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Zero-Day IE Flaw Highlights The Danger Of Lingering Windows XP Market Share | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | If you are reading this in Internet Explorer, you should probably close it and fire up Chrome — and come back after a newly reported zero-day flaw is patched. Even the U.S. and U.K. governments are use of Internet Explorer for now. The zero-day flaw has been uncovered in Internet Explorer versions 6,7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, . Those browser versions comprise around 50 percent of the global browser market, . Microsoft proposes a number of mitigatory measures that can be taken, but for now I’d just sit out the Internet Explorer game. Microsoft has made large strides with Internet Explorer in the past few years, so to see the company admit to a stinging security flaw even in the latest Internet Explorer 11 that ships with the current Windows 8.1 is somewhat disappointing. The flaw allows for “remote code injection,” which is quite nasty. Microsoft states that it is
“aware of You don’t need to understand the technical details to get the picture, of course. Here’s why it’s even worse than you might think: Windows XP won’t be patched, given that Microsoft has put it out to pasture. That means the remaining folks on Windows XP are at a now much greater risk than before. We knew this was coming. Here’s : And while Firefox and Chrome will both be supported on Windows XP beyond the end-of-life, the substantial number of people using Internet Explorer 6-8 is strongly suggestive that many of these Windows XP users are going to be using not just an unsupported operating system, but an unsupported browser, too. Exploitation of these people is inevitable, and it’s hard to see this ending well. Ding ding ding. Here’s what Microsoft is promising to do: Security-types are wringing their hands, as expected. Here’s : – It’s time to get off Internet Explorer for now and Windows XP forever. |
Straw-Based Filament Could Drive Down The Cost Of 3D Printing | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | Like a high-tech Rumpelstiltskin, you may soon be able to spin straw into plastic. A new filament, made by Chinese manufacturer Jiangsu Jinghe Hi-Tech Co., is made primarily of straw and a plastic base. The resulting filament melts at about 170 degrees Celsius and costs far less than standard ABS or PLA. The manufacturer can use wheat straw, rice straw, or corn stalks for the base material which is then ground up and mixed with polypropylene. The resulting pellets can then be extruded into filament for 3D printers. The material comes out slightly brown and has a soft, clean finish. According to “14,000 tons of the straw-based plastic can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 22,400 tons every year” and costs half the price of ABS plastic to make. The company is making the material for mass market customers currently but will expand into filament manufacture over time. This means 3D printing filament could drop from $50 per spool to something like $10, an important jump that could speed 3D printing adoption. |
When $324 Million Isn’t Nearly Enough | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe have in response to a suit brought by employees of the firms who were financially impacted by their agreements to not hire from each other. That action suppressed the wages of their staff. The $324 million figure is paltry and an embarrassment. Interesting to this case is how blatant the companies were in engaging in behavior that was contrary to the interests of their employees — in an industry famous for coddling its workers with perks and rides and the like, there is ironic dissonance here. Facebook, notably, . The tab could have run as high as $9 billion. The New York Times , including a paragraph that I think is worth revisiting: The companies privately scoff at the $9 billion figure that the plaintiffs are seeking, contending it amounts to extortion. The employees, who number about 100,000, suggest that the facts are so damning against the companies — and so embarrassing — that they won’t settle for anything less than a blindingly high number. It turns out that the employees were willing to settle after all. I find it annoying that companies that were content to harm the interests of their constituent members felt they had the moral standing to “scoff” at the proposed amount. $9 billion is a hard amount to contextualize. For perspective, I calculated before the most recent earnings season (using December 31st, 2013 data for the most part) that the four firms had a total of $242.844 billion in cash, short-term investments, and long-term investments. That’s enough to have paid the then potential maximum $9 billion in fines nearly 27 times. The companies could — again using the $243 billion figure — afford to pay the $324 million settlement 750 times. The four firms are now only another quarter richer. The price for unfair collusion, and market distortion that harmed their workers’ ability to derive the fair price for their labor is 3.2 percent of one quarter of Apple’s net income. So in effect there is no punishment here. With 64,000 plaintiffs, the dollar amount per aggrieved, discounting for lawyers’ fees and the like, is just a touch over $5,000. After fees and taxes the real remuneration to harmed will be essentially zero. That’s just not reasonable. |
The PiPhone Is A DIY Cellphone Powered By Raspberry Pi | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8eaiNsFhtI8] The is a mini computer, just like most smartphones, so it stands to reason that you can create what amounts to a home-brew cellphone out of a few store-bought electronics parts. That’s just what . By connecting a RaspPi to a GSM module, a small TFT screen, and a battery, he’s essentially created a the DIY-est of DIY cellphones. The total cost for the project was $158 and that included $48 for the GSM module and $40 each for the Pi and a screen. He wrote his own phone interface and all the phone can do is make and receive calls, which is probably some privacy-lovers’ dream come true. What’s most fascinating about the project is that it requires no soldering or any particularly strenuous electronics knowledge. Because it is made of off-the-shelf components, you could fit one of these together in less than an hour. However, because it could (and does) overheat, Hunt doesn’t recommend stuffing this hunk of electronics into an enclosure, which could put a damper on your rainy day phone calls. The most ingenious part of the package is the GSM module which is essentially a tiny modem. Writes Hunt: The fact that this phone would have been impossible to build even a few years ago is staggering to me: we are in an era where almost all electronics can be considered potential DIY projects. Let me know if you try to build one of these in the U.S. because I’d love to see it. |
Facebook Plans To Break Ground On A Second Iowa Data Center Soon | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | Facebook is just about ready to finish construction on its 476,000-square-foot . Even before this new facility goes online, though, the company today that it plans to build a second data center right next to it. The company still has to jump through the usual regulatory hurdles to get this project approved, however. Its plans are up for review at the tomorrow evening and will then have to get approval from the city council in May. Assuming all goes as planned, the company will break ground shortly after that. The new data center will be roughly the same size of the original building. According to Facebook’s own stats, 460 people we involved in building the Altoona 1 data center. They logged a total of 435,000 hours. Iowa has become a popular destination for data center operators. Google has a large facility there (largely ) and Microsoft is planning to build a $1.1 billion facility in West Des Moines, too. Facebook’s decision was surely influenced by Iowa’s positive tax climate for its operations. The company was awarded $18 million in state tax credits last year , and, as part of its agreement with the city of Altoona, the company won’t have to pay property taxes on the facility for 20 years. Facebook’s other data centers are located in Prineville, Ore., Forest City, N.C., and Luleå, Sweden. |
Microsoft Boosts OneDrive Storage For Corporate Clients From 25GB To 1TB Per User | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | In the cloud storage wars, capacity is a weapon, and one that is rapidly losing its dollar value. Put simply: Companies that offer cloud storage are scrambling to add value on top of stored gigabytes, as the marginal dollar price that can be charged for that storage is rapidly dropping to zero. Microsoft, making that point even more explicit today that it is bolstering its provided OneDrive for Business and Office 365 ProPlus products to one terabyte, up from 25 gigabytes in the case of the former. In its blog post, Microsoft all but called out by name both Dropbox and Box as insufficient competition for its cloud products: File sync and share solutions represent key capabilities that keep people on the same page and responsive. There are several solutions offered, many from companies that have sprung up to focus exclusively on this market. Some have come from the consumer world and are new to the enterprise software market and the requirements around delivering enterprise-grade cloud services. Others are focused on the enterprise, but only as a point solution. Few are prepared to meet the evolving needs of businesses looking for a holistic and comprehensive approach to meeting the full needs of their employees as they live a cloud first, mobile first workstyle. Consider the shade tossed. Dropbox especially is to grow inside the corporate space. Microsoft doesn’t want that to happen. (To its credit, Dropbox’s most recent crop of products are in fact beautifully designed. It will be interesting to see what sort of play they can receive in the enterprise. There are doubters .) The financial dynamics at play here are incredibly interesting. As I when discussing the Box S-1: The [financial] pressure here is amplified by a host of competition, and declining per-gigabyte fees. This cuts at what Box can charge for a key part of its value proposition, as larger, better monied players like Google and Microsoft beat each about the ears. The dance that Google and Microsoft are playing is different from what Box offers, but here’s the new reality: Cloud storage without editing and collaboration tools is moot, as are editing and collaboration tools without cloud storage. Microsoft just cut the fee for the proximal stored gigabyte to a titch over zero. So, storage itself can no longer be a differentiator. That’s tough for companies like Dropbox and Box that have long charged for storage. Google and Yahoo have also helped lower the cost of storage. Yahoo of storage on Flickr, and Google recently for cloud storage to boot. Dropbox and Box must move up the value stack, and are, to their credit, to . But Microsoft doesn’t want to cede the space, as doing so would directly impugn its future Office cash flow. And that’s not something it wants to divest. |
France Could Create A Developer Visa To Support French Startups | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | French Secretary of State for the digital economy Axelle Lemaire announced in an interview with that the French government will work on a developer visa for highly skilled employees. While the French government already announced that it plans to create a so-called startup visa for entrepreneurs and investors, Lemaire wants to extend this visa to engineers. According to French governmental agency , hiring developers is the most difficult hiring process in France. And it’s not over — tech companies will be looking for 36,000 new developers in the next five years. French engineering schools are very good but won’t be able to make up for this increase in job openings. Moreover, many engineers choose to move to the U.S. and work for American tech companies. You can see this phenomenon by looking at French tech engineers alumni networks, such as . Previously, the plan for the startup visa only concerned entrepreneurs and investors who wanted to create jobs in France. Following Tariq Krim’s on French developers, Lemaire wants to provide the same advantages for developers as well. Starting in 2015, everybody working for a startup, from founders to developers, will get a visa and be able to work for four years in France. Finally, Lemaire will work on France’s educational system when it comes to computer science. French engineering schools are among the best engineering schools in the world, but many average students are not good enough at math or physics to pass the competitive exams. Contrarily, there are very few computer science schools that only teach you how to code. France needs more computer science schools for anyone with a and a passion for startups. With the current dearth of talent, these students will easily find a job. |
null | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 4 | 16 | null |
Cloud App Monitoring Company New Relic Raises $100M | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | , maker of application monitoring tools for developers, has in funding led by BlackRock, Inc., and Passport Capital with T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Wellington Management also participating. We’re hearing from a source that the valuation of the company in the round was north of $1 billion, but have not been able to confirm this. In the company’s last round, New Relic was valued at Founded by Lew Cirne, New Relic is the all-in-one server and application performance tool that lets developers see the performance of cloud applications from the end user experience through servers and down to the line of application code. The company’s SaaS combines user monitoring, application monitoring, and availability monitoring in a single platform, allowing developers and operations teams to manage web application performance in real-time. The company currently analyzes over 200 billion data points per day for over 3 million application instances from tens of thousands of customers. “We monitor billions of data points in real-time for tens of thousands of active accounts,” said Cirne in a release. “This funding will help us further accelerate company momentum on a global basis, build out our presence among large enterprises and develop both new and existing products, including our real-time analytics platform to enable more organizations make better data-driven business decisions.” Last year, Cirne (who sold his previous company, Wily Technology to CA in 2006 for $350 million) talked about an IPO as a possible outcome, so this could be the last round of outside funding for the company as it prepares for a public offering. Early investors in the company include Benchmark, Trinity Ventures, Tenaya Capital and Allen & Co. |
Facebook Messenger Adds Video And Quicker Selfies For Snapchat-Style Visual Conversations | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | People love the intimacy of communicating through photos and videos. Snapchat proved that. Now Facebook wants more of these visual conversations happening in Messenger so it’s added video sharing plus faster photo uploads and camera access in an today that’s rolling out to Android this week. The new message composer puts the camera, photo reel, stickers, and audio messaging all one-touch away. Facebook even wants Stickers to be conversational, so it’s making them viral. When someone sends you a sticker, you can tap and hold on it to download that pack. It’s also quicker to find who you want to chat with thanks to a new always-open search bar on the recent conversations tab. Until now, Facebook Messenger could only send photos, not videos. Now you can send them and watch them in-line, but not record them in-app. WhatsApp recently revealed that its users share a day, which may have lit a fire under Facebook to get this feature released. The new selfie system gives Messenger a much more immediate feel. Tap the visible camera icon and half the screen turns into the front-facing camera viewfinder. Tap once more and your selfie is instantly sent. It actually feels a lot brisker than Snapchat, which always forces you through the recipient selector screen after your shoot a pic. The new design sacrifices some chat window space to make room for the new attachments bar below the text composer. But by making the multi-media options instantly available, Facebook could get more of its sharing more than just text. |
Apple To Raise Another $17B In Debt To Avoid Repatriating Foreign-Held Cash | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | As it looks to return — cash, and so forth — to investors, Apple will again to raise the funds needed. If that seems odd, keep in mind that most of Apple’s cash is held overseas, and to bring it home would incur a financial penalty equal to the full United States federal corporate tax rate: 35%. So, the company is looking to in debt to pay its shareholders a part of its profits. Given low current interest rates on corporate paper, it is an order of magnitude cheaper for Apple to borrow billions at home than to bring billions home. And with the Fed prioritizing growth instead of fear of inflation, that’s not likely to change. I’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the reported debt sale. ZeroHedge detailing why Apple needs to raise more local capital to execute its increased shareholder return program: So, while Apple remains massively solvent, its lack of capital in its home market makes it mildly difficult for it to return cash to shareholders at the rate . Icahn aside, it’s fun to note the implied penalty that the United States government is enacting onto Apple, or, that Apple is willing to pay to avoid what some would call fair taxation — sure, it will pay a few points on the debt, but that cost represents a massive savings. |
TechCrunch Giveaway: Kindle Paperwhite 3G And The Last Free Ticket To Disrupt NY | Elin Blesener | 2,014 | 4 | 28 | Believe it or not, is just one week away! Crazy, right? As you know, we have an all-star lineup of special guests and speakers who will be joining us, including , Sequoia Capital’s , Andreessen Horowitz’s , Nasty Gal’s Sophia , BoxGroup’s , SV Angel’s , HBO’s ,” and littleBits Electronics’ . That’s not even half of them. You can view our list of special guests and speakers on our Disrupt page . The full agenda for the show can be found . This is one event you really won’t want to miss. This is one lucky reader’s to win a free ticket to Disrupt NY (valued at $2,995). We’re getting excited and feeling generous, so not only will this winner receive a free ticket to the show and all of the after parties, they will also win a free (valued at $189). All you have to do to enter for a chance to win is follow the steps below: 1) 2) Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. PT. Anyone in the U.S. and Canada is eligible. Please note the ticket does not include airfare or hotel. Update: Congratulations to Scott Markman for winning! |
Guides.co Aims To Be The Hub For Companies’ White Papers And How-To Content | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | There are plenty of how-to sites on the Internet, but sometimes, in the words of Guides.co CEO Scott Annan, you need to look up something “more complicated than tying a tie or stuffing a turkey.” When you do, Annan is hoping you’ll visit . He argued that most forms of content have been reinvented for the digital world, but not instructional, how-to books — which, unlike a novel, “you don’t read from start to finish.” When published through the Guides.co platform, instructional content is broken down into more digestible chunks, with easy navigation for the reader and the ability for authors to keep their content up to date. Basically, it’s closer to an interactive website rather than an e-book. Guides.co also gives authors more details about who their readers are (you have to sign up and provide your email address to get access) and what they’re reading, with features like a heat map that shows how long people are engaging with different sections. The company (previously called Accel.io) started out with a focus on startup-related content, but its ambitions have broadened. It relaunched today with the new name, highlighting its goal to become the home for any guide-type content. And a new feature allows companies to create their own branded mini-sites highlighting all of their content. Annan suggested that these sites could eventually replace the “resource center” and “white paper” sections of corporate websites. For example, Pop.co ( ) has created to help non-technical founders start online businesses, covering topics like , as well as . Publishers can offer their guides for free or charge for access. If they charge, Guides.co takes a transaction fee, though Annan said the fee is just covering costs — the real plan to make money is by charging businesses for premium features like the branded mini-site. Guides.co recently raised a $500K seed round from angel investors, including Shopify founder Scott Lake, Shopify vice president Adam McNamara, and TravelPod founder Luc Levesque. |
The Rufus Cuff’s Size And Features Lord Over Puny Smartwatches | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | [vimeo 89260714 w=500 h=281] With its three-inch screen, the thumbs its nose at smartwatches with their tiny faces and dainty wristbands. The wearable device, which bills itself as a “wrist communicator” and runs on Android, has access to the full Google Play store; a built-in mic, speaker, and camera; a full Web browser; accelerometer and gyroscope; touchscreen keyboard; and attaches to a switchable silicone band in five colors. Both iOS and Android devices can be controlled by the Rufus Cuff, which is now , with a Bluetooth 4.0 connection. Wait a second, you may be wondering. Why not just strap your smartphone to a wrist holder instead of buying another gadget? Gabe Grifoni, the CEO and co-founder of , says that as smartphones grow ever larger — at just four inches, the latest iPhone model is an exception — the Rufus Cuff’s goal is to eventually relegate mobile phones to “more of a hub device 50% of the time, like a home router that just pushes information out to a screen that could be used for full two-way communication without needing to pull out your phablet.”
Unlike smartphones, the Rufus Cuff is designed to be used in landscape mode (making it easier to type on a small screen). Grifoni adds that even with a three-inch screen it is much thinner and less obtrusive than a smartphone strapped to a wrist holder. “Making something that was big enough to work as needed but not oversized was the goal in designing a device specifically meant to be worn, glanced and used on the go,” he says. The “design is very important to us and we think designing wearables for that specific intent is the way to go. It’s akin to saying why not just add a folio with a keyboard to your iPad and not use a laptop. I think some people do that but for me I find specific purposes for both of those devices in my life.” Rufus Labs eventually hopes to create an ecosystem of products that will allow the Rufus Cuff to replace your smartphone, keys, and wallet. For example, you could use it to control a door’s smart lock or connect it to online payment providers and loyalty cards. The Rufus Cuff has raised about $144,000 of its $200,000 goal and with 10 days left in its campaign, the device has a decent chance of reaching its goal. The cuff starts at $249 with an estimated delivery date of September 2014. |
Tuition.io Picks Up A New Investor, As It Manages Over $1 Billion In Student Loans | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | In the year since its launch, , the company billing itself as the Mint.com for managing student loans, has grown to manage over $1 billion in loans. The company, which provides a monitoring and management service for student loan payments, has just picked up an investment from Raj Date, the former second-in-command at the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Agency, through the advisory and investment firm he helped found. Tuition.io’s origins prove the adage that necessity is indeed the mother of invention, since the company began when chief executive and company founder Brendon McQueen confronted his own $120,000 in student loans split between 12 different lenders. McQueen’s story is not unique among the roughly 37 million people in the U.S. who have outstanding student loan debt. Those loan obligations total over $1 trillion and are a huge drain on the finances of debtors, especially given the high interest rate of most government-backed loans. The majority of federally backed student debt is at an interest rate higher than 6 percent, with more than three-fourths being at an interest rate above 4 percent, . These rates are double or triple the 2 percent rate of government debt, and that disparity has resulted in additional costs for young borrowers who are least able to repay the loans. Indeed, default is a huge problem for government lenders. Given the demand, it’s no wonder that Tuition.io’s growth has been scorching. When it raised its $1 million seed round in February 2012, the company had just surpassed the $250 million mark in aggregate user debt under management. At the time, the company’s backers included Mohr Davidow Ventures, early-stage investor Jerry Neumann, New York-based venture firm Mesa+, AF Square’s Troy Carter, Richard Wolpert, Rob Glaser and Launchpad LA. The company is just now looking at ways to monetize, and has seen early revenue from ads, because its blog generates significant traffic, McQueen said. “Outstanding student loan debt is hovering at $1.1 trillion which is larger than credit cards or auto loans,” said McQueen. “If you think about it there are a lot of companies out there like CreditKarma or Mint [but] you don’t have a lot of technology-based student loan optimization products out there.” Venture investors are keenly aware of the demand for products that make student loans easier to manage and pay down. Companies like and raised over $100 million in March alone for their lending services for student borrowers. “The market is pretty profoundly broken,” said Date. “Every other asset class is getting better, but student loan credit performance is getting worse. That tends to matter because of the decision model across the industry that is pretty profoundly flawed.” For Date, Tuition.io provides a simple, credible solution for student borrowers that often have nowhere else to turn. “The reality is that the average student does not have that firm of a grasp on what he or she actually owes. If you don’t know what you owe it’s harder to do the non-trivial task of dynamically managing your debt load,” Date said. For McQueen, the rationale behind Tuition.io is even simpler. “People out there are getting hosed pretty bad.” |
Founder Stories: Serial Entrepreneur Karl Jacob Is Up At The Plate Again With Hangtime | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | In his career, Jacob has raised over $200 million in venture capital across the companies he’s founded, and in this discussion, he shares with us some of the best lessons he’s picked up around reading term sheets, negotiating term sheets, and how AngelList could possibly move to a level of standardization in documentation. Jacob also shares a wealth of wisdom around how founders should think about the rights to sell their shares, about what “control” means in a legal context of a startup, how to find the right lawyers, and the biggest mistake he’s made as a founder — not having a true outside/independent board member on his BoDs. We also talk about how years of doing startups have helped him evolve on product development philosophies, iteration, and using data. Jacob carries an incredible amount of knowledge about being a startup founder and CEO, so this video would be of interest to all TechCrunch readers. |
As Food Delivery War Heats Up, Sprig Plans To Serve Lunch | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | SpoonRocket is about to have some competition in the lunch on demand market. Sprig, currently dinner-only, will soon start serving lunch, according to a source who said Sprig now delivers 1000 meals per day. Sprig just raised a $10 million Series A two weeks ago, and is wasting no time in ramping up the fight for our stomachs. With this info, I called Sprig CEO and co-founder Gagan Biyani and he confirms Sprig is working out logistical details to start delivering lunch. He said it could be ready to go as soon as Monday but the company typically makes decisions last-minute and will launch lunch when it’s ready. Before we go any further, these are the most magical-feeling startups I’ve experienced since Uber and Lyft. You open or ‘s app, and choose between two healthy yet tasty meals. It’s $8 plus tax from SpoonRocket delivered to the curb outside your place in San Francisco or the East Bay in about 10 minutes. It’s cheaper and faster but the food can taste a bit dry or rubbery at times, though still pretty good. Sprig is $10 a meal + $2 delivery fee for food brought right to your door in most of San Francisco averages 18 minutes (though I’ve had several deliveries slower than that), and the food is amazing with big portions. I’ve had SpoonRocket meals arrive in as little as 3 minutes. Faster than I could walk to my kitchen and put peanut butter on bread. The ability to instantly satisfy your hunger with food you won’t feel guilty about and a price that’s cheaper than more restaurants is amazing. Sometimes I’m hungry right this minute or need food before heading somewhere else, and lunch or dinner, SpoonRocket hits the spot. But if I’ll be around for a while and am craving something especially tasty, I’ll order Sprig. The problem is Sprig doesn’t do lunch. But it’s about to. A source heard directly from Sprig that today it beta tested serving lunch and will launch soon. The current plan is for lunch to be available from 11am to 2pm, Monday through Friday, though this could change slightly. Lunch will complement the Monday to Thursday dinners it offers from 5:30pm to 9:30pm. The company apparently now has eight distribution centers in San Francisco that supply its drivers with 1000 meals per day to deliver. Job listings on and confirm it’s preparing lunch. Neither Sprig nor SpoonRocket has achieved mass mind share and both are still confined to the San Francisco Bay Area. Following in late March, from Foundation Capital and General Catalyst. Now they’ll both be spending in hopes of hammering out their logistics, growing their customer base, and becoming a household name. With any luck, this will lead to a , which has driven down on-demand car service rates in San Francisco. Because when food services battle it out, it’s our tummies that win. |
I Hijacked The Startup Alley Application System To Extend The Deadline, So Apply Now! | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | Attention, startups! This is a code red situation. I have infiltrated the Disrupt Startup Alley application system and left registrations open. (Cue evil laugh.) See, the powers that be wanted to shut down the applications right now, meaning that you fine startups who haven’t signed up wouldn’t get the chance to set up shop in the Startup Alley at Disrupt NY, where thousands of investors, tech bigwigs, and members of the press will be on the prowl for their new favorite moonshot. I didn’t like that idea, so I hijacked the system. As a representative of TechCrunch in NYC, I insist that there’s no such thing as too many companies in the Alley. You can thank me later. If I can maintain control of the system for that long, I plan to leave open until April 28. Sign up . What is , you ask? It’s the true show floor of the Disrupt conference in New York, going down from May 5 to May 7. Hundreds of startups set up demo tables and lure in passersby to recruit, close deals, form partnerships, and get press coverage. Oh, and the luckiest and most amazing among them have the opportunity to get plucked from the Alley and dropped onto the main stage for the Startup Battlefield, if the audience at the show deems fit. Last year, our Startup Alley companies generated nearly $100 million in funding collectively after debuting at the show. It’s an incredible opportunity for any startup, and you’ve just been blessed with extra time to sign up. Do not squander it. More questions? Ask the folks at startupalley@beta.techcrunch.com. So… see you guys at Disrupt?
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Get Poached | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | The tech/startup industry is about as incestuous as it gets, and that’s any clear tools to help people switch from one moonshot to the next. So imagine a world in which there are two! Allow me to proudly introduce , the anonymous employee auction site, and , the NY-based site for finding your next employer. Both sites focus on solving a similar problem: you’re sick of working at Google, or Amazon, or Postmates, or Tinder, or wherever, and want to know what lies beyond the white picket fence, in the flowing green pastures off in the distance. With , you simply put in your current salary and experience information and sit back and wait. Think of it as a Secret for employment. Auctions go live at a specified time and date, and then companies who are signed on to the platform have the option to send you interview offers, paired with salary propositions. That way, company’s have access to the best-matched talent and potential candidates have the ability to sort out their options. is slightly different. Instead of using the auction model, Underdog simply asks for your resume and some basic information. The idea is to focus on the NY startup scene, get in good with growing and hiring companies, and facilitate the best possible matches between programmers, engineers, social media folks, and “product people” with their potential employers. Both tools seem really clever, and could come in handy if you’re looking to shake things up professionally. |
Instacart Could Raise A Big New Round Of Funding Valuing It At $400 Million | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | On-demand grocery startup is fielding term sheets for a big new round of funding, according to sources. We’ve heard the new financing could be led by a non-VC investor, and according to one source it would value the company at up to $400 million. Instacart provides same-day delivery of groceries from a number of different local stores in various cities around the country. Customers place orders either through the company’s website or its mobile apps, and have groceries brought to their homes in a matter of hours. It’s delivers for national chains like Whole Foods and Costco, while also teaming up with smaller regional stores like Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco or Dominick’s in Chicago to make their goods available to customers. The company currently operates in eight cities — San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Jose, and Washington DC. But it plans to continue expanding aggressively over the next year. At the same time that Instacart has been adding new markets, revenue has exploded. In the two months prior to its New York City launch, for instance, its . In an effort to accelerate that growth, the company is considering raising another big round of funding less than a year after it closed its Series A. Last July it brought on led by Sequoia Capital, with existing investors Khosla Ventures, Canaan Partners, SV Angel, and Paul Buchheit also participating. To date, Instacart has raised a total of about $11 million. As Instacart prepares for aggressive expansion, its next round is expected to be much larger and richer in valuation. According to one source, the company has fielded term sheets from non-venture capital investors like hedge funds or private equity firms. Typically, those types of firms don’t invest until the Series C or Series D stage, but a few — like Tiger Global, which recently invested in Kitchensurfing, or Coatue Management, which put money into HotelTonight — have shown an appetite for earlier-stage investments in companies with very strong traction. Based on what Instacart has shown so far in its first four markets, it probably qualifies. Not surprisingly, Instacart declined to comment for this story. |
Meet The 11 New Startups Launching At AngelPad’s Spring Demo Day | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | , the San Francisco-based startup accelerator founded by early Googler and tech investor Thomas Korte, is holding demo day for its Spring 2014 class in San Francisco today. Since its inception back , AngelPad has established itself as a top player in the ever-expanding field of tech incubators. Now with operations in New York City (AngelPad’s brand new NYC office is pictured here) and its native San Francisco, the organization steadily graduates about a dozen companies in each batch, with solid alumni success stories including MoPub, which was acquired by Twitter last fall for , and Crittercism, which has raised a . AngelPad itself has kept its operations lean and mean: The firm was self-funded up until this past fall, when it raised a round from a small group of individual investors. This afternoon, eleven startups focused on a wide-ranging set of capabilities are set to make their debuts to a roomful of investors, tech executives, and media. TechCrunch will be on hand at the event too, and no doubt there will be more to say about these startups in the days ahead — but for now, without further adieu, here is a list of the newest batch of startups to get their AngelPad “wings”: : A web infrastructure monitoring platform founded by ex-Google engineers who previously developed analytics tools used internally by the Google Apps team. Hiveary promises to provide “predictive, contextual, and collaborative” alerts. : Founded by Rapleaf’s former VP of product and VP of engineering, TapFwd is a big data mobile ad platform that brings together offline and online data to improve mobile ad targeting. : A software platform for enterprises aimed at “managing and improving” team performance. PeopleGoal says it’s on track to pilot its platform with 12 companies totaling more than 20,000 employees. : Arthena is an investment platform with a focus on the fine arts, aiming to give accredited investors access to co-invest with art world leaders. The founder’s resume includes work at the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, and Amazon Art. : A research and communication platform for physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals. : A business-to-business platform targeted at helping create streamlined workflows at medium- to large-sized enterprises. The company has signed up customers including paint corporation Benjamin Moore. : A mobile-first car valet service for large cities and airports. : is a mobile communication platform aimed at providing top recommendations from trusted social networks. : Founded by a team of brothers who are alums of both Oxford and Goldman Sachs, Seed.jobs is an inbound marketing platform for talent acquisition. : A marketplace for home and office painting, Paintzen currently has a revenue run rate of over $1 million. : A platform for businesses to get sales and marketing tasks completed online by US college graduates. Our own Leena Rao sat down with AngelPad founder Thomas Korte this past fall to talk all about the organization’s growth and plans for the future. Check that out in the video embedded below:
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Weibo Spikes 19.06% In Its Debut | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | This morning Weibo , offering fewer shares than previously expected, though the bloc was priced at $17, in line with yesterday’s reporting. The company went gangbusters its first day of public trading, spiking 19.06% to $20.24 by the end of the day, likely adding draft winds to other technology companies, social or otherwise, looking to list on the public markets. Given a starting market capitalization of at its IPO price, Weibo gained $376M in value. Weibo joins a number of other recent technology IPOs to have big first days. As TechCrunch on April 6th of this year: “Friday was a busy day for tech companies on Wall Street, with , and going public on the same day. It went well: GrubHub spiked , Five9 , and IMS Health .” Here’s Weibo’s first day as a public firm: Gaming giant King Digital has struggled since its public offering. Aerohive, another recent technology IPO, claimed that it saw “ ” in the investing market during its roadshow. Box’s losses when it disclosed its finances in its S-1 were larger than expected, causing some to doubt private-market valuations of certain tech sectors. But Weibo’s IPO is another indication that investors are more than willing to snap up tech shares, provided the growth upside looks firm. Welcome to the club, Weibo. We’ll see you at earnings. |
Zola Debuts Its iPhone App To Allow Couples To Manage Their Wedding Registries On The Go | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | the new wedding registry startup emerging from Gilt And AlleyCorp founder , has launched an iPhone app to allow couples to create and manage their Zola registries from anywhere. Zola, led by former Gilt employees and , is trying to . It’s part content, part Pinterest-like inspiration sharing, and part wish list/registry. The result is a well-designed, easy-to-use wedding registry that tells a story of a couple. The startup recently raised in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital. The iOS app includes a lot of the functionality of the web app, but is tailored for an immersive experience. With the Zola app, couples can create and edit their registries while on the go, and scan any product onto their registry using the barcode scanner. The app also includes a feature called Blender, which allows couples to browse the entire Zola selection of items (i.e. kitchen tools), one at a time, swiping right to add to their registry or left to pass. Other features of the app include the ability to upload photos from your iPhone, create new collections for gifts, and track and manage gifts. While there are many startups aiming to disrupt the wedding registry, Zola’s growth has proved that many couples are craving something new. Since Zola’s launch in October 2013, over 10,000 couples have created a registry on Zola.com, with registry growth accelerating every month. There are now 3,000 products/experiences available on Zola.com, with experiences available across four cities and plans to expand into at least four more within the next six months. |
Chromebooks Could Soon Be Unlocked Automatically When Your Smartphone Is Near | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | Passwords, geez those things suck. You may not need them to login to your computer in the future, and Chromebooks might be the first PC device to offer that feature natively, according to some hints found in the developer preview channel of Chrome OS by (via ). Early code included in the latest build suggests there will one day be a way to unlock your Chromebook just by having an Android device registered to your account nearby. The so-called “Easy Unlock” feature already has a graphic-based, user-friendly explainer for setup and use, but it doesn’t appear to offer live functionality yet, so even if you’re running the bleeding edge dev channel build you won’t be able to do much beyond seen the new walkthrough. Still, it looks like Google has done more than just think about this in passing. Google has been looking at ways of getting rid of the password and replacing it with physical authentication for a while now, and we reported on efforts it was taking as of to let it know it’s really you. A smartphone is obviously an easier device to use for this kind of authentication than a specialized piece of hardware, and given that Google has figured out how to frustrate its own CAPTCHA software for detecting real humans, hardware alternatives could have applications beyond basic login security down the road. This looks like it stands a good chance of making it out to the consumer release of Chrome OS, but don’t expect it to get to your Chromebook for another few months yet. |
Sonos Wants To Ditch Its Only Annoying Shortcoming | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | Sonos has often been praised for its super minimalist setup process. Power up a couple Sonos speakers in different rooms, open the smartphone app, and boom — wireless sound around your house… right? Mostly. There’s currently one tiny asterisk in the process that tends to get forgotten: one of those speakers (or a separately purchased “bridge” unit) needs to be wired directly into your router to act as the brain of the operations. The reason this sucks? Because “good spot for a router” and “good spot for a booming speaker” don’t always overlap. Thanks to improvements in wireless signal technology, many of us just stuff our routers in the back of some closet and forget about it until the Internet whonks out and we have to smack it with a hammer. Now Sonos wants to drop that requirement. Before this, you had two options: In a this morning, Sonos announced that they’ve figured out a way to rework their software so that wired connection to the router is necessary. In an upcoming update, the speakers will be able to wirelessly work together to orchestrate the operations and keep your tracks in sync, all without a speaker/bridge unit hardwired into the router. Now, you still need a router/WiFi in the mix, so don’t expect to drag the ol’ Sonos system out to the beach — but for many people, this takes the one last little annoying quirk out of the Sonos configuration process. Sonos notes that while their new setup should work for most people, folks with particularly big homes (or homes with walls that like to eat wireless signals) might still need a bridge. For them (and for everyone already using a bridge), the bridge should continue to work just as it always has. Sonos is rolling out the new bridge-free software in Beta first. Interested? |
Is Winter Coming? Hear More From Our All-Star Investor Panel At Disrupt NY | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | VC is at its highest level since 2001, and valuations are soaring. The question on everyone’s mind is, are we in a bubble? Besides our obsession with Game of Thrones, there’s a reason why our investor panel at Disrupt NY is titled “Is Winter Coming?” We’ve never seen as many billion-dollar exits and valuations, many of which have been funded by the investors we have on stage at in May. . Our all-star panel of investors includes (Highline Venture Partners), (Greylock Partners), (Sequoia Capital) and (Spark Capital). New York-based Fisher has made a number of savvy bets early on hot new technologies and companies, including Pinterest (recently valued at $4 billion), Stripe (valued at $1.75 billion), Makerbot ( ), Vine, FiftyThree, and Refinery29. She also recently as a board partner. Sabet and Spark were the early backers of Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare and a number others; and have continued its strong of wins, including the most recent of Oculus VR to Facebook. Sequoia Capital partner, and former Zappos COO Lin is a rising star in the VC world, and has backed companies like Airbnb, which is rumored to be valued at $10 billion in its latest round of funding. Lilly has only been a VC at Greylock for three years, and he’s already collected a number of tech’s biggest wins under his belt, including Dropbox (whose latest valuation is pegged at $10 billion), Instagram (sold to Facebook for $1 billion), and Tumblr (sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion). Beyond bubble talk, we’re going to hear about the changes in seed stage investing, the real story behind competition between VCs on deals, how to find the unicorns and more. to hear the answers to these and other questions at , which kicks off on May 3rd. General admission tickets and sponsorship packages are . |
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Six Months After Acquisition, Magnify Rebrands And Relaunches As Waywire | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | Last fall, in an effort to create more efficiency around video curation. The idea behind the acquisition was to combine the former’s enterprise video curation business with the latter’s content deals and consumer-facing technology. At the time, : In some ways, the matchup makes a lot of sense — both companies, after all, have the shared vision of empowering users to find, collect, and share videos with others. But in other ways, the tie-up of Waywire and Magnify shows a stark contrast in how the different companies hoped to achieve that vision. On the one hand, Magnify had spent seven years (!!!!!) building a very steady business providing tools to enterprise clients who wished to manage and curate their own channels of video content. Waywire, meanwhile, got ahead of itself by promising a consumer-facing curation platform that never quite fully launched. After several months, the combined company has resolved the technical side of things, as well as its branding, to relaunch as Waywire and release a new product called . The platform takes advantage of Magnify’s curation chops, as well as the content deals that Waywire had signed, to offer up both enterprise and consumer-facing products. Already, Waywire will have legacy clients on the enterprise side like and . On the content side, the new Waywire has video from , including providers like Conde Nast, Yahoo, AOL, Discovery, BBC and MSNBC. While the enterprise business will help pay the bills, the company is looking to expand the opportunity for advertising on that are curated by its users, using videos that are available through the Waywire deals. Examples for shows like and are already available, with people who have been approved by Waywire building pages of videos that are relevant to those topics. The same model is being applied to allow curators to find and curate video clips of their favorite celebrities or musicians. That focus so far has been on content in the entertainment category, but Waywire CEO Steve Rosenbaum says there is an opportunity to create highly relevant curated channels about any number of topics, from education to healthcare. Potential curators are now to run channels that they are experts in, and Waywire will vet those curators before handing over the keys to those channels. Rosenbaum said this would allow for very specialized channels, like a specialist curating a channel on a specific healthcare topic, for instance. With those channels, Waywire is hoping to attract “audiences” that will be attractive to advertisers -and our partners who have ad sales organizations. The idea is to change the current mass media approach to advertising, where agencies try to reach audiences at scale, but find their messages may only be applicable to a certain portion of the people watching. It’s an ambitious goal, but one that Waywire believes it now has the platform, content, and audience, to achieve. |
Google Analytics Now Lets You Track Web And App Data In A Single View | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | Here is a small but important : Developers can now create a single that includes both web and app data. Google says this will help businesses that have multiple digital touchpoints for their users (web, mobile apps, other devices) to better understand them. Until today, Analytics users had to choose between an or when they created views. Both options provided a slightly different experience. Now, no matter how users collect their data (whether on the web or from a mobile app), all of the stats can appear in a single view, which should indeed give businesses an easier way to gain insights from their users’ behavior through Google Analytics. This also means that the current web “Visitor” and “Active User” app metrics are now combined in a single “User” metric. Instead of talking about “Visits” — which really only makes sense on the web — Analytics now refers to “Sessions” across the service. According to Google, this will give you “ Users who want to keep their web and app metrics separate will have to filter them in their reporting views. As part of this update, Google’s analytics.js library for web apps now also includes the ability to track the user’s screen name, app name, app version and exception tracking. These new features will roll out to all Analytics accounts . |
Putting The Many Pieces Back Together After The Death Of Your Co-Founder | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | Sébastien Métrot shared a tough story today at at the Ministry for the Economy and Finance — he co-founded in 2011 with CEO Jean-Marc Plueger, who died in a scooter accident in 2012. But It wasn’t just an accident, Métrot said Plueger’s terrible work/life balance was a contributing factor. Today’s interview was Métrot’s tribute to his departed co-founder. “What brought him to the accident is that he lost sight of his work/life balance. He lost track of what was right for his health, what was right for his life,” Métrot said. “Doing a startup like this is not passion anymore, it’s obsession. From what I gathered after his death, he was sleeping two or three hours a night. There is no way you can live a life like that.” In sharing this story, Métrot wanted to warn entrepreneurs in the room that you have to keep your friends, you have to pay attention to your family. Or, as he put it, “you have to have a life outside of your company.” “When you’re an entrepreneur, the work pressure is very different. You want to personally succeed and bring your dream to life — and it can push you way too hard. Knowing my co-founder, he was really passionate about the project. He wanted the company to succeed so badly.” When your co-founder and CEO has an accident, there are some personal implications as well as professional problems. “I’ve been fortunate with my family, and my investors as well. On the mental health side, we got all the help we needed. We had seven employees and nobody left. Everybody stayed until the end, and that’s very important.” Since then, the company shut down. “Without your co-founder, you have to learn overnight to take care of everything,” Métrot said. “There are also many legal issues. Who has to take care of the company? What do we have to do on the inheritance side?” “There were some technical points in the way we structured the company that made the process harder. When you start a company, you’re supposed to subscribe to key man insurance for the main managers of the company. That was our biggest failure. We weren’t able to get new money for the company, we weren’t able to sell the company.” Métrot stated that the company didn’t even consider this outcome. The team overlooked this aspect and it shouldn’t have. Investors Jaïna Capital and Kima Ventures later added requirements in their term sheets when it comes to key man insurance. This is when the company realized that Yasound couldn’t continue without Plueger. “I couldn’t abandon the team, because the team didn’t abandon me. I helped them find new jobs, I mostly succeeded there. I had to go through the shutdown process — it took me eight months.” You can never be prepared to deal with a tragedy. All you can do is act like a human — and that’s exactly what Métrot did. “I never thought about the money side during this experience. I learned so many things from this experience, and I never thought about the money.” |
Optimizely Brings Its A/B Testing Platform To iOS Apps | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhuGaDJXqFI&w=560&h=315] , the popular service for testing out different variations of your website, today announced the launch of Optimizely for iOS. The company says its new mobile tools allow customers to try out different interface and content changes to their iOS apps in real-time, without going through App Store approval. Thanks to the Optimizely Visual Editor, no coding is required to make these changes. While Optimizely is the big name in A/B testing on the web, we’ve written about a number of other services that have launched on mobile, . One of Optimizely’s selling points is the idea that you can run your web and mobile app tests from the same place. “We believe that website and mobile app testing are no different from each other in the sense that data enables our customers to deliver the best possible experience to their visitors, regardless of device,” said CEO Dan Siroker in . Optimizely made today’s announcement as part of OptiCon, its first customer conference. The company says it has more than 6,000 customers, including Starbucks, Disney, and CNN. |
Behold, Murdoculous Rift | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | wearing Oculus Rift headsets are the new And who better to start the trend than media mogul and Rupert Murdoch? According to the fantastic Tumblr “ ,” Murdoch spent yesterday at NY computer graphics studio with pals |
Major League Gaming Snags New VP From Machinima To Further Grow Its MLG.tv Network | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 17 | Major League Gaming (MLG), one of the oldest e-sports companies out there, picked up a new hire today from Machinima, another well-known gaming content company. Ryan Wyatt will join MLG as its vp of programming. The hire fits into MLG’s MLG.tv strategy that has seen rapid audience growth, enough even to drive MLG . To date MLG has . According to MLG, MLG.tv has grown its viewership 60% monthly since launch, growing a total of 1,376% in the first quarter of 2014 alone. That’s actually less surprising than you might imagine, given that MLG launched the online network with a limited set of broadcasters that it quickly worked to expand. Wyatt, former head of e-sports for Machinima, is actually returning to MLG in this move. He left the company for Machinima three years ago. His role at MLG is simple to get: He’ll work to expand its content, both in-studio and via game streaming personalities. More content, more viewers, and more viewers, more money. That’s the gist of it. Machinima, which has raised , has seen a in the last six months, including the installation of a new president. Wyatt’s impact will be easy to grok: Either MLG.tv’s audience continues to grow quickly, or it doesn’t. If Wyatt can’t keep the new content flowing, it probably won’t. |
Show Software Who’s The Boss At Hardware Alley At Disrupt 2014 In New York | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Ayy! Angelar! How about you bring some of your hardware to New York and show it off to some amazing people? Still crowdfunding? Not a problem. We take all kinds at in New York! What is ? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that features everything from robotic drones to 3D printers. We try to bring in an eclectic mix of amazing exhibitors and I think you’ll agree that our previous We’d like you to register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get to exhibit on the last day of Disrupt NY, May 7, to show off your goods and get access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. We’d love to have you. All you need to demo is a laptop. TechCrunch provides you with: 30″ round cocktail table, linens, table-top sign, inclusion in program agenda and website, exhibitor WiFi, and press list. You can reserve your spot by purchasing a . If you are Kickstarting your project now or bootstrapping, please contact me at john@beta.techcrunch.com with the subject line “HARDWARE ALLEY.” I will do my best to accommodate you. Hope to see you in New York! |
“Code And Canvas” Unites SF Startups And Artists Under One Weird Roof | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Fast-rising rent was about to force a dozen artists out of their studios in San Francisco. But it turns out all that tech money that’s gotten so much hate lately can actually do some good. Four entrepreneurs leased the whole warehouse, let the artists stay, and renovated the place. Now there’s enough room for at least five startups to move in to what the founders are calling . This co-working and creative warehouse could create a model for how tech workers in the Bay area can take the rent crisis into their own hands. have strangled the supply of housing and working space in San Francisco. As the tech industry booms, thousands of engineers, designers, marketers, and managers have flocked to the city, exacerbating the problem. The result has been rapidly rising rent that’s forcing out long-time residents, and widespread malice towards technologists that has culminated in . But while there are certainly some tech workers who are happy to collect their fat checks at the expense of their new neighbors, others want the community to retain its artists, families, and heritage. Those include Nik Ajagu of Facebook and Ecosystem Ventures, Gi Fernando of Free:Formers and Techlightenment, Jeff Miller of Punchfork and Pinterest, and John Yi of Pinterest, Facebook, and Yi told me the story of how a family had owned the Code and Canvas warehouse for 30 years and was generous in keeping it affordable for the artists who worked there. Eventually, the family needed to bring the rents closer to market rate, though, which would have pushed out the artists. Luckily, a friend asked if Yi wanted to rent a desk as he’s an aspiring novelist on the side. That wouldn’t be enough to pay for the whole space, though, so Yi brought the other founders together to create Code and Canvas. Unlike other tech co-working dens that may be displacing local culture, Code And Canvas tries to bring it in-house. “It’s definitely industrial, but that’s part of its charm” Yi tells me. Yi says the space is designed so the artists and entrepreneurs have physical proximity and will commune around the proverbial water cooler. Also, “We’ve architected the entire space so all the walls fold over to use the main area as one massive continuous space for events that will be curated by artists, architects, and graphic designers.” Artists who occupy Code And Canvas include
Yi says the anger pointed at the tech industry and the tales of its especially insensitive members seem “a little overblown…a little anecdotal” to him. But he’s sensitive that the tech boom is causing real hardships for other people in the bay. “If even 1 or 2 or 10 people are getting moved out because of [real estate] profiteering, that sucks.” The city certainly doesn’t need tech workers thinking of themselves as saviors of the local artists, but that’s not how Yi came off. He seems legitimately concerned about his industry can be obsessed with “short-term quarterly revenues” instead of compassion. That’s why Code and Canvas’ principles center around craft, mastery, cross-pollination, and an endeavor to improve lives. It’s not just about tech and workers co-existing peacefully, but actively inspiring each other. |
Reddit Starts Listing Trending Subreddits To Get More Users Into Its Smaller Communities | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Subreddits are, perhaps, reddit’s biggest strength. Introduced in 2008, they’re a huge part of the reason why the site rose to popularity, and why that popularity has yet to taper off. Want a community for something you like? Build a subreddit. Don’t like the current popular subreddit for that thing? Screw it, build a new one. Anyone can build one — and as long as the subreddit’s content stays legal and abides by the site’s TOS, reddit’s staff generally doesn’t get involved with administrating what goes on there. It’s easy for one huge community to die almost overnight (see: Digg). But a community made up of a zillion sub-communities? That’s a different beast. But finding new subreddits to join can be a pain. After you’ve found the subreddits for your hobbies and favorite TV shows, most people only stumble into a new subreddit when someone else mentions it in a comment. Many users, meanwhile, end up subscribing only to the handful of subreddits that reddit puts all new users in by default. Seemingly trying to combat this, reddit has just starting rolling out a “trending subreddit” feature. It’s unclear if this change is permanent, but it seems to be showing up for most (if not all) users. The idea: each day, reddit will algorithmically select a half dozen or so non-default subreddits that have seen a particularly high amount of activity lately, and list them at the top of the front page. Right now, for example, they’re highlighting /r/oddlysatisfying (which collects images of things that are inexplicably satisfying), /r/JapaneseGameShows (which is mostly clips from, you guessed it, Japanese game shows), /r/smashbros (which blew up this week after Nintendo released a bunch of new details about the WiiU Smash Bros release), /r/minimalism, and /r/GameOfThrones. Based on the submission history of the bots that power the feature, it looks like they’ve been fiddling with their trending algorithms in a semi-public space since While it’s a handy new feature for users, it’s a pretty clever business move, too. Despite its userbase, . Advertising to specific communities — like, say, all of /r/GameOfThrones — is one of reddit’s more straightforward revenue streams… but it only really works when lots of subreddits have enough members to make an ad worthwhile. If they can make up-and-coming subreddits grow even faster, everybody wins. Another clever decision: the trending bar shows up even when a user isn’t logged in. Its a quick, non-obtrusive way of saying to new users, “Hey — there’s more going on here than what’s listed on the front page.” reddit has officially announced the new feature , and addressed a few user concerns: |
Refresh Makes You Smarter At Meetings | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | the party scene in when Emily Blunt’s character is whispering the names of party guests to Meryl Streep’s character, briefing her on who everyone is as she meets them? a product that aims to keep you as prepared as possible for your next encounter, wants to be the app equivalent of that character. I’ve been using Refresh in the wild for about two months now. After a meeting with Redpoint’s , during which he raved about the product, I downloaded it out of curiosity and synced it with my Google and iOS calendar thinking nothing would come of it. Something did come of it, however, as I ended up receiving its notifications often enough that I would actually click on them. I found that the more I looked at Refresh’s detailed “dossiers,” which pulled information from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, CrunchBase, AngelList and various other sources beforehand, the more prepared I was for my meetings. The more prepared I was for my meetings, the better those meetings went, and I ended up saving myself a lot of frantic pre-meeting Googling and stress, because Refresh had already pulled the data for me. The best thing about Refresh was you could forget it existed, and it would remind you that you needed it 15 minutes before you needed it. I also ended up learning things I didn’t know about my co-workers and friends. Refresh has a very refreshing backstory. Its founder, , was originally working at LeapFrog Enterprises, a startup that built tablets for kids. LeapFrog somehow happened to catch the attention of Howard Zucker, the then , who wanted to use the technology to teach women in Afghanistan about prenatal safety. Eventually, Shah ended up taking on the project and visited Afghanistan himself. In Kabul, he was impressed with the diplomatic brief books that the then U.S. Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson had at his disposal (“they were written in prose!”): “Someone should democratize the briefing book,” thought Shah at the time. “You say someone should do it, but you don’t think you should be the one to do it. And then you do it.” The app comes out of beta today, with a series of updates and prime real estate as Apple’s featured app. The core product — a discrete file of the available data about people in your calendar when you need it in real time — is updated with easier onboarding, personalized email insights (aka who made the intro), contact cards, people search for over 40 million people and the ability to email a “dossier” to your inbox. Refresh isn’t perfect and falls into a category easily dismissed as “a feature not a product,” because it’s hard to get right. Rapportive, which also aggregated contact-info data, fell to LinkedIn. Cue, an app that pulled data around your calendar beyond just contacts, sold to Apple in an acquisition of similar magnitude. Disrupt startup Trace, a cross between the two, vanished without a trace. Shah will not tell me how many downloads, DAUs or MAUs the app has amassed since its beta launch . The app has raised over $10 million in funding and shares the space with apps like Triggerfox. Shah believes that Refresh’s competitive advantage is comprehensive data. “We don’t just do this for one or two sources, but for hundreds. Then we connect the relevant dots together to tell one story.” It’s easy to see how this kind of model can apply to insights beyond people, like if you’re invited to speak at a and have nary a clue what leveraged finance is. We are not super human, and forgetting a key detail — the difference between and , for example — in a meeting could mean the difference between a deal won or lost. “World leaders have learned centuries ago that productivity isn’t about a to-do list or getting everything done on time — it’s about connecting with people on a human level. I wanted this kind of tool and thought everyone should have it,” Shah says. Providing the context around the pillars of daily life is a challenge, and Refresh isn’t the first app to want to be the Emily to your Miranda. But as someone who keeps pulling it out in meetings, because I love showing off cool apps, I keep finding Refresh useful. Even if just as a conversation starter itself. |
DATA Act, Which Would Make Government-Spending Data Available Online, Passes Senate | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | The Senate unanimously passed the , or DATA Act, today. The DATA Act is designed to help bring new transparency to spending by the federal government, by making spending data available to the public at . The bill’s goal, to quote the Congressional Research Service’s (CRS) summary, is to “provide consistent, reliable, and searchable government-wide spending data.” That data will “improve the quality of data submitted to USASpending.gov by holding federal agencies accountable for the completeness and accuracy of the data submitted,” according to the CRS. No politician wants to be caught opposing clarity in government spending, which makes the act’s unanimous passage unsurprising. As , “[t]he final language also requires everything the federal government spends at the appropriations account level to be published on USASpending.gov, with the exception of classified material and information that wouldn’t be revealed in response to a Freedom of Information Request.” Precisely. The more data we the regular folk and assorted watchdog groups have, the better oversight we can impugn upon our elected officials from every branch and level of government. Republican House leadership appears confident of quick passage: The Senate has passed the DATA Act!! — Eric Cantor (@EricCantor) And original co-sponsors of the bill in the House that passed in November seem quite content with the Senate’s actions: Today the Senate unanimously passed the DATA Act–a big victory for advocates of and taxpayers who appreciate transparency. — Darrell Issa (@DarrellIssa) Today the Senate passed the DATA Act which promotes of how tax dollars are spent. A victory for ! — Mike Quigley (@RepMikeQuigley) The original version of the bill passed the House by a vote of 388-1. Given that, the chance of it failing to pass the House this go-round is incredibly low. With broad definitions of what counts as a group that must report its spending, the DATA Act would force the Secretary of the Treasury to start tracking submitted data from “each federal agency” monthly, with data including “outlays, funds reprogrammed or transferred,” according to the CRS. The secretary will set the regulations for data, and as possible make the information collected available in formats that are “widely accepted, nonproprietary, searchable, [and] platform independent.” This will harmonize data from various agencies, allowing for better comparison and historical tracking. Also, no group should be able to hide behind technical issues to prevent public oversight. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget will have a role, as well, helping to set data standards, and putting together a two-year pilot program to help gel rules so that reporting standards are not onerous to parties forced to comply. Nice to see the above on the fast track. It’ll take years, according to current language, to get the program fully up and running. But given current momentum, I think it’s safe to say that whoever wins the next presidential election will see, early in their first term, a new amount of light spilling in from outside on just what the government is buying and how much it’s willing to pay. |
TapTalk Is A New Video Messaging App That Adds Location | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | My TechCrunch colleague Natasha Lomas – quite convincingly – that startups should stop trying to make proximity-based social networking “happen” — that most attempts had failed, and even ongoing ventures like Foursquare have had to tone down the idea. And yet these apps still keep appearing. And who can blame them — we might as well do social with that GPS chip. is a new iOS and Android app to send friends a photo or video, but it’s way more interesting and fun than that might initially sound. You can download it from the . After connecting via Facebook, the app lets you tap the image of a friend to take a picture – in itself an innovative new kind of UI. But hold their picture down, and you record a short video of a few seconds. Using the front-facing camera you can send a selfie or, as is often the case, a short video message to your friend. Click on the bottom half of the camera field and you can type in a short message. Talking a cue from SnapChat, any photo of video you send can’t be retrieved after you’ve seen it. You also can’t pre-take a photo and upload it. Everything you send to others is unique. Because the app displays both the photo/and a map of where you are — in the case of sending a video — this means the app is turning into a sort of video Walkie-Talkie. It is excellent for use in urban environments like cities. You can add friends by user-name, mine is ‘mikebutcher’. TapTalk has been created but – which does something similar, but is built more around location. TapTalk is not really a photo app. In fact all this suggests that TapTalk is using location as a feature, not as the focus. In fact, you can also use it without sharing a map of your location. If that’s the case it should get some kind of traction. If not, it’ll be yet another app trying to make proximity-based social networking happen, when – unless people use it for sex (Tinder, Grindr) – it probably won’t. |
US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius To Resign | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius . President Obama, according , has selected Sylvia Mathews Burwell of the Office of Management and Budget as her replacement. Secretary Sebelius became a household name following the , the government’s portal to provide a marketplace for private health insurance during the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. Despite that flop of national proportions, the secretary weathered withering calls to resign, and, after the site got on its feet, oversaw, at least in part, the come-from-behind victory of Obamacare to reach its initial, un-revised sign-up goal of by the end of open enrollment in early 2014. According to the New York Times, who spoke to both the secretary and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, her exit was of her own accord. Her conversations with the president regarding her exit are said to have begun before the March 31 deadline that ended with a victory lap for the administration. McDonough told the Times that the Secretary felt that the moment was propitious for change. What appears doubtful is that the political war over Obamacare is over. This morning Secretary Sebelius that the total Obamacare sign-up tally is now 7.5 million. |
FTC Says Facebook Will Need Permission From WhatsAppers To Use Their Data | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Facebook will need the “affirmative consent” of WhatsApp users in order to use their data for advertising or anything. comes from Federal Trade Commission alongside its approval in US for Facebook to acquire WhatsApp. announced in February will still have to get past international regulators. Facebook’s business model is based on mining biographical and interest data from users in order to target them with ads. Facebook users automatically opt into this practice when they sign up. But WhatsApp’s most recent privacy policy from July 7th 2012, states that: After the acquisition announcement, WhatsApp wrote “Here’s what will change for you, our users: nothing …. And you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communication.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “We are absolutely not going to change plans around WhatsApp and the way it uses user data”, and a Facebook spokesperson confirmed Facebook would uphold WhatsApp’s promises to users. Now the FTC has approved the acquisition in the US. A Facebook spokesperson tells TechCrunch “ But with that approval, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection to Facebook and WhatsApp explaining “Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp would not nullify [the promises listed above] and WhatsApp and Facebook would continue to be bound by them…any use of WhatsApp’s subscriber information that violates these privacy promises, by either WhatsApp or Facebook, could constitute a deceptive or unfair practice under the FTC Act” section 5. [scribd id=217534451 key=key-20w5xbog8ku9vs5tajb8 mode=scroll] If Facebook and WhatsApp want to change what they collect from WhatsApp users or how that data is used, such as to improve Facebook’s News Feed algorithm or improve ad targeting on Facebook for users who are on both services, they’ll need direct permission. Rich writes “if you choose to use data collected by WhatsApp in a manner that is materially inconsistent with the promises WhatsApp made at the time of collection, you must obtain consumers’ affirmative consent before doing so.” That’s going to make it harder for Facebook to coin off its new international messaging darling. Finally, Rich says “If you choose to change how you collect, use, and share newly-collected WhatsApp data, we recommend that you offer consumers an opportunity to opt out of such changes or, at least, that you make clear to consumers that they have an opportunity to stop using the WhatsApp service.” Credit is due to Rich for standing up to Facebook on behalf of users. While “independently-run” startup might not want to start cluttering its app with ads, there are plenty of other ways the data ir doesn’t collect could aid it and its parent company. Contact info from address books could help with improving the user aquisition process. Data about the words people write could help Facebook refine ad targeting on its own site and app for users of both services. And Location data could improve engineering infrastructure or help Facebook show hyper-local ads. Now the question is how Facebook and WhatsApp would go about attaining consent to change WhatsApp’s data use policy. If it simply asked WhatsApp users to opt in to less privacy, they’d probably reject it. But the two companies could play hardball and demand people approve a new privacy policy or stop letting them use the app. Facebook will have to weigh the value of the data it could collect against the users it could lose and backlash it would suffer. As Instagram’s own proved, users aren’t always willing to change their behavior to support their ideals, but if you mess with them. People don’t always understand privacy polices, and |
Bitcoin Falls Below The $400 Mark, Down More Than 60% From Its All-Time High | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Bitcoin reached another milestone today, with the cryptocurrency falling below the $400 per-coin mark. Bitcoin sold for over $1,100 inside of the last 52 weeks. The price correction was driven by news from China, as it often has been. Fresh rumors of a government crackdown on the currency in the country, which could blunt demand and adoption, and therefore impair its value, . It has since continued to slip. According to , the average price of bitcoin is currently around $388, down from a 52-week high of roughly $1,132. has the current price of bitcoin at around $394, down from a peak of $1,126. Bitcoin had a good start to 2014, rising from around $770 to north of $900. Here’s the Coinbase one-year chart: It’s worth noting that total bitcoin transaction volume has also weakened in the past few weeks. Here is Coinbase’s chart of bitcoin transactions per day. Keep an eye on the trend following the early March spike: Divining the next short-term move in bitcoin’s price is something of a fool’s gamble — — meaning that recent declines could merely be a trough. But with falling volume and falling prices, bitcoin’s vital signs are not as strong as they once were. As , bitcoin’s network is the key to its value. However, it could be that the network’s activity has not grown quickly enough to support declining speculative interest in bitcoin. That’s my best guess, at least. So here’s the question: What next centennial mark will bitcoin reach? $300 or $500? |
Hackers, Coders And Designers, Come To The Disrupt NY Hackathon | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | It’s that time of year again. The birds are chirping, the flowers are blooming and, soon, coders will be hacking together APIs at the Disrupt NY Hackathon. We’ve just released another batch of tickets. Registration is free. Grab a ticket or on the form below. The 24-hour event kicks off on Saturday May 3 and runs through the night until the teams take the Disrupt stage on Sunday to present their creations. TechCrunch and the Hackathon sponsors will of course provide food, plenty of caffeinated beverages and Nerf guns to keep everyone from falling asleep. Spots are limited so register while you still can. We’ll release more tickets as the show nears. Good luck and happy coding! 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 – 6:00pm – 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* – The 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.
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Twitter Makes In-Browser Notifications Official | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Twitter today that it would start to offer in-browser notifications — as we , noticing a test of the feature. “When you’re logged in on twitter.com, you will receive notifications if someone has replied, favorited or retweeted one of your Tweets. You can also receive notifications for direct messages and new followers,” Michael Ducker of Twitter writes. “They’re fully interactive, so that you can reply, favorite, retweet, and follow right from the notification. We’ll be rolling this feature out over the coming weeks.” A reader in Holland alerted us to the feature being tested yesterday, and we wrote a full look at what the implications of the feature were. Twitter says it will be rolling it out in the coming weeks. |
Aereo Plans To Launch Chromecast Support On May 29th | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Despite being in the middle of a battle to convince the Supreme Court that their service isn’t illegal, Aereo rolls on. In case you’ve missed it: Aereo rents HDTV antennas to cordcutters for $8 a month to let them view and record live TV from their phones, tablets, and computers. The antenna stays at Aereo’s HQ, and all of the video data is piped to users across the Internet. Cable companies argue that because Aereo isn’t paying the retransmission fee that cable companies are required to pay, what Aereo is doing is illegal. They’ve dragged the matter into federal court twice now, and the courts ruled in Aereo’s favor both times; the Supreme Court is set to hear the case on April 22nd. Following up on an first made back in December, Aereo has just officially announced plans to support Chromecast by May 29th. One catch: for now, at least, Aereo’s Chromecast support seems to be limited to Android. While Aereo have an iOS app, there’s no mention of Chromecast support coming to it just yet. Of course, this all depends on Aereo … you know, still being around by the end of May. According to Aereo investor Barry Diller, if the Supreme Court rules against them. |
Amazon Acquires Digital Comic Book Store Comixology | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Amazon has just announced that they will acquire comiXology, a service that offers digital versions of comics from Marvel, DC, and many others. If you’ve never used it, it’s probably easiest to think of comiXology as a sort of iTunes/Kindle Store for comic books. You buy a comic through , then read it either on the web or through the company’s iOS/Android apps. To date, Comixology offers upwards of 50,000 comics for sale. In 2013, the company launched a self-publishing platform for comics that allows comic creators to upload and sell their own work — a strategy which fits hand-in-hand with Amazon’s own self-publishing efforts for books. Last year, the comiXology iOS app was one of the App Store’s top performing, by gross sales. In fact, it was one of just two non-games to find itself in . The news is confirmed by a post , who says that the company will retain its brand, living on as a subsidiary of Amazon. Terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed… |
Google Lets Anyone In The U.S. Become A Glass Explorer For $1,500 Starting April 15 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Google isn’t doing its consumer launch of Glass just yet, but it is doing the next best thing: Opening up the . That’s right, as of next Tuesday, any American resident can grab a Google Glass unit for $1,500 plus applicable taxes, and these will ship with your favorite shade or Glass-specific frame included, too. The program opens its doors at 6 AM PT on Tuesday (9AM for you east coasters), and there are only limited spots available, so it’s probably going to be first-come, first-served. This is still a very expensive piece of hardware, and Google is very clear about this still being the Glass Explorer program specifically, so that comes with all the caveats about this being bleeding edge tech that’s prone to some bugs and refinements yet to come. Google has previously expanded Glass Explorer program availability by giving the first round of Explorers invites for their friends and family, and now clearly wants to do as much as possible to open up the floodgates for a much broader beta pool. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YxUT0RmErg] If you’re outside the U.S., Google is still intent on saving you $1,500; the search giant says that it’s “not ready to bring Glass to other countries” as of yet. Expanding the Explorer pool doesn’t mean the , but it does mean that Google can gather feedback from a wider user group, and one that’s more likely to include people not constantly connected to the tech world and eager to adopt tech as early as possible. That’s probably still going to describe most of those willing to spend $1,500 on joining a beta pool, but when you’re pioneering face-based computing, it’s probably best to get as much early input as you can. If you want to get reminded about the April 15 6 AM start time, . |
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Zynga Names David Lee CFO, As Longtime Exec Mark Vranesh Departs The Firm | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Today after the bell, announced that its CFO and CAO Mark Vranesh will depart the firm after six years, and that David Lee will assume both roles effective April 14. Vranesh will help out for a month to, in the words of Zynga, “ensure a seamless transition.” According to Zynga, Vranesh made the choice to vacate his role toward the end of 2013, making today’s announcement less of a surprise. Zynga, a social and mobile gaming company, will report its earnings just over a week after the date of the CFO transition, April 23rd. Given that the passing of the baton will take place before that date, Zynga’s CEO Don Mattrick made a few general, if positive, comments on the now-past first quarter. This was likely an effort to calm investors who might have read the change in leadership as indicative of either weak results or accounting issues: “I am pleased with the progress we have made so far this year against our strategic frame of growing and sustaining our franchises, creating new hits and driving efficiencies. The year is off to a solid start and our teams have created a strong base for growth throughout 2014. We look forward to sharing details about our results and financial performance during our upcoming first quarter earnings announcement.” Given rules surrounding what a company can say before earnings, I’ll leave that to you to parse. Still, as far as expectations-setting goes, it’s hardly negative. In the , the most recent reported quarter, Zynga posted revenue of $311 million, a net loss of $48.6 million, and non-GAAP earnings per share of 1 cent. Those figures bested expectations, and Zynga’s share rose in after-hours trading following the release. Zynga’s stock has risen since Mattrick last summer, leaving Microsoft for the smaller gaming company. Zynga traded for around $2.80 when Mattrick was hired, and now sits around $4.09, having spiked to as high as $5.79 before experiencing a broad selloff. That recent decline, however, is in line with slippage that a number of other technology stocks such as Twitter have endured, falling from late 2013 and early 2014 highs to more modest valuations. Lee was mostly recently the senior vice president of finance for Best Buy, and has also held finance roles at Del Monte and strategic roles at PG&E. Lee doesn’t appear to be a games guy. But perhaps Zynga has enough of those, and instead needs someone who has more experience in the trenches helping to turn around businesses of varying types. Zynga was steeply down in regular trading, falling more than 6.5 percent. |
Facebook’s Feed Now Punishes Pages That Ask For Likes Or Share Reruns | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | You’re not clever enough to fool Facebook. Asking users to “Like this post!”, sharing the same link or photo over and over, or bait-and-switching people with links to ad-filled sites will now get your Page’s reach in News Feed destroyed, the company . Share unique, interesting content and you’ll be fine. Last week I wrote a deep guide to . The tl;dr is that there are more and more Pages and friends competing for the finite amount of time people spend reading the feed. Increasing competition plus limited attention equals decreasing reach. The way to keep your own reach up is to share posts that are widely Liked, commented on, shared, and clicked. Those signals tell Facebook’s News Feed algorithm that your posts are worth showing to more people. Here’s a simplified equation for how the feed picks what to show. It features the top five factors Facebook looks at, but there are a hundred thousand others. Today’s announcement, part of Facebook’s push to about how News Feed works, lays out factors that will get your Page quarantined. Many of these have likely been in play for a while, and Facebook started punishing usage of image memes last year, but now these transgressions could with heftier penalties. Here are the rules: Facebook cares about Pages and businesses, but it cares more about people enjoying the News Feed for years to come. Make the feed worse and you won’t show up there any more. |
Amazon’s Annual Shareholder Letter Talks Drones And Grocery Delivery, Not Sales And Supreme Court Cases | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Amazon’s is out today, and it includes a few juicy details on Amazon’s products, services and future plans, though not any hard data like , of course. But some of the more interesting items on the report include updates on Amazon Fresh expansions (the company’s online grocery delivery service), Amazon’s “Pay to Quit” program which will pay unhappy warehouse workers to leave the company, and, oh yeah, they’re totally doing delivery by drone. Totally, like that was a PR stunt at all. Nope. In case you missed it, “Prime Air” was as an in-house experiment which had Amazon testing delivery of small packages by autonomous delivery vehicles (drones). Bezos referred to them as “octocopters” in a 60 Minutes interview during which the company showed off the technology. The drones can reportedly carry packages of up to 5 pounds for 10 miles, which could mean you could take delivery in 30 minutes or less. You know, like pizza. Of course there are with those plans, including , the placement of Amazon warehouses outside of densely populated urban centers where drone delivery makes sense, and not to mention the fact that gun-toting Americans could easily make “free stuff from the sky” a fun, new national pastime. But no matter, drones are definitely in the works, says Bezos today: “The Prime Air team is already flight testing our 5th and 6th generation aerial vehicles, and we are in the design phase on generations 7 and 8.” 7 and 8! So that’s like any day now! The company , borrowed from its own Zappos division, which will pay Amazon’s warehouse workers up to $5,000 to quit their jobs. (Yes, , mind you. Developers wanting seed money as they run off to build their own startups are out of luck.) Explains Bezos: It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company. Usually people want an honest day’s wage in a safe work environment with reasonable goals and decent working conditions. Not, you know, . Oh, – a case that’s made its way to the Supreme Court, in fact. Amazon also offered a little tidbit regarding its grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh, which is now available in Seattle, L.A. and San Francisco. Bezos to new markets, as has been previously reported, but was vague on the details: We’ll continue our methodical approach – measuring and refining Amazon Fresh – with the goal of bringing this incredible service to more cities over time. As for the other highlights, much of it is a rehashing of things Amazon watchers have already heard, but it’s handy to have it all spelled out in one place. A few of the notable stats and details: Mayday Tech Advisors have received 35 marriage proposals from customers. 475 customers have asked to talk to Amy, our Mayday television personality. 109 Maydays have been customers asking for assistance with ordering a pizza. By a slim margin, Pizza Hut wins customer preference over Domino’s. There are 44 instances where the Mayday Tech Advisor has sung Happy Birthday to the customer. Mayday Tech Advisors have been serenaded by customers 648 times. And 3 customers have asked for a bedtime story. Good to see Amazon taking informing shareholders seriously, yeah? Read the whole thing . |
PC Market Posts Smaller Than Expected Q1 Declines On Strength Of Windows XP’s Demise | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Data out from tracking groups point to a slightly rosier picture of the PC market than expected in the first calendar quarter of 2014: Gartner a Q1 decline of 1.7 percent in shipments of PCs; IDC estimates a decline. That IDC number bests its forecast of a 5.3 percent decline. Keep in mind that it is that 2014 will be a down year for PCs. IDC predicted in March that shipments would contract by 6 percent total in 2014, so its reported 4.4 percent decline in Q1 is almost a win. Almost. What worried IDC before — sales weakness in emerging markets — isn’t what drove volume in the quarter. That’s not to say that its worries didn’t come to pass (more on that in a second), but that instead something else rode to the rescue: Windows XP. Yes, Windows XP’s seems to be driving sales at last. IDC: “Commercial refresh projects, which had already been protracted, received a last push from the impending end of Windows XP support, particularly in Japan. In addition, slowing demand for tablets seems to have helped constrain previously drastic cutbacks in notebooks.” So, Windows XP in global markets is finally helping the PC market and its constituents. Still, as mentioned above, emerging markets remain an issue. IDC claims that they posted “weak results” in the quarter, as expected. Microsoft and Intel declined to comment. Gartner also cites Microsoft’s now-shuttered operating system as a positive driver for sales: “ Fair enough. The question is whether these better-than-expected numbers can persist into the second quarter. I’d wager yes, given that Windows XP actually lost full support from Microsoft in the second quarter; what impacted the first quarter could be amplified in the second. What would be interesting is whether such a short-term updraft could bolster Gartner estimates to the point of having a year-over-year of positive unit growth in PC shipments. None of this is to say that the PC market doesn’t still contain weaknesses. The transition to Windows 8 by the industry remains in progress, as Microsoft improves its operating system and OEMs build better, more touch-focused computers. This data is better than expected, but a single quarter of decent news does not a trend make. |
Criteo Buys AdQuantic, A Startup That Applies Quantum Physics To Search Marketing | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | We have discovered that , the French ad tech company that raised in an IPO on NASDAQ last October, has quietly made an acquisition. It’s bought , another ad tech startup from France, this one co-founded by two doctors of statistical physics, which has developed a bid management tool for search marketing based on game theory, quantum physics and related mathematical models. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, and AdQuantic and Criteo have not made a formal announcement of the acquisition, but Criteo has confirmed it to us in an email: “We can confirm that Criteo has acquired AdQuantic,” a spokesperson writes. “The talented team at AdQuantic will be a great addition to our staff and we are excited to bring them on board. They will join Criteo with immediate effect.” That staff includes CEO Olivier de Taisne; co-founder Cedric Chanal (who is AdQuantic’s CEO); but possibly not the other co-founder, Simone De Liberato, who is a board member but also appears to be affiliated with a university in the UK. AdQuantic has not responded to our requests for comment, but as far as we can see, the Paris-based company had not raised any outside funding that it has publicly disclosed. But we have seen some references to investments in the company. John Power, a director at Saba Capital Management, is listed as an angel investor in AdQuantic on his , and Stephane Lopes, a director at Credit Suisse, is as a private investor and board member. This notes a “private placement” in May, 2013. Criteo is at just under $37 per share, with a market cap of $2.12 billion. AdQuantic works with a client base that appears to be primarily French and European, with customers inlcuding PixMania, Etam, LeFAC.com and the TBS Group, among others. Given that the companies have yet to announce any deal, it’s a fair assumption that for now the company will continue business as usual. Longer term, this is an interesting deal for Criteo. It is already a leader in ad retargeting and other kinds of performance marketing. But this is an increasingly crowded field, so the trick right now is twofold. You need to expand the kinds of services that you offer, and platforms you touch, as an ad tech company- and you need to get more intelligent with your algorithms. An acquisition that Criteo made earlier this year, , speaks to the first of these strategies with an emphasis in email marketing. This latest deal emphasises how Criteo hopes to improve in the latter area. Getting more sophisticated in search-based advertising is smart also considering that it’s a business that is likely to see some pressure in years ahead against display advertising. According to a report earlier this week from , the analysts there believe that display revenues will overtake search by 2015. AdQuantic, whose slogan is “bid with science,” has a rather interesting that uses statistical analysis for each keyword and similar keywords, for specific moments in time, in order to make accurate projections for what to buy and when. “This is where methods from quantum physics are applied because of the discrete nature of the data,” the company notes. It also describes, in the parlance of game theory, the “calculated risks” that it determines from its algorithms that give big-picture benefits: “Our algorithms use mathematical models to take calculated risks on each keyword, which might or might not pay off at the keyword level, but generate performances at the campaign level.” Alongside this, it offers plug-ins to work with existing datasets, a reporting platform and tools to help future campaigns. As with Criteo’s previous acquisition of Tedenis, AdQuantic is based in Paris and so is one more boost for the startup ecosystem in France — and a win specifically for those startups in Europe built around the very hot field of data science. |
Messaging Is A Winner-Take-Some Market | Anamitra Banerji | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | , venture partner at SoftTech VC, made for why messaging is not a winner-take-all market, and it’s worth highlighting four points. We use multiple messengers because they reflect our diverse social circles, our various personas, and the variety of content we publish. If Google Circles got one thing right, it is that our friends aren’t in some uber social network. Instead, we consciously bucket them in different mental circles, and we communicate with them in different ways. What Google got wrong, however, is that we don’t associate all our circles with any one company, and we don’t want to work too hard in categorizing friends into circles – it’s just too much work. But if circles were pre-created for us, we’d use them. That’s exactly what my friend groups do when they display a preference for a given app or apps: The different messenger apps are essentially my Google Circles – all facilitated by different companies, all created and maintained by my friends. Each desktop social network is distinct in its user experience, and getting started takes time. But most messaging apps have a basic texting feature that looks the same regardless of the app. It’s easy to enter text, pick a friend, and hit send. It works the same in all apps, so there is no learning time, no onboarding time, no cognitive dissonance. Further, access to the phone’s address book catalyzes all of this. Just as it’s very easy to get started with a messaging app, it’s really easy to stop using an app or switch to another one. Since user loyalty is low – as soon as you stop receiving messages from your friends, you stop using the app. That’s why messengers are enticing users with services such as voice, video, games, content, and browsing. That is because new ways for humans to communicate are always evolving and will continue to evolve until we can perfectly mimic face-to-face conversations. For all the finger tapping on all the world’s smartphones, we are barely scratching the surface when it comes to visual communication. The innovators and entrepreneurs out there with mobile messaging on their minds should know that there is plenty of room for new and better ideas, just as there is plenty of room for new and different paths to success. |
Google Launches Chrome Beta 35 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | Google today the latest . While there aren’t any major new features for end users in this release, the company added a wide range of new functionality for developers to its browser that will make web apps running in Chrome better in the long run. The features users will likely notice first once developers implement it is support for a number of new properties for touch and zoom input. With the help of the new , for example, developers can now disable touch scrolling, pinch-zooming and double-tap zooming on parts of their content. Google says this will give developers over the often annoying 300-millisecond click delay on mobile and allow them to create more reliable side-swipe UIs and . For desktop users, the release introduces a system that allows web apps to receive when the Control key is pressed. Right now, when you use the scroll wheel and hold down Control, Chrome will zoom in and out of the page. For some sites, including Google Maps, that’s not the right behavior, so developers can now invoke other actions based on this input. Google also unprefixed access to the Shadow DOM in this release. Shadow DOM is an essential feature for Web Components to work. According to Google, it “ Also new in this update is support for a number of new JavaScript features under the . JavaScript is the best-known implementation of this standard, and ECMASCript 6 is due for release at the end of the year. Google has already started to implement some of its features, though, including support for things like (a feature similar to JQuery’s ), and for creating garbage-collected data structures and for observing changes to JavaScript objects. This release, however is not just about adding features. Google is also removing a number of features. It’s doing so to simplify its codebase and minimize attack surfaces, but the company says deprecations are mostly about evolving the web API surface “to |
The Dawn Of Cloud 2.0 And Why Google Started A Price War | Peter Relan | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | Google up to 85 percent reduction in pricing for its PaaS and BigQuery services. Soon after, and followed suit. Welcome to Cloud 2.0. Google’s core cash engine is its paid web search/advertising business, which generates almost $4 billion a quarter from 29 percent net profit margin. Amazon’s core business, on the other hand, is retail e-commerce, which generates almost no profit. So Google can muscle its way into the cloud IaaS and PaaS space even though Amazon was the pioneer with AWS. Microsoft can, too, with its huge Office and Windows profit engines. AWS may well be the pioneer of Cloud 1.0, but it’s not clear whether it can play a full-on price war with Google and Microsoft — and others to pounce on new opportunities. Even though Jeff Bezos has always convinced the street that he can pull a rabbit out of a hat, this one is going to be a tougher sell. But don’t bet against him yet. There is still Cloud 2.0 and he can acquire things in that space. But back to Google for now. Even if Google do it, why did it ? As mobile , Google’s growth on the web is slowing, and it has new challengers, including Facebook, which is killing it in mobile. Mobile usage continues to eat away into desktop usage, browser usage on mobile versus app usage continues to decline, and mobile clicks generate less money than desktop clicks. YouTube is certainly now generating revenues, and Google Docs is certainly taking some share away from Microsoft Office, especially in the SMB market. But guess what? They are basically both cloud plays. So the next growth engine in five years is self-driving cars, drones or Google Glass? Unlikely. The (Advanced Technologies and Projects) groups are exciting but not huge growth businesses yet. Cloud services and apps, however, are expected to grow dramatically to over $100 billion of the $1 trillion of spend on software. So Google needs to aggressively gain share in the cloud market. It needs to double down on the cloud plays that are working and offer even more in the cloud to capture growth in markets other than web advertising where its growth is slowing. Price wars don’t usually bode well for innovation. It’s often a signal that the offering has become a commodity. But what it really means is that, while Cloud 1.0 is moving toward commodity, Cloud 2.0 is already gearing up — and it will be disruptive again. So what can we expect from the gorillas and the next Cloud startups? They’re muscling for market share with Cloud 1.0. Surely there will be some innovation like Google BigQuery, which came out only last year and is based on Dremel, Google’s internal big-data engine. But the disruptive innovation will come from startups. Surprised? There will be two types of startups in the next generation of cloud computing. One will be startups that leverage the incredible cost structure Cloud 1.0 just achieved for them to build cloud apps. Of the $100 billion cloud market, this is the largest category — possibly half of it, according to research analysts. Google is already in there with its own cloud apps like Google Docs. Both enterprise and consumer apps will combine with mobile in new and interesting ways to create huge new companies. The second type of innovation will be from startups that invent new Cloud 2.0 services, while the gorillas focus on the market-share war of Cloud 1.0 services in IaaS, PaaS and now BaaS. IaaS innovations will include software-defined networking, virtualization, edge computing, storage and security advances. At the end of the day mobile apps with cloud-based backends are a new architecture. PaaS innovations will include like Pantheon that make it easier and faster to build breakthrough content and app experiences. And BaaS innovations will include new , along with data-mining and analytic services in the cloud. Cloud 2.0 will be heralded by a bevy of startups already innovating for the next wave while the gorillas who can and have to fight for Cloud 1.0 market share divvy up the market. Then there will be a wave of acquisitions as Cloud 2.0 companies gain scale, and Cloud 1.0 gorillas have to differentiate. What do you think? Please comment and let me know. |
Crowdfunded Gadgets That Talk To Your Home And Charge Your Phone With Wind Power | Ross Rubin | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | Part of the smart-home dream has always been being able to talk with a place of residence and trust it to control climate, security and sense problems. Of course, for as long as smart-home technology has been developed, it’s been reaching toward this goal without ever getting there. ALYT is an Android-powered hub that looks like the solution to these problems. By being an open platform operating on just about every imaginable form of wireless data, ALYT allows for voice and video recognition to control virtually any aspect of a home – as long as developers create an app for it. Compatible with iOS, Android, Bluetooth, NFC, Z-Wave, 3.5G and more, the flexibility of the ALYT system opens it up to all kinds of innovative development. Homeowners constantly have to ask themselves questions about the state they left things in. Is the oven on? Is the front door locked? Did I close the garage door when I left? Now with a combination of some hardware and an app, that last question is a question no longer. Open-Me is a sonar sensor that can be placed on a garage door that hooks up to a home Wi-Fi network. By checking the app, users can determine if their garage door is open by even as little as a foot, and open or close it remotely. Additionally, using GPS, the app can be adjusted to open automatically when the synced phone or tablet is within a user-determined distance, and to close automatically once that device travels outside of that range. We’ve all been there. Our phones die and we have no access to an outlet. When in public, there’s always the option of trolling for one in a Starbucks, but for those out camping or hiking, there’s little hope. Trinity is a portable wind turbine power system to charge your portable devices. The mini turbine uses a 15W generator that powers an integrated battery, which can also be charged via microUSB on those days without much wind. It has three legs that fold out either into a tripod shape or flat on the ground. Trinity is white and the body is 12” long with 11” legs. |
Why Your Favorite App Isn’t Business-Related And How It Can Be | Todd McKinnon | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | Think about your favorite app. Let me guess. It’s a consumer app — something like Uber, Instagram or Pinterest. So what do we do to get business apps into that list of favorites? It’s rare to hear end users rave about an enterprise app that’s useful, simple, engaging and (dare I say) emotional – particularly all at the same time. if we want to perfect the enterprise user experience, which is why we should learn from beloved consumer products. If we put the user experience first and incorporate utility, simplicity, engagement and emotion into our products, we can make work just as easy and delightful as posting a photo. The most important aspect of the user experience is utility. The design, simplicity and engagement of an app don’t matter if the app isn’t useful. As , our UX architect at Okta, says, the key to creating a product people love is to create something they didn’t even know they needed and now can’t live without. Take the various (and now abundant) transportation-related apps like Uber, Lyft and Waze, for example. A few years ago, if you were using your phone to get a ride to the office or the airport, you were probably calling a cab company. Now a ride just about anywhere is only a few clicks away, and if your driver doesn’t know the best way, or wants to check the traffic, that only takes a few seconds on your phone, too. Users love Uber, Lyft and Waze because they’re useful – they enhance your travel and driving experiences so much so that I’d venture to guess you haven’t dialed Yellow Cab in months, maybe years. How can cloud providers learn from their success? We should strive to create an experience so useful that users can’t imagine working without it. Asana is already doing that with project management – with some users abandoning email entirely, saying, “ ” after getting up and running with their workflow solution. is another that has revolutionized how people work in real estate, encouraging almost 1 million agents and brokers to trade in FAX machines and scanners for cloud software – and creating the opportunity to get deals done on their mobile devices. Every enterprise should aspire to have its users ask, “What would we do without this?” They can only do so by prioritizing utility as the most important component of the user experience. The key to a simple product isn’t that it’s just “easy” to use; it’s that it helps you easily. There’s a big difference – and more often than not, it means the product team probably spent as much time on the back-end as the front-end, making the app just as powerful as it is beautiful. The best consumer apps seem to do this seamlessly. Take . In its simplest form, Strava allows users to track bike rides or runs via a mobile device. The app also has features designed to motivate athletes and provide camaraderie (which I can tell you comes in handy when you’re doing a tough climb), which Strava made possible by investing significantly in its backend. The engineering team behind a distributed messaging system, a real-time computation system and a WebSocket server, all of which enable Strava users to easily and quickly keep up with other athletes. Consumer apps like Strava that use back-end technology to make the user-facing solution easy to use are the ones we need to mirror in the enterprise. Enterprise solutions known for their ease-of-use are few and far between, but some are starting to pick up on the importance of simplicity upfront and power in back. Box, for example, knows how important speed of access is to its users. That’s why they to keep performance at a steady state so users can upload, share and collaborate quickly and easily. ClearStory Data, an up-and-comer in data analysis, is another company that’s making significant investments in the backend to that makes analysis simple, but also powerful – so collaborating and making data-driven decisions at work has never been easier. Sustained engagement has proven tricky when it comes to business apps. When we talk about user experience at Okta, we often talk about “stickiness,” describing how difficult it is to leave an experience once you’ve logged in. Pinterest has quickly become the poster child for engagement in the consumer world – it’s just about as sticky as a site can get. Twitter’s average of 3 seconds per user pales in comparison to the that users stay on Pinterest. Put simply, that gap is because Pinterest always offers something new, beautiful and relevant to its users not in the form of a constant update stream. And while Pinterest skillfully uses visual stimulation in the form of pins of designer clothing, exotic destinations and famous faces, that’s hardly the only way to engage users. Just offering relevant recommendations will do the trick. Spotify’s personalized discovery tools provide song and artist suggestions for music lovers based on what they already listen to (and they just to make those tools even more powerful), while Kindle integrates with Goodreads so readers can see what books are popular, and what their friends think of them. The intent behind recommendations and relevant discoveries is to put users first. And , it’s an area enterprises (both software providers and their customers), can improve on. It’s something that we think about daily at Okta – not only giving users access to the apps that their employers say they need, but also those we think will increase productivity. (Or apps they’ll benefit from in other ways, like by watching .) If we as an industry can successfully engage users like our consumer counterparts, we have an opportunity to make work easier and more enjoyable than ever. Utility, simplicity and engagement are all qualities of an app that prompt users to proclaim “I love this app” but there’s one thing we haven’t covered that makes us feel a personal, emotional connection to a product. That’s customer service. Even if your solution is beautifully designed, power-charged and engaging, your users will inevitably have an issue – or just a simple question – at some point in the relationship. If you’re in e-commerce, it may be an incorrect mailing address. If you’re a service provider, it might be a specific feature or downtime. Whatever it is, you need to have a customer service team in place that’s going to interface with the customer directly and ensure that the issue is fixed. And fast. That’s why consumers applaud Zappos – the classic example of customer service – and why successors like Gilt Groupe implement systems like Zendesk to make sure their support is top notch. (And with an , you can be pretty sure Gilt’s doing it right.) In the enterprise, customer support spans the entire lifecycle, from sales to adoption to addressing issues. (And the issues you’ll run into in business are often more complicated than an ill-fitting pair of shoes and have further-reaching implications than an angry tweet.) Every touchpoint, whether its rollout or fixing a bug, should be personal and positive. It’s not just about customer service in the enterprise; it’s about customer success and understanding customers’ business problems before even thinking about implementing a solution. Lauded, popular consumer products put their users first. Plain and simple. Enterprise software providers are on the way there. We can point to companies like Box, Asana, dotloop and ClearStory Data for already getting its pieces of the user experience “puzzle” right. There’s still a lot of ground to cover, but if we focus on utility, simplicity, engagement and emotion like our consumer counterparts, we’ll have the opportunity to change the way we work and get a business app or two on that list of favorites. |
Nike Says The FuelBand Isn’t Dead, New Color Options Coming | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | Nike was said to be on the heels of layoffs on Friday, signalling a significant exit of the wearable fitness device market by one of the more prominent companies involved in the space. That’s not quite true, however, according to information provided to . There were indeed some layoffs, Nike confirmed, but it also said it’s still committed to the Nike+ FuelBand SE, plans new color options for the gadget and should support it and continue to sell it for the foreseeable future. Nike plans to continue with its original plan of adding to the Silver and Rose Gold ‘Metaluxe’ edition Nike+ FuelBand SE models with the addition of colorways. It doesn’t mention anything regarding hardware beyond the current generation FuelBand models, however, which could indicate that its commitment to its wearable devices extends only as far as this particular gadget. There has been some speculation that Nike plans to shift focus to software in the future, and possibly support the hardware efforts of others, including Apple. Apple is rumored to be working on an iWatch with health-tracking features, and its CEO Tim Cook sits on Nike’s board of directors. |
2,500 Bunsen Burners + Dubstep = Best Visualizer Ever | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | Take 2,500 bunsen burners, and put’em in a grid. Make the flames react to sound waves, thanks to some amazing physics trickery. Then drop the bass. What do you get? The . [* and probably most dangerous] The first few minutes of the video explain how everything was put together, which is incredibly interesting in its own right — but if you’re just looking for that sweet, sweet firey-dubstep goodness, skip to 3:30. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2awbKQ2DLRE?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] The board was built by , a Danish youtube channel that mainly exists to demonstrate the awesome things they can do with fire. Youtuber Veritasium spotted clips of their flame-board online, and tracked the team down for a closer look. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so tempted to build something that would probably just burn my house down. I found another video showing the same board (with a closer look at how all the parts fit together) playing a different track. The music in this one starts at 1:25 [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Q4tirAOmU?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] |
Beats Music Gets In-App Subscriptions, Beefs Up Free Streaming Options | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | Beats Music, the streaming radio solution spun out from the makers of Beats audio hardware products, has decided to bite the bullet and give Apple its 30 percent cut on subscription sign-ups. The streaming music provider originally side-stepped Apple’s in-app ecommerce options in favor of carrier billing arranged outside the app to pay for its full service, but now users can sign up much more easily in the app itself. The free service included in Beats Music called ‘The Sentence,’ which randomly shuffles music, is much-improved too, with thousands of new songs available in the mix. Monthly subscriptions, which include to on-demand playback of any of the music in the Beats catalog, can now be unlocked via a $9.99 in-app purchase. Beats allowing the in-app subscription option means that the service likely wasn’t happy with the volume of subscribers it was getting through the old methods. An in-app option is definitely far more convenient for the average user, but it comes with a significant cost to Beats, who have to pay up around $3 to Apple on each new user they sign up for the privilege of using the App Store as the means of distribution. Still, if it leads to a significant increase in the volume of new sign up, it’s probably worth it. Other new features include a new section that allows artists to push their own music and merchandise, and improved social and offline playback features. |
Gillmor Gang: Action Items | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, Semil Shah, Danny Sullivan, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — played the latest favorite game of the Mobility Addicted. It’s called Lock Screen, and some of us think it’s where the early adopters meet the great unvarnished Silent Majority. Forget clicks or swipes or doing anything; it’s all about glancing. What this means is that social scientists need to figure out how to measure the impact of a push notification as it flashes on the lock screen, that ephemeral moment when a prioritized message makes it upstream enough to be born in the pool of the Now. It’s couch potato politics at the Wearables. Who’s making the popcorn? @stevegillmor, @semil, @dannysullivan, @kteare, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Google App Engine Gets GitHub Push-To-Deploy Support | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | Last summer, Google started allowing developers to get their code onto App Engine to deploy their applications instead of using Google’s usual SDK. Starting today, developers who use the popular service to manage their code repositories . Developers can now connect their App Engine projects to their GitHub repositories and trigger a deployment by simply pushing their project’s master branch on the service to App Engine. By using the standard to interact with App Engine instead of Google’s SDK, the deployment process should be a bit simpler for developers than when using Google’s own tools. Git has also become such a standard technology for most developers — and GitHub such a widely used service — that failure to support it probably put Google at a bit of a disadvantage. Microsoft, after all, supports it for Azure and in its Visual Studio development environment, and deploying from git to AWS is also a pretty . |
Bitcoin 2.0: Unleash The Sidechains | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 4 | 19 | “Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet,” Naval Ravikant. “Our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle,” Fred Wilson. And Andreessen Horowitz have very visibly on Bitcoin. Even if you don’t believe in Bitcoin as a currency, and I’ll grant there’s plenty to be skeptical about, you should be thinking: . But as I wrote myself , there’s a big difference between blockchain technology and Bitcoin itself, right? …Maybe not. A brief technical refresher: “blockchains” are the distributed-consensus technology introduced to the world by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, wherein a peer-to-peer network is used to codify and cryptographically verify transactions, without any central authority. What’s more, transactions can be orchestrated by programmable . Bitcoin is both the first and most successful blockchain application, but there are “cryptocurrencies,” known as “altcoins.” What’s more, there are numerous other, non-currency applications being built on new blockchains, notably and , and several proposals for expanding and evolving Bitcoin itself, eg , , , etc. I realize this all sounds like abstruse hair-splitting to those not yet mentally invested in cryptocurrencies; but as Ravikant put it at TC Disrupt seven months ago: Naval Ravikant ( ) just compared Bitcoin today to TCP/IP in 1995. I'm not saying he's necessarily wrong, but that's a bold statement. — Jon Evans (@rezendi) …so, continuing that metaphor, imagine for a moment that it’s 1995 and you’re just beginning to notice that, over the last year or two, those weird crusty techies who sit in the corner have all started talking excitedly about “HTTP” and “HTML” and “cookies” … which apparently power this thing called the “web.” So. We’ve got Bitcoin and its blockchain; and we’ve got scores if not hundreds of other blockchains, powering various altcoins and Namecoin and ( ) Ethereum et al. But blockchains, like social networks, benefit from a . The most popular becomes the most resilient, the most powerful, the most valuable; and Bitcoin’s blockchain is, by far, the big dog today. These two facts have provoked a certain amount of . On the other hand, other blockchains are where most of the interesting innovation is happening. Namecoin as a DNS replacement; Ethereum as a generic platform for any kind of blockchain technology; hopefully some kind of ; for solar power; Dogecoin for those of us who love absurdism for its own sake; etc etc etc. The Bitcoin blockchain, despite/because of the of power poured into it, has grown sluggish and slow to change, a victim of its own success, which impedes the pace of innovation… …or so I thought, until I met with Austin Hill and Adam Back. Hill is the former founder and CEO of , a multi-million-dollar startup that was a good 15-20 years ahead of its time; Back is the inventor of the Hashcash algorithm which powers Bitcoin. They have considerable credibility, in other words — and they’re building a stealth “Blockchain 2.0” startup, based in part on the notion of “ .” are which are backed by Bitcoins, via , just as dollars and pounds used to be backed by cold hard gold. You could in principle have thousands of sidechains “pegged” to Bitcoin, all with different characteristics and purposes … and all of them taking advantage of the scarcity and resilience guaranteed by the main Bitcoin blockchain, which in turn could iterate to implement experimental sidechain features once they have been tried and tested. If sidechains take off, though — which will — this probably bodes for the existing altcoins. Not surprisingly, the proposal has attracted a , not least from Vitalik Buterin, the chief scientist of Ethereum, who that sidechains require not just protocol changes but “the permission and active assistance of 50% of all Bitcoin mining pool operators.” Why should you care? Two main reasons. One: because if Ravikant, Wilson, Andreessen, Hill, Back, etc. are correct, then in the long run, blockchain-backed cryptocurrencies could become the substrate of entire economies. Hill : “I want to build a blockchain that could support a nation-state putting its national currency and phasing out paper dollars.” Or, as A16Z’s Balaji Srinivasan describes a different-but-similarly-ambitious notion: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/454892068427411456 Two: because, as Hill said to me, Never mind “don’t be evil”; we want to build a company that actually be evil. …by which he means, an organization which is limited by contractual obligations built into and enforced by its blockchain(s). https://twitter.com/balajis/status/455119978945978368 The distributed nature of Bitcoin has caused people to speculate about powered by blockchains, which sounds like a creepy Kafka-meets-Gibson notion if I ever heard one. On the other hand, a company which committed to behaving in a particular way, not with a mere promise, but with an enforceable and cryptographically ironclad contract, might be much worthier of the public’s trust than your standard amoral corporation. This is, of course, all highly speculative verging on cloud-cuckoo-land until people actually start shipping code which turns these notions into reality. What interests me most about sidechains is that, if implemented, they might bring that day closer, by aiding and accelerating the entire ecosystem of blockchain . And I’m awfully curious about what Hill and Back still have up their sleeve ( .) Interesting times indeed. . |
How To Hack Hiring | Vivek Ravisankar | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | Everyone knows there’s an arms race for tech talent. Companies in every industry, not just tech, need this talent to survive. Take banking for example. Bank of America has as of April 8. In Silicon Valley, Facebook and Amazon hire thousands of engineers every year, and expect to hire more tech talent in 2014. 37 since 2012, battling Facebook and Twitter in the — companies are buying other companies to get their hands on the best tech talent. Ironically, San Francisco the second hardest city in which to hire tech talent. The only way this frenzied demand is beginning to be met is because engineers are creating tools that aid recruiters in the hiring process. With new sets of tools and smarter interviewing standards, our data shows tech titans are saving 70 percent to 80 percent of their time hiring talent by hiring smarter — which equates to about 1,500 hours every two months. So what are the current myths of hiring and how are innovative companies hacking the process to come out on top? Talent is everywhere; it’s all about going off the beaten path. Look beyond well-known developer heavyweights like Stanford. There are a great number of universities that are graduating a consistent number of programmers equal in skill to your average Stanford grad, though the average student might not be comparable with the Ivies. For instance, our data from India alone points to 12 schools from where a number of programmers have performed on par with students from the Ivies, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon or MIT. Schools in China like Zhejiang University and Waterloo in Canada are also producing top-tier talent. Universities like UCLA, National University of Singapore, NTU, the Middle East Technical University and Purdue are all examples of schools with a high number of enthusiastic and top-notch programmers who need to be on recruiters’ radars. Taken together, these schools are producing an untapped long tail of strong programmers that are overlooked in favor of the more famous places. The new world doesn’t look like the film, . Smart companies prepare candidates, ask consistent questions, and have done away with “gotcha” questions to trip up interviewees. Examples of this evolution are everywhere; Google its storied brainteasers because they are worthless for practical evaluation; Intel has created a to help give insight into their hiring process; Amazon’s former VP of tech in his interviews. This doesn’t mean that candidates are given a chance to game the system; it means you start with a question where you can accurately measure the quality of the answer, and then you dig. you to Google around during your interview for answers, and also welcomes collaboration with interviewers to reach an answer. For candidates, it’s equally as important to be super clear on your resume. Don’t just show you did, emphasize the your work had. Google’s SVP of people operations, Laszlo Bock, achievements should be descriptive. For instance, rather than saying, “I worked on the backend development team,” be specific about what you did and the value it brought: “I worked on new indexing infrastructure that reduced latency from multiple seconds to less than 10 milliseconds. This included a transactional, memcache write-through persistence layer on Google App Engine.” Top recruiters are using new tools to find and evaluate talent. From algorithms, to platforms, to , to — it’s time to get with the program and update your toolset. Coding environments in particular need to be completely rethought. It’s the part of the interview that you’re using to quantify skill, so approach it carefully. Writing lines of code on a whiteboard or a Google Doc will absolutely skew results; the environment in which the interview is conducted should be as close to real world as possible; tools that are closer to the actual work environment give better results. In particular, we believe it is essential to have a collaborative platform where both parties can code together beyond a text editor. So we created a platform that lets the interviewer visually demonstrate corrections or tips or introduce additional challenges. In general, analysts see this as that is empowering the recruiter to make smarter decisions easier. never hear back from employers, and this has always puzzled me. Smart companies use each interaction with candidates to build a hiring funnel — apply for only two jobs in five years. Keep in touch with them! Coding is a very scientific skill that can be tightened and sharpened with practice, and big companies are catching on. Citrix has first-time applicants sign up in their to keep in touch later on, and lets candidates evaluate them after the interview to get a sense of how they are perceived in hiring and also to help hire later on. It has been proven that no communication after an interview can , and can result in a candidate smearing the company in their personal network, making a number of people less likely to be a customer later. While Silicon Valley is leading the way, everyone is starting to realize the importance of changing their tech hiring. surveyed globally by Deloitte are changing or have already revamped their talent acquisition strategy, and another 27 percent are considering it. It’s time to acknowledge this change and take action or risk falling behind in the race for technical talent. What do you think about the technical hiring process? Have you ever missed out on a great candidate because of a skewed interview? There are big changes being made in the way we hire developers, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. |
A Look At Play-i’s Successful Crowdfunding Campaign | Vikas Gupta | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | In just six months, Play-i went from just an idea to a working prototype to $1.44 million in pre-orders through our crowdfunding campaign. We’re making robots, Bo and Yana, that help children ages 5+ learn programming concepts and creative problem solving. We launched our crowdfunding campaign on October 28, 2013, and hit our goal of $250K in just four days. After two weeks, we were at $500K and hit $1.44 million at month’s end. We received visitors from 180 countries and orders from customers in 80 countries even though we were shipping to about 20 countries. Before our campaign, the largest consumer robotics crowdfunding project raised $188K. Entrepreneurs often ask us what we did to run an effective campaign. So I’m sharing our strategy and what we learned along the way. Play-i’s Bo and Yana In deciding whether to go with our own website or a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, we looked at a lot of data from past projects. Our target customer, parents of 5-10 year old children, didn’t really overlap with the demographic that tends to back projects on Kickstarter. Seventy-five percent of backers on Kickstarter projects were also first-time backers. Network benefits from Kickstarter were low, and we would have do most of the work to drive people to our own project page. There were four major reasons why we decided to host our own campaign: We felt that we had to launch on our website, on our terms. We used , and it was certainly not a trivial process. You need to have design and engineering resources to get it done right. We spent a lot of time figuring out how the website should work for the customer. We didn’t want our page to be too cluttered, so we actively cut out information that wasn’t relevant for customers to make a buying decision. Every word was chosen with care, and the call to action was clear. We also kept the rewards page, where the customers chose their pledge, simple and straightforward. A few months before we launched our campaign, we started to actively build our mailing list of people who wanted to be informed about our project. We put together a blog about STEM and parenting, topics that our target audience cared about. Without any information about the product itself, we grew our audience to a few thousand people through social media, word of mouth and online advertising. As we got closer to launch, we gave in-person sneak previews of our prototypes at technology companies and parent groups in the Bay Area. Our friends and early supporters played a big part in community organizing and spreading the word. We were lucky and grateful that many journalists were interested in covering our launch news. About a month before our campaign went live, we pitched and scheduled in-person demos and interviews with journalists who were interested in our pitch. We reached out to people we knew at technology and mainstream news outlets so we could get personal introductions to reporters who covered relevant education and/or consumer technology news. Two weeks before launch, we visited major publications in San Francisco and New York City to show them the robots. We also did Skype interviews with journalists who were abroad. We lined up the presses for our launch at 5 a.m. PST, and we knew we were going to get a surge of traffic when our campaign went public. We needed to build social proof right off the bat, so we created special perks for the first few buyers. Our first 1,000 backers got limited edition, exclusive outfits for their robots as incentive to back early. We emailed our existing audience and friends several hours before our campaign went live so they could be among the first to back the project. This gave us the momentum we needed to get off to a good start. We gave perks for backers at all levels. There were different exclusive robot outfits for backers at every stage: first 1K, the next 2K, and the final 4K. This scarcity model created a reason for people to back early. As a company, we believe in starting with the customer. We responded personally to every email that came in, every comment on Facebook, and every question on Twitter. And we got them excited about our mission to bring programming to every child. We also released additional features and stretch goals in our updates based on feedback from our backers. They became a part of our story, and so many of them helped us spread the word about our campaign. We made sure that all the stretch goals we released were substantial and exciting. Though we had lots of ideas for stretch goals, we only released a few that we truly believed would be appealing to our backers. Our best and most buzz worthy stretch goal was one where our existing backers got something of value without an incremental purchase if we hit a new goal. We included the smartphone attachment at no cost for backers (who had bought the accessory pack) when we hit $1M and vividly illustrated the benefits and abilities that it could give to their robots. We saw a lot more people sharing and posting about our campaign as a result. It was a win-win for both our customers and for us. As the campaign progressed, we used online advertising to remarket to customers who already visited our website. We planned for this from day one; so we set up the appropriate pixels before the campaign went live and turned on the remarketing spend at a later point. We used a platform called to run our retargeting campaigns. This turned out to be quite effective for us to bring customers back to our website, especially towards the tail end of the campaign. As a hardware startup, our fixed costs of getting started are much higher than software startups. Getting manufacturing set up properly requires both volume and a large capital investment. Our crowdfunding campaign helped us prove that there was demand for our robots and served as a springboard to raising our Series A round of funding. Play-i founders Saurabh Gupta, Vikas Gupta and Mikal Greaves |
Five Hard Things That Great VCs Do | Michael Driscoll | 2,014 | 4 | 26 |
In Ben Horowitz’s , he recalls a conversation in 1999 where one of his investors asked coldly: “When are you going to get a real CEO? Someone who has designed a large organization, someone who knows great senior executives and brings pre-built customer relationships, someone who knows what they are doing.” Horowitz describes how that stinging comment became the inspiration for starting his own fund and one of its goals: teaching founders how to grow into executives. This is one of the hard things about being a VC today: You must give entrepreneurs more than just capital. In my experience as a founder and sometime investor, here are five hard things I’ve seen great VCs do for their companies long after their checks have cleared. Board meetings are the most tragic waste of time in Silicon Valley. The brightest investing minds and most talented founders gather monthly in conference rooms for a ritualized parade of facts and figures. It doesn’t have to be this way. The best VCs will ask you to ditch the slides with an ask like “send us the deck 48 hours in advance and assume we’ve already read it.” This frees up board time for wrestling with your thorniest problems: Vinod Khosla, one of our investors, avoids board meetings altogether in lieu of strategy sessions. In these sessions, with nothing but a whiteboard and a list of six key strategic topics, the executive team and I discuss, explore, and debate with our biggest backer. These may be the best hours we spend all year. Startups, as Paul Graham says, are fundamentally about growth. Team growth is the most critical kind to get right, as a company’s early DNA is its self-replicating prophecy. Investors can help source, vet and hire the best people because they are themselves connectors of people and judges of talent and, above all, because they are closers. As sources of hires, investors are walking Rolodexes of talent, whose own success depends on knowing which firms are bleeding, which engineering teams are reeling, and which VPs are mulling a new gig. Investors are some of the most effective closers of top talent for three reasons. First, because taking a job itself is an investment. The story of “why I believe in this startup’s vision” resonates more credibly from an outsider than a founder in the weeds. Second, investors provide credibility for every startup’s IPO aspirations because they can point to their own winners. And third, because the best candidates know that building a relationships with a top-tier investor puts them in the fund’s rolodex, providing a measure of risk-mitigation. No one but a founder can (or should) close a startup’s biggest deals or partnerships, aka “whales.” But the best investors are positioned to kickstart that process with introductions, and they strengthen these ties with each exit to a Salesforce, Yahoo, or Google. VCs drive a revolving door of ideas, talent and capital between startups and enterprises. In many cases, these relationships are formalized: our lead investors regularly host small delegations of executives seeking solutions from startups for an area of need. , founder and CEO of , an in-memory database company, was introduced to Zynga’s CTO by one of his investors, of Data Collective (disclosure: where I am also a partner). That conversation ultimately led to a commercial relationship. , founder and CEO of the data science platform Kaggle, told me recently that his VCs’ relationships have been a valuable source of leads, in part because they know “how to push executives’ buttons” to get them engaged. Just as investors can give powerful advice on the big picture challenges of a startup, they can also help founders avoid tripping up on boring but important stuff, including legal contracts, financial audits, and patent filings. Most early startups outsource such tasks to a network of professionals, hiring in-house finance or counsel as they grow. Investors are ideal sources of recommendations for these professionals. In addition, investors themselves often have had deep operational experience in one area. Two of my board members were former public company CFOs, and we’ve directly involved them in our financial planning and sales compensation discussions. Every startup trajectory has its bumps, and founders, like mogul skiers, live life as a series of small recoveries. A product launch is delayed, a key engineer leaves, customers churn. But when bumps begin to pile up, and multiple milestones are missed, founders can’t always see they’re in trouble. Investors often can. The best will firmly, impolitically point out failures before it’s too late. Delivering negative feedback is a hard thing that great VCs do, and their experience make them uniquely qualified to do it. Likewise, when founders open up and engage investors in brutally honest, critical conversations about what is and what’s not working, it has the double-edged quality of aligning both sides in the pursuit of a fix. |
A Different Approach To Tech M&A | Tomio Geron | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | Many top Silicon Valley buyers like Google, Facebook and Twitter have a standard process for how they manage acquisitions. One main part of that is the technical interview. In this process, the selling company’s key engineers stand before a whiteboard and answer a number of programming questions, brain teasers or computer science questions on the board. These questions may not be directly related to the engineers’ everyday work but are often seen as proof to an acquiring company and its technical executives that a selling team is knowledgable or skilled enough to join a top company. However, one Silicon Valley executive, , executive vice president of corporate strategy and development at , often does not allow his engineering team to conduct these traditional technical interviews. This is one way Iltchev does things differently than other corporate development executives in Silicon Valley. Iltchev, who previously led the investment and M&A program at Salesforce.com, thinks that for many top technical teams, this kind of interview is insulting. That’s because you often have 25-year-old engineers interrogating experienced PhDs, he says, which doesn’t make sense. “The (seller’s) product should speak for itself. The quality of work manifests in the product.” Instead Iltchev prefers a more informal interview to ask startup teams about the challenges they’ve faced and how they solved them. “My approach is to have the startup’s engineering team talk about what decisions they made in building the product and why,” he says. “It’s a conversation and through that we can extract the technical knowledge and competencies without putting them through a process that can be perceived as demeaning.” Despite his different approach, Iltchev has still gotten results. Iltchev oversaw Salesforce’s incredibly active investment program and led more than 15 acquisitions while at Salesforce.com. Now he’s trying to that same model at LifeLock. In addition to acquisitions, Iltchev’s role also includes partnerships and a new program to invest in startups for LifeLock. While he doesn’t have the same scale and resources as he did at Salesforce, he is starting a program to invest in four to five companies per year. Besides providing potential future acquisitions, the investments establish a foundation of trust for building commercial relationships, enhancing LifeLock’s reputation with the startup community, and bringing intros to other startups. Unlike some other corporate venture firms, Iltchev prefers having both investing and corp dev in one unit, to develop a flexible relationship with startups that could turn into a partnership, investment or acquisition. “For a startup, it is very stressful and potentially threatening to be very open with corp dev teams,” he says. “The conversation is one way and it is about whether they want to acquire you. I find it much more constructive and disarming to walk into a meeting with an open mind knowing that I have the flexibility to partner, invest, or acquire.” Iltchev has a generally skeptical view of his own industry–corp dev–because the job is difficult to evaluate. That’s because there are many ways an acquisition can go bad: the wrong strategy, deal structure or post-deal integration. Or the top executive leadership or business sponsor on the buy side could make a mistake. Or they could do something great that corporate development had no role in. “It’s very easy to take credit when a deal goes well and it’s easy to deflect when things go bad,” Iltchev says. “It’s easy to survive in corp dev and build a career because it is so difficult to establish concrete goals and metrics upon which the corp dev function can be evaluated.” In terms of getting a deal done, price isn’t always the most important factor. This is where corporate development can make a difference. Iltchev says he’s done multiple deals where he wasn’t offering the highest price but still won the deal because of other factors, like trust and reputation, the deal terms, the attractiveness of the buyer, strategic alignment or the people involved. For startups, having an existing relationship with a potential buyer is key if you want to get acquired. If you just get to know a buyer when you are weeks or even a few months away from running out of cash, that doesn’t leave enough time. Iltchev has never bought a company where he didn’t have some relationship or connection to the seller. “People forget an acquisition is mostly about the people,” he says. “It requires a level of trust. Those relationships are incredibly important.” But how do founders get to know corporate development professionals, especially if they’re not well connected? Iltchev says many corporate development executives will reach out to startups in their own sector. If they don’t, you should reach out to them. “It’s totally okay to say, ‘Hey Villi, we’re working in this area and we want to get your feedback and see what you think. And see how you guys view this space.’” This is an easy way for an entrepreneur to stroke the corporate development team’s ego and not come across as too eager to sell. You can also reach out to the head of product or engineering in an area relevant to you with the same request. A common worry of startups is that corporate development executives are going to steal their ideas. For the vast majority of companies, this is not going to happen, Iltchev says. And even if it does, this shouldn’t be your primary concern. “I’m fascinated with entrepreneurs who are afraid to talk to corp dev teams,” he says. “Ideas are a dime a dozen. Corp dev teams are looking for companies to buy, not ideas that can be copied or stolen. They want to be inspired, look smart, and feel confident that this team can execute.” For startups, Iltchev’s main pieces of advice are first, when dealing with corp dev buyers you have to be honest and transparent. Most corporate development professionals have intuition to figure out when you’re feeding them a fake story. Secondly, startups should surround themselves with good advisors. Many startups put their fates in the hands of advisors who have no idea how things work in Silicon Valley. Finally, don’t wait until the last moment. “Buyers smell blood better than anybody. If you have less than three to six months of cash you’re in a really tough spot. I will know you can’t raise capital and are scrambling. Don’t wait to build those relationships and don’t wait until the last moment to start these conversations.” To make a startup acquisition successful, there are many things buyers can do, Iltchev says. The overall goal for buyers (and sellers) to keep in mind is that top talent on a startup acquisition wants to be empowered to build, iterate efficiently and work hard. Create an environment where they’re challenged and motivated to go all out for you. One way to do that is to empower them to get things done and avoid bogging them down in bureaucracy, he says. “These hackers are going to work 18 hours a day,” he says. “The question is, are they working for you 18 hours a day or will they work nine hours for you and hack away when they go home?” The success of acquisitions often comes down to the little things. For example, most founders say they don’t care about their title in the new company. But they will care eventually. “That’s how things work in a corporate environment,” Iltchev says. “Titles do carry weight and allow you to make things happen. As a buyer you need to be smart and save a founder from himself.” For corp dev buyers, the biggest challenge is often keeping their ego in check, Iltchev says. Many times these people are high-ranking executives and they often let their emotions and pride get in the way of a deal. But swallowing your pride is often what’s required. “To be a really good deal maker, sometimes you have to put your pride and ego aside for the better of what you’re trying to accomplish.” |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 10 | null |
The Screen That Doesn’t Scream | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | In a noisy room, trying to shout louder to make yourself heard just escalates the problem of being overwhelmed with sound. It’s a fitting analogy for mobile devices and content too. More, bigger, shinier, more colourful and capable screens filled with more and more apps, making incessant demands on our attention. It’s a whole cacophony of noise. In that context, less starts to feel like more. For that reason I love e-ink. It’s the screen that doesn’t scream. Yet it’s a technology that is underutilized and one that feels increasingly overlooked in the rush to cram over-saturated HD panes onto all the smart surfaces in our lives. Arguably e-ink’s underuse is just stored potential. This technology just needs neat ideas. Ideas like the , dual-screen smartphone, which uses it as a supplementary, secondary screen for low powered, always-on notifications. Or even an idea as quasi-crazy as . Ok, you wouldn’t be watching YouTube videos on it but it’s low powered, readable in bright sunlight and could make an interesting device in countries where access to power is scarce. Well, here’s another idea looking to make more of e-ink — specifically by using it to tone down the general noise: it’s a low-power Bluetooth-connected bedside clock with an e-ink screen. The device — called — is another project from hardware maker Hex3 (whose past projects include the , and styli; and a showed off at Disrupt SF back in 2012). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME1uQ2nd41M&w=640&h=360] The aclock, which is currently in development while Hex3 takes to to raise funds for full commercial production, has been designed as an update to the traditional bedside alarm clock — whose primary function has generally been usurped by the smartphone. Why bother setting a fiddly clock-radio alarm when you can just use your smartphone, right? Well, aclock’s makers argue that using your phone as your bedside companion entails too many potential distractions at a time when you should be concentrating on rest and sleep, rather than checking who’s Whatsapping you. (There is some evidence that using small bright screens late at night .) So your sleeping companion should be something a lot more docile and taciturn: step forward, then, their Bluetooth-connected e-ink clock. aclock is intentionally pared back. There are no buttons on it at all — it’s operated by motion sensing (to backlight the display) and via customisable gestures such as double taps or shaking to snooze or cancel an alarm. And all alarms are configured within the corresponding app (iOS first, with Android likely to follow). That does slightly undermine its premise, since you have to use your phone anyway to set the alarm clock. But the alarms can be configured ahead of time, for every week day, so you don’t have to set one daily at the point of going to bed if you plan ahead. With e-ink’s low power consumption, Hex3 says the micro-USB rechargeable clock is able to last about a year on a single charge. The 1.54-inch e-ink display also offers some user customisation options, with a choice of different clock hands/time display format. And some hardware customisation too, with packs of different clock face designs planned as part of the project. Hex3’s Jon Atherton describes the aclock as a “Pebble for your bedroom” — referring to the eponymous that syncs with a smartphone so you don’t have to check your main device to view notifications. To that end he’s planning to incorporate an element of measured notifications into aclock — but only displaying them once the alarm has gone off, so when the sleeper is due to start their day. “We have a small screen where we can show you things like weather, upcoming appointments and other notes — but not while you should be sleeping,” he tells TechCrunch. “In fact we’ll even have the option to blank the clockface until an alarm actually goes off — so checking the time will be pointless — there is nothing worse than checking the time 45 minutes before an alarm is due to go off — you never get back to sleep!” “There are a lot of exciting things we can do with aclock, the first step is to get it across the funding line – then we can do some very cool things with the free companion app and open up to other app developers. I’m already talking to some well known devs who want to build onto the platform,” he adds. “I envisage a variety of apps working with aclock to do different things, all of them at the owners’ discretions of course.” Hex3 hopes to be able to ship aclock to Crowdtilt backers by late October in time for the holiday season, assuming it raises enough funds to get the device to market. At the time of writing it’s raised more than $7,800 of its $35,000 funding target with 33 days left to go. The clock starts at $49 for black or white polycarbonate for early bird backers, rising to $69 for black or silver aluminum. The future retail price for those two options will be $79 and $119 respectively (assuming the project gets funded and makes it to market). In terms of other efforts in recent memory seeking to rethink the bedside clock, aclock follows in the wheeltracks of , a device that deliberately rolls away from sleepers’ attempts to hit the snooze button. While Clocky was fun, it was not a connected device, and was ultimately a one-trip pony. aclock is a whole other tech generation — one which replaces a fiddly on-board interface with an easy-to-use app, something that’s been made workable thanks to developments in Bluetooth Low Energy technology over the intervening years. Hex3 used Kickstarter to successfully raise funds for its prior projects but Atherton said it’s experimenting with Crowdtilt this time as the fees are lower. He says the cost of running the project on Crowdtilt is around half that of Kickstarter — with Crowdtilt taking 2.5% of the total collected and levying a 2.5% processing fee per contribution vs Kickstarter taking 5% and Amazon applying credit chard processing fees of 3%-5%. “~10% is a pretty big hit for a startup business,” he adds. And while he concedes the Kickstarter network effect is strong, he reckons it’s worth trying a quieter alternative if it means getting to hold on to more of the funds raise. “The big difference is discoverability though. Kickstarter has great network effect, discoverability seems to be significantly better than Indiegogo. Whereas we are basically on our own with Crowdtilt. Thankfully, we have a reasonable following from past backers, so I thought going it alone was a good thing to try out. Learning lots!” he says. “At the end of the day with our five previous Kickstarters the funds raised that came from KS were around 40% of the total… So we will probably not raise as much as we could on KS, but it’s an interesting experiment!” |
We Are Dropping RadiumOne As A NY Disrupt Sponsor | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | TechCrunch will be dropping RadiumOne as a hackathon sponsor. As Leena Rao , we simply couldn’t sleep at night knowing that we were supporting and promoting a company led by someone who our values on the issue of domestic abuse. In this decision our team is united, both on the editorial and the business side. We will not condone, support, or deal with in our community. Their business is not welcome on our pages, at our hackathons or at our events. |
A Letter To The Board Members Of RadiumOne | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | Dear RadiumOne Board Members, In covering the day-to-day launches, funding announcements, and feature additions of tech startups and companies, I rarely think about the founder or CEO of a company’s personal life. Sure, when it’s a serial entrepreneur, I take note. Or if the founder happens to be a friend, I’ll ask about their kids and families, and trade banter over the usual kid talk. But I prefer to take an objective, if not ignorant, view of the personal background of the people behind the products and businesses I report on. These and around RadiumOne’s CEO have made me question that approach. As you know, the CEO of the company you are on the board on, RadiumOne CEO and founder Gurbaksh Chahal, was arrested and charged with violently hitting and kicking a woman in his home 117 times over a 30-minute period. The attack was caught on video, which was then ruled to be inadmissible in court because of the nature of the way in which the police obtained it. Additionally, the victim did not want to testify and cooperate with prosecutors. As someone who has been trained as a counselor to domestic violence victims, I know this is quite common. And it goes without saying, this particular crime touches a personal note. Chahal was charged with 45 felony charges, which he was able to avoid due to the video being inadmissible, and was sentenced to only three years of probation plus some community service. As the mother of a daughter, I have to ask what if it was your daughter? What if it was your child who was kicked and beaten so many times she suffered a hematoma after the attack (according to the medical report we received)? How would you feel about the CEO of that company being able to continue in his job, and reap more money from being in that job, and then even more from going through a potential IPO? How could you stomach him on TV, proudly ringing the bell of the NASDAQ or NYSE, as your daughter’s life will never be the same because of the abuse she has suffered? Do you understand the shame she would feel everyday because of the violent attack and that she will bring this shame into every relationship she has from that time forward? Would you think that a misdemeanor was the punishment to fit this particular crime? I realize that I am writing about the emotions of this situation, so let’s address the business decision. While I see that you are probably looking at this from the point of view as an investor, who so often has to exclude the personal from financial decisions that are made, I still don’t understand the rationale. So many great investors talk about the importance of betting on the right entrepreneur, the founder whose values and integrity match the value of the mission that is being accomplished. Is this CEO in that class of entrepreneurs? Is it worth sacrificing your own reputation, or the reputation of your firm in favor of the money and the stake? I constantly think about what I want for my daughter as she grows up. First, I want her to find a passion, something she loves. But considering the field I come from, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I would want her to be a builder, in some way, shape or form. And I would love for her to find inspiration in the world that my husband and I have fallen in love with, technology. Of late, however, I’m left wondering if the technology world has come as far as I thought it has when it comes to supporting women. There are now too many stories that make me wonder whether the innovation we so proudly tout in the faces of Wall Street, Hollywood and Washington D.C., has really extended to gender equality in this world. I would think that investors, the people who are the backers, and sometimes builders, of these great companies, would lead us in the right direction when it comes to right vs. wrong. Even if that means losing a few dollars. You see, I am afraid that this world is at risk of being a place where people are known to sacrifice ethics, and values, and sometimes genuine human decency in exchange for making money. This scares me, as does the fact that a violent, angry man is being left to prosper without full responsibility and retribution for his crimes. I also wonder if perhaps you don’t own enough of the company to be able to oust the CEO and help him get the help he so desperately needs. If this is the case, I implore you to just speak up, and address the allegations. But most of all, I hope you can sleep at night–knowing that there is someone who is one of your portfolio CEOs who can also inflict that type of extreme violence and battery on someone, whatever the circumstance might be. I know that if I were in your position, I would suffer many sleepless nights to come. Leena |
Seed Is A Process | Paul Martino | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | The seed “round” as a singular event appears to be dying. What used to be a discrete funding round is now more of a rolling, continuous financing process. Manu Kumar at K9 ventures wrote a great this month in which he points out that these days “the Series A is now the fourth round of funding in a company,” after friends and family ($50K), pre-seed (~$500K), and seed (~$2 million). At Bullpen we say “seed is a process,” and it’s important for entrepreneurs to know how to tailor this process to minimize dilution and maximize survival chances. Here is a diagram of this process from our investor documents: The fundamental change in the seed financing process was caused by two things: the lean startup approach, which drove early-stage financing documents to be as lean as the companies using them, and the consolidation of traditional venture funds, which drove them to larger, later rounds and opened up room for more diversity at the early stages. In the pre-Internet days, the venture community only seemed to invest in 10 or 20 predictable deal types, infrequently betting on consumer behavioral change. Now, in the world of low initial startup costs and rapid product iteration, entrepreneurs can throw many crazy new ideas at the market to see what sticks, and then focus their full efforts on the winning ideas. The early seed process is, in essence, all about maximizing options and keeping the company agile by taking capital in the right amounts at the right times. The more pragmatic part of the explanation is that it obviously makes no sense to pay lawyers $25K to complete a $50K financing round. Therefore the structure of early stage of financings had to become as lean as the company’s initial go-to-market strategy. The solution was the now ubiquitous “capped convertible note,” which enables founders to accumulate money from various investors over time and then convert those investors’ holdings into equity shares down the road. Prior to the capped convert, founders had to raise a discrete seed or Series A round, which was expensive, slow and cumbersome – unsuitable at a time when “lean” startup methodologies are now the norm. By contrast, the capped convert is lean and fast and allows the founder to stack up notes, even to collect different prices for different caps. Part of the reason the capped convertible note has become so popular is that it was the standard structure adopted by Y Combinator. The specific flavor of note from Y Combinator has been copied and reused by others under the heading of “the YC note.” Since innovation doesn’t occur in a vacuum, Series Seed documents were created and shared with an open-source attitude so that much of the time and cost associated with the “old style” Series A could be eliminated. This new process of financing can have significant advantages for the founder CEO. In many ways the biggest benefit can be summed up in a statement I recall Keith Rabois making at a board meeting a while back. This is not a direct quote, but pretty close: “The weapon that the startup CEO has to counter the VC process is WHEN he or she raises.” This comment was made many years ago during the discrete finance era. But now with the continuous process, the CEO can wield this weapon more frequently and preserve significant ownership for the founding team. Here’s why. Each time the company hits a significant milestone, the CEO can increase the cap on successive convertible notes, making later tranches of money less dilutive. Companies that are on a quick upward trajectory can play this game very successfully over a period of 6 – 18 months. We have seen many companies that have done 3 or 4 separate convertible notes over the period of the first year or so of the life of the company. We are investors in one YC company that has done 6 or 7 at this point. With each new note the CEO (or 3 party) can increase the value appropriately because the deal becomes less and less risky for investors. Another major benefit to this process (beyond preserving ownership) is the ability for the founders to continue to select value-added investors. If the process is rolling and you can’t get in front of one of the people you want in time for the first close, no problem! You will probably do another close in another 90 days. One caution we give entrepreneurs when discussing rolling closes (the continuous process), however, is that they “optimize for success.” When your metrics are “up-and-to-the-right,” all is well. When you stub your toe, all of a sudden no one is interested in adding onto the note and you are left with a very short runway to hit the next big milestone. In addition, convertible notes constitute debt and not equity, and debt is much less forgiving if you encounter a downside situation before it converts into equity. While strategizing a financing plan, we generally encourage entrepreneurs to build a large enough syndicate, or a syndicate with a deep enough pocket or two to get the company through any setbacks. There is a certain irony to this milestone-based fundraising process. Big bad old-school venture capital firms used to use the “tranche” mechanism you, offering some money now and some later only when you hit key milestones that they defined. If those conditions weren’t met, the entrepreneur was often at the mercy of the VC who held the option to trade the deal price down. The power dynamic today, however, has shifted significantly in favor of the founders. There are 150 or so institutional seed funds out there to choose from now, and you can control when and how much you raise – timing capital intake with key milestones to maximize success. One final comment: We have been searching for data sets to validate this overall thesis, but in general the data sources are only tracking discrete financing events. The public frequently only sees the big financing round (or even the increasingly common “ ” round), and doesn’t get visibility into the rolling notes underneath the surface that carried the company along the way. We think this has the potential to be very misleading to both investors and entrepreneurs, so we’re very open to collaborating to bring some transparency to this process. Whether third parties are interested in collecting the right data, or founders and investors are willing to discuss informally/anecdotally about what they’re seeing in their own experiences, we’d be happy to get in touch. |
TechCrunch Is Here In Hanoi With A Meetup Later Tonight | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | Just a quick and spur-of-the-moment note, I’m in Hanoi this week and would love to meet founders and engineers from the community. Our writers and editors regularly travel through the major tech hubs of the world and we haven’t had a chance to do a series in Vietnam yet. These informal meetups offer you guys the chance to meet TechCrunch writers and editors. I’m here to hear your pitches, exchange stories, just casually hang out and learn more about Vietnam’s brewing startup scene. I’ll be at Nhà Hàng Bia Hiền at 123 Nguyễn Ngọc Vũ tonight at 9 p.m. following . They’re having Dung Tran, the CEO and founder of mWork, and Do Tuan Anh, the CEO and founder of Appota, speak. (Yes, we’re piggybacking off each other to achieve double the awesome.) [googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m18!1m12!1m3!1d3724.5554761649355!2d105.81044399999996!3d21.010448799999978!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!3m3!1m2!1s0x3135ac9e10ccc31f%3A0xbceb0e1c2f25408b!2zMTIzIE5ndXnhu4VuIE5n4buNYyBWxaksIFRydW5nIEhvw6AsIEhvw6BuIEtp4bq_bQ!5e0!3m2!1sen!2s!4v1398141647739&w=600&h=450] |
Let’s Talk About Exits, Berlin | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | What’s missing in the Berlin tech ecosystem? Well, . But the elephant in the room really is one – no, a few – sizeable exits. This isn’t to create rich VCs, this is to create rich engineers – equipped with a wealth of experience and ideas – ready to have their next (or first) shot at building companies. And for this you need large liquidity events where the wealth is distributed widely throughout the entire company that has been acquired. There is a lot of discussion about whether Berlin i) should have already had a few big exits (there have been a few in the several hundred million range; but we are talking $500m+, ideally $1bn+) ii) should have some big exits soon (next 1-2 years) or iii) should avoid (premature) exits and focus on growth, as its companies are comparatively young. . To date there has been no shortage of opinions (including our own), but a shortage of facts – so we decided to crunch some numbers. What you really need to look at is: i) how old companies are and ii) how much money they have raised. It takes a lot of time and money to build a large company. Only with sufficient age and capital raised is it reasonable to expect a large exit. So, how does Berlin compare to other key European tech ecosystems and recent large European exits with regard to these two key metrics?
Berlin’s top* startups are on average around 4 years old, with the oldest ones coming in at just over 6 years. This “age” pretty much coincides with the transition of Berlin from a local to a global tech hub – i.e. going from building local businesses to more disruptive global companies – which has been happening over the last 5 years or so. So it’s no surprise that most top startups fall within this age bracket. London’s tech ecosystem is much older. This is reflected not only in the significantly higher age profile (average = 7 years, therefore 3 years older than in Berlin), but also simply in the number of top startups in the city.
Stockholm’s cohort is a little smaller so the conclusions have to be taken with a pinch of salt. The ecosystem has an older age profile than Berlin (average = 6 years), but a smaller difference compared to London. However both Klarna and Spotify are going on to their ninth year, putting them 2-3 years ahead of the oldest members of Berlin’s top cohort. For good measure we also collected a bunch of startups outside of the main tech hubs and looked at their age profile (average = 7 years.) To sum up the age profiling of ecosystems we looked at another simple metric: the % of “top” startups in each ecosystem that are older than 5 years: Looking at all of the above, it seems fair to assume that Berlin’s ecosystem is, by quite a significant margin, the youngest of all major European tech hubs.
The other part of the equation is money. Here the situation is a little different – there seems to plenty of evidence that all 3 major tech hubs can attract significant amounts of venture capital not far off from each other. Berlin’s top cohort has raised over a billion in venture capital in recent years, on par or even above other key European tech hubs. This fits with the that Berlin had, for the first time, attracted more VC than London. Zalando certainly is an outlier here and the picture would look different without it – Stockholm has a very similar situation with Spotify; whereas London venture capital is more evenly distributed. However if you look at the median amount raised the picture is (unsurprisingly) similar to the age profile of the tech startups. London’s top cohort has raised a median amount of $43m, Stockholm of $36m and Berlin of $27m. This makes sense as – all else being equal – an older ecosystem will have more advanced companies that have raised more. Berlin’s average is pushed up significantly by Zalando* and Delivery Hero: London seems to have fewer outliers**: ** Berlin’s Zalando effect is echoed in Stockholm by Spotify and Klarna, rasing the average significantly: It’s probably fair to assume that Berlin as an entire ecosystem has raised enough to produce a few large exits; however most of the top cohort will need 1-2 more large rounds (if you compare median raised) to make it to that point. This is what we should be looking out for. Our last analysis on this matter, the % of startups that have raised more than $30m (our proxy for a minimum amount of capital raised for a large-ish exit – more details towards the end) lends further support to this. Of course comparing just privately held companies will not give you the full picture. What if all the top London and Stockholm companies just have already exited and hence we are comparing apples and oranges? So we took a look at “large” (starting couple of hundred million $) European exits* over the last 5 years and then compared these to the top cohorts of still privately held startups in each key hub. The median is 10 years, US benchmarks suggest . Quick exits are still an exception; it takes a lot of time to build very large companies. Comparing time-to-exit vs age of current top startups shows that Berlin is still significantly below the 10 year average exit mark. The same can be said for London and Stockholm, although some of the top cohort there are much closer to this value. We then looked at the total capital raised prior to exit, with the average sitting at the $60m mark and median at around $40m. (Note: the data here is very patchy so we could only use a few examples – a more thorough analysis is welcomed.) Comparing the median capital raised prior to exit with the median capital raised by current top startups produces less of a clear argument, as the figures are not far off one another. Berlin is still the most divergent (median of $27m vs $40m), but the difference is not as plain to see as with age. London even has a slightly higher median amount raised already – $43m vs $40m. We actually think this is good news: Europe is systematically creating much larger companies then ever in the past; so it is not surprising these are / will be raising more venture capital than past precedents. So, there we have it. Some obvious conclusions but we really just wanted to kick of a more fact-based debate. And if you view Europe as an (and you really should) – the quantity and quality of startups across all key hubs (and outside) combined makes a flurry of outsized exits highly likely. Maybe this is the real story here. |
Google Brings Its Hotel And Restaurant Search To Android | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | Google is adding a to Google Search on Android. This is a pretty straightforward integration that allows you to type or speak queries like “show me hotels in San Francisco,” and the search results page will indeed return a list of hotels. Since its acquisition of ITA Travel, Google has been slowly adding travel-related products to its arsenal. There is no faster flight search engine on the market than , for example, and its hotel search, which aggregates data from numerous sites, is also fast and highly competitive. Oddly enough, though, few people know about these features and indeed, Google doesn’t really advertise them heavily. It’s worth noting that Google has already integrated flight search into its voice search. The same kind of queries also now work for restaurants. Just ask Google to “show some restaurants in Portland” and it will do so. Overall, the restaurant search seems pretty flexible. You can ask it for specific cuisines, for example, and you can ask for cheap or expensive restaurants, too. By default, the search seems to prioritize well-rated restaurants. That’s a good thing, because I haven’t been able to find a query that lets you filter by ratings, though you can always drill down a bit deeper in the search interface itself. According to Google, all of this is meant to make last-minute reservations easier. As we’ve pointed out before, though, the company is putting a lot of emphasis on all things voice search lately and sees it as one of the main ways we will interact with its services in the future. As such, it makes sense for Google to continue to bring more of its products into the fold and let users interact with them this way. |
Recyclebank Turns “Green” Actions Into Discounts At New Shop For Sustainable Goods, One Twine | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | , a company founded in 2004 which today , is now getting into e-commerce. With the launch of a new website called , Recyclebank is hoping to attract consumers looking to buy environmentally conscious goods and other sustainable items across a variety of categories, ranging from health and beauty to gear and gadgets to children and pets and more. At launch, the site features over 400 products from nearly 30 brands, all of which are rated through One Twine’s “Impact Lens” – a list of nine criteria that take into account a product’s total environmental impact. This list includes things like whether the item was produced using recycled or renewable materials, if harsh chemicals are used, whether the item’s makers are treated fairly, if the product itself is recyclable, and more. The website places icons next to each product indicating which of the nine criteria to help consumers shop smarter. Explains Recyclebank CEO Javier Flaim, shoppers will also be able to filter the product selection by the criteria that matters most to them. “For example, if you’re searching for shampoos and want to ensure it is has a gentle impact on an animals and the environment, you click on the gentle impact symbol and it will filter appropriately,” he says. Flaim sees One Twine as a natural expansion for environmentally focused Recyclebank, which today works to increase recycling rates in over 300 communities across the U.S., where 4.5 million members have recycled 3.8 billion pounds of waste since its launch in 2004. On average, Recyclebank members recycled an additional 157 pounds of material in 2013, compared to the rate prior to launch of Recyclebank in their community, notes the CEO. “Our mission has always been to inspire people to live more sustainably,” Flaim tells us. “This addition is a great way to extend that mission and provide enhanced value to our members. Our business first focused on recycling, and we have since added other ways for people to easily incorporate sustainability into their daily lives.” The company had been hearing from its members they wanted help in making smarter shopping decisions, Flaim adds. “Understanding the full lifecycle of the things you buy, use and dispose of is a simple yet impactful way to help the planet,” he says. The new site, roughly six months in development, will also tie into Recyclebank’s rewards program, allowing members to use their earned points to shop, and redeeming them for discounts at checkout. One Twine will compete with a number of other “green” shops, including (from Quidsi), , green grocery store , , and . After launch, the company will listen to user feedback about what products to sell next, and plans to add more to its virtual shelves every week as well as build out an area for local and community brands. The new site is live here: . |
What’s Your Honeywell Bubble Count? | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | I divided my time this month between West Africa and the Bay Area, which triggered a lot of cultural whiplash, which got me thinking about . I fear today’s technology can reinforce our instinct to confuse what’s with what’s … which leads to skewed perceptions, bad decisions, and needless conflict. It’s OK to live in a bubble, but it is not OK to not that you live in a bubble. At the same time, though, I’m an engineer, which means the entire preceding paragraph already feels far too abstract and handwavey. What’s a bubble? How can one distinguish between what’s familiar and what’s normal? How can you possibly measure and quantify any of this? …Conveniently, I have an answer to that question, my friend , and I hereby name the Honeywell Bubble Count after her. It’s a very simple algorithm indeed: Now just add those percentages. Voila! My Honeywell Bubble Count is 39+14+32 = 85. Does your total exceed 80, he said, choosing that number for true and valid reasons and totally not at all just picking it out of the arbitrary ether so that his own score looks pretty good? Well then, well done! You probably don’t live in a constrictive bubble which massively distorts your worldview and all of your instincts and beliefs on a daily basis. Is it lower than 80? Is it lower than 80? Are any of those numbers lower than — gulp — 20? Then you may have a bubble problem. In theory, the Internet should bring us all closer together and slowly eliminate our differences. Earlier today I friended a Senegalese taxi driver (on Facebook, unfortunately for my bubble count), a kind of ongoing connection that would have been inconceivable only ten years ago. And yet, it’s all too easy to cherry-pick those occasional vivid examples, while turning a blind eye to the fact that modern technology lets us unconsciously withdraw from most of the world and spend almost all of our time in the same kinds of social circles in which we’ve spent our entire lives; not gonna lie, I look at that up above and I wince. (See also Anil Dash’s “ .”) But measuring a problem is often the first step in solving it. Think of the Honeywell Bubble Count as a Fitbit for filter bubbles. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pretending that this is serious analysis and/or consideration of how to measure cross-circle social interactions; in fact, I’m not pretending it’s anything other than a whimsical and easy-to-calculate metric with a catchy name. But I suspect any glimmer of self-awareness is better than none. I reckon I’ll try to get my HBC up to at least 100 this year. And if you calculate yours and are shocked by its paucity, maybe consider doing the same. |
Gillmor Gang: Call Forwarding | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 4 | 26 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — record a midweek Wednesday edition after Apple and Facebook earnings calls but before Microsoft’s the next day and . Microsoft posted good numbers against the backwash of the Post-PC decline, but Google claiming the Vic news had no impact on the Google+ strategy was pure spin doctor. The Gang seems comfortable with Apple numbers setting the table for a Wearable Winter, if you can count an iWatch as meaning both something on the wrist and Apple TV as an extension of the AppStore. With Facebook perhaps moving away from the status update stream and toward private messaging as a way to reclaim the high school set, the stage is set for a good old fashioned showdown between Web and Apps. Forget Net Neutrality, it’s all about Native Neutrality. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
TechCrunch Giveaway: Linksys Router And $400 Gift Card | Elin Blesener | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | If you’re just returning to the daily grind after Spring Break and can’t quite seem to get back into work mode, well we have a sponsored giveaway for you. Our friends over at have sent us one of their new ($279) with SMART WiFi capabilities which one of you can win, along with a $400 Linksys gift card for all of the router accessories you could possibly need. Yes, router accessories to help you ease your way back in to office life. This SMART WiFi router allows you to monitor, control and adjust your Wi-Fi connection from anywhere you feel necessary, create multiple passwords for your guests, kids and friends, and prioritize which devices on your network receive the most bandwidth. There will never be another excuse to miss a TechCrunch post ever again! One lucky reader will win both. If you want to enter, just follow the handy steps below. 1) 2) Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. Make sure you follow the steps above and you’ll be optimized for when we choose our winner on April 29th, 7:30pm PT. Anyone in the U.S. and Canada is eligible. |
Makers: Rock Out At Hardware Alley At Disrupt 2014 In New York | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | We need a few good Doozers to head down to Disrupt in New York to show off your wares. You can be in any stage of the process – from pre-funding to finished product – and we’re even looking for hardware-related services. Still crowdfunding? Not a problem. We take all kinds at in New York! What is ? It’s a celebration of hardware startups (and other cool gear makers) that features everything from robotic drones to 3D printers. We try to bring in an eclectic mix of amazing exhibitors and I think you’ll agree that our previous We’d like you to register as a Hardware Alley exhibitor. You’ll get to exhibit on the last day of Disrupt NY, May 7, to show off your goods and get access to some of the most interesting people (and most interesting VCs) in the world. We’d love to have you. All you need to demo is a laptop. TechCrunch provides you with: 30″ round cocktail table, linens, table-top sign, inclusion in program agenda and website, exhibitor WiFi, and press list. You can reserve your spot by purchasing a . If you are Kickstarting your project now or bootstrapping, please contact me at john@beta.techcrunch.com with the subject line “HARDWARE ALLEY.” I will do my best to accommodate you. Hope to see you in New York! |
500 Startups-Backed Roam And Wander Presents DiDi, An Interactive Teddy Bear | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | , a toy and children’s entertainment studio that is currently participating in , is now raising funds for its Called DiDi, the classic brown teddy bear is twice as large as Roam and Wander’s last toy, a , and comes to life with the aid of an iPad. Didi’s companion apps include games that teach young kids letters, numbers, basic reading, and other skills they will need in elementary school. “My son’s nickname is DiDi, and when I was a boy my favorite toy was a brown teddy bear (that I still have),” says founder Jason Warren. “I wanted to create a toy for my son, who has mild autism, and for other kids, to help them connect with and play and learn from the same classic toy that I had.”
I got the chance to test out a DiDi, which is about the size of an infant and has two windows that turn into its “face” and “belly” when an iPad running Roam and Wander’s apps is inserted. The stuffed animal has a wide bottom that keeps it sitting up and is made of high-quality plush fabric. One thoughtful feature is a sewn-in face so DiDi still looks like a cuddly bear even when the iPad is removed, instead of a nightmare-inducing featureless pile of fur. “We gave DiDi an interactive belly because we wanted to give kids a space to play games and read books, but keep DiDi’s face and personality while the kids are playing,” Warren explains. “It’s also because it’s a lot of fun to see the food fall into his belly when you feed him. We’re designing some games like ‘Operation’ for DiDi’s belly.” TuTu is currently and in brick-and-mortar retail outlets in Asia. While in 500 Startups, Warren says Roam and Wander, which is also backed by and , plans to focus on “growing our presence in the U.S. and expanding our distribution as a publisher. “We’ve started to license TuTu and DiDi to other game and kid’s book publishers, and we’ve been hiring a team in the U.S. to help with retail distribution and community engagement,” he says. To help accomplish that goal, Roam and Wander has grown its marketing team and is currently working on several projects with a major entertainment company in L.A. The Kickstarter’s early bird price is $25, which includes a DiDi or TuTu and a set of interactive toys, including an apple, carrot, toothbrush, and box of milk. The toys are expected to ship in August. |
Google Maps Rival Mapbox Adds Smart Directions, A Navigation Service For Any App | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | , the OpenStreetMap-based mapping platform that lets app developers incorporate maps into any app, is adding another feature to better compete against the likes of Google Maps, ESRI and Nokia Maps: , a navigation service that developers can customise with extra details such type of terrain, specific places of interest, and current traffic conditions. Its first partner, getting announced today alongside Smart Directions, is , the electric vehicle-sharing startup . It will offer Smart Directions-powered navigation in the Scoot app so that its users of its scooters can avoid the hilliest routes around the city, starting Tuesday. Mapbox has not yet revealed how Smart Directions will be priced, but the idea is to continue to wrap more premium features into the Mapbox platform (a plan that for a while). Currently, the wider product is offered as a , with a basic tier at no charge and more enhanced plans beginning at $5 per month and increasing up to $499/month, depending on the amount of map views, geographic features and storage use for the cloud-based product. Smart Directions is Mapbox’s first additional feature on top of its main map service, and CEO Eric Gundersen tells me that it will not be the last. “We are like Lego,” he told me in an interview. “We put out tools to let developers create their own worlds.” Off the back of a , Gundersen says the goal of future features will be to get “maps to start becoming more responsive… and go beyond baked-in customisation to using sensors to start influencing maps in real time and using new rendering technology that wasn’t there before.” For example, someone using a running app could see a route changed in response to the speed at which he or she is moving. “We’re as much a map as an API company, a true platform player,” he says. Today, Mapbox counts some 3,000 developers linking into its APIs, big names like Foursquare, Pinterest, Mozilla and Evernote, who use the Mapbox APIs to create maps that they can then customise with specific fonts and colors. Gundersen would not say who else may be eyeing up Smart Directions, although you can see navigation integration could be useful. (For example, think of a night out in an unfamiliar city, where you used the Foursquare app to plan where you drink and eat and later dance, and then have possible itineraries mapped out for you.) Gundersen says the hope is that Smart Directions opens Mapbox to new categories of developers such as those who make apps for connected cars and wearables. Gundersen is easy with his praise for Google Maps, who he sees as Mapbox’s (much larger) main competitor, but also quick to highlight its shortcomings and the subsequent opportunity for his own company. “Google has built amazing maps and routing,” he says, “but they are designing those for Google,” he says, referring to the very standard view you get of a Google map when it appears in a different app. “We think every app maker or map maker should have the same control of design as Google does. Think of us as a more customizable Google Maps.” The bigger picture, widescale view is that Mapbox’s growth comes at a time when navigation and mapping remain moving targets. Google last year, apparently at the same time that others like and were also eyeing up the company. Meanwhile, Apple its mapping groove, and Facebook has yet to make a big mapping/location buy. Nokia, very soon to be liberated of its handset business, is putting a lot of eggs into its mapping basket. And there are companies like Dropbox, building out a mobile-friendly platform, which has left location conspicuously to one side for now. No specific comment from Gundersen on where Mapbox — primarily bootstrapped from its founding in 2010 until last year — may fit into all of this. “In next couple of months we’ll be working with partners in the space,” he says. “We’re continuing to keep our heads down, building our platform.” |
Comcast Fires Back After Netflix Tosses Shade On Its Proposed Merger With Time Warner Cable | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | Netflix would prefer an ISP market with a number of large players, competing with each other on price, speed and availability. It is not in favor of Comcast swallowing Time Warner Cable, creating an even more powerful firm that could, in theory, extract increasing sums from itself. The company was plain-spoken in its : Comcast, naturally, doesn’t feel the same way about its proposed merger. In a , Comcast responded to Netflix’s complaints specifically. Regarding Netflix’s assertion that Comcast was able to essentially for a peering agreement, Comcast was almost derisive: The first bullet point is difficult as comparing a company like Google to Netflix feels like a stretch, even though Google owns YouTube, a global platform for video content. The second bullet point indicates almost too patly that Netflix came to Comcast. It didn’t have much of a choice, given that its end-user experience for Comcast customers was deteriorating — it needed a deal to ensure that it could support its extant customer base. I think that we can agree that Netflix would not have gone to and paid Comcast if it didn’t feel like it had to. This is also reflected in its complaint that we read previously. This undermines Comcast’s third bullet point, as it was therefore not the case that Netflix had no need to secure an arrangement with it, or could have worked with a separate party. Comcast’s dismount is worth reading: The difference between the two sides here is . Netflix for “traditional” net neutrality — treating all content sent across an ISP’s network the same — as well as “strong” net neutrality, which would also prevent peering agreements that it recently signed with Comcast. Confused? Netflix pays to ensure that its content can make it onto Comcast’s network and thus reach its own customers. In its view, this isn’t reasonable given that customers have already paid for its service, Netflix, and the bandwidth they consume under their Internet deal with Comcast. Comcast doesn’t like the deluge of consumer demand for Netflix that leads to its network becoming saturated with the stuff, so it wants to shift some of the costs to supporting that consumer demand to Netflix. Netflix finds this obscene. Comcast finds it reasonable. Is it fair for Comcast to bear the cost of supporting its own customers, or does Netflix retain some sort of fiduciary responsibility for its popularity among Comcast customers? We’re not done with this issue. |
Sequoia Backs Simplisafe In A Play For The Home Security Market | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | l has made a minority investment in the do-it-yourself home security company in a play on the home security and automation market, TechCrunch has learned. The investment from Sequoia came on the heels of , which showed just how lucrative the home market can be. That deal netted a healthy return for investors, including , , , , and Google’s own . The Nest acquisition also marked the first push by a large tech company to open a gateway into home automation. Investors think it probably won’t be the last. Even before Nest showed the corporate appetite for home automation — including thermostat controls for heating and cooling, home security, and other types of remote monitoring and management — investors had begun backing a slew of startups tackling the problem.
Now Sequoia has a portfolio company of its own to tackle the market. The firm invested in after an intense bidding war through a process that was handled by the investment bank , according to multiple sources with knowledge of the investment. Sequoia declined to comment for this article. Simplisafe’s out-of-the-box home security system , and is already installed in thousands of homes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpsU-LGuJek While Simplisafe has gotten a huge boost with its new Sequoia financing, it’s not the only entrant that’s attracted big-name venture capital. Earlier this year Khosla Ventures invested $10 million in Canary, another high-concept, well-designed security system. And capital from investors keeps coming, according to data from .
Some investors may have placed early bets, but the market for do-it-yourself home security and automation is still wide open, and new opportunities to back privately held companies that haven’t yet raised any institutional investment abound. For instance, the Chicago-based company has completed a successful Kickstarter campaign; offers a panoply of automated security technologies for the home; and also has new security and safety technologies for homeowners and apartment dwellers who would have more comfort if they were staying in a place more castle than home. “There’s a bunch of investments in the space,” says Lemnos Labs founder Jeremy Conrad. “The fact is that everybody is looking at ADT and how they pull down a couple of billion dollars in revenue for a service that hasn’t changed in twenty years. It’s very similar to how Nest went after Honeywell in the thermostat space.” |
Mailbox Brings Latest Features To Its iOS App | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | Mailbox 2.0 for iOS is and brings a hosts of enhancements and goodies. Chief among the additions is auto-swipe, a feature that on Mailbox’s new Android app. As previously explained by a Mailbox team member, with auto-swipe, “With just a tap, I get less email tomorrow than I did today.” The email app learns which emails users end up archiving and automates the task. It learns swipes and snoozes to determine patterns. Best yet, the settings for this feature and the rest of Mailbox are now stored in Dropbox, allowing a user to sync preferences between Mailbox apps on different devices. After , a user is prompted to sign into their Dropbox account. The sign-in can be ignored, but the app will prompt you again. After skipping the sign-in window to write this post, I saw the sign-in screen again within 30 seconds of ignoring, but that could be because I was digging around in the settings, unsuccessfully trying to find other options for the Dropbox tie-in. |
Aol Mail Hacked With Spoofed Accounts Sending Spam | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | It’s not just you. Aol Mail was hacked affecting an untold amount of accounts that were seemingly spoofed. The Twitter hashtag is filled with first-hand accounts of spam being sent from either the hacked email account or an email account spoofed to look like the original. We’ve reached out to Aol for further clarification. The company said in a statement earlier today that they were working on resolving the issue. The Aol Twitter account is scrambling to respond to requests for help and directing people to for more info. Sources close to the company believe the impact was less than 1 percent of all users and that they expect the issue to be quickly remedied. This issue seemingly first surfaced three days ago. If you receive a link in an email from an Aol email address, it’s best not to open it, and make sure they know their account was compromised. The hack seems widespread, although Aol has yet to comment on the scope of the incident. Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Aol. This is not a spoof account. Or is it? |
Inside Jobs: What Loudr’s In-House Attorney Loves About Digging Into Legal Docs | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | Lawyers are infamous for having jobs that are hard to understand. There’s a reason why “legalese” is a term, after all. But , the senior counsel at music licensing and distribution platform startup , is part of a rare breed: She is an attorney who can both function at the highest level of her field and happily try to explain what she does on a day-to-day basis in a way that the rest of us non- can understand. So it was a pleasure to stop by Loudr’s San Francisco headquarters and learn about her work life for our video series. Before Annie Lin embarked on a legal career, she made her name as , touring the United States and recording albums that garnered favorable reviews from the likes of the Village Voice. But as she says in the video embedded above, she always had a real knack for the business side of the music world. So she headed to law school, and set her sights on specializing in the field of music licensing. If you’ve ever wondered who in the world actually reads those long Terms of Service documents, look no further: That’s what Annie Lin does for a living. And as she told me, she actually loves doing it, especially when it deals with the music industry and digital rights: “I read a lot of agreements. I read a lot of agreements. Footnotes and fine print, I am actually looking at that. You know, I just find it to be so fascinating. I love finding out who played with who, who wrote music with who, who controls this song. And then what mergers and acquisitions have happened to lead this song to ending up in some, you know, some vault at Warner. How did that happen? That’s really fascinating to me.” For Lin, Loudr brings all of her interests together in one place, and has her surrounded by coworkers who are similarly passionate about music. It’s a pretty cool story of landing a unique “dream job” that can happen nowadays in the startup world — with a mix of a lot of luck, and a lot of determination. Learn about Annie’s job in 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 . |
Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia Explains The Broadcaster Battle In His Own Words | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | In the past year, has fought legal battles in three different states with broadcasters looking to get the streaming TV service kicked off the air, if you catch my drift. Tomorrow, the case before the Supreme Court, where lawyers from both sides will make oral arguments. The case is highly complex, with broadcasters alleging that Aereo has no right to stream its copyrighted content, and Aereo arguing that the consumer has control over the content and its recording, and that Aereo simply provides the antenna from a remote location. Many legal precedents go into the case, including the Sony Betamax ruling, which gave consumers the right to record broadcast television to a VCR. A more recent Cablevision precedent also comes into play, that said consumers who legally acquire copyrighted content have the right to stream and record it as they choose, whether the content itself is stored in the box in their living room or in the cloud. Then there’s the . With so many moving parts, we thought it was smart to sit down with Chet Kanojia, Aereo CEO, and have him explain the terms of the case in his own words. If you’d like to get a closer look into Aereo’s technology, check out our . Tomorrow, we’ll be covering the court case closely so be sure to stay tuned. |
GitHub Denies Allegations Of “Gender-Based Harassment,” Co-Founder Preston-Werner Resigns | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | GitHub published a today detailing the results of its investigation over lodged against the company by its now-former employee . According to the company, the “investigation found no evidence to support the claims against Tom and his wife of sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation, or of a sexist or hostile work environment.” However, the company acknowledges that the investigation did uncover “evidence of mistakes and errors of judgement.” GitHub co-founder , party to many of Hoervath’s statments, has resigned. GitHub issued a blanket denial regarding “the remaining allegations,” stating that the investigation found “no evidence of gender-based discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or abuse.” Horvath’s original comments about the co-founder following her departure were sharp. As TechCrunch reported at the time: According to Horvath, the founder accused her of threatening his wife, who she had not interacted with or contacted since the wife asked her out to drinks. Horvath cried during the episode, as she said the founder both “chastised” her and called her a “liar.” Horvath said the founder ended the meeting by saying that it was “bad judgement” to date coworkers (referring to her relationship, which was with another employee at GitHub) and then left. Horvath recalls sitting there after his departure both “crying and shaking uncontrollably.” Preston-Werner also published a today admitting to “mistakes” but firmly denying that he behaved in a way that was biased due to gender: First, I want to address the serious accusations that were made against me and my family over the past month. With every decision I made at GitHub and in every interaction I had with employees, I tried to treat people better than they expected and to resolve conflict with empathy. Despite that, I’ve made mistakes, and I am deeply sorry to anyone who was hurt by those mistakes. It devastates me to know that I missed the mark, and I will strive to do better, every day. That said, I want to be very clear about one thing: neither my wife, Theresa, nor I have ever engaged in gender-based harassment or discrimination. The results of GitHub’s independent investigation unequivocally confirm this and we are prepared to fight any further false claims on this matter to the full extent of the law. I believe in diversity and equality for all people in all professions, especially the tech sector. It’s immensely important to me and I will continue to do my very best to further that belief. Preston-Werner expressed an interest “immersive computing,” hinting at where he might work next. GitHub is instituting new controls and procedures to better provide “an inclusive work environment,” including training and “employee-led initiatives.” Following the release of both posts, Horvath released a set of tweets constituting a rebuttal of the published notes. At the time of writing, Horvath has not replied to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Here are her tweets concerning the recent developments: Horvath responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment. Here is her response to the day’s events: Tom had no other choice but to resign. There was substantial evidence of his and his wife’s harassment and that they both exploited company resources to witch hunt myself and other women at the company. If Tom had not stepped down, GitHub would be bleeding good employees by now. Although, I’m not sure it won’t start at this point. It’s clear the investigation was all smoke and mirrors. It will be interesting to see what happens next, and how GitHub communicates the effects of its actions here in the future. |
Netflix Says It Will Increase Prices For New Members By “One Or Two” Dollars | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | New Netflix members can expect to see their subscription rates go up in the next few months, according to the company’s most recent (the letter also included , which beat analyst estimates). The letter says Netflix’s online selection has “greatly improved … since we introduced our streaming plan in 2010 at $7.99 per month” and as a result, “Our current view is to do a one or two dollar increase, depending on the country, later this quarter for new members only.” Existing members will stay at the current price “for a generous time period.” Presumably, not forever. Earlier this year, the company said it was , adding that it hadn’t settled on anything and that there would be “generous grandfathering” for existing members. Today’s shareholder letter doesn’t mention anything about tiers, but the pricing discussion is vague enough that those tiers could still be part of the plan. “These changes will enable us to acquire more content and deliver an even better streaming experience,” the company says. Netflix plan back in 2011, leading to its . At this point, it seems that Netflix has weathered the transition to streaming video pretty well, although it says it still has 6.7 million DVD subscribers. |
Sprig Tries To Eat SpoonRocket’s Lunch By Delivering Its Own | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | Hope you’re hungry. Gourmet, on-demand dinner delivery service today expanded to start serving lunch, just as a few days ago. The includes service to several districts of East San Francisco from Monday to Friday. The move puts Sprig in direct competition with , which also delivers on-demand lunches and dinners — a space we expect to heat up this year. For more on in minutes for a price cheaper than most restaurants, check out my scoop on Sprig launching lunch from last week. Essentially, Sprig and SpoonRocket cook huge quantities of a few entrees, and load them into cars that drive around their service areas so they’re always close by. You choose what meal you want to eat from Sprig or SpoonRocket’s site/app, and it’s brought to you lickety-split. Sprig’s co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani tells me “The mission is to make eating right the easy option.” While Sprig and SpoonRocket are competing with each other, their success will more depend on whether they can disrupt the existing ways to eat at home: cooking, take-out, and standard restaurant delivery. Biyani tells me his customers are “currently unsatisfied with their options”, and that’s why they’ve turned to his startup and given it a 5-star rating on Yelp. Compared to SpoonRocket, Sprig has slightly longer delivery times and high prices but tastier food. The problem is it only served dinner. But starting today, it will deliver lunches 11am to 2pm, Monday to Friday, in San Francisco’s Financial, SoMA, Mission Bay, and Dogpatch districts with zip codes 94103, 94104, 94105, 94107, 94108, 94111, and 94158. That’s a more constrained area than it serves during dinner. Customers will be able to choose from a rotating set of three sandwiches, wraps, or salads each day, with at least one vegetarian and gluten-free option available. The price is around $9 per meal plus $2 for delivery. For example, today Sprig featured a steak and manchego sandwich, a balsamic chicken sandwich, and a beet salad with orange and faro. Our writer Ryan Lawler sampled them this morning and found the sandwich tasty, and nothing wrong with the salad. Both included ample portions. With and funding rounds of $10 million or more in the last month, you can expect them to try to streamline their supply chain and market aggressively in hopes of attaining the coveted title of “Uber For Meals”. Biyani says the company is actively hiring for product, design, engineering, and marketing roles, but the hardest part of his job is smoothing out the logistics. “Food is a complex business that requires sourcing the best ingredients, making hundreds of meals, and delivering those meals quickly and efficiently” Biyani admits “We’ll do whatever it takes to provides people with a healthy delicious meal, any meal of the day, as fast as possible” the founder exclaims. But wait, Sprig only does lunch and dinner now. Does this mean breakfast is on the roadmap? I could practically hear Biyani’s smile over the phone when he replied “I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually we figured out a good solution to breakfast.” |
Online Fitness Startup Wello To Be Acquired By Weight Watchers, Sources Say | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | , the startup that connects people with personal trainers to receive private fitness consultations through online video chat, is in talks to be acquired by Weight Watchers, sources tell TechCrunch. We’ve contacted Wello for details on the deal, but at the moment, the company has declined to comment. This post will be updated with any additional information, such as financial terms, we receive. Wello, which launched , has raised some $1 million in seed funding from a range of well-known investors including Rock Health, Kleiner Perkins, Mohr Davidow, Aberdare Ventures, Mayo Ventures, Morado Ventures, S-Cubed Capital, PhilQuo Ventures, and other angels. Since its launch two years ago, Wello has extended its product lineup from one-on-one video chat to include and gym-like . Wello has said its core aim is to “democratize” access to personal fitness training, which has historically been a relatively high-end and rarefied service. This mission fits well with Weight Watchers, which has become a household name for making weight loss and nutrition consultation accessible to the masses. Weight Watchers has been moving in recent years to expand its reach into the wider health/fitness “lifestyle” market, so Wello could be a nice bolt-on product to add to its offerings. |
Fake Startup Landing Page From HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Is Better Than Many Real Startup Landing Pages | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | The hottest startup in the Bay Area is now online: . The documentary tracking the company’s progress, produced by the noted biographical network HBO, is the cause célèbre of Silicon Valley at the moment. Nerds of every stripe gather near talking boxes each week to watch the exploits of people that are about to be far, far richer than themselves. Pied Piper is a startup right out of the history books. From high-minded corporate statements that you pretend to understand: Pied Piper is a multi-platform technology based on a proprietary universal compression algorithm that has consistently fielded high Weisman Scores™ that are not merely competitive, but approach the theoretical limit of lossless compression. To employee-investor-stoner-executive hybrids that have generated hundreds of millions in venture capital losses over the past few decades: It’s worth noting that Yahoo’s job listing for Chief Yahoo does in fact require a degree in Frisbee, whereas Lead Magician at Box does not. Perhaps we’ll see Bachmann don the purple in coming months. For now, read the site. You can’t be a lean SaaS ninja with a focus on cryptocurrency and on-demand artisanal burritos if you don’t Pied Piper. |
Netflix Beats Expectations With 4M New Subscribers, Earnings Of 86 Cents Per Share | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | Netflix today released its first-quarter financial results, with the company beating analyst expectations. For the first three months of the year, the company reported earnings of 86 cents per share on revenues of $1.27 billion. Earnings were above analyst expectations of 83 cents a share, while revenues were in-line with the $1.27 billion Wall Street forecast for the quarter. In , Netflix earned 5 cents a share on $1 billion in revenue. From January through March, Netflix gained 2.25 million domestic subscribers, bringing the total to 35.7 million. That was in line with the company’s forecast 2.25 million new domestic subscribers from the last earnings announcement. On the international side, Netflix added 1.75 million subscribers, which was above its estimate of 1.6 million. On the international front, Netflix said that it ultimately expects non-U.S. subscribers to surpass those in its home market at some point. Today, international accounts for 25 percent of its streaming revenues. The company also said that the international business is on pace to achieve profitability, but that its plans to expand will keep that segment at a loss for the time being. Netflix growth has remained steady as the company continues to add new original series, while also releasing new seasons of series its viewers already know and love. In the first quarter, that meant the release of , which was the first of its originals to be announced. It’s coming out with its second season of successful series Orange Is The New Black, as well as new Hemlock Grove and Derek episodes coming soon. It’s also added series like kid-focused Marco Polo, Marvel’s Daredevil, Wachowski sci-fi drama Sense 8 from the Wachowskis, and action-drama series Narcos from Brazilian director José Padilha. At the same time, Netflix has been working to improve its quality of service from a technical perspective. It recently added for some titles, for instance. The most significant move, however, was a deal it struck with Comcast that enables a and cuts out third-party middle men. While the deal wasn’t expected to , it did cause streaming speeds to after the connection was in place. Investors applauded the earnings announcement, sending shares up more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. data by |
Sony’s Waterproof Tablet Goes On Sale In The U.S. | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | Sony’s latest Android tablet is now on sale in the U.S. Available for pre-order on Sony.com and available in Sony Stores on May 4th, the Z2 is Sony’s latest effort to shore up its crumbling brand. And an impressive one at that. The Z2 is the thinner, faster, and waterproof successor to the Z1 that hit in 2013. Darrell with the device when he spent some time with it last week, saying it’s so thin that he felt he could snap it in half. , the Z2 packs an impressive 10.1-inch display that really stands out. It also sports a 8MP camera, front-facing speakers and 3GB of RAM paired with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC running at 2.3 GHz. It’s an impressive kit but at $499 for the 16GB flavor, the Z2 is not a bargain. Still, Sony will not rebuild its brand by racing downmarket and selling Kindle Fire HD competitors. Nope, it needs the Z2 which can stand tall against the best of Samsung and Apple. [gallery ids="988505,988522,988523,988506,988507,988508"] |
Feastly Launches An ‘Airbnb For Dinner’ Marketplace | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 21 | Over the last few years, a number of marketplaces have popped up to enable people who have assets or time to share them with others: There’s Airbnb for hosts who wish to share their apartments with guests who wish to stay there; RelayRides to allow people to share their cars with others who want to rent them; and Lyft to connect drivers with passengers in their cities. Now there’s , which provides a marketplace to connect hungry eaters with cooks nearby. Feastly follows a pretty typical peer-to-peer model: People who are passionate cooks — whether they be professional, semi-professional, or amateur chefs — can list food that they plan to cook and invite eaters to buy a seat at their table during the meal. The goal is to lower the barrier of entry for cooks to enter the marketplace while also making dining more social. Launched in private beta in January, the platform has seen three-quarters of all cooks host multiple meals. The cost of meals has ranged from free to $150, but the average price tends to be about $35, according to co-founder Noah Karesh. Some chefs have already made thousands of dollars using the platform, even in private beta mode. For eaters — which the company calls “feasters” — the idea is to offer authentic or exotic foods to try out, as well as those that fit certain dietary lifestyles. Like other marketplaces that have launched over the last few years, Feastly is making its service available in one market after another. Currently available in San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., the company plans to expand its offering into other cities over time. To feed that expansion, the company has raised funding from investors that include Tim Draper, Mike Walsh, Scott and Cyan Banister, Lisa Gansky, Adri Capital, and others. |
Google Delays I/O Registration By A Week At The Last Minute | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | If you were planning to wake up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to get your name into the running for a Google I/O ticket as early as possible (not that timing matters, given that it’s a roulette this year): feel free to cancel that alarm. Google has just announced that its pushing back I/O registration by a week , from April 8th to April 15th. The reason? The system just isn’t ready yet. Says Google on their : “We’re still working to make the registration process even easier for you, and it will now be open four days starting next week (opening next Tuesday and closing Friday).” The I/O registration page . Also changing is the length of the registration window: Instead of running for three days (April 8th through the 10th), it’ll be open for four days (April 15th through 18th). Not changing, however, is the overall plan to offer up tickets roulette style. Tickets will be sold to randomly selected applicants, and given that they just extended the length of the registration window, it’ll probably be just a harder to win one. |
GrabTaxi Raises Series A, Prepares To Expand In Southeast Asia | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | , which claims to be the largest taxi app in Southeast Asia, has raised its Series A round from , a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek, an investment company owned by Singapore’s government. The startup’s CEO and founder Anthony Tan declined to disclose the exact amount of the funding, but said it was more than $10 million. The startup launched in 2012 and has since opened offices in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia (where it is called MyTeksi). GrabTaxi will use its new funding to expand into new cities. The app currently has 250,000 monthly users and over one million downloads. It claims to book a taxi every two seconds. GrabTaxi competes in the same space as several domestic taxi-calling apps, as well as and Rocket Internet’s , both of which are aggressively expanding in Southeast Asia. But Tan downplays the so-called “taxi app war.” He says that the demand in cities like Singapore or Bangkok is high enough to support several players and that the main challenge for taxi apps is not competing with each other, but changing human behavior. “We are all fighting to move people from taking taxis on the street, from streets hails to e-hails,” says Tan. “Our challenge is convincing people to move from street hailing to call centers, from SMS all the way to an app,” he adds. While Uber and Rocket Internet is Tan says GrabTaxi differentiates by closely examining the needs of local customers. In order to attract riders, GrabTaxi has focused on two things: convenience in inclement weather and safety, especially for women hailing cabs at night. The app uses drivers from different taxi networks and automatically shows riders which cars are nearest and have the most reliable drivers using an algorithm that includes variables like distance, traffic, and quality rankings. The app charges a low booking fee (for example, two ringgits, or 61 cents, in Malaysia). Like other taxi apps, GrabTaxi allows riders to rate their driver and track their vehicle’s movements using GPS. Tan says that in the near future, GrabTaxi will expand into new cities within the countries it already operates in instead of new countries. For example, it just launched in Ho Chi Minh City. Cebu, the second most populous city in the Philippines, is next on the list. |
Adobe Launches Primetime 2.0 With Cloud Ad Insertion, Adds Xbox 360 And Roku Support | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 7 | Adobe’s isn’t among the company’s most well-known services, but if you watched the Olympics online, chances are you have interacted with it. It’s Adobe’s platform for online TV delivery and monetization and it counts the likes of TBS, the Tennis Channel, Major League Baseball, WWE, M6 RTL Group, NBC, Comcast, Shaw and Bell Media in Canada among its users. And if you ever watch TV on your tablet or phone, chances are you’ve also used Primetime to tell the channel that you are a cable subscriber. Today, Adobe is launching version 2.0 of its service at the 2014 NAB show in Las Vegas. As part of this update, Primetime now includes a new cloud-based ad-insertion service that allows its users to insert ads into live, linear and on-demand content across platforms. Given that broadcasters can provide online viewers with far more targeted ads than through regular cable TV distribution, more flexible options for inserting ads into online streams is something they have long been asking for. Adobe argues that having this technology run in the cloud allows for “maximum flexibility and scale for companies that sell TV ads across devices.” Another new feature introduced with this update is Concurrency Monitoring. With this service, which is still in beta for now, TV providers can manage how many streams a user can access across each device. Concurrency monitoring gives TV programmers and operators the ability to see a count of active streams per user in real time. While Primetime already supported a wide variety of devices, today’s update also brings it to Xbox 365 and Roku devices. With the Xbox 360 still being one of the most popular media streamers in the U.S., that move alone will add a big number of potential new users to the platform. Also at NAB today, Adobe previewed 4K support for its customers. While there aren’t all that many 4K TVs in living rooms today, Adobe expects to ship support for this to its Primetime users later this year. In addition, Adobe also previewed support for the new for adaptive bitrate streaming. This feature will ship by the end of 2014. |
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