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Why We Hate Google Glass — And All New Tech | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | I first noticed this phenomenon at the turn of the century when Dean Kamen invented the Segway self-powered scooter. You may recall when it came out. People dismissed it as a gimmick. I remember having a debate in an email discussion group about it. I thought it was cool. Most people thought it was useless or silly. And while the Segway never gained mass usage, it certainly found its niche in areas like city tours. Today, we see a similar level of fear and loathing around Google Glass. People have had a visceral reaction to the announcement of a wearable computer, and mostly, people have gone to the worst place possible — that it would be used by pervs and spies to surreptitiously take pictures and videos of us. Never mind that we are constantly being photographed with smartphones. For some reason, that device sitting on your face made all the difference. Fairly soon after Google announced Glass, . Not long after that, the term “glasshole” entered the popular lexicon, a word specifically created to belittle early adopters as pretentious posers. In an interview at SXSW last week, Kamen suggested that this initial pushback is just human nature and people have a natural fear of the unknown. “Almost everybody is reluctant to change almost everything. Whatever you learned as a kid you want to keep always,” he told me. Kamen said people often lack the imagination to see a purpose for the new technology. “People today wonder what’s the point of Google Glass.” He pointed out that people had a similar reaction 30 years ago when the personal computer came on the scene. They wondered why individuals would ever need computers. That was something for the military or business, and of course over time we adopted computers and now we couldn’t imagine life without them. At another session this week at SXSW called , a panel dug into the reasons behind the Glasshole phenomenon and what makes people reject it out of hand, often before they’ve ever even seen, never mind used, one. Patrick Miller, senior creative director at , said that even though we are used to being photographed without our permission with the proliferation of smartphones, and we are sharing large parts of our lives with mobile and social tools, there is still this gut reaction around the lack of permission we feel with Glass. “Wearables remove our ability to filter it and control [these interactions] the way we want to,” Miller said. And yet for all the negative reaction, there remains a big curiosity about them. A friend who owns Glass says he likes to wear it to conduct video interviews with startups because it’s easy to record the video without a device coming between him and the interview subject, and he can upload the video to YouTube seamlessly from the Glass interface when it’s over. Yet whenever he conducts these interviews, the subjects inevitably want to try it. People may fear them, but there is massive curiosity around them. Timothy Jordan, staff developer advocate at Google, who also spoke on the SXSW Glasshole panel, obviously sees it differently. He emphasized the convenience of having this device on your face, but he said Google certainly recognized there needed to be a conversation about how these devices work in practice in the real world, which is precisely why they created the Explorer program. “Many of you know we did the Explorer program,” Jordan explained. “The reason we did this was to have this conversation. Technology gives you more options, but it’s your choice what you would do with it. We didn’t want to have this conversation just internally. We wanted to expand.” But Miller shot back, saying that it’s not always quite that simple. “We have choices about how we use these devices, but people being recorded don’t have a choice,” he said. Jordan acknowledges that it’s both necessary and healthy to talk about the privacy implications of new devices like Glass. “Privacy is an important conversation to have, but it’s hard to give one answer that this is the right way to do things. We all live in different communities and have different sets of norms,” he explained. And as though to prove we are making this up as we go along, just last week in Massachusetts when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that upskirting, the act of taking a picture using a mobile phone up a woman’s skirt without her permission, was not illegal because there was no law against it. The court wasn’t sanctioning the behavior, only acknowledging that without case law they couldn’t convict this person of a crime. and sent it to the governor for his signature. This was a case where the law caught up with the technology and defined a social norm in legal terms on the fly. And over time, it’s entirely likely that similar situations will pop up with Glass and we will have to define social and legal norms about how it’s acceptable to use them. As Kamen says, it’s up to us to figure out how to use technology in an intelligent way. “Technology makes it so easy to innovate. Memory is free. Bandwidth is free. A lot of people innovate what they can innovate instead of what they should innovate, and we are losing the opportunity to do real change.” Glass probably does represent an opportunity for real change on some level, but as I found when I tried it, it’s not for everyone, privacy implications notwithstanding. As a society, people have to define new norms as each technology comes hurtling toward us, whether that’s Kamens’ Segway, the iPhone, Google Glass, 3D printers or whatever comes next. No matter what we do, one thing is clear: We are only at the beginning of technology acceptance cycle when it comes to wearables like Glass, but given the number of sessions devoted to it at SXSW, I’m confident that we will be seeing wider adoption before you know it. And as that happens, we are sure to forget the debates we had about these devices in the early days — just as we always have. |
Investors Debate The Ethics Of Anonymity Apps | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | VCs are publicly and privately debating the morality of investing in the burgeoning app space, after a series of negative posts, mainstream gossip, a and have pushed the volume of the debate to eleven. Last night, Netscape founder had one of his characteristic Twitter surges. He began his speech by referencing product developments that unequivocally exist for the good of humanity, comparing them to products that are “designed to encourage negative behavior, tearing people down, making fellow souls sad.” He asks in his soliloquy (included below) whether these products should be invested in, from an ethical and moral standpoint, due to the possibility of negative consequences. Investor Mark Suster, who has been singled out as a target on Secret just like A16z has, supported Andreessen’s view. “Investors make choices every day,” Andreessen wrote, in a continuation of the thread. “Many things don’t get funded that would make $ but aren’t ethical, moral, and/or legal.” He confirmed that ‘public opinion’ sensitive LPs are one reason behind this, and notes that “headline risk”, “branding risk” and “explaining to family risk” are some others. While he emphatically did not mention specific apps, the most popular apps in the space currently are Yik Yak, Secret and Whisper. The Secret and Whisper CEOs have replied to Andreessen, citing that the positive aspects of their respective products outweigh the negative. To Whisper CEO Michael Heyward, who brought up an example of a on Whisper, Andreessen responded, “How do you decide who to protect and who to out?” with a about Whisper gossip and Gwyneth Paltrow. As far as I can see, no prominent Secret or Whisper investors have joined the discussion, but Homebrew’s Hunter Walk , holding that moral issues should affect investment choices but not focus solely on a product’s negative side. Walk says that he asks, “Is the world a better place because this product exists? Not ‘can this product be abused and utilized for negative purposes’ but rather ‘what is its primary use case, primary reason for being and can the team sustain that true north over time?'” before choosing whether to invest. If I were a Secret investor, I would say that people are people, and will exhibit bad behavior almost anywhere you put them. Former about.me community manager brings up the fact that Twitter, Andreessen’s debate platform of choice, did nothing when a user posted her home address and issued death threats. In fact, some parody accounts on both Facebook and Twitter allow for a form of antagonization similar to that on anonymous apps. I would also echo what Secret co-founder David Byttow , that the potential for these apps to improve upon the human experience is immense, but we have, “lots of hard work to do and difficult issues to work through.” I have never read worse things about myself and our writers than on Secret. Not even in our comments section. Sure, this is the business we’ve chosen, but what happens when you point this water cannon at a person who has never owned an umbrella? “This is [the] heart of a big part of my concern,” says Andreessen, “It’s the most vulnerable people who will be most damaged when this goes wrong.” Despite sharing this concern, I am a happy user of Secret and other apps in the space, and want to see them adjust themselves to provide maximum objective good with the least amount of bad. Bringing this aspect of human behavior into the light is a first step, as is adding features like . This is an important topic beyond tech, a question of how humans should treat one another: Can we enforce niceness? Do we want to? Do we have a moral obligation to do so? And if we do, how can we execute on that, without a heavy hand of censorship? Who decides what defamation is, or fair commentary? When does gossip become slander? And are we equipped as an industry to handle these questions? We in tech are great at building, but at moderating? There we don’t have much of a track record. As this is a very timely and ongoing discussion, I’m looking forward to continuing the debate in our comments section, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Secret, on Whisper, on Yik Yak, on Wut, . https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444709881900064770 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444710221596745728 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444710538707095552 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444710962549882881 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444711728446590976 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444712063193993217 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444712485250031618 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444712765777670145 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444713031897845761 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444713435184390145 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444713752785473536 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/444715111098236928 https://twitter.com/msuster/status/440859215704231936 https://twitter.com/msuster/status/440860062366437377 yes. Lots of hard work to do and difficult issues to work through. — David Byttow (@davidbyttow) this is some1s daughter, some1s sister, some1s best friend. Believe me, they're happy this platform exist — Michael Heyward (@michaelheywire) yes also a good point — 46 days old but funny that this came to fever pitch after secret, not whisper — ಠ_ಠ (@MikeIsaac) Anonymous apps don't end well, especially for the ladies in the crowd. My time on Secret doesn't suggest anything different. — Gina Bianchini (@ginab) |
In A Changing Financial World, Thinknum Wants To Democratize Financial Analysis | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | One of the most important functions of any modern financial institution is conducting valuations. On Wall Street, this means developing financial models – projections of how a company will perform based on a set of assumptions. Get these models right, and suddenly you can make trades on public equities that bring in enormous profits. Blow it, and . Despite the importance of financial models, the process behind modeling remains as cumbersome as ever. Since today’s analysts develop models using Microsoft Excel and collaborate through email, it is difficult for multiple analysts to work on the same document at once. Even more worrisome, assumptions and models are rarely version-controlled, which means that mistakes have a tendency to amplify given the frenetic pace of a trading floor. This is the world that Justin Zhen and Gregory Ugwi discovered when they graduated from Princeton together and joined Wall Street in the heyday years before 2008. Now, as founders of , a platform for financial analysis currently in beta, they hope to dramatically improve this state of affairs by offering better access to key data and a significantly improved environment for sharing and collaborating on models. The founders, though, are not limiting their vision to just a few analysts in Manhattan. Instead, they believe that better collaboration around models could do for finance what GitHub did for programmers – democratize finance by allowing anyone, anywhere to contribute to a better understanding of valuation and become recognized for their work. Right now, Thinknum has two products: Cashflow Models and Plotter. With , users can develop their own valuation models using an Excel-like product for the web. Similar to GitHub, once a model is built, analysts can openly share it for free, or securely save it for a price. “Analysts often spend a lot of time rebuilding models again and again, but what happens if we could fork it?” Zhen asks. At any time, a user can take any model and edit its assumptions, parameters or formulas, allowing them to experiment with different approaches. Data is fundamental to modeling, and traditionally, getting high-quality financial data has proven difficult for startups without the resources of or , the incumbent financial data providers. That changed recently, as the Securities and Exchange Commission has , the eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Thinknum takes advantage of this new environment by allowing instant access to company financial data. Since the variables are standardized, this means that you can run the same financial model across an entire industry in a matter of moments. Or, using a tool called QuickBuilder, you can use sliders to adjust such variables as gross margins and revenue growth to evaluate the sensitivity of a company’s valuation. One issue that modelers face is finding the right index data to compare a company to. For instance, modelers may want to compare a company to the rate of expansion of the manufacturing industry (using an index like a ) or growth in the U.S. GDP. Through Plotter, analysts can evaluate correlations between data and use a visual tree to discover indices. “In current tools that [analysts] use, they need to know exactly what they want, and they don’t see relevant data that they haven’t thought of,” Zhen says. Most importantly, the entire product is designed to be used without a programming background, knowledge that is uncommon among traders and analysts. “If you are a quant, it isn’t as difficult to get data and clean it up. We are targeted toward non-programmers, who don’t have the same abilities. They may trade millions of dollars, but they don’t write code,” Zhen says. He hopes to maintain a focus on keeping the platform open to the widest number of people as possible. Thinknum’s potential extends beyond getting a bunch of analysts on Wall Street to stop emailing spreadsheets back and forth. The founders hope to expand the company toward emerging markets where sophisticated financial tools are often lacking and analysts are disconnected from the global investment community. While due to and instability in Ukraine, Thailand, and Venezuela, there remains a deep market for better financial understanding of emerging market companies. Thinknum’s founders see better models as the first step to building a stronger investment climate. “Creating communities of trust allows us to create insights into the market,” Zhen says. “If you are able to create a large number of models, and get an average of all of those models, that number is really, really powerful.” He hopes the impact of the product isn’t just helping investors make better financial decisions, but also helping groups like farmers better navigate a volatile global trading environment. “Let’s say you are a tomato farmer in India. How would you price your tomatoes? How do you know what the trends are? With the explosion of Internet access, we believe we will provide a lot of value in connecting these people to global trends in prices. Right now, it may seem like a sophisticated tool for financial analysts, but our grand vision is to provide this information and insight to all kinds of different types of people.” For a company only a couple of months into production, there is obviously much to do. The sharing mechanisms can be a bit clunky, and the user interface has definitely been bootstrapped by a pair of former investment professionals. But the company already has several paying customers, indicating at least some desire on the part of the industry to find a better toolset. The company hopes that allowing charts to be embeddable in websites will give it wider distribution, and further improvement to its user experience should broaden the site’s appeal. As investment banking undergoes a number of changes (like !), it’s time to look into the technical infrastructure of financial analysis and improve upon tools first developed in the 1980s. Along the way, we have the opportunity to open up finance from a handful of major cities to anyone with an Internet connection. |
With 40% Of U.S. Doctors Signed On, Doximity’s Jeff Tangney Reveals How The Social Network For M.D.s Hit The Tipping Point | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | With the arrival of Obamacare, millions of uninsured Americans are entering the healthcare system for the first time. As these new patients happily stream into waiting rooms, doctors are scrambling to keep pace with the increasing demand. Preserving a high standard of care amidst the waiting room blitz requires greater efficiency from medical practices, and doctors are desperate for solutions that can help relieve some of the pressure. By making it easy for doctors to connect and communicate across teams, hospitals and entire health systems, wants to provide a release valve for the nation’s M.D.’s. The San Mateo-based company launched in early 2011 to give medical professionals a free, HIPAA-compliant alternative to LinkedIn and it’s been growing like a weed ever since. That’s partly because Doximity has been working to transform itself from a social network (and a vertical-specific version of LinkedIn) into a platform. Today, Doximity serves doctors as not only a professional network and profile page, but a way to find relevant specialists for patients, a rolodex, a CME tool, a news portal, an email and text service, and a virtual lounge. Founder and CEO wants the platform to become a utility for healthcare professionals and doctors, and one that helps them get things done by turning to physicians in its community to help it make product decisions. Doximity isn’t Tangney’s first time on the HealthTech merry-go-round, having founded and acted as president and COO of mobile health software applications giant, Epocrates. However, with the medical social network’s announcement today that it now reaches 40 percent of U.S. physicians — some 250,000 of them — the demand (and support) for Doximity among the nation’s M.D.s comes as a surprise even to Tangney. In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, the Doximity CEO stopped by to offer a little insight into how the startup has been able to reach the tipping point and what’s driving this growth, as well as a peak into the company’s plans for the future. Well, it starts with the fact that being a doctor just isn’t a normal job. I mean, what other career requires nine years of post-graduate education, a full Latin lexicon, and to swear an oath? So there’s quite a bit that’s different about our site — like HIPAA-privacy, specialty forums, research alerts, medical education credits, and so on — from the familiar names in social and professional networking. But I’d say the main reason we’ve grown so fast is secure email. I can’t imagine doing my job without email, but in fact that’s what we ask every U.S. doctor to do. It’s a little crazy when you think about it. We’re seeing that tipping points really happen by sub-market. In our case: a hospital, a city, or a specialty. Each is a little different, but it’s that magic point where folks in a pre-existing social or economic group feel “left out” if they’re not on it. The chart below shows Doximity coverage and usage for the top 1,000 hospitals in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the more doctors we have in a hospital, the more usage we get from each. It’s network effects and Metcalfe’s Law in action. Also, not surprisingly, the smaller markets tip first. For us, it was Alaska. Doctors on the Alaskan north slope needed specialist input but often lacked the time or money to medevac (fly) their patients hours away to hospitals. So they started using our mobile app to find other doctors and send secure photos. Since there are only 1,500 doctors there, it took just a few months to hit critical mass. Even today, it remains one of our most active states. Yes, the platform piece has been really cool. We’re over 75 partner sites that now use our OAuth “Login with Doximity” button to verify physicians. It’s made it easier for docs to verify and credential themselves with all these great new health services that are sprouting up. As for the rest of our usage, I’d say our patterns are broadly in line with that of LinkedIn or Facebook. Surfing the “medical graph” via referral searches, viewing profiles, reconnecting with past colleagues is primary use. About 25% of our doctors regularly use our secure messaging (including our free eFax) and 1 in 3 uses our CME and research alert tools monthly. My entrepreneurial life began by listening to my physician roommates at Stanford, and 15 years later at Doximity, it’s still what I love to do. We have 5 doctors on staff, plus advisory boards, monthly and annual physician meetings…a lot of our energy is devoted to truly understanding what doctors need. Doctors are super busy, so speedy, well-designed features are key. Like a lot of startups, we do a lot of split testing. We even take it a bit further by running internal contests — e.g., we had two data science teams square off to A/B test a “people you may know” algorithm. The winners got cushy new office chairs and the losers had to “peacock” (wear costumes) out to a karaoke bar. We seek a lot of live feedback, too — an annual weekend with doctors, monthly dinners, and such. Some of our best ideas have come from just listening to doctors talk over dinner. Some of our best ideas — like continuing medical education credits, referral templates, efax, hospital ranking surveys, and online schedules — have come from these sessions. Over the last five years, about a third of doctors have moved from private practice to working for hospital systems. Obamacare is accelerating that shift. This is changing the way doctors communicate and the way they think about their careers. We’re here to help them through these shifts, and to optimize communication with their colleagues and patient care. Broadly, this is part of the large trend towards more transparency in healthcare, both for patients and providers. With nearly 40% of physicians on Doximity today, we’ve got some big ideas, but nothing we can discuss publicly yet. Let me just say that we believe we can further the wisdom of medicine, both collectively (new treatments) and collaboratively (patient-level). Like LinkedIn in the business world, we are the “profile of record” for most doctors. And if that’s all we did, we’d be pretty pleased because medicine really needs a master directory for us all to more easily find niche experts, navigate insurer networks and such. On the content side, we tried a research alert service last year and it’s gone pretty well, so we’re now rolling it out to all specialties. The core idea came from a doctor at one of our dinners. Like about half of US doctors, he’d authored published research, in his case on a rare aortic disease. Others had cited his research, but he’d have to go search the National Library of Medicine every month to find out who. So we started sending alerts now able to alert 70,000 doctors each month that new research has cited theirs. In addition, we let him contact the other doctor to collaborate, and that’s led to. Keeping up to date with new medical literature is a part of a physician’s job—but so is tracking publications, sending secure messages, getting referrals and planning a career path. A statistic that we found particularly concerning is that the average time that a specialized new medical innovation takes to diffuse across the United States is 17 years. For the right new treatments, we think that number should be 17 days. Contrary to common perception, I think doctors are actually very digitally savvy, especially when it comes mobile. They may not have desks, but 90% of them own smartphones. And before most of us had even heard of apps, they were downloading my last startup’s product (Epocrates) which allowed us to be the first mobile app IPO ever. Part of the problem is Health IT software. It’s designed for the hospital accounting department first, and the doctor second (or third if you include regulations). So you’ll hear doctors complaining a lot about computers, but really they’re complaining about the software. And they’re right. The software they’re forced to use is pretty awful. Our business model really parallels that of LinkedIn and we‘ve seen strong growth on the recruiting side this year. We now have over 200 hospitals and health systems as clients. In fact, there’s big news here: With 52 people on payroll and a year ahead of plan, we just finished our first cash flow-positive month in January. We’re growing our team to keep up with demand and are about to double our office space in San Mateo. That’s a great question. We worry about that a lot. Unlike LinkedIn, recruiters on Doximity are required to name their proposed salary up front. That rule, combined with filters that doctors can set to be very specific about the job type, title, call duty and location they’re interested in, makes the experience very relevant to busy physicians. Our click rate on recruiter messages is over 24%. Doximity is a huge step ahead of the current system of medical recruiting. Doximity has been a “mobile-first” company since the very start. Mobile was already the hot technology for doctors when I founded Epocrates back in 1998, it’s only grown more important in a doctor’s daily workflow since then. Since most doctors go from exam room to hospital room and back to another exam room to see patients, and don’t sit at a desk in an office, mobile is really the best tool for them. We make it easy for them to stay connected to their colleagues and to transfer patient information without needing to log onto a desktop computer. |
Why Can’t A Startup Build A Self-Driving Car? | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | On a 10- to 20-year horizon, large-scale technological innovation is going to center around machine intelligence, robotics and sensors. Each of these fields requires gargantuan amounts of capital and a lot of patience, a combination well beyond the scope of even the most progressive venture capital firm. As Google has demonstrated with its self-driving car, the combination of machine intelligence, robotics and sensors can already perform better than a human at a complex task such as driving a car, something that 10 years ago was unthinkable to most people. No doubt, Tesla has built an amazing car and after much trial and tribulation, brought it to market. However, General Motors had already shipped a production electric car years before. Tesla took advantage of the innovator’s dilemma, where legacy car companies are virtually incapable of embracing electric-only cars and integrating modern electronics. Tesla’s roadmap includes “autopilot” and eventually “autonomous” features. Perhaps Tesla also will deliver these features slightly before legacy car manufacturers do, including Mercedes and Lexus, which are aggressively adding similar features. But the winner in this game is Google, which has a multi-year technology lead and can extract enormous licensing fees. The amount of raw computing horsepower necessary for cognitive computing is massive. Integrating next-generation sensors such as LIDAR is extremely complicated. The regulatory environment for introducing smart machines is extremely unpredictable, and the required experimentation and unpredictable timelines of this type of work puts it squarely in the “research” side of research and development. And venture capitalists inherently hate research – they like development. Even the biggest venture-backed play in machine intelligence, DeepMind, with $50 million in very patient funding and 75 top researchers on staff, was recently . Google has been on a massive buying spree lately, snapping up the building blocks of future technology with robotics acquisitions, other , and key , who is considered by many to be the godfather of commercial cognitive computing. , a much-maligned quantum-computing company. Companies like Google, IBM and Microsoft have been building out machine-learning teams that can leverage their investments in vast networks of computers built around the globe. The amount of transistors needed to match the number of neurons in a human brain is a tremendous 100 billion, and it will take us until around 2025 to replicate on a computer chip, according to Kurzweil, although this might be aggressive due to the physics around increasingly smaller transistors in microchips. The market uptake of machine intelligence is going to take a while. IBM has shown that a computer can outperform humans at chess and Jeopardy, and is transitioning its cognitive computing work into fields such as medicine. Even at the scale of an IBM, shareholders are complaining about the cost of this transition and the . If IBM’s Watson were a startup, its investors would have long ago forced it to sell so that they could put their capital into more efficient short-term and mid-term investments. Other companies with large computing grids are starting to get into the game. Facebook recently kicked off an artificial intelligence lab with the , and also . EBay hired to spearhead its machine-intelligence efforts. Yahoo! has spun a to access their researchers. Apple, with its relentless focus on the client side of computing, is struggling to keep up with making its email systems scalable, let alone keep its Siri acquisition on par with Google’s relentless drive towards machine intelligence. The upside is huge. Every sector of the economy will soon enough have its own version of a self-driving car, even fields as advanced as medicine. As anyone with an undiagnosed or somewhat diagnosed medical condition can tell you, the amount of guesswork and over specialization of medical professionals is maddening. A computer can take a holistic approach and quickly narrow down what a problem could be, and iterate with exclusionary tests. Given the fundamental shift required, it will take quite a while for this transition to happen in fields such as medicine. Despite , startups are definitely taking on far bigger challenges than just photo and chat apps. But will startups be able to compete with these giants in areas such as machine intelligence? Perhaps Google, IBM and Amazon will offer Cognition-as-a-Service that would usher in a wave of new companies, much like Amazon’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering reignited the web. IBM has created a $100 million investment fund for Watson-based companies and just . Amazon could kickstart a cognition service by acquiring nascent cognition service companies such as Wise.io, Expect Labs, and BigML and offering them at scale. Now that would unleash a generation of “smart” startups. |
Tableau Preps $345M Offering, Less Than A Year After Its Gangbusters IPO | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | Tableau Software would like some more, please. The company, less than a year after its IPO that , . Here’s what’s fun: That sum is greater than what the company raised in its IPO. That total, $254 million, now all but feels quaint compared to the new, coming cash. This is not even the first time that the company has gone back to the markets since its public offering, though its previous re-collect was for extant shareholders, and not the mother firm. As : [The new offering] follows a secondary offering in October, though in that instance the company did not reap any cash from the stock sale, as it was primarily connected to existing stockholders. So that was for liquidity, and now the company is playing for keeps. It’s not rare for a firm to pick up more cash when it can, especially after a successful offering, amidst a buoyant market that will likely embrace the new shares. Tableau is deliciously unclear about what it will do with the funds, though acquisitions are directly name-checked: The principal purposes of this offering are to increase our public float and financial flexibility. As of the date of this prospectus, we cannot specify with certainty all of the particular uses for the net proceeds to us from this offering. However, we currently intend to use the net proceeds to us from this offering primarily for general corporate purposes, including working capital, sales and marketing activities, general and administrative matters and capital expenditures. We may also use a portion of the net proceeds from this offering for the acquisition of, or investment in, technologies, solutions or businesses that complement our business, although we have no present commitments or agreements to enter into any such acquisitions or investments. Worth more than $5 billion, Tableau is not risking much dilution with the new shares. And given its modest — relative to the proposed cash infusion via the tertiary offering — $252 million in cash and equivalents, the new dollars will be more than welcome. |
Gillmor Gang Live 03.15.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve GIllmor. |
It Took 8 Years, But Someone Just Broke One Million Gamerscore On Xbox Live | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | If you’ve ever dreamed of dustin’ off all those unfinished Xbox games and somehow becoming the first person to cross 1 million gamerscore: don’t bother — as of tonight, it’s been done. For those unfamiliar with the Xbox gamerscore system: it’s a cumulative score of all the “Achievements” you’ve earned across any and all Xbox 360/Xbox One games. Each game has different challenges (some harder than others), each worth a set number of points. Each game gets a maximum of 1,000 gamerscore to dole out to each gamer for the achievements they tackle, though they can bump that up a bit with downloadable content released after launch. In short: the more games you beat to absolute completion, the higher your gamer score. For the past few years, gamers watched on as two particularly dedicated dudes raced for a million. In the last few months, though, it became clear that one of them — Stallion83, or, as he’s known when he’s not in front of a TV, Raymond Cox — was going to hit it first. To give you a sense of time, here: this is something that Cox has been shooting for since the launch of the Xbox 360. Yeah, the 360 — not the just released One. The 360, as in, a console released ago. The crazy part? At a certain point, the challenge was not in conquering the achievements, but in . Up until recently, there simply weren’t enough games released, and enough challenges within those games, to total up to a million. And to put this all into perspective: even with over 80 million Xboxes sold, less than gamers are known to have a gamerscore of over 500,000. The game that pushed him past the limit? Titanfall. What else. In a sign of the crazy times we live in: he livestreamed the last few hours of his race to a million on Twitch.TV, and . Whatever, man — I’ve still got the top score on the Pac Man machine at the pizza place down the street. |
Avoid Stagnation: Acceleration Trumps Incubation | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | Interest in startup accelerators and incubators has exploded in the past several years, but how effective have they been? One thing that has become clear is that “incubator” and “accelerator” refer to two very different models for startup workspaces, and the distinctions may have significant effects on startup success. The key distinctions between incubators and accelerators are time period and structure. An incubator gives startups workspace and community at an affordable rate for an indefinite time period. Accelerators generally have workspace and a cohort that forms a community. They are run over a fixed time period with some significant degree of structure with regard to education and coaching. Accelerators are also capped by a demo day after which startups have to make it on their own, without further subsidy from the accelerator. While the business incubator concept has been practiced in the U.S. since 1959, it has only been since 2005 that accelerators have become an alternative, and . Y Combinator and TechStars are the two most examples of the accelerator model. But seemingly every day, they are joined by new industry, regional or corporate implementations of this approach. Universities, like MIT, have taken notice in the strong interest from its students in such programs and while there were strong and varying feelings about the efficacy of each model, there was little concrete data to validate the assertions being made. So it was with great interest that I got to see the difference firsthand through two programs MIT ran for its student entrepreneurs during the summer of 2012, one using an accelerator model and the other an incubator model. Running proper experiments on startup education is hard, but through a series of accidental but fortuitous events, the teams selected for the programs were similar enough that we can draw conclusions about the programs by comparing their levels of success. The accelerator, called the MIT Founders’ Skills Accelerator, or FSA, (now the , or GFSA), was announced in the spring of 2012 and attracted 129 applications for 10 spots. As a result of the extraordinary demand, the applicant teams were of such a high quality that we had a deep pool of qualified candidates beyond the 10 we could accept for the student accelerator program. As a result, we were able to procure space for a student-led incubator, called the . Since the caliber of the FSA and Beehive teams were very similar, it significantly lessened the “selection bias,” which suggests that FSA teams would have stronger outcomes because they were stronger teams to begin with. In all, some 40 teams participated in the Beehive that summer. Each program had dedicated workspace in its own location, and participants quickly built strong communities that were fostered by the program leadership. The difference came in the educational structure. The FSA put teams through twice-weekly seminars, countless individual meetings with mentors, and monthly “board meetings” that held teams accountable to the milestones they set at the beginning of the summer. Teams could earn up to $20,000 by meeting the milestones. By contrast, the Beehive offered occasional guest speakers, but otherwise participants had to take the initiative to schedule meetings with our center’s mentors. The results proved informative for how we design programs to support student entrepreneurs. We expected to see both groups make good progress because they would receive lots of encouragement from the peers in their community, and the dedicated workspace would allow them to focus better. FSA teams would probably do better with the more high-touch support, but with so many strong Beehive teams, we expected some level of improvement across the board. However, while some Beehive teams did achieve success, the overall rate was much lower than the accelerator teams. The rate of progress was noticeably lower as was the drive to get their team to achieve “escape velocity” – our term for being a strong enough team to move out of the “MIT bubble” and establish itself as a standalone company. An unexpected side effect of the Beehive was that teams did not want to leave the community they had built. The very social bonds and support that created such positive effects also had the negative effect of creating an environment that was too comfortable. The image of an incubator as a warm comfortable place to hatch eggs comes to mind and starts to haunt us. Fortunately for us, we had two forcing functions – many of the students were on the verge of graduating, and the extra space we had for the program was temporary due to an impending renovation of the building. Does that mean that the Beehive experiment was a failure? Absolutely not. But while we would enthusiastically do it again, we would redesign the program. What made the difference between these two programs, and how specifically would we redesign the Beehive program to be more effective? A lot of it boils down to a simple chart: Teams participating in the Beehive tended to follow line A on the graph, in which they made initial progress but stagnated over time. By contrast, teams participating in the FSA underwent several forcing functions throughout the program. Within the first 30 days, they put their ideas (and teams) to rigorous testing, so that by the end of the month (“t ” on the graph), they either had to show they were on the path to great success (line B), or they had to scrap or significantly revise their idea (line C). The individual components of their business were regularly scrutinized, as well. Now, you may say, “Of course line B is the goal, but it’s hard to achieve. Isn’t the moderate success of line A better than the failure of line C?” The answer is an emphatic NO! Companies following the path of line A are the “barely living.” Their rate of progress has slowed to near-zero – significantly less progress than they could make doing something else, both for the entrepreneur’s benefit and society’s benefit. As the rate of progress slows, the entrepreneur’s rate of learning slows, making them less-prepared for tackling the challenges of future startups. The startup will last only as long as the money does, if the entrepreneur doesn’t lose interest first. By contrast, companies that follow the path of line C don’t waste time and money doing something that doesn’t work. In failing, they learn a lot about how to improve. They are ultimately on a better path to end up on line B with a successful company. Some may even decide, after enough line C failures, that they do not want to pursue entrepreneurship, giving them the opportunity to establish a career years earlier than the stagnant startup stuck on line A. Therefore, a well-designed accelerator will force its participants onto either line B or line C by default, preventing or at least dramatically reducing the occurrence of line A. And we found in the FSA that teams that followed line C were able to quickly retool and establish strong businesses along line B. An example is , which started out as an idea involving network-connected solar panels. A few weeks into the FSA, they saw major shortcomings both with the idea and the composition of their team. They added a team member and began exploring turning landfill gas into energy. They have seen a lot of success, . A second example, from our 2013 GFSA class, started with a very specific medical idea, and realized within two weeks under the pressure of the GFSA that they were not on line B. They regrouped and developed that was much more successful for them. In these two cases in particular, the defined time period, hands-on mentoring, and uncompromising board-meeting sessions resulted in hard decisions being made sooner rather than later, with no option to choose a “comfortable state.” Our experience with the Beehive is in line with other data about incubators. , the vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, reports that “Multiple studies have shown that incubators don’t work and, worse, they frequently subsidize companies that would otherwise fail. One report that 90 percent of public and private incubators in the U.S. were ineffective. True, there are a handful of successful incubators, but incubators suffer from a design flaw: they are more often about real estate than entrepreneurship.” As for accelerators, the data is not in yet, but MIT’s experience is encouraging. One key question to consider is whether the success of teams coming out of accelerators is due to the accelerator’s ability to attract and select great teams (sorting or selection value) or to the actual added value created in the program (added value). MIT professor pointed me to that showed in venture capital deals that 60 percent of the value created is based on selection value, and only 40 percent is added after the selection. Our FSA/Beehive experiment reduced the selection bias as much as possible, and we were still able to see a significant improvement from teams in the acceleration model versus teams in the incubator model. It makes sense to me that when a team is forced out of its comfort zone, it will rise to the occasion far more than a comfortable team; it is why I channel Eleanor Roosevelt and tell teams “to do something every day that scares the daylights out of you” if they want to be great. We will certainly do a program similar to the Beehive in the future, because the number of MIT student entrepreneurs is vastly more than the FSA’s super-high-touch model can support. But we will make it more of an accelerator than an incubator, incorporating lots of time-defined forcing functions and a more hands-on mentorship approach. This has also influenced how we design the accelerator program going forward. We hope this insight can also help future programs elsewhere to be better designed and for entrepreneurs to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each. “Incubator” and “co-working” spaces (which, due to the great economies of scale they provide startups, often resemble incubators in function) can have a positive role in a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem, but their limitations should be known and carefully considered. Programs can and must be thoughtfully designed to avoid stagnation and instead provide a positive impact on entrepreneurial growth. This experience reminds us that “comfort” is a word that negatively correlates with great innovation and entrepreneurship. |
Hey! You! Get Off Of Our Bandwagon | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 3 | 15 | And lo, it did come to pass, as prophesied by the geeks of yore, that in the twenty-fifth year of the Web, the world entire, from Kathmandu to Timbuktu to Zanzibar to New York, began to notice its by the Law of Moore. And the eyes of the world were turned upon those places where that Law had been birthed, and numberless throngs of geeks still teemed, and CEOs and venture capitalists gathered and plotted; to the Vale of Silicon, and the City of Saint Francis, in California North. And it became apparent to all that London and Tokyo and New York, in their might and arrogance, had been displaced; that the Area of the Bay had . And lo, the titans and mavens of the media, from their ancient complexes in London and skyscraping towers in New York, did dispatch emissaries to these newly sacred places, and , commanding: “Tell our people of these lands, and of the doings of their geeks, that our people may be appalled and entertained, and dream of traveling there as founder-pilgrims themselves, and shake their heads in dismay and warn of the comeuppance that will befall these upstarts on the day this bubble bursts, all at the same time. And keep your expenses low this time.” And so these emissaries , and , and warned darkly of growing chasms between , and between . And the people of the City of Saint Francis did gaze upon these reports; and did they roll their eyes. Biggest bubble right now in tech is SF angst trend pieces. Rents are high! Valuations are crazy! Gentrification! Same story, different cycle — modest proposal (@modestproposal1) A well-written Modern Byzantium article in search of a point: (its ostensible one is forced and false, if y'ask me.) — Jon Evans (@rezendi) (Software skills are such a seller's market that it's more that those who have them work on what they think is cool, which varies with age.) — Jon Evans (@rezendi) (I too have much lamented the profusion of sugar-water apps, but they're a side effect of better techfrastructure, it's not an either/or.) — Jon Evans (@rezendi) But strive as they might to cast these tales entirely from their mind, they could not. For it seemed true to them that in recent years the founder-pilgrims who had flocked to the City had grown as numerous as locusts, and to many, as welcome. And at brunches around the City there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and even wearing of sackcloth and ashes, when conversation turned to the monthly rent to be tithed if one were to move to a new apartment, even across the great waters in the Land of Oaks. Indeed it seemed to many of the blessed residents of this newly declared Promised Land that, increasingly, the Law of Moore brought wealth . Once the City had been a haven for freak and geek alike; was there ? And yet, many of those who complained most bitterly about the newcomers had once been newcomers themselves. Was there no little hypocrisy there? The denizens of this City were an intelligent, resourceful, and compassionate people. They . They understood that . But now that Technology was King, and they were that King’s capital, any such measures seemed feeble and insufficient when arrayed against a colossal shift in wealth and power that was transforming the world entire — a shift whose very hinge was their City and the Vale to its south. And so they bridled anew at every report dispatched around the world, telling of their wonders and their wealth and their decadence, where once they had been proud. They understood, too late, that while this boom , being pronounced Center of the Universe was more burden than honor, especially for a people who had long been devoted to arts and pleasures and . And soon they found themselves gazing with resentment upon the teeming masses around the world who longed to join them in their paradise, and wondering when and how this madness might end … and imagining darkly what might if it did . (1)Allow me to stress that according to no less a source than , “wizard” is a gender-neutral word. |
United To Launch Personal In-Flight Entertainment For iOS Devices Next Month | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | Starting next month, United will offer an in-flight that will allow passengers to pick from 150 movies and about 200 TV shows through their laptop’s browser or . The airline , but mentioned the program again in last month’s frequent flier statements, which were just sent out. United told TechCrunch that they plan to expand the system to Android devices later this year. The system will be installed on most domestic aircraft by the end of 2014, starting with Airbus A319, Airbus A320, Boeing 747-400 and some 777-200 aircraft, says United. The app and browser plug-in, which is required to watch certain content, can be downloaded during flights without the purchase of United Wi-Fi. Other programs can be watched through the United Portal on a laptop without a plug-in or app. Of course, many passengers already load their mobile devices and laptops with TV shows, movies, and e-books before flights, but United’s library of on-demand content might help it standout as Wi-Fi becomes more common on airlines. According to airline-ranking site , 38% of U.S. flights now offer Internet access and more carriers are adding Wi-Fi to international routes as well. |
Founder Stories: When It Comes To Open-Source Technologies, Reverb’s Tony Tam Has A Word For It | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | Reverb’s CEO, , joined me for a discussion about the formation and work at the company. I’ve worked with Tam over the years and know him well, as a disclaimer — I’m also an advisor to Reverb. In this chat, Tam recounts how the company’s unusual formation led Reverb down the path it charges down today, as a content-discovery engine and destination, focused on personalization and serendipity. Beginning with a technology, Tam explains how he and his team had to embark on the challenge of turning that technology into a product — which became — that focused on the roots of words and what they mean. Additionally, Tam discusses more technical aspects of Reverb’s core, such as the difference between being a CEO (at Reverb) versus CTO (in his previous companies), how they built and open-source Swagger (a framework to distribute computing across servers), and how open-sourcing their technologies helped generate serendipity for the company itself in terms of reaching over 10,000 developers and recruiting — just like one may experience serendipity in real life. For founders out there building deeply technical systems, Tam’s approach to enabling technologies, frameworks, open-source, and recruiting could be quite instructive. Especially key is his note on the importance of serendipity, particularly in technical recruiting, as so much of today’s talent is fragmented across companies. |
iOS Update Reportedly Includes New Capability For iAd Attribution | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | As part of iOS 7.1, the to its mobile operating system, Apple appears to have added a new feature to its iAd program. This should allow the company to take credit for the app downloads driven by its ads, and allow advertisers to get a better sense of whether campaigns are paying off. In , mobile ad attribution startup says there’s no mention of these changes in Apple’s documentation, but there is API code that seems to indicate a change. Here’s how HasOffers interprets the code: Based on our interpretation, we believe this method will provide insight into whether a user engaged (impression or click) with an ad from iAd, in specific, prior to installing the app. If the user did engage with an ad specifically from iAd, then the “determine App Installation Attribution with Completion Handler” method will return a value of 1 for yes. If the user didn’t engage with an ad from iAd (perhaps the user engaged with an ad from another channel like Google Adwords or didn’t even engage with any ads at all), then the function will return a value of 0 for no. I’ll spare you my attempt to squint at the code and tell you whether HasOffers’ interpretation is plausible. Instead, let me point out that through its MobileAppTracking product, HasOffers is (though it has also ), so this is an area where I’d trust their interpretation. I’ve reached out to Apple and other companies that work on mobile attribution, and I’ll update this post if any of them get back to me. Following iAd’s announcement in 2010, the program seemed to fall off the radar, for Apple. However, recent reports suggest that Apple is looking to revamp iAd, with (focused on monetizing iTunes Radio) and reportedly in the works. Together with ad attribution, these developments suggest that Apple is expanding beyond the high-end brand advertisers that it initially targeted with iAd, and it’s catching up with the ways in which the mobile ad landscape has evolved. |
Overstock’s Bitcoin Purchases Account For Less Than 1% Of Revenue, But It’s Growing | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | Since Overstock.com started to , the company has received a good press for its efforts to support the nascent cryptocurrency. Working with Coinbase to process Bitcoin, Overstock.com announced that it in the currency earlier this month. A better details how Overstock.com is faring with Bitcoin now that the novelty of its acceptance of the digital payment method has cooled. After the day one sales number, according to Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, Bitcoin has settled in the “$20k to $30k” range, and is “gradually increasing from there.” Let’s use the $30,000 sum, given that the company is seeing a ramp in the numbers, and if we are going to predict revenue we might as well give ourselves some room to wiggle. Let’s find out if Bitcoin is moving the needle for the company. For , Overstock.com had revenue of $1.304 billion. Given that the company’s revenue is quite seasonal, we don’t want to use a fourth-quarter number to compare current Bitcoin sales run rates. So let’s take the quarterly average for the company as a starting point. That gives us a 90-day figure of $326 million, or $3.6 million per day. $30,000 next to $3.6 million is a very small drop in the bucket. In fact, it works out to 0.83 percent. After the of the Bitcoin integration, the dollar amount is somewhat minor. Now, its early days for both Bitcoin itself and even Overstock.com’s integration thereof, so don’t take the above as indicative of failure. More that the network for Bitcoin purchases remains modest, despite Bitcoin itself having a very high market cap. I’ve been looking at for some time. Food for thought: Total Bitcoin in circulation is worth $7.9 billion. In the past 24 hours, Bitcoin had volume of only $18.5 million. That’s about 0.23 percent daily turnover. Picking a random stock, say, Groupon, we see that its volume as a percentage of its similar market cap is 3.7 percent daily. That’s about 16 times as much as Bitcoin sees. I think this is the impact of having around . That wealth concentration means that the number of people who have enough Bitcoin to purchase items at Overstock.com is smaller than you might expect. That said, the larger Bitcoin network — so far as I can tell — is growing daily. So, expect to see Overstock.com move six figures a day in Bitcoin sales by the holiday season. |
Lineshark Turns Your iOS Or Android Device Into An XLR Recorder/Effects Rig | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | Connecting your guitar to your iPhone should be fairly simple. With the right adapter you can blow a line in through a standard headphone jack and get some tinny audio. But what if you really want to kick out the jams, as it were? For that you need something that will manage and amplify the signal as it comes out of your guitar and mic. acts as a sort of bridge between your XLR mics (the ones with the three massive pins), guitar line, and your phone. You can play through the Lineshark and manage power and gain using a dial on the front. Similar to the , this is some pretty geeky stuff but is a godsend for mobile musicians. Jed Eaton and Jonathan Mayer created the project and they’re looking for $60,000 on Kickstarter. Eaton has a BSEE from Georgia Tech and works at Cisco while Mayer works at “Both of us are musicians – we’ve played together since middle school,” said Mayer. “In our day jobs, Jed builds consumer hardware devices and I market and sell enterprise technology. Between the two of us, we have a complete picture of design, logistics, marketing and sales. Jed plays in several local Knoxville bands, and in fact the concept and early prototypes for Lineshark came out of the ‘Band Room,’ a converted garage rehearsal space in Jed’s backyard where local musicians come to rehearse and jam. It’s loaded with mics, amps, keyboards and instruments, and we were always grumbling about having to search for converters and cables to patch instruments and effects boxes together.” The key to Lineshark is the ability to bring audio back out of a mobile device once it’s been recorded or effects have been added. “Everything on the market was aimed at recording, not jamming or playing together,” said Mayer. “Our project is an all-in-one audio interface for mobile devices. We connect any instrument, mobile device, and stage setup together in a single interface so musicians can use mobile devices to create new sounds in live performances.” If you don’t know how this would work for you you probably don’t need it, but if you wanted to use your iPhone as something like an effects pedal, this would be perfect. The team is very close to manufacturing the devices and, given their skills and pedigree, it looks like these guys have what it takes to deliver. Early bird units cost $100 and you can grab one for $150 when those are gone. They plan to ship in July.
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Trulioo Raises $6M To Verify Online Profiles | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | recently announced that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Tenfore Holdings, with participation from BDC Venture Capital and previous investor Blumberg Capital. Trulioo has now . When I , it was analyzing Facebook profiles and estimating the likelihood that they belonged to human beings, not bots, so that businesses can focus their marketing efforts on real people. The platform now includes Google and LinkedIn as well, and the company says it has performed more than 100 million verifications. “The new funds will be used for hiring some new executives, to expand our reach into international markets like the UK where we have had some early success already, and further invest to enhance our product with support for [international] additional social networks like VK, Qzone, and Renren,” CEO Stephen Ufford told me via email. |
iOS Now Alerts You When Your Kids Are Free To Spend All Your Money On Fake Cat Food | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | Apple has apparently learned a lesson. After several high profile stories of children spending literal fortunes on virtual nonsense, the latest version of iOS users of Apple’s policies towards in-app purchases. Following an in-app purchase, such as virtual coins or fake cat food, a message now appears in iOS 7.1 stating that unless changed, for the next 15 minutes, more in-app purchases can be made without needing a password. A button to iOS device Settings is also visible. This policy is not new. It has been in place since the App Store debuted in 2008, but is easy to overlook. Just ask any parent who leans on an iPad as an impromptu babysitter. Earlier this year, Apple agreed to pay $32.5 million in refunds as a settlement over unauthorized in-app purchases made by children. The FCC had been investigating Apple’s seemingly lax policy on the matter. This new notification will probably not stop all unauthorized purchases, but it should curtail it a bit. In-app purchases is a booming industry among itself. Give a kid an app, he’ll play for an hour. Give a kid an app where he needs to buy things to play, he’ll pay for your yacht.
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Lending Club’s Renaud Laplanche To Speak On The State Of Lending At Disrupt NY | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | French American entrepreneur founded Lending Club in 2007, wanting to connect investors with borrowers and bypass banks altogether. Since then, the company has facilitated more than $3 billion in loans. As Laplanche is uniquely positioned to speak to the current status of lending to individuals and startups, we’re thrilled to announce that he will be joining us for an onstage interview at . To say Laplanche’s path to CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company was unorthodox is a massive understatement. He didn’t attend MIT or Stanford, he didn’t participate in any Y Combinators or hackathons, and his formal education has little to do with what he’s doing now. In his teens, Laplanche was a competitive sailor good enough to win France’s national sailing championships in 1988 and 1990. From there he went on to briefly practice law at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton before launching his first startup, TripleHop Technologies, a search engine for enterprise content that he sold to Oracle in 2005. After realizing the disparity between credit card interest rates and high-yield certificate of deposit return rates, he founded Lending Club, a person-to-person lending company that’s radically disrupting the individual money-lending industry. Lending Club quickly became synonymous with the P2P lending movement, and despite several new challengers, remains the biggest player in this emerging market. Lending Club is set to go public with a mid-2014 IPO at a multi-billion-dollar valuation. Laplanche launched Lending Club with Soulaiman Htite in 2007 with over $10 million in Series A funding from Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners. In mid-2013, the company raised $125 million from Google Capital and Foundation Capital on a $1.55 billion valuation as they prepared for their upcoming IPO. Lending Club has raised over $220 million to date according to the company’s . Because Lending Club relies on individual investors to back its loans, it can offer both lower interest rates for borrowers and better return rates for lenders than traditional banking institutions. Currently, Lending Club only provides individual loans, and most loan-seekers use funding to either consolidate debt or pay off credit card balances at these lower interest rates. In 2014, Lending Club plans to expand its services to include small-business lending, which will radically change the way small businesses secure funding. And that’s only the beginning. Laplanche plans to transform the entire multi-trillion-dollar consumer loan market, from mortgages to student loans to car loans and beyond. The market is there, and Laplanche plans to seize it. This will be Laplanche’s first time on the Disrupt stage. He joins other notable founders speaking at Disrupt NY such as Fred Wilson, Ken Lerer and Secret co-founders, Chrys Bader-Wechseler and David Byttow. More speakers are set to be announced in the coming weeks as Disrupt NY draws near. Disrupt NY will take over the Manhattan Center in New York City on May 5-7. Tickets can be purchased , and if you’re interested in being a sponsor, please contact our sponsorship team . |
Watch Arnold Schwarzenegger Crush Things With A Tank… For Charity | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | If you’ve ever wanted to see Arnold Schwarzenegger crush a 5-foot roll of bubble wrap with his own personal tank (and really, who hasn’t?), congratulations! Today is your lucky day. Just a few years ago, the folks behind Omaze set out on a rather commendable quest: to raise money for charity, they’d sell what were essentially raffle tickets for myriad “once-in-a-lifetime opportunities” — from hanging out with a celebrity for a day, to visiting SpaceX HQ. I doubt, at the time, that they thought “Hey — maybe one day we’ll get Arnold Schwarzenegger to roll around in his tank and crush taxis, gigantic easter eggs, birthday cakes, and massive rolls of bubblewrap. FOR CHARITY.” The Omaze is up for another two days. If you win, you get to roll around with Arnie himself, smashing stuff in his tank, smoking cigars, and probably making random Arnold Schwarzenegger movie references that you’ll immediately feel awkward for making. And if you don’t win? Don’t feel too bad: most of the money is going to After-School All-Stars, which helps to fund after-school fitness programs for kids. (Fun fact: The idea for this . Arnold is actually something of a regular around those parts; he’s done a few AMAs, and pops up now and again to drop knowledge bombs on the bodybuilding subreddits.) |
SketchDeck Turns Terrible Slide Decks Into Beautiful Presentations In Just A Day | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | A number of startups over the years have tried to reinvent PowerPoint with services that made it easier or quicker to create a slideshow presentation. Newly launched is taking a different approach: Instead of providing an alternative to PowerPoint or similar software applications, it’s offering a service that enables individuals or businesses to have their slides made beautiful by a team of designers who can turn around assignments within 24 hours. Explains SketchDeck co-founder and CEO Chris Finneral, this kind of service actually already exists, but only within larger organizations, like banks or consultancies. He would know, as Finneral himself used to work as a business analyst at McKinsey in London where he made thousands of slideshows himself. McKinsey which allowed staff to send out their roughly drawn slides to an overseas team that would, overnight, turn those into high-quality, well-designed presentations, then email them back to you. “It was so valuable there, but it didn’t really exist in any nice form outside of big organizations,” says Finneral. “Yet, all businesses make presentations – board meetings, sales pitches, marketing presentations – everyone’s making them,” he adds. “And lots of people don’t have much time, so the value proposition still works.” The service as it stands today is designed to be very simple to use. Customers either upload or email their draft slide deck to go@sketchdeck.com, and within 24 hours, they receive the professionally designed version in return. On SketchDeck’s side, the presentations are channeled first to a junior team of overseas designers who make more basic improvements, like adjusting the formatting or alignment, applying templates and more. It’s then sent off to a senior, generally U.S.-based team, that adds the custom flourishes that complete the project. (SketchDeck pays its designers by the hour, generally around $10/hr for the junior team and $50/hr for the seniors.) The product is available to both individuals and businesses on either a pay-as-you go basis, at $5 or $20 per slide, depending on whether you want a more basic, templated slide, or a custom-designed one. Businesses can also choose to pay for SketchDeck as a service, with plans that range from $100/month to $1,400/month, depending on the size of their company, the number of presentations they’ll need, and the customizations involved. Since SketchDeck’s soft launch in November, they’ve created around 250 presentations – some as large as 300 slides – for a variety of customers, including several YC startups (VC pitch decks galore!), and other contacts Finneral had from back in his McKinsey days. Longer-term, he says the idea is to take this concept beyond just slide decks, to offer similar design services for other materials that businesses need, including brochures, handbooks, flyers, and more. In fact, the team has already quietly handled a few these types of things, but for now, its main focus is on getting presentations right. The Y Combinator-backed company is currently working out of Mountain View, and is a team of two full-time (not counting the designers paid hourly): Finneral and his co-founder David Mack. |
Slideshow Of Stylish Women In Tech Includes Women Who Compiled The List | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | co-founders and have apparently voted for themselves as #2 on Lucky Magazine’s list of The list, which includes Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer (twice!), is heavy on the East Coast women, which, if you believe my feed, are generally more attractive and fashionable than San Francisco women. Now as I haven’t left the house in anything more snazzy than yoga pants for the past two months I completely understand my own omission. But, with all due respect to the sartorially savvy ladies like and who solidly represent here, these sorts of lists can be very subjective. Many of them are just an excuse for the writer to promote friends or people they like who also happen to exemplify the characteristic in question. For example, why aren’t , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Perhaps one of them could take Marissa Mayer’s second slot? According to at least one man on our team, “best dressed women” lists continue to proliferate gender stereotypes in our profession. But, I don’t think so. When done in the right way, ”tech culture” coverage like superlative lists can be quite awesome and , albeit sometimes ridiculous and fluffy. In fact, I can’t wait until we can roll out our own arbitrary lists once AOL gets around to our change request: “40 Best Founders Over 40,” and “Top 2,500 Most Stylish Women In Tech” here we come. [ Other dressy techies I forgot to include are , , , , , , , , , and .] [* Despite the confusing nature of the Lucky slideshow format, Rachel Sklar has messaged me to clarify that she and Glynnis MacNicol did not author this list, and did not suggest themselves to Maura Brannigan who built the slideshow. In fact, their inclusion — presented in the same format as all the list participants — was meant to highlight that they were list “helpers.” The collaboration, according to Sklar, consisted of sending a “bunch of names and brief descriptions” of their picks to Lucky Digital Editor Verena Von Pfetten. Pfetten has since updated the list headline to and removed Jenna Wortham at Wortham’s request. There are now in the slideshow, with multiple women featured on each slide. See how this could get confusing? |
FiftyThree Updates Creativity App Paper For iOS 7 To Improve Navigation And Control | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | has thrived over the last few years, due to the massive popularity of its drawing and and the release of its . Today it’s taking a big step to improve the creation process with an update to its Paper app, which has been updated to be faster and more responsive, and to provide even more tools for its users. Paper was already one of the best-designed tablet creation tools out there, and has won awards and received accolades ever since it was launched in 2012. But the new version of the app is even better, with a new look for iOS 7 that FiftyThree hopes will make it easier to read and improve the overall creation flow for users. Re-releasing the app enabled FiftyThree to improve on the general design in both big and small ways. “We wanted to take this opportunity to make everything a little cleaner, a little brighter, a little fresher,” co-founder Andrew Allen told me. That includes improved navigation with faster menus, a simplified icon menu, lighter colors, and improved readability. Allen says that with the refresh, the company updated thousands of visual elements, some of which won’t be immediately noticeable even to hardcore Paper users. It helped that iOS 7 by itself has a more streamlined view than previous versions of the operating system. “There was a lot of decoration in iOS 6 that has been stripped out,” he said. “I think we literally updated every asset in Paper. Almost every pixel has been touched, even subtle things that you probably wouldn’t notice right off the bat.” It’s also worked to give users more detailed control as they zoom in and out. Zooming in now adjusts the size of the draw, color, erase, and blend tools, to give creators finer control over their projects. And it’s updated the way dots work in draw and erase, enabling users to tap quickly to make small dots, or hold down on the canvas to create larger ones. Of course, FiftyThree isn’t the only iOS developer to have released an app called Paper. Facebook also when it released a new app that . FiftyThree subsequently for the name Paper, but it’s not clear how strong its case . Nevertheless, the company appears to be doing pretty well. It’s still one of the Top 20 apps in the productivity category, and last summer raised from Andreessen Horowitz, Highline Ventures, Thrive Capital, SV Angels, and Jack Dorsey. |
Threes Comes To Android, And I’m Not Just Using This To Tell You My Top Score Is 10,125 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | Threes, the number matching game that’s part Sudoku and part Bejeweled (or Candy Crush Saga for the young folk) is . You may not think this is a big deal, if you’ve never played the game, but that’s probably because you were on Android and unable to experience how awesome it is. The 100% original, all natural, homegrown Threes! is now available on Google Play — Threes! (@ThreesGame) The game is from the makers of Puzzlejuice, another addictive title, and is illustrated by Greg Wohlwend, who designed Ridiculous Fishing. It’s also got a soundtrack by the same guy who scored Mass Effect 2, in case you needed any more evidence of its prime pedigree. It’s a paid app, which is weird these days, but for a limited time it’s only $1.99 on the Play Store, which is 33.33% cheaper than it is normally, and it contains absolutely no in-app purchases. Oh, and I’ll just leave this right here: |
Bob’s Watches Streamlines The Rolex Market With An Electronic Exchange | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | As a watch nerd, I love to see the stuffy old watchmaking industry try new things. That’s why I was intrigued by the recent changes at , a retailer turned website that buys and sells Rolex watches using a very simple exchange model. Founded by Paul Altieri in 2010, the site was mostly a sales portal for years. Now, however, the company has created a Rolex Exchange, a real-time engine for pricing Rolex watches. Owners can post their own watches for sale and Bob’s gets a cut while buyers can see prices for hundreds of pieces. First, a bit of background: Rolex watches, unlike most fine watches, tend to hold their value. There is a massive underground of exceedingly obsessive collectors who buoy prices and the brand awareness is such that potential customers are everywhere. A particularly popular Submariner that cost $8,000 retail can usually maintain its value over the years, falling to $4,000 on a bad day but generally staying within 50% of the purchase price. The vast majority of classic watches don’t do this – an Omega or Breitling falls precipitously in value over the years but the price can rise if it’s a particularly nice or historical model. The only other popular brand that truly maintains its value is Patek Phillipe but those start in the tens of thousands. What Bob’s has done is create a simple market. Buyers can ask for a quote and Bob’s will sell the watch through their site. This gives the seller a better chance of getting a fair price and reduces much of the risk in dealing with an anonymous online seller. Given that almost every watch hobbyist has seen at least one timepiece get “eaten” by FedEx or DHL, it’s nice to be able to pawn some of the risk off on another party. “Customers are able to see both the ‘Buy’ and ‘Sell’ prices for each model Rolex and the website attracts over 200,000 visitors each month,” said Altieri. “Bob’s Watches serves as an online marketplace, or facilitator, for pre-owned Rolex watch customers as the secondary market was long overdue for a more efficient way to connect buyers and sellers.” If this seems obvious, it is. However, in the benighted world of watch retail, Bob’s is basically Google. Forums where users bought and sold watches online have been around for most of the past decade and new services like and are trying to integrate watch resellers and owners into the modern web but it’s definitely slow going. Many watch brands are going online. was the first major brand with a stragglers coming up behind every year. Transparency is an anathema to the luxury market primarily because, 99% of the time, you’re buying branding. However, if you’re a lover of fine watches you’ll understand the strange draw they have on collectors. Bob’s isn’t quite done. The service still isn’t real time and it still requires users to go through Bob’s appraisers to confirm the value of the pieces they’re selling and you don’t really get to see multiple items at once. The average customer will appreciate the “one price” model while savvy customers may look to eBay or the forums to pick up their Rolexi. In the end, however, anything that makes it easier to pick up a nice watch is OK in my book. |
www.happybirthday.net | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | 25 years in a time machine to meet the you of 1989. The you that was watching the Berlin Wall fall, the you that saw Jim and Tammy Baker come back to TV, the you that was probably peripherally aware of something called the Friday The 13th Virus. Now imagine telling this past version of yourself about the World Wide Web. What could you say? That it’s pervasive, now, like oxygen? It’s a constantly changing medium, a system that reinvents itself every second as the energy of a million minds is focused, laser-like, on one meme after the other? Will you tell that old you about how you don’t go to stores anymore but expect everything – from diapers to food – to be brought to you with the click of a button? Do you tell that you about the demise of the book, of the death of the postal service, of the implosion of the record industry, the shuttering of the great newspapers? What do you tell that you, the innocent you of green screens and .plan files? Do you talk about , about the way a NeXT computer began serving up simple documents to scientists and then exploded? about the way built an operating system that is the backbone of a modern railroad, silver lines of code replacing the steel and spikes of the first connector? Or do you talk about the dates you’ve been on with people you met on the Internet, about the fun you’ve had, about the things you’ve learned, about the things you carry now that act as a literal lifeline to the life of the mind? Do you tell that you that things aren’t better now, but are far different? Do you tell that you about how quaint it is to see movies feature paper files stacked a mile high on some drudge’s desk? Do you talk about how you worry that somehow all of this is making you sick? Or giving you cancer? Or alienating you? But we don’t have a time machine and the you of 1989 couldn’t have known where we’d end up. No one had a clue. Some prescient writers saw the barest hints of what it would mean to be connected. “Cyberspace,” wrote . “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.” But even Gibson sold the ubiquity of Cyberspace short. His characters had to move in meatspace far too often. Today’s technothriller involves a someone with security clearance sticking a USB stick into a port and blowing up the NSA. It’s the birthday of the web, the protocol that burns down dictators, agitates the downtrodden, and pacifies the well-fed. It’s where we get our pleasure, where we experience pain by proxy, where outrage bubbles like a mad stew. It’s the home to horrors, beauty, and endless scrap. It is the trash heap of the human mind, a vast field of knowledge that wastes our days and enriches our lives. What will you tell the you of 2039? What will that version of you tell you about their day online? Of one thing you can be sure: the web will be a constant. You may not recognize it, but one of the greatest inventions of the modern age won’t go away. I got my parents to buy me a modem for my PC in the early 90s and then figured out how to get into BBS systems. There was a project in Amsterdam at the time that gave you a Telnet connection and from there, I somehow found The Well. Later I got Mosaic somehow and managed to get on the web through some long-forgotten ISP. I probably bought one of those printed web directories, too…
My first experience with the ‘Internet’ was going to a friend’s house and watching him log on to a local BBS on a modem and download Shareware. I eventually ‘borrowed’ his old 2400 baud modem and connected to a few myself. Later I upgraded to a 9600 baud modem and started connecting to other BBSes, chatting with folks there, playing games and eventually connecting to a bunch of w4r3z sites. One month I ran up $150 in long distance charges connecting to a multi-line 0-day w4r3z site in Toronto (I think) to download either Rise Of The Triad or Primal Rage. Maybe both. I once stayed home sick to play ROTT, actually feeling ill. I think I realized after a time that I felt nauseous either due to the jerky gameplay on my 486 or the blood and extreme violence of exploding soldiers. It was only later that I connected to AOL and learned about webpages, and eventually the real ‘Internet’ in college.
I was in middle school, still living in Russia in the end of 90s. My first experience was in downloading software and short movie clips using Reget, making hideous web pages in PHP with flashy buttons and colorful backgrounds, and of course ICQ!
It was the mid-90s. I was in one of my early jobs in journalism writing about newspapers and Mosaic came out. We figured the magazine should have a web site so we asked our Quark designer to come up with a design. After working out how to upload the HTML files we waited as the creakingly-slow modem downloaded our site, complete with large red buttons. Eventually I bought a modem myself for home and started surfing around using applications like Veronica and Gopher. I also bought a (fairly basic) book about getting online by a guy called… Keith Teare.
A whirl and a series of rasping beeps accompanied an excitable 12-year-old me with dreams of downloading Counter Strike (14hrs) and Blink 182 tracks (25mins). The vast expanse of the internet presented the cumulative knowledge of thousands of years of recorded human history, experiences and philosophies at my very trembling fingertips. I went straight to Yahoo! chat.
We had computer class for the first time in fourth grade and everyone thought it was the coolest class because we’d get to play educational games and learn how things like Netscape Explorer and Ask Jeeves worked. My mom had no clue how the Internet worked and freaked out one month when I was in middle school and my brother and I racked up a huge phone bill using dial up internet to chat with our friends on AIM. My brother and I quickly figured out how Limewire and other similar services worked and we’d download episodes of Family Guy. I remember thinking it was incredible that we could watch TV at whatever time we wanted and without commercials.
It was 1997 the first time I got on the Internet or even had a home computer. I was 13 and I had never used one at school for longer than a half hour, but one day my dad came home with a new machine and broadband. He immediately set up email addresses for our whole family. Dad was sitting in front of our new HP 8180 and called me over. “I made your email mconnor@home.com, what do you want me to set the password as?” That made no sense. “Why can’t the email address be tconnor? Why did you use my middle initial?” My dad, also named Tom, didn’t look up from the computer. “Because I took tconnor, you can’t have it.” “Can’t you use tconnor1 for me?” My dad scoffed. “That’s dumb. We’re not doing that.” (oh, the irony). I really didn’t want to use my middle initial in my email, but dad pressed on without me. “Look I already registered the name, so you have to go with it. What do you want the password to be?” I had never picked out a password before, and I tried to think of something I’d remember. I chose “defiant,” the name of the most badass starship on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Dad typed it in and hit enter. “Alright, you’re done.” Armed with a handle that made no sense and a password pulled from a science fiction show, I was ready to be a power user.
My first time on the Internet came as a second grader in the spring of 1996. I grew up as an Army brat, and my family lived in Germany at the time. While the Internet might have been growing in popularity back in the US, as a child with only the Armed Forces Network and Cartoon Network for media consumption, I remained almost completely insulated from the concept. My mother subscribed to Family Fun magazine which had a feature along the lines of “good websites for children” so my mom decided we would go the library and visit a few. At that point, I think the library may have been the only public internet access on post so their tiny bay of computers with dial-up always had a line. Each user had an allotted ten minutes so we did not have to wait too long. We finally received our turn and loaded up the first page on the list: crayola.com. I think we only managed to load two or three pages within the site before our time ran up, but even now, I remember being hooked and immediately getting in the back of the line to surf again.
Netscape
titties, line by line
Will it ever load?
so I can shoot mine
My science teacher introduced me to the wild, wonderful world of Alta Vista one day in class. All of this information was literally at my fingertips and I was blown away. No need to wait my turn at the library to use the microfiche machines — it was all there in a few keystrokes. This wasn’t my dad’s Internet of geeky Silicon Valley engineers exchanging information on bulletin boards. It was relevant to me and a pretty clever research tool. And I loved it.
, TechCrunch First memory of the Internet was in the mid-90s when my father taught me what search engines were, suggested I use Alta Vista and explained why he liked that one better than the other engines out there. He also told me about Boolean terms. While I know I used it in between these times, my second clear memory of the Internet was my first online shopping experience when I was in college (circa 2000). I’m sure this is a shocking revelation to all.
Leslie Hitchcock, TechCrunch Back in the early nineties phone lines in Poland could barely handle 1200 baud, local calls were expensive, and parents did not see a modem as anything worth buying. So, my very first experience with the Internet was in the hallway of the Center for Informatics at the University of Warsaw, or CIUW for short. Therein stood text-based terminals to some IBM mainframe (sight unseen, but I was told it was big). After a formal petition, rubber stamped and signed-off by the Secretariat of the Dean or some other important body, I was awarded username and password. The account came with an email address in the plearn.edu.pl domain, some disk space on the VMS operating system and a photocopied getting started instructions. The terminals were on the first come, first served basis, so sometimes you had to wait a solid hour or better. Turns out, some people were using them for long periods of time, apparently much to their enjoyment as evidenced by occasional giggles or facial expressions of normally associated with situations of grave danger. That’s how I too discovered Internet Relay Chat. I was hooked. Like an addict, I began using IRC more and more, eventually clocking 13 hours straight in front of that green-lettered screen, which did not even have a scrolling feature. Somebody must have brought me food that day. So, sending an email was probably the very first thing I did on the Internet, but IRC had me. Gopher was also available as were MUDs but I used them only marginally.
Victor Olex, My first experience with the internet was in college, but it was very geeky and manual back them. Some nerdier friends of mine were into it, trying to explain to me crazy things like how “Gopher” worked, but I didn’t spend much time online then – I was mostly working on schoolwork and papers. (There was this one chat session where some girlfriends and I accidentally ended up interacting with someone who had already discovered the internet was a great porn machine, but that’s probably not a good story. Well, it’s not an appropriate one for this venue.) My interest in computers and the web didn’t really take place until later in life, when I bought my first Windows computer. I remember connecting over dial-up, and the squeals of the modem connecting. I remember browsing the web through directories of links in the pre-Google days, and making horrible Geocities homepages with HTML code I taught myself from books. I remember reading these proto-blogs where people in cities far away from me detailed their lives, which made the world feel like a smaller place.
I have two super-early Internet memories. When I was in fifth grade, our class somehow had a few minutes on a “modem” that allowed us to do… something. I’m honestly not sure what we were able to do with it. And the “minutes” were discussed as if they were gold. First real memory I have is using a black and white laptop and the first version of Netflix. When webpages, worked, they loaded so slow. And whenever I found something interesting, I would save it to a 3.5″ floppy disk. There was a feeling of vastness to the Web. This was new, primitive, and fascinating. Pages were chaotic and strung together without the years of design training that coach any modern site. I tried to enter a chat room, but having to reload every time I wanted to see a new message proved frustrating. I was curious.
Seth Porges, tech writer and It was AOL dialup, and I remember there being this AOL interface that had a “Kids Section” or something. I played with this but got bored almost instantly. And I was a kid, so well done AOL. I remember search pre-Google was a fucking shitshow. Oh and porn on dial-up. Damn, we were patient back then.
My high school friend Katherine T. was the first person I remember playing around on the Internet in 1990. She had a dial-up connection and an AOL account (I think) and would log in to chat rooms and talk and play text-based games while the rest of us were doing whatever else high school kids did (drinking I think). She told us all that this Internet thing was going to be huge, but we were too busy driving around aimlessly by the levee to listen to her (I grew up in Lynyrd Skynyrd song).
I remember that day vividly. Picture it: Westchester NY, late August ’94. A new school year was about to begin in a week. There was a faint smell of technological change in the air all around. Over at my friend’s house that windy Wednesday, he showed me this thing called Compuserve and I was blown away. In a matter of just 2 minutes and a few keystrokes, some foreign sounds I’d never heard before magically connected his computer to this new revolutionary world he called “the net.” On that polished 256-color cathode-ray tube, I witnessed the future for the first time when with a click of a mouse, I was watching a video trailer for the upcoming movie “The Quick and the Dead.” Video was on something other than a TV! I knew then and there the world would never be the same. This was one of many seeds that were planted in my growing teen years that inspired me to eventually drop everything for the last 2 years and create a live video shopping destination.
Adam Davis, My first experience with the internet was AOL AIM in high school. My chat name was Leaner10is. My parents were too cheap to pay for the internet so we used to get the AOL CDs from Blockbuster.
(I feel old) My first experience with the Internet was in college — my boyfriend had a computer made by his uncle (who worked at Bell) that linked to the outside world using one of those audio couplers. My own Mac was not “connected.” I used to go to the computer center and send messages to friends at other colleges over the VAX system (I think that’s what it was called. It was all super manual. Each university had a special route, Wesleyan’s was ‘eagle’, which was eventually part of your email address when they adopted those, and then finally just dropped altogether. We jokingly called it VAXing each other. I remember sitting in there with a lot of role-playing nerds, who had no idea why I was there.)
I got my first computer (a Packard Bell PC… I know…) for Christmas of 1996, about two months before my 11th birthday. I don’t particularly remember the first website I visited (it was probably nintendo.com or something like that), but I do remember spending an inordinate amount of time that summer in the Nickelodeon chat rooms on AOL… a lot of A/S/Ls in those days! (This was when TV commercials would say, “Be sure to check us out on AOL keyword ,” kinda like how ads nowadays use hashtags all over the place.) AOL also had a kids’ trivia section where you’d compete for high scores. “Who was the third president of the U.S.?” That kind of thing. This was before Wikipedia, Siri, and Google Now, folks! More embarrassingly I do remember creating a couple of “fan” sites for Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat very early on using AOL Press, some WYSIWYG website builder for Windows. There was MIDI music and animated GIFs as far as the eye could see–kinda like this one. Now imagine 40 of those sprawled across your monitor. Just a complete zero I was (am).
Nicholas Deleon It was 1994 in the tiny town of Oakhurst, CA. I was General Manager of Sierra Publishing, the largest division of pioneer game developer Sierra Online. I worked directly for Ken Williams, co-founder and CEO of Sierra (as we called it). He was the smartest boss I have ever had. He called me the night before and was all excited by this new product he had bought (I think at Egghead) called Internet In A Box. He sent me a copy via overnight mail and insisted I try it out first thing. I think I had a speedy 14.4Kbps modem to connect with and the Mosaic browser that came with Internet in a Box. I think I went to Yahoo, called Ken and told him I was on the Internet. There wasn’t a lot to do on the Internet at the time. I didn’t understand or appreciate the significance at the time but to his credit Ken called the ball in 1994. He said this would usher in an era of the dumb terminals connected to the “invisible mainframe”. Twenty years later we call it the “Cloud”.
My dad got us connected to Telnet/Gopher stuff through his job at the university before it was widely available when I was a wee lad. I used to spend hours on MUDs and BBS’s, doing the nerdiest possible things you can imagine in completely text-based environments. What I’m saying is: The Internet ruined my life.
My brothers were more active on the internet than I was. My first internet experience was downloading music on Napster (yes, I’m part of that generation who grew up with Napster). After that, I became very active on a couple of nerdy forums. My dad used to read all my posts because I was really a kid. I learned a lot of stuff by reading forums. I learned English as well (a lot of reading, a lot of chatting, a lot of movie downloading…). It was better than school classes.
My parents’ friend showed them Prodigy on his computer and we started subscribing that week. I joined a Sherlock Holmes fan club and started emailing with people who lived all around the world and were twice as old as me. When Geocities launched, I made a Web site (in /SoHo, of course, because I was a pretentious nincompoop) with lots and lots of information about where I lived, my school, and my extracurricular activities. To sum it up: I’m lucky I’m still alive.
I used the Computer Merit Badge as a thinly veiled excuse to connect to the Internet for the first time. It was of course Aol. I think it was version 4.0 where the Internet was a series of colorful bars and sponsored keywords leading to different curated portals. I had to keep a log of my usage so I didn’t exceed the free hours offered by Aol. Eventually, I completed the requirements for the merit badge and by that time my family was hooked on the Internet and we moved onto a local ISP. I played a lot of Quake 2 multiplayer after that and eventually made a series of Quake 2 fan pages on Geocities filled with tiny gifs and random quotes.
A friend of mine left Cincinnati Computer Store to start an ISP in 1994. Over a second bottle of Merlot, we decided the world needed one site to find lottery results quickly. At the birth of the internet, the states were showing the results by displaying 60K GIF files for each ping pong ball number pulled from the lot. Remember that most people were enjoying 1200 or 9600 bps modem speeds and that would take 3-5 minutes to load a result. We designed a website that was mostly text based and you can find any lottery results from any state in 2 clicks (thanks to advice from Razorfish about design.) I created a program in Apple’s HyperCard to scrape the results from web and publish 576 different static pages with up to date results. We had to install 2 x 128MB ISDN lines to handle the traffic. By 2001, we were getting 1 million visits per month on lotteryusa.com. I sold the site to a Canadian company, and am involved in a onemorepallet.com — a web platform that reduces small business freight costs by matching customers with unused space on trucks.
A geeky friend game me a dial-up modem when I was a teenager. I used to hang out on IRC chatting with fellow European Atari nerds on #atariscne. The backstory to that is long and convoluted but I used to do graphics/pixel-painting for an Atari game-making group – my older brother was the programmer. I actually have a lot more memories about an early ‘proto’ Internet based on swapping floppy disks containing computer demos and other stuff like Diskzines. In the days when information wasn’t instantly connected, floppy disks containing new wares had to be posted manually out to your network.
I’m not sure what year I first went online, but it was when hardly anyone had the internet in their homes. It was a half hour session at an “Internet cafe” and I spent the whole time in chat rooms telling people I was older than I really was and learning what “ASL?” meant. So yeah, I wasn’t much of an early adopter, but that was my first experience.
Ramy Khuffash, My first experience on the internet was creating an email account at , from what I can remember :)
Vlad Ciurca, I found the internet in middle school on my dad’s work computer through a painfully slow (and loud) dial-up connection. I didn’t know a world beyond Aol, and spent most of my time answering email questionnaires, talking on Aim with my friends, and (to be perfectly honest) checking out the “Romance” chat rooms. Looking back, it was pretty disgusting, but it’s also the beginning of how I realized I was gay. When the world opens up to you on a silver platter, it’s hard not to choose the most delicious item on the menu.
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Angry Birds Epic Is Final Fantasy With Swine And Fowl, Hits Australia And Canada This Week | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | The next Angry Birds game features Rovio’s now very recognizable birds and pigs, but duking it out via different in-game combat mechanics in a turn-based RPG. Angry Birds Epic makes its debut in Australia and Canada later this week, for iOS devices, which the time-tested way to see how you product works with a small, US-like English-speaking audience ahead of a broader launch. Unlike the physics-based Angry Birds franchise, which sees players flinging their birds at structures and evil pork, Epic features a story-driven campaign , and it has the aforementioned turn-based combat system and RPG levelling, along with a crafting mechanic where you can build in-game items and armor by redeeming currency either earned through play or via (you guessed it) in-app purchase. I used Final Fantasy as a facile comparison for those less familiar with the RPG realm, but this is likely to be more akin to something like Infinity Blade meets Paper Mario in terms of mechanics and game design. Once the soft launch is done, Rovio plans to launch Epic across Android and Windows Phone 8, in addition to iOS, and around the world. Rovio has recently started to spread (dilute?) the Angry Birds brand, with the launch of cart racing game Angry Birds Go! last December. Go! is currently in the top 60 in the iTunes top games list, is loaded down with in-app purchases, and sits at 115 in the Top Grossing list, so presumably it’s operating as a decent income source for the Finnish software maker. It must’ve fared better than Amazing Alex, Rovio’s previous attempt at an Angry Birds follow-up and a departure from its core brand, if the company is continuing to explore alternate takes on its central birds and beasts. |
Adblock Plus Now Blocks 8,600 Tracking Filters As Ad Tech Explodes | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | The story of advertising online in the last year has significantly also been a story about the rise of ad tech — ways of serving users more relevant ads, and ways of monitoring how users have responded to them. Unsurprisingly, this has also translated into a big rise in tracking technology: , the popular German-based open source project that creates browser extensions and an Android app to block “annoying and intrusive” online ads, says that it now blocks 8,600 different trackers — cookies, scripts and tracking pixels on sites that run usually in the background when you visit a web site — in its filter list, more than double the number it blocked a year ago (4,200). The trackers, in turn, collect data on usage (anonymised but still your data) to sell on to advertisers or other data management companies to help inform how advertising is bought and sold across the web, sometimes following you as you visit other sites. Last year, Adblock found that made it on to their “whitelist” of acceptable advertisers based on “good behaviour” principles. These include fairly subjective points, like ads being “not annoying”, as well as more practical and more objective attributes like whether the ad is transparently an ad, or whether the ad distorts page content. Adblock Plus’s CEO and co-founder Till Faida tells me that while that whitelist remains its “mainstay solution,” the anti-tracking that it does with tools like EasyPrivacy is offered as an additional tool for those looking for more protection. “We don’t think all tracking is bad – it can actually be useful if done transparently; but we do think you should have a robust block list if you want to get rid of it,” he says. Tracking tools are hidden on websites and run mainly in the background in order to create unique profiles for users, which are often sold to advertising or targeting companies. For example, EasyPrivacy blocks 13 elements on nytimes.com. EasyPrivacy allows users who do not want to be followed around the web to block these tracking attempts. Trackers are prevalent across many different pages online, including legit content sites: Adblock notes, for example, that EasyPrivacy has found 13 tracking elements on nytimes.com. He notes that the list of trackers is definitely on the rise, currently rising at a rate of 3% in the first two months of the year. “Being open source is an advantage here, however, because more people can contribute to keeping our block list one step ahead of the trackers,” he says. Faida says that Adblock is on track to hit 300 million downloads by next week, with active monthly users at between 50 million and 60 million at the moment. Last year, Adblock began to its , “since we got kicked out of Google Play”, Faida recalls. That complication and workaround have kept Android numbers “relatively low” compared to usage across Firefox, Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari browsers, Faida tells me. Looks like we may have an update there soon, too: “We are making huge strides with the Android app that we think will bring us a lot more users in the coming year,” he says. Photo: |
Google’s Search Results Ditch The Underlined Links, Increase The Font Size & More In New “Experiment” | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | No, it’s not just you: Google’s search results may look different right now, thanks to a very large “bucket” test currently underway, which has dramatically changed the look-and-feel of Google’s list of blue links. Most notably, the search result links are no longer underlined, the fonts are larger, and , but are rather just flagged with a small yellow label that says “Ad.” Google often runs experiments like this to determine whether or not a change is either financially viable, benefits its user base, or, in the best case, both. Often, these tests fly under the radar, but in the case of something as significant as Google’s search results pages themselves, it’s hard not to notice when they change. Some users are able to see both the current design and the new design when they switch between browsers, but your mileage may vary, as they say. (In my case, I see the new results in both Safari and Google’s Chrome browser on Mac.) According to a report from , Google’s head of search, Amit Singhal, told the audience at the Search Marketing Expo West conference this week that the changes users are seeing were just an “experiment” as per usual. However, the company points out to us that these changes were actually for mobile and tablet users. This update, then, could be seen as an extension of a broader series of changes already in the works, meant to better unify the desktop and mobile experience. As for the yellow “Ads” labels, those also were originally introduced on tablet and mobile, before being . Google notes that they’ve been testing these new labels for several months now, in fact. Though this may still be “just” a test, this particular experiment has been rolling out to more and more users as of late, which can indicate that the company is aiming for a wider release in the near future. : Google on Wednesday the changes, in a post on Google+, copied below: You may have noticed that Google Search on desktop looks a little different today. Towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements for Search on mobile and tablet devices (mobile first! :-). Today we’ve carried over several of those changes to the desktop experience. We’ve increased the size of result titles, removed the underlines, and evened out all the line heights. This improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look. We’ve also brought over our new ad labels from mobile, making the multi-device experience more consistent. Improving consistency in design across platforms makes it easier for people to use Google Search across devices and it makes it easier for us to develop and ship improvements across the board. |
Yahoo Partners With Yelp To Bring Local Data To Its Search Tools | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | Today Yahoo that it has partnered with Yelp to bring local data into its search experience, both mobile and desktop. The deal will see traditional Yelp information, such as ratings and user photos piped into Yahoo. Put another way, Yahoo’s search is now flavored with more third-party data that it lacks. Yahoo is no longer a company known for its search products, having long-ago ceded its search technology to Microsoft, but the company does command a slice of the query market. That slice is in decline, something that the company wants to correct. Yahoo has tried to slow, stall, or get out from under its search deal with Microsoft, given that the partnership has failed to perform up to financial expectations. But, lashed as Yahoo is to the Microsoft Bingwagon, the former is imitating the latter. Microsoft’s search engine also partnered with Yelp, albeit 2 years ago. As TechCrunch : Microsoft’s Bing is on a roll…in terms of new partnership announcements, that is. Today, and are announcing a co-branded relationship that will bring Yelp’s local business content to Bing’s Local search pages. The pages will display “Powered by Yelp,” beginning today with full U.S. availability expected over the next few weeks. Yelp will bring its reviews, photos, business attributes and more to the Bing search engine, reinvigorating Microsoft’s efforts at taking on Google Place pages, which . Yelp remains a trove of information that search companies et al like to have in their pocket. That or you have to collect it yourself, something that Google is betting it can pull off. Bing and Yahoo, lacking Google’s scale, seem content to buy off the shelf. |
On-Demand Ridesharing Startup Lyft Adds Insurance Between Rides | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | In the modern transportation market, companies like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar have emerged to help get users from point A to point B. But with current regulations, there are questions about who is protected against potential liabilities when something goes wrong. Tonight Lyft sought to alleviate some of those concerns with the announcement that its insurance will cover drivers even when they aren’t actively driving a passenger that requested a ride on its platform. Lyft had previously obtained insurance that covered any incident when a passenger was in a car. But the company’s liability was unclear at times in which drivers had signed on to accept rides but had not yet picked someone up. That differs from the typical taxi structure, in which drivers are generally covered so long as they are in a marked car. For Lyft that means obtaining insurance between the time a contracted driver logs on and when they log off. There have been some questions about this, in part due to a in which a man who drove for Uber ran over several members of a family while off-duty. For its part, Lyft is trying to provide some clarity about when its drivers will be covered. In a statement, the company announced that it will cover the time in which Lyft drivers have passengers in their cars, in addition to the time in-between. In a statement sent to TechCrunch, the company said: While we do expect personal carriers to cover the time period prior to carrying a passenger, in order to erase any uncertainty, Lyft will now provide additional protection. This new protection will provide backstop coverage to drivers when they are in match mode and are not providing rides. We will be rolling this out state-by-state in the days to come. For Lyft, the move follows a broader initiative toward working with regulators and personal insurance carriers as part of the new Peer-To-Peer Ridesharing Coalition, which it announced earlier this year. |
Former Baidu COO David Zhu Joins GGV Capital’s Investment Team | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | David Zhu, former COO of Chinese search giant Baidu, has as an investor. Based in Menlo Park and Shanghai, invests in companies that bridge the gap between the U.S. and China. Its portfolio includes top Chinese tech companies like , , , , , and . Zhu’s experience at Baidu, which is the largest search engine in China by market share, makes him an ideal fit for GGV Capital. The firm’s managing partner Jixun Foo and Zhu have already worked together on several projects, including social media management platform and (EDB), which supports 2,000 vendors on , one of Alibaba’s biggest e-commerce platforms. Zhu worked at Baidu between 2002 and 2007. Prior to that, he was vice president of Han Consulting, where he focused on business development and sales. Zhu also co-founded Original Power Information Technology Co., and served as a vice president of , China’s largest software company, from 1997 to 2000. In a statement, Foo said “David brings unique insight into the relationship between large companies and start-ups companies, and the partnership opportunities and the operational challenges for each one. As the US and China tech economies continue to convergence, David’s experience will be invaluable in helping our portfolio companies navigate these important changes.” |
Rdio Acquires India’s Troubled Music Streaming Startup Dhingana To Push For Global Expansion | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | India’s troubled music streaming startup , which announced , is being acquired by . While Rdio will gain from Dhingana’s existing catalog of over 1 million songs in 42 languages through this acquisition, the latter will find a new home and hope for some of its staff who were facing an uncertain future until this week. The companies are not disclosing financial details of this transaction. Rdio will launch later this year in India, adding more muscle to its global expansion that . Dhingana founders Snehal Shinde and Swapnil Shinde will join the executive team at Rdio, where they will work to continue Rdio’s expansion efforts in India as well as other emerging markets. “India is a tremendously vibrant market for music and culture and one of the largest and most important in the world. We are one of very few global companies that can provide a great music experience to an expanding international audience,” said Anthony Bay, Rdio’s CEO. “It is our objective to bring that experience to India and to non-resident Indians and fans around the world.” “Dhingana, with over 1-million songs in 42 languages and Indian genres has become synonymous with India’s love of music for its millions of users around the world. We are excited to bring a new experience for millions of Dhingana’s loyal fans, to extend that to all Indian smartphone users, and join an amazing globally-minded team at Rdio,” said Swapnil Shinde, Co-Founder of Dhingana. There are some big challenges facing both the free streaming and the pay-for-download models in India — music piracy is clearly the toughest to battle, with most consumers still preferring to download free music from illegal sites like Songs.pk. The other challenge is that most big music labels demand stiff fees for awarding any digital music rights apart from the per-stream cost for each of the songs. Dhingana started when its biggest partner — T Series — said it will not renew the agreement. T-Series president Neeraj Kalyan had confirmed to TechCrunch, that the company will not renew the license set to expire for nearly 8,000 songs from Dhingana’s catalogue. We have reached out to Rdio with questions on strategy and future plans. We will update this story after hearing back from them. |
Lavabit’s Ladar Levison Discusses Privacy And Dark Mail At SXSW 2014 | Jay Donovan | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | If there were any thematic backdrops present at SXSW 2014, certainly privacy was one of them. To be sure, the Edward Snowden and Julian Assange keynotes were packed, but there was also a more subtle conversation about privacy taking place in Austin this week. Of all these viewpoints described to me, none had the same intensity nor conviction as those I heard in my chat with Lavabit’s Ladar Levison. You may recall Lavabit — the encrypted email service used by Edward Snowden — , after a protracted battle with the U.S. Government. The government was requiring Mr. Levison to hand over SSL keys to the encrypted accounts, to search for information about Snowden. A staunch privacy enthusiast, Levison resisted as long as legally possible, until ultimately being forced to deliver access for Snowden’s account, but not before shutting down the rest of his ten-year-old service in an attempt to protect the privacy of his other clients — a move he says he didn’t take lightly. Nowadays, Levison is back on the scene after funding his next service called via . I caught up with him and we discussed the past, present and future. |
Former General Catalyst and Lightspeed VCs To Launch New Fund Called Binary | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | Venture capitalists Jonathan Teo and Justin Caldbeck are planning to launch a new fund that will focus on consumer technology. The news was first and was confirmed to TechCrunch by two sources. We’ve learned that the fund will be called Binary and it will focus on making early-stage investments in consumer technology. Our sources told us that Binary is not a seed investment fund, but that it wants to help new startups focus on developing their products instead of worrying about capital. Teo and Caldbeck, who declined to comment for this post, have been friends for six years. Teo previously spent two years as managing director at , where he was a personal investor and led GC’s Series A and B participation in . His other investments there included , and . Before joining General Catalyst, Teo was at Benchmark Capital, where he originated its investments in and . While a partner at , Caldbeck’s investments included , which recently , , and TaskRabbit. Before joining Lightspeed, Caldbeck was a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, where he launched the firm’s West Coast office. Teo and Caldbeck’s decision to strike off on their own may be a loss for their former firms, but it is a boon for consumer tech startups that struggle to find post-seed stage investment. TechCrunch doesn’t know yet how much Binary wants to raise, but we’ll keep you updated. |
With 10K Schools On Board, BrightBytes Lands $15M To Help Measure The Real Impact Of Technology In Education | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | Over the last year, has become a personal favorite in the ballooning world of education startups. The reason for this begins with the fact that when it comes to our beleaguered education system — from its skyrocketing costs to its middling outcomes and dwindling resources — many have begun to look at technology as a savior. Certainly few would argue that the litany of new tools and services technology is bringing to classrooms and learners has the potential to transform the learning process in a number of exciting (and positive) ways. However, in all the excitement over the slew of smart learning devices, tools, services and software now proliferating through education, it’s important to consider whether we’re advocating for the use of technology for its own sake (or progress’ sake) or whether these new tools are actually having an impact on student outcomes and achievement. BrightBytes launched in 2012 to help answer this critical question. Since then, the San Francisco-based data analytics startup has been on a mission to evaluate the real impact of technology integration in our nation’s schools on student achievement. Through its flagship SaaS-based platform for K-12 institutions, BrightBytes takes the latest research and data from schools, and examines how teachers and students access and use technology in the classroom, distilling that information into actionable guidance that links tech adoption to changes in learning outcomes. In short, BrightBytes wants to help districts and administrators decide how and where they should be spending those precious dollars allocated to education technology. We first , after it raised $750K from Learn Capital, NewSchools Venture Fund and ReThink Education. By offering educators the ability to identify learning gaps and providing recommendations on how to best fill those gaps (without being swayed by the influence of vendors), BrightBytes has quickly gained favor among K-12 educators. With 10,000 schools now signed on to use its platform, BrightBytes is looking to capitalize on the growing demand for solutions to the industry’s nagging problems — namely the misspent dollars and disappointing experiences that still prevail in primary education. Plus, it’s a big problem. As Fast Company points out, the company is now dealing in a high stakes game, considering that schools across the globe now spend $40 billion every year on education technology. BrightBytes’ success relies on its ability to quickly and effectively transform complex research and an increasing number of disparate data sets into simple, actionable roadmaps that educators and administrators can understand. That’s a lot more difficult than it sounds, and it doesn’t sound that easy. With adoption growing fast, it puts a lot of pressure on its blended team of experienced teachers, engineers and data scientists to make it work. To help its team and support mechanisms keep pace with growth, BrightBytes recently added a big chunk of new capital — $15 million in Series B financing, to be precise — in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Existing investors NewSchools, Learn Capital and ReThink contributed to the round as well, bringing the startup’s total funding to just over $18 million. BrightBytes is looking to help primary education understand how technology is impacting learning outcomes and address new, residual problems that arise from this adoption, like the fact that many schools may not be properly training teachers on how to actually use and make the most out of these new technologies. With its new funding in tow, BrightBytes now has more room to investigate these problems, and the ability to begin bringing its tech-investigating microscope to new markets and educational systems around the world. |
Security Startup Shadow Networks Has Raised Over $10 MIllion To Pull Threats Into The Matrix | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | , a stealthy new security company with high-powered backers, has raised over $10 million in a round of financing disclosed to the US Securities and Exchange Commission under its old name . Part of a new breed of security startup, Shadow Networks is based on technology developed for the U.S. Government that creates virtual environments where programmers can simulate cyber attacks. After the round, the company’s backers now include , a Washington, DC-based investment firm specializing in security and defense technology investments; , a seed investment fund focused on the Pacific Northwest and Canada; and two undisclosed venture firms, according to a person familiar with the company’s financing. As a result of its most recent round, and through its deep connections in the security industry, Shadow Networks also nabbed , the chief security officer at Cisco Systems, for its board of directors. Security threats are evolving and Shadow Networks was launched to tackle not the amateur hacker in a basement, but the advanced persistent threats that are increasingly the work of . “These APTs exist and they try to establish a beachhead in the company that gets targeted. Once they’re in there they’re trying to get to the crown jewels,” said one former Shadow Networks executive. “[Shadow Networks] is providing these highly scalable honey nets to create virtual infrastructure to obfuscate targets. It increases your attack surface and creates these shadow networks around your infrastructure.” Meanwhile, Shadow Networks chief executive and company co-founder Eric Winsborrow, the former vice president of product marketing at McAfee, said that the technology was akin to putting security attacks inside virtual networks like the Matrix. “[And] like agents in the Matrix, these honeynets can show up anywhere in the network at any time,” he said. The company’s technology is so impressive that even investors who aren’t backing it are willing to sing its praises — like Redpoint Ventures partner John Walecka, who named-dropped the company in “Software defined networks have changed the game,” said Winsborrow. |
Russia Blocks Websites Of Putin’s Critics, Including Chess Star Garry Kasparov | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | Russia of President Vladimir Putin. The Prosecutor General’s office ordered Russian Internet service providers to cut off access to a handful of websites, including the blog of famed chess champion, Garry Kasparov. “These sites contain incitement to illegal activity and participation in public events held in violation of the established order,” the announcement (via Google translate). Kasparaov immediately took to Twitter to denounce the move: [tweet https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/444241941732274176] Blocking theses websites is just the latest in a turbulent month for the Russian government. Earlier this month, Ukrainian activist websites, protesting their military intervention of Crimea. Last week, a Russia Today anchor on-air, saying she could no longer work for a network that “whitewashes” Putin’s image. , claiming that he is preserving order and upholding the law. |
After Apple Acquisition, Burstly’s SkyRocket Users Get 90-Day Notice | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | When we that Apple had acquired Burstly last month, a lot of the attention was focused on TestFlight, its popular mobile app testing platform — and specifically around how it would discontinue support for Android and the wider TestFlight SDK to new users. But it looks like this won’t be the only part of the Burstly business that will be winding down. A customer who was using the company’s product — the other side of its business that focuses on app monetization — has forwarded us a letter from Burstly. Dated March 11 and signed by Ryan Rifkin, one of Burstly’s co-founders, it notes that Burstly is terminating their publishing and SDK license agreement, 90 days from the date of the letter — in other words, June 9. We are reproducing the text of the letter below, with names and other identifying data redacted. Another customer of SkyRocket’s, who used the service only on iOS, confirms that he has also received the same notice. And in the past day we have seen mention the same 90-day window for SkyRocket on and . To be clear, there is no mention in the letter we have seen specifically of SkyRocket shutting down, but this appears to be the implication. “As our Publisher and SDK License is being terminated in 90 days, it’s a pretty strong indication SkyRocket is being closed,” our source tells us. “Apple may revise and offer up some new terms, but winning customers back will be hard given the course of action.” Anecdotally we have also heard that people on the mediation team at SkyRocket were laid off a couple of weeks ago. We’ve reached out to Apple and to Burstly to ask for comment on the letter and more information, and we’ll update as we learn more. We don’t know how many customers Burstly had for SkyRocket. As for the SkyRocket product, it covered areas like ad mediation (essentially a platform that lets developers integrate multiple ad networks and direct ads in an optimised way); app cross-promotion services; and customer segmentation (offering ways of segementing different customers and offering rewards or other perks if they are seeing a lot of crashes, or for loyalty, for example, or removing ads for other users). SkyRocket competed against other startups, many of which have also been subsumed into bigger companies. They include MoPub (now part of Twitter), Mobclix (part of Velit), and AdMarvel (part of Opera). While the SkyRocket suite of products, which first started to appear in , catered initially more to larger publishers, last year it opened the doors to more smaller developers with a . All in all, just the kind of technology and product that would serve Apple well in its own developer ecosystem. But even if that is the case, the termination notices seem to imply that Apple wants a clean break regardless. Publishing and SDK License Agreement – Termination This letter serves as written notice that Burstly, Inc. shall terminate the Publishing and SDK License Agreement, dated as of XXXX, pursuant to Section X. Pursuant to this notice, the Agreement shall terminate as of 90 days from the date that notice is provided in accordance with Section XX of the Agreement. We are looking forward to a smooth transition as we conclude our relationship under the Agreement. Yours sincerely, Ryan Rifkin |
Xapo Raises $20 Million To Bury Your Bitcoin Underground | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | With the implosion of and the rising popularity of cryptocurrency, it makes sense that someone would want to build an FDIC for BTC. thinks it may have figured out how. The company, founded by Wences Casares, raised $20 million from Benchmark Capital and Fortress Investment Group LLC, among others, and has been in stealth mode for two years managing bitcoins for large institutional clients – think investment banks and financial firms. Now they’re opening their service up to consumers. “If you have one or a couple rogue employees there’s not anything they can do to take the coins out of our vault,” said Wences. “The coins that are in the vault are on servers that are never online — have never been online.” The private keys — essentially the way you access your BTC — are under armed guard and behind layers of physical security in deep storage spaces around the world.
“In the wild west of Bitcoin, it’s disorder that makes people realize just how much they want civilization,” said Adam B. Levine, Editor-in-Chief of Let’s Talk Bitcoin Network. “Private ‘Vaults’ are a natural response to Mt.Gox, the equal and opposite reaction, but I’m truly excited about these early insurance products. We’re now seeing the evolution of the open source cryptocurrency experiment where the tokens are worth enough and the concept is viewed seriously enough to make it warrant professional, institutional-grade security and insurance.” Users can create a Bitcoin wallet using the service and then move their coins into a vault for an “annual custody fee of .12% of your vault balance.” This service also insures your bitcoins against theft and hacking, a valuable asset for those worried about getting Mt.Goxed. Your wallet is protected by a four-digit PIN, which isn’t very heartening, but it makes the creation and management of BTC wallets far simpler. “To break into that you need to break the technology, break the processes, and break into different vaults on different continents,” said Wences. Wences noted that one client came to him with a laptop containing 30,000 bitcoins. The IT team had physically ripped out the Wi-Fi card but in the process they had almost damaged the CPU and hard drive, essentially losing those coins. “And these were some pretty sophisticated people,” he said. The wallet, said Wences, works like a checking account while the vault works like a savings account. They have no intention of ever becoming an exchange. If the service sounds simplistic, there’s a reason. The company aims to make the storage and protection of far simpler for everyone, from big banks to the average Satoshi. The $20 million investment is going towards managing the massive amount of security required to maintain a secure bitcoin environment and, more interestingly, apply enough security to convince insurance houses to pay up if someone hacks into the vault. “To this point in Bitcoin, there’s been no way to outwardly tell if an institution is competent or not – they’re all black boxes. The introduction of these insured plays, and believe me this is the first but not the last, means that any service advertising it’s got this insurance is one who has been vetted, and who is being watched like a hawk by its insurers because if something goes wrong it’s their funds that’ll fill the gap,” said Levine. |
The SXSW Effect, Visualized | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | Secret bet that the massive density of technology enthusiasts in the city would be fertile ground for it to grow in popularity, with a viral loop being formed by the swirling nerds visiting Austin. It worked, with its popularity spiking inside the top 500 most popular iPhone apps in the United States, but has since declined. The above chart, in a nutshell, is the ‘SXSW Bump, such as it is. Secret recently at $50 million post-money valuation. |
#BanBossy May Have Beyonce, But #BeBossy Has Nicki Minaj | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | has done it again: She’s managed people by her sheer choice of words, and the logical fallacy that one woman’s experience equals all women’s experiences. I’ve spent some time looking at the campaign and am very impressed that Sandberg corralled Beyonce — whose song happens to be my personal anthem — to perpetuate her rhetoric. As always, I am grateful to Sandberg for opening up these discussions and giving women leverage to call out bad behavior, as well as making people challenge their assumptions starting with the very language they use. But just as with the there are slight adjustments to be made. Instead of further creating negative connotations for the word bossy, the boss lady of culture appropriation herself, cultural theorist , argues that we should embrace the word. She has set up the campaign to encourage women to own it. Sandberg is correct in her assertion that our culture chooses toxic labels for women and girls, but I’m not sure the adjective form of “boss” is the right target. When my peers called me bossy as a young girl, I was proud. Every woman’s experience is different, but I think it’s the other B-word that is the actual problem here. As points out in the above video, shot before the world was up in arms about what to do about the word bossy, “There’s no negative connotation behind ‘bossed up’, but lots of negative connotation behind being a ‘bitch’.” Just the other day I was talking to a bright young woman who was hesitant to speak up for fear of being labeled a bitch, i.e. “emotional,” “shrill” or “hysterical,” a subset of words that the and commercial highlight as being specific to women. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjNcZvwjxI Another biased word is “gravitas.” The only time I hear it is when it’s used to refer to why some women aren’t serious enough — read “enough of a man” — to hold whatever position. So Sandberg is right that there’s a problem with women being discouraged from leadership, due to the negative labels our culture puts on female leaders. But maybe she’s not so right about the solution. I agree with hooks a that we should try to reclaim the word and provide girls with strong female role models instead. Perhaps Beyonce should change her motto to, “I bossy, because I’m a boss”? What does this have to do with tech? Well, right now most , and female founders invested. Only of Y Combinator companies have a female founder, and that is an all-time high. Don’t you think these numbers would change if we normalized risk-taking and leadership in young women? I do. Boss up. [ had, well, something on the “bossy” dilemma back in 2006.] |
Layer3 TV Announces A $21M Series A Round Of Funding For “Next Generation Cable” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | Today , a company that will operate in the cable space, announced that it has raised a $21 million Series A round of capital led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Evolution Media Growth Partners. The company bills itself as a “next generation cable provider,” which is clear as mud. Its executive leadership is heavy on people, unsurprisingly, with experience in the cable and broadband industries, including stints at Time Warner Cable, ATT Broadband, Comcast, and others. The company was previously operating in stealth. In its release, the CEO of the firm, Jeff Binder, stated that “Layer3 TV merges the television experience with consumers’ digital lives in ways that engage and enhance the programming and distribution ecosystems. We intend on delivering that promise.” Again, unclear. Still, with a shiny $21 million, perhaps we’ll see a product soon. |
Seeing 15M Travelers In 2013, Gogobot Goes After Kayak With New Hotel Metasearch Utility To Help You Find The Best Deals | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | launched in 2010 in the early stage of a wave of new interest in the social travel space, as a glut of new startups promised to as a new generation of companies promised to transform stodgy old travel with the magic of the social graph. Some of those players built products on top of Facebook, growing quickly thanks to the instant-scale of Facebook’s platform. However, it was a dangerous game, as Facebook could shut off access to its social graph, platform and data, and Gogobot knew that it couldn’t rely on the social network to build a business, Gogobot founder Travis Katz tells us. While the platform remains one of the most popular destinations if you’re looking for socially-powered recommendations or reviews of travel destinations, hotels and activities, Gogobot is looking to become more of an end-to-end solution or travel concierge. People are still going to dozens of sites while planning vacations and travel, Katz says, so Gogobot wants to expand its utility with tools that will help eliminate some of the fragmented search problem. To do that, on top of the ability to peruse its 650K reviews and four million photos, Gogobot has added features like the ability to book a hotel on the fly (on web and mobile), view realtime hotel pricing and availability, user rankings and hotel class. The startup has also been looking for ways to deepen its utility as a travel search mechanism, like filtering results based on where your friends have been, what hotels are available for “x” price and so on. The Gogobot CEO tells us that 15 million people used the platform to plan their travels in 2013, and as the network grows, the company continues to step into Kayak’s territory, especially where search is concerned. Today, for example, the startup added metasearch functionality to its social travel platform, giving travelers a way to search for and find hotel and accommodation deals from a range of booking services, including Booking.com, Hotels.com and Travelocity. The launch comes on top of Gogobot’s recently launched , which allows users to search for destinations or different experiences according to their style and preferences of choice. Tribes leverages the millions of data points Gogobot has collected over the last three years on trends and styles among different demographics of travelers to help those researching a trip find one that matches their particular preference. Travelers can search through the vertical’s categories, like “Adventure Travelers,” “Art And Design Lovers,” “Foodies,” or “Budget Travelers,” for example, to find the “best place to picnic in Paris,” and so on. With Tribes and its new metasearch feature, following in the wake of Kayak, Gogobot wants to become a one-stop shop for travelers to research and book travel and streamline the trip planning process. For instance, as nearly 5 percent of travelers visit more than 150 sites before securing a room on a hotel’s website, metasearch aims to narrow that process down. Now, when users search for hotels in Las Vegas, Gogobot will show prices from over 30 different booking sites, giving users optionality while allowing them to get smart recommendations and a realtime look into how pricing compares between sites. This is especially relevant on mobile, as travel platforms are now seeing an increasing amount of traffic derived from users searching for flights, hotels and restaurants from their mobile devices. Over 40 percent of Gogobot’s traffic now comes from its mobile site and native apps, for example. However, with travel being a highly-regulated industry and competition quickly increasing for viewers’ attention — not to mention that people usually only search widely for travel (other than business) a few times a year — it can be tough to make money. This, in part, explains why so many companies have turned to utilities like hotel search and booking, an area where it’s a bit easier to make money. To this point, Gogobot has the advantage of the fact that 93 percent of its traffic is organic, Katz says, which means the vast majority isn’t paid and allows the company to keep its burn rate low. In addition, the CEO tells us that leads to its hotel booking partners has grown 10-fold over the last 12 months and revenue is beginning to pick up as a result. Ultimately, metasearch and hotel price comparison can only go so far. But, with over 650K reviews, Gogobot is starting to boost its likelihood of becoming the place that people researching destinations for their next vacation or getaway turn to for advice — and to book. For more, |
9th Dot Aims To Be The App For Consumer Feedback And Suggestions | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | Got a great idea for your favorite business? A startup called has created an app where you can share that idea, with potential rewards if your idea actually gets used. There are plenty of other options for businesses that want to collect customer suggestions. Many of them take the form of crowdsourced “idea” sites like , where users can submit and vote on different ideas. However, 9th Dot co-founder Jeff Spurlock suggested that those sites aren’t very convenient for most consumers — you might have a great idea when you’re in the store, then forget about it by the time you’re back at your computer. And for most stores, you probably don’t even know what the idea website is. Or you might get a feedback code or link, but who knows if you’ll actually see and respond to it. With 9th Dot, the goal was to create, a “very simple and very consistent” experience every time a customer has “an ah-ha moment,” Spurlock said. So whenever you think of a way a business could do better, regardless of who the business is, you can open up the 9th Dot app, find them, enter your idea, and hit “submit”. You can also review all of your ideas and check their status — if one of them is actually adopted, you’ll get a reward, with the level of the reward determined by how broadly the idea is implemented. Spurlock acknowledged that many of these businesses want to control their own user communities, rather than sending them to a third-party app. However, he said that in order for this to work, “We really need [consumers] to associate this with an external brand.” He added that there’s another benefit for businesses to 9th Dot’s approach: If you have a public community where customers vote, you create a potentially awkward situation if the most popular suggestion just isn’t feasible for one reason or another. You might make everyone feel like they’re not being listened to. 9th Dot’s more “closed” strategy gives the businesses more control over the process (and the perception thereof), while still making sure users get transparency into whether their ideas are being adopted, and rewarding those users when they are. And just to be clear, the businesses listed in 9th Dot don’t have a relationship with the startup yet. Instead, Spurlock said the idea is to get a “critical mass” of consumers making suggestions and then bring the businesses on-board. You can . |
What’s The Best Amazon Prime Alternative? | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | There isn’t one. Sorry, Charlie. Amazon Prime stands alone as the best deal online. No other service offers the same amount of substance: Free two-day shipping on a ton of stuff, cheap overnight shipping, and a streaming library second in content only to Netflix. Like it or not, Amazon Prime is still a great deal even after the it announced this morning. Starting on April 17, it will cost $99 a year instead $79 a year. The company hinted weeks ago that this could happen. We all knew it was going to happen and Amazon knows exactly what it’s doing. Prime launched nine years ago and Amazon had yet to raise the price while slowly adding more benefits. Plus it was ridiculously easy to bypass paying for it at all by signing up for the somewhat limited Student or Mom program. Amazon wanted people on Prime. It was growth hacking at its finest. For the most part, that’s still the case. to avoid paying the new price next year. The Student program now costs $49, which is still a great deal and relatively cheap. And Amazon Mom is still around and offers the free two-day shipping portion of Prime for free. Competitors have attempted to clone Prime, but none are worthwhile except for maybe Newegg’s. Called , it costs subscribers $50 a year and offers free three-day shipping and free returns. Premier of course lacks the video streaming library found on Prime. Newegg doesn’t have Amazon’s inventory but the U.S.-based retailer does have a lot of stuff. Another upstart called partners with traditional retailers to offer free two-day shipping. There are 85 retailers currently onboard, including Timberland, Toys’R’Us, AutoZone and American Eagle. The company clearly strives to bring the spirit of Amazon Prime to third-party retailers, but sort of misses a major point of Amazon’s aggregation of goods. There’s no need to go to each retailer’s website. It’s all on Amazon. Still, ShopRunner smells an opportunity and is currently to give its service for free to Amazon Prime subscribers upset with the price increase. Amazon is in a tough spot. Put another way, during the last holiday quarter, Amazon managed to miss financial expectations on both its top and bottom lines. Something needed to change and raising the price on Prime was probably an easy decision. The new price of $99 is toward the top end of the value scale, though. I would argue that it’s worth more — I would pay up to $150 a year — but anything higher than $99 is a big jump and Amazon would probably see a drop off of renewals. There’s a reason it’s $99 instead of $100. And Amazon being the retail data monster it is, probably knows that. Things change. It’s unfortunate, sure. If you don’t like the extra cost, don’t pay for it and order your home goods from Newegg or Walmart. As it stands right now, Amazon Prime is still a great deal at $99 a year. |
Apply Now To Write For TechCrunch This Summer As A Paid Intern | Billy Gallagher | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | Are you obsessed with the startup world? Do you read TechCrunch all the time? Good news! We’re hiring paid interns for this summer. A year and over a hundred posts later, I was sitting in a tiny room backstage at our Disrupt NY conference interviewing intern candidates to join us and cover the crazy tech world. politics fashion sports Interns will work out of either our New York or San Francisco offices, where they will be mentored by our all star cast of reporters and editors. The internship will run for ten weeks, with the opportunity for future part-time or full-time work after that. Some basic information about the gig: summer 2014, we will work the dates out with final candidates Our San Francisco or New York offices Join us! |
CEO Sean Rad Says Dating App Tinder Has Made 1 Billion Matches | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | is announcing that it has made 1 billion matches between its users. As most (all?) of you know, Tinder works by giving users a stack of potential matches and allowing them to swipe right or left to show their interest. If two users express mutual interest, then the app will connect them, allowing them to send each other messages — those are the matches that Tinder is counting. The company isn’t disclosing how many registered or active users it has, so it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples connection to other apps. What this illustrates, according to co-founder and CEO Sean Rad, is, “Tinder is here to stay. Tinder is absolutely solving a … core human issue that people have with social discovery.” If you want some sense of how quickly Tinder has grown, well, when we first covered the IAC-backed startup in January of last year, it said it had made , and the number was in December. Rad added that the number of connections made per user is on the rise, something he attributes to the team “constantly improving our recommendation engine — we’re increasingly better at suggesting people that we think you’d be interested in knowing.” He also confirmed , although he said, “We haven’t fully rolled it out yet.” He explained the feature by saying the team is “committed to the authenticity of our ecosystem.” Tinder told me that Rad was scheduled to make the announcement a few minutes ago in an interview on CNBC (though I don’t have a TV on in front of me). Rad also appeared at last month, where he noted that the app is becoming more age diverse (with 18-24 year-olds making up 50 percent of the total user base), and he hinted at plans to move beyond dating by connecting people non-romantically as well. |
Study: Feelings On Facebook Spread From Friend To Friend | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | According to a study from the University of California, San Diego, feelings on Facebook can spread from user to user like a virus. In other words, your friends’ moods can affect your moods, positively or negatively. As we well know, humans can spread their moods to each other in face-to-face situations. A grumpy co-worker can make you grumpy while a happy significant other can cheer you up. This also happens, wrote the researchers, “among strangers or near-strangers.” But no one had quite figured out if it spread via social media or not. Until now. Using anonymized data, PhD student Lorenzo Coviello and Adam D. I. Kramer and Cameron Marlow from Facebook looked at English-language status updates over 1,180 days. Using automated text analysis, they assessed the mood and tenor of each post to get the “emotional content.” What did they discover? First, they found that when it was rainy in a specific geographic location, the moods in that location tended to go negative, and positive posts fall. This could be seen as a “topic contagion.” However, the researchers wanted to see what happened to friends outside of that area who were unaffected by the rain. The effects, while small, were definitely interesting. The researchers write: “If an emotional change in one person spreads and causes a change in many, then we may be dramatically underestimating the effectiveness of efforts to improve mental and physical health,” said James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science in the School of Medicine at UC San Diego and lead author. “We should be doing everything we can to measure the effects of social networks and to learn how to magnify them so that we can create an epidemic of well-being.” In short, they found some correlation between, say, your mood and your friends’ moods on Facebook. When you feel bad, it actually spreads, digitally, to your friends, something that should give us pause next time we post “Life sucks” on Twitter. The researchers believe this could help improve public well-being through social media and widespread messaging. All the more reason to pick |
null | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 3 | 12 | null |
Smart Sparrow Lands $10M To Help Teachers Make Online Learning More Adaptive And Interactive | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | For most students, learning within the traditional confines of the educational system has been something to be endured, rather than something that’s just as fun as it is rewarding. Every student knows that learning is more fun when content it comes alive and is personalized. In other words, when it’s actually adaptive, interactive and engaging. Thankfully, advances in adaptive learning software have begun to overturn this paradigm, and make learning more dynamic. However, Sydney-based education startup, , thinks we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of the potential applications of this technology, and that it’s ability to transform learning goes far beyond multiple choice quizzes. This week, with faculty at over 400 universities now using its adaptive learning platform, Smart Sparrow is looking to step on the accelerator, and has raised $10 million in Series B financing to do that. Led by London-based investment firm, Yellow Brick Capital, with participation from the startup’s existing investors Uniseed and One Ventures, the investment follows the $2 million Smart Sparrow raised last year. The new capital brings its total to just over $12 million. Smart Sparrow’s history dates back to 2005, when Dr. Dror Ben-Naim began the research and development process that would lead to the development of the startup’s core technology. Leading a research group that focused on intelligent tutoring systems at the University of New South Wales, the professor recruited some of his students to help him develop the project. Over time, the technology was adopted by academics, slowly working its way into the hands of dozens of teaching programs and thousands of students. When Ben-Naim decided it was time to finish his PhD, his colleagues officially founded Smart Sparrow, and launched its new platform. Today, the adaptive eLearning platform provides educators with a suite of tools that allows them to create interactive content, which can be tailored to any class or group of students based on the subject and that group’s particular demands. Broken down, Smart Sparrow offers a dynamic, drag-and-drop authoring tool that works in any web browser, and allows teachers to define personalized learning paths for their students, collaborate in realtime, and access pre-made templates to help them save time during the creation process. Educators can easily import rich simulations in Flash or HTML5 into their adaptive lessons, and then add lessons into their LMS or embed those lessons in any web page. Today, Smart Sparrow claims to integrate with most modern LMSes, and supports both gradebook and single-sign access, while allowing professors to deploy their lessons to students (and make them live) with a click of a button. Teachers can then evaluate their students’ progress as they go via the platform’s analytics tools. All in all, the startup’s platform is attempting to give teachers the ability to create content and materials that can be personalized in such a way that they account for the many permutations of students’ potential errors and struggles. This means that, as students proceed through the teacher’s lesson and engage with the materials, Smart Sparrow provides teachers with instantaneous feedback that allows them to better understand what their students are struggling with so that they can tweak their content accordingly. The key to Smart Sparrow’s value proposition is that it gives educators the ability to control what content they’re delivering to students, and manipulate that content in realtime as they teach. Rather than offering technology that simply automates content delivery and adaptive learning, the startup wants to put teachers back in the driver’s seat and give them the ability to tailor what and how they teach to each student’s learning path. For more, find Smart Sparrow |
If You Look At One Picture Of 3D-Printed Chicken Today, Make It This One | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | You like chicken. You like 3D printed stuff. Why not slam them together to make the ultimate in 3D printable model food? How does that sound? Cool, right? I thought so. So what’s going on here: some designers at in Yokohama, Japan wanted to surprise the staff of . They grabbed a tasty KFC drumstick, scanned it using a high-resolution laser scanner, and then printed it in full color, creating something that looks like a cross between a marzipan chicken part and the leg of roasted armadillo. This is actually a test of iJet’s interesting color-printing technology that essentially squirts layers of color onto each layer. The plaster layers absorb the color very precisely, creating a print that is actually surprisingly realistic. Don’t think you’re going to eat this thing: it’s very fragile and, although it looks greasy and delicious, like the steak in it is completely fake. |
Potcoin, A New Cryptocurrency To Help Ease The War On Drugs | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | It started with one evocative name shouted into the phone from one developer to another: “Potcoin!” The Founding Fathers had to work for years to craft a Constitution that would grant the government the power to “coin money.” However, three developers in the frozen north, who were only able to provide me with pseudonyms because the businesses and investors they’re associated with would frown upon their new venture, had, within weeks, gone from uttering that single word to creating a cryptocurrency. Hasoshi, Mr. Jones, and Smokemon 514 (“gotta smoke em all!” he shouts) united online to develop Potcoin, an online Bitcoin-like currency that can be used to store value. It launched on January 21, 2014 — at 4:20 p.m. The Potcoin team is defying conventional banks, money laundering authorities, and the DEA in order to build out a safer way for marijuana dispensaries to deal with daily transactions. , but that hasn’t stopped a bunch of alternative cryptocurrencies from trying to steal the spotlight. In this brave new world, Internet trends have become a viable means of supporting real-world causes. It was dogecoins that , Auroracoins that , and if the trio of Potcoin developers has its way, it’ll be Potcoins that will the recently legalized marijuana in Colorado and Washington. Why not use good old Constitution-coined money? The problem, as Smokemon points out to me, is that the conventional financial systems in those states are slow to deal with change. With federal law and the prohibitive still technically hanging over state law, conventional businesses view marijuana as something to be distrusted. Dispensaries that make their living growing and selling a now-legal product are confronted with the reality that the system in place is treating them the same way it always has: with apathy at best, and with malice at worse. While a fair amount of skepticism regarding a new line of legitimate business may be warranted, the degree to which marijuana dispensaries are effectively cut off from banking services forces them into desperate situations. Ironically, a ballot measure intended to reduce violence over the illegal drug trade may be resulting in more because of this gray line, as robbers that they know must be carrying a large amount of cash on hand. A digital age requires digital solutions. Potcoin can act as a proxy for the banking system that has abandoned marijuana dispensaries. Knowing that most of their cash reserves will be digitized, robbers may be less inclined to visit dispensaries, and a safer, more prosperous, and more credible marijuana trade will be able to benefit both growers and consumers. That is, if you believe in the magic ingredient holding the system together — trust. As we saw with Mt.Gox, novel innovations sometimes have a way of going askew. Pressed on this point, the Potcoin team assures me that “whenever there is money involved, there is a higher level of accountability.” They hasten to point out that they are not the only ones in the trade of crafting cryptocurrencies for marijuana, but that they are the only ones making an extensive effort to create a public community of users, including their own custom . They believe that exposing themselves to public censure, and having a strong community with diverse views, holds them in check. The team itself is an odd but likeable bunch. They’re all startup entrepreneurs who have crafted several successful businesses. For example, Mr. Jones went through a series of personal struggles, at one point almost losing everything, but is now the founder behind a multi-million-dollar company. Together, the team helped raise money for Snoop Lion’s charity for kids: he’s giving them a video shout-out. Smokemon hastens to point out that they all defy the living stereotype of the lazy pothead: Everybody on the team smokes, and everybody on the team builds lots of cool new stuff. He himself is a “high-functioning pothead. Their contribution to the pet cause of many technologists may ultimately go beyond defying authorities. Smokemon starts getting to the larger point of the possibility of destigmatizing hemp products. At this point, I push him for the larger picture behind Potcoin — the “why” that defines its ideals. Do they want to end the war on drugs? The answer comes quickly: “Yes” says Smokemon. |
Bill Gates: It’s OK If Half Of Silicon Valley Startups Are “Silly” | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | Microsoft Founder Bill Gates doesn’t worry that Silicon Valley is the home of billion-dollar texting apps and farming games. “Innovation in California is at its absolute peak right now. Sure, half of the companies are silly, and you know two-thirds of them are going to go bankrupt, but the dozen or so ideas that emerge out of that are going to be really important,” Gates Rolling Stone, in a wide-ranging interview on government surveillance, financial inequality, immigration reform, and the cultural backlash against Silicon Valley. Gates’ sentiment is a nice to response to a that lambasted Silicon Valley investors for encouraging their brightest minds to work on solving the problems of yuppie 20-somethings. “Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?”, asked writer Yiren Leu in the aptly titled “Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem”. It’s important to keep in mind that many of the technology industry’s most impactful companies were originally targeted at the recreational lives of (relatively affluent) users. Facebook was built to help ivy league college students share fun photos. Today, Facebook significantly voter turnout, , and in developing nations. Gates also let loose on other important political topics, describing the current U.S. immigration system as “insane.” “I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name,” he argued. “You’ve got 12 million people living in fear of arbitrary things that can happen to them.” But, Gates didn’t carry the standard tech line on all issues. When asked if whistleblower Edward Snowden was a “hero,” Gates said, “I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn’t characterize him as a hero.” He also didn’t express as much misgiving about government surveillance. “Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing”, he said, noting that in London has reduced petty crime and that the government has good reason to investigate serious national security threats. Despite our political problems, Gates remains optimistic, “Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn’t because we didn’t have good politicians; we had some really good politicians,” he argues. What really lifted humanity out of poverty was technology, from electricity to genetics research. “Innovation is the real driver of progress,” he said. [ ] |
Firm You Haven’t Heard Of With $13M In 2013 Revenue IPO’d Today, Spiking To Valuation North Of $3B | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | So you are a company. You’re about six years old. You’ve to date, including a Box-esque $100 million Series D bloc. The tough bit is that your revenue in 2013 was a mere $13 million. Even more troubling, your losses are accelerating, increasing from $19.9 million in 2011, to $35 million in 2012 to $62.2 million in 2013. You lost $6.28 per share last year, so the obvious next move is to , yeah? Yeah. So you do that, pricing your shares between $9 to $11. But , so you move that up to $13 to $15 per share. In the end, you land on a price of $16 per share. That per-share price puts your valuation at what? $1.39 billion? And you are going to snag $178 million presuming that you sell all 11.1 million shares on your IPO day. Turns out you guessed too low. Investors, after watching you ratchet up your offer price from single digits, bounce your shares to $39.80 a share, spiking your valuation to, wait for it, . Naw, I’m not messing with you about some stupid story from 1999. That IPO happened today. The company is . Surprised? The market appears to be betting that the company’s will rapidly expand its top line, and help the firm approach profitability. Here’s the company’s S-1 filing detailing its current aggregate-future-business scorecard: [O]ur total backlog, which we define as including both cancellable and non-cancellable portions of our customer agreements that we have not yet billed, has increased from $44.0 million as of December 31, 2012 to $108.7 million as of December 31, 2013. The company could have very strong gross margins: The cost of revenue for 13 million in 2013 top line was $125,000. So, you can see how the company reaches profitability provided that it can scale to service its full backlog in a timely manner. For more on the firm, on their products and future at the time of their last funding event. Investors are betting big that Castlight is a rocket ship. We’ll see in its first quarterly report if that’s right. |
Pinterest Debuts A “Gifts Feed” Featuring Only Things You Can Buy | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | Pinterest publicly introduced a new on Wednesday that only displays “Product Pins” – pins that are enhanced with additional details, including pricing, availability and where the item can be purchased online. The announcement was made on , aimed at advertisers, instead of on the company’s more widely read, consumer-facing . The company describes the Gifts feed as a “work-in-progress” section on the Pinterest website where only those items that are available for sale are listed. These products can also be filtered by price by clicking on buttons that range from one to four dollar signs ($ – $$$$), equating to products that range from less than $50, $25-$50, $50-$200, and over $200, respectively. Product pins as one of many new pin types on the service, which also included other new things, like movie pins and recipe pins, for example. In order for retailers to take advantage of the new functionality, they have to first update their website with the appropriate metatags (described ). Afterwards, Pinterest users encountering those products on the social service would be able to see the product’s price and inventory levels, and could even click through on the provided URL to make a purchase. Product pins have been used for other Pinterest features, too, such as the company’s ability to , and then alert consumers when the price drops. Pinterest is currently curating the Pins feed, which means retailers can’t directly add their pins to this section – instead, they have to implement the rich pin functionality on their website in order to have their pins appear. Those merchants selling on larger marketplaces, like eBay or Etsy, won’t have to worry about this, however, as the integrations have already been done for them by the commerce platform provider. Pinterest tells us that it decided to launch the new Gifts section after seeing success with a similar feed around the holidays. The feed actually went live a few weeks ago, but was only publicly announced to the Business blog readers this week. The Gifts feed with the price selector feature is currently available only on desktop; it’s available also on mobile web, without the price selector. The new section on Pinterest could later become more personalized, similar to , which is meant to highlight pins related to a user’s interests. Today, that interests homepage is just a mix of articles, how-to’s, photos, and products, while the Gifts feed is obviously just the latter. The Gifts section could also be another section on the site where Pinterest advertisers could pay to have their pins shown to end users, though given the “work-in-progress” label, it doesn’t appear there’s any sort of formal program around this at the time. |
Sina Weibo, China’s Answer To Facebook And Twitter, Files For $500M IPO In The U.S. | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | , the microblogging and social media service that’s often characterized as China’s answer to Twitter and Facebook, has filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $500 million in an initial public offering. Weibo was launched by Chinese online media giant in August 2009. Today, Sina owns a majority stake in the company, with Alibaba . According to the , Weibo pulled in revenues of $188.3 million in 2013. Like its U.S. counterpart , however, the company is still not turning a profit at the bottom line: Weibo recorded a $38.1 million net loss in 2013. The company had 2,043 employees as of December 2013. The company has had some impressive growth in China and beyond. In its IPO prospectus, Weibo shared some of its figures: “Since our inception four years ago, Weibo has amassed a large user base in China and in Chinese communities in more than 190 countries. In December 2013, Weibo had 129.1 million monthly active users, or MAUs, and 61.4 million average daily active users, or average DAUs, increasing from 96.7 million MAUs and 45.1 million average DAUs in December 2012, respectively, and 72.9 million MAUs and 25.2 million average DAUs in December 2011, respectively. A microcosm of Chinese society, Weibo has attracted a wide range of users, including ordinary people, celebrities and other public figures, as well as organizations such as media outlets, businesses, government agencies and charities.” |
The “Stolen” Mt.Gox Data Contained Malware That Robbed Users Of Bitcoin | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | Security researchers at Securelist have found that the data “stolen” from Mark Karpeles’ computer actually contained a BTC-stealing Trojan that masqueraded as a back-end app for managing Mt.Gox trades. The app searched user directories for Bitcoin-related files – wallet.dat and bitcoin.conf – and uploaded them to a server that is now defunct. The app apparently ran on OS X and Windows. The files . The documents contained mostly public information regarding Mt.Gox and the aforementioned payload. Writes Kaspersky’s Sergey Lozhkin: The malware creates and executes the TibanneSocket.exe binary and searches for the files bitcoin.conf and wallet.dat – the latter is a critical data file for a Bitcoin crypto-currency user: if it is kept unencrypted and is stolen, cybercriminals will gain access to all Bitcoins the user has in his possession for that specific account. In short, delete that payload if you’ve downloaded it. |
CrunchWeek: Uber Beefs Up On Insurance, Secret’s New Funding, More Trouble At Clinkle | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | In this episode, Ryan Lawler, Alex Wilhelm, and I talked about Uber to its U.S. drivers to “close the insurance gap”, anonymous social sharing app Secret after seeing a (and subsequent fall) in user installs, and the latest sign of trouble at Clinkle, with the of its well-regarded COO Barry McCarthy. |
Meet Memebox, Y Combinator’s Korean Beauty Import | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | Not many companies in the Y Combinator stable have executives who’ve spent time at both and the Korean . I’m betting is the only one. It’s the first Korean company accepted into the Y Combinator program and arguably one of the more mature, with a $1.5 million round of venture funding already under its belt and a strong base of customers across Korea. Founded by Hyungseok Ha, a graduate of Parsons School of Design who worked for Tom Ford before moving back to Seoul and working for TicketMonster in Korea, Memebox is similar to in that it sells customers curated beauty products that arrive in an aesthetically appealing package. Birchbox’s model has been embraced by venture investors, and the company is reportedly out on the road looking to raise another $50 million in financing on top of the $11.9 million the company already has in the bank. Other startup competitors like are also pursuing the cosmetics market with an innovative makeup package. For Y Combinator partner Kevin Hale, the similarities between Birchbox and Memebox end at the box. “They do sell these beauty boxes, but they don’t have monthly subscriptions. Each box is numbered and they have products that are in discrete runs,” Hale said. Another difference is that Memebox has gone straight to the Asian cosmetics manufacturers like to fill its boxes, using the Asian brands as a selling point. And Memebox is looking to launch a brand of its own. “U.S. customers tend to think that Asian companies have better skincare products,” said Ha. “We’re continuing to push the skincare products more than the makeup products, and the price point we’re bringing to the U.S. is lower than Sephora.” Despite a minimal marketing and sales presence in the U.S., the company has managed to pick up 10,000 customers across the country and applied to Y Combinator to help with its expansion here, Ha said. “Even thought it’s been two years that we’ve been running the company in Korea, we’re new here [in the U.S.] and we thought we should partner with someone,” said Ha. Down the road Memebox expects to start selling more of its own branded products, and has plans to expand its U.S. operations significantly, Hale said. “I can see them being the next ,” said Hale. “There’s no limit to their ambition.” |
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs… | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | Sure, Babar was a pretty cool elephant, but what happens when he becomes a cyborg bent on the destruction of the mustache man who stole his crown in ? He goes out and gets one of these robotic trunks and starts tearing stuff up around Paris. Pure insanity.
, a German robotics company, is making sure that Babar will be able to bring the hurt down on all of us with this odd, trunk-inspired limb. By using soft segments and resistance sensors it can pick up items and not squash your fingers in between the sections – unless it wants to. You can read a bit more at . A trunk doesn’t look dangerous enough? Oh, how about a flying robot that Tases interns? Boom: here you go. Created by , this semi-autonomous robot shoots out Taser barbs when you tell it to, incapacitating your target like a flying Robocop without the heavy artillery. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1KdNCMWbU4#t=87] This last video is just of a Phantom quadcopter flying through an active volcano. There’s honestly nothing scary about that… unless the quadcopter caused the volcano in the first place using its secret death ray! It could totally happen. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0-shWVW1UBc] Until next time, friends, this is signing off. |
Popcorn Time Is Dead | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | : Two days after this article was published, another group of developers re-released Popcorn Time. The details are . Hollywood won. The open source project called is dead after just four days. It’s not really surprising. “Popcorn Time is shutting down today. Not because we ran out of energy, commitment, focus or allies. But because we need to move on with our lives,” and a post on . Days after its quiet launch, was . The program was an overnight success. “Popcorn Time got installed on every single country on Earth. Even the two that don’t have internet access,” reads the blog post. But success can be counterproductive. Ask Dong Nguyen, the man who created and then took down Flappy Bird. The creators long stressed that Popcorn Time was legal. Yet I know from my own interactions with the developers that the constant questioning of the legality was taking a toll on them — a cost that they likely didn’t anticipate. The Popcorn Time project as it previously existed is gone. The front-facing website bragging about its movie-streaming abilities is a simple blog post now. The link to download the installer is gone. Most of the files are gone from GitHub. This is the Internet, though. Nothing is ever completely gone. The installer can still be found on several torrent sites and the open source nature of the project suggest that it’s not dead forever. This isn’t the end of Popcorn Time’s story. It can’t be. The roaring success of Popcorn Time shows that there is a pent-up demand for such an app. So don’t think of this as goodbye. Think of it as To Be Continued… |
Mozilla Cancels Firefox For Metro, Cites Fewer Than 1,000 Daily Active Users | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | Mozilla today that it will halt development of its browser after about of development. According to Mozilla’s Firefox VP Jonathan Nightingale, the organization has never seen more than 1,000 active daily users for the Metro app, so in order to free up resources for products that have traction, Mozilla has decided to pull the plug on this project. Mozilla’s other pre-release version of Firefox, he says, are being tested by millions of users. “Mozilla builds software to make the world better, but we have to pick our battles,” Nightingale writes. “We’re not as tiny as we were when we shipped Firefox 1.0, but we still need to focus on the projects with the most impact for our ; the massive scale of our competitors and of the work to be done requires us to marshal our forces appropriately.” It’s been a rough road for Firefox for Metro from the start. In the early days of Windows 8, it wasn’t even clear if Microsoft would ever allow other browsers to run in Metro mode, but in the end, it just kept them out of the Windows RT environment (and few people ever bought an RT machine anyway). A nightly build of Firefox for Metro launched back , but the release date for the stable version was later pushed back a few times, leading up to today’s cancellation of the project. Even though Mozilla has stopped development, it will continue to . Should Windows 8’s Metro mode ever get wide adoption — anything is possible, after all — the team could always go back to the existing code base and get it ready for release. Google, by the way, still continues to support Chrome for Metro, but it has decided to give its browser a slightly different spin there. Instead of only focusing on the browser, it is essentially in Metro mode. |
Secret Now Warning Users Not To “Defame” Others | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | It seems that are not the only ones who aren’t able to handle the power of anonymous social applications appropriately. Secret, the San Francisco-based (and now, ) confessional app, has begun warning users to not “defame” others when posting on its service. The message appears in some cases after Secret detects a name in a post. Several members of TechCrunch have seen posts on Secret about the new warning message, and one admits to having their own post flagged in this way. Secret co-founder David Byttow confirmed the basics of how this warning system works, saying that, “when we detect a first name, we display a reminder and point to our community guidelines before the user can post.” He also added that “this is just a first step,” hinting that other community management mechanisms may be in the works. A company representative also noted that using Secret to post malicious or personal attacks is a clear violation of its , so in the update that rolled out at SXSW this year, it added this new reminder feature, which “pops up occasionally to remind the poster of the rules.” Arguably, there could be a small nugget of value in a few of these comments, when handled in a certain way. For instance, Secrets about what it’s like to work for someone that only focused on their management style and expectations, could help another person decide whether or not to accept a job offer, perhaps. Others could help new startup founders choose or avoid particular VCs, maybe. Of course, it’s still a bit of a stretch to say that this type of communication to be shared on a public platform like Secret, where anyone can join and post, and statements can’t be verified. And the above examples are the “kindest” ones we could dig up. More often than not, when someone’s name is brought up on Secret, the commentary gets downright seedy, ranging from details regarding their sexual preferences to outright name-calling. (One public figure is routinely called the b-word, for example.) It’s good that Secret is now gently reminding users that its community have guidelines, and, yes, someone is watching what you say. And it’s possible now with the additional funding, Secret will be able even bring on a community moderator or two, as well. Anonymous social apps will all have to face the problem of unwanted content and trolling, both inadvertent and intentional, that comes with operating in this space. Secret’s competitor Whisper, for example, by allowing the post to go through, but not displaying it to the rest of the user base, while directing the poster to resources where they can get help. Meanwhile, recent teenage fav from even using its service, by way of geo-fences. Secret, for now, is taking a lighter approach. After all, juicy Silicon Valley gossip is why the app is so addictive – at least for those in this tech industry bubble. Likely, the company doesn’t want to clamp down too much, and overly sanitize the service. That being said, I think some of us would be open to there being an “NSFW” category, though. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 13 | null |
Ask A VC: TransLink Capital’s Jay Eum On Expanding To Asian Markets | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted Jay Eum visited the studio to talk about expansion to markets in Asia and more. Eum is a co-founder of VC firm TransLink, which actually specializes in helping startups partner with companies in and expand to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. As he explained to me in the interview, most startups lack the resources to develop their business in these countries, and need help navigating the landscape. And one interesting part of TransLink’s approach is that it will help potential startups before a term sheet is signed–the firm wants to prove to the entrepreneur that they can provide value. Check out the video above for more. |
GoDaddy Preps For IPO Fewer Than 3 Years After Its $2.25B Sale To Private Equity Groups | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | GoDaddy, the well-known domain and hosting company, is preparing to go public. The company was in the summer of 2011 to a mixture of private money, including Silver Lake, a group now famous for its work to help Dell go private. According to , GoDaddy has “plans to interview banks that would lead the underwriting of its IPO.” That timeframe, the paper goes on to note, would place its IPO sometime in the second half of this year, presuming a normal pacing. It’s a rollicking time for technology IPOs, with Twitter’s famed day-one pop now etched into history, and Box trundling towards the public markets to boot. Last year was a strong year for tech IPOs, and with the NASDAQ at its current heights, folks who were thinking about taking some of that public dollar are looking to get in while the gettin’ remains good. Today, for example, Castlight Health, a company that sells cloud healthcare tools, spiked more than 100% after its flotation went live. Five bucks says Goldman Sachs participates and the company trades as GDDY on the NASDAQ. |
AOL Lays Off “Double Digit” Number Of Employees | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | AOL had a round of layoffs today affecting a “double digit” number of employees, according to sources with knowledge of the company. We reported on larger AOL layoffs (with hundreds affected) in , and then again . Those cuts stemmed mostly from the challenges at, and , hyperlocal news effort Patch. One source said that today’s layoffs reflect consolidation and restructuring, rather than broader cuts. They said AOL (which owns TechCrunch) continues to hire in other areas such as video and programmatic advertising. Another source speculated that along with the Patch layoffs, this could potentially be a move toward packaging AOL for a sale. However, the aforementioned hiring, the , and the company’s doesn’t make that seem all that likely. I’ve reached out to the company and will update if I hear back. Just for some additional context, it’s probably worth pointing out that , was around 5,100 people. [image via ] |
How Telecom Company Free Nearly Disrupted The French Mobile Landscape All Over Again | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | Last week, everything was very different in the mobile landscape in France. France’s Free was about to make the best strategic move I had ever seen. Yet, it all fell apart today. While it’s a boring industry, the acquisition of SFR is a story of secret agreements and betrayals. SFR (the second biggest telecom company behind Orange) is about to get acquired by Altice (the parent company of internet provider Numericable) for $16.4 billion in cash (€11.75 billion). Vivendi (the parent company of SFR) will still hold 32 percent of the new entity. It’s a great deal for Vivendi who has been looking into a potential sale for months. But Numericable wasn’t the only player in this acquisition. You don’t get such a high number without having a second potential acquirer. This is where it gets complicated — Bouygues, the third largest telecom company, also bid for SFR. Because Bouygues and SFR are two large telecom companies already, the deal wouldn’t have gotten clearance from the competitive authority. Bouygues had to do something to make its offer compelling. According to , Bouygues and Free negotiated for three days and nights. They finally reached an agreement late Friday night. Bouygues was about to sell its entire cell network to Free for $2.5 billion (€1.8 billion). This was the most unexpected scenario. In short, Bouygues was about to acquire SFR, Free was about to acquire Bouygues’ network. This was a much more serious proposition for SFR as Bouygues is a much larger company than Altice. According to the government and many commenters, SFR had no choice but to accept the offer. As a reminder, Free only started operating in 2012. It is the so-called fourth mobile phone company. It has a small 3G and LTE network and relies a lot on its partnership with Orange. The two companies signed an expensive agreement so that Free can use Orange’s 3G network until 2017 while it is still building its network. The young and scrappy company was able to provide truly unlimited offers for a fraction of the price. Imagine unlimited talk, unlimited SMS and MMS messages, tethering and, even more important, unlimited data with a speed reduction after 3GB. All of this costs $25 a month (€20). And there is no contract. You can leave whenever you want. And it worked. In six months, the company was able to attract 3.6 million customers. Even more impressive, the mobile phone activity of the company is now profitable — the company stayed lean. Yet, competitors had no choice but to lower their plan prices. It’s not as compelling as it used to be to switch to Free as you can get the same plan with another carrier. Buying Bouygues’ complete network for $2.5 billion was the perfect opportunity to turbo start its network and become independent from Orange. It wouldn’t be just a low cost carrier. And $2.5 billion is very cheap in this industry. Interestingly, Free and Bouygues can’t stand each other. Founders and CEOs of the two companies have regularly attacked each other through press interviews for years. This is what made the offer unmissable as well: Bouygues was ready to make a huge present to Free so that Bouygues could acquire SFR. But Free got screwed up. SFR took the offer from Numericable. “I heard that Vivendi decided to sell SFR to Numericable at all costs,” French minister Arnaud Montebourg said to Europe 1. In an sent to employees, Free board member Cyril Poidatz said that Free will continue with its original strategy of slowly building its own network — it will be a long and expensive process. |
Bill Gates Says Snowden Is No Hero | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | When Edward Snowden starts his official fanclub, he . The richest man in the world isn’t much of a fan at all, it turns out. In an , Gates outlined his view of Snowden in the context of his methods, and privacy itself. Answering the question as to whether he viewed that Snowden was a hero, or a traitor, Gates hedged slightly, but leaned noticeably in one direction: I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn’t characterize him as a hero. If he wanted to raise the issues and stay in the country and engage in civil disobedience or something of that kind, or if he had been careful in terms of what he had released, then it would fit more of the model of “OK, I’m really trying to improve things.” You won’t find much admiration from me. The test of is quite silly, especially since Gates mentions in the next sentence that “civil disobedience” would have been a better option. Gates was then asked if it is “better now that we know what we know about government surveillance?” Gates: The government has such ability to do these things. There has to be a debate. But the specific techniques they use become unavailable if they’re discussed in detail. So the debate needs to be about the general notion of under what circumstances should they be allowed to do things. What I find interesting about the above is that Microsoft as a company has been active regarding the NSA’s activities, and the larger surveillance state. Microsoft in suing the government for the ability to share more about governmental requests for its users’ data. Happily, Snowden’s contributions to the world help you whether you like the man behind them or not. |
Report: Changing Tax Rules For Tech Giants Would Mean $89 Billion For U.S. Gov | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | Tech giants, including to , are notorious fans of offshore tax havens, which saves them . A from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that “if this cash was brought onshore and taxed at the current US corporation tax rate of 35%, it would produce a $89bn windfall for the US Treasury – equivalent to 17% of America’s projected $514bn budget deficit this year.” While the controversy isn’t new, these findings put a very high cost on not changing the tax code. “If a US multinational puts its offshore cash into a US bank and uses the money to buy US treasuries, stocks and bonds, those funds ought to be treated as having been repatriated and subject to US tax,” said Senator Carl Levin in response to the bureau’s report. Here’s the breakdown of what many of the biggest names in tech stash abroad, much of which is held in U.S. agency debt. Tech companies gave a standard reply to the report: “Cisco pays all taxes that are due”. Likewise, Apple said, “we pay all the taxes we owe – every single dollar. We not only comply with the laws, but we comply with the spirit of the laws.” Apple CEO Tim Cook has argued that the company of its offshore accounts back to the U.S., if the government simplified the tax code. Some members of Congress, including Republican presidential contender, Rand Paul, have defended the practices of offshore heavens: [tweet https://twitter.com/SenRandPaul/statuses/336867611868536832] Either way, it is unclear whether Congress will get around to revising this particular portion of the U.S. tax code this session. Congress still has to debate immigration reform and reforms to the NSA — all in an election year that will gear up in a few months. |
I’m Going To Interview Vine Co-Founder And GM Colin Kroll At Disrupt NY, And Then Vine It | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | It’s been just over a year since launched into the world, catapulted by parent company Twitter to bring mobile video creation to the masses. A lot has happened in that year, including the launch of Instagram video, Twitter’s IPO, and the explosion of mobile video apps. So what does have to say about all this? Luckily, we’re about to find out. At , I’ll be hopping onstage with the Vine boss for a solid 20 minutes to discuss competition, monetization plans, the company’s relationship to Twitter, and the incredible acquisition story that started it all. And if time and Twitter permit, we might even delve into the that littered the app’s history since launch. (You guys know how I love a good sex scandal.) Kroll started his career as a software engineer at Right Media, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2006. From then until 2011, Kroll led the engineering team in Yahoo’s search and advertising tech group before joining Jetsetter as VP of Product. He was then promoted to CTO just before leaving to start Vine in 2012 with co-founders Dominik Hofmann and Rus Yusopov. Before ever launching, and launched in January of 2013 as a video-flavored answer to Facebook’s Instagram. So far, competition has been heated in the space, not only with Instagram but with the many new entrants in the social mobile video vertical. In other words, there’s to discuss. I’m stoked to be hosting Colin Kroll this year at Disrupt, and hopefully you’re just as excited as I am.
are currently available for Disrupt NY. There are also for startups to exhibit, sponsor and pitch at Disrupt. |
Let’s End The Search For Mobile TV | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | Mobile TV has never been a thing. Since the in 1982, we’ve been excited at the prospect of mobile TV, but no matter how good our devices are, there still seems to be something missing. As recently as this January, Josh Elman to John Borthwick that the results of the study show that even now, no one keeps mobile video apps on their smartphone homescreens; we don’t even give YouTube or Netflix top billing. That is not to say that those two apps don’t generate an enormous amount of mobile video views. But interestingly, they have not increased the watching video on mobile devices to a point where it threatens traditional TV sets. You might say: Why do we care about watching TV on mobile devices when I’ll likely just watch TV on my biggest screen? I’m not arguing that the TV-viewing experience could ever be preferable on a mobile phone, but I do think that the discovery of content can and may already be better on mobile. Mobile might have the right set of constraints to require a real change in user experience, if not the underlying content recommendation technology. As a result, video consumption on mobile is currently at two extremes: 1) slowing your scroll to wait for six-second Vines to load while you’re on the toilet, and 2) time-shifting massive TV series from the home when we need to prolong our life-threatening drama binges on our commutes. The first mobile TV revolution happened before the iPhone from around 2005-2008 when a few measly million early adopters started double-paying for either MobiTV, MediaFLO from Qualcomm or VCast from Verizon Wireless. One of the biggest businesses when the CTIA Wireless shows were still kind of a big deal was for TV networks to meet with mobile carriers to discuss TV content licensing deals. However, once the iPhone took off, we forgot all about mobile TV and watched the dawn of mobile video, powered by YouTube searches and Facebook and Twitter shares that enabled the Gangnam-style, billion-view explosions of 2012-14. Now, nearly 10 years later, it might be time to tune in again. First, we need a distinction between what we mean when we say “video” versus “TV.” “Video” is when you watch the one thing that someone else told you to watch. “TV” is a broadcast concept. Let’s call TV a time-based experience when you turn on a TV on the wall, computer or phone, and just start watching. The catch with TV for the consumer is that it shouldn’t be hard to change the channel and you shouldn’t have to know what you want to watch before you turn on the TV. The TV experience becomes worthwhile to producers when consumers spend enough time watching TV that they see more than one video in a session, so there can be commercial breaks rather than pre-roll ads. With cable TV interfaces, channel changing is not worth the effort as the 1980s-90s pastime of flipping channels has devolved into scanning bloated menus that look like Microsoft Project and are not conducive to navigating with a remote control. However, search is not the key to finding shows that you’ve never heard of before. For example, searching for “really good new TV” makes no sense, and automated recommendations are still not satisfying. In fact, the whole search model on desktop has been an easy target for companies like Aol and Turner to game results by featuring videos on well-trafficked pages or through SEM and SEO to get more views for videos that may or may not be the best or most relevant to watch. The NYTimes’ David Carr that the universe of quality TV content is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. The new Netflix model of laying out full seasons of TV dramas that are suspenseful enough to get you to binge watch is only the beginning of an explosion of quality content. , head of BD for Montreal-based boutique film production strategy and finance firm MediaBiz, considers this the moment before a global tidal wave of newcomers will start to compete with traditional U.S.-based TV networks. , Walmart-Vudu and Apple will be followed quickly by international players like Canal+, iTV, Scandinavia’s SVT and DR, and possibly even China’s . “Your average TV series buff is now drowning in quality content and not necessarily able to find all of it.” So if there’s all these shows just lying around but no one company owns the best content suggestion interface, what will the industry do to solve that problem? As Jim Barksdale “Two ways to make money in business: you can unbundle, or you can bundle.” YouTube has succeeded in unbundling TV into mobile video, while (MSO) are trying to take bundled video to mobile and call it TV. MSOs like Verizon and Comcast carry with them nearly all the quality content creators via the television networks, and access to that content comes at a licensing and authentication cost across your devices. In its Q4 2013 Digital Index, Adobe said that iPads, iPhones, and iPods produce nearly 50 percent of play requests for content. I asked someone from the original MobiTV team about his experience in 2014, particularly as a parent, in attempting to unlock mobile TV for his family: TV Everywhere has absolutely succeeded in that it’s enabled the media guys to keep their content behind a paywall without double-charging anybody; that was one of the issues with a MobiTV subscription, you had to buy your mobile content separately from your existing cable package. However you need to authenticate with your MSO on every device you want to use, which requires your Verizon username and password you got the day they hooked you up…and probably haven’t used since. In practice, you install the app on your iPhone or iPad, forget about it, and then when you actually want to use it you fire it up and have to authenticate it, which takes a couple minutes so it kills the instant gratification factor. The MSOs and YouTube both may be too big to create an enjoyable new experience for mobile TV. , which was recently , uses a mood selector to automatically queue up video categories, and it does a great job of making sense of the vastness of YouTube content that’s out there that would otherwise never be watched. Shelby.tv, Frequency and ShowYou add socially shared videos from Facebook and Twitter to signal which videos should come into your playlist, and they use explicit interactions within their apps such as likes to discern popularity. The biggest company that is aggressive in this space is Yahoo with two strong offerings made for mobile TV. The acquisition of Tumblr now has given Yahoo a machine for social referrals to TV tune-in. In the same Adobe Q4 Index report, we see that “half of visits referred from Facebook or Tumblr to sports related sites result in a video view.” The Tumblr team has also found that TV brands are getting serious tune-in through animated GIFs. Sima Sistani, director of media at Tumblr, considers this behavior totally . “Let’s say I’m in my Dashboard, and I see a hysterical GIF from Jimmy Fallon’s latest rap battle. Now I’m captivated, and I click through to watch a video on his site. In an on-demand world, tune-ins can happen at anytime.” Yet, even with high growth, only 6 percent of video starts come from social media referrals, and it seems to be limited to destination TV, such as live events or well-advertised dramas. Yahoo Screen is the company’s mobile TV pure-play product, and Marissa Mayer has written a huge check to NBC so that Yahoo Screen can stream the back catalogue of . However, the challenge remains that if all you really want to do is watch a show that everyone knows, like SNL, then Yahoo still needs to solve the discovery challenge for the rest of its content, especially the non-sports ones like comedy. When I asked if Facebook, and other social networks would just soon look more like TV platforms, founder and CEO of 5by said that wouldn’t likely happen without Facebook launching a new app, because mobile apps need to provide single-purpose user experiences. For example even Facebook’s Paper, which only changed the reading navigation experience on Facebook, was different enough to require a new app so as not to cause a revolt from the user base. But something has to change to make watching more than one video at a time enjoyable on mobile. It’s possible that one of the things that holds mobile TV back, the fact that when using a smartphone you actually have to hold the screen with the same hands that you use to type, could inform a subtler UX that takes implicit metrics like “seen” instead of “tapped-on.” If you look at the newest crop of mobile TV apps, a new, accepted interface for them is starting to solidify. All apps are moving toward minimizing the user interface into simple video players that show videos full screen and feature “tap to pause” and “swipe” to change channels. However there are slight differences in the UX of each of these apps, and one company that has yet to officially launch, called EndlessTV, thinks that its UX recipe can help it take the Pandora genome idea for music, and adapt it to fit your mobile TV. Once called Tip or Skip, a “Hot or Not” for products, the team at pivoted last year to experiment with video. Over the past six months, they’ve deployed 15 interest-based TV channel apps that would help them create and analyze content communities. Additionally, when EndlessTV launches its flagship app at the end of this month, it will use implicit metrics, such as average engagement time and percentage-viewed thresholds — instead of industry-standard metrics for video views, likes and shares — to power its content-suggestion genome. The company’s hope is that these engagement-based metrics paired with interest-based channels will make automation watchable. Also, they found that the one big difference between trying to make a genome for TV rather than music is that in many cases, especially for news, TV requires an expiration date on certain content. While watching the data from their 15 apps and 250,000 downloads, which are mostly on iOS, EndlessTV’s other job has been to woo TV producers to give them quality content for free, before it unifies its content into a single app offering. So, the mission of the new, bundled, of an app is to achieve the ultimate balancing act in promising users that “TV is free again” and promising TV producers that free TV is lucrative again. To make sure that they solve for the business case, EndlessTV made a couple of interesting design choices for the app in the name of advertising and for getting the cleanest data for feeding their mobile TV genome. EndlessTV omitted the timeline scrubber from videos so, by design, you can’t adjust where you are in the video, and it removed all mention of the titles of what you’re watching. By making sure that users only start from the beginning of videos, they have an idea of how engaging each video is based on both crossing a relevant threshold in the clip and time spent on each particular clip and can say to TV producers, ‘give us your most engaging videos’. Like their competitors, on EndlessTV ads would only show up in-between videos as commercial breaks instead of via pre-roll. Also, by requiring a user to tap to pause the video before they can identify the video’s title, EndlessTV gets an additional display ad space on half of the screen for a , but doesn’t have to resort to overlays or interruption of content. Their favorite stat is that after they turned on their nascent mobile TV genome they were able to extend the session time of its users versus a control group by 3x. The measure of success for EndlessTV and its other mobile TV competitors is to be able to monetize better than YouTube, so the bar is actually pretty low. But as Netflix grows in its subscriber base and continues to collect massive amounts of data, while keeping subscription prices low, these free mobile TV apps might prove an ally to TV networks and independent producers as they rethink their alliances with MSOs and consider their own direct to consumer offerings. Proving a concept like mobile TV is hard, so any success, like getting users to have a favorite app for their homescreen would be a major victory. |
A May-December Media Strategy Could Help Locally Focused Startups | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | In Silicon Valley, it’s sometimes easy to focus solely on social and other types of cutting-edge, digital advertising when advising startups on their marketing strategies. But these businesses, particularly those serving specific geographic markets, can also amp up customer acquisition by combining their Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest strategies with old-school, traditional media marketing campaigns. Radio spots. Local newspaper ads. Billboards. Cable airtime. These are all time-tested tactics for companies trying to acquire new customers, but they’re often looked down upon as liver-spotted has-beens in the thumping nightclub of today’s digital and data-driven marketing environment. Detractors say these old-codger strategies lack the flexibility, adaptability and low-entry cost of a self-service cost-per-click (CPC) campaign. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Based on recent testing, I’m convinced that a certain kind of retro/digital mashup — a May/December marketing romance, if you will — can pay real dividends for startups willing to experiment and look past their first impression. Consider Candy Crush Saga, King.com’s megahit game for mobile and tablet devices. Launched in November 2012, it quickly attracted a massive following fueled not only by organic and viral distribution online, but also relevant mobile advertising. Data collected by iSpot.tv and other third-party sources shows that Candy Crush then took its marketing retro: In March of last year, King began layering national cable advertising onto its marketing strategy, and significantly ramped up those TV buys in the subsequent quarter. These commercials showed up on old-school networks like Game Show, TV Land, and the Hallmark Channel (Little House on the Prairie, anyone?). iSpot estimates Candy Crush aired 4,515 national cable spots in all (a lot!). The program that featured the most Candy Crush ads? Re-runs of the late ‘80s hit “The Golden Girls.” Another innovative May/December strategy is the one recently pursued by , an online grocery retailer for natural and sustainable foods based in Charlottesville, Va. Right now, the company operates in only a handful of metro areas throughout the mid-Atlantic region. So it has to think locally when it comes to advertising to its target customers: educated, affluent women who love attending the farmers’ market but rarely have time. Until recently, Relay acquired new customers mainly through branded delivery trucks that drove around its target markets, as well as word of mouth and targeted “street teams” that canvassed public spaces and offered Relay gift cards. But the company wanted to find new ways to amp up customer acquisition without breaking the bank. The company tested almost a dozen different tactics, but finally hit upon an old-school/digital hybrid strategy that worked. On the digital side, the team ran CPC campaigns on Facebook with page-post ads that linked back to the Relay site. These spots targeted women 25 and older in the geographies Relay serviced and were purchased at around a one-dollar cost per click. On the retro side, the team tested running “remnant” ads on local radio stations. These were inexpensive time slots that were discounted because they “remained” after other advertisers bought specific inventory but still hit the target audience. In Richmond, Relay paid about $25 on average for a traditional, 60-second radio ad, which meant the company could run 200 spots a week for $5,000. This gave Relay a pretty heavy mass-media presence in that market. It also cost far less on a CPM basis than what the company was quoted by digital-music service Pandora for ads targeting the same region. Finally, Relay topped off the campaign with retargeting, working to re-engage and convert potential customers who didn’t sign up immediately, through both Facebook’s exchange and the broader web. The results? The company started averaging about 1,000 new customer acquisitions a week, up from fewer than 100. Sales, gross margin and contribution margin shot up, and Relay was able to mine this radio audience for months before shifting back to a mostly digital strategy. Similarly, VistaPrint, the e-commerce leader selling business cards, stationery and marketing collateral, among other items, has for many years maintained a dual presence on digital and traditional media. One of the company’s arguably octogenarian tactics that I’ve admired from afar is the use of package inserts, which are printed offers placed inside the shipping box of an online, catalog or TV order. Carrying an implied endorsement, they cost much less to get into people’s homes than individually addressed direct mail and can scale significantly. It seems like a great fit for VistaPrint, and Relay Foods also has used remnant alternative print channels successfully (with a regional distribution focus of course). I could also see companies combining content syndication campaigns on Outbrain or Taboola with remnant print-newspaper ads, or Twitter with local cable. These types of mash-ups may become more common as we see other online/mobile companies build businesses serving particular cities or geographic areas, at least early in their life cycles — provided those target customers reside in the same markets. So this strategy would work better for local-meal delivery, for instance, than it would for car rental. Yet many companies don’t consider old-school, local marketing because 1) it seems too outdated, and 2) it can actually be more expensive compared to national advertising, at least in audience-adjusted terms. Car dealers, restaurants and furniture stores traditionally have inflated the costs of such advertising, since they’re essentially held hostage to local media and may not apply a strict ROI lens to their media buys as they try to achieve strong reach in certain metro areas. But by strategically marrying inexpensive, remnant local advertising with a well-thought out digital campaign — then spreading retargeting on top, like the icing on a wedding cake — online businesses can dramatically boost customer acquisition. And that’s a love story both young and old marketing professionals can embrace. |
The Sweet Irony Of Popcorn Time | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | So the big fun story of last week was this . Essentially, it aggregated torrent links and packaged them with artwork and a nice interface that allows one-click streaming of movies. Popcorn Time is incredibly illegal almost anywhere, but it’s also almost impossible to stop people from using it without ISP intervention. Even though the original version of the app has been killed off, the project has by a new group. Now that the concept is out there I doubt it will ever go away completely — whatever iteration may come. The absolutely lovely irony here is that Popcorn Time is doing for distribution of pirated movies exactly what the movie industry needs to do for itself. Torrents are confusing and a mess. My mom could not download a torrent app, find a torrent that was not a virus and download a movie on her own with no help. But she could definitely download Popcorn Time. As fast and available as torrents are, they’re still fragmented, dangerous and complicated. They require a modicum of technical familiarity and engender some risk every time you place your trust in an un-verified link. Popcorn Time unifies them under one roof — in exactly the agnostic, friendly way that the movie industry in aggregate has been so unable to do for its own products. In contrast, streaming movies with one click is a much more complicated and tortuous affair. Titles are split across a strata that include a variety of creators, distributors, technologies and pay gateways. There is no such thing as a one-price-plan that offers unfettered access to any movie you want to watch, and even if you want to rent an item you’re going to have to have at least 2-3 accounts on services from Apple, Netflix, Amazon or half a dozen others in order to guarantee the flick you want to see will be available when and if you want to see it. The torrent landscape — the illegal download market — has its own crumbling architecture of groups and sites risen and fallen. But the pirates are out-innovating the studios — and apps like Popcorn Time prove that the movie industry is not being held back because of technology, it’s the lawyers. Because the technology exists to make this happen easily. Services like Ultraviolet are proof of that. Many main-stream companies have even turned to torrents for use in delivering updates. If you’ve played World Of Warcraft in the past few years you’ve likely utilized torrents to get updates, whether you realize it or not. The other major media business — music — was struck by a very similar bombshell with Napster. Never before had the main stream been able to one-click download a song or album as easily — even if they to pay. The point isn’t that Popcorn Time marks the first time that you can download movies illegally — but it is drop-dead simple. It democratizes movie piracy in the same way Napster did for music. Also, as my colleague Ryan Lawler pointed out to me when we were chatting about this, broadband connections have gotten a lot faster since Napster made its debut. Downloading a movie can take as little as 15 minutes, about the time it took to download an album back then. The music industry underwent a series of changes as a result of Napster. Albums broke into singles, digital surpassed disc and that has all culminated in the rise of the subscription over the pay-per-play model. Then Apple came along and essentially formalized the Napster model — throwing the labels a lifeline in their distressed and desperate hour. Content deals in the media business are made on 5-10-year cycles, and always have been. These included fractured elements like video on demand windows, theatrical release, streaming rights and broadcast rights — all of which are promised to separate entities with their own ‘middle man’ businesses. And each of those businesses have lawyers whose job it is to negotiate those deals in the most binding, most profitable way. Look at how technology has changed life in the last 10 years. Thanks to smartphones and easily available high-speed wireless internet, it’s unrecognizable. So we’re still beholden to content deals made for — quite literally — a different culture. I don’t even have anything with a disc drive in it besides game consoles — and I only buy discs when I know I might play them once or twice through and then sell them. Last night I was watching Shark Tank — and two young co-founders presented them with a business that rented e-textbooks, called . College students are able to rent textbooks by the day when they need to reference them, adding up to a couple hundred dollars in savings per semester. These guys had exactly the kind of product we talk about every day on TechCrunch. 4/5 of the sharks 100% did get it, at all. Kevin O’Leary especially was insistent in talking about why the powerful incumbent textbook publishers would never let this happen — largely informed by his years of negotiation and frustration with those publishers. Which only served to make it that much more evident that those same publishers are ripe for someone to undermine their way of doing business, in a way that could change the industry. I haven’t done any due diligence on Packback and or Popcorn Time, and this is not an endorsement. But it strikes me that this is exactly the kind of thing that will need to happen for the movie industry to come to its senses. There will be no major shakeup of the back-room deals (though powerful people like Apple’s Eddy Cue have been at it for years). Instead, someone will find a way to make those deals obsolete entirely. I’m not a piracy advocate, and never will be. I have friends in the movie and media business who are technicians, craftsmen — not high rollers. Their salary, like it or not, is directly related to you paying for a movie. It’s not the paying — it’s the way you pay. It’s not the renting — it’s the way you rent. It’s not the profits — it’s the greed. Something has to give. It may start somewhat innocuously, with a revenue share rental model — or perhaps Netflix’s backdoor content creator strategy will tip the scales. Or maybe an app will make it so easy to pirate films that the aging carapace of a hundred years of the movie business will slough away for a new model. But, sooner or later, it will happen. |
Hacker News Attempts To Fix Its Comment Problems With Pending Comments | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | As it has grown, has struggled to keep its comment threads relevant, thoughtful, and above all else, friendly. Like YouTube, Reddit, and other sites with a large community of commenters, popular threads on Hacker News can degrade into grandstanding, arguments for the sake of being argumentative, and ad hominem attacks with little or no actual substance. This has been a known problem on Hacker News for some time, leading some members of the community to create parodies not just of the , but also that . (The resulting Hacker News thread about that last link is, in its own right, .) In an effort to improve the quality of discussions that crop up on Hacker News, Y Combinator founding partner Paul Graham yesterday announced some to the way comments would be posted and appear on the site. In what could be one of Graham’s last big moves*, he’s implementing a new “pending comments” system at Hacker News. The idea isn’t new, and is something that Graham had . But it’s finally making its way onto Hacker News. Under the new system, comments that are submitted will no longer be immediately posted to the site, but will instead be placed in a pending comments queue until seen and approved by multiple Hacker News users who have over time accumulated more than 1,000 karma points. Those users will be able to endorse pending comments, in addition to flagging them for removal. The goal is to get users to post comments that are substantial without being mean-spirited. In his post, Graham cautions against “throwaway remarks” and those that include “gratuitous nastiness.” He also warns that people who regularly endorse comments that fail either of those tests will lose their ability to endorse comments in the future. While implemented to improve the quality of comments, a fair amount of discussion that followed questioned whether the system would work actually work. And not everyone seems happy about it — in particular, how quickly the change is being implemented and without a whole lot of warning, and how it puts more responsibility into the hands of high-karma users. In a on the change, (who admittedly is not a Hacker News user) warns that since moderation is being done by those who are most deeply invested in how Hacker News currently operates, it’s likely to remain more or less the same: This new system is designed to improve the quality of comments on Hacker News. But to me, it seems like it will result in more of the same, but with less dissent. And more of the same, but with less dissent, is not something I’ve ever been able to trust. Like many big changes of this type, we won’t know how the change will actually affect the quality of comments or engagement in the community until it’s actually implemented and adopted. Until then, however, it’s at least an interesting experiment in community and comment moderation. ==
* PG notes in the blog post that he’s checking out of HN at the end of this YC cycle. |
Turkey Moves To Block Twitter At The IP Level | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | In its effort to curtail access to Twitter, Turkey is getting more aggressive with a block of the service’s IP address, according to as well as a DNS provider. That means that changing their DNS server, whether it be Google DNS or OpenDNS, will no longer work for residents in the country. Previously, Twitter users in Turkey had and other services as a way to circumvent the country’s ban of Twitter as a communication service. The government later with a block of the DNS service as well, while other services, like OpenDNS, remained available. But the latest move by the government will make it more difficult, but not quite impossible, for residents to access Twitter. By blocking Twitter at the IP level, DNS services will no longer work. Instead, citizens are being urged to access the service via VPN or by using the . While Turkey seeks to reduce usage on Twitter, its ban of the service has had just the opposite effect. Residents there who have found workarounds are actually tweeting more than before the government sought to block it. Tweeting up 138% in Turkey after Twitter was banned. Cc: — Mikko Hypponen (@mikko) |
Turkey Blocks Google DNS, YouTube Could Be Next | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | The social media crackdown in Turkey continues, as the country has moved to like Twitter through Google DNS. YouTube, another service offered by the global search giant, might be next after refusing to remove videos alleging government corruption. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government called the ban a “preventive measure” after the service had been used by citizens to spread allegations of corruption within the government. “Twitter has been used as a means to carry out systematic character assassinations by circulating illegally acquired recordings, fake and fabricated records of wiretapping,” the government . After Twitter users found themselves unable to access Twitter beginning Thursday, many as a way to circumvent the ban. That proved only a temporary solution, however, as the government has removed access to that service as well. Of course, there are other similar services out there, like OpenDNS, which we’ve heard is still up and running. According to one of our sources in Turkey, VPN usage is at all time high, along with usage of privacy tools like and (which had been last fall. OpenDNS is still seeing high query volumes in Turkey. Not blocked. Higher than previous two Saturdays. — ☁ David Ulevitch ☁ (@davidu) Twitter isn’t the only communications service that could find itself banned in Turkey. The government has requested the company , a request that YouTube says it has refused. That has led some internally to believe that it, too, could find itself blocked in Turkey. “We feel an immediate threat,” one YouTube employee told the Wall Street Journal. If Turkey does ban the video-sharing site, it wouldn’t be the first time YouTube was not available to residents there. The site between 2007 and 2010. Turkey is now blocking Twitter at the IP level, so changing DNS servers . |
After WhatsApp: An Insider’s View On What’s Next In Messaging | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | I was driving to a meeting in San Francisco when I got the message: “Facebook to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion.” I pulled over and watched as messages started to stream in. Everyone had the same question: Is Facebook crazy? As the CEO of the only smartphone messenger more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S., I gave them all the same answer: “No.” In fact, we had expected something like this for quite some time. And as we’ve now seen with , led by China’s Alibaba Group, interest in this space clearly isn’t going away anytime soon. Messaging is a complex topic. It’s also one of the most misunderstood sectors in tech today. What’s the difference between WhatsApp and GChat? Why not just use SMS? Why did Facebook need to buy another messaging app just three years after it had ? At the same time, however, messaging promises to be one of the highest-stakes battles in mobile, similar to what search was to the web or what productivity software was to the PC. So what does messaging mean to mobile? It’s a question we at Kik have been thinking about for a long time. In fact, given that we launched in 2010, we’ve probably been thinking about it more than almost anyone else. Now, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s latest purchase, the question seems to be on everyone’s mind. So I thought I’d share with you what I’ve learned over the years. Grab a coffee, because this might take some time. This story begins in 2007, when I was working at BlackBerry as one of more than a thousand interns hired each term. The iPhone hadn’t launched yet, and data plans were so expensive that only Wall Street bankers could afford them. At RIM, however, we were all given BlackBerrys with full data plans. We used BBM like crazy. Thanks to MSN Messenger, we were already used to instant messaging – but somehow this was different. It was more immediate, more intimate. With MSN, you’d always get people who would turn off their computers or leave them at their desks. But now the computer was always with you, always on, and always connected. For the first time, there was no such thing as offline. Apps such as MSN, Facebook Messenger, and Skype have added mobile access over the years, but their desktop legacies live on: The “offline” setting is always a looming option. With WhatsApp, Kik or even SMS, on the other hand, the messaging communities are tied to the phones. By default, then, there is no such thing as offline – there’s only online, all the time. So if you’re running five minutes late to meet your friend for coffee, you don’t send them a GChat or a message through Skype. You send them a text. Why? Because you want to maximize the chance they get your message. Only a mobile-only community guarantees everyone will be online, all the time. If BBM was the first mobile messenger, WhatsApp was the second. It was 2009 and I had just left RIM to build a “Spotify for BlackBerry.” We planned to plug it into BBM to facilitate sharing. But towards the end of 2009, we realized the iPhone was actually going to be a thing, and that our music app needed to be on both BlackBerry and iPhone. At about the same time, WhatsApp took off. It was basically BBM for iPhone users. Then it turned out they were planning to launch on BlackBerry as well. It was a killer idea. We went to RIM and asked them to launch BBM on iPhone. Not only did we need it for our music app, but we also thought it was the only way to compete with WhatsApp. RIM, however, needed BBM to sell BlackBerrys and chose not to take it cross-platform. We decided to take matters into our own hands and launch our own cross-platform messenger. Fast forward four years and today the world is a very different place, with thousands of ways to message on a mobile phone. But when it comes to smartphone messengers, there are really only five messengers left in play: WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Kakao and Kik. Yes, there are voice apps like Tango and Viber, as well photo apps like Instagram and Snapchat, but when it comes to that base utility of saying “Be there in five,” these are the ones that matter. These five apps are quite similar, and only differentiate on one of three vectors: identity, region and platform. For me, the first mobile messenger was BBM, but for most people it was SMS – and SMS worked well. It was mobile only and pre-installed on every phone. The key question for companies in the messaging space was: How do you take users away from SMS? The most obvious answer: make it free. It’s easy for people in the U.S. to underestimate just how big a deal “free” is, because for most of us SMS is already free. Why would I use WhatsApp when I can just text? Because in most other countries around the world, texting is expensive. That’s why WhatsApp was compelling: it was SMS, but it cost nothing. There was just one catch: your friends needed to be on WhatsApp, as well. As a result, WhatsApp spread like crazy. In Asia, some companies reacted quickly and were able to compete. In China, Tencent launched WeChat; in Japan, Naver (actually a Korean company) launched Line; and Kakao sprung up as a startup in South Korea to launch KakaoTalk. For the most part, though, WhatsApp consumed the world. Except the U.S. Aside from not being free, SMS has another problem: you can’t block people. For most people that’s okay. But there are times when you would like people who encounter you on Instagram, Tumblr, or SoundCloud to get in touch with you privately. Posting your phone number on such services is out of the question, because then you open yourself up to all sorts of spam and calls from weirdoes. Once that happens, the only way to stop the unwanted contact is to get a new number. We chose to base Kik accounts on usernames, so you don’t have to hand out your phone number. As a result, we’re now seeing people share their Kik usernames to facilitate connections across a variety of services, including social apps, gaming apps and fitness apps. The companies behind some of these other apps have seen all this activity and tried to build their own messaging right into the product. Take, for instance, Instagram Direct or Twitter’s Direct Messages. So far, those moves haven’t really worked out. People don’t want a messenger for each app they use – they want one messenger for all the apps they use. I remember being at RIM when they had a simple, singular vision for Blackberry: email on your phone. That was it. And it worked for a while. BlackBerry grew faster than everyone else and became bigger than everyone else. When the iPhone came out, we all laughed. “Look at how bad the battery is!” “Look how slow the email is!” “All those apps! Who even wants apps? They just get in the way of email.” For a while, RIM was right. Smartphones were a big enough leap that consumers needed a simple value proposition like “email on your phone” in order to understand them. Soon, though, consumers came to understand email on your phone. Eventually, they would have a new question: “What else can I do on my phone?” WhatsApp feels to be in a similar place right now. The company’s simple “SMS but free” proposition is lighting the world on fire, but at some point will consumers find that offering mundane? Will they start to ask: “What else can I do with SMS?” We’re about to find out. Each of the four remaining messengers has a beachhead that WhatsApp can’t touch. Line has Japan. KakaoTalk has South Korea. WeChat has China. Kik has cross-app chat. So none of us are going away. But we each want more than that. We’re all hungry to win, hungry to find a way to take users away from WhatsApp. And each of us has settled on the same way to do it: by building a platform. A platform lets you maintain simplicity for people who only want messaging, while providing for those who want a little something more. Okay, just do that. Sure, try this. How about this… Platforms let us maintain the simplicity of a core messenger while also creating differentiation. On Kik, you can chat with your friends, play Words with Friends, and listen to music with them too. On KakaoTalk, you can sell digital items. On Line, you’ll soon be able to create and sell your own stickers. Using WeChat in China, you can pay for taxis and coffees right from the app. Once you add developers into the mix, an entirely new computing ecosystem will develop. Thanks to the enormous spread of smartphones and mobile Internet connections — we’re looking at mobile phone users by 2017 — it’s an ecosystem that could surpass anything we’ve seen so far, including Windows and Facebook. This is where “messaging apps” are heading. This platform play has long been the game plan for messengers like Kik whose platform is, uniquely, built in HTML5. We all started off as “SMS but free,” but that meme is fast becoming “SMS but more.” We’ve learned from BlackBerry taking too long to respond to the iPhone that, if the big shift does happen again, for WhatsApp it may well be too late. We always knew messaging would be a valuable space, but somehow a $19 billion acquisition has made that all the more real. From here on out, there are only two questions that matter. If the answer to the first question is “no,” then WhatsApp has likely already won. If the answer to the first question is “yes,” then WhatsApp has likely already lost, and it will be up to the other four companies to fight it out. Then you’re left with the second question, which is the more interesting, and more lucrative, one. WhatsApp doesn’t have an answer for question two, so the answer will have to come from somewhere else. For us at Kik, that’s the really exciting part. That’s the future of messaging. |
Deal With Getty Images Means Quality EyeEm Photos Make Cash For Their Owners | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | , the Berlin-based startup which focuses on high-quality photo sharing, has signed a partnership with Getty Images to license EyeEm images across its platforms, including on iStock by Getty Images and a bespoke collection where they are royalty-free and rights-managed. The EyeEm collection will be populated with images from its community. It’s worth pointing out that this is a pure distribution deal – Getty is not investing in the startup. But clearly this is going to mean decent revenues for the company that, to date, has raised $6 million from Passion Capital, Wellington Partners and Earlybird Venture Capital. The marketplace is opt-in for the users themselves, but EyeEm maintains control of who gets to join, helping to keep the quality of photos high. Those users, many of whom are professional photographers taking casual snaps with smartphones, add their best snaps work to the marketplace. These smartphone photographers then get repeat revenues, because of the deal with Getty. The upside for the users is that they hold all rights and can leave the marketplace at any time. This arrangement between EyeEm and Getty effectively competes with Shutterstock and Fotolia (the France-based image service). The key thing here of course is that EyeEm is very different, in that these are real-world ‘authentic’ photographs from real people, not your average image stock stuff. |
Vicarious Grabs A Huge, New $40M Growth Round To Advance Artificial Intelligence | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | , a San Francisco-based company that developed technology to solve Captcha queries last fall, just raised a big new $40 million round from investors including Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8, Mark Zuckerberg, Vinod Khosla and Peter Thiel. Zuckerberg invested personally while others like Dustin Moskovitz and Ashton Kutcher invested through their funds. Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital, Bryan Johnston of Braintree, Box.com CEO Aaron Levie, Sam Altman, Open Field Capital, Zarco Investment Group and Metaplanet Holdings filled out the rest of the round. In total, they’ve raised $56.1 million for a company with 10 employees. Why so much? They’re planning grow their headcount significantly. And their vision is far more encompassing than solving Captchas. D. Scott Phoenix, the company’s co-founder, said that other artificial intelligence companies leverage convolutional neural network technology that has been around since the 1980s. “It’s worked in the past because we’ve had this explosion in computational memory, but it’s not how the brain works,” he said. “It’s a rough approximation. By rethinking these core algorithms, Vicarious has been able to leaps forward in performance.” Phoenix added, “This is a project that takes a really long time.” He and his co-founder Dileep George, who doctoral work at Stanford focused on the , are hoping the company’s technology will eventually lead to breakthroughs in areas like robotics, clean energy, and medicine. Also, they’re hoping it will lead to the world’s first intelligent machines. |
CrunchWeek: Airbnb’s $10B Valuation, Netflix And Net Neutrality, And Microsoft’s Email Brouhaha | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | It’s Friday, and that means its time for another episode of CrunchWeek. This time, sitting around the White Table with me were my two excellent colleagues and . We dug through Airbnb’s , Netflix and the , and Microsoft’s . As an aside, this was the first time that I have ever hosted the show, so please be gentle with your humble servant. |
Gillmor Gang: No Reply | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Semil Shah, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — wade into the rumors that Twitter is dumping @Reply and #Hashtag from the mix. Scoble and Teare insure themselves of no seats on the Google plane with diatribes against Glass polishing and management confusion respectively. The plane is still missing. Or is it. @stevegillmor, @semil, @scobleizer, @kteare, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Rocket Internet’s PricePanda Launches In Thailand | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Rocket Internet has launched its price comparison site in Thailand. The site, which is also backed by Tengelmann Group and AB Kinnevik, already operates in eight countries throughout Latin America and Southeast Asia. In a statement, PricePanda co-founder Christian Schiller said “with 66 million inhabitants and a growing and increasingly affluent middle class, Thailand is one of the most attractive and flourishing markets.” The country, which has an Internet penetration of about 30%, is an especially promising market for e-commerce. According to a , 80% of Internet users in Thailand have shopped online. PricePanda announced in January that it had . At that time, it said that the funding will be used to expand in South Asian markets. The site lets shoppers compare prices and reviews for products listed on different e-commerce stores. PricePanda’s version for Thailand currently has listings for smartphones and tablets, but will add new categories, including computers, software, health and beauty, home appliances, music, and games, soon. In Thailand and Indonesia, PricePanda will compete against , which is backed by CyberAgent Ventures and currently has over 2.5 million active unique visitors each month, . Since launching in 2012, PricePanda has expanded quickly and says that it has redirected 1 million users to buy from partner sites. Already operates in Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines. |
Enter The Blockchain: How Bitcoin Can Turn The Cloud Inside Out | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | Drop whatever you’re doing and go read Maciej Cegłowski’s absolutely magnificent essay , an astonishing history of the amazing Russian engineer Lev Sergeyevich Termen. Make sure you read right down to its punchline, “the most badass answer imaginable.” But if time is short, or you struggle to read English, please at least read its , from which I quote: Technology concentrates power. In the 90’s, it looked like the Internet might be an exception, that it could be a decentralizing, democratizing force … but those days are gone … What upsets me, what really gets my goat, is that we did it because it was the easiest thing to do … Making things ephemeral is hard. Making things distributed is hard. Making things anonymous is hard. Coming up with a sane business model is really hard—I get tired just thinking about it. We put so much care into making the Internet resilient from technical failures, but make no effort to make it resilient to political failure. We treat freedom and the rule of law like inexhaustible natural resources, rather than the fragile and precious treasures that they are. And now, of course, it’s time to make the Internet of Things, where we will connect everything to everything else, and build cool apps on top, and nothing can possibly go wrong. He’s right. And so the Internet has, for most intents and purposes, evolved into a landscape dominated by centralized systems, epitomized by — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. To quote, er, : They don’t want much, those Stacks. Just your identity, your allegiance, and all of your data. Just to be your sole provider of messaging, media, merchandise, and metadata. Just to take part in as much of your online existence as they possibly can, and maybe to one day mediate your every interaction with the world around you, online or off. The Stacks exist in part because less centralized systems are extremely difficult to build. Consider, for instance, Google+ architect Yonatan Zunger’s i.e. the means by which data can be safely preserved in distributed systems with multiple editors. It’s absolutely brilliant — but none of its 8,000 words are wasted. The gold-standard is sufficiently complex that a pair of Stanford engineers recently published a paper entitled “ ” (PDF) — the title of which sums up the state of the art nicely — in which they present a new alternative, “Raft.” Distributed algorithms, distributed data, distributed systems, distributed security: messy, tricky, complicated, a maze of vibrating tightropes stretched across an N-dimensional pit full of hungry failure modes with sharp teeth. Hard stuff. But not . Just ask Satoshi Nakamoto. Beyond the hype and the greed, Bitcoin is powered by a (1), to a degree I did not properly appreciate when I . The “blockchain” — the engine on which Bitcoin is built — is a new kind of distributed consensus system that allows transactions, or other data, to be securely stored and verified without any centralized authority at all, because (to grossly oversimplify) they are validated by the entire network. Those transactions don’t have to be financial; that data doesn’t have to be money. The engine that powers Bitcoin can be used for a of other applications… Currently at 89 categories of things that can be placed on blockchain. Not bad BTC-Twitter for 3 hours work. :) — Antonis Polemitis (@polemitis) …with one huge caveat. As Michael Nielsen puts it, in his excellent, detailed explanation of : For [the blockchain] to have any chance of succeeding, network users need an incentive to help validate transactions. Without such an incentive, they have no reason to expend valuable computational power, merely to help validate other people’s transactions. And if network users are not willing to expend that power, then the whole system won’t work. The solution to this problem is to reward people who help validate transactions. Satoshi Nakamoto’s genius was twofold; technically, he built the world’s first(1) blockchain; socially, he lured people into powering it, using good old filthy lucre as an incentive. Which was very effective, but is now also a little awkward, as Bitcoin-as-a-currency has attracted a large number of … er … let’s diplomatically call them “colorful personalities,” and also, money-as-a-store-of-value is one field where in fact you probably do want centralized authority, or at least insurance. I agree with the mordant observations on Twitter that it’s highly amusing watching the extremist fringes of the Bitcoin community slowly rediscover from first principles exactly why financial regulation exists in the first place. Meanwhile, though, the noise and smoke of the ongoing endless (and endlessly entertaining) Bitcoin has — ironically — obscured its real breakthrough; the blockchain. You see, it’s not that hard to imagine other blockchain-based systems which aren’t currencies and don’t attract as many “colorful personalities.” Suppose you replaced the Internet’s centralized Domain Name System with a blockchain for Internet names ( ) such that every DNS request included some proof-of-work effort. Or you used any blockchain (including Bitcoin’s) as a . Or you built a new blockchain for . Or you replaced a centralized system which absolutely does need to be scrapped — that horrific barrel of worms known as — with a powered at the browser level. Or you built a new distributed email service, with a blockchain for email addresses, and every time you checked your email you contributed to the network. Or a new distributed social network, with a blockchain verifying identities, powered by code that ran every time its users launched its app or visited its web page. (Technical note: this would obviously be a far more diffuse and granular system than Bitcoin’s, which runs on machines generally devoted 24/7 to mining. I don’t that would require substantive changes to the algorithm, but while I’m a pretty good engineer I’m not an expert. That said, there’s no reason why a large number of relatively ephemeral clients would be fundamentally incompatible with a -esque proof-of-work system, though I guess you might need a smaller subnet of persistent “supernodes” to maintain the blockchain.) To be clear, I’m not suggesting that some smart startup might turn around tomorrow and replace Gmail or Facebook with a blockchain-powered solution. But I saying that some indeterminate number of years hence, as bandwidth improves, and processors grow ever more powerful, and storage gets ever cheaper, it’s not inconceivable that those massive server farms could be replaced, not with a “ ” — a bad idea for many reasons — but by massive distributed peer-to-peer networks: open-source, encrypted end-to-end, and orchestrated in part by blockchains. I’m saying that I can at least , albeit vaguely, the decline of the Stacks. Which if you look at the Internet today seems like a pretty striking and revolutionary thing to say. For what it’s worth, I’m shouting that the blockchain is a big deal; heck, just look at Andreessen Horowitz over the few months. And it seems likely that the blockchain, and Raft, and , and that great granddaddy of distributed peer-to-peer data called BitTorrent, are only the beginning; I expect more and more distributed-computing breakthroughs of comparable magnitude over the next decade, as the world’s searchlight minds turn to the forthcoming Internet Of Things. Last year I argued that “ .” Now, though, only six months later, I see traces and hints that we’re finally making the first faltering motions towards doing it right. BitTorrent is thirteen years old, but it has only just now been done right (at least for pirates) in the form of . Raft might be, in a sense, Paxos done right. looks like group communications done right (and, again, distributed, at least to the extent that email is distributed.) seems like a step towards PGP done right. is cross-platform end-to-end-encrypted messaging done right. Maybe, just maybe, our online future is actually bright, and peer-to-peer, and encrypted end-to-end, and maybe even open-source and far less overtly commercial than today — and built, in part, on blockchains. (1)You can argue that it’s more a synthesis of previous theoretical breakthroughs than a completely new invention; whatever, I don’t care. |
Real Engines Of Growth Have Nothing To Do With Growth Hacking | Contributor | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | Imagine you’re a 17-year-old girl at a well-to-do high school in Los Angeles and you just discovered Snapchat. Until that moment, every time you thought about sending risqué photos to your romantic interest, you had to worry about images of your naked self ending up on the Internet. When you wanted to gossip with your peers about a crush or a friend or an enemy, you had to worry about your words falling into the wrong hands and being seen by the wrong eyes. But suddenly, you’ve got this new thing called Snapchat, and you know that when you use it to sext-message your boyfriend or talk trash about your frenemy, your messages will self-destruct. You know that unlike Facebook or Tumblr or Instagram, Snapchat will not store these messages in the Internet’s forever-index or share them for the whole world to see. So you’re this 17-year-old girl. What are you gonna do? You’re going to tell your coolest friends. All of them. You’re going to tell your boyfriend, too, and he’s going to tell his friends. And because his friends want their girlfriends to share naked pictures with them, too, they’re going to tell their own girlfriends, and soon, Snapchat is the hottest thing to hit high schools and colleges since Facebook landed like a digital asteroid almost a decade ago. If you ask Stan Chudnovsky, co-founder of and PayPal’s VP of Growth, about what’s going on here, he’s got a straightforward answer: “I know Snapchat is cool; I know you will think it’s cool; and you will think I’m cool for telling you about it.” But Snapchat, Chudnovsky says, is not particularly different from any incredible growth story on the consumer Internet going back to the days of Hotmail. “The most powerfully growing products,” he says, “do three things at once: they make you look smart to the people you invite. They give real value to you when the people you invite join. And they give real value to the people you’ve invited once they sign up.” Notice that Chudnovsky says nothing here about “growth hacking.” Indeed, Chudnovsky thinks that growth hacking is bullshit. “In many cases,” he says, “growth hackers are people looking for little tricks here and there or people just looking for a niche they can apply themselves to, like data scientists were a year ago.” Among real growth experts — the ones who have worked on growth at high-growth Internet companies — “growth hacking” is a loaded term. Loaded with hype. Loaded with bad ideas about how Internet companies actually grow: Empty at best, misleading at worst. The term “growth hacker” was in July 2010 by Sean Ellis who is known for helping Dropbox (among others) grow in its early days. But when Ellis first came up with it, the term didn’t really catch on. It wasn’t until a blogger named Andrew Chen wrote a piece called “ ” in April, 2012 that the idea of growth hacking went big. Chen’s post described how, through a combination of savvy marketing and smart engineering, Airbnb’s team figured out how to automatically cross-post to Craigslist, even though Craigslist offers no APIs. The result? The uber-classifieds site became a major driver of traffic, links and new users for Airbnb. Boom goes the dynamite. Since Chen’s post, the number of people who self-identify as “growth hackers” has exploded. I found 450+ instances of the term in Twitter bios and over 1,000 on LinkedIn. Last year, a writer named Ryan Holiday wrote a book called “Growth Hacker Marketing” that was a top marketing book on Amazon. TechCrunch has at least eight posts that talk about it. Here’s the chart from Google Trends: In case it’s not obvious, growth hacking has been getting a lot of play. But when you pause for a minute and think about it, the growth hacks that get all the attention were built on top of already-compelling products: Dropbox’s sharing-for-storage mechanism helped Dropbox take off because Dropbox is awesome and easy to use. Airbnb spent one to two years nailing their product (manually taking professional pictures of listed apartments, for example) before they “hacked” Craigslist to find a new avenue for growth. The other thing you’ll notice when you start digging in is that the vast majority of people who call themselves “growth hackers” are neither hackers (they don’t code), nor do they work for high-growth Internet companies. These two things suggest that most “growth hacking” is hot air. But if growth hacking is hype, where does that leave us? If, to paraphrase a well-known saying about the Holy Roman Empire, growth hacking is neither hacking nor growth, what are the real engines of growth on the Internet? To answer these questions (and more), I talked to three people that have done real growth work that led to real growth at high-growth Internet companies: of Greylock Partners (formerly: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn); ; and of (formerly: Facebook, Twitter and Quora). Their insights are instructive. , who worked on growth at Twitter before joining Greylock as a VC, believes that word-of-mouth remains the fundamental principle of sustainable growth on the Internet. While “there’s lots of stuff that layers on top that aren’t pure word-of-mouth” he says, “the atomic unit of growth is one person talking about a product to another person. It doesn’t matter if it’s an app, a new restaurant, or new toothpaste. The same principle applies.” When you’re building your user base around word-of-mouth, Elman argues, “There are no magic hacks.” Instead, “sustainable growth takes a lot of deliberate thought, effort, and consideration.” For Elman, the kind of growth that keeps giving boils down to three core principles or phases. He calls these three phases “purpose, inception, and adoption.” According to Elman, the most successful products on the Internet all have a compelling purpose — an important need they fill in their users’ lives. “Purpose is not your vision or your mission,” he says. “It’s the core reason people use the product. It’s the story they tell themselves and other people about why they use it and love it.” This may sound simple, but it’s actually something that seems to be lost on a lot of startups: If your product doesn’t have a compelling story that is easy for people who use it to explain to people who don’t, your growth will stall. “Inception,” Elman says, “is the phase where the potential user hears about your product and thinks ‘I want this right now.’” To illustrate this concept, Elman tells a story about Conan O’Brien: When Conan O’Brien lost his job at the Tonight Show and went on Twitter to announce his stand-up comedy tour, you could tell the story one of two ways. You could say “Conan O’Brien tweeted once and sold out his comedy tour on Twitter.” Or you could say “If you were on Twitter when Conan O’Brien announced his tour there, you could have bought tickets before they sold out.” As Elman points out, the second story is far more compelling to Twitter’s potential users. “The fear of missing out,” he says, “is a huge driver of behavior.” To master inception, Elman says startups should ask themselves how they can engineer and scale word-of-mouth. While the actual mechanics of this will depend on the nature of your product, Elman highlights three useful tactics: Of course, all of the inception strategies in the world don’t matter if you can’t get people to embrace and adopt your product once they show up. In Elman’s terms, adoption is everything that happens after a potential user arrives at your door: “You’ve already got them interested. Now you have to explain your product clearly, get them excited about it, and make them happy once they’ve started using it.” As an example, he points to the changes he and his team made to the new-user experience at Twitter: When I started working on growth at Twitter, the original on-boarding experience was like: “Hey, here’s Twitter! Write an update! Go to town!” We redid the introduction to teach new users how to follow. We had to teach them what following was, how it worked, and why following mattered. Then we had to get them actually following people. If you were a new Twitter user before Elman and his team recalibrated the on-boarding process, you were thrown to the wolves. You had no one to follow, no one following you, and Twitter was asking you to share your first status update into the complete void. After Elman and his team retooled it, Twitter made more sense to new users, and (though adoption remains an ongoing challenge) a whole lot more of them started sticking around. As Elman’s Twitter example shows, adoption is not just about sending automated emails. It’s the whole process of teaching new users the important skills required to understand and get value from your product. “Ask yourself,” Elman offers, “what’s the main skill new users need to master to be successful? How do we teach them that skill as part of the process?” To , the foundation of real growth is the language you use to describe your product. If you want to build a product that grows, he says, focus there. “A lot of people and companies overlook the importance of language,” Chudnovsky says. “But language defines product. Think about ‘share photos’ versus ‘store photos.’ On the surface, they look the same. But they lead you to build something completely different: share is Facebook or Instagram. Store is Dropbox.” This is a fascinating concept: the language you use to talk about your product is not just for incepting customers, it’s for your whole team. As Chudnovsky says: Of course, as he will tell you, words are just the beginning. Like Josh Elman, Chudnovsky says that the most effective products on the Internet teach people how to use them as part of a natural process, instead of simply showing them what to do with a video or telling them how with written instructions: Think about photo tagging on Facebook. When you get that notification, there is no way you’re not gonna check it out, because it’s a picture of you. Meanwhile, getting that notification teaches you that tagging photos is possible. Instead of Facebook explaining that you should upload photos and tag people, they just showed you. As another example, he highlights LinkedIn’s Endorsements, a feature that lets you give simple, one-click endorsements of someone else’s skills: “In a single click, I’m providing compliments to lots of people. I didn’t have to do much work, and I gave them some value. I feel great about myself, I feel great about the app, and the people I endorsed feel great about me.” According to Chudnovsky, features like Facebook’s photo-tagging notifications and LinkedIn’s Endorsements come not from growth hacks, but from a deep understanding of the “psychology of the retained user.” A computer science grad who also studied psychology at school in Moscow, Chudnovsky believes that growth on the consumer Internet sits precisely at the intersection of engineering and human nature. “To instrument real growth,” he says, “you have to understand psychology, technology, data, product and marketing. You can’t call yourself a growth hacker unless you have mastered all of those things.” If you want to succeed with growth, Chudnovsky argues, you have to get to the core of your users’ motivations: Why do they stick around? What makes them share your product? How can you get them to do what you want them to do while adding value to them the whole time? Without answers to these questions, he argues, you will tend to build your product in ways that stifle growth instead of encourage it. He points to on-boarding experiences that try to get new users to invite tons of people before they’ve even used the product: This approach makes sense: Why would I want to invite my peers, friends, or teammates to a product that I’ve never used? If I don’t understand the product I’m asking them to join, why would they have any reason to accept? If you want your invites to succeed, Chudnovsky says, make sure the majority of them come from people who can explain the value of your product in clear, compelling, and credible terms. Invites from people that have yet to use your product generally won’t make the cut. , a founding member of Facebook’s original growth team who now works on growth at Wealthfront, believes that having a clearly-defined user in mind is one of the keys to building a product that grows like mad. Facebook did this, exploding onto the scene by nailing the experience for the students that were its early users. It became the dominant social network for college students, then high-school students, then the world. Johns has applied this lesson to his product role at Wealthfront, which has seen its user base grow more than 300 percent in the last year. “Wealthfront’s growth originated in building the right product for millennial investors: technology-savvy 20-35-year-olds who care about long-term investing.” Johns says Wealthfront’s success came from understanding its target user completely, building a product that makes them happy, then making it as easy as possible for them to understand and unlock its value. For him, this is about clearly describing your product, then reducing friction all the way down. “With every product I’ve ever worked on,” he says, “just explaining the product in clearer, more compelling ways has led to big wins.” This is much like Elman’s notion of purpose and inception, and Chudnovsky’s focus on language: When people understand your product in simple terms that speak to their needs, your product catches on. Of course, then comes the long, hard slog of eliminating friction. Johns says that “real growth is about finding and removing friction.” Assuming you have that great product, he says, the opportunities to eliminate friction are usually huge. They are so huge, in fact, that they can take years to fully uncover. “When you start going down that path,” he says, “you start finding so much opportunity, that it’s not a couple of weeks worth of work. It’s not a couple of months of work. It’s a couple of years of work.” The good news is that there are usually major wins to be found early in the process. To find those wins, Johns says, startups should “understand where your success is coming from today and double down on what is already working. If these channels are working for you without any real effort on your part, then there are huge opportunities to expand on them.” In Johns’ view, the most powerful, most sustainable growth happens organically, and creating this kind of growth is often a slow, manual process in the beginning: There’s a natural attraction to going after the kind of customer that’s easiest to acquire and paying for them, but the best growth happens by hand. Look at Airbnb. They went deep for one to three years, getting penetration in one city and learning what works and what doesn’t. That’s the sort of growth that more companies should invest in. As Paul Graham wrote: . Johns belief in the importance of building a great product for a clearly-defined user, then reaching your early users by hand, leads him to a big beef with growth hacking. “Growth,” he says, “is not about ‘hacks’ or finding tricks to grow products. That’s generally what you resort to when you haven’t built the right product.” Indeed, Johns is passionate about the shortcomings of the growth hacking concept: He points out that Twitter’s growth team grew to as many as 20 people, and Facebook’s to 40 — a long way from the idealized model of the lone growth hacker, riding in from the badlands to rescue your startup from irrelevance. All of the growth experts I talked to agree on this point: no growth hacking can make a helpless product successful. Andy Johns puts it: “You can’t sustainably grow something that sucks.” No story (no matter how compelling), no inception (no matter how well-implanted), no on-boarding experience (no matter how brilliant) makes up for a product that doesn’t add lasting value to the people who use it. Given all of this, it seems clear that the foundation of real growth on the modern Internet is a product that people love, that they rely on, that they can’t stop talking about. As Johns says, working on growth after that is “throwing fuel on the fire of an already-amazing product.” When you’ve nailed your product, you’ll know it. Your retention will be great and people will happily engage with your emails or push notifications. Then, when you’re ready to start focusing on growth, don’t think about it in terms of clever hacks, or quick wins. Think about how to make your story simple, coherent and compelling and how to spread that story to everyone who will care. As Josh Elman says: The biggest thing is a bias towards just doing. It’s really easy to get analytical and try to predict the best features. But that just gets you behind on executing. Build and learn by building, but make sure you don’t get stuck on tweaks and incremental features: they don’t matter anywhere near the order of magnitude as the big, core principle stuff. In other words, if you want to build a company that grows like mad or wins its market by dominating its niche, don’t worry about optimizations at first. Nail the major things. “You need to think big,” Elman says. “You need to take big swings to drive big growth.” |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 3 | 14 | null |
The Short, Serendipitous Life & Untimely Death Of Antisocial Photo-Sharing App, Rando | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 3 | 22 | Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about a new photo-sharing app called built by a London app & design studio, , which had a colourful app release history (including the popular, psychedelic game ). What was really exciting about Rando was not that it offered yet another way to share photos with your friends. Rather it was exactly that it didn’t offer that. Rando was entirely photo-sharing. The app asked users to upload a photo and share it with a total stranger — likely never knowing exactly who received the picture. In return for this random act of digital gifting, a photo taken by someone else would materialise in your possession, sent by a random stranger, after a short but satisfying wait. This hesitation was intentional. Rando was deliberately non-instantaneous. It forced its users to slow down, to take in the scenery, to be contemplative of the content they had — not ravenous for the next bit of eye candy looming in their immediate future. It asked users to live a little more in the moment. The photos shared on Rando were also inevitably distinct from the norm. Images sent and received were not the perfectly cropped, expertly filtered, quasi-symmetrical self-marketing fodder of Instagram. Or indeed the endless regurgitation of socially acceptable baby, wedding and binge-drinking shots shared over Facebook. Smug was not an inevitability on this antisocial network. Rando was another beast entirely to the prevailing social photo-sharing communities. While the app itself was beautifully designed, the content it generated was quotidian, banal, usually mundane. And refreshingly so. With its requirement that people take a new photo for every image they shared, it continually hole-punched momentary windows into the lives of others. A rando could have been snapped by someone living under the same sky in your own city, or a foreigner from the other side of the world. Occasionally Rando’s serendipity took your breath away. Sometimes the photos shared via Rando were mysterious. More often they were gloriously dull. Inconsequential corners of rooms. Blurred lines. Inscrutable darknesses. Exactly the kind of imagery people self-screen from putting out on their social networks. Yet, being so partial and imperfect, Rando engaged the user’s imagination — asking you to construct the missing social narratives yourself. Like a good book, this app required an active reader. Rando was always intentionally antisocial. It was intended by ustwo as an experiment in what happens when you strip away all the established digital paraphernalia and feedback loops of likes and comments and favourites and followers. There was no way to comment on randos within the app; no way to follow particular users (indeed, no way to ID users at all); no likes (at least initially); and no identifying context beyond whatever the photo-taker chose to share, and the location of the shot (if the user allowed location sharing) — which was displayed as a pin-point on a map. Introducing Rando in a last March, ustwo wondered: …what happens when you cannot communicate between users in this social-media world that we’re living in today? Are users still going to be incentivised if they have no way of patting each other on the back with likes? Are you going to be engaged if you can’t follow specific users? And what happens when you are producing something but have no control over who will see it? To get a measure of how unusual this sort of antisocial stuff was a year ago, just look at my tautological headline for the : ‘Ustwo’s Rando Is A Random Photo-Sharing App That Deliberately Snubs Social Features’. . Any sub-editor under the sun would tell you that’s build in redundancy. Snubs implies deliberate, ergo deliberate isn’t required. But really my year-ago self must have felt the subconscious need to stress the fact that Rando’s antisocial tendencies were in fact agency, not accidental. A year on, doing something antisocial, random or anonymous isn’t half so strange. There are , . Ephemeral self-destructing messaging, which requires you to memorise the missives you are sent, has powered its way into mainstream consciousness thanks to the of . Anonymity is also being used as a catalyst and enabler to . Or . Or, well, . And Rando has clearly inspired a series of . Last year’s revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, of the extent of government agencies’ dragnet surveillance of Internet users, have also poured considerably fuel and interest into an online privacy movement that necessitates a degree of anti-sociality in order to protect your personal data from so many prying eyes. Suddenly having everything you do online tied to your real-world identity doesn’t seem so harmless anymore. And with social networking absolutely mainstream, it’s clearly less cool to be always out and out overtly social. Putting some of your digital activity back in a private closet is far more interesting than sticking everything on Facebook’s public record. Yet, despite this energizing of a general digital movement to be more antisocial, Rando is not going to be able to benefit from any wider momentum. TechCrunch can confirm that the app that lived for a year — and snagged close to a million downloads over this period (circa 880,000 in total, across its three mobile platforms) — is being taken offline permanently today. The death of an app can take many forms. Often apps are shuttered because they’re not popular enough. In Rando’s case it’s not exactly lack of usage that’s killed it. With close to 1M downloads it’s arguably a pretty substantial property for ustwo (for some context, the studio’s most popular app, Whale Trail, has had 5.2M total downloads since release in October 2011). Rando has had several download spikes over its lifetime — off the back of things like Reddit posts, or a South Korean pop star telling his fans about it. One such spike led to a download peak of 34,000 per day at one point. However downloads are not the same as sustained usage, and more on that aspect of Rando’s demise anon. The general problem for ustwo sustaining Rando is that the app has become more used than can be supported by its experimental origins. It’s an app without a team behind it now because there’s no monetisation strategy attached to it, ergo there’s no revenue to help keep it afloat. Indeed, it’s been something ustwo’s Kenny Lövrin, who came up with the original idea for Rando, has kept going mostly in his free time as a passion project in recent times. Rando was always a side-project for ustwo whose bread and butter business is building apps for others. It does also take in revenue from apps of its own. The ones that have a monetisation strategy at least (the forthcoming is one example; Whale Trail is another). Rando never looked like a business. It was a learning exercise/though experiment that became more successful than was ultimately sustainable. However ustwo’s Lövrin did keep Rando ticking over for a time. And while a one-man-support-band for a three-mobile-OS-platform app might not have been sustainable forever, it had kept Rando afloat until last week — a week in which,incidentally, another Reddit-fuelled interest spike saw the app snag another ~80,000 downloads. So Rando was still pulling interest in. The nail in the coffin was an outside act, by a 20-year-old Russian programmer called Artëm, writing a script that reverse engineered the server API and flooded the system with 50,000 identical photos. That meant he was able to make off with all the original content being uploaded to Rando in one go, rather than having to upload a new photo to get a new photo. A sort of digital heist, if you will, that counteracted the give-one, get-one spirit of Rando. (I spoke to Artëm via IM and turns out he wasn’t at all interested in obtaining a huge heap of random photos — rather he wanted to test the limits of the app. He also says he didn’t realise it wouldn’t have anti-overflow systems in place, and was “shocked” to return from work to find his image — of his profile — had been uploaded 50,000 times. “Author should make a limit on the uploaded photos or at least determine if there are more than 1,000 for 10-20 minutes,” he said. “Author should consider not only the users but also people who can do nasty things.” Why did he make the script at all? “Just for the lulz” of course.) ustwo banned Artëm but he was able to create a new account and repeat the behaviour. Plus his mass uploader script had been distributed online so others started using it. ustwo took a server offline for a while to firefight the problem but it told TechCrunch a proper fix would require While Artëm’s actions were the trigger that brought Rando down, it’s also clear the app, in its current form, wasn’t sustainable — not for ustwo, at least — because of limited resources and no revenue attached to it. At one point, says Lövrin, ustwo tried switching the app to paid — asking £0.79 for it — but downloads dried up. Developing premium features for in-app downloads might be another possible way to keep Rando going but, considering the radically antisocial stance ustwo took with Rando, it felt it didn’t have a lot of room for manoeuvre in expanding its feature set. Plus adding new features would again require resources and investment — something ustwo is clearly not willing to risk on more experiments. It is, however, open to handing Rando over to someone who thinks they could keep the app going. “This whole antisocial aspect has been quite popular recently so there is probably some way of making money out of Rando but it’s just that we haven’t figured it out,” says Lövrin. “For us it would be quite nice if there would be someone else that would come and say ‘actually we really like this application; we can give it a new home’. If it could live on, there’s nothing wrong with that — if somebody’s willing to take that upon themselves.” One misstep Lövrin points out, with the benefit of hindsight, is ustwo overreached itself by deciding to release the Rando app on three platforms (iOS first, then Android and also Windows Phone). It wanted to do this to showcase its capabilities as an app development studio but, for Rando, this meant support overheads were far higher and any fixes for bugs had to be rolled across all three platforms. It’s not even a 3x overhead but more like a 5x overhead per bug fix, he says. Keeping Rando on a single mobile platform would have made it far more manageable. But the biggest problem for Rando appears to be its absolutist antisocial stance. ustwo did end up softening this approach slightly along the way by adding in a feature that allowed users to say whether they liked or disliked a photo by moving a slider from beaming smile to severe frown (or something in between). This meant users could view their sent randos and not only see where they had ended up but also whether the recipient had liked them. That was already taking Rando slightly out of its purist antisocial corner. But having made such a , rolling back further wasn’t really an option. “In our case, by being really vocal about ‘we are not going to do social’ you kind of paint yourself into a corner,” says Lövrin. “Because it’s hard to break out of that and still keep your face.” Part of Rando’s problem is that social stuff is put there by developers for a reason: it’s sticky. It makes people come back and keep coming back to an app or service. So if you deliberately pull out all those social hooks then achieving sustained usage is evidently an uphill task. At least without some other addictive additive to pull people back (quasi-anonymity among groups of friends that at least allows people to try and guess who’s who, for instance, or guess where gossipy content might be coming from or who it might be referring to — thinking of apps like and ). ustwo doesn’t have solid monthly active user data for Rando but says one measure — based on percentage of users that have been logged into the app at least once in the past two weeks — generally hovered around 15%. So, in other words, quite low. That underlines the difficulties of making something that’s truly antisocial sticky enough for the mainstream. People may download it and use it for a bit, but they will likely forget about it when the next cool app arrives to distract them. “One thing we always struggled with, with Rando was the retention rate of users,” says Lövrin. “Because of these peaks… we would have quite a lot of downloads, but we weren’t really able to keep the interest of the users for very long… I think a lot of the people [who downloaded Rando] don’t have the app installed anymore.” There’s no doubt Rando did have some fans ( ), even if users didn’t always stick around. Just under 20 million photos were uploaded to the service over a year of usage (not including last week’s reverse engineering incident). But squaring the circle of a small group of engaged users and zero obvious revenue potential with increasing infrastructure/support costs — due to transient popularity spikes and the unfortunate interest of seekers — was never going to be sustainable. An app without investment is ever a doomed app. It seems ironic that, given how much energy, effort and creative ideas are now swirling around a — let’s call it — movement among app makers that Rando, an early champion of doing things differently, should have to fall on its sword. But so the digital winds blow sometimes. There is always still the chance that someone could come along and adopt Rando — perhaps . Or with a cunning strategy to monetise antisocial photo-sharing. Lövrin says one of the more “entertaining ideas” kicked about while ustwo was trying to think of how they could monetise Rando was creating a companion (paid) app that would distribute only the inappropriate content that had been flagged and filtered out of Rando, i.e. for people who wanted to see that kind of stuff — ergo, a pivot to porn. But doing that is not in this particular app studio’s wheelhouse. “A lot of applications that are free are sold based on their data but in our case it’s a little bit strange, even if we have a lot of data it’s a strange kind of data because it’s anonymous and it’s random photos. When you think of the value, you think oh yeah we’re actually sitting on a pile of data here but it’s not evident what it actually could be used for,” he adds. Here’s hoping someone comes up with a strategy to save this radical antisocial app. In the meantime, RIP Rando. “A lot of people have expressed how much they really seemed to love the application,” adds Lövrin. “We’re really happy that our users have been enjoying it… It’s very mixed feelings having to shut it down. I’ve been going from huge relief to deep sadness” — the relief referring only to the lifting of the one-man-app-support burden, of course. “It’s been a great learning experience for us, on a technical perspective, to handle what has been, at times, quite a lot of data,” he adds. “Even though it’s not on Facebook and Instagram level of data it’s still more than we’re used to so obviously there’s a new experience that we can bring in to both our own IP in future and also client work.” |
Apple Pledges To Make iOS Emojis More Racially Diverse | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | has vowed to update its emojis after Miley Cyrus and actor Tahj Mowry complained about the cartoon emoticons’ lack of diversity. MTV Act blogger Joey Parker and got this response from Katie Cotton, Apple’s vice president of worldwide corporate communications: “Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.” Cotton didn’t say exactly when Apple will update its emojis. In fact, the unofficial campaign to make emojis more diverse has been running for more than a year, after Miley Cyrus responded to a Sephora tweet asking for more nail polish emojis by . Parker notes that the drive to make emojis more diverse has been met with ridicule. For example, most comments on a Fast Company story called “Are Emoji Racist?” were dismissive and ranged from “lmao wow minorities are never happy” to more evenhanded responses noting that emoji were first available on iOS devices in Japan, making them Asian if they have a race. But Parker writes ‘although it may ‘just’ be an emoji, representation of all races and genders is an important part of working towards a more equal society.” |
TechCrunch’s Picks: The Top 8 Startups From Y Combinator W14 Demo Day | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | While today saw Paul Graham physically pass the reins to new Y Combinator president Sam Altman, the bigger buzz at Demo Day was about how most investors thought this was the best YC class yet. There were unsexy startups in industries ripe for disruption, deep B2B specialization to meet the needs of specific companies, and several non-profits out to make the world better, not themselves richer. After Graham was awarded a pair of khaki shorts signed by the whole class, 68 startups took the stage at the Mountain View Computer History Museum. 55 presented on the record, and you can read about all of them in our overviews of , , and (If you want to be part of the next round of YC, the accelerator is currently .) Once the dust settled, TechCrunch’s team queried top investors in attendance and huddled together to choose our picks from this season. With fewer inane social apps and no-one-needs-this service startups, it was especially tough this time around, but here’s our selection: Voice is how we’ll control devices too small for a keyboard, like watches, earbuds, and much of the “Internet Of Things.” But it’s a ton of work for a developer to build their own voice system, with natural language processing, speech recognition, and other engineering requirements. So Wit.ai has created a voice interface API, and developers can pipe into their app to enable voice command. That could let them offer in-app voice search, hardware control without buttons, and more. Its co-founder sold his last company to speech tech giant Nuance, and now Wit.ai has 3,000 developer-users like Pebble and Samsung and is growing 29 percent per week. Every app will soon need speech tech, and any startup that can offer an alternative to big providers like Nuance or (maybe) Google will be in a great position for traction or acquisition. . — “Dating should work like Uber, and with The Dating Ring, it does,” says the startup’s co-founder. Currently, dating online is a big hassle. You sift through profiles or Tinder cards, approve some people, wait for a match, and make chit chat. If you’re lucky, it progresses to a real date, but then your partner might look nothing like your partner. With The Dating Ring, you apply to join. Pass the first bar and you’ll meet in-person with a Dating Ring matchmaker for five minutes. They’ll assess your style and open the ability to go on group dates with three men and three women (or a group of four for gay users). But unlike Grouper, a matchmaker has ensured you’re more likely to fall for one of your date mates. Users pay $25 for the initial matchmaker meeting and $20 per date. The Dating Ring certainly made a stir when it announced plans to to be delivered from New York City to lonely San Francisco guys. The Dating Ring’s revenue is growing 60 percent per month for the last six months, it’s profitable, and 70 percent of users go on a second date. While only $2 billion a year is spent in the space, The Dating Ring wants to grow the pie. It seems reasonable that people would be willing to pay for love…or at least to go on real, match-made dates instead of endlessly browsing profiles online. . — It’s crazy that when you’re at your computer, you still have to open your phone to look at push notifications. Pushbullet syncs them so you can respond on the device you’re currently using, including the web thanks to a Chrome/Firefox extension. You can even send files back and forth between your phone and computer. But Pushbullet also lets you turn changes on websites and more into push notifications, even if a site doesn’t have a mobile app. For example, you could ask to get an alert the next time Nike puts a new line of shoe on sale. Pushbullet is now handling 10 million notifications a day for 100,000 weekly users and 60,000 daily users. Push is quickly becoming the most powerful way to reach people and is eating email’s lunch. Pushbullet could hit the bullseye by enhancing the standard and bringing it to more devices and sites. . — AirHelp wants to help fliers get compensation that they are legally entitled to after an airline screws up and is late, or cancels their flight. The total dollar amount this sums to each year is $16 billion. And you can go back three years, meaning that there is another $48 billion potentially sitting there. AirHelp handles the details. You , and if you can get paid, they’ll handle it. The company takes a one-fourth cut it gets you money back. Not a bad business model unless you are an airline. Weave is a telephone service that better connects patients and their medical providers. Going to the dentist is roughly as fun as, well, going to the dentist. The company wants to make that better by helping dentists keep track of their patient information, and needs, integrating that into their communications system. When you call, the receptionist instantly sees your profile connected to your phone number. This way they don’t have to put you on hold, they can instantly see info about your past visits, and they can even spot revenue opportunities like that your spouse hasn’t had a teeth cleaning in two years (eww). Before Y Combinator, Weave had yearly recurring revenue of $790,000. Post Y Combinator, that figure is now $1.8 million, up 38 percent per month during the period. Weave picked dentists to start because they are wealthy and low on regulation. The product will scale into other health verticals. Weave charges $300 per month per location for its service. There are 190,000 dental offices in North America, indicating that its addressable market is quite large. And Weave is determined to scale its system to other health verticals, making medical care better and friendlier across the board. Learn more about . — There are 30 million sellers on marketplaces like Airbnb and Etsy, and they all want more sales. Bettable makes it dead-simple for them to run ads promoting their apartment for rent, or homemade handicraft. Sellers just sign up and send Boostable the URL of their listing or item, select their budget, and Boostable runs efficient, A/B-tested ad campaigns on Facebook and soon Google using advanced retargeting to show them to the right people. And since each sale also earns the marketplaces money, they’re happy to connect Boostable to their sellers. Airbnb has already partnered with the startup. With its current deals, Boostable could reach 500,000 sellers. If it can convince advertising novices they need to spend money to make money, Boostable could pull in enough small ad contracts to see huge revenue. — Kimono turns websites into APIs. What that means is that you can point Kimono at a website, set parameters, and scrape data from it. Think of it like building a small Google just for your needs aimed at one website. So far 20,000 devs have signed up to use the service, a figure that is growing 15 percent per week. In its short life of around 10 weeks, Kimono claims to have helped triple the number of public APIs online. I’m honestly interested to see what people could do with Kimono, TechCrunch, and CrunchBase data. Data becomes much more valuable when it’s structured. . According to BatteryOS, if you charge a battery to 100 percent, it rapidly degrades the battery itself. After many cycles, batteries’ capacity declines. With BatteryOS, the company claims you will be able to charge your batteries to full capacity and not suffer that degradation. The company claims that if the Chevy Volt used BatteryOS, it would have twice the range, and last 8 years longer. The company did not explain how its product works, but did allude to having orders for units in the tens of thousands. Learn more about BatteryOS from TechCrunch’s coverage . — Noora Health trains families to take care of their kin after they return from the hospital. For families living, say, more than one hundred miles from professional medical care, basic healthcare knowledge could be a scarcity. Imagine having a child with a serious heart condition and stressing that you might do something wrong with their medication, care, or diet that could land them back in the hospital or worse? Noora Health gives families training that can be taken back to their homes, leading to healthier outpatients. They don’t go back as nurses, but the training that individuals receive from Noora Health can reduce complications by 36 percent. The non-profit estimates that its training thus far has saved 124 lives. The company has trained 7,000 families so far. The company is selling its product to hospitals in the U.S. and using those funds to pay for its work in other places. The company told gathered investors and press that it is building something that is not dependent on donor dollars. It’s a smart model that makes Noora feel more like a startup than a charity. For a deeper look at Noora Health, check out TechCrunch’s . |
YC-Backed CareMessage Is On A Mission To Improve Health Literacy By Bringing Mobile Healthcare To The Underserved | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | It’s no secret that the U.S. healthcare system is in desperate need of change, especially as costs have continued to rise, while the quality of care remains the same. While technology will play a critical role in reversing this trend, many assume that improving outcomes is simply a matter of putting smarter technology in the doctor’s office. However, the problem isn’t a scourge of careless doctors or shoddy diagnostic tools. Much of healthcare’s high costs only come after patients have left the hospital or clinic. Out of their physician’s immediate care, patients start acting like people. They forget to take their meds, realize they don’t understand their doctor’s instructions, and so on. So, one of the most important steps we can take to improve the quality of healthcare? with and engage patients once they leave the clinic or hospital. Current solutions aren’t cutting it: Today, provided by doctors and practitioners is forgotten almost instantaneously. Pamphlets are static and confusing, and get discarded quickly. Considering that 70 percent of older patients have difficulty using and understanding printed materials, thinks this is where technology can really help, and is likely needed most. The Y Combinator-backed non-profit startup is launching today to provide clinics and healthcare organizations with software and interactive mobile programs that help them stay in touch with (and engage) at risk patients. Vineet Singal, Manuel Rivera and Cecilia Corral have also built CareMessage around a “social” mission. Rather than simply developing software for endowment-rich healthcare organizations, the non-profit startup focuses on clinics that work with at-risk patients, particularly those from low-income, low-literacy and non-English speaking areas. While that may seem like a small audience, the need for a better solution is huge, considering there are some 30 million patients in the U.S. classified as “low-income.” To close this gap, CareMessage’s software aims to help care coordinators, admins and support staff improve the quality of care at scale by leveraging the ubiquitous technology living in our pockets. Thanks to the increasing accessibility and affordability of mobile phones, Americans have become addicted to text messaging. For those in lower income brackets, the rise of SMS, reduced costs and unlimited plans makes texting an appealing (and more affordable) to spending time talking on the phone. , for example, adults earning less than $30K/year actually text twice as much as those who make more than $75/year; in turn, SMS usage is four times higher among adults with less than a high school education compared to those with a college degree. To help healthcare organizations leverage these trends and adjust their care and communication strategies to help them better serve at-risk and low-income patients, CareMessage has developed an interactive text messaging system that offers support for both mobile and landline communication. The service enables clinics and healthcare providers to actively guide their patients through the process of managing chronic health conditions via SMS, and allows them to provide individualized educational programs that are tailored to their specific health needs. The idea, says CareMessage co-founder and CEO Vineet Singal, is to create a user experience that can help patients create long-term habits that can significantly improve their health by opening up the communication channels between healthcare providers and patients. By allowing providers to guide their patients through the challenging first steps that come before treatment and after, doctors feel more accessible, and the entire experience becomes more engaging. To get started, all clinics need to do is signup with one of the startup’s representatives and either upload patient data to its databases directly, or ask their patients to self-enroll. Once their data is uploaded, healthcare providers can use CareMessage’s dashboard to manage the care process and access their calendar, appointment schedule, or send reminders and collect RSVPs. Clinics can manage group events as well, allowing patients to sign up for health awareness classes, seminars, flu shots or disease management programs, for example. They can also customize and send interactive text-based “campaigns” that are customized to each patient, while communicating directly with patients and groups via text or landline. To support these features and allow clinics to begin engaging patients right off the bat, CareMessage has developed a catalog of content that addresses a range of the more common conditions found at clinics serving at-risk patients — like obesity, diabetes, HIV and high blood pressure, to name a few. By providing patients with the ability to RSVP and cancel appointments via mobile or landline, access relevant info before and after appointments and send tips, reminders, and advice via text, CareMessage has begun to make a dent in the patient engagement problem. To avoid spamming patients, campaigns are limited to three to four messages a week, while allowing clinics to create a more fluid feedback loop designed to encourage real changes in behavior. Or at least that’s the idea. Either way, it seems to be working thus far. Singal tells us that, to date, 70 percent of the questions sent by CareMessage’s interactive program have been responded to by patients, and 92 percent of patients complete the full program. Thanks to these high engagement rates, CareMessage has been able to sign on early customers like the L.A. County Department of Health Services (the second largest in the country), Sinai Health System (one of the largest systems servicing Medicaid patients), Unite Here Health, as well as hospitals in Mexico and Nicaragua. The startup has also begun with the Stanford Prevention Research Center, the University of Michigan and the Public Health Institute to help these organizations measure their ability to improve outcomes and to reduce no shows and overall costs. All told, more than 100,000 patients are now using the startup’s software across 16 states, and its user base is growing 25 percent week-over-week, Signal tells us. Along with its hyper-focus on engagement, the key to driving this early growth has been finding every possible way to lower the bar to entry and increase accessibility, the co-founder explains. A noteworthy example, which is also in keeping with its social mission, CareMessage allows clinics to access its software for free. To generate revenue, the startup offers a monthly subscription plan, with price varying depending on the number of patients clinics manage through its software. Furthermore, if customers require more advanced integration or customization, CareMessage will charge an up-front development fee, though it has been building support for EMRs like Allscripts and Epic, for example, in an effort to help companies reduce those extra fees. Looking forward, Singal and the CareMessage team are setting the bar high. They are currently on pace to reach one million patients by the end of 2014, and have begun raising an expected $2 million in seed capital to go after its big, long-term goal: 10 million patients. For more on CareMessage, find them , or check out our coverage of |
Confirmed! | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | In the realm of beautiful acquisition stories, someone about a Mark Zuckerberg sighting at offices. Today Facebook Oculus Rift for $2 billion. “So no way to confirm this, but my friend works in the same building as Oculus, and he ran into Mark Zuckerberg taking the elevator to Oculus’ floor,” the original Reddit poster . Facebook confirmed to us that Zuckerberg has visited the Oculus offices (in Irvine I assume), so it “might have been him.” But what more confirmation does need than today’s news? “Finally! I’ve been in a bad place all month ever since I posted this. Just trying to grasp the fact that no one believed me. I stayed strong in my “reddit thinks i’m a fraud” support groups, and they told me it would get better… one day, they said. This is that day. This Is That DAY!!” Now again, Zuckerberg visits a lot of companies and obviously doesn’t acquire all of them. And there’s no guarantee that a Zuck visit will end up in a sale because he’s not Acquisition Santa (that’s Marissa!). But just like the WhatsApp founder’s , it’s a poetic bit of digital detritus. It’s a weird world. |
Y Combinator Winter 2014, Batches 3 And 4: Meet Kimono Labs, TwoTap, Abacus And More | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Here are the 17 startups that presented in the third batch of companies and the four from the fourth batch that were on the record. Let’s go! Ambition was formed by a bunch of sales guys who were looking for ways to optimize performance… But what better way to do that than by getting already-competitive people to compete with each other? With Ambition, salespeople form teams and then compete against one another day-to-day. Those salespeople then typically sell 44 percent more than before the platform was introduced. While today the system is optimized for sales teams, there’s a bigger opportunity in enterprise teams to make whole organizations more efficient by competing against one another. For more on Ambition, . Algolia is a faster database search technology that claims to work up to 200 times faster than current technology. According to Algolia, many people querying databases are using technology poorly suited to the task. And given how many times per day people do in fact query a database, the market they are looking at is quite large. The company has 80 paying customers, is seeing 50 percent revenue growth monthly. It turns out that TechCrunch’s own CrunchBase uses Algolia. More on Algolia . Most e-commerce sites don’t have the development teams to build advanced personalization and marketing features. Orankl wants to bring the tools Amazon has to all e-commerce vendors. Once a site signs up, it’s crawled by Orankl, and traffic and purchase data is measured. Orankl can then send customers personalized email marketing messages with product recommendations based on their browsing habits. It also offers a super-simple product reviews plug-in that makes people more confident in their purchases. Orankl now has over 500 pilot stores, and says its average store client sees a 20% sales increase in just a few weeks. The democratization of commerce will only work if small vendors have the tools like Orankl’s to compete with big businesses. Read more from TechCrunch about Orankl. This company is a used-furniture marketplace that actually works, connecting buyers and sellers and taking a cut of the sale. Before AptDeco, users were stuck with Craigslist, which was an inefficient way of getting furniture to exchange hands. But AptDeco seeks to change the process with a better user experience and by providing logistics to move furniture. The service offers clear photos and descriptions of furniture, a one-step checkout process, and an inexpensive $65 pickup and delivery fee. The used-furniture market is a $5 billion a year business. AptDeco has already reached a $1.3 million run rate with 33 percent week-over-week revenue growth since joining Y Combinator… And it did that in New York during a horrible winter. What will it do when it moves to other markets during good weather? Here’s our . Email is incredibly bad and working to stem its evil is a worthy task. Threadable wants to improve email by reforming mailing lists, with simpler get-me-out-of-here and member curation. Since December, the company has seen nearly 500 percent growth in use each month. Expect the product to cost around two bucks per month per user when the service starts to charge. Email is bad, but if you must use it, you can at least make less noise with Threadable. Consulting firms like McKinsey employ 1,000 people or more dedicated to beautifying presentations for their teams. SketchDeck wants to build this same service for the general public. A user creates a rough, ugly draft of a presentation in Microsoft Word or another non-presentation format and sends it to SketchDeck. Within 24 hours they get it back from SketchDeck as a beautiful presentation. Anyone who rarely does presentations knows how agonizing getting it to look right can be, which is why SketchDeck is growing 40 percent a week, took in $5,000 in revenue last week, and is now profitable. It charges $5 per templated basic slide or $20 per custom slide, and businesses can pay for subscriptions ranging from $100/month to $1,400/month. If Sketchdeck succeeds, you might never have to fiddle with PowerPoint or Keynote again. Read more about SketchDeck. This startup hopes to redefine the journalistic process by having readers pay for the projects and stories that they wish to have written. Beacon charges readers $5 a month to read content on the platform, and has seen 30x revenue growth since launch. Why are people paying Beacon for content? In part because journalists launch their own products on the platform, and readers help decide which of those projects get funded. For more on Beacon, . Ads are bad and their returns are weak. This is known. TwoTap wants to change that by letting people buy products right in their application instead of showing ads. TwoTap then helps them checkout and ship without leaving the app. Does it work? According to the company, partner app Kiip saw its revenue rise by 10X on the same number of impressions. Provided that is a repeatable win, and TwoTap can keep product diversity strong, this could change how apps monetize. Caller ID is dated technology that has little place in the modern world as it is. According to Next Caller, companies spent $14.9 billion last year asking people to spell their names over the phone. Next Caller, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt, has profiles for 220 million people that can be accessed when they call in, cutting time and costs. Those profiles can include name, location, Twitter handle and follower count, income level, and more that help companies know how to route calls and maybe even whether they should give them premium support. For more on Next Caller, TechCrunch’s is required reading. Eventjoy provides a ticketing platform that is built for mobile users. Ticketing is a $4 billion market, and Eventjoy wants to provide a better way for customers to find and book events. It appears to be working: People who attend Eventjoy events are also the company’s target market, and for each new event that appears on the platform, another two are posted. Read . Kimono turns websites into APIs. What that means is that you can point Kimono at a website, set paramaters, and scrape data from it. Think of it like building a small Google just for your needs aimed at one website. So far 20,000 devs have signed up to use the service, a figure that is growing 15 percent per week. In its short life of around 10 weeks, Kimono claims to have helped triple the number of public APIs online. I’m honestly interested to see what people could do with Kimono, TechCrunch, and CrunchBase data. Noora Health trains families to take care of their kin after they return from the hospital. For families living, say, more than one hundred miles from professional medical care, basic healthcare knowledge could be a scarcity. Imagine having a child with a serious heart condition and stressing that you might do something wrong with their medication, care, or diet that could land them back in the hospital or worse? Noora Health gives families training that can be taken back to their homes, leading to healthier outpatients. They don’t go back as nurses, but the training that individuals receive from Noora Health can reduce complications by 36 percent. The non-profit estimates that its training thus far has saved 124 lives. The company has trained 7,000 families so far. The company is selling its product to hospitals in the U.S. and using those funds to pay for its work in other places. The company told gathered investors and press that it is building something that is not dependent on donor dollars. It’s a smart model that makes Noora feel more like a startup than a charity. For a deeper look at Noora Health, check out TechCrunch’s . Camperoo provides a marketplace for children’s camps that helps parents find places for their kids to spend time. Since joining Y Combinator, the company has seen 225 percent growth rate. In addition to helping camps find patrons, the company also gives them free software to help run their platforms. And parents are looking for ways to find more choices and book summer camps online. You can read more on TechCrunch . Admit it: You are bad at expenses. There, didn’t that feel nice? Abacus wants to end expense reports. It does so by having employees report their expenses from their smartphones, as they occur. Employees get paid back the next day. Abacus syncs with accounting software, giving companies granular understanding of their daily costs. Abacus has 60 customers, including Pinterest. Transactions on its platform are growing at around 30 percent per week. CodeNow, another nonprofit in this batch, wants to help teach kids how to code, “with an emphasis on reaching girls, ethnic minorities, and other underrepresented groups.” CodeNow provides in-person training at tech companies on the weekends in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. It has provided 19,000 hours of training so far. As we in our previous coverage: CodeNow’s curriculum uses tools like (for programming basics) and (for robotics) and involves a combination of weekend sessions and online coursework, as well as a boot camp (held over the longer school breaks or on consecutive weekends) with “intensive training” in Ruby. Nowadays DJs are rock stars of nightlife events, and Shoobs is positioned to take advantage of that fact by offering ticketing solutions for nightclubs. Today that’s a $2 billion market, and it’s growing fast. Shoobs wants to be there to dominate the club market. Minuum wants to be the keyboard layer for all devices. Launched on Android, it has racked up 100,000 downloads to date. Its technology converts to small screens as well, which is something that matters as screens become, well, smaller. Of its initial set of users, 40 percent are paying customers. What Minuum is betting on is simply that the idea of smartwatches and other wearable computers are not pipe dreams, and that they will need soft keyboards. What Minuum has built looks cool. See more Minuum coverage . This startup provides a new way for families to solve the issue of everyone wanting to eat something different. By working with restaurants, it delivers food that each member of a family will enjoy for a low fee per meal. The average customer spends about $70 a week on Gooble and uses the service for about a third of their dinners. The company’s revenue has quadrupled in the last four months and it’s already profitable. You can read our .
HoverChat is a new way to message based on the premise that messaging should be pervasive, and not be constrained while inside other applications. Teens, the company pointed out, love to multi-task. Following a featured slot in Google’s Play Store, HoverChat users are now exchanging 2.2 million messages per day. In the company’s view, messaging is the killer experience for mobile. It will be interesting to watch its growth curve, given that scaled messaging apps have tremendous value. Formerly known as Ninja SMS, HoverChat also sells a version of itself for four bucks. TerrAvion wants to make farms more efficient by providing them with actionable photos and data to get the most out of their land. Every week, farmers get a picture of their fields. The company has grown from 900,000 acres of farmland last year to 50 million acres today. It plans to continue scaling up over time. You can read more about TerrAvion . Move Loot takes furniture from those who want to get rid of it, inventories it, snaps pictures of it, and then sells it to other locals, handling delivery in the process. People hand their stuff over to Move Loot for no upfront payment. The two then split the revenue generated from its sale. Why are people willing to go along with being paid late — and half the sale? Because, according to the company, they are that intent about getting rid of their furniture that they don’t want. Great news for Move Loot, and also for consumers who get a far superior buying experience. According to the company, a “full service marketplace” is the only option worth considering. A quick scan of their website shows inventory of an eclectic, interesting nature. Read more about Move Loot . |
Candy Crush Maker King Prices Shares At $22.50, Puts Valuation At $7B | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | In the most anticipated gaming IPO of the last few years, that will raise $326 million for the company and value it at slightly more than $7 billion. Shares will trade for the first time tomorrow. That valuation will put King at nearly four times its trailing annual revenue of $1.88 billion. The vast majority of that revenue came from the mega-hit Candy Crush Saga, which pulled in 78 percent of the company’s bookings. That valuation also makes King worth more than 1.5 times Zynga’s market capitalization and puts it slightly south of EA’s $9 billion market capitalization. The IPO ends one chapter of the company’s 10-year-long journey and is a big test of public investor appetite for gaming companies. The last notable gaming IPO was Zynga’s, and that company saw its shares decline by about 75 percent in the year after it went public on concerns that it missed out on mobile gaming and was seeing its player base erode on the Facebook platform. Since then, other companies have decided to stay off of public markets. Supercell, Clash of Clans and Hay Day, decided to sell more than half of itself for Japanese mobile carrier Softbank and gaming company Gung-Ho Entertainment last year. Still others, like the U.K.’s NaturalMotion, decided to sell to Zynga for roughly a half-billion dollars. So this is a big test of free-to-play casual gaming. The concern is that King may not be able to follow up with another mega-hit after Candy Crush Saga. Indeed its quarter-over-quarter revenues declined to $601.7 million from $621 million in the most recent earnings period, . King is arguing that it has a slightly different strategy than that of Zynga. While Zynga seeks to own specific categories or genres in gaming like farming or casino, King mines a historical repertoire of games from a longstanding web-based destination that attracts a small group of dedicated casual gamers. That’s where it was able to pull titles like Candy Crush Saga from and redesign them from the ground-up with mobile devices in mind. |
UK E-Commerce Intelligence Startup Ometria Raises $1.5M Seed Round | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | The UK’s is another startup that wants to help online retailers make better use of data, and, in turn, compete harder with larger, more data-driven players in the market. It offers an e-commerce “intelligence” platform that provides retailers with insights relating to customer behaviour and product performance and enables them to take subsequent actions — all in the name of attracting the right customers and boosting loyalty for existing ones. And shifting more product, of course. The London-based company is disclosing a $1.5 million seed round today from a large group of angel investors — I count 16 in total. And while it’s tempting to call this a party round, with no obvious lead investor, it’s hard to argue that this is anything other than an impressive list of entrepreneur-backers from the e-commerce, retail and SaaS worlds. These include Huddle co-founders Alastair Mitchell and Andy McLoughlin, Tim Jackson (founder of QXL), Phil Wilkinson (founder of Kelkoo), Guy Westlake (Shutl’s Head of Marketing), Sean Cornwell (Chief Digital Officer at Travelex), and Ned Cranborne and Shan Drummond (partners at Samos Investments). In addition, Former eBay and TalkTalk executive, Elisabeth Ling (currently VP Digital at online retailer AlexandAlexa.com), has invested and joins the board of Ometria. Meanwhile, Ometria says it will use the new funding to grow the team and to further develop the platform. Its HQ is in Mayfair, London, and the startup has a second office in Moscow. It boasts a team of 12, including developers, data experts and programmers originating from Israel, Uzbekistan, Russia, Croatia and Portugal. How very European. Ometria competitors span anything from Google Analytics, or an upstart like , or something like U.S.-based . On how Ometria is differentiating itself from others in the e-commerce analytics and business “intelligence” space, Ivan Mazour, founder and CEO, tells TechCrunch: We were built from the very beginning for retailers, taking guidance and feedback only from these, rather than attempting to fit an existing all-purpose solution to this particular segment. We developed a product which would have immediate integration and which would require no complex setup or customisation. This is not the case for our competitors, and is only possible because our product was designed for retail. To that end, Ometria is compatible with commonly used e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify and Hybris. Customers get a 28-day free trial and then pay a monthly subscription. |
Facebook Says It Has 1B Monthly Active Users On Mobile, 200M Actives On Instagram | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Following up the announcement that it’s , Facebook also shared some numbers about its growth, because why not? On the acquisition conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that, as of last week, Facebook has 1 billion monthly active users on mobile. That’s up from as of the end of its most recent quarter. Zuckerberg also said that Instagram, which Facebook owns, has reached 200 million monthly actives, up from . In a , Instagram added, “As we exceed 20 billion photos shared on Instagram to date, we look back in wonder at the beauty and importance of everything this community has created.” |
Facebook Buys A Virtual World | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Today, in a somewhat surprising move, Facebook . The buy elicited visceral reactions from people dismayed that Oculus sold out so early to snarky comments about what Facebook might do with it. First of all, any talk about the Facebook news feed appearing in virtual form is far too short-sighted. Will someone port the feed over to Oculus? Probably. But that’s not even close to the endgame here. Nor is Facebook’s chatter about gaming really what this is about. There will doubtless be a lot of gaming-focused development to come, and it makes little sense for Oculus to abandon that line of thought entirely. But the gaming market, no matter how lucrative, isn’t the resting place here. You might even see people talk about this being a “platform play,” but that, too, isn’t the half of it. When Facebook launched, the landscape of computing wasn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eyes yet. On the desktop, Facebook was a master of its own destiny, free to iterate and play with the web as much as it pleased. Yes, there were some limitations with regards to hardware or window sizes, but the world was generally its oyster. Then along came mobile, upsetting the cart entirely. Facebook was caught a bit flat-footed and got busy offering up versions of its site on Android and iOS that have gotten generally better over the years — especially the past few. But while it was scrambling to make a product that people liked to use on their phones or tablets, the enormous tectonic plates of mobile — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google — were grinding on without them. If Facebook wants to be a major Internet pillar, and I don’t doubt that’s what Mark Zuckerberg wants, then it is missing a major key component that all of its competitors have: A conduit. Apple has iOS, Google has Android, Amazon has its fork of Android called FireOS, Microsoft has Windows Phone. Facebook has….what? Facebook, one of the most valuable companies in the world and an organization that aspires to “connect everyone” is left at the mercy of its competitors who own the conduits that they must travel on. Want to create a custom experience on iOS? Play inside the sandbox. Care to create a “home” for Facebook users? You have to pay to install a default app on an Android phone and call it yours. The mobile touch era has settled into its strata, and it’s unlikely that there will be a late player that cracks the code on a completely new OS — though let’s go ahead and leave a loophole here for Samsung’s eventual fork of Android. I think Facebook is getting along fine on smartphones and tablets. And there’s still plenty of runway to take advantage of those opportunities. But buying Oculus illustrates foresight that goes beyond “let’s make some cool games” or “wouldn’t it be awesome to chat with friends on Messenger in VR.” Facebook has purchased itself a hardware conduit that prepares it for the next generation of operating systems and interfaces. This time, Facebook won’t be locked out. If, as many seem to feel is destined to happen, VR drives the next wave of human interface design and interaction, Facebook has just purchased an early pass to the show. This time around, Facebook will have a first-party conduit directly to its users. And, if my line of thinking is correct then these new virtual interfaces will rest on top of existing operating systems both mobile and non-mobile. If you own the conduit to a virtual world that’s agnostic to the delivering platform, you’ve made them inconsequential. While it’s still working in a space where we talk about how much time people spend on mobile versus desktops, Facebook is preparing for a world where we talk about how much time we spend in virtual reality versus “real” reality. The latest version of the Rift headset contains much of the that’s in a mobile phone, plus a large “virtual” display. This kind of miniaturization and power was unthinkable a decade ago. Imagine how powerful and streamlined these network-connected displays will be 10 years from now. Couple that with a virtuality hosted in the cloud and you’ve got a radically new way of thinking about the ‘Internet’. What happens when we work, socialize and play inside virtual realities for large portions of the day? You might not like this future — it may even disgust you — but it’s a very real possibility. Sure, it’s a ways off still — it may take decades for it to ever happen if it does. But that kind of long-term thinking is exactly what Google is doing with Glass and it’s up to. With Oculus, Zuckerberg is putting pennies into the same basket. If the next big breakthrough in computing is a set of world-spanning virtual realities that we slip in and out of by putting on a pair of glasses, Facebook just bought in cheap. |
HTC Goes “Blah Blah Blah” In The First HTC One M8 Ad | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Frankly, the only way this ad could be more effective is if it were a “let me Google that for you” link. HTC is right here. Dead right. In the first video ad for , Gary Oldman advises viewers to turn to the Internet to learn about the new phone. It simply doesn’t matter what Gary or tell viewers about the phone. It’s all marketing speak. Worthless. But great SEO is priceless. HTC’s new flagship phone is the successor to the universally adored HTC One. It’s hard to find a bad review of the original One, which is seemingly the case for the new One as well. Google it, as HTC suggests, and the results will be filled with articles praising the phone. Everything else is “blah.” HTC, quietly clever. |
HTC One M8 Hands-On: Come For The Styling, Stay For The Warranty | John Biggs | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | The past few years have taught once high-flying cellphone makers one or two things about demand. As Samsung rose in Android prominence, the rest of the manufacturers fell one by one. LG? Life’s not good. Motorola? Mostly moribund. Then there’s HTC. HTC made quite a splash with its impressive One last year. The styling, the features, and the price were right and the company allegedly sold over 5 million units in 2013, although these numbers are estimates. This seems great until you understand that Apple sold 33.8 million iPhones in the September quarter of 2013 alone. So yeah, HTC needs a miracle. We’ll have a full review shortly but let it be said that I’m very impressed by the One M8. It’s a beautiful phone, metal clad and meaty, large and usable without being a monstrous phablet. The styling is great, the little accessories – like the hole-punched case that allows you to read the time and caller ID using an ingenious simulated LED system – are clever, and the whole package is very reminiscent of HTC’s salad days when Sense was new and the Android ecosystem had not yet been infested by the destructive Northern Snakehead fish that is Samsung. Can this phone – or any phone – save HTC? I don’t know. The presentation today spoke mostly about software features that are already available on the Android store. The unique Lytro-esque camera is cute, but the rest of the ecosystem, including Zoe (a photo sharing app) and Blinkfeed (a new reader), is nothing new and can easily be eclipsed by extant software. Where HTC has really changed the game, however, is in warranty protection. That’s right: something so boring and so simple truly makes this phone stand out. First, you get six months of cracked screen protection. That’s a big deal. That we, in this day and age of Gorilla Glass and ballistic cases, can be excited by a warranty is a testament to the flaccidity and sameness of the cellphone market. So here’s to the Hyundai of mobile, the company with the best warranty in the business. Its efforts will give other manufacturers pause, and if you can’t convince the world to buy your phones for the features, you can at least convince them to buy because they’ll get a free replacement if they drop their devices. It’s the little things. [gallery ids="978569,978576,978575,978574,978573,978571,978570"] |
Minecraft Creator Cancels The Oculus Rift Version Because Facebook “Creeps” Him Out | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Minecraft creator Markus Persson (aka Notch) has cancelled the Oculus VR version of the game, because, as he puts it: “Facebook creeps me out.” His studio, Mojang, had been in talks to bring a version of Minecraft officially to the VR gaming headset, but he said on Twitter shortly after the was announced that he “cancelled that deal.” We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out. — Notch (@notch) Oculus Rift ports of Minecraft already exist, as , but none have the official backing and branding of the studio. That’s too bad for gamers who wanted to dive into the blocky virtual world builder up to their eyeballs, but there’s always the chance Persson could have a change of heart. Maybe to help convince Notch to come around. In an extended statement on his blog, Notch about why, exactly, he’s still bullish on VR but doesn’t want to work with Facebook. Facebook is not a company of grass-roots tech enthusiasts. Facebook is not a game tech company. Facebook has a history of caring about building user numbers, and nothing but building user numbers. People have made games for Facebook platforms before, and while it worked great for a while, they were stuck in a very unfortunate position when Facebook eventually changed the platform to better fit the social experience they were trying to build. Don’t get me wrong, VR is not bad for social. In fact, I think social could become one of the biggest applications of VR. Being able to sit in a virtual living room and see your friend’s avatar? Business meetings? Virtual cinemas where you feel like you’re actually watching the movie with your friend who is seven time zones away? But I don’t want to work with social, I want to work with games. |
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