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Microsoft Challenged A National Security Letter That Included A Gag Order — And Won | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | Microsoft challenged a National Security Letter from the FBI last year — . The documents relating the case were recently unsealed, making the effort public. The gist is simple: Microsoft received a National Security Letter requesting “ The letter banned Microsoft from disclosing to anyone that the data had been requested. Microsoft didn’t think that reasonable and filed a challenge. The FBI then retracted its request. The customer in question was an Office 365 user. The FBI wanted data involving “several categories of information regarding a single user account associated with the e-mail domain which is [redacted] supported within the block of individual Office 365 accounts [snip] provided to [redacted] by Microsoft under the Contract.” On the heels of the passage of an NSA reform bill that , and the to a separate bill aimed at defunding certain government actions that weaken encryption and harm privacy, this is welcome news. What’s fun in this isn’t that a single National Security Letter was beaten back, but more how Microsoft argued its case. A few excerpts that are worth noting, regarding why Microsoft felt the Letter wasn’t a legal request: And: Those successful arguments could be applied to other letters it seems. Microsoft has an obvious economic interest in the above; it just showed its Office 365 customers that it is willing to stand up to the government regarding their data and privacy. The company called the victory an “important and successful step to protect Microsoft’s enterprise customers regarding government surveillance.” But even though this is to its benefit, demonstrating that the FBI will back down when presented with a legal challenge at least part of the time is worth knowing. |
The Era Of Good-Enough Smartphones | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | market remains quite peculiar. Despite a plethora of inexpensive models from other companies, Apple and Samsung remain the dominant manufacturers that collectively take about 68 percent of the market and whose iPhones and Galaxies are among the most expensive options available. And they aren’t just getting affluent consumers to purchase them. , iPhone sales grew 64 percent among consumers with incomes below $30,000. One reason for this sales growth is that both companies have provided consumers with more affordable options, either by introducing new models or cutting prices on existing ones. Apple continues to sell the iPhone 4S, which today is $450 unlocked. Samsung has an extensive line of affordable phones whose , although many of these sales happened in markets outside the U.S. That is only part of the story, though. For years, both companies benefitted from a combination of wireless carrier subsidies, atrocious substitutes, and network effects that brought consumers to them in droves. But the market is continuing to evolve, and all three elements are changing in directions that will place new pressure on high-end phone manufacturers to compete effectively. For years, high-end smartphone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung benefitted from a crooked subsidy in America. Mobile service operators like Verizon covered the cost of a high-end device as part of their standard phone plans, allowing customers to pay about 25 percent of the device’s true cost (roughly $200 for entry-level models), and pay the balance over the course of the two-year subscription. Everyone was required to pay for this subsidy — even customers who brought their own phones to the carrier and received no benefit. Since plans are the same price, consumers are incentivized to buy their devices through a carrier contract. Entry-level phones were free, and high-end devices like iPhones and Galaxy devices generally started at $200. Given the minimal cost difference, it is unsurprising that many consumers decided to splurge for the better options, . , and with it, the protected business models of the top-priced device companies. Last year, America’s fourth-place carrier, T-Mobile, announced a new marketing campaign Among the many improvements the telco initiated was the decoupling of phone and data service from mobile device subsidies. Customers can now purchase just a service plan, and then choose to additionally finance a new phone over a two-year period. A consumer can spend $100 on an entry-level phone or pay $27.50 per month for 24 months (a total of $660) to receive a Samsung Galaxy S5. For the first time, cheap devices are now actually cheap for consumers in America. The range between the top-of-the-line and bottom-of-the-line phones is not $200 anymore, but more like $600 or even $700. That’s quite an increase in choice for consumers. At least at T-Mobile, that is. Unfortunately, the other three carriers have not followed suit as aggressively, instead offering various programs that essentially act as a discount on purchasing a new device. Their reticence perhaps isn’t surprising – financing the purchase of a phone is as lucrative for Apple and Samsung as it is for the carrier. Consumers are responding by voting with their wallets, as this last quarter was a strong victory for T-Mobile over the other carriers. , and Of course, many factors go into the decision by a consumer to choose a particular wireless carrier, not least of which is T-Mobile’s offer to pay the early termination fee of its competitors. Yet, the fact that any of the carriers are giving consumers choice outside of the narrow expensive phone options of the past is a troubling omen for the manufacturers who have been subsidized by it for years. This victory has been muted, though, because cheap phones have generally had dramatically inferior hardware specs, software, and design compared to their more expensive counterparts. , consumers have been forced to compromise on the quality of their devices in order to save cash. , that is no longer the case. As Darrell Etherington wrote, “OnePlus One manages to do the impossible, offering up top-tier specs at mid-tier prices. It does this seemingly without sacrifices…” Their phone has technical specs that match the leading phones from other manufacturers at a price point of $300. The OnePlus One is certainly not the first smartphone that offers great performance at a fraction of the price. You can get unbranded phones from China at even deeper discounts, and companies like . So far, however, these manufacturers have been unwilling to turn their eye to the U.S. market, and instead have targeted emerging economies. That is likely to change as the device subsidy system slowly phases out, and these phones are suddenly deeply price competitive. For Apple and Samsung, this turn of events is probably the most serious threat to their supremacy in the U.S. market since they introduced their smartphones (this development has already taken place in emerging markets). Their phones are using the same core hardware technologies as devices half their price, and at the same time, consumers may start to feel the full brunt of the additional cost of purchasing an expensive device. Many will continue purchasing high-end models, of course, but now they will have at least some choice on what they want to buy. Neither Apple nor Samsung have the necessary cost structures to be able to compete on price. Take a look at Apple’s assumed cost of producing an iPhone. From the original version to the 5s, the estimated bill of materials has barely changed in the last seven years, hovering around $175 per device, according to (see the graph below). Even Apple’s lower-cost iPhone 5c has a bill of materials of $173.45, only $25 cheaper than its 5s cousin. That’s just for the parts, though. If we add areas like marketing, distribution, sales, and related expenses (“cost of goods sold”), the total marginal cost per unit approaches $300. Thus, Apple’s profit starts at the price of its competitors’ products. It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma. The incumbent players, faced with inferior competing products, don’t worry much about the market that they already own. Over time, though, those inferior products become good enough for many consumers who prefer a lower price over the souped-up products at the high end of the market. In such situations, companies attempt to persuade consumers that their products are superior, and thus should command a higher price. We have seen precisely these moves from Apple and Samsung in their latest releases. , an easy way to unlock the device without the need for entering a keycode. , features not generally supported on competing phones. Where Samsung and Apple differentiate themselves is around software. The burgeoning crop of mid-tier smartphones has yet to build a killer device that was complemented by equally well-designed software. As our review on the OnePlus One noted, the version of Android shipped with the device allowed for incredible customization, but at the expense of the simplicity noted in products from Apple and even Samsung. Beyond the operating system, Apple benefits from its deep library of apps. Developers still commonly launch their products on iPhone first, and the limited number of Apple models ensures that quality control remains simpler than on Android (even with that platform’s device-independent tools). Samsung’s dominant position in the Android market ensures that most apps are tested against its devices, giving its users a great experience. These are network effects – the more consumers that use a handful of devices, the more likely that developers will build for those devices. Yet, the share of the worldwide smartphone market held by these two companies continues to slide. Startegy Analytics that both Apple and Samsung lost market share last quarter, and combined they now represent less than 50 percent of the total market. Even though both companies continue to grow their sales, the overall market is increasing in size much more rapidly, and they aren’t competing effectively in emerging markets. As WhatsApp showed, there is a lot of money to be made in serving the wider diversity of handsets available outside of the premium market. While iOS has long had a stranglehold on developer revenue (its customers love spending money on apps), this may not hold as true if its market share continues to decline and Android reaches more and more people globally. One approach is to think of these top smartphones as luxury devices. But it is a deep mistake to believe that a smartphone, or really any computing device today, could ever truly be a luxury object. Luxury goods are fundamentally about exclusion through price. In the right conditions, the demand for a product may be proportional to its price ( ), meaning that a product is more desirable the higher its price. This makes sense for fashion and accessories like purses, watches and sport jackets, where functionality matters less than social distinctiveness. But today’s smartphone consumers demand their devices interoperate and collaborate at all times, making it difficult to create a luxury brand. We want to be able to interact with our friends through applications and share our experiences playing the same games or reading the same content. Due to these fundamental network effects, software is a winner-takes-all system, even outside of areas like office productivity. Consumers congregate in a couple of hit apps, and the long-tail receives scant notice. That’s why it is a bit disconcerting that Apple , ostensibly to provide that elite Burberry touch in each of its several hundred retail stores. While Apple hasn’t moved toward being a luxury brand, it needs to ensure that it doesn’t attempt to move too far upmarket – and suddenly see its market share look more like the Macintosh than the iPhone over the past several years. The key for analysts then is to watch how consumers adapt to the changing market and see if the high-end manufacturers are capable of responding. Carrier subsidies may just continue as they do today, and thus, there still won’t be competition for consumers. If subsidies do slowly disappear, consumers may continue to choose Apple and Samsung just as they did in the past, and the lower-priced options may never find demand. But I believe these mid-tier phones are going to be much more compelling than many analysts give them credit. If that prediction proves true, then Apple and Samsung would either have to lower prices and hurt their margins to remain competitive, or attempt to become more upscale in a space where broad popularity is key to attracting the attention of developers. Neither option is compelling, and thus, the next two years will be the era of good-enough smartphones. |
Airbnb Now Waiving Charges For Those Displaced By The Floods In Southeast Europe | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | Whenever disaster hits an area that Airbnb covers, the company works with local hosts to try to offer free housing for those who’ve been impacted. In response to the (which have killed nearly 50 people and displaced hundreds of thousands), Airbnb has enabled their “Disaster Response Tool” for people looking for a place to stay in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Through the tool, Airbnb Hosts with locations within traveling distance of the flood can opt in to offer their homes up free of charge to those who’ve been displaced. Airbnb also waives all of their normally associated fees. The program will run until at least June 3rd. Right now, it looks like there are about 48 locations being offered up through the program, most of them in Belgrade. It’s not enough to house everyone, of course — but that’s at least 48 people/families who have one less thing to worry about in a time that may be truly awful for them. Whether you’ve got a place to offer or are looking for a place to stay, |
Netflix Is Bidding Big On New Original Series The Crown, Which Could Cost More Than House Of Cards | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | Netflix is close to reaching a deal for what could be its next big original series. Called The Crown, the latest in a string of exclusive new TV shows will likely cost more than House of Cards, the series that got it started in originals. Netflix has been investing heavily in new original content as a way to differentiate its offering from other streaming services, and it shows: Both House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black have the kind of high production values that you would expect to see on a premium cable network like HBO or Showtime. But instead, those series premiered on Netflix, where they were streamed into people’s homes through any number of Smart TVs, streaming set-top boxes, game consoles, and tablets. The latest original that Netflix is pursuing is a historical drama called The Crown, which is being written by screenwriter and playwright . Morgan is best known for his work with in that genre, as he had previously penned movies that include Frost/Nixon, The Last King Of Scotland, and The Queen. That last credit will give him plenty of fodder for the new project, which we’ve heard follows Queen Elizabeth II over the course of various historical events during her reign. According to sources, an initial concept for the show could have different actresses portraying the Queen at different points in her life. Our sources say the series is being produced by Sony Pictures Television, which has also such as Breaking Bad, Damages, and Justified. Just as it did for House Of Cards, Netflix could commit to two seasons of the series, although that has yet to be finalized. When the company licensed House of Cards, it reportedly shelled out about $100 million to exclusive secure rights for the first two seasons of that series from production company Media Rights Capital. From what we’ve heard, The Crown could end up costing more than House Of Cards did when Netflix struck that deal a few years ago. Part of that stems from the fact that Netflix is much bigger now than it was then, with 35 million subscribers in the U.S. and a bigger geographical footprint. House of Cards was primarily licensed for the U.S. and a few select international markets. But as Netflix is working on deals now, it has many more countries to obtain rights for. Presumably that includes the six new European countries it announced expansion plans for later this year, including France and Germany. For Netflix, investing in original content is expensive, but at the end of the day it provides more value than getting rights to shows that people already know and love. After all, having exclusive access to a new show — especially one that people are clamoring to watch like HOC or OITNB — ends up being the most successful marketing that a company like Netflix can do. It gets new subscribers signed up, and it keeps them waiting for the second season, when it’s ready to be released. Considering that Netflix has gained about 6.5 million U.S. subscribers in the year or so since the release of House of Cards (not to mention Arrested Development and Orange Is The New Black), it seems like that investment was ultimately a smart one. When reached by email, a Netflix representative declined to comment. |
Notifyr Is A Nifty Little App That Sends Your iPhone Notifications To Your Mac | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | lets you receive iOS notifications on your Mac. When I work, I put my iPhone on the table next to my Mac. Every time it buzzes, I look away from my screen to see whether it’s an important notification. I get quite a lot of notifications, and most of the time it’s not important. But it can become problematic if I’m trying to focus and write a . I know it’s a first world problem, but Notifyr just solved it. When I first discovered this new app on yesterday, I immediately installed it. Using Notifyr works a lot like using a Pebble, except that your notifications appear on your Mac instead of on your phone. First, you need to install the iOS app from the App Store (it costs $3.99), and the free Mac app. When you open the app on your phone, it’ll ask to use Bluetooth. On your Mac, the app will runs as System Preferences pane. You activate Bluetooth on your Mac, pair your iPhone and you’re done. The app uses Bluetooth Low Energy, which means that it won’t be compatible with iPhone 4 or below. But it also means that it won’t drain your battery too quickly. Now, every time my phone buzzes, I receive an OS X notification in the corner of my screen. I can also see all my previous iPhone notifications in the Notification Center on my Mac. If you receive the same notifications on your phone and Mac, for example if you have two separate Twitter clients on your laptop and iPhone, you can exclude this particular iPhone app from Notifyr. It’s really simple, and the setup process is quite easy. Now, I could have solved this problem another way. Maybe I should try to switch off my phone from time to time. Maybe I should work on my attention span so that I don’t stop writing mid-sentence to |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 14 | null |
JD.com’s IPO Lands Strongly, With Shares Currently Up Over 8% | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | After , JD.com’s IPO has , with its shares currently up more than 8 percent from its $19 per share debut. JD.com popped higher this morning in its first moments as a public company, but it’s evened out to the $20 to $21 range for now. Is an 8 percent jump modest? Perhaps, but in the current, choppy market, pricing above range and nearly picking up a double-digit gain on your first day is just fine. Zendesk went public recently, but priced mid range. It is up to $16.90 from a $9 debut. Other companies like Box and Alibaba are in the process of prepping for public runs. JD.com, known as the Chinese Amazon, is a large business, as TechCrunch reported yesterday following its formal price of its shares: In 2013, JD.com had , a net loss of $8 million, and a net loss attributable to its shareholders due to preferred stock costs of $410 million. That was its smallest net loss on a per-share basis in several years. On a non-GAAP basis, JD.com had adjusted income of $36 million in calendar 2013, and free cash flow — again, non-GAAP — of $376 million. For now, investors are willing to accept non-GAAP profits in lieu of normally measured profitability. Likely valued on its revenue growth, JD.com has work ahead of it to maintain its valuation. For today, however, it’s sitting pretty. |
AppGyver Launches Composer, A Drag-And-Drop Tool For Building HTML5 Apps | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | Until now, was mostly known for its and Steroid.js, a command-line based tool for quickly building HTML5 apps. Today, the company is bringing both of these ideas together with the public beta launch of , a drag-and-drop HTML5 app builder that can work with data from any REST API and integrates with popular backend services and tools like Facebook’s Parse, and Kimono Labs. The company is targeting this service at developers who want to quickly bootstrap a mobile hybrid app. http://player.vimeo.com/video/80436716 I’ve been testing the service, which has been in private beta for a while now, for the last few days and its interface is indeed very easy to use and self-explanatory for the most part. While it suffers from the same kind of problem that most visual editors like this do in that you sometimes want to do things the system simply can’t accommodate, the list of tools is exhaustive enough to allow you to at least create a working prototype of an app quickly. From there, you can always export your app and work on it in a more full-blown HTML5 development environment. The apps are based on Google’s , the HTML5 hybrid app framework and PhoneGap, as well as AppGyver’s own Steroids, which forms the basis of much of the service. One nice feature of the service is that you can generate a QR code for your app, scan it from and then see all of the changes you make in development on your phone in real time. So far, the company’s users have created about 10,000 mobile apps with its existing tools. The Composer feature will likely bring its services to a much wider range of users — including those who wouldn’t necessarily consider themselves developers. With this launch, AppGyver is entering an for drag-and-drop app builders. They vary greatly in quality and depth, but this is definitely a field where standing out is becoming very hard for newcomers. AppGyver’s tool, however, hits the right balance between complexity (in large parts thanks to its backend integrations) and ease of use. will be available for free during the beta period, which the company expects to last until at least the third quarter of this year. Even after that, though, the company will continue to offer a free tier. |
Metaio’s Thermal Touch And The Future Of Augmented Reality User Interfaces | Jay Donovan | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | [youtube=http://youtu.be/t1HmYNqp8NM&feature=player_embedded] is demoing a new possible future in the evolutionary path for input control of wearable computing devices and it should be no surprise that Augmented Reality plays a role. There is a known UI problem with which many software and hardware makers have grappled: What is the best way to interact with the HUD (heads up display) and to control it, for example, if you are looking at a real table with a virtual chessboard on it? There are several motifs in use today for these kinds of situations. Touching physical buttons or controllers connected to the HUD (like on Oculus Rift or Google Glass), voice command (like on Google Glass), Depth-aware gestures (like on Meta SpaceGlasses), and others. However, many of these are problematic in that they are either bulky, noisy, unnatural, or that you look like a doofus to the world around you while doing it (e.g. swiping virtual menus in thin air). The Metaio engineers have a novel concept that attempts to solve this first-world conundrum. It works like this: Hook up a thermal camera to the device you are wearing and track the heat signature your finger leaves behind on real-world objects you touch. That lingering heat signature can be used to trigger actions in the digital content you see in your HUD, just like a mouse click or a touch. Watch the video. It has several after-effects enhanced visualizations that show how they ultimately envision the concept working in the future, but it does show the working prototype near the end which is quite interesting. I’m not going to say that you wouldn’t also look like a doofus punching in virtual key codes or dialing phone numbers on a blank wall, but still, somehow, interacting with real-world objects seems more natural. More human. The team I spoke with at Metaio thinks the technology is still approximately five years away from being market-ready, but that hasn’t stopped them from building a prototype demonstrating their concept. They’ve built it into a tablet for now, but the use case is really geared toward HUDs or other interactive eyewear. They will be demoing this prototype at the taking place in Santa Clara, May 27-29. |
Finding Game Design | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | Let’s talk about game designers. The “game designer” is the powerhouse, the visionary, the one who’s going to change up games. “Game designers” represent a cause, an idea, a vision of what games will be. “Game designers” set the next stage of the games industry’s evolution. “Game designers” live exciting lives of talks and interviews, being interesting and working on super cool things. Why wrap quotes around “game designer” in this fashion? Well because that image of the game designer is a figment. It’s a catch-all label that applies to leaders of big-budget studios or tiny one-man indies. It’s a label that anyone can self-appropriate as shorthand for “I make cool games,” just as anyone can call themselves an entrepreneur. It doesn’t really describe anything, but it sounds awesome. Game design as a craft isn’t nearly so cool, often undervalued and misunderstood. A long running impression (propagated by game designers as much as anyone else) is that design is more of a jack-of-all-trades kind of position. Not exactly. Mostly a game designer specifies the mechanics of a game, documents them in detail and laboriously works through balancing them. It’s also commonly a supporting role in mid or large sized teams. Creative authority is rarely bequeathed to the designer, instead staying at the team level, and the designer’s job tends to revolve around synthesis rather than invention. Mechanics play a key role in the development of a game, but there’s more to making a great game than that. They still need to be acid-tested through prototype and implementation to find out if they really work. A great designer helps facilitate rather than dictate that process. So “game designer” is a role about function, about zeroing down on the key risks and figuring out the best ways to validate them without costing a project a fortune. Yet because of the impression of the “game designer” as persona more than skill base, developers tend dubious of their worth. A vague game designer who thinks and talks in terms of experience and dreams, for example, is often ineffective. He essentially foists the difficult work of mechanics onto his team and acts more as a quality vet, which most teams grow to despise. There’s a lot of design-fatigue to be witnessed in studios made of veteran developers, and indeed some studios make a point of pride in saying that they don’t hire designers. They consider themselves doers rather than thinkers. And they have a point. Game designers are a thinky and eggheaded bunch, often speaking in what sound like arcane terms. The general familiarity or literacy of design beyond designers is poor, and among designers it’s perpetually quarreled-over. There are many smart books on the subject, often debating the nature of games or deep approaches to thinking about design. But those texts are often not read by developers and they sound fluffy and ineffectual. As a result game design as a discipline unto itself is highly respected in some venues and highly disrespected in others. It gets rolled in more with the idea of the game maker (such as many indie developers), democratized to an extent and considered informally. The question is whether anything is lost in that? Doesn’t it just reflect, for example, that some designers have greater initiative than others and create their own authority? That respect needs to be earned? In part yes, but on a wider level I think the state of game design is a roadblock to progress. A few years ago I encountered an earnest young man at a conference who had spent a long time creating a design for his dream game. He had written a 200-page design document chock full of material, and was looking to sell it into a studio. I was in the position of having to tell him he had wasted his time because the games isn’t like Hollywood. There’s no market for ideas separate of execution. Instead the tradition has long been that game development is dominated by insular studios. Their common refrain is that making games is hard and ideas are cheap, so they have enough of their own to go on. In fairness, 200-page design documents are usually useless, but not for the reason that ideas are cheap. They’re just the wrong approach, but I think there is a right approach out there. When you think about it, for an industry as big as games the notion that all ideas should come from in-house sources is pretty narrow. It indicates that cross-pollination isn’t happening well. Rather than thinking of mechanics as sets of techniques that can be pulled together to create original games, it is far more common to see studios clone or heavily copy source games. Sure is cloned because it seems that games of that nature are hot, but on another level the reason such clones happen is because developers can see that the game works but not meaningfully analyze why. That lack of technique familiarity is a roadblock. It’s all well and good to have a maker’s mentality, to be focused solely on nuts and bolts, but it comes at a cost. The advantage of a good game design is perspective. A good designer, for instance, tends to be familiar with smart user interface conventions from numerous games whereas non-designers make naive mistakes. A good designer understands resonance, but non-designers tend to struggle with why it is their game isn’t working. A good designer understands naturalism where non-designers tend to have to prototype everything out to find that out. What I’m saying is that there is an argument for the portability of technique for developers of all levels, but the challenge for design is to make itself more useful. I doubt that game design will ever really be like Hollywood with its scripts, but maybe it will evolve into something more like architecture. Design consultancy is nothing new, but maybe we’ll see the emergence of game design agencies, or markets for design, or similar. Sound far fetched? Maybe. The cost of game development all across the spectrum is rising, even in usually low markets like mobile. The risks are perceived to be higher, and so smart executives are always looking for ways to reduce risk. If designers can figure out how to design their work to have more utility and less eggheadedness, they may find themselves filling a much-needed role once more. |
Ebay Says Lists Of Stolen Customer Data Now Appearing Online Aren’t Legit | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 22 | Following of a cyberattack which compromised a “large number” of eBay users’ personal information, several lists purporting to contain that illegally acquired information have now shown up online. On anonymous data-sharing site Pastebin, for example, there are at least a of to provide “full eBay database dumps,” which you can pay for via bitcoin. However, eBay tells us that, at least so far, none of these published lists contain “authentic eBay accounts.” As one on Hacker News theorized this morning, these lists were probably targeted at “people gullible enough to send $1000 speculatively to a random person on the internet.” It seems they were right. These are legit data dumps, eBay says. Fortunately, too, it seems no one has taken the bait, either – in both cases, the bitcoin shows no transactions as of the time of publication. (Maybe the Internet is not as gullible as one would think?) According to eBay, the safest way for users to protect themselves is to reset their passwords, as the company yesterday. However, on Wednesday, that turned out to be easier said than done. A number of users reported they had problems trying to reset their password yesterday, and were encountering an error page as eBay struggled with high traffic volumes. That means that some number of eBay users who were trying to protect themselves by resetting their passwords, were, at times, unable to do so. Hopefully those users will return again today, as well as change that password anywhere else they may have used it online. This “high traffic volume” problem doesn’t seem to be continuing today, now that the initial rush has died down. Ebay wouldn’t share how many users ended up blocked from completing their password resets yesterday, but testing the system this morning from the East Coast, it appears to be functioning normally. |
Kakao And Daum To Merge, Creating One Of South Korea’s Largest Internet Companies | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | and that they will merge through an equity swap, creating a company with a 3.4 trillion won (about $2.9 billion) market capitalization. Kakao is the maker of KakaoTalk, South Korea’s top messaging service, while Daum is one of the country’s largest Internet portals. If the deal goes through, the combined company will be listed in October. Kakao and Daum stand to become one of South Korea’s largest Internet companies and will be better positioned to compete against , South Korea’s largest Internet portal and the maker of KakaoTalk competitor , which . Line had about 400 million users as of April, while about 145 million people use KakaoTalk. News of Kakao and Daum’s merger follows and Japanese Internet giant . According to a , Kakao had been planning to file for an IPO that could have been worth $2 billion in South Korea. In a statement, Daum said, “The merger will solidify core business operations and create positive synergy.” For Daum, the deal represents a chance to expand its mobile offerings. Like its peers in other countries, and , Daum has struggled to develop a cohesive mobile strategy as its users spend more time on smartphones and tablets. Kakao, on the other hand, will now have more source of income besides its , which has . The company has recently tried to diversify, however, by launching products like a , a , and a . |
The Crazy Genius Behind Solar Roadways | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | Here’s an idea crazy enough that it just might work: Pave the streets with solar-powered panels that have their own built-in heat and LED lights. That’s what hope to accomplish with their ongoing project, which they just funded through a hugely popular crowdfunding campaign. The husband-and-wife team has spent the better part of the last decade developing solar-powered modular panels that could be installed in roadways and parking lots, and would be able to collect power from the sun. Those panels could also keep streets clear of snow and ice, while illuminating them with LEDs. Rather than paving streets and driveways with asphalt, the Solar Roadways panels would theoretically be able to decrease our nation’s dependence on fossil fuels by generating massive amounts of clean energy. Panels are made from ruggedized glass and connect to one another through a mesh network, so that even if one panel fails the system will notify repair crews that it needs to be replaced. The whole thing is a pretty outlandish idea, and one we first wrote about . Now, after rolling out some prototype panels in a driveway, and putting together a couple of videos to show how they work, the Solar Roadways team seems to have reached a point where it can actually start productizing and deploying its panels. They will be helped by more than $1 million that they raised in a . (The campaign goes on for another week, for those who’d like to contribute.) After building out and testing its thanks to funding from the Federal Highway Administration, the company is hoping to deploy the panels in the wild. While frankly it’s a pretty cool idea, the Solar Roadways team has a lot of work ahead of it if it hopes to get its panels installed in real-world situations. And given the amount of highway and road infrastructure in the U.S., it would no doubt be crazy expensive to deploy in any massive scale. But the whole thing is crazy and cool enough that it just might work. |
Getting In Bed With Mattress Startup Casper | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | Earlier this year, I wrote about , a Lerer Ventures-backed startup that . Since then, the company actually , so I decided to swing by Casper’s office in the Noho neighborhood of New York to try the mattress out for myself. In the video above, you can see the mattress, the material it’s built from, and the packaging that it’s in delivered in. (You also get to see me reading in bed, which is kind of weird.) Co-founder and CEO Philip Krim told me that the “secret sauce” of the bed is layering latex foam on top of memory foam, tapping the advantages of both materials. “By going direct to consumers and selling through our own website, we’re able to cut out the middleman of a traditional retail store,” he said. “So a bed that uses some of the materials that we use would traditionally for $3,000 or $4,000, but by going direct we’re able to sell it for under $1,000 at all sizes.” |
R.O.W. With Butch: Despite A Dark Past, Sarajevo’s Tech Scene Emerges | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | At the height of the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995, some 8,000 grenades a day would rain down on the capital city of Sarajevo, while snipers plied their deadly trade from the hills above the city. The internecine warfare between Bosnia’s different nationalities, religions and ethnic groups – a result of the breakup of communist Yugoslavia – was total, and remains one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. Driving from Sarajevo airport into town, passing tall Soviet-era tower blocks, you can still see the bullet holes covering many buildings, forming large clusters near the tops of the buildings where more snipers would hole-up. But after years of tough economic times, the city, the country and its resilient people are looking to the future. Last weekend saw signs of a new cluster emerge on the European and global tech scene – that of the Sarajevo tech cluster. But as has happened in many other Central and Eastern European countries before them, the tech scene in BH is gradually changing, as new entrepreneurs emerge and traditional outsourcing companies realise they too can start to produce their own startup products. has been amongst the first events in the city to begin to galvanise the tech startup scene there, (preceded only by the Balkan Venture Forum in the city, a day before). It certainly was not the easiest of timings. After uncharacteristic, torrential rain, Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia have all suffered from the worst flooding in 120 years (see below). Organized by , regional tech news site , and , the #SarajevoFTW event brought together key players from Bosnia Herzegovina to connect startups with investors and investors with each other. A pitch competition run by European-wide accelerator Startup Bootcamp saw very early stage startups pitch to a crowd of brand new Angel investors, mentors and others. In the end the pitches were one by , and Light Docs (yet to launch), a startup started by two 16 year olds – an unheard of result a few years ago, and testament to the explosion of technology around the world. But it quickly became clear that the key lynchpins in this new ecosystem are two men named Edin. Edin Mehic (left, above), CEO, of and Edin Saracevic (right, above), founder, and . Saracevic decided to double-down on the potential of the city and the country to produce new companies, after exiting his own startup. Founr months ago, Saracevic, a serial entrepreneur, found a disused shopping mall which had lain empty for 12 years and converted two floors into a co-working space (Nest71) and a General Assembly-style educational facility, Academy387 based at HUB387. Why all the 387s? Because in a multi-ethnic country, it’s much easier to refer to the countries’ area code of 387 than it is to refer to a place or region. Saracevic hopes to help educate the next generation of engineers and entrepreneurs in Sarajevo. He also plans to build a fund four startups in the next 18 months. “Today everyone can dream – everything is possible,” he told me. Max Gurvits, Partner with Teres Capital (a new fund based out of Sofia, Bulgaria), says while the tech scene is still ‘early’, he’s confident a range of new tech startups will emerge from the wider South Eastern Europe region, of which Bosnia is a part. For his part, Mehic, who created the new accelerator called , says Sarajevo has some advantages in the Balkans region. While Belgrade is the biggest city in the former Yugoslavia, some companies are using Sarajevo as a hub for the region due to its lower costs and relatively neutral location. His own story reflects the journey of the country, and its tech scene. During the Civil War his parents were concerned about his education, so sent him and his sister to Croatia where he had to make ends meet and look after his younger sister. He returned age 19 and went to university. From there he was responsible for putting Sarajevo back on the Internet via a satellite link to Amsterdam to the internet, all on Windows 95. One day he was in the computer lab at the university and a professor came in. “He said he wanted us to develop software for the UN.” Thus, Mehic helped develop the first country-wide software system to track displaced people as a result of the war. More recently Mehic has exited a regional job listings board (bought by the UK’s Daily Mail group) and started salary survey site, also acquired by a Finnish group. He now concentrates on developing Bizoo and the local ecosystem. Thus, where once grenades and mortars fell, a converted shopping mall played host to a tiny new startup winning a pitch competition. Sarajevo, once a city synonymous with war, finally has a brighter future, and hopefully tech entrepreneurship will play its part. This video was shot in Croatia, but is representative of the flooding across the whole region: The Balkan countries have been devastated by floods. If you would like to donate to relief efforts, one charity to consider is the appeals set up by , or the . Below you will find more info.
IBAN: HR 6923400091511555516
SWIFT: PBZGHR2X
FULL BENEFICIARY NAME : HRVATSKI CRVENI KRIŽ,
FULL BENEFICIARY ADDRESS: ULICA CRVENOG KRIŽA 14, P.P. 93, 10001 ZAGREB
Red Cross Bosnia and Herzegovina
IBAN CODE: BA391610000000850119
SWIFT CODE : RZBABA2S
FULL BENEFICIARY NAME : CRVENI KRIZ FEDERACIJE BIH SARAJEVO
FULL BENEFICIARY ADDRESS: NEDIMA FILIPOVICA 9, SARAJEVO |
Founder Stories: Guy Goldstein’s Make-Or-Break Bet With Check | Contributor | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | Six years ago, Goldstein helped found what is now Check, a mobile payment company that helps people track their finances and do payments, moving about $500m in payments a year. But, the path to get here wasn’t linear and required a big, make-or-break bet. Check started out as a web company, but Goldstein quickly realized the company wasn’t acquiring enough users and the team needed to admit things weren’t working. Luckily for them, this was around the time of the new iPhone, so they bet the company entirely on mobile in about three months (after building Facebook apps that failed) and became one of the first apps in the App Store. At that time, they couldn’t even get funding for the mobile product, so had existing investors support them. Goldstein relays this story with a founder’s excitement and humility, sharing lessons about how he selects investors, why it’s important to celebrate the highs in startup life, and how his team is precise about having colleagues in Palo Alto and Israel travel back and forth to make sure there are strong bonds at the company. For any company that has or will face a make or break situation, Goldstein’s story is a must-watch. |
#Love: Wanderlust | Contributor | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | Over the years, I’ve run my passport ragged, each foreign visa and customs stamp an inked reminder of life experiences. I travel as much as possible, sometimes for weeks or months at a time. And even though I often wander solo and choose erratic destinations, I generally don’t get too lonely because I’m constantly encountering fascinating people or things. But one arena it has impacted is the ability to sustain romantic relationships. Whereas I keep in touch with newly made platonic friends via social media, it’s challenging to keep a flame alive at home, or, considering my “let’s catch a bus and see what happens” preferred style of vagabonding, entertain anything long-term on the road. Enter the absurd world of geolocation-enabled online dating, which has given “wanderlust” a whole new meaning. Recent suggests that people’s personalities actually shift with extended travel, resulting in increased agreeableness and openness to experience, as well as decreased neuroticism. Another shows that ample opportunity, such as extended or frequent travel, is the biggest predictor of extramarital affairs. Whether you’re single or attached, this seems to support the free love “sex on vacation” mentality – in essence, the “why” part of travel romance. Technology, then, may be seen as simply the “how” — it’s our vehicle for modern-day introductions. Take this past Winter Olympics in Sochi, for example. Women’s Slopestyle gold medalist Jamie Anderson on what happens behind the scenes when you segregate 2,850 high-strung competitors away from the rest of the world. “Tinder in the Olympic Village is next level,” the U.S. snowboarder told Us Weekly. “It’s all athletes! In the mountain village it’s all athletes. It’s hilarious. There are some cuties on there.” This is not entirely surprising: a bunch of absurdly fit people under high pressure, crammed into dorm-like conditions, with 100,000 condoms handed out to last a mere two weeks? “Next level” bacchanalia is kind of expected. But take away the sexy athlete angle, the sardine-like confinement and the lifetime supply of Trojans, and you’ll find people 10,000 miles away also using the app to connect. This past winter an American scientist based at McMurdo Station in Antarctica decided to pull up Tinder for kicks and found a woman located a mere 45-minute helicopter ride away (hey, it’s Antarctica). They both swiped right and began chatting, and though they were only able to meet briefly before she was due to leave, he New York magazine’s The Cut that she’ll be back later in the research season. “There’s still hope,” he says. In these instances, whether you’re swarmed by crowds or isolated from them, technology is helping people in foreign places find a spark. – a momentary connection to last till they’re back at the boarding gate. They’re not entirely wrong: there’s , a Bluetooth-enabled app that matches airline passengers who want to join the mile high club, and , which pairs generous frequent fliers with beautiful but cash-strapped girls. Even online communities that aren’t dedicated matchmaking sites have gotten side reputations. Last December Business Insider how Couchsurfing, the online travel community that promotes cultural exchange by matching local hosts with passers-through, has become something of a hook-up site. Long-time Couchsurfers have disappointment with the burgeoning fling aspect that’s encroaching on the mission of the community, but there’s no denying its presence. (Indeed, even a cursory Google search of “Couchsurfing” and “hookup” results in dozens of “couch-bang” blog entries and step-by-step seduction how-tos.) Before reading the BI article, the idea had never crossed my mind. But three weeks later, as I was in Vancouver essentially being a Van-cougar with my years-younger 25-year-old host, I had to laugh. This wasn’t like on a 17-year-old girl through Instagram; there was no predation or deception involved. The fact that we met via technology as opposed to something analog like through work or at the grocery store is irrelevant to one simple fact: we just got along. He seemed to think the same: “You were a very forward, highly outgoing and extremely easy person to talk to,” he recounts via email. “Based on the great day we spent together and your aforementioned qualities, many of which I believe I possess also, I decided to be very honest and forward.” For him, it’s not about gaming every girl who walks through his door (he claims he hasn’t extended the invitation to other female surfers). Rather, it’s about increasing the likelihood of catching lightning in a bottle during that limited window of time – and whether you can find that chemistry via tech or otherwise, regardless if it’s fleeting or forever, there’s no point in limiting your resources. “With so much choice,” he types, “how can a person settle for just one?” , because his real name is equally unlikely, would have to agree. “I’ll basically check out OKCupid and Tinder whenever I land in a new city, so I have dates waiting when I get there,” the 30-year-old entrepreneur tells me via Whatsapp, rattling off a list of eight countries he’s employed this digital dating strategy. “I’m always upfront about it,” he adds. “You never want to do anything under false pretenses. That’s an asshole move.” Like my Couchsurfing host, Francesco insists it’s not at about bagging just anybody; he largely bases his selection around shared interests and intellectual chemistry, just like regular old-fashioned, in-person dating. “Remember, I’m spending limited time in an amazing new city. There are literally hundreds of other things that I can do,” he tells me. “It really needs to be a cool date that I’m excited about, because otherwise I won’t even bother. I can get enough awkward dates with mediocre girls at home, you know?” But Francesco’s approach differs slightly than the fleeting Wingman-users and Tinder-ing Olympians: yes, he meets women via technology, but also keeps up with them via technology, too. “Technology, via Whatsapp, allows me to keep in touch and hold flames for longer, while apps like Tinder allow me to meet new ones when I travel,” he explains. I think about our own digitally enhanced relationship, and the logic is dead-on. Introduced a few years back in New York through a mutual friend, Francesco and I developed an easy friendship that was as honest as it was flirtatious, full of good cheer, respect and rapport. And now, nearly two years after he’s moved back to his native country, or when I’m off on another international bender, it’s not unusual for us to have radio static for months, only to one day have my phone randomly ping with an incoming text: “That photo from Burning Man you just posted to Facebook is doing very bad things to my pants area right now.” Whatsapp has made it possible for us to keep each other’s company in spite of the distance, as if we were joking with each other from across a table rather than across continental lines. In our case, the nomadic lifestyle has not prevented us from intermittently keeping up with one another at all – as long as there’s a wi-fi connection, that is. The latest Pew study indicates that one in 10 Americans an online dating site or mobile app, and the proportion of Americans who say that they met their current partner online has doubled in the last eight years—a statistic that doesn’t exclude travelers. In the summer of 2012, Klaus, then 26, was just a guy living in Portland, OR, offering space to travelers via Couchsurfing, and Noemie was just a Dutch girl passing through. “I did not expect to meet a girl on Couchsurfing, partially because I felt uncomfortable hitting on female surfers, as I did not want to make anyone staying with me feel uncomfortable. I think that’s sleazy,” he says via email. “However, Noemie and I just hit it off. When you fall in love, everything is strange and strange is wonderful.” After she returned to Europe, Klaus, a writer, continued to romance her with poetry, which evolved into long emailed conversations, which turned into hours-long daily Skype sessions. A mere five months after they met, Klaus flew to the Netherlands to visit Noemie. Three months after that, he moved out of this apartment to be with her – and that’s where he’s emailing me from right now: their shared flat in Amsterdam, where they’ve now lived together for almost a year. “The weirdest feeling is to sometimes look at where I am and realize that the only reason Noemie and I found each other is because we were open-minded and sociable enough to use Couchsurfing,” he says, citing the implausibility of their meeting otherwise due to geographic distance and general circumstance. Again, that general openness to new experience and possibility that Klaus talks about – the personality hallmark of travelers – is echoed amongst the other wanderers as well. Francesco says he’s absolutely open to translating his momentary connections into a serious relationship, should fortune come that way. He relates a sweet story about a French girl he met in Paris and kept a Whatsapp rapport with for over a year, but due to their infrequent in-person meetings on their respective continents, it wasn’t meant to last. “There’s only so long you can keep these sort of ephemeral relationships going before everyone sort of moves on, you know?” he types. “This last time we met up in Paris she had a boyfriend and whatnot, so we left it at that. We’re friends, which is cool. “For me, it’s more a question of, can I find a girl here who has similar sensibilities and tastes? In other words, find a rooted girl who shares and understands my rootlessness?” I sit there for a bit, letting his words sink in. “Yes, I totally know what you mean,” I finally type. A pause. “OK, last question: What are you wearing?” |
Apple’s Expanded ‘Your Verse’ Campaign Pitches iPad As Mobile Creation Tool | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | Apple is releasing two new TV spots today, along with . The spots will continue its ‘Your Verse’ advertising, which attempts to demonstrate the ways that the iPad can be used to create and ‘do’. The campaign consists of two new ‘Your Verse’ TV spots. The first focuses on , the principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London and Conductor Laureate of the LA Philharmonic. The second features . Alongside those spots are sections dedicated to both Esa-Pekka (who has a , go figure) and Chérie on Apple’s website and there will also be corresponding iTunes and App Store promotions that and featured in the spots. On a high level, the spots continue to be effective in presenting the iPad as a device that goes beyond passive activities like movies and browsing the web. Both segments highlight that real things can be accomplished on the tablet, in ways that contribute materially to the owner’s way of life. You can argue all you want about whether that’s actually true for everyone — I know plenty of people who struggle to find uses for their iPads — but the use cases in the spots are strongly presented and I think they’ll be effective. My personal iPad gets used a lot for email, gaming and distraction-free writing, but not so much for brute-force tasks that are more suited to a desktop. I do find it interesting that the Esa-Pekka spot showcases the iPad at its strongest — as a piece of technology that can transform itself into another object entirely, in this case a piano and composition notebook. There are 60 and 30-second versions of the spots that will be airing on TV and will be available on Apple’s YouTube channel. In both cases I find the 30-second spots to be more effective. The beats are more percussive and impactful and the longer spots feel a bit gratuitous. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4msNKgRQDc The Esa-Pekka segment especially, given that it’s a focused use case, works better as a shorter compilation. The conductor is shown composing a piece on the iPad in a variety of different environments including while shaving, in a cab, on a street at night and other scenarios. There are only two apps shown used here, The final couple of seconds of the shorter spot are fantastic, as it ends just as the maestro is about to launch into the composition he has created and bam, it ends, leaving it to the viewer’s imagination. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbXYqHke9n8 The Chérie King spot, as well, is more impactful in its shorter form. King, a prolific and well-followed travel blogger, uses the iPad for navigation, photography, communication, translation and writing. But the shorter spot, I believe, better illustrates the way that the iPad helps her, as a deaf person, navigate tricky scenarios that come up while in foreign lands. And the two beats where she uses sign language both to a person over FaceTime and in person, are more prominent and easier to pick out when the spot is more concise. and , a live flight tracking and airport info app. The usage of the iPad here is much more ‘general purpose’, though all related to travel. The aim is very similar to the Esa-Pekka spot — you are to see the iPad as something that can be ‘out in the world’ letting you do things, not just something you use on your couch. The message that’s to be transmitted here is that the iPad enables creativity in scenarios which — while maybe technically possible for a laptop — would be wildly uncomfortable or impractical with another kind of computer. This is a continuation of the theme that I wrote about when Apple debuted the Your Verse spot back in January — the . If there’s some criticism I have here, it’s that the examples given in these spots are still a tad bit ‘out there’. I don’t necessarily want Apple to go down Microsoft’s ‘office hero’ path, but there has to be some use cases that feel a bit more down to earth than ‘impresario’ or ‘exotic travel blogger’. I personally know farmers that use the iPad in their fields, for instance, and folks who pack them with reference materials that would have filled up a bookbag or backpack — and there are plenty of journeymen artists that use it to good effect. If Apple continues to expand ‘Your Verse’, I’d like to see them set out some simple, practical examples of the way the ‘everyman creative’ could use the iPad. Especially as Microsoft gets . Even as people get angsty about Apple’s recent tablet numbers, that tablet sales will handily eclipse PC sales this year, and are on a stiff upwards trek. And Microsoft has even acknowledged that tablets are what they are, and has become as comfortable as possible positioning the Surface 3 as a laptop alternative, rather than a pure tablet. As far as why the spots both feature people up and out and off their butts, I think , and other tablets, are used give us the answer. They clearly point to a massive surge when people get home and have access to their couches. These spots both show use cases that are somewhat…aspirational for iPad. Yes, they can be used as creation tools in the back of a cab and a travel assistant in a foreign land. But most people are still using them to browse celebrity gossip, watch video and peruse social networks. As the prices and weight come down and they get more proliferate, we may see some shift here, but for now these examples are in isolation, not aggregate. Apple, in the end, is trying to advertise the iPad Air here, and I think that these spots will help. But the uses cases here are just as powerful with any truly capable and app-rich tablet platform. Unfortunately, Android tablets have yet to really cross a quality rubicon when it comes to hardware or software — but Google is trying really hard to make that happen. Eventually, probably, someone else will make that happen. Until then, these spots will likely sell a few more iPads. |
Now 100 Cities Strong, Startup Grind Aims To Spread The Entrepreneurial Bug Worldwide | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | One thing I often hear when talking to entrepreneurs who live outside of the San Francisco Bay Area is that it’s hard for them to connect with other entrepreneurs nearby. It’s not that there are no startup-minded folks in Boise, Idaho or Guatemala City, Guatemala. There are just fewer events to bring them together in one place than there are in networking-happy tech hubs like Silicon Valley or New York City. That’s the problem that is looking to solve. Founded in 2010 by fellow entrepreneurs and , Startup Grind’s aim is to create Silicon Valley-esque communities all over the world where like-minded entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, writers, and others can come together and share their experiences. And it seems to be hitting a nerve: Last month, Startup Grind expanded to its 100th chapter, a big leap up from the five chapters it had just two years ago. Today, there are Startup Grind chapters in 42 countries worldwide, from to . Though that kind of global growth may seem like it could be overwhelming, according to Andersen, all of the Startup Grind chapters speak a common language through entrepreneurship. “Our values are what connects our community,” Andersen told me in an email. “Helping others first, giving more than you take, and making friends (not contacts) are the common links between the 100 Chapters and the 300 people that run them.” Indeed, Andersen follows those tenets himself. As my former colleague Rip wrote in his great profile of Startup Grind , Andersen is not an investor, and he doesn’t demand equity or monthly dues from Startup Grind’s participants. The organization makes money through event sponsorships and ticket sales. It’s a refreshingly straightforward structure, and that seems to attract an especially genuine crowd. I’ve personally attended several Startup Grind events at the Silicon Valley chapter, and they’ve all been fantastic. (The feature image above is of Startup Grind’s 2013 event in Mountain View, California, where many speakers were met with enthusiastic standing ovations, a nice contrast to the crowd of lackadaisical people staring at laptops that often greets speakers at tech events.) Andersen says that ideally, Startup Grind will spread economic strength in areas beyond the handful of geographic hubs in which it has traditionally concentrated. “Every country, community, and government in the world is trying to figure out how to support and keep their best local entrepreneurs in their country… Silicon Valley doesn’t need another billion dollar company. But if Melbourne, Stockholm, or Philadelphia got one, it would totally change that city and its people.” While Startup Grind’s current network of 75,000 entrepreneurs worldwide is an impressive start toward achieving that goal, Andersen likes to point out that there are 400 million entrepreneurs in the world. So in a way, he says, they’re really just getting started. |
From The Ivy League To State Schools, Demand For Computer Science Is Booming | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | For years, people in the tech industry have more young people in the United States to become interested in studying computer science. It now looks like they’ve finally gotten the message. Demand for computer science classes and programs is booming at universities across the U.S., according to this past week at the by , the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and Stanford Computer Science professor . At Lazowska’s own school, the number of incoming freshman who plan to major in computer science is soaring — the graph below, published earlier this week , speaks for itself: It’s not just UW that’s seeing a CS boom. Computer science class enrollment is markedly up at a number of institutions, from traditional tech hubs like MIT and Stanford to more humanities- and business-focused schools like Harvard: Number of CS majors at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and UPenn Now, when the word “bubble” gets thrown around, many tech industry leaders like to point out that public market activity is the irrational exuberance seen during the first tech boom. But in academia, enthusiasm for learning to code is at all time highs, with CS enrollment at some schools far surpassing the numbers that were seen during the late 1990s: But at the academic level, Lazowska and Roberts say that this time around things just feel different than they did during the first dot-com frenzy. For a variety of reasons, the recent dramatic growth in CS studies may very well continue for a long time, rather than head for a trough like they did in the early 2000s. With the current in the job market, this all seems like great news, right? Well, there’s a catch. According to Lasowska and Roberts, our higher education institutions today aren’t adequately prepared to handle the surge in computer science education demand. At the moment, there just aren’t enough instructors to teach all the students who want to learn. Many schools are currently torn between either limiting the number of CS degrees they give out, or letting class sizes become “enormous.” While these may seem like great problems to have, they are still problems. How will academia handle the big CS boom? You can view the entire slide deck for Lasowska and Roberts’ talk . |
Women Vs. Women, Or The Ugly Side Of Feminism | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | With the birth of the new feminist narrative sweeping popular culture, it is bound to enter its awkward teenage phase. And just like a teenage mean girl, the new feminism is growing unwieldy before gracefully settling into something we can agree on. But before it makes it there, I hope it doesn’t tear us all down in the process. A few weeks ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York, I observed hundreds of men descend upon the Manhattan Center determined to build an app that would catch the eye of various parties awarding prizes. Among them were a handful of women who were certainly holding their own in the testosterone-heavy environment. One of those women headed a team that to help women organize trips to the nail salon. It was called and as co-founder Velina Ivanova was pitching on stage, I couldn’t help but get excited about the concept. At the suggestion of the editors backstage with me, I wrote about the project. “If you like it, write about it, Leslie!” they encouraged. So I did. First rule of blogging is to never read the . The rancor that my blog post and the unwitting Indulge inspired was disheartening, and not in the way you’d think. What was most upsetting about them was that women were attacking Velina simply for the idea of Indulge. Love the responses to the initial comment. Wow. Nothing that I love more than broad, sweeping generalizations. But that aside, it upset me because Velina is an incredibly bright, articulate, highly educated, substantial young woman who came with her (male) co-founder to the Hackathon and competed against 650 other developers to build something that ended up winning second place from our TechCrunch judges. The problem obviously extends further than our Hackathon, though. Here’s the rub. Lately in the press I’ve been seeing a lot of of self which women are apparently especially prone to. . In the annual “Shape Issue” of Magazine (AKA the one with Kim Kardashian on the cover), several articles focused on high-powered, arguably successful women in business. Each woman expressed some concern over being taken less seriously because of her individual interest in fashion and style. “…if you talk about fashion in the boardroom, it takes on a stigma. It’s an insidious form of misogyny,” aptly put in the issue. Where I become frustrated is where men are concerned, a stigma does not exist when talking about sports or other male-associated topics in a business environment; but women hesitate to fully express themselves in this way lest it erode their image. Consider the profile of Marissa Mayer, which drew quite a bit of . Onstage at Disrupt last year, Michael Arrington jokingly asked her to autograph his copy of the magazine. The Yahoo CEO has never shied away from her interest in fashion, as she’s moved through the ranks, but it is not supported in a way, say the Larry Ellison’s infatuation with boat racing is. This double standard is what Velina, Indulge and, subsequently, I were subjected to when my post hit TechCrunch. As a woman who has a successful career in business and plans to continue in an upward trajectory, I also enjoy my twice-monthly manicure and get excited about the color of the polish I choose. This is totally healthy and normal behavior, by the way. I also enjoy watching college basketball, practicing yoga, purchasing high-end footwear, and traveling. All of these activities make me a well-rounded individual, and certainly not someone who would be less capable of running a company one day. I’m not a one-trick pony and neither are the women who were featured in . I started to feel badly about supporting Indulge because of the comments on my post, and that is unacceptable. My initial reaction — excitement about the app, seeing a real use case, and then expressing that to the TechCrunch audience — is what really matters, and I’m proud to stand by it. I know we’ve been Lean In’d to death in the last year, but Sheryl Sandberg raises a valuable point about women needing to support one another. The does nothing but fragment us. Until we get to a place where we are truly equals, we cannot tear each other down for something like a project at a hackathon. No one bats an eye when a man builds a sports-related app at a hackathon. I want more for us and fewer mean girls attacking women who are trying to build new things. |
Long-Delayed Connected Device Tile Finally Starts Shipping | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | The Bluetooth-powered lost item finder called , which last summer raised , has finally begun shipping, the company . Early backers may be a bit skeptical, given the delays the company experienced since raising a significant round of funding many months ago, then not being able to deliver in a timely manner. But over the Memorial Day holiday here in the U.S., Tile’s Twitter account has re-tweeted of at least one happy customer’s receipt of the Tile device as proof of the shipments , and to publish a more complete ship schedule soon. For those wondering when their own Tile will arrive, the company notes that it will ship in order by the date the pre-order was placed. Or in other words, Tile’s earliest backers will receive their devices first, as it should be. Despite not having a product on the market (until now, apparently), Tile became one of the buzziest new companies in the connected device space, offering small, affordable, square-shaped dongles which you’re able to attach to real-world items like wallets, bikes, suitcases, bags, keychains and more in order to keep track of them when they go missing. These Tiles, as the dongles are called, work alongside a mobile application that lets you view the Tile’s last known location. Meanwhile, the company’s long-term vision is to blanket the world with these little devices, helping to form a distributed network of sorts, as each Tile app will become capable of picking up the location of any Tile marked as lost – meaning that you’d be track down lost items even when your Tile goes out of range (approximately 50-150 ft.) Tile gained a lot of attention for its record-breaking crowdfunding campaign last year, but then . In the time since its raise, Tile has faced competition from a number of companies hoping to tap into the latent consumer interest in connected devices, and capitalizing on Tile’s inability to meet that demand. Devices like , have stepped into fill the void, and yet, Tile with its millions in funding and its thin and sleek devices, still seems to be the one to beat thanks to the viral attention it received in months past. The company says Tiles will last for a year before needing to be replaced. (Unlike some other competitors, Tile’s batteries are not user-replaceable.) This is both a positive and a negative, of course. It’s what allows the Tile device its slimmer appearance, but on the other hand, it means consumers will always have to order more dongles, which are more expensive than the batteries themselves. Tile is still accepting orders, offering one Tile for $19.95 or four Tiles for $59.85, and more. CEO and co-founder Nick Evans recently to Tile’s support site that customers will be asked to confirm their shipping address approximately two weeks before their order ships, noting also that early backers should have already received this email. In addition, the company released more info on its on Friday, showing Tile customers what their package will look like, what their first steps should be, and more about the way the device works. Stay tuned. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyC9YGjCr8M] |
The Internet Is Now Part Of The Crime Scene | John Biggs | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | Elliot Rodger, a young man with some horrible ideas and serious mental problems, . He left pages of digital photos and hours of video detailing his pain and his envy. In the voice of an entitled boy not given what he wants, he talks about being alone while others are together. He became a misogynist through his own twisted self-reflection. Now his efforts to reach out to seemingly like-minded groups on the Internet make him look like a monster created by the Internet himself. This is wrong. A decade ago a crime scene was a photo and a report. Now it is a sea of interconnected tracings, the murderer bobbing loosely in social media and the forums. We can watch him make his way through these straits, we can watch the madness growing, and we can watch his terrible end, all through murk of media. We are quick to judge and we are quick to look at his wake and say, definitively, that he was this or he was that. He was frustrated. The frustration grew. He went to a place he thought would help. It didn’t. There are two ways to see this young man. On one hand and they made him what he was. On the other hand, he was sick and his efforts to find himself led him down terrible paths. But we can’t expect the Internet to help a man like Elliot Rodger. He wanted human contact and he got no solace there. He wanted advice and the Internet did what it does best: it reflected his own sickness back at him. Forum posters can catch a whiff of madness and react with sarcasm but who there can help? Hashtags don’t prevent murders. Therapists and gun locks do. We are not qualified to look at this man’s life and judge him. He did a horrible thing. He was terribly sick. He had access to all the tools necessary for this to go either way: he had a gun to kill and he had expensive therapists to help him. He took the way of the gun. We envy the perfect lives we see through the terrible lens of the web and we wish we were different. We envy every day and we covet. And we covet with our hearts. Most of us learn to temper this greed with love. He coveted until the end. That’s not the Internet’s fault, but we are all to blame for letting this man and others go as far as they did. |
How Cloud Startups Are Changing The Face Of Innovation | Pete Sonsini | 2,014 | 5 | 25 | After more than a decade of hype and billions of dollars of value creation, it would be reasonable to expect investors to start losing interest in cloud-related startups. In the venture business, me-too investors reap ever-diminishing returns compared to early entrants in a new sector. And while the sweeping transformation that began with the migration of non-critical applications from the data center to the cloud has proven massive indeed, it’s certainly no longer early days. Indeed, even the second wave of cloud opportunity — essentially reinventing the infrastructure underlying cloud applications to meet the growing demands for performance and scalability in an increasingly mobile, app-centric world — has begun to level off in terms of new opportunity. The enabling technologies that were hand-sewn by cloud pioneers like Google or Facebook are becoming more and more commercially available; one by one, obstacles are being eliminated and problems are being solved, primarily by startups. A number of startups addressing cloud scalability challenges for massively scalable web applications have already become market leaders ( and ) or have achieved outstanding exits by being acquired by market leaders ( and ). There’s still plenty of room for innovation, especially around mobile bandwidth and real-time interaction with diverse data sets, and it’s still early in the cycle as far as value creation and exits. But the days of low-hanging fruit are well past. Yet cloud computing touches every software-related company that we invest in today in one way or another. Why? If the first wave of cloud computing was all about applications (SaaS), and the second wave was all about fixing everything that the cloud breaks (networking, storage, security, etc.), then what’s left? A lot, as it turns out. Because cloud didn’t just everything — it also an entirely new opportunity set — applications . So on the downslope of the first wave of the cloud transformation, the underlying architecture was a severely limiting factor. But that second wave doesn’t just allow us to fully exploit the first; it also fueled a third: agile development of cloud applications, utilizing cloud APIs, application assembly and other techniques to rapidly enhance developer productivity. NoSQL databases are fundamental components of the agile development movement, allowing a team to start coding an application immediately and forego the long drawn out process of planning a database schema. In general, the hopper is loaded with great future exits for companies that play into application assembly: security and authentication services (e.g., ); communication ( ); integration between cloud and on-premises applications ( ); application deployment and management ( ); analytics (Keen.io); and application delivery controllers ( ). This next-gen development wave is still ramping up and “application aware” is quickly becoming the new catch-phrase in technology infrastructure. “Big data,” a hype cycle unto itself, starts earning its keep in this third wave. Now that we know how to process, serve and store the massive volumes of data being generated, we can finally start something with it. Next-generation cloud applications are dynamically data driven; the data consumed by a given application and how it reacts to that data will be key differentiators. The application will leverage programming interfaces based on open web standards to ingest and crunch this data from multiple sources, while also exposing its own set of services to others with open APIs. What about the underlying infrastructure technology? It too looks different going forward. The scalability of the technology will be at hyper scale. No longer will it just be about using virtual compute but also virtual networking and storage technologies. And the data layer will embrace a new wave of technologies offered by next-gen infrastructure companies such as MapR and Hadoop for data warehousing or Databricks and Spark for real-time analytics. This new wave of opportunities, likely to drive venture returns well into the next decade, combines modern technologies across all layers of the stack — from the very top access tier down through the business logic and data persistence layer — with the scale of cloud computing to deliver something that legacy technology could never achieve: data-driven, mobile-first, personalized cloud solutions, leveraging open APIs and operating at hyper-scale in real time. The stack was the great divide between the past and future of cloud, and it makes for a fairly effective sniff test when looking at new cloud investments. Similar to the way customer acquisition cost ratios, “magic number” and ROI became the metrics for screening SaaS businesses, investors looking for cloud opportunities need to assess the extent to which the company has embraced the modern cloud stack. The former criteria have become so prevalent in cloud entrepreneur parlance that we rarely get five minutes into a presentation before someone mentions unit economics. Today, we’re just as eager to assess the pervasiveness of cloud at every layer of their business, from the way the application is designed to the underlying guts of the infrastructure powering the application. The cloud has suffused the innovation landscape; it’s intrinsic to how we think about technology today and a building block for everything that comes next. And from this VC’s perspective, it’s got a pretty long runway. |
StumbleUpon and Uber Founder Garrett Camp Is Raising $75 Million For Company-Building Venture Expa | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Garrett Camp, co-founder of both StumbleUpon and Uber, is looking for help in funding his new company-building venture . According to an SEC filing, Camp is looking to raise up to $75 million to bring about a portfolio of innovative new ideas. When Camp first last May, he told my boss Alexia that the holding company would be structured much like similar ventures from entrepreneurs Max Levchin ( ), Evan Williams ( ), Michael Birch ( ), and Ron Palmeri ( ). That follows a backing technology studios that help to create and fund a series of ambitious new projects at once. Camp always seemed more comfortable in the role of building early-stage companies, where he can act as a product visionary, rather than in the later stages of building and scaling a business, where operational expertise is key. Before he got to this point, he helped found content discovery platform StumbleUpon, which he sold to eBay for $75 million and later bought back, as well as Uber, which he co-founded along with now-CEO Travis Kalanick. That said, not everything Camp has worked on has been a success: Last year, he made a push behind BlackJet, which was billed as the “ ” — yes, even by TechCrunch. That idea (get it?!), and BlackJet, which was once , is now noticeably missing. So what’s next for Expa? It’s not clear, but knowing Camp he probably has a whole bunch of ideas that are already being worked on. We’ve reached out to him to catch up on Expa, and will let you know if we hear back. |
Getting Girls Into Programming, One Children’s Book At A Time | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | [kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lindaliukas/hello-ruby width=640] I normally dislike writing about the issue of women in the technology industry. The media either ends up treating female entrepreneurs with kid gloves or the conversation ends up in some emotionally charged place where people feel angry or violated. And then we’ve made little progress. Are there systematic biases embedded in the industry? Are women not leaning in hard enough? Do we not have enough role models? All of the above? One thing is clear, however. There are just not enough women in the pipeline starting from as early as K-12 schools. If are awarded to women in the first place, how can we expect a proportionate number of women to move forward into entrepreneurship or engineering careers? So that’s why it’s refreshing to see someone intervene at such an early stage, and in such a playful, delightful way. , who founded an educational non-profit called that has taught programming skills to women in 160 cities globally, has switched her attention to a younger set. She’s authoring an illustrated children’s book called to get girls into coding. And by girls, I don’t mean women in a pejorative sense. I actually mean girls, as in little girls from ages 5 to 7. Liukas says she came up with the idea of her little red-haired protagonist, Ruby, while teaching herself programming. “I would use the Ruby character as a reference. How would she explain object-oriented programming?” she said. Liukas was a business student before she started Rails Girls, which originally was never intended to be a global phenomenon. It grew into a community that has reached 10,000 women through events and weekend workshops. She then went onto work for Codecademy, the New York-based startup that teaches people how to code. She said there’s this huge, untapped potential in younger girls that gets missed. “Teenage girls have such energy, this unhinged energy, that shouldn’t just be expressed in repeating or reblogging,” she said. “They should be creating instead of curating.” She remembered when she was thirteen and dabbled in web development by once making a “really ugly” website about Al Gore. “I was 13. I had all this teenage girl passionate energy and I was really, really, madly in love with Al Gore,” she laughed. She didn’t get back into programming or web development until more than a decade later, but imagine if others like her stuck with it? In Liukas’ project, Ruby is a little girl who makes friends with characters like snow leopards and penguins while solving problems. There are two books: one is an old-fashioned story book with a narrative and different characters. The second book is a workbook that introduces basic programming concepts like loops and variables. All of the exercises in it can be solved with a pen and paper. “It’s going to be very tangible and crafty. You’ll be able draw and doodle all over it,” she said. So far, she’s blown through her original Kickstarter goal of $10,000 to raise more than $268,000 for the project with 18 days to go. She added two stretch goals: at $250,000, she pledged to write parents guide and at $500,000, she’ll build a complementary mobile app for books. “The book is only a glimpse of what’s possible,” said Liukas, who said she’s been blown away by the community’s response in beating her original fundraising goal by more than twenty-five fold. “I’ll remember this for the rest of my whole life,” she added. |
Twitter Is Hiring Commerce Specialists | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Twitter has not responded to reports, from and , that it is building a marketplace-style platform where users can buy things, but the social network appears to be quietly building it out anyway. The latest development is that Twitter has posted job ads for people to work on a commerce service — one of the rare times that the company has itself disclosed detail of what it is planning to do. Some of it confirms earlier reports of how Twitter commerce will take shape. The roles currently listed are for a , a and a . At least one of these jobs appears to have been posted only earlier today, with a current Twitter product marketing person Tweeting out the . The role of the senior manager for commerce partnerships will be responsible for “incubating our nascent commerce business as we empower our users to conduct commerce in ways consistent with our values.” The person will report directly to VP of commerce — that would be Nathan Hubbard, the ex-Ticketmaster CEO who . The successful applicant will be responsible for a number of areas: The role of product marketing manager, meanwhile, seems to tie the business of commerce more directly into how Twitter manages advertising across its site. “A successful candidate knows how to drive advertiser acquisition, retention and education with strategic marketing and has a strong background developing and managing product marketing programs,” Twitter notes, later explaining, “This role will be particularly focused on bringing new commerce experiences to users through the Twitter platform, so experience in online retail, payments, or commerce will be valued.” Later, in the list of credentials for the role, Twitter notes that a candidate needs to have “deep understanding of online commerce. Experience working for an online retailer, marketplace, payments platform, or other commerce technology company strongly preferred.” Lastly, the product manager will help Twitter “drive the vision and execution of Twitter’s commerce strategy” to other colleagues, management and externally. Responsibilities will include the product roadmap for commerce merchants on the platform as well as the following: For the role of product manager, Twitter is not only looking for people with marketplace, online retailer, payments platform and other commerce technology experience, but also with advertising credentials, a computer science or engineering background, MBA a plus, and a “strong experimentation mindset.” So, what can you take away from these ads? It sounds like at least some aspects of the service will be laid out in a marketplace format — given the mention of marketplace in two of the three ads. Twitter will work on bringing in different third parties to a single platform to sell consumers their goods and services. Nothing is made clear on how the payments aspect would work. To recap, we heard that both Stripe and PayPal were among those being considered, and Re/code notes that Stripe will provide the backend. What is more clear is that Twitter is leaving some options open for what else it might outsource (“Make build, buy, or partner recommendations for various aspects of the product solution” it notes as one job directive). Meanwhile, the ad for a product marketing manager seems to imply more of a link between the advertising that is sold on Twitter and the goods that will be sold on Twitter. Intermingling ads and commerce with Twitter’s mainstay, user-generated content would make it more like Facebook than a pure-play e-commerce venture. This would also confirm the reports that we heard that it is looking at a card-style format — essentially adding commerce ‘cards’ into the river in the same way that a promoted post, or a very noncommercial photo from your friend, might appear in your feed today. There is also the question of what will be sold on Twitter. A leaked mock-up of how a Twitter transaction might work for goods on Fancy.com points to interest in the design and home goods vertical. But it also appears that Twitter is keeping its options open for other verticals, as long as the numbers support them: “Analyzing the business opportunity for Twitter across commerce verticals and building a data-driven case for participation.” A fitting litmus test for new commerce features, and perhaps for the commerce platform as a whole, as the company approaches its as a publicly-traded company. : A spokesperson for Twitter tells us that it has “nothing beyond what’s listed in the job description” to share. |
Those NSA Transparency Reports From Google Aren’t So Transparent | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Google, Facebook, Microsoft and LinkedIn all made headlines today for releasing “transparency” reports about the number of users for which the U.S. government has requested data. We now know that major Internet companies have given up personal information from between 0-15,999 user accounts, but we don’t know what exactly was given up or whether additional data was taken without the companies’ knowledge. “The numbers themselves don’t tell us very much at all,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo tells me. “These transparency reports only represent a small portion of what the NSA is doing to get data out of these companies. A lot of what the NSA is doing is without the company’s knowledge.” So, for instance, there are worries that the NSA can simply eavesdrop on any communication by into fiber cables. The unconfirmed reports supposedly motivated Microsoft, Yahoo and Google to of their data streams. The EFF tells me that this sort of bulk collection wouldn’t show up in a transparency report, because the government is just taking everything and isn’t requesting information on individual users. Today’s transparency report was the first time that tech companies could disclose the number of requests from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the judicial body that authorizes some of the more controversial elements of the NSA’s spying program. Facebook has long claimed that being able to release the number of users spied on would “sensationalist and inaccurate media accounts” of their relationship with intelligence agencies. But, these reports still don’t tell us what the NSA may, or may not, be collecting. “The fiber-optic splitters that we know they used at, for instance, AT&T facilities, which capture all IP traffic going down the wire won’t be reflected in these numbers,” says Cardozo. The relative obscurity of these numbers led the Washington Post’s Andrea Peterson transparency reports “mostly a PR stunt.” I wouldn’t go that far. In the beginning, the transparency reports from Google were a bold move that got the public thinking about government censorship. Since then, Google has raised awareness about all the ways governments around the world try to stifle free speech, such as Brazil’s aggressive speech laws . But, for the U.S., the numbers just aren’t that informative and it isn’t necessarily the fault of these companies. Is the government going after dissidents or are more criminals using the Internet? What laws are being invoked to request the information and does it represent the entirety of what is being collected? I don’t think any reasonable critic ever thought that the government could monitor the activities of millions of individual citizens. The worry is in the bulk storage and how corrupt officials could target dissidents. At 15,000+ users, some of that worry may be justified by the pessimists among us. I tend to not worry too much about these conspiracies, nor do I believe tech companies are in cahoots with the NSA. The entire scandal is one over doomsday scenarios. That said, the reports today really don’t tell us much we didn’t know. Indeed, Google and other tech companies are still suing to be able to release more information. So, the reports neither allay fears nor prove critics right. It’s just a crack of the window that helps folks like the EFF battle in court over a few more specifics. For the rest of us, not much changes. |
Dropbox Is Spilling Over To A Humongous Second SF Office | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | is growing so fast it will soon run out of room at its San Francisco headquarters. That’s why it’s just signed a 12-year lease on a second office a 10-minute walk away at 333 Brannan to house spillover of its 500 employees, sources close to the company tell me. put out a press release bragging about leasing the space to Dropbox earlier today. Back in 2012, Dropbox moved from an 11,000 square foot into its current spot at 185 Berry St in the China Basin area of San Francisco’s South Park district. Originally that office was 87,000 square feet, but then Dropbox expanded to more of the building to occupy a total of 200,000 square feet. When I visited the single-floor 185 Berry location a few years ago, it was practically empty. Dropbox had less than half the number of employees needed to fill it. With so much ground to cover, employees would often ride scooters and skateboard-like Ripsticks over its polished cement floors. There were lines of unfurnished meeting rooms, and a whole wing of the office was completely uninhabited. But when I went by for its latest enterprise in December, it was already starting to feel claustrophobic. With so many people walking around, wheeled-locomotion had become too dangerous to attempt. Every area was crammed full of desks as well as LED art, a jam room for musical instruments, and sculptures of its AK-47-toting velociraptor mascot (that I just had to take a selfie with). Dropbox said it to the company in 2013, and it showed. Then last month, Dropbox raised $250 million (with another $150 million possibly in the works), giving it a total of $500 million with which to . Selling to Fortune 500 companies requires a big sales force that likely wouldn’t fit in its current digs. Sales could be one department housed in the new 333 Brannan location. However, sources close to the company say Dropbox hasn’t decided exactly what part or parts of the team will be booted from the headquarters into its nearby annex. Dropbox will control all 187,000 square feet of the William McDonough-designed office still under construction at 333 Brannan. It’s a six-story brick and concrete building with the open floor plans preferred by startups, plus a rooftop garden and deck. It will feature a rainwater reclamation system that could cut water usage by 45 percent and energy usage by 26 percent. The location is about a 15-minute walk from BART and a 10-minute walk from Caltrain for employees commuting via public transportation. Keeping its offices in the city might give Dropbox better luck in some areas of recruiting. Many tech giants choose to build massive campuses in the South Bay then run controversial shuttle buses back and forth from San Francisco so employees can live in the city. But Dropbox’s youthful company culture likely attracts people with little interest of living in social dead-zones like Mountain View and Menlo Park where Google and Facebook have their plots. This way, energetic Dropboxers can live and work in SF (if they’re willing to pay the rent). By nearly doubling its total office space, Dropbox should have room to house at least another year or two of swift growth. And plenty of dinosaurs. |
Democrats Introduce Open Internet Preservation Act To Restore Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Democrats in the House and Senate today introduced the Open Internet Preservation Act, a bill that would reinstate now-defunct net neutrality rules that were . Net neutrality, in its most basic form, is the idea that ISPs must treat all Internet data the same. Under its regime, ISPs are not allowed to selectively speed up or slow down information requested by their customers due to their selective gatekeeping of the services impacted. Or, more simply, Comcast can’t decide that a site you want to load, or a video you want to watch, should be slowed, and content that it prefers, accelerated. With last month’s striking of the FCC’s net neutrality ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has changed the landscape of the Internet. Those in favor of net neutrality view the regulatory scheme as key to a free, open, and level playing field. Its antagonists decry it as government regulation of something, namely the Internet, which has worked just fine thus far, thank you. The Preservation Act — — is short and merely “restores” what was “vacated” by the court’s decision. So it would take us back to where we were in December. According to , the act has all but no chance of becoming law because “Republicans are almost entirely united in opposition to the Internet rules, meaning the bill is unlikely to ever receive a vote in the GOP-controlled House.” The bill has been introduced in both the House and Senate, but passing merely half the bicameral Congress is roughly as useful as trying to reform your local DMV. Other voices were quick to criticize its thrust. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) it as “counter-productive,” saying that “insisting on stagnation in the essential infrastructure of the Internet is no way to promote innovation and the public interest.” The gist of the AEI’s argument, if I can summarize, is that if ISPs are prevented from charging fees to content providers — think Netflix, et al. — it stunts their potential revenues and therefore investment into further infrastructure. This argument is somewhat circular, as the Internet has seen rapid and massive investment in its life while existing under the conditions that the FCC wanted to codify as the regulatory standard. The bill’s sponsors see the world slightly differently than the AEI, focusing less on theoretical lost rents from a third-party non-participant to the customer-ISP relationship, and instead hitting on consumer protection and choice: “The Internet is an engine of economic growth because it has always been an open platform for competition and innovation. Our bill very simply ensures that consumers can continue to access the content and applications of their choosing online.” Rep. Waxman It has always been my view that forcing ISPs to treat all content equally is the correct way to ensure that all voices — the new, the established, the next, and the marginalized — have space. If YouTube had been forced to pay extra carrier fees early in its life, or Netflix for that matter, would they have become the giants they have? If we increase the marginal expense of reaching consumers in a random fashion by granting ISPs that power, we cede the advancement of technology to demonstrably conservative actors. And there is a simple question of who decides. If ISPs can censor and slow at will, what can stop activist networks from pushing on those companies to halt what they do not approve of? If a religious group called Comcast complicit in hate speech for delivering content Internet users requested that they found blasphemous, what can Comcast do? We’re removing their shield of “we deliver all to all equally,” which could harm ISPs down the road. That the parties exposing themselves to that sort of trouble are the precise parties calling for the end, now I suppose the continuance of the end, of net neutrality is ironic, and sad. |
Valve Adds In-Game Music Controls & Playback To Steam | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | What fun is playing your favorite game if you can’t blast your favorite tunes? Today, Valve announced a pretty great new feature for its fledgling SteamOS and Big Picture interfaces: in-game music controls. (Wondering what the heck “SteamOS” and “Big Picture” are? SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system Valve is building for a series of dedicated, living-room-friendly PCs they call “Steam Machines”. Big Picture mode is essentially SteamOS minus the OS, meant for people who want the new interface but already have Steam set up on their Windows/Mac/whatever PCs) As it currently stands, switching up your music in the middle of a game (like a game of, say, Team Fortress 2) is a bit of a pain. You’ve got your standalone music player crankin’ away in one window, and your game running fullscreen in front of it. You can alt-tab from one to the other — but that takes ages, and tends to make most fullscreen games freak the hell out for a few seconds. Trying to change up your music queue in between spawns ain’t very easy if your monitor chokes up each time you switch in or out of a game. This problem is made all the worse when you’ve got Big Picture mode running on a TV across the room. Most desktop music players, with their tiny fonts and itty-bitty buttons, aren’t meant to be controlled from more than a foot or two away. With the new Steam Music features, your music is brought right into the Big Picture/SteamOS interface. You tell Steam where your music library is, and it’ll build a shiny new catalog for your perusal, complete with album art and artist photos. And once you’re in a game? Music controls are a keystroke away, having been integrated into the same Steam Overlay that lets you keep track of your friends and achievements without ever leaving your game. Steam Music is currently in early Beta, with Valve rolling the feature out in waves to those who’ve opted-in. To opt in and hopefully get it early, join over here. The new music control features seem to be meant for Big Picture/SteamOS only at the moment, with Valve promising “desktop features soon to follow” — so if you’re using the good ol’ fashion Steam interface (as I imagine most keyboard/mouse gamers are) you might be waiting a bit longer than your Big-Picture-usin’ cohorts for in-game controls. |
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California State Agency Tells Google To Move Its Mystery Barge | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Sometimes move fast and break things ends with broken things. Today that the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), a state agency, has told Google that it must move its infamous mystery barge. The company appears to lack proper authorization to have started the construction. According to the AP Larry Goldzband, the BCDC’s executive director, the Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) could face fines or “enforcement proceedings” for allowing the project to proceed. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch “we just received the letter from the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission and we are reviewing it.” TechCrunch has reached out to the BCDC and the TIDA for comment on the AP story. The Google barge became the focus of intense speculation, before it was eventually uncovered that it would likely be a sort of for Google’s toys. Cool, but hardly James-Bond-Villian enough to hold the public’s attention. Now, the barge will have to find a new home — or the proper permits — to make it to the public stage. Image: |
Encrypt All Your Shared Data With nCrypted Cloud | John Biggs | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Enterprise users who want to use common file-sharing services like and Google Drive have a big problem: their IT guys will always be worried that one hacker will be able to bring down their internal network. A new service called is trying to assuage this fear by encrypting everything, everywhere, and offering an audit trail to see who accessed what files when. In short, nCrypted is supposed to encrypt everything on your Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive and Box accounts. While that may sound boring to the average user, imagine the importance if, say, you were using your cloud storage as a place to stash business documents or important photos and video? Founded by repeat entrepreneur Nicholas Stamos and encryption master Igor Odnovorov, the company raised $3M in a seed round from angels at Microsoft, Cisco, Reveal Imaging, and Broadcom. They are currently looking for a Series A. The system works by first encrypting files on the fly as you add them to your shared drives. You can also encrypt files as needed. It also creates a paper trail so IT departments can see who encrypted and decrypted what during the files’ lifecycle. “The PCS model nCrypted Cloud implements enables IT to delegate the responsibility of protecting shared data in the cloud to their end users. But with responsibility comes accountability. nCrypted Cloud provides network agnostic, device agnostic, and cloud storage agnostic forensic level data usage auditing, allowing centralized visibility and oversight of user activity,” said Stamos. They also have plenty of traction. “Our users have generated over 100M audit events, and encrypted over 10M files. Most customers are large enterprise users, so for security reasons, we do not disclose the actual number of users,” he said. The company also offers personal versions of its software for smaller users. on the site. You can check out the . Stamos says the app is about accountability and not overarching, top-down control. “For the first time, IT is given a looking glass into where data is going and being used outside the organization, and on non-corporate devices. Anomalies are easily detected and corrected. This is an accountability based model; it’s the only way to scale; and it’s the way our society works. A good parallel is that most states have speed limited to 65 mph. But cars are not limited to 65 mph. Why not? Because we have decided that drivers can be held accountable for their actions, and traffic flows freely. We need the same model to balance the corporate requirements of protecting data, while allowing business users to move as quickly and efficiently as possible. nCrypted Cloud solves this problem and provides that balance,” he said. |
A Tale Of Two ‘Papers’ | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | most people forget about the story of David and Goliath: both sides were at war. Facebook, our very own Goliath, and FiftyThree, the David-size company responsible for a design app called Paper, are well aware of this. Until today, was the first app shown when you search for “Paper” in the iPad App Store. But , also named Paper, may usurp that spot very soon. Facebook’s Paper app was last Thursday, but launched on the . FiftyThree , explaining that after communicating with Facebook and asking that the name of the new app be changed, the social network refused. “We reached out to Facebook about the confusion their app was creating, and they apologized for not contacting us sooner. But an earnest apology should come with a remedy,” reads the blog post, penned by CEO and co-founder Georg Petschnigg. We reached out to Facebook as well, but the social network declined to comment. Legally, the situation is complicated. As it stands now, no one lays claim to the term “Paper” on its own, as trademark lawyer Victor Cardona confirmed. So technically, Facebook hasn’t done anything wrong. The trademark owned by FiftyThree is “Paper by FiftyThree,” which was filed for in May of 2012, and passed in December of the same year. Though FiftyThree declined to comment on legal matters with its trademark, Cardona (who is a partner at ) believes that the company chose to pair “Paper” with “by FiftyThree” so that it could slide a generic term like Paper through the process. Cardona also added that in certain situations, trademarks are use-based. This means that “just by using a mark in a particular field, you’ve got rights,” said Cardona. “Some are state-based and some are federal-based, but if I start using a mark before you in the same area of goods or services, I’ve got rights to the mark over you.” When asked if FiftyThree would move forward legally, Petschnigg simply said that FiftyThree is “keeping options open.” However, he did express that trademarks are use-based, and that Paper is recognizable as a FiftyThree brand, which hints that the company is certainly considering taking this one to court. If such a scenario arises, Cardona believes that FiftyThree “has a good shot.” According to Petschnigg, Fifty-Three filed an application to trademark the term “Paper” on its own, but would not disclose the timeline. USPTO applications show up in search almost immediately, and neither Cardona nor I could find FiftyThree’s application for just “Paper”. In other words, it’s entirely possible that Fifty-Three filed for the term “Paper” in the past five days, after hearing about Facebook’s new app name. Trademark lawyer and expert, , also believes that FiftyThree has a valid infringement case against Facebook. “It really will come down to how many third-party Paper marks are out there in this industry, and whether or not FiftyThree’s mark has been made weaker by other third-party marks,” said Ledesma. “But Facebook should have been aware of FiftyThree’s prior trademark rights.” But setting legalese aside, is Facebook right or wrong? After all, Facebook has all the resources in the world, both financially and creatively, to come up with an original and simple name. Obviously, Paper by Facebook is an important app to the company — lately Facebook has been more focused on separating out services into stand-alone apps, and Reader just may be the one to — so you’d think originality would be a top priority. So why take a name from an app developer that claims to have strong ties to Facebook? Here’s what the blog post said about it: On a personal level we have many ties to Facebook. Many friends, former students and colleagues are doing good work at Facebook. One of Facebook’s board members is an investor in FiftyThree. We’re a Facebook developer, and Paper supports sharing to Facebook where close to 500,000 original pages have been shared. Connections run deep. “At this point it’s about asking Facebook to do the right thing,” Petschnigg told TechCrunch. “We’re taking a stand for creativity and believe in having a level playing field when it comes to people building their brands and their companies.” The apps don’t directly compete in terms of utility, so there’s certainly no hostility between the two companies. Which is why an explanation from Facebook seems even more warranted. But is it? Facebook has about the fact that its new products aren’t “original.” When Snapchat posed a threat, Facebook launched Poke, a . Zuckerberg recently , but I bet Fifty-Three isn’t laughing today. And I bet Evan Spiegel didn’t laugh at Poke. When Instagram started consuming the minds and thumbs of social media addicts, Zuck bought it. Most recently, Zuck was reported to offer Snapchat a after seeing the photo-sharing app’s rapid growth over the past two years. Even the Paper app isn’t original. It’s just a rip-off of Flipboard and Pulse and other content curation services. Ten years after the social network revolutionized the way we communicate and connect on the internet, Facebook is anything but original. And that’s not really a problem. Some of the most successful companies in the world have piggy-backed off of the innovations of others, elevating an already-discovered technology to a more user-friendly place. Just look at Apple. Does this make Facebook more lovable? No. Does it grow our respect for the social network as an innovator and world-changer? Certainly not. But that’s what happens when you grow up. Facebook is no longer the mom-and-pop bakery where you get your morning coffee, nor is it the super private social network we used to connect with our college friends. Facebook is Wal-Mart. Facebook is Exxon. Facebook is a business, and at that. And no matter how much it sucks for Fifty-Three, who will forevermore deal with confusion over the name of their first-born product, Facebook really doesn’t care if their new app disrupts some startup’s business. And this isn’t the first time we’ve heard this story either. Like the last times, we’ll make a big fuss and then forget. Zuck will save the internet, or crush it with mobile ad revenues, or do something else awesomely Zuck-like, and it won’t matter who was crushed along the way. It’s just good business. |
Adobe Photoshop Veteran John Nack Moves To Google To Work On Digital Photo Team | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Adobe’s John Nack is leaving the company after 14 years to work at Google. Nack was on the Photoshop team for 8 years, working on features like Camera Raw, Smart Objects and Adobe Bridge. He’s been acting as Principal Product Manager at Adobe since then, focusing on its mobile app efforts like Photoshop for tablets. In a , Nack says he’s moving over to Google to work on its digital photography team. This is a fairly big coup for Google as Nack has a deep knowledge of what makes Photoshop tick and has acted as an evangelist for the editing suite and its community for years. “Merlin Mann once asked me, “What do you want ten times more of?” I knew the answer: . I’m so proud of the impact I’ve had at Adobe,” says Nack. “From to * to countless little tweaks over the years (“I swear because I care!!”), I’m proud of that legacy. Now, though, I’ll get a chance to work on some new projects. It’s about doing something very different from, and I think complementary to**, the work I’ve done at Adobe.” In a footnote he adds that “Adobe & Google have enjoyed great collaboration for years, and I hope to take that even further. There’s so much we can all do to help photographers & storytellers of every sort.” Unfortunately, Nack indicates that — as a side effect of him joining Google — his Adobe blog, which I’ve visited regularly over the years, will be going silent. Google, of course, has been making an intense effort to shore up the capabilities of its Google+ photo suite. The platform now does an insane amount of cloud processing on photographs to edit and enhance them — something Nack could doubtless aid them with. Google’s recent acquisition of Snapseed gave it a great core of edit tools to work with and its absorption of Picasa into Google+ has made for an expansive and robust online photo solution. For a lot of folks I speak to, Google+ photos is a to use Google+ at all — something that many have been struggling with since its inception. It seems Google is pulling the thread further on creating a definitive online editing suite and repository for photos. Provided you’re comfortable boarding the Google+ train that is. Image Credit: , Flickr/CC |
Tumblr Adds Support For SSL But Doesn’t Turn It On By Default | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Like the numerous tech companies that have come before it, including big names like , and , Tumblr has today (finally) support for SSL security on its blogging platform. One big caveat, though: it’s not switched on by default. You have to DIY. For security-minded users – which these days should mean just about everyone – having at least the option to enable this additional layer of security is a good first step for the now Yahoo-owned network. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that SSL will be on by default – after all, when Twitter rolled out SSL , it began by allowing users to manually type in the “https” prefix themselves if they wanted to protect their connection. Doing so is smart, of course, as SSL can prevent hackers and others who may want to snoop on your connection, which is especially a risk on public networks like those at coffee shops or conferences. According to Tumblr, the feature has been in testing for “weeks” now, and today is available in Tumblr’s settings. To enable it, users have to go to their Tumblr dashboard’s Account Settings, then toggle the switch, so to speak. Another reason why Tumblr may be hesitant to immediately make SSL the default is that , which offers a “power user” experience to Tumblr users with dozens of extra features like enhanced notifications, a better inbox, plus several tweaks, themes, navigation tools and more. Explains XKit on its blog, “if your XKit went missing after enabling the new ‘SSL Security’ setting from Tumblr, it’s because XKit disables itself automatically on pages served using SSL protocol.” The company says it’s working on a fix for this, but for now you’ll have to choose between XKit or SSL. Guys, choose SSL. Seriously. |
Skryf, The Robot That Writes Poetry In Sand, Reminds Us Of The Ephemerality Of Art Or Whatever | John Biggs | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Let us go then, you and I, to meet , a robot created by Dutch artist Gijs Van Bon. The robot uses a repurposed CNC machine to spray out a thin layer of sand in the shape of letters and Van Bon uses it to print out lines of temporary poetry on sidewalks. As the robot writes, the feet of passersby spread the sand far and wide, destroying the art as it is created. This video, filmed in July, shows Skryf printing poetry at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. “When you’re writing one [line of] text, another one is going away because people start walking through it,” wrote Van Bon on . “Once I’ve finished writing, I walk the same way back but it’s all destroyed. It’s ephemeral, it’s just for this moment and afterwards it’s left to the public and to the wind.” The robot – basically a standard RC quad-wheel with a fairly impressive sand dispenser on CNC rails – receives its orders and then writes about 130 feet per hour. Van Bon takes cues from the places he’s visiting in order to chose the poets Skryf will write out. For example, at Dutch Design week he chose , the poet of the city of Eindhoven. It’s a beautiful commentary on the value of art versus technology in society and it’s also a pretty nice printing rig that could be repurposed to paint in liquids or even chalk. It’s also a clever way to get people to think about poetry again. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgmmbTmukF0] |
Anonymity’s Moment: Secret Is Like Facebook For What You’re Really Thinking | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | In the mid-90s, it was all about . Then a decade later, Facebook conquered the web, becoming the dominant identity provider on the web. Mark Zuckerberg himself was a lack of integrity. But perhaps the pendulum swung a little too far. on his original point, apps centered on ephemerality and anonymity are now the rage. It’s that lets you share thoughts with friends without revealing who you are. It’s like a riff on and it shares , but what makes Secret stand out is that you’re communicating primarily with friends. So even though you don’t know who is saying what, you have a higher level of curiosity or empathy because they’re likely to be people you know. “Secret feels like a masquerade ball,” said co-founder , who was the lead on Square Wallet before starting the company. “You know who’s on the guest list, but you don’t know who is saying what.” He said that the point was to share things you wouldn’t otherwise attach to your name. The kinds of things people share on Secret are a little bit more vulnerable, insecure, emotional, sad, goofy or angry than what you might see on Facebook or Instagram, where people are trying to groom images of picture-perfect lives. When you think about it, yes, it is kind of absurd that people would need a mobile app to be more vulnerable or self-aware with their friends. But Byttow says that Secret creates a very different space for sharing feelings or thoughts than currently exists through other social networks. “This isn’t necessarily about sharing secrets. It’s about sharing secretly,” Byttow said. “People feel a sense of belonging or validation when we’re all feeling the same things. I hear people’s internal dialogues and they resonate with me.” A secret can spread to a friends of a friend or a stranger if they attract ‘likes.’ In the app, I’ll see half of the updates come from friends or friends of friends, while others have arrived from Colombia, New York or Wisconsin if one of my friends has liked them. Byttow and his co-founder say that the community is surprisingly non-trollish. “People give each other advice and there’s this camaraderie,” Bader-Wechseler said. “It touches on this fundamental basic human need to relate to others or help them. And you don’t need to have identity to get that fulfillment.” Each secret is also its own unit. You can’t see a record or history of secrets from any single user, to keep user privacy safe. The company explains Contacts are hashed, so no raw phone numbers or personal details are sent to Secret to match friends to different friends. Metadata for each secret is also stored without referencing any single user. The company including Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan through their Initialized Capital vehicle, Index Ventures, Matrix Partners, SV Angel and Fuel Capital. |
As Windows 8.1 Overtakes Vista’s Market Share, Update 1 Leaks Online | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | In January, , taking the fourth-place slot behind 7, XP, and 8. In the month, Windows 8.1 picked up moderate market share, and Windows 8 eased as expected, meaning that Microsoft’s new platform is seeing slow total growth. In fact, Windows 8.x — both Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 — gained a mere 0.09 percent market share in the quarter. Looking more broadly, Windows 7 sat essentially flat, and Windows XP lost more than a half percent. Vista continued its descent into irrelevancy. The were kind enough to graph the data: It’s worth noting that Windows XP’s decline as an operating system is slow, far slower than needed to have the world completely off the code by the end of its official support on . Windows XP will turn 13 this year. Microsoft wants it gone. Companies that have it deployed, however, seem to be more willing to stay put than upgrade. The company’s planned Update 1 to Windows 8.1 leaked this weekend, showing off what Microsoft has in mind: fixes, improvements, and general quality of life updates to its current desktop and tablet platform. As you would expect from a non-numbered release, the changes are modest. Update 1 was expected in April, but recent scuttlebutt indicates that the new code could . Also, what leaked could easily not be a current build, or what the company intends to send to consumers. Caveats aside, what can we see in Update 1? As expected, the new code includes user interface changes that make it easier to use the operating system with a keyboard and mouse. The Verge — — that demonstrate the new capability: The other interesting, and also expected change, is the start of Microsoft bringing Metro apps to the desktop. Also included in Update 1 is the ability to pin Metro apps on the task bar. You can thus select Metro apps from the desktop environment, better blurring the dichotomization between the traditional and the new in Windows 8.x. According , the Windows Store app comes automatically pinned to the task bar by default. You can also choose to have all Metro apps that are open at the moment. Microsoft is de-emphasizing the Metro side of Windows 8.x, but by bringing the Store front and center on Desktop, it could mitigate a potential loss of momentum for its new platform and marketplace. You can trace the arc of development for Windows 8.x in a simple line: Microsoft brought in so much new in Windows 8.0 that it crowded out the desktop experience. However, users still preferred the desktop part of Windows, leaving the nearly forced main experience in the way. 8.1 cut at the chasm between Metro and desktop, and it seems that Update 1 will continue that effort. Microsoft declined to comment on the leaked build. |
Facebook “Paper” May Beat Trademark Complaint As Drawing App Is Registered As “Paper By FiftyThree” | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | There’s a whole stack of apps named “Paper” in the App Store, but may come out on top despite a requested name change from drawing app maker FiftyThree. One problem is that FiftyThree registered its app’s trademark as not “Paper”, and while it’s a lame legal loophole, it may be enough to let Facebook keep the name. This morning, the published a about its app that launched in March 2012, explaining: “It came as a surprise when we learned on January 30th [2014] with everyone else that Facebook was announcing an app with the same name—Paper…We reached out to Facebook about the confusion their app was creating, and they apologized for not contacting us sooner. But an earnest apology should come with a remedy…Facebook should stop using our brand name…What will Facebook’s story be? Will they be the corporate giant who bullies their developers? Or be agile, recognize a mistake, and fix it?” It’s a reasonable take on the issue. is well-known and loved. It won Apple’s 2012 iPad App Of The Year award. And it was in the App Store first. Yet today, Facebook launched a content reader and . The argument conveniently ignores fellow drawing app Paper, released in October 2011 which has 25 other apps in the store. There’s also another drawing app called Paper released in . Plus there’s more than 50 other apps with Paper in their name. Paper Doll, Paper Camera, Paper Ninja. Still, FiftyThree’s accusation that Facebook uses its size to bully developers rings true. But it might not matter because of the name FiftyThree registered its trademark under. I asked Facebook if it had a statement regarding FiftyThree’s complaint and was given a “no comment”. But if the complaint was elevated into a formal lawsuit, Facebook could likely tell the court “We didn’t release an app called ‘Paper By FiftyThree.'” Though that position could hold weight legally, it’s not exactly honorable. Especially considering Facebook to force other companies to change the names of products like Lamebook and Placebook. Though in those cases, third-parties were directly piggybacking on how Facebook used “book” to popularize their own brands. Here, it’s more of a coincidence that Facebook wants to use a name already employed by FiftyThree rather than it trying to coin off the existing mindshare of the word. But it still feels like Facebook is trying to muscle in. In the case of a legal battle, the court would be deciding if Facebook’s Paper is confusingly similar to Paper By FiftyThree. Since they’re distinct apps with distinct icons, Facebook’s has no drawing element, Paper is a common name other apps use, and the names are techncially different, Facebook may escape being forced into a change. Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become the modern newspaper, offering high-quality content no matter what your area of interest. Though colloquially used by another developer, FiftyThree doesn’t have the legal rights to the name, so “Paper” may have just been too juicy for Facebook to pass up. |
YC-Backed DataRank Raises $1.4M For Its Online Analytics Platform For Brands | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Recent , which helps companies track online conversations related to their brands and perform other competitive analysis, has closed on $1.4 million in seed funding, the team is announcing today. The funding is led by New Road Ventures, and also includes participation from FundersClub and other angel investors. Founded in October 2011 by Ryan Frazier, Chuong Nguyen, and Kenny Cason, and headquartered in Fayetteville, Ark., DataRank lives far outside the Valley, but its unusual home base is one that turned out to be more practical over the years, as the company shifted from its original focus of being a financial tool to one tracking data for consumer product companies. That’s because the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, Walmart, is also headquartered in nearby Bentonville. Today, there are roughly 1,400 consumer product companies with research teams in the area surrounding Walmart, explains Frazier, who is DataRank’s CEO. “Being able to walk into those places – sitting down, showing them your product and getting immediate feedback, has been immensely helpful,” he says. That being said, DataRank later joined Y Combinator to expand its network in the Valley, allowing it to compete for the engineering talent it needs to grow. The 11-person company recently hired four additional engineers, and is now looking to grow out its sales team. As for the product itself, DataRank offers companies a way to track conversations around their product shared across thousands of sources on the web and social media, including well-known outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube as well as blogs, forums, e-commerce stores’ review sections, and more. After first signing up to use DataRank, the company will pull in six to 12 months of historical data, then establish the product or brands and competitive topics the customer wants to track. For instance, DataRank can be used to track the volume of conversations, total reach, sentiment, and demographics surrounding a brand, digging into details about who uses the products, where they live, how old they are, their gender, and other factors. It can also compare how various product features (e.g. packaging, product features, coupons available, etc.) compare with competitors’ products, as well as how new products from the competition are performing. In fact, notes Frazier, a larger share of the company’s revenue today comes from this competitive analysis. Today, DataRank counts 14 enterprise customers including Clorox, Callaway Golf, ConAgra Foods, and others under NDA. It charges anywhere from $500 per month for smaller companies up to $10,000-$20,000 per month for its enterprise customers. Customers access the service via an online dashboard where it can pull in the company’s internal business or sales data to combine that with its own findings, as well as export data back out via a JSON API or CSV download. But what makes DataRank stand out versus its larger competitors, like Radian6 ( ) for instance, is the way it prioritizes the data it pulls from around the web. “If you think about the competitive space, it was basically like if when you were on Google, it returned results based on date and time,” explains Frazier. “What we think is a better way of doing it – which is the way Google actually does it – is if you run a search for a topic, it returns the most relevant or useful links first. That’s what we do with all this conversation and unstructured data, is provide structure to it so it can be used to make decisions.” The historical data the company provides is also important for doing research, he adds. And that will come into play even more in the future, as DataRank plans to build out the workflow between research and marketing even further by performing more predictive analysis and recommendations. “Our first focus is getting the highest quality data, but then, with that, we see the potential to really make decisions and create campaigns without an entire research team telling you what to do,” says Frazier. The company was recently profitable, though it’s not currently as it’s trying to expand and hire. But it has been growing steadily around 20 percent month-over-month for the last 12 months, and grew over 300 percent last year, we’re told. |
Heroku Introduces More Powerful Dynos For Large-Scale Apps | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | , the cloud platform Salesforce acquired in 2010, today a new class of dyno that has 12 times the RAM and 40 times the CPU power of a regular dyno. In Heroku’s world, are the containers your applications run in, with the most basic ones costing 5 cents per hour. The new performance dynos, which are part of the Heroku XL family that the company is launching with this release, run on machines that are highly isolated from the rest of the Heroku infrastructure. While regular dynos run on a multi-tenant infrastructure, performance dynos do not share their CPUs with other applications. This, the company argues, allows for a “high and consistent quality of service” that allows apps to run faster and with better . Heroku argues that some of the largest app on its platform now often exceeds 10,000 requests per second; both and headline factory run on the platform. In total, Heroku serves over 5 billion requests per day for about 60,000 requests per second on average and 90,000 at peak times. These kinds of large-scale apps, the company says, will benefit from these new performance dynos. As part of the Heroku XL package, developers also get access to runtime metrics to help them better understand their resource consumption and 24/7 premium support. Heroku runs on Amazon’s infrastructure and the company says that the performance dynos use Amazon’s c1.xlarge EC2 instances. Amazon charged $0.58/hour for these, while Heroku charges $0.80/hour. While the new dynos are isolated from the rest of the infrastructure, the company notes, users can still easily scale their existing dynos up to the new size (or switch down to a lower-performance dyno) as needed. As Amazon continues to roll out larger and updated instances, chances are Heroku, too, may move away from just offering a limited amount of dyno types (right now there are , including the new one) to give its users a wider variety of options. |
Microsoft, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google And Yahoo Join Apple In Revealing More On NSA Requests | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | All the big tech companies are opening up a bit more about requests made by the U.S. National Security Agency, with , , , and detailing new info included in their respective transparency reports today. The new reports now include how many requests for the data of its members it has received from the government, how many total users were affected, and what percentage of those receive a response from the company. Apple alongside its earning call, and there’s a reason for the timing that’s non-coincidental: A change to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act just put into effect now allows the companies to share more specifics around what kind of information they’re sharing and being asked to share by the government. The , in a ruling addressed to the legal counsel of all those companies listed above. These new reports will be updated every six months, which is also stipulated in the new ruling, subject to changes in the degree of transparency legally allowed by the government. The rules allow for the information around number of FISA orders for content, non-content (i.e. age, name and location) and number of customer accounts to be narrowed only by blocks of 1,000 or more, and the number of customer accounts affected to be reported in chunks of 250. It’s not pulling back the curtain entirely, but it is a step towards greater transparency. This is likely part of U.S. President Obama’s efforts to introduce surveillance reforms, but hopefully it’s just the start, because I imagine this will leave a lot of interested observers hungry for more. |
How To Get Facebook Paper If You’re Outside The US | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | Facebook’s super pretty new standalone app, Paper, . For some crazy reason, it’s only available if you’re in the US. That restriction is a pretty easy thing to workaround. (If you’re just looking for the Paper download link, ) If you’ve ever had to work around the App Store’s geographical restrictions before, this’ll all be old hat. And if you haven’t? Don’t worry — it’s easy. All you have to do is convince iTunes that you’re from the US. If you’re trying to download a paid app, that’s a pretty huge pain; you’ll need a local address, a local credit card, etc. But Paper is free! So iTunes doesn’t hassle you too much. Just a heads up: If Facebook wants to lock this thing down to US-only for whatever reason, it’d be fairly trivial to implement a geofence that borks the app when you’re outside of the country. But they probably won’t do that. Hopefully. Even if you live in the US, keep this trick in mind! App developers will often release their apps in non-US countries as a soft-launch/beta test, because apps that aren’t launched in the US tend to not get noticed by US press. If you hear about an app being available elsewhere early, this trick might help you get it. |
Komli Media Launches Remarketing Platform To Take On Google, Facebook | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | It’s been a roller-coaster ride for so far, the Indian digital ad network that has raised around $97 million from investors including Peepul Capital, Norwest and Nexus Venture Partners. Within few weeks of raising its biggest funding of $30 million in October last year, Komli’s CEO, Prashant Mehta, quit the company, . Till then, the startup was aiming to achieve $100 million in revenue by 2014. Amar Goel, who founded Komli in October 2006, had to take the charge back after the CEO’s exit. Now, Goel is bringing several key changes to ensure that Komli gets back on its growth path again. Firstly, Komli is now officially moving into the direction in terms of building the next generation ad platforms. Goel told me in an interview that the startup is launching its remarketing demand-side platforms (DSP) that will mean a massive shift in the way it earns revenue. To start with, the billing will shift to SaaS model, where marketeers will pay on the basis of how how successful the remarketing campaigns are. explains why DSPs matter and how do they work. As part of its new strategic shift, Komli is also making few management changes. Ashwin Puri is being appointed as the head of Komli’s newly created remarking DSP business unit and Damien Lavin will now lead the startup’s South East Asia and Australia businesses. Komli has already signed 20 customers including online fashion retailer to use its remarketing demand-side platform (DSP). The startup is hoping to achieve ad spend worth over $100 million on these new platforms in about two years. Traditional ad networks have been facing a double whammy of sorts over past few years — on one hand both Google and Facebook have been quietly, but smartly chipping away the share of digital ad spend — and on the other hand, marketeers have been demanding more control and transparency. “Remarketing and social ads now account for around 20% of the digital ad budgets, and marketeers are asking for solutions that help them manage their ads across search, social, etc., on their own because they are spending more,” added Goel. While , the idea of combining them with deeper, analytics-based demand-side platform, will help customers track and manage campaigns on-the-fly, without leaving any room for confusion about how effective a particular campaign has been. Clearly, big data is at the core of Komli’s new strategy. “Just today I was looking at some analysis our team has been doing about the time between 2 purchase versus 3 purchase at a given site, and the exponential drop off this has. This is all coming from our big data analysis,” said Goel. For now, Komli wants to remain focused on South East Asia markets, which it estimates to be worth around $1 billion annually. India too, is a growing market and already worth around $500 million in social, digital ad spend. Backed by investors such as Peepul Capital, Norwest, Nexus, Helion and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Komli has acquired six companies over last two years. “We are not looking to aggressively chase any acquisitions, an IPO too, is not on the radar yet,” said Goel. As Komli makes this transition from being a traditional online ad network to providing analytics-based platforms, it faces some tough challenges from Google, Facebook and even InMobi. For Amar Goel, who had to come back after the Komli CEO quit last year, a lot is riding — not just in terms of investor money, but also in ensuring that the startup he founded is back on track, and turns profitable soon. |
Sherpa Ventures Closes On $87 Million Of $150 Million Fund | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | , the “ ” investment group founded by Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford, has made its first close on a planned $150 million fund. As , the first $87 million of its raise has come in, with investors including TPG Capital. Pishevar declined to comment on the raise, citing SEC restrictions, but we’re likely to see more from the team soon. The entire round is expected to close sometime over the coming months. |
Scott Guthrie To Take Over Satya Nadella’s Microsoft Role On An Interim Basis | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Who will take over for Satya Nadella’s , helming the Server and Enterprise Group? It’s longtime Sofite Scott Guthrie, a respected technologist. TechCrunch confirmed with Microsoft that Guthrie will take the position on an interim basis, maintaining his current job title of corporate vice president. In the Microsoft hierarchy, corporate vice presidents rest below executive vice presidents, who report to the CEO. So, Nadella moved up a notch, and Guthrie did as well, provided that his interim status becomes permanent. Who is Guthrie? Good question. Long-time Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley published a in her report on his ascension: Guthrie, known for wearing red polo shirts during his public Microsoft speaking appearances, moved from being the Corporate Vice President of the .Net platform in the Developer Division, to head the Azure Application Platform team in the Business Platform Division in May 2011. He has been a major advocate for developers and has made a priority integrating open-source tools and technologies into the Microsoft stack. Red shirt he may be, but Guthrie is hardly a freshman. More as we have it. |
Fair Competition Or Foul Play? Rival Car Service Fires Back At Uber Over Alleged Attack | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | If we’ve said it once, we’ll say it again: Competition can get pretty fierce in the world of on-demand transportation. Consumer demand for better, faster and more convenient car services has exploded and top startups are racing to meet the opportunity. As an early mover in the space, is used to pushing back against unwelcoming opposition, having done battle with unions, legislators and more as it’s expanded into new markets in the U.S. and overseas. However, , an Uber competitor has now made it clear that the company’s enterprising and aggressive approach to sales (and expansion) have likely crossed the line. , formerly GetTaxi, brought a rival black car service to New York City for the first time this fall. Soon thereafter, Gett crossed a $100 million annual run rate, thanks in large part to its strong international presence. Naturally, the startup’s entrance into an already hyper-competitive New York market did not go unnoticed. during the week of January 13th, Gett alleged that Uber employees launched the “real world” equivalent of a DDoS, or denial-of-service, attack, ordering and canceling more than 100 of its cars. Evidence provided to TechCrunch at the time showed that more than one dozen Uber employees had worked simultaneously to request rides from its competitor, in some cases waiting until the cars had nearly arrived before canceling their orders. Having obtained drivers’ numbers as a result of ordering the rides through the app, Uber employees then texted as many of the Gett drivers they could in an attempt to recruit them, offering cash incentives to those for those willing to switch into its camp. From Gett’s perspective, this was “uncool” for a number of reasons, chief of which was the disruption of its newly-established New York business. However, to Uber’s credit, it responded to the allegations with a public apology, admitting that it had in fact attempted to recruit Gett drivers, and saying that its “local teams can be pretty determined when spreading the word about Uber and how [the company’s] platform opens up new economic opportunities for drivers.” While that could have been the end of it (and perhaps should have been), Gett isn’t satisfied. The startup heard Uber’s apology acknowledging that it screwed up — but saw that apology as more of an appeasement measure aimed at customers and vocal opponents on Twitter. The particular sticking points for Uber’s competitor involved its in which it said that members of its New York team had made these requests to “generate leads of independent contractors” but had in fact “cancelled those requests seconds later,” and paid “cancellation fees for these requests.” The company also defined its requests as “sales tactics” — even if qualified by the admission that they were “too aggressive.” Gett, simply put, seems to think that, when it comes to taking responsibility for potentially anti-competitive behavior, this was the bare minimum as far as apologies are concerned. That Uber’s statement, in reality, was the equivalent of apologizing, but saying, “hey, we’re an aggressive company with go-get-’em sales tactics and we shouldn’t have done that, but ‘no harm, no foul’ because we cancelled seconds later and paid any necessary fees.” In a follow-up statement today, Gett is firing back with more evidence, saying that Uber’s attempt to shift focus away from their transgression is unfair and that their presentation of the situation as the result of well-intentioned but “too aggressive” marketing tactics doesn’t quite do it justice. According to evidence provided to TechCrunch, this was not simply a random, rogue employee going off the reservation. Gett’s original claims were that not only do the dozen or so Uber employees whose names appear on the order include a social media manager, operations manager, community manager and general manager, but that more than one Uber employee created multiple accounts using different, potentially false names. In other words, this wasn’t just a dozen employees using their real first and last names, but multiple employees using, say, their first name and middle name, or variations thereof. Uber General Manager Josh Mohrer, for example, allegedly created two accounts, one being “Josh Martin” and the other being “Jim Martins.” For one of those names, Mohrer allegedly provided an invalid credit card and requested rides not just from the Uber offices or one individual location, but multiple rides originating from all over Manhattan and the outer boroughs — from Times Square to La Guardia. The majority of these rides took place over the course of one hour, Gett says, at the very least making it difficult to contend that Mohrer was in all of those places at once. To add further fuel to its claims, Gett also alleges that Mohrer was far from alone in this behavior, as multiple Uber employees used invalid credit cards and removed that information after canceling their rides. When asked what purpose Gett had in coming forward with this kind of information, Gett CEO Jing Herman said that “driver information is not for sale and indulgences don’t go for $10.” She also said that Uber had managed to recruit one of Gett’s drivers since then, and the company wants to make sure that this kind of behavior does not continue. As to whether Gett planned to pursue legal action against Uber? The CEO said that the company had not made a final decision yet on this front and is “evaluating its options.” TechCrunch asked former Federal Prosecutor Fred Tocce whether or not he thought Uber’s actions potentially warranted more serious, er, legal action from Gett. Tocce, whose firm Panitch Schwarze Belisario & Nadel, specializes in intellectual property law, including unfair competition, and who himself has worked on over 200 cases in this area, said, in short, “yes.” Elaborating, the former federal prosecutor said that Gett would potentially “have a number of viable causes of action against Uber under New York law” — as well as the laws of many states in the U.S., he added. Tocce cited potential causes of action as including but not limited to, unfair competition, tortious interference with contractual relations and tortious interference with prospective contractual relations. If the false credit card part of the scheme were true, Tocce continued, then there could also be cause for action for fraud and conversion, but in all cases, it would be a matter of showing that Uber’s conduct caused harm and just how much harm to business it actually caused. In the end, however, Gett has thus far been content to let this play itself out in the press, rather than enter into a lengthy and potentially expensive legal battle against one of the largest companies in the space. Of course, if one were to view this situation from the other side of the table, one might say that Gett is also taking advantage of the incident and is, overall, on a mission to use Uber as a focal point around which to base some of its own marketing; particularly around the fact that Gett does not use surge pricing as Uber does during peak hours, for example. Which, for some, might be a deciding factor in choosing between two rival car services. When TechCrunch reached out to Uber for a response, the company again apologized and reiterated its previous response: We apologize for the tactics used to recruit drivers in NYC a couple of weeks ago and took steps to ensure that it does not occur again … We believe that the Uber platform is the best option for drivers to maximize their incomes and become their own entrepreneurs. As we were working to bring more drivers on the Uber platform quickly to meet consumer demand, the NYC team got overzealous in getting the word out to drivers. Uber also contended that what is likely the case is that, while some employees might have used their first name and maiden names, they weren’t looking to actively conceal their identity or produce fake accounts. Furthermore, to their knowledge, all of the credit card information provided was authentic, although there was one instance in which an employee had a card authenticated by had removed the information once it triggered fraud protection at their bank. To that, Gett responded saying that, like other car services (including Uber), it used Braintree to process payment information, intimating that it wasn’t using some kind of alternative or unusual system or tools to process payment information. COO Adi Vaxman explained, saying that Gett “authenticates cards at the time the account is opened and also runs a small pre-authorization amount when a ride is requested, similar to all mobile app vendors.” In the event that a pre-authorization fails, he added, the user is then “prompted to update their payment method in order to pay for their ride.” According to Gett, the Uber users in question did not in fact update their payment information. When the cancellation fees were later processed, the company learned that some of the cards were invalid while others were removed from the accounts entirely, and that Gett “could not charge all users due to invalid credit cards and cards being removed,” the CEO said. For now, it is up to readers to decide what to make of this unfolding story, but from the facts presented by both sides, it doesn’t exactly look like there are too many ways to spin this in Uber’s favor. Yes, stories like this could work in Uber’s favor, portraying it as the market leader and the incumbent, but that’s not going to be much of a surprise to anyone familiar with on-demand car services. In reality, what could potentially be more interesting, and worth more conversation, is how leaders in a space that doesn’t exactly have 10,000-foot barriers to entry react when competition arrives (and they may not have IP to protect them). What defines appropriate, and fair conduct for those leaders — and for the startups that hope to compete with them? Is this a case of all’s fair in love and on-demand transportation, or is this something that Uber needs to be held accountable for? You be the judge. |
Google Extends Security Rewards Program To Cover Its Own Chrome Apps And Extensions, Ups Reward Level For Open-Source Patches | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Google has long run a rewards program for security researchers who find vulnerabilities in its software. Today, the company is program to also cover its Chrome apps and extensions. These include extensions for Hangouts, Screen Capture, Google Translate, PageSpeed Insights and . The rewards for developers who find security vulnerabilities range from $500 to $10,000, depending on how grave the issue is. Most of Google’s other rewards programs top out at . In the announcement, Google Security Team members Eduardo Vela Nava and Michal Zalewski point out that they believe “developing Chrome extensions securely is relatively easy,” but because many of these apps are also very widely used, “we want to make sure efforts to keep them secure are rewarded accordingly.” Besides this new program, Google is also increasing the rewards of its , which rewards patches that secure widely used, open-source software like OpenSSH, libjpeg, Chromium and security-critical components in the Linux kernel. Developers can now earn up to $10,000 for “complicated, high-impact improvements that almost certainly prevent major vulnerabilities in the affected code.” More moderately complex patches will come in at $5,000, and very simple submissions will be rewarded with between $500 and $1,337. After launching the Patch reward program , Google quickly this program to include the Android open source project just a month later. At that time, rewards still topped out at $3,113.70. Officially, this program is still “experimental,” but given the increase in reward levels, it looks like Google is ready to keep it going for quite a while. |
Inside Satya Nadella’s CEO Comp Package From Microsoft | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Through a , Microsoft has revealed the compensation package for its new CEO. In short, Satya Nadella is buying all the beers for the next few years. In numerical terms, Nadella will pick up a $1.2 million yearly cash salary, with installments doled out twice monthly. Nadella is also eligible for a cash bonus of up to 300 percent of his salary each year, or $3.6 million. The new chief is also set to pick up a target stock bonus of $13.2 million in fiscal 2015. So, for fiscal 2015, Nadella should pick up a total of $18 million. Now, it gets more complex. Recall that Microsoft wanted to pick up a new CEO for the next decade. Nadella’s compensation includes three five-year periods in which Microsoft’s stock performance will be compared to the S&P 500’s performance over the period. The three periods begin in 2014, 2015 and 2016. They end, of course, in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Microsoft has a target of being in the 60th percentile of performance on index, for which Nadella will receive 600,000 shares for each of the periods. If Microsoft performs at the 80th percentile or above, Nadella will collect 900,000 shares. So the new executive could warrant up to 2.7 million shares total at the end of the three five-year programs in aggregate. 2.7 million shares at Microsoft’s current share price are worth $98,145,000. However, as that award will be calculated in shares that have likely appreciated (given that the 2.7 million-share threshold is only met if Microsoft spanks the larger market), Nadella stands to land north of $100 million, in addition to his salary, bonuses and regular stock disbursements. Big dollars. JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon saw his this year to $20 million. So, Nadella is being valued by Microsoft as commensurate in value to Dimon, if not more, taking into account the five-year-period disbursements. Nadella is not being paid a disproportionate sum to his peers in technology, but it’s safe to say that the raise was welcome. Sign of tech losing its marbles and grounding in reality? No. Instead, Microsoft has aligned nearly all of Nadella’s income with performance of the company and the company’s stock price. If you wanted to incentivize performance along certain lines, strap cash to it. If Nadella hits his marks and takes down the full stack, he’ll have been cheap at twice the price. And if his performance suffers, well, the board can cut his yearly bonuses and he won’t get much, if any, of the long-term incentives. |
Apple And Others Fund $750 Million In Education Gadgets And Internet Broadband | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Major tech companies $750 million worth of products to help bridge the digital divide. During a speech earlier today, Obama gave details about the pledges from the tech companies, along with a commitment to connect more schools with broadband Internet. : During the State of the Union, Obama that Apple, Microsoft, Sprint and Verizon would help connect 15,000 schools and 20 million students to speedy Internet. “Now, this is an extraordinary commitment by these business leaders, but they’re business leaders, so they’re not just doing it out of the goodness of their heart. They want the country to do well, but they also understand that they want educated customers,” Obama. “They want customers who are able to get good jobs, who are going to be using these tools in the future. They want that next young architect coming out of here to be familiar with using that iPad so that they’re designing buildings and using their products.” Research on the effectiveness of broadband in schools is more scant, however. The Urban Institute found that broadband in the home slightly decreased math and reading proficiency [ ], while an experimental study in Portugal found the same for broadband in schools [ ]. The authors cite heightened distraction as a potential explanation. Though, technology could allow schools to also radically change their curriculum, which would teach a different set of skills that may not be captured by test scores. So it seems like the government is funding a project that we don’t entirely understand the outcome of. |
TrackMaven Lands $6.5M From NEA And Others To Bring Better Competitive Intelligence To Digital Marketers | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | As content marketing becomes an increasingly significant part of the digital marketing arsenal, it it brings with it new opportunities, both allowing marketers to expand beyond traditional approaches to advertising and tap into new revenue channels. However, it also comes with a downside, as digital marketers are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the number of channels they have to create engaging content for and manage. While the number of significant digital marketing channels has increased to upwards of 20 in the last three to five years, digital marketing budgets and headcounts among marketing teams haven’t quite increased at the same rate. In August 2012, Acceleprise General Manager Allen Gannett founded to act as a solution — and to help simplify competitive intelligence for digital marketers. Rather than having to cobble together data from a variety of sources, TrackMaven automatically aggregates competitive intelligence data from paid, earned and owned media channels into one interface. The idea, Gannett says, is to show digital marketers what their competitors are doing across these channels, and particularly, what’s actually working for them. While most competitive intelligence marketing tools either focus on first-party analytics or social listening (i.e. what consumers are saying about a brand, not what brands are actually doing themselves), the founder says, TrackMaven enables marketers to see what their audiences are interested in and then benchmark against their peers in each of those categories. Offering data and insight from 15 different channels across paid, owned and earned media, TrackMaven has built a customer list that includes brands like Eddie Bauer, Aol, Computer Sciences Corporation, Martha Stewart Living, and the NBA, to name a few. With demand increasing as marketers continue to struggle with creating engaging content across a growing set of channels, TrackMaven announced today that it has raised $6.5 million in a round led by New Enterprise Associates to help it expand. Bowery Capital and Acceleprise Ventures also participated in TrackMaven’s latest round, bringing its total raised to date to just under $8 million. The Series A financing follows on the heels of the $1.25 million the startup raised last March from Aol Ventures and a group of angel investors that includes Sean Glass (former CMO of HigherOne), Hemang Gadhia (former CEO of Condaptive, acquired by Millenial Media), Adam Riggs (former President of Shutterstock) and Roger Krakoff (Cloud Capital Partners), among others. As a result of the round, NEA General Partner Harry Weller, whose has previously invested in companies like Groupon, Cvent, Eloqua and SourceFire, will join former CEO of Eloqua Joe Payne and co-founder of HigherOne, Sean Glass, on the startup’s board of directors. The key to TrackMaven’s value proposition thus far, Gannett explains, is that the company is attempting to establish itself as the first true enterprise competitive intelligence platform for marketers, enabling big brands and corporations to both benchmark and track their digital marketing efforts. With the startup’s platform and dashboard, marketers can dig down into the topics, tactics and channels that are working for their competitors’ audience, the TrackMaven founder says. Using TrackMaven’s dashboard, marketers are able to get a more three-dimensional view into their traditional marketing channels like news and PR, email, site traffic, organic search, display and text advertising, as well as “newer” digital channels like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Ultimately, the TrackMaven founder believes that the platform is off to a good start by allowing digital marketing teams at big brands to discover key tactics and more easily build benchmarks, graphs, and reports on the data therein. But, with its new funding, the company wants to take its platform to the next level, incorporating new data sources, better exporting, expanded custom visualizations and a wider range of integrations, like with backend BI systems, for example. TrackMaven . |
Sources: Munchery Raising An Additional $20M For Its Gourmet Meal Delivery Service | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | San Francisco-based , the startup that offers prepared gourmet meals on demand, is in the process of raising a new $20 million funding round, multiple sources familiar with the deal have revealed to TechCrunch. The new round adds to its existing , and $700,000 in seed funding. The startup currently counts Sherpa Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthos Capital, e.ventures and individual investors including Matt Mullenweg, Randi Zuckerberg and Eric Ries as backers. Founded in 2010 by Tri Tran and Conrad Chu, the point of Munchery was to make it possible for busy professionals to have a convenient meal option that wasn’t just your garden-variety fast food or greasy takeout. Munchery plays on current trends in diet and nutrition, providing meal selection based on categories including “dairy-free,” “vegan,” “low carb” and more. All meals are made from scratch and will be delivered same-day within the SF Bay area upon ordering. You just choose the dish and the delivery window (in one hour increments), enter delivery and payment info, and your food will be prepared and ready by the end of the day. The value proposition isn’t just fresh food that’s relatively healthy: Munchery has a buy-one, give-one system through which it provides another meal for those in need for each one ordered, plus it uses eco-friendly packaging and uses professional local chefs for meal preparation. That kind of attention to detail can’t come cheap, which probably partly explains the need for more cash coming off its A round, which was but only officially closed in September of last year. Last fall when that round closed, Munchery was claiming a 20 percent month-over-month growth rate in its business. Then in October, , rebuilt its mobile apps and introduced wine, beer and cider ordering. It also hired Bridget Batson, a three-star chef, as a step in building out its roster of in-house culinary talent. Those kind of product and organizational moves don’t come cheap, so it isn’t surprising to hear that the company is looking around for fresh funding. As with any offline service business, expansion for Munchery is going to be expensive. Given what it managed to accomplish with its existing $5 million or so, however, we could see growth accelerate rapidly once it nails down this funding, complete with Munchery making its way out of its Bay Area crib. Munchery declined to comment for this article. |
A Facebook Life | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | begins at conception. “We’re expecting!”, your parents post. You don’t have fingers but you’re already accruing likes. A shared sonogram means hundreds have seen you before you’ve even opened your eyes. You have a Facebook presence despite lacking a physical one. Think about that for a second. Like it or not, in 10 years Facebook has changed everything. Each phase of this life is playing out right now across a billion people. You exist in limbo until you turn 13. Your parents can post whatever they want about you, but you’re not supposed to sign up. But perhaps your curiosity wins out, so you fake your age and create a profile. Quite possibly the first in a long series of adolescent rebellions and lies about your age. From then on, every action you take and thought you think will be accompanied by a little background decision to be made: “Should I share this on Facebook?” Every sunset, surprise, and sexy face. Yes, you are thirteen years old and deciding which photo you look least ugly in so you can set it as your profile picture. When your parents walk in, you switch to another website or hit enter over and over until your chat history climbs out of view. Each person you meet must be classified. To friend, or not to friend? Will their life provide enough entertainment? Will this weak tie generate opportunities down the road? Will connecting online make you more likely to connect offline again someday? The decision is not yours alone. It is theirs, but also society’s. The social contract demands courtesy. Accept their friendship, don’t break their heart. Then you’ll spend five seconds every year from then on either deciding not to wish them a happy birthday, or doing so as efficiently as possible. You grow to become an actor in the success theater. Put on a good show and people will think you’re beautiful and accomplished. Refuse to take the stage and acquaintances will forget about you. Implode in the spotlight and they’ll all think you’re broken or desperate for sympathy. Your real friends will see through the statuses, though, and ask how you’re doing…really. Eventually, something truly spectacular will happen to you. Rather than share it intimately with those geographically and socially closest to you, you will share some shadow or slideshow of your story with all your friends. And they will congratulate you. They will like and fawn and comment and cheer and share your moment. And while you haven’t seen most of them in quite some time, their little tokens of appreciation will fill you with pride and joy and gratitude. These clicks can never recreate a hug, but that doesn’t make them worthless. Those resentful of your good fortune will scoff. And though you’ll never know exactly whose blood was boiled by your luck, a smug smirk will consume the corner of your mouth because you showed them, finally. You’ll one day meet someone so attractive you can hardly wait to escape their presence so you can stalk their every publicly available tidbit of information. You never got their phone number, but with a combination of savvy search parameters you’ll pluck them from the billion-human haystack. You’ll message them something flirty you’d have been too scared to say on the phone and you’ll become “friends.” Before your first date, you’ll know all their favorite bands, the places they’ve travelled, and what their ex looks like. You’ll learn more about them alone than you could in a half-dozen dinners together. You’ll meet up having never heard their voice since that initial encounter. And you’ll fall in love with someone you would have lost but instead you found because you both live a Facebook life. Your relationship will be condensed into a series of moments. A vacation together, a formal party, an anniversary dinner. No one will know about the fights over work/life balance or the creeping worry they’ll get bored of you, because those don’t make likeable posts. But you’ll send stickers to convey the complex emotions when you’re at a loss for words, and they’ll understand what you mean. You will accumulate a Timeline full of happy memories, and when you scroll through, you remember why you fell so hard in the first place. You’ll create a secret Facebook event to set everything up. Friends with telephoto lenses stationed halfway across the park, a serendipitous string quartet. You know this moment isn’t just for you two. It’s a public expression that you’ll do anything to make them happy. You get down on one knee and the photos are being uploaded before they can even stop crying to say “yes.” You hold hands as you change your relationship status to “Engaged.” You will see ads for wedding photographers, for caterers, for florists. You will seek nothing because the intent you’ve revealed and the money in your pocket are enough to make marketers salivate with the thrill of the chase. You will send a “Save The Date” via Facebook but not the invitations because this is special. You won’t change your relationship status to “married” at the altar because that’s tacky, but will do it as soon as you two are alone together. A modern consummation. You will be anxious because people will share photos from the wedding with the friends you just weren’t close enough with to invite. They will be offended but comment “wow, looks like so much fun” and you will feel awful, but you’ll all get over it. Soon it will be you posting that you’re expecting. The birth will see you struggle to reconcile experiencing the moment first-hand and documenting it for friends. No matter what anyone tells you, you’ll swear everything your child does is monumental and worth sharing. Your friends will privately loathe this but publicly humor you with “aww cute” and “they’re growing up so fast.” Then one day your kid will join Facebook and you’ll have to choose if you’re their “friend” or not. You’ll be terrified they’re on there sharing sexed-up selfies and fodder for identity theft. You’ll demand to see their profile and realize they’re just talking about how much homework sucks. It will take you a while to realize that the scandalous stuff now goes down in other apps, not Facebook. You’ll embarrass your kid by commenting on their posts. When some snot-nosed brat bullies your kid in their statuses, you’ll calmly message their parents telling them to teach their children better netiquette. But you’ll also seek revenge by reporting the little jerk to Facebook, hoping it’ll shut down their account and assassinate their digital existence. And when you grow old, your family will ask their friends to keep you in their prayers. But when you pass, you won’t disappear. Your profile will become a memorial page, a shrine to the moments of your life that you converted from atoms to bits. And once again, you will have a Facebook presence without a physical one. |
PillPack Takes On CVS And Walgreens By Mail, Launches A Full-Service, Subscription-Based Online Pharmacy | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | , more than 20 percent of Americans take more than five prescription medications each day. This fact goes a long way to showing how big of a role the pharmacy has come to play in millions of lives. While managing prescriptions, medications, and one’s healthcare is critical, it also happens to be far from easy. No one . While earning his diploma at pharmacy school, TJ Parker met Elliot Cohen through program, and the two decided to run an experiment, through which they hoped to prove that managing medications could actually be far more simple than the process most Americans wrestle with on a daily basis. However, the two quickly learned that in order to tackle the friction within the pharmacy system in the U.S. and truly provide a better alternative, they would have to go beyond apps and smart pillboxes and actually build a better pharmacy from the ground up. After graduating from TechStars Boston early last year, Parker and Cohen finally unveiled the result of their experiments in — a full-service, fully-licensed online pharmacy. After a year of development, the startup opened up early access this fall to pilot the program with a group of early customers, and a few months and tweaks later, PillPack is today ready for its full-scale launch to the masses. Well, the masses of Americans taking more than five prescription meds each day. To put a fine point on it: As of today, PillPack is now available (read: Licensed) , with additional states expected to roll out over the course of 2014. That’s all well and good, but, how exactly does it work you ask? Essentially, the program allows customers to have their medications shipped two them every two weeks in a (yes, two-week) roll of individual packets that are organized by time and date — rather than using those standard, ubiquitous bright orange pill bottles. Beyond their prescriptions, customers can also sign up to receive any over-the-counter medications or vitamins that they happen to be taking on a regularly basis as part of each shipment. Once they’ve established which prescriptions, over-the-counter meds and vitamins they want to receive every two weeks, shipments are sent to their doorsteps, with cocktails arriving in a chain of “dose packs,” each pack assigned to a different of the week — all of which comes pre-packaged and linked together in a recyclable roll. Each package comes with a clear label and an image of the medication inside. While PillPack is limited to shipping prescription medications in the 31 states in which it’s currently licensed, the startup can ship over-the-counter meds and vitamins in all 50. However, while shipping medications directly to customers’ doorsteps is a good first step, as anyone regularly taking doctor-ordered medications will tell you, the real key is ensuring that they get their prescription on time, and actually take those medications on time. To assuage any potential concern among American pill-poppers, PillPack guarantees that those shipments will arrive on time. Leveraging the resurgence of the subscription model among digital startups and consumer product companies, PillPack offers its program for a monthly fee of $20/month (plus co-pays), which includes unlimited shipping so that additional meds can be sent anytime. Generally speaking, the founders say, the co-pay charge included in the fee stay the same, and the startup now accepts “most major prescription insurance plans, as well as most forms of Medicare Part D.” Furthermore, because refills and subscription renewal planning tend to be the most time-consuming aspect of the pharmacy routine, PillPack offers a feature called “Proactive Refill Management,” which essentially assigns one of the startup’s on-staff pharmacists to monitor and coordinate each of your refills and renewals ahead of time. The startups also rotates its bullpen of pharmacists such that someone is “always on-call for 24/7 support” and available to answer questions or handle emergencies, the company said. As it looks to continue scaling its online, over-the-mail hybrid pharmacy and follow-through with licensing in the remaining 19 states not yet signed on, PillPack has taken on $4 million in venture financing to help it get there. The startup’s latest round of funding — a $3.5 million in Series A round, which closed last summer — was led by Atlas Venture, with participation from Founder Collective. The round followed close on the heels of a $550K seed round of angel funding raised shortly after it graduated from TechStars in May of 2013. While early test runs have been promising, the founders say, the key to PillPack’s future success will be in how well it’s able to maintain a simple (and quality) customer experience, while ensuring on-time shipments and 24/7 support as it scales and usage increases. The founders believe that by spending time building a sophisticated back-end system to help it manage and process orders, and by combining technology with pharmacists that review each prescription and over-the-counter cocktail before it ships, it will at the very least have a leg-up on the complicated, confusing, and time-consuming world of the brick-and-mortar, American pharmacy. For more, |
Hey, Big Spender! Venture Investment Soars In January | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Holy shit did venture capitalists spend a lot of money in January. Investments in new companies shot to $5.8 billion by the end of the month up from $3.5 billion over the same period last year, according to data from . It’s only one month, not a full quarter, but it seems like venture investors are setting the stage for a very, very active year. Software investments led all categories with just over $1 billion committed to deals, up from $597.3 billion last year. But hardware companies, e-commerce startups, mobile technologies, financial services offerings, and health-related technologies all attracted significantly more cash, CrunchBase data showed. It’s also worth mentioning that while the total amounts that investors committed went up in most categories, the number of investments made by venture capitalists actually declined in six of the top 10 investment sectors by capital committed compared to last year’s figures. This lends credence to the notion that prices for companies continue to climb.
The pace of investors’ commitments has caused some industry watchers to wonder whether the market is heading for some sort of reckoning. “As soon as people start pouring money into a sector, that’s when we say we better slow down,” said one investor at a multi-billion-dollar venture capital fund. Meanwhile, limited partners are especially concerned about later-stage valuations, which seem… frothy. “The later stage stuff is getting scary on the multiples,” said one investor at a large fund of funds. The last time venture investors put this kind of money to work in deals was in 2010, when VC-backed companies raised over $5.9 billion in deals. Investments from VCs keep rising even as the amount of money venture investors raise from limited partners continues to slide. pegs the amount of capital that venture firms have raised at $16.7 billion in 2013, down from $19.6 billion in 2012. Meanwhile, investments into startups climbed in 2013 to $29.4 billion, up from $27.3 billion in 2012 and nearly level with the $29.7 billion committed in 2011, according to the NVCA. Still investors are loath to define the market as a “bubble” despite and . A lot of this can be attributed to a movement from earlier stage to later stage deals. As the chart below shows, a lot of the money from the biggest spenders in January went to companies that had raised at least two or three rounds of financing.
Some of these later-stage fundings — like the $101 million round raised by virtualization technology developer , the $250 million raised, or the $112 million for — are all later-stage deals. The $30 million second tranche of a Series A for healthcare startup , or the $122.5 million for shaving company , seem a little less… typical. As other industry professionals have noted, there’s a that’s happening, as well. Even the amount of money that early-stage investors are spending for angel, seed, and Series A round deals is increasing, according to data from CrunchBase.
These numbers may just be an anomaly, but if investors keep up the pace, 2014 could signal a new beginning for an industry that had been trying to find its footing – or it could be another sign that VCs are walking closer to the edge. |
Unified Adds Business Intelligence To Its Social Marketing Tools | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Social advertising company just launched the new version of its “social operating platform” today, and it sounds like the biggest change is the addition of business intelligence — basically, more customizable, big-picture data to help advertisers see how they’re doing. The company already offers ad-buying tools, as well as a for monitoring different ad-buying systems. (It also last year.) With the new version, Vice President of Marketing Dave Donohue said Unified is the “only social marketing platform with fully integrated BI.” To be honest, I wasn’t totally clear at first about how this is different from the data that Unified was already providing its customers, but co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jason Beckerman told me this is much more about tracking general trends and benchmarks, not just a few social metrics around an individual campaign. He added that a lot of this data is currently trapped in Excel, while Unified can bring it together and make it accessible in real-time. For a more concrete example, Donohue said a large auto manufacturer could use Unified’s BI tools to bring up different visualizations about how their awareness campaigns are performing, broken down by car model and region. Other features in the new version include one-click sign-in to all of Unified’s applications and global currency support. The company, by the way, says it works with more than 500 customers, including Lenovo, Edelman, and PBS. One of the keys to its approach, Donohue said, is the way that it can bring together different agencies and teams, as well as organic content and paid advertising. “If you have organic content that performs well, you basically have a 24-hour window in order to amplify that content [with advertising],” he said. “Absent [Unified’s] social system of record there’s no way to do it within a day.” |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 3 | null |
Flipagram Raising $50-$60M At A $300M Valuation From Sequoia | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Buzzy mobile video app is raising $50 to $60 million in funding at a $300 million valuation. We’re hearing from sources that Sequoia is in the round. The WSJ recently that Flipagram, which creates short video sets from photos set to music, was raising cash at a $300 million valuation. Here’s an of a Flipagram. Flipagram is part of Cheerful, a company by Farhad Mohit. He sold Shopzilla in 2005 for $569 million and went on to start DotSpots and Gri.pe (both of which are TechCrunch Disrupt companies). DotSpots hit the deadpool, but Mohit went on to create Cheerful Inc, bringing Gripe and mobile app Chee.rs together under one roof. Flipagram is the latest app from the studio. The WSJ reported that as of December, the free app — which has been likened to for mobile — was reaching more than 10 million users per month. what the final product looks like, in its most basic form, it’s a slideshow culled from your phone photos and set to music. Sequoia has been leading a number of deals on fast-growing consumer mobile startups, including and Roelof Botha was on both of these deals for Sequoia but it’s unclear if he’s the lead on Flipagram. We’ve contacted Flipagram for comment. |
YoVille Creator Seeks To Avoid The Game’s Death By Buying It Back From Zynga | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Zynga when it announced it would be shutting down , a virtual world online game that’s been running since 2008. The game’s players have been building their simulated communities for many years now, but they only have until March to say goodbye. Unless, that is, YoVille’s original creator and his new game studio have their way. , which is headquartered in Toronto and counts Albert Lai as its other co-founder, is looking to acquire the YoVille property from Zynga to help it avoid an early grave. That’s something the community definitely seems to support. Right after the announcement, a petition popped up from YoVillians threatening to boycott all Zynga titles if the closure went through (the ) and there have been some surprisingly emotional responses to the decision posted not only on Facebook, but to YouTube as well. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG0qCCB24bk?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] There’s a good reason why Zynga was looking to shut down the property, however: It has only around 500,000 active users per month at this point, which is off tremendously from its roughly 20 million actives during its peak popularity. Zynga said that it made the decision based on a need to redirect time and energy to new games, rather than to maintaining some of its older ones. Still, Big Viking sees a lot of value left in the property. Lai explained to me in an interview that the company is in advanced talks with Zynga to take over the game. “YoVille’s a massive virtual world not unlike Second Life (but not “adult” in any way) that at its peak was one of Zynga’s top-3 money-makers, and far, far bigger than Second Life ever was in user base,” he said. “Mark Pincus is involved in getting it back to us at Big Viking.” Pincus of course is a Zynga co-founder, and was the company’s CEO from its inception until July 2013, when Microsoft exec Don Mattrick took over the role. Pincus remains at Zynga as Chairman of its Board of Directors, however, and as Chief Product Officer of the gaming company. His support isn’t the only sign that Zynga prefers this outcome: Lai says the company has been “amazingly good” throughout the purchase discussion process. “We’re in dialog with them right now and ironing out technical and legal issues,” he said about the state of negotiations. “We are hoping it will happen soon, but it’s hard to put a number on it. The game serves a huge community of players that rely on it daily, from elderly players that are homebound and find it an outlet to socialize and ‘walk around,’ kids finding an outlet and support group. Also Zynga is at a scale that makes it hard for them to give it the level of focus and TLC I think we are able to.” Lai says that Big Viking thinks its telling that there were once tens of millions of users on YoVille. That reflects the fact that it fills a need, he said, one specifically aimed at “casual social community” rather than “hack and slash” or other types of game mechanics currently in vogue. He won’t talk about what kind of price might be in discussion, but notes that Big Viking has been “quietly building a small war chest over the past two years” for exactly this type of scenario. For its part, Zynga isn’t commenting on any potential YoVille deal at this time, but if it does go through it’ll mark the first time the casual gaming giant has sold back one of its acquisitions. That could benefit all parties, too, since while the game’s audience has shrunk, it remains numerous and dedicated. |
What Could Go Wrong For Satya Nadella? | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Microsoft , with Satya Nadella taking over the reins from exiting CEO Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates will spend a portion of his time at the company assisting with product choices. While Nadella was essentially the unanimous choice of those outside the company — your humble servant included — his clippings have become too nice. Let’s take a moment instead to focus on what could go wrong for the new CEO. To be plain, Nadella’s new role is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, jobs in technology. Microsoft is still pulling its re-org together at the same time it is changing its business model. This puts Nadella in the helm partway through two key and coinciding changes to the company. The following list is a sample of the issues and challenges that Nadella may face during his tenure as CEO of Microsoft: Windows Phone’s was capped by a Windows Phone handsets. If that presages a broad slowdown of Windows Phone sales, Microsoft’s mobile momentum could stall, pushing that magical 10 percent market share figure further and further out into the future. That would harm developer interest in Windows Phone, and by extension, the larger Windows ecosystem, thus harming the still nascent Windows Store. That’s not to diminish the fact that Windows Phone itself needs all the developer attention it can muster. Falling growth is anathema to such dotage. The global PC market is expected to contract a few points this year, and . That might not happen. If the PC market sees continued weakness akin to what happened in 2013, PC unit volume could decline until key partner OEMs bow out. And PC volume has been the savior of the Windows 8.x platform as it has slowly arranged its ducks in a row. Without that key influx of new devices, Windows 8.x’s store is all gussied up with no one to dance with. Worse-than-expected PC sales would also harm OEM revenues for Microsoft, both from consumers and enterprises. This brings us to: A huge chunk of the PC market remains on Windows XP. Nearly , to be precise. For an operating system that Microsoft wants to , that’s downright depressing. As Windows XP ages, it holds off future PC purchases and makes companies that use it less secure. Microsoft would prefer more secure customers running shiny new Windows 7 or 8 boxes. There has been a presumption that XP users would make the switch. That doesn’t appear to be the case. That’s Nadella’s new problem. Surface had a solid fourth quarter in 2013, taking in . However, that was during a quarter in which Microsoft spent heavily on advertising for the two new devices it had just launched. I don’t think that anyone expects Microsoft to beat that number in the current quarter. A better question is how well the larger set of tablet devices running Windows 8.x sell. Microsoft is preparing an update to Windows 8.x that is mostly focused on improving the Mouse And Keyboard experience, not its touch brother. So the Windows 8.x we have for mobile today is likely the Windows 8.x for mobile we are going to have for some time. Whether consumers are willing to buy those devices has thus far been a mixed bag. Nadella needs to find a way to increase tablet sales, a device class that I suspect uses Windows Store apps on a larger per-unit scale than other form factors. Despite more than doubling its revenue in the period, Surface in the past quarter. Microsoft has been strident in the past in stating that it intends to have strong margins on the Surface line of products. But the mere cost of Surface revenue was more than the revenue itself, meaning that the larger Surface loss for the period was much larger than you might think. Spending heavily to support your new business model is a good plan. But at some point Surface will need to flip to the black. It’s up to Nadella to ensure that the Surface project can finally be taken off financial life support and walk under its own steam. Office 365 has seen very strong growth in its early stages. Microsoft reported, for example, that Office 365 Home Premium has collected during its most recent earnings call. A fine figure, but one that only points to a third of a billion dollars or so in revenue. Microsoft also sells Office 365 to businesses large and small, governments, and educational customers. What isn’t clear — and may not come to pass — is whether there is enough market space for Microsoft to replace its traditional Office revenues completely, and then grow the sum. So far, Microsoft has shown good momentum, but Nadella could find himself with a substitute product that can’t generate as much cash as its predecessor. Windows Azure, Microsoft’s IaaS and PaaS cloud computing could services slip given that Nadella’s attention will be now more broadly distributed. Nadella is synonymous with the cloud for a reason. If Microsoft cedes ground to Amazon, or more precisely fails to grow its share of this market, it could harm its ability to promote its own software products, not to mention see a key new revenue source stagnate. The economy remains fragile. That is a material risk for Nadella. For example, it was corporate spend that kept Microsoft’s OEM revenues from falling heavily in its most recent quarter. As : Critically, Windows OEM revenue for the period only declined 3 percent, a figure that was cushioned by 12 percent more OEM revenue to commercial customers. So, large companies offset weak consumer demand, mostly. This is a more general risk, but a portion of Microsoft’s recovery thus far is due to macroeconomic conditions outside of its control. That flips and Nadella has a new problem on his hands. The Nokia deal is about to bring a huge chunk of new staff into Microsoft’s business roughly at the same time that it is picking up a new leader. That could go poorly. Nadella will have to welcome droves of people into a culture that he will be only freshly in charge of. And, given that Stephen Elop was tipped as a , some could be unhappy that their guy did not win. Nokia, when whole, was not a particularly profitable company. The piece that Microsoft bought isn’t much better. I’ve done already on what impact Nokia could have on Microsoft’s earnings, and it looked slight. But, in the harsh afterglow of Google’s Motorola purchase and sale, you have to wonder what might happen. And finally, it has been an assumption that Nadella will have full avail of Microsoft’s cadre of executive vice presidents. That may not be the case. Now that the dust has cleared on the CEO question, those who hoped for the role and did not get it could exit. Also, while Nadella is generally considered to be well-liked internally, he can hardly be universally popular. If key talent departs, he could find himself lacking down-ticket leadership in key areas. – Much of the above is completely theoretical. But so is the future. Nadella is a strong CEO pick, but his job will be industrial strength. Let’s see what happens. |
Sony Reportedly Seeking To Sell Its PC Division | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Sony is apparently looking to shed the dead weight that is its PC business. , relaying a report by Nikkei, Sony is in talks to sell its personal computer business to investment fund Japan Industrial Partners for up to 50 billion yen ($490 million). A new company would be formed to sell the computers, with Sony retaining a small stake in venture, the report states. Just last week, another report surfaced stating that Sony was talking to Lenovo over a joint venture. Sony flat-out denied this report. Still, when there’s smoke, there’s often fire. And Sony’s VAIO brand is burning a hole in Sony’s ledger. This move shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sony’s PC division has long been a weak link in Sony’s chain. Besides, when Kazuo Hirai took over Sony in 2012, he didn’t list personal computers as one of Sony’s cornerstones. Instead, Kaz pointed to digital imaging, gaming, and mobile on which rebuild Sony, a strategy clearly present as of late. Sony has released innovative and, frankly, killer products in the three aforementioned categories. Still, despite making amazing products, Sony is trailing others in those spaces. By ridding itself of a forgotten appendage, perhaps Sony can better compete with the likes of Samsung and Apple. |
FarFaria Raises $3.25M To Bring Children’s Books To The iPad (And Eventually Other Devices) | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | , which has , is announcing that it has raised $3.25 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Inventus Capital Partners, with Inventus’ Manu Rekhi joining the board of directors. The firm, which recently , touts its ability to connect Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with “India’s natural advantages,” but in this case FarFaria CEO Ajay Godhwani told me that he plans to stay focused on the U.S. market for now. (In the FarFaria funding release, Rekhi also said digital subscription services are a “key theme” for the firm.) Godhwani argued that offering a curated library of books through a subscription model is ideal for children’s books, because it means bookworms can read title after title without having to pay for more books, and parents don’t have to worry whether the content is appropriate. (Other children’s book subscription services include and .) He also said FarFaria adds five new books every week, with 600 books in the library already — 20 percent is licensed from traditional publishers, while the rest comes from independent creators. The content that’s most-liked by readers is also “the most heavily rewarded,” Godhwani said. Other features include a “Read To Me” feature (so parents don’t have to be there to read to there kids, though they can if they want to) and a map-like menu for finding books. “The layout, the design, the colors — it’s less Silicon Valley, more like what Disney or Hollywood do,” Rekhi said. Noting that , Rekhi added, “It’s a good marriage between his experiences.” Next, Godhwani said he wants to continue growing the library and add more devices. FarFaria offers one story per day for free — beyond that, a subscription costs $3.99 per month. You can . |
YC-Backed Taplytics Lets You Run A/B Tests On iOS Without Waiting For App Store Updates | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Y Combinator-backed is launching its A/B testing platform for iOS applications today, which allows app makers the ability to test different experiences and quickly push out minor fixes, like visual bugs or typos, without having to wait on the App Store’s slower release cycle. The company was founded around nine months ago by Cobi Druxerman, Aaron Glazer, and brothers Andrew Norris and Jonathan Norris. The team, who has known each other since high school, came up with the idea for Taplytics based on their own experiences building apps together over the last couple of years. For example, before Dropbox rolled out its own automatic photo uploader, members of the team ” which let you easily snap and save your photos to the cloud. “We’ve been building mobile apps for a while and kept running into different problems – whether that’s the need to A/B test, or the need to get updates for apps out a lot quicker, or managing the process between dev and design,” explains Taplytics co-founder Druxerman. He says they ended up building interfaces for their own apps to help manage these concerns, and later those ideas grew into what has today become Taplytics. The product itself is designed to be very simple and straightforward to use. Developers download the SDK, then it’s just a line of code to get started. After setup is complete, anyone tasked with tracking engagements and conversions can manage the A/B testing campaigns from a web interface. To use Taplytics, users pair an app on a development device to a web dashboard where they can then tap on any part of the app to select it for changes. From there, they can create variations, turn them on or off, and run experiments. These could include previews of experiments you want to trial before pushing out updates to the App Store, as well as making immediate changes to live apps without having to first re-code and redeploy them. Nor do you have to pre-plan for your A/B testing – you can decide what you want to test for after the app is already live. “Everything is managed in our web interface,” explains Druxerman. “That really allows you to push for every aspect of your A/B test, whether that’s changing of the elements, the changing of your flows, or the setting up of your goals,” he says. Being able to change which views buttons display when pushed is something no one else is currently doing, the company notes. There are a number of A/B testing services on the market today. , Twitter and LinkedIn have all built their own internal systems, and there are a bevy of startups too, including , , , and , for example. There’s even a competing company, , which recently raised $2.1 million and which also came out of Y Combinator. Asked what makes Taplytics unique, Druxerman says they have a very specific focus on simplicity and ease-of-use. “The whole concept of the one-line code integration and not needing to code any other part of the experiment is what sets us apart,” he says. “Some other platforms may go a bit deeper in other areas, but we feel that, if it’s not extremely simple to use, people just aren’t going to get the full power of the platform.” The platform itself is $20/month for 10,000 monthly active users and goes up to $150/month for unlimited users. A free tier is available for apps with up to 5,000 monthly actives. The Palo Alto-based company currently has 250 customers, including 500px, Frank and Oak and Pivotal Labs. Today, however, is the “official” launch for the service, which is to any interested iOS developers. Later this year, an Android version will also be introduced. |
Myntra Confirms $50M Fund Raise Led By Premji Invest | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | As , Indian fashion portal Myntra has just confirmed raising $50 million in fresh funding from investors led by Premji Invest. The new funding comes after Myntra preferred to invest in its own growth and did not pursue a merger offer from India’s biggest e-commerce company Flipkart. “We are confident of achieving $1 billion GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) by 2016 and will be by far the largest fashion destination in India,” said Mukesh Bansal, co-founder and CEO of Myntra. The startup said there’s enough and more opportunities to grow in India’s $3.1 Billion e-commerce market (excluding online travel), which is expected to reach $22 billion in five years, according to a CLSA report. “We have been growing steadily, increasing our product offerings and attracting new users from different corners of the country. This round of funding will allow us to scale up, attract and retain superior talent, ramp up our technology infrastructure and strengthen the Myntra brand,” Bansal added in a statement. Since its launch in 2007, Myntra has raised close to $75 million from investors, including Accel Partners and Tiger Global. As TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden wrote in January, Myntra now has the funds to continue to invest in its business for the next stage of growth as a standalone company. The company is on track to have gross merchandise value — the total value of goods sold via Myntra’s portal — of $100 million for the current fiscal year. But it has been growing at a rapid rate. In the rate was 100% every six months, and Myntra believes that GMV will be $1 billion by 2016. As a point of comparison, Flipkart is projecting a . We will be updating this post with details of Myntra’s latest funding and comments from other investors. |
White House Conspicuously Silent As It Attacks A Bill To Make Spending Transparent | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 4 | Barack Obama’s presidency was supposed to usher in a new wave of data transparency. And, with the exception of the NSA, the administration has pioneered groundbreaking open government initiatives, from maps of stimulus spending to the vaults of consumer energy use. But, as the Senate pushes to make federal spending transparent to the public, forces inside the White House . “The Obama administration talks a lot about transparency, but these comments reflect a clear attempt to gut the DATA Act,” Senator Mark Warner FedScoop. “DATA reflects years of bipartisan, bicameral work, and to propose substantial, unproductive changes this late in the game is unacceptable.” The DATA Act, which had overwhelming approval in the House of Representatives, would essentially allow citizens to monitor federal spending. Right now, groups such as transparency advocate The Sunlight Foundation, argue that federal spending is nearly impossible to track. footed the $823,000 bill for a government agency to party it up in Las Vegas? The DATA Act, would, theoretically, make this type of accounting available in a format that could be monitored and analyzed by experts. The powerful Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has made unusual efforts to centralize authority in making spending transparency. A proposal to gut the most important provisions of the DATA Act was leaked to the Data Transparency Coalition. The leaked document reveals OMB wants to strip rules requiring standardized data from all agencies and would significantly delay the implementation. “The stance taken by OMB in the leaked document does not reflect the administration’s stated values, but it does reflect OMB’s shoddy history of commitment to quality spending data.” the Sunlight Foundation. I work with the White House on a lot of open government stories, so usually I can just email a few folks and get an explanation. On this, I’ve gotten nothing but a cold shoulder and boilerplate responses. “The Administration believes data transparency is a critical element to good government, and we share the goal of advancing transparency and accountability of Federal spending. We will continue to work with Congress and other stakeholders to identify the most effective & efficient use of taxpayer dollars to accomplish this goal,” was the answer I got via email. I followed up with my sources, who are usually quite forthcoming about open data. Nothing. The thing is, the DATA Act has the support of transparency advocates who previously worked in the White House. “It’s an act of law that makes people do things,” says former US Inspector General Earl Devaney, who was tasked by Obama to oversee Data.gov. I interviewed him a few years ago when the DATA ACt was being debated. The benefits of transparency, he continues, “can be codified best by a piece of legislation like the DATA Act.” Someone within the ranks of the White House, most likely at a senior level, is torpedoing a bill and no one seems to know why. If there was a legitimate reason, someone could just walk us through the arguments and we could have the debate out in the open. We will continue to investigate and hope the White House is more forthcoming with the American people. [ ] |
Lyft Announces Rideshare Insurance Coalition And Additional Coverage For Its Drivers | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | is seeking to combat questions about insurance and liability today, with the introduction of a new Peer-to-Peer Rideshare Insurance Coalition, as well as the announcement that it will be providing additional insurance to drivers on its platform. In a , the ride-sharing startup announced the formation of a working group made up of “transportation companies, regulators, insurance providers, and other stakeholders.” The coalition is designed to address issues surrounding the way insurance companies view and handle claims that are made when someone is offering peer-to-peer rides as part of a service like Lyft or SideCar. While Lyft hasn’t announced any other members of the working group, it said on its blog that the first meeting of the group would take place later this month. The full list of participants is expected to be announced later this week. In addition to the formation of the coalition, Lyft announced that it would be providing excess insurance for drivers operating on its platform. The company already has a $1 million liability policy for drivers, but the new policy is designed to provide further protection for drivers in the case of accidents that aren’t covered by insurance. The excess coverage includes: Both the introduction of the insurance working group and the additional insurance are being announced as the peer-to-peer ride-sharing industry is facing increased scrutiny. Part of that is due to an incident that occurred on New Year’s Eve, in which a driver who works for Uber was . But that type of accident wouldn’t be covered under the new insurance policies, a Lyft spokesperson confirmed to me. That’s because the driver involved in the accident was not on duty at the time of the accident. The excess liability policy would cover only drivers when they’re in the middle of a Lyft ride. |
MissionBit’s Volunteer Hackers Close The Computer Science Education Gap In SF’s Schools | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | A couple days a week, 25-year-old (pictured above to the left) takes the Muni’s T line in from Bayview, where he lives in a house full of other founders through . Yes, he’s a pretty recent computer science graduate from University of Michigan. Yes, he’s new to San Francisco and just moved here six months ago from Detroit. Yes, he’s tinkering around with startup ideas and he moonlights at hackathons for rent money. No, he’s not some entitled techie douchebag. He takes the train in several days a week because he teaches free after-school classes on web development and programming to students across San Francisco’s public schools. Even though he jokes every once in awhile about how broke he is, Clark has spent hours designing and developing curriculum for the new San Francisco non-profit running these classes, . Last semester, students made a , a chat client and another program that visualized audio tracks through Philip Hue lights. About 90 percent of them had never written a line of code before they started. brings in developers from the industry to teach pro-bono classes and they’ll have 70 middle and high school students this semester. Only five of the 17 high schools in the San Francisco Unified School District offer computer science classes, meaning that students are missing out on learning highly employable skills in web development despite living in the global capital of the technology industry. “Initially, I was just frustrated with public school education and I was looking for a way to give back and put energy into improving it,” said MissionBit’s founder . Last August, Daugherty partnered with another San Francisco non-profit called Out of Site that already had a relationship with the school district to offer free after-school arts classes. In their first semester last fall, they started with a beginning programming class for 15 students. Demand was so overwhelming that they ended up with 25 kids on the wait list. This semester (their second one), MissionBit has more volunteer instructors than it can handle. “The amount of good will that is being demonstrated from these awesome technologists and some very high-powered people is pretty inspiring,” Daugherty said. In a class I ended yesterday, there was one instructor for every two students. “Why are we here?” asked Matt Wescott, the lead instructor for that day. “To learn,” chimed in one of the students. It was the first day, so students dreamed up applications that could help them get to know each other better. One was for Google Glass, while another was a more basic online social network. Eight-nine percent of MissionBit’s students from last semester had never written a line of code and more than 40 percent of them are female. (In contrast, .) They sign up for the classes voluntarily and Daugherty says MissionBit designs its curriculum so that it’s complementary to the district’s official computer science classes. High school students can take either an introductory classes teaching HTML, CSS, and Javascript or an intermediate class that teaches Ruby, SQL, and JavaScript. They earn 2.5 elective credits for the San Francisco Union School District. Then there’s an introductory class for middle-school students. MissionBit sits in between many other efforts to expand computer science education; it’s much more local and on-the-ground. In contrast, is a much broader effort to change the perception of computer science in education nationally. “They’ve got the mega-stars,” Dougherty said of Code.org’s videos, which feature Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. “They’re tackling it from the top-down, making sure that computer programming is recognized as core science and technology education.” If you want to be involved with MissionBit, they’re running an Indiegogo campaign that ends later today. So far, . While they don’t need instructors this semester, they’ll be looking to scale up even further next semester and they’ll be needing donated laptops and laptop chargers too. |
Amazon Acquires Video Gaming Studio Double Helix Games | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Amazon has acquired a gaming studio called , TechCrunch has learned, and Amazon now confirms. The deal was for both talent and IP, we understand. Financial terms have not been disclosed. The Irvine, California-based company, founded in 2007 through the merger of two well-known game development shops, The Collective, Inc. and Shiny Entertainment, today employs 75 people who will now become Amazon employees and will continue to operate out of their Orange County home. News of the deal leaked due to an invitation to joint recruiting event from Amazon and Double Helix Games taking place in L.A. on February 13th. The acquisition announcement was planned to take place at that time, most likely. Amazon has provided TechCrunch with the following statement regarding the deal: “Amazon has acquired Double Helix as part of our ongoing commitment to build innovative games for customers.” The Double Helix deal may fuel to the recent rumors that Amazon is preparing to release its own gaming console in the coming months. Last week, the video game industry blog VG247.com that Amazon is planning to launch an Android-powered “dedicated games and entertainment device this year priced below $300… [that] will compete directly with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.” Buzz about an Amazon console has been around for a while: This past summer, the rumor was that the company was a Qualcomm-based console system. Amazon declined to comment on the console speculation when reached today. Of course, also has a presence Double Helix has a history of creating popular games for nearly 20 years, when you consider the work Shiny and The Collective had done before the merger. Shiny, for example, was the creator of classic like “Earthworm Jim,”
“Sacrifice, MDK” and “Enter the Matrix,” while The Collective had previously put out titles like “Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb,” “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” As Double Helix, the firm has a decent track record as well. Its most popular game today is “Killer Instinct,” but throughout the years, it has created including “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” “Green Latern: Rise of the Manhunters,” “Silent Hill: Homecoming,” and “Front Mission Evolved,” among . As you can tell by the titles, it specializes in large-scale action games based on blockbuster franchises. , “Strider,” is scheduled to launch this month on PS3, but others including “Dirty Harry” and “Harker” are no longer expected to follow. Amazon says that Double Helix’s current lineup of games and other future developments will be supported, following the acquisition. |
Don’t Like Your Facebook “Look Back”? You’ll Be Able To Edit It Soon. | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | For the past 24 hours, my Facebook newsfeed has been predominantly filled with just two things: 1) People sharing those cutesy automated “Look Back” videos that Facebook made for most of its users to celebrate the company’s 10th anniversary 2) People complaining that they hate their Look Back Don’t like yours? Too many pictures of your ex? Don’t sweat it too much. Facebook is working on an edit tool, we’ve learned. I’d heard from a source just after the Look Back videos started rolling out that there was supposed to have been an edit tool built in — apparently, it just wasn’t ready to go in time for Facebook’s anniversary. The tool would allow you to pick alternative photos/clips if you weren’t into the ones that Facebook’s Emotion Bot 4000* picked for you. Sure enough, a for the “Look Back” feature has lingering mentions of an “Edit Your Movie” button that doesn’t exist, further suggesting that the option was supposed to have been there to begin with. I reached out to Facebook about a few issues users were having with Look Back, and a rep from the company confirmed the feature: “We will be launching an Edit feature soon that will allow people to change moments in their movies or update the ones they shared. I don’t have exact timing at the moment, but this will enable people to remove a post from the movie that was pre-selected and change it to a different one.” With Facebook getting into video automation building up a user interface for making tweaks, it’s pretty easy to imagine that this won’t be a one-off thing for the company. With all of the content people post on Facebook, they can do all sorts of these videos. Annual recaps of your year on New Years Day? Auto-magic video compilations following an event, made up of your and your friends’ uploaded pictures? Now that they’ve built out the base functionality, turning it into a proper, regularly occuring feature is a matter of tweaking the auto-selection algorithms. If you still haven’t figured out how to find your look back, |
AOL Quietly Changes Our 401(k) Employer Match Program | Chris Nesi | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Starting this year, AOL has changed how it distributes its matching 401(k) contributions for all employees, which could put a sizable dent in the retirement accounts for workers who part ways with the company before the end of 2014. The company, which owns TechCrunch and, it goes without saying, employs me, matches 50 percent of up to 6 percent of our pre-tax income (or a 3 percent maximum match, for the non math-majors). Until recently, AOL would make its matching contributions each pay period. For employees who take full advantage, this means all year long you would be working with an additional 3 percent of your salary in the market, gratis. Not bad for a year like 2013 when all three major stock market indices enjoyed double-digit gains. In the new changes, which were included in the 2014 AOL employee benefits summary, the match amount remains unchanged, but instead of being paid out throughout the year, it will be received as a lump sum after the end of the year. Perhaps worst of all, employees who leave AOL before Dec. 31 will forfeit the company match altogether. This means an employee could lose in retirement savings if the match is forfeited. AOL is not the first big U.S. tech company to do this. IBM made in 2012, and a Wall Street Journal report cautioned that it could start a trend among big companies looking to trim their retirement account budget line. Four months after the retirement account changes, IBM announced it would be of workers as part of a global restructuring plan, Bloomberg reported at the time. In January, AOL in its long-hemorrhaging hyperlocal journalism effort, Patch (which, disclosure, I also used to be part of) to investment firm Hale Global, laying off several hundred employees in the process. However, AOL has not announced any plans for further layoffs. Overall, AOL has been doing well. It beat Wall Street estimates on its , announcing a 6 percent increase in revenue to $561 million for Q3 last year, largely on the strength of its video advertising business, which included several high-profile acquisitions in 2013. For the year, shares in the company soared more than 50 percent, last month hitting their highest price since the split from Time-Warner in 2009. Now, for some perspective, many companies, even ones I’ve worked for, abandoned their matching contribution policy long before the Great Recession. Matching contributions and other monetary perks are always low-hanging fruit when the economy turns. The fact that AOL offers a match at all is a privilege, and I acknowledge it as a privilege. However, if the purpose of company matching contributions is to encourage employees to save money, this new policy, which effectively renders the match conditional, blunts that “we’re all in this together” feeling typically associated with it. I personally have maxed out on the company match since I started working for AOL, and the bi-monthly matching contributions coupled with a rebounding stock market has made for a modest but adequate cushion, which has been, frankly, invigorating to watch grow. It not only gives me peace of mind knowing I’m some semblance of “on track” to retire comfortably, but it takes the sting out of putting aside 6 percent of my pay seeing AOL’s contribution side-by-side each pay period. With the decline of pensions in America, and every worker decades from retirement wondering about future of Social Security, the 401(k) has essentially become investment vehicle for working people. Every dollar I lose out on today translates to multiple dollars lost from my retirement coffers. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong addressed the changes today in an employee town hall conference call, pledging openness and transparency regarding changes to benefits. He issued the following statement in an internal AOL communication: AOLers – As we discussed at the town hall, we care about you and the company – a lot. This morning, I discussed the increases we and many other companies are seeing in healthcare costs. In that context, I mentioned high-risk pregnancy as just one of many examples of how our company supports families when they are in need. We will continue supporting members of the AOL family. We provide a wide range of benefits – including our 401k plan – and conduct open information sessions each Fall on all available benefits as well as any changes being made. We will continue to do that. The spirit of the town hall and the spirit of how we choose benefits are the same – we want to be open and transparent about the choices we make and why we are making them. As I have said over and over again, our employees are our greatest asset. Let’s move forward together as a team. – TA |
Twitter Data Grants Program Gives Access To Historical Tweets To Researchers | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Twitter wants researchers to turn its mountains of data into insights, from to New Years celebrations, that could delight and help the world. So today it announced the program. Researchers can to get free access to Twitter’s public tweets and historical data through one of its . [Correction: Twitter tells researchers won’t get the firehose, though the blog post mentions “With more than 500 million Tweets a day, Twitter has an expansive set of data from which we can glean insights”. Instead, researchers will only get the data they need for their project.] Many other big tech companies including Google and Facebook frequently work with researchers like the to gleam trends from their data. But Twitter’s program is highly formalized, and is publicly accepting applications from members of the academic research community until March 15th for its first pilot. The program could help promote Twitter and prove its importance. That’s critical right now as today’s earnings revealed , up just 3.9% in the last three months compared to 30% over the past year. It also for the future. To become the ad giant its valuation implies, it needs massive scale. |
Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Vegas Tech Fund’s Jen McCabe | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | This week, Jen McCabe is joining us in the TechCrunch TV studio to talk hardware and more. You can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. McCabe, who leads the new hardware arm of Tony Hsieh’s seed stage investment fund, VegasTechFund; previously joined Romotive, a Sequoia-backed personal robotics company, as an early employee running operations. While there, she led manufacturing and new product lifecycle activities for the company. McCabe is also a Y Combinator alum, and founded Contagion Health, a social exercise challenge site funded by Esther Dyson and Founders Fund Angel. We’re going to ask McCabe about how she is evaluating hardware startups at the early stage, and how she’s advising companies to approach manufacturing, and sales (i.e. Kickstarter, or pre-orders on a site). Please send us your or put them in the comments below! |
Mozilla And EverythingMe Preview “Firefox Launcher”, An Android Homescreen That Fights App Overload | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Mozilla wants to help you find new apps and rediscover those you downloaded but forgot. So today it previewed , a homescreen replacement powered by Israeli contextual computing startup that will become available for download “in the coming weeks”. Firefox Launcher gives you suggestions of apps you’re most likely to use at any moment, smart folders that collect apps with similar purposes, and smart search that shows apps you have as well as those you might download or web apps you might visit that relate to a searched keyword These Firefox Launcher features are the major components of EverythingMe’s eponymous contextual that just came out of beta yesterday. Mozilla previously tapped the 60-person, to bring , its new mobile operating system. EverythingMe co-founder Ami Ben-David tells me that the deal includes revenue sharing, so if Firefox Launcher earns money by referring people to certain apps, driving ecommerce purchases, or showing sponsored content, EverythingMe will earn money. Ben-David says “It’s about distribution…They have almost half a billion people who love their brand and trust their brand.” However, EverythingMe will still promote its own branded homescreen. Mozilla and EverythingMe showed off a demo of the forthcoming Firefox Launcher experience today at the in San Francisco, and gave me some extra screenshots not available on the Mozilla blog. Here you can see how Firefox Launcher’s Prediction Bar (the second row from the bottom) knows it’s the afternoon and suggests appropriate apps like your calendar, Huffington Post News, and an app for checking out nearby businesses so you can plan your evening. These differ from the apps shown in the “Good Morning” screenshot above where the Prediction Bar suggest weather and alarm apps. It determines what to show based on tons of signals including your phone’s sensors, geolocation, what apps you’ve used in the past, and what other people like you use. When you search for something in Firefox Launcher, it brings up related apps on your phone and relevant web experiences. It deeplinks these icons so if you search Katy Perry it will show you a Spotify shortcut that will open her artist page instead of the standard Spotify homescreen. Firefox Launcher also provides context by directly providing information through content cards. Search “News” or “Tech” and it will bring up cards from various news sources about the top stories of the day. Firefox Launcher will compete with products like , recent Yahoo acquisition , (though that’s a lockscreen and you can use both at the same time), GoLauncher, and more. With app stores over run with crap and us collecting more and more apps on our phones, smart ways to discover and surface apps are becoming all the rage. |
Dick Costolo On User Growth: Twitter “Will Reach Many More People” In 2014 | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Twitter CEO Dick Costolo answered repeated questions this afternoon about the company’s user growth. His big point seemed to be that (despite ), “We feel very well-positioned for growth,” and the company “will reach many more people” this year. For one thing, Costolo offered some justification for the 7 percent quarter-over-quarter drop in timeline views, which Twitter provides as a measure of how much content users are consuming. He suggested that some of the user experience changes that Twitter made recently, such as , have reduced the number of timelines that a user needs to load. At the same time, Costolo argued that each timeline view is actually becoming more valuable — something that’s certainly true . Analysts asked if there were similar mitigating factors in terms of Twitter’s monthly active users (a number that only grew 4 percent quarter-over-quarter), but Costolo didn’t mention any. Instead, he suggested that until last year, Twitter’s growth was “viral and organic.” In other words, “growth was something that happened to us,” rather than something it actively pursued. However, starting in the final quarter of 2013, Costolo said Twitter has been introducing more features to increase user engagement. He added that the early results are promising, so the company plans to continue introducing more features in areas like new user on-boarding, content discovery, and one-on-one conversations. Ultimately, Costolo said there’s a “collection of these things that we want to do over the arc of the entire product,” which together will “develop the change in the slope of the growth curve” that the company is hoping for. Another analyst asked if Twitter might consider releasing a variety of different apps ( ). Costolo replied that, rather stealing users from each other’s apps, a successful social app “carves out a use case and tries to do that job better than anyone else.” He suggested that as long as Twitter stays focused on that idea, he doesn’t need to have “any particular religion” on a strategy of one app versus multiple apps. |
My Favorite Companies From The Seventh 500 Startups Accelerator Class | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | It’s demo day again for the crew, as the seed stage investment firm and accelerator is showing off the latest batch of companies that have survived its three-month accelerator program. Those companies are presenting their products and services to investors and press for the first time in Mountain View, Calif. There are 28 companies presenting today, but I’ll be honest: I don’t think I’ll be able to take notes and keep track of everyone that gets on stage. After all, demo days are exhausting and I’m just one dude. If you were an investor at this demo day, you wouldn’t be writing checks to every single one of those companies (unless, of course, you were 500 Startups). You’d be picking those which you personally thought had the most potential. So I’m going to pretend for a day that I get to pick and choose who I would invest in, and just tell you about my favorites. Anyway, here they are, in no particular order: As a sort of “LendingClub for Real Estate,” RealtyShares has provided a crowdfunding platform for investing in commercial real estate, allowing investors to avoid all the hassles that come with it. Users can pre-buy shares in rental properties that are being purchased or built, without having to come up with all the capital necessary to do so. Already, the platform has signed up more than 1,100 accredited investors, and 70 percent are repeat investors. On the property management and development side, RealtyShares has signed 150 companies who are signed up to raise capital through the platform. That allows them to focus on what they do best — own and manage real estate. For that, they pay between 3 percent and 5 percent administrative fee for access to investors. RealtyShares has funded $1.1 million in deals since being launched in beta, and is now sourcing $1.5 million per week in real-estate transactions per week. We’ve , but I still think it’s a good idea, so here goes. The company provides a platform that enables users to shop for groceries by meal, rather than shopping for individual food items. PlateJoy gives users a choice of different meals, and then provides them with the ingredients and recipes to make those meals. By doing so, it enables users to eat better and reduce waste. PlateJoy partners with large grocery chains to source and deliver food to customers, so there’s no inventory or overhead from that perspective. And it’s seen a fair bit of success from customers, with more than half coming back to order a second time. Partender gives the folks who work in bars an easy tool to manage inventory and order of all the liquors that they have sold or need to order. Using a simple mobile app, as well as Partender’s backend platform, bar workers can easily keep track of how much is sold or how much is needed. With the app, workers only need to point to where on a bottle the liquor is filled up to to estimate how much has been used, and it records the result. That allows bars to track how much is being sold day-to-day and to estimate how much inventory they need going forward. Depending on what features they need, Partender charges $99 to $899 a month, and has more than 550 bars and restaurants signed up to use the platform. EquityZen provides a platform that enables employees to sell equity in hot startups to investors who would like to purchase them on secondary markets. It hopes to provide an alternative to offerings like SecondMarket by giving the companies that those employees work for or have shares in to have more control over secondary transactions. “Secondary markets today are broken. The sellers get cash, buyers get access, and all the company gets is a headache,” said founder Atish Davda. EquityZen, by contrast, is designed with company in mind, giving it control over who gets to sell equity, how much, and when. This company is building a big data platform for the construction industry. By providing a Mint.com-like interface for managing budgets and purchase orders, Builk enables construction companies to better understand the costs of their projects. They can also save time and money in doing so. But how does Builk make money? It gets that data for free, and can then sell it back to suppliers, giving them real-time information that can be used for understanding their customers to help increase sales. Builk is all over Southeast Asia already, and has grown 40 percent over the past three months. OLSET uses the power of big data to personalize travel booking. It’s developed patented technology to enable any travel booking site to offer hotel recommendations that appeal to individual users. The goal is to update travel booking, which is way too complicated and more confusing than it needs to be. OLSET isn’t looking to offer these direct to consumers, but through partners. An example is Any.Do, where users can get personalized hotel results right in the app, showing users which hotels are right for them. Honorable mentions: |
Media Queen Gerry Laybourne Joins Betaworks Board | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Betaworks’ John Borthwick has today announced, via the company blog, that Gerry Laybourne will be joining the board of directors. Alongside co-founding Kandu, a betaworks-backed technology company for kids, Laybourne is also known as one of the most . She started out at Nickelodeon in the 80’s and 90’s, conceiving of classic children’s shows such as Rugrats, The Secret World of Alex Mack, and Pepper Ann. After more than a decade at Nickelodeon, she founded Oxygen Media in 1999 and served as Chairman and CEO until she sold the company to NBC Universal in 2007. Her latest venture, , lets people build their own games and software applications without any knowledge of how to code. It hasn’t launched yet, but we can glean a bit from the company’s about page: It’s not okay that only a small number of people can make software. It’s as if only a few could write at a time when reading was taking off — precisely the situation in the 15th century when the moveable press was first invented. After the invention of the book, it took hundreds of years for literacy to spread. At Kandu, we don’t think it should take hundreds of years for people to become literate in the creation of software. betaworks has always been focused on media of all shapes and sizes, whether its Digg or Dots. Most recently, the New York-based company hired Branch Media founder as a part-time venture partner. Laybourne, on the other hand, brings more traditional experience to the team. Laybourne joins current betaworks board members Mike Buckley, Ken Lerer, Paul Cappuccio, Stu Ellman, Eric Martineu-Fortin, John Drizik, and John Borthwick. |
Instaradio Debuts Android App, Aims To Be The SoundCloud For Amateur Live Audio Broadcasts | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Toronto-based startup and Extreme Startups grad is unveiling a brand , and is also updating its iOS application with a significant overhaul. The app provides instant live audio streaming broadcasts for users, via their smartphone device and using nothing more than their built-in mics, unless they opt to add their own additional accessories. The app enables broadcasts published via social networks like Twitter and Facebook, so that those doing the broadcasting can instantly reach their existing audience without having to build one on a new network. It has a little over 50,000 downloads since its original iOS launch last year, which isn’t bad but isn’t good, but its founder says it’s finding purchase in significant use cases, including as a platform for expressing social unrest in politically volatile locations like Egypt and Turkey. “[There’s] no pushback from government as of yet,” Instaradio founder Kevin Kliman explained in an interview in answer to a question about its role as a political tool. “Right now, it’s being used jointly as community organizing and political platform for someone trying to get elected in one of Chicago’s most dangerous neighbourhoods. I’m hoping that it can be used as an example for other community leaders.” Kliman says that Instaradio is better-positioned to target amateur broadcasters than competitors like SoundCloud, regardless of whether they’re political dissidents or just aspiring singers hoping to find an audience with live streamed performances. That’s because of how people perceive SoundCloud as a platform, he says. “Relative expectations are important for a publishing platform,” he said. “Most people won’t put themselves out there if they think what they make is below the expectation of the community. I think that’s a big reason why Instagram works so well: Anyone can produce good-looking pictures. There’s a ton of great studio produced content on SoundCloud, but most people can’t create audio on that level. ” [slideshow include=”953650,953652,953653,953654″] Instaradio is still trying to find its footing, however. When I attended the Extreme Startups cohort demo day for the company’s class last June, it was talking about its potential among the amateur comedian crowd, who were using it to broadcast shows to their non-local followings and build a bigger audience. Kliman admits they’re still feeling out their best target audience. “To be perfectly honest we are still searching for the best niches,” he said. “Comedians can be shy about putting their sets online, but like doing short funny blurbs. Conferences are a simple pitch and accessible to us, [since] all they have to do is plug a mobile device into the soundboard and press two buttons to create another media channel that can be monetized. Tech events are especially good because attendees tend to be more creative with how they use technology.” In addition to those opportunities, he says they’ve also seen interesting uptake among churches, amateur artists and would-be teeny-bopper YouTube celebs, and educators. The biggest opportunity, however, in terms of potential for monetization, is linking the sale of goods and services to broadcasts. They’re also looking at ways to derive value from their growing library of recorded content, and from potentially licensing their tech. Instaradio raised $480,000 in seed funding last fall before ceasing their fundraising efforts and turning attention to product building. Starting in the spring, the team will be looking to raise another $500,000, hopefully sourcing the funds from strategic partners in the audio industry, Kliman tells me. |
Pandora Falls After Hours On Weak 2014 Revenue Guidance Despite Strong Q4 EPS Of $0.11 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Today Pandora its fourth-quarter financial performance, essentially matching revenue expectations, and beating on earnings per share. For the period, Pandora had non-GAAP revenue of $200.8 million, and non-GAAP earnings per share (diluted) of $0.11. Investors had $0.08 in earnings per share and revenue of $201 million. Given those results, why is Pandora falling so heavily in after-hours trading? I think there are two things to blame: Slow listener growth, and lower-than-expected revenue projections for the current quarter and year. In its earnings report, Pandora stated that in the fourth quarter, its users listened to a total of 4.54 billion hours of audio, up a slim 16 percent from the year-ago quarter (3.91 billion). So while the company’s full-year revenue was up a strong 56 percent, that end-of-the-year metric was lackluster. Combine that with the following guidance for the first quarter of this year, and you have a somewhat uninspiring short-term future ahead for the company: “Non-GAAP revenue is expected to be in the range of $170 million to $176 million. Non-GAAP basic and diluted EPS is expected to be between a loss of $(0.16) and a loss of $(0.14).” The company declined to estimate its full-year GAAP earnings per share. Also, the company’s full-year outlook of $870 million to $890 million is under prior street estimates. All told, the Oakland, Calif.-based Pandora is sometimes profitable, has hundreds of millions of cash in the bank, and sports a growing user base. But its growth appears to be under the rates that investors used to price its shares in their projections. And that is a cardinal sin for a technology company valued on a growth curve higher than its — now apparent — reality. If there is a metric that I would highlight as indicative of potential future growth for the firm, it would be the following: “Advertising revenue was $162.0 million, a 39% year-over-year increase. Non-GAAP subscription and other revenue was $38.8 million, a 132% year-over-year increase.” Provided that Pandora can continue to convince more people to start paying it directly, it could better monetize its extant user base, boosting its ARPU effectively, making its financial performance less tied to raw listener growth. |
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Materialise Buys Polish 3D Prototyping Firm e-Prototypy | John Biggs | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | , a 3D-printing products and services company, has acquired for an undisclosed sum, a move that further consolidates the 3D-printing space in Central Europe. Materialise, based in Leuven, Belgium, also owns Czech prototyping firm Usti Nad Labem CR. “Thanks to the acquisition, Polish customers will be gaining access to the vast production capacity of Materialise. Furthermore, current Materialise customers will benefit from access to the scanning and reverse engineering services of e-Prototypy,” said Bart Van Der Schueren, Vice President Industrial Production in a . What does this mean for the central european 3D printing world? Plenty. First, it shows that these sorts of companies are heating up as evidenced by this purchase as well as 3D printer maker recent sale of 6,000 units to Dell Asia. Central Europe has always been a manufacturing center and as new techniques come aboard it’s only natural for major industrial cities throughout the region to come back online while experimenting with new methods of manufacture. While the deals aren’t quite huge, there’s definitely something moving in the high tech vodka belt. |
Twitter Stock Down 18 Percent After Earnings Show Disappointing User Numbers | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | You’d think investors would be happy. Twitter just released as a public company, with . And yet, as of 6:02pm Eastern time, Twitter’s stock had fallen 18 percent in after-hours trading. What happened? Well, the company also said that it now has 241 million monthly actively users — up 30 percent year-over-year, as the release says, but only up about 4 percent from . In other words, it looks like user growth continues to slow. In addition, Timeline Views, which are another indication of user engagement, actually fell 7 percent to 148 billion. The concerns make sense, but at the same time, the discussion feels like a big reversal. As have pointed out, a couple of years ago, the big concern around consumer social networks (well, mainly Facebook and Twitter) was whether they could actually make money from their rapidly growing user bases. By the time Twitter’s S-1 was revealed to the public last fall, , and now it seems those concerns are having a real effect on stock price. (Note: I’ll be updating this post until about 6pm Eastern just to make sure the numbers are still accurate, but they don’t appear to be changing hugely.) during the earnings conference call. |
Twitter’s Mobile Business Now At 184M Monthly Actives And 75%, $165M Of All Ad Revenues | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | Twitter today reported its first quarter as a publicly listed company, and while the market may be it a for slower overall user growth (despite ), Twitter’s mobile story continues to be a strong one. Twitter said that mobile monthly active users stood at 184 million for Q4 2013, up 37% on a year ago. Given that overall users were 241 million, that makes mobile 76% of overall users. Twitter doesn’t break out how many of its mobile users are mobile-only, although they may spell out more detail on the earnings call later. Crucially, mobile continues to grow faster than the bigger mix: overall user growth was up by only 30%. The 3:4 ratio is also being reflected in revenues. Twitter says that mobile ads now make up some 75% of all of its ad sales. That works out to $165 million of the $220 million Twitter made in ad revenues. The mobile story is one that Twitter plans to continue to push. In terms of revenues, are filling out its proposition with more sophisticated ad tech to expand how it works with third parties both on its own platform and beyond. On the product side, the company continues to add more features to the mobile platform both to give it more parity with the desktop experience ( of favorite and retweet counts being one example), and to maximise ways of and other mobile-specific features. Interestingly, if you compare Twitter to Facebook, Twitter continues to lead the world’s biggest social network in terms of how its pushing sales on the mobile platform. Facebook’s were the first time that the company has managed to tip into making more from mobile ad sales than desktop (at 53% of all ad sales). If you compare today’s numbers to those from Twitter’s S-1 filings leading up to its IPO, the company mobile story is definitely getting bigger. The first S-1 put of all ad sales, although later those got revised up to around 70%. |
My Not-On-Facebook Life | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | , I wake up with Northern Europe’s low winter light filtering through the blinds in my bedroom. The silence is near perfect. It’s too early to hear the week-day procession of parents ferrying their kids to the neighbourhood school. The slamming concert of car doors and tearful wails of protest at another day wrenched from comforts of home and bed will filter through the single-glazed window panes into my office in a few hours. Later still, the sounds of life going on elsewhere will shift from the front of the house to the back, drifting over the gardens from the school playground, as wave after wave of joyous shrieks — tears of parting and protest long forgotten. For a moment I let my mind drift, indulging in a feeling of transitional limbo, allowing the silence before the work day begins to let me collect my thoughts. Such waking moments of quietude and personal reflection don’t translate to social media. They leave no digital footprint to be tracked and traced. Their impact is internal, unquantifiable, yet undeniable. My phone’s alarm sounds, pulling me parent-like in the direction of work. Demanding I open a few apps — Convo, Gmail, Twitter — to check in with colleagues and check in on the news cycle. As I head for my office to start work proper, I close this entirely unchronicled chapter of my morning, lacking social commentary and with no incremental increase in the number of likes attached to my existence, without regret. I carry its reflectivity with me — intact and internal. The demands of work pull me in multiple digital directions during the day, as I take calls, interview founders, spend time writing and researching, and converse with colleagues remotely. Some of this work leaves a public trace, of course, stamped with my byline. Other parts of it remain unpublished — but although hidden from view these bits are no less essential; the underpinnings reinforcing the (pen) tip of a writer’s output. I use many digital tools to get work done — from Skype to WordPress to Chrome — but Facebook is rarely, if ever, one of them. If I need to break off for a moment during the day to talk with a friend there are many choices on tap — Google Chat, Skype, SMS, email, Twitter — all ready to become the private go-between for shared personal communication that does not demand a public arena. I don’t categorise my friends by the type of technology we use to communicate with. Or the amount of entertainment they provide for me. Or the opportunities that knowing them might open up in future. A friend is a friend is a friend is a friend. And not every friend is a Facebook friend. These are people I know well enough IRL to have become friends with in the first place. There’s shared history between us. We have stuff to say to each other. None of us treats each other as an incremental number in a vanity tally. We like each other; we don’t need to like each others’ Facebook posts. When there are events to arrange — birthdays, leaving drinks, dinners, coffees — some of these friends do use Facebook to send invitations. But they always text, tweet, IM or email a reminder too. I haven’t missed any social events I wanted to go to because I didn’t check into Facebook often enough. At lunchtime I leave my computer to make a sandwich and some coffee. I watch the cats caper around the kitchen while the kettle boils, playing with off-cuts of the carpet remnant which was recently fitted upstairs. I take a photo of them playing on my phone — and email it to my mum, who views it on her iPad and emails me back. My mum and I are not Facebook friends. Later still, as the work day draws to a close, I receive an SMS from someone truly spectacular. We’re not Facebook friends either, and never will be. We didn’t meet online. There’s zero photo-log of our relationship in existence anywhere in the cyber ether. Digitally, we don’t exist — unless you count email and SMS. We carry on our conversation in person over dinner. The topics that fire our collective imagination become shared themes, embedding themselves in the language we use with each other, building a collective understanding between two individuals that draws us closer. None of this communication happens over or on Facebook. None of the time we spend together has any place on Facebook. It remains a phaneron of our own. And so another day ends, without any trace of Facebook. |
What Happens To California If Silicon Valley Became A State, In 7 Charts | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | At least one wealthy tech investor wants to encourage California’s latent separatist tendencies and , including one State of Silicon Valley. Per California law, no matter unlikely or odd a proposed ballot proposition is the Secretary of State and the Legislative Analysts Office release a report to voters on a bill’s potential economic impacts [ ]. Usually, ballot proposition analysis is pretty dry, but making Silicon Valley it’s own state? This was one was a lot more interesting. Here’s what California thinks could happen if voters approve Tim Draper’s proposition to split California into six states. Silicon Valley, comprised of San Jose, San Francisco and its cousin to the East, Oakland, would consist of approximately 6,000,000 citizens. “West California,” whose capital will be Los Angeles, would be the biggest state, with 11,000,000 residents. The slicing and dicing would be directed by 12 commissioners, two from each state. Congress would have to approve it by 2019. If Congress’s current productivity is any indicator, we would need to get them the paperwork next week and then threaten to shut down California every month for the next 5 years to get any forward momentum. Silicon Valley would become the richest state in all the Union, with a 63,288 average yearly income which would be enough to make a down payment on an apartment. California would lose 28% of its income tax base ($14.5 billion) but the Valley would be a pretty nice place to live. Silicon Valley requires almost half the state-aid per pupil as Central California ($3,031 vs. $5,321), partly because of high property taxes. The other states would either need to raise revenue, or enact a Hunger-games style competition to select which students received lunch. The middle of the state has sufficient medical or law schools, which means they would need to be imported to train more residents. Silicon Valley also comprises about half the State’s share of Medi-Cal recipients. The federal government would need to allocate more resources to the needy residents. Alternatively, Silicon Valley , so that they can pay their super-sized medical bills. California has a torrid love-affair with water; frequent droughts and a complicated management system have always tentatively balanced each region’s needs. Silicon Valley may have money and talent, but it imports ~60% of its water needs. So, Silicon Valley could trade a few doctors and teachers for running water. Or, as most tech companies do, just snag a corporate sponsor. There are also a few loose ends. Each state would need a new capital, pay a transition team, and figure out where to put prisoners. I presume Governor Larry Page would get to live out his , and turn Oakland into a drug-induced rave for Googlers to run all sorts of experiments on. I’d live there if he also offered Google’s salad bar to the residents. |
Twitter Crushes With Q4 Revenue Of $242.7M, But Shows Slow User Growth To 241M Actives | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 5 | In regular trading, Twitter eased just over a percent in a mixed session for the major indexes. In after-hours trading, following the release of its financial performance, Twitter is sharply lower. For the period, Twitter reported 241 million monthly active users. The service also reported monthly mobile active users of 184 million. Critically for the company, mobile advertising revenues constituted 75 percent of its total advertising revenue. Twitter is essentially a completely mobile company from that perspective. This was a very strong quarter for Twitter financially, showing profit in the face of expected loss, and strong revenue growth on both an expectation and quarter over quarter basis. However, user growth appears to be slower than expected. That appears to be dragging the stock down in after hours trading. If Twitter’s core user growth cannot be sustained, its ability to drive future revenue growth — and therefore profits — is essentially under fire. According to its pre-IPO S-1 filings, Twitter of $168.6 million in the sequentially preceding third quarter of 2013. The importance of this report is hard to underestimate. Twitter priced its initial public offering — after much financial politicking — at $26 per share. Since that offering last November, Twitter has traded north of 70. Investors had priced the company for strong growth. Comparisons to Facebook’s offering have been inescapable. Twitter rose following its own offering, while Facebook fell. |
Neo4j, A Graph Database For Building Recommendation Engines, Gets A Visual Overhaul | Alex Williams | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | Part of the problem with any powerful technology is how it is perceived. It might be something that is too early for its time or it may just need those years of development and use for the market to catch up to its potential. That is true of graph databases like which now has a new graphical interface that helps people map relationships between different people, places or things. There is one simple way to think about graph databases, said Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology and one of the original developers of the graph database technology. And that is to explore how graph databases treat relationships as first-class citizens. The knowledge is all about relationships. When more connections are made, the view fills out. Graph databases find the relationships, the missing pieces that help form connections. Graphs databases are still known by relatively few people, but they are gaining acceptance as the use cases increase. The reasons are clear when you consider how much data is now getting . With that scaling comes a growing demand for new types of analytics capabilities. Graph databases are becoming more popular for the varied amounts of data they aggregate and analyze. They treat everything as a node. That might be things like a street light or people. The properties of a graph database describe the nodes. A graph database also has “edges” that connect the nodes and properties, defining the relationship between them. The value is derived when analyzing the patterns between the nodes and the properties. Neo Technology has put a heavy emphasis on the user interface to make it more accessible and easier to query and build graphs from large data sets. It took the developers 10 years to get to Neo4j 1.0, said Eifrem. They built it to be fully transactional and ACID compliant, meaning transactions are processed reliably. But it lacked a decent user interface. So that became the focus as they developed the 2.0 release. In this new version, the goal is to make it possible for developers to create their own recommendation engines using visual guides and simple queries. , the query language, has been updated and streamlined, making it more accessible to someone like a business analyst. It also now supports labels that refer to subsets of nodes in a graph, introducing a form of schema into the technology. This means that the data can be indexed better, allowing the developer to tell the database more about the data. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbZ_Q-YnHYo&w=640&h=480] uses Neo4j to build social graphs that find the patterns in the data to recommend potential matches on dating sites. Graph databases also apply to network and data center management. A cloud infrastructure, for example, is a connected system. The shape of the data can help track the root cause analysis of a data center outage. Neo4j is the most popular graph database, said , a research director for data management and analytics at . But these are early days and there are competitors like and established providers such as that have layered a graph capability to its Aster database. takes a different approach, Aslett said. They are doing it in reverse. They have a single API that allows the user to sync multiple databases with its service that has a graph capability. It does not layer on top of the existing database. Instead, it syncs with the existing database. In Orchestrate they get the graph capability, which is connected to the pre-existing database. Data has been locked up in rows and columns on a spreadsheet for years but that has to change as we increasingly need to visualize what the data means. There is just too much of it for our minds to comprehend unless it is shown in some way through pictures and graphics. The visualization in Neo4j helps show the relationships between different data sets that you can’t get by only looking at the code. This visualization capability is supported with Cypher, the query language developed by Neo4j. Each query represents an interaction that is shown in the visualization. Traditional SQL engines are not meant to collect data and seek out relationships. They are instead designed more for transaction-oriented systems. Graph databases handle the loads with far more ease as they model, store and query the data. Everything is connected. A relational database will often deteriorate in performance over time as the data set grows. It may be a result of joined tables or queries that rely on joins. This can make it quite slow as opposed to a graph database that is densely connected and easily queried. It will be a long time before relational databases ebb into oblivion. But their role is no longer universal. Graph databases are here to stay and for now Neo4j is setting the standard for the rest of the market. “There is a tipping point but that will take some time,” Aslett said. |
Fly Or Die: LG G Flex | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | The is one of the most hyped phones of the year. Granted, it’s only January and granted, LG isn’t the most exciting Android manufacturer around, but ! Curved, I say! And LG even says it can heal itself if you scratch it. For these reasons, we couldn’t resist getting this thing into the studio for a Fly Or Die, and we walked away generally impressed. The G Flex, a true phablet, sports a 6-inch POLED 720p curved display — and it’s beautiful. It’s also got 2GB of RAM, 32GB of onboard memory, a 3500mAh battery and a Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor under the hood. As phones go, it’s a pretty damn powerful one. On the other hand, the curve of the display is no more than a gimmick. Though it’s said to meet the contours of your face for a more comfortable experience, it’s really just something you can point to when you’re trying to be cooler than your friends. And as far as self-healing goes, neither John nor I were convinced. The scratches we made were slightly minimized, but definitely still showed up. All that said, the G Flex is still one of LG’s most impressive handsets. If you’re on the market for a powerful, beautiful Android device, this may very well be the one for you. Two flies. |
GoldieBlox’s Super Bowl Ad Is A Counterbalance To Rampant Sexism | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHXbQ4PeNLI&w=640&h=360] On Sunday night, about 110 million people turned on their TVs to watch a series of lavish, expensively produced 30-second skits interspersed with live footage of men throwing a ball around. Fox Sports for each ad spot this year, with companies like Anheuser-Busch, Chevrolet, and Pepsi coughing the record-breaking figure. But one of the was created by a 15-person tech startup called , which makes . The San Francisco-based company that it won Intuit’s Small Business, Big Game challenge, landing one of the year’s most coveted advertising spots. (GoldieBlox’s Super Bowl ad also helps distract , who are suing the company for using an unauthorized parody of “Girls.” The Super Bowl ad played a cover of “Cum Feel The Noize” by Slade that was, presumably, licensed and paid for.) It’s extremely unusual for such a small company to advertise during the Super Bowl, but what makes GoldieBlox’s spot, which features a hoard of little girls turning their boring pink toys into a rocket and launching it into space, especially interesting is that it serves as an antidote to the outrageous sexism constantly on display in each Super Bowl’s commercials. Of course, it also gives Intuit a chance to boost its image without having to figure out how to make a commercial about tax software interesting. The misogyny in Super Bowl is so egregious that advocacy group to help viewers send complaints directly to the companies responsible. It’s still too early to tell which ads will make this year’s list of the worst offenders, but based on Twitter reactions, SodaStream and Volkswagen are in the running to earn that dubious distinction. Here’s a , including Carl’s Jr’s desperate attempt to make fish sandwiches sexy. But the tide may be turning as the gap between . For example, GoDaddy.com, one of , dramatically . Hopefully more companies will figure out how to make attention-grabbing ads without resorting to crass stereotypes. |
TC Droidcast Episode 20: Motorola Goes To Lenovo, Google Loves Nexus And Ouya V2 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | It’s a brave new dawn for the TechCrunch Droidcast as I take over hosting duties from Chris Velazco… who returns temporarily from the distant lands of Engadget to share his insights on , the Nexus program at Google and what’s next for hardware there, and the new, slightly improved Ouya Android console. Remember that you can now also catch , if you miss him. Plus remember that even though Google has jettisoned its own pet mobile phone maker, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have hardware chops – the , for instance, and isn’t likely to leave the roost anytime soon. As for the Ouya, if you’re looking to learn more about what’s new with the updated hardware, you’ll find .
Intro music by Direct . |
Meet Carrot Fit, Your Own Personal Sarcastic AI Weight Loss Coach | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | There are countless weight loss apps available out there. Some pair up with dedicated activity-tracking devices, while others count calories, and yet still some . Or . Or it. In today’s edition of , I bring you , the humorous weight-loss app. laughing burns calories, you know. Carrot Fit, the latest in the , isn’t all that different from earlier generation of the “motivational” app. The name comes from the old “Carrot and Stick” method of training, wherein one receives a combination of rewards and punishments to enforce good behavior. [gallery columns="4" ids="951282,951283,951284,951285"] That said, Carrot Fit will most certainly berate you, so be ready — the app is definitely aimed at people who have a sense of humor about their body, as opposed to those who are sensitive about it. But that’s Carrot’s shtick. The Carrot family of apps includes and Carrot Alarm, both of which come at you with the same ferocious sarcasm. They seem to take a note from , the vicious and sarcastic AI voice in the Portal games, which is something no other fitness app seems to offer. And in an ever-crowded landscape like weight loss apps, the more you differentiate the better. You can check out the Carrot Fit app . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrHeZDMI91U&w=640&h=360] |
What Games Are: Flappy Bird, Patterns And Context | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | It’s nice to know that the games industry can still surprise you and that – just when everybody thinks it’s been figured out – there’s room for a . , if you don’t know, is the latest game-from-nowhere that’s taken over the App Store. It’s another , , , or . The game that seems to just pop, leaving many heads scratching as to how it did it. The repeated success of these games shows that there is always room for a new game mechanic. Players still like to play a fun game that seems new compared to all the other stuff they’ve been playing lately. Simple. Yet if there’s one thing on which you can always rely, it’s that the industry will over-complicate what it means. I have no doubt that developers and publishers from here to Timbuktu are now looking at and trying to figure out what the “endless tapper” genre will look like. They’re probably adding categories into spreadsheets to model it against other genres. Some may be theorizing that successful iOS games should all feature retro graphics and birds, just as some console game makers used to believe that success on PlayStation in the US meant making games featuring ninjas, vampires or Nazis (true story). We’re always acting like mathematicians trying to solve quantum relativity There’s always plenty of room to speculate about tactics. Maybe was featured somewhere. Maybe someone influential tweeted it. Maybe it happened to run a successful ad campaign through a partner channel. And maybe if we do the same then we will see the same success. It’s very attractive to think that way because it feels like finding signals in the noise, and who doesn’t like to do that? That’s why numerous companies right now are rationalizing themselves into making a or or or . We’re predisposed to think in patterns, but However their value tends to be inflated. Within some sectors where the inputs and outputs are very knowable (such as casino or first person shooters) they are worthwhile. But the awkward problem that we don’t like to acknowledge is that most of the time the market is Ultimately most of our complicated thinking is nothing more than dressed-up confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance, but it’s still powerful. The financier class (investors, VCs, publishers, etc) particularly finds it hard to resist falling into these mental traps, and so money spent making games tends to follow this way of thinking. Contract developers specialize in making outsourced games for publishers who think this way and have become experts at pitching to their concerns. Learn to think and talk this way and your game will get funded. Do it well enough and your funding is actually your profit margin. Cynical perhaps but all too true. Depending on the strategy of the publisher and the depth of its pockets, a fast-following game . But the formula for 2011 fails in 2014. Why? Because by then every other pattern-driven game maker who thinks the same way has flooded the market. They reduce the act of making exciting new games to a process of profit margins that may look excellent for a while but will inevitably narrow. Thinking in terms of fixed nodes and genres tends to over-emphasize the idea that games can be solved and under-emphasize the role of context. There’s a sentiment that mobile is dead for the little guy, that now you need big budgets or publishing partners or fancy PR firms to succeed. And indeed that Dong Nguyen’s probably just got lucky. Our confirmation bias tends to do that. It over-ascribes scientific technique to some games (particularly games with free to play economies because who doesn’t enjoy analyzing money) while sidelining all other forms of success as lucky. Four and half years and 20+million copies later you can still throw a stone while blindfolded and hit a pundit who’ll tell you that . Like all popular paradigms, we have an answer for everything even if we’re dead wrong. Personally I think the big lesson that should be learned from and similar successes is that patterns are informative, but should not dictate what we develop. During the good times patterns tend to slow us down. When Mark Pincus, Shervin Pishevar and Kristian Segerstrale were all raising big money for “social games” off the back of some very early numbers they were largely doing so without patterns. None of them could really tell you how big that market was likely to be, or what players liked, so they just went for it. Developers in their studios had no roadmap for success and so they just tried a bunch of things, some of which worked. The following year you could not move for consultants who extrapolated these early successes into formulas for making social games. Of the thousand other competitors who dived into the market, the vast majority were largely lifting success-lessons from studying others’ games (as were some of the already-successful competitors) as though they were commandments. During the bad times patterns turn fatalist. I ather than accept that the problem is how we think, we usually just try and do the same thing over and over until the money runs out. It’s rare that we take off our mental shackles and genuinely pivot. The challenging part of working in games, particularly in financing, publishing or platforms, is accepting that it’s a contextual market where the most important factors are novelty, marketing stories and a degree of amnesia. All three involve thinking ahead, of looking not just at what other game makers have already done, but what they might do. All three involve letting go of constraints in the service of trying to build a game with better internal consistency and relying more on gut feel. Patterns are attractive but their overall success rate is pretty poor. When you don’t have piles of cash at your disposal to prime the pump, the road to success usually looks a lot like luck but actually has more to do with good timing. If a lone developer from Vietnam is able to upend the market with a game about a small flapping bird then anything is possible. The question for all of us is are we able to let ourselves think freely? Or are we trapped endlessly trying to see patterns where there are none? |
PSA: Missed Call From A Mystery Number? Be Careful. | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | The people who read our site are a pretty savvy lot. You know not to accept checks from . You can spot a from a mile away. But here’s one that might be new for you: scammers are apparently trying to exploit your “missed call” screen, now. The scam, simplified: They call you, but immediately hang up. You see a missed call. You call back. They charge you for the call, and for each minute they can keep you on the line. According to , this so-called “One Ring” scam is on the rise. Like many a ruse, this one relies on hitting many, many potential targets at once. The scammer sets up a computer to call thousands of numbers per hour — because for every 99 people who follow their gut and don’t call weird numbers, there’s 1 person who will. Maybe they’re waiting for response on a job interview, and don’t know what number it’ll come from. Maybe they’re hoping it’s that girl from the bar last night. Maybe the number just looks kind of familiar. It’s all about making mass sweeps and finding the exceptions. The trick? One ring is enough for the number to show up on your missed call screen, but just short enough that you’re not likely to answer it in time (which keeps the call from fully connecting and thus keeps the scammer from having to front for any long distance fees.) Speaking of long distance fees: the number it’s dialing from is, generally, one from outside of the US — but one that has the same country code (+1, which we share with Canada and almost all of the Caribbean nations, from the Bahamas to Jamaica), and thus looks like a US number. On US premium numbers, the FTC requires the caller to explicitly agree to charges. On international numbers, the FTC has no jurisdiction. We’ve seen like this before, using many of the same basic concepts —the sneaky international number, the hook to get you to call it back. A few years ago, a common scam technique was to text someone saying “Your [relative here] is hurt, and you are the emergency contact! Call [sneaky international number here] for more information.” But this is the first time I’ve seen them boil it down to a simple missed call. It plays on the ubiquity of smartphones, and that… no one really calls each other anymore. If someone is calling, it’s probably important, right? Better call’em back! While reports on scams like this tend to warn you that you’ll be charged a zillion dollars per second, that’s… usually not the case, in reality. Carriers will often void the charges if they/you catch them, so the scammer’s goal is often to keep anyone from noticing the charge. But even if they charge you nothing, there are other reasons not to call’em back: tl;dr: stranger danger. [image credit: on Shutterstock] |
Unpacking Facebook’s Mobile Strategy: Paper, All The Mobile News That’s Fit To Print | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | TechCrunch In the world of mobile apps, the biggest news from this week was the announcement, by Facebook, of a new app, built by the social network, to read news and stories: . Make sure to watch the , which is very Apple-esque in its elegance and emotion. When Facebook announces these kind of apps, it evokes memories of their previous attempts to build and distribute standalone apps that unbundle one of its features, such as Camera, Poke, or Messenger. The initial reaction within the technology startup community has been a mix of skepticism and excitement, with some drooling over the new design (it does look good) while others lament its a copy (some interactions do look like ). This all begs a question: Will Paper go the way of Poke, or the way of Messenger? The answer will have big consequences for Facebook. On mobile devices, Messenger has been successfully unbundled from Facebook. Messenger is one of the top messaging apps out there, it works great, and even today, Facebook is so focused on making sure everyone has it on their phones that they actually route users who are inside Facebook’s main app entirely out to Messenger (and then back in) to coax the behavior of using Messenger itself. With Poke, as we all can recall, even Facebook wasn’t able to use its enormous, engaged mobile user base to turn it into a real experience to Snapchat. This episode was a highly visible example of how Facebook’s high mobile engagement could shoot any app right to the top of the charts, but also exposed the limits of its power to affect mobile engagement as users quickly abandoned the product experience. When it comes to Facebook and mobile, we are witnessing the early stages of the company’s attempt to unbundle and distribute its core features in new mobile products. Back in September 2011, I wrote a column right on TechCrunch which argued Facebook’s strategy for blanketing our devices with their software was to break it up. You can read that post , and make sure to check out the picture. Two and a half years later, Facebook is in a much stronger mobile position. Earlier this week for earnings, Facebook shared mobile stats, reporting nearly . This type of scale and engagement for mobile apps affords Facebook incredible amounts of actionable data, which translates to market power, which they use to through mobile app install ads — just wait until they roll out mobile re-engagement ads and deep-linking options, as well. Can Facebook, moving forward, effectively leverage the power and scale of its own network to drive its daily active users to new mobile experiences (as they’re doing with Messenger), or will users only temporarily flock to only to abandon them (as they did with Poke)? And, in the case of Paper specifically, will users convert to getting real-time mobile push notifications about news and stories about their friends, or will they find this spammy and revert back to their original sources of news (which includes regular Facebook)? It will be interesting to see the world’s reaction tomorrow (February 3) when Paper is released. Two great pieces on this are by TechCrunch’s own , who takes a deep dive on , and Wanelo’s , who looks when it comes to Paper. Facebook is a very different mobile company today than it was a year ago, or two years ago. The scale is just massive, and the engagement is off the charts. Assuming the product experience itself is relevant, which is why news and personal stories are interesting, even a low conversion rate to Paper would be a very sizeable audience. The reason we see more and more news apps on our phones or in the App Store is because checking the news isn’t just a daily active use case, it’s a , and one that Facebook, with their mobile user data, their algorithms, and their scale and engagement, could exploit with this move and be the first thing people read in the morning — just like the newspaper used to be. Only time will tell, so pick up the Paper tomorrow morning and read all about it. / |
Releasing Ads Early Pays Off For Super Bowl Advertisers, According To Visible Measures | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | If you’re watching the Super Bowl today, some of those brand new ads may feel awfully familiar — a growing number of them are being released online ahead of time, either in their entirety or as a partial teaser. A spokesperson for video advertising and analytics company , told me that his team looked at every Super Bowl campaign since 2010 and found that more and more advertisers are following this strategy — there were 13 in 2010, 27 in 2011, 34 in 2012, and 42 in last year. (Visible Measures found 30 brands that had their ads ahead of time this year, but that was in the middle of the past week, so the final number will be higher.) Basically, it seems that advertisers now treat the game as just part of a monthlong campaign, one where online views are increasingly important. As Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University, : “It is not about winning the Super Bowl but winning an entire month.” Super Bowl ads saw a total of 370 million online views last year, Visible Measures said (measured one month after the game). And advertisers who release the ads early are the ones who win, according to the company’s data. Visible Measures , including sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe, and Vimeo. When the brands released their ads ahead of time, they saw significantly higher True Reach than those that didn’t — the difference peaked at 600 percent more views in 2012 before falling to 200 percent last year, presumably due to increased competition for online attention. As one example, Visible Measures pointed to Samsung’s video “ ,” which had already been viewed 8.7 million times by the time the Super Bowl aired, and which had a total of 33.5 million online views a month later. And this year, Budweiser’s “ ” ad (embedded below) has already been viewed 26.7 million times — so its final viewer count is going to pretty impressive. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQB7QRyF4p4&w=560&h=315] |
In Praise Of Metro | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | It looks like Microsoft has finally that Metro (or the Modern UI or whatever else they call it these days) wasn’t right for the desktop. If the rumors are true, it’ll continue to de-emphasize Metro with the first major Windows 8.1 update later this year. No doubt, that’s exactly the right thing to do. Metro is actually a great user interface – just not on the desktop. So let’s look at the positive side: On a tablet, Metro is actually really, really good. On a tablet like the Surface, it’s a more productive interface than iOS or Android. In large parts, that’s because you can have more than one app on the screen, something Microsoft often emphasized in its ads, but something you only really come to appreciate when you switch back from a Windows tablet to an iPad. It suffers from the lack of must-have apps and Microsoft never quite figured out how to get decent apps on the platform. Even today – with the exception of games – the best Metro apps are actually from Microsoft itself. Bing News is a very nice newsreader, for example. Microsoft’s finance app, too, is very good, and so are SkyDrive/OneDrive, Xbox Music, Bing Weather and Bing Maps (and especially the latest preview version). Live tiles are a great idea. Even Internet Explorer in Metro turns out to be a fast, touch-first browser. Those apps, however, show the potential of a platform that is radically different from its competitors (which may just explain its failure). Microsoft was willing to take a gamble and created a modern, highly usable user interface that can sometimes make the competition look like it’s a few years behind the design curve. Metro uses some touch gestures that aren’t always intuitive. Who would think to slide in from the left and slide right back to open your recently used apps? Slide in from the right to bring up your “charms” and settings? Once you get used to its quirks, though, it all just works. Yet if failed and I’m sure we’ll see plenty of business school papers written about Windows 8 in the future. Instapaper founder Marco Arment Windows 8 – and Metro specifically – failed because “Microsoft isn’t Apple, and Microsoft’s customers aren’t Apple’s customers.” In his view, Microsoft’s customers weren’t ready for this radical change and the company forgot who its customers are. There’s some truth to that, but my feeling is that Microsoft’s main mistake was simply to force the old desktop and the new tile-based interface into a single operating system. Just like Apple, Microsoft understood that a touch interface has to be different from a regular desktop interface. But instead of just building a Windows for tablets (preferably with a name that didn’t include “Windows” at all to avoid confusion) and a better Windows 7, it just had to cram it all into one. In a way, Windows RT was supposed to be that Windows for tablets, but even that had a built-in desktop so people could run Office. But RT just confused people. If Microsoft had just allowed itself to let go of its Office fetish, it may have had a better chance at making RT a success. Metro is great, but Microsoft was clearly wrong when it thought people would quickly adopt touch on the desktop and on their laptops. Maybe that’ll still happen, but for now, it’s doing the right thing for its users by hiding as much of the Metro interface as possible. |
What We Talk About When We Talk About Economies Of Scale In Tech | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 2 | When I joined the Industry Analyst community in 2000 the industry was much smaller. For those in the business and analyst community who were in the field decades prior it was even smaller still. Early in my career as an analyst I was studying the semiconductor industry as it related to markets like PCs, mobile phones (not smartphones), digital home and a few other consumer-facing segments. In those days, the PC was the talk of the town. It was on a steady growth stream and the only question we would debate internally is how much the industry would grow in the next few years and how many more PCs we would sell in the years to come. The PC crossed the 100 million in annual shipments mark in 1999 then crossed the 200 million annual shipment mark in 2004. I recall discussions with many of the PC vendors and major suppliers of semiconductors and there was so much excitement that the industry would sell 200 millions PCs every year from here on out. The big question was when would we get to 300 million? Well, that happened in 2009 and shipments have never gotten over 400 million since. During those days, the industry felt larger than ever. Hundreds of millions of PCs were being shipped each year and exciting growth in computing was taking place. Now, today, when I give industry presentations and keynotes at events, my language has shifted from hundreds of millions to billions and trillions as I talk about the industry going forward. The economies of scale of the global technology industry are often lost and under-appreciated by many industry commentators. Several things have happened in a short amount of time, which has led to the remarkable economies of scale we are now talking about in the technology industry. The first is that the industry itself has matured. When you see more evolution than revolution coming from leading companies, then you know a segment has reached a nadir of sorts. This does not mean revolution isn’t possible or still doesn’t happen — only that it is less frequent. Think about the automotive industry for example. This is one of the most mature industries and do we see revolutionary products frequently? No, and this is why it can no longer be expected to be a frequent thing in the technology industry. Mature industries act differently once they have matured and then march on toward post-maturity. You can look at consumer electronics, packaged goods, automotive and even all the way back to railways and shipping industries. The markets that make up industries when they mature act differently as well. Primarily when an industry matures the consumer of the products of those industries understand more about what they want from the product or service and start searching out things that serve their unique needs, wants, or desires. This is what opens the door for broader competition and segmentation, and it is when this happens that the competitive dynamics within a market often change. The second is that the tech industry has gone global. Thanks to the industry being mature we can now bring nearly every class of consumer technology product to the masses at a variety of price points. The power of local manufacturing in China, and the growing capabilities of India, Latin America and other countries are accelerating the pace of the industries growth and bringing with it challenging implications for foreign brands. Case in point, a company I love to study based in China named Xiaomi recently unseated Samsung and Apple to take the top smartphone sales spot in the month of December, according to Kantar. This is quite remarkable for a local Chinese upstart fewer than four years old. The result of the industry maturing and going global is the foundation of why we are no longer talking about millions but billions of annual device shipments and billions of connected devices in use in the marketplace. My firm estimates that by the end of 2014 there will be over 4 billion PCs, smartphones, and tablets in use. I forecast that by the end of 2018 the annual sales of smartphones will be approximately 1.8 billion. Every time I think about this single number it astonishes me. Every year, almost 2 billion smartphones are sold. Astounding. There may not be a single product with this kind of total addressable market. Things start to sound even crazier when we start talking about the Internet of things. We are counting down the time before we hit 50 billion connected objects. That number will be quickly eclipsed by 100 billion connected objects as we march toward an inevitable future where we have 1 trillion-plus connected objects in the world. These connected objects will surround us in our homes, cities and workplaces, and will even be embedded into everyday objects like our household appliances, cars, beds, shoes, sports equipment, and clothing. There is tremendous opportunity ahead for everyone participating in advancing the technology industry. This is not a zero-sum game where for someone else to succeed someone else has to fail. This fact is a core trait of a mature industry. This industry is large enough to sustain a number of healthy growing companies all thriving for decades to come. Those of us who write about, observe, analyze, and work in this industry are on a journey. However, on a journey the scenery changes. And while this industry is mature, there is still much change that will take place in the years to come. I believe we are just about halfway through this journey and this adventure will be filled with twists and turns for decades to come. |
Apparently Students At Tim Draper’s “University For Heroes” Are Selling Sex Toys For Class | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 20 | Well, that’s an unusual school assignment. , who says he’s a student at the , emailed TechCrunch earlier today to inform us that he’s selling Jimmyjane sex toys on Indiegogo as part of class. Apparently, today’s assignment in the entrepreneurial training program (organized by venture capitalist Tim Draper) involves sales — specifically, sales of sex toys. Heilbut said different teams are taking different approaches to the assignment. Some, for example, have been calling up escorts. His team, however, has taken a more familiar path in the tech world, posting a (fewer than 30 hours left as I write this) on Indiegogo, where they’re selling Jimmyjane products at a 30 percent discount. For example: You can buy “the Rabbit” for a measly $110. I asked Heilbut if he was surprised at all by the assignment, and he said, “I would’ve been more surprised at the beginning.” Apparently, the University for Heroes is full of “zany activities,” including a weeklong survival program in the wilderness — I’d tell you more, but students aren’t allowed to discuss it in detail with the outside world. I’ve emailed Draper and the university for comment and will update this post if I hear back. Heilbut did put me on the phone with Michael Hom, who works in customer service at Jimmyjane (which was actually ), and who confirmed that he’s speaking to Draper students to help train them in cold calling potential customers. Apparently, Heilbut’s team isn’t doing quite as well as the competition, which is why he’s hoping TechCrunch can give him a boost. I’m not sure that I agree of his assessment of TC’s readership, but hey, . Draper emailed me the following message: “Cold calling is one of their many challenges at Draper University of Heroes.” And a Draper University for Heroes spokesperson sent me the following statement: Sales and marketing are an important part of our curriculum and skill for entrepreneurs to have. We invite all-star speakers to share their stories firsthand with our students (ie, the founder of jimmyjane came to talk about starting the company and sales/marketing). Draper University’s philosophy is that entrepreneurs learn best by actually going out in the world and TRYING things. Being an entrepreneur is one of the hardest things in the world, so we wanted our students to go out and sell something that would be uncomfortable or ‘difficult’ for most to sell so they would have to get creative- like launching an Indiegogo campaign. DUH students in the past have undergone selling a variety of goods to actual customers including not just luxury personal products but also high end condiments. |
With $8M In Fresh Funding, Ezetap Is More Than Just A Square For Emerging Markets | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 2 | 20 | There are almost 900 million active cell-phone users in India now, and from newer startups to some of the biggest companies in the world, everybody is chasing the next mobile disruption that could potentially result in a business model for all of the emerging markets. One such startup is , a mobile payment company backed by some of the biggest names in the VC industry, including Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of , and , an Indian seed fund run by serial entrepreneurs. Ezetap is much like Square, at least in terms of the basic model. It uses a rectangular device that can turn any mobile phone into a point-of-sales terminal when plugged in. The device including a card reader and chip, costs around $50, and Ezetap has been able to sell around 12,000 of them to date. The startup is aiming to have over 100,000 such devices installed across Asia-Pacific, Africa and Middle East in a year. “From day one, we wanted to go global and really felt that mobile payments in general is a great opportunity for emerging markets. There’s disparity in cash versus electronic payments leading to the challenges of financial inclusion,” Abhijit Bose, CEO of Ezetap, told TechCrunch. Back then, mChek and several others fizzled out because of . “I believe there was nothing wrong with mobile payment back then, it was just the timing,” said Bose. Indeed, the environment has changed dramatically. Back then, there were only 10 million credit cards. Today there are around 316 million credit and debit card holders in India. More importantly, the telecom infrastructure has improved tremendously, allowing users to do much more than just voice calls and texting. “Chip and pin is now the established global standard for mobile payment processing, and will soon take over the U.S. as well. Ezetap has created the only product that is certified globally, at a price point materially better than any other player – regional or otherwise,” said Palihapitiya. Both Ezetap and Square are using similar models to enable mobile payments, but for completely different target markets, which is perhaps why Bose doesn’t like being called “the Square of India.” Ezetap’s merchants include India’s biggest e-commerce company Flipkart and even much smaller mom-and-pop shops. we want to build a business that makes us number one mobile payment platform in emerging markets,” said Bose. To be sure, Ezetap is not the only mobile payment startup that’s beginning to do well. With around 2 million customers using its mobile wallet, is aiming to reach the 100 million mark in two years. While MobiKwik and at least two dozen others are offering mobile wallets, startups such as are more similar to Ezetap. Mswipe raised its Series B funding earlier this year from investors including Matrix Partners. All these startups are shaping an ecosystem of mobile payments in India that goes beyond just creating a non cash economy. |
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