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Marketplace app Mercari nabs $75M to become Japan’s first startup unicorn | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | , a peer-to-peer marketplace app, has claimed the title of Japan’s first pre-IPO startup unicorn after raising 8.4 billion yen (about $75 million) at a valuation of over $1 billion. This is the Tokyo-based company’s first Series D and brings its total funding to 12.6 billion yen (about $111 million). The round includes new investors Mitsui & Co, Development Bank of Japan Inc., and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank’s Japan Co-Invest, along with returning backers Globis Capital Partners, World Innovation Lab, and Global Brain. Chief financial officer Kei Nagasawa says the new capital will be used to grow Mercari’s services in Japan and expand in the United States (where it ) and the European Union. The company is also keeping an eye on potential merger and acquisition targets. The three-year-old company claims its app has been downloaded a total of 32 million times (with seven million of that number from the U.S.) and that its current gross merchandise value is above 10 billion Japanese yen (about $88 million) per month. It’s worth noting that that have reached a market capitalization of at least a billion dollars. Mercari’s annual revenue meant it had the opportunity to hold an IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but Nagasawa says it decided to stay private to retain strategic flexibility as it expands overseas. In the U.S., Mercari has to compete with a long roster of e-commerce players, including and . It focuses on mobile commerce, but in that category it is up against other well-funded startups like (which connects Chinese merchants with American customers), , and fashion marketplace (about half of the products sold on Mercari in Japan are clothing and accessories). Mercari, however, has had practice differentiating itself in Japan, where it came in as a rival to Yahoo Japan’s , which—like Mercari—also focuses on consumer-to-consumer transactions. Nagasawa says the company’s strength is positioning itself with a “pure mobile focus on C2C,” making it easy to list items on its apps, and monitoring vendors closely to make sure none of them are actually business merchants pretending to be individual sellers (its customer service team has about 100 employees in Japan, the U.S., and the Philippines who keep an eye on listings). It also integrates with Yamato Transport, one of Japan’s largest logistics companies, to provide shipping: once vendors sell an item, they get a barcode they can stick on their package before dropping it off at Yamato’s service centers without having to write out addresses or calculate postage. In the United States, Mercari has stuck to a similar strategy. It also positions itself as a “flea market” app, for users to sell each other small consumer goods like clothing and collectibles. It has partnered with USPS and FedEx for shipment and uses Braintree as a payment vendor. “We do acknowledge that is still the dominant player, but there is no dominant player at this point in mobile. We are a pure mobile player. Another difference is that while you see a lot of classified players in the U.S., like and , they don’t manage payment and logistics also,” says Nagasawa. Mercari makes revenue by taking 10 percent of each sales in Japan, but it won’t monetize in the U.S. until it gains more scale and is still deciding what its take rate there will be. With its newly minted unicorn status and worldwide expansion plans, Mercari earns itself comparisons to and , two Asian e-commerce players that have become very successful in their home markets of Japan and China, respectively, but struggled to gain a foothold in the U.S. When asked how Mercari plans to succeed there when Rakuten (Japan’s largest e-commerce site) hasn’t been able to, Nagasawa says that the business-to-consumer market is more competitive and that Mercari wants to do a better job of localizing by hiring local product managers in its U.S. office and sending its Japanese engineers over there to work with them. “I think that’s the key to see how our product thrives in the U.S. We’re not doing a fundamental change of our product, but there are a lot of tweaks. For example, in Japan, people spend a lot of time on the platform. The average daily active user spends more than 40 minutes on the platform. It’s like a magazine, you flip through the pages but you aren’t looking for something specific,” he says. “That’s the preference for Japanese users, but in the U.S. people want to search more efficiently and they want more recommendations.” |
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly breaks American spaceflight record | Nitish Kulkarni | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | When former International Space Station Commander steps out of a Soyuz descent module on the Kazakhstan steppe at around 8.30PM PST later today, after 340 days on the International Space Station, he will have spent more continuous time in space than any other American astronaut. You probably best know the 52-year-old former United States Navy test pilot from his prolific photography, full of incredible shots of the Earth and other celestial bodies, from arguably one of the greatest vantage points around. A post shared by (@stationcdrkelly) on Kelly was at the ISS as a part of a joint U.S.-Russian collaborative biomedical experiment on the impacts of prolonged spaceflight on the human body. Called the and proposed by , the mission paired Kelly with Russian Cosmonaut and aimed to extend and modernize earlier Russian work on the physiological effects of extended spaceflight. A post shared by (@stationcdrkelly) on While better understanding the impacts of prolonged microgravity on the human body is vital for any future developments and progress in space travel, it’s worth noting that NASA that the mission was not meant to “mimic any specific future exploration-type mission.” The mission aims to investigate seven broad biomedical issues associated with space travel, including increased risk of osteoporosis and muscle atrophy, sensory dysfunction, nutritional sustainability, and long-term adaption risk. Another area of investigation is autonomous medical care; being able to diagnose medical issues and administer treatment onboard is a vital need that needs to be investigated, especially on long missions whose “turnaround” return trajectories are measured in months or even years. While the highest-profile part of the mission is the prolonged spaceflight, the experiment Kelly and Kornienko are subjects of is a three-year endeavor. Fluid samples, including blood, saliva, and urine that were taken at regular intervals before, during, and after their spaceflight are going to be subjects of intense investigation. Some samples from the pair will not return to Earth with the pair today, instead hitching a ride to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft later in the year. Kelly’s twin brother Mark was also an astronaut who went to space on several Shuttle missions. The brothers are also part of the , a national collaboration between researchers and academics at 12 universities and across several NASA labs. The study is intended to improve NASA’s abilities in personalized medicine, and having Mark Kelly on the ground as a control subject in the study will likely yield invaluable and novel data on the more subtle impacts of spaceflight. While photography from the ISS’s cupola module was not Kelly’s primary mission, his prolific, inspiring work will likely have far-reaching implications, especially because of his choice of platform. Whether or not he intended it, using Instagram no doubt worked wonders to increase general interest in science, technology, and engineering. , we can only hope that this is just the beginning. |
The future of on-demand: Where are we going, and are we getting a Lyft? | Ash Rust | 2,016 | 3 | 1 |
If the was a young pup in the late 2000s, then it has since evolved into a much more sophisticated animal: strong, resilient and capable of adapting to its environment. This movement was bred from the human desire for immediacy. Agile startups evolved quickly with real-time feedback, all conjoined by the central pillar of this new industry: the smartphone. When we need to get somewhere, we call an or a . We all need groceries, but we’d happily pay to avoid spending hours in the grocery store each week, so allows us to choose and receive our groceries with an app. When we feel ill, we use to schedule an appointment with a doctor. But that’s just the start. Want a tailored outfit? Call , and it’ll send someone over to get you measured. With new clothes, you’ll need to do laundry. is here: It’ll take your dirty clothes, launder and fold them, and bring them right back to you. On-demand services even exist for your pets, such as dog walking. And if you can’t be the kids’ chauffeur today, is here to deliver them safely wherever they need to go. On-demand transport, healthcare and grocery delivery are popular because they make consumers’ lives easier. But on-demand businesses hardly have it easy: Despite at least being invested in the on-demand economy since 2010, on-demand businesses are subject to failure like any other startup. And on-demand companies’ — due to their business models and substantial labor needs — mean they generate less profit per transaction to address these challenges. First, the hiring process is overwhelming. Uber’s success hinges on the availability of drivers, who numbered by fall 2015. On-demand services require a lot of manpower, making it crucial to recruit efficiently, process applications quickly and complete thousands of background checks. Additionally, many full-time employees — who form more than of the U.S. workforce — don’t want to freelance. On-demand employers must offer competitive compensation to attract high-quality, trustworthy people who care about those companies. Of course, on-demand brands must compete against one another for workers, too. Hiring contract employees rather than full-timers is a good way to limit costs and improve those thin margins, but it comes with some legal gray area, as were inked long before the rise of on-demand businesses. Many services, such as , aren’t awaiting legal judgments and are proactively employing contractors. However, only larger, more mature companies may be able to bear this expense. Communication is one of on-demand’s biggest challenges. When a customer expects something in minutes, on-demand companies can’t afford to keep them waiting. A complex network of triage and backup is required for almost every on-demand service. Another logistical issue is proximity. On-demand services must be near users, wherever they may be. Maintaining a company headquarters and hiring representatives for every city of operation can be exorbitantly expensive. For on-demand services, profitability requires significant scale in areas with high population densities. But logistical challenges are just that: challenges. Pioneering on-demand companies have already conquered these challenges, and that’s emboldening up-and-coming startups. The blossoming economy is also providing tools to make the journey easier for on-demand startups. , for instance, enables discreet, on-demand background screenings and driving-record checks via a developer-friendly platform. Not without its detractors, the new economy faces challenges from entrenched industries, labor costs and logistical needs. However, in less than five years, on-demand has gone from an economist’s pipe dream to permeating our everyday lives. We’ve just begun to scratch the surface, so what’s in store next? Because on-demand services can be priced affordably, even brands unassociated with the on-demand movement want to join in. For instance, Taco Bell, which has long resisted delivery, now allows customers to order food any time, anywhere, and have it delivered via . Beyond fast food, can deliver anything — from a toothbrush to airline tickets. Services that aren’t necessarily obvious on-demand candidates will also be infiltrated. Wag! is growing rapidly — but who would’ve guessed 10 years ago that on-demand dog walking would be a viable business? The on-demand economy feeds on imagination, and it’s brave enough to innovate in even the most established industries. has cropped up to offer flower delivery within hours, while lends an on-demand hand for furniture moving and can help take the stress out of parking. While flower delivery and valet parking aren’t new, the on-demand economy is reimagining them by making these services more convenient, more affordable and available with a few taps. As the economy matures, more successful companies will consume smaller ones. Look at the consolidation we saw in the daily deals space. During 2010 and 2011, Groupon acquired seven companies, mostly to fuel its global expansion. LivingSocial, a perennial No. 2 in the space, acquired eight companies in the same period; most were international and offered daily deals. Thin margins tend to breed a winner-takes-all environment. Some companies will handle multiple on-demand services at once. Already, will go to your car, change its oil and replace its wipers. But what if you could outsource your motoring needs? This hypothetical app might obtain insurance quotes; offer small, on-demand repairs; contact a garage for in-depth service; and even help you sell your car. Great challenges lie ahead in the on-demand economy, but great accomplishments lie in its wake. The Industrial Revolution spanned centuries; America’s transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy took between a quarter- and half-century. Now, in less than a decade, on-demand brands have become household names, and of U.S. workers are freelancing. Nobody’s quite sure where on-demand is headed, but one thing is clear: On-demand is building a bridge to a more efficient time — one when we ask for things only when we actually need them. |
Nanigans brings its social ad tools to Twitter | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | Social marketing company announced today that it’s launching support for Twitter. Nanigans is best known as a Facebook ad automation tool, but that one reason for raising the company’s $24 million Series B was to expand beyond Facebook. He’s also started to make good on that by . Asked about what Nanigans brings to the existing ecosystem of Twitter ad products and partners, Calvillo told me that Nanigans allows advertisers to achieve broad scale for their campaigns without sacrificing effectiveness and return on investment. “For example, if you were a large advertiser using Twitter’s native tools or that of another vendor, the ability to surface meaningful performance metrics attached to business goals such as revenue is hard if not impossible,” he said. “We bring real-time reporting at the individual ad level which enables the advertiser to understand which audiences and which creatives are working to drive the most downstream sales. Then, we make it easy, in a couple of clicks, to set up and traffic new ads based on those learnings. ” Some Nanigans advertisers are already onboard for the expansion into Twitter, including Core Digital Media and Dashlane. In a press release, both companies said Nanigans has allowed them to dramatically expand their Twitter ad efforts. |
Getting predictive about politics (and everything else) | David Elkington | 2,016 | 3 | 1 |
Photo courtesy of Flickr/ . Photo courtesy of Flickr/ . Photo courtesy of Flickr/ . |
Daqri acquires 1066 Labs to power its augmented reality smart helmet | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | Augmented reality smart helmet company announced today that it had acquired 1066 Labs, a leading head-mounted display manufacturer focused on serving enterprise clients with augmented reality solutions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2007, 1066 Labs manufactures a variety of “see-through components” for head-mounted displays and has worked on implementing its tech with “advanced consumer electronics start-ups, Fortune 500 companies and Formula One dynasties” according to a company bio. “We have been impressed with what 1066 Labs has built to date and the team there is world class when it comes to innovations in head-mounted display hardware,” said Brian Mullins, founder and CEO of Daqri, in a statement. The deal seems to have been finalized in early January according to several LinkedIn bios from 1066 Labs employees who made the transition to Daqri. It also appears that several of the executives from 1066 Labs, which had offices in Hastings, UK and Redmond, WA, have made the move to Daqri, including 1066 Labs CEO David Hayes who is now serving as EVP at Daqri. “The 1066 team is excited to be joining DAQRI at such a pivotal point in the company’s growth,” Hayes said in a statement. “Our expertise in hardware combined with DAQRI’s innovations in both hardware and software will be game-changing for wearable tech. We look forward to working together to bring the most advanced wearable device to market.” This acquisition makes a ton of sense for Daqri, which showed off the latest version of their enterprise-focused augmented reality smart helmet at CES this year. The tech from 1066 Labs will likely be making its way into future headsets from the company if it hasn’t already. |
Strange sensations: HTC’s brave new virtual world | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | I notice is a feeling of weight on my face. Followed by a sensation of standing in boundless space. A monochrome 360-degree vanishing-point vista winks into view. I look around, blinking into the far distance and very quickly my adjusting eyes fill with grit… Welcome to the weird world of 21st century virtual reality. What does it feel like to step inside the latest hugely-hyped tech reboot? Something like — I — the sensation you might experience had you been swallowed by a 1960s television set, perhaps after spending too many hours staring into its grainy screen. There’s even an electrical umbilical tethering you to the wall. No reality here, then, just pixels every which way you look. Does it feel like the future? Frankly no, it feels strangely retro. Wind back the clock an hour and the pixels have fallen away from my eyes and I’m sitting, untethered, on an actual sofa, looking at a real human being in retinal high definition – HTC’s Drew Bamford, corporate VP and head of its Creative Labs team of product designers. Also a VR evangelist, as I am about to find out. “We were just talking about you people,” he says, looping in the PR sitting to my left with a knowing side-eye, after I confess my VR scepticism. They both laugh – with a little too much hard-pumped enthusiasm. HTC has a lot riding on the success of the Vive. And therefore on the virtual reality reboot, generally. Sceptics aren’t exactly welcome in this brave new world. Bamford is of course a paid up member of the ‘VR is the future’ club – but then he has to be, given the precarious fortunes of HTC’s business. The mobile maker has been hammered in the competitive Android OEM space in recent years and is banking on its VR partnership with games publisher Valve to revive its device making business. The wider consumer electronics industry is also on the hunt for the next smash-hit success – as the smartphone market reaches saturation point. Although few others stepped into VR as early as HTC or have yet bet so big. And so we arrive at the HTC Vive, which will ship to buyers next month, on , priced at $800 plus the price of a powerful enough PC needed to drive the VR experience. This cutting-edge yet somehow retro-looking headset is undoubtedly why I have been afforded half an hour of Bamford’s time here at . VR, we’re told by the ceaseless tech PR drum-beat, is going to be 2016’s Big Thing. HTC is a clear believer; one of relatively few companies throwing a headset into the VR ring at this nascent stage. Although more are getting involved — at least at the more budget smartphone-powered ‘ ‘ end of things. But then considering how crowded and viciously thin the margins in the smartphone space nowadays (iPhones excepted), the barren hinterlands of VR probably induced sensations of wild relief in HTC’s management. ‘Here, finally, is a space where we can stand out without needing to wield Samsung-sized marketing budgets,’ they might well have thought. Safe to say, ‘sick of smartphones’ is probably one of the more concise explanations for the latest attempt to kindle a mainstream VR market. And this time the virtual reality is for real! Or so they’d have us believe. “I come from a background in consumer electronics products, primarily, design. And so I’ve worked on a lot of diverse products but since I got to HTC almost nine years ago I’ve worked almost exclusively on phones. So this is for me a little bit like getting back to my roots and working on different kinds of consumer experiences,” says Bamford, discussing his personal excitement for VR and – therefore – for HTC’s Vive. (And, by implication, his fatigue with phones.) “But for some of the team it’s kind of a new thing — they were hired as phone people and now they’re like learning about designing stuff you wear on your body or immersing people in VR. “For me it’s a little bit like going back to 2006 when we were pioneering smartphone experience design and there was an opportunity to establish new patterns. To discover new ways of interacting. We’re actively doing that, especially in VR right now — which is a lot of fun.” “We’re creating a totally alternate reality in VR. And there’s a lot to do,” he adds “There’s a lot to figure out. But we’re taking it step-by-step, right. I have no doubt that the things that we’re designing today will seem quite antiquated in a couple of years. But that’s just how the process works.” Here at MWC, the world’s largest mobile industry focused conference, HTC’s booth is symbolically split in two, divided across a carpeted thoroughfare that funnels a continual parade of suits back and forth. One half of the booth displays a smorgasbord of mobile hardware: different smartphones and connected devices (such as the wearables HTC is making in partnership with Under Armour) curated into what amounts to exhibition of well made but sadly under-appreciated hardware. On the other side it’s pure, minimalist VR. Here the Vive branding looms large, watched over, here and there, by HTC’s neon green lettering. Over the four days of the conference a steady stream of men queue for a chance to don a headset and sit in chairs blasting virtual stuff in partially screened booths or prancing around in carpeted display rooms with painterly backdrops probing the Vive’s room-scale claims. Most of these test bays can be peered into by anyone who happens by. HTC’s brave new public face, then, is the strange spectacle of besuited blokes blindly gesticulating into thin air. Here’s To Crazy, indeed. It has already taken a long time for HTC to arrive at this point. At MWC last year and gave the first official glimpse of the Vive’s distinctly dimpled headset. Chou has since been moved out of the company, passing the CEO role to chairperson Cher Wang who described VR as its priority. Implication being that smartphones are now playing second fiddle to the virtual future it’s hoping to build with Valve. And yet VR evangelists can only dream of a profitable business comprised of pixelated ‘experiences’ at this oh-so-nascent stage. The hype is real, certainly. The profits are – for now – tantalizingly imaginary. Bamford’s job, then, is to talk up the potential of VR. And talk he does. “I believe outside of gaming there are all sorts of incredible applications for this technology,” he tells TechCrunch. “For example one area we’re working quite a lot in is tools for designers and engineers. So we’re working with partners like Dassault Systemes in France to figure out how to let automotive designers for example visualize cars in VR. So that they don’t have to build these full scale clay mock ups. Because it’s so important to be able to get a sense of the scale of the product. And see different sight lines and things like that, and it’s not something you can easily do on a monitor. Many of these automotive companies have been building these giant cave systems that cost millions of dollars to install. And now they can basically replace it with a $799 Vive. “So that’s exciting. And of course the other area — from a design and engineering standpoint — that’s interesting is architecture. Because it’s so much about inhabiting a space. And feeling… different sight lines, feeling what it’s like to move through a space, which is the perfect application for a room scale device like Vive. It’s not something you can really get an experience of on a monitor.” “We’re working with medical partners like Surgical Theatre,” he continues. “Which is doing pre-visualization of tumors for brain surgeons. That kind of application — it’s information the surgeon couldn’t normally get; a 3D view of the tumor they couldn’t normally get. So it may be inconvenient to put this thing on your head or dorky or whatever but in an environment like that of course you’re willing to do it.” Specialist enterprise use-cases are one thing, where VR can blend in as just another task-specific work tool. But that’s not a mainstream market to rival the massive appeal of smartphones, which is of course the trick every mobile maker yearns to be able to repeat. The raging success of the smartphone is, however, a very hard act to follow. Would anyone really want to spend all day in VR? Isn’t that just dystopic? “Don’t count it out,” says Bamford, suggesting certain types of information-dense office jobs – like finance workers – could, for example, replace their banks of monitors with a VR headset. “Certainly in the office I can see a lot of people wearing a VR headset all day at their desk.” Which sounds like one way for office drones to escape drear cubicles — in an almost style real-world VR plot twist… “One of the things that I’m personally really excited about is content that you could say it’s not really a game but content that provides people with experiences they couldn’t normally get in the real world,” Bamford continues. “For example one of the most popular demos we have is Wevr’s The Blu… It’s an underwater experience where there’s a blue whale. So it’s not really a game actually, it’s just you’re experiencing being underwater in an environment that most people will never see in real life. I think there’s a huge opportunity to do more of that kind of experience. For example you could visit the top of Mount Everest or journey back in time to be in the Roman Colosseum. Just being in a place and exploring a place I think can be really compelling in VR.” “I agree a smartphone is a more everyday product, for sure,” he adds, picking up the earlier train of thought. “It’s something you can carry with you everywhere and you can use easily in public without looking like a cyborg… But I would not discount the fact that eventually some types of people will replace their desktop monitor with a VR headset. Depending on what you’re doing. Already we have partners like Envelop that are building systems that allow VR developers to develop in VR so they don’t have to have a monitor — they just use a headset. “Certainly people in the VR industry will do that but I think even outside of that you’ll see — you could imagine somebody in the finance business. These guys right now have six Bloomberg screens in front of their desk. They could easily replace that with an HMD [head-mounted display] in order to see more data — which is what it’s all about. “And beyond that I think as the technology is miniaturized, as VR and AR [augmented reality] converge, you’ll get VR-like experiences with a significantly less alienating physical experience, right. You won’t necessarily have to put an HMD in front of your eyes in order to experience 3D content… From the AR side, there’s going to be this kind of portable VR that maybe is less intrusive, just looks like glasses or something. But certainly in the office I can see a lot of people wearing a VR headset all day at their desk.” Is he envisaging a much lighter weight wearable in future? Or something else? “You’ll have holographic displays,” he suggests. “Where you get similar content experiences. Where all the software work we’re doing can translate into that but it’ll be a totally different hardware delivery system over time. I mean this is years out, but maybe not too many years. Maybe in five years you’ll be doing something like that.” VR without the need to don a headset starts to sound a lot less like a separate industry, IMO – and more an adjunct to the smartphone market. After all, a holographic smartphone would still be a smartphone, just one with added VR smarts. Much like mobile makers a few years ago trying to push 3D screens. (A push that fizzled out just as quickly.) Not that HTC is in VR to be a VR purist of course; it just needs to sell product – whatever shape or form that takes. Hence it’s already crossing the VR/AR streams by adding a front-facing camera to the Vive headset that allows for some real-world ‘content’ to bleed into the wearer’s virtual world. In part this is a helpful safety feature, so users can switch to the Vive’s rotoscope-style view of what’s actually going on in the room around them – say, to avoid treading on sharp objects left on the carpet. Or to sneak a glimpse at what their friends are up to. So there’s an element of the AR/VR blend that presumably helps reduce VR FOMO too. Fear of missing out has explicitly driven another Vive feature addition: phone services, which will enable users to take and make calls when in VR. Bamford says this feature was added after feedback from testers found people were worried they were missing on real-world communications with their friends. Which, given how much people love their smartphones, messaging and social media apps should probably have been abundantly obvious. Even pure, unadulterated escapism from real life needs to be diluted to accommodate constant connectivity needs – and so Vive has both an eye on and line back into the real world. “One of the things that we discovered in our research is that people love the idea of being immersed in VR and feeling like they’re in a completely different place and not worrying about the real world. But at the same time when they’re in there for a while we found that people start to wonder if they’re missing things. Are they missing calls? Are they missing messages from there friends, etc. And so the phone connectivity is an attempt to solve that problem. So when you’re in VR you can get a phone call — you can talk on the phone. You can get text messages, reply to text messages — so you can enjoy VR without worrying that you’re missing what’s going on in real life.” The need to ensure that VR users still feel connected with their real-world relationships when they’re escaping into virtual worlds has presented one specific design challenge that Bamford says HTC is still wrestling with: how to inject real world missives/notifications into VR without ‘breaking presence’, as it’s known. (See the end of this post for a short VR glossary.) “We don’t want to break presence. That’s the central tenant of VR. You don’t want to take people out of the experience. So we try to make it as non-intrusive as possible,” he explains. “The way it works right now is you can be in any VR experience and you get a notification that appears in 3D space that says you’re getting a call or text message. And then if you want to act on that notification you bring up a pretty standard UI that lets you do things like answer the call or send a canned response to a text message.” I jokily suggest that maybe emails should appear as white rabbits hopping into view. “That could be the next version — so an Alice in Wonderland style,” laughs Bamford. “Different animals could trot into the scene… ” “That’s the kind of native VR integration that eventually we’ll get to, I think. But at the moment it’s quite a bit simpler than that,” he adds. “It’s been a challenging part to design. And we’re still, frankly, tuning that to make it as seamless as possible. But we’re getting there.” Standard UI elements can appear as wireframe interfaces within Vive’s virtual spaces to make them stand out in more richly rendered environments. Engaging with these menus means using the bundled controllers to point, swipe and click. These twin sticks – one held in each hand — have multiple buttons and a swipe-pad apiece, allowing them to stand in as virtual hands or guns or shields, at one moment, and then act as a point and click device to navigate menus the next. The controllers are lightweight and ergonomic enough that at times it’s possible to forget you are holding a couple of oddly shaped pieces of black plastic and believe you are really hefting that translucent shield or pair of guns. Depending on the quality of the content, of course. HTC’s selected demos did the best at showcasing the immersive potential of VR, as you’d expect, but I was less convinced by some of the content that will be bundled with the Vive. In one game, Job Simulator, the controllers appear as a pair of cartoonish white hands — and trying to pick up objects in the virtual office environs using these mitts felt hopelessly clumsy. But perhaps that was the point? Playing a game where you pretend you’re inept in a simulation of a fake office job where everything appears ridiculously cartoonish and nothing really needs to be done is presumably someone, somewhere’s idea of fun. Still, on the content front, VR offers the prospect of something worse than mild tedium – out and out nausea. On the risk of this, Bamford says: “We’re very confident that our technology will make you the least sick of any VR experience.” And in my own half-hour or so demo of the Vive that claim at least stood up. I came away without feeling nauseous. But did experience a feeling of grittiness in the eyes, much like if you’ve been straining to look at a poor quality screen or trying to read in the dark or have spent too much time exposed to UV lights. I was also being careful about how I moved around — avoiding making any fast or jerky movements. When it comes to VR, FON (fear of nausea) and FOLLAD (fear of looking like a dork) are at least as potent as FOMO, IMO. “We do think with 90fps, with very low latency, with low persistence displays, with millimeter precision tracking that we’re offering you’re very unlikely to get sick with Vive,” says Bamford – although he quickly follows this up with the caveat “if the content is designed correctly”. Has he ever personally felt nauseous while testing Vive? Only when something has gone wrong, he says – such as when using a development prototype that isn’t working properly. Then he’s felt “dizzy”. Even so, he concedes there are a lot of variables in play — some of which HTC/Valve can’t control, given they’re leaning on “hundreds” of developers to create the ‘mind-blowing’ content needed to lure people into their virtual spaces. “There are a lot of variables in how you design the experience. And some experiences are more likely to make you feel ill than others. So one of the things we’ve discussed and debated is whether there should be some kind of rating system for propensity to get sick from a particular type of content. But it’s quite controversial because you don’t want to turn people off of certain content and everybody has a very individual sense for how they’ll react so we haven’t gotten too far on that yet. But I think that could happen, I think there could be a rating system where on a scale of one to five this is more or less likely to make you feel less nauseous.” “This is the reason we really need a way to filter the best content into our experience and make sure that bad content doesn’t get onto the market because it could poison the well,” he adds. Eyestrain aside, the strongest negative sensation I experienced from trying the Vive (in what, it should be emphasized, was HTC’s own controlled demo environment, being shown demo content they were choosing) was a feeling of being constrained. But given this (gen-1) VR experience requires wearing a weighty headset over your eyes while walking in a small space tethered to a cable that easily tangles with your feet it’s hardly surprising to come away feeling more fettered than liberated. ‘Room-scale VR’, then, translates to being able to take a few tentative steps in a given direction. Provided there isn’t a wall in the way. Another demo — Google’s Tilt Brush, a painting program that lets you paint trails of virtual paint in the air and which will also be bundled free with Vive — ended up making me feel a little claustrophobic after I ended up painting myself into a cage made of glowing orange streaks. Thing is, the elements you see within VR are always at risk of invading your personal space; because of course there’s no screen barrier here, you are right inside the content – so it’s possible that, rather than feeling liberated within boundless virtual space, you end up feeling hemmed in and/or mobbed by pixels. And sure, you can always walk right through the fourth wall (as it were), passing through these virtual objects since they’re not — haha! — real. But since they look solid and are designed to trick your brain into belief, well your perception of how much space you have to move around shrinks to fit them. At another point during my Vive demo I materialized partially inside a moon floating at about head height. Discombobulating is probably the appropriate word for that. And not a little ironic that I had to take a few side-steps to try to find a little personal space in what was a virtual rendering of infinite outer space… Feelings of being trapped inside virtual infinity? Yep, those are the weird sentences you end up typing when writing about VR. Talking of moving around, Bamford says that one of the custom elements HTC’s Vive might let users switch on and off, depending on how sensitive they are to faster animations within VR, is a teleportation feature that lets people “zap themselves” (as he puts it) from different locations to avoid needing to actually walk to places given that their (physical) play space has some hard limits.(The Vive’s tracking system maxes out at a space that’s 15 feet by 15 feet.) “The safest way to do it is just by blinking your location to a new place. You’re instantaneously transported. But actually some people’s preference – including my preference – is to do really fast transition, animated transition… Some people call it ludicrous speed so it’s this really fast animation. And that doesn’t bother me at all. And actually for me I believe it provides you a lot more context because you don’t get as disoriented when you’re moving. You understand how you got there. But for some people it actually makes them pretty nauseated.” “So this is the kind of thing where we’re working on ways for people to turn stuff like that on and off, depending on how sensitive they are. It needs to be a personal preference,” he adds. There’s also a lot of internal debate at HTC about another element of VR design: whether people will want to have realistic looking (i.e. selfie-style) avatars, according to Bamford. Or whether they will want to go full-blown fantasy character stylee – and look like a cartoon dog or something. This question does not arise so much for solitary play but rather for social VR — which Bamford is convinced will be a thing. People will want to get together virtually when they are physically apart, he asserts. “People do want to be social in VR. As much as you think of VR as a very solitary thing where you’re just wearing a headset in your basement, people want to go into that virtual world and then interact with other people, so that’s a huge area of investigation for us. “The social element is a little funny. But we’ve looked at scenarios like, for example, sitting next to your significant other on a couch and you’re both wearing headsets watching a VR film. I think that will happen,” he continues. “You’ll still be able to interact with the person it’s just that you’re in VR.” Interact sure, just don’t lean in for a kiss. Smashing VR headsets together doesn’t sound at all fun. How many marriages is VR going to ruin, I joke. “At the same time how many people will meet in VR and be perfectly happy?” he counters. So perhaps VR can save Second Life too. (Yes, in the tech.) Or perhaps it will power the next big thing in online dating. (Albeit, the burning question then would be: in VR would anyone be able to tell if you’re a dork in real life too?) On the avatar design point, Bamford says the internal debate continues. “We’ve looked, for example, at technologies that would allow you to easily scan your own face and create an avatar that looks like you. But it’s unclear if anybody really wants to do that. Or certainly if you do scan yourself everybody kind of agrees that you’re going to want to be able to improve/touch up your avatar. So it looks sort of like you but a better version of you.” How photorealistic can VR avatars be made to look at this point, with the current gen tech? “It can look like you but then the challenge is animating the eyes and the expression around the eyes and the mouth, so that it actually looks realistic is quite difficult,” he says, admitting there is still an “uncanny valley problem”. “Probably you will look like a creepy version of you,” he concedes. It’s a very strange world you’re building here, I observe. “Well someone has to do it,” he says, before asserting more emphatically: “It will improve dramatically over time. And I think it’ll be pretty quick, the improvements. Already for example we’re working with partners that will take just the audio stream from your voice and automatically animate your mouth to match the words that you’re saying. And it’s still a little bit funny looking but eventually as the rigging gets better on the characters and as the speech recognition gets better it could be do-able.” So are people going to be wowed by the Vive’s gen-1 VR experiences or is it going to take a few iterations — and some of the refinements Bamford has been talking about — to hone the hardware and software to a point where the experience is more lifelike blow-your-socks off and less grainy/creepy tethered in an uncanny valley? “I absolutely think people will be wowed,” says Bamford. “I’ve been working in technology for a long time — 20 years. And I’ve worked on a lot of stuff that people thought was ground breaking at the time but I’ve never worked on anything that got the reactions that VR gets. I mean I’ve seen so many people do the demo and literally have to [sit down… because of] the sensory overload. “It’s quite impressive the reactions you get out of this. I’ve actually never seen anybody after a demo that was not — that didn’t say it was in some way mind blowing.” Sensory overload from demos of is one thing but there are likely to be more sensitive considerations when it comes to certain types of VR games and experiences. On this point, Bamford tells an anecdote about the first time he played the zombie game, Arizona Sunshine, in VR. “Nobody told me how to pick up the gun and use it so I didn’t know how to protect myself. And what happens is these zombies come at you and then just start hitting you with their limbs. And it was horrifying, actually. “So you can imagine people actually being really scared playing some of these things so I think there do need to be some kind of warnings depending on the content type – ‘this can seriously mentally disturb you’, actually. If you’re not prepared for the content. So you have to know what you’re getting into. And I think there will have to be some education around what sorts of content’s appropriate to different people.” “But for people who want to be scared – and there are a lot of people who want to be scared, it will be the most satisfyingly horrifying experience you can imagine,” he adds. Bamford does not stick around to see me do my Vive demo. But he does have a few words of advice for what I should do if I feel like I’m turning a little green. “Remember,” he tells me, “you can always close your eyes.” Amen to that. Leaving the conference later in the day my VR experience dissolves into the Barcelona sunshine and a residual thought surfaces from the depths of my brain: wow, now that really does look amazing… – – – a VR system that can track a user’s head howsoever it moves – the ability to walk and be tracked around a space while in VR, rather than needing to sit or stand still. Does still require the headset to be tethered to the PC that powers the VR – the light emitting system inside the Vive’s twin base stations which power its 360-degree head tracking by determining the position of the wearer’s head. The base stations sweep the room with lasers while multiple photosensors on the headset keep time between light sweeps – using the numbers to calculate the position of the user’s head – a safety feature within Vive that bleeds a wireframe view of real-world objects into the Vive’s virtual world to help prevent the user from hurting themselves by, for instance, walking into walls – a technique to reduce motion blur/judder as it is perceived within VR by illuminating pixels for a short time only, when they are correctly aligned for the user’s viewpoint, and switching them off immediately the viewpoint shifts – the feeling of immersion that a user of VR experiences; designers aim never to ‘break presence’, as they term it – VR content that’s not designed as a game per se but is rather intended to evoke feelings or emotions on account of the spectacle/encounter the user experiences – the challenges of animating humanoid VR avatars so they seem realistic, rather than creepy, such as animating expressions around the eyes or lips to sync with spoken words – mingling with other VR users in a virtual environment as opposed to escaping into a solitary other worldly VR experience – the ability to view something in simulated 3D in VR before actually viewing the object in real life – a locomotion mechanism that animates a VR user’s transition from one place to another in a game world to help preserve location context and reduce disorientation. Can cause nausea |
Slack will soon start testing voice and video chat | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | Slack is gunning for Skype and Google Hangouts with the 2016 product roadmap it revealed today. The biggest change coming: the ability to seamlessly turn a text chat into a voice or video chat will begin testing “very soon”. This builds on Slack’s January 2015 , when it said these features would eventually be released. [ : Slack was being cheeky when it said voice chat would be coming “very soon”. Today the feature began rolling out on desktop.] At its customer conference in San Francisco, the company outlined what it plans to do to stay ahead of its workplace chat competitors. It already has 2.3 million daily active users, up from 2 million in December, and wants to give them more options to be productive, collaborative, and transparent. While that DAU stat might sound low, it’s huge in the enterprise. Considering Slack sees 320 million minutes of active usage per weekday, that breaks down to about 140 minutes of usage per user per weekday. Slack VP of Product April Underwood tells me that voice chat on desktop will come first, and then the company will focus on making it work on all its devices and apps. Video will have to wait until after that. Underwood noted that you can already make voice calls via Skype’s Slack integration. But with its own feature, she says the use case will be “If I’m DMing someone in Slack and we want to switch to have a quick voice conversation, it addresses that problem.” Slack plans to make a full what-you-see-is-what-you-get formatting tool for messages so you can make sure text looks just right in case a co-worker wants to copy and paste it out. Slack will be improving search operators to make it easier for non-power users to find files and other content. Shared Channels will become a bigger part of the Slack experience. They could help you communicate across siloed teams at big companies. Eventually, Slack says it also wants to empower organizations to interface with outside parties like marketing agencies and technology vendors. Slack is also improving its billing system so large teams can quickly get started. To make it easier for developers to build more powerful experiences atop its platform, Slack is also building out its Search, Learning & Intelligence (SLI) division. Beyond the roadmap, Slack spent the conference highlighting teams like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Charity:Water, and medical researchers who are using Slack to stay in touch. , who Slack promoted to VP of Product in January, opened the day saying she was just going to tell everyone what Slack plans to build rather than being secretive. “We like to be really open and transparent because we want your feedback” says explained. Underwood followed the announcements by taking questions from the crowd…though that quickly devolved into attendees asking if their dream features would ever get built. The imminent release of voice and video chat could make offices noisier, but it will certainly make Slack more of a comprehensive communication solution rather than a tool plugged into a suite of other products. That might convince companies Slack is worth paying for. Given Slack’s focus on making work searchable, it’s easy to imagine that years down the line, Slack could use voice recognition to create transcripts of your voice or video meetings. Outside its own product, Slack is fostering an family of third-party apps, integrations, and bots. While others might be able to copy its features, they won’t be able to copy its community, drawn to the network effect of the market leader.’ In December, Slack announced it had 2 million daily active users and 570,000 paid seats. It leveraged that momentum to get its A-list investors to compile an If Slack’s strategy pans out, it could pull away from the pack and solidify itself as the next staple of the enterprise. Because everyone needs to communicate, Slack could become ubiquitous enough to serve as a social hub and identity layer for other enterprise apps. |
Violence in the West Bank after Waze led Israeli soldiers into Palestinian danger zone | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | A battle broke out just outside of Jerusalem Monday after GPS mapping app led Israeli soldiers into the Kalandia Palestinian refugee camp. According to , two armed soldiers from the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Okets unit were traveling in a military vehicle along a route they thought was within the Israel border. Palestinians immediately started throwing rocks and a firebomb at the vehicle and it is believed these actions set the vehicle on fire. At least one Palestinian died in the clash and 10 others were seriously wounded, according to the . The soldiers managed to escape and scattered in different directions. One soldier was able to use a cell phone to call for help, but the other was still missing, prompting Israel to send more troops and helicopters to the area. Israeli forces found the missing soldier safe in a different location a few hours later. Google bought the Israel-based routing app Waze for $1 billion more than two years ago. The app is supposed to highlight dangerous areas in the region, but according to initial reports, Waze sent the two soldiers on a route that went past the Israel border and into a war zone. Waze punched back, claiming the soldiers turned those settings off. And, according to a statement issued to , Waze also said it was the responsibility of drivers to pay attention to road signs and to follow local laws when traveling in those areas. “[Waze] includes a specific default setting that prevents routes through areas which are marked as dangerous or prohibited for Israelis to drive through,” Waze wrote in the AFP statement. “In this case, the setting was disabled. In addition, the driver deviated from the suggested route and, as a result, entered the prohibited area. “There are also red signs on the road in question that prohibit access to Palestinian-controlled territories (for Israelis). It is the responsibility of every driver to adhere to road and traffic signs and obey local laws.” Waze is a popular app among Israeli citizens and works on crowdsourced information for the best route. However, it does not offer travel routes along the West Bank or in some of the most dangerous areas along the Israel-Palestine border. The soldiers would have had to turn off the safety settings in order to travel in those areas considered dangerous. Waze may have also been confused about which route to give the soldiers, as many of the areas on either side also have similar names. There are three Kalandias along the Israeli border. It’s not clear why the soldiers were using Waze, given the obvious safety concerns, instead of paying attention to road signs. |
Meet the foxes behind LA’s latest startup gem | Sanjna Verma | 2,016 | 3 | 1 |
Scrolling through the @shopboxfox Instagram account is enough to notice the clean-cut aesthetic: feminine, driven, artistic. However, the ladies behind LA’s , Chelsea Moore, Sabena Suri and Jenni Olivero, are channeling much more than their social media accounts let on; they are enhancing strategy and technology to make one of life’s favorite moments, gift giving, easier and more customizable than ever before. According to Olivero, when one of the three founders’ mutual friends fell sick with pneumonia, they wanted to cheer her up with a couple of her favorite things. But, “with long work hours, we couldn’t find the time to run around to our favorite stores then get to the post office before closing,” she said, “We created BOXFOX for busy women like ourselves, so that even if you don’t have the time, you can easily send a thoughtful, personal gift that means the world.” The three women pooled together their personal resources and funds and launched BOXFOX in November 2014, in Los Angeles. In this tech-and-funding-hype era, the founders felt like their lack of conforming to typical California startup ideals, such as moving to the Silicon Valley or doing funding rounds, were actually to their advantage. “We’re up against a lot more glass ceilings — as millennials, as women, as small business owners. There will always be naysayers but we’ve grown into the mentality not to take no for an answer,” said Olivero. “We’ve been hearing no ever since we started,” laughed Moore, when she started talking about partnership outreach to various retail firms. BOXFOX was turned down by retail idols several times over before partnering with Herbivore Botanicals in their first month of business. “Every time we got a ‘yes’ we had so many more ‘no’s’ beforehand, so it was both a humbling and awesome experience,” said Moore. Scrolling through shopboxfox.com now, retail vendors like Rifle Paper Co., Kate Spade, Sprinkles and Honest Company showcase the founder trio’s determination to keep BOXFOX products aligned with their aesthetic, luxury standard — and, of course, not-taking-no-for-an-answer mentality. “I can’t imagine what would have happened if we stopped at our first ‘no’,” said Suri, and Moore nodded in unison. The past 16 months have twisted and turned Moore, Suri and Olivero’s lives inside out. The three women are juggling second jobs, social lives and family commitments while simultaneously dealing with BOXFOX’s sudden success. BOXFOX began by offering a set of standard gift packages, like the Hustle or Jet Set boxes, and later launched their BUILD-A-BOXFOX campaign that includes handwritten notes and customized box creation. Building each box takes time and effort and a careful eye, not to mention that the BOXFOX founding team prides itself in curating relationships with their customers. Olivero noted that her favorite part of box creation was the personalized notes. “People really say the most beautiful things to each other, and that kindness is such a strong reminder of what we’re all about: real, human relationships,” said Olivero. BOXFOX’s moral values, alongside attention to detail and artistic aesthetic, projected their growth faster than any of the three women could have imagined. “We hit our 1 year goal in about 4 months, and all of a sudden, every spare minute we could find went to customizing each box and shipping them out,” said Suri. “It’s always been quality over quantity for us, but now we are having to consider getting that extra help when we need it.” Extra help so far comes in the form of sisters, friends, family members and significant others who have come in and out during peak holiday season to help with inventory. “We’re kind of lucky that we built BOXFOX out of our house, so making it like a command central was easy,” continued Moore. “Everyone has been really understanding because they see that this is what drives us every day.” Suri agreed, adding that “coffee, iCal and noise-cancelling headphones all help — maybe in that order?” For the coffee-drinking, hardworking trio, this is merely the beginning for BOXFOX. For two weeks starting February 5, BOXFOX is opening a pop-up shop at The Grove in LA, the first time they will have done any kind of brick-and-mortar presence for BOXFOX. “[The pop-up shop] will be an interactive experience for shoppers to mix and match our products and create beautiful gifts to send their friends near and far,” said Suri, “but there is so much more we are experimenting with through our data and research, and observing the way our customers interact with the site. The pop-up shop will be our chance to see how they interact with us in person. We are really excited!” The three are especially excited to see how the customers engage with some of their favorite and new boxes. As an avid traveler, Olivero’s favorite box is the Jet Set pack, while Moore is partial to the Hustle box because of the mentality the three ladies share. Suri is excited to see the reception to the BOXFOX Galentines Line, adding, “Galentines gifts propelled our business, because women love to give and get gifts. We modeled some of the boxes of what we would want to get or what our sisters would want to get, and the pop-up shop is the perfect time to see how the new line goes!” At the end of the day, BOXFOX has created the most unique experience for each of the three founders. For Suri, “it’s been the opportunity to be such an integral part of some of people’s biggest moments, whether that’s a new baby or a new home, a graduation or even a wedding.” For Moore, it’s been the ability to say “we’re there for you” even when time or work doesn’t permit the in-person interaction. Olivero acknowledges that “there’s a constant tug of war between dreaming big and staying grounded. We want to do big things. We want to be the go-to for gifting for any and all occasions. At the same time, we always want to be sure that what we’re doing is grounded in a real, tangible service that makes people’s lives easier — and that much more happy!” “We’re in that part of life where we don’t want to stop, and we love what we are doing. Everyone around us is supportive of our ambitions, which is another important key to our success as well,” said Moore. These three women are part of an unstoppable force in the startup community and, in my eyes, are role models. Interacting with them over the course of three weeks solidifies my assumption of the new generation of womankind. They prove that despite working two or three jobs, having a social life and achieving all your dreams is possible. |
Microsoft’s Brad Smith stands with Apple while passionately defending encryption | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, gave a passionate defense of encryption today, saying his company stood with Apple in its legal battle with the FBI. He made his remarks at the in San Francisco. “There is no technology better than encryption,” Smith said. “Despite the best intentions, the path to hell begins at the back door and we need to make sure that encryption technology remains strong.” Smith asserted that his company is going to defend its customers and it’s up to the government to make its case with a targeted individual or business instead of trying to do an end-around via the cloud vendor. “We believe emphatically when the government wants to investigate a business, it should go to the business and not go to the cloud provider. It’s the way it’s worked for over two centuries. Cloud computing should not change that balance,” he said. Smith also emphasized that when there was legal grounds to give up information, the company also took that legal requirement very seriously. In fact, i last year it answered a variety requests for information on the suspected attackers. “In the days and weeks after the Paris attacks, Microsoft received 14 lawful orders for people at large in Belgium. We were able to respond, determine they were lawful and turn the content over over [to the requesting law enforcement agencies] in under 30 minutes,” Smith told RSA. He made it clear, however that a big issue today is that the law has failed to keep up with technology and that had to change. “We live in a world where some things improve with age and other things do not. Technology law does not improve with age,” he said. He held up a 1912 adding machine, the same last week to show that the All Writs Act, and was last updated in 1911. That’s when the state of the art in technology was that adding machine. He believes we can do better than that and it’s time for the law to catch up with technology and for us as a society to bring the law in line with the age of cloud and mobile computing. That’s going to involve some thoughtful debate and it’s going to require the technology community to come together, while “heeding timeless values and respecting fundamental rights,” he said. “Technology keeps moving forward. Our job is to innovate. We can’t do it in a vacuum. We need to connect with the world and engage in public debate. The world will [continue to advance technologically] only if the law can catch up,” he said. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 8 | null |
Extensify lets you “tweak” your iOS apps without jailbreaking | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | A newly launched “tweak store” called gives iOS users an alternative to jailbreaking their devices by offering a simpler way to install modified versions of popular third-party applications like Snapchat, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Vine, Instagram and others. Unlike with some of the jailbreaking efforts in the past, the Extensify app – basically an app store for tweaks – can be installed without needing to be tethered to a computer. However, it stops short of allowing users to modify the iOS operating system itself. That doesn’t necessarily make using Extensify “safer” than jailbreaking, of course – you’re still downloading software from outside the trusted App Store environment. The usual security concerns apply here, and you should not proceed to use Extensify without a solid understanding of those risks. However, Extensify does represent a clever way to avoid having to jailbreak your phone or tablet in order to take advantage of various tweaks. Extensify comes along at a time when the benefits to jailbreaking your iOS device have been diminished. Over the years, Apple has introduced a number of customizations to its software inspired by the jailbreak community, including things like , a battery saving mode, an easier way to access commonly used controls (via the Control Center), picture-in-picture mode, split screen mode, interactive notifications, and In addition, Apple has hardened its operating system, making jailbreaking more difficult as increasing numbers of security holes have been closed. Combined with a dwindling user base of jailbreakers, and the of , jailbreaking has been on a downward trend. Instead of jailbreaking, Extensify users can instead just run modified apps that offer additional functionality, which are installed fairly easily. The idea for Extensify comes from developers Majd Alfhaily and Kevin Ko, who featured prominently in the jailbreak community and know first-hand how frustrating it can be to wait for new jailbreak releases. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VtQupPOiaw] “We don’t treat Extensify as a jailbreak replacement, but our plan is to fill the gap between jailbreak releases,” says Alfhaily. The way the system works is by first installing Extensify through a configuration profile on your device. After Extensify is trusted, you can browse its app store to download the tweaks. The app sends a request to the iTunes App Store, downloads a fresh copy of the host application, repackages the app with the tweaks (called “exos” in Extensify), then sends the request back to the device and sideloads the application. (Side-loading apps, as you may recall, became possible with the release of Xcode 7.) Extensify doesn’t host apps on its servers, only the exos (the tweaks), as all but one are made by the team behind Extensify. The “Phantom” tweak for Snapchat is the only exception. At launch, there are over 25 different exos available. Exos only work on free applications, and the tweaked apps can run alongside the originals. (The tweaked version will have a “+” plus sign next to its name.) But the creators say they will open up the Extensify platform to outside developers, who will have to go through a submission and vetting process to get their apps onto Extensify’s “tweak store.” “All submissions will have to go through us first to make it to Extensify, we always ensure that the tweak is safe to use before accepting the submission,” explains Alfhaily. “When using a tweaked app, no personal data is going through our servers. It functions just like the original app, with added functionality,” he adds. It’s likely that many mainstream iOS users will not be comfortable with this sideloading system due to security concerns, but, as with the devoted jailbreaking community, there is always a group that believes the advantages outweigh the risks. In this case, the advantages are apps that let you do things you couldn’t with the official version. For example, the “Phantom” Snapchat tweak lets you keep snaps in your feed and mark them as read whenever you see fit, automatically save sent media, select multiple contacts at once, specify where received media is saved, and much more. A tweak for Twitter offers a video downloader, native Instagram viewer, a tool to view blocked profiles, a way to confirm favorites, and other fixes. Similar tweaks are available for other apps. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_20Qvynfgk&w=854&h=480] Where Extensify may run into problems is its business model – it will launch as a subscription business. The plan is to charge users $8.99 every three months, and introduce other payment tiers for 6- and 12-month subscriptions. Jailbreakers are often notoriously against paying for software, and can access many tweaks through jailbreaking already. As they may not want to pay for Extensify, the team will likely need to target power users outside the jailbreak scene. That could be a small niche. In addition, the software developers whose apps are being “tweaked” may take action against Extensify, especially as it’s profiting by modifying their proprietary software. In other words, get it while the getting’s good, for it may soon be gone. Extensify’s developers are rolling out invite codes to the app now, but its system is handling these in a randomized fashion, they tell us. That means it could take minutes, hours or even days to get your promo code for a download. Of course, whether or not you download Extensify is up to you. |
Google pours $30 million into European news tech companies | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | Pouring gas on the bonfire of news tech, Google recently announced that it has distributed more than €27 million ($30 million) into projects spanning the European news tech scene. The fund’s goal is to ‘help stimulate innovation in digital journalism’ over the next three years, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said at an event in Paris last week. This batch of project endowments is the first from a €150 million ($167 million) fund the company . “The funding will go to a wide variety of organizations”, Pichai said, describing the companies applying for the (DNI) funds as “wonderfully diverse, ranging from automated content personalization and robot journalism, to hoax-busting apps and tools to verify social media in real-time reporting.” Google and European news organizations have had a tense relationship over the past few years, and Google no doubt hopes to mend some bridges with the Digital News Initiative. In Germany, for example, publishers wanted Google for using short snippets of copy on Google News. The spat culminated in Google making inclusion in Google News and temporarily . The new fund is designed to fund projects in three categories, including ‘prototype projects’ requiring up to €50k ($55k) of funding to build a prototype. In addition, the fund is open to medium projects open to startups and news organizations requiring up to €300k ($333k), and large projects, open to larger organizations with more ambitious goals requiring larger amounts of funding. Among the 128 projects, Google highlights , a Spanish news site that is creating a new journalism funding system based on a crowdfunding model. It will identify niche groups of audiences and invite them to fund a specific story or top up the financial gap in an important coverage. Another recipient of project funding is the German startup . It will use the funds to build an artificial intelligence engine to help publishers communicate directly with readers via instant messaging apps. The first round of contributions is distributed across startups in 23 different European countries, with the largest project investments made in Germany, the UK, Spain, France and Belgium. |
Facebook fights Periscope by showing Live videos higher than saved streams | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | It doesn’t matter if it was Live if you missed it. And Facebook knows that people watch actually Live streams 3X longer than saved ones. So it’s changing the News Feed to prefer on-going broadcasts. Twitter’s big advantage with Periscope is that they’re both inherently real-time platforms. Periscopes generate notifications for all your followers there, and show up instantly at the top of the Twitter timeline. Facebook’s News Feed wasn’t built for real-time content. It’s designed to show you what’s best, even if that’s a few hours old. But that doesn’t work with Live video. Facebook Live lets you permanently save and show off your streams rather than deleting them after 24 hours like Periscope. But it’s the urgency, interaction, and raw unpredictability that make Live videos fun to watch. So today, Facebook made the so-sensible-it-should-have-always-been-like-this decision to rank videos that are currently streaming Live higher in the feed than old saved streams. for celebrities in August before slowly rolling it out to people with Verified Profiles and Pages and eventually Then it gave the option to broadcast last week. Rather than notify all your friends or fans when you broadcast, Facebook cut spam by only sending you a push if the stream comes from a close friend, Page you recently interacted with, or you purposefully subscribed to their Live videos. The change should make it more likely that you’ll catch Facebook Live streams while they’re still in-progress. This way you can leave comments that the broadcaster will see. We’re finally seeing the ways that Facebook Live and Periscope differentiate, considering the streaming and live viewing experiences are nearly identical. Twitter will rely on notifications and you seeing the initial tweet or retweets of Periscopes. It’s more about getting people in during the first few seconds. Meanwhile Facebook will hope to use the massive attention its News Feed receives to surface the best on-going streams where you’re already looking. It can use signals such as Likes and comments to just surface the best streams so you don’t end up getting notified about or shown some boring lunch monologue. |
Pebble just cut the price of the Time and Time Round smartwatches | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | Pebble’s latest smartwatches are now a little less cash. The Time Round is $199 and the Time is $149. At these prices, the Pebble sits more comfortable among its competition. Fitbit’s new Blaze costs $199 and Garmin’s Vivoactive is $219. At $149 rather than $199, the Pebble Time should look a bit more attractive to its target consumers. After all, the Time is a smartwatch with some activity tracking abilities while the Blaze and Vivoactive are activity trackers with some smartwatch capabilities. However, the svelte Time Steel is still $249 — because fashion. This price drop could be the result of several factors. The smartwatch race is getting more competitive with more models hitting the market — but above Pebble’s price point. Second, Apple could announce a refreshed Apple Watch or price drop in the coming weeks and Pebble wanted to get ahead of the news. Or Pebble itself is about to announce a new model and needs to clear the inventory pipes prior to the announcement. Whatever the case, a Pebble Time for $149 is a great deal. It’s a solid device. [gallery ids="1161941,1161919,1161917,1161915,1162036,1161912,1161914,1161913,1127022,1127020,1127021,1161911"] |
The presidential candidate who might do the most for your healthcare is not who you think | Dan Peate | 2,016 | 3 | 1 |
I’ve been at the hospital a lot over the past few weeks, thanks to the arrival of my newborn son. As I sat in the waiting room while my wife did all the hard work, I had a lot of time to watch the staff coming and going. Something that stuck out to me was the numbers of Porsches and other fancy sports cars in the staff parking lot, easily paid for by the 6-figure salaries that . Compare that with the visitors lot, which was full of dusty Honda Civics and Ford Fusions and you have a good illustration of the growing gap between the high costs Americans are paying for healthcare, versus the high profits doctors, hospital administrators, and insurance companies are reaping. Despite many healthcare insurers having decried Obamacare as the end of days, the truth–as measured by both stock prices and revenue results–is the nation’s largest healthcare insurance companies . What’s the source of the ongoing positive return on shareholder investments? It’s the on plan premiums paid by individual policy holders. All this is fueled by sharply increased costs at the consumer level. In fact, has found that since 2010, health insurance deductibles for the average worker have risen nearly three times as fast as premiums, and seven times as fast as wages and inflation. Clearly, with these , we’re at a breaking point, with healthcare reform an inevitable outcome. Yet despite healthcare reform being a popular talking point for most of the candidates, many people (including some of those candidates) don’t truly understand it. Our citizens appreciate that they are able, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to get insurance, which in turn provides them with the ability to receive health care. However, people don’t appreciate penalties. I think it’s very unlikely our next President will repeal the ACA. Instead, I believe we’ll end up with a more sustainable, less profit-driven form of healthcare, something closer to Canada’s healthcare system, or akin to Medicaid. For a glimpse into what a more sustainable form of healthcare looks like, take a look at what Kaiser Permanente has been doing. Kaiser is a medical group, hospital administrator, insurance company, technology platform and medical records holder. Note that 15 years ago I would have been shocked to use them as a model getting it right, but with their vertical integration, they are able to operate constantly in the best interest of the ecosystem. Compare this to our current state of multiple competing parties’ self-interest. Doctors are trying to bill as much as possible. HMOs want as many people on contract as possible without seeing most of them. Kaiser is focused on educating their members on making healthy choices and providing preventive care that can promote long-term healthy outcomes. To power this new kind of healthcare, Kaiser relies heavily upon technology, which gives some of their potential members, who aren’t early technology adopters, cause for concern. But their model is the wave of the future. Technology is key to providing on-demand access to medical records, and coordinating care. Interestingly, few of our presidential candidates seem to have embraced this new model of healthcare, instead pitching an assortment of unlikely to see the light of legislation plans that are more about debate talking points, or serving as a renouncement of Obamacare than well-thought out, sustainable ways forward. Here’s my take on how the leading presidential candidates address healthcare reform if they took office: Trump: In a shocking turn of events, the campaign’s most polarizing candidate has proposed the plan that’s the best compromise between republicans and democrats. He won’t repeal the ACA, but will get rid of some of the penalties and taxes. His point of view boils down to making sure everyone has healthcare that is affordable, but his solution won’t be Medicare for all. Cruz: From a healthcare standpoint, Cruz is the biggest wildcard, and believes he can (and should) “ ”. But can you actually imagine the economic and personal impact that would have on the country? Thousands of people with cancer all of a sudden denied coverage and stuck with mounting medical bills they’d never be able to pay? This extreme plan has little chance of making it through even a Republican-controlled Congress. Rubio: It’s no surprise that Rubio, who has long been a vocal leader in the call to repeal Obamacare has made that the central component to his healthcare plan. His position is we should get rid of government healthcare subsidies and replace them with a refundable tax credit, and give more power to the States in place of a Federally-controlled program. This fundamentally gets around Obamacare’s biggest Republican ACA sticking point while allowing people to retain their coverage. Sanders: In an ambitious plan that many have called “too good to be true”, Sanders is by vowing to replace the ACA with a government-run Medicare-for-all program. His single-payer universal healthcare proposal, while aligned with Sanders’ proclamation of being a , would see well-funded opposition from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies who would take the largest hit, as well as from Republicans and Libertarians that wouldn’t be onboard with putting the government in charge of the nation’s healthcare. Clinton: Clinton’s position can be summed up as status quo when it comes to healthcare. The former healthcare crusader doesn’t have the appetite for taking at starting from scratch. And there’s no way she’d repeal the ACA. Overall it’s unlikely you’d see any change to the ACA under a Clinton presidency. Regardless of your personal feelings about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the one thing we can agree upon is its unprecedented access to healthcare for all. No matter your pre-existing medical conditions or employment situation, you are now able to purchase healthcare insurance for yourself and your family. And I don’t see Americans as a whole standing for taking back that access. Unfortunately, and as evidenced by this year’s crop of healthcare reform plans, the ACA hasn’t been the answer to all of our country’s healthcare woes. Even with the advent of the government subsidized insurance exchanges, healthcare costs have risen consistently since 2010, shown in the consumer price index. So what’s the solution to these ever-expanding healthcare costs? Making people smarter consumers of healthcare. Generally, people think the healthcare they receive costs what their monthly contribution and visit co-pay or deductible costs. But healthcare is a lot more expensive than that. Right now, most people don’t know and don’t care what their doctor is charging their health insurance company, or why. What if you were aware that your health insurance had reimbursement policies that were causing your doctor to make different care and treatment decisions than they would make without it? Or that your doctor suggested a non-essential procedure or test that your insurance pays out at a high level, to meet their monthly billing target? Or that the hospital you are having surgery at is getting paid twice what your surgeon is? If people would question total costs, not just their portion, healthcare would be a different ball game. Regardless of who takes their seat in the Oval Office next January, it’s clear that healthcare will be the top of their agenda. Here’s hoping that they also see the pressing need for educating consumers to be smarter healthcare consumers, and pursuing policy that leads to more sustainable healthcare systems. |
Checkbook lets you email anyone a digital check and deposit it free | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | If you’re sick of running out of paper checks and stamps or hassling with routing numbers to send zero-fee payments, you can bank on . The startup today launches its digital check service where you can send anyone a check with just their email address, and they can deposit it immediately online to get their money or even print it out. What’s remarkable is that it’s totally free for individuals to send up to 50 checks a year, and for businesses, it’s just $1 per check. That’s exceedingly cheap and easy. With paper checks, you have to keep a deck of them on hand plus pay for envelopes and postage. Credit card payments can cost 2.9%. And for businesses it can cost between $7 and $16 to send a check, and $1.50 just to receive one, according to Aberdeen Group, Bank of America, and the AFP Payment Cost Benchmarking Report. With over 19 billion checks for over $30 trillion sent in 2013, B2B checks cost businesses $25 billion a year. Yet conducting the money transfers over the traditional banking backend costs Checkbook merely pennies each time. It’s one of those classic startup businesses where you just wouldn’t expect that tech could cut prices so low. “I was sending you a check while you were talking” Checkbook founder PJ Gupta tells me. Sure enough, I open my email, and there it is. I can login with my bank and deposit it instantly, or print it out and deposit it at the bank or ATM like any normal check. Checkbook effectively makes sending checks as quick as Venmo or PayPal, but without fees even when you pay large amounts to businesses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DepzAOBRuAQ Gupta figured out how to build Checkbook on top of the existing ACH payments and Check21 infrastructure because he was the chief architect of Visa’s network. “This is a 100-year old problem no one was solving” Gupta insists. The business model works a bit like Dropbox in the sense that Checkbook gives away its service to consumers in hopes of infiltrating businesses that it will charge. Rather than try to sell Checkbook’s convenience to companies one at a time, it hopes to gain viral traction and parlay that into real customers. That opportunity attracted a seed round from Boost.vc, Rocketship.vc, AngelList’s founders, and a slew of angels including Tim Draper. While there are ways to send checks online already like eChecks, they’re cumbersome because you can’t easily deposit them online instantly too. You’re essentially passing the chore on to the recipient. Checkbook deposits can clear as quickly as a day, but are sometimes delayed to four days if there is any suspicion about the sender and their funds. Keeping security locked tight will be critical for Checkbook. A breach could be disastrous. The somewhat janky design doesn’t scream “Legitimate!”, so that should get a refresh. Checkbook will also have to convince businesses it’s not just a consumer service, but one robust enough for them too. The startup is adding to its integrations for shopping carts on Magento and major accounting packages like QuickBooks as it raises a Series A. It also has a business API for those pushing and pulling tons of checks. Next, Checkbook wants to build plugins for accounts payable and accounts receivable. If does its job, no one will ever have to pay their rent late because there’s no dead tree to sign, or demand someone’s banking info just to send them cash. |
The hot e-commerce app Wish has “hundreds of millions of users” (plus other fascinating stats) | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | Last week, toward the end of a StrictlyVC in San Francisco, GGV Capital managing director took the stage to interview one of his portfolio CEOs, Peter Szulczewski of . With an increasingly boisterous crowd as their background, Tung managed to ferret out lots of fascinating information from the highly personable Szulczewski, who looked very much the part of busy founder. (Blood-shot eyes, rumpled clothing.) We’d been eager to learn more about Wish — an e-commerce mobile app that has raised nearly from investors — as Szulczewski hasn’t talked often with the press or shared much hard information about the company. He did last week, though, including telling attendees that Wish now has “hundreds of millions of users,” that it saw “single-digit billions of dollars” in gross merchandise volume, and seemingly confirming that the company has seen interest (if not concrete acquisition offers) from Alibaba and Amazon. If you’re interested in e-commerce or want to understand merchants in China particularly, this is a must-read. Here’s much of what Szulczewski had to say: Szulscewski, a computer scientist by training, noted that he’d spent 6.5 years at Google solving “really big matching problems” before cofounding his company, ContextLogic, from which Wish evolved. The idea was to build a next-generation, mobile ad network to compete with Google’s AdSense network, whose tech was “relatively stale” at the time, in 2011. Szulscewski and his cofounder, Danny Zhang, realized they were “pretty bad at business development,” though, so eventually pivoted to Wish. Wish began as an app that asked people to create wish lists, then the company approached merchants, letting them know a certain number of customers wanted, say, a certain type of table. Things took off from there, he said. “We thought that being more relevant and showing the right recommendations would be critical; what we didn’t predict was the types of products and the types of merchants. “Because shopping on smartphones is relatively new and sort of an impulsive experience, the average order value tends to be relatively low. I don’t think people are comfortable with buying a $5,000 TV on their phone. I think even $300 is high, as most people want to compare prices, read through reviews, etcetera. People were willing to spend $20, $30, $50, but not much more than that [which we learned]. “Another part of our hypothesis that did work was that we’d be so good at relevance that these merchants would ship these things directly from their distribution centers and factories, and we’d cut out all the middle men. But were naïve [about who would do this]. A brand like Nike isn’t going to do that; it would be undercutting all its other retailers and its brand, on which it spends a lot of marketing dollars. “[On the other hand], if you’re an unbranded merchant who’s selling a dress or a wall mount, you just have your manufacturing and shipping costs, and those are the people we work really well with and why we have such good prices. We know who’s interested in fishing, and our merchants can reach them for free. The value proposition for the consumer is really cheap stuff. For merchants, it’s, ‘Hey, I don’t have to do anything. I just upload a CSV file or do it through an API or enter it manually, and I just start seeing sales.’ “The two biggest biggest retailers in the world are Walmart — which sees revenue of half a trillion dollars a year, primarily from U.S. customers — and the Alibaba subsidiary Taobao, which is the biggest platform in China. And both focus on value-conscious consumers. [That’s because] the median household in the U.S. is around $52,000 a year. In Europe, it’s even lower.” “Last year, [gross merchandise sales] was single-digit billions. It took us just under three years or so to get there. We do charge a take rate of 15 percent. Part of the reason is we do a lot more than, say, Alibaba, which doesn’t charge a take rate. “Take your local merchant in Shenzhen, where the majority of the world’s goods are manufactured, both branded and unbranded. That merchant has no idea how to sell to people in the Netherlands, France, Brazil, the U.S., Australia. He also has no idea how to communicate with those customers, so we take care of all of that. What merchants get in return [is] suddenly, they get an additional audience of more than a billion smartphone users who don’t really cannibalize their existing market.” “We’re shipping little things – not TVs or motorcyles or bicycles. And it turns out it’s relatively cheap to do that. Even by air, it will cost $1 or $2 unless the item is unusually heavy or large. [Largely we rely on a partnership between the USPS and China called ] I think most countries have these kinds of treaties. I’m not sure what percentage of our goods use the program, but it’s really efficient. Everything is shipped by air and it’s surprisingly cost effective.” From what we’ve heard, the partners involved are very happy with it. If it goes away, it goes away for everyone, so the prices would probably rise for everyone. But we also have interesting back-up solutions even if it does.” “In the U.S., the average time is 13 days or so. Across the world, it’s maybe a little higher. In certain countries like Brazil where logistics aren’t as optimized and there may be much more regulation around imports, it could be as long as 30 days on average, so it really depends on the market.” “Initially, it was a lot of fashion. Then we got make-up, home décor – cheaper or smaller items. What’s really taking off now is a lot of hobby stuff. Certain parts for cars, for example. Things for people who are into fishing gear, paintfball, surfing, photography, drones. So a lot of different sets of users are coming who don’t need a branded good but need something that works, like fishing bait.” “The answer is yes and that’s starting to happen. There’s one package of like 20 toothbrushes that costs $3 dollars that we’re selling tens of thousands of every month. Paper towels are too large and too heavy to ship out of China but maybe we have a partnership with someone here who ships it out of their warehouse and we offer it that way. So we are thinking about nondiscretionary more and more and it’s starting to creep into our platform.” “We realized early on that unless you set out to build a really massive, self-sustainable business, you’re just not going to be able to do it. Basically, really big companies have these people in corp dev, god bless you [laughs], but there’s this asymmetry, which is like: the founders’ time is the most precious commodity that you have. You only have 24 hours a day. But there are corp dev people at these companies who have an infinite amount of time to spend with these founders… We want to build a self-sustainable business. We think that just like Alibaba, just like Walmart, we can get to hundreds of billions [of dollars in market cap]. I think both those companies were built on the same premise of saving time and money for their consumers. We’re doing the same thing on your phone.” “I was at Yuri Milner’s house for some kind of dinner party, and I met Richard [Liu], who’s the founder and CEO of JD, and I find their business fascinating; it’s the exact opposite of what we do. [Editor’s note: Unlike Wish and Alibaba, which directly connect buyers and sellers, JD is more like Amazon, buying branded goods from manufacturers, storing the inventory in its own warehouses and, once purchased, delivering the goods quickly – often the same day.] I think JD has the best logistics in the world. They have 80,000 employees delivering these goods. And we’re the exact opposite, so we struck up an relationship and we could probably learn a lot from them, and they could probably learn a lot from us, because we’re not competing because they’re not really doing anything outside of China and we’re not entering China, at all. So we really like them and yes, they invested $50 million in the last round.” “We take a tech-driven approach to curation and it’s slowly evolving to be more pretty and I think we’ll get there. But every time we try curation — the algorithm, in terms of conversion — it just destroys any kind of curation. It’s an order of magnitude difference. So we’re always trying things and maybe there’s a way to algorithmically curate [a prettier] interface. So that’s always been a priority for us. “[Another priority is] customer purchase experience, which is, ‘Hey, maybe for some of the products where we can forecast the sales really accurately, you should be able to get them in less than three days.’ That’s probably possible for half the GMV if we’re running at scale. “We’re also focusing more on customer support, which was, last year, up until November, horrific. Now it’s getting better.” “If you think of the rise of Taobao, they’re at 50 purchases per user per year. Amazon is at 15, by the way, which I’ve heard from many people and I think is accurate [information]. I think JD is somewhere below Amazon – they don’t give me that kind of data. “We’re at 5 purchases per year and that’s growing relatively quickly. We’re not something you use every week but we certainly want to be. As think as long as we can provide the most bang for the buck for consumers, we’ll get there.” “It’s true that consumer expectations in China are very different. Like, if you order a red sweater and you get a blue one, [shoppers are] like, ‘Eh, next time.’ So we have a lot of merchants that have only sold to Chinese consumers and we have to educate them that it’s not okay to ship a blue sweater because you don’t have any red sweaters in stock. [Laughs.] “We also have to educate them on what ‘counterfeit’ means. We have to literally tell them that you can’t just put an Apple logo on something and sell it, that that’s wrong. Some genuinely don’t know that. They’re like, ‘It’s my factory, I can do what I want.’ “I think there are more engineers on the platform team, working with merchants, than there are on the consumer-facing product team [because it’s] more important to educate and work with the merchants to create a win-win situation.” “Two years ago, the merchants were like, ‘I’ll try this. I don’t know what the hell it is, but I hear other merchants are making money, so I’ll give it a shot.’ And if you tell them, ‘Hey, if you take this inventory and put it in the U.S. or Germany or Spain, you’ll make more money,’ they’re like, ‘No. You’re the fifth thing on my mind. There’s Amazon, Taobao, my own e-commerce site.’ But after you have two or three years of these merchants getting meaningful revenue and sales and it’s growing month over month, then you get their buy-in. Then it’s, ‘Okay, now you’re the third thing on my mind.’ Then, ‘Now you’re the second.’ ‘Now, you’re the first or second; how can I get more sales?'” |
GetLinks raises $500K to connect tech talent with employers in Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 3 | 6 | , a Bangkok-based startup focused on helping tech companies find and hire top talent, has closed a $500,000 seed round. 500 Startups and CyberAgent Ventures provided the money for GetLinks, which started out as a ‘Tinder for jobs’ style company before pivoting into a curated job platform. That means that both candidates and employer vacancies are vetted being accepted on to its job platform. GetLinks itself makes money once a candidate has been hired — taking a cut of their salary, like a headhunter — which incentives it to provide quality candidates and jobs on both sides. Today’s funding represents a remarkable change in fortune for GetLinks’ French co-founder and CEO Djoann Fal. Last February, Fal — who first came to Asia to work for Rocket Internet — appealed to friends, family and others to help crowdfund his startup as the money dried up. Now, with the company graduating accelerator programs from JFDI Asia (Singapore) and 500 Startups (U.S.), it has raised money from two of Southeast Asia’s most prominent seed-stage investors. GetLinks takes a different approach to building its userbase than something like LinkedIn, thanks to its focus on offline events. Its meetups attract thousands of attendees, which, Fal told TechCrunch, helps build the company’s brand, raise awareness of its service and bring employees and job seekers on board. The company has run events in Thailand, and is gearing up for on March 12. This money will go towards growing its presence in Vietnam and also making a move into Singapore, via an event and some marketing. Fal said the company has begun talking to investors about a Series A round with a view to expanding to more countries. earlier this year to help give top talent passive job hunting experiences, and GetLinks is moving towards the same goal in Southeast Asia, where professional social networks like LinkedIn have nothing like the reach of Facebook, which is often use to connect for networking. Woo is pretty exclusive with just 5,000 candidates. That might work in the U.S., but with no job site dedicated to Southeast Asia’s nascent startup space, GetLinks needs to be somewhat more accessible. Fal said that GetLinks’ current employer partners include Google, Uber, Line and Rocket Internet’s Lazada. |
Ray Tomlinson, the man who put the @ in email, passes away aged 74 | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 3 | 6 | Ray Tomlinson, one of the pioneers of email, has passed away at the age of 74, . New York-born Tomlinson is best known for selecting the @ symbol to connect a username with the destination address email, making it a central part of the communications process. While working for Bolt Beranek and Newman, the company that developed the first program for sending network email, Tomlinson chose the symbol — which was fairly obscure at the time — to differentiate local and global emails on a list. From there, it became the designation for address formats, which exploded as email went global as a communications medium. , Tomlinson explained his choice: “I looked at the keyboard, and I thought: ‘What can I choose here that won’t be confused with a username?’” Tomlinson remembers. “If every person had an ‘@’ sign in their name, it wouldn’t work too well. But they didn’t. They did use commas and slashes and brackets. Of the remaining three or four characters, the ‘@’ sign made the most sense. It denoted where the user was … at. Excuse my English.” Tomlinson’s invention has had a larger modern-day impact too, shaping social media services like Twitter and Facebook, where @ is universally synonymous with direct communication with an individual. , the Internet Hall Of Fame praised the impact of Tomlinson’s work: Tomlinson’s email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate, including the way businesses, from huge corporations to tiny mom-and-pop shops, operate and the way millions of people shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans. Today, tens of millions of email-enabled devices are in use every day. Email remains the most popular application, with over a billion and a half users spanning the globe and communicating across the traditional barriers of time and space. Fellow Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and Google’s Gmail team were among the many to pay tribute to Tomlinson. Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map. — Gmail (@gmail) Very sad news: Ray Tomlinson has passed away. — vinton g cerf (@vgcerf) I worked with Ray Tomlinson at BBN. While known for the '@' in e-mail, he contributed much more than that. Sad news. — Mudge (@dotMudge) Here’s Tomlinson’s induction to the Internet Hall Of Fame in 2012: |
Apple head of software engineering says FBI’s demands compromise the safety of all iOS users | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 3 | 6 | , Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering (and ) says the FBI’s demands on the company will make all iOS users more vulnerable to malicious attacks . Apple is that would force it to create new software for the FBI so the bureau can unlock an iPhone 5c used by one of the perpetrators of a Dec. 2 shooting attack on a social services center in San Bernardino, California that killed 14 people. The company has said repeatedly—including in a and —that doing so would set a precedent that could compromise the security of all iOS users. Apple’s stance got reinforcement at the end of February when in a separate but legally similar case in New York, a district court judge by denying a government request for information on an iPhone, saying that the government had failed to prove it is entitled to force Apple to help it bypass the device’s passcode by the . In his op-ed, titled “The FBI wants to roll back safeguards that keep us a step ahead of criminals,” Federighi wrote that fulfilling the FBI’s request would force Apple to compromise its current encryption technology, negating years of work by the company’s engineers and creating a security hole that could be exploited by criminals: That’s why it’s so disappointing that the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies. They have suggested that the safeguards of iOS 7 were good enough and that we should simply go back to the security standards of 2013. But the security of iOS 7, while cutting-edge at the time, has since been breached by hackers. What’s worse, some of their methods have been productized and are now available for sale to attackers who are less skilled but often more malicious. To get around Apple’s safeguards, the FBI wants us to create a backdoor in the form of special software that bypasses passcode protections, intentionally creating a vulnerability that would let the government force its way into an iPhone. Once created, this software — which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones — would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all. The ruling in this case potentially affects all tech businesses that need to safeguard sensitive customer data. Companies that have include Box, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Square, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The United Nations’ human rights commissioner has . |
Process as code: Security ops orchestration for a brave new world | Sandeep Bhadra | 2,016 | 3 | 6 |
Cybercrime is an enormous problem — a nemesis of the federal government, America’s biggest corporations and tens of millions of individuals. But there is now legitimate hope that a big piece of the cybercrime problem can eventually be solved. Despite the fact that the highest-level attacks are very sophisticated, more than are lower-caliber attacks built on the foundation of off-the-shelf components, purchased in shady underground marketplaces. This is the good news — it’s much easier to repel these run-of-the-mill attacks than highly sophisticated, well-financed attacks. But there are other challenges the industry is facing. There is a massive shortfall in the number of trained security experts to man a typical Security Operations Center (SOC) monitoring the health and safety of a corporation’s digital footprint. It takes almost a decade for security researchers to acquire the skills to defend against modern-day attacks. has forecast a shortfall of 1.5 million trained security experts by 2020. SOC teams, overwhelmed in handling the deluge of low-impact incidents, fail to respond in time or miss altogether early incident alerts flagging serious attacks. There appears to be a solution to deal with this massive human shortfall and empower SOC teams. Serious efforts are afoot to record process as code — or simply put, to use software to automate repetitive but time-consuming tasks while increasing the productivity of individual security experts. Much of this is so-called orchestration. Some historical background is important. SecOps is an analogue of the far more mature movement that grew around the simple idea of recording common IT processes as code and collaborating across IT teams. This allowed new and useful features to be developed, tested and put into production in days instead of weeks. Today, DevOps tools created by companies like , , , (a Menlo portfolio company recently acquired by Red Hat) and enable IT teams to launch new features and changes as often as multiple times an hour! SecOps orchestration essentially takes DevOps methodologies and applies them to security to better investigate and respond to incidents. It manages the security incident lifespan, end-to-end, as a consistent business process, documented with code in the form of “playbooks” or “recipes.” SecOps has the potential to be far bigger than incident response today. Today, responding to security incidents is a manual process of cobbling together disparate tools, including logging systems, netflow analyzers, third-party threat intelligence feeds, data forensics and software patching, backup and recovery. Using this approach, discerning the root cause and fixing the impact of attacks can take weeks or months. In contrast, pioneers with large online infrastructure footprints like Netflix and Google are already borrowing from the SecOps playbook and automating routine tasks with code. These include, among other things, re-imaging endpoints, following up on email phishing attacks, coordinating data between the network and endpoint devices and updating firewall permissions — all increasing the rate and speed at which security incidents can be processed. I believe a successful SecOps orchestration platform can carve out a large standalone business for itself by focusing on a few business and architectural priorities — automation built on open APIs, a neutral community to share best practices and intuitive UI. To be effective at automation, SecOps orchestration platforms from , and (recently acquired by FireEye) rely on “recipes” that read from, and write to, a wide array of security appliances built by third-party vendors. Today, large customers like banks — who plan to spend on cybersecurity — are forcing vendors to open up their APIs and play nice with others. The emergence of software/cloud appliances and robust open APIs as a common interface for them has made it easier to build orchestration products. Companies must also learn to band together to build and share these automated recipes. After all, a great way to deal with malware purchased on black-hat marketplaces would be to build a white-hat marketplace or community of the good guys! The U.S. Department of Defense already has such , but private security specialists and vendors are skeptical today about sharing data, partly because they operate in multi-national jurisdictions. Vendor-neutral and open frameworks like (an open-source project started by a team at Netflix) and Phantom’s create a virtuous cycle, attracting security experts to build their own playbooks and recipes encoding on best practices. Finally, great workflow, UI and design are key to building seamless orchestration and collaboration across IT teams. and FireEye/Invotas have built great workflow tools that help SecOps teams respond to incidents in a consistent fashion. has a modern approach to collaboration, building a security orchestration bot that works through Slack’s messaging user-interface. Startups in this space are working to solve a massive ubiquitous problem and to democratize best cybersecurity practices. And they tend to be vendor-agnostic, putting them in a good position to build a community and products that reflect the best interest of customers. Today, private security experts are fighting their adversaries manually and alone. Tomorrow, they will band together and implement best practices into code — and, finally, build a highly effective defense against the bad guys. |
The broken world of mobile payments and how to fix it | John Rampton | 2,016 | 3 | 6 |
It’s being predicted that by the end of this year, payment transactions in the . Despite this impressive gain, it turns out that not everyone is taking advantage of In fact, in a found “Only about 1 in 5 people (20.7%) in the U.S. that have an iPhone that works with Apple Pay, (this would be the iPhone 6 and newer versions), have even Apple Pay.” To add salt to the wound, Tech Insider also discovered that 56 percent of users “have only used Apple Pay once during a typical week, and 15.3 percent say they have ‘never’ used it during the week.” Why aren’t more people enjoying the convenience and ease of ? There are always numerous reasons for the variance in behaviors in the of tech. In the of m tech — where a monetary system is being set up and becoming an accepted avenue for the exchange of money and — there seems to be some concern. Some have said that the system for money exchange in the m w was before it began. But is this statement true? Let’s address some of the concerns about the w of m p Arguably the biggest concern regarding is the fact that people are worried about security. In fact, during the Money 20/20 2015 Conference, Bryan Yeager, an analyst at eMarketer Inc., payment user growth is projected to grow to 37.5 million users in 2016, up 62%.” However, it seems security is still prohibiting some of the . Yeager informed the audience that “57% of US internet users cited security concerns the main reason they were hesitant to use payment services.” He also stated that “62% of US smartphone owners that don’t use or plan to use a wallet cited worries about security as the reason.” International compatibility is another concern when using . As Raomal Perera, CEO of Valsita, , “The reality is that until common interfaces are defined, based on current standards users will not properly engage in m-commerce. Only then will consumers see the benefits of using their phone as an ‘electronic wallet’ that allows them to conduct transactions more conveniently than more traditional channels.” Once a global standard is adopted, consumers will be able to “use any application without having to install new software each time they make a purchase,” Perera adds. This will simplify the purchasing process and spark innovation. Not yet obtaining a global standard also makes using payment systems a hassle when traveling abroad. For example, may work perfectly in parts of Africa, but users would have trouble using the same system if they are traveling through Europe. Visa is attempting to change the money problems inherent when traveling to other countries with its . The U.S. is now accepting EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa), which will in turn put this concern to rest. The is getting brighter as companies like Visa, MasterCard and AMEX are coming together, but, currently, no standard is in the works. What happens when a app shuts down or you’re not satisfied with the service? You would think that you could easily uninstall the app. This may not always be the case. Early adopters to the wallet apps used apps such as Softcard, which later closed their business and users couldn’t uninstall the app. As states, “When a wallet fails, it doesn’t go away. Companies upgrade dormant apps and remove their functionality, but the apps stay on users’ phones.” To observe this problem firsthand, merely take a look at the “Wallet” app on your iPhone. Most likely every person reading this article has the wallet app on their iPhone — and you ‘t remove it either. Why? If you’re a merchant toying with the idea of accepting you have different options: . Depending on your industry and clientele, each option has its pros and cons, which make it difficult to choose which option to use. For example, if you just purchased a new EMV POS system that comes equipped with an NFC reader, why would you invest in a code-based or cloud-based system? But, what if a large percentage of your customers prefer code-based or cloud-based systems? Are you willing to invest in those systems? Obviously, the answer would lie in finding the percentage of your customers who request or require a certain system in order to use your product or service. According to studies conducted by , there remains a portion of the population who are satisfied with their current banking system because they feel it is more secure and less complicated than . Additionally, non-users of the payment system also enjoy the incentives their credit or debit cards provide. Until more people feel the safety issues have been addressed, and they learn how to use the systems with ease, will remain a tough sell for those who are set in their ways. Despite the convenience and potential that currently possess, there remains room for improvement. This is where innovation will come into the picture. According to Bijan Khosravi, founder and CEO of InBounce, this innovation will include: The ability to send people money directly and simply by using your device is already here, thanks to apps such as , , (personal company) and even . Apple is also getting into the action. states that Venmo is already “favored by young adults and teenagers who particularly like a feature in which they list their on a social-media feed.” Instead of carrying a number of credit or debit cards, smart phones will consolidate your cards into one location. This consolidation will also be the case for gift cards. Google Wallet and Apple Pay are already using this technology, but is another interesting option that will also store gift and loyalty cards. To pry customers away from traditional reward systems, merchants use a centralized network where they accept loyalty rewards from each other. For example, you could use your airline miles from Delta for your purchase at Starbucks. People will be able to donate to socially conscious projects like never before. , for example, is a startup that allows you to view the profile of a person in need of financial help and donate money to that specific person on the profile or SMS. There will be a point when no longer have to rely on physically visiting a bank to create an account and conduct all of our banking needs. This will become important for the unbanked population who previously did not have the means or ability to physically visit a bank to open an account. This will also assist employers in paying employees who do not have a bank account; is a payroll solution that accomplishes this task. But what about the biggest concern involving security? Currently, companies, such as Android, have implemented something called host card emulation (HCE). describes HCE as “a technology that emulates a payment card on a device using only software. This approach offers technical and business benefits to a wide range of industry stakeholders who are active in the near field communication (NFC) ecosystem.” Previously, payment credentials were stored on the device inside hardware known as a secure element. Thanks to HCE, this secure element is now outside of the device. This improves security because it removes third-party involvement at a low cost. Another company addressing the security of is ID Global Solutions Corporation and its . This company says they prevent fraud because, “IDComplete utilizes a secure encrypted irreversible tokenization process with multi-factor authentication to enable secure real-time cardholder verification.” Beyond that, technology could also lead to even more interesting developments in the industry. One of the most widely discussed innovations in the payment is . Blockchain is estimated to be able to . Currently, companies like IBM, Intel, Cisco, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and State Street have created their own global online ledger known as the Open Ledger Project. The hope is that this blockchain, along with other alterations, will “provide a more secure, more reliable, more transparent, and more automatic way of exchanging money, securities, and other assets.” Furthermore, as mentioned in , “it will also let you trade assets as easily as you trade emails today — and you trade them without putting your trust in any one person or organization. This could eliminate many of the slower technologies and expensive middlemen that clog up today’s markets.” Finally, may come to a point when cards and wallets stored on our smartphones will come to an end completely. There are a number of companies who are experimenting with using . This could include everything from fingerprints, facial recognition and heartbeats as way to verify a payment. Whatever the hurdles that must be tackled, it seems that our payment options are only going to increase. Companies and innovators are going to have to solve some of the problems and issues surrounding the payment . By addressing, answering and solving the questions that have been raised, companies will be able to quiet the hesitation of its users by providing optimal solutions for the convenience of . |
null | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 3 | 1 | null |
Cognitive correction and creating better human-to-machine interaction | Lisa Michaud | 2,016 | 3 | 6 |
The lifetime of the computer has been marked by an ongoing struggle to communicate with the machine. When two human conversational participants come from different languages, true communication only occurs when one can learn to speak in the language of the other. At the beginning of the history of computation, it was the human who had to use the language of the machine; early programmers expressed themselves in binary. But over time, we built better interfaces. Binary machine code was replaced by languages employing commands that took the form of words. Typed command-line interfaces gave way to graphical interfaces and abstractions of file systems that suggested physical space. Commands took the form of mouse or swipe gestures. And now, the maturation of natural language processing (NLP) technologies means that we have started to “talk” to our phones, our cars and our toys. Through these technologies, we are being introduced to digital assistants and textual interfaces that empower us to help ourselves. Designing these systems requires overcoming certain challenges, of course. is a design philosophy recognizing that just as an ergonomic keyboard might bend so that the user’s wrists do not have to, a system’s design should bend so that the user’s natural processes for accomplishing a task do not have to. More and more, users expect not to be forced to to communicate to a computer. When the communication takes the form of natural language, people would prefer to be able to converse as if the dialogue partner were another human. A move away from “interactive responses” and toward “dialogue,” however, entails more than just a shift in thinking away from menus and keyword detection. Designing systems for natural human communication is challenging; dialogue breaks the “rules.” For example, it is not news to anyone who communicates via any of the text-based channels that these environments have developed a dialect of their own. “Textspeak” often involves deliberate modifications to the spelling and grammatical standards of natural language, and this has spawned entire domains of linguistic research. The phenomenon, however, is hardly new to human communication. Morse code operators, in the interest of economizing their keystrokes, also developed a shorthand that can still be observed today by listening in on the conversation between any two ham operators, such as: NC1M DE AA1JD GA DR OM UR RST 5NN HR QTH TIMBUKTU OP IS MATT HW? NC1M DE AA1JD KN Multiple publications have claimed that roughly 15 percent of the words occurring in SMS and Twitter text are not found in the dictionary, which is a significant problem for automated NLP tools hoping to communicate with users via text. , texters deviate from standard spellings with acronyms, shortened/simplified versions of words and even lengthened variations. One study found an average of 5.5 shortened spellings per text message sent by English-speaking millennials. How can a computer understand this? One option is to add “ROTFL” to the dictionary. But while there are many resources listing common slang and abbreviations, this will not cover the many extemporized variations. This means we need to augment our slang dictionary with a reliable way to transform unrecognized text into standard spelling. Most approaches text by generating potential respelling candidates and ranking them from most likely to least likely in order to pick the top one. In typo correction, respelling candidates are generated through knowledge of how fingers or memories typically stumble. Thankfully, we can do the same with intentional spelling variants; some studies have shown that if you can describe the systematic ways in which people typically modify words in text-based communication, you can use this to generate and rank respelling possibilities effectively. If you augment this domain knowledge with semantic (meaning) and syntactic (grammar) context from applying natural language understanding (NLU) to the rest of the utterance, the ranking will be even more accurate. Another way in which we are challenged in natural dialogue is the need to handle the fact that dialogue progression is not always strictly linear, as is seen at the beginning of this article. When users are asked a question, it is natural for them to respond with a question of their own (“What is my balance?”). Natural dialogue often enters into a short digression in which the system must recognize that the of the user’s utterance was not an answer, but a query for relevant information; and the system must be able to answer the query. Then the dialogue initiative can return to the system and continue naturally. A user may also provide more information than was strictly asked (“From savings to checking.”), or may speak ambiguously (“What is my balance?” Of which account? In this case, either is relevant, and to save additional dialogue turns clarifying the intent, both can be provided). Dialogue systems therefore must be flexible about more than spelling; they must also avoid restricting the interaction flow to a prompt-and-response exchange. This is the era for successful and powerful interactions to arrive as these questions and more are addressed; the machine, and not the user, will to meet us in the middle ground. |
Autodesk CEO Carl Bass on investing in the future | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 3 | 6 | A year ago, the design-focused software firm announced it would stop selling standalone perpetual licenses of its desktop software and instead sell subscriptions. Early last month, it began , a move that will be complete by mid-year, when the company’s older products will no longer be available. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as part of its “restructuring plan,” the public company also recently laid off 925 people or roughly 10 percent of its workforce. At a StrictlyVC event last Thursday, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass – who sold two companies to Autodesk before becoming its CEO in 2006 – talked about that ongoing transition, describing it as “painful.” Bass also talked about Autodesk’s new IoT fund and how it approaches investments generally. In fact, his interviewer was Ben Einstein, managing director of , a young San Francisco- and Boston-based hardware-focused venture fund that has received capital from Autodesk. (Disclosure: Autodesk hosted the event at its gallery in downtown San Francisco.) Some notes from that conversation: CB: Yes, it’s painful. Here’s the painful part. We used to get $6,000 for a license. Now we get $2,000. So every traditional, conventional financial metric looks like crap while you cook through that. That’s the terrible part. The flip side, what people don’t realize, is you’re basically putting it on the balance sheet, and just as it doesn’t get counted on the way in, it gets counted on the way out. The thing I like about it in a big company is that when you make a big change, it’s easy to motivate everybody to do it . . . [Big companies are] really hard to move, but when you get [them] to move, you can make a big impact. CB: I didn’t know the number, but we’ve been acquiring things for a lot of years, and some of them are awesome; they’re the foundation of multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses. And some of them are total crap. We’ve bought things that I hugely regret. I was talking to the investors of one of those companies today and he said, Oh, yeah, you bought [our company, Revit Technology] for $133 million and it had $1 million in revenue three years going forward. It was an incredibly hard sale to the board. One member had a policy at his own company that you don’t pay more than $1 million per employee and this company [we were acquiring] had 75 employees at the time, so he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. But we bought it, and that product is now the foundation of a $700 million to $800 million part of our business that’s incredibly profitable. There have been others that are just as big a disaster. CB: The way I think about it [is] there are three kinds of companies: ones that are really people who have a technology that we want to [build up]; middle-size companies, meaning they have product that they’re selling, maybe even internationally; and third, [cases where] they have a company. Everyone, even in the first category, thinks they have a company, but [not really, not in the sense that the business is] long term, sustainable, with multiple products being sold around the world and stuff like that. What we really like to do is a huge amount in the first category, a handful in the second, and very rarely do we do really big acquisitions. CB: First, people think because you built a shop on a pier that it’s incredibly expensive. It turns out that because of a deal with the city, a square foot of space down there is one-seventh the price of a square foot here [in the center of downtown San Francisco]. Because the city couldn’t invest in the piers, there’s this incredible deal that any improvements that you put into it get deducted from your long-term lease. We also make software that drives machine tools and helps people get ideas and turn them into physical artifacts, and [that pier] is kind of our laboratory. In the old days, we might have had a room filled with pen plotters. Now, our customers have an idea, and they go from making a digital model into creating a real thing, whether that’s through our collaboration with Bolt, our , [or the] things we do with corporate partners. CB: Someone tweeted the other day, and I was laughing about it, that IoT is like teenage sex. Everybody says they’re doing it. They’re not really doing it. Those that are doing it aren’t doing it well…[laughs]. As for why create funds, we’ve had good returns on the money we’ve invested but [more] it gives us incredible access to looking at deals. So on 3D printing, we get an incredible look at the deals there. Many of the people in the room would know that most VCs do not like corporate VCs; they really want corporate VC to be dumb money at the late stage. It’s hard to aspire to that. [Laughs.] But the general tone is you could be useful later when you’re willing to pay too much and there’s not much to do. That doesn’t fit our need for what we’re trying to do, which is find people at the edge who are doing new stuff. So when we did 3D printing, it was on far-out 3D metal printing, including 3D printing combined with metal printing with 3D milling… Also [yes], if nothing else, it’s a good way to form relationships with companies that, at some point later, may [turn into acquisitions]. |
As Silicon Valley chills, Europe’s tech gets hotter | Mattias Ljungman | 2,016 | 3 | 24 |
We are accustomed to hearing that European is . Now there have been that the local scene is starting to feel ’s valuation woes. If true, this should raise alarm bells, because if European technology startups struggle to raise money from wary investors, it could hit the brakes on Europe’s budding digital economy just as the EU begins ramping up its industry, preparing for a digital single market. However, the data paints a more nuanced picture, one showing that, in the main, Europe is not as susceptible to the impact from a U.S. downturn, because it has now — talent, mentors, angel investors, local VCs, incubators, accelerators and communities — that are propelling Europe on its own, separate investment cycle. The data about Series A funds raised, capital invested and $100+ million exits, gathered from Dow Jones VentureSource, CB Insights and S&P Capital IQ, shows that in relative terms, Europe is now starting to fire on all cylinders, much like did in 2013. , while in Europe is growing, purposefully, confidently and across a broad front of geographical hubs and industries. Currently, France is leading Europe in investments so far this year. CB Insights shows that the absolute number of funding rounds for early-stage companies — what’s called Series A rounds — in the U.S. appear to have peaked in 2014 (2015 was down from 2014 by -4 percent). Series A rounds are important because they are one of the best indicators of the health of an ecosystem in producing a solid pipeline of companies that have gained sufficient traction to raise an institutional round from venture capitalists. In Europe, Series A investments only really started to ramp from 2014, and the number of local companies hitting this funding milestone continues to rise. 2015 was a record year for Europe — up 12 percent from the year before. In January and February so far this year, A rounds are up 38 percent year-over-year (versus 19 percent up in the U.S.). Generally speaking, venture investing in companies in the U.S. has been volatile, with a large uptick in funds raised by venture capitalists since 2012, and big spikes in 2014 and 2015, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. In Europe, we’ve yet to see any big jumps or dips in VC funding. According to CB Insights, $100+ million exits — when startups are acquired by larger firms or IPO — started to ramp in the U.S. from 2011 onwards, reaching an eight-year high of 122 exits in 2014, but then declining again in 2015 to 83. In Europe, the ramp in $100+ million exits only really kicked in from 2014 (18 exits), and reached a new high of 26 exits in 2015. None of this is to say that the gung-ho spirit of Silicon Valley has dampened and that Europe has magically thrown off its yoke of conservatism. U.S. startups are still raising money, although, for some, the valuations are coming down to what some might say is a more realistic level. European institutional investors — with some exceptions such as in the Nordics — could still step up their activity in late-stage funding, and a handful of activist EU data protection authorities are erecting barriers to the global free-flow of data. Investment pace in the than just two years ago. But tellingly, this year (so far), several fast-growing private firms in the U.S. have seen their valuations plummet. You can’t really argue with the numbers: For , from heyday valuations has started. CB Insights has even created a on companies that have raised money or exited at valuations lower than their earlier investment rounds. For now, it’s mostly populated by companies from the U.S. (83 percent of all companies on the list). This could, of course, spread to Europe, but so far the data does not show this to be the case. Listed companies haven’t fared much better. The aggregate market cap of the 34 public Internet Software & Services companies that have IPO’d in the U.S. since January 1, 2013 was trading at 42 percent below their aggregate first-day market cap on March 16 this year, according to S&P Capital IQ. Here too, Europe has not seen the same impact. The 25 public Internet stocks that have listed in Europe in that same time period have been much more resilient, and are trading 9 percent above their initial first-day aggregate market cap. Given all of the above, it seems that a more informed way to think about whether or not Europe will be caught in ’s downturn is to understand that the has been on fire since 2008, and Europe has only really got going in the last three years. So does trajectory mean that we’re heading for the same kind of correction just a few years down the line? Not necessarily. Due to the relative scarcity of capital in Europe when compared with the glut in the , Europe’s industry has also had less hype — and hopefully the conditions for more sustainable, long-term successes. We have the opportunity to both learn from the successes in the U.S. and pre-empt some of their issues. That’s a great position to be in. |
Sanitation And Health Rights in India launched its non-profit for sanitation and water purification services | Jonathan Shieber | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | In 2013 more than 340,000 children under the age of five died from diseases caused by a lack of safe water, sanitation and basic hygiene, according to a report by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. In India, the problem is especially acute, with roughly 600 million citizens lacking access to basic sanitation services, and 100 million without clean water. In health care circles the sanitation issue is called open defecation — it’s a serious problem that’s led to diarrhoeic diseases and malnutrition among children… and it’s a problem that a new non-profit, which launched yesterday in the latest Y Combinator batch, is looking to solve. is the fruit of work that 29-year-old Anoop Jain has struggled with for the better part of the last six years. Ever since a trip to the Himalayas left Jain with an abiding sense of the profound transformations that could be wrought through non-profit work, the son of an oil man who claims New Orleans as his home has been working tirelessly for India’s rural poor. His Himalayan excursion put him in contact with community activists from Behar, where he became convinced that he would do nutrition work there, akin to the soup kitchen he’d built for Tibetan refugees. But the burden of disease that stemmed from rural practices of open defecation was a much more serious problem for the communities in the country, Jain said. “That’s when we decided we were going to focus on building toilets.”
It wasn’t always an easy road. “The first two years were spent figuring out what the hell we were doing,” says Jain. And how they were going to do it. Now, after the months spent in Y Combinator’s boot camp, the company has rebranded with a new plan and a new sense of purpose to get its hybrid restrooms and water purification facilities into rural areas across India. Y Combinator isn’t the first outside support that the company received, but it may be the most significant. The first money into SHRI came in the form of a $30,000 grant in 2012 from the That money, coupled with donations from friends and family allowed the nascent non-profit that Jain had envisioned to buy its first parcel of land and buy the first of its public toilet blocks. That first toilet is just the beginning. Located in Supaul, a community in the Northern Indian state of Behar, the public toilet opened in 2014. There are 2.2 million people who live in the district, and 200,000 in Supaul itself… and few modern toilet facilities. “We work in rural areas because those are the areas where the problem of open defecation is most pronounced,” says Jain. “There are certain things we can prevent and we need to design our society in a way that mitigates the effect of these natural disasters and man-made disasters.” A student of environmental engineering at Northwestern University, Jain had devised a novel system that not only would deal with the problem of public defecation, but also provide a way to pay for its upkeep. The waste from the facilities is collected in a cement tank where it is converted to biogas. That biogas powers a water purification system located on the grounds of the facility. That water is sold for cents on the dollar to generate revenue to hire attendants to keep up the public toilets. One year after completing the first public toilets in 2014, the non-profit built its second. Now Jain is looking to build as many toilets as quickly as possible. “There are hundreds of millions of Indians who don’t have these services and who need them desparately,” says Jain. “We had been convinced by other non-profits who have been through the program that the lessons can be applied to non-profits to help them grow.” To that end Y Combinator has been invaluable to the growth of a non-profit that could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indians. Beyond Y Combinator’s training, SHRI can look forward to getting some cash from the incredibly deep pockets of the Indian government, which has committed $30 billion to end the problem of open defecation in India. “We’re still, in the grand scheme of things, we’re pretty early with our work,” said Jain. “But for $100,000 we can improve access to waste facilities and clean drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people.” |
Machine learning technique boosts lip-reading accuracy | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | For human lip readers, context is key in deciphering words stripped of the full nuance of their audio cues. But a technology model for lip-reading developed at the University of East Anglia in the UK has been shown to be able to interpret mouthed words with a greater degree of accuracy than human lip readers, thanks to the application of machine learning tech to classify the visual aspect of sounds. And the kicker is the algorithm doesn’t need to know the context of what you’re discussing to be able to identify the words you’re using. While the model remains a piece of research at this stage, there are scores of potential applications for technology that could automagically transform visual cues into accurate speech — whether it’s helping people who have audio impairments, or enhancing audio-less security video footage with additional speech data — or even to try to figure out exactly what charged word one footballer spat at another in the heat of a match… Such a tech could also be applied as a fallback for poor audio quality on a mobile or video call. Or for automating subtitles. Or even perhaps to power a front-facing camera-based mobile ‘voice’ assistant which you wouldn’t actually have to speak to but could just discreetly mouth commands at (how cool would that be?). Safe to say, the list of applications-in-waiting for machine powered lip-reading is as long as the dictionary is deep. So there’s bags of future potential if only researchers can deliver the goods. The UAE team behind this new machine learning training model for lip reading have been looking purely at visual inputs — so training their model on the shape of the mouth as certain sounds are spoken, without any audio input cues at all. “We’re looking at… visual cues and saying how do they vary? We know they vary for different people. How are they using them? What’s the differences? And can we actually use that knowledge in this particular training method for our model? And we can,” says Dr Helen Bear who created the visual speech recognition tech model as part of her PhD, along with Prof Richard Harvey of UEA’s School of Computing Sciences. “The idea behind a machine that can lip read is that the machine itself has got no emotions, it doesn’t mind if it gets it right or wrong — it’s just trying to learn. So in the paper… I’ve been showing how we can use those visual confusions to make better phoneme classifiers. So it’s a new training method,” she adds. Dr Bear notes that a lot of current research in the lip reading field is looking both at audio and visual cues to try to improve the accuracy of machine lip reading. So the UEA model stands out on merit of focusing solely on visual speech to try to boost machine-powered lip reading. “We were effectively pretending that that audio signal is not there at all,” she says. “The idea being you can either have a lip-reading only system or it could be used in an audio-visual system that maybe one day hopefully it would be nice if it could jump in, do the visual signals only until the audio comes back in, for example, if you’re on a Skype call and the audio goes out but you can still see somebody.” The core challenge for lip reading techniques in general is there are — at least to the human eye — fewer visual cues than there are acoustic audio sounds humans make. Examples of sounds with confusingly similar shapes when seen on the lips are ‘/p/,’ ‘/b/,’ and ‘/m/’ — all of which typically cause difficulties for human lip readers. However UEA’s visual speech model is able to more accurately distinguish between these visually similar lip shapes. “It turns out there are some visual distinctions between ‘/p/,’ ‘/b/,’ and ‘/m/’ but it’s not something that human lip readers have been able to achieve,” says Dr Bear. “But with a machine we are showing that those distinctions are there, they do exist and our recognizers are much better at doing it.” “If I was to try and build a classifier to recognize just the /p/ sound what I would have done is it’s first trained on all the sounds that look the same. What we then do is we then refine that training by doing some more iterations of training which are only on the /p/ sound,” she says, discussing the training technique. “We’re actually learning and understanding what all these visual units mean and why they differ between people and we’ve used that knowledge in order to change the conventional lip reading system and make it better. It is a significant step forward,” she adds. ‘Much better’ is still relative — with the accuracy level for lip reading remaining low. Accuracy at the word level for the model stands at between 10 and 20 per cent (i.e. for correctly identifying a word), according to Dr Bear — albeit she stresses that’s still much higher than guessing. Over a sentence it of course becomes easier to distinguish sense from an entire transcript, she adds. “In all honesty we’re not 100 per cent sure [why it works],” she tells TechCrunch. “We just know that with our particular classifiers if we train them in the right way, with the right data, they’re not biased towards anything. “The complexity is that understanding the science of why visual speech is as complex as it is is a much harder question than can we use machine learning to get better results. We know that machine learning is evolving all the time, and we’re getting different types of classifiers… But actually asking the hard questions of what it is they’re learning and how visual speech is and how much it varies and how we’re going to control all those variables, those are the harder questions.” Asked to hazard a guess on how far out the research might be from being usefully commercialized in an application, she jokes: “If I worked for Google probably a lot sooner!”, before adding that any commercialization is likely to be “a fair few years away yet”. “We’ve still go things we need to learn and understand,” she says, characterizing the research as just one piece of an interlocking series of linguistic models that will be needed enable machines to adroitly and accurately pull speech data from the twists and turns of human lips. It’s also worth noting that the UEA model was also solely focused on the English language. So the scope of the challenge ahead to deliver on the promise of lip-reading powered applications is not to be underestimated. Could the UEA model be combined with other predictive linguistic techniques — perhaps machine learning based next-word prediction technologies — in order to further enhance lip-reading capabilities? “That’s exactly what I love to be able to do,” she says. “To have something that robust would be amazing but that’s going to take quite a bit more work as yet. It’s not going to be going to market any time soon.” is presenting the research findings at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Shanghai this — will also be published. The research was part of a three-year project, supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. |
Apple offers a workaround and patch for older iOS devices stuck halfway through the iOS 9.3 update | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | It seems that some iOS users on older devices are running into a snag during the 9.3 update. Upon installation, the update requires the Apple ID and password originally used to set up the device – and this ID might not match your current one. When this happens, you end up stuck in the middle of the installation process, with no way to move forward. “In some cases, if customers do not recall their password, their device will remain in an inactivated state until they can recover or reset their password. For these older devices, we have temporarily pulled back the update,” said Apple in a statement to TechCrunch. The issue affects iOS devices up to and including the iPhone 5S and iPad Air generation, which aren’t exactly “old” so much as “not new,” meaning there are probably plenty of people out there who should hold off. Apple is issuing an update to the update “in the next few days” which will fix the issue, but if you’re already stranded at the activation screen, try the workarounds listed at this . |
Retro gaming fans rejoice: Atari Vault is on Steam with 100 games | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | Longing for the days of the sticky floored arcades of your youth and long nights spent with the Atari 2600, but can’t be bothered to dig through your mum’s basement to find all the bits and bobs to throw yourself into a retro-gaming binge? Aren’t you in some industrial-strength luck. , Atari Vault gives you 100 retro games to while away a rainy weekend. What’s not to love… The game vault includes several Asteroids, Breakout, Championship Soccer, Dodge-Em, Double Dunk, Millipede (both the 2600 and the arcade versions), Outlaw, the original Pong arcade version, Sub Commander, Super Breakout, and, well, another 90 or so more games. The selection is heavily skewed toward Atari 2600 games, but there’s a fist-full of arcade versions as well, to keep things interesting. squirreled away somewhere, you can get the full arcade trackball experience on games like Centipede, too. Whenever I hear “Atari” my heart rate shoots up, my right hand cramps up into a joystick-shaped claw and my eyes start to water in anticipation of the all-nighters of days gone by, so spending $16.99 on 100 of the old classics seems like a bargain. You’ve got to be quick, however: the price will be bouncing back up to $19.99 when the introduction offer expires. The only downside? Atari Vault is only available for Windows, so if you haven’t a gaming box sitting around running Microsoft’s Finest, you’re up Sith creek without a light saber. Still need a bit of help to convince yourself? At the introductory price of $17, even if you only spend 20 minutes with each game, that’s still just $0.50 per hour of entertainment. You’ve spent money on dumber things, and you know it. |
Apple plans unscripted, app-focused show for its first original TV content | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | Apple’s plans for its first original TV show don’t make it sound like a swing-for-the-fences, -style project. Instead, it’s working on an unscripted TV series about apps and app developers. There are some big names attached, though, including musician Will.i.am and TV executives Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens. (Silverman was previously co-chairman at NBC Entertainment and also serves as one of the executive producers of Netflix’s .) Beyond that, details are scant. As , “Executives declined to discuss specifics, such as financing, title, timeline, storylines, episode length or how people will watch the show.” Well, then. Apple’s Eddy Cue did that the company will be distributing the show across its devices, and that its involvement isn’t just superficial: “This is not us lending our name, it’s more than that.” We’ve seen been previous reports about (including ) and pursuing those plans with a team reporting to Cue. When asked by the Post if Apple would be competing with Hollywood, Cue said, “Yes, we’re going after Disney. Just kidding.” |
Encryption pioneer Martin Hellman talks security, Apple, the FBI and the future of cryptography | Nitish Kulkarni | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | Hellman and then-Stanford researcher Whitfield Diffie won the award for their fundamental contributions to modern cryptography. The two introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which laid the basis for most security protocols used on the Internet today. The two are integral contributors to the debate on computer and Internet privacy, and were at the forefront of what are now referred to as the first “crypto wars.” The two fought the NSA and other government agencies for the right to publish and disseminate their work to the broader public, instead of the small community of government users who wanted to keep encryption a closely guarded secret. We spoke to Professor Hellman at his home on Stanford University’s campus, discussing the work that led to the award, his fight for computer privacy and the current legal feud between Apple Computer and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over backdoors into the iOS mobile operating system. |
Marketing startup Olapic acquires Pinterest-focused Piqora | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | Two visual marketing startups are teaming up — is announcing that it has acquired . Both companies promise to help businesses promote themselves through user-generated photos, but Olapic co-founder and CEO Pau Sabria said his company’s strength has been on Instagram (which was its initial focus), while Piqora’s has been on Pinterest (ditto). So he sees the organizations as “very complementary,” while also praising Piqora’s technology and its relationship with Pinterest. The plan is to integrate Piqora’s main products — including its content scheduling tools, its analytics tools and its Instagram shopping product Tapshop — into the Olapic platform, where they will likely be rebranded. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. from investors, including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Freestyle Capital and Baseline Ventures. New York-based Olapic says it will fold Piqora’s San Mateo, Calif. team into its own operations, although it’s not saying how many team members specifically are joining. Piqora CEO Sharad Verma, meanwhile, will serve in an advisory role during the transition before moving on to his next venture. Verma said one reason an acquisition makes sense is the consolidation in the marketing industry, with “the need to reduce the number of vendors, the friction and platform silos.” As for Sabria, he predicted that the need for Olapic’s platform will only grow. “Whether it’s seen on Pinterest, powers an ad or shows up on a website, what you will see more and more, thanks to Olapic, is that content generated by users is helping brands be much more symbiotic with their consumers,” he said. |
Spike in investments in classified ad apps could mean the death of Craigslist | Aimee Millwood | 2,016 | 3 | 24 |
When you think about the fastest growing areas for startup investments, you probably don’t think about classified ads. More likely, your mind wanders to music apps, e-commerce or social platforms. It’s understandable; after all, the classified ad industry has barely innovated since came to the scene. But a recent wave of huge investments in classified ad apps and local marketplace startups presents the possibility that Craigslist may finally have some competition. There’s nearly $400 million in investments among the most promising startups, along with backings by Sequoia Capital and former Zappos alums. It’s a trend that’s caused investors to pay attention. Recently, venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz included classified ads apps on his list of . And one of the leading global classified marketplaces, , was co-founded by serial angel investor Fabrice Grinda. Classified ads apps have silently risen to prominence under our noses. Here’s what you need to know. Twenty years ago, Craigslist disrupted the classified ads industry. It was revolutionary because it not only solved a need to bring online classified ads from the newspapers, but it also provided a space for local communities to connect, conduct commerce, advertise local events, post job openings and more. Craigslist has long been the reigning king of classified ads and local e-commerce; perhaps because of this, it hasn’t seen much need to innovate over the years. In contrast to websites today, which constantly feel pressure to A/B test, improve UX, and add better functionalities, Internet staples like Craigslist and Reddit have such a fiercely loyal user base that they continue to survive. But recently, investments in a variety of classified ads startups raise the possibility that the giant Goliath may have quite a few viable contenders. But a handful of up-and-coming startups seek to dethrone Craigslist and disrupt the classified ads industry — and they’ve got the money to make it happen. Some of the biggest community marketplace/classified ads startups aren’t coming out of Silicon Valley. The two leading the race — and — are both from Barcelona. Wallapop has about $150 million in backing while letgo has $100 million. The founder of letgo, Alec Oxenford, , which is known as the Craigslist of developing markets. There’s also the Canada-based , backed by Sequoia Capital, among others. Another international player is , from China. In 2015, it sold $1 billion in goods and has recently come to take on the U.S. market. To date, they’ve raised $30 million in funding and have a $300 million valuation. In the U.S., there’s , with $93 million in investments, a $500 million valuation and 12 million downloads; and , founded by three Zappos alums with $500,000 in seed funding. eBay has also tried to take a stab at the market, rebranding its mobile-first classified listings app . For these new mobile classified ads apps, taking over the market won’t be easy. One challenge for these apps are issues surrounding trust. Craigslist and other classified ads services have a longstanding reputation for being prone to scams, and these mobile apps will need to work hard to establish trust among their user bases. The startups are trying to solve the issue in different ways. OfferUp tackles trust issues through ID verification, buyer and selling ratings and round-the-clock customer support, while VarageSale handles the issue with a heavily regulated community policed by volunteer moderators. These up-and-coming classified ads apps have to contend with other niche-specific sites, like Indeed.com, StubHub, Airbnb, Couchsurfing, etc. These sites have built up a reputation for being the best in classifieds in their specialty, making it difficult to compete for competitors who try to provide an all-in-one classifieds platforms. Additionally, with so many competitors rushing into the market, none of the startups may be able to provide real value. Craigslist thrives because it’s where everyone is. When you have five apps from which to choose, using these apps may make the process of finding what you’re looking for more complicated, rather than easier. One startup, , seeks to cut down on the noise. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, the platform centralizes all the classified ads and local marketplace apps. currently indexes more than 20 million ads per day, and their localized and data-backed algorithm gives users the right results for them. The emergence of engines like begs the question again: With so many sites vying for the same slice of the pie, will anyone succeed in taking down Craigslist? |
Things are about to get ugly as activist investor wants to take over Yahoo’s entire board | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | Are you ready for a big fight over Yahoo’s control? Activist investor is really unhappy about Yahoo’s current state and wants everyone to know about it. In an , the activist hedge fund is saying that many things are broken at Yahoo right now and the investment firm could fix everything by taking over the company’s entire board. In order to do this, Starboard announced nine candidates who are running for the board of Yahoo. If investors agree, it would be an unprecedented move with a single activist investor controlling the entire board of a company that is around $33 billion. This move could happen at the annual shareholder meeting in June 2016 or before. So why does Starboard want to take over Yahoo? Starboard is really unhappy with the current board and management team at Yahoo, saying that they are not maximizing the value for Yahoo’s shareholders. In other words, it would get tough for Marissa Mayer and her team to stay at the helm of Yahoo with such an aggressive board. Starboard currently owns 1.7 percent of Yahoo, representing around $570 million. “Unfortunately, as we have outlined in previous letters, we have been extremely disappointed with Yahoo’s dismal financial performance, poor management execution, egregious compensation and hiring practices, and general lack of accountability and oversight by the Board. We believe the Board clearly lacks the leadership, objectivity, and perspective needed to make decisions that are in the best interests of shareholders.” This is war, and it’s going to be interesting to see whether Starboard’s plan is going to go through. The current board is not going to leave the room without a fight. But what would Starboard do differently? According to the very beginning of the letter, it seems like the investment firm is open to all options (“operational turnaround plan, separation, or sale of assets”). But the tone changes quite a lot as you read down. In particular, Starboard is saying that the sale process is broken. While Yahoo signaled that its core business (Yahoo without Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan) is , the board and management team are dragging their feet on this front. “Yahoo is only now beginning to engage with prospective bidders on NDAs and appears to be demanding onerous and off-market terms. Further, it has been well-reported that Verizon, normally a conservative company, has utilized every public appearance to state its interest in Yahoo’s Core Business. Yet, as recently as March 9th, Verizon representatives stated that they have not actually received any information from Yahoo with which to consider a bid.” This isn’t the first time we’ve heard that Verizon was interested by a Yahoo acquisition. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong even be the person in charge of exploring this deal (AOL is TechCrunch’s parent company, and Verizon is AOL’s parent company). And yet, according to Starboard, these discussions are going nowhere. Verizon is shouting “Hey! HEY!!! CAN WE BUY YOU???” And Yahoo is looking the other way. From the outside, it looks like the board is confident that Marissa Mayer is the right person to lead Yahoo. And it looks like Marissa Mayer still thinks she can turn the company around. She recently that a turnaround could take five to seven years. But it’s hard to see Starboard sitting around for five years without doing anything. “This atrocious performance is even more appalling when you consider the billions of dollars spent in recent years on what has proven to be wasteful acquisitions and research and development expenditures. As an example, Yahoo has spent over $2.3 billion on acquisitions since 2012 and has already written down $1.2 billion relating to those acquisitions.” A few years ago, activist investor Dan Loeb managed to grab three seats on Yahoo’s board. He then of the company. And now, another activist investor could shake up the company once again. The King is dead, long live The King! |
Y Combinator gets friendlier by naming Justin Kan as new spokesperson | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | People often misunderstand Y Combinator’s accelerator, with its broad range of startups that sometimes pivot before launch. That’s in part because YC’s president and spokesperson Sam Altman is too busy to tell its stories over and over, and he’s more of a techie type than a polished press liaison. So today, Altman handed the , one of YC’s partners, a multi-time participant in YC’s program, and a budding Snapchat star with a flair for public speaking. “Basically, Sam doesn’t have enough time to talk to all the press” Kan tells me. “So he said, ‘Justin, you like doing it. You should be YC’s spokesperson’, and I said ‘Sure.'” Kan started Justin.tv and later SocialCam (sold for $60 million), which both went through YC. Justin.tv’s video game streaming content was spun off into TwitchTV, which later scored a $970 million acquisition from Amazon. But Kan also had to shut down his on-demand assistant startup Exec after it couldn’t make the finances of $20 hired hands work. Both the success and failure give Kan deep credibility with fellow founders who might consider applying to YC. at “justinkan”, giving a behind-the-scenes view of a high-profile founder’s life in Silicon Valley. Altman says that Kan “connects so well when he speaks to other entrepreneurs” that he can both get Y Combinator’s message out there, while also attracting more applicants to its program. Press don’t always comprehend how YC’s partners assist its portfolio, and that its admits often pivot before launching at Demo Day. Kan’s more extroverted style could help clear up YC’s story. Kan explains that “Today, we write on our blog and just put it out there. I think we could be a little more thoughtful about it.” For example, the entirety of Altman’s of Kan’s appointment is “Justin Kan is going to be the new spokesman for YC and handle the PR requests we get. You should probably follow him on Snapchat. On a more serious note, I’m always impressed with how well-spoken Justin is, and how well he is able to connect with both reporters and founders.” Justin Kan, the original lifestreamer The only reason I have anything more to go by is that Altman mentioned the role change off-hand yesterday at , and I wrangled Kan for an interview a few minutes later. But now, press should get some deeper looks into how and why Y Combinator is changing. Kan says he wants to highlight the excellent engineering team that makes YC’s backend run, and tell the stories of how its partners with different sets of expertise offer guidance to YC startups. “One thing that would be really nice to communicate better…is the purpose of YC as we articulate it internally: to create more innovation” Kan shares. “Whenever I think about what should we be doing, I think about it through that lens. Whether that’s funding more companies internationally or investing more broadly in synthetic biology or space companies…we think about it through that lens.” What makes Kan special for this role is his self-awareness. He’s not so deep in the weeds of the tech scene that he can’t hear his own clichés. That’s important if YC is going to stay prestigious without seeming out of touch. Kan laughs about his own previous statement, saying “It sounds a lot like a commercial. ‘GE funds innovation!’ But for us it’s very actionable.” |
Trax & Wax is a vinyl subscription service for those craving that fresh, underground dance sound | Travis Bernard | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | Launched this week, London-based startup is the first vinyl subscription service focused on sub-genres within electronic dance music. It works with the most prominent distributors of dance music including , , , and to select a personalized monthly box of 12″ records. Currently, Trax & Wax offers four niche music categories for the subscription: There are also two tiers of service (2 or 4 records per month). Each monthly release is a surprise. Subscribers will not know what’s next until opening the package. Trax & Wax co-founders Manon Clayeux and Thomas Amundsen explained to TechCrunch that the company used the old idea of “DJ pools” as a model for this new service: “It is similar in that customers will receive a selection of brand new releases on a regular basis. We’ll also allow our customers to sign up for different packages that suit their needs as a vinyl fan or club DJ. Further, we’ll enable labels to submit their new releases for consideration so that anyone has the chance to be included in the monthly box. In that sense, I think the model is similar and a perfect tool for both home listeners and professional DJs looking for new records to include in their sets.” Trax & Wax is self-funded, and the first shipments are set to go out next month. Clayeux and Amundsen say they are primarily focused on the UK market, but other areas can still use the service if they pay shipping costs. Vinyl subscription services are great until a bad record arrives in the mail. I’ve tried a number a different “record clubs,” and I always cancel after 3-6 months for the same reason: one too many records that weren’t the type of music I enjoyed most. The biggest issue with vinyl subscription services is that they aren’t niche enough, and if a user really digs a certain sound there’s no way to get more of that type of music. Record clubs often just send what’s popular and try to lure in vinyl lovers with . Isn’t it supposed to be all about the music? Even sites like that are supposedly more niche, aren’t really . For example, one category on Prescription Vinyl is “electronic, beats, and downtempo.” Anyone that listens to some form of electronic music knows it’s a pretty broad category with tons of different beat patterns and tempos. And users crave these different sub-genres. There are sub-genres and micro communities within every type of music, and perhaps niche vinyl subscription offerings will become a trend. There are already some other companies testing out the idea with hyper-specific markets. One of the more popular niche services, , is all about alternative rock music. Another one, , focuses on unsigned indie artists. But what about electronic music? Electronic music is growing like crazy, and I expect to see more and more sub-genres and micro communities pop up as it grows in popularity. By focusing on a personalized experience and very specific audience, Trax & Wax could create a tribe of loyalists that thrives on regularly getting fresh underground dance music releases. |
Mapstr adds directions to its app to keep track of your favorite places | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | French startup is a nifty bookmarking apps, but for your favorite places. It lets you keep track of restaurants, bars, shops or your friends’ homes. With today’s update, you can now get walking, driving and public transport directions with integrations with Google Maps, Uber and . And this could make the app a bit more useful. Until today, Mapstr was a great way to get data into the app and browse this data. But when it came to acting on this data, it was a cumbersome process. Nobody wants to copy and paste an address into Citymapper or figure out how much time it’s going to take you. The good thing is that now you don’t need to. When you tap on the directions button, you get multiple options. The first one is Uber. It tells you how much time it’s going to take if you call an Uber and the cost. With Google Maps, Mapstr calculates the walking and driving directions. As for the Citymapper integration, you can compare other times with public transportation. The best part is that you can tap on one of these buttons and it’s going to enter your destination into one of these apps — thank you, deep linking. Rumor has it that people working at Uber and Citymapper were already using Mapstr, so it wasn’t that hard to ask them for an unlimited API access. Mapstr has $800,000 from business angels. Its user base has saved 1.5 million places in total. Users can also share some of their favorite places with friends. You can add as many tags as you want to your bookmarks in order to filter them out later using the tag drawer (restaurant, sushi, cocktails, etc.). It’s also a great way to check opening hours, get a restaurant phone number and more. At some point, Mapstr is going to develop its own API so that other apps can add places into Mapstr for example. And this is the only thing stopping Mapstr from becoming a sort of Pocket but for places. |
Hulu steps into virtual reality with a new app for Samsung Gear VR | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | As promised, The streaming service today announced the launch of an app designed for Samsung’s Gear VR powered by Oculus. Now available on the Gear VR Oculus Store, the new app is the first of what the company says will be several VR apps for different platforms, currently in the works. In addition to providing access to Hulu’s 2D content library in a “360-degree” environment, Hulu has also introduced exclusive original content along with several VR films. Even though the 2D content was not designed with VR in mind, the app allows viewers to watch in a fully immersive viewing environment. Users can choose between a variety of scenes for watching their favorite shows or movies, including a living room, big screen movie theater, or watching from a beach. Each 360-degree environment also lets viewers make adjustments to the outside scene, lighting, and look-and-feel. At launch, the company says there are over 25 pieces of VR content available in the app from Baobab Studios, Discovery Communications, Las Vegas, The National Geographic Channel, RYOT, Showtime Networks, SilVR Thread, Spoke, Studio Transcendent, The Uprising Creative and Viacom. The 3D virtual films are also available to every VR app user, even if they’re not paying for a Hulu subscription. One of the more notable items offered in the app is “The Big One” – Hulu’s first-ever originally produced VR film. The film was developed in partnership with Lionsgate and features Freddie Wong and his RocketJump brand, and allows users to watch a meteor shower that “soon turns into an apocalyptic nightmare,” says Hulu in its announcement. The Hulu VR app today only works on the Samsung Gear VR – a device that works with the Galaxy S7/S7 edge, Galaxy Note5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge phones. However, this is not going to be Hulu’s only effort in the VR space – that it was developing VR apps and content for other platforms, though it has not offered details on which devices, specifically, will be supported in the future or when they will arrive. But Hulu says that now that the app has arrived, it plans to release new VR films, shorts and environments with new gadgets on a “regular basis.” Hulu is not the only streaming service with plans for VR. Rival Netflix is also working on apps in the VR space, including , for instance. In addition to the news of the announcement itself, Hulu also offered a behind-the-scenes look at Here the company goes into detail about some of the challenges about building for VR platforms, and how Hulu’s engineers overcame those obstacles. Although the app is out now, Hulu clearly still feels that there will be much to learn about how VR experiences should be developed, and what kind of content will work best on this new platform. “We are at the very beginning of VR and like everyone involved in VR technology and content, we at Hulu, have a lot of learn about what makes for a great VR experience in the eyes of the viewer,” wrote Ben Smith, Hulu’s Head of Experience, on the . “We are super excited about our first steps into VR.” |
Facebook’s Timehop clone On This Day gets 60 million daily visitors | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | A year after blatantly copying , Facebook’s nostalgia feature is proving how successful big platforms can be when they rip off smaller products. Each day 60 million people visit , and 155 million have subscribed to its notifications that show your photos, status, updates, and wall posts from this date in years past. Facebook released the data on the one-year anniversary of itself. For reference, Timehop started in 2011 and by the end of 2014, had 12 million registered users and 6 million daily users. On This Day on the right looks remarkably similar to predecessor Timehop on the left When On This Day launched, Timehop CEO Jonathan Wegener seemed to downplay the threat, telling me “My general feeling is that this is awesome validation that we’re doing something worth doing. One of our investors put it really nicely that if Facebook isn’t playing in your space, you’re probably not doing something worth doing.” The startup has including a $10 million Series B in July 2014 from Shasta Ventures. But despite Timehop also bringing in posts from Twitter and other platforms, heavy Facebook users might have less of a need for it now that On This Day is available where they already browse. In just a year, Facebook has leveraged its enormous 1.59 billion user base and promotion on its News Feed to reach 5X as many people with On This Day. Facebook tells me it’s spent the year improving the product to better understand what you want to see and avoid showing anything that could make you sad. It’s now using artificial intelligence to rank the posts you see in On This Day, and is personalizing the feature based on your past use and your demographic. Facebook also engineered in compassion by filtering out memories of people who you’ve blocked or who were ex-romantic partners. After 12 year online, Facebook has built up a remarkable digital history on many of us. And while Timehop or others might be able to pull posts from the past, Facebook understands exactly who and what you care about, so it can show an old photo of you and your best friend rather than some random acquaintance. While Timehop is surviving, today’s stats are a glum warning to developers about what can happen when you build something too close to one of the 800-pound gorillas. |
Swarm launches new profile pages with front-and-center history search | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | Foursquare has just launched , complete with brand new profile pages, updated search capabilities, full-screen photos and a weekly Swarm update from your friends. The most important update to the app comes by way of new individual user profiles. These profiles show a clickable map of all the places you’ve ever been right at the top, followed by basic information like number of check-ins, photos, and number of friends. All of that was previously displayed on profile pages, alongside a chronological feed of your check-ins. Now, that feed has turned into a number of sections that are a more general indicator of what your Swarm life is like. The first section is a readout of where you check-in the most, based on category. For example, my top category is bars, then airports, followed by coffee shops, American restaurants and offices. If you click into any one category, you’ll get a more detailed readout. When I click into bars, I can see that I frequent cocktail bars the most, followed by dive bars and sports bars. I can dive even deeper and see which bars in each of those categories I visit the most. These views are available over the last sixty days or all-time. The next section is top friends, which shows you the friends you check-in with the most often. This is also viewable over six months or on an all-time basis. The third section shows the specific places you frequent the most, again with a version for the past sixty days or all-time. And finally, you can check your streak history and see how many weeks in a row you’ve been to bars, restaurants, hotels, offices, etc. At the bottom of the revamped profiles, Swarm will offer up a unique fact about you. Right now, mine says that my longest check-in streak at sports places lasted 15 weeks. Individual profiles are only viewable to the user, whereas searching for friends’ profiles will show the same chronological feed of check-ins as past versions of Swarm. Swarm 4.0 also includes a brand new search bar, placed prominently at the top of your brand new profile. The search is universal, letting users search by category (like Sushi restaurants), city, or friends, listing all the relevant results based on each query. Another update to the app is Weekly Swarm updates. This is a feed that is more algorithmic and curated than the basic chronological feed, showing you all the most important or interesting check-ins from the weeks. These check-ins are categorized based on friends who traveled, folks who went to cool events like sports games and concerts, and trending places. Weekly Swarm also shows new and lost mayorships as well as new stickers. Finally, the new and improved Swarm shows full-screen images in the feed, instead of the cropped, thumbnail-ish versions from before. Since the launch of Swarm 3.0, which re-introduced mayorships and turned the social utility app into more of a game, Swarm has now reached 8 million daily check-ins. You can check out Swarm for yourself right . |
Email is dying among mobile’s youngest users | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | In case there was any doubt that messaging apps were the future of communication in the mobile-first era, a new study released this morning puts some solid numbers behind their traction – and their increasing dominance over email, among today’s youngest users. According to a from , email is effectively dying among this crowd. Those aged 13 to 24 now spend more than 3.5 times overall usage time in messaging apps than those over 45 years old, while the older users still default to apps that replicate desktop functions, like email and web browsers. The data for these findings comes from a large sample of real-world users, notes App Annie, combined with the company’s own proprietary data sets. However, it only focuses on Android smartphone users, which in the U.S., doesn’t present a holistic overview of the market. Adding iOS data could change these numbers somewhat, though it’s likely that the larger trends would remain. For those who did not grow up with a smartphone in hand, there’s a propensity to use the device like a smaller personal computer, it seems. Those aged 45 or older spent a higher share of their time in the top 5 mobile web browsers on their phone than any other age group, for example. Plus, they spent more time in the top 5 email apps for Android and less time in the top 5 messaging apps. Meanwhile, the reverse could be said of the youngest demographic. In 2015, those aged 13 to 24 are far more likely to use messaging apps over email on their devices. In fact, the disparity in the usage patterns of the two services is fairly dramatic. (See chart above, left.) Messaging app usage doesn’t just top email, it blows it away. With the shift to a mobile-first culture – and as the younger users become the adults – the importance of messaging apps will only increase. That’s why a number of today’s top companies have already been doubling down on their own efforts to establish themselves as a leader in this space. Facebook, for instance, has been working to make its Messenger and WhatsApp products more than just an alternative to texting by communications, and product discovery, as well as virtual assistance through a In other markets, messaging platforms like KakaoTalk, LINE and WeChat, already do much of the same. In fact, messaging apps the – as opposed to the web browser, Google Search, or even a more public social network like Facebook. In addition to their preference for messaging, today’s youngest users are also heavy consumers of video streaming services on their phones, the report found, noting that their time spent in the top 5 streaming apps on Android was over double that of those aged 45+. The younger users also accessed these apps more than 4 times as frequently on an average day, App Annie said. However, when it comes to mobile shopping, it’s the middle tier (ages 25-44) who spent the most time in the top 5 retail apps on Android, and launched them more frequently than both their younger and older counterparts. That speaks to their spending power and comfort using mobile services. Of course, in time, the teens and young adults will also behave in a similar way as their income increases. |
Razer goes budget-friendly with new Blackwidow X keyboard line | Stefan Etienne | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | In the world of gaming accessories, “budget-friendly” is not a word frequently used. Naturally, one of the biggest players industry, Razer, aims to change that with the Blackwidow X. The newest set of keyboards added to their existing lineup, the Blackwidow X has changes made not only to improve simplicity, but to promote more competitive (e.g. budget-friendly) pricing for gaming keyboards, overall. Starting at $130, it’s $10 cheaper than the previous generation, yet features a new in-house switch design called the Razer Mechanical Switch, which has a purported increase in lifespan of 80 million key strokes. Some quick mathematics: 80 million key strokes is around 4-5 years of normal usage, or 2-3 years if used for gaming. Also important is what Razer calls Chroma lighting — custom individual backlighting for each key — which stays in all of its colorful stupor despite the change in keyboard technology and price reduction. However, there are some compromises: no USB ports on the keyboards or top body layer — essentially you’re getting a more minimalistic design. To compensate, the existing line of keyboards with the aforementioned features will stay. The new line of (slightly) price conscious keyboards are now available at the aptly named . |
Redesigned DoorDash app helps you choose restaurants based on delivery quality and speed | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | is today, putting each restaurant’s delivery experience front-and-center. That’s happening through a new “Delight” score, which Head of Design Josh Abrams described as an “industry-first” rating — one that doesn’t just reflect the general quality of the meal, or the experience of dining in the restaurants, but rather the food that arrives on your doorstep. To calculate the score, Abrams said DoorDash is looking at a number of data points, including customer feedback and restaurant popularity. The idea is to take data that DoorDash has already been collecting and boil it down to a single number that can help customers choose the restaurant that will provide the best delivery experience. Some of that experience, however, isn’t the responsibility of the restaurant itself, since DoorDash (or rather, the independent contractors it works with) is the one making the deliveries. CEO Tony Xu said the company did “an extensive amount of work on getting the right attribution in this score.” So for example, “If there was one experience that went poorly, because maybe we were late on the delivery, we’re certainly not going to penalize merchants for that fact.” The updated DoorDash also has a new design (one that’s responsive on the web, so it’ll adjust to your device and screen size), with the ability to sort restaurants based on price, speed and that new Delight score. And it’s going to start featuring food photography, with pictures taken by the DoorDash team itself. All of this comes, by the way, comes just a couple of days after DoorDash announced that it has (in what was , with a lower valuation than its previous funding). Xu said that the back-to-back announcements, is “just how the timing worked out.” |
Sony announces plans to make PlayStation games for iOS and Android | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | It looks like Sony will follow Nintendo’s cue and focus on mobile gaming. The company today that it will form a new business unit tasked with bringing PlayStation titles and IP to iOS and Android devices. That sounds like great news for gamers, but there’s a caveat here, it seems. Forward Works, Sony’s mobile gaming arm, is going to focus on users based in Japan and Asia, according to today’s announcement. The division will be formally created on April 1 — not a hoax (we hope) and the same date that Sony Computer Entertainment becomes Sony Interactive Entertainment — so we’re likely to learn more after then. Atsushi Morita, SCE’s head in Japan and Asia, will lead Forward Works. Other directors of the organization include Andrew House, who is Group CEO of SCE. , Miitomo. The long-awaited title isn’t really a mainstream release, though. Rather, it is a social app that lets users create cartoon-like avatars — very much like the ‘Miis’ you can create with the Nintendo Wii. That’s likely to limit its appeal to hardcore Nintendo fans. Sony, however, has hinted that its mobile titles will be “full-fledged,” which makes us optimistic that they will be more universally appealing. Sony’s previous effort at tapping smartphones — PlayStation Mobile — was tied to its Vita handheld device. last year. |
Smartwatch firm Pebble lays off 25% of its staff | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | Smartwatch pioneer Pebble is laying off 25 percent of its staff amid increased financial concerns. This situation has been coming. Last year, was in some trouble and had turned to debt funding and loans, as well as traditional investor cash, “in order to stay afloat.” Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky of the layoffs, which TechCrunch has verified with Pebble. Migicovsky also confirmed that his company had raised $28 million in debt and venture financing over the past eight months, in addition to . He blamed a more cautious outlook from VCs focused on tech as the primary reason for letting 40 of Pebble’s employees go. “We’ve definitely been careful this year as we plan our products. We got this money, but money is pretty tight these days,” he told the publication. Pebble’s news comes amid challenging times for wearable device companies. Fitbit was initially championed as an industry leader after a promising public listing last year, but . Part of the problem is that smartwatches haven’t set the market alight. The category was seen as heralding much potential, thanks in a large way to Pebble’s sudden arrival, but no company has created a watch that has truly wowed and won the market. Essentially they are seen as nice-to-have gadgets, which makes selling them to mainstream consumers challenging. Apple has probably come the closest to cracking this conundrum, and it just cut the price of its own smartwatch, which , prompting some to suggest that it isn’t selling as well as hoped. However, the company has never revealed sales figures and that’s in line with previous Apple product pricing. Competition is pretty fierce these days, and Pebble is rivaled by Apple, Samsung, Motorola, LG and others, but its products sit at the lower end of the scale, ranging from $50 to $299. Pebble was the first to really push the genre, bursting on the scene in 2012 via a (then-record) on Kickstarter, but with increased numbers of competitors targeting what is still a niche consumer market, business is tough. And, crucially for Pebble, it doesn’t have a smartphone unit or other businesses to fall back on to offset the cost of running a smartwatch business. Its other rivals do. |
Online lender Kreditech closes out Series C at $103M after getting $11M from the IFC | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | — the German startup that offers loans and other financial services to consumers who have little or no credit history by using some 20,000 data points online to assess their suitability — has added another $11 million (€10 million) to its Series C round of funding. This brings the total raised by Kreditech in this round to $103 million, after first announcing (€82.5 million) in September 2015. Other investors already in the round include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Amadeus Capital Partners, Värde Partners, HPE Growth Capital and Blumberg Capital. The round was led by U.S.-based private equity firm J.C. Flowers. Kreditech’s valuation remains the same as it was previously for the Series C — between €250 million and €300 million ($279 million-$335 million), according to a source close to the company. The company has raised . This latest tranche is notable because of its origin: it comes from the (IFC), a division of the World Bank group that focuses on economic development in emerging countries by financing private enterprises whose businesses can spur that development. Other recent investments made by the IFC include a in Supermarket Grocery Supplies Private Limited, a wholesale grocery distributor in India that is also the key supplier for (and IP licensor) to BigBasket, which itself this week. While Kreditech is probably best known for its online lending products, this round, and the IFC funding in particular, is getting used to help grow one of its newer products, Monedo. This is a platform — and app — that not only helps people apply for and receive loans or credit, but also provides a larger set of banking products to those users. For example, in addition to the loan, Monedo is essentially a digital wallet or account where that money can be stored. As with Kreditech’s loan platform, Monedo assesses a consumer’s suitability for credit not through traditional credit checks, but by vetting the individual online — a key process considering that many of these consumers do not have a credit history. Rene Griemens, Kreditech’s CFO, said that this is an area where the company will also be investing to improve the climate for lending for users from emerging markets, both in terms of risk assessment and subsequently lower interest loans; and in terms of making the whole process transparent and fair. Kreditech and the IFC are also making an effort to promote the idea of financial inclusion, helping write guidelines on responsible lending. The IFC endorsement, and working with it on better practices, is also very significant, considering that one of the biggest of the company has been its lack of transparency both on interest rates for its loans and the product in general — practices that Kreditech seems to try to be improving as it grows. “Most of our customers are not able to obtain credit at traditional banks,” said Alexander Graubner-Müller, Kreditech’s CEO and cofounder. “These institutions lack proper credit scoring for this segment and are unable to assess the customer risk. Through Kreditech’s technology we can perform a more precise credit rating to offer credit at fair and riskweighted conditions. With the new funding, we will continue advancing our scoring technology to continuously improve and expand our product offering.” Part of the logic of 20,000 data points, Griemens says, is that if you have a large pool, then it gives you a better shot of a more accurate picture with data in one area offsetting a lack of information in another, which he says makes its products more accurate than that of its many competitors in the online lending and financial services space. Kreditech today does most of its business in Poland, Spain, the Czech Republic, Mexico and Russia, but given the remit of the IFC will likely expand elsewhere. |
Gobi Partners and MAVCAP launch a $14.5M seed fund for Southeast Asian startups | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | has partnered with , which claims to be the country’s largest venture capital firm, to launch a $14.5 million fund dedicated to seed-stage companies in Southeast Asian. Called the Gobi MAVCAP ASEAN SuperSeed Fund (or just SuperSeed Fund for short), it has already invested in five companies: e-commerce site operator ; restaurant discovery engine ; on-demand service platform ; tour site ; and , an advocacy group and event organizer. This is the second time Gobi has collaborated with MAVCAP. In September, the in Southeast Asia and China. SuperSeed Fund is managed by Gobi co-founder and managing partner Thomas G. Tsao; Gobi’s Singapore-based partner Kay-Mok Ku; and MAVCAP CEO Jamaludin Bujang. Founded in 2002 to focus on startups in China, Gobi entered Southeast Asia eight years later with its first Singapore fund, Ku tells TechCrunch. “That makes us not only an early player in the market, but also one of the first Chinese venture capital firms to expand to Southeast Asia. Since then, we’ve seen dramatic growth in the region,” he said. “When we first entered, startups generally couldn’t receive institutional funding unless they were already profitable.” While followup funding was especially difficult for startups to secure, this has gradually changed as family offices turn into full LPs, especially in Indonesia, Ku adds. More venture capital firms are also setting up shop in Southeast Asia. This means that Southeast Asia now boasts its own unicorns, including Indonesia e-commerce sites T and and Singapore-based ride hailing app . “However, the region is still ripe, as many firms in Asia remain heavily focused on China and India, making Southeast Asia a gem for early-stage investors as it has yet to reach the hype levels China and India’s startup scenes are currently experiencing,” Ku said. The SuperSeed Fund will focus on four areas: e-commerce; financial technology that will enable more consumers to pay for online purchases; mobile (Southeast Asia has one of the in the world); and startups targeted to Muslim consumers, since Indonesia and Malaysia are both Muslim-majority countries. Startups in the countries of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia get a lot of investor attention because they have large populations and government support for new companies, but Ku believes Thailand is also very promising. “It is the region’s second-largest economy and individual purchasing power is double that of Indonesia. It is also an important cultural, tourism, and transportation hub for the region and to connect China and India,” he said, adding that Vietnam and the Philippines are also attractive because of their youthful populations. |
Ceres’ mysterious bright spots revealed in unprecedented detail | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | NASA has released close-up images of the dwarf planet Ceres, the biggest object in the asteroid belt, revealing new details about its mysterious bright spots. These images were taken by the Dawn spacecraft, which left Earth nearly a decade ago. Dawn was the first mission to reach a dwarf planet and the first mission to orbit 2 distinct extraterrestrial objects (it orbited Vesta in 2011). The spacecraft has been orbiting Ceres for more than a year now, getting closer to the dwarf planet over time. The recent images are the closest look we’ve seen of Ceres yet. Of particular interest are the high-resolution images of the Occator Crater, which contains the mysterious bright spots that have perplexed scientists for years. Ceres’ bright spots were initially identified in grainy photos taken from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003. Because of the resolution, the bright spots appeared to be clumped together as one. According to at the time, “the bright spot that appears in each image is a mystery.” Better images were obtained when the Dawn mission approached Ceres in 2015 and revealed that the bright spot was actually a cluster of bright areas inside of a crater, now called Occator Crater. Taken from an altitude of 240 miles above the surface, the most recent images provided sharper detail of Ceres’ surface than anyone had ever seen. With the new data, scientists were able to see that the material reflecting the light is on top of a dome in a crater about 2.5 miles deep. There are also fractures that surround the dome and run through smaller bright regions within the crater. These details don’t solve the bright spot mystery – in fact they provide more questions than answers – but they’re finally giving scientists something to work with. “The bright spots in this configuration make Ceres unique from anything we’ve seen before in the solar system. The science team is working to understand their source.” – Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission Initially, scientists had a few hypothesis to explain the sources of Ceres’ bright spots. Ice, volcanoes erupting ice, or salt deposits were all explanations for the material that was reflecting sunlight. Upon further analysis, experts that the shiny spots were probably due to light reflected by salt deposits. The prevailing theory is that there is a subsurface layer of briny water ice. When asteroids have hit Ceres in the past, some of that briny water ice was released onto the surface. Eventually, the water ice evaporated and left behind salty deposits. Because they’re lighter than their rocky surroundings, the salt deposits would reflect a relatively high amount of sunlight. Using different instruments on board, NASA has started to investigate the possibility of subsurface water ice. Dawn’s Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector is used to determine the chemical makeup of Ceres. Gamma rays and neutrons measured from Ceres, which are sensitive to the elemental composition on the surface, can provide scientists with a fingerprint of Ceres’ chemical composition. So far, the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector has found indications of increased hydrogen concentrations at high latitudes. Because hydrogen is a principal component of water, it’s possible that water ice is close to the surface at these locations. “Now that we can see Ceres’ enigmatic bright spots, surface minerals and morphology in high resolution, we’re busy working to figure out what processes shaped this unique dwarf planet. By comparing Ceres with Vesta, we’ll glean new insights about the early solar system.” – Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator for the Dawn mission Ultimately, there’s more work to be done to understand the complex processes shaping Ceres, but thanks to the Dawn mission, scientists are much closer to solving these mysteries. |
The SEC could change the requirements for investing in startups, and that’s not good | Evan Engstrom | 2,016 | 3 | 23 |
As strange as it may seem, only a small percentage of Americans can legally invest in most today. Under long-standing rules governing who qualifies as a so-called “accredited investor,” only quite wealthy individuals (those make at least $200,000 in annual income or have $1 million in assets, excluding their home) can buy shares in a fast-growing, privately held company. This “accredited investor” definition is extremely important for the startup ecosystem, since the that use to raise funds limits participation almost exclusively to accredited investors. Granted, the landscape of investor participation in funding may be changing thanks to the JOBS Act. What’s being referred to as “regulation crowdfunding” is set to go live in May, allowing to accept just monetary donations, but securities-backed investments, from online supporters, regardless of their income. Nonetheless, , the regulatory for both issuers and investors participating in this new form of crowdfunding may limit its full potential. Because regulation crowdfunding will be costly and restrictive for most issuers, many entrepreneurs may opt to instead rely on traditional accredited investors to raise capital, whether in the form of venture capital or angel investments. Thus, despite some new opportunities in non-accredited investor financing, the fact that the Securities and Exchange Commission ( ) is considering adjusting the financial threshold for accredited investors is alarming. Increasing the income requirement to inflation would substantially diminish the already limited pool of people eligible to fund . Today, around 10 percent of U.S. households qualify as accredited investors. If adjusted for inflation, that figure , according to the ’s own analysis. Data from the Angel Capital Association shows why increasing the accredited investor thresholds would be so damaging to the startup economy. The ACA that some 25 percent of its more than 12,000 members would lose accredited investor status and that this loss would be even more significant in areas outside of New York, Boston and California, where venture capital is already much harder to come by. One third of ACA members in these other regions would no longer qualify, amplifying the barriers outside the coasts already face in securing adequate seed funding from existing VCs and angel networks. As angel has become an increasingly important source of capital, particularly for emerging startup ecosystems, why is the now considering altering these eligibility ? For starters, the Dodd-Frank Act mandated a review of the current definition. And, considering the threshold hasn’t changed since it was originally established in 1983, it’s perfectly understandable to revisit the definition to make sure it’s still accomplishing its original goals of protecting people without sufficient financial foundations to take on the economic risks of private investments. Since 1983, our financial institutions and our economy at large have dramatically changed, so a review of the definition is certainly warranted. Back then, fewer than 2 percent of U.S. households qualified as accredited investors, and the tech sector represented only a small percentage of the economy. Yet, assessing what’s transpired in the startup and investment world since 1983 doesn’t suggest the definition needs changing — at least in any way that would further limit who can invest. By maintaining the accredited investor qualifications for so long, the has functionally enabled more investors to participate in supporting the startup economy, facilitating a thriving angel investor community that continues to grow each year. And this has all happened in an era in which the availability of information about business investments, and the opportunities to make those investments, have exponentially increased. These are indeed different times to be an entrepreneur or an investor, which is why the staff’s recommendation (detailed in ) to adjust the accredited investor definition for inflation is misguided. Though far more people can pursue these admittedly extremely risky investments than in 1983, there is no evidence that the present definition has harmed individuals who would be excluded under an inflation-adjusted threshold. Any increase should be justified based on the goals of the definition, and there is no evidence that the current definition is failing to adequately protect investors. The ’s report does acknowledge inflation-adjusted caps would “shrink the accredited investor pool considerably” and proposes additional income-based conditions to mitigate the effect. These proposals include maintaining the current threshold, subject to limitations, for investors whose incomes fall between the current and proposed inflation-adjusted threshold, as well as allowing households with existing minimum investments to qualify. staff estimate this additional criteria would actually expand the pool of eligible accredited investors from the current 10 percent to 11 percent of U.S. households. While this higher percentage is certainly appealing, it’s entirely convincing. It would place new limitations on existing accredited investors, effectively creating a second tier of accredited investor. And the minimum investment qualification covers people whose net worth doesn’t meet the inflation-adjusted threshold, but nonetheless have substantial assets invested, likely leaving limited remaining capital to participate in private offerings. If the is ultimately willing to expand the pool of accredited investors, why modify the minimum income threshold in the first place? Instead of creating new, conditional income- and net worth-based criteria in order to qualify, expanding the pool of eligible investors would be better accomplished by adding qualitative measures for investor sophistication. In fact, in its study, staff also recognizes that income alone may be the best way to determine who should be permitted to invest in risky . In addition to adjusting the threshold to inflation, the study further recommends the agency consider creating new ways to qualify as an accredited investor, including obtaining certain professional credentials, demonstrating investment experience or even passing a kind of accredited investor exam. These are welcomed suggestions, but if they come only as a concession for an increased financial threshold, then they’re ultimately insufficient. Determining and administering these new will require complex and slow-moving bureaucratic rulemaking that would unduly limit capital formation in the intervening period. |
BMW announces Android app integration | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | was among the first auto manufacturers to introduce integration with in 2011. Now, five years later, the company has at last announced at the that BMW Apps will integrate with Android devices. The first three apps to work with the iDrive system in the 2016 BMW 7 Series are all about the music: , and . So far, it’s just those apps and that one BMW model, but this opens the possibility of more BMWs and having more apps in the future. Users need to download the BMW Connected app to stream music from their phones through iDrive via Bluetooth. The features that each service’s devotees love remain intact in iDrive: you can still give a thumb up or down to a song in Pandora; paid and free Spotify accounts can access playlists and browse; and your saved Favorites in iHeartRadio are there along with live radio stations across the country. Apple keeps a tight lid on apps developed for its platform, and as one of the first manufacturers to integrate smart phones with its on-board entertainment system, BMW appreciated being able to easily evaluate iPhone apps for safety while driving. Android devices are part of a deliberately more open environment, but all those devices in the pockets of potential buyers can’t be ignored forever. BMW obviously chose three popular apps to start with that would be very easy to safely operate as a driver. All apps available for use with the iDrive system, no matter the platform, must be “optimized for safe use” while driving (e.g. not requiring the driver to take his eyes off the road to scroll through a near-infinite list of songs), according to the press release. If it works with iDrive, BMW has certified that the app won’t take too much of your attention. |
Here are the 59 startups that demoed at Y Combinator Winter ’16 Demo Day 2 | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | “Food, housing, healthcare, transportation. Life essentials made better and more affordable.” These are the types of startups that partner Paul Buchheit said were demoing today at Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 Demo Day 2. Yesterday, we covered the first from the batch, and . Plus, check out from these 59. Buchheit went on to say about today’s big aspirations, “Those challenges may seem too large or too complex for a startup to solve. But as Kyle and Dan showed us with Cruise, often the hardest problems are the best investments.” He was referring the GM’s $1 billion acquisition of Cruise, a YC startup that built self-driving car tech. Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit Today, the room was jam packed, with more chairs brought in for rich investors who were forced to sit on the floor yesterday. Buchheit joked about the first YC batch in summer 2005, saying “Back then no one wanted to go to Demo Day.” Someone in the crowd yelled, “15 people wanted to go to Demo Day.” Now, there are several hundred VCs avidly watching the presentations. Over the past few years, Y Combinator has expanded to accept startups from a much wider range of industries than traditional apps, including biotech, energy, hardware, and international logistics. When we spoke to investors in the past, some worried they might not have the expertise necessary to evaluate these companies. Now, YC President Sam Altman tells me many VCs have “hired other experts” to fill the gaps. He says “it’s become fashionable to hire a Chief Science Officer.” As a result, Altman believes that when it comes to funding, these alternative startups “seem to be doing just was well if not a little better” than their traditional software batchmates. These are the 59 startups that presented on the record today at the Computer History Museum:
Last year, over 5 million people were catheterized. Spinal Singularity wants to tap into the $2 billion urinary catheter market with a connected catheter that allows you to control the flow of urine by actuating a magnetic valve. The connected catheter is minimally invasive, and can be inserted or extracted in your own home. Spinal Singularity is starting human clinical trials this year and plans to start selling directly to consumers next year. Konsus helps find freelancers for companies and freelancers find clients. Companies send them a task such as content writing, lead gen and other business tasks and then Konsus finds the right freelancer for that task. The startup says it has grown 10 percent weekly since launching 28 weeks ago and already has $55,000 in revenue with a 40 percent gross margin and claims two out of every three customers come back for more work. Sales emails perform better when they’re contextualized with information about the recipient, rather than being generic. Nova uses artificial intelligence to write these emails automatically. It can search the web and social media for facts about the recipient that it can include in the email, like that they were recently the subject of a news article, or enjoy a specific hobby. Nova’s emails perform better than humans. They get a 67% open rate and 11% click through rate. Nova wants to charge $99 per seat per month to the 4 million B2B salespeople in the US, and has already signed Uber and Monster. With the CMO of Salesforce as a co-founder, Nova could replace bad sales email with computerized excellence. Instead of relying on expensive machines like heart rate monitors and package scanners, Mason America wants businesses to license its low-cost Android devices. Mason America also provides access to apps, software updates and the ability to track devices remotely. To date, Mason America has closed a $1.6 million licensing deal to power heart rate monitor devices. GetAccept is reinventing the sales proposal to close more sales. Sales managers send out proposals with a video attached. A personalized retargeting campaign then launches to engage the participant with an esign workflow. The startup claims to close 80% more deals in the industry, with customers charged $45 per month for services. The startup claims to have gained $200,000 ARR since December and says it is growing by 23% week-over-week. Retailers spend $2 billion a year on paper receipts, but by switching to email, they can collect valuable contact information plus deliver targeted marketing messages. flexReceipts lets them do this easily, while it collects the SKY, quantity, price, location, and more data. It can use this to track offline purchase habits of customers across businesses. By using these email addresses to power Custom Audiences Facebook ads and other email-based ad targeting, flexReceipts got 10X the click through rate compared to one of its clients got on its own. flexReceipts is creating the offline cookie for purchase tracking. Analyzing web and marketing data can take a lot of time. With PaveIQ, companies can pay $200 a month for access to its web analytics and marketing data analysis tool and recommendations. PaveIQ is currently profitable with 86 paying customers, including Four Seasons and Greyhound UK. DeepGram searches for imperfect speech-to-text recorded speech. Transcript errors kill search. Example: Siri might interpret the ask for “Y Combinator” as “why contractor.” Right now humans analyze the calls, but DeepGram replaces that with accurate speech search. The team is made up of dark particle physicists and plans to move to the entire web for recorded speech. Most car dealerships can’t actually allow complete purchase transactions on their websites. Their purchase flows end up with you having to speak with a dealer on the phone, leading to lost sales. Drive Motors builds a plugin that lets customers actually buy cars online from the comfort of their home, even when the physical dealership is closed. Drive Motors makes dealerships more money with no extra work, since it integrates into their existing financial and inventory software. Next, it could expand it offering online sales of car maintenance. When people inject insulin incorrectly, it can lead to complications and hospitalizations. With DoseDr, people with diabetes can use the mobile app to enter their blood sugar level to learn exactly just how much insulin to take. Earlier this year, DoseDr started a pilot program with five clinics and 50 high-risk patients. In the first month of the program, DoseDr was able to bring 93% of patients into the safe range.
PocketSuite helps local businesses run their operations through a smartphone, with calendar, payments and messaging in one app. Since launching, PocketSuite has grown revenue 38% month over month. It currently has 1,100 businesses active on the platform. This month, those businesses will process over $1 million in payments through PocketSuite. Most life science research is still done by hand. Pipetting can be a tedious process where researchers must fill vials one at a time. But OpenTrons automates the wet lab to make the process faster and less tiresome. A farmer who wants to engineer crops or scientists developing a new super material in their garage can use the platform to reduce time, for instance. OpenTrons calls itself the “first PC of life science” and sells both software and reagents. The startup first launched out of Haxclr8tr in China and ran a successful Kickstarter in 2014. It now claims to be growing by 50% month over month, with a $1 million run rate. Over 4 million biologists currently run these experiments by hand and OpenTrons plans to grow in what they say is currently a $47 billion market stuck running the lab by hand. . The third-world needs solar energy, but there are initial costs. SunFarmer is a non-profit that uses initial donations to establish sustainable solar companies in developing nations like Nepal. Solar panels are installed at schools and government buildings so hospitals can have power for devices and schools can power lights and computers. SunFarmer’s first spin-off in Nepal will be profitable in 2016, and now it’s seeking $1.5 million to launch in two more countries. Solar power doesn’t have to require endless charity. SunFarmer makes getting solar installations started repeatable without handouts. Chatbots could be the future of how businesses communicate with customers. But operating these chatbots on multiple platforms at once is complicated. Msg.ai offers a centralized dashboard with analytics to detect trends and sentiments, and integrates with Salesforce Desk and Zendesk. With Msg.ai’s intelligence and A/B testing, businesses can maximize the benefit of their chatbots. Scientists waste time cutting and splicing tissue samples. HistoWiz promises to save up to two weeks by allowing scientists to mail tissue samples and creating a database for research. Scientists view slides online and can have instant remote access to what amounts to a virtual microscope. HistoWiz is made up of a team of cancer researchers and computer scientists and says it now has over 400 customers worldwide and a $1.2 million annual run rate with 300% yearly growth in a $56 billion market. “Until now none of this tissue data has been collected in one place,” fonder Ke Chang said onstage. “We already have the largest database in the world.” In an attempt to make outbound sales easy, ZenProspect helps businesses find their most lucrative potential customers. Since launching, ZenProspect had seen 45% monthly growth and has grown to $1 million in ARR, and is profitable with 70% net margins. It currently has 110 customers paying an average of $800 per month. Scaling DNA production leads to errors in DNA production. The reason? We are using DNA that can only work with short amounts of letters, according to founder Tuval Ben-Yehezkel. Loop Genomics can do more with $2 per molecule. The startup now has a $50,000 pilot program and a $21 million a year pilot customer with Twist Biosciences. On top of that, the same tech can be used to diagnose human DNA such as cancer. Loop Genomics believes this is an additional $30 billion opportunity. Focusing on improving message read rates, Locent is a service for building and managing automated text campaigns. Compared to the average 23% email open rate, Locent claims a 95% open rate in three minutes. Lucent is currently working with clinics to let patients get text reminders when they need to get their medication. Lucent is adding 100 businesses per week. 70% of trucks in India are either owner operated or operated by owners with less than 10 trucks. That makes it tough for businesses that need trucking services to find and manage them. GoLorry is a mobile app that connects businesses, truck owners, and drivers so they can find help with jobs, handle logistics of deliveries, and transact payment. Trucking is an enormous $179 billion business in India and it’s growing as the country becomes more successful. GoLorry could become the critical logistics layer that smooths operations. OSVehicle builds the “guts” of electric vehicles. Most think of Tesla and the passenger car market, but there’s another type of vehicle in the electric car market and that is where this startup comes in. OSVehicle already has 13 customers and claims these customers present a $300 million opportunity. The team comes from auto industry such as BMW, Ducati and Vespa and the startup has more than $300,000 in revenue in a $600 billion market and is expanding with the belief that it is inevitable vehicles will become electric on a global scale and it can help manufacturers produce vehicles in half the time and cost. Early detection of cancer could save a lot of lives. X-Zell is a simple blood test that says it can detect cancer early on. It does this by removing healthy cells from the blood sample and then depositing the cancer cells onto standard slides. That’s when a pathologist performs an evaluation. In tests, X-Zell has had over a 90% success rate. Employees don’t know how their goals measure up to the bigger picture. Lattice makes sure everyone is focused on the border goal and teams stay aligned. The startup says it promotes transparency by highlighting problems and solutions and that goal making is a $6 billion business.
Over one-third of crop production costs are labor. Iron Ox is developing a set of robots that can run a greenhouse automatically This way, orders can be placed and food gets shipped without human help. Iron Ox already has robots that can cut 10% and 20% of farm labor, and is currently growing lettuce, basil, and bok choy. With talent from Google X’s drone delivery lab, Iron Ox wants to lead the future of farming automation. Physio health is a mobile health platform that rewards employees and endeavors to reduce costs for employers. Only a small percentage of employees tend to engage in health incentive programs. But Physio says 33% of employees stay active within the platform, or 5x’s more than other programs. How it works is each employee gets a mobile app that connects to other apps like Fitbit. Employees get rewarded for healthy behaviors and the rewards are things employees want. Employees get stuff they want, companies save money and brands are happy because they reach more people. Physio also makes money based on SAAS fees and referral fees. So far the startup has three global customers, covering 32,000 employees and a team made of Harvard MBA’s, behavior psychologists and gamers working to improve the $30 billion corporate wellness industry. 600 million Indian citizens defecate outside every day because of a lack of proper toilets. This causes the spread of diseases that leads to 500,000 deaths per year and huge productivity losses. Sanitation and Health Rights in India (SHRI) has built a toilet that converts poop into methane gas that powers a water filtration system that creates clean drinking water. SHRI then sells the water in the local community to make the whole system sustainable. It’s already producing 90,000 liters of water per month from just 4 facilities. They want to raise $1 million to bring clean water and toilets to tens of thousands of people. And, SHRI had the most memorable closing of any YC pitch, saying “Please come talk to us if you give a shit about solving one the world’s greatest development challenges.” Air travel is pretty terrible, unless you have a lot of money to blow on first class. Still, first class doesn’t change how fast you get from point A to point B. Boom wants to be the fastest passenger airplane ever, which it says is 2.6x faster than any other airliner. Instead of an 11-hour flight from San Francisco to Tokyo, Boom can get you there in 4.5 hours. The first 10 Boom airplanes are for Virgin Group, with the first test flight happening next year. Better drugs are out there but doctors might not know they exist. TrendMD informs doctors about the drug trials they need to know. The startup works with more than 2,000 medical journals garnering half a million clicks. Pharma spend $34 billion to reach 9 million doctors and TrendMD believes it has a better way to reach these customers. Trend says it’s the only channel to reach docs online. It does this with an embed widget and claims a $528 million annual run rate at 90% growth month-over-month. It works with major journals such as nature and BMJ and says it has 100% customer retention thus far. Georgette Packaging is going after the $130 billion small bakery packaging industry with simple printing industry tricks. Founder Sarah Landstreet is uniquely positioned to do this with a background in mechanical engineering and as a former bakery owner. Bakeries spend $1.1 billion in packaging in the U.S. alone, but Georgette has already sold bakery packaging to 150 businesses and has a $1 million run rate with 36% growth month-over-month. Customers can buy just 100 packages for small batches rather than a larger amount they’d normally have to purchase through this startup. $11 billion in food stamp benefits are unclaimed each year because the process of applying is so tough. It can require a 90 minute phone interview, 18-page application, and 10 documents per family member. mRelief helps people qualify for food stamps by texting them 10 simple questions. This saves the government time and leads to a 20% increase in total income for families it helps. mRelief has assisted 5,000 families already and just signed a deal with the city of Chicago. It wants to eventually help people apply for housing, health insurance, utilities assistance and more as it becomes a self-sustaining non-profit.
Protonet is a secure, on-premise cloud storage solution that you can set up in less than five minutes. Today, there are 2,045 companies using Protonet, including BMW, Audi and Airbus. Protonet has already raised over $4 million for the product via crowdfunding, and has generated $2.5 million in sales revenue.
Traditional video broadcasters want to go online and provide Netflix-like services, but don’t have the technology. Mux wants to provide it for the $400 billion TV industry that’s moving online. The first product in its suite is performance analytics that lets companies understand buffer rates and load times just like Netflix. Next it will move into hosting, streaming, and playback. It’s already monitoring millions of streams, and the team previously sold video business ZenCoder for $30 million and built the video.js video player used by Twitter and Instagram. Mux could eventually let any channel or studio compete with Netflix.
Today, there are 8.6 million women at high risk of breast cancer. iSono Health wants to make it easier for women to screen their breasts for cancer. It will do this by creating a 3D ultrasound that attaches to a wearable for automatic and repeatable imaging at home. It’s radiation free, takes only two minutes to do, and women can do it monthly to detect and track any changes. iSono Health plans to launch next year. It’s not clear exactly how much the product will cost. Pluot is affordable conferencing software that “just works”. Video conferencing is a $2 billion industry currently and Pluot wants to deliver to the next 99 million conference rooms. You can plug in and set up in just 5 minutes, according to the founders. The team behind it has already sold $20 million in video conferencing to Fortune 500 companies and the founders want to create repeat success with their own startup by giving away the hardware and charging $50 month per room, or a possibility of $60 billion in ARR.
Booking agents rely on an outdated mix of email, word documents, PDFs, and spreadsheets. Gigwell offers a software suite designed specifically for booking entertainers like musicians and public speakers. It lets agencies automatically create contracts, develop tour itineraries, and collect payment. Gigwell charges $100 to $600 per agency per month, plus a 1% to 6% fee on transactions. Since musicians earn 70% of their money on the road, and the concert business is growing, there needs to be a smarter way to get live entertainment booked, and Gigwell is building it. Every publisher wants people to watch their videos because that’s how you make money these days. With Pulpix, publishers can offer additional content discovery inside a video to drive 20% more views and increase engagement. Pulpix customers include GQ, WB, Vice and over 30 others, and is processing 10 million video views per month.
Emburse uses cards that enforce corporate policies as well as virtual cards to use online. It can notify the user immediately and make the CFO’s life easier. It’s grown by 30% month over month. Clients include Shyp and Wealthfront. Emburse also works on a referral program. It manages purchase orders, payments and other expense related transactions. Businesses waste an unbelievable amount of food throwing out what’s unused. But this is quickly becoming illegal, with big fines levied on companies that don’t donate leftovers. Copia provides a service where businesses can call its trucks, get their leftovers picked up, have the food delivered to homeless shelters, and then have Copia do all the paperwork. This earns businesses big tax breaks, and Copia charges 25% of this plus a pick-up fee, The company has already saved companies $1.6 million in tax breaks, and is already at a $1 million revenue run rate for 2016. Throwing away food isn’t just wrong. It’s becoming illegal. Copia makes it easy to earn tax breaks by doing the right thing. StartClosing says severe storms like hurricane and floods affect call centers. But contractors try to sell information in an old-fashioned way. The startup helps by creating a marketplace for repair leads after severe storms. StartClosing claims a 3x’s industry lead conversion rate using its lead gen platform. Since launching, it has generated a $75,000 market run in leads, with $60,000 in profit and a 78% monthly growth rate. The founder focused on storm damage previously and hopes to expand that same success. The charter bus industry could use an infusion of technology. Sharethebus connects eventgoers, groups and sports fans with one of the 3,000 bus companies in its network. Through Sharethebus, passengers can track their bus in real time and message the driver if they’re running late. In the last twelve months, Sharethebus has helped move over 50,000 people in 1,200 bus trips. That made up for $1 million in busses booked. This quarter, Sharethebus facilitated $500,000 in bus bookings. Monthli believes property managers are path to more than 360,000 HOA’s. The startup brings insight to property managers with a platform to help empower them to check on properties with booking and tracking capabilities. It currently has lead generation with 5,000 homes and works on commissions and direct services in a $2 billion industry. Thee long tail of 7000 rare diseases will take 400 years to cure at this rate. But 1 in 12 people suffers from a rare disease, and they’ll pay $500,000 each to get well. Perlstein Lab uses CRISPR, the command line for editing genomes, to test worms, flies, and fish for ways to cure these diseases. Perlstein Lab can then sell these drugs or license them for royalties. It already has deals on the table with big pharma, and is working with patient groups the industry thinks are too small to care about. Methodical, tech-enabled drug testing could eventually help us cure diseases even if only a few people have them, because each life is valuable. LinkedIn tries to make you introductions, but it’s really no good, at least in our experience. Index finds introductions to new contacts using the data in your inbox. It understands that people you email often are good contacts, as are the people who respond quickly. Index has been live for eight weeks and already has 15 pilots in place with companies like Box and Atomico. it charges customers $50 per user per month. Interstate is analytics for online advertising. U.S. advertisers spent $50 billion in online ads last year, but advertisers are still using Excel spreadsheets to track ad spend. Interstate helps by tracking and providing data analytics targeting that can create audiences easy to sync with Google, Twitter and Facebook. The startup says it has grown 9x in 3 months and that analytics is just the beginning. It claims to be the first ones going after this problem and that it is a $2 billion a year revenue opportunity. Chat makes apps more sticky, but it’s complex to build. SendBird provides the UI, SDK, and backend to let any site or app add chat in five minutes. It supports one-to-one chat, group messaging, cross-platform sync, read receipts, and profanity filters. It’s already working with eBay, SK Telecom, and many more clients, and is delivering 1 million messages per day. The SendBird team previously sold a 5 million-user gaming company for $10 million and now it’s hoping to beat the big names in messaging and bring chat to every app.
Vein care is a big business in the U.S., with a total of 4 million people spending millions of dollars on it per year. InnoVein has created a prosthetic valve for the veins in an attempt to offer patients curative therapy. InnoVein did a successful trial run with sheep and plans to start human trials in Q1 2017.
NetBeez is network monitoring that detects problems before users do. Intranet downtime costs companies $300,000 and hour. Users know better than IT that the network is down. NetBeez works with network sensors to detect when the network is down and alert the IT officer so users don’t have to tell them. The startup claims $34,ooo in monthly recurring revenue with a 4x growth in the last 12 months. NetBeez is already working with more than 1,000 offices and says it has the potential to reach 5.6 million offices in the U.S. with this product. 1 in 15 Americans owns a rental property, but people hate being landlords. It’s tough to find tenants, collect rent, handle maintenance, and deal with emergencies. And traditional property management services are expensive and have poor service. Castle uses automation and on-demand labor to let a single account manager handle 120 properties, 4X as many as standard managers. By charging a $79 per property per month fee, Castle could win a $35 billion market that might grow as property management gets easier. Software is eating landlords. There are roughly 70,000 chemicals made today and 99% of them are made from petroleum. Lygos is engineering yeast to convert sugar into specialty chemicals, which results in a 3X reduction in production cost of key industrial chemicals. Lygos has already identified the first 10 chemicals to produce using yeast technology. The first is malonic acid, which Lygos is already selling.
Landscaping might seem easy, but it requires lots of management of customers, scheduling, and payment. Yardbook lets them handle it all with web and mobile software. Clients save hours and increase revenue by an average of 32% after 1 year. It’s already onboarded 10,000 landscaping companies that handle 170,000 households, and has processed $56 million in invoices. Next, Yardbook will implement transaction fees and paid marketing services. While Landscaping is a fundamentally offline business, it doesn’t mean it can’t be enhanced with technology.
Online reviews make or break businesses but it’s hard to get a review unless you’re a top-notch restaurant, or the absolute worst one in town. Podium helps businesses collect online reviews across sites like Google and Facebook. In January, Podium launched pilots with three enterprise customers across 10,000 locations. To date, Podium has generated $3 million in ARR.
White-collar freelancers are essentially one-person businesses that have to be their own admins, accountants, and lawyers. But they don’t know how. 50% are paid late or not all when they should be. Bonsai provides simple contract and payment tools that let freelancers sign deals with clients, and Bonsai makes sure they get paid on time. Bonsai will soon release a $19 per month premium version with extra workflow and admin tools, and will develop cash flow tools for escrow, collections, and cash advances. There are 10 million full-time skilled freelancers out there, and Bonsai lets them work like full-fledged businesses.
Sales teams across industries face a big issue, paying out over $800 billion in sales commissions. A lot of them do them in Excel and email, two processes that are prone to error. With Compgun, companies can calculate and optimize sales commissions. Companies can also do commissions in real time, instead of waiting until the end of the month. The idea is that seeing the amount of commission you make will drive sales performance.
Clothing companies waste tons of money manufacturing products no one ends up buying. Coach literally incinerated $30 million worth of purses and other goods last year that it couldn’t sell. Hingeto lets clothing brands set up shops where they can offer designs, and only actually make them if they sell. It works a lot like Kickstarter but for established brands, and Hingeto earns 15%. The team already worked with tons of brands sell clothes with their previous business, and they’re helping clients increase sales by 20%. Clothing brands soon won’t have to guess what will be popular, they’ll only make what sells. Customer relationship management tools could use some work. That’s because sales people still end up wasting time fixing and adding contact information to the CRM. Elucify has created software to add and fix contacts in those systems. It does this by crawling public data, processing 250 million data points per month. It also allows customers to contribute data to the product. Elucify is going after a $3.2 billion market and has a $30,000 ARR. Current lab tests costs $20 each, take hours or days for results, and must be sent to a lab. Unima’s paper strip costs $1 each, takes 15 minutes, and can be run on site by someone with no experience. That’s because it found the vNAR antibody that enables these tests. You take a blood sample, put the blood sample in a paper microfluidic device, and in 15 minutes you take a photo with your smartphone and get results in 3 seconds. It’s first test for HIV and tuberculosis had 96% accuracy vs the 75% of the current test. Unima expects to be in the market next year, and is planning tests for Influenza, Dengue, and STDs. One in five Americans suffer from mental health issues every year. With that in mind, Kip Health is on a mission to improve therapy with measurement-based data — something that will be required of clinicians starting next year. Kip is a mobile app that patients use to track symptoms and progress throughout the day. That data gets shared with their therapist who can then use that information to tailor the treatment. In the last six weeks, Kip Health has brought on 90 clinicians to the platform. Hiring is the #1 problem at big companies. Referrals are the best ways to grow a team, but most companies don’t get enough. StrongIntro helps companies throw sourcing parties where employees import their email, Facebook, and LinkedIn contacts, which are referenced against open jobs. They can then be sent recruitment messages, and StrongIntro earns a 10% fee per employee hired. It’s already helping companies like Zesty and Teespring get 15X to 20X more referrals so they can build their team intelligently and maintain their culture. Slack has become a huge platform — so huge that companies are building for it. Birdly is a Slack bot for teams to fetch and share data from Intercom, Salesforce, Zendesk and Stripe. In the last two months, over 900 companies have used Birdly’s bots, and the company has seen 23% growth in weekly usage. In order to fuel growth, Birdly plans to add more integrations.
Engineering efficiency is critical, but there are no benchmarks. Standup meetings or quantity of code written often don’t explain if an engineer is closer to completing something. GitPrime can track the lifespan of code to check for churn, or code that’s being thrown out, plus more indicators of real progress. Every company with a software engineering team needs this. SolarCity, Ooyala, and Sphero are already onboard, and it’s growing 73% month over month. Don’t just code harder, code smarter. You would think that if your phone needs to process something simple like adding 1+1, it would require less processing power than loading up a JavaScript-heavy website. Well, that’s not currently the case. Reduced Energy Microsystems is building asynchronous processors so that simpler operations take less time. Its commercially viable, patented asynchronous processing approach has already resulted in a real chip built for a customer, which was part of a $300,000 contract. This chip is completely asynchronous and makes processors 2-3x more efficient. Reduced Energy Microsystems plans to tackle the IOT industry with its technology. |
Bullish with Tristan Walker, CEO of Walker & Company Brands | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | Tristan Walker is becoming, if he’s not already, a household name in Silicon Valley. He’s the founder and CEO of Walker & Company Brands, the startup behind the successful Bevel razor and shaving cream products for people of color. I first spoke with Walker in December 2013, , while writing for Business Insider. He was in the San Francisco Bay Area and I was in New York, so we could only chat over the phone. So, I was super pumped (proof at bottom of post) to finally meet him IRL for what turned out to be an amazing episode of Bullish. In today’s episode of Bullish, Walker and I chatted about how personal health and beauty startups fit into Silicon Valley (spoiler: they don’t), getting VCs to back these kinds of startups, misconceptions around Walker & Co. Brand’s market opportunity, and a lot more. The “funny thing” about Walker & Co. Brands being a niche opportunity is that “it’s not at all,” Walker told me. “We’re targeting a consumer group that’s the majority of the world, if you think about black, Latino, Asian consumers.” And by 2040, they’ll make up the majority of the U.S. Walker went on to say that what he’s doing is actually the opposite of niche. “If there’s anything I’ve said that I’d like folks to really take with them is, really don’t let your lack of context cloud your judgment,” Walker said. “There are opportunities out there that are significant, and just because you’re not a part of the demographic that we’re serving, doesn’t mean there’s not a significant opportunity.” Me before the shoot with Tristan Walker Scroll back up to the top to watch the whole interview. Peace! |
JetSmarter puts a jet in your pocket, and is happy to see you | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | If traveling first class is just a teensy bit too plebeian for you, has you covered. The company lets you book a private jet from your smartphone, and announced today it is expanding into Europe, with scheduled routes between London, Nice, Paris, Geneva and Moscow. Sure beats the red-eye in cattle class. JetSmarter claims it is the fastest-growing private jet company in the world. It wouldn’t share how many users it has, but told me that it has seen 15-20 percent growth per month since its launch in March 2013, with more than 350,00 app downloads. The company is operating an all-you-can-fly service for a cool $3,000 sign-up fee and an annual membership with a $9,000-per-year price tag. Once you’re a member, you can live the high life of an unencumbered jetsetter. JetSmarter offers a few different services, including JetCharter, where you can book a whole jet from anywhere to anywhere else, or JetShuttle, where you can search for a flight that is already scheduled and that may have a couple of spare seats. JetSmarter doesn’t own its planes, but partners with 800 air carriers all over the world. Between them, the carriers are making more than 3,000 aircraft available to JetSmarter customers. So, why would you stick your boarding pass through the shredder, leave your worries behind and go private? JetSmarter , including avoiding “the misguided masses,” not having to mingle with freshly released terrorists and getting frisked by the TSA, and avoiding people with “the natural inability to ever pipe down.” Yikes. Off-color marketing aside, it does seem like the company is flying — and not just literally. It announced this month, and former U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security Tom Ridge to its board to help bolster its safety and security infrastructure. In addition to flexible flights whenever you fancy, the company is running regular routes between a rapidly growing number of cities: If you’re into planes, this is probably exciting to you. I’m not, but the engines are shiny, so that’s fun. Grabbing a seat — or a whole plane — is easy with the JetSmarter app. JetSmarter from — among others — the Saudi Royal family and Jay Z last year, for a total of $56 million raised so far. The funds are being invested in a broad expansion plan. In addition to its existing offices in , , , , and is expanding with additional offices across Europe, the U.S. and in the Middle East. |
Gecko Robotics Does The Heavy Inspecting At Power Plants To Prevent Human Fatalities | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | Gecko’s proprietary magnetic adhesion technology works much like the sticky foot of a gecko, allowing its robots to crawl up walls to inspect for damage along the way. A human would normally be the checker, but that presents an often dangerous situation. According to Gecko, most plants must shut down at least once a year to check for damage to the boiler. To do these inspections crews install 150-foot scaffolds and climb up the walls in search of areas in need of repair. On top of that, inspections can take up to seven days, with plants losing up to $1 million per day, says Gecko. But for $50,000 to $100,000 Gecko deploys robots to do the work of human inspectors, saving time and money in the process. The startup is currently working with several U.S. power plants and plans to be profitable by the end of the year. We spoke with co-founder Jake Loosararian about his wall-climbing robot inspectors. You can see that interview in the video above. Note: The startup debuted its robotic technology at . |
Degreed acquires European education startup Gibbon | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | , a startup promising to “ ,” today that it has acquired . Degreed offers tools for tracking lifelong learning and earning additional credentials. Gibbon, meanwhile, is supposed to help you learn by . “Hands down, Gibbon has built the most elegant tool for curating your learning,” said Degreed founder David Blake in an emailed statement. “We are excited to add the strength of the Gibbon team to Degreed as well as the elegance of their approach to the Degreed platform. ” The acquisition price was not disclosed. While Degreed is headquartered in San Francisco, the Gibbon office in Leiden, Netherlands will become its first international location. |
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen pledges $100 million toward cutting-edge biotech research | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | Investor, entrepreneur, billionaire and Bill Gates’ other half in the founding of Microsoft Paul Allen has announced a $100 million investment in the , a fund focusing on the future of biotech research. Allen, who is worth about $15.3 billion, announced the investment today at the in Washington, D.C. The purpose of this investment is to “explore the landscape of bioscience and fund ideas at the frontier of knowledge to advance science and make the world better,” according to a . “To make the kind of transformational advances we seek and thus shape a better future, we must invest in scientists willing to pursue what some might consider out-of-the-box approaches at the very edges of knowledge,” Allen said. “This of course entails a risk of setbacks and failures. But without risk, there is rarely significant reward, and unless we try truly novel approaches, we may never find the answers we seek.” The new Allen Discovery Centers will offer up to $30 million in funding ($20 million of which will be doled out over an eight-year period) and initially includes work with Stanford and Tufts University. The Allen Distinguished Investigator (ADI) program will offer a smaller amount of $1 million to $1.5 million each and will support early-stage research in conjunction with the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), MIT, UC Berkeley (utilizing Jennifer Doudna’s CRISPR Cas9 technology), as well as the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière in France. Focus areas for the first leg of the funded projects include developing methods to read and write code for tissue and organ regeneration, using synthetic biology to fight deadly drug-resistant bacteria, determining the principles of biological innovation and the creation of computational models to understand the multicellular basis of infectious disease. “Over the next 50 years bioscience will undergo a radical transformation as advancements in life sciences converge with mathematics, physical sciences and engineering,” newly appointed head of the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group Tom Skalak said in a statement. “The time is now to make this type of transformative investment in bioscience to advance the field and ultimately to make the world better.” |
null | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 3 | 24 | null |
Feminism is in the details | Nogah Senecky | 2,016 | 3 | 23 |
The topic of in can take on different forms. It is about ‘s positions and promotions (or the lack thereof) in the industry, with initiatives meant to help network, find opportunities or . It is also about developing technology that can help us this world kinder to , by offering solutions to problems that have to do with ’s health, safety and . And not last nor least, it is about how the information we consume and are exposed to influences the representation (or, once again, the lack thereof) of everywhere. The world is an arena where discoveries are made every day, and the responsibility to lead others in new directions is all around. Today’s human society learns via Wikipedia, blogs and social networks, which is why so-called insignificant are in fact quite dramatic. The following is a set of stories that have taken place over the past year; they may not be earth-shattering, but they absolutely symbolize the winds of feminist change. A famously annoying saying declares that behind every successful man, well, you know. As it turns out, until recently, Facebook’s friends icon demonstrated a similar reality by showing a woman’s silhouette behind that of a man. In July, however, the company decided to change that and bring forward. (Photograph: Facebook/Caitlin Winner) This change was made after the company’s design manager, Caitlin Winner, realized that displaying a smaller image of a It is not the first time that the social media giant has chosen to share a feminist vision with users. This should come as no surprise, considering that Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is a feminist leader and the woman behind the Lean In movement. In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to take a struck a conversation, as well as his recent comment to an elderly user who encourages her granddaughter to date nerds, letting her know that she should instead encourage her to “ .” The fact that it is Facebook, of all companies, that proves to be extra sensitive to how are represented through their products is what matters most of all. As a leading force in the social networks arena, Facebook has tremendous influence on how we as a human society communicate with one another. By embracing a feminist point of view, it helps assure that the conversations we form are a little better. The Legend of Zelda is a well-known Nintendo game (at least to those who grew up in the 1990s), where the main character, a boy named Link, saves princess Zelda. As so often happens, young parents who choose to share beloved gaming classics with their kids feel both nostalgia and a desire for change. Such is the case of Tony, a father who decided to hack the famous game and create a more gender-neutral version. The new version does not approach the game from a male perspective, thanks to well-thought-out in terminology. It’s interesting to note that hackers seem to have a thing for this game, as this is at least the third time we’ve heard of such an effort. allowed players to choose Zelda as the game’s leading character and lead her on a quest to save Link. The issue of representation in gaming was pretty hot this past year, with the Gamergate controversy making headlines and creating a disturbing wave of anti-feminist reactions and threats. It is refreshing to see hackers using their skills to actively create a better experience for future generations, without being scared to revisit and critically assess their own childhood memories. Stock photos are an important resource to anyone creating or sharing content online. Therefor, they are instrumental in telling ’s stories to the world. That is also why ’s rights activists find it so frustrating that many images show an outdated, chauvinistic and often ridiculous portrayal. In an effort to change the representation of in the industry through commonly used stock photos, the organization created a partnership with Getty images in 2014. A new photo collection was created to help promote the modern image of the modern woman. In 2015, we have witnessed another wonderful effort, this time highlighting the online presence of of color in . was created by WOCinTech Chat and photographer Mike Ngo, and is distributed for free. These photo collections help fight the stereotypical image of , in and outside the industry. Instead of short skirts and bizarre scenarios ( , anyone?) they display a more authentic reality. Technology has brought an abundance of virtual assistants into our lives. Many VAs are given a female name and voice, which is disturbing enough on its own. But what is even more disturbing is how quickly Siri and Cortana have joined the awful statistics of verbal sexual harassment after being asked inappropriate questions about their sex life. In the case of Cortana, the developers at Microsoft decided to . The writing team made to Cortana’s personality that let her fight disturbing communications and answer without apologizing. This is obviously more alarming than anything else. The fact that the mere notion of a female presence is enough to cause harassment is telling and sad. But Microsoft’s decision to address this issue and the company’s way of dealing with it are admirable, and sends a valuable message about what forms of communication are simply unacceptable. After raising the question of what it means to do things “like a girl,” wants to empower through a new set of emojis that truly represent them. Currently, all professional or athletic images show male figures, whereas girls are offered a pink selection of brides and nail polish images. Because emojis are an incredibly common form of communication, particularly among younger audiences, this is indeed a problem. So, yes, this is all part of a commercial campaign, and we have to be slightly cynical about it. But considering the number of ads that invest in doing the exact opposite of empowering this is nevertheless an important step in the right direction. More than anything, the above examples show how a feminist point of view allows us to see things in a new way. For me personally, any form of critical thinking is like a visit to the optometrist. With a new pair of eyeglasses, you begin to see things, notice things, that didn’t seem to be there before. Only they were always there, and right under your nose. You cannot unsee what you have just discovered, and now feel the need to warn those around you who remain unaware of the obstacles standing in their, or others’, way. Just like in Plato’s cave, you now hold the responsibility of bringing others into this newly discovered sunlight, on a mission that is never easy, never-ending and always crucial. |
As FCC considers new broadband privacy rules, report urges wider user data safeguards | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | A new report from U.S. consumer rights and privacy advocacy group, the , has set out the case for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to tighten data protection rules around how ISPs and telcos collect and use consumer data. The FCC is currently consulting on on how ISPs can gather and utilize customer data — with an internal vote due at the end of this month. If the commissioners vote for the rule changes (as expected), a wider U.S. public consultation would then take place ahead of any new regulations being forged. Making the public case for updating consumer protections earlier this month, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler argued it boils down to a matter of consumer choice. “Every broadband consumer should have the right to know what information is being collected and how it is used. Every broadband consumer should have the right to choose how their information bits should be used and shared. And every consumer should be confident that their information is being securely protected,” he wrote in an article in the , flagging up the visibility ISPs such as TechCrunch’s parent AOL’s parent Verizon can have into users’ digital lives. “This is not to say network providers shouldn’t be able to use information they collect — only that since it is your information, you should decide whether they can do so. This isn’t about prohibition; it’s about permission.” “Simply by using the Internet, you have no choice but to share large amounts of personal information with your broadband provider,” added Wheeler. “You have a right to know what information is being collected about you and how that information is being used. That’s why establishing baseline privacy standards for ISPs is a common sense idea whose time has come. The bottom line is that it’s your data. How it’s used and shared should be your choice.” The FCC chairman is by no means the lone voice raising privacy concerns here. Wheeler was sent a letter co-signed by around 50 consumer rights and privacy organizations all urging the FCC to create stronger rules to regulate broadband providers’ use of data. “What tracking is going on now and how the info is being used is in most cases not readily apparent,” Susan Grant of the — one of the letter’s co-signatories — told TechCrunch at the time. The CDD was another co-signatory. In its report it’s now seeking to further flesh out what’s at stake — by profiling in some detail the data harvesting practices of specific ISPs and cable providers, including AT&T, Comcast, Dish Network, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, Disney/ABC, News Corp (Fox) and others, as well as detailing some of the interplay between ISPs/broadband/cable providers and different data brokers and larger Internet companies also involved. It’s this complex and non-transparent (from a consumer point of view) web of data harvesting and processing relationships that has enabled ISPs to amass sophisticated consumer tracking and ad targeting infrastructures in recent years (including ), the CDD argues. “ISPs have made partnerships with powerful data brokers, giving them insights into our online and offline behaviors. They are incorporating state-of-the-art “Big Data” practices — such as “programmatic advertising” — that significantly threaten the privacy of subscribers and consumers,” it writes. “The stealth data-profiling apparatus that determines whether a person is bought, sold, or ignored, and used to target family, friends and others, requires the Federal Communications Commission to address the use and consequences of practices that threaten privacy and pose consumer-protection concerns,” the report adds. The CDD is urging the FCC to adopt rules to help reverse what it dubs “the tide of ever-growing and unchecked collection and use of consumer data across devices”. “A truly “open” Internet that embraces “network neutrality” must have privacy and consumer protection at its core. Otherwise, powerful data and digital marketing gatekeepers will be in an even more influential position to influence the kinds and diversity of programming available in the marketplace,” it goes on to assert, suggesting there is a risk of consumer information being used in “unfair and discriminatory ways that can harm individuals and families” — by, for example, financial data being used to target high-interest credit card or loan offers to at-risk consumers; the singling out of seniors to promote unnecessary medical devices and services; basing targeting profiles on racial and ethnic data; and taking advantage of young people. The CDD is advocating for consumer protection rules and privacy policies that reflect “Fair Information Practices”, rather than just requiring opt-in consumer consent for data harvesting and processing — arguing for a total bar on “pervasive and continuous data collection”, such as via crossdevice tracking (a , for instance) and offline/online data profiling; and for data minimization safeguards “to ensure that online records are kept to a minimum and cannot be used for ongoing targeting”. It also wants a ban on deep-packet inspection being used by ISPs to allow them to examine the content of communications. As you’d expect, ISPs are opposed to the FCC’s proposals for stricter regulations around data use and consumer privacy — and have claimed they are amply regulated by the FTC already. However they may well be whistling into the wind there. The has paved the way for what is a more powerful regulatory body with (unlike the monitoring body, the FTC) legal authority to create new rules. Last year’s strict now look like only the FCC’s first order of business, vis-a-vis broadband providers. Beyond ISP’s philosophical objections to being more strictly schooled in how much snooping they can do on users, one more specific criticism of the FCC’s proposals — made by ISPs and — is that it focuses only on ISPs and does not loop in larger Internet companies, such as Google, which may also have amassed sophisticated data processing, user tracking and ad-targeting capabilities. Internet companies remain the regulatory purview of the FTC. Indeed, the CDD report itself includes Google as one of the companies profiled, noting that the company is “in the forefront of using programmatic and other data-driven advertising across platforms, including digital video” and adding: “Google illustrates how the role of data and our use of digital devices is fundamentally transforming our viewing across screens”. “I added Google and others to show that the basic data collection business model — all your data, all the time — is impacting every part of the media, communications and advert sector,” adds the CDD’s Jeffrey Chester, when asked about this. “While ISPs have unique and powerful ways to capture consumer data, such as deep packet inspection, they are part of a digital environment where privacy is always at risk.” Earlier this month, in , the Electronic Privacy Information Center also called for the new privacy rules to be applied more broadly. “While ISPs are engaged in invasive consumer tracking and profiling practices, focusing only on these providers misses a vast amount of data collection activities by other service providers,” it argued, also calling for the FCC to establish “a broad framework for communications privacy, based on Fair Information Practices. And in another blurring of the line here, one of the big Internet companies in question (Google) is also an ISP (via its ). Albeit a far more dominant Internet company than it is ISP. The CDD report notes that Google is using data-targeted ads as part of its Google Fiber Internet and TV service in Kansas City, adding that: “Google Fiber set-top boxes are IP based,” which allows for continuous monitoring and changes via the cloud — including for targeted marketing.” You can read the full . |
CurrencyFair scores further €8M for p2p currency exchange | Steve O'Hear | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | , one of a number of so-called peer-to-peer currency exchanges, has scored a further €8 million in funding. The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Proxy Ventures. It brings total raised by the 2010-founded company to around €20 million — a figure that is dwarfed by noisy rival TransferWise, which in Series C funding last year alone. At the same time, the Ireland-based startup is announcing the appointment of Unibet Group PLC’s former CMO Nils Andén. The marketeer will help CurrencyFair further differentiate its currency exchange from other claimed p2p-based exchanges, as well as continue the narrative, propagated most by TransferWise, that these fintech upstarts are set to give the banks a run for their money with fairer exchange rates and more transparent fees. In case you’re not familiar with the so-called p2p model, the idea is that by matching customers in different countries with inverse currency exchange needs, money doesn’t unnecessarily leave each country and any subsequent savings can be passed on to customers, providing a better exchange rate than banks typically do. However, where there is a mismatch between the amount of money customers in one country/currency want to exchange with another, these startups have to fall back on the open FX market where margins are tighter, that the p2p model isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be. To that end, CurrencyFair is perhaps more open about this discrepancy than most players in the p2p currency exchange space. It actually operates a hybrid model: If you want to transfer money immediately and with a guaranteed rate, the startup will step in and buy exchange on the open market on your behalf, taking a pretty competitive cut along the way. But, presuming your FX needs aren’t urgent you can list your requirement on the CurrencyFair Marketplace, which is purely p2p and, , has a far better chance of actually beating the mid-market ‘interbank’ rates that are typically beyond the reach of consumers. |
Google Stackdriver helps IT get unified view across AWS and Google Cloud | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | Today at the in San Francisco, Google announced the launch of , a tool that gives IT a unified tool for monitoring, alerting, incidents management and logging complete with dashboards providing visual insights across each category. when it was mostly devoted to AWS cloud monitoring. It helped the team incorporate that into the Google Cloud Platform while continuing to support AWS (making it an extremely valuable tool for companies that support both platforms). Stackdriver is not only bringing these capabilities together into a single tool, which is in itself providing a valuable service, it’s also making it highly customizable. For example, if you know that your application has problems when there are memory spikes, rather than CPU spikes, you can fashion an alert that lets you know when your application has a memory issues. Theoretically, this should enable you to react before the problem gets out of control. The logging capabilities let you search across your GCP and AWS clusters from a single interface. It also alerts you when your instance is near capacity, something that new senior VP Diane Greene alluded to her in keynote when she said that cloud vendors should be ensuring the success of their customers. The vendor (Google), she said should be helping customers with things like capacity planning, letting them know when they need additional resources. The burden she suggested shouldn’t be on the customer. This tool gives the kind of insight she was suggesting. To that end, the tool also sends error reports, again completely customizable, that alert users when there are issues with applications running on the Google Cloud Platform. All of this is designed as Greene suggested to make it easier for the customer by providing the tools they need to do their job, giving visual displays of what’s happening across your cloud instances — whether in Google or AWS — and providing a flexible and customizable environment. In essence, Google is doing a couple of things here. It’s trying to differentiate itself from the competition, particularly AWS, even while supporting AWS in this tool. It’s also playing to its strengths as an engineering company and providing the types of tools like-minded folks need to do their jobs more easily. |
Google ramps up hybrid cloud security strategy with Splunk, BMC and Tenable partnerships | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | Not to be left behind as companies like , and all expand their services for enterprises opting for hybrid cloud environments, Google today announced a raft of partnerships to advance its position in the market, too. , the company’s platform for managing IT ops between Google’s cloud platform, AWS, and other servers, is now with , and , to expand in areas like IT ops, security and compliance. Expanding to third-party partnerships is not too surprising, given that these are hybrid clouds that we are talking about here — where end users are bringing together a number of different computing environments to work in a single place. “Integration with rich third-party ops solutions is important for customers, and we know that many of you are already using these tools to manage hybrid operations in private and public clouds,” write Deepak Tiwari and Joe Corkery, cloud platform product managers. With the Splunk integration, users need to already be subscribers to Splunk Enterprise. This will give those users Splunk insights on its GCP traffic, specifically covering Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), which you integrate via Google’s messaging API for routing data between apps. The BMC integration, similarly, will give BMC users the ability to manage all applications in one window, while also monitoring security and compliance. The Tenable integration is focused on its SecurityCenter Continuous View product, in which GCP users can monitor what apps, devices and people are accessing your network or running on it. SecurityCenter Continuous View works across both on-premise and cloud environments. As with the other products, this is partly a way also of expanding business for the third-party product. Here one needs to install SecurityCenter CV, and then create a service account within Cloud Platform, assigning permissions to the Tenable service account. It also runs using Pub/Sub messaging. |
Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | Have you heard about Boom? is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on things like the autopilot system on the 787, fighter plane engines, and flight dynamics on Spaceship Two. Some of these guys are ex-NASA, ex-Lockheed, or ex-Boeing. Today, another big name is getting attached to the project: Virgin. Boom is announcing today that Richard Branson’s Virgin Group has optioned ten planes, in a deal ultimately valued at about $2 billion dollars. Boom also says they’ve optioned 15 additional planes to a European carrier that it declined to name, bringing the total value of the optioned planes up to $5 billion. Now, this doesn’t mean that Virgin has the planes — it’s a bit too early for that. They’ve signed a letter of intent, meaning that, having seen the nitty-gritty specs of the plane and the company’s plans for moving forward, they intend to buy 10 planes if everything comes together as planned. But it also looks like Virgin is going to help make that happen: Boom founder Blake Scholl tells me that Virgin Galactic’s space division, The Spaceship Company, has committed to helping build and test the planes, including helping with the supersonic testing when the time comes. And now from the other side of the agreement, a Virgin Group spokeswoman confirmed their plans to : “We can confirm that The Spaceship Company will provide engineering, design and manufacturing services, flight tests and operations and that we have an option on the first 10 airframes. It is still early days and just the start of what you’ll hear about our shared ambitions and efforts.” This company should be a wild one to watch. Building real, physical things is hard — but building a passenger plane that goes faster than any before it, including the ill-fated Concorde? Thats a whole new level of hard. Boom is funded by Y Combinator, Sam Altman, Seraph Group, 8VC, and other unnamed angels. Boom declined to comment on whether Virgin was providing capital as part of the deal. |
Google launches new machine learning platform | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | Google today announced for developers at its in San Francisco. As Google chairman Eric Schmidt stressed during today’s keynote, Google believes machine learning is “what’s next.” With this new platform, Google will make it easier for developers to use some of the machine learning smarts Google already uses to power features like Smart Reply in Inbox. The service is now available in limited preview. “Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate and Inbox (Smart Reply),” the company . “Our platform is now available as a cloud service to bring unmatched scale and speed to your business applications.” Google’s Cloud Machine Learning platform basically consists of two parts: one that allows developers to build machine learning models from their own data, and another that offers developers a pre-trained model. To train these machine learning models (which takes quite a bit of compute power), developers can take their data from tools like , , , , and . “Cloud Machine Learning will take care of everything from data ingestion through to prediction,” the company says. “The result: now any application can take advantage of the same that power many of Google’s services.” The pre-trained models include existing APIs like the Google Translate API and Cloud Vision API, but also new services like the Google (you can ). The Cloud Speech API powers Google’s own voice search and voice-enabled apps. It can do speech-to-text conversion for 80+ languages. Google stressed during today’s keynote that it wants to bring the technology it developed internally to developers and make it as easy to use as possible. At the same time, the company is also open-sourcing tools like Tensorflow to allow the community to take its internal tools, adapt them for their own uses, and improve them. |
Prosecutors find that ‘Fappening’ celebrity nudes leak was not Apple’s fault | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | Hacker Ryan Collins to stealing a number of nude photos — including ones of Jennifer Lawrence — from Apple’s servers. He was snared by the FBI, and in the process of the trial, it became clear that the hack didn’t involve Apple’s services being compromised through brute-forcing or password cracking, but rather that they were the result of social engineering, in the form of a . At the time when the images leaked online, that Apple’s iCloud services had crumpled under brute-force password-hacking attacks. Apple denied this at the time, and that the hacks were more likely to be a phishing scam. It is now becoming clear that this was indeed the case. Back in 2014, a number of photographs of celebrities in various states of undress found their way onto the internet after a series of email and Apple iCloud accounts were compromised. Collins was able to download the backups of the iCloud accounts, and apparently extracted the compromising photos from there. “People store important private information in their online accounts and in their digital devices”, said United States Attorney Eileen M. Decker. “Unauthorized access to such private information is a criminal offense.” From the court documents, it became clear that the victims of Collins’ attack fell prey to a phishing scam. Collins allegedly sent e-mails to the victims that appeared to come from Google or Apple, warning the victims that their accounts might be compromised, and asking for their login details. The victims would enter their password information. Having gained access to the e-mail address, Collins was able to download e-mails, and get further access to other files, such as iCloud accounts. According to the prosecutors, he was able to access more than 120 different Gmail and iCloud accounts, and he is being tried for a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It’s worth noting that he isn’t being tried for actually uploading the images online. It isn’t clear whether the DoJ is pursuing an investigation into other people who may have had a hand in spreading the images. Collins has not yet been sentenced, but faces a maximum of five years behind bars, along with fines of up to $250,000. It is expected that he will accept a plea agreement resulting in an 18-month sentence. Apple added to their site in June of last year – after the account hacking scandal broke. In it, they advise that “if you receive an unsolicited email requesting personal information, do not provide any information without first checking directly with the company that appears to be the one requesting this information”. Prudent advice. |
Pope Francis will reportedly start an official Instagram account | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | Pope Francis already and may soon start posting on Instagram, too. Italian newswire that the pontiff will make his Instagram debut on March 19 using the account name Franciscus, citing a Vatican Radio interview with Holy See spokesman Dario Viganò. Pope Francis, who has “to build a society which is healthy and open to sharing,” last month (he’s also had meetings with other tech execs like Eric Schmidt and Tim Cook). Media reports don’t say if the two discussed setting up an official papal photo-sharing account, but they did talk about the power of images to bring people together across social boundaries, . The Vatican with about 78,900 followers. If Pope Francis does indeed launch his own account, it might help stem the flood of pretenders posing as His Holiness on the photo-sharing network, including at least two that claim to be “official,” and ward off . The pope’s Twitter page, which launched in 2012, currently has 8.87 million followers. TechCrunch has emailed the Holy See and Instagram for more information. |
InstaRem raises $5M to make overseas money transfers cheaper and faster in Asia | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | , an international remittance payments startup headquartered in Singapore, has raised $5 million in a round led by Vertex Ventures. The Series A investment included participation from Fullerton Financial Holdings, an investment fund that, like Vertex, is a subsidiary of Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, and existing investor Global Founders Capital. A wave of fintech companies are promising to liberate bank customers from pain of international transfers, which come with sub-market exchange rates and hefty processing fees. While the likes of TransferWise, which was founded by Skype alumni and is among others, offer better exchange rates and lower fees, the usual cross-border service takes days and has limited support worldwide. That’s where InstaRem hopes to stand out from the crowd. The company is focused on serving Asia, and it claims to charge lower fees than banks and traditional remittance services like MoneyGram or Western Union — InstaRem’s rate is typically less than one percent — while transactions are completed within one day, if not same-day. The service started out serving Australia. InstaRem isn’t saying how many customers it has, but co-founder and CEO Prajit Nanu said it has already captured two percent of the country’s payments corridor to India in just over one year of operations. He added that the average transaction size is $1,800 — multiples higher than typical remittance companies — while InstaRem sees 60 percent repeat trade, and 80 percent of new customer accounts make a transfer within the first five days of registering. Companies like to funnel money across borders using different customer transactions as the float. InstaRem, by contrast, uses more traditional means. It works with mid-size banks that already trade in overseas currencies. It’s the financial equivalent of putting a few boxes on a UPS freighter that’s about to head out, thus paying just a sliver of the costs you’d incur if you had to find a boat and ship it yourself. Banks might seem like they are being cut out here. But the cross-border payments represent a fraction of their overall business, while mid-size establishments are interested in companies like InstaRem, Nanu explained, because they have the potential to bring them transaction volumes. The company holds financial licenses in Australia, Hong Kong and Canada, and it said it is in the process of applying in Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Luxembourg (which opens banks across Europe) and a number of U.S. states. That said, according to Nanu, “the focus will largely be on [serving customers in] Asia.” Beyond just individuals — such as expats and first-generation migrants wanting to send money home — InstaRem also works with SMEs, which make up around 20 percent of its customer base. While non-business customers tend to appreciate the cost savings, Nanu said that business customers are also keen on the faster transaction times. “Some of our SME customers I thought used us for price, but one told us recently that a primary reason is because they can sit on invoice longer than with a bank,” he recalled. In other words, one-day overseas transfers help small business owners with their cash flow because they can hold on to their money until just before it is due. InstaRem currently has 20 staff and is anchored in Singapore, with offices in Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai and New Jersey. Nanu is targeting volumes of $100 million per month before the end of the year, as the company and its service ramps up to include more markets, which he said will include “more remote places” like Nepal and Bhutan as well as more obvious markets. InstaRem is currently working on a range of new products, targeting unbanked populations in South Asia and tapping into its mesh network to offer new services to banks. The latter is one area where its relationship with Fullerton, which made its first investment in a tech startup with this deal, could pay dividends since it holds investments in banks across Southeast Asia. |
Apple: ‘Government misunderstands the technology’ involved in demanding they decrypt an iPhone | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | On March 22nd, will head to federal court to determine whether or not the government can force Apple to open up an otherwise deeply-encrypted iPhone used by terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook leading up to the San Bernardino shootings. The lead up to the hearing has been an unending game of back-and-forth between Apple and the government, and Apple has just lobbed the ball back to the other side of the court one last time prior to the hearing. Last week, the FBI had filed with the court, describing Apple’s court-borne resistance to complying with its unlock order as ‘corrosive rhetoric’. , characterizing the FBI’s filing as “an indictment”. Basically, both sides had gotten to the openly hostile portion of these proceedings. During a call last week about the filing, Apple executives, including general counsel Bruce Sewell, spoke in a way that can be best characterized as surprised and outraged. The FBI’s tone shift from legal argument to character assassination in its filings had clearly taken Apple off guard. The tone of today’s filing and subsequent call was much more cold and precise. Apple got some time to consider the best way to respond and went with dissecting the FBI’s technical arguments in a series of precise testimonies by its experts. Where the FBI filing last week relied on invective, Apple’s this week relies on poking holes in critical sections of the FBI’s technical narrative. The gist of their final reply is summed up well in the following: This Court should reject that request, because the All Writs Act does not authorize such relief, and the Constitution forbids it In the reply and a brief press conference hosted just after its publishing, Apple focused on five main assertions: Unsurprisingly, in its filing, Apple mentions that the FBI shot itself in the foot when it had San Bernardino county officials change the iCloud password of the device. In doing so, the FBI removed a critical pathway to getting the information it says it wants to see if Apple unlocks the phone. But, along the way, Apple also pokes holes in two technical arguments that the FBI has been trying to make. First, that the iCloud backups are encrypted with the device passcode. They are not, as pretty much any security expert or even reporter on this case knows. Apple’s Erik Neuenschwander, the wielder of the rapier in this filing, slices up some FBI spam: The statement that even if the device did perform an iCloud backup “the user data would still be encrypted with the encryption key formed from the 256 bit UID and the user’s passcode” is incorrect. Data backed up to iCloud is not encrypted with a user’s passcode. He also points out that Apple does not log keystrokes in its keyboard, as claimed by the FBI: As noted above, I also reviewed the Supplemental Pluhar Declaration. I believe that declaration contains several mistakes. For example, in paragraph 10(a), Agent Pluhar claims that the device’s keyboard cache would not backup to iCloud and that such keyboard cache “contains a list of keystrokes typed by the user on the touchscreen.” This is false. The keyboard cache in iOS 9 does not contain a list of keystrokes typed by the user, or anything similar. Embarrassingly, the FBI also appears to think that because Mail, Photos and Notes were turned off on the device, that this also toggles what gets backed up via iCloud Backup. It does not. http://twitter.com/JZdziarski/status/709880785256505349 Apple spends the majority of its supplemental material dismantling various technical arguments put forth by the FBI. But the core of the filing itself rests on the limits of the FBI’s request and the limitations of the All Writs Act in general. Here are what we read as some of the most important highlights of their reply (their full reply is embedded in the bottom of this post.): Thus, according to the government, short of kidnapping or breaking an express law, the courts can order private parties to do virtually anything the Justice Department and FBI can dream up. The Founders would be appalled. It has become crystal clear that this case is not about a “modest” order and a “single iPhone,” Opp. 1, as the FBI Director himself admitted when testifying before Congress two weeks ago. Forcing Apple to create new software that degrades its security features is unprecedented and unlike any burden ever imposed under the All Writs Act. The government’s assertion that the phone companies in Mountain Bell and In re Application of the U.S. for an Order Authorizing the Installation of a Pen Register or Touch-Tone Decoder and a Terminating Trap (Penn Bell), 610 F.2d 1148 (3d. Cir. 1979), were conscripted to “write” code, akin to the request here (Opp. 18–19), mischaracterizes the actual assistance required in those cases. The government seizes on the word “programmed” in those cases and superficially equates it to the process of creating new software. Opp. 18–19. But the “programming” in those cases—back in 1979 and 1980—consisted of a “technician” using a “teletypewriter” in Mountain Bell (Dkt. 149-1 [Wilkison Decl.] Ex. 6 at 7), and “t[ook] less than one minute” This case stands light years from Mountain Bell. The government seeks to commandeer Apple to design, create, test, and validate a new operating system that does not exist, and that Apple believes—with overwhelming support from the technology community and security experts—is too dangerous to create. The government accuses Apple of developing the passcode-based encryption features at issue in this case for marketing purposes. E.g., Opp. 1, 22. This is a reckless and unfounded allegation. Since passcode-based encryption was first introduced in October 2014, Apple has produced 627 separate ads in the United States and approximately 1,793 ads worldwide. These ads have generated 99 and 253 billion impressions, respectively. Not a single one advertised or promoted the ability of Apple’s software to block law enforcement requests for access to the contents of Apple devices. The idea that Apple enhances its security to confound law enforcement is nonsense. Apple’s “chain of trust” process—which follows accepted industry best practices—is designed to secure its mobile platform against the never-ending threat from hackers and cyber-criminals. Here, if Apple is forced to create software in this case, other law enforcement agencies will seek similar orders to help them hack thousands of other phones, as FBI Director Comey confirmed when he said he would “of course” use the All Writs Act to “return to the courts in future cases to demand that Apple and other private companies assist . . . in unlocking secure devices.” Apple is set to head to court next week and we’ll bring you updates then. As of now, the company has garnered support in the of New York in a similar (though different) iPhone unlocking case. Orenstein also believes that the All Writs Act is too broad, and needs hard limits when applied. A host of have backed Apple’s play and even have stepped in on Apple’s side. Many of those experts – like — note that the FBI could very likely simply reach out to the NSA for assistance in unlocking the phone. But it has not, which makes this more about setting a precedent than it does getting into an iPhone which the FBI even .
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Mobile portfolio app takes Moo beyond business cards | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | As a creative, you’re most likely to get hired for a job off the back of your portfolio of past clients and work. Aimed squarely at this market, — the company better known for their business cards — launched , a free app that aims to help make portfolios more portable. Using the app, you can create a series of themed portfolios showing off what you do: screenshots of websites, photos, links to websites and a lot more. Monogram is very easy to use, and is one of the more elegant ad hoc presentation apps I’ve seen. Creating a presentation is easy and straightforward. In addition to images, you can add text, social profiles, links to websites and more. In the process, you are building a rich portfolio/presentation that looks remarkably slick. It can be shared by e-mail, as well, creating an interactive presentation for your potential customers to peruse at their leisure. “While we love print, we’ve been keen to develop a digital product for our customers,” says Richard Moross, Moo’s CEO. “Monogram seeks to build on the 300-year-old ‘ceremony’ — the time you first meet someone. It seeks to bridge the divide between the humble business card and a more involved website.” If you have all the images you need on the camera roll on your phone, the app works offline, which is handy for building presentations or pitching to new clients when you’re on the plane or if you do most of your business in a Faraday cage. The Monogram app follows in the company’s recent tradition of attempting to zap some life into the frankly slightly retro world of business cards. Last year, Moo launched which are cards embedded with an NFC chip for sharing contact information wirelessly. With Apple’s persistent insistence to refuse supporting NFC, however, the cards never really got off the ground, and I’ve yet to see one in the wild. The new app also has a somewhat significant oversight: The app doesn’t enable uploading of video content, which means that filmmakers and mime artists will have to go elsewhere for an app to show off their trade. There might be hope, though: Chad Jennings, Moo’s VP of Product and Design, hints that video and GIF support could be coming in the future. The app is , and Moo says it is “looking at an Android version in the future.” |
Your mobile phone bill is sparking an edtech renaissance | Jeremy Friedman | 2,016 | 3 | 15 |
Have you ever noticed that 90 cent charge at the bottom of ? Little did you know, that is the key to fueling a in education technology. When edtech made its debut in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the initial fanfare quickly gave way to a decade of struggle in the industry. This dip occurred largely because schools did not have the infrastructure it takes to support a classroom full of students and high-content apps online. Adoption lagged, and so did funding. Flash forward to 2013, when a study found that of educators said their school’s connectivity met their needs. Still. The consequences are felt across the country, but especially in rural and low-income communities, where digital tools and resources can help educators level the playing field. To address the problem head-on, the U.S. Department of Education created , a program that aims to fit 99 percent of America’s schools with broadband by 2018. Enter . To make the fueled program work, the FCC agreed to add an additional $1.5 billion to , a decades old federal program that subsidizes telecommunications services for schools and libraries through monthly contributions from consumers’ telephone bills. They also made crucial moves to modernize it, directing funds from legacy allocations like fax machines and landlines to the more modern tech infrastructure. Now, about 90 cents from monthly cellphone goes into a pool that schools and districts tap into to improve broadband and Wi-Fi for better connectivity. These new regulations aimed to bring high-speed Internet to 75 percent of rural schools and an additional 10 million students by the end of 2015 alone. Why is this fueling an resurgence? With the rise of personal devices, the rapid democratization of education technology at the teacher level and an in-school infrastructure in place, cloud-based software and high-bandwidth apps are becoming available to schools for the first time. Districts can now make the types of technology purchases that will last for the long haul, and deploy them at each of their schools without connectivity becoming an issue. that K-12 IT spending will hit $4.7 billion in 2015, with significant budget going to student software, applications and computer upgrades. Subsequently, investment is expected to reach $2 billion this year, a staggering increase from the $385 million invested in the space in 2009. Many of the newly funded companies have a strong play in K-12. Teaching is a difficult job, and there is no silver bullet. But faced with overcrowded classrooms and increased pressure to raise performance, educators need better tools to give students the personalized instruction they need — especially if their classrooms include a broad range of intellectual and developmental needs. With E-Rate helping build better infrastructure, schools can successfully implement the type of technology that enables educators to teach beyond the four walls of the classroom. Connectivity enables access to video content, collaboration with students in other parts of the country or world and blended learning that mixes digital content with traditional textbooks. Technology infrastructure is a must-have. Those 90 cents are vital for this new generation of students. But sufficient Internet access should be considered the first marker in a school’s journey toward better educational outcomes, not the final one. Teachers don’t just need connectivity, but also devices and software that work together with the infrastructure, so they can access content and deliver learning experiences that engage students. That infrastructure can’t just sit there; it needs to be the foundation for facilitating collaboration, simplifying assessment, gauging progress and enabling the type of personalized learning that will change a student’s perspective along with their test scores. For this to become a reality, providers whose products sit on this infrastructure are going to have to become more sophisticated, with more insights without making things harder or more complicated for educators. Taking a cue from the Salesforce playbook, education technology needs a system of learning record that ties everything together. Making point solutions that don’t integrate into a broader platform is a Sisyphean task for . Raising the spending cap on E-Rate, 90 cents each month and directing funds toward high-speed Internet connectivity opened the door for a host of new tech-fueled possibilities in the classroom. Further, classroom technology adoption begets even more entrepreneurship and invention in this sector. More students than ever are gaining access to new content and resources; soon, the world’s knowledge will be at their fingertips. This an incredibly exciting time to be in education; the possibilities are huge, so we have to get it right. |
Faraday Future gets its first patent | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | has its first U.S. patent in hand for a smaller, more powerful inverter. So it’s definitely not as sexy as the Batmobile-like concept car the company brought to its splashy debut at , but it is arguably more useful. For one thing, this is a real-world piece of equipment that will be a core component of Faraday Future’s first vehicle—and next vehicle, and next vehicle, and the vehicle after that. FF is betting on its Variable Platform Architecture to underpin all the vehicles it creates, from compact cars to pickup trucks. “We need to have technology to back that up,” says FF spokesperson Ezekiel Wheeler. An inverter, as Silva Hiti, the senior director of electric drive at FF, explains, “transforms the energy from the batteries to a form consumable by the motor.” So the DC power stored in the batteries flows into the inverter and then flows out to the motor as AC power. The FF Echelon Inverter, as the new device is known, is more reliable and easier to manufacture than “off-the-shelf” inverters for electric vehicles, with a higher-power density. The solution to many of these problems was to build a simpler system with fewer parts. That translates to fewer parts that can fail and fewer materials to be used. “We want it to be as light as possible and as small as possible to address reliability issues,” Hiti says. Smaller and simpler also translates to better efficiency. “You want to maximize the inverter’s efficiency to get the most range from the batteries,” says Steven Schulz, a tech fellow at FF. “If you have, say, 100 watts going in, you want as close as possible to 100 watts to come out.” Wheeler notes that this is the first patent of about 100 the company has filed in its year of existence. Since FF plans on keeping its first vehicle under wraps until it’s nearly ready for release to the public, we can probably expect to see more of these patents and components before we ever see a prototype or concept car that’s anything like what we’ll be able to buy — possibly in 2017. “We’ll have plenty more news coming out down the line,” says Wheeler. “This is just the start.” |
Former Squarespace employee alleges ‘overt’ racism | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | Accounts of racism, sexism and discrimination are unfortunately . The latest comes from Amélie Lamont, a black woman and former employee at website creation company Squarespace, who was fired after slapping a co-worker at a bar. Lamont was a customer care supervisor at Squarespace from September 2011 through February 2014. Squarespace, founded in 2004, has raised $78.5 million in funding from investors like Accel Partners, Index Ventures and General Atlantic. The story, which she shared on Medium in a post titled “ ,” compares the customer care department to high school and touches on an office romance, the time she slapped a co-worker after he touched her at bar, and a lawsuit that was ultimately dismissed. Lamont filed the lawsuit in August 2015 after she was fired. She says she filed a claim alleging that she was coerced into signing a severance agreement, saying that she signed it immediately upon receiving it. That actually turned out not to be true. “I misremembered, and had actually been given the agreement the day before,” Lamont wrote on Medium. “I had 24 hours to look it over before signing it, and thus my case against Squarespace dissolved.” Still, Lamont says she experienced racism while working at Squarespace, and says the company has not owned up to its mistake, she wrote on Medium. Among the alleged slights are racism, discrimination and sexism. Here’s the most damning part, in which Lamont describes an interaction that happened at a weekly supervisor’s meeting with the VP of customer care: She stared at me for a few seconds and remarked, “Oh. I didn’t see you. You blended in. ” I didn’t believe what I was hearing and I didn’t know what to do. I looked at my arm, compared it to the chair in front of her. “Nope, my arm is brown and the chair is black,” I quipped awkwardly. She replied, Despite Lamont’s actions, there is no excuse for what the VP of customer care allegedly said about her blending into the chair because she’s “so black.” I even tried to redeem the situation by giving the VP of Customer Care a chance to backpedal. She chose not to.” When I asked Squarespace about the alleged racism and discrimination, a spokesperson provided the following statement: While it is our policy not to comment on HR issues involving current or former employees, we can confirm that Squarespace has long-standing policies against harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Our workplace integrity is of the utmost importance and we take any such allegations very seriously. We work tirelessly to maintain an open and safe work environment here at Squarespace. Lamont published her story late last night. Since then, another black female, Stephanie Duncker, who formerly worked at Squarespace, has chimed in on her experience. “The entire time I worked at Squarespace, I was convinced my work wasn’t good enough, that it would be impossible to get another job, that I had to stay and put up with the nonsense b/c just paying back the moving bonus (~$2000) would set me back too far,” . “My self-worth plummeted and I too had to start seeing a therapist.” Squarespace’s overall rating on Glassdoor is a 4.4 out 5 stars, with 87 percent of employees saying they would recommend the company to a friend. Of the 73 employee reviews of Squarespace on Glassdoor, 10 gave the company a rating of two stars or less. Six of those 10 ratings came from people who were part of the customer care team — the same team Lamont worked with. the cons as no growth with promotions handled “by and with sympathy, favoritism and just by having a cheerleader attitude (remember to repeat frequently that all is f*** awesome).” On the flip side, a top rating says a pro of working at Squarespace is that there’s a lot of room to grow. Though, I wonder how many of those ratings came from people of color. Women, women of color and people of color in general are more at risk of facing challenges and discrimination in the workplace than their white, male counterparts. That’s due in part to the fact that tech companies are predominantly white and male, and that there are a lot of unconscious conscious biases constantly at play. Squarespace has not released a diversity report, but that there was only one black employee at the Squarespace office in Portland when she worked at the company. Regarding what happens next, or, what Lamont would like to happen, she’s “more interested in this being used as a platform for other people to find the courage to speak up,” Lamont told me via email. “Stephanie Duncker is a great example–proof of the toxic environment that companies create for employees of color well. I’m honestly not sure of how to continue and build this platform beyond pushing a ‘publish’ button.” You can . |
Star Wars Battlefront is coming exclusively to PlayStation VR | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | More Star Wars force is coming to virtual reality. At , Sony CEO Andrew House teased onstage that PlayStation will be partnering with EA to bring about my (and everyone else’s) fantasy of Star Wars Battlefront in virtual reality. The PSVR employs something called a Social Screen to allow local multiplayer between super awesome users emerged in virtual reality and really lame regular gamers stuck just watching the TV. The company announced today that its long-awaited PSVR headset will be arriving in October for $399. A good deal of Star Wars VR news has been coming out of GDC this week. We got to see a sneak peek of “Trial of Tatooine,” a that will be available on the HTC Vive headset. House was scant on details other than mentioning that it would be a system exclusive and there will be more details to come. |
PlayStation VR will arrive in October for $399 | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | Sony took to the stage today during GDC 2016 in SF to show off the consumer-ready version of its PlayStation VR headset. A good deal was already known about the company’s first foray into console virtual reality, except for a couple of key ones: price and availability. Well, we now know that the PSVR will be arriving in October 2016 for $399. This places the barrier of entry for PSVR dramatically lower for gamers looking to take a whack at virtual reality. With the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive priced at $599 and $799, respectively, while also requiring pretty hefty PC builds, PSVR has a real shot at being the headset to beat in terms of popularity. The $399 price tag notably doesn’t look like it includes the , which will be required for gameplay. The camera is going for around at the moment so it’s not a major cost though it’s definitely fair to assume that while some users already have the device it will be an additional cost for most PlayStation owners. Also not included are the glowing orb Move controllers, though PSVR users will definitely be able to use the motion-tracked DualShock controller that’s included with the system. We already knew quite a bit about the system, but here’s a quick rundown on the specs that matter. We’ll have full hands-on impression tomorrow after we’ve had a bit of time to play around with the final consumer version of the headset. There’s an inherently isolating quality to putting on a virtual reality headset (at least in the user’s immediate vicinity). An area where Sony holds a particular advantage over PC gaming is in regards to command of the living room. To keep VR gamers and console gamers engaged, PlayStation will be offering local multiplayer thanks to what they call a “Social Screen.” It will allow the PS4 to power both the TV and PSVR displays so someone with a PSVR headset can still sit on the couch and play with their buddies. If you’re a dedicated PlayStation gamer, you may already have everything you need to welcome the PSVR into your home setup including the PlayStation Camera, which will act as an eye seeking out the pair of Move controllers (or a DualShock 4) and the LED-emblazoned PSVR headset. Field-of-view (FoV) is one of the most apparent metrics in virtual reality headsets for achieving immersion and presence. The higher the FoV, the less it looks like you’re viewing content through a pair of goggles. Sony has said that the FoV of the PSVR is 100 degrees. The FoV for the consumer versions of Oculus’s Rift and HTC’s Vive have yet to be publicly disclosed but rumor is they both are somewhere in the 100 to 110-degree region. For comparison Gear VR’s field-of-view is 96 degrees. FoV surely isn’t everything. Oculus and HTC could build 200-degree FoV headsets if they wanted to. But right now, the key to building a top-of-the-line VR experience that won’t leave users reaching for barf bags is also keeping frame rates above 60fps. Having both of those (FoV and high fps) right now will probably require users to drop a few thousand bucks on a high-end graphics card, something that won’t do any favors to an industry looking to drive user adoption. PlayStation has the advantage of knowing the system limitations of every one of its users, and is, in turn, able to build a headset that maximizes the power of the PS4 system. The PSVR will operate at a constant 120hz refresh rate, a system level standard that is quite a bit higher than the 90hz offered by the Rift and Vive. This refresh rate is powering a 5.7″ OLED screen operating at 1920×1080. Screen Door Effect (SDE) is a fairly common term in VR that refers to the unsightly visible black lines between pixels that make it appear as though you’re viewing content through a screen. Sony claims that their subpixel screen design significantly lessens visible SDE by having individual red, blue and green subpixels make up each onscreen pixel. There are currently over 36 million PS4s out in the wild that are ready for VR. In addition to the expensive upfront costs for the headsets and controllers, gaming on the Vive or Rift requires a ~$1,000 PC build just to get fired up. While the PSVR may not initially offer quite as rich an experience as the other VR headsets because of the system constraints of the PS4, it’s accessibility in terms of price and available ecosystem give it some clear advantages that may land it a greater slice of the market when the “VR Wars” turn less friendly. |
Instagram is switching its feed from chronological to best posts first | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | The average Instagram user misses 70 percent of what’s in their feed, including great photos with tons of Likes and posts by their best friends. So today Instagram it will start rearranging the order of posts in its feed. Rather than strictly reverse chronological, Instagram will order posts “based on the likelihood you’ll be interested in the content, your relationship with the person posting and the timeliness of the post.” The testing will start out slowly; at least at first “all the posts will still be there, just in a different order.” But eventually, low-quality posts might be filtered out entirely. The changes mean if you don’t check your feed until the next morning but a friend whose photos you usually Like posted something awesome the night before, it could appear at the top of your feed even if it is hours old. This is essentially how Facebook’s feed works, and how Twitter recently reconfigured its feed to work. On the one hand, the relevancy-optimized Instagram feed will make sure you don’t miss great content even if you don’t neurotically check it all the time. You’ll be able to follow more accounts without worrying about them drowning out your favorites. And it will be easier to keep up with international friends who might normally post while you’re asleep. At the same time, remixing the feed will make Instagram less useful as a real-time content feed because the most recent posts won’t necessarily be at the top. Users will have to worry about making their posts good enough to be chosen by the algorithm or their posts could be de-prioritized. And brands might lose the reach of a previously reliable marketing channel, the same way they did with Facebook Pages. Filtered feeds tend to score more attention from users, as there are few boring posts that push them to close the app and do something else. And at this point, Instagram is so ingrained in people’s lives that they’re unlikely to ditch it over this change. But with Instagram and Twitter both moving to algorithmically sorted feeds, getting seen on social media will become more of a competition than ever. |
10 ideas that won’t be on the next president’s tech agenda but should be | Colin O’Donnell | 2,016 | 3 | 15 |
As November 8th creeps closer, we’ve still heard little from our presidential candidates about a key policy area: technology. There’s no denying the growing role of technology in our economy, in our culture, and in our lives, and yet the conversation to date has been somewhat limited to a myopic sliver of the tech universe— the place where privacy and homeland security overlap. Campaign season should be more than just stump speeches; it’s a chance for us to evaluate how our future leader will handle the many tech opportunities and challenges ahead. In the absence of a clear vision from any of the candidates, we’ve laid out a tech agenda that could drive innovation in health and safety, create new high-paying jobs and help us prepare for the dramatic technological advancements we’ll see during this next president’s tenure. Our next president should rethink the way the federal government allocates spectrum. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s laid the framework for taking advantage of the massive public resource we call the RF spectrum, proposing increased efficiency via sharing. With shared access between the public, telecom and mobile carriers, and the government, we can clear the way for incredibly fast wireless across the country. This would open up opportunities for new service providers, increase competition, and ensure the maximum possible utilization of this valuable asset— . The U.N. has classified internet access as a basic human right yet ; it’s time we connect millions of offline Americans to jobs, education, and the online economy. Apple has , Android has , so why does our federal government’s web presence look like a patchwork quilt of 1990s web? Good design has a multiplicative positive effect: it makes everything it touches more intuitive, more efficient, and more pleasant. Bad UX creates barriers that prevent people from getting what they need from government, from taxes, to visa forms, to voter registration. 18F and the USDS have taken the first step in creating a for consistent UX across federal government — our next president now needs to implement and expand on that work, and take it a step farther to drive better real-life user experiences, too. Could the federal government be as easy to use as Gmail? . Drones are more than just flying cameras and national defense tools: they stand to revolutionize the way we travel, deliver goods, and provide services in urban and rural environments alike. The federal government can clear the path for advancement by creating clear regulations that encourage development and experimentation while protecting the public’s safety. By the time the next president’s first term is over, drones and bots will be rapidly becoming part of our daily lives. Let’s lay the groundwork to make sure this happens safely. . Since Henry Ford, the U.S. has been a car-driven nation. But those cars and are a large source of air pollutants. If implemented smartly, autonomous vehicles stand to move the needle on both issues, helping us travel more efficiently and safely. Federal government can play a big role in shaping the future of AVs. By building on efforts like the to create designated AV innovation zones in top US cities, and by giving AVs benefits on America’s roads and highways— think HOV lane access like electric cars— the next President can help spark AV innovation and adoption at the local and national level. Face it, video cameras and sensors are a part of our daily lives. From the supermarket, to the restaurant, to the intersection in your neighborhood, you’re on camera. With camera density around our cities nearing ubiquity, it’s only a matter of time before computer vision algorithms start to crop up in each of these devices. CV has massive potential to improve our lives, but we need to implement it responsibly to protect the safety and privacy of the public. By creating clear national guidelines, our next President could steer CV to drive more user-centric value, setting a global precedent in the U.S. . We’ve talked a lot about creating digital fluency in our students with technology in the classroom, but in most American schools we’re still struggling to integrate technology effectively. Done right, the start-up world’s interactive education tools (like and ) could create a learning environment that serves all kinds of learning differences in students, enables real-time insights into on student’s progress and weaknesses for teachers, and can extend the classroom at home and after school. The tools are there; the training, mandate, and methods are not. If we set a new national standard, our next president’s first term could be the moment when we finally create a successful mixture of online and in-class curriculum that takes advantage of the best of both worlds: individual student pacing online and at home, paired with real-world collaboration and activities in class. If we can get kids using computers, surely we can get our government to, too. Imagine what could happen to transparency if we truly digitized Congress, taking them from an in the House and roll call voting in the Senate to transparent, real-time, online attendance and voting reporting. Paired with user-friendly, indexed, and searchable digitized bills and information in one easy-to-access verified location, we could give Americans insight into how decisions are really getting made— and create a sense of real-time accountability for our lawmakers. Our nation was founded on the idea that citizens deserve a voice and therefore a vote. And yet today, difficulties in getting to the polls, taking time off from work, and outdated voter registration processes are barriers that prevent countless of Americans from making their voices heard. With more and more of our most private interactions happening online—banking, filing taxes, communicating with loved ones— and with today’s security, encryption, and authentication capabilities, we’re running out of excuses: our next president should make online voting and voter registration a national standard. Cities in Canada experimented with it and had a ; Estonia’s been doing it for years. Voting is our civic right, and the effect of empowering so many Americans— including many underserved populations and elusive millennial voters— could be election-changing. The federal government has enormous databases on the activity of our country. Too much of this data still sits in siloed systems that don’t work together. and the open data movement have made preliminary progress in opening up government data to civic hackers, but we’ve only scratched the surface. Could we unlock a new generation of urban scientists by publishing and collecting data on activity within our cities? Could applying AI to vast stores of government data help us rethink decades old processes? Could we go even farther, reimagining old services like turning every with wearables to detect air quality and conditions at the homes and businesses they visit each day? By creating a standard format for data, pushing for real-time reporting, and applying AI to help create insights, imagine the possibilities and efficiencies that our next President could create. There’s no denying it: thanks to Tim Cook, encryption and privacy is top of mind this cycle. But rather than getting mired in “Manhattan projects” or terrorism hunting algorithms, we should focus presidential attention on supporting a more comprehensive, pro-user approach— a Universal User’s Bill of Rights. A digital version of that famous founding document could ensure a fair and safe online life for our increasingly connected country. Our next president could use the bully pulpit to empower our nation’s best and brightest to create and implement this standard of online expectations, including things like encryption standards, privacy policy, or a universal Terms of Service agreement to replace the thousands we blindly agree to. The billions of dollars spent in federal procurement could certainly serve as a strong incentive for early adopters. Now is the time for our candidates to get serious and thoughtful about their plans for technology in America; development and advancement will continue without them if they don’t. For decades, the US was a global tech leader– the Manhattan Project in the 40s, aerospace in the 50s and 60s, and personal computing in the 70s and 80s. With smart policy to guide the progress and integration of evolving computer capabilities and intelligence into our lives, we could reclaim this leadership position and make the U.S. a better place to live for all Americans. By focusing on what technology can do for us, not on what it shouldn’t do, our next president can guide our county to a more equitable and connected future, leading the globe with a developing aspect of tech— the human side. And candidates: let the tech sector be more than just donors; let us help you improve our country, one bit at a time. |
This new Star Wars virtual reality experiment looks beautiful and insane | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | Around June of last year, Lucasfilm and its usual cohorts — Industrial Light and Magic, Skywalker Sound — to form the ILM Experience Lab, or ILMxLab. The new team would focus largely on figuring out how to translate the Star Wars universe into something magical in virtual reality. The team’s latest project, , a VR experiment (read: probably pretty short) that taps the wonderfully capable HTC Vive headset, looks… friggin’… amazing. We got our first glimpse of ILMxLab’s efforts back in December, for Google Cardboard. Alas, Google Cardboard doesn’t have much in terms of input, so Jakku Spy was mostly a sit-back-and-watch experience. This one, on the other hand, is built for the HTC Vive… and that means they get to bring the Vive’s super-accurate, full-motion-tracking hand-held controllers into the mix. And , of course, means lightsabers. The ILMxLab team is doing private demos of the new experiment at the GDC conference this week, but there’s no word yet on if/how/when they intend to release it publicly. Most folks don’t have an HTC Vive just yet — after all, preorders of the Vive won’t even ship until April. [via ] |
In pursuit of empathetic machines | Sri Nagabhirava | 2,016 | 3 | 15 |
The universal reaction to Atlas, the newly upgraded next-generation humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics (a company owned by Alphabet), was lots of empathy. Unmindful of being punched, pushed and teased, it focused on finishing tasks in a . People who watched the video responded with comments like “stop bullying” and “say no to bullying.” It was clearly evident that we are on the verge of creating machines that can look and act like us in a physical sense, as well as take over repetitious manual labor — to the delight of monotony-hating, fun-loving humans. However, providing these machines with the human traits of emotion and empathy is a missing piece of the puzzle that continues to baffle AI researchers. Empathy — the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes — is key to human behavior, collaboration and collective knowledge, as well as the fabric that helped define and shape human evolution. Keeping aside the figurative incongruity (empathy and machines), humans have made great progress in building functional pieces of the human brain — from machines that can handle computation, memory storage and retrieval to probabilistic reasoning, pattern recognition, natural language processing, classification, learning, etc. We now have tools that can mimic parts of human intelligence sans emotions and empathy. Suddenly there is renewed passion for and vigor in AI, and excited scientists are predicting we may be at the beginning of singularity — which could potentially lead to a human-created . Human intelligence is a combination of logic, cognition, emotion and empathy. With the recent big win of , a game considered to be more complex than chess, it is almost conclusive that machines are capable of meeting or beating humans on logic. Earlier, outperformed the opponents on Jeopardy, a knowledge contest, and proved that machines can be made superior to humans regarding natural language processing and information retrieval. Can any of these “deep” machines win a talent contest like American Idol? Not yet; we are a long way from producing artistic, creative and intellectual output associated with our right brain using a synthetic Mozart or a synthetic Picasso. The deep machines are not deep enough to understand our human mind, and singularity will remain a daydream unless we figure this out. The mind is a product of the brain. We still don’t know how our right brain works; this is key to our emotions, empathy and the creative side. . Our thinking and emotions are tightly intertwined and are the output of our bodily state. Our bodily state, free of hormones or full of dopamine, produces a different emotional outcome and behavioral response depending on many contributing variables. of his inventions during the later part of his life. to mimic strong AI — which he felt are too opaque and can be easily fooled. Will our left brain ever be able to understand how the right brain works? While we may have applied AI based on the modeling of our left brain, which is associated with logic, reasoning and can effectively replace our left brain, the strong AI or full AI (also called affective computing) that combines logic, cognition, emotion and empathy is largely unexplored. There are several computational algorithms that can do what our left brain does, but there is a huge gap when it comes to modeling our right brain. According to Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, co-founder and Chief Strategy and Science Officer at , an MIT spin-off that specializes in emotional computing, their emotion-aware technology platform Affdex has already captured more than 50 billion emotional data points using a multi-modal approach that uses facial expressions and head pose. The technology can capture fleeting expressions, such as a squint or twitch of a lip; combined with cultural and contextual information, it can consistently detect the expressed emotion with a high degree of accuracy. The technology leverages deep learning methodologies and a huge data repository to map images and videos of faces to a read the emotions expressed in the face. The more data it has, the better it gets. The initial use cases were targeted toward online digital content in media and advertising to gauge audience response. But Rana is more excited about emerging applications where developers are making their applications emotion-aware. Affectiva already has pilots in gaming (the game dynamics change based on the player’s emotional response), and movies that have different endings based on the viewer’s emotional profile. She sees a future where social robots become an important part of our lives, and maybe even human companions. She feels the day is not too far off when social robots become part of our everyday lives, quoting an example where a mom’s social robot could communicate with a child’s robot: “Mom is a little frustrated today. Don’t bother her about the weekend party and I will let you know when to ask.” Lots of key players are joining the fray. Apple has reportedly acquired , a San Diego-based company that uses artificial technology to detect emotion from facial expressions. Microsoft is working on their own platform, , that has an Emotion API available to developers. Google developed its own emotion-sensing technology for the now-defunct project , which can help developers detect emotional facial attributes. There are several big questions. Can we build strong AI or full AI? Why do we need it? How do human-equivalent machines help us? How will it impact human psychology? Will humans prefer interacting with machines and start loving machines instead of humans? It may lead to an empathy paradox — the more we rely on technology to understand how others feel, the less time we spend thinking about how others feel and their needs, which is counter-intuitive. Finally, the debate rages on the moral dilemma of creating superintelligence. We may not have the answers in our lifetime. Maybe we already have the answers in fictional dramas like or a future Robo II? Anybody’s guess is as good as anybody else’s on this nascent subject. Which brings up another thought. What kind of beliefs and moral values will the empathetic machines create on their own — besides those with which humans program them? Soon, anything repetitive within a frame of reference will be taken over by weak AI, and the strong AI will become the next frontier in technology — with a potential that could alter the course of human evolution. A glimpse into our future is hard to miss with all the signs around us. It is both exciting and scary. |
Draft U.K. surveillance powers bill takes more flak at second reading | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | Proposed new U.K. surveillance powers are getting a second reading in parliament today, as the government seeks to update and extend the law in this area before the end of the year. The Investigatory Powers bill has been dubbed a Snoopers’ Charter by privacy and civil rights groups. It also received substantial criticisms from the three parliamentary committees that scrutinized the first draft of the legislation. The official opposition Labour Party is taking a more nuanced — or else — stance in its opposition to the bill at this stage, with Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham describing the “Snoopers’ Charter” label as a “lazy” characterization during today’s second reading. Labour’s position is important here in part because the U.K.’s Conservative government only has a small majority, but also because the government is seeking to pass complex and lengthy legislation within a relatively short parliamentary timetable — and the quickest way to do that would be to gain consensus from opposition MPs (not to mention wholesale support from the public). “The simple fact is, Britain needs a new law in this area,” Burnham told parliament. “Outright opposition, which some are proposing risks sinking the Bill and leaving interim laws in place. To go along with that would be to abdicate our responsibility to the police, security services and more importantly the public and I am not prepared to do that.” However, he also confirmed the Labour party will not be voting for the bill in its current form. It will instead abstain on the second reading vote. This follows remarks he made , when he said the party wants to see “substantial changes” to the IP bill — and would prefer to see the legislative timetable extend into 2017 rather than a bad bill being rushed through this year. In his speech today Burnham noted: “Of the 122 recommendations in the three [committee] reports the government has reflected less than half of them in this revised bill. And I say to the Home Secretary she will need to be prepared to listen more and make further significant changes to her bill if she is to achieve her goal of getting it onto the statute book by December.” He went on to detail six specific areas where Labour wants to see amendments or other action, namely: “Given the seriousness of these concerns people have questioned why we are not voting against the government. The simple answer is we need new legislation. But this bill isn’t yet good enough — and that is why we have set the tests that we have. Simply to block this legislation would in my view be irresponsible. It would lead the police and security services in limbo,” added Burnham. “However… there is no blank check for the government. We will not be voting for this bill because it is so way from being good enough. And if the government fails to respond adequately to the concerns I have raised then I give notice to them today that we will withdraw our support for the timetabling of this bill… I think the public interest lies in getting this right — and not sacrificing quality to meet the deadline.” Home Secretary Theresa May reiterated the government’s claim that it has made a swathe of amendments to the draft bill, taking on board committee recommendations to, for example, reduce the time when an urgent warrant that is authorized by the Secretary of State must be reviewed by a judicial commissioner from a period of five days to three. In her opening remarks she also claimed privacy protections are now “hardwired into the bill” — a phrasing Burnham took issue with, arguing the government needs to do far more to achieve a balance between security and privacy considerations. “We all share an interest in maximising both our individual privacy and our collective security. As a House of Commons, our goal should be to give people both,” he argued. Also speaking up for more to be done to bolster privacy safeguards in the legislation was Dominic Grieve, chair of the ISC, who noted that the government had responded to only nine of its 22 recommendations. “We were disappointed that the bill doesn’t include a clear statement on overarching privacy protection,” said Grieve. “We accept the bill has safeguards but they do come across as slightly piecemeal so we think it’s a missed opportunity — a missed opportunity above all of providing that level of public reassurance, even if the practical consequence wouldn’t make a vast amount of difference.” The committee had been seeking to improve the legislation by trying to provide “greater clarity, transparency and increased safeguards” as a way to bolster public trust in the bill, he added. “The fact a particular power may never to our knowledge have been misused doesn’t mean we should disregard creating transparent safeguards for its use — if this can be done without interfering with operational capability. We also have to accept the possibility that times might change and standards slip. It’s important we should provide safeguards against such slippage.” Grieve added that another missed opportunity with the current bill is the fact that it does not gather all the investigatory powers into one place. “The government has chosen to leave some powers elsewhere. We thought it would have been helpful to put them all in this bill,” he said. Burnham said a key part of Labour’s concerns with the legislation as it is currently drafted is the risk of misuse of the powers by state agencies, going on to detail several instances where he asserted state surveillance capabilities have been inappropriately used in the past. “In recent years, there have been revelations about how bereaved families, justice campaigners, environmental campaigners, journalists and trades unionists have all been subject to inappropriate Police investigation,” he said. “Last year, a former senior police officer turned whistleblower claimed Police involvement in supplying information that led to the blacklisting of construction workers. And, for those who claim these fears are exaggerated, I would refer them to the biggest unresolved case of this kind — the 1972 national building-workers strike and the convictions of the 24 pickets known as the Shrewsbury 24.” Responding to Burnham’s point about raising thresholds for the use of powers in the bill, May pointed to the addition of judicial authorization as the independent check and balance the government is baking in to combat any such misuse. But he countered that the grounds for which police and security services have the ability to put forward applications for warrants “should be as tightly defined as possible.” “I don’t think it helps if she is proposing that they can be brought forward on the grounds of general economic well-being… It opens up a much wider range of potential activities that could be subject to the most intrusive warrants,” he added. During the reading, May was also asked by Conservative MP David Davis how long she personally spends reviewing each of the circa 2,500 warrants she is asked to review each year — aka some 10 warrants per working day. “It’s impossible to put a time on it because each decision differs,” she said. “The amount of information that’s available, the type of case that wants looking at, the extent to which it may refer to a matter that has already been considered. It all varies. So the amount of time I give to each case is the amount of time necessary to make the right judgement about each case.” The Scottish National Party also said it will be abstaining from today’s vote, raising a raft of concerns about the current draft, including what it dubbed “vague definitions,” the wide-ranging scope of ICRs and the continued role of ministers in authorizing warrants (versus a system based solely on judicial authorization, as is the case in the U.S. and elsewhere). |
Smart savings app Clinc is a new fintech startup from ex-CEO and founder of Numbrs | Steve O'Hear | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | Last April, Julien Arnold quietly left his role as CEO of Numbrs, the he co-founded with Swiss company builder Centralway. Now, almost a year on, he’s on the verge of launching his next project: , a mobile app to make it easier to save money for a future purchase or financial rainy day. Using what Arnold describes as a “dynamic intelligence algorithm,” Clinc promises to track your current account spending and analyse the results to find the optimum amount to save each month, which is then automatically deposited into your Clinc savings account underpinned by the startup’s partner bank. The secret sauce, which he won’t go into much detail on, is that the app is dynamic, able to make on-the-fly adjustments to how much you transfer to your savings account based on how your spending has changed or is predicted to change. In other words, Clinc’s central proposition is to help you achieve your financial goals faster. “This is the biggest challenge you can tackle in financial technology,” says Arnold. So, for example, you could tell the app you want to save up to purchase a new iPhone. Clinc will then analyse your current account and determine how much money you can afford to set aside each month. Should your expenses rise due to, say, an increase in your rent or car payments, the app will adjust your savings rate automatically. “Once Clinc has calculated the perfect amount for the user to set aside, it is automatically transferred to a Clinc account, fully owned by the user, of course,” explains Arnold. “This account lies with our partner bank and can be opened up within only two minutes”. With that said, Clinc is still operating in stealth mode, with a limited closed beta. The newly outed startup is planning a full launch in Germany in the middle of this year, and international availability, including the U.K. and U.S., sometime in 2017. On why he chose to leave Numbrs, Arnold had this to say: “I saw a great opportunity with Clinc and wanted to focus on building this new venture. Clinc’s added value for the user is immense. We are changing the economical behaviour of the user by helping him reach financial goals faster.” He also says that Numbrs continues to operate under the management of Centralway. |
Dashlane hires former Fab.com and Makespace CFO David Lapter | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | David Lapter, , is moving on to to serve as chief financial officer. Dashlane is a password management service that helps users keep track of their passwords, as well as helping with safe online transactions through a Dashlane digital wallet. Lapter started out his career at a boutique strategy firm called Parthenon, where he served for nearly four years. He then went on to work as an associate at Upfront Ventures, where he again held the position for almost four years. From there, Lapter began his career as CFO for multiple companies, such as CTSpace, KickApps, and Fab.com. He spent two-and-a-half years at Fab.com and left after the company began to experience turbulence due to too-rapid growth. In June 2014, Lapter went to Makespace as CFO, and between that and his start now at Dashlane he was an advisor to TruOptic. Dashlane has more than 4 million users, and Lapter’s experience as a financial officer should help the company (which has raised a total of $30 million in funding) to grow further. |
Google launches HTTPS Transparency Report, says over 75% of requests to its servers are now encrypted | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | Google today a new section to its that focuses on the use of encryption on Google’s own sites and across the web. The company says over 75 percent of requests to its own servers are now using encrypted connections (though traffic to YouTube is not included in this report). Across Google’s products, Gmail and Google Drive are leading the move to using and both services now use it as their default. Other products like Maps and Google’s have now also passed the 75 percent barrier, though Google News and Google Finance are still lagging behind. The company says over 95 percent of the unencrypted traffic to its servers now comes from mobile devices. “Unfortunately, these devices may no longer be updated and may never support encryption,” the company notes, though it sadly doesn’t break out which devices and mobile operating systems are the worst offenders here. While Google is mostly looking at its own sites in this report, the company also looked at HTTPS usage across the , which Google says account for about 25 percent all global website traffic. There, the list of sites that don’t support any kind of encryption is surprisingly long (though the good news, I guess, is that the world’s top adult video chat sites all support encryption…). |
Check out the new AI-powered TechCrunch news bot on Telegram messenger | Travis Bernard | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | We’re excited to announce the launch of our first artificial intelligence-powered news bot on the encrypted messaging platform Telegram. We teamed up with to build the bot, and after a month of development we’re thrilled to show it off to the world. If you are already on Telegram, you can check out the bot by (or search for “techcrunchbot” within the platform). The goal of the bot is to help you stay on top of the topics and stories you care about the most. You can subscribe to different topics, authors or sections of the site, and the bot will send you news articles from TechCrunch about the things you are interested in the most. For example, I’m subscribed to news about Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. The bot will send you a digest of trending stories about the topics you want twice a day. By default it will send you the most popular stories. You can also ask the bot questions like “Who is Jack Dorsey?” or “What is Disrupt?” This is our first crack at a bot, and we know it’s not perfect. Maybe one day we can get the bot to Tony Stark level, but until then, we need your help. There’s a “feedback” section, and I encourage you to submit thoughts on the bot and help us improve its functionality. [gallery ids="1291363,1291362,1291359,1291360,1291361"] |
Priority Cycles’ latest Kickstarter is the Coast, a rust-proof surf bike | Stefan Etienne | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | This past week I made it my mission to see what was going on in downtown Manhattan. A well-timed email here, a hastily caught train there, and I found myself at the headquarters of Priority Cycles — a NYC-based bicycle startup that got its wheels on Kickstarter . Raising over $565k for its original city bike, called the Classic, resulted in the birth of a niche category: bikes that you could throw around without much need of maintenance, if any. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted from a bicycle? But my visit to the new headquarters of Priority Cycles wasn’t to window shop or to look at the bikes of last year, but to speak to co-founder Dave Weiner, and see the next bike in the lineup. Turns out, it’s a surf bike: characterized by a relaxed riding stance, curved handlebars and mount accessories to accommodate things you’d use at a beach, like a surfboard. Weiner calls it the Priority Coast. While the model seen here is a prototype, the core materials and aesthetics will remain the same, with indigo, black, white and “sunset rose” colorways . A single Priority Coast will go for $349, but alas, that’s only for the first 100 backers; the final retail price will be $399. With a name like that and a clean aesthetic, the Priority Surf looks — picturesque. Made of aluminum and stainless steel with sealed cartridge bearings, sand and water will have a hard time ruining your fancy new surf bike. Also, note the lack of traditional bike chain: a Gates Carbon Grease-free belt drive is used instead, meaning this is a fixie surf bike. Despite never having needed a surf bike, I can entertain the need of having a rust-proof bike. However, personally I don’t take too much liking to relaxed riding — chalk that up to being a “young man.” So while some might not see it aesthetically suited for the urban flora of Manhattan, that Priority Cycles’ choice of materials is robust, results in confidence knowing that the Priority Surf can take a beating near the California surf — or a New York pothole or two. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 23 | null |
How to train your human, part II: Products that make habits last | Lakshmi Mani | 2,016 | 3 | 12 | In the of this series, we learned about designing products that use good triggers and motivators to get users like Joe to engage in healthy behaviors. Now, how can we ensure that these new behaviors become long-term habits? In this second part, we return to to look at reinforcing Joe’s behavior through rewards and an investment in your product. Rewards serve as a way to users for the actions they take.
Interestingly, brain imaging studies show that it’s not the sensation of the reward that excites us. When a reward is given each time after a good behavior, anticipation fades away, making the behavior seem dull and routine. However, when the reward is given in an unpredictable manner, we start repeating behaviors for the thrill of the chase. It’s the reason people play slot machines; they don’t win money each time — the thrill of hitting the jackpot is way more exciting than the money itself. So, variable rewards can also be very powerful in repeating healthy behaviors. In Nir’s Hooked model, there are three types of variable rewards: rewards of the and We are social creatures. We crave belonging, connection and acceptance from other people. As such, Let’s look at some of these rewards. . It establishes your status within the community, and gives users a good sense of self-esteem. Health apps use many gamification concepts such as leaderboards and user challenges to achieve this. The reward of winning is highly variable, because your rank is not only dependent on your performance, but also how others have performed. Nike+ Leaderboard (left), Jawbone’s Duels (middle) and Strava’s League Challenge (right) For the user, this causes a strong craving to reach the top. In fact, fear of losing in a competition is an extremely powerful motivator for users to get better next time! Rewards from cooperation can be a sense of belonging, feeling a part of a community, feeling wanted and loved. Apps such as and Weilos use social feeds to make it easy for users to join groups and encourage one another. Upon completing their goals, users get rewarded with props and encouragement from fellow members. Weilos (left) uses “Inspired” and Fitocracy (right) uses “Props” The praise the user receives each time is variable. This creates a sense of craving, to keep on sharing and working out on the platform to receive approval from peers. Rewards of the tribe are extremely powerful for users, and are also a great way to foster an active and thriving community around your product. We as a species are also excited by the thrill of the hunt. What once used to be a hunt for food, animals and shelter has now translated into a hunt for things like money, fancy objects and deals. Gamification concepts of rewarding users with badges and trophies is common in many health app these days. From left to right: Strava, Nike+, Fitocracy, Fitbit These rewards are given for completing different actions. They are doled out in a variable frequency, making it thrilling for users to achieve them. These are rewards that satisfy our intrinsic need for personal excellence and a sense of competence. A lot of health apps accomplish this through gamification techniques, such as levelling up and progress bars. Credit: Superbetter One of my favorite examples is , an app used to help people reduce social anxiety. Users attempt a series of tasks progressively from low to high anxiety, giving them a progressive sense of control of their anxiety. With the increasing popularity of gamification, it might be tempting for us as product makers to want to use them all in our products. But slapping gamification concepts onto a product, without consideration about who the users are, will only lead to poor product design. We need to ask ourselves, will this reward actually motivate my user? For example, research in gamification shows that only the Poorer performers are actually terrified by leaderboards! If you’re designing a mass market wearable, pitting the fitness-freak athlete with the out-of-shape middle-aged dad will lead to an unsatisfying experience. Understanding your users’ intrinsic motivation (which we discussed in ) is essential in designing a good rewards system. When users take an action and we reward them for it, they end up making a small commitment of time/effort in using your product. As product makers, we can leverage this small investment to encourage better behavior in the future. We are strongly driven to be consistent with our own past behaviors. Robert Cialdini, describing his principle of Consistency and Commitment, says that, “ Health apps such as make an excellent use of our deep need to be consistent with ourselves. Credit: Jawbone Jawbone asks users to make a small commitment in the morning to get to sleep by a certain time at night. And at night, Jawbone makes the big ask of reminding you to go to sleep at the time you committed to. And by simply clicking on the “I’M IN” button, Users also irrationally value their own efforts, which Users tend to value way more a product they’ve spent effort and time on than a product in which they put no labor into. For example, the first time you open , it only has a basic weight tracking function. The small action of regularly taking your weight earns you points and earns you new functionalities, such as workouts and new difficulty levels. The more effort you put into unlocking the app, the more you end up valuing the app as a result. By repeating tiny actions, we start valuing highly the results of those actions. And when this happens repeatedly, users start to change their attitude toward the new behavior, setting them on a path toward habit change. Health apps encourage these tiny actions, by getting users to invest their Lots of health apps encourage users to key in their weight or their fitness profile, or to import data from other apps. For example, apps such as and track your sleep data. Each day you track your sleep, the new data is used to recalculate your sleep patterns. This makes it much harder for users to leave the apps. Sleep Cycle (left) and Pillow (right) Health apps also get users to invest a little bit of content, making it easier for them to repeatedly use the product. For example, , a healthy recipe recommendation app, asks you to enter your food preferences and allergies during the onboarding process itself. So the first time you see recommendations, the content is highly curated for your needs. Zipongo’s curated recipes As you “favorite” more recipes, your recipe list gets more and more curated based on users who like similar recipes. By asking users to invest just a tiny bit of information about themselves in the onboarding process, Zipongo ensures that, as time goes on, each action becomes an investment into more curated content. This makes it easier for users to repeatedly use Zipongo for their cooking needs. Apps that focus a lot on social workouts, such as , reward their users with trophies and ranks as a sign of their accomplishments. When users start to work out, they build up a list of trophies and followers. Over time, this becomes a big investment in the product as the user now has a reputation to maintain on the platform. By asking users to invest even just a few minutes of their time and effort, we can get them to keep repeating certain behaviors. is a product that helps users who struggle with depression. It uses short (two-five minutes) exercises to engage users in mindful thinking and behaving. Credit: Xiayouji.com Once the user completes an exercise, these are taken into account by the app to tailor future interventions based on the current exercise the user undertook. During the investment phase, it is also important to set up future triggers to start the next habit-forming loop. For example, when I first sign up for , Step 1 of my onboarding asks me to set my movement, sleep and weight goals. Sure, it’s an easy enough task, and I do it. Jawbone’s onboarding process Jawbone then uses this little information I invested to regularly send me new triggers to go to sleep on time and move more. It is important that during the investment phase we are able to get investment that can help trigger users to take action the next time. By doing this, we can increase the chances of a user cycling through the habit-forming Hooked model multiple times. Nir’s Hooked model is a great way to look at how we design products that help our users with long-term health behavior and habit changes. It’s important to encourage good behaviors by giving our users We also need to give users the motivation they need to want to perform that action. By making the action as easy as possible, we also increase the likelihood the user will do it. A surprising and engaging reward at this time helps users form positive associations through repeated use. Through this process, users invest more in your product, making it more likely that they will cycle through the habit-forming loop. And voila! We’re on our way to forging long-term habits. The examples I shared are all interesting ways in which companies out there are tackling a difficult problem of habit change. However, these examples aren’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution. As product makers, we need to understand our users’ deep pain and what truly motivates them. Everything that we design must flow from that core. Once we understand our users’ intrinsic needs, the Hooked model can serve as a great framework to design for long-term healthy habit formation. |
Driving the new American century | Jake Chapman | 2,016 | 3 | 12 |
The World Economic Forum, the Detroit Auto Show and CES all occurred recently, and each has driven a great deal of discussion around self-driving cars. The expectation is that within a decade we will begin to see autonomous vehicles on the streets and a correlated reduction in accidents, traffic congestion and demand for parking. While the ongoing conversation is good for those who wish to see self-driving cars enter use, a careful analysis of the facts, coupled with an understanding of how similar transitions have played out through history, indicates that the majority of the discussion occurring right now vastly underestimates the speed with which self-driving cars will become the norm and ignores the tectonic shifts the transition will bring to all corners of American life. Self-driving cars will not only impact transportation, they will change how people feel about their homes, how cities are built, how families stay in touch, where we work and other facets of American life far removed from transportation. The self-driving car revolution will be big and it will be here soon. Exactly how big and how soon are very complicated questions, but by analyzing disparate data sets, we can arrive at a fairly clear idea of what the next decade will bring. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, consumer expenditures roughly break out as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 It shouldn’t comes as a shock to anyone that transportation represents the second largest expense category for Americans, behind only housing. What may surprise some people is the transition to self-driving vehicles will impact not just the transportation sector but each and every major consumer expenditure. According to an auto industry analyst at Morgan Stanley, autonomous vehicles can contribute $1.3 trillion to the U.S. economy . Figure 2 shows the breakdown of how autonomous vehicles add value to the economy. Figure 2 Indeed, $1.3 trillion is a lot of money. To put that number into perspective, here are a few of the things we could do with that much money (see Figure 3). We could balance the federal budget ($500 billion), make social security solvent ($180 billion), double all major federal research programs, including NASA, NSF, DARPA and NIH ($60 billion), double federal education investment ($120 billion) and, finally, double federal infrastructure investment ($100 billion). Amazingly, even if we committed to all of these investments we would still have more than $300 billion left over every year for debt reduction. Figure 3 Many top auto industry analysts have predicted the transition to autonomous vehicles will take at least a decade to achieve scale. Xavier Mosquet at Boston Consulting Group has predicted ridesharing driverless vehicles won’t begin to appear in major cities for another six to nine years, and that further dissemination will take longer. While there is much optimism around the future potential of self-driving cars, pessimism abounds around the timing of the transition. Pundits believe we are nearing the infamous “Peak of Inflated Expectations” in the Gartner Hype Cycle (see Figure 4), and a long letdown is ahead. Figure 4 While there are certainly technology, infrastructure, political and social challenges to face, the sheer weight of investment in the space is overwhelming. Traditional automakers GM and Ford have partnered with technology companies like Lyft and Google with an eye toward an autonomous future. Technology companies like Google and, reportedly, Apple have invested substantial resources in developing their own self-driving cars. New automaker Tesla has already released a semi-autonomous highway mode, and the government has gotten involved with President Obama earmarking $4 billion to prepare the way for autonomous cars. The brightest minds in American industry, backed by unprecedented quantities of capital, are pushing autonomous vehicles forward with a shockingly unified vision. In the face of this commitment, accelerated adoption seems likely. However, the future is inherently unknowable, and if we want to predict the future, the best method is to examine our past. Specifically, we should look to see how quickly the transition from the horse and buggy to automobiles occurred. Horses served as a primary means of powered transportation for millennia leading up to the twentieth century. What we need to know is how long it took for them to give way to the automobile once the automobile ceased being a niche oddity. In 1900, only 4,000 cars were sold in the U.S., representing approximately one car for every 20,000 residents. At this time, it’s fairly safe to say the car was still a niche product. Henry Ford released the iconic Model T in 1908, but there was still less than one car for every 400 residents. It wasn’t until 1914, one year after Henry Ford’s moving assembly line had been in full swing, that the car became part of the average American experience. In 1914, the U.S. boasted 1.7 million cars, or about one car for every 60 residents. Fast-forward to 1925, and there were more than 20 million automobiles registered — enough for the vast majority of urban households to own a car of their own. Looking at these numbers we can confidently say the transition from horse and buggy to automobile was completed between 1908 and 1925, a span of 17 years. Complicating what superficially looks to be a 17-year transition period is the urban traffic survey data we have. New York City, for example, recorded that automobiles outnumbered horses on the streets by 1912; a year before the assembly line had even kicked automobile production into high gear and a blazingly fast four years from the introduction of the Model T. Clearly there is a discrepancy between the urban transition and the rural transition. To narrow the transition window further, it is instructive to look at horse populations in the U.S. Figure 5 shows horse population versus registered vehicles in the U.S. from 1900 through 1930. Figure 5 Figure 6 illustrates two key dates in the transition. The first occurs in 1915, which is roughly when the U.S. achieved “Peak Horse.” This date is significant because, given the 30+ year life span of horses, it is, if anything, a trailing indicator of the transition away from horses to automobiles. The peak horse data coincides with the data showing the urban transition to automobiles actually occurred in the period between 1908 and 1915. The second key date is 1926, where we see for the first time the absolute number of automobiles eclipse the number of horses. The data corroborates our earlier assertion that some time between 1920 and 1925 is when automobiles eclipsed horses in both rural and urban areas. Figure 6 Triangulating these data points indicates two distinct transition periods: The urban transition, which occurred roughly between 1908 and 1912, and the full national transition, which began with the implementation of the assembly line in 1913 and was well underway by the early 1920s. For those playing along at home, this translates into a four-year urban transition and a 7-10 year national transition. The parallels between the transition from horse-to-car and the transition from car-to-autonomous car are many; however, the hurdles faced by the current transition are actually much lower. To transition away from horses, the U.S. developed a nationwide network of paved roads, gas stations, gas distribution infrastructure and auto mechanics. Each of these networks was a major infrastructure project in its own right, and yet each was developed in time to support a rapid transition to the automobile. In comparison, 95 percent of the infrastructure needed to support self-driving cars is already in place, making a very rapid transition plausible, if not likely. Some may argue that whether or not the infrastructure for self-driving cars already exists, the time it would take to replace the install base alone lengthens the transition. The U.S. Department of Transportation says there are 204 million vehicles available for daily use. In 2015, there were approximately 17.5 million cars sold in the U.S. If we assume all the numbers held steady, it would require a grueling 11.5 years to replace the entire install base. Our analysis can’t stop here, however, because self-driving cars fundamentally change our relationship with the automobile. Currently, cars have an astoundingly low utilization rate of 5 percent. This means in a perfect world we would only need 1/20 the number of vehicles (10 million cars) to satisfy our needs (see Figure 7). Given our manufacturing capability, the U.S. could build an autonomous fleet in as few as 7 months. Is this analysis simplistic? Yes. There are scores of positive and negative feedback cycles that would impact the amount of time it would take for a complete transition, and we will never get to 100 percent utilization. The important takeaway, though, is that we have the infrastructure and the manufacturing capability to “flip the switch” on autonomous cars much more quickly than most people realize. Figure 7 The impact of transitioning to self-driving cars is potentially huge in terms of real dollars to the economy, and the transition could happen very quickly. But what would the transition mean in more concrete terms? The disruptive changes autonomous vehicles will bring to this country are too numerous and nuanced to be discussed in a book, let alone this article. Instead, we will examine a few of the major non-obvious changes we can expect as a direct result of autonomous vehicles. Americans have been in love with the car for generations. One very obvious consequence is that the average American single-family home sports a two-car garage. While some homes have no garage, others have three-car garages, bringing the average to just over 1.9 garage spaces per home. These two-car garages are space hogs, claiming somewhere around 500 square feet of prime living space. As the self-driving car transition matures, individual car ownership will wane, as will the necessity to park one’s automobile in a garage. According to U.S. Census data, as of 2011, there were approximately 81 million detached single-family homes in the U.S. If these homes average two garage spaces, we would expect there to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 billion square feet of garage space available. To put that number in perspective, the U.S. only added approximately 1.5 billion square feet of single-family home space in all of 2014. If self-driving cars allow us to gradually reclaim garage space as living space, we can reclaim more than 25 years worth of new home construction (see Figure 8). Figure 8 The tendrils of this garage space recapture will reach far and wide. Self storage as a business will face a quickly eroding market, new housing starts should see pressure, home decor/repair retailers should be buoyed by DIYers looking to improve newfound space, so-called “boomerang kids” returning from college should be able to move back in with their parents and Airbnb should see inventory increase as homeowners look to monetize newly refurbished living space. Speaking of garage space, the impact on multi-family housing will be at least as significant as it is on detached single-family homes. According to a recent study, the cost of building parking garages into multi-family housing is borne by the tenants, and can drive rents up by 15 percent or more. A four-story multi-family apartment complex will often dedicate the entire lower story to parking instead of additional housing units. This means 25 percent of the capital expense and maintenance of the building is dead weight borne by the other three floors of construction. Reducing the need for parking should translate directly to an increase in affordable housing. The media business is fundamentally about grabbing your attention. Until the introduction of the modern smartphone in 2007, the amount of people’s time available to media had been static for decades, and competition was a zero-sum game. Mobile opened up new territories for settlement — territories that have now been claimed by Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and a handful of other major players. We are once again approaching an era of zero-sum competition, but that era will be short-lived as the estimated 75 billion hours Americans spend commuting will be up for grabs. Today’s media giants will all make a play for this new supply of attention, but the jostling will make space for new upstarts or for an older player to reboot themselves. Seventy-five billion hours is an extremely difficult number to conceptualize, but, in practical terms, it represents about twice the amount of time Americans spend on Facebook, an attention-based company worth almost $350 billion. Here’s a list of top media companies, with a total value approaching $700 billion (given in the media industry, these 15 conglomerates own almost all the name brands in traditional media): A U.C. Berkeley study recently noted there are between 700 million and 2 billion parking spaces in the U.S., covering substantially more than 5,000 square miles. This means three times as much land in the U.S. is devoted to parking than is devoted to growing wine grapes (see Figure 9). What civilized people would so horribly misallocate their resources? As self-driving cars begin to obviate the need for high-value urban real estate to be devoted to parking, these spaces can be reclaimed. This newly liberated land can gradually be transitioned from the urban blight it currently represents to new housing, urban green space, unique local businesses and the things that make living in an urban environment interesting. Figure 9 The transition to self-driving cars will be fast, and it will create tremendous value for the country, but that isn’t to say it will be positive for everyone. Many sectors of society will be clear losers in this transition. There are some obvious businesses that will gradually face extinction. These include gas stations, auto parts retailers and service stations. It is hard to imagine a self-driving future that doesn’t ultimately break us away from individual car ownership; once you approach cars from the fleet perspective, gasoline and retail-level auto maintenance don’t make sense. There are some less-obvious victims, too. Public storage facilities will feel the bite as their largest competitor will become the 40 BILLION square feet of free garage space opening up over the next couple decades. In the transportation space, airlines will face pressure as the shorter regional flights that are so critical to the hub and spoke system will need to compete against self-driving cars. Once a self-driving car can make the door-to-door trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in four hours or less, it will be cheaper, safer and more convenient than anything the airlines will be able to offer. Similarly, the insurance industry will need to adjust as the highly profitable auto insurance business line disappears. As the number of accidents plummet, the auto insurance industry will see their margins compressed to near zero. Moreover, given the problems around attributing agency/fault in a world dominated by self-driving vehicles. it may make more sense for auto insurance to eventually be taken over by a state-run fund similar to the workers’ compensation system. There aren’t many things we can say about the future with certainty. However, we can say that the potential for massive social and economic change contained in autonomous vehicle technology rivals the potential, now released, first contained in computers, the Internet and the mobile device. For those who are looking for a new American Century or a new “New Deal,” look no further than Uber, GM, Ford, Google, Lyft and Apple. The autonomous vehicle dividend is almost mature, and if policy makers don’t epically screw this up, we may all get to cash in. |
Gillmor Gang: Getting Better | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 3 | 12 | The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Daniel Ilkovich, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 11, 2016. The Gang joins the hybrid world of thin media, where bots masquerade as us and vice versa. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Elisa Camahort Page, Rebecca Woodcock, Francine Hardaway, Mary Hodder, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @borthwick, @scobleizer, @danielilkovich, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=84366596 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302] |
Artificial intelligence and language | Vasco Pedro | 2,016 | 3 | 12 |
The concept of artificial intelligence has been around for a long time. We’re all familiar with HAL 9000 from , C-3PO from and, more recently, Samantha from . In written fiction, AI characters show up in stories from writers like Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Isaac Asimov. Sometimes it seems like it’s touched on by every writer who has written sci-fi. While many predictions and ideas put forward in sci-fi have come to life, artificial intelligence is probably the furthest behind. We are nowhere near artificial intelligence as exemplified by the characters mentioned above. Sometimes it seems like we’ve been waiting forever. We can ask Siri or Google or Cortana simple questions and they will answer, but everyone who’s used that technology eventually . We thought Siri was the future when it first came out, but these days, most of us barely use it beyond simple Google searches and dead simple tasks, like setting timers. The reason these software programs leave so much to be desired . This is where natural language processing (NLP) comes into play. Artificial intelligence can grasp the meaning of simple language, and speak back to you, but it is limited by its literal interpretations of our questions. A computer can know the definition of a word, but it doesn’t understand the meaning of words within a larger context. If you’re interested in tech or sci-fi, you’ve probably heard of the Turing test. Alan Turing was one of the first people to take the potential of AI seriously, and he knew that one day machines would match human intelligence. He had an idea for a simple test: If a human can’t distinguish between a machine and another human in conversation, then the machine has reached the level of human intelligence. The Turing test is a bit more complicated than that, but the concept is still useful as a benchmark for natural language processing. In other words, if it can think like a human, it can process language like a human. (Given the complexity of the human brain, a machine able to think like a human will be a huge accomplishment). Think of Scarlett Johansson’s character Samantha in . She’s a great example of AI that can understand language fluently. She understands everything said by Theo, played by Joaquin Phoenix. There are a few things she didn’t know, but when explained to her, she understood immediately and incorporated it into her existing knowledge. Just like a human would. The replicants in are another interesting form of AI. Not only do they process language easily, they’re even poetic. Consider this quote from the replicant Roy Batty: It’s a famous line because it’s so beautiful, and so human. Do we want androids who spout poetry? Do we need them? That’s a topic for a sci-fi story, but the fact remains that Roy has a thorough understanding of language, and the emotion that comes with it. These types of AI are common throughout science fiction, and have been for decades. But we’ve failed to deliver on that. The more we’ve learned about how to build true AI and NLP, the more we’ve realized that we know next to nothing. This is largely because we understand next to nothing about the human brain. We haven’t been able to build anything that thinks like a human because we have no idea how the human brain thinks. At this point we’ve distinguished three levels of AI. I can’t put it much better than Tim from , so I’ll quote him here: Something I heard awhile back that has stuck in my head is that humans are capable of calculating physics and trigonometry on the fly. When a football is flung into the air, we can tell when and where it will land; quarterbacks also know when they throw the ball. They make complex calculations and apply it to their physical movement. When you think about it, it’s incredible. And we have no idea how we’re able to do this. Donald Knuth, a computer scientist and former Stanford professor, once said, “AI has succeeded in doing what requires thinking but nothing that we do without thinking.” That’s really what this all comes down to, because we don’t understand how the human brain processes things without thinking. Including language. When listening or reading in a language in which we’re fluent, we don’t think about processing the words. It just happens. So how do we develop AI that can do things we don’t even understand? That’s what giants like Google and Palantir and many startups, including X.ai, MetaMind, Feedzai, Signal n, Lilt and many, many others are working on. We’ve tried a few ways to move past this roadblock. Although we don’t know much about how the human brain works, we know a bit more about how it got to this state: natural selection. So some people are trying to artificially replicate natural selection with machines — although it won’t take millions of years, because it’s less random. It’s called evolutionary computation, or genetic algorithms, and it sets up machines to do certain tasks; when one is successful through trial and error, it’s combined with other machines that are successful. But it’s an iterative process, which presents a problem: We don’t know how long it will take to create intelligence equal to our own. So far, this method has proved unsuccessful and it was mostly abandoned in the 1990s. Our brain is a biological neural network, so companies are building artificial neural networks. They’re trying to replicate the way the brain processes information by learning though trial and error which neural pathways lead to the right answer. In reality, artificial neural networks have much less in common with biological brains than the name might indicate. Artificial neural networks are a rough mathematical model, , inspired by the little we know about the brain. Nonetheless, people are doing some crazy stuff with neural networks. Perhaps the most fun, or silly, application of the technology recently made the rounds online. A man named Andy Herd fed all of the scripts from the TV show into a recurrent neural network. It was able to learn the style of the writing and the characters’ personalities and . They are pretty ridiculous, and don’t make too much sense, but the fact that it’s able to do this at all represents a huge step forward from where we were just a few years ago. And through machine learning, the AI will continue to get better. But at this point, it’s captured the spirit of Chandler, at least: “Chandler: (in a muffin) (Runs to the girls to cry) Can I get some presents.” Anyone who’s watched knows this is classic Chandler, even if the narrative is… nonsensical, to say the least. Andy used Google’s open source machine learning software library to build his hilarious and important script generator. Google has built it into many of their products, from Photos to Search to Gmail, and obviously Google Now, an app that essentially takes everything Google knows about you and uses it to provide helpful and relevant information. It’s also where the Google version of Siri lives. Deep learning has massive potential to revolutionize AI and help get us to the next step. But there are other solutions people are working on. It’s clear that replicating human intelligence is not easy, and no one knows if our other methods will work at all, or do it in a reasonable amount of time. So some people want to design machines to make themselves smart, by researching, learning and revising themselves. This is seemingly how Samantha from works. She is capable of learning just like a human is, although much faster. At the beginning of the movie, Theo needs to teach her a lot. But by the end, she has blown past him on an intelligence level. It’s an exponential process. In layman’s terms, the more she learns, the more she is able to learn, and so on. Perhaps this will lead to radically new types of intelligence, created by machines rather than humans. This brings us to the concept that artificial intelligence depends on: Moore’s law; the idea that computational power doubles every two years. Talk about exponential power. While the growth rate has started to slow, it’s still advancing exponentially. This already shows; deep learning was already around in the 1970s, but the exponential increase in computational power and data was largely responsible for the breakthroughs we are experiencing now. This is similar to that lies within the Messenger app, aiming to be your personal assistant. Facebook says that M can do anything a human can — and that’s because their software is working with real humans. After all, AI isn’t capable of calling a restaurant and making a reservation, but the humans on the other side can. When you make a request, if M can’t do it alone, it sends the message to a Facebook contractor and, as they work with the software, the AI learns. M isn’t available to the public yet, but it looks like it has a lot of potential. Facebook is all in on AI. They’re developing a lot of different technology (like a feature that identifies what is in photographs so blind people can “see” them), but one of the coolest is their attempt to solve the “understanding” part of natural language processing. As we touched on before, AI isn’t yet capable of reading or listening like a human can — it only knows specific things. It knows what a word or sentence means, but it can’t summarize a paragraph. So Facebook is trying to tackle this. Last year they showed off some cool software. They fed in a synopsis of and the AI was able to answer that look straightforward for us, but are . But one of the coolest applications of natural language processing is coming from Microsoft: they recently pushed out a feature in Skype to translate on-the-fly. So you can be on a call with someone who speaks another language, and (almost) immediately. This is huge for global commerce, and society in general. , imagine how much more productive we could be, or how many people we could learn from or talk to that we previously couldn’t, or how much more successful global businesses could be — especially smaller companies that can’t afford a large staff of translators. Without language barriers, the world opens up, especially to those who don’t have the privileges of people in first-world countries. There’s a long way to go before computers can understand language. Every language is complex, with subtleties, dialects, slang, implications, emotion, tone, narrative and context, all of which are hard for machines to understand. While software like TensorFlow and are a massive step forward, to get there. And we will get there, but it will take at least 15 years. Samantha from HAL from , C-3PO from — and all the other artificial intelligence we’ve been promised — are inevitable. It doesn’t need to be presented physically, as an android or robot. But it has to think like a human. Breaking open the language barrier will blow the potential of AI wide open. Until then, AI and humans working together is the best way to reap the benefits of existing technology. We don’t have to wait. We can use AI to change the world right now. |
Technology and the laws of power | Jon Evans | 2,016 | 3 | 12 | Is the tech industry partly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump? That’s what John Robb, who’s always worth reading, suggests in a series of recent posts, citing the great Nassim Taleb in support. : “The nation-state as we’ve known it is rapidly hollowing out … this century’s spike in globalization, financialization, and technological change is gutting it…” Robb that America is increasingly fragmenting into two opposed groups: the , “a class united by global outlook, education, financial success, status, and technological adoption,” and the , “the supermajority of Americans getting creamed by the hollowing out of America.” And he : What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for. But wait, you say. They’re not talking about the tech industry, they’re really talking about the . Sort of! But — leaving aside the fact that the tech industry is increasingly the Establishment, and — I’ve been arguing for some time now that as software eats the world, and leads to economics, it drags us all (to again.) There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Extremistan. Its overall output is likely much greater than that of Mediocristan. But it is a land of economic distributions, in which a minority will do very well … while a majority will count themselves lucky to stagnate. The tech industry and the Establishment are on course to be that wealthy minority, which Robb calls the technorati. The rest? They’re the left-behind. Imagine the inequities of present-day San Francisco as a microcosm of the future everywhere. That seems to be the direction in which we’re headed: This is a remarkable chart — Matthew C. Klein (@M_C_Klein) writes: “America’s most successful cities, states and firms are leaving the rest behind,” in a called “The great divergence.” What’s causing that divergence? Our move towards Extremistan. What’s causing that? Technology, more than anything else. Even those not directly affected know that there is a new zeitgeist, a new Gilded Age, a new quasi-aristocratic class of the wealthy, privileged, hyper-networked tech elite, making six figures straight out of school, leaping from one plum job in one alpha city to another, exiting startups with millions or more. Whether or not this class is theoretically accessible to everyone is irrelevant to those who know in their gut they’ll never join it. And let’s not kid ourselves: tech be more meritocratic than some other industries, but it’s far from a perfect meritocracy. Taleb rages at . (Which ought to make me uneasy, but fortunately, journalist-insider is a part-time gig for me, I spend my days writing software.) There’s no question that this rage has metastasized. But why now? The self-serving Establishment has been focused on perpetuating itself for decades now. This sudden hunger for revolution “worldwide, from India to the UK to the US”; this upending of seventy years of American precedent by the Trump and Sanders insurgencies; why is this happening Tech, again. There are no longer a handful of gatekeepers, readily influenced by the Establishment, who control all access to mass media. Now Facebook, and its users, exert profound collective control over the means of media distribution; now Trump can speak directly to his 6.8 million Twitter followers, without any filtering intermediaries. This ongoing in-part-tech-driven “Great Divergence” is very apparent to those who are not benefiting. They hear the “paternalistic semi-intellectual experts” telling them what to do; but now they hear other voices, too, telling the left-behinds that they have been cheated, manipulated, betrayed; telling them that the status quo truly only serves the smug preening Establishment. …Which is, to understate, not obviously wrong. So the fearful, hateful and/or authoritarian among them turn to Trump, or Marine Le Pen; the hopeful liberals turn to Sanders, or Jeremy Corbyn; but what they’re all really doing is turning from the belief that the way things are can possibly work for them. The interesting question is whether the tech industry will support and ultimately merge with the Establishment — or, put another way, whether technology will ultimately increase equality of opportunity for everyone, or will intensify and calcify our existing inequities. Call me an inveterate optimist, but I think the former is more probable. https://twitter.com/MichaelOChurch/status/699359893984296960 Let me recommend to you a fascinating piece: “ ” by Kevin Simler: If an alien film crew chose to feature our species in a nature documentary, they’d have plenty of spectacular superorganisms to choose from. Perhaps they’d spotlight the U.S. military, the most powerful superorganism ever to arise on our humble planet. Or the Catholic Church, a superorganism that’s managed to survive, with awe-inspiring continuity, for nearly two millennia. Meanwhile, impressive at smaller scales, the Boston Symphony Orchestra coordinates muscle movements to a precision of millimeters and milliseconds. And improv troupes like the Upright Citizens Brigade manage to arrange themselves into compelling scenes at the drop of a hat, all without any explicit coordination. Then there’s the superorganism responsible for the stable, secure, 20-million-line codebase that powers much of the world’s computing infrastructure — a loose affiliation of some 5,000 individuals, mostly strangers, who have somehow managed to assemble one of the most intricate artifacts ever built. As you might have guessed, I’m referring to the developers of the Linux kernel. Politics is, to an extent, the art of creating superorganisms. Trump and Sanders have turned some of the vast masses of the left-behinds into “the Trump superorganism” and “the Sanders superorganism,” two entirely new beasts challenging the venerable Republican and Democratic superorganisms. But the key point is that new technology makes it easier to create, connect, and inspire superorganisms … and to trigger hockey-stick hyper-growth in them when the conditions are right. It seems probable that none of today’s new political superorganisms will win the day; that in the end, the Establishment will triumph once again. This time. But as we move ever deeper into Extremistan, as the left-behinds grow angrier and more numerous, and as technology continues to foster , it seems to be only a matter of time before some kind of profound political transformation is upon us. |
Netflix and the creation of global monoculture | Spencer Lazar | 2,016 | 3 | 12 |
is an incredible company. Had you invested in the business in the depths of The Great Recession of 2008 and held until today, your stake would be up more than 20x your initial investment (a venture capital-worthy return that happened in the public markets). In that period, the company outperformed the NASDAQ as a whole by more than 12x. Just astounding. But as tremendous as their financial performance has been, what’s equally as impressive has been the boldness and consistency of their product execution. The achievements include: (1) navigating the transition from their initially revolutionary analog DVD rental business to a digital subscription (remember ?); (2) breaking device and platform silos to offer its content as one of the first true web services; (3) pioneering the concept of “original content,” driving consumer satisfaction, stickiness, defensibility, and stronger long-term operating margins; (4) pushing consumers expectations of what streaming video fidelity… While it’s catalogue often still is missing the specific movie that you’re looking for, the company has clearly established itself as a fountain of consistent entertainment and a partner to those looking for a cozy lean back experience ( !). So when Netflix to expand to an additional 130 countries overnight, you’d expect that people all over the world would have been celebrating in the streets. A recent story, however, on NPR called got me to see the company in a different light. The piece describes the reactions of Kenyan consumers and local entertainment industry. Local consumers, on one hand, appeared overjoyed. For years, they have been finding clever hacks to tap into “sugar bowl” of Netflix-style content. But the site’s formal domestic launch took the hassle out of access, and allowed locals to feel like participants in the global media community conversation. iROKO actor search On the other hand, those — like actors, directors, and producers — with hands in the creative process of making local content were up in arms. They fear that Netflix’s content, capital, technology, and product are so strong, that they will locally not be able to compete for domestic consumer interest. And as such, the indigenous stories and sensibilities will struggle to survive. There is truth to both sides here. Entertainment is one of America’s largest global exports. Maybe that’s because we are a nation of immigrants, and so are maximally relatable. Maybe it stems from something aspirational about the stories we tell. But no matter the reason, it’s clear that Netflix is a crucial new piece of infrastructure, paving the way for the migration of our talent and stores. To the extent that local businesses are economically suboptimal mechanisms for global storytelling, as painful as the transition may be, I support the market efficiency Netflix facilitates. If local creatives can partner with Netflix to develop and distribute their content, and do so more cheaply and effectively, that’s great. I fear, however, that the first content to be successful locally on the Netflix platform will be non-local content, capturing imagination and attention. These are existing shows like Narcos, House of Cards, and Orange is the New Black. While this might be the most profit-maximizing strategy for Netflix, as it continues to pour , I very much hope that the company reaches into the local countries and cultures it touches to bring out their own stories. While internet connects us and unites us, it also has the potential to facilitate a kind of imperialism and monoculture. Beyond Netflix, as companies like Facebook, Twitter, and even Medium continue to go global, they should work to preserve the unique local flavors that make the world a truly interesting place to explore. |
How new domains are building better brands | Alan Dunn | 2,016 | 3 | 12 |
New domain extensions have accumulated some pretty big numbers over the last couple of years. Collective registrations for the new GTLDs (generic top-level domains) have now surpassed 13 million, according to NTLD stats. This number is not small by any means. Comparably speaking, this represents just over 10 percent of total .com registrations, more than 50 percent of the total .net registrations and 30 percent more than total .org registrations. While these numbers may not be a surprise to some, they certainly prove the Not-Com revolution (a term coined by Jeff Davidoff, CMO of Donuts, and the largest applicant for new domain-name extensions) is certainly making waves. From Lady Gaga (bornthisway.foundation) to Oprah (wherearetheynow.buzz) to Slack (slack.help), thousands of companies have adopted the new domains. Some use one as a primary domain, others for email; others are embracing the very tangible, visual marketing advantage of these. Companies spend billions annually on brand building, yet one of the most visible elements that brands have often been forced to use in social media are URL shorteners, owned by another brand. For example, take a look at one of Deadpool’s recent tweets: Win a Edition Alpha and a trip to Hollywood. Sunglasses not included. — Deadpool Movie (@deadpoolmovie) Deadpool uses a URL shortener from to promote an external link. In theory this works, because Bitly is a well-trusted brand. However, Deadpool is missing out on a very real opportunity for consistent brand experience by using a custom URL shortener — maybe deadpool.link, dp.link or something that’s more the Deadpool brand than someone else’s. Bitly has even started embracing the adoption of Branded Short Domains under their Bitly Enterprise product offering. For example, ATTN.com is a highly popular news site with more than 1.6 million Facebook likes. However, if you look at ATTN’s Twitter , you’ll see they use attn.link as a URL shortener. Now, visit ATTN.link and you’ll clearly see that the domain name is part of Bitly’s Branded URL enterprise solution product, where Bitly claims users can experience up to a 34 percent CTR increase simply by changing the name of their URL shortener (read ). For brand builders, these custom URL shorteners provide an extremely low-cost solution for maintaining brand consistency. You may have to sacrifice a character or two, but Twitter has discussed in future tweets. From generic extensions like .help and .link to targeted extensions like .movie and .style, brands may do well to remember they often have the power to control anything left of the dot. For those who doubted new domain name extensions, it may be time to widen your perspective and possibly even your ROI — which is, after all, every company’s dream. |
Big data and the Death Star | Evaldo H. de Oliveira | 2,016 | 3 | 13 |
The Wars movies have captured the imaginations of everyone, from baby boomers through millennials on down to tots. It seems like everyone has been talking about the latest episode in this saga. Around the water cooler, discussions begin with “Have you seen it?” Being a database company, the topic around this office is, of course, “How much do they need to manage in the ?” To avoid spoilers, we will discuss the requirements of the original , as it debuted in “Episode 4: A New Hope.” That incarnation of the planet-destroying battle station was on the order of 150 kilometers in diameter. It included a super laser capable of disintegrating entire worlds in one blast. The crew on board the was estimated at 1.7 million military personnel (stormtroopers and their commanders, trash compactor operators, etc.) and 400,000 droids. This is close to the population of Philadelphia — if you don’t count the droids. The name “Philadelphia” literally means “brotherly love.” In 2014, they officially changed their nickname to “The City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection.” If it is overrun by 400,000 droids, they will need to update that title again. We propose “The City of Brotherly Love, Sisterly Affection, and Droidly Indifference.” Economics students at Lehigh University estimated it would require more than one quadrillion tons of steel to build the . At the current rate of steel production, you will need to wait more than 800,000 years for the raw materials to arrive… . The amount of created each year by all the people here on earth is growing exponentially: It is expected to double each year. By 2020, it is expected to have increased to 40 zetabytes. That’s Using that estimate, we could figure that the 1.7 million personnel on the would generate 8.84 exabytes of per year. If you prefer to express in factors of 1024 bytes, the number is 8.63 exabytes (or “exbibytes”). Of course, that’s assuming residents of the generate as much as a human living in the year 2020. We think the galaxy far, far away may be far more advanced than that. Meanwhile, back in this galaxy, a new force is bursting on the scene and generating even more . Earth is currently experiencing the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). generation is not limited to content we humans create on our phones and tablets. Now we wear watches and wristbands that spew a continuous stream of telemetry about their owners’ heart rates, locations, pacing, etc. Any non-humans who are reading this should not feel left out: The IoT includes refrigerators that create shopping lists of items to be purchased by the humans they control; thermostats that report statistics about energy usage in their homes while making intelligent decisions about how to minimize it; automobiles that download GPS and mapping information, not to mention streaming tunes from the Internet; traffic cams reporting road conditions; and the list goes on. And which residents of the most closely resemble the IoT? The 400,000 droids, of course. It is a difficult challenge to decide how droid usage compares to the from a refrigerator or thermostat. Because droids appear to be relatively intelligent, let’s assume they generate as much as an equivalent number of humans (many of whom are relatively intelligent). Using the same math above, we can estimate that the droids create 2.08 exabytes per year (or 2.03 exbibytes per year). The ship certainly needs a database of full architectural specifications and maintenance procedures. The size of that database could be estimated based on a database maintained by a city of similar size, which takes us back to the city of brotherly, sisterly and droidly love, Philadelphia. They maintain 326 datasets covering all aspects of the city: city council districts, park locations, historic structures, demographics, businesses, etc. Another way to look at this question is, “How complex a structure can you build with one quadrillion tons of steel?” When the students at Lehigh University made their estimate of the cost of a , they assumed it was similar to a modern battleship…although much bigger. This article did not show the students’ math (for shame!), so we need to reverse their calculations and divide 1.08 quadrillion metric tons of by 22 thousand tons per battleship, telling us that they figured a is equivalent to almost 50 billion battleships. So they would need almost 50 billion times the amount of engineering on a single battleship. Anybody know how much engineering is stored on a battleship? But there is much more to this battle station than a crew and some steel. It’s the super laser that puts the “ ” in . A significant source of likely to be found aboard the will be for targeting that laser. Surely this battleship has detailed about every planet it encounters. Our own, rather typical, galaxy, the , comprises 100 to 400 billion stars and at least . If that far, far away galaxy is similar our own, the would need to keep track of a comparable number of bodies. All of the inhabited planets pose potential threats; all of the stars are potential sources of fuel. We can make the assumption that all this will be stored locally. Remembering the estimate that, by 2020, the total amount of in the world (our world, earth) will have reached 40 zetabytes, we can use that as the amount of the would need to store for each planet in their galaxy. Now, before you go multiplying 100 billion planets by 40 zetabytes, we must first look at Drake’s equation. In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake proposed an to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations that might be trying to communicate with us. It takes into account such factors as the percentage of stars that might have planets, the percentage of those planets that may support life, the percentage of life that develops into intelligent life and builds civilizations and the percentage of civilizations that develop technology to communicate across the expanse of space…and actually decide to send us a tweet. Using all those factors, and a few more, scientists estimate that the Milky Way may currently be home to 1,000 to 100,000,000 civilizations. Over the years , which range from 0 to 36.4 million. Taking a number in the middle, let’s say the is monitoring 1 million planets. Multiply that by 40 zetabytes of for each planet and we have 40,000 yottabytes. A (no connection to Yoda, but we weren’t the first to ponder this) is 1024 zettabytes. Enough 200GB micro SDXC cards to store a single yottabyte would fill the . So this much would require storage media the size of 40,000 Hindenburgs, or 282.4 billion cubic feet of flash memory. Of course, the uses very advanced technology. Looking at possible advances, DNA has been proposed as a storage medium for biomolecular computing. DNA packs a full blueprint of a human — or presumably a Jedi, Sith or Wookie — into the nucleus of a single cell. Using this technology, a yottabyte could be stored in less than one cubic meter. Don’t forget, we still need 40,000 of those storage vessels. That’s enough DNA to fill about 330 very large (53-foot) shipping containers. Based on the assumptions we made, the would need to store 8.84 exabytes of for personnel and enough structural and engineering for 50 billion battleships. All of which is dwarfed by the complete intragalactic database coming in at 40,000 yottabytes — a billion times bigger than all the other sources combined (which makes sense, when you consider it represents “all of the from a million planets”). Oh, and another 40,000 cubic meters of storage space to back it up. The ideal candidate will have database administration experience with an emphasis in the area of d …really b d . compression skills are a plus. May the force be with you. |
Future Finance raises $171M to grow its student loan platform in Europe | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | The idea of student loans is still a relatively new one in many parts of Europe, where university education in several countries is either entirely or largely subsidised by the government. But as that begins to change, and more young people and their families are being required to pony up academic and living fees, a new startup hopes to capitalise on the emerging gap to help them. — a startup based out of Dublin that provides loans to students in Europe using big data algorithms to asses their credit-worthiness — is today announcing a new £119 million ($171 million) in funding. This includes £19 million in equity and £100 million towards future loans made through the platform. Future Finance is currently live in the UK and Germany with plans to expand further in the region, according to co-founder and CEO Brian Norton — an American with a background in finance who upped sticks and moved to Dublin to build Future Finance in this part of the world. This latest round brings in some notable investors, and also sheds light on some of the others that have been funding the startup up to now. (Future Finance has raised $266 million, or £185 million, since going live in May 2014.) Future Finance’s equity investors now include QED Investors (a major VC in U.S. fintech), Blackstone Strategic Opportunity Fund, Colchis Capital, Invus Opportunities, KCK, DW Partners, Fenway Summer Ventures, Ridge Road Partners and 1/0 Capital. And the company also has disclosed that Goldman Sachs has also been backing the company, providing funds for the £25 million in loans paid out on on the platform to date. The among loaned so far may sound relatively low but there is a clear sign of more demand: the company says it has had 37,000 applications received to-date and has seen loan growth of over 900% year-on-year. To the average reader in the U.S., the idea of a student taking out loans to finance his or her higher education is very commonplace. And there are a number of startups out there that either help students get loans in the first place and/or help refinance those they already have, provided either by banks, special loan organizations like Sallie Mae, or by way of federal programs. SoFi and CommonBond are two startups specifically targeting students and refinancing. Other platforms include Lending Club, Prosper and Upstart. The problem that Future Finance is aiming to solve is one that is still largely nascent in Europe, but is bound to grow over time: While the cost of going to university in Europe is tiny compared to average prices in the U.S., those costs have been on the rise. Traditional banks have yet to fill the funding gap for students after grants, scholarships and government programs, and while students also work through college, sometimes this can become a distraction. This is where Future Finance is stepping in. In its most mature market, the UK, Norton tells me that the average price for a university undergraduate degree is around £60,000. “The average person can borrow £35,000 from the government on terms that are pretty easy, flexible and student friendly,” he said. Future Finance aims to make up the difference, providing loans of between £2,500 and £40,000 per each academic year, with the funds typically used both for tuition and living expenses. The loans are specifically aimed at students and their financing needs, both in terms of how students are assessed and in terms of how they are expected to repay them. On the assessment side, Norton tells me that what Future Finance does “ On the repayment side, Future Finance aims to provide terms that are more student-friendly than an ordinary bank loan, with ten-year loan terms, no early repayment charges and payment holidays built in. And that’s before you consider that many students aren’t even eligible for bank loans because of a lack of credit history. While Future Finance plans to expand further in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, it’s own future finance roadmap does not include the U.S., where Norton (remember, he’s an American ex-pat) says he is a “huge fan” of SoFi but believes the loan terms are much more different and less desirable for his company. “Europe is structurally very different than the U.S.,” he said. “There is a very high ROI on education here,” with more students likely to earn more than they have invested in their educations, which is not always the case in the U.S., where education costs are so high, regardless of whether you end up as a public school teacher or an investment banker. More likely, the company will explore more markets in Europe to launch its own retail service, as well as eye up how and if it has a prospect as a white-label provider of student loans. Given that many banks have yet to size up and act on this opportunity, there could be a clear opening for this and other startups to make a move. The still-early opportunity is also something that QED, which like SoFi, Fundera, CircleUp and others in the finance space, also sees as promising: “Future Finance’s use of technology and data to democratize higher education is a huge win for students and society,” said Nigel Morris, Managing Partner of QED Investors, in a statement. “We are very impressed with Brian and his team and see enormous potential for the business in what is still a nascent market for student finance in the UK. We are delighted to support Brian and his team to take Future Finance to its next stage of growth.” Notably, Morris was a co-founder of CapitalOne. Future Finance is not disclosing its valuation in this round. (We’re still trying to find out anyway.) |
Like player coaches, tech CTOs should know how to code | Kiran Bondalapati | 2,016 | 3 | 13 |
They seem as anachronistic as helmetless hockey players, the no-dunking rule and . But the player-coach was once a familiar figure in pro sports. and in the NBA. and in football. The first six World Series were won by guys who filled out the lineup card and also were on it. This form of multi-tasking fell out of favor decades ago, however. The last NBA player-coach was of the Boston Celtics during the 1978-79 season. Want to bet who the last one in Major League Baseball was? , in 1986. In most tech startups, the Chief Technology Officer’s role is as demanding and complex as that of a modern head coach. He or she establishes the company’s technical vision and presides over all aspects of its realization. The CTO leads technological development and drives the organization to strive for and execute innovation. He or she may serve in other important roles as well, from media spokesperson to conference speaker to customer-facing deal-closer and problem-solver. One hat that today’s CTO seldom wears is hands-on software developer. Similar to the way that the player-coach has disappeared in sports as the head coach’s role has become more multi-faceted and arduous, the thinking regarding CTOs is that they have enough on their plates with strategy. Who has the time or desire to roll up their sleeves and get busy with code? I would argue that this reasoning is as misguided as leaving Stephen Curry open for an uncontested three. With enough determination and dedication, it’s possible and necessary for a CTO to be both a visionary and a key in-the-trenches contributor. Which means that the player-coach model, though long gone in pro sports, serves as an excellent template for tech startups. A CTO engaged at the ground level – let’s call him or her the Coding Chief Technology Officer (CCTO) – can give tech firms, especially young ones, a real leg up. Here’s why: Most CTOs are intimately familiar with the “why” (the rationale for building a company or product – the goal line, if you will) and the “what” (the technological features to reach the goal) but not the “how” (the actual code). A CCTO, however, can be in the rare position of being an expert at both the macro and micro levels. This eliminates one of the biggest pitfalls in any organization: a strategic leader who is divorced from the details that can make or break the strategy. When you truly understand the little things, you’re in a better position to make decisions on the big ones. You can see, in an immediate sense, what’s going well and what isn’t. You also tend to look a lot smarter about the technology in a customer meeting. If you know the details, you can, for example, give a better estimation of the level of effort required when a customer requests a new feature. You can give a more educated response, either in the affirmative or negative, with strong backing reasons. The CTO may be the sharpest technological mind in the company. The CCTO puts him or herself in a position to spread knowledge in impactful, day-to-day ways. In the words of the late , “The proper, primary aim of programming is not to produce programs but to have the programmers build theories of the manner in which the problems at hand are solved by program execution.” A hands-on, coding CTO can share best practices and coach less experienced developers to avoid common mistakes, such as emphasizing speed over quality or thinking too much by lines of code rather than larger patterns. And it’s the best kind of teaching – showing, not telling. A so-called visionary always gains trust and admiration when that person is willing to work in the trenches. That’s just human nature. The trust is necessary for a team to execute on the vision successfully. Today, the re-use of open-source code packages is an integral practice in application development. As a CTO, you’re constantly making judgment calls on programming languages, frameworks, libraries and packages to use. Unless you are involved at the ground level, you could make a wrong technology choice that takes the team down the wrong path and waste precious development time having to revisit incorrect choices. I’ve been coding for 25 years. As I often repeat to everyone: “I love coding in any language to solve real business and technical problems.” To me, it’s an art and a science, not work. I plan to still be writing software when I am 70 (hopefully not for a living!). So by remaining an active coder despite all my other responsibilities as CTO, I’m not just aiming to add value, I’m enjoying myself. Now, I’m not going to pretend the life of a CCTO is easy. I spend about 20 hours a week coding and another 10 or 20 reviewing code written by others – a lot of that is nights and weekends. You can only do that if you are passionate about technology and software development. That’s why you’ll often find me late at night in my den, banging away on my laptop as I listen to classic rock. I find that I’m more productive if I’m accompanied by music that I like and am familiar with — Jimi Hendrix and The Eagles are two of my go-tos. Doing double duty wasn’t easy for player-coaches either. But the situation often worked out well. Russell won NBA championships with the Celtics in 1968 and 1969. Halas guided the 1921 Chicago Staleys (now the Bears) to the NFL title. While we may never see those kinds of two-headed figures in sports again, the CCTO offers a back-to-the-future approach that more startups might want to consider to maximize the value of their technical leader and improve the organization’s overall performance. |
Wherefor lets you search for vacations based on how much you want to spend | Jay Donovan | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | As a travel enthusiast, it was a problem Ryan Wenger had often encountered: How can a person search for a flight and hotel based on the amount of money they want to spend rather than by destination only? What if you know you want to go somewhere, but just not where you want to go. Setting out to solve this problem, Wenger quit his job as an attorney and founded (now a team of eight). Apparently, the existing (GDS) like Travelport, Sabre, Amadeus and NITA don’t search this way. These are the backend, B2B systems that power the searches of consumer-facing sites like Expedia. They are destination-based and are not set up to search by price for some reason. Recognizing this, Wenger and team built their own intellectual property and API to organize and export travel results in this way. The patent-pending method does not scrape sites like Expedia for data. They partnered with while creating this technology but they own the IP themselves. As I listened to info about this startup, I’ll admit the words “wait, nobody has already thought of this?” were echoing in my head, but apparently no one has yet. I spoke with Wenger at SXSW 2016 this week and he summed up their concept with an analogy. The GDS players are like punch bowls. The punch is the inventory of flights and hotel reservations. The consumer-facing sites and tools like Expedia are people drinking out of the punch bowl using straws to consume that inventory, but they all use the same kind of straw…because they are not in the business of building straws. Wherefor built a new kind of straw to consume, serve and organize this inventory of flight and hotel information and it does this based on price rather than destination. It sounds like a good idea and could be a valuable tool that benefits the travel industry and consumers alike. Patenting their IP will obviously protect them from other sites replicating this system themselves, but the reality is that a small company like Wherefor is likely an acquisition target. They currently operate as a responsive website, and have not yet built a native app for iOS or Android. They raised $400K as a convertible note and Richard Bangs—co-founder of Expedia—is on their board of advisers. Additionally, Wherefor provides financing for trips. So if you can’t afford a $500, four-day, round-trip to Mexico City, you can split that payment over 12 months with no fees. In this way the company seems very focused on lowering travel barriers. Wherefor would not provide the name of its financing partner. |
How emerging tech can solve ad desensitization | Ari Brandt | 2,016 | 3 | 13 |
Advertising has lost sight of a very basic concept: The pleasure principle. In the “golden days,” the 1960s and 1970s, colorful creative in a full-page spread was enough to create buzz — and that’s not just Mad Men nostalgia talking. With the advent of the Internet, new technology had the power to make advertising more poignant; instead, the worst-case scenario happened. Brands, desperate to quantify efforts, settled for meaningless metrics like impressions and click-through rates. Within a blink of an eye, advertisers began flooding the Internet with ads shoved into every available pixel of space, serving 5.3 trillion ads in a single year, with little regard for user experience, creative quality and, most importantly, achieving any modicum of the pleasure principle ( ). Instead, users have become , developing “banner blindness,” and are mostly antagonistic toward advertising, with of mobile users blocking ads or planning to do so. Taking back the power to delight consumers and stimulate their senses will be difficult, if people even attempt it. The easiest, most obvious answer is to decrease frequency and placements: Stop focusing on impressions and evolve advertising objectives toward more valuable brand metrics like recall and sentiment. However, hundreds of companies have created a complex ad ecosystem to cash in on “tonnage” ad spend that’s reaching nearly in the United States alone. None of those companies will take the advice “advertise less” lying down. So, it’s time to get creative with timing and technology to liven up the senses once more in the next few years. Technology has enhanced touch sensations since the first haptic feature on a video game controller, but advertisers rarely capitalize on it. Granted, the technology isn’t for desktop advertising, but it’s a whole different story for newer platforms like mobile, wearables, VR and other connected devices brands will soon focus on. At this point, haptics on mobile are a pre-conditioned stimulus for users — everyone instinctively feels a spark of excitement and reaches for their phone when they feel a vibration. If marketers harnessed that conditioning in a creative and selective way (and not just in branded push notifications), it would be a powerful thing. And as Apple works on a greater variety of vibrations and opens up functionalities for 3D touch, the possibilities will become endless. Advertisers need to pay attention. No, this isn’t a joke (although 12 years ago ). Of course, retailers and magazines have been using scent marketing in the physical world for years, and there are plenty of well-known examples of luxury scented car rooms and pheromones in trendy clothing stores. The question is how this technology could translate to digital advertising in some way. It may seem far-fetched, but it’s important to figure out. After all, scent is the influencing memory recall and emotions. Emotions, in turn, drive 80 percent of decision making ( , Professor of Neuroscience, University of Southern California). There may not be a chance for mobile adoption of scent-marketing technology for years to come, but connected devices may provide new opportunities for it. Just imagine a refrigerator tantalizing you with food scents, or future breeds of smart TVs delivering the scent of the tropics during a travel commercial. Another burgeoning area where there’s opportunity for scent technology is in virtual reality. More immersive experiences than ever, coupled with entirely new hardware being brought to market, means there is potential for built-in scent marketing. Captivating users once more with video and audio will be the trickiest undertaking. The problem with advertising isn’t the just the creative, after all; delivery is the bigger problem. Brands need to start focusing now on how to get in on emerging technologies such as virtual reality, where the content market will reach , or more established ones like 360 video, which capitalizes on interactivity for more engagement. Overall, though, the effort to stimulate users with sound and vision in existing digital mediums will be more nuanced and gradual. Creative and delivery must get more scientific to enhance their efforts. For example, intelligence from eye tracking and advanced biometric measurement to see how users respond gives a better sense of their subconscious reactions to ads, which, again, is the largest part of decision-making. Another key to making your audio/visual more appealing to users is to match it to content design trends influenced by technology. This principle applies to the creative, the timing and the ad container: They all should acknowledge and align with the consumer journey and be truly “native” and additive to whatever content environment they’re in. The tech industry is innovating on a near constant basis, and we’re on the cusp of many technologies that will change life as we know it. So, it only makes sense that we allow those technologies to change advertising as we know it — and this time, for the better. Technology is enriching our daily lives and can enrich advertising, too. |
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