title stringlengths 2 283 ⌀ | author stringlengths 4 41 ⌀ | year int64 2.01k 2.02k | month int64 1 12 | day int64 1 31 | content stringlengths 1 111k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A Tour Through Autodesk’s Pier 9 Workshop, The Fabrication Facility Where Out-There Ideas Turn Into Reality | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | But for months now, people have been telling me that Autodesk’s new “ ” that opened this past fall on Pier 9 on the San Francisco waterfront is a must-visit for TechCrunch video. So we headed over to see what all the buzz is about. Autodesk’s Pier 9 workshop has pretty much every type of fabrication equipment that you can think of, from top-of-the-line 3D printers to CNC machines to laser cutters to woodwoorking tools. The idea is to put all of these things together in one space and make it available to two groups of people: Autodesk staffers, who develop the software that makes the machines run, and a group of “ “, who will use both the software and hardware in new and out-there ways. It’s a pretty incredible space, both because of the impressive equipment and the wildly creative things that have been produced using it. Take it all in in the video embedded above. |
Adform Raises $5.5M To Expand Its Rich Media Ad Business In The US | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | European ad-tech company is announcing that it has raised $5.5 million in Series B funding. The company was founded more than a decade ago, in 2002. Chief Marketing Officer Martin Stockfleth Larsen told me it sells its technology to both advertisers and publishers, with products including a demand side platform for ad-buying from multiple sources. Most DSPs, Larsen added, “compete on algorithms,” namely their ability to efficiently buy ads through real-time bidding. While that’s part of Adform’s offering, its real focus has been on rich media ads, including . Those formats aren’t unique, but Larsen said that with Adform, advertisers can “easily scale rich media” rather than go through the standard process that’s “very manual, very cumbersome” and can require negotiation with and customization for individual publishers. Those ads can run across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices — Larsen said mobile has become a big part of Adform’s traffic, though revenue lags behind. Supposedly, the company has always been profitable, but he said the funding will allow it to become “more aggressive,” particularly in the United States, where it recently opened two sales offices (in New York and Los Angeles). Adform also plans to launch its own data management platform and to expand its efforts in outdoor advertising. The new funding comes from Nordic firm Via Venture Partners, which a few years ago. |
Why I Go To Disrupt | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | It’s never good for someone inside an organization to defend its actions to the outside. It smacks of self-serving and one-sided debate, and, as the Bard wrote, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Be here I go protesting too much. Valleywag’s Sam Biddle wrote a fairly even-handed look at after visiting us for one day. He saw the flop sweat of the entrepreneur, the smug looks of men with too much money exhorting other men with a little money to give up money entirely, and the efforts by our team to produce an event that will extricate as much of that money as possible. Biddle, whom I count as a friend, called the former the “ ,” which is a fine image, and his piece, if taken out of context, is an interesting look at what I call the theatre of entrepreneurship. Sam, here’s what you didn’t see (and this is why I attend year after year and why, after eight years, I still work here). First, you didn’t see the efforts by our team to give attendees as many breaks as possible. We attempt to include about every small startup, whether they’ve paid for a table or not, whether they even paid for a badge or not, in the “engine of change” that is the Silicon Valley experience. Many of our attendees, for example, are students or bootstrappers who get free tickets just for taking part in . Many of the tables are winners of regional pitchoffs who have been given free tickets or free tables by staff who have flown around the world to sit through pitch after pitch to find a few that can make it. The people on stage come for free, and are primarily unpaid (I think Arrington still gets cash), in order to talk to a group of people who really want to hear them. Second, you didn’t see the value we try to add. We try to write about nearly everyone we meet. There are certain cut-offs, though. I tend to favor those who reach out to me after events with a quick email (I’m at ) and then I can work with them on a longer announcement. We also cover hackathon participants and Startup Alley participants and people on the floor via and in our posts. We never sit backstage helping the rich get richer if I can help it. As for our “ ,” understand that we talk to a lot of people and we’ve been through a lot. Mike has been spit on. We’ve been threatened outside of events. We need to protect each other. That said, I’ve spent many a night pushed up in a corner talking to someone who might be a little too enthusiastic about fish delivery. I’ll take my lumps. Disrupt isn’t about money any more than a publishers’ convention is about money or a doctors’ convention is about money. Money is, obviously, an undercurrent, and the mercenary will always find ways to optimize for cash. But, these conventions also bring together the faithful to learn, to experience, to network, and to figure out if this life is for them. For many, Disrupt is aspirational, a sort of tech Graceland where those who love the thrill of working all night to build something cool can go in order to say to themselves, “That guy made it, so can I.” Our winners have gone on to make . I’m proud to be part of it. The money, in my eyes, is secondary. It’s a cliché, sure, but it’s true. And if a cool company like Makerbot gets funded at the event, in a little side room, I’m really happy. Sam, you looked at this the way a big city reporter writes about a State Fair. You write that the bumpkins are killing themselves with fake food, drinking horrible beer, and milling about in tents that smell of cattle. Their kids are pushing over portable toilets while the fair owners rake in the cash. Country stars appear on the fair’s main stage and play five or six songs while drunk or high and then stumble into their tour bus with a curse and a fart. Absolutely. You can go to any fair and see that and you can say it’s awful. But there’s a reason that fair exists. The livestock tents are there to allow young farmers to show off their prize animals. The food tents are there to expand a county’s culinary palette. The beers are there to allow a little downtime for adults who are just trying to live their lives, and the angry kids are few and far between and are probably angry for reasons we don’t understand. The country singers are probably tired and may be drunk but they know their base and they’re there to make a little music and ride on down the road. And the fair owners probably lose money. From the parking lot, everything about the fair looks like a refugee camp for the ignorant. From inside it’s a nice afternoon out for the family and a way for future farmers to show off their prize rabbits. It’s my mission to make Disrupt work the same way; sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail, but we try. There is, to be sure, a certain theatre of entrepreneurship that the overly cynical can point to to say that we are bilking an unknowing public. You can say that old white men on stage talking about money is one of the most uninteresting things in the world (I do, in fact, say that and I think we have some excellent speakers that are far from that and add quite a bit to the proceedings). You can say that we are mercenaries in the pay of Lord Armstrong. Yeah, maybe all that’s true. But you work for Denton and he just hasn’t figured out how to monetize events yet. What I see when I go to Disrupt is a Comic Con without the costumes. There are plenty of people, lots of networking, a lot of fun, and a lot of interesting on-stage talks. And there’s opportunity for a guy or girl working alone in their basement to come up for air. Sometimes Disrupt can help refine their vision, help them meet a VC, or even help call them on their BS. It’s a way to get out of your head for three days. It’s a way to see that there are others like you out there and that they care and that they want to help you. I am, to be clear, a neophiliac and techno-utopian, but I know that humans like to meet other humans with similar interests and a Disrupt is a place where they can do just that. Maybe you don’t like those people. And maybe that’s a “you” problem. |
KakaoTalk Launches Its First Desktop Client For Mac | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | has launched its first desktop client for Mac, which is currently available in Korean and English. The release, which can potentially help South Korea’s top messaging service score more users, comes less than a week after , creating a company with a 3.4 trillion won (about $2.9 billion) market cap. In addition to its Mac client, the company also added a new search feature to its desktop client KakaoTalk for Windows, which allows users to look for keywords within a chatroom in reverse chronological order. Like desktop clients by KakaoTalk’s competitors, including and , KakaoTalk for Mac and Windows syncs between mobiles and desktop computers. In its press release, Kakao said that it will add the ability to search chats and send files soon to its Mac version. The search feature will also be added to mobile apps later this year. The merger of Kakao and Daum, which will create one of South Korea’s largest Internet companies, puts KakaoTalk in a better position to compete against Naver, South Korea’s largest Internet portal and the maker of Line, which is by the end of 2015. Line had about 400 million users as of April, compared to KakaoTalk’s 145 million. KakaoTalk for Windows is currently available in Korean, English, and Japanese, while the Mac version is in Korean and English. In order to compete with Line, KakaoTalk will have to attract more international users. As , major messaging apps like KakaoTalk, WeChat, Line, Kik, and Skype were all developed outside of the U.S., while Mountain View-based WhatsApp has a much wider userbase overseas than in the U.S. |
SketchVid Turns Your Doodles Into Eye-Catching Animations For Instagram | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 11 | is a cool new iOS app that lets even the most ham-handed doodler make striking animations for . The app lets you trace over or draw on a photo, or sketch freehand. It records your strokes as you are drawing and then automatically turns them into a 15-second video. I have a , but I’m still pretty bad at writing on my iPhone’s touchscreen, let alone drawing. Thanks to SketchVid’s tracing feature and a photo of Crispin Glover, however, I was able to render a recognizable portrait of my favorite actor and imaginary husband in a few minutes.
If you are a talented artist to begin with, SketchVid lets you share how your creations come to life. I love watching on YouTube, and I can see illustrators and other visual artists using Sketch Vid as a marketing or educational tool for their Instagram accounts. The app can potentially have a wide appeal, however, and I also bet children would have lots of fun “finger-painting” animations.
SketchVid was created by Saeed Ghaferi and Arfan Chaudhry, Toronto-based mobile app developers and friends. One day Saeed drew a sketch and sent it to Arfan. “Arfan pretty much didn’t believe that Saeed made the sketch,” the two said in an email. “That’s where the idea sparked from. Why not create an app where strokes for sketches are recorded and turned into a video?” The two decided to focus on Instagram because the photo- and video-sharing network is “a great medium for artistic people to show off their talent in a new way,” they explained. While there are other apps that record sketching videos, Ghaferi and Chaudhry wanted to make one that was specifically for Instagram. The app lets you crop photos into a square and automatically renders animations, no matter how complex, so they fit within Instagram’s 15-second time limit. SketchVid is currently and premium features are available for purchase in-app, including extra drawing tools. I found that the app already creates smooth animations, but its developers plan to upgrade it so it delivers higher quality video. An Android version is also in the works. Check out some of Ghaferi and Chaudhry’s favorite animations below.
|
Emergence Backs SteelBrick’s Technology For The New, Mobile Salesforce | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | in a $5 million transaction, Godard Abel, the serial entrepreneur behind and , has brought in $6.5 million in new financing from for his latest venture. “I always liked the team [at BigMachines] and kept in touch,” says Emergence Capital founder and general partner — and new SteelBrick board member — Jason Green. “When [Abel] told me about the SteelBrick transaction I got very excited. They have a lot of domain expertise and a track record.” Like BigMachines, provides configuring, pricing, and quoting software for salesforces, except it does so through Salesforce.com’s own development platform. Other than SteelBrick, there wasn’t a solution that was native on the Salesforce.com hosted service, according to Abel — who assumed the chief executive position at SteelBrick. His company’s software now fills that void in the Salesforce.com suite of products. Abel says there’s a ton of complexity around salespeople knowing what products a customer can buy from a vendor and what kinds of discounts a salesperson can offer. “Right now it’s very inefficient and SteelBrick automates all of that and does it right on top of the SalesForce platform,” says Abel. As Emergence looks at the ways in which software as a service (or SAAS) has changed the face of enterprise computing, the firm is coming to the realization that mobile software will be the next step in the evolution of developing technology for businesses, says Green. “Mobile does to SAAS what SAAS does to traditional enterprise software,” says Green. “There’s a huge advantage of recognizing how important that new major trend is. [New software] goes deeper into workflows and business processes to add more value.” That’s exactly what Abel sees SteelBrick doing on the mobile platform. “This is a really interesting app because it touches on a number of different functional areas,” Abel says. “Executives know in real time when quotes [to customers] are changing and what’s going on in the process.” SteelBrick charges $45 per month for the service per seat and has over 130 businesses currently using the software. “It’s been rolled out to thousands of users across those companies,” says Abel. At Emergence, this kind of back-filling of the interstitial spaces between large enterprise functionalities will be the next wave of investment for the firm, according to Green. “The major functional areas have been cloudified,” he says. “Now the areas between those functionalities are going to become the next white-space.” |
null | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 27 | null |
This Is SpaceX’s First Ever Manned Spacecraft, The Dragon V2 | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Not too long ago, the idea of a commercially-built craft that could carry people back and forth into space was but a sci-fi pipedream. Tonight, SpaceX revealed a spacecraft built to do just that. Called the Dragon V2, the craft is built to carry up to 7 passengers (or fewer passengers, with cargo) into orbit and up to the International Space Station. According to SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk, it’ll be able to return and “ “. “The reason that this is really important,” said Musk, “is that it allows rapid reusability of the spacecraft. You just refill the propellant, and go again… Imagine if aircrafts were thrown away after each flight; no one could afford to fly.”” SpaceX had previously shown Dragon V1, a smaller, unmanned version of this craft meant primarily for testing and, in a few cases, sending cargo back and forth to the International Space Station. Dragon V2 also has an improved heat shield, allowing it to better protect passengers on their return flight through the atmosphere. The biggest single change to the design, though, is in the engines: where each of Dragon V1’s engines (the “Draco” engine) could produce about 100 pounds of thrust, each of the Dragon V2’s engines (the aptly dubbed “Super Draco” engines) can produce about 16,000 pounds of thrust. The particularly cool part? SpaceX says they’re actually the engines out of a specialized metal alloy (called inconel), as opposed to more traditional manufacturing methods like milling. Beyond the awesomeness inherent to being able to say , it’s worth noting that this is the first US-built manned spacecraft in — and there’s more at play there than just matters of pride. When our spacecraft are supplied largely by other countries — as they currently are, as the US uses Russia’s Soyuz spacecrafts almost exclusively — the US’ ability to reach the stars (or, for that matter, our astronauts on the ISS) lays in the whims of other countries, as well. This became immediately clear at the end of last month, when Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin responded to US sanctions against Russia by suggesting that we could use “trampolines” next time we wanted to reach the ISS. Within hours, Elon Musk publicly pledged to reveal a manned spacecraft by the end of the next month: Cover drops on May 29. Actual flight design hardware of crew Dragon, not a mockup. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) NASA and SpaceX hope that the spacecraft should be ready for flight by 2017. You can find a replay of the (surprisingly short!) announcement |
Watch Elon Musk Debut SpaceX’s First Manned Spacecraft Tonight | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Back in May of 2012, SpaceX proved that they could launch a spacecraft filled with cargo, have it dock with the International Space Station, and return it to earth safely. Tonight, they’re unveiling the spacecraft that’ll help them take the next logical (if daunting) step: sending up a handful of astronauts. Called “Dragon V2” (or sometimes “DragonRider”, or “the Space Taxi”) the ship SpaceX is unveiling tonight is said to be capable of carrying up to seven astronauts (or a mix of astronauts and cargo), to and from low-earth orbit and the International Space Station. Word of this pending announcement first broke on April 29th, when, in response to US sanctions against Russia, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin suggested that the US could perhaps use “trampolines” to reach the ISS, instead of the Russian Soyuz spacecrafts we currently depend on. Musk responded quickly, further cementing his position as the closest thing we’ve got to a real life Tony Stark: Cover drops on May 29. Actual flight design hardware of crew Dragon, not a mockup. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) You’ll be able to watch the announcement with the widget below (or, if that doesn’t work, ). It’s scheduled to start at 7 P.M PDT: |
Maker Studios Culls Content On Blip’s Video Platform | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | A lot of online video platforms have disappeared . Now it looks like one — while not shutting down — is having a pretty brisk spring clean. , the video distribution startup (which is now itself getting ), has been sending out notices to many users telling them that their accounts are getting closed. That’s on top of the fact that it’s currently . Blip — which lets producers upload, distribute and monetize their video content — suggests in the note sent to some current users that they upload videos to YouTube and apply to join the Maker RPM network there. The full note, posted on Instagram by producer , is below. This is not a closure of Blip per se, but a decision by Blip to shut down accounts that it deems were , or simply were not active enough. “Blip isn’t shutting down. We’re just closing more accounts as part of our effort to focus the library,” in the of Jeff O’Connell, an SVP of technology at Maker Studios and Blip. We have reached out to Blip and Maker to ask for more details about what is going on, and are still waiting to hear back. It looks like we are not the only ones. A quick search on finds a number of other producers noting they’ve also been bounced, with little direct explanation about what’s happening. Closure or not, there have been rumors for a while, it seems, that Maker was planning to shutter Blip eventually. But in the meantime, there have been other developments that seem to point to Blip — if not closing down — getting less attention than in the past. Maker earlier this month , its own streaming platform that sits independent of YouTube and will be the home for original and “exclusive” content from its pool of producers. It’s largely thought that Maker.tv was built on some of the assets that Maker acquired with Blip — which in an earlier incarnation had try to position itself as a viable YouTube alternative, before it pivoted into a distribution network that helped put videos on to YouTube, along with other sites. In the meantime, while Blip the site is up and running, it seems to be somewhat on autopilot. The company’s blog has not been updated in three months, and one of the invites users to “follow our sister blog [at Maker Studios] for more shenanigans.” Of the two people who ran the blog, one now describes himself as a VP of product at Maker, and the other works elsewhere. The for blip also stopped getting updated in February — save for , earlier today, suggesting someone with a question about collecting revenues on his videos contact Blip support. While Blip may have had a hard run competing against the size of YouTube, Maker’s producers collectively generate billions of online views monthly, and it seems like Maker realised it could capitalise on that with its own platform, Maker.tv, that it could better control its revenue generating destiny, with no cut to YouTube’s owner Google — or other platform providers, for that matter. Or, using Blip’s distribution technology, better control the whole distribution chain. It will be interesting to see what Maker does longer term with its culled-down Blip producer pool and catalogue of videos. One possibility is that they get migrated to the Maker platform too. |
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Said To Buy LA Clippers For $2B | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Steve Ballmer, best known for his long tenure as the CEO of Microsoft, is reportedly set to purchase the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team for $2 billion, . Previously, he had been tipped to for the team. The Clippers are in flux at the moment after their owner, Donald Sterling, was recorded saying a number of racist comments. The NBA fined him. He’s made public comments indicating the he may fight a forced sale. According to the Times, rival offers came in at $1.2 and $1.6 billion. |
Apple Will Use Curation To Beat A Path To Mainstreaming Music | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Ask the average person who their favorite musicians are and they’ll struggle to name more than a few. That’s one reason search-based streaming services haven’t hit critical mass. They force users to know what they want to hear. And this is why Tim Cook Beats as the “first streaming service that really got it right. Beats doesn’t ask people what they want to listen to. It tells them. That’s curation. Spotify and Rdio have suggestions, but they’re still centered around an intimidating search box connected to the history of recorded music. The plethora of choices causes decision paralysis. This friction to play something great creates a barrier to use. Best-case scenario: you probably keep searching for and playing the same songs. And most people already using an on-demand streaming service are in a niche of music aficionados. Apple doesn’t do niche. Apple does scale. And the way to do scale with an on-demand streaming music service is to make it idiot-proof. That was Apple’s strategy with the iTunes download store. Keep it bright and simple like a digitized Wal-Mart music department where mainstream listeners buy CDs. It was built for everyone to be able to buy songs from the top of the charts, new releases, or that they’d heard elsewhere. It worked, and iTunes has grown to 800 million users. As digital music sales decline and streaming grows, Apple is using Beats to away from the iTunes download model to cloud subscriptions. But if Beats (which could one day be merged with iTunes) is ever going to get as big as iTunes is today, it has to embrace a different interface. Rather than paying à la carte, you’re free to listen to anything. But most people won’t know what to choose. And herein lies a big answer to why Apple bought Beats. It liked its curation style. In the acquisition press release, Apple explains that Beasts “focuses on providing for each user through a unique blend of digital innovation and musical passion. with over 300 years of experience across all genres, Beats Music ” In Tim Cook’s letter to Apple employees (obtained by , he says “Both Apple and Beats believe that , and we will continue to expand what we do in those areas.” Beats’ Jimmy Iovine discusses the need for curation Cook also told that Beats “had the insight early on to know how important human curation is.” And Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine said onstage at that and curation is critical because the album is going away. Unlike some backend technology Apple surely could have built, Beat knows how people think about music. The whole app is built around that knowledge. The home screen is ‘Just For You’, which explains “We get what you’re into. Check out some music handpicked by our experts”. Press play, and something relevant like “Beyond The Hits: College Rock” starts playing with no need to search. Slide over and there’s “The Sentence” which lets you say what you’re up to, where, with who, and what genre you’re feeling. Select “I’m [poolside] and feel like [dancing] with [my boo] to [hip-hop]” and you’ll get Lil Wayne’s “6 Foot 7 Foot,” a perfect fit for this situation. Another swipe brings up “Highlights” with more collections of jams like “Dream Teams” featuring high-energy collaborations. Or you can explore music by genre, select an activity like “Breaking Up” or “Celebrating,” or choose a curator you trust like DJ Mag or Pitchfork. Not once do you have to type anything. You never have to know what artist or song you want to hear. Sure, Beats has a search box. But that’s not the point. Beats knows music so you don’t have to. That’s a recipe for Apple’s Beats to achieve mainstream success, because the have-nots of music taste far outnumber the haves. It’s a lot like what Beats did for headphones. It didn’t make them for audiophiles. Beats made them cool looking so anyone could wear them on the street. It made decent-sounding headphones part of popular culture, and now it could do the same for streaming. |
Foursquare Loses Biz Dev Head To Postmates, COO Also Departing | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Foursquare’s COO Evan Cohen and VP of Biz Dev Holger Luedorf are leaving the company, reports . The departures come amidst major changes for the company. The Foursquare app split in two and spun out with new app Swarm earlier this month. Foursquare’s CEO Dennis Crowley told Isaac the two departures were merely coincidental. He maintained that Foursquare was doing “just fine.” Cohen, who has been with the company for 4.5 years now, says he’s leaving for personal reasons. As he told Isaac: “I was running low on gas, frankly, and it made sense for me to hand the baton off to a fresh new executive.” Foursquare confirmed to TechCrunch in an email that they’ve appointed Jeff Glueck, a former Travelocity CMO and former CEO at Skyfire to replace Cohen. Mike Harkey, a current Foursquare biz dev team member, will be stepping in for Leudorf. “We couldn’t be more excited about Jeff and Mike’s new roles, and the continued momentum of Foursquare,” said a spokesperson. “Evan and Holger have been instrumental in growing Foursquare from a small shop to a company employing more than 170 people worldwide – without them we wouldn’t be where we are today. Luedorf, meanwhile, will be joining the still young food delivery startup Postmates. Foursquare says they are excited for Glueck and Harkey’s new roles. According to the company, they conducted an extensive, six month search process before deciding on the two. |
Ousted RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal Promises To Sue His Board | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | In a , former RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal promised legal action against his former board of directors today. He also announced his resignation from that board and provided context, from his perspective, into how legal choices were made to protect the company’s potential IPO. After public outrage grew concerning Chahal’s domestic violence case, . That came after the company’s board for the executive after he plead guilty to a count of domestic violence battery and a count of battery. Initially charged with 45 felony counts, a key piece of evidence (a video purported to contain proof of the domestic assault at the heart of the case) was dismissed due to legal issues relating to how it was collected. Here’s the key set of allegations that Chahal claims as accurate, which intimate that his legal strategy was shaped by the board: Given the timing of an IPO, you began suggesting that I should try for full exoneration with a trial, since that could take a year or more and disrupt the timing and IPO process. One approach involved getting the case to a misdemeanor plea so that we could resolve the case and focus on the IPO. You communicated this to me during several board meetings, emails, as well as conversations with my counsel. By April, after the first settlement conference and preliminary hearing, my legal team was able to get a misdemeanor plea that was satisfactory to both the RadiumOne board and the bankers. You were well aware that . Instead, I sacrificed full exoneration for the sake of the Company’s IPO, and – more importantly – for you and for our shareholders. On our board meeting of Tuesday, April 22nd, with only a week to go before the IPO bake-off, I told all of you that my personal matter had been resolved. Everyone was very happy with the outcome, as evidenced by various congratulatory gestures. The final sentence confirms the previously leaked emails. Chahal goes on to promise “legal recourse” and “severe legal consequences” for the board. TechCrunch reached out to RadiumOne for comment on the letter. A spokesperson for the firm provided TechCrunch with the following statement: “While we have not seen Chahal’s complaint of wrongful termination, such a complaint would be without merit. Gurbaksh Chahal’s own actions impaired his ability to lead RadiumOne as CEO and gave the board no choice but to terminate his employment and name a new CEO.” Chahal appears confident in parts of the letter that he could have beaten the case: “If I had gone to trial I would have gotten full exoneration.” This makes his later claim that “everyone seemed fixated on the initial allegations made by the DA, which were false,” harder to parse. Whatever the case, Chahal isn’t letting the matter rest. |
Amazon Prime Music Streaming Service Pegged For Summer Launch | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Amazon is about to round out its Prime subscription service with a music streaming service, . The service will stream old and new-ish music to Prime subs and will launch in June or July. The music service will likely be bundled with Amazon’s Prime service that currently offers subscribers with free two-day shipping and access to a video streaming service and ebook lending library. However, the music service will leave Rdio and Spotify users wanting more. New releases will not be offered. BuzzFeed reports that the music catalog will offer a limited selection of songs and albums that are six months old or more. But that’s how Amazon rolls. When Amazon launched its video streaming service, the selection was limited and more of an added benefit to its Prime service than a stand-alone Netflix competitor. Yet, as its user base grew, so did the video library. Now, some six years after its launch, the catalog is competitive with Netflix. Expect the same with its music streaming service. Even after its price jump to $99 a year, Prime remains a fantastic value especially after the addition of HBO content to Prime Instant Video. A music service would just sweeten the deal. |
Here’s The First Hands-On Video Of Android Wear In Action (Spoiler: Lower Your Expectations) | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | : Sorry, folks. The original video above was pulled from YouTube for copyright violations. Thankfully nothing is ever deleted from the Internet and someone reposted the video. It’s embedded above, but could be eventually pulled as well. The video above is with a beta unit of LG’s upcoming Android Wear smartwatch. Not a lot is shown. Hopefully that’s because it’s in beta and not the true depth of Android Wear. Google Now’s card-based UI is prominently featured. Apparently, , users scroll through a list of cards. However, even if this is just a beta unit, the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. Of course this is par for the course with Android. Historically it takes several software incarnations to properly translate Android into different form factors. Google TV and Android’s venture onto tablets took several significant updates before it was worthwhile. Android’s open nature also allows each OEM a bit of wiggle room. There’s a good chance that Motorola’s Android Wear watch could be significantly different (and better) than LG’s. As , the hardware seems polished enough. It looks a touch thick, but that’s to be expected from a first-generation device. Charging appears to be done through a proprietary connector instead of microUSB, allowing the device to be dust proof, as LG . |
The NewViewWear Wearable Camera Hides In Your Shirt | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Elvis Costello once sang of watching detectives, an act that, to most of us, has been difficult. Now with the always-on, always-recording , however, you can see them “shoot, shoot, shoot” and them “red dogs under illegal legs” no matter how they try to hide. Lifecasting waned in popularity when people realized it was kind of creepy, but there is no reason to ignore the , a shirt that actually hides a small always-on camera. The product, which is hoping to raise $100,000 on , includes a small camera that fits into a pocket behind a hole in a specially designed shirt. You can tap the camera three times to remember something that just happened, or you can just let the thing record all day long, allowing you to review your day in ways heretofore yet unimagined. The $199 camera and shirt combo allows multiple recording modes including continuous, looped, and automated recording. You can even do time-lapse recording. It’s also one of the smallest 1080p cameras out there and lasts for a few days on one charge. You can also add microSD cards for more storage. Like it or not, these sorts of devices will become more and more common as people realize the value of keeping records of their interactions. Like an always-on Instagram, devices like this may soon be the Russian dashcams of meatspace, a chilling thought to those who sometimes go shirtless. That said, I’m curious to see how this is used – and what happens when someone catches you. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nGfus2LrhBE] |
Philz Coffee Drops Euclid Analytics Over Privacy Concerns | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | In the conflict between advocates of consumer privacy and those promoting the benefits of wide-reaching data collection, it’s not often we hear about the former getting a win. Yet it appears that’s exactly what happened in San Francisco last night. , the Bay Area coffee shop mainstay, announced that it would no longer collect the information of customers and passersby over Wi-Fi using technology from Euclid Analytics. Some Philz customers about the customer analytics being deployed in its locations in the Bay Area TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez explained how the technology works: “Traditionally, retailers have used everything from basic door clickers to optical solutions like beams above a door or video cameras to track their customers’ comings and goings. But Euclid had a different idea – it could passively detect customers’ smartphones with Wi-Fi enabled and collect their phones’ MAC addresses. Because MAC addresses are unique to each device (although not personally identifiable info), Euclid hashes the MAC address before storing the number on its servers. It also contractually requires that its customers place signage in their stores .” The biggest privacy concern involved with the collection of this information is that unique device IDs might be tied to real or online identities, allowing companies to have a greater idea of what people spend their time doing and thus better target them with ads. That’s a legitimate concern for many offerings in this space. D-Link, for instance, offers a router that makes it easy for restaurants and small businesses to . According to a release from Euclid ( ), their analytics platform anonymized data, simply allowing its customers to improve their offerings by looking at the general behavior at different locations: Euclid CEO Will Smith said the following in a prepared statement quoted by “We’re shoppers too, so we wanted to create a powerful product that helps retailers optimize the shopping experience, while at the same time could be proud of as consumers. We’ve built our technology from the ground up with privacy in the fore-front, and none of the information we collect can ever be traced back to an individual.” That Philz was so quick to drop Euclid should be a warning sign to those looking to enter the retail analytics space: It can’t be taken as a given that customers won’t reject moves to collect information just because data is anonymized or seamlessly collected behind the scenes. |
Microsoft And Salesforce Announce Broad Product-Integration Partnership | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | This afternoon, Microsoft and Salesforce a broad partnership that will bring their respective software and service products closer together. Salesforce will support Windows, Windows 8.1, build “interoperability Salesforce and Office 365,” Microsoft’s subscription-based productivity suite, and integrate OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, And Outlook in various capacities. This is a big deal for Microsoft given Salesforce’s quickly expanding customer base. Salesforce, a pioneer of the SaaS model that Microsoft is now also pursuing, likely has a rich pool of customers that Microsoft either wants to court, or make happier. Salesforce likely wants to attract Microsoft’s more conservative customer base by providing stiffer integration with products they already know. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. I’m reading that as Microsoft paying Salesforce. Microsoft is fighting a multi-front platform war with Google, Apple and others, and so any wind it can put at the back of its nascent business-facing services, such as OneDrive for Business, is a positive for the firm. The deal isn’t short-term. According to a Microsoft announcement, regarding Windows support, “[a] preview is planned to be available in fall 2014 with general availability in 2015.” Salesforce is up more than 3 percent in after-hours trading. Microsoft is flat. |
A 3D Printed Cast That Can Heal Your Bones 40-80% Faster | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | It looks like something from (read, cool), but it’s actually a cast for healing bones. The , created by Turkish student , incorporates 3D printing and ultrasonic tech to make healing a broken bone more bearable. The idea of ultrasonic healing vibrations to heal bones ( ) has been . But the problem was doctors couldn’t get past the plaster cast to apply the vibrational therapy. Take a look at the pic below and you’ll see the Osteoid’s skeletal design allows ultrasonic drivers to be placed directly on the skin. The Osteoid is just a prototype at the moment. However, future production will enable each individual to have a custom-fitted cast. Combine this cast with the accompanying low-intensity, pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) bone stimulator system (shown above) and, according to Karasahin: For single 20 minute daily sessions this system promises to reduce the healing process up to 38% and increase the heal rate up to 80% in non-union fractures. The only downside is you won’t be able to get your friends to sign it anymore. |
Twitter’s Senior Vice President Of Engineering, Chris Fry, Has Stepped Down | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Christopher Fry, Twitter’s Senior Vice President of Engineering (read: the man responsible for fighting off the fail whale), has stepped down from his position. The news comes by way of documents . Alex Roetter — a founding member of Google’s AdSense team and Twitter’s current VP of Engineering — will be stepping up to Fry’s role. If you’re curious how much such a position pays, by the way, the documents spill the beans: Roetter’s pay is being bumped up from an undisclosed amount to $250k a year. Fry will remain with the company in an advisory position. Fry, in his move to an advisory role, is well regarded both inside and outside the company. There is a general feeling, we hear, that these exec moves to advisory roles are being made for those who Twitter feels have done a particularly good job for the company. Still, there is a shift underway when it comes to product development at Twitter, much of which has to do with the pace of releases in that area. Roetter comes from Twitter’s ad products department, which has been on fire since 2010 when Twitter first launched them. Compare that to the substantially more subdued — if not glacial — pace with which Twitter has been iterating on the platform, and you can start to put a bit of shape on this move. So, expect faster product-development cycles from Twitter. |
Watch The Finale Of HBO’s Silicon Valley With TechCrunch | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | That is actually good, so good I binge-watched all 7 episodes last Friday. The last two episodes at TechCrunch Disrupt, replete with my former colleague as a host and a guest appearance by our founder . Because there’s so much TechCrunch in the show, we thought it might be cool to host a viewing of the finale episodes this Sunday June 1st at the in San Francisco. Not everyone has HBO, or a friend’s login to use, and besides, we never get to see you. Tickets (which you can ) are $5 and seating is limited. Doors open at 7:00pm, the episodes start at 7:30pm and end at 8:30pm. Following the show, there’s an after-party at the from 8:30pm to 10:30pm. The first two drinks are on us with your printed or electronic ticket. So come, join our commingling group for maximum finale viewing and optimum startup camaraderie. Help us make the world a better place. |
The Best News-Reading App, Reeder 2, Returns To Mac | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | For all five of us who still prefer managing our own news-reading experience through a dedicated RSS reader application, there’s good news out today: One of the best news readers on the market, , has finally returned to the Mac. The Mac application had been unavailable for nearly a year, following the shutdown of Google Reader, because it was built on top of the search giant’s infrastructure instead of its own. Catching up with your favorite websites via RSS may have been too geeky a task for a mainstream user base, and therefore not a Google-scale business, leading the company to shut down its once-beloved RSS news-reader service, Google Reader , as you may recall. But RSS is not quite dead yet, even if Google has exited the building. In its wake, smaller companies picked up where Google left off, including Digg (with its much-hyped ), as well as another betaworks-operated service called ‘, which is focused more on female users interested in fashion, beauty, interior design, and food. But it’s companies like and that really stepped up to save the day with building RSS applications. Because when Google shut down Reader, it didn’t just kill a product, it killed an entire ecosystem. With the return of Reeder (aka “Reeder 2”), the company now offers a desktop news reader that works with multiple services, including Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, Fever and Readability. And if you don’t want to rely on a third party this time around, Reeder supports local RSS, too. If you go that route, however, you wouldn’t be able to sync your progress across platforms – and Reeder for iOS is a pretty great news-reading client. (I use it with Feedly, and it’s my go-to RSS reader these days.) Like its iOS counterpart, Reeder 2 for Mac offers a huge host of sharing services, including Facebook, Twitter, Messages, Mail, Safari (Reading List), Quote.fm, Buffer, Readability, Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote, MarsEdit, Pinboard, Delicious and App.net. And it offers the same simple interface as the mobile client, allowing you to easily switch between unread, starred and all items, toggle items’ read/unread status, favorite posts, organize feeds into groups, and more. In addition, the Mac app offers a handful of themes to choose from, ranging from light to dark, support for gestures via the Mac’s Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse, and customizable shortcuts. For those who still enjoy a solid, well-built, and design-oriented news-reader experience, dropping $9.99 on Reeder 2 is going to be a no-brainer. For everyone else who’s like, , well, thanks for ruining the internet. (Ha, kidding!) The point is, with Reeder 2, it doesn’t matter if you know what RSS is; you can just add some websites you like to read and start enjoying them. Reeder 2 is here on the . |
Read The Email Snowden Sent To The NSA | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | In an interview yesterday, former NSA contractor and now infamous leaker Edward Snowden indicated that the NSA had record of his internal complaints regarding government policy. Today the United States government released an email from Snowden asking several questions. The email, notably, is mostly benign, and is not the sort of email that would qualify as strong internal “whistleblowing.” That the government is therefore willing to release it isn’t surprising. Snowden himself has indicated that he raised internal worry more than 10 times before he leaked his set of documents. Today at the briefing, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney indicated the email would be released. It was published on both and . by
|
Skycatch Raises $13.2M To Field Data-Gathering Drones Both High And Low | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | Drones distract, drones deliver and drones do battle. But what else can drones do? That was the question facing entrepreneur Christian Sanz when he began building his own drones a few years back, and after exploring various possibilities, including delivery and also simply drawing together audiences of curious spectators, Sanz found a big need drones are perfect for that wasn’t being addressed: data collection. Now, his startup has raised a new $13.2 million round of venture funding to support that mission. Sanz told me in an interview that he clued into the possibility when someone working on a construction site asked him to take some aerial photos of his build while he was showing off his drone to a crowd of gathered spectators. The contractor gave him more work, and offered to pay even though Sanz had volunteered to do it free. There was clearly a need for this kind of unique perspective on construction sites, since usually site planners only get maybe a single flyover of aerial shots once every couple of months, if they’re lucky. What Sanz could provide, via a fleet of drones, was a constantly updated wealth of data about the site as it progresses – changes could be caught early on, avoiding potentially costly mistakes. It’s not just about catching mistakes, however. It’s also about building a huge wealth of data about a construction project, using input not previously available. Drones with cameras and sensors can collect all kinds of information about what’s going on with a site, and Skycatch is as much about providing sophisticated and powerful access to that data as it is about building and flying the robots that capture it. Sanz says, in fact, that that’s the larger part of their business in terms of future potential, even though they’ve had to build their own specialized hardware, and have even dabbled in building hardware for other companies, too. [gallery ids="1009230,1009231,1009232,1009233,1009234,1009235,1009236,1009237,1009238,1009239,1009240,1009241,1009242,1009243,1009244,1009245,1009246,1009247,1009248,1009249"] The company has a lot of clients already, including Bechtel, Bouygues, Rio Tinto and “many” others who can’t be named because of contract specifications. For these clients, the startup provides drones that can be operated remotely to capture 2D and 3D imaging, but Skycatch is special in that it offers autonomous drones for this purpose; the drones can fly out for missions, then return to a base station landing bad to offload data from the 15GB on board repository and swap out a fresh battery, which is good for around 30 minutes of operation, depending on the wind conditions. The new funding for Skycatch will go into building out its existing business, but also into an ambitious new plan that would see the startup build new high altitude unmanned gliders that could fly perpetually and gather data on demand in specific locations per client requests. This kind of “aerial imaging on demand” model bears some similarity to the kind of things that Google and Facebook are doing with their high-flying data network UAVs. I asked Sanz what happens when the skies get too busy, and he said that while we’re still far off from that point, in the future companies will likely work together using aerial and satellite imaging and common communications channels to ensure that even above commercial flight altitude, they won’t interfere with one another. [vimeo 91765990 w=640 h=360] Skycatch combines two things that have immense potential for the future of building businesses – drones and big data, and it does so in a way that companies can see the value of instantly. Whereas before you almost had to wait until your building fell down to figure out that you had a serious issue that could’ve been spotted and resolved early on, now, Skycatch gives you a full, 360-degree view of your project from above, in way that can provide you feedback on your progress almost in real-time. It’s cheesy to say, but the sky really is the limit with this budding business. |
Qleek Brings Your Music Back In To The Physical Realm | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | When I first heard about I was a little skeptical. You see, it’s a music player that uses physical, wooden blocks called Tapps to activate digital playback. You want to listen to some Jazz? Find the Coltrane block and stick it into the player. Want to listen to ? Dig out the block and slot it to make yourself a little fitter and happier. It’s like the old days of physical media but it’s completely digital. To use the pucks you simply assign each unique NFC code to a separate album, playlist, or artist. You can decorate them however you want or even have them pre-printed with your favorites. One playback device and 5 Tapps costs $249 on . Now if you are like me, your initial reaction is incredulity. Why do we need this? But just imagine: say you’re at a party and you put out a bunch of Tapps with pre-made playlists. People can pick them up, fiddle with them, comment on your song selection. Or you can create a wall of Tapps and enjoy the very physical experience of “putting something on” the stereo. It’s almost comforting in a way and quite a fascinating solution to the digital/physical divide. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xDx-7N4IN_M] It’s also very high-concept and nicely designed so I could see it in a hotel room or lounge where visitors can control the music with a wooden disk rather than bugging the DJ. I met one of the creators, Pierre-Rudolf Gerlach, in Warsaw this year and he showed me the device and this Tapps. He’s aiming for $70,000 and he’s already got $20,000 so I suspect this will get funded. “We wanted to make Qleek a ‘new medium for new medias,’ by giving a way to people to re-materialize the online content they love most,” he said and I agree. While at first glance it seems a little silly, I really think Qleek is onto something. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tsaQt0NSJOM] |
2008 TechCrunch50 Finalist TrueCar Goes Public, Raises $70M In Its IPO | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Today TrueCar, a company that was selected as a finalist in went public, raising around $70 million and gaining nearly 12% to end its first day as a public company at $10.06 per share. The company priced its shares at $9 apiece. That final price was steeply under its . The current IPO market, , is somewhat unsettled. The CEO of TrueCar indicated that his company was “launching into fairly choppy markets” , providing a simple explanation for the share-price discount. In 2011, TrueCar , at the time hinting at future IPO plans. TrueCar is the first company to present on TechCrunch’s stage and go public, but there is a special wrinkle to its class of competing startups worth noting. TrueCar didn’t win in 2008. It, and the rest of the flock of new firms , which went on to sell to Microsoft . Dropbox, FitBit, and Swype all lost that year along with TrueCar. Even so, while Yammer may have bested it out of the gate, TrueCar’s current market capitalization of $607 million — according — is hardly small change. TechCrunch50, of course, lasted for two years, growing on what started with the TechCrunch40 confab. After the second TechCrunch50, our little series of conferences was renamed TechCrunch Disrupt, and now takes place globally. It’s nice to look back and see the firms that we got to know now more than a half decade ago doing so well. Alright. Who’s next? |
Apple And Google Agree To Dismiss All Direct Legal Action Between Themselves | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Late today, Apple and Google announced that they have agreed to dismiss direct lawsuits aimed at one another, and will work together to help push patent reform forward. It’s a huge change for the two companies, which compete on everything from music sales, to productivity tools, to cloud storage, to mobile app distribution, and so forth. According to a source speaking to , about 20 lawsuits will go dark. Here’s : Apple and Google have agreed to dismiss all the current lawsuits that exist directly between the two companies. Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform. The agreement does not include a cross license. There is narrowness implicit to the agreement, given that the companies can still pursue legal action that could harm their core businesses. Apple could sue firms that work with Google, or with Google products, and the like. Given that surface area of their competition, the détente is notable. Technology patent wars are incredibly common. Apple and Samsung’s recent courtroom battle ended with a nine-figure payment awarded from the latter to the former. The agreement doesn’t appear to ban future litigation, so this is hardly a disarmament — instead, it is a deescalation of current legal action that the firms appear more than willing to leave behind. If was a gambling man, I’d wager we don’t see much activity of this sort moving forward. And the anti-trust hairs on the back of my neck are prickling ever so slightly. |
Switchcam Video Shuts Down, Facebook Hires Founders | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Facebook’s mobile video feature is pretty awful. No multi-shot recording, stabilization, or editing. Hopefully it will get an update soon, though, as a source has tipped me off that last month Facebook hired the founders of , a startup that specialized in video sharing. The founders Chris Hartley and Bret Welch both now list Facebook as their employer, and Switchcam has been shut down. (right above) lists April 14th as his start date as a product engineer at Facebook, while my source says Welch (left above) traveled the world for a few weeks before beginning at Facebook this week. says he became a Facebook product manager on Monday, so my source was dead on. Switchcam’s site now notes “Switchcam has shut down.” Facebook declined to comment, which is atypical for when it makes acquihires, so Hartley and Welch may have been hired through the standard application process. Since we don’t have a date of the Switchcam shut down, it’s possible the entrepreneurs may have shuttered the company and then applied to Facebook Originally called Veokami, Switchcam was founded in 2011 to stitch together different user-generated YouTube clips of concerts or other events into . Switchcam’s magic was being able to sync all the videos to the same time stream by analyzing their audio. Switchcam was part of the February 2012 500 Startups class, and the San Francisco-based company went on to , 500 Startups, Turner Media Camp and more that summer. Over the years, Switchcam worked with music festival Lollapalooza, PBS, and Anheuser Busch. In 2013, Switchcam moved to offer an app that event organizers could give out to teams of videographers so they could purposefully record and merge videos together into something more interesting than a single static shot. Random people could also use Switchcam’s iOS app to find nearby events and volunteer to contribute their own clips, while directors could use a special dashboard to and promote their final products. But then in February 2014, The shift to a more straightforward subscription business model may have been a sign the company was running out of cash. After Switchcam shut down, it looks like Facebook was happy to scoop up the capable video app makers. The question now is what Hartley and Welch will be working on at Facebook. I don’t have inside info on this, but my guess would be Facebook’s sorely outdated video upload flow. Facebook recently revamped its video playback, allowing videos uploaded directly to it or Instagram to . Almost like animated Gifs, the videos play silently as users scroll past, and the audio can be turned on with a click. Facebook gives the same preferential treatment to premium advertisers, while all other linked videos like YouTube clips stay static until clicked. Facebook’s video recorder (pictured here) is way behind the times So videos natively posted to Facebook are now much more eye-catching, but the upload process is still years behind Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat. The fact that Facebook’s new acquisition WhatsApp recently revealed that its users share might have clued Facebook in to the fact that people like posting videos, and highlighted how backwards its own upload flow is. As I’ve written, . Instagram has laid out a sensible blueprint for what a modern video sharing feature should look like. Tap and hold to record multiple clips, choose a cover frame that people will see in the thumbnail preview, choose to add filters and image stabilization. If Facebook simply did that, it’d be a big step up. If it wanted to go further, it could crib the ruler grid and ghost mode for stop-motion from Vine, overlaid text and drawings from Snapchat, or soundtracks from Cameo. And if it really wanted to flex, Facebook could allow you to upload multiple previously shot clips or even collaborate with friends on a video. With the Switchcam guys aboard, Facebook has new expertise in making itself a contender in video sharing after years of neglect. |
CrunchWeek: Net Neutrality, Big Late-Stage Raises, And Snapchat’s Latest Features | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | This week is all about CrunchWeek East, as we’re bringing this episode to you from AOL HQ in New York. , and dive into the most recent madness in the industry. We discuss the , major late-stage raises from companies like , , , and others, as well as the that take the app from social network to messenger. We hope you enjoy watching the show as much as we enjoy filming it. Happy Friday, everyone! |
The Zeus Is A 3D Printer, Scanner, And Teleportation Machine All In One | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | The future, as they say, is already here, but it’s just not very evenly distributed. To wit: the Zeus, a 3D printer that can scan and copy objects and, using the Internet, “fax” objects to other printers. That’s right – it’s the first 3D all-in-one. Created by , the $2,499 printer has a build area of 8 by 6 by 5.7 inches and can scan objects up to five inches high. It has a 7-inch front touch screen for managing print jobs and a replaceable extruder which makes it easy to fix things if they break. The system is, obviously, fairly simple: the 3D printer is a standard plastic filament system that can print at 80 microns and scan at 125 microns. 3D printers can be had as cheaply as $200 these days and 3D scanners are about the same price. But putting them both together, getting them to work together properly, and setting things up so you can transfer files between printers is a big deal. That said, I expect to see more and more of these things on the market as it gets easier to embed all of this hardware into a handsome case. The and will ship this summer. Being able to copy objects is the Holy Grail for designers, artists, and makers, and devices like this one are simply amazing to me. |
The Once And Future Web Platform | Contributor | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | As a developer, articles are easy to dismiss out of hand. It’s not unusual or unexpected for people to predict (or herald the arrival of) the next big thing and declare the status quo dead. Yet despite the mobile explosion over the past few years, the web is going to remain the dominant software platform for the foreseeable future. First, let me say that by web I mean HTML content accessed in a browser or lightweight browser-like shell. A broader definition might include the HTTP APIs used by nearly every native mobile application. By that definition, the web has no competition at all. Native applications existed long before the web. Why then did the web come to be such a powerful platform for software distribution? Even in the days of Internet Explorer 6, the web gained ground due to several key advantages: These advantages sum up to the lowest barrier to entry in software history and an opportunity too good to pass up. Designed as a way to deliver documents, the web soon became something much more: an application platform. Over time the web got much better at being software. Cross-platform JavaScript libraries let developers make pages more interactive. AJAX allowed browsers to send and receive new data without reloading the page. CSS evolved to make the construction of application-like interfaces simpler. Web technology is always changing, evolving over time to meet the needs of the people using it and developers building for it. With the meteoric rise of the App Store it’s easy to forget that 2007 Apple’s original “app” plan . While many things contributed to Apple’s move to native third-party apps, the most-cited reason is performance-related user experience. We’ll talk about that shortly. The App Store brought massive improvements to native application distribution. Installing and updating apps suddenly became almost as easy for the end user as visiting a web site. The App Store also provides a single centralized payment authority (never underestimate the power of stored credit card data!). These factors have led to many touting mobile app stores as a viable competitor or successor to the web. With , has the web finally met its match? Is it time to pass the torch onto the younger native app generation? Nope. This isn’t the first time that the open web has faced a popular adversary. America Online boasted a massive walled garden of content in the mid-nineties. The biggest ISP in the United States at the time, they geared their entire service toward users living within it. Today AOL is a content company that runs properties (including TechCrunch) on, you guessed it, the open web. The web won. Flash was once the toast of developers and users alike. It offered things that HTML didn’t like video, animation, sound, and interactivity. The Flash plugin was installed in more than 97% of all browsers. Today, Flash is on down from a high of more than 50%. The web won. There will always be new technologies challenging the web for software dominance. Many of these will have advantages in one area or another over the web at first. But that’s the web’s superpower: it keeps evolving. As Jason Kottke , “In competitive markets, open and messy trumps closed and controlled in the long run.” July 22, 2010 is one of the most important dates in the history of the web platform. It’s the day Google announced a . Chrome, then on version 5.0, is now on version 34.0. In 2011, Mozilla followed suit and announced a similar plan for Firefox. A fast-paced release schedule coupled with a “release channel” concept (early access to new features for the willing) forever altered the landscape of web development. Consider that Internet Explorer 7 came out five years after Internet Explorer 6. Chrome set the new normal release pace to be 40 times faster. It’s no coincidence that the set of browser technologies called “HTML5” went from zero to commonplace in the same timespan. Browser vendors must evolve their platforms or be left behind by increasingly discerning users. Today it isn’t Microsoft but Apple who stands as the biggest obstacle to the advancement of web technology. On iOS, Apple by forcing them to use a slower JavaScript engine. They also forbid developers to release alternate browser engines on the platform. While frustrating, it’s standard practice for incumbents to stifle threatening innovations. A better web browser means a bigger threat to Apple’s iOS distribution choke-hold. Modern browsers are operating systems in their own right. Browser technologies exist to meet or exceed nearly every advantage of native. A few examples: As new use cases emerge, it’s never a question of if the web can support a new technology. It’s just a question of when. For many of the web’s doomsayers, the only issue worth consideration is performance. “The web will never be as fast as native apps!” they cry. And they’re right. But the web doesn’t have to be as fast as native, it just has to be fast enough. Most-often cited is as “proof” that the web isn’t fast enough. There are several problems with this argument: Recent developments like are bringing high-end game engines like Unreal and Unity to the browser. Hardware accelerated transforms make buttery smooth animations and transitions a reality, even on mobile. What you can do today in a browser seems like magic compared to just three years ago. If you’re building a graphics-intensive game or video/image manipulation software, by all means build native. For the vast majority of applications, however, multi-platform native is going to be an anchor around your developers’ necks. And developers are really important to the dominance of software platforms. While users dictate the demands of application functionality, developers make it happen. The web as a platform is easier to learn and lets developers do more faster than any other platform. That’s why companies from Treehouse to Codecademy to General Assembly focus more coursework on the web than any other platform. The distribution of the web is objectively the largest on the planet. Every platform that has native apps also has a browser. That’s why . That’s why I’ve been able to use a Chromebook as my primary computer for the past year. And that’s why, regardless of the short-term advantages of competitors, the web will eventually rise to the top. The web does have a few tricks it could learn from mobile. We need standards for browser-driven authentication like Google’s login on Android. We need simpler ways to pay for things on the web ( is a good first step). We need tools to make application-building a first-class concern of HTML (Web Components, led by Google’s are going to change everything). As a developer working with web apps for more than a decade, I am confident that the technology will evolve to meet the demands of developers. By all means go out and try the shiny new technology. That’s how the technology industry (and the web) gets better. Just be careful not to get too swept away. Betting against the web in the long run has always been a sucker bet. My advice is to be extremely careful before you place it. TL;DR: |
After Pushing Ahead With Net Neutrality Vote, FCC Chairman To Face Congress On Tuesday | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Following the Federal Communications Commission’s with new that could allow for some companies to pay for faster delivery of their content online, calls of protest have sprouted from . What’s next? FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will head to congress on May 20 for a sitdown that should prove contentious. When it that Wheeler would testify in front of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, it was before it was clear what the proposed net neutrality rules would be and when they would be voted on. In light of recent developments, Wheeler’s visit is all the more interesting. Expect House Republicans to question whether we need net neutrality at all. And, I’d posit, House Democrats will likely question the impact of the potential for codified paid prioritization to distort the Internet’s openness. House Republican leadership any sort of net neutrality as unnecessary. And leading Democrats have that fast lanes will be tantamount to handing over control of the Internet to large businesses. As such, let’s make a drinking game for the 20th! Anytime you hear a question, or statement that at least paraphrases one of the following take a sip of your coffee: Ok, kidding on that last one. Now, for two bonus comments. If either of these come up, finish your coffee (have another on deck, just in case, you’ll want to stay seated): I’m being slightly cynical in that I don’t expect anything earth shattering to come out of the session, either from Chairman Wheeler or those asking him questions. But then again, maybe congress will surprise us for once. |
The App Store Is Proof We’re In Idiocracy | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | The number one game in the iTunes App Store is a game about selling weed. Yes, really. The app, “ ,” however, looks brilliant when compared to what comes next: it sits just above yet another fairly dumb, time-waster of a game called “ ,” reminiscent of beer pong. And that’s followed “ ,” which offers you quick games to play while you… …go, as well as “ ,” which tests to see how fast you can swipe to make the money fly. Welcome to the Everyman’s App Store. Or, as some have put it, . Idiocracy, or the App Store — Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) It’s as if there were an App Store in the movie Idiocracy. — Brian Herskovitz (@gadgetmanBrian) These games, the mobile equivalent to America’s obsession with low-brow content along the lines of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” or “The Real Housewives,” aren’t just popular in the U.S., but are making their way into the top charts of a number of English-speaking countries around the world. Their popularity is reflective of many factors, including the fly-by-night app developers are using to manipulate the top charts to unfairly boost their brain-damaging, disposable app above the next “Flappy Bird” or “ ” clone. But their presence is also indicative of the changing nature of the App Store itself. Today, smartphones are in developed markets, meaning these phones are now in the hands of a broader, more diverse group of people, both young and old, who won’t necessarily share the same tastes as the tech elite whose punditry and personal recommendations about the “next great mobile app” used to matter more. ( , TechCrunch, .) The App Store is for everyone, and, in droves, “everyone” likes tabloids and reality TV over literature and NPR. Plus, let’s not forget that, today, – heck, they practically them for socializing. And they’re going to play some pretty stupid games. In fact, “Flappy Bird” creator Dong Nguyen he believed that most of his players were school children. This more “mature” market (which seems a hilarious word to use given the context of weed farming games and time-wasters for your bathroom breaks), is no longer downloading their first-ever apps onto their first-ever smartphones, which is why even apps as popular as Google Search, Pandora, WhatsApp, Pinterest or Twitter, are regularly out of the top 10 entirely, and often out of the top 20. This schoolyard crowd may also have power to sway the App Store’s charts in ways the broader industry has yet to fully grasp. Grade school trends over the years have had the power to move markets, but today, it’s not toy stores selling out of Cabbage Patch Kids or Tickle Me Elmo dolls, but virtual store shelves restocking unlimited quantities of whatever this young crowd is goofing around with next. But we can’t blame the App Store’s race to the bottom only on the ever-younger ages of iPhone users. Maybe in today’s high-pressure, information-saturated, always-on world, people are just looking for a little escapism. You’ve probably indulged too. Judge ye not without looking at your own homescreen. |
Gillmor Gang Live 05.16.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | – Kevin Marks, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, John Borthwick, and Steve Gillmor. And find us on Facebook . |
Zendesk’s Stellar IPO And The Current Tech IPO Climate | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Following a nearly 50% pop on its on Thursday, Zendesk is up double digits again today, rising more than 11% in midday trading. For tech companies and their investors, it’s a sign that the IPO window, recently worried to be either closed or rapidly closing, , for the right kind of company. And investors are not as closed minded to the intricacies of cloud-based businesses and the fickle, long-odds nature of tech startup metrics, as some might have thought. “I’m impressed by the quality of the investors that we’ve met on our roadshow,” said Mikkel Svane, co-founder and CEO of Zendesk, in an interview after the company’s debut on the NYSE. “These are sophisticated investors and they understand what it means to invest in growth. The public market investment is as sophisticated as the private market investment.” In case you missed the run-up to Zendesk’s offering, here are the brass tacks: Zendesk priced at $9 per share, in the middle of its expected (but lowered) range, bringing in $100 million. According to Google finance, after its gains, its market cap is nearing the $1 billion mark. Revenue expanded from $38.28 million in 2012, to $72.04 million in 2013. Most importantly, the company’s net loss declined from $24.15 million in 2012, to $21.83 million in 2013. So, as Zendesk grew its top line from 2012 to 2013, its net loss decreased. That’s the key difference, looking at yearly data, between Zendesk and a few other companies — from a GAAP perspective — that are looking to go public. Here’s Box’s : And Good Technology’s : As you can see in both cases, their losses are expanding quickly, staying stubbornly over revenue in the case of Box, or in the case of Good, falling from a high to mid 70s percentage of revenue. Box and Zendesk are SaaS plays, and the most quickly growing component of Good Technology’s revenue is its “recurring” column, so they share much in common, even if each offers a different kind of enterprise-focused product. There are two camps of people who look at the S-1s of SaaS companies: People who fret, and people who love the burn rate. A crop of non-GAAP financial metrics are useful to understand why normal accounting doesn’t do a great job at showing off future growth, and profits, of companies that spend heavily to acquire customers, and then earn revenues off that customer in regular intervals for the future. These methods compare the cost to acquire a customer (CAC), with the average lifetime value of a customer (LTV). Conventional wisdom is that you want to have an average CAC that is no more than a third of your average customer LTV. Why? Because your CAC doesn’t take into account a host of costs that you will endure, and, of course, you want to have a net profit margin at some point. How does this apply to the above? If you have up-front CAC costs, and LTV spread out over time, with a break-even period, of say, 12 months, you burn heavily in the short-term to buy annual recurring revenue (ARR) that will, provided your unit economics work out over the life of a customer, more than pay back those earlier expenses. So, in the case of Box, say, it’s willing to pay heavily for ARR up front, because it will continue to enjoy the fruits of those losses for quarters to come. It’s a reasonable idea. Here’s the sticking point: In Box’s S-1, for example, here are the number of mentions of ARR, LTV, and CAC: 0, 0, 0. So, we’re discussing abstract accounting principles, with little in the way of handles to get our arms around Box’s performance in this regard. Returning to Zendesk, its sales and marketing costs rose 65% from 2012, to 2013, while its revenue expanded 88% in the same period. Sales and marketing is Zendesk’s largest line-item cost, so this comparison, practically, allowed the company to reduce its net loss while quickly growing its top line. While Zendesk’s financial performance did improve on a GAAP basis from 2012 to 2013, in its updated S-1, Zendesk’s first 2014 quarter showed a steeper loss than in its first 2013 quarter. Revenue grew from $13.91 million to $25.09 million on a year-over-year basis, while its net loss grew from $5.35 million to $10.20 million. Comparing single quarters is less compelling than comparing full years, but it seems that Zendesk isn’t afraid to pick up larger losses. Speaking with Zendesk, the company seems to understand that a very careful approach to spending is the order of the day right now. we’re not in any acquisition considerations.” A wrinkle from Zendesk’s S-1: “subscriptions to our customer service platform and live chat software are shorter than most comparable SaaS companies.” That could impact its expected CAC repayment periods, decreasing the short-term impact of its sales cycle, lowering its short-term net losses. A good thing? Not if shorter contracts lead to more customer churn at the expiration date, and thus less total gross profit per customer. But, again, we’re speculating. To sum up, Box and Good’s financials look scary as heck from a GAAP perspective, while making more sense from a potential perspective. But in the case of Zendesk, it differs from its SaaS brethren because it has delivered a full-year period of revenue growth with a smaller recorded loss. That’s compelling. Its wider Q1 2014 loss could be indicative of a change in strategy, but proving that you can lose less while growing is worth something. The above may help explain why Zendesk’s IPO has performed as well as it has, and why Box and Good may have a harder time convincing investors that yearly nine-figure GAAP losses are reasonable investments in future cash flows. |
Let’s Face It, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft All Have Weaknesses | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Venture capitalist Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures made waves recently when he told TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden that by 2020, (that’s less than 6 years, folks), –and Google and Facebook would be. Wilson argued that Apple’s lack of understanding of the cloud would eventually do it in, while Google and Facebook, which are inherently more cloud friendly, would survive. He left the door open for a third company we haven’t heard of for the remaining top spot. It’s an interesting theory, but I’m here to tell you that each of these companies has a profound weakness by which any one of them could be undone. It’s also important to note that in spite of these weaknesses, each company is so wealthy that they can find ways to buy their way out of trouble for many years to come and maintain their market dominance through brute force, if not through innovation. Let’s start by looking at Apple. Wilson is spot-on, of course. In spite of several years ago, it never really seemed to understand the cloud. There have been fits and starts, of course, with iCloud being the latest iteration in a line of failed attempts, but even as someone who uses cloud products on a daily basis and who writes about the industry, I find iCloud obtuse and difficult to understand. I’ve talked to tech-savvy friends who have similar feelings. For Microsoft, its big weakness is mobile. As hard as it has tried to make headway in the mobile space, . This after years of trying different ways to encourage more adoption. . They have bought Nokia, their best brand, and nothing seems to work. Up until recently, you could have said Facebook didn’t get mobile either, and you would have been right, but they are adjusting and over the last several months, they’ve done better. They have numbers in their favor of course in terms of users, but that user base is not fixed to them, and if they continue to abuse users around data and privacy issues, not to mention constant interface changes and a complete lack of transparency about data usage, their hold on that audience is not guaranteed. Facebook is also a closed system meaning that beyond ads, that many of us ignore, it doesn’t have meaningful linkage out to the open web. If I want to buy something, I’m going to go to Amazon or other shopping site for that. If I want to watch a video, I’m going to YouTube. If I want to make travel plans I’m going to Kayak or Airbnb. Facebook is great for sharing stuff and asking what my friends like, but when I actually want to do something, I’m leaving, and that could hurt Facebook eventually. Finally, we have Google which in spite of having its fingers in all kinds of pies, is ultimately a one-trick pony when it comes to actual profits. It makes the vast amount of its money to this day on Internet searches. That’s all well and good, but as my friend , a public relations and marketing professional pointed out to me, they lack a social sense. That is, you can search for restaurants in Brooklyn and all the companies that bought keywords or which people clicked on most frequently will surface to the top, but so far at least, the ones my friends like aren’t part of the results. “I define social search as when I go onto Facebook and ask, ‘Hey everybody, I’m headed to NYC tonight, what new restaurants should I definitely eat at this weekend in Brooklyn?’ That’s a search that will not flow through Google,” Rutherford told me. And he believes that lack of social savvy could haunt Google in the long run. I agree. Will any of these companies fade by 2020 or will it be just Apple as Wilson suggested? Nobody knows of course, but any of these weaknesses could eventually undermine any one of these companies, and then there is the unknown entity, that third company Wilson suggested that will swoop in and become a force. That is in fact very likely to happen. But what impact that will have on the market is hard for any of us to gauge. It’s fun to speculate and it makes great headlines, but none of us knows what the future brings. We only know that we have a handful of powerful, extremely well-heeled companies battling it out. But Wilson is probably right about one thing, the market is going to shift in some significant way in the next 5 or 6 years and for at least one of these mega brands, their weakness will be their undoing. How that plays out though is anyone’s guess. PHOTO CREDIT: |
Samsung Goes For Another Round In The Wearables Ring With The Gear 2 | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | If I’ve noticed any sort of trend in the wearables space it’s that watches now look like watches. Runners will remember early Garmin GPS watches that looked like bulbous alien egg sacs on your wrists while even the wrist computer still looks like an unlanced polyp. But almost everyone else – , Basis, and the like – have created devices that are one step above the thinness and usability of an old Casio calculator watch. And that’s a compliment. Now, I dare say, Samsung has upped the game. The is the company’s latest smart watch and it works with a number of Galaxy smartphones. It is a Jack-of-all-trades and features a bright AMOLED screen, responsive notification and control system, and a number of fitness features that could (if the watch were generally compatible with all Android phones) put out of business. And the best part? It looks and works like a normal watch. Here’s why this is important: wrist real estate has traditionally been used by either bracelet like devices that act as adornments (and more recently notifiers) but watch shaped devices have always been very difficult to sell, especially if the functionality is limited. Except in very few cases, for example, I find the Pebble to be more of a distraction than a tool. Pressing a button to wake it up or getting rattled by a buzzing notification breaks you out of the normal interaction paradigm that has been familiar to humans for a hundred years. The space on my wrist dedicated to time-telling is a sacred space that requires the user to either accept a watch as a watch or make a number of very jarring compromises.
Now that I’ve gotten my personal rant out of the way, let’s see how the Gear 2 stacks up. First, it’s always ready as a watch. It’s waterproof, to a degree, and can stand a bit of rain or even a run under the sink. Don’t go swimming and you’ll be fine. In terms of battery life, I got about three days of sparse use but your results will probably vary. Exercise use will wear the battery down quickly but basic notifications do little to drain the watch. The camera is pretty good – good enough for a watch – but it’s definitely not the main attraction. The watch pairs quickly and easily with compatible Samsung phones and Bluetooth LE handles all the communication. It is a very intuitive system. Then there’s the excellent interface. As a watch, the Gear 2 wins. Thanks to a few accelerometer tricks the watch lights up as soon as you need it and tends to stay dark when you don’t. Your phone can send notifications to the watch or you can mute them, essentially disabling distractions. To access various features you swipe along the face and the first screen includes contacts and notifications, the second apps and music controls, the third tools including voice memo and a built-in remote control, and finally health and fitness apps like the pedometer and heart rate sensor. A small LED sensor on the back of the watch can sense your heart rate with some accuracy although it’s not good for folks in a hurry. Samsung recommends you stay still and not talk while the sensor is active, which puts a damper on off-the-cuff heart rate sensing. [slideshow] The question then is not whether I’d recommend this watch if you have a Galaxy S5 – I would, and without hesitation. It’s some of the most amazing engineering to come out of Samsung in a long time. The waterproof case, the long battery life, and excellent responsiveness make it a winner and if you own an S5 I’d wager that you’ll be more pleased with the Gear than the phone itself. The Gear 2 looks like a solid watch that doubles as a wrist computer. The question whether you should enter the Galaxy ecosystem just to pick this up. I’m not certain. Pebble still has a lot going for it if you’re looking just for notifications and there are many, arguably less feature-packed solutions that can offer heart rate sensing and health data. This is Samsung’s walled garden. Make no mistake. Rail against others in this space all you want, but Samsung knows that it needs to lock down the Gear 2 as much as possible and I suspect it will remain thus for the foreseeable future. That said, if you’re in the market for a phone and watch combo, it’s a nice garden to wander. As a mechanical watch lover I could see the value in wearing this over a ticking hunk of steel and I honestly think it it’s a solid improvement over the original Gear. Should you make the switch? That’s up to you and your wrist. |
Google Maps Adds Elevation Profiles To Bike Routes To Help You Avoid Those Steep Hills | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Google Maps now features elevation profiles for bike routes. Google added biking directions to Google Maps and specialized maps that highlight bike routes a few years ago. If you are weak like me, though, and learned to bike in Holland, where the biggest obstacle is a dike, you don’t just want to know what streets to take, but also what hills you will have to huff your way up on the way to your destination. Until now, Google was no help there and you needed to go to third-party sites that mashed up elevation data with Google Maps routes. Now, however, Google has quietly added this feature to Google Maps directly. We asked Google about this and the company confirmed that this is indeed a new — and as of now unannounced — feature. It looks like the elevation profiles are available in all the 14 countries Google offers biking directions. These include Just look for a route on Google Maps, choose the biking directions and look for the new elevation profile. Besides the graphical representation of those hills you will have to climb, the new card also shows you the total number of feet you will have to climb on your route (and those joyous miles you get to just kick back and try not to die while you barrel down the hill on the other side). The only time you won’t see the new elevation profiles, it seems, is for routes that are essentially flat. For now, these profiles sadly don’t appear in any of Google’s mobile apps for Google Maps, but chances are the company will add it to those apps in the long run, too. |
Google Has Acquired Quest Visual, The Maker Of Camera-Based Translation App Word Lens | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Word Lens wowed when it debuted back in 2010, with its tech that could . Now, Quest Visual, the maker of that app, has been acquired by Google, the company . With the acquisition, Google gets Quest Visual’s tech, which it will incorporate into Google Translate in the future, according to Quest Visual’s statement regarding the deal. And while the apps Quest Visual has created in the past likely won’t be supported once that transition is complete, the startup is making them available along with all language packs for free on Google Glass, Google Play and Apple’s App Store for a limited time. Word Lens for Google Glass actually just got an update alongside a slew of new app introductions for the face-based computing platform. Chances are that Google is more interested in this tech for its broader applicability across its Google Translate platform than with regards to Google Glass specifically, however, as incorporating its features into all of its own mobile apps would likely make get it a lot of additional use. Google confirmed the deal in an email to TechCrunch, and a spokesperson explained that Quest Visual’s talent and tech both displayed a strength that led Google to deem them a good fit for its Translate team. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: WunWun, Samsung, Cheap Phones, Amazon, And More | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | We had trouble narrowing down podcast topics this week, which means that we’re kind of all over the place. But the upside is that there’s plenty to learn during this week’s discussion. We start out with a lively conversation around Amazon’s speedy shipping, and then move on to chat about , an on-demand delivery service based in New York. Meanwhile, Samsung is sending out invitations for what we expect to be a new health tracker as well as new colorful versions of the Galaxy Tab. And then finally, we move on to the . We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by . |
Under Ex-Googler CEO, LiveJournal Gets A Revamp, Promises New Services, Apps And More In 2014 | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | wants to matter again, and is making a number of changes over the course of 2014 which the company hopes will make it a more relevant social networking destination, starting with a major revamp of its homepage and user interface, rolled out into beta just yesterday. On the horizon, the company is also promising several new services as well as new mobile apps, in an overarching vision that sounds as if it wants to find a new niche for itself as something of a competitor to . Though LiveJournal isn’t interested in specifically detailing these new services today, the company would say that they’re designed to help bloggers “highlight their best content and amazing writing,” plus help readers better network, and bring “location aspects into long form.” In other words, like the modern blogging platform Medium. Plus, the company isn’t beyond stretching into other, not as social areas, too. For example, it’s also exploring the idea of helping users run e-commerce shops on its site – something that many of its users in Singapore do today. The blogging platform, which publicly claims 60 million+ monthly unique visitors and more than 48 million journals, is, of course, still associated with an older era of the web, when blogging was still relatively novel, and a far more community-oriented activity. First launched in 1999, LiveJournal grew in popularity by offering users free personal journals, which were set up as online diaries or broader online communities, often around some niche fandom. It became home to things like fan fiction, support groups, creative communities, gamers’ discussions, and more. In fact, it was sort of like a precursor to Tumblr, but with a more advanced, albeit complex, set of administrative features for managing and moderating LiveJournal sites. It even publicly with the issues surrounding its hosting of adult content, including , much like Tumblr faced in later years. However, more recently, LiveJournal’s biggest claim to fame in the U.S. is that it hosts “Game of Thrones” writer George RR Martin’s website, dubbed “ ” But more often than not, the name LiveJournal is mentioned with a sort of smirking tone, as with Salon’s April post about “ ,” for example, which referred to the site as an Ooh, burn! The company has also had a variety of owners over the years. Its creator Brad Fitzpatrick sold the service to Six Apart (Moveable Type, TypePad) in 2005, and then, a couple of years later, it was sold again to Russian firm SUP Media. Now, it’s owned by Rambler&Co, which is controlled by ANN Investment Group. The site today has a large footprint overseas, where it’s the number one blogging platform in Eastern Europe, and is ranked 138 (Global) according to Alexa. Though the company wouldn’t speak to its revenue specifics, it would say that currently half of revenues come from user payments related to . LiveJournal also runs some advertising, but this is not its core focus. And now, LiveJournal is hanging out the “under new management” banner yet again. Last month, the company announced a new CEO, , who previously worked at Google, Box and Microsoft. Akudovich was confirmed in a unanimous vote by the board of directors, who believe her international experience at these major tech companies will help her make LiveJournal a top social media platform yet again. “My Box experience, where I started the Deal Desk department, gave me unique insights into how a company turbo-charged an amazing product,” she tells us. “At Google, it was about bringing the right content in the right form to brand new Google Play markets. And this is exactly what we’re planning to do at LJ,” Akudovich says. In addition to the new services Akudovich teases, LiveJournal is also rolling out new iOS and Android applications next month, designed to appeal to both writers and readers. And the company is hopping on the ‘anonymity’ bandwagon, now in vogue thanks to services like Whisper, Yik Yak and Secret, noting that LiveJournal “will remain anonymous and will never ask its users to identify themselves.” That’s also been a big selling point for the service in areas of the world where free speech crackdowns continue, including in Russia. (For instance, LiveJournal recently removed the display of subscriber numbers on LJ blogs, following the approval of a new Russian law with over 3,000 daily visits.) But LJ’s new strategy for 2014 and beyond is one where it hopes to promote itself as a platform for longer-form content and self-expression in an era when users can’t seem bothered to post status updates, preferring Instagram selfies, looping Vine clips, GIFs and texts over , lengthy videos, and the like. But that, thinks LiveJournal, is the opportunity. “There’s a big market for this that really only we and Medium are filling – and with significantly more personalization, while still being easy to use,” says Akudovich. “Our users generate an amazing amount of deep content – half a million long-form posts a day – these are not tweets, these are real long-form posts where people write some very interesting things. We have amazing communities too,” she says. That may be so, but a LiveJournal “comeback” would require more than a few new services and a fresh coat of paint to achieve this vision of a long-form content network. And let’s remember, this the company has out r, after all. The company still has a way to go to make the “LiveJournal” brand something that isn’t just hilariously retro, but a name that can make inroads with a larger, and yes, younger, crowd of online users looking for a personal home base beyond a Tumblr blog or Instagram profile. |
ShopDrop Alerts You To Local Sales From Major Retailers To Small Boutiques | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | A new shopping and sale finder app called , also the Audience Choice winner from our recent , is now live on the . Today the service helps users, mainly New Yorkers, find nearby sales, both at larger retailers and smaller boutiques, but the company plans to expand its coverage to more major cities in the future. At launch, ShopDrop’s online feed of sales, deals and new products is national, but its best feature – the map of in-store deals and sample sales – is only available in NYC. The company notes that there’s only one other iOS application for NY sample sales, and it’s fairly buggy. Founded by Cory Bishop and William DeMuro, bootstrapped ShopDrop was originally conceived after Bishop’s move to NYC. He noticed the large number of boutiques, and was curious as to how he or anyone could stay up-to-date with their latest offerings, along with sample sales. He quickly realized how fragmented it was for these small stores to try to get the word out via newsletters and social media, and even street side chalkboards, at times. The app today competes in the same general space as a number of deal-finding and alerting utilities, including things like Shopular, RetailMeNot, Zoomingo, Shopkick, Flipp and others. But unlike some competitors, the company isn’t just digitizing the sales data publicly available on other sources, like retailer websites, newsletters or Facebook pages – it’s also working to bring smaller shops onto the platform, too. And it’s this focus on the small boutiques that helps ShopDrop differentiate itself. Currently, the company has data for larger chains like Anthropologie, American Apparel, Armani Exchange, Banana Republic, Brooks Brothers, Uniqlo, Free People, H&M, Express, Gap and others, as well as smaller shops like Bird, A.P.C., DQM, Opening Ceremony, Oak, Surface To Air, and more. There are around 80 total stores live at present, half of which are big-name retailers. ShopDrop gathers its data from a variety of sources. The team built an algorithm that sweeps up all the boutique’s data from email newsletters and social media feeds, with some additional curation on top for timestamps and keywords. For larger stores, the company uses public APIs. Plus, ShopDrop works directly with boutique owners, and has partnered with Stylish City (and soon, others) for sample sale listings. Consumers customize the app by selecting their favorite stores, and then can be alerted via push notifications when there’s a new event at one of those locations, whether that’s a special promotion, new product, or otherwise. The notifications work when the app is running in the background, and ShopDrop will also notify you based on proximity, so you’re alerted to deals when you’re actually nearby. The company is now working to develop a dashboard for retailers where they could view consumer analytics and customize their messages. This is now in piloting testing with a few boutiques like Ferris NY and La Petite Mort. Eventually, ShopDrop plans to allow the businesses to post directly to the app (with some moderation, of course, so users aren’t spammed.) The client posting and business profile would be free, but a tiered subscription model would come into play that lets the retailer offer in-store messaging and foot traffic analytics via iBeacons, alongside ShopDrop’s own analytics, history and usage. The ShopDrop app, meanwhile, is a free download . |
As Samsung’s Chairman Remains Hospitalized, South Korea Prepares For Its Next Act | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | There is a tension at the core of all great startup stories between the cold technology that powers these businesses and the raw, emotional hearts of founders discovering their humanity under some of the most searing conditions imaginable. Too often in the tech press, we glide over the human soul of our stories in the pursuit of the next feature, the next funding round, the next acquisition. It is the tragedies and the triumphs that are crucial in building up businesses and forging the leaders who run them. No where was this more true than in South Korea this past month, which has been a study in mobilizing for the future in the face of adversity. The country’s wealthiest and most famous businessman, Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, , and . It is hard to describe the emotions of many here, who remain in awe of his accomplishments while fearful of Samsung’s future and influence. News teams remain stationed at the hospital – a Samsung hospital, no less – awaiting any news on the 72-year-old’s condition. Yet, the personification of triumph over tragedy emanated not just from the top of Samsung’s corporate ladder, but from its most humble rungs as well. For years, workers at Samsung’s semiconductor plants have fought for compensation related to the deaths of more than 40 workers from cancer, which is believed caused by carcinogens originating in the chip manufacturing process. Following and , the company , and offered compensation to the victims. Korea is sometim es described as the Republic of Samsung, and the company’s somber atmosphere was equally reflected in the country as a whole. Few moments have hit the country harder than , leading to the deaths of almost 300 people, most of them high school students on field trips. Following the tragedy, yellow ribbons have popped up across the country in solidarity with the families of the victims. Many Koreans are asking how their institutions reacted so poorly to the disaster, and . The answer may well be one familiar to this audience: startups. This week, Seoul got a taste of its growth in innovation through two conferences, which offered a comparatively optimistic dose of solace to a country otherwise reeling from recent events. At the third incarnation of BeLaunch, the story was all about the success of Korea’s top two startups – and – as well as the increasing interest of Silicon Valley investors in the region. At Startup Nations, a dozen Asian nations participated in finding common ground between their startup ecosystems. It is this dichotomy of Korea – a nation whose broadband is , yet whose people have – that remains at the heart of the intensity of this country’s drive to the future, and can make the country so difficult to understand for those who don’t follow it closely. Korea’s development of a startup ecosystem has certainly been rapid, coming not just from a desire to create the future, but a fear that its top companies risk being left behind in the changing technology landscape and competition from China. In many ways nonexistent three years ago, the size and diversity of this awakened ecosystem is profound, with a new generation of startup entrepreneurs increasingly refusing to follow their predecessors into the top corporations. They are assisted by billions of dollars in government programs designed to encourage and sustain startups with the funding needed to become big businesses. Korea’s rapid ascent has gotten the attention of nations around the continent. At Startup Nations on Tuesday, representatives from across Asia learned from Korean startup leaders and each other on how to foster an entrepreneurial culture. Sponsored by the , a recently endowed $400 million local non-profit that acts as a sort of for Korea, participants discussed the investment climate, accelerators, government programs, and other infrastructure required to get startups off the ground. Interestingly, the conversation centered on scaling businesses up, rather than getting talented founders to start their businesses in the first place. Despite the stereotype of risk-averse Asian entrepreneurs, there are an increasing number of people across the region who feel deep resonance with the ethos of Silicon Valley, but these trailblazers are facing enormous hurdles due to a lack of funding and a narrow view from investors on business models and profitability. Additionally, some countries like India and China have very low internet penetration rates, making it difficult to build the kind of technical startups loved by Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, Korea’s largest startup event BeLaunch took place in the recently opened , created by starchitect . This was the event’s third incarnation, and by far its strongest showing. More than 100 startups hung out in the central startup zone, ranging from a startup with fighting drones to a security company that turns your Wi-Fi base station into a home security system through software. Among my favorites were , a beautiful new approach to editing documents, and , a JavaScript-friendly integrated development application for OS X. For venture capitalists working along Sand Hill Road, finding startups used to be pretty simple. Have the founders of companies drive down Highways 101 and 280 to Menlo Park for a meeting, and make an investment decision in the ensuing weeks. Given the history of startup unicorns, it seemed only natural to focus investment energy on their seemingly native habitat of the Bay Area, and ignore much of the rest of the world. Yet, the last few months should give everyone pause about the exclusive dominance of Silicon Valley or even the United States in building startups. , dwarfing the size of Facebook’s 2012 financing. China’s microblogging service Sina Weibo, which debuted last month on NASDAQ, is currently valued at $4 billion. And several more IPOs from the region are likely to come soon. Seoul has not always been a noted destination for Valley dollars, but it did manage to host noted investors David Lee of SV Angel, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, and Joe Lonsdale of Formation8, who stopped by BeLaunch and doled out advice to the attendees. As Samsung faces headaches in its growth, the hope is that one of these startups has the potential to be Korea’s next global powerhouse. But those are merely dreams. Today, these founders have much more simple concerns, like paying the rent and finding an investor who believes in them. The tragedy is that many of these businesses won’t make it more than a year or two. The triumph is that they started at all. For a country whose tragedies have been front-page news for the last few weeks, that endorsement of the future is perhaps the greatest story of all. |
null | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 29 | null |
Eddy Cue Says Apple TV, With 20 Million Units Sold, Will Continue To Evolve | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Apple TV has been a pretty modest success when you compare it to some of Apple’s other products, but with 20 million units sold, the product has clearly captured consumer attention. Tonight at the CODE Conference, Apple SVP Eddy Cue said the Apple TV will continue to evolve as the company seeks to improve upon today’s TV experience. Sales on Apple TV topped $1 billion last year, and Cue said it will be even bigger in fiscal 2014. The company will continue to update the product as a way to improve the user experience for consumers. Cue noted that the company had added a lot of new content to the Apple TV, and has tied more of its content to iCloud, like user photos. When trying to explain the reason for the interest in TV, Cue said that it’s because the TV user experience is so bad. In particular, it hasn’t changed in the last several decades. Cue said the biggest innovation he’s seen came with the introduction of the VCR, which allowed users to record content. But since then, the experience has been “stuck.” Still, there’s work to be done. Even with the growth of TV Everywhere services, the large number of different content providers and services means that it’s never really clear which content consumers have access to. According to Cue, there are also rights issues that need to be worked out. That’s something Apple is no doubt looking to solve, as it thinks about the next vertical that it can disrupt with innovative new products. |
The Price Is Right: For Early-Stage SaaS Companies, It Needs To Be | Contributor | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | Nothing is more critical to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business than pricing strategy. Pricing is the moment of truth for a new product … and doubly so when it is a company’s first product. But far more often than not, I’ve observed new startups leaving “money on the table” when it comes to pricing enterprise products. I’ve seen founders say their product saves hundreds of thousands of dollars — yet their product is priced as if it’s only saving thousands of dollars. One reason for this is assuming the need to price and program similarly to competitive products. With a potentially disruptive product, however, falling into the trap of pricing like a legacy competitor not only leaves money on the table — but it could fail to surface your differentiation. Said another way, your product your price and how you price your product reflects value from the buyer perspective as well as what your company believes is valuable. SaaS products also have the advantage that they are priced not just for the service they offer, but for the potential of saving massive capex/opex spent directly by the customer. From your business perspective, SaaS products have a level of stickiness that would be the envy of the packaged-and on-premise software generation. Since the uncertainty and social science aspects of pricing can be uncomfortable, especially for technical founders, here is a framework — from the perspective of a product manager — to consider when pricing new SaaS products. The product manager role is critical in SaaS because the ability to fine-tune the monetization of the product is closely tied to its features and implementation. The product needs to be designed with such flexibility in mind when it comes to making features available, prioritizing features, or even just choosing where to spend engineering time. Just remember that “business isn’t physics”, as Bill Gurley notes in his excellent on some of the metrics here. Andreessen Horowitz also has a on understanding SaaS valuations as great background for pricing discussions. Because pricing is math, there’s a tendency to create the spreadsheet model and assume it will all work. But there’s also a ton of psychology that comes into play: beyond math, pricing involves judgment, vision, and flexibility. In a new business, it’s easy to spend money, but the combination of a new product the unknown cost of acquiring customers leads to an “unsolvable” problem. One approach is to take lean/iterative methods and apply them to finding the right pricing fit. This post is about a framework to arrive at such early prices, which will change. (This is very different from what happens in an existing company with existing customers, where you really only get one shot at pricing something right). The business side of SaaS involves a complex array of such as customer lifetime value (LTV), customer/subscriber acquisition cost (CAC), average revenue per user (ARPU), cost of goods sold (COGS), and churn; as well as pricing models such as freemium, tiered, and time based. Then, depending on whether you’re targeting consumers or enterprises, there are very different sales models that influence your pricing approach (for example, business products invite complexity, especially when dealing with purchasing managers). Similarly, the product side of SaaS is a complex set of equations related to usage patterns, scenarios, and variable costs of a large number of resources. The most critical costs are related to customer acquisition and sales/marketing expense — which can appear to erase any potential for profit by traditional accounting measures — so the key to early-stage SaaS businesses is to focus on understanding customer acquisition costs relative to the estimated long term value of a customer. Since we don’t know how much it will cost to acquire a customer yet, we will just have to move forward assuming some budget (along with some allocation for margin in the ultimate price relative to this long term value). This post focuses on the pricing models relative to product and features and assumes a higher level view of customer acquisition costs and long term value. One way to approach this is to establish upper and lower bounds on pricing: The lower bound represents your costs to serve a customer your product. One common example is the basic costs of spinning up the IaaS/PaaS elements of what you do — creating accounts, allocating minimal resources, other infrastructure, and then subsequent usage. It might be convenient to think of this lower bound as what you could offer for “free” to some customers. You might make some assumptions about the use of variable resources such as compute, egress, storage, etc. in order to arrive at this lower bound. (Note, since this is a product-centric view these bounds are absent the allocation for fixed and variable costs outside the product/technology, so do not not include opex, S&M, etc.) It is important to understand this bound across the full breadth of your product. While you might initially view some features as “premium”, you also want to assume that over time capabilities will migrate from advanced to essential and you will fill in new features at the top. I think it is a good exercise to consider the full product as a base case initially. The upper bound represents your costs to serve a “depth” user: in this case, the customer using the parts of your product that drive ongoing costs to scale (for example, this customer is using increasingly more bandwidth, storage, or compute). Now is where you can look at what you offer relative to your competition, and want to understand if you have scale attributes that are better/worse/same. By knowing this you can begin to separate out variables for your model. Presumably in developing your product, you created a unique architectural approach relative to existing competitors. Do you scale better for more tenants, use storage more effectively, or maybe your mobile app is more efficient at bandwidth? The importance of knowing your own strengths and weaknesses will inform what variables to use in your pricing. You can also think of your upper bound as a competitive foil — the stronger you are on some attribute, the more you should use this attribute to differentiate your offering. This might allow you to charge more for capabilities that are just too expensive for your competition. When you’re pricing a new offering, it is worth understanding where your product is today relative to a core set of potential pricing attributes. Whether it is Bronze/Silver/Gold, Free/Select/Premium, Trial/Select/Premium, or Individual/Business/Enterprise, the norm for SaaS is to offer a “3xN” matrix of 3 pricing plans and N attributes — as in . The more mature a SaaS product, the more rows and columns its matrix has. (One SaaS product I researched had five top-level features organized into an array of 27 price points based on combinations of the three to five of the features and number of users.) A broad range of SaaS products can be considered across the following core service attributes: If your product lends itself to dividing the features themselves — such as import/export, visualization, view/edit, or connectivity to other products — into good-better-best then differentiating price points here might work. In a freemium model, dividing must-have features among free v. paid users can be a customer-hostile way to differentiate or optimize pricing, so beware. The reason to hesitate on this dimension is because customers understand that you’re basically just inhibiting access to code that is already there and hence being draconian. Another reason to be cautious with this model is that as usage of the product deepens over time, paid features will tend to get pulled into lower-priced tiers — which means you need to fill in new features/prices with every release or update. As easy as it is to communicate general-use features in pricing tiers, there’s a level of distaste with this approach for many customers. One of the most common approaches to differentiating a SaaS product designed for business is to separate out the IT-focused features as a pricing attribute. These could be features for security, audit, identity integration, domain names, sharing, control, management, etc. Businesses understand what it is like to both value and pay for these features. Commonly this approach is used to a product that has become viral within an enterprise, so be careful about how you approach an enterprise with pricing here. Otherwise you might come across as an arsonist-firefighter who is offering to contain the very situation you knowingly created. Another broadly used SaaS pricing attribute is storage consumption (even for products for which storage is not a primary attribute): It’s easy to measure, easy to articulate, and is relatively expensive. The benefit of using storage is that people “get it” to some degree. It also gets cheaper faster than people can consume it (and in most scenarios customers need to be doing something fairly extreme to consume vast amounts of storage). At the same time, the platform companies have been steadily increasing free storage or ultra-low priced storage as a base, no-frills service so simply using storage as a one-dimensional offering might not work. With a new SaaS product, be sure to consider ways to avoid basing costs on storage given challenges. One novel approach seen recently is using third-party storage and letting the customer establish a paying relationship such that storage is not part of the pricing of your product, since that way you do not serve as a pure pass-through for a visibly priced third-party element of your product. There are many novel attributes in modern software that can be used as consumption variables; one relatively new one is to use depth consumption of APIs/calls as a price tiering structure. (Box, where I’m an advisor, recently announced pricing for as an example.) Developer-oriented products work especially well for consumption pricing because developers understand the product architecture and what can drive costs, even if those costs are variable with usage. SaaS products used by small teams, cross-organizations, or that just scale with more members collaborating/sharing/using are almost always priced by number of unique users (and subsequent integration with organization-based directories). Pricing this variable is straightforward and over time you will see distribution of engagement and resource usage that will further let you refine the discrete price points. Because most products priced this way also want to encourage more users/usage, carefully consider where you put the first step or two. But large-scale customers like this approach because it allows for predictable pricing on a metric they understand: number of employees/users. In general, you can think of this as per-seat pricing but can also apply to device end-points, servers/CPUs, VMs, etc. Every product is used by different customer segments — whether measured by size of organization, industry segment, geography, or type of individual within an organization. Common pricing tier labels here include “government”, “non-profit”, “academic”, “healthcare”, “small business”, and so on. As a product matures, you will almost certainly either label or expand your pricing tiers to account for this. Before you jump into this level of differentiation, however, you want to gain more data on usage — are you seeing customers across some set of segments, and are they using the product differently? More importantly, do you see a path to develop differentiation that allows you to target and sustain these segments (or are you just optimizing revenue along these lines)? Some products are designed only for specific segments like education, which allows you to further refine within them: e.g., public, private, post-secondary, etc. But one customer segment that is almost always special is the These folks can push a product through an organization when required, or develop custom solutions on your platform that either deliver or enhance the value of your work. Developers are key in this regard. For any platform-oriented product, it is worth considering how you offer developers the ability to experiment with and use the full product in a development environment at a very low price. One way to accomplish this is to separate out usage-as-development versus usage-as-production, and price accordingly. As a new offering with any established competitors, pricing will be the easiest point of attack. And if you are a disruptive product, you want to have the deepest possible understanding of the value you are bringing to the table so you can maximize the initial pricing model. So the most important suggestion for pricing I have here is to to price and announce. Even for enterprise products, things like round-numbers, 9′s, and discounts all matter. Do keep in mind that discounting will be substantial in enterprise products with direct sales and 50% or more off “list” price is not uncommon (and often required). That’s not an excuse to bloat the price, but it is important for purchasing managers and for empowering your salesforce that you enable a level of customization — and know what variables you are using to do so. Some say that you can never change or raise your prices once you’re out of the gate. Always keep in mind that once you have customers, price changes or product composition relative to price are never viewed as positive changes, even if you think for some customers you are lowering the price. And when you do change your prices, always offer existing customers time to adapt and grandfather them in (at least). Finally, remember to engineer a product framework that can support pricing flexibility. Create the model, use the model, but don’t let the model do your thinking. Price carefully! |
Payments Firm Swipely Raises $20M More As Its Processing Tally Crosses The $2B Mark | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Payments company Swipely has announced that it raised a Series C round totaling $20 million. This round, led by the Pritzker Group and including previous investors Shasta Ventures and First Round Capital, brings the company’s tally to more than $40 million. Swipely had recently announced that its payment processing rate had doubled to $2 billion on an annual basis, but declined to tell TechCrunch at the time if it was pursuing more capital. As it turns out, and as this publication presumed, it was in the process of nailing down the Series C. The company’s revenue tracks up with its payment-processing rate, so to see it double that figure from $1 billion to $2 billion in under a year implies quick top-line growth. Competitor Square is processing around 15 times as much, or in the neighborhood of $30 billion. Swipely CEO Angus Davis declined to discuss a solid growth expectation for the company’s processing rate, but he did tell me that companies growing at more than 50 percent yearly can be described as going through a period of hyper-growth, and that his firm is growing more quickly than that. Davis is known for his work at TellMe, which . Davis also told TechCrunch that Swipely’s lifetime customer value (LTV) compared to its customer acquisition cost (CAC) was “well in excess” of three, a standard industry threshold. LTV to CAC is a SaaS firm metric that is widely cited. It implies that a company is generating more than thrice the cost of acquiring a new customer in top line. That excess revenue then covers other corporate costs. If your ratio is less than three — or more 0.33, if you flip the numerator and denominator, of course — your growth as a firm can be viewed as a combination of being inefficient and too expensive. The company intended to raise between $15 million and $20 million for marketing and product expansion. I also asked the firm about its views on Square’s recent move into loaning clients money for expansion purposes. Swipely, Davis told TechCrunch, already does that in some capacity, using third-party support. The company, if I had to infer, doesn’t view the effort as a core part of its business, but one that it could expand. Square’s financials, recently disclosed, indicate that the company’s gross profit margin is a pressure point. Moving up the value stack — loans could supply such incomes — will therefore be attractive to market participants. |
Google Admits It Hires Too Many White Dudes | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Today, one of the valley’s biggest employers, Google, is finally and how it goes about hiring women and minorities. The gist is that Google knows it has a problem and it’s sorry, but Google says it’s not entirely its fault…there’s just not enough women and minorities in tech. No surprise here from a giant tech firm in Silicon Valley, the odds are 7 male to every 3 female Googlers. But break that down into tech and non-tech jobs and the numbers skew much more heavily for male at 83%. It’s no better on the race front, either, with the highest minority being Asian at 34% in tech and next to non-existent in anything else. The company, who let everyone know they’d be doing this at their annual shareholders meeting – and in the presence of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his diversity coalition , admits readily, “…that Google is miles from where we want to be when it comes to diversity.” They’re not alone in the valley here, as a of 20 top tech companies shows similarly dismal figures. Those numbers were hard to come by. Most companies, for obvious reasons ( don’t want to disclose how few women and minorities they employ in tech here in Silicon Valley. Google says its aim in doing this is to open up the discussion and begin to fix the problem: Being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution. Rev. Jackson also attended a earlier this month to push for more diversity there. He then sent letters on to other tech giants including eBay, Apple and Twitter (none of which have released numbers) to encourage more diversity in the tech space. The US Government is no help here, either. There’s a of historical numbers out on women, minorities and the workplace, but it’s pretty scant in the tech sphere. While Google does come out and admit it has a hiring problem, it says the reason for this is a lack of qualified candidates. From the : There are lots of reasons why technology companies like Google struggle to recruit and retain women and minorities. For example, women of all computer science degrees in the United States. Blacks and Hispanics make up , respectively. Google may have a point, here. According to the National Council of Women in Information Technology (NCWIT), Google’s stats fall just below the average of at 25%. Still, this is Google. Don’t they have the resources to recruit better? Even though it’s one of the largest minority groups already, Google has a plan to educate others about Asian culture in hopes to retain this minority. No mention of how it plans to educate, retain or recruit the other minorities, however. Gotta throw Google a bone, though. Not every tech company is willing to show their numbers so starkly. It’s very mature. It may even encourage other tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, etc. to open up, admit there is a problem and start to look for ways to solve it. |
Spark Capital Raises $375M For Later-Stage Investment Fund Spark Growth, Adds Jeremy Philips As Partner | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | , the venture capital fund known for its savvy early-stage investments in web hits such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare, announced today that it has raised $375 million for a new fund focused on later-stage investing called Spark Growth. , the Internet and technology executive perhaps best known for helping shepherd News Corp. into the digital age as a from 2004 through 2010, has joined Spark to head up the new growth-stage fund, Spark founder said in a post . Philips will be based in New York City, and Spark Growth will be jointly operated out of New York and San Francisco, Sabet wrote. Spark is not the only tech investor getting into the growth stage of late. Earlier this year, Google announced , a new investment arm separate from Google Ventures that is focused entirely on late-stage investments in more established companies such as Survey Monkey and Lending Club. |
Jimmy Iovine And Eddy Cue Talk Acquisition, Say Beats Music Has 250k Subscribers | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Now that Apple has , both Apple SVP Eddy Cue and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine have a lot to talk about. Three weeks after the deal was , Apple SVP Eddy Cue and Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine talked through the reasons for the deal and how it’s going to work on stage at the inaugural CODE Conference. We already have some understanding of the terms of the deal, and some of the business structure behind it. Under the terms of the deal, Apple will pay $2.6 billion in cash and another $400 million in equity for the Beats team and assets. And now, we know that the service has amassed 250,000 subscribers after just three months. Jimmy Iovine has agreed to quit his day job at Interscope and will be joining Apple full-time. Dre will keep being Dre, but he’ll also be expected to . They’ll report to Cue, Apple’s SVP of Internet software and services. At the conference, Cue said that there were three things that Apple wanted out of Beats: There’s the talent of Iovine and Dre; the premium music hardware line, which Cue called “hugely successful”; and, then there is the Beats Music line. “We think what we’re going to do today is incredible. It’s not about what Apple is doing today or what Beats is doing today, but what we’re going to do together,” Cue said. He also said that the number of new releases in iTunes is the smallest they’ve ever seen, noting that music is ‘dying’ in the way that we know it and hasn’t been growing. Iovine says Beats had 5 million visitors to its service, but that it didn’t use Apple’s in-app purchase option at first, so lost out on conversions to paying customers. Cue then noted that Apple has some 800 million credit cards on file. “It’s not two plus two equals four, it’s something much greater than that,” Cue said. Beats Music will of the iTunes music group. The unit will also continue to create hardware, although it for its product design. While reviews of Beats headphones have been mixed, Cue and Iovine both talked up the quality of the Beats headphones and how the products will provide better quality than what Apple currently offers. Iovine said that Apple makes earbuds “to see if the machine works,” and “They make a phone… It’s not their responsibility to make the headphones.” Cue followed up and admitted, “Jimmy will tell you, we make the best headphones that come in the box.” Beats has also been very successful in marketing its products in new ways. Iovine said the company reached $500 million in sales without spending a dime on marketing. One of the ways it was able to do that was with product placement. As , the deal is about bringing in some serious hardware revenues now — Time Cook expects the deal to be accretive in Fiscal 2015. But it’s also about securing Apple’s future in a digital music ecosystem that is becoming more and more about subscription streaming and less about content ownership. That would mean Apple could end up competing against upstarts like Spotify and Rdio. It’s also long-range replacement for the traditional iTunes music owenrship model, which is by those subscription streaming services. While Cue admitted that growth in music sales had “leveled off,” he said the theory that music sales are “going away or severely going down is way overrated.” As evidence, he noted that Apple passed 35 billion songs sold last week. |
CEO Tony Fadell Hates When Nest Is Called An ‘Internet-Of-Things’ Company | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | We here in the tech press have gotten used to categorizing new, interesting products that are getting smart and connected under the umbrella term “Internet of Things.” But today at CODE Conference in Southern California, Nest CEO Tony Fadell said he hates the term, and sought to clarify why Nest shouldn’t be described that way. “The ‘Internet of Things’ is a term for this audience, not for consumers,” Fadell said. Instead the company is focused on building products for the home that will work better than consumers are used to. “We’re not an ‘Internet of Things’ company… We make a thermostat, and we make a smoke alarm.” Nest has seen some major ups and downs as of late: The company was earlier this year in a deal worth $3.2 billion in cash. While Nest only had a couple of products on the market at the time of the deal, it quickly became apparent that Google was buying . Fadell said that the company is focused specifically on products in the home, things that are not mobile or wearable. And he promised that new things are in the pipeline. Not everything has been working perfect, however. Recently Nest took one of its core safety products off the market due to a bug in one of its features. After selling more than 400,000 Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, Nest halted sale and disabled its , which turns an alarm off when it detects someone in the room waving at it. But Fadell said consumers got confused when, six weeks after it notified customers, the issued a statement saying the product was being recalled. “We did all the right stuff in the first few days and then they decided six weeks later [to issue the statement],” he said. More recently, there have been reports that Nest is interested in purchasing video security company Dropcam. While Fadell wouldn’t comment on that specific report, he said the company was talking to different large security companies about integrating its products with theirs. |
Twitter CEO Says Its Reach Goes Beyond Its 255M Users, But Can It Monetize Reach? | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Wall Street thinks Twitter has a growth problem, but CEO Dick Costolo said at its reach includes people who see tweets on TV and embedded online though they aren’t counted in its . Costolo also discussed trying to figure out how to get Twitter into China. But while reach is nice, the problem is that Twitter can only show ads to logged-in users. That doesn’t mean these incidental users aren’t valuable. Seeing tweets visualized during news casts, hashtags splayed out on commercials and billboards, and threads hosted on blogs surely primes people to become Twitter users. But it has to convert them somehow. Twitter’s growth rate has improved in the last quarter, but only after falling sharply for a year. In Q4 2012 its monthly active user count was up 10.8 percent quarter over quarter, and up 10.3 percent In Q1 2013. But growth sunk to 6.9 percent in Q2 2013. Twitter’s share price when it reported growth had slumped to just , prompting concerns of a growth crisis. And $TWTR got dragged down 11 percent to its when its Q1 2014 didn’t impress investors. Contributing to the growth problem may be the struggle to reactivate burned users. Millions have signed up but churned out because Twitter failed to demonstrate the immense value of from friends and top thinkers. Many new users have trouble building an audience or finding the right people to follow, so they stop using Twitter. In some ways that could be worse than them never signing up at all. At least they’d still be curious and Twitter would have a fresh chance to impress them. Instead, it has to convince them it’s much better than it was. One way to make people feel more welcome is to get users more favorites, replies, and retweets per tweet. Costolo said on stage that Twitter’s been very focused over the course of the last six to nine months on increasing per-tweet engagement. It’s seen an increase in retweets and comments. Growth is based on increased engagement per timeline view, but that’s one side of the engagement coin, he noted. Perhaps getting into China could help. Costolo said he didn’t expect Twitter or Facebook to be unblocked by the Great Firewall Of China in the forseeable future, but was still in early conversations about what a government-OK’d Twitter would look like. For now, Twitter is happy to take advertising dollars from Chinese businesses that want to reach an international audience. To get Twitter growing soon, it may need to concentrate harder on its onboarding flow. It’s already better than old versions that just subscribed users to some celebrities and dumped them into the service. Now Twitter walks rookies through how to tweet, and finds them people to follow that align with their interests. But the answer to boosting retention amongst new users may be finding them an audience. Twitter may need to push hard to get veterans to follow and engage with new sign-ups who they know. Facebook managed this by sucking in people’s address books so it could recommend they friend their contacts who signed up later. Twitter might need to push harder on this dimension, because nothing feels quite as lame as tweeting to nearly zero followers. No one likes shouting into a black hole. |
Apple Now Makes Apps For Other Mobile Platforms – Which Could Be Huge For The Future Of Media | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Apple became something more with the – a multi-mobile platform developer at least for the time being. The company will continue to operate Beats Music on Android and Windows Phone, Apple CEO Tim Cook tells The following the acquisition. While Apple has offered iTunes for Windows in the past, this marks the first time that an app it runs, even through a subsidiary, will be available on a rival mobile OS. Apple says it’s “all about the music” when addressing this change of practice, and it marks a departure that could become very significant as we think about what this deal means for the future of digital media. The Apple acquisition of Beats is said to be primarily about the streaming service, according to a source familiar with the deal, and the Beats brass team will be reporting to Eddy Cue, we’re told. That provides lots of support for the theory that Beats will help in part to transition iTunes from digital downloads to . What’s most interesting here, however, is that Apple has secured a multi-platform foothold in streaming – one that iTunes Match didn’t really help it to achieve, especially with regards to the mobile ecosystem. Apple might still champion and make the vast bulk of its money on iOS and the iPhone, but if it wants to continue to dominate the digital music and media industry for the next decade in the same way it has the last, it needs to look further afield. From the horse’s mouth, via a published by 9to5Mac: Apple’s history in music began with selling Macs to musicians. That remains important to us today, but we also bring music to hundreds of millions of customers with iTunes, which is at the forefront of the digital music revolution. Music holds a special place in our hearts at Apple, and we know that we can make an even bigger contribution to something that is so important to our society. That’s why we have kept investing in music and why we’re bringing together these extraordinary teams — so we can continue to create the most innovative music products and services in the world. Cross-platform has long been a defense that streaming media companies have thrown up against the threat of efforts by industry giants like Apple. If Apple sticks to Cook’s stated plan to offer Beats Music across a range of devices, that may no longer be a valid point to hide behind. We reached out to Apple to find out if in addition to remaining available, the Windows Phone and Android Beats Music apps would continue to be actively developed, but we had received no response at press time. |
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Urges Tech Community To Give Back Right Now | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Over the years, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has emerged as one of the greatest philanthropists in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he wants others to join him. Today at the CODE Conference, Benioff urged the members of the tech community to make stronger commitments to give back to their local communities. A number of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the U.S. have already made the , a promise to give away more than half of their wealth to charity. But that pledge isn’t a legally binding contract, and even those who make it . But Benioff said that’s not enough, and said he wants techies to begin giving back “right now.” “San Francisco is a great city, and we are lucky to be there… But this is not its first gold rush,” Benioff said. He also noted that civil disobedience is in San Francisco’s DNA. When asked what tech companies, founders, and employees can do about the growing unrest between inhabitants who have lived in the city for decades and the tech workers, Benioff said that the best thing they could do was to contribute more to the local community. “I think the main issue is that tech has to be committed to giving back to the city,” Benioff said. “Every company needs to have a philanthropy strategy, even from the start. He made a point to note that philanthropy was one of the founding principles of Salesforce, and committed to giving 1 percent of profits to charity and 1 percent of employee time to community service. Employees have contributed 600,000 hours of community service, and the company has more than 20,000 nonprofits running its software for free. “We need to integrate with the community, and the way to integrate is through giving,” he said. Benioff also suggested that people in tech look beyond just their own city and focus on giving to “communities of promise” that haven’t benefitted as much from the economic recovery as San Francisco has. He noted that just across the bridge, Oakland is one of those communities, and recently made one of his first philanthropic gifts there recently. |
Sequoia Backs Coupang, South Korea’s Answer To Amazon, With $100 Million | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | , South Korea’s answer to , has raised $100 million in a round of financing led by Sequoia Capital. The investment led by Sequoia chairman adds one of Asia’s fastest-growing and most valuable startups to Sequoia Capital’s already impressive roster of Asian deals. According to one person with knowledge of the deal, the new investment values Coupang at well over $1 billion. Founded three years ago by Harvard Business School dropout Bom Kim, Coupang now has over $1 billion in sales — a milestone it reached faster than any other Asian e-commerce company. , Kim had the idea for Coupang after seeing the explosive growth of online retail companies like Groupon in the late 2000s. Realizing that the ship had sailed for a similar company in the U.S. Kim thought that the South Korean market, where shopping is a pastime, mobile phones are everywhere, and high-speed Internet is ubiquitous, would be an ideal country to launch an e-commerce site. Kim’s gambit paid off, and with the help of initial investors , , and , Coupang has grown to become the country’s top privately held e-commerce vendor. Sequoia backed the latest round through its Sequoia Capital Global Equities and Sequoia Heritage investment vehicles, according to a statement. “Organically, we’ve grown faster than any e-commerce company we know of, and with these resources, we can set our sights even higher,” said Coupang’s chief financial officer, Richard Song, in a statement. “This financing is highly strategic as we continue to go after a rapidly growing $45 billion market.” For Sequoia, Coupang is just the latest in a series of investments made in Asia in recent years. Since 2009 the Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm has invested heavily in China, putting $1.8 billion to work in over 100 deals.
|
Beats Parts Ways With Design Firm As Apple Takes Over Hardware | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Now at Apple, Beats Electronics is leaving behind the design firm that made Beats synonymous in popular culture. The news came from Ammunition’s founder, Robert Brunner, shortly after Apple the $3 billion deal. Ammunition has been with Beats since the beginning. Originally tasked with working with Monster Cable, the firm designed the brand’s iconic headphones and boomboxes from the start. The Beats Studio, the Beats Pro and the Beats Pill are all products of Ammunition’s design. As a studio focused on pushing the limits of what design can do to create new business opportunities, we cannot imagine a more validating outcome. My journey with Beats began with a small meeting in 2006 with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre at Interscope Records. The incredible impact that the design of Beats has had on culture as a result of our collaboration since that first meeting is still unbelievable to me. I am humbled by the thought that millions of music-loving people proudly wear Beats on streets all over the world. As Brunner explains, the transition will happen over the coming months. Apple is now charged with carrying Beat’s brand, design language and identity forward. Of course Apple itself should do just fine protecting its $3 billion investment.
|
GrabTaxi Raises $15M Series B Led By GGV Capital | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | , the taxi-calling app that claims to be the largest in Southeast Asia, said today that it has raised a $15 million Series B led by GGV Capital with participation from Qunar and returning investor Vertex Venture Holdings. The latter led GrabTaxi’s Series A round, which was announced last month; though the amount was undisclosed, CEO Anthony Tan said it was more than $10 million. GGV Capital managing partner Jixun Foo will also join GrabTaxi’s board of directors. Though GrabTaxi competes in the same space as and Rocket Internet’s , both of which are targeting Southeast Asia, Tan told TechCrunch last month that demand in cities in Singapore and Bangkok is high enough to support several taxi-calling startups. In a statement, GrabTaxi said its Series B round will be used to fuel GrabTaxi’s growth into new cities in Southeast Asia, as well as driver loyalty and retention programs. It currently operates in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore, with about 20,000 drivers registered. The startup says that the app has been downloaded 1.2 million times and more than 250,000 passengers in 15 cities use the app at least one month to hail a cab. In a statement, Foo said “We are excited about working with Anthony and his team. Their focus and understanding of local markets will fuel their success and provide competitive advantage. Therefore we believe that GrabTaxi for Southeast Asia and Didi for China will be the go-to transport app in their regional markets.” |
null | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 5 | 16 | null |
Distil Networks’ $10M Funding Round Valued The Bot Detection Company At Around $30M | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Bot detection startup announced today that it has . A source with knowledge of the deal says the round valued Distil at about $30 million. The company declined to comment on the valuation, but co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid was willing to discuss some of the other details. For one thing, he said that Foundry Group “shot us down” twice over the past couple of years before Distil’s growth convinced the firm to lead the Series A (along with Techstars’ Bullet Time Ventures). Essaid also said that he’d set out initially to raise $7 million, and even when raising a $10 million round had to turn some VCs down. So why go with Foundry? Was it all those previous “no”s? Actually, according to Essaid, it was because the firm shared Distil’s vision. “Some of the VCs that we talked to were focused on how we make more money doing the same thing,” he said. “Foundry looked beyond what we’re doing today and asked, how do we become a bigger, more holistic security company?” Right now, that means building a comprehensive solution to battle online bots, rather than focusing on the individual problems that bots can cause. For example, Essaid said that when Distil works with an e-commerce company, it tackles click fraud (which would mean the company is paying for useless ad clicks), price scraping, and more: “What we try to do is bring everybody to the table. That makes the sales process harder, but it also makes [the product] stickier.” Distil says it works with customers ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies and has blocked 9 billion “bad bots,” with revenue growing 20 percent month over month. As part of the funding, Ryan McInTyre of Foundry Group and David Cohen of Bullet Time and Techstars (where Distil was incubated) are joining the company’s board of directors. This suggests that Cohen was successful in for Bullet Time, which, , was aiming for a $150 million third fund. ff Venture Capital, IDEA Fund Partners and Militello Capital also participated. Much of the new money will go towards marketing and sales, Essaid said. Presumably that encompasses a lot more than , but Essaid did promise, “We will get much better robots next year.” |
Mystery New iMac Models Caught Lurking In Pulled OS X Beta | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | If you’re looking to grab yourself an iMac sometime soon, you might want to wait a few more weeks. Based on details left lurking in the latest beta of OS X Mavericks, it looks like an iMac hardware refresh is looming. Poking around the internals of the OS X Mavericks developer beta just released this morning, Apple-fan spotted references to up to three hereto-unseen iMacs: Mac-81E3E92DD6088272.plist / iMac15,1 (IGPU only)
Mac-42FD25EABCABB274.plist / iMac15,n (IGPU/GFX0/Apple display with id 0xAE03)
Mac-FA842E06C61E91C5.plist / iMac15,n (IGPU/GFX0/Apple display with id 0xAE03) The crucial bit is the “15,1” and “15,n” labeling; up until this release, only the currently released iMac models — 14,1 and 14,2, the 21.5-inch models and 27-inch models, respectively — had ever been listed. Alas, as tends to be the case with plist leaks like these, there’s not much in terms of concrete details or specs. Curiously, as , the Mavericks beta seems to have been pulled now — just four hours after it was released, and very shortly after word of the iMac listing started spreading. If Apple has three new iMacs tucked up its sleeve, they probably won’t be hidden up there for long: WWDC, where Apple generally debuts wares like these, is in just five days. |
Twitter Soars 10% | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | It’s been a big day for Twitter, with its shares picking up just over 10 percent. What caused the spike? An from Nomura. The new buy rating came with a reiterated $43 price target. Twitter closed today at $33.77 per share. The good news for Twitter comes on the heels of it picking up yesterday. A report indicated that Twitter would see strong user growth in Asia in the next few years, and the company announced a nine-figure, two-year deal that could help it drive revenue growth. That, along with today’s upgrade and ensuing share price bounce, have put new shine on the social company. Twitter remains far below its record highs, but has managed to recover from its . The company’s decline has been in line with the by a number of other public technology companies — the so-called “momentum” tech stocks have led to fretting that valuations for all sorts of tech firms were in for a correction. That worry . However, for Twitter, today is a nice break from the trend. Twitter’s life as a public company has been interesting, given that the firm has outperformed financial expectations, but seen its shares plummet each time it reported quarterly results. Concerns involving potential growth in its user base have been at the forefront of investor minds, making yesterday’s report on that growth key. All told, after a prolonged rough patch, Twitter is having a good week. |
HackerOne Get $9M In Series A Funding To Build Bug Tracking Bounty Programs | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | , a startup that was started by the former head of the Facebook security team, announced it was getting $9M in Series A funding and that former Microsoft lead security strategist was joining the company as Chief Policy Officer. Moussouris joins co-founder and CTO Alex Rice, who is formerly of Facebook and Merijn Terheggen, co-founder and CEO. The company helps organizations by providing a platform to share security and bug information with the idea that the more eyeballs you have on a program or service, the more likely you’ll find an issue. While they have existing clients, this is the first time they are announcing the service publicly. “The general problem is that vulnerabilities are inevitable. No matter what your security system, you are going to find issues. The current state of the world is pretty terrible. A researcher that finds [a bug] in the wild doesn’t know what to expect,” Rice explained. “They could get a pat on the back or have their door kicked in by the FBI,” he added –and Rice believes there is a better more open and transparent way to deal with this type of reporting. HackerOne offers a platform to give companies an organized way to set up bug tracking programs. Ultimately, Rice said they want to treat people who find these vulnerabilities with respect, and if they wish, the company establishing the program can give the bug finder a monetary reward as well, although he stresses that’s not a requirement by any means. They can add the finder to the Hall of Fame or thank them publicly on social channels, give them a t-shirt or any means of thanks they come up with. “If you look, the pioneers of these programs were Google, Facebook and Microsoft. All that experience is what we are productizing into an organization or service,” Rice told me. “Unlocking the creativity of research community is the most effective thing you can do for security. To do this, you need to add transparency and connect the people working on programs and projects,” he explained. HackerOne gets 20 percent of any bounty payment if and when a payment is made. The $9M is being provided by Benchmark and as part of the deal, Bill Gurley from Benchmark will be joining the board. |
Apple Buys Beats Electronics For $3B | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | purchased Beats, which includes both Beats Audio hardware and Beats Music, the streaming radio service that was founded by rapper Dr. Dre and longtime music industry exec Jimmy Iovine. The deal was reported to be in the works earlier this month, and was said to be worth an estimated $3.2 billion at the time, though a recent report said it was cut to . The price is indeed $3 billion, with $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock. Apple typically makes smaller purchases of startups and companies most people have never heard of, so Beats is a considerable change of course for the company. The last really high-profile acquisition Apple made was NeXT, back when it bought that company to bring Steve Jobs back into the fold. Much speculation has been made around what the Beats acquisition brings to Apple, which already has an existing streaming radio business and a very healthy third-party ecosystem when it comes to headphones, Bluetooth speakers and other peripherals. Apple doesn’t yet sell on- or over-the-ear style headphones, however, or its own speakers, and these are areas where competitors like Samsung currently operate to support their smartphone devices. The company also reportedly enjoyed , according to a recent Bloomberg report. And bringing on Beats’ top executive talent, which includes . In an interview with the New York Times, Apple CEO Tim Cook cited Dre and Iovine as important factors and praised the Beats streaming music service. Given the stature of this acquisition, Apple is being a bit more communicative about the deal than it has about others in the past. Apple indicates and operate as before (even on other platforms). Also as part of the deal, Beats co-founders Iovine and Dre join Apple’s management team. Full release below:
|
Apple Will Operate Beats Music’s Streaming Service Separately From The iTunes Download Store | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | , but rather than risk cratering iTunes download sales by evolving it into a streaming service, it will operate Beats Music’s streaming service in parallel to give listeners an all-they-can-hear subscription option. This confirms my scoop from last week that to allow for a graceful transition as download sales decline and streaming picks up steam. “The addition of Beats will make our music lineup even better, from free streaming with iTunes Radio to a world-class subscription service in Beats, and of course buying music from the iTunes Store as customers have loved to do for years,” Apple SVP and iTunes head Eddy Cue said in the press release about its $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics and Beats Music. Note that last line. Cue and Apple didn’t want to shock users by ripping the familiar download purchase model out from under them in favor of streaming. iTunes’ Eddy Cue (left) and Beats’ Jimmy Iovine (right) Instead, early adopters of streaming will have an option from Apple, while those still building collections of digital music files can keep buying them from iTunes. Financial Times’ that Beats will remain available for Android and Windows Phone. As Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker showed in her new , digital music download sales are falling while streaming is booming. Digital track sales fell 6 percent in 2013 and total from Q1 2013 to Q1 2014. Meanwhile, U.S. streaming music consumption grew 32 percent in 2013. Essentially, selling music is a dying business and streaming is the future. But sales aren’t dead yet, and Apple won’t put them in their grave. While in Silicon Valley it might seem like no one buys music, there were still 1.26 billion songs and 117.6 million albums sold online in 2013. If Apple instantly turned iTunes into a streaming subscription service, the approximately $1 billion it pays out to labels each year might go up in smoke while users slowly migrate to streaming subscriptions. So instead, Apple can use Beats Music to smooth out the transition. Those wanting streaming can go to Beats, and, one day, if Apple deems music sales have fallen below the tipping point, it could switch iTunes to streaming then. In a letter to Apple employees attained by , CEO Tim Cook says: “Beats Music was built with deep respect for both artists and fans. We think it’s the first subscription service to really get it right. Both Apple and Beats believe that a great music service requires a strong editorial and curation team, and we will continue to expand what we do in those areas. The addition of Beats will make our incredible iTunes lineup even better, extending the emotional connection our customers have with music.” The personalized, curated Beats experience Cook discusses here complements iTunes’ more one-size-fits-all approach. While iTunes would feature new and upcoming artists on its home page, most users likely came to the store with an intent for what they were going to spend their money on. Since each additional stream is free on Beats, users can explore and experiment more. That makes curation and personalization like its “Just For You” homescreen more important since users need guidance. Again, this lays out a highly functional dichotomy where more traditional music listeners stuck in their preferences can use iTunes, while more open-minded users willing to discover new artists and styles can find a home on Beats. What will Apple do with Beats? As Cook tells it’s all about what they can build together in the future. In the meantime, though, he says “Financially, it’s great, because even in the short term there are synergies. Using Apple’s global footprint, there’s hitting the gas on the subscription service…” And later he notes “We could build just about anything that you could dream of. But that’s not the question. The thing that Beats provides us is a head start.” Now the question will be whether Beats’ price remains the same at $9.99 a month, or if Apple can convince the labels to let it lower the price to make it more accessible. Then we’ll see if Apple’s elegance and Beats’ street cred can combine to convince the world that the entire history of recorded music is worth a few bucks a month. |
Samsung’s Health Event Was All Hype, No Substance | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Samsung’s “Voice of the Body” event held earlier today had seemingly everything Samsung could squeeze out the door before Apple’s . A cool-looking watch that can collect multiple data points on your health? Check. Software for storing that data? Check. Promises that partners will do all kinds of innovative stuff with said hardware/software? Check. Beyond Samsung’s hype though, there’s nothing for consumers to actually get excited about. The SIMBand is a reference device, a proof of concept. Maybe they were fibbing a bit, and plan on bringing the device to market themselves at a later date — the company already has multiple smartwatch platforms competing with each other on the market, so they could just be waiting for one or two of them to fail. But wait! Wasn’t that live demo of the watch awesome? You could see several pieces of data instantly collected and presented in a pretty interface. True — except that’s a fairly useless feature. The point of these devices is to aggregate a ton of data and present users with easy to understand trends and recommendations. After all, if your heart rate is up, you can feel it. But if your heart rate is consistently higher than usual that might be something to keep an eye on. And when it comes to the software for looking at that kind of information that Samsung showed off today, there wasn’t much that we haven’t seen before. Here’s what Samsung demonstrated during the event today: And here’s a screenshot of the Body IQ web app from , the health wearable startup : If Samsung really wanted to take the air from beneath Apple’s wings, it needed to show us something that stands out from the crowd. Instead, it showed off a device that doesn’t do much we can’t already do with current wearables that might never come to market, although it does them in a prettier way (which gets points from some consumers and members of the press.) The same can be said about the software that debuted today. Perhaps the biggest blow against what Samsung showed us today is that the University of California San Francisco researcher on stage couldn’t give a great reason for this to exist today, instead falling back on platitudes of “innovation” that could be summed up as “Silicon Valley will find something cool to do with this… eventually”: If Tim Cook and Co. really do announce Healthbook next week (which they could still decide not to do), you can bet that Apple has already come up with actual use cases for their new software. That’s why people are excited for whatever it might be, and it’s something Samsung can’t just copy. |
The Most Important Facts From Mary Meeker’s 2014 Internet Trends Report | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker’s data dumps have become a highly anticipated event in the tech industry, as her research helps everyone else level up. The only problem is the is 164 slides of dense data, so we’ve broken it down into a digestible summary of the most important findings. |
WePay Withholds Funds From Sick Woman Due To Offer Of Porn For Donations | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 17 | Should credit card processors and crowdfunding sites be able to deny funds to adult entertainers and sex workers? That’s the question at the heart of an unfortunate situation where donated medical funds are being withheld from a sick woman. Legal and moral issues often entangle to facilitate discrimination against those who earn a living in adult work, or at least complicate their lives in ways that induce hardship. Here’s what’s happened, according to and reporting by . Adult entertainer Eden Alexander had an allergic reaction to a medication, causing her to need serious medical care. In Alexander’s account, as stemming from hard drug use, due to her occupation, and did not give her proper treatment, which made her even sicker. Alexander then set up Crowdfunding campaign for her medical bills on GiveForward (now removed), which processes payments with WePay. Unfortunately, one of the campaign’s supporters tweeted offering nude pictures in exchange for donations to Alexander’s campaign, and Alexander retweeted the offer. That retweet was deemed to violate , which states “you will not accept payments or use the Service in connection with the following activities, items or services: Adult or adult-related services, including escort services, adult massage, or other adult-entertainment services; Adult or adult-related content, including performers or “cam girls”; and Obscene or pornographic items.” The list of prohibited uses of WePay is long and many items are open to broad interpretation, including the site’s own origin story. WePay subsequently withheld some of the funds donated to Alexander and eventually had her GiveForward page shut down. This isn’t the first time its enforced its TOS against people in the sex industry who were trying to use the service innocently. Bay Area sex worker had funds raised on Fundly for a trip to the Feminist Porn Awards frozen by WePay for violating its terms. , and supporters to shame WePay for its actions. Alexander claimed she was unaware her retweet would violate the service’s terms. WePay eventually responded with a explaining that it released donations made to Alexander from May 11th to 14th. A WePay representative wrote “WePay is extremely empathetic to what Eden Alexander is facing and her hardship is unfathomable. We are truly sorry that the rules around payment processing are limiting and force us to make tough decisions.” Alexander had a new crowd funding campaign set up on Crowdtilt, which remains live. We reached out to WePay CEO Bill Clerico, who tells me the donations from after May 14th were refunded to the donors. As for why its TOS bars adult services and why it had to enforce them, Clerico wrote: “WePay faces tremendous scrutiny from its partners & card networks around the enforcement of policy, especially when it comes to adult content. We must enforce these policies or we face hefty fines or the risk of shutdown for the many hundreds of thousands of merchants on our service. We’re incredibly sorry that these policies added to the difficulties that Eden is facing. We offered to help her setup a new campaign that complied with our policies, but I believe that her friends chose to work with another company instead. We continue to stand by to help if Eden would like to work with us further, and we are reviewing both our Terms of Service & account shutdown process to see how we can avoid situations like this in the future.” Clerico also tweeted: I followed up asking whether the partner and card processor stances come from legal or moral grounds. Clerico responded “I don’t think I can speculate on why they’ve made that decision, but I do know that it is a relatively common requirement in the industry. As to why WePay prohibits it, it’s because we are contractually required to.” WePay has so far absorbed the majority of the backlash from this situation. It failed to go to bat against its partners on behalf of Alexander, which perhaps it should have. But if it had, it could have suffered shutdowns that would impact other users raising money for worthy causes. Blame might also be properly placed on WePay’s partners who refuse to accommodate adult-related money transfers. Either they’ve made a deplorable moral judgement against workers in the adult industry, or they’re following along with society’s stigma against sex workers that has wormed its way into our laws. related to adult entertainers on several occasions and threaten to break integrations with sites that work with them. prohibits “the sale of…pornographic items”, it’s important to note. That means it too may have had to cancel Alexander’s campaign if she retweeted offers of nude photos for contributions. When asked what Crowdtilt would have done, CEO James Beshara said “ It’s understandable why people would want to go after WePay. The company surely could have handled the issue with more care, like how when PayPal forced it to remove the payment processor’s integration from adult-related pages. And WePay seems to have learned little from a previous time it froze funds of a sex worker. This situation, like many in the new frontiers opened up by the Internet — exposes many grey areas: Are retweets endorsements? And do legal obligations trump moral ones? At the very least, it should teach companies that enforcing terms of service shouldn’t be done robotically.It might not always be scalable, but we must remain humane in how we treat each other, even online. |
The End Of The Acqui-Hire? | Ben Narasin | 2,014 | 5 | 17 | A few years ago, before seed investing was as well defined as it now is, I co-hosted a bean bag sitting circle at The Lobby on the topic of “the seed round.” While I assumed the topic would appeal primarily to founders thinking about their next startups, we had a surprising number of industry players — the large monolithic cash hoarder and sizzle brands that buy so many startups, early and late. Their comments on seed investing ran to “you seed guys should fund more companies, because even if they don’t work out we’re going to buy them and you’re going to get your money back.” As an institutional seed investor, when I fund a company, the decision is heavily, but not exclusively, weighted toward the team. Reality has taught me I need five things: people, people, people, a great idea and a huge market if it works. The quality of the people behind the idea is paramount. I fund entrepreneurs I believe will travel the 10-year-plus path to outsize outcomes. But there have historically been opportunities for those whose journeys end in acquisitions by major players aimed at landing the top-tier talent, commonly known as acqui-hires by the beanbaggers at my session. Investors recover their money, and the talented team has a new career at a meaningfully elevated level from when they left the corporate world. On its face the concept seems logical — we fund the best and brightest, and with that money, and hopefully our help, they go on to become more knowledgeable and valuable, as they build an idea from nothing into a company, than they would have if they had spent another year on the job. We empower great people to become even greater. So, when their ideas don’t work out, the concept of that time and upgrading of talent being compensated through an acqui-hire that pays back investors and rewards the founders with new elevated roles seems like an all-around win — and it was for some time in some cases (though I don’t know a single seed investor I respect that would fund someone with that intention in mind). The problem is that for all the encouragement to “fund more startups,” when the time comes to buy these teams, the big buyers try to push the bulk of the economics into the retention programs for the team instead of equally across the equity holders in the company. Their attitude is often forget the investors, pay them the minimum to keep them from blocking the deal, and put everything, or almost everything, into a vesting schedule and/or “signing bonuses” for the team. The worst deals are the ones where the founders put up with these shenanigans, and get the minimum the company will pay. The best deals, in total consideration, come from the founders that fight the good fight and demand that the entire company be paid equitably, and the investors be treated well and get a return. The founder’s requirement forces a higher price and a more equitable distribution, and makes them more in the end, as well. In addition to this consistent, and I’d argue immoral or at least unethical, practice, acquisitions focused on teams have taken an even darker turn. Some acquirers now feel no need to even pay investors the minimum to pay back their investment. Apparently the time and education the money provided is no longer a factor. We are no longer a source of value add, but a source of cost to be avoided. A company I invested in recently received a term sheet to get “acquired” by a large portal. There were seven people on the team, all engineers or UI/UX designers — critical jobs for any acquirer — and all had gone through multiple acquisition interviews. The portal wanted them all. The amount they were willing to pay beyond salaries and stock to those hired? About 10 cents on the dollar invested. They weren’t even willing to pay as much to the company or investors as they would have even to a recruiting firm to gain the same people. So after spending over a year, every week, trying to help the entrepreneurs grow their business and their abilities along the way, we’d receive less than a recruiting service that merely introduced the same level people in exchange for 30 percent of their first-year salary. I want the best for all my entrepreneurs. Success in their startup is my primary goal for them, but if that doesn’t happen I want them to find a home and a promising path. But I believe that acquisitions should be equitable across the entire extended team, both of founders and investors. It’s not that investors should come first, but at a minimum they should be treated equally and equitably in the acquisition economics. And if the buyer is merely hiring the team, assuming a cost in line with the cost of recruiting would seem a more logical floor than an amount both insulting and nonsensical. Talent is a rare and precious commodity in Silicon Valley, and the big players have an insatiable need for it. If they want the support of the seed investing ecosystem to feed that talent to them when the time comes, they should make sure we have a desire to do so, as we are more likely to favor those that do or our own portfolio companies. They’re hiring, too. |
For Aspiring Female Engineers, A Square Meal Of Code | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 5 | 17 | school student Michelle Nguyen had all but given up her hope of becoming an engineer. A Senior at Mission High School in San Francisco (which did not offer a computer science class), she thought she had to be smarter, more privileged, and be a male to be successful in computer science. “I thought I had to be a guy to be an engineer,” she told me as she was siting in the Square offices nearby her home in the Tenderloin, only days away from taking the AP Computer Science test. But Nguyen still held some small hope for being part of this world — she would read publications online that gave her an inside view into technology. She was reading TechCrunch last fall when she came across an about payments company Square’s High School Code Camp, a 9-month long program that taught students from local San Francisco high schools how to program in Java; and gave them the opportunity to take the AP CS exam in May. “I knew I had to look beyond what I was offered at [high] school to get what I wanted,” she told me. Susan Tham, whose school Raoul Wallenberg Traditional High School ,did offer an AP computer science course soon found herself to be the only girl left standing. Out of a group of 30 or so students, only 4 girls enrolled in the AP Computer Science class at her school, and the three other girls quickly quit the class because of the challenge and intimidation. Tham herself just stayed in the class not because she had dreams of being a programmer but because she actually enjoyed coding and was good at it. In fact, she taught herself how to code initially by taking classes on Udacity. “It was easy to learn how to code. I love the instant feedback,” she told me. Her CS teacher saw her potential and recommended she apply to Square’s program, though Tham says she was so surprised when she was admitted — she never thought she would have been chosen. For Tham, Code Camp taught her that she could actually make a career out of being a software engineer. And that this wouldn’t mean working in a tan cubicle for a boring company. She’ll be attending UC Irvine this fall for Computer Science. Through my conversations with the girls, it became evident that part of what made Square’s Code Camp so successful is that it gives these girls real-world exposure to what being an engineer at a startup looks like. Everything that they had ever known about working in tech came from movies and TV — a boring sea of cubicles, not the wide open spaces and collaborative environments favored by so many Silicon Valley startups now. “It was really cool to see that I could be working in an open space, not just in a cubicle, dreading my work,” said Nguyen. The students met twice a week from October through May, for two hours at a time at Square’s headquarters. Classes would begin with a short lecture and then dove straight into hands-on coding work. Every fourth week was Hack Week, where they applied the concepts they learned to build a working demo of a feature or product. The computer science curriculum was created (and taught) by Square engineers. And non-technical Square employees were given the chance to pair up with these students and learn how to code alongside them. Teodora Caneva, a senior at Balboa High School, and a Code Camp participant, started learning about coding on Codacademy but was intimidated about taking a computer science course at school because “it was all boys.” Her teacher knew of the Square initiative and encouraged her to apply. Like Nguyen and Tham, she will also be studying computer science at SF State this Fall. Vanessa Slavich, who leads Square’s talent programs and the Code Camp, explains that Square wanted to tackle the problem of getting more women into engineering, and initially started with a similar program at the college level, which is a four-day immersion program developed to inspire women engineering students to pursue a career in computer science after college. But she quickly realized that there also needed to be something at the high school level that encouraged girls to go into college with an interest in CS. But the AP Computer Science class, which is often the gateway for both men and women to go into CS in college, is only offered at a handful of schools in the Bay Area. In fact Sarah Friar, CFO of Square who also has a masters in engineering, shared some staggering statistics: only of U.S. high schools offer AP Computer Science, and , 19 percent number of the students who take that class are women. Those women who do take the AP Comp Sci class to go on and major in computer science in college. So the goal of taking AP exam, and the longer time frame of learning (8 months), helped give Square’s high school program structure. Because the class was collaborative and interactive, the learning process was more accessible, less intimidating and actually fun, she explains. All the girls were paired with a mentor at Square who helped them think through problems, guide them in their education, and even college plans. Square also held events with women in the industry where the girls could meet other women and role models who had pursued engineering as a career. Just seeing other women in these roles was a big inspiration for Nguyen, Tham, and others in the program. As Nguyen mentioned above, she believed being a female would be a disadvantage in a career in computer science. As Tham explains, “It’s so easy to get intimidated by this industry because it is so male-dominated.” “When people say engineer, I think of men,” Caneva told me. Slavich says that part of the education is also around making these girls aware of that misconception, and assuring them that they can succeed in what is, for now, a male-dominated world. One of Square’s software engineers, Kat Hawthorne, helped design the curriculum of the program, and actually graduated from the first Square College Code Camp for women, said she wished she had been able to attend this program in high school. She didn’t start coding until her junior year of college, but once she started she was hooked. She found out about the Code Camp online, and after attending knew she wanted to be an engineer. Hawthorne applied for a job at Square right out of college, and is now on the engineering team working on Square Market. Beyond just being prepared to take the test, these girls actually learned to expand their coding skills, and create. Tham says that she learned about pseudocode, and she was able to figure out how to actually organize her code. Nguyen created her own program, a game, and derived confidence from the fact that she could actually create something herself. Square’s code camp isn’t the only program to inspire High School girls to begin to code. , , and are attempting to give young women the opportunity to learn and discover the art and science of coding. There’s no doubt that we need more initiatives, especially at the local level. Square is tackling the issue in SF, and plans to have a another class next year, but the hope is that technology companies in SF, and other cities launch their how high school code camps for young women. One day, gender will be a non-factor in career choice. But we are still a far way from that. And until that day, we need more programs like Square’s Code Camp and Girls Who Code. I began this piece with Nguyen’s inspiring story, and I will leave you with another inspiring story from a past generation. In 1967, 25-year-old Damyanti Gupta immigrated to Detroit with one goal—to be an Engineer at Ford Motor Company. But there were no female engineers at the company. When a hiring executive flatly told her that “we don’t have any women on staff”, she quickly replied “if you don’t hire me, then you won’t have that benefit.” A few weeks later, Damyanti, who is my mother-in-law, was hired as Ford’s first-ever female engineer. She went on to stay at Ford for 35 years until she retired. Now that I have a daughter, I know she will find motivation in her grandmother’s story, but I am also hopeful that she will grow up hearing many more stories from young women like Nguyen, Tham, and Caneva, who have been so courageous to share their own fears in order to help inspire others to take their journey. |
Cue Is A Connected Lab-In-A-Box For On-Demand Health Testing At Home | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 5 | 17 | The quantified self and quantified health trends frequently overlap — but few startups are quite as tightly screwed into that sticking place as . Not yet anyway. This San Diego-based startup, which was founded back in 2009 in the midst of the swine flu peak and has attracted more than $1 million in backing from an undisclosed U.S. angel investor, is building a hybrid electronic-mechanical-chemical connected device that it says will enable people to quantify their health at a molecular level. And, with the help of the corresponding smartphone app, use the resulting data to tweak their lifestyle for the better — whether that’s to identify the most fertile times in their cycle to help them try for a baby. Or push their body to recover faster after a particularly punishing workout. Or identify a vitamin deficiency and tweak their diet to compensate. The scenario they sketch for Cue is that people are going to be able to run their own ‘before and after’ experiments at home to quantify whether a particular fitness routine or diet is actually having a beneficial result on their own body. There’s no external lab in this diagnostic loop requiring the user to send off samples. Rather the Cue device itself is the lab, and it lives at home — connecting to your smartphone by Bluetooth to feed data into the Cue app. Cue’s makers dub it a “deep health tracker” — since it’s actually tracking the user’s health on a molecular level, rather than more remotely monitoring signals like heart rate or blood pressure. The idea for Cue came after the founders saw how many people were flooding the healthcare system wanting to know whether they had swine flu or not. “All these people were seeking this one piece of information, and we thought that there had to be a much simpler way for people to find out the information without having to stand in a huge emergency room line or wait for a doctor’s appointment,” co-founder Ayub Khattak tells TechCrunch. “As we developed the technology, we saw that it was highly adaptable to other diagnostic tests run on and realized that there are other health indicators that people might want to have on demand access to, especially related to health and wellness as people seem to have an innate hunger for information about their body and their health.” So how exactly does Cue work — or rather, what exactly is it doing? “We’ve used some time tested basics, so the things that you find in the lab right now — in particular antibody based, very specific targeting of molecules,” explains Khattak. “That’s how tests are run today at the lab. What we’ve done is we’ve taken that concept — that fundamental principle — and we’ve used biosensors and microfluidics to make it so that we can execute those basics in a very compact, very automated way. “So what we did is we developed the microfluid technology and the biosensor technology and integrated those together to execute those fundamentals.” “What the technology is doing is converting a biological sample to an electrical signal or digital result, which then we can take from our device, Cue, and Bluetooth over to the smartphone,” adds Cue’s other co-founder, Clint Sever, breaking the process down further. “This is a fundamental principle of electrochemistry.” “Another way of saying that is we input a biological sample, it reacts with our chemistry to create an electrical signal which we then take in from our sensor on the cartridge and then that’s now our electrical signal that we translated to a digital result — and then that’s Bluetoothed over to the phone,” adds Khattak. The pair says the main innovations allowing them to squeeze a lab into a connected cube that’s (relatively) affordably priced are in the area of thermoplastics and fluid handling/microfluidics. “We’re able to leverage really low cost plastic manufacture,” says Sever. “And then also on the biosensor side we’re able to use stuff that’s already in huge scale in the industry today. And so because of that we’re able to basically combine those elements into a working unit that packages all those fundamentals into a very inexpensive cartridge that’s disposable. “That’s something that’s never existed before — the scale of the components that we’re able to execute with. And then also the smartphone; just the trend of the smartphone existing and it being such a hub of people’s information and people being comfortable with that. And people putting in different types of data into that so that we can have that context.” The samples from which Cue draws data — either blood, saliva or nasal swabs, depending on what the user wants to track — are introduced into the device via collection wands, which are inserted into different cartridges, again based on the type of analysis the user wants to perform. If you want to tracking fertility it’s a different cartridge to monitoring inflammation, and so on. The cartridge with the sample wand is then inserted into Cue so the sample can be analyzed and the data sent on to the Cue app. In the case of the blood sample, required for three of the tests (fertility, inflammation and vitamin D), the collection wand includes a tiny lancet to pierce their skin so the user can harvest a droplet of blood for the test — much like a glucose meter. There are five initial cartridges for Cue: flu, fertility, testosterone (worth tracking because it has a role in muscle production), Vitamin D and inflammation — but its makers say their the aim is to continue expanding what the system will be able to monitor in future. Albeit, they don’t want to tip their cards on exactly what else is on their roadmap at this early point. “The ultimate vision is anything you can find in a lab today you’re able to access very easily in your own home through Cue,” says Khattak. “Because of the way we designed it we can plug in different targets for different target molecules into the system and you don’t have to redesign the entire system to accommodate that — you just add that new updated chemistry to the same hardware architecture and you’re able to run multiple different types of analysis on Cue,” adds Sever. The Cue itself is on pre-order currently, and isn’t due to ship until the first half of 2015 — so everything is vision at this point, although they’ve built working prototypes that they’re confident to take into production. And they’re in the process of gaining FDA clearance. Returning to the specifics of what the first iteration of the device will be able to monitor, each health condition is being tracked by the identification of a specific molecule. “With the flu virus we actually look at a protein that’s on the virus itself, actually inside the virus itself. That’s how we do flu. For testosterone there are free testosterone molecules floating around the saliva and serum and that’s what we collect, in the saliva actually. And then with fertility there’s a hormone — it’s called luteinizing hormone — that we can quantify there as well, in the blood,” says Khattak, who brings a background in biochemistry — including three years in a biochemistry lab at UCLA — to the startup. “And then with Vitamin D it’s a molecule called 25 OH D: 25 hydroxy D3. That is the molecule that we measure from your blood. And the last one is inflammation — inflammation is a systemic response, a lot of things are involved with it, but there’s one marker in particular in particular that is very effective at tracking overall inflammation and that’s called HSCRP. It’s high sensitivity CRP — C-Reactive Protein. And that’s used very often for gauging inflammation from medical professionals.” Giving an example of why tracking inflammation might be useful, Sever suggests a fitness enthusiast who has been for a particularly long run could use Cue to track how their body recovers from that punishing workout session, and also take steps to speed up recovery time. “[When you’ve been running] there’s a lot of pressure on your joints, there’s a lot of demand on your muscles and your tendons and your ligaments, and all of that — your body actually responds to that abuse and it generates this protein, called C-Reactive Protein,” he says. “The more of that protein that there is generally, that indicates a higher level of response to that injury, and over time your body heals itself — and that protein level drops, so you can see how the response to that exercise drops over time so you can measure recovery and you can see what foods potentially can boost that or speed up that recovery time. “We’ve seen studies that show foods rich in omega 3s like wild caught salmon and green vegetables, those lower that recovery time by helping your body recover and heal itself faster.” “We actually used our technology and our product to measure these things — inflammation for instance — in ourselves over a 30-day period,” adds Khattak. “We would go out, exercise for instance and the inflammation response would completely vary depending on how much you exercised — was it a moderate walk or a really hard core weight lifting session. “The weight lifting session your inflammation would spike dramatically — because you were ripping up your muscles and you need some time to heal. So it’s just really interesting to see how your body responds at this really deep, molecular level. And then you’re able to take steps to put out that fire. And that’s what’s really fascinating — we were able to test foods and see how they were able to bring that inflammation down.” Beyond fitness recovery, inflammation is also a strong indicator of long term heart health, according to Khattak. “It’s way better than cholesterol. A heightened state of inflammation over a long period of time is a very bad sign for your cardiovascular health. So, by tracking it, you have a very good way of monitoring your long term heart health and taking steps to improve it.” How accurate is the data generated by Cue? The pair claim it’s extremely robust, thanks to the level of automation in the analysis process. “One of the reasons we’re able to do what we do is that we automate the entire process and in automating the process we remove 99% of the human error that actually introduces variability into traditional laboratory tests,” says Sever. “And so what we’ve seen is that we are either at the same level of performance as traditional laboratory testing and in some cases better, because of this automation in the entire process.” The Cue device will ultimately retail for circa $300, but at the time of writing was being offered at half price for the first thousand pre-orders. It’s now up to $199 on pre-order. For that buyers get a Cue, five cartridges and five sample wands. Early demand for the product has not been focused on the U.S. but has been global in nature, according to the founders. Cue’s business model will focus on selling the hardware units, with selling individual cartridges for ongoing sample-taking as its recurring revenue model — either by users buying batches of cartridges as and when they need them, or paying for a regular supply via subscription. Cartridges will cost $30 for a three pack of flu tests, or $20 for a five pack of any of the other tests. The data interpretation and visualization aspect of the business — done via the Cue app — is not something it will charge for. The founders say they see potential to integrate Cue with other less ‘deep’ health tracker services and gizmos — such as wearables — to pull in more user data to flesh out the context around a particular sample. So, for example, a measurement of inflammation taken via Cue could be tallied with data from a user’s sports tracker bangle to give a more holistic view of cause and effect. Food tracking can also be incorporated into the mix to see how different diets expedite or impede recovery — indeed they intend to provide their own food logging interface to facilitate that aspect of health tracking. “Right now we can access the M7 co-processor on the iPhone, and then obviously there’s the rumoured iWatch and there’s other data that you get from other activity trackers as well. Eventually we think that all those data streams will be relatively commoditized — so we’ll be able to tap into any of them,” says Sever. “The idea then is that we can really build a context for you.” The possibilities for quantified health/self tracking are clearly huge — although there is also a correspondingly large risk that users might be led to misinterpret readings, and tweak their lifestyle in ways that may not be as beneficial as they hope. Getting that balance right is going to be a key challenge for personal health focused biotech startups like Cue. As any scientist will tell you, correlation does not imply causation — yet businesses are being built on the notion that it’s possible to isolate one health signal and use it as a jumping off point to ‘hack’ your personal biology by tweaking your lifestyle. Another startup in this emergent biotech space that springs to mind is , which last year took to Indiegogo to raise money for a business based on analyzing users’ blood samples to track DNA damage. The notion of being able to identify particular lifestyle factors as being the culprit for DNA damage is pretty controversial. Cue’s premise is at least more targeted — since it’s focusing on specific use-cases, such as whether the user has flu or not, and identifying a single biological marker that can track each one. So it will be hoping to minimize any criticism about its product being potentially misleading. Still, there’s little doubt that a product which invites people to analyze partial health data and draw conclusions from it will invoke some controversy about the risks of steering people in certain directions based on a promise of beneficial health outcomes. As another saying goes, a little learning can be a dangerous thing. “One of the important philosophies of the product is the idea that we make this information accessible. So that means that we don’t want you to have to be a scientist to use it from the standpoint of the mechanics of operating the test, but also interpreting and understanding what that result means for your body, and what you should do because of it,” said Sever, discussing how Cue can bridge the gap between the specialist science its performing and the mainstream consumer it’s targeting. “In general that’s definitely a concern but also, at the same time, that concern also existed for the pregnancy test. When it was first introduced in the 70s and early 80s what happened was the medical community, essentially, was very against women being able to test for pregnancy in the home because what they said was that it would be worse to know this answer because a women wouldn’t know what to do with it, and she would have to go to the doctor anyway so why not just do it at the doctor’s office than have her be concerned about what’s happening in her body.” “It’s a fundamental reaction to anything new,” he adds. “Now, obviously, every woman would use a pregnancy test if there’s a suspected pregnancy or there’s any question about it. It’s become so obvious and intuitive. In the same way we think that being able to track and quantify different types of markers in your body is going to be a very fundamentally obvious thing in the near future… The best we can do is to give you really strong suggestions and recommendations as to what to do in certain conditions.” The first focus for Cue is squarely on interested consumers who want to track and quantify aspects of their personal health, since that’s the big disruption here: letting non-scientists deep dive into their molecular biology. But its makers do also see future potential — albeit “eventually” — for their technology to grow into the b2b space too, with other quantifying products designed for healthcare professionals. “We both think that the big idea and the big opportunity is getting this information into the hands of consumers because that’s where it has the most impact right now, today,” says Sever, adding: “This is an incredible shift in the way that people manage their health. “You’ve never been able to have this kind of health information on demand and then be able to connect it to people and physicians at will via your smartphone. It’s this incredible connection of your body to your network and the people in your network that we’ve never seen before.” |
Gillmor Gang: Fits and Starts | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 5 | 17 | The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — take a walk on the wild side as The New York Times publishes all the news that fits. Except, that is, the news about itself. The Twitterverse is clogged with leaked Innovation reports, business model Kremlin Wall analysis, and newsroom disappearances galore. For the record, we also stop in for another revealing of the Beats buys Apple story, even as there’s still doubt the deal will even go down. Whether it’s music or TV or eyes, ears, nose, and throat, our media orifices are up for grabs. Did I forget mention fragmentions? Now back to our movie — Gray Lady Down. @stevegillmor, @borthwick, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
With A Revamped Website, Geek Culture Hub Nerdist Enters “Phase Two” | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 17 | When I got on the phone with the team at to talk about the geek culture site’s recent redesign, I had a confession to make — even though I’m a regular listener to the Nerdist podcast, and I’ve watched , I’d only been to the actual website … Once? Twice? My experience might not be typical, but it’s one illustration of how Nerdist fans aren’t necessarily focused on the main website. Here’s another: Nerdist.com reached a high of 2 million unique visitors in the last month, while the flagship Nerdist Podcast supposedly sees 5 million monthly downloads. Editor in Chief Brian Walton acknowledged that the audience is a bit fragmented, and beyond the by now switch to responsive design (allowing the site to adjust to any size screen, including smartphones and tablets), the redesign was also aimed at “bringing all the good stuff … to one roof.” He added, “Nerdist.com is going to be the place where, as a brand, we move forward.” For example, he said that Nerdist will continue to run videos on its YouTube channel, but we’ll start seeing more exclusive video content on Nerdist.com. The company was founded in 2008 by comedian Chris Hardwick, whose combination of funniness and geekiness seemed to position him perfectly for the explosion of interest in science fiction, comic books, and other elements of geek culture. (Hardwick has become at San Diego Comic Con’s .) Nerdist was (which is behind the new movie, among many other films) in 2012, with the promise that it would continue to operate as “an autonomous editorial brand.” Seth Laderman, Nerdist’s senior vice president of content and operations, the website redesign kicks off “phase two” for the company (yes, ), which will also involve adding more social features to the website. It won’t turn Nerdist into a full-blown social network, he said, but given Nerdist’s emphasis on community, it makes sense to create more ways for visitors to interact with each other. Another big aim in “phase two” is to help the non-Chris Hardwick members of editorial team step further into the limelight, not just by filing regular news stories but also featuring more heavily in the podcasts and videos. “It’s very rewarding to see the people that work here get recognition, but it’s also is a bit of a situation where fans will still say, ‘Congratulations, Chris, really good article!'” Walton added. “You deal with it, but you know, that’s because Chris is a damn good ambassador. We’re naturally creating a more distinct voice, and Chris has been nothing but supportive about it.” Walton went to explain the team dynamics with an elaborate Voltron analogy that, frankly, went over my head. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7cGOdipg5g&w=560&h=315] |
The Western Twitterer’s Burden | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 5 | 17 | Sigh. Here we go again. The eyes of the world turn to something awful happening in a remote corner of Africa, and what feels like half of the Western population immediately rushes to proudly embarrass itself on social media everywhere. On the Internet, at least, #BringBackOurGirls is little more than #Kony2012 reloaded. It’s condescending, it’s patronizing, it’s infantilizing, and it’s dumb. As my friend Gavin Chait puts it, in this : I’m trying to imagine under what circumstances it would be acceptable for Samantha Cameron, the wife of British Prime Minister David Cameron, to appear on the front page of every major news service holding a cardboard sign saying #PrayforSandyHook … Yet, somehow, it’s noble when Michelle Obama holds up a sign saying #BringBackOurGirls? … When Kim Kardashian takes up your cause, you know you’ve hit rock bottom. He quotes Jumoke Balogun in : Simple question. Are you Nigerian? Do you have constitutional rights accorded to Nigerians to participate in their democratic process? If not, I have news for you. You can’t do anything about the girls missing in Nigeria. You can’t. Your insistence on urging American power, specifically American military power, to address this issue will ultimately hurt the people of Nigeria. Facebook and Twitter are outraged: a berserk group of Islamic madmen named Boko Haram, which means “Western Education Is A Sin,” kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school, and now must be hunted down by military forces, preferably of the American or British variety! Except. Um. “Boko Haram” is , . They have , and it seems , rather than some kind of dramatic military raid. What’s more, Nigerian security forces have a long history of the region in which they operate, including, apparently, . As a Nigerian governor : “When you burn down shops and massacre civilians, you are pushing them to join the camp of Boko Haram”. Or as the Defense Department’s principal director for African affairs : Finding [Nigerian military] units that have not been involved in gross violations of human rights has been a “persistent and very troubling limitation” See also this from Foreign Policy: If only Twitter could save Nigeria's stolen schoolgirls. Latest cartoon from — Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) In what kind of hopeless basket case of a nation could this be happening? So glad you asked. Did you know that Nigeria’s economy has been growing at a remarkable 7% per year for the past decade, and was recently ? And did you know that is significantly larger than Russia’s, and that Nigerians has a smartphone? I realize that the Internet is where nuance goes to die, but come on, people, can you at least begin to consider the possibility that the situation is a more complex than your social media streams made it sound? (Meanwhile, of course, the American press are mostly desperately trying to spin this as an vs. issue, as that’s the only prism through which they know how to look at the world. This is than #BringBackOurGirls is in the first place. Sigh squared.) Social media should help to open minds, but all too often instead it closes them. Westerners are presented with a cartoonish black-and-white version story like this, which jibes nicely with their preexisting belief that all of Africa is a cauldron of disaster, blood and bullets; then they share it, to help reinforce that mindset among their friends and family … and the vicious spiral of ignorance continues, while all along the real story is so much more complex and nuanced (and, in the case of Africa as a whole, interesting and optimistic) than hashtag activism can possibly admit. Two years ago, outraged by Kony 2012, I wrote a piece here entitled “ ” The sad thing is that I could have repurposed that piece almost paragraph-by-paragraph here. So I’ll end by quoting myself at some length, while marveling at how little has changed. I should probably just keep it cued up for the next time this happens: Raise your hands: who here seriously thinks the Special Forces will be any more effective because Taylor Swift, Diddy, Rihanna, and Zooey Deschanel are tweeting their moral support? Exactly how deluded do you have to be to think that “public awareness” will solve a grim and deadly military problem? Remember a few years ago when the Twittersphere got all irate about Iran’s disputed election, and everyone set their location to Tehran to “help the resistance,” as if a posse of faraway microbloggers might help take down a totalitarian government? Have we learned nothing? Don’t get me wrong. I’ve said time and time again that technology, especially social media, can overthrow governments and change the world in fundamental ways. But only if it’s synchronized with actual on-the-ground action. What good is “public awareness” going to do to hunt down a gang of crazed psychopaths wandering around one of the last effectively lawless regions in the world? And that’s without even beginning to consider the whole insulting, paternalistic “Africans are helpless and doomed, as ever! Only we rich Americans and Europeans can save them!” subtext. (Meanwhile, in the real world, over the last decade, six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa.) But if all this still somehow strikes a colonial chord in your heart, and you feel like you need to do something — do me a favor? Give to Doctors Without Borders, who go to the toughest, grimmest places in the world, where they do astonishing, lifesaving disaster-relief work, with their eyes wide open to the limitations and compromises of their context. And please don’t pretend that “raising public awareness” has anything to do with actual solutions. |
Fjuul Activity Tracker App Measures Exercise Intensity, Not Just Steps | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 5 | 10 | Hardware fitness trackers are wrapped around the wrists of tech luminaries. Rumours continue to swirl about . Facebook acquired Finnish fitness and activity tracker app Moves . The emergent quantified self/fitness tracking movement is gunning to go mainstream — and that means a whole lot more personal tracking services are going to push into what is already a crowded (and intentionally sweaty) space. is another Finnish startup tackling activity tracking with an iOS app aiming for mainstream users. Its app (pronounced ‘fuel’) has attracted €400,000 ($550,000) in funding thus far, with investment coming from Finland’s and local public funding agency, . The startup launched v1 of its app last July to “learn and refine” — but is just now doing a full global launch with v2 of Fjuul. The is priced at $2.99/£1.99/€2.69. The main difference between Fjuul and Moves is that instead of just tracking movements, such as steps, Fjuul calculates the intensity of the activity too — to help it generate an overall score (called ‘Fjuul Points’) which takes multiple types of varying activity into account. This means users are given a single overarching metric to evaluate how much exercise they really got, rather than just approximating their fitness by measuring overall steps. The Fjuul Points metric is fed by multiple types of locomotive activities — with the aim of making activity tracking simpler and also motivating its user by allowing different types of activities to count as exercise (and show up in the data). The app does also display steps taken and calories burned, but the focus is on Fjuul earned. How exactly does it work? Fjuul does not rely on additional hardware to recognise and track movements — so there’s no wearable wristband — but rather makes use of sensors already in the iPhone, coupled with its own algorithms (it’s not reliant on the M7 chip either, but works on all iPhones). Specifically it says it’s looking at accelerometer, sensor and contextual location data to capture locomotive/continuous movements. It’s also not relying on GPS data to calculate speed/intensity — which means that just sitting on a moving train with your iPhone in your pocket won’t result in gaining lots of unearned Fjuul Points. (Not constantly drawing on GPS also helps the app reduce battery drain.) Examples of casual activities that can contribute to your overall Fjuul Points include shopping, gardening, dancing and walking — as well as more obvious exercise such as running or jogging on a treadmill. The startup concedes there may be a little ‘noise’ generated in the captured motion data during the day, such as if you’re taking a bumpy train ride, but claims this will be a marginal addition to overall activity tracked. “You will get points for bike rides (and steps for that sake) and the energy might be a bit lower (calories) compared to heart rate/GPS tracking,” it tells TechCrunch when asked about the types of activities that can and can’t be tracked by Fjuul. “Overlapping movements, such as rowing etc Fjuul doesn’t capture. The app captures… casual activities which represent in our view 80% of things people do.” The app runs in the background, continuously capturing activity data to feed its analysis of your sedentary or not-so-sedentary lifestyle. Since it says it’s able to distinguish the type and intensity of motion it can send you a notification when your activity level is high enough to have what its website describes as “real impacts on your health”. The startup says the aim of the app is to make fitness and exercise “part of daily, casual life for regular people” — i.e. rather than being (another) app targeting the well-served fitness fanatic niche. So activities such as walking and housework absolutely show up in the data, encouraging users to be generally more active. After it’s analysed your daily activity, Fjuul will suggest personal goals and calculate how you can reach them. So, like all exercise regimes, it requires sticking with it for a while to get the most out of it. The startup told TechCrunch its algorithm needs 15 second intervals to approximate MET (metabolic equivalents of tasks) which gives it the energy cost for each activity. The phone also has to be in a pocket to represent body motion for the system to work best, rather than held in the hand. “The way Fjuul measures intensity is through the sensors of the device and elements like motion curve, frequency and more,” it noted. It uses the Mifflin St Jeor Equation to convert MET to calories based on the user’s personal profile (not just their weight). So, on sign up, the user is asked for their gender, weight, height and age data, which helps it customise calorie counts. I tested the app by going for a run at slightly below my usual pace, thanks to post- tiredness and jetlag. The result of this 3.7km run was ~35 Fjuul Points earned, and a top-line verdict that I was “pushing hard”. But the nature of the app makes it hard to single out a particular chunk of exercise, since the point is to measure overall activity throughout the day. Here’s the same run mapped below with data from my Nike GPS Sportwatch — which generated 982 NikeFuel units (Nike’s own propriety fitness tracker metric), and apparently accounted for 182 calories burned. (Nike’s system didn’t give me a verdict on how hard I was pushing — asking me to sync more runs to get a handle on that since I haven’t had time to go running for a week so it’s lacking the comparative data right now). It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison of course. The Sportwatch is aimed at existing runners seeking granular and specific data. While the Fjuul wants to encourage a far wider user group to shake their tail feather a bit more often to increase their general fitness level. Personally, I find the Fjuul app a bit opaque for my tastes. I’d rather be given access to more raw data so I can analyse it myself. But for a target user who needs motivation to be more active, having a simplified approach to fitness data capture and visualisation may be just the ticket to get them off the sofa. The app allows for basic fitness level goals and challenges, such as burning off the equivalent of a “burger”, to be set with a couple of taps. Despite its apparent focus on simplicity, it’s worth saying that the interface is minimalistic to the point of being cryptic at times — so there is certainly room for improvement there. It also has some irritatingly naggy notifications, which seem out of place for software that’s supposed to just run in the background. But these are likely teething issues to be worked out as Fjuul starts taking on more users, now that it’s opened its app up with a full global launch. Fjuul was founded in 2012 by Sascha Wischek who is currently studying for a PhD at Cambridge University. Wischek began the academic research that underpins Fjuul back in 2012. |
People Go Bananas Over MonkeyParking | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 5 | 10 | It was inevitable. In a place where you could pay for to come to you via mobile, to have empty parking spots eventually come to you via mobile. That is the premise behind Italian app , which allows you to “sell” your parking spot (or rather, the inside information about whether your parking spot will be available shortly) starting at $5. In a city where certain people consider the normalized fee for parking, one could argue that MonkeyParking is a much-needed innovation. In fact, I would try MonkeyParking out, like , just to be reporterly about it, but I no longer keep my car in San Francisco. The reason? After my entire street , I got tired of driving around endlessly, looking for parking, so I permanently parked my Saturn Vue in Palo Alto. If I did have a car in SF, I could try out one of the 24 MonkeyParking spots now available nearby — so I guess it’s popular. The SF City Attorney’s office is also looking into whether it’s legal. “So far, all we’ve determined for sure is that it’s extremely weird,” a spokesperson The Chronicle. As far as I can see ( ) tech people are MonkeyParking as the most novel form of “sharing economy” yield management yet, and SF veterans that it is yet another example of a tech corporation . I guess the moderate view is that it’s some sort of Italian anarchist performance art. , round 5,002. . er, you are not reducing traffic, you are just exchanging a rich parking-cruiser for a less-rich parking-cruiser. — midendian (@midendian) we just provide info about spots that are going to become free. no intentions to do something bad: we aim at reducing traffic! — MonkeyParking (@MonkeyParking) https://twitter.com/EC/statuses/462754915358490624 |
Gillmor Gang: Eat Your Beats | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 5 | 10 | The Gillmor Gang — Josh Miller, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — welcome the latest Jobsian takedown of the music cartel, the presumed acquisition of the Beats hardware/streaming empire by Apple. How the Gang winds its way through the leaks and feints of BigTech is left as an exercise for you. As one Ganger channeled John Lennon early in the chat: “I don’t believe in Beats, I just believe in streams…” – J.C. Bouvier. Or as new guy Josh Miller wrote, the secret word is Lockscreen. Me, I can’t wait for my iPhone Air. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @joshm, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
We’re Still Traveling Like It’s 1996 | John Balen | 2,014 | 5 | 10 | Travel still provides some of the highest human anxieties of anything we do on a routine basis. There are countless variables when it comes to travel: weather, mechanical issues, overbooked flights, traffic, human delays and so much more. But if we could combine all of our intelligent data in a way that it works together, travel disruptions could be corrected automatically and efficiently. Think about and all of the random occurrences and variables it encounters on the road — and its ability to react and correct based on real-time information. Smart travel should not be so different. This is the overarching problem with travel today: booking travel efficiently — and getting a good deal on it — is still very labor-based and lacking in transparency. Ultimately, there are hundreds (or thousands?) of customer-service agents on the other side of or online booking portals, and if just one aspect of travel plans falls out of place, customers are forced to wait on hold to speak to a live person. Not even the very first step of travel planning — the initial booking — is automated. And even still, it’s based on laborious manual research as we scour the Internet and review numerous different options for flights, hotels, rental cars, etc. Can we really trust booking services that tell us we’re getting the lowest possible price? The discovery that than to those browsing on PCs has only led to more time spent on trying to find the best deal and manually cross-referencing multiple sites. Thanks to economies of scale, big agencies can buy up better rates on hotel rooms, but as average consumers, you and I don’t have access to such deals — or to information about what the best prices really are. The booking process hasn’t evolved nearly enough since the likes of and came about in the mid-1990s, bringing the first revolution of online travel booking. We’ve grown light years in terms of gathering valuable data, but for most of us regular consumers, that useful big data is still in the dark. It doesn’t have to be this way. Personal data and preferences exist in multiple scattered databases – what hotels I’ve stayed at, airlines I’ve flown, cities I’ve visited, the kinds of activities I like to do, where I like to eat, and even tasks that I need to complete before I travel (board the pets, have someone pick up mail, etc.) Of course there is all that social data, too. Integrating my social graph into travel planning would allow me to see recommendations based on where friends or colleagues like to go. But these pieces of data haven’t been brought together in a single comprehensive system that actually my preferences, and knows how much I’m willing to pay for them. In other words, various pieces of big data are still too compartmentalized. Right now, I have to rebuild my ideal travel experience, when really it should be pre-built for me based on my past patterns. I get recommendations the travel sites I want, rather than what it I want. Everything you buy creates a signal. has used that data to tailor suggested products for each individual. But the travel industry as a whole has struggled to break out of its own silo and adopt a similar approach in order to better suit personal preferences. We have more data available to us than ever before, but so far nobody has managed to link it. Sites like at least do some of the online legwork for us by showing multiple sites at once to compare prices. But no service goes far enough beyond price comparisons into knowing our full travel histories and being able to make recommendations based on past bookings and preferences. To streamline the travel process — and overall industry — we need the travel supply chain to have a radical transformation, primarily around transparency and how big data is ultimately applied, in order to deliver targeted, personalized results for consumers. Like an Amazon, travel needs a booking service that tailors results based on previous preferences. Early last year, British Airways made moves in the direction of personalized travel by announcing its “Know Me” program, designed to use Google images and social networks (or as many customers saw it, “ ”) in order to bring customers better service once they arrive at the gate. While British Airways was clearly thinking about ways to use data to make travel more pleasant, this may not be the most useful application of data to travel. It’s more like a step up from the traditional loyalty programs rather than a solution to the problems of travel booking. Most of the pieces are ready to fall into place for big data-based travel to become a reality: a proliferation of smartphones — — that can pull data from across services, apps and social networks; and the availability of real-time information on changing travel itineraries and pricing. A few companies are already in a strong position to win the travel innovation game. Clearly Google is a force when it comes to data, and we should especially keep an eye on , one of the most interesting consumer-facing experiences of big data in action — and one that’s built for agile mobile experiences. Google Now is starting to read your data across Gmail, Calendar and Maps (and maybe soon?), to provide valuable information on where you need to be and what information may be relevant to you at the right time. Microsoft’s expands on Siri’s capabilities by trying to anticipate what mobile users want before they ask for it. While it is likely to struggle (much like Siri) in certain situations, it’s a step in the right direction and shows how big companies are starting to think. One new startup that may be worth watching is , started by ex-Facebook engineer . The service hasn’t launched yet, but it claims to solve the headaches of travel booking with a streamlined process built on big data. There are also a few companies tackling the issue of transparency in the hotel-booking space that are exploring the usefulness of big data in making reservations. A new study by Amadeus IT Group, “ ,” is another encouraging sign that innovation is on the way, noting several case studies of hotels and travel services that are stepping up their analytics game. I look forward to the day when I can book a week-long trip to Paris through a travel bot that automatically gives me a window seat, books my hotel and makes a dinner reservation at my favorite restaurant in Montmartre. Big data can get us there. |
TechCrunch Is Invading Austin And Seattle In June, Pitch-Off Applications Are Open Now! | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 5 | 10 | Fresh on the heels of TechCrunch Disrupt NY, we’re already thinking about our next events. and , are you ready to get down with TechCrunch? Our tour will take place the week of June 10, but we want to open up applications to the Pitch-Off as soon as possible. What is the pitch-off, you ask? It’s only the best way to get the word out about your budding startup, make connections with investors, and potentially win the chance to go to Disrupt SF in September, all in one night. Founders have 60 seconds to present their product on stage in front of hundreds of people, including a panel of expert judges from local VC firms and TechCrunch editorial staff. Entrepreneurs with products in stealth or private beta are encouraged to apply ( and . First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Second Place will receive 2 tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. Third Place will receive 1 ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt. But even if you aren’t presenting, we want you to come out and support the companies who are and make connections. It’s a great opportunity to recruit, or get hired, or simply make new friends who love tech and solving problems. Tickets start at $10 ( and ), and will go up during the week of the event, so make sure to get out ahead of this. The Austin meetup is on June 10, at , and will go from 6pm to 10pm. The Seattle Meetup is on June 12, at , and will also go from 6pm to 10pm. Here is the agenda for both: 6pm – Doors Open
7pm – Pitch-Off
8pm – Winners Announced
8:15pm – Networking
10pm – Goodnight |
Google Maps Has Forsaken Us | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 5 | 10 | Once upon a time, in the days of yore — meaning, in hyper-fast-forward Silicon Valley, five years ago — there were things you could count on, evident truths on which you could rely, cornerstones on which you could construct your mental model of the world; and high on any such list would have been “Google will provide you with relevant search results.” Yeah, well, that was then, this is now. I am sorry to report that after exhaustive anecdotal use I have concluded that the new Google Maps is kind of a shit show. Check this out: Remember when GMaps would actually show you the places you searched for? Sigh. From a Berkeley IP number, no less: — Jon Evans (@rezendi) Seriously, Google? I try to find some tasty In-N-Out Burger in the East Bay (because the city in which I live is of such) and when I search for “in-n-out east bay” you direct me to Gleghorn-South Kilgore, ? ( Arkansas. Sorry, I’m Canadian.) If you have developed a sense of humor, it is one with sharp ironic teeth. But wait, there’s more. Consider this: …Well, OK, I guess there’s just no such place, must have misspelled it or something. Unless…let’s just try… FFS, Google. If I search your maps for “Sambisa Forest” and there is anyplace in the world named, conveniently enough, “Sambisa Forest”, how about you without me having to first specify the nation in question? Is it just me? I sure don’t think so: new google maps: like most web 3.0, fucking terrible and substantially worse than old google maps. — ಠ_ರೃ Alex🔜GDC (@aeleitch) Alex is quite right. All of the above are searches which, I’m quite confident, back in the day. Google Maps used to be absolutely wonderful. It was working, and then they broke it, and now it’s actually pretty bad. I know, I know, I’m whining about a free service — for the — but it’s a free service that provides Google with an immense amount of valuable data, one which is portrayed as convenient and reliable, and one which they presumably want me to keep using. I think it’s reasonable to point out repeated ridiculous-seeming failures in what is arguably its most fundamental feature. Or, as Matt Haughey : “That’s Google trying to be helpful, but not being actually helpful: and in reality, confusing me … Google indexes all of the world’s information … Why doesn’t Google bring any of that additional information into searches and results within the Maps app?” Good question, Matt. I suppose one possible culprit is Google’s increasing use of (PDF) Such networks are, by their nature, black boxes whose outcomes cannot be traced to any particular algorithm or line of code. Maybe I’m just unlucky enough to be an outlier who keeps running into anomalous outcomes, which have actually improved for the vast majority of users. Maybe. But I doubt it. Instead I strongly suspect the answer is strongly related to some kind of byzantine system of feudal silos and fiefdoms within the Google empire. Because when I’m tooling around the East Bay in search of tasty In-N-Out Burger, I’m busy writing web and smartphone apps for , and in that capacity I keep running into kind of astonishing Google-product bug reports like: My point? The ways of Google are mysterious. Both its moonshots and its ignoble failings are dictated by criteria and desires as inscrutable and baffling as those of the fabled Bavarian Illuminati. Users? Developers? Don’t make me laugh. Nowadays we are barely worthy of Google’s contempt. The amazing thing is that Google is so dominant in so many fields, and employs so many smart and capable people (disclaimer/disclosure; some of whom are friends of mine, or at least they were before this post was published) that this actually doesn’t much matter. Not today, at least. But do be careful, Google. They say hubris goeth before a fall; and even the mightiest titan ought to live in perpetual fear of looking down one day to suddenly see . |
Should Twitter Crack Open Its Nest Egg To Acquire SoundCloud? | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | SoundCloud might be the YouTube of music, but that doesn’t mean Twitter should play Google and . There are better ways to spend the $2 billion from its IPO than on a music startup which won’t necessarily improve its core service. [Update: And now , a German news outlet from SoundCloud’s home country, says Twitter is not buying SoundCloud. SPIEGEL reports that Twitter did in fact consider buying the startup, but sources familiar with the matter tell it Twitter decided against going through with the deal.] MoPub. Now that was a at a price tag somewhere around $350 million. Twitter knows a lot about what people are thinking about but has limited room to show marketing messages. Pouring its targeting data into MoPub so it can sell better ads elsewhere strengthens both. SoundCloud, on the other hand, makes a lot less sense. that sources familiar with both companies say Twitter is considering it. The service lets anyone upload audio that others can stream or download. People follow each other (yes, like Twitter), and it’s popular with both up and coming DJs looking to host their mixtapes and big name artists trying to generate buzz. SoundCloud earns money by that lift the limits on hosting and downloads, and with its like image slideshows and suggestions of whom to follow. Founded in 2007, SoundCloud has risen to fill the hole left by Myspace, becoming a highly functional homepage for musicians looking to promote themselves. Last July it had 40 million registered users and served 200 million total users including unregistered listeners each month. By October 2013, that number was , so it’s safe to assume it’s close to 300 million now. That’s swift growth that shows SoundCloud has big potential. SoundCloud’s latest round from January reportedly valued it at . Twitter would likely have to pay a significant premium or even multiple on top of that to buy the startup. Twitter raised about in its IPO and is overall, including $132 million in Q1 2014. Twitter also has a $1 billion credit line if it wanted to borrow money. All together, buying SoundCloud could burn a big chunk of Twitter’s cash, or at least cost a significant amount of its current $18.9 billion market cap in stock. Is this really the best use of its war chest or equity? Twitter is eager to expand its audience outside its own service, Kafka suggests. Buying SoundCloud could do that. Meanwhile, Twitter could bring advertising infrastructure to SoundCloud. Kafka cites alignment because the music service with the , likely from artists tweeting their streams and homepages. From a higher level, the argument for the acquisition might be that it would aid Twitter’s push to be a next-gen media company. It already hosts images and has Vine for video. SoundCloud could let it control music too. SoundCloud is how many musicians forge a deep connection with their fans, and Twitter could thrive by owning that connection. The ongoing democratization of creation tools necessitates a service for sharing original sounds online. Twitter could build better promotional tools for musicians on SoundCloud. That way, when artists tweet links to their pages, it gets both high quality content in the Twitter feed and traffic to SoundCloud that it can monetize. Twitter already lets SoundCloud music be played in-line from its feeds through its cards, but interactivity is limited and could be improved if they were one company. The ideal situation would see Twitter providing SoundCloud with the muscle and runway to become a YouTube-esque publishing platform. Artists would be incentivized to drive traffic there because they’d receive a share of the ad revenue. The issue is that music is often in available many places like streaming and download services, not just SoundCloud. If the two could really succeed in making SoundCloud content shared on Twitter the way artists distribute music directly to fans, the deal could be a good move. But that will take nimble execution. Still, these synergies might not add up to be worth the price to Twitter. I spoke with several top music tech executives today, and none could come up with a compelling reason why this would be a smart buy for Twitter. It already tried to make music a bigger part of its service with its We Are Hunted-powered . That app crashed and burned, though, as users had plenty of other ways to discover music. Twitter a few months ago to concentrate on conversations about music in its main app. So while rocking out might be important to people’s lives, they might not look to Twitter for it. Trying to bolster audio’s place on Twitter by jamming in more SoundCloud might not fare any better. SoundCloud is not a user-generated content-driven service. It’s largely professionals and semi-professionals who upload the music that powers it. While Twitter and Vine might be ruled by “influencers”, the average person can still tweet or shoot a video. Most people have zero they could post to SoundCloud. Instead, they’re listeners, many of whom play tracks in the background as they surf the web or are on the go. They won’t be so easy to monetize with the visual ads that Twitter knows best, and people despise audio ads. Plus, a fair amount of the content on SoundCloud isn’t properly licensed. Cracking down on that to make it more ad friendly could hurt SoundCloud’s street cred. Twitter could build better promotion tools for musicians without buying SoundCloud if it wants more music content shared to it. And if it wants to be a media company, music doesn’t seem like the best fit. It’s not inherently snackable the way photos or short video clips are, and people seem reluctant to pay for it like they pay for games or streaming video services like Netflix. Twitter already has strong relationships with artists, and it might inherit a more troubled relationship with record labels from SoundCloud. While SoundCloud was truly special a few years ago, and still hosts remixes and mixtapes you can’t hear elsewhere, the rise of clean, standardized legal streaming music services like Spotify has reduced its value proposition when it comes to big name artists. Mainstream listeners who want no-hassle access to popular songs can consistently find them elsewhere on services built for listening, not discovery or fan-artist connection. Or on YouTube, whose familiarity, SEO, and browser-based status often make it the quickest way to hear a song. SoundCloud won’t be the exclusive provider of content with mass appeal. That makes it tough to build a media empire on. Buying Instagram could have given Twitter user-generated, snackable, exclusive content with tons of reach, but that ship sailed to Facebook long ago. I get why SoundCloud would want this deal. It could give its music huge reach through Twitter’s network, and get monetization help from Twitter’s business team. Without its own ad business shining bright, SoundCloud might find it tough to wow investors with an IPO. A source tells me the major labels are seriously squeezing SoundCloud around licensing, and some in the record business are intent on maiming or killing the company. That makes achieving an exit now even more lucrative, though SoundCloud’s growth means it could become worth a lot more, provided it can survive. If Twitter was a bigger company with all its ducks in a row, the acquisition might be a better move. When it bought YouTube, Google already had its search ad and AdSense businesses humming, and was working the kinks out of Gmail and Maps. YouTube was only a year old and had raised less than $12 million. Twitter is still trying to stabilize its core product, and while it’s making great early progress with advertising, the business still needs time to ramp up and make the company profitable. SoundCloud is seven years old, and has raised $123 million. It might be a good acquisition, but not for Twitter right now. It would be for tough for Twitter to make the decision to save the money when it sees Facebook drop $19 billion on WhatsApp. And if Twitter doesn’t buy SoundCloud, maybe Facebook or Google will take advantage of their size and snatch it up. Still, Twitter needs to stay focused. Focused on making its service more consistently appealing to new users who don’t have a built-in audience, making its feed manageable so veterans become more and more engaged, and improving its ad targeting and measurement to prove return on investment to advertisers so they buy huge campaigns. SoundCloud does none of these. Twitter might be best off saving its money to hire and acquire companies that could make its core service fly higher, rather than just adding another bird to the flock. |
Survios Snaps Up $4M To Lead The Next Generation Of Virtual Reality Tech | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | , a San Francisco startup that aims to pioneer the next-generation of virtual reality (VR) technology, has raised $4 million in series A funding. The round, which was reported this morning , was led by Shasta Ventures, whose founder Rob Coneybeer will be joining Survios’ board of directors. Also participating in the round were Mavent Partners’ Michael Chang, World Innovation Lab’s Gen Isayama, and Felicis Ventures’ Renata Quintini. Of course, Survios’ funding comes on the heels of Facebook’s , the maker of the Oculus Rift headset. Survios, which got its start in the same University of Southern California Mixed Reality Lab that counts Oculus founder Palmer Luckey as an alum, is perhaps best described as a “Kinect-meets-Oculus-Rift” — it tracks your own physical movements, and incorporates them into a 3D virtual world that you view through an immersive headset. Last month, TechCrunch’s own Kim-Mai Cutler stopped by Survios’ headquarters to , which is currently focused on gaming applications, for TechCrunch TV. The Survios experience looks pretty amazing already, so it will be exciting to see how the company scales now that it has some serious funding at its disposal. You can watch that in the video embedded below. |
Microsoft Likely To Break Out A Bigger, Not Smaller, Surface Tomorrow Morning | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Tomorrow in New York, Microsoft is holding a Surface-themed event that was expected for a time to include the unveiling of a new, smaller Surface device — the Surface Mini as it was dubbed by the media. Not so, it now appears. Reports have that a smaller device isn’t happening, and that instead, Microsoft will release a screened Surface device. Color me excited. I’ve since heard the same thing, so if I had to wager, I’d say we are game on for a new, larger Surface Pro. Good move? I think so. My biggest complaint with using a Surface Pro — of either generation — as a main computing device is that the screen was too darn small. Yes, you can hook up your Surface to an external display, but, at the same time, you still have a very modest main screen. Bumping up to a 12-inch screen (the size I have heard, and one that matches other reports) would be a large improvement — at least in theory. We’ll need to touch the thing to know more, but as far as bents go, this one I like. Oh, and as far as names go, I think that we . The event kicks off at 11 a.m. EDT, so be ready for a morning shindig. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 28 | null |
Moving Tech’s Moral Compass From The Inside Is Harder Than It Looks | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Whether or not it actually lives up to its ideals, the tech industry has a long history of trying to hold itself to a higher standard in its rhetoric. (This .) But as founding a company has become de-risked over the last 10 years and many growth-stage companies begin to veer into highly regulated areas like education and transportation, this messaging can miss the mark. A classic example of this mismatch came up a few weeks ago when Asana co-founder Justin Rosenstein gave a speech at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York based off In it, he urged other engineers, product managers and founders in the industry to devote their talents and limited time to meaningful work instead of products that quickly and solely produce revenue or exits. On stage, he repeated the message he first set forth in the essay, saying, “Let’s do great things. Let’s do things that really, substantively work to help humanity thrive. Let’s solve the big problems. Let’s dedicate our energy to consciously moving the world in the direction of our dreams.” The speech was polarizing. On the one hand, Rosenstein said he was inundated with positive e-mails from people who said they were inspired or were considering changing their career paths. On the other hand, he was ridiculed both on and on for that channeled So I’ve known Justin for years, and I do believe he’s coming from a genuine place. After establishing himself as an early engineer at Google and then Facebook, he set out to build , a startup that builds software for teams to collaborate productively. He’s taking the Giving Pledge to contribute at least half of his wealth to charity, while his co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who used to be the world’s youngest billionaire, Yet messages like his can reek of the very sort of clueless entitlement that the tech industry is already under public barrage for. “The guy behind me said he wanted to punch him in the face,” Disrupt attendee Tomas Puig, who currently heads marketing for WP Engine, told me. After hearing some of the divided reactions over his talk, Rosenstein called me up and sounded a bit exasperated. “There’s this frustrating catch-22 for those of us in the tech industry who’ve been arguing for social good,” he said. “Before you’ve achieved success, no one listens to you. And after you achieve success, you’re considered out of touch.” He went on, “People protesting the “privileged techies” are saying that we’re being selfish, that we’re hoarding wealth without creating value. So here I am saying, ‘Hey, fellow privileged techies! Let’s care about the impact of our work, let’s be thoughtful about how leverage our privilege. Let’s give back.’” For one, it’s hard to be told by anyone — even our parents — to do more meaningful work. It’s even more aggravating when it’s coming from a person who will never have to worry about feeding his or her kids or putting a roof over their head. Rosenstein reiterated that his message wasn’t really for everyone. It was for people who have been lucky enough to have educational opportunities and connections to multiple career opportunities. He’s worried that the culture of the Valley has become increasingly oriented toward money over the last five to 10 years, and that conscious business isn’t even part of the conversation. It’s a concern echoed by other long-timers like Om Malik, . “My experience in talking to most, but certainly not all, hotshot engineers is that they really want to ensure they maximize what they get out of the opportunity like money and experience. But they don’t even bring up social good as on their list of considerations,” Rosenstein wrote me in an e-mail. “That’s not because they’re bad people, it’s because it’s not sufficiently part of the cultural zeitgeist or conversation. We need more cultural celebration of missionaries vs. mercenaries.” Then, when TechCrunch writer Alex Wilhelm grilled Rosenstein afterward on stage, he pointed out that his message lacked specificity. Who gets to say what helps humanity thrive? It’s fuzzy. Rosenstein was critical of social games like Candy Crush Saga. But even though Zynga, say, makes FarmVille, which has been a massive time suck for its targeted audience of middle-aged women, the company is considered one of the better ones in terms of its philanthropy and local civic engagement in San Francisco. Likewise, online ad-based business models incentivize clickbait and content that splinters people’s attention. But it’s the boring ad-based businesses that mint cash for companies like Facebook and Google, so they can aim for more ambitious and outlandish pursuits like virtual reality and self-driving cars. And while those ad-based businesses may seem boring today, putting the world’s wealth of knowledge at a person’s fingertips on their phones or connecting more than 1 billion people through social networking are still stunning achievements. Rosenstein said he looks up to a specific cohort of companies that are both for-profit and aim for social good like Coursera, SolarCity, Change.org, Lending Club, Zipcar, Quora, ResearchGate and Tesla. Lastly and most importantly, to be a great leader, you need be a great storyteller. You need to tell a convincing story about what a person or a community could become. And to be convincing, you have to know in a very human and empathic way what it is like to live another person’s life. The problem with delivering this message from a standpoint of privilege is that people like Rosenstein may never know what it is like to . We live in a country where so many people feel powerless, in their ability to pay for basic needs like food and housing, in their ability to provide a better future for their families, in their ability to stay in and keep contributing to their communities. In his original speech, Rosenstein said, “Cynicism is just a symptom of disempowerment, and we are too powerful to be cynical.” OK, fine, we might be more powerful than we realize. But if you never truly understand what it is like to powerless, how effective will you ever be in convincing people that they can transcend their own circumstances? There are tech leaders in the past who have done it well. is pretty much the only thing that comes to mind. It was effective not just because of his achievements, but because his speech was about powerlessness in the face of death. That powerlessness before mortality is a universal human experience. Anyway, I raise these questions about messaging because while it’s easy for outsiders to lob spitballs or point out hypocrisies in tech, there is a dialogue that needs to happen internally too. Doing it is much harder than it looks. It’s like herding a bunch of cats. There are the that have come in over the last few years, who arguably have a totally different set of values than the engineers who showed up here 10 years ago right after the first bust. Then there the companies who have grown up and seem to behave in ways that have questionably little to do with their origins. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington posed that question to Y Combinator’s new head Sam Altman earlier this month, “Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is about the evilness of companies. And how companies that started off in this incredibly naive and great way saying, ‘We’ll never be evil,’ end up becoming Microsoft in some way.” He went on, “The gist of it would be, Google’s motto was, ‘Don’t be evil.’ But what that means is they redefine what evil means to fit their behavior as opposed to changing their behavior to not be evil.” Altman replied that different kinds of people are attracted to work for companies at different stages, and that changes their internal culture. “You start with missionaries and end with mercenaries,” he replied, around the 20:00 minute mark in the video below. Then there are billionaire tech luminaries who are trying to have impact through philanthropy with mixed results, Then there are, of course, San Francisco’s problems. Several tech leaders that have reached out in the last few weeks, asking for feedback on how they can better engage with the local community A lot of people are worried. They don’t want to live in a monoculture. They don’t want to live in an exclusively wealthy city sanitized of all that’s interesting or special or historic about it. The gradual , far away from job opportunities and social services historically provided in the urban core, is disturbing. I don’t really know the answers to these very complex problems. But I do know that the conversation has been fragmented for a very long time. In the context of San Francisco, solving these issues means sitting down at the table and listening. There are lots of non-profits representing different interests from the Tenants Union to Mission Economic Development Agency to arts-focused groups like that have been working on economic development, social mobility and housing for years. These conversations are thankfully starting to happen, but sitting at the table will mean receiving a lot of anger, sadness and frustration. It means people may yell or scream at you. It might take hours. Realistically months or years. It may mean listening to things that sound untrue or unfair. It means sitting there and taking it. Because even that much is educational. Only then will you begin to understand the depth of the losses that are happening. I was speaking with a longtime former Apple executive and board member named Peter Hirshberg for another story. We were talking about the notion of civic hackathons, and he said the methodology needed to evolve. “There’s this conceit that if you’re well-intentioned and you think you’re a good developer, you can show up at a very real problem that is systemic, not knowing anything about it, put 48 hours into it, help it and walk away,” he said. He added, “It leads to something like a civic Tourette’s syndrome. It’s not that the tech industry doesn’t mean well. They’re just busy and naive and then they just show up in matters of community and into very real problems.” Rosenstein’s speech wasn’t just about San Francisco. It was about many issues from health to education to clean energy. Even if his message isn’t new, it still needs to be said and repeated. There is a conversation that needs to happen the tech industry too. So I turn the table to you, readers. What’s the way to have this conversation without seeming like a bunch of pricks? |
Andreessen-Incubated Teleport Aims To Make Location Irrelevant For Mobile Workers | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Is finding housing getting you — and apparently, the rest of San Francisco — down? Then leave. Go somewhere else! Stop coming here! (Just kidding.) But not really. Because that’s kind of the idea behind , a new Andreessen Horowitz-incubated startup from early Skype executive and This company, which was in stealth, . The idea is to help the globe’s knowledge workers find the jobs and places that maximize their take-home pay, or the difference between their paychecks and what they spend on housing, food and transport. The big, broad idea is to make location irrelevant. While there are clusters of talent in cities like New York, London and Singapore, in theory, people should be able to work from anywhere, right? “Jobs do not equal places any more,” . “Millions of more people every year can live anywhere and work remotely. This started first in tech-heavy professional circles but the wave continues: already one fifth of all working people around the world telecommute.” He added, “While your income sources have gone mobile your costs remain strongly tied to your physical location. Housing, transportation, child care, education, health care — the cost or even just availability of these services depends on where you are. More costs emerge from being too far from the people and places you want to spend time with. And don’t even get us started on taxes.” I’ve reached out to Tamkivi, and will update when I hear back. They haven’t released any products or services yet, but they’re looking for workers that are interested in relocating. The gist is to build a sort of “life search” engine that helps mobile workers find the best quality of life based on their pay and interests. If you stretch this thinking out, it could have all sorts of interesting ramifications for global economic development. Imagine dispersing the tech industry’s talent to many more cities around the U.S. or the world, and what that would mean for the kinds of companies people would start if they were exposed to different living situations or cultures. The issue is that one of the great paradoxes of modern living is that physical proximity has become more valuable even . It’s called the , where efficiency improvements lead to more, not less, consumption of certain goods or services. Improvements in information technology have paradoxically led to more demand for complementary face-to-face contact. And it’s turned out that densely developed cities are far more favorable to knowledge-centric economies. We’ll have more details on this one. Stay tuned. |
Insight Venture Partners Raises $510M Coinvestment Fund | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | announced that it has raised a $510 million coinvestment fund to invest alongside it announced last year. Founded in 1995, the firm focuses on later-stage deals, with investments of $15 million or more; includes Twitter, Tumblr, Indiegogo and many others. It recently , maker of blogging platform WordPress. Insight says that with the addition of the new coinvestment fund (the firm’s third), it can now invest as much as $500 million in a single deal. |
Inside Jobs: What It Takes To Be The PR Lead At A Startup | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | When a tech company makes the news, the public usually sees the names of a few people: tech executives and the journalist who wrote the story. But oftentimes, a public relations person was involved too, helping to schedule the interview and otherwise facilitating communication between the company and the press. PR people will tell you, though, that if they’re doing their jobs right, ideally their names will stay of the story. So it was a big pleasure to sit down with , the PR lead at , and have him step into the spotlight for a little while to find out what his day to day work life is like for this week’s episode of . I especially liked Brackett’s insights on grabbing attention in journalists’ crowded inboxes: “Over the past five years of doing this, I’ve learned what I like to call ‘the art of the subject line.’ I think how a journalist would think. And so my subject line is a headline. I write my pitch like a small version of what their story is going to be. It takes practice, it takes writing iterations. In the same way that a journalist probably writes several versions of a story, and throws entire pages away that they agonized over, that’s how I approach PR. You have to be willing to be working towards something for two weeks, maybe two months, and then the direction completely changing. And that’s why you work at a startup. If you’re not OK with that, don’t work at a startup.” Before joining TaskRabbit full-time, Brackett got his start working at a technology PR agency, managing the accounts of a handful of companies. And years before all of that, Brackett studied broadcast journalism, and also had a passion for theater. It was interesting to hear him talk about the differences between all these different worlds — and the common thread between them, which is storytelling. Watch him discuss all of that and more in the video embedded above. Producing, shooting, editing, sound, and lighting for Inside Jobs is done by . Production coordination and creative direction is done by . Original logo design by . Motion graphics and graphic design by . |
Machine Vision App PetMatch Finds You A Dog Or Cat That Looks Like Your Old One | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Still mourning the loss of your little buddy Chairman Meow? Upload a photo of him or your favorite Lolcat into , and the app’s machine vision algorithms will find a similar looking kitty in your area that you can adopt. Sounds adorable, but PetMatch is no joke. It’s the first consumer app from , a $20 million-funded startup with a dozen PhDs working to teach computers to see like humans. To use PetMatch, first you upload a photo of a pet, pull one from the web ( Doge!), or choose one from the app’s internal library. Superfish then does a geometric analysis of the image using its machine vision technology to look at the distance between the animal’s eyes, the angle of its mouth, and the shape of its face as a whole. PetMatch does this same analysis on images from PetFinder, a service that aggregates data about adoptable pets from shelters and rescue organizations. The app then presents matches between your image and similar-looking pets around the country, and the best matches it can find that are nearby. See one you like and you can tap through to call or email the shelter and adopt the little furball. PetMatch isn’t purrfect. Get a strange angle and the app can think it’s looking at a completely different variety of pooch. But the ability to track down matches to nameless mix breeds can be very helpful. (If you want more online ways to adopt pets, check out , , , and . And if you’re lost your pet, check out , which uses facial recognition to reunite you.) “Wait, so they’re spending $20 million and employing PhDs from Stanford and MIT just to find me a puppy?” Not exactly. The Israel and Palo Alto-based has been working on machine vision since 2006 thanks to money raised from and Vintage Investment Partners. Superfish offers an that can find similar products to one you’re looking at. The apps now reach 100 million users a month. Thanks to the affiliate fees it generates, Superfish has been profitable for years. But now it’s using standalone apps to prove its technology works and get the word out. Beyond pets, Superfish plans to launch visual search apps for jewelry and furniture. Visual search is becoming a hot startup space, with and . I can’t say I’d be surprised if Superfish was acquired by one of tech giants. Superfish co-founder and CEO Adi Pinhas tells me his goal is “to change the way people use the camera in their mobile.” Rather than taking a photo and then it gathering dust in your camera roll, Superfish wants to turn your lens into the eye of an all-knowing robot that can tell you what you might want to see, do, or buy next. That might sound creepy, but PetMatch is a perfect example that computer vision can actually make the world a cuter, cuddlier place. |
GoPro Files For $100M IPO With 2013 Revenue Of $985.7M, Up 87.4% From The Year Prior | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | This afternoon GoPro with the SEC, detailing its financial performance as it looks to go public. The company states that it will raise up to $100 million in the offering, trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol ‘GPRO.’ The company’s revenue expansion has been impressive, with top line in 2011 of $234.23 million leading to 2012 top line of $526.01 million and finally, in 2013, revenue of $985.73 million. The company is GAAP profitable to boot, reporting $60.57 million in profit in 2013, up from a more modest $32.26 million in 2012. The company’s adjusted EBITDA — a very, non-GAAP number — for 2013 totaled $133.72 million. How many cameras does the maker ship each year? Ok, I forgot to convert those figures, by, ahem, a factor of 1,000. Thanks to @ for . Now, the real figures: 2011: 1.14 million units. 2012: 2.31 million units. 2013: 3.84 million units. Given that sunny set of facts, what’s the rub? The first quarter of 2014 was not as strong as its comparable period in 2013. Revenue for the three-month period this year came in at $235.71 million. In the year-ago quarter that sum was $255.05 million. Profits also fell, from a first quarter-2013 total of $23.03 million to a slimmer $11.04 million. As with any S-1, GoPro handicaps its results, saying frankly that investors “should not consider our recent revenue growth as indicative of our future performance. In future periods, our revenue could decline or grow more slowly than we expect.” It’s boilerplate of a sort, but it’s also accurate. Investors will have to decide if the first quarter slowdown is a blip, or indicative of a post-peak quarter. Whatever the case, with GAAP profits and nearly 10 figure revenue, GoPro is a big, and valuable company. Want some vanity metrics? They’ve got them: 20,000 a day are uploaded using the company’s GoPro Studio product. 6,000 daily YouTube uploads are tallied as well. The company has more than $100 million apiece in cash and debt. The offering is being underwritten by a sheaf of banks, including J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Barclays. |
HackerRank Wants To Build A One-Stop Shop For Technical Phone Interviews | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | When it comes to hiring engineers, many companies now use a real-time web platform like TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield and Y Combinator to see how candidates write their code. That way, interviewers see not only the code candidates write, but also get an insight into the thought process behind it — and how they handle mistakes. HackerRank relaunched earlier this year when it added and today, it is announcing an interesting new feature to its hiring platform and some key hires that set the company’s hiring platform up for the future. On the technical side, it is adding real-time audio to the platform. This new feature uses Twilio’s backend to make it very easy for the interviewer and candidate to set up their calls. According to HackerRank co-founder Vivek Ravisankar, the idea here is to create a “ HackerRank is clearly doing something right. It has signed up a large number of major companies to its site and Ravisankar tells me it has hit a seven-figure run rate. To continue on this path, the company also today announced two additions to its board: General Sentiment co-founder and chief science officer Steven Skiena and IGN co-founder Mark Jung. The company also tells me that it is building out its team with a number of key hires of former LinkedIn and Zynga employees, including Zynga’s former Senior Director of People Operations Brian Schneider, who will oversee talent and operations. While it looks like the hiring platform is currently on the forefront of the HackerRank’s roadmap, the company continues to also run the HackerRank community. There, programmers can participate in a number of coding challenges every month. It will continue to operate this side of the business, but in terms of monetization, its enterprise hiring platform is likely driving most of its growth at this point. |
IBM Watson Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup Cognea | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | IBM’s has announced a new acquisition today — artificial intelligence company Cognea. IBM confirmed the acquisition via a Cognea developed a cognitive computing and conversational artificial intelligence platform. The startup offers virtual assistants that relate to people through personalities. On the company’s , it says it counts NASA, HP and Start Farm as customers. As IBM explains, “We believe this focus on creating depth of personality, when combined with an understanding of the users’ personalities will create a new level of interaction that is far beyond today’s “talking” smartphones. We welcome to IBM, [Cognea’s] co-founders Liesl Capper and John Zakos, and the rest of the Cognea team.” Watson is the artificially intelligent, question-answering supercomputer developed by IBM (that also ). In January, IBM unveiled the Watson Group, which aimed to further develop, commercialize and expand Watson and other cognitive technologies. At the time, IBM said it would invest $1 billion in the Watson Group to be used broadly for R&D and investments. The Watson Group Welltok, a maker of online healthcare management communities, and Fluid, which is building a cognitive shopping assistant. So what does this mean for Watson? IBM says Cognea’s technology will be brought into Watson, giving the system the ability to have more real conversations with users. IBM adds that Watson conversational services will be available to its business partners, entrepreneurs, universities and enterprises. See a demo of Cognea’s technology below. Does it remind you of Siri? [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Uj_wj5qN8M] |
Kyle Russell, Sarah Buhr And Ron Miller Join TechCrunch | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | TechCrunch is incredibly happy to announce three new hires today including Kyle Russell, Sarah Buhr and, somewhat belatedly, our enterprise reporter Ron Miller. As a Business Insider reporter, has impressed with his balanced coverage of being hassled for . He’s shown a passion for covering companies like Google and Apple, as well as . He’s also displayed a talent for breaking in a way that makes them interesting and engaging. Also joining us is University of Utah alum Sarah Buhr, who comes to us by way of NPR, USA Today and, , some work on the dark side in PR.
We’ve enjoyed her coverage of hot button issues like , , and others for USA Today. She’s also written about unique and the difficulty . In her writing, Sarah has been able to translate complex technologies into clear, concise writing for a broader audience, something we’re excited to see her do more of here. Lastly, we would like all of you folks pitching us about enterprise companies to know that we’ve got an incredible dedicated writer who understands this stuff hands down. Ron Miller has actually been on at TechCrunch for a few weeks now and is doing fantastic work. The enterprise isn’t an easy thing to both understand completely translate in human, understandable ways — and Ron is doing both in spades. You might have read intertwining themselves more tightly, or about the ‘top companies’ in 2020. His compressing enterprise companies into new shapes and forms is a must-read. We’ve been enjoying Ron’s work here so far and we’re sure you have too. Look out for our new writers over the coming weeks, and if you see them, say hi, whether it’s in our comments section or Twitter or real life. |
Glass Half Empty | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Google made Glass available for purchase to anybody . You’d be forgiven if you didn’t notice. What started out as one of Google’s most hyped products more than two years ago, now finds itself on the brink of failure. It’s unclear how many people bought Glass this week, but it doesn’t seem like there was a massive run on it. Two years ago, that would have been unthinkable. At its I/O developer conference in 2012, with the mother of all tech demos. Glass was riding high on a mixture of mystery and excitement. A few people were able to try Glass briefly at I/O, but Google also allowed developers to pre-register for the $1,500 Explorer Edition at I/O to be among the first to try it. Fast-forward a year to 2013 and Google finally starts sending out invites to those developers. The first experience was exciting, but also pretty underwhelming. The early apps on Glass weren’t all that interesting, and it would be a long time before Google would launch the Glass Development Kit, so developers could build more interesting interactive apps instead of just pushing Google Now-style cards and video to the devices. A year later, Glass is on sale and nobody really cares. Glass has become an inadvertent symbol for all that is wrong with Google — real or perceived — and with the tech world in general — especially in San Francisco. People don’t actually want to be seen with them. I’m not going to say that Glass is dead — it’s still officially in beta, after all — but my feeling is that it took Google far too long to go from hype to showing the prototype to consumer launch. This allowed Glass to get caught up in a spiral of negativity that will be hard to stop at this point. Some of this may not even have been Google’s fault. Glass arrived just as privacy became a hot-button topic, for example, and just as our relationship with large tech companies started to become increasingly complicated. Scoble taking a shower with it also didn’t help, of course, and once the first bar banned Glass and got some press for it, others quickly followed. The fact that Google allowed so many myths to crop up around Glass (the camera is always on, it can recognize people’s faces, the military is experimenting with it) is something it might have been able to control by making more units available to the public (and maybe press) early on. It’s been two years since we first saw Glass, but the overall design hasn’t changed and the software is pretty much still the same. The next I/O is just around the corner, however, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a new version of Glass were already in the works for a release later this year. Now that Google is mostly emphasizing the Glass as an accessory to real prescription glasses and frames, maybe some of the style issues will solve themselves (though the fact that Google is including prescription frames for free for new buyers is leaving a bit of a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of those who bought the early versions — myself included). Bringing — who has some experience in the eyewear business — will surely help as well. Looking at this year’s I/O schedule, it’s clear that Google is moving ahead with Glass. There are daily sessions to help developers build better Glass apps. At the same time, the program also features even more sessions about wearables in general, so my guess is that in the near future, we will hear quite a bit more about Android Wear and less about Glass. Google is clearly deeply invested in the Glass project, however, and even if this first version doesn’t catch on, there will be others. But Google may have missed the boat with this current iteration. It’s not for a lack of functionality, which is only increasing as more apps for Glass arrive, but because it’s fighting an increasingly uphill battle around perception. Maybe that’ll change as more people get to actually try it, but I’m not sure it will. So I’m still ambivalent when it comes to Glass’ future. Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below (and yes, we know your friend made $5,000 in his first month working from home — no need to tell us again). |
Alibaba’s Massive IPO Could Touch Down In August | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | According , Alibaba’s IPO could kick off in the first full week of August. That timing would give the company enough time to respond to questions that the SEC may have regarding its business, and its forecasts — a standard give and take before a company goes public. TechCrunch confirmed the validity of the potential timing window with an individual familiar with IPOs and the venture capital space. That person indicated that the normal review cycle could be larger for Alibaba than a normal United States-based company, which could push back its filing date. Also, given the choppy current markets, a . As around the time of the filing of Alibaba’s F-1, the company is massively profitable, with net income in its most recent fiscal year (2013) of $2.85 billion on revenue of $6.51 billion. The company is expected to raise as much as $20 billion at a valuation that should tip the scales north of $160 billion. That implied trailing-PE ratio of around 60 is modest in the context of other recently public technology companies. Many firms in the IPO pipeline to date are unprofitable on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. As such, Alibaba could be less susceptible to current investor sentiment chop. Facebook currently at a trailing PE of 76.68, and Twitter has a PE of 128.64. Finally, the IPO timing would push any Yahoo windfall on its stake in the company into the third quarter, so adjust your forecasts accordingly. |
FCC Chairman Cites Google Fiber As Model For The Rollout Of Speedy Broadband | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler’s for his trip to the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology have been published, detailing the FCC’s views on net neutrality (again), the coming spectrum auction (again), and, interestingly, Google Fiber. The chairman’s document includes the following set of remarks regarding Google Fiber, and how it may pursue faster broadband in the United States (Emphasis: TechCrunch). The private sector must play the leading role in extending broadband networks to every American. That’s why the FCC is committed to removing barriers to investment and to lowering the costs of broadband build-out. That’s encouraging. Broadband competition is a fine way to ensure better, cheaper and, potentially, less-biased access. The FCC also in favor of so-called “community broadband” in which local forces work together to provide access. The FCC went on to state that it would “preempt state laws that ban competition” from community broadband. Multi-provider competition would be a boon for the U.S. consumer. Chairman Wheeler kicks off tomorrow in front of the House, which will likely see a spirited debate about net neutrality and more. TechCrunch will bring that to you as it happens. |
Hugh Howey, Author Of The “Silo Saga,” Talks About Making It Big In Self-Publishing | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | is a best-selling Sci-Fi author with a long and interesting pedigree. He’s been a yacht captain, a computer guy and, most recently, a bona fide publishing sensation. His book, the , started as a novella on the Amazon Kindle Store and suddenly blossomed into a massive, multi-volume opus that is a #1 Bestseller on Amazon and the winner of Kindle Book Review’s Best Indie Book of 2012 Award. It’s been optioned by Ridley Scott and recently appeared in hardcover under the Random House imprint in the U.K. Plus, he’s a pretty cool guy. As part of the on self-publishing for the entrepreneur, I thought I’d ask him a few questions about , his writing, and the business of doing it yourself. He was kind enough to oblige. My writing career took off with the publication of a short story, Wool. But I was happy with my career up to that point. I had been writing and self-publishing for three years. My first six novels had sold around five thousand copies between them, which was far more than I ever thought I would sell. I was getting $100 – $150 in the mail every month, and the amount was creeping up. But then Wool came out, and the sales shot through the roof. 1,000 copies in October. 3,000 in November. 10,000 in December. I wrote four more stories, which turned the short piece into a full novel, and the collected work went to the top of the Amazon charts. Within months of publishing Wool, I was flooded with emails from agents and people in Hollywood. I had to quit my day job just to handle all the media requests and fan emails. It was insane. I had previously dreamed of being able to work at the bookstore I was helping manage no matter how popular my books became, but that just proved impossible. For the past two years, I’ve been on the road constantly. Wool has been picked up in over 30 countries, and I’ve sold over two million books worldwide. Not what you expect to happen as you’re working in a bookstore and writing stories in your spare time.
I’m a bit of a vagabond. I dropped out of college, where I was studying physics and English, and I sailed off to the islands for a year. I went through a couple hurricanes and had to take on odd jobs to effect repairs to my sailboat. This led to a career as a yacht captain. I did that for the better part of a decade, and then I met my wife and started spending more and more time on dry land. I’d always wanted to be a writer, but I couldn’t get past the first few chapters of any book I started. It wasn’t until I began reviewing books for a crime fiction website that I learned the skill of writing every single day on a deadline. This lesson — plus traveling to book conventions — motivated me to try my hand at a novel, just to be able to say I’d done it. Wool was my 7th or 8th published work. It’s an idea I’d come up with year earlier, about what it does to us to see nothing but bad news on the TV and in the papers all the time. We live in a Plato’s Cave of sorts, and the shadows on the walls are the worst of what’s behind us. I wanted to write a story about a people terrified of the outside world, where the heroes are the ones brave enough to go out and see for themselves and fight to make the world a better place.
I didn’t do any marketing for Wool until after it took off. I mean, I didn’t even have a link to the story on my website. I didn’t Tweet about it or Facebook about it. I think I published sample chapters early on, while it was still in rough draft. But nobody was reading my website then (or now, really). I did some stuff for my first novels. I did signings around town, spoke to some classrooms about writing, and I kept up a blog about the writing process. But the best promotion was just to write the next work. And the success came from word of mouth.
I’m not great at selling books, to be honest. I don’t like asking strangers to check out my works. I find it embarrassing, and I’m just not good at it. My approach is to write stories that I find engrossing and then get them out there. And do it again. The way I use social media is to make myself available to my existing readers, not to win over new ones. I cherish every single reader, and I think that shows. If they enjoy my works, they are the best people to go out and spread the word. Man, we probably don’t have enough space here. Because I can write whatever I want. I’m working on a children’s picture book right now. I’ve written horror, YA, sci-fi, dystopia, general fiction, literary fiction, fan fiction, you name it. I can publish as often as I want. I don’t have deadlines. I make 70% on my e-books and $4 on my paperbacks (nearly twice what most Big 5 authors make on their hard backs). I can price my works however I want or give them away. I get to publish without DRM, which is a very important stance for me. I can even celebrate people pirating my work and only paying for it if they want. It’s hard to do any of this with a major publisher.
It’s doing just fine. Publishers are seeing great profit margins. But that’s because they aren’t paying their authors a fair rate on e-book sales. This could backfire on them in the future. My guess is that we’ll see major publishers move to 50% of net on e-book royalties in order to keep their authors from bolting to self-publishing.
I plan to continue publishing at least two works a year, but I want to do other things as well. I’m going to get into publishing in a different way soon. And I’m exploring opening up an independent bookstore.
Oh, yeah. It’s all I do. My goal when I first started out was just to write a single novel. It has been a dream of mine since I was 12. So that was as far ahead as I was looking. But once I knew I could do this, I was hooked. And that’s when I decided I’d make a real go of becoming a full-time writer. My plan was to write for ten years before I judged my sales and earnings. I thought I could publish two works a year for a decade, and then I’d have a library of twenty works to promote. I didn’t waste my time trying to sell that first novel; I just kept writing. And I didn’t stick to one genre; I wrote a wide variety of stories in order to gauge my strengths and interests. Being patient and having a long view was crucial, I think. I didn’t get discouraged, because I had no expectations. It isn’t like my books go stale. They’re all e-books and print-on-demand paperbacks. They are brand new and always in print, just waiting to be discovered. I firmly believe that if a well-read author commits to honing their craft and writing two novels a year for ten years, they will be able to make a career out of writing. The beauty of self-publishing is that you can give yourself that ten-year chance. You don’t have to rely on being discovered by an agent. You don’t have to waste your time querying and spending the two or three years it can take to get a single book published. And you aren’t limited to the narrow window in which your book will be displayed on a store shelf. You can publish now and publish forever. That’s a huge benefit, one that I recognized very early on. My one other piece of advice is that you should publish your works as if millions of people will read them. Invest in quality cover art that looks great both in print and on a small online thumbnail. 90% of the bad covers out there are due to horrible font selection. Don’t get fancy; use something big, bold, and blocky. And get help with the editing, even if that means exchanging services with other writers. Don’t be in a rush to publish. Make your work shine. |
Western Union And eBay Try To Horn In On Bitcoin With New Patents | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Two weeks ago, received a patent for which, in short, is a way for the company to use and accept “alternative currencies.” At the time of filing, back in 2009, these currencies included barter systems like Bartercard and virtual gold and dollars from various online sources, including Second Life and World Of Warcraft. Western Union, we should remember, but would love to get a piece of the virtual goods market. Unfortunately, the patent includes these few tidbits, which bitcoin itself could currently infringe upon: That’s not all. Last , eBay filed another patent on a BTC currency exchanger which, according to , could be a sort of “digital wallet that can take multiple types of currency.” This looks to be more like a multi-currency wallet that would allow users to deposit and use bitcoin in their PayPal accounts, a tool that would definitely get the attention of a certain breed of bitcoin bull. But looking at this a bit more realistically, it’s clear big money transfer companies are looking to nip this bitcoin thing in the bud. This loving embrace of is far from magnanimous. It’s the sort of bear hug that smothers the hugee and gives the hugger a brief advantage. I suspect, for example, that PayPal would love to accept Bitcoin all day long and trap it within their system with their own sort of currency (PP Points? PalDollars?). Additionally, Western Union just wants to prevent its clientele from realizing that current currency transmission pricing is wildly high. In a very , Reed Jessen of the assessed the patents with a keen eye. All is not lost, he concludes. Western Union, for example, has patented the addition of an “assessor” step to the fiat currency to digital currency exchange, which allows the company to have a middleman to “assess” the value of the trade. This would create a sort of Standard & Poor’s for cryptocurrency sellers, rating some traders as high and others as low. These patents may be too little too late when it comes to bitcoin. One of the primary reasons the currency has taken off is that it is completely decentralized and its users and enthusiasts have every reason to keep it that way. Like the Internet, plenty of folks can attempt to patent email and submit buttons, but in the end the network routes around damage. Unlike 3D printing patents, for example, there isn’t just one way to do a specific thing in cryptocurrencies (generally speaking) and the resulting mishmash of techniques is impossible to patent. and Western Union need to accept cryptocurrency as a looming threat. The question is whether they embrace it or attempt the old trick of embrace and extend. The former will keep them in goodwill for years while the latter could spell their doom with the digerati. |
Google Launches An Instagram Account | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Instagram is so hot that no one can resist joining in. Not even Google. The search giant, in a (??), has today launched . So far there is one video post, showing today’s time-sinking Google Doodle. In other words, Google’s first Instagram is kind of, sort of (though not technically), a regram. Come on, Google. Get original! The company announced the account , and its Instagram already has nearly 5,000 followers.
Consumers follow brands and celebrities to get a window into a more realistic world than the tabloids and endless promotional tweets can offer. Google, for all intents and purposes, is building the future of our world, from projects like driverless cars to Google Glass to smarthome implementation. Plus, Google’s brand perception has changed considerably since launching more than a decade ago. In the late 90s, Google was the little startup with a big dream, and that little startup has now grown to be the most powerful and influential technology company in the world. Giving users a window into the company’s mission statement, as it’s played out every day by makers and engineers and futurists, can bring back some of the magic of that grassroots effort at the heart of Google. It’s also worth noting that Google has seemingly as a true social network play, so there’s relatively less for Google and Facebook to fight over right now. |
Networkr Is A Tinder-Style Networking App For LinkedIn Contacts | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 5 | 19 | Meet — a Tinder for professional networking powered by your LinkedIn contacts. No, it’s not the dating app that uses LinkedIn data to find prospective love matches (that’s in case you’re wondering). This app wants to help you move your interests forward by upping your networking game. Proximity social networking has often been a tough sell to consumers. Witness . Consumers may be dubious about the benefits of shouting too obviously about exactly where they are in order to get to know folks in their immediate vicinity. But there’s one specific scenario where almost everyone would welcome a little help breaking the in-room ice: professional networking. That’s not to say apps haven’t tried to crack this one; there’s , for instance, which lets you sign up to have a networking lunch with a nearby professional. But it’s fair to say no one owns this space — yet. The problem such apps often run into is the network effect: Why would anyone use a networking app that no one else is using yet? That doesn’t exactly sound useful. (On a side-note, LinkedIn is one company that probably own it, given its existing professional reach. So perhaps a proximity networking app is on its to-do list as it , unbundling that desktop sprawl via a “multi app strategy”.) Dating app Tinder got around the network effect problem by making itself into the digital equivalent of catnip. The proximity aspect of Tinder is subservient to the main component — dating, or more specifically a simple question of whether I fancy this face or not — to the app’s secondary theme — playing a game (of snap). Tinder shows that proximity can certainly be a key component in a networking app, provided the use case is compelling enough; by contrast Foursquare badges were more marketing gimmick than serious stickiness. So now Networkr is hoping to emulate Tinder’s success in the proximity dating game by applying a Tinder-ish interface to professional networking. The app lets you view potential business matches in your vicinity and then decide whether to connect or not. Its argument is that professional networking is that simple. Again, it’s not alone in this thinking. Another likeminded networking app is , for instance. But Networkr reckons it’s setting itself apart from the pro-proximity-networking crowd by an initial focus on conferences and events — i.e. where there’s a pressing need to lubricate the networking process. Again, networking apps have been tried for conferences for years — the GSMA, for instance, has long been flogging a networking feature on its website for its annual Mobile World Congress tradeshow (previously unbundled into ). But getting people to use these things has always been an uphill struggle in large part, I would argue, because of their hideously awful interfaces. Pushing water uphill is more fun than using the GSMA’s website. Tinder’s stroke of genius was to both simplify the interface and make it fun. Networkr is evidently hoping to emulate that with a clean app that offers easy-to-use toggle and slider controls, and displays each prospect contact in an attractive, card-style format with their photo and job title/employer prominently on show, and additional details available for digging into below the fold. The app asks the user to make a yes/no decision on a prospective contact, by tapping on a button to say whether they are interested or not interested in connecting with them. If both users express a desire to connect, the app notifies them of the match — and users can then revert to LinkedIn to take things further. The product roadmap for Networkr extends to in-app messaging, iBeacon integration and an Android app — but all of that will fall by the wayside if it can’t get over the network effect hump. Time will tell. It’s certainly early days for Networkr, which is just launching v1.0.1 of its iOS app. It’s also taken to U.K. equity crowdfunding platform with the to make more improvements to the app and to promote it to try to push past the usefulness tipping point. The two co-founders of the mobile app development agency behind the app, , are based in London and Denmark — and that’s where their initial promotional focus for Networkr will be, with London their primary marketing focus. One word of warning for Networkr: Tinder’s ease of use is also powered by snap aesthetic judgments. It’s basically asking users to say whether they think a particular face is hot or not. Whereas Networkr’s proposition is a tad more complex: whether a certain individual might be a worthwhile business contact. For some industries or users, making that professional judgment may be akin to a snap one. For others, such as (indeed) journalists, working out whether such a person is a good professional prospect may require a bit more research — and that added complexity may end up putting the brakes on Networkr’s network effect. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.