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The Creator Of Doom Is Now A Facebook Employee | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | This isn’t bizzaro world. We will soon live in a world where the maker of Doom, Quake and most of my childhood memories works for Mark Zuckerberg. John Carmack will soon be a Facebook employee. Facebook its plan to buy Oculus VR for around $2 billion in cash and stock. The company will operate independently within Facebook with a focus on gaming. Facebook communications confirmed to TechCrunch that everyone stays the same at Oculus and John Carmack will remain Oculus’ CTO. Carmack left id Software for Oculus VR in late 2013. Apparently id’s parent company, Zenimax, didn’t share Carmack’s enthusiasm for virtual reality and attempted to limit the resources available to make VR games. “They couldn’t come together on that, which made me really sad. It was just unfortunate,” Carmack . “When it became clear that I wasn’t going to have the opportunity to do any work on VR while at id software, I decided to not renew my contract.” If Carmack says VR can be a big thing, it would be wise to listen. As the champion and developer of many of the aspects that make up games, Carmack has made a bigger impression on this billion-dollar industry than just about anyone else. Likewise, it’s understandable why Zenimax and others are a bit more bearish on VR. So far the technology hasn’t proven itself to be anything other than a cool tech demo. Its opportunity to be a viable consumer product is still years away. But Facebook is in this for the long haul. Mark Zuckerberg told reporters and investors today during a call that it’s his company’s vision to build the next computing platform. And with John Carmack in the fold, Zuck now has one of the best in the business working for him. |
Facebook Missed Mobile Gaming, So It Bought Oculus To Own Virtual Reality For Gaming And Beyond | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Facebook had a huge success with its web gaming canvas, but got locked out of mobile gaming revenue by platform owners Apple (iOS) and Google (Android). Facebook seems determined not to miss the next big gaming platform, as today it , maker of the Rift virtual reality headset, for $2 billion in cash and stock. And long-term, it’s looking to take VR beyond games and into simulated in-person connections. If Apple or Google had acquired Oculus, it could have been the mobile gaming fiasco all over again. On the web, Facebook’s canvas attracted tons of big developers like Zynga with its personal data and opportunities for growth. In exchange, it got to lay a 30 percent tax on what developers earned through in-app purchases. But on mobile, the native app stores were controlled by Apple and Google. They were the ones that received that 30 percent tax. Facebook tried to launch an HTML5 gaming platform, but it floundered since mobile web games were so much less powerful than native ones. In the end, Facebook was relegated to becoming a , providing login, sharing, and advertising to game developers. Eventually it to add a mobile-backend-as-a-service to its offering. But it was still iOS and Android that held the reins. Now with the , the roles could be reversed. Developers who want to build for virtual reality hardware will have to come to Facebook, and it’s Apple and Google who could feel left out in the cold. [Update: As for exactly how Facebook will monetize Oculus, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the call to investors, “We’re clearly not a hardware company. We’re not going to try to make a profit off of the hardware long-term…but if we can make this a network where people are communicating, and buying virtual goods, and there might be ads down the line…that’s where the business could come from.”] For now, Facebook will let Oculus operate independently with a focus on gaming. And to some, that makes the acquisition seem out of sync with Facebook’s mission to make the world more open and connected. Perhaps that’s why . But down the line, that VR could be used for much more: “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home. This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.” [Update: On the call to investors, Zuckerberg said “Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever.” He also said that Facebook expects people will love using virtual reality, it will become an integral part of people’s lives, and it could be the next important computing platform.] This all reveals how Oculus could be at the center of Facebook’s long-term strategy to connect people as vividly as possible. A criticism frequently lobbed at Facebook is that it actually isolates people rather than brings them together. Scrolling through the News Feed is not the same as talking and laughing with a friend in person. But with Oculus, Facebook could one day make you feel like you’re right next to the people you love, no matter how far away they are. |
Facebook’s Oculus Buy Signals A Hardware Land Grab, And Company Fit Isn’t A Concern | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | There’s a gold rush on, and the people striking it rich are the ones building things — not apps, not software, but honest-to-goodness hardware, like the Oculus Rift, whose creator, in cash and stock. Earlier today, Intel closed its purchase of , and for $3.2 billion. Google is also said to be nosing around wearable device makers for another purchase, and everywhere you look, Internet companies are spending money on things, not just platforms or virtual experiences. So what’s the story here? Does Facebook really care about immersive gaming technology, which, while exciting, is undoubtedly still something that excites the fringes and core gamers more than anyone else? And is Google really that interested in building thermostats and smoke detectors? The answer is probably not, but both companies are interested in the future of the web, and the future of the web doesn’t limit itself to apps on your smartphone or pages in your browser. This seems odd when taken as a single data point on its own, but consider the contextual web that surrounds it: Google has acquired a number of robotics startups over the past couple of years, and it also recently purchased Motorola’s mobility division. It sold Motorola to Lenovo, but not before it , a division that focuses on building advanced, connected next-gen hardware. Microsoft similarly picked up Nokia’s smartphone business, which means it, too, is expanding its hardware arsenal. Also, I’ve heard FB wasn’t Oculus VR’s only suitor. On the Oculus side, the startup had made good progress and only recently announced its DK2 developer hardware, which is a step closer to a consumer product but isn’t quite there yet. Facebook’s offer seems to include stipulations that will see it continue its development of its virtual reality headset at Facebook, both for gaming and for “the most social platform ever,” according to a statement by Mark Zuckerberg, which will “change the way we work, play and communicate.” While Zuckerberg seems to suggest FB is preparing for an immersive social-networking experience akin to a much more advanced Second Life taking place in a Star Trek holodeck, I’m more inclined to believe that this is part of a larger hardware land grab that doesn’t necessarily have a clear endpoint in mind. Google and Facebook are much more competitors now than they ever have been in the past, and if one is making a big bet on connected devices as the future of the web, the other is sure to follow. People might want to seek out a more specific, complete motivation for this purchase, especially given the price tag. But it’s much more likely that these are bets made in advance to set the purchasing companies up for a game on a board that isn’t yet clearly defined, and that won’t take shape for at least another few years. |
Facebook’s $2B Oculus Deal Happened Over The Last Five Days | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Facebook’s deal to buy Oculus VR for $2 billion happened relatively quickly and the negotiations were hammered out over the last five days during the industry’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, according to sources familiar with the deal. Mark Zuckerberg had been by Oculus’s Southern California offices just once before to hang out earlier this year. He played with the company’s DK2, or second development kit. Spark Capital and Matrix Partners, which co-led the company’s $16 million Series A round, and Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company’s $75 million Series B round, have an equal stake in the company, according to the source. We’re hearing from multiple sources that the IRR or the internal rate of return on this deal is one of the higher ones in venture history for the Series A investors. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, recused himself from the negotiations. “For whatever reason, he got the religion,” a source involved in the deal said. Oculus’s headset has already seen 75,000 orders for development kits, Zuckerberg said on an investor call. Zuckerberg explained that he felt that Oculus represented an entirely new post-PC and post-mobile platform. Indeed, after not moving quickly on other earlier deals, perhaps Zuckerberg felt that he needed to be more preemptive. Because Facebook doesn’t own its own mobile operating system, it has had to pursue a more horizontal strategy by building several standalone mobile apps and creating a social layer across third-party apps. But because mobile phones can also be connected by the address book, other competing mobile social networks like Snapchat have been able to rise up quickly and accumulate hundreds of millions of users. According to other sources familiar with the $19 billion WhatsApp deal, the company’s leadership on the messaging product had been urging Zuckerberg to buy WhatsApp for at least two years. But because both companies didn’t get serious until this year, WhatsApp had already accumulated nearly half a billion users and came with a significantly higher price tag. “I don’t think you should expect us to do multiple multi-billion dollar acquisitions at this rate,” Zuckerberg said on the call. “We think that WhatsApp is one of the rare companies that will reach 1 billion people, and those companies are really valuable. Also, there are not that many things that are candidates to be the next major computing platform. This company Oculus has a clear lead to do this.” Like the Instagram acquisition, Facebook is promising Oculus the freedom to operate independently. With Instagram now attracting more than 200 million monthly active users, Zuckerberg is citing that deal as an example of the company’s ability to do big billion dollar strategic acquisitions well. But unlike both the Instagram and WhatsApp deals, Oculus is something Facebook has never done before. They’ve never done hardware, although their mobile team has done some partnerships with handset makers. “The Oculus guys have a clear roadmap. The only thing that I see changing is that Facebook will be able to help them get it to market sooner,” said Antonio Rodriguez, the general partner at Matrix who led the deal. “What Mark has proven with two other companies, is how he let them operate completely independently.” |
Facebook To Buy Oculus VR, Maker Of The Rift Headset, For Around $2B In Cash And Stock | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Facebook has to purchase Oculus VR, the company behind the Rift headset, for around $2 billion in cash and stock. This includes $400 million, and 23.1 million Facebook shares. An additional $300 million earnout will be paid in cash and stock if Oculus hits certain unspecified milestones. “I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a . Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. For the past few years, this has mostly meant building mobile apps that help you share with the people you care about. We have a lot more to do on mobile, but at this point we feel we’re in a position where we can start focusing on what platforms will come next to enable even more useful, entertaining and personal experiences. This is where Oculus comes in. They build virtual reality technology, like the Oculus Rift headset. When you put it on, you enter a completely immersive computer-generated environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away. The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you’re actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives. Zuckerberg says that their efforts with Oculus will continue to focus on gaming initially, and that the company will continue to operate independently of Facebook. But after gaming, Zuckerberg says, they’re going to expand into a variety of other arenas. “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home,” he says. “This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.” In a post on its blog, of the partnership might not be immediately visible. At first glance, it might not seem obvious why Oculus is partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform. But when you consider it more carefully, we’re culturally aligned with a focus on innovating and hiring the best and brightest; we believe communication drives new platforms; we want to contribute to a more open, connected world; and we both see virtual reality as the next step. Most important, Facebook understands the potential for VR. Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we learn, share, play, and communicate. Facebook is a company that believes that anything is possible with the right group of people, and we couldn’t agree more. Facebook, of course, found early success with games. Social gaming is responsible for a lot of the growth and spread of Facebook as a platform, rather than just a social service. Acquiring Oculus could signal a variety of things, but being able to tap into what is potentially the next big gaming trend is likely one of them. In addition, Facebook has been aggressive about understanding and supporting mobile use cases — but only after an initial period of foot-dragging and desktop focus. If VR is “what’s next” then Facebook will want to tap the market early to avoid any transitional gaffes this time around. The purchase is expected to close in Q2 of 2014. Oculus has taken over 75K orders for its virtual reality headset so far. Those headsets have been developer editions designed to get developers interested in playing around with VR technology. The most recent “Crystal Cove” prototype features a full 1080p display and more sensors to detect and position users in virtual environments. Of course, if you pull the thread of virtual reality out really really far, you could see a future where we’re not talking about the percentage of time people spend on mobile vs. desktop. Instead, we’re talking about the amount of time that people spend in virtual reality versus actual reality. In that kind of landscape, Facebook starting in on VR early makes painfully obvious sense. The company has received a total of $93.4 million in funding so far from Spark, Matrix, Founders Fund, Formation 8, BIG Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Oculus got a big boost in legitimacy recently when one of the founding fathers of 3D gaming, . “Over the next 10 years, virtual reality will become ubiquitous, affordable, and transformative,” concludes the Oculus post, “and it begins with a truly next-generation gaming experience. This partnership ensures that the Oculus platform is coming, and that it’s going to change gaming forever.”
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Facebook Stock Slides In After-Hours Trading Following Acquisition Of Oculus Rift | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Wall Street doesn’t like what it sees. Facebook’s stock price ( ) is dropping in after-hours trading after the company announced its purchase of virtual reality startup Oculus Rift. The stock, which closed up on the day, is now under its open price of $64.25, resulting in a loss of $1.5 – $1.8 billion market cap. The stock price following Facebook’s announcement that it was buying WhatsApp. About an hour-and-a-half after the stock market close today, Facebook took to the wire to for $2 billion in cash and stock. Citing a goal to make the world more open and connected, Facebook notes that it is now in a position to start focusing on next-generation platforms. Oculus Rift is at the forefront of virtual reality, which could become the next generation. Facebook was slow to adopt mobile technology. It doesn’t want to miss out on VR if it becomes a big thing. |
Y Combinator Demo Day Winter 2014, Batch 2 – The Dating Ring, Unbabel, Pushbullet, AirHelp, And More | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | Today’s Y Combinator Demo Day started a little differently. Co-founder Jessica Livingston presented YC’s former leader and her husband Paul Graham with a pair of his own shorts signed by all of this batch’s companies to commemorate Graham passing the torch on to new YC president Sam Altman. And then the pitching began. 68 companies will have presented by the end of today’s Demo Day to a crowd of salivating investors. below is a look at the second batch of 17 startups: Zesty wants to beat Seamless GrubHub and other food-delivery services by trimming the fat. Literally. The service lets businesses and individuals order only the healthiest menu items from well-rated local restaurants. Users can see photos and calorie counts for everything Zesty sells. Its in-house dieticians even work with restaurants to make their cooking practices healthier. Zesty will have to beat established incumbents, as well as new food startups like SpoonRocket, Munchery, and Sprig, but its revenue grew 25X this year to a $2.5 million a year run rate. Here’s how the business model works. It costs Zesty about $500 to sign up a large business customer, who will then spend $100,000 a year, netting Zesty $15,000 from its 15 percent commission. That means it pays back its customer acquisition cost in just 12 days. As businesses compete for talent, having healthy, tasty food like Google is a huge talking point. Plus, healthy foods leads to productive employees. . Analytical software for online purchases isn’t hard to find. 42 wants to build similar tools for offline sales, which make up 93 percent of total retail sales. The company has already locked down a few high-profile clients. 42 charges per store per month, with a $10,000 price tag quoted by the company. Essentially, 42 is bringing sales-facing analytics SaaS to the rest of the world that hasn’t yet moved online. TV broadcasters currently use racks of expensive, single-purpose hardware to run their on-screen graphics, tickers and ads. That’s because software was too unreliable. But Vidpresso’s $500 a month software can run off a cheap Mac Mini, saving stations tons of money. CNN already used Vidpresso to power its social media ticker during its New Year’s Eve broadcast, has other clients around the world, and is growing 26 percent per month. Vidpresso sees software eating hardware and wants to do the same for the television industry. . Fashion is expensive, so StyleLend wants to make it affordable. The company helps local people lend and borrow dresses from each other. It calls this monetizing the closet. In the company’s estimation, there is $50 billion worth of fashion items in closets in the U.S. The service has grown 26 percent per week recently, though, only in San Francisco. Unlike Rent The Runway, StyleLend leans on an extant supply of items, limiting its cost structure. “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. . Unbabel offers a fusion of machine and human translation that it claims can offer similar quality to human translation for 2 cents per word. That price point is five times lower than the industry standard, according to the company. Unbabel translators — there are 4,400 so far — are five times as fast as human translators working without technological help. According to the company, translation is a $34 billion market, a figure that it thinks will grow now that translation is both cheaper and better. 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. . Everyone wants to learn to code, but nobody wants to “complete lessons,” especially kids. But CodeCombat has baked programming education into a classic swords ‘n’ magic role-play game. Players write JavaScript to beat levels, and can even compete and code along with friends. The final levels are hard enough that only top engineering talent can win. Soon, CodeCombat will release 10 level sets for four more programming languages. The games are free to play, and CodeCombat makes money by pointing recruiters towards players who’ve proven they’re great programmers. By getting more people code-savvy and helping companies win the talent wars, CodeCombat could do good and become a sustainable business. . 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. The 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. . 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 put in your flight number, 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. MadeSolid wants to make the materials that go into your 3D printer better. In its view, the better the stuff that you put in, the better the stuff will come out. The market is reacting well to its products, with its revenue growing at 16 percent per week on products that can have margins up to 80 percent. The company has shipped to more than 20 countries. 3D printing is a growing revolution that is not going away, so making the stuff that the people behind the dials will use isn’t a bad idea. BellaBeat is a sensor and app that lets mothers of unborn children track the heartbeat of their child to be and keep an eye on its development. BellaBeat also includes a community for moms to interact and share their kids’ progress. The device, which costs $129, has margins of a high enough level that the presenting founder was too “ashamed” to admit them. The company sold “thousands” in Europe, and in its first three weeks here in the United States has sold 3,000 units and signed 12 distribution deals. Quantified baby. It’s going to be big. This is a nonprofit organization that is seeking to revolutionize the way that people reach social services. It helps low-income families get the help they need by pointing them to the right resources. There are more than 46 million people living under the poverty line today, so this is a big problem seeking a big solution. The problem for many of these families is that there are too many social services to choose from. There are 6,000 local resources in San Francisco alone, but they all live on paper and are difficult to find on the web or on mobile. One Degree, in contrast, can provide personalized recommendations for services that they’re trying to reach. Learn more about One Degree . This is a messaging app that has already taken over the Slovenian market, and now the team behind it wants to take over the U.S. Unlike other photo messaging apps, which are push-based, Povio requires users to connect via text before they start sending photos. After becoming bigger than Snapchat in Slovenia, the team came to the U.S. and did a test with students at the University of Santa Clara. It got 1,200 students to sign up, half of which use the app every single day. Now it’s looking to grow that user base on other campuses. Read . This startup offers same-day delivery as a service, helping other companies to launch on-demand services without having to deal with all the headaches of running a logistics business. No hiring drivers, scheduling routes, or dealing with customers. Instead, Rickshaw turns deliveries into an API call. It makes deliveries on behalf of its customers, allowing them to focus on their core business. As it gets more customers, it can be scaled up and offer even better services based on economies of scale. In short, it hopes to do for the offline world what Amazon Web Services did for online services. Zidisha is a micro-lending platform for developing nations that takes advantage of advances in online marketplaces and the ability to reach small businesses that are seeking funding. Unlike Kiva, which charges high interest rates due to partnering with banks, Zidisha hopes to reach borrowers directly. As a result, the platform is able to offer an interest rate of 10 percent versus the 30 percent to 80 percent for other services. It’s already signed up $1.8 million in loans to 5,000 small businesses in Africa and hopes to sign up more. Read more about Zidisha . Rocketrip is a company that helps businesses to save money on business travel that their employees book. To do so, it provides a platform that estimates the amount of money that employees should spend. It then rewards them by giving gift cards and other perks that are 50 percent of the money they saved. By doing so, Rocketrip is saving companies that use its platform 24 percent off the travel bills that they would otherwise spend. Customers pay Rocketrip 10 percent of the savings, but it actually makes more money processing rewards for third-party partners. You can read . |
Numari Offers Affordable Luxury With Custom-Fit Women’s Dresses | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | “Fast fashion” has made it easy to stay on top of trends, but drastically lowered the quality of clothing available in mass market stores. Several startups, include , , , and , are trying to reverse the trend by offering custom-made menswear. Now a new startup called wants to do the same thing for women. To purchase a dress from Numari, customers fill out a measurement profile (the site says doing this takes less than 15 minutes) and pick details like hemlines and sleeve length. Garments are made-to-order in Asia and take about three weeks to process and ship, which co-founder Arti Anand says is about the same as for men’s custom brands. As Numari scales up, it hopes to reduce that time to 10 to 14 days. Standard sizing for women’s wear often ignores the differences in body proportion and height, says Anand. “I have personally met a ‘fit model’ (someone who helps guide a brand on how a certain size should fit) for my standard size and this woman was 6 inches taller than me with completely different proportions,” she wrote in an email. “It’s no wonder that while apparel is one of the largest and fastest growing e-commerce categories, it suffers from high return rates.” If a Numari garment’s fit is off but fixable, the company will reimburse the customer up to $30 for alterations, remake the garment for free, or offer a full refund. Prices range from about $160 to $280, about the same as mid-market brands like and . Numari is able to keep costs down with a “tech-enabled operational work flow” and because it doesn’t have to carry finished inventory, says Anand, who is currently bootstrapping Numari with co-founder Komal Kushal Raj. Anand says the rise of startups that offer men’s custom clothing is also “fueling some of the pent-up demand in the women’s market.” To be sure, there are already several notable startups offering custom clothing for women, like and . There are also sellers on and who make bespoke garments for women at similar price points and turnaround times to Numari. Bow & Drape, however, focuses on casual clothing with customizable details, but not fit, and Anand says that Numari offers higher-end clothing and more classic styles than eShakti. Numari also gives customers a more convenient and streamlined shopping experience than buying from individual vendors on Etsy or eBay. “We aim to serve the affordable luxury market who is looking to keep these garments for a longer period of time, and thus require better materials, quality, and finishing,” says Anand. |
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft Is Bullish About Developer Reaction To Its New Tools | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | This morning Microsoft announced a grip of and at its Build conference in San Francisco. Crowd reaction during the lengthy keynote appeared to be mostly friendly to the stage show. I sat with Microsoft’s corporate vice president this afternoon after the dust had settled some, to get his take — report card, if you will — on how developers viewed Microsoft’s newly unveiled efforts that he had a large hand in. He rates response thus far as “ Specifically, Soma indicated that work announced to allow for so-called “universal apps” that will see code shared between Windows and Windows Phone applications greatly rise, has been popular. That’s fair, matching what I’ve heard myself. Soma also said Roslyn was receiving strong response from developers. What’s a Roslyn, you ask? Soma called it a compiler-as-a-service, and Microsoft announced today that it will become an open-source tool. Compilers have been, in Soma’s eyes, akin to “black boxes.” The idea with Roslyn is to change that by giving developers full access to the guts of the thing. I asked Soma about momentum with Azure, Microsoft cloud storage and its computing service. In his estimation, when Azure introduced infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capabilities, it reached a turning point of sorts. Market interest in Azure is now growing by “leaps and bounds.” What the above indicates is that Microsoft is optimistic that what it built and released and announced today is sitting well with the very people it is strenuously looking to court. What’s fun is that we’ll be able to vet market reaction independently: If development rates pick up, and more apps are released for Microsoft’s platforms, its bets succeeded. If we see a flattening, or even decline, Microsoft will have failed. Furthermore, a minor incline is not enough. Microsoft needs to greatly increase the pace at which developers build and release apps for its greater Windows platform. |
T-Mobile CEO Fires Back After Losing BlackBerry Sales Arrangement | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | BlackBerry and T-Mobile executives should read . Breaking up over the Internet is rough on everyone. In a letter released this evening, T-Mobile’s outspoken CEO John Legere talked about with the wireless carrier and reassured BlackBerry customers that their devices will continue to operate on T-Mobile’s network. Earlier this week, BlackBerry announced that it would not renew its sales arrangement with T-Mobile at the end of April. This came several weeks after T-Mobile launched a marketing promotion that was . Legere’s T-Mobile is currently attempting to rebrand the company as a so-called “ .” As he spoke to in his letter, this includes doing things differently, which is exactly what the original promotion attempted to do by offer BlackBerry customers a great deal on an iPhone 5s. Since undergoing this makeover, T-Mobile has dropped annual contracts and allowed customers to upgrade to newer devices whenever they want. BlackBerry itself is also changing under new leadership. Since John Chen took over, the company has gone on the offensive against leaks and saw key executives leave as the company attempts to stay afloat. For better or worse, the BlackBerry of today is not afraid to burn bridges. |
AdsNative Raises $2M To Help Publishers Manage Native Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | , a startup that helps online publishers incorporate native ads, is announcing that it has raised $2 million in seed funding. The company also says that it’s expanding its technology to include a supply-side platform. In other words, instead of just focusing on native ads (such as sponsored posts) that publishers sell directly, AdsNative is also helping publishers work with native ad networks and exchanges. Co-founder and CEO Satish Polisetti told me that we’re still in “the first innings” of the shift toward native ads, with many “direct, handheld deals.” The next step has been the creation of native ad networks, and of demand-side platforms that work with advertisers — but Polisetti said that until now, there hasn’t been anything on the publisher side, allowing them to manage all their inventory in a way that maximizes their fill rate and revenue. The goal, he added, is to “give the capability of Facebook-style advertising or Twitter-style advertising to the next generation.” AdsNative’s seed round was led by Interwest Partners, with participation from Onset Ventures, the Foundry Group Angels syndicate on AngelList, KBS+ Ventures, and various angel investors, including InterClick’s Barry Honig, former Yahoo vice president Mike Kerns, and MdotM CEO Sourabh Niyogi. AdsNative publishers include Politico, SourceForge and Rant Media Network. The company says it processes hundreds of millions of ads each month. “We’re continuously approached by native ad networks to place their ads on our pages,” said Rant Media’s chief revenue officer Grant Brown in the funding release. “In an effort to maximize revenue and fill, we’ve turned to AdsNative to optimize fill and eCPM. Plus the ability to layer in a native marketplace and ease of executing direct buys through their platform gives us the best ability to maximize our potential revenue.” |
Why Is Facebook Page Reach Decreasing? More Competition And Limited Attention | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | wants everything they post shown to everyone. But people only read a limited amount of News Feed per day. There simply isn’t room for everything, and the competition for feed space is intensifying. The total number of Pages Liked by the typical Facebook user grew more than 50% last year — a new stat that came from a 45-minute interview with Facebook’s head of News Feed. The surplus of content and lack of space forces Facebook into the role of the ‘bad guy’ for filtering the feed in an attempt to show the most relevant posts (plus some ads). And so far, Facebook has done a terrible job of communicating how and why it filters the News Feed. The result is widely shared criticism like to the social network that saw the company delete its 70,000-Like Facebook Page in protest of fewer and fewer of its fans seeing its posts. It’s sensible to sympathize with Eat24, actor , and the of brands, local merchants, and public figures about the drop in reach. They worked hard to entice people to Like their Page. They Facebook for ads to get people to Like their Page, because Facebook told them it was a good long-term investment. They built businesses around the reach they got on Facebook, devoting resources to fill Facebook with content that pulls in the attention it monetizes. And they feel that if someone explicitly said they wanted to hear from their Page, they should see the Page’s posts. When that doesn’t happen, Pages feel robbed. However, this perspective looks at each Page’s reach in a vacuum, when in fact they’re part of an entire ecosystem of Pages and people competing for attention in the zero-sum game that is the News Feed. It doesn’t recognize that every additional post you see from one Page is one less you see from a friend or other Page you care about. Over time, people add more friends and Like more Pages, yet they can’t keep increasing the amount of time they read News Feed. Facebook says that an average user might have 1500 posts eligible to appear in their feed each day, but if someone has lots of friends and Likes lots of Pages, that number could balloon to 15,000. Yet there are a finite number of hours in the day, and people probably only read a few dozen to a few hundreds posts. If every friend and Page were treated equally, it’s natural and in fact unavoidable that organic reach — the percentage of their friends or fans that see their feed posts — will decrease over time. And it is. A study from of 50,000 posts by 1,000 Pages shows organic reach per fan (median) has steadily declined: The roughly 50% decline in reach over the past year matches the 50% increase in Page Likes per typical Facebook user over the same time period. As people Like more Pages, the organic reach of each drops. But all Pages and people are not treated equally because Facebook’s goal is to show people the most engaging posts out of all the ones they could see each day. Facebook’s ability to earn money showing ads and pursue its mission to connect the world hinges on people coming back because they see interesting content there and don’t get bored. This puts Facebook in the very tough position of choosing what content gets shown and what doesn’t. I call this the filtered feed problem. Facebook decided that the best way to entertain and inform users was not to show them a reverse chronological list of everything posted by everyone they follow. People and Pages that frequently published inane thoughts and mediocre marketing messages would drown out the most important life changes and biggest new of friends and businesses you care about. Noise would overwhelm the signal. This is what I call the . Instead, Facebook chose to filter its feed. It built a News Feed sorting algorithm, unofficially known as EdgeRank, that analyzes every signal possible to determine the relevance of each post to each person. Roughly of importance are factored in. I asked Facebook News Feed Director of Product Management Will Cathcart what are the most powerful determinants of whether a post is shown in the feed, and he told me: You can see this as a simplified equation at the top of this post, though there are many, many more highly personalized factors that impact visibility. Cathcart says that for each user, Facebook assigns a score to each post they could see. It injects some ads, but “for the most part we put them in rank order” he says. It doesn’t matter if a post is from a friend or a Page, Facebook just tries to show people what they want. This means the more succesful a post is, and the more popular its creator is amongst everyone and the potential viewer, the more likely that viewer is to see the post. The fact that someone Liked a Page or added a friend at some point over the years doesn’t matter nearly as much. It’s whether the Page continues to be interesting to everyone and to any specific potential viewer of their posts. Essentially, everyone has to earn their space in News Feed. If they publish posts that are interesting enough to get likes, comments, shares, and clicks, their reach increases. If their posts bore people and are ignored and scrolled past by anyone who sees them, their reach decreases. And since the natural trend is for reach to shrink as competition grows, Pages have to work harder and harder to stay visible. Some Pages have actually benefited from Facebook’s that rewarded deep content and penalized the use of click-bait headlines and shallow image macro memes. With funny, fascinating, dynamic content that fits their audience, Pages can still get a ton of free traffic out of Facebook. News outlets and others that publish their real product to Facebook, like news articles, tend to see more reach than Pages that merely publish marketing messages for their products, as shown in this study of the reach of 1,000 Pages in March I commissioned from EdgeRank Checker. You can Like both The New York Times and Oreos, but you can actually read the NYT on News Feed whereas you can’t eat a cookie there. So it makes sense that the NYT would reach a higher percentage of its fans — its posts are more interesting. The only way to beat the system is to pay for ads. That’s not new. Facebook has been allowing advertisers to pay for visibility since its early days, but where the ads appear and how they’re bought has changed. Originally, the ads were relegated to Facebook.com’s sidebar, and had to be bought through a clunky interface. Eventually it began allowing ads to appear in the feed and then the mobile feed, and buying them got simpler. But now, Facebook lets Pages instantly copy the content of one of their posts into an ad. It’s still the same pay-for-visibility situation, yet it combines with the natural decline of reach to cross some mental border that makes it feel like Facebook is extorting Pages for many in order to communicate with their own fans. “I used to reach more of my fans, now I reach less, and Facebook wants me to pay for what I used to get for free” is a compelling complaint and technically it’s true, but it seems more like an unfortunate emergent by-product of the system than a malicious choice by Facebook. What was truly disingenuous was that Facebook told companies to buy Likes as a long-term investment, when it likely could already see or at least predict that reach to those fans would decline, devaluing the investment. It’s like telling someone to save their money in a time of rapid inflation. Advertisers made calculations comparing the lifetime value of a fan vs the cost to buy them through Facebook ads. Without integrating the decline in reach into that math, they might have bought fans at prices they can’t recoup. It’s a bait and switch that may make advertisers weary to pour resources into buildig their Facebook presence. Facebook is trying to protect the quality of the News Feed because its long-term success depends on it. If Facebook departs from what people want to see and shows more Page posts in an effort to stabilize declining reach, users will abandon it and the attention pie will shrink for everyone. If it can improve its algorithm to better detect and surface relevant content people resonate with, the pie will grow for everyone. That’s a core purpose of Facebook’s big long-term investment in its Artificial Intelligence research lab. AI could let it better understand what you care about and match you with that content. But making the News Feed healthier for the long-term may be a bitter pill to swallow, and Facebook hasn’t offered much sugar to help the medicine go down. Last year it began , but it needs to break open the black box of how feed sorting fundamentally works and why it does it. It needs to approach the issue with more sympathy for the innocent Pages who are watching their businesses suffer as competition drags down their reach, The “tough break, you’re not that interesting, get over it” attitude exhibited by Facebook’s Director Of Global Communications / Monetization Brandon McCormick’s . And it should apologize for encouraging brands to buy Likes without warning them about inevitable reach decreases. Businesses and public figures abandoned Myspace when they got better reach on Facebook. But today, a billion users doesn’t matter if the channel to reach them is overloaded. Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others will are happy to welcome former Page managers to focus more on their uncrowded platforms. So while Facebook can’t give marketers exactly what they’ll want, it must treat them with respect. |
You Can Now Create Windows And Windows Phone Apps In One Go With Microsoft’s App Studio | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Microsoft’s service is fun. At launch, it so everyone could get their hands dirty and build . The service has been , and today picked up a key : The ability to create a combined Windows and Windows Phone application in one go. Here are a few slides that would help you display, in brilliant colors, the latest TechCrunch content on your Windows Phone and Windows 8.1 device: There are a few more steps, but you get the idea. (Sadly, .) The above fits into Microsoft’s news today concerning that will see Windows 8.1 and Windows apps share code between them, user interface tweaks to better fit disparate screen sizes aside. Shared code lets developers move more quickly, likely making Microsoft’s increasingly unified platforms more interesting. App Studio has been brought into line with the current Microsoft developer toolset in terms of code reuse. As a final note: I like App Studio, but for a non-commercial reason. By making app development approachable for all, even if only in its most lightweight fashion, Microsoft could be helping the younger generations get excited about writing code. |
Drawbridge Says It Now Supports Video In Its Cross-Device Ad Targeting | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | , the startup that targets ads across devices, announced today that it has added support for video ads, too. It sounds like the targeting technology remains the same. Drawbridge is still looking at user behavior to suggest when multiple devices are likely being used by the same person, which in turn allows advertisers to use desktop data to improve the targeting of their mobile ads. It’s just adding video into the mix, as well. However, co-founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan told me that this is still a significant move for the company. For one thing, there’s the general rise in video advertising, particularly on mobile. For another, she said that this should help Drawbridge expand into other advertising categories, such as entertainment and automotive. For example, if someone watches a movie trailer on their computer, Sivaramakrishnan suggested that it’s useful for a movie studio to know that, so that they can deliver targeted marketing and promotions to their smartphone. Moving forward, Sivaramakrishnan said she wants to do more to support different types of “creative dimensions” at Drawbridge. “I don’t think we’ll ever be a creative shop,” she said. “What we will do is expand our arsenal to support a myriad of formats that are very relevant across a spectrum of performance.” Drawbridge says it has added new metrics to its ad reporting as part of its video support — in addition to ad clicks and impressions, it’s also looking at completion rates, viewability, and drop-off points. And the company can both host ads directly or integrate with existing video ad platforms. As part of today’s announcement, it’s unveiling its first partnership on this front with Twitter-owned MoPub. “Partnering with Drawbridge provides immediate benefits to our clients, as well as advances video advertising in general,” said MoPub Director of Exchange Janae McDonough in the announcement release. |
Intel Releases $99 “Minnowboard Max,” An Open-Source Single-Board Computer | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Not to be outflanked by rivals, Intel has released the $99 Minnowboard Max, a tiny single-board computer that runs Linux and Android. It is completely open source – you can – and runs a 1.91GHz Atom E3845 processor. The board’s schematics are also available for download and the Intel graphics chipset has open-source drivers so hackers can have their way with the board. While it doesn’t compete directly with the Raspberry Pi – the Pi is more an educational tool and already has a robust ecosystem – it is a way for DIYers to mess around in x86 architected systems as well as save a bit of cash. The system uses break-out boards called Lures to expand functionality. Intel is interested in this space mostly because it has been out of it for so long. Raspberry Pi runs a Broadcomm system-on-chip with a 700Mhz ARM processor and is probably one of the most popular SBCs available. The Minnowboard brings Intel’s low-power Atom processor back into the hands of hackers and makes Intel relevant in that space again – at least that’s the goal. The new . |
The Boston And Los Angeles Meetups Are Next Week, So Get Tickets Now! | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | In our travels across the country, we’re often asked what exactly a TechCrunch Meetup is. “What is that? A meetup? Is that like a geek party?” We answer as graciously as we can. They just don’t understand yet. “Yes, it is a geek party,” I say, stepping forward. “The greatest geek party in the world.” With our and Meetups (and Pitch-Offs!) right around the corner, I think it’s about time for a refresher course. That’s part of what you buy with your ticket. 21+ only please. It’s not really like this…
It’s more like this…
And by the end of the night, I start to get a little drunk, and I think I look like this…
But really it’s more like this…
We do these interviews with big-name startups in each city we visit. In Boston, we’ll be chatting with , a 3D printing company, and in L.A. we’ll be sitting down with . We have some pretty exciting chats. They’re not as glamorous as this …
And because they’re pretty much tech celebrities, I usually get a bit overexcited…
And then after the interview, we get into one of my favorite things about the meetups: It’s a part of the show where startups from the area (who have applied and been selected), pitch their product in 60 seconds or fewer to a panel of local VC and TechCrunch staff judges. I host the show. In New York, we had pizza and I was like…
And the judges are kind of like…
But then someone’s declared a winner…
It’s pretty awesome. If you want to purchase to either of the events, being held on April 8 in Boston and April 10 in Los Angeles, head over here for tickets ( and ). The price goes from $10 to $15 during the week of the event, so better to move now and save some cash. |
Unreal Engine 4 Gets Support For Making Linux And SteamOS Games | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Unreal Engine 4, the newest version of the game engine that powers many a AAA gaming title, just got a feature that may prove quite important in the near feature: the ability to build games . This news comes just weeks after the entry fee for . Instead of requiring weeks of licensing negotiation and hundreds of thousands of dollars up front, Epic Games decided to license Unreal Engine 4 to developers for $19 a month (plus 5 percent of gross revenue). That news (and this move into Linux to some extent) are almost certainly meant to help Epic secure their footing among indie developers — a market that a relative newcomer, Unity, has managed to get a pretty solid grasp on. With past releases of the Unreal engine, Epic largely focused on licensing to huge development houses. As the costs of game development plunge and things like the App Store/Google Play/Steam make self publishing an incredibly viable option, however, indie developers are more important than ever. With this addition, Unreal Engine 4 is able to build games for OS X, Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux. “Why does this Linux addition matter?” you might ask. “Doesn’t Linux account for something like 2% of the desktop OS usage?” Yep. For now. While many a Linux devotee would have said “It’s going to be big, soon!” for most of the last decade, there’s one key thing on the horizon that’s different this time: Valve’s Steam Machines. For the last year or so, Valve has been working with third parties on a line of pre-built PCs primarily purposed for the living room. Dubbing the line “Steam Machines,” Valve is trying to take the perks of a PC and pack them into the small, convenient package of a console. It’s building its own controller and their own OS. That OS, aptly called “SteamOS,” is Linux-based. If Valve’s Steam Machines see any sort of success, Linux support will be a must-have. |
Nest Halts Sales Of Protect Smoke Alarm Over Safety Concerns About ‘Wave To Dismiss’ Feature | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Nest CEO Tony Fadell has just users disable the Protect smoke alarm’s ‘wave to dismiss’ feature. In testing, it was discovered that people could accidentally trigger the dismiss feature, delaying a smoke alarm. Sales of the Nest Protect have also been halted. He recommends that users disable the feature for now, and says Nest is going to update units that will allow the feature to work correctly. In addition, if your Nest Protect is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, it will have the feature disabled automatically. Until the feature has been corrected, users can tap the button on the unit to silence alarms. “At Nest, we conduct regular, rigorous tests to ensure that our products are the highest quality,” says Fadell. “During recent laboratory testing of the Nest Protect smoke alarm, we observed a unique combination of circumstances that caused us to question whether the Nest Wave (a feature that enables you to turn off your alarm with a wave of the hand) could be unintentionally activated.” Fadell says that the testing will take two to three months, and that they will update consumers as they progress. “We’re enormously sorry for the inconvenience caused by this issue,” he continues. “The team and I are dedicated to ensuring that we can stand behind each Nest product that comes into your home, and your 100% satisfaction and safety are what motivates us. Please know that the entire Nest team and I are focused on fixing this problem and continuing to improve our current products in every way possible.” In a , Nest says that it had observed the issue in testing and has had no reports of it from any customer. There are also instructions provided that will allow users to disable the feature even if the units are not connected to the net. The post notes that if any consumers do not want to keep the Nest Protect, a complete refund will be offered. Somewhat ironically, the Nest Wave feature was promoted heavily as a benefit of owning a Protect unit. On the plus side, because this is a device that has built-in software and connects to the net, it can be updated remotely to fix software-related issues. But recently, an issue with a Nest Thermostat software update caused problems with Wi-Fi and batteries in some units, highlighting the delicate nature of software that powers our environmental systems — and that we trust with our safety. The Nest Protect was the company’s second product after the Nest Thermostat. Nest announced plans to be . |
Kodak Launches A Photo Book App For iPad, Makes Awful “Selfie” Joke | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | A newly launched photo book application for iPad is bringing a familiar name to mobile photography: Kodak Alaris is debuting “ ” an app that lets consumers create and order photo books, prints and enlargements using drag-and-drop on iPad. Competitor Shutterfly should not be too concerned, however. Kodak Alaris, for those unfamiliar, is the personalized and document imaging businesses group that retained the license to the Kodak brand following Eastman Kodak Co.’s last fall. The company today offers photography-focused mobile applications for consumers on iOS and Android. The benefit of using Kodak’s new iPad app is the turnaround time. After building your photo book or ordering prints, you can pick up your creation same-day at a nearby Target or Bartell Drugs store. That’s convenient in terms of last-minute gifts, and the app didn’t throw as many bugs my way as when I shortly after its launch in order to pick up a photo book at a nearby Walgreens. (Walgreens makes an API available to startups, which is both a good and bad thing for its brand, as it turns out.) However, while the Kodak app is , it’s definitely not what one would call . The whole experience looks like they ported some dated kiosk software program to the iPad – either that, or some website from the pre-Web 2.0 era. The background is black, with photos falling from the top of the screen to the bottom (flourish!), and generally speaking, the whole application seems as outdated and out of fashion as the Kodak brand itself. What a shame. Even the App Store description was kind of awful, with the company referring to Yahoo’s Flickr as “FLICKr” (you can grab photos from FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM too, it says), and included the groan-inducing joke “it’s easy to do it your ‘selfie!'” I’m serious. This isn’t just in their App Store copy, it’s, like, their The photo book prices are reasonable, though, with a 5″x7″ 14-page softcover for $7.99 going up to a 8.5″x11″ double-sided hardcover book for just $19.99. That’s than Shutterfly, and when I’m being super stingy, I may be willing to squint my eyes to use a terrible-looking app like this in order to save a few bucks. Nope, probably not. The iTunes download (for your mom or dad) is . |
Secret Shoots For Growth With New Anonymous Invites | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Want to be sure you don’t miss any juice gossip or heartwrenching tales from you friends? Now when you re-open , you’ll start where you closed the app instead of at the top of the feed so it’s easier to read comprehensively. Secret’s latest update also adds anonymous invites that could help it grow by letting you ask a friend to join the app without them knowing it was you. Additionally, there’s comment notifications that bring you back to where you left off in the conversation, and the Street Fighter-esque option to hit shuffle when composing a Secret to easily replace a drab white background with a colored, textured one. Secret, , has seen its popularity wane following a strong surge of usage during the SXSW conference. Secret has slipped out of the top 1,000 most popular applications in the United States. It is 104 and 148 in the social category in the United States and Canada, respectively. By adding the ability to directly invite friends to the service, Secret is hoping to build a viral-loop that will at once grow its userbase, and also improve the service for its current users; the more secrets that users can read from their friends, the more useful, and in theory, delightful Secret becomes. There is, of course, the risk of overzealous recruiting — spam, in other words — with anonymous invites. [Update: Luckily, Secret is purposefully trying to avoid spam by throttling invites if multiple users send them to the same person, and not providing an option to invite all your contacts.] To really improve the browsing experience, though, Secret may want to move towards a dynamically filtered feed that optimizes for showing you stories from immediate friends. Right now, you always get a mix of friends, friends of friends, nearby, and popular distant Secrets. But if you don’t open it for a few days, a juicy tidbit from one of your friends could get lost near the bottom of the feed, drowned out by Secrets from people you don’t know. Gossip from friends seems the most compelling, so filtering out the non-friend Secrets could make the app more fun for those who only check it occasionally. This would be similar to how Facebook shows you the best stories since you last visited rather than just the most recent ones, and how Tinder stacks people who’ve positively right-swiped at the top to increase the liklihood of giving you matches right away. |
Monument Valley Is A Legend In The Making You Must Play Now | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | I consider myself a fan of games, but once in a while, a game comes along for which I feel something far beyond fandom; Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is , and now , a game out today by UK-based development studio and in many ways, a spiritual bedfellow to Superbrothers, is another. Don’t get me wrong, Monument Valley definitely stands on its own apart from any other previous title; but it has a similar ethereal, fantasy feel and abstract storytelling, plus a rich but spare visual look and haunting soundtrack that sticks with you despite the mostly casual nature of the gameplay. Monument Valley, however, also relies far more heavily on puzzle play, and therein lies its real lasting charm. The – environments rotate and set pieces slide in and out to shift not only the field of play, but also the player’s entire sense of perception. Up can become down, background foreground, hurdles on one side can turn into helpful tools on another. It’s a little like Fez, but a lot like nothing else before it.
Monument Valley is one of those games that you never want to end, and so far, I haven’t been able to play through the entire thing. But it’s also a feast for the eyes, and a game where you can see the level of care taken in creating each individual part of the whole. It’s beautiful in the extreme, and a testament to a time when games were something contained and crafted as a top-to-bottom experience, and not a rough framework to fuel continued commerce through in-app purchases. If you have an iPhone or an iPad, you must play this game; paying just $3.99 for a universal app that works on both feels like theft given the quality of the experience so far, and I’m just a few levels in. |
CitusDB Releases An Open-Source PostgreSQL Tool That Promises Better Database Performance | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | CitusDB, that is hoping to take on big boys like Oracle, today announced the release of CSTORE, a columnar store extension for PostgreSQL. The open-source tool, which the company says is the first for PostgreSQL, is available for a free download starting today. “Columnar stores bring notable benefits for analytic workloads where data is loaded in batches,” said the company in a . That means that companies using this tool could get much better database performance. How much better? CitusDB claims a 2x increase in query times and a data read reduction time of 10x. What’s more, company CEO Umur Cubukcu said in an email that faster analytics queries through advanced optimizations and ~3x compression could drive down storage costs. “The column store is available on both single node (all standard PostgreSQL users) and scale-out PostgreSQL (CitusDB) for petabyte scale analytics,” Cubukcu explained. The latter is designed to work with the core CitusDB product, but users can download the new tool and use it as they see fit. Cubukcu says overall this tool offers a couple of advantages. First, users can work with row-based and column-based tables together in the same database based on their usage patterns, he explained to me. And second: “This builds on Citus Data’s approach of merging the reliable enterprise features of PostgreSQL with the scalability of Hadoop; offering big data analytics customers worldwide a simple and powerful analytics database.” In fact, at the end of February. The company emerged in 2011 from Y Combinator and . Alex Williams release for TechCrunch this way: “CitusDB is based on , a real-time analytics database that has surpassed Hadoop’s analysis capabilities. The difference is in its parallel-computing capabilities and SQL-like functionality. Do a query across petabytes of data over thousands of servers and the results come back in real-time.” CitusDB has received $1.65 million in funding to date from investors, including Data Collective, Bullpen Capital, SV Angel, Trinity Ventures and leading angels. Customers cross verticals including ad technology, e-commerce, retail, security and mobile analytics. The new tool is available on GitHub starting today and they are hoping the community will help build on this and add new features to it over time. |
null | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 3 | 25 | null |
Twitter’s Vine Introduces Direct Video Messaging | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Twitter’s Vine has that allows you to message other users directly via video. This adds both a direct messaging channel and video clips to its messages, a big addition to Twitter’s video app. There is a direct parallel to be drawn here between Instagram’s Direct image messaging feature, obviously — and it goes hand in hand with Twitter’s renewed interest in its direct messaging channel. The allegory is interesting, as there isn’t a lot of public evidence that Direct has had any real traction. Still, it allows Twitter to experiment with video messaging in a separate silo, and it does make some sense to start with Vine before adding video messaging to Twitter. You create a new Vine message by tapping on the Messages section, recording a video and sending it off. You can send to multiple recipients, but all of the conversations are one-to-one — much like competing messaging app Snapchat. If you send to multiple people, you’ll get separate threads for each one. Notably, you can send Vine messages directly to anyone in your address book, regardless of whether they have Vine or not. This leverages your “private graph” in a similar way to WhatsApp’s early strategy. Twitter is likely hoping that this will spur growth much in the same way. Offering a backchannel will also allow users to side-step the increasingly polished and professional community of Vine creators. This doubtlessly creates a barrier that stops some people from sharing because it’s not “good enough” to sit in their feeds. Like Snapchat, this allows people to post silly, stupid or funny videos that may not be as polished — or as pretty — directly to their friends. Vine messages are split between friends and “others,” delineated by the people in your network and those outside. You can choose to only get messages from people you follow or friend in the settings section. This version of the app also introduces color selections for profiles and is available on both iOS and Android. There are some immediate questions, of course. Will brands and advertisers be allowed to utilize the messaging feature to pitch their wares? This seems likely, but the built-in privacy controls should allow people to minimize that. If it does roll out to advertisers, I’d say it’s not likely to do that right away. I also question the inability to start group chats. Was this a technical limitation or something that grew out of a design decision? Though Instagram direct has its faults, I still use it fairly regularly with friends and enjoy the group discussions that come out of posting images. I’d love to see what sending groups of video messages back and forth looks like. (For that matter, I’d like image replies on Instagram, but oh well.) The experience seems fairly straightforward, and was surprisingly pleasant to use, for the few minutes I’ve played with it so far. There is a quick reply option, à la Snapchat, that lets you fire off an instant response, as well as the full suite of video tools. There’s a certain expanded sense of context that replying in video gives you — especially when emoting. Text messaging is often prone to misunderstanding because it’s hard to convey your mental or emotional state; that’s where emoticons came from. But video expands way beyond emoticons and could add some nice human cues to messaging — if it gets adopted. When asked about the brand’s aspect, Twitter said only that “Vine messages are available to all users,” which means that yes, if a brand has a Vine account they can probably send them. Which is why there are those privacy controls, most likely. As far as sending messages one-to-one only, Twitter said that it was about design and user experience. “We thought a lot about the overall experience and how to create a feature that makes messaging on Vine fun, easy and unique. Ultimately, we felt that the best way to introduce Vine messages was with one-to-one conversations.” This move by Vine doesn’t telegraph Twitter’s interest in offering its users a direct messaging channel any harder than its own efforts to build out DMs. It’s been working on that for a while now after neglecting the feature for years. But it does offer the company a way to to compete with apps like Snapchat and Instagram, as well as the large messaging apps like Line, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat. |
Brendan Eich Resigns As Mozilla CEO Following Criticism Of His Support For Prop 8 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Recent Mozilla CEO pick Brendan Eich is no longer CEO, according to a new from Mozilla itself (via ). The post, penned by Mozilla’s Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker, explains that the company felt it didn’t “move fast enough” to properly address the issues the community had with Eich as they arose, and resolved to “do better.” Eich stepping down is described as his own decision, in order to help Mozilla and its community. Baker’s blog post goes on to reaffirm Mozilla’s commitment to both equality and free speech, and doesn’t do much in the way of finger-pointing or blaming Eich for the controversy. Instead, it centers on the lesson that the Web needs protection for continued openness of conversation. From the post, detailing next steps: What’s next for Mozilla’s leadership is still being discussed. We want to be open about where we are in deciding the future of the organization and will have more information next week. However, our mission will always be to make the Web more open so that humanity is stronger, more inclusive and more just: that’s what it means to protect the open Web. Re/code adds that Eich will also step down from the Mozilla Foundation’s board as a result of the changes. Pressure had been put on Mozilla to reverse the decision to install Eich as CEO since a donation worth $1,000, for the 2010 California Proposition 8 legislation repealing gay marriage was made public. , and OkCupid mounted a very public campaign on its site earlier this week to voice its . Mozilla had previously issued a . Eich had not done much to really distance himself from his past views on gay marriage and LGBT issues, which likely didn’t help his chances of sticking it out at Mozilla. The maker of Firefox prides itself on embracing diversity and equality, so keeping Eich in the CEO spot without a clear and unambiguous rejection of his earlier expressed viewpoint on Prop 8 would’ve stood out as fundamentally contradictory. GLAAD provided the following statement from President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis on the news via email: Mozilla’s strong statement in favor of equality today reflects where corporate America is: inclusive, safe, and welcoming to all. |
The Beauty And The Danger Of The Amazon Copy Machine | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Amazon spent a lot of time talking about consumer reviews of competing devices when it , and that provides tremendous insight into its product development process. As the largest online retailer of goods in the world, the company has a unique line on shopper sentiment data – its online reviews constitute possibly the single-largest repository of expressed consumer sentiment available anywhere. Like major brick-and-mortar retailers before it, this means Amazon can see what’s doing well, partner with manufacturers to produce its own version, save on marketing, packaging and staff, and then resell that same thing at a lower cost while retaining decently high margins. That’s what Amazon does with its line of gadgets and accessories, which offers everything from cables to Bluetooth speakers at a fraction of a cost of the versions from the market leaders in those categories. But it also offers more than that; Amazon’s extensive database of reviews is a treasure trove of possible direction for research, development and product design. That’s because unlike at traditional retailers, Amazon doesn’t just know what is and isn’t selling – they also have customers volunteering information about their sore spots with products they otherwise love, or around features they wish otherwise impressive devices might add in the future. Amazon can’t quite read the minds of its shoppers, but it comes as close as is humanly possible for now. The results are products like the Amazon Fire TV, and the Kindle Fire line of tablets. These are devices that have been developed with one eye on the competition and another on consumer response to the same; Amazon can see what devices have the potential for sales growth based on sales numbers, and it can also see which have potential to do even better, based on where it sees a lot of interest, but also a lot of expressed wishes for improvements. Imagine a graph with a cluster graph showing “If it just…” as a sentence fragment mentioned frequently in 3 and 4 star reviews – this is what Amazon is no doubt looking at itself, behind the scenes. This is essentially what Amazon admitted it did with the Fire TV on stage yesterday. Over and over, it displayed a quote from a review on Amazon.com for competing products like the Apple TV, to illustrate a deficiency in the competition it aimed to fix with its own entry. That’s a focus group, but one that’s millions strong, and one that frequently returns to update their impressions after extended periods of time That’s undeniably an invaluable resource. But it could also be a huge burden, one that has the potential to stifle innovation. “Design By Committee” is a famous phrase used to describe something made by the many, working in concert. It’s diametrically opposed to the concept of the Auteur, who is the lone creator building things based on their inspiration alone. Apple has traditionally been viewed as a company that takes the Auteur approach, and Google is seen as favoring Design By Committee. In reality, the line isn’t so clearly defined, and both probably engage in a combination of both approaches. But Amazon’s strategy seems to be the ultimate expression of a committee take on product design, where the committee includes everyone who uses its international online sales portal. I’m excited about the potential of Amazon’s customer insight machine, and what it might mean in terms of pushing the needle on emerging product categories, like smart TV devices. But I’m also wary about the chance this model has to result in anything truly category-defining. The Kindle Fire, despite its name, is only really lukewarm taken on its own merits relative to the rest of the tablet field, even considering Android devices on their own. Fire TV is already striking some as a table-stakes device which matches current offerings, but doesn’t really go far enough beyond to get anyone that excited. Herd mentality might be to blame, and Amazon has to prove that its treasure trove of consumer sentiment isn’t just a huge hoard of fool’s gold. |
Innovative Crowdsource Insurance Startup Friendsurance Raises New Cash | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Peer-to-peer insurance startup has announced two new investors: the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing and his technology focused Horizons Ventures, plus VantageFund from Australia. The funding round was undisclosed but we understand the round is in the ‘millions of Euros’. The company already has funding from private investors including e.ventures. Friendsurance delivers cheaper insurance to customers using an innovative peer-to-peer method. Customers can connect online and create their own insurance pool. Small claims are paid out of this pool, with bigger claims covered by traditional insurance. If the claims do not exceed the pool, the money is returned to the customers. Customers never pay more than their original premium. The more friends in the pool and the fewer claims means the more you save. In January, 94 percent of customers on the Friendsurance network received cash back. The Friendsurance cashback is currently available on a range of retail products. The business has grown to over 40 staff since launch in 2010 and is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. |
Kickstarter Funded Nearly 4,500 Projects To The Tune Of $112 Million Last Quarter | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | Kickstarter published its first quarter report yesterday – a – about its project statistics. According to CEO Yancey Strickler, the company funded 4,497 projects with pledges of $1,244,868 per day which adds up to a solid $112,038,158 total pledged in a single four month period. And they say crowdfunding is just for desperate singer-songwriters. Strickler noted that saw a massive number of backers – 91,585 in all – while the site has funded 7 Oscar-nominated films and two Grammy-winning music projects. “We’re thrilled at what backers and creators have achieved in the first three months of the year. We’re looking forward to the rest of 2014!”, he said in an email. The popular site recently passed the $1 billion mark in pledges and is still competing mightily with other services like Crowdtilt and . However, these very visible and very public numbers definitely puts Kickstarter in with the big boys. |
Vine Co-Founder Colin Kroll Steps Down From Day-To-Day Role | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | This afternoon Vine co-founder Colin Kroll , fittingly, that he has stepped back from “day-to-day” duty at the service, and that he will remain an adviser to the product. This marks the of a founder from Vine. Dom Hofmann departed the company in January. Twitter purchased Vine in late 2012 for a . The nearly conjoined departure could indicate that they had wrapped up a vesting period or contract mandating their staying at the social firm. Vine, after its Twitter acquisition, managed to . It now ranks comfortably in in the U.S. market, a more than decent position. It’s worth considering how much more Twitter would have been willing to pay for Vine had it sold six months later when it was the most popular app in the U.S. TechCrunch reached out to Twitter for comment on the departure but it only said it had nothing to add to Kroll’s announcement. Twitter’s purchase of Vine has similarities to Facebook’s purchase of Instagram — two large, graying social services picking up more nimble, mobile-focused services with strong youth buy-in. Instagram and Vine have both performed strongly since their purchase. Instagram, for example, recently passed the . |
The 11GH/S HexFury Is The Latest In Low-Power ASIC Bitcoin Miners | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | If you’re a bitcoin nerd, you’ll know that finding cheap, low-power mining hardware is pretty hard to do. USB “thumb drive” miners are traditionally woefully underpowered – the little mining rig under my desk right now is running three and I’m essentially paying for the pleasure of mining – but this 11GH/s unit seems to have what it takes to at least make a dent in the blockchain. Confused as to what this does? Essentially this board runs the calculations that makes bitcoin work and, more importantly, runs them fast enough to earn you a little money. It’s sold by and is in stock right now. At a little over $265, it’s affordable to the average miner and it can run on a standard USB hub and host machine, which seems to include the Raspberry Pi. It uses last year’s Bitfury chips, special ASIC designed for mining, on a “stick” board with a single USB jack. This means you can place a bunch of these on a hub and because they aren’t as power-hungry as a traditional ASIC you don’t have to worry about them overheating. Will you make much money with this rig? Probably not. It’s essentially baby’s first bitcoin miner and you’ll max out at about $15 a month until the difficulty goes up too far for this device to even be effective. However it’s an exciting change in the mining landscape and well worth considering if you want to attach a few of these together and try to make your money back that way. |
Sungevity Raises $70M To Expand Its Solar Business Globally | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | , an integrator and marketer of solar installation services, has raised $70 million in new financing as it looks to expand internationally. The round was led by Jetstream Ventures, a Nashville-based investor focused on companies that have an environmental and social benefits. Other investors included the Germany utility , and , who previously invested in the company’s $125 million equity and debt funding in July 2013. Oakland, Calif.-based Sungevity doubled its U.S. sales in 2013 and is expanding in the Netherlands and Australia, where it launched services in 2011 and 2012, respectively. “As new, more customer-centric solutions around residential solar arise, we want to provide our customers with the best solutions available,” said Susana Quintana-Plaza, vice president of technology and innovation/strategic co-investment at E.On. “Our capital investment in Sungevity’s technology and customer-centric platform is a significant part of this.” The company sells solar design and integration services to consumers in nine states and the District of Columbia, and is the exclusive partner to the home repair and furnishing retailer Lowe’s. “We are the hub, if you will, for several partners in different areas of the industry,” said John Ordona, vice president of marketing at Sungevity. “We are the hub for equipment partners in terms of panels and modules and installers and also financing partners. We are the face to the consumer.” The company’s financial partners include , , and according to chief executive Andrew Birch. over the past few years; despite its recent woes is up from its initial public offering, and utilities are making moves to acquire their own solar installers. “The fundamentals of solar have been improving over the last five to 10 years,” said Birch. “That’s going to continue.” In January 2013, the company raised $125 million in venture capital and project financing from investors, including Energy Capital Partners, Brightpath Capital Partners, Lowe’s Cos., alongside Craton Equity Partners, Vision Ridge Partners and Eastern Sun Capital Partners. |
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs… | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | In the year 2000 (well, more like 2020, at this rate), we fans will be able to ride six-wheeled robotic rovers into battle, our shorts flapping around our chicken legs, our friends hooting as we fall on our butts. But then the tides will turn and the robots will begin riding us. Their laughter, mechanical and strange, will haunt our sleepless nights as we are forced to carry them ever further into the darkness of a benighted earth. Anyway, watch Rusty of get tossed off a drone. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SrzpJc_jOF8] , makers of the elephant trunk robot we featured a few weeks ago, have created this amazing little robotic kangaroo for you and yours. This little robot mimics actual kangaroos and, barring the addition of laser cannons or a missile launcher, will be perfectly harmless when the robots take over the earth. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mWiNlWk1Muw] Finally we have the Pi Bot, a DIY kit for kids who . While I’m all for STEM education, I can’t support teaching our kids how to build the very things that will soon lead to their doom, namely simple robots that can follow lines and “listen” to their surroundings. But they sure look fun, don’t they?
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Human Adds M7 Support And A Daily Timeline To Its Fitness App | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | Health tracking app just added a few new features to its latest update. First, the app now supports Apple’s M7 fitness chipset if you have an iPhone 5s, while retaining compatibility with iPhone 4S and iPhone 5. The company also added a new daily summary to keep track of all your activities. With the new activity recap, Human now competes directly with more traditional activity apps, such as or . At heart, the app remains a sort of smarter Fitbit for busy people. Human is a passive iOS app designed to help you stay healthy. The goal is to move for 30 minutes every day and to keep up with this simple habit. The company calls this the ‘Daily 30′. And it seems to be quite effective. While the company first saw that regular users moved 10 minutes more on average, people are increasingly affected by Human push notifications, recaps and badges. Now, regular users move 75 percent more on average after six weeks of usage (average users move around 40 minutes per day when they sign up to Human). The app now tracks 2 million activities per week. It could probably represent anything between 10,000 and 100,000 daily active users. Yet, a major challenge is coming up. Apple is interested in this space — rumor has it that Apple will add a Healthbook app in iOS 8 and take advantage of the M7. While not impossible, it’s always harder to compete with a first-party app. Human can count on its well-thought-out design. But there are still users who move less than 30 minutes a day. For these users, the company is trying to find new ways to motivate them. You’ll see that in upcoming updates. |
Amazon Tests Dash Barcode Scanner For Ordering AmazonFresh Groceries | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | If you need help assembling your grocery list, it seems that Amazon has a product for you. The company is featuring something called on a new web page. Apparently it’s a Wi-Fi-connected device that allows users to build a shopping list by scanning bar codes and saying product names out loud. It connects directly with AmazonFresh, , so once your list is complete, it should be easy to make the purchase from your smartphone or laptop. Among the benefits highlighted on the Dash site are the ability to build your list throughout the day, and to “never forget an item again.” Personally, I don’t find writing out a shopping list to be all that arduous, but then, I shop like a 31-year-old single guy (in other words, my refrigerator’s pretty bleak). I could see Dash being handy for someone who has a longer list. And hey, as Amazon notes, “even the kids can help.” Dash is currently being tested with a limited group of customers. A company spokesperson sent me the following statement: We’re excited to trial Dash with a select number of Prime Fresh customers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. [AmazonFresh is currently available in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Southern California.] With Dash, Prime Fresh customers can easily shop over 500,000 Amazon items for same-day and early morning delivery, including electronics, toys, fresh groceries, household essentials and local favorites [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFYs9zqYpdM&w=560&h=315] |
#Love: When Your Lover Has Your Password | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | milestone in each significant relationship that is rarely celebrated. There’s no holiday, no dinner, and no party. It just happens – one day you’re strangers, the next you’re not. It’s the day you hand over your passwords to your SO. Everyone reaches this particular milestone differently. Some – if they’re smart or particularly untrusting – never reach it at all. Sometimes people realize one day, without ever being told explicitly, that they already know their partner’s passcode. Some treat it like a small declaration of trust and intimacy. “0852,” they say, proudly. “Don’t snoop.” Others learn out of circumstance. “Can you text Jane and let her know we’ll be late?” they ask with their hands full. “My phone is over there. 4928 is the passcode.” And then it’s happened. Likely the two most important entities in your life, your partner and your smartphone, are bound together. They have access to each other. As with any new phase, if this milestone is reached too early it can spell trouble. We had both just gotten out of serious relationships, and the rebound factor was clouding our judgement. That said, we moved way too fast. After a month or so of dating, I was essentially living at her place. I had a set of keys. We were grocery shopping together and combining laundry. I remember when I eventually gave her access to my digital world. I was making meatballs, and she asked me to send her a picture I had taken earlier that day. Hands covered in raw hamburger meat and egg, I said she could do it herself: “9873.” She smiled, silently accepting my trust. It was an offering I made out of circumstance, but I also can’t pretend that I didn’t quietly warm up at the notion of being that close to somebody. And make no mistake, it’s a unique type of closeness that can’t be achieved through passionate sex or honest conversation. Your smartphone is a reflection of yourself. It knows more about you than almost anyone. Your entire history, from years worth of communication and pictures to general interests, is recorded right on the device. We left our computers open, email and Facebook logged in, and didn’t worry about snooping or invasion of privacy with each other. It wasn’t a conversation we had, but as trust grew in the relationship, we simply left more things accessible in the digital realm. For a minute there, I actually believed that this form of sharing strengthened whatever trust we already had. I had opened myself up to her, and she to me. But that ended. After we had been dating about six months, I got a call while I was on a business trip in Atlanta. “How much did you spend on the flowers you bought Hayden?” she asked coldly. Hayden was my ex, and when Rosie and I first started dating, I had sent Hayden flowers to congratulate her on a new job. Rosie knew about it, but I have lied about how much I had spent. “Like… $30,” I said, sticking to my lie. Meanwhile, I was frantically flipping through my phone to figure out how she knew I had lied. “You left your email open on my iPad, Jordan,” she revealed. “I’m looking at the receipt right now. So did you still only spend $30?” That fight lasted all night. We moved on eventually but the breach of trust on both sides of the relationship never left. And by that point, there was no way to go back. I couldn’t very well change all my passwords. She had already caught me lying. Any new password that shut her out of my life would be a red flag, signaling that I was lying or misbehaving once again. I’m certainly not alone in the password swap or the snooping significant other. In fact, teens seem to think of password sharing as a modern-day equivalent of exchanging letterman jackets or senior class rings. The that around one in three teens has shared a password with a boyfriend, girlfriend, or best friend, with girls offering up the secret spell more often than boys. I talked to my sister about it. She’s 21, and goes to a state university in the south. And just as I have a different perspective from people who didn’t go to college with Facebook, the divide between us is bigger than five years suggest. She had Facebook, and an iPhone, from the age of 13. “I know a girl — this is really creepy — but I know a girl who wanted to know if this boy she was crushing on sent just a snap, or if it was a mass snap he sent to a bunch of people,” she said. “She went on and checked his Snapchat score to see if his points had gone up for more than one person. Creepy, right?” She said she has another pair of friends who have been dating for a while and have a policy in place: they know each other’s Facebook and email passwords at all times. To me, having a “policy” regarding sharing passwords is even creepier than Snapchat score stalking. Between 30 and 40 percent of adults over 18 have snooped on the call history or the email of a spouse or partner, according to a . In the UK, it’s even worse. that 62 percent of men and 34 percent of women admitted to looking through a partner’s phone without their knowledge, and more than half of them already had the passcode they needed to conduct their spy work. Almost all of them said their reasons for this were based around jealousy and insecurity, and they were checking to see if any infidelity had been committed. Sadly, about half of them had their suspicions confirmed — their partner was cheating. The evidence usually surfaced in text messages or through direct Facebook messages. It seems to be a much bigger issue for younger couples, but that doesn’t mean that older folks are excluded. , and pushing 40, says he sometimes checks up on his wife’s email or phone. “I go through her Gmail about once a year,” he told me. “It’s not with any intent, and I never expect to find anything. I trust her, but it just kind of happens.” But Michael believes we, the younger generation, have it much worse. “You think social media is a reflection of the person, when really it’s a reflection of a reflection,” he explained. “Making a big deal out of your boyfriend friending his ex is stupid. Unless he’s actually cheating on you, it’s harmless.” Perhaps he has a point. Studies show that simply breeds more jealousy in a relationship. And maybe, when I’m older and wiser, I’ll feel differently about how much of me — the real me — is exposed within my digital imprint. But right now, my smartphone and its contents don’t feel like a reflection of a reflection. My thoughts, hopes, dreams, interests, secrets are all in there. It’s the piece of my mind that I carry in my pocket instead of inside my skull or inside my chest. Rosie and I were laying in bed after an incredibly long day. I was starting to doze as she played a game on my phone. I woke suddenly to her voice. “What is this?” she said, holding a bright phone screen in front of my sleepy eyes. She had found old correspondence between Hayden and I in my text messages. “Why are you reading my texts?!” I said angrily. “WHY ARE YOU TEXTING YOUR EX?!” she snapped back. The relationship didn’t end then. We went on to torture each other in new and interesting ways for another six months. But whatever future we had came to an end that night. The milestone of sharing those passwords, whether by accident or circumstance or with the intent to “share everything,” came far too early. It came before actual trust had been established. We mistook the symbolism of trust, embedded in those passwords, as actual trust. Because Rosie and I weren’t ready — after all, I was texting my ex and lying to her — the exchange of passwords only made things worse. Whatever small amount of trust there was easily abused. It wasn’t enough to resist the temptation of my open email account and un-holstered smartphone. And once she crossed the line, I didn’t trust her with that temptation anymore, either. my friend Carrie Anne said in a text. “I wouldn’t even be as mad if they read my diary. But with texts and emails, it’s such a condensed and far-reaching invasion of privacy, and my friends’ privacy, and my employer’s privacy.” But snooping seems to be a temptation many people can’t withstand. And maybe that’s the technology’s fault. “Kids these days don’t know how to sneak around,” said my friend Jessy. “They don’t know how to really be dishonest.” I’m told there was a time, before the age of the internet and even cell phones, that cheaters had to do quite a bit of sleuthing to get away with an affair. “You had to find someone outside your normal circle, and be an excellent liar, and hide your credit card statements,” said Jessy. I followed her train of thought, and realized how incredibly difficult it must have been to plan out an affair without your own smartphone, or an email account. The most obvious answer is to use work phone lines only. What a closed world it was when you weigh it against our various cheating channels today. “And if your partner is fooling around on you, you had to do even more work,” Jessy said, recounting the story of when she found her ex-husband’s phone records with a woman in another state. “You had to be able to tell they were lying, and then rely on your gut to confront them. Or else just follow them around town.” In today’s world, a quick glance into someone’s smartphone tells you everything you need to know. From there, you can access email and call logs and Facebook and text messages and Tinder and photos and anything else that might be incriminating. The same channels we open to each other, as a sign of trust or love or intimacy, are the very ones we’re most likely to cheat on. No wonder snooping is so popular. And no wonder exchanging passwords feels so much like real trust. If you have access to every potential method of cheating, then you have no reason not to trust your partner, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Sharing passwords may be a symptom of trust that already exists between two people, but it cannot be proof of that trust. It cannot be the reason there is trust. When it’s real, those passwords aren’t actually needed. They may be convenient, and they may be a great safe-guard for married couples (just in case something tragic ever happens), but they are not a required clause in the trust treatise. That’s not to say sharing certain passwords is a bad thing. The phone password, at a certain point, almost always becomes fair game in a trusting relationship. Dating and married couples use each other’s phones — it just happens. But email and Facebook are different. Sam Biddle put it well in an : “The inbox is one of the few sacred places left online, the only space on your monitor not shared into oblivion. This isn’t about having something to hide—it’s about keeping meaningful boundaries in an era when there are verrrrry few. We all need whatever scraps of privacy we have left, and your email is just that.” Not everything that needs to be said needs to be heard. And, in a way, my friend Michael is right: Not everything that happens on a person’s smartphone or in their inbox is an accurate portrayal of their loyalty. Context, by definition, grants access to true understanding. And in the context of snooping through your partner’s digital life, everything you see is out of context. The message from his or her ex, or the cordial response back, or the pictures stored from past relationships all seem like direct attacks on your happiness. They are not. When I sent Hayden flowers, I lied about the price because I knew Rosie was sensitive about my ex. I didn’t send Hayden expensive flowers to win her back — I was actually really happy with Rosie and wanted to pursue the relationship. But to Rosie, the lie and the cost of the flowers signaled otherwise. We trust that the ones we love won’t leave us, won’t cheat, won’t run. But that trust used to come from inside us. When love can be reduced to a four digit passcode or a swipe through an email list, that trust is cheapened. Mark Twain said we’re like the moon – a light side and a dark side we show no one. Nothing on our phones is particularly dark, but it certainly is private. |
eBay Now Allows Virtual Currency Sales | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | , owners of payment service , has quietly added a new category to their sales site, allowing users to sell virtual currency like , as well as miners, and mining contracts. The category is sparsely populated right now and the , suggesting that eBay wants buyer and seller to hash out their sale outside of the company’s jurisdiction, thereby reducing risk of become liable for scams and fake sales. The company has been moving into but has long held a no-nonsense policy against digitally downloaded items. One listing for dogecoin, for example, notes that the cryptographic keys to the currency will be sent, presumably on a thumb drive or hard copy, via USPS or UPS rather than via email, something eBay has long frowned upon. The category is so scattershot and clearly new that there is no telling just how this will change eBay’s policies towards digital items. Considering and recent patent filings have shown eBay is working towards a type of cryptocurrency for its users, it makes sense for them to test the waters in this way. I’ve reached out to eBay for comment and will update when they respond. UPDATE – eBay writes: eBay has .
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Tiles Is An Easy-To-Use 3D Design Program That Lets You Print Your Own Objects | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | is a 3D modeling program for kids that lets the wee tykes drop blocks, walls, and pixels into an environment and then output the object for 3D printing. Designed to be dead simple, you basically create a shape in 2D and then “extrude” it into 3D, adding features as you build. The software costs $25 for an early “Founders” edition with free updates, larger canvas and more block options. Less expensive versions reduce the size and shape of the objects you can create. The company is looking to raise $30,000 and will make the software available on PC, Mac, and Linux and iOS and Android if they reach their stretch goals. To create objects you simply place LEGO-style bricks in virtual space. Once you’ve built your model you can export to an STL file for printing on a or similar printer. Aimed at the very young, Tiles offers a number of building styles including additive building by dropping blocks and “chip-way” that lets you remove material from a larger block. Unlike tools like , which translate game worlds into STL files, this is a true CAD tool, albeit one with considerably reduced complexity. Tiles was created by , a 3D model marketplace, and is the company’s first software offering. They also allow users to upload objects to their library so you can share your blocky creations with the world. Like TinkerCAD, Tiles lets the extremely inexperienced try their hand at 3D modeling and, once they get good, to graduate into more complex tools. If there is one thing holding back the average 3D hobbyist its an understanding of 3D design and Tiles is doing its best to remedy that.
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Enterprises Embrace Inflexibility Instead Of Change | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | At the this week in Orlando, it struck me that companies are remarkably inflexible when it comes to adopting new technologies, but the crowd at AIIM wasn’t alone. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than the brouhaha over the Windows Start button, a feature which, by the way, dates back to Window 95 — as in 1995. After 18 years, do you think it’s possible that we could have the imagination to think of a new way of working? Apparently not. Preston Gralla writing on Computerworld was particularly adamant, ! You could almost hear him stomping his foot. But Microsoft customers aren’t just inflexible around a minor change like the Start button; they also have issues with the cloud. in June, 2012 for a cool $1.2 billion, but many Microsoft customers couldn’t deal with a cloud-based tool of any kind so for about a year, they delivered SharePoint Social on premises and Yammer in the cloud in tandem as part of the latest release of SharePoint. , and if you’re a SharePoint 2013 customer and you want social, you’ll just have to suck it up and go to the cloud version. This isn’t just about Microsoft customers, though, because they are far from the only ones. As I moved around AIIM this week, I heard people tip-toeing around the cloud, either deathly afraid of it, or, at most, barely tolerating it. To be fair, these were records managers and this is an area of the enterprise that has been particularly slow to adopt change. But these folks were the living embodiment of cloud FUD. It wasn’t until the last day when 451 Research analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe finally gave the audience an opposing viewpoint, telling them, “Don’t tell me the cloud is insecure. You can hire a hacker for $50 to break into your system. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars making their cloud secure.” I get that change is hard and companies have been burned in the past by chasing the latest computing craze. The data center is littered with bad ERP, CRM and content management installations. But the thing is, this is much more than a craze. As Dion Hinchcliffe, co-author (with Peter Kim) of , who followed Pelz-Sharpe as a speaker said, “You can’t chase fashion, but there is no doubt high impact technology is affecting business in so many ways.” He’s right. This is different because it’s more than the technology flavor of the month. It’s a fundamental change in the way we do business, and companies have to get a grip. Either that or they’ll get left behind by smaller, faster and more agile competitors born in the age of the cloud and mobile who will simply run you over while you’re forming your committee to study the problem. It’s worth noting that Pelz-Sharpe followed his admonition by saying, “Cloud adoption is a slow burn, not a quick switch.” Indeed, and I don’t hear anyone suggesting you should shutter your private data center and move lock, stock and barrel to the cloud tomorrow. But you have to take the first step at some point, and maybe Microsoft, by forcing its users to adopt Yammer as a cloud-based social tool, is taking the correct approach. Once they see the sky hasn’t fallen by using the cloud, perhaps companies can begin to test other approaches. On Twitter today, CITEworld editor Matt Rosoff perhaps put it best : “Execution is hard. You make bets and lose some. Talent recruiting and retention is brutal. Management structure gets ossified.” But all the more, in the face of these challenges, enterprises cannot afford to sit still and hunker down. They have to start shifting to new ways of working. As Hinchcliffe said, “All of this has significant competitive implications,” and, as such, inflexibility is no longer an option. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 3 | null |
MobileAppTracking Says It’s The First Platform To Support iAd Attribution | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | Earlier this month, mobile ad attribution startup spotted what seemed to be an important new feature in the latest iOS update — . Now it looks like the company was right, because it just announced it’s taken advantage of the new feature to support iAd attribution in its MobileAppTracking service. Basically, this means advertisers can see whether their iAd campaigns are paying off, because when a consumer performs a desired action (like downloading an app or making a purchase), the advertiser will know whether they saw an iAd first. Even though HasOffers says it’s “the first platform to support attribution for iAd,” CEO Peter Hamilton acknowledged that developers don’t have to work with his company to make this attribution happen. “Any client can work with any partner — they can always set up direct kinds of relationships,” he said. “We’re really just software as a service that makes it easier. We’re grease on the wheel.” Hamilton also pointed out that this news comes as Apple is also expanding iAd by and supporting new types of actions in ads — not just driving downloads but also showing videos, pointing users to websites, and promoting iTunes content. The new Workbench features and new iAd attribution mean that we’ll see a combination of brand campaigns and performance campaigns, Hamilton said. In , HasOffers wrote: The team at iAd has done an amazing job getting attribution technology available to developers, while also providing an approach that puts user privacy first. Because this attribution touch point is at the operating system level, it is unique to the app and not even visible to the iAd team. Because iAd was designed to support developers rather than generate revenue, it has some inherently unique motives which easily align it with a high level of user privacy while not losing the value of what will likely be some of the strongest targeting and optimization available. HasOffers also that it will support ad attribution in Windows. |
Gillmor Gang Live 04.04.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. |
My Spiroo Can Tell Your Doctor When You’re Out Of Breath | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | Asthma sufferers use a tool called a peak flow meter to see how much air is passing out of their lungs. It is useful to assess when flare-ups are happening and what outside allergens or problems might be causing a bronchial flare-up. Until recently, all that was available to take this measurement was a very basic mechanical device. aims to fix that with a connected, ultraportable peak flow meter that connects to your smartphone. Created by Dr. and , the product is about as big as a traditional mechanical peak flow meter but has a headphone jack to connect to your phone. “Spiroo is the answer to the problem of excessive time and repetition a traditional peak flow meter requires,” said Bajtala. “It makes it possible to save the results of the measurement on your phone and share them.” That way, rather than noting flow on a sheet of paper, you can record it on the fly, anywhere. The founders will create a Pro version for doctors as well as a patient-only version with fewer data collection features. They are working with a Polish pharma company and some venture capitalists but the product has been bootstrapped since creation. Because of the connected nature of the system, the team is planning to add geolocation and statistic information to the app as well as collect asthma data from users. This would allow them to release warnings to sufferers who may react to certain pollen or pollutant levels and help users manage their inhalers. “We catch all data from our device, anonymously, and visualize this data, helping make a world global asthmatic map,” said Bajtala. Spiroo won second place in a Polish startup festival last week and looks to be on its way to production this year. |
CrunchWeek: Amazon Fire TV, Mike Judge’s Debut Of Silicon Valley, And Microsoft’s New Windows Strategy | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, in which a few of us TechCrunch writers plop down in front of a massive white table to talk about the news du jour from the past week. In this week’s episode, Ryan Lawler, Alex Wilhelm and I chatted about the announcement of Amazon’s streaming box, the upcoming debut of Mike Judge’s , and the highlights from Microsoft’s BUILD conference, including and the free for small tablets and smartphone. |
Windows Phone, Android And iOS Enjoyed A Holiday Bump In The U.S., BlackBerry Cratered | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | During the November to February period, Windows Phone, Android and iOS picked up market share in the U.S. smartphone game. Windows Phone grew the most in real percentage terms — 0.3 percent — and in terms of relative percentage growth — 9.7 percent more share compared to its previous tally of 3.1 percent. That pace of growth, while better than holding fast for the holiday season, does indicate that Microsoft’s ability to increase its market share in its growing home market remains limited. That Microsoft needs to reach 10 percent market share has become a mantra. At its last pace, it would take the company 22 quarters to hit that mark, or five-and-a-half years. That’s a bit too long. Microsoft ended the period with 3.4 percent market share. Android grew by 0.2 percent to 52.1 percent market share in the U.S., while Apple picked up another 0.1 percent to end up with a 41.3 percent share. If the top three grew, what fell? BlackBerry. During the period, the company lost 0.6 percent market share, or 17 percent of its former tally to end at 2.9 percent. So BlackBerry started the holiday season ahead of Windows Phone in the United States and ended far behind it. A small victory for Microsoft, and a real one. Call it stasis in motion: things are not changing much. Apple and Google run the show, Microsoft wants more of the action but remains a minor player, and BlackBerry continues to fall from the sky, on fire and visibly disintegrating. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Amazon FireTV, Windows Phone 8.1, And The New Start Screen | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | Another week has come and gone, and with its close, we offer you this Friday Gadgets podcast. Today we’re talking about Microsoft’s introduction of , as well as their of the much beloved and never-forgotten Start screen. Plus, Amazon launched a brand new media console called the that includes gaming functionality. I know, it was a big week. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by . |
5-Year Old Kid Finds A Security Exploit On The Xbox One, Gets A Researcher Credit | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | I thought I was a pretty clever kid when I was 5. Other kids ate boogers; I didn’t. Do you know how many gold stars I had? the gold stars. One thing I have, though: an acknowledgement from Microsoft for finding a security vulnerability. This kid does. In a story that is surely making day pretty crappy over at Microsoft HQ, a 5-year old kid reportedly figured out how to bypass the account restrictions meant to keep him off of his Dad’s Xbox One. The trick? When asked for a password, he pounded the space bar a bunch of times, then hit enter. For some crazy reason, this… worked. Repeatedly. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUxgcHydhcI?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] Late April Fool’s joke? Doesn’t seem like it. Word of Kristoffer’s 1337-ness comes from ABC10 news down in LA, who notes that Microsoft took the bug seriously enough to give Kristoffer a security researcher credit after the bug was patched. Sure enough, a quick glance at Microsoft’s lists one Kristoffer Wilhelm von Hassel. He’s one of few individuals on the page whose name doesn’t link to a Twitter account, since he’s… you know, . Sure, it’s not like the kid found some buffer overflow that let him execute remote code and turn the Xbox into a toaster or whatever. But he tried something, and it , and he knew he’d done something he wasn’t supposed to — enough so to admit he felt a bit nervous about the whole thing. This kid is awesome. Remember to put this one on the ol’ college application when the time comes, Kristoffer. Pretty sure “Acknowledged by Microsoft as a security researcher at the age of 5” would open a door or ten. [via ] |
Study Finds Download Volume May Impact App Store Search Results | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | New research released today from mobile app marketer examines the impact that download volume has on search results in the iTunes App Store. Today, the App Store has over a million applications available, which means, more than ever, app discovery is being fueled by search as opposed to lists and top charts. Developers now need to know not only how to increase their App Store ranking, but also their search result position, so that their apps are returned first when users type in a query referencing a particular keyword or phrase. Search results are generally understood to be calculated by three key metrics: the company name, an app’s title, and the 100-character meta-keywords provided within iTunes Connect by the app’s publisher. But Fiksu says it found that download volume, as measured by Category rankings, appears to also have a strong impact on search results ranking. App Store search today still leaves a lot of room for improvement. The results sometimes fail to showcase the better-known, more recently buzzed about apps in the top results (as when ), while other times results for nearly identical phrases are . Fiksu wanted to figure how if “popularity” as determined by download volume was having any impact on search results, so it began testing App Store search following the removal of the viral hit Flappy Bird from iTunes. Every day after Flappy Bird’s disappearance, Fiksu ran a search for the phrase “flappy bird” and then matched the results to the app’s then-current overall chart rankings. These chart rankings are based on recent download volume, among other things. When averaged out, the data indicated, not all that surprisingly, that search result rank and overall rank were closely related. That is, the No. 1 search result would also have the highest overall rank (usually No. 1 overall), and the others were ordered by descending overall rank. In other words, Apple gives apps a bump in search when their recent download volume increases, it seems. However, there’s still some sort of secret sauce that hasn’t been quite figured out because, while the above data is based on averages, there were occasionally instances where a No. 5 search result would be the No. 1 or No. 2 app in the store, or when a No. 1 overall rank wasn’t the top search result. Fiksu looked to see if an app’s average rating was having an impact, but those results were inconclusive. (The apps all had similar ratings, though – 3.50-4.50 – so that could have been an issue). In addition, the company noticed that search ranks were more volatile than the charts, with 22 apps showing up in the top 10 search results over the course of the two weeks. In order to make sure that the volatility wasn’t just a “Flappy Bird” thing, so to speak, the company also ran searches for the term “game” and found a similar pattern. While these initial experiments seem to indicate there’s at least a between download volume and search ranking, they can’t definitively prove that the algorithm works this way, especially as it’s still unclear how much weight other factors carry, like the app’s name, keywords, or metrics like historical downloads or average ratings.* What can be said for sure, however, is that an app’s search position will matter more as the store grows in size, and as queries become increasingly sophisticated thanks to recent App Store improvements, like the related search suggestions, for example, and other changes yet to come. * : Ian Sefferman, CEO at , says he found a high correlation between the percentage of the reviews which include a keyword and search rankings, as well as a high correlation between average rating and search rankings: |
Mike Judge’s Uncanny Silicon Valley | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | band closes out its set with a triumphant howl and pyrotechnics, and is rewarded by the pathetic applause of a couple dozen guys in hoodies. That could have described any of a dozen overwrought tech parties I’ve attended over the past few years since moving to San Francisco, but instead it’s the opening scene to Mike Judge’s . Welcome to a magical land where a few ineffectual, socially awkward engineers are hoping to change the world with their high-performance lossless media compression algorithm. Where everyone — whether it be your doctor or BevMo cashier — has a startup idea to pitch. And where founders become pawns in an epic pissing match between a couple of tech billionaires. Before we get into what is, though, let’s first talk about what it’s not — specifically, that it’s not a satirical takedown or a documentary-style exposé of the tech ecosystem. Some of the characters are clearly based on real, identifiable people. As , it’s easy to see a little bit of Peter Thiel in the libertarian angel investor Peter Gregory, and it’s not a stretch to imagine Hooli CEO Gavin Belson being based on enterprise software magnate and philanthropist Marc Benioff. The Hooli campus — which is decked out in primary colors, is home to every snack imaginable, and is populated by brogrammers — clearly evokes the Googleplex. And the so-called “incubator” where members of the Pied Piper team live is reminiscent of the notorious . And, over the course of the season, you’ll see cameos from folks like Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Re/code reporter Kara Swisher, and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and alumnus Jason Kincaid. But that’s where most of the similarities between the real Silicon Valley and Mike Judge’s version end. The ideas behind the show might be based in fact, but the characters and situations are little more than caricatures on screen. For the sake of its audience, that’s probably a good thing. The Silicon Valley story follows the exploits of a group of engineers who decide to strike out on their own with some compression code that Hooli employee Richard created in his spare time. He recruits hacker housemates Big Head (Josh Brener), Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani), Guilfoyle (Martin Starr), and Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) to help him. Along the way, he finds himself in the middle of a battle between billionaires Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch) and Gavin Belson (Matt Ross). Judge and his team of writers went to great pains to get right: They visited various startups and incubators, and even spent time backstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF last year, seeing how the event’s Startup Battlefield works. (That bit eventually made it into the show, as we’ve .) But for all the work Judge has done to make seem authentic, the wit and charm of the show comes not from the minute details that it gets right, but the ways in which it makes things seem larger than life. This is the same guy who made and , after all, and so comedy comes from inevitable glitches in technology — one of the biggest laughs of the first five episodes comes from a malfunctioning hologram machine. There’s no shortage of dick and race and immigrant jokes to go around, which, considering all the hand-wringing around diversity and inclusion in today’s startup ecosystem, may be a bit overdone. The lack of women in Judge’s is also a serious flaw, and if the show gets renewed, Judge & co. might want to “change the ratio.” And while brogrammers and wantrepreneurs surely exist in the real Silicon Valley, they are seemingly everywhere in Judge’s universe. Some early reviews of the show have criticized it for the cartoonish nature of some of the characters and situations, even drawing fire from none other than Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. At a premiere party in Redwood City that featured the cast, crew, various HBO execs, and reporters like me. Musk criticized the show for its lack of authenticity, . “None of those characters were software engineers,” [Musk said]. “Software engineers are more helpful, thoughtful, and smarter. They’re weird, but not in the same way.” But that all seems besides the point. Judge is writing comedy, after all, and good comedy often comes not from a detailed and comprehensive study of a subject’s character, but in his foibles and ruffles around the edges. Sure, I don’t know any startup founders as ineffectual as Richard or anybody running an incubator who is as hilariously bombastic as Ehrlich (although Dave McClure comes close). It’s difficult to imagine a billionaire as brilliant as Peter Gregory also being so socially awkward. And, let’s face it, real startup engineers probably don’t spend nearly as much time arguing with each other as Guilfoyle and Dinesh do. (Or at least, if they did, their startup wouldn’t last very long.) But we’re not judging the characters on how “real” they are, we’re judging them on whether or not they make us laugh. (And if we’re really going to go down that path, you could probably level the same complaint of character single-mindedness or lack of dimension against the “girls” of HBO’s or the women of .) Anyway, it’s the eccentricities of the characters that makes this show funny, and the way that certain character traits rub up against one another — for instance, in the way Ehrlich seeks to be Steve Jobs to Richard’s Steve Wozniak, or a pivotal scene in which Gregory and Belson meet. But the humor is not mean-spirited, and you never feel like Judge is mocking them. The same could be said for the way Silicon Valley, the region, is portrayed. It’s a place where conspicuous displays of wealth — whether that’s Kid Rock playing a concert for a disinterested audience or a startup founders attending a toga party for one of their investors — are rightly called out for being ridiculous. Yes, these events actually happen, although perhaps not with the regularity that the show suggests. I’ve attended a fair number of parties packed with startup folks feigning interest as a big-name performer from twenty years ago rocked out on stage. While I’ve never personally eaten “liquified shrimp,” I’ve definitely been treated to various culinary concoctions that sounded better as hors d’oeuvres than they actually tasted. The set pieces are also pretty true to life: I’ve seen everything from the giant corporate campuses of tech titans like Hooli to the weird live-work arrangements that startups like Pied Piper have tried to implement. Neither of which surprises me these days. So yes, in that sense, is actually pretty reflective of today’s Silicon Valley. But no one really cares about that. The big question is, “Is it funny?” On that front, it’s a definitive yes. As someone who covers startups, I think the tech nerds will appreciate the thoughtfulness and nuance that went into re-imagining Silicon Valley for Mike Judge’s world. But for those who aren’t programmers or VCs, there are plenty of laughs not tied to cultural in-jokes. So in conclusion: The first episode of Silicon Valley premieres April 6 at 10:00 pm. You should watch it. |
Egomotion Raises $750K From Android’s Co-Founder And Others To Make Your Smartphone Smarter | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | Back in November, I wrote about an Android app . Agent uses your phone’s myriad sensors to make your Android smartphone just a wee bit smarter. It’ll detect when you’re driving, and automatically respond to texts to let people know you can’t type right now. During the hours you normally sleep, it’ll auto silence your phone (but still give people a way to ring through in case of an emergency.) When your battery is low, it can flip the switches to turn off things like Bluetooth and auto-sync to eek just a more life out of your phone. The company behind Agent, Egomotion, recently raised $750k. While it’s not a massive round (Egomotion calls it a “second Seed” rather than a Series A), what I find particularly interesting is who invested. The round was lead by Google Ventures, and their investment was driven primarily by Rich Miner, one of Android’s four co-founders. When a guy who you’re trying to improve pushes an investment in your company, you’re probably on to something. Other investors in the round include Initialized Capital, Atiq Raza (founder of NexGen, back in 1996), Hooman Borghei (one of the iPhone team’s founding engineers), Bee Partners, Vipul Patel, Evan Schwartz, and Tim Jellison. While the idea of a “second seed” isn’t super common, it’s not unheard of. In this case, it makes a good bit of sense; when Egomotion raised their first seed round at the end of 2011, they were working on a very different product — albeit one of a parallel vein. Called “Tagstand”, it would trigger events on your phone when they came in contact with NFC tags placed around your home, car, or office. A tag on your nightstand, for example, could silence your phone at bed time. When they realized that most of what they were using NFC for could be done without needing NFC at all (for example, silencing based on the hours you usually sleep instead of an NFC tag), they changed directions. They sold their NFC technology and company name off to a NFC company in China, and launched a no-NFC-required app called “Trigger”. While Trigger found an audience, the setup was a bit complicated. When Egomotion found that most Trigger users were just setting up the same group of auto-triggered actions, they released Agent — a pre-packed, pre-configured set made up of just Trigger’s most popular tricks. For the folks at home who like to keep track of valuations: I’m told this round valued Egomotion/Agent at ~$10M. To date, the company has raised roughly $1.85M. If you haven’t tried Agent yet (it’s free!), you can |
Crazy Oculus Game Has One Player Defuse A Bomb While Everyone Else Shouts Instructions | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 5 | Aaaand in this weekend’s edition of “Crazy Games Made Possible By Virtual Reality”: here’s . The premise: you and everyone in the room are part of a bomb disposal team. You’ve found a bomb that is already ticking down, and you’re preparing to defuse it… but you need help. One player, wearing an Oculus Rift, is responsible for interacting with the bomb. By bringing a Razer Hydra controller into the mix, the Oculus-wearing player is able to bring their hands into the game to emulate things like cutting wires, pushing buttons, and manipulating the bomb. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WYs3Xxh3XE&w=640&h=390] The catch? There’s no one way to defuse every bomb. The series of steps you need to follow (Cut the blue wire! Punch in “1987” on the keypad!) changes with each playthrough — and that’s where everyone else comes in. Everyone wearing a headset is responsible for tearing through a complicated manual full of instructions, and helping the headset-wearing player figure out what to do next. Does the bomb’s serial number end with an odd number? That means you have to cut a certain wire first. But wait! Is there an equal number of red and blue wires? That changes everything. As the counter approaches zero, everyone gets…a little more shouty. Is it something you’d want to play over and over again? Eh, maybe not. But it looks like a damned fun thing to play in a big group, and a solid way to introduce people to the crazy things possible in VR — and in the early days of this new wave of VR, those are going to be the games that sell headsets. This game was built as part of a gamejam back at the end of January, and the team released the (Unity-based) project files on GitHub — . While the , they were still working on it and demoing it at conferences as recently as If you want more information if/when this game moves forward, they’ve got a |
“Full Disclosure” Shutdown Raises Questions About Email Mailing Lists In The Social Media Era | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 5 | In the days before Twitter, Facebook and even Friendster had arrived, a great deal of social interaction on the Internet occurred via email mailing lists. The closure last week of an information security mailing list, Full Disclosure, prompted a number of InfoSec professionals to ask whether these lists still have relevance when so many powerful new social media platforms are available to replace them. The rapid relaunch of that same list under new management has answered that question. Mailing lists still matter, and reasons why may shed light on opportunities for further innovation in social media. The Full Disclosure mailing list is a loosely moderated forum where computer security researchers disclose the full details of vulnerabilities in software products, in some cases before those vulnerabilities have been fixed. Although some people bristle at the existence of these kinds of detailed disclosures, it is important to have a central forum where they can take place. Unfortunately, last week the moderator of the mailing list that he was closing up shop, citing legal threats from software vendors and a decline in the quality of posts. This event immediately prompted suggestions that vulnerability details should be disclosed on blogs, pastebin, and Twitter instead. However, there are three key characteristics associated with email mailing lists that social media platforms currently have trouble replicating. The full disclosure of the details of security vulnerabilities is a controversial subject, but the bottom line is that if it is going to happen, it’s important that everyone who is responsible for protecting software systems and computer networks from attack be aware of the fact that it has occurred as quickly as possible. Having a central mailing list where these kinds of disclosures occur helps ensure that everyone who needs to know gets the word immediately. If these details are disclosed on blogs instead, everyone in the community might not be aware of posts that are out there, or it might take a longer time for information about new posts to disseminate within the community. Those delays can translate into windows of exposure in which some networks are unprotected. One way to combat the lack of a central monitoring point is to use hashtags on Twitter. that if everyone who had a vulnerability to disclose linked their disclosure on Twitter with the hash tag #fulldisclosure, people who need to keep track of vulnerabilities could do so by monitoring that hashtag. This approach would solve the need for centrality, but it brings up some other key issues. The Full Disclosure mailing list is loosely moderated, but it is moderated. On the other hand, anyone can use the hashtag #fulldisclosure on Twitter, and many people do so all the time for reasons that have nothing to do with information security. This fact introduces a higher cost for those who seek to monitor the hash tag, as they have to wade through lots of irrelevant content. Retweets might naturally ensure that vulnerability disclosures get elevated within the information security community, but the problem with this approach is that it favors vulnerabilities that are interesting. Vulnerabilities in obscure software packages may not get retweeted as often, and as a consequence, people who need to be aware might miss them. A potentially viable approach is for dedicated moderators to set up Twitter identities that exist for the sole purpose of plumbing through all of the different #fulldisclosure tweets and retweeting all of those that do, in fact, represent real vulnerability disclosures. Given the nature of the topic at hand, this moderation task could be risky. Shortened URLs that link to supposed vulnerability details could, in fact, link to malicious websites, so moderators would need to incur the risk of regularly clicking on potentially dangerous links. And there is another concern. It is said that the Internet is forever, but it’s not really true. Old websites and blogs often get taken down and social media systems usually aren’t architected to provide convenient access to old content. When it comes to vulnerability information, it’s important to have a historical archive, because security vulnerabilities that are disclosed today may still exist in computer networks many years from now. One solution is to mirror every disclosure on multiple websites. Although it might be technically possible to mirror every web page linked from every tweet with the hash tag #fulldisclosure, it is far easier, from a technical perspective, to mirror an email list, because emails all have the same format. It is safer, too, because it is usually impossible to craft a text-based email in such a way that it can exploit a vulnerability in an email client or a web browser, but the rich content of web pages can often be turned to malicious purposes. In addition, discussions about information security need to occur on platforms that are highly resistant to censorship, as any such discussion is going to be the target of frivolous legal complaints. As much lip service is paid to the idea that large commercial social media systems meet this requirement, in fact, they are not as resilient as they are thought to be. Social media platforms that serve large numbers of people attract large numbers of spammers and other abusive users that they have to contend with. As a consequence, they often don’t have the resources to carefully scrutinize the abuse complaints that they’re receiving or adjudicate disputes rapidly. I’ve experienced this personally – my own Twitter account was disabled inexplicably late in 2011, and it took several weeks to get it reinstated. The ability to suppress important vulnerability information for several weeks by filing a complaint about it could have significant consequences for Internet security even if the complaint was ultimately judged to be inappropriate and the content was reinstated. Fortunately for the information security world, the Full Disclosure mailing list , by Fyodor, the creator of the NMAP network scanner. Some have argued that we no longer need a Full Disclosure list, or even that mailing lists as a concept are obsolete. They say researchers should just tweet out links to advisories that can be hosted on Pastebin or company sites. I disagree. Mailing lists create a much more permanent record and their decentralized nature makes them harder to censor or quietly alter in the future. The designers of future social media platforms should take note of these observations. There is value to platforms that provide centrality, moderation capabilities and permanence. It seems obvious that modern social media platforms could offer these capabilities, but they often don’t. If email is ever going to truly become obsolete, a new platform will be needed that meets these requirements. |
Google Prepares To Launch Android TV (Report) | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 5 | Google has plans for another smart TV product, according to . Apparently this set top box will be less ambitious and easier to use than one of the company’s previous initiatives, . In the words of Google documents that The Verge said it has obtained, “Android TV is an entertainment interface, not a computing platform.” The idea is to give users a simple interface for accessing entertainment content and lightweight apps. The most distinctive feature, it seems, is a recommendation system that will suggest content to users as soon as they turn the device on. There are no details about a launch date, but the documents suggest that Google is currently recruiting developers to build apps for Android TV. These plans shouldn’t affect , another of the company’s efforts to build a TV platform. The news comes just a few days after . I’ve emailed Google for comment and will update if I hear back. [image via ] |
U.K. Startup SkillFlick Opens Its Doors As A Marketplace For Local Services | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 4 | 5 | is a U.K. startup with the self-described aim of building an ‘Airbnb for local skills’. The site was founded two years ago, launching in beta in January 2013 and is just opening up fully to the public this month. It’s bootstrapped and is actively looking to raise a seed round now. TC last came across the startup pitching at our , when we described it as as an ‘Amazon marketplace but for local services’. What exactly is SkillFlick’s proposition? It wants to be a local services marketplace where people with some kind of ability to offer others can sell their talent as a service in their community. “There are millions of incredibly talented people whose skills are undiscovered,” says co-founder and CEO Ryan Perera. “We are creating a website where any skilled person can have a web presence, be discovered and have an online store to sell their services. We want to help them make money doing what they love. This means a talented local baker could sell cupcakes online, a local piano teacher or DJ could receive bookings online.” The site currently divides offers into four main categories: services, lessons, food & drink, and custom goods. And then subdivides within those to cover a range of services, from cleaning and handyman repairs, to language and acting lessons, to baking, event catering and even customised jewellery. The mix is eclectic — as you’d expect with a horizontal platform that’s aiming to be an umbrella portal, rather than a niche specialist in any one area — but the unifying thread here is you’re buying local. Whether that’s a strong enough pull to draw in enough traction remains to be seen. SkillFlick is certainly not there yet — albeit, it’s been building in stealth for the past two years, and is only now starting to shout about its proposition. “There is no easy way to discover or compare services and prices offered by local skilled people,” argues Perera. “Google is an inefficient and fragmented solution to this, e.g. searching for piano lessons would give a variety of results, which are not sortable by distance, price or reviews. SkillFlick will be the one place where you can compare prices and services and book online.” Some of the individual skills currently being offered for sale on the site include a barista selling lessons in making the perfect cup of coffee, a baker doing classes in vegan Victoria sponge-making, house and cat sitting services, and language lessons in French, Spanish or Russian. Users can browse offers and book any service that takes their fancy through SkillFlick’s platform. The startup guarantees a refund if the seller fails to deliver the service. Details of how to collect a service are included on the item’s profile — and might include meeting the service seller in their local area or asking them to come to you. It’s entirely free for sellers to list their services but charges a 10 percent commission fee for services booked through its platform. The site has around 300 service providers signed up currently — and that’s something it’s looking to start ramping up now that it’s exiting beta, according to Perera. “Initially we handpicked and invited the best sellers in London based on word of mouth and using our in house research to manually reach out to sellers and invited them on an invite only basis,” he says. The initial beta pool of sellers has resulted in more than 1,000 services being offered in over 100 categories, with the main focus being London — although some sellers are offering services from further afield. Per London postcode area, the number of services on offer remains relatively low. A search for my local London district brings up nothing for sale as yet. Searching for Croydon, a much larger bit of London, brings up around 90 services in total — with a glut of cake-baking related offerings. SkillFlick is definitely going to need to get a lot more locals signed up and selling if it is to grow into a proper marketplace, and move beyond the feeling of sparse virtual shelves. Add to that, there are of course scores of more niche online businesses that SkillFlick is effectively competing with. If you want a local handyman, you can put out a call on MyBuilder or RatedPeople, for instance, and get local builders contacting you. For other general tasks there’s TaskRabbit. Want to buy custom goods? That’s what Etsy’s for… And platforms selling access to language lessons/tutors abound online. The challenge for SkillFlick is making local services into a compelling enough brand to stand out in a landscape of online specialists. There’s certainly an opportunity there — there is a movement to buy more stuff locally and support small-scale sellers, rather than feeding money into the tax-dodging coffers of giant faceless offshore corporates. But building community traction around an umbrella online service is going to require considerable amounts of targeted marketing, and likely a lot of boots on the ground in a lot of different local areas too. (Thinking of the effort a site like Pinterest puts in to community outreach and running local branded events to connect with particular interest groups.) In the meanwhile, SkillFlick has to rely on pulling buyers in based on the generic idea of ‘skills’ — and really, no one starts an online search with the thought ‘I must find me some skills today’. People might be a little more likely to think ‘I want to find some skills’ but even then, if they have a specific need in mind that niche need is most likely where they will start their search. For SkillFlick it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. It needs to build serious momentum behind its services platform if it’s to become the place people think to search for local first — rather than just going to Google, or using existing local service directories like Yell.com. Or shortcutting to a specialist niche platform. But to get momentum it needs the sellers and buyers to be there. Ultimately, it may make more sense for SkillFlick to narrow its focus, based on the categories and sub-sections that end up getting some traction. And if it’s going to focus on any particular type of local service, selling local cake-baking services online might be a good place to start. From SkillFlick to SugarFix perhaps? |
Hack Your Summer | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 5 | Summer is just around the corner, and if you’re in college, chances are either you’ve already got your internship lined up or you’re racing to get an internship lined up. What happens if you can’t get one? Maybe it’s because you just can’t find one that is a great fit (check out Julie’s and my advice on ). Or maybe your skills are sharp enough to make the cut, or you’re trying to get into a new area. Maybe you’re geographically constrained. There are lots of good reasons internships fall through or just don’t work out, but there’s no excuse to let the summer slide by in frustration. Take, for example, this weekend. I was looking at resumes from a wicked sharp physics major and a up-and-coming CS major, both of whom were trying to get into big name tech companies’ internship programs with no luck. It looks like the top tech firms aren’t going to give them one of their highly sought-after slots despite their obvious brains and talent. This disappointing outlook reminded me of a conversation with about his book and the importance of taking control of your education (we both had a ). It got me thinking—if you can hack high school and college, why not hack your summer? If you can’t get an internship or lab position that you love, screw it. Make your own internship up. How? My advice is to go to every single hackathon you can. Granted, you’re not going to get paid, but it’s a whole lot better than sitting your summer out while the rest of your peers are acquiring new skills. Think hackathons are just for code? Think again. There are ones for designers, data scientists (one of my favorites are the ), etc. They can focus around social good (like the one we did for ), be civic-oriented (I like the ones), or just plain fun like the ones we hosted last year at . You can even ask about attending hackathons hosted by the company that might have rejected you (a great way to prove what you’ve got). Want to make it a competition or can’t be there in person? Take on pros at , , or where you can make some money, too. The whole point is that with the options out there, you can be in control of your destiny by just doing a few searches and showing up. Here’s my recommendation to being efficient at hacking your summer: It’s your summer and your goal should be to maximize your learning. Try different languages. Awesome at web? Try your hand a mobile development (Android vs. iOS). If you walk away and you didn’t learn anything, ask yourself why. Do a post-mortem and course correct for your next experience. Hackathons are short, and your time is valuable. By asking for help you’ll make friends faster and you’ll often get a nugget of wisdom from a battle-scarred veteran. Think you’re going to turn the idea into a big business? Ask the judges what would prevent it from becoming a real solution. Most of the time, the judges come from a background where they can tell you about issues you might not be able to see until you’ve invested too much time on the idea. It’s the best way to start your professional network. You’ll learn more as a group, too. Hackathons are hard work and you’ll want the team to help carry you through. In a real company you’ll almost always be working on the team, so this is a great way to learn that aspect of your professional life. And who knows, one of them might be hiring. Maybe your Javascript sucks. Great! Dive in. Never tried to be a designer? Here’s your shot. In most internships box you in. In a hackathon, you can be who ever you want for the next 24 hours. They’re there for a reason. They want to see cool stuff being made and they love to hear ideas. Often, they’re prominent people, so it’s a great networking opportunity. When I attend a hackathon, I’m always on the lookout for the jewel in the rough. It’s so easy to forget, but remember that it’s your summer and you have every right to enjoy every moment of it. Have other ideas on how to hack summer? I’d love to hear them. |
Gillmor Gang: Blank Stairs | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 4 | 5 | The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — celebrated Office for iPad’s 12 million in sales and who knows in real traction i.e. subscriptions. The Amazon Fire debuted to shouts of thin and expensive, but surely what we need is a builtin HDMI switcher. Letterman’s retirement announcement hit some of us like a ton of bricks and memories of hanging with Paul and the band. An era is ending for sure. Meanwhile, we’ll look back at these good old days where word processors hooked into the message bus. Note: audio on the quiet side; sorry. @stevegillmor, @borthwick, @scobleizer, @kteare, @dbfarber, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Google Street View Adds Panoramic Photos Of Angkor Wat | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | Google Street View now has . The gorgeous photos were taken during sunrise at more than 100 historic sites, including Bayon Temple and the Ramayana’s Battle of Lanka bas relief carvings. Equipment used include Google’s Street View cars and Trekkers, or backpack-mounted cameras. More photos of the Cambodian landmark are available at the Google Cultural Institute’s new exhibit about Angkor and Khmer culture. These include 12th-century sculpture, modern-day illustrations showing daily life in medieval Angkor, and photographs from the mid-20th century. In a blog post, Manik Gupta, group product manager at Google Maps, said: “We hope this new imagery will not only let people experience the scale and beauty of Angkor wherever they are, but also demonstrate how technology can change the way cultural treasures are preserved for generations to come.” |
Clari, A Mobile-First Predictive Sales Tool, Comes Out Of Stealth With $6M From Sequoia | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | CRM behemoths like Salesforce and Oracle, and more mature startups like Domo, have made some significant inroads into mobile and specifically apps for mobile salespeople, but a new startup believes that its streamlined, mobile-first solution can do it better. , a mobile-first sales productivity tool that leverages real-time big data analytics to help salespeople do business, is emerging out of stealth today with $6 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and a list of “dozens” of customers that includes VMware, Juniper, Cisco, Box, and Nimble Storage along with several other Fortune 500 names. According to CEO and founder Andy Byrne, the key to what Clari does that’s different from its much-bigger competitors is that it focuses on helping salespeople sell better rather than report what they have been doing better. This is a crucial shift: the former means that information is delivered to people on their devices right when they need it; the latter implies that while new sales information may still get recorded or even used by a mobile worker, the actual information crunching that produces actionable data happens back when you’re at your desk, or perhaps by someone else entirely. Like many a startup, the concept for Clari’s came out of Byrne trying to solve challenges elsewhere. At a previous company, Byrne tells me, “We saw that selling that we experienced was incredibly hard. CRM productivity was hard. There were too many application silos, and a lot of ‘black magic’ in how things were done, We felt there was a massive opportunity to address these pain points, and we were excited to explore how the BYOD trend and mobile eating up the enterprise could play into it.” For Clari, its approach to solving this problem translates into some interesting features. They include a cloud-based service that effectively mines and then crunches data from sales platforms and other platforms based on terms that you enter: current integrations include CRM systems (yes, like Salesforce’s), Sharepoint, Exchange, Box, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Gmail, news and Twitter. There is also a “Deal assistant” — effectively a equivalent for the world of sales that lets workers input information by voice. Clari also has something it refers to as “CRM accelerators”. These come in the form alerts pushed to workers as they leave meetings to help them better manage their feedback from them, and to suggest other sales threads that may need to be followed up. There is also a “deal progression dashboard” — the kind you imagine exists on many a whiteboard in a sales office, now kept in the cloud with significantly more information and links within it. You can see a demo of how these different features work . The company also launched during the event this week in San Francisco. There are a few interesting trends that Clari highlights: The first is how “big” and mainstream big data applications have become. Once the terrain of data scientists or engineers who knew how to create and parse searches in specific computing languages, which were then passed on to others for further insights, we’re increasingly seeing applications for enterprises trickling down that let non-technical employees also tap into some of this data more directly. (Another company that’s part of this trend, for example, is for marketing teams, and in business intelligence.) The second trend is how far the industry has come in terms of startups’ credibility: Clari has not only made its way into meetings with larger enterprises, but managed to score their business. The need to build up a paying client base was actually one of the main reasons that Clari has been in stealth until now — a trend common with other enterprise startups. “I am a relatively conservative person,” Byrne told me. “We wanted to have marquee customers before launching. Having customers there, it’s nice to have those proof points.” (I didn’t ask, but I’m assuming their sales people used the Clari app to help them along.) The third trend is the perennial importance of coming to the table with a world of experience behind you. You might wonder why Sequoia bet early on Clari, and the answer in part comes down to executives like Bryne. , among his other past roles, he was a long-time part of the executive team at Clearwell, which was eventually acquired by Symantec. (Clearwell too was focused on “discovery” of digital data, much like Clari helps salespeople better mine and discover insights.) Before that, he was a co-founder of Timestock, acquired by Wily and then subsequently Computer Associates. “This is company number-four with Sequoia,” he tells me. In other words, Byrne and his execution skills are known quantities both to investors, and eventually early customers. As part of this latest investment, Sequoia partner Aaref Hilaly (who had once been CEO of Clearwell) is joining Clari’s board. Clari has to date raised $9 million, including $3 million from previous backers. |
When Your Carrier Becomes Your Bank | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 4 | 5 | I write to you from my vacation, meaning, this time, the dusty port town of Kaolack in sunny Senegal. (What, your vacations don’t involve long hours spent riding in–or, sometimes, on–overcrowded West African inter-city public transit? Weirdo.) The day I arrived I picked up an Orange SIM card, which cost me 1000 francs (US $2) and came with 1000 francs of credit, and then got my phone’s APN configured for some sweet 3G Internet. So far so standard, nowadays. But then my cab driver kind of blew my mind. Huh. My Dakar cab driver just pulled over to gas up at a Total station…and paid for it with his candy-bar Nokia. "Orange Money" FTW. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) I apologize for on you here. But still. I mean, I knew mobile money was big-verging-on-ubiquitous in Africa, though M-Pesa–which, incidentally, has just –but I hadn’t realized that it has grown so commonplace here in the West that it is used by cab drivers at gas stations. You can use “Orange Money” for both payments and transfers, here in Senegal, and even internationally to Mali and Burkina Faso. In fact, across the developing world, where the vast majority of the population doesn’t have bank accounts per se, mobile-phone carriers have, or will, basically become their nations’ dominant banks. Oh, they’re not lending money–yet–but if you allow your customers to withdraw, deposit, pay, and transfer money, then you have basically become, for most intents and purposes, a retail bank. I don’t know how I didn’t notice until now that while software was eating the world it incidentally pretty much ate across a huge swathe of Earth. Unfortunately, its next meal here may be slow to arrive. The smartphone revolution is already en route, of course. On Tuesday I took a from Dakar to Saint-Louis; one driver and seven passengers crowded into an ancient Peugeot station wagon for five hours, upper-tier public transit but public transit nonetheless. The woman to my left kept tapping at her dual-SIM Samsung Galace SQ; the man in front of me had a T-Mobile branded Galaxy S, presumably secondhand from some European nation. (T-Mobile isn’t active here.) But new phones remain pricey — the cheapest Orange offered was the Galaxy Pocket, for US$120–and worst yet, data is crazy-expensive. I am currently paying Orange twice as much per megabyte than I pay T-Mobile back in the USA, where I’m not on an unlimited plan. (By contrast, in India three years ago, 1GB cost me $1.) Alicia Levine recently wrote a on how Facebook and Google are fighting for the next five billion customers both with their phone/balloon Internet plans and their “Facebook Zero” and “Google Zero” zero-cost-to-access- -site initiatives. Advantage Facebook, here and now, as per this screen shot from my Nexus 4: but as much as I’m sure they’d love to have everyone on the planet walled within their garden, the Internet isn’t particularly useful if its free content consists entirely of Facebook — and/or Google, Wikipedia, Twitter — and everything else remains oppressively expensive. In the long run, now that the carriers here are also the banks, it’s probably to their own benefit to cut data access costs and reap the long-term economic rewards. Let’s hope they see that too. yours truly, . I have now posted to TechCrunch from no fewer than a dozen different nations, mapped here . (Canada, USA, the UK, France, Turkey, Senegal, Ethiopia, Kenya, India, Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines.) Do I win a prize? I bet John Biggs has me beat cold, though. |
Microsoft Updates IE11 With Enterprise Mode On Desktop, Reading And Data-Saving Modes On Mobile | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | As part of its , Microsoft today also an update to its Internet Explorer 11 browser. While the changes on the desktop are mostly about enterprise users, the F12 developer tools and bringing the interface up to par with the overall Windows update, this is the first time IE11 comes to mobile. There, the changes are pretty dramatic for Windows Phone users. IE11 on mobile, for example, now features a distraction-free reading mode, InPrivate browsing and unlimited tabs. To speed things up, the new version will also do pre-loading and pre-rendering. Just like on the desktop, Windows Phone users will now also be able to pin sites as live tiles. Tabs, too, will now be synced between devices (using your Microsoft account and OneDrive). The updated JavaScript engine, the company tells me, should be about 20% faster on the than the previous version. Also new is a “High Savings Mode,” which is similar to Google’s data-savings proxy and Opera’s Turbo mode. This mode will route your data through Microsoft’s data centers and the service will compress your images and other page elements. In total, Microsoft says, this can reduce data usage by 60 percent to 80 percent. The other smart feature here is that this service will only load the elements of the page that are relevant for the content you want to view. In the long run, Microsoft tells me, this mode could also come to the desktop. On the desktop, the main enhancements are hidden in the F12 developer tools. The debugger, for example, now features source maps, a tool for granularly measuring UI responsiveness and other improvements that let developers drill down to how their code performs on IE. You can find a full rundown of the changes . Enterprise users will also get a bunch of new features. Most importantly, a new compatibility mode that allows organizations to run web apps written for Internet Explorer 8. IT departments will be able to create an exception list. This, Microsoft , will allow enterprises to benefit from a modern browser, while still giving them the option to reduce their upgrade costs and extend the life of their older apps. Unlike previous IE launches, Microsoft will update the Windows 7 version at the same time it launches the Windows 8.1 Update. For developers, Microsoft is also making a couple of changes to become a bit more transparent about its support for web standards. will give developers insights into what standards are supported on IE, which ones are under consideration and which ones Microsoft is actively working in. For now, this is just a beta and doesn’t allow for any two-way communications with the IE team, but that dialog is what Microsoft is looking for and will be added to the site later. To show off the power of WebGL on IE11, both on desktop and mobile, Microsoft also launched a new version of its aquarium benchmark – this time, in full WebGL glory. You can give it a try . |
Social Casino Games Are Among The Most Lucrative Mobile Gaming Categories, Says Distimo | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | Though they receive much less attention than other apps, social casino games are one of the top-grossing categories in mobile gaming, says a . The report used data from Distimo AppIQ to see how much revenue different publishers are making in the iOS App Store and Google Play. Even though they don’t get the attention of , , , and the other highest-grossing game publishers, social casino game makers still have a significant presence among the top 100 grossing apps in the iOS App Store and Google Play. Distimo found that in the iOS App Store, the top overall grossing publishers globally from March 17 to March 23 included 20 publishers among the top 100 who publish at least one social casino game. On a similar leaderboard for Google Play, it found 19 publishers. All seven of the top social casino game makers generated more revenue on the App Store than Google Play. In fact, Big Fish Games made 84% of its total revenue on the App Store. Williams Interactive and Buffalo Studios tieing for the biggest total revenue share on Google Play at 43%. On the App Store, , the creator of Slotmania, was the number one publisher and accounted for 21% of total revenue among the top 10 publishers. came in second, with 16% of the total revenue. was third, with 12%. Playtika was also number one on Distimo’s leaderboard for Google Play, with 22% of total revenue among top 10 publishers. The next highest-grossing developer was with an 11% share, making the gap between the first and second publishers much more pronounced than on the iOS App Store. Playtika is among several top publishers of social casino games have been acquired by casino operators and game manufacturers. It is now owned by Caesars Interactive Entertainment, a subsidiary of Caesars Entertainment Corporation. Caesars has also purchased Buffalo Studios, Pacific Interactive, and the rights to the World Series of Poker mobile app from Electronic Arts. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 4 | null |
Yahoo Bolsters Encryption Between Data Centers, Promises New, Encrypted Messenger In “Months” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | This afternoon, Yahoo detailed progress relating to the encryption of its various web services and properties. Most importantly, Yahoo now “fully” encrypts data moving between its data centers, as of March 31. Yahoo was one of two companies that the NSA targeted with its , which tapped data cables between the foreign data centers of Yahoo and Google. A similar program had been found illegal in the United States. Google has made to bolster encryption. For users searching from the Yahoo homepage, and across most of its network, searches that are executed by users will be encrypted by default. Looking ahead, Yahoo will release a new version of Yahoo Messenger that will feature encryption in the “coming months.” This should cover video chatting, as well. In conversation, Yahoo’s chief information security officer, , stated that the company’s goal is to have “all data” sent to and from its users safely encrypted. And “invisibly,” importantly, meaning that user friction relating to the changes will be minimal. Partner companies that can’t hack it and can’t meet Yahoo’s new encryption standards are being shown the door. Stamos stated that some providers of ads to Yahoo Mail have already departed, as they couldn’t meet new standards. On the government front, Stamos stated that Yahoo hadn’t fielded any complaints yet from government entities relating to the changes it was implementing. In a Tumblr post, Yahoo indicated that it intends to implement Perfect Forward Security and Certificate Transparency also in the “coming months.” Speaking more broadly, Stamos indicated that if a nation state wanted to find some way to get around its new protections and target a single person, it would likely be possible. In his view, Yahoo’s duty is more to protect users against broad, non-targeted surveillance. Full front and back-end encryption should be the goal for all major technologies in Stamos’s view. Yahoo has taken knocks for and other data protections. The company seems to be working to turn that around. |
AwesomenessTV Buys YouTube Network Big Frame For $15 Million | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | AwesomenessTV announced today that it acquired multichannel network Big Frame in a $15 million deal that further consolidates the number of companies built around creating video content for YouTube. Big Frame is a network that focuses primarily on verticals, including beauty, fashion, fitness and music. Over time, it’s amassed more than 300 channels of content, 39 million subscribers on YouTube, and 3.4 billion views. Together the companies have 80 million subscribers and close to a billion views a month. AwesomenessTV itself was less than a year ago. The deal follows the last month, as well as the recent . |
Hands-On With Amazon’s New FireTV Media Player | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | It’s only been a few hours since , giving us a good chunk of time to play around with it and get familiar with the new UI and controller. Amazon hyped three big selling points for the FireTV, including speedy performance, easier search, and an open content community. , Amazon certainly delivered. We’ll get to the full details in a formal review, but for now, features like “ASAP” (which learns what you are likely to watch and cues it up so you don’t have to wait for it to load) and the ability to fast scroll through content categories is snappy as can be. And that’s not putting it lightly. I’ve owned high-end Rokus, a Samsung SmartTV, and an Apple TV and have . That’s not to say there’s no loading screens whatsoever. Downloading apps takes a hot second, and shows that aren’t cued up with ASAP still go through a loading process. , Amazon tried to solve this through voice controls. The new Amazon FireTV controller, equipped with Bluetooth so you don’t need to point it at anything, has an embedded mic so that you can bring up certain titles, genres, etc. This, too, works pretty seamlessly. You simply hold the microphone button on the remote, speak your query, and get answers back. It’s quick. It’s easier than typing. And it seems like a no brainer. Bravo, Amazon. . Undoubtedly, Amazon’s FireTV has plenty to choose from, including Netflix, Hulu+, WatchESPN, Showtime, Pandora, and thousands of games from the FireOS ecosystem. However, it is missing HBOGo, which is kind of a deal-breaker for me. Roku, Chromecast and Apple TV all serve up Girls and Game Of Thrones. In terms of UI, I’m still undecided. Everything new takes some getting used to, but the dual panels on the left side, for FireTV options and then the subsequent categories for each of those options, has been confusing. But let’s get back to gaming. Amazon created a gaming experience to pair alongside the FireTV, that lets you use the remote, a dedicated gaming controller, or an app on your phone or tablet to game it up. I’m still not convinced that this is a selling point to most people. If gaming is important to you, you probably own a console. If gaming is a secondary priority, you have the option to play games on your smartphone or tablet. The in-between space is a difficult one to tackle, but Amazon’s original games seem relatively intriguing. In other words, my initial impressions are that the gaming controller and gaming functionality are most certainly not a reason to buy the device, but may prove an interesting addition to the set top box landscape. The FireTV is $99, and the additional gaming controller is $29.99. HDMI cord not included. We’ll be hitting you with a full review in the next couple weeks, but until then, enjoy this little video and figure out your streaming priorities. We’ll get this sorted out together. [gallery columns="5" ids="982566,982567,982568,982569,982570,982571"] |
Google Is Reportedly Testing A Snooze Button (And More!) For Gmail | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | An email comes in. It’s important. Not like, oh-god-drop-everything-or-we’ll-all-die important, but it’s something you should probably answer. But you’ve got stuff to do right now, so you don’t. “I’ll answer this tomorrow,” you tell yourself. By tomorrow, the email has dropped down to the bottom of your inbox, replaced by 100 way less important things. You’d still answer it… if you hadn’t totally forgotten about it. It happens to the best of us. Back when Mailbox (now owned by Dropbox) launched in January 2013, their solution to this — the ability to “snooze” an email to have it resurface at the top of your inbox — was one of its most exciting features. Now, it seems, Gmail wants in on the snoozin’. According to , Google is testing a build of Gmail with a bunch of neat new tricks packed in, email snoozing included. This sort of thing is why it was that Mailbox sold when they did. As nifty as many of Mailbox’s features were/are, it was only a matter of time before the big guys got around to copying all of the best bits they could manage. |
Parsing Free Windows | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | Just what the hell is Microsoft doing making Windows free for small tablets and smartphones? Buying market share. By cutting the cost of Windows for smartphones, Microsoft is sweetening its pitch towards OEMs, providing new incentives to adopt its mobile platform. OEMs, often paying a per-device fee to Microsoft to ship devices running Google’s Android, now have a separate option that includes no software payments. That’s interesting. How can Microsoft afford this decision? It’s worth keeping in mind that the revenue streams that Microsoft is deprecating were small. Windows OEM revenues are not small, but they are in modest decline. What was the total top line that Microsoft secured per quarter from Windows Phone handsets? Presume 10 million sold units and a $5 per device royalty, and the revenue sums to a rounding error. On the other end of the stick, Microsoft tablet market share is minute. Here’s the latest : So that’s a million a quarter, a fraction of which are eligible for free Windows. That revenue is a rounding error of a rounding error. So Microsoft’s move doesn’t harm it financially, and could reap it precisely what it needs: market share. The company is shifting to garnering top line in other ways than one-time software fees, but we don’t need to suss that out all over again here. Regarding market share, Microsoft needs better OEM support for Windows Phone, and to make it a financially attractive move to build small Windows tablets that vend at low price points. There is unity between the decision to ax small Windows revenues, and : [W]ith Update 1, Microsoft rejiggered Windows 8.1 to work with devices with 1 gigabyte of RAM, and 16 gigabytes of internal storage. The firm calls these devices 116 devices, wittily. Bingo. Microsoft extended Windows 8.1 with its Update to support devices that will sell for a price point so low that the cost of Windows itself, had it been maintained, would have represented an outsize percentage. Now, it’s no percentage at all. For a company like Dell, it means that their per-device profit on popular devices like the Venue 8 Pro (8 inch tablet) just got better. And as Microsoft essentially can’t lose tablet market share — you can’t lose what you don’t have — this can only help its position. Microsoft cannot afford to lose OEM and other OS revenue from the vast majority of devices that it sells. That would quickly impair its financial performance. But if it can keep those revenues mostly stable, its other growing businesses likely provide enough top-line growth to allow Microsoft to not collect fees on Windows for growing device categories that it very much needs to accelerate. You know, that mobile thing. |
“If We Lose, We’re Finished,” Said Aereo Investor Barry Diller | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | It’s win or go home for Aereo. “[Aereo] probably will not be able to continue,” key Aereo investor Barry Diller about the company’s Supreme Court case. He added that there might be some salvageable material. There isn’t a plan B. The issue is that broadcasters believe Aereo is stealing their signals out of the air and rebroadcasting those signals to consumers unlawfully. However, Aereo works very similarly to the way a regular set of rabbit ears does. Because each Aereo user has their own remote antenna that records their very own copy of various programs, the startup has been consistently successful in court. The fate of the upstart apparently rests in the hands of the Supreme Court. The is whether or not Aereo’s service constitutes a public or private performance. Despite legal issues from the start, Aereo has methodically rolled its service out to new markets and in funding earlier this year. A victory would vindicate Aereo’s argument, opening up the antiquated TV market to much-needed disruption. |
AirPooler Is Lyft For Private Planes | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | Pilots want to fly, but it’s expensive. People want to travel but it’s a hassle. brings them together on its site where pilots can sell empty seats on private plane flights. This bootstrapped startup is launching today with availability on flights out of the Bay Area and San Diego, and gave TechCrunch the exclusive first look at collaborative consumption in the sky, and whether it can be done safely. Here’s how AirPooler works. Pilots choose a date and itinerary for a trip, say Palo Alto airport to South Lake Tahoe. They enter the type of plane, the number of available seats, and their pilot’s credentials and experience. AirPooler calculates the price per seat by dividing the total flight’s fuel, airport tax, and hangar cost by the number of passengers (pilot included). AirPooler lists the available seats and accompanying info on its site, and anyone can book a spot. Passengers choose from the available flights, enter their weight plus luggage, and a request is sent to the pilot. Once a pilot accepts, the passenger receives contact and arrival details for meeting the pilot at the airport. After the flight, any unforseen costs such as fuel for idling on the runway are added, and the passenger’s payment details on file are charged. Law prohibits private pilots from profiting from passengers so you only pay for your share of the cost of the flight plus a 20 percent fee to AirPooler. The Federal Aviation Administration also bars private plane pilots from advertising flights, which is why AirPooler is careful to never promote any specific flights. It’s hired as its general council the former assistant chief council of regulation of the FAA to make sure it doesn’t break the law. “We’re confident that what we’re doing is legitimate”, AirPooler’s CEO and co-founder Steve Lewis tells me. If that’s true, only time will tell. Investors and pilots might want to hold off until they get more assurance the FAA won’t come to shut down the startup and suspend people’s pilot licenses. So why the hell would you want to get in a stranger’s airplane? Because the alternatives, namely driving and commercial air travel, can be a nightmare. By air you have to deal with checking in early, security, delays, cramped planes, and airports that may be far from where you want to go (you have to fly to Reno, not Tahoe). By car it’s slow, there’s traffic, some one has to drive, and someone has to stay to drive. Plus, unless you book far in advance, AirPooler expects to be cheaper than commercial air travel, similarly priced to driving but faster, and offer a unique experience. AirPooler CEO Steve Lewis Co-founder Steve Lewis knows flight pricing. After getting a PhD in political economy from MIT, he worked at ITA software, the pioneering flight search engine later acquired by Google. He admits he’s no designer, but he built a roughshod private plane-versus-driving comparison tool into AirPooler (though its driving cost estimates seem a bit high). It says to fly from Palo Alto to Tahoe using AirPooler it would take about an hour and cost $50. Flying commercial you’d have to pay $129 from San Jose or $329 from San Francisco for the hour flight if you booked a week-and-a-half ahead. Driving would take 3.5 to 4.5 hours and cost $35 in gas. To fly from Denver to Aspen, Colo., would cost about $100 per person one way on AirPooler. Right now, if you booked two weeks ahead on commercial, it would cost about $325, or you’d have to drive 198 miles for 3.5 hours which would cost $35. The sweet spot for AirPooler is regional travel. These little propeller planes are not going to get you across the country. And they’re definitely noisy and bumpy. But they’ll get you 400 to 500 miles to and from Palo Alto or San Diego. AirPooler is eyeing Boston, Arizona, and Florida as its next markets, and hopes to show some traction before raising a round that could improve its crummy-looking site. AirPooler faces some fledgling competition from other air travel startups. Positioning itself as an alternative to driving makes it different than , the attempted ( ) on-demand private jet service that supports much longer flights. Blackjet charges a $2,500 yearly membership fee, seats are pricey ($6,000 for Palo Alto to Tahoe), you have to request a quote before seeing the price, and there are reports of limited availability. AirPooler’s on-demand model also sets it apart from , which offers for flights between Palo Alto, Monterey, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. Surf Air is a great deal for frequent business travellers going up and down California, but it’s much more rigid than AirPooler. You might assume getting pilots to offer their empty seats might be tough. Some boat owners have been apprehensive about renting out their babies on though it’s still gaining traction. Similarly, pilots might not want to risk any issue with FAA regulations. But Lewis says private plane pilots are eager to join, and word is spreading fast in the tight-knit community. There are already 2,000 pilots in the system, and the majority he talked to said they’d offer seats on AirPooler because it would help them recoup the costs of their hobby. Fifty-five percent of pilots in a small survey in Boston said they’d even add additional flights to take AirPooler passengers. And there are a lot of them. The Bay Area has between 15,000 to 25,000 amateur pilots and another 15,000 commercial pilots who fly their own planes in their off hours. And nationwide there are around 20 million passenger seat hours in private propeller planes that go unused each year. If traction grows with pilots, Lewis says there could be hundreds of flights a day out of the Bay Area. Lewis admits the core challenge will be gaining consumer mind share and convincing them AirPooler is safe and simple, which it might not be. This is a “use at your own risk” startup. While most pilots’ insurance covers all their passengers, people are probably less worried about getting paid if there’s a crash as they are about surviving. Luckily, prop planes are relatively safe compared to other transportation methods, and the planes can glide back to the ground in case of an engine failure. Still, accidents are most common with pilots with fewer than 100 hours of experience. I’d encourage AirPooler passengers to look closely at their pilot’s credentials and only book with seasoned aviators, because the startup merely requires a minimum pilot’s license, doesn’t personally screen pilots, and doesn’t flag them for lack of experience. That seems a bit irresponsible to me. Some kind of warning on rookie pilots would help. Lewis confesses “I wouldn’t jump in a plane with someone who just got their license yesterday.” At least AirPooler eventually hopes to let flyers review their pilots to weed out any wackos. The travel market is huge and if AirPooler can get to cruising altitude, it could earn a lot of money. That’s a big “if,” though. While most people feel comfortable in an Uber or Lyft even though driving is dangerous, there’s just something a wee bit unsettling about being thousands of feet up in the hands of a stranger. Conveying a sense of safety should be AirPooler’s top priority, the way it became for Airbnb after the . With fears calmed, could open up private air travel to a wider income bracket and increase the range people can affordably travel on weekend trips 9X over driving. As more of our formerly prized possessions like albums and photos get digitized, society is putting a higher and higher value on experiences. What startup can offer you something as memorable as sitting shotgun in a propeller plane as you zoom over highway traffic towards your getaway destination? |
Amazon Game Studios Is Packing Some Serious Talent With Experience Across All Genres | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | Amazon made – it unveiled a dedicated gaming controller, but more importantly, announced the creation of original content for the platform through its Amazon Game Studios. Said studio is rife with talent, too, as BuzzFeed’s business reporter . that Amazon Game Studios has hired both key Portal designer Kim Swift and Far Cry 2 creative Clint Hocking. Both have experience at Valve, but also at other major studios including LucasArts. Their game experience runs the gamut, but focuses a lot on more core gamer titles including Splinter Cell, Left 4 Dead and the Far Cry series, as mentioned. That’s significant because Amazon looks to be trying to do the splits with its gaming ambitions, so to speak, with one foot firmly in the mobile/casual realm, and the other leg extended into the more hardcore, dedicated gaming market. Its Fire TV hardware is a more graphically capable beast than other streaming set top boxes currently available, and on stage at its introduction, Amazon even took some potshots at the home console gaming monoliths, Microsoft and Sony. But can Amazon really contend with the top contenders in gaming? The Fire TV is powerful relative to Apple TV, but it’s no contest when it comes to the PS4 or Xbox One. Still, software can trump specs, as we’ve seen time and time again in the smartphone and tablet race, so Amazon Game Studios might have a shot at building software that transcends processor limitations. Who else is on board? A cursory search by Lynley revealed that Amazon Game Studios includes talent from Microsoft, EA, Activision, Zynga, SCEA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Blizzard, Naughty Dog, Konami, Square Enix, Capcom, Bungie, Sega, Popcap Games, Apple and more. Employees at Amazon’s game dev studio have experience building things as varied as the sci-fi TV tie-in MMO Defiance, to the Candy Crush predecessor and former casual king Bejeweled. The early previews Amazon showed off its in-house games, like Halo-style Sev Zero, were promising, and there’s probably a lot more coming given the number of employees involved in the project and Amazon’s emphasis on gaming in its Fire TV keynote. There’s definitely room for someone to own the middle ground between core and casual gaming, and that looks to be exactly what Amazon is attempting with the Fire TV and Amazon Game Studios. |
SITU Scale Tallies Up The Nutritional Information Of All Your Food | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 2 |
Sure, you know what food you’re eating, but you don’t necessarily know what’s in that food you put inside you. that doesn’t just measure weight – it offers up information about the nutritional value of the stuff you’re weighing, too. The Bluetooth-enabled scale talks to your iPad, listing any and all stuff you weigh as you go, with an extensive database of foods and ways to save favorites to make it easy to tally up the stuff you eat most often. It’s not magical; SITU creator Michael Grothaus (who, disclosure, also writes for Aol-owned TUAW) explains in a demo video how you have to enter the type of food you’re measuring so that the scale knows how to count, meaning it won’t identify your food for you, but once you get set up and teach it more about your routine, you’ll find it’s pretty easy to keep track of your caloric intake on a daily basis. Grothaus says his invention has helped him lose and keep off 60 lbs so far, so that’s a fairly strong endorsement that using it to keep count can produce real-world results. The scale isn’t without peers, either; a smart scale from The Orange Chef (renamed from Chef Sleeve after pivoting to new products) ran its own . The Prep Pad, as it’s called, is available now, and the Orange Chef has a distribution deal in place with Williams-Sonoma, too. Like the SITU, it works with a companion app, providing a visual readout of the nutritional information you use it to weigh and keeping a detailed history for your personal use. The SITU is available to backers at a starting price of £70, which is around $120 US, while the Prep Pad retails for $150. The SITU has a concave bowl design on top to better hold food and a built-in display so you don’t have to use the companion app every time if you just want basic info; the Prep Pad has a recycled material surface and is made in the U.S. Both products offer slightly different takes on a concept that’s likely to get even more popular in the future, so take a look and see which you prefer. If successful, the first units of SITU will ship around November this year, and the app will launch in beta along with the first round of hardware. |
Greenpeace Dings Amazon, Hails Apple, Google And Facebook In New Green Net Report | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | Environmental watchdog agency Greenpeace is looking at the ecological performance of the world’s leading Internet companies once again, and this finds that Apple, Facebook and Google are doing the most to lead the charge towards a sustainably powered Internet, while Amazon, and specifically AWS, is dragging everybody down. AWS is one of the world’s leading distributed hosting providers, but it doesn’t reveal any details about its energy footprint to either its customers or the public in general, which is what has it running afoul of Greenpeace’s rankings. In addition to being the least transparent company on the report, it uses only 15 percent clean energy sources according the organization’s own investigations, and Greenpeace says it continues to slide relative to its competitors on energy performance. The top performers get much more of their energy from clean sources, rather than bad ones like coal and nuclear that earn Greenpeace’s censure. Apple uses 100 percent clean energy sources, according to Greenpeace, to power both iTunes and iCloud. Part of that comes from its solar station, which is the largest privately owned one in the U.S., and is responsible for keeping its North Carolina data center humming along. Facebook uses half clean energy sources, and is investing in renewable energy initiatives to power its North Carolina and Iowa data centers, which serve itself as well as Instagram. Google also uses a good chunk of clean energy, powering about 34 percent of its web-based properties (including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Play) from clean sources. What’s next? Greenpeace calls for all major web companies to make a commitment to becoming 100 percent renewably powered, and to become transparent in respect to their energy sources. Finally, they’d like the Internet giants to figure out a clear strategy for leaning more heavily on renewable energy sources. |
Hands On With Wello, The iPhone Case That Monitors And Tracks Your Vital Signs | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | That’s the idea behind the , a smartphone case that doubles as a personal health monitoring system. Azoi, the company that makes the Wello, says that they’ve packed the capabilities of more than $2,000 worth of medical equipment in one $199 device. It’s an interesting claim, so we asked Azoi’s founder and CEO Hamish Patel to come by TechCrunch HQ and give us a hands-on demo, which you can see in the video above. The Wello is available in the U.S. through Friday at 11:59pm Pacific Time. Patel says that the Wello will begin shipping in the States in the fall of 2014, pending FDA approval. For most of the early adopters who buy the Wello in the U.S., it will mostly be a fun”quantified self” accessory, complementing the FitBit and other such apps. But Patel says that the larger vision of the Wello is a bit deeper. Azoi as a company aims to help improve the lives of people all over the world who may not have easy access to basic healthcare, Patel says. That’s why from the start, the Wello launched to be available in 34 countries. “In a place like India or Africa… most of the clinics don’t have spirometers. So people have to travel hundreds of kilometers to a clinic to get their oxygen levels done,” Patel said. “Imagine a device like Wello, with an Android phone or an iPhone. This could actually service a whole village. We wanted a larger set of people to get access to Wello because of the disruptive nature it has in healthcare.” |
Tax Day Advice From A Bitcoin Expert | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | As we approach tax day, many bitcoin fans may be wondering how to handle all of their newfound wealth. Given the , things can get kind of hairy when mining, buying, or trading your BTC. What to do? Thankfully, folks like Tyson P. Cross are around to help. The owner of , Cross handles tax returns and offers tax planning with a focus on cryptocurrency. That’s right: he’s a bitcoin accountant. I asked Cross to walk us through the recent ruling and what it means for Satoshi-ites. Tell us about yourself. How did you get involved in bitcoin? Cross: I first learned about cryptocurrencies in early 2012 when I came across a law review article discussing their legal uncertainties. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the foresight to view them as a potential investment opportunity, although I admired their possible application in the banking and finance industries. It wasn’t until spring of 2013 that really took a professional interest in bitcoins from a tax perspective. I spent the next ten months exhaustively researching the proper tax treatment of bitcoins and ended up developing a real passion for this area of the tax law. How will the IRS find out about our bitcoin? Can they? Cross: As a general rule, the IRS only knows what it is told. This means that it has no knowledge of your bitcoin unless someone tells them. Here are four ways that can happen (others may exist). First, your bitcoin exchange may report your transactions to the IRS. This would be done with a Form 1099, which you’ve probably encountered at one time or another in a different context. However, it does not appear that bitcoin exchanges are currently subject to the 1099 reporting requirements (although that will probably change in the future). Thus, unless the exchange voluntarily files a 1099 against you, it is unlikely that the IRS will receive a report of your bitcoin transactions. Note that they would need your Social Security number to file a 1099 in your name, so a request from your bitcoin exchange to provide your Social Security number may be indicative of a 1099 filing. Second, your bank or bitcoin exchange might file a Suspicious Activity Report (“SAR”). U.S. banks and bitcoin exchanges are required to file SARs for wire transfers that are “suspicious” and larger than $5,000 ($2,000 in the case of bitcoin exchanges). The meaning of “suspicious” is very vague and highly discretionary. Out of an abundance of caution, many banks automatically treat all international transfers as “suspicious.” So, if you’ve sent or received a wire transfer of more than $5,000 to/from an international bitcoin exchange like Mt.Gox or BTC-e, you can be pretty sure that your bank has already filed a SAR against you (although they are prohibited from telling you if they did, so you’ll never know for sure). The larger and/or more frequent you SAR filings, the more likely they will become a legitimate red flag and trigger an investigation. Although FinCEN is generally concerned with money laundering activities, the IRS does have access to FinCEN filings and it is common for IRS special agents to participate in FinCEN investigations. Third, someone can report you to the IRS, which happens far more often than you might think. The simple fact is that people get jealous, and if they’ve heard that you’ve made lots of tax-free money with bitcoin, they might get tempted to make sure justice is served. There’s also that nice reward the IRS will pay them for their efforts. Fourth, you voluntarily and accurately report your gains on your tax return. That might sound ridiculous to some people given the inherent anonymity of bitcoin, but there are some very rich people in prison right now who used to think the same thing about their Swiss bank accounts. The fact is that penalties for failing to report income are significant. This includes the possibility of criminal prosecution. You can also add to this the additional penalties for failing to report foreign financial accounts, which can be even more severe. At the end of the day, you have a decision to make. You can comply with the law and pay taxes just like everyone else, which is admittedly unpleasant. Alternatively, you can violate the law and hope that you don’t get caught. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. If you are caught, though, the amount of money you’ll be forced to pay in penalties and interest will drastically exceed the amount you saved. That’s not to mention the possibility of a felony criminal conviction and prison sentence. Personally, I have seen the havoc wreaked on people’s lives by tax crimes and I would never want to be in their shoes. Neither should you. What do these new laws mean for miners? Cross: IRS Notice 2014-21 clarifies the tax treatment of bitcoin miners. Specifically, the Notice provides that miners must recognize income for each bitcoin mined during the taxable year. The amount of income is equal to the market price of bitcoin on the day it is awarded on the blockchain. This amount also becomes the miner’s basis in the bitcoin going forward and will be used to calculate gain/loss in the future when the bitcoin is sold. For example, assume someone mines 1 bitcoin in 2013. On the day it was mined, the market price of bitcoin was $1,000. That person has $1,000 of taxable income in 2013 as a result of his or her mining activity. Going forward, that person’s basis in the bitcoin is $1,000. If he or she later sells the bitcoin for $1,200, he or she will have a taxable gain of $1,200 – $1,000 = $200. Mining expenses, such as electricity, would be deductible in the taxable year as an expense. The proper method for deducting these expenses will depend on whether the miner’s activity rises to the level of a trade or business, which is a highly factual determination and should be made with the assistance of a tax professional. This determination also has additional consequences in the form of self-employment taxes, which the IRS notice also confirmed are applicable to miners engaged in a trade or business. What do these new laws mean for exchanges? Cross: Surprisingly, the IRS Notice was silent with regard to bitcoin exchanges (although it did address companies that provide bitcoin settlement services to merchants). However, as bitcoin exchanges continue to open in the U.S., this will likely not be the case for long. At some point, the IRS will have to address bitcoin exchanges. When they do, it’s likely that bitcoin exchanges will be made subject to the same requirements as other financial asset exchanges, which would include reporting bitcoin transactions on Form 1099-B. For now, though, the greatest burden on bitcoin exchanges remains compliance with federal and state anti-money laundering laws. What do these laws mean for the average Josephine with a few BTC? Cross: For the average person who bought BTC as an investment and plans to hold it as such, the IRS Notice has little impact. However, for those who plan to use bitcoin as a medium of exchange, the IRS Notice will create some difficulty because of its position that every bitcoin transaction is a taxable event. This means that bitcoin users will have to determine their taxable gain (or loss) each time they use bitcoin to purchase goods or services. That creates a serious burden that will need to be addressed before bitcoin can achieve widespread adoption. The solution might be as simple as a software program that tracks bitcoin transactions automatically. Preferably, though, it would be a recognition by the IRS that bitcoin needs to be classified as a foreign currency for tax purposes (which would render personal transactions non-taxable). Is there anything special to watch out for? Anything we may miss? Cross: Going forward from here, it’s vitally important for the bitcoin community to get involved in shaping the tax treatment of cryptocurrencies. The Treasury Department is accepting public comment and I would expect groups like the Bitcoin Foundation to participate in this process. As the saying goes, the power to tax is the power to destroy, and this is no exception. You can contact . |
Nokia Announces Three New Lumia Phones: Two Cheap, One Not-So-Cheap | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | Microsoft is just this first day of its Build conference with news. ! Royalty-free Windows ! The return of ! And now? Not one, not two, but new Windows Phone-powered Nokia Lumia phones. With these new phones — the Lumia 630, 635, and 930 — Microsoft is trying to cover its bases at both ends of the market. On the lower end of things, there are the Lumia 630 and 635.
The two handsets are remarkably similar, with just a few subtle differences between the pair. Both have a 4.5″ screen, a 5MP rear camera (though, oddly, there doesn’t seem to be a front camera or a flash), and an acceptably snappy 1.2 Ghz CPU. The difference? The 630 is meant more for use outside of the US (it’s launching in Asia, Russia, China, India, and Europe), while the 635 plays friendly with US LTE networks. The 630 will go for $159 off contract (or $169, if you want to add in a slot for a second microSIM card), while the 635’s LTE bumps the price up to $189. The 630 will ship in May, while the 635 should start showing up in the states sometime “this summer”. On the (markedly) higher end, they’ve got the Nokia Lumia 930. As Nokia’s new flagship Windows Phone handset, they’ve cranked the specs up about as high as they go — but don’t expect it to come cheap. At $599, it’s over 3x as expensive as their just-announced lower-end wares. For the price, you get a big ol’ 5-inch, 1080p display, a 2.2Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM, LTE support, and a 20MP camera. At least on paper, the 930 sets the bar for other Windows Phones to beat. Strangely, Nokia seems to be omitting the US from all mentions of availability: It will be available from June – beginning in Europe, Asia, India, Middle East and Latin America – and will continue to rollout throughout the world (except the US) throughout the summer. This is, presumably, because the 930 is to the , which Verizon seems to have locked down exclusively in the states. But will it sell? There’s a reason why Microsoft/Nokia is launching low-end Windows Phone handsets today, and giving them just about as much attention as their big, shiny flagship: because the low-end is is selling best. At the end of last year, Nokia’s budget-friendly 520 accounted for of US Windows Phone sales. The high-end stuff? Seems Nokia can’t — and shouldn’t — stop making high-end handsets. To do so would be damning for Windows Phone, Nokia, and everyone else involved. But when it comes down to units shipped, the low-end units like the 630/635 are where they seem to be drawing people in. |
Tindie, The Gadgets Marketplace For Makers, Ramps Up | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | I met Emile Petrone, the raffish owner of gadget marketplace , a few weeks ago and he told me that I would like his site. It turns out I really do. Part maker community and part amazing e-shop, Tindie is where good handcrafted gadgets go to become businesses. It’s basically a cool place to find electronics projects for you and yours including sections for kids, musicians, and even fans of the great outdoors. Think of it as the island of misfit gear or for solder. Petrone started Tindie in 2012 and now has some solid traction. He saw 10,000 orders so far and has shipped to 71 countries. He’s also celebrating the 2,000th item on the site. Before starting the market he spent a year at Yelp then and Redbeacon and then worked at Urban Airship and left to build the marketplace. “We are the only marketplace geared specifically towards indie hardware and maker-made products – small batch, niche, electronics. We say, ‘see the next GoPro before it goes pro,'” he said. “That means our stuff is generally geared at niche categories and verticals and not consumer focused (Etsy for electronics). We are on the cutting edge where a maker lists a project without an idea of if it will sell or if someone is interested. However if it starts selling, the maker iterates quickly – multiple iterations in a year.” To use it you simply upload some images and data about your product and sell it through their site. The service acts as a middleman and takes 5% of the sale as well as credit card fees. Tindie uses PayPal and Stripe to handle payments. The company raised a seed round last fall to the tune of $1.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others. They’re focusing on grabbing cool products like this and this . Petrone came up with the idea while messing around with Arduino in 2011. “It seemed like something was changing as people had begun posting interesting hardware projects on Reddit, Hacker News, and Kickstarter. So I posted the if anyone would support a marketplace for these types of products,” he said. “The response from that has been incredibly inspiring as we have customers ranging from NASA, Google, Intel, to libraries, CS departments and hobbyists. I have JPL’s purchasing department saved in my contacts. Never thought I’d have NASA as one of my contacts.” The company doesn’t just want crowdfunded projects. In fact, Petrone really enjoys seeing unfunded indie hardware pop up on the site. Because the little guy rarely gets a chance in the market and some of the hardware is so esoteric, a marketplace like Tindie makes sense. already proved it was a good idea. Now curators like Petrone are adding even more fuel to the maker fire. |
Ron Conway Asks Tech CEOs To Step Up For Ellis Act Reform, Stop Evictions | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | Ron Conway, the widely influential angel investor, is asking tech CEOs across San Francisco to support Ellis Act reform, which will help slow no-fault evictions of long-time residents as rents across the city skyrocket. The non-profit Conway started, , sent a letter out to its hundreds of member companies earlier today. The Ellis Act is a provision in California state law created in 1986 that was intended to let landlords go out of business and remove their units from the market. But as market-rate rents , a to evict longtime rent-controlled tenants, who are sometimes the elderly or are illegal immigrants with little legal recourse or financial resources to fight back. They then put . The Rent Board found that 186 apartments were served Ellis notices between March of last year and February 28, according to testimony last night at the city’s board of supervisors meeting. Two San Francisco-based state legislators, Mark Leno and Tom Ammiano, have each drafted legislation that would give individual cities more flexibility in regulating Ellis. Leno’s bill, which Conway is asking the tech community to support, need to own a building for at least five years before evicting tenants through the Ellis Act. Ammiano’s bill is more stringent and gives local jurisdictions the Conway is asking that tech CEOs draft letters that could be attached to the bill as it gets discussed in in committees this spring. Stand In Support of Ellis Act Reform to STOP EVICTIONS OF RENTERS IN SF We ask that all sf.citi members support Senator Leno’s new legislation, Senate Bill 1439 to reform Ellis Act law in protection of tenants rights in San Francisco. TODAY, Wednesday, April 2 by 12 noon, please have your CEO, founder or a senior level representative of your company or organization sign, date, and affix a letterhead to the attached letter template, then email to Barry.Steinhart@sen.ca.gov, fax to 916-445-4722, or mail directly to Senator Leno’s Office as soon as possible. Senator Mark Leno
State Capitol,
Room 5100
Sacramento, CA 95814 By doing so, your letter of support will be submitted on the record in the state senate policy committee hearings starting the beginning of April, and will have the potential to significantly effect the process. Thank you. Ron Conway
Chair, sf.citi |
Tesla Drivers Are Using Their In-Dash Browser To Keep Up With The News, Quantcast Says | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | What are Tesla owners actually doing with their in-car web browsers? That’s the question that ad measurement and targeting company tried to answer with some just-released data. Apparently, the Tesla Model S (of which there are now ) includes , and yes, it works when you’re driving. To see the kind of browsing that someone might actually do in a car, Quantcast used a browser identifier to isolate Tesla visits to 100 million sites over a 30-day period. Focusing on properties that received more than 100 pageviews, the company tracked 463,000 PVs from Teslas over that period, and it says news sites accounted for an unusually large amount (54 percent) of traffic — Drudge Report alone represented 10 percent of all Tesla pageviews, with finance news sites collectively representing 13 percent. In the news category, local sites made up 26 percent of all visits. Quantcast also found relatively uniform usage between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., which seemed surprising — in a blog post, the company wondered, “Do Tesla owners simply drive all day?” Well, there were some differences across that time period, with entertainment usage higher during midday and news during commute hours. Quantcast said it’s saving the question of whether those are the same drivers browsing through the day “for a later analysis.” And what does this tell us about broader usage patterns as more Internet-connected cars hit the market? The company concludes: While the Tesla Model S is the first large-scale production car shipped with a standard web browser, it’s not clear that browsing behavior from the Model S can foretell the future use of connected cars as a media platform. Connected cars will evolve as automakers begin to offer native app environments from Google and Apple. The current browsing activity appears to be more reflective of Tesla owners, half of whom live in California and are self-selected to have higher incomes and be early tech adopters. What we can say is that Tesla owners are using their in-dash browsers for news, finance and more, even though they presumably have smartphones on hand. Tesla drivers have validated the value of an in-car browsing experience that goes beyond destination finding—an early indicator that the connected car is a new media platform to watch. |
Supahands Offers Multilingual Virtual Assistants For Clients In Asia | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | Southeast Asia is the in the world, but a new company called wants to help locals by bringing virtual assistants to the region. Based in Malaysia and Singapore, the startup plans to expand to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bangkok, and Australia. Co-founder Mark Koh first thought of launching a virtual assistant startup for Asia in 2010, but decided the market wasn’t ready at that point. Born in Malaysia, but raised and educated in Australia, Koh instead founded a Melbourne-based company called that hires Southeast Asia-based employees to handle customer service requests for medium-sized companies. Last year, however, Koh decided that it was the right time to revisit his original idea. Based in Malaysia, Supahands launched in December. The startup, which is bootstrapped, says it currently has 500 active users. One of the main things that has enabled Supahands to launch . Most of the startup’s clients use mobile phones to enter tasks, get matched with a virtual assistant, and check on the progress of projects, says co-founder Andrew Tan. Though 60% of requests are in English, Supahands caters to local customers with assistants who speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Tamil, and Malay, among other languages and dialects. The startup currently has six full-time assistants, called “agents,” based in an office in Kuala Lumpur, but as the service scales up within Malaysia and Singapore, Supahands plans to train part-time employees who will work from home. Some clients hire an assistant for a one-time program, like vetting cleaning services, but these turn into recurring tasks, says Tan. For example, a property owner who lives abroad and hires a cleaning team might ask Supahands’ agents to make sure that they show up at the right times. One of the biggest tasks Supahands has handled so far was planning a honeymoon. Supahands’ chief competitors include freelancing sites like and . Tan argues that Supahands makes hiring a virtual assistant easier by training and working closely with its assistants so clients don’t have to interview them. All communication is done through Supahands’ online dashboard, instead of directly between clients and assistants, which Tan says helps with quality control. He adds that Supahands’ biggest rival is actually the self-sufficiency of potential clients. “In Southeast Asia, most locals have the mentality that they want to do everything by themselves, so our challenge is to help them see that they can outsource these tasks and save time for something more valuable,” says Tan. |
Square And Google Were Not In Acquisition Talks | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | The WSJ that payments company Square was in acquisition talks with Google. We’re hearing from multiple sources close to both companies that these talks did not in fact take place in any serious capacity. Co-founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Square has raised over $300 million in funding from top tier investors like Khosla, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins; and is valued in the billions. But payments, especially at the point of sale, is a tough industry to reign supreme and the company has faced a number of speedbumps and challenges. Most recently, Square just of credit around $200 million, after on hold. The WSJ story describes this $200 million line of credit as We heard from one source that Square was actually shopping itself around, and met with M&A executives from number of companies in the process, including at Google. The WSJ is also reporting that the company was in talks with PayPal and Apple. We’ve heard that the latter would be more likely to seal the deal with Square than Google, given Dorsey’s deep-seated admiration for all things Apple. The Information’s Jessica Lessin recently reported that Google But none of the meetings the payments company had with Google amounted to actual acquisition talks, we’re told, just “a two minute meet and greet.” When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Square denied that it was in acquisition talks with Google, as they did to the WSJ before it published its story. Nope. RT Square discussed possible sale to Google, Apple, PayPal as losses widen & payments startup consumes cash — Aaron Zamost (@zamosta) |
FIO Is A Simple, Attractive Time Zone Tracker | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | One of the things I love about working with people all around the world is that I feel like an . Unfortunately, by “mystery” I mean time zones and my propensity for mixing them up, especially since I live in a country that does not participate in daylight saving time. Missing phone appointments or calling people obscenely early in the morning is embarrassing, so I was happy to install (an acronym for Figure It Out). The free Chrome extension lets you pick a 12-hour or 24-hour clock and up to five locations, including your own. It then arranges the time zones in order and assigns each of them a color that shifts throughout the day. Bright orange means afternoon, while indigo blue signifies the middle of the night. But wait, you might be thinking, why not just use the iOS world clock (which includes a map on iPad) or one of the The answer (at least for me) is simple. There are days when I talk to people in at least five time zones and if I have to stare at yet another row of clock faces or world map, I will go crazy. The impact on my sanity is incremental, but very real, and I thank FIO for saving a little piece of my brain. FIO’s colors and format can also help cut through the mire of jet lag if you frequently travel. I plan to use it alongside , an easy-to-read time zone converter. FIO’s developers plan to add features like winter and summer clocks, as well as clocks based on major time zones, like Greenwich Mean Time, and make the site fully responsive so it can be used on mobile devices, too. |
What Games Are: Worrying About Indie Games | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | Of the many changes that have happened to the gaming market since 2008, none is more welcome than the liberation of indie game developers. 2008 was the year that Xbox Live published , as well as the year that Apple launched the App Store on iPhone. It was also around that time that Steam really started to take off, that Unity3D gained significant traction, and that everybody really started to understand what the Facebook Platform might do. One major shift was how the economics of digital distribution shifted in favor of the game developer. Great tools was one thing, but the ability to capture 70% of the revenue on an ongoing basis was something else. For a long time it had been essentially reversed. Flash gaming portals, for example, commonly used to keep the lion’s share of advertising revenue, or simply buy games outright for small amounts and run them in perpetuity. Pre-iPhone mobile operators used to do something similar, and consoles struggled to make their digital economics make sense. The other major shift was in market access. In the pre-revolutionary era management of a digital platform tended to take the shape of a boutique publisher. In the interactive TV space, for example, we used to run a catalog of games like a magazine and cycle through the best performers to maximize audience retention and revenue. The same practice was true in most venues, but over time digital platforms moved into curation or aggregation. Rather than deal with iPhone as a publisher, for example, you simply submitted your game to a clearing house and got access to the market as long as you didn’t break the rules (admittedly with some bumps). This change was huge. The two shifts combined to create an open marketplace where the major platforms were no longer trying to wedge profits out of a relationship and instead facilitating one. You got many a surprise hit game surging through platforms and a sense of occasional market hysteria. You got a whole cornucopia of service markets (monetization tools, analytics, etc) becoming available to any who wanted them. And you got lots of indies coming to join the party, making a quirky game in their spare time and going onto becoming worldwide successes. I don’t think it’s out of line to retroactively use the phrase “golden age” to describe how much more refreshing the game development scene is today compared to where it was. A whole new generation of stars has emerged off the back of these shifts, as well as new ecosystems of games. These days the cool and interesting game, whether it be a or a , feels like it can come from anywhere. The way that game makers communicate with their audience is now much more direct, to the point that some are even live-streaming the act of making games. The golden age has also empowered content makers at all levels. There have been some very high-powered successes, companies that came from nowhere and exited or IPO’d for hundreds of millions of dollars. And there have been some powerful and personal successes, many indie game makers who managed to find an audience and make good (games like ). One interesting difference between the two ends of the spectrum is how they’ve tended to happen in slightly different spaces. The large scale digital distribution publisher tended to come out of Facebook or mobile directly, for example, while indies tended to come through on PC first. Either way it’s been good times for many participants, regardless of their origins. But lately I find myself worried about the indies. I keep hearing an opinion in conversation with notable indies that the most pressing need in the space is to curtail “the crap”. By this they mean the second- and third-rate game makers who tend to flood into any open market with clones and knock-offs and charge cheap. Indies of a certain caliber hang out and support each other, and they tend to view crapware as threatening to their whole scene. Lately that’s starting to make their argument sound an awful lot like advocating to pull up the ladder, about the fear of everybody. It’s a justifiable, if not defensible, fear. One of the common effects of liberalizing any market is that lots of people dive in, but the resulting wall of content has some side effects. When your highly-designed can be easily gazumped by your simpler there’s a point where platform holders in particular start to ask the question of whether it’s more important to have games from star developers, or rather to have games representative of a certain types. The latter tend to be cheaper and easier to control. On a related note I worry about indie games themselves. These days to be indie tends to have the character of being part of a cultural movement, a movement which often seems hellbent on pushing itself as far to the outer edge as it can. This is good, important even, because the edges tend to be where most of the energy lives. Not to sound too cynical, but it’s often easier to motivate a tribe of fans if you’re speaking to their edgy passions. Yet every cultural movement tends to have its phase when it’s fresh and new, but then it’s other phase when it’s aesthetic becomes a form of kitsch. 80s music in the 80s was considered hot, for example, whereas 80s music today is just kitsch. The aesthetic becomes a style but loses the energy that it brought there. Perhaps it’s a result of the here-comes-everybody effect, but I’m starting to get the same feeling about indie games. Lately I’ve seen a lot of indie games that are easily pegged as being of a certain visual style because “that’s what indie is” and it’s starting to feel a little tired. To be offbeat and edgy in a predictable ways isn’t really that edgy at all. It’s be to lost in relic arguments that the majority no longer connect to. I worry that “indie” is becoming shorthand for “retro quirky games that evoke a style of yesteryear that are increasingly only for those who know” and that that increasingly describes a generic volume of content . I worry that platform attitudes are shifting in a couple of different directions. One is Steam’s push away from curation by allowing developers to control pricing and promotions rather than run managed sales. Some have speculated that the result will be , as was the case on iOS, and they are probably right. The effect of sales and Humble Bundles on the PC space is undeniable, and for that to become the de rigueur method of operation tends to make me think that Steam could well become a promotion-driven market. Another shift is the one where the platform decides to take a strong directional hand. In the earlier days of Facebook, for example, the attitude was extremely hands off. Then Facebook curtailed its viral channels while also looking for ways to get its 30% revenue share. Now Facebook is running in exchange for more revenue. If that proves successful the natural conclusion on the platform’s part would be to do more of that and essentially reinventing the Flash portal business. What I’m talking about from both sides is the strategic shift in platform priorities. In Valve’s case it seems to be essentially to put their store into autopilot while the company focuses on building its operating system and machines. In others, however, it’s about an alteration in the value of growth versus return. Facebook, for example, needed games back in the day to help drive to a billion users. But now that it’s there does it still need growth? Or is it time to reap the rewards, and if so how? By claiming slices of all pies. When adoption reaches a natural inflection point priorities often change. What would happen if Apple, for example, decided that it wanted to move from 30/70 revenue splits to 50/50? Or how about 70/30 until an app reached a certain threshold? Does that sound insane? Maybe it is if your only reference point is the last few years, but this kind of shift has happened in multiple platforms over the years. There’s a lot of speculation, for example, that iPad sales . Might that change the priorities at Cupertino? Ok, you think, maybe that means indie game development moves back to platforms like consoles and PC. Yet I worry about those too. I have a history in this column of tending to take the dim view of the . I worry about the impact that the smaller PC audience will have all across the spectrum, especially if we have a younger gaming audience coming through that’s mobile- and tablet-first. Meanwhile I also worry that the current love affair between next generation consoles and indie games will prove short lived. Several of my indie friends have seen great success from deals signed with one or more console platforms because right now the mood of all three major manufacturers seems pro-indie. Tools are cheap, access is there and many of the old roadblocks (like concept submissions) are either entirely gone or reduced to a minimum. In context of how all three used to behave this is great news. Yet I’m old enough to remember previous times when it was good for indies in console, such as 7/8 years ago with Xbox 360, and how it all went south. The story there goes that it was a golden era until it wasn’t, that it went from being a great way for indie games to gain access to millions of users to a backwater in the back end of the interface. That it went from open-arms to a constrained queue of releases that effectively pushed a lot of talent away. I worry that the underlying dynamics of console gaming have not changed. The business model of consoles is the opposite of phones (sell devices cheap and make money on software rather than selling software as a way to sell expensive devices), and so it tends to lens the positioning of premium software over indie software. A is going to sell 20m copies whereas a isn’t. So which do you feature? In that context, “having indie games” was always more of a prestige point than a business plan. A console would drive enough indie content to ensure that it checked that box and the journalists at Kotaku had something to write about, but that didn’t translate to a wider movement. I worry that the current console love affair with indie will come to an end once management has concluded that their platform has enough of those kinds of games to look cool. If I’m right (and I hope I’m not) then indies face an uncertain future where the perceived value of their distinctive voices is diminished. They face clogged platforms, amoral competition and typology-driven publishing. They face hostile economics and a decline in benighted platforms in favor of more consumerist outlets that don’t care. They face platforms deciding that having indies doesn’t matter to the bottom line as much as indies think it should, and consequently a weak negotiating position. Perhaps the one factor that they have remaining that stands against all this is the perception of being cool. It seems more important than ever to me that indies have to focus on communicating to their audience, not just to the people who already like them but beyond. The tools are there to get their faces and stories out there and connect to players, and that more than anything else is their value. Perhaps my earlier supposition on the value of will be the deciding factor. If indies can indeed get to that 1:1 relationship with their players and thrive independent of what any platform is doing then the travails of the technology arms race will cease to matter to their futures. My worry is whether we’ll actually see a phase where many struggle or are ejected from the industry entirely before that happens however. Yeah, I’m worried. |
Airbnb And NY Attorney General Prepare To Meet In Court This Week | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | Airbnb will finally have its day in court in New York this week, as the first oral arguments related to a subpoena filed by the state’s Attorney General are expected to be heard on Tuesday. Last fall, the Attorney General related to hosts in New York in an effort to identify bad actors and illegal activity on the platform. While Airbnb said that it is also committed to removing bad actors on its website, the company argued that the subpoena is “ ” in the amount of information requested by the government, and filed a motion objecting to it. On Tuesday, the two parties will meet in court to argue each of their positions. At the core of the dispute are illegal listings that the NY attorney general claims make up a disproportionate number of listings on Airbnb’s platform. While there is a narrowly defined law that allows residents to rent out rooms in their own apartments, the state is looking to go after hosts who operate multiple listings as a sort of virtual hotel. Airbnb claims that about 87 percent of listings come from hosts renting out their own apartments, in many cases to help them make rent. But a in late January found that in New York Airbnb had 19,522 listings and 15,677 unique hosts. While the majority of those hosts had just one listing, the study found that 1,849 hosts had more than one listing for a total of 5,964 listings. In other words, 12 percent of hosts made up about 30 percent of listings in the city. The company says it has been working to weed out hosts running large-scale rental operations. Data compiled by the NY AG late last week shows that not are there still a number of hosts with dozens of listings, but that since the subpoena was filed last fall, many have actually heavily increased the number of listings that they manage. One host going under the name has more than , according to that data. Meanwhile, two hosts have added 30 new listings in the months since the subpoena was filed. In a and email sent to NY hosts today, Airbnb public policy chief David Hantman said the company would fight the subpoena in court this week. He wrote: The judge in this case could issue a ruling on Tuesday, or take weeks or even months to make up his mind. He could rule in our favor, or against us. He might ask the Attorney General to narrow his demand. If we are ordered to hand over any data, we will work to ensure you are properly notified before the government receives any information about you or your listing. Regardless of the outcome, Hantman wrote that the company would hold a community meeting Wednesday at 7:00 PM and a webinar the next day at 11:00 am. |
AI Experts On The Reality Behind The Sci-Fi Thriller “Transcendence” | Peter Barnum | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | An ambitious blend of fact and fiction, “ ” is Hollywood’s latest dystopian-edged take on the implications of artificial intelligence. The movie presents the tale of the wildly brilliant researcher, Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp), and his team as they perform a radical experiment in uploading a human mind to a computer. It’s set in the near future and, as otherworldly as the plot may seem, director and writer (who with electrical engineering and computer science experts) have delivered a pretty cool experience for AI nerds like us, with a script that emanates from some real, cutting-edge research. Here are some examples of where the film displays some chops in computer vision, intelligent systems and brain imaging. The AIs in “Transcendence” primarily use cameras to visually sense the environment — and Paglen clearly did his homework, because many of the specifics parallel the latest research, which involves making a camera and computer function like our eyes and brains. Currently, common tasks include detecting faces in a photo album, determining when a suspicious car enters your driveway, and reconstructing the 3D structure of a scene from a bunch of 2D images. And indeed, the AIs in the film are able to perform the computer vision tasks of recognizing faces, reading emotions, and guiding surgical instruments. Regarding , one of the movie’s AI systems — PINN or “physically independent neural network” — is able to recognize individuals walking into its server room and greet them by name. In the past few years, such systems have burst out of the lab and into mainstream applications. Companies like Facebook and Google use it to automatically tag pictures of you and your friends. Governments and police are also using facial recognition to identify terrorists in places such as airports and train stations. To recognize a face (or any object), many vision algorithms have two steps. First, they convert small patches of raw pixel data into “local descriptors” that encode information, such as shape and texture. Then they match these local descriptors to a database to find the person (or object) that has the most similar descriptors. This gets much trickier as your dataset gets bigger, as you’re looking for a particular tree in an increasingly large forest. On top of that, the hardest task is often simply determining whether the object you’re looking at is in fact in your database. An algorithm can always find the closest match, but it can be really hard to tell the difference between a known person with a bad hair day and an unknown person. In “Transcendence,” the characters were impressed that PINN recognized someone it had only seen in a photo. But this is doable even with current technology. They would have been way more impressed if PINN realized that it had never seen the person, even in a photo. As for emotion recognition, a quick look at his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) through a camera revealed to Dr. Caster’s AI that she was feeling upset and, in one scene, perhaps lying. Modern computer vision does not yet nearly approach human capability for , but it’s rapidly improving. Johnny Depp as Will Caster in Alcon Entertainment’s sci-fi thriller “Transcendence,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. (Photo credit: Peter Mountain) Today’s algorithms can analyze face and body movements and look for patterns in datasets of known emotions. Sometimes these algorithms use details that make sense to humans, such as a raised eyebrow. Other times, when given a large , they’ll learn models that only a computer can understand. In the film, there’s a moment where we see a screen with a set of bar graphs displaying the values for parameters of the AI’s emotion-estimation model. It’s amusingly similar to debugging plots made by real researchers, where each little sub-plot displays the value of some model parameter. Lastly, although we don’t have fully autonomous robot surgeons, there have been a number of impressive developments in . In general, computers are bad at making complex judgments. But if you point them in roughly the right direction, they can be much more accurate than people. For example, hip-replacement surgery requires very precise cutting. In an advanced variant, a surgeon holds a laser scalpel, and a computer determines the exact position of the bone and the scalpel’s relative position. If either the surgeon or the computer thinks the scalpel is out of place, the cutting beam is turned off. This way, the surgeon figures out the rough area to cut and the computer assures that the cut has micrometer precision. In the film, the AI did all the work. Perhaps that might be on the horizon, but we’re certainly not there yet. One of the core concepts of the film is what Dr. Caster refers to as — or “general intelligent action.” Without question, there have been amazing leaps in “intelligence” technology in recent decades. Early evidence of this came in the triumph of a computer — , developed by IBM — over world chess champion , in 1997. Today, we interact with dozens of intelligent systems every day. Navigation systems can route you to your destination to avoid morning traffic. You can speak to your smartphone in English and have it set a reminder or send an email. You almost never have to look past the first page of to find that single website you’re looking for out of a trillion. A recent example of this kind of smart is IBM’s , a computer that in 2011 outperformed the top human players on the quiz show . Watson is much more powerful and general than an AI for chess — but it also has its downsides. Many were shocked when Watson answered a question in the “U.S. cities” category with “Toronto.” This incident demonstrates that Watson doesn’t use a large set of “if-then-else” logic. Instead, it has 200 million pages of data, much of which is English text articles. This allows Watson to play Jeopardy like a human, and even think outside the box, sometimes so far outside that it demonstrates its lack of human common sense. Moreover, Watson was designed only to deal with Jeopardy-style prompts. It can’t hold a conversation or play pub trivia. Even though it like Watson can think, it doesn’t think the way we do. These applied AI systems are the kind of research that the film’s Dr. Waters (Paul Bettany) is talking about when he says he wants to use existing technology to cure cancer and save lives. Dr. Caster, on the other hand, wants to create a general-purpose strong AI as opposed to applied or “weak” AI. The argument became popular at universities in the 1980s, when philosophy professor critiqued the (named after British mathematician ), which challenges a machine’s ability to show human-like intelligent behavior. Turing, who many consider the father of computer science, claimed that if you could interact with a machine without ever being able to tell it was a machine, then it was intelligent. Who cares how it’s implemented if it’s good enough to trick people? Searle, on the other hand, called this weak AI, and claimed that a strong AI would be a system that could actually think and reason, not just perform a complicated set of tricks. This was a recurring theme in the movie. When Dr. Tagger (Morgan Freeman) asks the AI if it can prove that it is self-aware, he’s clearly taken aback by its response: “That’s a difficult question. Can you?” Currently, many researchers are working on beating the Turing test, and have developed text-based systems that have come close to making the grade. For example, in 2011, the web application was judged by humans to give responses that seemed 59.3 percent human, while the actual humans in the test did only slightly better — 63.3 percent. But still, while Cleverbot might be impressive in mundane conversation, tricking it is fairly easy. While there is a clear academic interest in creating a strong AI, funding for applied AI is much more prevalent. Researchers are actively working on a general purpose AI, but the AI community as a whole is skeptical as to if, and if so, when, such a technology will be developed. One of the core problems, which is in fact mentioned in the movie, is that we don’t understand consciousness well enough to implement it. The solution to this problem in the film is the use of an existing consciousness, namely Dr. Caster’s, which is scanned and uploaded to the computer. From there, of course, it’s off to the races. Speaking of consciousness, while we are very far from being able to capture its essence, researches have been able to tease out various components of thought in subjects’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or . While similar to the you may have seen at a hospital, which produces a series of static images, fMRI gives information about which regions of the brain are most active at particular times. Combining these readings with statistical analysis, it’s possible to determine, to some extent, what a subject is thinking about while “in” the machine. For example, researchers have been able to determine with some reliability when a person is lying by looking at fMRI brain scans. If you tell the truth, only the portion of the brain associated with memory activates. If you lie, however, you typically remember the truth, suppress it, and then create a falsehood, and the difference in brain activity is noticeable. fMRI studies have even demonstrated that the brain patterns of Apple enthusiasts are similar to those of religious people seeing religious symbols. There are many promising research directions using fMRI, but we are nowhere near full brain mapping. When Dr. Caster’s brain is scanned in the film, he is asked to read words not only to record his voice, but also to help map brain activity, which makes sense since fMRI can only see parts of the brain that are active. By reading and thinking about each word, you could, in theory, build a map of a person’s thoughts. Similar techniques are actually used during [warning, graphic video] to avoid damage to critical sections of the brain, such as the speech center. Although research on has been done, we are decades away from being able to transfer these sorts of fMRI scans into a machine to be part of an AI. In the end, “Transcendence” has some serious roots in today’s fast-expanding AI world. We’ll leave an assessment of the high drama to you, but we can say this: this fiction based in fact certainly got our professional attention. What would Watson say? We’ll see after this opening weekend, but perhaps something like, “I’ll take AI for a quite a few million, Alex.” |
President Obama Will Headline DNC Fundraiser Hosted By YC’s Sam Altman And Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | This May 8th, Y Combinator’s and Yahoo CEO will hold a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee headlined by President Obama. The fête will take place at Y Combinator’s offices in Mountain View. This is certainly not the first time technology types have dived into political waters, and it’s a sort of thing that we should expect to happen more frequently as time passes — the intersection between government and technology is increasingly busy. Want to hit up the event? It isn’t a cheap do: $1,00 to attend, $5,000 to attend and get a picture, $7,500 for a couple to get a picture with the President, and up. According to , the event was originally intended to take place at Mayer’s home in Palo Alto, which would have afforded space for around 200 attendees. However, high demand led to the venue change. The Bay Area, where the above-listed fundraiser will take place is almost comically Democratic territory. Here’s , following the presidential election of 2012: Mr. Obama won the nine counties of the Bay Area by margins ranging from 25 percentage points (in Napa County) to 71 percentage points (in the city and county of San Francisco). In Santa Clara County, home to much of the Silicon Valley, the margin was 42 percentage points. Over all, Mr. Obama won the election by 49 percentage points in the Bay Area, more than double his 22-point margin throughout California. That said, the money flowing from some technology companies has an when compared on a party-versus-party basis. The technology world has had a very political last year, with events ranging from the explosive, involving government overreach, to the over a donation made years earlier in opposition to marriage equality. Throw in a bucket of when it comes to immigration reform, and the ever-present discussion of , and you have our current mix. So to see Washington D.C. hit up the area for cash is about as surprising as Silicon Valley’s willingness to host, and show up with checkbooks. |
#Love: I’m Single, Therefore I Tinder | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | of , you win or you get bored and give up. That is pretty much standard operating procedure for anyone with a smartphone and a libido. But what if you’re bad at Tinder? Naturally, I can’t solve all your problems. But experts from across the country, as well as Tinder’s own , have hooked us up with some solid advice. Tinder represents a new phase in the era of online dating. At one point, the only real online dating options were eHarmony and Match.com, and their rich, divorced customers were usually looking for something more serious. Then came OkCupid, asking you to browse photos in the cold blue light of your computer. Now, we’re in the age of Tinder. The Tinder Years. Not only is the app free, but it tries its best to mimic the experience of perusing hotties in a bar, as opposed to surfing pictures on the web like a creep. And that’s the dream, right? To look across a crowded room and see eyes glaring back at you, silently undressing you until numbers are exchanged, and then saliva, and then maybe some token of trust and monogamy. Perhaps, . Tinder wants badly for that to be your experience on the app, which is why it’s an app in the first place. Rather than use it in the cold blue light of your computer screen on lonely nights, the app travels around town with you in your pocket. You may very well be on Tinder, digitally flirting in a bar, while you are actually . Yet despite their similar characteristics, the two experiences are very different. Tinder is far more similar to Candy Crush than it is to flirting in a bar or even using OkCupid. It is a game centered around attraction. You swipe right if you like what you see, and swipe left if you don’t. And, if you prefer, that can be the entire experience. Waiting for an elevator, or growing bored of your friends’ conversation hanging out, you tap on that little orange flame and sink some time. Left, left, left, right, left. Your thumbs do their own military march to the rhythm of your unending judgement. If you’re lucky, you have some new messages. You are, more than anything, entertained. You are not engaged. But most of us don’t download Tinder with the hopes of adding a new, judgement-filled game to our smartphones. We download Tinder with the intention to engage with other humans, and all of us with different end goals. So how do you, as a user, transform Tinder from “playing a game” to “I got game”? The most prominent answer is that you don’t. To win at Tinder (or, to Winder, if you will) is to first accept that Tinder is a game. Hell, the app even tells you to “keep playing” after every match. It’s a great game. A game you can win. Once you’ve let go of the idea that your soulmate is one swipe away, you may actually stand a chance at finding him or her. Tinder claims to have received emails on over 1,000 engagements from couples who met on the app, with the app approaching 1.5 billion matches. The founder of the app met his current girlfriend there. The odds are ever in your favor. With Tinder, there are four important parts of the game to focus on: Pictures are everything on Tinder, and the first photo is the most important. It’s what (Full Tinder glossary can be found .) See, Tinder users have the option to swipe left on a candidate without ever clicking into their bio and subsequent photos. Without a good “calling card,” you’re barely getting past Baltic Ave before going bankrupt. For one, this should never be a group shot. It is well known across the internet and in real life that anyone who posts a group shot as their first photo is likely trying to hide behind the beauty of others. “You want to be careful when you contextualize yourself,” my friend Peter warned me. He’s spent a good deal of his professional career researching and understanding online dating behaviors, and is pretty damn good at Tinder, too. “If I put myself in a photo with a group of ridiculously good-looking guys, or if you post a photo of yourself with a group of Amazonian runway models, even if you’re an 8 or 9, there’s the issue of preference,” he explained. Not only does it show some form of insecurity, but using a group shot as a calling card automatically offers people another option. You go from a true or false situation to multiple choice. “People get annoyed by group photos, and they aren’t very effective” said Sean Rad, Tinder creator and founder. “You don’t know who you’re swiping on, so you tend to swipe left.” The calling card should also clearly show your face. You may have a full body shot as a calling card if it is an important expression of your personality or interests, such as a shot of you skateboarding or performing on stage. But be forewarned: any calling card that asks a question more complicated than “do you think I’m hot or not?” will limit you in some ways. You will have a more concentrated set of matches that are more aligned with your interests and personality, but will also be filtering out people who aren’t into skateboarders or singer/songwriters. The important thing to remember when making these decisions is what you’re looking for from Tinder. And be genuine. Misrepresenting yourself never works out in the end. Even if you manage to get some messages, that person will eventually find you on social feeds and other channels. And then you’re just a liar. “I went on a date with someone thinking they were very attractive, and he had five different photos, so I thought I was in the clear,” said Barbara, a writer from LA. “When I got there, he was so unbelievably unattractive that it took my breath away. I stayed for 30 minutes and then left because it was so overwhelming.” “What was overwhelming?” I asked, over the phone. “How ugly he was?” “No! It was that he really misrepresented himself and it just felt really fucked up.” Rad explains that people don’t swipe based on the attractiveness of a person, but more based on a combination of all the information in that first photo. He said that the most successful profiles are the ones that are genuine and show a clear sense of interests. Most of my experts agree you need at least four photos. Once people have a clear sense of who you are and what you look like, they’re much more comfortable talking to you. These photos should include your genuine calling card, something that shows your body relative to others, one that clearly defines your interests or personality, and perhaps one with friends to show you aren’t a total loner. “As a society, we’ve gotten incredibly good at picking up on hidden messages in photos,” said Rad. “Everyday, we’re hit with hundreds of photos that are expressing who people are, so we’re better than we’ve ever been at understanding the explicit and implicit messages in each photo.” That said, the more photos there are to look at, the more information there is to connect with. Finally, where photos are concerned, get by with a little help from your friends. I asked for a little help. She’s written on Tinder alone, and millions on relationships, sex, and dating. “Can I see your Tinder profile?” she asked, sitting next to me at a bar. “Your first picture is your worst picture!” she said. It was a picture of me smiling on stage at a TechCrunch meetup. I thought it was an accurate and attractive portrayal of myself. “Nope,” she said. “I used to have a picture of me eating and laughing in this green field at a wedding, because I thought it looked like I was having fun. My friends said it looked like I was about to puke.” You might think that your Tinder calling card is literally the best photo of you that has ever existed. you’re probably wrong. Ask for help. The first step is admitting you have a problem. Once you’ve mastered the art of the calling card, you’re ready to move on to your bio. These 500 characters are the next step in garnering interest among other primates in your area. And just like your calling card, your profile should be a for anyone approaching you. Rather than trying to describe yourself, which is boring and usually sounds untrue, you should tailor your bio so that it works as a filtration system. For one, telling people that you’re funny and smart makes you seem boring and dumb. The only descriptors you should really include in your bio should center around things that can’t be picked up in your photos, or things that are deal-breakers for you. Other than that, your bio should represent your personality in a way that grabs people’s attention. My friend Peter has a ridiculous bio, where he claims to have invented electricity and found Amelia Earhart on an island somewhere and that he holds the record for longest untethered space walk. None of it is true, but he doesn’t want to be with someone who can’t have fun goofing around and enjoying their imagination. This might limit Peter in his matches, but the people he does match with are people he’s actually interested in talking to. Another friend uses her bio as a game within a game. She posts four “facts” about herself and asks which of the four “facts” is a lie. This achieves two different goals. The first is that it gives a sense of who she is, not only through the facts, but through the fact that she’s essentially quizzing her matches. She’s a stubbornly inquisitive person, and nothing explains that better than her quiz. Secondly, she gives her matches something to talk about. They automatically have an opening line in the form of their guess. The self-promotion aspect of Tinder bios has me somewhat perplexed. On the one hand, giving someone a look into your Instagram account gives an even more well-rounded look into your life. That part is great. But it also makes you look like you’re using Tinder to get more Instagram followers. Which is a bitch move. The first question to ask yourself is who initiates conversation. Many straight men and women believe that it’s the responsibility of the man to message first. To be quite honest, it doesn’t really matter who messages first as long as you know what you want and how you want to present yourself. However, most people agree that the person who initiates the first message loses the upper-hand, the same way that someone who makes the first move in real life loses the upper-hand. “I think anyone would perceive someone they message first as less interested than if the other person messaged them first, simply because someone approaching you makes it clear that they interested,” said my dear friend Ella, a 23-year-old from Brooklyn. “Even if the interest is there on both sides, the first person to make a move is saying ‘Yes, I am interested’. It’s the same thing as talking to someone at a bar.” Girls who approach men in bars and say “hi” first aren’t necessarily going to get less attention from those men. Instead, they’re putting off a certain vibe, perhaps that they are more outgoing or that they’re not looking for a formal chivalrous courtship. Plus, you can send signals at a bar without making the first move, which doesn’t exist on Tinder. Be aware of what you want. If you’re looking to generate as many conversations as possible, you need to start as many conversations as possible. “I force lovelorn friends to sit down and just systematically initiate messaging with in one fell swoop. The key is not being offended if they don’t write back.” The thing is, many people that I’ve spoken with have the same complaint about Tinder. They download the app, sort through potential candidates, and get . So many matches that they can’t believe their lucky stars. They’re suddenly hot shit. Except there aren’t very many messages. According to Tinder, around 50 percent of matches end up messaging each other. However, a quick poll of my friends and some of the experts interviewed for this story say they’ve messaged with around 10 percent of their matches, at most. “I wonder if the handful of people who message are throwing off the stats,” suggested O’Connor. My suggestion: be one of those people throwing off the stats. Or maintaining the stats. Whatever. As long as you aren’t crippled by rejection from strangers, this is the best way to get the ball rolling. “Tinder doesn’t give you detailed information or advanced sorting algorithms; it’s purely that you can see a lot, talk a lot, and when necessary, a lot,” O’Connor explained. “So if you’re the sort of person that gets anxious in that kind of situation — if rejection or flaking bothers you deeply — then Tinder may not be the best dating method. But if you are comfortable letting go and just , you can have a lot of fun!” As a kid, I was always curious why my parents and their adult counterparts were constantly talking about gas prices and the weather. As an adult, it makes a whole lot of sense. Weather and gas prices, while endlessly boring, are two things that constantly affect almost everyone, and yet they change enough to remain as useful go-to icebreakers. On Tinder, you have no ice breakers. And if your match’s bio isn’t chock-full of information, you’re left with nothing. “Hey,” “Hi,” and “Well, hi,” are all very common, and thus uninteresting. Instead, Rad suggests that you be as genuine as possible in your first message and try to find a topic where you can connect. A good way to do this is to ask a general get-to-know-you question. This can range from something super simple, like “what’s your favorite color?” to something more detailed, like “would you rather be the most successful Olympic athlete in the world or uncover the most substantial scientific breakthrough of the century?” In either case, you want the information given in the question and received in the answer to tell you something useful about the other person. Again, your messages should function as a litmus test. I once asked a girl on Tinder what her top three desert island songs would be. The songs that, while trapped on an island, would be the songs she listened to over and over again for the rest of her life. was all she had to say for me to know that we could never be. You can copy and paste a particularly successful question into all your matches to go for volume, or mass-message a different type of opener. Peter, with his crazy profile, has a strategic opening message that he claims to be successful with more than 80 percent of the time. I call it “The Neg And Reverse.” You start with something along the lines of “I had high hopes for you. It’s really too bad that we’ll never work out.” That’s the “Neg”. For Peter and his friends, who are straight, this gets a response the majority of the time. When the girl asks why, you deliver the “Reverse”. The key is to pick something from their profile, and to treat it like a deal-breaking difference when it’s not a big deal at all. For example, if they say they like kittens, you would respond with “I saw that you like kittens, and I really prefer puppies.” From there, the conversation is started and can evolve. I asked some of my lady friends to conduct the same experiment with the same opening line, and shockingly men’s egos are not quite as receptive as females to being shut down from the get-go. Still, the four people that tested this out for me received between 30 percent and 50 percent return on investment. Tinder asks you to pass judgement on others and be notified each time someone takes interest in you. It’s built to prioritize your self-esteem. So no matter what you message, realize that the primary motivation for most people to be on Tinder is to be entertained and to get a little ego boost. Be entertaining, and manipulate the ego to your best advantage. And finally, pay attention to timing. If Tinder is meant to be the equivalent of picking up someone at a bar, don’t go to the bar at 9am. Pay attention to when you message people. Sending a message in the middle of the day or at 4am sends a certain signal along with it, that you’re either unemployed or a horny insomniac. Rad says that Tinder usage is very similar to other social networks like Facebook and Instagram, in that people use it when they’re bored. “We see a lot of activity during lunchtime, when people get home from work, and late at night,” said Rad. “Sunday night is our busiest night, and Saturday sees a lot of activity, too.” Like any game, people will try to find ways to cheat at Tinder. There is a phenomena, discovered by writer Amanda Lewis, where certain players reflexively swipe right on everyone and sort their matches later, just to see every single person that was potentially interested in them. Rad says that users who do that rarely try that method for too long, as it ends up taking the fun out of the game. Tinder is yet another arena where cheaters don’t prosper. |
Hands On With Facebook Nearby Friends [Video]: No More Checkins | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | is based around broadcasting how far you are from friends, not your exact coordinates, and that’s why it could succeed where other location apps have failed. But while we might be comfortable sharing proximity, that doesn’t mean we’re comfortable doing it on Facebook. Functionally, Facebook struck upon a smart innovation with proximity. For a deep l . The opt in feature is rolling out to Facebook for iOS and Android over the coming weeks. Essentially it lets you show a bunch of friends your approximate distance from them, see a feed of nearby friends, and send specific people your exact on-going location for a few hours. This hands on video and article look at how it feels using Nearby Friends and the barriers to its adoption. With services like Google Latitude, it feels a bit creepy letting anyone see where you are all the time, even your closest friends. Occasionally checking in on apps like Foursquare can make you feel exposed too if you share that information widely. Plus just because someone is at a cafe down the street doesn’t mean they want to see you. They could be in a work meeting or on a date. In the end, your exact location is actually irrelevant to most people. What really matters is if you’re close enough that it’d be convenient to meet up. That’s what Facebook Nearby Friends is about. If you are, you can communicate to see if you’re both interested in hanging out and then potentially share your exact locations. Until then, exact location is more creepy than helpful. Location discovery only really works if you a have critical mass of users. So Facebook tried to lower the bar to sharing with this proximity-focused strategy and by building it into its main apps rather than a standalone app. Unfortunately, that leaves Nearby Friends feeling buried in the More tab of the interface. Notifications and feed stories should keep people from forgetting it, but because it’s turned off by default, it could take constant promotion and persuasion from Facebook to get people to dig in and turn it on. If I ended up using it a lot, I could foresee wanting it accessible from the Facebook homescreen or as a standalone, or potentially integrated with Messenger. The basic proximity feature is relatively simple to use. The Nearby Friends feed intelligently ranks friends so you see close by besties at the top. The decision to measure distance to the tenth of a mile but cap accuracy at a half mile if someone is closer than that seems like a good balance on privacy. It does feel a bit strange to know the current cities of friends around the world, though, especially when there’s obviously no way to hang out with them. Facebook might consider not displaying people in the list if they’re over 100 or even 1000 miles away to make the feature less stalkerish. Where Nearby Friends gets more clunky is when you decide to share your precise location with someone. The compass icon buttons that trigger this aren’t very intuitive. The little expiration slider works fine, but the 40 character messages you can send with your location are sometimes too long to fit in notifications or the map view. For safety, it’d be nice if Facebook sent a periodic reminder alert if you don’t set your real-time location to expire from someone’s view so you don’t leave it on forever. The more conservative, opt-in approach was wise for Facebook as forcing Nearby Friends on people could have caused extremely heavy backlash. You have to turn it on, can set a smaller Friend List or group as who sees your proximity info, and there’s an easy way to turn it off. People should still consider setting the visibility of their proximity to a smaller group than the default of all friends. Overall, though, the privacy controls seem strong yet simple. But even though Facebook’s social graph gives it a big advantage building something like Nearby Friends, and it built it well, people just might not want to share this info on Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. Years of stumbles on privacy might come back to bite Facebook in the ass when it asks people to turn on Nearby Friends. It doesn’t help that I’ve con s. That means using the feature is a value exchange where you get help gathering if you give up your GPS data. There’s probably an opportunity for someone to create an independent clone of Nearby Friends. [Disclosure: I advise a college friend’s stealth social location-sharing startup codenamed ‘Signal’ that is based in San Francisco. This advising role has been cleared with AOL and TechCrunch’s editors.] Take the same smooth concept of proximity broadcasting and real-time location sharing with specific friends, and build it off address book phone numbers instead. It would be tough to gain the same potential ubiquity that Facebook has access to through its enormous existing smartphone user base. But a startup with a heavy focus on privacy and security, not unlike Secret, might be able to convince people who are apprehensive about Facebook to share where they are. For now, though, we’ll have to watch how the world warms up to proximity sharing through Facebook. The staggered roll out process isn’t doing Facebook any favors with making it go viral, unfortunately. Some of my friends have it but it seems some of them don’t, and there are huge network effects to be won by getting whole clusters using it. Personally, I’ve already found Nearby Friends useful to see which friends were at a concert, and who lives in my neighborhood to grab brunch with. I’m looking forward to trying to use it to meet up with friends in SF’s Dolores Park, one of the use cases that it’s creator and former Glancee CEO Andrea Vaccari tell me inspired the feature. For Nearby Friends to thrive, Facebook needs to make people understand how its privacy works, and why it’s different than other location apps. It should also try to strip out as much creepiness as possible, such as by taking people over a thousand miles away out of the feed, and reminding people if they’re currently sharing their general or exact location with some indicator on the homescreen. At its best, Nearby Friends could turn missed connections into blissful intersections. But first it has to instill a new perception that proximity is safe to share. |
Cognoa’s App Will Evaluate Children’s Risk For Autism From Videos And Other Data | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | There are life-changing technologies that are being developed at the intersection of health evaluation and diagnosis. For example, Neurotrack has developed a cognitive test to the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. And a new startup, , is launching to help evaluate children’s risk for Autism. As CEO Brent Vaughan explained to me, the incidence of autism has risen to 1 in 68 children in the United States, and the incidence of all learning delays in children is now close to 1 in 5. Families are faced with enormous individual challenges to navigate through the complex healthcare ecosystem to understand their child’s risk and how to take action. And the average lag time between an initial warning sign and a diagnosis of autism or other developmental condition is around 13 months, with the average waiting time to see a specialist who can provide a clinical diagnosis around 1 year. By the time children get through the system to the clinical professionals, they’ve lost the time to benefit from intervention programs, which are known to be more effective in younger children. Once the child receives an official diagnosis, families are often left to determine alone how to manage their child’s care and therapy. Cognoa’s test on the iPhone evaluates the risk for developmental delay and autism for children before the age of 3. The app asks parents set of questions around your child’s behavioral tendencies (i.e. will your child play with peers when in a group with two or more other children), and the app also allows parents to take a home video under 5 minutes showing a child in a simple set of activities. With this data, Cognoa’s test analyzes the video and answers to the questions and will provide an assessment on whether the child has a risk for autism. The technology on the back-end was developed by Dr. Dennis Wall, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where his lab is developing statistical approaches to decode the complexity of autism spectrum disorder and related conditions. It’s important to differentiate that Cognoa isn’t actually diagnosing, but instead just evaluating whether there could be a developmental risk. It’s still early days to determine the efficacy of the test but Cognoa has been tested in several studies and over 20,000 times, and is showing accuracy of evolution at and above 90% in children under 4 years old and as young as 13 months. |
In Digital Health, Does Nike Have A Path To Victory After Fuelband? | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | TechCrunch This past week, reports about Nike leaked, suggesting either or outright abandonment of its high-profile Fuelband line. For those focused on the intersection of digital health, wellness, mobile startups, and wearable technologies, a move by Nike, one of the world’s most brands and visible companies, will be examined under the microscope. With the news swirling about the future of Fuelband, chatter has focused on the prospects for wearable hardware moving forward and what moves Nike makes as a result. Will they acquire a new team to rethink Fuelband? Will Nike instead attempt to connect items that they already sell? Will they just focus on mobile software, and if so, how will they get the data and distribution? The answers to these questions may help us all sort through how technology startups in this space may best position themselves moving forward. As reports with company statements so far, I’ll lay out their two scenarios and briefly discuss what options could make sense: To Nike, having user data is important, so there’s a decent rationale here. Well, good luck. There are very few teams in the world that can build fully-integrated hardware and software products, and this is in part why Google shelled out over $3Bn for Nest and wired about $1Bn of that directly to Tony Fadell, who had learned his craft under Steve Jobs at Apple. Companies like Jawbone have now reached an orbit and breadth of offerings which would make an acquisition difficult to swallow for Nike. Smartwatch makers, like Pebble, likely have too much upside ahead of them to concede at this moment. Makes sense on the surface, but I’ll contend again that Nike needs to access user data in order to provide these services. The Fuelband was their data capture vehicle, so without that device, Nike could either (A) build out its own branded software-focused products across iOS and Android, focused on the application layer, but there they’d be competing with (B) a number of health and fitness apps which already have distribution, consumer attention, communities, and data. ( ) These aren’t the only scenarios for Nike, a $65Bn company. Back in December 2012, Nike a partnership with TechStars to leverage the company’s existing technologies. It’s very possible Nike had already considered these scenarios years ago in inking such deals, and those relationships likely provided the insights to eventually plan for a mobile software-focused strategy. If eventually Nike moves away from hardware (which I think they will), it will have started out with an of being vertically-integrated between its own hardware and software offering and potentially will end up with a Google-like approach focused on mobile software and services. Additionally here, Nike can take advantage of the onslaught of off-the-shelf sensors hitting the market and mobile hardware advancements (like Apple’s M7 motion sensor in the iPhone) to create the next great mobile health and wellness service. Or, maybe Nike will elect to eventually take a Facebook-like portfolio approach and focus on buying products to access user data? It’s no longer a crazy idea. While all of this is easy to chart out on the whiteboard or a blog post, an ominous storm looms over the horizon for Nike and their desire to crack this space. While they were figuring out Fuelband and investing in the startup ecosystem via TechStars, a handful of small, scrappy, focused startups (isn’t this always the case?) have been aggressively building health and wellness mobile products and communities for the mass consumer market. in the context of user data and graphs, startups like , , , , and others have a terrific chance to own the space inbetween the consumer and his/her data. For instance, , a startup focused entirely on building software products for the running community, has been one of the first teams to in the iPhone and deliver more value to its loyal base — and this week, they announced yet another app to their suite, , which tracks a user’s steps. It sounds cliche, but small, dedicated, driven teams focused on these seemingly narrow challenges and opportunities are more likely to find the speck of white space to leverage current technologies and build incremental value for their users. And, if that is an immutable law of small teams versus big corporations, in the world of consumer health and wellness, Nike is presented with a complex challenge in order to preserve its self-proclaimed association with . / |
The 3D Printing Landfill Of Opportunity | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | There are lots of reasons to love 3D printing. It democratizes manufacturing, putting consumers in granular control of the things they own — rather than requiring them to choose from a finite pre-made selection. The additive manufacturing technology also extrudes a bridge linking creativity and utility. You can turn a sketch on paper into a 3D object that can be held, turned, admired. You can clone a cherished object you already own to create a spare. Or print a spare part to fix something that’s broken. And you can do all this without having to send off for third-party assistance. So long as you have the skills to use the 3D design software or the 3D scanner, a 3D printer and a suitable physical substance to feed into your personal making machine. However there’s a flip-side to this freedom. The detritus that will inevitably be created simply because it’s possible to print a physical object at the click of a button. Many 3D printed objects used to demo the potential of the tech are effectively just trinkets — the kind of throwaway trash you get in the average Christmas cracker. That will hopefully change — as 3D printers (and the materials they use) get better and more capable, meaning the quality of the the output increases, and (hopefully) the utility, longevity and sustainability of the objects printed will too. And indeed as consumers find genuine real-world utility for 3D printing. But in the short term the is going to fuel a boom in sub par machines that churn out cheap plastic trash. Just because they can. is one interesting example where additive manufacturing technology has the potential to reduce the associated costs (and waste) of traditional manufacturing. But that’s an in industrial use-case at the very high end of the price spectrum. At the consumer product level, humanity already has a massive waste problem when it comes to plastics. We use too much plastic. We throw far too much away. Plastic already contaminates huge tracts of land and ocean. And the rise in ownership of low cost consumer 3D printers risks sparking a new boom for the stuff — reeling in spools of shiny coloured filament to gratify our magpie appetites. It’s not necessarily as simplistic as that though. Mass uptake of consumer 3D printers might end up displacing and replacing the production of some cheap plastic trash — by devaluing some of the pre-made baubles consumes can currently buy in 99 cent stores and the like. Why buy a novelty plastic keyring when you can print one that has your own face on it? So the plastic mountain that’s fueling that landfill-generating class of products might end up being diverted to the 3D printer market, where there is at least a better chance of the end-user wanting to hold on to the trinket they’ve made — since whatever they printed was customised to their personal preferences. But the risk is still that people print disposable things just because they can. And that more and more of this transient stuff gets conjured into existence — requiring us or our environment to deal with its disposal. To reiterate, the risk is that a new mountain of electro-generated junk is created by a new generation of machines that fuel our appetite for a contaminating material exactly when we should be trying to pare back our usage of it. Indeed, this post was triggered by being sent what can only be described as a abject waste of plastic, by a company hoping to use it to highlight its capabilities. This 3D printed PR object was a customised ‘designer’ plastic egg — pictured above and below in a wastebin for illustrative purposes (I’m attempting to return it to the company in question so they can recycle the plastic). So basically instead of emailing a digital press release, this company’s marketing spend generated a lump of pointless plastic trash. That’s exactly what this fledgling space needs to avoid. It’s worth noting that different kinds of 3D printer filament do already exist — and PLA filament, for example, is compostable and biodegradable (being made from plant starch). But it still generates the greenhouse gas methane as it decomposes. Meanwhile the common ABS filament is petroleum based — ergo it’s non-biodegradable (although it can be recycled). There are some 3D-printing related counter-currents to a future increasingly contaminated with increasing quantities of plastic waste. One interesting development last year was (combined with glue) as its fuel for building up a 3D object. If the glue being used was non-toxic and water-based that could provide an interesting alternative to producing transient 3D objects from plastic filament, which could ultimately be recycled along with your standard household paper waste. Another effort on the 3D printing materials side, called , is a filament made by a German company that’s comprised of 40% recycled wood (combined with binder polymers so it can be flexible enough during the print process). It’s unclear exactly what the polymers are but the use of recycled wood could provide a substitute for some petroleum-based filament. On the plastic filament side, there’s — a plastic upcycler designed to let a consumer turn their own household trash into plastic filament for using in their 3D printer. So the home 3D printer could conceivably help reduce general household waste by repurposing it and giving it a second life around the home — keeping it out of landfill in the process and generating a more virtuous circle/cycle of plastics usage. There are also to encourage the manufacture of ethically produced, recycled plastic filament for use as standard in 3D printers — providing an income for plastic pickers in developing countries who remove existing plastic waste from the environment and process what is a negative environmental contaminant for positive utility in the 3D printing economy. We’re going to need a whole lot more innovative projects like these coming up with creative ways to reuse, recycle, upcycle and reduce our reliance on plastics as 3D printers proliferate. The good news is that additive manufacturing allows for more flexibility in what we produce and how we produce it. So the opportunity is certainly there. Now we just need the ideas. Over to you. |
Who Gets Into Accelerators? Persistent Men With SaaS Apps, Says Study | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | What kind of startups get into Accelerators? Well, according to new research, it’s startups with around 2-3 founders, most male, often SaaS platforms and ones who are persistent, applying for at least two programs. And on average, less than 4% of applicants ever make it in. Those are the findings of new research from , a web portal which allows startups to apply for multiple accelerator programs, as well as offering other services, such as aggregating deals and advertising jobs. F6S found that, on average, 3.98% of applicants to the 1,564 Accelerator programs that ran their application process through F6S between February 2013 to February 2014, were accepted into Accelerator programs. The results are based on 62,262 applications from over 150,000 founders in 95 countries. Of course, these are F6S’s figures and don’t take into account applications to accelerators that were run through it’s platform. However, these are high figures, and acceptance rates gleaned in different ways are rarely available in the same way. The stats show that it’s not necessarily easier to get into an accelerator program in one country versus another, as the regional acceptance rates were competitive overall and varied broadly, ranging from: -3.78% in the United States
-3.67% in Europe
-5.09% in South America
-5.12% in Asia
-5.38% in Australia/New Zealand. That said, the overall acceptance rates for Accelerators ranged from a low of 0.41% (roughly 1 in 244) to a high of 55% (roughly 1 in 2). It’s not known which accelerator(s) had such a high acceptance rate. The difficulty of getting into the top programs may gradually be eased by the fact that there is now a wide proliferation of vertical accelerators in areas such as healthcare, transportation etc. Anecdotally, verticals may be easier than broad-brush ones that have big public profiles. In terms of make-up, F6S found that the Startups that apply and successfully enter Accelerators, on average, appear to have 2-3 founders and are overwhelmingly male. The figures were almost exactly the same for unsuccessful applicants. The exact figures were: 2.3 founders (vs. 1.9 founders for rejected startups) and founders that are 86.8% Male and 13.2% Female (vs. 85.2% Male and 14.8% Female for rejected startups). The study’s results may well raise a few questions. Either low numbers of women founders are applying for accelerators, or the gate-keepers for accelerators are somewhat closed-minded — or a combination of both. The top 10 industry areas for startups that are successful in getting into Accelerators are: – Web Applications/SaaS 36%
– Mobile 15.3%
– Media 12.4%
– Marketing 12.3%
– E-Commerce 9.2%
– Data and Analytics 8.9%
– Advertising 8.8%
– Social Networking 7.6%
– Entertainment 7.5%
– Education 6.7% Many successful applicants failed multiple times before they got a place in an Accelerator. The startups that were accepted had tried an average of 3.34 programs on F6S, while unsuccessful applicants took a shot at only 1.8 programs. In other words, try at a couple more and you might get in. Persistence wins. We asked F6S if they thought the 3.98% average acceptance rate they’d come up with was below or above industry averages, or about right? Sean Kane, F6S Co-Founder (with Jon Bradford, who happens to also lead TechStars London) thinks: “The range of acceptance levels from a low of 0.41% up to double digit rates is interesting me as well as an indicator of the diversity in the sector and the entrance of new Accelerators that are still building towards a competitive program.” Kane added: “These results not only provide the first global view of who gets into an Accelerator, but also support key lessons we’ve learned as an ecosystem — like success is a group effort and the only way to win is to fail along the way.” F6S claims that that about 90% of Accelerators globally, including two-thirds of the top fifteen programs, use the platform to take applications, manage community and select successful applicants. Among the top 15 they name are TechStars, AlphaLab, Capital Innovators and The Brandery. F6S says over 250,000 founders and 47,000 startups globally used its site to access free deals from service providers, funding listings and recruiting tools. |
null | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 2 | null |
The Not-So-Secret Language Of The Misfit Shine | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 20 | Here’s a random tidbit about the , the activity tracker from . I ran into CEO Sonny Vu about a week ago, and when he pulled a Misfit Shine out of his bag, he pointed out something that no one seems to have noticed. Or if they noticed it, they didn’t say anything about it online. It’s been there since , on the back of the packaging, right below the Arabic. What’s that weird language there? Apparently, anyone who saw the “KL” label assumed that it stood for Kuala Lumpur (which is , but, okay). Nope. It’s Klingon. Vu explained via email, “The alternative was Elvish but we didn’t know any reasonably solid speakers.” It’s a funny idea, if you have the right (nerdy) sense of humor. And hey, translating “I am Shine, your physical activity monitor. You can wear me anywhere. Tap me for your progress and the time.” into Klingon probably required less effort than, say, . There was a tradeoff, however. In order to make the room for the Klingon text, the company had to get rid of Russian. “Which, in retrospect, we probably shouldn’t have done,” Vu admitted — it made things a little awkward a few weeks later when Misfit was approached by the company that eventually became its Russian partner. Vu pointed out that even though the language was removed from the packaging, the app and the website have been translated into Russian. “We’re now sold in 32 countries, not including ,” he said. [photo by Susan Hobbs] |
Nike Is Said To Be Killing Off The FuelBand | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | Bad news, Fuel fans: Nike is purportedly killing off their wearable hardware efforts, including the FuelBand. Just a few days ago, folks started whispering about shakeup in Fuelband land after the : Now, sure enough, they’ve got a person-in-the-know confirming that the majority of the 70-person FuelBand team has been let go. It’s a pity, really; despite never really finding a massive audience, the FuelBand is/was a damned slick piece of hardware. It was hardly perfect, but it did some things — like its super pretty dot matrix display — quite well. So why might Nike be heading for the exit? Because the wearables market is about to get really, crowded — primarily by devices that will do everything the FuelBand does, and more.
On one hand (wrist?), you’ve got Google, who just launched an entire branch of Android dedicated specifically for use with devices like smartwatches. On the other, you’ve got Apple, who has supposedly been brewing up a wearable device of their own for months now. And guess who’s on Nike’s board? Apple CEO Tim Cook. Throw in the fact that Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is right around the corner, and the pieces seem to fit together almost too well. If Apple was ever going to let Nike know that it might be time to get out of the dedicated-wearables game, it’d be right about now. |
Counterforce Protests Tech Using Tech | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 18 |
Rising income inequality is quickly becoming the most prevalent issue of our century, “the defining challenge of our time,” to President Obama. Nowhere is this more acute than in San Francisco, where rents the national average are squeezing out the lower and middle classes in favor of tech workers who can pay astronomical housing prices. This widening gap between the haves and the have-nots is leading to protests, and the tech industry, though not responsible for all these ills, . Some protest groups like have targeted Google Buses and their routes, while the has gone the route of earmarking accessible members of the tech community in order to leverage these people’s media reach. There is probably no tech employee more accessible than Google Ventures’ , and thus the Counterforce found its hook, showing up to his house two Sundays ago with “Kevin Rose Parasite” banners. The group, which is starkly , recorded the extremely awkward conversation on an Android phone (“we have no choice”), and leaked the full video to . This doesn’t exactly reinforce their credibility. The entire banal exchange evokes the Upton Sinclair quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” |
CrunchWeek: Airbnb’s $500M Funding, Twitter Gobbles Up Gnip, Instagram’s Swapped Username Scandal | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | In today’s show, , and I huddled around the big white table to talk about the confirmation that in a massive new funding round, Twitter’s of its longtime partner for social data “firehose” aggregation Gnip, and the scandal around Instagram to one of its own employees. |
214 Technologies Is Crowdfunding A Smart Doorbell Called Chui | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | “What the heck is a smart doorbell?” That’s what my friends asked me any time I mentioned that I’d be meeting with Nezare Chafni and Shaun Moore, co-founders of 214 Technologies. They’ve developed a product called , which they describe as “the world’s most intelligent doorbell.” Chafni and Moore brought a Chui prototype by the TechCrunch office in New York, and you can see it in action in the video above. Basically, it scans visitors’ faces, tells you who’s at your door, and can deliver a personalized, prerecorded message. You can also set up a “do not disturb” list of people you don’t want to see at all. Obviously, there’s a bit of acting in the video, but the core demonstration, where the camera correctly identified each visitor, was real. Chui might eventually be connected to other smart home devices, for example automatically letting people in if they’re on your friend list, or turning on your TV as soon as you arrive home. The company is currently , with plans to ship the device this fall. |
Ask A VC: Next World Capital’s Ben Fu On Engineer Recruiting Challenges | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we hosted Next World Capital’s Ben Fu in the studio to talk about big data, recruiting and more. Fu, who has backed Datameer, Datastax, and Good Data among others, talked about the talent crunch, and the challenges founders face when recruiting engineers, especially in the enterprise world. Check out the video above for more! |
Raise Now: VC Funding For Startups At Highest Point In More Than A Decade | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | There is a reason it feels like everyone and anyone is raising money to build a company: They are. According to two studies, capital raised from venture capitalists by growing, private companies is at its highest point since 2001. A pegs the total sum raised in the first quarter at $9.47 billion. By its number, that is the highest figure since the second quarter of 2001, when venture capital invested $11.5 billion. The year-ago quarter according to the study saw a more modest $6.01 billion of inflow. A separate has a slightly different figure for the period, estimating total first quarter investment at $10.7 billion. It also estimates the comparative 2001 figure at $11.5 billion, however. Regardless of which group has it more right, the trend is plain: Huge dollar amounts are up for grabs at the moment, as investors look to pour capital into companies of all stages while the NASDAQ is high, the IPO window is open, and cash-rich industry titans are more than willing to buy talent and products alike. Bubble? It depends on who you ask, but I doubt anyone can say with a straight face that we’re living in financially conservative times. Cracks have appeared, with Square its IPO, Box’s S-1 raising , and King’s struggling to . But that hasn’t from going public and taking on new cash. All that said, it’s important to keep scale in mind. Note the above stats indicate that we’ve reached mid-2001 levels of investment. That says nothing about how high investment was before, naturally. BusinessInsider, in a “Venture Capital Funding Is Nowhere Near The Levels We Saw During The Dot-Com Bubble,” published the following chart [data is from the above-cited MoneyTree study]: Venture capital investment is therefore at record levels when you compare backwards to any moment before the massive implosion of 2001, but remains dwarfed by prior excesses. A few data points: Pre-2008 crash, venture investment topped out at $8.45 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. It topped $28 billion in both the opening quarters of 2000. That’s a pace of around three times the investment we are seeing now, and funds are often going to larger, more established companies with nine-figure revenues. The market is not in perfect balance, and there is quite a lot of stupid money bouncing around funding foolishness. But the total dollar figure for the first quarter of 2014, given how top-heavy it is toward mega deals for late-stage companies, likely isn’t a reason in and of itself to panic. |
Gillmor Gang Live 04.18.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | – Danny Sullivan, Dan Farber, Semil Shah, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. |
Canary Smart Home Security Shows Off Its Smartphone App For The First Time | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | Canary has had a big year. After and picking up an extra , the company is nearly ready to ship its home security product. Due to a couple of hurdles, Canary units won’t arrive until “this summer,” but to tide us over, the team has given us our first real look at the complementary smartphone application. So, when you first receive your Canary, you must pair it to your Wi-Fi and your smartphone. Rather than go through some painful process, the company set it up so that you can pair the unit with the smartphone connect the Canary to the Internet by simply using a standard audio cord, which is included with the device. Once you’re paired, you create a user ID and password and you’re essentially done. From there, the Canary will give you constant access to a live video feed of your home, as well as reads on temperature, air quality, noise, etc. But you can have even more control. Canary lets you sync up to four different units in a single location to get a clear view of every room in the house. You can also set up multiple Canary units in different locations to keep a lookout on your house and your office, for example. For each location, the user can assign contacts as either primary or backups. Primary users (most likely family members of roommates) have complete access to the Canary system at any time, and get notifications if anything is awry. Backups are usually neighbors or close friends who will not have anytime access to the live video, but will be next in line if you don’t respond to a notification. That way, friends and neighbors can rescue your cat if there’s a fire while you’re at work, or call the cops if someone is breaking in and you don’t respond to your notifications. The app also has different modes: “Home”, “Away”, “Privacy” (which stops recording and monitoring) and “Vacation.” Canary already knows when you’re home and away, and you have complete control over the vacation and privacy modes. Perhaps the most interesting part of the Canary app is the ability to flag events. I asked the founders why anyone would need to save recorded clips of “motion events” on their smartphones, as it seems you would either act on them or not need them anymore. However, Canary realizes that not every event has to be a bad one. Maybe Canary picks up your kid’s first steps, or catches a special moment in your life and you want to hold on to that. By flagging the event in the Canary app, that moment is saved and can be downloaded to your computer. Canary doesn’t ship until this summer, but the team is still taking pre-orders . [gallery ids="990011,990004,990002,990010,990012,990013"] |
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