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Audience Choice Winner Roadie Automagically Tunes Your Guitar | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | is a nifty little robotic device. It’s a small box that you put on your guitar’s machine heads. You connect it to your phone and it automatically tunes your guitar, all by itself. Earlier today, the startup was selected as the audience choice in the . And it’s no surprise. Roadie is accurate, fast and easy — if you’re a musician, it will save you a lot of time. “Our company is called Band Industries, and we specialize in music tech products. We basically want to bring richer experiences around music,” co-founder and CEO Hassane Slaibi told me in an interview before going on stage. The company’s first device is Roadie — it costs $79 and is available to pre-order on the . The startup plans on delivering the product in July. In the meantime, it did a Kickstarter that ended in January 2014, in which the company raised around $180,000. “We worked for two years on the technology out of Beirut, Lebanon,” Slaibi said. Then, the company got accepted into Haxlr8r, a startup accelerator based in Shenzhen, China. In Slaibi’s own words, Shenzhen is “the electronics capital of the world.” Roadie’s key advantage is that it works with any guitar. Electric guitars, acoustic guitars and string instruments with guitar-like machine heads are all compatible with Roadie. “It’s one device for all guitars,” Slaibi said. When it comes to the technical foundation, Roadie connects via Bluetooth to your phone. The phone is like the heart of the device. It listens to your instrument when you pick a string, and it sends comments via Bluetooth so Roadie can adjust the string. In addition to the Kickstarter campaign, the team of four has so far only raised $25,000 from Haxlr8r. And now it gets the chance to demo its product on the Disrupt stage in front of our tough team of judges. ( ), ( ),
( ), and
( ). You have a good consumer product, why don’t you focus and continue in that direction?
We’re all musicians in the company. We love this field so much. We don’t think a guitar tuner will change the world, and we will change the world of music. How do you guys win? On product, brand, community?
It’s the product itself, definitely. It makes life so much easier. Electronic tuners are $9 on Amazon, why would I buy this?
It opens up a new dimension to your music. Why don’t you guys see yourself as a community company? GoPro is really building a community.
I agree with that. If you get extra special things, that could be an interesting play.
That’s somewhere we’re looking into. We’re looking into creating a service where you can see how a certain artist tunes its guitar. It seems like a niche market, but your execution is really good. There may be undiscovered options, and I wish you good luck.
Thank you. [gallery ids="998309,998308,998307,998306,998304"] |
Oculus CEO Says Selling To Facebook Convinced Big Developers To Build For It | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | “Do we want to be Game Boy, or iPhone or Android?” That’s how Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe says his team considered the . Without the financial backing, Oculus may have had to scale back its ambitions. But now, virtual reality platform. On stage during a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt NY with co-editor Matthew Panzarino, Iribe followed up saying, “I think Game Boy is an awesome platform, but I think you’ll see handheld gaming largely disrupted by the mobile market…And for VR where we want to go, connecting a billion people, do you want to be building a platform that has a billion people on it, or 10 or 20 or 50 million people…for game developers, they’re going to a have a lot more success shipping their content into…a platform that has a billion users, more than 50 million or 100 million. And “ You can watch the full video of Iribe’s talk below: Developers kicked and screamed when Facebook bought Oculus. But Iribe told me backstage that the acquisition actually convinced big developers that Oculus was a stable platform they could confidently build for. It turns out that for all the talk about hating big corporate parent companies, what matters more for devs is knowing their efforts won’t go up in smoke because the platform runs out of money. And Facebook has very deep pockets. Though there was a short period of grumbling, Iribe says “We announced our deal a few days after [the Oculus Developer Kit 2 went on pre-sale] and continued to a see adoption go through the roof. We sold as many units in the first 12 months of DK1 as we did in the first month on DK2.” You can watch our backstage interview at the top of this post. What is most fascinating isn’t the volume of entrepreneurs piling into Oculus, but that Facebook lured in the top developers: “The biggest thing I think for us was that to a new platform — because they need to see the monetization, they need to see the return, they want to see a huge audience — . And so now for the general developer, there’a greater chance that you’re going to be able to develope something and then create a business off of our platform, knowing that with this partnership, it’s going to be bigger, better, faster.” Really, this outcome shouldn’t be such a surprise. When , some developers got pissed and threatened to jump ship. But in the year since the acquisition, Parse has grown from . Yes, developers on both platforms now have to deal with Facebook getting an eagle-eyed view of what’s working and what isn’t. If someone builds a great messaging feature on Parse or a private VR chat room on Oculus, Facebook might know about it sooner so it could clone it. That fear seems to be supersceded by the promise of stability, though. Having Facebook behind Parse assured developers that Parse’s platform wouldn’t disappear, and instead would have resources to accelerate its progress. The same seems to be happening to Oculus. The company has even that will work with universities to get students building VR experiences. In fact, there’s a trickle-down effect happening now around venture capital investment in virtual reality content developers. Iribe tells me “VCs are now investing in developers’ projects” around Oculus, because they too know the platform has longevity. [gallery ids="997996,997989,997988,997987,997986,997985,997984,997983,997982,997981,997980,997979,997978,997977,997973,997972"] |
Evercam Makes It Easy To Integrate Cameras Into Any Project | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | Programmers don’t like to leave the confines of their offices. Therefore, access to closed-circuit cameras would be a great addition to any programmer’s arsenal, at least to see if the pizza guy is outside. From this problem was born . The system works in three ways. You can connect your IP camera to the system to . For example, you can press a big red button to take snapshots using the Big Red Button app or create time-lapse videos with one click. Developers can use the system to add camera input to their apps and create apps for Evercam streams. Finally, manufacturers can integrate with the system as well, ensuring that new cameras will be Evercam compatible. The creators, Vinnie Quinn and Marco Herbst, began by selling whiskey in college (really!) and then founded Jobs.ie in 2000. After selling it in 2005 they decided start a hosted CCTV service called Camba.tv. Camba evolved into Evercam. Evercam recently closed a €500k round and will be raising a Series A in the coming year. “Companies like and Sensr.net are hosted camera software, but not developer orientated. Companies like Milestone are camera developer platforms, but are not hosted,” said Herbst. “We’re the best of both worlds, offering a Twilio like experience for cameras.” [gallery ids="998294,998293,998292,998291,996932,996931,996930,996929,996928"] “Camera projects are hard,” he said. “The video security market is quite low margin and well catered for, including by older analog technology.” The team hopes to turn IP cameras into “Social Media Cameras,” “Marketing Cameras,” and “Business Information Cameras,” turning what used to be a dumb product into a smart one. They are launching today at during TC Disrupt Battlefield. |
Mobile Social Networking App Skout Acquires Nightlife App Nixter | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | , a social networking app that’s backed by $22 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, just Skout’s CEO Christian Wiklund (pictured above) said he pursued the deal to find a better way to marry offline and online interactions in Skout’s app with real-world events. While Skout is an app that helps connect strangers all over the world, Nixter’s platform lets party seekers find upcoming nightlife events in their city, buy tickets, see the guest list or get VIP accommodations. “This will be a huge value-add service to our users. I also think it’s highly monetizable and it will build even stronger loyalty from our users,” Wiklund said. Wiklund didn’t close the amount Skout paid for the company. The deal was a mixture of cash and stock. Nixter, which came out of Santiago, Chile, was founded about two years ago and it now operates in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It had raised about $200,000 in angel funding, largely from a group of angel investors down in Chile. The company’s co-founder Francisco Saez says the company weighed a bunch of different options. They’re competing against a number of other apps including “We had other offers, but we worried about losing a lot of power and autonomy until we started talking with Skout,” Saez said. Wiklund said that Nixter will be kept as a separate app and brand, although it will be heavily integrated into Skout. As for Skout, while Wiklund didn’t share overall audience numbers, he said the company hit profitability about six months ago. The app sells points, which are like a virtual currency that can be redeemed to unlock special features like the ability to see who has checked you out. Wiklund says that 30 percent of Skout’s users are in the U.S., while the remainder are abroad. |
Simply Grid Is Putting Clean, Easy Power Where People Need It | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | Power is readily available for most people in North America these days, which can make it hard to grasp how annoying it can be when it isn’t – especially if you’re trying to run a business. TechCrunch Battlefield NY 2014 competitor Simply Grid aims to offer power from the established electrical grid in situations where people would otherwise have to use gas-powered generators or other more expensive alternatives. The first use cases that Simply Grid is working with are providing power to food carts like hot dog vendors, and also to idling vehicles, like emergency services providers and repair/utility trucks. Before, these vehicles and food carts had to employ costly gas generators, or simply run their engines (which ends up adding a lot of wear to a vehicle) in order to stay powered on, heated, and ready to operate. “In New York, just about on every other corner there’s a Halal cart, or a hot dog cart or a coffee and pastry cart,” explained Simply Grid COO and founder Jeffrey Hoffman. “And these guys are sitting there running those little two kilowatt generators to power their carts, their blenders, lighting and all this type of stuff. These are really expensive to run, and cost about $5,000 or $6,000 to run per year for them to operate and fuel those, plus you’re looking at something that produces a tremendous amount of pollution.” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXaBqDAKQBg&w=420&h=315] Instead, Simply Grid offers simply stations that connect to the existing power grid in frequently used locations on the street. Food cart vendors essentially have staked territories that they return to over and over again, so it’s fairly easy to install the permanent locations that Simply Grid uses to get them connected. Service and emergency vehicles likewise tend to park and idle in the same areas while doing their work, so it’s a matter of consulting with the agencies involved to figure out where to place them. [gallery ids="998252,998251,998250,998247,998246,998245,998244,998243"] Each installation costs a few thousand dollars, with costs varying depending on whether the spot is located on private or public land, how far away it is from a mains to tap into, and so on. Once set up, it works by offering vehicles a place to plug into, and then once those people unplug and send a message to stop their billing, they’re charged for the amount of power used. With emergency vehicles, there’s a way for it to automatically shut down provision of power when the vehicle departs to make the whole process easier. The company is currently looking at possible expansion into powering refrigeration units at huge delivery depots like Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. The opportunity here is to simplify and make green a process that has been super expensive, complicated and terrible for the environment in the past, and Simply Grid has leveraged tech new and old to make that happen. Q&A Q: What are your margins like? A: They’re reasonable. Q: What exactly is your product, is it the hardware, software, both? What’s your core competitive advantage? A: Yes it’s all of the above. We’ve got really good hardware, we’ve got patents on the hardware we built for the fire department. Our cost of building the control system is only a couple hundred bucks, which is much better than competing tech. Q: 20 years from now, will you be all over, or will you dominate a single market? A: We’re strong in solving the problems for municipalities and I think that’s where we’ll excel. Q: How long is the payback period? What’s the cost after the payback period? A: Depends on location and other factors, and the cost can still offer 70 percent margins and people are happy to pay that. |
Alignable Is A Social Network For Local Business Owners | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | With all the handwringing about the future of local business, a startup called aims to connect those businesses and help them work together. The company was co-founded by Eric Groves (formerly a senior vice president at Constant Contact) and Venkat Krishnamurthy. Groves, who’s the company’s CEO, said that most local businesses don’t have a way to work with each other or even know what’s going on at stores down the road. “It’s amazing how local businesses truly feel like they’re alone,” he said. With Alignable, on the other hand, businesses can connect with each other, send each other messages, and post to a communal news feed for their town. One common use case, Groves said, is to can mutually promote their sales and events through their various Facebook followings and email lists. Another use case is asking for advice, like how to obtain a certain permit. As an example, Groves showed me the page for Hollister, Calif. the small town where I used to work as a newspaper reporter. There was a fair amount of activity, with a post from the Hollister Downtown Association about an upcoming beer and wine tour at the top of the feed, and many of the businesses having reposted it to their own Facebook Pages. While the focus is on businesses, Alignable creates consumer-facing and for its communities, too. Even though the company hasn’t done much marketing or press, Groves said Alignable is now being used by tens of thousands of communities in all 50 states of the US. In many cases, he said the initial interest is driven by downtown associations, main street organizations, and chambers of commerce. (However, he noted that the community pages aren’t controlled by any one entity — anyone can post what they want.) Alignable has raised $3 million in funding led by Saturn Partners (an early Constant Contact investor), with participation from NextView, LF-VC, Boston Seed, Longworth Partners, and CrunchFund. (Like TechCrunch, CrunchFund was co-founded by Michael Arrington. Also, Arrington was sitting a few yards away from me as I wrote a lot of this post.) |
Boomerang Commerce Helps Retailers Get Their Prices Right | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | Today’s e-commerce retailers are under serious competitive pressure from all sides, but maybe most importantly from Amazon. That company has developed a massive big data analytics service for its online retail operations that can track and adjust prices based on internal and external data every two minutes. Given that most users make their purchase decisions based on price, that can be a serious problem for smaller competitors and even large legacy retailers with online operations. wants to give these companies their competitive edge back by providing them with a dynamic pricing engine that takes into account over 100 factors, including their competitors’ prices. Founded in 2012, the company is officially launching at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today. Boomerang Commerce CEO and co-founder Guru Hariharan, who previously worked at Amazon and eBay, told me that he and his team noticed how the analytical divide between Amazon and the rest of the retailers was growing in recent years. A few years ago, many legacy brick-and-mortar retailers were just trying to keep up by getting their e-commerce operations going, but now they also need the competitive intelligence and analytics to keep up with Amazon and other large competitors. Currently, many retailers just change their prices every three months, the team argues. The platform consists of a number of different components. The analytics platform allows vendors to monitor their competitors’ prices and assortment in real time. This can help them spot deals on their competitors’ sites, for example, and adjust their prices accordingly. At the same time, they can also look at what their competitors are actually selling, what their best selling products are (most retailers thankfully make of those publicly available) and other data about their competitors’ pricing strategies. The company ingests this data in real time by scraping websites for this data and plugging it in to third-party content providers. Hariharan told me that one of the hardest problems to solve here was to ensure that the company actually compares the right product with its equivalent on other sites. Just knowing the SKU, for example, is often not enough. A pink set of headphones, for example, may retail for 20 percent less than the black version and yet both will have the same SKU. The company believes that this validation layer sets it apart from its competitors in this space. Just having this data is helpful, of course, but Boomerang Commerce then goes a step further and allows retailers to dynamically adjust their own pricing based on the service’s algorithms. To do this, retailers can set up their own filters to decide whether they want to optimize for revenue, margin, customer lifetime value and other factors. While most of the algorithm runs in a black box, users can also set lots of bounds and rules for how the algorithm works. For those who don’t trust the system, Boomerang Commerce offers a manual mode where every price change has to be approved before it can go live. [gallery ids="998269,998268,998267,998266,998265,998264"] Retailers can plug the Boomerang Commerce pricing optimization engine into their existing systems, either through using basic flat files or through the company’s APIs. Currently, the company is targeting retailers with more than $50 million in revenue and says that every deal it has made so far has been worth more than $500,000 (with the average being far higher and additional subscription fees over the lifetime of the contract). “We want to focus on the top dogs,” Hariharan says, and Boomerang Head of Product Vamsi Vutukuru adds that it’s mostly for companies at that size where using the service makes the most sense. Q: How does a product get into your catalog?
A: The websites we work with today, they have hundreds of thousands of products. We were in closed beta for the last six months and the retailers we work with provide us with this data. Q: How many companies are there that are doing more than $50 million in annual retail sales.
A: There are about 600-700, but that number is growing quickly. Q: How much do you charge?
A: Seven-figure contracts and subscription fees based on the value we can create for these companies. Q: How do you get displaced?
A: If somebody else comes up, there is a real risk for us, but pricing is the kind of business where if you’re in, you are in for three or four years. Most of the deals are currently three-year deals. Q: How many variables are you tracking right now?
A: About 100 per product. |
After Years, Michigan’s Attempts To Build A Startup Ecosystem Bear Fruit | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | Five years ago, Michigan had seven early-stage companies raise money from venture capital investors in the first quarter. This year that number climbed to 31. The story behind this growth was more than a decade in the making, as state and local leaders crafted a policy to make early-stage investments more robust and lay the foundation for a startup ecosystem that is finally coming to fruition. “I’ve been involved with this since Michigan began its push in late 1999 or early 2000,” says Michael Finney, the president and chief executive of the Michigan Economic Development Corp. (MED). “Fast forward 14 years later and most of the strategies that we put in place are things that are really starting to bear fruit.”
Over the course of three governorships with commitments from successive state legislatures, Michigan managed to implement an investment system that is bucking national trends. The number of venture capital professionals in the state rose by 84 percent over the five-year period, while the number of professionals declined by 13 percent nationwide, according to data from the MED. Over the same period, the number of venture capital firms rose by roughly 50 percent to 33 firms either headquartered in or that have offices in the state. The bulk of the firms investing in Michigan are, at this point, homegrown in part because of the success of the state in financing its own ecosystem.
“Michigan was a state that had a handful of VCs with maybe three or four firms, and now we have several billion of capital under management,” says Finney. “Michigan was not competing in the venture capital space in a real way.” The state’s push into venture capital began with the creation of a “life sciences corridor.” Michigan committed $1 billion from the tobacco settlement funding it received for a 20-year period. In fact, the state’s evergreen fund now makes direct investments and fund of funds investments in venture capital firms investing inside and outside the state. One of Michigan’s wins is , which raised a $59.5 million round in April. “We’ve made direct investments in 150 startups from our universities,” says Finney. New legislation from regulators also created roughly six years ago to raise capital through pledging tax credits in exchange for money. Through the mechanism, Michigan was able to attract $150 million which the state is deploying in another fund of funds. Further buoying the state’s investment community is the raft of recent exits of venture-backed companies. “There’ve been quite a few exits of venture-backed companies in Michigan,” says Jan Garfinkle, the founder and managing director of Michigan’s largest investment fund, Arboretum Ventures. “There’ve been 18 companies that have exited for over $1 billion. That’s a huge factor.” Garfinkle also pointed to the state’s fund of funds efforts as a reason for its success in attracting startup capital. For Ted Serbinski at Detroit Venture Partners and a recent transplant to the Motor City, the cheaper cost of capital means that startups can get more bang for their buck. “An Internet startup can be anywhere in the world. When you’re a scrappy startup why would you pay $5,000 a month for rent in New York or San Francisco, when you can be in Michigan where the cost of living is much lower,” Serbinski says. Garfinkle also pointed out that the cost savings mean that starting a company in Michigan is one-third as expensive, so exits that are lower rake in the same returns as the big blockbusters on the coast.
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OfferBoard Brings Crowd Investment To Growth Capital | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | The U.S. Platform Development Group has a pitch for companies looking for growth capital and the investment bankers that love them. The group launched , its new growth capital crowdfunding platform, onstage this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “Because raising money sucks,” according to the founders. Using the Princeton, NJ-based company’s services, bankers and businesses can more easily reach a broader base of potential investors, says company co-founder Chris Tyrrell. Meaning entrepreneurs could cut the time they spend raising growth capital to take their companies’ products from the corner store to the world market. One of the innovations that the company has added to its service is a fundability score, which looks at a company’s data and compares it with companies that have successfully and unsuccessfully raised funding in the past. The fundability score can change as entrepreneurs adapt their companies to make them more attractive to investors. “We took the largest data set of small private offerings in the world and we layered in data from other U.S. databases both public and private,” says Tyrrell. “Our model is simple. For investors and issuers on the site, signup is free.” OfferBoard takes a 2 percent fee for any successfully completed transaction using its service and also offers its own investment banking services for companies that would prefer not to manage the process themselves. Already companies are seeking to raise at least $250 million through the service. [gallery ids="998153,998154,998156,998157,998158,998159"] Several companies already leverage the Internet to harness the wisdom (and wallets) of crowds in ways that have transformed so many aspects of so many different businesses that it’s hard to think of a single industry unaffected by the phenomenon. Crowds are now financing everything — from movies to egg timers to home loans to startup companies; OfferBoard sees itself as another step in the evolution of these crowd-based tools for business development. There’s a continuum of these crowdfunding platforms, according to Tyrrell. and can fund projects and the development of new products — a service that also provides (albeit in a different way); while , , , and all have crowdfunding services to finance new technologies, brands, and companies. On the other end of the spectrum are the crowdsourced financial lenders like , , , , and that all offer crowdsourced lending services. Now John Donovan and Tyrrell, a former lawyer and serial startup entrepreneur, are launching OfferBoard after a year in stealth mode to bring this movement to the lower middle market companies and boutique investment and merchant banks that service them. The idea for OfferBoard came to Tyrrell soon after President Barack Obama signed the JOBS Act in May 2012. At the time he was working as a manager for Nehemiah Investments — a family office interested in “double bottom line investing,” according to Tyrell. “One of the things they were interested in was capital liberation,” say Tyrrell. “We started working on a model that looked like the early city stock market model. Before the 1929 stock market crash every city had their own local stock market. We wanted to try to build a system that could build intra-state transaction.” The idea was to enable local investors to back local companies through a marketplace or exchange in much the same way investors had done in the pre-Depression era of financial speculation. As soon as the JOBS Act passed, the firm shifted its focus to crowdfunding. “The minute that law passed I started to get interested in crowd funding,” says Tyrrell. “Two weeks after the President signed the JOBS Act I was looking for who was doing this and who had done this before… The only place where this has been done for a long time is Australia and they’ve been doing this kind of thing since 1997.” Hopping on a plane to Australia, Tyrrell went to meet a publicly traded Australian company that had developed the first crowdsourced platform for accredited investors — the Australia Small Scale Offerings Board Ltd. Through Nehemiah, Tyrell scored the exclusive license to use and develop technology based on the Australian company’s intellectual property as the U.S. Platform Group, Tyrell says. “The value is that they’ve been executing these transactions in a fraud-free way for a long time,” says Tyrrell. Unlike other programs targeting smaller investments, OfferBoard is looking at deals in the $2 million to $25 million range and expects the average capital raised through its service to fall between $8 million to $10 million raised. Furthermore, while OfferBoard is happy to serve the tech community, the company expects the meat of its growth-capital deals to come from more traditional lower-middle-market deals, according to Tyrell. Currently, tech companies represent only one-quarter of the offerings raising capital through the OfferBoard’s service. With the company’s Lending Club connections, it’s not hard to imagine how the platform could grow to be an all-in-one crowdsourced financing shop for lower middle market deals. OfferBoard could serve up the equity financing from investors while a crowdsourced lending platform like Lending Club could serve up the debt portion of a buyout deal — providing the leveraged capital that a company can use in lieu of more equity at the smaller end of the buyout market. “What we’re doing is facilitating a combination of institutional and retail capital that are going into a different point on the value chain,” says Tyrrell. “This is not an equity-formation business; it is a capital formation business. I’m looking at a couple of different partnerships to leverage these transactions to create the greatest value for our clients.” Photo via Flickr user |
Tom Hadfield Is Trying To Make Fetch Happen To Improve Mobile Shopping | Billy Gallagher | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | , a mobile app that connects users with personal shopping assistants, launched today onstage at Disrupt New York. Users can simply open Fetch and type what you want, record yourself saying what you want, or take a picture. Fetch has trained assistants on the other end who will look at your request, find the best price for the product you want, and order it for you. When Fetch founder and CEO showed me the app last week, he typed out “Gillette Mach 3 razor blades.” We waited a couple of minutes, and an assistant showed us the lowest price, then ordered it through Hadfield’s Amazon account. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPElspYGE6A] “Buying should be as easy as describing the product that you want,” Hadfield argues. He explains that mobile purchases currently only make up 10% of all e-commerce, and a huge portion of the interface we use for e-commerce was invented for browsers, not the mobile web. Hadfield grabbed the audience’s attention during his presentation today by taking his shirt off and purchasing the same shirt on Fetch faster than his teammate did on Google Shopping Express. [gallery columns="1" ids="998207,998206,998204,998203,998202,998201,998200"] With heavyweight competitors like Amazon and Google Shopping Express, I’m skeptical of how great a need there is for Fetch. The most compelling aspect of Fetch for me is the ability to get help from an assistant if I don’t know where to buy the product I want. Hadfield explains that if you take a picture of someone else’s shoes or bag or other products and explain in some detail what it is–especially the brand–the assistants can usually find it for you. Hadfield argues that this human element will differentiate Fetch from automated services. “Amazon is the 8,000 pound gorilla in the room,” he says. “But we think Amazon’s reliance on algorithms is its fundamental design flaw. I’m less concerned about anyone who’s taking an algorithmic approach.” Fetch currently has 50 people trained as shopping assistants on the platform. The buying assistants are paid per transaction, and Fetch gets an affiliate commission from merchants. Hadfield has founded three companies before Fetch. He founded his first company, Soccernet, when he was in high school; Soccernet later sold to ESPN for $40 million. The company has raised $2.3 million in seed funding from Kapor Capital, Black Green Capital, Tamarisc, Cane Investments, Beechwood Capital, Thatchstone, Ryerson Futures, Tom Rutledge, RP Eddy, Michael Foster and Dariush Maanavi. Fetch has set up an invite code, “TECHCRUNCH” for the first 1,000 folks who sign up. After that, there will be a wait list. You can check out Fetch now on and . The Startup Battlefield judges grilled Hadfield and the Fetch team about their margins, business model, and the benefits of real buying assistants versus automation after the presentation. |
The NSA’s Code Tweet Deciphered | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | So, the NSA tweeted this earlier: tpfccdlfdtte pcaccplircdt dklpcfrp?qeiq lhpqlipqeodf gpwafopwprti izxndkiqpkii krirrifcapnc dxkdciqcafmd vkfpcadf. — NSA Careers (@NSACareers) What does it mean? Well, realized quickly it was a substitution cypher, something that is pretty simple to solve. In this case, c in the cypher is t, and d in the cypher is o, and so forth. Here’s the coded words next to their corresponding translation: Fun, yeah? Indeed. Without extra static, here’s the message: “ Complex hiring tactic? Hardly. Solving the above doesn’t tell the NSA much regarding your potential for hacking, code breaking or anything of the sort. I suspect there are online engines that can solve substitution cyphers in milliseconds. But, if the NSA wanted to get folks out there excited about code breaking, and potentially working for it, it’d want a tool that would drive attention and cause delight. Not bad for a tweet. |
Kurbo Health Debuts A Mobile Service To Help Fight Childhood Obesity | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | This afternoon on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage in New York, debuted its mobile subscription service designed to teach children — and their families — how to eat healthy. The overall idea is to combat the growing issue of childhood obesity, the company says, noting that over 30 percent of U.S. kids today are overweight. That’s more than 25 million children between the ages of 10 and 18. The issue was a personal one for Joanna Strober, a venture investor and board member at BlueNile and eToys, whose own son struggled with his weight. When she began researching the various ways she could best help him, she found lots of great options for adults and very few for kids. Mainly, she would come across weight-loss programs run by hospitals. “But those programs were very expensive, and they took place during the day, so you’d have to leave work to get to them,” she explains. “And they were branded in a way that my son was not interested in going to them,” Strober adds. That is, they were dubbed things like “obesity centers,” for example – that’s something no kid wants to be associated with. During her research, she came across the Stanford Pediatric Weight Loss Program, where her son found success. (He now sings Kurbo’s praises, says Strober.) But although the Stanford program is one of the best in the country in terms of results, it’s still very much “1970’s tech,” Strober notes: “Paper and pencil and in-person visits.” However, while there, she met Kurbo Health’s co-founder Thea Runyan, who has a Masters in Public Health, and had worked at the center for 12 years. The two realized that there was an opportunity to take the behavior modification techniques and tools from Stanford’s program and combine them with the best mobile adult weight loss programs in order to create a mobile, scalable, and data-driven weight-loss program for kids. The co-founders teamed up with Strober’s fellow Gloss.com investor and MIT-educated engineer, Mark Vershel, and then licensed Stanford’s program. The result is Kurbo Health, a mobile service founded last June, which combines a food-tracking program, games, challenges, and coaching to encourage kids to make smarter eating choices. Similar to adult weight-loss apps, such as MyFitnessPal or Noom, for example, children keep a food diary in Kurbo Health. However, while adult-aimed programs track a variety of metrics, like calories, sugar, carbs and fat, this kid-friendly app uses the established — and simpler — “Traffic Light” diet. That’s a 30-year old program that categorizes foods as “red,” “yellow” and “green,” and tells you how many of each you can have per day. In addition, once per week, Kurbo Health users connect with their weight-loss coach either via phone, Skype or text, who works on behavior modification techniques with them. The coaches also help the kids set goals and maintain them. And here’s the interesting part about Kurbo Health: Although moms and/or dads are involved in the program — you know, so mom’s not chowing down on pizza while the kid nibbles on carrot sticks — they’re actually able to see the child’s food diary. Explains Strober, the company listens to a kid advisory panel who gives them feedback about how the app should work, and they found that kids didn’t like when their parents scrutinized the details of what they were eating. Instead, moms and/or dads can set a big reward simply for having the child participate in the program by tracking their food choices. Parents are only alerted as to whether the child is tracking, not what they ate. That reward could be something like letting the child keep the iPhone they’re using, or they could get a new video game, for example, and the app will remind the child from time to time what reward they’re working towards. But, says Strober, that’s not these kids’ main motivation. “A lot of our kids to eat healthier, they just don’t know how to do it,” she says. “These kids are craving a tool that helps them without them feeling like they have to fight with their parents about it.” The company recently launched into private beta with 50 kids, over half of whom are now losing weight. (There are 200 total users, as parents are also involved). Other interested parties can sign up for when Kurbo Health launches more broadly. Pricing for the program is on a subscription basis, with different tiers determined by the type of coaching: $85/month for live coaching; $35/month for text-based coaching; and it’s free for virtual coaching (more automated feedback based on what you’re eating). The company stresses that while it’s tackling something that’s in the medical space with childhood obesity, they’re not issuing medical advice and they’re not doctors themselves, nor are the coaches doctors or nutritionists. The program simply teaches children and parents how to make healthier eating choices. Kurbo Health is currently backed by $1.8 million in seed funding from Signia Ventures (Rick Thompson); David Cowan (Bessemer); [gallery ids="996951,996950,996949,996948,998132,998136,998135,998134,998133,998140"] Judges for this session included: Ayah Bdeir (littleBits), Rachel Haot (New York State), Jacob Mullins (Exitround), Henrik Werdelin (BarkBox).
Q&A’s paraphrased for brevity. JM: Social features in app?
A: Have features in app for kids over 13 and under 13. There’s no talking in the app – so no teasing. RH: How does Stanford benefit from this?
A: They receive a 1.5% royalty RH: Who are the coaches?
A: We’re looking for teachers, and other people trained in talking with children. AB: What sort of challenges were discovered in beta?
A: Parents are the challenge. They want to get on the phone calls. We learned that parents need coaching too, so we’re adding that. JM: How are you marketing this?
A: The front of website says eat healthier, but our ads have to say lose weight – that’s how they get clicks. HW: Kids don’t want to do this:
A: This takes food police job away from parents. Parents can offer rewards in the app. (e.g. earn the iPad, etc.) JK: What if you lie to app?
A: From coach perspective, we assume child is telling the truth…it’s about how the coach talks to the child. We’re also working with therapists to customize the messages. |
S’moretgage Launches To Bring Real-Time Mortgage Data To Real Estate Investors | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, S’moretgage wants to bring real estate data for pros and consumers alike. The company launched a preview version today with data pertaining to New York City. According to S’moretgage, the information will include “individual mortgage-level detail on loans recorded in New York City,” including such data points as a loan’s interest rate and the date when it began. S’moretgage’s plan is to fully build out its New York dataset before expanding to other large cities like Chicago. Founder Patrick Browne told TechCrunch that the idea for the company was born when he had to track down reams of real estate records by hand, which was painfully time-consuming. What’s the company’s secret sauce? Technology that can scan publicly available mortgage documents and rip out the key information. The company then organizes the data, providing what it calls a “real-time overview of market transactions.” This will help people spot new hot areas, trends in lending rates, and so forth. S’moretgage has been bootstrapped to date, but intends to start raising outside capital within the next quarter. From whence the name? It’s a play to make the word “mortgage” less weighty and ponderous. According to Browne, the company thought that “S’moretgage could be a nice way to make that word sound a bit less intimidating.” Once you learn how to spell it, it’s not too hard to remember. S’moretgage is almost a bet that the currently slugging real estate market will recover. The more people who want to buy real estate the more demand that the company will see for its service. [gallery ids="998099,998095,998093,998092,998091"] |
CEO Shane Smith Says He Wants VICE To Be 10 Times Bigger Than CNN | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | seems to be getting more journalistically legit, particularly with its international coverage, but CEO Shane Smith said today that he doesn’t consider himself a journalist, and doesn’t want to be a journalist. “I think if you look at the failure of journalism in the modern age, then I don’t want to be called a journalist,” Smith said today while on-stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt New York conference. As an example, he pointed to the failure of the mainstream media more than a decade ago to aggressively question the Bush administration’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And he went on to paint VICE’s success as a result of the traditional journalism’s shortcomings. Smith recalled that when VICE started to move into video, everyone believed that young people didn’t care about news, and that they would only be interest in short, fun, “snackable” videos. [gallery ids="997828,997841,997840,997839,997837,997836,997835,997834,997833,997832,997831,997830,997829"] “What we found was that Generation Y is absolutely consumed with news,” Smith said. “They love news, it’s one of their biggest passion points. The problem is they’ve been disenfranchised by traditional media outlets and because of that — look, if the world was going along tickety boo and the Fourth Estate was doing its job, VICE would not be purveying news.” Asked , Smith replied that the main thing is that it must be interesting: “It should punch you in the face.” Looking ahead, he said the company will continue to pursue digital and traditional media channels, with the goal of becoming completely “platform agnostic.” VICE is currently doing 160 or 170 million views each month, but Smith said he wants to reach “Machinima numbers, but with news.” “We want to be doing a billion, 2 billion, 3 billion video views a month, but with news,” Smith concluded. “And then, like I say, we won’t be the next CNN or ESPN or MTV, we’ll be 10 times that size. And I think that’s what we’re going to do in the next few years.” |
Oculus VR Created A Research Group To Advance Virtual Reality | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | was recently all over the news because it was by Facebook for $2 billion. But Oculus VR is still operating independently and trying to figure out the future of virtual reality. Co-founder and CEO took the stage at today to talk about a new research initiative to turn virtual reality into the next major tech platform. “We just started a research group. There are starting to recruit very talented engineers,” Iribe said. “And they will engage with universities and work with students.” The company will also sponsor hackathons and get engineers excited about the Oculus Rift. In other words, Oculus VR plans to crowdsource virtual reality use cases. The company already knows one thing for sure — virtual reality has a huge potential. TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino’s first questions were of course about the acquisition. And, according to Iribe, it makes sense because Facebook and Oculus VR share the same vision and ambition. “We started off with a big focus in gaming,” he said. “But looking at where VR is going to go in the next 10 years, it’s going to be a lot about face-to-face communication and social.” Over the past decades, multiple major tech platforms were created and became mainstream. At first, there was the personal computer. Then, the Internet built on top of that. Smartphones put all that in your pocket. Iribe believes that virtual reality is the next platform. “Mobile is probably one of the last 2D screen-based platform,” Iribe said. “We are replacing vision and actually making synthetic vision. This is going to be what we call the final platform. You can convince and trick your brain to be in this place.” For example, the research & development team of Oculus VR has developed and interesting demo. When you put the Oculus Rift headset, you are transported into an empty room with a cube at the center. This cube is attached to another headset, meaning that when someone else puts another headset, the cube will move with this other person’s head. You instantly know that it’s another human being, even though it looks like a cube. This is why virtual reality is powerful. “You will believe that these virtual avatars are real,” Iribe said. Iribe also had comments on Google Glass. According to him, Google is not really competing with them. “You just get notifications in the corner of your eye,” he said. Moreover, Google Glass is facing a social issue — wearing Google Glass in public is still awkward. Or, in Iribe’s own words, “Google Glass has a little bit of that Segway feel to it.” [gallery ids="997996,997989,997988,997987,997986,997985,997984,997983,997982,997981,997980,997979,997978,997977,997973,997972"] |
Tango PC Wants To Be The First Everywhere Computer Without Compromise | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | Smartphones are more powerful than they’ve ever been, but PCs are still able to do more, and do some things better, too. Size advantage has generally meant sacrifices when it comes to computing, but wants to change that with its modular dock and computer design that moves space-heavy heat diffusion components out of the main body using technology tricks borrowed from space ships. “What we have is this breakthrough in thermal transfer technology, ” Tango PC CEO and founder Bhavesh Shah explained. “It’s not actually in the realm of electronics or hardware, it’s actually in the realm of space technology.” There are no ways to use vents and exhaust fans in space, explained Tango PC CEO and founder Bhavesh Shah in an interview, so instead the space station and shuttles transfer accumulated heat to other conductive surfaces for cooling where they encounter the extremely cold temperatures of space. The Tango PC similarly pushes heat out to the dock, which itself has fans, vents and other cooling equipment. [gallery ids="996921,996920,996919,996918,996917,996922"] Tango PC has previously run a where it raised over $300,000, but that was designed to get the product made in a small-scale production run designed for enthusiasts and hobbyists. The new Kickstarter campaign launching this weekend [Update: The ] aims to get Tango PC ready for high volume production, and distribution with some of the largest retailers in the world including Best Buy and Amazon. It also introduces a new way to use the Tango, which is with a travel adapter dock that combines remote desktop software with a companion iPad for a totally portable, contained full PC experience. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuhPlhICG2I&w=620&h=465] The Tango PC itself houses the CPU, GPU, SSD, RAM and battery, while the dock offers additional ports, power, a heatsink and fan. In a package about the size of a small hard drive, it has about 10 times the power of a smartphone with a quad core AMD 2GHz processor with integrated GPU, a maximum of 8GB of RAM and with the dock, three USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, DisplayPort and 3.5mm audio out/in. The idea is that you can carry the main Tango PC unit with you anywhere, for use in a variety of docks. It’s the ultimate BYOD device, according to Shah, since it means a user can have their PC with them wherever they go, with full access to all licensed software, and with just a small $89 dock (about the size of a Mac mini) required at each new location to get up and running with your own, pocket-sized setup. In terms of performance, Shah says the Tango PC is on par with last-gen consoles, and can play games like Call of Duty 4 with decent performance. The gaming angle is a way to get consumers interested in this device, which is the initial target market. The idea is to get general users interested so that they seed the device in enterprise and office settings, where its modular portability can really shine. [gallery ids="998177,998176,998175,998174"] Retail pricing is going to start at $299 when the device goes on sale this summer for a very basic system, and will range up from there to around $500 for a kit with most of what you need for a full office installation. Q&A Q: You mention Best Buy and consumers but do you see the bigger opportunity in the enterprise market. A: We wanted to start with consumers because we’re small, but want to replicate the Apple model of consumer first, and enterprise later. Q: Is there actually any market demand? A: We did market research to find it did. People were overwhelmingly interested based just on seeing a photos. Q: What’s the cost of the full system? A: Starts at $299 depending on specs. Q: Why not focus on people who need high-power computing power on the go? A: Niche markets are definitely higher percentage conversions. We will be focusing on individual markets when we go live with the product in stores (hopefully) this summer. Q: Why not get a $300 laptop? A: You’d take that and connect it to a huge display anyway to use as a desktop, and it’s not really hands-free in terms of transporting it – Tango is pocketable. |
Peekster, A Shazam For Print Media, Launches In The U.S. At Disrupt NY | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | It may surprise you but print media isn’t dead yet. Hell — some people even reading ink off of pulped tree. And that curious fact is something U.K. startup is intending to cash in on — with an app (yes, it’s still an app) that links offline reading habits with online socializing and sharing habits to please old school readers and publishers alike. We’ve , as a graduate of last year’s Wayra UK accelerator intake. But today Peekster is strutting its stuff on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in our battlefield competition, and has just announced it’s launching its app in the U.S. today. Peekster’s U.S. launch publications are the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, which join the six existing U.K. publications (The Times, Independent, Metro, The Guardian, the London Evening Standard and City AM) already supported by the app. Users of Peekster who like to read these learned journals in dead tree form will be able to whip out their smartphone and digitally ‘clip’ an article from the paper edition they’re reading by scanning a few words from the headline or first paragraph. When I say ‘clip’ — which Peekster calls tagging — I mean the app will locate the digital version of the article a user is reading so they can share it online with their social networks, or save it for later reading (Peekster integrates with read-it-later services such as Pocket and Instapaper for that). In other words, the app enables a newspaper reader to connect their offline reading with their online identity and networks. The iOS app uses optical character recognition to figure out what the iPhone’s camera is pointing at and point the user to the correct online article. Where a publication’s content is not currently being linked to within the app, Peekster will suggested related similar articles based on the words the user scanned — so you can use it as a related content discovery engine too, if you wish. On the discoverability front, the app also curates a real-time list of popular tags — based on what the community of Peekster users is scanning. So its pitch to publishers is that it can also help bring in new readers, as well as linking their offline readers to their online content. To be clear, Peekster says it is not maintaining a database of publishers’ content itself (to avoid any copyright issues). It’s either looking at a publication’s RSS feed to locate the content a user is after, or doing a web search, says co-founder Tine Hamler. Although he adds that it does do some headline and URL indexing to speed up internal searches. [gallery ids="994738,994737,994735,994736,994760,994761"] Since there’s no database to build out, the only real reason for Peekster limiting the number of publications whose content is accessible within its app is on business model grounds. Ultimately it’s hoping to be able to persuade a sub-set of publishers to pay for the privilege of having their content in front of Peekster’s audience. But to do that, it needs a sizeable enough audience to encourage publishers’ to pay — so this chicken/egg is not there yet. Peekster needs some content to get readers interested of course — hence it’s starting by offering a limited selection of mainstream publishers’ content without them having to pay it, in the hopes that the ability to locate their content will help it amass enough users to get other publishers interested in paying to get content accessible within the app. (This is one of the reasons it’s focused on adding free newspapers in the U.K., says Hamler, owing to the potential volume of readers that brings in.) Peekster is not currently breaking out app user numbers — but the app only launched last November so that’s not too surprising. Hamler says its active weekly user percentage is around 15% and that’s also something it will need to ramp up if it’s to make itself attractive enough to get publishers to pay. The startup itself was founded in May 2013, on selection by Wayra U.K. That’s its only funding to date too. Now, post-Wayra, Hamler says it’s looking to raise a half a million dollar seed round and is currently meeting with investors — with the hopes of being able to close the round in about four months. While you might think it’s a retrograde choice for a startup to build a digital business atop very-long-in-the-tooth media format (print), Hamler argues there’s life left in dead tree media — and, over the longer term, an opportunity to provide publishers with technology to help them promote and sell individual articles in a mostly digital future. “We saw a lot of people reading newspapers on Tubes, on public transport… and we did some market research and found out that people still rather prefer print over digital when commuting to work,” he says, explaining the genesis of the idea for Peekster. “The over 35s are still big print consumers so we checked the market and 80% of all the publishing industry is still on print, and only 20% is on digital subscription. [gallery ids="998085,998084,998083,998077,998076,998075,998074,998073"] “Also print brings in most of the revenue for publishers, and so we thought why not? Why not try and make print more interesting — why not include popular services from the Internet, like sharing stuff, like saving stuff.” But the grand vision of Peekster goes beyond the current generation of print media — so ultimately isn’t tethered to print publications. The app’s makers envisage a future where big name publishers require new ways to flag up and distribute their content in an increasingly crowded marketplace of digital content. “Print is declining but at the moment it’s still a pretty huge market,” says Hamler. “But in the future we believe that we will witness a big change in content distribution because all the content will be online and it will be hard to stand out and be found… We want to play a part in this. Our idea is that in the future publishers will need to advertise their content — not just their brand, but also the content; the articles themselves.” Hamler points to billboard advertising campaigns that have been run by the Economist which present different angles of a story and encourage viewers to text certain keywords to get sent a copy of the publication as an example of the kind of advertising that large publishers are increasingly going to have to turn to, to drive interest in their content. “I think print will go down that road — that content will be advertised on billboards and so on. It will be great for Peekster because you’ll be able to just scan the billboard and basically buy that one article with an in-app purchase,” he adds. In the mean time, while it waits to enable a future where readers pay per article (at least from publications which can afford to advertise their wares on billboards), Peekster has several revenue strands in mind — including, hopefully in the near term, being able to persuade smaller publishers to pay for having their content included in its app. It is also already taking revenue from other sources. Its basic app is freemium but certain advanced functions (such as exporting content to other services, and an offline mode feature) require an in-app purchase to unlock them. It’s also taking revenue from pushing promoted content within its app, collecting a fee per click on that. Another possible revenue stream for the business is providing ‘Google analytics’ type services to print publishers — about the kind of articles people are looking at in paper newspapers and magazines. Hamler says it may also look at licensing its technology (via an API) to publishers so they could add its ‘scan and tag’ function within their own apps — but he says those publishers it has talked to so far seem to prefer the concept of a standalone, independent service, which offers the chance of bringing in new readers, not just serving an existing readership. Why did you go to the newspaper market first as opposed to billboards?
We see Peekster and printed media as a great driver to introduce Peekster to the audience because we can also count on publishers’ support as a way to promote their content Do you see print publications supporting it? It seems to me going to consumers and changing behaviour is a lot harder than going to the publishers and saying use this as a white label solution…
We are getting offers from publishers to white label. One aspect [of your pitch] is it’s in places where people don’t use their device, but you’re also expecting people to use their device so there’s a little bit of disconnect there –- so where are people doing the sharing? And also it seems like you really need the long tail of content? So how do you coach the user to use it?
Peekster is meant for print readers. So they consume content from print. Peekster is here just only for that second that the reader wants to share something to social media. If we don’t find the right article for you we always suggest three similar stories so you can pick other articles from other publishers. Do you support reading in the app, like Pocket?
We link you directly to the website, but we offer in the future the option to remove all the clutter around the website, and then save to Evernote or Pocket or things like that. Do you see people coming back? Is there a way to bring users in more often than just grabbing a headline to share it?
Peekster is also widely used for content discovery – like you saw in the demo we provide this popular list, so you don’t need your print newspaper to discover new content. You’re doing OCR, so why couldn’t you just do a Google search to find the article that way?
We built a custom search that includes only publishers. What type of user data do you have to show that customers are sticking with it? To me it seems like you’re solving a problem that may not be a problem…
People are reading print because they like print. We have from 25% of our users are weekly active users. How often are they sharing content?
They are sharing on a weekly basis. The engagement rate is around 15% |
CrunchWeek: Foursquare Splits Into Two Apps, Facebook f8, Twitter Stock Sinks To New Lows | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Josh Constine, Anthony Ha, and I discussed Foursquare’s plan to different standalone apps, the inside scoop on , and Twitter’s causing its stock price to . |
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs… | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Good morrow, Bluffkin! How dost thou find thouself this good day? Not afraid of robots? You should be! Our first robots of the day are , a swarming cleaning team that can fix messy floors or suck you up and turn you into pink slurry. Huzzah! Avidbots uses swarming patterns to figure out where your floors are dirtiest or, potentially, where refugees are hiding so it can eat them. The bots work together and can replace lazy humans in warehouses around the world. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ioGui_OSAKg] Next up we have a charming robot called Justin that can clean windows. Why? The better to see you run, my dear! Justin is made by the DLR, the German aerospace engineering center. Justin is supposed to clean up in space but it appears they’ve indentured him here on earth where he’s doing all sorts of cleaning duties – until he gets tired of it all and destroys us. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3HaK9BQo40o] Finally we have these cool little robots that act as interactive UI elements. They react quickly to your desires and “show up” when you’re trying to turn up the stereo or tweak a a molecule. You can move them around an interactive surface and they will simulate real world positions on a simulated map. What else can they do? Coordinate the robot attacks of the future! [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SsD3uTUtPks] See you next week on ! |
With IPO Hopes Fading, Square And Box Face Reality Of Commodity Products | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Square and Box would seem to be the very epitome of every startup founder’s dream of reaching the pinnacle of entrepreneurial success. Take a kernel of an idea and turn it into a massive, multi-billion-dollar company that publicly debuts in an IPO. For the founders involved, the exhilaration and elation of that drive to the top must be deeply palpable, and at times it probably seems as though every single molecule in the universe is working in their favor. Yet, the cruel vagaries of startups are such that those laws of physics can change in mere moments. Square, a favorite with the press with its charismatic founder, Jack Dorsey, seemed to have everything it needed to conquer and crush the physical retail point-of-sale market, an industry that has called out for innovation for years without much progress. Box, the poster child (in a literal sense) of the power of a 20-year-old founder to transform the enterprise into a cloud- and mobile-enabled world, was flying high as one of the top valued startups in America. Yet, both – perhaps indefinitely – and analysts are seriously questioning the to . This isn’t the kind of bubbly they were hoping to pop. It is the ultimate of Zero-World Problems: what do you do when your billion-dollar company is hemorrhaging cash, yet can’t be sold, can’t go public, and can’t raise funding? For founders facing the Series A crunch, such questions may seem irrelevant, perhaps even a tad obnoxious. Yet, in the tale of Square and Box lies a grave message for all of us about the ability of certain founders to defy gravity, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of the difficulty of building startups targeting commodity technology markets. Businesses want to command entire markets and become monopolies to extract profitable rents from customers. Competitors see the opportunity in these markets and similarly want to get a slice of the profits. Conflict breaks out between these companies, who compete with each other by providing better products and lowering their prices. Consumers win by getting more for less, while companies face diminished profits as their specialized products become commodities. That’s the textbook description of market economics, but the best technology companies rarely follow such a narrative. Instead, they search for ways to create some sort of network or lock-in effect, where they can seize the entire market and hold their competitors at bay, or what From there, the company can expand into other markets, using its economic power and superior technology to leverage its business into other commodity spaces. It’s this expansion and defensive capability that venture capitalists seek in funding pitches from startups — a sort of iron law of raising capital. Almost all of the great technology businesses can be described this way. Google built a search engine that has few competitors even today, and the company used its success to move into commodities like email and messaging. Facebook designed a social network that remains the largest and most engaged in the world, but it has also made forays into areas like messaging and news. Microsoft turned its strength in the Windows operating system into a massive platform for enterprise customers. The massive size of these companies comes from their ability to defend their inexorable growth in hugely profitable markets, while leveraging their business to enter into new markets. None of the technologies that underlie these companies are a commodity, which is why there are so few successful search engines, social networks, and operating systems. When we turn to Box and Square, they have never had the same capability to keep competitors out of their markets. Square is one of dozens of payment processors and point-of-sale solutions on the market, and Box has dozens of cloud storage competitors. These two companies didn’t start with a highly profitable niche and exploit it with the best possible product on the marketplace, but instead brought to market an evolutionary improvement over existing solutions. That was always going to be a tough sell. When Box started, file syncing was hard, and getting access to files on mobile devices was nearly impossible. Yet, there is no “monopolistic” effect built into such an infrastructure, and consequently, competitors saw the same market opportunity that Box did and began developing their own products, ranging from startups like Dropbox to behemoths like EMC, Microsoft, and Google. Square faces a similar competitive environment. It’s hard to differentiate a product in a space like point of sale systems, since customers of small businesses just want their credit card accepted as fast as possible. Similar comments can be made about in mobile device management and in customer support management, two companies that are also waiting to enter the public markets. Aaron Levie Venture capitalists are hawks for certain signs that a company doesn’t have command of its market. One obvious warning is when sales and marketing expenses are very high, particularly compared to the average sales price of the product. When companies lack highly differentiated products, they can’t compete on technology, so they compete on marketing to try to build differentiation through mindshare. Thus, you see initiatives like and as lead generation, or Box offering the vast majority of its customers free services while putting up billboards along major U.S. freeways. , the company spent more than $170 million on sales and marketing in the year ending January 31, 2014, a period in which the company made $124 million in revenue. Or, to put it another way, 137 percent of Box’s revenue was spent on sales and marketing. There is, of course, an argument to be made for spending today to invest in the future. was whether the long-term sales contracts that the company is presumably signing guarantees it an income stream that will allow it to slow down sales and marketing expenses while continuing to rapidly grow its top line. Similarly, if Square can build sufficient penetration into the SMB space, it might be possible for the company to build additional services on top of its platform to grow its income from merchants. The fact that both companies have delayed their IPOs demonstrates what analysts thought of this line of thought. Another warning sign of a commodity business is a low average sales price, particularly when compared to expenses. In other words, how well can a company protect its margins. Even today, Box’s average sales price is only around $3,600. With Square’s business model, it takes a tiny fraction of the transaction fee for each dollar that flows through its payments network. While its profit margins have never been made public, , a pricing decision designed to quickly expand the company’s business. These high expenses and low revenues lead to obviously high burn rates. , and Box lost almost $160 million last year, as well. Such rapid evaporation of cash truly limits the options for the founders of these companies, since it puts a very large ticking time bomb around their necks, weakening their negotiating position with potential acquirers. Finally, a more qualitative sign of a commodity business comes from the culture of the company. In the rush to create differentiation, companies often try to spit out products hoping to find some feature that secures customer sales. Both Square and Box have expanded their product lines dramatically, often without a comprehensive strategy involved. Levie at Box speaks easily about his vision, but the company’s actual array of products is still blurry, with consumer and enterprise options still prominently featured and at times at odds with each other. Square is even more variable, launching a blistering array of products in the last few months including Square Market, Square Wallet, and Square Cash in addition to its core point of sales products. A lack of focus is not a good signal. We know that the iron law of raising capital is to prove expansive power and defensibility, and we have analyzed how Square and Box both appear to be in typical commodity markets given their performance and metrics. It’s therefore astonishing that earnest venture capitalists and non-traditional venture investors have driven the valuations of both companies to stratospheric levels during the last three years. Square raised about , pushing its valuation to $5 billion according to CrunchBase. , pushing its valuation to $2 billion. Jack Dorsey That’s despite clear evidence that Square and Box are getting squeezed by competitors from above and below. Box faces challenges from a number of startups, most prominently its arch-rival Dropbox, for control over the cloud data market. But its real competition comes from larger behemoths like Microsoft and EMC, who already have deep inroads into the enterprise, and are already offering decently comparable cloud services on their existing platforms. Similarly, Square has had to compete with entrenched merchant software companies like Intuit and PayPal, which both offer readers similar to Square, yet already have millions of customers using their products. The obvious economic response to this situation is to try to move up the value chain, and indeed, both companies are repositioning themselves to find higher-value markets. , a translation layer between the existing commodity cloud storage companies and application developers. It sees itself as the glue for enterprise collaboration. And it appears Square is trying to be a more full-service commerce provider, in the hope of offering better services for small businesses. In a way, one could argue that this is a classic example of , in which a startup disrupts an entrenched company by providing a simpler and cheaper solution and slowly eating the market upwards. Unfortunately, such disruption is rarer today in the technology industry, if only because executives are more attuned to this sort of disruption that they were in the past. and haven’t ignored cloud services any less than , and they have enormous advantages due to their scale to overcome any delay in their product offerings. So what did the venture capitalists see in these two companies to drive their valuations so high so quickly? One half of the answer is obviously metrics, particularly around revenue growth. Few companies in the world have grown as fast as Box or Square, and , growth is truly everything in getting to the top. The other half of the answer is more qualitative, and simply has to do with the founders of both companies matching certain archetypes of success. Box was founded in 2005 and helmed by a 20-year old founder named Aaron Levie, a first-time entrepreneur who dropped out of USC to build the company with his childhood friend Dylan Smith. Square was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, who helped to lead Twitter to one of the most significant Valley exits of all time. The inspiring college dropout and the second-time entrepreneur are hard to turn down for most venture capitalists. A second iron law of startups might be that the higher the valuation of a startup, the fewer options it has for financing and exits. If a startup has only raised a seed round, there are an immense number of options the company can choose, such as a talent acquisition, a strategic investment, a partnership, a bootstrapped approach, a full Series A round, or maybe a controlled shutdown. But once a company has raised and is valued in the billions, its options are essentially to go public or find a very interested buyer with deep pockets. There are few other options on this side of the startup pipeline. Interestingly, VCs have been willing to ignore this law, because the flush times for technology startups meant that the hardest part of investing was simply getting into the best rounds and holding. In an industry where startups have been greatly helped by the rising tide of enthusiastic equities markets, nearly every deal that could get to the markets has been a smash success. Thus, even companies that were competing ferociously in commodity markets like cloud storage, mobile device management, or human resources have seen tremendous value creation. Then the markets corrected. Technology stocks, particularly among software-as-a-service companies, as investors flee for safer investment options. The lack of appetite for growth tech stocks means that IPOs in the sector are nearly impossible, putting every company’s plan on hold. Square and Box are part of that holding pattern, but they are unlikely to be the ones that encourage investors to wade back into the market. In disrupting such well-known industries as payments and storage, analysts are familiar with the businesses here, and they haven’t liked what they have seen. That doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting companies that have the potential to reenergize the markets. As a marketplace for bedrooms, Airbnb has a natural monopoly in its business model which will allow it to leverage its profits into a variety of premium services like cleaning, transportation, and tour-guide products. Its balance sheet is highly desirable as well, since it doesn’t hold any physical real estate compared to traditional hotel chains. A company with a more neutral outlook might be Uber. The company certainly has a network effect, since users will likely default to a single choice of app when requesting a taxi. But Uber’s competition is a tap away, and thus it needs to refine its products to build more defensibility. But that is small solace for the founders, employees, and investors at Square and Box, who are going to face a period of deep uncertainty. These next few months will be defining for both companies. If Levie and Dorsey can rebuild their products under excruciatingly tough pressure, both companies have a chance to get out from their predicament. Given their burn rates, it is more likely that both startups will sell or begin a process of downsizing to reduce expenses. We’ll finally pop the bubbly, but it will be more Box wine than Dom Perignon. |
MyFitnessPal Moves Into Asia With Localized Apps For China, Japan, And Korea | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | , a nutrition and fitness startup that says it now has more than 50 million registered users, is announcing the last big piece in its international expansion. The company back in June of last year, and this week, it released versions in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Co-founder Mike Lee told me that this brings the total to 14 languages. “We will be adding additional languages, but we’ve really handled the core set,” Lee said, adding that the focus now will be on “continuing to execute and grow the user base.” Even before the current international push, MyFitnessPal was already available in other countries, and it already has an audience in Asia, albeit one that’s “not nearly as large as we’d like,” Lee said. However, when the company launches a localized app, it isn’t just translated into the local language; it also uses local units of measurement and includes data about local foods. Lee said that while each country has its own cultural nuances, he sees a big opportunity in each. For example, even though China, Japan, and Korea have different obesity rates, “The trend lines are all in ,” so something like MyFitnessPal (which allows users to track the calories they eat and share that data with friends) can help. Asked if he had big plans for marketing the app in new countries, Lee replied, “We’ve found that when you deliver a great product and something that helps people actually be healthier, then they’ll talk about it, and that’s how we’ve grown since day one.” By the way, the company that found that social sharing does help with weight loss, and it announced that it’s integrating step tracking data from the iPhone 5S. |
Steve Ballmer Now Owns More Microsoft Stock Than Bill Gates | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Bill Gates sold 4.6 million Microsoft shares recently, an released today indicates. That action lowered his holdings to 330,141,164 shares in the company. Former CEO Steve Ballmer owns The sale therefore , the second CEO of the company. This is not a surprise. As ComputerWorld’s : What will be interesting to watch will be how quickly Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, can accumulate stock in the company. Various that comprise a large portion of his compensation could net him nearly nine-figure equity in his first half decade in charge, in addition to his nearly $20 million yearly salary, of which a large portion is shares. When it comes to any of these three, as I before, they will be “buying all the beers for the next few years.” |
Gillmor Gang Live 05.02.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | – John Taschek, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. |
Facebook Promotes VP Of Product Chris Cox To Chief Product Officer, But No Organizational Change | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Chris Cox helped invent News Feed and devised Facebook’s “Social By Design” strategy, so now the company is recognizing his critical contributions by promoting the VP Of Product to Chief Product Officer. The new title won’t come with any organizational change, but cements the 31-year-old Cox as a leader of Facebook alongside COO Sheryl Sandberg. Mark Zuckerberg delivered the news to the company in an internal announcement this afternoon. Cox has been part of the special “M-team” that regularly meets with Zuckerberg to define the direction of Facebook. He stood right behind his CEO and close friend when Zuck rung the NASDAQ bell the day of Facebook’s IPO. Externally, Cox is widely remembered for his heartfelt on-stage demo of Timeline at Facebook’s f8 conference in 2011. You can watch a clip of that presentation here to get a feel for Cox’s emotive way of thinking about software. Just skip forward to 1:33:27. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r46UeXCzoU&t=94m27s] I’ve seen Cox give several presentations with a big smile and patient tone at Facebook over the years, and I’m not alone in thinking he’s the company’s best voice. f8 this year felt the noticeable absence of his ability to show the sentimental side of even the most mechanical update to Facebook’s product. He once recounted , back when he and Boz would tweak its algorithm by hand. “There were funny moments like when feeds were flooded with basketballs when we did an integration with ESPN for March Madness,” Cox chuckled. He still works closely with the News Feed team as it tries to balance stories from all the people and Pages we’re connected to. Regarding Cox’s new role, a Facebook spokesperson gave this statement: “Chris Cox’s elevation to Chief Product Officer is a reflection of the major role he plays in overseeing the products and features at Facebook. Chris has been instrumental in shaping the evolution of people’s experience using Facebook, our culture and our company, and he’ll continue to do the same as CPO.” While he’s now an even more highly ranked executive, Cox is anything but square. He dropped out of Stanford to work at Facebook in 2005, and is a remarkably talented keyboardist in a reggae band. Facebook Director Of Engineer Mark Slee : Facebook’s bio for Cox now reads: |
Making Child Support Easier, SupportPay Raises $1.1 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Managing child support payments sucks. Even when divorces are amicable, the process of figuring out who pays for what when it comes to raising a child can be devastatingly difficult. Looking to make the process just a little bit easier, Sheri Atwood, a former executive at Symantec and the founder of Ittavi, has raised $1.1 million for , a child support payment management service. The seed round was led by , the personal investment arm of DFJ co-founder Tim Draper, along with and — the new investment firm launched by former DFJ managing director Jennifer Fonstad and Theresia Gouw, a partner with Accel Partners. Additional support came from several prominent angel investors in Silicon Valley. “I am the child of divorce. I had a deadbeat dad and I grew up in that environment,” says Atwood. “Many years ago when I faced my own divorce my ex and I swore that it would be amicable and we said we’d just share my daughter’s expenses.” But even with the agreement in place, the mechanics of dividing the cost of child care was difficult, she says. In North America alone there are 39 million divorced couples exchanging over $200 billion. SupportPay sells a service that provides private, secure, transparent and automated payments for sharing expenses and managing child support. The company’s technology standardizes the billing and payment process for child support and provides transparent access to expenses — ranging from medical, child care, education and other expenses — not addressed by court orders or state-run payment technologies. It also has tracking and reminder features for parents. Available online or as an app on Android and iOS, SupportPay has both a free and subscription option and was built on the Salesforce1 Platform. Ittavi beta-tested the SupportPay service last January and officially launched roughly three-and-a-half months ago. It now has 2,100 users in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. Globally the market for child support services is nearly $1 trillion, Atwood says, and there are no competing services to contend with. “This isn’t a 21-year-old-white-male-who-graduated-from-Harvard problem,” says Atwood. “There are tons of problems that people in my age group faced that are not being addressed by technology today, but could be.” For Draper Associates partner Joel Yarmon, investing in SupportPay wasn’t an easy decision at first, but the longtime investor quickly became convinced of the opportunity after researching what was happening in the U.S. with child support. “I was shocked to hear that 42% of kids born in the U.S. today are born out of wedlock,” he says. And in Atwood Yarmon says he found the perfect entrepreneur to lead the company. “She’s been divorced for ten years, she has a kid, so she lives this,” he says. “Divorce today is so painful. And nobody is addressing [child support] from an online perspective. It’s an area that hasn’t received a lot of attention and it’s one that’s ripe for disruption.” |
Ugggghhhhhh | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | At a time when Silicon Valley is facing increasing scrutiny over the treatment of women in technology, there emerges a website called Codebabes.com that, as you may have already , involves women stripping as you learn to code and pass online tests. . . To which I have to say only this: What in the actual f@ck? The site is so over-the-top about its soft-core “edu-tainment” offerings that have that the entire creation is an elaborate hoax. An Internet troll’s absurdist views. A dissent’s social commentary on the way the tech industry responds to issues surrounding human sexuality or the objectification of women. Or maybe it’s just some asshole trying to make a buck. Whatever. I’d venture that it’s more than a hoax, because if so, it’s a costly one. While the website itself could have been thrown together in a few hours, the video production involved could reach the thousands. They booked professional models ( ” by the way), for starters, which involves scheduling, photo shoots, video production and editing, and more. In other words, it would take longer than just a few hours to make this site, which rules out casual social commentary. In reality, the online business is designed to opportunistically capitalize on the current backlash against the tech industry and its ongoing issues around sexism by simply thumbing its nose at people’s concerns. In fact, CodeBabes is downright reveling in the social media backlash. Though the site’s creators won’t reply to reporters’ inquires — including ours so far — they’re active on Twitter, that “people hate us so much that we’ve streamed 9.23 TB of lesson videos in 2 days.” As they say, sex sells. And, hey, so does bad press. In fact, that’s the gimmick here. Shortly after this month’s launch, someone using a disposable email address “tipped” us off about the site’s existence. “It’s insanely sexist and twitter is about to explode over it,” they said. And like clockwork, that’s exactly what happened. Some pro-equality organizations are even putting together more formal responses, like , detailed below. In an email to members, the group writes: “In an industry where women hold just 25 percent of tech jobs, and are only 18 percent of computer-science majors, stories like this only reinforce the feeling that not everyone is welcome in Silicon Valley… “In the most innovative, best paid and fastest growing sectors of our economy – where much of our present and future society is being built and shaped – we deserve better representation. This week, in addition to tweeting , let’s support those that are actively drawing more women into tech careers. Help spread the word about organizations like and that are changing culture, providing mentorship, and increasing opportunities for marginalized groups. While we don’t yet know who’s behind Codebabes, we do know through technological means that the person(s) viewing (but not responding to) our emails is based in San Francisco. That means they’re clued in to the current scandals in tech involving sexism and abuse – and are likely using those to their advantage. You see, Codebabes has very deliberately arrived at a time when the historically male-dominated tech industry is facing a number of problems regarding its openness, or lack thereof, to women. There are the recent allegations of domestic violence committed by the CEO of RadiumOne, ; a sexism scandal at GitHub resulting in ; a fairly regular stream of name-calling on anonymous social app , favored by Valley insiders; whose services they bought to celebrate a company milestone. And, okay, let’s not forget our own mistakes here: TechCrunch’s previously too-loose oversight of our hackathon once allowed two misogynistic presentations on our own stage. ( then .) The question — and one I debated with myself before writing this article — is whether the knee-jerk press coverage to Codebabes’ clearly manufactured marketing techniques is the right response here. By reacting to their over-obvious attempts to provoke, we’re raising awareness of this site and inadvertently supporting their cause. Should we not let them wither and die by refusing to boost their SEO? Should we not waste our virtual ink on this GIRLSGIRLSGIRLS sideshow, while more serious transgressions on the main stage — toxic workplaces, abuse, work/life balance, equal pay, equal opportunities, etc. — lose our attention? Should we worry that , in parts? (If we laugh parody, is that wrong?) At the end of the day, Codebabes is a tasteless and offensive money grab, and one we’ve helped promote by jabbing at it with a stick, waiting for it to explode like . It’s everything the tech industry doesn’t need right now. But while we may have drawn attention to the site with our complaints, lining the pockets of its trolling overlords, we’ve also taken another step in the right direction by making the default public position on such things one that clearly states: “This is unacceptable and unwelcome here.” . As for Codebabes, the site itself will eventually fail because its business model sucks. After all, any real business that actually wants to teach people to code would have to come to grips with the fact that their customer base includes women. Meanwhile, Codebabes’ users who are more interested in online titillation are already There are few other sites where you can see such things around here, you know. And they don’t require that you take a quiz first. |
Apple Acquires Power Efficient LED Tech Company LuxVue | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Apple has acquired , a stealthy company that had been working on micro-LED, screen technologies, we’ve heard from sources close to the transaction. The company had raised in funding from Kleiner Perkins, iD Ventures America and others. Apple has given us a statement which reads “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” which is as close to a conformation as the company usually gives on acquisitions. LuxVue had managed to remain fairly quiet over the past few years, and what we know is that the company develops low-power, micro-LED-based displays for consumer electronics. We’ve heard Apple acquired the company to add to its hardware innovations area. Because the company is working on mirco-LED displays, this could mean that the technology could be integrated into Apple’s hardware for better battery life and screen brightness. VentureBeat that the company has filed on micro-LED technology. At Disrupt SF last year, KPCB partner John Doerr about LuxVue’s technology, which he said had “a technical breakthrough in displays.” It’s also worth noting that this is likely to be one of Apple acquired over the past 18 months. We’ve contacted Apple for comment and will update when we hear back. : A spokesperson for Apple issued this response: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: The Harman/Kardon HTC One, LumaFit, and TC Disrupt | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | News was flowing this week, as HTC launched a new alongside the . Meanwhile, we took a closer look at the , and as would be expected, we’re all getting geared up for next week. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
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Announcing Your Disrupt NY Startup Battlefield Final Judges: Borthwick, Botha, Dixon, Mayer, Pokorny And Wilson | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Welcome to sunny New York City, where people wear jackets to parties and time is of the essence! As you can probably guess, our whole team is here for the at the . We’re really excited about this year’s lineup, which includes Marissa Mayer, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, Sophia Amoruso and Mike Judge . Just like in the HBO show “Silicon Valley,” 25 startups have rehearsed and re-rehearsed in order to launch spectacularly onstage. The brightest star will take home the famous Disrupt Cup, a $50,000 check and a lifetime of memories. Only four startups will make it to the final round, where the true honor is getting to present in front of our illustrious, industry-legend Battlefield judges. This year, they include John Borthwick (Betaworks), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Andreessen Horowitz), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Brian Pokorny (SV Angel) and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures). Tickets are available , and startups that want one last chance for a place on the Battlefield stage can apply for the last remaining spots in . You can find the full agenda .
John Borthwick is CEO and co-founder of betaworks, a company that builds and invests in essential products driven by data and the social world. Prior to launching betaworks, John was CEO of Fotolog, and prior to that he was SVP of Technology and Alliances at Time Warner. He arrived at Time Warner — AOL — in early 1997 when they acquired WP Studio, which he started back in 1994. WP Studio was a producer of three sites: Total New York (one of the first local city guides, now gone), äda ‘web, and spanker (a pre blog, daily journal of the occasionally twisted mind of Carter Adamson). John also sits on the board and/or acts as an adviser to Rhizome, WNYC (public radio), and HRW (Human Rights Watch). John holds an MBA from Wharton (1994) and an undergraduate degree BA in Economics from Wesleyan University (1987). Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital, and works with a broad range of companies. Some democratize technology access (Square, Eventbrite, Unity, Nimbula); some create global user communities (YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram); and others disrupt markets through innovative business models (Evernote, Weebly, Xoom). Roelof also sits on the boards of Jawbone and Mahalo. Roelof is a champion of consumer Web plays and considers himself as “just another consumer.” Roelof led the initial financing of YouTube on behalf of Sequoia Capital in 2005. Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal, where he led the company through its IPO in 2002, and the acquisition by eBay before joining Sequoia Capital in 2003. Roelof loves to hear a founder recount what inspired them to strike out on their own and to gain an understanding of how the founder is uniquely solving a customer pain point.
Chris Dixon is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch. He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. In addition to his work with Founder’s Collective, Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode.
Marissa Mayer is CEO of Yahoo. Previously as a VP at Google, Marissa Mayer led the product management and engineering efforts of Google’s local, mobile, and contextual discovery products including Google Maps, Google Maps for Mobile, Local Search, Google Earth, Street View, Latitude and more. At 36 years old, she was also the youngest member of Google’s executive operating committee. During her 12 years at Google, Marissa led product management and design efforts for Google web search, images, news, books, products, toolbar, and iGoogle. She started at Google in 1999 as Google’s 20th employee and first woman engineer. Marissa’s contributions and leadership have been recognized by numerous publications including the New York Times, Newsweek and BusinessWeek. Fortune magazine has listed her for the past 3 years on their annual Most Powerful Women’s list, and she was the youngest ever to appear on the list. In 2010 Marissa was honored by the New York Women in Communications, Inc. with a Matrix Award. She also been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and Woman of the Year by Glamour Magazine. Marissa serves on the board of various non-profits, including the Smithsonian National Design Museum, the New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Prior to joining Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. Marissa received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence.
Brian Pokorny is a Managing Partner of SV Angel. Prior to this, he was at Airbnb, where he joined via an acquisition of DailyBooth/Batch. DailyBooth was a venture-backed startup that Brian led for 3 years as their CEO. Before this, Brian was a partner at SV Angel with David Lee and Ron Conway upon the launch of the firm. Prior to SV Angel he was a founding team member and partner at Baseline Ventures, a leading seed-stage investment firm. Before joining Baseline, Brian spent 3.5 years at Google within various positions in the Content Partnerships team and Direct Sales Organization. Before this, he had various roles within sales operations and finance at Juniper Networks, TIBCO Software, and Applied Materials. Brian graduated with a degree in Operations and Management Information Systems from Santa Clara University. Brian is an angel investor in Twitter, Square, OMGPOP (Acquired by Zynga), Tweetdeck (acquired by Twitter), DailyBooth (acquired by Airbnb), Milo (Acquired by eBay), Posterous (acquired by Twitter), Chomp (acquired by Apple), Milk (Acquired by Google), Bump (acquired by Yahoo), WiFast, Couple, Elepath, MessageMe, and has advisory positions with Ooyala, Stitcher, and Rupture (acquired by EA)
Fred Wilson is a founder and Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures. Fred began his career in venture capital in 1987 and he has focused exclusively on information technology investments for the past 16 years. From 1987 to 1996, Fred was first an Associate and then a General Partner at Euclid Partners, an early stage venture capital firm located in New York City. In 1996, Fred co-founded Flatiron Partners. Fred was the Managing Partner of Flatiron Partners and was responsible for securing $150 million of initial capital commitments from Chase Capital Partners (now JP Morgan Partners) and SOFTBANK. He built the investment team, which grew to 10 investment professionals, and managed the creation of a $570 million portfolio. Fred has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Fred has been a guest lecturer at The Stern School of Business at NYU and is active on a number of community and nonprofit boards. |
Google Buys Rangespan To Add Big Data Inventory Management To Google Shopping | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Google has made another move to build out its e-commerce business, and specifically its retail portal . It has acquired , a London-based provider of back office services for online retailers, using data science to help them expand their product selection based on real-time sales dynamics. The company is based out of London, making this the third acquisition for Google out of the UK this year after AI-specialist and anti-malware startup . The service is getting shut down and integrated into Google, founder Ryan Regan tells me. The company, he says, is not disclosing the terms of the deal. “Some of us, including me, are moving over to join Google,” he says, declining to elaborate on who exactly is joining. They will be going to Zurich (originally I wrote Mountain View but we were on a bad phone connection). “There are a lot of parallels between what we are doing and what Google is doing and we are excited to work together.” On Rangespan’s CrunchBase profile, four people are listed as working for the company. In addition to Regan, there is co-founder Matt Henderson, technical director James Summerfield, and Jurgen Van Gael, data science director. The news was originally announced on Rangespan’s home page: We are very happy to announce that Rangespan is joining Google. We will continue to work on services for shoppers and retailers at Google, and we’re super excited about the opportunities to come. As part of the change, we will wind down Rangespan’s services. We’ve already begun working individually with each of our retailers and suppliers on this process. Rangespan had raised . Rangespan and its team could be an interesting addition to Google in more ways than one. The company itself has built up software that lets retailers and online goods suppliers to use existing market data to decide what products to add or take away from their current product ranges. In its time it has worked with huge UK retailers like Tesco, Argos and Asda on such solutions — giving an indication to where Google may be setting its own sights in its shopping spree. Its efforts have extended into working with retailers to optimise selling through its portal and also home delivery services via Google Shopping Express. The idea here could be that Google wants to sweeten the deal for large retailers by helping them sell better through Google. But there is also the talent in question. Regan and his co-founder Henderson are both alums of Amazon, and Regan was also once chief digital officer of Last.fm. |
Tweets Can Guide Emergency Responders Almost Immediately After An Earthquake | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Aggregated data from sites like Google and Twitter have given researchers new ways to track things ranging from to . But those are situations that usually take hours, if not days, to develop. Now Stanford researchers to add potentially life-saving information to , which are created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earthquake Hazards Program to track earthquakes, in almost real-time. ShakeMaps are first produced using recordings, a ground motion prediction equation, and geological data from the site of the earthquake. Then witness accounts (called “did you feel it?” data) collected by online surveys are used to supplement that information. Researchers Mahalia Miller, Lynne Burks, and Reza Zadeh say that data from Twitter is a potentially valuable addition to ShakeMaps because it “is a service that enables everyone to create and share ideas and information instantly,” and many of its 255 million active users are in regions that are prone to earthquakes, including parts of the U.S., Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines. In fact, the USGS is also currently looking at how tweets can be used for rapid earthquake detection. This is especially important for people in earthquake-prone areas, who need to know immediately if they have to prepare for aftershocks or related events like tsunamis. Miller, Burks, and Zadeh looked at all geo-tagged tweets with the words “earthquake” or “tsunami” in several languages written within the first 10 minutes after Japanese earthquakes at magnitudes of 6 or more from 2011 to 2012. They found “that counts of geo-tagged tweets at different radii around a particular site are good predictors of shaking intensity when used in combination with earthquake-based features such as VS30 [a global map server] and source-to-site distance.” This is a valuable tool for first responders because other data sources, including inspections by engineers, measurements from recording stations that are not connected to the Internet, and online surveys, are often not ready before decisions about rescue and recovery operations need to be made. Using Twitter to help estimate the size of an impacted area can have “significant potential for regions that may not have an extensive network of existing earthquake recording stations but have many active Twitter users,” Miller, Burks, and Zadeh added. For more information, check out the , which will be presented at the in July. |
White House Report On Big Data Calls For Email Privacy Reform | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | The White House this week released a on big data in which it calls for an update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The act, which should in fact be called the Electronic Communications Lack Of Privacy Act, is . The ECPA allows the government to access email that is older than 180 days, or has been opened, with a subpoena. In short, it has the legal authority to read most of your email without a warrant. The law made more sense in the era in which storage capacity was expensive. Today, it is not. Here is the report’s note on reforming the act: Amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Congress should amend ECPA to ensure the standard of protection for online, digital content is consistent with that afforded in the physical world—including by removing archaic distinctions between email left unread or over a certain age. Yes. There is ample interest in Congress to reform the bill. In fact, have been proposed. The Leahy-Lee Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act ( ) was one such effort. Rep. Zoe Lofgren also . Nothing managed to get itself passed by both chambers of Congress and across the President’s desk. This should be a no-brainer. In late 2013 Google a that called for reform of the ECPA, and so forth. Adding protection to email akin to the sort of protection that your other papers enjoy is logical, and will, I think, eventually make it into law. The question is how and when? There is a slight tinge or ironic mental dissonance at play in this discussion, living as we do in the — how important is it to limit the government from one door, when another stands wide open? But this is a fight worth having, because we can win. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 5 | null |
KidAdmit Wants To Take The Hassle Out Of Applying For Preschools In The Bay Area | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Applying to preschool in San Francisco is not that different from when you may have applied to college 15 years ago. You have to complete a bunch of applications either by hand or print them out from an online application, and then you have to mail them in manually with a check to each school. It’s archaic and fairly frustrating in the highly connected world we live in (I don’t even own a printer). , an early-stage startup in San Francisco, was born out of the same frustration. Founded by local mom and finance exec Tejal Shah and her cousin and former PayPal engineer Parth Shah, KidAdmit is sort of like the common application but for San Francisco preschools. As Shah explains, she faced the same challenges outlined above when applying for preschools in San Francisco and thought there was a better way to bring this online. Some schools have their own online applications, but KidAdmit aims to bring all these into one place where you can store all of your information (and potentially auto-fill this info) into each application for each preschool. You can also pay your admissions fees to each school via the platform. Beyond just the application, you can search for preschools in your area, save schools to a list, and access general information about the school even if it hasn’t signed up to be part of KidAdmit’s “common app.” The company was previously focused just in San Francisco, but last week, expanded to include preschools in the greater Bay Area. Currently 25 percent of San Francisco preschools allows you to apply via KidAdmit. Shah adds that this is a huge market when you think about the fact that there are 35 million applications for preschool every year around the country. It’s also worth noting that the startup has raised seed funding led by K9 Ventures (Manu Kumar) with SV Angel, Wayee Chu and Ethan Beard participating. I used KidAdmit for several of my preschool applications for my daughter this past year and found it to be super easy to use. I found myself wishing, however, that every school would sign up with KidAdmit — many do not allow you to apply via the site, but just provide general information. But the startup is working on adding more schools, and like many compelling startups these days, has aimed to solve an offline problem online. |
Sphero And Ollie Robotic Toy Maker Orbotix Has Raised Another $20M, Say Sources | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | , the company that makes fast-moving, robotic toys that you control with smartphone apps, has raised another $20 million in funding, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed with a reliable source. This brings the total raised by maker of the popular ball to $35 million, as it gears up to start selling its next product, the cylindrical (originally called the ), later this year (pictured here). We are still trying to find out Orbotix’s valuation, as well as the investors are in this round. Previously, Orbotix — based out of Boulder, Colorado and originally incubated at TechStars — had from TechStars, Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures and SK Ventures. That includes Series A, B, and C rounds; a partial close in 2013; and, it seems, a very earlier this year. That last round included Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson from the Foundry Group and Mark Solon from Highway 12 — possibly an indication of who is involved in this latest raise, with that Form D for such a small amount actually a place marker for a bigger round. Orbotix has never revealed sales figures for the Sphero, but we understand that it has sold some half a million units of the first and second versions of the product, with version two retailing at $129. Co-founded by Ian Bernstein and Adam Wilson, robotics and software engineers who are now respectively Orbotix’s CTO and chief software architect, the company was an early mover in the new generation of toy makers that have tapped into the rapid growth of smartphones and apps in their products. An SDK that it launched in 2011 has become the basis for some on iOS and Android devices, both made by Orbotix and outside developers, which create games around the features of the ball. The latest version of the Sphero rolls at up to seven feet per second and operates via a Bluetooth connection with a range of 100 feet and is powered by induction charging and features colored lights. But while there are definitely fun and games to be had with the product, there are more educational angles, too — not just in terms of developing apps using the SDK but also teaching children about geometry and physics, which is how more toys should be in my opinion. We have contacted Orbotix to confirm details directly and will update the post as we learn more. |
Heyzap Is Killing Its Standalone “Social Discovery” Apps For Gamers | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Mobile ad network is shutting down its standalone , company CEO Immad Akund confirmed to us. The , which previously served as something of an app discovery service for mobile gamers, is already gone from the App Store, and the plan is to do the same with the Android version in the near future, Akund says. The company, for background, had originally built a mobile social network for gamers where through either the Heyzap app, or, with the introduction of the Heyzap SDK (software development kit), check into games automatically via Heyzap integrations. Heyzap’s own app was with a “play with friends” feature, designed to make connecting with other users easier and more social. At first, the disappearance of the Heyzap iOS app while the Android version remained looked like something that may have been done at Apple’s request, if not pulled by Apple itself. After all, Apple doesn’t care for apps that compete with its own services, like the App Store – especially when those are used to help promote or market applications in a way that could affect App Store rankings. ( , in fact.) Could it be that Apple was done with letting Heyzap fly under the radar until now? Akund says that’s not the case, even sending an iTunes Connect screenshot (above) to prove it. Instead, he explains, the company itself decided to pull down its standalone application because the team hadn’t worked on it in over a year, and the app was now causing confusion about what Heyzap is all about. Plus, he says, the social back-end server costs are high and servers require maintenance. Today, Heyzap’s small team is trying to focus on their current priorities, not this older experience. The app, however, will still work for now for those who have it installed, it’s just no longer available for sale. Meanwhile, the company is now asking its Android app developers how they want to export their leaderboards and achievement data. “We…didn’t want to remove the Android app till we have a good solution for them,” says Akhund. The plan is to keep the back-end servers online for a little while, even after the Android app is pulled down from Google Play, but the company doesn’t know right now how long before those servers would be shut down for good. These days, Heyzap is no longer focused on its standalone “social discovery” platform for apps within standalone applications. Instead, as , the real business for the company now involves its SDK, which allows developers to target ads to people who like similar games. Heyzap currently reaches around 5,000 games, and has around 450 advertisers, including Kabam, Gree, DeNA, King, Supercell, and Spotify, the report noted. And Heyzap is now expanding into other applications, as well, to offer similar personalized recommendations. , the company has been profitable this year, with a revenue run rate of $13 million-$14 million, and growing. For comparison’s sake, Heyzap was only doing $1 million per year in April 2013, notes Akhund. |
Happy Birthday, BASIC | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | Fifty years ago this month, in 1964, a computer programming language winked to life that changed the course of a generation. While many would point to the rise of Unix and other ubiquitous programming languages in the intervening years as formative points in the history of computing, on May 1, 1964, a computer at Dartmouth College ran the first BASIC program, changing the world forever. Created by Professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz and a team of student programmers, the Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code was supposed to be a simple system for teaching computer literacy and escaping the strange runes associated with early mainframe programming. Gone were commands like “EBCDIC ARRAY E [0:11],” replaced by a simple “HELLO” to begin programming and a delightful “READY” prompt that showed the computer was listening. BASIC was perfect for beginners. The structure was inherent in the language – each line was numbered – and the commands encouraged linear thinking. While it’s fallen out of favor in recent years, replaced by new BASIC-like beginner’s languages, the Dartmouth’s contribution to history has always been a great introductory tool for millions of programmers. Early BASIC was a strange beast but the language slowly but surely accreted all of the tools necessary to do real work. Most early home computers ran BASIC as a default and I fondly recall created executables in , a powerful successor to Dartmouth BASIC that essentially bolted a Ferrari engine into a Pinto. With the rise of the web BASIC fell out of fashion but you can , , and . You can even program it on and . I think it can be safely said that the following few lines of BASIC have introduced more computer programmers to the magic of creation than any other. It’s the language that launched a thousand ships. 10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”
20 GOTO 10 I remember fondly typing in that code – the “HELLO WORLD” replaced with something more scatological – and getting in trouble in third grade. Don’t forget the semicolon after the last quote for extra fun! You can read a little bit more about and follow . You can see the original manual [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gxo9LVIgOiI] |
Foursquare Swarms Over Swarmly | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | News that a major company or extremely well-funded competitor has launched a new product with a similar or identical name is certainly the kind of thing that keeps startup founders up at night. . Well, the former has just happened to location-sharing UK startup , after location-sharing app announced yesterday that it would launch a new app called . Foursquare as a whole pre-exists the UK startup by some years. It’s offered a “swarm” feature from very early on, a “ ” that users could earn when checking into a place alongside 50 others, or more for a “super swarm.” But the similarity in name and general purpose are unfortunate to say the least. To be clear, Foursquare’s new — and, as yet, unreleased — app is not completely identical in feature set to Swarmly. Swarmly, for iOS and Android, lets you share your location with friends and anonymously, as well as locate social “hotspots” — — in realtime, powered by its aggregated, anonymized location-based data. Meanwhile, Swarm essentially splits out the old Foursquare’s check-in functionality — leaving the main Foursquare app to focus on location-based search and discovery, taking on Yelp directly — as well as adding a Facebook “nearby friends”-type feature that makes sharing your location more general and less specific. Foursquare itself isn’t particularly perturbed by the similarities they do share. “Swarm, the Swarm brand, and the Swarm functionality are all the product of five years’ learning, hard work, and development,” a spokesperson tells TechCrunch. “The brand is taken from the original Foursquare badge set, and the app was developed coming from that.” It’s, unsurprisingly, a different tune from the David to Foursquare’s Goliath. “[It] certainly makes things a bit more complicated when it comes to discoverability if we have to compete with a similar app with an almost identical name from a well established company,” Swarmly CEO and co-founder Marco De Nichilo tells TechCrunch. There’s also a certain irony since Swarmly is, in part, powered by Foursquare’s API in order to surface venue location data (although it has plenty of in-house tech, too). That suggests, if it wasn’t already extremely likely, that Foursquare would have been aware of Swarmly’s existence. “It does seem somewhat.. odd,” adds De Nichilo. “They are definitely aware of our app [since] we use their venue API, and [they have] started moving in that direction with an incredibly similar name at the same time. It seems a little too coincidental especially given their previous stance regarding always-on location sharing.” Swarmly has alway had a focus on “always-on” location sharing because of its dual functionality, where aggregating realtime location data is as important, if not more so, than individually sharing your location with friends. That’s a feature we previously as something akin to Waze’s crowdsourced traffic data but for people. Foursquare’s Swarm app will also allow for background, “always-on”, location sharing, hence De Nichilo’s feeling that the company has moved in on a space Swarmly was already occupying, along with others such as Highlight, Circle and the now-defunct from Google. In a further twist, along with a ton of games in the iOS store stuffed with keywords related or similar to ‘swarm’ (such as Angry Wasp!), another startup carries the exact same name. , backed by Icon Venture Partners and a number of , is a mobile tool for bricks ‘n’ mortar retailers. |
The Fourth Internet | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Not very often do you read something online that gives you the chills. Today, I read two such things. The from former Gizmodo, Buzzfeed and now Awl writer , who wrote about the brutality of the mobile social (or for sake of discussion ‘fourth’) Internet: “Metafilter came from two or three internets ago, when a website’s core audience—people showing up there every day or every week, directly—was its main source of visitors. Google might bless a site with new visitors or take them away. Either way, it was still possible for a site’s fundamentals to be strong, independent of extremely large outside referrers. What’s so disconcerting now is that the new sources of readership, the apps and sites people check every day and which lead people to new posts and stories, make up a majority of readership, and they’re utterly unpredictable (they’re also bigger, always bigger, every new internet is.)” This broke my heart. In 2008, two Internets ago, was my favorite site. It was where I went to find out what the next would be, or to find precious baby animal videos to show my cool boyfriend or even . And now it’s as as the I first discovered there. National Internet treasures like Metafilter (or for that matter) should never die. There should be some Internet Preservation Society filled with individuals like Herrman or Marc Andreessen or Mark Zuckerberg or whose sole purpose is to keep them alive. But there isn’t. Herrman makes a very good point; Useful places to find information, that aren’t some strange Pavlovian manipulation of the human desire to click or identify, just aren’t good business these days. And Herrman should know, he’s worked in every new media outlet under the web, including the one that AP staffers are now so desperate to join that they make mistakes The fourth Internet is scary like Darwinism, brutal enough to remind me of high school. It’s a game of identity where you either make people feel like members of some exclusive club, like does with a pricy subscription model or all niche tech sites do with their relatively high CPM, or you straight up play up to reader narcissism like Buzzfeed does, slicing and dicing user identity until you end up with Which brings me to the thing I read today which truly scared the shit out of me. Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti, though is completely bereft of it in favor of MIT, was apparently an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz in the late 90s. , about identity and capitalism in post-modern times, which tl:dr postulated that neo-capitalism needs to get someone to identify with its ideals before it could sell its wares. (Aside: If you think you are immune to capitalistic entreaties, because you read and are a , you’re not. Think of it this way: What is actually wrong with being chubby? But how hard do modern ads try to tell you that this — which is arguably the Western norm — is somehow not okay.) The thesis Peretti put forth in his paper is basically the blueprint for , which increasingly has made itself All About You. Whether you’re an , or an or a person born in the 2000s, 1990s or 80s, you will identify with Buzzfeed, because its business model (and the entire fourth Internet’s ) depends on it. As Dylan Matthews More than anything else in the pantheon of modern writing or as the kids call it, content creation, Buzzfeed aims to be hyper-relatable, through visuals! It hopes it can define your exact identity, because only then will you share its URL on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr as some sort of badge of your own uniqueness, immortality. If the first Internet was “Getting information online,” the second was “Getting the information organized” and the third was “Getting everyone connected” the fourth is definitely “Get mine.” Which is a trap. Which Cog In The Digital Capitalist Machine Are You? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRH3iTQPrk |
Google Accused Of Denying AdSense Payouts In Fishy Class Action Lawsuit | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Last month, an anonymous blogger claiming to be a former employee slammed Google with so it wouldn’t have to pay publishers. Despite a strong denial from Google, that claim has been escalated into a filed on behalf of Free Range Content, a California company that says Google killed its AdSense account in order to withhold payment. The class action suit claims that Google “unlawfully denies payments to thousands of website owners and operators” and it “seeks damages for all U.S. Google AdSense publishers whose AdSense account was disabled or terminated, and whose last AdSense program payment was withheld permanently by Google.” But the whole thing smells fishy. the original blog claims were bunk for a slew of reasons laid out below, and Google gave us this statement in April, strongly denying the accusations: “This description of our AdSense policy enforcement process is a complete fiction. The color-coding and ‘extreme quality control’ programs the author describes don’t exist. Our teams and automated systems work around the clock to stop bad actors and protect our publishers, advertisers and users. All publishers that sign up for AdSense agree to the of the service and a designed to ensure the quality of the network for users, advertisers and other publishers. When we discover violations of these policies, we take quick action, which in some cases includes disabling the publisher’s account and refunding affected advertisers.” When we investigated, here’s what we found. Despite saying they were a Google employee, they didn’t use langauge consistent with Google’s internal lexicon. It purported that “invalid clicks” were used by AdSense publishers’ competitors to get their accounts cancelled for fraud, but Google has sophisticated algorithms to detect this kind of attack. Functionally, Google is believed to refund advertisers if it doesn’t end up paying their money out to a publisher, so it couldn’t earn money by the supposed scam laid out in the class action suit. And killing off publishers with high lifetime values to Google just so it could get a one-month boost in its revenue is an unsustainable and thereby unwise strategy. |
Indian E-Commerce Site Snapdeal Raises Another $100M From BlackRock And Others | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | , one of the larger online e-commerce companies in India, has raised $100 million from Temasek, BlackRock, Myriad, Premji Invest and Tybourne. This follows a round of funding from marketplace giant eBay, Bessemer Venture Partners and others that was just announced three months ago. This brings Snapdeal’s total funding to over $400 million. The e-commerce market in India has been exploding, thanks to the rapid rapid rise of online consumers and global investors eager to get a piece of the action. India’s e-commerce market is projected to grow sevenfold to $22 billion in the next five years, as Internet infrastructure improves further, making it easier for the country’s nearly 200 million online population to shop on-the-go. The country’s e-commerce market is currently worth $3.1 billion annually. Snapdeal also recently acquired fashion products discovery site We hear the funding will be used “We see this financing round as another endorsement of Snapdeal’s differentiated strategy and progress as India’s largest online marketplace. We are pleased to welcome several marquee global investors as our partners and believe their association will contribute to Snapdeal’s long-term success. Our mobile and internet commerce marketplace is now connecting millions of buyers to a very large base of sellers that offer products and services of national and international brands. We will continue to focus on creating life changing experiences for the buyers as well as sellers in the Snapdeal ecosystem.” said Snapdeal co-founder and CEO Kunal Bahl in a release. This funding news comes amidst the acquisition reports between . According to these reports, India’s largest retailer, Flipkart, is set to buy Myntra in a deal worth $330 million. |
Messaging To The Tune Of A Remix | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | When you’re speaking to someone who’s created a photo sharing app that has a social component, there’s a certain kind of mutual understanding. This isn’t the first time that this has been done — they’re mostly hoping that the permutation on the formula that they’ve come up with will be one that resonates. During those conversations, there’s one thing you always wait to hear: the word “communicate.” Because if your photo sharing app has a social component of any sort, it’s not actually a photo sharing app — it’s a messaging app. Whether the model is one-to-many or one-to-one, once you invite feedback you’re having a dialog. It’s something that a surprising number of photo sharing app creators don’t get right away — if ever. Just because you’re not using text or audio doesn’t mean that you’re not having a conversation. Studio designer Joe Wilson says that the latest version of the app, , is all about art that elicits a response. The act of creating, of self-expression, is typically a single-player experience, says Wilson. But when it’s done online via networks like Tumblr, Instagram or in Studio, it’s done to evoke a reaction. That was the lightbulb moment that the team had after shipping their 1.0 product, which we covered a few months ago. Studio 2.0 is an app that lets you shoot a photo, add filters and a variety of vector-based flourishes like text, frames, crops and designs — and post it to the app and other networks. The app has taken seed investment from CrunchFund*, SV Angels, Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade, Peak Capital Partners, Michael Levinthal and the KickStart Seed Fund. The key hook is that you’ve got an absolute ton of free elements to play with — and you can take designs that others have created and riff on them by remixing those designs with your own photo, elements and tweaks. The result is a sort of collaborative collage feed that can, at times, feel like a Photoshop battle thread on Reddit or another online forum, and I mean that in the best way. The first , relegating the remix option to a sub menu. But it became clear that some people really had a knack for creating original designs in the app, where others had issues even getting started, failing out of the design process due to the “blank canvas” barrier. Wilson describes a conversation he had with Kevin Heap, one of Studio’s developers. “You go home at night and make these fun things with Studio,” said Heap. “I fire it up and make stuff that looks like crap.” That’s exactly the barrier that the remix option is designed to overcome. The mechanics of the remix feature are clever. When you choose to remix another person’s design, the ‘base’ photo fades away, forcing you to use your own. This was done to prevent bullying and will likely encourage the continuation of the dialog aspects of Studio. Your remix launches with the design editor floating on top of a live camera feed, encouraging you to shoot away. The design elements are conversational tools, and the photo is the basis of the conversation. I’ve been fascinated for some time with the way that messaging apps leave a whole layer of emotional subtext behind when they stick to text or even emoticons. Giving people a starting point of design language to play with creates a mood that they can then modify and tweak as they continue the conversation with people via remixes. And people are responding. The remixes, even before today’s more prominent release, have been in the mid-teen percentage of posts, and the number is rising. The app has 2.5M installs and 10M designs posted and people have made 16.5M connections by following people in the app. When discussing Studio, Wilson makes an interesting comparison to collaborative business software, like Yammer or Salesforce. That kind of back and forth collaboration, in an environment of share and share-alike is what they’re trying to replicate with Studio. You’re creating things with the knowledge that they’re just the start of what could become a conversation with your followers. That was done by deciding that anything in Studio should “live,” says Wilson. Unlike other photo editors like Photoshop or a variety of other titling and creation apps, nothing in Studio is “dead on export.” It continues to be able to be manipulated and played with in service of a conversation. This expands the vocabulary of sharing beyond photos to both the individual elements that you use to create your posts, as well as the resulting remixes. And the posts are threaded together by a credit that shows who the remixed design was inspired by and enables you to flow backwards through the conversation. “[These users], they’re not designers, not photographers, not artists but they’re creating things,” says Wilson. “Our goal is to have the largest community in the world of people creating.” And opportunities for monetization abound, from packs of design elements created by independent designers or brands looking to produce collections that spread their marketing agenda. There have been some other attempts at this kind of collaborative remixing, such as ex-NYT designer Khoi Vinh’s , which was . But there’s something about the focused aspects of Studio that make it interesting — and might give it a chance of surviving when there are 10 other social photo apps waiting in the wings. Regardless, there’s something here — especially in the way that it combats the brutal fear that a blank canvas can inspire in people that aren’t designers by nature — and even some that are. Let’s see how this one develops. Studio 2.0 is available in the now. |
AUGMENT Is A Stylish, Lightweight Charger And Case Set For iPhones | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 20 |
Keeping your iPhone fully powered is a pain, especially if you like running a lot of battery draining apps. popular cases can hold a charge forever, but they are bulky. Separate battery cases are more lightweight, but they usually attach with a cord and dangle awkwardly from your phone like a placenta attached to an umbilical cord. A startup called wants to make charging phones less cumbersome with AUGMENT, a set with a charging module that snaps securely onto a matching iPhone case without a cable. Now on , AUGMENT is just $1,000 away from its $17,000 goal with 28 days left to go. The campaign price for the full AUGMENT case and charger set costs $45, or the two pieces can be purchased separately. AUGMENT’s estimated ship date for backers is this August. AUGMENT’s charging module weighs just 38g and has an 1200mAh battery that holds 60% of an iPhone’s full power. The case has a hard polycarbonate inner layer encased in soft thermoplastic polyurethane that makes it more comfortable to hold and also ensures that your iPhone can be easily removed. AUGMENT’s battery and your iPhone can be recharged at the same time.
The set was created by Will Matters, an Australian industrial designer who is currently based in Hong Kong. In addition to being a stylish change from most iPhone cases, AUGMENT’s square design also allows the charger to mount securely, which means it won’t fall off while you are using it. The section of the case that surrounds the camera lens is black to avoid affecting the color balance of photos. Matters has more details about AUGMENT’s design process in this . “Similar to Google’s Project Ara, we designed AUGMENT on the concept that not everything each person needs from a smartphone can be fit into single package. However, we designed this system to ‘augment’ and enhance your existing smartphone by adding features, rather than just reconfigure it,” Matters told TechCrunch in an email. “We also wanted it to be as easy as possible for the user, which is why we chose a minimal aesthetic and Lego-like functionality.” AUGMENT’s modular design also means that Rubix will be able to create other matching snap-on iPhone accessories in the future. AUGMENT has already received approval from Apple for its Made for iPhone (MFi) plan, which means it should receive final certification as soon as it reaches its Kickstarter goal. For more details, check out AUGMENT’s . |
null | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 2 | null |
The Little Surface That Didn’t | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Earlier today when Microsoft’s Surface event was wrapping, and took to to head off a stampede of writers trying to get their hands on the , tweets were still wondering what had happened: Where the heck was the much-rumored smaller Surface? Bloomberg indicating that Microsoft had worked on the small device, but had reversed on showing it off. Here’s the key paragraph: Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and Executive Vice President Stephen Elop decided that the product in development wasn’t different enough from rivals and probably wouldn’t be a hit, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans weren’t public. Engineers had been working on the device and had planned to unveil it as early as today at an event in New York, two of the people said. Surface has struggled with unit volume through its life, so to head off a new variant of the product due to concerns relating to its hit potential is slightly ironic. What about the Small Surface would have stood out, when stacked next to other devices in the market? It’s worth noting that the strong points of the Surface line, which help to differentiate it from other tablets, came together in the Pro 3 — its set of keyboard covers and the kickstand. Would those have translated well to a smaller device with a screen of, say, 8 or 9 inches? I can only speculate, but I doubt the translation would be that great. (I can’t confirm Bloomberg’s entire post, but I’ve heard similar things, regarding work on a smaller Surface, and a later decision to put it back in the box.) So, as far as things can be “Surface,” the Surface Pro 3 is darn pure. Could we see the smaller Surface down the pike? I have heard nothing on that. It’s not impossible, I’d wager, but not that likely either. What’s interesting in this is that the media appears to have been right most of the time, but were caught flat by Microsoft’s choice to cancel its plans. Fair enough. TechCrunch will have more on the Surface Pro 3 over the next few days. Microsoft has laid its bet. Let’s see how it pays off. |
Dropbox Buys Bubbli, Will Integrate The 3D Photo Tech Into Its Photo Service | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | It looks like has made another acquisition today in the photo space: it has acquired , a startup that has built some innovative ways of incorporating 3D technology into 2D views, and packaging it in a for ordinary consumers to use. We’re reaching out to get more details from both companies. For now, Bubbli has been sending out a notice to its users today announcing the deal. The note points out that Bubbli is not popping, so to speak. The tech is getting integrated into Dropbox, and in the meantime the existing Bubbli app will stay alive. Full text below. We have some exciting news to share: Dropbox has acquired bubbli! We’re thrilled to be joining Dropbox. Bubbli’s goal has always been to capture experiences in a way that feels like you are not just viewing photos but reliving memories. By joining forces, we’ll be able to continue to transform how you experience your memories on a much larger scale. The bubbles everyone has shared have blown us away. We’re working on integrating bubbles into Dropbox and we’ll keep you posted on our progress. Until then, you can continue capturing bubbles the same way you have in the past! Thank you for all your support thus far and here’s to the future! Cheers,
Ben & Terrence
Co-Founders Bubbli was founded by two Stanford alums, Ben Newhouse and Terrence McArdle, who have respectively broken ground in imaging technology. McArdle “invented the first seamless digital spherical photo in 1991, three years before the release of QTVR,” Bubbli notes on its . Meanwhile, Ben — while working at Yelp several years ago — created Yelp Monocle, the “first Augmented Reality app to launch on the US App Store.” The two met at Stanford and started to work together combining their expertise, resulting in Bubb.li — which gives users the ability to take panoramic-style pictures with a sweep of their phones, and then use those to create spherical-like, moving pictures, complete with sound. The acquisition builds on Dropbox’s existing assets in the photo space — specifically acquisitions like (which was eventually shut down) and — as well as the launch of its photo storage app earlier this year. But what’s interesting about Bubb.li is that it marks a new chapter for Dropbox on the photo front. Snapjoy and Loom were startups that focused on smarter ways of organising your photos — Snapjoy helped unify disparate photo albums on different platforms and organise them chronologically and with some serendipitous resurfacing of pictures you may have forgotten existed; Loom had a clever way of letting your store large files but use faster and smaller ones on your mobile device. Bubb.li, however, is more about the art of creating pictures, and doing more innovative things with the basic images you are recording and storing. In my opinion, this points to how Dropbox is looking to add more value to its services, beyond that of a basic and efficient storage provider. As the company grows, it’s only natural that it will look to attract a wider range of consumers, beyond power-users who need tons of storage space and early adopters. With something like Bubb.li, you can imagine that some users may come for the pretty pictures, and then stay for the premium storage, or the other services Dropbox has today, or may have in the future — or so the hope may be, at least. Ironically, just earlier today (before we knew about Bubb.li) we were discussing at TechCrunch whether Carousel offered enough value to users as a basic photo storage app to woo them away from Flickr and other existing services. The figures from don’t paint a very pretty picture: H/T |
Investors Circle Taptalk After Facebook Clone Rumors | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Facebook was recently to be working on a new “ephemeral messaging” app similar to Snapchat, allowing users to send short video messages very easily. Dubbed Slingshot, the app is understood to resemble , the video-messaging app from Berlin-based Wit Dot Media. In Taptalk, users tap or hold a contact’s profile picture to instantly send a photo or short video. This can be seen only once by the recipient. TechCrunch understands the company has already raised a $1 million seed round from undisclosed investors, and is now in active talks with West Coast US VCs because of the Facebook rumor. Indeed, Facebook’s engineers are understood to be “all over” Taptalk, say sources. A large amount of Facebook employees have been using Taptalk since it opened up its beta in March, and it’s understood that the Slingshot app will look almost exactly like Taptalk. The app has gotten a lot of attention in tech circles for its simplicity. In Taptalk the top part of the app always shows a live image. You just tap on a profile picture once to send and image to that person. If you hold and release you send a video. You can add text by tapping on the bottom right of the screen prior to sending a video or photo. New message alerts take you to a video or picture and the sender’s location (this function can be disabled). This gives it a ‘visual walkie talkie’ feel. The speed of the app means there are no re-takes, no filters, etc., so it’s very quick. You cannot send the same video or picture to a few people at the same time, making it more personal and authentic, and less prone to social over-sharing. In part because of the rumor about a Facebook clone, we understand Taptalk user numbers are skyrocketing. Facebook tried to take on Snapchat before, in December 2012 , but failed miserably. Many observers believe Facebook needs a Snapchat-like app to appeal to teenagers who are going cold on the service in favour of messaging apps. |
A Walk Through The Surface Pro 3, Microsoft’s Ultralight Laplet | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | To top off our cavalcade of coverage today, I present a very quick walk-through of the Surface Pro 3 with a special guest star. So far, the laplet (laptop-tablet) is quite an improvement over the original Surface. Make no mistake: This is a full PC. It has a powerful Intel Core processor — this model contains an i5 and runs as fast as any Windows 8 laptop. The improved hinge is unusual in that it can fold almost all the way back, a clever way to make it more lap-friendly. It has minimal ports — a USB 3.0 and MicroSD slot along with a DisplayPort — and most of the features are focused around cloud access to your files and on-board editing tasks. It is a tablet made for work rather than a tablet retrofitted for work. Does that mean it can replace a full laptop? It all depends on how you’ll use this. I haven’t put it on a plane yet, and the seat back tray test is important simply because the previous Surface was messy when it came to using the device in confined spaces. So far I’m really pleased with the Surface. This is Microsoft’s Platonic ideal for what an 8.1 tablet should be, and I think it succeeds in creating a device that balances size, weight, power and power consumption. I think we’re still a long way off from using these sorts of things as our everyday laptops but I, for one, welcome our laplet overlords. [gallery ids="1005120,1005118,1005117,1005116,1005114,1005113,1005112,1005111,1005110,1005109"] |
Local Services Marketplace Thumbtack Raises $30 Million | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | , a marketplace that connects local professionals with clients, has raised a $30 million Series C round from and , TechCrunch has learned. The startup has an original approach when it comes to local services. Unlike with , customers don’t have to waste time searching for different options. Instead, they tell the platform exactly what they are looking for, and service providers have 24 hours to bid on the job. The client receives multiple quotes, can compare reviews and then only needs to pick the right person. There are many professionals on the platform, including handymen, DJs for a reception, photographers, yoga teachers and more. After selecting the job and your location, you need to fill out a short form to narrow down what you’re looking for. For example, for a bartender, you will be asked to select beverage types, say who is bringing the bottles, if tip jars are allowed and more. For now, the service is only available in the U.S. Back in , the service had 250,000 different service providers. Even more difficult, the company needs to keep a healthy number of providers, as they are the ones who answer requests. They can’t just wait for clients to show up. A year ago, the startup $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital, Javelin Venture Partners and MHS Capital. So far and including today’s round, the company a bit less than $50 million. After the previous round, Thumbtack didn’t have any plans for international expansion. Maybe it has changed, or maybe the startup just wants to go to the next level in the U.S. |
Major U.K. Real-Time Train Database Opens Up To More Developers | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | A long-standing pain-point for U.K. developers wanting to do cool things with real-time train data looks like it’s going to ease up, thanks to changes in the terms of access and usage being announced today. From the user side, this will also (hopefully) mean more U.K. apps offering better and cheaper access to useful up-to-date train data. From June 1, the U.K.’s National Rail Enquiries’ (NRE) — which analyses raw data from numerous rail industry sources to predict the arrival times of trains — is switching to free for developers to access, waiving the fee that had been levied on some services up to now. Most existing developers who are paying NRE for access to the data will no longer need to pay (although it should be noted that the licensed services that currently incur a charge are the minority: just 26 out of a total of 523). Darwin access will also likely be free for all developers of new commercial apps wanting to use the API until they scale their user-base to a size where a fee becomes required. And that’s really the key: devs who were being put off before, by the cost and complexity of NRE’s restrictions to accessing the Darwin database, may now be encouraged to use it. Developers with commercial apps whose services are used more than five million times in a four-week period will still be charged. As will private users of that same scale. There won’t be any charges for public bodies using the data regardless of their size — unless they are using the data for commercial purposes, in which case the same rules apply. NRE said only one of its existing clients falls into the ‘will still be charged’ category. The database is offered as a pull API, making it valuable for devs wanting to easily add things like train arrival push notifications to their apps. NRE has been for several years — as far back as 2010 — for a lack of transparency around access to the data, in terms of what can and can’t be done with it, and for slapping a fee on some users (even, in some instances, for non-commercial uses). Critics argued the fee and arduous licensing requirements for using the API have made it much harder for (especially) smaller developers to incorporate useful real-time train data into their apps. Some free apps that had been using the data for free — prior to 2010 — were even as a result of NRE actively starting to enforce licensing in late 2010. At that time it started requiring a token to access what had previously been left open for non-commercial/public use. On the licensing side, NRE has also been criticized for the sweeping conditions it imposed on developers wanting access to the data — one developer even likened parts of the license to a . Another criticism has been the length of time it can take NRE to grant access, even for those who were willing/able to pay for the licence. This timeframe could apparently stretch to months. Not exactly app-maker friendly. NRE is owned by the — so it’s a for-profit industry group, rather than a public body. But it’s worth pointing out that some train operating companies do pull in taxpayer cash in the U.K., so some of that public money has effectively been filtering down to sustain the Darwin database. Arguably, therefore, NRE has been jealously guarding publicly funded data — even if it’s not actually profiting from it (it claims it doesn’t profit off Darwin, saying that revenues only go towards maintaining the system). No surprise, then, that NRE’s proprietary attitude has stuck in the craw of developers and open data enthusiasts alike for years. Especially as that attitude has increasingly been cutting against the grain of U.K. open government data initiatives — which in recent times have been trying to widen access to valuable public data stores to get more utility from the info. At root, though, the protectionist walls around Darwin have meant that the traveling, app-using British public has been punished by having to shell out over the odds to get their hands on apps containing the most useful kinds of real-time train data. I know this, because I was one of them — paying for the excellent more years ago than I care to remember (when it cost around £5 if memory serves). It’s a great app, but it wasn’t a cheap app and I did have a moment’s pause before tapping purchase just so I could figure out when a delayed train back to London would be limping into the station. Fast forward to today and it appears that NRE has seen the error of its ways. At long last. Or at very least realized that making it harder for developers to do cool stuff with its data ends up disadvantaging the traveling public who use — and pay for — its services. That in turn arguably encourages travelers to consider other, more to trains. Ergo, it’s bad for their business too. Yep, it really has taken some four+ years for NRE to figure out that being more open with its data might actually be a good thing for everyone involved. As one person I spoke to judiciously put it, “t So, after June 1, instead of the fee for commercial usage and current arduous licensing process, smaller developers and private users will be able to apply for free access to Darwin online, with only a T&Cs page standing in the way of them and the data. Even if they’re building a commercial app. I asked to see these new T&Cs but the NRE spokesman said they are “being worked on at the moment” — so it remains to be seen how developer-friendly they end up being. He added that they will be “based on our review of conditions used by other public sector transport information and open data providers, such as TfL, Traveline and Network Rail, who use a version of the (OGL). The new terms will be based on the old TfL terms and conditions (they have recently changed to an OGL) and the existing NRE service licence… Network Rail and Traveline use terms similar to an OGL, which has also influenced the terms we are putting together.” All of which makes the process sound far more torturous than transparent. But at least he’s bandying the word ‘open’ around. In a call with TechCrunch he did also say the aim would be to have a “prejudice towards saying yes” to a developer applying to use Darwin in future. ie, rather than steamrollering any use-cases that don’t conform to NRE’s prior sweeping conditions (not that the spokesman put it that way). “All you will have to do is go on a website, probably somewhere on NRE, it will say ‘do you agree to these terms and conditions?’… Say yes and you’re away. That’s the idea. It’s quicker, easier, there’s a prejudice towards saying yes, rather than ‘we’ll check’,” he said. “You won’t have to have a licence anymore, you won’t have to go through NRE, you’ll just go to the website.” “The reason that we’re keen that people use Darwin is because it’s the most reliable. We want to have one click, consistent source of information that’s available to passengers — and Darwin is it. So we’re keen that whether it’s through NRE or third party apps that’s getting out to as many people as possible,” he added. The detail in the smallprint of the new T&Cs — and whether the process really lives up to that low-friction description — is going to determine how radical a shift this is for U.K. devs wanting to work with real-time train data. Amy Worrell, a developer working for the company that makes the trusty UK Train Times app, which does license the Darwin system, reckons the shift when Darwin switches from fee to free could be significant — but only if what she dubbed the “onerous licensing process” gives way to a genuinely open API. “If Darwin went free, but still had the approval process before you could make an app, it’d probably bring down the price of apps slightly, but that’s about it. However, if it went open (i.e. free and anyone can use it), that would change everything. There would be innovative apps doing things we can’t currently do with live data,” she told TechCrunch. One thing that’s worth noting is that in the years since the Darwin API ‘paywall’ went up, U.K. devs have not stood still but have taken action to route around the NRE database. So there are alternatives to using that data — and they are clearly helping to railroad NRE towards being more open. (Disruptive weather is another driver for liberalising the data as train users have been critical about the lack of accurate, up-to-date info in times of acute service stress. Social media can also, therefore, take some credit — having provided an open customer criticism channel to pile more pressure on.) The dev team behind , for instance, devised a workaround based on using open data from another industry body, , and “a lot of manual labour mapping signalling info”, as developer, Tom Cairns puts it. “I’ve looked into [using the Darwin system] several times in the past and investigated the fees for what I wanted to do. The bar (and control over how I could use data) was sufficiently high that I ended up writing ,” he added. Real Time Trains does charge for access to its API but its fees are evidently lower than Darwin’s (at least until June 1). Despite an apparent brave new era of transparency for NRE, the spokesman would not provide details of the fees it currently charges for access to Darwin, claiming that’s commercially confidential data so would require client sign off to disclose. He did say that collectively the switch from paid to mostly free will cost NRE around £250,000. And that there are approximately 169 customers who are licensed to use Darwin, 124 of whom are actively using it. Another open data advocate who took up arms against NRE throwing up protectionist walls around its data, back in 2010, was . His response was to replicate the Darwin data by approaching Network Rail to ask for access to their timetable and real-time data (access which they granted). He then spent time decoding it and set up the — which helps services such as Real Time Trains work around Darwin (although the Network Rail Data does not do predictions — that’s an add-on by Real Time Trains). Hicks is currently employed for a company that’s helping make more of Network Rail’s data open and accessible, and runs the not-for-profit website. Echoing the NRE spokesman, he also makes the point that Network Rail’s data is not perfect — “neither complete, nor 100% accurate” — so believes there is still a lot of value in the data held within Darwin, and therefore value in it being opened up to more users. “NRE still hold a lot of data that is of use and value to everyone — they could really change the landscape by making their version of the truth, which is replicated on station boards and apps, universally accessible, liberally licensed and ‘free at the point of use’. It would help them achieve their goal of a “single version of the truth”,” he said. Come June 1, more U.K. devs will be able to start assessing that version of ‘train times truth’ for themselves. Plus there are a few more tidbits: NRE said it will also be providing developers with “greater availability of information about service disruptions”; and providing them with more info about interchanges between national rail and other modes of transport, such as the DLR or the London Underground. It has also committed to making it easier for passengers using NRE to find info about the routes on which their ticket is valid — another sizeable pain-point for train users thanks to fiendish ticketing complexities that appear intentional and profiteering in their scope. And, according to the NRE spokesman, it’s “working on” getting Darwin data fed into all of the information screens at U.K. stations. “It’s in some of the stations at the moment, but getting it into all of the stations will again make sure there’s this one consistent source of what’s happening,” he added. Commenting on the changes in a statement, (yet another) rail industry body, , put up its lead on transparency, David Brown, who said: “The rail industry already publishes more information and data than many business sectors and leads the way among European railways, and we are committed to going further. Better access for developers to live train information will make it easier for even more passengers to get the most up to date information about trains where and when they need it.” So full steam ahead on the openness rhetoric at least. |
Gogo Opens Up Its APIs To Allow Developers To Build Better In-Flight Apps | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Now that most airlines allow you to use your mobile devices during flights and many offer Wi-Fi on their planes, it’s no surprise that we are also seeing more applications that enable that in-flight use. Most major U.S. airlines use to their on-board connectivity, and the company obviously wants to encourage people to sign up for its service. Its latest effort to get people to work at 35,000 feet instead of just reading a good book is the launch of an API that will allow developers to create new in-flight apps for passengers and flight crews. This new Gogo platform, which is powered by enterprise API service , will give developers access to flight information data, as well as the ability to check whether users are authenticated on Gogo’s network and to allow them to purchase a Gogo pass if they are not. Sadly, it looks like Gogo is only going to make these APIs available to a small number of registered partners for the time being. It’s unclear how developers can become “registered partners,” however. We have asked the company for clarification and will update this post once we learn more. The company has already worked with partners like , which uses the API for its , and , which now makes it easy for flyers to share their locations with those they’ve left behind on the ground. For reasons only the FAA knows, you aren’t allowed to use your GPS in flight, after all, so by combining your flight data from Gogo and your in-air Wi-Fi connection, you can still update your friends about exactly where you are in the sky. What we’re seeing here is probably just the start. Travelers — and business travelers especially — are a lucrative market, and there are plenty of cool and useful apps somebody could build for in-flight use. Sadly, Gogo wouldn’t make any detailed information about the API’s features available to us, so we are not really sure what its exact capabilities are. |
Captora Raises $22M To Help Marketers Increase Their Reach | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | , a company led by former Marketo and SuccessFactors executive Paul Albright, announced today that it has raised $22 million in Series B funding. Albright said he co-founded the company to address some of the challenges he faced in his previous roles, where as chief revenue officer (at Marketo) and chief marketing officer (at SuccessFactors) he tried to increase the productivity of the sales and marketing teams. Ultimately, he decided that one of the most promising avenues was to find more leads and to find them sooner. When asked for an example of why Captora can make a big difference, Albright said that the vast majority of the “marketing pipeline” from web search comes from people using “branded terms,” i.e. searching for your company or product name. At that point, however, you may be too late, because they’ve probably made up their mind already. Captora can help marketers reach consumers earlier by automatically creating campaigns targeting a wide array of related search terms, optimizing those campaigns based on how consumers respond, and delivering customized content based on the search. (In addition to search, it works with display advertising and social media.) Even though Captora has largely flown under the radar of the press, the product has been available for about a year now, and the company says it has 30 customers, including Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceMax, SnapLogic, and AppDynamics. Albright said Captora should be useful to a broad range of business and consumer marketers, but he went after those particular companies to show that Captora isn’t competing with the marketing automation and sales software. Instead, it’s complementary, increasing the number of leads that are then managed in those systems. For ServiceMax, Albright said Captora has created hundreds of different campaigns, so that the company could target searches for all kinds of service software. If a plumber is searching for service software, they’ll now see ServiceMax near the top of the results for “plumbing service software,” and if they click on the link, they’ll find making them more likely to actually sign up to learn more. The new funding follows a $5.25 million Series A. New Enterprise Associates led the round, with Series A investor Bain Capital Ventures participating. NEA General Partner Scott Sandell is joining Captora’s board of directors. |
Weev Sends A Screed To The Federal Government Asking For 28,296 Bitcoins In Restitution | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Andrew “ ” Auernheimer to the United States Federal Government today asking for restitution for the 38 months he spent in custody, including time he spent in an upstate NY prison. His letter, which quotes Shakespeare and calls bomber Timothy McVeigh a patriot, is sure to turn any court in the land against him, which, I suspect, is his goal. “Now the government’s answer, or lack of it, will be permanently preserved in the Bitcoin block chain as a matter of public record,” he writes. “PAY ME MY MONEY, YOU LYING SUBHUMAN GARBAGE. You also should resign from your posts, as you’ve shown yourselves to be collective disgraces to rule of law and enemies of the United States Constitution. Those of us who actually love this country should take your places.” Weev, who recently left prison thanks to a , is now building a . He’s also looking for one for every hour he spent in prison.
Whether or not the government will pay up is the question of the day, but I suspect the latter will be the case. Chaos is Weev’s mode and modus, and his efforts to raise awareness of his causes are always loud. “The federal government has declared war on We the People,” he writes. Apparently he is now a combatant on the other side of that war suing for reparations. How he will go about this is still in question, but I suspect he’ll do a bit of amateur lawyering on his own behalf, as he has in the past.
Weev, behind his bluster, was arrested for incrementing an integer. While his screed will give the rational mind a run for its money, his complaints are backed by fact and his anger justified. We may not support Weev now, but when we are taken in for similar “crimes,” we’d do best to remember his strange trajectory. |
Dating Website Plenty Of Fish Hit By DDoS Attack | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Add to the list of technology companies whose websites have come under DDoS attacks from unknown cybercriminals in recent days. The company says that it was the victim of a five-hour attack today that affected approximately 1 million users. Initially, the attacks took down the Plenty of Fish website, then later the company’s mobile apps on iPhone, iPad and Android. As per the usual M.O., the attacker first contacted the site to warn them of the impending DDoS at 6:45 AM PT, then the attack started at 8:13 AM PT where it continued for several hours, off and on. The company says it was only recently able to mitigate the flood, and is now fully up and running again. The attack was 40 Gigabits in size, which makes it larger than the attack which took for nearly five days last month – that attack was “only” 8 GBps, the company had said at the time. These DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service attacks) have become more powerful as of late, thanks to the way older internet protocols like Network Time Protocol, or NTP, to increase their size. That seems to be the case here, given the size of the attack that Plenty of Fish suffered. Other companies that have been attacked more recently include , , Vimeo, Bit.ly, and , marketing analytics software provider , to name just a few. under DDOS Attack from dalem leinda darienwir@gmail.com again. demand for bitcoins are higher each time! — Anthony Skinner (@askinner404) In Plenty of Fish’s case, the attacker demanded $2,000 to have them stop the attack. Want to know if your company is about to have a bad day? Look for an email like this: From: dalem leinda <darienwir@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 20, 2014 at 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: DDoS attack, warning If you feel ready to negotiate, I’m still here. For something around $2k, I will stop the current attack and I will not resume further attacks. The amount depends on how quickly you can make the payment. |
Twitch Is Basically League Of Legendsville | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Google might be paying for an audience that’s mostly interested in watching people play a single game. If you take a look at the most-viewed games on , there’s a clear and definite frontrunner. , a massively popular online multiplayer game, had . At any given time, League of Legends will have 100K to 200K viewers on the service, 3-6 times as many as the next most-viewed title. To give you an idea of how big that viewership is, Twitch’s audience watching League of Legends can dwarf that during the middle of the day — and mostly consists of the valuable young male demographic. While relying so heavily on a single game may seem like a vulnerability, the truth of the matter is that there has never been a competitive game as big as League of Legends. Games like Counter-Strike, Quake, and StarCraft may have legitimized e-sports, but League of Legends brings in roughly and Its brought in , beating out subreddits that users of the site Those numbers are astronomical in the hardcore gaming industry. , a League of Legends competitor from the company behind the and the , had 7.9 million players last month and is estimated to have brought in about $80 million dollars from microtransactions last year. called Twitch “the ESPN of the video game industry” when the story of Google’s courtship of Twitch first broke. Right now, that’s not really saying much — competitors like have got nothing on the service in terms of scale or performance. With Google’s resources, Twitch’s inclusion on major game consoles, and the League of Legends player base growing by leaps and bounds — — the potential is there for Twitch to become a must-have service for gamers on every platform, just as ESPN is a requirement for any sports fan when signing up for television service. |
Pinterest Rolls Out A New “Business Insights” API To Select Marketing Technology Companies | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Fresh off the heels of another massive $200 million funding round which , Pinterest is preparing to announce a new initiative that will allow businesses to gain a better understanding of Pinterest trends, as well as an enhancement to its API platform which will aid with those insights, TechCrunch learned and Pinterest has confirmed. The API will inform businesses which products are most popular, which types of images work best, which Pins are driving the most sales, and more. A select group of marketing technology companies have been invited to test this new “Business Insights” API, including Salesforce (Exact Target Marketing Cloud), Hootsuite, Spredfast, Percolate, Piqora, Curalate and Tailwind. Explains Pinterest, though the company will continue to offer its own free product, it knows that some companies choose to use third-party marketing tools to help them figure out how their business is performing on other platforms. By offering this “Insights” data via API, Pinterest is making it easier for those businesses to engage with consumers on Pinterest, as they’ll be able to see which of their pins are really driving traffic, and which are being re-shared (or, in Pinterest lingo, re-pinned). Businesses would then be able to customize their own Pinterest activity accordingly, including their marketing campaigns. For now, the only way for an interested business to access this data via an API is through one of the above-mentioned marketing technology partners, who are the first to have access, as members of a pilot program. Several of these companies have already built new products and services on top of the developer API, and they will also now be rolling these out to their own customers. The companies will only be able to access public Pinner activity, to be clear. Meanwhile, Pinterest is encouraging the companies to add their own additional insights and features, like conversion tracking, which Pinterest itself doesn’t currently offer. One example from (see below) is the company’s new “Pinterest Trends” product, which allows Pinterest marketers to gain category-level insights into a brand’s performance on the site, as well as how they stack up against competitors. Pinterest has been busy in recent weeks working to crank up its efforts at turning the addictive visual bookmarking site into a revenue-generating business. The company its first paid Promoted Pins earlier this month, which are shown to users in both the search and category feeds on web and mobile. The new API is tied into this larger vision, because a business marketing itself and its products across Pinterest would also want to know which search terms or category feeds it would want its ads to appear in, so it could create the appropriate content and title it correctly. And in turn, it would want to know what specific terms its potential customers are looking for, and which of their pins in which categories are being repinned and clicked on the most. Pinterest says that the API is not being opened up to additional developers at this time, but those wishing to track this development further can sign up for weekly newsletters to hear more or contact the marketing technology companies directly. |
Here’s What HTC’s Next Flagship Phone Might Look Like | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | Oh, you thought HTC’s 5-inch flagship phone One (M8) was big? Just you wait. I’d heard whispers on more than a few occasions that HTC’s next flagship would come in with a big ol’ 5.5-inch display. Sure enough, renders of such a mammoth have just leaked out. Released by the shockingly reliable , the animation below is said to show off HTC’s plus-sized followup to the One M8 — a device that, for now at least, is being dubbed the One M8 Prime. At first glance, it looks a whole lot like the original One M8. The main visual difference: the camera now juts out a bit, rather than being sunken into the body of the device. (Oh, and, of course, it’d have to be a good bit bigger in order to account for the larger screen.) The camera on the One M8 was one of few things that reviewers and fans found to criticize with HTC’s otherwise damned-solid handset; if the camera on the M8 Prime is being redesigned, it’s a good sign that HTC has tried to address its sometimes lackluster performance. But what’s inside this thing? Is it a scaled up M8? If the current seemingly-sound rumors hold true, not quite. The unconfirmed innards: – The display is said to run at 2560×1440 (versus 1920 x 1080 on the current M8)
– 3 GB RAM (versus 2 GB)
– Runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 805 chipset Call me nuts, but I think HTC (and LG, etc.) are sort of just seeing what they can get away with at this point with these displays. They know theres a point where “big” becomes “too big” — so now they’re just tip-toeing up to the line until they start feeling resistance. Having used the 5″ display of a Nexus 5 for a few months, I already find myself having to stretch my thumbs across the display on the regular. Adding another 0.5″ just seems like tacking another blade onto the razor; a spec for the sake of spec. [via: ] |
Salesforce Beats In Its FQ1 With Revenue Of $1.23B, Up 37% | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | In the first quarter of its fiscal 2015, Salesforce that beat expectations. Revenue for the period totaled $1.23 billion, of which $1.15 billion came from “subscription and support,” and $79 million from “professional services.” Total revenue was up 37 period compared to the year-ago period. Investors expected Salesforce to report $1.21 billion in revenue. Salesforce also beat non-GAAP earnings-per-share predictions, bringing in an adjusted $0.11 per share in the quarter. The street had expected $0.10 in non-GAAP EPS. On a GAAP basis, Salesforce lost $0.16 per share. Shall we reconcile? Here’s the company’s verbiage detailing the difference between its GAAP and non-GAAP earnings per share: The company’s non-GAAP results exclude the effects of $131 million in stock-based compensation expense, $44 million in amortization of purchased intangibles, $11 million in net non-cash interest expense related to the company’s convertible senior notes, and $9 million related to the loss on conversions of our convertible 0.75% senior notes, due 2015, and is based on a projected long-term non-GAAP tax rate of 36.5%. It’s up to you to decide how you want to weigh non-cash costs that are commonly stripped from the EPS figures of quickly growing technology companies. Salesforce rose after reporting its earnings around 3 percent in after-hours trading, but has since receded to a more modest 0.6 percent gain. Salesforce ended the quarter with cash and equivalents of $1.53 billion. The company is worth around $32.3 billion. The company expects its fiscal second quarter to include revenue of $1.285 to $1.29 billion, GAAP earnings per share of $0.13 to $0.12, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.11 to $0.12. Looking further ahead, the company raised its full-fiscal-year revenue guidance $5.25 billion to $5.30 billion, to $5.30 billion to $5.34 billion. |
OnePlus One Review: Smartphone Value Redefined By A Newcomer | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 20 | beast: A startup building smartphones. Their first device is the , which, despite its unnecessarily repetitive name, is impressive hardware in a market where legacy device makers rule the roost and charge top dollar for smartphones packing the same kind of internals as the One. The OnePlus One is actually a remarkable deal at $299 for an unlocked device, and proof that Google isn’t the only company in town that can offer Nexus style price economics. The OnePlus One is a monolithic device; with its 5.5-inch screen, it’s firmly in the realm of what we once referred to as phablet devices (sadly the term is dying as more phones extend to larger displays). But it does at least manage to fit all that screen in a package that’s as slim as possible – the device is only around 0.35 inches thick. [gallery ids="1005040,1005041,1005042,1005038,1005043,1005044,1005045,1005046,1005047,1005048"] It’s just a shade smaller than the Galaxy Note 3 in terms of overall footprint, but it more closely resembles the Nexus 5 in terms of its lines and the matte finish of the plastic back, which is somewhat rubberized for grip. As far as gargantuan devices go, the OnePlus One is among my favorite to hold, however, and the Nexus styling is visually appealing, too, as is the slightly protruding top and bottom metal-look lip. It manages to be one of the best looking Android phones recently launched, even if the look is a tad derivative. The OnePlus One’s performance is unparalleled for a device in this price range, and that’s almost all that needs to be said about that. It packs as much RAM and the same kind of processor as smartphones that lead the category in terms of specs, like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One (M8) – yet it manages to do so at a fraction (more than 1/2) the price of those devices. And the specs aren’t hollow; their effect is felt in the animations of the OS and the performance of Android games and apps loaded onto the device. There were some issues early in testing with weird visual glitches when accessing the settings and notification panel from the top bar of the home screen, but OnePlus quickly acknowledged and then zapped these issues with a software update – another of its virtues is that it can push these out without leaning on either Google or carrier partners thanks to the use of as its primary OS. This Android fork offers a near-stock experience in many ways, but with extensive customization options. It’s a very capable performer, too, and in many ways much better than the customized interfaces that most other Android OEMs throw down on top of Google’s mobile platform. Speaking of Cyanogen, it provides the OnePlus One with many of its tricks, which include the ability to fully change the skin of your device with various onboard and downloadable themes. By default, the phone came with a horrible square icon reskinning of Android, but the point is that I didn’t have to live with the bad design choices of the phone’s creators; instead, I was able to swap out for a much more default KitKat look with minimal effort and no special permissions required. OnePlus is full of such customizations, and a quick look at any Settings screen will reveal the extent to which you can modify elements including the lock screen, notification/status bar, home screens and more. The whole thing is basically a playground of tick boxes, switches, submenus and more, and that’s a very welcome thing for people who like to fuss with their phones. But for those who are content to have a device that works reliably and consistently, and presents an uncomplicated experience, this could be a bit overwhelming; most OEMs try to reduce and refine the Settings app, not complicate it further. Still, for this reason, OnePlus’ inaugural device is something that probably appeals more to hardcore Android fans than even stock Nexus devices. It encourages playfulness and meddling, which is in the spirit of the original Android OS, before Google started slowly massaging it into more of a closed and controlled direction. Software-wise, this is the Nexus for Nexus lovers, as illogical as that may sound. The OnePlus One is impressive in most regards, but the fact that it can manage to include such an effective and good-looking screen at this size in a handset at this price is perhaps most impressive of all. The 5.5-inch display has excellent color rendering, and at 404 PPI pixel density, also won’t show any pixels no matter how hard you stare at normal viewing distances. The display seems to hover at the very top of the glass on the front of the phone, too, and renders text perfectly. It’s great for watching movies and viewing images, and if there’s a flaw to it at all, it’s that some of the assets included, like stock OS icons for the built-in flashlight and audio recorder, aren’t designed to be viewed on such a high-res display, meaning they appear slightly fuzzy and look wrong. OnePlus One manages to do the impossible, offering up top-tier specs at mid-tier prices. It does this seemingly without sacrifices (battery life was excellent, for instance, especially when using the smartphone’s display sparingly). The camera is a decent performer, beating the Nexus 5 by a wide margin, though falling short of the Galaxy S5 and the iPhone in this department. But its flaws are small things, details that fail by matters of degrees rather than huge margins, and for a smartphone that costs less than half of many of its competitors, that’s nothing short of amazing. |
The NSA, Cisco, And The Issue Of Interdiction | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | It’s been a hectic week of NSA news in light of Glenn Greenwald’s recently published book, which furthered the revelation that the NSA from US companies. The agency then reportedly compromises the equipment before it is delivered to overseas customers. Published imply that Cisco technology is part of the class of equipment captured in-transit, before it is received by foreign buyers, and weakened so that the NSA might have greater insight into activity that it helps maintain. In short, the NSA is allegedly hacking American hardware that is sold abroad. This is akin to what the United States government has that Chinese companies are doing on behalf of their local government. Today, a letter from Cisco CEO John Chambers wide . It states that if the NSA revelations are correct, and the pictures accurate, the actions of the agency “undermine confidence in our industry and in the ability [of] technology companies to deliver product globally.” That’s putting it mildly. Chambers called for a new “standards of conduct,” indicating that, sans reforms, the globe could end up with “a fragmented Internet.” Chambers went on to state that “Cisco does not work with any government, including the United States Government, to weaken [its] products.” In an interview this morning, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the interdiction program that has been variously reported over the course of several revelations “does not sound familiar There’s an implicit counter-argument here that I think applies to much of the recent course of NSA revelations: That if only the programs had not come to light, the harm to American companies and citizens would have been nonexistent. This is a treatment of the ‘ignorance is bliss’ cliché writ national. (I call it the Scooby Doo defense: “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.”) The gist of the idea is that if not for Snowden et al, the programs that are now causing trouble would not be, as they would still be secret. As such, what was uncovered would have been a fraction of what would have been unturned a half decade from now. And the scale at play and likely made a leak of significant size at some point unavoidable. So to point the blame externally isn’t too fortress a defense. Also component to the above is the idea that the NSA — and therefore the Federal government — has the right to insert itself between, say, Cisco and one of its customers, on a chronic scale that weakens their products on a per-unit basis. Does the Federal government not make mistakes? What happens if its handiwork causes Cisco technology to fail, thus causing that company’s business to suffer? Would it apologize? You can answer that one. |
Google/YouTube Reportedly Prepping To Buy Twitch | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | Yowza. So much for Sunday being a slow news day. About an hour after AT&T officially announces their plans to buy DirecTV, word of another billion-dollar acquisition has surfaced. The story this time around: Google/YouTube reportedly want Twitch.tv, the increasingly/explosively popular service meant to let gamers watch others play games, live. The purported price tag? 1 billion. According , it’s already a done deal, and they say the official announcement is looming. The WSJ, meanwhile, says the talks are very early on – too early for a price to be set, even. While the concept behind Twitch might seem crazy (I can’t even count the number of people I’ve heard ask “Why would you want to play video games?”), the service has done nothing but rocket in popularity since launching back in 2011. Turns out, people to watch other people play games. With competitive games, like League of Legends, gamers watch to learn; with other, more casual games, like Minecraft, they watch just to be entertained. Twitch.tv is actually something of an oddity, in that it’s an independent spin-off of another company. A few years after launching Justin.tv (another video livestreaming service, meant primarily to stream live video from your webcam) its founders noticed that the site’s gaming channels always managed to pull in particularly massive numbers. In 2011, they spun the site’s Gaming section into a site of its own — Twitch.tv. By 2014, Twitch had grown so huge that the parent company was rebranded as Twitch Interactive. For those keeping track: Twitch has raised roughly $35M since becoming an independent company. |
#Love: Design For It | Contributor | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | If you believed the hype, you’d think technology was killing love. To start, the search has been tainted, or so people say. Algorithms are turning serendipity into superficial math. Swipe right and find yourself mired in a gone mad. Try the likes of Grindr and experience the irrevocable blurring of the lines between dating and porn. Emojis offend the language of courtship. That photo of you five years and 20 pounds ago is…flattering. An inbox and their copy+paste approach to “asking girls out” is a distorted echo of romance. The search for true love is a battle against the alienating forces of modern technology. And then, once in love, we hear that technology is . Screens take us away from the moment and bring us elsewhere, into a private, isolated world of flirtation with old high school “friends,” pleasantly mind-numbing games, and the strange gratification of having 16 people like our latest Instagram creation. If you ask , the first thing you should do to keep love alive is to start charging your phone in the kitchen rather than the bedroom. Our dialogue with the one we love is , real speech replaced by the terseness of lol, omg, fml. Staying in love is a battle against the alienating forces of modern technology. While I’m quite sympathetic with those who find love particularly hard to find and sustain in today’s world, I’ve come to believe love can be sweeter, richer and more wonderful than ever in our digital age. In fact, I think it’s actually the job of makers working on problems of love to address the obstacles that tech lays in the path of love — and, more importantly, to double down on the ways tech makes love more available, more fulfilling, and sexier than ever. In a sense, our question as product-makers should be: how can we “design for love”? I have a rather peculiar vantage point on this question. Over the last four years my and I have been building a whose goal is to help people fall in love and stay in love. We’ve created a popular dating app. We’ve built a “date night concierge” service for people in relationships, and recently we have launched a new messaging app called that’s made just for couples. In a sense we’ve been trying to figure out how technology can enhance rather than deplete love. Over this time I’ve heard countless stories of people’s search for deep, abiding love — their struggles and successes. I’ve also spent many days working with our data scientists to make sense of the patterns that emerge from millions of data points about how people — both single and in relationships — actually use technology in their hunt to find and keep love. During this same time period, I have myself fallen in love. I know a lot about the power of our screens, as walls that hinder connectedness and as windows into lasting closeness. From newspaper classifieds to 1970s video drop-off/pick-up dating services, to 90’s chat room love to kiss.com, to the niche brilliance of JDate, to long-distance lovers on Skype, to OkCupid’s free friend/enemy genius, to Zuck’s ‘relationship status’ invention, to love via Yelp commenting, to the awkward trend of LinkedIn pickup lines, to Grindr’s mobile path-blazing, to Foursquare stalking (I mean this in a more positive way than it sounds), to my site HowAboutWe’s “offline” dating movement, to couples FaceTiming from afar, to the high school flirt machine that is Kik, to Tinder’s explosion. Not to mention the thousands of wonderful and bold attempts to design for love that have ended in failure. People have, for decades, understood the tremendous power that technology has to make love happen and to make that love richer. ~ And yet, I think we’re still in the early innings. Here are a handful of yet-to-be solved design challenges in the space of love:
Makers need to focus on making people feel even more comfortable privately sharing about themselves online. I would venture to say that it’s only in the last year that people became, en masse, really comfortable searching for love online. But this comfort level is thus far only photo-deep. Tinder, the herald of this sea change, hasn’t solved the profile problem. The result: a great hook-up app, but not a great love-finding app. As we collect more and more data (particularly data about where people go on dates and when they make successful connections), we will have an exponentially stronger capacity to help people connect with the best possible partner. Seeing someone on video is obviously a better way to know if you’re going to actually like them. You get such a deep sense of someone’s nature by watching how they move. The trouble is, video — and particularly mobile video — generally makes people look far worse than they do in the flesh. This is a problem solvable by design. This is an opportunity that hasn’t yet been truly figured out. Hinge is making a reasonable go at this. Matchmaking has a long tradition, but no one has yet created a marketplace dynamic around this; altruism is not generally the most motivating of forces. Design could change this. As we the Internet on our bodies, we’ll see more and more technology created to help us safely and non-sketchily cross the fear barrier on the subway platform or at the cafe. It’s crazy that no dating app has yet nailed the booking of “first dates.” I believe that HowAboutWe is getting close. Grouper has made intriguing moves here. But no one has gotten this fully right yet. Soon(ish) and biological data points will be used to help make matching far more effective. Don’t think for a minute that our computers won’t soon know who we’ll really want when we meet face-to-face. And so on… It’s my opinion that HowAboutWe for Couples has come closest to solving the problem of what to do on date night. Services like YPlan and Sosh offer curated activities, but not with a focus on dating and relationships. Otherwise, there is no app that really answers the proverbial question, “Honey, what are we going to do on Friday?” No app other than Netflix, that is. Staying close when far apart is a huge need for couples during travel and in long-distance relationships. The likes of FaceTime have started to solve this problem. Snapchat’s release this past week points, I think, to a new phase in video chat. But we have a long way to go. It’s no mistake that the biggest social network ever built was the acquirer of Oculus Rift; virtual reality is a as the design solution to geographic separation. (And I of course think that, in the meantime, couples could use a better messaging app.) There’s no great solution yet for a couple to a keep a record of their story together – their road trips and adventures, their ups and downs, their lives. Yes, I think tech can make sex better. No, I don’t know how yet! There’s no great solution yet for couples who want to make new couple friends. No, no, not swingers. Real friendships among like-minded pairs. Hard problem. Totally unsolved. There are a hundred problems in daily life that haven’t been designed to be solved by two people. For example, take the simple problem of meeting up at X place. This is a problem couples experience more than any other group. There’s no app that let’s you share a live, “Uber-style” map with two coalescing dots. The little things end up being so much the stuff of love as it’s lived by real people; we should be able to design for these in ways that bring care and fun into our relationships. As couples provide more and more data to their computers, we should be able to build experiences that give back to couples. For instance, presumably technology can help to identify, mediate and solve conflicts between two people who love each other. We’ll see how long this takes as it’s obviously extremely subtle; at some point, though, your computer will tell your husband and you to chill out and stop badgering each other. It’s early. LoveTech is going to get better and better. How should current and future makers think about creating products for love? In my opinion, the key design principle to keep in mind is that we already know how to love. Accordingly, the job of technology products is to take what we already know about how to love and help us do those things better. Two cases: Tinder and You&Me. Tinder enhanced the very simple experience of making eyes across a bar. We already know how to do this. We’ve been doing this since we were fish in an infinite prehistoric ocean. But with Tinder it just got a whole lot more…effective. They designed for…well, maybe not love. And it definitely . But they definitely designed well for the hook-up part of loving. is an iPhone app my team launched in the past month. It’s a messaging app for couples. Existing mobile messaging apps are definitely taking a step in the right direction when it comes to enhancing love between two people. In fact, these days love is often . For the couple in their routine, texting is a repository of day-to-day connectedness. It’s how couples stay close. It’s . It’s how they sync up. It’s how a lot of humor — the great balm of love — happens. It’s even the bed of foreplay, here and there. Mobile messaging has been a huge innovation in couples communication. And yet, when you talk to couples about their love lives (and we’ve talked to thousands of them), again and again they share their desire to be more in sync, to stay closer, to maintain the freshness. Specifically, they often point to problems with digital communication. We have categorized those problems into a set of critiques of mobile texting apps — critiques we sought to address with You&Me. Here’s a summary: The past is treated by messaging apps as though it’s irrelevant: the impossibility of effectively searching; the at-first-fun and later just-plain-annoying feeling of clicking “load earlier messages” ad infinitum; the absence of any repository of shared media; and so on. Texting is not a tool built for happy nostalgia, a staple of love. Photos and videos are treated like a pale afterthought. There are few to no other ways to share. It’s as if modern digital communication was being purposely strangled into a few very simple ways of talking. But we talk today in such : sharing music, collaborating on media, creating expressive (and hilarious) gif- and sticker-adorned images, engaging around location, making lists, and so on. This kind of rich communication is particularly prevalent between couples who have so much to share. Text is a dumb, restrictive tool, but love is smart and unbounded. But the conversations we have with our partner are not purely private. They are private by default, but they have moments that we wish could live in a broader context — be it a group or a social network. This broader sharing creates a sense of connection, affirmation, and excitement. Texting as we currently know it is maniacally insular. It’s either or — in the case of pure SMS — it’s just rudimentary ugly. And this goes beyond looks. There’s very little sense of context: of the setting in which a conversation took place, of the start and end to a conversation, of who we were at the time the conversation was happening. There is a kind of default stupidity in texting that’s quite limiting to the fullness of the conversation we have with our partner. Our most important conversation deserves the most beautiful interface. In most cases, you spend a lot of time with your significant other. And yet, texting is focused purely on situations when you’re apart. What about when you’re together? How can you keep a record of the wonderful experiences you’re having together? Texting utterly fails at this kind of “together” experience. Love is the best thing ever, and so we embrace texting alongside sleepless nights and less space and the loss of alone time and the inevitable daily compromises. We embrace it happily. But let’s be real: texting kinda sucks for love. In the case of You&Me, the project was also a bit personal. While we were talking to hundreds of couples about how they communicate and surveying existing apps and building our own…I was falling in love with a wonderful woman. And for this new love, I wanted an app that would let us share — the random hellos, the R.E.M. song I was listening to on my way to work, the post-gym logistics, the hilarious co-worker gossip, the weird singing lady outside the apartment that was mine and was becoming ours, our trip to Boston for my nephew’s birthday, a midday kiss from afar, my treadmill jog time, her with her father walking through the leaves, this picture of her face that I adore, the same picture with a panda sticker sitting on her head just because, reflections on a dumb fight we had, a Rilke poem I wanted her to hear me read, a link to a post about bitcoin flailing and me losing money like a dumbass, a keylime pie recipe that was going to make us hate ourselves for eating too much, a selfie video of us together traipsing happily through the New York City snow. I wanted a better way to be in love, online. I wanted an app truly designed for people in love. Yes, you two should avoid sleeping with your phones in your bed. Yes, you should be wary of Internet dating photos that portend accuracy. Yes, you should avoid the potential pitfalls of love in the digital age. But alongside this, you should fully embrace technology as a critical pillar of modern love. You should use technology to find and keep just what you’re looking for. And if you are building for love, if you are designing for love — you should trust that we all already know how to love. Just make us better at it. Love can, should, and will be so so sweet in the digital age. |
EverPurse Raises Seed Round For A Different Kind Of Wearable | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | , the fashion technology company is back in the proverbial saddle with a new product and big plans for the future of a different kind of wearable. The Chicago-based company, which was launched by the dynamic husband and wife duo Liz and Dan Salcedo, has returned with a clutch wallet that doubles as an smartphone holder and charger and a fresh seed round of just under $1 million from SOS Ventures, angel investors, and friends and family to develop its next generations of wearable fashion technology. In the time since they launched the first product, the two spent time in the Shenzhen, China-based hardware accelerator program , developing their manufacturing connections to compliment the fashion network the two have been building in the U.S. and Europe. “They have a whole roadmap of different things that they’re going to do over time,” says Michael Silton, the executive chair of the UCLA Venture Capital Fund and an angel investor in Everpurse. “If you look at how technology is becoming an integral part of our life — and the fact that fashion always has been — bringing those two worlds together means there’s so much that can happen.” At a coffee shop in New York City, the two founders laid out their plans for creating technologies that would embed into purses, wallets, and other fashion accessories. “We know that charging is a good first step, but it’s just a foot in the door,” says Liz Salcedo, a former social worker turned entrepreneur.
[gallery ids="1003940,1003936,1003949"] Silton and the Salcedos don’t think that Everpurse will have a huge run as a fashion company. Instead, the founders and their backers see the development of their branded accessories as a way to prove their concept to larger fashion houses that can adopt the technology. “Like all startups that are building a platform that is going to be integrated into other companies’ products, they need to add new features and new functionality,” says Silton. “The great thing that they’ve done with their strategy is they’ve gotten real world feedback from customers that they can take to fashion houses.” Currently, Everpurse is selling the charging wallet for $129, but has an embedded electronics technology that it is discussing inserting into purses for smaller fashion houses over the next few months. The products could see store shelves within a few years, according to the two founders. Using a flexible chipset with bluetooth and a central processing unit along with an RFID beacon, the company’s next generation of products will not only keep track of purses, but also the cosmetics inside purses, and determine whether a handbag or accessory is counterfeit or not, says Dan Salcedo. “We’re at the tip of the iceberg,” Silton says. “Power is not an exciting feature, but changing the way you think about powering your phone is. And more and more capabilities are going to be expected in our clothing and in our accessories.” |
AT&T To Acquire DirecTV For Nearly $50B | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | As has been rumored for the past few weeks, AT&T has just officially announced their plans to acquire DirecTV. The terms of the deal came together at roughly $95 per share, which comes to a grand total of $48.5 billion dollars. If you add in the nearly $19B worth of debt that DirecTV is towing behind it, though, this deal sets AT&T back to a tune closer to billion. It seems DirecTV will continue to operate as a (mostly) independent company for at least a while, even after the deal closes. They’re keeping their headquarters in El Segundo, CA, and AT&T is pledging to offer stand-alone DirecTV service for at least 3 years. Next step: AT&T and DirecTV have to convince a bunch of regulators (in both the US and Latin America, where DirecTV has a fairly huge customer base — it’s where roughly 20% of its revenue comes from) that this merger is a good idea. AT&T expects that to take at least 12 months — so if you’re worried about the deal impacting your service in any negative ways, know that you’ve got a year or so before that can even start to happen. |
As TrueCar IPOs, The Fuelist Launches Classic Car Pricing App | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | TrueCar’s public offering on Friday showed that investors are willing to back a service — and the founders of are hoping that same appetite for price clarity will drive demand for their vintage car and motorcycle pricing service. People spend a lot of money on classic cars worldwide; with one English dentist . Roughly $13 billion changes hands between classic car collectors worldwide, according to Fuelist co-founder . According to a recent article in , . It’s no secret that rich investors are finding new things to speculate on and classic cars seem to be as good a place as any to park a few thousand (or a few million). The Fuelist offers a way for buyers and sellers to compare pricing for vintage cars worldwide. A user can select from hundreds of different car makers and models to find the sales prices for a particular style of vehicle… or a range of prices for different cars. On Monday, the company will submit a mobile version of its online service through the iPhone app store, according to Rand-Nash. Even are to invest in classic cars — and with the advent of an institutional investment community collectors or investors could find that the stock of “cherry” cars could be gone in 60 seconds. Fuelist has spent the past several months in a private beta for its first 1,000 users, according to Rand-Nash, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded the mobile app development company Mobile Genius LLC with his Fuelist partner Matthew Hamilton. Rand-Nash envisions several revenue streams for The Fuelist. At a basic level the company will be charging subscriptions for access to its business intelligence and analytics around car pricing and the best place to sell a vehicle. For investors or institutions, the company will offer comparable pricing tools so that a user can find a range of different vehicles sellign at a similar price point. The company is majority owned by the OTC Bulletin Board listed , a conglomerate which owns both oil and gas and technology and media properties, according to Rand-Nash. Photo via Flickr user |
Novena, The Crowdsourced, Fully-Open Laptop, Is Shipping This Winter | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | Hardware magician Bunnie Huang’s , a completely open-source computing machine, is fully funded and will ship in January. There are 13 hours left in the crowdfunding effort, but so far the system has surpassed its goal of $100,000 and is on course to raise over $500,000. The laptop itself is designed for simple, tool-free upgrades and features a completely open architecture. It has a 2GHz Freescale quad-core ARM processor on a . The OS is also available for download.
The standard laptop costs a hefty $1,995 or you can buy only the motherboard for $500. The case is also unique. An internal gas spring brings the screen up and off the motherboard, and you can even replace the bezel and all of the case parts with your own designs. Inside is something Huang calls a “Peek Array,” a series of small mounting holes at the bottom of the case that you can use to mount almost anything inside the computer. The basic version includes a battery controller and screen but no keyboard – you bring your own – or you can pay $5,000 for an “heirloom” model that is handmade out of wood and aluminum. Huang knows hardware, and this is one of the coolest projects he’s done in a while. There are only 13 hours left in the campaign and, given the fear of potential hardware hacking by , this could be an interesting solution. It’s obviously a bit pricey but I’m sure they can get it down once it goes into full production. [vimeo 90679582 w=500 h=281] |
What Games Are: Welcome Back, Xbox One | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | This time last year I wrote up my deep reservations about Microsoft’s Xbox One. Comparing it to the Spruce Goose, I called it a technological marvel that solved last year’s problem. I faulted it on its size, on its focus on TV, and on its short-head approach to games. Overall I said it was an example of a product that was out of step, one which thought television was still the first screen and fighting a battle for the living room that seemed dated. To its considerable credit, Microsoft understood its missteps early. It ditched its complex DRM-driven plans after Sony poked fun at them over and over. It canned the requirement for the box to be always-online. It gave much more prominence to its ID@Xbox indie program and started trying to make up for a lot of PR damage in that area. It heavily pushed on as a big innovative killer app. In short the company realized that for all its high talk of becoming a meta-box for all media everywhere, it was still in the games business. However there was still one major roadblock: The oversized, over-engineered, impositional and kinda NSA-ish webcam called Kinect. While the reaction in the games press to the news that Kinect will no longer be mandatory has largely been positive, the tech press is full of talk of Microsoft backing away from “the future”. But Kinect represented a future that nobody wanted. Kinect was already dead. That’s the part that the tech press doesn’t seem to get. Kinect was dead a year after the original version launched. It was a novelty, perhaps a neat add-on if you were into waggle-driven party games, but it was never a serious thing. Sure Microsoft sold a lot of them, but Kinect’s story had already been played out by Sony with EyeToy or Nintendo with Wii. In both cases the lesson was that waggle is fun in a cheap-and-cheerful sort of way, but it gets old fast. Kinect should have been thought of solely as a way to breathe life into an aging system with a passing fad. But Microsoft was bewitched by its potential narrative. Kinect became yet another example of a console maker losing touch with the simple truth of the console business (gamers to sit on couches and play awesome games with joypads) and getting lost in its own bullshit. Kinect came to fruition right around the time that Microsoft convinced itself that the solution to all its problems was Metro. It was that time of one-interface-to-rule-them-all and of willfully disbelieving that live tiles weren’t such a great idea. What sort-of made sense in phones became the dictum for tablet, for PC and for TV, and the company excitedly tried to sell us all on a big ecosystem play. One massive misstep in that vision was Windows 8. The other was Kinect. Xbox One got tagged with a sales-killing requirement of bundling a Kinect camera in with every system. And not just a little one, oh no. The next generation Kinect was huge, with a massive camera that looked like the child of HAL and the Eye of Sauron. Microsoft insisted over and over that the camera wasn’t just a peripheral but core to the whole experience. You would have to plug it in to use your Xbox One at all times. It would stare at you, unblinking, forever. For some reason the company couldn’t understand why that was a major mood killer. So it went to market with a console that had all this weight attached, at a price $100 higher than its savvier-looking competition and fueled by the MBA-ish logic that says customers come around if they’re promoted hard enough (If my first law of technology is “ ” then my second is “). But, finally, reality brought sanity. The good news is that the Microsoft has managed to get to the place where it could unbundle Kinect in such a short space of time. That can’t have been easy to do, a sort damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t decision. But it’s absolutely the right move. Kinect was Microsoft’s version of Sony’s infatuation with Blu-Ray on PS3. It was a vision imposed on a gaming product for corporate reasons. It was part of that sad living room narrative that sideswipes tech executives from time to time, the notion that there must be a meta-market out there for a product that does all the games and all the movies and all the music and all the things at the same time. Since desktop computers do that, the reasoning goes, there must be an equivalent room on the couch. Maybe there is, but if so that device is the tablet, not the TV. The TV is for concentrated use cases only, and customers have long been comfortable with buying devices that tailor to those use cases. They’ll buy DVD players, they’ll buy DVRs, they’ll buy media streamers for their Netflix and they’ll buy gaming consoles. What they won’t do is buy meta-devices that do all of the above equally. They just don’t want under-the-TV PCs guys. The last step for Xbox One’s road to recovery (well except for the name, but we’ll just have to live with “Xbone”) will be to de-emphasize the TV angle and get back to games. It does no harm to have Netflix and Amazon Instant Video and available on the system, but all of that cable box menu selection stuff just isn’t an interesting feature (especially as the system doesn’t even act as a DVR). Certainly not at the expense of games. Last year has been spent learning the lesson that imposing grand corporatist visions on users is dumb, and it seems like a lesson that’s been well-learned. Let the next year be the one where Microsoft gets comfortable with the idea that it’s still in the video games business, and in it for its own ends rather than as a stepping stone to some fantasy living room. While the tech blogs may gripe that this makes the console seem less futuristic, on the plus side it will start to look like a product that gamers may actually want to buy. When game makers big and small start to feel that Xbox One takes them seriously and gives them prime positioning on the system’s home screen, the narrative around the console will become positive. When gamers start to see lots of game choices as their first and foremost options, they will start to believe that the system has an identity. Then, not unlike the way that Sony recovered from its own self-hoisted petard, Microsoft’s Xbox One will stop looking like the platform that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Welcome back, Xbox One. Looking forward to seeing what you do next. |
Wavii Founder Leaves Google | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Lots are at the Re/Code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes this week. But at least one of them won’t be a Google executive for very much longer. Wavii founder is leaving the search company, a little more than a year after acquisition of his content aggregation startup, in order to start a second company. It is unclear whether he left money on the table. It’s also unclear what that new company will do, but Aoun is said to be bringing some of the Wavii team along with him to do it. While at Google, Aoun was part of the Artificial Intelligence division, aggressively building out the AI organization in pursuit of Google’s goal of developing the “ Google considers this task — a broadening of — the future of search. Aside from Google exec-ing, Aoun has invested some of his own money into startups including Pinterest, Vurb, Layer and AltSchool. Wavii itself was backed by Max Levchin, SV Angel, Marissa Mayer, Crunchfund* and others. *Disclosure: Crunchfund was founded by the founder of this blog, Michael Arrington. |
Why Google Made Its Self-Driving Car So Darn Cute | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | for knowing computers better than people, it understands that people might be a bit afraid of its self-driving cars. So rather than show the power and cool-factor of its new autonomous vehicles, Google made them look like Playskool cars, built them out of phone, and capped speeds at 25mph. The result is that attention stays squarely on their world-changing potential. The option to evolve into that power and cool remains, but with a lot less fear about the risks of self-driving vehicles. |
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Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin On Google X’s Translation Of Research Into New Businesses | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Google co-founder Sergey Brin wants the company to explore new areas of technology and develop projects that could have a huge impact on the world. Which is why he’s thrilled to be leading the company’s experimental technologies division, Google X. Google still makes the lion’s share of its profits from web search, but that doesn’t mean the company is resting on its laurels. To the contrary, it’s been expanding aggressively to work on a number of new high-risk, high-reward technologies, including everything from to to to . They’re what Google calls “ ,” and Brin has been the driving force behind a number of these new innovations. Why? “It’s important to work on something you really enjoy and feel confident about,” Brin said. “And I think it’s important for companies in general to try to do new things.” Earlier in the talk, Brin compared Google today to what it was about a decade ago, and said that the roots of what it does with its Google X division is similar to its early translation of a university research project into a commercial enterprise. “With search, we took a university research project and made it sustainable,” Brin said. Many of the other things that we do are also about taking research and bringing it to life in ways that we hope will change the world.” Brin said he’s been leading Google X for three years, and there are now about eight projects underway. Not all of those are available to the public, but there are others that are — like Google Glass, which Brin brought on-stage, and the Loon balloon Internet project. And then there’s , which Brin also showed off at the conference. Prototypes of those cars, which lack steering wheels and pedals, could hit the road later this year. While Google has been doing a lot of in-house development, it has been relatively acquisitive over the last year, buying up everything from (which will expand its purview to become ) to to . It’s not stopping there: The company is in talks to for $1 billion and also has taken a look at . The company keeps looking for new ways to change the way people think about the tools that consumers use on the web. “I think Google is best when it changes the way people think about a thing,” Brin said. He gave the example of Gmail, which made webmail into an enterprise-grade product. But the company hasn’t always been successful in its ambitions to enter into new markets. Google+ wasn’t exactly successful, with the company pulling back on the project earlier this year. But Brin admitted that he was “kind of a weirdo” and the wrong person to ask about social products. |
Valve Delays The Touchpad-Happy Steam Machine Controller | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | The future of gaming will have to wait. Valve has pushed the release from 2014 to 2015. Essentially, it will be released when Steam thinks its ready and not a minute before. Smart. Hardware rarely recovers from a rocky launch. The minimum viable product has to be free of bugs and full of enjoyment — especially from an unknown hardware maker like Valve. The Steam Machines next-gen controller needs to be awesome from launch day. The word came from detailing the Machine’s controller development, which also reports “everyone from industry professionals to die-hard gamers to casual gamers” are testing the system with wireless controllers. Progression to live testing is a good sign. Valve itself is focusing on the controller rather than the actual gaming systems. Besides , that task was outsourced to trusted PC makers such as Dell’s Alienware, Asus and several others. Unlike traditional gaming PCs, Valve’s in-house SteamOS will power the boxes, giving them a console-like user experience free of the pains of a normal desktop OS. These systems from 3rd parties could be released prior to the Steam Controller, but without a halo product like the innovative controller, the launch would be rather lackluster. Of course gamers shouldn’t have expected anything less. Valve doesn’t launch; it delays.
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An Adorable Android Easter Egg, Hidden In Plain Sight | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 18 | I’ve always had a special place in my heart for design . Particularly the ones that are hidden in plain view — the ones that I’d somehow looked at a hundred times without actually . When’s the last time you took a close look at the icons on an Android phone? Like, really, close? If you’ve got an Android phone handy, take a look at the icon for the “People” (contacts) app, in particular. It’s a rolodex-like set of cards, with a bit of text that’s small enough that you’d probably never stop to try and read it. If you did, you’d spot a clever little Easter Egg left behind by one of Android’s icon designers. The itty-bitty name written on the top contact card is “Lauren Ipsum” — which, to many who might stumble upon it, probably just looks like a random, made-up name. If you’ve ever dabbled with design (or stumbled across someone’s unfinished website), though, you’ve probably already caught the gag: it’s a reference to , a nonsensical faux-Latin blurp of text that designers often use as a placeholder to show how a design look if you plugged in some real words. They needed a placeholder name for the contact card — thus, Lauren Ipsum was born. I’ve probably looked at that icon 1,000 times without spotting that little touch. Now I’ll probably never see it. [via ] |
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says Company Will Keep Bing, Xbox | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Ready for an update from the no-surprise department? Microsoft isn’t keen to sell either its Xbox or search businesses. Today at the CODE Conference Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella indicated that he has no intention to divest Bing, the company’s search property, or Xbox, its gaming and living-room play. This should come as precisely no surprise. It rises to the level of being news-worthy in that analysts pontificate often that the company should shed one or the other, logic aside. According to , Nadella indicated that Bing is “a lot more than Bing.com,” and that it serves around 30% of the search market, a figure that he likened to the iPhone’s market share. Shade aside, Nadella’s point that his firm won’t sell Bing or otherwise release is simple to grok: Bing isn’t only a search portal, but is also the technology that Microsoft uses to power its broader search products that are found in Windows 8 and the like. So, to point towards a sale is to indicate that the company is willing to sell core technology to its platform work. . Pushing forward, Nadella said that he has no “intent” to sell Xbox. Why? Xbox was brought into the Windows world with the release of the Xbox One. That makes it part of Microsoft’s larger platform push, and therefore core its services and devices strategy. There are that can only view business units from the perspective of their discounted cash flows. That group, apparently, doesn’t include the current Microsoft CEO. |
Google X Built A Fully Self-Driving Car From Scratch, Sans Steering Wheel And Pedals | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Google’s experimental Google X division has been working on self-driving cars for a while, but it’s created the prototype for a brand new version that looks nothing like the retrofitted version. “We took a look from the ground up of what a self-driving car would look like,” Brin said at the CODE Conference tonight, after showing a demo video. What does a built-from-the-ground-up self-driving car look like? Well, you start by taking away all the things that allow you to actually drive the thing — you take away the steering wheel and pedals that give a driver control. Check out our gallery post for . Brin said the company has not had any crashes so far, but the company has also been testing it in pretty safe conditions. But for Google, the self-driving car is part of a bigger vision for re-envisioning the transportation environment. “What I’m excited about is how we could change transportation today,” Brin said. If you look at people who are too old, too young, or disabled, and can’t get around, that’s a big challenge for them.” Brin said the company decided to develop this prototype vehicle because it could do a better job than with one of its retrofitted vehicles. The big reason it could be better was safety — placement becomes more optimal with where it could put lasers. Steering was also better, with redundant power steering, and it had redundant braking as well. The cars, for now, only drive about 25 miles an hour, which also increases safety. It also adds about two feet of foam on the front, and instead of glass uses plastic. The company plans to build about 100-200 prototypes. Brin said that the company would be testing the vehicles with safety drivers by the end of the year, but the company hopes to surpass its safety level later this year. |
Microsoft Demos Real-Time Speech-To-Speech Translation On Skype | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Microsoft’s Skype has long enabled people in different parts of the world to communicate with one another through video, voice, and text chat. Now the service is looking to expand those capabilities by testing out a feature that could allow people who don’t speak the same language to talk with each other. Today at the first annual CODE Conference, showed off a new speech-to-speech translation technology that the company is looking to introduce in future versions of its Skype products. The feature, which Skype is hoping to roll out in beta later this year, translates speech from one language to another in near real-time. As it was demoed, the feature translated Pall’s speech from English into text for transcription on a colleague’s screen in German, and also into voice in German… and vice versa. In a chat before the demo, Pall said “Skype is about bringing people closer, and breaking down barriers.” That started with the idea of cheap international calling and expanded into face-to-face communications via video. Now it’s taking on the challenge of breaking the language barrier. The feature was a collaboration between Skype, Bing, Microsoft’s Research Lab, which has long been working on natural language processing and machine learning for a while. Language recognition is powered by the same technology as on Windows 8.1. At the conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the feature would be avialable later this year, and that the company would try to launch it on as many devices and apps as possible. |
How To Mine Bitcoins With The HexFury ASIC USB Miner | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | At this point, unless you steal power from the electrical grid in some weird squat or you have your own hydroelectric plant, home bitcoin mining is a sucker’s game. Sure you can make a little and you definitely help out the bitcoin network by processing the hashes that make up bitcoin transactions, but plugging in your own hardware usually means huge electricity bills and a trickle of BTC so slow that you barely make back your investment. With that in mind, then, I decided to plug in a HexFury 11 gigahash/second USB miner, one of the last powerful USB miners that can actually make you a few dollars a month. First, let’s understand what this thing is. The HexFury is a USB mining rig with six small ASICs made by a company called . The , in this case, are chips that do one thing – mine bitcoin – and they do it very well. Up until the HexFury, most USB miners of this type could run at 2 GH/s per second or slower, enough to mine a few dollars a year. At this point these older ASICs cost about $12 while this model costs $200. Could you mine with the smaller ASICs? Sure, but you’d essentially be burning money in a tiny bonfire. I ran a collection of three 1 GH/s ASICs and got about $1 a month. A unit arrived from and I unwrapped the single chip and checked it out. On one side are the six ASICs and on the other side is a large, passive heatsink. It looks like an overgrown thumb drive with exposed innards, which should give owners of inquisitive cats pause. The device requires a 5V USB hub (Belkin makes a few good ones) and a separate fan. I used this . To mine I used a Raspberry Pi with a USB card onto which I installed , a free mining platform that supports multiple types of ASIC miners. It is one of the simplest ways to turn your Raspberry Pi into a real mining rig and is very cool. You can learn how to install . To run the chip with Raspberry Pi Minepeon installation I had to install and recompile cgminer 4.3.2, the latest version of a standalone mining app that runs on most platforms. I had to recompile it to work with the current version of Minepeon. Once you’ve put Minepeon on an SD card and booted up your Raspberry Pi, you need to download and compile cgminer for your environment. Here are the commands I used: This should get you the latest version of cgminer. How does it perform? Well, with the fan pointed directly at it and the hub powered on, I consistently saw 12GH/s. This enough to make about $150 a year at this current difficulty and bitcoin price. This is a screen from Minepeon. You’ll notice that at that speed we would see about 0.018 BTC per month, or about $10. Given the cost of electricity and the constant rise in the bitcoin mining difficulty rate, this will eventually fall until 11 GH/s is a paltry speed. Home mining, at this point, is more about the experience of mining than any real money making. While you make a little money with this, you’re obviously going to have to connect a few of these together and have free electricity to make any sort of dent into the initial $200 investment. This is a speedy and powerful little chip and a real testament to what kind of power you can stick onto a small PCB. As these things catch up with higher-powered units, it’s only a matter of time before we can all make a few BTC a month with something the size of a stick of gum. |
Despite Exits, Aerospace Deals Are Crashing To Earth | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | With Google and Facebook both interested in and , perhaps other investors are taking the time to look to the skies. Last week to acquire the satellite company in a deal that could easily top $1 billion. It follows the search giant’s acquisition of , a drone manufacturer which had also caught the eye of Facebook . While Facebook and Google are providing financial exits for drone and satellite investors, to bring down the costs associated with launching satellites. It’s all creating a heady environment for investors who feel that the time for the venture-backed disruption of the space and aerospace industries may no longer be on the other side of the event horizon. However, our data shows that so far very few investors have attempted to make the trip. Indeed, at the height of investors’ interest in drones there were only six companies that raised cash across the market, according to CrunchBase data. And the most money investors have ever committed to the industry in a single quarter is a minuscule $72.4 million, the CrunchBase dataset shows.
Still, some investors are undeterred. “We’re in the absolute very beginning of a new aerospace paradigm,” says Jeremy Conrad, the co-founder and partner at early stage hardware-focused investment firm, . Lemnos has three investments in drone technology companies, including: , which makes autopilot systems for drones; , a developer of wing technologies for drones; and , which uses imaging technology to optimize water and fertilizer use for farmers. The firm is also backing the miniature satellite manufacturer, . Conrad and Lemnos Labs isn’t the only firm that sees promise in the drone industry. Draper Associates, the Foundry Group and Andreessen Horowitz all believe in a droning future. Andreessen actually invested in the over $10 million Series A round for Lemnos’ own company Airware. Most of these players are also major backers of companies in the satellite businesses as well. “I think the robots have taken over and it’s time for us to admit it,” says Jason Mendelson, a managing director with the Boulder, Colo.-based venture capital firm The Foundry Group and the firm’s representative on the board of its drone company, . Using drones will allow individuals and institutions access to places — and an ability to do things — that previously were impossible, he says. The same is true for investors’ adventures in space, and their attempts to boldly go where no venture capital firm has gone before. Chiefly, firms like DFJ, Lux Capital, and First Round Capital, have backed a number of drone and satellite imaging companies — most notably , which for a fleet of low-cost imaging satellites.
At I2BF Global Ventures, a Russian-backed investment firm with operations around the world, satellites have occupied a small part of the portfolio, but represent huge potential for founding partner Ilya Golubovich. His portfolio company
is set to launch four satellites over the next six months and his asteroid mining company, Planetary Resources is readying a 2015 satellite mission to reconnoiter the asteroid belt with a fleet of satellites to conduct spectral analysis and other kinds of tests before the company prepares for a launch “later in the decade,” according to Golubovich. Planetary Resources already has the luxury of being revenue positive, according to Golubovich, thanks to the company’s contracts for technologies that are complementary to its grand mission, the Russian investor says. “There are going to be 2,000 micro-satellites launched in the next decade. A lot of them are going to be imaging satellites, so the amount of imagery available is going to go way up,” says Golubovich. The problem will be finding applications for the massive amounts of data these satellites will be collecting. At Lemnos Labs, Conrad is bullish on the future of satellite technology and enabling applications and services for the space industry. “There are a couple of things that are happening that are going to fundamentally change [the industry] and you’re going to see an absolute explosion in satellite companies,” he says. Chiefly, the reduced costs of getting to space and the profusion of data coming from satellites are going to open doors for companies. At Draper Associates, which is an investor in Skybox Imaging and VIRES, the opportunities are also apparent. “The consumerization of IT in business is now the consumerization of IT in space,” says Joel Yarmon, a partner with Draper Associates. |
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says We’ve Entered The Post-Post-PC Era | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella said the company is looking beyond the post-PC era that we’re currently in now, which is defined not by consumers and businesses being tied to a single device. Instead, the company is betting on a cloud-first, mobile-first future. “I think we’re at the very beginning of what I describe as the ‘post-post-PC era,'” Nadella said at the first annual CODE Conference tonight. The new CEO has , but it’s been a busy three months. In that time, the company has , , and introduced a new piece of hardware, the , to . Granted, those projects were underway before Nadella took over. But as just the third CEO of the company in nearly four decades, following Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, he will be tasked with reinventing a company best known for licensing software into one that is . On that front, he seems to be the perfect choice, having previously served as Microsoft’s EVP of Cloud and Enterprise, and moving the company toward cloud services in products that include Bing, Xbox, and Microsoft Office. At the conference tonight, Nadella said that the world was entering a more personal computing world, in which the company wouldn’t just build apps for a single device. Instead, consumers are looking for services that work across multiple devices. It’s also looking to use data to create a more personalized experience. More than ever before, Microsoft is also interested in building its own hardware. That trend was partly by necessity as the post-PC era has begun in earnest and Microsoft can no longer rest on its software licensing laurels. With Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android emerging as the dominant platforms for mobile development, Microsoft purchased Nokia — which anyway — as a way to control its own destiny on a new generation of smartphones and other devices. Pushing its own hardware is also a way for Microsoft to . That strategy could perhaps best be seen in the arrival of the Nokia Lumia 930, which . Nadella said that the company got into hardware in part because it needed to create new experiences and new categories that its other hardware partners could build off of. He said that innovation in the PC ecosystem would come from the software layer, hardware layer, and apps, but that Microsoft would have to be active in all those places to help drive innovation. “Hardware is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself,” Nadella said. “I want to use hardware to create new categories.” One of the more surprising things that have happened in Nadella’s early reign was the release of the Microsoft Office app on the iPad, before a touch-based version of the app was available on its own Windows devices. “The intent is for us to make sure that our services are available on all the devices… We have to make sure our software runs on all of them,” Nadella said. But, he added, “We wanted to make sure we had a touch-first app on the platform that has the most share. Frankly, I didn’t want us to hold back because the idea of getting it on our platforms wasn’t important anymore.” It might seem like a departure for Microsoft, but for Nadella, as he seeks to remake Microsoft, the goal is to help the company .” |
TC Cribs Tours Twitch, Where Playing Games Is Part Of The Job | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | In this episode of Cribs, we stopped by , the San Francisco-based startup that’s created a massively popular video platform for live streaming online gaming. With that surpasses the likes of Facebook and Tumblr at peak hours, Twitch is often called the ESPN of online gaming. It’s one of the hottest companies around these days, as evidenced by the current rumors that Google is to snap it up in a billion-dollar deal. So it was no surprise to see that Twitch’s San Francisco headquarters is basically a big shrine to all things gaming, with big and small references to everything from games like Super Mario, to Portal, to Halo, and everything in between. There’s even a on premises, which unfortunately we weren’t able to take for a spin. Maybe someday. As you can see in the video embedded above, Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear told me all the references are a key part of Twitch’s interior design. “We wanted to make it feel like you were walking into a piece of the Internet, where there are references everywhere, and every little thing is something fun,” he said. Walking through, I wished that I were more well-versed in gaming culture, since there were definitely lots of things that went right over my head. Even so, it was lots of fun — I pretty much had a smile on my face the whole time. Check it all out in the video embedded above. |
These Kids Are 3D-Printing Their Education | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | A group of junior high and high school students in Cambridge, Mass., are part of an experimental education program that aims to prove they’re capable of solving real-world problems early with the help of 3D printers, Arduino and group collaboration. Co-founders Saeed Arida, David Wang and Saba Ghole started as a way to apply their dissertation theory, which claims that kids as young as 13 are capable of working on design and engineering projects normally reserved for those at the master’s level. By the looks of several projects involving medical devices, a game that helps you lose weight and a modular telepresence robot you can control from far away, the theory seems to be correct. The program integrates several engineering and design principles. But Arida says that when he frames it to prospective students as something of a creative-learning program instead of as an engineering or math-oriented one, everyone gets excited. “We actually don’t go into an emphasis on engineering. We just say we want to teach you the creative process and then when you are trying to create the project you need a lot of engineering,” he says. Students work on a visual illusion device based on the Moire effect. The program does more than just teach kids 3D printing, design and engineering principles, although Arida admits there’s probably not a single project that doesn’t incorporate the use of Arduino at some point. “We wanted to show people how you can create a school that is different…What the school of the future can look like,” says Arida, whose dissertation research at MIT was in creative problem solving and collaboration in K-12. NuVu students participate in the program for three to nine months at a time and collaborate in several creative projects. Some of them, like the short film that students Sam Diatzman and Christopher Smith produced on security issues after the Boston bombing, equip students with an understanding of screen writing and film production. The program started four years ago out of a local private school with just a handful of kids. It now includes a diverse group of kids from both public and private schools. There are 28 in this year’s class — 20 come from public and charter schools in the area. And though engineering tends to be male-dominated, Arida says an equal number of boys and girls attend the program. Arida says the students from previous classes have gone on to Harvard, MIT and Stanford. When I asked if they choose engineering or design studies after participating in NuVu, Arida tells me they don’t. “They’re actually shocked they don’t get to do the same stuff we do in the lab until they are in a master’s program. It can be frustrating for them.” Arida and co-founders would like to change the school system so that more kids get this kind of opportunity and exposure. Arida says they also plan to expand the project nationwide, but that will take a while. Ten other schools have adopted the NuVu Studio project so far. There are no special requirements for students interested in the program, according to Arida. They just need a willingness to learn. |
Iran Summons Zuckerberg Over Instagram, WhatsApp Complaints | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Iran has Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to court over privacy concerns involving WhatsApp and Instagram. He won’t go, of course, because the U.S. and Iran do not have an extradition treaty. And because the summons is ludicrous. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on the matter. While Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has called for more Internet freedom, that push hasn’t yet in the country. That result isn’t too surprising given the dynamics regarding censorship in the country. Iran heavily censors the Internet, including Facebook. WhatsApp and Instagram are to be banned as well. As : So despite public statements in favor of a more relaxed Internet policy, Iran’s formal rulings remain restrictive, forcing many in the country to use tools to get around imposed censorship. Iran, with more than 70 million citizens, isn’t a small nation, and it isn’t the only one working to censor the Internet. Russia and Pakistan have for censoring Twitter, through the company itself, in their nations. Conservative social and political policies mix poorly with free expression. |
Foursquare Declares Local Search (Yelp And Google) Broken, Vows Fix With Personalization | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Foursquare versus Yelp and Google today with a blog post explaining that its redesigned app will beat their “one-size-fits-all results” that users get “regardless of their interests or places they’ve been before”. Foursquare explains it standalone app to let the focus on local search, which it calls “fundamentally broken”. Foursquare and Yelp have been at each other for years, even though Dennis Crowley and his crew don’t name-check Yelp or Google here. Foursquare has ramped up its concentration on providing tips and restaurant dish recommendations, while Yelp has tried to become more social with and more mobile with on-the-go reviews. Google meanwhile to fill out its Places database, and now shows big rows of ratings or cards of info about local businesses in its search results. After years of lying in wait, building its archive of geo-tagged knowledge, Foursquare is poised to go hard at local search this summer with a new interface for its main app. Foursquare writes “We believe local search is fundamentally broken. Too many people are using antiquated tools to find places to go and getting the same one-size-fits-all results regardless of their interests or places they’ve been before. We’re reimagining Foursquare to provide people with the a whole new local discovery experience.” Who wins the battle may come down to what kind of format people prefer for local discovery guidance. Foursquare centers around quick tidbits of information, like the best entrée at a restaurant or the prettiest part of a park you have to see. These are quick and easy to consume on mobile, and give answers into the question “Why should I or shouldn’t I go there?” But they’re also more subjective and present a less holistic view of a place. , on the other hand, will have to rely on its more familiar star-based rating system and comprehensive reviews. While it might not know as much about what you like, it knows a lot about the crowd thanks to years of popularity in a wide set of geographies. Yelp averages things out to give a more reliable assessment opposed to putting you at the whim of one user’s recommendation like Foursquare. Yelp’s long reviews may be tougher to read, but they can give you deep insight into the overall feeling of being somewhere. Google just wants to make things easy. Open the same search interface you use for everything else and it will recognize your queries as local-related and pop up basic information. If you want the hours, phone number, or address, Google will have it instantly. But try to dig deeper and you’ll find Google/Zagat’s reviews can be thin and vague. The company just hasn’t built a reputation as where local experts share their tips. Foursquare’s not-so-secret weapon in the war on sounds like it will be personalization. The last line of the Foursquare post I quote above implies Yelp and Google only know what you search for, not where you go or what you love. While Yelp has a large passive user base, only a fraction actually leave the long-winded reviews the service is known for. Similarly, you might use Google Search and Maps all the time without explicitly contributing. Their results don’t adapt. But thanks to Foursquare’s checkins and tips, and now Swarm’s always-on real-time location tracking, Foursquare can construct a deep profile of where you actually go to surface relevant recommendations. Foursquare could win by providing personal recommendation for you and people like you by tallying the votes you cast with your feet. |
Western Digital Has Lost Its Mind | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Western Digital has a new $100 media streamer it would like you to buy. At first glance is a standard affair with the usual A/V jacks, Miracast support and a focus on local media streaming with MKV and FLAC support. But it lacks Netflix. Seriously. The ubiquitous app is not available on this player making it — and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here — the only A/V streamer released within the last three years to not support Netflix in any way. The player has : YouTube, Spotify, Vudu, Slingbox, Aol HD, Hulu Plus and many others. Except Netflix. Good job, Western Digital. Gold star. It seems WD is going after the niche market of those who want a $100 media player that can play back media from a local network source but can’t be bothered to install XBMC (or the like) and has a burning hatred of Netflix to the point that they will not buy a player that has Netflix installed. Western Digital has long made similar streaming devices ( ), but this is the first time the company has released an SDK for devs to build custom apps for the device. But if I was a developer, I would develop an app for a streaming device that people will actually buy instead of this Western Digital turd very few people ever would because it lacks a ubiquitous feature. But that’s just me. |
Pictorian Offers A Uniquely Designed Photo Storage App, Perfect For Your GIF Collection | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | On an App Store that today sports applications and a set of that hold a heavy influence over how developers proceed, it’s rare to come across an app that offers a unique perspective. But a newly launched photo storage application called does just that. The app, a simple utility for storing photos outside your iPhone’s Gallery – including animated GIFs – has developed an intriguing interface for interacting with its service which involves a menu in the form of concentric rings. This menu is dubbed a “Concentric Radial Menu” by Pictorian’s creator, Chris Stroud, a part-time undergrad researcher in Human-Computer Interaction who’s now working toward his computer science degree. Stroud has been building apps for around seven years, he says, and has spent the last five months or so coding Pictorian. “I spent a tremendous amount of time sorting out the menu system and polishing the overall user experience,” he says. The original idea for the app itself came from Stroud’s desire for a place to properly store his animated GIFs, which he liked to send out over text message to his friends. While he admits there are several other apps that also do this today, he wanted to improve upon the experience with “careful design and engineering.” “I wanted something that if I were browsing Twitter and came across a funny GIF or meme, I could quickly stash it for later. When I wanted a relevant GIF for an iMessage chat, I could quickly get to it again,” explains Stroud. With Pictorian, you can easily save GIFs or other pictures you come across while surfing the web, and the app will even try to identify image URLs saved to your clipboard, if you’re not able to copy the image itself. After finding the image you want to archive, you just copy it, then switch over to Pictorian, which seamlessly imports the file to your collection. These images are also saved in the iPhone’s photo gallery; Pictorian serves as an alternative storage system. Here, you can annotate the image with a text description to help you find it later, plus search and share your photos. But what really makes the app interesting is its “Concentric Radial Menu” which is how you interact with the images, once archived in Pictorian. From the homescreen, you can press and hold with your finger to bring up menu options like “View,” “Copy,” and “Delete,” and from the photo’s page itself, you can press the blue button at the bottom then slide your finger up to other choices like “Share,” “Describe” and “Delete.” The “Share” button is what makes it easy to text your photos using iMessage or SMS, as it takes advantage of iOS 7’s default sharing interface, which also allows you to email or share your photo on social networks like Twitter, Facebook or Flickr. “To me, the CRM the most exciting thing. The app is cool and all, but the menu interactions are really different from what else is out there,” says Stroud. “You put your finger down and it’s there, pick it back up and it’s gone again. The beauty is that it doesn’t try to force you to tap a tiny button; the symmetry of the rings allows you to drag your finger outward in whatever direction is most comfortable for you in that moment,” he adds. There have been a handful of apps over the years that have experimented with different ways to navigate or interact, and it’s always interesting to see how well they work out. Some have involved dials or . And just year, for instance, called Viewfinder was acqui-hired by Square for their design and engineering talents. In the meantime, the so-called “hamburger button” has become exceedingly common in mobile apps, even though . It’s time for new ideas. Over time, Pictorian will be updated with a number of features, including batch imports, photo library imports, iPad support, cross-device syncing and more. Stroud is also going to Apple’s WWDC to learn about porting the app to iOS 8, and will later be submitting a short paper about the app to . Pictorian is a bootstrapped creation from Stroud’s SnarkyBits, and is . |
Watch Dogs Launch Day Uplay Disaster Is A Reminder That PC Game Sales Are Broken | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Today I made a mistake: I bought a PC game. I’ve been good – I haven’t bought one in a while, since Just Cause 2 probably. But I was looking at graphics comparisons of Watch Dogs on Xbox One and on PC and I thought “what the heck, let’s try it.” I have an extremely capable gaming PC that’s pretty much neglected after all, and it’s in close proximity to my workstation (of course I’d only ever play at lunch, kind bosses). The problems started as soon as I made that decision. First I had to figure out to buy Watch Dogs digitally for PC. That took more than simple Googling, surprisingly. I had to go to the official Ubisoft site originally, and figure out that Uplay is in fact Ubisoft’s digital storefront, and then there still wasn’t any clear indicator it would be digital delivery, except for the fact that they didn’t ask for a shipping address. So I managed to sign up for a Uplay account and complete the transaction, at which point I expected a download link. And I got one, but for Uplay, not for Watch Dogs. So I downloaded that – and it promptly crashed upon first launch with an “Unrecoverable” error. So I tried again – and encountered a connection error. So I tried the Ubisoft Uplay support forums – and encountered a connection error. I’m currently further away from my goal than ever, since I uninstalled Uplay entirely based on the advice from the Ubisoft support Twitter account, which advised reinstalling. But I couldn’t redownload because, of course, the servers are down. So now I’m in refresh loop hell. I’m definitely not alone in my plight. of the pain of server errors and Watch Dogs/Ubisoft have acknowledged the problem and are said to be working on a solution. Kotaku also has a story up . My problem is this: everyone knew this was one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2014, so be prepared for that. It’s going to stress your servers, so be more than ready. There’s nothing worse than looking forward to a launch day and having that day arrive and having nothing to show for your $60 (or more, if you sprung for any of the special features). I was wondering why Uplay was down and then I remembered that Ubisoft released a game today. Nice to see they haven’t learned. — Peter Hasselström (@TheManko) Game publishers and studios are precious about their own online storefronts. Uplay, EA’s Origin, Battle.Net shop, and so on. But these serve to do nothing but make digital downloads, which should be a godsend of convenience, incredibly arduous. At least on consoles, the storefronts are consolidated by Microsoft and Sony. Valve would love to do that on PC with Steam, but they can’t break apart the stupid feuding fiefdoms – which would be somewhat acceptable if only these warring factions could get their act together enough to actually ship a digital game when they say they’re going to. New video game day used to be an exciting day, but now it’s an exercise in misery and coping mechanisms. I don’t even want to play Watch Dogs anymore. Well okay, that’s not true, but I’m definitely far less enthused. |
Slidely Launches New Show App For Making Videos Out of Pictures | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Israel-based , which claims 50 million users across several image apps, recently closed $7.3 million in funding but it was something of a mystery what the cash was actually for. They did say they would produce an iMovie-like app, which is now revealed to be called “Show,” . Show lets users create movies that stitch together social media photos and videos from social networks and then share across those networks again. It reminds me of Animoto back in the day, but for mobile. Slidely says what sets it apart is a balance between features and automation, allowing videos to be created easily. What is useful is that you don’t rely just on photos on your phone. You can elect them from Dropbox, Facebook, and Instagram, as well. Its reminiscent of perhaps, but with more features. The finished HD video is created fast and can be shared on all the usual platforms or saved to the mobile device’s camera roll. Special effects include slow motion or fast motion effects and remixes. Videos are hosted on Slidely and can be embedded. |
Facebook Isn’t Axing Auto-Shares From Other Apps, But Will Favor Explicitly Shared Stories In Feed | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Facebook has no plans to discontinue “implicit sharing” from third-party apps, likely because the data is still very valuable, but today the company said it will be in the feed over auto-shares. Facebook isn’t giving up on auto-sharing; it just doesn’t want to show it all those Spotify listens, Instagram Likes, and more in the News Feed. What that means is that if you formally open a “share to Facebook” window in a third-party app, add your own description or content, then post it to the News Feed, more of your friends are likely to see it. If you simply enabled a setting that auto-shares to Facebook every time you do something such as like a photo or listen to a song, that stuff is less likely to appear to friends. Facebook will still collect the auto-shared data about you, which it could use to target advertising, such as nearby concerts of bands you listen to. And that data will still appear in your Facebook profile. But Facebook likely found that users were less likely to click on these auto-shared stories than ones they knew their friends took the time and care to purposefully post. Facebook launched its Open Graph protocol at its 2011 f8 so developers could let users post their activity to Facebook from others apps without constantly being interrupted by sharing prompts. The program quickly gained steam as developers are always hungry for growth. But Facebook over-flooded the feed and the now-mostly-dead Ticker with all the news friends were consuming in Open Graph news apps, listening to in Spotify or Rdio, and where they were running. These stories often felt lifeless and robotic compared to what people posted natively on Facebook or deliberately from other apps. A backlash ensued, , and whole classes of apps like news readers (The Guardian, The Washington Post) and social video platforms (SocialCam, Viddy) cratered. But in the end, that was good for the average Facebook user’s experience. tests of the upgraded News Feed algorithm that showed fewer auto-shared stories reduced the total number of time stories shared from other apps were marked as spam by 75 percent. Auto-sharing got a bad rap. But as I wrote back in 2011, the . I don’t care if one friend listened to a song or read an article. But if 15 of my friends did in a single day, even if none of them shared it explicitly, that content is probably highly relevant. Auto-sharing let Facebook cobble together these aggregated stories about friends’ activity. And it still will, even if auto-shares about what a single friend does get hidden. Developers may be somewhat less likely to integrate auto-sharing now that it doesn’t have as much feed reach, but most apps will take whatever growth they can get. Facebook wants developers using its new mobile Like button instead of auto-sharing The move ties in with Facebook’s f8 announcement of new explicitly sharing tools for mobile. Those include the mobile Like button, the Message option for private sharing to friends, and an improved explicit sharing dialog. It also extends Facebook’s quest to , making it more personal and relevant and less susceptible to viral memes, like-baiting posts (“Please Like this!”), and click-bait news stories from sites like Upworthy. Because while Facebook wants to maintain a good relationship with developers, the user experience has to come first. If the feed gets boring, no one will read it, and it won’t matter what apps share there. It’s a complex dance, but Facebook would rather step on a few toes than break its own legs. |
Twitter Lands $230M Deal With Omnicom | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | Twitter’s MoPub will integrate with Omnicom’s programmatic ad purchasing product in a two-year . According , the agreement includes a “‘first look’ at mobile-ad units created by Twitter.” The Omnicom deal could indicate that Twitter’s purchase of MoPub, a into the mobile space, wasn’t a misplaced wager. The deal expanded Twitter’s reach away from its own user base. That matters as investors appear to be regarding Twitter’s ability to grow its own audience. At the time of purchase, that it planned to use MoPub’s technology to build real-time bidding into the Twitter ads platform so our advertisers can more easily automate and scale their buys.” The deal is the second piece of good news announced today. A indicated that the company’s growth in Asia could impress. Twitter’s shares are trading higher today, besting the larger market rally, but only slightly. Investors don’t appear to overly impressed by the twin positive entries, implying that this sort of growth and deal flow may be already priced into the share price of the social company. |
FCC Said To Tweak Proposed Net Neutrality Rules, But Preserve Pay-For-Speed | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | Call it a non-fix: According , FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has tweaked the language of his proposed rules to allow content providers to of their content across an ISPs network. He has not recanted that proposal. Instead, according to the Journal, “the new language by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to be circulated as early as Monday is an attempt to address criticism of his proposal unveiled last month that would ban broadband providers from blocking or slowing down websites,” but would still let companies that are content-intensive “pay [ISPs] for faster delivery of Web content to customers.” Doesn’t that feel precisely the same as the plan before? Yes, but, this time, the Journal continues, we’re going to have “ This is , written down with a different color pen. Wheeler has made comments before that indicated he for the Internet to become bifurcated to the disadvantage of those who don’t pay. But if advantage is for sale, how can that not be the case? If I pay for an advantage, and you deem is fair, is it? The FCC will take comment on the proposal. If you are opposed to the concept, making more noise, and not less, has thus far and likely will continue to do so. Just a thought. |
Alibaba’s Cloud-Computing Unit To Open First Hong Kong Data Center | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | Alibaba Group’s cloud computing unit, called (or AliCloud), . This is significant because it marks Aliyun’s first step toward international expansion. The announcement comes less than a week after Alibaba , which is expected to be one of the largest tech IPOs ever. It is important to note, however, that Aliyun Instead, the subsidiary is targeting Chinese businesses operating in the Greater China region and Southeast Asia. As Alibaba explained in its announcement, Chinese companies that want to set up business outside mainland China usually need to add Web servers in local markets to handle additional traffic. This means that they have to deal with a new set of Internet regulations in each country. Renting Aliyun servers means that they will be able to sidestep regulations, lowering costs and barriers to entry. Aliyun already has three data centers in the mainland Chinese cities of But Aliyun still faces fierce competition, , which recently launched in China. AWS China includes all the other services offered in other regions and marks Amazon’s first move into cloud computing services in the country. Its clients already include major tech players like Xiaomi, Qihoo 360, and Kingsoft, though it also targets small- to medium-sized businesses. Furthermore, last October IBM and 21Vianet, the largest carrier-neutral Internet data center provider in in China, teamed up to provide data-computing services there. Though many U.S. tech companies, including Google and Facebook, have been blocked from gaining a footprint in China thanks to government regulations and censorship, the thanks to a relative lack of infrastructure. The Chinese government is investing heavily in building data centers to serve the country’s increasingly large number of smartphone users. According to a , China’s cloud-computing value chain is expected to be worth $122 billion by 2015. |
Parrot’s Newest Drone Packs A Serious Camera, Extreme Range | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | Say hello to Bebop, aka the AR Drone 3.0. This is the latest drone from Parrot and it’s a big upgrade from the much-loved AR Drone. It’s essentially a flying camera that can even pipe imagery directly into an Oculus Rift headset, taking flying in the clouds to a whole new level. Sticking out of the center of the small drone is a 14 MP camera with a fisheye lens. This setup, along with some nifty software tricks, allows the drone to capture silky-smooth video — the video can even pan and tilt while the drone hovers. Essentially, thanks to the 180-degree field of vision allowed by the fisheye lens, the software captures more video than it needs. It then uses home-brew software to cut out the desired bits and discard the rest. This allows the angle of view to remain fixed even if the drone is swaying in the wind. This setup gives the Bebop a unique selling point over competitors, including models from Phantom that rely on more traditional camera and gimbal rigs. Like previous AR Drones, connectivity is achieved through Wi-Fi and the Bebop has four antennas and can ride on 2.4GHz and 5Ghz frequencies. Still, range through Wi-Fi is limited to, well, the range of Wi-Fi. The Bebop can do much more. Along with the Bebop, Parrot is introducing the Skycontroller that extends the Bebop’s range to 2 kilometers. The tablet or smartphone used to control the drone just mounts in the middle of the controller. Using an assortment of antennas and boosters, the controller boosts the controlling tablet’s signal by 36dBm. If that’s not enough, the Skycontoller can also output the field of view streamed from the drone to an Oculus Rift. You become the Bebop. Early reports state there is a bit of lag. The drone also packs a GNSS chipset that uses GPS, GLONASS and GALILEO data for autonomous flight and return to take-off position. Sadly, like the AR Drones before it, flight time is limited to a paltry 12 minutes. Parrot has yet to release pricing for the Bebop, instead stating it will cost a bit more than the $300 Parrot AR Drone 2.0 and the $1,000 models from Phantom. It’s expected to be released in the fourth quarter of the year. The Bebop will likely be a hit. This marks Parrot’s third-generation drone. Thanks to the AR Drones before it, the company figured out the way to market and sell drones to the general public. The Bebop builds upon the fun consumers had with the novel AR Drones and adds practicality with a high-def camera and extended range. [gallery ids="1001037,1001038,1001039,1001040,1001041,1001042,1001043,1001044,1001035,1001034"] |
What Games Are: The Politics Of Play Matter | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | A few years ago, film critic Roger Ebert royally put his foot in it when he declared that . Tone deaf though his reasoning was (he got hung up on their functional nature and saw the capacity of play as destroying all possible representation), the most interesting aspect of the debate was just how pilloried he became. Ebert wasn’t just wrong, he was on the wrong side of history. It was an example of how games are increasingly political, and of how some of the next gamer generation finds personal significance in them. I don’t mean stuff like players who cosplay their favorite characters at conventions. I mean issues of representation, reflection and the dynamics of power. Just look at how Nintendo got caught up in a PR vortex this week around . The game is a lighthearted sim intended to be played for laughs. Players can use their Miis to play the game, largely watching them interact and do silly stuff. One of the things that their Miis can do in that context is marry. But the game doesn’t support gay marriage. Reports first indicated that it initially did, but was phased out as “a bug”, but later proven untrue. There are several articles considering why gay marriage was left out of the game. For the most part they concluded that, because it’s a Japanese game and Japan is more conservative, perhaps it was considered too far. Or maybe in all honesty is just never occurred to the developers to include. Regardless as the issue gained momentum ahead of the game’s launch in the West it become a question that Nintendo had to answer. And its first answer was profoundly dumb ( For every noble cause there are also opportunities for the reactionary voice. Witness the small furore surrounding designer Zoe Quinn as she documented an experiment with implantable tech. Quinn is a fan of implanted chips and wanted to toy about with having a programmable one . The actual device she implanted ( ) seems pretty rudimentary, but it’s still an interesting experiment. Yet to look at some of the comments on the Kotaku article that featured her experiment is to see the dark political underbelly of gaming. You know, the one that thinks that anything that women do is basically an act of being a fame-crazed showy whore. Or that they clearly have a flexible relationship with sanity and need to have their derangement to them. Perhaps no-one gets this treatment more than Anita Sarkeesian. In her most recent essay Sarkeesian makes the perfectly reasonable point that female characters in games often tend to be feminized versions of male characters. In many games you’ll have a slew of character choices for instance (the tall one, the fat one, the small one etc) and one of them will be the female character. The female character is often attired in pink, girlish and annoying. It’s woman reflected in man rather than woman as woman. Sarkeesian’s point is that we should enjoy our games but also consider their culture. And maybe be a little less blinkered and more willing to think of female character representation on its own terms. Seems perfectly reasonable doesn’t it? And yet she receives heavy backlash. Some are valid counter-arguments but many are ad hominem attacks on her person. And she’s often threatened. Another form of the politics of play is to be found in crowdfunding. We seem to be past the novelty phase which drove huge amounts of money to some games, but in 2014 there’s a lot of crowdfunding going on. Many of the kinds of game that do well in crowdfunding tend to be aligned with tribal causes. Funding the return of retro classics or spiritual successors, for example, is pretty common. So is funding what-games-should-be projects like . Yet consider . is one of those games from back in the day, a forerunner (along with ) of . It’s considered a cult classic and – like many cult classics – there is a latent market for its return. However unlike many a similar campaign, Harmonix’s campaign raises a lot of political questions because it seems like a game belonging to “The Man”. Peter Molyneux faced similar questions when he raised funds for in late 2012. Surely, many a journalist asked, a guy like Molyneux could gain funding through official channels like publishers. And similarly with , surely crowdfunding is supposed to be about the little guy against “The Man”. Indeed I wrote recently about how exposed a very deep divide between how games people think about this stuff as opposed to tech people. In tech crowdfunding is for neat stuff. In games crowdfunding is supposed to be a statement of loyalty according to some. In a sense crowdfunding seems like it should be a reinforcement of that Supreme Court ruling that money equals speech, but whose speech? The sentiment that some games are worthy of funding regularly runs through the gaming media yet by this standard there have been some notable failures such as . And at the same time is may well make it (going on its current performance), which leads to this question: Is the politics of play actually that important, or is it just loud? Do the politics of really matter to its sales? Does the conspicuous lack of a female character in actually matter? Or, more darkly, is the vague suspicion that such omissions happen for fear of hurting sales true? Do the economic perceptions around what crowdfunding should be in the media really matter? Or does it all just amount to lip service? And that brings up an uncomfortable thought: The politics of play may (not to be insensitive) essentially be a sideshow. The Nintendo example may be interpreted as a lesson in how not to do PR, but not really change anything as such. We may see a phase of game makers inserting token characters and other elements by way of appeasement, but not taking the political issue any further than that. Game developers, publishers and platforms need to be smarter than that. One way to read the dynamics of crowdfunding is to think that the politics matter only so far, but that’s only to consider where it is today. It forgets that the younger generation are simply cash-strapped. Maybe current Kickstarter success is largely about affluent mid-40s white guys and their childhood obsessions with games involving Cthulhu or fantasy sagas and so on, but that dynamic won’t last forever. They’re simply the ones with disposable income for whom games are a certain kind of passion, but it’s different for their successors. The younger generation may well be up to its eyes in college debt and unable to pay rent while middle-aged moms burn money in , but that will change. The indie kids of today care about identity, representation and consider their play as more than simple amusement. The dynamic of a smarter and more sensitive culture is stirring all around us (from the through to the ) and that’s just in free media. As today’s generation gets better jobs and start having more disposable income it’s eventually going to be the decisive force, the one that gets to with its wallet and make the crowd decisions. Society is on the move in games just as in every other part of culture, and it’s up to us game makers to engage with rather than token-ize it. Otherwise we’ll be replaced by those who get it. |
If You Read One Book With A Hashtag For A Title This Year, Make It #GIRLBOSS | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | Motivational stories are banal, personal anecdotes of people you don’t know are boring, and most business books contain about one postcard’s length of wisdom, spread out over several hundred pages. Sophia Amoruso’s recently manages to avoid these pitfalls, fusing her personal life, her professional life, and a series of teachable moments together to form something quite readable. Amoruso didn’t start on top. Her story is a series of mishaps and adventures that led her to start an eBay store that sold vintage clothing. That store, Nasty Gal, has raised $49 million to date and now has revenues in the nine figures. Going from struggling in school to an almost-arrest for shoplifting to running a company worth far more than $100 million isn’t a simple story. The book, aimed at youths as it is, drags in some sections when it comes to practical advice that you might have already learned. Skip the parts that don’t apply to you. Amoruso wasn’t a born mogul. In fact, she claims that if she knew what she does now back when Nasty Gal was busy being born, she wouldn’t have pursued the company: “I never started a business. I started an eBay store, and ended up with a business. I never would have done it had I known it was going to become this.” Given that Amoruso appears happy, and in command of her responsibilities at Nasty Gal, her comment implies that her past self would have balked at the amount of work that would follow, and not that if she could go back and redo life, she would have not founded the company. Lesson: You go to war with the army you have, so if you aren’t fully equipped to be the CEO of a major company today, don’t worry. You are still growing. Pervasive in #GIRLBOSS is the concept of work. That work, instead of something that should be avoided, should be embraced. This goes for everyone. For the young: “A lot of people in my generation don’t seem to get that you have to work your way up. An entry level job is precisely that — entry level — which means you are not going to be running the show or getting to work on the most fun and creative projects. I’ve heard to many people in their twenties complain about their jobs because they ‘have so much more to offer,’ but first and foremost, you have to do the job that you’re there to do.” For the more experienced: “You want to know what four words I probably hate the most? ‘That’s not my job.’ […] In an ideal world you’d never have to do things that are below your position, but this isn’t an ideal world and it’s never going to be.” When Nasty Gal was just starting to grow, Amoruso spent her time spamming MySpace — hey, it worked — aggressively riffing through estate sales to find new items to sell, while also handling inventory and fulfillment. She was a one-person company. But, “What part did luck play in her success?” is a fair question. Was all that success luck? Fortune isn’t binary, but Amoruso’s focus on details — shipping labels that sit just right, modeling each piece, tracking what sells and what doesn’t to better tailor product mix, and so forth — was the real magic. Her comments on the concept of luck take the cliche that “luck is when preparation meets opportunity” a bit further: “I hate the concept of luck, especially when people try to apply it to me. Yes, it’s true: Hundreds of thousands of businesses fail. Mine succeeded. Was that all just because I ‘got lucky’? I don’t think so. What I hate about luck is that it implies being devoid of responsibility. It implies that you can do nothing and then step into success as easily as stepping into a pile of dog poop on the sidewalk. […] Luck lets us believe that whatever happens, whether good or bad, it’s not to our credit or our fault. That is why I don’t buy luck. Framing that, the most successful CEOs that I know, or know of, tend to be exhausted and harried and not precisely the jovial-yes-we’re-killing-it types that so often end up on magazine covers. Amoruso’s current status is predicated on years of sweat and unglamorous labor. It’s always tricky to talk down about yourself once you pass a certain level of success — can you manage to not sound humblebraggish? Amoruso mostly pulls it off. The core arc of the personal component of #GIRLBOSS is watching the younger Amoruso fall down again and again, with increasing magnitude, until she essentially decides to shape up after the shoplifting expedition that ends with her watching her “outlaw lifestyle fade quickly into the distance.” Amoruso still didn’t particularly want to fit in (“Being from the suburbs, I’d always equated comfort with ennui…”), but she jarred her life onto a track that had Nasty Gal at the far end. So, it turns out that smearing poop on the wall, piercings, low grades, hitchhiking and bumming around with hippies*, working a stream of dead-end jobs, and committing serial theft do not make you unfit for a life of doing well for yourself, and yes, if you are into that sort of thing, the company you found. Life isn’t easy, and business is harder. But regardless of where you are today, you can advance your career or build something that may or may not fail. Cheer up, that’s good news. |
Does The Beats Aftermath Usher The Next Episode For Wearables? | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | : Apple on May 28th. As to , there are a few things about the news that should have tech investors’ ears ringing. One, Dre may hate embargoes more than reporters do. I guess Dr Dre doesn’t adhere to embargoes. — danprimack (@danprimack) But beyond Dr. Dre’s (booze-fueled, but who could blame him?) is a potentially $3.2 billion validation that even the most basic form of wearable technology is worth a lot of money to the right company. There’s no doubt that headphones are wearables — and , then the earbud or headphone could be a gateway to an entirely new form of computing. Setting aside music streaming, Apple’s acquisition of Beats could represent the company’s take on one version of the future user interface for computing — Google Glass and Facebook’s $2 billion Oculus are another. In some ways it could be a philosophical split on whether users will interact with data aurally or visually in the future. To be sure, streaming music is another (possibly the primary) component of any potential Beats deal. Streaming music service Pandora Media, which went public last June, has a market cap of $4.5 billion. Venture backed startups offering streaming music services like , , , and have raised well over $500 million since 2011. As the debate plays out in the marketplace, one thing is certain — venture capitalists haven’t lost faith in the wearables market, despite the to shift its emphasis from hardware to software in its popular FuelBand business. Beyond — which was the largest commitment to the wearables market, according to CrunchBase data (and should the Apple deal close, one of the largest exits) — a number of venture capital’s top firms have placed their own significant equity and debt bets on wearables.
These venture investors have invested over $1.1 billion in wearable technologies — and that doesn’t include money spent by private equity shops like Carlyle or the secretive investor Rizvi Traverse, . Beyond the big dollars, investors are backing more and more companies that define themselves as wearable, according to our data.
Certainly Apple believes in Beats’ online music service and headset business enough to make it the company’s largest acquisition ever — should the deal go through. Here’re Apple’s disclosed deals by purchase price in terms of their relative size. The Beats deal would dwarf them all, ensuring that no matter what else he does, it’s doubtful anyone will ever again.
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#Love: When Mothers Text | Contributor | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | I bought my mom a cellphone a few years ago. It was just a simple Nokia flip phone. Something to keep with her on long drives to use in an emergency. She has a penchant for driving long distances, often to see me. The first thing she did was send me a text. I don’t even remember what it said. She probably does. But I do remember the exchange that followed. I texted: “hey look at you texting.” She wrote back: “I might be old, but I’m not stupid.” Touche, Mom. Touche. So began our almost daily text exchanges. We have laughed, fought, sent photos and videos of my dog Jake (this is a favorite pastime of ours), given each other advice, sent photos of shoes we thought about buying–and then didn’t. Through it all, I never once received a text I didn’t understand, not a single line I’d put up on a site called “when parents text” or whatever. She does have her own shorthand for things such as cleaning the house: MOTTP…mucking out the tee-pee. (Feel free to use at will.) She grew up on the Ute Indian Reservation in northeastern Utah so it makes sense. Oh and she grew up in a house without running water, electricity or indoor plumbing. When friends–particularly friends who are 20 years younger than me and with mothers who are yes my age–say things like “oh my mom doesn’t know how to text,” they get that smug look on their faces. It says with no sense of shame or regret, but with the appropriate amount of snark: look how technologically illiterate my mom is. I equate it to the same sort of thing that used to happen when people first bought VCRs and joked that they had to ask their grandkids to program it so the time didn’t endlessly flash at them, like a beacon of their stupidity. But then every generation likes to think it’s smarter, faster, cooler, whatever than the one that birthed them. My rebuttal is always “my mother can text.” She also does a lot more on the “stupid little phone” as she calls it. She generally runs right up to her monthly data limit because she pretty much uses it for everything–ordering dog treats from Amazon or house-hunting or critiquing the mobile experience for a new journalistic venture I’m working on. Recently, she had a fight with her phone because I suggested we upgrade the iOS after the whole security scare around SSL encryption. I wish I’d just left well enough alone. Overnight, her phone went from being something she understood quite well to being like a city whose buildings and streets were just in slightly the wrong place. Some things were completely missing. Suffice to say, she did not consider it her fault that she was having problems with her phone. It was Apple and its unwillingness to let well enough alone. I hadn’t realized that she hadn’t upgraded her phone in about a year, so truly her phone was completely different once the upgrade was done. But she didn’t throw up her hands in despair. Instead, she called Apple to complain mightily about not being able to go back to a previous version (Apple you might want to consider that). She talked to a writer at a tech blog who kindly walked her through the biggest changes and how to fix the phone so it worked well for her. (Thanks, John Michael Bond at TUAW.) But I digress or am going off on a tangent. This column is supposed to be about love in the time of technology. Since I went off to New York for graduate school, my mom has put up with her only daughter wandering around far-flung places. Back before mobile phones, Skype, or yes the Internet, you stayed in touch as best you could. When I moved back to New York after a year in Seattle and Salt Lake City after grad school, I drove a Ryder moving truck by myself from Salt Lake City to Astoria, Queens. Every five hours, as agreed upon before I drove away from Utah forever, I would stop and make a call to my mom on whatever pay phone I could find to let her know I was safe. When I moved to Singapore a few years later, I finally had an email address so we stayed in touch that way and made weekly calls with a callback service that made it a lot less expensive to call internationally. I was pretty late to getting a cellphone. I could have bought one in Asia, but it wasn’t until I moved to Detroit and was required to carry a cellphone–I was a writer for the Wall Street Journal–that I began to understand how helpful they could be. Filing stories by from the United Auto Works strike line in Flint, Mich. was my first brush with “backpack journalism.” I also have come to realize how cellphones can be used to express love. Often it’s not the big, all-consuming love. Instead, it’s love expressed in small ways. I have called my mom to have her “walk me home” a few times when I’m in a place that feels sketchy. But on one memorable evening I asked her to help me pass the time as I hobbled across the campus of the University of Michigan in a pair of high-heeled boots I had worn for far too many hours. She didn’t miss a beat when I told her the only way I’d get to my car with the boots–and my sanity–is if she just talked me to my car. I still have my feet and those boots. I still travel, too much now it feels, as I don’t leave an empty apartment behind, but also Jake. There’s nothing worse than the “are you ever coming back” look a dog gives you when you drag the suitcase out the door, tempt him with a treat so you feel better yelling good-bye and quickly shutting the door behind you. My mom helps out immensely, flying in to stay with him when I need to go on a long business trip or staying a few months as I transition between apartments and houses. But she does more than that. Pretty much every single day that she is with him, I receive at least one, if not several, photos of Jake doing something she thinks I should see. There are also the videos of him gnawing on bones, catching balls or just going for a walk with her. I will fully admit to being hopelessly in love with my dog. I am one of “those” people. My mom knows this. She also knows that a text doesn’t make up for being there. But it helps. It helps. So I’m thankful for a mother who doesn’t think a piece of plastic, metal and wires will ever get the best of her. Instead she takes it all in stride and I suspect that when she can pop up as holographic image from her phone and say hello to me, she will be one of the first people to try it out. And she’ll bring Jake along with her. So on this Mother’s Day, instead of joking snidely about how your mother doesn’t know how to text, teach her how to do it, be patient and don’t be an ass about it. And then, turn off both your phones and have a good chat. |
Q: Why Did Quora Join Y Combinator? A: It Was Almost Free | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | Quora has plenty to learn from Y Combinator but it’s not giving up the traditional 7% equity share to . Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo tells me “YC invested an amount that was similar to their standard $120k. They invested as part of the Tiger round.” That $80 million round valued Quora at $900 million, so the startup only traded away approximately 0.013%. Because YC is only contributing $120,000 at the $900 million valuation, its upside is limited, and the cash is a drop in the bucket for Quora. D’Angelo explains “It’s a pretty minor thing. We let YC put in a little bit of money. We’re not trying to pretend to be a small company. We just wanted to be part of the network.” This matches the official answer from D’Angelo on why Quora is joining YC that he posted… : “There are a bunch of reasons why it’s valuable for Quora to be a YC company: We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.” That alumni network could prove fruitful to Quora, as it might provide a leg up when courting failed YC startups to become talent acquisitions. Quora won’t have some special team doing the whole intensive program, D’Angelo tells me. YC is designed for founders, and after Quora’s other co-founder from the company in 2012, Adam’s the only one left. “It’ll be me” the CEO says. “I’m not necessarily going to do all the things” because they don’t apply since Quora is a late-stage company, not a new one. Y Combinator President Sam Altman gave me a few more details, saying “Adam will come to dinners, events, etc.” Wikipedia is a household name. Quora is not. Y Combinator’s growth scientists could help it bridge the gap. Quora has been cagey about its stats since forever, only talking in relative growth and vanity metrics rather than absolute user counts. For example, Quora says it grew 3X in all metrics from May 2012 to May 2013, and hit . This makes it tough to know exactly how popular it is, but the general consensus hovers around “known amongst Silicon Valley intellectuals” and “just not big enough”. Quora exec Marc Bodnick did tell me last month that public measurement services “significantly underestimate” Quora, and “are off by a factor of 5X to 15X.” An average of (sometimes inaccurate) comScore and Compete numbers for February multiplied out would put Quora somewhere between Quora’s web traffic could be somewhere between 5.5 million and 16.5 million monthly users, plus the 40 percent of its users it’s said are on mobile. That doesn’t seem too shabby, except Quora mission “To grow and share the world’s knowledge” targets everyone, yet it’s far from ubiquitous. Plus, Quora was founded by well-regarded Facebook execs and has $141 million in funding including an $80 million Series C raised last month . As we’ve seen with , investors are demanding . Monetization potential aside, it’s having enough people to push that business to that matters right now. It’s quite possible that Quora touts its other stats because it has highly engaged users reading, writing, and answering but just not enough of them to look impressive in a world where Facebook has 1.28 billion users. Meanwhile, Quora needs to find some way to make money, as D’Angelo told me last month that me “We specifically want to stay independent for the long-term.” Without acquisition potential to rescue it, Quora must climb monetization mountain. Right now, though, Quora makes basically no money. It shows no ads. Yet since people come to the site to learn something specific, Quora could monetize through demand fulfillment keyword search ads that leverage purchase intent. That’s one reason why D’Angelo tells me “it’s very likely that we will have an ad-based revenue model. We’ll experiment but I think that’s the most likely outcome.” So Quora needs to grow and get monetization rolling. Fortunately, those are things Y Combinator teaches best. D’Angelo tells me “If they ‘re helpful with those things for other companies, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were helpful for us.” If you’ve ever been to a YC Demo Day (I’ve seen around five), you’ll remember two staples of many presentations. “We’re growing X% week over week…and we’re profitable!” YC specializes in helping young startups craft a compelling service with product-market fit that can grow rapidly and get somebody to pay for it. While Quora’s subject question-and-answer service provides a ton of value if you dig into it, it’s not as intuitive and familiar as object knowledge bases like Wikipedia that piggyback off the classic Encyclopedia style. Quora has come a long way with the addition of full-text search, but it hasn’t found the secret sauce to convince the average person its app is essential resource to frequently check. The guidance from YC’s expert partners, and the rigors of the program could help whip Quora into shape. Even though YC is getting a much smaller cut of Quora, the deal makes plenty of sense. The YC President’s post about Quora joining in is quite vague, but a source tells us “Altman wants a piece of every billion dollar co, every .” Quora only needs to grow a little more to join the billion dollar valuation club. While typically YC has to bet on baby startups with a high likelihood of failure, Quora has already had a degree of success. Plus, many believe the subjective knowledge space is sure to be important in the long-run, and Quora is far and away the front-runner. A quick tour of the nonsense and trolling on Yahoo Answers confirms that. Altman calls the arrangement with Quora an experiment, and a source tells me it won’t be YC’s only one. The incubator is also said to be admitting some very slow-burn startups working on hard technical problems over the long-term. That’s different than the fast-to-market startups YC is more accustomed to. When I asked Altman about this tip, he confirmed it, saying “Yes, that’s true. My hope is that the YC model will work well for these companies. The mistake that a lot of hard tech companies make is biting off too big of a chunk for a first project. So we’ll help them find good intermediate goals and make progress towards those. Startups run on momentum, and so it’s good to have early wins.” With the and this next batch being one of its biggest, YC is attempting to scale up without diluting its value-add. Now as it reaches to encompass a wider range of late-stage and hard-tech startups in its 10-week regimen, it will also have the challenge of scaling sideways. |
Why We Can’t Forget About Dre | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | The of Beats by Apple has captured the public imagination. Though it is not yet official, we’ve spent all weekend about it on Twitter, shocked at Andre Romelle Young’s , joking that Forbes should change its list because he’s now a billionaire, for some reason. Quite honestly, part of the appeal of this story is that it’s refreshing: We’re used to all these faux humble acquisition tweets from startup founders and Dr. Dre’s like, Some (reaching for yet another Dr.Dre post, because they’re more fun than what tech reporters usually cover) have I don’t think so. Dr. Dre and his partner Jimmy Iovine are examples of a caste of atypical tech founders, entrepreneurs and leaders that are becoming all the more typical. People from the worlds of fashion and art, designers and marketers and artists — who have never written a line of code. is one. So is . So is . And even Bieber . Tech’s future goes beyond engineering. It has to. Dre the world’s first rapper billionaire, but he is a member of a different, very small group: Dre is one of the first founders who started as an artist — and the first musician — to have a tech company exit for more than a billion. Others include and , and if you consider Steve Jobs an artist, and going public an exit, Apple itself. That is the true reason for our captivation. As post-Jobs Apple stacks its ranks with fashion executives like and , and Ashton Kutcher one of the best early stage portfolios in the Valley, Dre’s exit means media and fashion’s involvement in tech is more than just marketing, it’s serious money. Billions. And what’s the difference between me and you Dre? Nothing. [spotify id=”spotify:track:1SWVDBtw6h3tm9OehOkDhv” width=”300″ height=”380″ /] |
R.O.W. With Butch — Either Tax Tech Giants In Europe Correctly, Or STFU | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | “Amazon UK boycott urged after retailer pays tiny tax bill” “Politician says consumer action could persuade Tech firms to cough up tax” “Fresh questions to be raised over Google’s tax avoidance” Headlines like this are an annual event in Europe as companies file their taxes at the end of the financial year. The reasons are very simple. For convenience and to create a working market in Europe’s fragmented continent, the Europe Union – with the open-eyed sanction of its member states – has constructed a way for companies to be legally HQ’d in one country in Europe (and taxed there) but trade all over Europe, thus creating a notional ‘single market’. There’s only one problem – this encourages companies to locate their legal HQ in a country with a low tax regime, while trading in all the rest. Not only that – it also allows companies to transfer assets and income between subsidiaries. ! It’s just like Capitalism! But the latest example of how all this operates hit the news this week when that Amazon had paid just £4.2m in tax last year, despite selling goods worth £4.3bn. This is more that the combined UK sales of Argos, Dixons or Marks & Spencer Food, all ‘Main Street’ retailers in the UK. The previous year it paid £3.2m in tax. What tax it does pay in the UK is on it’s UK subsidiary. reported profits of £17m in 2013, and effectively paid 24% of that in corporation tax, the legal going rate. Predictably, politicians weighed in on the headlines, as they yawningly do every year without doing much about it. They said we (we!) should shop elsewhere. No doubt politicians in other parts of Europe, where Amazon trades, are doing the same thing. This strategy can have some effect. Starbucks resumed more ‘normal’ UK tax payments last year, after a little outrage from the great British public. But then, you can often choose which coffee shop to walk into when you’re out on the street. Online, the convenience of buying in one click from Amazon, rather than punching in credit card numbers into some other online store, is a temptation just too much to bear for many. In the last ten years Amazon has paid just over £10m in taxes. But in the last four years it’s generated £23bn in British sales. And of course, the principle is very simple, and well-known to the tax accountants serving the likes of Amazon, Google and many other US tech giants. Simply take online payments via a subsidiary based in a low tax jurisdiction – in Amazon’s and many other cases it is the tiny state of Luxembourg – but locate all your warehousing, engineering, accounting, human resources and other functions in a country where you can easily hire and fire, attract talent and conduct an efficient business. Given that hiring and firing in Europe is perhaps the easiest in the UK or Ireland, that’s where many companies locate the bulk of their operations. Meanwhile, two desks in Luxembourg gather dust while a couple of accountants sip their morning espresso, or order some crémants while tucking into their ‘Judd mat Gaardebounen’ (a smoked neck of pork and broad bean casserole with a thick creamy sauce, if you must know). Mostly likely, Luxembourgians are also jostling for elbow room in the restaurant, as their country is only slightly larger than the tiny Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, while chit-chatting with all the other accountants in the place (for who, pray tell, would do anything else in Luxembourg than be a worker for a U.S. tech giant? Nice work if you can get it, although Amazon does say it has “hundreds of employees” in Luxembourg. (This is clearly bad news for any pigs in the vicinity who’d like to hang onto their necks). Thus when a European who can’t be faffed to do a simple Google search for another store or physically leave their house wants to buy from Amazon, their bank statement will show a payment to “Amazon EU S.à.r.l.”, not Amazon.co.uk or whatever other URL Amazon operates in each European country. “Amazon EU S.à.r.l.” (try saying that quickly!) is merely the a master company in Luxembourg, while all other EU operations are subsidiaries, one of the largest being in the UK. “Ooh, but it’s so UNFAIR,” bleated Tory MP and tax campaigner Charlie Elphicke. Actually, he didn’t say that, but he did say something similar. Of course, it serves the Politicians and the tabloid press well that make constant references to tax against revenue; where you don’t pay tax on revenue, but on profits. Admittedly the UK government has been pressing the EU on this whole tax loophole for some time. Because last anyone checked, a small bookshop or retailer in Europe has to pay taxes. Even massive retailers like John Lewis – like Macy’s in the U.S. – have to pay tax. Amazon and Google barely do, but that they do pay, they pay entirely legally. Then again, Amazon’s UK business employs 7,000 staff, with many more seasonal workers joining its warehouses at Christmas. And that’s just them. Google, Twitter, Facebook and all the others employ skilled, educated workers in Europe. That means Europe is encouraged to produce those people from its education systems. These are the jobs of today, and the future, are they not? An Amazon spokesperson has defended the company noting that it “pays all applicable taxes in every jurisdiction that it operates.” Amazon EU ships to all 28 countries in the EU from multiple websites in a number of languages. But poor old Amazon isn’t the only one getting it in the Judds. Twitter doesn’t make anywhere near as much money in the UK as Amazon, but it’s using a similar tax strategy, HQ-ing itself in low tax Ireland. Twitter in its European HQ in Dublin. Engineers? Some. But mostly sales, legal, human resources and finance. Meanwhile in London to spend £1.5m to fit out 25,000 sqft of offices in Euston, London. That’ll be for way more than 100 workers. Twitter will be joined in the building by fellow US social media giant Facebook, which agreed to take 90,000 sqft of the building in September last year. Twitter will take the ninth floor, while Facebook will take floors three floors in the building. And they’ll have neighbours! Google is planning a £300m headquarters up the road in nearby King’s Cross. How cosy! Will the hundreds of employees there be filing in tax forms? Well… we do know most will be hammering the phones and going on long lunches in Soho with London’s huge ad agency community. See, all these tech giants (and MANY other international companies, not just tech ones) operating over here all employ a common corporate tax method called transfer pricing. This takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there. This more or less avoids the country’s 12.5 percent income tax. The so-called ‘Double Irish’ relies on shuffling the money between two Irish companies. Google Ireland Limited employs almost 2,000 people in Dublin and is credited by Google with the bulk of its non-U.S. Ad sales. The Dublin subsidiary has its “effective centre of management” in Bermuda, . Irish tax law exempts certain royalties to companies in other EU- member nations, thus, payments from Google’s Dublin company don’t go directly to Bermuda, but make a detour via the Google Netherlands Holdings B.V. Tax lawyers call this method the “The Dutch Sandwich.” Cute, huh? For its part Facebook sends its earnings from Ireland to the Cayman Islands, according to the company’s filings in Ireland and the Caymans. I could go on but I won’t. All this is well known to governments, politicians and the companies concerned. Everybody knows. . The simple point here, is that none of these tech giants are doing anything illegal. Remember, a company’s obligation to its shareholders is to legally try to minimize its taxes and all costs. They are just doing what companies do. It may not fair. It may not very fabulous, given the spending strain on governments in the global recession. But this is literally the away the cookie crumbles. And the companies did not bake the cookie, the governments did. So if UK politicians want to hit up Amazon or Google or Twitter or anyone else for more tax, they shouldn’t bleat about the methods companies use to pay as little tax as possible. And it’s not even just tech companies doing this. These are just the companies politicians can easily finger, because they provide products (mostly FREE products) almost all of us use every day. No, greed is not good. No, none of this feels right, or within the spirit of the tax laws. But if European politicians and law makers want to do something, they should instead invade Luxembourg or Dublin or Amsterdam with a battalion of paper shredders. Or just shut the fuck up. Because this same debate happens . Politicians saying something is not fair is like alcoholic parents chastising a teenager for getting drunk at a party. Instead of dealing with the tax issue, they put the onus on us as consumers to sort the issue out. Meanwhile, back in Euro-land, Jean-Claude Juncker – a politician you probably haven’t heard of, is a longtime Euro politician campaigning to become the next president of the European Commission. He is on the admittedly laudable platform of encouraging Europe to create a “single digital market” and re-energise its technology industry. No bad thing. But what was Mr. Juncker before? Prime minister of Luxembourg. |
Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | Despite what you may have read, Mozilla isn’t canning its plans to sell sponsored tiles on its new-tab page. A few days ago, Mozilla’s Vice President of Firefox Jonathan Nightingale wrote a defending the organization’s plans to include sponsored tiles on Firefox’s new-tab page. For some reason, a couple of people Nightingale’s comments as a retreat and assumed that Firefox was abandoning this project after too many of its users complained about it. That’s not the case, however. Instead, Nightingale simply clarified that Mozilla would move ahead slowly with this program, experiment with different new-tab pages and that they will likely include sponsored content in the future. Mozilla — which doesn’t always see eye-to-eye with advertisers — first this program at an Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in February. Now, it’s starting to experiment with different layouts of its new new-tab page, according to Nightingale. Mozilla’s for adding sponsored content to the new-tab page sounds quite compelling at first. Because the new-tab page is populated by looking at the sites you regularly visit, it’s of no use to new Firefox users. Adding some Mozilla properties and other “useful” — that is “sponsored” — sites could benefit those first-time users. I doubt that Mozilla has received many complaints about the empty new-tab page, though. What definitely won’t happen, Nightingale promises, is Firefox turning “into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit.” Typically, those sponsored tiles would stay around for the first 30 days after a user installs Firefox unless a user actively manages them. It’s hard to imagine that this first-time user experience is the only thing on Mozilla’s mind. Mozilla barely has any other funding source but its contract with Google. In 2012, 97.9 percent of Mozilla’s revenue came from its deals with search engines — and most of those came from Google. Mozilla simply needs to start finding new ways to generate revenue and while those new-tab tiles surely won’t be able to replace its income from Google anytime soon, it’s a start. The problem, however, is that this doesn’t really fit into Mozilla’s brand image. It’s supposed to be an independent, mission-driven organization. Once it starts taking money from big brands, it will be harder to maintain this image. |
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