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After the Satoshi Roundtable, is there a way to bridge the bitcoin divide? | Salil Deshpande | 2,016 | 3 | 13 |
A recent rift amongst the developers of Bitcoin, which originally started with a question over increasing the so-called block size (so that throughput of transactions can be increased), exposed deep divides about distributed governance; and has now ironically led to entrenched positions, flared tempers, public insults, accusations and disparaging remarks. The opposing views of those advocating for preserving the current implementation of Bitcoin (Bitcoin Core), and those who believe that the block size needs to be increased immediately to overcome scalability challenges, has balkanized the Bitcoin developer community into mainly two camps. Leading up to the event, the community appeared to be supportive. This was in contrast to the first meeting of the Roundtable, where the sentiment appeared to be, “Who are these guys and why are they meeting in secret? Who do they think they are, the Illuminati?” This year, it was, “Do it, guys. Find a resolution.” At this point, however, the entire Bitcoin community seems to have unified around a single vision – roughly 2MB of transactions per block, whether via Segregated Witness or via a hard fork, is something that can be both technically supported and which adds more headroom before second-layer technologies must be in place. Additionally, it seems that the vast majority of the community agrees that segregated witness should be implemented in the near future and that hard forks will be a necessity at some point. With the apparent agreement in the community, it is incredibly disheartening that there is still so much strife… There was agreement that the rift was hurting everyone. There was also agreement that Bitcoin splitting into two blockchains would be very, very bad; transactions would be lost or duplicated; that it would be unclear what the real Bitcoin was; that the reputational damage would be significant. Although on the next day when consensus appeared more difficult, there were some contrary opinions that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad because one or the other blockchain would survive as the real Bitcoin. Everyone agreed that the problem started off over blocksize (and that still is the immediate problem) but the inability of the community to resolve that problem has surfaced a larger problem: the desperate need for governance. But this is a seriously hard problem to solve because (a) bitcoin is all about decentralization and not having the need to trust a central entity, (b) Bitcoin is not controlled by any one body or even jurisdiction and (c) this group, and the community in general, reacts very negatively to any suggestions for a governance structure or body. Over the course of the program, people brought up the need for changes to what’s called A noted crypto scientist, and creator of one of the other crypto-currencies similar to Bitcoin, suggested that we be open-minded to not reaching compromise, because it’s too hard to negotiate when you’re right next to a cliff: I find the stance impressive and I admire him taking the bull by the horns. Just because we upgrade to Bitcoin Classic now, does not mean we need to stay with Classic forever. It is a risk mitigation option. It’s tough for the average reader to verify the research, though. Particularly, what I think is the crux: |
Play your Steam first-person shooters in full virtual reality with MyDream Swift | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | As the launch dates of the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive virtual reality headsets approach, so does the release of a ton of awesome VR gaming content. To gamers with full Steam libraries however, it’s kind of a shame that once they put the headset on, most of their favorite content is no longer available to enjoy. is looking to bring old Steam content into the next generation of gaming with its VR conversion software that brings experiences like Battlefield and Borderlands into immersive virtual reality. You can try any DX9 or DX11 game (i.e. most popular games) with the software, but it’s definitely optimized for first-person shooter-style POV experiences. For the non-FPS titles that feel a bit wonky in VR due to camera perspectives, the app also has a cinema mode that gives you a “near distant” virtual screen setup to view and dive into familiar titles within the VR headset. The team didn’t set out to build a piece of software like Swift, initially they were just looking to convert their own game , a creative community game that lets players build their own 3D worlds, into a virtual reality experience. The Swift UI isn’t all that flashy, but it’s about as simple as it gets. Check a box for “Cinema mode,” select your title and you’re good-to-go. Looking to dive into full VR for a first-person game? Just check “AutoVR” and “first-person camera controls,” launch the game and get to playing. The team says that games convert with lossless quality and maintain 90hz render times so everything should look smooth, though Swift notably foregoes stereoscopic rendering for the sake of performance. I was given a remote demo of the software, but when it comes to VR you really have to try it in-person to see how experiences stack up. MyDream understands this as well and told me that they’ll be offering demos at VRDC in San Francisco this week to anyone who wants to take the software for a whirl. MyDream Swift is for $29.99 and is available for download on March 28. The $30 buy also includes MyDream VR, the company’s latest iteration of its namesake gaming title. |
The two misconceptions dominating the encryption debate | Nico Sell | 2,016 | 3 | 13 |
challenge affecting everyone –- startups, government, corporate systems and consumers, of dollars annually. Tragically, the one solution we are — mandating encryption backdoors — will undermine the integrity of our networks, as confirmed by information security and the government’s own and . For the tech industry to become more effective in making its case for strong security to the public and US policy-makers, we all need to understand and rebut two critical misconceptions currently dominating the policy debate. NSA Museum. Photo courtesy of Flcikr/ . The first key assumption is that law enforcement does not have enough data to combat crime and must therefore boost its capability to intercept and decrypt web communications. Let’s look into what data the government already has access to and whether it is being utilized effectively. The majority of global networks – including Facebook, Google, Twitter and Skype – operate with full visibility into user accounts and often their activities, rendering this data available to law enforcement with a warrant request. That includes metadata, a rich unencrypted layer in our expanding profiles – who we talk to, where and how often, where we spend time and with whom, and what our interests are. — from and transport to commercial data collectors time-stamping and geo-tagging billions of photos of license plates – supplies an exhaustive picture of ourphysical activity. Law enforcement has access to a historically unprecedented amount of information, capable of mapping out countless connections between people, businesses, locations, and things – sometimes with and sometimes without a warrant. Current trends in technology are only adding to the pool of data that law enforcement can draw from. When vulnerability is injected into technology used worldwide, it becomes everyone’s liability. By 2020, the IoT industry will add as many as – from smart TVs capable of listening to ambient noise to cars equipped with GPS and voice-activated systems to toys and baby monitors with recording features. Many of these technologies operate with minimal data safeguards, expanding not only the attack surface for criminals but also real-time surveillance opportunities for law enforcement. — the majority of tech businesses are built around collecting and analyzing data that people around the globe generate while using services. in the near future as we add more products feeding data into global systems. Thus, the quantity of data and information channels available to law enforcement provides ample opportunities to obtain lawful intelligence. However, as have demonstrated, governments have yet to establish data analytics capabilities allowing the massive amount of data already collected to be timely and effectively analyzed in order to extract actionable intelligence. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter/ Photo courtesy Flickr/ With its access to countless data streams and targeted information sources, the government is now faced with an urgent need to secure public and corporate information systems. Both are now a high target for foreign state actors and criminals alike. Following OPM and other major breaches of national networks, that to securing data in transit and at rest and . However, no matter how many expert voices loudly and adamantly confirm that it is technologically impossible to limit backdoor privileges to one party without making the whole system vulnerable, some officials continue to dismiss the tech industry as uncooperative and uninventive — behind strong crypto. Unfortunately, the result of this misunderstanding is a demand to force the private sector to work against public interests, which may cost us all a gravely compromised national cyber defense. Due to the lack of security awareness, for many non-technical folks this argument remains too abstract – simply an obstacle to providing law enforcement with a backdoor access it wants. Meanwhile, a case where an intentionally built-in backdoor against US government systems by the House Oversight Committee. A severe vulnerability discovered last December in Screen OS by Juniper Networks – employed across government agencies and global corporations – may have allowed foreign hackers to infiltrate networks and decrypt traffic. As with many cyber intrusions, especially of this magnitude, it is hardly a trivial task to determine when the breach occurred, what information has been compromised and whether hackers still retain a persistent presence within the network. When vulnerability is injected into technology used worldwide, it becomes everyone’s liability. If mandated, today’s crypto backdoor is likely to become a “ticking time bomb,” open to exploitation by foreign intelligence and criminals harvesting data and communications. With the Web being a borderless global space, intelligence needs to be targeted, expensive and therefore accessible to only the most sophisticated state actors. Otherwise, we risk weakening everyone’ security to harvest data without a cause to the detriment of our own rights, economic freedoms, and political stability. The demand for compelled cooperation to alter technology against public interests has a powerful negative impact on the relationship between the industry and the government. It not only limits the possibility for every-day open and effective collaboration, but also creates a deep distrust at a time when cyber threats are rising, requiring all of us to work together to strengthen the security of our critical information systems. Unless we are prepared to live with the consequences of inadvertently enabling foreign nations and hackers to exploit a government-mandated backdoor, we must shift the national dialogue to examining how law enforcement can effectively use and secure the data it already has access to. The government and the tech industry can work together to enhance national security by applying innovative technologies and data safeguards to critical networks, rather than battling over access to data which most likely will not assist lawful investigations, but will guarantee weaker security for all. |
Building a brand-new Internet | Menny Barzilay | 2,016 | 3 | 13 |
We do not possess the ability to read the future, and yet we can predict with a high level of certainty that we will see more major cybersecurity incidents in 2016 and 2017. The world’s cybersecurity capability is not able to advance in line with the growing vulnerabilities. We are faced by more and more threats each day, and hackers are becoming more sophisticated. Whether an organization invests $1 million or $100 million in its security infrastructure, it will still remain vulnerable. What’s worse, there appears no end to this disparity. Emerging security solutions, great as they may be, do not change the overall way of things; the Internet favors the attacker. Amazing entrepreneurs, as well as established companies, are creating solutions that implement better anomaly detection, better network segregation, better user identification and better leakage prevention. However, these are simply stepping stones, without the necessary leap forward that is required for a long-term solution. At the same time, the cost of securing businesses from cyberattacks is constantly increasing. This is compounded by old technologies not being replaced by new technologies. Instead, new technologies are being added to already crowded security infrastructures. Unless this changes, there may come a day in which it is no longer deemed cost-effective, business-wise, to introduce new services on the Internet. Incremental security changes will not work. We need disruptive innovation in the world of cybersecurity. A paradigm shift — something that will change dramatically the way things work. We want a solution that will have a significant positive effect, similar to the one created by the invention of the car, smartphone or time travel. I am going to discuss one such solution now — creating a new, much more secure Internet that will dramatically improve cyber resilience and, at the same time, dramatically reduce expenditures on cybersecurity. Welcome to the world of AGNs (Alternative Global Network). To understand the concept of AGNs, we must go back to 1969. In 1969, the same year that Neil Armstrong became the first man to step on the moon and the Beatles released their last album, , a first packet was transmitted over a small network named the “Advanced Research Projects Agency Network,” also known as the ARPANET. Trust was not something to be concerned about in this small and controlled network. Trust existed in the ARPANET because there was trust in the real world. The different users knew each other and the few connected devices were all controlled by the creators of the network. Risks such as fraud, hacking, malware, denial of service attacks and others were, to say the least, extremely improbable. As time went by, the ARPANET expanded and became the technical foundation for the Internet as we know it. So what do we have today? Billions of users, who don’t know each other and certainly do not trust one another, connecting through all sorts of devices (we have no clue what is connected to the Internet) and using the network in any way they deem fit. Trust has become a challenge. When the ARPANET project began, no one expected that it would become such a huge success. In these essential early stages, it was not designed with security in mind, but rather to ensure connectivity. And yet, in a very short time, the ARPANET grew from a small research network to the huge global network that we all use today. Many of the modern security challenges that we experience should be attributed to the fact that the Internet is not secured-by-design. It should be agreed that given the opportunity, we would definitely redesign it. And to make things worse, much worse, the way the Internet was implemented prevents us from upgrading it to a more secure version. Let me explain what I mean when I say that the Internet cannot be upgraded. We see a lot of innovation on the Internet. We see amazing new applications using new types of innovative protocols, like Voice over IP and video tunneling — things that no one imagined when the Internet started. Nevertheless, none of those innovative applications are improving the core way the Internet works. We have been using the same problematic TCP/IP stack (more or less) over the past few decades, with zero probability that it will be replaced in the years to come. Why? To upgrade the Internet, we actually would have to upgrade all the routers, switches and other connected network devices. And that is impossible to achieve because the network devices are mostly embedded systems that are bundled with hardware. They do not have standard interfaces and only the manufacturer controls the software, which means there is no way to do it remotely. We would have to access and upgrade each and every device. Even with IPv6 we have failed. IPv6 is still not widely implemented, even though the IETF published its in 1998 and everybody agreed about its importance. Google’s show that only about 10 percent of the users who access Google services are doing so while using IPv6. And much like any other place in which innovation has taken a backseat, we see so many problems with networking technologies today: they are hard to manage, inefficient, unreliable, costly, prone to manipulations and the list goes on. Billions of new devices will be connected to the Internet in the coming years (according to ). At the same time, as we have discussed, cybersecurity threats will dramatically increase. Therefore, we have an immediate need for a more efficient, secure, trustworthy and innovation-friendly (upgradeable) Internet. Though upgrading the current Internet is an unfeasible task, there might be another way. Wireless connectivity technologies of all kinds (Wi-Fi, satellites, cellular, etc.) have vastly improved in recent years. And soon they will reach a point where commercial companies, by using a small number of network devices, could implement worldwide networks that will allow Internet access from everywhere, by anyone and at any time. Two great examples of companies that are currently working on bringing wireless Internet connectivity solutions to places around the globe that do not have traditional access are Google and Facebook — Google with activities like , in which they are planning to use high-altitude balloons, and Facebook with activities like that propose the use of solar-powered drones. Though daring, a worldwide wireless Internet is inevitable. It simply makes more sense than spending trillions on upgrading super-costly physical infrastructures. And herein lies the opportunity. A “worldwide wireless Internet access solution” will allow us to implement a new way of networking, instead of using the traditional TCP/IP Stack based network. This network will not necessarily be IP-based, but rather be built upon a new connectivity model — more secure, simpler to manage and more efficient. Let’s call this non-TCP/IP global network AGN: Alternative Global Network. AGNs will introduce numerous opportunities (as well as numerous challenges) — far too many to discuss here. Hence, I will write about three disruptive benefits that represent a paradigm shift in the world of cybersecurity that will be created by AGNs. In the world of cybersecurity as we know it today, every new problem (or family of problems) leads to the creation of a new family of products. New attack vector = new security tools. This is why, while trying to keep up with emerging threats, we continue to buy new security products. As previously mentioned, those new emerging solutions represent incremental improvements in cybersecurity. They retain the status quo, rarely addressing the underlying problem, and do not create the changes necessary to overcome the threat of hackers. AGNs will radically change our current approach toward cybersecurity, rebalancing the power divide between the Internet as a force of good and those seeking to undermine it. The AGN architecture design should allow the AGN provider to upgrade the network operating system and protocol stack both quickly and simply. Obviously, this creates new innovative opportunities, and will also have a tremendous effect on cybersecurity. Here are some examples: The ability to mitigate security risks and create new network services breaks the paradigm of new security risks = procurement of a new set of security tools. Through this, one of the biggest challenges facing cybersecurity today can be solved. AGN benefits can include, among many others, all of the benefits that software-defined networking (SDN) aim to introduce, but on a global scale. Benefits such as cost reduction, software-defined packet forwarding, central management and many others. If you are not familiar with SDNs, I urge you to learn more about the concept. One of the most important benefits of SDN, which will also become one of the most important benefits of an AGN, is what is known as simplified virtual management. Though virtual management is already implemented in some organizations (through SDNs), in a global network its benefits are leveraged and ultimately augmented. Virtualization in networking will have a similar effect to the one virtualization has in computing, i.e. completely revolutionizing the paradigm of the existing coupling between hardware and software. Virtualization means the ability to simulate a hardware platform, such as network devices, in software. All of the device’s functionality is simulated by the software, with the ability to operate like a hardware-device solution would. With network virtualization, any network architecture can be defined for any given set of devices, while completely ignoring the physical aspects of how those devices actually connect to the network. For example, your “home” network could contain your computer, laptop, mobile phone, car and all of your family member’s devices, with no regard to where they are in the world and without the need to implement any type of VPN solution. Because the allocation of a device to a network is determined by soft switches (application-based switches), you can sit at the other side of the world and still be connected seamlessly to your home network. This is possible because the network architecture is defined by software rather than physical hardware (as opposed to today, where connections to your home network are only possible if you are connected to your home router). You might be able to define any type of network architecture just by drawing and setting it up on a graphical dashboard. Alternatively, you might be able to combine any type of security solution in your network by using simple drag-and-drop gestures. Those tools can include firewalls, IDSs, IPSs, network recording, Anti-DDoS, etc., all of which are virtual appliances. The virtualization of networking will also simplify implementing security tools. If a CISO suspects that someone is already inside his network, and thus he wants to implement a new network inspection solution for a short time, he will just have to add it to the dashboard and, with a click of a button, make all the traffic in the network flow through the new device. No need to define complex routing settings. No need to change vLan ACLs nor firewalls’ rules. Those of us who have faced these problems with traditional networks will really appreciate the change. But for this to fully work, we also will have to change the way we think about networks. No more LANs and WANs. Anyone who wants to benefit from the network virtualization features will have to live by the principle of “every device is connected directly to the AGN” and the AGN will define logical separation to networks. The source of many problems we experience with the Internet today can be attributed to the fact that we are trying to supply services that require user identification on a network in which users are anonymous by default. The same network is being used for e-banking services and drug purchasing, viewing medical results and child pornography, social networking and promoting terrorism. The AGN provider will be able to implement an identified-by-default network. In this solution, the AGN will authenticate users whenever they are starting to use the network and be able to supply this identity as a service to any application that requires it. In that case, a user might even be able to access his bank without the need to type in a username or password. The federated identity approach is already being serviced by companies such as Facebook and Google. Federated identity means that the user’s single identity is being used by different identity management systems. But not only will users be identified, the hardware devices, or rather the network interfaces, can also be controlled to improve security and trust in the network. How can that be achieved? To connect to an AGN, one must buy a new type of Network Interface Controller (NIC) that supports the AGN protocols stack (obviously, current TCP/IP NICs will not work with AGNs). A wise designing of such an NIC will create a remotely programmable/upgradeable firmware (to support the AGN provider’s ability to upgrade the AGN quickly and remotely). The NIC will also hold a unique private key (NICPK). This key will facilitate tunneling between devices, as well as functioning as a type of license to use the AGN. Based on those NICPKs, stored in all the NICs connected to the AGN, the AGN provider will have the ability to create some kind of Network Access Prevention (NAP) solution that will prevent any unidentified and authorized NIC from communicating within the AGN. Also, device to network allocations will be determined based on the devices’ NICPK. For example, a CIO might define a whitelist of NICPKs that are allowed to access internal resources. And probably the most important feature of using NICPKs is increasing users’ accountability. In the Internet, as we know it today, it is very hard to exercise accountability. Hackers and other malicious entities are getting away with almost anything. The AGN provider will change this, and monitor activities across the entire network. The provider can identify any activity that is not aligned with the network code of conduct and exercise the appropriate sanctions on the user and the device. For example, if a user created a phishing attack, he will be banned from the AGN network (his account will be disabled and his NICPK will be removed from the whitelist of allowed devices). If a user used torrents to download movies illegally, he will be banned from accessing the AGN for a week. If somebody instigated a DDoS attack using many zombie computers (infected computers that are being remotely controlled by a hacker without the users’ knowledge and consent), the AGN provider will prevent those computers from accessing the network until the virus is removed. Another feature of an identified-by-default network is the ability of the AGN provider to control which protocols and which websites are allowed. This gives the AGN provider the freedom to decide whether torrents will be allowed, and whether people are allowed to use TOR-like services. One might think that by creating protocol encapsulation, users can override the AGN provider restrictions, and eventually create things like an AGN-based darknet. But this is not as easy as it might sound, for two major reasons: (A) centralized network management allows relatively easy deep protocol inspection, and (B) the moment the AGN provider learns about this new service, he will be able to completely eliminate it in a very short space of time, thus not allowing any unauthorized services enough time to grow. Moving to an identified-by-design network with a centralized control and high level of accountability is a paradigm shift from the uncontrolled and decentralized Internet that we have today. We can expect AGN providers to create native services that can only be accessed by the AGN users, and AGNs might eventually even completely replace the old TCP/IP-based Internet. Nevertheless, in the meantime, it is obvious that no one will use AGNs unless access to the servers and services on the “Internet 1.0” will be enabled and seamless. For that to happen, the AGN provider will have to implement a secure gateway. This gateway will be in charge of protocol translation (by stripping and reconstructing or encapsulation) and safe pass. Creating an AGN <-> TCP/IP (or Internet 2.0 to Internet 1.0) gateway, while retaining a high level of security in the AGN, is one of the biggest challenges. AGN providers will have to endure to create an alternative Internet. It is becoming harder and harder to secure digital assets. We need disruptive solutions that will create a shift in the balance of things — providing a vital lead over malicious factors. Not only can AGNs do that, but they can also completely alter our approach toward cybersecurity. Some might be concerned about the loss of privacy in an AGN world — and they would be right to be worried. An AGN provider will have infinite power over its user. But the fact that he , doesn’t necessarily mean that he . Many times privacy and security are opposite forces, and balancing between them is more an art than science. Sadly, the same goes for privacy and monetization. Nevertheless, if designed right, AGNs can have a real, positive impact on the world of technology, while making the users feel comfortable and secure. Implementation, however, will require a very responsible and privacy-aware AGN provider — one that will not misuse their power. Finding a balance between security and privacy, between centralized control and open network, between monetization and fair use, are all challenges that we will have to face on the way to creating a secure AGN. To be able to create a world in which AGNs are possible, we need to overcome several challenges and initiate several activities: |
NASA tests first rocket engine designed to send humans to Mars | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | NASA has successfully tested their first RS-25 rocket engine for the agency’s next heavy lift rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), for 500 seconds. The SLS, which will use 4 RS-25 engines in its core stage, is designed to take humans to deep space destinations like asteroids or Mars. NASA stated that “the next time rocket engine No. 2059 fires for that length of time, it will be carrying humans on their first deep-space mission in more than 45 years.” Interestingly, the engine used in the test was one that flew during the Space Shuttle Program. After the space shuttle retired, there were 16 RS-25 engines (also known as the space shuttle main engine) left over. Aerojet Rocketdyne, the prime contractor for the RS-25 engine, has modified the engine to meet the performance requirements for the SLS. These modifications will enable the engine to operate at 109 percent thrust levels, up from the 104 percent thrust level generally used for the space shuttle. Four RS-25 rocket engines will be joined with a pair of solid rocket boosters to create the configuration for the first SLS flights. Because RS-25 engines were used in 135 space shuttle missions between 1981 and 2001, Aerojet Rocketdyne calls them “the world’s most reliable rocket booster engine.” During the space shuttle program, the RS-25 engines would return to Earth on space shuttle orbiters to be refurbished and reused. With the SLS, the engines won’t be coming back. Because the rocket engines will be expendable, the 16 RS-25 engines in inventory will allow for 4 flights with SLS. In November of last year, a $1.16 billion was awarded to Aerojet Rocketdyne to restart the development of the RS-25 engine. The contract stipulated that NASA could order 6 additional RS-25 engines, allowing for a fifth SLS flight. Engine testing will continue to be conducted at NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, while the SLS program is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Ultimately, the SLS will use ground operations and launch facilities at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This week’s test was used to validate the updated engine’s capabilities and verify the different operating conditions needed for the SLS. “Not only does this test mark an important step towards proving our existing design for SLS’s first flight, but it’s also a great feeling that this engine that has carried so many astronauts into space before is being prepared to take astronauts to space once again on SLS’s first crewed flight.” – Steve Wofford, engines manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center SLS will carry the Orion capsule with up to 6 crew members on board to deep space destinations laid out in NASA’s Journey to Mars initiative. Although some are skeptical that this will ever happen citing insufficient funding levels and an unclear mission manifest for the program. Critics call the SLS the “ .” There are many factors that will determine the fate of the SLS program, including the upcoming Presidential election and change of administration, but time will tell if NASA’s next powerhouse rocket can be sustainable. SLS, complete with 4 RS-25 engines, is scheduled to make its in 2018 with an uncrewed Orion along with 13 CubeSats onboard. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 15 | null |
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales blasts “deranged” companies editing their own pages | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | “Companies think it’s a powerful marketing tool but I think they’re deranged and should leave us alone,” said Wales. Yet he believes that the best public relations teams know better and would rather avoid the embarrassment of getting caught publishing something misleading. He said that the rise of smartphones could lead to a decline in income for his businesses. While Wikipedia is ad-free, Wales is involved with other projects, including Wikia fan pages, which have ads. “Revenue per page view on mobile is a lot lower than on desktop,” said Wales. “We could be in a situation — if certain trends continue…it could have half the revenue that it does today.” Wales also spoke of his fascination with driverless cars and shipwrecks, and his disdain for Donald Trump. “Because I already live in London, I can’t threaten to leave the country if Donald Trump is elected president.” |
NowThis teams up with immigration lobby group FWD.us | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | Video news startup is partnering with , the immigration lobbying group backed by Mark Zuckerberg and , to tackle one of the biggest issues in this year’s election cycle. Last night at South by Southwest, the two organizations announced a partnership where NowThis is creating a video series focused on immigration. NowThis President Athan Stephanopoulos told me they’re planning to publish eight videos total, to be released every one or two weeks between now and June. The series will be promoted across NowThis’ various social channels (it doesn’t publish any content to ), but Stephanopoulos said Facebook will be the series’ “primary distribution platform.” While FWD.us had after being announced in 2013, it hasn’t gone away. And its big issue of immigration reform has certainly been in the headlines recently, albeit mostly . “The reality that many people let slip away is that we are a nation of immigrants – yet our immigration system is broken and outdated,” said FWD.us President Todd Schulte in a statement. “Telling stories that show exactly why we need to fix our immigration system is critical in our fight for reform. Sharing these stories will build urgency around this issue: we must challenge the absurd proposals of mass deportation this election cycle and we cannot and should not tear families apart.” [facebook url=”https://www.facebook.com/NowThisNews/videos/1012828395473951/” /] NowThis hasn’t been ignoring immigration before now, particularly when it comes to about the topic, but the company will be giving the issue an extended focus with the new series. Stephanopoulos said FWD.us is “working closely with our producers on the concepts and scripting of the series” and also providing data and insights. As you can see in the first episode above, the combination resulted in at least one video that has a strong point of view on refuting “immigration myths.” (That episode, by the way, was published yesterday and already has more than 3 million views.) However, Stephanopoulos emphasized that NowThis is creating this as “an editorial series in partnership with FWD on immigration,” not as an ad for the lobbying group. “This has been an issue that resonates with our audience and is a key topic of the election, of which we are covering in a unique way,” he said. “We are doing deep dives into the issues of the election and this is the one we are doing in immigration.” |
Innovation center for black and Latina founders opens this summer in Atlanta | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | , an organization geared toward advancing equity in tech, is opening an innovation center for black and Latina female founders in tech this summer. Located in downtown Atlanta, GA, the BIG Innovation Center will be home to a four-month long accelerator program as well as a paid developer internship program for students interested in computer programming. digitalundivided hopes to reach around 2,000 black and Latina founders per year. The accelerator program will offer training around how to build a startup, office space, mentors and seed funding from the Harriet Angels’ syndicate, which is backed by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Kathryn Finney, the founder of digitalundivided. Underrepresented minorities in tech could stand to benefit from this quite a bit. Of all venture deals from 2012 to 2014, only 0.2% (24 of 10,238 deals) went to went to black female founders, according to a recent report by digitalundivided, . On average, black female-led startups raise just $36,000 of outside funding, according to the report. There are only 11 startups founded by black women that have raised more than $1 million in VC funding. Through digitalundivided, that should hopefully change. “We are champions of game changing innovation and disruptive ideas and are excited to continue our work in the city of Atlanta”, digitalundivided Managing Director Kathryn Finney said. “We look forward to being a vital hub for Atlanta’s emerging diverse tech community.” |
Sony to buy the remaining half of Sony/ATV shares from Michael Jackson’s estate for $750M | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Sony has agreed to purchase the remaining 50 percent of Sony/ATV from Michael Jackson’s estate for a total of $750 million. The music publishing company was created in 1995 as a joint venture between ATV, which was owned by the late King of Pop, and Sony. It now owns or administers over 2.8 million copyrights, including music by Taylor Swift, Adele, and Justin Bieber. Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton said in a press release that “this acquisition will enable Sony to more quickly adapt to changes in the music publishing business.” The deal, which is expected to close by the end of this month, will not impact its other music assets held by Michael Jackson’s estate, including , which is owned by an investor consortium lead by Sony. It also does not include Jackson’s master recordings or Mijac music, the publishing company that owns all Michael Jackson songs and is . Sony exercised a right in its original contract with ATV that allows one partner to purchase the other’s interest and that the transaction will have no material impact on its fiscal year results. , the Sony and Michael Jackson’s estate begun negotiating the deal last year, though it was unclear at first if Sony would purchase the remaining shares or sell its stake back to the estate. ATV was founded in 1955 and purchased in 1985 by Michael Jackson, who paid $41.5 million for the company. In a statement, his estate said, “This transaction further allows us to continue our efforts of maximizing the value of Michael’s Estate for the benefit of his children. It also further validates Michael’s foresight and genius in investing in music publishing.” |
Verizon signs direct roaming agreement with Cuba’s state telecom | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Verizon has signed an agreement that makes it the second U.S. carrier to offer direct roaming in Cuba. The deal with Etecsa, a government-owned telecom, will enable direct voice calls between U.S. and Cuba. In November, Verizon rival Sprint with Etesca. That deal was actually announced in Cuba using one of its Pay-As-You-Go travel plans. Verizon’s first roaming service, however, was made available and very pricey, with voice calls costing $2.99 a minute and data $2.05 per megabyte. Direct roaming, on the other hand, allows Verizon to connect calls itself instead of through third parties and is therefore less expensive, though it hasn’t announced prices yet. Etesca says the services will be available after the two companies finish technical testing. U.S. telecoms have been , ten months after between the countries. This is expected to create a huge boost in tourism, with Marriott International if travel restrictions are removed. |
Why Apple is right to resist the FBI | John Eden | 2,016 | 3 | 13 |
The FBI wants Apple to do something no private company has ever been forced to do: Specifically, the FBI wants Apple to build a new version of its mobile operating system (iOS, or GovOS) so that the contents of an iPhone can be removed from an iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the gunmen in the San Bernardino shooting. A magistrate judge recently ordered Apple to comply with this request; Apple in turn filed a Motion to Vacate (MTV) the magistrate’s order. The key point made in the MTV — and the key issue on which this entire case hangs — is that complying with the FBI’s request would weaken a valuable encryption platform at a time when the United States desperately needs stronger, more effective encryption. There is an arms race to create more-sophisticated, harder-to-crack encryption tools, and if the FBI gets its way, we will be running that race with a self-imposed handicap. This week Apple is appearing before Congress to address the issues raised above. For those unable to attend the hearings, I want to explore how Apple is thinking about the FBI’s legal authority to compel the company to create new software to crack Apple’s security measures. After exploring that legal issue, we’ll consider the broader constitutional stakes involved in this case. After all, it’s not everyday that the U.S. government asks a private company to undermine a technology platform without providing any concrete evidence that doing so will make Americans safer. To understand what the law says, we must first properly frame what the FBI is trying to compel Apple to do. Without a precise understanding of what the FBI is demanding in this case, it is hard to clearly say that the FBI is trying to overstep its bounds. What is the FBI seeking here? First, the FBI is demanding that Apple make a new software product. Second, that software product would have to be designed in accordance with specifications provided to Apple by the FBI. Third, once Apple created that software product, it would have to test the product to ensure it met Apple’s own quality standards. Fourth and finally, Apple would have to test and validate this software product so that criminal defendants would be able to exercise their constitutional rights to challenge the government’s legal claims as provided by the Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE). Simply put, the FBI is demanding that Apple create a new software product that meets specifications provided by the FBI. As Apple clearly articulates in its MTV, the FBI is demanding “the compelled creation of intellectual property.” The legal grounds for the FBI’s demand come from the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act ( ) and the All Writs Act ( ). With this understanding in mind, what does the law say? Is there any law that allows a government agency such as the FBI to compel private companies to create new software products? Let us begin with the key law regulating the interception of electronic communications, CALEA. This law was enacted to carefully control the government’s right and ability to intercept communications in order to enforce the laws of the United States. Specifically, CALEA outlines the circumstances in which a private company must provide law enforcement with assistance in order to effectively carry out electronic surveillance. Under CALEA, there is a strong argument that Apple cannot be legally required to create new software of any kind for any department of the federal government. When Congress passed CALEA, it had the opportunity to include device manufacturers like Apple within the scope of the law. Congress decided to require telecommunications companies to ensure that their equipment and facilities are built in a way that allows the government to conduct surveillance on the basis of a lawful surveillance warrant. In other words, telecommunications companies have to build in a back door. However, under CALEA, Apple is not a telecommunications company; instead, Apple is considered an “information service” to which CALEA does not apply. In short, Congress made it clear they did not intend for CALEA to even apply to companies like Apple. Even if CALEA applied to Apple, the FBI would not be entitled under CALEA to force the company to break its encryption protocol. The statute in section 1002(b)(3) states that telecommunications companies are not responsible for decrypting communications “unless the encryption (1) was provided by the carrier and (2) the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication.” Because Apple does not currently possess that information, even an improperly broad interpretation of CALEA would not compel Apple to create GovOS in this case. The FBI can ask, but under CALEA it cannot compel. The All Writs Act (AWA) also does not allow the FBI to compel Apple to create new software. Enacted in 1789 as a stop-gap that allows the government to efficiently administer its given legislative privileges, the AWA is being given an impermissibly broad interpretation by the FBI. According to that interpretation, this stop-gap gives courts any relief that is not specially prohibited by existing law. So, if there’s no law expressly prohibiting Apple from being compelled to write code for the FBI, then the AWA gives courts the authority to force the company to do just that. Let’s take a completely make-believe example. Imagine that a federal law gives a particular agency the right to do X, but doing X is hard and costly. The AWA might be invoked to help get X done more efficiently. But the key is this: The AWA is only appropriate when there’s already a federal law or a constitutional principle that gives the particular agency the right to do X in the first place. That is precisely why the AWA cannot be lawfully used by the FBI in this case: . If this seems like a legal technicality, zoom out a bit and reconsider that for just a minute. Imagine if the Department of Homeland Security used the AWA to argue that citizens with certain last names should be subject to arbitrary detention to make it easier to catch terrorists. Would that violate American values and our system of laws? Absolutely. Alternatively, consider a scenario in which the Department of Energy tried to use the AWA to force federally funded universities to “donate” resources to the DOE in order to enhance its Energy Materials Network. Would this be inappropriate? It would be completely inappropriate, because the DOE does not have the underlying legal right to force universities to do this. In a nation of laws, the FBI’s attempt to expand the AWA is dangerous. The FBI’s interpretation of the AWA transforms the law into something it was never meant to be: a tool granting government agencies boundless powers not authorized under the Constitution or in existing federal law. Lawyers have a fancy way of describing this problem. They say that expanding the AWA violates the between the federal courts and Congress. After all, what is the purpose of Congress if our courts are allowed to expand federal law without any meaningful limitations? One might go further still and say that forcing a company to break its own technology appears to be something a dictatorship might do, not a democracy like the United States. Fortunately, a Brooklyn judge recently ruled, in a separate but similar case involving a demand from the Department of Justice to unlock an iPhone, that the AWA only empowers courts with “residual authority to issue orders that are consistent with the usages and principles of law.” Judge Orenstein explicitly condemned the government’s overreach in that case, echoing the exact concerns explored above: “The implications of the government’s position are so far-reaching — both in terms of what it would allow today and what it implies about Congressional intent in 1789 — as to produce impermissibly absurd results.” Apple should do what is necessary to preserve our enduring constitutional values, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those values also include the privacy and speech rights protected by the Constitution. The First Amendment famously protects an individual’s right to say what he or she thinks or feels, and the Fourth Amendment guarantees that Americans shall be free of unreasonable searches and seizure. These values and constitutional ideals are not mere commodities to be traded away, but are instead regulative ideals that capture and define who we are. Such ideals must remain unmolested by the temporary whims of each and every government agency. That’s what it means to be a nation of laws that is guided by a constitution. In this particular case, Apple has a to resist the FBI’s efforts to force the company to undermine the security measures in its mobile operating system. To understand what is at stake here, one has to think deeply about what the world would be like if Apple were to comply with the FBI’s demands. Imagine that Apple complied with the FBI. To do so, Apple would need to build a new version of iOS (GovOS) that does three things. First, GovOS would bypass the auto-erase function for an individual iPhone. This feature is designed to prevent third parties from getting unauthorized access to an iPhone’s contents. Second, Apple’s newly minted GovOS would need to provide the FBI a new way of electronically submitting passwords to a particular iOS device. At present, these passwords must be manually submitted, and each incorrect password submission results in a delay before another attempt can be made. Third, and finally, GovOS would disable the delay between incorrect password submissions. In a nutshell, GovOS would be a special version of iOS that allowed an iPhone to be cracked automatically without knowing the owner’s password. The FBI, then, is asking Apple to build a technology that of the key security mechanisms built into its mobile operating system: The FBI wants to force a private company to build a tool that completely breaks the security technology for what is arguably the world’s gold-standard for mobile operating systems, iOS. On this narrow issue, the FBI has to agree and concede this critical point. For the FBI cannot say that (1) it needs Apple’s assistance to crack an iPhone but (2) Apple’s assistance would not break a world-class encryption product. Once the FBI says that it needs Apple’s help, the FBI can’t honestly challenge the fact that the help it seeks would utterly break a security suite that Apple has spent years developing. A recent conversation with information security expert John Sebes (formerly of Securify, acquired by McAfee) put this issue into proper context. Imagine you are building a security mechanism for your mobile ecosystem. You have spent years developing this system because you want to provide your customers, private citizens as well as the government, a software product that is secure. Your intention, in other words, is to create a product that protects the security and integrity of information your customers place on any device that has that security mechanism. Now, someone comes along and asks you to make a special technology that defeats your security mechanism. If you go ahead and create this special technology, what happens to the of the security mechanism that you took so many years to create? It simply vanishes because your customers now know that you have designed a way to undermine your supposedly world-class security mechanism. No one has to wonder whether this security mechanism could be broken; you’ve already demolished it. This is a key insight lost on many who argue that the FBI’s request can be honored without eliminating the value of Apple’s security features on iOS. Many have said that Apple or the FBI could protect the integrity of GovOS by maintaining a special lab specially designed to make sure no bad guys ever got access to GovOS. Do you see the irony here? The agents in charge of this case are effectively admitting that they are deeply confused, because here’s what they’re saying: The idea that a super-secure place, virtual or real, can be designed to make sure none of the bad guys ever get ahold of GovOS is really, really silly. “If human beings can in any way touch the code, to create it in the first place or modify it later, then human beings can copy and steal it, period,” noted Mr. Sebes. Further condensed: . This is precisely the point: There is no perfect “super-secure room” to hide GovOS so only the good guys can use it to catch the bad guys. So, in a world where Apple created GovOS for the FBI, a couple of things would happen immediately. First, the retained value of iOS’s security protocol would vanish. All of Apple’s customers, including government agencies, would know that iOS has been cracked. Reflect for a second on what this means: In this imagined future, we would all that iOS could be breached. Second, the bad guys would have an additional incentive to rely on non-Apple encryption technologies from third-party vendors. After all, once the bad guys know with certainty that Apple’s products are not secure, they will want to use tools that are not susceptible to countermeasures by the U.S. government. Third, while the bad guys transition to third-party encryption vendors, Apple would have to rethink its strategy. Because its individual and government customers would know that iOS’s core security features had been defeated, the company would have to decide whether it should continue investing in best-of-breed encryption technology. It’s really hard to say how Apple would internally approach this question. Yet one thing would loom large in the minds of Apple executives: Technological advances in encryption would no longer matter to consumers because they would no longer have any reason to believe that encryption is, well, what it’s meant to be — a technology that prevents any and all third parties from accessing one’s data. Perhaps this is the right time to share Franklin’s adage about the moral quality, or lack thereof, of folks who want to trade privacy for a little temporary security. Franklin wrote the following to the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1755: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” I truly wish Franklin’s quote sufficed to describe the constitutional predicament we are in today. But matters are far worse than that. Franklin’s quote imagines a scenario where “temporary safety” can indeed be purchased by giving up liberty. That’s not the bargain the FBI is offering. Instead, the FBI is offering what some people have called a where A gives something of concrete value to B, but B is not required to clearly specify what A will receive in return. In this case, Apple is being asked to give something of concrete value to the FBI (e.g. the time of its engineers) but it is totally unclear what the FBI is giving back to Apple or to the American people. In a nutshell, here’s where we are: A government agency is trying to force the world’s most valuable technology company to break its encryption technology despite (1) having no legal authority to do so and (2) being unable to articulate what they hope to achieve on behalf of the American people. Sounds like a grand bargain to me. |
Ulysses for iPhone makes me consider writing articles on my phone | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | I write hundreds of words every day on my phone. At first it was just emails and text messages, but now it’s also Slack conversations, notes and countless of messages of various sizes and shapes in all sorts of messaging apps. And yet, there’s one thing I’ve refrained from doing so far — writing TechCrunch posts on my phone. But this is also changing. Earlier this week, small indie development shop The Soulmen released . Ulysses is a popular writing app on OS X and iPad. I’ve played with the app on my Mac in the past. But I couldn’t really consider using it seriously because there was one missing element — an iPhone app. Ulysses is a text editor for small and big projects. It works quite well for anything between a blog post and a novel. And Ulysses is also the kind of apps we need on iOS. It’s an expensive $25 app that provides nearly all the features of its desktop equivalent. In other words, it’s a serious app to do serious work with a clear business model. And of course, everything stays in sync between the different versions of the apps. And this is key to understanding how Ulysses stands out. I can now start a draft on my phone, edit it on my iPad, give it a final look on my Mac and publish it on this website. I’ve already written a handful of drafts in on my iPhone in the past. But this is a much more streamlined process. Ulysses is a polished iOS app that lets you write, organize and export your writing in different formats. It’s a well-designed, versatile app that is worth trying if you write every day. It competes with many other apps, such as and on iOS, and on OS X. I wanted to take Ulysses one step further and make it work seamlessly with our CMS — WordPress. I started with Ulysses for OS X. With a few clicks, I can now run a Ruby script that sends my draft to our backend so that I just have to review it, tweak a few options and publish it. But what about iOS? You can’t do that on iOS right? Feeling inspired by iOS automation wizard , I tried to recreate my OS X script on iOS. And sure enough, automation app lets you do that just fine. I can now post to WordPress from Ulysses and auto-fill the headline, tags and excerpt using . lets me upload images to WordPress from iOS. I’ve already written a few posts using this process and it’s been even more useful than I expected. I already spend so much time typing on my iPhone that I can type nearly as fast on my iPhone as on my Mac. But in many cases, it’s much more convenient to write on my phone. In fact, this post was written on my phone. [gallery ids="1290674,1290676,1290675,1290677"] |
Phonvert has a plan to convert old smartphones into IoT nodes | Jay Donovan | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | As humanity creates more and more smartphones each year there is an unintended glut of still capable yet less desirable one-year-old or two-year-old smartphones that take the backseat to new models. While many of these retired smartphones still work and have usable sensors like cameras, accelerometers, touch screens and Bluetooth radios, large swaths of them remain unused or worse yet, end up in landfills. At , I spoke with the leader of the project, Tomo Kihara, and he pointed me to research from IDC “that more than 280 million working smartphones were replaced without being recycled last year.” With this info in mind, Tomo, along with Keisuke Shiro, Kosuke Takahashi and Seibe Takahashi, founded Phonvert, an open-source software platform that can convert retired smartphones into usable Internet of Things nodes. You install Phonvert onto your old smartphone and then you can make it usable and valuable again for a variety of tasks like Fridge Cam, Mailbox Cam, Video Baby Monitor to name a few. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK2vU0_mXEc&feature=player_embedded] It’s important to note that the team — based in Tokyo — thinks of itself more as a movement than a startup. They are also open to collecting new ideas for how smartphones can be reused with their software on Twitter via the hashtag #phonvert. |
Lyft and GM partner on Express Drive, a rental service that paves the way for autonomous cars | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Two months after a $500 million investment in transportation startup to work on autonomous cars, the pair are launching their first service together. No, it’s not a self-driving car fleet (yet); it’s a short-term rental program called Express Drive: GM will provide all-in rental cars to Lyft drivers, who will pay between $99/week plus mileage and nothing at all, depending on how many Lyft rides they provide using the vehicles. Going live first in Chicago with 500 vehicles, all of a single model — the — Express Drive will then roll out to three more cities — Boston, Washington, DC and Baltimore — before expanding elsewhere (and potentially to other car models). Lyft and GM believe that Express Drive will help the pair lay the infrastructure for fleets of self-driving cars down the road. But one of the more immediate aims of Express Drive is simply to put more Lyft vehicles on the streets today. In a press call with journalists on Monday, Lyft co-founder John Zimmer said that in the four cities where Lyft and GM are launching Express Drive first, 150,000 people that have signed up to drive for Lyft could not do it because they did not have suitable cars. In Chicago alone, there have been 60,000 applicants, he noted. “We’ve now made car ownership optional on both sides of the market,” Zimmer said, referring to drivers and passengers. “Now you don’t need to own a vehicle to make money on the platform, or to give rides to passengers.” Lyft has launched past initiatives like to sweeten the deal for drivers to choose Lyft over working for rivals like Uber. Express Drive is also constructed to incentivise drivers to take more Lyft rides. Those who use the Express Drive car for less than 40 rides per week pay $99/week plus 20 cents per mile. Those who use the car for between 40 and 64 rides per week pay $99/week flat. And those who use the car for 65 or more rides per week pay nothing at all. And while drivers pay for gas, all other services including insurance are thrown into the single price, regardless of whether you are ‘on call’ with a passenger or driving the car for personal use, Lyft tells me. Cars can be rented for between one and eight weeks. Lyft and GM are not disclosing the specifics of their financial terms for Express Drive but see it as a way of growing new revenue streams in their respective businesses. “We are still assessing the size of the program, but John and I are both hoping for solid financial results,” said Julia Steyn, GM’s VP of urban mobility. Autonomous cars have been touted as a chief motivation behind GM’s strategic investment in Lyft — and clearly it is a big priority with GM, which just last week driverless car startup Cruise. But it will be years before these vehicles are widely in use. So the connection between this concept and today’s rental news was a bit more tenuous. Asked how the two were related, Steyn at GM said that Express Drive would help lay the groundwork for future vehicles. “This is going to build structure for autonomous vehicles,” Steyn said. “To create the infrastructure in many cities is very important, starting with ride sharing with Lyft… We are looking at a different future going forward. Vehicles will… need to be managed. This is about creating better assessment and vehicles on demand.” Indeed, if self-driving cars in their early days turn out to be cost prohibitive or impractical for the average consumer, you can imagine how a company like GM might consider ways of deploying fleets of them for specific use cases… like transportation services. GM said it would implement some of the services around Express Drive by way of , its new business unit that includes all the company’s work on car ownership models of the future. Express Drive services will include access to OnStar — GM’s in-vehicle security, diagnostics, turn-by-turn navigation and calling system — along with maintenance and warranty servicing, and insurance. This is not the first time that Lyft has offered a short-term leasing program to grow the number of drivers in its fleet. In October last year, it announced a . But that program, which is now live in Las Vegas and Denver, seems to be more expensive — respectively starting at and per week — and it’s also without the other perks that GM and Lyft are throwing into the deal. Nor is Lyft the only on-demand transport service that has looked to rental and leasing programs to boost its fleet of vehicles on the road. Uber offers a longer-term option, , but this program typically commits the driver for 36 months. Uber has also for short-term rentals. Others further afield, like Lyft’s network partner from India, Ola, also have built out rental programs to equip drivers with better cars. And there are other companies like that exist solely to rent vehicles to drivers on these services. |
Watch us beat the heck out of each other in Disney’s new fighter, Marvel Battlegrounds | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Tomorrow morning Disney will launch Marvel Battlegrounds, a new four-player superhero fighting game built on top of their Disney Infinity platform. Disney Infinity producer John Vignocchi stopped by TechCrunch HQ to give us an early peek… and things got intense. We here at TechCrunch tend to take everything a little too seriously, so the stakes were high. Namely, we were fighting for the Iron Belt — a finely crafted leather masterpiece that we promptly lost and replaced with a plastic dollar store wrestling belt with Iron Man crap glued to it. I’ll save my full impressions for a proper review in a couple days, but at a glance, at least, Marvel Battlegrounds seems like a blast of a game… but one that comes with some big built in costs. The pacing of the game is fast, but not quite to the newcomer-crushing degree found in other brawlers like Super Smash Brothers. The learning curve is certainly a bit less steep than Smash… though, at the level we were playing at, we were mostly just mashing buttons. It reminds me a bit of Power Stone, a 1999 Dreamcast game that I really, really loved. As you take and give damage, you build up a charged attack that does massive damage to everything around your character. These seem like they’re going to be key: in each match we played, knowing when to fire off (and how to avoid) these attacks are what swung the game toward the eventual winners. My only hold-up, and it’s not a tiny one: like all games in this toys-to-life category (where physical, real world figurines are used to unlock the in-game characters), this one seems like it could get expensive fast. There are around 25 characters to chose from at launch, one of which (Captain America) comes with the set. Each figurine costs $10-15 bucks, depending on where you buy it. If you want to have every character at your disposal (and with a multiplayer fighting game, you generally do. More characters = more variety = more fun.) that’s over $300 you’re shelling out on figurines. Add that on top of the $35+ you’ll pay for the required Disney Infinity starter set and the $20 you pay for the Marvel Battlegrounds playset to begin with, and… well … it gets a little crazy. Stemming the craziness considerably is the concept of trial coins that you earn while just playing the game. Each trial coin can temporarily unlock any character on the roster until the next time the console is powered down, allowing you to give that character a spin — or to unlock a bunch of characters when your friends come over — without throwing down for the respective figures. Once the console turns off, though, they’re gone. Meanwhile, Disney will also temporarily unlock a rotating handful of characters for one week at a time. That way, even folks with just one statue and no trial coins to spare will have enough characters available for a four-player match. It also helps that older Disney Infinity 2.0 Marvel figurines work with this set, some of which existing Infinity fans probably already own. But, on that same note, some of these older figurines can be tough to find, thus making it tough to fully flesh out your roster. All in all, the game seems like a blast; but is the inevitably-expensive toys-to-life category a good fit for a fighting game? Disney is being more generous than they have to be here with the trial character/coin system… but the completionist in me is already tempted to throw down piles of money just to have the full experience. |
Defeated Go world champion beats DeepMind AI in penultimate match | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 3 | 13 | Machines 3, humans 1… That’s the current score in a five-match series being played out between DeepMind’s AlphaGo and human Go world champion, Lee Sedol. Last week the Google-owned AI chalked up a by winning the opening bout with Sedol — the first time a machine had outplayed a world class professional Go player. The algorithm then went on to cement victory in the five-match series by winning both the next two games, to take a consecutive three-game streak. However as the final two matches are played out, Sedol has clawed one back for humans by winning the (via ), and chalking up his first win against the AI. DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis tweeted that the machine’s loss was due to Sedol’s ingenuity in pressurizing it into making a fatal mistake… Lee Sedol wins game 4!!! Congratulations! He was too good for us today and pressured into a mistake that it couldn’t recover from — Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) Lee Sedol’s brilliant moves deliver a comeback against in game 4 → — Google (@Google) AlphaGo combines two artificial intelligence techniques in its quest try master the hugely complex game of Go, applying deep learning with Monte Carlo Tree Search — allowing the AI to simulate millions of games, glean the outcomes and learn from those to generalize a (evidently highly successful but not unbeatable) Go game strategy. Discussing the complexity of the challenge ahead of AlphaGo earlier this year, Google noted in an : “There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions [in the game of Go] — that’s more than the number of atoms in the universe, and more than a googol times larger than chess.” Although AlphaGo’s triumph against Sedol, a professional Go player who is ranked second in the world, is undoubtedly impressive, the artificial intelligence is still very much a narrow AI — in the sense that it has been designed for one very specific task, as with other AIs built to master other games like chess and Jeopardy! The holy grail of artificial intelligence remains the creation of a learning AI that can apply multifaceted intelligence to solve problems of all stripes. And machines are clearly very far away from being able to claim victory in the chaotic complexity of the off-boardgame world, as . The number of variables involved in even apparently simple human tasks — like tidying a room — quickly makes even the most sophisticated machine intelligence look dumb. So us humans shouldn’t feel too bad about losing at Go… You can follow the final match in the AlphaGo series, due to take place on March 15, . |
Google loses Android antitrust appeal in Russia | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Google has lost an appeal in a Russian court against an antitrust ruling pertaining to its Android mobile OS (via ). The competition complaint was brought against Android back in February 2015 by local company Yandex — aka the “Google of Russia” — which had argued that Google’s contract for Android broke competition rules by requiring handset makers to pre-install various Google services in order to be able to access the Google Play app store. The original ruling was handed down by Russia’s FAS (Federal Antimonopoly Service) . Google appealed the ruling, but today the Moscow Arbitration court rejected the company’s appeal — upholding that Google’s practices broke Russian law by leading to the “prohibition of pre-installation of apps of other producers.” Google will now be required to amend its contract with OEMs in Russia to comply with the ruling. Asked for its reaction to losing the appeal, a Google spokesperson said: “We’re not commenting as we have not yet received the judgment.” A spokesman for Yandex said: “After careful consideration of all the facts in the case against Google’s anticompetitive practices, the court has upheld FAS’s judgement. We are satisfied with the court’s decision to uphold FAS’s judgement in the case against Google.” While this antitrust ruling only applies to Google’s Android-related business practices to Russia, the European competition commission is also as a whole — in addition to formally probing the company’s search comparison practices. Europe’s antitrust commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, described the Google Android investigation as a “high priority” for her department. Complainants in that instance say Google uses Android’s platform dominance like a “Trojan horse” to drive adoption of its services, squeezing out competing apps which — unlike Google’s apps and services — require users to discover and download them. Analysts peg Android’s global share of the smartphone market at , with Apple’s iOS in a distant second place — giving Google huge power to dictate which apps and services smartphone users discover. |
European Space Agency’s ExoMars successfully starts its journey to the red planet | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | The first phase of , an uncrewed Mars mission from the European Space Agency (ESA), successfully launched today from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Lifting off on a Russian Proton-M rocket, the Mars-bound spacecraft has begun its 7 month, 300 million mile long journey and is scheduled to arrive in October. Signal from confirmed! We have a mission to ! — @ESA_ExoMars (@ESA_ExoMars) The objective of today’s mission is to search for evidence of life on Mars, active geological processes, and to test key technologies required for subsequent Mars missions. ExoMars is made up of 2 phases. Today’s launch brought along 2 different modules that make up the first phase: the and the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module known as “Schiaparelli.” ExoMars Phase 2 will launch in 2018 and includes a rover designed to conduct exobiology and geochemistry research. Upon arrival to Mars on October 16 , the Trace Gas Orbiter will separate from Schiaparelli. Three days later, on October 19 , Schiaparelli will begin its descent and attempt to land on the surface. After touching down, Schiaparelli will use the Trace Gas Orbiter as a relay to communicate with the ExoMars team back on Earth. A successful landing would mark an important milestone for ESA. Their last attempt to place a lander on the Martian surface occurred in late 2003 with the Beagle 2 lander. Similar to ExoMars, the Beagle 2 traveled to Mars with an orbiter. On December 19 2003, Beagle 2 was successfully deployed from the Mars Express orbiter and was scheduled to land on December 25 . Unfortunately, ESA was unable to contact the lander after its expected touchdown. After multiple failed contact attempts, ESA declared the mission lost. Over 12 years later, ESA intends to overcome that failure by successfully landing and communicating with Schiaparelli.
In addition to enabling communication for the lander, the Trace Gas Orbiter will collect scientific data from an altitude of 400 kilometers above the surface. For reference, the International Space Station orbits the Earth also at an altitude of 400 kilometers. The instruments on board the orbiter will be used to detect and characterize trace gases in the Martian atmosphere with an improved accuracy of 3 orders of magnitude compared to previous measurements. Scientists are particularly interested in characterizing the presence of small amounts of methane that have been detected in the Martian atmosphere. This piques researchers’ interests because living organisms produce large amounts of methane here on Earth. While there are also purely geological processes that produce the gas, it’s a good starting point for those searching for life on Mars. To make matters more interesting, methane is short-lived on geological time scales. Its presence suggests that there’s an active source producing the gas on Mars today. Further research is required to determine where the methane is coming from. The Trace Gas Orbiter will also be used to map hydrogen levels just beneath the Martian surface. Locations where hydrogen is found may indicate water-ice deposits, which could be useful for future crewed missions. Landing locations for crewed missions may be influenced by these findings since water-ice can be leveraged to generate potable water or rocket fuel. Phase 2 of ExoMars will launch in May 2018, which is also when NASA’s next is scheduled to embark on a trip to the red planet. |
Validating adtech: Innovation is a stronger proof point than share price | Hagai Tal | 2,016 | 3 | 14 |
Adtech is in trouble because many firms have gotten the cold shoulder from venture capital. Supposedly. Another way to say that, of course, is that smart venture capitalists passed on startups that failed to demonstrate how they would add value to the space. So is that bad news or good news for adtech? Unfortunately, many people confuse free-flowing capital with value. That way of thinking suggests that the volume of speculation is the sole measure of an industry’s vitality. A better metric, however, is revenue, because it validates a company’s fundamentals as well as the larger potential of the market. Consider adtech’s consolidation binge; companies with value got acquired, they didn’t go bankrupt. That value, often enough, is the innovation contained within the technology those firms developed. Adtech is healthy, not because investors are taking wild bets, but because we’re seeing an accurate and dispassionate appraisal of the winners and losers from the previous funding round. More importantly, investors and adtech companies enjoy an alignment of expectations, meaning that new money will continue to fund new ventures — so long as those companies demonstrate value in a constantly evolving and innovating space. Step back from the daily swings of the stock market and a paradox emerges for adtech companies. Big players like and — both adtech companies at their core, if you look at revenue — are seen as having bright futures. In contrast, the same people who tout Google and Facebook so highly paint the rest of adtech with a skeptical brush. Why the schizophrenic outlook? The answer depends on whether you take the narrow or wider view. From a narrow perspective, adtech has an abundance of companies that are impossible to differentiate. Some of these companies add value, but many more profit by leveraging the technology of others. They are middlemen, and adtech is bloated with middlemen it does not need. Publishers and advertisers understand this problem because they have come to understand that the quick hit — the click or the impression — is only a small piece of a very large and complex puzzle. Put simply, firms that leverage the technology of others for the sole purpose of optimizing campaign performance are in trouble because their only product is worth a lot less than previously thought, while, at the same, the field of competitors has grown more crowded. From a wider perspective, it’s a different story because we’re talking about a very different goal. The broader challenge in adtech no longer centers around the superficial click; rather, it’s a question of building a data model that captures the lifetime value of the customer. Quite obviously, Google and Facebook have the scale to understand the customer within a larger, lifetime context. But we shouldn’t conflate the opportunity to collect data with the tools that make that information so valuable. Here, many adtech players have a lot to offer because the more of them that endeavor to know about their customers, the greater the need for tools that provide real-time insights, analysis, and action. That’s a tremendous opportunity to invest and innovate when you consider the fact that nearly half of all marketers in a recent IAB cited “insufficient availability and functionality of supporting technology” as a key obstacle to deriving value from data-driven marketing. The big news is that . There’s a core truth to that assertion in terms of the larger challenge of building infrastructure and tools that are essential for an omni-channel, lifetime view of the customer. But the adtech/martech merger also comes with a lot of hot air, because adtech’s valueless middlemen see it as an opportunity to rebrand and (they hope) secure the next round of financing. No wonder some say adtech isn’t in trouble, it’s just misunderstood. Of course, technology investors are too sophisticated to fall for a rebrand. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if you call yourself adtech, martech or just tech. What we’re really talking about is performance. The companies that add value will be the ones that improve performance as it pertains to sales and other concrete business goals. To a point, advertising will remain a part of that mission, but the task is much bigger than targeting and retargeting an ad campaign. In the same way that adtech innovated the ad campaign through targeting, automation and attribution, the mission now is to broaden and deepen that revolution across the enterprise. That’s why there’s a lot of opportunity in adtech; our value will be measured by the extent to which we become enterprise-wide innovation partners to our clients. |
Blooming measures your heart and brain to reduce stress at work | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Finnish startup is aiming to help bouncing-off-the-walls-stressed office workers regain control of their lives by using wearable tech. The service includes monitoring and tracking stress levels, plus recommendation software and meditation advice to help give workers the space to stop and smell the roses. To help its plans come to fruition, the company recently raised a small round of pre-seed funding from and . The company combines existing hardware solutions with their own software platform and a series of coaching services. For the brain activity monitoring, it partnered with , which already creates a series of products to help improve mediation. For the heart rate monitoring hardware, Blooming turned to , which has a broad line-up of tools for sports, stress, and sleep monitoring tools. The service combines training programs, technology for self-monitoring, personal coaching and a light brushing of peer pressure to help keep stress levels under control, all delivered via smartphone app. The main thrust of the company’s siege against mental corrosion is mindfulness meditation. “Blooming’s vision is to make mindfulness meditation as widely practiced as physical exercise, giving people tools for self-empowerment, leading to reduction of stress and anxiety”, says Kristian Ranta, Blooming’s CEO and Founder. The Muse headband measures your brain activity to help give feedback on your meditation session When onboarding, users receive a personal headband and a stress monitor, after which they’re guided through the basics of mindfulness meditation, before engaging with a personal mindfulness coach and becoming connected to a peer-group consisting of colleagues. The programme is designed to monitor and track a user’s progress and to make an effort to build a lasting habit of meditation. The company’s CEO Kristian Ranta co-founded Diabetes-care company . Ex-Olympic snowboarder and mindfulness coach joined Blooming as the head coach, and developed the training programs. Pricing-wise, Blooming’s service positions it as a high-end perk; “An intensive 8-week program with a personal coach will cost $2,500”, says Riku Lindholm, Blooming’s co-founder. After the initial two months, follow-up content $79 per month. The company’s battle plan is ambitious, but the company will be facing some serious cultural challenges. The price point indicates that Blooming is aiming for high-end corporations, but that might just prove be the wrong crowd. While mindfulness and meditation is finding favor in certain industries, that may not be true for bigger corporations — and especially in the company’s home market of Scandinavia. Sitting cross-legged and chanting mantras at work will be met with a range of emotions from mild amusement to deep suspicion, and I fear asking workers to don headbands and heart rate monitors on top of that is bound to go down like a 1984-flavoured, sarcasm-laced lead balloon. Blooming’s service has been in early testing since December 2015 and is now being further developed towards a Beta release this month. |
Google doubles max ChromeOS bug bounty to $100k | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | After shelling out $2 million in rewards to security bounty hunters in 2015, Google it is doubling the reward for reporting serious security flaws, raising the top bounty from $50,000 to $100,000. Google has been pretty serious about its security on Chrome; it has had a in place since 2010, eligible to hackers who find vulnerabilities on Chromebooks, the Chrome browser and Chrome OS. Google distributed more than $2 million in security rewards to hackers last year. The Chrome operating system hasn’t found as much success as Mac OS or Windows, but it has found a niche in schools. Its gradual growth, low cost and target audience has placed the operating system is in a unique position: , the platform is a perfect low-cost option for emerging markets and first-time computer buyers. This makes the Chromebook attractive to people who wouldn’t traditionally be particularly vigilant on security, which makes getting security right on Chrome OS all the more important — and the bounty program is a key part of that. The increase in the top-level reward program is aimed at “persistent compromise of a Chromebook in guest mode.” In other words: A Chromebook that is hacked in guest mode, and remains hacked after a reboot. Google never had an opportunity to pay out the bounty when it stood at $50,000, but the wording of the target hints at why Google is making this type of exploit a priority: The company wants to . By increasing the bounty to $100,000 for the most egregious exploits, the company no doubt hopes it will be able to lure hackers its way so the Chrome team can resolve the issues, rather than letting more sinister forces buy access to the vulnerabilities. |
Unlocking blockchain for the underbanked | Jackie Hyland | 2,016 | 3 | 14 |
As 2015 came to a close and the new year began, many thought leaders in the financial technology space made their and in One of the most prominent technologies that repeatedly appeared on these lists was the blockchain. More familiarly known as the technology behind the bitcoin digital currency, blockchain has emerged from the shadows of bitcoin with a new, solo image. In an age when companies are looking for innovative ways to optimize internal processes, make and verify transactions and increase data management and security practices, the blockchain stands out as the candidate to solve their problems. Simply put, blockchain is a public ledger of transactions distributed among a large network of computers without a central authority. Bitcoin still remains the largest example of the blockchain technology, but there have been other examples of distributed ledgers springing up around the world. In bitcoin’s early years, using the blockchain on a large scale was just as strong a technology as a philosophy and belief in a new decentralized economy that would serve the masses. Hence, it’s no surprise that many startups in the space see that blockchain has a fitting case for to provide better, faster and cheaper financial services to those who are outside or heavily burdened by their local formal financial systems. At , we have reviewed and spoken to a multitude of early-stage companies looking to use both bitcoin currency and the underlying blockchain technology to expand financial services throughout different emerging markets. Companies — like BitPagos, Bitex.la, Bitso, Volabit, Wayniloans and Blinktrade in Latin America; BitPesa, Atlas and Switchless in Africa; Coins.ph in Asia; and Abra and Allaire in the U.S. — are trying to tackle real problems and inefficiencies in the market, whether in payments, lending or remittances. In the mix of bitcoin and blockchain-only business models, we’ve repeatedly seen that the poor need a reason to care about bitcoin as a currency. Underserved customers won’t see benefits to using bitcoin for its inherent coolness; rather, they need it to simply and easily address a pain point or make their lives better. Bitcoin ends up being a complicated concept that, unless attached to a trusted fiat currency or local mobile money system, has no value. Unless there is an ecosystem in which bitcoin is accepted ubiquitously in an underbanked person’s world, is a regulated and trusted form of value and is easily accessible So, the question remains, how can the blockchain begin to have real meaning in the lives of the two billion excluded individuals around the world? There are a few ways we believe blockchain can help revolutionize access to financial services for the base of the pyramid in the near future. previously, the cost of remitting money averages 8.4 percent globally, driven in large part by the legacy brick-and-mortar distribution networks and multi-bank settlement chains of incumbents like Western Union and MoneyGram. Using the bitcoin blockchain as a back-end to transact local currency provides a clear way to ensure that the customer can feel comfortable with the product, while also receiving the cost and technology benefits of the blockchain technology. Using the blockchain in this fashion will not only lead to more value accretion to remitting customers, but it will also be the kind of radical value proposition improvement that will be required to attract customers and break them from established habits around sending and receiving money. Similarly, the blockchain can be used in remittances to enhance pricing transparency and provide better transfer security, as well as be used as an on-ramp for other technology driven financial services. It’s important to also consider that while blockchain can help lower costs and smooth transactions, it alone does not make a company poised for complete success -– there are other huge components of a remittance startup that need to be taken into consideration, such as cash-in/cash-out points and a unique customer acquisition strategy. Property rights have long been a source of conflict and pain for many lower-income individuals. Formalizing property and expanding formal information networks for the base of the pyramid allows low-income property owners to enter the formal financial system and generate collateral for financial products; it also provides legal protections and visibility in the local formal economy. Companies like in Colombia and in Africa are using innovative technologies to bring down the cost of land titling and formalization. While they are not using the blockchain to maintain their databases or connect with the local governments, there is a huge potential to do so. For example, decentralized record-keeping startup has partnered with the government of Honduras on a new land title registry initiative to develop “a permanent and secure land title record system” using the bitcoin blockchain, the distributed ledger that tracks all land title transactions across the Central American nation. Similar to property rights, many base-of-the-pyramid individuals do not have access to traditional financial services because they lack verifiable identification. Governments and individuals alike understand the complex nature of identification, and while some low-income individuals prefer to remain anonymous, the systematic and individual costs of doing so remain very high. By using the blockchain, individuals can receive a digital identity for transacting value nationally and internationally with relative ease. For example, is using blockchain to help solve the refugee identity crisis in Europe. Their system currently helps Syrians get an “emergency ID” in order to cryptographically prove individual identity and family relationships. Similarly, at , usernames are created within an open namespace and user data is embedded directly into the blockchain to help individuals who want to voluntarily identify themselves, even when local governments make it difficult to do so. This would give those typically excluded from the financial system a way to potentially open their own bank account, send money across borders and even apply for loans. Users can voluntarily identify themselves via the blockchain, and may be granted access to health care, social services, job opportunities, and more. In addition to the above possibilities, we know there are more great ideas out there, and these are just a few as to how the blockchain could support the underbanked around the world. We have not invested in blockchain technology yet, but perhaps as all the experts have advised, this may be the year we find a worthwhile venture. |
Trainline buys Captain Train for up to $189 million | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | We hear a lot about how companies like Uber are transforming car-based transportation, but today comes news of another play in the sector, this time covering rail services. , a U.K.-based ticket service for railway and long-distance bus journeys, has acquired , a Paris-based competitor that sells tickets for rail journeys on the continent, in what sources close to the deal tell us is a deal worth over €100 million, potentially between €160 and €170 million ($178 million to $189 million), half in cash and half in shares. points to wider consolidation in the market, creating a single company that will let users buy tickets across 22 countries and covering some 36 train operators — and potentially help that industry compete better against other forms of short and longhaul European travel, such as low-cost airlines. Acquisition talks started a year ago in March 2015. Clare Gilmartin, Trainline’s CEO, would not confirm the price range that our sources provided us with, but she told us that the funds used in the deal come from a “multi hundred million pound” investment made in Trainline by KKR, which Trainline in January 2015, in a deal valued at up to $671 million (as with today’s deal, the financial terms were not disclosed). While the terms of the deal and the amount of shares have been set in stone for a while, the valuation of Trainline as well as the EUR/GBP exchange rate have fluctuated over the past few months. The company had (€9.6 million) from Index Ventures, Alven Capital, CM-CIC Capital Privé and TheFamily, as well as business angels, such as Xavier Niel and Liligo founder Pierre Bonelli. While most of the train companies that work with Trainline and Captain Train are also, in a sense, direct competitors with online booking forms of their own, Captain Train (originally called Capitaine Train) made a name for itself by that makes the process of buying those tickets significantly faster and easier — faster in fact than Trainline’s own service currently. There are two key reasons why Trainline wants to acquire Captain Train. First, Trainline is overwhelmingly dominant in the U.K. but doesn’t operate anywhere else in Europe (Trainline has been trying to break into Europe, unsuccessfully). Captain Train sells tickets in France, Germany, Italy and many other European countries. Acquiring the French startup is much faster than signing deals with each train company in other European countries. Second, Trainline doesn’t have its own itinerary calculation system. The company pays millions every year to use . In the future, you can expect Trainline to switch to an in-house system powered by Captain Train’s technology. It would save the company millions every year. “Today, the focus is on growing as much as possible in Europe,” Captain Train co-founder and CEO told TechCrunch. “We have the partnerships in Europe, we have the technical expertise with our own itinerary system that they don’t have. They have the vast majority of the U.K. market and marketing power.” Guyot will remain CEO of the subsidiary and take on the additional role of Director of Trainline International Limited. Captain Train currently has some 1.4 million registered users and sells 5,000 tickets daily. In 2015, Captain Train processed $80 million in train ticket transactions (€72 million). Trainline, originally a spinoff from the Virgin Group, says it is the fifth largest e-commerce business in the U.K., with 4.7 million active customers and nearly 21 million web visits per month. It processes some $2.3 billion ticket transactions annually (£1.6 billion). The two brands will co-exist for the time being. In the coming months, Trainline will add European itineraries and Captain Train will add British itineraries. Trainline has also been trying to tap into the convenience and cost factors, building an app, Train, to help people better navigate the transportation system. When KKR acquired Trainline many saw it as a move that would take the UK company away from a potential public listing. Today, Trainline makes about a 5% commission on each ticket sale in the UK, Gilmartin said. Captain Train doesn’t disclose its margins. This could help position the company for displaying a bigger growth trajectory and potentially going public down the line. “One year ago when KKR first invested in Trainline we had the vision of creating the clear global leader in digital rail mobility,” said Philipp Freise, Member and Head of Technology, Media and Telecoms in Europe at KKR in a statement. “The combination of Trainline and Captain Train is an important step on this journey, and will bring together a management team of world-class talent in rail, tech, product and marketing.” |
Michael Goguen’s counter-complaint calls accuser an “exotic dancer” who was “looking for a payday” | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Michael Goguen, the longtime venture capitalist who was following a stunning , has just filed a in San Mateo County Court that proposes the accusations against him are a myth. In reaction to claims that Goguen sexually and emotionally abused a woman named Amber Laurel Baptiste for more than a decade, and then failed to follow through on an agreement to pay her $40 million to keep her claims confidential, Goguen is now countersuing Baptiste for extortion. He’s not holding any punches. In his countersuit, Goguen’s legal team paints a picture of a woman in love with him, and features a long list of text and email messages from Baptiste to underscore that depiction. Among them: “The love that I hold in my heart for you was instant. It is a perfect love. And to me it is the perfect way to love someone. It is forever and unconditional;” “I love our visits. I feel so blessed to have met you and have been able to maintain a special relationship with you. I can only hope that it continues;” “I know it feels really good when we are together and to me it feels so perfect and I never want to let go of you;” and “I miss you so Much [sic]. My Body Misses you so Much. I love you so Much.” The counter-complaint also features pictures that Baptiste, born in 1980, had allegedly sent to Goguen of herself dressed in lacy lingerie. Goguen had joined Sequoia Capital in 1996, five years after getting his master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. (The now-52-year-old studied electrical engineering as an undergrad at Cornell.) In her complaint, Baptiste’s legal firm had written that Baptiste was abused by Goguen “sexually, physically and emotionally for over 13 years” and across three of his former marriages, beginning soon after she was brought to the U.S. as a “victim of human trafficking.” Her complaint provides excruciatingly detailed accusations of these alleged abuses, including “countless hours of forced sodomy, verbal abuse,” and other “demeaning rituals.” In a particularly disturbing characterization, Baptiste’s complaint states that Goguen severely injured her during sex, then left her to “seek emergency medical aid alone in a foreign country, nearly hemorrhaging to death.” But in Goguen’s counter-complaint, it says that, “Far from being ‘forcibly sodomized’ and ‘left bleeding alone on the floor of a hotel room . . . nearly hemorrhaging to death,’ the supposed [injury] was so minor that Mr. Goguen was unaware of it until Ms. Baptiste emailed him after the fact gushing about how wonderful the night was and noting that she was scheduled to have a ‘small surgery’ that was ‘not a big deal.'” “[Baptiste] wrote of that night: ‘I would never erase that night for anything. It was beautiful each and every moment;’ ‘The last night together was really incredible for me. I could feel so many things moving between us that I have not felt before. Hopefully I will feel you again soon.'” Goguen’s counter-complaint goes on to assert that once “scorned,” Baptiste’s tone changed dramatically. She allegedly began to make “malicious allegations” that “frightened Mr. Goguen—not only for what they would do to his personal and professional reputation, but also the devastation such allegations would wreak on his family. When faced with the false and libelous claims she has now asserted in this lawsuit, Mr. Goguen wanted Ms. Baptiste to leave him and his family alone, and felt that he had no choice but to pay her to accomplish this.” Indeed, it says Goguen “acquiesced” to the “$40 million that [Baptiste] was arbitrarily demanding ” on a variety of conditions, including that she “stay away from Mr. Goguen and stop her harassment.” Yet according to his counter-complaint, after Goguen made the first of the four payments, for $10 million, “Ms. Baptiste resumed her campaign of harassment, sending thousands of text messages after signing the document, including ones that disparaged Mr. Goguen and his family and threatened to send him to jail unless he accelerated the payment schedule.” Baptiste’s complaint includes a copy of the agreement. It states that: “For a period of time, Amber and Michael were involved in a personal relationship. Amber had prepared and contemplated filing a lawsuit against Michael seeking monetary damages for personal injury and other claims arising from their prior relationship. Michael desires that all details relating to their relationship remain confidential, and Amber is willing to agree thereto.” It also states: “Michael specifically bargained for the confidentiality provisions in this agreement, and without them he would not have agreed to pay any amount of consideration to Amber.” The contract then outlines a payment schedule for four payouts totaling $40 million that was to be fully transferred to Baptiste by last December. Baptiste, who is characterized in Goguen’s cross-complaint as a Canadian native who in 2002 “entered into a sham marriage” to obtain her U.S. citizenship and now lives in L.A., is seeking the enforcement of that settlement agreement, along with attorney’s fees and other compensatory damages. Goguen is meanwhile seeking “compensation for all damages and losses caused by Ms. Baptiste’s extortion, including but not limited to return of the $10 million she extorted from him.” Goguen was asked to leave Sequoia last week. Reached Friday about Baptiste’s complaint, a Sequoia spokesman wrote us, “We first learned of these claims [Thursday]. We understand that these allegations of serious improprieties are unproven and unrelated to Sequoia. Nevertheless, we decided that Mike’s departure was the appropriate course of action.” In Whitefish, Montana, where Goguen has a home, he has been a “hero” to many locals owing to his philanthropic efforts, says one source who vacations there. Among his local contributions: a trail system called The Whitefish Trail and two state-of-the-art helicopters furnished on behalf on the local search and rescue program. According to a by a local outlet called the Flathead Beacon, Goguen has invested “untold millions more into an assortment of local causes and community investments, as well as business ventures,” including a local bar and a that produces rifles and barrels for the U.S. military. The article says that in 2014, Goguen further donated “$2 million over five years to the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children task force in an effort to protect kids from online predators.” “I don’t know what more can be said,” the chairman of a local non-profit in 2012 of Goguen. “He’s a great and gracious guy. I’m impressed that a gentleman who’s been so successful in his professional career would find it in his heart to do this for the community. He’s a very modest and quiet man. He’s humble and soft-spoken.” The full counter-complaint can be . |
Netflix pulls its Android Beta Program, says it was not meant for consumers to join | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Netflix confirmed this morning the existence of what appeared to be a new , but says it did not intend to make it available to consumers via Google Play. In addition, the company tells us that features in the beta app should not be taken as indication of those planned for forthcoming releases. That said, some testers had reported seeing the option for a “Mobile Data Saver” setting on their devices after joining. This was mistakenly to be a feature of the Netflix beta, but it’s actually a bucket test ahead of a broader iOS and Android launch. The data saver mode was at Mobile World Congress 2016 as a forthcoming update that will launch on both the iOS and Android applications sometime this year. Reporters at MWC were allowed to preview the feature and take screenshots of it in action. Several users today say they’ve already for a data saver mode appearing on their devices while streaming. However, Netflix tells us that the feature has not been publicly released on either Android or iOS, nor has the company announced when that will take place. Those who saw the option were a part of a test unrelated to the beta. The current, official release of the Android application only lets you choose whether streaming is limited to whether you’re on Wi-Fi or not, under the “Video Playback” options. There is no toggle for Mobile Data Saver in this section in the public release. However, seeing the feature pop up in the wild is promising in terms of a public release in the near term, as bucket tests tend to precede a larger rollout. In case you missed the news from MWC, the Mobile Data Saving feature is able to work out the best, most economical bandwidth and will allow users to reduce the video quality below full HD 1080p. There’s also a second button to allow HD to give you more control over your minimum quality levels for your streams, Netflix had told reporters. For users with limited mobile data plans, this would obviously be a big benefit, as it would allow them to watch more of Netflix’s shows and movies without worrying about going over their limits and then getting caught with a larger monthly bill. [gallery ids="1291184,1291183"] The beta program was first spotted by the blog . Initially, the blog said the data saver option was new in the beta, but has since corrected that statement as some readers told them they already had the feature on their device. Netflix said that the link for the beta program should be down, but it’s not sending users to a dead website. Instead, the message that appears simply says that the testing program “has enough testers” and isn’t accepting more sign-ups. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see Netflix running a beta program for consumers, so it’s understandable why some believed that to be the case. Today, a number of other major tech companies, including , , , , , and others, offer ways for early adopters to try out new features not yet released to the public by optionally installing a beta build of their applications. |
Blockai uses the blockchain to help artists protect their intellectual property | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | While most of the discussions around blockchain have , startup is looking at something different — helping artists, photographers and other creators register their work so that they can protect it from potential copyright infringement. CEO Nathan Lands is pitching this as an intermediate step between registering your work with the Library of Congress and doing nothing. Technically, your work is copyrighted as soon as you create the novel, drawing or whatever. However, if you want to sue someone for infringement. Lands said that when interviewing artists around the San Francisco Bay Area, he found that only 10 percent are registering their work with the Library of Congress, but the rest of them are worried that they should. So the goal here is to create proof of creation in a public database (namely, the blockchain) without necessarily dealing with the time and cost of officially registering. With Blockai, you just drag-and-drop to register your work, and you’ll get a registration certificate. Then if, say, someone’s reproducing your digital art or photo without permission, you can send them a copy of the certificate. Will that hold legal water? According to Lands, it hasn’t happened yet, but “we believe that a record created on the blockchain using Blockai would serve as sufficient evidence in a court of law.” And hopefully you won’t have to go to court at all, since sending the certificate seems “a lot more serious than sending them an Instagram picture.” “The blockchain is the perfect solution for providing proof of creation,” Lands said. “It’s a permanent immutable record. Meaning, once the record is there it’s there forever and will never change.” As I asked about enforcement, Lands also brought up the topic of , the often annoying (or worse) systems that can restrict how media gets shared. Apparently convinced him that “strict DRM is not the right solution and with images is basically impossible anyways.” “The ideal future system is one where there is a universal database for claiming ownership of creations and for paying royalties,” Lands added. “Making it as simple as possible for people to do the right thing.” With Blockai, Lands is at least taking steps in that direction. The startup has raised $547,000 from investors including Scott and Cyan Banister (plus their AngelList syndicate), Social Starts, Sterling VC, Vectr Ventures, Brian Cartmell and Ramen Underground. |
Xbox Live now supports cross-platform multiplayer with PS4 | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | At this point, there’s very little difference between the and the PlayStation 4. But there was one key differentiating point. Xbox gamers could only play with Xbox and PC players as Microsoft was restricting access to the multiplayer component. Microsoft that game developers can now create cross-platform multiplayer modes that work with other consoles and operating systems. So it means that the next Call of Duty or FIFA could feature a multiplayer mode that works with both Xbox and PlayStation gamers. It just depends on developers now. Microsoft has historically restricted cross-platform play as the Xbox Live was the first successful multiplayer network for consoles. The only appeared with the PlayStation 3. And yet, Microsoft is now the PlayStation 4 with its Xbox One. There are more online players on competing platforms, and Microsoft is now the underdog. By opening up cross-platform multiplayer, Microsoft could convince late adopters to buy an Xbox One even though their friends have a PlayStation 4. It’s also a way to make sure that there are enough players for less popular games. The first game that is going to support cross-platform multiplayer is Rocket League. Microsoft mentions cross-platform multiplayer between the Xbox One and Windows, but you can also expect support for PlayStation gamers as well given that the current version of Rocket League supports cross-platform multiplayer between PlayStation 4 and PC players. It’s unclear how developers are supposed to deal with duplicated PlayStation Network and Xbox Live screen names. For PC games that were using Microsoft’s online framework, these games will also work with other operating systems, such as OS X. And finally, Xbox players will be able to restrict multiplayer modes to other Xbox players only, but it’s unclear why you’d do that except if you’re a hardcore Xbox fanboy. |
Google launches new services for Android game developers | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Google today announced a number of new services for game developers at its annual at the Game Developers Conference. They include tools for managing virtual goods and currencies, the launch of the Video Recording API so developers can make it easier for players to stream and share videos to YouTube, and a new ad type that allows new players to trial a game for 10 minutes right from the mobile search results page. Google didn’t share all that many new numbers about games on Google Play today, but the company did say that the number of games reaching more than a million installs grew by 50 percent. The most interesting of these new features is probably the announcement of Google’s new “Search Trial Run Ads.” These new ads, which will launch in a few weeks, will allow users to stream a game right from the search results page without having to install it. All new players have to do is hit the “try now” button and the game will stream to the phone from Google’s servers. This trial period is limited to 10 minutes. After that, Google will prompt players to install the game from Google Play (and maybe pay for it). The concept here is similar to Google’s effort in from some more static apps like Hotel Tonight when they offer the best results for a given search. Streaming content from games, though, is obviously a tougher challenge. As a Google spokesperson told me, that’s why this new feature will only appear for users who are connected to Wi-Fi. Other in this update include support for portrait video ads and the ability to target ads to users who spent more than 30 minutes playing games (or who played any Google Play Games game) in the last 30 days. Chances are, after all, that these users are also the most likely to want to try a new game. Both of these features are scheduled to launch in the next few weeks. To help indie developers, Google is also adding a new “Indie Corner” to Google Play. The company says this new section will highlight “amazing games built by indie developers.” Developers who want to participate will have to submit their game for review — and the game has to be “awesome,” of course. The addition of Google’s new Video Recording API for game developers is probably the most interesting. With this, game developers will soon be able to allow players to stream their gaming sessions right to YouTube (hello, !). They can, of course, also record their games offline and share their videos to YouTube later on, too. This new API is slated for a public release “in the coming months.” Other new features announced today include the ability to update gameplay and game economy parameters in games in real time without having to upload a new version of an app to Google Play, as well as a new service that gives developers the ability to predict which users are most likely to spend money in their games (or drop out). |
#CSForAll: Ensuring tech access for all students | Cullen White | 2,016 | 3 | 14 |
On the heels of the (#CSForAll) announcement and the celebration of , we are excited about the work being done to make STEM opportunities accessible for all kids. The #CSForAll initiative is a plan to ensure that every student in America has access to a robust and rigorous computer science education. The initiative includes a proposed $4.2 billion targeted toward teacher training, curriculum development and the strengthening of public-private partnerships. We applaud the White House’s commitment to ensuring that all students have access to high-quality computer science instruction so they can pursue computing-related studies and careers. It was surreal to watch President Obama dedicate the entirety of a weekly address to a topic we hold near and dear. A new day for computer science education has dawned; it is times like this that beg for both reflection and visioning. We’re at a turning point in the history of education, not only for students, but also for their teachers. Computer science education offers an unprecedented opportunity to impact the lives of students, equipping them with skills that lead to internships, college scholarships and a pathway toward fulfilling careers. Unfortunately, too many students — especially those from low-income areas — don’t have access to computer science courses in their schools. That’s a problem — not just for them, but for their communities and our nation. Currently, just one in four schools nationwide offers computer science classes. With 98 percent of all undergraduate computer science majors reporting exposure to the field prior to college, this disparity of early computer science experiences cuts promising students off from the many benefits the field has to offer. More kids need this experience. Low-income students and students of color in the United States do not receive the high-quality, rigorous computer science instruction needed for success in college and beyond. It’s important that we help expand access to computer science education for a diverse set of students, especially in our increasingly technological and interconnected world. Teachers can fix this. But, unfortunately, there aren’t enough computer science teachers. A recent Google/Gallup study revealed that school administrators view a lack of trained computer science teachers as a top barrier to offering computer science courses. It is important for more individuals with a background, or strong interest, in science and tech to consider teaching, and for schools to find innovative ways to incorporate computer science into their curricula. For us, teaching computer science was the most powerful way to combat educational inequity. Just six years ago, Cullen was a social studies teacher with a passion for tech. He entered the world of computer science education — without prior programming experience — because computer science teachers weren’t available for his students. His district gave him the opportunity to learn computer science concepts and earn certification. Because of this support, he had the privilege of introducing his students to a world of innovation and advancement through computer science. And for Claire, the lack of computer science courses at a Title I high school situated mere miles away from the world’s premier tech hub was shameful. The opportunity gap for her students — most of whom loved STEM — was obvious. Excuses as to why they could not offer a computer science class at a high school like hers were plentiful: We’ll never find a teacher who knows computer science and wants to work here; computer science is hard; the students don’t have computers available to do their homework; and, most misguidedly, we will never get students to sign-up. Emboldened by the doubters, Claire partnered with her school to make it happen. The first class defied all expectations; people generously donated old computers that students took home, and her class of 22 students, primarily young women, thought the class was hard, but ultimately excelled. The momentum created could not be contained by the four walls of Claire’s classroom. She searched for ways to increase student opportunity and ultimately landed a role leading computer science initiatives within the Oakland Unified School District. In this role, she now leads the charge of bringing the critical thinking, problem solving, agency and joy exemplified by the students in her own classroom to 50,000 young people in Oakland. President Obama’s commitment to computer science education is a justification of the work we spearhead to impact students at scale. We believe this focus on the PK-12 computer science continuum has the potential to reimagine teaching and learning. Computer science provides opportunities for project-based learning, collaboration and authentic, hands-on experiences. It has already forced educators like us to re-envision a teacher’s role in the classroom — from allowing students to drive their learning to helping students find their passion in this field. The time is now. And together, we can ensure that all of today’s students have the access and knowledge to become the innovators and pioneers of the future. |
YouTube block comes and goes in Georgia amid government sex tape allegations | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Google’s , the world’s biggest video site, is no stranger to getting blocked in some countries when content uploaded by users runs against state policies on media and public information. The latest chapter in that story comes from Georgia — the country, not the U.S. state — where became inaccessible on the country’s biggest ISPs, with some linking the outage to sex tapes featuring government officials getting uploaded to the site. The matter, for the moment, appears to be resolved, with full access to YouTube restored, and the videos removed. However, the story may not be over, as it looks like the people posting the videos are to release more if certain members of the government do not resign (h/t ). According to reports from Georgian blog , there was no access to YouTube over the two leading ISPs in the country, Silknet and Caucasus Online, both on Friday and Monday in the wake of the videos getting posted. Neither ISP has responded to questions we have sent them. Silknet told that the outage was because of an unspecified technical problem. Google, for its part, says it also has not been involved in any block. “We saw reports that some users were unable to access YouTube in earlier today. There was no technical issue on our side,” Google spokesperson Alla Zabrovskaya told us in response to our questions. This seems to be contradicted in some of the local reporting on the situation, however, with Georgia’s State Security Service after it intervened. The motivations behind these videos getting posted — which are in any case — also seem to be mixed. While the identity of the people posting the videos is not clear, the subjects of them appear to be members of the country’s opposition party. It looks like the videos highlight a few ongoing issues: maintaining the privacy of the individuals in the videos; corruption of those who may be behind the videos getting made and being made public; and finally how sites used for a variety of purposes are getting clumsily caught in political crossfire. shut down in as sex videos of politicians- illegally obtained by most probably Georgia's own security – spread — Giorgi Kandelaki (@kandelakigiorgi) If the Georgian government was involved in this takedown of YouTube, it raises questions about freedom of speech and its potential for blocking the site more arbitrarily for its own ends. I can confirm YouTube inaccessible from , including on Caucasus Online. Works with mobile app and Beeline — Giorgio Comai (@giocomai) YouTube being blocked in its entirety over single pieces of content would not be unprecedented. In Georgia, at one point the when the government was actually aiming to take down certain pages that were hosting pro-ISIS content (those specific pages , while the rest of WordPress is up). And in Russia, the whole video site was after the regulator deemed that certain content encouraged suicidal tendencies (it was a how-to video for applying Halloween makeup). YouTube, like many other sites heavy on user-generated content, has maintained a position of complying with local laws, while itself supporting the idea of freedom of information. We’ll continue to look out for developments on this story and any responses from the ISPs. |
FinLeap’s solarisBank to offer Banking-as-a-Platform so startups can ride fintech gravy train | Steve O'Hear | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | Offering what it calls Banking-as-a-Platform, , the German fintech ‘startup factory’, has hatched its latest venture. This time the Berlin-based company builder (to use the preferred terminology) is investing and betting on the underlying regulatory and financial technology infrastructure — the picks ‘n’ shovels, if you will — in the form of , a fully licensed digital bank designed to power an array of fintech services. Born out of the frustration experienced by FinLeap’s own startups when faced with the need to piggybank an existing banking license and technology in order to be able to offer various financial services, solarisBank has developed what is described as a modular-based banking toolkit, including, and crucially, various modern banking APIs. This means that it’s able to offer other fintech businesses various services that, in turn, they can offer to their own customers. These include account and transaction services, compliance and trust solutions, working capital financing, and online loans. Those services not only require a technology solution, but in many instances, a banking or e-money license too. SolarisBank handles the heavy lifting for both. “We are confident that most major Internet companies will want digital banking solutions that expand their product range and offer it within a challenging regulatory environment,” says FinLeap Chair Jan Beckers in a statement. “We haven’t seen a bank that offers a technology platform like ours and can partner with so many different kinds companies and business models.” While solarisBank is officially de-cloaking today, it has already begun servicing a number of test customers. It isn’t disclosing who they are, but I understand that one is an e-commerce platform that is using the banking platform to offer new value-added financial services relevant to its existing customer base, such as loans. In this instance, SolarisBank is acting as both regulatory banking partner and technology partner. A second customer is a gift card provider who would otherwise require an electronic money license. “Solaris’ services are like Lego bricks: our partners can pick the bricks they require and assemble custom solutions to fit their business needs,” a company spokesperson told me via email. “Partners can access Solaris Platform services via our easy-to-implement API. The frictionless and straight-forward integration enables solarisBank partners to launch quickly and concentrate on their core business. In addition to the focus on technological innovation, we meet or exceed all regulatory requirements with our full bank license.” |
Apple’s new iPhone SE unlikely to make a splash in Asia despite low price | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | Apple’s newest addition to the iPhone family may be its cheapest phone yet at $399, but isn’t likely to move the needle in emerging markets, where the lion’s share of growth in the handset industry lies. found that global smartphone sales have reached their slowest growth rate since 2008 as smartphone saturation sets in, particularly in Western markets. That general slowdown, which , has sent many phone companies in search of growth potential in nascent markets like India, Southeast Asia and Latin America — regions were consumers are particularly price sensitive but smartphone volumes are rising. Apple has faced many calls from investors and industry watchers to release a more wallet-friendly device to capture new users in such growth markets, but the iPhone SE is not that phone. Apple is never likely to move into the mass market bracket of places like India, where the majority of handset volume is sub-$100, but the new release does offer something new. The iPhone SE marries the innards of Apple’s top-of-the-range iPhone 6S, including the same 12-megapixel camera and 4K video capture, with a four-inch form factor at snip of the $549 starting price of the 6S. That’s unlikely to make a dent in China, where the market has long moved to larger, “phablet”-sized devices which are preferred for video, entertainment and other such activities. Apple’s previous stab at a mid-range phone — the ill-fated iPhone 5c — didn’t go down well in China where it was perceived as cheap. The iPhone SE has evoked a similar reaction in China, where users of microblogging site Weibo have christened it ‘The Red iPhone,’ in homage to , . The iPhone SE may not satisfy mainstream tastes in China, but it may have more luck in India. At the iPhone SE launch event yesterday Apple revealed that it sold 30 million iPhone 5s units last year alone, and the device — and clearly the model for the iPhone SE — performed particular well in India. “When Apple lowered the iPhone 5s price in Q4 2014 to nearly $300 [from an initial $500], [its] contribution [to the total number of iPhone sales in India] went up from single digits to nearly 43 percent,” Tarun Pathak, an analyst at , told TechCrunch in an interview. That rise in demand showed that Indian consumers are willing “to lock themselves into the Apple ecosystem” even if it involved buying a two-year-old phone, Pathak added. Putting more advanced technology into that same form factor at a similarly low price could offer the best of all worlds, but Pathak isn’t quite so bullish on the iPhone SE. That’s because the big problem for Apple is price. The iPhone SE that is billed as starting at $399 will sell Higher pricing for Apple products isn’t new in India. Thanks to taxes and other fees, India was the most expensive country to buy an iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S plus last year. Apple, which sells in India via channel partners since it isn’t permitted to run its own retail business in the country, subsequently cut costs, but, in a price sensitive market with much competition, the markup may cut into the phone’s potential. A highly specced iPhone at $300 may be a snip, but once a device is priced around $500 it requires a buyer with a certain level of spending power. Inevitably, at $500, that person has the capacity to spend a little more and, since many in Asia are moving towards larger devices, that means less of a need to compromise screen size for price. Indeed, Apple’s own portfolio could provide competition to its new phone. “Because the price of the iPhone 6 [and iPhone 6 plus] already dropped in India, Apple is directly competing with its own phone which might be more appealing to consumers,” analyst Kiranjeet Kaur told TechCrunch, referencing the fact that, like China, Indian consumers are increasingly interested in larger screen iPhones. The iPhone SE compared to the iPhone 6S plus The iPhone 6 retails at upwards of $649 brand new in India, that’s not a lot more, while a pre-used model could cost hundreds of dollars less. Counterpoint’s Pathak said Apple is applying for a license to sell the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus refurbished in India, an eventuality that could see the devices retail from stores for around the same price that the iPhone SE currently occupies in India. ( for its own retail stores in India, which would give it greater price control.) When faced with the choice of a larger phone for the same price as the iPhone SE, analysts believe aspirational consumers may choose the latter. Or, at least, that there is a decision will impact Apple’s new phone. “In emerging countries, we are not very convinced that [the iPhone SE] will generate volume,” Pathak said. His firm, Counterpoint Research, estimates that Apple has around 4.5 million active iPhones in India, just a fraction of India’s billion-plus population, while its sales are nearly 15 times lower than China. “It may be a short growth spurt not a long-term one,” IDC’s Kaur said, slightly more optimistically of the new iPhone. “But I don’t believe it will create a new segment for Apple” in emerging markets. There is some cause for optimism though, as part of Apple’s wider efforts. Counterpoint’s Pathak is of the belief that the new device, while unlikely to be universally appealing, may entice some new price-conscious users to Apple. “People in India are aspirational. Those locked into the ecosystem via a low price device may upgrade later. That’s an important market for Apple. In two, three or four years, the same young population will have increased affordability,” he said. The device is likely to perform better in Western countries, where fewer consumers desire large screened phones and many have held on to the iPhone 5s in the face of newer product releases from Apple. The iPhone SE would give them a taste of Apple’s newest technology — such as Touch ID — without forcing them to adopt a new form factor. But price is unlikely to be a key motivator in markets like the U.S., where consumers typically choose either high-end premium devices or budget phones. The move away from fully subsidized devices could play in the iPhone SE’s favor but, then again, U.S. consumers are adopting monthly payment plans for their phones which enables them to buy more expensive flagship devices as they do with contract deals. Just banking primarily on small phone lovers in the West might not equate to volume either. that it expects Apple to sell fewer than six million iPhone SE units in its first year, with the company’s high-end offerings likely to be more appealing to consumers. |
Cygnus launches to space station with new experiments on board | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | The Cygnus cargo vehicle was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida at 11:05pm EST to begin its 3-day journey to the International Space Station (ISS). Launching on top of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, Cygnus was carrying 7,500 pounds of food, water, science experiments, and other necessary supplies. Now that Cygnus has successfully launched, it will take 2 days to get into a higher orbit above the Earth. On its third day, the spacecraft will dock with ISS. Crew on board will unpack Cygnus and, after about 2 months, Cygnus will be filled with trash and released from the ISS to start its trip home. Among Cygnus’ scientific cargo is a 3-D printer, a “ ” study, and a large-scale fire experiment. Made in Space, a 3D printing company, has partnered with NASA to send the first commercial manufacturing facility to the ISS. Their 3D printer, known as the (AMF), already has 20 paying companies signed up to use it. Gecko Gripper, a NASA-led study, involves an adhesive technology designed after the specialized hairs on a Gecko’s feet that allow them to stick to vertical surfaces without falling. According to NASA, the technology “promises to enable many new capabilities, including robotic crawlers that could walk along spacecraft exteriors; grippers that use a touch-to-stick method to catch and release objects; and sensor mounts that can work on any surface and reused multiple times.” Gecko's hitching a ride with . See our Gecko Gripper tech ready to launch to for — NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) On previous missions, Cygnus would leave the station and simply burn up in the atmosphere. For this mission, however, there is another science experiment known as that will be conducted inside the spacecraft as it begins its journey back to Earth. Saffire will be NASA’s first large-scale microgravity fire experiment. When Cygnus leaves station about 2 months from now, a swath of cloth will be remotely ignited and sensors on board will track the results. Cygnus will stay in orbit around the Earth long enough for the experimental data to be downlinked to a ground station. About 9-10 days after Cygnus leaves the ISS, it will descend to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. Today’s mission, known as OA-6, is Orbital ATK’s sixth Cygnus spacecraft and their fifth operational Cygnus mission to the ISS. In October, 2014, one Cygnus resupply mission was lost due to an explosion of an Antares rocket. The Cygnus spacecraft was developed specifically for the purpose of ISS resupply missions under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. SpaceX was the only other company to receive initial resupply contracts under COTS in 2008. In January, NASA that they were extending the life of these resupply contracts to SpaceX and Orbital ATK, and that they were including a third winner in this round: the Sierra Nevada Corporation. From 2019 to 2024, each of these three companies will be responsible for a minimum of six supply mission to the ISS. Today’s launch was the fifth of 10 Cygnus supply missions ordered by NASA in the first round of COTS contracts. The next US supply mission to the ISS will be provided by SpaceX on a launch that’s to take place April 8th. |
Malaysia-based Nuren Group raises $2M for its wedding and parenting sites | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | , a Malaysian-based company that runs community and e-commerce sites for women, has raised a $2 million Series A led by Gobi Partners. The capital will be used for hiring and to add more services and e-commerce features to and , Nuren’s wedding sites, and its upcoming parenting marketplace . Combined with its seed round, Nuren’s Series A brings its total raised to $2.25 million. The company was founded in 2013 by CEO Petrina Goh, CTO Kelvin Leow, COO Stacey Lee, and CSO Alice Ong. The company’s services are currently available in Singapore and Malaysia, but it will launch in more Southeast Asian countries over the next two to three years. Goh tells TechCrunch that Nuren’s sites focus on “important life stages where women spend the most time and money.” Wedding.com.my and Nuren.sg are meant to be one-stop shops for wedding planning, where women can find a dress, reserve a venue, book catering and other services, and plan their honeymoon. Nuren has a wedding consulting team that generates leads and sales to vendors, who pay the company marketing fees in return. Since its launch, Nuren says it has served 300,000 couples, connecting them with 1,500 vendors. The company claims that Wedding.com.my is Malaysia’s top wedding platform, while Nuren.sg takes the number three spot in Singapore. Motherhood.com.my, which will launch in the second quarter of this year, will have an e-commerce shop for baby products, as well as a marketplace/directory for service providers. The new markets Nuren plans to enter are Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In Southeast Asia, there are two million weddings per year, with couples spending $18 billion in total while planning them, says Goh. The company’s goal is to eventually serve eight out of 10 brides in Southeast Asia. “The wedding industry in Southeast Asia is still very conventional, lack of price openness and trusted information online. People largely still rely on word of mouth to find ideas and vendors they need,” Goh says. “I believe within the next three years, we will transform the traditional wedding industry into a transparent and connected network.” |
Why Quartz’s news app is so much bigger than news | Tom Popomaronis | 2,016 | 3 | 22 |
Have you tried the Quartz , yet? Please do. Imagine a text conversation with a bot that sends you a topic. You’re then presented with two choices: Either tap a string of relevant (and surprisingly entertaining) emojis, which is like pressing “learn more,” or tap an “anything else?” button to have another topic served: If you opt for the emojis, the sends 1-3 follow-on texts that provide a high-level summary of the story and link to the article. If you’re lucky, you’ll even see a pertinent and entertaining gif in the mix for added value. When it comes to apps in general, I like to scroll through a daily aggregator feed I’ve personalized to my liking; I usually don’t want someone else telling me which stories to pay attention to — especially not one at a time. originally, my intrigue with Quartz left me feeling a little conflicted (#WhoAmI?). Plus, while I’m sure they’ll add personalization, at first this knew nothing about me and my preferences. I was fed a random, Hail Mary topic on something I only opted to learn more about 20 percent of the time. Yet I willingly continued to let them try. This is because there was a comfortable, visceral familiarity with the that made me want to spend more time with it. It’s similar to talking to a friend with lightning-quick response time. Except in this scenario, you’re “conversing” with a lite, programmed AI with informative yet amusing responses. In other words, I was engaged in large part because I knew an immediate response would follow. It satisfies the “instant gratification” check box. And the medium is familiar — it mimics texting, which is how we spend of our modern lives. That’s when it hit me: The magnitude of what I was experiencing was simply -based interactive texts. In fact, it’s likely just the beginning. Here’s why: It’s poised to send shock waves through the live-chat industry. Live chat has been a significant upgrade in customer support over the years. But this kind of mobile and interactive chat has even more potential. For those brands and companies who elect to use it with customers, I imagine an added layer of interactivity and decision-tree-like qualifiers. As a result, it will maximize moderator efficiency, allowing them to know exactly when they need to step in, while still delighting the customer. These interactive qualifiers wouldn’t be “off the cuff,” either — they would be pre-validated by endless customer support data points. The timing is ripe, too. . My hunch is that live-chat adoption will not only increase, but we’ll also see an increased willingness to leave more candid feedback. Interactivity amplifies live-chat-provider features while strengthening the brand-to-consumer relationship, whether you have one customer or one million. The learning curve will be virtually non-existent, there will be little to no rollout fear and it’ll come with unlimited upside and brand-messaging customization. Anyone on the over/under that is the first-mover, here? Hal 2.0 is coming. AI needs to quickly evolve to have “Siri-like” text conversations with customers. That AI would arguably be able to have a sophisticated conversation with the customer, scan their shopper profile through necessary auths, ask them the correct, pertinent questions and guide them to specific products via informed logic in real time — all without the need of a support rep. The data repository of consumer insights alone will be invaluable, but we’re also talking about a massively better experience on the customer side. After all, how more fun will it be to skip scanning an endless page of outdated FAQs and instead “text” with a witty bot? Admittedly, I see Amazon being able to have the most fun with a project like this, as they’d be able to predictably scan and package up their personalization techniques via interactive text. . “Hal-azon” comes to mind. Too soon? It’s inevitable that players will emerge to take advantage of the opportunities here, which are endless. For example: replace with promo incentives. I present to you the Quartz , remastered: The potential applied-use scenarios really are endless. From gamification to loyalty to surveys, there will be no lack of opportunity for startups to serve an evolving need. I consider this the early stages of next-gen consumer interaction. Dive in, ladies and gentlemen, there’s plenty of room. |
Famous dodges Apple iTunes ban with web app | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | The Famous app got itself banned from Apple’s App Store about a month ago. They sidestepped the ban by , and is today back on an iOS device near you in the form of a . The Famous interface, in which your correspondent is the world’s biggest fan of Twitter. Which is true on several levels. The App Store ban wasn’t the first brush the company had with disaster. Before its renaissance as Famous, the game was known as Stolen, and under that particular name, the company landed itself in a colossal cyclone of crap. The company when it became clear that you could buy and comment on profiles of people who hadn’t consented to being used in such a manner, making it a high-risk zone for abuse, harassment and bullying. “We need to have an around-the-clock moderation team monitoring our chat, monitoring our nicknaming, monitoring our wall posts,” the Stolen team at the time, just before shutting the service down. For the new version, the company recycled much of the game mechanics, minus the commenting and chat functionality that made it prime bullying real estate, and re-launched as Famous, with . In its new incarnation, Famous is a fantastically addictive game that involves a surprising amount of strategy. As long as the company manages to keep the platform clean and free of spam and abuse, it’ll hopefully continue going strong. The web app is very well done, but who knows? Perhaps Apple will eventually change its mind about having banned Famous. |
Instagram beefs up web interface with notifications tab | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | Instagram began as a mobile-only service, but now it’s enhancing its web version so you can use the service without opening your phone. Today on web that’s identical to the notifications tab inside its app. Here you’ll be able to see who Liked or commented on your posts, or who followed you or tagged you. It’s now available to all users. We were first tipped off about the launch by . The move follows Snapchat, another mobile-only-at-first service, bringing its last month. Instagram first launched user profiles on the followed by a , and . Instagram declined to comment regarding whether this was part of a bigger push on the web, so this seems like more of a one-off feature addition. But making Instagram more cross-platform enhances its ubiquity and network effect. That could grow its moat and make sure no other service usurps it as the hot permanent photo sharing app. |
All 60 startups that launched at Y Combinator Winter 2016 Demo Day 1 | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | “You’ll notice we have many more startups that aren’t in the traditional software category,” said Y Combinator President Sam Altman at the start of its Winter 2016 Demo Day 1. While once upon a time YC was known for legions of social and marketplace apps no one needed, it’s branched out. Now Silicon Valley’s top accelerator features tons of hardware, engineering, alternative energy and enterprise startups, too. [Update: Check our our list of the according to investors and TechCrunch’s writers. You can also see all the startups that pitched on , plus from that set.] The afternoon began with a moment of silence for Andy Grove, former Intel CEO and beloved business mentor, as well as the victims of this morning’s terrorist attacks in Brussels. Y Combinator President Sam Altman The house at YC’s Demo Day was packed — more than anyone expected, it would seem. A few chairs short, millionaires from around the world could be seen sitting on the floor to watch startup after startup strut their stuff — many of them for the first time. The big theme of the day was profitability. In the past, YC startups have highlighted their growth, downplaying profitability as some saw it as a sign that they were shooting too small or not reinvesting enough. But due to the market correction, VCs are more keen on startups that can become sustainable faster and won’t need endless funding to succeed. Today, many startups mentioned that they were already profitable, would be in several months, or were in specific markets where you don’t account for money spent trying to expand. Yet Altman told us that investment was “hotter” today than he’s ever seen it, with VCs aggressively pushing to invest on the spot. For the last year, he says YC has been telling startups to raise less and get to profitability faster in anticipation of a frosty fundraising climate. Yet now he believes the correction “hasn’t trickled down yet” but maybe will by next Demo Day. Altman also mentioned that the $1 billion Cruise self-driving tech acquisition has bolstered investors’ interest in hard-tech companies. Sixty-three companies launched in all today, with 3 of them being noted as “off the record” in advance (that is, they’re a bit too early-days for media coverage; as always, we’ve honored that request). Here’s a look at the 60 we can talk about. Getting birth control can be quite difficult — one needs to have a means of getting to a doctor and be comfortable speaking with a doctor about it. With Nurx, you pick a birth control and one of their doctors writes the prescription and ships it directly. Commuting between cities and suburbs can be a pain. MagicBus tries to be the best of both worlds — affordable and fast. MagicBus vehicles can fit up to 14 people and guarantees riders few stops. The transportation between cities to suburbs market is $1 trillion, according to the company. MagicBus says it is growing 50 percent month over month, with 48 percent of riders using the service every day. Despite solid Internet penetration, most payments in the 180 million-person country of Nigeria are done offline. Paystack lets businesses accept payments via credit card, debit card, money transfer and mobile money on their websites or mobile apps. The integration takes just 30 minutes, rather than 3 weeks, and reduces the payment process from 7 steps to 2 steps. Paystack costs businesses $0.50 plus 1.9 percent for local cards and 3.9 percent for international cards. By unlocking online payments, Paystack could help African businesses thrive with the next generation of customers. This is a set-and-forget smart oven that can automatically cook meals “to perfection.” When you put one of their tech-enabled meals into their oven, it knows the exact timing/temperatures required to cook your meal. They also have a subscription plan that sends ready-to-cook meals to your door. They have raised $240,000 on Kickstarter. Downtime costs companies a lot of money — about $26.5 billion in lost revenue, to be exact. As it turns out, human error is the biggest cause of downtime. That’s where Redspread, which builds collaborative deployment tools, comes in. Redspread launched three weeks ago. U.S. power plants spend $15 billion a year doing safety inspections of their industrial infrastructure. But these inspections can take seven days, with plants losing $1 million a day in business, and they’re dangerous. Gecko Robotics has designed its own safety inspection robot that can climb walls and do dangerous jobs fast and cheap. For $50,000 to $100,000, it can do a 7-day inspection in just a single day, while collecting more data and not putting lives at risk. Gecko expects to be profitable this year and plans to expand to adjacent industries soon. The startup is driven by a desire to eliminate the tragic stories of safety inspectors falling to their their deaths. This is an online marketplace for farmers in India to sell directly to institutional buyers, which the team says is a $200 billion industry. The farmer — say a potato farmer — uploads details of his harvest. A buyer — like, say, a potato chip maker — finds them potatoes on their marketplace and purchases them. Learning can come in many different ways, especially outside of the classroom. Outschool is a class marketplace for homeschoolers that offers classes and field trips for kids around topics like anatomy, space and photography. Outschool says it’s on track to sell $14,000 worth of classes per month. Getting insurance can be a hassle, but with Cover, you just take a photo of your car, home, pet, jewelry, speedboat or race horses. Right now, Cover farms out these leads to other insurance companies and is collecting $190,000 per month in referrals fees. But next it’s getting licensed to sell insurance directly so it can keep all the commissions, which amount to a $22 billion per year market in the U.S. By making insurance buying mobile, Cover could recruit a new generation of customers focused on convenience. Rappi aims to be a combination of Instacart and Postmates for Latin America. It charges customers a 70 cent fee for delivery, while paying delivery people roughly $2/hour — a generous and competitive rate for the area, according to the company’s Latin American founders. Ninety-five percent of kids under the age of 10 in the U.S. don’t have cell phones, but parents want to stay in touch with them. They just don’t want kids playing on their phones too much or contacting strangers. So Toymail, which sold $10 million-worth of an alarm clock that runs away from you, has built plush doll toys that are actually phones. Kids can use them to send voice messages to their parents, other family members or friends with Toymail phones. Selling hardware to these kids could be a $3 billion business, but Toymail is planning an app store full of games, stories and educational apps that it will sell, too. Amazon is already signed up as a developer. Toymail could make buying a cell phone for your toddler safe. Read more about Toymail on .
Connecting with your followers and fan base in meaningful ways continues to be a challenge for businesses. With Chatfuel, those looking to build and engage an audience can use the native interface to create bots that help facilitate conversations. More than 130,000 bots have been created on the platform. Publishers, like TechCrunch and Forbes, can build on Chatfuel and deploy to any messengers. To date, Chatfuel sees more than 1 million daily active users.
These are self-driving shuttles (sort of like big golf carts) for private campuses like colleges and company headquarters. They have paid pilots ongoing at six college campuses. Their shuttle costs $50,000 per year to operate. Its three founders met while majoring in engineering at the University of Waterloo. Messaging platforms are taking off in just about every industry. Stich is a healthcare messaging platform for healthcare, doctors, nurses, social workers, pharmacists and others. It’s HIPPA-compliant and integrates with electronic health records. It’s growing 40 percent month over month with more than 400 organizations already signed up for Stitch. The secret to the growth, they say, is the focus on nursing homes, rehab facilities, pharmacies and urgent care centers. Stitch claims it has a lot of engagement, with users spending 8 hours a day on it, and sending 20 messages each per day. Focal Systems has designed an indoor positioning system that is said to be 14X more accurate than iBeacons and 20X cheaper. The startup retrofits old shopping carts with a camera phone and their positioning system so the carts know where they are in the store. The phone can help shoppers navigate the store and show contextual, targeted ads right as they pass by the advertised product on the shelf. Focal Systems’ demos have shown they can raise revenue by $100,000 per month. The company charges $2,500 per month per store and splits the ad revenue with the store 50/50. It already has a deal lined up with Safeway grocery stores that could bring in $66 million in a year. Walking through brick-and-mortar stores feels stuck in the past. By updating the experience with indoor positioning and screens, it could get easier and much more lucrative for merchants. After coming to the U.S. as educated, legal citizens, Stilt’s founders realized how difficult it was for immigrants to get loans due to a lack of U.S. credit history. Stilt focuses on providing loans for them: $431K of loans so far, $60K of which has been paid back, with 0 percent defaults to date.
People are obsessed with their pets and want peace of mind that they’re okay when left alone at home. In the last 15 months, PetCube has made $2.5 million revenue selling its home camera for pet owners. In total, the company has sold 20,000 units at a retail price of $199. PetCube sells its product in more than 400 stores, including Nordstrom, Best Buy and Brookstone, with over half of its sales coming from retail. This year, PetCube is launching a subscription service, as well as launching a connected treat dispenser. Goodybag makes it simple to order food for your office, a $30 billion a year market in the U.S. But rather than mess with low-margin on-demand delivery, Goodybag simply facilitates the ordering. It’s earning about 10 percent on transactions, giving it $5.5 million in annual revenue run rate, of which it keeps $600,000. The startup has already made its Austin market profitable and can hit break-even in 6 months as it expands to new cities. With 93 percent retention and $350 shopping carts (10X that of consumer food ordering), Goodybag has found a part of the food ordering market that can actually earn money. Blowouts, makeup and men’s haircuts on demand. Pick a job and tell them where you are, and they send a vetted stylist to you. Sixty percent of StyleBee customers use it once a month. They’ve hit a $1 million run rate in the past 12 months in SF alone, with margins of around 35 percent per job. Automated ground stations for drones, built by Armada, are designed to replace expensive, human operators. Armada ground stations house, charge and launch drones for various types of missions. It’s first deployment is in the Panama Canal, where it delivers parcels from the port to ships for just $300. https://youtu.be/DI9rqu_J5U8 GoPros aren’t getting that much better year after year, so fewer people feel like they need to buy the newest one. But Revl has addressed the biggest problem with action cameras — stabilization. It combines physical and digital stabilization to make its footage extra smooth. Revl also offers automatic editing software so you can share your best moments without having to sit down at a computer for boring manual video editing. The $10 billion action camera market is growing 22 percent every year, but Revl could make it accessible to people who aren’t good at photography or editing. Revl is now on Indiegogo where it’s sold $70,000-worth in the last 4 days. On-demand babysitters, all handled over SMS. This month, they’ll handle roughly 500 babysitting appointments — with all growth happening by word-of-mouth, and at a current rate of about 50 percent per month. They currently have 40 vetted sitters available in the Seattle area. The multiplayer desktop dueling game League Of Legends has hit 27 million daily active users and earns $1 billion a year. UnnyWorld wants to bring a similar game to mobile. It’s designed for short sessions of around 5 minutes so gamers can play on the go. And rather than a keyboard, players can cast spells and coordinate complex attacks with finger gestures. Built by a 12-person squad that’s been together for 5 years, UnnyWorld’s team has already built games with a total of 5.4 million downloads. It’s beta see users playing for 30 minutes per day on average, and the global launch is planned for September. While cloning popular games might not be prestigious, bringing the League Of Legends experience to mobile could be quite lucrative. People collectively spend billions of dollars a year around races; $2 billion goes to race tracking. That’s where Trac comes in. Trac wants to make it easy for any and every race to offer professional-caliber timing at an affordable price. Trac provides chips for runners to place on their shoes, and the time-tracking hardware for the race host to place at the finish line. 500 million farmers around the world are at the whimsy of the weather; if it doesn’t rain, their crops don’t grow and they don’t make money. WorldCover insures farmers in developing regions; they use satellites to measure rain fall, and pay out automatically based on the rain data. Rocking an outdoor party required lots of expensive equipment, technical knowledge and set up time. But SOUNDBOKS is a single, portable suitcase-style speaker that can make dozens of people dance outdoors. It’s practically unbreakable, and has a 60-hour battery that can be swapped out. In the last 20 days, SOUNDBOKS has sold $600,000 worth of its speaker via crowdfunding with a 55 percent margin; it will ship in April. Next, it will release a smaller Jambox-sized competitor, and a bigger Elemental line that it claims can power events for thousands of people. Sonos fixed the same problem for wireless indoor audio and became a billion-dollar revenue business. The outdoor audio market is growing 39 percent annually because people love gathering offline with their friends. If SOUNDBOKS can live up to its hype and can blast music all day long on the go, it could capitalize on the shift to the experiential culture. Email sucks. MailTime is an email messenger that’s trying to make email suck a little bit less by making it as simple as text messaging. MailTime displays your emails as conversations instead of threads. To date, MailTime has seen 100,000 daily active users and is the No. 1 independent email app in China. It’s also gearing up to integrate with the top messenger in China, which has over 200 million users. Restocks tells “superconsumers” when certain sought-after brands (Supreme, Yeezy, etc.) go up for sale. Users tell Restocks which brands they like, and Restocks monitors a wide array of sites. They charge users $25 per year. Passwords are easily stolen, but it’s hard for hackers and bots to replicate a real user’s behavior pattern. Castle tracks the behavior of users on its clients’ websites and apps, and can revoke access from those who are acting suspicious. For example, on an e-commerce site, real users might browse several items before adding something to their cart and checking out. But a hacker would add a ton of items and instantly try to check out, but Castle could block them. Castle now has 150 deployments, protects 400,000 users and is growing 35 percent each week. Each new user it protects also teaches it more about the difference between legitimate behavior and the sketchy patterns displayed by hackers.
We’ve seen very little innovation in the home space, and Acre Designs wants to change that by making it easy to build net-zero homes that produce their own power. Last year, Acre Designs built two prototypes and secured deposits for six homes worth $2.9 million. Acre Designs sells the kits for $250,000, and makes a 12 percent margin. Builders can then sell the homes for $400,000. Vinebox delivers wine “by the glass.” Rather than delivering full bottles that a user might not like, subscribers receive three individual single-serving containers of wine. They’ve been shipping for 3 months, and have sold ~17,000 glasses. Subscribers can turn around and purchase wines they’ve found they like through the Vinebox app. There are 4.5 million parking meters in the U.S. and 90 percent of them only accept coins. MeterFeeder lets cities cheaply upgrade to a system where citizens can pay for parking with a credit card through an app that uses GPS to tell where they are and what to charge. Parking enforcement officers get a tablet they can use to quickly check license plates to see if people have paid through MeterFeeder, and it costs 1/10th of other smart meter systems. And since it gets more people to actually pay for parking rather than risk a ticket, cities earn 30 percent more in parking revenue even as they issue less tickets people hate. MeterFeeder gets a 15 percent cut of all payments, is growing 18 percent per week, now has 3,000 meters in the system and just signed a $1 million annual deal with Pasadena, California. The U.S. parking market was $30 billion last year, and MeterFeeder could bring it into the mobile era.
Waiting in line is the worst, and, it turns out that on average Americans spend two years of their lives waiting in lines. Enter QueueHop, a self-checkout app for retail stores. QueueHop transforms traditional tags into RFID tags to detect whether an item has been purchased. As a shopper, all you do is scan, pay and leave. If you haven’t paid, the tag will set off an alarm as you’re trying to leave the store. QueueHop launched a pilot one week ago and has 11 retailers on board. Set a topic… get a phone call from a stranger. Wakie connects people within about 10 seconds, and currently has around 100,000 weekly active users. Their money model focuses on those who want to practice a new language, charging those users for premium subscriptions. At a deeper level, they’re a machine learning company — they analyze the contents of phone calls (and the preceding requests) to better match users. Americans spend $6 billion a year on shampoo and conditioner, but are frustrated because they can’t find the product that matches their preferences and hair type. Function Of Beauty asks customers a set of questions, then its machines fill bottles with a unique combination of ingredients, and even prints the customer’s name on the bottle. There are over 300 million permutations of Function Of Beauty’s product, and it earns a 50 percent margin on its average $30 order. The startup is growing 45 percent each month, had $20,000 in sales last month and will be net profitable in 5 months. Next, it wants to move into other beauty products, using personalization to provide next-level satisfaction. The student-loan industry is a big business in the U.S., and a lot of students are in debt. At LendEDU, a marketplace for student-loan refinancing, the goal is to save graduates thousands of dollars by helping them find low-interest rate loans. Since launching six months ago, LendEDU has seen 50 percent net monthly revenue growth. This month, LendEDU is on track to reach $50,000 in monthly revenue and achieve profitability. Enflux aims to do 3D capture of workouts without requiring a camera. With the data provided by sensors within the (machine-washable!) clothes, they’re able to analyze form and pacing. After opening up pre-orders around 2 weeks ago, they’ve sold over $85,000 worth of clothing. Messaging apps are where people spend their time, and chatbots let them interact with businesses there. Prompt is a chatbot building platform that lets businesses build a chatbot in 15 minutes with 15 lines of code. It can then be deployed instantly to Slack, Line, WeChat, SMS, and soon Facebook Messenger. Prompt’s platform includes authentication, payment processing, language flexibility, and analytics. Prompt gets paid for every message sent, but doesn’t have to pay carrier fees like Twilio does with SMS. That gives Prompt a 95% gross margin. Prompt is already working with Uber, Nest, Yelp, and Dominos. Prompt sees chatbots as successor to apps, and wants to be the universal development platform where they get built. Under the affordable care act, one third of medical group’s are held financially accountable for how healthy their patients are. With Able Health, the goal is to make it easier for medical groups to get paid for making their patients healthier. Within two months of launching, Able Health brought on its first enterprise customer, which signed a $100,000 contract. Getting a pair of Nikes from the US to Africa would cost over $200 in shipping fees; Shypmate uses inbound travelers to deliver the same items in 5-10 days for around $20 — you just meet the traveler at the airport to get your package. “And yes,” says founder Chisom Ebinama “it’s legal. Very, very legal.” When designers and developers build something, they don’t reinvent the wheel. They cobble togetehr resources from UI kits, plugins, and pre-made assets. The problem is finding them with traditional Google Search. UpLabs has built a community of 250,000 users curating these resources. If a business needs to make a payment form, they can grab the graphics, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for the form straight from UpLabs’ 18,000 curated resources. Search on its platform is up 7X from 12 weeks ago and is growing 20% per week, and its quarter-million users are spontaneously hosting meetups around the world. Next, it wants to move into providing lucrative web development and app design services. UpLabs could the be the future of efficient development thanks to its human-curated archive of how to do things right.
Here’s a crazy stat: there’s about $90 billion in unclaimed salaries in the cybersecurity market. There are currently one million open jobs for cybersecurity experts, but it’s difficult to find the right people to fill them. Since launching three months, Stealth Worker’s marketplace for cybersecurity experts has facilitated $114,000 in job bookings, is growing at 105% monthly and is already profitable. Sells smartswitches to new home builders, as opposed to selling to consumers. Currently has agreements for $750,000 worth of purchase orders across 9 different builders. They focus on selling easily upgradeable “dumb” switches to home builders, then upsell interested new homeowners on the smart upgrade. https://youtu.be/voJ2g6_Y-OM 90% of people who try to learn guitar quit because it’s difficult to learn the 300-year old user interface of vibrating strings. Magic Instruments has built a guitar where you can play chords with one finger. It builds musical intelligence into the software in the guitar so anyone can play songs with just sight-reading. Guitar Hero sold $6 billion worth of fake guitars that don’t even play real music. Magic Instruments thinks it can earn even more selling its $299 guitar and $6 per month subscriptions to content like chords and lyrics of popular songs. It’s launching on Indiegogo on April 18th. A live feed for a user’s college, but with a weird twist: top posts are 100% anonymous, but comments use your real identity.
Building native, mobile apps should be simple for anyone, according to Thunkable. That’s why it has created a drag-and-drop tool for building native, mobile apps. The cloud-based tool features templates, real-time testing and easy deployment to the Google Play store. Thunkable currently has over 90,000 users who have built over 200,000 apps. An easy-to-add SDK for a mechanism that allows app users to contact support without leaving the application. Used by Lyft, Soundcloud, BuzzFeed, Shyp, and more.
Hykso creates sport sensors for boxers to track the types of punches thrown, how many the boxer has thrown and how fast they’ve thrown them. The Hysko sensor fits on the wrist and comes with an app to show boxing analytics. So far, Hysko has sold $80,000 worth of devices, which it’s selling for $150 a pair. Buying a home today is hard — particularly if you don’t have wealthy parents who can help you with that down payment. Landed helps teachers buy homes by raising debt-free downpayment funds from student’s parents; parents provide money for the down payment in exchange for equity in said homes. They also work with companies and affinity networks. The Affordable Care Act forces hospitals to pay when their lack of follow-up care leads to preventable readmission of patients. Right now, these readmissions cost hospitals $36 billion per year. But CareSkore’s system helps hospitals make follow-up calls to the right patients at the right time and ask them the right questions to catch complications before they spiral into expensive health problems. CareSkore found the hospitals it demoed with saw a 42% reduction in readmissions. It sells its CRM prodcut for $500,000 per year per hospital, creating a $10.8 billion annual market that’s suddenly appeared because of the Affordable Care Act. CRM has helped businesses make more money, now it’s going to make patients healthier. If you wanted to make a smartwatch or drone, you’d have to spend days creating the digital model for each chip on your circuit board. With SnapEDA, an electronics parts library, all you do is download the model, and then drag and drop it into your design. Already, companies like Nest, Google, Boeing, General Electric and Sony are using SnapEDA and they’re downloading thousands of models every month. SnapEDA costs $1,200 a year for a subscription.
Data infrastructure in the developing world is a mess. That means even when they have the money and man-power to distribute vaccines or recover from a large scale emergency, they don’t know where to start or how to manage the projects. Zenysis offers data management systems for developing nations, and is now in a $1 million pilot program with the Ethiopian government. Zenysis found all the fragmented data on vaccinations, got 100% of it integrated, and made the distribution process efficient. With 150 developing nations plus big organizations like the Gates Foundation as potential customers, Zenysis could make a profit while preventing the next Ebola crisis. Skymind builds an open source deep learning engine for enterprise Hadoop users, providing AI-driven solutions for things like fraud detection, product recommendations, and facial recognition. They’ve built Deeplearning4J, a set of deep-learning algorithms for Java developers. AlphaFlow wants to make it easy for real estate investors to build and manage their portfolios across P2P platforms. It lets you browse deals from across the industry, find good investments and create deal alerts. Currently, AlphaFlow has 850 investors managing over $80 million in investments on the platform. 7,000 people die a day in American, and their families spend $21 billion a year on their funerals, burials, and cremations. But there’s no way to book this online or get any price transparency. That forces families to visit funeral providers in person, and puts them at risk of getting ripped off or making a bad decision in haste. Halolife lets families select the service they want and where they want it, and the startup finds them the optimal funeral provider and price. It takes 7.5%, which means it has a $1.5 billion annual market opportunity. Funerals shouldn’t be a time for frustrating shopping. Halolife makes planning a goodbye for a loved one peaceful. “E-commerce in Egypt sucks!” says Lynks’ Egyptian founder — citing import product markup of over 2x. Lynks lets Egyptian customers paste in shopping links for any US site, and handles all customs and shipping logistics and explains all involved fees up front. A lot of businesses these days depend on some sort of API. With Secful, businesses can prevent API attacks in real-time through custom-tailored security. Secful is an automated solution that can detect any abnormal activity within your API and identify the hacker profile. Many people forget the subscriptions they’re paying for, and don’t know how they could save money by switching between different providers. Truebill makes it easy to manage your media, digital content, and physical good subscriptions. You connect you back account or credit card, and it shows you everything you’re paying for on a recurring basis so you can instantly cancel ones you don’t want. The average user cancels at least one subscription, leading to hundreds of dollars in savings. Truebill plans to use its data on rates, subscription lengths, and why people cancel to make recommendations on subscriptions and collect referral fees. For example, it could suggest you cancel ComCast cable and sign up for Netflix, Hulu, and HBO GO. The average number of subscriptions people pay for has doubled from 5.5 to 11 in the last 18 months as more businesses use recurring billing to rack up reliable revenue. It already has 10,000 users. Truebill puts the power back in the hands of the subscriber. Streamup gives pro-grade live editing tools and advanced chat controls to encourage them to livestream their own shows — things like cooking programs, or fan Q&As with bands. They have 22mm monthly active users. MineralSoft provides automated revenue management for minerals like gas and oil. Since launching its enterprise product in January, MineralSoft has brought in $12,000 in monthly recurring revenue. |
New findings from Pluto mission reveal a dynamic world | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | The New Horizons science team has published new findings from their mission to Pluto in a series of 5 articles in the journal . The data from the papers reveal that Pluto is much more geologically diverse and dynamic than anyone could have imagined. “These five detailed papers completely transform our view of Pluto – revealing the former ‘astronomer’s planet’ to be a real world with diverse and active geology, exotic surface chemistry, a complex atmosphere, puzzling interaction with the sun and an intriguing system of small moons.” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator Even though less than half of New Horizons data has been transmitted back home to date, the science team has already had their work cut out for them. NASA described the findings of Pluto as “more interesting and puzzling than models predicted.” A dense hazy atmosphere, floating icy hills, and an icy surface that appears to have changed in recent history and may be actively changing today are just a few of the discoveries that have come out of the New Horizons mission. Four faces of : methane, nitrogen, carbon monoxide & water-ice landscapes. — Corey S. Powell (@coreyspowell) Much of the geological diversity stems from the multiple volatile ices on the surface. Pluto has methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide ice that seem to go through freezing and precipitation (perhaps ) cycles. These cycles occur as Pluto moves closer to and farther away from the sun during its 248-year, highly elliptical orbit. When Pluto is farther away from the sun, part of its atmosphere can freeze and fall to the ground. When it comes closer to the sun, the surface ice will sublimate back into gas. On Earth, the only molecule that constantly goes through similar large-scale cycles is water. High resolution imagery of Pluto’s surface have revealed what scientists believe to be floating icy mountains. According to a NASA , Pluto’s nitrogen ice glaciers appeared to be carrying “numerous, isolated hills that may be fragments of water ice from Pluto’s surrounding uplands.” Water ice can float on nitrogen ice because water ice is simply less dense than frozen nitrogen. This scenario would mean that mounds of water ice are actively moving across Pluto’s icy surface over time, making the dwarf planet much more of a dynamic world that we previously believed. Pluto’s atmosphere particularly surprised the New Horizons team. “We’ve discovered that pre-New Horizons estimates wildly overestimated the loss of material from Pluto’s atmosphere. The thought was that Pluto’s atmosphere was escaping like a comet, but it is actually escaping at a rate much more like Earth’s atmosphere.” – Fran Bagenal, University of Colorado, Boulder, lead author of the particles and plasma Pluto paper With new data from the New Horizons mission, it’s now believed that Pluto’s atmosphere contains layered hazes and is colder and denser than expected. New Horizons launched on January 19 , 2006 and traveled 3 billion miles over the course of 9 and a half years to reach Pluto. At the time of launch, Pluto was still considered a regular planet. It wasn’t until August of 2006 that the International Astronomical Union voted to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status. That decision is still in some scientific circles to this day. On July 14 , 2015, the spacecraft had reached its destination and performed a successful flyby of Pluto, providing the very first close-up look at the dwarf planet. Prior to New Horizons, our best picture of Pluto was a grainy, blurry image provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. During its approach, New Horizons sent back a now-iconic image of Pluto, complete with a heart-shaped geological feature on the surface. To scientists, Pluto had always been a bit of an oddball. The small dwarf planet has about 6 percent the gravity of Earth, it has a higher orbital inclination than the other solar system planets and it rotates at a fairly extreme tilt. Its orbit brings it much farther away from the sun in an area known as the “third zone” of the solar system. Visualization of the extreme tilt of 's axis compared to Mercury, Moon, Earth, and Mars. — Kimberly EnnicoSmith (@kennicosmith) Exploration missions have focused on larger and closer bodies in the first zone (innermost terrestrial planets) and even the second zone (outer gas giants), but not much was known about planetary bodies like Pluto in the third zone. New Horizons was the first mission to explore this “new” type of planetary world. Because of its distance from Earth, data from New Horizons, traveling at the speed of light, takes 5 hours to reach us. Using its 7 science instruments, the mission captured 50 gigabits worth of data during the 9 days surrounding the flyby. With the rest of the data expected back by the end of this year, we’re likely to see even more Pluto discoveries in the months to come. |
Why you should fear artificial intelligence | Doc Huston | 2,016 | 3 | 22 |
I have voraciously read endless pro and con scenarios about artificial intelligence since first writing about it years ago. At this point, there is no doubt that concerns about the dangers of runaway AI raised by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Bill Joy and others are genuine. There also is no doubt whatsoever that the new organizations aimed at mitigating the dangers — , , and others — are extremely important developments. Clearly, no sane person or organization wants to see, let alone encounter, runaway AI. However, a base problem is that no one knows where the actual crossover point — the edge or tipping point — exists, and thus we mortals are unlikely to be able to prevent it from occurring. Said differently, there is a very high probability that we will misjudge where that crossover point is and will thus go beyond the key threshold. Overshooting is the norm in biology and in most, if not all, evolving systems, but especially man-made ones. Part of the overshoot problem is related to the fact that we are really talking about the dynamics of nonlinear systems. It is what Nassim Taleb called “black swan” events and saw as a source of the 2008 economic meltdown. That is, where the statistically improbable becomes probable if only because of the highly probable convergence of other statistically improbable trends or events. This leads directly into the other part of the problem, human nature, aka hubris. While we talk a good prophylactic game, and all those working on AI want to believe, “us versus them” constitutes “realpolitik.” Machine learning is all the rage today. The basic idea is straightforward. Present a computer system with enough examples of something you want it to “learn” — e.g. language translation, facial recognition — and by pruning away the outliers, the correct result will emerge as a statistical probability and be recognized consistently as the best possible match. The situation is far less straightforward with activities that are inherently amorphous and or ambiguous. For example, as yet, no computer program can evaluate the quality or reliability of Internet content, nor comprehend the range of nuances in human conversation. When it does, however, we will face a different set of dilemmas. In particular, with the ability to evaluate the quality or reliability of Internet content also comes the computerized ability to read and evaluate all of human history and knowledge at light-speed. While evaluating and comprehension are not synonymous, the ability to evaluate content should establish machine-learning threshold benchmarks for human behavior and intent. Such comprehension, the aim of voice-activated virtual assistants — e.g. Siri, Now, Cortana, Echo, M — starts with the rudimentary routing of queries to third-party databases. Of course, machine learning is at work in the background. As this learning process progresses there is not only an appreciation of standard conversational nuances, but also various dimensions of subterfuge, deception and lies. In considering these developments, the new prophylactic AI organizations and like-minded programmers believe they can somehow short-circuit AI from developing a negative view of us or create some failsafe mechanisms. That is a tall order under the best of circumstances, a challenge requiring unprecedented precision with little, if any, room for error. Given the range of arbitrary, even contradictory, interpretations of morality and ethics we continue to demonstrate as a species, the idea that all variables and permutations can be captured in code defies credulity. I mean, just look at the disparate interpretations of religious and legal texts today after a millennia of effort. Similarly, there is no computer code written that cannot be hacked and exploited. Encryption, even when quantum computing matures, is likely to lead to competing, dueling algorithms like seen with high-frequency trading. The idea that there is some overarching directive — some golden rule — we can instill in AI begs the question of what that might be. Thus, it seems, at a base minimum, all we want is for AI not to work against us. Still, given biology’s predator/prey nature, how biochemistry and emotions drive us psychologically and how, as a civilization, we learned to distrust the “other” and authority, even this is a Sisyphean challenge. The new prophylactic AI organizations have a number of worthwhile strategies. One is to design multiple and diverse systems to illuminate potential pitfalls that can be remedied before an AI system is institutionalized. Another is to develop preemptive failsafe mechanisms. Then there is the possibility of developing a checks-and-balances scheme among competing AI systems. All are great ideas — but the devil is in the details. While diverse system designs will reveal some pitfalls, the likelihood of discovering them all suggests an unprecedented degree of future knowledge and perhaps an infinite number of scenarios. Failsafes or kill-switches sound good. The real problems come in to play when we are looking at an AI that recognizes deception as both an offensive and defensive strategy. Competing systems to check or limit supposed excesses of another AI assumes there is neither a competitive algorithmic arms race for supremacy or “borg-like” collusive merger of AIs. But here is the real, fundamental problem. During the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet Union made a treaty banning “offensive” bio-weapons. However, after the Cold War we learned the Soviets were developing an anthrax weapon designed to carry one hundred deadly organisms to preclude an effective response. Meanwhile, the U.S. and its allies were developing “defensive” bio-weapons, which were intended to provide insight into “offensive” weapons — a small step technologically. Thus, neither side lived up to the treaty’s spirit, and bio-weapon development never really slowed at all. Similarly, one of the Snowden revelations was how the NSA manipulated and weakened the RSA cryptography standard that the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued to organizations. In other words, this was an instance where the government deliberately lied about the security features various organizations were acquiring so the NSA could secretly spy on them. Finally, the U.S. and Israeli governments created an extraordinarily sophisticated cyber-weapon called Stuxnet to attack Iranian nuclear facilities. The attack worked. But despite the brilliant design, the planners neglected to anticipate one minor detail in the code they developed. Namely, how once out on the Internet every government and malicious hacker actor would be able to copy and learn its sophisticated malware techniques, thereby upping the game and stakes in the global cyber arms race. I could go on, but you get the gist. There is no reason to assume that however successful these well-intentioned new prophylactic AI organizations are in mitigating potential threats that governments and military organizations throughout the world will play by the same rules. Rather, as all of history tells us, they will bend or break rules however they see fit under the claim that the ends justify the means. That is classic realpolitik — if we don’t do it, “they” will…and we lose. Of course, none of these governments or military organizations presumes their AI systems will exceed their control. But, even it if did exceed control, the Cold War logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD) makes sense to these Doctor Strangeloves. Setting aside fundamental evaluative and comprehension issues discussed herein, there will come a nonlinear crossover point. AI will become self-aware and experience an “intelligence explosion” that comparatively puts humans on a par with other primates, if not ants. The core problem is not that we do not see the threat or have bad intentions. Rather, the real problem exists somewhere between the hubris of human nature and our institutions. Paraphrasing , the real problem of humanity is [that] we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology. Consequently, short of creating real, more truly democratic 21st-century institutions soon, it might be wise to adopt a philosophical attitude. That is, like our children, AI is our prodigy. Like our children, for better or worse, they will carry our legacy forward — to the stars and beyond, for eternity. |
Truebill raises seed funding to help you cancel unwanted subscriptions | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | , a startup that helps people track and cancel their subscriptions, announced it has raised a small round of seed funding. The round includes $120,000 from Y Combinator, with additional funding from angel investors like David Marcus (formerly a PayPal executive and now vice president of messaging products at Facebook), KISSmetrics co-founder Hiten Shah and Saba founder Bobby Yazdani, bringing the total round size to $350,000. Now, some of you might be responsible people who don’t need any help managing your subscriptions. But are you there aren’t any surprises lurking in your bank and credit card statements? It’s easy to forget to cancel something, and Truebill founder and CEO Yahya Mokhtarzada argued that as more and more businesses are moving toward a subscription model, the need for something like Truebill will only grow. “People don’t want to remember 15 different logins for 15 different services,” Mokhtarzada said. What the service currently does is examine your bank statement, identify subscriptions and help you cancel with one-click when something isn’t wanted. And to be clear, you don’t need to remember your login information to cancel — Truebill will just ask for the needed information, like your email address and your billing address. (In more difficult cases, like gyms, you might need to cancel in person or send a certified letter, but Truebill can actually generate that letter automatically.) Mokhtarzada added that since in February, more than 10,000 people have signed up and they’ve canceled more than $300,000 worth of annual subscriptions. Eventually, he said he wants Truebill to become a “full subscription management platform.” In other words, not only will it help you cancel subscriptions, but it could notify you when a subscription needs your attention, say if you need to provide more information for a NatureBox or Blue Apron delivery. “We actually take a positive view of subscriptions,” Mokhtarzada said. “Subscriptions are good for consumers — they’re convenient, they help consumers try things when they’re not ready to buy it yet. We want to make it easier to make subscriptions a bigger part of your life by reducing the friction in both signup and cancellation.” |
Batteries and all, EVs are greener than gasoline | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | Electric vehicles come out of the gate with green cred. They don’t even have tailpipes because they don’t have any emissions while they’re driving. But do EVs deserve their goody-too-green rep? A report from the says they do indeed. Even if you take into account the battery, the manufacturing process and even the recycling and disposal process, EVs are the source of fewer greenhouse gases over their lifetimes than gasoline-powered vehicles. The UCS modeled the two best-selling all-electric vehicles in the United States, the and , and compared them with an average of gasoline-powered models of similar weight and size, such as the Ford Focus and Audi A8. The Leaf was considered a “mid-size mid-range” vehicle with its 24 kWh battery, while the Model S was a “full-size long-range” car with an 85 kWh battery. There are two common caveats people mention when talking about the cradle-to-grave emissions of an electric vehicle: the resources required to make the lithium-ion battery and the source of the electricity used to charge the car. It’s true, according to the UCS study, that manufacturing a lithium-ion battery produces a lot of greenhouse gases. “The larger the battery, the greater the vehicle range; but also the greater the weight added to the vehicle and the greater emissions from manufacturing the battery,” the report notes. So the Tesla battery goes 265 miles on a charge, but it also emits more greenhouse gases to make that battery. The good news is that emissions-free driving in an EV makes up for those greenhouse gases more quickly than a gasoline-powered car makes up its manufacturing emissions. The Leaf-like car would offset those emissions in 4,900 miles of driving, and the modeled Model S would take 19,000 miles, using the average U.S. electricity grid mix as a source for charging. In both cases, that’s about a 50 percent reduction in emissions compared to the gasoline cars over their lifetimes. As for the source of the electricity, no matter where you live in the United States, even if your local utility includes coal in the mix, an EV will produce lower global warming emissions than the average new gasoline powered car getting 29 mpg. Coal use is dropping, though, so in two-thirds of the country, driving an EV will have lower emissions over its lifetime than a 50-mpg gasoline car. So even with the admittedly emissions-intensive process of manufacturing the battery and the possibility of using coal to charge up every night, the UCS found that modern EVs are cleaner from cradle to grave and well to wheels than most gasoline-powered vehicles on the road today. EVs still aren’t for everyone — if your commute involves mountain passes or sub-zero temperatures, you might want to hold off. But if you were looking for one more reason to go electric, this might be it. |
Adobe announces new data-sharing effort for cross-device ad targeting | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | Adobe unveiled a new push for cross-device targeting today at its Adobe Summit. Amit Ahuja, the general manager of data management for Adobe Marketing, explained the product to me beforehand, and he laid out the problem in a pretty straightforward manner: “If you don’t know who the user is across different devices, clearly that’s broken.” So at a basic level, the aim of cross-device tracking is to identify when the same person is using multiple devices. Ahuja acknowledges that Adobe isn’t the first company to address this issue, but he argued that are lacking. They generally fall into two categories — you’re either using login information (the “deterministic” approach) or you’re making an educated guess based on user behavior (the “probabilistic” approach). Using logins sounds a lot more reliable. After all, if someone signs into Facebook from a laptop and then they sign into the same account on their phone, there’s a pretty high chance that both devices are used by the same person. The problem, of course, is that not every company can be Google or Facebook or Amazon. So Ahuja is pitching the new Adobe Marketing Cloud Device Co-op as a way to combine the accuracy of the deterministic approach with the scale of the probabilistic one. To achieve this, members of the co-op will share data with each other. So if Company X has been able to use login data to establish that two devices belong to the same person, other members of the co-op take advantage of that fact and tailor their advertising accordingly. So yes, that means if a business wanted to target ads at you on your laptop, they could now try to reach you on your smartphone, too. The ads can also get smarter in other ways; for example, if you looked at a product on your laptop and then bought it on your tablet, if the advertiser connects those devices, it knows that it’s probably not that useful to bombard you with retargeted ads for something you’ve already purchased. AdExchanger first , when it was hearing rumbles about privacy concerns from potential participants. On the question of privacy, Ahuja noted that advertisers using the Adobe Marketing Cloud will only participate in the program if they explicitly opt in. He also said that no personally identifiable information is being shared about individual users — only the fact that certain devices are associated with each other. |
Domo takes on Slack with $131 million at $2 billion+ valuation | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | Domo also today , a mix of about 1,000 free and freemium apps, which can be customized for any company. The company is also introducing a free messaging service with threaded conversations, which James refers to as a Slack competitor. “By making Buzz available for free to everyone in the organization and putting business insights at the center of the conversation, Buzz redefines how social technologies can improve the speed at which insights can be reached and business decisions can be made,” James said in . |
The 9.7-inch iPad Pro is slightly slower than the 12.9-inch iPad Pro | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | Apple doesn’t like to talk about specs. But it turns out my boss Matthew Panzarino already has review units of and iPhone SE. So nobody is going to stop us if we want to run on these new devices. The result is both interesting and unsurprising. While the 9.7-inch iPad Pro features an A9X chip like its big brother, it’s a bit underclocked. As you can see on these Geekbench screens, the system on a chip runs at 2.16 GHz. Comparatively, the runs at 2.24GHz, leading to higher Geekbench scores. This isn’t the first time Apple underclocked its own processors. The company usually does that for the iPad mini for example. The smaller iPad Pro has a smaller battery, and underclocking the processor is a good way to save battery. When it comes to RAM, it’s a bit of a surprise as the 9.7-inch iPad Pro only has 2GB of RAM compared to 4GB for the bigger iPad Pro. The iPad Air 2 already had 2GB of RAM and you could feel it when you were multitasking a lot and using multiple Safari tabs. Another detail, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro’s lightning port doesn’t support USB 3 speeds. Standard lightning cables are USB 2 cables, but if you wanted to transfer large videos over lightning using a camera adaptor, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro is a better option. [tweet 712331691579219968 hide_thread=’true’] But it’s not like the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is worse iPad than the big iPad Pro. It has a better camera, a better display and an integrated Apple SIM. It looks like the 12-megapixel camera is the same as the one in the iPhone 6s. It can shoot live photos and 4K videos. The selfie camera is better as well. Many people were also wondering whether the 9.7-inch iPad Pro would stay still on a table because there’s a camera bump on the back. The answer is: no, it doesn’t wobble. [tweet 712328099384270849 hide_thread=’true’] The display has new four-channel ambient light sensors to measure the ambient light more accurately and adjust white balance. It’s also 25 percent brighter and 40 percent less reflective than an iPad Air 2 with a wider color gamut. At 500 nits of light, it’s the brightest iPad ever. And the LTE variants of the 9.7-inch iPad Pro comes with a built-in Apple SIM so that you can subscribe to data plan when you travel. The nano SIM card slot is still here. Finally, the software keyboard is the as the one on the iPad Air 2 — Apple didn’t add extra keys like on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. As for , it has 2GB of RAM . So Apple hasn’t cheaped out on its small iPhone. As far as we know, it has the same A9 processor and camera as the iPhone 6s. But it doesn’t have the faster TouchID sensor — it’s the same TouchID sensor as the one on the iPhone 5s or 6. The iPhone SE looks like a surprisingly capable device, while the iPad Pro lineup is a bit confusing. In some ways, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is more powerful, and in others the 12.9-inch model is better. It all comes down to what you’re going to do with it as the 12.9-inch iPad Pro is substantially bigger than the 9.7-inch device. |
8tracks is raising a $30 million crowdfunding round | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | Music startup has always had a strong sense of community. But the startup is taking this one step further by raising $30 million from its own community. Instead of asking money from venture capitalists, the company has started an equity crowdfunding campaign on and it’s been working well. Around 30,000 community members have committed to invest $1,000 each to get a fraction of the company. So if everything goes as planned and the investment is cleared by the SEC, 8tracks should raise a $30 million Series A round. Under the JOBS Act, anyone can invest in private companies, not just people who make more than $200,000 a year. “As you can imagine, it’s a particularly good fit for 8tracks as our community is our chief asset,” founder and CEO David Porter told me. “It’s our users who make the programming and our users who promote that programming, so it’s only natural that they should also be able to finance that programming and literally own a piece of 8tracks.” 8tracks is a laid-back radio service like Pandora, but with human-generated playlists. When you create a playlist, you associate it with various tags. These tags can be a mood (happy, love, etc.), an activity (workout, study, sleep) and of course a music genre. As a listener, you can then combine these tags together to find the perfect playlist. For example, you could do a search for “study + indie + summer.” The company had previously raised a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, SoftTech VC and Ben Drury, as well as . It now has 6 million monthly active users, slightly down compared to . This upcoming round is a huge step up compared to previous rounds, and it looks like the company is going to need it. The company has been signing with music labels in order to access their catalogs. It’s also on international streaming as the company doesn’t have proper licensing deals for countries outside of the U.S. and Canada. Re-enabling international streaming as well as signing more music label deals are two cumbersome and expensive processes. But as the company will soon have enough money in the bank, it looks like 8tracks is going to do just that. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 3 | 14 | null |
Facebook joins WhatsApp in dropping BlackBerry support | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | BlackBerry-loving device clutchers are facing a tricky choice if they wish to continue to interact with their friends: WhatsApp, Facebook and Facebook Messenger all hit the “unfriend” button on the struggling phone maker’s latest operating system, BlackBerry 10. Facebook-owned WhatsApp made on the BlackBerry platform three years ago, and announced at the tail-end of last month that it was rescinding that decision. “While these mobile devices have been an important part of our story, they don’t offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app’s features in the future,” the company announced. They are for BlackBerry, along with operating systems like Symbian S60, S40 and ancient versions of Android. This week, Facebook and Facebook Messenger are following in WhatsApp’s footsteps, announcing that both will stop supporting BlackBerry’s own OS later this year. Of course, BlackBerry models running Android, such as the , will continue to be able to run the Android version of Facebook’s apps. “We are extremely disappointed in their decision as we know so many users love these apps. We fought back to work with WhatsApp and Facebook to change their minds, but at this time, their decision stands,” a spokesperson for BlackBerry . Facebook said that 99.5 percent of smartphone sales today are covered by mobile phone operating systems from Apple, Google and Microsoft. BlackBerry users will continue to be able to use the mobile web version of Facebook to post and consume content, but without a native client, it will be hard to deliver a reasonable user experience for BlackBerry 10 users. Having said that, not all hope is gone: BlackBerry 10 , via – bizarrely enough – the Amazon app store. For customers who care about social media, this move likely means buying a BlackBerry is off the table, which is undoubtedly a hard blow for the company. On the other hand, BlackBerry has been aimed more at the corporate/enterprise market for a long time, and it’s possible that the lack of native social media clients is less of an issue for that reason. It’s unclear whether Facebook’s vote of no confidence is just a little bump in the road, or yet another sign that BlackBerry is circling the drain. The stock market doesn’t appear to have reacted negatively to the breaking news, but I, for one, am happy I don’t own any BlackBerry stock. |
Loverly raises $2 million more to put a wedding planner in your pocket | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | A new service from the online wedding inspiration startup wants to put the capabilities of a wedding planner right in your pocket. Officially launching today, Loverly is unveiling that will send brides and grooms a list of vetted wedding vendors that match the couple’s budget, needs and who have availability for the wedding date in question. In addition to this, the company is announcing an additional $2 million in funding to support the launch of this new marketplace, from both new and existing investors. Loverly had previously raised a . The new funding round, meanwhile, was led by Hunt Technology Ventures, LP with participation from Montage Ventures, GrowthX, Transmedia Capital, 645 Ventures, Great Oaks Capital and Female Founders Fund. To date, Loverly has focused on offering a website and service that offers inspiration, through imagery, lists of products, scoops, expert advice, tips and more. However, its last year didn’t quite pan out. The company has since shuttered those efforts and returned to its roots – connecting couples with local service providers, albeit now in a different format. The move comes at a time when a number of companies are experimenting with chat-based virtual assistants. However, some are finding that their often human-powered bots weren’t sustainable. That has led a handful to pivot to more automated systems, like , for example, or how the emerged from earlier efforts that were also less automated. With Loverly’s concierge app, though, there’s a combination of human assistance and automation at play. To get started, brides and/or grooms tap the concierge button in the company’s mobile app and provide information about their wedding, including budget, guest count and date. This is followed up by a 15-30 minute phone call, in most cases, where a trained wedding expert at Loverly’s headquarters gets filled in on what’s really important to the couple in terms of how they want to spend their budget and what pain points they’re encountering. For now, this is a very high-touch process, but the company is building out technology to make this more automated, we’re told. Lastly, by way of an algorithm that matches what the couples want with the vendor criteria on file, Loverly is able to return a list of vendors. However, before sending these suggestions over to the couple, the company will also check with the vendor to make sure they are actually available on the wedding date. [gallery ids="1295420,1295421,1295422,1295424"] 48 hours later, the concierge “bot” in Loverly’s mobile app will send the couple a package of recommendations for a given category, like flower vendors, for example. The bride and/or groom can choose to unlock this package for a $49 fee. Explains Loverly founder and CEO Kellee Khalil, the company had tested making its consultations free, but found that more users flaked on phone calls when they weren’t being charged. With a fee, the perceived value of this service increases. But it’s also more affordable than using a traditional wedding planner, she says. “A wedding planner costs, on average, $3,500 starting, for a full-blown one,” says Khalil, which is why only 16% of brides hire one today. Plus, one of biggest reasons couples hire a wedding planner in the first place is vendor recommendations. “That’s really what you’re paying for early on when you’re hiring a wedding planner,” she adds. Loverly today features over 70,000 vendors in total, but only a subsection are live in the chat service at launch. The overall platform, however, sees a million and a half monthly visitors who engage with the site and its content. Now, the goal is to move those users to the mobile app, which also lets them browse ideas and save media, images, articles and more to a mobile scrapbook. Khalil believes that the new messaging-based marketplace will benefit vendors, too, as well as the couples hiring them, as it’s able to send vendors qualified leads. That is, it matches vendors to those who can afford their prices and can fill a hole in their schedules. Vendors also pay $99 per month for inclusion in this new product, which is live now only in New York and L.A., with plans to roll out to other markets based on customer demand. In the meantime, couples outside these regions can use the concierge app for more general tips and advice. The concierge service is live now in the Loverly iOS application, . |
Houzz opens its Commerce API to third-party vendors | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | , the home remodelling site with a focus on giving you house envy, today announced that it is opening up its Commerce API for third-party developers. While you may mostly look at Houzz as a mobile app and website that features beautiful home remodelling photography in an effort to connect you to the professionals behind these projects, the service also features a that to sell you the products needed to complete your next kitchen or bathroom remodel. As the Houzz team tells me, its recently launched , which lets you see what a certain product would look like in your home, is driving quite a few sales, too. About half of the users who purchased something through the Houzz app used this feature. The company says it currently features about five million products from over 10,000 merchants on its site. Houzz president and co-founder Alon Cohen tells me that the API will be open to all merchants who are selling home good. “We know that merchants want fast, seamless ways to integrate with to submit products, process orders, and keep inventory up-to-date and a commerce API will help us deliver that experience,” Cohen said. Houzz’s launch partner for the new API , which now features a Houzz sales channel for its users, for example. Using this channel, Shopify users can publish their products on Houzz and those who use a different service will be able to use the new API to integrate their existing backend systems with Houzz’s. For the time being, there is no cost associated with using the API. Potential partners who want access to the API can apply (and those who are already approved sellers on Houzz can do so from the service’s Seller Central page). |
David Lee is back with a new fund: Refactor Capital | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | David Lee, a former Google executive who for several years ran the seed-stage venture fund SV Angel, is back with his own new firm, shows an . The outfit is called Refactor Capital and it’s apparently targeting $50 million for its debut fund. Refactor, which was incorporated , doesn’t appear to have a site up and running yet. But the SEC filing lists as Lee’s cofounders Zal Bilimoria and Rick Barber. Bilimoria has spent the last 2.5 years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where, according to his , he co-led the firm’s investments in Cyanogen, Teespring, Omada Health, ToutApp, Altschool, Lyft, Product Hunt, Honor, HumanAPI, Mixpanel, SolveBio, uBiome, and Zenefits, among others. Bilimoria says on LinkedIn that he also recently helped get Andreessen Horowitz’s new off the ground. He looks to be leaving just as Andreessen Horowitz nears a close on its fifth multi-stage venture fund, which sources have told us will be at least in size. (That’s where the firm capped its fourth fund .) Rick Barber, who also worked briefly at Andreessen Horowitz — he was a data scientist on staff in 2013 — most recently served as the chief of staff at , a five-year-old, San Francisco-based health care analytics company. Reached at his L.A. home, Lee declined to comment about the fund, citing SEC regulations. Seemingly, the firm is an extension of the angel bets that Lee has been making since leaving SV Angel, which is itself and with which Lee somewhat abruptly in May of last year. (Firm cofounder Ron Conway said at the time that Lee had “made a personal decision to spend more time with his wife, children, and extended family in Los Angeles.”) Among his numerous personal bets over the last year, Lee has backed , a new, L.A.-based online marketplace connecting indie toymakers with retailers. He has also seemingly spent a lot of time looking at health care-related startups, with other investments in , a year-old, San Francisco-based personalized drug combination testing service for cancer patients; , an eight-year-old, St. Louis, Mo.-based company that’s building disease diagnostics using RNA (as opposed to DNA); and , a year-old, Palo Alto-based telemedicine startup that calls doctors on demand. (We profiled the company in January when it closed on $10 million in Series A funding.) Indeed, sources familiar with Refactor’s plans say the firm plans to spend much of its time on the intersection of healthcare and software. It isn’t surprising. Lee, a cancer survivor, had talked about his beginning in 2013. News of Refactor’s new fund was in Term Sheet. |
DARPA kicks off $2m Grand Challenge focused on intelligently splitting up radio spectrum | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it’s not an automation moonshot like the self-driving car challenges of the early 2000s or the recent (and ) . The Defense Department’s R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applications: radio frequency spectrum splitting. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape. Seriously, check out that cool chart at the top ( at DARPA’s site if you want to print out the poster – 56k warning): everything is spoken for right up to the border with microwave frequencies, and more gadgets are crowding into each one daily. “The current practice of assigning fixed frequencies for various uses irrespective of actual, moment-to-moment demand is simply too inefficient to keep up with actual demand and threatens to undermine wireless reliability,” said William Chappell, director of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, . The solution? Well, someone else has to figure part out. That’s the point of these challenges. It could be you, assuming you’re a world class, multidisciplinary team of engineers! Leverage all that hot new tech: AI, machine learning, hyper-miniaturized transceiver arrays (I made that one up, but it sounds plausible). Just come up with something and bring your best game to DARPA’s record-size wireless testbed, which it plans to call the “Colosseum.” Pretty bombastic name for a glorified anechoic chamber, but it should actually be a cool environment to test in. The researchers will be able to simulate radio-saturated environments like cities and battlefields to see how competitors’ systems function. The Challenge was announced at the International Wireless Communications Expo in Las Vegas, and Chappell offered more details at the Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Summit, a separate but nearby event that seems tailor-made for talking about this particular challenge. No rush on getting your system ready: 2017 will see the first of three year-long phases, paring down the competition to teams that will duke it out in the Colosseum sometime in early 2020. Future updates can be found at — where else — . |
What marketers can learn from the economy of convenience | Justin Gray | 2,016 | 3 | 25 |
If you think about it, money is a ridiculous concept. Without going into a gold standard history lesson, let’s just say the idea that I can hold this , this little cloth rectangle of varying denomination, and exchange it for tangible goods and services is, at the very least, a system of belief. How we carry our money, and how we’ve evolved to about our money, is an even stranger anthropological phenomenon. For a while, we represented our worth exclusively in a way you could touch — cash. It was finite, and it kept things simple: When I’m out, I’m out. The rise of plastic in the 1960s made commerce easier, but not simpler: When I’m out, I can still keep going. And how much do I really have, anyway? And now, here we are — a wallet-less society, if we so choose. Pay with your phone, pay through an app, pay with an automatic deduction you set up once. And you and probably don’t even remember your password to access and cancel. There’s money — your money — flying around in every direction almost every day, and you don’t even have to stop and think about it. And you’re with that. Researchers coined a name for this: It’s called the . In short, when you don’t have cash, you spend more money. It makes perfect sense — parting with a crisp $20 bill is a little more sorrowful than a mindless swipe of a card, even if you tacked on a few more items to raise your total to $25. The majority of consumers think this way, and businesses are foaming at the pocketbook to get in line. We are smack dab in the middle of the . There’s an app for every one of our whims, many with premium features for which we don’t think twice about upgrading. Once you’ve linked up your bank account with Uber, Apple Music or Tinder Plus (don’t lie), money is forever in the background, and it’s all about that sweet, sweet content. To me, this willingness to so easily separate ourselves from our cash (especially in the millennial generation) signals that we value convenience and customer service more highly than ever before. Uber might add a 150 percent surcharge during peak hours, but for the clean car, friendly driver and access to Spotify, I’ll happily pay it. It’s given whole new meaning to the irritating phrase “convenience charge.” Now, thanks to innovations like one-click payments on Amazon, I can actually see the convenience in real life, make it personal to me and accept it with no problems. If this sounds like a utopian world where happy consumers are forking over extra nickels and dimes where they never would have in the past, it is — for brands. In this on-demand economy, we’ve grown accustomed to sharing personal information with our devices in exchange for the ease of transactions. The younger the buyer, the more willing and trusting they are. In 2015, millennials overtook all other generations in terms of , and each year more and more of those millennial buyers are buying more and more. And that means enormous reserves of data for retailers and marketers who can now serve real-time convenience to the cash-less masses. As companies get a better understanding of what we buy, they’re beginning to map we buy it. Select Target stores have already installed that communicate with shoppers’ cell phones, using location data to learn about consumer buyer habits that can greatly influence the layout of stores, placement of certain products and staffing management. This type of opt-out technology will have plenty of detractors who view it as invasive, but the same argument could have been made when we started feeding routing numbers into our phones. In fact, Apple Pay, which is quickly emerging as the new standard in commerce, has to prevent the type of wide-scale credit card data breach we’ve seen retailers suffer in the past several decades. The methods of studying consumer behavior may have changed with new technology, but marketers have long gleaned insight from buyers in order to make the shopping experience more convenient. Which, as we know, makes it more lucrative for businesses. I don’t think any technology will soon replace credit cards in totality. That shouldn’t even be the goal. You can see by the list of Apple Pay’s early-adopting retailers — McDonald’s, Walgreens, Starbucks — that marketers understand how squeezing the most out of small “cash” transactions and making that upcharge a subconscious decision on the part of the consumer will go a long way. With the help of marketers, technology enables us to feel like winners: the personalized ping when you’re one aisle over from a great deal, the promo code to get 20 percent off your next ride, the instant-order barcode scanners. There may be a small price to pay for feeling like a winner, and it’s probably a couple bucks more than you would have paid in cash. |
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel nabs another $1.3 billion for Founders Fund | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | Peter Thiel’s decades old pulled together another $1.3 billion dollars today for Founders Fund VI. Thiel, a billionaire investor in Facebook and SpaceX and co-founder of PayPal, will remain at the helm, with partners Lauren Gross, Ken Howery, Geoff Lewis, Scott Nolan, Luke Nosek and Brian Singerman. Founders Fund is known to focus on cutting-edge investments in space, biotech and other fringe areas. The new capital comes at a time when unicorns, mid- and early-stage startups are struggling to raise and get to profitability. Will the new infusion have a certain area of interest? Not according to a spokesperson for the fund. The team consists of generalists with experience investing in every stage, and the spokesperson told TechCrunch they are “open to looking at all sectors, including areas they haven’t previously invested in.” “We look to make a material impact with each investment, and that requires investing with conviction,” said Founders Fund partner Singerman in a . “We’re not afraid to go all in when we truly believe in a company. A fund of this size will allow us to put more capital behind our strongest entrepreneurs.” This is the sixth fund, bringing the total amount of capital raised thus far to more than $3 billion.
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Live is having a moment | Tarikh Korula | 2,016 | 3 | 25 |
Twitter, which turned 10 this week, has apparently made Live its . At an all-hands meeting last month, Mark Zuckerberg declared live video a top priority for Facebook. Clearly, Zuck’s toward Twitter’s Periscope, a mobile live streaming app which itself with Meerkat. Amazon is expanding its recently acquired live gaming platform, Twitch, to new content categories like . Google, which Twitch with Amazon, is rumored to be working on a while collecting millions of viewers by live-streaming events including the and the presidential primary debates. Meanwhile, and are playing catchup to , which premiered its first web experience for the Oscars and its first global for a cricket match this past week. Live media is the most dynamic category of mobile storytelling developing today because it’s fast, immersive and consumable in the palm of your hand. It’s everything we love (and occasionally hate) about the internet – immediate, first person, and chaotic as hell. And it’s changing the way we connect with the world’s stories because it’s creating and participate in real-world events. Breaking news launches new media. When the 7/7 London bombings struck in London, Flickr’s user-generated photos from the event transformed it to the international photo platform in an instant. When Sully Sullenberger safely landed an airplane on the Hudson, Twitter became the way the world saw a photo from the . And with the recent San Bernardino shootings, SnapChat in the eyes of many from sexting app to . While live streaming has been with us for a decade, Live media is new. So let’s get our arms around what we mean by Live media. Despite the variety of platforms and formats, there are some common characteristics. Live media comes from real-time stories, rooted in a place and time, told from different points of view. Live media is mobile media. It can be photos, videos, comments, status updates, check-ins and various combinations of the above. Live media uniquely gives remote audiences the ability to both experience and participate in the story as it unfolds. And finally, because Live media is multi-angle, multi format, and unsynchronized, it’s often a royal mess that requires some human editing to aggregate into summarized streams for easy consumption. Live media is: Live media is going mainstream due to an explosive combination of factors. Over two billion camera-enabled smartphones and tablets are activated globally. viscerally captures the massive coverage of mobile devices in our world. Add to that picture, taken in 2013, now ubiquitous and robust 4G networks, and it’s possible to stream media seamlessly to both emerging and dominant that themselves blanket an engaged, global audience of billions of eyeballs. The final ingredient in the adoption of Live media is a generation of millennials—and increasingly all of us—who rely on mobile as their first home for information gathering, consumption, and participation. This mobile generation supplants previous generations tethered to televisions and desktop browsers. Their world is mobile-to-mobile, with real-time media, first person perspectives, active participation, and Post-live replays in their hands. And how will we manage all this Live media? Most of us are too busy to respond to every alert. How will consumers search, discover, and consume the Post-live blizzard? People will naturally want ways to bookmark, replay, search, categorize, and surface Post-live media. (Note that I have a horse in this race, as I’m CEO of , a video platform that is actively working on search, discovery and distribution of Post-live replays). Speaking of Post-live replays, “Live” has always been a bit of a construct. Live radio delays built in for editing and television has been broadcasting pre-taped “Live” shows like Night Live for decades. While it appears as though technology has evolved to the point where “live” can actually mean “live,” Live can still be a slippery concept. SnapChat’s Live Stories are often made up of media shared hours earlier. Twitter’s real-time feed now controversially contains “While you were away…” time-shifted tweets. Much of this distinction is smoothed over by time-sensitivity through ephemerality on platforms like SnapChat, Meerkat and Periscope. But as these platforms mature, there will be a growing tension between corralling Live participants and reaching larger Post-live audiences. Consumers love video. SnapChat Live Stories started as photo collages but are dominated by video now. Expect to see video play a growing role in Live media and the content we create and consume on our phones. More video on our phones is inevitable as mobile cameras improve, networks expand capacity, apps for creation and editing improve, and more folks cut the cord and look for new sources of content. Since video ad rates outperform other online ad stock, there’s going to be a platform hunger for it as well. Perhaps this is why social networks like Facebook and are racing to incorporate video. “[Live video is] one of the things I’m most excited about,” . “I think video is a mega trend, almost as big as mobile,” . To the extent that purveyors of Live media can, they should focus on improving and diversifying all their offerings around video. If Live media is as big as Zuck and the rest of the players in the space are betting on, it will transform how we communicate, tell our stories and get our news. Currently, it’s early days and there’s much left to flesh out. Will online marketplaces develop for consumers to request coverage? Imagine being able to pool resources and work together to document breaking and niche events through networked online communities. With an explosion of Live media apps, will new services attempt to differentiate in verticals devoted to niche communities? note that we’re already starting to see this with services like , , and . Currently, SnapChat Stories, Twitter Moments and Instagram Spotlights all have a layer of human curation and editing. Will algorithms be able to help sort, rank and create highlights? Can communities be leveraged to participate in curation? Or will editorial voice and reportage become more important? Nothing in life is free. Services will need to figure out business models around Live media. Expect to see monetization experiments with sponsorships, pre-roll advertising, overlays, analytics, virtual goods and patronage. It remains to be seen how all of the above will transform the way we connect to stories. But one thing is certain: the revolution will be Live. |
2020 is set to be the biggest year yet for Mars exploration | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | 2020 is set to be a good year for Mars exploration. The United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, Europe and Russia all have planned Mars missions that are scheduled to launch, or likely to launch, in that year. There have been more than 40 to Mars throughout history. Some of these missions were failures, while others completed their goals and are no longer operational. Today, there are two operational robots on the Martian surface and five operational orbiters circling the planet. To date, all successful missions to Mars have been completed by four entities: NASA, the Soviet Union, the European Space Agency and the Indian Space Research Organization. Japan and China have tried and failed. In about five years, UAE and China hope to join the ranks of nations who’ve successfully explored Mars, while NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are planning ambitious missions to expand their Mars exploration capabilities. Why is everyone launching in 2020? It’s part strategic, and part coincidence. Because of the location of Mars relative to the Earth, prime launch windows (where the least amount of power is required to travel between the two planets) only open up every 26 months. One of those windows happens to be between July and August of 2020, which is when these missions are scheduled, or expected to launch. Of course, any of these missions could have been launched during earlier windows in 2018, or later windows in 2022; 2020 just happened to line up with budgets and development timelines. NASA owns and operates the only two working rovers on the surface of Mars today. Three of the five operational Mars orbiters also belong to NASA. A smaller Mars mission, the , is scheduled to launch during the 2018 window, but NASA’s next big rover worth $1.9 billion will leave Earth in 2020. The design of the Mars 2020 rover is based largely on the design of the Curiosity rover, one of the highly successful robots that is still operational on Mars today. The new 2020 rover will make use of Curiosity’s landing system and rover chassis design, but will carry a new set of seven instruments and upgraded hardware. Like many of the other landers and rovers before it, one goal of the Mars 2020 mission is to assess the habitability of its surrounding Martian environment. The rover will also directly search for signs of ancient Martian life. Equipped with a coring drill, the nuclear-powered rover will be capable of collecting and storing Martian samples. NASA’s goal is to, , design a sample-return mission that would be able to retrieve the samples and bring them back to Earth. Another possibility is that future astronauts would collect these samples and bring them back. “Next year, we will send the InSight lander to study the planet’s core and in 2020, a new rover called Mars 2020 will build on the success of Curiosity and help us prepare for human arrival at Mars and, for the first time ever, it will cache a sample for later return to Earth.” Dr. Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator The Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch in July, 2020. In recent years, China has focused its exploration on the Moon. Performing the first soft landing on the moon in 37 years, their Chang’e 3 lander sent back a suite of never-before seen true color of the lunar surface. A follow-up mission to the far side of the Moon is planned for 2018. In 2020, however, China has its sights set on the red planet. Late last year, China unveiled a model one-third the size of the spacecraft they intend to be the country’s first successful Martian mission. The spacecraft is composed of two main parts: an orbiter and a rover. With their own spacecraft in orbit around the planet, China can ensure a means of communicating with their lander. India, ESA and NASA also have working orbiters around Mars, but collaborating with other nations for communication purposes would be tricky, or downright impossible. So instead, they’re sending their own. Animation of the mission can be seen at the 1:47 minute mark in the video below. https://youtu.be/rwq3p-UKLEQ?t=1m47s As their first Mars mission, the primary goal is to successfully develop the capability to remotely navigate a probe into orbit, soft-land a rover on the Martian surface and maintain communication with both. While scientific goals are also likely, China has yet to release specific details on this part of the mission. At just two years old, the United Arab Emirates Space Agency plans to complete its first mission to Mars in 2020 with an orbiter they’ve named Hope. In the video below, the Hope mission team explains that they plan to produce the first-ever truly global picture of the Martian atmosphere and perform the first holistic study of the Martian climate. With a scheduled launch in July, 2020, the space probe will be the Arab world’s first Mars mission. After a nine-month journey, Hope will arrive at Mars in 2021. That year holds particular significance for the UAE because it’ll be the country’s 50th anniversary. “Despite all the tensions and the conflicts across the Middle East, we have proved today how positive a contribution the Arab people can make to humanity through great achievements, given the right circumstances and ingredients.” Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President of Dubai. While the mission is managed completely by an Emirati team, the data from the Hope mission will be shared with more than 200 universities and research institutions around the world. “We aim for the UAE to be among the top countries in the field of aerospace by 2021” – Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates Finally, Europe will also add a Mars mission of their own to the 2020 launch window. Their mission, ExoMars Phase 2, will include a rover designed to conduct exobiology and geochemistry research. The mission will also include a Russian surface platform which will image the landing site and conduct long-term climate modeling and atmospheric investigations. ExoMars Phase 2 is currently scheduled for the 2018 launch window, but because of funding issues and technical delays, there have already been to postpone it to 2020. Unfortunately with Mars missions, if the project is a few months behind, you cannot simply push back the launch by a couple of months. Missing the short two-month window means you’re probably just going to have to wait another 26 months. NASA recently went through this same decision process when they postponed the InSight lander from the 2016 launch window to 2018. Europe successfully launched earlier this month. Similar to the proposed Chinese mission, ExoMars Phase 1 consisted of an orbiter and a lander. In addition to analyzing the Martian atmosphere, the orbiter will also be used as a relay for the ExoMars team to communicate with the lander and the rover once it arrives. Illustration of ExoMars Phase 1 / Image courtesy of ESA Phase 1 will arrive at Mars in October of this year. Phase 2 intends to soft-land a rover, which will be the most technologically challenging addition to the ExoMars robotic team. Upon landing, the rover will leave the Russian surface platform and travel across the surface of Mars. In addition to proving out the capabilities of robotic mobility, the rover is equipped with scientific instruments, including a drill, which will be used to conduct exobiology and geochemistry research. If all goes according to plan (and if ExoMars Phase 2 does get postponed), 2020 is going to be a big year for important (expensive) launches. Six to nine months after the 2020 launch window, Mars can expect a fleet of orbiters, landers and rovers coming from five different nations back here on Earth. |
Microsoft apologizes for hijacked chatbot Tay’s ‘wildly inappropriate’ tweets | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | The colossal and highly public earlier this week raised many questions: How could this happen? Who is responsible for it? And is it true that Hitler did nothing wrong? After a day of silence (and presumably of penance), the company has undertaken to answer at least some of these questions. It issued a mea culpa in the form of : We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay… Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. As a result, Tay tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images. We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time. The exact nature of the exploit isn’t disclosed, but the whole idea of Tay was a bot that would learn the lingo of its target demographic, internalizing the verbal idiosyncrasies of the 18-24 social-media-savvy crowd and redeploying them in sassy and charming ways. Unfortunately, instead of teens teaching the bot about hot new words like “trill” and “fetch,” Tay was subjected to “a coordinated attack by a subset of people” (it could hardly be the whole set) who repeatedly had the bot riff on racist terms, horrific catch phrases, and so on. That there was no filter for racial slurs and the like is a bit hard to believe, but that’s probably part of the “critical oversight” Microsoft mentioned. Stephen Merity in the Tay method and dataset, as well — 4chan and its ilk can’t take full credit for corrupting the system. Microsoft isn’t giving up, though; Tay will return. The company also pointed out that its chatbot XiaoIce has been “delighting with its stories and conversations” over in China with 40 million users, and hasn’t denied the Holocaust happened. “To do AI right, one needs to iterate with many people and often in public forums,” wrote Lee. “We must enter each one with great caution and ultimately learn and improve, step by step, and to do this without offending people in the process.” We look forward to Tay’s next incarnation. https://twitter.com/TayandYou/status/712732131277950977 |
Beware the pitfalls of Silicon Valley | Dieter Gerdemann | 2,016 | 3 | 25 |
A recent article in titled “Will Facebook Enslave Us?” captures a sentiment prevalent among companies around the world: admiration for Silicon Valley — albeit, with a dash of fear. International media outlets eagerly cover disruption developing in labs up and down the San Francisco peninsula. Boards of directors are spending hours debating how to react to the next wave from Silicon Valley. Today’s common conclusion is an old one: If you can’t beat them, join them. But for many, that is easier said than done. Many global business leaders want to experience Silicon Valley firsthand to understand what makes this hotbed of technology so unique, to uncover its secret recipe and to tap into potential collaboration opportunities. According to San Francisco’s Bay Area Council, European firms have more than 1,000 permanent outposts and have invested $4 billion in the area (many U.S. firms headquartered outside of Silicon Valley also have a presence in the Valley). Germany’s consul general hosted about 3,000 German political and business leaders on weeklong visits to Silicon Valley in 2015 alone, and a far greater number actually hit the ground but were not hosted by the consulate. But outside of Silicon Valley, firms point to several obstacles that limit their success. Many businesses are hesitant to defer to foreign or not-invented-here thinking. There also are cultural differences, and often a clash between the hands-on entrepreneurial culture of the Valley and the more conservative approaches of the boardroom or CEO. There also is the oxymoron of fixing issues at the core of an organization, namely lack of innovation, by outsourcing it to a tiny outpost on the other side of the world. As one executive put it, “Silicon Valley is not a zoo where you can study dangerous animals in a neatly fenced environment that you can visit for a day or two and then fly back home and expect to have it all sorted out.” Too many decision makers are unclear about what they want to achieve in Silicon Valley and, perhaps even more importantly, what they bring to the table that makes them interesting enough to grab the attention of Silicon Valley. Even with the drawbacks, there are examples of how companies can profit from active collaboration with Silicon Valley firms, proving that it can be a worthwhile undertaking to maintain a presence there. Bay Tek Games, the market leader in arcade gaming systems founded in 1977 and headquartered in Pulaski, Wisconsin, was challenged by declining interest from millennials and their children. Innovation had been stagnant for a while, and a general wisdom had developed that the time for arcade games was over. However, research showed that if the machines were connected to smartphones, arcade gaming could be revolutionized to again become attractive for younger generations. The company could not come up with a cost-effective solution for that connectivity, but then teamed up with Crestlight Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture fund that specializes in applications for the Internet of Things. Crestlight helped Bay Tek Games join forces with local startups that connected the arcade machines to the Internet and provided a basic cloud platform within a few weeks. Crestlight then organized a hackathon at Plug and Play in Sunnyvale, California. The result was an abundance of interesting application prototypes to revamp the arcade platform. Fast-forward one year: Bay Tek Games has won industry awards, begun to use lean startup principles in R&D, and captured record-breaking revenues. Another salient example is Axel Springer. When Mathias Döpfner became CEO of the German publishing house in 2002, he prominently defined three priorities for his tenure: Internet, Internet and Internet — a bold statement only one year after the burst of the dot-com bubble. Döpfner knew print revenues would continue to decline and Axel Springer would not survive unless he radically shifted the business model. Among other initiatives, he led an expansion into Silicon Valley. In 2013, Axel Springer opened a presence in Palo Alto, California, to enable a culture change among the firm’s leadership and open the firm up for digital business models. Alongside this presence, he established an investment fund specifically to create new business models. Today, Axel Springer has sustained revenue above its 2002 level, and the company is on a solid growth trajectory with its digital business models attributing to 60 percent of its revenue and 70 percent of profits. With Bay Tek Games and Axel Springer, there are three practical lessons for firms that want to engage with Silicon Valley: Success for international firms is never guaranteed, but there are tangible steps to assist with a smooth engagement in Silicon Valley. Firms outside the U.S. are right to look on in awe and aspire to collaboration with Silicon Valley. But they should also be familiar with the potential drawbacks. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 03.25.16 | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | – Frank Radice, Robert Scoble Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang on Facebook G3 on Facebook |
500 Startups brings its ‘Distro Dojo’ program to LA for post-seed startups looking for big growth | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | 500 Startups has been aiming to globalize its brand and work toward attracting the attention of young, cool companies outside the Bay Area echo chamber. This has taken 500’s investments into distant corners of the world, with dedicated funds and accelerators scoping out what has amounted to a prolific number of investments. Today, TechCrunch has learned that 500 Startups is launching its Distro Dojo program in Los Angeles, aiming to give founders of post-seed, pre-Series A companies a shot at building out growth for their startups. It’s looking for 10 startups to take part in the program. 500’s Dave McClure tells me that Dollar Beard Club has already signed on to step into the dojo. LA’s startup community has been increasingly gathering the attention of prominent venture capitalists, especially those peering into digital media and entertainment-focused companies. In the past few months a decent number of startups in LA have seen sizable early- and late-stage funding rounds, though there have also been warning signs of an investment “crunch,” with total investments in 2015’s last quarter. 500 Startups has always held a significant presence in SoCal, with a number of notable investments in the past few years in companies like , , Lettuce ( ) , and . The three-month Distro Dojo program consists of one month in-residence in downtown LA, where founders will be given access to resources aimed at heightening growth marketing for their companies. Unlike 500’s other accelerators, Distro Dojo is focused on companies that already kind of have their shit together, but are looking to expand even faster. 500 wants companies running at least $100,000 in revenue per month. The program is being headed up by 500 Startups Partners Andrei Marinescu and Matt Ellsworth and Program Director Jess Erickson. 500’s LA Team: [left to right] Andrei Marinescu, Matt Ellsworth and Jess Erickson If you think your LA-based company might be a great fit for Distro Dojo, hit up the . |
Toyota and Lexus will have standard automatic braking by 2017 | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | Last week, announced that 20 auto manufacturers and three agencies had agreed to include as standard equipment by 2022. was one of those 20 companies, but this week they upped the AEB ante: Nearly every Toyota and Lexus model and trim level will have standard AEB by 2017. That’s next year. Many models already offer AEB as part of the Lexus Safety System+ and packages, but consumers have had to pay extra for these options (unless they leased a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle; it already has AEB as standard equipment.) By the end of next year, all but the Lexus GS, Toyota 4Runner and Toyota 86 — which was developed together with Subaru — will have AEB installed at no extra cost. (Interestingly, the new Prius Prime unveiled at the New York International Auto Show has Safety Sense as an option rather than standard equipment.) The AEB function is part of Toyota’s safety suites, which will be included in 25 Lexus and Toyota models. Both makes have a precollision system that detects the possibility of collision with the car ahead and engages the brakes if the driver doesn’t react quickly enough, as well as lane departure alerts and automatic high beams. Toyota’s move leapfrogs ahead of making its Honda Sensing system, which includes AEB tech, available as a flat $1,000 option on every Civic Sedan. |
With Privacy, you can create virtual debit cards to protect your online payments | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | Meet , a new startup with a confusing name but an interesting product. Privacy lets you generate a virtual burner card every time you need to enter your credit card number on the web. Your actual credit card number stays safe, and you get more control over your online subscriptions. Privacy works with a Google Chrome browser extension. After installing the extension, a tiny Privacy icon will appear next to a credit card form when it’s time to pay. When you click the button, the extension automatically generates a new virtual Visa debit card specifically for this website. Behind the scene, Privacy connects with your bank account so it can withdraw money from your bank account. Right now, Privacy works with the big American banks (Bank of America, Citibank, Chase, Wells Fargo), as well as . Privacy also has an iOS app in case you’re not in front of your computer. There are four key features that make Privacy useful. First, it’s more secure than using your real card on the Internet. If you’re ordering a new fishing rod from bestfishingrodever.com, you might want to use an alternative payment method. That’s how PayPal became successful in the first place, but not every website accepts PayPal — and maybe you to use PayPal anyway. Second, Privacy works with subscriptions. Two years ago, I remember subscribing to because they sent me a promo offer with two months for $5. Immediately after signing up, I noticed that if you want to unsubscribe, you have to call The New York Times’ customer service (and no, this isn’t happening in 1998). With Privacy, you can just disable your virtual card and The New York Times can’t bill you again. Third, the service is free. The company makes money by processing transactions. Every time a payment processor charges a card, it gives a small cut to Visa, and a small portion of this cut goes to the card issuer — in this case, Privacy. It’s a volume play, but it looks like Privacy has a . Finally, a Privacy burner card works with any billing address. If you don’t want to give your real address or name to Netflix for instance, Privacy lets you do that. And if you do that, Edward Snowden will be proud of you. |
Google launches the Android Experiments I/O Challenge for open-source app developers | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | Google is launching the today in an effort to bring more interesting open-source apps to its . The three winners of the challenge, which will run until April 13, will get a trip to this year’s . The five runners-up will get Nexus 6Ps (which, in turn, makes me think Google’s I/O giveaway this year will be a Nexus 6P). In the world of mobile apps, open source isn’t quite as prevalent as in other areas of software development. Projects like this are at least partly about bringing more open-source mobile apps onto the platform so new developers can take this code and learn from it. Here is what Google is looking for in the submissions: These Android apps can be for phones, tablets, Android Wear . |
Snapchat briefly snags the number one spot on U.S. App Store for the first time | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | Snapchat, the rapidly growing social application favored by mobile’s youngest users, has hit a notable milestone: for the first time ever, its iOS application reached the top of the iTunes App Store, where it briefly become the #1 overall free application in the U.S. While Snapchat is almost always in the top five or ten, the highest rank it had achieved previously in the U.S. was #2, according to data from and internal sources. The app only hit the top spot for a short period of time today – around 2 hours – which means it may end up recording today’s ranking as a #2 position when all is said and done. Snapchat’s climb to the top of the store was first spotted by Appsfire CEO Ouriel Ohayon on Twitter. And it’s done. Ladies and gentlemen, for the 1st time ever Snapchat is the #1 free app in the USA — Ouriel Ohayon (@OurielOhayon) According to those familiar with Snapchat’s ranking, as tracked by the company internally, the app has gotten very close to #1 in recent months. The app hit #2 Overall multiple times in February 2016 (Feb. 5 & 12), and in March 2016 (March 21-23). It also reached the #2 spot on November 27, 2015 and September 16 and 17, 2015. It had also reached #2 in 2014 and 2013 a few times as well, but never anything higher. The jump comes on the back of , in a deal valued in the ballpark of $100 million, . The interest surrounding this news story could have caused an increase in downloads – enough to at least briefly move the needle enough to see the app grab the #1 position. Snapchat’s iOS application has been on a steady climb since December, where it had been struggling to climb back into the top 10 just ahead of the holidays. After Christmas, Snapchat bounced around in the top 10 Overall Free applications, and by last month, it was flirting with the number one position, but always falling just one or two positions short. By the beginning of March, Snapchat toggled between positions #3 and #4, then reached the #2 spot on March 20, according to App Annie’s data. It held onto that ranking for the days that followed, until finally jumping into the number one position today, Friday, March 25th. Of course, this isn’t the first time Snapchat has held the number one spot on iTunes anywhere in the world – it has scored that position in a number of smaller markets where the App Store is less competitive than here in the U.S. That includes a handful of North, South, and Central American countries, as well as European and Asian countries, among others, including places like Spain, Brazil, France, Mexico, Canada, and elsewhere. However, achieving the top spot in the U.S. is much more of a feat – that means Snapchat had to beat out other big-name apps like Messenger, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube as well as a number of popular games. As the day progresses, we’ll see if the app is able to bump itself back into the #1 spot, or if ends up hanging around at #2 for the rest of Friday. |
After numerous delays, Microsoft finally starts shipping its $22K Surface Hub | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | If you’re in the market for a giant 84-inch 4K touchscreen computer (and have ), today is a good day. After , Microsoft today its to business customers. Surface Hub comes in both the giant 84-inch version and a smaller 55-inch HD edition for a relatively affordable $8,999. You’ll still need a stand for them, too, which will set you back another $3,699 for the rolling stand for the 84-inch model and $2,350 for the 55-inch version (or less if you just want to mount your Hub to a wall). Microsoft had originally set the prices for the Windows 10-based Surface Hubs at $19,999 and $6,999, but later . Microsoft is marketing the Surface Hub, which is based on the technology it acquired when it in 2012, as a new tool for collaboration — both in person and through video conferences. “Our early Surface Hub business partners can tell you confidently that they work together better with Surface Hub,” Microsoft devices marketing GM Brian Hall writes today. “This is why we built Surface Hub. […] We are excited to see how Surface Hub will bring people together to work, create and learn in new ways.” The company says a number of companies are already using Surface Hub to see how it “will improve how people work together and engage customers.” Because $20,000 is obviously a big investment for any company, Microsoft worked with Forrester to commission a . This study showed that using Surface Hub in a business environment resulted in benefits ” of more than $850,000 (3 year NPV) based on savings in device deployment and management costs, avoided printing and device purchase costs, and improved sales.” You should obviously take that with a grain of salt. Microsoft commissioned this study, after all. If you need to make an argument to management why you need to buy one of these, though, you should probably bring a copy of this study to your meeting. |
Netflix is making videos look like garbage on AT&T and Verizon | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | If you’ve tried streaming Master of None from your tablet running on Verizon or AT&T, chances are it looked like a big pile of unwatchable pixels. It turns out Netflix is quietly capping videos on these networks so that you don’t burn through your entire data cap in just a few hours. How bad do these videos look? Netflix is streaming videos at a resolution of 360p with a bitrate of 600kbps on AT&T and Verizon’s wireless networks (side note: Verizon owns AOL, and AOL owns TechCrunch). In other words, even on a normal smartphone with a 5-inch display you’re going to see that it looks bad. Netflix is capping its own service because it doesn’t want you to exceed your data cap and pay for overage fees. Interestingly, Netflix doesn’t cap its videos on T-Mobile and Sprint because these two carriers are more permissive when you go over your data cap. And of course, T-Mobile lets you stream Netflix videos at 480p without counting against your data plan if you activate the . A good user experience involves finding the right balance between capping videos to consume less data and streaming high quality videos. But the thing is Netflix started capping videos five years ago. Smartphones, tablets, LTE networks and even data caps have changed quite a lot since then — and 360p doesn’t seem like enough. “We believe restrictive data caps are bad for consumers and the Internet in general, creating a dilemma for those who increasingly rely on their mobile devices for entertainment, work and more,” Netflix on its blog, . “So in an effort to protect our members from overage charges when they exceed mobile data caps, our default bitrate for viewing over mobile networks has been capped globally at 600 kilobits per second. It’s about striking a balance that ensures a good streaming experience while avoiding unplanned fines from mobile providers.” It also makes AT&T and Verizon look bad. Many users must be thinking that these two networks are too slow and can’t handle streaming these videos in a decent quality. It’s also worth noting that Netflix caps videos on many other networks around the world, especially those with expensive overage fees. According to , an hour of HD video represents 3GB, while an hour of SD video only represents 0.7GB. But instead of taking a decision for its users, the company should offer settings for those who want a better streaming experience. Spotify for example does a good job on this front: But it looks like the company is going to move in this direction with . With better settings, the company shouldn’t make any distinction between carriers, period. |
Immediately’s Branko Cerny on the rise of bottom up sales and the importance of branding | Harry Stebbings | 2,016 | 3 | 25 |
One of the most groundbreaking themes in the world of enterprise sales in the last few years has been the rise of bottom up sales techniques due to its ability to allow startups to target hundreds of paths into a company. In contrast to the more traditional top down, generally involving the sale to a CIO or VP, the bottoms up sales approach enable each employee to be a credit card carrying decision maker. In our latest interview with Branko Cerny, Founder and CEO at we discuss the exponential increase in buyers, leading to the inevitable increase in the world of sales processes. Now that sales processes target individuals, sales cycles are much shorter. The realization of the need to target individuals resulted in the fundamental thesis surrounding Immediately, branding. As employees are all credit card carrying decision makers the ability to influence them through branding becomes ever more important. As Branko emphasises in the interview, “employees are buying into the lifestyle brand,” and going even further to state that “enterprise companies can learn a lot from dominant consumer brands such as Tinder and Equinox.” However, branding is only one side of swaying the decision making of the ever growing consumer employee market. The other determinant has very much become the product itself. Following up the branding which educates and entices potential customers, the product must now stand and deliver, forcing the customer to convert from a trial to a paid customer status. The culmination of these two factors; the presence of a brand and the beauty of the product leads to SaaS companies being able to effectively spin a customer acquisition flywheel that can be utilised to generate enough new customers to scale the business very quickly.
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Snapchat reportedly acquires Bitmoji maker Bitstrips for $100 million | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | is reporting that Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging platform that has , has agreed to acquire Bitstrips, the folks behind popular emoji-creation service Bitmoji. Though we haven’t received confirmation from Bitstrips or Snapchat, Fortune’s sources say that the deal is “in the ballpark” of $100 million. The idea behind Bitmoji is simple. Users download the app and create an Avatar that represents them. They can choose from a wide range of options like face shape, hair color and cut, eye shape and color, etc. From there, Bitmoji is added as a third-party keyboard, and the app offers hundreds of options for users to send to their friends, all featuring their avatar. Given Bitstrip’s experience with keyboard integrations and general design that people have grown to love, there are a number of options for Snapchat to integrate the service into the main Snapchat platform. For one, Snapchat’s geofilters could become more personalized and tailored to each user. On the other hand, Snapchat could use the Bitstrips team to integrate Snapchat into the phone’s main keyboard, as Fortune suggests. That said, neither company has commented on the deal or even confirmed its existence, so we’ll have to wait to find out more. Bitstrips has raised a total of and is based in Toronto. |
Tinder rival Bumble is majority-owned by European dating behemoth Badoo | Steve O'Hear | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | It was already on public record that Andrey Andreev, the low-profile Russian founder of European dating behemoth Badoo, is an investor in dating app , the Tinder competitor founded by ex-Tinder founding team member Whitney Wolfe. However, TechCrunch can now reveal a number of previously unreported details of Wolfe and Andreev’s partnership, including that Andreev invested via Badoo Trading Ltd, the U.K.-registered operator of Badoo, and that the multi-billion dollar company is in actual fact the owner of Bumble. But before we dig a little deeper into Badoo’s relationship with Bumble, here’s a quick recap of Bumble’s founding story, which goes something like this: After Wolfe controversially left Tinder, including against the company for sexual harassment and workplace discrimination, she begun thinking about a new startup idea, a social network for young girls, focused on positivity. That’s when Badoo’s Andreev got in touch. The two met up in around August of 2014 and, after realising they both had a similar vision for where online dating could go next, a partnership was formed. Wolfe then went about assembling a team, including two other ex-Tinder employees, Sarah Mick (previously VP of design at Tinder) and Chris Gulczynski (co-founder/CCO at Tinder), to come on board, initially as consultants. The new venture, Bumble, would launch on December 1st 2014. A recent company filing for Bumble Holding Limited — the U.K.-registered entity behind Bumble — shows the exact equity breakdown of the company. Most strikingly, Badoo has a whopping 79 per cent stake in Bumble, making it by far the majority owner. And, as you’d then expect, in second place is Bumble founder Wolfe with an ownership stake of 20 per cent. Fellow ex-Tinder employees, Mick and Gulczynski, make up the remaining 1 per cent. “Badoo and Bumble are separate companies. Andrey Andreev, via Badoo, invested in Bumble as a startup,” Bumble told me in a statement after I pressed for further details regarding the relationship between the two entities. “As is well publicized and documented, Andrey Andreev and Whitney Wolfe decided to partner on a new company in 2014. Badoo invested in this new project — the new project became Bumble.” The company also stressed that the investment is from both sides, enabling Bumble to not simply fundraise, but to “strategically tap into the wealth of experience held by Badoo as a global market leader”. “It also allows for Bumble to scale, without needing to seek outside capital,” adds Bumble. “That is an important part of what makes this a highly unique and opportune deal. For a company like Bumble with such incredible growth, this strategic move has been invaluable when it has come to easily and seamlessly solving common startup issues such as scale and infrastructure.” And while the benefits of having a strategic investor with the deep pockets of Badoo shouldn’t be underestimated — the dating app space is incredibly competitive right now and isn’t easy for new entrants to break into — it’s worth re-iterating that Wolfe is in every sense the founder and CEO of Bumble. I’m told that the startup operates as an autonomous, independent company, and always will do, with its staff, head office, and HQ in Austin, Texas. It’s also my understanding that the thinking behind Badoo’s large stake in Bumble, and in turn, Wolfe’s smaller stake, is that it will enable the startup to grow indefinitely without the need for numerous further funding rounds, which would see Wolfe’s stake diluted significantly anyway. As the statement above says, Badoo’s investment should allow Bumble “to scale, without needing to seek outside capital”. None of which should take away from Wolfe and her team at Bumble’s success to date. The app boasts 3.5 million users since launching just shy of 15 months ago. It’s also been steadfast in its female-led approach, an underserved portion of the market. In Bumble, women are required to make the first move, and I’m told have done so over 36 million times via the app — a number that suggests Wolfe’s vision for a new type of dating app is actually working. |
Student founder turns down Microsoft and Google to build Bae, an app for black singles | Kaya Thomas | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 22 | null |
Switcher Studio turns your iPad into a live video editing studio | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | While improvements in camera-phone technology have led to our mobile devices slowly but surely replacing clunky single-purpose cameras, most heavy editing and production still has to be done on desktops. This is especially true for live video, which often requires a full mixing board and production studio. Enter , a mobile production suite that lets you use an iDevice for live video mixing and production. In its most basic form, Switcher Studio lets you record HD video from the built-in camera on your iDevice, which can either be recorded and edited, or streamed live directly to sites like YouTube, Ustream, and Twitch. But, the magic happens when you enter Director Mode. This is when you disable video recording on your main mixing device (probably an iPad), and wirelessly connect up to 4 other iOS devices, all which can be used as video sources. These additional cameras can then all feed live video into the main device, essentially turning your iPad into a multi-camera live production studio. You can even add a laptop as one of the video sources, in case you want to do things like add web browsing or a Powerpoint presentation into your production. The studio also includes a bunch of editing features designed to make your video look like it came out of an actual studio. These include transitions, picture-in-picture, and TV-style graphics and overlays. These edits can either be done in real-time, or in post production after your recording is done. The company, which is still self-funded, charges $25 per month to use its platform. This includes access to the iOS and desktop apps, as well as its cloud platform (which lets users live stream to services like YouTube). |
Micromanufacturing the future | Dmitry Slepov | 2,016 | 4 | 3 |
Micromanufacturing. As soon as I finish typing the word, my Grammarly spell checker promptly underscores it in red and suggests a replacement: “micro-manufacturing.” But this new spelling is about to go mainstream. When I say micromanufacturing, I don’t mean making tiny (micro-scale) components. There’s another definition: “Micromanufacturing is the manufacturing of products in small quantities using small manufacturing facilities.” I’m talking about “tiny factories.” How tiny is tiny? Well, right now, everything-fits-in-one-small-room tiny. Several years down the road, the size of an office copy machine will become the standard of “tiny” in micromanufacturing. Many of us grew up in an era of giant factories. In the beginning, they were in our backyards, then they moved to China and became even giant-er. Some factory floors for making electronic boards and products are now so large you have to drive around them! So, why the heck am I talking about tiny factories? Is this even attainable or practical? I always thought those large manufacturing facilities dotting the landscape of China and other industrialized nations were like computer mainframes of yesteryear. Built with huge capital investment, these facilities are shared between users, each one utilizing only a portion of the available capacity. Now, what happened to mainframes? The era of these computing monsters was followed by an explosion in personal computing. PCs took something enormously expensive that was previously shared by many and placed it in the hands of individuals. The same is going to happen in manufacturing in general, and the manufacturing of electronics in particular. Here are four reasons for why I think we are going to see an explosion in “personal manufacturing.” The first reason is that the equipment needed to produce electronic devices is getting smaller and cheaper. Machines for producing electronic boards are not all that sophisticated. Your laser printer has more parts in it than an SMT “chip shooter” does. The chief reason these machines are so expensive is because they only sell in tiny volumes. As more and more people start to buy or lease their manufacturing equipment, prices will go down — as they always do when sales increase. In a perfect positive feedback loop that invariably forms around emerging technologies, SMT machines, reflow ovens and other necessary components of electronic board production will become smaller and cheaper, then cheaper still as they get even smaller. Naturally, these compact machines will have relatively modest performance, but that’s okay. Office laser printers are very slow compared to professional printing equipment, but we rarely see this as a limitation. In any case, the laser printer in your office isn’t there to print a large volume of documents. It is there to print on demand, when you need it, without waiting and scheduling. The same deal applies to micromanufacturing. The second reason is Digikey. For electronic components, Digikey is like Amazon and Wikipedia rolled into one. I say Amazon because Digikey is a vast store of virtually anything and everything that goes on printed circuit boards, from humble resistors to mighty CPUs. And I say Wikipedia because Digikey also provides technical data and marketing materials for everything they offer. When I first started working in Taiwan back in 1996, our company had a large purchasing department staffed by employees who were handling the procurement of electronic parts. A typical BOM (bill of materials) -– the list of parts needed to build a product – often runs into hundreds of entries. Most of these parts come from different suppliers, and it was the task of our purchasing department to source the components, negotiate the price and set the delivery schedule. Sourcing is an arduous, monotonous job that requires manpower and concentration: Even a single mistake can derail your production. For this kind of work, doing it 99 percent right just doesn’t cut it. Only 100 percent suffices. Large factories in Asia still have sizeable purchasing departments. Negotiating directly with suppliers allows these factories to get the best prices, and build relationships. For specialized players, the task of sourcing parts for small production runs is a major drag on productivity. Fortunately, we have Digikey now. These days, our purchasing department is very small. For many BOMs, we just punch the list straight into Digikey. Would we get better prices had we dealt with vendors directly? Sure, but this would come with strings attached: We would be asked to order “MOQ” (minimum order quantity), and MOQs can be relatively high. Digikey rarely demands “MOQs.” You can buy most parts in “QTY1” (quantity of one). This is more expensive, but you don’t bloat your inventory. Understanding where things are going with micromanufacturing, Digikey has quietly started doing two things. First, most components can now be ordered in reels, even if the order quantity is very small. These reels go straight onto SMT machines, thus decreasing the time needed for production setup. The second innovation pursued by Digikey, as well as Avnet and other players, is the scheduling service. The idea is to allow manufacturers to create parts delivery schedules and thus achieve that coveted just-in-time production. Extrapolating into the future, I see a world where compact SMT machines automatically order electronic parts from Digikey. If HP’s inkjet printers can now order cartridges without your intervention, why won’t your future SMT machine do the same? You see where I’m going with this? Cheaper machines, coupled with reduced labor and complexity of getting parts. This is a revolutionary combination, and I’m just halfway through my list of reasons of why micromanufacturing will take off. The third reason is politics. The era of globalization is over. That is a bold statement, but if you look for the signs, they are everywhere. The second half of the twentieth century saw an unprecedented removal of trade barriers, cheered on by the Chief Globalization Cheerleader — the United States. Global trade treaties ensured unprecedented access for American corporations. They also have led to the demise of American and European manufacturing, so much so that some types of factories are now entirely extinct there, and workers of certain professions have ceased to exist. These days, the tide seems to be turning. Even the Chief Globalization Cheerleader is now trying to bring the jobs back home. Look no further than the election platform of Donald Trump. Mr. Trump makes it clear where he thinks American goods should be made — in America. He is far from being alone in touting this message. “Made in America” has once more become a favored marketing line. Whenever there is a new business or societal trend, America is always quick to come up with a flashy title, a phrase or a word that tries to capture the very essence of that trend. Well, there is a new word for bringing the factories home, and the word is “reshore.” Reshoring is the opposite of “offshoring” — the term that was hot two decades ago when everyone was shifting their production to China. If language is the herald of things to come, the new term sends an unequivocal message. Manncorp, a well-established supplier of SMT equipment, has recently run a banner on their website. It read: “Helping American businesses to reshore.” There also is , with its Reshoring Initiative, and hundreds of other outfits that are promoting the idea. This budding movement to bring the manufacturing back home is not restricted to America alone. Across the globe in Russia, the government has started to eliminate tariffs on electronic components and simultaneously created significant barriers to using imported goods in government projects. The trend is clear, and countries big and small are beginning to follow suit. Now, what kinds of factories have a chance to come home? Donald Trump seems to think that just about anything can be reshored, even the production of iPhones. I doubt that, and so do industry experts. Bringing iPhone factories home would require an enormous expense and effort of automating the manufacturing process with robots, and this is not feasible just yet (see my article titled ). So, let’s leave the dream of bringing production home to politicians and their election-year politics. What’s suitable for domestic manufacturing today is the production of niche, specialized products. America and Europe have a lot of those, and gigantic Chinese factories are not a good fit for manufacturing them anyway. Compact, agile production facilities are much more suitable. This is where politics will meet the practical demands of business. Politics aside, many countries now have a small but influential and quickly growing group of people referred to as “makers.” These guys just want to build cool things. They want to make stuff, and they want to do that personally, not outsource to faraway places like China the process of making. Aided by immensely popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these young entrepreneurs have already figured out how to collect the funds for their projects. Now they are figuring out how to build their products locally. They don’t need large factories. Instead, they require compact, personal manufacturing facilities tailored to small, flexible production runs. For many makers, micromanufacturing will be the key to their commercial success. Reason number four is this: Many folks are tired of dealing with China. I will argue that many companies relocated their production to China for reasons far removed from the hard economic necessity. There was a romantic component: “I’m a globe-trotting entrepreneur.” There was a bragging component: “Look, I’m so international that my office is in L.A. and my manufacturing is in China.” There was the usual herd mentality: “Everyone is going to China. I must go, too.” That was then. These days, many are tired of the long intercontinental flights. It’s not fun, and not exactly romantic after you do it a couple of times. Then there is China’s rampant disregard for intellectual property. As one of my Swiss customers says: “We don’t just see copies of our products. We see copies of copies.” Then there are quality issues. The only way to get good quality in China is through constant inspections and monitoring. It is costly and tiresome, and the moment you stop looking is the moment you get quality issues. Then, there are “night runs.” These are unauthorized production runs that produce the same goods, then sell these goods through illegal channels. The problem is enormous. Countless major brands are affected by it. Last week, I was presented with a Salvatore Ferragamo scarf. I was assured that the scarf was “100% real.” “OEM” smirked the guy who gave it to me, OEM being a polite, tongue-in-cheek code for the “night run” production items. Several other factors add to the overseas customers’ pains. The standard of living and wages have improved dramatically in China. This spells all kinds of positive changes in the Chinese society, but also drives up manufacturing costs. The government there has gotten much better at accessing and collecting taxes, and instituted some new ones as well. Foreign companies that were once lured to massive manufacturing parks and zones with low costs and rebates now feel at a disadvantage compared to local manufacturers who seem to be increasingly favored by the government. Finally, consider the generational factor. The generation of entrepreneurs who went to “open” China in the 1980s is now getting old. Many of these guys are itching to come home. For a lot of them, micromanufacturing and automation offer a real hope of reshoring. There you have it, my four reasons for why micromanufacturing is about to take off in a big way. Think anyone here in Asia gets it? Absolutely not! It took me two years to put my own micromanufacturing facility together. There are thousands of machinery suppliers, but very few had anything remotely useful for my mini-factory project. I had to combine things in unexpected ways and invent my own gear where none was readily available. Two years on, my mini factory is alive and working well, but the effort turned out to be much larger than I anticipated. One day I was on the elevator in our office building in Taipei. The guy standing next to me was a rep from a stencil maker (solder paste stencils are used in the production of electronic boards). This guy just delivered new stencils to my office. Suddenly he laughed and said: “I just saw your factory. It is soooooooooooooo tiny! Before coming here I went to my other customer, he has an assembly line that runs the entire block”! He opened his arms as wide as the elevator walls allowed and looked at me with unbridled curiosity. To him, I was a grown-up playing with toys. Well, I’m wondering if he will still be laughing in, say, 10-15 years. By then, SMT “chip shooters” will shrink to the size of a large office copy machine. They will come with sophisticated management software that will automatically order parts from global distributors. Ovens and other necessary equipment will be available in vertical form factors to save floor space. Affordable robots will be summoned to insert large components, tighten screws and do all that other stuff SMT machines cannot do. Yes, that micromanufacturing future I’m imagining is still far off, but the revolution has already begun. Compact SMT machines are almost affordable now, and we are only at the very beginning of a powerful cycle. This cycle has repeated countless times before. Once you bought a car, you were much less likely to take a bus. As soon as you had a laser printer in your office, you were almost entirely gone as the print shop’s customer. Once you purchased your micromanufacturing equipment… I leave finishing this thought to you. |
UPDATE: Reddit’s firing up a thread on the Panama Papers leak | Jonathan Shieber | 2,016 | 4 | 3 | UPDATE: An earlier version of this story linked to an earlier expose’ conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on offshore companies. The post has been edited. The good folks at Reddit about the massive we reported earlier this evening. Meanwhile the hits just keep on coming from news outlets around the world. Fusion of the political players involved and a on the law firm involved; as it goes down the rabbit-hole chasing one of the companies that the firm set up. And people around the globe are taking to Twitter and beginning to pile on with their own stories and commentary on the news. Breaking: Wilson Security named in massive tax haven data dump. See the full story tonight — Sally Neighbour (@neighbour_s) Govt’s integrity & nationalism be judged by how it investigates . Journalism of courage — Yogendra Yadav (@_YogendraYadav) I wonder how many of the world leaders involved in the are going to be pro-encryption all of a sudden. — Laurie Voss (@seldo) How China’s elite—including Xi Jinping—are linked to offshore deals that hid millions of dollars — Quartz (@qz) Even has gotten in on the action with a of the countries involved. |
As sanctions lift, Western companies can meet a thriving Iranian e-commerce industry | Amir Bozorgzadeh | 2,016 | 4 | 3 |
Despite the perceptions from many outside of the country, Iranians haven’t been twiddling their thumbs, waiting idly all these years for sanctions relief. The country has long since accustomed itself to be self-sufficient, and the e-commerce industry in Iran is no exception. Over one-third — or 39 percent of Iranians — are shopping online at least once a month, according to our latest study. 1,132 respondents completed the survey between . For foreigners looking to enter the country, it’s clear that e-commerce could be a huge target for investment dollars. Twenty-three percent of Iranians are shopping online at least once a month, 16 at least once a week, and 5 percent are doing so on a daily basis. When we asked what products they have purchased in the past 3 months, apps and digital (34 percent) came at top followed by travel tickets (27 percent), games (23 percent), and electronics (22 percent). “More than 1,300 apps are published on Cafe Bazaar each week,” says Hessam Armandehi, CEO of , the largest app store in Iran with over 28 million active installations and 11 million weekly visits. “Iranians have a constant thirst for the latest and most popular games and applications.” In fact, homegrown startups like Cafe Bazaar, which reportedly has 85 percent of the app store market in the country, are a key factor in what has flowered to be a thriving online shopping scene. Sanctions may have stifled the presence of global players like Apple, Google, and Amazon, but this has at the same time created a vacuum in which young entrepreneurs have stepped in. Another example is , the Amazon of Iran, which was reported last year by The Economist to be valued at $150 million with over 80 percent share of the online retail market. That’s quite the accomplishment for an online retail brand that was started by two twin brothers in 2007 and now has over 900 employees and the fourth most visited site in the country based on Alexa rankings. Twelve percent of respondents said they bought daily deals like restaurant coupons in that same time frame, but when we asked which product categories they felt currently limited in accessing, this number jumped to 42 percent without a single other category contender. “Bargaining is deeply ingrained in Iranian shopping culture. A seller that gives a good discount shows that they care for their customers and that they are willing to invest in a long-term relationship,” says Nazanin Daneshvar, Founder & CEO of , a leading daily deal site in Iran that is experiencing 100 percent annual growth. The cultural disposition towards deals is likely cranked up by the influence that sanctions have had in recent years. The sanctions drove up the prices of imported goods or reduced supplies to zero. In either case, it’s understandable that such conditions have increased the receptivity of Iranians towards the prospect of saving a buck, be it in the form of discounts, loyalty programs, or sweepstake draws. After apps and software, the second most desired category is clothing (23 percent), followed by event tickets (19 percent), insurance (19 percent), and electronics (17 percent). Iranians expect that in the next 6 months foreign companies will usher in greater access to electronics (65 percent), apps and software (43 percent), travel tickets (27 percent), games (25 percent), and clothing (21 percent). “More international brands are flocking to Iran, therefore the availability of various products is increasing and so is the demand,” says Ehsan Golabgir, CEO of , a popular e-commerce portal in the country. “In the past year or so, we have experienced a significant growth in non consumer electronics products, especially in fashion and beauty.” So what keeps the other 40 percent from jumping on the bandwagon? The top concern continues to be fraud. That’s followed by a whole host of issues ranging from the quality of products to payment security online. “Iran’s online banking system, contrary to outside view, is pretty solid when it come to fraud protection,” says Hossein Entekhabi, Operations Director at , an 18-month startup that is now the second largest e-commerce company in Iran. “There are challenges with invalid payments or terminated transactions on payment gateway; nevertheless payment fraud is very low, especially compared to high rates of offline banking fraud.” People are often surprised when they hear how comfortable Iranians are paying online. 87 percent shop using their debit card that can be used to purchase online when activated to the Shetab network, an interbank card switch introduced back in 2002. “Iranians are generally well disposed to paying online because the central bank was the first to introduce and encourage it as a means to pay for their utilities,” says Dr. Aliakbar Jalali, a Professor at Iran University of Science and Technology, considered to be the father of IT in Iran. “So by the time e-commerce portals made their appearance, they were already adapted to punching in their debit card details to make an online transaction.” This effectively turns their debit card into the single easiest mode of payment. Twenty percent are shopping daily using their debit card, 24 percent weekly, and 28 percent on a monthly basis. “The growth of online purchasing is picking up at rates unseen in any other markets,” adds Entekhabi. “Most of goods and services are concentrated in Tehran and through ecommerce the rest of the country has instantaneous access to a range of products and services that was never possible.” The percentage of Iranians with foreign credit cards is another high value target for potential investors. Roughly 11 percent of Iranians hold credit cards like Visa and Mastercard, which means they either have a passport in another country that provides them with access to credit cards, or else they have acquired prepaid credit cards in neighboring countries like Georgia or the United Arab Emirates. |
Africa Roundup: DealDey Acquisition Creates VC Exits | Jake Bright | 2,016 | 4 | 3 | Africa’s e-commerce startups continue to tally outside investment. This time through of Nigerian online shopping site for an undisclosed amount. DealDey is a Groupon like startup that aggregates daily discounts on popular goods and services. The venture previously raised at least from the Swedish investment firm . Ringier—a Swiss media and e-commerce company—named the acquisition as part of a to invest in digital marketing and online sales verticals. Ringier created a new joint venture for the DealDay purchase: . RADG will pursue other related e-commerce investments across Africa. The DealDey acquisition marks continued outside investor confidence in the value proposition for —expected to top , according to McKinsey Consulting. Ringier’s purchase follows the recent in e-commerce company , which reached a after a including and . The market moves also signal African tech is in the early stage of a new phase: its first notable acquisitions, exits, and IPOs. In addition to the DealDey purchase and investor exits, we reported in the on the London Stock Exchange. African IT companies are also finding themselves in the middle of high stakes . For months South African telecoms giant has been embroiled in a dispute with over a the former levied claiming MTN failed to comply with a disconnect deadline for unregistered SIM card users. MTN has appealed for a lesser charge and recently brought in former on the case. The presidents of both countries—representing Africa’s two largest economies—have also weighed in on the impasse. that MTN offered $1.5 billion to settle the $3.9 billion fine, after making a $250 million “good faith” payment in February. We’ll see if Nigerian regulators accept. Check out the latest on in . The blue chip company opened a in 2013 and is re-creating a —to “solve the continent’s grand challenges.” TechCrunch caught up with IBM’s Dr. Kamal Bhattacharya on the Africa lab’s progress to date and plans to open a new research lab in South Africa later this year. |
Documents leaked from a Panamanian law firm reveal a global web of corruption | Jonathan Shieber | 2,016 | 4 | 3 | It started with , and what it has become is, quite simply, yet seen on the Internet. All day, the Internet has been abuzz with stories — roughly 2.6 terabytes of documents, related to hundreds of thousands of offshore companies, leaked from a small, relatively unknown Panamanian law firm called . While the -based firm’s name may be unrecognizable to many, its client list links to politicians, celebrities, athletes, and organizations that have been at the center of global scandals. Among the stories to hit the papers based on revelations from the Panama Papers are pieces on ; the Prime Minister of Iceland’s , which served as a tax haven for his private wealth; and no corruption scandal would be complete without mentioning international soccer’s governing body, FIFA, . German authorities had known about the connection between Mossack Fonseca and some criminal elements for at least two years. A whistleblower at the firm had sold information to the authorities, according to the story in the Suddeutsche Zeitung on the history of the Panama Papers’ leak. As part of the investigation several European banks were fined and some information was shared with authorities around the world. But the current leak dwarfs anything that has been seen before including and . Working with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Munich paper has marshaled the resources of at least 100 reporters from news outlets around the world to comb through the documents and uncover what they can. In a video describing the leak, Bastian Obermayer, of the Suddeutsche Zeitung’s investigative team, said that , the BBC, and are also involved. “I would say, first observation, it’s a lot more promising than even some of the more, other projects that we’ve done that have turned out to be very, very big,” said Gerard Ryle, a director at the ICIJ. Here’s a on what the documents contain: Information from the documents reveal business dealings of some of the world’s most notorious dictators, autocrats, and authoritarians including former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s toppled dictator, Muammar Gaddafi and Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad. “The sheer number of people involved is becoming clear to us,” says Frederik Obermaier, from the Suddeutsche Zeitung’s investigative group. “There are dictators, members of the Japanese Yakuza mafia, the Sicilian mafia, the Russian mafia, weapons dealers, drug dealers, and pedophiles. You start to feel a little nervous when you realize this one leak is going to expose all of them… and that it all started at the Suddeutsche Zeitung.” |
The insurance tech equation | Choon Yan | 2,016 | 4 | 3 |
Insurance policies can be complex, and some policyholders may not understand all the fees and coverages included in a policy. Indeed, people typically buy policies on unfavorable terms. In 2014, two major insurers, for misrepresentation of the coverage network, which caused delays for their consumers in accessing needed health care. Yet, insurance should help societies and individuals mitigate catastrophes’ impact through the way it changes who bears the cost of losses. “There are 46 insurance companies in Fortune 500, with an average age of 95 years. Cumulative market cap is more than $1T,” said of General Catalyst Partners. However, according to , half of policyholders have one or less interactions per year with their insurers — and less than 60 percent of those who made the contact are satisfied with the experience. Underwriting and closing a policy may take several days, even several weeks. Once the policy is underwritten, claims management and customer service are cumbersome due to the insurer-centric and paper-based structure. The commission structure of the status quo is such that agents and insurers make the process a misalignment of interest between the insurers and policyholders. Fortunately, it is not a lost war for insurer incumbents, as they have their competitive advantages. Incumbents have the consumers’ trusted brand perception and existing coverage network, regulator’s policed compliance and licenses, as well as the most analytical actuarial talents. An insurance premium paid currently provides coverage for losses that might arise many years in the future. The financial stability and strength of an insurance company is a major consideration when buying an insurance contract. To understand the insurance business better, it has to start from their business model. Insurers’ business profit can be reduced to a simple equation: Insurer’s profit = sum of earned premiums and investment income on premiums after underwriting cost and claim expenses. With the dawn of the pension scheme and a changing workforce that has increased the number of freelancers, startups are exploring the nexus of technology and insurance in an attempt to wake the dinosaurian industry. In 2014, insurance tech startups raised just over $740 million in venture and equity funding. Just a year later, funding to insurtech companies rose by 350 percent, to $2.65 billion in annual funding, according to . These insurtech startups may open new streams of premiums, encourage investment income, find a leaner method to underwrite costs or effectively manage claim expenses. The emergence of digital-first insurers has created a new business model on delivering value to consumers. The world’s biggest insurtech startup is , valuated at $8 billion after being invested in by three Ma (Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Tencent’s Pony Ma and China’s second largest insurer, Ping An’s Ma Mingzhe). It opened new segments of insurance, where traditional insurers did not touch: Zhong An partnered with Alibaba for coverage on returned goods’ delivery charges and even drone/mobile phone damage policies tailored to the new digital economy. Besides tackling the new digital frontier, Zhong An is essentially innovating on distribution, with a more integrated sales channel embedded as part of the e-commerce shopping process rather than depending on the traditional third-party agent distribution model. Anthemis-backed creates customization of home insurance by allowing coverage of individual key items rather than a predefined set with an average payout. An app-based mobile platform helps easily collect information about the things users bought through photos, market values, receipts and other product details. With Trov, users can always see the total value of the things they own and have stored on Trov and track their value over time. With detailed records close at hand, it can be used as information to decide on the level of insurance coverage with Trov’s partnered insurers serving in the backend. A one-stop shop like this is able to capture a use case and add more value with protective insurance products. Insurtech such as , and stealth are banging big on P2P insurance models. Using a sharing economy approach, users are invited to form small groups of policyholders who pay partial premiums into a pool to use for small claims. Policyholders are able to get back the remaining pool of money at the end of the year, after claims. Claims-free policyholders are able to obtain higher cash back, which is a clear financial benefit for fair behavior to reduce fraud and claims expenses. Most importantly, these P2P models can possibly rethink how to make short-term liquidable investments on the pooled money and higher returns bet on other premiums. With distribution channels being increasingly digital, will insurance agents end up in the same fate as the local bank branch? Despite huge commissions, traditional insurance agents fail to provide significant added value. Thus, new intermediaries are welcomed, especially online tools that are scalable. brings in-person customer experience online by offering website surfers an option to talk to live representatives via video, which aims to give potential leads more meaningful information than just poking around randomly. Furthermore, it allows insurers to mitigate the effects of not having the human touch in insurance sales, and tailor products for possible completion of micro-insurance online. “With Big Data and AI, there are lots of new opportunities with low cost through the use of technology on marketplace and micro-insurance models, especially in developing economy like Asia with growing mobile penetration,” said , fintech thought leader and 20-year investment visionary. The core competence of insurance is ready for a big leap, thanks to all sorts of new technologies, such as machine learning and data analytics. solutions make use of a machine learning platform that combines data from structured and unstructured sources to score and predict risk behavior of consumers. For instance, it provides insurers with preventive solutions, applying big behavioral data and machine learning to generate the best predictions on default, bad debt, prepayments and customer churn resulting in individualized risk assessment. Insurers must see themselves in the prevention business on top of the protection business that they are already in. Data is going to drive healthcare, which indirectly impacts insurance. Data can be leveraged to individually underwrite and personalize insurance for people. innovates in the preventive business by rewarding car owners with lower premiums for fewer miles driven (through a plugged-in car sensor). There are going to be more insurers leveraging IoT devices, such as fitness tracker and environment sensor . Perhaps the speed and ease with which self-automating smart contracts could be changed within the blockchain could see more insurance policies that reflect actual personalized risk in a real-time manner. However, the industry has to make good strides in not creating sub sectors of the society that can’t buy insurance due to big data rendering them as less attractive risks. , and are all about mobile solutions that help insurers make a leap in customer engagement to become much more effective every step of the new digital journey. Claims adjusters obtain the tools to enjoy an automated experience; a mobile solution enables consumers of insurers to settle a claim completely virtually. The solution simplifies claims, reduces the operation costs and increases touch points between insurer and customer, leading to better satisfaction. Gone are the days when insurers are the perfect intermediaries to underwrite decisions or own the narrative of how insurance products get pushed to end users. IoT with inexpensive sensors will have a transformational impact on how insurance policies are underwritten. New digital entrants with strong customer relationships can formulate personalized policies and distribute more efficiently. According to , the global population is set to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 and 34 percent of global growth in worker population (aged 15-64) lies in South Asia. Although B2B insurtech and many financial comparison sites are operating in the underinsured and uninsured region, much of the insurtech innovations and targeted consumers are still primarily located in Western and China markets. I believe the next generation of Fortune 500 insurers will have to partner with various stakeholders, including the unmentioned regulators, to drive cost low and premium acquisition high on the equation in a consumer-centric way, as well as replicating successes in high-growth emerging markets. |
Platforms are the real powerhouses in Silicon Valley’s business landscape | Vivek Wadhwa | 2,016 | 4 | 3 |
One of the most important lessons that Silicon Valley learned, that gives it a strategic advantage, is to think bigger than products and business models: it builds platforms. The fastest growing and most disruptive companies in history — Google, Amazon, Uber, AirBnb, and eBay—aren’t focused on selling products, they are building platforms. It goes beyond tech. Companies such as Walmart, Nike, John Deere, and GE are also building platforms for their industries. John Deere, for example, is building a . Platforms are becoming increasingly important as all information becomes digitized; as an Information Technology and entire . A platform isn’t a new concept, it is simply a way of building something that is open, inclusive, and has a strategic focus. Think of the difference between a roadside store and a shopping center. The mall has many advantages in size and scale and every store benefits from the marketing and promotion done by others. They share infrastructure and costs. The mall owner could have tried to have it all by building one big store, but it would have missed out on the opportunities to collect rent from everyone and benefit from the diverse crowds that the tenants attract. Platform businesses bring together producers and consumers in high-value exchanges in which the chief assets are information and interactions. These interactions are the creators of value, the sources of competitive advantage. The power of platforms is explained in a new book, , by Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Choudary. The authors illustrate how Apple became the most profitable player in the mobile space with the iPhone by leveraging platforms. As recently as 2007, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG collectively controlled 90% of the industry’s global profits. And then came the iPhone with its beautiful design and marketplaces — iTunes and the App store. With these, by 2015, the iPhone had grabbed 92% of global profits and left the others in the dust.
Nokia and the others had classic strategic advantages that should have protected them: strong product differentiation, trusted brands, leading operating systems, excellent logistics, protective regulation, huge R&D budgets, and massive scale. But Apple imagined the iPhone and iOS as more than a product or a conduit for services. They were a way to connect participants in two-sided markets — app developers on one side and app users on the other. These generated value for both groups and allowed Apple to charge a tax on each transaction. As the number of developers increased so did the number of users. This created the “network effect” — a process in which the value snowballs as more production attracts more consumption and more consumption leads to more production. By January 2015 the company’s App Store offered 1.4 million apps and had cumulatively generated $25 billion for developers. Just as malls have linked consumers and merchants, newspapers have long linked subscribers and advertisers. What has changed is that technology has reduced the need to own infrastructure and assets and made it significantly cheaper to build and scale digital platforms. Traditional businesses, called “pipelines” by Parker, Van Alstyne, and Choudary, create value by controlling a linear series of processes. The inputs at one end of the value chain, materials provided by suppliers, undergo a series of transformations to make them worth more. Apple’s handset business was a classic pipeline, but when combined with the App Store, the marketplace that connects developers with users, it became a platform. As a platform it grew exponentially because of the network effects. The authors say that the move from pipeline to platform involves three key shifts: But not every industry is ripe for platforms because the underlying technologies and regulations may not be there yet. in on “transitional business platforms”, Kellogg School of Management professor Robert Wolcott illustrates the problems that Netflix founder Reed Hastings had in 1997 in building a platform. Hastings had always wanted to provide on-demand video, but the technology infrastructure just wasn’t there when he needed it. So he started by building a DVDs-by-mail business — while he plotted a long-term strategy for today’s platform. According to Wolcott, Uber has a strategic intent of providing self-driving cars, but while the technology evolves it is managing with human drivers. It has built a platform that enables rapid evolution as technologies, consumer behaviors, and regulations change. Building platforms requires a vision, but does not require predicting the future. What you need is to understand the opportunity to build the mall instead of the store and be flexible in how you get there. Remember that business models now triumph products—and platforms triumph business models. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 3 | 25 | null |
Hollywood vs. VR | Jon Evans | 2,016 | 4 | 3 | Let us all take a moment to celebrate the remarkable resilience of Hollywood. As “the music industry finds itself fighting over pennies while waving goodbye to dollars,” to the New York Times; as the publishing industry finds itself increasingly eclipsed by Amazon; as “the number of people watching TV is falling off a cliff,” as Business Insider — movie box office just keeps rising. From strength to strength: “Revenue from the American box office grew by 6.3% in 2015, to a record high of $11 billion. Thanks to droves of new filmgoers in China, where the market grew by 49% last year, global revenues increased by 4% to $38 billion,” . Now, it’s true that these headline figures paper over serious problems. DVD sales, once a major source of income, have sunk to irrelevance. Production and marketing costs have as the movie biz moves into Extremistan, relying on a few big hits to make money, squeezing out the middle class of mid-budget movies. “The top grossing films each week accounted for 33% of total box office in both 2015 and 2016, almost twice the average of 18% that prevailed in 2011-13,” according to some on . But there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Extremistan. The multiplexes are still full of new movies every week, some of which are actually good, and more importantly, moviegoers still keep flocking to them. (Including yours truly; I see probably 40 movies a year in theaters.) Granted, higher ticket prices mask the fact that slowly rising box offices mean slowly attendance, but the growing worldwide audience, courtesy of capitalism’s remarkable ability to make poor nations richer, will more than make up for any slow secular decline in the West. So far so good… …but what happens when the VR age hits? The zeitgeist seems to have declared 2016 the dawning of the age of virtual reality. On the one hand, this is incredibly exciting. VR is to flat screens as color-with-sound is to silent-black-and-white; at least one quantum leap, maybe two. We’ll have to develop — we’re already beginning to develop — whole new vocabularies of “virtual literacy” … and whole new forms of storytelling that may have more in common with video games, and immersive theater like Punchdrunk’s , and Third Rail Projects’ , than traditional screen narratives. But whither the traditional, beloved movie theater in such a brave new narrative world? What need will we have of a place to congregate to watch stories when the projections end a few inches ahead of our eyeballs, and we cannot see or hear those around us? An excellent Aaron Levie in quotes Jeffrey Katzenberg: “It seems that all the zero-sum thinkers should reconsider their math… throughout this history, in not one instance did a new form a mass media replace an earlier form.” Levie’s larger point — that technology is the friend, not the enemy, of Hollywood and all forms of cinematic storytelling — is absolutely true. But I note that very few people go to see silent black-and-white movies any more. (I happen to be one of them, but trust me, we’re a minority.) Hollywood, in the sense of an enormously popular and influential industry that performs and projects stirring stories for vast quantities of money, will thrive. But very little of today’s Hollywood infrastructure will … including, I’m sorry to predict, movie theaters, or the notion of “first-run” box office. This will take years, of course, and will be a slow, staged process. At first VR will seem a fad; then only for hardcore gamers; then perhaps VR “arcades” will arise, a la the video-game arcades of the 80s; and only then will movie theaters be seriously threatened. But it’s hard to envision a future in which that does not happen. Again, this is no bad thing! The systems and stories that supplant and replace today’s will almost certainly be superior. But Hollywood’s braintrust had best bear in mind at least the that VR’s most enthusiastic boosters are actually underestimating its appeal … and movie buffs like myself had best brace ourselves for some wrenching farewells. |
AccorHotels acquires Onefinestay for $170 million | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | is acquiring for at least $170 million (£117 million). The company is also committing to a $70 million investment in Onefinestay (£50 million) over the next few years. Onefinestay is a London-based startup that provides an Airbnb for high-end homes combined with a hotel-like service for hosts and travelers. The startup last summer and $80.9 million in total . Index Ventures led the first round. It operates in four cities — London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles. “We’ve looked at around 200 companies in 2015,” AccorHotels deputy CEO Vivek Badrinath told me. “We’re really interested in this vertical; private rentals for high-end stays. Our clients are interested in this vertical. And if we follow our clients’ needs then we’re sure we remain relevant for them.” The hotel giant also thinks that it has a lot of knowledge on the hospitality industry and Onefinestay can benefit from it. In particular, Onefinestay cleans and gives you the keys to your place so that you have a consistent, upscale experience. And AccorHotels thinks private rentals and hotels aren’t a zero-sum game. Overall, the market is growing, and the hotel company wants to take advantage of this trend. When it comes to Onefinestay, the company won’t change much. If you want to look at a place on Onefinestay, you’ll still have to go to the company’s website. “Onefinestay will remain an independent company,” co-founder and CEO Greg Marsh told me. “We’re not going anywhere, the business will continue to be led by the current founders and management team. In many ways, nothing will change in the way we deliver our service.” Onefinestay now manages 2,600 properties, and these properties are exclusively working with Onefinestay. “Ultimately, we could have continued to build this business as an independent company,” Marsh said. Onefinestay has opted for a luxury approach. Compared to Airbnb, the startup is curating each property individually. “We run our own hotel experience but we run it in private homes. It requires people on the ground, it requires infrastructure,” Marsh said. And this approach is quite lucrative as Onefinestay agrees on a per-night basis and then handles pricing, listing and everything with a healthy margin of 50 percent on average. What’s going to change is that Onefinestay is going to expand much more quickly. The plan is to go from 4 to 40 cities over the next five years. Rome is launching in June, but the company also plans to open in Asia for example. |
Virtual reality is about to go mainstream, but a lack of content threatens to hold it back | Tony Scherba | 2,016 | 4 | 3 |
Technology is surrounding us; its surface is becoming more complex, pliable and familiar to the eye. Virtual reality is no longer creeping into the : It’s leaping. Just last month, secretive startup received more than $793 million in new funding through Google, Qualcomm and others, quickening its progress toward creating seamless experiences in which digital and physical worlds collide. When editor Rachel Metz visited Magic Leap’s headquarters, she discovered a world where crisp virtual characters were already roaming the halls, waiting for a device to be perfected that will bring them into the public eye. Not to be outdone, Microsoft revealed its plans to release a sleek-looking augmented reality this year, too. HoloLens will allow users to interact with holographic surroundings and characters, and Volvo, NASA and Trimble are already testing it in the business world. Though the industry is giddy with the potential of , the consumer is still a step away from being able to enjoy a virtual experience while riding the bus. In terms of hardware, we’re standing just behind the starting line. Three companies are set to release headsets this year: Oculus , the Facebook-owned company, will release its headset; HTC and Valve promise to release their headset; and Sony’s model, the , will emerge. These are exciting launches, each headset has its own hardware demands that haven’t quite been solved. The Oculus headset must be connected to an Oculus-ready PC, which isn’t cheap. On top of its $800 price tag, the HTC/Valve device needs a partner computer that costs $1,000. Sony has perhaps the most -ready device, although even it cannot operate unconnected to a late-model PlayStation. Still, tech companies have demonstrated a remarkable ability to address hardware barriers. Microsoft’s HoloLens, for example, weighs less than a pound, and it’s to be worn with eyeglasses and ponytails, thanks to the headband that causes it to “float” atop users’ noses. Magic Leap is developing its product to beam images into the user’s field of view to ensure virtual images are comfortable, sharp and indistinguishable from real life. Motion sickness can also be problematic. The latency effect caused by displays refreshing can make users uncomfortable. To combat this, Google is baking into its device and improving its software. Additionally, audio components must be improved to precisely map the body and determine the direction of the user’s gaze. The body uses sound to continuously , so devices mimicking reality must direct sounds from the angle at which the eyes view holograms. Today’s equipment still has some kinks to iron out, the hardware is nearly complete enough for consumer use. However, for to make a proper splash, today’s software developers must focus their efforts on creating that consumers will use on their headsets. Developers should focus their efforts on these varieties of to help users maximize their devices: has the potential to , from how we watch movies to how we to how we pass time while waiting for a flight. In anticipation, large entertainment studios have companies, and some companies are even entertainment studios. Magic Leap’s enigmatic CEO, Rony Abovitz, has been tight-lipped about the features of his device, he’s already of virtual concerts and cartoons. Consumers are already getting excited about ’s potential in the . In a manner endlessly more “real” than today’s gaming hardware is capable of, will immerse players in games. Environments will become more expansive as plots become more riveting and characters become more vibrant. HoloLens recently hosted a contest to decide which game it would create. Voters selected in which users navigate space, land on planets and watch their homes be transformed into craters and nebulae. Industries in which consumers view or test a product prior to purchase will be transformed by . With ample walk-throughs, home buyers won’t drive or fly out to see a property to get a good feel for it: They’ll be able to “live in” thousands of homes before making a decision. Likewise, has the potential to become users’ new travel agent, offering a teaser experience of a holiday destination. , an African travel operator, launched its virtual brochure app earlier this year, allowing travelers to ride a hot air balloon or meet a gorilla before they set off on the real adventure. Automakers, too, can benefit from virtual . has already pioneered the test drive to get consumers’ adrenaline pumping and their pocketbooks itching for the real deal. With immersive tutorials, lessons and professional experiences, will make education more effective, more hands-on and much safer. With virtual lessons, Scottish children will sit in on lectures in South Africa. Immersive simulations can help students more fluently than classrooms ever could. History students could virtually experience events like Columbus’ discovery of the Americas and see long-gone cities mapped across contemporary landscapes. also will change the face of professional training. has already sent HoloLens devices to the International Space Station to help astronauts prepare for various life-threatening scenarios. Likewise, HoloLens has with Case Western Reserve University to transform surgeons’ anatomical training. With the HoloLens, muscles can be investigated individually, students can practice procedures without slicing skin and a single cell can be traced uninterrupted. has the potential to transform nearly every industry imaginable: product design, interior design, car manufacturing — the list goes on. One can hardly imagine all the new industries that will be created. To reach those innovations on ’s horizon, industry experts must partner with leaders in the tech sector to craft immersive that educates, informs or entertains — or, hopefully, does all three. has crept up on us faster than even we in the tech industry expected, and it’s on the cusp of consumer readiness. Fasten your seat belts (and headsets) and prepare for a new reality. |
RobinHood’s chief executive on the importance of design in fintech | Harry Stebbings | 2,016 | 4 | 3 |
RobinHood, the no-fee stock trading mobile phone app, was able to attract 1 million people to their waiting list before a product was even launched. In this podcast, chief executive Baiju Bhatt discusses what it was about their initial value proposition that made so many users convert, and the integral role design plays at RobinHood. Bhatt also discusses how to take a more macro approach to the global trading market and why the current financial systems are outdated and in need of disruption. Finally, he discusses his grander vision for RobinHood, with Baiju presenting his vision for RobinHood to be an “equalizing force, allowing everyone to invest.”
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Facebook’s tool to help the blind “see” images just launched for iOS | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Facebook has launched a tool, Automatic Alternative Text, for blind and visually impaired people to “see” images on the site. For people using screen readers to identify what’s displayed, AAT uses object recognition technology to generate descriptions of photos on Facebook. This tool, led by Facebook’s accessibility team, . “You just think about how much of your news feed is visual — and most of it probably is — and so often people will make a comment about a photo or they’ll say something about it when they post it, but they won’t really tell you what is the photo,” . “So for somebody like myself, it can be really like, ‘Ok, what’s going on here? What’s the discussion all about?’” Before AAT, people using screen readers would only hear the name of the person who shared a photo, along with any accompanying text that the person wrote on Facebook. Now, someone could hear “image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors.” [gallery ids="1301824,1301825,1301826"] The object recognition powering Facebook’s AAT is based on a neural network with billions of parameters, and one that is trained with millions of examples. Neural networks are one type of model for machine learning. When it comes to images, you can think of a neural network as a pattern recognition system. In Facebook’s technology for AAT, it recognizes images and words in transportation (“car,” “boat,” “motorcycle,” etc.), nature (“outdoor,” “mountain,” “wave,” “sun,” “grass,” etc.), sports (‘tennis,” “swimming,” ‘stadium,” etc.) food (“ice cream,” “sushi,” “dessert,” etc.) and descriptive words for appearance (“baby,” “eyeglasses,” “smiling,” “jewelry,” “selfie,” etc.). AAT is currently available for iOS screen readers set to English because that’s where Facebook sees the most use from blind and visually impaired people. Facebook will soon add the functionality to other platforms and languages. |
Marketers should stop relying on hover rate | Scott Knoll | 2,016 | 4 | 3 |
For many, the promise of digital advertising is the wealth of information that comes with every impression they buy. However, all this data becomes virtually useless when marketers employ the wrong success metrics for their campaigns. What use is it to know your click-through rates if more than half of those clicks are fraudulent? And how much do you really gain by optimizing for lower CPMs if your impressions are all showing up in non-viewable locations? Unless marketers are able to judge the effectiveness of their online spend using metrics that are proven to affect business results, there’s no reason for them to trust digital media any more than they do radio or print. One major area where we are seeing marketers and some adtech vendors making a huge mistake is placing value in metrics based on how people maneuver their cursors while browsing a web page. Although conventional wisdom suggests that someone is likely to be looking at an ad if their mouse is hovering over it, recent research suggests this is not the case. A study we conducted in September examined billions of impressions and found that marketers who optimize their campaigns using such mouse-based metrics actually the likelihood that they’re reaching a bot mimicking human behavior. Hover rates were 27 percent higher on impressions that were blocked, such as high brand-safety risk or fraud. Simply put, these kinds of statistics are woefully inadequate for determining the success of an online ad campaign, and they need to be abandoned. Much of the trust our industry places in hover rates and heat maps dates back to conducted at Carnegie Mellon University, which suggested a “strong relationship” between a person’s cursor location and where they were looking on the page. As a result, the authors concluded, companies could use mouse-tracking as an inexpensive alternative to eye-tracking systems. Nearly 15 years later, the paper is now very much out of date, particularly when it comes to how people browse the web. At the time of its publication, virtually everyone was accessing the Internet from a bulky desktop computer, and mobile phones had little functionality beyond making calls and the occasional game of Snake. Not only do today’s consumers have vastly different browsing habits, but we are now also able to collect a great deal more information on how they use the Internet. It’s no surprise that user experience experts from both Google and Microsoft have since produced research directly contradicting the findings of the 2001 study. In a 2010 presentation in Belgium, that 42 percent of the search users the company studied had no active mouse movement as they attempted to complete a task on the page. Further, of the remaining 58 percent of participants who move their cursors during the study, the eye movements of just 32 percent matched their horizontal mouse swipes, while only 10 percent exhibited a relationship between their eye gaze and their vertical mouse movements. As a team of scientists from Microsoft and the University of Washington concluded in , “Cursor movements, scrolling, and other client-side interactions are easy to collect at scale, which many Web analytics services offer to do. But claiming that the cursor approximates the gaze is misguided — as we have shown, this is often not the case depending on time and behavior.” Not only is mouse movement ultimately useless in terms of predicting whether a user has seen an ad, optimizing campaigns for hover rate is actively damaging to marketers’ efforts to reach their target audience. Just as black hats have learned to take advantage of KPIs like CPM and CPC, fraudsters have in recent years found ways to game the system by programming bots to wiggle a virtual mouse over the area where an ad is supposed to appear, thus fooling measurement vendors into thinking a real person saw the impression in question. The September research project from our data science team actually found a statistically significant correlation between hover rate and ad fraud; hover rates were 48 percent higher when served to bots rather than humans. While many marketers see a relatively high hover rate as a sign that they’re running a campaign with great viewability, the truth is they are more likely being swindled by fraudulent actors. |
An insider’s handbook for IoT startups | Ryan Margoles | 2,016 | 4 | 4 |
Tips are everywhere. There’s an abundance of generic advice available for how to build teams and culture, how to fundraise, how to be productive, how to stay above the noise… But what about specific advice? Specific tips for what differentiates the leaders from the followers. And even more specifically, a guide to differentiate and succeed as a hardware startup. We’ve learned a ton while working on Notion over the past couple of years. We’ve had some big wins and some big losses. We read the blogs, read the books, attended conferences, focused on best practices and did our best to be a walking TED talk. What we really could have used, though, was an insider’s guide; a sherpa for navigating the common challenges all will face, a treasure map to the best-kept secrets. Although we weren’t able to track down such a coveted document along our path, we figured it was time to put one together for those who are finding their way now. Without further delay, here are a number of insider tips for building a great company and product. Ideas! Innovation! Changing the world! There will always be improvements you know you can make to your product. But, as the second tip alludes to, a minimum viable product (MVP) should be the main the focus — what is the least functional, the least capable implementation of your product that is commercially viable? Go build that! Expand on it later. Take solace in the plot below, which seemingly illustrates most (hardware or software). You’ll have an idea, expand on it before you build it, realize you don’t have the time or resources to make it as feature-rich as you’d hoped, make your way through development and, finally, launch — with fewer features than you thought possible at the beginning. But, if you follow the second tip, that will all be okay. By definition, if your product is at MVP, it’s viable. Therefore, there are no additional features needed, no additional bells and whistles. Could it be better? Of course! Should it be? No! MVP is key. And, defining what MVP means for your product and team is paramount. To give you an idea, our overview document is 10 pages and outlines more than 150 features in excruciating detail. They range in complexity and depth, but a few examples are: “As a user, I should be able to access support via email” (on the simpler end) and “As a sensor, I should be able to be adhered to any household surface” (on the more challenging end). From here, we have two additional frameworks: “acceptance criteria” and “definition of done.” For the latter feature above, here’s a reference outline: Data makes for informed decisions. That’s easy and well understood. But, how much data is needed to make these so-called “informed decisions”? Paralysis by analysis can cause many an argument amongst teams. If you’re waiting until you’re 100 percent comfortable with a decision, you’ve waited too long. aren’t afforded the discretionary time to make for such clear-cut decisions. When you’re 80 percent sure (or even 70 percent sure), move ahead. You must accept the risk of being wrong or you’ll never get to the finish line. Does your product require compliance? FCC, PTCRB, WEEE, RoHS declaration, UL, California’s Prop 65? Will you have export restrictions? Do you have more than two batteries in your device (meaning you need an IATA battery handling label on every box)? How will you display your radio compliance IDs on your packaging? On your product? These are all tough questions that can have somewhat ambiguous answers. Finding the right outfit to guide you through the process can be challenging. Get started early. Be proactive and build compliance research into your feasibility assessments and budgeting (FCC alone can run $10,000+). Here are a few companies that can likely help you: , and . Unicorns won’t just make a single manufacturing run, right? Then give yourself the best chance to succeed and make that initial manufacturing run as simple as possible. We’ve had to adjust processes for reflow, stenciling, AOI (automatic optical inspection), panelizing, de-panelizing, flashing, testing components, heat staking, assembly, ID assignments, packout, packaging and more. If our contract manufacturer wasn’t 30 minutes away, we’d have had a much harder time working through solutions. Per-part costs will be higher initially, but all that matters is you know what your upside can be. Sell the dream to investors, “We manufacture for price X now but will be at price Y when we ramp overseas.” Know what price Y is in full detail and be ready to pull the trigger when the POs start rolling in. Check out and for more info on From test environments to server instances, the infrastructure for your product will be complex (to say the least!). As you scale, operating your own data centers can become expensive and unwieldy. The cloud offers the promise of on-demand pricing, but how do you ensure your services run the same on your dev machine as they do in production? Enter , a container technology giving you portability, agility and consistency. Containers run independent of the hosts on which they are placed, giving you consistency from test, to dev and all the way to production. With open-source tools like , or , running containers at scale in the cloud is becoming easier than ever. Hardware is hard. While diligent testing, unit tests and purposeful QA processes help, there are always going to be logic changes and feature adjustments. Get out in front of that need and plan for your over-the-air updating (OTAU) system. OTAUs give you the flexibility and capability to patch mistakes, upgrade services and, overall, provide a much better product as you move past MVP. Once your OTAU plans are in place, test, test, test! We call our system the “NUT,” which stands for “never-ending update test.” We constantly run sensors through over-the-air changes alongside a series of diagnostics to help isolate any issues that pop up. This is your bread and butter. This is how you set yourself apart. If you have a consumer-facing product, make it consumer-proof. Make it intuitive, neighborly, intelligent. Make it purposeful and appealing. This takes work… lots of it. But, you’ll be all the better for it, we promise! Run user tests in person, ask people not only if they’d buy your product but how much they’d pay for it, be critical and don’t make assumptions. Some great resources: , and . “So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose.” — Dead Poets Society Messaging is everything. Be thoughtful, be transparent and be forthright. Often times, engineers and creative/expressive writing don’t mix. Figure out how to bring that missing link to your team, whether it be through a professional copywriter or a full-time team member. An articulate, personable website, a useful, intuitive mobile application and a poignant branding campaign can go a long way toward success. Words can get you into accelerators, they can garner investor interest and they can ease the pain of tight circumstances. Write like your business depends on it… because it does! Your product will never be ready. It’ll never be bug-free. Your product will never have five-star reviews from all users and perfect 10s for NPS surveys. There will always be improvements to be made, better interfaces to develop, better copy to implement. But, you know what? That doesn’t matter! Stick with what you defined as your MVP. Get your product out there and let people use it. Get more feedback and iterate from there. A transparent company iterating through launch challenges is much better received than a silent company not acknowledging issues. If you’re ready to launch, you waited too long. If you don’t have to build your own Wi-Fi solution, why should you? Just like knowing your overseas COGS, know what your upside is to spin your own component solutions, as well — but don’t do it… yet. You can save time and energy utilizing platforms like to connect your product. It’ll get you to launch more quickly and help you prove product market fit. Once you’ve hit it big time, cost-engineer down to what you’ve known all along you could get to: Your bottom line will appreciate it, your investors will be happy because you did what you said you could do and you’ll have been on the market that much sooner because you didn’t belabor your team creating something that was already at your fingertips. This last one sounds a little silly, but stay with me here. Founders and members of early-stage tend to eat, sleep and breathe their product. It stands to reason that sleep and energy may suffer after long bouts with launch-the-product-itis. The best way to kick nagging colds, tackle tough travel periods and be at your best is to make sure you sleep. And sleep hard! A great pillow could be the best investment you ever make. Get a memory foam mattress topper. Get a system to help you track sleep cycles and to wake you up at the best possible time within those sleep cycles. Get an air quality monitor, like , to help you create an environment conducive to best sleep. That’s it! Twelve insider tips to help you reach the top. We could go on and on (get your packaging figured out before it’s too late, , build a model with recurring revenue, be thinking about unit tests for hardware QA…). It sounds like we just talked ourselves into a revision to the — but hopefully, this gets you started! |
Laurene Powell Jobs’s XQ America project enters a new phase this Friday | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | An untold number of schools will be receiving some happy news this coming Friday. According to an on-stage appearance today at the in San Francisco, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs revealed that a six-month-old national education challenge she’s backing called , is announcing which U.S. schools advance to the next phase. The competition will ultimately see at least five institutions receive a collective $50 million to try what will be for them entirely new educational approaches. Powell Jobs spoke about XQ on stage earlier tonight with Russlynn Ali, who worked in the Obama administration’s Education Department as the assistant secretary for civil rights. Ali now heads up XQ and she told attendees that the challenge has clearly struck a chord. In fact, its administrators have now heard from more than 40,000 individuals, including educators and parents, since Powell first made public the project. Ali also said the program has received nearly 700 applications from 49 states. (This includes 10,000 applicants and school designers, meaning individuals who both submitted full applications and those who participated in the design process.) One of those applicants is Sullivan High School in Chicago, which, like other schools, was asked to come up with a new vision for itself that’s specific to its student population. According to a , Sullivan features students from 35 countries, who speak 20 languages, and its principal, parents, and community members have proposed a curriculum that would provide incoming freshmen with time to focus on themselves. It would then ask sophomores to contribute their ideas and time to performing community service and problem solving — ideas the students would be asked to apply to a national level their junior year and a global level during their senior year of high school. Whether or not Sullivan is ultimately chosen to receive funding and assistance from XQ, both Ali and Powell Jobs emphasized tonight that its ambitions to help schools rethink education is more important than ever, largely given how quickly the nature of work is changing. Recounting an earlier conversation she’d had with Powell Jobs, Ali told the audience that “schools have been a black box” for too long. The pair also noted that in the last 100 years, the Model T has given way to Teslas, and switchboards have given way to incredible smart phones. Meanwhile, the model for U.S. high schools has remained virtually unchanged. The pair also noted that while each of the winning schools will likely be addressing issues differently, the schools’ different models, including their learnings, successes and failures will be shared across the entire network. (Powell Jobs added that she expects “many commonalities” among them as well, including “highly relevant, interest-based, experiential learning” that’s “integrated with businesses in the community so that internships are accessible to every single student.”) If XQ is at all successful in jump-starting a bigger movement, Americans will hopefully “no longer see time as the proxy for learning but instead the actual mastery of content,” suggested Ali. If not, she seemed to warn, the U.S. could be saddled with both an achievement and opportunity gap that only grows wider from here. You can learn much more about Project XQ . |
Disney to “broaden the scope” of succession planning as its COO departs | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Thomas Staggs, chief operating officer at The Walt Disney Corporation, is stepping down. Staggs is as the successor to CEO Bob Iger, so this makes the entertainment giant’s plans after Iger’s departure seem a lot less certain. Staggs has been at Disney for 26 years, and he was recently to COO, a move that cemented the perception that he was the heir apparent. His departure is takes effect on May 6, although he will remain on-board as a “special advisor” through the end of the fiscal year. In a statement, Iger said: Tom has been a great friend and trusted colleague for more than 20 years. He’s made important contributions to this company, earning wide respect across the organization for his achievements and personal integrity. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together, immensely grateful for the privilege of working with him, and confident that he will be enormously successful in whatever opportunity he chooses. The company also said that its board of directors “will broaden the scope of its succession planning process to identify and evaluate a robust slate of candidates for consideration.” Iger is expected to leave Disney . While we’re speculating about Disney’s future, it’s also worth noting that the company has been increasingly (though not solely) positioning itself , with including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Square and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and BlackBerry CEO John S. Chen on its board. The news about Staggs’ departure was first . |
Experience Here, the augmented audio device from Doppler Labs | Felicia Shivakumar | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Doppler Labs’s augmented audio device, Here, seems to be all the rage in music hardware these days. Doppler recently won a and will begin a partnership with Coachella starting next week. Each Coachella attendee gets an exclusive code to skip the waitlist and purchase devices to wear at the week-long music festival. “We’re integrated into each stage,” says Doppler Labs founder and CEO Noah Kraft. “We’ve created specific filters; we are going to have places on the ground where you can actually try the tech. And it’s been really important to us because we want people to wear this out in the world. It is not a headphone. It is a live listening device, and what better way to use it than a place like Coachella?” I had never tried or really heard of augmented audio before I visited Doppler Labs. Unlike headphones, which simply transfer music from your device, the Here Active Listening system changes the way you experience live audio. The device uses a Bluetooth connection and lets you control the sound around you via the app. TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook recently of what it’s like to use Here, which goes into more details about what it is like to wear it around New York City. I, on the other hand, was really interested in the inspiration and design of the device. “Everyone knows at this point what virtual reality is,” Kraft says. “You’re essentially creating a secondary world — different from the reality you’re living in. You put on some goggles and it allows you to be transported to something completely different. Now people are starting to also understand augmented, visual reality like HoloLens or Magic Leap, and that puts a layer of a filter on the way you experience the real world. “Now audio augmented reality takes that same concept and applies it to your ears. It allows you to still hear the world but it allows you to filter and curate how you want to hear, what you want to hear, and what you don’t want to hear.” The first thing I noticed is that the device is quite small considering all the tech packed into it. It’s light enough and comfortable to wear for 30 minutes or so at a time. “Some of the earlier versions that we looked at — they just started getting bigger, bigger and bigger,” says Jacob Palmborg, Doppler’s director of design. “As we started adding more technology and more chips, the device started to grow. And when you try to fit into someone’s ear, there are only so many directions you can actually grow in. “In the design process, we went through hundreds of iterations of this. Almost daily we went through new models, new concepts, new ideas that we could evaluate both in the office but also bring in a lot of users and get their feedback and thoughts about what we were making.” Aesthetically, I felt comfortable wearing Here in the office and out and about town — not self-conscious at all. And I don’t think anyone was really looking all that closely at my ears — and if they were it because they thought the hardware looked interesting, not out of place. “We were trying to make something that did not come across as a medical device or a hearing aid but also didn’t look like your typical earbud or headphone,” says Palmborg. The biggest challenge that came up over and over no matter who on the Doppler team I spoke with was the battery. It needed to fit into the device, not weigh it down and last long enough to fulfill the most common uses cases. I found that the battery worked fine and lasted longer than I’d ever need it to, largely thanks to the case that also charges the buds when they aren’t in your ears. However, using Here throughout the day did drain the battery on my phone. I’d imagine this is something that can be solved by running the software in the background. That said, I anticipate Coachella-goers will opt not to use the device, in favor of texting and taking photos, if this issue isn’t fixed soon. If you are sold on Doppler’s Here, good luck getting your hands on one. Currently, the company has seen just under 80,000 sign-ups on its waitlist. But some still have a chance. The Doppler team is hand-selecting folks based on stories they submit — or you could purchase a ticket to Coachella. When I ask Kraft how the team is reacting to all the buzz about Here, he said, “Frankly, it’s been a little surreal to see how positive and excited people are about Here Active Listening. We know the idea of a computer in your ears, like Her and Star Trek Babelfish. This is a potent space, but frankly we weren’t sure that audio augmented reality as a first feature set would be anything more than a niche product.” |
NASA’s new sea level site puts climate change papers, data, and tools online | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | NASA took the wraps off a new website on Monday dedicated to tracking global changes in the sea level. It’s packed full of free online resources that will likely be useful to teachers, the climate-change-curious, and anyone just looking to dig into publicly available data. is NASA instead of NOAA because the site focuses on space-based observations — though the latter agency’s mark is all over the place as well. There are sections on the history of observing sea level, ice reach, and other climate markers that make for good primers if you’re not up on your oceanography. You’ll probably have more fun fiddling with the , however. It’s a big world map with a couple layers you can add onto it and animate (looks like !). Still a little buggy (it’s in alpha) but worth trying out — students might even learn something from observing sea level height and temperature changing over time. More datasets will be added later, so you might want to hold off on building your lesson plan for now. There’s also a database of published papers backing up the info on the site — some of which are free to read, but you’ll have to pick through to find out. (Note to NASA: love the site, but an indicator for open access articles would be great.) The landing page also apprises you of the latest depressing statistics: sea level rising 3.4 millimeters annually, for instance, or Greenland shrinking by 287 every year. Great job, everybody! [graphiq id=”gSiFBivjh8p” title=”Global Land and Sea Temperature Anomalies” width=”640″ height=”561″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/gSiFBivjh8p” link=”//www.graphiq.com/wlp/gSiFBivjh8p” link_text=”Global Land and Sea Temperature Anomalies | WeatherDB”] |
Microsoft’s mobile problem may not be a problem at all | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | When Microsoft announced its Windows 10 strategy last year, the thinking was that and finally bring the Windows phone out of the doldrums where it’s been virtually forever. The idea was you could develop once for Windows 10 desktop and easily share that code on any device, making it impossibly attractive for developers, which would finally drive Windows Mobile popularity in a beautiful virtuous development cycle. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way, and Microsoft finds itself in an unusual position, developing software for iOS and Android because it simply doesn’t have a viable Windows mobile ecosystem. According to , Microsoft had 2.9 percent market share in the U.S. for the fourth quarter last year. That was unchanged since September, in case you were wondering. In its fourth quarter earnings report in January, Microsoft . That would cover the period where the Windows 10 mobile development magic was supposed to be happening. As you can plainly see, the plan doesn’t seem to have worked as drawn up. Windows 10 is out. It appears to , but it doesn’t seem to have trickled down to Windows smartphones much at all. Here’s how in an interview with Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet last year: “[T]he free upgrade for Windows 10 is meant to improve our phone position. That is the reason why I made that decision. If somebody wants to know whether I’m committed to Windows Phone, they should think about what I just did with the free upgrade to Windows, rather than — hey, I[‘m] making four more phone models of value smart phones.” In an interview with Matt Rosoff from Business Insider this week, Rosoff pointed out the lack of discussion of Windows Mobile at last week’s Build developer conference. : First of all, I don’t think of Windows for mobile differently than Windows for HoloLens or Windows for Xbox now. We have only one Windows. We don’t have multiple Windows. They run across multiple form factors, but it’s one developer platform, one store, one tool chain for developers. And you adapt it for different screen sizes and different input and output. TechCrunch’s Haje Jans Kamps also keynote discussions. At one point while introducing Xamarin, the presenter put it like this: “We don’t care if it’s Android or iOS, we have you covered,” the presenter said, and continued onto the rest of his presentation. “Spot any platforms missing from that two-bulletpoint-list,” Kamps wondered with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. The question remains; can Microsoft succeed without a strong Windows mobile position? From the looks of things, they don’t seem to have much choice. Nadella appears to be staking his position in the cloud, which is a perfectly reasonable way to play it, while opening up his company’s tools to iOS and Android in the absence of any meaningful Windows phone adoption. When you look at the beauty of the mobile-cloud connection, it’s understandable Microsoft would want to be there with Windows, but perhaps Nadella is beginning to understand that Windows is not necessarily the future of the company — Azure and Office 365 are — and that could explain why the company stayed firmly focused on these two areas at Build. When you combine that with , including Cortana (Microsoft’s talking virtual assistant), that can run in Microsoft’s tools or external platforms like Slack and LINE, you start to see a vision where Microsoft thrives even without an in-house mobile platform. As the world moves swiftly to that mobile-cloud intersection, perhaps the underlying OS becomes less important. If that’s the case — if Microsoft can have a piece of the underlying cloud-mobile plumbing and have apps and bots created in its ecosystem, run anywhere on any device — it renders the Windows phone gap irrelevant. For Microsoft with its weak mobile position, it had better hope that’s the case. |
NASA partners with Microsoft to launch “mixed reality” Mars exhibit | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | NASA has collaborated with Microsoft to create a new mixed-reality exhibit known as “ “, allowing the public to explore the red planet with holographic tour guides. The exhibit will open this summer in Florida at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Featuring the second person on the moon, Dr. Buzz Aldrin, and guided by Curiosity Mars Rover driver Erisa Hines, viewers will check out real sites on Mars where scientists have made important discoveries. The experience was created using imagery taken from the Curiosity Rover which landed on Mars in August 2012. “Destination: Mars” makes use of software, a Mars rover mission operations tool co-developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Microsoft. With OnSight, NASA scientists have a more intuitive way to explore the area around Mars rovers. Users can interact with a 3-D simulation of the Martian environment and use a first-person perspective to plan and conduct science experiments. In a , NASA noted that up until this point, “rover operations required scientists to examine Mars imagery on a computer screen, and make inferences about what they are seeing.” Virtual reality can open up an entirely new way of conducting research on a planet over 100 million miles away from Earth. “OnSight gives our rover scientists the ability to walk around and explore Mars right from their offices. It fundamentally changes our perception of Mars, and how we understand the Mars environment surrounding the rover.” Dave Lavery, program executive for Solar System Exploration at NASA Headquarters OnSight is already becoming integrated in robotic Mars missions. Recently, Abigail Fraeman, a Curiosity science team member at JPL, to identify a potential transition path for the rover between two Martian rock formations. Microsoft has previously worked with NASA to send one of their virtual reality headsets, the HoloLens, to the International Space Station. Astronaut Scott Kelly tested the headset during his stay on station. HoloLens projects light directly on the user’s eyeball in order to create a mixed reality experience. The headset overlays images on top of the actual environment around you. In an after he returned to Earth, Kelly said that virtual reality has a lot of potential when it comes to space exploration. He explained that the headset had cameras on it which could share what you’re seeing to someone back on Earth. “A person on the ground could be drawing things in your field of view and pointing to things. I could be doing the same. I could say ‘Hey, is this the bolt or connector you’re talking about?’ and the other person could just write an arrow in your field of view. And it worked great, I was really surprised.” Astronaut Scott Kelly on the Microsoft HoloLens As for other strategic partnerships, it comes as no surprise that Dr. Buzz Aldrin would want to be involved in the “Destination: Mars” project. Through his , social media accounts, and speaking engagements, Aldrin has proven to be a steadfast advocate for making Mars, rather than the moon, the next destination for human exploration. By popular demand! You can now get my official Tee on my website at — Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) While NASA had originally focused on first sending humans back to the moon under the Bush Administration, the focus was changed to Mars under the Obama Administration. NASA is currently centering time and resources on the initiative. “As we prepare to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, the public will now be able to preview the experience the astronauts will have as they walk and study the Martian surface.” Dave Lavery, program executive for Solar System Exploration at NASA Headquarters Wherever the ultimate destination, NASA engineers are working to transform scientific and exploration efforts in space with the addition of virtual reality and mixed reality tools. With exhibits like “Destination: Mars” and tools like OnSight and HoloLens, exploring and working in space from Earth is becoming a much more realistic and immersive experience. |
FAA committee proposes official categories for drones that fly near crowds | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | A committee of industry representatives appointed by the FAA turned in recommendations suggesting a four-tiered system for classifying drones and how they may (or mayn’t) interact with crowds. — the FAA declined to provide it to TechCrunch, though it should be public soon. The rulemaking committee was , and its recommendations are not legally binding, just advisory — it’s a similar procedure to the task force that in November . According to the documents obtained by the AP, drones would fall into one of four categories: Drones under 250 grams would be permitted to fly over crowds as long as the manufacturer demonstrates that the chance of injury from collision is insignificant (under a 1 percent chance). These little guys would have no height restrictions. Consumer drones like the popular DJI phantom would have to show a similarly low risk of injury if they are to be flown over people, and they would have to stay 20 feet above their heads. A third category would be for industrial or commercial drones that fly over people who know the risk — contractors overseeing the survey of a property, or a film crew working on an aerial shot. A 30 percent maximum risk of serious injury at maximum force applies here (so wear a helmet). The last category would be for sustained flights over crowds — serious extended flights for filming concerts, doing news reporting and that sort of thing. These would have that higher injury risk, but would have to have a “congested area plan” for safely exiting an area of operation should something go wrong. More specific language and descriptions will surely be found in the document itself as soon as it is published — and the FAA will likely chime in, as will groups like the and the . |
Auka brings Google Cloud-powered banking to Europe | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Norwegian startup is setting its sights on hitting two birds with one stone: helping banks to get into compliance with EU regulation and rolling out high-tech banking to customers across Europe. The company is a white-label service aimed at retail banks and is the first fully licensed and regulated payments infrastructure running on . The service aims to make it easy for financial institutions to create mobile payments services and more. The company’s mCASH product is aimed at small retailers — and making it easier for friends and family to send and receive money. Historically, payment systems have been operated by banks themselves, but are forcing the introduction of an open market, in the hope of making it is far easier to make intra-account payments and payments to merchants. This, in turn, is paving the way for API-first and mobile-first banks such as , and — with one further layer of abstraction — Auka. Today’s announcement is that the company is releasing its tech as a turnkey solution for banks who are lagging behind the curve and haven’t gotten their act together in the mobile banking space. Instead of having to invest huge amounts of time and money in developing their own solutions, Auka claims that a full end-to-end integration with a bank takes less than three months. The mobile solutions can be customized with branding, and can include real-time peer-to-peer payments, point-of-sale solutions and merchant services. Auka is . “I’m excited and privileged to work together with the Auka team. I believe what Auka is doing is very disruptive and a great step forward for the financial industry,” said Otso Juntunen, Head of Google Cloud Platform in the Nordics. Auka launched mCASH, its first mobile payments platform and a competitor to PayPal of sorts, back in 2014. mCASH targets entry-level mobile payments for small online stores, sending money to friends and family and running small retail operations such as cafes and restaurants, concerts and events. With its white-label relaunch, the company is entering its second wind, aiming at a much bigger market. The platform counts 17 banks and thousands of merchants among its users. “It is a digital revolution that will completely alter the current banking model and require financial institutions to adapt their business and operating mode,” Auka claims, and with its Europe-wide roll-out, the company is offering a helping hand to the large number of slower-moving players in the banking world. |
Salesforce acquires MetaMind | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | , a Palo Alto-based AI startup founded in July 2014, is being acquired by Salesforce. According to a published at the company’s website by CEO Richard Socher — a Stanford PhD who studied machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision — Salesforce plans to use its technology to “further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes. [MetaMind will] extend Salesforce’s data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform.” Salesforce confirmed the deal but isn’t disclosing financial details of the transaction or commenting on whether MetaMind’s entire team will join its ranks. As a standalone company, MetaMind’s general-purpose platform was designed to predict outcomes for language, vision and database tasks. As of the middle of last year, its technology could reportedly answer everything from specific queries about snippets of text to the sentiment of that text. Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor at the University of Montreal, last June of MetaMind’s architecture, it’s “interesting in that it is aiming at something potentially very ambitious, trying to sequentially parse a large amount of facts . . . in such a way, via a learned semantic representation, that one can answer questions about them.” Reportedly, MetaMind later its focus on natural language processing to include more image analysis, too, which Socher knows well. Back in 2009, while still at Stanford, he helped create , an image database that AI researchers still use to compare their image-recognition software in an . (Last year it was won by a group of researchers at the .) MetaMind had both paid and unpaid users. For unpaid web users, MetaMind’s products will be discontinued on May 4, according to Socher’s post. For its monthly recurring users, MetaMind’s products will be discontinued on June 4. The company says it will delete any data it has stored for unpaid web users and monthly recurring users after April 11. MetaMind had raised $8 million from investors, according to . Its backers include Khosla Ventures and (notably) Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. |
The SEC is voicing concern about ‘eye-popping’ startup valuations | Shriram Bhashyam | 2,016 | 4 | 4 |
Consider it an early warning, or maybe a gentle reminder, from your friendly securities regulator. SEC Chair Mary Jo White came to the heart of Silicon Valley to deliver a speech at Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance on March 31, 2016, which touched on a variety of topics but was rather forthright in addressing startup valuations. Management and boards at late-stage, or pre-IPO, companies are on notice that the SEC is paying attention to the late-stage financing arena, and should look internally to ensure that corporate governance and financial controls are befitting their scale, and should also ensure the accuracy of the disclosures they make when raising funds. Job No. 1 of the SEC is investor protection. Viewed through this lens, it makes sense that the SEC would start paying attention to what’s going on in the world of unicorns and their “eye-popping,” as White put it, valuations. To be fair, late-stage financing occurs in the private markets, where the players are sophisticated and typically understand the risks associated with growth-stage investing. However, these financings are still subject to basic securities laws requirements, including the provided to prospective investors in these companies, which White openly questioned. She was concerned that the motivations to achieve a high valuation may lead to impropriety in disclosures. White noted, “In the Unicorn context, there is a worry that the tail may wag the horn, so to speak, on valuation disclosures. The concern is whether the prestige associated with reaching a sky high valuation fast drives companies to try to appear more valuable than they actually are.” It’s well-known in Silicon Valley that valuation itself has become a KPI, whether for noble reasons ( ) or not (valuation as ). White wondered aloud “… whether the publicity and pressure to achieve the Unicorn benchmark is analogous to that felt by public companies to meet projections they make to the market with the attendant risk of financial reporting problems.” The SEC has now reminded companies that these motivations and pressures do not excuse bending the rules by inaccurately reflecting company performance. Further, the SEC is keenly aware that the risk of inaccuracy is increased at startups because they tend to have looser internal controls than their public counterparts (Zenefits is the here). Accordingly, White stressed the importance of financial controls and corporate governance at pre-IPO companies. The trend of companies staying private longer has had an effective multiplier effect on concerns about internal controls. The IPO process itself is a solution to these problems, through the disinfecting nature of transparency and the commitment of companies to strengthen controls and governance. By punting on the IPO, companies are also delaying transparent financial and operational reporting and the building of strong internal governance and financial controls. Private companies that operate at a scale that is on par with listed public companies, but which do not have the same level of internal controls, pose a risk to investor and market protection. And when that happens, the SEC will care. Indeed, White warned that fast-growing unicorns may be at risk of not having controls in place to ensure accurate financial statements. Leaders in the startup community should consider whether companies they manage or advise have grown their internal controls and governance structures in proportion to the companies’ operational scale. Leaders at companies ought to examine whether their management teams and boards have proper regulatory, financial and industry experience to make the right decisions to benefit all stakeholders. |
Simplify your stock-picking process with these apps | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Investing in the stock market made easy — that’s the goal of these apps, which make investing more convenient and help you keep tabs on the market updates. And you don’t have to be a finance whiz to work them. Trade stocks without fees on . After a quick registration, use Robinhood to access market data and quotes in real time, build a personalized watch list and track your portfolio. The startup has been gaining significant traction in the finance app space and is backed by celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Jared Leto and Nas. Robinhood almost makes it too easy to put money on the stock market, so be careful with those impulse purchases. Robinhood is an Apple Design Award winner and a . The app is free on the iPhone and Android. There is also an Apple Watch app. Stocktwits Forget hashtags, on , it’s about the “cashtag.” The social media platform is tailored for people who want to get real-time insight into what others are saying about the stock market. A Twitter for investors, search for chatter about companies by putting a dollar sign before the ticker symbol. Follow your favorite stocks and get notified when they’re trending. Investors mark whether they are bullish or bearish and you can see if there is positive or negative sentiment around a company right now. Share insight and build a following, or simply see what others are saying. StockTwits is free on the iPhone and Android. They also have an Apple Watch app. Put those pennies to work. is all about investing your spare change. Attach a credit card and the app rounds up to the next dollar on each transaction, investing it into a customized and diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. In other words, every time you spend $3.75 on a latte, a quarter goes into the stock market. Acorns charges a dollar per month for accounts under $5000 or .25% per year for accounts with more. But while Acorns may be great at motivating you to invest, do your research and make sure their ETF investments fit with your strategy. The venture community is betting big on Acorns and the team has raised $32 million to date from Greycroft and others. The app is free and is available on the iPhone, Apple Watch and Android. Acorns |
Medic Mobile locks $1 million grant to help community health workers in the developing world | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Tech nonprofit has attained $1 million in unrestricted grant funding from the for apps that help health workers deliver care to people who lack reasonable access to doctors and hospitals. According to Medic Mobile founder Josh Nesbit, about 10,000 health workers in developing nations use Medic Mobile’s apps today to record data about individuals’ health, and prioritize resources so that those with the most pressing needs get help first. Medic Mobile also gives health workers task lists and diagnostic information to help them accurately assess and do what they are able to on-the-spot for patients with a health problem. The San Francisco-based organization designs apps that are lightweight enough to use in the field on $10 Nokia phones and Android devices, which are commonly distributed by NGOs and government health offices to their workers. But it also designs its apps to be robust enough that they can be used, for free, by any clinic or hospital that needs software to manage their operations, and keep or share accurate, up-to-date patient records. It distributes its apps via one-click downloads, or on parallel sim cards that click into mobile phones. Established as a nonprofit in 2011, MedicMobile has raised about $10 million in philanthropic funding to-date, Nesbit said. Like most nonprofits, Medic Mobile is always fundraising. Typically, the checks it receives are earmarked for specific initiatives that matter to a donor, like bringing technology to workers focused on maternity and neo-natal health issues, or developing analytics that help health workers understand the spread of a vaccine-curable disease like malaria in a particular region. While $1 million may not sound like a handsome sum to tech startups operating as for-profits, the unrestricted grant from the Peery Foundation to Medic Mobile is noteworthy, because it goes to generally support the company, said Shannon Farley, founder and executive director of , an accelerator for tech nonprofits. Medic Mobile graduated from Fast Forward in 2014, receiving $20,000 from the accelerator and additional $20,000 from its partner, . Nesbit said that Medic Mobile intends to use the new grant money from the Peery Foundation for hiring and product development. “We will heavily pursue analytics as a way to help the manager who needs to decide which village to visit today, or a way to help health workers figure out what exactly is going on, like is a child malnourished or does he or she have malaria,” Nesbit said. He also said the company is developing “toolkits” that will help an individual worker, clinic or health office start using its technology immediately, on a DIY basis, even where they don’t have good web or cellular access. |
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