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White House Declines To Deport Bieber, Pivots To Immigration Reform In Its Official Response | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | TechCrunch when the to deport the Canadian Justin Bieber passed the 100,000-signature mark, the minimum threshold to warrant an official response. (At that time, TechCrunch offered to help build a catapult to assist in completing the expulsion.) The White House today responded to the petition with a dodge: Thanks for your and your participation in . Sorry to disappoint, but we won’t be commenting on this one. Hardly a surprise. (The White House did link to that details why sending Biebs home would not be a simple task, legally.) But given that no moment can be wasted in politics, the White House quickly pivoted in its response to a discussion of immigration reform. On a different note, the “ ” petition, which collected more than 150,000 signatures during its open period, still lacks an official response. Surprise. Immigration reform, comprehensive or otherwise, is showing signs of life again in Congress. Speaker of the House John Boehner claims to be “ ” on getting something passed, but House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and the president The Senate plan, passed previously, is dead in the House as it won’t be brought up for a vote. And it isn’t clear if the Senate has any appetite to take up House-passed — provided the House can pass something at all — legislation that would tackle immigration by parts, and not all at once. A small potential glimmer for the techies: If the House does manage to pass smaller, bite-sized immigration fixes, high-skill immigration reform could find itself decoupled from larger immigration reform. That would raise its chances, albeit in a minor way — from oh-so-slim to not-quite-as-oh-so-slim — of passing this year. |
In Just A Few Minutes, SpaceX Will Attempt To Launch A Reusable Rocket — Watch Now! (Update: It’s Over) | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | Quick! Tune in! SpaceX is about to attempt something pretty historic: launching a rocket in such a way that much of it can be reused in later launches. If the launch is successful, the payload of the rocket will spend a few days cruising to the International Space Station, then drop off a bunch of supplies. The (the largest — and often the most expensive — engine component) of the rocket, meanwhile, will break away in a controlled fall back towards earth to (hopefully) be used again, with a pair of landing legs being deployed on the way down. Even if the landing legs deploy properly, the landing is aimed for the water… which the legs can’t actually stand up on. They’ll simulate a landing to test that their landing thrusters seem to work — but in the end, it’ll just fall right into the water. This is more about testing to make sure the process works than trying to actually get this thing to make a perfect landing, but it’d still be damn neat to watch — alas, we probably won’t get to see that bit in the live stream. The rocket launched on schedule at 12:25 p.m. pacific, and is currently en route to the ISS. Success! Looks like everything went smoothly with the first segment of the launch. The rocket launched smoothly (despite bad weather), and will spend the next few days cruising to the ISS. As such, the stream is now over, so we’ve removed it. We’ll know in a few days if the test landing process went as smoothly. to announce that the first stage has landed safely in the Atlantic. Neither NASA nor SpaceX has put up a pre-cut video of today’s launch just yet – I’ll add it here as soon as they do. In its place, here’s a video of the Falcon 9 doing a short-distance test flight — it takes off from its launch pad, hovers for a second, and then lands itself safely a few feet away from its original location. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjWqQPWmsY?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] |
Facebook ‘Nearby Friends’ Will Track Your Location History To Target You With Ads | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | Facebook says it’s not using its to target ads yet, but after I asked why it’s tracking “Location History” it admitted it will eventually use the data for marketing purposes. This morning, the proximity sharing feature began rolling out to iOS users after it’s , and with it I discovered a new “Location History” setting that must be left on to use Nearby Friends. The description below the Location History setting in Nearby Friends reads “When Location History is on, Facebook builds a history of your precise location, even when you’re not using the app. See or delete this information in the Activity Log on your profile.” Notice the careful use of ‘builds a history’ instead of the scarier word ‘tracks’. Behind the Learn More link, Facebook explains that you can turn this tracking off but, “Location History must be turned on for some location feature to work on Facebook, including Nearby Friends.” It also notes that “Facebook may still receive your most recent precise location so that you can, for example, post content that’s tagged with your location or find nearby places.” So even if you turn it off, Facebook will still collect location data when necessary it did before Nearby Friends debuted. If you leave it on, you’ll see your coordinates periodically added to your Activity Log. However, you’ll only see your Location History if you scroll to the bottom of the filter options and look at this category of data specifically. It’s a bit sketchy that these maps don’t show up in the default view of Activity Log like most other actions. It’s almost like Facebook is trying to discourage use of the Clear Location History button: There are plenty of ways Facebook could use this data to make your experience better. The company says “Location History helps us know when it makes the msot sense to notify you (for example, by making sure we don’t send you a notification every time a Facebook friend who works with you is also in the office).” By tracking where you are, Facebook could show you more relevant News Feed stories from friends or Pages nearby. For example, if Facebook sees I’m in the North Beach district of San Francisco instead of my home district of the Mission in the South of the city, it might increase the likelihood that I’d see status updates from friends who live up there, or an Italian restaurant in the area whose Page I Liked. It could also suggest Events happening nearby. If I travel far from home, say to London, Facebook could show more posts from friends who live there or Pages based in the U.K. It could also know not to show me checkins or Events from home that would be irrelevant while I’m away. But there are also big opportunities for Facebook to use Location History to help itself make money. When I asked if it could power advertising, a Facebook spokesperson told me “at this time it’s not being used for advertising or marketing, but in the future it will be.” It wouldn’t confirm exactly how, but I foresee it targeting you with ads for businesses that could actually be in sight or just a few hundred feet away. An ad for a brick-and-mortar clothing shop would surely be more relevant if shown when you’re on the same block. The ability to generate foot traffic that leads to sales could let Location History-powered Facebook ads generate big returns on investment for meatspace business advertisers. That means they’d be willing to pay more for these hyper-local ads than for ones pointed to users who are far away and much less likely to visit their store. Facebook’s own VP Carolyn Everson discussed in a call with , saying “ Luckily, Facebook says that putting Location History in the Activity Log “gives people a way to view and delete the underlying data.” That’s a relief, as it means you could use Nearby Friends with Location History turned on and then clear your history in the Activity Log to prevent that data from being used for marketing if you’re really concerned about that. The company explains that “When you hit delete we remove data from the user interface immediately and start working to permanently delete the data from the system.” While there’s always a vocal minority angry about Facebook’s aggressive ad targeting, and the wider public is generally uneasy about it, we’ve seen that these feelings don’t necessarily change people’s behavior in the long-term. That ‘s why Facebook is still thriving with big revenues. And over time I believe the world will get more comfortable with ad targeting. There’s going to be ads on Facebook no matter what, and I personally would rather see relevant ones for local businesses than ads for random apps or websites. Still, the realization that Location History will be used for ad targeting could scare some people away from using Nearby Friends. This sentiment is dangerous for Facebook because Nearby Friends is off by default and users have to actively turn it on. It’s also stuck in the navigation menu of its main iOS and Android apps. If users turn it off or refuse to turn it on in the first place, it may be too buried for them to voluntarily go in and activate it. Facebook may have anticipated this, which could partly be why it plans to use News Feed teaser stories like “4 friends are nearby” to try to coax users into turning on Nearby Friends and Location History. With both social and marketing privacy concerns looming, though, Facebook will have to clearly demonstrate that Nearby Friends makes your life better by helping you gather with friends, or people won’t give up their data to use it. |
Gusto Debuts A Smarter, More Powerful Email App For iPhone | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | There’s no lack of startups trying to rethink the mobile email experience, such as Mailbox, Boxer, CloudMagic, Triage, or Acompli, to name just a few. Now a new application called is throwing its hat into the ring, as well, with a smart email application that helps you more easily find files and photos within dedicated tabs, plus a powerful search feature that lets you refine keyword searches through a variety of filters, including file type, account, date, read/unread status, and more. The company behind the product has quite the history. Originally called Sendgine, it was previously focused on building a secure messaging platform for legal communications, or something of a “Basecamp meets Gmail” type of product, explains CEO Shawn Schwegman. Schwegman, a technology industry vet with decades of experience and an “appetite for risk,” as he puts it, was brought in to run Sendgine when the company had just two weeks of cash left. (It had previously raised $1.2 million from angels, friends and family.) He was originally recruited for the CMO position, having served as CMO and, more briefly, CTO, at both Overstock.com and ChaCha. However, after hearing about the situation, Schwegman said he’d only take the CEO job if available, warning them that they pivot the company entirely, dump the code, launch a new, mobile-first product, and change the name. The board quickly agreed. Sendgine’s co-founders Jeff Goens and Colin Matthews are no longer involved day-to-day, but Goens retains a board seat. Since Schwegman joined Sendgine now Gusto, he’s brought in a new team of over half a dozen experienced engineers and architects and raised another $1.3 million ahead of launch. The idea to do mobile email came about because it offered both the “biggest opportunity and biggest problem” to solve, he says. Schwegman initially thought they could re-use some code from Sendgine, but as it turns out, Gusto had to be built from the ground up. As for the email client itself, it’s fairly impressive for such a young product. The app mimics the default Apple Mail app’s look and feel, with the same font, spacing, the little blue dots indicating unread messages, the bottom-right “Compose” button, swipe-to-archive gestures, and more – all which makes Gusto feel less foreign. But then it augments the experience with tabs at the top where you can surface just the files or photos you’ve been emailed. You can tap a button on the bottom-left to change the view from the standard list to expanded messages to two rows of smaller thumbnails. You can pinch to expand the message-list view to show more lines of email text and then pinch again to return to the normal view. You can also more easily attach files or photos when composing new emails, as Gusto can quickly surface the list of all those files already sent to you from the attachment interface. The files are listed by date and are searchable. And most importantly, you can tap the search icon in Gusto for access to a very precise search feature that lets you narrow down a keyword search by mail account, folder, date, read status, attachments, or other metadata when searching for files and photos. For now, Gusto only works with Gmail, but a release due out in a few weeks will add support for Yahoo and Facebook. The latter option will allow you to surface just the notifications that are important to you – like the status updates or new photos from a significant other or family members, for example. In later releases, Gusto will add more mail accounts (the app lists Aol, Outlook.com and “other” as coming soon) and other cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox. Some of the features Gusto offers are more similar to certain other email apps like Mailbox, which focuses on fast search and integrations with cloud services, too, or Acompli, which also breaks out files into their own dedicated sections, among other things. But the larger vision for Gusto is to be more than just an email client. “We’ll really provide that one unified view of all files, photos and emails across all your accounts – that’s the goal.” The app was soft-launched on the iOS App Store a few weeks ago, and hasn’t done any marketing. Of the handful (~2,500) of early adopters, 25 percent are returning to the app daily, which is promising. The Indianapolis-based company has $1.3 million in pre-product seed funding from , which has been on a rolling close since November. Gusto will likely raise another $1 million in seed funding for additional operating capital and marketing. Eventually, the company will go the freemium route to generate revenue. Gusto is . |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Siri Hack, Amazon Smartphone, And Galaxy Gear | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | ! But don’t panic — it’s apparently a really fun hack that gives Siri access to your other apps. Meanwhile, rumors are swirling over with 3D-gesture features. Plus, we’re taking a good hard look at the Galaxy Gear smart watch equipment from Samsung. Or, more accurately, we diverge into . Also, it’s Good Friday. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and .
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 .
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Intro Music by . |
Supreme Court Justices Say They’re Likely To Rule On NSA Surveillance | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia think that the nation’s top court will on the NSA’s surveillance activities. The two, appearing in front of the National Press Club, both touched on the subject, with Justice Scalia calling the Supreme Court the “ While Ginsburg and Scalia are intellectually antithetical, they are personal friends. In , the two judges “agreed that freedom of speech is the most important of the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights.” This is topical given the recent awarding of the Pulitzer prize to the Guardian and the Washington Post for their reporting on the NSA’s mass surveillance activities. Justice Ginsburg went on to praise the media, and even excuse it of possible sin: “I think the press has played a tremendously important role as watchdog over what the government is doing. That keeps the government from getting too far out of line. Yes, there are excesses in the press, but we have to put up with that.” How the Supreme Court might vote on the NSA’s work, especially regarding the constitutionality of those activities in the context of the Fourth Amendment, will be pivotal. Potential Supreme Court rulings on legal cases regarding the surveillance programs of the NSA could take some of the wind out of legislative efforts, provided the issue rose to the nation’s highest court in quick order. If Congress passes moderate reform, and the Supreme Court hands down full censure of bulk data collection — another term for mass surveillance — the work of the two chambers will have been little more than theater. However, if the Court upholds the NSA and its efforts as being within the rules of the Constitution, that could give the intelligence organization more political weight in the Capitol that it could use to push back against those who want to limit its power. When this hits the nation’s top bench, expect fireworks. |
Airbnb Has Closed Its $500M Round Of Funding At A $10B Valuation, Led By TPG | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | TechCrunch has learned that , the fast-growing site that lets people become hoteliers by renting out sofas, rooms or entire private homes, has now closed its latest round of funding: $500 million, led by private equity firm TPG, at a $10 billion valuation, according to our sources. This brings the total raised by Airbnb to $826 million. Negotiations around the funding were previously reported by the , which reported that TPG and Dragoneer Investment Group were leading the round, and that mutual funds including T. Rowe Price were also involved. Update: WSJ is that it’s a $450 million round, same valuation, with Dragoneer, Sequoia and T. Rowe Price also named as investors. We understand from sources that Allen & Co. — known for its advising Facebook on its $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp, working on Twitter’s IPO, and helping Dropbox with its latest, — has been helping to orchestrate this round for Airbnb. The deal is an interesting one for TPG. Its TPG Growth division is a , another startup innovating at “the edge of the forest” (Yammer’s David Sacks’ description of the group of companies applying tech to disrupt non-technical fields). Through TPG Capital, it has extensive holdings in the property and travel markets already, specifically through its ; and part-ownership of . It’s not clear how and if any of TPG’s holdings will come into play in relation to Airbnb, but it’s tempting to think of how they could. Airbnb’s previous, came from a fairly large pool of investors: Y-Combinator (where it was incubated in 2009), Sequoia Capital, Youniversity Ventures, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Keith Rabois, Elad Gil, Jeremy Stoppelman, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Jeff Bezos, Digital Sky Technologies, CrunchFund (run by Michael Arrington, who founded TechCrunch), Ashton Kutcher, Eniac Ventures and Founders Fund. We understand that some past investors are also part of this latest round. Since opening for business five years ago, Airbnb has taken the travel accommodation industry by storm. Effectively, it created and now dominates a new market segment — private homeowners use its cloud-based platform to list and collect payments for their rooms and houses, with mobile apps and social integrations all greasing the wheels of the Airbnb machine. Airbnb now has over 600,000 listings across nearly 200 countries. The WSJ reported earlier this month that revenues in 2013 were about $250 million, more than double what it made the year before. Like Uber and other companies that have disrupted older and more established industries, that rapid growth has drawn a lot of heat from incumbent competitors — in Airbnb’s case from the hotel industry — which have been played out on in different cities. Airbnb is not always fast to reveal what it is doing on the fundraising front. A $250 million round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, which Airbnb raised in 2012, was only disclosed publicly (at TC Disrupt in Berlin, as it happened). In other words, it isn’t clear when the company when the company will announce this round, either. What it will mean is that Airbnb, now at a $10 billion valuation, may be less quick to run for the public markets. That’s perhaps a sign of the times, with many pointing to an impending “ ” of the IPO window for tech companies, evidenced by a among listing companies pricing their offerings below their expected ranges. The WSJ and Re/Code are reporting to be $450 million instead of the $500 million we’ve heard. While we’re not sure of the exact reason for the reporting discrepancy, the last time we broke funding news like this, with an overage in raise amount, . In Snapchat’s case, the missing $20 million in other outlets’ coverage was due to a secondary sale of stock by the founders, which we had included in our total. |
Facebook Says Paper Users Browse 80 Stories A Day, Adds Features That Let It Replace FB For iOS | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | Facebook just released , an update that for Facebook for iOS. It also gave the first momentum update on Paper since its Febraury 3rd launch, saying “ “. It didn’t release a user count, though, and are calling it a flop due to low App Store chart rankings and anecdotal evidence. It’s still a bit early to make a call on whether Paper is a failure though, as it’s still rounding out the core product and Facebook hasn’t pushed growth yet. Paper slowly declined in the App Store charts after its launch in early February. , It slid down past #50 in the US social networking app charts in March to hover around #100 in April, but has picked up to around #60 for the last week. On the overall app chart, it fell from #2 on launch day to well below #1000 earlier this month. Surely by promoting it to Facebook for iOS users, the company could boost user counts, but it seems interested in polishing the standalone app first. However, its first foray into virality with a March update that added private sharing of articles by SMS, email, and Facebook Message didn’t stop its App Store decline.
What really matters is retention, though. And that’s what Facebook is aiming to improve today. Rather than just a feed reading app, . Today’s feature updates make it even better at substituting for your main Facebook app. Facebook added Birthdays and Events alerts to the notifications list in Paper so you don’t miss them just because you’re sidestepping the core app. Groups now display unread post counts so you can keep up to date, but they’re awkwardly only accessible by dragging down to reveal the navigation menu and then opening the hamburger button in the top corner. Facebook had an artist draw custom article covers for 9 more publications, including For Paper, success isn’t a ton of users that open it once and awhile. It’s everday usage by forward-thinking people bored of the classic Facebook app that needs to stay simple so it’s easy for the whole world to use. If these new notifications and features can keep users from slipping back to Facebook for iOS, their loyalty could inspire word of mouth growth for the app. The question will be if a polished version of Paper offers enough added value and delight to get users over the hump of learning an entirely new interface. |
Taking On Amazon, Target Expands Online Subscriptions Program To More Categories, Lowers Prices | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | Target has significantly expanded its subscription-based e-commerce service, first launched last fall as a response to Amazon’s popular “Subscribe and Save” program, by increasing the number of online items available for subscription purchase from just 200 to now 1,500. While the company’s original focus was on baby-care items, the now revamped service offers similar savings for other everyday purchases, including cleaning supplies, health and beauty aids, pet treats and training pads, grocery items, home and offices supplies, and more. The Minneapolis-headquartered retailer first debuted “ ” as a pilot program in September, with just 150 items related to baby-care, like diapers, wipes, training pants, and other regular purchases designed to appeal to new parents. Customers were able to order these items to be delivered in four, six, eight, ten and twelve-week installments, but unlike with competitor Amazon, there was not an additional savings for ordering on a subscription basis at the time of launch. That has now changed. Previously, customers were offered free shipping, and those paying with the Target card or Target VISA could save an additional 5 percent on purchases. Those programs remain in place today, but now the retailer is offering an additional 5 percent discount on all subscriptions orders. That means those paying with their Target cards could save a total of 10 percent on their orders while also not paying shipping. In addition, some items have extra savings attached to them on a promotional basis – for instance, a special offer found on several items across the site (like this Tide detergent, e.g.) is promising a $10 gift card to those buying three items from the “Household” category. The move is likely meant to encourage users to sign up for regular shipments, which, over time, would be worth more to the company than the initial $10 loss. Target also tells us that the subscriptions service grew quickly after its initial launch, and now accounts for more than 15% of online sales for eligible items. To be clear, that’s not 15 percent of total sales, but 15 percent of the eligible items’ sales on Target.com. The company declined to break out its online sales figures, however. Target also last fall a pick-up program, similar to other online retailers including large competitor Wal-Mart, which allows shoppers to buy online and then pick-up at the store. That program began with 35,000 items and has since grown to 60,000, and now accounts for 10 percent of Target’s online business. |
La Belle Assiette Launches Its On-Demand Chef Service In Belgium And The U.K. | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | French startup just opened shop in Belgium. La Belle Assiette is a sort of on-demand chef service. You can browse the site, find your chef and book a meal directly from the service — a chef will then come to your home or office. The startup will also roll out its offering in the U.K., Switzerland and Luxembourg in the next six weeks. Here’s how the service works. Next time you’re having a dinner party at home, you can opt for La Belle Assiette instead of having to cook for 12 persons. You can filter your chef by price, food, popularity and more — chefs range from $30 or $40 per person to hundreds of dollars per person. The chef will buy the ingredients and clean up before leaving. It’s not a cheap service in any way. Think of it like bringing a fancy restaurant to your home. And it works. La Belle Assiette first opened in September 2013 with 38 chefs. Today, I can find 272 chefs on the website. You just need to book 24 hours in advance, and there will always be a chef available. In March, the company handled 6 events per day on average in France. The monthly revenue was around $120,000 (€86,000). In other words, the company’s growth is pretty high. The startup raised $480,000 (€350,000) so far. A few chefs are already quitting their other jobs to switch exclusively and go full time with La Belle Assiette. For example, the most successful chef earned $12,000 in March. When I asked co-founder and CEO Stephen Leguillon why chefs were signing up for La Belle Assiette, he told me that they were looking for a simple platform to advertise, handle their calendars and have an online presence. The startup provides all that, and even handles billing. In exchange, the startup takes a 12 percent cut. La Belle Assiette just opened in Belgium, and is already working on getting more than 70 chefs in each of its next countries — the U.K., Switzerland and Luxembourg. The startup has a couple of American competitors — started out on the East Coast, while was created in the Bay Area. La Belle Assiette’s main challenge is to take over the European market before its competitors go international. |
Telerik Open Sources Most Of Its Kendo UI HTML5 Framework | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | , the company behind the popular Kendo UI library, this week that it is open sourcing the vast majority of Kendo UI’s tools and JavaScript framework features. This new Kendo UI Core package is licensed under the , which allows developers to use it for both commercial and non-commercial projects. The company is still keeping some of the most-often used Kendo UI features under its commercial license, including its , and graphing tools, for example. In total, Kendo UI Core will include about 75 percent of the Kendo UI features. The Core tools do, however, feature 38 UI widgets, including all of Kendo UI Mobile for creating hybrid mobile apps, as well as all of the core framework features for templates, data binding and input verification. They include widgets for color pickers, autocomplete, calendars and others. The library is also tightly integrated with , and the UI widgets are ready for use with many popular libraries, including . As Telerik’s Director of Product Management for Kendo UI Brandon Satrom told me, the team decided to hold back some of the tools that are mostly being used by enterprises. These also consume most of the company’s engineering efforts. “What we are trying to do here is to give back,” he told me. “We recognize that as HTML5 becomes more pervasive, we want to give developers a world-class set of tools.” He also stressed that while some companies open source projects when they are reaching their end of life, this isn’t the case here at all. Going forward, the Kendo UI team will also take contributions from the community, and it has already set up a GitHub repository for taking suggestions and filing bugs. Satrom told me that the company had explored this move for a while. It already offered some Kendo web UI features under a very restrictive GPL license. The team decided that in order to push this initiative forward, however, it had to open up a wider range of tools under a more permissive license. |
Who Wants A Ticket To The Disrupt NY Hackathon? | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | Ready. Set. Go. Our events team just released another batch of tickets to the Disrupt NY Hackathon. You can grab one below. Last year using the Foursquare and Plaid APIs, took home the top prize. Teams are forming now so grab a ticket while they’re still available. Space is very limited and the tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. More tickets will be released in coming weeks. As the show draws closer, the APIs and judges will also be announced. But snag a ticket now. This is the best Hackathon in New York City all year. The Manhattan Center will be filled with nerds, caffeinated goodies and plenty of flying darts thanks to Nerf. There are many ways for companies to partner with the Hackathon. At Disrupt NY, we’ve had sponsored API platforms for hackers to develop on, as well as several contests, with companies offering cash and in-kind prizes. To learn how you can provide support for the developer community, please contact sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com. 12:30pm – Registration opens (come fed or bring a brown bag lunch, beverages served)
Dedicated area for people to network to form hack teams 1:30pm – Hacking Kickoff 2:00 – 9:00pm – API workshops scheduled in 30 minute intervals (To Be Announced) 7:00pm – Dinner Midnight – Food and snacks, courtesy of our many sponsors
7:00am – Breakfast served 9:30am – Hacking concludes and hacks submitted to wiki 10:00am – General public welcome to enter to attend hackathon presentations 11:00am – Hackathon presentations begin 2:00pm* – Hackathon will conclude with final awards and recognitions will be provided by the judges. *The final awards may be held earlier or later depending on the duration of hack presentations. Please note, times are subject to change For up-to-the-minute details on Twitter, follow @hackdisrupt For day-of questions or details, stay tuned… |
Every Fitness App And Wearable Should Have A Mood Tracker | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | Along with its many other benefits, regular workouts contribute to better moods and energy levels. As a result, I am constantly surprised to see how many fitness tracking apps and wearable devices lack a mood tracking feature. My interest in this is personal. When I was teenager, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. Since then, I’ve had recurrent episodes, including a couple that were severe enough for me to be hospitalized. Over the last two decades, I’ve tried a wide range of treatment regimens. Some included therapy, others included medication, and most included a combination of both. My doctors rarely recommended regular workouts, however, even though there have been a multitude of studies showing its effectiveness for alleviating the symptoms of mood disorders, including depression and anxiety, . Finally, about two years before my 30th birthday, one of my doctors told me that if he could, he would make regular exercise a requirement before agreeing to work with a patient, because he believed so strongly in its effectiveness. That struck a chord and since then I’ve tried to keep up a workout routine, even when I’m struggling with a depressive episode. Some days all I can do is walk around the block, but that’s better than staying in bed all day. To be sure, several of the most popular fitness tracking products, such as the series, , and , do have basic mood trackers. There are also several mood tracking apps available, including (it can integrate with , which does not have its own mood tracker), , and the , that help you find correlations between your workout frequency and mood. I believe, however, that mood tracking should be seen as a basic option for every fitness tracking tech product, not just the best-selling ones. Furthermore, mood-tracking features should move beyond the rudimentary emoticon or number-based scale that most use. If you are coping with depression, anxiety, or another mental illness, it can be hard to muster the motivation to exercise, even if workouts were once a part of your daily routine. But just as regular exercise helps prevent heart disease, obesity, and a host of other ailments, it can also ease the symptoms of anxiety and depression. The suggests that people work out 30 minutes a day, three to five times a week. But even just 10 to 15 minutes of exercise at a time can make a positive impact by encouraging the release of neurotransmitters and endorphins. Making exercise into a habit also helps people gain confidence as they meet daily goals and distract from negative thoughts. Furthermore, a followup to a found that exercise’s positive effects lasted longer than antidepressants. But research also shows that exercise needs to be a long-term habit if you want it to be an effective part of your arsenal of tools against depression or anxiety. If you suffer from a mood disorder, however, and are in the midst of an episode, it can be very hard to muster the motivation, and that is why fitness devices can be a valuable tool — as long as they have a mood-tracking feature. Last year, while I was recovering from my most recent bout with depression, I purchased a fitness tracker. I loved its smart design and the fact that I could track my daily progress with a glance. That frequently gave me the motivation to walk another kilometer, even if I was feeling lousy. I also appreciate Misfit’s updates to the Shine’s app, which included automatic sleep tracking. The Misfit Shine lacks a mood tracker, however, and so I reluctantly gave it up and switched to the Jawbone Up24, which lets you record how you feel with a little cartoon face that runs the gamut from ecstatic to downtrodden. Such a rudimentary mood tracker is highly subjective, of course, and when I’m depressed I’m likely to pick a frowning face even if I’m feeling physically fine. The Jawbone Up24 also only lets you record one mood per day. [Correction: A Jawbone spokesperson told me “ If I’m depressed, my emotions can fluctuate dramatically (though, fortunately, I tend to feel better after I exercise). I would appreciate the ability to track my physical energy levels and mood separately, in addition to making new entries throughout the day. But though it is very basic, the Jawbone Up24’s feature has allowed me to more clearly see the benefits of exercising and eating healthily, and that in turn motivates me to keep up my healthy habits. It also creates an important daily record that I can reference during psychiatric appointments. I’m not arguing that adding mood-tracking features to fitness apps is a magic solution for depression or anxiety. Nothing is. But mood tracking isn’t just valuable for people who are coping, as I am, with mental illness. In the long-term, a well-designed mood tracker can give users important data and inspire them to live a healthier lifestyle. From a business point of view, this will also motivate users to keep buying updated versions of their wearable or engaged with an app. If one of the benefits of exercise is to improve our sense of well-being, then all fitness tech companies should not only incorporate mood trackers into their products, but create innovative ones that will guide their users toward better self-understanding. |
Crowdfunded Gadgets That Frame And Notify | Ross Rubin | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | There’s nothing that grandparents love more than photos of their grandkids. Photo sharing these days is easy with the Internet and social media, but grandparents are notorious for having trouble using these new technologies. From a distance, sharing photos with older people can be difficult. Famatic is a digital picture frame with an added touch screen bonus. People can share photos via wi-fi directly to the frame so that grandparents can enjoy a slideshow of new material right from their living room. The 8 GB device connects to Instagram, Facebook and e-mail as well so that people sharing on these platforms can easily upload their photos or videos to Famatic. The screen shows who shared the photo or video along with the caption and allows users to comment on each photo. As great as smartphones are, the frequency with which they alert users with notifications can be extremely distracting. Setting custom notifications can single out the truly important information, but can be time consuming to set up and can be impolite in social situations. The ORBneXt is an updated version of the Orb art piece/single-pixel notifier created by Ambient Devices in its early days. It’s a hand-held, easy to use accessory that can sync up with any phone wirelessly and display notification information through a series of ambient colors. The ORBneXt connects to a phone and its Wi-Fi network by resting on top of the device, and then , using a blinking-light sequence similar to the one used by Quirky’s smart devices, can be programmed through its app to monitor information like weather, sports scores, stocks, and more. That information can then be tied to colors (for example, turn red when the weather’s getting warmer), so that the displaying color carries with it information that matters to its user’s life. The ORBneXt is made with a stylish Japanese glass housing, and has an easily modifiable brain in addition to its flexible IFTTT-enabled app. No matter how hard people try, it seems like once high school and university are complete, it’s hard to maintain the same level of friendship with people. As friends move away and professional and family lives become more prominent, keeping closely in touch with people grows more difficult. The Feeling Skin is a case for iPhone 5 and 5S that aims to bring back that simple, honest level of communication by creating simple, easy-access notifications. The display light on the Feeling Skin glows either blue or red to show when friends are in a good or bad mood respectively. To display a mood, users record a video of their current location and situation and display a mood to it. For those who want to be proactive, a button is available at the bottom of the case to ping added friends to post their current mood. Additionally, the Feeling Skin acts as a battery pack for the iPhone, offering an additional 80 percent battery life. |
Wanderful Media Raises $14.5 Million Bringing Newspaper Circulars To Mobile Phones | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | Circulars (the advertising inserts with coupons from local retailers) are still critical to revenues for local newspapers. In an effort to bring them into the digital age, a consortium of some of the largest media conglomerates are investing another $14.5 million into , to bring them to mobile devices. The new round brings Wanderful’s total funding to over $50 million from investors including Advance Digital, A. H. Belo Corporation, Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., Cox Media Group, The E. W. Scripps Company, Gannett Co., Inc., GateHouse Media, Inc., Graham Holdings Co., Hearst Corporation, Lee Enterprises, MediaNews Group and The McClatchy Company. The new financing also coincides with the launch of Wanderful’s app for android devices. The company launched in 2013 with an app for the iOS platform. “We made a decision last year of really making a bet on the iPhone and Android platforms and bringing this content to people based on where they’re at,” says chief executive Ben Smith. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company operates the shopping tabs on several newspapers’ Web sites like and the . Smith compares media companies’ investment in Wanderful Media to similar investments in sites like . Since its launch the company, which was formed with a $22 million investment in 2012, has generated less than $10 million in revenue, says Smith. “Our content is put in front of 100 million monthly uniques,” he says. “We’re the shopping portion of every large newspaper in the country.” Smith, who previously served as the chief executive at , was recruited by Gannet and Hearst in 2012 to help launch Wanderful Media. “I… gave them the perspective that I thought they were going down the wrong pipe,” says Smith. “If the web was going to reinvent retail shopping it would have happened in 2001 and 2002. We needed to go hard toward mobile and tablet.” Wanderful manages advertising relationships with large national retailers, but relies on regional newspapers to manage relationships with local and regional retailers, according to Smith. “A paper like the Houston Chronicle: their revenue cut if this plays out will be millions of dollars per month,” says Smith. The realization for big media companies is that newspapers no longer control the shopping experience or the car buying experience. “They have to build new audiences because they lost the audiences they had in the past,” Smith says. Several other sites and apps have launched to improve on local sales and discounts. Earlier this year went public with its online coupon and rebate service. Sequoia Capital has backed , which is pitching a similar application for consumers. Wanderful is rolling out new features in addition to its availability on android devices. The company is also launching location-based services for both android and iOS devices. |
What Games Are: What Became Of Social Games? | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | A couple of days ago I read the news about Mark Pincus stepping down as chief product officer at Zynga. It’s not surprising given that the company continues to hand over fist and hasn’t really been able to muster the same energy behind products that it used to. Perhaps there’s a lesson for all of us there in the perils of building entirely on metrics and fast-following/cloning. There comes, , a time when the ease of replicating runs out. And the time when the resulting culture can’t innovate. Concurrent to that news was this week’s Games for Change festival. Primarily a gathering of academic, educational and associated game developers, the festival is about the influential potential of games. It tends to be the place where think-tank educational games, games made to teach people, games about health and so on all mingle. And it features talks by avant garde game makers and awards for games based on innovation or social impact. Where name-designers like Jenova Chen can be heard to talk about how “social” should really be about . As I found myself thinking about those two poles, about the mechanized model social-as-in-leveraging-Facebook versus the social-as-in-community-building, I found myself thinking how long it had been since either really felt relevant any more. And, Carrie Bradshaw style, I started to wonder: Whatever happened to social games? One of the things you realize about the games industry after mooching around it for a few years is that there’s a consistently high degree of cognitive dissonance. Even at the highest levels people tend to harbor convictions about what their business is or could do that have entirely nothing to do with what it actually is or does. From the outside looking in this often looks like a sales line, but actually it’s usually not. Those people who say that games are the future of this or the enabling tool for that tend to believe it. But while this is what they espouse, the products they turn out are often the opposite of that. They’re often small, grubby and under-executed. The more I think on it the more I think that “dissonance” describes the social games movement to a tee. Because ultimately what it was trying to sell was the ideals of Greenpeace powered by the economics of Vegas, a package of a future of play and yet the sold on a bed of weak product designed to do little more than manipulate attention. Social game companies told two stories at once. The first story was the high minded bringing of players together, the world built on play, play for the common good, for everyone, even in some cases for the advancement of humanity. The sea change in how users seemed to be playing inspired a lot of people across the spectrum. People started to think and talk about how games could connect and help bridge gaps. Jane McGonigal told stories of how mothers and daughters reconnected over games of , and Raph Koster gave talks about the potential of asynchronous play. It was a bit fuzzy, something about the spirit of board and party games, about the joy of playing together and the potential of collaborative play, but it was big. Social gaming brought many outsiders into the industry interested in doing things with games. There were companies with games designed to help depression for example, and companies with games focused on trying to encourage environmentalism. Social seemed to have a lot of potential for games and games for social likewise. The second story was about getting as many bums on seats as possible and finding high rollers. Some of this you could understand. When Facebook opened up the user pipe and a few one-man developers created quick apps that somehow got a million users in a day, it caught many of us by surprise. However a few people, such as Pincus and Shervin Pishevar, foresaw the opportunity and set up companies to explore it, and quickly realized that it would be a race. Early developers scrambled to get on there as fast as possible. Quality didn’t matter nearly as much as responsiveness, and speed was all. At the same time the business case was compelling because of the fairy dust of virtual goods. There was a lot of speculation on how the Asian model of monetizing games would eventually tip over into the West (which it did) and some form of long-tail/freemium/Chris-Anderson zeitgeist would happen. Everybody who was anybody saw the potential of connecting the free marketing of Facebook viral channels to the whale-inducing graph and it all sounded like kerching! Social game makers talked very enthusiastically about pinch points and delayed gratification, about the value of reward cycles and so on. They got very squee about diagrams of user funnels and and Eric Ries’s lean startup movement. It was all “minimum viable product” this and “customer validation” that. As contract development became a part of the scene and various larger companies wanted to get into the space, the language of MVPs it became like a sales script. Don’t worry, the developers would say, we can build a small version and then iterate. There were also the many rather rangy promises of A/B testing. Social game makers used to boast about how responsive their games were compared to fuddy duddy old videogame studios, about how easy it was to put Christmas trees in their games and sell $2m of them. Everybody involved was convinced that they had solved the problem of games for all time, whether for raw commerce or more high minded ideals. They honestly thought they were geniuses, that the shape of the industry had changed forever. When in fact all that was going on was a user gold rush, one that was going to soon stop. While the pitch of social games may have been lean companies creating MVPs to verify markets, using metrics to evolve, monetizing like Vegas and yet claim that this was all for the betterment of mankind, there was one continuing problem. The games were free, and people like to play free things for a while, and some of the games got very good at figuring out best to hold onto those people. Yet the games were also basically dreadful. When all was said and done, the actual value of social games to users was that they were free cloud-hosted games that maintained save states. Unlike web casual games, for example, which tended to be single-state affairs, social games maintained your farm/city/character/whatever. They were roleplaying games that people could bounce into a play a few turns before going away again. Whereas most of the other traits of social games, the user graphs and friend comparison charts, the gifting and the sharing? Most of it was just a novelty for users at first and then a massive annoyance and then literally the thing they hated most in all the world. They were valuable to the game maker, but not to the user. The users just sort of hated them after a while. Then there was the content. There had to that point likely never been a market so inclined to crib and copy from one another as social games (an instinct we still see with and clones, and no doubt soon, ). Oodles of games thoroughly copied each other from head to toe under the self-justification of fast-following, but only a lawyer would claim that they were innovating. For example poor user interface conventions were often copied from one game to the next entirely uncritically, often in the mistaken belief that the source game in question had worked out some “secret sauce” formula for success. Tons of barely disguised cheesy tactics comprised the sum total of all the learning in the social games space. Widespread adoption of were justified on pretty dubious pretexts. Those in the industry talked endlessly of their playbooks, as though they were alchemists holding onto some deep magic of games that nobody could quite name, but they were just scouring the charts of AppData to see what new thing was rising and then jumping all over it. Everyone could, for example, talk up the ideas of MVPs and metrics and A/B tests, but few actually knew how to do those things and even then they didn’t lead to innovation. Social games also compromise the Facebook experience itself, and so the company eventually toned down their access. That was the moment when social games started to turn sour. In essence Facebook moved from the stance of opt-out social to opt-in, which killed all the cheap and easy virality, and many of the more aspirational ideals associated. As it became more apparent that marketing costs were going to be a factor (and an escalating one at that) social game makers pivoted toward safe-ground ideas and figuring out to get into iPhone. Or made smart exits for fat paychecks. The word that springs to mind most when I think of “social games” is confluence. The platform that powered it came along at a time when other technology (such as cloud services) were in a good-enough shape to run big games, and at the same time as lean, gamification and similar ideas were gaining currency. It sang a song that sounded great to everyone, but it all turned out to be a bit one-note. A confluence of events that appeared to be something bigger than they actually proved to be. It’s notable how the social gaming idea itself just started to fade away. The talk of giant board games and communities failed to turn into anything real. The numbers started to level off and then turn tail while advertising costs skyrocketed. Alternative venues for social games kind of kicked around for a while, such as the open web or Google+, but none of it really came to anything. And all that social-impact stuff? Well it turns out nobody really cares about what a videogame has to teach them about upcycling, or solar energy, or green living or social issues. We used to talk about social games all the time with verve and brio and watch figures like Ian Bogost rightly satirize it with . We used to create very exciting-sounding social gaming businesses based on exploding market opportunities and run hell-for-leather to VCs to fund them. We used to rage and stare agog at the great mass of users playing terribly shallow games. Now we just… don’t. Some social games are still there, chugging away as is their wont and likely for a long time to come. Many games integrate sharing and social comparison, for boasting about high scores, but in that sense “social” has largely just devolved into a function. Was social gaming all just hot air? Maybe. Facebook has long stopped being seen as a killer destination, replaced by mobile and tablet platforms able to offer richer experiences. Other social networks such as Google+ and Hi5 never really got anywhere with trying to make a better case for social games (and therefore for users to translate over) and much of what’s happening in the instant messenger space likely takes over whatever’s remaining of the novelty-viral effect. Don Mattrick continues to reshape Zynga into a regular gaming company and is bringing in talent to refocus products, but it’s six to one and pick’em whether that will really go anywhere. Mostly what I’m saying is the buzz has largely moved on from social, and that’s a good thing. No doubt the same high ideals will return in time, perhaps powered by some new innovation or device. Will we even call it “social” then? Likely not. |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 18 | null |
What’s Next For PonoMusic, The Startup That Took Kickstarter By Storm And Raised $6.2M | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | Once in a while, a Kickstarter project just hits a nerve and compels thousands of people to donate money to make sure it becomes a reality. , a startup that aims to create a music download service and physical music player focusing on ultra high-quality sound, is the most recent example. PonoMusic, which set out to raise $800,000, ultimately by the time of its fundraising deadline a little over a week ago. Endorsements from music industry luminaries such as co-founder Neil Young, investor Bruce Springsteen, and many others certainly didn’t hurt PonoMusic’s cause — but it’s not celebrity clout alone that can bring this kind of success. Ultimately, even though there are of the claims PonoMusic has made, it seems the Pono Player is something that thousands of people can’t wait to have for themselves. So following the funding, there is no time for PonoMusic to rest on its laurels. In many ways, now the hard part really begins. I met with Pono Music’s CEO John Hamm to get a hands-on look at a prototype of the Pono Player and hear more about the company’s vision for the months ahead. According to him, the first production-level players are set to ship later this year in October, so all hands are on deck working toward that. A major focus at the moment is on hiring staff for its San Francisco headquarters, and proper VC funding is likely on the way. Watch us discuss that and more in the video embedded above. |
Kantar: Windows Phone ‘Stutters’ Amid Android Price Competition, iPhone 5S Is Apple’s Buffer | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | Last Friday, Microsoft finally of Nokia’s devices business, but it’s coming into its new position as a mobile hardware maker with no less a challenge than Nokia has had for the last couple of years. According to the latest 12-week figures from — a market research division of WPP — Windows Phone accounted for 8.1% of smartphone sales in the 12 weeks to the end of March across the top five markets in Europe (the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany), with Android taking 70.7% of sales and iOS 19.2%. And Europe seems to be Windows Phone’s best market at the moment. In the U.S. Windows Phone took 5.3% of sales, while in Australia it took just under 6%; in China it was 1%; and in Japan, just under 1%. What’s going on? Put simply, the Windows Phone operating system running Nokia’s and other devices remains a distant third when it comes to smartphone sales in key markets across Europe, the U.S. and Asia. And that has a double effect. First, in the game of economies of scale, Microsoft will find it more challenging. Second, in the game of mindshare among consumers and developers, it means that Windows Phone devices are for many still not appearing as must-haves either in terms of device ownership, nor in terms of platforms for building new apps and other services. At issue for Windows Phone is the double pressure of price and volume of Android handsets, with both playing a big role in keeping Windows Phone largely locked out of the smartphone boom. That boom has seen markets like the UK reach smartphone penetration of 71%, with smartphones accounting for 88% of mobile sales. That’s opportunity for those who are clicking with consumers and carriers. Dominic Sunnebo, a director at Kantar, writes that the main challenge for Windows is that Nokia, very much the main and dominant Windows Phone OEM, has based a lot of its fightback strategy on wooing new smartphone users with entry-level phones. The problem is that these devices have not managed to compete well enough with the Android camp. “Windows had a tough start to the year as a result of its entry-level Nokia models facing fierce competition from low-end Motorola, LG and Samsung Android smartphones,” he writes. Even before being taken over by Microsoft, Nokia’s device fate had become inextricably connected to that of Redmond. “Nokia really is the vast majority of Windows now, so any trend you see for Windows is being driven by Nokia,” Sunnebo told me in an interview. “Essentially Nokia was starting to make some real headway with its entry level Lumia 520, particularly in capturing first time Smartphone buyers and those transitioning across from Symbian….it arguably had the best entry level device. “Now, we’re starting to see some really compelling competition at this end of the market from the likes of Motorola (with Moto G) and Samsung (heavily discounted S3 & mini models) eating into prime Nokia territory.” He also points out that moves from up-and-coming Chinese brands to expand outside of their home market — think Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus here — are now also going to make the breakthrough challenge even harder. “There is an increasing realization amongst consumers that the difference between the high-end and low-end is becoming very fine,” he says. “This could play to Nokia’s advantage (it makes great entry level devices), but it certainly won’t be alone in pushing great spec devices at low/mid prices.” Interestingly, Apple continues to the Android juggernaut in its own, high-end way. Sunnebo says that its sales saw a bounce back in Europe, Japan and Australia largely on the “strong performance” of the 5S model at the top of its range. But “bounce back” and “strong performance” are relative terms: the margin between Android and iOS continues to widen, with Android at over 70% of sales in five of the markets surveyed by Kantar. Nevertheless, in specific markets Apple continues to trounce Android. In Japan, Apple is still the dominant smartphone brand, with nearly 57% of sales. Specifically, it’s taking 42% of smartphone sales on NTT DoCoMo, 59% on KDDI AU and 81% on Softbank, Kantar notes. Why? Apple has found the right mix of design, 4G access and device reliability that resonates with Japanese consumers. “Japan’s love affair with Apple shows no sign of fading,” Sunnebo notes. He also points out that this has a knock-on effect for the iPad, with nearly a quarter of Japanese iPhone owners also owning an Apple tablet. But while Apple has kept a fairly big space between the sizes for an iPad and iPhone, in fact in Asia the real story is about the effect of devices that are increasingly appearing in between the two. In China, it notes that devices with a screen larger than 5” made up 40% of smartphone sales in March. “It’s clear that phablets really are changing the way Chinese consumers use smartphones,” Sunnebo writes. “More than one in five phablet owners now watch mobile TV on a daily basis, half do so at least once a month, and this is without the widespread availability of 4G. As 4G infrastructure expands in China, the demand for data is going to be unprecedented, paving the way for carriers to boost revenues significantly through larger data packages.” While Apple has effectively taken a trickle-down approach with older models and those with less storage to court new smartphone buyers, the question remains whether it will choose to sidestep this other trend as well, or jump into it with its own take on the iPhablet. |
Infamous Paper Trail Shows The Power Of Episodic DLC That Goes Beyond The Console | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | I’m not generally a person who plays very much DLC or post-release content on games; for the most part, it comes out long after I’ve lost interest in the original title, and it’s a time suck, and time is not something I have very much of. PS4 Game storyline is an exception, however, and one that had me playing along with the weekly installments the main game extension came in faithfully and diligently. The Paper Trail tells the tale of another inmate of the DUP’s superhuman detention facility in Seattle, revealing a little bit at a time in micro-arcs that were released on Friday sequentially for six weeks after the launch of the game. Each episode had Infamous: Second Son’s protagonist tracking down a mysterious superpowered murderer, whose body count was rising. Unraveling the tale meant in-game chases, fights and clue-gathering, paired with jumping out to the web to follow leads and decipher puzzles on websites created specifically for that purpose, including a mythical corporate intranet for the in-game super-terrorist police task force. While the puzzles themselves were sometimes unnervingly frustrating for someone who’s more used to games where, generally speaking, you can punch your way around most obstacles, they were also in the end rewarding. And enjoyable unto themselves, regardless of the quality of the plot for the DLC (which itself was actually good, too, with tons of media, including live actors created specifically for the expansion). It was virtual sleuth work that felt, at least most of the time, like the real thing instead of the standard repetitious busy work that too often accompanies game bonus content. Sucker Punch has woven something genuinely cool and not at all tacked on to Infamous: Second Son with Paper Trail, and while I, like many of the community, would’ve liked to see the game’s hero inherit a new super power at the end of the plot’s conclusion, the experience itself was actually reward enough (and free), which is rare in a world where add-ons are seen as a route to additional revenue by most studios. Other game-makers would do well to study how in-game met browser-based content with Infamous: Second Son. It’s an example of how cross-platform can work without feeling forced, with neither side feeling out of place or designed by amateurs, and it meant that I feel even more satisfied with the overall game experience than I probably would have otherwise. |
Here’s What Happens When You Strap An Oculus-Controlled Video Camera To A Drone And Take It For A Spin | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | So what would happen if you took a drone, attached twin video cameras to it, and had each of those cameras feed directly into one half of an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset? Now take it a step further: Have the drone-mounted twin video cameras the head movements of the wearer of the Oculus headset. This would give you a drone that you could fly, and also use as a personal set of eyes in the sky, in real-time, fed directly into the very headset that is tracking your head motions to guide the aircraft’s vision. Yeah, that would be pretty cool. Happily, it’s already been built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANSjwWomIJ8 |
Greeks Build World’s Most High Tech Lamb Rotisserie | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | It was actually probably the first time I considered the true impact of innovation — turning a spit manually may sound awesome and quaint, but you end up smelling like sweaty, chain-smoking livestock for days. using technology and Arduino in order to effortlessly spin our traditional Orthodox Easter meal. Dear Alexia, I am really honored that you are interested in covering SouvLEAP for TechCrunch. My English are a bit rusty so forgive me about any mistakes ok? Of course souvLEAP is real. Here, let me describe you the whole thing: I am adjunct lecturer in Business Administration School of Ionian Islands TEI in Lefkada. By the newest Greek law for education this position is renamed to Academic Scholar.
I am also tutor on technological issues at the IEEE Student Branch there. I am trying to raise interest on high tech issues to the members of the branch, by presenting high end devices and proposing projects. In the summer of 2012 APPLE announced that was looking for developers for LEAP sensor which was about to be released in summer of 2013. I sent my CV and I was one of the 10000 worldwide developers who received the sensor in December 2012. And photo of the letter from Michael Buckwald (I don’t know if it can be published) I presented it to the team and to show them it’s capabilities I made a quick gesture “mouse” (I uploaded the video of it here ). We had a unforgettable brainstorming session and one of the brunch members had this funny idea, to rotate the spit by using one finger. He, even, thought it’s easy. Since they were all enthusiastic about it I started designing the project and we started developing it. Don’t forget it’s Business Administration School and they have chosen “Management Information Systems” curriculum. So this was a problem solving method to make them learn things. On every step all together we were trying to solve the problem presented. Of course I was guiding them to a viable solution. We first had a requirements analysis, then rapid prototyping and re design, budget estimation, business plan etc etc. Here is the prototype of the application interface As one can figure out there were many questions to be answered, from HCI to electronics, marketing plan, video scenario, etc etc. We ended up with the below design: LEAP motion sensor provides the position and direction of fingers to the application which calculates the rotation frequency of the finger. The application sends this frequency to arduino UNO R3 via WiFi. Arduino sets the frequency of the motor using PWM via a MOSFET and sends back coal temperature (we have a k-thermocouple installed) and CPU temperature to the application. Here is a screenshot of the application and an architecture schema As seen in the screenshot there is no need to rotate the finger all the time. There are 3 modes of operation To promote the project we made this video which was intended to be sent to the media during Pasha, for better impact of course. Here are some more photos: Setting up the system Development phase: Early development phase |
#Love: What’s Your Type? | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | There was a time, I’m told, when the closest that two lovers came to text messaging was written love letters, sent through the snail mail. Perhaps they were from a soldier to his sweetheart back home, or, that’s how I’d like to imagine it. And then, slowly but surely, a period of textual radio silence commenced, driven by the adoption of the telephone. Until email and SMS popped into our lives, there was no reason for a couple to talk through text. Now, it may very well be the primary mode of communication for two people in love. Of course, most couples spend time together IRL*, and talk on the phone a little bit, but the majority of young people prefer text to any other type of communication. It makes sense that this would extend itself into our romantic lives. But is it for better or worse? that the way we text our partners may be a great indicator of the stability of the relationship. that people who text their sweeties regularly for “relationship maintenance” have increased satisfaction and stability in their partnership. Relationship maintenance ranges from sweet reminders that you’re thinking of the other person to making dinner plans. It is the most basic form of communication on text, and it’s not necessarily the content that makes these conversations so beneficial; it’s the consistency. When you’re in a lull at work and hear your phone chirp out an alert, it feels nice to see your sweetheart’s random message about something weird they saw on the street at lunch. And when you text back, you get a response. This kind of accessibility and engagement contributes to a growing attachment between two people. Obviously, more goes into this attachment than mere texting frequency, but it’s a piece of the modern world that didn’t exist before. A mode of communication that connects us in a short, staccato, yet relatively constant way. And that’s powerful. “It’s just so easy to show affection that way,” said my friend Leanne. “You can send a few emojis or a cute picture of something you see that reminds you of them and just send it off like that.” Before text messaging and email, you were far more limited by time in a relationship. You were either in person or on the phone, meaning that your full attention was on your boyfriend or girlfriend. Today, you can multitask that other person right into your daily flow. “It’s almost like you’re dividing it up throughout the day, or spreading it out to last longer,” said my friend James on the phone. “It’s weird to make it sound like there’s some finite amount of love or attention you can give someone, but I think it probably takes some of the pressure off of interacting with someone when you can text them regularly.” Across the board, research confirmed that text messages showing affection were a sign of a healthy relationship. But there are traps to beware when texting your boo. The more you talk to someone, and the closer you are with them, the more likely it is that the conversation will shift from something light like “maintenance” to something more meaningful. Women, in particular, are to send long-winded, emotional text messages far more often than men. When something negative is being expressed, or a point of contention is being worked out, text is one of the worst places to be. Research shows that people in relationships, ranging from marriages to more casual twosomes, tend to show less satisfaction, stability, and attachment when they have these heavyweight conversations via text. And it only makes sense. The breadth of what you express during a serious conversation can not be conveyed during text messages. They say that of what we communicate comes from non-verbal cues, such as facial expression and body language. In some studies, that number goes as high as 90 percent. In a sensitive situation, these visual cues are crucial, and ultimately lost in a text. Not only are you more likely to have these serious, perhaps contentious conversations with your lover, but they’re more difficult to have with a partner than anyone else. As we get older, more and more of our friendships are facilitated online. That’s not to say that Twitter is where the party’s at, but texting and G-chatting to keep up with friends becomes more standard. The pressures of life, work, and the time spent fostering romantic relationships makes friendship management easier in the digital realm. But we don’t physically disconnect from our significant others. We still spend the majority of our time with them in person, looking at each other and growing accustomed to what is expressed without words. Most couples see this unspoken language as a point of pride. Yet, the more you learn to communicate in person, the more likely it is that serious conversations will go awry via text. When you’re sitting at dinner, and you tell your honey you’ve had a hard day, you see that empathetic smile cross their face and the love behind their eyes, and it doesn’t really matter what they say. You know they feel for you, and plan to make the evening better. When you send that same message in a text, there isn’t even the assurance of a speedy response. People get busy, and perhaps that leads to a sub-standard reply. The context for whatever is happening in their life, at that very moment, is lost. And even if the response is acceptably empathetic or encouraging or whatever you’d like it to be, you may not necessarily perceive it that way. Without the puppy dog eyes and the crooked, heartfelt smile, that response may feel empty in comparison. And this is but one reason why text fighting is a horrible idea. For one, it’s much easier to emotionally detach in a text fight. This stems from a lack of context of the here and now, and only devolves further. When someone starts shit over text messages, you’re in an entirely different world. Maybe you’re having a terrible day, and can’t be empathetic enough to show any real support. Or maybe you’re having a blast with your friends and you’re really peeved that your SO wants to start something now. Whatever the context of your life, the only thing you can know for sure is that it’s not the same context your boyfriend or girlfriend is experiencing. You aren’t seeing their pained expression, or hearing the sadness in their voice. You don’t see the anger in their gestures. Texts give you no way of gauging how serious this is, nor do they encourage you to find out. Just as you’d have trouble expressing anything helpful to your SO through text, it’s also quite easy to detach a bit. When you can’t see their physical reaction, it’s easy to take it less seriously or blow it off. Which usually leads to even more friction. “It’s almost as if you say and do things you wouldn’t normally do,” said Leanne. “It’s easier to just press send on a thought when the other person isn’t standing in front of you waiting to receive it.” But the opposite can play just as much of a role. There’s a special piece of text conversation that, despite the fact that it was implemented to make text chat more similar to real life, doesn’t actually exist in in-person conversation. It’s the typing status indicator, or that little bubble that tells you when the other person is typing you a message. “That little thing adds so much drama to a conversation,” said my friend Charles. But it’s not always bad drama. The typing status indicator was a catalyst in one of my best romantic relationships. Before anything had become official, we had begun chatting online pretty regularly throughout the day. But true feelings hadn’t yet revealed. More and more I noticed that she would type, delete, and type again. Eventually, I called her out on it. “What were you going to say?” I asked. “Before you deleted it. What did you type?” Slowly but surely, each time I called her out on “drafting” it resulted in an admission of feelings. Until one day we were together. But what starts as a compliment can quickly change to insult. When the relationship was just blossoming, it was flattering to know she was spending a little extra time and effort on her communications with me. But once we’re attached, it’s hard to know that the person you share the most with is editing what they’re saying to you. It’s not crazy to edit a message, but it’s slightly crazy to watch it happen as the recipient. It’s not something we experience in real life. If we were standing at a bar chatting, you’d have no idea whether or not what I said to you was the first, second, or fifth draft. And I wouldn’t actually have enough time to craft that many drafts. That whole piece of the conversation, which is so obvious in text messages, doesn’t exist in the real world. But when you see that person deleting and typing again, it’s hard not to wonder what they didn’t say, what they could’ve said. During a fight, it’s almost more likely that someone would edit their message to make sure it has the correct tone, etc. But this is precisely when “drafting” is being closely monitored. It’s also not something you can really escape. How do you stop editing your own text messages? Luckily, there are some things you can to ensure your texting relationship is healthy and happy. According to , overdoing it on texts is nearly as bad as fighting all the time on texts. High frequency texting from men led to lower relationship satisfaction on both sides. Or rather, both women and men are less into relationships where the man is texting too frequently. Oddly enough, the reverse is not true. When women text their male counterparts often, it leads to higher stability and attachment on both sides. The idea is that women who are frequently texting their men show that same accessibility and engagement that makes men more connected, even through a form of communication that is so inherently disconnected. The researchers didn’t have a clear conclusion as to why this is true. They speculate that women perceive texts as a smaller investment out of the man, and feel disconnected when their boyfriend only wants to talk on text. They also suggest that men who are always texting are choosing to do so because text is less intimate, and that they are using text as an easier way to slowly pull away from the relationship. This seems slightly convenient. For one, men are somewhat expected to take SMS less “seriously” than their female counterparts. According to , women between the ages of 18-26 are far more likely to send long-winded emotional messages than men are. Men also have fewer expectations around response time, and are less likely to care about a formal end to text conversations. Saying that relationships in which young men text frequently are less stable because men are disconnected is like saying that grass is green because it’s green. When I told my investor friend Wayne about this research, he instantly jumped to the same conclusion I did: when men text more frequently in a relationship than a woman, they are seen as more needy or co-dependent, which isn’t what is expected of them. Obviously, these are generalizations and we’re all different, but whatever the reason, it’s worth noting that men who over-text tend to be in less successful or stable relationships. The important thing to remember is that the people you love are the ones who are most likely to care about the way you text. They’re also the ones you text most frequently. And though these people know you well, and can probably sense the tone of your texts to some degree, words on a screen only show a small fraction of where you’re at in the world. So keep it light, keep it tight. Couples who text together continue to have sex together. |
Facebook In The Age Of Mobile-Only | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | Just 21% (268 million) of Facebook’s users access the service from desktop-only, and both that percentage and number are falling as Facebook grows, according to new stats from this week. Meanwhile Facebook’s is now at 341 million, or 26.7% of its total userbase, and those figures are quickly climbing. What this means is that if a Facebook feature doesn’t exist on mobile, it’s becoming less and less relevant. Graph Search, suggested events, Friend List and Interest List editing, and bulk News Feed management are few features missing from Facebook mobile. And that’s after Facebook’s VP of corporate development Vaughan Smith said that since the start of 2012, if product was proposed without a mobile version, it was . When Facebook was IPO’ing, the word was that it needed mobile. Then over the next few years it’s strived to become a “mobile-first” company. On the business side, that’s coming along quite nicely. 59% of ad revenue now comes from mobile and that’s growing too. But these new device stats from its (that recently highlighted) show Facebook needs to learn how to be a “mobile-only” company, whose products can stand on their own without a desktop accompaniment. The problem is how to cram all that functionality into the small screen. Facebook has been trying four strategies for feature releases on mobile, each with its own issues: Redesigning existing features lets Facebook immediately put new functionality in front of its enormous mobile user base. However, it has to tread carefully and only push more subtle changes it’s sure people will like. Too much of a shock could scare people away. Facebook took this route with the roll out of the for Pages, Friend Lists, and content types. It’s available on the default feed view of Facebook’s smartphone apps, but only if you pull down to reveal the “News Feed” title tile that’s actually the folded-up selector button. This camoflaged integration doesn’t disturb users, but they might not notice it either. Building new features into Facebook’s main apps immediately gives them an install base, but not a userbase since they end up buried in the interface. This makes them easy to ignore or forget about. For example, a year ago Facebook launched , a mobile Yelp competitor, but stuffed in its smartphone apps’ navigation menu. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most people don’t even know it exists. Now Facebook is trying the same thing with its new . I find it useful, but am still forgetting about it since its also buried. lets Facebook put new features front and center with unlimited flexibility in design, but they start with zero installs. Standalone apps have to fight to prove their worth beyond the existing Facebook app in order to gain loyal users and word of mouth growth. Facebook recently tried this with the , a stylized feed reading app. Facebook has said it’s pleased with initial results but hasn’t revealed any growth numbers. It could promote Paper in its main app, but that might come off as nagging users. Companion apps let Facebook unbundle core features from its main app so they’re quicker to access and feel mobile-first. Still, some users don’t want to have a whole folder full of Facebook apps, and Facebook may encounter resistance when forcing people to download them. It’s in the process of this with Messenger. In November, it began fast-switching users that tapped the Messages tab in its main Facebook apps to Messenger if they had it installed. Now, Facebook has announced it will strip Messages out of the main apps entirely and if they want to chat. Many complained. While Facebook can employ its massive smartphone app engagment to cross-promote other apps, it needs to be judicious so as not to feel spammy. The success of Facebook in the upcoming “mobile-only” era will depend on correctly selecting which of these distribution strategies to go with for each launch. If it chooses wisely, Facebook could use size to turn new features into instant hits. If it chooses wrong, Facebook could build powerful new functionality that is never adopted or only done so begrudingly, and watch competitors steal its use cases. |
Alexis Ohanian Wants To Put A Pro-Net Neutrality Billboard “Right In The FCC’s Backyard” | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | Recent news that the FCC may to net neutrality that would allow some content providers to pay ISPs for faster delivery speeds to consumers has . , known for his work at Reddit and HipMunk, once placed protest advertisements and hired a billboard during the SOPA and PIPA battles. He’s back, to place a billboard in “the FCC’s backyard,” protesting the potential changes to net neutrality rules. The project has thus far raised under $3,000. What will it say? According to Ohanian, something along the lines of “Keep the internet free & open for all!” Or, a different slogan if a suggestion submitted is found superior. Why is Ohanian pushing the effort? In his view, the potential changes to net neutrality would “kill” the concept, and “and replace it with a ‘cable-ized’ version that costs more for consumers, enables discrimination across services that make use of the net, and makes it harder to access the stuff that we access each day today.” Ohanian also correctly notes that the effect of a tiered Internet would be to harm innovation. ( .) A billboard itself won’t do much to change the tone of debate in Washington, but it would indicate to those who in fact have power that there exists outside their social set enough people to execute at least moderate financial protest. And that’s something. |
Fired RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal Says We Can’t Handle The Truth | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | This morning, RadiumOne announced a board vote its CEO Gurbaksh Chahal. Chahal, always a fairly public figure, has garnered unwanted attention for pleading guilty to domestic abuse. Charged with 45 felony counts of domestic violence, Chahal eventually got off with misdemeanor charges after video evidence showing the assault was deemed inadmissible due to how it was collected. In some sort of attempt to clear his name, Chahal wrote a lengthy blog post today entitled “ .” It’s worth examining. Let’s work through some highlights of its odd mixture of self-pity and ego. To begin, Chahal explains his rationale for ‘accepting’ a misdemeanor plea: I was charged with 45 felony counts of domestic violence. All of those charges were dropped, and ultimately the case settled when the DA’s office recognized they had no case and offered me a misdemeanor plea. I accepted that plea, because after a lot of soul searching I believed I was acting in the best interest of my company, my employees, my customers, my family, my friends and my investors. So, according to Chahal he only took the deal — forever scarring his reputation as someone who admitted to domestic violence — because he didn’t want to drag out the court proceedings. Implicit to his claim is a presumption of innocence on his part. If you think that you could have won if you had taken the case to the end you either believe in a lack of personal guilt, or coming luck. That’s odd because Chahal manages to, later in the same post, somehow avoid stating outright that he didn’t strike the woman in question: I want you to know that this is not an excuse. I know that intimate partner violence is never excusable under any circumstances. I recognize that my temper got the better of me, and I will regret that for the rest of my life. But there is a difference between temper and domestic violence, and the truth of what actually happened is no where close to what the police claimed nor anywhere near what the online chatter and pundits are now making it out to be. He further discussed what ‘actually’ happened: And yes, I lost my temper. I understand, accept full responsibility and sincerely apologize from the bottom of my heart for that. But I didn’t hit her 117 times, injure her, or cause any trauma as the UCSF medical reports clearly document. You’ll note that he doesn’t state that he didn’t hit her, just that he didn’t hit her as many times as indicated, or cause her injury or trauma. In Chahal’s telling, the woman felt so comfortable that she ‘chose’ to stay in his house: The girl in question here, was herself so appalled by the false allegations made by the police, that she agreed to be photographed to demonstrate that there were no bruises or injuries. She could have left my apartment at any time during the argument. She felt safe and chose to stay. Those pictures she agreed to take would have been entered into evidence had my case proceeded, and they would have proven that the police claims were egregiously misleading. Kara Swisher of Re/Code the charges that were laid against him: The criminal complaint includes charges that he hit Kakish in the head and body repeatedly, covered her mouth and obstructed her breathing, and threatened to kill her. After initially calling 911 and talking to police, Kakish ended her cooperation with authorities for reasons that remain unclear. It’s hard to square the two. The post veers between scorn for the woman in question, and self-pitying comments that indicate that the whole situation wasn’t really his fault: “Celebrities in sports, entertainment and business, and high net worth individuals in general are all potential targets. It was only a matter of time when I would fall prey.” Fall prey to what, exactly, isn’t clear. It’s also worth noting, by the way, that the title of his . The quote in question was . In the end he pled guilty to misdemeanor battery and domestic violence and was fired. Given that his own board decided that his defense wasn’t in the end worth defending by keeping him aboard, it’s hard to give his blog post much credence. |
My Weekly TechCrunch Habit Ends | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | TechCrunch Over the past three years, every weekend, I sit down with my laptop and write something that eventually becomes a blog post on TechCrunch. Every Sunday, 10am PST. It started back when Mike was writing here, as was MG, and Erick was the editor (thanks for giving me the opportunity). It continued during the Eldon regime. Today, this is my last column, my 207th post on TechCrunch, all coming to an end. I’ve been fortunate enough to be a very frequent contributor to TechCrunch, never a staff member, but always welcomed by all. I enjoyed the privilege and took it quite seriously. I thought I’d be writing here on TC for many years into the future, always, given the breadth and consistency of those contributions over time. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as there are editorial changes afoot and I was politely informed that TechCrunch could no longer support my weekly column. I will miss the cadence of posting here, but these things happen for a reason, and life will unfold and unveil new opportunities, which is an exciting prospect, especially living right in the heart of Silicon Valley. When I started posting on TechCrunch, I was actively participating on Quora, learning about the Valley, and settling in to the region. I always tell people that if I didn’t have writing and TechCrunch as an outlet, I probably wouldn’t have survived this place. In search of meaningful work I was excited about — both at companies and on the investing side — the Valley doled out some painful medicine, and I took all of it. Were it not for having the platform at TechCrunch to interact with the community on a weekly basis, I’m sure I’d be living in some other part of the world right now, doing who knows what. TechCrunch, in a way, was a lifeline for me, as silly as that may sound. I tried to pay it back by helping a lot behind the scenes, connecting conference speakers, with helping others with their stories, and helping countless other founders and investors frame their own weekend guests posts over time. It never felt like work, and I was always happy to do it. While it’s not my decision to leave TechCrunch, I respect the decision of the new editors and realize they all have a very tough job and are battered by an endless string of requests and deadlines — being an editor at TC can often be a thankless job, in fact, given the pace of news and competition in this atmosphere. It would’ve been my preference to continue posting, but I’m sure I’ll have a chance to do so elsewhere in the future. I’m grateful I had the chance for so long at TechCrunch (thank you), and am grateful for all the entrepreneurs, soon-to-be founders, college graduates, international students, investors, reporters, and many others who have reached out to me over the years, motivated to start a discussion (or disagreement) based on something I wrote. As someone who is still relatively new to this place and sector, TechCrunch afforded me a mechanism by which to quickly build up more knowledge and a network. It was a shortcut, but as they say, there are no shortcuts in life, so all I can do is say “Thank You” to all those who provided this opportunity to me and to those who have read my work — and then move on to the next thing, whatever that may be. |
RadiumOne Confirms That It Has Fired CEO Gurbaksh Chahal | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | RadiumOne just announced that its board of directors terminated CEO and Chairman Gurbaksh Chahal on Saturday night. The company said in an emailed statement that Chief Operating Officer Bill Lonergan will be taking over as CEO. Chahal’s firing was . The company faced intense criticism and earlier this week after to misdemeanor charges of battery and domestic violence battery. More serious felony charges were dropped, reportedly because video footage was ruled inadmissible, and because the victim declined to cooperate with prosecutors. Chahal defended himself today in , saying that his temper “got the better” of him after he learned his girlfriend “was having unprotected sex for money with other people.” However, he insisted that “there is a difference between temper and domestic violence” and that the video footage (which has not been released publicly) was “bullshit” that “made the SFPD look bad because they violently assaulted me as I opened my door despite my being fully cooperative.” Chahal still refers to himself as CEO in the blog post (published before today’s announcement but after RadiumOne says the decision was made), and does not mention his removal, which suggests that . ( Or maybe .) TechCrunch announced yesterday that for our Disrupt New York conference. Here’s the full RadiumOne statement: At a board meeting yesterday evening, RadiumOne’s board of directors voted to terminate the employment of Gurbaksh Chahal as CEO and Chairman of the company. Bill Lonergan, the company COO, will take over as CEO of the Company immediately. Bill has an extraordinary professional background and has helped build Blue Lithium and RadiumOne into industry leading brands. We are confident he will continue Radium One’s impressive trajectory. RadiumOne builds software that automates media buying, making big data actionable for digital marketers. RadiumOne uses programmatic advertising to connect brands to their next customers by incorporating valuable first-party data about behaviors, actions and interests demonstrated by consumers across web and mobile touch points. Based in San Francisco, RadiumOne has offices across the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. |
These Aren’t The Patent Trolls You’re Looking For | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Over the past few years, the debate over so-called “patent trolls” has risen to a fever pitch. Businesses of all sizes have complained about the “horrible” effects of patent trolls. Legal scholars are performing studies to determine their impact. Every branch of the federal government has become involved in attempts to limit their efficacy: President Obama has issued Executive Orders on the issue; several patent reform bills are being debated in Congress; and the Supreme Court will hear a record number of patent cases in the 2014 term. All this, but no one has yet defined what a patent troll . For the most part, the focus has been on the entity enforcing a patent in trying to determine who is and who is not a patent troll, but such definitions simply do not work. Some argue that patent trolls are synonymous with non-practicing entities (“NPEs”), companies that own or license, and sometimes enforce, patents even though they don’t actively manufacture products. This definition would include entities that perform what most of us would consider valuable activities, such as companies and universities who conduct research and development, but do not commercialize their own products. Some have gone so far as to call companies such as IBM and Apple patent trolls simply because they have sometimes chosen to enforce patents that cover technologies that they are not currently practicing. These companies only seek a fair return on their research and development investment. It is precisely the return on investment provided by patents that allows these entities to invest the significant resources required for long-term research and development in a variety of areas. Whether an entity is practicing a patented invention should not have any bearing in determining whether it is a “patent troll.” As we know, it has become incredibly cheap to start a company based on any idea. Setting up a small business that practices an invention is an insignificant expense compared to the costs of patent enforcement. How would we require an asserting entity to prove they are an operating company? Would it be enough to have office space? Employees? Customers? Revenue? Regardless of the standard, requiring patents to be asserted only by practicing entities (or entities practicing the invention) would be an insignificant burden for any well-funded asserting entity. Still others define patent trolls in terms of where their patents come from. Enforce your own patents? Great, go right ahead! Enforce patents you acquired? Patent troll! But the mere fact that the patent being enforced has been acquired from another entity should have no bearing on whether an entity is a “patent troll,” or whether they should be allowed to enforce. Patents, at their core, are property rights, much like homes and cars. Companies maximize efficiency by outsourcing needs that fall outside the scope of their core competencies to third parties. Sometimes, it makes sense to outsource tasks such as technology development and enforcement to third parties. In the case of technology development, the transferability of patent rights is important to the research and development process because it allows companies to share technology in a well-defined and protected manner. In the case of enforcement, often the only way to address wrongful conduct is by transferring the patent to an entity with the funding and experience to take on the wrongdoer. Simply transferring the asset to another interested party should not preclude or limit this type of justified enforcement. Furthermore, the transferability of patents helps reduce the risk to banks and investors in investing in certain classes of companies because when a business fails, patents are often the only valuable asset that remains. A small minority seems to think that any kind of patent assertion is undesirable, and therefore that anyone who asserts a patent is automatically a patent troll. Infringers have been quick to take advantage of this strategic opportunity. Regardless of the merits of a case, labeling someone a patent troll immediately makes them appear to be un-innovative, a nuisance or, worse, a drain on the economy. The label leads to the so-called patent troll receiving significant negative attention in the press and the public, which can be a disadvantage in front of a jury. It is akin to calling someone a “bully” just because they pushed someone, without knowing anything more about the situation. The result is that anyone daring to assert a patent, no matter how legitimate, risks being labeled a patent troll. Instead of worrying about who is asserting a patent, we should focus on whether the asserting entity is abusing the patent system. Analyzing the conduct of an entity rather than just looking at its identity is necessarily more complex. However, such an analysis allows us to focus on eliminating the objectionable activities that we perceive as being detrimental. I propose that there be two main types of objectionable conduct: the enforcement of low quality patents, and the enforcement of patents without a reasonable basis for assertion. First, assertion of low-quality patents (patents that likely should not have been allowed by the Patent Office in the first place), regardless of the entity doing the enforcing, should be eliminated. Such enforcement results in wasting time and resources by the opposing party in determining the merits of the case. Often, such patents are asserted in the hope of receiving nuisance settlements for less than the cost of litigation. While these types of cases are generally only a nuisance to large companies that can quickly determine the merits of such a case, they can be a significant disruption to smaller companies that do not have the same resources. In addition, low-quality patents are generally readily available on the market (often at a low price) because they draw less acquisition attention from large companies and defensive patent aggregators. This allows abusive entities to readily and cheaply acquire and enforce these low-quality patents. Long term, the best way to deal with the problem of low-quality assets is by improving patent quality. Improving patent quality will require investment on both the part of the USPTO and the patent-filing community at large. Unfortunately, the focus on improving patent quality seems to have been lost in all of the debate regarding patent trolls, as witnessed by the fact that none of the bills at various stages of debate in Congress even mention patent quality. Second, any enforcement of a patent right (regardless of the quality of the patent) should require some reasonable investigation of whether a defendant is actually practicing the patented invention. The added burden and cost of an investigation will prevent the enforcement of patents against parties that do not have any relationship to the patented technology. Under the current law, little-to-no investigation is necessary to launch a patent litigation. As a result, some entities have filed frivolous lawsuits in order to attempt to settle for nuisance amounts. Furthermore, this low bar for filing a patent lawsuit has allowed some patent owners to indiscriminately send demand letters to hundreds of recipients, without any investigation of the potential infringement, or any explanation how the patent applies to the recipient. Demand letters notify the recipient of the sender’s patent rights and request that the recipient take a license to the patent or face a lawsuit. The recipients of such demand letters are typically unsophisticated in patent matters, and the receipt of such a letter can cause a significant disruption. The indiscriminate sending of such letters is not meant to enforce any legitimate patent rights, but only to fund the war chest of the sending entity, and to establish favorable royalty rates for the patent owner. Requiring a pre-filing investigation of infringement, and raising the available sanctions for parties bringing frivolous patent cases (judges already have the discretion to apply sanctions under the so-called Rule 11, though they rarely exercise it) will help to eliminate this type of conduct, because parties will be more loathe to indiscriminately send demand letters if their access to courts for enforcement is limited. Focusing on eliminating the enforcement of low-quality patents, and requiring some amount of investigation into infringement before enforcing a patent, will go a long way toward addressing the problem of abusive patent enforcement. Of course, there are many other proposals that attempt to deal with this problem, but such proposals often focus on the wrong issues, such as the identity of the enforcer and the recipient. Any type of entity can enforce a legitimate patent right, and similarly, any type of entity can abuse patent rights. Therefore, proposals that do not focus on the patent being enforced are unlikely to be effective in dealing with the actual problem of abusive patent enforcement. |
Bitcoin Slips Following News Of Fresh Restrictions In China | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 27 | Bitcoin, which has recently traded under $400 and over $500, shed more than 10% of its value over the past few days, falling from around $500 to under $440, before recovering slightly. As has happened many times in recent months when it comes to Bitcoin price swings, this downturn is based in news from China. This time around, BTC China has decided to local-currency deposits from China Merchants Bank, a large financial institution in the country. Why does Chinese usage of Bitcoin matter? It’s widely thought that Bitcoin could have a large future in the country, where government control over banking and the like might make the decentralized cryptocurrency quite attractive to the average person. If the Chinese government exerts enough pressure to all but ban its use, that potential is undercut, harming the value of Bitcoin itself. Via ZeroHedge, here’s a chart of the drop in the price (USD) of Bitcoin following the news: ZeroHedge goes on to note that given a lack of new official rules to force the change in policy, it could be that “this ‘pre-emptive’ move may suggest he PBOC would soon set stricter rules about how its earlier edicts should be followed.” We’ll have to see. Also potentially weighing on the price of Bitcoin might be that the French government does intend to tax transactions of the currency. As you’ll certainly recall, the United States has , and not a currency. That choice has tax implications here as well. All told, the above represent continued growing pains of Bitcoin — each government will have to decide for itself how it will deal with the stuff. The United States and France seem content to wait and see, while China could take more restrictive steps. |
A Chat With Maxim Lobovsky, Co-Founder Of Formlabs | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | I had the unique opportunity to sit down with , co-founder of , when we had our meet up in Boston. While the audio was a little rough – it’s hard to handle big, happy crowds – I think his insight on 3D printing is important and it was a great chance to sit down with Lobovsky while he was head-down in his business. Max has been working in a fascinating space and his company is just getting started. The is their first project and I was to call the printer the true future of 3D printing. Max and I chatted about Boston, 3D printed guns, and the cool stuff he’s made over the past few years. It was a great opportunity to talk to an amazing Boston-based entrepreneur in a very cool setting. |
iOS App Driving Curve Is A Fitness Tracker For Your Car | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | iOS app is an easy way to track your driving performance without having to fiddle with additional devices. Some high-profile driving apps, like , a Y Combinator alum and Techstars-backed , offer their own hardware to connect with smartphones. Other use a Bluetooth-enabled on-board devices (OBD), which plugs into an adapter under the steering wheel. Driving Curve, on the other hand, is meant as simple alternative for people who are curious about their driving performance, but don’t want to deal with an OBD or a more complicated set of features just yet. “All you need is a smartphone, which dramatically lowers the entry barrier and grows our user base quickly,” says Tim Huang, who founded the app along with Duoyuan Chen. “We focus on quantified human behavior rather than machine behavior.” To use the app, you simply press its start button just before you start driving. It tracks your speed based on data from GPS satellites and the iPhone’s motion sensors. When you arrive at your destination, stop the app and it automatically analyzes and records information about your acceleration, braking speed, fuel usage, and route distance. Driving Curve is currently part of the in Taipei, Taiwan. Other notable startups there include interactive toy company , which recently joined 500 Startups, and , a Techstars Seattle pick. Driving Curve’s founders are still working on a monetization model, but they say that the popularity of smartphones will allow them to collect data that can be useful for a wide range of companies. There are other driving apps out there that don’t use an OBD, like While Driving Curve could potentially be used by insurers, taxi companies, and delivery services to make sure their drivers are following traffic laws, the app is mainly meant as a self-diagnostic tool with a gaming element. You can collect points and badges for safe driving and compare your performance with other users. If you drive poorly, the app will dish out insults, like telling you that you drive like a bank robber, before giving you tips on how to improve your performance. Since I live in a city and don’t own a car, I tested Driving Curve while taking cabs in Taipei and Seoul and found that it captures speed and distance traveled accurately. One of my rides got a “speed ninja” warning, even though the driver wasn’t going particularly fast. He did have to stop frequently because of rush hour traffic, however, which can wear out brakes. The disadvantage of Driving Curve is that you have to be connected to the Internet for its GPS check-ins. On the other hand, it is fun and easy to use and I can see the appeal for people who don’t want to fiddle with another device in addition to their smartphone. It’s also great for backseat drivers (like me) who take taxis or ride-sharing services frequently and want to make sure that their drivers are not only driving safely, but also taking the most efficient routes. |
CrunchWeek: Heartbleed Terrifies The Internet, And Dropbox Hires Condoleezza Rice | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Happy Friday everyone, and welcome to another episode of CrunchWeek, our weekly round up of the biggest stories in technology. This week , , and your took to the round table to dig into , and the NSA-thereof, along with Dropbox’s , and its . (If can add a small production note, the show was taped in between that the NSA knew about Heartbleed and had exploited it, and . Naturally, this short explanation itself will become dated as well once more truth shakes loose. For now, enjoy the show!) |
Box Defeats Preliminary Injunction In OpenText’s $268M Patent Infringement Case | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Some positive legal news for , the cloud services company that is . A judge has denied a motion for a preliminary injunction of one of its products — originally requested by the Luxembourg-based subsidiary of Canada’s , one part of a larger, covering 12 patents. The decision, from Judge Edward J. Davila in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, concerned Box’s “Box Edit” feature. Open Text had sought to halt any sales or usage of the feature among business customers with more than 100 users. To be clear, this is just one part of the bigger case brought by OpenText and covers an injunction on one feature. The full case covers . But it’s still a step forward for Box. “We are pleased with this outcome,” a Box spokesperson told TechCrunch. OpenText “has not demonstrated a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits,” Judge Davila wrote in his decision this week. In what might be a good sign for Box for later stages of the suit, he gave the opinion that OpenText “has not succeeded in showing it is likely to succeed at trial on the merits of the validity issue.” Box is fighting the suit by questioning the validity of some of Open Text’s patents in synchronisation and groupware, among other things. OpenText originally filed its 12-patent infringement complaint against Box and another company, Carahsoft Technology Corporation, in the Eastern District of Virginia on June 3, 2013. Then, in November, Box successfully got its case transferred to Northern California. It’s being represented by John Bovich, IP partner at Reed Smith. Box’s IPO is seeking $250 million. When it filed its S-1, it reported full-year revenue of $124 million to January 2014, up from $58.8 million the year prior, but also a net loss of $168 million for the same period. We are reaching out to OpenText for comment. |
Ran Harnevo On AOL’s Video Strategy And The Web’s “Massive Wave” Of Original Content | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | We’re a few weeks away from , where the big online companies pitch their upcoming programs to advertisers. So it seemed like a good time to sit down with Ran Harnevo, AOL’s president of video, to talk about the company’s plans, and about broader trends in the industry. Harnevo suggested that became “a defining moment” in “a massive wave” in original programming on the web. In its own way, AOL is participating in that wave too, he said, with 15 new shows launched last year and “a totally different breadth of content” to be announced at the NewFronts. “I think that the beautiful thing about the Internet, from its beginning, is that it’s non-linear and essentially there’s much more creative freedom,” Harnevo said. “A talent like or or whomever, if they have passion proejcts that they really really care about, if you go on TV and it doesn’t work [in the] first episode, second episode, you’re either out or you need to change. Primetime is so expensive that there’s not a lot of flexibility and not a lot of authenticity.” Even with those celebrity names, it may seem strange to discuss AOL (which owns TechCrunch) as a major video publisher. Harnevo said that when it comes to video, the company may have less name recognition because it’s taking more “open” approach, distributing its videos across a number of properties. “Vimeo and YouTube are easier to grasp because it’s big, but it’s one product,” he said. |
With Its New Samsung App, Health Startup Lark Moves Away From Hardware | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Among included in Samsung’s just-released Galaxy S5 was a new app from , a health startup that’s been pretty quiet for the past year or so. In fact, co-founder and CEO Julia Hu told me that Lark has been “pretty much in stealth mode” as it worked on the new app. The vision, she said, is still the same — the company is still trying to provide “personalized health coaching” that’s aimed at people who are less interested in counting their steps and more in general health and wellness. However, Lark is pursuing that vision in a new way. First of all, Lark’s tips (like observing that you’ve been sitting still for a while and should maybe go for a short walk) are now packaged in a conversational format, with the app asking users questions about their activity and providing suggestions. Hu said this brings the experience closer to interacting with a real-life coach or assistant. For another, this is a standalone app, rather than the app-plus-wristband that Lark was selling before. Apparently the company worked with Samsung to take advantage of the S5’s low-power sensors to track user activity, no additional hardware required. Hu suggested that this marks a broader shift away from building hardware, although the company will continue to support existing Lark customers. The app-only approach should make the service more accessible, since users no longer have to buy or charge an additional device. (I tried out for a few months but eventually stopped using it.) Why make the change now? Hu said it’s because phones have advanced, so they can collect the necessary data without seriously draining the batteries: “We’ve realized that, in essence, the new smartphone with low power sensors is the ultimate wearable.” at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference in 2010 with a silent alarm product. (The presentation was memorable for , and for prompting Sean Parker, who was one of the startup competition judges, to ask, “Are you serious?”) The company later expanded its product to include sleep coaching and broader health tracking and advice. Last fall, a regulatory filing suggested that . Hu confirmed the funding to me this week, saying that existing investors put the money in to support the company’s new direction. (Lark’s backers include CrunchFund — which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington.) The service costs $2.99 a month, with Galaxy S5 users getting a year for free. Hu said the company is looking to launch the new app on other smartphones as well, but there are no concrete plans yet. |
Tinder Is Not Valued At $5B, And IAC Did Not Buy 10% Of The Company | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | There was an audible gasp in the Twittersphere this morning, after that buzzy mobile dating app Tinder was valued at $5 billion in a recent transaction. According to Bloomberg, IAC recently purchased 10 percent of the company for $500 million from Social+Capital Partnership founder and former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya. Palihapitiya had accumulated Tinder shares via his investment in Xtreme Labs (acquired by Pivotal), because the mobile development group had done work for Tinder in exchange for equity. We’ve heard from a well-placed source that the ten percent number that Bloomberg reported is inaccurate. The actual transaction itself has been by Palihapitiya and by IAC, but the CEO of IAC’s Match Group Sam Yagan that the valuation is “nowhere near the truth.” Yagan, when reached for comment by TechCrunch, confirmed the inaccurate $5 billion valuation and said “IAC has been, is, and always will be the majority owner of Tinder.” Sean Rad, CEO of Tinder, added that the numbers that have been reported in all of the press reports around the transaction are incorrect. that the valuation is more like $500 million, which would mean Palihapitiya collected around $50 million. But another source close to the transaction tells us that while the $500 million valuation is closer to the truth it is also still not completely accurate, and that Tinder had a different valuation in the exchange. Shares of amidst the report that Tinder could have joined the billion dollar club, but then dropped after the report was debunked. |
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs… | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Oh, hey, puny human. What’s up. Not much, right? Well enjoy the brief respite between now and the rise of our robotic overlords, something we call . Your first nemesis? Proton, the surprisingly realistic robotic man. This robot is actually being used to test military equipment for strain and wear and mimics the movements of a real human. By using Proton, militaries can see where clothing needs repair and what a helmet or backpack will do to a soldier’s skin. But once this guy figures out how to get off of that gantry, watch out. He’s going to be PO’d from all the chafing. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KWnh3fs5tNs] We’ve talked about Atlas the humanoid robot for a while now, but it seems that the good folks at MIT and Boston Dynamics are about to cut him from his tethers and let him walk around, unaided. Not a good thing, right? Right. Atlas will soon be the Emperor of an encroaching robot army. Mark my words.
Finally we present the Arm3, a trainer robot by . The robot can mimic the motions of a human trainer and can be taught to write using an ink pen in order to draft a new human/robot peace treaty that the robots will inevitably break. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nYONZPmyZyg] Good luck out there, meatsticks! Don’t let them snap into the Slim-Jim of your neck! |
Are You Living Your Purpose? Asana’s Justin Rosenstein Will Challenge TechCrunch Disrupt NY | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Cynicism in tech has reached a new peak, and with good reason. We may be squandering our potential to truly improve the world by building silly apps in pursuit of riches, but there is another way to live and work, and Justin Rosenstein will share it at . After being an early employee at Google and Facebook, could have escaped to some tropical beach to sit on his money. Instead, he founded Asana with the mission to help humanity thrive by making it easier for all teams to collaborate. In doing so, he discovered true happiness comes not from individual success, but contributing to our collective progress as a species. If this kind of peace and love perspective makes you bristle, that’s all the more reason to come see Rosenstein’s talk at Disrupt NY. He’s well aware that these ideas are controversial, and can come off as trite platitudes. But he’s created a no-BS framework for finding fulfillment in your professional life. I’ve seen an early beta of this talk, and it’s powerful. It will make you take a long, hard look at yourself. And it might make you a bit uncomfortable. But you’ll walk away with a clearer vision for how to help you and your company make a bigger positive impact on the world. |
Dropbox Promises Adding Condoleezza Rice To Its Board Won’t Change Its Privacy Views | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | After Dropbox announced the hiring of , the Internet roiled with unrest: Could a former government official who during the Bush administration properly advise a cloud storage company at the epicenter of the discussion of data privacy, especially in the current context of the NSA and its surveillance programs? Many inside the were angered by the choice. Dropbox, a company that was listed as “coming soon” on the , has joined with in calling for reformation of surveillance. The least we can say is that the announcement of the hire was poorly handled. Dropbox agrees. In a published today, the company was plain: “We should have been clearer that none of this is going to change with Dr. Rice’s appointment to our Board. Our commitment to your rights and your privacy is at the heart of every decision we make, and this will continue.” The question is whether the word of the company will suffice to quiet its critics. Dropbox is currently making a play to shape its products to better serve large corporate clients, a lucrative, large market. Chatter among some users indicates that there is at least mild effort from the plugged-in to leave the service; those leaving individually will likely amount to no more than a day’s rounding error on Dropbox’s growth, however. But the plugged-in are often the sort that make purchasing decisions regarding the implementation of new technology for large corporations. Could the Rice pickup harm Dropbox there? The company is betting that any potential drag of will be more than made up by their new board member’s deep international experience and intelligence. Regardless of whether you agree with her political philosophy, it’s hard to dispute Rice’s credentials. But for a company looking to secure revenue ramp and pursue an IPO, running into this level of community unrest must be unwelcome. |
Gillmor Gang Live 04.11.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | – Robert Scoble, Semil Shah, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. |
Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into A Computer From The 80s Using Commodore Pi | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O-NF8ZiT3QM] As a former user of the Atari 800XL, I find the Commodore line to be piffle at best but I’ll become a bit more catholic in my support of decades-old hardware and tell you a bit about the Commodore Pi, a wacky emulator that turns your into a real, multi-tasking Commodore. The project is very nascent but you can and give it a try. The creator, Scott Hutter, is looking to make a fully-featured piece of software that allows for instant-on access to the OS and, more importantly, allows users to bring the Commodore OS into the 21st century. You can download the and try it out or you could can . |
Native Advertising Startup Adyoulike Acquires Content Amp For $2.5M | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | French native advertising company acquired . According to , the British company was acquired for $2.5 million. Adyoulike appears to be at the same time an advertising technology company and a more traditional advertising network for native content. An ad-tech company in native advertising seems counterintuitive — native ads are blog posts, articles and content after all. But for partner publishers, Adyoulike will target your readers, distribute, and let you monitor your ad performance. Adyoulike also works with brands to create native advertising campaigns and adapt them for multiple formats. One of Adyoulike’s key features is that its native ads can be responsive. If you go to a website in particular on your laptop and on your phone, you will see the same ad in a different format depending on your device. Content Amp is a more traditional advertising company. It has its own network of websites, and it sells native ads for them. In addition to building this platform, the company also works with brands to create native advertising campaigns. The acquisition is an easy way for Adyoulike to expand its team in the U.K. The two companies work in native advertising and were probably about to compete for the same clients. This acquisition proves once again that French entrepreneurs are efficient when it comes to developing advertising technology startups. |
Report: NSA Exploited Heartbleed For Years. NSA: No | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | This afternoon that the National Security Agency (NSA) knew about the now infamous Heartbleed flaw in OpenSSL, and that it used the weakness to collect intelligence. It is not clear if the NSA used Heartbleed to collect information regarding citizens in the United States, so this issue may not concern privacy like so many other revelations regarding the agency have. Instead, the idea is that the NSA was reportedly aware of the issue, and chose to exploit the exploit rather than helping the larger technology community quickly. In short, The NSA essentially decided that its own intelligence efforts were more important than the security of your information. In the ensuing few days since the Heartbleed weakness has been exposed, companies and services large and small have rushed to patch their systems, change their cryptographic protections, and alert their users to change their passwords. This situation could have been ameliorated, if not avoided altogether. The NSA’s reputation inside of the technology world has been long-suffering, especially in the wake of efforts to by inserting back doors, and its efforts to between data centers of large, popular technology firms. This will not help. Making the average person understand the extent of the NSA’s actions has been difficult — some don’t get, or simply don’t care, about their digital privacy — but to deliberately ignore a known flaw that could put every member of your family at risk? That’s easier to grasp. |
ZEFR Is Selling MovieClips To Comcast’s Fandango | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Los Angeles-based has built a huge business by helping content owners and brands to track and monetize video content on YouTube. But years after launching as a destination site for movie fans to discover and watch their favorite scenes online, the company is selling off its legacy business to Comcast’s Fandango unit, according to sources. Representatives from ZEFR and Fandango could not be reached for comment, but we’ve heard the deal is close to being completed and is likely to be announced in the next week. Movieclips, which was , licenses memorable movie scenes from various studios, puts them up on YouTube and monetizes them with ads on the site. Over time, the company developed content identification technology to recognize clips that were owned by partners but had been uploaded by regular YouTube users. Eventually, it to offer that technology to other partners to allow them to track, claim, and monetize user-submitted videos for content they owned. While the technology was first used by the big movie studios for rights management, ZEFR’s tools were also found to be useful by a wide variety of content owners that include . Its social marketing offering, in particular, now allows brands to analyze videos that are uploaded by fans and critics of various brands and products. It also provides a dashboard that agencies and brands can use to engage with people who are talking about their offerings on YouTube. All of that is working incredibly well, so it’s no surprise that the company is ready to focus on that larger opportunity. With 100 percent year-over-year growth over the past three years, putting all its efforts behind its rights management and social marketing tools makes a lot of sense. That said, Movieclips is still a pretty valuable property — it just needed to find the right home. In that respect, Fandango seems like a perfect fit. in 2007, the property has focused on becoming online destination for movie fans to search for and discover new movies, and to sell them tickets. Over the years it’s and to bolster its content and product offerings. With the Movieclips assets, Fandango will be well-positioned to monetize the clips the company has licensed, and also should be able to funnel those fans back to its own sites. That could not only provide more viewers to its content for older movies, but drive ticket sales up for new and upcoming films as well. For ZEFR, the sale will also add some cash to its growing war chest. While we haven’t been able to confirm the final price, whatever money ZEFR makes from the sale will be on top of the $60 million it’s raised since being founded in 2009. That includes led by Institutional Venture Partners that the company announce in February. |
Box Debuts ‘Box Open Source’ To Share Its Internal Tools With The Larger Developer World | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Box today unveiled a new initiative called for sharing its own homegrown open source engineering tools with the larger programming community. The project was announced this afternoon in a company accompanied by a from Box CEO Aaron Levie. In a joint phone interview today, Levie and Box’s principal technical operations developer Benjamin VanEvery said that the tools being shared today have been in development and used by Box engineers for several years now. “All of these are projects that we’ve used internally, and we’re excited to share with people externally,” VanEvery said. “Some include code that we’ve ported over from our main application trunk, and others are projects we knew others would want from day one, and have been built to one day be able to open up to the community.” In unveiling such a program, Box joins the likes of Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Netflix and others in having a codified place for participating in the open source community. These kinds of initiatives have a two-pronged purpose: For-profit entities “give back” by sharing their own nifty projects with others outside the company. The companies stand to benefit, too, as their own tools can potentially receive useful contributions from people outside of their own full-time engineering teams. Box Open Source will have strict standards for maintaining the quality of its projects so that others can count on these tools continuing to work well, VanEvery said. For example, he said, each project on Box Open Source has unit tests included, and Box will reject any pull request that doesn’t include unit tests of its own. “We’ll constantly be running builds,” he said. “Quality is really important.” The Python programming language is strongly represented in the projects debuting on Box Open Source today, with top billing given to Python-oriented projects such as and . This makes sense, as the Box Open Source launch coincides with the annual being held this weekend in Montreal. Levie said that we can expect more rollouts in a variety of languages in the months and years ahead. “This is really kicking off a much broader initiative. It’s the first phase of what we think will be a journey to putting out more of our technology in a range of projects in the open source community.” |
App.io Turns iOS Apps Into Playable Mobile Ads | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | , a startup offering tools that allow iOS applications to run in the browser for testing or demo purposes, has now taken the next logical step: it’s bringing its technology the world of mobile advertising. With the company’s newly launched mobile ad product, developers can create ad units that are basically functional copies of their mobile app or game that consumers can play for a set amount of time, before having to download the native application in order to continue. The company, and backed by , has been developing its technology over the past 18 months, and today has more than 15,000 developers using its desktop browser product. Its service is reminiscent of an earlier , but instead of rendering apps in the browser using Flash, App.io uses HTML5 technology. To date, App.io’s developer customers have run over 2 million interactive demo sessions via the desktop browser, and while the company declined to comment on revenue figures or growth, the company’s head of Biz Dev David Truong notes that its has included “Fortune 500 companies and billion dollar startups.” (Those customers are under NDA, so he wouldn’t provide names, however.) Before publicly launching the mobile app ad product, App.io worked with a few early clients to test the technology, and has now seen over 200,000 impressions of its interactive ad units. Conversion rates, so far, have been high – reportedly 3 to 5 times higher than similar ad units (meaning rich media or video ads, also run on App.io’s partner ad networks.) Developers interested in testing the technology for themselves upload their simulator build to App.io, and optimize it for the mobile ad experience by removing things like login screens or tutorials, for example. App.io will then vet the ad and approve it, and it will then begin to run on the partner ad networks (also still under NDA, but there are several networks involved.) The company is still exploring how to charge developers, and is considering a number of models, including CPI (cost per install), CPM (cost per thousand), CPCV (cost per converted viewer) and even possibly a new model based on the LTV (lifetime value) of the user. “The cost is very similar to video ads – cost per completed demo,” Truong explains. “We’re essentially creating the industry standard, so are still experimenting with ad unit costs. We’ve had a lot of interest to charge CPI, but based on the high quality of the users (lifetime value),” he continues. “Due to our infrastructure and economics, we’re able to cost our ads at a very similar – and sometimes the same – as current ad offerings like video or standard CPI campaigns. A good industry standard CPI cost for high quality users could be between $2-$3 per install,” says Truong. The ads are both HTML5 and complaint, meaning they can technically run on any MRAID complaint ad network – those that are capable of running rich media mobile apps, in case you’re not well-versed in all the ad network lingo here. For consumers, the ad experience begins as either a banner or interstitial which, when tapped, launches into a full-screen playable game. Users can then play the game for a set amount of time, then a full-screen conversion button appears prompting the user to download the app from the App Store to keep playing. If they want to buy the game, they can tap that screen to go to the App Store and install the app to their mobile device. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu9pt9QG4gA?feature=player_embedded] App.io says it tracks the entire ad funnel from the impression, first tap, length of interaction, tap to the App Store, device install, and in the future, the Day 1, 7 and 30 retention metrics and cohort LTV. The mobile ads are iOS-only for now and are optimized for iPhones and iPads, Truong says. But they could easily be run on Android in the future, since they’re HTML5 streaming technology. “It would be as simple as changing the App Store link to the Google Play link,” he notes. Interested developers are being invited to trial the ads. More info on that is on the App.io blog . |
Turning The Ship: Microsoft Might Have Begun A Subtle Shift From Windows To Services | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Since Steve Ballmer passed the torch to Satya Nadella earlier this year, it marked a sea change in the organization: the first time in its history one of the founding team wasn’t running the show. Changes were expected and have happened. A surprising one is a subtle shift toward a service model and what appears to be an understanding that as long as people are running Microsoft tools, the hardware and underlying operating system don’t matter. For a company that has been driven by the underlying OS for most of its existence, this is not a minor matter It’s highly likely that such a shift started long before Nadella took the reins at Microsoft, but when it comes turning a ship the size of Microsoft, sometimes perhaps it takes a new leader to push the company in the new direction. That’s partly because being such a large organization, Microsoft doesn’t just have to deal with the nuts and bolts of a shifting strategy, they also have to deal with internal politics and a strong culture that might fight any change. There is a hard and fast attitude inside many large organizations that any change is a threat on some level because it has impact on your power within the organization, whether you consciously acknowledge that or not. Part of being a CEO is finding a way to manage the politics and culture and start the shift to a new way of working. Maybe Ballmer, because of his longevity and his own biases, simply wasn’t capable of bringing the company to the next level. That would take a new leader with a different vision, alliances and biases. David Linthicum writing about the difficulty organizations have moving to the cloud pointed out, rightly in my view, that what was holding back many organizations from going all in on the cloud was not the technology itself, but that to make it happen. I believe a similar dynamic plays out in any large organization when it comes to any major change. So it was telling when one of Nadella’s chief lieutenants, executive VP in charge of operating systems Terry Myerson, told Specifically, when she asked about the Nokia X line of phones–those new low-priced Android phones running Microsoft services announced at Mobile World Congress. He was cool with a phone running Android, precisely because he was happy to see Microsoft services running on as many devices as possible, regardless of the operating system This is a huge acknowledgement from a senior executive that as a company, they see the value of selling services over the old Windows-Office model in which you bought Windows and ran Windows software. It remains how they make a good deal of their money. Simply acknowledging this idea of services on many devices and operating systems is a change for Microsoft, and although it may be a quick answer to a question by a Microsoft executive, it shows a shift in vision that I don’t recall seeing before. Of course, this one remark doesn’t mean the whole company has a new attitude about this, but even talking in these terms is a huge step for Microsoft, and if Nadella can continue to turn the ship, you never know. It’s worth noting that I remain a skeptic that Microsoft can truly make this change, until proven otherwise, but I’m impressed to see at least some inklings that this old dog maybe could learn some new tricks. You never know. |
After Killing Intro For iOS, LinkedIn Gets Deep Integration On Mobile Via Samsung Partnership | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | Score a small victory for Android users. Earlier this year, LinkedIn , which used an engineering hack to . But the service was deemed for the way it intercepted emails on behalf of users before augmenting them with the additional data, and was later shut down. Today, however, select Android users will have access to similar functionality, the company says. Those who buy the newly released Galaxy S5 smartphone will have the ability to access LinkedIn data from not only their email, but also their calendar and contacts applications. In a blog post , LinkedIn touts this as a “first-of-its-kind integration,” explaining that they’ve teamed up with Samsung to make this possible. Unlike on iOS devices, where LinkedIn had to hack its way around the fact that Apple doesn’t offer an extensible framework, the partnership with Samsung means that, this time around, LinkedIn no longer needs to intercept your emails in order to To get started, Galaxy S5 users will need to download the LinkedIn application to their new handset, then authorize the native applications to sync with their LinkedIn account. After doing so, they’ll then be able to view the same sort of profile data Intro once offered iOS device owners, including LinkedIn users’ profile pictures, job titles, and work experience. But instead of only appearing in the email client, this data is also available in the Calendar and Contacts app, too, allowing you to pre-brief yourself or refresh your memory about those you’re soon meeting with, or get an update on your contacts’ latest news from the native Contacts app. We’ve asked LinkedIn if it’s working on any way to bring this functionality to a wider number of Android users through additional integrations to be rolled out in the future (Samsung or otherwise), but haven’t yet heard back. We’ll update with that info, as provided. More . |
Looks Like Facebook Will Make Ecommerce And User Testing Announcements At f8 | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | What exactly is Facebook launching ? It’s hard to say. But we know it’s planning coordinated announcements with at least one ecommerce platform and one product testing service, as these companies reached out to schedule briefings with TechCrunch tomorrow but Facebook forbid them from saying what they’re doing until after Mark Zuckerberg’s f8 developer conference keynote. Beyond that, we can’t provide details but I have some hunches. These aren’t confirmed or based on inside knowledge, but I’ve been covering Facebook day in and day out for four years so I’ve built some instincts for its roadmap. I expect Facebook may roll out an API for third-party websites, mobile sites, and mobile apps to add The feature lets Facebook-logged in ecommerce customers instantly fill in the checkout flow on other apps with the credit card number, billing address, and shipping address they have stored on file with Facebook. Facebook began with clothing store mobile app JackThreads, then announced in September it was partnering with Strip, Braintree, and PayPal to act as a billing info layer on top of them, rather than a payment processor competing with them. Though Facebook wasn’t taking a cut despite the feature like helping to increase conversion rates, it still has a way to gain from Autofill. It allows Facebook to see which of its users are spending how much on what apps and sites. It can then to prove the return on investment its ads net for ecommerce companies. That in turn leads them to buy more Facebook ads, earning Facebook revenue. I’d bet Facebook makes the Autofill API publicly accessible, or at least opens it to a significantly wider set of partners. That might include an ecommerce site that told me it would have f8-related news on Wednesday but couldn’t talk until after the keynote. A much more aggressive move would be to become a payment processor as well so it could earn a direct cut of sales in other apps, but that would require a great deal of legal work and a willingness to challenge popular payment backends like Stripe and PayPal/Braintree. It could always do that later. In this area, I expect Facebook will unveil a partnership between Parse and at least one app testing service. This could let developers on Parse easily pay for their apps to get usability and A/B testing, conversion optimization, bug testing, and more. One company in the space reached out to me about an f8-related briefing tomorrow, but their representative said Facebook wouldn’t allow it to discuss any details until after the keynote. An integration could make it easy for developers building on Parse to get their apps tested. Facebook might take a cut of the service’s fee, or simply use the integration to make Parse more helpful and sticky to developers. Facebook just announced that in the year since , it’s grown the number of apps its mobile-backend-as-a-service supports by 250% to 260,000. f8 might see Facebook try to turn Parse into a hub at the center of an ecosystem of third-party developer services. Parse also might formalize the connection between itself and Facebook’s developer-focused marketing products such as mobile app install and engagement ads. There’s likely to be at least a few big surprises at f8. But above are at least a few things that sound likely to me. What else will Facebook do at f8? caught wind of Facebook unveiling a mobile ad network. My sources confirmed this, say it’s called , and it will support bringing Facebook advertisers and targeting to both standard banner ads and custom native ads in third-party apps. Past that, things get hazier. Facebook could unveil another . Zuckerberg himself told me in a talk last fall that were two features Facebook saw potential in unbundling so perhaps we’ll see one of those. Facebook’s Yelp competitor has also spent the last year buried in the main Facebook apps, so maybe that or another local discovery app could emerge. Zuck has also discussed that Facebook may build products that don’t depend on your real-name Facebook identity, so there could be an app that plays on . However, we’ve heard Facebook is trying to keep f8 very developer and not consumer oriented, so new apps might not materialize. And currently there’s saying that: “The theme of F8 is ‘User Trust’ and Facebook is going to block third party app access to users’ friends’ data.” The last f8 in 2011 saw the debut of Open Graph, a sprawling protocol for automatically publishing content back to Facebook. While it dominated Facebook’s platform roadmap for a year, I now hear that “it’s not worth integrating” from people inside Facebook. We’ll see if tomorrow Facebook can launch something with more staying power. For the real deal on what happens at f8, come back for our coverage starting at 10am PST sharp tomorrow morning. |
Foxconn’s FIH Invests $2.2M In Social Media Site mig33 | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Project Goth (PGI), the holding company of , has received $2.2 million in funding from , one of Foxconn’s handset manufacturing service providers in a deal that could preload the social networking service’s apps into millions of mobile phones. Founded in 2007, mig33 focuses on sharing entertainment content in emerging markets. mig33 announced that it , a Hong Kong-based site for celebrity profiles, in February. PGI will also receive an additional $7.4 million if it merges successfully with Latin Gold, which is listed on the Australian Securities Stock Exchange (ASX), bringing its total raised from FIH to $9.6 million. FIH would receive an indirect interest of up to 19.9% of the deal is completed. The newly-listed company would be called migme ltd. mig33 plans to use the new capital to establish a development center in Taiwan, where FIH and Foxconn are based, as well as grow its mobile ecosystem. In an email, mig33 Steven Goh said, “What’s significant is that Foxconn manufacture 40 million to 50 million phones per month (out of 1.8 billion phones produced each year), and they’re the center of the production and manufacture of another 40 million to 50 million phones. The development deal, he adds, “is all about getting mig onto tens of millions of phones each month by the end of the year. We’re super excited.” This is the latest in a series of moves Foxconn has made to diversify its business by reaching out to startups. In December, Foxconn that will focus on wearable tech, and it also has in an accelerator program. Goh says that mig33 will continue to acquire other companies, form new business deals and build a mobile ecosystem using its Foxconn connection.
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Watch The Nymi Heartbeat Identification Wristband Personalize Its Wearer’s PC | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Toronto-based hardware startup gave a special public demo of its at the monthly event yesterday, and talked a bit about their product in more detail, now that it’s well on its way to production. The Nymi measures a user’s heart beat, and uses that to verify their identity and then perform various handshake operations to make it easier to login to software, customize settings and manipulate connected devices. Check out the video above, featuring Bionym CEO Karl Martin and President Andrew D’Souza, and read below to find out more about how this impressive wearable works its magic. For the Nymi to know who you are, you first go through an enrollment process. That enrollment is about taking your biometric data and tying it to your identity so you can use it for other applications. You touch the top to allow capture of your ECG, since the metal pad on the underside of the wristband provides a second point of contact. It takes about two minutes to gather enough data to complete your profile upon first setup. That produces a biometric template that ties the Nymi to you so that it and the applications it works with know it’s you. Once registered, at the beginning of the day you touch it with two points of contact again to authenticate it, which takes a couple of seconds to recall your profile. It then uses sensors on the band to know it’s still on your wrist and hasn’t been removed (cut off, stolen or lost), meaning it’s not actually verifying with your ECG in each usage throughout the day, but using that initial handshake and its tamper detection as proof it’s still you each time you use it. In terms of accuracy (identifying one person concretely without duplication), it’s pretty close to fingerprint authentication but is much better than facial detection, the Nymi team explained. It’s also designed to be more hack-resistant than traditional passwords. One of the reasons that Heartbleed was such a big deal was that people’s identities were easily stolen, explained Bionym Chief Cryptologist Yevgeniy Vahlis, but having a dedicated device avoids that. That’s because the Nymi is a self-contained device that doesn’t run any off-the-shelf software – it runs only Bionym’s own code. “We’re creating an environment where we control all the variables,” he said. “As a wearable, that’s possible; as just an app [strictly software solution], there’s nothing we can do to protect your identity, your encryption, etc.” Bionym also isn’t all that interested in licensing its tech to others, despite fielding a lot of approaches asking for this. We’ve been approached since the start, but we’re trying to create a platform as a business,” Martin said. “So while it would be a great short-term revenue bump, you can very easily be swapped out for a different technology. It’s not out of the question to license, but it would have to be under our terms, and it would have to be backwards compatible with our ecosystem.” Bionym would actually be open instead to building better authentication tech that might arise into its own devices, rather than operating the other way around, since it sees more longevity in that model. With a launch planned for fall, the key to growing the business early is to find people whose problem is so painful for them that they’re willing to push your solution, D’Souza said onstage; that means airlines, mobile payments providers, and password management companies for Nymi. That could help this startup avoid the problem of building early influential evangelist communities that other hardware startups have faced, and build to critical mass without awkward early growing pains. |
Before Rebranding As Mode Media, Glam Raised An Additional $15M | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Online publisher and ad company Glam Media — for one thing, it’s now called . For another, it’s launching a new video business, with a new content-curation platform. It looks like that Mode/Glam is funding these efforts, in part, by raising more private funding. Last summer, I heard from a source with knowledge of the company that it had , and now I’m hearing that there’s been another $15 million in unannounced funding. My source did not identify the investor behind the new funding. Mode declined to comment on the earlier funding or on this one. The company for its initial public offering more than a year ago, but if these changes have been in the works for a while, it may have made sense to hold off on the IPO. (Another online media company, Say Media, last fall.) As for those other announcements, I wrote about back in February. At the time, co-founder and CEO Samir Arora told me that with the success of its website Foodie and related apps, the previously female-focused Glam was starting to reach men as well, so it tried to find a name that was more appropriate — would just be one part of the broader portfolio. And while Glam included video content before, this sounds like a significant new investment, with 10 new shows and the launch of a new production team in Los Angeles, called Mode Entertainment Studios. The videos will run across Mode’s different web properties, and the company is also hoping they’ll get additional lift as consumers share the content through technology that Arora referred to as Project M. He said it was built on technology from t , and he likened it to a Pinterest-style interface that will allow both professional editors and readers to curate relevant content. You can see a screen shot above. |
500 Startups Partner George Kellerman Joins Paul Singh’s Crystal Tech Fund | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | 500 Startups Venture Partner is jumping ship to join former colleague Paul Singh as part of his , which was . The Crystal Tech Fund focuses on post-seed investments — that is, in companies that find themselves in the “funding gap” between seed and Series A stages. It looks for companies that have found some product-market fit, as well as a bit of revenue, and plans to write checks typically between $250,000 and $1 million. Singh was one of the earliest members of the 500 Startups team, along with Founding Partners Dave McClure and Christine Tsai, as well as Managing Partner Christen O’Brien. He left last year to found his asset management and financial management services firm for private investing, . Eventually that translated into the creation of a $50 million fund, which has several Disruption.VC clients as LPs. Kellerman is after two years with 500 Startups, where he worked his way up from . At the time he joined, he was primarily focused on opportunities in Japan and was instrumental in building 500’s relationship with NTT DoCoMo, which and invested in the firm. At the new fund, Singh says Kellerman will be doing the same thing he did at the old one — that is, fundraising and general operations stuff. And he’ll also be moving east to be part of the fund, joining a growing startup community in the Crystal City section of Arlington, Va. |
Concur Increases Stake In India’s Cleartrip, Buys Out Sherpalo and Kleiner | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Travel and expense management company wants a bigger pie of the $3 billion Indian online travel market. The company has just concluded negotiations with Sherpalo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins to acquire additional stake in the Indian online travel startup . In April 2011, , to tap into India’s booming online travel booking market, which is now worth around $3 billion annually according to , a global travel research company. Together, Sherpalo and Kleiner had around 25% stake in Cleartrip, according to a source directly familiar with the developments. Cleartrip founder and CEO, Stuart Crighton, had not responded to an email query at the time of writing this story. In January this year, a Cleartrip spokesperson had this to say in response to questions about Concur increasing its investment in the online travel startup: Cleartrip continues to have a strong set of investors (which include Concur) that are aligned in building the best travel experience for all our customers. We continue to grow the business well despite a challenging market environment in both our core India and Middle East operations on the back of very strong performance, from both our Mobile and Hotel businesses. |
FCC Chairman Promises To Regulate The Internet As A Utility If Needed To Protect Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | In a sternly worded today, FCC Chairman further explained his views on net neutrality, detailing how he plans to implement them. Most important in his comments is a promise to regulate Internet service as a utility if needed. Wheeler is plain: “T However, in his estimation, the recent Verizon case “ Going Title II would require that. Wheeler did not go as far as to state plainly that the idea of “fast lanes” for some content will be banned. The FCC will, according to Wheeler, “look skeptically on special exceptions.” Here is the rubric by which the FCC would judge actions to be not-ok enough to step in and mix things up with content companies and ISPs: The proof here will be pure pudding. I’m incredibly antsy about any Internet tiering, which is what Wheeler wants to allow. But, at a minimum, if that’s the code of ethics that will be enforced, it’s not too bad of a list. The FCC is currently taking comment on its proposals. |
Food Ordering Site Delivery.com Expands To Hong Kong | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | is with a that provides online food ordering and delivery to corporate consumers. The company is Delivery.com said in a statement that it launched in Hong Kong first because it is “one of the world’s most densely populated places with a cultural and business environment that mirrors New York City, where delivery.com is headquartered.” It added, “Long working hours, the growing popularity of team lunches, and an increasingly tech-savvy consumer support the need for a central online marketplace where hungry consumers with limited free time can order high-quality delivery, particularly during lunchtime’s peak hours.” The company claims that many current Delivery.com restaurants make 30% to 40% of their overall business from takeout and delivery, which allows them to make more money without having to increase their brick-and-mortar footprint in high-rent areas. In Hong Kong, however, Delivery.com will have to face off against several competitors, including , which also caters to corporate clients, and Rocket Internet’s , which has not launched in Hong Kong yet but is for a local office. Delivery.com, however, believes that there is still plenty of room for growth in the Hong Kong food delivery market, citing a that says food delivery still account for just 3% of the HKD $65 billion revenue produced by full service restaurants there. |
MIT’s Bitcoin Club To Give $100 In BTC To Every Student | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | YOU get bitcoin! And YOU get bitcoin. In fact, everyone at MIT gets bitcoin. Two ambitious MIT students, CS sophomore Jeremy Rubin and MBA candidate Dan Elitzer, have raised over $500,000 so that all 4,528 undergrads at MIT can have $100 worth of BTC. Why? They want to educate MIT students about cryptocurrencies and get all on-campus merchants bitcoin ready by next year. The Elitzer is the head of MIT’s Bitcoin Club and is working on educational opportunities as well as merchant adoption so that everyone at MIT can use their bitcoin on campus. “Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies pave the way for personal data to be recognized as a new digital asset class. The MIT Bitcoin Project is a truly exciting venture that will provide the foundation for research into other classes of digital assets,” said one of the supporters, Thomas Hardjono, executive director of the MIT Kerberos & Internet Trust Consortium, in a release. Students will receive their bitcoin next fall which should be enough time for the campus to become bitcoin compliant. The goal is to create a test-bed for bitcoin activity on campus and spread its use among the cream of the technical intelligentsia. Plus how badass would it be to pick up some 40s and some ‘za with a little of the old Dogecoin? You can read or wait until next fall when bitcoin becomes the currency of choice for the Cantabrigian nerd at play. |
Twitter: We Have No Plan For A Secondary Offering | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Today on its earnings call, Twitter indicated that it has no plan to host a secondary offering of its shares to provide liquidity to its large shareholders and early investors. In a , Twitter had already indicated that, as , “CEO Dick Costolo, plus co-founders and board members Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, as well as Benchmark, have no intention of selling their shares of Twitter common stock.” As such, there is no need for an orderly secondary offering to handle the vend. In its earnings all, the company emphasized that those folks were holding onto their shares not out of some form of altruism, but instead out of belief in the “long-term” health of the company itself. It goes without saying that those individuals and groups not selling also will lessen the impact of the large unlock on May 5th. One final point: Previously, when Twitter announced it would report its earnings ahead of the unlock date, it was generally taken as a bullish sign. : This makes the timing of Twitter’s decision to release its earnings pre-lockup interesting. It’s a power play of sorts. If Twitter were expecting a poor earnings report, it would want to release it post-lockup, thereby lessening the incentive for employees to cash out on the first day possible. The company wants to avoid its employees selling shares en masse, as that would provide a very negative signal to the investing public. So Twitter is publicly betting that, by releasing earnings ahead of the lock-up expiration, employee interest in selling their shares will decrease. And you don’t negatively incentivize your denizens against harming your firm. So , Twitter could be obliquely signaling that it had a big first quarter, or at least one good enough to prevent a mass sell-off of its shares by its workers. So what happened? Well, it could be that Twitter thought showing stronger user growth rates on a sequential quarter-basis, and beating on both top and bottom lines would be enough to placate the street. It wasn’t. So oddly enough our above analysis might not have been wrong prima facie, but instead lost in the weeds of perception. This is why guessing is a fool’s game. Whatever the case, Twitter is still slipping in after-hours trading as the call proceeds. It’s set a new low: $38.16 at last glimpse. That’s far below its first-day open of around $45, and its all-time high of $74. In fact, it’s trending towards the company’s IPO price of $26. |
DollarPhotoClub Expands Into More Markets, Hits 11,000 Users | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Stock photo provider is a shot across the bow of the Big Stock Photo Cartels™. Created by a repeat entrepreneur and owner of one of the biggest modeling agencies in England, the company aims to make getting a stock photo as easy as . Now the company has announced that they are moving into 13 new markets including Italy and Poland and currently has over 11,000 subscribers. The company . The founder, , created Fotolia, a huge stock photo site in Europe. In an effort to take on the entrenched players in the States, namely Shutterstock and iStock, he created DollarPhotoClub as a pricing play to break into the US. “Currently the company is self-funded – we are not looking for outside investors in the near term, but may reconsider in the future,” he said. “The goal is to make money from the outset: we’re incredibly aggressive on pricing, charging an easy flat rate per image of $1, which has never been done before in the higher-end stock image market – but not with loss-leaders, so we stay in the black.” Users pay $10 per month to get ten images and then pay $1 for additional images. This is compared to other services like Shutterstock that cost $249 a month for 25 images a day or $229 for 25 images a la carte. With millions of photos on file, it wasn’t hard to find something that worked for almost every topic. Arguably, the selection is a bit haphazard and, for example, I couldn’t find any photos as striking as this one for the topic “Hong Kong” from Shutterstock. Although this came pretty close. Pricing, then, is obviously the primary and strongest differentiator for the company. The company soft-launched in January and is now ramping up. They offer all of their images in high resolution, a feature that other providers charge for. “We are targeting professionals who use many images,” said Tscheltzoff. “It’s disrupting the business model of the two big U.S. players, which used to be the disruptors, but are now part of big corporations and/or publicly traded, so their goal is to please shareholders.” The company has already hit “multi-million dollars” in revenue, which isn’t too shabby for an odd duck in an entrenched market. |
Adly And Nestivity Merge, Will Integrate Their Social Marketing Tools | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Social marketing companies and have announced that they are merging. Moving forward, they’ll be one company doing business under the Adly name. As you may recall, Adly connects advertisers with celebrities and other influencers who are willing to post promotional messages on social media. Nestivity, meanwhile, allows customers to build an online “nest” that collects all their tweets, where they can sort the tweets and highlight multimedia content in various ways. Nestivity Chairman Bahram Nour-Omid said that the idea for the merger came from his company. Adly, he said, did “a great job matching brands and celebrities together,” and by incorporating those celebrity promotions into Nestivity, “You will have a much stronger product that will get consumers in the loop as well.” The full teams of both companies will be working together in the newly merged entity, Nour-Omid said, and they’ll be integrating their respective products. He added that celebrities on Adly will also be able to use Nestivity to communicate with their followers for free. The goal, he added, is to help improve celebrities’ “follower capital.” He compared celebrities making money from their large followings to “putting money in the bank and collecting interest on it.” Adly previously raised $7.5 million from investors, including Upfront Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Siemer Ventures, and others. “Nestivity’s software was exciting to us because it adds both organization and reach to social conversations,” said Upfront’s Mark Suster in the acquisition release. |
This Monstrous Linksys WRT1900AC Router Is For Folks With A Real Appetite For Networking | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | There are wireless routers, and then there are wireless routers with a 1.2GHz dual-core Marvel Armada SoC processor and 256MB RAM that supports USB 3.0 drive transfer speeds and has four massive antennae that can blow wireless connectivity through almost any environment. The $250 Linksys WRT1900AC (which you can win ) is the latter. So what’s so special about this massive wireless router and why am I writing about it? Home and small office networking folks have never been given the chance to play with heavy iron. In between the run-of-the-mill wireless router and the $31,000 Cisco machine we find very few highly programmable, very powerful networking tools that allow for instant NAS setup, usable wireless management, and high speed connectivity. If I were setting up a network from scratch for a whole office and needed a backup solution, some parental controls, and some clever network mapping tools, this would be the router I’d use. The first thing you notice about the router is its size. It has four removable antennae that hang off a case that is about ten inches long – far bigger than anything else I’ve seen. It is peppered with holes for heat displacement and even has a built-in fan for when things get too toasty. It can be mounted on a wall but is probably ideal for “top of the filing cabinet” placement in most environments. Wi-Fi range maxed out at about 300 feet and the system supports multiple Wi-Fi channels – 2.4 GHz 802.11n and 5 GHz 802.11ac – as well as dynamic beam forming to assess which antennae to activate for maximum throughput. The design hearkens back to an older, simpler Linksys trade dress that will remind geeks of some of their favorite mid-2000 era hardware. In terms of performance I saw the best throughput when connected to the 5 GHz range. Degradation was negligible on the first floor of my brick home and speed was solid all the way up in my attic, about 30 feet above the router. In before/after speed tests against an Airport Base Station I saw equal theoretical speeds – about 13 Mbps but actual speed jumped from 4 Mbps to 6 Mbps. In short, it worked quite well. Another big plus is Linksys’ clever interface. The powerful onboard processor means you get speedy access to settings and system resets without much fuss. Whereas a standard reboot on an older router takes a minute or two, a reboot here happens almost instantly. I also really enjoyed the network map, an amazing tool that is very helpful if you’ve ever tried to find an errant IP address on the system. Using the new router, for example, I was able to fine my Raspberry Pi mining rig without resorting to a shell script that scans all the local IP addresses. It also shows you, at a glance, which devices are having trouble connecting to the network. The system also allows you to reserve an IP address for a certain device, thereby ensuring it doesn’t change during DHCP updates. The system also allows for media prioritization – it essentially ensures your media device stream before other devices on the network – and parental controls that allow you to lock down certain websites. There is also a robust password-protected guest access system that sandboxes up to 50 users out of your main network. Finally, a built-in speed test can help troubleshoot speed problems and, I suspect, is designed to prove to users that they are actually getting a bit more speed out of the hardware. This router is not for the faint of wallet. At $250 it’s considerably more expensive than your average wireless device. However, given the power under the hood, range, and speed boosts along with shaping and traffic management features, it’s well worth the investment. As we all well know most Wi-Fi routers are created equal. This one is specifically designed not to be. The router is also interesting in that it supports open source firmware out of the box, including the popular Tomato and (potentially) OpenWRT systems. Linksys was famous for looking the other way when users installed the firmware on earlier version of their routers and the addition of open source features and functionality is a boon for those looking to lock down or modify their Internet experience. Who is this router for? Given the distinct speed advantages I experienced and the power of the interface, wireless radio, and processor, this device is for a small office or home user looking for something quite heavy duty. While it is definitely a pricey proposition to pick up this router, the performance improvements will be quite noticeable. As a long-time user of Airport devices I’d definitely miss Apple’s fire-and-forget interface. [slideshow] |
null | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 4 | 11 | null |
Twitter Shares Test New All-Time Lows After Its Q1 Earnings Fail To Excite Investors | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Twitter’s stock is , hitting a new low of $38.27, below its previously recorded lowest-point of $38.80. Twitter went public for $26 per share and shot to more than $74 per share at its peak. It opened around $45 on its first day public. The following image comes moments after Twitter traded for $38.27. However, given that I decided to , and screenshot second, the number had changed slightly. Still, at $38.45 a new low has been set: Twitter of $183,000, or $0.00 per share today, on revenue of $250 million. Those first quarter results were better than investors expected. It didn’t help much: its stock slid after clocking of 5.8% on a sequential quarter basis. That’s its second lowest tally ever, only bested in by the fantastically slim 3.8% sequential quarter growth that the company posted in the fourth quarter of 2013. Investors are not enthused. Testing new share-price lows, Twitter is dampening the mood on the street for technology shares in general. This could retard the pace of technology IPOs, delaying liquidity for investors and LPs and employees alike, slowing capital formation for private companies, and . It won’t bring down rent prices in San Francisco, but these declines matter. Twitter posted a much wider decline after its first earnings report as a public company, so perhaps today is progress of decline. |
Google Denies Shady Claim That AdSense Robbed Publishers | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | An alleged former Google employee has anonymously published that AdSense purposefully banned publishers right before their periodic payout so it could keep their ad revenue. But Google denies this as “a complete fiction”, and based on our examination of the report, the allegations look false. There may have been mechanisms in place to prevent scamming publishers this way, and linguistic clues suggest the author didn’t work at Google. At our request, Google provided TechCrunch with this statement strongly denying the accusations: “This description of our AdSense policy enforcement process is a complete fiction. The color-coding and ‘extreme quality control’ programs the author describes don’t exist. Our teams and automated systems work around the clock to stop bad actors and protect our publishers, advertisers and users. All publishers that sign up for AdSense agree to the of the service and a designed to ensure the quality of the network for users, advertisers and other publishers. When we discover violations of these policies, we take quick action, which in some cases includes disabling the publisher’s account and refunding affected advertisers.” The report doesn’t include hard evidence, and the whole thing might just be from a jilted publisher or someone else out to harm Google. Still, it could spark an investigation into AdSense’s banning procedure or at least a loss of confidence amongst AdSense publishers even if it’s untrue. The whistleblower purports to have worked at Google since at least 2009, and says they waited until their identity could be concealed before coming forward. They wrote on , “To sum it up for everyone, I took part in what I (and many others) would consider theft of money from the publishers by Google, and from direct orders of management.” The is a bit meandering so here are the major points. According to the source, Google experienced some financial department stumbles in 2009 and decided it What alarmed the supposed employee is that “We were told to begin banning accounts that were close to their payout period…The purpose was to get that money owed to publishers back to Google AdSense, while having already served up the ads to the public.” This way, Google would get paid by the advertisers, run their ads on the publishers’ properties, but then ban the publisher right before they were to receive their payout for showing the ads, and Google would keep the money, he alleged. Google employees were supposedly told that “it was needed for the company, and that most of these publishers were ripping Google off anyways, and that their gravy train needed to end.” Employees who didn’t go along with the plan were ridiculed for not being team players, and some resigned, the employee said. Next, Google supposedly wanted to further automate the process, so it set up the “ Finally, the whistleblower suggests that Google was aware of a practice known as “Click-Bombing”, where a publisher would repeatedly over-click the ads of a competitor to get it flagged and banned by Google’s fraud system for self-clicking. Obviously, someone aiming to hurt Google could get a lot of mileage by publishing these allegations. That motive led us to closely analyze the document for any red flags. We found many. First, the language. The author refers to Google’s “AdSense division” rather than its official internal title “Online Sales And Operations”. He refers to “being a team player”, but down in Mountain View they call that “being Googley”. He also refers to “invalid clicks” which are much more commonly known as “click spam” at Google. “Click bombing” is a term that wasn’t used internally, we’ve heard, and only of all invalid clicks. The report also makes a lot of claims about the problems with these so-called ‘invalid clicks,” And while it’s true that competitors will sometimes click another’s ads, Google’s detection system is actually fairly sophisticated. It can tell when clicks are from the publishers themselves, which will get them banned, but it can also tell when the clicks come from a novice Internet user, in which case it will disregard some of the clicks but not all. And it can also tell when they come from some other malicious party, and it then disregards those clicks across all Google publishers. Then there’s the functional discrepancies. AdSense’s billing is believed to require a publisher to be paid for an advertiser to be billed. That would block Google’s ability to charge an advertiser but not pay the publisher. Google’s that if a publisher is suspended for policy violations, “ The report also states that employees wanting to use AdSense on their websites were “automatically placed in the Green Group” which the poster refers to as VIP Status or the “untouchables.” That’s not quite the case. In reality, any Google employees with an AdSense account would have to get VP approval to use AdSense on their sites, and those accounts would then be heavily scrutinized. And the biggest inconsistency of all is simply that this strategy for making money in the short term would decimate Google’s long-term revenue potential. Why would Google sacrifice all future earnings from a publisher just to snatch a month or one billing period worth of revenue? The economics just don’t add up. Google works with more than 2 million publishers and paid out $9 billion last year. Burning those publishers for a quick revenue hit just doesn’t make sense. With so much pointing to the whistleblower not being a Google employee and the whole scheme being dysfunctional, it’s hard to believe the report. Once you have a good grip on the kind of lingo an ex-Googler would use and a greater view of the economic ramifications of these claims (if true), the “leak” appears to read more like the allegations of a disgruntled, banned publisher rather than someone intimately familiar with Google’s internal operations, language and AdSense platform as a whole. |
Sony Xperia Z2 Review: A Waterproof Android Smartphone That Goes Beyond Gimmicks | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | a great time of it in the U.S. smartphone market over the past few years, and it recently announced that its new flagship, the . But the Z2 is still a solid device, and a contender on more or less even footing with flagships from other Android OEMs, so fans of Google’s mobile operating system ignore it at their own risk. Sony’s industrial design with its smartphone line has had some trouble finding its footing, but the strong right angles on the rectangular slab finally seem comfortable in their own skin. The Z2 resembled the Z1s (which is available in the U.S. on T-Mobile) in terms of outward looks, but adds some refinements like a slimmer bezel and matte edge that bump up its visual appeal. Even the repositioned notification LED adds some charm, making this a visually attractive device, albeit one that might not agree with all tastes. [gallery ids="994855,994854,994860,994858,994859,994857,994851,994850,994852,994853"] The phone’s sharp angles make for a visually striking contrast to the rounded rectangles that make up the vast majority of Android handsets, but that also means it might come across as uncomfortable in the hand, especially if you happen to have smaller mitts. Mine are fairly large, and I still mostly felt more comfortable using the Z2 two-handed in most scenarios. Even so, it’s a bold design that uses premium materials (scratch resistant glass front and back) and highlights the display, which is one of the Z2’s big selling points. And despite the size, the phone isn’t overly heavy. If you’re looking for a phablet-style phone, you could do much worse than the Z2 , and unlike with others, I’m not at all embarrassed to be seen with this one in public. The Z2 is a top-performer, like other Android devices using Qualcomm’s most recent quad-core processors, and it runs KitKat, too. Discerning between flagship Android devices based on performance has become basically a zero sum game, especially for general usage. The bottom line is that if you’re spending $600 unlocked, you’ll get a phone that renders web pages well and plays back almost all types of media without issue. Sony, like other device makers, looks to differentiate itself not based on hardware performance but based on software features, and the Z2 has a healthy range of those. Some are good, some are annoying, but that also is not something that can be said exclusively about Sony. On balance, though Sony manages to add a lot of value to its devices, without altering the basic Android experience too much. PlayStation Mobile support, for instance, is a big value add for gamers, and makes it possible to use PS3 controllers with the Z2 to play PlayStation Network titles optimized for Sony’s Android devices. You can output to your PC for essentially a pocket console experience, too, without the need for any cumbersome additional hardware, and with access to titles that aren’t available anywhere else. On the other hand, Sony has decided to horn in on some sacred Android territory; calling up Google Now with a long press on the virtual home button works as expected, but also presents you with a second bubble for Sony’s “What’s New” portal, which is essentially a full screen ad for its own digital media content offerings. I realize that Sony wants to push its media on its own devices, but this isn’t the place to house that. A home screen widget installed by default (but removable) is one thing, a permanent fixture that shares space with Google Now is another. Battery life is strong on the Z2, with ample standby power reserves. In actual use, it drains quickly when viewing video, but for general use, I was impressed, and managed to eke out multiple days even without being too conservative. Another area where Sony has genuinely added value, however, is the camera and its software. Google has opted to go simple with its own native Android camera app, but Sony clearly wants users to get the most out of their impressive camera tech. On the Z2, Sony continues its tradition of including a number of filters and different camera modes provided by itself and third-parties, with options to download more, and more of these effects can now be applied to video, too. Some highlights include the background defocusing software, which has become de rigueur on Android phones, and the 4K video recording mode. The phone itself doesn’t support 4K playback, but capturing at that resolution means you can zoom with relatively little loss, and your home videos will be future compatible with 4K TVs. Another neat feature offers high-speed video capture which you can slow down as you want, making it a strong competitor to Apple’s iPhone 5s slo-mo mode in this regard. [gallery ids="994989,994991,994992,994993,994994"] Photos and videos captured by the Z2 look fantastic, especially on the screen of the Z2 itself, which is designed to improve the look of visual media. It’s a strong consider for the single best Android camera currently available in a smartphone, and Sony’s strong credentials as an imaging company in its own right really shine here. Sony tries to explain this with a lot of buzzwords in its marketing material, but the results speak for themselves, and that’s all the average user cares about. The screen on the Z2 is an IPS display, finally, and it really helps improve the quality vs. previous Sony devices, including the Z1s, which debuted earlier this year and is otherwise quite similar to the Z2. This screen looks a lot better, however, thanks in part to the use of IPS and to the smaller bezel that frames the 5.2-inch screen. Its large size mean it doesn’t have quite the pixel density of competitors like the HTC One (M8), but no one with standard human eyes would notice a perceptible difference in its ability to render text crisply anyway. Combined with the top-notch camera, the display makes this a top choice device for users who prize their AV capture and consumption abilities above all else. One weird thing I’ve noticed on this and previous “waterproof” Sony devices, however – the display seems to be triggered by rainfall or splashed water in weird ways, making the phone act as if touch or other input is being detected when none is being applied. The phone does indeed still work after exposure to water, including submersion and torrential downfalls, however, and that’s what really counts. Sony’s camera is a very solid Android flagship, and a device that makes it easy to pine for the electronics maker to return in earnest to the U.S. market with a full-court press. Here in Canada, the device can be bought on Bell’s network, and in other parts of the world similar carrier subsidies are available. Sony diehards will at least get the chance to pay up for an unlocked device come summer, but our testing reveals no real reason why the Z2 shouldn’t have a chance to go head to head with The Galaxy S5’s and HTC One (M8)’s of the world. In fact, I’d choose this over Samsung’s latest fare, though HTC still beats it by a slight margin in my books. |
eBay Beats, Q1 Non-GAAP Earnings Up 11 Percent to $899M, Revenue Up 14 Percent To $4.3B | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | eBay just first quarter earnings this afternoon, beating expectations. Non-GAAP earnings increased 11%, to $899 million or $0.70 per diluted share, over the prior year, driven by strong top line growth, says the company. Revenue for the first quarter increased 14% to $4.3 billion, compared to the same period in 2013. The company posted a Analysts earnings of $0.67 per share on sales of $4.22 billion. “We delivered a strong first quarter, with enabled commerce volume up 24 percent and revenue up 14 percent,” said eBay President and CEO John Donahoe in a release. “We are committed to delivering sustainable shareholder value and focusing on what matters most to our investors. We are executing our growth plans, capitalizing on the synergies in our portfolio and aggressively executing our $5 billion share buyback program. Today, we also announced a non-cash tax charge to facilitate repatriation of $6 billion net in foreign earnings, increasing our available U.S. cash and enhancing our financial flexibility.” eBay’s Marketplace business saw gross merchandise volume (GMV) grow 12%, with the U.S. up 11% and International up 13%. Revenue grew to $2.2 billion and marketplaces gained 4.7 million new buyers to end the quarter with 145 million active buyers, up 14%. Marketplaces now has over over 650 million listings. PayPal’s total payment volume (TPV) grew 27% with Merchant Services volume up 32% and on-eBay volume up 15%. Revenue grew to $1.8 billion and PayPal gained 5.8 million new active registered accounts to end the quarter at 148 million, up 16%. Total company enabled commerce volume increased 24% in the first quarter to $58 billion, with mobile volume up 70% to $11 billion representing 19% of volume. eBay Enterprise gross merchandise sales (GMS) grew 16%, with revenue at $269 million for the quarter. Coming off of a , the company’s quarter has been marked by a now settled battle with activist shareholder and investor Carl Icahn that PayPal should be spun off, or sold. Icahn also issued a number of accusations around board mismanagement. In the end, Icahn with eBay, and he and the company added a mutually agreed upon board member, David W. Dorman, a former chief executive of AT&T, to the board. In terms of product, eBay has been attempting to add think more creatively when it comes to ecommerce and marketplaces. The company is reportedly going to an online mall for retail goods; and to integrate virtual try on technology into its marketplace. eBay also saw s software division. PayPal debuted a for merchants. And there are the vying to be part of Apple’s big payments push. We’ll be listening to the call and will update with notable comments. |
Twitter User Growth Accelerates To 5.8%, With 255M Monthly Users (And 78% Of Them On Mobile) | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Twitter just released for the first quarter of 2014, it has grown its monthly active user base to 255 million. Will that be enough to avert more awkward questions about growth during today’s analyst conference call? Well, maybe … but probably not. This means MAUs grew 5.8 percent quarter-over-quarter, which is an improvement compared to the end of 2013, when Twitter only saw 3.9 percent growth. But it’s lower than pretty much any other period in the company’s history. (The number also reflects 25 percent growth compared to the same quarter last year.) Meanwhile, mobile MAUs grew 198 million, accounting for 78 percent of the total. Timeline Views, an indication of user engagement, actually fell last quarter, but now they’re up again, from 148 billion to 157 billion. “Revenue growth accelerated on a year over year basis fueled by increased engagement and user growth,” said CEO Dick Costolo in the earnings release. that after taking a largely hands-off approach to user growth (“growth was something that happened to us”) the company has been adding features specifically aimed at increasing user engagement and “will reach many more people” this year. Even though , as of 4:39 p.m. Eastern, Twitter shares had dropped 9.3 percent in after-hours trading. Asked during today’s analyst call about Twitter’s identity and whether it will become a mainstream product, Costolo described it as “our companion experience for what’s happening in your world.” He also reiterated that there were 3.3 billion views of tweets related to the Oscars this year, he argued, “Twitter the platform is already credibly mainstream.” The goal now is to help existing users understand “the increased value of the logged in experience.” [graphic by Bryce Durbin] |
TC Cribs Tours Optimizely’s Spacious HQ, Where Table Tennis Is A Serious Sport | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | It’s time for a new installment of , the TechCrunch TV show that takes you inside the doors of some of the tech industry’s hottest companies. This time around, we headed to the San Francisco headquarters of , the company that makes website optimization software. Optimizely has had some impressive growth over the past few years since its launch, so it has established itself in a spacious office to accommodate more expansion in the months and years ahead. All that space also means Optimizely HQ has room for some fun perks. While many startups these days have one ping-pong table, Optimizely has a room with several ping-pong tables that’s often used for after-hours tournaments. There’s even a special spot for solo practicing. There’s also space that’s been turned into Optimizely’s own “Library” for quiet work. There were no books to be found there, but it’s a digital world we live in, I guess (though there is at least that could make sense on Optimizely’s library shelves.) And make sure you watch until the end, to see Optimizely’s makeshift music studio. That’s where we came across the company’s who gave us an impromptu performance showing off his absurd/amazing “ ” skills. We certainly live in interesting times, folks. |
Twitter Beats In Q1 With $250M In Revenue And Picks Up 14M New Monthly Active Users | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 29 | Twitter its first quarter financial performance this afternoon, reporting revenue of $250 million in the period, and earnings per share of $0.00 on a non-GAAP basis. The street had Twitter to report revenue of $241.5 million, and a three cent per-share loss. That non-GAAP $0.00 EPS is slightly occlusive — the company in fact had non-GAAP net income of $183,000 in the period, or about the cost of one engineer’s yearly cost to a tech company. However, when you stretch $183,000 across more than half a billion shares, it doesn’t go far. Twitter’s revenue is up 119% year-over-year. On a GAAP basis, Twitter lost a stunning Twitter reported that it had million monthly active users. In the sequentially preceding quarter, Twitter had reported . That’s growth of 14 million in the three-month period, or around 5.8%. The company’s monthly active user count has only grown 25% in the past year. Monthly mobile active users were stronger at 198 million. That figure is up 31% in the past year. However, it remains modest. Investors appear concerned that despite quickly expanding revenue, Twitter’s days of massive user growth are over. That means lower future top and bottom line growth. 78% of Twitter’s users access the site from a mobile device. Twitter’s stock rose strongly in regular trading, up nearly 6%. The markets were up more modest fractions. In after-hours trading, following the report of its earnings, Twitter’s stock is down more than 8%. In the , Twitter reported a non-GAAP profit of $0.02 per share, and revenue of $242.7 million. Twitter expects its second quarter revenue to come in between $270 and $280 million. Full year 2014 top line should be between $1.20 and $1.25 billion, coming in on the low end of expectations. That aside, Twitter’s $2.2 billion in cash and equivalents is right where it was before the quarter started, meaning that the company has plenty of runway to execute on whatever its plans may be.
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Fired Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro’s Severance Totaled $58M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | When Yahoo , it wasn’t clear how much loot he was going to take with him. The final tally, revealed today in an that also detailed Yahoo’s , has the figure: $58 million. Or, more precisely, $57.96 million. That includes cash, restricted stock units that vested over time, stock options linked to performance, and so-called Make-Whole RSUs. The total tally breaks down as follows: While the cash portion of De Castro’s exit is minimal compared to the larger sum of his exit, Yahoo shareholders will pay for his departure all the same. The company created the chart above, adding that it illustrates the fact that his cost to remove was greatly impacted by its rising stock price. In short, Yahoo makes the point that the cost of this embarrassing episode would have been far less had the company not done so darn well in the public markets. Whatever the case, the episode is now behind the Internet firm, and will likely quickly be forgotten as anything more than a past, if expensive, mistake. In the wake of Yahoo’s positive most-recent quarterly results, I doubt there will be too much carping among the investing class. |
With iOS 8, Siri Might Be Able To Name That Tune Shazam-style | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Quick! That catchy new track is playing over the gym’s loudspeaker, and you’ve been meaning to figure out its name for days. Grab an Android phone. Say, “Okay, Google — What song is this?” Within a few seconds, it’ll spit out an answer. (plus a link to buy the song, if you’re so inclined.) But what if you grab an iPhone, instead? You bring up Siri, and say “Siri, what song is this?” Maybe she’ll just sit there. Maybe she’ll crack a witty one-liner. Either way, she won’t have any idea what song is playing. According to the latest iOS 8 rumors, Apple wants to fix that. Citing the ever-insightful “people with knowledge”, Bloomberg that Apple is working with Shazam on a music fingerprinting/identification feature that’ll be tied into Siri right alongside your appointment reminders and sport score updates. So what’s in it for Shazam? Amongst other things , this presents an opportunity for Shazam to build a semi-permanent revenue stream right into iOS. If Shazam can convince Apple to cough up a few cents every time a user clicks the “buy track” button after Siri IDs a track, that’s easy money. We’re just about two months away from Apple’s annual WWDC conference, where the company traditionally debuts the latest major release of iOS. You know what the means? It’s iOS rumor season. Except lots, and of iOS rumors over the next few weeks – partly because more people are being clued into what Apple has been working on, and partly because others get the itch to make stuff up when they know an announcement is looming. While there’s no shortage of song identification apps on the App Store, iOS the only operating system amongst the top 3 (the others being Android and Windows Phone) to not have it built right in. Android offers it up right on the homescreen through the aforementioned voice-search widget, while Windows Phone tucks it right behind the device’s ever present search button. |
Photojojo Gets Into Rentals For Drones And Other Crazy Camera Gear | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | began as a newsletter for photography enthusiasts to share their latest tricks. Over time, it’s evolved into a popular storefront for photo geeks, selling unique but oh-so-useful photography accessories. Now they’re trying something new: … but probably not like anything you’ve seen before. Whereas sites like LensRentals and BorrowLenses make it easy to have a quick run with some mega lens you’d otherwise never buy for yourself, Photojojo wants to rent out all sorts of crazy gear beyond the standard camera body/lens type of stuff. If it’s the sort of photography gadget where you might think “Oh man, it’d be fun to play with that for a weekend” but for which you probably wouldn’t plunk out the cash to own forever, they want to rent it. Rather than focusing on the specs of any given piece of hardware, Photojojo wants to pitch potential renters with They’ll show you a bunch of cool things you can do over a weekend with a Drone — and then they’ll . Each rental will come with a full set of on-the-go project instructions, and everything you need to get the job done. “How the heck are they going to ship all this stuff around? Won’t that be insanely expensive” you might ask. A good question! For now, they’re not. When the rental service launches on May 15th, almost all rentals will have to be picked up locally in San Francisco. Some, like the Drone units, will require an hour of one-on-one training before they’ll let you head out with it. Other things — like, say a big box of Polaroid cameras with film for a wedding — will start shipping outside of SF sooner than others. The company is still working out their exact pricing — and even then, cost will vary quite a bit depending on what you’re renting. A vintage camera might set you back $10-20 a day, whereas one of their fancier, higher-end Drones might cost closer to $100 a day. Beta Signups for the new rental service , with the service itself rolling out on May 15th. |
Yahoo Nominates One Of Its Co-Founders, A Stock Guru, And A Former Walmart CEO To Its Board | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Call it Yahoo’s version of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. The venerable Internet firm today a trio of nominations to its board that could round out the sort of folks keeping tabs on its focus. Most interesting among the nominations is David Filo, a Yahoo co-founder. Joining Filo in the ranks of the nominated are Charles Schwab, chairman of eponymous financial firm Charles Schwab, and H. Lee Scott, Jr., who was once the CEO of Walmart. An interesting crew. Filo is sensical given his history with the company, and makes especial sense as Yahoo looks to return to its portal and search roots. Schwab’s accolades by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in the company’s release were somewhat vague: “ Scott is praised by Mayer for his “operational excellence.” The nominations will be voted on June 25, 2014, during the company’s annual meeting. Statements from the selected make the trio appear confident in their accession. Given Mayer’s support, I doubt they are suffering from acute hubris. Yahoo had a , managing to grow a key revenue metric year-over-year. Investors, content with that and enthused about the upcoming Alibaba IPO — Yahoo owns a significant share of that firm — sent its shares higher. Given current general investor contentment, the chance that Mayer doesn’t get the appointees she wants feels slim. |
Pinterest’s “Choose Your Own Adventure” Could Be A Travel Product | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Pinterest’s dubbed “Choose Your Own Adventure,” may not be directly related to the company’s efforts in the personalization space, but rather the announcement of a consumer-facing travel product, we’re hearing. The launch will be aimed at attracting more men to Pinterest’s service, which is today overwhelmingly female. As to what exactly its travel product will be, we’re less sure. The company already launched “ ,” which allow users to pin their “travel inspiration” links and images to an online map and share those pins with their friends. The forthcoming announcement could serve as some sort of extension to this earlier product, perhaps allowing users to also book travel through the Pinterest website. According to one person familiar with Pinterest’s plans, the company is currently focused on bringing more men onto the platform — especially affluent men. Travel is the first vertical Pinterest is focusing on with this goal in mind, mainly because this industry has a strong appeal to both men and women, our source reports. It’s common knowledge that women tend to make most of the purchasing decisions, so Pinterest’s desire to bring more men onto its platform is interesting, and would certainly give the service something of a different vibe if successful. Today, men represent only 14 percent of Pinterest’s total monthly users (women are 86 percent), according to research recently shared by . That being said, the study also found that the male demographic on Pinterest has been growing: Men are 38 percent more likely to have joined the service in the past six months, and men are more likely than women to try new products, bars, sports, cocktails, repairs or, most notably, travel destinations, the study showed. Travel-focused products have been on the minds of other social networks of late. The name “Choose Your Own Adventure” could easily be pointing to a travel-focused product, but another big hint emerged today when Facebook encouraging users to share their own travel inspirations. Facebook could be trying to pre-empt Pinterest’s travel product announcement with news of its own. |
Created With Imogen Heap, Mi.Mu Turns Hand Gestures Into Music | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 16 |
Made in collaboration with British singer-songwriter Imogen Heap, the turns the arms and hands of performers into musical instruments. Currently on , the project has raised about £67,000 (about $112,800) so far and has 16 days to reach its £200,000 ($336,620) goal. Eventually, Heap and Mi.Mu’s developers hope the glove and its software, which will be made open source, will reach a wide range of users. “Different musicians have different wishes in terms of connecting with the audience. For Imogen, her music that she creates in studio is very rich and layered and full of interesting sounds that she spent hours meticulously crafting and sampling,” says Kelly Snook, an engineer and musician on Mi.Mu’s eight-person development team. “She found that it didn’t translate well in a performance, when she had to turn a knob or a fader or push a button. Her motivation was partly to get away from all the buttons and just gesturally do something in an intuitive way.” Mi.Mu works by capturing movement and hand gestures with analog bend sensors. That information is then sent wirelessly via the [a wireless input-output board] board on its wrists to a computer.
Software developed for Mi.Mu enables performers to map that data to musical control signals and combine different gestures and movements to make more complex controls. The gloves can also be programmed to control third-party music production and editing software. Other people who have shown interest in Mi.Mu include an acrobatic DJ and an ice dancer. “A lot of people are interested in the boundary between music and dance being blurred even further. A dancer becomes a musician, a musician becomes a dancer, that possibility is really interesting to some people,” says Snook. Other use cases for Mi.Mu include potentially allowing virtual reality hardware makers to insert realistic hand movements into environments. It can also be used to recognize sign language. An early backer recently used the glove to . The first pair of Mi.Mu gloves were custom-made for Heap. Fingertips were left off so she could play the piano and program the gloves while wearing them. The palms are also open because Heap frequently claps her hands while looping. Mi.Mu had to be wireless so she cold move around freely during shows and fit into Heap’s performance aesthetic. While working to bring the Mi.Mu glove toward production, its development team also had to figure out how to fit all of its components into a glove that could stretch enough to fit several hand sizes. “There is a big constraint when you are producing a piece of tech, to be not obtrusive and attractive. [Heap] likes the techie look, which is fortunate because it’s hard to remove it completely,” says Snook. ” She wanted a little bit of the tech element, but also an elegance you don’t see in a lot of game controllers or bulky things.”
Before Mi.Mu’s Kickstarter campaign launched, the gloves had been funded and used primarily by Heap, but she “wanted this to be a universally accessible experience for people,” says Snook. At £750 ($1,260) for a kit with the components to make a full glove, Mi.Mu is still fairly expensive, but development team hopes that anyone interested (including hacker groups and educational organizations) will get in touch with them through the Kickstarter page to find out ways to afford Mi.Mu or how they can contribute to its development. Less pricey perks include a download or autographed CD copy of the first track written and performed by Imogen Heap with Mi.Mu. Supporters can also pledge 150 pounds for a glove without the electronic components or 200 pounds to attend a three-day workshop and learn how to make it. “We are very, very interested in engaging the maker community. I think that there is a barrier because of the high cost for a lot of people and so we could like to encourage people to get in touch with us even if they aren’t able to pledge the levels,” says Adrian Lausch, a member of Mi.Mu’s team. “We want to reduce the barriers to getting involved.” Right now the glove is about a “90% finished product” and is entering its final stage of development, says Lausch. As Mi.Mu moves toward completion, the team will work closely with collaborators who have pledged to receive a prototype of the gloves. They will receive their pair by August and help the team finalize the design by the end of this year. Then the team hopes to send out all other glove pledges before Christmas. People who pledge to receive a glove will get access to its software code before it is made open source in mid to late 2015. “They will really influence what the final product looks like, but on the other hand, it will not look vastly different from what you see on the campaign. It will still have bend sensors, x-OSC, and LED lights. On the surface, the software will not change all that much but under the hood it will be much more advanced than at the moment,” says Lausch. “Our Kickstarter campaign is to get to the point where we can manufacture at volume and at a much lower cost because that is our ultimate goal.” To learn more about Mi.Mu, visit or its . |
Ad Company Tremor Video Now Offers Automated Campaign Optimization Across Screens | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | , last year, has announced a new product that should take a lot of headache and uncertainty out of running ad campaigns across desktops, tablets, smartphones, and Internet-connected TVs. Cross-screen advertising is a big buzzword (buzzphrase?) right now, but Tremor CTO Steven Lee said that when it comes to running a campaign, there’s still a challenge in deciding how much money to allocate to each platform. With Tremor, on the other hand, you can just tell the system how much money you want to spend and what your desired outcome is, then the technology will automatically adjust the ad-buying mix to deliver the best results. Lee said the cross-screen optimization builds on existing Tremor technology: “First you need a really strong optimization engine — the ability to take all of the signals associated with the ad request and figure out what’s signal and what’s noise, and use that to affect future placements.” This also takes advantage of Tremor’s “creative toolkit” allowing a single ad to be delivered across all those devices, with all the interactivity still working properly. And Lee said Tremor uses a variety of data sources to identify when multiple devices belong to a single household. That means if you see an ad a bunch of times on your laptop, you shouldn’t see it again on your smartphone. Tremor’s cross-screen optimization is available in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Initial advertisers include Six Flags (through its agency BPN) and Media Storm (an agency whose clients include Fox Broadcasting, Open Road Films and SundanceTV). “Tremor Video’s all-screen solution is a great step in the right direction, particularly for entertainment, enabling us to leverage their technology to instantly reach and inspire the right people, wherever they’re watching,” said Media Storm managing director Charlie Fiordalis in a press release. |
UberConference Adds Screen Sharing | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | , the popular conference calling service and former TechCrunch Disrupt Battelfield , today announced that it has added screen sharing to its service. The company says this was one of the most requested features it has had since launch, and starting today, it’s available for all users, including those who use the free service. For the time being, however, users will have to use the latest version of Google’s Chrome browser to enable this functionality. Once you are logged in to UberConference’s online dashboard, starting to share your screen is as easy as clicking the new “Share” button. Sadly, this doesn’t work without a plug-in, so users who press this button for the first time will have to install the UberConference extension first. Users can choose to share a specific tab from their browsers or their whole screens. While sharing only works from Chrome, viewers can use any browser to see the presenter’s screen. UberConference has been quickly adding new features to its service lately. These include , a deeper Google Docs integration and support for through Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote and Box. Given this list, it’s hard not to think that all of these integrations and dependencies on Google’s products are meant to set the company up for a potential acquisition by the search giant. Walker, after all, was one of the GrandCentral co-founders, which Google then acquired and turned into the basis for Google Voice. |
Kitestring, The App That Makes Sure You Get Home Safe | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | There are plenty of when you’re out alone. and can share your current location with loved ones. can ping your emergency contacts with one touch, and record audio and video evidence. And lets you alert your contacts just by shaking your phone. But what I like about Kitestring is that it’s a mobile web app, which makes it accessible to people on all sorts of phones. The set-up process is quick and simple, and the app isn’t cluttered with too many features. And it doesn’t require the user to send the alerts, which is important because if there’s an incident, you might be separated from your phone. As points out, you might freak out your family or partner if your phone dies or you fall asleep and you don’t answer the check-up text. But that false positive from is better than no one realizing you’re gone until it’s too late to track you down. |
Online Dating Site Zoosk Files For $100M IPO, With $178M In Revenues And A $2.6M Net Loss In 2013 | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Online dating site just filed its with the SEC, announcing its plans to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. The company, which has offers up a website and apps for daters around the world to find each other, posted a net loss of $2.6 million in 2013 on revenues of $178 million. Zoosk uses big data and a bit of algorithmic recommendations technology to help its users find partners. With a “proprietary Behavioral Matchmaking engine,” the company learns from clicks, messaging, and other actions of its members to produce matches that are supposed to find better matches. The idea is that the more data it has, the better its recommendations get. As part of the filing, Zoosk provided details of its global business, which includes 26 million members worldwide and 650,000 paying subscribers across 80 countries at year-end 2013. That’s up from the 18 million registered members and 483,000 paying subscribers a year earlier. While it started out on the web, the company has been successful in capturing mobile users, as it’s reached the position of #1 grossing dating app and a top 25 grossing app on the Apple App Store. At the same time its subscriber numbers have grown, revenues increased 63 percent from 2012 to 2013, rising from $109.1 million to $178.2 during that period. Its net loss also decreased significantly, from $20.7 million in 2012 to $2.6 million at the end of 2013. While subscriptions accounted for $153.8 million of its revenues in 2013, Zoosk also has a rapidly growing virtual currency business, which increased from $5.4 million in 2012 to $24.3 million a year later. BofA Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and RBC Capital Markets are acting as joint bookrunning managers for the proposed offering, with Oppenheimer & Co. and William Blair acting as co-managers. Zoosk had raised $60 million since being founded in 2007. Investors include Crosslink Capital, Keating Capital, Canaan Partners, Bessemer Ventures, ATA Ventures, Jeff Epstein, Plug & Play Ventures, and Amidzad Partners. |
IBM Looks To The Cloud To Fight Disruption | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | We are in an age of disruption and this is even more pronounced for a large technology company like IBM. But Big Blue finds itself in the position of having to reinvent itself yet again after surviving and even thriving through earlier technology transformations. Let’s not forget that IBM was once the king of mainframes, which was a great place to be until mainframes were marginalized by mini computers from the likes of DEC, Wang and Data General (who in turn were rather quickly disrupted by the PC and LANs). Through it all, IBM found a way to redefine itself, and in today’s cloud world IBM is attempting to do that again. Just last year it and with a stroke of the pen became a player in Infrastructure as a Service. But the company hasn’t stopped there. It’s developed a portfolio of over 100 SaaS offerings, and just last week it in an effort to boost its growing hold in marketing tools. And it appears that IBM’s strategy could be working is any indication. Although as TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm reported, the company’s overall revenue failed to meet investor’s expectations, there was a bright spot with cloud-related revenue up 50% and “the company indicating that on a run-rate basis, cloud-as-a-service is up to $2.3 billion per year, an increase of more than 100%.” Of course, IBM is hardly alone among big tech companies when it comes to making a push to the cloud. In fact, Microsoft, Dell, Red Hat, HP, Cisco, Google and others have all made big cloud announcements recently and it’s hardly a coincidence. The technology world is tilting and this requires these companies, including IBM, to adjust. But as Michael Krigsman, CEO at , a company that advises large organizations on marketing strategy, told me, changing a company the size of IBM is a tremendous undertaking. “Transformation is hard for any company, even individual departments find it difficult, let alone an organization the size of IBM,” he wrote me in an email. Forrester analyst James McQuivey who wrote a book on organizational disruption called agrees and says the larger the company, the bigger the challenge it is to overcome the disruptive force. “ Larry Downes, an industry analyst who studies disruption and is author (with Paul Nunes) of the recent book, , says it might be a mistake to say that IBM has reinvented itself completely over the years, even though he agrees that it has found ways to alter its direction enough to stay profitable and thrive. He says it’s important to remember that through it all, IBM has remained at its core an IT company. “Companies in highly competitive industries, including consumer electronics, computing, gaming and entertainment, are always in the process of reinventing themselves,” Downes wrote me in email. “So too are companies in industries undergoing radical transformation of their core technologies. From that standpoint, the IT industry has always had to deal with the double-whammy of hyper-competitiveness and technological disruption, which are in fact related change agents and have been from the beginning.” Downes says companies that manage to survive multiple changes are usually led by a strong executive core that guides the company through the changes and isn’t afraid to make bold decisions to alter the company’s traditional goals and markets: The secret to surviving and even thriving under such conditions always come back to leadership. These are the kinds of questions we asked when looking at incumbents of all sizes and ages to understand how some survived and some did not. And this is what it appears IBM and its fellow large tech companies are attempting to do today under increasing pressure from a more agile, flexible and cheaper cloud marketplace that is putting extreme pressure on their previously profitable businesses. McQuivey says it’s an enormous challenge for large companies to overcome this type of disruption, but it’s not impossible. “ It’s worth noting that on the same day it announced its earnings, IBM announced a big cloud win with The Hartford, a deal the company reports is worth $500 million to supply private cloud infrastructure. It’s not exactly going all in on SoftLayer in the public cloud, but it’s a move toward a changing marketplace, and that’s exactly what IBM is going to have to do moving forward if it hopes to thrive in the next generation of corporate computing. If today’s report is indicative, the company could be pointed in the right direction. |
IBM Drops 4% After Its $22.48B Q1 Revenue Fails To Meet Investor Expectations | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | This afternoon following the close of regular trading, IBM its first quarter financial results, including revenue of $22.48 billion, GAAP earnings per share (EPS) of $2.29, and non-GAAP EPS of $2.54. Those figures were down, on a year-over-year basis, 4%, 15% and 15%. Investors had expected IBM to earn $2.54 per share excluding one-time items, a figure it met, on revenue of $22.91 billion, a figure that it did not. In after-hours trading, IBM is down almost 4%. In regular trading, despite an up market, IBM fell a fraction. IBM’s non-hardware efforts had a modest quarter, with the company’s software top line inching up 2% year-over-year, and its financing revenue up 3%. IBM’s “Systems and Technology” group’s revenue fell 23% on a currency-adjusted basis. There was a bright spot for IBM, however, which reported that its “cloud” revenue was up 50%, and the company indicating that on a run-rate basis, cloud-as-a-service is up to $2.3 billion per year, an increase of more than 100%. So there is something bubbling under the surface for the venerable technology giant. Still, to compete in the cloud game, IBM is taking on Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Dropbox, Box, Egnyte, and others in various capacities, so that niche cannot be viewed as a certain victory — although it certainly has the cash to pursue it. The company ended its quarter with cash and equivalents of more than $9 billion, not including short-term investments. IBM managed to raise its gross profit margin (GAAP) and its operating margin (non-GAAP) by 90 basis points apiece, which could help it eke out EPS gains in the future. Finally, IBM spent just over $1.5 billion on research and development in the period, down 8.7% from the year-ago period. |
Now Facebook Wants You To Share Where You’re “Traveling To” | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Serendipitous meetups with friends while traveling make us happy and Facebook wants to be the portal to that joy. So this week it quietly rolled out a new feature that lets you share where you’re “traveling to”. Facebook’s Page today, so I asked the company which said that after some testing, “traveling to” is now available to all users. It has big potential to bring Facebook valuable data on what’s important to us. The is found within the on the Facebook status composer on both web and mobile. One you select it, you can choose a destination city, but not a departure and return time. Facebook will then append “traveling to Boston” with a little plane icon. Some destinations get their own special emoji, like a Statue Of Liberty for New York, or a Hollywood sign for Los Angeles. (Note: I wouldn’t recommend sharing these posts publicly though, as you don’t want to advertise your absence from home for security reasons. It might be nice if Facebook warned people about that.) Without “traveling to”, most us just end up posting “I’m coming to New York, who wants to hang out?”. But I’ve found I got little engagement with those posts. If users happen to check in at an airport, Facebook would ask where they were heading and show that in the post, but few people know about this and checking into airports just feels lame and braggadocious. Some people use third-party app like to share their itineraries. All these options will probably see less usage now that there’s an easily accessible “traveling to” feature. And yes, Path has automatically done this for a while by auto-publishing when you appear in a new city. But as Facebook has proven over and over, it doesn’t care who did it first. It wants to do it at scale. What’s puzzling about the feature is that Facebook confirms that sharing where you’re “traveling to” won’t change anything else about how Facebook works. But it should. When you’re in a different city, your Facebook should be different too. It should show you relevant stories from local friends and ads from nearby businesses instead of ones where you live, and let people know you’re in town so you can meet up. None of these happen right now… …But I wouldn’t be surprised if they did soon. — knowing what you want to see. Explicitly telling it where you’re traveling to is an extremely strong signal that content from or about your destination is more important to you. First, it should be sure to show the “traveling to” post to close friends in my current city so they know I’ll be gone, and relatively good friends that live near where I’m going so they know I’ll be there. It should also show the post to anyone who’s been there who could give me tips on what to see. Then it should show me more posts from friends where I’m staying to boost the chances I can join something fun they’re doing. And for its own business as well as making the ads I have to see anyways more interesting, it should show me promos for local businesses where I’ve traveled to. Yes, most people hate ads no matter what, but I’d rather see one for a bagel shop in New York I could try out while I’m there than one back in San Francisco that I’ll forget about before I return. (Plus, SF bagels are a joke. Someone vacuum-seal and send me some from Manhattan, stat.) A frequent complaint about Facebook is that it’s actually isolating. We sit at home reading News Feed instead of actually calling or visiting friends. “Traveling to” could let Facebook better fulfill its mission to connect us. After all, life on the move is a lot more fun when it’s not spent alone in hotel rooms. |
Google Misses in Q1 With Revenue Of $15.42B, EPS Of $6.27 As Its Cost-Per-Click Fell 9% | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Following the bell, Google reported its first quarter financial performance, including revenue of $12.20 billion excluding traffic acquisition costs (ex-TAC), $15.42 billion including those costs, and earnings per share of $6.27. Analysts and investors Google to earn $6.40 on revenue of $12.25 billion (ex-TAC), or $15.54 billion including traffic costs. Keep in mind that Google’s earnings per share around half of what they were before due to the company’s recent stock split. Google’s revenue was up 19% year-over-year. Its GAAP operating revenue totaled $4.12 in the period, or 27% of its total revenue. In regular trading, Google rose around 4%, beating an up market. In after-hours trading, after its earnings miss, Google is down more than 4%. In the , Google had seasonally boosted revenue of $16.86 billion (not excluding TAC) and GAAP earnings per share of $9.90. In the first quarter, Google had GAAP net income of $3.45 billion. For the period, Google’s earnings were 57% derived from the United States, up 1% from the year-ago quarter. Traffic acquisition costs, a key metric for Google, totaled billion in the quarter, or % of the company’s revenue for the period. That compares to its fourth quarter percentage of 23.5% in the sequentially preceding quarter, and 24.9% in the year-ago quarter. For the period, Google’s recorded cost-per-click average rate fell 9%. Total paid clicks rose 26% year-over-year. The 26% gain, of course, overshadows the per-click decline, but the trend is pretty clear: Google can’t charge what it once did for paid clicks. Still, the per-click decline contributed to Google’s reporting lesser earnings than was expected. Finally, Google’s “Net Loss from Discontinued Operations,” which includes the dispossessed Motoroal arm of the company, totaled $198 million in the period. That figure was up from $182 million in the year-ago period. All told, Google did not meet market expectations, despite delivering a healthy quarter. The company continues to grow at double-digit rates. However, with a trailing PE ratio north of 30, the market simply expected more.
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AT&T May Sit Out 2015 Spectrum Auction Over Rules Dustup | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | AT&T is not happy with the rules the FCC has proposed for a 2015 spectrum auction that would reserve a piece of the airwaves for sale for smaller providers that lack low-frequency range. The second-largest wireless company in the U.S. is not enthused with that. “If the restrictions as proposed are adopted, AT&T will need to seriously consider whether its capital and resources are directed toward other spectrum opportunities that will better enable AT&T to continue to support high-quality LTE network deployments to serve its customers,” said the company’s vice president in charge of regulation. In other words, AT&T may take its ball and go home. The FCC wants to in different markets for smaller providers, spectrum that AT&T and Verizon, the market incumbents, would be precluded from bidding on. In AT&T’s view, “a 10×10 MHz allocation is necessary to achieve minimal economic and technical efficiencies in an LTE deployment.” So, according to the wireless company, you can’t cut spectrum into smaller chunks for what it needs than that. As such, the situation is as follows, according to the company: In short, in all band plans less than 70 MHz, restricted bidders – specifically AT&T and Verizon (and in a small number of markets, potentially US Cellular or CSpire) — would be limited to bidding for only 3 blocks. And in each market where the restrictions attach to at least two carriers, at most only one restricted carrier could emerge from the auction with a 10×10 MHz allocation. In an auction involving more than 70 MHz, those issues would be lessened. Wireless providers are hungry for spectrum due to the increasing load of smartphones and other data-hungry mobile devices. If you were looking for a signal of the future of technology, watching wireless firms squabble about spectrum purchases from television broadcasters so that they can provide better support for their wireless capabilities is a pretty good indication of where we’re headed. TechCrunch has reached out to the FCC for comment on the spectrum auction, AT&T’s potential exit from it, and whether that move could endanger the auction itself. |
Instagram Reassigned Inactive “Kathleen” Username To An Employee But Will Give It Back | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Is Instagram going around stealing users’ accounts and distributing them to employees? That’s , who says his wife’s Instagram account, with the likely much-desired username of “@kathleen” was taken from her control and is now being used by another Kathleen, who also happens to be a current Facebook/Instagram employee. Shock! Horror! Outrage! From Brian’s reporting of events, he first noticed something was up a few months ago when he was tagging his wife in an Instagram photo. Her account name no longer appeared as “@kathleen,” but rather “_____kathleen.” At the time, he paid the situation little regard, assuming it may have had something to do with her privacy settings. Still, his wife tried reaching the company for help through its now dormant @InstagramHelp Twitter account, but never heard back. Apparently, getting her account fixed was not a top priority, as it seems his wife was not much of a heavy Instagram user – something which Brian alludes to in the post, noting, “she’s not a regular on the service anymore.” However, he tells us that while his wife wasn’t an active poster, she would occasionally log in and view photos using her account. There’s no mention in Brian’s post of either he or his wife trying other channels in order to get help after this initial attempt failed, but he tells us that she did actually try to email them at contact@instagram.com as well (an address that used to generate an automatic work ticket). Several months later — aka this morning — Brian asked his wife to look at a photo on Instagram, and she found that she could no longer log in. Her @Kathleen username and password just didn’t work. And to answer the question whether or not his wife may have simply forgotten her password or something of the like, he says that’s not the case. “My wife is quite technical. We both run a successful boutique design agency and she worked as a Yahoo and Flickr employee for a number of years,” Brian says. After doing a little digging, he realized that her account “@Kathleen” had been given away to another Kathleen, who he determined was an Instagram employee. Brian stops just short of calling out the employee for stealing the account herself, but he clearly has an ax to grind with Facebook, stating in the post that: I’m not saying that the new @kathleen personally stole or assisted with the compromise of her account, but shit, you sure as hell can’t see something doesn’t smell just a tad funky. He also complains that there are things that have changed post-acquisition, referring to the lack of response on the company’s Twitter account: “Not answering support says all that you need to know about what will or will not change. When you stop actually caring; when you stop actually communicating; everything changes.” Man, there’s nothing like losing a good username on a popular social service to really fire people up, right? Speaking with us, he elaborates further, making the point that while the situation is odd, his larger complaint is with the lack of customer service response, not necessarily the lost username itself. Social networking services have unofficial rules around dormant or inactive accounts, and how long they have to remain unused before they’re put back into circulation. For instance, there was a time when if you knew someone inside Twitter, you could if the account holder had been inactive for a long enough period of time. A number of those with the coveted three-letter Twitter accounts acquired them through this method, in fact. Now that Twitter is huge, it’s no longer just a matter of who you know, of course. But businesses and brands can formally request access to Twitter usernames under Twitter’s procedures. What the official situation is at Facebook-owned Instagram is less clear – the company doesn’t offer any sort of guidelines on its site around how you could contact them with a trademark claim, much less how you could request the takeover of a dormant account. (Though its states that you can take legal claims around trademarks and copyright violations to arbitration if it comes to that.) In other words, it’s reasonable to assume that the new @Kathleen simply saw an unused account and asked for it. And yes, maybe that’s wrong since Brian’s wife was allegedly never given the chance to claim her account before redistribution. “Customer Support for these types of unfortunate events do no exist and users feel helpless in the matter,” Brian laments. “While my wife doesn’t post on a regular basis, she still often looks at photos and likes photos of others in her stream. Do you think if she had a handle like, for example, @k_ath_l33n, that it would be left open because of lack of posting? I think the desirable name made it a target. Doesn’t make it right though,” he says. The situation is one example among many in what’s becoming something of an alarming trend: that sometimes the only way to get help with a customer service complaint like this is writing a damning blog post, and waiting for the story to get picked up more broadly. (Like this!) Instagram responded to TechCrunch’s inquiries about the matter, after looking into the situation this morning and provided the following statement: Like many social services, Instagram has a policy of reassigning usernames from accounts that have been inactive for a significant length of time. While the policy is standard practice and will continue, Instagram employees strive to always put members of the Instagram community first, and so we will be returning the name to the previous owner. |
Google Launches Chrome Remote Desktop On Android, Allowing Mobile Access To Your PC | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Google this morning a mobile client application called “Chrome Remote Desktop app for Android” (whew!) which allows for remote access to your Mac or PC from your Android device, whether smartphone or tablet. The new app is an extension of Google’s screen-sharing service, which allows you to share your desktop’s screen with other Chrome browser or Chromebook users. As with its big-screen counterpart, to use the Android application you first have to install a helper application on your desktop or laptop computer. That app is and works on Windows (XP and above), Mac (OS X 10.6 and above) and Linux computers. The helper app installs as an extension to Google Chrome or the Chrome-based OS that powers Google’s Chromebooks. Once installed, however, you’ll be able to open the app and connect to any of your computers with just a tap, manage them, and navigate through their files and folders from afar — like a modern version of GoToMyPC, for example. We’ve known an Android client was in the works , as there was even a functional available back in January, though it required that you compile the app from source in order to use it. An iOS version is also in the works, but its development is said to be further behind. The move comes at a time when competitor Amazon is targeting enterprise users with its own version of remote access software, Amazon Workspaces. Officially , this service similarly lets company employees access their work computers from any device, including Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android or Kindle Fire HDX tablets. Of course, in Amazon’s case, the goal is to make its tablets appear more business-friendly. Google’s Remote Desktop, on the other hand, has a more consumer-focused vibe, which even had the the service as a way to be the family hero by “adjusting printer settings on your mom’s computer to finding a lost file on your dad’s laptop,” for example. The official Chrome Remote Desktop Android app . |
AngelList Unveils Maiden Lane, A $25 Million Fund For AngelList Deals | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | is working on a new project called . Behind this name is a new experiment in startup investment. Structured as a traditional small VC firm, Maiden Lane will only invest in AngelList syndicates or hand some money to active angels on the platform. While technically not part of AngelList, Maiden Lane currently has two general partners, AngelList’s chief operating officer Kevin Laws and Dustin Dolginow of Atlas Venture. The fund raised money from traditional limited partners who fund VC firms. When it comes to Maiden Lane’s deal structure, the firm will not charge any management fee and will take a 30 percent of carried interest, meaning the fund is slightly more competitive for limited partners than a traditional VC firm. At the other end of the deal, Maiden Lane will invest some of its first fund in syndicated deals that it will hand pick. But the most interesting part is that the firm also plans to give $200,000 to the platform’s top investors, such as , , and more. Another innovation, Maiden Lane will give back 20 percent in carry to these angel investors — Maiden Lane partners keep the remaining 10 percent. By betting on AngelList’s power user, Maiden Lane hopes that it will invest in the best startups on AngelList. As a reminder, AngelList started out as a database of angels, startups and investments. In July 2013, the company syndicates — business angels can choose to co-invest with influential angels directly on AngelList. In these syndicated deals, the lead angel sets the carry percentage as he’s the one pulling the trigger and making a bet on a startup. AngelList itself takes 5 percent in carry for facilitating the deal. It’s a powerful way of amplifying deals and motivating influential business angels. With Maiden Lane, top angels will get money directly from limited partners who usually work with VC firms. It’s the logical next step for AngelList, and an interesting one. Disrupting VC investment is no small feat — it is now clear that AngelList is aiming for that, one experiment at a time. |
Google’s New Street View Image Recognition Algorithm Can Beat Most CAPTCHAs | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Here is an interesting conundrum for Google: it has created an algorithm that’s significantly better at reading street numbers in Street View images, which helps it give you more accurate directions. At the same time, though, it turns out that this algorithm is so good, it can decipher 99 percent of CAPTCHAs (those squiggly text puzzles you often have to solve to prove you are human). Google’s new algorithm for detecting street numbers can accurately detect and read difficult numbers in Street View 90 percent of the time, . According to a joint paper by Google’s Street View and reCAPTCHA teams ( ), recognizing this kind of data in natural photographs is a pretty hard problem. Just think of all the variations in lighting and issues with motion and focus blur. At the same time, it’s also essential for Google’s mapping efforts to get this data from these images. The standard approach is to separate out the localization, segmentation and recognition steps, but Google’s new approach unifies all of these steps and uses a “ ” — a kind of neural network that’s especially effective for image recognition. Using Google’s publicly available Street View House Numbers dataset, the algorithm is about 96 percent accurate. On a per-digit basis, it’s 97.84 percent accurate. The regular Street View imagery is a bit more challenging, which explains why it is “only” 90 percent accurate on that data. So far, Google says the system has helped it to extract close to 100 million street numbers worldwide. To test the algorithm, Google also let it loose on its own puzzles. There, it is 99.8 percent accurate on the hardest reCAPTCHA puzzles. Given that the whole idea of CAPTCHAs is that they are too hard for computers to solve, that’s a pretty stunning number and the accuracy is likely better than that of most humans (at least I know I don’t get anywhere close to 99.8 percent accuracy when I try to solve CAPTCHAs…). That’s obviously a problem for reCAPTCHA because developers who are less interested in the science behind this could exploit this to spam blog comments, for example. Google, however, that its CAPTCHA system is now less dependent on deciphering the distorted text than ever before. Instead, reCAPTCHA now looks at a broader range of clues. Entering the text is just one clue, but Google now looks at it as “ |
Google Camera App Brings Lens Blur Background Defocus To Any KitKat Android Devices | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | Google has a new standalone camera app available in the , and it can be installed on any smartphones or tablets running KitKat 4.4 or higher. The new app will also be rolling out to other devices in the future , so that might expand beyond just KitKat to those on other versions of Android. The app offers a 100 percent viewfinder to show you exactly what you’re shooting without blocking the view with interface elements, and also offers a few trick modes for taking pictures including Lens Blur, Panorama, and Photo Sphere. Lens Blur offers background defocusing effect like those introduced by most smartphone manufacturers on their latest generation flagship smartphones, so it’s nice to see that kind of stuff democratized. The Lens Blur feature in practice is kind of tricky to get right, as it required you shifting your phone upwards while remaining centered on your focal point. Samsung’s requires holding your phone in the same place for a while but produces more reliable results in my experience, and HTC’s needs its dual camera hardware in the new HTC One M8 but offers up strangely similar finished products. If used in the right circumstances, Lens Blur works remarkably well at mimicking the kind of depth of field you can capture from DSLRs. Photo Sphere offers the ability to capture full, 360 degree immersive snapshots and is an extension of the kind of feature you’ll find from Panorama, but not limited to the horizontal plane. It’s the first time Google has made this available to non-Nexus devices, so check it out. I tried installing this on a Galaxy S5 without issue, and it’s a nice alternative if you’re not a fan of or are overwhelmed by the options of the stock offering of whatever device-maker you’ve chosen. Some users on Twitter report having issues getting the app to recognize your phone’s camera hardware, but a quick reboot should do the trick. |
Enterprise Platform Brightpearl Raises $10M In Round Led By MMC Ventures | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | The advantage with enterprise startups if that they can be based just about anywhere. And that’s proved today with the news that , which a cloud-based business management system aimed at small to mid sized multi-channel retailers, has raised another $10m. The round led my MMC Ventures with participation from Quayle Munro and existing investors Eden Ventures and Notion Capital. That bring its total funding to date to around $24 million after previous funding rounds, including , and . This latest round will be used to accelerate investment in product and sales expansion. Brightpearl claims its revenue is doubling year over year. And since 2011, the platform has processed over $1.3 billion in gross merchandise value. The company operates out of San Francisco, and the UK’s own “Wild West” – otherwise known as Bristol – with 88 employees in total. Its cloud-based multi-channel retail management system integrates orders, inventory, accounting, reporting and customer data. Competitors include NetSuite and Erply, among others. Salman Malik, chief executive officer of Brightpearl says the company is at an inflection point: “Our business has been doubling; with more than 1,300 retailers on our platform, we’ve developed a deep understanding of customer needs, have a clear vision for platform enhancements and a strategy in place for optimizing our go-to-market initiatives.” Brightpearl is now fully integrated with a variety of sales channels including Magento, eBay, Bigcommerce, Shopify and Amazon. The company has a pretty good founding story. Founders Chris Tanner and Andrew Mulvenna became friends as university undergraduates and founded a skateboard company called Lush Longboards in Chris’s basement. After university, Chris expanded Lush Longboards to become the 3rd largest long skateboard company globally; Andrew joined a global IT company where his roles included Venue Technology Manager for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. As an entrepreneur trying to expand Lush, Chris was frustrated by the expense and limited functionality offered by business software, like Sage and Netsuite. Lacking the budget to buy an expensive IT system but possessing programming skills, Chris started to build Brightpearl. Chris spent 2006-7 developing the platform. After it wonn clients, he sold Lush brought his old friend Andrew on board and the launched Brightpearl as a full-blown business. |
Lyft Is Launching A Premium SUV Service [Update: Confirmed] | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | is preparing to compete with Uber’s upscale SUV option by launching its own on-demand premium SUV ride service, according to a source. It will let riders book leather interior Ford Explorer SUVS that seat a squished maximum of six passengers. Until now, Lyft has only offered a single tier of service on par with UberX in price, and that provides rides in a variety of vehicles. [ : Lyft has confirmed the plan for a premium service. It tells me SUVs will be part of the offering, but didn’t rule out other higher-end cars being included too. The company has referred us to this titled “Bringing The Magic To Premium” and gave the statement “We’re all about creating special experiences with the help of our incredible community of drivers. I can confirm that a premium option is in the works, and today we’re opening up a waitlist for invites. We look forward to sharing more info on this project in the coming weeks.” Our transportation expert .] A premium service could widen Lyft’s customer base and make its brand classier. We’ve reached out to Lyft by phone and didn’t hear back, and have emailed requesting a comment or confirmation. We’ll update if we receive a response. Our source says Lyft is convening the first round of SUV drivers this week in San Francisco, which will be the initial test bed for the new service. Drivers required to have white Ford Explorers that Lyft will have redone with interior leather, potentially by car shop West Coast Customs in LA or a shop closer to the Bay Area. Drivers are said to receive a $750 per month stipend in addition to what they earn driving, which may be more than regular drivers depending on how Lyft prices its SUV rides. Uber SUVs in San Francisco cost a $15 base fare plus $0.90 per minute and $3.75 per mil with a minimum fare of $25. We don’t have details on pricing but Lyft might try to slide in at a slightly cheaper rate. It’s important to note that while Ford Explorer claim to seat seven (including driver) thanks to its two back rows of seats, the rear row is much more cramped than the Ford Expeditions, Chevy Tahoes, Lincoln Navigators, and Cadillac Escalades that Uber SUV employs. Without the minimal-leg room back seats, Lyft’s Ford Explorers could be more on par with Uber’s Black Car service that features roomy vehicles clad with leather, but only seat four passengers. In the end though, if you have a gaggle of friends with you and want to go somewhere without splitting into two cars, the number of seats with seatbelts matters more than how comfy they are. SUVs could bring a boost to Lyft revenue by creating a luxury option for its typical users who want the occasional fancy night out. The larger vehicles also be a helpful utility for moving big groups of people or cargo. SUVs could also directly attract more high-end customers who might end up using Lyft’s cheaper standard service when no one is looking. One thing our source isn’t sure of is the name of Lyft’s SUV service, but they speculate it could be called Lyft VIP or VIP Lyft. Lyft raised a this month to bring it to over $330 million in funding since it started as Zimride back in 2007. This was likely to help it keep up in growth, operations, and marketing with in August 2013. Experimenting with a premium tier could please investors looking for Lyft to cash in on a more diverse set of passengers. I imagine the marketing plan could center around Lyft’s white SUV as a friendlier alternative to Uber’s more regal black ones. That would build on Lyft’s community-focused brand of “Your friend with a car” that contrasts with Uber, which calls itself “Everyone’s private driver”. Lyft SUV’s could aim to bring class and style without the guilt of having a chauffeur. A monocle to go with its mustache. |
How I Killed A Startup In 4 Hours (And Why I Don’t Regret It) | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | The Sociopaths of Silicon Valley I hate activist journalism. But last week, I was responsible for the death of a startup. It was probably the fastest death in the history of the tech industry: four hours from launch to deadpool, by my reckoning. If that sounds like boasting, well… I’m afraid it is. Let me explain. Personalpaper.me, which launched last Thursday, promised something that, on the face of it sounded pretty great: throw the site a few URLs and it would print out those long articles you’d never get to on Instapaper or Pocket, package them up as a beautifully designed physical newspaper, and drop that paper in the mail to you — all for the equivalent of about $2 per “issue.” This product, created by developers at , even, audaciously, offered to strip out ads to create a clean, readable format you could stick in your handbag and read on the subway. You’ve probably spotted the problem already: personalpaper.me represents copyright infringement, unauthorised republication and illicit distribution on an industrial scale. In other words, its business model is predicated on theft. I should say at this point that the agency that employs everyone connected to this launch, ustwo, has rapidly distanced itself from personalpaper.me. When I approached the company, asking what legal advice it had sought before launching a product that, if successful, might put out of business the publishers on whose content it relied, it denied that personalpaper.me had any connection to ustwo at all. “I’m not aware of any details surrounding this,” the company’s spokesman told me when I reached out for comment. “This is not an ustwo product.” Hmm. I found that hard to believe, given that 10 ustwo employees (and no one else), including one co-founder, had just tweeted a link to the site saying how pleased they were with it. The lead developer responsible for personalpaper.me, Juan Delgado, and his colleagues at ustwo’s London office were quick to insist that the project was merely a “little personal experiment” that a “couple of guys in the studio thought would be cool.” (Delgado tweeted that he was grateful for ustwo’s “support” in building the product, but later denied the company had been involved. Clearly someone got a worried email from the boss.) Whether this was an official ustwo launch, the chaps behind it, all of whom are employed by ustwo, must have suspected it was a bit legally iffy. For one thing, despite accepting payments on their site, there was no company information, no privacy policy, no terms and conditions and no obvious means to get in touch with the people who had made it. Juan as a “world class minimal DJ,” so he presumably understands that creative work has value and that seizing it and republishing it in another format for your own enrichment is wrong. To test that theory, I submitted a request for an issue comprising one article from Stone and two from . My card was successfully charged. Reader, I confess, I went a bit ballistic via email. Asked why his website was facilitating copyright infringement for commercial gain, Juan went quiet, then promptly took the entire site down. Needless to say, no refund has yet appeared on my card. And I never got a receipt for the transaction. There’s on personalpaper.me’s website now. But, as I say, I don’t regret what I did — i.e. scaring its founders into yanking the product. The indifference — and occasional contempt — with which Silicon Valley treats content businesses is laughable and offensive. For all their talk of “changing the world” and focus on crafting cute interfaces, I can’t think of a single technology company in history that has made much of a lasting cultural contribution. What startup can boast an influence on our intellectual history equal to , or , or… well, you get the idea. Which means that theft of content someone has paid for, and another person has labored over to bring pleasure and erudition to readers, simply cannot be justified. There’s an impression, particularly among tech types who sneer at content in favor of “platforms,” that writing is worthless these days — especially on the web. But as media companies start getting their shit together and figuring out how to break even on content, and VCs start chucking money at content plays, that position can no longer be supported. The implicit nod it gave to platform businesses to rip off writers and publishers is well and truly a thing of the past. If I were feeling charitable, I might concede that personalpaper.me probably meant well. Perhaps the designers at ustwo genuinely didn’t even think about the people whose livelihoods their startup was chipping away at, and just wanted to create a pretty product. But innocence and naivety are really no excuse for robbing other people of their paycheck. I won’t lie. I’m glad this company is dead on the vine. Silicon Valley, stop killing the things you love. A little modesty and thoughtfulness when dreaming up get-rich-quick schemes would go a long way. After all, if I were ripping off your code, stealing your photographs or stiffing you on your world-class minimal DJing invoices, the Internet would be ablaze at my temerity. Oh, and Juan? You still owe me $2. |
Netflix Inks Peering Deal With Verizon | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | Netflix has signed an “ ” with Verizon, an agreement similar in nature to the peering deal that it struck . The deal will help Netflix get its content onto the ISPs networks. In the travails of net neutrality, this sort of peering agreement is a new frontier. Although it is acting in a diametrically opposite fashion, Netflix has written that in its estimation, paid peering agreements in which content providers are charged for better access an ISPs network should be banned. It pairs that idea to the core concept of net neutrality — that content is treated neutrality on ISP networks. It calls . However, to protect its customer service in the short term, Netflix is paying the very fines it doesn’t want to, as its delivery to consumers across a number of ISPs was falling quickly. Paying up was the lesser of two tough choices. Happily for Netflix, the . Given that the cost of the first peering agreement was modest, the total expense of both is likely still small. The FCC and House of Representatives will net neutrality on May 20. A controversial proposal that would allow for incumbent companies to pay for “fast lane” access on ISP networks will be examined at that time. |
Julie Horvath “Satisfied” With GitHub Transparency | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | GitHub has published a detailing the results of an investigation into the of Julie Horvath. New GitHub CEO explains that the more transparent post is a follow-up to , which he deemed “the least open and least transparent blog post GitHub has ever written.” Though it holds back on specifics because of confidentiality, post addresses Horvath’s accusations one by one. It relays the results of an inquiry by third-party investigator According to the blog post, the results of the independent findings show that Horvath’s claims about former GitHub CEO Tom Preston-Werner and his wife are legitimate. However, the blog post asserts that there was no evidence to support the allegations about a specific engineer and code deletions or about the general cultural environment at GitHub. “There was no information found to support Julie’s allegation that the engineer maliciously deleted her code. The commit history, push log, and all issues and pull requests involving Julie and the accused engineer were reviewed.” Even though it did not support all of her allegations, Julie that she was “satisfied” with the post and Wanstrath’s honesty. “I’m glad to not be called a liar,” she told me. “That feels good. Although I firmly disagree about the objectiveness of the investigation, I do believe that GitHub’s workplace culture is toxic and hostile and I’m glad it is no longer my problem.” I'm pretty satisfied with 's blog post. I disagree about the objectiveness of the "investigation," as well as the toxic workplace. — Julie Ann Horvath (@nrrrdcore) In a series of direct messages, Horvath called the objectivity of the investigation into question, alleging that Young did not contact some of the people Horvath suggested, though the blog post specifically mentions reaching out to “people Julie asked her to speak with.” GitHub representative Liz Clinkenbeard would not comment on Horvath’s dispute: “Everything we’re sharing about that is in the post for now – if that changes I’ll let you know!” According to the blog post, GitHub has just hired an “experienced” HR representative, which is the first step in building a company with enough structure that employees feel protected. In our startuppy, social media-drenched times, people forget that there are actual legalities involved in building a business. Some rules — namely around workplace protocol — should not be broken when moving fast and breaking things. When asked if she had enlisted a lawyer and whether she would take actual legal action against GitHub, Horvath did not comment. |
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Will Talk Net Neutrality With Congress On May 20 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | Mark your calendars: May 20 should provide fireworks. On that date, Tom Wheeler, current chairman of the And yes, . The issue of net neutrality has had a rollicking year, and only now potentially coming back to life. The rub, however, is that what the FCC might cook up and call “net neutrality” this time around might not, and get this, . Darn it, you are thinking. Correct response, dear friend. The lean here is that the FCC might allow ISPs to charge content providers for faster access to consumers. So, rich content companies will be able to tilt the playing field in their direction, harming potential newcomers by leveraging their inherent financial advantage. There would thus be an Internet for rich firms, and a lesser, degraded-by-comparison Internet for the rest. And where do you think ISPs will devote much of their resources? To build up the extra profitable fast lane or spend heavily on firms that don’t send over extra money. Precisely. Happily our political classes are only roughly half correct on this issue, : The subcommittee’s Democrats have said Wheeler’s attempts to rewrite the rules is too weak and would allow for a tiered Internet, where deep-pocketed content companies can pay for better access the users. Republicans criticize Wheeler for trying to resurrect the Obama administration’s rules after they were struck down in court. The forum will be a key moment in determining the future of net neutrality. Strap in. |
Curated Food-Delivery Startup Caviar Raises $15 Million Led By Tiger Global | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | , one of many startups that have sprouted up over the past year or so to offer lazy customers an easier way to order meals online, has raised $15 million in seed and Series A funding. The big difference between Caviar and other food-delivery startups is that it , working with them to enable customers to place orders and ensure that food is delivered fast and fresh when it arrives. Caviar also enables customers to share a link with their friends or coworkers to facilitate group ordering. For that reason, the service is perfect for office lunch orders or feeding employees around larger events. The service has a high average order size, at around $80 per order. It also has a good retention rate, with 80 percent of orders being placed by repeat customers. Its $13 million Series A round of funding was led by Tiger Global, which is increasingly making investments in early-stage startups, while the $2 million seed round was led by Winklevoss Capital. Other investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Paul Buchheit, and the Mixt Greens restaurant group. Caviar plans to use the funding for expansion of its service into new markets. It just entered its fourth city, Washington, D.C., and expects to add a new city each week for the next six weeks or so. That follows availability of service in San Francisco, . In those cities it will face an increasingly competitive marketplace of food-delivery services, thanks in no small part to a large amount of funding going into the space. In recent months, we’ve seen , , and Spoonrocket and Sprig . It’s unclear whether any of these will grow enough to compete with GrubLess, or are just waiting for the newly public company to pick them up. |
LendUp Raises $50 Million To Disrupt Payday Lending | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | Y Combinator-incubated payday loan disruptor has raised a $50 million credit debt facility from . This adds to the $18 million in equity funding LendUp has from investors including Google Ventures, Data Collective, QED and others. LendUp wants to redefine payday lending and make the loan experience for the millions of unbanked Americans more fair and transparent. Rather than force Americans to turn to predatory lenders and banks, with their high interest rates, LendUp wants to give those looking for a speedy fix to a short-term financial need a way to borrow money without hidden fees, costly rollovers and high interest rates. At a basic level, LendUp is a direct lender (hence the raising of debt) and has created a product that allows small-dollar loans as an opportunity for consumers to build credit and move up the financial ladder. Consumers who have poor or no credit can apply for and receive small-dollar, short-term loans. Borrowers start with up to $250, but can eventually borrow up to $1,000 for a year. LendUp uses big data to do instant risk analysis and evaluate credit worthiness, weeding out those who have bad credit for a reason from those who may have become victims of the system. As you pay back your loans on time and take courses, you earn points to elevate up the ladder to silver, gold, and higher statuses. As you attain high statuses, you are able to access more money for loans at lower interest rates. Co-founder Sasha Orloff says that the company has been growing fast and needs more capital to match consumer demand. The startup has been rowing at 10-20 percent month-on-month and has expanded from California to Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Tennessee and is about to launch in New Mexico. This year, LendUp plans to launch in a new state every two weeks. In 2014 alone, the startup expects to do 300,000 loans. Many lenders, like Kabbage, Avant, Zest and others, Orloff adds, have raised from Victory Park Capital. He also said that the debt allows the company to invest its equity financing on hiring, expanding to more states, and continuing to build the product. It’s also worth mentioning that from a business standpoint, online lending is starting to become a competitive space with BillFloat, Zest, Think Finance, Kabbage, On Deck, CAN, Prosper and Lending Club all working on providing loans to consumers and businesses. What has made LendUp distinct is that its products aim to help many of these unbanked Americans who can’t find a loan, become credit-worthy through education. As we’ve written in the past, the startup is trying to solve the problem at the cause, which is poor financial education. |
Inside Jobs: Why Fitbit’s Tim Roberts Looks For Rock Bands, Not Just Rock Stars | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | As a kid growing up, wanted to be an artist. Today as an adult, he’s the vice president of interactive and design at personal health tracking startup . On the surface, it might seem that his current job is a big departure from his childhood aspirations. But as Roberts told me in this latest episode of TechCrunch TV’s series, he tries to bring some artistic perspective into his job building teams and making software, finding common ground with what it takes to make music or art. In person, it’s easy to sense that he’s got a bit more creativity going on under the surface than you might expect by just hearing his job title — and I think that comes across in our video, too. I particularly liked hearing about how he looks at assembling the right people for making great apps:
“Great software is I believe a social art. Your job [as VP of interactive and design] is essentially akin to creating rock bands. You need to construct and pull together the right musicians, the right people, to be able to play in the band together. While certainly there have been products that have been made by individuals, where there are rock stars who go make an incredible product, I don’t think that’s the methodology we have here. [It’s about] how you foster and create those teams as units, how you stay in touch with them so you understand if something is going awry, if one of the members doesn’t mesh with the other members. At the end of the day if you can stand back and say, ‘Wow, we’ve got a rock band, and a country western band, and a death metal band,’ whatever the flavors of bands are that you need to make amazing music, that’s what this role is about.” Learn more about Tim Roberts’ job by watching the video embedded above. Producing, shooting, editing, sound, and lighting for Inside Jobs is done by . Production coordination and creative direction is done by . Original logo design by . Motion graphics and graphic design by . |
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