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Much Of Intel’s $740M Cloudera Investment Likely Went To Existing Shareholders | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Yesterday’s that Intel had invested $740 million in Hadoop-focused Cloudera was a surprise. The market hadn’t expected Intel’s investment to be so large. The deal was so large that industry watchers like TechCrunch and ticked through Cloudera’s seventh amended and restated certificate of incorporation, and tried to square the firm’s Series F Preferred Stock with the investment size. Things didn’t add up: Either Intel paid a much higher per-share price for Cloudera than did its , or it bought from sources outside the company. The former might be true, but the latter certainly is. Intel and Cloudera both confirmed with TechCrunch that Intel purchased shares from entities outside of Cloudera itself. This means that Intel did in fact spend $740 million to buy 18 percent of Cloudera, but that those dollars did not all go to Cloudera itself. In fact, it is feasible that none of them did. When asked, Intel declined to comment on whether it had purchased any shares directly from Cloudera. It would be sensible that it did, however. The $160 million Series F round of funding that Google Ventures took part in would only encompass of the Series F Preferred shares that Cloudera authorized. So, Intel could have picked up the remaining 3 million shares or so at the stated $14.56 per share for around $44 million. Cloudera declined to comment on whether Intel directly purchased shares as well, instead referring TechCrunch to the forthcoming Form D that will make the issue clear. This matters as the media generally reported — — that Intel had invested $740 million into Cloudera. That’s technically true, but mostly false: Intel definitely invested $740 million of its own dollars purchasing shares of Cloudera. But those shares appear to have come from various sources, at least some of which were outside the company. This paints a picture that is quite different from Intel investing that full dollar amount directly in the firm. Cloudera did not get 740 million Intel dollars. This means its cash hoard is far smaller than many think. How did we get here? Cloudera’s yesterday was accurate, but occluded, and the press skipped over the nuance (again, I am guilty of this). Here’s Cloudera on the money: Cloudera, the leader in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop™, today announced a $900 million round of financing with participation by top tier institutional and strategic investors. This financing round includes the previously-announced $160 million of funding from T. Rowe Price and three other top-tier public market investors, Google Ventures, and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment arm of Michael Dell and his family, and a significant equity investment by Intel that gives them an 18% share of Cloudera. Did you miss it? The $900 million is called a “round of financing,” while the $160 million is called “funding.” That’s the difference. When the media generally reported that Intel had invested $740 million directly, the companies were mum. That irks me slightly, but I must commit most of the opprobrium onto myself for being wrong. Here’s an Intel spokesperson on the deal: Intel wanted to acquire a meaningful share in the company given the importance of big data in the data center. This required Intel’s buy out of some existing stakes to reach the strategic level that we intended. Cloudera, via email, echoed Intel’s comments. The company’s CFO, Jim Frankola, told TechCrunch the following [Bolding: TechCrunch]: “ . The terms of the deal
(including price) reflect the deep and rich collaboration between the
two companies that extends from a commercial partnership, to joint R&D
roadmap to a board seat.” “ . We do not disclose
specifics with respect to either names or amounts. Our existing
investors did not want to sell. However, the company and investors
wanted to give Intel a significant ownership interest without diluting
the company too much. The only way to make that happen was for the
existing shareholders to sell a relatively small portion of their
shares. Which they did do, since the opportunity to collaborate with
Intel was so compelling.” “ . They stood aside
to allow Intel and the other new investors in without adding too much
dilution to the company.” It isn’t clear if Intel invested any money directly into Cloudera. That said, we are still looking into the matter. What we know now is that 740 million Intel dollars did not land in Cloudera’s bank account. |
Stratsys Acquires 3D Filament Researcher Interfacial Solutions | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | , the 3D-printing company that bought , has purchased , a Wisconsin-based R&D house and maker of plastic filament for FDM-style 3D printing. The company announced the . No purchase price was given. “Interfacial Solutions provides significant expertise in plastics and filament,” wrote David Reis, CEO of Stratasys. “We believe its knowledgeable team and experience will accelerate Stratasys’ materials development efforts for all of our FDM platforms, including MakerBot.” This purchase essentially streamlines Stratasys operations by allowing them to manufacture both the hardware (Stratasys professional and Makerbot’s entry-level models) and the filament. Not unlike traditional printer manufacturers, this purchase gives the company control over the printer and the “ink.” The transaction will close in Q2 2014. |
With Infamous: Second Son, Sony Has A Console Selling Exclusive | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | The console wars are in full swing, and Microsoft gave gamers a lot to get excited about with the launch of Titanfall last month. Sony fired back with its own high-profile console exclusive launch last week, and it’s a fan favorite that’s sure to get PlayStation gamers excited. is a spin-off for what is arguably the best original superhero story ever released as a video game, and it delivers the kind of appeal that could bring new buyers to a platform at a time when supply has finally caught up with demand. Second Son isn’t tied directly to the main story line of the previous Infamous games; instead, it follows the exploits of another Conduit (Bio-terrorist to the government forces trying to stop them, or superpowered person to the rest of us) as he tries to liberate Seattle and track down his archnemesis to steal her powers. In the process, he acquires not just one, but multiple power sets, which makes it feel a bit like you’re getting three games in one. Luckily, if you’ve been exploring the open world map much at all, getting acclimated and upgraded with each new power set won’t feel like a chore, and despite being different enough, they all have enough similarities to make switching between using each natural enough. The game is little more than an excuse to use a city as your playground for an extended super-powered romp, with a morality choice engine built in, and entertaining mini-games including the spray painting missions, which make clever use of the PS4’s motion-sensing DualShock controller to mimic using an action spray paint can to deface walls and structures. Sucker Punch’s work on Infamous: Second Son admittedly feels familiar; you won’t find too much here that wasn’t already present in Infamous or Infamous 2, but that can be a very good thing, and in this case, it is; with strong legacy titles and characters, players aren’t looking for studios to reinvent the wheel, and in fact they mostly want another round of what worked best about the previous versions, with refinements and additions for variety’s sake. Second Son delivers that almost perfectly, maintaining the charm of the original but offering plenty of new stuff to get excited about, and doing so with a story line that’s fresh enough that gamers new to the franchise won’t feel like there’s too much of an information gap to overcome. This is a title that’s good enough to buy a console for. That’s not to say I necessarily see huge numbers of people seeking out the PS4 just to play Infamous: Second Son, but it is a game that will make those who do decide to pick Sony in the console wars feel justified in their decision. A lot of critics have called out the lack of must-have games for this round of new consoles, but the latest from Sucker Punch should start to quiet some of those voices. |
HBO Go Still Recovering From Outage During Game Of Thrones Premiere | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | HBO Go crashed during the Game of Thrones’ season premiere due to “overwhelming demand,” potentially affecting millions of viewers. The service .” But that might not be enough for fans who are almost as devastated as they were during [SPOILER ALERT] last season’s Red Wedding. In a statement to TechCrunch, a HBO Go representative said: “HBO GO did experience issues due to overwhelming demand around the premiere of Game of Thrones. The service has returned to several platforms and we are working hard towards full recovery, which we expect soon.” This is not the first time HBO Go has crashed during a highly-anticipated episode. An outage last month caused similar outrage among fans. In fact, some speculated that to stop subscribers from sharing their login information with non-paying users, which HBO CEO Richard Plepler has denied. |
What Games Are: Fire TV And The “Casual Console” | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | Sometimes I have to walk a fine line between my weekday job and my writing. Not because I’m enjoined from writing (actually actively encourages it) but to rather to avoid the perception of conflict-of-interest. It’s easy to write about a game design issue, for example, or talk about the fate of VR because they’re not likely to be perceived as influenced by my work situation. On the other hand writing about topics like microconsoles is a lot trickier. But then sometimes a long comes a piece of news that comes close. This is one such time, because of course Amazon can’t be ignored. Fire TV is sitting on the front page of Amazon.com, featured by one of those Bezos letters that launched the Kindle. It’s loud, it’s proud, it’s Androidy and it’s very exciting. So I ask that you trust that what I’m writing here is said sans my OUYA hat, even though there are clear crossovers. Okay? Okay. Fire TV is basically doing what everybody’s been saying Apple TV should be doing by now. It’s a sexy little black box that sits under your television, and from such humble beginnings you can access all of your entertainment. 80% of its pitch is about having video and music from many of the usual sources. You have your Netflix, your Pandora, your Hulu and your Amazon Instant Video. Of course you don’t have your iTunes, but similarly on Apple TV there’s no Amazon Instant Video. Fire TV also has the neat addition of voice search (and the bold claim that it actually works) and this apparently makes . The other 20% is that Fire TV is a microconsole. With the addition of a joypad (which comes with some free credits to buy games), suddenly you’re playing and and right on your television at pretty cheap prices. Many of those games come from well known sources such as Double Fine, app developers like Future Games of London and a few indies like Golden Tricycle. In addition Amazon is making games of its own, with launch title gaining reviews of the “ ” variety. And the company has also hired famous game designers Kim Swift and Clint Hocking. Interesting. Fire TV also appears at a time when the streaming market seems to be heating up. Not 24 hours after its launch the news was going around that Google is readying a second crack at that space with , although the prospects for that product seem a little more muted out of the gate. Roku is determined to maintain its leadership position with its very own . And everybody’s waiting on Apple to show its hand, with rumors indicating that it’ll happen soon. Most of the above will include games. Overall it’s an exciting time, one which poses a lot of questions. Some of the biggest questions are: There are lots of possible scenarios in which either could prove true. But perhaps the most interesting question is whether the kind of casual gaming that media streamers seem to envision is a real market. Or is it just a broken idea? A frustrating but persistent perception that floats around the microconsole is the idea that because it’s based on Android that must mean that its games are just mobile games appearing on TV. That somehow their Android-ness actually represents a use case rather than just an operating system, and that that use case is wrong for television. In essence the logic of that argument goes as follows: It’s easy to think of platforms in these sorts of narratives, but the reality is operating systems are just technical layers that translate input and output. The fact that Linux first appeared on PC, for example, doesn’t bring PC-ness to all the other uses of Linux. Furthermore the narrative is one only known to developers, journalists and folks in or around the technology scene. The average Joe or Jane has no idea that their Kindles and Samsung Galaxies share similar operating systems. Nor do they care. Why should they, as long as their devices do what their supposed to? Moreover the idea that casual games are purely second screen and always short is wrong. The casual PC games scene has thrived for a decade (through publishers like Big Fish) and it’s single screen. Games like may use short sessions, but is relatively long and yet played by casual gamers in their droves. Hidden object games typically take a half hour per map and people play those games for hours on end. “Casual” doesn’t describe a paradigm of play. It describes a cultural grouping (others include “core”, “indie”, “casino”) which could be better described as “ “. By this I mean a relatively disengaged customer type that likes to play games but does not seek them out. Muggles are often unaware of the wider gaming world except in passing. Muggles are hard to reach through non-traditional marketing because they aren’t paying attention. Muggles tend to prefer games that conform to aesthetic archetypes that they already hold, and they tend to judge games in a binary fashion (is it fun or not?). Muggles also tend to be cheap, preferring to play games for free where possible. It’s also hard to sell gaming hardware to muggles. Only Nintendo has managed to do this over the years, such as the Wii and . Most of the rest of the time muggles tend to find their way into games via devices whose primary use is something else, like a mobile phone, a tablet or a PC. Gaming is what muggles do in their off hours with machines intended for other things. The bet that media streamers such as Fire TV make is that there’s a trojan horse opportunity for gaming on TV, that by primarily selling video but then also offering gaming they will turn on millions of casual gamers. Are they right? There is precedent here. I used to work as the senior game development manager for an interactive TV gaming portal six years ago. There were several such portals across services such as DirectTV and BSkyB, and they were located deep in what was colloquially called the “red button” menu of set top boxes. The entire red button business essentially worked on the basis of the spare 1MB of RAM than happened to be left over on cable set top boxes. The boxes also had pretty terrible processor power, no local storage and their payment mechanisms used to work through dial-up connections over phone lines. They were also a pretty heavily regulated form of game (in the UK at least) because they were perceived to fall under the purview of the rules that covered broadcasting. Oh and the primary control mechanism for red button games were TV remotes. Nonetheless at its height the red button business thrived. Many of its games were essentially basic kids platformers stuff based on Saturday morning cartoons, clones of and , word games and games based on game shows. Red button served a small but vital, and very decidedly casual, marketplace with a pay-to-play offering that in many ways foresaw the free-to-play model common in casual game markets today. Its overall addressable market was balkanized and small (essentially dependent on the whims of national television providers), but it worked better than most people know. Though eventually superseded by the app economy, the red button business proves that, yes, casual gamers can be coaxed into playing games on television if the conditions are right. Much as the tablet or the PC act as casual game vectors when not being used for other purposes, red button games often attracted customers every bit as loyal as those we think of when we describe “whales” (or other ignominious terms) in today’s free-to-play world. In many ways I see media streamer gaming as a kind of red button 2.0. The host technology has advanced immeasurably, meaning that the games on offer can be much more powerful, but the proposition is surprisingly familiar. This time it’s games secondarily offered to Netflix, but more visible than in the old days of red button (on the Fire TV it’s a top-line menu item for example). And given that the streamers are cheap, there’s every possibility that lots of muggles will buy them just to check them out. And that then leads them to explore what games might be on offer. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Well, almost. I think the one mistake that Amazon has made with Fire TV is its joypad. Selling a gaming pad separate to the main unit constitutes , and peripheral barriers can be pretty limiting. After the early adopter phase (that’s you, me and everyone else reading this blog) it could be that pad adoption drops to as low as 20%, in effect chopping the addressable gaming audience to 1/5th of Fire TV customers. If it were up to me, I’d bundle them together as standard. Furthermore I worry that the joypad is too complicated for the muggle player. Successful casual gaming platforms are always accessible. Tablet and smartphone games have a very low cognitive gap because learning how to play them boils down to touch it with your finger and drag. After that all the rest of the learning is about the game rather than the interface. Similarly successful casual games on PC stay away from WASD and use only the mouse and its left button. Anything beyond that risks being seen as too complicated. Fire TV’s joypad, on the other hand, is the typical twin stick, D-pad, face buttons, bumpers and triggers as seen on PlayStation, Xbox, OUYA and other gaming consoles. Historically that kind of joypad has always put off casual gamers because it’s seen as complicated and techie. Muggles just want to play a game, not to feel like that they need to earn a gaming driving license before they can start to have fun. The great lesson that Nintendo taught (and then forgot) with Wii was that casual gamers prefer simplicity. Not in the slightly-mad vein of Kinect but in the ordinary sense. Give a muggle a wand or a simple pad with only a couple of buttons and he gets it straight away. He’s immediately having fun. Give him something more than that and he’s always asking “what does this button do?”, feeling hesitant and inclined to give up, saying “i’m not a gamer” before returning to on his iPad. Ideally what the “casual console” idea needs is a game controller that’s no more complicated than the old SNES joypad or the Wii Mote, and then included with every system. A controller that’s good enough to handle a wide variety of games but which doesn’t look like some sort of fearsome engine. A controller that is perhaps extensible (again, like Wii Mote) to serve core game interests, but whose root use case is easy peasy. Once that problem is solved then I think the casual console will really take off. |
Secret And Whisper Get Their Own Chinese Clones | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | and have hit a dubious benchmark of success. Both have been cloned by developers in China. Secret this weekend, while Tech In Asia was the first English-language publication to . Mimi means “secret” in Chinese, while Xiaosheng means “quiet.” Mimi was made by Shenzhen Wumii Technology Limited, which , while Xiaosheng’s developer shares the app’s name, according to . We’ve contacted both for comment. and are both available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. The copies aren’t surprising, consider the success of both Secret and Whisper in the U.S. and the buzz around anonymous apps. Furthermore, Secret is not available for phone numbers outside the U.S. and though Whisper allows users from around the world, the bulk of its secrets are in English. It makes sense that developers would want to piggyback on the apps’ popularity by making “localized” versions while they are still hot.
Mimi’s interface is a near-perfect clone of Secret, down to the style of icons used to denote individual anonymous users in the comments section of each post. But there is one key difference. In order to see secrets from your friends, Mimi first requires you to send at least three invitations through SMS, messaging app WeChat, and several popular Chinese social networks. Though this ploy seems like an obvious growth hack, Mimi insists that it is to protect your friends’ privacy. On the other hand, Secret asks you to verify your mobile number before seeing posts from your friends. (Secret’s co-founder David Byttow emailed me to clarify that the app does require you to have between three to five friends, depending on various factors, and then it the app just notes that posts are from your “circle” instead of a friend or “friend of a friend.”) Xiaosheng works the same way Whisper does: you enter your secret, select fonts and a background image, and then share it with all the app’s users. Like Whisper, you can sort the secrets of other users by the latest, most popular, or their location.
Though Xiaosheng is a near-perfect duplicate of Whisper, it’s important to note that Whisper’s own resemblance to the defunct PostSecret app was . The cloning of Secret and Whisper is symptomatic of a problem other developers of popular apps, , have dealt with. As mobile penetration in China and other countries increase, smartphone users will want access to the same types of apps as their counterparts in the U.S. If those apps aren’t available quickly enough, it’s likely that a local developer will step up to the plate before startups have time to launch their own localized versions. In fact, Tech In Asia says that “it’s unfair to call these Chinese apps rip-offs, as the originals are useless to a Chinese audience without any local content.” The near-identical UIs, however, might make it hard for Secret and Whisper to agree. |
The ‘World’s Largest Tetris Game’ Was Played On A Philadelphia Skyscraper This Weekend | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6P1sskPc4w&w=640&h=360] On Saturday night, a 29-story Philadelphia skyscraper hosted what’s purported to be the “world’s largest game of Tetris,” and likely the world’s largest videogame overall. A team led by Drexel University computer science professor hacked into the LED lighting system of the building in downtown Philadelphia to create a larger-than-life Tetris game that could be played during the city’s ongoing tech week. The spoke with Lee and his team about the project and created a fantastic video report that you can watch . Unfortunately that video wasn’t available for embed on other sites, but you can also see the game in action in the video embedded above. Lee told the :
“People will think of this as a game, but I think of this as a public ornament. Technology has sort of made us isolated from each other. I want us to be with each other, and play with each other.” This is the second year in a row that Lee’s team has hacked into the more than 1,400 LED lights on the Cira Centre to create large scale versions of classic arcade games. In April 2013, Lee’s team on the skyscraper, and scored the Guinness Record for the world’s largest architectural videogame display. This past weekend’s Tetris game was twice as large in size as the Pong display, so they’re expecting to set another record, Lee told the NYT. A very big video game is not rocket science or world peace. But sometimes these days it can feel like technology is all about the money, metrics, and “ .” So it’s nice to see people playing with tech in a more, well, playful way — the same way that likely made them first fall in love with it. |
Apple Said To Be Looking To Bring Display Chip Design Mostly In-House | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 1 | Apple is looking to acquire a 55 percent stake in a joint venture between Sharp and Taiwanese company Powerchip formed to develop chips for use in smartphone displays, according to a new . The stake Apple is after is currently owned by Renesas Electronics, and the division is called Renesas SP Drivers. It consists of around 240 Japan-based employees, and is the world’s number one producer of “drivers and controllers for small and midsize LCDs” according to Nikkei. Apple would be looking to close its purchase of Renesas’ share by the end of summer, and in so doing it would take over a unit that’s responsible for around one-third of the worldwide supply of display chip components. The processors specifically help determine how good a display is in terms of resolution and color performance, and also go a long way to dictate the overall power efficiency of the phone or tablet using the display, since screens make up a huge hunk of battery usage overall. The other partners in the unit include Sharp, which has 25 percent and is expected to also sell its stake to Apple if the deal goes through and Apple requests it do so as part of the bargain. Powerchip, on the other hand, owns 20 percent and handles manufacturing, and probably will maintain its stake. The final arrangement could look something like the deal Apple has with GT Advanced to produce its sapphire tech, albeit with a more sizeable ownership stake for Cupertino. Apple is said to be looking to make this investment in order to protect and own its smartphone display component design tech. We’ve seen the company bring component design more in-house in the past, including the latest in the , after previously depending primarily on third-party sources to provide the designs and the manufacturing. If this report is correct, display chips might be the next thing it brings in-house. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment, but they have not provided a response as of this writing. |
From Office Space To Silicon Valley: How The World Has Changed In Mike Judge’s Tech Wonderland | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | Tonight viewers will be treated to Hollywood’s latest take on the startups in Mike Judge’s on HBO. But while Judge might be known best for his comedy, he is no stranger to the tech world — he used to be an engineer himself, and about fifteen years ago he filmed what would become a cult classic in . Things were different then — programmers wore ties instead of hoodies, worked in cubicle farms instead of hacker hostels, and saved their code to floppy disks instead of housing it at Github. Instead of malfunctioning hologram machines, they were plagued by printers that refused to print. In some ways, the bright, colorful canvas that Judge plays with in shows us how far we’ve come since , which also centered around a group of downtrodden engineers. That film, which was released in 1999, followed three hapless programmers who were updating bank software ahead of the so-called “ .” There wasn’t the conspicuous display of wealth back then, and it’s humbling to see programmers working out of an office park rather than the huge tech campuses or SOMA lofts that they’re used to today. (It’s probably worth noting that was set and filmed in Austin, not Silicon Valley, but I think the point stands.) At the end of the day, however, the characters we see in aren’t that different from their forbears in . They still have the same social awkwardness, the same insecurities, and the same difficulty adjusting to a society around them that doesn’t quite understand what they do. It’s something I asked Mike Judge about at a Code/Media event in Santa Monica last week. That is, what’s changed since then? Why are things so different today? “ to me… in my mind it was set in the late ’80s,” Judge said. “I think the landscape has changed. The personality types are the same, but at that time the barrier to entry was so much higher. Nowadays the question isn’t, ‘Can you get this to work?’ It’s ‘Will the public buy this?'” He went on to explain that today the cost of building a startup is so much lower, and funding is so much easier to come by, that there’s no reason not to strike out on your own. What’s missing in is the feeling of opportunity and entrepreneurship that is commonplace not just in Judge’s , but in the real-life version as well. I was reminded of this the other day while watching the movie again the other day and was struck by one scene in particular: “What if we’re still doing this when we’re 50?” one of the characters asks. “It would be nice to have that sort of job security,” another replies. For the Silicon Valley of 2014, that wouldn’t even be a question. The idea of being a mindless software drone for the next 25 years isn’t even a possibility for most young engineers. They don’t want job security, they want to feel like they’re changing the world. |
The Market Welcomed Tech IPOs Last Week, Even As Industry Giants Slipped | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | 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 . A good crop, you could say. On the other end of the stick, a number of young-ish, but already public technology companies took it on the nose: Facebook fell 4.61% on Friday, while Twitter gave up 2.07% and Yelp fell 6.87%. Those drops, while steep, are not the only declines those firms have experienced recently. Facebook, ending the week at $56.75 is down from a 52 week high of $72.59. Twitter currently rates $43.14 per share, far under its 52 week high of $74.73. Yelp trades for $65.76, again deeply beneath its 52 week peak of $101.75. Commentary has been on “momentum stocks” in the tech sector, with fair enough reason: The NASDAQ is riding high, pushing valuations up across the sector, helping a busy IPO calendar. The getting is good at the moment, as the most recent IPO cadre demonstrates, and so investors are trying to get. There isn’s a single uniting reason for the declines. Twitter’s slow was its downfall. Yelp is in some . And Facebook appears to have tracked down on a dearth of news. Kidding, of course, it recently got into the . Despite slipping luster on the larger firms, the Street appears amply open to letting new firms hit the market. This could bode well for Box, a money-losing storage cloud storage company that is in an upcoming public offering. The market is not all roses for new offerings: Keep in mind that the massively profitable King Digital has , mostly on investor fear concerning its . Still, Twitter, Facebook, and their brethren are held in high esteem by the market. Facebook’s current trailing twelve month PE is nearly 100. For now, however, high flying firms are having their wings clipped as smaller players look to take flight. |
Bootstrapping Into Brazil’s Travel Metasearch Market With Voopter | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | Global Founders Capital has made its first Brazilian investment in , the newest player in Brazil’s travel metasearch market joining . , and also operate in the country, though only Mundi and Voopter are Brazilian startups. The Series A is Voopter’s first capital raise, after 100 percent bootstrapping for the first three years as a part-time project. Voopter co-founders Pettersom Paiva and Tales Tommasini met working in advertising in Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil. Tommasini moved to Spain in 2003 and invited Paiva, who started managing performance clients for advertising giant Media Contacts in 2005. “Seeing how we were in Spain, the principal digital industry is travel. So I had a lot of travel clients, like Expedia, handling their digital marketing. We tracked their conversions and had to optimize their trafficking against performance. So I got to know the metasearch engines, which were already starting to garner attention in 2005, like Kayak and SkyScanner.” After a stint managing publisher relations for TradeDoubler, Europe’s biggest performance marketing network, Paiva decided he had enough subject-matter expertise, paired with Tommasini’s interface and programming skills, to launch their own metasearch engine. As a hobby. While they kept their day jobs. After a couple of years they decided it was time to go full time and move to Brazil. “The markets we were in before with Voopter, Spain and Portugal are much more stable and advanced,” Paiva says, “but there are a lot more competitors, and the markets are already shrinking because of the economic crisis. So if you’re the eighth player in a saturated market, it’s a really risky proposition. We got to Brazil and there was only one competitor in the whole market segment — .” And things are not looking so great for Mundi after its principal investor, Globo, in the company in January and started laying off staff. Voopter is the lone player in Brazil’s travel market that maintains a 100 percent neutral position as a flight aggregator. Travel agencies, which dominate the market, as well as Mundi, prioritize listings in accordance with who they have the best partner deal with, versus who is offering the best price to the end consumer. “It’s one approach,” says Paiva. Voopter displays search results from airlines directly, as well as travel agencies, which in Brazil often offer a cheaper ticket price, and they make money every time a lead from Voopter converts to a sale. They’ve been turning a profit since they launched in Brazil last year, and maintain 25 percent profit margins, although Paiva says they might reduce them to make way for customer-acquisition campaigns. The snazziest feature? Truly multi-date searches that let you pick up to four non-sequential dates for each leg of the trip. And after bootstrapping for their first three years of operation, Paiva and Tommasini decided it was time to raise some capital. Voopter is the latest Brazilian startup to raise capital abroad. “Brazilian investors offered a lot less money,” Paiva says. “Here in Brazil, what you find more than anything is angels, and we were already past that stage. The sensation I got was that the investment firms in Brazil are a lot more conservative, and Global Founders is much more aggressive. You’re going for No. 1 or nothing. And our mission in Brazil is to be the No. 1 travel metasearch engine, and now we have the resources.” Global Founders Capital is a for Rocket Internet, the world’s largest digital incubator, which has funded Brazilian startups like Dafiti, a fashion ecommerce site that closed 2012 with $200mm in revenue. GFC invests aggressively in emerging markets, and Brazil’s travel market is certainly emergent in some respects. Brazil is late to the low-cost airfare party that has been going strong in the U.S., Europe and Asia, which the Wall Street Journal “government regulation, poor airport infrastructure and the dominance of flag carriers.” But with “rising wages, government support, improving infrastructure and the failure or consolidation of some of the region’s biggest full-service carriers,” Brazilians are starting to spend more time flying the friendly skies. Paiva says the market is fertile for low-cost airlines – and flight comparison sites like Voopter. “The first reason is that demand for air travel was repressed by really high ticket prices. Air travel used to be a privilege reserved only for the highest economic class. It’s still expensive, but it’s a lot cheaper than they used to be. And that has to do with the introduction of new airlines in Brazil like Azul and Avianca.” Since JetBlue founder David Neeleman’s discount airline Azul (“Blue”) landed in Brazil in 2009, Brazilians taking flight have jumped 40 percent to 94.6 million people. That’s still fewer people than take the bus, but bus travel is down 3 percent in the same period to 126 million people. In 2011, about 5 percent of the country (10.7 million Brazilians) . And more Brazilians are going abroad than ever. Brazilians are the of foreign tourists in New York alone, and the fastest-growing. Paiva also cites a piece of Open Skies legislation expected to be approved this year, which would allow foreign airlines to operate domestic routes in Brazil, for 3.6 million World Cup travelers this summer (four out of five will be Brazilians). Which will mean more competition and lower prices. “Normally they’re really protectionist. Brazil is an extremely protectionist market in various sectors, including air,” Paiva explains. “But the Brazilian government knows that the air solution is more rapid than building more roads or train tracks, which is expensive. And you’re looking at decades, not years. So for all the problems Brazil has with travel infrastructure, the fastest and most efficient solution in the short term is more flights.” Brazil’s flying class has been growing for the last decade. Boeing a 400 percent increase in air travel in Latin America over the next two decades. And in Brazil, they’re starting to buy online. Only 20 percent of tourism bookings in Brazil are made online — people actually visit physical travel agencies; online travel is a industry in Brazil, but it’s by the Olympics. “In the last five years, the number of people with Internet access doubled in Brazil. In the same timeframe, the number of airline passengers grew at the same proportion,” Paiva. “Coincidence? Absolutely not. Among the diverse factors contributing to the rapid expansion of the travel industry in Brazil, more specifically the airline sector, the Internet has been without a doubt the most important.” Brazil’s online travel agency market is booming, but it’s dominated by travel agencies. Rio de Janeiro-based HotelUrbano, which last summer from Insight Venture Partners, and from Tiger Capital and Insight, is expected to top $250 million in revenue this year – and they rank eighth on the list of Brazil’s comparison travel sites, capturing . Mundi ranks fourth with 9 percent of the web traffic share of voice. |
Bing Is Here To Stay | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | Every couple of months, new about Microsoft trying to sell off its search engine pop up. At some point late last year, the was that if then-CEO candidate Stephen Elop would take the reins of the company, he would sell Bing as soon as possible. After last week’s , I think we can now put those rumors to rest. Bing is now a core part of Microsoft’s strategy, and there is no way it could sell Bing without disrupting many of the services it has recently built. There are some credible that back in 2012, Microsoft did indeed try to sell Bing to Facebook. But that was 2012 when Bing was “just” a search engine. Today, things look different. Bing offers much more than basic search and it’s become a core platform for Microsoft. The best example for how important Bing has become to Microsoft is probably — the company’s newly announced personal digital assistant. It pulls from a huge variety of services that are all part of the larger Bing ecosystem. It uses Bing’s entity engine to find facts, Bing’s machine learning tools, the Bing-branded voice-recognition service to actually understand its users, and the Bing stream-processing engine to parse real-time information from a huge range of sources. The jury is still out if Cortana can compete with the likes of Siri and Google Now (or if users are even all that interested in these tools to begin with), but none of what Microsoft built here would have been possible without Bing as the platform to power it all. It’s worth remembering that Bing isn’t only responsible for powering big set pieces like Cortana. It’s also baked into lots of small features in Windows, including the built-in search tools. makes life a little bit easier for developers in Visual Studio, too. Bing Maps may not get a lot of play in the press (or with users, I think), but it’s a credible alternative to Google Maps and its 3D maps (still in preview and only on Windows 8.1) are actually more detailed than Google’s. It’s impossible to know if this was always Microsoft’s master plan for Bing — but chances are it wasn’t. Now, however, it looks as if this attempt at building a smart search engine has given Microsoft a way to be a bit more agile in reacting to market demands. While it isn’t leapfrogging the competition, it can at least offer a meaningful challenge to some of the recent advances from Google and Apple. Whether that’s enough remains to be seen, but at least it gives the rest of the field a reason to stay paranoid and push their services forward, too. |
The Fallacy Of Android-First | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | To build a messaging app on iPhone, you have to create your own communication channel — essentially an IM service. But on Android, you can simply replace the built-in Messages app, while still using the underlying SMS/MMS medium. You save yourself the effort of building a communication service. And, your users needn’t invite their friends: they’ll receive messages in the same place they always have. That lowers the barrier to trying your app, easing adoption. (This difference isn’t based on any technical limitation; it’s purely a choice by Apple and Google, one that either company could reverse in the future.) But what of the conventional wisdom that Android users won’t download apps? We looked at the data and didn’t see it. Android users were less likely to pay for apps, to download games, and to pay for in-app content. But they were certainly downloading. Android had more users globally, and was on track to surpass the iOS installed base in the U.S. (It has since done so.) Android’s UX was improving, and a few from iPhone. We heard other hopeful rumors: Android apps were easier to build. Adoption of recent Android versions was high enough that we could limit our backward compatibility, avoid serious fragmentation, and still have a large potential user base. And, while many Android apps were still clunky compared to their iPhone counterparts, companies like and were starting to show that you could build a polished, delightful experience on Android. So we jumped in. polished our rusty Java skills and had an Android alpha out by February 2013. We posted a public beta in July. And in October, we launched with , including from a few folks who sang our praises specifically because we went Android-first. Android users are sick of watching new apps launch on iPhone, with Android as an often-underwhelming afterthought. We launched on April 2, and we’ve pulled Emu for Android out of the Play Store. We hope we’ll return to Android someday, but our team is too small to innovate and iterate on multiple platforms simultaneously. We’ve concluded iPhone is a better place to be: Our decision to build on top of SMS/MMS involved huge, unanticipated technical hurdles. Even when you don’t support older Android versions, fragmentation is a huge drain on resources. Google’s tools and documentation are less advanced, and less stable, than Apple’s. Android’s larger install base doesn’t translate into a larger addressable market. Android attracted us because it provided access to SMS and MMS — the traditional, ubiqutious text messaging channels built into every phone. By developing on top of them, we thought we’d reduce the barrier to adoption. We were right — but didn’t anticipate the costs: Android’s SMS APIs are not well-documented, and Google has changed them over time. Prior to Android 4.4, individual apps can block each other from receiving SMSes; other apps on a given device will affect whether yours works properly. MMS (group and picture messaging) is an old protocol, and implemented in different ways by different carriers. It also requires that we know a carrier’s specific MMS settings. We can read these automatically on older versions of Android, but after Android 4.1, we’re blocked from doing so. So, when we encounter a mobile carrier we haven’t seen before, we need to ask the user to go into Settings and send us the details. Since manufacturers and carriers often modify Android’s Settings app, we can’t always tell the user where (or whether) she might find them. Fragmentation worsens the MMS problem. Carriers modify the OS to support their particular MMS idiosyncrasies. This results in bugs that are intermittent and difficult to pin down. The challenge isn’t simply fixing them; it’s that we have no way of knowing what they are, what’s causing them, or if they’re actually bugs in our app (vs. problems with the device or service). All of this means significantly more time spent developing, debugging, and testing a portion of our product that doesn’t distinguish us from what the user already had. A stable SMS/MMS app, in itself, isn’t interesting. Meanwhile, 2013’s explosion of messaging services suggested that we’d overvalued the low barrier to adoption: it seemed many people were happy to try new services, under the right conditions. As long as we wanted to build on SMS and MMS, we had to be on Android. Abandoning them didn’t require we abandon Android, but it did allow us to reconsider iPhone. Android’s fragmentation is a contentious topic. When I , I encountered both hostility and denial. So here are two examples from our experience: On a Galaxy S4 with Samsung’s Multi-Window feature enabled, Emu’s popup windows are squished by the keyboard. This doesn’t happen on the Galaxy S4 sold by Google, without Samsung’s software modifications; or with the Multi-Window feature on the Galaxy S3. We’ve investigated, but because it relates to Samsung-specific functionality, we probably can’t fix it without direct cooperation from them. On some Galaxy Nexus phones, when you’re listening to Pandora and get a notification sound from Emu, Pandora’s volume drops. This doesn’t happen with other apps’ notifications, nor does it happen with streaming apps other than Pandora, nor does it happen on any other device. Our backward compatibility isn’t broad, by Android standards. Initially, we supported Android 4.0 (released fall 2011) and later. We’ve since dropped 4.0 support to try and reduce fragmentation further. And yet, according to Google Analytics, our app has been installed on over 300 different devices since October. In some cases, those “devices” might be different variants of the same device, but bear in mind that, for instance, the Verizon Galaxy S4, the AT&T Galaxy S4, and the direct-from-Google Galaxy S4 are running at least somewhat different operating systems. In contrast, our iPhone app supports only iOS 7 (released fall 2013). That means five devices–iPhone 4, 4S, 5, 5s, and 5c. Each runs the same operating system. It’s rare to encounter a bug that affects, say, an iPhone 5 but not a 5s. If the app works on one device it will usually work on all five. The problem with fragmentation isn’t merely the quantity of bugs. It’s also the difficulty of finding them, and of understanding them well enough to fix them. We can’t test on every Android device we support, so we get bug reports in the field that we couldn’t anticipate and can’t reproduce. And, plenty of bugs go unreported and, therefore, unnoticed. In, “ ,” Steve Cheney writes (emphasis mine): All of my conversations over the past year…confirm a simple hard reality: This is due to a multitude of reasons: less sophisticated tools, generally more cumbersome APIs, fewer exposed advanced features, enormous QA issues brought on by fragmentation, etc. The rough rule of thumb is for every iOS engineer you actually need two Android engineers—or twice the development time. This isn’t an issue of platform preference or capabilities; it’s a question of how we make the most of limited time, energy, and capital – especially in an early-stage startup, where significant iteration is inevitable. Steve Cheney’s post mentions, “less sophisticated tools” and “more cumbersome APIs.” That matched our experience as well. Eclipse is slow, over-featured, and hard on CPU and RAM. Google’s replacement, Android Studio (based on IntelliJ), is far better – but still suffers from all of those problems. Xcode isn’t perfect, but by and large it’s fast, clean, and straightforward. And Xcode 5 fixes most of the major issues I had with earlier versions. Google’s APIs can be buggy compared with Apple’s. For instance: We encountered performance issues with Android’s built-in JSON library. (Oddly, Google has two JSON libraries; the one that doesn’t ship with Android performed much better.) Several text-layout and view-layout bugs created situations where a seemingly harmless visual change would create significant UI bugs. If you want to add a drop-shadow to a view, you may need to rearrange its parent view first. Until recently, putting a Google Map in a scrolling view created serious screen-redraw problems. Until recently, putting a Google Map in a scrolling view resulted in this. Google’s documentation is far easier to search than Apple’s, but can be confusing and inconsistent. Several times, I read through an article about how to implement something, only to discover a note at the bottom telling me it actually wasn’t possible. Sometimes there are conflicting docs for the same thing in different places. Sample apps don’t compile. And Stack Overflow, that miracle of community documentation for developers on any platform, often dries up when it comes to detailed UI/UX issues on Android. Android apps also take much longer to compile than iOS, so you’ll find yourself waiting around a bit. And, while iOS developers often use the built-in simulator for quick testing, Android’s equivalent is slow, with a startup time measured in minutes. The iOS world is far from perfect. Apple’s provisioning and certificate system is a nightmare, and its manual app-review system is painful and seemingly arbitrary, especially for quick fixes and experiments. I would love to see some of Android Studio’s code-completion and code-navigation features make their way into Xcode. Android’s XML-based approach to non-code resources — simple graphics, strings, dimensions, colors, etc. — does a nice job of separating design-related things from the rest of the code. But it’s not enough. , Android has 52 percent of the U.S. smartphone install base, while iOS has 41 percent – a hefty number in either case, but Android is larger and growing. However, new versions of Android are adopted more slowly. That’s not because Android users are reluctant to upgrade; it’s an outgrowth of Android’s open-source nature, which allows carriers and device manufacturers to customize it. When Samsung or HTC releases a new phone, they choose a recent version of Android, then modify it — sometimes slightly, sometimes significantly. When Google releases a newer Android, the manufacturer doesn’t necessarily re-modify it to support existing phones, presumably because there’s no incentive to do so. The result: it’s possible to buy a new, relatively high-end Android phone running an outdated version of Android. Apple, on the other hand, only ships phones with its latest OS, and maintains several years’ backward compatibility. In concrete terms: By building for two years’ worth of Android (as we did originally with 4.0+), you’ll support about 40 percent of the U.S. smartphone install base. Removing 4.0-4.1 support leaves you with one year’s worth of OS compatibility, and that number drops to 12.5 percent. By building for iOS 7 only, you’ll support 32 percent of the U.S. smartphone install base. If nothing else, this suggests that size of install base alone shouldn’t be a factor in choosing a platform. That doesn’t mean Emu will get more users on iPhone; it merely describes the total number of people who can install our app if they want to. We have more specific hypotheses about how switching platforms might affect our ability to reach target users, but they’re still hypotheses. We’ll write more once we see whether our iPhone launch confirms or refutes them. In the year since we moved to Android, it’s become more popular to launch Android-first. And for some products it may very well be the right answer. But consider the trade-offs carefully. We’ll never know how things would have gone had we stuck with iPhone from the beginning. But here’s my guess: we would have launched our beta in April (not July) and our 1.0 in August (not October). We’d be building more functionality in less time. Our UX would be more polished, we’d have fewer bugs, and our addressable market would actually be larger. |
Dropbox Reportedly Secures $500M+ In Debt Financing | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | Online storage company has obtained a credit facility of more than $500 million, according to . I’ve emailed Dropbox for confirmation and will update if I hear back. Apparently the Financial Times first broke the news in , but Recode says it has confirmed the financing with “sources close to the situation.” Earlier this year, in equity funding at a $10 billion valuation. (The company never officially announced the round, but earlier reports were .) So it seems this will be a period of aggressive growth for the company. We may get a better sense of its plans at a press event scheduled for April 9. Dropbox isn’t the only young-ish tech company looking to raise more money through credit and debt — Square just secured a credit facility in the “low hundreds of millions,” . It looks the news of the Dropbox credit line first broke a week ago, . |
Anti-Tech Protesters Are Telling Kevin Rose’s Neighbors That He’s A “Parasite” | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose says that his San Francisco home was visited by protesters today, who held up a banner calling him a “parasite” and distributed leaflets with the same message. What did he do to deserve this? Well, he invested in startups. Rose of what he said was a flyer distributed to his neighbors. It says, in part: As a partner venture capitalist at Google Ventures, Kevin directs the flow of capital from Google into the tech startup bubble that is destroying San Francisco. The start-ups that he funds bring the swarms of young entrepreneurs that have ravaged the landscapes of San Francisco and Oakland. The flyer claims to speak for the service workers who “serve them coffee, deliver them food, suck their cocks [?], watch their kids, and mop their floors” and goes on to complain that most techies are “just like Kevin Rose,” though again, it’s short on specific criticisms, aside from pointing out that techies make a lot of money. This is far from the first protest to focus on the impact of the tech boom on San Francisco, but the ones I’ve heard about until now have focused on companies and the industry as a whole ( ), rather than targeting individuals at home. While Rose didn’t sound happy about the protest, he also , “I did agree w/ them that we need to solve rising rents, keep the SF culture, and crack down on landlords booting folks out.” I’ve reached out to Rose (who’s a contributor to TechCrunch through ) for additional comment and will update if I hear back. I’d contact the protesters as well, but as far as I can tell, there’s no specific organization claiming responsibility. A from “The Counterforce” offers more details about why Rose in particular was targeted. It starts a photo of the protest with a banner declaring “IMA SNIP SNIP YR BALLZ [smiley face], then goes through his history as an entrepreneur and an investor, concluding: To this end, we now make our first clear demand of Google. We demand that Google give three billion dollars to an anarchist organization of our choosing. This money will then be used to create autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California. In these communities, whether in San Francisco or in the woods, no one will ever have to pay rent and housing will be free. With this three billion from Google, we will solve the housing crisis in the Bay Area and prove to the world that an anarchist world is not only possible but in fact irrepressible. If given the chance, most humans will pursue a course towards increased freedom and greater liberty. As it stands, only people like Kevin Rose are given the opportunity to reshape their world, and look at what they do with those opportunities. Also, just to clarify a couple of points from my initial post, apparently the photo . And there’s been at least at the home of a Google employee. [image ] |
eBay Is Betting On Bringing Commerce To Wearables And Other Connected Devices | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | The next frontier for eBay could be bringing commerce to wearables and other connected devices. In fact, the company has formed a brand-new group of engineers and designers internally, as part of its Innovation and New Ventures group, that focuses on creating ways to incorporate commerce into anything with a screen. Part of eBay’s resurgence in the past five years has been attributed to the company’s early bet on mobile and tablet technologies. This effort was spearheaded by Steve Yankovich, who now heads the Innovation and New Ventures group at the company. In those early days of the iPhone, and beyond, Yankovich explained that the company built for every platform and for the mobile web and didn’t really debate over which to focus on singularly. Yankovich wants to take a similar approach to developing for new types of devices and screens. The Innovations group as a whole was created to focus on redefining commerce across eBay Inc., including the marketplace, enterprise business and PayPal. “We’re not focused on short-term revenue, we’re trying to see what the future looks like.” Last year, the group began building an app for a potential smartwatch and thinking through what a commerce app would look like on a user’s wrist. A few weeks ago, eBay its app for the Samsung Galaxy Gear, and an As Yankovich explained to us, he sees a future where we have smart devices, beyond just phones and tablets, that use personalization, historical behavior and the sensors of a connected life to make it possible for consumers to shop and pay. He specifically calls this Zero Effort Commerce (ZEC), which he says is a future in which commerce intelligently happens automatically through our smart devices. ZEC will anticipate your shopping needs and act upon them. “For example, a really smart digital personal assistant would take advantage of ZEC,” says Yankovich. “I have a friend who has a personal assistant who keeps track of his needs. His personal assistant replaces ceiling fan light bulbs, replaces shirts that she noted show wear, constantly fills the fridge, changes the wiper blades in cars, and on and on. In this person’s world everything he needs and wants automatically happens. We can work towards building a virtual personal assistant that uses personalization, historical behavior and the coming sensors of the connected home and life around us to do much the same thing but for all of us.” In terms of where Yankovich sees the next frontier for wearables and screens heading, clearly as more watches hit the market, eBay will continue to develop. But the group also has been working on other projects, such as in shopping malls. And there are other areas, he says, where connected glass makes sense. For example, he sees an opportunity for connected glass in cars that could tell you where the nearest gas station is or order a replacement part for your car. While Yankovich recognizes that some of these “moonshots” are far out, he believes that eBay has a unique opportunity to get ahead of commerce considering the company’s marketplace and payments assets via PayPal. eBay and PayPal have not been historically categorized as part of the innovators in the tech world, but the company is making interesting and changing internal cultures. Can this make eBay the next Google and Google X? Probably not, and Carl Icahn certainly thinks that the company I wouldn’t count eBay out just yet. The fact that it’s thinking beyond the present and using its resources to move into under-developed areas like the offline world, as well as new connected devices makes me think that there could be a new era of innovation for eBay. And the company is clearly doing everything to make sure it won’t be left in the dust when it comes to the future of commerce. |
Tap Your Phone, Get Stuff (Including Funding) | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | TechCrunch Earlier this week, , an investor with RRE in New York City, about all the various startups that offer consumers the ability to order goods and services directly from their phones. These startups — Uber is the prime example — turn our phones into remote controls. I call it, “ ” And if we look at the list, we see many startups that have not only raised decent early-stage rounds of financing, but some of them are quite big. I’m writing this week’s column for people who want to build mobile businesses. Right now, this seems to be the . I’ll explain why below. Briefly, it’s hard to breakout with a game, and less likely to be funded early. Photosharing and location-based apps need something special out of the gate to get funded, but then require explosive growth — I can already think of one seeded photosharing app that raised about $2 million from Valley angels, launched after a private beta, and is most certainly in a deadpool right now. Messaging apps or other apps with network effects (like marketplaces) could use a jolt, and I think we’ll see more rolling out soon, but those , especially across two mobile platforms. And, then, we have this category — “tap your phone, get stuff.” Out of the box, it just works. Look at the image above. How many names you not only recognize, but how many of these apps you use. Investors want to fund these apps! Consumers want to be able to order stuff from their phone, quickly. They’ll often pay a premium (in-app) to do so. Apps in these categories are often more straight-forward. I do not mean to suggest this is all easy, but beyond a few screens and settings, consumers often don’t need more than that. Once a startup presents a service to the consumer, grabs their payment and credit card information, and accepts the promise of the user, most of the work to fulfill that service is done without the consumer knowing or seeing anything. Yes, I know you can see Ubers and Lyfts driving around on your phone, but most often, consumers leave the app in which they initiated the transaction and are kept up-to-date through a mix of text messages and/or push notifications. On the , the best startups in this category build different forms of software to manage these logistics and keep things efficient. This usually includes systems that route requests to those who will fulfill them, crossing the web to mobile and back again. Right now, with the in a mix of freelance, hourly, or contract employment (if employed at all), startups are . In the Bay Area, where many of these services start, it’s not unusual for companies in this category to have more consumer demand than they can handle, all constrained by the fact that they can’t hire enough drivers, enough skilled workers, and so forth. With mobile, thankfully, workers can work when they choose, and startups can access labor at the edge of the network, often at will. Businesses in this category that can use mobile to find equilibrium in the market for specific goods and services can be rewarded with decent margins, and if there’s enough market activity, those margins can add up quickly and snowball — just ask Uber and Lyft. Now, I don’t mean to trivialize that each step of the process is easy, but given the conditions in mobile right now, these are the businesses that are working earlier in their life cycle, these are the businesses that consumers understand, want, and talk about with their friends, and these are the businesses that investors have figured out fast enough to open their checkbooks if they see things working in real life. Will only a few special startups figure out how to optimize their local models and expand them geographically, like Uber masterfully has? Will all these swiss army knife services consolidate into a single brand eventually? With fewer barriers to entry, will competition fragment services geographically, stifle expansion, and ultimately reduce the size of the pie? In the face of such competition, what will keep consumers (and employees) loyal? But, in the long-term, we’re either all dead — or your mobile company will be. Either way, when it comes to mobile-first, and given the funding climate, I can’t think of a better category to launch in. As you see on Schalfman’s chart, many categories are crowded, so if you venture down this path, make sure to present a different kind of solution or different market. I know it seems crowded, but I’m convinced other non-obvious opportunities exist. If you see them, please do get in touch. |
As March Madness Winds Down ShotTracker Gears Up To Make Everyone Clutch | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | In the annals of sports there’s no bigger hero than the clutch shooter, whether it’s to get Kentucky to the , or . In an effort to make every would-be baller a scoring machine, , a small startup from Kansas City, has been demonstrating their new wearable technology at the tournament. The company has developed a wearable sleeve, which can be used in conjunction with strategically placed sensors and the company’s proprietary software to track shooters from anywhere on the court and determine how to improve their stroke. Launched by serial entrepreneurs and , ShotTracker has raised $1 million in seed financing and is taking pre-orders now for its sensors and software. The idea came to Ianni while watching his then 10-year-old son shoot hoops. “I thought if i had technology on his shooting arm that was on a chip [like a Nike Fuel band] I could use that like a trigger. Then if I could monitor the motions of the shot and monitor for shot attempts and I could put a sensor on the net and I would have shot attempts made and missed,” Ianni said. The missing piece of the puzzle was motion detection sensors that could follow a shooter’s position on the court. “No one was really capitalizing on the market,” said Ross. “There are 10 million competitive basketball players between the ages of 7 and 17.” The two met through a network of entrepreneurs . ShotTracker has a partnership with to develop the technology and has already raised roughly $1 million in seed financing. The company is taking pre-orders for the ShotTracker now and expects the device to retail for roughly $99. “We’ll have a middle tier offering and a enterprise offering as well,” Ianni said. For Ross, a former college basketball player, the most impressive thing about the technology is its firmware. “It starts learning your shot and builds your profile.” The package includes a chip that is embedded in a shooting sleeve or wristband, and another that clips on to the back of the net. Once a user downloads and launches the app, the devices sync immediately with the hardware. ShotTracker is currently demo-ing its tech at “Bracket Town” in AT&T’s sponsor booth. “This is sports specific wearable tech,” said Ianni. There are already several hundred pre-orders, and through Ross, the company has relationships and partnerships with several teams at various levels both high school, college and professional, he said. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/79111529] |
Million Man Ban | Devin Coldewey | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | Participating in democracy “takes a certain amount of civic courage.” Although I never expected to say this, I found the words of Justice Scalia (in Doe v. Reed) coming to mind these past few weeks. In the Internet era, it takes more civic courage then ever: more of our speech is public, and much of it has global reach. Billions are capable of seeing your tweet, reading your email to the editor, or perusing your voter registration data. We’re used to the good side of global visibility, because the good side is what we always attend to first: a band breaks out because of their video on YouTube; a kid in Bangladesh crowdsources money for an operation; a proposed law withers under the heat of criticism. But as always, the silver lining is in the shape of a cloud: trolls bully a middle schooler in another state into suicide; scams and malware trip across continents; seeds of hatred find fertile soil. The Internet is also the biggest mob of all time. Split it into a dozen or a hundred wildly different factions, and each still dwarfs the slaves of Rome or the peasantry of 18th-century France. More than enough, in other words, to take up a cause. What this ensures is that no matter what position you take, however enlightened, ignorant, hurtful, helpful, or anything else, there are a million people ready to side with you and just as many taking dead aim. Consider too that your life is public; you have made it public, and it has been made public for you. Some things remain sacred by default: your vote, for instance, or the thoughts that only you know, or the words you write in your journal before you go to bed. Sharing these is left to your discretion. But that is not the case for other things. Your appearance and position in the world are not something you may choose whether you disclose; when you step outside, you have surrendered both. And when you exercise your right to free speech, you are by definition making that speech publicly — if it wasn’t public, how could anyone prevent you from speaking?. Another thing you cannot fail to disclose is your ethics. Like Hugo’s guillotine, an ethical question “does not permit you to be neutral.” You cannot fail to answer, because that is what defines an ethical choice: to do one thing or another. To remain silent on an ethical question is a show of civic cowardice, a choice which must be scorned. So when it comes to an issue that is both political and ethical, the Internet has raised the stakes higher than ever. It’s a simple equation: your ethics must be spoken, your political speech must be public, and your public speech may be seen, judged, and responded to by countless people. If you want your ideas to be heard by as many people as possible, you’re in luck. If you want your ideas to be known by as few people as possible, I’m sorry, but you are living in the wrong era. On the other hand, to speak out on an issue in today’s broadcast culture is often to take part in a movement larger (in headcount, at least) than many of those famous in history for their size and effectiveness. Slacktivism may not be particularly inspiring, but you can’t beat it for scale. Yet it’s scale that has given rise over the last week or so (this Mozilla business) to some interesting allegations. “Lynch mob,” I believe, was a common reference. Leaving aside the irony of this outrageous perversion of that phrase, I find it interesting that Internet protests, almost universally a laughing stock for years now, have suddenly been determined to be deadly effective. When millions tweeted, phoned their representatives, and signed petitions a few weeks back for “The Day We Fight Back,” everyone seemed convinced that such armchair activism was pure folly! But now a man has been “bullied” out of his job by people doing the same thing. Which is it, effective or ineffective? As this is not an ethical question, we may land somewhere in the middle. When the tools of nonviolent resistance — boycotts, public speech, civil disobedience — overlap with the domain in which they are applied, they are effective. Gandhi could never have tweeted up a free India. But when it comes to a web-native company that offers its most valuable services online, what better form of nonviolent resistance is there than speaking out online, showing your numbers online, boycotting the company online, making those who support the offender unwelcome online? Call it The Million Man Ban. (As this is was an issue of civil rights, I think this play on the original is permissible; otherwise, I should not have attempted it.) Your speech is free. But to speak is to invite response — and many will answer the call. More than ever, in fact, which is as heartening in one case as it is daunting in another. Combine this with the fact that many things we once considered private are simply no longer so, and it’s clear that your civic courage is sure to be tried before long. The web is a global democracy like the democracies of old: the voice of one person may be heard by all, and on any issue. It may be exhorted, protested, denied, or prosecuted, but it will never be silenced. Just don’t expect the billions you’re addressing to be silent, either. |
The Lean Hardware Startup: Investing in Hardware Startups | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 6 | This is the fourth part of a series on . Nest and Oculus got acquired for billions, Jawbone and GoPro are going IPO, multiple projects are crossing the $1 million bar on Kickstarter. Something is happening in hardware. Yet many investors from angels to institutional investors are still reluctant to get into hardware before it’s a proven market. At HAXLR8R we typically invest a year before the product hits the market. Here is some of what we learned doing it across over 40 startups. Our investments range from , , , wearable , and even . We cover a fairly good cross-section of what is going on in hardware. We also learned and wrote about iterative prototyping, production, financing and positioning during the four acceleration programs we ran. As part of the recruiting phase we also receive hundreds of applications. This gives us a sense of near-future innovations. We also have the tough challenge of selecting for our program the startups we believe we can help shape into businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Our focus is early-stage investment. We look typically at those who reached the prototype stage, so we have built a checklist to narrow down choices. We generally don’t consider products at the “idea” stage that are not brought by successful repeaters or unless they have a solid indication of demand (from extensive customer discovery, for instance). We start the list with “Is something working?” on the product side. Are all necessary skills covered from mechanical, electrical, software engineering? Is someone in charge of business / customers / sales? Along with those two, another necessary element is to have the right spirit: a combination of optimism, persistence and resourcefulness. This is often fueled by a sense of mission. Other things we look at but are more “fixable” are positioning, demand, distribution and an inspiring vision beyond the first product. Many new hardware products are coming out because smartphones have changed both the economics of sensors and displays but also brought affordable connectivity via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Yet, pure hardware is at risk to be copied and commoditized quickly. To have a defensible competitive advantage, a startup must be doing something that is hard to do. We see three things that can make a key difference: software, manufacturing knowledge and community. Putting together some sensors, connectivity, a battery, a nice form factor will most often be just an entry point to software, where the hard IP is. Mastering manufacturing is a hurdle for many hardwarians, and many see it as a necessary evil rather than a key skill and asset. Our view on this is summarized by the first rule of Lean Hardware: “No hardware plan survives contact with a factory.” Learn the tools that make the things, and leverage the expertise of production engineers to find better solutions. Startups who master manufacturing will strive. While not a startup, Apple is an obvious example. Last, a community assembled to support the product can be a very valuable asset. This is certainly the case for GoPro, Makerbot and Oculus. Beyond the accelerator program, we found that having more vocabulary to talk about hardware informed our thinking. This is how we defined this list of “-wares” that raise red flags for investment. If you can think of more, comments are welcome! The first one is a frequent case in the maker community. We call them FUNware. While those products ask interesting questions and offer surprising answers, they don’t qualify as startups. For instance, the “Chindogu” movement launched by Kenji Kawakami is about funny and creative inventions. Along with those, here are the 12 “ware” categories to be careful with. Here’s the breakdown: FUNware is not a business. EASYware is not defensible. SAMEware is not positioned well enough. SOLUTIONware is the typical project coming out of universities: great technology in search of applications. We also say it has a “hammer” problem: I have a hammer so there must be nails! We take only a few of those in every accelerator batch because they require much more effort for product/market fit, positioning and customer discovery. VAPORware is an increasing occurrence on crowdfunding platforms. When not a complete scam, it is naively optimistic and end up not shipping. LAMEware did not keep its promise and ships a mediocre product. FAILware kept on specs but successfully built something nobody wants. LATEware validated a market (via crowdfunding, for instance) but handled manufacturing so badly it shipped after the competitors it woke up. LOSSware has been priced badly and can’t make a profit. Frequent in crowdfunding, too. While it might ship to its backers (sometimes at a loss, or forcing founders to eat ramen for a year) it will never cross the Bridge of Death (https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/28/financing-lean-hardware/). BOREware gets boring after a short time. From a few conversations we had with wearable enthusiasts, a current big trend in wearables is to stop wearing them. FUTUREware is so futuristic that the majority won’t buy it until many moons have passed. The company will have a hard time keeping the lights on waiting for its market to come to age. LOCALware is so tied to the local ecosystem it can’t be done elsewhere. In Japan this is known as the “Galapagos Syndrome” with things like the i-mode (precursor of the iPhone app ecosystem), FeliCa NFC technology and many more things. Can you think of products in those categories? If it’s a successful project it probably never fell into any of them during the life cycle.
Each investor has his or her favorite timing depending on fund size and economic model: starting from concept to various levels of prototype development; post-Kickstarter when demand has been proven; after shipping when ratings start coming in; and when scaling retail or pre-IPO. On the startup side, cash flow can be hard to manage and fundraising might be necessary at stages that are not optimal — in particular the dreadful “Bridge of Death” after the first shipment to backers. This is the time when a startup gets paid last, rather than first in the case of crowdfunding. HAXLR8R focuses on the prototype stage, with the aim to bring the company to its first shipment. The fund at the origin of the program, HAX, has invested at later stages in companies such as Leap Motion, FormLabs, Incident gTar and more. Investor interest rises when risk goes down, and hardware is the riskiest before good reviews come in. A strong Kickstarter proves some demand but not if backers will be satisfied with the product, neither if the product can actually cross the chasm beyond innovators and early adopters. From our observations, if a project goes the crowdfunding route, a VC will generally not consider it unless it passes $1 million. Angels might be keen above $250k, often matching your backing with a similar amount. Without a Kickstarter, founders had better be repeat entrepreneurs, have knowledge of manufacturing or pitch something extremely inspiring.
We believe we are at the dawn of the second wave of the hardware revolution. The first generation consisted of products that had just been made possible: trackers, 3D printers, drones, etc. While they were breaking ground in their own right, they also had major flaws. Trackers provided data that was not very meaningful, not very fun and often failed at helping build new habits or leverage existing ones. Desktop 3D printers were now affordable but too slow to be turned into businesses — the manufacturing revolution will need affordable, fast and high-quality printers. Drones were fun to fly for hobbyists but were prevented from building larger businesses such as delivery by performance and regulations. The second wave will soon be upon us: more fun and habit-forming, social and viral, personal and contextual. Startups are now embedding tech into ‘real’ things, impacting the way we’ll learn tennis or skateboarding, for example. This new wave will finally be a force to influence strong habits such as sitting with the right posture or smoking cessation. Computer vision and robots are getting to the point where they will be affordable to small businesses in areas such as cleaning or painting. We will display this explosion of innovation in May at our San Francisco Demo Day. We believe the future of hardware does not have to be a smart-pocalypse. As investors, we can make a difference in bringing thoughtful products to the world. [slideshare id=32741574&style=border:1px solid #CCC; border-width:1px 1px 0; margin-bottom:5px; max-width: 100%;&sc=no] |
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Pinterest Launches Exploration-Focused Guided Search And Reveals Custom Categories For Mobile | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Today Pinterest announced two new mobile products: to lead you on chains of explorations, and a third one that will be unveiled in a few minutes, and Custom Categories for making it easier to browse your way to cool stuff through a dynamic interface. Guided Search will be available on and in an app that was just pushed. Custom Categories will slowly roll out across devices in the next few months. The press event at Pinterest’s SF headquarters also saw CEO Ben Silbermann give a momentum update, saying , and that number is up 50% in the last 6 months. He also revealed that 90% of pins now include related pins, and the algorithm that picks these suggestions is now better at showing products that you might also be interested but don’t look the same or are another version of the same product. Pinterest team member Naveen Gavini explained “Guided search is focused on discovery rather than finding. The serendipitous experience of finding things you didn’t know you were looking for is what makes it so special.” To see exactly how Guided Search looks in action, check out this video from Pinterest: Pinterest explains Guided Search saying “ When users start a search, they can choose between pins, boards, and pinners. After they enter their initial search, Pinterest will show a slideable row of additional terms that can be tapped to refine a search. For example, a search of “Plants” will reveal suggestions like “for shade” “potted” and “keep mosquitos away”. Even a relatively specific query like “hairstyles for medium length hair” will offer ways to go deeper still, such as “bangs”. Custom Categories creates a dynamic feed of very specific topics, such as Bob Dylan. Silbermann described how the Pinterest team picked the traditional categories available from the homescreen somewhat haphazardly and there was a lot of debate about what to offer next. Custom Categories allow you to “Choose Your Own Adventure” (the theme of the press event), finding categories that match your taste no matter how obscure. You can browse pins about the category, and slide through a slick row of suggestions of related categories that looks similar to the additional search suggestions from Guided Search. While these updates aren’t revolutionary, they could make Pinterest both more accessible to new users who don’t know what to search for, and hardcore who are always looking for ways to spend more time combing the service for inspiration and delight. Digital nesting just got easier. |
Pinterest Hits 30 Billion Total Pins, Up 50% In 6 Months | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Tonight at an event in the company’s San Francisco headquarters, CEO Ben Silbermann announced that users had contributed more than 30 billion Pins since the service was founded, a number that has grown by nearly 50 percent in the past six months alone. Users have also created more than 750 million boards in that time. ( Our initial story said 30 million, not 30 billion. Big difference.) That growth has stemmed, in part, from the introduction of Related Pins, something the company released about a year ago. Nowadays more than 90 percent of Pins have Related Pins connected to them, and the number of people who repin Related Pins has grown by 20 percent. Silbermann compared Pinterest to curation that already exists elsewhere in the world. Specifically, how collections on Pinterest are like curated art in museums, articles and photos in magazines, and collections of clothing at a retail location. As Pinterest has grown up, it’s sought to provide a lot more information about the things its users are Pinning. For food,it introduced the ability to add full recipes. And just a few months ago, Pinterest released Place Pins. “Boards themselves aren’t just containing images, they’re containing objects,” Silbermann said. “When you see a movie on Pinterest, it’s likely to have the actor and the director.” In March, Pinterest said that was coming from its native mobile apps. And previously it announced that . eMarketer Pinterest at 40 million monthly users in the U.S., an audience big enough to drive serious ad revenue, and that doesn’t seem to include mobile. With all those Pins begin carefully curated by its Pinners, Pinterest needed a way to surface them better. And so, the company introduced a , as well as the ability for its users to create custom categories. |
Storyful’s Verification Tech Could Stop Fake News From Spreading On Facebook | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Twitter is the king of real time news, but people’s eagerness to retweet juicy stories sometimes outweighs their willingness to verify the facts first, leading them to parrot misinformation. That’s why the most intersting thing about with to create a isn’t about refferal traffic or find things to cover. It’s that putting Storyful’s news verification process in the spotlight could make the Internet more trustworthy. The fundamental problem is that people love being the first on their block to share a big news story. Whether it’s a natural disaster, celebrity death, geopolitical crisis, or a manhunt, we crave to be seen as having our fingers on the pulse of the world. The allure of hundreds of likes or retweets can cloud our bullshit detectors. And so we blindly share. There are plenty of examples of how falsehoods spiral out of control on social media, as Storyful lays out. “ Luckily, Storyful has developed a that can distinguish between real and fake news. It digs to identify the original source of the news, and then reviews the content and collects evidence to determine its trustworthy. Factors it looks at include: Until now, this technology was only available through paid licenses to newsrooms. Bloggers on a budget and the general public didn’t have access. But now, the Newswire Facebook launched today. There are issues with the idea that Facebook Newswire’s editors will have control of what’s important enough to verify or debunk. Even if limited, though, it provides real-time stream of news content from verified primary sources. For example, Storyful helped verify a photo of a firing on alleged terrorists, shots of a being tested before its recovery mission for the capscized South Korean ferry, an image of , and an taken by an astronaut. All of these were taken by local journalists and other primary sources, and any of them could have been faked. Thanks to Storyful’s verification technology, journalists could cover these news items with confidence. Newswire is also publishing a #DailyDebunk post that outs an erroneous story. For example, a supposedly from Everest this month was revealed to be from 2011. The terms of Facebook’s partnership with Storyful, which was recently acquired by News Corp, haven’t been disclosed. It’s likely, though, that through data, cash, or exposure, Facebook is effectively compensating Storyful to open a free stream of verified stories to journalists. But the potential for this partnership could go much further. Facebook Newswire could become social version of Snopes, where anyone can go to check whether urban myths and news stories are believed to be real or fake. Facebook could even go a step further, potentially appending a link to Newswire or a warning if it sees people sharing posts that Storyful has assessed to be fake. By creating a resource that promotes truth in the news, the two companies could debunk false stories and reduce their spread across the Interner. Because if fewer false stories proliferate on Facebook, they’ll inspire fewer erroneous news articles, blog posts, and tweets. The web gave us a way to share news faster than we could fact-check it. Storyful’s technology could bring distribution and verification back into balance to create a more truthful Internet. |
Mozilla Names Firefox OS Co-Founder Andreas Gal As Its New CTO | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | When Mozilla named JavaScript inventor Brendan Eich , it left the CTO position Eich previously occupied unfilled. Today, Mozilla that will become its new CTO. Most recently, he was Mozilla’s Director of Research and later VP of Mobile and Research. Gal, who joined Mozilla six years ago, brings an impressive resume to the job. At Mozilla, he worked on many of the core technologies behind Firefox, including its Tracemonkey just-in-time JavaScript compiler, and co-founded projects like , the HTML5 Flash player and Firefox for Android. He also played a crucial role in the Firefox OS project, which he essentially co-founded back when it was still called Boot to Gecko. Gal also worked on and , Mozilla’s new programming language and the core of what could become the next generation of its browser engine. In his , Gal notes that he believes that “w It’s no surprise Gal puts this much emphasis on mobile — an area Mozilla was slow to embrace. According to Mozilla’s interim CEO Chris Beard, Gal will remain Mozilla’s VP of Mobile “ |
Co-Founder And CEO Marcus Nelson Departs Addvocate | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Marcus Nelson, who co-founded and served as CEO of social media startup , said that he’s no longer at the company. Nelson doesn’t offer any details about the reasons for his departure, but it sounds like this wasn’t entirely by choice. In , he wrote, “These are never easy situations, but there really was no choice. I join the legions of other founders who’ve reached the same decision.” , when Nelson left his position as head of social at Salesforce.com. (Before his time at Salesforce, Nelson co-founded customer service company UserVoice.) The company built tools to help businesses encourage their employees to share on social media, last year. Earlier this year, it where customers set their own prices. I’ve emailed Addvocate for comment, and to confirm that Chief Operating Officer Piers Cooper will be succeeding Nelson as CEO. I’ll update this post if I hear back. According to his post, Nelson doesn’t have any concrete plans about what he’s doing next. He also wrote that despite his departure, “I will cheer [Addvocate] on from afar.” Cooper just sent me the following statement: I can confirm that although Marcus is no longer with Addvocate he remains a great supporter of the company and our mission to continue executing on his vision. Marcus is a gifted serial entrepreneur that can recognize opportunities way before the market and has the courage to pursue them. |
Google+ Is Walking Dead | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Gundotra after eight years. The first obvious question is where this leaves Google+, Gundotra’s baby and primary project for the past several of those years. What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform — essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. A Google representative has vehemently denied these claims. “Today’s news has no impact on our Google+ strategy — we have an incredibly talented team that will continue to build great user experiences across Google+, Hangouts and Photos.” According to two sources, Google has apparently been reshuffling the teams that used to form the core of Google+, a group numbering between 1,000 and 1,200 employees. We hear that there’s a new building on campus, so many of those people are getting moved physically, as well — not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure. As part of these staff changes, the Google Hangouts team will be moving to the Android team, and it’s likely that the photos team will follow, these people said. Basically, talent will be shifting away from the Google+ kingdom and towards Android as a platform, we’re hearing. We’ve heard Google has not yet decided what to do with the teams not going to Android, and that Google+ is not “officially” dead, more like walking dead: “When you fire the top dog and take away all resources it is what it is.” It will take copious amounts of work for it to un-zombie, if that’s even a possibility. It’s not clear, according to our sources’ intel, where the rest of the employees will go, but the assumption is that Larry Page will follow Mark Zuckerberg’s lead at Facebook and send the bulk of them to mobile roles. This would telegraph a major acceleration of mobile efforts in general, rather than G+. The teams will apparently be building “widgets,” which take advantage of Google+ as a platform, rather than a focus on G+ as its own integral product. One big change for Google+ is that there will no longer be a policy of “required” Google+ integrations for Google products, something that has become de rigueur for most product updates. One impetus of this was that the YouTube integration with Google+ did not go well, something that the public recognized through the comments blowback, but that was also seen inside the company as a rocky move. That doesn’t mean that all G+ integrations will go away, though. Gmail will continue to have it, but there may be some scaling back that keeps the “sign-on” aspects without the heavy-handed pasting over of G+. We’ve heard that there were tensions between Gundotra and others inside the company, especially surrounding the “forced” integrations of Google+ into products like YouTube and Gmail. Apparently, once each of those integrations was made, they were initially being claimed as “active user” wins until Page stepped in and made a distinction. Taking Gundotra’s place inside Google will be David Besbris, though we hear that parts of Google+ are under “the person responsible for Chrome,” according to one source. It’s not clear if this is Sundar Pichai, Google’s head of Chrome and Android, or why this would happen. “It’s complicated,” our source said. Google PR denies this account. We’ve heard that the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook may have been a factor in the phasing out of Gundotra’s grand experiment. There was a perception that Google had missed the “biggest acquisition in the social space.” Though another source tells us that Google knew what was up with WhatsApp but simply didn’t want to pay out for it. Google+ is and always has been about turning every Google user into a signed-in Google user, period. If true, these changes dovetail with that focus going forward, with Google+ acting as a backbone rather than a front-end service. That being said, there are a ton of really interesting things going on in Google+ like its efforts in imaging. Having the photos team integrate the technologies backing Google+ photos tightly into the Android camera product, for instance, could be a net win for Android users. In the long run, the issues with Google+ didn’t especially stem from the design of the product itself, but more from the way it interjected itself into your day-to-day Google experience like some unwelcome hairy spider. Perhaps these changes will scale back the grating party crashing? One of Gundotra’s final G+ posts was “ .” |
Stewart Butterfield’s Slack Raised $43M Million In New Funding | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | , a collaboration platform founded by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, is raising $30 million-plus in new funding, we’ve learned. (Update: the company confirmed the day after we published our scoop that it the final amount was ). For background, Butterfield left Yahoo and started TinySpeck (and a multiplayer game called Glitch) but then decided to take a different turn, tackling the enterprise market. Thus Slack was born as a collaboration platform that lets users port in conversations and links to other work from dozens of other apps (including Dropbox, Google Docs, GitHub and Asana). The aim is to track progress on different projects in one platform; reducing email overload. Over the past few months, Slack has been growing fast, quickly becoming the rising new star in the enterprise collaboration market. The company had said earlier this year that it had plenty of cash leftover from the Glitch days and was heading towards profitability. In the current market it makes sense for the company to raise as growth is ramping up. In terms of the product itself, we’ve found Slack particularly useful for mobile interactions in teams, and the app lacks the kind of annoying bugs that we’ve all found in its predecessors. And that Slack is growing is a testament to the fact that there is something lacking in the competition. But still, it lacks threaded integrations, which prevents our team from using it. TinySpeck had previously raised $17 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Rob Solomon, SV Angel, Jeff Weiner and Bradley Horowitz. It also wouldn’t be surprising if the company has been the target of some acquisition interest. We’ve reached out to Slack for comment. |
Automattic Buys Scroll Kit, A Code-Free Website Builder That Once Got Legal Heat From The NYT | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | WordPress maker acquisition spree to build out its platform continues apace. Today comes news that it has acquired , a New York-based startup that had developed a platform for people to build websites without needing to know any code, or, in the words of co-founders Cody Brown and Kate Ray announcing the news, “a process for making the web that was more like drawing on a piece of paper.” The Scroll Kit editor is being shut down in three months as its co-founders integrate some of the features into WordPress. “I can’t go into details about what we’re working on but I can say that we’re shutting down Scroll Kit so we can work on the core WordPress.com product,” Brown tells me. “We’re drawn to WordPress because it’s an opportunity to take the best features inside Scroll Kit and reach an audience that is many magnitudes larger.” “You’ll be able to download all of your work in the next six months and after that, scrolls will continue to be online but the site will become read only,” the pair write on the Scroll Kit website announcing the news. The price has not been disclosed and all that Brown tells us is, “We are very happy with the financial terms of the deal.” This is Automattic’s 14th acquisition, with the previous one being . The site had $225,000 from the likes of the Knight Foundation, and its advisers included media industry academic/supremo Clay Shirky. But it also had a more controversial string on its bow: Scroll Kit is the company that received a after it managed to rebuild its much-celebrated, much-labored interactive experience in an hour. (It was done to demonstrate how awesome Scroll Kit was; but the experiment was short-lived since the startup didn’t have the means to fight the NYT. The founders make a wink-wink reference to this chapter of their history in their acquisition announcement, where, among the various well-known and less-known people they thank, they include “The New York Times legal department for their jurisprudence.”) For Automattic, Scroll Kit will give it some technology that can be used to enhance ways that people can use WordPress to create websites. While today there are thousands of ready-made themes that you can use for a WordPress-powered site, what Scroll Kit will do is give users the ability to add even more creativity to the process, if they so choose. And that facility is something that applies not just to average, non-technical types, but also those who do know code, but don’t know design. As Ryan pointed out when he two years ago, “While the tool proves that you don’t need to know how to code to build something beautiful, the real point is to show that even if you do know how to code, that doesn’t mean you will be able to build a great website.” |
Warburg Pincus Buys Compensation Software Service PayScale For Up To $100 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Making its fourth acquisition of a technology company in fewer than three weeks, is announcing that it has bought compensation software services vendor in a deal worth up to $100 million. In the 14 years since its launch in 2000, PayScale has developed a massive database of individual compensation profiles, containing salary information on 40 million jobs, to provide a snapshot of current market salaries through software available online. The Seattle-based company has over 3,000 enterprise subscriptions in 13 countries, and those businesses are using PayScale’s software to make salary decisions for more than 2 million employees, according to a release from the company. Since March, Warburg Pincus has bought PayScale; spent over $1 billion to acquire Electronic Funds Source, a corporate payments solutions business; Mercator, the Dubai-based information technology developer providing logistics services like luggage tracking for airlines; and Liepin.com, a Chinese online job recruitment service. Money from the Warburg Pincus buyout of PayScale will be used to support marketing and sales initiatives and new hires, according to a statement from the company. “It’s a large and growing addressable market with small- and medium-sized businesses,” writes Warburg Pincus spokesman Ed Trissel, in an email. “It’s also a disruptive, crowd source solution in an industry that has traditionally relied on third-party data.” Since its launch, PayScale had raised over $33 million from investors including Montlake Capital, Madrona Venture Group, Fluke Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Allen & Co., and SAP Ventures. Raymond James & Associates served as financial adviser to PayScale. |
The FyreTV Porn Streamer Maker Is Suing Amazon For Trademark Infringement | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Remember the ? Probably not, but it was a media streamer, much like Amazon’s new FireTV streamer, that was released in 2008. Unlike Amazon’s FireTV, however, the FyreTV streams porn and only porn. And now the company behind the device is suing Amazon. WREAL, LLC, makers of the FyreTV box, recently in a Florida court alleging five counts of unauthorized use and infringement upon Wreal’s FyreTV and FyreTV.com trademarks, reminding the courts that the two trademarks were registered six years prior to the Amazon Fire TV’s announcements. The court documents reveal Wreal’s contention that “Amazon’s continued use of the “Fire TV” moniker has caused, and will continue to cause, serious irreparable harm to Wreal’s established business, necessitating this action.” Wreal points out in the initial complaint that the two products are very similar, noting that “the FireTV is nothing more than a proprietary STB that performs a substantially similar, if not identical, function to the proprietary STB marketed under the FyreTV trademark.” Both provide instant access to a massive library of streaming video content — one library just happens to feature a lot of nudity. Carlos Nunez, an attorney at WNF Law, P.L. representing Wreal, tells TechCrunch this lawsuit is about fairness and avoiding losing the value of Wreal’s federally-registered trademarks. He says his client wants to protect its interest in its trademarks by keeping the public free from confusion and ensuring fair competition. Sure enough, with FireTV.com (NSFW) redirecting to FyreTV.com, it’s highly likely more than a few unsuspecting shoppers thought Amazon had gotten into the adult film business. The two names are pronounced the same, and FyreTV owns FireTV.com, which is definitely a problem for Amazon. In fact, Wreal points out, when the term “FireTV” is searched for on the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS), FyreTV appears (although I was unable to recreate these results.) Essentially, Wreal alleges Amazon knowingly infringed on the FyreTV brand. The complaint requests a jury trial with Wreal seeking damages for trademark infringement, false designation of origin, and unfair competition. The company wants Amazon to fork over the profits it earned “by its illegal use of the Fire TV name.” Amazon did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for a comment. |
Domino’s Launches Its Pizza Ordering App For iPad With 3D Custom Pizza Builder | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Domino’s Pizza has its menu and turned around its over the last few years, during which time it also started to offer mobile ordering. Next Monday, the pizza chain will launch its iPad app, which will allow you to build your pizza and order it for take-out and delivery right from your couch. What makes this app stand out is the 3D pizza builder that uses OpenGL to give you a more realistic view of what your final pizza will look like (of course, as in all food photography, the preview will still look quite a bit different from what will be in the box by the time it arrives at your door). “The new Domino’s iPad app takes the experience of ordering pizza to a whole new level,” said Kevin Vasconi, Domino’s Pizza chief information officer, in a statement. “This is the coolest technology we have launched since Domino’s Tracker, and we are excited for customers to use the beautiful custom pizza builder that lets you visualize your order in a whole new way.” Just like Domino’s other apps, the iPad app will also feature the company’s national menu, coupons, store locator and digital order tracker. It will also feature the ability to save your favorite pizza creations so you can reorder them with just a few clicks. Digital orders are a big deal for Domino’s. It now accounts for about 40 percent of all of the company’s sales in the U.S. The new app will go live on Monday. Until then, you’ll have to order your pizza the old-fashioned way with your iPhone or Android device. You could, of course, always go out and get a real pizza, too — just remember that you can’t play Titanfall in most restaurants. |
Apple, Google, Intel And Adobe Settle Antitrust Lawsuit Over No-Hire Agreement | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Four of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies have settled an antitrust lawsuit brought against them over a shared no-hire agreement that prevented poaching employees from one company by another. The terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed, , but this averts a trial that had been scheduled to start later in May. The class action lawsuit represented around 64,000 employees and estimates of potential damages were as , a figure the plaintiffs were confident about given their perception of the strength of their evidence in the case. The settlement that was reached wasn’t disclosed, as mentioned, but given the potentially astronomical damages that could’ve resulted, you can imagine the payout likely involved a considerable sum. Google confirmed the existence of the filing to TechCrunch but wouldn’t comment on its contents. |
The Stalactite 3D Printer Uses A Projector To Produce High Quality Objects | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuGott75nss#action=share] The , like the Form 1 before it, is a resin-based, light-cured 3D printing system that “extrudes” objects out of a bath of liquid. Unlike the , however, this printer uses an ingenious workaround to the problem of getting a bright enough light source into a small package: they’ve suspended a commodity projector off the side of the printer which allows for multiple resolutions depending on the placement of the light source. The printer works using DLP technology which essentially projects light through the resin which then hardens into micron-thin patterns. Unlike stereolithographic printers, the Stalactite does not have a laser that has to skitter across the surface of the resin and instead does one layer at a time, in sequence, which can help speed up the printing process. The Barcelona-based team claims to have a 25 micron layer height – on par with the Form 1 and far thinner than the common 100 micron layer height found in other printers like the . This means the objects that come out of this printer are very smooth and cohesive, something filament-based FDM printers cannot produce. Should you want one? Well, their uber early-bird price is now at about $2,500 for the first five orders and they’re topping out at $4,000, so the printers are definitely expensive. Printers like this one arguably make some great prints; the results coming out of this device are impressive. The team has also added some nice, simple software to make it easy to load and print models. I’m still a big fan of Form Labs and the Form 1 but it’s well worth giving these guys a try if you’re able to get in at early-bird pricing. They’re looking to raise $50,000 on Indiegogo and have just hit $4,000. Because they use what looks like an off-the-shelf projector they’ve been able to reduce footprint considerably and the 4″ x 3″ x 7″ looks to be big enough for simple projects. Most interestingly they’ve reduced the number of supports needed to print objects – one of the Form 1’s biggest problems – and they’ve created a simpler removal system for prints. I love me some 3D printers and this one looks really interesting. |
Amazon Beats Street In Q1 With Net Sales Up 23% To $19.74B, $0.23 EPS | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | Amazon today reported its results for the company’s first financial quarter of 2014. Amazon reported net sales up 23 percent to $19.74 billion compared to $25.59 billion and $16.07 billion in the year-ago quarter. Operating income, however, decreased 19% to $146 million in the first quarter, compared with $181 million in first quarter 2013. Ahead of the earnings, analysts the company to report earnings of $0.23 a share and revenue of $19.43 billion. Amazon’s own guidance was for between $18.2 billion and $19.9 billion in net sales and for operating income to come in somewhere between a $200 million loss and a $200 million profit. Most analysts expected Amazon to come in around the high end of the company’s own estimates, so there will be some disappointment there.
Given that Amazon’s earnings are often unpredictable and the company doesn’t always focus on profits as much as some shareholders would like it to, it’s worth noting that there was a wide margin of opinions among analysts, with the lowest estimate coming in at a loss of 1 cent per share and the highest clocked in at earnings of $0.52 per share. Despite the fact that Q1 is traditionally a slower quarter for retailers, Amazon made a wide range of announcements over the last few months, including its and the launch of its . The company also recently announced that it had signed a deal with HBO to get more content for its streaming service. While it’s unclear how much this influenced Amazon’s earnings in this quarter, a also argues that the company is losing sales in those states where it is forced to collect sales tax now. Sadly, while Amazon likes to stuff its earnings releases with numerous minor facts about its products, it doesn’t release separate numbers for its different business units. It’s still a company secret, for example, how much profit it makes from its AWS cloud computing platform (or how much loss it incurs from it). In the cloud computing space, Amazon is currently embroiled in a with Google and Microsoft. Typically, Amazon announces a number of interesting facts about the business in its release, but this time around, the company simply decided to recap its news from the last quarter. Amazon’s guidance for the next quarter includes net sales of $18.1 billion to $19.8 billion and the expectation of an operating loss between $455 million and $55 million. |
Microsoft’s FQ3 Earnings Beat With Revenue Of $20.40B, EPS Of $0.68, Surface Top Line Of $500 Million | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | This afternoon Microsoft its fiscal third quarter 2014 financial results, with revenue of $20.40 billion, and earnings per share of $0.68. Analysts had expected the company to report $20.39 billion in revenue, and earnings per share of $0.63. Surface revenue was slightly soft, Office 365 uptake remains solid, and Azure grew quickly. The company also reported 1.2 million Xbox One sales in the quarter, along with 800,000 Xbox 360 sales. In regular trading, Microsoft was up a fraction in line with the markets. In after-hours trading, the company is slightly up following its earnings beat. Microsoft had operating income of $6.97 billion, and net income of $5.66 billion in the period. Here are the raw numbers compared to the year-ago period: Windows revenue in the period was strong: “Windows OEM revenue grew 4%, driven by strong 19% growth in Windows OEM Pro revenue.” This was somewhat expected given that Windows XP finally died, forcing many companies to upgrade. The company reported Surface revenue for the period of $500 million. That compares to the past two sequential quarters of top line from the tablet-hybrids of $893 million and $400 million. Surface revenue is a bellwether of sorts for the company’s attempt to become a devices company. The quarter’s tally feels slightly soft. Bing advertising revenue popped 38%, while Xbox Live transactional top line expanded 17%. Office 365 is key to Microsoft’s services strategy. The company reported that there are now 4.4 million Office 365 Home subscribers, up “nearly” 1 million in the quarter. Office 365 revenue on the Commercial side of Microsoft’s business “grew over 100%,” compared to the year-ago period. Another key part of the ‘new’ Microsoft, Azure, grew its revenue by 150 percent. This revenue growth is key for Microsoft. The following comes from the company’s slides: That right there is how Microsoft can grow in the short and medium term. Devices and Consumer revenue grew 12 percent to $8.30 billion, while Commercial revenue at the firm grew 7 percent to $12.23 billion. Microsoft ended the period with cash, equivalents, and short-term investments of $88.4 billion. Microsoft’s deal with Nokia is expected to close tomorrow, putting it outside today’s report. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will take part in the earnings call this afternoon.
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Hulu Plus Launches Remote Control Feature To Connect With Game Consoles | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | just to its mobile apps that will enable users to control the videos streaming on their game consoles from their phones or tablets. The new app connects with Sony’s PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, as well as Microsoft’s Xbox One. Users open up their Hulu Plus app, and it should be able to automatically detect game consoles nearby. Once that’s done, a “cast” button appears on the device and users can beam videos straight from their second-screen devices to their TVs. The feature, which is similar to the company’s support of Google Chromecast, will give users all the same controls they get within the Hulu Plus app that they can use to pause/resume, seek, and rewind by 10 seconds. |
We’ve Got To Embrace It, Man | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | First, understand that as an employee of AOL, I’m embarrassed but far more amused by our “digital prophet,” David Shing AKA Shingy AKA . His efforts to make AOL look cool have, at best, made us look like absolute idiots. Remember, we’re not all him, but sadly he represents us. Here’s my biggest problem: Shing’s future is not the real future. Shing’s future is a Best Buy full of SD cards and thin TVs, wafer-thin MP3 players in your hip pocket, and countless opportunities for corporate media to engage with customers. To wit: this video on – which is arguably only a selection from Shing’s longer presentation – embodies everything that I hate in Valley “thought leadership.” In his world the future is not a concrete, messy place full of uncertainty and promise. It is instead a sleek, Jefferson Starship of easy-listening music and hypnotic platitudes. The problem is not that Shing bops around the world talking about driving dogs and embracing video and sound and platforms and wi-fi-enabled cats. That’s well within his rights and I’ve been known to look into the . However, in an era of unprecedented change and some very real problems facing some very real people, this sort of unabashed Faith Popcorn-era big-think gibberish is dated at best and damaging at worst. If you think this is how real change in the technology ecosystem is made, please stop. The TED Talks future is fun and often makes for a good story, but the actual future is messy and is full of possible near dystopias. If you’re not offering to help you’re basically standing on the sidelines emoting. Your startup doesn’t have to save kittens in war-torn countries to do good. But it does have to work in the context of everyday life and improve on the human condition. A tech conference in Amsterdam featuring endless presentations about the future of this or that is an ideal place for a personage like Shing. The context of his presentation is missing here as is the room size, the audience (maybe this was a lunch-time thing?). It’s probably unfair to rant on his goofiness without that context, but this is the Internet and I’m exhausted by our own Digital Prophet. If he can talk about the bright future of purple, why can’t I talk about the dead future of blue-sky visioneering? In short, he pretends to understand the hard work of technologists, engineers, and programmers and falsely connects their important (and sometimes unimportant) work with futuristic mumbo jumbo. He’s why people hate technology. Because he presents it as a poetry slam and not as a tool. |
You Know You Want A Galaxy S5 With Swarovski Crystals On The Back | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTLBCACEX2k Samsung and Swarovski are back at it again with another unholy mash-up that puts crystals on the back of Samsung Galaxy smartphones. Because why not? As the teaser shows, the phone is adorned with countless crystals, effectively turning the backside into a knuckle-scrapping, pants-ruining device from hell. But at least it looks better than Samsung’s faux-leather plastic back. This isn’t the first time the two companies have joined forces to enrich humanity. There have been several Galaxy and Note handsets bedazzeled in similar manners. Apparently people buy them. But then again, people buy gold iPhones and iPads and that’s on a whole different level. |
FTC Issues Blistering Rebuke Of States Limiting Tesla’s Direct Consumer Sales | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is not big on state’s limiting the ability of electric car manufacturer Tesla to sell its cars directly to consumers. In a , fittingly on its Competition Matters blog, the FTC whacked such restrictions, detailing how legal protections for dealers were built, and how they in time evolved into the opposite of their original intention. Here’s the commission on independent dealerships and the law: When the automobile industry was in its infancy, auto manufacturers recruited independent, locally owned dealers to reach consumers in localities across the country. State laws progressively embraced wide-ranging protections for these dealers due to a perceived imbalance of power between the typically small local dealers and major national manufacturers. Dealers persuaded lawmakers that they needed protections from abusive practices by manufacturers. Federal laws, too, developed to protect auto dealers from abuse. These protections expanded until in many states they included outright bans on the sale of new cars by anyone other than a dealer—specifically, an auto manufacturer. Instead of “protecting,” these state laws became “protectionist,” perpetuating one way of selling cars—the independent car dealer. Such blanket bans are an anomaly in the broader economy, where most manufacturers compete to respond to consumer needs by choosing from among direct sales to consumers, reliance on independent dealers, or some combination of the two. This undercuts the core structure behind the legal bans and restrictions that Telsa has spent some time now running into head-first. If the laws on the books are suspect, so too, axiomatically, is their enforcement — the branch is never more healthy than the root. As Jalopnik , the FTC’s clarion call is scathing: Such change can sometimes be difficult for established competitors that are used to operating in a particular way, but consumers can benefit from change that also challenges longstanding competitors. Regulators should differentiate between regulations that truly protect consumers and those that protect the regulated. We hope lawmakers will recognize efforts by auto dealers and others to bar new sources of competition for what they are—expressions of a lack of confidence in the competitive process that can only make consumers worse off. It’s somewhat humorous to see who is a free market capitalist when it comes to the industry of others, and a protectionist whiner when it comes to their own dealings. At issue is political money and power pushing bans on Tesla selling its cars directly. New Jersey the third state to enact a ban, joining Arizona and Texas in being as backwards as possible. Given Texas’ consistent ballyhooing that it’s a , its ban is more than slightly ironic. How are the bans being enacted? In the case of New Jersey, with subterfuge and cowardice. A rule change was jammed through, with Tesla casting aspersions on the state’s administration for both going back on its word, and having sat on its dealer license renewals. Those in favor of competitive markets are pro-consumer, and those opposed are not. So it is encouraging to see the FTC end up on the right side of this discussion. Get with it, states. |
Sorry, But Google Glass Isn’t Actually For Sale To Everybody Yet | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 24 | that is currently for sale to in the United States. Sadly (or not — depending on your feelings about Glass), that’s not actually the case. While the Google Glass store is indeed open and ( : ), Google tells us that this isn’t the public launch of Glass to anybody who wants to plunk down $1,500 (plus tax). According to a Google spokesperson, the store is only functional to allow those who participated in its to finish their purchases. Here is the full statement: This link was created to accommodate potential Explorers who were still in the pipeline from last week’s sale. We’re shutting it down shortly. As always, we will continue to experiment with ways to expand the Explorer program in the weeks and months ahead. When Google put Glass on sale for everybody on the 15, it sold out of its allotment by the end of the day. It remains unclear when Google will start selling Glass again. We asked Google about what will happen to those orders that people may have been able to place while the store seemed open today and will update this post once we hear more. |
Vevo Releases New iOS App With A Real-Time Feed And Live Vevo TV Streams | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Music video distributor just launched an update to its iOS app today, providing users with a new, regularly updated home page, as well as access to the company’s live, programmed music channels. The new version of the app, which the company , follows a major redesign to its website that . In that update, Vevo did away with its rotating carousel of artist images, and replaced it with a regularly updated feed of featured artists, videos, and playlists. The company also added two more channels to its live Vevo TV lineup. Vevo TV was to provide a continuous, programmed stream of music videos — kind of like what MTV used to do before it got taken over by bad reality TV. Now all of that is being brought into Vevo’s new iOS app, which is available on iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. The app also adds improved navigation through a menu of options that can be launched with a tap of the “hamburger” button on the touch screen. Users can browse, search and navigate through different videos even while they’re watching a minimized version of a video playing on the screen. Viewers can also easily add or edit videos in a playlist or share through social networks via action buttons built into the app. The app was architected with a new that was launched at SXSW. While used internally, the SDK is also being made available to third-party developers to build their own experiences around Vevo videos. Check out the video above for a look at what’s new in the app. The update will be available in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. |
The Return Of Reddit’s /r/Technology Is “Certainly Possible” | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | of Reddit was demoted this week, with the subreddit being removed from the Reddit homepage and the default subreddit subscription feed. Earlier today I spoke to Reddit General Manager about the process of demoting subreddits as a form of punishment for mismanagement. Side note: I know Martin from back in the day when Reddit had . It now has 12. Martin tells me that the consensus decision to demote the subreddit happened after the volunteer moderators used the AutoModerator program to filter out the huge volume of submissions by keyword, leading to an effective suppression of certain topics like Tesla, bitcoin and startup. He called the strategy “hamfisted.” Martin told me that before it was demoted, the /r/Technology subreddit brought in 15 million pageviews a month and 4 million uniques a month. To most of us, these numbers are impressive, but in the context of Reddit traffic, /r/Technology was not a top subreddit. Reddit as a whole sees 114 million uniques a month and 5.4 billion pageviews a month, with 500 subreddits created each day. It sees 1 million comments and 22 million votes per day on average. Sixty percent of its traffic comes from inside the U.S. As odd as it might sound, this isn’t the first time a subreddit has been booted from the Reddit homepage. The company removed last summer after similar moderation issues, such as the banning of specific domains like the Huffington Post’s. The traffic on the /r/Politics subreddit fell by half after it was demoted. (Note: The subreddit chose to remove itself after it had issues with the limit on the number of moderators. And subreddits have been removed completely for other reasons that weren’t as mundane as moderation, like what happened with .) While they comprise some of the most contentious topics online, Martin tells me that /r/Politics and /r/technology weren’t even in the top three top subreddits in terms of popularity when they were pulled. By comparison, the got 200 million pageviews last month. Perhaps we should start LeagueofLegendsCrunch? Martin said that subreddit controversy is nothing new, and that there is a possibility that another tech-related subreddit like might eventually overwhelm /r/Technology in appeal, similar to how grew larger than and how grew larger than after their respective moderation controversies. He said that the one thing that hasn’t yet been conveyed thus far in the press coverage of /r/Technology incident is the difficulty of moderating a subreddit. “You can ask 20 people what should belong in there and get 10 different answers,” he said. Martin also said that Reddit’s team of 40 was working on better tools to help the moderators manage their formidable task and better options than filtering things by keyword. Hundreds, if not thousands, of links are submitted to a given subreddit daily. Martin revealed that the Reddit’s return to the homepage was “certainly possible.” When I mentioned to him that it was a shame that there’s currently a tech-shaped hole on Reddit.com, he replied, “We share that view.” /r/politics moderator @ had this to say about why the /r/politics subreddit was demoted, “We cannot be certain why the /r/politics subreddit was removed from the default set, the Reddit administrators and specifically said the that /r/politics and /r/atheism “just weren’t up to snuff.” So you can interpret that however you’d like.”
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Gillmor Gang Live 04.23.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | – Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Michael Arrington, and Steve Gillmor. |
FCC Tells Internet To Chill, Denies That It Will Kill Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Earlier today that the FCC was considering new rules that would allow content purveyors to pay ISPs for preferential access to their networks. This would have made it possible for content companies to speed the delivery of their material across the Internet. The FCC, nearly a full working day after the story broke, has in the negative: “There are reports that the FCC is gutting the Open Internet rule. They are flat out wrong. Tomorrow we will circulate to the Commission a new Open Internet proposal that will restore the concepts of net neutrality consistent with the court’s ruling in January. There is no ‘turnaround in policy.’ The same rules will apply to all Internet content. As with the original Open Internet rules, and consistent with the court’s decision, behavior that harms consumers or competition will not be permitted.” Two cheers for the FCC: It won’t make the Internet worse — at least in this fashion. Why the kerfuffle? Simply put, a tiered Internet is at the expense of newcomers. This stifles innovation and harms the consumer, at the anti-cost to extant powers in the form of all-but-unearned financial renumeration. So if the FCC had in fact created rules that would have allowed for companies to pay to accelerate their content’s delivery, it would have fucked the Internet. Said fucking will not take place. We still have a very long way to go to getting net neutrality back to where it was, and perhaps even bolstering it past where it sat before it was knocked from its perch. But it appears we do have one less battle ahead of us. I’ll take it. More tomorrow when the FCC lets us in on its thinking. |
Google, AT&T, Verizon And Comcast Each Spent More Than $3M In Q1 Lobbying Congress | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | The dollars from tech companies are showing little signs of abatement: Google spent $3.8 million on lobbying in the first quarter, AT&T $3.7 million, Verizon $3.5 million, Comcast $3.1 million, Facebook $2.8 million, Microsoft $2.1 million, Time Warner Cable $1.9 million, Oracle $1.5 million, Apple $1.1 million, and Amazon $830,000. Other players spent less: Yahoo dropped $710,000 in the period and Sprint spent $784,000. Twitter spent a mere $50,000. (You can look up other firms .) That adds up to a lot of cash. The Wall Street Journal of lobbying spend by several tech companies: Why did Facebook spend so much in the quarter? Stock-based compensation costs. So Facebook’s non-GAAP lobbying spend would look a bit flatter. You can thank me later for that joke. If you take a look at tech spending in the first quarter of 2011 in the above chart, and the first quarter of 2014, every company listed has boosted its output. This reflects the increasing surface area between the political and technological worlds. What are they spending the cash on? Verizon, for example, on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, the Cybersecurity and American Cyber Competitiveness Act, and so forth. The list is long for each firm. As immigration reform, privacy rights, net neutrality, and the NSA remain thorny issues, expect spending to stay high. Comcast, for one, has contracts with . Can you ? |
The FCC’s New Net Neutrality Rules Will Brutalize The Internet | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | The FCC will propose new net neutrality rules that at once protect content from discrimination, but also allow content companies to pay for preferential treatment. The news, first reported by , would in fact create a two-tiered system in which wealthy companies can “better serve the market” at the expense of younger, less well-capitalized firms. According to the Journal, the rules would allow for the preferential treatment, provided that the “ The above is only “net neutrality” in that it protects all content from having its delivery degraded on a whim. The rubric reported doesn’t actually force neutrality at all, but instead carves out a way for extant potentates to crowd out the next generation of players by leaning on their cash advantage. In practice this puts new companies and new ideas at a disadvantage, as they come into the market with a larger disadvantage than they otherwise might have. Any cost that we introduce that a large company can afford, and a startup can’t, either makes the startup poorer should it pay or degrades its service by comparison if it doesn’t. This will slow innovation and enrich the status quo. That’s a shame. It’s worth remembering Netflix’s on what net neutrality should mean. The company indicated that the mere treating of all content the same once it makes it onto an ISP’s network is “weak” net neutrality. In Netflix’s view, net neutrality should also extend to “peering agreements,” forcing ISPs to accept all incoming traffic onto their networks without charging a fee. What the FCC apparently wants to put into place would therefore be something akin to “very weak” net neutrality. Call the FCC’s new plan the homeopathic version of net neutrality, given how watered down its rules are. ISPs will love the plan. |
Facebook’s Standalone App Plan: Launch Betas, If They Work Grow To 100M Users, Then Monetize | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Facebook plans to launch more standalone apps, and today on its call, Mark Zuckerberg laid out a blueprint for picking which ones to throw the company’s weight behind. First, its Creative Labs initiative will build apps with specific purposes. If they resonate with users, Facebook will push to grow them to 100 million users. If that succeeds, only then will it try to earn money off them. Zuckerberg said “We’re pleased with the initial reaction to Paper,” the first app from . The company is still actively refining the Paper product, hoping to polish it before potentially using Facebook’s core app and site to promote the standalone, design-focused feed reading app. Facebook will use a similar plan for its acquisitions Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuckerberg says the current priority for these two companies is growth, not monetization, even though Instagram recently started showing its first ads. This roadmap will take a long time to play out. Zuckerberg said that Creative Labs apps “will probably take a few years” before they get to the stage of WhatsApp and Instagram, “which themselves are still years away from being big important businesses.” Chart from Weaving Capital and Chamath Palihapitiya Why the focus on growth first? Because monetizing too early can scare off users. If an app can hit a huge user count, network effects kick in to make it more useful and fend off competitors. In the case of WhatsApp, there are plenty of international messaging apps still vying to replace SMS. Rather than nickel and dime users now and increase the risk of stagnation or losing the war, Facebook wants to earn dollars later by concentrating on getting these apps to massive scale. This is all further proof that Zuckerberg and Facebook are not concerned with short-term growth and are definitely playing the long game. The share price declined when Facebook bought Oculus, the front runner in virtual reality, because it doesn’t earn any money now. But Zuckerberg envisions VR as one day becoming a critical computing platform and a huge business, so he’s willing to spend the money on it now. On the investor call after the Oculus acquisition was announced, Zuckerberg said “There just are not that many services in the world that can reach a billion people, and all the ones that do just have to be incredibly valuable.” Right now, four of the (at least) seven services that are that popular: Google, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. Facebook wants more of its own. |
Apple Sold 20 Million Apple TVs, Which Are Now Far From A Hobby | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | The Apple TV continues to gain traction despite little effort from Apple. On today’s financial earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that Apple has sold 20 million Apple TV boxes. By the end of 2013, the company had sold approximately 10 million Apple TV units. The product is clearly on-pace for a killer year even with new offerings from Amazon and Roku. “I’m feeling good about this business and where it could go,” Tim Cook said, further revealing that the company stopped calling the product segment a hobby once it pulled in $1 billion in revenue in 2013. “It didn’t feel right to me to refer to something that brought in a billion dollars as a ‘hobby,’” he said. “We’ve got a pretty large installed base there,” Cook said, speaking to competitors. He feels the Apple TV stands “extremely favorable” against other streaming devices like the new Amazon Fire TV. Cook failed to go into future plans in the space. He didn’t reveal any upcoming Apple TV features or partnerships. But with this sort of traction, why change course? |
iTunes Now Has Nearly 800 Million Accounts, Most With Credit Cards Attached | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | In June of last year, Apple announced that over 575 million accounts had been created for iTunes Just 10 months later, they’ve grown that number by nearly . On the Apple earnings call today, Tim Cook announced that they were just about to surpass their 800 millionth iTunes account. If my quick calculations are correct, that’s a growth rate of something like 710,000 accounts . Continuing at this rate, iTunes could easily find its billionth user in less than a year. The crazy part? The vast majority of those accounts have credit cards attached to them. That’s nearly accounts with one-click purchase access on things like the App Store. Insane. |
Apple CEO Tim Cook Lauds Office On iPad, Chides Microsoft For Not Delivering It Earlier | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Apple CEO Tim Cook took time to answer a question about Microsoft Office for iPad arriving this past month, and his answer was surprisingly long. “I do see that Office is a very key franchise,” he said, and also added that he “wholeheartedly welcome[s] Microsoft to the App Store.” Cook admitted that Apple’s “customers are clearly responding in a good way that [Office] is available,” and also said it’s definitely a good thing for the iPad in the enterprise and for enterprise users. But it wasn’t all praise for Apple’s long-time rival and occasional partner. “If it had been done earlier, it would’ve been better for Microsoft frankly,” Cook said about Office’s arrival on Apple’s tablet, which is indeed something users have been asking about for years, ever since the original launch of the iPad itself. To its credit, Microsoft did manage to and a mobile user experience, even if it is a shame that its full functionality is locked behind the requirement for a recurring Office 365 subscription. |
Apple Acquired 24 Companies In The Last 18 Months | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Apple’s pace of acquisition has seemed to be picking up lately, and Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed just how many the company has been making of late. Cupertino has nabbed 24 companies over the course of the past year and a half, which is a pace that observers recently noticed actually . Typically, Apple doesn’t make any official announcements when it acquires smaller companies, instead waiting until the deals are ferreted out by those of us in the media, or revealed through other means. Once discovered, it usually issues a boilerplate statement about how it makes acquisitions from time to time, without actually confirming anything directly. That means that while we may have a good idea of most of those 24 companies based on reports collected over the past few years (Wikipedia ), it’s possible some have still gone unnoticed. Apple’s acquisition pace suggests a company that’s increasingly willing to spend on external purchases to advance its plans for internal R&D and product development efforts. |
Apple’s Stock Surges In After-Hours Trading Following Earnings Beat, Promise To Return More Cash To Investors | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | The market likes what Apple today, sending its share up more than 7% in after-hours trading. The company reported an earnings beat today, with $45.6 billion in revenue, $10.2 billion in net profit, or $11.62 in earnings per share. Analysts had expected Apple to report $10.18 in profit per share, and revenue of under $44 billion. The company also that it will execute a stock split, increase its dividend by 8%, and also increase its share buyback program by $30 billion, to a total of $90 billion. Slowing revenue growth has some worried about the company’s momentum, and its year-over-year in iPads isn’t sunny, but investors are enthused about the company’s larger position. Up go the shares. Roughly , the firm’s $38.91 dollar price spike in its value is worth around $34 billion dollars. |
Apple’s Greater China Revenue Grew Sequentially In Q2 As iPhone Growth Impresses | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Apple’s , and the iPhone’s 17 percent growth was likely the most noteworthy number in its hardware results. That’s a big increase for a device that analysts expected to perform pretty much on par in terms of Q2 last year. One probable reason: growth in Greater China, where Apple saw 5 percent increase in revenue sequentially between Q1 and Q2, versus a pretty consistent 20 to 30 percent dip across the board in all other regions, which is the usual course for post-holiday results. That the iPhone’s growth is probably tied to China comes down to one major factor, and a few smaller ones; Apple launched the iPhone with China Mobile during the quarter, adding a massive new potential subscriber base to its existing customer pool in the area. Analysts had reported that they saw “several million” pre-orders for iPhone on China Mobile ahead of launch, and Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster predicted sales of 3 million devices on the new network through March. On the earnings call today, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the company saw all-time record sales of iPhone in the BRIC countries, and that revenue of near $10 billion in Greater China also represents a new all-time record. On the call, Cook also noted that in China, 62 percent of iPhone 4S buyers came from Android, as well as 60 percent of iPhone 5c buyers, indicating those lower cost options are doing what Apple needs them to do. |
Apple’s New Retail Leader Angela Ahrendts Officially Steps Into Her Role Next Week | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Apple’s new retail chief Angela Ahrendts is going to start officially at the company officially beginning next week, CEO Tim Cook revealed on the company’s earnings call today. Ahrendts comes from Burberry, and her move to Apple was announced in October of last year, but she hadn’t yet begun in her new role yet. A report from last year suggested that Ahrendts might be delaying her start at Apple until halfway through this year, with the main factor cited being a bonus she would receive at Burberry mid-year. Cook’s statement disproves this earlier report. Ahrendts will occupy an SVP role at Apple, and is the first retail head since Apple dropped former Dixons CEO John Browett in 2012. Her experience in fashion could signal a move from Apple to appeal more to that market, but already, Apple’s retail is more comparable to high fashion brands in terms of revenue generated per square foot of retail space, than to other consumer electronic retailer brands. |
Apple Announces 7 For 1 Stock Split, Boosts Its Dividend 8%, Adds $30B To Its Buyback Program | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | As part of its earnings cycle today, Apple that it will increase its dividend 8 percent, add $30 billion to its share buyback program current to a total of $90 billion, and split its stock 7 for 1 in June. The company’s dividend will also now rise yearly. Apple is incredibly cash-rich, and has been under pressure to utilize its vast financial resources to reward its investors. Apple’s shares fell more than 1 percent in regular trading, and are up a minute fraction in after-hours trading. The news matters, as Apple is helping set the tone for other wealthy tech companies. Apple is relatively new to having a dividend at all, so to see it push here could force other firms to make similar actions. Microsoft has also been pressed to better shareholder returns. Apple will now pay out around $11 billion in yearly dividend payments. Given that much of its cash is sitting in foreign accounts that it doesn’t wish to repatriate to avoid massive tax fees, Apple will hit up the debt markets for more dollars, it being cheaper to use other’s domestic cash than its foreign reserves: To assist in funding the program, the Company expects to access the public debt markets during 2014, both domestically and internationally, for an amount of term debt similar to what the Company raised during 2013. The management team and the Board of Directors will continue to review each element of the capital return program regularly. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook called the changes a “significant increase” in Apple’s “capital return program.” Correct. And if investors were getting grumpy about his tenure, I doubt there will be much whining after all this. Apple closed today at $524.75 a share. |
Apple Sold 44M iPhones, 16M iPads And 4M Macs In Q2 2014 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Apple shared its , and for fiscal Q2 2014, the company moved 43.7 million iPhones, 16.3 million iPads and 4.1 million Macs. That compares to 51 million iPhones sold , along with 26 million iPads and 4.8 million Macs, but that was a holiday quarter, so a dip is to be expected. Last year , Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones, 19.5 million iPads and 3.95 million Macs. Estimates for the quarter from Wall St. had pegged iPhone sales at 38.77 million units on average, with predictions of 19.36 iPads sold and 4.07 million Macs. iPod sales decreased from 5.63 million a year ago, too, and now sit at just 2.7 million for Q2 2014, but that’s not surprising given that they’ve been trending downwards a long time, and that Apple didn’t even update iPod touch hardware last year. Apple’s year-over-year performance includes iPhone unit sales growth of 16.8 percent, while iPad sales slumped by about the same amount, with negative 16.4 percent growth. That iPad number represents a considerable miss, and will likely be cited by analysts as yet another sign that the tablet market might be nearing saturation. As for the Mac number, it’s just about flat from last year. The iPod tumbled even more than expected, but again, Apple doesn’t seem to be too concerned with that product category as it looks to other opportunities that are replacing it in terms of consumer interest, like the iPhone. Apple as the reason for the big discrepancy (sales surged unnaturally during Q2 2013 as a result).
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Parchment Launches College Recommendation Engine So Applicants Can Hedge Their Bets | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Hello, high school juniors. Stressed about graduation next year? Nervous about getting into college? Well , co-founder of the online education giant and current chief executive at , has some advice for you: Treat your college applications like you would a stock portfolio and hedge your bets. And you can even use a new tool from Parchment to do so. Today the company launched its college recommendation engine, a tool that takes all of the existing user information Parchment has about you — your GPA, your SAT and ACT scores, your extracurriculars and the list of schools you just to attend — and crunches numbers to show you just how likely you are to get into those top-choice schools. The new service also recommends schools that are similar to the ones already on your list. The idea is to diversify your portfolio of would-be colleges to ensure that you get into at least one or two of the schools that’d be a good fit — all while reducing the total number of applications you have to fill out. Because, let’s face it, filling out college applications sucks. It sucked in 1994 when I had to do it and it sucks now. (At least I assume it sucks. Thankfully I haven’t applied to anything other than a job since 1998.) “We see more and more students applying to more and more colleges,” Pittinsky says. “But, while students apply to more colleges, the colleges are accepting the same number of kids.” Statistically, the service isn’t perfect. It’s based on the total number of users that are on Parchment. So, in some cases that sample size can be limiting. So far, the company has 1,000 college listings for potential applicants. In cases where the data isn’t there to give would-be applicants a sense of their success or failure in an application, the company’s web site will make that clear, Pittinsky says. The point is that students won’t have to apply to 10 or 12 schools if they use Parchment’s service, Pittinsky says. Instead, students can target their applications to the schools that are most likely to accept them — based on Parchment’s calculations of students with similar profiles who have been accepted or rejected by the schools on the list. Fair warning: Some schools, particularly smaller liberal arts schools that put more weight on written essays or personal interviews, don’t align neatly with the company’s predictive analytics. The company is still going gangbusters with its core business of providing certifications, credentials, transcripts and diplomas to the folks that need them, Pittinsky says. That was why the company had no trouble tranche for its latest round. |
Facebook Passes 1B Mobile Users, 200M Messenger Users In Q1 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Another mobile milestone for Facebook: the company reported in its that it has now passed the 1 billion mark for monthly active users on phones and tablets. 1.01 billion to be exact. That is a sign of how mobile is approaching near-parity with desktop for Facebook: overall MAUs across both desktop and mobile totalled 1.28 billion. That’s without Instagram users or those on Facebook Messenger, which in themselves are each now at over 200 million monthly users (Instagram was announced a ), the company pointed out during its earnings call. Nor does it include WhatsApp users, nor what CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to on the earnings call as “the third step” in its mobile strategy — a reference to its Creative Labs effort and apps like Paper “and other things that we might announce at some point,” he said. “It might take a few years” for usage of these to reach meaningful proportions compared to Facebook and the other, more established apps.” Facebook’s daily active users on mobile are at 609 million for the quarter. Facebook defines a DAU as “a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, used our Messenger app, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website or application that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day.” (And a MAU is defined as “a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, used our Messenger app, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website or application that is integrated with Facebook, in the last 30 days as of the date of measurement.” Hence the higher number as the metric catches more people.) Interestingly, mobile-only users nearly doubled over a year ago and now stand at 341 million. Were Facebook to consolidate WhatsApp usage, and that of Instagram, with its wider mobile numbers, that figure would presumably shoot up to over 800 million, with WhatsApp making a timely , just a day before its new owner’s quarterly earnings, that it has reached a milestone of 500,000 “regular, active users of WhatsApp.” “We’ve grown fastest in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, and Russia, and our users are also sharing more than 700 million photos and 100 million videos every single day,” WhatsApp noted in the blog post announcing the news. The news that Facebook has passed 1 billion users, rising 34% in a year, is on one hand a mark of a relentless trend for the company — more and more people are accessing the social network on phones and tablets than on desktop computers, a trend that is only growing as Facebook pushes into more developing markets where handsets are often a user’s primary link to the Internet. On the other hand, hitting 1 billion is a vindication of sorts: Facebook in the last quarter announced that it would on mobile messaging service WhatsApp to help it push deeper into connecting with and growing its mobile user base, and specifically into the kinds of markets where WhatsApp does well, emerging and fast-growing economies. Facebook is, in some regards, betting the house on mobile. While we have yet to see how Facebook eventually decides to monetise its WhatsApp userbase, one area where it is already reaping some big rewards is in advertising on its existing products, specifically its Facebook itself. Mobile ads continue to be a powerhouse for the company. They are now at 59% of all ad sales, equivalent to $1.4 billion. A year ago they made up 30% of all ad revenues. Facebook is expected to be announcing a at its F8 developer conference at the end of this month, and in the earnings call today COO Sheryl Sandberg confirmed “early testing” of such a network. (Note: it’s time we’ve but apparently this may really, really be coming out now.) Interestingly, it sounds like whatever future plans Facebook has for driving more mobile ads, it will not necessarily factor Instagram into the equation in a massive way, at least for now. “Instagram is a great advertising product because there are tons of demand and pictures are visually appealing. We have seen some great results,” Sandberg noted during the call, using a campaign from Levi’s with pictures of denim in outdoor space, as a sign of things to come. But that’s not at the expense of continuing to scale up the user base. “We don’t see the need or urge to ramp this,” she said in reference to adds. “We want to grow it slowly and deliberately.” One thing that stood out during the earnings call, in terms of Facebook’s mobile future, is that whatever those levers will be for growth, it sounds like they will continue to remain native experiences. “There’s nothing wrong with HTML5… but both Apple and Google have made it easier to provide good experiences on their own platform,” Zuckerberg. “A large number of people access people from the mobile web so we are continuing to develop that but for the foreseeable future we will continue… to work on the native app experiences we have now.” And the more established native app experiences are continuing to develop. Despite the WhatsApp acquisition, we may see more from Facebook’s pre-existing, in-house efforts, for example. “We have a lot more coming to Messenger in the first half of this year,” Zuckerberg noted a — before the WhatsApp tsunami. No surprise, considering Messenger’s growth. It’s added about in the last 15 months. Indeed, Facebook’s been pushing Messenger much more aggressively of late. In November 2013 Facebook began shortcutting users from its main apps into Messenger if they had the standalone chat app installed, and if you chatted with someone who wasn’t using Messenger, you were given a link to invite that person to do so. Eventually, the plan appears to be to from the main app to drive much more downloads of Messenger. Additional reporting Josh Constine
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Apple Beats In Q2 2014 With $45.6B Revenue, $10.2B Profit And $11.62 EPS | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Apple has just its fiscal Q2 2014 earnings, reporting $45.6 billion in revenue, $10.2 billion in net profit representing $11.62 per share. Compared to the , it corresponds to a growth of 4.6 percent in revenue, and 15.2 percent in EPS. According to , the consensus among analysts was for Apple to report earnings of $10.22 per share on $43.45 billion in revenue, with revenue very slightly declining and EPS very slightly growing year-over-year.
Guidance from its last earnings release forecasted between $42 billion and $44 billion in revenue, with gross margin between 37 percent and 38 percent. Over the past year, Apple’s own guidance has been much more accurate, with the upper end of the forecast very close to what it actually reported. In other words, analysts and Apple itself all anticipated a flat quarter — flat revenue, flat gross margin, flat net profit, flat everything. This was mostly due to a slight decline in iPad sales and a slight increase in iPhone sales. But this quarter is an exception. Apple performed better than anticipated. In particular, the iPhone was a big seller this quarter. It could come from better international performance, and especially in China. Apple sold 43.7 million iPhones, 16.4 million iPads and 4.1 million Macs in the quarter. Compared to Q2 2013, iPhone sales grew by 16.8 percent while iPad sales declined by 15.9 percent. Read all the details about hardware sales in our . “We’re very proud of our quarterly results, especially our strong iPhone sales and record revenue from services,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in the release. “We’re eagerly looking forward to introducing more new products and services that only Apple could bring to market.”
China is one of the main reasons behind today’s performance. Apple has a hard time selling more devices in countries where it is already well established — it has to look elsewhere. Moreover, China Mobile recently added support for the iPhone. While Q1 is usually a very strong quarter for Apple, the company actually performed better in Q2 2014 compared to Q1 in China. Read more about this in our .
The company also made a few announcements regarding its financial strategy. First, it’s going to make a 7 for 1 stock split on June 1. It just added $30 billion to its share buyback program. And finally, the dividend was increased by 8 percent. It’s an impressive buyback program. Apple has been pursuing an share buyback strategy. In February, the company repurchased $14 billion of Apple shares. Buying back your own shares is an alternative to issuing dividends and proves that you think that your stock is currently underpriced. So far, it doesn’t seem to have a significant impact on the stock price. But today’s update just changed that. Shares jumped following the announcement. Read about Apple’s financial strategy in our . Apple’s own guidance for Q3 2014 predicts between $36 billion and $38 billion in revenue with a flat gross margin between 37 and 38 percent. The company $35.3 billion in revenue last year, so Apple is still a growing company. |
Zynga Founder Mark Pincus Steps Down From Chief Product Officer Role | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | Along with the , Zynga announced that founder Mark Pincus would be stepping down from any operational duties and ceding his chief product officer title today. The company said that Pincus, who started the social gaming company in 2007, will remain chairman of the board. The announcement comes about nine months after the company announced and hand it over to longtime Microsoft executive Don Mattrick. Since then, the company and gone through a , as Mattrick has tried to right the ship. |
Mashfeed Lets You Discover Better Content On Social Networks | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | At first I didn’t understand the point of because there are already plenty of social media aggregation platforms. Plus, many people crosspost the same content to different sites, rendering aggregators redundant. Then I realized I was using the new iOS app wrong. Like , a photo discovery app that , Mashfeed isn’t just about finding new content. It also lets you organize posts in a better way than most social networks currently allow. On Mashfeed, you create public or private channels (called mashfeeds) that let you add specific users, pages, or hashtags on , , and . You can also subscribe to channels made by existing users or Mashfeed and trending topics (which currently include Coachella Fashion and Ryan Gosling memes). The app’s creator, Adam Mashaal of New York-based startup Pressto, plans to add support for Twitter and other popular social networks. Pressto’s other products include , which lets friends and families collaborate on interactive scrapbooks. While working on Presstomatic, Mashaal found that users had to spend a lot of time scrolling through their feeds on various social networks to find the content they wanted. Mashfeed was created to solve that problem. “Say, for instance, you love looking at surfing photos and keeping up with what surfers are posting across multiple platforms. You can try blindly searching for ‘surfing’ on Instagram or YouTube, and you might even find a few users to follow,” he says. “But even then, you have to wait for cool surfing posts to pop up in your feed, all while jumping between sites. The process is disjointed and laborious.” Mashfeed, on the other hand, lets you quickly find the right content from the accounts you want to follow. I found Mashfeed especially useful for organizing Facebook pages. Since the social network launched that feature in 2007, I’ve liked over 500 fan pages. They are especially important in Taiwan, where I live, because many small businesses, artists, and independent musicians use their fan page as their main online presence. It is extremely difficult, however, to follow their updates on my Facebook newsfeed. Mashfeed let me rediscover and organize many of these pages. So far, I’ve created mashfeeds for local stores and design studios. I also made one using several hashtags on Instagram so I can see photos of stationery by , a Japanese brand I like. One of Mashfeed’s current drawbacks is that you can only add 10 channels per social network on each of your feeds, so they have to remain relatively small. But the app’s design is very simple and clean, especially compared to other social media aggregation apps like . Mashfeed is meant for the “average mobile user” instead of, presumably, the kind of people who still can’t get over . It focuses on sites and social networks with visually-oriented media instead of text, unlike social reader apps or . With its focus on targeted content discovery and sharing, Mashfeed should have plenty of options for monetization. Mashaal says he’s still developing revenue strategies, but they include working with partners on promoted mashfeeds. |
Mt.Gox Will Reportedly File For Liquidation Instead Of Bankruptcy | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | has filed for liquidation in a Tokyo court instead of going forward with its plans to rebuild under bankruptcy protection, according to . The newspaper’s sources said that Mt.Gox decided to abandon its previous plan for rehabilitation because it was too complex and unrealistic, but that it still hopes a buyer for the exchange can be found. If Mt.Gox does indeed file for liquidation, however, it makes it even more unlikely that creditors will recover all of their assets. Mark Karpeles, the founder of Mt.Gox, in response to a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Karpeles’ lawyer said he wanted to first find legal representation in respect to FinCEN’s questions. Mt.Gox’s site still displays a notice in Japanese and English telling visitors that it is pursuing a civil rehabilitation procedure. Filed for bankruptcy protection in February after revealing that it had lost about 850,000 bitcoin. About 200,000 bitcoin were later , reducing the total loss to a , or about $400 million at current exchange rates. Though Mt.Gox claimed that it lost the bitcoin to a bug called transaction malleability, recent research from ETH Zurich University found that the company only lost 386 bitcoin to the attack, making the Mt.Gox even more confusing. |
TPG Growth Commits $100M With India’s Smile To Help Internet Cos Tap Emerging Markets | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | has committed around $100 million in a joint venture with India’s for helping Internet and e-commerce companies build and scale their businesses across emerging markets such as India and Africa. TPG and Smile will co-invest through their joint venture, , which will work with Internet companies in the marketplace, classified listings, local commerce, digital media, e-commerce and mobile space. Katalyzers will help rollout their businesses across Asia and other emerging markets. After identifying opportunities, the joint venture will co-invest through Katalyzers in customers’ emerging market operations, pick some sweat equity and offer all support needed to create a fresh revenue stream. Over past few years, Smile has done similar alliances with AirBnB, Yahoo!, under the same model. “We will bring together on one common platform local Asian knowledge, experience of building businesses, in-house talent of entrepreneurs, media and technology professionals, partnerships with marketing and performance media companies and now in partnership with TPG, deep financial assets for co-investment opportunities,” Harish Bahl, founder of Smile Group said in a statement. Over years, in India and also worked with Silicon Valley startups such as AirBnB to help them expand beyond U.S. “Bringing companies to the international markets will require deep expertise and capital,” Keith Nilsson of TPG Growth said in a statement. “TPG Growth looks forward to supporting emerging technology companies in their endeavour to enter new overseas markets in partnership with Katalyzers.” |
India’s Snapdeal Acquires Fashion Discovery Site Doozton, As Battle For Online Fashion Heats Up | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Online fashion retail is fast becoming the next battlefront for India’s growing e-commerce startups. With two of the biggest Indian e-commerce companies — Flipkart and Myntra — , rival Snapdeal is now pushing aggressively to get its piece of action in the online fashion retailing space. Less than two months after , India’s biggest e-commerce marketplace is putting some of that funding to use by acquiring fashion products discovery site , a bootstrapped startup, which is less than a year old. The companies have not disclosed the financial terms. E-commerce in India is booming, as more consumers get online and the so-called “aspirational middle-class” looks to increase spending on fashion products. And while the market for e-commerce in the country is quite price-sensitive, fashion products are still able to attract premium. Doozton helps consumers buy specific fashion products suited for over a dozen occasions — right from wedding to the Valentines Day, etc. “The technology built by Doozton will enable an artful and personalized way of listing and suggesting fashion merchandise on Snapdeal, making the acquisition fruitful for burrs and sellers on the platform. At Snapdeal, we have seen a 10x growth in our fashion categories in the last 12 months, and we foresee the benefits of this acquisition will further boost this growth,” said Snapdeal co-founder Rohit Bansal. Fashion is going to be the next battlefront for Flipkart, Myntra and Snapdeal. Myntra, a specialist fashion e-commerce site, is seeing huge growth too. Online fashion nearly doubled in value from $278 million in 2012 to $559 million in 2013. Investors are scrambling to put money in these ventures to ensure they don’t miss out on the opportunity. In January this year, with four main investors: PremjiInvest, Belgian-based Sofina, Accel and Tiger Global, taking the total capital raised to $125 million to date. After the latest eBay funding, Snapdeal has now . With Doozton, Snapdeal is aiming to get its piece of action in the space. Doozton was founded in March 2013 by Pushpendra Singh, an Indian Institute of Technology graduate. “With Snapdeal.com, the technology of Doozton will get a wider and more established platform. I am glad about this acquisition by Snapdeal, which will allow for a much larger canvas for our mission of enabling intuitive and fun merchandising of fashion products,” Singh said. Growing influence of women shoppers who accounted for a little over quarter (around $500 million) of the total e-commerce sale in 2013, is helping e-commerce growth in categories such as fashion, home decor, jewelry and baby care, according to a recent study by Accel India. India’s e-commerce market is projected to grow sevenfold to $22 billion in the next five years, as Internet infrastructure improves further, making it easier for the country’s nearly 200 million online population to shop on-the-go. The country’s e-commerce market (sans travel sites) is currently worth $3.1 billion annually. |
Online Invitations Startup Paperless Post Raises $25M From August Capital | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Online (and offline) invitations startup has become a modern-day greeting card company, enabling users to create custom cards to their events and send them to friends. TechCrunch has confirmed that, today, the startup has closed a $25 million Series C led by August Capital, with participation from existing investors. That’s in addition to the $12 million that it’s raised since being founded in 2008, bringing the company’s total funding to $37.4 million. Previous investors include RRE Ventures, SV Angel, Draper Associates, Ram Shiram, and Mousse Partners. Paperless Post launched in 2008 with a series of skeuomorphic online invitations that attempt to evoke the same emotions one might get from ripping open a real-life envelope and reading a real-life greeting card sent by real-life people. With a healthy focus on design, the startup started out by providing a wide variety of virtual stationery and that online users could personalize and have delivered by email to their contacts. It also provided a way for those contacts to RSVP and for users to track who might (or might not) have opened the invitation, signed up, and decided to attend (or not). While the company started out as a purely online way for users to send invitations and RSVP, it’s expanded to provide offline printing services, as well. A year-and-a-half ago, it launched a premium that allows users to have custom invitations printed out and emailed to their contacts. Today, the company enjoys over 45 million users, doubling its user base for the second year in a row, and has sent over 100 million custom invitations and cards since launching. The company currently has 70 full-time employees in an office in downtown Manhattan. Here’s what founder James Hirschfeld had to say about today’s raise: Paperless Post lets you communicate beautifully, conveniently and privately about the social experiences you care about. Our goal is to become the new protocol for valued social communication, regardless of the medium you choose. We’ve always been a very capital efficient company with strong organic growth. Adding this cash to our balance sheet will help us realize this vision faster for a greater number of people in the US and abroad. The funding will go toward accelerating the development process of the company’s mobile and online tools. |
Ellen Tries Out Google “Glasses” | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Today is . For the first time, the company is letting anybody and everybody order a pair with no application process needed. Because before, if you wanted to give Google $1,500 for a face computer, you had to . Now that Google Glass is fair game, we’re probably going to see it a lot more. Take, for example, , where Ellen Degeneres tries on her own very special pair of “Google Glasses.” At the end of the day, the selfie queen doesn’t actually play around with the real thing, but instead pokes a little fun at Google with the knock-off Google Glass she purchased on Craigslist for $14.95. Hey, it’s a good deal! She also calls them “Google Glasses” the entire time, which will inevitably happen as the product filters into the mainstream. If it makes it that far. Google Glass is a polarizing product. While some feel great conviction that facial computing is the new frontier, an equally loud and large group of people feel that the whole concept is slightly ridiculous. But it goes further than poking fun, as Google Glass wearers have in the Bay Area, as the housing crisis continues to create between the tech community and others. Skip to the :55 mark to check out the “Google Glasses” bit. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wShiPvYW4Y?list=UUp0hYYBW6IMayGgR-WeoCvQ&w=640&h=360] |
HP Finds Mobile Tax Apps Lacking On Security, Privacy | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | As the clock ticks toward midnight, , Hewlett-Packard is warning consumers of mobile tax and finance apps that they may want to audit their own usage. According to the HP Audit, more than 90 percent of the applications the company tested, including , and , contained at least one potential privacy violation. Those included accessing the phone’s address book, geo-location, storing sensitive data in clear-text, not setting cookie properties securely and insecurely transmitting data. Another 50 percent of the applications use cryptographic methods that are known to have security weaknesses like md5 or SHA1. Other flaws included image caching from a Social Security number input screen, which could expose the information to malware installed on a device. “The bottom line is that even with all the best intentions of providing fast tax filing assistance, mobile tax apps could put users at risk,” said “Usually the mobile app interacts with a cloud service and typically you’d file your taxes on your PC,” Bledsoe said. “But all the software services for tax preparation have mobile app extensions so you can check on your refund, and get status updates on your account.” Ultimately the applications are still accessing data from the account, and from a security standpoint, that mobile app is just as dangerous, said Bledsoe. “A lot of companies are looking at mobile apps as a fancy user interface, and they’re putting their protection on the back-end behind their firewall,” she said. “But they’re not realizing yet that this is yet another attack vector and is an entry point for the hackers.” Companies are responsible for the sensitive data they manage, but consumers need to be aware and actively control what information they give to application providers. “We have the tendency these days of downloading any app under the sun because it’s cool and nice,” Bledsoe said. “This stuff is not just a fancy user interface. All your private data is sitting right there so you have to be pretty careful with what you’re putting on your phone… [For instance] if there’s no reason why this app has access to this address book, don’t let it.” |
Pinterest Plans “Choose Your Own Adventure” Product Announcement For April 24 | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | A more personalized way to pin may be on the way as Pinterest has announced a big press event in San Francisco on April 24th with the teaser image above. We’ve confirmed with the company that this will be a product announcement and CEO Ben Silbermann will speak. So what will Pinterest unveil? The startup has written that this year it’s focused on helping people discover pins related to their interests. In January it launched a that learns from what people have browsed and pinned in the past. This page then presents pins related to their tastes, and uses a mosaic of different-sized tiles to highlight certain items instead of Pinterest’s iconically uniform mason grid. A full launch of Explore Interests would match the “choose your own adventure” theme. It would also mesh with That could make Pinterest a more relaxing place to visit and browse. Instead of having to hunt through topic-specific boards or know what you’re looking for with search, Pinterest will bring what you like straight to your digital doorstep. That could make it more addictive for hardcore users and more accessible to rookies. As the , I’d expect this personalization to show up on the small screen too, not just the desktop. We’ll also be on the lookout to see if Pinterest announces any more plans on the monetization front. Pinterest raised a jaw-dropping $225 million at a $3.8 billion valuation in October, and everyone wants to know how it will make good on that investment. After months of testing, Pinterest plans to formally launch its “Promoted Pins” ads this quarter, . These ads look like organic posts from users, but brands pay to make them appear in search results and category pages related to specific topics. Pinterest is looking to charge a pricey $30 to $40 per thousand impressions (CPM), and has been asking for $1 million to $2 million commitments from advertisers. In my opinion, this kind of keyword-based advertising could be a very lucrative for Pinterest, because its visitors often come with a great deal of purchase intent. Promoted Pins won’t be scattershot demand generation, which has historically been Facebook’s wheelhouse. Instead, these will be demand-fulfillment ads, similar to Google’s bread and butter of search keyword ads. And they could rake in cash for Pinterest by helping people make big purchase decisions. Dream vacations, ideal homes, children’s nurseries — there are the expensive things people pin. People know they want to vacation on St. John, buy a crib, or rent a lake house, but don’t know exactly where to spend their money. A beautified Pinterest ad could make the difference between which resort you visit, what home you lease, or where you shop for all your baby gear. With big cart sizes, e-commerce advertisers could quickly earn a return on their investment. eMarketer Pinterest at 40 million monthly users in the U.S., an audience big enough to drive serious ad revenue. We’ll be there at Pinterest headquarters for the event on April 24 at 6pm PDT, and you can expect live updates from TechCrunch. Until now, Pinterest has acted almost like a clearinghouse for subscribing to magazines about your specific interests. But soon, it could employ big data so rather than having to subscribe to what you like, that content (and related ads) will come find you. |
Investors Send Twitter Up 11.4% Following Gnip News, Adding $2.7B To Its Market Cap | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Twitter had a massive day in the markets, soaring more than 11 percent following news this morning that it has . Gnip is a company that provides other firms with access to social media information streams. Gnip became well known by being a Twitter partner that could provide the latter’s “firehose” of tweets to companies willing to pay for access. As a company, Twitter also picked up a : Google Maps guru Daniel Graf to help leads its consumer-facing product work. That, the Gnip news, and indication that Twitter is its earnings ahead of a key employee equity unlock period have contributed to the company’s buoyant stock price. Twitter’s spike of 11.38 percent in regular trading added billions to its market cap. Twitter closed yesterday at $40.87 and today at $45.52. Using of 589.45 million, Twitter gained value worth . The company, along with a large cadre of other quickly growing technology companies, has had a rough 2013, falling from 52-week highs as investors retreated from former levels of optimism. Twitter, despite trading far above its IPO price, is far below its 52-week high of more than $74 per share. Twitter’s large pop today was both in contrast to the U.S. market’s modest gains and small pickups by Facebook and other analogous stocks. After a long decline, Twitter shareholders have something to cheer about. |
Telefonica, Blackstone Launch Axonix, A Mobile Ad Exchange Built On Defunct MobClix Tech | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | , the Spanish carrier with operations in 24 countries and 323 million customers, is making its latest bid to expand its business beyond basic mobile and telephone services, by moving into ad tech. It’s teaming up with Blackstone to launch , a real-time bidding mobile ad exchange that has been built on technology from , the defunct ad exchange whose assets were acquired by the private equity giant at the beginning of this year. Axonix, which will be based in London, is officially opening for business in May with its self-service mobile ad platform initially focused on the U.S., Latin American and European markets. MobClix, you might recall, was a fast-growing mobile ad company that had been , apparently for over $50 million, back in 2010. Last year, when troubles started to hit Velti and it on the MobClix platform, and then reported , Mobclix went into bankruptcy protection and Velti filed for Chapter 11 protection. MobClix’s assets, along with the rest of Velti, were then picked up by GSO Capital Partners, the credit division of Blackstone, in January, for an undisclosed sum. (Part of Velti’s marketing assets are now in a new business, too, called . “Affiliates of GSO Capital Partners LP, a division of Blackstone, purchased certain assets from Velti in January 2014 and launched mGage using those assets,” a spokesperson says. “mGage is an independent company and completely separate from Velti.”) The wider transaction up to in debtor-in-possession financing, including “a $10 million cash injection to support the operations included in the proposed sale.” Fast forward to today, and it looks like Telefonica and Blackstone see some value in MobClix’s technology under the right custodianship. Simon Birkenhead, Telefónica’s director of global advertising sales and previously an exec at Google, has been named CEO of Axonix. He will be taking on just one ex-employee from MobClix, Simon Bailey, who will become Axonix’s COO. In an interview with TechCrunch, Birkenhead would not disclose how much money Telefonica or Blackstone are putting into the new Axonix venture, except to say that it will be well funded for the next two years. “There is sufficient investment from Telefonica and Blackstone, and it’s sufficiently stable and funded for the next two years,” he says. There will be money for “generous” hiring packages to woo ambitious talent from other firms, as well as potential acquisitions. He says the firm does not expect to look for outside funding from VCs. Some of Axonix’s funding is likely to come from the $25 million debtor-in-possession funding originally put up by Blackstone for the bigger Velti asset acquisition. Part of the acquisition of the MobClix assets included integrations with some 100 demand-side partners, but no debts. Those old debts “still sit with Blackstone,” Birkenhead says. It will be up to Axonix’s sales team — which will initially be Telefonica’s sales network — to convince the industry that MobClix’s technology is now being run within a more credible business. “Our feeling was that MobClix had a great platform, one of the best on the market,” he says. “It was a great shame it went into bankruptcy through no fault of its own. Our intention is to take the tech but put it into a much more secure and stable company that we will be able to operate on a more sound financial footing for the next couple of years.” The move comes at an interesting time for Telefonica, which has long been trying to figure out the most lucrative place for itself in monetizing better around the growth of smartphones and broadband networks, through advertising and other initiatives. In , the company channelled those efforts into one division that it named Telefonica Digital, complete with 2,500 employees and a host of different digital ambitions, including a Global Services unit (enterprise services), but the internet portal Terra, the internet-calling company Jajah ( ), the “Spanish Facebook” Tuenti (still going), R&D operations, and many different mobile assets such as BlueVia (its app venture, also being wound down – see below) and its other, . But earlier this year, Telefonica made the decision to Telefonica Digital and re-integrate parts of that operation into the bigger organization. Telefonica Digital had put millions of investment into , more, and launching other efforts like this , and the closure points to challenges for the carrier. (One casualty of that was BlueVia, the open API platform Telefonica launched to offer services like carrier billing on its network to developers. “The platform will continue to be maintained and supported but no new connections will be made. Instead we will work with all new partners to help them integrate through preferred aggregators,” a spokesperson says. “In terms of the decision to suspend new connections to BlueVia, this was reached after a strategic review. It was a question of priorities. We took the decision to re-allocate the budget to product development in other areas within Telefonica.”) In short, it seems like Telefonica ran out of patience to see how some of its more ambitious “tech” ideas would eventually play out within a large and still-lumbering telco. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why it’s decided to develop Axonix as more of a standalone entity. Still, the potential is strong for Telefonica, which is why it has and will continue to keep chipping away at these ventures: estimates that in 2013, $13.4 billion was spent on mobile ads, or 13% of all Internet ad spend; and it forecasts that by 2016 mobile ad spend will grow to $45 billion, or 28% of Internet ad spend. It will compete against the likes of MoPub (now owned by Twitter), and Amobee (owned by SingTel). In the UK market, eMarketer projects that mobile ad spend will reach $3.53 billion (£2.26 billion) compared to $1.86 billion in 2013, equivalent to 15.1% of total media spend. Overall, it says the digital ad market is still dominated by Google and Facebook, just as it is in other big, Western markets like the U.S. Google will be just under 41% of all digital ad revenues in the UK in 2014. So who will be the customers on Axonix? Unsurprisingly, Telefonica will among them. The company currently uses DoubleClick for ads on its Terra broadband network, and has a “longstanding relationship” with Amobee for its mobile business. “It’s fair to say we will be evaluating the tech partners that Telefonica has, and seeing where it makes sense to use Axonix,” Birkenhead says. “Amobee is up for renewal this year, and so it’s an opportune time to look at this.” But similarly, other potential customers could include partners of Telefonica’s, such as Firefox OS and Sprint. “Telefonica has an existing partnership with Sprint announced last year for mobile advertising,” Birkenhead notes. “Sprint has a mobile ad business and uses its consumer data to enrich targeting, but it doesn’t have an in-house platform, so we will be engaging in discussions to see how it could use Axonix. It will be natural to engage with others like Firefox OS and Mozilla, where TEF already has a relationship where they don’t have in house technology.” That potential funnel, he says, also includes all operators “besides Singtel.” Photo: |
Inside DODOcase, Where Modern Tech Accessories Are Made The Old Fashioned Way | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Welcome to a new episode of , the video series that takes you inside where the offices where all the tech industry magic happens to see what it’s really like for the people who work there. This time around, we headed to the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco to visit , the startup that makes iPhone, iPad, Kindle, and Android mobile accessories using traditional book binding processes. People working in tech typically have pretty sedentary workdays. They are often either writing on whiteboards or typing on their computers — well, there’s the occasional ping-pong tournament too. DODOcase was a unique place for TechCrunch Cribs to tour because its headquarters is also a factory. So in addition to the people sitting at desks building out DODOcase’s website and handling customer support, there were lots of people moving around and working with machinery to bring DODOcases to life. Check it all out in the video embedded above. |
Google Actually Sells Out Of A Google Glass Model | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Apparently some people still want Google Glass. The white model after Google the product. Models of the other colors are still available — at least until Google stops selling the product tonight. , Google made Glass available to anyone. This is the first time since the product’s announcement that Google has allowed the general public to purchase Glass. Previously, interested buyers either had to apply to purchase the product or receive an invite from someone previously deemed nerdy enough by Google. The white model, Cotton is the official name, sold out shortly after 3:00 p.m. eastern time. Sky, Charcoal, Shale, and Tangerine are still available as of writing. Since Google Glass was announced in 2012, the general perception of the product has digressed from optimistic to absurdity. In some circles, Glass is now the punchline instead of the moonshot it once was. Yet there are clearly still some people who are curious enough to spend $1,500 to beta test the product for Google (including me). |
Seeking Growth, The Payments Industry Embraces New Technologies | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Now a victim of its own omnipresent success, the global electronic payments industry is increasingly turning to new technologies as it looks to expand its footprint and find new ways to make money by getting consumers to spend theirs. The pace of technological advancement in the payments market , with innovations like cryptocurrencies continuing to grab headlines and attract government scrutiny at the federal and state level. Those same regulators are also looking for ways to alleviate the financial pressures and burdens that affect the underbanked and to address the issues of privacy and security that continue to bedevil the industry. These are no small problems, but then again, the electronic payments business is no small industry. In 2013 there were $4.9 trillion worth of volume on cards in the U.S. in 82 billion transactions, according to data from the Electronic Transaction Association, the industry’s trade group — that’s 2.6K transactions per second. An industry that large is bound to attract venture dollars, and indeed, startup companies are beginning to make their presence felt even among giant companies like Visa, Mastercard, and the privately held First Data Corp. Venture capital investment in payment technologies hit a five-year high in committed capital in the first quarter of 2014, when 59 startups raised $492 million for technologies to support, or supplant, existing payments companies.
While executives in some industries would be quaking in their boardroom chairs over a surge of venture money into their markets, the payments space embraces disruptive technological change more readily than most, according to the organization’s chief executive Jason Oxman. “Our industry has embraced disruptive technology in ways that others have not,” Oxman said. He pointed to the music industry’s response to Napster as an example. Rather than trying to litigate new technologies out of existence, the group’s members are actively embracing new payment methods via the mobile phone, and working strenuously with technology companies to improve security and provide additional services. In some cases that means companies like , the global payments processor leveraging Mastercard’s transaction network; , a mobile payment company; or , which is trying to improve the process of transacting online. “There’s a synergy between these core players in payments and venture-backed startups,” said Rick Yang, a principal with the multi-billion-dollar venture capital firm NEA. The value-added services that technology companies can provide through software and big data analysis can help juice the payments industry’s razor-thin margins. And technology companies like the ones backed by Core Innovation Capital can help companies like Visa achieve one of its main objectives — expanding stakeholders in the electronic value chain. Speaking at the ETA Transact conference at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas last week, Bill Sheedy, head of Core exclusively backs startups that are working on bringing financial services to the underbanked, according to co-founder Arjan Schutte. Schutte’s firm isn’t the only venture capital team to tackle the payments market. Investments in payments are fairly evenly distributed among what most would consider to be some of the top quartile funds.
“It’s not just the payment network but financial technology, banking technology, and payment technology companies,” said Dan Rosen, general partner at Commerce Ventures. “The networks themselves have been around for a long time and they serve the purpose they need to. It’s very difficult for a startup to create a MasterCard or Visa network. That said, building applications on top of that is an interesting area for several market segments. [And] larger companies will want to acquire startups that develop really unique intellectual property or technology companies that reach scale, either in terms of numbers in consumer users or in the number of merchants that they enable.” Indeed, Rosen sees opportunities around the marketing and advertising services that can be layered above certain payment or transaction platforms. “A lot of the companies delivering solutions for merchant, gift, loyalty, data analytics and point of sale, are developing solutions that are not payment solutions but they do touch payments,” Rosen said. |
Yahoo’s Shopping Spree Is Slowing Down, It Used A Net $22M For Acquisitions In Q1 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Yahoo’s acquisition train looks like it may finally have slowed down, at least in terms of value if not numbers. Yahoo noted in its that it used a net $22 million for acquisitions in the three months that ended March 31, covering eight companies. The tide could turn, however, post an IPO of Alibaba, which is expected to help Yahoo balloon its cash holdings to $12 billion from a current $4.6 billion. Sequentially, the $22 million net spent in the last quarter is just over a third of the net amount Yahoo said it spent on acquisitions in the quarter before that, when it spent $60 million, also to acquire eight companies, and just 13% of the net value it spent in Q3 of 2013:
The eight companies Yahoo acquired in the past quarter are , , , , , , and . The only three we’ve had prices for were Tomfoolery ($16 million), Aviate ($80 million) and Wander (“over” $10 million). The reason for the numerical discrepancy could be because Yahoo is not calculating earnouts or share portions of acquisitions (Tumblr if you recall was an almost all-cash deal). All told, Yahoo has acquired 38 different startups since Marissa Mayer took the helm as CEO, and if there have been themes to the furious buying it’s been to replenish the talent ranks at the company; to add more product focus in key areas like mobile, with the notable outlier of Tumblr, gave Yahoo an instant boost to its positions in social and with younger users. The tide may change again after the Alibaba IPO. The company’s cash, cash equivalents, and investments in marketable securities was $4.6 billion at the end of the quarter, down by $400 million from the quarter before. The Alibaba IPO, however, is expected to balloon that to $12 billion. Asked on the how Yahoo might spend the proceeds and whether there might be more acquisitions ahead, Marissa noted that there might be “some tuck in acquisitions, some strategic acquisitions,” without elaborating further. “We will continue to think about how to maximise all the use of those proceeds,” Ken Goldman, Yahoo’s CFO, noted. “There are theories we continue to work on,” he added, which might be a reference to a large acquisition up ahead that would be as strategic as its move to pick up Tumblr. “Finding an acquisition that would make sense…could help us scale… and think about international,” he noted later. Among the many rumors of Yahoo acquisitions, the company has apparently been looking at , the online video company, and , the popular photo sharing site. Image: |
Google Releases Helpouts App For iOS | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Google introduced Helpouts last year to HELP PEOPLE OUT (yeah that’s where they got the name). The system works through Hangouts, letting people connect with experts for paid or free video chats that are about solving a specific problem, rather than just shooting the breeze with pals as we all do on Hangouts all the time. Now Helpouts is available on . Helpouts for iOS works like Helpouts on the web, offering users the ability to connect to any of the free video chats made available on the Google-powered platform. That’s likely because trying to offer the paid variety through Apple would incur its standard developer fee of 30 percent for transactions made through its mobile OS, and that’s something that isn’t worth Google’s time or that it just doesn’t want to do. Helpouts launched for Android back in November of last year, so the Apple-friendly follow-up is a bit of a laggard. The app offers expert ratings, as well as scheduling of sessions with experts, and participation in sessions directly from their device. The app is free and designed specifically for iPhone. |
Intel Meets In Q1 With Revenue Of $12.8B, EPS Of $0.38 On Back Of Recovering PC Market | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Following the closing bell today, Intel its first quarter results, including revenue of $12.764 billion, and earnings per share of $0.38. The results roughly match analyst expectations that the company would earn $0.37 per share on top line of $12.81 billion. It’s worth noting that that $0.37 per share earnings expectation was the lower than at least the company’s last five quarters’ results. In the , Intel had seasonally-boosted revenue of $13.83 billion, on earnings per share of $0.51. Like other members of the larger PC ecosystem, Intel benefits from the holiday sales rush. Intel was essentially flat in regular trading, and is up just under 3% in after-hours trading. All told, the company’s PC division had revenue of $7.9 billion in the period, down 1%, while its Data Center Group had revenue of $3.1 billion, up 11% year-over-year. Net income for Intel during the quarter totaled $1.9 billion, a 5% year-over-year decline. The company broke out two revenue categories this cycle that are worth taking a note of. They are as follows: $482 million. Intel notes that this sum is “ [Note: As the Wall Street Journal , this top line likely includes prior ’embedded’ revenues, so don’t take this segment to mean that Internet of Things has exploded quite yet.] $156 million, which according to Intel is “down 52 percent sequentially and down 61 percent year-over-year.” The company expects second quarter revenue of $13.0 billion, with a margin of error of $500 million either direction. Looking broadly, the Intel results show a firming PC market, and continued weakness at the chip company to target new segments such as mobile for short-term growth. |
Yahoo Beats Street For Q1 On Sales Of $1.09B, EPS Of $0.38 But Flat Display Sales Of $438M | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Yahoo has just reported its , with ex-TAC revenues of $1.087 billion and earnings per share of $0.38, and net income of $314 million. That just about beat analysts’ expectations on revenue: they were ex-TAC sales of $1.08 billion (First Call estimates were $1,076.9 million). Yahoo had provided adjusted earnings guidance earlier this year of between $290 million and $330 million. [Yahoo defines “revenue ex-TAC” as “a non-GAAP financial measure defined as GAAP revenue less TAC. TAC consists of payments made to third-party entities that have integrated our advertising offerings into their Websites or other offerings (those Websites and other offerings, “Affiliate sites”) and payments made to companies that direct consumer and business traffic to Yahoo’s online properties and services (“Yahoo Properties”).”] , Yahoo reported revenues of $1.07 billion and earnings of $0.38 per share. “I am really pleased by our first quarter performance, marking our best Q1 revenue ex-TAC since 2010,” CEO Marissa Mayer said in a statement. The company says that it now has 430 million mobile users — a “pivotal” part of the company’s growth plan. Mobile may be the future, but today for Yahoo the mainstay of the company remains how well it is doing in advertising. On that front, it was a a mixed picture. GAAP display revenue, the company said, was $453 million for the first quarter of 2014, flat compared to the first quarter of 2013. But display revenue ex-TAC was $409 million for the first quarter of 2014, up 2% increase on the $402 million it made in Q1 last year. The number of ads sold was up 7% compared to a year ago, but the price per ad was down by 5%. GAAP search revenues were $445 million, up 5% on a year ago, while ex-TAC search revenues were $444 million, up 9%. Paid clicks were up 6% and price per click was also up by 8%. Yahoo continues to partner with Microsoft on search but there have been reports that the company may be looking to reconsider that relationship. As part of the search agreement, Yahoo notes that Microsoft takes 12% of the net (after TAC) on search revenue that’s generated on Yahoo properties and affiliate sites. To forge ahead, Yahoo’s tried to break new ground in advertising with new product launches. Yahoo Advertising is its cross-platform, integrated ad buying platform covering web, mobile, and video ad products across native, audience, and premium display ads. Yahoo Gemini is is marketplace for mobile search and native advertising. And it also started to power sponsored posts on Tumblr. It’s also now working with Yelp and cross-referencing content from the local reviews and local search company across Yahoo properties. More to come. |
Respondly Launches To Simplify Your Support Team’s Workflow For Emails And Tweets | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | The founder of , a tool that surfaces popular Twitter favourites, has launched a new startup with a Twitter focus — bringing a customer support tool called out of private beta today. Its tagline best sums up what this b2b startup is aiming for: ‘Team inbox for email & Twitter’. The basic concept, say co-founders Tim Haines and Phil Cockfield, is to strip back the problem of managing customer support across multiple touchpoints — by focusing on making it easy for teams to respond to (and keep on top of) incoming emails and tweets. The pair previously worked together on a Favstar redesign in 2012 but have known each other for a decade. The idea for a unified system for managing support-related comms came to them when they were trying to manage Favstar user enquiries. “As Favstar user numbers grew, so did the amount of user enquiries, and those enquiries naturally came in via Twitter. We were getting crushed by the daily onslaught of these support tweets,” they note. Early design and prototyping on Respondly started in January last year, with those prototypes put into active use fielding enquiries from Favstar’s 3 million+ monthly users. The pair have also beta-tested the product with a small group of third-party beta testers — fewer than 200 organizations in all, says Haines — including the likes of Tweetbot, Pocket and Stripe. So really it’s been cherry-picking those startups that are going to immediately grok its pared back, consumerised approach to the support problem. “The strategy for Respondly has been to compete through nuanced, minimalist design that provides a simple yet more powerful experience for users,” says Haines when asked how Respondly sets itself apart from existing customer support/social media comms management tools. “Time and again the industry has seen seemingly minimal changes to the design of a social messaging system result in an out-sized improvement in adoption and the way people engage with the tool. Our goal with Respondly was to translate these design lessons over to a team-based business tool,” he adds. Specifically, Respondly offers a central, shared inbox for support teams to manage and respond to incoming customer support enquiries via email and Twitter. During set-up the team members who will be using it are added, along with any associated email addresses, Twitter accounts and Twitter searches you want to monitor. Tweets and emails then land in this shared inbox where the whole team can triage the conversations — with no issues about who gets to see what, since the whole team can see everything. [gallery ids="988053,988052,988054"] All emails and tweets relating to a particular conversation also get grouped together, to make it easier to keep track of any back-and-forth, with threads resurfaced if a new missive comes winging in to highlight associated context for whoever’s picking up the thread this time. “Respondly solves the problem of communication amongst a team and their customers becoming fragmented, siloed, hard to manage, or just plain forgotten,” says Haines. “It provides the central, ‘go to’ location that all team members can find and collaborate on a conversation with a customer. “Whether the team does customer support, public relations work, or marketing, they’ll find Respondly is a powerful way of keeping the whole team on top of conversations as they happen in real-time.” Respondly can, says Haines, be used both as a way to do group comms internally, or as a system for managing external comms coming in to a team that need assigning and responding to. Its potential market is therefore considerably broader than pure customer support (even though the startup’s initial focus is on the support market as, well, a way to keep the business focused). “While we have focused initially on customer support as a strategic first step, the wider vision for Respondly extends much further. The logical extension of where ‘team collaboration around public conversations’ takes you, is to a place that is significantly larger than customer support alone,” he says. “Starting with a focus on customer support grounds Respondly in a pragmatic, go-to-market reality, and avoids the problem of trying to ‘boil the ocean’ by going too wide, too soon. Getting the basics for the ‘support collaboration’ use-case done really well opens up an enormous market for all manner of powerful team collaboration on the platform.” So really Respondly’s grand plan can be couched as a -style play to rethink interactivity — albeit one that’s taking baby steps out of the gate, to avoid a . In terms of the competitive landscape, Haines notes that “several” of the early beta-customers have switched to Respondly from Zendesk, Desk.com and Hootsuite. “A common statement we’ve heard is that Respondly is easier to use, and lets you get your work done faster,” he adds. Stripping away the layers of complexity of dashboard tools like Hootsuite is exactly the aim of Respondly. But although its initial focus is just on email and Twitter, it’s likely the startup will expand these touchpoints to add more social media options — such as Facebook — in future. The risk, of course, with anything that leans on simplicity as its USP, is that over time all the complexity gets added back in as users demand the additional features you stripped out in the first place. Ergo, the service that started simple ends up just as hoary and horrible to use as the rivals it was set up to disrupt. But Respondly in its current form is a long way from social media dashboard hell. And considering the founders’ highfalutin user-centric design talk, they will presumably be sticking out their necks to ensure the product doesn’t stray from its righteous UI path down the line. In the meanwhile, Haines argues that existing email interfaces are ripe for disruption — and you really can’t argue with him there. (Although getting people to switch from something they are so habitualised to using, even if they don’t actually like using it, is quite another matter.) “Gmail is 10 years old and largely unchanged from it’s initial release. Even more so with Outlook. The scope for elegant, powerful design around email, and the impact that will have on email as the ‘de facto communication channel’ for small businesses worldwide, is immense,” he says. “Add to email the nuanced integration of Twitter, and you’re on the path to side-stepping a false dichotomy between ’email’ OR ‘social’. It’s a ‘yes AND’ relationship we’re building between these channels. Twitter is our first step for social-media channels done right,” he adds. The business model for Respondly is straightforward software-as-a-service, with its introductory plan costing $9 per month (there is also a free 40-day trial period so new users can kick its tires), rising to $849 per month for its premium enterprise plan. It doesn’t charge per individual user, since the tool itself needs a team to function fully. Haines say the usage/features “sweet spot” sits at $79 per month for the entire team. Haines and Cockfield have been self-funding Respondly thus far but say they are exploring the option of doing a seed raise post-launch to accelerate development — assuming they can find the right kind of investors. “We’re not in a hurry to do a deal,” says Haines, adding: “The main focus for us is to partner with the right kind of investors – folks that have sophistication and appreciation of using design as a competitive lever in business software.” |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 23 | null |
Samsung’s Galaxy S5 Can Be Tricked By The Same Lifted Fingerprint Hack As The iPhone 5S | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Remember back in September when a couple of researchers figured out how to bypass the iPhone 5S’ fingerprint lock ? Turns out, the fingerprint sensor on Samsung’s new Galaxy S5 falls victim to the very same trick. They didn’t even have to make a new mold. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfhLZZWBn5Q&w=640&h=390] Germany’s SRLabs released the video above this morning demonstrating the trick. They first train the phone to recognize their finger, then immediately test the sensor with a rubber stand-in. Sure enough, they get right in. To be clear, this is an easy trick to pull off. You need a fair amount of time and expertise, both in lifting the original fingerprint and in creating a rubber mold from it. It’s something to be aware of — but : if someone is going so far as to make fake replicas of your finger, you probably have bigger things to worry about. While the executions are nearly identical, the end result is somewhat more severe in Samsung’s case. Apple limits fingerprint-authenticated payments to the App Store, whereas Samsung’s PayPal tie-in (allowing users to log in to PayPal with their fingerprint) potentially puts a user’s larger financials at risk. But of course, tricking phone’s fingerprint sensor opens up access to any email account configured on the device… and really, that’s about as bad as it gets. The big lesson here: a fingerprint password is better than no password at all, but it’s not bulletproof. If you’re trying to keep your bored toddler or a drunken friend from getting in to your phone, sure — fingerprint away. But if you’re a secret spy shuttling important documents around on your phone? Maybe pick something else. For the curious, here’s the original iPhone 5S video that shows the entire finger-faking process: |
Hands On With The Xperia Z2 Smartphone And Z2 Tablet, Sony’s Waterproof Wonders | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | Both Samsung and HTC have new flagship Android phones out in the U.S., but Sony isn’t just sitting back and doing nothing. The company has its new launching soon in select markets, including in Canada in May. The waterproof glass-encased handset has a lot in common with last year’s Z1, but goes the extra mile with new imaging options, noise cancellation features and 4K video recording. I got to try out the Xperia Z2 and the Z2 Tablet, Sony’s new Android-powered slate, and came away impressed with both. The Z2 has a screen that could challenge Samsung’s Galaxy S5 for best display on the smartphone market, thanks in part to special tech Sony has included from its television lineup that makes colors really pop. This works for photos and videos captured on the device, and for media from the Internet, including Netflix, with special pixel-rendering software that makes for stunning images on the screen. I’m not sure what exactly is included in the special sauce, but the results truly are impressive on the Z2’s panel, which now also features IPS. [gallery ids="988521,988520,988519,988518,988517,988516,988515,988514,988513,988512,988511,988510,988504,988503,988502"] Sony’s hardware feels light and a bit chunkier than some of the other handsets on the market, but it also feels a bit sturdier than some of its plastic compatriots, and the all-glass look seems improved on the Z2. Thinner bezels make that star screen standout more, too. In practice the Android 4.4.2 OS is speedy thanks to the beefy quad-core 2.3GHz Snapdragon 801 processor, and the waterproof phone really is that – you’re not only free to spill water on it or bring it in the shower, but also snorkel and shoot photos and videos with it. Take that Galaxy S5. The camera is impressive, delivering 20 megapixels and up to 4K video capture. In my brief tests, it seemed to fare better than its predecessor in low-light image performance, and the host of developer and in-house-created filters that Sony offers mostly now work on both photo and videos. There’s a background defocus feature, but it’s kind of tricky to get right and definitely requires a steady hand plus lots of time, just like the same feature on the GS5. Overall, the Xperia Z2 seems like a very impressive handset, with features that make it perfect for the active traveller who only wants to carry around a single device. In Canada when it launches next month, it’ll debut on Bell first. No word yet on a U.S. launch timeframe. [gallery ids="988505,988522,988523,988506,988507,988508"] The Z2 Tablet is what Sony calls the thinnest and lightest tablet yet, and it really is impressive on both counts for a tablet with its screen size. The display is also impressive, and it’s waterproof, too, meaning you could theoretically use it to watch Netflix in the bath if that’s what makes you happy. My only issue is that it feels so thin and light I actually felt concerned I might be able to snap it in half thanks to its plastic back cover construction. Sony’s been quietly building up its smartphone chops over the past couple of years, and based on initial impressions, the Z2 feels like it can stand toe-to-toe with the Android flagships of its rivals at the very least. We’ll have full reviews of both gadgets to see how they stack up after a closer, more prolonged impression. |
How Much Time Have You Killed In Front Of Your TV? This Tool Tells You | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | Oh man! I’m going to be so productive this weekend! I’m going to work on of my side projects! Screw side projects! Lets re-watch all of Breaking Bad! Do you ever wonder how much time you’ve spent watching TV shows? It’s probably a lot. But Two week’s worth? A month? crunches the numbers for you. Punch in a show you’ve watched, then how many seasons you’ve seen. It’ll tell you how much of your life each show gobbled up — and, more painfully, it’ll add up the total time across all your shows. Have you seen every episode of ? That’s 5 days. Sat through twice? That’s another 3 days each. Mad about the last thirty minutes of That’s okay — you spent 4 days of your life getting there, after all. Don’t get me wrong: I me a good TV show. I’ve watched all of the aforementioned shows in entirety at least once, and generally have a random episode of some show or another playing in the background while I work. But , does it add up quick. As John Lennon is often ( ) quoted: “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted.” But he also, you know, started the freaking Beatles. No one on the planet can accuse you of wasting time after that. Screw it. I’m going outside to build a shed or something. |
A Multi-Factor Analysis Of Startups | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | Every decision we make from what to wear to whom to hire requires a balance of multiple factors. Sometimes we decide quickly and other times with deliberate consideration. Either way, we do this every day. Picking what to wear, for instance, depends on a number of variables: what we have in the closet, what we’ll be doing that day, what the weather’s like, etc. Often we pick something to wear but later question our judgment. This happens for a number of reasons: Selecting a startup to invest in isn’t much different. First, we have a number of alternatives, i.e. our deal flow. We don’t have access to available deals. Second, we have a limited amount of time to decide and we have other constraints, such as how much cash we have, contingencies, terms, existing portfolio and so forth. Multi-factor decision analysis, or multi-criteria decision analysis as it’s more commonly known in academia, is an approach that is intended to force hard thinking about the alternatives, contingencies, constraints, etc., to promote good decision-making. It won’t give you the “right” answer, but it will challenge intuition, help structure the problem, provide a sounding board for testing, and combine different perspectives. People love taking shortcuts when making decisions — smart people more so than others because they believe they are better than others based on their prior accomplishments. This is error No. 1. People also place more emphasis on recent events than the event warrants, such as pouring money into messaging apps after the WhatsApp acquisition. This is error No. 2. We also anchor our valuations to recent events. Error No. 3: If an IPO is successful, funding to startups goes up. Error No. 4: We value the popular view especially shared among more successful people. Case in point is YC demo days. Error No. 5: We think that what we have available is all that’s available. And finally, when we succeed we take a lot more credit for it than the responsibility we take when we fail. This is error No. 6. I’m not pointing out these errors to dismiss the intellect of successful people. These errors are like a hammer chipping away from a beautiful chunk of granite leaving you with a small stone. And these errors, aka cognitive biases, are there because of where we are in our evolution. A million years from now we’ll probably decide better. We all suffer from “ .” So let’s dig deeper now. Consider a time when you’re an investor evaluating Facebook. Here’s the scenario: It doesn’t look that compelling, does it? But look at the pros: You may say this is hindsight but bear with me. If you decided not to invest in Facebook, the error you’ve made is simply assuming that the four negative parameters carry the same weight as the three positive parameters. You wrote pros and cons and crossed them out; whichever side had more won. This is when multi-factor analysis comes into play and shows its magic. All you had to do was decide which parameter was more important and by how much. One may decide it looks like this: Consider RingCentral. It’s similar. VoIP is not new. Competition is huge. But it’s got a great team, a good (not yet great) product, great monetization, a big and underserved market segment, etc. Here’s how you build your multi-factor matrix: The attributes we selected here come from . MCDA takes this a step further and forces the decision-makers to identify how important each attribute is. Naturally, not all attributes have the same level of importance. To take this a step further, one may decide to run more statistical analysis on attributes and how they impacted startups in the past. The results will help the team understand the importance of each attribute better. Once you identify the factors and their levels of importance, run each startup in your deal flow through this matrix. Each one will give you a different score. From there, you can calculate your bang for the buck on each alternative. It forces you to avoid biases and look at the problem as a whole, and it builds a framework that takes you from complexity to simplicity. Multi-factor models have been criticized in the past because they often appear “simplistic.” The simple model does not deny the complexity of the problem. It forces you to distill the key factors in a transparent, easy-to-work-with manner, and this can generate further insights and understanding. is a renowned professor of Information and Decision Sciences at the University of Warwick. In his book named “ ” he states the following: Decision analysis has been berated because it supposedly applies simplistic ideas to complex problems, usurping decision makers and prescribing choice. Yet I believe it does nothing of this sort. I believe that decision analysis is a very delicate, subtle tool that helps decision makers explore and come to understand their beliefs and preferences in the context of a particular problem. …There is no prescription, only the provision of a framework in which to think and communicate. We agree with Professor French. The biases described above are quite apparent in the way investors make decisions. We need a disciplined approach to VC investing just like in any other asset class. Today, we have a lot more data on startups than ever before. We know the cash influx into startups and exits. We know stage-by-stage changes in valuations. It’s worthwhile to study what attributes make or break the startup instead of making blanket heuristic statements such as “most of your investments will fail” or forming valuation correlations such as “x accelerator graduates commend higher valuation.” Our job as investors is to avoid biases and have a structured approach to how we select startups that creates consistency and translates to newer-generation VCs unlike the models of traditional VCs, which, in our opinion, does not. |
Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | I used to think corporate culture didn’t matter. Discussion of vision, mission and values was for people who couldn’t build product or sell it! We had work to do and this MBA BS was getting in the way! And then my first company failed. Cambridge Decision Dynamics did not fail because we didn’t have a great technology or a great product or customers. It failed as a sustainable, scalable organization because we had no meaningful purpose to create team unity to fight through the tough times. Now the company sits comfortably in a perpetual state of what I like to call “deep stealth mode.” Compare this to the rapidly growing company Eventbrite that I visited recently with some of my students. Eventbrite enables event planners to manage ticket sales and RSVPs online, and its users have . There was palpable energy and excitement in the air when we stepped in the door. Dozens of neatly parked bicycles spanned a row next to the smiling receptionist. The employee who gave us a tour proudly showed off their conference rooms named after big events that they had helped their customers pull off, including “Promunism,” which was a Communist-themed high school prom. That room had a conspicuous red rotary phone for the emergencies that might come up in planning such a large event, a clear and visible sign linking the company to its customers in a positive manner. A minute later, we walked by a whiteboard with the prompt “Home to me is…” that was covered with enthusiastic employee suggestions. Eventbrite office in San Francisco (photo: Bill Aulet). Being from New York, I am inherently skeptical about worlds of happiness and cohesion. But it all made sense when our host, VP of marketing, former MIT student, and single-digit-number employee Tamara Mendelsohn, came striding in the room, beaming with pride and energy, to discuss how Eventbrite went from just a few employees to hundreds and became a model of success for others in Northern California. There was a lot of technical advice on primary market research and marketing techniques to drive market traction, but by far the most interesting part was about how the founders and the leaders of the company had consciously “engineered the company’s culture.” At first, she explained, the primary focus was testing for humility during the hiring process, and they had a checklist to enforce their “no assholes” rule. But they quickly realized they needed to do more. As the company grew, they wanted to keep the same GSD (Get Stuff Done) attitude across the company and not let their company turn into “just another company.” This was tricky, but because the founders and employees were deeply committed to this attitude, they developed the following solution: “You can’t complain here,” Tamara explained. “If you see something wrong, you must fix it. We say it is a great opportunity to come up with a solution, and this is where many of our best programs have come from. Anything can be changed. We aren’t victim to anyone. We own the culture.” It is no accident that such a strong culture has produced such a successful company. Event planners have enough to worry about without their ticket-sales software having problems – it needs to just work. When we have used the tool for our center’s events, we have found both a good feature set but also a super-responsive technical support team that has us covered when we screw up or don’t understand certain features. When Tamara explained Eventbrite’s culture to us, it made sense to me why their support team was so on point. As we talk about in our classes (and credit to Peter Drucker who had the original quote which we have modified), “culture eats strategy for breakfast, technology for lunch, and products for dinner, and soon thereafter everything else too.” Why? Because company culture, a concept pioneered by , is the operationalizing of an organization’s values. Culture guides employee decisions about both technical business decisions and how they interact with others. Good culture creates an internal coherence in actions taken by a very diverse group of employees. Some may believe that culture cannot be “engineered,” and that it just happens. It is true that culture happens whether you want it to or not. It is the DNA of the company and is in large part created by the founders – not by their words so much as their actions. So the very decision to not try to create a corporate culture, or worse, to not have company values, is in fact your choice of what culture will prevail – and not for the better. Should this have been a surprise to me? No, because for over a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s, I worked for IBM when it was the most respected, profitable and rapidly growing company in the world. From day one of training (training which lasted often for two years), the company made clear the importance of their trio of : respect for the individual, superlative customer service, and the pursuit of excellence in all tasks. It was this fervent adherence to these core values – through the training, the monthly communications, the performance-appraisal system, the role models, and ultimately every decision we made –that made us great. In my later years there, I had seen a distinction erosion of management’s commitment and adherence to these values. Leaders started to cut corners on these to achieve short-term objectives, as they felt less confident in their position and felt it was more important to deliver short-term results. It was this ambiguity about these values that contributed so mightily to the fall of IBM, which led to the installment of Lou Gerstner as CEO. As he worked to turn around the business, he came to a deeper understanding of the issue, which he voiced himself at the end of his tenure: “I came to see in my time at IBM that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game. In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.” While IBM is a large company, this pattern is true as well for the world of startups I now operate in — especially startups that want to scale. My colleague, Paul English, built a unique culture at Kayak that was the foundation of that company’s success. The founders created a system where their company culture of excellence and productivity was created from the hiring process through to operations. Meetings where decisions were to be made were to have no more than three people because then people were wasting their time. This created a culture of action and accountability while trading off consensus. This culture does not work for all people and all companies but they made no apologies for it at Kayak and pursued it consistently. It was reinforced daily by practices ranging from Paul’s behavior, to size of conference rooms to the incentive system. The result of these efforts was that the company’s revenue per employee was $1.25 million, which was more than double the industry average. In June 2013, by . Another example is a company called , which is based in Manchester, N.H. This company performs the crucial but unglamorous work of creating, managing and improving the plumbing of the Internet for users. The company’s founders believed deeply that they needed to have a strong culture. Aligning with what will create value for their customers, they focused on creating an environment that was exceptional at allowing people to be honest about their mistakes, driving them to rectify them, and then celebrate and immortalize the technical efforts that brought the solutions to life. Again this culture was brought to life by the real estate, the way visitors were handled, the actions of the company leaders and their highly visible movie posters. An example of a movie poster is shown below. In this case, the customer had a broken workflow for registering new domains, so the employees worked on a solution that made it so easy “even your parents can figure it out.” The company then invested in creating the poster below and then having the team sign the poster. It is now permanently and prominently hung in their headquarters. It is no surprise to me that Dyn has grown from 53 employees in 2011 to 300 employees today and is considered a huge success story in an unconventional location. Poster hanging on wall in Dyn common area (Photo: Cory Von Wallenstein). Every company, especially startups, will experience random events that will help or hurt. It is impossible to fully anticipate these events ahead of time. That’s not the question. The question is how your organization will react to the series of inevitable unknown and random events. A strong product plan is great, but it also takes strong culture to handle potentially adverse scenarios in a positive way. A positive culture like Eventbrite’s takes what would be an inherently fragile human system and makes it anti-fragile (i.e. it gets stronger with random events), to use the concept that describes in his books. The unpredictable world of a fast-growing startup, and the daily decisions that must be made in response, tend to make the venture stronger rather than weaker or more confused. So count me among the completely converted. When I talk to entrepreneurs now, before I get too carried away with the idea, I want to probe them about their vision, mission and values. Ideas are cheap – and tasty too. Culture eats them even before its pre-breakfast morning run. |
Phones Go Back To The Future | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | I’m no fan of LG’s rear smartphone control keys — but turns out the company had its finger on the pulse of looming hardware disruption when it ushered in those backside smartphone controls last summer, with the . Smartphone case-makers start quaking because all that unused real-estate on the rear of the proverbial handset — which, for years, you’ve been free to clad with lurid coloured plastic or rubber skins — is becoming a space to watch in its own right. Hardware innovation that’s been forced to slow elsewhere, with the front of the phone becoming locked down with as near an edge-to-edge display as is technically possible, is moving in on the back of phones, an under-developed, mostly overlooked landmass ripe for spicing up. Examples of interesting backside smartphone developments (for want of a better phrase) in recent times include some at the margins of the market, such as — an NFC-powered backplate that snaps onto the mobile-maker startup’s (which ) to allow users to customise the look and feel of their smartphone theme, thanks to the NFC connection betwixt the two. The NFC connection on the Other Half also allows users of the handset to get access to branded content, such as a news feed or product catalogue from an Angry Birds or Makia co-branded Other Half. But the rear of Jolla’s handset also incorporates a power and a bus connector — meaning the back of the phone has been designed to be a much broader platform ( ) that developers can extend in multiple ways. Ideas for Other Halfs (Other Halves?) floating around the Jolla community include incorporating sensors into the back of the phone so you could mute it by waving your hand over it. Or adding an OLED display for notification info such as the time and battery percentage (as seen in the video below). Or even an RGB display that changes colour so the user can customise the look of their device without having to swap out the back plastic for another colour. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLolLNn1WMM&w=640&h=360] But perhaps the best example of backside smartphone innovation — still from the margins of the industry — is Russian smartphone startup Yota Devices, whose Android handset is a dual-screen device with an entire e-ink screen on its rear. The e-ink display allows for the rear of the to be used for additional and companion functionality, supplementing the standard smartphone playbook of apps and games and YouTube in your pocket, with a display that draws less power, and which can permanently show a piece of static content without drawing any power. Longer-form text content can be sent to the back pane of the YotaPhone for easier on the eye reading that can also help extend the device’s battery life. (The next-gen YotaPhone, pictured above and below but not due to be released until the end of the year, will offer a Smart Power mode that enables the user to switch off the colour display entirely to keep the device going when battery levels are at critical. This mode will allow them to retain basic functionality, such as making calls and sending texts, by performing them on the e-ink touchscreen.) The e-ink display can also be used to display notifications permanently, including a real-time dashboard showing sports scores, or even quantified health data. It also enables user customisation and personalisation of the device, by offering a canvas for displaying photos and wallpapers. Even if the phone’s battery dies, an e-ink imprint can remain — so it can also be used to retain a map or mobile ticket without having to worry about keeping the device juiced. The first gen YotaPhone, which has the e-ink second display but without it being fully touch-enabled, , the U.K., back in March. Turning to larger players, Google’s modular smartphone (actually , the company ), is another example of the rear of the phone becoming a canvas for change and creativity. From the front, the forthcoming Ara handsets won’t look that different to any other standard smartphone. But turn them around and it’s a different story. Here the phone’s rear will be transformed into a mosaic for a user-choosable pick & mix of modules that will spec out the overall device’s functionality. It’s early days for Ara, with Google only just releasing an for hardware developers to think about building these modules — and a commercial release not likely before Q1 2015 at the earliest. But the modular concept introduces more possibilities for extending the phone’s functionality — and for making the smartphone itself a more mutable tool in hardware as well as software terms. You may not want to upgrade your entire phone just to get a heart rate monitor or a pulse oximeter or a geiger counter but, assuming this phone makes it to market, an Ara owner could hot-swap particular sensor components that make sense for them at a given time. Adding a geiger counter if they’re traveling somewhere where radiation levels may be higher than normal, for instance. Ara clearly takes inspiration from the which either plugs in via the headphone jack, or connects wirelessly via Bluetooth. But instead of plugging new stuff into a port in the side of your phone, Ara deconstructs the entire handset — turning all that underused rear space into a modular mosaic and allowing the user to choose the bits and pieces that make most sense for them. The Ara concept supports user-customisation at both a design and functionality level — and it’s all thanks to the remaining wiggle room on the back side of the smartphone. Ara is undoubtedly massively ambitious, and may well prove a user flop, but again it’s interesting to see phone makers trying to do more with the least exciting surface of the modern smartphone. Even , whose iPhone has had but the merest design tweaks over the years since launching in 2007, has been filing patents that could see some growths swelling on the rear of future iPhones. Earlier this month it was for bayonet mounts (pictured below) on the rear of the iPhone that could allow for swappable lenses in future. show Apple has also been exploring extensible iPhone cases and magnetic attachments — both for extending the camera. These patents are nowhere near as radical as Ara, certainly, but it’s telling that even in Cupertino the unused space on the rear of the iPhone is being eyed up as a possible development plot where new hardware innovation could take root. Android OEM behemoth , meanwhile, has slapped a heart rate monitor on the rear of its latest flagship handset, the . Again, it’s not a huge change to its standard smartphone formula — but it’s still telling placement for the sensor, utilizing what is otherwise mostly wasted space. The rear of the smartphone has always been a resting place for our hands and fingers — and Samsung is making more of that passive touch by siting a sensor that requires contact with human skin on the backside of the device. The advantage of that positioning is it’s easy for the user’s fingers to reach and does not eat into screen space, allowing for usage of the heart rate monitor not to impede the screen. has not overlooked developments taking place on the rear of phones either. Its new flagship, the , has two camera lenses on the back, extending the camera’s capabilities via twin imaging sensors. These dual lenses can be used to improve the phone’s ability to recognise background and foreground portions of images to allow for filters to be applied differently to different portions of the picture. It also means the M8 can perform Lytro-style refocusing tricks on users’ photos, after the shutter has been clicked. Again, as with Samsung’s S5, there’s still an awful lot of wasted space on the M8’s rear. But radical changes tend to take place in the margins of a market, before they filter into the mainstream, so these small initial steps by mainstream mobile makers are what you’d expect. HTC has also cooked up something more radical with an accessory for the M8: a case that allows users to view dot-matrix style notifications through the casing itself. Admittedly this does not enhance the rear of the phone — the active portion of the casing is a screen protector cover for the front of the device which works by relaying LED and touch-sensitivity from that front display through the protective casing. But even though this development is not focused on the rear of the smartphone, it’s interesting nonetheless, as another example of phone makers thinking about how to do more with previously uninteresting surfaces — whether that’s the back of the phone, or, as below, the plastic cover of a protective screen casing. Making all surfaces smarter is the name of the game, here. The backside of the smartphone is just the most obvious candidate for upgrading, since there’s so much surface there — yet, in general, so little being done with that space. Add to that, for certain smartphone users, the number of notifications pinging into view from the plethora of apps they have on tap is getting unworkable. Creative solutions for better managing ambient information transfer so that the main smartphone screen doesn’t get cluttered up with too many alerts makes plenty of sense. In the hierarchy of information, certain apps and functions are always going to be more important than others. So here’s to lots more creative reworkings of the lesser seen side of smartphones — to better layer and manage the things we need our phones to do. |
Apple Nabs Itself A Renewable Power Plant Project in Oregon | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | Apple’s been on a bit of a buying spree lately. ! ! ! If you had to guess the next thing Apple would take under its wing, what would it be? If you guessed “a hydroelectric power project in Central Oregon”, you’d be right! You’d also be a weirdly specific guesser. reports that Apple has taken over the efforts to complete a hydroelectric plant just outside of Prineville, Oregon. “Cool!” you say. “But what the hell is a hydroelectric plant?” You know those big wooden water wheels you always see in kitschy paintings of rivers? It’s like that, except with more of that sweet, sweet science. Falling water is used to spin big turbines, which in turn generate electricity. The Hoover Dam, for example, doubles as a hydroelectricity plant. As for why Apple would want one, it’s simple: data centers. Apple operates a handful of data centers around the world (including one right down the road from their new hydro plant) to power things like iCloud. Data centers use a of power; even just keeping them cool enough to operate is a costly battle. Apple that 100% of the energy that powers their data centers comes from renewable sources – but for now, they’re still buying much of that energy from third-party wind, solar, and hydroelectric plants. As made clear by this move and the company’s , Apple would much rather be filling their energy needs on their own. Don’t expect them to be entirely self-sufficient right away, though — even with regards to just their Oregon data center. This new hydro-electric project is said to output somewhere around 3-5 megawatts. Many big data centers — like Facebook’s Oregon data center, just down the road from Apple’s — require up to 6x that. |
Instagram Is Down (Update: It’s Back!) | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | RED ALERT! We are at DEFCON 1. Instagram is down. According to and , and my iPhone, the service is down for everyone. According to this service status site, Instagram has been down for about an hour. Twitter is about Coachella. Instagram has not made a comment on the matter yet, but we’ve reached out and will update as soon as humanly possible. Instagram says they’re aware of the issue and are working on it, but it’s still down. https://twitter.com/instagram/status/455025601553108993 Instagram hasn’t confirmed that everything is back up yet, but things seem to be coming back online slowly. 3 hours later, Instagram seems to be almost entirely back online. Let the narcissism commence! |
A Wearables Startup Playbook | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | received as much buzz as the wearables market. From fitness bands and anklet baby monitors, to smartwatches and Google Glass, wearables are fun, cool, and cutting-edge. The rise of mobile broadband, commodity sensors, smartphone-based companion apps, virtualized manufacturing and supply chain, crowdfunding, and nimble design have converged to make wearables mainstream. With the category now validated as a strategic hotspot for all major corporations and platforms, investors are clamoring to fund wearable tech startups. In 2013, investors poured $458 million into 49 wearable company deals, according to . Year-over-year, deal activity in wearable startups rose 158 percent, while funding grew 80 percent. Companies like Thalmic Labs, InteraXon, Soundhawk, Misfit Wearables, Fitbit, Jawbone and Rest Devices have recently raised significant rounds. ABI Research predicts wearable devices will exceed 537 million annual shipments by 2018, with smartwatches and glasses being the fastest-growing categories. Not only are major tech companies like Apple, Google, Samsung and Intel investing heavily in wearables, but non-tech giants like Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, lululemon, and others now view the category as strategically critical to future profits. is extremely bullish on wearables; the research firm believes the market could be worth $50 billion by 2017. But what does it really take to build a viable, lasting wearables company, and can these high-tech gadgets generate solid returns for investors? As an early investor in Basis ( ) before there was a formal category name I’ll continue to bet on the sector. But I won’t invest in just any wearables company based on slick industrial design or even an oversubscribed Kickstarter campaign. I actually fear that despite all the rosy predictions, most of the startups in the space will end up in the dustbin of history because of the immense challenges in building standalone companies. Here are some lessons I’ve learned that I hope will help wearables entrepreneurs in this field avoid common pitfalls along their journey — lessons that are also well-suited for connected devices startups in general: Most wearable companies have either hardware- or software-heavy founding teams and spend considerable effort going up the learning curve in the area they’re not as familiar with. But to win the wearables space, you’ll actually need to build three mini companies (hardware, software and platform) under one roof, which is no small feat from a hiring perspective. From day one, you’ll need to be assembling a diverse Avengers-style team of rock stars encompassing hardware, software, firmware, design, data science, manufacturing, logistics, user experience, community management, customer support, app store, API and product-marketing expertise. Top wearables startups will eventually be taking on Apple, Google and other big boys who are capable of delivering delightful integrated hardware and software experiences, so you’ll want to design your organization to be able to do the same. Fortunately, very few other large companies can cover all these bases at any meaningful level, so the caliber and diversity of your team will play a key advantage. Building your own team of Avengers can be maddeningly difficult in today’s labor market, and you’re corralling talent sets that haven’t necessarily worked together under the same roof before. But it’s worth the time, effort and dollars, given the inherent value you’re creating, by assembling the right mix of people. Spend extra time on attracting the right systems engineering lead. This person will save your company time and time again, as the tectonic plates of hardware, software and firmware engineering grind together during the long, hard road to shipping product. He or she will serve as the referee when tempers run hot and all fingers are pointed at each other as to why the product is again delayed. The interdependencies are complex, and if you’re not an extremely technical founder who can work out the intricacies, then you’ll need somebody who can see how all the pieces will fit together. Make sure there is someone on the team who is asking the key question: Yes it’s beautiful, but is it truly wearable? Is your device too bulky, and will it interfere with shirt sleeves, belts, pants or other clothing and jewelry? Is it fashionable enough that users are proud to keep wearing the device even if they don’t engage with the data or app after a couple weeks? Does the device help the user make a personal branding statement in the right way? How can the device be personalized, and can it come in white and pink as well? When your product team or industrial design firm shows you breathtaking mockups with sleek new materials allowing for attractive finishes, modular accessories and swappable bands, make noise. Your internal Spidey sense should be going off like crazy, with visions of poor fit for slender or thick wrists, unforeseen skin rashes, supply problems from boutique materials vendors, fit and finish rework, temperature and moisture sensitivities and mass recalls. Assume the worst and rigorously review this disaster checklist lest you suffer already in the field like some great companies have. The rise of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the kindling that helped ignite the wearables and the Internet of Things blaze. Companies like and have platforms to not only raise money, but to also engage pre-order customers. Use the power of personal storytelling to provide a glimpse into the people behind the idea. Share your own motivation and dream to give the audience a sense of why you’re working so passionately on your product. And when it comes to explaining the “what,” be sure to use slick visuals, including design mockups and catchy videos engineered to be shared on social media did an amazing job with its video and Facebook ad campaigns, as did . Remember that you’re designing for the “Holy Sh*t, I gotta have that!” moment in the first few minutes. Without triggering this impulse reaction, you’re not going to convert viewers into pre-order buyers and sharers. But the most successful crowdfunding campaigns leverage something even more important than the beauty or cool factor of the product – they harness the , which dramatically increases the value of a product to customers by involving them in the creation process. Your crowdfunders aren’t just buying your product because of utility or coolness. They want to participate in the journey and play a part in the story. This is why VIP crowdfunding packages that offer unique and scarce experiences often sell out first, despite the much higher price points: Many of your supporters are looking to buy an experience that they get to talk about (i.e. a story of their own) and not just a product. Plan for this by thinking through all the different ways you could offer deeper touchpoints with your supporters. Set up tiered bundles and limited-edition experiential packages, whether it’s letting them have input in the creative process, hang out with the creators, see their names on the credits, attend the opening launch party, or own a limited-run version of the product in pink. Once you have created a runaway success and secured the funding you were looking for, setting timing and expectations with your early community is everything. More likely than not, you’re going to get delayed and miss your advertised launch date. It’s better to just expect and plan for it. The one factor in your control is you go live with your pre-order campaign. The rule of thumb is that the shorter the gap between taking pre-orders and an achievable ship date, the better. This all comes down to visibility on the details of your manufacturing process, and the more homework you do ahead of time on manufacturability and DFM (design for manufacturability), the better off you are. I meet many founders who have wickedly cool concept sketches and industrial design, but haven’t spent nearly as much time thinking through the manufacturability of the product and the various trade-offs they’ll have to deal with to get to product launch on time. For example, plastic injection molding may not sound like cutting-edge rocket science, but the nuances and devilish details involved can bring a startup to its knees in a “death by a thousand cuts” fashion. Do yourself a favor and wait before launching your crowdfunding campaign until you have as much clarity as possible on viably delivering the product as promised and on time. Yes, there’s the terrible pressure of wanting to be first in the market before a competitor launches something similar, but remember the three strikes rule: Your backers will likely give you one, maybe two, hall passes for schedule slips, but even your most die-hard fans will start to give up on you no matter how profusely you apologize and over-communicate the situation for slip No. 3. While crowdfunding is a great way to bootstrap and raise funding, it’s just a baby step on the road to success. The upside is that it’s gotten easier to get started with a wearable device idea. The downside is that you’ve now got a highly involved, engaged and vocal community of customers to manage as soon as the first pre-order comes in. Whether you like it or not, community management must become a core competency of your company from the get-go, and you’ll need dedicated resources for this. Your supporters will be an unruly, organic beast comprised of different personalities, all excited for your success but also impatient to get their shiny new toy. Your most enthusiastic fans can quickly become your most vocal haters. The good news is that this community is yours to tap into and communicate with directly, so don’t just treat them as passive customers waiting in the wings. Think of them as a huge focus group, eager to engage and offer their feedback in the form of pre-launch market research as you try to hone your product-market fit. After you raise money through crowdfunding, the real work begins: getting your product manufactured and launched, while keeping an impatient community happy along the bumpy road ahead. Unfortunately, this is the time when most startup teams realize that they don’t actually know what they don’t yet know, and end up paying steep tuition in climbing the manufacturing learning curve. Traditional wisdom is to “just outsource to an Asian CM or ODM,” but finding a reputable Asian manufacturer is difficult and costly, especially in terms of time, complexity, and re-work. But realize that you’re likely to sacrifice initial margins for reliability, quality, and peace of mind in launching on time, and appeasing an impatient list of customers who have already given you their credit cards. 3D Robotics Assembly Plant in Tijuana, Mexico You may also have the chance to learn critical details about the nuances of your manufacturing process, thus making you smarter in future dealings with overseas partners who may or may not be trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Again, with U.S.-based supply-chain-solutions providers such as PCH and their hardware accelerator Highway1, you may be able to find a workable hybrid solution to bridge the North America/Asia gap. I’m also hoping that regions like Detroit may someday be able to reinvent themselves through boutique manufacturing outfits optimized for small batch production runs for startups. Do yourself a favor: if you haven’t already read Dan Arielly’s “ ,” go out and pick up a copy and apply some of the lessons when deciding upon your price points. Some I’ve found handy in the world of wearables include: Terrific places to boost margins. You’d be surprised by the power of Limited Edition Pink or White. Same goes for personalization: Is it possible to offer (and upsell) engraving or printing of user-provided text, logos or images? If customers find your product that innovative and exciting, you’ll notice that they rarely just buy the basic bare-bones device if you give them other attractive bundle options. Think about grabbing their attention with a $49 or $99 price tag, but quickly demonstrate how much additional goodness comes with the Starter Kit package, or the Silver, Gold, or Black Diamond Elite bundles. What about the Family Pack that comes with multi-account sync and management? Or the Platinum Plus bundle that comes with one year of subscription service? Get creative with your bundles, and think of the extra peace of mind and delight that comes from extra chargers for the home, office and car; spare battery packs; swappable bands for work and workout; extended warranty periods — you get the picture. It comes with gold plating, 24/7 (outsourced) concierge service, lifetime subscription service, recognition in the user community, and every possible accessory and add-on. You may only sell a few of these, but you’ll end up lifting the attach rates of the next highest bundles by several points. At the same time, don’t be surprised if you sell out of these first: when whales decide to spend, they don’t do so based on economic value – they spend because they can. To me, an oversubscribed crowdfunding or waitlist campaign can often be a false positive, just as a burst in download activity for an app featured in TechCrunch or the Apple App Store may only be temporary, primarily reaching the early adopters. Continue to test for what it takes to generate ongoing pre-order interest even after the crowdfunding campaign is over, and see if you can sustain some level of ongoing demand. Try multiple approaches, from invite codes, to Word of Mouth campaigns, Facebook advertising, and SEO. See if you can redirect traffic from an expired crowdfunding page directly to your own site, where you can still take waitlist sign-ups. (Many startups we’re seeing are also using next-gen self-hosted crowdfunding and self-start platforms like CrowdTilt, Celery, SelfStarter, Crowdhoster Shoplocket, etc.). Post-launch, you’ll likely need to raise a monster follow-on round to ramp-up demand generation, as well as to launch distribution on eTail (Amazon) and retail channels (BestBuy, Walmart, etc.). The more you can prove organic, direct e-commerce demand for your product, the better leverage you’ll have in working with distribution channels. And expect your distribution channels to help with meaningful demand generation – that’s your job, not the blue shirt at BestBuy. You’re unlikely to land an end cap in retail or a promoted slot on Amazon (unless you shell out big money or have explosive ongoing sales already), so prepare to be just one product lost among many on the shelf, and be ready to deploy your own marketing war chest in support. Most wearables startups that pitch me place heavy emphasis on the value of the data they’re collecting, and aim to be the centralized data repository of their users’ lives, eventually aggregating, measuring and generating insights across multiple devices, apps and feeds. While this sounds great to VCs, the reality is that the data needs to be made relevant, continuously engaging and “playable” to users in order to get them wearing the device past the dreaded three-week habit-formation threshold and beyond. Many startups are proud of the pretty dashboards and feeds they show to users via companion apps, but these lose the novelty effect quickly if you just show the same thing to users over and over again. Think of how you can provide insights and apps that actually adapt and progress with the user’s journey, and not just simple, static gamification and missions. Expect that users will tire of tracking the same metrics over and over again, no matter how disciplined they are. Can you instead provide multiple branches of mastery and building, and even allow for multiple ways to “play” and “win” to accommodate different personality types? I believe that the future of services enabled by wearables will ultimately be a hybrid model combining algorithm and AI with human-powered networks, harnessing the best of man and machine. While sensors and algorithms can tirelessly track your stats for you around the clock, it’s all too easy to dismiss a recommendation or alert on a screen after you’ve seen it for the 10 time. This is where the power of communities, cohorts and coaching come in. People are often most accountable to other people, and nothing bonds humans more deeply than a shared struggle against a common adversity — be it weight loss, drug addiction, an obstacle course filled with electrified wire, or a hostile enemy force trying to kill you – this is why the small group mechanic plays such an important part in Weight Watchers, AA, Tough Mudder, and the military. But don’t assume that users always want to be “social” with the habits they’re working on, particularly if they’re uncomfortable to talk about or potentially embarrassing. In fact, I often advise startups to avoid the usual Facebook/Twitter/Instagram auto-share integrations, and instead try to turn their user base into a vertical community of their own. Offer an opportunity for customers to join cohorts of fellow users who are embarking on the same phase of a journey (total strangers can often be more comfortable to team up and share with when you’re in the same boat together). Match them up with veteran-user mentors and provide coaches to lead the way. Not only are these types of group and individual coaching services an opportunity for a subscription upsell, but they’re also a way for your customers to elevate their standing and involvement in the user community and stay engaged by working with others. Retrofit and GoQii are some interesting examples of startups in the wearables space harnessing some of these mechanics. Think of the wearables market as an intensifying arms race of how many sensors and deep algorithms you’ll be able to pack into a connected device in a quest for increasingly granular data that can be collected seamlessly and around the clock. The point of this data is to generate more and more dramatic insights to help improve users’ lives. The future winners in the wearables space will have two ace cards in their hands: one is a year or more lead-time in using unique or multiple sensor types in the device; the second is the data science know-how to correlate across multiple data streams to mine for richer insights. Take the case of connected pedometers. As beautiful as you can make one look, ultimately any number of competitors can launch a similar offering by throwing in an off-the-shelf accelerometer (expect every coming smartwatch to have one, as well). You can release apps that claim to measure sleep quality and other deep insights, but eventually users will realize that asking a pedometer to analyze sleep phases is a bit like asking your shoes to talk about your TV-watching preferences. Customers’ expectations will continue to rise, and after their first pedometer they’ll be asking “what else can these things do?” Ideally your device leverages multiple sensors to paint a deeper data picture, and maybe you’re the first in market with a next-gen sensor that others haven’t tried to use before. Perhaps you’ve found a medtech or industrial sensor type that has never been tried for a lighter-weight consumer use case before. Either way, wearables are a big data play in the long run, with your algorithms crunching multiple inputs. These might include sensors on your own device, additional sensors from other devices the you’re using, and even other feeds and sources you can gain context from — be it cloud-based calendars, email accounts, social media feeds, location, public databases, and other apps. You’ll need killer data scientists to pull this off, and that team alone may end up fueling a tremendous amount of your future strategic value. Many wearable tech companies tend to manage by a standard set of metrics: number of units sold and shipped, product gross margins, sell-in and sell-through in the channel, contribution margin versus returns, support and customer acquisition costs, and maybe device activations and total install base. But few companies measure what really matters: how often users engage with the devices and the accompanying software and services; the average lifetime of active usage; and the ways users are engaging. Successful wearable devices startups are really software and services companies, so they’ll need to adopt standard software and app metrics: percentage of users registered, registered users to monthly active users; monthly active users to weekly active users or daily active users; average revenue per daily active user; and lifetime value. Of course, this requires the proper instrumentation and analytics to track, so think of how you bake those hooks into your device, app and cloud. Just like most mobile apps are forgotten about shortly after download, many wearables are no longer worn after a month or two. But if you’re looking to capitalize on the Device-as-a-Service business model, your entire strategy hinges upon usage, just like any company with an in-app purchase and upsell offering. If you can lock in attached subscription services from the initial purchase, all the better. Otherwise, you’ll need to obsess over active usage and ongoing engagement of your customers. In the early days of this market, we all tend to think of wearable tech startups as hardware companies driven by beautiful design and cool companion apps. We focus on product gross margins, pre-order volumes, and then retail demand, sell-in, sell-through and total install base. We expect that each holiday season there will be a new rev of the product, and that margins will hopefully hold through volume and supply-chain optimization as the competition and channel distribution start to takes their toll. However, focusing on hardware sales as the primary business model actually places a wearables startup on an even more “hit-based” treadmill than a game or movie studio. I worry that most of the software, apps, and APIs built for today’s connected device startups are treated more like an after-thought or a future roadmap item to deal with later. In fact, I predict that the most successful wearable companies will really be software and services firms, with a hardware entry point. Even the most gorgeous device ends up unworn and collecting dust after a few weeks unless it includes compelling software and services to make the user’s life easier, better, more fun, and/or more productive. Over time, it’ll really be the software and service experience that keeps users coming back, and it’s here that you’ll need to deliver a magical experience – from the out-of-the box moment to one-year-purchase anniversary and beyond. Creating a software product roadmap should be the first thing you do – even before you bring in designers to create an awesome-looking gadget. You can’t bolt software onto your hardware later; it has to come first, and it needs to be baked into the core experience. Ask yourself these questions: how much better can the device be made through the SW and service experience? Can you even design the device to be purchased with a subscription up front? Not every wearables startup may be a fit for a subscription service, but it’s certainly worth thinking about. (Although not a wearables company per se, Dropcam managed to achieve a majority of users signing up for recurring subscription services very early on, and is an inspiring point of comparison.) Of course you’ll have grand ambitions to become a platform (or will be told to grow into one if you take significant VC funding), so you’ll need to have your API and SDK locked in on the roadmap. In addition, you’ll need your first Killer App or three to legitimize your platform, and use these as an opportunity to begin building out your own App Store for your device. Cut API integration deals with several well-known apps in adjacent categories, and proudly feature those logos on your site and product packaging. In the process, you’ll hopefully be demonstrating to your users that your product isn’t just a one-trick tracker, and that it offers a whole “mall” of use cases and habits to take on, while adding value to other devices and apps that the customer is already using. Eventually, you may even host hackathons and provide third-party app support with your own app and content publishing model. Be prepared to have a team devoted to managing this side of the business, and see if you can get a Deepak Chopra, Tim Ferriss, or other noted influencer, thought leader or celeb to co-author an app or module to showcase. Building the backends and technology for all these pieces is no trivial task, and you may want to look at off-the-shelf and PaaS (platform as a service) solutions to fill in parts of the stack versus building the whole thing in-house. If your product idea is that great, then you can expect it to attract copycats, from other well-funded startups, fast-followers, and especially massive incumbent corporations that have decided your category is now strategic to them. Better to anticipate this day, and think several moves down the chess board when Foxconn rolls out a white-label version of your device, or Apple, Google, Samsung, and Amazon announce their offerings. By that point, ideally your software and service business, as well as user community, are firmly in place, and difficult to displace. Your brand is strong and even becoming the “Xerox”-style verb in your category. You’ve got retailers and channel increasing their purchase orders, enterprises looking for volume deals, and maybe healthcare companies asking to help you develop an FDA-approved version for the medical market. Most importantly, your phone will start to ring off the hook with partnership, OEM and joint-venture opportunities with all the other companies worried about being left behind if Apple, Google and Amazon get serious about your space. While terrifying to suddenly be square in the crosshairs of the big boys, recognize that you’ll also be a potential buy or build solution for everyone from Lenovo to GE, Philips to J&J, Qualcomm to Foxconn, and Comcast to Kaiser. And if your software and subscription businesses stands to grow non-linearly from mass distribution deals, it may not be a bad idea to exit the hardware business altogether at the right time and spread your tentacles elsewhere. Just remember to own the customer relationship if possible, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility: most device and component makers aren’t set up to run effective software and services businesses, and will likely need you to run that side of the house for them. These represent a handful of lessons that I try to share with entrepreneurs looking to play in the wearables space. It’s meant to be a daunting list: “hardware” starts with the word “hard” for a reason, and it’s better to go in with eyes wide open. Sadly, Basis was founded in an era before we could properly leverage crowdfunding, hardware accelerators and many of the suggestions listed above, but we always had the notion of Device-as-a-Service firmly in mind even from the early days. Along the way we hit almost every pitfall possible and many we hadn’t expected, including the speed at which the category evolved from “who the heck would wear stuff like this?” to “must-have strategic priority” for many major tech giants. It’s a true testament to the quality of the team and the scope of their vision for persevering through such a difficult journey and achieving a happy outcome. Overall, I’m still bullish on this space, because the opportunity is huge and there are so many more valuable devices and services to be invented (I’m not kidding when I talk about wanting to find “the Nest meets Retrofit of connected Toilets”). Entrepreneurs who keep the above lessons in mind have a better shot at success, and I’d be happy to champion anyone able to apply these learnings to their business plan. |
Changing Our Education System One Programmer At A Time | Contributor | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | In the off chance you’ve been sleeping under a rock with no Wi-Fi for the past 20 years, here’s some news: The U.S. educational system is under attack from multiple fronts and is on the verge of being reshaped by a profound entrepreneurial uprising. This is acutely evident in higher education. Colleges are in an unsustainable arms race of spending on non-teaching lures – football stadiums and sushi-laden cafeterias – to attract students who can neither afford the cost of education nor find jobs to repay their debt once they’re out in the real world. With more than $1.1 trillion of outstanding student debt, up to 40 percent of recent college grads are either unemployed or underemployed. In 2010, the unemployment rate for young workers aged 16-24 hit 19.6 percent, the highest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking unemployment in 1947. The next time you go to an amusement park, think that one in four park workers has a college degree. As is often the case, change is coming from entrepreneurs looking to reshape education. After all, this stems from a real need on the part of startups to attract and retain great engineers. In most startups, the hardest jobs to fill are positions in core technology, product design and product management. Educational startups used to be off-limits for entrepreneurs. The space was filled with a collection of schools and administrators resisting change and innovation. But in the past few years, two things have happened that offer real opportunity. First, the state of education is being challenged by systemic problems. And as software has become more approachable to the masses, it has led to a grassroots movement toward innovation in education. The first forays into educational overhaul were companies like , which that took educational content and re-packaged it into forms that youth could relate to. The snack-size learning modules of Khan Academy mirrored videos that students were watching in their free time, and they became hits in their own right on YouTube. A second wave of entrepreneurs then created massive open online courses, or MOOCs, with more in-depth content in the form of start-to-finish courses. Companies like , , and others give students an opportunity to take longer-length classes on their own time and often for free. And they aren’t alone. In the last several years, we’ve seen the rise of other online coding programs like , which became popular after helping its students get into coding through its initial New Year’s Resolution challenge. In fewer than 48 hours, Codecademy was able to sign up 97,000 students. These companies are all exploiting a huge gap in American education. In 2013, only about 31,000 students in the U.S. took the Advanced Placement Computer Science (CS) exam. This was less than 1 percent of total AP exams for the year and about the same number as those who took the Studio Art 2-D Design AP exam. By contrast, nearly half a million American students took the AP English exam. One reason for this disparity is a dearth of trained CS teachers in middle and high schools. With few trained teachers, even students interested in learning CS in high school have no formal option – last year, one student in the entire state of Mississippi took the AP CS exam. Now a third wave of startups is sprouting up to tackle the dearth of vocational CS training with intense, in-person training. Companies like , which I recently invested in, and the , are teaching students in short-term immersion programs. They tend to attract very motivated students, many of them mid-career in non-technical professions, who spend day and night learning coding over short periods of time. After completing their programs, the students have the technical skills employers are looking for, and they are highly marketable. In fact, Flatiron boasts nearly 100 percent job placement. These schools are tapping into a large societal demand. Vocational training is the wedge to begin a 21st century institution of higher learning. And the schools are in good company. As Avi Flombaum, one of Flatiron’s founders, likes to remind people that Harvard was started in 1636 as a vocational training school to prepare a future generation of clergymen. |
Sequoia-Backed Chinese Retailer Jumei Files For $400M U.S. IPO | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | Beijing-based online retailer plans to hold its initial public offering in the U.S. In its over the weekend Jumei, which offers daily deals on fragrances and cosmetics, said it wants to raise up to $400 million, but did not disclose which exchange it will list on. The company was founded in 2009 and its investors include Sequoia Capital. Jumei says it is China’s largest online beauty retailer and held a 22.1% market share and 10.5 million customers in 2013. During that fiscal year the company made $483 million in sales. Its filing is one of several Chinese tech companies that will or are expected to hold U.S. IPOs this year. The most notable is , China’s biggest e-commerce firm, which that its public offering will be in the U.S. instead of Hong Kong as originally expected by most analysts. Its IPO may value Alibaba at more than $100 billion. Microblogging platform and Alibaba rival is also for later this year. The high profile of these companies may mark a turnaround in investor sentiment toward Chinese stocks listed in the U.S. since 2012, when after several firms pulled out of the U.S. stock market in response to accusations of improper accounting by regulators. |
Google, Eich, Rice: The Evil That Tech Does | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | Techies hate politics. Well, no: we hate the of politics. Whenever I talk to pretty much anyone in the industry about politics as a sphere of human endeavor, from individual coders to zillionaire VCs, pained expressions cross their faces and they rush to distance themselves from the whole toxic mess. Which is a problem on two levels. One, now that technology is the dominant cultural and economic force of our time, it can divorce itself from politics. Two, for the same reason, decisions made by the tech industry can and do have political reverberations elsewhere. I’m talking about Brendan Eich and Condoleeza Rice, of course. Eich’s resignation has been met with consternation by people inside and outside the Valley, from Marc Andreessen to to, notably, , who : There is only one permissible opinion at Mozilla, and all dissidents must be purged! […] When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line. This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance. If a socially conservative private entity fired someone because they discovered he had donated against Prop 8, how would you feel? Andrew Sullivan is a smart guy, but he’s also a political animal, so I don’t think he understands the techie point of view here. First, Eich was neither “purged” nor “fired”: he . Political animals talk about people being “hounded” to resignation, but to techies, that’s nonsense; he resigned, and he didn’t have to. (And frankly I think that if he hadn’t, then the furor would have mostly blown over in a month or two.) More importantly, he doesn’t get that for techies, this wasn’t about politics, this be about politics, because we don’t politics, or so we tell ourselves. Politics is that icky stuff over there which we transcend. Brendan Eich did an evil thing and, as Sullivan notes, , which, to those unwilling to distinguish between an evil opinion and an evil person, makes him evil. (Whether it was for religious reasons is at best irrelevant; in the tech world, “evil for religious reasons” is arguably even worse than “evil.”) Those people really didn’t want Mozilla to be led by an evil person. As simple as that. Another example: the campaign triggered by the appointment of Condoleeza Rice to their board. (See also the ; over the last year or two HN has slouched and spiralled downwards into little more than the new Slashdot, but this is a brief return to form.) To be fair, the Drop Dropbox campaign does cite one argument that’s actually relevant to Dropbox in particular — Rice’s history of supporting warrantless wiretapping — but mostly it’s more of the same: “she’s evil! We can’t have evil people running our online services!” Which sounds naive. Or maybe idealistic. Another thing non-techies don’t really get about the tech world is that it is quietly a haven of starry-eyed idealism. Even the most jaded coder or cynical sysadmin, if plied with alcohol in a dark dive bar, will probably crack and admit to a certain techno-utopian streak. Many of us secretly-or-not-so-secretly believe that as technology brings the world together, and educates people, everyone will come around to thinking like we do; that San Francisco today is Earth tomorrow. In the context of that narrative, a bigot becoming CEO of Mozilla, or a member of the worst American administration in a very long time becoming a board member of Dropbox, seems viscerally, fundamentally . And there is actually something to aspects of our techno-utopianism. I’m still in West Africa as I write this, and I can assure you, technology steadily making the whole world better and its people happier — so far: Google motto 2004: Don't be evil Google motto 2010: Evil is tricky to define Google motto 2013: We make military robots — Brent Butt (@BrentButt) (I note in passing that I’ve recently encountered an interesting new approach to the same subject; not “don’t be evil” but “ be evil.” More on that next week.) But “evil” tricky to define — or at least, it’s tricky to determine who exactly gets to define it. If a person once contributed to an evil cause, doesn’t really recant, but does apologize and promise to never actually anything evil, are they therefore so evil that they cannot be accepted as a tech CEO? Really? How about as President? Consider Sullivan’s comparison between : If it is unconscionable to support a company whose CEO once donated to the cause against marriage equality, why is it not unconscionable to support a candidate who opposed marriage equality as recently as 2008, and who was an integral part of an administration that embraced the Defense Of Marriage Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton? I don’t want a bigot as CEO of Mozilla either. I too would like to live in a world where everyone takes as given that marriage is a fundamental right for anyone of any sexual orientation, and where those who instigated the war on Iraq and managed its disastrous aftermath are treated as contemptible pariahs. But we don’t live in that world, yet, and automatically demonizing everyone who disagrees with us, and everyone/everything associated with them, does not seem like the right way to bring it closer. Maybe I’m biased, because a friend of mine worked with Eich personally for years and is outright appalled by what’s happened; or maybe I’m optimistic, because I think it makes sense to give people second or even third chances; but I can’t convince myself that either Mozilla or the world is a better place now that Eich is perceived as a man hounded out of leadership because he once donated $1000 to Proposition 8. I think the case against Rice is actually stronger, but as Ramez Naam says: I'm not a big fan of Condaleeza Rice. But whether I stick with Dropbox or not depends on their product and their policies, not their board. — Ramez Naam (@ramez) I *will* be paying more attention to Dropbox's privacy behaviors from here out. Saying that Rice will help them on privacy is poor judgment. — Ramez Naam (@ramez) I don’t know. I’m conflicted. And I wish other people were too. These issues are almost always more nuanced than a simple “evil! no! out!” knee-jerk reaction allows. I realize that might sound like a preamble to messy and clouded political compromises, rather than clean moral decisions. But politics, at least as it should be practiced, is in large part the art of dealing with the fact that not everyone agrees with our morality … and technology politics now. Whether we like it or not. |
Gillmor Gang: Deep Bench | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 4 | 12 | The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, Semil Shah, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — Heartbleed security hole, changing landscape of Twitter notifications, Brendan Eich’s exit from Mozilla, politically charged and leadership compromised, Condoleezza Rice heading to the Dropbox Board of Directors? Dropbox, OneNote, Evernote, Box. Office on the iPad decidedly hot. Mobile’s in the driver’s seat, VCs on the spot. We the people like our apps, Google does not. Rash projections, drunken drones, angels on the outs. Something for everyone, if we can just wait it out. @stevegillmor, @semil, @scobleizer, @kteare, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
With Comixology, Amazon Acquires A Piece Of The Comic-Based Media Empire | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | Amazon , and that’s a huge deal, because it means the largest bookseller in the world now owns the company that brought digital comics distribution to the masses, and essentially forced big publishers like DC and Marvel to get with it and start distributing titles on the same day in print and via digital channels. It’s hard to understate Comixology’s role in digital comics and the transition of the medium from print to online, but that’s not the only thing Amazon gets through this purchase. They also acquire the relationships that Comixology has built with the major comics publishers, including Marvel and DC, and a direct line to the distribution of digital tie-ins for blockbuster film franchises like The Avengers, Spider-Man, X-Men and more. Comixology has tremendous value continuing on as it has been, and living autonomously from the Amazon brand, with direct sales through its iOS-based digital storefront delivering a 30 percent cut to Apple (something Amazon has said isn’t viable with its own Kindle storefront, leading to the removal of that feature from its iOS app). But Amazon also recently signalled strongly that it wants to begin tying its product lines together more tightly, with the introduction of the Fire TV. Fire TV is already being billed as something that works with the Kindle Fire line of devices. There’s cross-compatibility and dual-screen functionality with gaming and video programming, and likely a lot more to come. Comixology being part of the Amazon portfolio offers the chance for cross-platform and cross-media integrations that build in digital comics, which has potential applications not only with the Marvel line of films, but with gaming, too. If there was a better-suited candidate for Amazon acquisition than Comixology, it’s hard to peg one. The company is almost perfectly in line with Amazon’s ambitions on the digital media front, and has done much to raise the profile of digital comics in general. Amazon gets the premiere digital comics distribution platform with its purchase, but it also gets the potential for countless future cross-sales and cross-promotions, which, when you’re building a media and device empire, is no small win. |
What Games Are: Valley People And Games People | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | In the middle of talking about why the hype around Oculus Rift and Facebook I made a comment about why trust was a big issue, and why for game developers it’s not simply a matter of telling them to get over it. And this: (which betrays a big disconnect between how the Valley thinks and how games people think, but that’s for another day) A few people asked me what that meant. There are many disconnects between how the games industry thinks compared to how the tech industry thinks it should. To the tech guy the games industry is at the bleeding edge in some ways but way behind in others. Whereas to the games guy the tech (most especially the Valley) industry is built on nothing but flimflam. Tech and games are essentially a pair of estranged sisters. They come from a common root, but they have evolved into separate species. If you’re a games person then Klout makes no sense. The idea to give experience points to reflect your popularity in social media seems like the most incidental thing that a person could ever dream up. It has no viable business model and is just silly. To games people it’s not worth a farthing, and so the news that doesn’t just cause head scratching. It’s downright confounding. The corollary example is Zynga: While many games people dislike Zynga from an ethical standpoint, the company has a real business model. One which, when conditions were good, made money hand over fist and dragged tens of millions of users into individual games. Zynga may have been a number of things, but it was relatively sound as a business. And yet when it went to IPO Zynga’s shares tanked even though it could claim to have real revenue. Again to games people this makes little sense. I know a number of tech people who also think the Klout story is a little on the ridiculous side, and plenty of Zynga watchers who’ll point to its reliance on Facebook as a strategic weakness. Yet both stories depict a key difference between what game and Valley people value. Games people tend to value revenue where Valley people tend to value potential. To most game makers the question of revenue is ever-present. A relative few might be in a benighted position where they don’t have to worry, but for the majority this is simply not the case. They operate in app landscapes, on closed or open platforms and are always worried about paying bills, servicing their games and building their franchises. From the smallest indie through to the biggest publisher one of the biggest issues that will determine the success of any contract will be revenue share. However Valley types operate in a super-financed environment and that changes priorities. In that world every technology is essentially an opportunity to ride a rocket. The goal is rarely to sell a material product or units, but instead to sell a platform or a technology, and the sense of what might be done with that technology is a story that can be painted in the clouds. In that world cash is important to a point, but its primary purpose is to facilitate growth of the story. Those of you who’ve read your know that the whole purpose of a startup is to learn, to validate an idea and figure out a way to scale it into a business. Tech people often assume that a game development studio is a essentially a startup, but usually it is not. There are some examples of gaming startups that practice the lean model and then accelerate (Zynga again), but most game developers are essentially agency businesses. They exist in a world of for-hire contracts, often working on licensed content or similar. It’s rare that such companies ever get to the point of developing an asset valuable on its own terms as a result. Meanwhile those that work on their own games tend to do so as indies. Again, “indie” is not the same as “startup”. Indies are more like the games industry’s Sundance filmmakers. They don’t want to get rich, and they especially don’t want to validate and scale a business. Instead they want to create a game and playtest it to make it better, even exposing to players early to get that feedback. But the product always comes from the heart first and it’s up to the business to figure out a way to fit around it rather than a customer. Why is equity valuable in the Valley? Because it’s assumed that the entire point of the business is to exit or IPO. From a certain point of view, a Klout only exists in order to make a big exit for a relatively small investment, and that exit fuels any number of further investments. However if you take the exit/IPO option away then equity becomes what exactly? Shares that’ll never multiply in value. They become deadweight unless you can get percentages of revenue or profit, which is impossible for many Valley businesses. The sale is necessary, vital even, to keep the wheels turning. But most games people don’t want to sell. Like ever, if possible. Maybe they’ll sell to retire, get bored or if business conditions change such that their studio is no longer viable. But mostly not. Instead what they value is creative freedom to make the games they want to make, opportunities to make awesome games and opportunities to make money selling games. And that’s it. Only a few really want to get into the technology business, or anything that doesn’t involve getting to make games. Where successful Valley companies tend to become platforms or technologies incorporated into others’ platforms, game companies tend to stick as product companies. They make franchises and then run them for the long haul. Many of the world’s most successful game companies are comparatively static operations that simply sit on a couple of successful franchises and remake them over and over. Likewise many successful indies only dream of being able to keep being indie. The Valley person thinks early about how their product or service must be where the customer is. They worry a lot about paradigms, about being able to address the customer and ensure that the use of that product. This can lead to the appearance of fashionability (desktop is dead, you need to be on mobile etc) but it’s more a reflection of shifting device usage. Apply that thinking to games and it’s apparent why Valley types are big fans of ideas like game/life crossover apps, games that work across multiple platforms to provide transmedia experiences and so on. Games people tend to think in terms of one presentation at a time, and one platform at a time (even with new technologies like Unity3D that facilitate easier translation from one platform to the next). While some games people have enough appetite for risk to take chances on new platforms early (and often to great success) the majority tend to be slow to move. This is why Facebook gaming left so many established studios scratching their heads, but also later feeling validated when that business became unsound. New platforms like smartwatches may come today but go tomorrow, games people think, but there will always be PCs. Indeed it’s amazing how long it takes some of them to even get as far as a Mac build. Games people believe that the player will come to them. They’re used to markets where players lay out big monies for gaming machines like top-end consoles or PCs solely for gaming, and to the idea that pollination of the game experience between platforms is both hard to do and not that valuable. Game makers prefer to wait and know that a platform is a sure thing before diving in, and they actively dislike disruption. Another big difference is that games are a form of culture whereas technologies are merely tools. While the tech world clearly makes tools that the whole world can use, it’s rare that tools become an object of passion outside of the technology community. But games are like comics, music or blockbuster movies. They attract fans to their cultural totems and bind a community around them. To some people games matter a great deal, as do all the other cultural mores that go with them. Games people understand the value of that. Why is Notch’s on Oculus Rift such a big deal? Because Notch is a cultural leader. Millions of fans all around the world consider him as important to them as many a kid might affiliate with a band. Also because the sale of Oculus to Facebook is perceived as selling out (in the bad way) sacrificing creative ideals for cash. And that kind of thing is bad news because – for all the metaverse speculation about what Rift might be – VR is always likely to be about games. Unless of course game makers don’t want to touch the sellout platform, in which case Rift is a technology for nobody. That’s a harsh reading of that particular situation but it’s said to make a point. In the Valley world forgiveness is easy to come by because the focus of the community is on business opportunities. They may laugh at the travails of a Myspace, but technology writers will often be relatively uncritical and willing to see the best in what a promising startup might do. Games writers, on the other hand, are fierce critics with long memories. Especially once a game has launched. The gaming community has the same sort of tribal associations that we might associate with fanboy or otaku of all types. It also has very deep loyalties. Just this weekend, for example, a large portion of the community traveled to Boston just to see what’s coming up in the world of games. is but one of many shows in the US and around the world, from E3, GDC and PAX Prime through to Gamescom and Eurogamer Expo. Some of these events are attended by hundreds of thousands of fans. It’s not that the tech industry doesn’t have big events too, but my point is that the composition and function of these events is very different. At games events the topics tend to be much broader than product introductions or developer days. Issues like diversity and cultural inclusiveness, heritage and tradition, preservation and so on play a large part in their conversation. What it comes down to from the Valley side is folks not getting that games mostly operate by the rules of show business rather than products or services. Game developers make games to entertain and organize themselves around that goal, but Valley people don’t know how that business is supposed to flip. Valley people seem to have a blasé attitude to bottom line concerns that games people find maddening, yet they sit on all the cash. There are some corners of games that have behaved like a product business from time to time (such as social games) but the bulk of the games industry dances to a different beat. Valley people often say that they’re just not that interested in content plays, but really what that means is they have no affinity for the rules of the games business other than to know it’s very different. Will they ever reconcile? |
Inside Microsoft’s New Platform And Services Strategy | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | During the week before Microsoft’s Build developer conference, I spoke to the company’s (Guggs), corporate vice president in charge of evangelism, and , director of the company’s developer ecosystem. We discussed Microsoft’s changing views on the technology market, and specifically its place in it — topics that are quite interesting from a post-Build perspective. My separate discussions with each revolved around a few specific, and topics: How Microsoft is bringing its platforms together, how that work impacts developers, and the context behind the company’s decision to extend its tools and services to all platforms. At Build Microsoft discussed API harmony between Windows and Windows Phone, noting that it had now reached around 90% parity between the two. This ties into its that will spread across phones and more traditional Windows devices. Guggs told TechCrunch that that number, 90%, is up from around 25% to 30% a year ago. Regarding how much higher the 90% figure could go, Guggs indicated that Microsoft may not want 100% API unity, due to different device use cases: “[D]o you ever put printer drivers into a phone? Maybe. I don’t know yet. Do you ever put high-end camera support into a laptop? Maybe. I don’t know. So some of the things are logically not in the overlap API sets because they don’t make sense.” Gallo agrees, stating that he wants “one API set, one design point that I can go target the breadth of devices, and so what developers are really asking for is hey, make it easy for me to hit this breadth of devices” regardless of what ‘flavor’ of Windows they are targeting. This raises the question of the unification of Microsoft’s app stores. Will it eventually merge the Windows and Windows Phone stores? Guggs is optimistic: “I think in the long run you still want to get to one store.” There are features like carrier-billing that are prevalent in one and not the other, of course. The gist is that apps are now systemized to a point, but not completely, and that the stores that vend them are similar, yet unique. The trend is pretty simple: More unification as time passes. It’s worth noting that this is not a new strategy. It’s continuation of prior efforts, now more, if still incompletely realized. Windows Phone and Windows are smaller players in the app game when compared to their key rivals, iOS and Android. Gallo is frank on the matter: “When we look at [the actual] numbers, [we’re still] small, but the numbers are growing.” Despite the modest figures, Gallo states that “nobody writes us off anymore.” In Guggs’ estimation, there is a commercial advantage to having unified apps, as it helps Microsoft pitch developers on its platforms. He described that conversation as follows: “Now you go out and say, hey, look, if you write the app I can run it across both. Now let’s have a business conversation about what makes why is this interesting.” So while Gallo is correct that Windows Phone is modest in size, when lashed to Windows 8.x’s app download figures, the value proposition — even if still smaller when combined than the upper echelons of Apple and Google’s platforms — makes more sense. It’s an open question as to how much this will help. The strategy’s effectiveness will be vetted by the rising, or falling download and development rates. It should be considered a positive sign if an acceleration of development work is realized once universal apps become the developer standard for the Microsoft platform world. If development remains flat, that will be more than problematic for the company. Windows Phone and Windows 8.x are not the only platforms on the shared Windows core: Xbox. Microsoft confirmed at Build that Xbox will into the universal app ecosystem. Gallo declined to discuss timeframes with TechCrunch, but did indicate that from a “visionary point of view,” Microsoft’s intention is to have “Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox […] able to use the shared project.” The company has “a common API set to do that.” Why is Xbox not yet part of the universal family? Gallo explained: “It’s on a slightly different cadence as far as code development, just because of timing of getting everything on the different platforms.” It feels odd to discuss Xbox sales momentum as potentially important for the Windows platform, but if game developers could bring so-called ‘AAA’ games from the Xbox One to the Windows Store, it would help bolster the quality of that marketplace. That’s a long way from that actually happening, but it’s worth considering. Note of course that this is all intention, and not completed action. Microsoft has to build the above, well, and get developers to use it. That’s a large task. Microsoft once ruled the platform space. It was the platform. Then the Web came along, and at least partially exploded that hegemony. With Internet Explorer bundling, Microsoft managed to claw a chunk of that back. Firefox, and then Chrome came to fore, challenging its dominance, and then Apple showed up and carved out massive chunks of the platform world with its iPhone and iPad devices. iOS was joined by, and then surpassed by Android. Windows chugged along, slowly losing sales share to consumers and businesses alike. Microsoft now seems quite aware of its loss of preeminence. Guggs: I think there was a time in history, not just our history but in general, where people said, okay, I have to go work on this ecosystem or that ecosystem or this tool chain or that tool chain. And nobody played with anybody else. And I think we had a reputation for some period of time of not playing well with others. I think I want to sort of make sure we’re tuning that reputation to say, hey, we play great with others, and the stuff we build, it’s really good actually. Not that he wouldn’t love for you to use only Microsoft tools, but he admitted that “it’s not realistic today that all developers use all Microsoft. In fact there’s many developers who don’t.” Microsoft, in his view, is now trying to “both participate and support the broad set of developers by making sure that the services we use, even if [developers] don’t use all of our stuff,” those same people can employ whatever they find useful. Gallo is in very much the same headspace, indicating that Microsoft recognizes “clearly that we are not the only game in town and that the world is diverse,” adding “and [the world is] going to stay diverse. People just don’t always think Windows first.” The market might have been saying that for some time, but to hear it from Microsoft itself remains refreshing. Gallo admits that the stance is new: “We think it and we’re going to embrace it. That has not been a typical Microsoft stance embracing it. We’re embracing it and we’re going to thrive in it.” I highlight this section from the transcripts to underscore that what we heard at Build wasn’t lip-service to a supposed new perspective. Speak to various Microsoft executives and you get the impression that they mean it — that Microsoft remains committed to building its own platform (that Widows unity bit), but is also hellbent on selling its services to anyone with an Internet connection, mobile or otherwise. The question is whether the company can pull it off. When we ended our conversation, Guggs concluded with the following: “Now, let’s see how we execute.” Microsoft is moving more quickly to unify its platforms so that form factor becomes more afterthought than deciding factor for developers. Apple isn’t doing this, at least to my knowledge. And Google is pursuing a sort of dual-strategy by bringing Android to PCs where it is also selling Chrome OS. If Microsoft can quickly expand on its current efforts, sell that to developers successfully, and in the process generate more and better apps for its unified platform, while improving the core Windows experiences, it has a fighting chance. Guggs is right: Can Microsoft execute? |
null | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 15 | null |
Entitle Brings Its Subscription E-Books To E-Ink Readers, Including The Nook | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | When e-book service launched last December, one of the main selling points was the idea that subscribers truly own their books. Now the company says it has given users even more control by allowing them to transfer books to their Nooks, Kobos or Sony Readers. Until now, it seems that have focused on the big app ecosystems (namely, iOS and Android) and on tablets, rather than e-ink readers. For example, offers for iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire devices, and can also be accessed through mobile browsers, while is currently limited to iOS. However, CEO Bryan Batten said e-ink support has been the biggest request from Entitle’s initial users. Apparently, transferring Entitle content to these readers has been possible for a little while, but Batten said he wanted to make sure everything was working smoothly before making an announcement. The transfer requires the installation Adobe Digital Editions (which is why Kindles aren’t included — plus, the service may be less appealing to Kindle owners who already have access to Amazon’s lending library). Once you’ve installed Digital Editions, you just download a book to your computer, connect your e-ink reader, and then drag the book over to the device. You can . You may recall that Entitle has a different model than the competitors mentioned above. Instead of paying a monthly fee for access to an entire library of e-books, similar to Netflix, users can only download a limited number of books each month (pricing starts at $9.99 for two books). Not only does that model give subscribers “ownership” of their books (there was a little bit of dispute about the degree of that ownership, which you can ) — it also helped Entitle to bring on major publishers (like Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, HarperCollins Christian, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) with titles from best-selling authors (like Stephen King, Dan Brown, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Crichton, and Walter Isaacson). Since launch, Entitle says it has added 10 new publishers and 50,000 new books. Perhaps the most interesting trend is the fact that a big swath of books (45 percent) are being downloaded from the curated pages, while only 10 percent are being downloaded from search. Batten suggested this means most readers “are a little more open, and aren’t looking for a specific title.” |
#Love: Thanks, Porn | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | As a modern married male, the times spent alone with my computer and a box of tissues are, in some ways, the best times. That is not to say the manifold pleasures of family life and the wild menagerie of mere existence aren’t amazing, but a body likes to be alone. For this I thank porn. While there is no doubt that there are dark corners of this industry and that porn, to some people, is often considered unpalatable at best and horrendous at worst, I’m willing to sing its praises, at least with moderation. It used to be hard to acquire. I remember my first foray into a 7-Eleven when I was of age and interested in procuring some reading material. The material in question, a three pack of magazines that, to be honest, would be laughed off of Kink.com today, were sealed in a plastic bag that allowed only the titles to be seen. I skulked to the counter, placed down the bag and coughed something about buying it for a bachelor party. Or you could acquire it by chance. Dad or an Uncle might have had it in a file cabinet or bedside table, the flesh of lost summers peeking out from under the toenail clippers and copies of Omni. The best porn was the porn found in a culvert, in the woods somewhere, where the porn fairy often alighted and dropped her dewy offerings, usually striated with lines from repeated cycles of drying and being exposed to the elements. Porn also used to be hard to make. Cameras were expensive and even with the rise of the Polaroid you were only able to produce blurry squares of titillation, washed in the muted tones of the 1970s. Good porn was expensive and the industry revelled in the money it made, mad kings calling for more wine and more models. Now there is a low thrum in the media, a bass note under the endless cavalcade of news and chatter and commerce. That thrum is porn, vibrating like a secret chord through our lives. But porn is not some offshoot of perversity. Porn exists because we, the human animals, exist. And that, for better or worse, is the state of affairs. It’s a breather, a chance to vent (literally and figuratively) and an opportunity for reflection. I long ago smashed the iron codpiece that Catholic school wrapped around my loins, so the guilt is no longer an issue. I can only assume the lady wife knows of my digital manipulations (or she will now) and that it doesn’t bother her. A person who admits to no self-pleasure is either lying or genuinely unmoved by the activity. How is this about love? It’s about self love, and not the narcissistic kind. It’s about escaping the relentless tug of the reproductive act. It’s about the art that is made by two people thrust together. It’s about finding out what you like and don’t like. It’s about figuring how to talk to yourself – not others – about sex. We are born wanting a few simple things and those few simple things slowly morph into needs of real consequence. This desire is one of those. To deny it is to deny humanity. There are some who are fighting the good fight. has always been a quiet inspiration and her efforts at are, in a word, Herculean. The Internet economy pretends like porn doesn’t exist and, although there are a few exceptions, the only things that get funded are “dating” apps like , which is little more than a Hot or Not for lonely people. So we plod ever forward, casting off the fear and embracing the inevitable. We move through our daily endeavors with blank faces, careful to hide the secret, solo assignations with ourselves. We look and easily find porn. The ultimate platform. “Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it,” Mark Twain said, and I think his opinion of this dark side doesn’t suggest a nefarious dark side. Instead he is talking about the side we show to our families, our close friends, our spiritual guides. And, just off the edge of that dark place, in a plain that is quiet and clear and secluded, is a place of no judgement, where even the endless hum of humanity falls away and we are at our most alone and most free. |
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