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Enterprise File-sharer Egnyte Opens London HQ To Meet Euro Security Demand | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | , the Valley firm specialising in an enterprise file-sharing platform, has expanded in Europe, opening a London HQ. This will compliment its existing Amsterdam data center and design office in Poland. It aims to hire 100 new staff in London over the next 5 years. The company says there is growing customer demand for enterprise-grade file sharing which also addresses data security concerns. It says that recent revelations about PRISM and other widespread data breaches is driving European-based companies to look at higher-security cloud solutions. Many European businesses are reluctant to entrust their data to a US-based data center, hence Egnyte’s data center in Amsterdam. Its regional European revenues are expected to account for 20% of Egnyte’s global revenues by the end of 2014. Egnyte has hired Mark Rattley as vice president and general manager for Egnyte Europe. Rattley most recently worked at EMC as vice president of sales for EMEA. Customers in Europe includes Bowmer and Kirkland, Inter-Ikea, M&C Saatchi, Made.com, Mothercare and Tereos. It also has partnerships with UK-based software security firm Sophos and SafeGuard Enterprise. Egnyte has a hybrid file-sharing model. In other words, the people inside a business can access a file from anywhere whether it’s in the cloud or behind a secure firewall. Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte said: “You don’t want the next generation of your chip design on a Dropbox folder in China. But Dropbox doesn’t have to lose for Egnyte to win. We’re different.” He said the company’s expansion to London, “the most vibrant tech hub in Europe” is being driven by their customers. “I looked at Dublin, Benelux and UK but we had a natural affinity with the UK,” he added. |
UberRUSH Raises Three Critical Questions For The Future Of Mobile On-Demand Services | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | TechCrunch Last week, my column discussed how on-demand mobile services — — are ripe for venture capital investment. In the seven days that have passed, more startups in this category have been handsomely funded by some of the best investors in the world. And, to cap off the week, the leader in this category, Uber, , its local courier service. After years of savvy, brilliant PR campaigns to deliver ice cream via old-school ice cream trucks, Christmas trees, kittens and cupcakes, and most recently, the ability for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to hail a black car and directly pitch some of the partners at Google Ventures for possible investment, Uber has (publicly) that it’s a company that its . For a mobile company on a roll like Uber, it is a captivating move, yet also raises critical questions related to other on-demand startups, their specific business and operational models, and ultimately, how consumers may behave in the future. . Just like Google wants us to visit its home page, enter a term, and then leave, Uber wants people around the world to open its app, tap a few buttons, and then leave the app, get in a car, and go on with life. While the Bay Area, New York, and other select cities around the country host a slew of mobile on-demand service startups, Uber is the one mobile consumer brand which has painstakingly carved out great geographical penetration. On top of this, Uber’s daily active use case means people are using the times multiple times per week, if not per day, meaning they could leverage that consumer attention for other offerings. With RUSH, smartly, they elected for a more business-focused solution, extending their expertise into a naturally adjacent use case which occurs in every city worldwide and is often, like cabs, run by smaller companies with outdated networks. Let us see how RUSH evolves. It will take time. And while I wouldn’t bet against Uber on anything, there may some underestimation of just how hard this kind of horizontal expansion can be. While we can certainly opening the Uber mobile app in five years and seeing a menu of choices beyond cars, making those additional services a reality is excruciating work and could take years to form. Lucky for Uber, it has time, money, and the brand to make it happen. In the meantime, the introduction of RUSH raises large questions. It’s too early to what will happen and know what the answers will be, so in the meantime, we can debate what path other local service models powered by mobile may do to keep things competitive. Here are the three big questions triggered by Uber’s expansion into RUSH: from the perspective of business and operations, should various mobile on-demand services remain verticalized and standalone, or does it make more sense to consolidate? It might be seductive to assume, in the name of efficiency, that it will make the most sense to consolidate these mobile on-demand services, but the reality is that each of the growing services — for grocery, for deliveries, and so forth — run on different business and operational models. are all mobile on-demand services created equally? After Uber, what do the gross margins of other mobile on-demand services look like, and given those other offerings, how does one think about ranking the opportunity ahead of each one? RUSH makes a great deal of sense to me because it already happens ad-hoc in every city and extends Uber’s offering to a clear business use case, but it’s unclear what they’d offer next. Will the consumer masses prefer to have all of these types of services under one umbrella, or would consumers prefer more choice within verticals? All the strategy whiteboarding in the world won’t be able to predict the answer to this question, and that, combined with the ripe funding environment for such businesses, is a very good thing for consumers, for those looking for jobs, and the entrepreneurs who may just uncover the next great mobile on-demand service. “Hermes” / |
How Oculus And 8 Fake Ears Could Morph Concerts Into Video Games | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | I’m standing on a circular stage with neo-folk musician Beck. Surrounded by cheering fans, I blush, then turn and wave to thank them. They don’t see me, though, because I’m actually sitting in a dark, empty back room at Sundance Film Festival wearing an Oculus Rift. A few minutes before, I was blasting spaceships through Oculus, but that exhilaration was familiar. Most people can imagine how gaming will evolve thanks to virtual reality. But bashful is an emotion no other piece of media has ever made me feel, which is why Oculus Cinema or something like it could unlock whole new dimensions of visual and aural performance artistry. Famed music video director (Arcade Fire, Kanye West, U2) dreamed up this Lincoln-sponsored back in late 2012. Beck would play “Sound And Vision”, a David Bowie cover, in a round room ringed with 160 musicians of every style. A brass line, a gospel choir, a string quartet. You can watch a behind-the-scenes video about the show here below: I press a button, and suddenly I’m in the back of the audience, slowly revolving counterclockwise around this circuit. I’m free to turn in any direction so I can inspect the artists when I move past, or watch Beck on stage. As the boom-bap sound of a drum kit grows louder in my right ear, I know I’m approaching a rock band before I even see them. Sure enough, I turn around and find the drummer intensely keeping time. I listen as he eventually fades out of my left ear as I get farther away. The whole time, the look on his face says he knows this isn’t just any performance. That might be because what’s recording what I saw, heard, and felt was a terrifying human head mannequin covered with extra ears. No face. and a rig with six GoPro cameras. Together, they simultaneously record 3D audio and video. Music aficionados may have heard of binaural recordings, where a dummy head with microphones in each of its two silicone ears pick up sound the same way you’d hear it in person. A sound on the right will hit the dummy’s right ear a split second before its left. When listened to on headphones, binaural recordings make you feel like you’re standing still in a room with the musicians. But Milk took it a step further by inventing possibly the world’s first 360 binaural head microphone. When combined with Oculus’ head tracking sensor, this creepy face’s recordings maintain the binaural illusion no matter which direction you turn. What’s surreal is how magnificently Hello Again felt on Oculus considering that wasn’t even what it was shot for. The show was originally designed to be viewed on a computer screen. A webcam would track the viewer’s head movement to adjust the video and sound, approximating virtual reality with no special hardware required. Experienced this way, it’s still painfully apparent that you are not there, though. It’s like looking out a window versus being outside. The facsimile just makes you long to have attended the concert in person. You probably don’t have a VR rig handy, though, so you can watch that version . But seen and heard through Oculus, I actually felt like I got a better deal than the live audience. They were stuck in their seats. I could instantly teleport from the center of the stage right beside Beck to the front of the crowd to the outer perimeter with close-ups of the backing bands. Not only did Oculus make me feel present, I felt omnipresent. And that’s where virtual reality’s opportunity to evolve performance art lies — in its ability to let us be both anywhere and anyone. “My primary interest in technology is to tell stories that affect humans on an emotional level,” Milk tells me. “I’m not interested in tech demos. I’m not interested in how many hairs are in the paintbrush. I’m interested in the paintings you can make with the paintbrush.” He’s now founded a company called Omnia to build more hardware that could help artists explore the boundaries of recording a moment. That aligns with Oculus’s plan to help developers build out an ecosystem of auxiliary gadgets. “The last thing we want to do is say to an artist, ‘Go figure out this 360 stereo camera technology binaural multi-access audio and then execute on your vision,'” Oculus product lead Joe Chen tells me. “The more folks like Chris that help us with the technology development the better, as then we can cut to the chase of creating art instead of just making tech for tech’s sake.” Thanks to its , Oculus has plenty of resources to invest into such a community of experience hackers. As recently wrote, films like Gravity could become much more stimulating if made for Oculus Cinema. Instead of watching Sandra Bullock floating through outer space from the third-person perspective, you’d be there with her. Or you could be her, experiencing the space station tear apart all around you from whatever angle you decide to look. George Clooney would stare into your eyes as you figured out how to survive. 3D binaural recordings and 360 video could similarly transform the consumption of live performance art. It will be tough for virtual reality to match the invigoration of actually being there, but it could unlock much more vivid experiences for those who aren’t. The top complaint from most people about seeing a concert or theater performance is that it’s hard to see. You’re either too short in a standing-room-only crowd or too far away in the stands. VR could give everyone a front-row spot, but with the autonomy of perspective missing from a video feed. A limitless number of people could occupy this same virtual space, so an intimate small-room experience could scale. Even more exciting than being in the front row seeing a band would be being the band itself. Sleeker virtual-reality recording rigs like Milk’s can fit onstage, giving you the perspective of the artists like I got with Beck. Again, it’s not just the vantage point, but the ability to control where you’re looking that makes it feel like you’re the one who’s famous. Imagine getting to be a ballerina or the star of a play. What’s most tantalizing is that performances could eventually be done with a virtual audience specifically in mind. Even Beck’s “Hello Again” could be watched cohesively in person. But what if Beck recorded alternate versions of the show where you got to call the shots? You could decide what backing musician he would give a solo to, whether he’d jam more or bring back the chorus, whether he’d cut the house lights and soulfully croon by himself or turn lights the up and invite the whole crowd to sing along. A virtual choose-your-own-adventure, shows like this would blur the lines between passive and interactive art Sure, most people will still see music the old-fashioned way. But a few adventurous artists will explore the new virtual frontiers of performance art. And when you link arms with your favorite band and take a bow together, enveloped by thunderous applause, it won’t matter whether you call it a concert or a video game. All that will matter is how good it feels. |
US Government Will Detail Internet Exploits, Except When It Doesn’t Want To | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 13 | Heartbleed kicked off a in the rollicking discussion of privacy, digital security, and the role of government in protecting its citizenry from threats both real and imagined. News of Heartbleed , starting a soul-searching bit of Internet-scrambling by services large and small to examine their own networks and products to see if they were exposed to the flaw. Much work remains for those impacted to get their services air-tight and patched, with certificates and revoked and replaced. It’s no small task, and one . Friday that the NSA not only knew of Heartbleed, but had used the exploit for some time, perhaps two years. The NSA, in a statement, . The White House followed suit. Since then we’ve learned a few things that are worth keeping in mind. Let’s begin with what the U.S. government’s policy is regarding revealing flaws in Internet security. The New York Times , based on sourcing from “senior administration officials.” The gist here is that the U.S. government now claims to have a bent towards disclosing what flaws it does find, provided, as quoted by The Times, there is a “ While it is easy to appreciate a leaning towards disclosure, the above leaves American people in a position of either trusting the government or not. Put simply, as the government gets to decide for itself what is a “clear national security need or law enforcement need,” we, the average folk, have no window into what it not disclosed, and why. There’s reason for that, naturally: If the NSA decided to tell the world each and every exploit that it found and intended to use, they would all slam shut, and it’s job would become far harder if not impossible. At the same time, we haven’t answered the following question: If the NSA had known about Heartbleed — and some remain convinced that, denials, aside, it did — would it have told the Internet community? If we can’t be sure that Heartbleed wouldn’t have passed the anti-efficacy test — the idea that a flaw is so dangerous to the public safety that it must be disclosed, potential offensive capabilities be damned — we are left essentially nowhere. That tension negates the fact that the NSA claims to have not known; if we can’t be sure of its own methods for determining what is to be disclosed and what not, at least in the abstract, any single case is simply an occluded data point with no axes to measure from. The NSA doesn’t even need to know of an exploit in advance to, well, exploit it. The Guardian did a [I quote at length to preserve tone]: The agency’s permit “retention of all communications that are enciphered.” In other words, when NSA encounters encryption it can’t crack, it’s allowed to – and apparently does – vacuum up all that scrambled traffic and store it indefinitely, in hopes of finding a way to break into it months or years in the future. As , Heartbleed can be used to steal a site’s master encryption keys – keys that would suddenly enable anyone with a huge database of encrypted traffic to unlock it, at least for the vast majority of sites that don’t generate new keys as a safeguard against retroactive exposure. If NSA moved quickly enough – as dedicated spies are supposed to – the agency could have exploited the bug to steal those keys most sites got around to fixing the bug, gaining access to a vast treasure trove of stored traffic. The NSA isn’t building those datacenters to hold its internal email, of course. Presuming for the moment that the NSA and the larger US government didn’t know about Heartbleed — and you have to ask why, given their supposed prowess — it doesn’t close the loophole until all is patched. And we have little concrete in the way of promises that the government would have disclosed it had it known. And we have nothing to say that it wouldn’t do so again. The only upside to this situation is that we are engaged in what Professor Dawkins would call “consciousness raising,” or a period of rising public knowledge of a situation that needs massive course correction. We’re going to need better, and more encryption with more open-source technology along with even more minds parsing the code to ferret out the weaknesses. But at least we understand where we stand. The childhood and adolescence of the Internet are over. It’s time to grow up. |
Viddsee BUZZ Launches To Help Independent Asian Films Go Viral | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | , an , has launched the beta version of , a new site that is meant to help content reach a wider audience on social networks. The site, which launched last year, also announced that Viddsee has hit five unique million viewers. Viddsee currently serves artists from Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand, while about 30% of its viewership comes from outside of Asia. The site and its , museums, and film festivals gives filmmakers a new distribution platform, but co-founder Derek Tan says there was still a significant gap in marketing to potential viewers. Though Viddsee BUZZ’s concept resembles , , and other sites that rely on social networks, the startup wants to model its content after , , and . Viddsee Buzz’s posts have attention-grabbing titles like ” for a short film called “Potong Saga,” (screen grab above), but its articles focus on each piece’s themes and includes background information about its creators. “Viddsee BUZZ works in bringing the essence of the films out closer to the audience on the Web. This might come in terms of research, context, and thoughts behind the film,” says Tan. “The idea is to create a better context around the film, especially as audiences browse through a sea of content and potentially miss out on what is good.” |
BTC China Launches ATM Web App | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | , one of the world’s largest bitcoin exchanges by trading volume, released a new mobile-friendly Web app called the today. The Picasso ATM allows users around the world to exchange the digital currency for cash without having to find a physical ATM. To use Picasso ATM, bitcoin owners first load the currency into BTC China’s Picasso Wallet and then sell it through the Web app. Buyers can then immediately confirm transactions on their smartphones. The app is targeted at casual bitcoin users as well as businesses and store owners, who can set their own profit margins on the currency like owners of physical ATM machines. Since Picasso ATM is a Web app and does not have to be downloaded onto smartphones, BTC China says it can avoid “third-party app store censorship or regulation.” It also requires security confirmations from both buyers and sellers before a transaction is completed. The price of bitcoin, which is currently about $455.50, has since the beginning of the year thanks to several factors, including the and a series of legal crackdowns around the world, . Though the price volatility has influenced its public perception, BTC China CEO Bobby Lee told me that it “does not affect bitcoin’s ultimate viability.” The exchange will continue to launch new products to “encourage more international bitcoin use and facilitation,” Lee says. “This is the very first of our services that even allows bitcoin interaction with a currency other than [renminbi]. Previously, this has served us well since we are more dominant in China, but now, we want to create products that cater to cryptocurrency enthusiasts worldwide.” |
Microsoft Rolls Out The April Xbox One Update — Here’s What’s Inside | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Do you have an Xbox One? It’s update time! Get excited! Well, not too excited. Moderately excited. Like the last few monthly updates, this month’s patch is mostly meant to bring in features that aren’t so much oh-my-god-brand-new as they are things that were surprisingly absent after the jump from Xbox 360 to Xbox One. The new update should start hitting Xbox Ones this evening. Alas, still no sign of HBO GO. |
Microsoft Now Accepts Universal Windows Apps As Its Insta-OEM Kit For Windows Phone Goes Live | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Starting today developers can Windows Store and Windows Phone applications to create the that Microsoft announced recently at its Build developer conference. Microsoft is working to unite development for its two core Windows platforms, incentivizing developers to create apps for Windows by making it easier to target two separate audiences while reusing much of the code between the applications. Microsoft is in the process of harmonizing its stores, but that process is not yet complete. The company will eventually bring the Xbox One, another Windows-based machine, into the universal app game. The gist of a universal Windows app, according to Microsoft, is that it allows consumers to snag an app once, and download it for all compatible Windows devices. As we know, the devices that will be compatible with the app varietal will grow. This morning, Microsoft released Windows Phone 8.1 to developers. TechCrunch published hands-on notes of the new code, the feature set of which was detailed at Build. Also out today for developers is the ability to reserve application names for Windows Phone applications. Previously, this was only available for Windows Store apps. Keep in mind the theme: Harmonization. Over the weekend, Microsoft announced the consolidation of application pricing tiers to better match Windows Store and Windows Phone applications. This change will see the addition of $0.99 and $1.29 apps into the Windows Store. Shifting gears entirely, Microsoft’s announced today that the company’s to help manufacturers get up and running building Windows Phone handsets is live as well. You can’t do this in your garage, but the help could assist smaller, regional OEMs jump aboard Windows Phone. I suspect this offering is more enticing now that Windows Phone devices with smaller than 9″ screens . |
Google Glass Gets KitKat Support And Improved Photo Browsing, Loses Video Calls | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Anybody will be able to , but ahead of this, Google is giving the Glass software . There are a couple of new features in this update, including new tools for making working with photos easier, but Google has also decided to remove the option to do video calls from Glass for the time being. Google says video calls from Glass didn’t live out to the company’s “high standards.” Only about 10 percent of Glass users currently use them, and because of this, the Glass team has made “ As for the photo updates, Google now finally bundles photos together so when you scroll through your timelines, it’s not cluttered by lots of photos, and the photos you take are easier to find. Glass now bundles all your videos, photos and vignettes into a single bundle for each day. If you take a lot of photos on Glass, that’s definitely a major improvement. Despite losing the video calling feature, Hangouts on Glass are still an option for chats, and with this update, Google now allows users to more easily send photos in Hangout messages. Other new updates include a voice command menu that’s now sorted by frequency and recency, as well as the ability to more easily send feedback about Glass right from the device. According to Google, there are a few more features in this update, too, but it hasn’t updated its Glass Journal blog yet. We will update this post with a list of all the new features as Google makes this information available. |
Amid Reports Facebook Is Eyeing Up Financial Services, TransferWise Hits £1 Billion In Transfers | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | A million pounds isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? In the midst of reports that , one of the startups it’s rumoured to have talked to, the European P2P money transfer service , has hit a major milestone today: Its platform has processed £1 billion of customers’ money, an eight-fold increase — £125m to £1bn — since May last year when the company a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures. And whilst a better metric would be actual , this undoubtedly demonstrates significant traction for the London-based company. It’s also more evidence of the money transfer space heating up right now, with a plethora of startups, especially in Europe, aiming to disrupt the banks and legacy players such as Western Union — hence Facebook’s interest. Just last month, Dublin-based CurrencyFair hit the $1 billion money transfer mark — that’s dollars not pounds — claiming to be the leading P2P money transfer service, although presumably TransferWise would now dispute this. And in the same month, the UK’s Azimo — which the was a potential acqui-hire target for Facebook — a $10 million series A round, and WorldRemit a $40 million investment from Accel Partners. In a call, TransferWise Executive Chairman and co-founder Taavet Hinrikus refused to be drawn into speculation regarding whether or not it had been approached by Facebook, except to toe the line that, were the social network to get into the business of money transfers, it would be validation of the need to bring greater transparency to financial services. That’s in reference to TransferWise’s modus operandi: to expose the hidden fees charged by the banks when sending money abroad. By employing a P2P model, the startup’s platform is able to undercut incumbent players — it claims to have already saved customers over £45 million. “If someone as big as Facebook comes into the space, then I think that’s only going to be beneficial to everyone,” he says. Hinrikus was willing to wax lyrical on the opportunity as a whole, however, stressing that TransferWise was just getting started. “If I look at the world right now… money transfer is such a humongous market. Even though we have transferred a billion pounds so far, we’re just touching the beginning of it,” he says. “We’re focused on building and growing and we’re having a ton of fun every day”. That’s likely coded talk for “it’s far too early to think about selling” and another way to pour cold water on any TransferWise/Facebook speculation. And whilst founders speak in those terms all the time, judging by how passionante Hinrikus is when talking about the opportunity and startup life as a whole, I’m inclined to take him at his word. To coincide with that £1 billion milestone, the company is launching an Android app today, adding to its existing iOS offering. Hinrikus says mobile offers another — and different — opportunity and that TransferWise is thinking about “what more can you do on mobile?”. “Given that the phone is something you have in your pocket all the time, there is much more that money on mobile should mean to people and ways they can be in control,” he says. “It caters for a different usage experience.” Finally I asked Hinrikus — who recently — if and when TransferWise will support the crypto-currency. “When you can do something useful with Bitcoin,” he says, noting that the engineer in him is still very excited by the technology, but that it’s a technology “that doesn’t really have an application yet.” “I’d love someone to build a killer application for Bitcoin, and once that happens we will surely support it,” adds Hinrikus. |
How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained) | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Valley was some of the most valuable agricultural land in the entire world, but it was paved over to create today’s Silicon Valley. This was simply the result of bad planning and layers of leadership failure — nobody thinks farms literally needed to be destroyed to create the technology industry’s success. Today, the tech industry is apparently on track to destroy one of the world’s most valuable cultural treasures, San Francisco, by pushing out the diverse people who have helped create it. At least that’s the story you’ve read in hundreds of articles lately. But everyone who lives in the Bay Area today needs to accept responsibility for making changes where they live so that everyone who wants to be here, can. The alternative — inaction and self-absorption — very well could create the cynical elite paradise and middle-class dystopia that many fear. I’ve spent time looking into the city’s historical housing and development policies. With the protests escalating again, I am pretty tired of seeing the city’s young and disenfranchised fight each other amid an extreme housing shortage created by 30 to 40 years of from the old wealth of the city down from the peninsula suburbs. Here is a very long explainer. Sorry, this isn’t a shorter post or that I didn’t break it into 20 pieces. If you’re wondering why people are protesting you, how we got to this housing crisis, why rent control exists or why tech is even shifting to San Francisco in the first place, this is meant to provide some common points of understanding. This is a complex problem, and I’m not going to distill it into young, rich tech douchebags-versus-helpless old ladies facing eviction. There are many other places where you can read that story. It does us all no justice. Then are under rent control. (That’s about 75 percent of the city’s rental stock.) Homeowners have a strong economic incentive to restrict supply because it supports price appreciation of their own homes. It’s understandable. Many of them have put the bulk of their net worth into their homes and they don’t want to lose that. So they engage in NIMBYism under the name of preservationism or environmentalism, even though denying in-fill development here creates pressures for sprawl elsewhere. They do this through hundreds of politically powerful neighborhood groups throughout San Francisco like the . Then the rent-controlled tenants care far more about eviction protections than increasing supply. That’s because their most vulnerable constituents are paying rents that are so far below market-rate, that only an ungodly amount of construction could possibly help them. Plus, that construction wouldn’t happen fast enough — especially for elderly tenants. So we’re looking at as much as 80 percent of the city that isn’t naturally oriented to add to the housing stock. Oh, and tech? The industry is about 8 percent of San Francisco’s workforce. Then if you look at the cities down on the peninsula and in the traditional heart of Silicon Valley, where home-ownership rates are higher, it’s even worse. The true culprit behind our housing problems: let us deflect blame to Mountain View’s burrowing owl! (Photo: Wikimedia Commons user under a ) The Google Bus protesters , but the Mountain View city council . They’ve argued that it’s to protect the city’s burrowing owl population. (The city council even .) Even more mind-bogglingly, Then, by ballot measure last November. So the wealthy voting classes of the peninsula are also strangling themselves of housing too. The compared to , according to Zillow. Once you factor in the cost of owning a car — estimated at slightly more than $9,000 a year by the AAA — it’s not that much cheaper. If you look even closer to the Caltrain stations, rents go way up. The newly-opened Madera complex in downtown Mountain View Certain cities like Menlo Park seem more collaborative. Facebook . But that’s 394 units for a company with more than 6,000 employees. So one contributor to the tech industry’s spread into San Francisco is that the peninsula cities are more than happy to vote for jobs, just not homes. This is a demographic shift that is much larger than the technology industry itself — although there are some tech-specific reasons that have fueled a migration north from the historic heart of Silicon Valley over the last 10 years. This is what a major shift where cities and suburbs have traded places over the last 30 to 40 years. As people marry later and employment becomes more temporal, young adults and affluent retirees are moving into the urban core, while immigrants and the less affluent are moving out. San Francisco’s population hit a trough around 1980, after steadily declining since the 1950s as the city’s socially conservative white and Irish-Catholic population left for the suburbs. Into the vacuum of relatively cheaper rents they left behind, came the misfits, hippies and immigrants that fomented so many of San Francisco’s beautifully weird cultural and sexual revolutions. But that out-migration reversed around 1980, and the city’s population has been steadily rising for the last 30 years. This is a phenomenon that’s happening to cities all over the United States. It’s happening in Seattle, Atlanta, New York City, Boston and Washington. D.C.:
Its rapacious speed may even be accelerating. Witness in Brooklyn and Manhattan, or . Why? People are getting married later and are living longer. Nearly 50 percent of Americans, or , up from around 22 percent in 1950. The job market has changed as well. In 1978, the U.S.’s manufacturing employment peaked and the noise and grit of the blue-collar factories that once fueled the flight of the upper-middle-class disappeared. These vacant manufacturing warehouses turned into the live-work spaces and lofts that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in cities like New York and San Francisco. The concept of lifetime employment also faded. Today, San Francisco’s younger workers derive their job security not from any single employer but instead from a large network of weak ties that lasts from one company to the next. The density of cities favors this job-hopping behavior more than the relative isolation of suburbia. San Francisco , the urban theorist who wrote “The Rise of the Creative Class.” There are also some tech industry-specific reasons too. The capital costs required to found a company and launch a minimum viable product are much lower than a decade ago. Startups also need fewer people, especially with the low distribution costs provided by platforms like Apple’s iOS app store or Facebook. So it’s easier for lots of small companies to find pockets of commercial real estate in the city for new offices. It’s also easier for VCs to fund an order of magnitude more experiments, even if the same proportion of them fails. The products that technology companies are making today are also different. In the 1970s, “Silicon Valley” literally meant making semiconductors in large fabs that required expensive equipment and clean rooms. But the big wave of the last decade has been social networking. And every notable consumer web or mobile product of this wave has been seeded through critical mass in the “analog” world. Facebook had university campuses. Snapchat had Southern California high schools. Foursquare had Lower Manhattan. Twitter had San Francisco. An even newer generation of startups addresses distinctly urban questions. Airbnb exists because in 2007, San Francisco . Uber exists because the city’s taxi market was under-supplied with drivers and smartphones offered a new way of summoning transportation on demand. Then there are very young startups like , , , which is trying to shake up scheduled transport, or any of the companies out of , an urban ventures incubator. As tech workers have moved into cities, the industry has changed San Francisco’s culture and San Francisco has changed the technology industry. Nevertheless, while tech is fueling San Francisco’s current boom and has helped cut the city’s unemployment rate by about half since 2010, this gentrification wave has been going on for decades longer than the word “dot-com” has existed. And it’s happening all over the country. So a great question of our time is how American cities handle this shift. They have to do this in the face of global economic changes that are dividing our workforce into highly-skilled knowledge workers who are disproportionately benefiting from growth and lower-skilled service workers that are not seeing their wages rise at all. Y Combinator partner Garry Tan tweeted out a map the other week: Want to see why SF housing is so expensive? This is a map of allowed building height. Yellow = 4 stories max. — Garry Tan (@garrytan) Wouldn’t that be simple? But it’s not that easy. While the real estate market is hot, To go beyond that, you have to build political will. You have to win hearts and minds. You have to make sure that people don’t get pushed out or left behind. Origins of SF’s cautious approach to growth are and urban renewal struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. San Francisco’s orientation towards growth control has 50 years of history behind it and more than 80 percent of the city’s housing stock is either owner-occupied or rent controlled. The city’s height limits, its rent control and its formidable permitting process are all products of tenant, environmental and preservationist movements that have arisen and fallen over decades. . They saw what happened to the — when the city’s re-development agency razed it, displacing tens of thousands of black residents and the businesses they had created after World War II. To this day, there’s distrust and fear that the same thing will happen again, especially if it’s carried out by private developers. Advocacy group through Census data, noting that the Mission has lost 1,400 Latino households while adding 2,900 white households between 1990 and 2011. In the same time period, Oakland lost 40 percent of its black residents. Anti-tech sentiment during the first dot-com boom. During the first tech boom, there was the , which pushed for a moratorium on new market-rate housing and live-work lofts in the neighborhood. There were also more violent movements like , which slashed tires, keyed cars and broke windows. Throughout the years, these movements have found alliances with other neighborhood organizations, preservationist and environmental interests. There were struggles in the 1950s and 60s to stop freeways from cutting through the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park, which gave way to another as they encroached into North Beach and Chinatown. In 1986, To this day, 1972’s Transamerica Pyramid remains San Francisco’s tallest building. It’s only in 2017 . As political scientist and longtime San Francisco observer : San Francisco has emerged as a “semi-sovereign city” — a city that imposes as many limits on capital as capital imposes on it. Mislabeled by some detractors as socialist or radical in the Marxist tradition, San Francisco’s progressivism is concerned with consumption more than production, residence more than workplace, meaning more than materialism, community empowerment more than class struggle. Its first priority is not revolution but protection — protection of the city’s environment, architectural heritage, neighborhoods, diversity, and overall quality of life from the radical transformations of turbulent American capitalism. While we have to thank these movements for preserving so much of the land surrounding San Francisco and the city’s beautiful Victorians, one side effect is for the last 20 years. Meanwhile, alone. Even today, you can see these factions engaging in behavior that might seem absurd in the context of a housing shortage. On the ballot this June, is an that will require voters to individually approve height limit exemptions for developments on the city’s waterfront. It jeopardizes three major projects including the and Those developments are slated to deliver as much as 3,690 housing units and $124 million in affordable housing fees, according to a memo written by John Arntz, the director of the city’s department of elections. This initiative is funded overwhelmingly by a couple , who gave $75,000. (They did not reply to requests for comment.) It is overwhelmingly expected to pass, so even the mayor isn’t taking a position on it. “Would you like free ice cream San Francisco? ‘Why yes I would,’ ” is . “Why stand up against something where 60 to 70 percent are going to vote with the other side?” No. This is free ice cream! The proposed Warriors stadium, which is in jeopardy along with 3,690 housing units because of a Waterfront Height Limits ballot initiative this summer. You’ll also end up , which protest that replaces a Walgreens and a Burger King. It does not remove any existing housing or directly displace anyone. A coalition of Mission-based non-profits and activists demonstrating against a proposed 351-unit condominium development at 16th and Mission. At face value, this might not make sense. But there are a couple reasons that this happens. One is that gentrification raises the gap between market-rate rents and rent-controlled rents, strengthening the financial incentive for landlords to evict longtime tenants. Two is that neighborhood organizations . Unlike the wealthy waterfront NIMBYists, these communities are at risk of being displaced. If they don’t speak up for themselves, who will? Will you? Look at on Mission Street, which is a fancy new mixed-use building slated to open up next January (pictured below). , which got green-lighted quickly through lots of collaboration with local Mission-based neighborhood groups. As , when developer Dean Givas wanted to build luxury condos in the heart of the Mission District, he bent over backward for local community groups to get the project quickly green-lighted. Over two years of negotiations with community groups, Givas agreed to buy a plot on nearby Shotwell Street for the city to develop 40 units of affordable housing, dwarfing the 14 units that would have been required within the Vida building. He was already on the hook to pay $1.4 million in city-mandated impact fees, yet the community got him to agree to much more. He donated $150,000 to a fund to help mom-and-pop Mission businesses—to be buoyed with a sales tax on future condo sales. Then, in what the project’s attorney called an unprecedented move by a developer in the Mission, he donated $650,000 to 23 community groups, a strategy that drew sellout criticisms from purists in the nonprofit community and shakedown charges from pro-development forces worried that his philanthropic palm greasing would set a precedent. Next, Givas donated $1 million for the Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain to renovate the long-shuttered New Mission Theater next door into a five-screen dinner-and-a-movie cineplex. The Texans agreed to hire 50 percent of its staff from the neighborhood and to let nonprofits host at-cost benefits at the facility. In principle, it’s fine to use the levers of urban politics to redistribute the wealth an economic boom creates in San Francisco. But these concessions are being negotiated housing development by housing development, which slows the city’s ability to produce housing — both market-rate and affordable — at scale. Mayor Ed Lee and others are trying to speed this up, . It’s a good first step, but…. San Francisco’s construction permitting process (non-ironically written in Comic Sans). One of the things that makes housing development different in San Francisco compared to other major U.S. cities is that building permits are discretionary rather than as-of-right. In other cities, if a developer already matches the existing zoning and height restrictions of the city plan, they can get issued a permit relatively quickly. But for new housing developments in San Francisco, there’s a preliminary review, which takes six months. Then there are also chances for your neighbors to appeal your permit on either an entitlement or environmental basis. The city also requires extensive public notice of proposed projects even if they already meet neighborhood plans, which have taken several years of deliberation to produce. Neighbors can appeal your project for something as insignificant as the shade of paint, although the city’s planning department and commission tries to get through minor appeals quickly. If those fail, neighborhood groups can also file a CEQA or environmental lawsuit under California state law, challenging the environment impact of the project. Perversely, CEQA lawsuits have been . Then if that fails, opponents can put a development directly on a citywide ballot with enough signatures. ( ) That’s last November even though it had already gone through eight years of deliberation. These barriers add unpredictable costs and years of delays for every developer, which are ultimately passed onto buyers and renters. It also means that developers have problems attracting capital financing in weaker economic years because of the political uncertainty around getting a project passed. The sophistication with which neighborhood groups wield San Francisco’s arcane land-use and zoning regulations for activist purposes is one of the very unique things about the city’s politics. But the city’s political leadership doesn’t want to change it, because it fears backlash from powerful neighborhood groups, which actually deliver votes. Yeah, I was surprised by this. “We can’t build our way to affordability,” is a common refrain. Tim Redmond, who used to edit the San Francisco Bay Guardian, even (I have no idea how you would fund this.) Why the private market can never solve SF’s housing crisis — tim redmond (@timredmondsf) Several activists also sent me this paper, authored by Calvin Welch, of the .
Admirably, Welch has been fighting for affordable housing in San Francisco for the last forty years and is part of the politically powerful , which has seen that neighborhood through, well, everything. But this paper conflates correlation with causation. He argues that when there is a decline in new housing units, there is also a decline in price. Namely, he points to 2001 and 2002, while brushing off the mega-gigantic-enormous confounding variable of the dot-com bust and a regional recession. So I met Welch and he made good points. (He’s been working on this for nearly forty years.) will not make housing more affordable to working-class or lower-income San Franciscans. Left to its own devices, the market will only produce housing that chases the very richest buyers. In a time of rising inequality, those market-rate units are increasingly out of reach, even for middle-class San Franciscans. He points to tables like this one, which shows San Francisco’s residential housing pipeline for the last quarter of 2013. Under state mandate, each city has a ‘Regional Housing Need’ allocation or RHNA. In San Francisco, the market is producing almost double the number of housing units for people with ‘Above Moderate’ incomes, or 120 percent of the area’s median income, as the RHNA says it needs to build. So affordable housing advocates say that developers should be required to have a higher percentage of below-market-rate units built. The issue with inclusionary housing is that construction costs are so high in San Francisco — — that affordable housing requires generous public subsidies. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development says at a cost of $824.5 million. About $274.1 million of that funding is coming from the city, and the remaining $550.3 million has to come from somewhere else. The federal and state government used to help with this, but their assistance has dropped off dramatically since the 1980s. (Cuts to the federal Housing and Urban Development department budget under the Reagan administration coincided with the rise of urban homelessness in San Francisco.) When below-market rate units do get built, the lines are massive: . 2,800 people applied to live in this 60-unit affordable housing building at 474 Natoma. Also, inclusionary housing has its own trade-offs. , cutting out units that would be affordable to middle-class buyers. Hence, another reason for the disappearance of the San Francisco’s middle-class. You’ll see in the table above that the market is mostly producing housing for ‘above moderate’ incomes, then some ‘low income’ housing units, but hardly anything for ‘moderate incomes.’ The lack of options for middle-class San Franciscans in turn feeds the two-tier systems that we’re seeing in transportation with MUNI-versus-Uber and in education, . Pro-development advocates ) Meanwhile, supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the Tenderloin, is , meaning they’ll lose money by default, so they won’t build at all. Over the past decade, the city had carefully negotiated a The magic ratio is hard to find and it constantly shifts, depending on the state of the housing market and construction costs. More construction probably won’t make prices , but it will prevent them from skyrocketing as much as they would otherwise. and prices in 10 of the U.S.’s biggest tech hubs, you’ll see that San Francisco had the highest median prices per square foot and had the lowest number of new construction permits per 1,000 units between 1990 and 2013. There are also many long-term studies like or or from economists like Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and Joseph Gyourko at the University of Pennsylvania examining the impact of land-use restrictions and zoning on U.S. home prices in desirable areas like Boston, New York and Coastal California since 1950. They found that . But in places where zoning regulations create artificial limits on home production, In the 1980s and 1990s, they found that above base construction costs. You can also look at and California. Manhattan during the postwar boom years between 1955 and 1964. But between 1980 and 1999, the New York City borough was permitting just an average of 3,120 units per year. Between 1970 and 2000, the median price of a Manhattan housing unit increased by 284 percent in constant dollars. Similarly, California . That construction rate slowed down, and real housing prices in the state have increased by 385 percent from 1970 to 2010. Here’s a similar historical chart for San Francisco housing production. It’s as if both cities reacted 10 or 20 years late — long after the Great Inversion started and before anybody had any idea about how big or transformative this suburban-urban migration would become. This issue is profound. Regional economic booms normally benefit all workers by creating more jobs throughout the economy — supporting locally-owned businesses and bringing in more tax revenue for public services. Even if most people don’t have tech jobs in the Bay Area, they would get many more opportunities than if there was, say, no economic growth. The point is that if the entire Bay Area had a more elastic housing supply, it would not only make living affordable for most people, it would allow a far larger portion of the population to find jobs and do things like save or spend money instead of moving somewhere distant and spending their money on driving, or even being unemployed. UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti calculated But in San Francisco, that spillover effect is much smaller. This is in no small part because so much of our incomes end up going toward housing costs. The city’s economist Ted Egan estimates that each San Francisco tech job likely creates somewhere slightly north of two extra jobs, not five. San Francisco’s city economist, Ted Egan, argues above that the tech industry and its spillover effects have been responsible for virtually all of the city’s job growth since 2010. Still, the multiplier effect in San Francisco at slightly more than 2 jobs created for every single tech job, is much lower than the 5-to-1 ratio UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti calculated nationwide. Housing costs dampen the spillovers since people end up spending so much more on rent and mortgages. However, it’s hard to have even basic debates over modest increases in the housing supply here because of this ideological dispute. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDcq6CWqtXw] I keep coming back to the late 1970s because both the city of San Francisco and the state of California made choices that have had enduring impacts on housing to this day. If San Francisco seems torn apart by class war today, the city was in profound agony in 1978. and helped deliver the mayorship to George Moscone. Amid emerging allegations of physical abuse, Jones and hundreds of his followers defected from San Francisco to Guyana, where he sought to build a utopia. Instead, he convinced more than 900 of his followers, including mothers and infants, to ingest cyanide mixed with punch in a mass suicide. It was an enormous tragedy for the city; nearly every family in the black Fillmore district knew someone they had lost in Jonestown. Then, just nine days later, there was a double blow. Supervisor Dan White murdered mayor Moscone and gay political icon Harvey Milk in the heart of San Francisco’s beaux-arts City Hall. Tens of thousands of grief-stricken people marched down Market Street in a candlelight vigil. It was into this chaos that Dianne Feinstein, who had recently been widowed after her husband passed away from colon cancer, stepped into power and assumed mayorship. The broader U.S. economic picture was not great. Inflation shot from 9 percent at the time Feinstein became mayor to 13.3 percent a year later as another energy crisis. — again, prompting another cultural re-consideration of suburban ideal. Earlier in the summer of 1978, a cantankerous former small-town newspaper publisher named led a “taxpayer revolt” as property prices were soaring, threatening to throw home owners out of their homes because of rising tax bills. Jarvis’ idea was to cap property taxes at 1 percent of their assessed value and to prevent them from rising by more than 2 percent each year until the property was sold again and its taxes were reset at a new market value. Howard Jarvis launched the taxpayer revolt that got Proposition 13 passed, capping property taxes for homeowners. One argument that Jarvis used to rally tenant support for Proposition 13, was that he promised that landlords would pass on their tax savings to renters. They didn’t. They pocketed the savings for themselves. Tenants were furious, and rent control movements erupted in at least a dozen cities throughout California, from Berkeley to Santa Monica. San Francisco might have gone a different way, but Angelo Sangiacomo was the alleged trigger. The Italian-American landlord, who was born and raised in the Richmond District, Amid the outrage, Feinstein pushed for a 60-day rent freeze that would ward off the rise of a tenant-backed mayoral challenger. Both policies have had far-reaching and unanticipated ripple effects. Overnight, California’s property tax revenues , and the state had to make emergency allocations from a surplus that year to keep services afloat. Because the state’s K-12 schools are financed largely by property taxes, California’s spending per student fell in the mid-1960s in this decade. Without the ability to rely as heavily on property taxes, city governments throughout the state had in order to boost sales taxes. It may have even accelerated the homogeny of suburbs as smaller city governments had to cut deals to attract “big box” retailers to boost sales tax revenue, crowding out independently-run stores. It also created as California property values soared, creating a bigger gap in property taxes on newly-sold properties and ones that homeowners had held onto for a long time. That rigidity further enhanced the political power that NIMBY-ist homeowners accumulated in suburban city councils throughout the state. Proposition 13’s legacy? Owners of this Presidio Heights home, which just closed at a price of $5,125,000 earlier this week, . The home’s new taxes should be around $60,885. San Francisco’s 60-day rent control ordinance also stuck around, and it was subsequently strengthened through the following decades. The maximum allowable annual rent increase went from 7 percent to and . Because both Proposition 13 and rent control insulate homeowners and rent-controlled tenants from dramatic tax or rent increases when the market undersupplies housing, they undermined political will for building homes. Both of these policies were enacted just as the “Great Inversion” started. Rent control is a naturally divisive topic in the tech community. Progressives view it as a sacred right that protects the remnants of a working- and middle-class in the city. “It’s a non-renewable resource,” Erin McElroy, who is part of the , explained to me. But the tech community is both socially liberal market-oriented, . So price controls in the name of community stability and equity just makes people’s brains explode. Some influential tech leaders will be supportive (and, as I said, ). Then there are others, like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Stop SF evictions. Stop the Ellis act. — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) Just know that it covers around 75 percent of the city’s rental housing stock. If the Google Bus protests , you could imagine what would happen if you broached the topic of rent control. Want to alienate about half of San Francisco? Have fun. Yes, rent control is a blunt instrument of income re-distribution in an increasingly unequal world. It is not means-tested, meaning anyone from well-salaried, white-collar workers to very low-income residents can benefit from it. It also forces a number of small-time, mom-and-pop landlords to individually subsidize someone else’s cost of living in the city. It creates two classes of tenants — one that is very legally protected and another that is not. For market-rate tenants, there is under new city legislation like they will for Ellis Act evictees if they raise rents beyond what they can afford. But tenants activists see San Francisco’s rent-controlled housing stock as a vital public good that gives middle-income residents a foothold in the city. And while the make-up of the city’s rent-controlled , it likely contains less-wealthy San Franciscans on average than the market-rate units do. In studies of other cities where rent control unexpectedly ended via a change in state law like Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Francisco’s version of rent control also does not apply to buildings constructed after 1979, so it shouldn’t dis-incentivize developers from producing new units. Instead, of other factors are constricting supply. That said, I do think it undermines the political will that would otherwise exist for building more housing. San Francisco’s version of rent control lacks vacancy controls, which means landlords can re-set rents at whatever the market will bear when new rent-controlled tenants move in. The logic is that with vacancy controls, landlords won’t invest in maintaining their properties. But the flipside is that the landlord also has a strong financial incentive to evict longstanding tenants who are paying below-market rates. So every decade during a boom, there is a tragic, elderly face for the story of displacement. This past year, it was , the elderly Chinese-American couple with a mentally disabled daughter who were evicted last fall from their home of 34 years. But back in the 1990s, there was Lola McKay. A year after her eviction fight started, of 42 years at age 83 in 2000. It sucks. I sat in a high school gym in the Tenderloin full of terrified elderly and disabled people at the citywide tenant convention. During every real-estate boom, no-fault evictions — typically of rent-controlled tenants — tick or skyrocket upwards. At the heart of the Google Bus protests are a specific kind of eviction called an Ellis Act eviction. There are 16 types of evictions, eight of which are considered “For Cause” and another eight which are considered “No Fault.” No fault evictions are up across-the-board, . The Ellis Act is one of these. While it’s hard to fight a surge in other kinds of no-fault evictions like “Owner Move-In” evictions, the tenants movement has a stronger moral upper hand with the Ellis Act. That’s because the law, which was passed in 1985, was Tenants activists say that the Ellis Act is instead abused by real estate speculators, who evict their tenants, turn these rent-controlled apartments into tenancies-in-common and sell them at a profit. They , who are the worst serial Ellis Act evictors. One of them is , which is evicting 98-year-old Mary Elizabeth Phillips and Balboa High School teacher Sarah Brant, who live up my street. Phillips moved to the city in the late 1930s as a war bride and moved into this 1950s-era apartment building on Dolores Street, across the way from what is now a huge apartment complex containing a brand-new bottom-floor Whole Foods Market. Her last day was supposed to be six days ago on April 8. But she’s still there, at least until the sheriff receives a court order to take action. At 98, she has nowhere to go. 98-year-old Mary Elizabeth Phillips and Balboa High School teacher Sarah Brant are being evicted from their apartments in the Mission District by Urban Green Investments. Phillips’ last day was supposed to be six days ago. She doesn’t have anywhere to go and doesn’t have enough money to afford current market-rate rents in San Francisco. Brant, her neighbor, helps care for her. The city government is trying to respond as quickly as it can, but it can only do so much because the Ellis Act is state law. Earlier this week, city supervisor David Campos, who represents the other part of the Mission, . It’s going from $5,200 per tenant to the difference between the tenant’s current rent and the market-rate rent for a comparable apartment over two years. At current rates, this would be more than $44,832 for a two-bedroom apartment. They’re trying to change the law at the state level too. , who represents San Francisco in the California State Senate, also introduced a bill that Senate Transportation and Housing Committee earlier this week. Tenants-rights activists against Ellis Act evictions, but villains like real-estate speculators are too nebulous. Indeed, like But the Google Bus protests worked. protest at 24th & Valencia happening now. Very visual: — Jessica Kwong (@JessicaGKwong) They were a media sensation. They tapped into this inchoate sense of frustration around everything from rising income inequality to privacy to surveillance to the environmental impact of the hardware we buy to a dubious sense that today’s leading technology companies aren’t living up to their missions of not being evil. “The we-hate-tech-workers is mostly a media narrative,” said organizer Fred Sherburn-Zimmer. “It’s not about that. It’s about income disparity. It’s about speculators using high-income workers to displace communities.” Sherburn-Zimmer acknowledged that the bus protests were a tactic. But she said, without them, the movement wouldn’t have been able to get 500 people to march in Sacramento for Ellis Act reform. She also said that the support of Conway, the advocacy group he founded called and other tech companies will be invaluable in turning votes on the peninsula to get Leno’s bill moving. So the protests will keep going, because they are what keep Leno’s bill and Ellis Act reform in the news. (Don’t take it too personally. You can blame us — the media — for finding protests against globally-recognized brands like Google much sexier than protests against individual Mountain View city council members.) Hundreds still marching in the mission to demand no more evictions of teachers. Going bldg to bldg under threat. — David Zlutnick (@DavidZlutnick) Like the tech community itself, the activist community is pretty heterogeneous. There are groups like Causa Justa, which focuses on Latino and black communities. The are housing focused groups like the and others affiliated with . There are efforts like the , which is asking . McElroy, who is crammed into a two-bedroom, non-rent-controlled apartment with four other people in Bernal Heights, built it along with other tech workers including , and . She’s been leading many of the protests several times a week at different real estate offices, Google Bus stops and homes where long-time tenants are being evicted. The broad point here is that while tech-fueled economic growth can be good, gentrification carries enormous and often tragic costs for certain individuals and communities. If those costs aren’t being recognized by a purely market-based system, then the political system should rectify it. “We implore tech to start talking to us. Come out into the streets with us. I don’t think it occurs to people that they can be a body too. People live in bubbles here,” McElroy said. “If you’re scared, what does that compare to people who are being forced out of their homes?” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7jiEXCl_T0] But there are times when it can just get weird or borderline disturbing. The Counterforce left creepy flyers at Kevin Rose’s house and at the Berkeley home of Google engineering manager While McElroy communicates with The Counterforce, they are a separate group with different tactics. And it often feels like protests meant to stir meaningful discussion about income inequality, gentrification and housing veer off into misguided anger or hatred. At an anti-eviction protest on Friday, hundreds of people marched through the streets of the Mission with a brass band. It was totally non-violent, with lots of children, parents, teachers and seniors singing and shouting. Lowell High School senior took the microphone and said, “We can’t blindly hate on the techies and yuppies. Who are we to judge who can come into this city and who can not? Gentrification is not going to go away. But we can work with the people who are causing it.” But there was also one ‘Tech = Death’ sign in a visual reference to and a few other people carried pictures of , the Google lawyer who is evicting multiple tenants from his house on Guerrero Street. Following the protests, a Business Insider reporter named Kyle Russell Three protests so far have also individually targeted Google employees, including Kevin Rose, who came home to a large banner and flyers reading “Kevin Rose Parasite” (pictured below).
Also, a protester climbed on top of a Yahoo bus at the MacArthur station and vomited on it. Protester on roof of yahoo bus vomited on the windshield — The Red Son (@revscript) Randy Shaw, who houses low-income San Franciscans in 1,600 units under the non-profit , calls this backlash a . When he moved here in the late 1970s, he remembered straight residents making the same complaints about an influx of gays into the Castro or a flood of Latino immigrants into what was a largely Irish-American Mission District a generation ago. “…the war on tech workers—as opposed to tech companies or policies— is not really a “class war.” Rather, it is about one group of predominately white people complaining about a similar demographic group that likes many of the same restaurants, bars, street festivals, and Samba classes that they do—but who makes more money.” He points out that many of the in front of the company’s headquarters , which is largely possible because of the tech-fueled economic boom. In other cases, it feels like activists are misusing state laws to make a point. Several groups meeting earlier this month challenging the city’s decision not to put the new tech commuter shuttle pilot program under environmental review via CEQA. This is even though . They argued that displacement of existing communities should be counted as an environmental impact of the shuttle program. The Board of Supervisors disagreed, . “We’re not saying no buses,” Sherburn-Zimmer said. “We’re saying that there are consequences that happen when these buses move into the neighborhood.” Certainly, charging $1 per use of a public bus stop is low when the regular MUNI fare is $2. , the transportation agency is not allowed to create a revenue-generating program. So the program can only pay for its $1.7 million in costs now. Google But the activists aren’t happy with that. “Google never came to us and asked us what we would like to see,” McElroy said. “We are not into backdoor deal-making with politicians.” Also, none of this — the increased eviction protections, the push to stall the shuttle program under CEQA, Ellis Act reform — amounts to massive, systems-level change. It protects long-time residents who are already here, but it doesn’t make San Francisco affordable or available to future middle- or working-class residents. The activists know this. “We’re playing fastball right now,” McElroy said. “These are Band-Aid solutions.” Indeed, this is politics! Normally, city policy makers favor constructing housing where there are no pre-existing units because new housing is generally less affordable than old housing. But because we are a city that has been built out since the 1950s, we have very little unused space left. One project that could point . It’s a 1,900-unit complex that came about through an agreement in 2005 between the unlikeliest of allies. Trinity Plaza in 1962. Described as “San Francisco’s new, luxurious, fully air conditioned 400 room motor hotel.” On one side was the infamous “Father of Rent Control” Sangiacomo. On the other side was Chris Daly, a progressive city supervisor that ended up being turned into an apartment building with 360 rent-controlled units. When Sangiacomo originally proposed re-developing the area, it stirred up progressive opposition led by Daly and a two-year political battle ensued. But Sangiacomo eventually made an unprecedented concession in 2005. He Ironically, It was a big win. Longtime residents weren’t displaced and got brand-new homes at near their old rent, plus the city got to provide many more homes to other San Franciscans. If you can see any possible silver lining in being antagonized every day in protests, it’s that the city government will be really, really, really focused on housing. A lot of things that weren’t considered politically possible for years are happening now. Consider these things just a start. when is under attack! What do we do? Stand up fight back! — SEIU 1021 (@seiu1021) There is a ton of anger at the tech industry over two tax exclusions that were passed in 2011. David Campos, the city supervisor who represents the Mission, on the so-called “Twitter tax break.” (Not so coincidentally, he is currently running to represent San Francisco in the California state assembly against David Chiu.) It’s a complicated issue if you look into it. Yes, San Francisco is an extremely desirable place and it has more leverage than most cities in the entire country to squeeze corporations for additional taxes or concessions. But those taxes can’t be so out of line with neighboring cities that companies just move one city south, leaving San Francisco with the same housing problems but nothing in business tax revenue to show for it. This is one reason for why the biotechnology industry has historically been centered in South San Francisco with companies like Genentech, even though San Francisco is home to UCSF, one of the best medical schools and research facilities in the world. At the time that the city passed both exclusions, San Francisco was and one of the few in the nation that taxed employee stock options. Other cities in Silicon Valley like Palo Alto and Mountain View had almost non-existent business tax burdens. Mountain View , while . Both cities are more dependent on property and sales taxes. If Twitter So this uncapped, unpredictable tax liability that could stretch into tens of millions of dollars was a huge reason to leave even though Twitter’s leadership wanted to stay. At the same time, San Francisco’s unemployment rate was north of 8 percent at that time, so the city’s priority was to create jobs. The new HQ sign is an homage to the civic importance of its predecessor. Here’s old vs new. — Doug Bowman (@stop) , was created with Twitter in mind in 2011 to incentivize companies to stay in San Francisco and move to a part of Market Street that . The point was to create a tech cluster that would generate meaningful tax revenues over the long-run through and boost economic activity in the area. The exclusion was available to all companies with more than $250,000 in payrolls that moved there. Twitter was the anchor, and it . Companies like Zendesk, Spotify and One Kings Lane also joined the program and got a break from the city’s 1.5 percent payroll tax on additional headcount for up to six years if they moved to Mid-Market. In 2012, . Because these companies had more than $1 million in payroll expenses, they also had to create that documented how they’re giving back to the community through donations and volunteership. While the , its members are frustrated with Twitter and other companies for being too vague on commitments or not even showing up to meetings. Then, the following year through Proposition E in favor of a tax on gross receipts that’s starting to be phased in. The argument was that payroll taxes penalize job creation. On top of that, the city was only collecting the payroll taxes from in the city at that time. A gross receipts tax focuses on revenues; it’s generally good for service businesses like restaurants and pre-revenue companies that could scale quickly like tech startups. The city used to charge either the greater of a gross receipts tax or a payroll tax, but the California state court system ruled that this was illegal after The city but the measure didn’t pass until 2012. So this whole tax break that people are screaming about will be a moot point by 2018, And if San Francisco is able to convince tech companies to stay instead of moving down south to the peninsula, and one of them turns into a Facebook, Oracle or Google-sized company, the city will be able to capture a percentage of what will be billions of dollars in annual revenues. The city said today that the program had already in property and real estate transfer taxes, attracted 18 tech companies and convinced 17 small businesses to open on the street. The Mid-Market payroll tax exclusion zone. Companies that move to this area receive a break from the 1.5 percent payroll tax until 2017. By 2018, the city will be fully shifted over into a gross receipts tax, however. that focused on employee stock options and was created to retain pre-IPO companies in San Francisco like Zynga, Twitter and Zendesk. and it should also be over-ridden by the shift to gross receipts taxes. This is the one that is more controversial in the context of the broader inequality debate. James Temple, who now works at Re/Code, wrote a piece for the San Francisco Chronicle last fall on top of the projected $22 million in foregone revenue from the Mid-Market program. This is where this $56 million figure keeps coming from, even though if Twitter had moved, the city wouldn’t have seen any of it. Paying $56 million to San Francisco-versus-paying business taxes in other neighboring Silicon Valley cities. At the time it was passed, San Francisco was and it included them as part of the 1.5 percent payroll tax. The controller’s office also found that San Francisco had a higher propensity to lose businesses to other locales than The city government studied more than a dozen San Francisco-based IPOs since 1997, and . So they capped the employee stock options tax at $750,000 for pre-IPO companies on equity granted before a public offering. The city’s leadership made a choice to retain startups as they matured into growth companies, keep those jobs and then earn taxes on gross receipts later. Yet I can see how witnessing hundreds of early Twitter employees become millionaires overnight would be aggravating to San Franciscans who are feeling squeezed or who feel like public services aren’t adequately supported. Everyone is also disturbed by . A lot of other and are also digesting With more than 200 years of data, it chronicles an inexorable rise in inequality that was punctuated in the middle of the 20th century by the Great Depression and World War II followed by 30 years of evenly-spread prosperity. Ultimately, it advocates a globally-coordinated tax on wealth. The keyword there is . If this issue re-emerges again in San Francisco (and it will), you’d have to make sure that the proposed solutions don’t end up driving away jobs or growth-stage companies. The previous employee stock options tax was poorly-designed in the context of what neighboring cities were doing — Moreover, it’s a highly volatile source of tax revenue. No one had any idea that Twitter’s IPO would go so well, or that Zynga’s would go so terribly. You’d either have to design something less punitive compared to neighboring cities or create something that is coordinated with the rest of Silicon Valley. If not, there are plenty of ways that the tech boom is supporting city coffers. At an annual $7.9 billion, the city’s is more than $1.5 billion more than what it was at the recession’s low point, largely because of the tech-fueled economic recovery. Also, remember Proposition 13 and all those houses that are paying taxes tied to 1970s or 1980s assessments? Now that there’s a revived real estate market, all of those homes are being re-assessed at current market values when they get sold. So the city expects than the $1.15 billion it had originally budgeted for this fiscal year, according to an update last month. And again, we’re switching over to gross receipts anyway. Not exactly. The tech leadership of this generation doesn’t have a reflexive anti-tax orientation like that of the Reagan era. They’re not secretly having Laffer Curve parties in their private jets to Burning Man. It’s more nuanced. Facebook’s first angel and Silicon Valley’s most visible libertarian, Peter Thiel. “I wouldn’t mind paying more in taxes if I could do anything I wanted to do with the rest of the money, which I’m largely restricted in what I can do, from the FDA on down to the San Francisco zoning department.” “I live in the Marina area in San Francisco. They built the Golden Gate Bridge in three and a half years in the 1930s, ‘33 to ‘36. They’re now building an access road to the bridge that’s taken eight years and possibly will end up costing more in inflation adjusted dollars than the whole bridge cost in the ‘30s. So it’s one of the reasons I personally don’t want to pay more taxes, because I feel the government spends the money so extraordinarily badly. I’d be fine with paying more if I felt the government was run as well as it was run in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘30s.” Then Sam Altman, who is now running the Valley’s most selective accelerator Y Combinator, . Even venture capitalist Tim Draper, , conceded that Silicon Valley to support it out of all the hypothetical Californias he wants to create. He didn’t say why though. And your renegade law-breaking companies of Airbnb, Lyft and Uber? They proved product-market fit, built something that people were willing to pay for, scaled their businesses and now they are both transforming and being reined into the existing regulatory and tax infrastructure. Airbnb is and seeing enforcement from the city’s planning department. While there is a visible libertarian fringe, (which means they’re pro-business moderates in San Francisco’s terms). In 1912, . Understandably, Oakland refused. For more than a century, the Bay Area’s housing, transit infrastructure and tax system has been haunted by the region’s fragmented governance. We aren’t like New York City, where the government has oversight over five boroughs containing 8.4 million people. For the 7 million people of the San Francisco Bay Area, it’s every city and county for themselves. While there is a council of city governments called the Association of Bay Area Governments that was started in 1961, it’s not sufficiently powerful. That means NIMBY-ists in every city try and shove the housing issue onto someone else. That means it’s a race-to-the-bottom on business taxes. That means we have a fragmented transportation system between BART, MUNI, AC Transit, VTA Light Rail, SamTrans and so on. BART would have run around the entire Bay Area, and then Marin did too. Not only is transportation down the peninsula fragmented between all of these different systems, the suburbs have also blocked many denser housing developments along the Caltrain stations that would have supported workforces for companies like Google and Facebook. Actually, this is happening. Just not in Detroit. Yet. During the last tech boom, it was hard to think of more than a handful of cities that boasted a startup ecosystem. Today, there are many. The high cost of living in the Bay Area is the rest of the world’s gain. A measuring the depth of various tech entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. Look all over the world. In the and Kreuzberg neighborhoods of Berlin. In where Tsinghua University is sprouting companies. In . In Israel, where the country is having a run of consumer exits with the and . In Noida and Gurgaon. The world’s . The world’s , just acquired for $2 billion by Facebook, is run out of Orange County. The world’s leading mobile gaming companies are run out of and Helsinki. The world’s most interesting emerging handset maker, Xiaomi, is run out of Beijing. Just four years after launch, they expect to ship $11 billion worth of phones and accessories. Snapchat, started by a handful of Stanford graduates who would have probably stayed here a decade ago, is . — OK, make fun of them — just decamped for Los Angeles because warehouse space was too expensive here. Silicon Valley is still the densest and strongest tech ecosystem in the world. But it is only ahead because — in startup parlance — it was a first mover. Consider when Silicon Valley’s building blocks were laid in the 1940s through the 1970s through foundational companies like Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild and Shockley Semiconductor and Xerox PARC. At that time, the rest of the world’s major economies were being rebuilt. Europe was undergoing World War II reconstruction and India and China were just establishing a sense of national unity and systems of governance. Both India and China have made major economic reforms and today, the choice between Bangalore, Beijing and Silicon Valley is more of a coin toss for entrepreneurial talent than a no-brainer. While Silicon Valley certainly isn’t in peril, its continued resilience depends on whether it can keep attracting the best talent and new ideas from everywhere. No, we’re not fucked. If you’ve actually read this far, you know why we’re here. We’re paying crazy rents and mortgages or rolling around on gMuni bouncy balls in the streets because the Bay Area has done a lot of things right. I know that the But do you know what else is true? Harvard and Berkeley economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline and Emmanuel Saez They found that children in San Jose and San Francisco had the highest chances of moving from the bottom income quintile to the top quintile out of all major metropolitan areas in the United States. There are the absurd stories, like that of Then there are the more realistic ones, like that of my mother, who moved to the Bay Area in the late 1970s as a Vietnamese refugee. Because my grandparents were too old to work and they couldn’t speak English, my mother and her five sisters pooled together their earnings to collectively buy a home in San Jose all while in their mid-twenties. They then parlayed the equity from that home into buying homes of their own when they were ready to start families. We have to remember that cities are unequal because the opportunities they provide attract the very rich and the very poor. San Francisco’s extreme juxtapositions of wealth and poverty exist because the city is both an extremely desirable place to live it maintains protections for residents through programs like rent control in spending on homelessness. The gleaming, onyx NEMA towers exist side-by-side with homelessness because San Francisco created the Mid-Market program to lure companies like Twitter the single-room-occupancy hotels and non-profits that house and feed the city’s poorest residents have been politically protected in the Tenderloin for decades. Both the tech industry and San Francisco have delicate ecologies that have taken decades to cultivate. As they become more intertwined, the political winds of the city are shifting. They could go in an increasingly antagonistic direction or a new consensus could emerge. What will it be? It’s not as easy as just building up. This battle has been raging on since the sand dunes of the Sunset district were flattened for single-family homes in the 1950s. Try to understand where others are coming from. There are people out there like Mary Elizabeth Phillips, who could really use your help whether that means , calling or , or . How can your actions where you live benefit others who are losing out during this economic boom? How will you participate in your community? Will it be through charity? Through volunteership? Through taxes? Are you willing to fight the political battles and form the alliances necessary to create housing for tech workers and teachers alike? You need to vote, to show the city government that there is political will for development or else the old, anti-growth regime will keep dictating preservationist policies that turn housing into a zero-sum game. Companies like Gap, Wells Fargo, Levi Strauss & Co. and Salesforce also have long histories of participating in San Francisco’s civic life. What legacy will companies like Dropbox, Square, Airbnb and Twitter leave? The tech industry is helping your home values skyrocket, but your property taxes have not kept up with the cost of providing services or schools. Stop sitting in the background while the city’s workers, the poor, the elderly and its young duke out in this ugly charade. While there are some tech workers who do strike it rich, most just have salaries and would love to raise families in the Bay Area just as you did when you came here years ago. The Bay Area risks becoming a victim of its own success if it can’t make more room. At this point, blocking individual housing developments to protect your views is tantamount to generational theft. Invoking CEQA clauses to stall the city’s tech shuttle program through an environmental impact review so that 1,400 of 4,000 tech bus riders may or may not decide to move slightly south is not a game-changing way to address housing affordability in San Francisco. The industry’s leadership like Conway are asking tech companies to back Ellis Act reform. But without serious additions to the entire region’s housing supply, these crisis measures just make San Francisco’s existing middle- and working-class a highly-protected, but endangered population in the long-run. With such limited rental stock available on the market at any time, what kind of person can afford to move here today when For the more extreme groups, you cannot logically fight both development and displacement. The real estate speculation running through the city right now is just as much a bet on political paralysis in the face of a long-term housing shortage as it is on San Francisco’s desirability as a place to live. Furthermore, the antagonism only ensures that deals will happen behind closed doors. The unfortunate path of least resistance for most tech companies will be to just pay their workers more, instead of engaging in regional politics. That is a loss for everyone. For the more pragmatic groups, the tech community could easily be persuaded to support inclusionary housing, provided the numbers still work out profitably for developers and that lots more overall housing units gets built. The same goes for Trinity-like projects. The crisis we’re seeing is the result of decades of choices, and while the tech industry is a sexy, attention-grabbing target, it cannot shoulder blame for this alone. Unless a new direction emerges, this will keep getting worse until the next economic crash, and then it will re-surface again eight years later. Or it will keep spilling over into Oakland, which is a whole other Pandora’s box of gentrification issues. The high housing costs aren’t healthy for the city, nor are they healthy for the industry. Both thrive on a constant flow of ideas and people. So while Google may not be opening a giant office in Detroit anytime soon, the people of Detroit and the Midwest are coming here. I meet them every day. There are people like , who actually did move from Detroit, and was living off various hackathon winnings for San Francisco’s public school students. Earlier this spring, he was literally . But he won the Launch Hackathon and now has initial funding for a new startup called , a mobile feedback and user engagement tool he built. Or like , who I wrote about last month. He grew up in a working-class family in Southern California that relied on social services to make ends meet. Now he’s working on fixing the problems he remembered as a child through One Degree, which is a Yelp-like platform that helps Bay Area families Many of the people who come here will stay, and make vital contributions for decades through their work, their taxes and their charitable contributions. Some will come for awhile and then go back and invigorate entrepreneurial ecosystems back home. This circulation of creative talent is crucial not only for the Bay Area, but for the rest of the United States. I would not want to deny anyone — rich or poor — the chance to transform or be transformed by this place. |
Entertainment Deals Take Center Stage In LA’s Burgeoning VC Scene | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | A string of big acquisitions, public offerings, and a pipeline of growing young startup companies has venture investors saying “ ” The recent acquisitions of and , as well as the planned public offering for TrueCar , all point to a healthy investment ecosystem, but there’s still one industry that rules over Tinseltown: . “Our ecosystem has been building for the last 20 years and it is coming to a crescendo now,” said , a partner at the Los Angeles-based firm . “Americans watch 5.3 hours of television a day and they read less than a half an hour. You’re not going to change media consumption patterns [so] you’ll continue to see the rise of a tech ecosystem in L.A. because of the rise of TV and commerce and what that entails.” Indeed, investors in the Los Angeles technology ecosystem love entertainment-related deals, according to data from CrunchBase. It’s one of the most heavily invested sectors in the region.
“The infrastructure already exists for Los Angeles to support a new medium, and investors have taken notice,” Suster said. “That’s why you see an emergence of video deals. It’s , which was bought for almost a billion. You also have , , and .” Among the fastest growing video companies is the upstart , backed by the Los Angeles powerbroker Peter Chernin and other indvidual and institutional investors. Mitu just passed its 1 billionth view earlier this year. Even as entertainment rises as the biggest star in the L.A. tech firmament, other sectors are vying for investors’ dollars and succeeding in getting their message out through the noise, glitz, glamor and razzle dazzle of the city of angels. Most of the largest investments made by L.A.’s venture capitalists weren’t in entertainment at all. Rather, investors flocked to back electric vehicle manufacturers, space companies, life sciences startups, and e-commerce companies. It’s a testament to a market that’s actually quite diverse and a city that graduates more engineers than any other in the country, according to Suster.
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100 Tesla Model S Convertibles Are Headed To China | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Hold on to your hat. The Tesla Model S is about to get more breezy thanks to a drop-top conversion by Newport Convertible Engineering. Both hard and soft top conversions are now available — they don’t come cheap, though. A soft-top conversion costs $29K and a hard-top $49K. Plus, the buyer has to supply the Tesla Model S. But, once converted, there’s no question that you’ll have the raddest Model S parked outside of your local Blue Bottle. that an investor in China has already ordered 100 conversions. Because why not. According to NCE, the conversion shop has been working on the project for six months with Tesla and recently asked the car company for assistance in supplying 5,000 more Model S’s to meet demand. Of course as with any vehicle modification, the converted vehicle is often wildly different from a non-modified example. There is often extensive modification required to a vehicle’s frame when the top is removed, resulting in extra weight and, therefore, a car that handles differently (read: often poorly). But when the top is down and the wind is blowing through your hair, zero to 60 times are moot. |
Meet TrustTheVote, A Project To Make Voting Open Source And Transparent | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | How was your last voting experience? Smooth? Perhaps not. The wants to change that by making voting simpler and more transparent. Its chief effort, called , is a push to develop airtight, open-source vote casting and tabulation software that can be paired with off-the-shelf hardware. Open-source code and off-the-shelf plastic mean that TrustTheVote will, if it meets its goals, sell better, transparent voting machines to precincts at a fraction of the current cost. Each major election cycle in the United States brings the same whispers: Irregularities in Ohio counties, odd voting machine behavior in Iowa, and constant fringe intrigue about which candidate is getting a secret electronic bump due to a distant relative’s relationship with a voting machine company. It’s not healthy for our democracy. The democracy space is heating up. News came out this morning that Sean Parker has into a company designed to shake up American democracy. TrustTheVote has raised around $1.2 million to date in cash and a few million more in in-kind contributions. The group is looking to raise much more to staff up and get its product finished, onto hardware and into the wild of elections as quickly as possible. TrustTheVote expects to have trials in the field by 2016 and a full rollout by the 2018 midterm election cycle. If that feels like a long way off, keep in mind that building voting technology is slightly harder than building other software — given the massive incentive for attack, the stuff has to be more than bulletproof. UI mockup, via TrustTheVote. I caught up with , co-executive director and chief development officer of TrustTheVote, to discuss what ails American voting and his vision for the technology most Americans should use to cast their vote. What’s wrong with current voting machine technology? Current voting machines are not high in quality of usability or ideally engineered for maximum disability accessibility. Many are also poorly designed in terms of ease of administration, leading to instances of election dysfunction labeled as “operator error” by voting machine vendors. The biggest problem is how these machines are engineered to “pencil out” for commercial viability to the vendors. The majority of voting machines are based on technology (hardware and software) that is well over a decade, and in some cases, 20 years old. The technology employed and the innovation resulting is only as good as necessary to make for a profitable machine with a good margin (i.e., return on cost of goods sold). Accordingly, we would not say they are “inept,” but we do argue they are significantly weak if not downright vulnerable to problems, breakdowns, usability issues and compromise. Will TrustTheVote lower the potential of voter fraud? The TrustTheVote Project work will significantly to increase transparency of elections operations, enabling greater public trust in election results. That transparency includes detailed information about both election administration and voting results and patterns. That information will enable the public to make their own judgment about fraud — both electoral fraud and voter fraud — as informed, fact-based, intellectually honest judgments, rather than in the province of conspiracy theorists. Is voter fraud a chronic problem in the United States? Candidly, we’re not convinced that the machinery is the real culprit in elections abnormalities, irregularities or suspect results. You may have seen news breaking about voting machines being impounded for digital forensics in Hidalgo County, Texas, this past Wednesday. We believe the root cause of voter fraud or election fraud is social engineering. Today, it is very easy to point to the black box and make it the scapegoat. The TrustTheVote Project Election Technology Framework will turn black box voting into glass box voting, and we think shift the klieg lights off the machinery and on to the human processes. Fraud has never been documented as anything other than occasional and rare. The same is true of electoral fraud. Admittedly, the perfect fraud, or hack or theft is the one that goes undetected. So we must be vigilant in monitoring, observing and verifying. The perception of belief of significant fraud persists due in part to the lack of any documentation of the actual events that could reveal fraud. — It’s an interesting moment for open source technology, given the recent but I haven’t yet met someone predicting the end of open source as a method for creating software. And, especially since we’re discussing how to collect and tabulate votes, transparency is a good thing. The alternative, according to Miller, is to re-up with old technology. According to him, “Voting machinery — will need to be replaced over the next 4-6 years as they reach the end of their life in terms of physical durability and reliability. Replacement choices ( ) will continue to be expensive, closed-proprietary “black box” systems with some of the same weaknesses [emphasis original].” That, it appears, is part of the reason that TrustTheVote wants to move briskly toward building its platform. TrustTheVote has larger goals than mere vote tabulation, including analytics and demographics, but the core offering in its larger suite is that of making the process of voting itself unimpeachable, in my view. The group is looking to raise around $6 million this year to fund its operations. TrustTheVote told TechCrunch that it has $1.3 million in commits so far for the year, including money from Facebook’s former Chief Privacy Office Chris Kelly. The group expects that it needs a total of $24 million over a four-year period to pull off its task. So, it’s looking to bring in $6 million yearly to keep itself afloat. It intends on spending raised funds to hire a number of product managers and build out its engineering team. TrustTheVote has a cadre of old-school technologists on board, including Pito Salas (Lotus), and Hugh Dubberly (Netscape). In Miller’s view, “election technology framework is like an operating system,” so you need the mental capacity to execute something hard. I don’t know if TrustTheVote will be able to pull off its goals and ship its open source software on large quantities of off-the-shelf hardware. But the organization’s drive is impressive. Miller believes that the majority of American voters will eventually cast ballots using TrustTheVote technology. By his estimation, that could happen as soon as 2020, a presidential election year. The voting process in the U.S. will change forever if TrustTheVote can pull it off. |
Social TV App Zeebox Relaunches As Beamly | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Zeebox, the app co-founded by former BBC iPlayer exec Anthony Rose, has rebranded and relaunched its social TV app for consumers as . The still has all the same that came with Zeebox, but the team has enhanced Beamly to be relevant to users even when they’re not watching their favorite shows. To do that, Beamly incorporates a wider range of content discovery and social functionality designed to keep users interacting with the app all day long. That includes news feeds and social conversations about their favorite shows throughout the day, giving them the ability to read reactions and discuss topics after an episode is over. For the company, doing so will hopefully drive up engagement with the app, even in times when users aren’t watching live TV. |
The Most Overused Startup Pitch Becomes A Super Rare Cards Against Humanity Card | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | “Let me tell you about my new startup. It’s basically [some popular startup] but for [some completely unrelated thing].” If you’ve ever been to any startup event, you’ve probably heard it 14 thousand times. Now it’s a Cards Against Humanity card. The bad news? You’ll probably never see the card in person, because it’s crazy rare. In case you’ve somehow managed to go this long without playing it, is a self-declared “party game for horrible people.” It began as a humble Kickstarter campaign, only to find a cult following that helped explode the game into a multi-million dollar company. Take the game , boil it down to its most ridiculously offensive form, and ta-da! Cards Against Humanity. The game and all four of its expansions have managed to absolutely dominate Amazon’s “Toys & Games” ranks for now. At a panel at the PAX East conference this past weekend, the team behind the game turned to the audience for suggestions for new cards. Many of the ideas were tossed out on the spot; others were worked into something better; some became instant favorites. At the end of the panel, though, there was a surprise twist: the ten best suggestions of the day were being turned into … but only for the few hundred people in attendance. An order was sent off to the company in New England that prints their cards before the panel had even wrapped, and each attendee was given a token (hidden under the seat) to let them pick up their set the next day. Amongst those picked was the all-too-common pitch: “Let me tell you about my new startup. It’s basically ___________, but for _________.” Alas, since this card debuted in a way that intentionally makes it rare, it might not ever make its way into an official deck. And since only a few hundred sets were printed, most people will probably never actually see the card in person. You could always use one of the provided blank cards to make your own, but that’s not as neat. ( ) Other cards picked for printing during the panel include the white cards “What The Rock was really cooking”, “Stepping on a god damn friggin’ LEGO.”, “A floor that is literally made of lava.” and a few others that I probably shouldn’t print on TechCrunch. Sets from the panel are (of course) already popping up on eBay for around 250 bucks a pop. |
Twitter Has Log Cabin Fever [Photos] | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 14 |
Today in the : Twitter installed its previously purchased log cabins, which we , into its office at The log cabins are part of the company’s mid-Market office expansion, which includes a new cafeteria. Twitter now of the 11-floor, 77-year-old SF Mart building. As if the numeric symmetry weren’t enough, there’s one big historic coincidence involved in the cabin timing. As Neetzan Zimmerman , Abraham Lincoln — perhaps the world’s most famous log cabin dweller — was assassinated 149 years ago today. I’m sure Lincoln would be chuffed to know the future usage of his signature domicile would be an ironic one. Did they even have hipsters back then? While the price of the log cabins was not disclosed, here’s a more down market version selling for . Our team guess is that the largest expense to Twitter would be transportation and assembly, and that the architect ( would have had to re-notch the dovetails and sand blast the wood to make the cabins safe for work. Guess there’s much opportunity for prank calls rife with wood and log jokes when log cabins are for sale. In the silliest Twitter comms email exchange since I have emailed Twitter for comment. “Are they supposed to be birdhouses?” is an actual question I have asked. : I hold Twitter shares. I don’t think |
Samsung Galaxy S5 Review: More Evolution Than Revolution Despite New Hardware Features | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | S 5, if you ask Samsung) is the company’s latest flagship phone and sure to be a swift seller. The phone is, in its own way, beautifully designed and the materials, while clearly plastic, are durable and should maintain a luster over time. Is this an iPhone replacement? No, but it is a replacement for the S4 that should please shoppers already predisposed to Samsung and Android. Samsung’s Galaxy S5 is not a revolution in industrial design. It looks like the GS4, with a bit of influence from the Note 3 that Samsung released last fall. The unit I tested had the black pebbled faux leather back, which is surprisingly pleasant to both touch and look at, and the phone is rimmed with a faux metal plastic border that reminds me of something from a 50s diner stool. It’s not the refined, all-metal design of the HTC One M8, but it is appealing in its own way. I still think Samsung would do well to join the big boys like Apple with use of high-quality materials, but if we must have plastic, then this is the plastic I’d opt to have. [gallery ids="987505,987496,987495,987494,987499,987497,987498,987500,987501,987502,987503,987504"] One advantage of the plastic: the back, at least, is relatively durable and drop-proof. Also, the phone is remarkably light, especially given that whopper of a display it’s packing. Plus, this is a water-resistant phone that doesn’t look like a water-resistant phone (read: it isn’t bulky) so that’s a plus. The USB flap door that ensures completely IP67 environment protection is a pain, however, given the frequency with which you’ll have to fidget with it to charge and connect to your computer. Samsung has refined TouchWiz, and the My Magazine feature on the Galaxy S5 is a nice way to get your social and news fix in one place, reminiscent of the BlinkFeed feature on HTC’s Sense UI. The built-in Samsung apps all get updates this round, but the best new features on the device are, surprisingly, the ones that sort of seemed glommed on unnecessarily. The heart rate monitor Samsung included on the device uses pulse oximetry to detect a person’s heart rate through their finger tip. The concept is surprisingly simple, and my veterinarian brother says they’ve been using the tech to find your pet’s heart rate for years; essentially, it shines a light through the capillaries in your finger tip, taking snapshots of the size of the blood vessels within in rapid succession, to detect how engorged they are and then translating that into a number representing beats per minute. It’s a highly accurate measurement method, and indeed in testing it returned results that made sense given my relative level of activity, caffeination, time of day and more. The fingerprint sensor is also interesting. It works decently well, but has a higher failure rate than Apple’s Touch ID sensor, at least when used natural with a one hand grip, swiping the thumb down from the screen over the sensor pad. This makes it suboptimal for use with unlocking the device, but used as a specific security tool for unlocking sensitive data within apps, or for authorizing payments, both of which are possible since Samsung makes the hardware feature available to third-party devs, it becomes a lot more interesting. That said, both of these features are unlikely to make a splash in your daily life. The heart rate monitor is a handy shortcut for aging users who need to keep tabs on their cardiovascular health fairly regularly and change their behavior accordingly, but for the most part, it’s little more than a neat trick to pull out at parties and then quietly forget about. Of the software features included on the Galaxy S5, the best is probably Milk Music, which is for U.S.-customers only and offers streaming radio, ad- and subscription-free. The service works great as a replacement for terrestrial radio thanks to its auto-start, dial-based discovery interface that required minimal user input to get to the music, and it has an impressive library of tracks thanks to Samsung’s use of Slacker Radio to power the service. Milk Music is available to any recent Galaxy device, however, so it isn’t necessarily a reason to buy. Samsung’s GS5 display is definitely a sight to behold, but it’s very hard to impress in the display world these days – or too easy. In terms of display quality related to pixel density and the crispness of text and graphics, I haven’t been able to discern a difference since Apple introduced its Retina display on the iPhone 4. The Galaxy S5’s screen size is impressive, however, and makes for a great way to watch mobile video thanks to full HD resolution and a 5.1-inch diagonal surface area, all in a phone that manages to still not feel overly large for a pocket. Is it the best screen in the smartphone business? Very possibly. Is it a huge improvement over the GS4’s screen? For most users, no, and in fact, it actually has less pixel density than its predecessor. If screen quality is a key decision point for those considering an upgrade from last year’s model, then keep that wallet closed; the GS4 still has an excellent screen, and the GS5 hasn’t made any strides in that regard to merit an expensive upgrade. Plus, as with seemingly every Android device, auto-brightness still has major issues getting things right. Apple seems to be alone in divining the secret sauce for properly dimming and brightening your display based on ambient conditions. The camera on the Samsung Galaxy S5 benefits from the company’s alter-ego as a camera maker, and works very well in optimal conditions, with fast autofocus and high res 16MP captures. But it still doesn’t fare all that well in low-light situations, the bane of all mobile cameras, and some of the features new to the GS5, while impressive from a tech standpoint, leave a lot to be desired. Specifically, the focus selection option on Samsung’s phone is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it produces great final results, letting you create portraits with background blur that look like they were taken with much more expensive cameras with fancy interchangeable, wide aperture lenses. On the other hand, they take a long time to capture, which makes getting candids with them near impossible, and taking portraits an exercise in “wait, no don’t move yet, it’s still processing.” The trade-off for your patience is that the photos are much better in terms of overall quality than the selective focus pictures captured with the HTC One M8’s Duo Camera (which captures images much faster though). But the effect can be replicated on other devices, including the iPhone, using third-party camera apps, so it has a lot less value as a selling feature for the GS5 over other handsets. The battery on the Galaxy S5 is removable, so that’s already a big advantage over some of the competition. It bumps up capacity over the GS4’s power house by 200mAh, which puts the total at 2,800mAh. In practice, it improved things over the GS4 and gave a full day of use under normal to high circumstances, but the HTC One M8 still outperformed it overall. The GS5 doesn’t offer any quantum leaps in battery tech, in the end, but if you like having the option to swap, it’s there with the GS5, and not with the One. The Galaxy S5 offers some genuinely useful stuff that the Galaxy S4 doesn’t, with extreme water and dust-protection (which really works, based on a brief 30-second submersion test and use in a fairly strong downpour) that should give most users a lot of extra peace of mind. It also increases the screen size even further, refines the look and feel of the all-plastic case and improves the onboard camera. You get some extra hardware widgets on this new model, both of which feel a little like kitchen sink additions. Overall, though, the Galaxy S5 can’t help but feel like a dressed up Galaxy S4. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and new users will be very happy with their purchase. It might not be enough to convince existing device owners to upgrade, however, and if you’re on the fence between this and other devices like the HTC One M8 or the upcoming iPhone, it’s probably best to wait it out or try competing devices in person. I stand by my declaration that the One is the best Android smartphone currently available, but Samsung’s GS5 is a close contender for the crown. |
Inside Jobs: How iOS Developer Danilo Campos Battles To Bring New Apps To Life | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Mobile apps are something that you interact with on a very personal basis — you carry them around in your pocket, check in with them frequently, and really let them into your life. So in this episode of we decided to turn the tables and get personal with someone who builds mobile apps. is the developer and designer behind beautiful mobile apps for iOS including and . To give us an inside look at how he works, Campos invited TechCrunch TV into his San Francisco apartment, where he currently works as a freelance developer of iOS apps for a variety of clients. When you talk to Campos, the main thing that comes through is his passion for what he does. In fact, he’s so passionate about it that he was dangerously close to becoming bankrupt on the way to pursuing mobile design as a career — in a lot of ways, his work is something that he’s fought for. I especially loved how he described the process of getting the first version of a new software project up and running: “There’s an author, Michael Lopp, and he has written that [version] 1.0 does not want to exist. And he’s right. 1.0 will fight you at every step of the way not come into existence. And that fight is so fun to me. I love the battle of dragging this thing kicking and screaming into existence. It’s just the most exhilarating thing in the world to get something out into the App Store, get people using it, get it into people’s hands, where once, none of this had existed at all.” You can take a closer look at Danilo Campos’ job in the video embedded above. Producing, shooting, editing, sound, and lighting for Inside Jobs is done by . Production coordination and creative direction is done by . Original logo design by . Motion graphics and graphic design by . |
Airlines Should Make Twitter A No-Fly Zone | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Whoops! Airlines are awful at Twitter, and should leave the platform entirely. I’m , but today’s served as an excellent reminder. No good can come from an airline being on Twitter, and here’s why: Airlines are not known for their customer service or product excellence, generally speaking. In comparison to air travel a couple of decades ago, it’s actually very cheap to fly — but in relation to what most people make and what product is being delivered — the price is too high. They have bad customer service, flights are over-booked and uncomfortable and everything is dirty. In essence, very few people love flying. Many of us do it very often, out of necessity, and some of us are more comfortable than others, but there are a select few people who get off by walking through a TSA checkpoint. So you fly because you have to, you pay a lot because you have to, and you sit through it because you have to. Having a favorite airline is choosing the lesser of two evils. It’s not like choosing an iPhone over a Galaxy S 7 or whatever. Secondly, Twitter is for complaining, and Instagram is for bragging. And what do people ? The bullshit experience of going through an airport, being delayed without explanation or further details, then being carted onto a cramped tube full of people and recycled air, only to land and have your luggage missing and only airplane-stank clothes on your back. That’s an exaggeration, but almost every experience with an airline ends with at least one bad memory. One pain point. That pain point usually ends up on Twitter. But people never brag about brands on Twitter. And people never brag about airlines . How many times have you seen a picture of the view from a plane window pop up on your Instagram feed? And how often is it tagged with the airline? Never. That’s how often. The third reason airlines should ditch Twitter is because timing simply isn’t on their side. I tweet more from airports and airplanes and tarmacs than any other place, except for maybe my desk at home during work. I only fly about once a month, but generate an astounding amount of tweets during the travel process. This is because there is nothing to do and no one to talk to while you wait to board a plane. It’s also because people-watching is incredibly interesting at the airport. The old couple next to me on the plane are adorable. “Bob, hold on. I’m texting. I’ll be done in a minute.” — Jordan Crook (@jordanrcrook) “Wonder what this button is for, may?” “It’s a picture of a lady with a cup… Probably the drink button.” — Jordan Crook (@jordanrcrook) Bob and May, studying the informational safety pamphlet as instructed. I love them. — Jordan Crook (@jordanrcrook) This is all dreadfully boring for my followers, but it’s more exciting than staring at the chair in front of me on the plane. And finally, things are pissing you off at the airport. The dude who won’t stop screaming into his phone, who is all but destined to be in the seat next to you on the plane, and the constant updates that your flight is only thirty minutes delayed every thirty minutes for four hours are enough to make a person mad. Crazy mad, and angry mad. Mad enough to need a place to vent. Plus, airlines have too many disgruntled customers and far too much information to process to be good at customer service on Twitter. The purpose of being on Twitter, as a brand, is to field as much as you can, but also to be able to make broad announcements to your users. When HBO is having trouble with Game of Thrones, they can tell everyone all at once. When AT&T coverage goes down in the entire North East, they can tweet about it and we all know they’re working on it. Airlines don’t have the same luxury. They have thousands of customers every day that are all on a different schedule, with a different itinerary. There’s no social media team in the world that can help those customers. They’re on their own. Which is why when they tweet their rage at the Airline that has wronged them, they get nothing back. For hours. Until they hear some . Something like: “So sorry about the delay to your flight.” When really… So, to sum it all up, this is what airlines are saying to people when they’re on Twitter: ” There’s just simply not enough social media manager attention in the world to deal with all the ire that’s out there. And sometimes those over-tasked social media managers use their work computers to share gross pictures with their friends, and forget that they have those disgusting pictures saved on their clipboard. The end. |
Y Combinator Adds Four New Partners, Including Stripe CEO Patrick Collison | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | is announcing today the addition of four new partners to its roster, as part of its larger push for more growth under new president . Altman announced in a this afternoon that YC’s current outreach director has been promoted to take on a partner position at the organization, and joining YC as part-time partners are Stripe CEO , Science Exchange CEO , and AeroFS CEO . Collison, Iorns, and Sagalov are all Y Combinator alums. You can read more about the additions . The new additions come less than a month after Y Combinator added YC alums to its roster of partners. It all seems to be playing into the vision of growth that YC founder Paul Graham shared with me earlier this year, when : “Now that we’ve got this new structure… all we have to do is hire more partners and get more startups. We could probably grow by 10x in our current form.” We’ll be able to hear more about Y Combinator’s growth strategy next month, when for an on-stage discussion at Disrupt NY. You can buy your tickets . |
Top Sequoia Capital Partner Roelof Botha To Take The Stage At Disrupt NY 2014 | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | When partner talks about a company, people listen. Botha has been the mastermind behind funding rounds of several successful startups, with a special knack for social services. He’s also repeatedly found himself in the top 30 on , which ranks the top individual investors at the major venture capital firms. All reasons why we’re excited to announce that Botha will be joining us for an interview at Disrupt NY 2014. Roelof Botha has become the go-to guy for picking social network winners like YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr. But social isn’t the only area Botha has shown acumen; he’s brought on financial startups Square and Xoom Corporation, electronic event planning and ticket sales app Eventbrite, and cloud-connected note-taking service Evernote. Recently, Botha led the funding rounds for and , which makes the popular QuizUp app for Android and iPhone. He’s also likely behind Sequoia’s , a social service that creates short video clips from photos set to music. Before joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Botha was the CFO of PayPal and led the company through its 2012 IPO. He currently serves as an invaluable board member of Xoom, Jawbone, Mahalo, Square, Eventbrite, Plain Vanilla, Whisper and many more. Botha is no stranger to the Disrupt stage, having served as both speaker and a judge for Battlefield at Disrupt over several years. Most recently, he joined TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and Tumblr’s David Karp for a at Disrupt NY 2013, and served as a Disrupt SF in 2012 and 2013. Botha joins other notable speakers, including Yancey Strickler of Kickstarter, Sam Altman of Y Combinator and Astro Teller of Google. Disrupt NY will take over the Manhattan Center in New York City May 5-7. Tickets can be purchased , and if you’re interested in being a sponsor, please contact our sponsorship team . |
Google Gets In On Ground Level With Drone Maker Titan Buy | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Titan Aerospace, the drone maker Facebook had been in acquisition talks with prior (as we’ve now confirmed following The WSJ’s ), was a name that took many in the industry by surprise. How was it that a company that reportedly has solar-powered drones that can fly at 65,000 feet above sea level for five years without needing to land, did not have more public attention or media coverage? The answer, as it turns out, is that there may not have been too much to actually cover yet, as the company was very young. For starters, it hasn’t been around long enough to prove that its drones can fly for five years, because the company itself isn’t that old. This is partly why investors were , we understand — it was too soon. However, we hear that Titan, though early, was still further along in some regards than other drone makers getting bought, including recent , which went for $20 million. Titan’s number, when it comes out, will be higher than that, we hear, as news that Facebook was sniffing around played a role in terms of negotiations. Titan had registered just one aircraft with the FAA in — the remaining small handful have been registered in either or — indicating its still-early nature. The team worked out of a nondescript New Mexico house, one source pointed out to us, referencing a Titan employee’s titled “walk through of the Titan crew’s new house in new Mexico.” A number of Titan’s hires are also more junior-level people who believed in founder Maximus (Max) Yaney’s vision. Only around a year ago did the company make its first notable hire worth issuing a press release about, when it brought in CEO Vern Raburn, who previously founded Eclipse Aviation, to run things. In its early days, Titan bootstrapped itself through a small grant from the state of New Mexico. In from the New Mexico Economic Development Department, dated Q2 2013, Titan Aerospace is described as being in the “final stages of R&D” for its solar-powered unmanned vehicles. The company at that time had 12 employees and was working with (TVC), a nonprofit foundation by Lockheed Martin that helps companies commercialize technology invented at Sandia National Labs and other New Mexico-based research entities. According to the report, Titan was working with TVC on an application for a grant, and it was also meeting with , an incentive program that pays for on-the-job training to help “fund training for future staff.” This is an interesting way to go about funding a company which has come up with breakthrough technology – but there’s a reason why Titan may have gone after grants like this, as we alluded to before: Raising from traditional investors was still tough, and Titan wasn’t at the point where it could prove anything about whether or not its ideas would work. For example, though there are recordings of flights on YouTube, they aren’t demos of what the final product promises. There is of a prototype taking flight, but it’s at about 2,000 feet in the air (not 65K) and it’s at a smaller scale than the proposed Solara models. The 2013 proof-of-concept test, which took place in Moriarty, N.M., was the company’s biggest, publicly detailed achievement to date. Titan didn’t have plans to begin production of the Solara 50 aircraft — weighing 400 pounds with a 162-foot wingspan, until mid-2014, . We hear that Titan will have another milestone to publicize soon, however, following this Google deal. That above report also pointed out that high-altitude, solar UAVs have been tried in the past, including by Boeing, which had been making progress on its SolarEagle until DARPA funding was cut, and AeroVironment, who developed the Helios prototype for NASA, . Titan believed it could do better. But patent searches for Titan Aerospace and founder Yaney come up short (even variations like or ), which is curious. There’s a with several non-drone patents, but it appears to be company pre-dating this Titan. Titan itself was an interesting entity. A of the Titan website showed that the company used to use the as its New York location. This was because Yaney was based in New York, and at one time had an office there with a small team for Titan. Titan’s drones were still in the R&D phases when Facebook came knocking. Facebook wanted to accelerate the production of the aircraft, which the company knew would be tricky because, in the development stage, the process is serial, not parallel. But Facebook’s effectively unlimited capital could speed up some things, like production planning or automating equipment purchases. , under its Project Loon umbrella, or elsewhere –potentially using the tech to augment its work with aerial imagery or having the drones carry atmospheric sensors, notes The WSJ. Or, in other words, as Google buys Titan, it’s definitely getting in on the ground (ahem) level here. |
In A Bullish Move, Twitter To Report Earnings Ahead Of Employee Lock-Up Expiration | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | Following its , Twitter soared north of $70 per share, topping out at $ In the face of that slide, and despite a massive share-price correction — — following , Twitter is its first quarter earnings before , the date when a large number of its shares owned by employees will unlock. Unlocked shares are available for sale on the public markets. That flood of freshly free equity could lead to a share price depression, as employees hungry for liquidity dump their long-held equity onto the public market. There is a wrinkle, however. If employees are largely convinced that the best days of their employer are ahead, they have a large financial incentive to hang on to those shares. This makes the timing of Twitter’s decision to release its earnings pre-lockup interesting. It’s a power play of sorts. If Twitter were expecting a poor earnings report, it would want to release it post-lockup, thereby lessening the incentive for employees to cash out on the first day possible. The company wants to avoid its employees selling shares en masse, as that would provide a very negative signal to the investing public. So Twitter is publicly betting that, by releasing earnings ahead of the lock-up expiration, employee interest in selling their shares will decrease. And you don’t negatively incentivize your denizens against harming your firm. So , Twitter could be obliquely signaling that it had a big first quarter, or at least one good enough to prevent a mass sell-off of its shares by its workers. Executives at Twitter indicated today that they intend to after the lock-up period ends Twitter is to lose $0.03 per share (non-GAAP) on revenue of $240.93 million. In the fourth quarter of 2013, Twitter made $0.02 (non-GAAP) on revenue of $242.7 million, besting analyst expectations on both scores. However, investors soured on its slow user growth. TechCrunch reached out to Twitter for comment on the timing of its earnings, but did not hear back by the time of publication. |
What Is The Opposite Of A BuzzFeed Quiz? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | “i really feel like we need a buzzfeed-type writer,” our community manager Skypes me, because we’re hiring and dealing with all the fun stuff that that entails, “everyones going in that direction it seems.” “What is that direction?” I ask. “something that you don’t have to click on yet do cause why not” is her answer. This is the most succinct description of the world of digital media I’ve heard so far. In case you haven’t noticed, TechCrunch just launched . There is a stigma around these types of media formats, because they optimize for the advertiser versus the user on average. “20 Sites That Capitulated To The Awful Truth Of Web Publishing Before TechCrunch Did” is an idea one of our writers submitted for a gallery, after we launched them. Today I had to listen to someone say the words “pieces of content” un-ironically, repeatedly. The person was very kind and sincere, just had never made the connection between that phrase and what other things it could sound like, namely, pieces of crap. I eventually pulled up the Nirvana song to prove my point that writing should never be commoditized, even on the web. Behind every article is a human being. Another thing I did today was see a tweet that said something like, “Being a teenager means you don’t have to apologize for liking the BuzzFeed quizzes.” It struck me, because even Rupert Murdoch loves . Why is the “awful truth” of web publishing that humans like dumb stuff? Why don’t we just admit that and move on, be cool with the appreciation of both high and low culture? And, if we’re going to be so judgey, what is worthy of our clicks, the opposite of a BuzzFeed quiz? Well, I would venture not clicking on anything at all, spending time with family, eating a soft pretzel, being grateful for your youth and health. But if everyone collectively did that, we’d go out of business. Brave new world with such pieces of content in it. |
Apple Sells iPhones To Reanimate The Pixies | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | One day in the fall of 1990, or maybe it was ’91, I discovered a box my cousin had left at our house. In the box was a black cassette tape with a grubby label. On one side, recorded in long play mode to fit it all, was the Beastie Boys ‘License To Ill’ and Concrete Blonde’s ‘Bloodletting’. On the other side was the Pixies ‘Doolittle’. To say that this black cassette with its ball-point scrawl changed the course of my life is an understatement in a major key. The Pixies, especially, informed the choices I’d make in the music I listened to for a very long time. Belle and Sebastian over boy bands, My Bloody Valentine instead of bro rock. So, your first instinct might be to assume that I’d feel a bit betrayed by the Pixies when one of their songs showed up in a new iPhone ad from Apple today. Not so much. The ad, if you haven’t seen it, is very good. The general consensus is that it’s the company’s best in a while, which is good because they’ve had a few stinkers and a few sanctimonious ones that looked more like b-roll on the background TVs in utopian sci-fi flicks than an ad for people today, right here. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODmfmUWqlSA] The ad is grounded in what people can do with the iPhone in a specific creative arena — music. An arena that Apple has always had an affinity for. Part of that comes from Steve Jobs, who was, by all accounts, a true music fan. Because of the attention paid to making them good tools for musicians, Macs have had a special place in the recording scene for quite some time. So it’s a savvy move for Apple to tap that goodwill — and a raw, electrifying track by the Pixies — to create a very effective ad for the iPhone. Remember, too, that Apple was not always the media behemoth it is now. At one point it was offering iTunes as a lifeline to musicians being eaten alive by illegal downloads while labels did nothing to prevent it. U2’s Bono called iTunes “ I’m not trying to tell you how to feel about this. The Pixies and other bands on its label were standard bearers for a time when the music getting played on the radio (remember that ha ha) was at its most homogenous, and headed towards an even blander future. You may hate the idea of ‘Gigantic’ being used to sell iPhones. But I say maybe, just maybe, Apple is selling iPhones just so more people will , and that is ok with me. The Pixies’ new , on CD and on vinyl. It is not available on cassette. |
David Einhorn Just Cried Bubble And Let Slip The Shorts Of War | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | David Einhorn, a hedge fund manager worth north of a billion dollars, isn’t bullish on technology stocks. In a to his investors sent today, Einhorn described the current market environment as the “second tech bubble in 15 years.” Calling today an “echo of the previous tech bubble,” Einhorn notes that there are currently “fewer large capitalization stocks and much less public enthusiasm” this time around. This means that the current bubble, such as it is, is smaller, and when it does deflate — how rapidly we’ll have to see — there will be less carnage — blood, red ink, or otherwise. It’s worth our time to walk through Einhorn’s arguments concerning tech stocks and accounting practices. Here are a few “indications” that demonstrate, according to Einhorn, that “we are pretty far along” in the current bubble: Valuing companies not based on their current profitability, and reasonable expectations of their future profitability, but instead on their pure revenue growth or other metrics is considered mostly reasonable at the moment. If it weren’t, Box , and things would certainly not happen. Thinking simply, Einhorn’s first and third bullet points are linked tightly. If we used conventional, even traditional, methods of calculating the valuation of many technology companies today that sport valuations north of a $1 billion, there would need to be a large correction. Einhorn expects things to settle down, making the following historical argument: This is a pretty decent encapsulation of the mental shift in the market in a post-bubble environment. Once it gets a little harder to raise more money, you have to either have your own or make some more. Cash on hand and profits are, after all, the fuel and goal of business. Einhorn thus thinks that many technology stocks are comically overvalued, so he’s shorting them: What’s interesting is that Einhorn thinks that a cadre of companies out there are potentially so overvalued that they could lose 90% of their value: Damn. I don’t disagree. The question is how long investors will be content to in the name of revenue growth. Finally, Einhorn isn’t impressed with your non-GAAP earnings that discount the cost of paying employees with stock in addition to cash. It’s trendy — perhaps it always has been — to report on cash-based expenses in adjusted earnings statements. Einhorn doesn’t like this: At least in a long-term sense, this is very reasonable. It ties into the above points concerning valuation metrics: If we are discounting the cost of non-cash expenses in our valuing of emerging technology companies, we’re probably skewing more than a little. Are we going to stop anytime soon? Probably not. As TechCrunch : There is a reason it feels like everyone and anyone is raising money to build a company: They are. According to two studies, capital raised from venture capitalists by growing, private companies is at its highest point since 2001. A pegs the total sum raised in the first quarter at $9.47 billion. By its number, that is the highest figure since the second quarter of 2001, when venture capital invested $11.5 billion. The year-ago quarter according to the study saw a more modest $6.01 billion of inflow. A separate has a slightly different figure for the period, estimating total first quarter investment at $10.7 billion. It also estimates the comparative 2001 figure at $11.5 billion, however. Keep in mind that venture capital spiked to more than $28 billion per quarter in the last bubble, so we are not utterly out of control. But I think that Einhorn does correctly call down parts of technology as overheated. On the other hand, large technology companies — Amazon aside, as always — are valued modestly. Microsoft’s trailing price-earnings ratio is 14.81 and Apple’s is 13.22. So, while we’re seeing elements of technology get slightly goofy, there is sanity to be found as well. |
Hipster’s Ludlow And eBay’s Mengerink Are Working On A Startup Called The Happy Home Company | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | Doug Ludlow, formerly CEO of startup Hipster, is working on something new called The Happy Home Company, and he has convinced former eBay executive Matthew Mengerink to co-found it with him. Hipster, for those of you who don’t remember, was a photo-sharing startup that was probably best known for stunts like . The startup was (which owns TechCrunch) two years ago, with Ludlow becoming a senior director on the mobile team and then , before departing in August 2013. Mengerink, meanwhile, spent the past decade at eBay and PayPal, where he was most recently chief technology officer for the X.commerce platform. He will be CTO and chief operating officer at the new startup, while Ludlow will be CEO. If it seems like I’m spending a lot of time talking about the founders and not the product, well, Ludlow is still being pretty secretive about what The Happy Home Company will actually do. He did say his aim is to “change the way people live in their homes.” So why talk about it at all? Ludlow said it’s because Mengerink yesterday, prompting lots of questions: “It’s like changing your relationship status. It’s not really real until then.” |
Lifeline, The Early-Stage Finnish VC Firm That Backed Supercell, Closes Another Fund | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | has never ceased to surprise me. There’s every November to find the world’s strongest investor and founder. Or, I mean, just look at their portfolio:
They even backed the Finnish rock band, , to make a game and a feature film about a half-Siberian, half-Mexican dog. They’ve also had some serious wins. They were the first investors in Supercell, the Helsinki-based game developer and maker of Clash of Clans, which eventually sold slightly more than half of itself to Softbank and Gung-Ho Entertainment for $1.53 billion. It was a 4,000X return, says Petteri Koponen, who is the firm’s founding partner (pictured above). Now the firm, which is one of the best-connected in all of Finland, is pulling together a second fund. Counterintuitively, it’s smaller than their first fund at roughly $20 million compared to $30 million. “We had a lot of external pressure to go bigger,” Koponen said. “Quite a few people said that they should be room for a growth-stage fund here, which would have meant we could have raised $100 to 150 million. But we just thought that we would actually maximize our impact if went even earlier stage.” The new fund also doesn’t have a standard lifespan of 10 years. It’s indefinite. “Instead, we could hold companies for 20 years or as long as it takes,” said Lifeline’s other founding partner Timo Ahopelto. “We’d never be in a hurry to sell.” It’s all very Finnish — pragmatic, long-term and maybe a little eccentric. Oh, and with this fund, they’re not planning on focusing too much on games, which might be surprising considering the Renaissance that’s happened over the last five years in the local gaming industry with successes like Angry Birds-maker Rovio and Supercell. “We think the chances of category leadership are pretty slim,” Koponen said. “If we discover the right kinds of games company, we would be super happy to invest. But while game companies can be really attractive and I can understand why the money is flowing there, it’s not our cup of tea.” They’re also excited about a few of their more recent investments like , which works on targeted cancer therapies and , which is a Facebook ads optimization tool. |
New Details On Tactus’ Funding | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | On the heels of last week, Tactus chief executive Craig Ciesla stopped by TechCrunch to talk about its future plans. Ciesla said that the company raised $13.5 million , with Thomvest Ventures as the lead investor, with Ryoyo, Wistron and other undisclosed strategic and financial investors participating. Ciesla says that the company is using the money to scale up its production in the wake of the Wistron partnership. There are attachments for existing, standalone devices, as well as integrated devices that will include the company’s technology embed the company’s microfluidic technology to automatically raise and lower keypads on flatscreen devices into any tablet or mobile phone. Now with the company laser-focused on getting the products into the hands of consumers, consumers can expect that Tactus-enabled attachments for mobile devices will be coming to market toward the end of 2014 and integrated devices should be on shelves in the first half of 2015. While the company sees the greatest demand in mobile computing, Ciesla says the company will look beyond mobile devices to the automotive space to solve the driver distraction issue. |
Meet The New CrunchBase | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | first launched in 2007, has been an invaluable source of information about major companies, startups, investors and executives in the tech ecosystem. Today we’re proud to introduce CrunchBase 2.0 — a more beautiful, easier-to-use, and more powerful version of the database that the tech world has come to depend on. The new CrunchBase is being launched after nearly a year of work and a drastic expansion of the team supporting it. While the site had grown to become one of the most comprehensive records of what’s happening in the tech world, over the years it started to show a little rust. Worse, the back end wasn’t always stable and it had a tough time keeping up with a rapidly changing tech ecosystem that required a more flexible architecture and data set. According to TechCrunch COO and AOL Tech General Manager Ned Desmond, there are now 23 people working on the CrunchBase team, compared to a skeleton crew that was overseeing the site just a few years ago. That team was assembled to work on a major overhaul of the forward-facing design, as well as the underlying code base. The fruits of their labor are finally being released to the public, as CrunchBase 2.0 is being launched today. The new site was built from the ground up to be easier to read, easier to use, and easier to contribute to. On the front end, that means a card-based design that is responsive and built to look just as good on a mobile screen as on a desktop. It’s built to highlight new types of information that wasn’t available on the old version of the site. [gallery ids="991563,991564,991562,991525,991524"] It’s also meant to make adding information and editing entries a lot faster and more responsive. With CrunchBase 2.0, most updates will be recorded and posted almost immediately, compared to the old version, in which edits were required to be manually approved before they were posted. In order to enable that, the new version has done away with the ability to edit pages anonymously. Those who wish to make changes are now required to log in with a social identity through Facebook, Twitter, Google, or LinkedIn. Like Wikipedia, CrunchBase will also log all edits to ensure they’re correct and to keep track of who is entering what information. Once logged in, visitors will be able to click an “edit” button on any of the cards and instantly add updated information. The hope is that the new editing flow, combined with near-instantaneous publishing of that information, will prompt more CrunchBase users to contribute to the platform. “The primary thing we wanted to do was create a platform for capturing more information about what was going on in the startup world,” CrunchBase president Matt Kaufman told me. “We had 65,000 people contributing last year, but we wanted to create a platform that would allow more people to contribute more information, and compel them to do so.” While most casual visitors will recognize the updated design and easier editing flow, the biggest overhaul is on the backend. There, the team rebuilt the CrunchBase system from scratch, creating what Kaufman calls a “business graph.” That graph will connect various bits of information that live in its database, so that individual entries will now be connected and dynamically updated as information is added. For instance, if an executive joins a new company, that new information will be extended to her bio page, as well as the company’s CrunchBase entry. Or when a startup raises a new round of funding, that information will be reflected on its own page, as well as its investors’. The new CrunchBase database was built to be extensible, so that over time the platform could support new types of data. In the short term, that includes activities like funding rounds, but over time it could mean the addition of things like crowdfunding campaigns or enable accelerators to keep track of which startups graduated from which batch. “We’ve created a platform that lets us evolve with the data that’s out there,” Kaufman said. “The first version of CrunchBase 2 doesn’t have a bunch of new fields, but it does give us the ability to add new features to the platform.” While rebuilding CrunchBase behind the scenes, the team has also been actively courting new content and API partners. That began with the introduction of the . That initiative launched with just 10 venture firms, but there are now more than 850 partners contributing their data to CrunchBase. The site also benefits from a partnership with AngelList that allows anyone adding their startup to the crowdfunding site to instantly have their information also published to CrunchBase. With an ever-growing data set, CrunchBase traffic also continues to increase. Page views were up 40 percent year-over-year, according to Kaufman. And it’s not just founders and investors that rely on CrunchBase. In fact, only 7 percent of all CrunchBase traffic comes from TechCrunch, while 20 percent of it is direct traffic. “There’s a myth that the traffic is just people from TechCrunch, and there’s a myth that it’s only something that matters to investors or people in the startup world,” he said. Furthermore, an increasing number of global consumer brands are using the data as a way to see what new technologies are emerging. And more than 7,000 API partners are taking advantage of the data set. With all of that interest, it’s becoming clear that CrunchBase isn’t just about startups. It’s about how software — or rather, technology in general — is eating the world. “In our view, this shows us that the startup economy is not just about Silicon Valley… It’s much broader than that,” Desmond said. |
Xappmedia Raises $3M For Interactive Audio Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | is announcing that it has raised $3 million in seed funding for its . The first part of a Xappmedia spot can sound like a regular ad, but then it offers a call to action. For example, an ad for a flower company could begin with a promotional spiel, but then ask users whether they want to find out more, or buy flowers, or whatever — not by clicking but by speaking a designated phrase. You can listen to some sample ads . (If anything, the ads remind me a bit of those audio menus that can come up when you call customer service help lines — “If you’d like to check your account balance, say: ‘Account balance!'”) Co-founder and CEO Pat Higbie said that Xappmedia is targeting “ultramobile” listeners. In other words, listeners who are on their phones or using another mobile device and in a position where they can’t actually touch the screens. This approach helps advertisers and publishers since, in situations where banner ads probably won’t work, they can still run interactive ads with clear measures of user engagement. And the ads can be created with a fairly straightforward point-and-click interface, Higbie said. He argued that this approach is good for the listener, too, because it gives them “choice and convenience” while leading to “less total ad time.” When Xappmedia , NPR (its first big partner) said it would be charging CPMs “north of $20.” The funding was led by co-founder and executive chairman Frank Raines, with participation from undisclosed angel investors. |
New Policy All But Bans The Intelligence Community From Speaking To The Press | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | A new policy put in place this March effectively bans members of the U.S. intelligence community from speaking to the media, even when discussing unclassified matters. The have sparked outcry from many outside the government, given that the policies as detailed in the directive further clamp down on interaction between the public and intelligence denizens. The rules are similar to a that died in the Senate in 2012 over concerns regarding their overzealousness. The ACLU’s Gabe Rottman to the directive that James Clapper, d “is trying to do by decree what he couldn’t secure through our elected representatives.” Here’s the key line from the directive, forcing members of the intelligence community to receive permission to speak to anyone in the media: Failure to follow the new rules can lead to the loss of classified access, or even termination: So what about whistleblowing through the media? Don’t count on it. The directive notes with little apparent ironic self-awareness that there are internal methods in place to report fraud, waste and so forth. In short, the NSA would like to keep its dirty laundry to itself, thank you very much. It’s also worth noting that whistleblower protection, such as it exists internally, doesn’t apply to contractors, the very sort that our intelligence apparatus depends upon. This impacted Edward Snowden, who that he tried to reach out to several people inside the larger intelligence world, but made little or no progress. He continued: Yes. I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them. As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the US government, I was not protected by US whistleblower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process. Given how much we now know about the NSA et al, I’d hazard that clamming up and preventing interaction between the media and the fine folks of the intelligence world isn’t a very good idea. It’s hard to engender anything approaching trust when you are barred from speaking with the other party. The from of the Government Accountability Project regarding the directive is correct: This latest action is a clear extension of the executive branch’s war on national security whistleblowers. It is a grotesque twist for James Clapper to limit public knowledge about government activity when he himself has been responsible for lying to Congress and misleading the public about the government’s overreaching mass surveillance programs. Precisely. |
Star Trek And The Politics Of Silicon Valley | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | Let’s get outside of the San Francisco bubble for a little while (trust me, ). I realize in a world saturated with protesters who have all the sophistication and menace of a shipful of , it may seem like a protest in front of Kevin Rose’s home is the Biggest News in the Universe. It may seem doubly so when said protesters are demanding $3 billion in , and your only news comes from (rebranded as Secrets with a capital S to appeal to a wider audience). It’s visceral, raw, enervating and local, and it would be the featured story on Downworthy, if such a portal existed. But outside the 7×7 Alpha Quadrant, things aren’t going so well for technology’s forces. Our local immigration lobby Bwd.Us (formerly known as Fwd.us) has had all of the luck of a beaming down with the senior officers in trying to change policy in Washington (we’re still waiting on news from sickbay). Meanwhile, Airbnb continues to fight the attorney general of New York to avoid paying taxes, even though its expansion there is happening at -rate, and Heartbleed showed us that our entire security infrastructure is about as secure as a Romulan walking through the Klingon High Council. Not to mention that little of the country has healed from the shock of the financial crisis, and families are still struggling to make ends meet. I grew up watching Star Trek, a world where technologies like antimatter power, replicators, warp engines, and holodecks together construct a society in which there is infinite energy, consumables, transportation and entertainment. In short, a utopia, a world without scarcity where humans could cultivate themselves without the violence and bloodshed of their past. That progressive hope for the future conveyed by Gene Roddenberry has been at the core of what Silicon Valley has always strived to accomplish. These days, though, it seems that the region has a very different goal in mind. Once fought, narcissism at Kirk levels is now cherished as a key design goal of businesses hoping to keep their “stickiness” up (there are four lights, and they are all shining on me!). Disruption, once considered a deleterious side effect of technological progress, is now lauded as a key virtue of great companies (makes you wonder if the have taken over). It’s as if we moved from the Federation with rose-colored glasses to the Borg with Google Glasses. Resistance is futile. When you look at the original founders of the Valley like William Hewlett and David Packard, these were people who evinced the culture of a show that hadn’t even been broadcast yet (unless time travel was involved, as it always is). Hewlett-Packard was famous for having unreserved parking spots even for top executives, and offering employees a generally egalitarian environment focused on technological progress. Compare that culture with the rumors surrounding Clinkle, and one has to wonder whether hasn’t made a reappearance. Yet it wasn’t just culture, it was the technology, too. While the Valley may not be the , there was a mutualism between Silicon Valley and government, in which government heavily subsidized the creation of new technologies such as semiconductors. Later, the Internet would become the idealized embodiment of all of the utopian and cybernetics theorizing of the 1960s, which included Star Trek itself. Here was a decentralized network of equal nodes who could interact with others at will, all pseudonymously. It was a society in harmony without violence or aggression. Yet that world would eventually be ruptured by a new group of theorists who saw the Internet in a very different light. Cyberlibertarianism came out of the 1980s, in the final throes of the Cold War when individual liberty was the watchword of the day. This group, with leaders like John Perry Barrow, channeled the zeitgeist of the time into a demand for digital rights, forming the Electronic Frontier Foundation along the way. The goals were certainly laudable, to protect individuals from government interference on the Internet. But that focus has changed as startups usurped the label to mean opposing any inconvenient government regulation. For the most part, that strategy has become a sort of for today’s startups. Regulations create artificial barriers to entry in markets, eventually infantilizing the competition and making these industries ripe for innovation. Controversy over breaking the rules and constant back-and-forth with the government assures ongoing coverage in the media, helping with distribution. This press has tended to be positive as well, since fighting government regulations has a special place in the American ethos, going all the way back to throwing tea into Boston Harbor. As customers flock to the startup, its political constituency increases commensurately, ensuring that the law will eventually change in its favor. Unfortunately, the rules are getting harder to break as Silicon Valley targets highly regulated industries like financial services, health care, and energy ( , essentially). The Valley hasn’t adapted to handling such industries, so its response has been and to build (that sounds like the perfect plot for an episode). We see the end result of all of these actions: fragmentation and isolation, not unity and engagement. This is not the Federation at work here. Airbnb, Uber and Tesla have targeted areas where local regulations have applied. But the next wave of startups will touch areas of society where regulations are strong and often handled at the federal level. To be successful, we need to bring back technology’s progressive ethos and demonstrate again that we can engage with our society rather than just disrupt it. It’s only logical, as some pointy-eared character should say right now. In many ways, we live in a Star Trek utopia today. Mobile communicators are plentiful, entertainment is essentially unlimited, and computer processing power is infinite through the cloud if not free. But the hardest challenges facing our race are sadly still too often present: inequality, famine, disease, war, energy, water, and the list goes on. If we want to evolve our society, it’s well past time for us to remove our arrogance, and direct our attention to building a future all of us can enjoy. And we should also apply for a construction permit for Starfleet Academy. Given its San Francisco Presidio location, it won’t even open until 2140 at the earliest due to the planning process. |
Roku FINALLY Releases A YouTube Channel For Most Of Its Streaming Boxes | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | After what has been seriously too long, Roku has just launched an official YouTube channel for of its lil’ streaming boxes. The catch: Roku says the channel is only compatible with “current generation” devices, which they define as any box launched after July 2011. Roku’s model numbering system is super confusing*, so just know that if your Roku came out in the last 2 1/2 years or so, you’re probably good. Also of note: the new channel will only work in US, UK, Canada, and Ireland. [ ] Up until now, most Roku users have needed some crazy workaround like Twonky or PlayOn to get YouTube to play through their boxes. The one exception: Roku 3 owners — they (and they alone) have had access to the YouTube channel . To find the new Youtube channel, hit up the Roku Channel Store on your device — alternatively, . |
Owlet, The Smart Baby Bootie, Raises $1.85 Million | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | , a smart baby bootie that measures your child’s heart rate, launched on our Hardware Battlefield last January and has just raised $1.85 million from multiple firms including ff Venture Capital and Eniac Ventures. Also in participation of the round was Azimuth Ventures, Life Sciences Angel Network, Peak Ventures, and Brand Project. The company also completed the RGA Connected Devices Accelerator through Tech Stars. “We are excited to have the right partners onboard to change the world with this product,” said CEO Kurt Workman. “We see the wearable future will include every single baby coming home from the hospital with a health monitor. Owlet is perfectly poised to be that monitor.” The monitor is shipping this summer for $250 and comes in blue and pink. They are currently accepting pre-orders for the first units. The company aims to be the only wireless baby monitor that will come home with almost every child at birth. Because it is engineered to be light, easily washable, and comfortable, the bootie will allow parents to ensure their kids are still breathing and, more importantly, offer important insight to researchers on the first few months of life. |
Aol Moves To Prevent Spoofed Emails Following Mail Hack | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | A few days ago Aol Mail was , and users’ address books were scraped. Today, that will help other mail providers reject email messages sent from email accounts spoofed from this security breach. Like Yahoo earlier this month, . This puts a line of text in its DNS record telling mailbox providers to reject Aol mail if it didn’t come from an Aol server. While effectively stopping email sent from spoofed accounts, this also affects bulk email that would have previously been authorized. With this line of code, Aol is telling other email providers to trash email if it wasn’t sent from Aol. TechCrunch was told by sources close to the company that they believe less than 1 percent of all Aol Mail users were impacted by this security breach. Still, that 1% was a vocal minority as the hashtag #aolhack is still going strong with users still reporting spoofing issues. Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Aol. Thankfully TechCrunch’s staff uses Gmail. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 4 | 14 | null |
You’re More Than Your Last Few Tweets | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | Our lives are not defined reverse chronologically, yet until now, that’s strictly how our social network profiles portrayed us — as a snapshot of our latest activity. Today, with the option to to the top of our profiles “ When you meet someone, you often ask them “how are you?” and the answer usually tells you almost nothing about them. They say they’re fine or describe the day’s wins or losses, but those tiny data points don’t represent their personality. Yet despite the dysfunction of this behavior, Facebook, Twitter, and Google all designed their profiles to mimic it when someone comes to check us out. Sure, you can dive into someone’s albums or interests, but above the fold we mostly just get the answers to “What do you do?” and “What’s up?” A short bio, and a few of their most recent posts. Most people never make it further than this. If you do peer into their photos, what they Like, or who they follow, you’re again stuck browsing reverse chronologically with little to signify what’s most important to the person you’re learning about. It’s like our profiles have the memories of goldfish. Rather than a brief encounter on the street, our social profiles might do better mirroring the way we decorate our homes and show them off to people we invite in. You don’t have the three latest photos you’ve taken sitting on you mantle. You have your favorites, the ones that show the things and people you care about most. You might have a large collection of books or records, but you feature a few favorites facing forward on the shelf, or on the coffee table, or by the stereo. Curation allows us to distill a lifetime of experience into a representative sample of ourselves. And conveying our identity accurately is critical to connecting to like-minds on the Internet. There are a billion people to circle, friend, or follow, so social networks need to make it easier to choose who we let into our feeds. Twitter moved in the right direction today with the new web profile. By pinning a tweet to the top of your profile, you can say that this quip, photo, or link shows who you really are instead of just what you posted today. It lets you say “this is something you can judge me by. Take it or leave it.” Twitter will also now intelligently increase the size of your Best Tweets: “ The top tweet with 14 favorites gets shown larger than one with no favorites thanks to Twitter’s new Best Tweets feature Together, these should make it much quicker to figure out if you should follow someone…or unfollow them. It can be tough ditching people from your feed based on just their latest tweets. Now if I see someone has an inane tweet pinned, I can unfollow with confidence. Facebook’s Timeline offers plenty of curation and privacy options, but they mostly influence your archive of old posts that few people will really dig through. Facebook Oh, and Google+ doesn’t seem to have any curation options beyond a cover image. Where does this go next? A whole best tweets tab on Twitter, or best updates or photos tabs in Facebook based on engagment could make it even simpler to get a feeling for someone. Or the option to curate a canvas with whatever I want. I’d personally enjoy the option to create a Pinteresque board inside my other social networks that shows off a comprehensive look at who I think I am. It’s understandable why these networks initially designed their profiles to be reverse chronological. That worked when we hadn’t shared much in to date. But Twitter is almost 8 years old and Facebook just turned 10. The ways we introduce ourselves online shouldn’t have amnesia. |
Dorian Nakamoto Thanks The Bitcoin Community, Reminds Us He’s Not The Real Satoshi | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w7YmJZ-qVW8] The alleged Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, has taken to YouTube with noted Bitcoin activist, Andreas Antonopoulos, to thank the Bitcoin community for sending him over . “If I was the real creator, I would never use my real name,” said Nakamoto in the video. He described his life as being turned upside down thanks to the article. “So from that point of view I’m sure you guys will know that Satoshi Nakamoto is not me. But Leah [McGrath Goodman, the author of the Newsweek story] thinks so and Newsweek said so, but it’s not true.” Nakamoto was when Newsweek ran a cover story claiming that the California-based retiree wrote the original that started the ball rolling. Nakamoto has repeatedly denied involvement in the movement and, unless this is an elaborate act of social engineering, he is most probably not the bitcoin mastermind Newsweek painted him to be. |
The UBR-1, A Hackable Robotics Platform, Is Now For Sale | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | One of the most interesting robotics platforms I’ve seen in a while, the , is now available for sale, something that should cause robotics wonks to rejoice. The platform runs the and includes a single hand with seven degrees of freedom, a 3D camera, stereo microphone, and speakers. It can move across the floor at 2 miles an hour and supports easy programming via a command prompt. That’s right: this guy has SSH. It also has an emergency stop system that ensures it can’t become sentient and eat you. came to us via the late, great and is part of a new breed of robotics startups that offer usability and hackability in a package that looks like it could come from the Apple store. Don’t think you’re going to get one of these for the bros in the office to teach to twerk. Powerful robotics platforms are expensive and the UBR-1 by Unbounded Robotics is up there with the best of them. The platform costs a solid $50,000 and comes with a portable crate that can be reused. This platform is perfect for experimenters and designers who might have their eye on a robotic solution to a problem but aren’t sure where to begin. [vimeo 77105142 w=500 h=281] Like , you can “teach” the UBR-1 by moving its arm and head and then having it play back those motions, ad infinitum. You can also train it to grab objects in its field of view. It is also completely autonomous and lasts for about 3 hours on a charge. Cool robots are, as a rule, badass. This is probably one of the most badass of them all. While I doubt many of us can pay $50K for one, I sure would like to play with an URB-1 some day. |
Apple Opens OS X Beta Testing To All Users With New Seed Program | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | Before today, you needed a developer account to help test Apple’s upcoming software releases before they hit the general user population. You didn’t need to actually develop anything, but it would still cost you $99 per year to partake, and technically it was still sort of against the rules. Today, Apple introduced its OS X Beta Seed Program to make pre-release Mac operating system software available to all who want to help try it out. You can , and all you need is an Apple ID. Once signed up, users can test out Mavericks pre-release builds before they’re launched for everyone else, and then submit feedback to Apple to help it iron out the kinks before general launch. It’s not for everybody, but early adopters who appreciate getting the chance at a sneak peak of tweaks before they come to market will appreciate the opportunity. The program comes with its own special utility software for installation on your Mac, which makes pre-release versions of OS X visible in your Mac App Store’s Updates tab. You’ll also need to agree to Apple’s Beta Seed and Confidentiality Agreement to participate, which is probably quite similar to the one it makes developers sign before testing software, but there’s no fee to participate. This move comes only a few weeks ahead of Apple’s WWDC developer conference, which kicks off June 2 this year. Apple is expected to reveal the next version of OS X at that event, and there’s a good chance it will also release a preview build of the operating system for pre-release testing at the same time, so it’ll be interesting to see if participants of the new Seed Program get access to that software ahead of time, too. |
Evernote CEO Details His Company’s Plans For A Wearable Future | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | There’s a conundrum facing software developers these days: Wearable tech is clearly an area of keen interest among consumers and industry watchers, but how to prepare for mass market adoption in this nascent space? There are still so many variables, so much left up in the air, that it’s hard to pick any areas of investment with guaranteed return on investment. But CEO Phil Libin has a warning for software companies taking a wait-and-see approach – if you do so, you risk being left behind. Evernote is already developing or has developed software for Android Wear, Pebble, Google Glass, Samsung Gear and more, and Libin told me that while it’s far too early to pick a winner, or to pretend that anything they’re doing now will look at all like finished products available to a mature wearables market, the experimentation isn’t considered optional at his company. And to look at just how broad Evernote’s approach to the so-called wearables market is, and what that might encompass, you can look to the company’s launch of its Market for physical goods last year, which at the time left many observers scratching their heads. “A big reason for why we even launched the Evernote Market over six months ago was to get experience designing for the real world,” Libin explained. “It’s going to be very hard for companies to be successful if they don’t understand how to design for the physical world. The whole nature of these devices is that they’re going to succeed or fail based on the experience that they give you, and the whole experience is very tactile and very tangible, it’s not just sitting in front of a computer typing.” Working with companies that produce goods on partnerships isn’t strictly about branding and name recognition; in fact, it’s more about learning how a future of interconnected hardware (both wearable, and the kind that’ll pervade every aspect of our lives) will work with and augment software. Evernote’s goal is to be the ultimate productivity aid for knowledge workers, and in the future, fulfilling that role might require much more than just being a codex or repository for the storage and recall of traditional media. “Even the design work that we’re doing on styluses and scanners and wallets and things like that, it’s there to get our people thinking about designing for the real world,” he said. “How do people interact with a watch? Is a watch really the right metaphor? How do people interact with wrist-mounted things? Where do people hold their hands?” That’s not the end of the questions Evernote is asking, however. It extends beyond those you might imagine a software company designing for platforms like those emerging in the smartwatch category would naturally ask itself. Libin says the wearable future won’t limit itself to just a shrunk down version of smartphone you wear on your wrist. There’s a whole range of material science to think about, too. “What kind of textures make sense? Can you give someone information based on tactile input, based on what something feels like? How do you think about shapes and colors? How do people move? How big is a backpack that’s too big to take on a train? What if you change some aspect ratios, how comfortable are people doing things while they’re sitting or standing?” Libin says he thinks a lot of companies will be caught unawares by this subtle but tectonic shift in how software gets made. It’s a matter of an entire side to the art opening up anew, and that could require a change in perspective that some companies just can’t manage. “This whole art was largely irrelevant for software companies for the last few decades, and now it’s going to become highly relevant. I think you’re going to see companies flaming out left and right that just ignored this, and that just focus on what they have been focusing on and are then completely unprepared for this new world.” It’s still early days for the wearables market, however, and despite the recent upswing in activity by companies like Google and Samsung to exploit this space, it’ll be years before we truly feel the impact of this latest swing in the tech industry. It’s easy to see why others would be taking a wait-and-see approach given the volatility of the market at this early stage, but will failure to act sink some of the industry’s longest sailing ships? Evernote thinks so, and it isn’t about to be counted among those who miss this sea change. |
Everplans Raises $2.1 Million To Help Users Plan For Their Final Steps | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | The internet ages with its users. As the first digital generation learned the language of computing and online networking it created tools for every conceivable life event. On the Web these days you can plan for everything from to to and even ( ). Now, Beyondly, which does business as , is set to announce a $2.1 million round of seed financing from investors including: as it adds a professional service to its end-of-life planning site. The goal is to help Baby Boomers and Generation X face the realities of dying — and plan for it. The New York-based company isn’t alone in attempting to get consumers to confront end-of-life issues. Its own site ranging from the to the . in the chance encounter between Abby Schneiderman and her co-founder Adam Seifer — both active entrepreneurs in the New York City tech community — who were advising a young startup company. Seifer had worked at sixdegrees.com, and co-founded , and was looking for his next startup. He and Schneiderman, then in the throes of wedding planning, talked about how there were plenty of ways startups addressed the needs of consumers that range from germane to joyous, but nothing for one of the most important and certainly the most inevitable events in anyone’s life – dying. Initially the company was a content provider with advice tips and a blog, but in the wake Schneiderman’s brother’s death in a car accident, the two co-founders realized the company needed to be something more. Now Everplans is a site where people can not only read about, but create and save a plan for what should happen in the event of their death. The company raised its first seed round of around $1.4 million to build out its planning architecture. So in addition to information, users have the option to actually act on the information with Everplans’ preferred providers. Anything from getting life insurance to drafting a will can be initiated through the company’s site. And now, with the launch of its premium service, thanks to the second tranche of its seed investment, users can actually store their information on the Everplans site. “Premium members have the ability to upload scans of documents to their ‘Everplans’ and the ability to invite multiple deputies into their accounts,” Schneiderman said. Meanwhile, free accounts can indicate where important documents are stored physically and invite two deputies (think of them as executors on the Everplans site) to access their private accounts. With its new cash in hand, Everplans is also launching an enterprise version of its product, which will give life insurers, and others the ability to offer co-branded Everplans services to their customers. The service certainly makes sense to new investor Brad Harrison, whose firm, Scout Ventures, backed the company in its most recent financing. “It’s super fresh because we just lost my father-in-law,” says Harrison in a phone interview. “Having a game plan so that you know what you’re doing at every step of the process is really important.” |
Microsoft Will Pick Up 93.5% Of The Windows Phone Device Market When Its Nokia Deal Closes On Friday | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | After delay and , the $7.2 billion Microsoft-Nokia deal will . With its conclusion, Microsoft will become the de facto Windows Phone OEM, building and shipping the lion’s share of the smartphones that are part of the platform. The Nokia assets will be called . According to the latest statistics from covering April of this year, Nokia-made Windows Phone handsets comprise around 93.5 percent of the global market. So, Microsoft, when it gets its mitts onto that company’s hardware assets later this week, will own effectively its entire market. Here’s the breakdown: Microsoft is working to court new OEM partners around the world to buy into its mobile project. The company, despite spending large to acquire Nokia’s smartphone business, wants to complete and play nice with others. Windows Phone has seen growing market share in Latin America and Europe, though its inroads in the United States remain limited. |
Shanghai-Based ChaseFuture Raises A $400K Round To Ease University Admissions For International Students | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | , a Shanghai-based startup that built a platform where admissions experts and college alums can coach international students on how to get in, just raised $400,000 in a fresh seed round. Led by Banyan Partners and Harbor Pacific Capital, the round also included Artesian Capital Management and other educational technology angels including an AngelVest consortium, SingTel Innov8’s managing director William Bao Bean, Lightspeed’s managing director Ron Cao, and Joshua Motta, who oversees special projects at CloudFlare. Founded a year and a half ago, . They have basic products that help students with admissions essays, choosing schools and polishing resumes, then higher-tier packages that can cost several thousand dollars depending on how much hands-on help a client wants. ChaseFuture’s platform connects about 140 alums and admissions experts from top U.S. and U.K. universities with prospective applicants through an online messaging system and video tutorials. CEO Greg Nance says the company now has about 1,000 paying clients, who are charged annual fees of anywhere from $300 to $5,000 per year. In their first cycle, seventeen students got into Columbia University, another 17 got into USC, then 16 got into Imperial College London and another 11 got into LSE. “Over the last eight months, we’ve just made a ton of progress in terms of our brand and establishing ourselves as a leading provider in the space,” Nance said. They’ll use the new funding to grow the company’s sales and technology teams and explore opportunities outside of mainland China in markets like India, Egypt, and Turkey. They’ll build out Arabic-language versions of all their videos in their library. They also released a beta version of App Tracker, a new tool with how-to articles and videos that guide students through the university application process. The company also implemented a ratings and reputation system for mentors and a new CRM tool to manage prospective clients. |
Microsoft Is Challenging The US Government’s Use Of Search Warrants To Access Data Stored Abroad | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | Microsoft its first challenge to the authority of the United States government’s use of search warrants to demand data stored abroad. Microsoft challenged a U.S. search warrant for emails stored in Ireland. The cloud does have a physical footprint, after all. The company was not surprised that it lost the initial test, noting in a that “the Magistrate Judge, who originally issued the warrant in question, disagreed with our view and rejected our challenge.” The company states that it “knew the path would need to start with a magistrate judge, and that we’d eventually have the opportunity to bring the issue to a U.S. district court judge and probably to a federal court of appeals.” So, today’s setback for Microsoft is not really a dispiriting moment. Think of it more as a first step. There is a process called the that countries can use to request data and the like from one another. So, even if Microsoft does in fact win in the end, it won’t close the system. American search warrants aren’t worth a thing in China, as Chinese search warrants aren’t of much use in California. Microsoft’s point that the location of data demanded matters is simple, and reasonable. |
US Telco Firm [REDACTED] Gently Pushed Back Against Bulk Metadata Collection In January | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | In December Federal Judge Richard Leon that in his estimation, the bulk collection of telephony metadata by the NSA was likely unconstitutional. He stayed his ruling, however, citing “significant national security interests” and “the novelty of the constitutional issue” at play. Less than two weeks later, an , calling the program constitutional. Given the first challenge, a United States-based telecommunications firm [REDACTED] that has to comply with the program specifically that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) explain its perspective on the ruling. This was minor dissent. Here’s [REDACTED] indicating that it intended to comply with the program, and that it was not requesting a hearing: Sleuths have that either AT&T or Sprint are the best fits for amount of space that was redacted. I’ll leave that to you. Why does the telco [REDACTED] want more information regarding the thoughts of the FISC? It boils down to the arguments that Judge Leon brought up — if they are valid, it could make the program that the telco [REDACTED] serves illegal. Taking part in the bulk collection of telephonic metedata, even under compulsion, wouldn’t be the best idea if that was the case. Here are the two key pieces: And: So, in short, the telco [REDACTED] wants to understand the logic behind the continuance of a program that has suffered its first real challenge. In terms of pushback, this feels quite gentle, but is also quite welcome. The response that [REDACTED] got is . Unsurprisingly, the government disagreed with Judge Leon. Judge Rosemary Collyer, after determining standing, took exception with Judge Leon’s analysis, heavily citing According to Judge Collyer, the Smith ruling matters as precedent in this case given its close parallel: As this feels somewhat awry, given that the Smith case dealt with one person, and the NSA’s programs with everyone. To then call the two “indistinguishable” feels somewhat woody. Judge Collyer also detailed the third-party doctrine, which indicates that expectations of privacy are forfeited when information is shared with a third-party. If you share it, your expectation goes away, and thus the government can’t illegally search that information, essentially, as it wouldn’t be a search in the technical sense if it did. Given that, Judge Collyer wrote the following: Essentially the government thinks that legal precedent is set. Read the document if you want a look into how the government explains its own defense of its actions. That’s something worth understanding. |
Sources: Blue Apron Cooks Up $50M From Stripes Group At $450M Valuation | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | is raising $50 million Series C round led by , TechCrunch has learned. The latest round is based on a $450 million valuation, according to multiple sources. It is unclear whether or not the deal has officially closed or still in the process of being finalized. We had previously reported that Blue Apron on the $500 million valuation , but those numbers seem to be preliminary. Other sources have said that cofounder Matt Salzberg was looking for a $500 million valuation for this round, though he has apparently settled for a touch less. Blue Apron, for those of you still getting up to speed, is a company that delivers fresh ingredients and recipes to your home for your cooking pleasure. Each meal costs $10/per person, and is delivered fresh with a full set of instructions to get cooking. As of March 2014, the company was serving up 500,000 meals per month, up from 100k meals/month in August 2013, so growth is apparent. The company also seems to have a $60 million revenue run rate, based on the latest figures for sales and price per plate. And it makes sense. Blue Apron has the ability to order food by the bulk at a discount, with the exact amount of food it needs determined by the pre-order structure. This takes care of any waste issues and ensures a lower price point for the product early on. But that’s not to say that Blue Apron doesn’t face competition. is a service that offers an almost identical experience and it has also picked up traction. Up until now, Blue Apron has raised a total of $8 million, according to . Two earlier rounds were led by Bessemer Ventures, so it’s possible that Bessemer followed on for this round, but not likely. We’ve reached out to Blue Apron but haven’t heard back. We’ll update the post as soon as we do. |
Y Combinator-Backed Streem Has Raised $875K For Its Unlimited Cloud Storage Service | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | If you’re hoping to store lots of large media files, might be the cloud storage service that you’re looking for. The startup, which is part of incubator Y Combinator, last week, and it’s announcing that it has raised $875,000 in seed funding. Co-founder and CEO Ritik Malhotra compared Streem to the external hard drives that he once used to transport large media files. Existing cloud services don’t quite work as a replacement, he said, because they usually store copies on your hard drive and they limit your overall storage — that can be problematic if, say, you’ve got lots of high-quality video files. (Dropbox, for example, offers 2 gigabytes for free and for storing 100, 200, or 500 gigabytes.) With Streem, on the other hand, you pay $20 a month for unlimited storage. The company can afford to offer this, Malhotra said, through a combination of de-duplication and compression: “De-duplication is the biggest space saver.” Although the files should act like any other files on your hard drive, they won’t take up any space. And Malhotra said the technology is optimized for media, for example adjusting the quality of a video stream based on the user’s bandwidth. The company has created apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and the web. As for the funding, it comes from YC, 500 Startups, Start Fund, IronFire Capital, Arbor Ventures, Grooveshark/Onswipe founder Andres Barreto, and various other angel investors. |
The Sony Xperia Z2 Will Launch In The U.S. This Summer | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | Sony has confirmed to TechCrunch that the Xperia Z2 will be released in the U.S. but not for several months. The release is scheduled for “summer.” A U.S. launch of the Xperia Compact Z1 is currently not on the books at all, we also learned. The Z2 will be sold unlocked through Sony’s online store. Carriers have not been announced, and from what Sony told us, it seems talks are ongoing with carriers and nothing has been finalized yet. Sony revealed both the Z2 smartphone and Z2 Tablet at Mobile World Congress a few months back. We recently with the pair and they’re impressive kits. Both the phone and tablet are waterproof and while incredibly thin, feel more like the swanky HTC One M8 than the plasticy Samsung Galaxy S5. The Z2 tablet is in the U.S. Yet as , the company is not focusing on the US market. Historically, the company has not had much success in the U.S. The Z2 smartphone was released in select Asian markets in March and April. It’s hitting other markets including Canada in May. The U.S. is apparently at the bottom of the list. And that’s a damn shame. The Z2 is a fantastic Android device. [gallery ids="988521,988520,988519,988518,988517,988516,988515,988514,988513,988512,988511,988510,988504,988503,988502"] |
Vungle Targets Brands With Its New Exchange For In-App Video Ads | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | announced today that it’s launching what it calls “the first ever advertising exchange built exclusively for in-app video.” When the company in February, CEO Zain Jaffer said that the exchange would allow Vungle to expand beyond app trailers to run video ads for big brands, too. He reiterated that point this week when discussing the exchange, saying that brand advertisers had avoided mobile video for five main reasons: ad quality, latency, brand safety, standards, and optimization. The exchange, which will allow mobile publishers to run ads from multiple ad networks and ad buyers, addresses each of those issues, Jaffer argued. On ad quality, Vungle will only serve high-resolution videos of 15 seconds or fewer. On latency, the company says it serves the ads “in less time than it takes the human eye to blink.” To address brand safety, the exchange will give advertisers control over where their ads can run, and it has also been built to support new video standards and formats that emerge. Lastly, the company says its algorithms can optimize the mix between app install ads and brand ads. Jaffer added that the Vungle video ad network will be one of the ad buyers on the exchange, but its ads won’t be prioritized — they’ll be judged using the same algorithms. “The combination allows us to essentially ensure the publisher always makes a ton of money,” he said. The Vungle Exchange is available as part of the company’s new software development kit. There will be new video formats launched on the exchange over the next year, the company said. And yes, it will be specifically focused on in-app ads, not ads on the mobile web. “I just want the world to know that we believe apps could be as big as the web if not bigger,” Jaffer said. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsWjtYCofy8&w=560&h=315] |
Hillary Clinton Excoriates Snowden’s Leaks, Mocks His Softball Putin Question | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | Former Secretary of State, Senator, and First Lady Hillary Clinton isn’t big on . Clinton excoriated Snowden recently, hitting him for leaving the country, not availing himself of whistleblower protections here at home, and for asking Russian President a now . That Clinton isn’t a fan of Snowden itself isn’t news — — but the severity of her remarks is worth noting, given that she is widely expected to run again for president. Put simply, there is a more than a decent chance that Clinton becomes president in 2016, and thus her tone on Snowden indicates what future policy regarding him, and what he revealed, could be. Here is Clinton on Snowden’s time in China, and now Russia (All transcriptions: ): “When he emerged and when he absconded with all that material, I was puzzled because we have all these protections for whistle-blowers. If he were concerned and wanted to be part of the American debate, he could have been. But it struck me as—I just have to be honest with you—as sort of odd that he would flee to China, because Hong Kong is controlled by China, and that he would then go to Russia—two countries with which we have very difficult cyberrelationships, to put it mildly.” It’s worth remembering, of course, that Snowden didn’t select Russia per se, but instead ended up when the United States government revoked his passport. His stay in a Russian airport for weeks wasn’t for fun. Regarding whistle blower protection, Clinton’s comment make it appear that Snowden could have clothed himself in legal protections. That’s not quite the case, as : Whistle-blower laws in the United States do not apply to employees or contractors at U.S. intelligence agencies, like Snowden. Additionally, the types of programs he has revealed are generally considered to be legal under current law, which would make it more difficult for him to obtain legal protection. Here is Clinton on the impact of Snowden’s leaks among American’s enemies: “I think turning over a lot of that material—intentionally or unintentionally—drained, gave all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like. So I have a hard time thinking that somebody who is a champion of privacy and liberty has taken refuge in Russia, under Putin’s authority.” It’s very fair to state that those opposed to the United States and its goals pore over what Snowden revealed to international news organizations. But the Russian quip remains mildly irksome given that it wasn’t his plan to stay there — to knock Snowden for a choice that he didn’t make is odd. Finally, Clinton managed to put together enough sarcasm for a decent joke: “And then he calls in to a Putin talk show and says, ‘President Putin, do you spy on people?’ And President Putin says, ‘Well, from one intelligence professional to another, of course not.’ ‘Oh, thank you so much!’ I mean really. I don’t know, I have a hard time following it.” This is fair. In the days following his abortive question, Snowden has taken heaps of knocks for the incident. Even his has admitted the blunder. The full clip is worth your time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0F2piTFjUo |
Apple Launches Replacement Program For Faulty iPhone 5 Sleep/Wake Buttons | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | Apple has launched a new program to help iPhone 5 owners affected by a fault that may render their sleep/wake button ineffective or unresponsive. The problem affects what Apple calls “a small percentage” of iPhone 5s made from March 2013 on, Apple says, and you can find out if yours qualifies and apply for the replacement hardware by inputting your iPhone’s serial number at the . Apple asks that users check their device on the site if their sleep/wake button has stopped working completely, or works inconsistently. If you qualify, you’ll then be able to get your device repaired, either in person at an Apple Store or authorized service provider, or by sending your iPhone in for treatment via mail. If you opt for carry-in, you can also get an iPhone 5 loaner model, which Apple will supply in 16GB variants only for use while your own device is having its sleep/wake button replaced. The program is live as of today in the U.S. and Canada, and will expand to other countries as of May 2. If your phone isn’t displaying the problem now, don’t worry about it just yet; Apple’s offer to replace broken sleep/wake buttons extends to two years beyond the first purchase date of the device, so in theory you’ve still got another year for the issue to manifest to get it fixed for free. |
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs… | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | What’s the haps, Pappy Van Meatsack? Still keeping your juices on the inside? Good, because we’re still not quite at the robot dystopia stage but we’re getting there. Our first contender for of the week is this robotic gecko that, aside from looking cute, can scuttle up walls and glass. The uses van der Waals’ forces to stick to surfaces thanks to tiny little hairs on its feet to scare the dickens out of you. It’s not all fun and games for the geckos, which is why this new model is so cool. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SayqhqTZoxI] Don’t think robots can rock out? Well they definitely can, as evidenced by this video by . These amazing quadcopters are busy playing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as well as some Christmas melodies, beautiful renditions all. But what will happen when the robots decide to play this beautiful music on our bones and organs? We will be powerless. Such beauty hides such violence! [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlqe1DXnJKQ] Finally, meet , a jumping, moving cube that can stand on its corners and scoot around with no visible means of control. That’s right: this thing is witchcraft! Don’t let it haunt your dreams, friends, because the end is nigh and you’ll need your rest! [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=n_6p-1J551Y] |
Yes, AT&T’s Threat To Boycott Next Year’s Spectrum Auction Was Bullshit | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | The rules proposed for the 2015 spectrum auction are crap, and ! . Fine, haha, we were just kidding. Or, to be more : Our desire to participate in this auction and our hope for a successful auction is unchanged. We believe that all stakeholders will be able to work together to achieve a successful incentive auction for the 600 MHz band. Nice try, though. |
CrunchWeek: The Future Of Google+ And Why RadiumOne’s CEO Has To Go | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | This week , and I sat around the Round Table to discuss the and the violently abusive CEO of RadiumOne. Gundotra’s departure from the Google — and we’re still trying to find out if he was fired — leaves Google+’s future in doubt. When it comes to the leader of RadiumOne, there is only one thing to say: . |
Contently Offers New Analytics Tools To Help Content Marketers Go Beyond Pageviews | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | There are a number of startups offering tools to help advertisers create articles, videos, and other content that can attract potential customers. ( to work with many of those startups.) But how can companies tell if this content marketing is actually working? That’s the problem that is trying to address with its new Insights product. Since content marketers are trying to build relationships with customers, rather than just get as many eyeballs and clicks as possible for their ads, co-founder Shane Snow argued that traditional measurements like pageviews fall short. Content marketing, Snow said, has to “be building relationships or it’s just creating content for nothing.” After all, a blog post might be getting a ton of traffic, but the pageview count doesn’t tell you whether or not people are reading a post because they like it, or because it’s a “train wreck” that everyone’s criticizing. Vice President of Product Paul Fredrich — who, along with Snow, gave me a quick demo of the Insights product — suggested that measuring pageviews is like going to a cocktail party and “waving at people.” With Contently Insights, the company was looking to track every time you’re “stopping at a table, talking to someone, and exchanging business cards.” So with the new product, businesses can see the total number of readers who visited their site over 7, 30, or 90 days, as well as the amount of time each reader spent on the site, and the total time spent across all readers. There’s also data on the performance of the average story over that time period — once again that will include the number of readers, the time per reader, and the total time, as well as the percent of readers who finished the post. And you can look at the stats for individual pieces of content and see how they compare to those averages. The idea of tracking these numbers isn’t entirely new. ( , not just pageviews.) However, Contently is placing them front and center; it’s one thing to say that pageviews aren’t important and another to remove that number from the dashboard altogether. In addition, Snow said Contently doesn’t just want to present numbers without context. It translates the data into fairly straightforward English (“Readers who were on your publication seemed to prefer this story”) that makes things easier to understand. The data is also used in Contently’s existing content marketing product. Now, when a brand is connecting with a freelance writer and giving them an assignment, they can see data about how the writers’ work has performed in the past. You can read more about the new product in from earlier this week. Contently, by the way, is one of those content-marketing startups that’s been attracting attention from investors, earlier this year. |
“Instagram For Doctors” App Figure 1 Updates With New Features | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | , the photo and information sharing service for the medical profession, is taking the next step in its evolution to become an image-based social network for physicians. Yesterday the company quietly launched a new version of its photo and information sharing service, which gives users the ability to create more robust profiles of themselves and create groups around institutions or interests. The updates to the app reflect a huge increase in user adoption since the company launched a bit more than a year ago. Currently there are roughly 3.5 medical images viewed per second on the site, Levey says. And earlier this week the company hit roughly 50 million images viewed. Toronto-based Figure 1 is akin to Instagram but for doctors. The company’s founders take great pains to ensure that there is no identifying information about patients that appears on the photo sharing app. Rather the idea is for doctors to share interesting cases among themselves. Figure 1 was born out of concerns company co-founder Dr. Joshua Landy had when looking at how doctors and medical students were using smart phones in hospitals and research universities. What the group found was that physicians and students were using social media to share information about patients and were doing it in a way that didn’t protect the patient’s privacy or store the records in a meaningful and secure way. “Tens of thousands of times a day patient records and educational images are transferred from healthcare provider to healthcare provider,” Dr. Landy says. “We were thinking of a way to try and preserve and protect that information in an archive that’s searchable and useful.” The co-founders: Landy, Gregory Levey and Richard Penner, launched the app in May 2013 and it’s now available on both iOS and Android platforms. For doctors, it’s a way to share knowledge virtually with other physicians around the globe. A simple photo and a comment about a unique case can lead to collaboration and the creation of new bodies of knowledge with doctors worlds away, Dr. Landy says. “We really have two valuable things,” says Levey. “We are concentrating on the product and growth and moving a little bit from educational information to more practical ways we can be used by care groups and other professional organizations. The app already has drawn users from over 10% of all of the medical school students in the U.S. “If you look at the app, it’s great from an education point of view. Now we’re pushing for care groups, different medical practices and hospitals to adopt it and that’s where it will have real utility.” With the new release, users have the ability to follow cases, and collaborate with doctors around the world. The newest iteration of the Figure 1 product also includes more robust biographies, taking the app from anonymous messaging to a more robust social networking function, Levey says. Doctors log in to the service through an API with physician-focused networking service, Doximity. Ultimately, the company sees itself as part of a group of new applications like Doximity and HealthTap, which are bringing the social networking tools for consumers and adding the features that medical professionals may need to do their jobs better. |
null | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 4 | 22 | null |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Sony Z2, FyreTV, And The Long-Rumored iWatch | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | Sony’s new Z2 tablet is , so we’re taking a look at , tablet and smartphone included. Meanwhile, Amazon is coming into a bit of a legal dispute thanks to a six-year old porn media player . And of course, because John can’t go a single podcast without discussing smart watches, we’re looking ahead to the forthcoming . At the end of this podcast, we discuss the Autoblow 2, which is a sex toy. So this is your NSFW tag if you’re listening to us out loud at work or something. Have a good Friday, everybody!
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The Rabbit Proto Can Print Real Electronics | John Biggs | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | Stanford students Alex Jais, Manal Dia, and Rohan Maheshwari have created a 3D printer that creates electronic traces – the flat metallic connections found on circuit boards. By replacing a standard plastic extruder on a 3D printer, the Rabbit Proto can “print” electronic wires inside a solid object, allowing you to build a sort of hybrid system that is both structural and conductive. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS6-Tzjeths] The project began in a design class where the team created a device with the ability to “print electronic ink on 3D surfaces.” By adding a simple extruder and conductive ink to a standard 3D printer, they were able to down to $350 for a single extruder module or $450 for a dual extruder system that can be connected right to a standard 3D printer. The latter solution, called the Super Rabbit, allows you to print both plastic and the wires inside. The team is also selling a with the extruder already installed, which reduces the time necessary to get up and running. You can also simply to build your own. Why is this tool important? Simply put, it allows for cohesive objects with embedded wiring to be created on a 3D printer in a few minutes. Electronics systems usually are built using PCBs that are placed inside hollow cases or encased inside epoxy. This solution would let makers create thinner and more robust electronics projects that require no internal wiring. Still not convinced you need a 3D printer that can print wires right inside a casing? You can also use the printer to 3D print in peanut butter, a feature few of us have ever thought we’d need but may come in handy if we have a lot of sandwiches to make. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwdRTaf7Zks] |
SpaceX Just Made A Big Step Towards Cheaper, More Sustainable Space Flight | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | Elon Musk just announced a significant milestone for SpaceX and, well, humanity. The first live test of a Falcon 9 rocket boost stage landing vertically was a success. The first stage of the rocket returned to Earth and landed vertically in the Atlantic Ocean after boosting the second stage to a resupply mission with the International Space Station. Sadly, this part of the rocket was lost to sea as SpaceX could not retrieve the rocket until two days after it “landed.” Musk stated at a press conference today that all telemetry data indicates that the rocket soft-landed in the water with the legs deployed — as if it were landing on land. The end goal is to have a reusable rocket, one that can launch, land, and launch again. Musk says SpaceX foresees being able to land and relaunch a rocket on the same day. The space transportation company has tried several times to retrieve rocket stages after launching, including using parachutes, but later switched to landing. This Falcon 9 soft landing came after extensive testing that a smaller version of the rocket called the Grasshopper. According to Musk, the boost stage constitutes 70 percent of the cost of a rocket and by reusing this part of the rocket, it would reduce the cost by at least 70 percent. Plus, as Musk preaches, reusing rockets would reduce the impact on the environment since it would decrease the amount of rockets built. SpaceX charges $60 million to launch a Falcon 9. SpaceX is currently building out several launch facilities in Texas and Florida. It’s modifying launch pad 39a at NASA’s Cape Canaveral facility which is where Apollo 11 launched from. The company is also fighting the U.S. Air Force over a contract with the Russian space agency. SpaceX has decided to file suit against the U.S. Air Force to get it to open up competition for national security-related rocket launches. |
SpaceX Files Suit Against U.S. Air Force, Cites Use Of Russian Rockets As Problematic | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | During an event today to , CEO Elon Musk also revealed that SpaceX has decided to file suit against the U.S. Air Force to get it to open up competition for national security-related rocket launches. Musk said that they were reluctant to file suit, but that the move is the last one available to them after trying to pursue other options, including complying with launch tests ordered by the Air Force before it entered into a sole-source procurement agreement that locks out private companies, which was entered into without justification, according to Musk. “This really doesn’t seem right to us, and we’ve tried every avenue to try to figure out ‘why is this the case,’ and to try to find other avenues beyond filing a protest,” Musk said. “This contract is costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars for no reason, and to add salt to the wound, the primary engine that’s used is a Russian engine.” Musk added that it seemed like the “wrong time to send hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kremlin,” given the situation in the Ukraine. “We have the advantage that our rocket was designed and built in the 21st century, whereas [the competition was designed in the 90s, with roots going back to the 70s and 80s,” Musk added, before going into more detail about why they’re more cost-effective (a third as expensive as those currently used under the single-source contract). The suit was filed in the court of federal claims, Musk said, and he also added that there may be others that join but currently it’s just SpaceX in the complaint. That’s not to say that SpaceX is looking to force the government to use it exclusively for these types of launches; far from it, Musk says. “We’re just protesting and saying these launches should be competed,” he said. “And if we compete and lose, that’s fine, but why were they not even competed?” Musk says they informed the Air Force just before the conference of the suit, which it decided to file just a month after it gained awareness of the award and tried first to hold discussions with the Air Force. “It’s not as if we’re battling the whole air force, that’s not the case at all,” he said, in answer to a question about whether this would damage their overall relationship with the U.S. defense agency. “Our concern really relates to a handful of people in the procurement department.” |
A Personal Reflection On Google+ | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | the day after my Stanford graduation in June of 2011, and two days later got to take a peek at the product I would be working on for the next three months. There had been rumors in the press for a while that Google was building some sort of secret social network, but these stories were mostly unsubstantiated rumors. Now, for the first time, I got to look upon the future of the world’s most recognizable Internet company and, perhaps, the future of social as well. The product, , was just two weeks from launch, and a digital counter near my desk was ticking down the days to June 28, 2011. I had just gotten my Google-issued laptop, so I opened up my web browser, and navigated to the internal version of the product, and …. stared. Just stared. It’s hard to exactly describe the state of the product at that point, but it was reminiscent of Facebook, albeit with a cleaner profile page and more whitespace. After about 10 minutes of using it, I got distracted and left to find some food. I never reopened the product that day, an ominous sign in retrospect. Later, I hung out with some of the other new graduates who had just joined the team, and there was an awkward silence that can only come when the emperor walks by without his clothes on. No one could figure out why anyone would use this. As we would learn soon, we weren’t the only ones. The news yesterday that Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of Social, . I read about it on Facebook first, then on Twitter, then on Secret, and then on Google+, which perhaps says everything about the success of Google’s most recent foray into social. Google+’s moment , but the lessons to be learned will last a lifetime for me, and for the hundreds of others who played a role in building it. Today, it can be hard to imagine that Google faced a deep existential threat to its business three years ago. The company’s financials were as strong as always, but there was a growing cacophony among bloggers and the wider media over the future of the company in the throes of an industry rapidly changing due to social, local and mobile. Google was still primarily a web-based company, the bulk of its revenues derived from advertising that had failed to deeply penetrate any of these three nascent verticals. These concerns were obviously external as well as internal to Google. It was clear that Facebook, with its ever-expanding social graph, was developing an extraordinary dataset that could undermine the supremacy of Google’s key search product. At the time, Google had a relationship with Twitter to access the social network’s firehose of data, but that agreement expired in mid-2011. Google needed a way to get social data, and fast. Earlier, Google had developed Buzz as the answer to this dilemma, but it failed to take off, and controversy over its leaking of private contacts killed any remaining hope that the product would receive wide consumer adoption. These fears manifested themselves in what would eventually be called Google+. The vision for the product is clear, albeit complicated: create a social network for everyone that would simultaneously provide Google with enough data about each user to ensure its search engine could adapt to a more social world. Despite cynicism from the press and industry analysts, this wasn’t entirely about revenues. Google’s search was the world leader because it always answered users’ queries with the best results. To continue to do so, the company had to learn more about the preferences of its users. Gundotra was charged with carrying out that task, and soon became the spiritual center of the product, a multifaceted leader who could be disarmingly positive in his interactions with colleagues. His constant enthusiasm, though, belied a very challenging set of fundamentals about the likelihood of the product’s success. The product that became Google+ developed over a lengthy gestation period. Key to its evolution was a model known as circles, which was popularized internally by and . The idea as eventually implemented was simple: allow users to define how they relate to people by putting their contacts into different groups. That way, you could choose how you wanted your content to be shared, and complicate the limited sharing options offered by competitors like Facebook and Twitter. In many key ways, Google+ was ahead of its time. Its internal product focus was on choice and privacy, which Google felt was the competitive advantage needed to beat the incumbents. It was reaching out to a demographic of users who had been turned off by the news about personal information leaking on Facebook, yet who were still interested in engaging socially online. The product leadership correctly predicted the trend in social that has made 2014 a banner for ephemeral communication. What few understood, though, is that Google itself was part of the problem. People’s fears about data collection by large Internet companies was already palpable in 2011, and would become widespread over the last year with the disclosures around the NSA leaks. Google needed data from its social network at the precise time there was a real strategic opportunity from a social network that saved no data. Snapchat, Whisper and Secret hit that moment right in the center. It completely eluded Google. The fight over real names, which was a constant area of discussion for the company during my time there, is a case in point. Google’s desire for privacy and choice was in direct contradiction to its need for real names to get the data it wanted. Google+ was not the only social network that required real names, but it was the hardest to avoid thanks to its integration across Google’s product portfolios. Frankly, the issue always got more publicity than it should have (really, there were people who actually cared about this issue based on user feedback), but it was a telling issue that Google just couldn’t think outside of its voracious appetite for data. Indeed, Google’s obsession with data was a clear problem in light of the need for a more holistic product management strategy, especially in social. This was evident in search, the area I worked on at Google. Traditionally, Google’s metrics are very clear about how search should perform – the page needs to load very quickly, and users should be clicking the early links on a page rather than links further down the page (i.e. link relevance is being sorted correctly). Yet, when applied to Google+ search, this model didn’t make a lot of sense. Engagement is the watchword of social networks, not speed of user departure. In product meetings outside of the immediate Google+ team, PMs didn’t just need the data to fight battles, but had to fight on the very mental model that people used to analyze products. That’s hard. That data centrism also played a role in the desirability of the circles model for Google+. There is a precision to Google+’s circles that simply doesn’t exist in our complicated social lives. We can’t just bucket our friends, because we don’t think of them in such a way. But the circles model made sense in a culture where data and algorithms reign supreme. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the constant request internally for adding logical operators to circles, so you could do AND, OR, and XOR operations on circles. This made sense if you had a Ph.D. in computer science, but it made far less sense for a product designed for everyday users. The product managers won that battle, but there shouldn’t have even been an argument. Google+ was also weighed down by its expected integration with every product at Google. It was literally everything to everyone. It was supposed to facilitate the future of chat (“Google Talk”) through Hangouts, be the glue for games across Android and the web, handle the future of news on Google News and Google Reader, and myriad other priorities, in addition to being the personal data layer across the company and a delightful social product to boot. One of the key lessons I learned from the experience that I have drilled into every founder I have worked with is that focus is absolutely everything. As soon as you have two goals, even one that is minor, you start heading toward the center of the convex set of solutions, and your product deeply suffers. Due to this integration, much of it forced, the culture around social at Google had become deeply poisonous by the time I had started. I still remember talking to a member of the Picasa team who told me to “f*** off” when I asked about integrating Google+ into the product. He was hardly the only one, as any number of company-wide emails from engineers could attest. Google may seem to be a placid company on the exterior, but it has an incredible amount of debate internally. The reality, though, is that the general cynicism added high levels of friction to a product launch that was already struggling to find traction. In many cases, it would take more than a year after the launch of Google+ to get anything done, and by then, it was too late. In part due to the secrecy of the project before launch, and in part because of this cynical attitude, the Google+ team had a phalanx of security surrounding its offices, and a strict “no entry” policy for the rest of Google’s employees. Indeed, a full week passed before new Google+ employees were granted access to their office, and interns learned all kinds of tricks for getting around the tailgating alarms, security guards, and cameras to allow us to do our work. Surprisingly, the exclusivity and otherness for the team was helpful, and arguably one of the few things the company got really right. The team needed that separation, to build a new product in a new environment. That experience was replicated as well at Google[x,] to better effect. This is just a smidgen of the context that confronted Gundotra. Back in 2011, it made no sense to me why the head of social for Google was formerly the chief developer evangelist for Microsoft’s various platforms. Getting developers to build apps on Google+ was certainly a key goal, but the everyday experience of using a social product was always going to be fundamental to its success. In retrospect, Gundotra was perhaps the precise person to fill the role. He was one of the few individuals that could get Google+ its breathing room, who could manage Larry Page and other key executives and buy time for the team to make the product what it needed to be. Page would end up moving his office away from the search team to Google+’s building, and would also mandate that company-wide bonuses would be based on Google+’s success. Gundotra’s experience navigating politics at Microsoft were deeply necessary, although unfortunately not sufficient. The challenges were not just cultural. Google is hardly an unknown entity to the world, and its product launches are often front-page news around the world. That tends to work fine for hardware devices like phones and Android, where a new version is merely an evolutionary improvement over a previous one. It is absolutely a trial by fire for a new product that has barely been tested outside of Google’s confines. Building a social product is a deeply organic process. It starts with a spark of imagination, but is refined through careful feedback in the early months of the product’s launch to adjust parameters and features. This process cannot be short-circuited, nor can it be emulated through a beta test. The best social products get it right fairly quickly, but they rarely get it right on the first day of launch. Thankfully, most social products are unknown at launch, so the founders have the time to tinker. Google+ never had such an opportunity. From the very first day of its public launch, millions of people signed up for the service, wanting entry into Google’s newest product. This was the benefit and curse of building a social product at Google: Everyone wants to use it, but you have no way of knowing whether they would stay after the initial excitement wore off. One failure came in those early weeks, when Google+ couldn’t handle the immense load placed on its servers and thus had to hold at bay millions of potential users. Robert Scoble, who quickly found himself among the most circled members of Google+, was regularly crashing Google’s servers because the calculations for counting second-degree friends was taking minutes per page due to his extensive graph. Furthermore, there was only a single data center devoted to Google+ data in the early days, and so the general speed of the site was far slower than users expect from a Google product. It certainly didn’t help that most of the code was written in Java, a language that even with libraries and an IDE is hard to use for rapid prototyping and iteration. Google+’s initial product was pretty dreadful, and it pales in comparison to the product that exists today. During the launch, everyone on the team was lucid about this, none more so than Vic, who consistently asked the entire team for patience in getting the product right. He never stopped his ceaseless march to get Google+ to where it needed to go, and the team made the adjustments and changes needed to make the product an engaging social experience within the next 12 months. By then, however, users had already made up their minds about the product, and they just weren’t going to come back, no matter how much the product had improved. In many ways, Google+ is eerily reminiscent of Healthcare.gov, where federal contracting rules would make it exceedingly difficult to add even the most basic of functionality to that site. Gundotra is certainly more tech-focused than Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services Secretary, but both faced similar organizational hurdles. Sometimes, the goals, motivations, and culture are so diametrically incongruent with a new initiative, that success is really, truly, absolutely impossible. In looking back at my time at the company, I realize I have become more sanguine about Gundotra’s performance. He headed an initiative that was, from nearly every possible angle of analysis, truly professionally challenging. He was never the right person for the product, but then, no one could have been in a situation that required the focused mind of a startup founder with the political skills of a top corporate executive. Google has promoted to succeed Gundotra as head of Google+. This is striking, since he was selected over the head of product, . This decision should make it clear to everyone that Google+’s time as a user-centric social network is over. While most analysts will chalk up the initiative as a failure, I think that is putting it too simply. Google+ failed as a social network, to be sure. But the competitive threat of social and the resulting focus around Google+ finally forced the company to change its product culture, results that continue to benefit the company to this day. It has been more than two years since the headline “Is Google Dead” had any meaning whatsoever. Facebook’s threat to the company now comes from mobile instead of social. Few would have predicted that outcome three years ago. For Gundotra, it was probably the right time to check out and begin a new track. He fought the good fight at Google, assuming the Herculean task of making a company formed by CS grad students into a forceful entrant in social. He failed, as almost anyone would. But he got the language infused in the culture, and that counts for a +1. Which, unfortunately, no one will ever see. |
Facebook’s Mobile Ad Network Is Called “Facebook Audience Network” And Here’s How It Works | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | Next week at , Facebook will unveil Facebook Audience Network, its mobile ad network that will let developers target both standard banners and custom ad units with Facebook’s vast trove of personal data, according to multiple sources. It could let developers monetize, advertisers buy more mobile impressions than News Feed can fit, and Facebook earn money without cluttering its own apps with more ads. Facebook a mobile ad network in 2012. Because it was just a targeting layer on top of existing ad networks that it had to split revenue with, margins weren’t high enough so Facebook paused it to focus on its native monetization efforts. Then in September 2013 it announced it was and this time it would work (apps that host the ads) which would let it keep more of the bounty. On Facebook’s , COO Sheryl Sandberg mentioned these ad network tests saying “Our initial efforts show a lot of promise and we’ve gotten good feedback from marketers.” This week, that Facebook would officially launch the ad network at its f8 developer conference next week. Facebook declined to comment, but I can now confirm Isaac’s report and have discovered more details about the project, including that it’s named Facebook Audience Network (FAN). It will offer both simple and custom ways for advertisers and other developers to harness the power of Facebook’s ad targeting data across the mobile app market. To start, Facebook will strike the deals with advertisers, pushing the 1 million that already pay for promotion on its own site and app to take advantage of new inventory on other apps. Many are already eager to do so. Given more specific targeting parameters, Facebook could previously only deliver a limited volume of impressions because it caps the number of ads it shows each of its 609 million daily mobile users. FAN will let it accommodate bigger campaigns some advertisers want. Facebook will also bring the ad targeting muscle, allowing advertisers to reach people based on biographical and interest data, and likely with cookie-based retargeting, too. Most other ad networks have a limited amount of data regarding who someone is, and that data is often inferred so it’s not always accurate. That makes it tougher meaning to show relevant ads that get results and command high rates for publishers. But Facebook’s social network has convinced people to volunteer tons of deep personal information like work history, education, and favorite movies, plus it can see what apps they use and where they are. Since people stay logged into Facebook, FAN can recognize exactly who the viewer is and show them an ad matched to their profile. In exchange for delivering the advertisers and targeting, Facebook will take a sizeable chunk of what it charges, and hand the rest to the publisher. The ads will be delivered in two ways. First, app developers will be able to easily integrate code to run Facebook Audience Network as a replacement for whatever competing ad network or homegrown solution they use to sell and target their like drop-down banners. If it’s easy to adopt and FAN drives higher ad performance that earns developers more money, Facebook believes they’ll switch. It just has to convince them it’s better than Twitter’s MoPub, AdMob, InMobi, and the rest. This strategy will make FAN immediately accessible to a wide array of advertisers without them having to do much work and without Facebook having to hold their hands. That could let Facebook ramp up revenue while keeping costs low. Facebook Audience Network will work with standard mobile ad units like banners (left) and interstitials (right) The second way FAN will be delivered is through custom ad units tailored to fit the apps they’re hosted in, multiple sources confirm. A navigation app could show “promoted locations” pins that are ads for nearby restaurants or businesses. A lockscreen or homescreen replacement for Android could show “suggested apps” that are essentially app install ads. Or a dating app could show ads for television shows in the form of fake profiles of the show’s characters. If an app is popular enough to have a lot of inventory to sell, Facebook will work with it to bring FAN advertisers and targeting to units that feel natural and don’t overtly disturb the user experience. The ads themselves could promote a range of products. There’s sure to be plenty of app install ads, Facebook’s current cash cow, as developers are desperate for installs and willing to pay. Mobile app re-engagement ads could also be popular. You might already have Hotel Tonight installed, but have forgotten about it. If Facebook sees you Like traveling, and just checked in to a restaurant in Los Angeles, it could show an ad delivered through FAN in another app that re-opens HotelTonight to a $99 hotel room in the city. Big brands and local businesses might also get in on the action, as Facebook’s offline measurement tools can prove that its ads drive in-person sales. Facebook Audience Network doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel for mobile advertising, it just needs to make the wheel spin faster. While piping in advertisers and targeting doesn’t sound revolutionary, it just needs to be better than what’s out there. Ads are a straightforward business. If Facebook Audience Network can show people more relevant ads that are more effective, and it can deliver a better return on investment for advertisers and bigger payouts to developers than they can get elsewhere, they’ll adopt it. Most of Facebook’s revenue comes from the News Feed. The more users look at it, the more ads it can show, and the more money it makes. This is a bit risky. It makes Facebook’s business vulnerable to competition. If other mobile apps like WeChat, Twitter, and Snapchat steal engagement from Facebook, its revenue could sink. But Facebook has something none of its competitors have, in part a relic from growing up in the web age: personal data. It wasn’t started as a single-purpose, super-lean mobile app like today’s upstarts. It’s a full-fledged social network based around rich user profiles. With its breadth of purpose and role as an identity provider and app activity hub, it knows more about people than possibly any company on the planet. Facebook Audience Network allows Facebook to monetize this existing data regardless of whether engagement on its own properties slips. It insulates Facebook from both competition and general market shifts. While the places that people spend time online might change, someone will always pay to target them with ads. Two years ago I wrote a story called Imagine No Ads On Facebook, It’s Easy If You Try. While that might be a little extreme, FAN is a step in that direction. It could let Facebook earn more money while showing the same number of News Feed ads or even fewer. That could let Facebook focus on getting people sharing and volunteering data on its properties that it monetizes elsewhere. Plus, if Facebook can lure developers with the promise of cash payouts for showing its ads, it could also sell them on its Parse mobile-backend-as-a-service. In that sense, FAN could round out and strengthen Facebook’s platform services. FAN may take a few quarters to spin up as Facebook rolls it out and advertisers test the waters. But if Facebook’s native mobile advertising business is any indicator, it has big potential. Facebook has used its deep targeting data to weather the shift to mobile, helping it to beat earnings estimates seven quarters in a row. In it made 59%, or $ of its ad revenue from small screens. By Q4 2014 FAN could start contributing meaninfgul revenue to the company. The question remains whether Facebook’s users will be freaked out if they notice their personal data is being used to target ads outside of Facebook. While they might not be gung-ho about it, we’ve seen the public endure the rise of retargeting, which somewhat creepily uses the sites someone browses to show them related ads later. With time, users may grow accustomed to Facebook-personalized ads on other sites. If they’re going to see the ads anyways, you could argue it’s better to see ones that are actually for things they want. It will be interesting to watch if and how Facebook offers an opt-out of being targeted by FAN. f8’s goal is to show developers with how to “Build, Grow, Monetize”. By helping one app gain users by paying another to host its install ads, its solving the latter two problems simultaneously. Until now, Facebook has been a parking lot, charging advertisers for space on its property. The launch of FAN will see it evolve into a bridge, collecting a toll for delivering advertisers elsewhere. |
Crowdfunded Gadgets That Let You Play Music, Charge, And Wash | Ross Rubin | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | Musicians have trouble spending time away from their instruments. But bulky instruments, especially guitars, aren’t very portable and cannot be left in cars or public places where they may be stolen. Those with busy lives who like making music are left with few options. The allows traveling musicians to travel easier. This mini guitar has one string and uses an app and electronics to allow the user to make music on the go. With the iOS app, users can add effects to their music and play with either an acoustic or electric guitar sound. The FretPen is the size of a normal pen and even comes with a pen attachment so it really delivers on its name. This product uses Bluetooth technology to deliver wireless music to your smartphone. Using the app, the FretPen user can then edit the music they’ve made however they wish. The more devices people keep on their person as they go about their day, the more likely it is that they’ll need to recharge at some point. Of course, with everyone facing the same dilemma, finding a public outlet can be increasingly difficult. Portable charging solutions are readily available, but rarely ideal. Winner of the Best of Show Award at CES 2014, the iDAPT is a portable recharging solution that is flexible in terms of compatibility and in how much power it can output. As its name implies, the Modulo can be paired up with other Modulos to offer more charging capacity, and more ports to connect devices to, allowing users to share power and keep more devices powered without the use of outlets. The Modulo is about the size of a current smartphone, so it fits almost any pocket and works with thousands of different devices. The washing machine has seen subtle changes to bring them into the 21st century, but their designs have remained largely the same. One inventor has made the washing machine simpler, more energy efficient, and more compact. The has a slide-out drum, not unlike a trash compactor, and can handle loads of a single garment all the way up to a winter comforter and duvet. The Reason weighs the load of laundry, calculates the appropriate amount of water and detergent, and custom tailors each cycle to only use what is needed to clean garments. The entire device is operated with a single button and can handle loads up to 12 kilograms. |
Pure Internet | Josh Jones-Dilworth | 2,014 | 5 | 3 |
The Internet wasn’t supposed to be so…Machiavellian. In 1963, and his wife set out on a landmark road trip, the goal of which was to educate and enliven the people they encountered with tools for modern living. The word “tools” was taken liberally. Brand wrote that “a realm of intimate, personal power is developing.” Any tool that created or channeled such power was useful. meant books, maps, professional journals, courses, classes, and more. In 1968, Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), an underground magazine of sorts that would scale in a way no road-weary Dodge ever could. The first issue was 64 pages and cost $5. It opened with the phrase: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” A year after WEC’s start, on October 29, 1969, the first packet of data was sent from UCLA to SRI International. It was called at the time, but with it the Internet was born. Brand and others would come to see the Internet as the essential, defining “tool” of their generation. Until its final issue in 1994, the WEC’s 32 editions provide as good a chronicle of the emergence of cyberculture (as it was then called) as you can find. Cyberculture. It’s a curious and complicated term in today’s society, isn’t it? Cyberculture is at once completely outdated and awfully relevant. As Fred Turner , Brand is a key figure in the weaving together of two major cultural fabrics that have since split — counterculture and cyberculture. Brand is also immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s as a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And Brand famously assisted researcher Doug Engelbart with the “ ,” the outline of a vision for technology prosthetics that improve human life; it would define computing for decades to come. The Merry Pranksters, still from the movie Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy — an elite East Coast high school, and an institution of traditional power if there ever was one. He was a parachutist in the U.S. Army. He graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford, studied design at San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State. He also participated in legal studies of LSD and its effects with Timothy Leary. That’s hardly the typical resume of a technologist or an entrepreneur or an investor. But it should be. The business of making culture has been for too long now controlled by people who live outside it. It is my opinion that the Internet of today can and must be countercultural again, that cyberculture should — needs to be — countercultural. That word , carries with it the connotation of liberal idealism and societal marginalia. Yet, the new countercultures we’re seeing online today are profoundly mainstream, and drawn along wholly different political lines. The Internet is its own party. The Internet has its own set of beliefs. Springs have sprung the world over and this isn’t simply a nerd thing anymore. We all care passionately about Internet life and Internet liberty and the continual pursuit of happiness both online and off. Yet if the Internet is a measure of our culture, our zeitgeist, then what does it tell us about the spirit of this age? Our zeitgeist certainly isn’t what’s trending; it’s not another quiz of which TV character you are; it’s not another listicle. I changed the global power structure and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And Facebook. And Twitter. What is this generation’s Rolling Stone? What is our Whole Earth Catalog? It’s an important question because if the Internet is defining our culture, and our use of it defines our society, then we have a responsibility to ensure and propel its transformative impact, to understand the ways cyberculture can and should be the counterculture driving change rather than just distracting us from it. There are beacons of hope. I eagerly await Jon Evans’ fantastic in these pages each weekend for reasons like . The , a publication I co-founded, documents today’s cyberculture through the lens of online communities — virtual locales in which we arguably “reside” more deliberately than any geography. You should also be reading , , and . Even Vanity Fair has turned to this theme, successfully I think, with articles like . Rolling Stone is doing a pretty of being Rolling Stone these days, too. I’m terminally optimistic, and I believe that counter-cyber-culture is inherently optimistic, as well. Even despite the U.S. government’s overreaching on privacy and “protecting” us from data about our own bodies, despite Silicon Valley’s mad rush to cash in on apps rather than substantial technology, despite most online media’s drastic descent to the lowest common denominator and even lower standards of journalism, I remain…optimistic. We have found a courage in our growing numbers online. People old and young can be be bold and defining on the Internet, underwritten by the emotional support of peers everywhere. We’re voting for what we want the world to be, and how we want it to be. Why do you think Kickstarter works so well? We fund things that without our help are unlikely to exist, but ought to nonetheless. Our “likes” and “shares” are ultimately becoming votes for the kind of future we want to live in, and I’m optimistic that we will ultimately wield that responsibility with meaning and thoughtfully. Tumblr. 4chan. Etsy. YouTube. We have emigrated to these outlying territories seeking religious freedoms, cultural freedoms, and personal freedoms alike. We colonized, and are still colonizing, new environs each day and every week. We claim and reclaim the Internet like so many tribal boundaries. We’re winning more often than not, thank goodness. Aaron Swartz heroically beat SOPA and PIPA against all odds. Yahoo against PRISM. The Internet against cancer…with pizza. My godmother knows what Tor is. The virtual reality community rebelled when princely Oculus sold to Facebook, for the reason that VR is a new superpower and a new countercultural medium that we’re afraid might have fallen into the wrong hands (I don’t believe that’s actually the case, but that’s grounds for another post altogether). So, yes. A countercultural moment all our own stares us in the face. Like Brand, I hope we can manage to be politically aware and socially responsible in a way that technology begs us to be, without giving ground to the idea that the Internet is anything but . Civil disobedience is a different game when the means of production and dissemination have been fully democratized. We seek differentiated high ground from which to defend our values. We build new back channels to communicate unencumbered. Instead of making catalogues, we make new categories. We wield technology, perhaps unaware on whose shoulders we stand, but at the same time free from the anxiety of influence. We aspire to be more in that sense. We want and we give and we need and we will have…pure Internet. |
eBay To Settle Antitrust Suit Regarding Its Hiring Practices For $3.75M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | This week eBay announced that it has agreed to a settlement with the United States Department of Justice, and the Attorney General of California, regarding a non-hire agreement with Intuit. The settlement will include the company paying out $3.75 million to cover compensation to impacted employees, along with various fees and costs. The settlement will need court approval before it is final. eBay is the opposite of contrite: “eBay continues to believe that the policy that prompted this lawsuit was acceptable and legal, and led to no anticompetitive effects in the talent market in which eBay competed.” Apple, Google, and two other technology companies recently reached a with 64,000 workers who were harmed by similar no-hire agreements in which large tech companies refused to hire from each other. This, naturally, distorted the market, rebalancing it in their favor, and lowering labor costs inside the industry. Labor costs are what employees call salary. According , we’re all done: “Bill Baer, the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said his office doesn’t have any other active investigations into recruitment practices by companies.” Other suits could crop up. The companies in question weren’t even given the financial equivalent of a haircut for their misdeeds. Baer agrees, ironically: “The behavior here was blatant and egregious. Part of what we’ve done here is make it abundantly clear to high-tech companies that the antitrust laws apply to them. You can’t innovate your way around the antitrust laws.” You can, though, innovate your way out of paying material, impactful fines. |
The Hackathon Is On! | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | The Hackathon is officially underway here in the Manhattan Center in New York City, where hundreds of coders have gathered under one roof to build something awesome and hopefully make a few friends. The Hackathon has always been the way we kick off our Disrupt NY conference each year, and as usual, this year is better than any Hackathon before. We have some incredibly talented coders who are using some amazing APIs, thanks to our sponsors, with $5,000 going to the winner and a number of sponsor prizes to be handed out. The coders have exactly 24 hours to build and then one minute to pitch on stage. The top three hacks will then have the chance to do their pitch on the Disrupt main stage. We’ll be tracking the happenings of the Hackathon throughout the weekend, with live streaming coverage of the presentations starting tomorrow afternoon. |
PayPal Strategy Exec ‘No Longer With The Company’ After Sending Inappropriate Tweets | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | PayPal’s new director of strategy Rakesh “Rocky” Agrawal . The company publicly confirmed that the relatively new hire is “no longer with the company” after sending a series of bizarre and insulting tweets last night. Agrawal , after working for many years as a consultant to payments and commerce companies. Hired as their director of strategy, he said at the time that he would be tasked with “help[ing] small businesses and entrepreneurs understand online commerce and payments.” (The hire was made despite previous disparaging comments from Agrawal , which he presumably had to educate small businesses about.) The honeymoon was short. After having the “best night of his life” at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, Agrawal sent a binge of . Those tweets, some of which insulted PayPal VP of global communications Christina Smedley, were deleted… But not before the Internet got hold of them. (This morning, Agrawal blamed some of the tweets on the .) Rakesh Agrawal is no longer with the company. Treat everyone with respect. No excuses. PayPal has zero tolerance. — PayPal (@PayPal) PayPal confirmed that Agrawal has left the company in a , but declined to say whether he left voluntarily or was fired. For what it’s worth, he seems to have offered his services to Foursquare, promising that he could make it a “$50 billion company”… No word on whether or not they’re interested in retaining his services. |
The Censorship Effect | Lydia Laurenson | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | The 29-year-old founder of VKontakte, Russia’s largest social network, just got “ ” and left the country. That is, Pavel Durov described himself as fired, although there were previous rustlings of . Durov’s departure was accompanied by much commentary about the censorship climate in Russia. He himself announced that he plans to create a new social network, and that he moved because “the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment.” This comes right on the heels of the U.S. IPO for , a social platform that’s sometimes called “China’s Twitter.” Mashable recently reported that when Sina Weibo filed its IPO, it Chinese censorship specifically as a risk factor. How much does censorship affect digital media from a business perspective? I’ve recently been researching cross-cultural social media while working on some articles . Unsurprisingly, it’s clear that censorship has a huge impact on how social platforms develop and on how individuals use them. Some of the specific effects of censorship can be surprising, though. , the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and other experienced commentators have that censorship can actually strengthen dissent when very popular sites get taken down. For example, a person who only visits YouTube for cat videos will be alerted that something big has gone wrong if YouTube is blocked, even if that person wouldn’t normally pay attention to the news. I’ve also heard tales of how censorship and its pal, propaganda, strengthen social media ties. “In China, the Internet plays a much deeper role in society because all the normal media is propaganda. You know that what’s appearing in state-run media is not objective, but something on the Internet might be,” says , the global managing director for international marketing agency Ogilvy & Mather. This is supported by other marketing reports like from management consulting firm McKinsey, which notes that Chinese consumers value the brand recommendations of friends, family, and social media influencers far more than American consumers do. However, there are plenty of situations where social media platforms are decimated by censorship. Some data crunching by the Telegraph in the U.K. that last year’s Chinese “war on rumors” — and more importantly, the war’s associated arrests — caused Sina Weibo usage to drop off a cliff. No wonder Weibo called censorship a “risk factor” in its IPO. The writer and anthropologist Sarah Kendzior, who researches authoritarian states in Eastern Europe, has “In authoritarian states, the circulation of state crimes often serves to confirm tacit suspicions, and in some cases, to reaffirm the futility of the fight. Fear, apathy, cynicism and distrust are as common reactions to these quasi-revelations as are outrage and a desire for change.” “What I think is interesting is how much of the authoritarian state mentality people take when they leave the country,” Kendzior tells me. “I see the same fear and wariness about social media from people who have fled Uzbekistan, as people who are still there. It’s very hard to shake off self-censorship.” Kendzior also mentions from 2011 where someone, probably the Uzbekistan government, created a fake activist who only existed on social media. Then they spread the news that the activist committed suicide. This was an effective strategy to weaken ties by spreading fear, anxiety and distrust. “It means everyone’s suspicious of everyone else,” explains Kendzior. “It makes everyone wonder: Am I talking to a real person?” China’s blockade on Facebook, Twitter, Google and other high-profile American platforms has arguably had some protectionist side effects for local industry. I’ve often heard China’s social media landscape compared to the Galápagos Islands — Darwin’s closed-off archipelago, which famously evolved many unique animal species due to its isolation. In other words, when China blocked most major U.S. social platforms, its government created an ecosystem where local platforms that came later to market could flourish. Censorship can carry other unexpected popularization effects, too. “Google Reader was really popular in Iran,” , the director for International Freedom of Expression at the , tells me. “The reason for that was that it enabled people to read blocked websites. You can’t easily block one Google service without blocking all of them, so people in Iran could use Google Reader to read blogs that they couldn’t normally get because of censorship.” On the other hand, China’s fencing-off of American digital services has also fenced off sites that use them for account authentication. For instance, a given site may not actually be blocked in China, but it will be if its users have to log in via Facebook. It’s rarely easy to figure out censors’ goals and methods, but in 2013, three Harvard researchers published some work on the problem (here’s the of the study by King, et al.). They managed to gather millions of posts on Chinese social media before the government reached them, and then they analyzed which ones were censored. Their primary finding was that the Chinese government doesn’t appear to censor criticism on social media, but it does censor social media posts encouraging collective action. In fact, the government even censored stuff that could encourage collective action around figures who the government supported! This analysis implies that the Chinese government will happily track open criticism, and that it will closely observe dissidents’ connections to each other but crack down on anyone who tries to build a power base that it can’t control. That makes some sense — although it’s worth noting that the study was published in May 2013, which was before the June “war on rumors” smack down and the subsequent arrests that eviscerated Sina Weibo’s user base. A lot of people, especially Americans like me, have strong emotional reactions to censorship. But whatever our feelings, we need to put them aside long enough to understand how and why censorship happens, especially those of us who work in the global media. We’ll see how the situation continues to develop — and how journalists, brands, and platforms adjust to it. Image by |
SweetLabs Picks Up HP As Its Fourth OEM Partner | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | SweetLabs has picked up another OEM partner, HP, to preload its software platform that includes a Windows Start Menu replacement on some of its PCs. SweetLabs, the creators of Pokki, a popular Start Menu and app tool, have placed their focus in recent quarters on helping OEMs boost per-device margins. In short, the technology they provide to consumers is used by OEMs to drive revenue on shipped computers. App recommendation and install advertisement is a growing business. Pokki, which also has deals with , sits on newly shipped computers, providing an alternative to the new Windows Store. TechCrunch learned of the HP deal after the company for Pokki use on its machines. SweetLabs confirmed the deal, but declined to elaborate further. SweetLabs has raised . SweetLabs, and its Pokki product, have evolved through time, starting as a way to run mobile-esque apps on traditional Windows, to a Start Menu replacement tool that also encompassed prior function, and now to an OEM-facing tool that builds on prior development. The old airline joke applies: Want a million dollars? Start with a billion and build PCs. Microsoft is gunning to make up for lost time. It intends to bring back its own Start Menu to Windows, and also push the Windows Store. SweetLabs is working to survive both by pivoting to OEMs instead of consumers, so far successfully. We’d know more with revenue numbers. |
Lost In Translation — Don’t Mistake British Reserve For Lack Of Ambition | Contributor | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | This post has been ‘brewing’ in my mind for a number of years now. It’s only taken a shape worthy of publication thanks to Julian Rowe, principal at Horsley Bridge (that Blue Chip investor in the world’s great tech VCs). During a recent meeting, Julian and I were talking about the cultural differences we’d observed between the US and UK, and discovered how much we agreed on. The words that follow are largely Julian’s, the thoughts are ones we share. It has often been said that Silicon Valley is not a place, rather a state of mind; a state of mind that celebrates ambitious innovation, coupled with a healthy disregard for fear of failure. As Britain’s tech start-up scene has blossomed in recent years, there are signs that something of a Valley mindset has evolved with it, with the very best British tech entrepreneurs now seeking to build companies as large and disruptive as anything emerging from the West Coast. However, as the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw observed, Britain and America are two nations divided by the same language — an observation which points not only to what each understands by ‘gas’ or ‘pants’, but also to how they expresses themselves more broadly. British reserve and American exuberance may be well-worn clichés, but like most clichés they carry an underlying truth. While British and American entrepreneurs increasingly harbour similar ambitions, when it comes to articulating them, cultural norms have a tendency to reveal themselves. In pitch situations, this can materially hamper British entrepreneurs’ ability to raise money. As a broad generalisation, US entrepreneurs tend to be adept at treading that fine line between confidence and arrogance when pitching their ideas and ambitions. Clearly there will be exceptions to this in both directions. However, the proportion of US entrepreneurs who can articulate a big idea, while demonstrating the energy to execute, is remarkably high. The evidence is mounting that in Britain there are growing numbers of entrepreneurs with the talent and ambition to go toe-to-toe with the best from the US. Yet after years of sitting in pitches with both British and American entrepreneurs, it has become clear to me that Britons struggle to express their drive and ambition more often than their US counterparts. This is certainly not to say that they don’t have the drive in the first place. Rather that where a British VC (or, like me, an investor who has lived in Britain for many years) may recognise a steely resolve lurking below the surface, US VCs can be left scratching their heads and underwhelmed. Much is lost in translation. Even European VCs with high levels of exposure to US entrepreneurs – and to investing in the ‘West Coast’ style — may not be attuned to a British entrepreneurs’ more reserved approach. To be clear, it is not being suggested here that entrepreneurs should go into pitches with VCs promising the world (unless, of course, you have a clear plan that demonstrates that you can actually deliver the world). Rather that an understated ‘under-promise and over-deliver’ type of approach does not always work well when raising capital. We’re also not advocating that a tub-thumping entrepreneur is necessarily more effective than a more reserved, follow-my-example type. This is not the primary assessment that VCs are making when looking for energy and conviction from the entrepreneur. But they do want to sense – and see — that the ambition is there to build a massive company, as stated goals can quickly become the targets towards which people end up aspiring. VCs also want to see that a founder will have the self-belief required to weather the inevitable challenges and setbacks along the way. It is undoubtedly a positive for the British tech ecosystem that in recent years US VCs have proven willing to invest more frequently and at earlier stages in the most promising British tech start-ups. The experience they bring of helping build early fledgling companies to massive sustainable success stories can be invaluable. Furthermore, with the US a vital market for most large tech companies — and with most of the world’s tech giants headquartered there — the deep US networks some VCs can bring are immensely powerful. A number of British-based companies are likely to attest to this such as Huddle, Just Eat, Hailo, SkyScanner, NewVoiceMedia, Far Fetch, ViaGoGo, Funding Circle and TransferWise, all of which have attracted top-tier US venture capital. Moreover, at Index we routinely partner with US VC firms in backing tech companies from across Europe. Take Criteo, elasticsearch, iZettle, Mimecast, Soundcloud and Zendesk, for example. Yet in order for more British tech startups to tap into this trend, perhaps tech entrepreneurs in the UK need to get better at speaking to American investors in their own ‘language’. Perhaps, too, US investors need to recognise that the understated, self-deprecating British entrepreneur may in fact have the hidden depths required to build a really big business. Don’t mistake reticence for lack of ambition, nor a seemingly modest plan for a lack of confidence. There’s every chance they have both in abundance. They just have a different way of communicating it. |
Gillmor Gang: Pattern Baldness | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Topics include Twitter Dead media bait, FourSquare’s move toward the new cross-app model championed by Facebook, the Google+ backslide, and Microsoft in the free lane. No matter how much the market wants to quantify the Twitter opportunity, the rest of the world is more concerned about how to process the stream. Notifications are reaching a first stage crescendo where the quality of your social cloud can be measured in the time you wait to click, and the relative weight of those who matter. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @borthwick, @dbfarber, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Managing Growth In A Volatile Market | Glenn Solomon | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | Over the past several years, founders have been operating in a steadily improving macroeconomic environment. Stock market performance has mirrored the economic recovery, with the tech-heavy NASDAQ having posted meaningful gains in four of the past five years and only 2011 posting a modest 1.8 percent loss. Leveraging this economic and stock market performance, venture capital firms have raised increasingly more capital and have begun to invest larger amounts in emerging private companies at growing valuations, moving rapidly to do so. However, high-growth tech stock performance over the past 6-8 weeks has put a huge dent in the euphoria that was beginning to emerge in venture capital land. Since early March, star performers have been shellacked, wiping out gains and compressing valuation multiples in the process – as examples, shares of , , and are all down between 20 percent to 50 percent. This type of prolonged volatility affects public investors, but it will also impact VCs, founders, executives and employees of private startup and growth companies. In a stable market, the rules of the game are well-understood – the milestones needed for future financings and the valuation metrics and IPO timing are all predictable. This isn’t to say things are easy, but they’re not full of surprises. All of this changes when volatility in the markets increases dramatically, calling preconceived notions into the question. Things can get erratic and unpredictable, making life tough for even the most experienced founders. If the markets go into a prolonged period of volatility, founders at all levels should prepare for a new type of playing field. There are three key areas of focus for a founder in a world with volatile capital markets: The venture capital market generally moves one to two quarters behind the broader equity markets, especially in a downturn. During the past two big moves down in the NASDAQ, the Internet bubble pop of 2000-2001 and the global recession of 2008-2009 were both closely followed by sizable declines in venture funding. Therefore, founders should not expect venture capital to be as easy to raise or in plentiful supply if the macroeconomic volatility continues or escalates. In the context of venture capital, founders have a maximum one to two quarters of leeway to raise a bigger round, even if dilution is larger than desired, to prepare for a long winter. It’s critical that founders have a plan to live off of this round indefinitely. If the market swoons, switching the company to a self-sustaining plan, where outside capital is no longer needed, could prove a life saver. As a founder, very few people, if any, are as passionate about your company and mission as you are. Employees, customers, and partners usually gain more appetite for risk in a stable or rising market. However, in highly volatile markets, this appetite for risks often abates, and these groups can grow more fearful. Therefore, a founder should prepare for such a scenario by explaining to colleagues that everyone is on a long journey together. Everyone should be reminded that big success stories from the past typically experienced big bumps on their paths. Founders and executive teams can also put plans in place to soothe customer concerns and closely monitor those whose own livelihoods may come into question in a tough market. Same goes for key partners. In rocky seas, founders cannot afford to lose key parts of their ship or best crew members. In a tough market, many of those who haven’t planned suffer wounds. This provides others, especially those who are prepared and who hold full coffers, with an opportunity – M&A. In this scenario, prepared founders should have a shopping list of companies they’d like to acquire and be ready to pounce at an opportunity to make an attractive deal. Additionally, founders should keep similar lists of potential employees they’d like to recruit or poach out of other companies, and similarly should track potential customers and partners who may have been previously unavailable, as they may come back into play. Volatility can be a scary thing, but as a founder, if you prepare by giving your company more runway, securing key assets, and readying an offensive playbook when others around you are paralyzed or weakened by fear, you could be in a position to make the most out of an uncertain situation. |
What Games Are: Is Formal Game Design Valuable? | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | There’s a number of us who claim the title of “game designer” but we aren’t really a contiguous group. Game design isn’t a set job description that applies evenly across all companies (or even projects within the same company). It doesn’t have a set of standard tools, or a standardized kind of output. Unlike engineers or artists, it’s hard to pin down what the deliverables of game design are, and as a result we tend look like geniuses or frauds. Given such haziness the question must be asked: Do you really need a game designer, or is “game design” just helium? In my travels I’ve encountered three ideas of what game design is or should be. The first could be described as the “architect” model. In this model there tends to be one person at the heart of a large studio acting as the keeper of the flame. He’s the visionary leader and – although he usually leads a team of more junior designers who focus on individual areas (combat, mechanics, balancing, user interface, content, etc) – is perceived as the all round central creative voice of the game. Architect-style designers are few in number and often regarded as games industry celebrities. The second model could be described as the “maker”. This game designer is a hands-on type who had an idea for a game and proceeded to draw, diagrammed, visualize, program and write the whole thing end to end. Either she did this alone or with some help, but the overall impression she exudes is of the talented core at the heart of a project. A lot of indies sit in this maker category and use tools like Unity3D to just make the thing that they see in their head and let the Universe sort out what it all means. Then the third model could be described as the “engineer”. Some shops (large and small) declare that they don’t have any truck with “game design” and instead have product managers corralling coders who iterate endlessly on living projects. In this context “design” usually only equates to content creation (levels, quests, etc) but the fundamental dynamics of the game are held to be pure code. Everything is kept deliberately collaborative and the game will be done when it’s done, which sometimes means never (and sometimes that’s ok). All three approaches have significant advantages depending on the type of game being made, but they also have their shortcomings. The architect-designer runs into disconnects. While he knows the experience that he wants to engender, translating that into specifics is often a major problem. Architect designers become the most hated people in their own teams because they will set the course for what the team should deliver, but then throw out the resulting prototype three, six or twelve months later because it doesn’t match what they saw in their minds. They generate a lot of waste in the quest for a certain feel for a game, on a lot of grand experiments costing millions of dollars, and yet the end results are usually quite ordinary. The most common criticism against architect-designers is they are too egg-headed, too indecisive and too much about their own ego. The maker-designer runs into a very different kind of problem. She may be cash-strapped and hacking her game together, but her larger issue is how she loses sight of the forest for the trees. The maker-designer barrels away on the minutiae of implementing her game but doesn’t realize that its core dynamic doesn’t extend well. Or that her premises for making the game are false. Or that there’s a big disconnect between the mechanics and the aesthetics (“ludonarrative dissonance”). Unlike the architect who can’t think down enough to turn ideas into action, the maker-designer doesn’t think up enough and consider how action is supposed to fit together. Meanwhile the engineer-designers’ problem is that groupthink leads to conservatism. At first this sounds counter-intuitive as surely more minds approaching a solution should be more creative, but they’re not. This is one of those areas where . In software there are direct solutions to definable problems like utility, ease of use or speed. In games the problems aren’t problems in that sense: They’re creative problems. How to make something fun, different, exciting and entertaining is rarely a matter of making better technology. But because engineer-designer groupthink tends not to see that, it demands validation for ideas before they are implemented (to avoid waste), and thus filters all innovations into those that will fit inside iterations and those that are never attempted. This is why engineer-designer studios get stuck making the same game over and over. There is a fourth model. There are some people who consider game design to be an emerging formal discipline. They’re the people for whom the mechanics of games, the user interaction patterns, the economics and their outcomes, are fascinating in the abstract. They tend to think that game design is actually a way of looking at games, seeing the operations of the mechanical machines underneath and then applying that learning to the design of new games. They also believe that their approach to design is teachable. Many formalists operate in the academic sphere, trying to get the next generation of students to think on games. Some do so in the service of pure mechanics, others to impart design as a foundation upon which to then build aesthetic vistas or narrative experiences. Formalists view games both pragmatically and philosophically, as a language of communication and expression built on components like verbs and loops outside of either the technical or the aesthetic. The potential value of the formal game designer is as a translator. The formal designer does the complex work of turning the architect’s high concept into mechanical specifications that make sense, saving studios millions of dollars and thousands of hours while preserving a creative direction. The formal designer helps the maker by assessing her ideas and prototypes, identifying the early gaps and then challenging her assumptions. The formal designer gives the engineers a direction that breaks them out of the cycle that they’re stuck in and maybe spins them off to somewhere else. Well in theory. When we formal designers go to dinner we talk animatedly about the ins and outs of our approaches. Napkins become instant design documents as we draw out circuit-like diagrams for the molecules of our games or their mechanical patterns. We talk of verbs and tokens, pools and emitters, actors and conditional rules, and we’re all roughly on the same page. The problem is that nobody else is, and so the biggest criticism of formal game design is that it seems to be bullshit. High concept bullshit perhaps, but bullshit nonetheless. I think the answer lies in standards. The rejection of design has something to do with creative control, but mostly quality of output. The history of game design documents, for example, is an ignominious tale of massive and poorly-written bibles foisted upon engineering teams then left to figure out what they’re supposed to do with them. Since nobody knows what to look for in a design there’s often too much room for vamping, and therefore waste. The lack of solid answers to key early questions turns cheap design time into expensive code and art time, and this is why game design gets no respect. For formal game design to help solve problems it has to becomes less dense and more deliverable-driven. The rest of the world is never going to sit down and learn our lexicon, so it’s up to us to figure out how to express design in a way that everyone else finds accessible. Then maybe design’s value will become apparent for all to see. |
After Technology Destroys Capitalism | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | In honor of , let’s think big for a moment. No, no, no. Bigger than that. Consider all the furious attention paid to economic inequality of late, courtesy of Thomas Piketty and . He argues that increasing inequality is an inevitable outcome of laissez-faire capitalism, and proposes we fix this with a global wealth tax. I humbly suggest that he’s thinking much too small, and that the 21st century will be far too transformative to be contained within the worn and shabby walls of capitalism. …Given that intro and title, I should quickly disclaim: I am, in fact, a big fan of capitalism. I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to have traveled across as much of the developing world as without being convinced of the enormous benefits (on the whole) of technology-powered capitalism and/or capitalism-powered technology, which have made billions of lives around the globe immensely better over just the last few decades. But: (Don't get me wrong. I'm a capitalist. But let's not pretend that capitalism is oh-so-awesome: it's just the best available alternative.) — Jon Evans (@rezendi) What if today’s technology is beginning to finally make better alternatives possible…but just as clean tech is being thwarted by the trillions of dollars previously sunk into fossil-fuel infrastructure, our collective investment in capitalism itself is forestalling superior post-capitalist alternatives? If that sounds completely crazy, consider this: Will ownership turn out to be largely a hack people resorted to before they had the infrastructure to manage sharing properly? — Paul Graham (@paulg) Replace “ownership” with “capitalism” up above — and I would argue the line is fine — and I submit you wind up with an awfully similar conclusion. Similarly: “We are beginning to witness a paradox at the heart of capitalism … enables an emerging collaborative commons to flourish alongside the capitalist market,” Jeremy Rifkin in the . And: “What should happen if and when the continuous production of surpluses stops being desirable or even necessary? The point, if you will, when capital becomes excessive to humanity’s needs?” , of all publications, the . I think it’s worth at least considering the possibility that we are, very slowly, inching towards a post-capitalist society. But if and when we get there … capitalism will be replaced with what, exactly? A centralized command economy? God, no. Everyone singing “ ” in perfect seven-billion-part harmony? Seems highly unlikely. Even in a good-case low-scarcity future, there will still be hierarchies, highly unequal distribution of resources, etc; it’s just that the rules of distribution will be different, and hopefully better. I strongly suspect that any post-capitalist society will be built around a technologically sophisticated , very very a la Cory Doctorow’s . Obviously we already live in a world full of subtle reputation economies — you see one in action any time a celebrity gets special treatment. Nowadays, though, technology could enable something much more codified and quantitative. (Crude hacks like Klout may at least , for all their flaws.) But any working reputation economy can’t be subject to centralized control. That would offer too much opportunity for corruption and abuse. Instead, it would probably need some kind of distributed algorithm which could reliably orchestrate and verify transactions without any central authority. If only such a system had arisen of late… Oh. Right. Huh. . How would a blockchain-based post-capitalism reputation economy work? I don’t pretend to know exactly, this is obviously highly speculative and hand-wavey, but: suppose that every month everyone got 100 Repcoins to allocate, along with some incentive to dole them out to people they don’t personally know … but Repcoins, like nuclear isotopes, dissipate over time, with a half-life of a few months. Voila: the artists, activists, and companies which many people think are awesome would collect, and spend, meaningful — albeit temporary — reputational wealth. I’m just spitballing here, to illustrate that we can and should think way outside of the box; currency with a half-life might not be the right idea. Regardless of the implementation details, though, all utopias (and this isn’t really a utopia, more like a next-itertopia at best) share the same key problem; how do you get there from here? If there’s no answer, this is nothing but meaningless speculation. But this time I think I actually see a way. Let’s back up for a second. I’ve been that the combination of new technology and old capitalism will soon drastically worsen inequality. It seems to me that technology will soon destroy jobs faster than it creates them, if it hasn’t started to already. Which is a good thing! Most of the jobs it destroys are bad, and most of the ones it creates are good. Net human happiness should be vastly increased, not decreased, by this process — but, unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t work that way. Even titans of capitalism and tech leaders increasingly agree. The : “Technology and globalization are transforming jobs faster than many workers can adapt.” The : “combined with other new technologies, robots might make the distribution of income far more unequal than it is already.” : “Technology makes wealth inequality worse.” : “Inequality will become the No. 1 issue for democracies.” And now, thanks in large part to Piketty, capitalism itself has become suspect, too. “Capitalism simply isn’t working…the gap between rich and poor threatens to destroy us,” , which also that the last five years in the UK have been “the longest period of falling real incomes in two generations.” There are alternative views, of course. Bruce Schneier’s interesting take on . A bizarre piece which . But it’s fair to say that both technology and capitalism — which, remember, brought us much if not of whatever progress we’ve made as a species over the last two centuries — are now being blamed in tandem for economic stagnation, inequality, and unfairness across the developing world. Suppose for a moment that this is true, that we have indeed now reached some kind of critical inflection point. (We can’t know this for sure, no matter how hard we look at the data; the nature of inflection points is that there’s no compelling evidence for them until well after they occur.) What’s to be done? Well, better education won’t hurt, but as the , “most new jobs are likely to be lower-wage jobs.” We already see highly educated graduates competing for , while millions of long-term unemployed have been “a mishmash of personal savings, odd jobs, credit card debt and loans from friends and family.” And so a lot of people have been banging the drum for a . The idea has become that ‘s review of Piketty actually for this: “”Why not propose a universal basic income: an inheritance, effectively, for everyone?” But as the Boston Globe : In the United States, the idea of handing out unconditional government allowances is seen, understandably, as a nonstarter … it just sounds too much like a socialist fantasy … the idea is widely seen as too radical a departure from the status quo. Working out the mechanics would be a nightmare … people who get free government money tend to work less and get divorced more … by guaranteeing people money without requiring them to do anything in exchange, we decouple their value in society from their ability to do a job That whole “people should work or starve” attitude seems evil and perverse to me — as Politico , “The idea that “full time” work is something foreordained and the bedrock of morality is new, mostly a product of the last century” — but it’s a moot point, because if I’m right, even those angry reactionaries who fulminate about parasites will eventually be forced to accept that there simply aren’t enough jobs which need to be done by people. Consider the fate of America’s millions of truck/taxi/Uber drivers when, as the , the entire concept of a car as an appliance is replaced by cars as the physical backbone of a transportation network or cloud … . The real action is commercial, where — freed from the cost of the driver — the fleet of delivery vehicles can easily expand …All of which is a recapitulation of what . Now let’s take it a little further. What happens in a world, or at least a nation, where most of the population lives semi-comfortably (by historical standards) off a basic income, supplemented by occasional temporary gigs, thanks to the economic output of tomorrow’s technology; a small middle class works at the diminishing number of jobs which can’t be handled by technology; and a smaller-yet minority of the ultra-rich actually design the tech, and/or live off their inheritances a la Piketty? Call it a “low-scarcity” future, as opposed to the full-on Singularitarian “ -scarcity” future. It seems to me that such a world would be extremely fertile ground for the rise of — you guessed it — a reputation economy. The key is that it wouldn’t outright a traditional monetary economy, at least not for some quite considerable time; rather, it would begin to thrive parallel to, and independent of, its capitalistic counterpart. Eventually, though, as I’ve , since we are fundamentally social creatures, in the long run, “at some point it will be better to be awesome than to be rich.” If this is so, then Paul Graham’s tweet up above is true but doesn’t go far enough; capitalism itself will be viewed as a crude but useful hack — albeit one with a whole lot of nasty side effects — which ultimately paved the way to a more enlightened system. I eagerly admit this is all very far from guaranteed; even if I’m halfway right, then I suspect this will all take a handful of decades yet. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong, maybe this will all happen much faster, on a near-Singularitarian timescale. Maybe if your ultimate goal is to be rich, you’re already barking up fundamentally the wrong tree. Because … will any reputation economy reward the lords of capitalism? Somehow, today, with the occasional , that seems . Don’t be too alarmed. This is just a May Day thought experiment. But I’m increasingly convinced that, if nothing else, it’s one at least worth contemplating. Repcoin: a bad name, but still better than “ .” |
A User’s Guide to Disrupt NY 2014 | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,014 | 5 | 3 | Conference is almost upon us and we’ve partnered with some amazing folks to make your experience this year better than ever. ! Join us on Monday for the Official After Party at , sponsored by our friends at . If you’re an arm chair Disruptor, thanks to you can watch the conference action from the TechCrunch homepage or the Disrupt NY event page. : is reprising its role at the Hackathon, providing the platform for our . Thanks, y’all! : The folks over at have generously offered free hosting credits for our intrepid hackers during the Hackathon. Can’t wait to see what gets built using them! TechCrunch wants Startup Alley to get the best support possible while at Disrupt, so we’re continuing to offer free What does that mean? It means that Startup Alley and Battlefield companies at Disrupt are entitled to schedule 1:1 meetings with attorneys from Perkins Coie to get courtesy legal advice and UPS CONNECT for help scaling your business. Don’t forget to sign up. is awarding cash and prizes to a lucky startup which documents its product and experience in the Magisto #StartupLife Movie Contest. and you’ll have opportunity to get on the Disrupt stage. : is pleased to sponsor our fun-filled Hardware Alley day on Wednesday. You can follow and comment on the conference in the twittersphere using the #TCDisrupt hashtag. has long been a TechCrunch partner. If you purchased a ticket, you used Eventbrite. We love them and we think you will, too. If you haven’t purchased a ticket, please go do that |
null | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 4 | 25 | null |
ThriveOn Wants To Make Mental Health Care Affordable And Accessible | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | Since 1986, has equaled about one percent of the U.S. economy, or about $150 billion in 2009. So much is at stake, both financially and for the , that it’s surprising how few tech companies focus on mental health. A gradually growing roster of startups, however, want to make it easy for people who are struggling through an emotionally difficult time to find help. These include Y Combinator alum , , and . Now is getting ready to join that group. The startup, which will launch at the end of this summer, offers personalized 8- to 12- week programs with professional therapists that users can access on their smartphones. ThriveOn’s founders are working with researchers at Stanford University and Washington University in St. Louis to create its programs. “Part of our mission is rebranding mental health. I like to call it the black sheep of health care,” says co-founder Alejandro Foung. “Even hospitals don’t want to deal with it and physicians don’t want to deal with it. Part of ThriveOn is to demystify and destigmatize mental health care.” ThriveOn was co-founded in 2012 by Foung, who studied psychology as an undergraduate at Stanford but ultimately decided not to become a clinical psychologist. Instead, he embarked on a career in tech, working at and before becoming an early employee of , where he met co-founder Nicholas Letourneau. The startup’s advisory board includes psychiatry professors Barr Taylor from Stanford University School of Medicine, who studies the intersection of technology and psychological treatment; Denise Wilfley of Washington University in St. Louis; and Michelle Newman of Pennsylvania State University. During their first meeting with Taylor, Foung and Letourneau first pitched a startup idea that would reduce the amount of paperwork mental health providers need to deal with. But then Taylor “pitched us the idea of widespread prevention, making it affordable, accessible, and less stigmatized,” says Foung. ThriveOn starts with an assessment that looks at your levels of stress and anxiety, how you feel about your body, your sleep quality, social life, and attitude toward food. A chart shows you what areas of your life you can potentially improve. If you chose to sign up, ThriveOn then creates a personalized program based on your results. Of course, privacy is extremely important for a mental health startup. Foung says ThriveOn is HIPAA compliant and uses anonymous, aggregated data from the assessment to figure out what kinds of programs they should offer. ThriveOn’s programs are based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques, in which a client and therapist work together to examine patterns of thoughts that can cause negative behaviors, according to a . “It’s been studied the most within psychology and those principles are what our clinical team uses to construct [ThriveOn’s] programs,” says Foung. “Our whole model is taking research and programs that have been validated clinically and making them more consumer friendly,” he adds. The price of ThriveOn’s programs are still being determined, but Foung says that a program will be under $100 a month. ThriveOn’s therapists interact with users by delivering in-app messages and weekly feedback. Each day’s content takes about 5-15 minutes a day to complete and includes writing prompts (a key part of many CBT programs), breathing exercises, and audio recordings. In many ways, ThriveOn’s concept is similar to , who provides daily feedback about what you eat for a much lower cost than clinic visits. “That’s how technology can play a role by providing engagement, much like you’d expect from any other service on your smartphone. Many health startups are using technology to change delivery of primary care and that is what we are trying to do, to provide great care in a new, more accessible, cheaper way,” says Foung. Though it won’t launch for a few months, ThriveOn is currently working with researchers at Stanford and Washington University in St. Louis to develop its Healthy Body Image (HBI) program, which it is using to test its platform at more than 30 universities in the U.S. According to , the current ratio of college counselors to students is about one to 1,600 and 29% of student health centers place limits on the number of sessions. Furthermore, many insurance providers do not cover private sessions with a psychologist, which means the average rate for an appointment is about $150 to $200. The expense of therapy, coupled with the stigma attached to it, means that many people don’t reach out for help until they are in the middle of a crisis. Instead, patients with mental health issues often rely solely on medication to cope with their problems. In a 2012 study, the American Psychological Association (APA) found that the use of psychotropic drugs by Americans increased 22% from 2001 to 2010, which means that one in five adults are now taking at least one medication. “It’s not because people wouldn’t like to try therapy,” Foung says. “But the barriers are too high and the number of people seeing therapists have been declining every year for the past 15 years.” ThriveOn claims that HBI, a 10-week-long online program that is meant to help users create better eating habits and improve their body image, has reduced disordered eating among users by 50%. HBI is supported by a $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The startup is currently researching the scale and efficacy of HBI through partnerships with college counseling centers. ThriveOn looks for coaches who are licensed, practicing therapists and can spend at least two hours a week (or twenty minutes per day) working with the startup’s clients. “We have personalized content, but also connectivity to coaches who give support and answer questions by text message and voice message, giving you the benefit of that one-to-one connection, but allowing you to do it on your own pace in a personalized way that meets your needs,” says Foung. It’s important to note that ThriveOn is not for everyone. If its assessment shows that someone may suffer from a serious psychological disorder, the company will refer him or her to a counseling center to see a therapist in person. Instead, it targets people who want to improve the quality of their life and deal with stress or bad habits. “ThriveOn is helpful for those types of situations, where you really want someone who is a trusted, known person who can help you think through negative thoughts and behaviors, and provide you with tools and exercises to reframe your thinking and give you tools to do that,” says Foung. “So we’re not talking about someone with PTSD or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.” Foung says that ThriveOn is focusing on building a network of counselors so the company can make good matches for people who need more in-depth, long-term support. Even if someone is not coping with a mental illness, working with a therapist can still be helpful. Though it’s often viewed as an indulgence, therapy is a form of mental exercise that helps clients correct negative habits and builds psychological resilience. Foung says that while working on ThriveOn, he was struck by the fact that schools are . Furthermore, there are a multitude of companies, including , that focus on exercise and nutrition. But although psychological well-being is just as important as physical health, there is still a paucity of companies in the area. “Right now the big brands in this space are drug companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer,” says Foung. “It’s one modality and there should be more options.” |
Peer To Peer Lending Marketplace Prosper Raises $70M | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | a peer-to-peer lending marketplace in the U.S., has raised $70 million led by Francisco Partners, a private equity firm with Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and Phenomen Ventures participating. This brings the companies funding to $145 million. Previous backers include Sequoia Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital, Accel Partners, CompuCredit, Omidyar Network, Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and Volition Capital. Prosper has riden the roller coaster of the peer-to-peer lending, an area which is now leading the disruption in the financial services. Prosper pioneered the concept of people-to-people lending in the U.S with its launch in 2006. The startup hit a in 2008 when the SEC all lending on the platform because the company didn’t register as a seller of securities. Peer-to-peer lending was a newly launched model back then and with the then-new climate of heightened regulatory oversight in light of the financial meltdown, the SEC was being more judicious in its oversight of financial institutions. The startup was able to re-launch its site in 2009 after the SEC the OK to facilitate peer-to-peer lending. The past five years have been spent doubling down on the products, bringing in new lenders and borrowers and establishing leadership at the company. Last year, Prosper brought in father-son team, and seasoned financial executives Stephan and Aaron Vermut. The Vermuts joined Prosper from Wells Fargo, where they led the bank’s first foray into prime brokerage services. At Merlin Securities, Mr. Vermut and his son created a prime brokerage service based on technology that allowed for a customized approach to managing investment portfolios. Merlin Securities, which was also backed by Sequoia and had around $2 billion in assets, was by Wells Fargo in early 2012. Mr. Vermut also spent 14 years at investment bank Bear Stearns. Under the Vermuts’ leadership, Prosper has begun to see impressive growth. CEO Aaron Vermut says that Prosper has grown monthly platform originations from $9 million in January 2013 to over $100 million in April. Last month Prosper crossed $1 billion in total loans originated on the platform, and Prosper plans to hit $2 billion in cumulative loans this year. And financially, Prosper Marketplace “is in a very solid place,” he says. In particular, Prosper has spent the past year focusing on improving the efficiencies os its lending product, and attracting new borrowers and lenders. The company says loan originations grew over 400% since last year and are up 30% from last month. At the end of April, Prosper had 35% share of the online consumer peer-to-peer lending market place. In terms of competition, Prosper goes head to head with the leader in the space Lending Club. Lending Club, which just raised its own large round of funding, also recently expanded to business loans. But Vermut says there are no plans to expand into business loans, and the company will continue to focus squarely on the consumer credit market. Lending Club has also been open about its goal of an IPO, but Prosper says that it has no plans for a public offering so far. “We are focused on building the business and building a company for the long-term. We think we’ve made great progress so far, and we’re very optimistic about our future growth,” said Vermut. |
Twitter Is Here To Stay | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | Rakesh Agrawal’s -trashing tweet disaster — and the subsequent chicken/egg story of whether he — was a slightly surreal turn of events for a company whose most explosive story over the last six months has been whether a notorious corporate raider was going to get his way and it from eBay (he ). To be honest, I don’t think the incident told us much about PayPal or Rakesh Agrawal that we might not have deduced on our own. Agrawal does not mince words in public forums and on Twitter — it’s kind of his thing. In fact it’s . And — shocker — in large corporate structures you have people who loathe each other. And they don’t waste much time stabbing each other in the back over it. The scandal highlighted something else, however: for about how Twitter doesn’t seem to have as much reach as, say, Facebook, and that it seems to suffer from a growth problem, it still matters. At the end of the day, Twitter is still a game changer, a platform that, if or when something happens on it and it’s big, it will make people jump, and things move. Rakesh unceremoniously trashes PayPal where? On Twitter. World reacts. And where does PayPal put its own statement dismissing him? On Twitter, too. (Okay, he quit . PayPal wouldn’t acknowledge that he did. This is a corporation, with formalities and all that.) , is the expiration date for the Twitter’s lock-up, when employees and other shareholders, who have been prevented from selling their post its IPO, can now do so. Given the knocks Twitter has had on recently, there has been some that we could see a big share sell-off of shares tomorrow, resulting in a drop in the company’s stock price. This may end up being the case, but for all the ground that the company has not managed to cover in its business so far, it has demonstrated that it is a must-read . And and . And .
As long as people keep getting fired for things they tweet, is a hold. — Alexia Bonatsos (@alexia) (Alexia owns Twitter shares; I don’t but I still agree with her.) Image: |
Pressing The Button | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | The is almost over. Over the past few months I’ve been writing about my experience crowdfunding and self-publishing a . After running an Indiegogo campaign and coming out with almost $20,000, I’m at the point where I have to start delivering books. When I started writing Mytro I wanted to go the traditional publishing route. I sent it to two agents who, I presume, didn’t trust it to sell enough units and, for all I know, they could still be right. However, I didn’t listen to them and so far I’ve been successful. Here’s what I did to prepare the book over the past few months. I started by rereading what I had written and trying to clean it up as much as possible. I thought I was happy with it until I found entire center sections that made no sense. I needed more help. I found a “developmental editor” named who had edited and written children’s literature. She was sufficiently removed from my own geographic location – she lives in the Midwest – that I thought she’d be an excellent extra pair of eyes without who could give me a bit of grounding. She did. I paid her about $400 for her time and she was well worth it. A dev editor is supposed to smooth down the rough edges. The resulting book was solid but not quite ready. I then ran it by another pair of eyes, our own copy editor Chris Nesi. He checked my spelling and made things more readable. I then got Bryce Durbin, our illustrator, to make a great cover and some inside graphics. Finally I paid an epub designer to I found the designer, Shelley Glasow Schadowsky, on where I originally thought about publishing. All told, I paid about $2,000 for all this work which would probably cost far more if this were a legitimate publishing endeavor. I decided to make the book DRM-free and sent out copies of the epub to backers who could then side-load it onto their devices. I also considered Creative Commons, which would essentially make it free. I’m not quite ready to dump it into the Creative Commons although one of my heroes, John Sudman, just did just that. He available at , which drops the book into Creative Commons once it passes a certain point in sales. It’s a fascinating tool and looks like it could make him some money and grow some readership. “I’ve had books under Creative Commons license for some time now, but it’s been a while since I advertised that fact or made free books available from my site. I like the idea of Creative Commons, but I also like the idea of paying my bills. So instead of steering readers to free versions of my books, I’ve steered them to Amazon and Barnes & Noble and places like that, where I actually can sell them,” he said. “My support of Creative Commons is somewhat philosophical but mostly pragmatic. People are going to copy digital goods – songs, books, movies, whatever. There’s no point in trying to fight that tide. Creative Commons offers a way to ride that tide, as it were. If nothing else, it allows me some measure of publicity, and some goodwill in the bookreading community.” I also didn’t want to sell this thing myself via Paypal or bitcoin. It just didn’t make sense given how much work I would have to do maintaining a web store. After looking around at distribution possibilities, I decided to go with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing as well as their free KDP Select program. This allowed me to get it up on Amazon – arguably the biggest publisher in this space – quickly. KDP Select allows you to set up special pricing tricks, including a time-sensitive discount as well as making the book free for short periods of time. This is a great way to market if you have the right platform, and I’m looking forward to trying them. That decided, I was ready to go. Yesterday morning, on a whim, I looked up the process on Amazon and saw it wasn’t very onerous. It consisted of typing in some book info, uploading a cover, and then uploading the mobi. After a bit of tax information input, I simply pressed a button. https://twitter.com/johnbiggs/status/462597962372485121 An hour later, I was a published author. I’m not done yet. I’m working on getting a print publishing partner to get my print edition out to backers and then perhaps something like CreateSpace to print future editions on demand. I explored printing locally in New York but it ended up being too expensive so I’ve probably settled on printing in Canada. I also looked into printing in China, but it seemed a little resource-intensive to send a few hundred books from Asia. by setting its bot farm to print 75 little rail cars for me. Those will go out with the hardcover editions of the book. Mytratti backers will be getting something a bit more special. We printed 75 train cars for TechCrunch editor , to help support his new book: — MakerBot (@makerbot) In short, this process was far smoother than I expected. While I don’t have the might of a big publisher behind me (which, in some ways, is futzing with my confidence at this endeavor) I keep reminding myself that I am — at least in the eyes of the world — a published author. There are plenty of worse books out there that get published for any number of reasons, and there are plenty of better books that never get published because their authors didn’t have the opportunities afforded today’s self-publisher. As I wrote on , “self-publishing” is no longer a dirty word. “One of the worst things I’ve ever seen was a grunting, sweating man trying to haul the boxes of of his own books to his station wagon after unsuccessfully trying to sell his wares at a strip mall,” I wrote. “He was the vanity press epitomized.” That’s no longer the case. Maybe what I’m doing is vanity press 2.0, full of flashy, scammy websites and easy access to skilled, mercenary editors. Or maybe it’s the next big thing. I don’t know, but damn if it wasn’t a lot of fun. |
HANA Visionary Vishal Sikka Resigns From SAP | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | This afternoon, , Executive Board Member for Products and Innovation, has resigned for personal reasons. The resignation was effective immediately. At the same time, SAP named a couple of new executive board members, including Robert Enslin and Bernd Leukert. The news could indicate some disarray or possibly a power struggle at the software giant, especially coming so close to its , which is scheduled for June 3-5th in Orlando. R Ray Wang, co-counder and analyst at Constellation Research said, the announcement could indicate that power is shifting at the board level. It’s worth noting that Sikka lead the development of HANA, SAP’s big in-memory database product, which the company has up until now seen as a foundational technology. Wang says this marks a big change at SAP, especially since he said that many had seen Sikka as a possible candidate for CEO down the road. Wang said this change could indicate a shift in focus from Sikka’s vision to one driven by Leukert’s approach: A strategy designed around a set of apps. Wang also speculated that with the board changing, this could mean that a new CEO could be appointed soon. “We would not be surprised if Bill McDermott will be named sole CEO soon,” Wang wrote to me in an email today. “This should make for an interesting SapphireNow,” Wang said sarcastically. This isn’t the first time that Sikka thought about leaving SAP. and considered calling it day after the incident. He had come on board in 2002 and by 2008 at the time of the crash, according , he was “having second thoughts about the direction of the company.” The car crash exacerbated those feelings and it was only after some heart to heart talks with company legend Hasso Plattner that he decided to stick around –and over the last six years he has helped redefine SAP as a company. According to , Sikka This was clearly not a figure head. He was a key member of the executive team responsible for driving much of the company’s vision in its attempt to redefine itself as a mobile and cloud platform. With him gone, it remains to be seen what impact this will have on the overall company strategy moving forward, but it will be something that’s interesting to watch moving forward. |
Vrban Wins The Disrupt NY 2014 Hackathon Grand Prize, Indulge And MixTape Are Runners Up | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | convened at the Manhattan Center for the Hackathon. They have worked tirelessly for the past 24 hours. After a long night, the 96 teams all took the stage to present a short and sweet one-minute demo to impress our judges and audience of talented hackers. Only one team could take home the grand prize. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt NY 2014 Hackathon winner. Vrban allows users to explore urban environments using the Oculus Rift. It’s particularly useful for seeing what a proposed building would look like in a particular urban environment. You can vary settings such as sunlight, point of view and location. This allows the user with the Oculus to observe the impact of different decisions in an urban plan, while his or her teammates collaboratively work on the plan by tweaking settings.
Indulge makes your nail salon visits more enjoyable, organized and fun. Just follow the four steps: mark your place, scan your nail polish’s barcode, snap a photo of your manicure and share with friends to inspire. Read more about Indulge .
MixTape is a web app which lets you host the playlists for your party online. Your guests can join and help create the playlist. They will also have the ability to vote for existing songs in the playlist to influence the playing order. The judges particularly appreciated the execution of the team. These three teams will also take the stage once again on Wednesday to demo their projects on the main Disrupt stage — the winner will also get $5,000. But that’s not all — other hacks took home some generous prizes from our API sponsors. Hackathon sponsors include ChallengePost, Concur, CrunchBase, DigitalOcean, Evernote, Hired, Mailjet, Microsoft Ventures, Pearson, UX Awards, Yammer, Yodlee, Alphonso, Esri, Facebook, IsaaCloud, RetailMeNot, Weather Underground and Domain.com have also graciously doled out prizes of their own for the most innovative and interesting uses of their APIs and services. Our judges this time around were BoxGroup partner Adam Rothenberg, NY Tech Meetup executive director Jessica Lawrence, Razorfish VP of user experience Bryan Hamilton, Clothia founder Elena Silenok, and Brooklyn Bridge Ventures partner and founder Charlie O’Donnell. They also insisted on three hacks that didn’t quite make it to the top three teams, but delivered a funny demo on stage. These three hacks were Wisconsin, Disrupt Taco Bell and It Gon Rain. With It Gon Rain, you enter your zip code and Ollie Williams from Family Guy will read you the forecast. Wisconsin lets you pretend that you are in Wisconsin by creating a digital footprint in… Wisconsin. Disrupt Taco Bell lets you maximize the calorie per dollar ratio. Read more about this hack in our . And that’s a wrap for our Hackathon. Congratulations to all the Hackathon participants. Disrupt NY conference starts tomorrow. |
Business Travelers Get A Boost At Disrupt NY Hackathon | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | How many times have you taken a trip for work, landed in a city you didn’t know and wondered how to get the most bang out of that sweet, sweet expense account buck? Thanks to Disrupt, there are now a few apps for that. , , , and all offered up some applications integrating with , , and many more to come up with the optimal business trip. Whether it’s figuring out how to pack for a trip, where to eat dinner and see a show while you’re in town, or even how to save some money while eating out, these hacks mean that (thanks Yogi). Concur Trip offered an all-in-one weather, local activity and agenda tracker, which won the MailJet top prize for its application. CorpSquare won the top prize from sponsor Concur with its recommendation engine based on previous Concur expenses. Dining Proffer served up dining discounts to business travelers based on location and expense account information. Meanwhile, YammCur took a different approach, giving business travelers a way to conserve their dollars and get rewarded for NOT spending a ton of money while traveling. |
Star Wars STREET By 50 Review: These Are The Headphones You’re Looking For | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | Today is a day of celebration: It’s Star Wars Day, and that means on onslaught of Star Wars-themed gadgets – like these special edition STREET by 50 headphones I got to test out, which feature the badging of the greatest freedom movement the galaxy has ever borne witness to. But do they honor the Alliance Starbird and all that it stands for, or do they fall flat? These are good-looking headphones, regardless of which you pick (they come in Rebel Alliance, Empire, Stormtrooper and Boba Fett editions) and depending on how nerdy you are. In my case, nothing would make me happier than to have the rebel insignia tattooed into my flesh for all time, so these fit the bill. The color scheme is fantastic (they’ll match your X-Wing flight suit perfectly) and they’re also portable, comfortable and feel sturdily built. [gallery ids="997388,997386,997387,997389,997390"] I’m not the biggest fan of on-ear vs. over-ear headphones, but these make the experience as enjoyable as possible. The high-gloss plastic in the cable does feel a bit toy-like for something that costs nearly $200, but it also does fit with the overall aesthetic. The oval hard case with an embossed Star Wars logo is also a nice perk. These deliver solid audio performance, although they do tend to bleed a lot of sound, almost like an open back design. They’re fine for wearing on the street, just not ideal for quiet environments like an airplane cabin if you’re listening loudly. They deliver rich sound, however, and don’t venture too much into the bass-heavy lows emphasis that tends to be popular among modern headphones aimed at younger buyers these days. Noise cancellation is also decent, though they’re not in the same realm as something with active noise cancelling like a Bose QC15. Overall though, these are more than meets the eye. It would’ve been easy for SMS Audio to be lazy with the sound on these headphones given the flashy branding tie-in. But in fact, when buying these Star Wars headphones, you aren’t just getting a $200 logo on $5 sound; these are the real deal, and should please even discerning music lovers. I take Star Wars very seriously, and sometimes cringe at seemingly opportunistic uses of the brand and nostalgia, but these thankfully don’t fall into that category. They’re clearly designed by people who know and respect the series and its tradition, and they also offer up high-quality audio that would impress regardless of looks. |
‘Disrupt Taco Bell’ Hack Stretches Your Dollar On Late Night Burrito Runs | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | It’s 1 am, you’re hungry and you’ve only got $5. How do you figure out what the maximum amount of grub you can snag inside that budget is? You could try to do some drunk math but that’s never going to work out. Or you could try the time-honored method of rolling up to the drive through and scrounging for coins in the ash-tray because you’ve over-estimated your wallet size. That’s what the TechCrunch hackathon Taco Bell Disrupt is all about. You shoot an email off to a special address with a dollar amount in the subject and it rips you off a menu of the maximum amount of food you can get under that limit. The list comes back with a list of items and the cost to you, as well as calorie counts to help you see exactly how much coal you’re giving your internal furnace. — just the kind of thing that we like to see at the hackathon. The hack was created by Kunal Batra, a Developer Evangelist at Sendgrid who came down with a friend just to have some fun. He scraped the Taco Bell website to snag the data and used a python backend to compile that together into the menu. Batra says that the genesis of the hack was a Taco Bell trip taken at 3:30 on the day of the hackathon after he really couldn’t figure out what to make. While he was there he had a brainstorm about maximizing the amount of food you could get for your money. This kind of hack is fun to me because it’s relatively simple in nature and seems frivolous on the surface. But, if Batra decides to productize it, I could totally see it taking off with college kids and people with limited money to spend on food. Add in more restaurants and dining options — and maybe allow people to search by calorie count if they’re on a diet — and you’ve really got something. And the model could also be applied to things that are more practical after you grow out of late-night taco runs. What about figuring out how many groceries you can stock in the fridge with a fixed income, or how many toys you can afford to buy your large family? Very cool possibilities, exactly what we love to see at the hackathon. If you want to try it for yourself, send an email to with just a dollar amount (no dollar sign) in the subject and nothing else. Happy taco-ing. |
Getting Girly At the Hackathon With Indulge: The Nail Snob App | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | Ladies (or so inclined gentlemen). Picture yourself at the nail salon, searching for the precise color you want applied to your fingers or toes. If you’re anything like me, you make that selection based on snappy nail polish names. After you’ve dried and you’re on your way, you text a picture to your girlfriends and inevitably the question comes: “What is the name of that color?” …Blank. “I can’t remember!” Indulge, introduced at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon aims to solve a very real problem, automating what was before a legitimate concern among the impeccably manicured set. Here’s how it works. When I arrive at the nail salon, I check in through Indulge. After choosing my color, I then scan the bar code on the bottle and Indulge records that data for posterity. Once I’ve dried, the app will send me a push notification prompting me to take a picture of my beautifully polished nails, which I can then send to my various social networks if I want, all through Indulge. The trio behind the app, Velina Ivanova, Hristo Hristov, and Paul Llanos, built version one of Indulge at the Disrupt Hackathon, but it took Ivanova a full year to convince Hristov that the app solves an need. Only recently did he relent and join the hackers overnight at the Manhattan Center. Ivanova (like me) had been manually performing this common manicure dance on a regular basis. Judging by my personal reaction backstage listening to the Indulge pitch, I think it will be well received by nail enthusiasts. [gallery ids="997270,997269,997268,997267,997266"] |
Ooberdocs Takes Incoming Email Attachments And Copies Them Into Your Dropbox Account | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | Tired of having your files pile up in different buckets, and want better harmony between your email and cloud storage account? , built during the and presented onstage today, solves that issue by copying attachments sent to your email address into your Dropbox account, as well. The hack is currently live, functional and slightly buggy. At the moment, you can use with Gmail, and other webmail services, though an issue is keeping Yahoo mail offline for now. The creators of Ooberdocs intend to add support for OneDrive, Google Drive and Box in the future. I think that building for Dropbox first in the cloud storage is similar to building for iOS first in the mobile world. The service, for its youth, is well-featured, with support for sending SMS when you receive new files, and the ability to properly sort where they land in your Dropbox account. For now, the service is free. Co-creator told TechCrunch that he could see charging a few dollars for the service down the road and that his team views the product as “a cloud storage add-on.” It’s always fun to attend hackathons and see what creative people have bouncing around in their heads. It’s even more fun when what they built could make people’s lives better. |
The oRouter Is A Tor-Powered Linux Box That Secures Your Internet Connection | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | Longtime TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon participants, Kay Anar and Gilad Shai showed off their hardware hack today called the “ ” – a Linux-powered, Raspberry Pi-like computer offering secure Wi-Fi access via the Tor network. The idea is to offer an affordable alternative to to your computer, as well as a way to more easily connect to Tor over mobile devices like an iPhone. Kay says the idea for the project actually came to him via a non-technical friend, who had asked him if there was something she could just plug into the back of her computer in order to secure her connection from snooping. An answer wasn’t readily available. The oRouter uses off-the-shelf components purchased at Radio Shack, including a low-power single board computer from Texas Instruments, and low-power USB Wi-Fi dongles. The device only requires 5 volts of power to run, which allows it to pull juice from something as simple as a portable charger, for example. The version of the oRouter demoed at the Hackathon today supports up to 32 simultaneous connections. As an end user, the process of using the oRouter is designed to be exceedingly simple. It’s zero configuration, meaning that you plug it in and then connect to the Wi-Fi network it provides. Unlike the Tor download, it requires no additional software in order to work. Once connected, as you browse the web and use online services, you’re actually using Tor (via Wi-Fi), thereby securing your communications from eavesdropping. In addition, for an extra layer of security, the oRouter’s MAC address (hardware address) changes every 10 minutes. In the future, more advanced configurations may be made available for technical users, which would allow them to tweak the settings for their own needs. While originally intended to just be a hack, the two teammates are now considering taking the project further, possibly raising funds via investors or crowdfunding, in order to put the oRouter in production and start selling. |
3Dioo Hardware Hack Is A DIY Oculus Rift | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | It’s always great to see hardware hacks. This one, called , just demoed on stage here at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2014 hackathon turns a standard Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone into a 3D capture device — and a viewer, when used in conjunction with a couple of hardware add-ons. The array for capturing the 3D is made from cardboard, held together with a few well-placed TechCrunch stickers, with a space to slot in the phone and four mirrors arranged so that they split the photo or video footage into two — enabling it to generate a basic stereoscopic output, without the need to have two lenses on your smartphone. The captured 3D photos or videos can then be viewed using a dedicated hardware viewer, which the two-person strong hack duo also put together overnight. The viewer (pictured at the top of this post being checked out by one of the hackathon judges) is made from a lens in a $10 View Master 3D toy, with a space to slot the smartphone at the right distance from the lens to be able to view the 3D. The viewer looks much like a DIY Oculus Rift. Albeit, the output of 3Dioo is obviously a lot less immersive — more pixellated than . But hey, it was put together in 24 hours. The two person team behind 3Dioo is Oscar Torres (pictured below showing the mirror array), and Candida Haynes. Torres was part of the , with Thingscription. “3Dioo is a 3D system for your phone. It’s a kit,” said Torres, showing off the rig backstage. “It’s going to have to be different for every single phone — so we’re going to have a kit for an iPhone, a kit for an Android of different types, because of the different sizes and different cameras.” “I wanted to do something more physical [than the Thingscription software hack],” he added, when asked how the team came up with the hack. “I’m really interested in 3D technology so when I saw this little View Master I was instantly thinking ‘maybe I can do something with this’.” The hack team has put together with tutorials showing off , and is hoping to use these ‘open source’ instructions to build a community of DIY 3D enthusiasts. “There’s the specs there… I give a link to where you can buy a View Master. And I give a sample video you can try automatically,” said Torres. “I want to see what people do with it. If I see a lot of interest with this — I even included the measurements for the mirrors — if anyone wants to do it, I want to see what happens. Essentially making it open source, and see what sort of attribution happens.” Sample videos can be posted on YouTube, which is where the team is hoping a community — built off the back of 3Dioo — might start to build around sharing and viewing DIY 3D. Torres added that he wanted to make something simple, given the constraints of 24 hours hacking — but which still had the potential to build something bigger than the sum of its cardboard parts. “I know from previous hackathons that some ideas that a lot more to make than others so something like this is so simple — it’s more about the community, and less about the product,” he said. “If a community builds around this we can do something with it — just the brand. Kind of like the MakerBot was open source but the brand maintained and there’s value in that. Just because it’s open source doesn’t mean you can’t capitalise on that… And the market’s pretty big for 3D.” As well as being a hackathon veteran (and winner of “a bunch”), Torres also has a location commerce startup, called . “We’re trying to build the Amazon for locations,” he said of that app. “If you look for a book in Amazon you see the vendors that sell it in our app. Once we get more scale you’ll be able to search for the book and see where around you it is — which stores are selling it.” |
Watch The Disrupt NY Hackathon Live Stream Right Here | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 5 | 4 |
Over 1,000 hackers registered to participate in the 24-hour Disrupt Hackathon, and now comes the moment of truth. Each of our hacks will have exactly sixty seconds to pitch their product to a panel of incredible judges and our guest audience. There are dozens of API sponsors to work with, including CrunchBase, Evernote, Yammer, and Weather Underground, and each will be giving out prizes to their favorite hack. Meanwhile, TechCrunch will award $5,000 to the ultimate winner, and the top three teams will have the opportunity to present on the Disrupt main stage during the conference. So sit back, relax, and enjoy watching sleep-deprived coders try to explain their latest build. |
Hackathon Project Data Injector Adds Public Data To Anyone’s Facebook Page | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | This morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon, web developer William Wnekowicz and teammate Edward Yu presented , a Chrome extension that adds relevant public data links to a user’s Facebook profile page. The public record data is sourced from , and makes a pretty good case for opening up Enigma’s API further – an API that is today limited to a hundred calls. That limitation prevents the hackers from publishing their Chrome extension to the Chrome App Store for widespread use, unfortunately, but they’re talking with Enigma about their options. For the purposes of the demo, Data Injector only looked at a small handful of public record data (under a dozen sources, i.e.). In their presentation, William pulled up his own Facebook profile, where a small box appeared under his photo at the top left. In this section, labeled “public data,” there were links to public records related to him being a pilot, like his license info. That’s actually a little creepy, he told TechCrunch backstage, since it makes his home address visible and, with the Data Injector hack, actually visible directly on his Facebook page. Asked if he intended with Data Injector to make a point about the “creepy” potential of an Enigma API, he says he likes pushing the privacy angle a bit. But in reality, he sees where this extension could be useful all around the web on places such as a business’s homepage when looking up a company’s board members, for instance, or when pulling up housing data like tax records, and more. Data Injectors’ two co-creators met here in New York at the hackathon, and say while they would be happy to continue working on the project after the event wraps, it’s all heavily dependent on what Enigma decides to do with regard to opening up its API further, or perhaps adding a login component so users could sign into the Chrome extension with their Enigma account in order for Data Injector to work. |
WhichBeers Wants To Help You Find The Right Beer | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | At our TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon today, Andrew Kae and Xiaoan Yan presented one of the most useful hacks of the day: a new way to find good beer. Imagine you’re in the store and looking at a giant display case with beers you’ve never heard of. Which one should you buy? WhichBeers uses image recognition and a database of beer reviews to give you a personalized recommendation. Kae has a Ph.D. in computer vision from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was previously at Cornell. Yan is working on a masters in Natural Language Processing at Cornell right now. While both worked with the same advisor at Cornell, the two only met at the hackathon. The app would allow you to take a picture and then annotate it with recommendations. Ideally, it would learn your preferences over time and then pull relevant reviews from sites like BeerAdvocate and similar beer review sites. Kae told me that one problem the team faced — and why it could’t show a live working demo today — was that there just isn’t a huge image dataset for beer yet, which makes it harder to be very confident that the six-pack it recognized was really Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale and not Bridgeport Brewing’s Hop Zar. Another factor that makes the image recognition harder is that many stores also put their beers into large refrigerators with glass in front of them, which adds lots of shadows and reflections that most image recognition algorithms don’t handle well. To solve some of these issues, the team is thinking about maybe using MIT’s . [gallery ids="997154,997153,997158,997159"] |
It’s Everybody’s Birthday At The Disrupt NY Hackathon | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 4 | As I write this, it’s about 1am on a Saturday night in New York City, yet is still humming along. Ryan Lawler and I spent the past hour wandering around, interviewing several sleepy-but-friendly participants. Fair warning: Although a hackathon doesn’t seem like an obvious venue for this sort of thing, the video does end with a brief flash of violence. That’s because some madman brought a box of Nerf weapons to the venue. Naturally, after Ryan insulted my honor (or was it the other way around?), I had to challenge him to a duel. We also participated in a couple of impromptu birthday celebrations. After all, why wouldn’t you want to spend the most important day of your year with TechCrunch? |
Tencent To Buy 11.3% Stake In Mapping Company NavInfo For $187M | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | , one of China’s largest Internet companies, will spend 1.17 billion yuan, or $187 million for a 11.3% stake in , one of the country’s largest mapping companies. Best known abroad as the maker of , Tencent’s products in China include a large range of consumer mobile products and NavInfo will help power its location-based services. The deal is notable because Tencent’s rival Alibaba Group, which is prepping for its massive IPO, , one of NavInfo’s main competitors. AutoNavi powers Alibaba’s location-based e-commerce mobile services, as well as other navigation offerings, including map engines, location search, and cloud computing services. Alibaba in May 2013. At that time, Alibaba did not have its own standalone map service, unlike rivals Baidu and Tencent, which meant it had a gaping hole in its product roster. Tencent will buy 78 million shares from NavInfo’s owner, state-run China Siwei Surveying and Mapping Technology Corp. The deal will make Tencent the second-largest shareholder of NavInfo. As TechNode (TechCrunch’s partner site in Shanghai) , NavInfo is “one of the veteran mapping companies in China, starting off with business-facing mapping data business” and began to focus on last year. NavInfo may be used to power Tencent’s mapping apps, streetview products, and Tencent and NavInfo announced the deal in a , which was first reported by . |
@WalmartLabs Buys Adtech Startup Adchemy, Its Biggest Talent Deal Yet | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | the retailer’s Silicon Valley-based innovation lab and R&D center, has now made its twelfth acquisition with the purchase of e-commerce technology company , its biggest deal yet in terms of people. Founded in 2004, and backed by nearly $120 million in outside , Adchemy had experimented with a number of business models over the years. And though it had been making steady , CEO Murthy Nukala as recently as last November, that it was not yet profitable. Adchemy founder and CEO Nukala is not joining as a part of the deal, we’re told. While deal terms are not being disclosed, we’re also hearing that Adchemy was mainly a talent acquisition for the retailer. The team of 60 who are joining @WalmartLabs include a number of skilled engineers, including Rohit Deep, previously the Chief Architect and Engineering Lead at WebEx; Ethan Batraski, formerly the head of search innovation at Yahoo; and data scientist Esteban Arcaute, a Stanford Ph.D., also previously at Yahoo. “They built an incredibly strong team of talented folks who understood product search, product relevance, SEO, SEM, and data scientists and Ph.D’s who could build this technology,” explains Jeremy King, who leads @WalmartLabs. The Adchemy team’s combined skill sets overlap with many of the same things Walmart itself is working on today, including improvements to its product search engine and product classification systems, for example. We also understand that Adchemy’s technology and IP is not going to replace Walmart’s existing infrastructure, but instead it will be about enhancing the talent pool in three specific teams working at @WalmartLabs today. For starters, Walmart has been working on improvements to its sites’ search engines (e.g., Walmart.com and SamsClub.com) over the years, having acquired semantic search company to help it build up its team. Though , the engineers remained. Together, they built on top of Kosmix’s “social genome” technology to launch . Those changes immediately improved conversions on Walmart.com by 20%, the company now tells us. With the Adchemy buy, a number of that company’s engineers will now be tasked with continuing the efforts started by that team. Another area where Adchemy’s engineering talent will help in product classification. Walmart added 6 million products to its site over the last year, and plans to add millions more in the months ahead, we’re told. Walmart, like other online retailers, has to classify items using the data provided by the manufacturer, reseller, or marketplace provider, to determine what the item is, how it should be categorized within Walmart’s own product database, how it should be tagged, and more. Adchemy’s engine was a bit different from Walmart’s in this case, however, as it was focused more on ad targeting. That is, it would determine if a page was about shoes or electronics, for instance, while Walmart’s tech goes deeper, trying to determine things like “which shoe,” or “which gadget.” Finally, Adchemy’s in-house expertise in SEO and SEM who will also be joining the @WalmartLabs’ team. Adchemy had a complicated history, last winter. The company began with six products but killed off five of them over the years, including its lead gen business, . Its most recent efforts had focused on semantic search technology, which why it ended up with the high-caliber talent that attracted Walmart’s interest. The idea was to extract the “meaning” from a retailer’s catalog, so it could respond with better product listing ads in Google based on that deeper understanding, rather than just keyword matching. It customers included Macy’s, ModCloth, Overstock.com, American Eagle Outfitters, Finish Line, Resolution, and a couple dozen others. Those customers were alerted about this deal, and will have their contracts terminated when it closes. |
Google Wallet Is Coming To Glass | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | is coming to Glass soon. According to a source close to the company, Google is currently testing a way for Glass users to send money to their friends through Wallet by simply using their voices to ask Glass to “send money.” The company is testing this service internally right now, but chances are it will launch to all Glass users in the near future. To install the Wallet service on their devices, Glass users currently have to be signed in to a computer on Google’s corporate network. From there, they can install the Wallet glassware, and after setting the service up from there, they are ready to send money from Glass. Given that Google has also rolled out a similar feature , it’s not a huge surprise that the company would also want to bring the ability to send money from Glass. The use cases, after all, are pretty much identical. Imagine you’re at a restaurant and you want to send your share of the bill to a friend. You simply ask Glass to “send money,” swipe through the interface a few times and you’re done (that’s assuming your friends let you wear your Glass with you, of course). By default, Google takes a 2.9 percent fee for these Wallet transactions or 30 cents — whichever is higher. |
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