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Entrepreneurs must learn to negotiate, or they can lose everything | Lawrence Susskind | 2,016 | 4 | 4 |
Successfully taking an idea to market involves many more negotiations than most entrepreneurs realize. First, they must figure out whether to share credit with any partners or advisors who helped them along the way. Then, they need to determine who owns what, and who controls what, as they make their way through multiple rounds of investment. Once employees are involved, they must figure out who will have what responsibilities, how production targets can best be met, what the marketing strategy will be and whether employees are entitled to equity shares (and which kind) in the company. There may be leases for office space and relationships with suppliers to work out. Then, at some point, many entrepreneurs will need to reach an agreement with their board of directors or their investors about whether or not to sell or merge the company. Every one of these decisions involves negotiations; if they are not handled properly, even the best ideas are doomed. The four most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make are: While it is true that most inventors know more about their inventions than anyone else, many inventors are much more likely to fall prey to a series of cognitive biases, like reactive devaluation (i.e. unfairly attributing negative motives to a negotiating partner), than someone who is not as emotionally involved. This means that knowing when and how to rely on agents or intermediaries is very important. It is hard to explain something to someone who doesn’t have the same technical background as you. Many entrepreneurial efforts stand or fall on the willingness of investors to believe that a prototype or an underlying concept will work as expected. They may ask experts of their choosing to assess a concept or a prototype. When experts disagree, it can be hard to sort things out. By engaging in joint fact-finding or pilot tests together, inventors and investors can reach grounded understandings that might otherwise elude them. Inventors are often willing to shoulder more risk than investors. At the very least, investors may want a guarantee of greater reward for taking on what they see as substantial risk. This tension over risk and reward often manifests itself in a contest over control of seats on the board of directors or hiring/firing power. Sometimes it comes down to valuation of a company or allocation of equity shares as a hedge against risk. One way out of these battles is to formulate contingent agreements. If two parties disagree on the risks they face moving forward, they can formulate a set of interlocking agreements with elements that are only triggered as milestones are met. Contingent agreements are more complex, and legal advisors may shy away from them, but they often are the best way of coping with complexity in entrepreneurial negotiations. Many inventors are too focused on financial considerations. They just want a deal. To get a deal they often say things that turn out not to be true. When it becomes clear they can’t live up to what they promised, trust is lost. The success of many entrepreneurial efforts hinges on cooperation over time, so a breakdown in trust can be devastating. Knowing when and how to share information, and what to keep secret, is the key to negotiating in a way that leaves relationships intact, or even improves them. There are many stories of entrepreneurs who have negotiated what appeared to be lucrative deals with venture capitalists, only to end up with nothing. It is important for entrepreneurs to be ready to negotiate, and to know how to learn from their own negotiation experience. |
Nest demonstrates the risks of being an early adopter by shutting down Revolv | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Remember the ? Probably not. The device was released in late 2013, and while fantastic, it largely flew under the radar before Alphabet’s Nest division bought the company, and promptly stopped selling the device. But the device was still available from various retailers and worth the cash for home packed with Internet of Things devices. It works great — and soon it won’t. Alphabet, through Nest, is shutting down the backend of the Revolv device on May 15, 2016. This change was sudden. Until the middle of February of this year, support for the Revolv hub seemed indefinite and then the company’s website was updated to indicated the impending closure. Though sudden, this shouldn’t be a large surprise. The device had not been sold for several years. The iOS app had not been updated since February 2015, per data provided by Sensor Tower, who also notes the app only ever received 96 ratings. When Nest bought Revolv in 2014, the company was clear that they were interested in the team behind the device and not the device itself. Nest co-founder Matt Rogers called the team one of the best for home wireless and home communication. At the time, Rogers indicated that Nest would continue to support Revolv customers. This shows the danger in buying devices reliant on backend services. There’s always a chance that the company behind the device will stop paying the server bills and leave users with a paperweight. Things do not last forever. Buyer beware is an old adage that’s still relevant today. |
DJI, 3DR, Parrot and GoPro form new drone advocacy group | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | DJI, 3DR, Parrot and GoPro are launching their own drone advocacy group to lobby for “policies that promote innovation and safety, and create a practical and responsible regulatory framework.” The Small UAV Coalition, which launched with participation from DJI, 3DR, Amazon Prime Air and others interested in the drone ecosystem, has been one of the main lobbying groups for drone manufacturers since it launched in 2014. Now, however, the logos of DJI, 3DR, Parrot and GoPro are nowhere to be found on the Small UAV Coalition’s (which still includes the likes of Google[x], Amazon Prime Air, AirMap, Intel and others). “There are significant economic and social benefits to drone operations in the U.S., and industry must work with policymakers to ensure a safe environment for flying,” the members of the new alliance said in a statement today. “The Drone Manufacturers Alliance believes a carefully balanced regulatory framework requires input from all stakeholders and must recognize the value and necessity of continued technological innovation. By highlighting innovation and emphasizing education, we intend to work with policymakers to ensure drones continue to be safely integrated into the national airspace.” As the drone market — and the number of companies in it — continued to grow, the Small UAV coalition probably didn’t feel like the right kind of group to represent the interests of these major drone manufacturers anymore. While the interests of the likes of DJI and Parrot are probably mostly aligned with the other companies in the ecosystem that provide services around drones or are looking to start drone delivery operations, the manufacturers’ largest market for now is probably the consumer market and there, the issues are somewhat different from those other drone companies are dealing with. As long as this doesn’t lead to unnecessary turf wars, having two organizations that essentially advocate for the same issues doesn’t have to be a bad thing, especially if the Small UAV coalition now gets to focus on commercial drone usage and the Drone Manufacturer Coalition on consumer issues. |
Samir Arora is stepping down as CEO of Mode Media | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Samir Arora, the longtime CEO of , is stepping down, replaced by interim CEO Jack Rotolo. Rotolo has serving in a number of roles at the company, most recently president of global sales and business operations. “Mode Media is poised to redefine social content for brands thanks in large part to Samir Arora’s dedication and vision,” Rotolo said in a statement. “I am very excited about the opportunity to guide Mode Media forward as the leading social content and video platform for brands.” Mode was started back in 2003 (Arora was one of the founders) and was known for most of its history as Glam Media — the same name as its flagship fashion site. Over time, it expanded into other areas with new sites like Bliss and Foodie, and with . (Marc Andreessen joined the Glam board as part of the deal.) Most recently, it where users browse stories and videos shared by content curators. A few years ago, the company was also , but the IPO never materialized. While Arora is stepping down as CEO, he will continue to serve on Mode’s board of directors. |
Faraday Future: “Tesla Model 3 is fantastic news.” | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | Nick Sampson, head of the startup electric vehicle company , spent a busy day as the title sponsor of the April 2. I interviewed him standing up in the shade of a tree on a warm California afternoon before we both had to hurry off to the track where the cars would be lined up on the grid for the standing start of the Formula E race. While he quickly ate a small plate of sausage and potato salad, Sampson fielded a few questions about the Model 3. “It’s not our competition,” he said. “It’s fantastic news.” Sampson saw Tesla rack up the preorders for the Model 3 and concluded that those numbers validate the pent-up demand for electric vehicles. As of Friday, Tesla had more than 180,000 preorders for its latest, most affordable model, though wonder if the company can fill all these orders. If they can’t, Faraday Future is hoping to swoop in and gather up those potential customers—if, that is, their own first and as-yet-unseen vehicle is ready in time. The interest in Tesla vehicles has done the electric car market a lot of good, according to Sampson. “It opens people’s minds to the possibilities.” It’s the same reason, he said, that Faraday Future jumped on board as a title sponsor for the Formula E race at the last minute. “Formula E is what we’re about,” Sampson said, though the company does not have a team racing in the series. “We’re trying to show that electric cars aren’t dull and boring. We’re both pushing in that same direction.” Faraday Future did bring its FFZero “car of concept,” a technological showcase wrapped in a cool race car shell. It’s built on a performance variant of the company’s core platform, Sampson said. “It’s the same technology—batteries and motors—that will be used for the production cars.” The FFZero didn’t take even a parade lap, but just as at CES where the concept debuted, the booth in the eVillage activity area was filled with fans taking pictures. Sampson saw the value of sponsorship in getting the company’s name out, and for race fans, the FFZero was a fine ambassador, even if it didn’t see any track time. |
Vivaldi browser hits 1.0 | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | After more than a year of public alpha and beta releases, the Vivaldi browser is . Vivaldi, which was founded by Opera co-founder and former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, prides itself as a browser for power users — a group of users, von Tetzchner and his team believe, that has been mostly abandoned by other browser vendors. For power users, Vivaldi offers features like customizable keyboard shortcuts and an optional command line-like interface, support for mouse gestures, tab stacks, and plenty of customization options (want your tabs on the bottom or the right side of the window? Vivaldi will happily oblige, for example). The browser uses Google’s Blink engine and lets you use Chrome extensions, too. In the last couple of releases, the team mostly focused on polish and getting the 1.0 release out of the door. Von Tetzchner tells me the team now feels that the browser is stable and feature-complete enough for a 1.0 release. “We’ve been very happy with the response so far,” von Tetzchner said about the beta process. “It’s been great to see a lot of people are liking what we’re doing and that we’re providing something that people want.” He admitted that it took the team a while to find the right direction and to build the right tools and libraries to get this new browser off the ground. Even though Vivaldi has now hit 1.0, there are still some missing features von Tetzchner hopes to add to the browser soon. Early on, for example, he promised to build a mail client into the browser — similar to what Opera used to offer. The team decided this wouldn’t be ready for the 1.0 release, though. “Building a mail client isn’t trivial,” von Tetzchner said and noted that Vivaldi will now have more engineers working on this. Also missing from this first release is the ability to sync bookmarks, setting and extensions. That, too, is on the roadmap and will become even more important once the team launches mobile versions of Vivaldi, which are also on the roadmap. One thing we likely won’t see as a built-in feature in Vivaldi is an ad blocker, though. While Von Tetzchner acknowledged that it’s “a complicated issue, he also noted he was surprised to see his old colleagues at Opera experimenting with this. If you , now is probably a good time to give it a spin. In my experience, it’s now as stable as any other major browser on the market today and over time, I’ve also come to appreciate features like and . |
Social payments startup Circle rolls into Europe | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | It may have started as a Bitcoin wallet but veteran entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire’s fintech startup has since shifted focus to social payments, launching an app in Q4 last year that lets users send U.S. dollars to settle IOUs between each other, with its pitch being it makes payments as easy as firing off an SMS (and perhaps cheaper, given there’s no fees involved for Circle users). And while fiat currency payments are now evidently the focal point for its business (rather than Bitcoin payments), Circle does still offer the ability to feelessly pay people elsewhere in the world, in some 150 countries — and for that it needs to loop Bitcoin into the mix, turning dollar payments into BTCs deposited into the recipient’s Bitcoin wallet. But Allaire prefers to talk now about the other, more fashionable ‘b’ word — blockchain — asserting that Circle is utilizing blockchain technology to “build a model for money that works over the open Internet”. “We never thought of ourselves as a Bitcoin startup. The media certainly classified us that way because we were involved with the technology. From the day we founded the company three years ago we’ve focused on trying to build a new consumer finance company. And one that makes money work the way the Internet works,” he tells TechCrunch. “We want… to connect the benefits of digital currency with the existing financial system. And the existing currencies that people use, day to day, the currencies they’re paid in, the currencies they pay people with etc, and connect that not just with blockchain technology but other major technical innovations that make doing what we do possible.” “When people use the Circle product… you don’t see Bitcoins. It’s sort of underneath. The blockchain is a technology that allows us to not just build another closed payments system but actually build something that’s interoperable with the rest of the world,” he adds. Today Circle is adding support for its second fiat currency — UK sterling — so it can now offer its users feeless cross-border payments between US dollars and UK pounds (or vice versa), as well as Bitcoin payments. Cross border currency transfers might prove more of a compelling draw to pull users into Circle vs the core proposition of an app to settle cash debts with friends/acquaintances, given the typical complexity and expense involved in sending fiat money abroad via traditional banking routes. And the relative hassle of asking your friend to sign up to an app just to redeem that $10 you owe them… Indeed, some might say that sounds like a dick move. (Albeit Circle claims it’s made sending/receiving money in the non-user scenario super easy, with the money sending Circle user entering just the recipient’s phone number to send, and the non-user able to snap a photo of their debit card to be able to redeem what’s owed.) But Circle is convinced that domestic personal and social payments will be its future bread and butter, with Allaire pointing to the massive success of China’s WeChat Pay and Alipay as examples of the huge potential it sees here. Although, unlike China’s WeChat for example, Circle is having to build its network from scratch — rather than leveraging an existing and highly popular messaging platform. It is trumpeting having gained an E-Money Issuer license from the UK’s , which also extends to operating in a third fiat currency (Euros), claiming it’s the first time the financial regulator has issued such a license to a consumer Internet firm for cross-border payments with blockchain technology. Allaire and co-founder Sean Neville say Circle will be gradually rolling out support for Euro payments in some European Union markets this year, although they’re not specifying which ones yet. But will say they won’t be launching it in all Euro-using markets in one big bang. Circle is also not disclosing any user numbers at this nascent stage. The process of obtaining the necessary licences and regulatory approval to operate in the US and Europe has taken some two years, according to Allaire — who is very complimentary about the UK government’s support for the adoption of digital currencies. In the UK Circle’s banking partner is Barclays which is proving the local accounts and infrastructure support to enable it to offer users sterling payments. “We need a commercial banking partner because we’re not authorized to store directly the local currency,” he explains. “So we need a banking partner that allows us to hold the local currency… and also gives us access to the infrastructure that’s needed to move the funds in and out of any existing UK customers’ bank account with Circle.” Another change today is that Circle is dropping prior transaction and withdrawal limits for users, with Neville saying it now has enough confidence in its risk assessment tech for extending short-term credit to be able to lift the caps on how much users can send and receive. The startup took in a this time last year, from investors including , and the co-founders say they still have a “significant chunk” of the total capital they have raised ($75M) in the bank so aren’t looking to raise again yet. Circle is not itself taking revenue at this point, given it’s not charging users fees for settling their payments. The grand vision, says Allaire, is that moving money around digitally should always be feeless, and instead a socially sticky, consumer friendly payment app with messaging smarts encourages consumers to shell out for other handy features — once they’ve been conditioned to rely on Circle for their core money-sending needs. “We really do fundamentally believe that sending and receiving money, which is really just updating databases, is something that is free… We don’t really believe that’s a viable business model,” says Allaire. “There are other valuable things that financial services companies do — future products that we would like to build and explore — but the payments side of it is intended to always be free. Or as very very close to free as we can possibly get it.” “[WeChat Pay and Alipay] in a really interesting way combined messaging, social graph, media sharing and payments in an integrated experience. And it took hold and got enormous scale in China over the past two or three years to the point where 500 million people are using it and it’s become a part of their daily life.” “It’s personal and social payments. Friends, family, co-workers, it’s across the board. Any personal or social payment. All that’s mediated through WeChat Pay and Alipay now in China. That category of social payment app hasn’t really emerged in a big way in the West. There’s virtually no major players,” he adds. “The opportunity is wide open.” That said, he names as one existing competitor in the U.S., but argues it has not managed to gain “anywhere near the scale you see with traditional Internet apps”. Another rather more well-known name — Facebook — might well be able to gain such scale, and is already , although Circle is evidently hoping to steal a march on Zuck & co by rolling out its rival social payments app faster. “Facebook haven’t fully rolled out what they’re doing with payments in Messenger but definitely we would view that competitively,” he adds. |
Google Calendar’s Reminders feature is now on the web | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | Way back in December, Google to the Google Calendar iOS and Android apps. Now, at long last, it is available for the web. Reminders basically amp up Google Calendar’s to-do list, so you can not only create tasks in your Gmail inbox, Google Keep, or calendar, but see a reminder that shows up on top of your Google Calendar, haunting you until you finally pay that bill or call that person or do whatever it is that you keep putting off, like For people who were juggling Google Calendar with to-do apps (the ones I’ve tried include |
Mirantis scores huge OpenStack win with VW | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | , one of the last pure play startups left standing announced a major win today when VW chose them over Red Hat for an enormous OpenStack implementation. It was huge for Mirantis and for the open source OpenStack project. VW knew it wanted to run a private cloud on OpenStack. The only question was the vendor. After a call for requests for proposals it came down to two: Mirantis and Red Hat. The project is massive involving dozens of data centers and tens of thousands of nodes, according to Boris Renski, CMO and co-founder at Mirantis. VW decided to take the private cloud route because it saw a couple of problems with public cloud offerings including a lack of features it specifically needed for its use cases, Mario Mueller, corporate director of IT operational services and infrastructure technologies at Volkswagen Group told TechCrunch. “Given the scale of our use case, we knew we [would] need to have a private cloud at some point. We also knew that private cloud would require more work. As we pursue digital transformation at VW group, we aim to tackle the hard problems first. Public clouds today feature a broad range of infrastructure services and go horizontal across all industries, because of that when it comes to large-scale vertical use cases (like automotive cloud for VW Group) the economics don’t work as well,” Mueller explained. VW put its finalists, Red Hat and Mirantis through their paces with 63 small pilots and use cases they had to solve on the fly at VW headquarters working in groups in separate rooms throughout the process. “It was an extremely rigorous process. We had two weeks to complete all of the tasks and a week to present them to the VW team,” Mirantis VP of worldwide sales Marque Teegardin said. VW judged the two vendors purely on technical merit based on how well they solved each task based on VW’s technical requirements. In the end, Mirantis scored highest and won the project. When asked if such a large project might be a strain on a startup, Renski pointed out while it was a big accomplishment it wasn’t the first large customer implementation it’s pulled off as a company. Other enterprise customers include AT&T (which has Mirantis running in 74 data centers), Ericsson and GAP. As for Red Hat, when asked for a comment, Margaret Dawson, head of global product marketing for cloud solutions at Red Hat took the high road, preferring not to address this specific deal directly. “Overall, we want OpenStack to win as the private cloud infrastructure of choice for telco, enterprise and government. This is a huge market, with 451 Research forecasting OpenStack to be a $2.5B opportunity by 2017, so we welcome and need a healthy OpenStack market ecosystem,” she told TechCrunch in an email. OpenStack, the open source private cloud project created in 2010 by NASA, Rackspace and others as a check against AWS’s growing power, has spawned a slew of startups and attention from the world’s biggest companies from Red Hat to IBM to HP to Oracle among others. While or , Mirantis is hanging in and securing wins against the some of the biggest traditional IT vendors. Mirantis has raised $220 million since it was founded in 2011. The most recent round was . |
Alibaba completes SCMP acquisition and removes the paper’s online paywall | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | South China Morning Post (SMCP), the Hong Kong-based media firm, has dropped the paywall on its website after . Its physical newspaper and PDF editions will continue to be subscription based. SCMP previously limited the number of stories that non-paying users could access on its website each month, but now that limit has been removed in a step that “paves the way to grow its readership globally,” according to Editor-in-Chief Tammy Tam. Tam further argued that the world needs “insightful and trusted news” from China, a similar line to what we’ve heard from Alibaba founder Jack Ma. in December. Companies buying media always elicits concern. Alibaba executive chairman Joe Tsai said at the time the e-commerce giant would not get in the way of the paper’s work, but instead use its resources “to take the SCMP to the next level.” That’s going to mean increased monetization efforts on the business side through what Alibaba calls an “e-commerce media ecosystem.” Beyond than three buzzwords bundled together into a phrase, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang has argued the case that media represents a potentially lucrative channel for e-commerce services — and those of Alibaba, in particular — while also offering to help media companies make money. Beyond SCMP, and is in the process of completing to beef up its media portfolio. In addition the removal of its paywall, SCMP’s mobile apps have also been upgraded with search, deep-linking, personalization and other features. These apps are something to watch since , with Many were skeptical of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ intentions when , but the paper appears to have been allowed to continue on under his reign. If anything it has seen a new lease of life. Alibaba is comparable to Amazon in many ways, and we can only wait to see if it can be patient and hands-off with its sparkling new media asset. |
Goldman Sachs-backed CompareAsiaGroup gets new CEO ahead of its second round of funding | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | , a consumer finance startup backed by Goldman Sachs, has appointed Sam Allen as its new chief executive officer. Allen previously worked at KKR, where he was a director on the private equity investment firm’s portfolio operations team. The company runs sites in eight Asian countries (Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam) that allow consumers to compare rates and terms on loans, credit cards, insurance plans, and other financial products. It closed last year led by Goldman Sachs, bringing its total backing so far, including seed funding, to $45 million. CompareAsiaGroup monetizes by working with financial service providers and charging them for each user who signs up for its services through its sites. Allen tells TechCrunch that CompareAsiaGroup is planning to raise a second round of funding that it will use to improve its technology and add more information from banks, telecoms, and other providers as its sites aim for faster growth. The company may also launch sites in new Asian countries, but it has no definitive plans right now. “We have 20 million users across the region. We help consumers save time and money and as we grow and continue to invest, we will continue to do that,” says Allen. |
Adidas wants to put these Zone fitness trackers on every kid in PE class | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | Everybody likes a good fitness tracker, but nobody is thinking about the children. The poor dears are being left out of the wearable revolution — looks like it’s up to Adidas to put a gadget on every wrist and a smile on every PE teacher’s face. The athletic-goods company aims to equip whole classrooms with standardized heart-rate trackers with the Zone system ( ). The Zone wristbands track heart rate and nothing else, which is a bit limited for a fitness wearable — but it’s also perhaps the one thing that matters to a PE teacher: activity. Get those kids moving! Doesn’t matter if they’re running, jumping rope, playing hoops or cage fighting. The band will show a kid’s heart rate and a color will indicate the level of activity being registered (low, moderate or “vigorous”). How is each student identified? The kids aren’t chipped (what district can afford it?) so NFC it is — the PE teacher’s laptop will know that when wristband number 22 taps in during fourth period, it’s Nisha and not Neil. , or $3,995 for a big case of 28 (a bit optimistic when it comes to class sizes) that doubles as a charge station, though presumably someone will have to hose them down regularly. Teachers can also request up to a dozen devices to test for a month. That’s “vigorous” on the right, there. Naturally, with all this data about children’s health flying around in the ether, there are security concerns. Adidas is working with Interactive Health Technologies, which claims to reach 600,000 kids at hundreds of schools. Heart-rate graphs will be integrated with IHT’s other data, like mile run times, maximum push-ups and any other metric the teacher cares to track. Whether the software and data management systems are any good is hard to say: as is so often the case at the frontier of tech and education, the capabilities are desirable but the execution is sometimes lacking. (“One software. All data.” proudly, which is not heartening.) But while skepticism is always warranted where the next generation is concerned (children that is, not the next generation of wearables), it’s laudable in a general way to try to match the capabilities of technology with the needs (well, “needs”) of educators, and specifically PE, an hour of the school day often overlooked. Can we quantify our children? We can sure try. Is it worth it? Companies like Adidas, Nike and Under Armour sure think so, but the ones who are in a position to know are the teachers. |
Why Facebook failed with Free Basics | Abhijit Bose | 2,016 | 4 | 5 |
Land grab! Net neutrality! Imperialism! There was a lot of justified outrage (and perhaps delight) when Mark Zuckerberg’s dream of bringing the Internet to rural Indians came crashing down recently, fueled by 457 companies and more than 800 startups that signed vehemently opposing ’s initiative. After getting hit by that tidal wave of blowback, discovered that scaling in India is not so simple. While most of the debate around , and its subsequent defeat, centered around net neutrality, the saga is really the result of a set of larger, incorrect assumptions by on how to reach and on-ramp rural customers. some distance from the initial raw reaction, it’s a good time to evaluate why ’s strategy for India was fundamentally flawed, and probably not worth the fight in the first place. Discovery, trial and viral expansion happened in other markets just by making available. Once someone tried , they would see an interesting, existing network, after which could use analytics to prompt further engagement, all from the Bay Area. If that context held in India, then offering for through a telecom partner would be great strategy for grabbing the next wave of rural Indian mobile Internet users. However, meaningful adoption in India often requires a far more nuanced understanding of how customers make a decision, and, ironically, a grassroots approach to managing a physical sales and distribution channel. Companies like Amazon and Uber have learned that many of the cultural and business assumptions from markets like the U.S. don’t apply in India. This includes the first tenet of product development in the Bay Area: focus only on your core value proposition and product experience, after which adoption will follow. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. In the developed markets where car ownership and credit card use were a given, Uber simply needed to focus on its core job of attracting drivers and consumers onto their mobile platform. Overhead was minimal, allowing the company to expand quickly. Then came India, which became the first market in the world to force them to bring in third-party payment partners and ultimately accept cash. Moreover, Uber needed to become a financing company as well as a taxi company, because few of the drivers owned or could easily afford a car. Similarly, you can’t simply ship a package from a warehouse in India and assume it will be delivered — much less delivered in a window of specific time. Amazon’s core strengths globally have been its massive selection, efficient supply management and focus on customer loyalty. That still is the key, but to scale in India, Amazon also needed to become a highly efficient logistics company, innovative distribution strategies and cash management capabilities, far beyond what could imagine. Jeff Bezos reinforced this in a recent article where he said that Amazon had to reassess “assumptions that American customers have taken for granted for decades. We know that in order to win in India we need to do things we have never done in any other country.” In both cases (and others), multinationals gained traction slowly against locally grown competitors only after they implemented a comprehensive set of India-specific operations and capabilities to scale their networks. How does this apply to ? Their primary assumption to acquiring rural users is wrong and, at least for the next year or two, they will need to do something that they likely haven’t had to do anywhere else. Any foreign company trying to reach consumers in rural India will have to compete, or partner, numerous local companies that have built large, grassroots merchant networks across the country. Although expensive and difficult to manage, the merchants in these networks have the strongest influence over what a local consumer does, from which mobile phone they buy, to which mobile operator they choose (all operators will be sold side by side), to which apps they download to their phone. For on-boarding the rural and lower-income population to full-service mobile Internet, the first interaction for customers will be an assisted one -– at their trusted local store. In remote areas, that store will not only serve as the one-stop, assisted e-commerce location, but also as the local financial service point for paying bills, banking and accessing government services. This is in part because of a cultural difference between the U.S. and India. In America, there’s a “DIY” (Do-it-Yourself) culture that encourages a person to test and try new experiences, products and technologies on their own. In contrast, India often has a “do-it-for-me” expectation — especially for new services — which means that a user often relies on someone else to do the initial groundwork, then set them on a path toward habitual use. People who already rely on their local store for trusted help and advice are not going to stop doing this just because offers data and they hear a passing reference to it by a minimally paid telecom sales agent. The money used to fund data might be better utilized as incentives to the local store owner to make sure the first app downloaded and set up on a villager’s new phone (purchased three days earlier from Amazon via that same store) is and not , or . The West has the tendency to assume that poor or lower-income countries simply want stuff; that price is the major barrier to adoption. My experience suggests that, within a certain range of affordability, people are more value-sensitive than price-sensitive. When offered a service that delivers real value — whether it is real-time communication any family member, pre-paying for an hour of electricity to cook food or reading via a low-cost LED lamp — even people at the bottom of the pyramid make decisions and pay money based on utility as opposed to what’s . They also make decisions in line that which they are familiar and comfortable. We have worked several financial service institutions that are bringing microloans, pensions and other banking services to the masses. When asked whether a villager will give up Rs.50-100 ($1-2) per month to set up a pension scheme, villagers are more than willing to do so. The business problem wasn’t generating consumer demand but operationally scaling face-to-face awareness and collections. From a strategic point of view, and other companies should focus on which part of their service can deliver immediate gratification and financial or lifestyle benefits to a user. WhatsApp is no doubt useful, but what else can offer the data or features that they have to solve first-principle problems for a family. Marc Andreessen ignited a his comments that implied that, without , Indians were going to be kept off the grid. The reality is that the big barrier to rural mobile Internet adoption is non-terrestrial high-speed mobile network connectivity, access to low-cost smartphones and the availability of services or goods that fill immediate needs (e.g. banking, communication, consumption, government services), not the availability of social network services. Here’s a final message to Silicon Valley — don’t worry about Indian adoption. It will happen, and at a pace faster than anything the U.S. will have seen. More than one hundred million bank accounts were opened last year after the government and public sector banks made it a focus. Mobile Internet adoption will happen at scale in the next 24 months, whether or not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have any part in it. To his credit, Zuckerberg has been largely graceful about the defeat of , perhaps taking a page from Jeff Bezos. Zuckerberg has responded that he remains committed to his programs in India. For him to succeed, Zuckerberg will have to do the hard work of building a scalable, physical distribution channel that incentivizes merchants to bring consumers on board, one by one. This will be a slower, more labor-intensive approach, but it’s the best way to connect and have a meaningful impact on the Indian consumers is trying to reach. That’s the lesson all entrepreneurs can take from . |
People feel weird about touching robot butts, researchers find | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | How would you feel if a robot asked you to touch its butt? Maybe it sounds like a silly question (actually, there’s no maybe about it), but as robots proliferate and anthropomorphize, it’s actually something that needs to be considered. So scientists at Stanford considered it. The study, to be presented soon but , is entitled “Touching a Mechanical Body: Tactile Contact With Intimate Parts of a Human-Shaped Robot is Physiologically Arousing” — and really, the title says it all. Though it should be noted that “arousing” only indicates a generally heightened state of awareness or attention. The researchers sat volunteers at a table with a Nao humanoid robot reclining casually on it. They were told (by the robot, in fact) that it was a vocabulary exercise focusing on terms for body parts. Volunteers were told by the bot to, for instance, “touch my ear” using their dominant hand, while the non-dominant hand remained on a skin conductance sensor that loosely monitored their physical state. When asked to touch “high accessibility” areas — places we normally touch on other people, like shoulders and elbows — volunteers did so without hesitation or agitation. But “low accessibility” areas — this would be the robot’s butt and where its junk would be — produced delay and that arousal we talked about. You really ought to watch the video: It’s not that robots are going to start propositioning humans and making them uncomfortable, but this is the kind of thing that must be taken into account when designing an interface — in this case, the robot itself, its gestures and posture. A robot isn’t a person, but because it’s shaped like one and designed to act and speak like one, we imbue it with a sort of temporary humanity when we interact with it. Phones don’t look like people, so they don’t have butts, or if they do, no one seems to care that we’re touching them all the time (HTC phones used to have chins, though). But I personally guarantee you will bump into a robot and find yourself saying “excuse me” some time in the next decade. Several of you have probably already apologized to the Roomba after stepping on it. The paper, by Jamy Li, Wendy Ju and Byron Reeves, will be presented at the in June. |
NVIDIA announces a supercomputer aimed at deep learning and AI | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | The sophisticated neural networks underlying systems like Google’s Deep Dream and all manner of interesting experiments require a great deal of computing power. NVIDIA proposes to put all that horsepower in a single box, specially engineered to meet the needs of AI researchers. NVIDIA already has , so this was a logical next step. It’s called the , and it’s basically a fancy enclosure for an 8-GPU supercomputing cluster. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There are 8 Tesla P100 cards in there with 16 GB of RAM each, plus 7 TB of storage for all the raw data you’ll be training your networks on. And there’s something called a NVLink Hybrid Cube Mesh, but I’m pretty sure that’s made up. There’s built-in neural network training software, though many researchers and companies will want to roll their own solutions. The DGX-1 is happy to crunch data either way. A standardized platform like this takes the guesswork out of building a system, and having a big name like NVIDIA providing support and regular updates is a nice way to justify the extra cost to your budget people. Still not clear on what exactly a deep learning system or neural network is? The short version is that they are programs that simulate human-like thought processes by looking very closely at a huge set of data and noting similarities and differences on multiple levels of organization. Deep learning systems are most commonly used for recognizing dogs in images. The result is a system that can quickly and effectively perform tasks like image analysis and object or pattern recognition. It’s still fairly new even to people in the AI and computer science field, so don’t feel bad that you didn’t know or that I’m bad at explaining. Systems like Deep Dream will run on regular CPUs and the like, of course, but as with so many other data-intensive computing tasks, parallel processing beats serial any day of the week. GPUs are already massively parallelized, having to handle huge amounts of data under extremely strict time constraints, so they’re a great match for supercomputing rigs. 8 Teslas in parallel is nothing to sneeze at (they produce 170 teraflops), and while you could rent time on a cloud cluster with more raw power, there’s a lot to be said for running your own hardware in-house. (Though you’ll probably be relying on NVIDIA for troubleshooting and maintenance.) You’re in for some sticker shock, though: the DGX-1 costs $129,000. No one said the future was going to be cheap! |
Collaborative Fund sets its eyes on consumer goods | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | Collaborative Fund is launching a new fund today. Called the Collab+Consumer fund, it’s part of Collaborative Fund’s third $70 million fund that’s geared toward finding companies that make consumer goods — like food and clothing. To be sure, the space is heating up. There are emerging companies focused on single products and businesses, like coffee shops that are increasingly getting venture financing. For example, Blue Bottle Coffee — a Collaborative Fund investment — most recently raised $70 million in a venture financing round. And there are subscription services for consumer goods, like ipsy, , that are also attracting a lot of interest. “Consumers are just getting smarter about how those products are being sourced, what are the chemicals and ingredients being used in those products,” Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro said. “With that transparency and information you’re seeing a shift toward independent, locally sourced, sustainable, organic products. A lot of these trends are undeniable, are kind of the areas we’re gonna be a little more aggressive in.” The firm will be working with CircleUp, one of its investments, to isolate the best potential consumer-goods companies. The benefit of consumer goods, founder Rory Eakin says, is that there already will be some data as to whether they will be successful compared to some pre-market software-driven companies. “As a VC, trying to gather all that data and synthesize it in a way to make an informed investment decision, the nice thing about doing this in consumer there’s a lot more data to analyze,” Shapiro said. “Unlike a tech investment, much beyond software, there’s not a ton to analyze, it’s the team and the code. In consumer you have data, where are they selling, how quickly is it selling, what’s the price point, what’s the experience of the team, and so on, and you can make a much more informed decision.” One example of that shift, Eakin said, is a company like Shake Shack going after McDonald’s and other fast-food burger chains. Collaborative Fund plans to focus on multiple different areas — like child development with its partnership with Sesame Street — with Collab+Consumer being another focus area that is coming out of its third fund today. Collaborative Fund’s funding sweet spot sits somewhere between companies that seek to generally improve the world around them but will also offer a good return for the fund. Some investments the firm has made in the consumer-goods space include the SOMA water filter and Blue Bottle Coffee. The firm has also invested in companies like Lyft and Kickstarter. All this boils down to increasing competition in the consumer-goods space — which could require firms to re-think their investment strategies and find new areas of focus. In part, this is a response to other firms going after that similar sweet spot, making it important for Collaborative Fund to drill down on certain sectors, Shapiro said. “Fortunately or unfortunately, the world has really evolved, there’s a lot more savvy investors that are talking about a lot of the same things we are,” he said. “This is a way to say, this is an area we really want to own, we want to be the best investor in this category, and consumer is the next.” |
The reality of AR/VR business models | Tim Merel | 2,016 | 4 | 5 |
There is nearly as much confusion as there is excitement about augmented and virtual reality. While , there are more questions than answers out there. I’ll be doing a deep dive on one aspect of AR/VR every month. This month we’re kicking off with business models. AR/VR hardware sales, e-commerce sales, ad spend and mobile data/voice could drive more than 80 percent of all AR/VR revenues. Things might look a little different than what you expect. Business models are hard to figure out during platform shifts, but can play out to great success (as in the case of mobile over the last decade). AR/VR is the fourth major platform shift (after PC, web and mobile). CEOs need to decide how to play. At the end of the day, business models come down to installed bases, use cases and unit economics, so let’s dip our hands in the virtual money pot and see what comes out. Facebook paid . Magic Leap took (and others). Apple bought . Plus major commitments from , , , and other heavyweights. Serious folks. Not their first rodeo. But hardware is hard to win. So why this much interest in an unproven early-stage hardware market? Looking at the future through the lens of the past helps, and that’s what is happening here. Apple owns global mobile hardware profits in the market it created, making it the most valuable company on the planet (mostly). Google has taken MVP as well, but increasingly relies on advertising sold using other people’s mobile devices — even though it owns Android. Facebook learned valuable lessons from how mobile played out, including its early fumble and spectacular recovery. Hardware is the strategic high ground during platform shifts, and these guys know it. AR/VR could have an installed base in the low single-digit hundreds of millions by 2020, ranging from low-end VR Cardboard up to premium AR Magic Leap (and everything in between). With long-run unit prices from free up to something equal to top-end smartphone prices, hardware sales could drive more than $4 of every $10 spent on AR/VR by 2020. Ignoring hardware is not an option for established leaders and new insurgents. Hardware sales could be the one business model to rule them all in AR/VR, and early investment looks like smart money. Alibaba led , with vice chairman Joe Tsai joining the board. Alibaba and Tsai are amongst the best and brightest in China (and the world). Why would a Chinese e-commerce company throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a Florida hardware startup with no sales? E-commerce sales could take almost $2 of every $10 spent using AR/VR in five years’ time. Alibaba, Amazon, eBay and a range of new startups will be able to sell stuff to folks in totally new ways. Some of this might cannibalize existing e-commerce/m-commerce, but AR/VR could also grow e-commerce’s share of all sales. For app and content developers (not selling hardware, goods or services), advertising sales could be the most valuable business model at around $1 of every $10 generated by AR/VR. The first AR advertising unicorn emerged this year with , and that’s before the head-mounted display market hits its stride. As advertising formats emerge, from virtual banner equivalents to full-blown, native AR/VR formats like , AR/VR advertising could follow the path blazed by web and mobile. With , platform change means serious business for advertisers. AR/VR advertising is more immersive than any rich media (when done right), and ad spend should follow the eyeballs. Mobility will drive installed base for AR/VR. For VR, installed base will be driven by price, with mobile VR solutions trending down from $99 to free. Free is the most compelling price point, despite high-end VR giving a more complete experience (for now). For AR, mobility is even more fundamental than for VR. AR devices that can’t make phone calls or access cloud-based services all day out of Wi-Fi range won’t be able to replace smartphones in the long run. AR devices that don’t help mobile networks make money from data/voice won’t be cross-subsidized by the telcos — a key to mass adoption. We’ve pushed hard for AR hardware makers to prioritize cellular capability and longer battery life on roadmaps for this reason. Mobile network data revenue from AR/VR could be golden for the telcos. YouTube estimates that each frame of . High-resolution, high-frame rate, stereo images and data could drive some applications even higher in terms of bandwidth requirements; someone has to pay for all that data. AR/VR data could be the catalyst to break mobile networks out of their current — so it’s a big deal. Mobile network voice revenue for AR/VR will largely cannibalize existing mobile voice revenues rather than add new revenues for the telcos. They’ll be there, but this isn’t new money. For mobile developers, in-app purchases are one of the core business models. Top-grossing mobile charts are dominated by free apps, and even premium console/PC games markets see downloadable content as a major business model. The AR/VR free versus paid app question is yet to be answered, but users have been trained that digital content is mostly free. Younger users, in particular, rarely pay for content, so there’s no putting the free genie back in the bottle. In-app purchases should be a major business model for AR/VR developers, whether through speed-ups/virtual items or additional services. There will be a premium apps market (see below), but in-app purchases could play as big a role in AR/VR as they already do in the mobile and web markets. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Spotify and others proved how effective subscription business models can be for web/mobile. AR/VR content and SaaS players are set to offer services that folks will happily subscribe to every month (although these might come at the expense of other platforms). Higher levels of service and ad-free services could drive AR/VR subscription revenues, although more innovative models may arise. The enterprise market is well-served by AR players like Microsoft, Meta, ODG and DAQRI, as well as a range of VR service/solution providers. With use cases across military, medical, education, architecture/construction, maintenance and beyond, enterprise sales will be a driver for both AR and, to a lesser extent, VR. Replacing traditional desktop/laptop machines might take some time, but business users will be able to improve productivity in specific areas. With HoloLens now on the , AR/VR will reach new heights for enterprise users (pun intended). B2B sales from AR/VR services/solutions providers will also be part of the mix. B2B revenues will come from areas like graphics engines ( at the high end to bundled, free services like with AWS), facial animation ( ), gesture recognition ( , ), 3D model distribution ( ) and more. Premium apps will have a role to play in AR/VR, despite the potential dominance of free apps. The higher-end the user experience, the greater the potential for paid business models. High-end VR games could see the highest proportion of premium apps, leveraging an installed base of console/PC gamers accustomed to paying up to $60 for their fun. Non-games AR/VR consumer apps more broadly could see a lower proportion of premium apps, similar to the paid share of mobile apps today. Back when Angry Birds’ 99-cent app ruled mobile, few predicted Supercell’s and King’s in-app purchase business models would dominate today. So while long-term business models could look different than those we’ve explored, AR/VR entrepreneurs don’t need to reinvent the virtual wheel. They get to augment it. In the coming months we’ll be digging in all over the place, so feel free to reach out if your company is doing something special (no guarantees on covering you, it’s a big market). Topics will include AR/VR video, commerce, social, voice/messaging, data, enterprise/B2B, advertising, space (I’ve been talking to NASA), games, theme parks, user interfaces, optics, processing (CPU/GPU/VPU), audio, platforms, tracking/sensors, venture capital, countries (U.S., China, others), pricing and users. |
ClearChat picks a heavily-encrypted fight with Slack | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | has a lot of functions, but end-to-end encryption isn’t one of them, which makes the platform a no-go for some users. Launching to the public today, comes along to save the day, serving the needs of the slightly more security-conscious teams, with chat, file transfer and more. ClearChat describes its service as “a combination of Slack and Dropbox,” except with some heavy-duty encryption and security-first design decisions thrown in. The company’s services have been designed with full end-to-end encryption, which means that the company itself cannot decrypt its customers’ private data, should it, say, get hacked, or receive a particularly grumpy court order from the FBI, CIA, NSA or other . “You probably wouldn’t buy next year’s iPhone if the advertisement was ‘Great new camera! Plus, we listen in on every call you make and record every text you send!'” explains Brendan Diaz, CEO of ClearChat, aggressively going after companies that, in his opinion, have a less-robust privacy and security stance. “If you’re using apps like Gmail, Skype or Slack this is already happening to you every day.” Diaz may be onto something here; Slack was , and as more and more business-critical information starts moving from shared folders to cloud-based chat rooms, the value of hacking a target like Slack increases by the day. Positioning itself as an alternative for teams who require privacy and security for compliance purposes — and for groups of people who just have an above-average interest in security — the ClearChat platform has been designed to be impenetrable, even to its own staff. In particular, the company has analyzed attack vectors against communication platforms, and has made an attempt to design them out of the systems, including robust authentication and verification protocols. By using decentralized encryption, the company has quashed the man-in-the-middle attacks that plague SSL-based encryption. The company has also put particular effort into foiling spoofing and phishing attacks. ClearChat evolved from , an email-like tool the company’s CTO developed three-plus years ago. Bitmessage is an open-source tool in use by thousands of users monthly, but is aimed at people who have a deeper understanding of tech. ClearChat is a more user-friendly version that’s more like Internet Relay Chat (IRC) — the same tech that inspired Slack. Slack keeps going from strength to strength with, . As a result, it should come as no surprise that there is no shortage of clones and me-too companies that fancy having a go, too. The secret sauce to taking Slack on at its own game is adding something special to the mix; something that will make potential customers sit up and listen. With , and the FBI/Apple case being at the forefront of people’s minds, the time is definitely ripe for ClearChat — if only people are willing to eschew the convenience and well-developed infrastructure Slack provides and swallow the switching costs to embrace a deeper security paradigm. |
Thrive Market brings its organic grocery store to Android | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | A company tapping into consumers’ growing desire for healthier food and organic products, is today bringing its online grocery store to Android users with the launch of a dedicated mobile application. The new app will allow users to shop for natural and organic products right from their phone, including its more recently launched private label items. Described as a cross between Whole Foods and Costco, Thrive Market’s business has been booming this year. To give you an idea of its traction, the company now claims to have more than 200,000 paying members. It also hit a $100 million run-rate in early February, after just 14 months into its business, and it reached nearly $10 million in sales last month. (The startup is not yet profitable, however.) The business has grown from 14 employees in November 2014 to nearly 400 today. And it has two fulfillment centers — one in Commerce, California and another in Batesville, Indiana. This allows it to guarantee two-day shipping to more than 85 percent of the U.S., the company claims. Unlike a traditional e-commerce store, Thrive Market’s business model is more like that of Costco’s — that is, members pay a fee of $60 per year to shop on the site. Also like Costco or other clubs, Thrive Market promises wholesale prices on the items it sells. That means customers can buy its organic and speciality merchandise online, ship it to their home as quickly as if they were using Amazon Prime and pay less than if they shopped at Whole Foods. (Shipping is not free as with Prime, we should note — only orders over $49 are free.) In addition to its membership fees, Thrive Market is also generating revenue on its private label products, which include things like organic coconut oil and tomato sauce, for example. Notably, the startup caters to consumers who care about how a business contributes to society as a whole. Through , the company donates one free membership to a low-income family for every paid membership it sells. This “social mission” is designed to provide those without access to quality food at lower prices a way to better feed their families. As the company explains its website, 49 million Americans experience food insecurity, more than 23 million live in “food deserts” (neighborhoods where healthy food is not available) and 80 percent of low-income families buy food they know isn’t healthy just to make ends meet. With a free membership to the site, these low-income shoppers can instead choose to buy natural and organic products at 25-50 percent off retail. The Android app’s launch in particular is important because the majority of the “Thrive Gives” families are Android users (51 percent are). [gallery ids="1302622,1302621,1302620,1302619,1302618"] However, mobile access to Thrive Market was previously available on iOS, where the app has already seen more than 50,000 installs in its first month, and has a 5-star rating on iTunes after 200+ reviews. The Android app is available as . I’ve personally used Thrive Market, and found the site to be easy to browse, thanks to its extensive breakdown of category listings. (It even separates “cooking and meal ingredients” from “baking,” for instance). Plus, it offers a simple way for users to shop by their “values,” meaning vegan, gluten-free, paleo, raw, etc. And you can filter items by environmental and social concerns, too, like “locally sourced,” “fair trade” and more. That being said, the site today works better for those who already know how to eat well or who adhere to a particular diet. It would be nice to see an expanded set of educational materials and recipes (like ), which could help teach people how to make healthier dishes. Right now, recipes are randomly posted to the company alongside other articles, which makes finding those that match your interests and tastes more difficult. L.A.-based Thrive Market has raised $58 million to date, including a still-open convertible note of $20 million. Investors include John Legend, Zoe Saldana, Sofia Vergara, Dr. Mark Hyman, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Mark Sisson, Jillian Michaels, Brian Lee (of Honest.com), Blake Mycoskie (of TOMS Shoes), Gary Hirshberg (of Stonyfield Farm), Mark Rampolla (of Zico Coconut Water) and David Barber (of Blue Hill Farm). |
Marijuana deliverer Meadow rolls up $2.1M for dispensary sales software | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | Meadow already lets you get a prescription for medical marijuana over video chat and order from a nearby shop that delivers. Now it wants to be the backbone of the weed business, too. Pot dispensaries can’t use standard point-of-sale or inventory software because they aren’t compliant with the industry’s strict regulations. So over the last year, since graduating Y Combinator, has been raising a $2.1 million seed round on a rolling basis to build out specialized cannabis sales software. Today it announced the round is sealed, with participation from ex SV Angel David Lee, YC’s Justin Kan, Reddit’s Steve Huffman, Kissmetrics’ Hiten Shah, Slow Ventures, SOMA Capital and Poseidon Asset Management. Meadow’s point-of-sale software for marijuana dispensaries The cash will help Meadow build out weed-friendly alternatives to QuickBooks and Square, and pay for marketing to smoke its big competitor Eaze. Next, it wants to keep working up the supply chain to build software for every part of the business, from farm to joint. “I’ve been smoking since high school, and it’s always made me feel great” co-founder David Hua tells me. The expectedly super-chill entrepreneur explains that “it’s helped me in so many different ways,” and now he wants to help others provide everything from psychoactive euphoria to pain relief in pot form. Meadow’s founders, with David Hua on the right Hua was the head of platform at Sincerely, which let people turn their camera phone photos into gift cards and other physical products. But after Sincerely was acquired by Provide Commerce, he craved more of the startup life, and left with some co-workers to devise a new venture. They brainstormed everything from landlord-tenant software to shift management for small businesses, “but ultimately those ideas petered out. We weren’t totally passionate about it.” Then Hua visited Oaksterdam, a marijuana entrepreneur academy in Oakland, California where he met Debby Goldsberry, founder of pioneering dispensary Berkeley Patients Group. Her day-to-day business sounded hellish because of how much she had to do manually or with a Frankenstein-combination of generic software. Meanwhile, Hua was frustrated by the few medical marijuana delivery services, which he tells me had outdated menus, inaccurate delivery times and felt insecure. “They’d say they’d come in 2 to 4 hours, or on ‘friday afternoon’ and you’re just sitting and waiting,” he gripes. “And I didn’t feel comfortable emailing my ID and doctor’s recommendation to a random email address or texting it.” So his squad decided to start Meadow. Meadow never handles marijuana itself. Hua refers to it as an ancillary service. That makes the whole business cleaner and simpler to fund. Today Meadow has three strains of revenue. Its original business is a that do deliveries. Meadow makes it simple to upload your prescription paperwork, browse up-to-date menus, learn about and compare different types of pot, fill a shopping cart and get delivery in well under an hour. It earns around a 10 percent fee on transactions from dispensaries for delivering them customers, and now has serviced about 38 percent of zip codes in California. Meadow’s online delivery storefront Meadow went a step further with . At first, they let users schedule a doctor to come to their house to do the dance and get prescribed. Hua says Meadow’s first doc actually rode around San Francisco on an electric skateboard. But now for $100 you can instantly be connected to a doctor over HIPAA-compliant video chat and get your prescription fired over to you electronically, in minutes. That gets slid over to Meadow’s delivery directory and suddenly you’ve gone from illegal pot wanter to legal pot smoker in an hour. It’s more expensive than competitor Eaze’s $40 video prescription service, but Meadow’s directory visitors are so hyped to buy pot they might not go looking elsewhere. Meadow’s iPad-compatible dispensary software Where Hua sees the not-so-hazy future of . First there’s its online menu system that it says boosts average order size by more than 50 percent. Dispensaries can embed the menu on their own sites or let people buy through Meadow, track their delivery people in real time and message with customers. For in-store purchases, Meadow also makes an iPad-based point-of-sale system similar to Square POS or Revel, but designed for compliance with medical marijuana laws that require strict tracking of how much pot gets sold to whom. Its analytics show which products are bought most, and helps stores manage inventory so they never run out of what’s selling. Hua relays rumors of Intuit and Square giving marijuana businesses a hard time or even kicking them off their services. So Meadow plans to use its new cash to keep expanding its monthly fee SAAS platform, and assist dispensaries with more of their finance, payroll and other back office problems. Hua is understandably relaxed in general. But when asked about his biggest fear for his company, he says it is a delivery driver routed by Meadow injuring a pedestrian, and the ensuing fallout like “people calling for over-regulation and more safety checks and things that are beyond our control.” As for competitors like Eaze, he repeats a popular YC adage that “99% of startups die by suicide” rather than being murdered by other startups. There’s plenty of green fields for Meadow and the other marijuana startups. Millions of people smoke every day, and the habit can add up to hundreds of dollars in weed a month. Legal pot sales climbed over $5 billion in 2015, and that’s sure to rise as more states allow medicinal and recreational usage. Hua hopes that if Meadow can nurture the business of pot, the taxes generated will convince more states to decriminalize the plant. He believes that could keep non-violent, often minority offenders out of jail and get actually sick patients medicine with fewer worrisome side-effects than pain killers and other drugs. Eighty years ago when alcohol prohibition was repealed, it created a gold rush that spawned an enormous range of businesses. Now we’re on the cusp of the green rush, and wants to make the transition cushy. |
WhatsApp completes end-to-end encryption rollout | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | It’s a security project that’s taken around a year and a half to complete, but messaging giant WhatsApp has now fully implemented strong end-to-end encryption on its platform and across all mobile platforms for which it offers apps. This means users of the latest versions of the messaging app will have their comms and media end-to-end encrypted by default. And there are a lot of WhatsApp users; earlier this year the Facebook owned company announced it had . Securing cross-platform video comms was the last piece of the puzzle, according to a WhatsApp spokesman. End-to-end encryption means the content of communications are not stored in plaintext on WhatsApp’s servers. Nor is the company able to decrypt users’ messages to access them since it does not hold the encryption keys. So WhatsApp will be unable to be compelled to hand over messaging data — even if served with a warrant by authorities demanding access. While the WhatsApp news may seem timely in light of the recent high-profile battle between over an encrypted iPhone, the company has in fact been implementing encryption since 2013, the year NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden triggered a global privacy storm by revealing the extent of government mass surveillance programs. WhatsApp then went on to partner with Open Whisper Systems the following year, and has been integrating its widely respected end-to-end encryption Signal Protocol specifically . In a post today the not-for-profit hacker collective behind the latter open source tech confirmed the WhatsApp implementation is now complete. “This includes chats, group chats, attachments, voice notes, and voice calls across Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Nokia S40, Nokia S60, Blackberry, and BB10,” it wrote. “Users running the most recent versions of WhatsApp on any platform now get full end to end encryption for every message they send and every WhatsApp call they make when communicating with each other.” Although the completion of default end-to-end encryption is a hugely important security milestone for the WhatsApp platform, it does not mean that from here on in every communication sent via the app is end-to-end encrypted, because that’s reliant on all users being upgraded to the latest version of the software. But the WhatsApp client will now notify users of the encryption status of chats, including showing a notice in the messaging screen, to help bridge the transitional phase: “Eventually all the pre-e2e [end-to-end] capable clients will expire, at which point new versions of the software will no longer transmit or accept plaintext messages at all,” notes Open Whisper Systems. WhatsApp users will also be able to confirm the person they are chatting with is the person they think it is, rather than an imposter performing a man-in-the-middle attack, by verifying the authenticity of the encryption session via scanning a QR code or reading aloud a number string. For its part, Open Whisper Systems says it is looking ahead to additional rollouts of its tech, saying it will “continue to work with additional messengers” over the next year. The group also has its own encrypted messaging app, , which launched in March last year. Albeit, the question now is whether Edward Snowden will be switching to WhatsApp… I use Signal every day. (Spoiler: they already know) — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) |
TiE Global Chairman Venktesh Shukla Joins Fenox Venture Capital as General Partner | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | is bringing on TiE Global Chairman and the founder of TiE Angels, Venktesh Shukla, as General Partner. For the unfamiliar, TiE is a nonprofit mentoring network for entrepreneurs and promoter of entrepreneurship worldwide. Its annual conference, , is in its 23rd year. According to Fenox VC partners, the firm will rely on Shukla to source deals in, as well as help entrepreneurs from around the world to scale their businesses in India. Shukla will also help connect tech entrepreneurs and other investors in India to those in Silicon Valley. Fenox VC runs 11 funds, each focused on specific industries or technologies including artificial intelligence, robotics and health. While eight of its funds are still active and putting capital into new deals and follow-on rounds, three are closed with all capital deployed. The company’s portfolio includes, among others: , the health diagnostics tech company inspired by Star Trek’s Tricoder; which makes a social robot for home use, entertainment and education; electric motorbike makers ; and , a site that helps couples through a divorce process. Shukla was not immediately available to comment on his new role with Fenox VC. Fenox VC Chief Executive and General Partner Anis Uzzaman said, “Sixty-percent of the world’s population lives in Asia. We’re already investors in companies in Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Bangladesh. Venk will help us expand our horizons to India.” In India, the firm expects to invest in e-commerce, and consumer web and mobile app companies, primarily. |
null | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 4 | null |
Lydia is launching a bot to pay back your friends directly from Slack | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | and Slack are two charming services and I like using them. So when I learned the two of them were having a baby together, you bet I was excited. Lydia is a French payment app, a sort of Venmo for Europe like stealth startup . It lets you instantly send and receive money with your friends without paying any fee. And it’s a great . The result of the Slack integration is a Slack bot. Once you install the bot for your Slack, it will monitor at-mentions and figure out if you’re trying to send money. For instance, you could say “I hope you enjoyed the burgers. @jordan @matt you owe me €10 each. cc @lydia.” Then, Jordan and Matt receive a notification on their phones asking them to confirm the payment. They can review and accept and you get back your €20. What if they don’t have Lydia? Non-Lydia users receive a link to pay using their credit cards. They just have to open a web page and enter their credit card information. If you are collecting payments and don’t have a Lydia account, you can enter your IBAN to get the money on your bank account directly. For small companies based in France, this could be a great way to pay for your lunch or even pay back expenses. Instead of having to fiddle with your bank account’s web interface, you can mention Lydia on Slack and send payments in no time. This is a step in the right direction for Lydia. Having a great app is one thing, but Lydia can also leverage its backend to integrate payment features in all sorts of apps, such as Slack. Now let’s hope the startup will release an API soon and expand to other European countries. |
Twitter makes it easier to share tweets privately with new button on iOS and Android | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | While nowhere near as big as this morning’s news that , the company is announcing another change to its service today aimed at increasing the functionality and usage of its Direct Message (private messaging) feature. Starting today, the company is adding a new “Message” button to tweets on iOS and Android that will allow users to more easily take a public conversation private. That is, when you click this button, you’ll be able to share the tweet via Direct Message (DM) right from your Twitter Timeline. To be clear, the ability to share tweets privately is new. In fact, with support for desktop and mobile. Even at that time, the option wasn’t something Twitter users were exactly clamoring for — it served more as a nice addition, if anything. But Twitter now sees a need to promote this type of interaction — the transition from public conversations to private ones — as the feature’s usage is growing. Twitter claims the number of tweets shared privately grew 200 percent in the second half of 2015. That’s faster than growth in private messaging in general, which climbed 60 percent in 2015. According to the company, the addition of the button is in response to user feedback about the feature. Users said they wanted it to be easier to share tweets like this, Twitter claims. Before, the option was available by tapping the “More” button, then choosing “Share via Direct Message.” Now the button is right there on the tweet itself, taking up valuable real estate on mobile’s small screens. The change is also one of many tweaks Twitter has been making to its Direct Messaging feature in recent months. The company has also introduced support for and , and , and it Many have said that Twitter should consider breaking out private messaging as its own application, but that has yet to come to pass. Still, Twitter insiders have continued to pitch this idea internally, . This change, while far from realizing that vision, still shows that Twitter is carefully considering the importance of private messaging in a world where its app competes with things like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and others. The new button is arriving today in the Twitter for iOS and Android updated applications. |
Cookies teases its payment app that wants to become the Venmo of Europe | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | wants to become the with a consumer app to pay back your friends in no time and with no fees. The company promises a speedy onboarding experience and a great design. And today, the company is showing a bit more about the app. With the following screenshots, you can see what Cookies is building. It’s a messaging-meet-payment app with a lot of emojis. You can send or request money, chat directly inside the app and confirm payments with the Touch ID sensor or a PIN code. It’s not groundbreaking if you’ve been using apps like in France, but it looks like a polished experience. There are two things that set Cookies apart. The two founders, Garry Krugljakow and Lamine Cheloufi, met when they were working for , a German fintech startup that has managed to convince more than 100,000 people to open a new bank account. Second, Cookies isn’t an e-wallet. You connect your Cookies account with your bank account so that Cookies can withdraw and credit money directly without relying on your credit card. It lets you skip one step and it means you’re not going to forget about some money you have on your e-wallet. I still believe there’s more to see about Cookies. If the startup can integrate in other apps, it could become a seamless and ubiquitous way to pay back your friends. And an API approach makes a lot of sense in the payment space. The service is launching soon and is going to work with all German bank accounts. [gallery ids="1302583,1302584,1302585,1302586,1302587,1302588"] |
The death of ‘Internet’ | Henry Pickavet | 2,016 | 4 | 2 | The folks responsible for the entries in the have announced that the word “Internet” will no longer be uppercased, thus breaking my heart and making some of our writers very happy. The AP Stylebook, which many newspapers and websites (one word? really?) use to guide their style efforts, defines Internet as “a decentralized, worldwide network of computers that can communicate with each other.” It’s a pretty big definition and has warranted the glory of a capital I. But no more. And that’s not all. The AP Stylebook has also decided to lowercase “Web.” We will lowercase internet effective June 1, when the 2016 Stylebook launches. — AP Stylebook (@APStylebook) The changes, which were not announced on April Fools’ Day, are to take effect on June 1 when the 2016 edition of the style guide is released. Then, and only then, will “Internet” join other inexplicable changes the style guide has made in the recent past, including “more than” versus “over” and “underway” versus “under way,” both of which still vex me. At least it still thinks ” |
IoT and the development of a circular economy | Sebastian Egerton-Read | 2,016 | 4 | 2 |
Few topics receive greater hype in the media today than the Internet of Things (IoT), and still a last summer argued that the potential impact of IoT technologies might actually be understated. An estimated economic impact of $3.9-11.1 trillion a year by 2025 was the bottom line of McKinsey’s research. Debates about economic value are ultimately intertwined with questions about how our global economy should function, but the raw figures attributed to emerging technologies are rarely accompanied with big-picture thinking around the frameworks and principles that should guide our economy. IoT technological advancements could reinforce existing paradigms, simply making the current take-make-dispose linear economy more and more efficient, whilst failing to address resource and natural capital issues. Alternatively, this new connectivity also offers the opportunity to re-think the underlying system and support the development of a . New technologies as being a key enabler of the transition to a circular economy, defined as being restorative and regenerative by design, while aiming to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times. Identified as a significant business opportunity, circular economy models have gained increasing momentum over the last five years. Combine the principles of a regenerative and restorative economy, where the utilization and useful life of assets is extended, with IoT technologies, which provide information about the condition, location and availability of those assets, and there may be an even greater opportunity to scale new models more effectively, while providing new direction to the digital revolution. To pose an example, the average European car currently spends 95 percent of the time parked. Large , including the likes of GM and Ford, have identified economic advantages to be gained by leasing vehicles through car-sharing models, rather than restricting themselves to a one-time sales model. To bring those models successfully to scale, manufacturers require the ability to carefully monitor the condition of a vehicle. IoT sensors could help to improve the maintenance and lifespan of existing cars, as well as provide a wealth of new data to inform the design of more durable and effective products in the future. Developing individual business models is one thing, but the recent report, goes a step further by looking at the opportunities for the larger system. A vision for the built environment where a digital library of materials is sourced from connected buildings, which also provide information that allows predictive maintenance and effective sharing and utilization of space and energy consumption, is sketched out in the report. The multiplier impact, in terms of benefit, of resolving a number of challenges with a single systemic solution is assumed to be significant. A similar approach can be taken in relation to a range of sectors. Contrast today’s energy system, reliant upon centralized generation of power through the burning of fossil fuels and by a few large players, with the possibility of a future connectivity-enabled distributed, grid-free energy supply, where hundreds of local solar and wind energy generators supply power locally. The technology required in such a system isn’t particularly “futuristic” either; indeed, startups like in the Netherlands and Brooklyn-based are already working in this way on a small scale. Few attempts have been made to quantify the scale of the economic value and savings made when implementing these wider systems. However, Nicolas Cary, co-founder of Blockchain, has , arguing that a digital payment system might be a critical element in a future economy: “For intelligent assets to create value in the circular economy the development of an open and global payment protocol is required. The technology behind the Bitcoin blockchain has the potential to enable the billions of internet devices that negotiate with each other to unleash market forces, to bring down the costs of goods and services for all.” |
The gig economy as a driver of innovation | Michael Contreras | 2,016 | 4 | 2 |
If you are reading this article, chances are you have taken an Uber, are familiar with Upwork and maybe even sold something on Etsy. Business models that fall under the have been proven for business-to-consumer and peer-to-peer markets because they make it possible to crowdsource products and services from huge communities of people. Large online networks can also be some of the greatest sources of innovation. Led by the enterprise and government research and development verticals, this trend is growing rapidly because of a shift in focus from single-point services to the co-creation (collaborative innovation) model. Some of the most novel case studies and applications of innovation and crowdsourcing are coming from unexpected places: large enterprises and government agencies. Driven by pressure for continued growth and tapping talent outside their workforce, large companies like , , and a have launched prize challenges seeking innovative ideas, products and software solutions. Even the U.S. government is launching challenges at an unprecedented rate. A estimated that more than $60 million in prizes was offered through the platform. The annual America COMPETES released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy reported that 17 agencies launched prize challenges in 2014 — seven of them being first-timers. This increased activity has contributed to a growing market for innovation and crowdsourcing capabilities, resulting in a recent $20 million worth of . As the market for innovation and crowdsourcing continues to grow, the enterprise customer is searching for co-creation frameworks that can deliver real value. One such framework is the that I co-founded and implemented at the Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). Catalyst builds real startups with prototypes from communities of innovators. Best suited for early-stage innovation in verticals where prototyping is inexpensive, Catalyst links a community of energy entrepreneurs (using the ) to a community of developers and designers in Appirio’s platform. Catalyst delivers real value through a four-step co-creation framework: (1) to find the top pain points and wish list of a specific vertical, (2) anchored by a business solution addressing the pain points or wish list, (3) using crowdsourced software development and (4) where teams are incentivized to grow and scale. The framework has been one of the few in open innovation to successfully and has been shown to be scalable across EERE, garnering funding in two rounds from the Solar Energy Technologies Office and the Building Technologies Office. In 2015, a $2 million prize backed 36 early-stage teams with prototypes and was shown to be 2x as fast and 10x as cost-effective to comparable phase I and phase II . In addition to media coverage from non-traditional outlets like , the program won a host of accolades, including the . With increasing enterprise investment being made in innovation and crowdsourcing, a new workforce with new skills will be needed to deliver results from co-creation business models. In recent years we have seen the rise of , whose duties can range from growth hacking to improvement of the community. With co-creation it is necessary to have a super-community manager (manager of multiple community managers) whose concern is not only engagement, but . Crowdsourcing and crowd-powered tools have been to be an exponential technology because of the exceptional access to innovation and enablement that they provide. Now, imagine the value of the new “gig economy” where communities of exponential capability not only deliver unique solutions, but their collaboration has a force multiplier effect that delivers game-changing innovation. |
Blue Origin releases video from third launch and landing of New Shepard | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 2 | Remember when Blue Origin made history by vertically landing a rocket after launching it into space? Remember when they that same rocket and then landed it again? Well, today Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, once again, launched that very same New Shepard rocket and successfully landed it At 11:28 AM EST, Bezos announced the successful landing of the New Shepard suborbital rocket as well as the crew capsule that it was carrying into space. While the rocket will eventually be used for crewed missions, there were no humans on this flight. Flawless BE-3 restart and perfect booster landing. CC chutes deployed. — Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) CC touchdown confirmed. — Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) Unlike previous launches where the public was mostly unaware of the event until after the fact, Bezos gave the world a heads up the night before the launch. Working to fly again tomorrow. Same vehicle. Third time. — Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) With a few tweets, Bezos revealed that a couple of things were different about this particular New Shepard launch. For one, upon the return of their rocket, New Shepard’s BE-3 liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen engine would be restarted closer to the landing pad at 3,600 feet from the ground. If there were any issues in restarting the engine, the rocket would impact the ground within 6 seconds. Blue Origin also tested a new, more efficient radar cross section (RCS) algorithm on the crew capsule. Crew Capsule is locked & ready for flt. Tortoises mark successful CC missions. — Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) Another unique aspect of today’s launch was that this mission had a payload on board. New Shepard carried two microgravity science experiments into space: one from the Southwest Research Institute and another from the University of Central Florida. The University of Central Florida is testing how a layer of dust reacts when a marble impacts it under microgravity conditions. The Southwest Research Institute is flying a “Box of Rocks Experiment” to explore the jostling and settling of rocky soil in microgravity. When Blue Origin first successfully landed their suborbital rocket in November, some were quick to compare Blue Origin’s success to SpaceX’s rocket landing failures at the time (although they successfully their Falcon 9 rocket later in December). However, the key difference between the two company’s current rocket reusability pursuits is Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is suborbital (reaches the line of space and comes back down to the Earth) while SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is orbital (powerful enough to send payloads into a full orbit around the Earth). Because of this difference, experts SpaceX’s orbital rocket is much more technically difficult to land successfully. Landing a rocket is only the first important step toward rocket reusability. In order to save money for customers who buy rides into space, a launch provider must be able to safely and reliably relaunch recovered rockets. With today’s launch, Blue Origin has now successfully a rocket twice. |
Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, gets some upgrades | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 2 | TechCrunch went out to the ballpark this week — specifically Citi Field, home of the New York Mets. Granted, it wasn’t the most tech-centric event, but the stadium has seen some changes between seasons — including the addition of a big LED Coca-Cola sign, which looms over the new Coca-Cola Corner in right field. Apparently, the sign is the second largest “freeform display” in Major League Baseball. While you’re in Coca-Cola Corner, you’ll be able to keep up with the social media conversation and show off off your batting skills at a virtual home run derby, which is powered by Microsoft Kinect technology. And throughout the rest of the stadium, you’ll see new interactive displays from another Mets sponsor, Nikon. (Verizon, which owns AOL and TechCrunch, is also a sponsor.) The Mets will play the year’s first game at Citi Field on April 8, against the Phillies. |
Why it’s so easy to ignore your to-do list app but get distracted by Twitter | Benjamin Brandall | 2,016 | 4 | 2 |
I’ve spent the past month in a daze, trying make sense of my own tasks and responsibilities while forcing myself adhere a system I came up with that simply doesn’t work. You can never anticipate how “perfectly designed” task-management system can fail. It’s our own nature — we’re sure of ourselves — that makes us think our idea will be the magic trick that solves all our problems. For me, this idea came around a month ago, on a rainy street in a cafe mostly filled with elderly ladies, looking at me disapprovingly while I did nothing scroll on my phone for two hours solid. Frustrated with the way I organize my reminders, I was looking for a way solve the problem that didn’t involve using 50 different apps. Instead, I ended up creating systems that would bring tears of laughter the eyes of anyone who knew the first thing about productivity. When I got home my laptop, I wrote an awful 2,000-word article about it. Thankfully, this isn’t that article. It probably won’t see the light of day — it’s too angry and incoherent to share with anyone. After some time reflect and apply rational thought the situation, I’m here, in the midst of a symphony of push notifications, writing this instead. I’m going talk about my fight against and my failing productivity, the apps and systems with which I’ve tried keep myself in check and the psychology behind why we build an aversion against getting things done. The way I used organize my whole working life was with . It seemed ideal, at first. You’ve got one card per quantifiable task that moves around the board depending on its status. It’s not like I let tasks stack up, the amount of places from which Trello gets data (using software like ) means that it’s full of cards I don’t know how deal with. It’s like layering office wall with sticky notes and not having a clue which one pull off and read first. A problem with all productivity apps is that they need upkeep. Apps can’t just make you productive by the fact that they exist; you must use them, maintain them and put in effort results. Many productivity apps can help you organize life as a secondary function their main purpose: can be turned into a – as well as being the permanent home for all quick notes, a or a scrapbook for receipts. Trello can notify you of upcoming deadlines, and store tasks, files and communications. can act as a reminder-bot, parsing natural language into concrete reminders at real dates and times. is a zoomable document that is great for and structuring projects — and it doubles as a task-management system. The problem with this is that unless you go all or nothing with one , you’re scattered between numerous different systems, some with push notifications, some with email summaries, some synced calendar, etc. Spending time maintaining a instead of doing work that matters is a huge productivity killer, one that I’ve been trying (and failing) fight simply because I use too many apps that don’t enough. We have an aversion getting told what versus getting told we’re being talked about. The phone buzzes over the other side of the room. I use my laptop to check my emails for a reply from an editor. Nothing. I check see if someone’s approving of my life choices. Nothing. I resolve it’s some kind of non-essential deadline coming nearer, and, out of defense, don’t check it, getting on with whatever I’m trying too hard focus on. Like a lot of other aspects of life, we’ve been conditioned only hear what we want hear. I don’t want know it’s time up, break my concentration and hoover the bloody house; although, paradoxically, I’d love my concentration be broken if it would only inform me of a retweet. In their article , and call notifications “the Pavlovian bell of the 21st century.” For designers and users alike, this is a double-edged sword. While notifications are exciting and a way engage users repeatedly, they’re also numbing. When half of notifications aren’t relevant and you’re waiting for an important reply, it can be like getting phone calls from everyone the pizza delivery guy. I work remotely with a huge degree of freedom. I have a few set weekly deadlines, other than that I’m free work in a way any boss with an understanding of how creativity works would allow — of my own accord, writing as and when I feel like it. A published by Florida State University tested students’ reactions a simple game against a group that played the same game had audible notifications distracting them as they went. Even though the participants never acted on the notifications, the test indicated that the notification sounds or vibrations them noticeably, and just as much as a phone call would. When it comes it, and I have an idea I have write down, I want that and only that. If I was working in an office (something I’ve only ever done for three months of my life), then my time I spend with tunnel vision in a text editor would be the time someone doesn’t let any calls come into my office. Why, then, I think it’s okay have a chiming phone going off every few minutes? I don’t think it’s okay be bombarded with notifications, I’m just lazy. Swiping away every notification that comes in is irritating, not enough of an involved task force me take meaningful action, which is a problem. Just like how I probably dismiss that Java update dialog box several times a week, it becomes a muscle memory reflex dismiss notifications without consciously registering them. A way solve this is by prioritizing just two tasks on every day, and removing reminders for the rest. In an that lets you create multiple lists and mark labels or star tasks (such as Trello, Wunderlist or ), you can have “today” and “backlog” keep only the most important tasks on the top of mind. From that, you can add reminders for only the tasks that are important and urgent. When I started with Wunderlist, I set myself daily recurring tasks for every little thing I can think of — process reminders, inbox zero, wash the pans. Even now I haven’t restructured yet because it’s easier sit through a stream of ignorable notifications than sit down and change the system. There’s going come a point where I ask myself if I really need process my Evernote inbox or items saved Pocket twice every week, or whether it’s something I should when I actually have the time it. Because right now, getting bugged about it regularly by my phone has given me an aversion it completely. An obvious solution is cut push notifications out of life completely. Owen Williams’ into his own psychology of overload concluded with him deciding rid of on his phone and only check the inferior web-based version. I’m not strong enough for that yet. Even though it kills my productivity, I’m a sucker for push notifications and will hold onto the silly hope that something interesting just happened me. As I typed that last sentence, I stopped midway through check my phone — mere seconds away from going into glazed-eyes- -scrolling mode. |
Moneyball is dead. Long live Moneyball! | Jay Laramore | 2,016 | 4 | 2 |
While it seems the term has been around baseball forever, the concept of “moneyball” — coined to describe the Oakland Athletics’ approach to building competitive teams despite being hamstrung with one of the sport’s lowest payrolls — entered the popular lexicon with Michael Lewis’ , in 2003 (followed by the film). The concept is simple. Rather than relying on the traditional, often subjective wisdom of baseball-lifer scouts, who use their eyes to judge player ability, moneyball uses an analytical, evidence-based approach to build a roster. It’s useful for cash-strapped teams because it typically identifies undervalued, overlooked players. The concept dates back to the days of — early analysis of nontraditional statistics that brought names like Bill James into the lexicon, and its use of “WAR” (wins above replacement) and emphasis on OBP (on-base percentage) rather than traditional measures of a player’s value, such as batting average and runs batted in. For a while, it worked. The Athletics made the postseason each year from 2000 to 2003, going a stunning 103-59 in 2002. Once Lewis’ book hit, suddenly moneyball was everywhere – across all four major U.S. pro sports, and even in some teams’ business operations such as ticketing, other revenue streams and marketing. Success breeds imitation, and some teams, such as the Boston Red Sox, combined moneyball concepts with their economic power to build rosters that merged overlooked assets with star players. Suddenly, the concepts that worked for small-market teams were co-opted by their major-market competitors. Oakland never got past the League Championship Series, most recently playing in the ALCS in 2006. People soon grew tired of the analytical approach; it became passé, even mocked by some. A Deadspin piece bore the headline It made a good point: If everyone is using the same analytics, does it give anyone an advantage? These are increasingly crucial distinctions in sports, where the information available to all teams has basically become standardized. A few years ago, the best data was brokered by independent agencies selling it to teams individually. Now, the NBA subsidizes team access to SportVU player-tracking data, while MLB Advanced Media is rolling out its own fielding-tracking system, giving teams access to more data than most know what to do with. That means there’s less and less low-hanging fruit for guys like Billy Beane, who were early to the notion of, well, simply bothering to look. And in February, I was surprised to read a in the stating that owner John Henry, who made his living in commodities trading (“moneyball for soybeans”?), believes the team has relied too much on analytics in making major decisions. He also replaced his data-centric general manager with a baseball lifer, Dave Dombrowski, who judges talent in an old-school fashion. This was a huge culture shift for the team. Despite a payroll either second or third highest in baseball, the Red Sox have also relied on statistics to build their roster. Former Sox player Kevin Youkilis, known as “The Greek God of Walks,” was featured extensively in Lewis’ book. And most of the time they’ve sought expensive free agents, the team has missed — mightily, from Daisuke Matsuzaka to Hanley Ramirez to Carl Crawford. But with all that said, I had to ask myself, is the analytics era over? As NFL referees would say, “upon further review” … no. In fact, I believe it’s still very much in its infancy, evolving as it finds peace with the established scouting methods and philosophies that have for so long dominated baseball. From the Globe piece: “[S]couts (were) giving each other high-fives and wearing smiles ear to ear while the analytics community was taken aback. Henry’s declaration was shocking to them, while the scouting community saw the comments as a victory.” That line is very telling, and displays the misconceptions “lifer” scouts have on data mining and analytics. The common belief is that scouts see the relationship between analytics and “feet-on-the-street scouting” as a zero-sum game: one approach has to win at the expense of another, a war of attrition between stat geeks like Bill James and old-school guys like Jim Leyland. I believe this is because the analytics side of the house still hasn’t effectively communicated its importance to the larger scouting community. Currently, analytics is analogous to the physics professor you had in high school or college who filled a chalkboard explaining Newton’s law of gravity — and, as a student, you sat there wondering, why do I need to know all this? Things fall from the sky to the ground. I get it. Scouts are like those students who question why such learning is necessary. If I hit 100 fly balls, I know that 100 of them will fall toward the ground; thus, gravity works. But once we stop seeing this as an all-or-nothing approach — and use the hybrid methodologies of successful teams like the Red Sox (2004, 2007 and 2013 World Series Champions) — success can be shared among an organization rather than credited to a siloed philosophy. The real challenge is learning how to encourage both sides to work together, as opposed to against each other, and fielding the best possible team with their budget. This type of dichotomy and resistance to work together toward a common goal is not a foreign concept. In fact, it’s present just about everywhere you look: the corporate world, colleges and universities, politics and even in a preschool playpen. Don’t believe me? Put two toddlers in a room with only one truck and tell me how well they work together. Put two strong-willed groups of people in a room with only one way of operating, and why would you expect the results to be any different? But baseball is not a zero-sum game, and it’s time to realize that both analytics approaches and traditional scouting offer value. They must work together so John Henry’s comments begin to sound not like a death knell for analytics, but the beginning of an era of cooperation. |
How to approach machine learning as a non-technical person | Aria Haghighi | 2,016 | 4 | 2 |
The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in machine learning technology and potential applications. As a non-expert, you’ve probably either had to assess ML technology for your product and business or as a potential investment. The jargon around ML technology is vast, confusing and, unfortunately, increasingly being hijacked by overeager sales teams. This post is not a primer on ML technology; this post won’t pretend to give you an explanation of deep learning or any specific technology, because these concepts change frequently and are largely irrelevant to much of the decision making. Instead, this post will address how to assess the technology and determine if it will yield pragmatic business value. Ultimately, ML is meant to be used in the context of a given task, a problem with inputs and a way to objectively assess how right or wrong an output is. While you may not understand the technology being used, it’s crucial to understand the task. Don’t accept vagueness or something poorly defined like “understanding what a sentence means.” If someone can’t explain what their ML actually does independently of technical jargon, it’s a bad sign. At a high level there are common kinds of tasks frequently seen in ML: classification, regression and ranking. For instance, image recognition, such as in ImageNet, is a classification task where we have an input image and want to predict the primary subject matter of the image (a photo of a dog, car, etc.). Regression is about predicting a real numerical value or values from an input, such as predicting the future value of a home or a stock portfolio. Ranking is about predicting an ordering of items which is “best” in a given setting; for instance, in search ranking, we want to order results that are most relevant for a given query and user profile and history. So when you’re hearing about an ML pitch of some kind, it’s important to take a step back and get an explanation. Once you understand the task, it’s important to understand how the ML system is being evaluated on that task. Typically, people will define a system evaluation metric that gives a quantitative measure of how well the system does on the task. As an example, in image recognition you can report what percent of the time you predict the right category for an image (e.g. I correctly guessed this was an image of a dog). The common ML tasks (classification, regression and ranking) all have standard evaluation metrics with which it would be worth familiarizing yourself. It’s unfortunately quite common for people to develop very complex algorithms and technology for problems, but not actually develop an objective evaluation metric. Not having a metric is a very bad sign. There’s no objective way to actually know whether their “super deep learning” actually yields any tangible benefits. When it comes to building ML, or any technology really, for business value, you want to work with people who focus and drive by metrics. A common and frustrating reality is that more complex ML technology does not necessarily mean improvements on evaluation metrics; especially in environments with limited data, simple techniques frequently outperform more complex ones. The corollary of this is if you’re building ML, always develop and try simpler methods first. I’ve personally consulted on many projects where people have heavily invested in ML only to find out something vastly simpler (in more than one case just Naive Bayes) performed at least as well, with an order of magnitude more speed and less development time. The last and trickiest aspect of assessing ML technology is understanding how improvements on the ML task will impact which business metrics and by how much. Sometimes there’s a very direct relationship. For instance, for ad placement in search results, the ML metric is typically predicting the probability of ad click-through (possibly weighted by expected CPC). The rate and revenue-generated ad click-through is either a core business metric or closely related to one. In this setting, it makes a lot of sense to invest heavily in ML, because gains will likely improve business metrics. In other settings, the relationship is less clear. For instance, at Netflix, improving movie recommendation quality by 0.5 percent, while difficult, does not necessarily mean that month-over-month subscriber retention will necessary budge (although something like engagement might). As a product owner or investor, it’s important that you understand which business metric you want to actually move and whether or not ML improvements might actually yield those changes. Unsurprisingly, this might be part of why Google invests so heavily in ML, because improvements are strongly correlated with key business and financial metrics. On the flip side, for Apple, a 1 percent improvement to Siri has a much weaker and tenuous relationship with how many iPhones are sold. If you want to work on ML in products or invest in the area, it’s crucial to understand whether this really is an area where ML can “move” the needle. |
11 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week | Travis Bernard | 2,016 | 4 | 2 | This week, Tesla unveiled a brand-new model, Oculus Rift shipped and Snapchat saw a major upgrade. These are this week’s top tech stories you don’t want to miss. . The base model starts at $35,000, and it does 0-60 in under 6 seconds. . [facebook url=”https://www.facebook.com/techcrunch/videos/10154133826592952/” /] Microsoft held its Build conference this week. The most notable announcement was that . You can find everything we wrote about Build . Lucas Matney wrote a . Simply put: it’s amazing, but you probably shouldn’t buy one yet. Josh Constine also wrote a feature about . [facebook url=”https://www.facebook.com/techcrunch/videos/10154119565197952/” /] , asking if he is in Nest’s way. As Loizos explains, “Fadell couldn’t be further apart from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.” . With “Chat 2.0,” Snapchat has seamlessly combined video, audio, GIFs, and stickers. As Josh Constine puts it, “Snapchat serves as a phone.” You can also see us run through all the new features in . [facebook url=”https://www.facebook.com/techcrunch/videos/10154123838997952/” /] Spotify is doing whatever it takes to compete with Apple Music, and this week . If Spotify doesn’t perform well, it could cost the company a lot of money. The FBI is full of shit. . Jon Evans dove into the encryption debate with a follow-up piece Contributor Sephi Shapira wrote about the connected fridge, and how having a smart refrigerator in the household could . Matt Joseph, a Y Combinator-backed startup founder, went on — racism and raising money as a black founder. Post tweetstorm and demo day, he is now . Remember the of a man’s attempt to cancel his Comcast service that went viral a couple years back? A new bill we’re dubbing ‘Ryan’s Law’ would allow you to . Because let’s be real. If you sign up online, you should be able to cancel online. Last week, Instagram announced it was going to be . Naturally, . Brands and professional Instagrammers asked followers to turn on post notifications for their pages. But the truth is, the algorithm is going to force us to compete. If posts don’t perform well, Instagram won’t show them. |
Opera brings built-in VPN service to its browser | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | When Opera acquired the virtual private network (VPN) service SurfEasy , it obviously did so to build that technology into its browser and maybe its Opera Max data-savings app. It took more than a year, but now Opera is actually launching a free built-in version of SurfEasy in the early release of its browser. The built-in VPN will protect your unencrypted browser session for being exposed on public WiFi networks and will also let you bypass the occasional firewall at your workplace or in countries like China. It will also assign you a virtual IP address, so it’ll be harder to track your location. Unlike the full version of SurfEasy, this built-in service only protects your browser session, though, and no other traffic that originates from your computer. “Everyone deserves to be private online if they want to be. By adding a free, unlimited VPN directly into the browser, no additional download or extensions from an unknown thirdparty provider are necessary,” Opera SVP Krystian Kolondra said in today’s announcement. For now, you can choose between three virtual locations (USA, Canada and Germany), but the company says more will be available once this feature makes it to the stable release channel later this year. Right now, this feature is still somewhat hidden in Opera’s settings menu. To give this a try, install the of Opera and then look for the “Privacy & Security” tab and toggle this feature on. Hopefully, this will become a one-click affair similar to turning on Opera Turbo once this feature hits the stable release channel. |
Spotify suffers notable hour-long outage for many users | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 2 | Breathe that weekend air, Saturday is here in most parts of the world! Great time to put on some music and relax, except, that is, if you’re a Spotify user because the world’s most popular streaming service is experiencing some issues right now. It looks like the service is returning for most users. Access to Spotify was problematic for around an hour, which makes this a notably long outage. Most users expect on-demand music so Spotify and its rivals can’t afford to let them down regularly. Many of Spotify’s 100 million users — me included — found themselves logged out of the service, some while listening to music, and are unable to access Spotify’s mobile or desktop apps. So if you’re seeing notifications that suggest that your password is wrong, that you don’t have an account or that you can’t log in via Facebook, don’t worry as something isn’t working right and it is affecting a lot of other people, too. This is a rare outage for Spotify, which recently passed 30 million paying users. The problem appeared to start around midnight PDT (8:00 GMT), according to user complaints on Twitter. Spotify acknowledged the issue on Twitter and said it is working on a fix, although it didn’t say what the problem is and how many users it may be affecting. (We’ve contacted the company to try to get more information.) We are investigating some issues and finding out more. Thanks for your reports – we’ll keep you updated here. — Spotify Status (@SpotifyStatus) Here are the error notices you may be seeing on Spotify’s desktop (left) and mobile (right) apps. The web client — — also appears to inaccessible. Those affected are, of course, upset, with some worried that their accounts have been wiped. https://twitter.com/Joshb2k15/status/716161619999391748 lost all my music and premium account, wtf is this — Lutfil Hadi (@LutfiLatiff) LET ME INTO MY ACCOUNT THAT I PAY FOR😡😡😡 — jade (@mccordsbutera) Hello , I can't login to my account with Facebook! Please fix otherwise I'm going to switch. — Warren Lee (@thewarrenlee) somethings going on with my account. Logged out. Won't let me log in, not with Facebook either. HELP ME!! — Tyler Stefanelli (@TylerStefanelli) Hey April fools is over, you can let me log into my account now — Dylan rojas (@Dylancrojas) Now might be a good time for Soundcloud, which , and Apple, which is , to promote their services as alternatives to Spotify for a little spontaneous new user acquisition. Maybe Kanye can even pipe up — this week so he might want to take credit for bringing Spotify to its knees. (Though it is not the reason for today’s glitch, of course.) |
Quora begins making money with the introduction of advertising | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | Question and answer site Quora has made its first push to make money after it introduced advertising. The company, which was when it closed an $80 million Series C in 2014, that it has 100 million monthly visitors, half of whom are from the U.S. with 15 percent from India. That’s up from , and likely the reason for this foray into ads. “Our initial ads will show on only a very small number of question pages, and only in cases where we believe that the fact that someone is reading this particular question page means that they are likely to be interested in what the advertiser is offering,” . Browne added that Quora will be highly selective of which companies’ messages it chooses to show. Initially it is letting four advertisers on to its platform — Lever, Uber, Wealthfront and Sunrun — though there are plans to open up to more over time. As for the kind of messages that you can expect to see, advertisements sit below questions and are market with “promoted by.” The desktop version of the service includes a small blurb, but in the mobile app it is just the advertiser’s name. This move into advertising follows the launch of new features that have taken Quora beyond its initial focus on questions and answers. Those include , which arrived last year, and a curious feature that lets anonymous entities offer up — the latter may well tie in to this new focus on advertising. Quora also made its first acquisition last month, , a Q&A site started by a former Googler who was involved in the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt. |
Rocket Internet’s Zalora loses co-founder and MD amid uncertain future | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | , the fashion-focused e-commerce site backed by Rocket Internet, has lost two top executives. Singapore-based managing directors , who is also listed as a co-founder, and have departed the company, TechCrunch understands. The company, like others in the Rocket Internet portfolio, has a fairly unorthodox executive structure with five joint managing directors overseeing the business over the past few years. Markl and Pundir’s exits indicate unrest and leave the remaining management stretched and under-experienced in some areas, sources inside Zalora told us. Markl’s final day was last Friday, while Pundir — a long-time fashion retail exec who previously worked in the U.S., France and India — quietly left “over a month ago” to pursue her own business. (Markl and Pundir’s LinkedIn profiles still list both in their Zalora roles.) Markl is said to be weighing up starting his own company, but multiple sources inside Zalora told TechCrunch that his exit was triggered by ongoing tension with Global Fashion Group (GFG), to manage its fashion e-commerce sites across the world, including Zalora. We contacted Markl but he declined to comment. GFG, which , is run by former Amazon France head Romain Voog and it is comprised of five companies: (Latin America), (India), (Russia and CIS), (Middle East) and . All in all, it claims to reach 23 countries worldwide. A source inside Zalora told us that while GFG provides benefits, such as financing — Zalora is not about to run out of money, , with GFG as its parent — there is disagreement on its approach to markets. Zalora executives, we’re told, view Southeast Asia as a long game that can be won, but GFG’s management team is more inclined to focus on markets that can return their investment faster — such as the Middle East, where Namshi is showing promise. That provides some context as to why Zalora is selling off its business units in Thailand and Vietnam for a relatively paltry $10 million a piece, . GFG considered them too nascent and, with TechCrunch understanding that there are plenty of suitors offering to take both businesses off their hands, the parent has decided to sell. That runs against some of the management’s belief that Zalora is on the cusp of breaking through. “We are 1/3rd of Zalando in terms of traffic, we are 1/15th in terms of revenues,” Markl wrote to Zalora staff in a leaving memo obtained by TechCrunch. “Hence, we have a lot of potential to grow and as a result we/you should aspire Zalora to be a 1bn EUR company in the next 2-3 years.” show Zalora’s revenue rose 78 percent to €208 million ($234 million) in 2015, but its net loss increased 36 percent to €93.5 million ($105 million.) Its current valuation is unclear since it is part of GFG. Zalora is currently run by Group CEO and (another) MD . ( , the fifth long-standing Zalora exec alongside those two, Markl and Punir, moved over to GFG — Rocket Internet is quite the management circus at times.) But Markl’s exit, first announced internally in late 2015, has seen a string of high-ranking employees follow him out of the door, including former CFO , who is now at Ensogo and . Zalora isn unlikely to land a mega investment deal like Lazada, its $1.5 billion-valued Rocket Internet sibling, which . But, we hear that the outlook is comparatively rosy thanks to high margins and the security of GFG. However, with changes at the top and some country units for sale, there’s a sense of uncertainty at the company. That could apply to investors, , too. , and it’s even less clear what those who bought into Zalora can expect. |
Federal judge rules FBI didn’t have proper warrant to hack child porn site | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | A federal judge ruled today that the FBI did not obtain the proper warrant before hacking a child porn website and that the evidence it collected against one of the defendants, Alex Levin, must be suppressed. The case centers on a child porn site called Playpen, which was hosted on a hidden Tor service intended to conceal users’ identities. The FBI in February of last year, but instead of shutting it down, the agency continued to run the site on its own server for several weeks. During that period, the FBI implemented its own hacking tool, referred to as a network investigative technique (NIT), to collect the IP addresses of visitors to the site. The FBI is thought to have obtained thousands of IP addresses during the investigation. One of the IP addresses allegedly belonged to Levin, a Massachusetts man who is charged with possession of child pornography. Levin’s public defender successfully argued that the warrant the FBI used to authorize the NIT was not valid because it was issued by a magistrate judge in Virginia, and Levin’s computer — located at his home in Massachusetts — was outside that judge’s jurisdiction. In today’s ruling, Judge William G. Young said that the evidence against Levin, including “eight media files allegedly containing child pornography,” must be suppressed. “The court concludes that the NIT Warrant was issued without jurisdiction and thus was void,” Young wrote. “It follows that the resulting search was conducted as though there were no warrant at all.” Young also expressed skepticism at the ethics of the FBI running a child porn site. “Unlike those undercover stings where the government buys contraband drugs to catch the dealers, here the government disseminated child obscenity to catch the purchasers — something akin to the government itself selling drugs to make the sting,” he wrote. The ruling is a victory for privacy advocates, who that the FBI should not be permitted to hack thousands of computers across the United States — and potentially around the world — all at once. “The FBI could have handled this investigation in a different way, but they failed to,” Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Mark Rumold told TechCrunch. The EFF has argued in another Playpen-related case that the NIT warrant was unconstitutional. “They just cast their net as wide as they could, and now they’re having to fight tooth and nail to bring these prosecutions. If they had done it in a way that was targeted in the first place, they wouldn’t have this problem,” he added. Although this ruling is likely the end of the case against Levin, other defendants linked to Playpen are standing trial across the country. Judges in those cases are not bound to follow Young’s ruling, and those cases may still proceed. The Justice Department may also continue to bring charges against other suspected Playpen users — but Rumold says that’s not a good idea. “At this point, there were so many problems with the way the FBI conducted this investigation that DOJ should just stop bringing these cases,” Rumold said. |
Qualtrics adds former Google and Apple exec Kim Scott to the board to help pull in top Silicon Valley talent | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | Billion-dollar customer insight startup hopes to recruit top Silicon Valley talent to its home base in Utah as it continues to grow and part of that strategy involves adding professional tech coach Kim Scott to the board of directors. Qualtrics became one of a handful of new unicorns in the Beehive State last year and it continues to climb up and to the right. But it’s hard to recruit leaders at the senior level in any firm and it’s . Scott helped Google and Apple scale and is a well-respected CEO in the Valley who trains tech execs on how to grow and manage their teams using an approach called “radical candor.” She was a founding member of Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and Doubleclick Online Sales and Operations at Google. Her forthcoming book, “Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing your Humanity, offers leadership advice and encourages impromptu feedback. Qualtrics already holds strong ties to Silicon Valley, previously raising $220 million from Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Insight Venture Partners over two rounds of funding. And, with 1100 employees, it’s already a large organization. However, the insights platform has major plans to expand in other areas of the world and mentioned it would like to include a more diverse executive team as well. Scott’s board appointment will help Qualtrics at a critical moment in growth and operations and will likely boost interest among top leadership in her circle. |
Tripping.com sees non-hotel lodgings draw “420-friendly” travelers | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | A search engine that lets travelers find and book a stay in non-hotel lodgings, , has detected a burgeoning “budbnb” trend in Colorado. San Francisco-based Tripping.com aggregates vacation rental listings from the likes of , , and other sites, and shows travelers the best prices on available lodgings. It currently lists about 8 million properties, according to founder and CEO Jen O’Neal. About 3 million of the properties on its site are “instantly bookable.” That means users don’t have to spend days emailing back and forth with a vacation rental owner to arrange a transaction and a stay. In states where cannabis is deemed legal for recreational use, vacation rental owners are increasingly using “420” and “420-friendly” as keywords to draw travelers, O’Neal observed. Her data team detected an 86 percent increase in the use of the keywords “420” and “420-friendly” for Colorado-based listings from 2014 to 2015, when the state made recreational cannabis legal. enacted a law in late 2012 that made the private and limited use and possession of marijuana legal for adults 21 years and older. The state established a system to regulate and tax sales of marijuana in late 2013. Legal pot sales commenced in the state in early 2014. Tripping.com is monitoring different cannabis-related keywords in its listings, and weed-related searches to see how the travel and tourism market is impacted by marijuana’s legalization. |
The Lian-Li DK-04 is a big PC case and a motorized standing desk all-in-one | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | What if I told you that you can strengthen your own core while liquid cooling your PCs? That’s the dream, right? Better still, you can accomplish all of that in a single product — which is precisely the sort of innovation one has come to expect from a computer accessory manufacturer that recently announced a case that . The is a great big thing as far as computer cases go — though it’s pretty reasonable by desk standards, with a 47.2 by 29.5-inch surface area. That kind of space allows for a lot of components under the hood, including up to 10 hard drives. With that kind of hardware, you’re going to need some serious cooling, and the DK-04 has fans galore, which can be augmented with a liquid cooling kit. The desktop surface is made of tempered glass, so you can behold your computer’s guts while working, lifting up for easy access under the hood. Up front are four USB 3.0 ports, a disc drive bay and a dimmer for the optional LED lighting. There’s also a control panel on the left side that electronically adjusts the desk’s height up to 3.8 feet, so users can tower above their weak-willed seated co-workers. The DK-04 is set for sale on May 10 for $1,500. That price doesn’t include the computer components though, without which it’s really just a big, hollow standing desk. via |
Adtech is going native on steroids, hyper-personalization and consolidation | Kfir Hod Moyal | 2,016 | 4 | 20 |
After years of VC exuberance, 2015 marked the end of an investment cycle for the adtech industry. Quite a few companies with high valuations stumbled, downsized, restructured and pivoted in order to achieve, or at least progress on a path toward, sustainable profitability. Yet, despite the contraction in VC investments, the industry is growing dramatically, fueled by agencies and advertisers competing for digital real estate across billions of screens, with billions more forthcoming in the next few years. 2015’s correction sets the stage for adtech to “grow up” in 2016, especially in terms of ad quality and industry structure. The first trend I expect in 2016 is a spike in contextually relevant ads (CRAs), like native advertising, that blend well with the user experience. Nearly 200 million ad blockers cost publishers $22 billion in 2015, an impact far from trivial. If consumers continue to face harassment from unwanted ads, this figure could double or triple in the upcoming years. The antidote: CRAs. We’ve witnessed Google command significant premiums from advertisers for more than a decade by serving CRAs along the search dimension, while Facebook’s dominance derives from the wealth of personal data it collects on each user and its ability to seamlessly integrate relevant advertising in the newsfeed experience. In the last few years, Outbrain and Taboola have leveraged content consumption patterns to create an entirely new category of CRAs known as sponsored content/native advertising. Even today, I find myself still clicking on sponsored content, thinking it’s native. It’s not that I’m being tricked, like with pop-up ads or clickbait; rather, the contextual relevance of the ad suits my interests. It’s nicely integrated in the page and is truly relevant. Contextual intelligence is a meaningful point of differentiation that leads to higher ROI for advertisers and publishers, and thus, the adtech companies that improve the marketer’s ability to provide the right message to the right person at the right time will attract substantial investment. The second trend we will see is hyper-personalization, with a special focus on what I will call the “smart creative.” During the last few years adtech has focused on data collection and analysis in order to better target consumers, optimizing yields for both advertisers and publishers. Yes, we’ve improved on many different fronts, but the ad creative has remained flat and static. Thanks to the death of privacy, we now have an abundance of data that can be used to make each creative hyper-personalized and much more engaging for the consumer. In 2016 we will see creatives that change on-the-fly based on each user’s unique characteristics rather than fixed images that are mass-distributed, and smart programmatic creative will become the standard. The third trend to consider is consolidation. The artificial silo between adtech and martech is crumbling. Despite the pace of advertising innovation the past 15 years, the complexity of adtech as a technology stack inhibits brands, agencies and marketers from seamlessly integrating digital advertising into their full marketing stack. In 2016, we’re going to see companies like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, AOL, Google and Facebook beefing up their martech war chests. These incumbents will snap up new entrants to enhance and complete their martech stack in a way that they can really become a one-stop shop for marketing and adverting in a digital manner. This trend is buoyed by increasing demand for accountability from premium brands (after the 2015 AppNexus’ cleanup that shined a spotlight on the pervasive fraud affecting marketers’ ROI). We’re going to see the CRM technology, the marketing automation technology integrated into the DMP and the DSP and the attribution solutions, the tracking vendors, all coming together into one platform that makes it much easier for the marketers to execute multi-channel, orchestrated campaigns that take advantage of data. On the monetization side, we’ll see more and more consolidation. Adtech and martech is, in particular, an industry where size is a major advantage. We’re seeing it even with Israeli companies like Taboola and Outbrain that are discussing a merger among themselves. I bet we’re going to see it more. We’ve seen AOL buying , and to make it easy for brands and agencies to advertise across their destination properties like TechCrunch, Huffington Post and MapQuest. We’re going to see that further into 2016, all across the board, either where the marketing players are going to buy the adtech players or the adtech players are going to buy the marketing players. As an iAngels advisor and general partner at Cyhawk Ventures, I am evaluating companies in the context of the themes outlined above. In light of adtech’s 2015 correction, startups that “face the mirror” will grow fast in 2016, in a much cleaner and accountable environment. This means they will be well poised to attract investments from multiple funds, and the adtech financing environment will get back on track. |
Build your brand, and they will come | Cyril Ebersweiler | 2,016 | 4 | 20 |
Your hardware startup got some buzz and you beat your crowdfunding target. You’ve lived on planes to set up production, and have even been a featured speaker at some hot tech events. At last, you’re ready for the orders to start rolling in! But then, silence. When do retailers start calling? The good news: hardware is hot. The bad news: you’re not selling a VR visor with Facebook, Samsung, HTC or Sony backing you. More bad news: retailers don’t call; you call them. At least the big ones, those who can really drive volume. You might get dozens of enquiries from smaller ones, but serving many geographies with small volumes would be a nightmare. So, you call the retailers. Or better yet, the sales agent you hired calls retail buyers across the country and sets up in-person meetings with each one. In those meetings, she will pitch your product, mention your thousands of pre-orders, your press coverage, and your four-and-a-half-star rating on Sound daunting to navigate? It is. But to achieve market scale along the lines of GoPro and Fitbit, effectively working with big retailers is a necessary part of the process. Despite the growth of online channels, more than 90 percent of the $200 billion U.S. consumer electronics sales still comes from brick-and-mortar stores. The hardware boom has created a glut of market-ready consumer products. This makes it extra hard to land shelf space. All too often, startups who ran a successful crowdfunding focus solely on execution of the campaign for the next 6-12 months; the campaign-generated buzz is often for naught. Successful startups shift focus from product to sales, marketing and branding as soon as their product goes into production. This doesn’t mean assigning engineers to a sales desk! It’s about founders hiring or transitioning themselves and business-focused staff to brand-building and sales operations, and finding key sales partners. Focus on branding and marketing first. If buyers have heard buzz about your product, they are more likely to say yes. Generate buzz through blog posts, social networks and paid marketing such as Facebook and AdWords. Build relationships with reporters and attend industry events. These efforts are not only rewarding long-term, they’ll pay off in real time through pre-orders. Brick-and-mortar retailers often lack specialists to explain products to customers: the “unassisted sale” is a new part of your reality. You are in charge of creating demand. This is another reason to focus on building a recognizable brand; it will be critical in converting customers in-store. Hire an expert salesperson. Sure, retail buyers love to meet startup founders — but the best person to close the deal is someone who has closed many, many retail deals and knows the ropes. Find a sales rep or sales agency that specializes in the retailers you are targeting. Leverage your network for these leads. Investors often have a network of qualified, tenured salespeople on tap. It often takes 6-12 months for a product to hit retail shelves, so the sooner your new VP of sales can hit the phones, the better. A number of brands have popped up on shelves since the dawn of the IoT revolution. Surprise! The winners are rock-star marketers and have built strong sales teams. is a bluetooth tag to keep track of your belongings. It also built a community to help users find lost items. The market is crowded — , and all compete for shelf space — but Tile managed to snag premium placement and sell millions of units at Apple, Best Buy and Target. What was their secret? They used the momentum of their successful 2013 crowdfunding campaign to engage with the backer community and build awareness, even in the face of shipping . They ran holiday campaigns solely based on gifting pre-orders. After shipping, they told hundreds of happy “found item” customer stories. By early 2015, Tile had hired a team of seasoned sales executives to help execute their retail strategy. Simple, explanatory packaging helped convert sales on the shelves. By the close of 2015, Tile was available at every major retailer. is a connected video doorbell that shows you via smartphone app who’s at your door. Ring hasn’t had an easy road to market; nimble competition ( , ), initial product issues and a in 2015 have all been potential hiccups. Sure, a $28 million investment from Richard Branson doesn’t hurt — but where was the money spent? In part, on a specialized external sales network to address each retail channel, and on advertising. was one of the first brands to use TV to educate the American consumer on a connected product. Investing in sales and marketing has paid off; Ring is available in all major retailers, and the company recently closed a $61.2 million Series C. , a photo-printing smartphone case (and HAX portfolio company) has had the hardware world buzzing since running a $1.5 million campaign in 2015. The product launched this spring on Amazon, and will be on store shelves near you later this year. How could they be so fast? Post-campaign, they quickly built a marketing team and secured an external VP of sales with a track record of selling connected products to retail. This focus on sales and marketing early reduced the time gap between fulfilling pre-order units and landing on retail shelves. Sure, these startups had airtight product/market fit (which contributed to crowdfunding and fundraising success), but reaching product/retail fit requires deliberate attention. Competition is quick to catch up, customers are fickle and there is only so much shelf space. To scale, the focus of founders must shift from product creation to demand creation, and sales. If you get this part right, we’ll see you on the shelves next Christmas! [slideshare id=60197877&doc=product-retailfit-10thingshardwarestartupsshouldknow-160330034619] |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 5 | null |
Review: Curb, energy monitoring for an entire home | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | My kids don’t turn off the damn lights. Ever. And now, with , I have a new way to see when they leave on their lights. All I have to do is look at an app. This is the future of parenting — and, well, energy monitoring.
. The system monitors the entire home by using sensors installed in the circuit breaker. For many consumers this means being able to monitor the energy consumed by a clothes dryer or electric range or all the outlets and lights in a bedroom. It cannot, however, easily monitor and report how much energy is consumed by a computer or espresso machine. system installed in my house over a month ago. It took licensed electrician about three hours. He had to install a sensor on each breaker and configure the system through an iPad app. This is not something an average homeowner can install themselves and that’s kind of the point. Curb aims to serve a homeowner with data not previously available. Other energy monitoring services either monitor the entire home or individual outlets. Curb sits in the middle of the two at the circuit break box. Each breaker gets a sensor and an app can display real-time consumption information as well as a dollar approximation of how much the energy is costing the homeowner. The data can be revealing and now I don’t ever want to use my electric clothes dryer again. In the graphic above, you can see a few things. The yellow line at the bottom a basement circuit which powers a cable modem, file server and networking equipment. It never goes off. That circuit also powers the lights in the basement, where were used for family time just before 7:00PM. The large dark blue spikes are the electric clothes dryer. It’s brand new, too! Just after 7:00PM on the chart, you can see when the stove was used and then again just before 11:00am (that’s when I made some eggs). Other highlights include the light green which is the other basement circuit. This was used just prior to 7:00PM for a movie with the kids and then again at 9:00 AM for a quick workout. In this chart, you can see the circuit that powers my son’s room. He went to bed around 9:45, but apparently had on several lights nonstop starting around 4:00 even though I know he wasn’t in his room during that time. He’s the worst. But what do I do with all this data? That’s where the system stops being useful. Obviously I can stop using my electric dryer and hang the clothes outside. Or teach my kids to turn off their lights. But I need help from there. The system should be able to display more historical data. Right now all it can do is show how much energy a particular circuit consumed — but now a total amount of watts. It can show how much power a home has consumed over a set of dates and also what the average was during that period. But what about the individual circuits? I want the system to let me dial down to a granule level. The web and smartphone app are basic at this point. The founder tells me the company is working towards implementing new features. The team is also playing with weekly emails that gives the consumer a breakdown of their energy usage and if anything abnormal occurred. Apparently, according to him, the system can identify when an appliance is consuming extra electricity, which could be a sign that it is nearing the end of its life. Currently, just after launch, the user experience of Curb leaves me wanting more. It is collecting so much information about my energy usage yet I feel it’s not benefiting me in a major way. Of course I should use appliances less. Yet the system shows a lot of promise in surprising ways. A few weeks family and I were standing in line for the Easter Bunny. This was the day before Easter so we were in line for over an hour. And like any good parent, I spent the time putzing around on my phone. Mindlessly, I opened the Curb app and discovered the stove was drawing power though I thought I had turned if off. I texted my neighbor who went over and discovered the oven was still on. Curb hails from Austin, Texas where a small team built the product. The company acquired $117,000 in preorders and pledges through an Indiegogo campaign and later went on to raise $1.25 million in seed funding from angels, strategic partners and Austin’s Capital Factory. Currently Curb is available through Indiegogo and Amazon. The company has sold just less than a thousand units and are working with electricians to get these systems installed. Alternatively, Curb is talking with solar power providers to use the Curb system to monitor the energy output of panels while also providing the deep energy usage data. Data is power and Curb has the potential to radically change how consumers use their electricity output. At the moment the system is rather basic and only provides a high level overview but hopefully as the company grows and expands, capabilities are added and new insights are gained. |
Shots acquires Mindie to build a teen video app empire | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | Mindie does with soundtracks what Instagram did with filters: It makes boring imagery interesting. And with the insane amount of video that teens are sharing, the music-video-making app seemed too useful to die when its creators shut down Mindie in December. So Mindie’s technology is getting dug out of its grave thanks to an acquisition by , the selfie app turned comedy feed backed by Justin Bieber. For an undisclosed sum, Shots just bought Mindie’s app, code, community and brand, Shots co-founder John Shahidi tells me. However, he says the price “wasn’t a crazy amount.” Though the team has dispersed and one of Mindie’s founders now works at Vine, Shots will soon re-release it on iOS and bring it to Android. “If I put my phone out the window on the Golden Gate Bridge and you have all this noise, it’s not that nice” Shahidi explains. “But if you put ‘On the Road Again’ as the soundtrack, it makes it more interesting.” Similar to how Camcorder also exists as a video filter inside of Shots, Mindie’s soundtracks could come to its parent app, too. The Mindie team originally released a storytelling app called Ever before launching its eponymous app focused on in 2013. It later added , and got for asking users to log in through Mindie and share music videos to their Stories. had raised a $1.2 million seed round from a strong set of investors, including Lowercase, SV Angel, Betaworks, CrunchFund (TechCrunch’s founder’s firm), Slow Ventures and its partners Dave Morin and Kevin Colleran, Troy Carter and Pete Cashmore. But eventually, Mindie got outcompeted by fellow music video maker and pulled out of the iOS App Store. Soon it will get a second chance. Shots has evolved from a selfie app (left) to also embrace comedy (right) What was once the butt of Silicon Valley has blossomed into a bouquet of apps to help kids laugh and express themselves: Beyond these products and their legions of teens users, Shots has also cultivated a roster of social media creators that use its apps and promotes them to their fans. Mostly forged on Vine, these stars, like Lele Pons, King Bach, DeStorm Power, Logan and Jake Paul and Amanda Cerny might now start shooting Mindie videos. Having Bieber as an investor could also help Mindie as it tries to formalize its relationships with the major record labels. Top music content owners have been surprisingly relaxed with regards to blocking apps like Mindie and Musical.ly from using their songs, presumably seeing the videos as free promotion for their artists. That might change if Mindie starts charging somehow, as the labels might want a cut or to block the app from coining off their content. Justin Bieber stars in an Awkward Puppets video Mobile video sharing and viewing is exploding right now, and Mindie could make people’s clips worth watching. Facebook and Instagram lack any native soundtracking features, though my gut says those apps are destined to get much more full-featured video uploaders soon, and about licensing last year. But even if the big social apps get into soundtracks, they might feel too bloated and complex for flighty teen fingers. “We like the standalone products because what people, especially our audiences, don’t want us to do is cram all these ideas into one Shots app” Shahidi says. “It’s better off to keep them all separate, so the different products don’t get too cluttered.” |
Viber defends new end-to-end encryption protocol against criticism | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | Messaging app Viber rolled out its own yesterday, following in the , and allowing users to keep their calls and messages private. But researchers are questioning whether Viber’s messages are really as secure as the company claims. In a announcing the change, Viber COO Michael Shmilov says that the new feature will protect messages sent by Viber’s 700 million users from being accessed by anyone aside from the people in the chat — including the company itself. “We have been working on this for a long time and are proud that our users can confidently use Viber without fear of their messages being intercepted — whether it is in a one-to-one or group message, on a call, on desktop, mobile or tablet,” Shmilov writes. But unlike WhatsApp, Viber has yet to publish details about how its encryption is implemented.(Developers of encryption systems commonly publish documentation so they can be audited for vulnerabilities by other researchers.) WhatsApp worked with the developers of secure messaging app Signal and published a detailing how users’ messages would be encrypted. Viber has so far declined to publish specifics about how it is encrypting users’ messages, which has left technologists to speculate about the methods Viber is using. Frederic Jacobs, a security researcher who previously worked on Signal and is currently a student at the EPFL, that Viber may be using an MD5 algorithm, widely considered to be . However, a Viber spokesperson told TechCrunch, “MD5 is not being used.” “Viber will not grant backdoor access under any circumstance and in any country. We agree with the stance both Apple and WhatsApp have taken. Viber can access records that show only that one phone number has contacted another phone number. However we cannot access the content of messages or phone conversations,” the spokesperson added. Shmilov told TechCrunch that Viber had been working on end-to-end encryption for several years, and that users would be able to authenticate their contacts before exchanging messages. A spokesperson clarified today that Viber has performed several internal audits on the encryption protocol it is using, and said that external audits are coming soon. “Our encryption protocol was based on an open source protocol concept, with an extra level of security developed in-house,” the spokesperson explained. Online messages are only as secure as the encryption used to protect them, and it can be difficult to build trust in a product if its maker isn’t transparent about security. Without proper security documentation, users are left in the dark when it comes to choosing which apps to trust. Joe Hall, the chief technologist of the , expressed concern that companies are so eager to join the rush to encrypting users’ messages that they aren’t taking the steps necessary to set up proper security. “In the rush to encrypt everything, I’m hoping encryption doesn’t become just a fad, resulting in poor security engineering. It’s not clear if that’s what’s happening here, but I suspect we’ll see that at some point,” Hall told TechCrunch. So far, Viber has made end-to-end encryption available in Brazil, Belarus, Israel and Thailand, but users will be able to access the feature worldwide within the next two weeks. |
The Shade Room is back on Facebook, other media startups still “in jail” | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | The celebrity gossip and news startup The Shade Room is back on , the startup today, albeit under a new moniker. Its previous page, which had racked up more than 4 million followers, was “facebook.com/theshaderoom;” the new profile is “facebook.com/shaderoominc.” The startup said its page had been removed from the Facebook ecosystem without any notice, highlighting a challenge for new media publishers that take a multi-platform approach or a Facebook-centric one. Companies that publish content to Facebook to grow their audience or connect with customers are subject to the social network’s policies — and policy changes. If they don’t play by Facebook’s rules, they can find their profiles suspended or removed. Jamie Bolding is the CEO of a London startup called that experienced a similar fate. He told us that Viral Thread had grown its follower-count on its main Facebook page into the millions before it was removed. The company is now running several Facebook pages, full of curated videos it hopes will be meme-worthy. Its main page there, “ ,” has a humble 132,416 followers today. Bolding said he has seen a rash of take-downs of startup brands’ Facebook pages over the past month, especially for those that have cultivated a large audience but never attained the coveted blue check indicating their accounts are verified, he said. The Viral Thread CEO said, “Facebook never informed us of [certain] policy changes. When you have a copyright takedown you get automatic emails, but never an actual serious warning of ‘your page is going to get deleted.’ I think their communication here was pretty appalling considering many businesses live off their Facebook page. We spent 2 years building ours up, helping Facebook grow, then they just cut us off with a flick of a switch, leaving me to deal with 15 employees.” We have reached out to The Shade Room and Facebook for more information. Earlier today, reported that Facebook representatives said they took down The Shade Room’s page for multiple copyright violations. But, The Shade Room founder Angie Nwandu told Re/Code that Facebook sent her a notification that only cited violations of their terms of use, and not specifically copyright issues. |
Rolltape adds Radio feature so you can share voice messages with the world | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | is a voice messaging app that’s supposed to . Now, with the launch of Rolltape Radio, it can help you share those stories on a broader scale. The change is pretty straightforward. Previously, Rolltape messages (which are recommended to be five minutes or less, but have no hard limit) could only be shared with friends, either individually or several at once. Now, those messages can be shared publicly — within the Rolltape iOS app, on and anywhere else on the web via links. Co-founder and CEO Jessica Taylor told me that adding public broadcasts was always part of the plan, something she hinted at when . “What we recognized was that we have a lot of creative users on the platform,” she said. “We’ve positioned Rolltape first and foremost as a messaging app — this is just going to allow them to scale their communications.” Anyone who’s used social media before shouldn’t have too much trouble wrapping their head around the distinction between public and private messages. For example, if a user wants to talk about some personal problems, or problems that their spouse is having, that’s probably something for a private message. But if they want to share some good news, like if they’ve given birth, then they can post a public message about it. To illustrate the need for a platform like Rolltape, Taylor pointed to recent news that because of “context collapse.” In other words, as you have more and more Facebook friends (or “friends”), you’re less comfortable being really candid and emotional. So Taylor sees Rolltape as a place where people can still share those kinds of personal stories. And on the other side of the spectrum, she also said that Rolltape Radio could become a “do-it-yourself podcasting platform.” “You don’t need to buy a microphone, you don’t need to buy any audio editing software,” she said. “Just do a five-minute podcast and experiment.” Taylor suggested that bloggers and comedians could also use Rolltape Radio to promote their work. You can . |
Mike Arrington takes on reduced role at CrunchFund | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | Michael Arrington — who famously co-founded TechCrunch in 2005 and just as famously with the outlet in 2011, one year after it to AOL — is now taking on a reduced role at the venture fund that he co-founded when he left TC. After an surfaced earlier today showing that is targeting $40 million for its third fund and even more notably not listing Arrington as a “related person,” he that he’s stepping back to focus on his health. “I don’t have cancer or anything, please don’t make it sound so serious,” he said, adding that he’ll continue to lead some deals for CrunchFund, as well as advise some of its portfolio companies. Arrington had founded CrunchFund with his college friend (and longtime VC) Pat Gallagher, along with M.G. Siegler, a star writer at TechCrunch who Arrington recruited. In 2013, Siegler to join Google Ventures, now called GV. CrunchFund has invested in hundreds of companies, including Yammer ( to Microsoft for $1.2 billion) and still privately held , and . Whether Gallagher, the sole person listed on CrunchFund’s newest filing, will be filling out the team with another hire remains to be seen. Gallagher did not respond to an email sent earlier this afternoon; a call to Arrington this afternoon hasn’t been returned. |
AI is not a threat to humanity, but an Internet of ‘Smart’ Things may be! | Abdalla Kablan | 2,016 | 4 | 20 |
After more than 60 years since its conceptual inception — and after too many hype-generating moments — AI is yet again making its presence felt in mainstream media. Following a recent , many perceive AI as a threat to our jobs, while others even go so far to assert that it poses a real threat to humanity itself. What is clear for the time being is that there are many questions that still remain unanswered: Can we actually create conscious machines that have the ability to think and feel? What we do we mean by the word in the first place? What is the accurate definition of And what are the implications of combining the Internet of Things (IoT) with intelligence? In the early 20th century, Jean Piaget remarked, “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do, when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.” In simpler terms, intelligence can be defined as doing the right thing at the right time in a flexible manner that helps you survive proactively and improve productivity in various facets of life. There are various forms of intelligence: There is the more rational variety that is necessitated for intellectually demanding tasks like playing chess, solving complex problems and making discerning choices about the future. There is also the concept of social intelligence, characterized by courteous social behavior. Then there is emotional intelligence, which is about being empathetic toward the emotions and thoughts of the people with whom you engage. We generally experience each of these contours of intelligence in some combination, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be comprehended independently, perhaps even creatively within the context of AI. Most human behaviors are essentially instincts or reactions to outward stimuli; we generally don’t think we need to be intelligent to execute them. In reality though, our brains are wired smartly to perform these tasks. Most of what we do is reflexive and automatic, in that we sometimes don’t even need to be conscious of these processes, but our brain is always in the process of assimilating, analyzing and implementing instructions. It is very difficult to program robots to do things we typically find very easy to do. The key predicament with AI is that since its nascent stages of development, scholars have attempted to begin with problems that are difficult for us (humans) to solve and that require a lot of logical thinking (for example, playing chess). This assumption was premised on the fact that the problems we don’t need to think hard about are easier to solve. However, we are now starting to realize that a chess-playing computer is intelligent, but it’s a form of intelligence. Actually, it is everyday intelligence that is difficult for AI, replicating actions that we are good at without knowing about it (for instance, making a cup of tea in someone else’s kitchen). Hence, after 60 years of hype surrounding AI, the things that we originally thought were easy are actually difficult in the realm of AI, and vice versa. In retrospect, it was not a good idea to set such high levels of expectation for AI. Using different AI and machine learning models, we are trying to perform the task of synthesizing, modelling and mimicking natural intelligence. Understanding natural intelligence is the most systematic way of developing AI. Many novel models are trying to simulate biologically inspired systems by attempting to mimic very elementary behavior of animals or insects. The rationale is that doing some of the most natural things is something that is even accomplished by most animals, because if they are unable to do so, they would starve, fall prey to other animals or miss out on mating opportunities. Even single-celled organisms have the penchant to “do the right thing at the right time” in order to survive, and it is apparent that they are equipped with the cognitive machinery to exercise value judgements, which is the key to understanding such behavioral processes. This becomes more evident when we consider that even the simplest of creatures that may otherwise be bereft of a conscious or explicit value judgement system have been imparted (through evolution) the discerning ability to know that doing a certain “A” set of things will make it more probable for them to survive, as opposed to doing a certain “B” set of things. This highlights the undeniable fact that such models are too generic. They may apply to a worm or bacteria, but we would do well to define intelligent behaviors in a manner that underpins the essence of intelligence as something that empowers organisms to go beyond their immediate environmental constraints and opportunities. The extent to which human intelligence gets manifested is predicated on the symphony between our bodies and brains. Human history is replete with instances where this progressive form of intelligence has led to great accomplishments triggered by collective goals for harmony and development. At the same time, it is this very intelligence that has been misguided and subverted to cause a number of catastrophic events, like wars and other atrocities. It has been proven time and again that intelligence, when polluted with negative traits like greed, avarice and vindictiveness, can become a curse to mankind. The recently deceased , the Godfather of AI, talked about , where our cognitive processes and cognitive architecture is not confined to one particular place and is not an isolated process; it is the collective behaviors of many subtly ingrained concepts that our minds are capable of. While this is not a new concept in the domain of AI, it assumes great significance, given that our brains are massively complex networks of 190 billion neurons that are in constant communication with each other. It is incredible that we continuously seem to understand “what is going on.” Neurons start triggering and responding to a multitude of fast-paced reactions, setting up patterns within the brain that subsequently decide the course of actions to be performed by our mind and body in perfect unison. From an AI standpoint, this links well with problem-solving models like The Searle’s Chinese room argument, which stipulates that if you have a room full of people enacting an algorithm, all you need to do is insert some question and without realizing what’s happening, they would follow the algorithm, and that will produce an answer. The inference was that this is essentially what our brain continuously does — something that we can simulate in a computer as a universal Turing machine. This links surprisingly well with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), which has accompanied promising new opportunities — but it has also paved the way for a number of additional threats. We are creating new complex networks or interconnected devices that can share infinite amounts of information. In conjunction with appropriate AI architectures and optimized machine “learning” models, this situation may eventually lead to an accurate imitation of the human brain on a much bigger scale. I am not just speaking about traditional artificial neural networks. I am proposing that under the garb of IoT, we may start creating intricate networks of machinery that are intelligent enough to start understanding things as inexplicable as human irrationality and humans’ dependence on machines. The fear does not arise from building humanoid robots (androids), because 99.99 percent of the real-world problems (the so-called useful problems that we hope to solve by leveraging robots) do not require an android body. For example, an intelligent driverless car does not require a humanoid robot that gets in the car to drive it. However, that intelligent connected car can certainly collect a lot of useful information about those using it, whether it’s their patterns, behaviors, preferences or coordination with other intelligent devices (seat belts and automobile gadgets, etc.). Once these traits get imbibed in a pattern that renders them smart, there is no reason why humans would not be enamored and eventually enslaved by such machines. A case in point is the ubiquitous obsessive behavioral patterns when it comes to smartphone usage, a phenomenon that has assumed alarming proportions. IoT is likely to exacerbate this problem, and incorporating AI into IoT to create an Internet of “Smart” Things may lead to some seriously unpleasant outcomes. Incorporating creativity was always one of the biggest challenges in the advancement of AI, and it has almost become the antecedent of a chess-playing situation, because chess is transformed into a sublimely creative game when played by humans. However, the way a computer plays the game cannot be deemed creative because it calculates a vast number of possibilities and runs through them in a programmed, calibrated manner using machine learning heuristics. When the first computer beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, it did not imply much in terms of AI consuming the world in its grip. It merely highlighted the real problems that were surfacing in the human cognitive process, the intrinsic unpredictability of the human mind and the plethora of intrusive yet persisting thoughts that sometimes make us behave irrationally. Despite being fully cognizant about our unpredictability, we are adept at taking strategic shortcuts at appropriate times, which makes it abundantly clear that it is our ecological smartness and creativity that has got us to where we are now. The problem is not so much with the machine that plays chess as it is with the human on the other side, and also the oddly-positioned pieces that propel us to unfathomable limits in our overzealous ambition to win at any cost. AI, like other forms of modern technology, can go on to become incredibly beneficial for us. Whether or not that happens is in the realm of conjectures, given the inevitable human tendency to misuse just about anything that makes our lives easier. As responsible developers of technology, we may want to ensure that our comfort-driven instincts do not take precedence over our larger commitment to inclusive economic growth, more compassionate societies and a better world at large. |
Influencer marketing startup Captiv8 raises $2M | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | today that it has raised $2 million in seed funding. Created by the founders of , Captiv8 is one of a number of companies connecting marketers with influencers on social platforms like Instagram and Twitter. However, the startup says it uses a technology- and data-driven approach, examining things like geography and demographics to predict which influencers could make a big impact for a given brand. In the funding release, Captiv8 co-founder Brands using Captiv8 include Johnson&Johnson, Microsoft and Amazon. And Captiv8 says it’s working with more than 125,000 influencers, such as , iJustine. Investors in the seed round include , , , , , and Fund. |
Zeitgeist wants to be the Warby Parker of electric bikes | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | The was designed to solve one problem: getting uphill on a bike. That led to other goals, like creating a battery that only had to be charged every two weeks and was hidden within the structure of the bike. This, then, led to favoring design and performance over the cost of the bike. “We want to be the of bikes,” said Zeitgeist CEO Kartik Ram. The carbon-fiber electric bike was designed for the Seattle-based company by Brian Hoehl of Denmark and has already won several awards. The battery, which slides seamlessly into the bottom tube, was designed in-house and patented. The entire bike, including the 500-watt battery, weighs only 44 pounds — still light enough to work with a bike rack. “You can carry it up three flights of stairs,” Ram promised. The battery only assists the rider as he pedals; there’s no throttle. But that assist gets you up to 28 mph, the legal limit for electric-powered bicycles in the United States. Company co-founder Gregg Stewart noted that you can ride up a steeper hill on an electric bike than you might be able to using only your own leg power. “Brakes become crucial on the downhill,” he said with a laugh, which is why the Zeitgeist has ventilated disc brakes. Zeitgeist’s research showed that there are cyclists, and then there’s everyone else. The people who love riding bikes are always going to love it, hills and sweat and showers at work included. But the Zeitgeist is aimed at casual riders, people who don’t want to take the car to run errands. They’ll use this bike a couple of times a week, not as a daily commuting vehicle. The company has already established a relationship with Thule to create a basket and panniers that fit the bike for these point-to-point riders. Stewart pointed out that at $3,999 for the first batch of bikes, the Zeitgeist is going to be treated differently than a commuter bike, which is often a $200 beater. Ram added that the bike’s buyers are “round trippers,” people who take it to get coffee then ride back home. The Zeitgeist can be locked up at the coffee shop like any other bike, but the battery can also be unlocked and popped out, removing one possible reason to steal the bike in the first place. Because the Zeitgeist was designed from the ground up — not by modding an existing bike model — it’s going to be sold differently, too. Ram and Stewart found that neither traditional bike shops nor big-box stores were a good fit. “We’re going to showcase the bike in pop-up shops and online to sell it through direct channels,” Stewart said. To get the company off the ground, the founders approached Tesla for a partnership, but that was a nonstarter. They also decided not to get “stuck in a Kickstarter hell,” according to Ram. They ended up working with , a funding platform based in Portland, Oregon, which found the project unique. “We were able to test it,” said Crowd Supply’s Josh Lifton in an interview, “so we were able to back Zeitgeist up with confidence.” At Crowd Supply, delivery rate matters most. When you order your bike, the ship date depends on how many people ordered before you. Ram said the company is going to sell the bike in small lots. “That’s key,” he said, adding that Zeitgeist is approaching the market more like than like . “We don’t like to tease. We want to give people the future now.” The first few backers on Crowd Supply will get their bikes shipped within about a month. The company wants to work closely with those early adopters to get feedback on how to improve the design for future iterations. Ram and Stewart hope that people realize how easy it is to explore their surroundings with an electric-assisted bike. And, as Ram said, “People want to buy cool stuff.” |
Facebook Messenger launches Group Calling to become your phone | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | Jump on the party line or hear the voices of your whole family with Facebook Messenger’s latest feature. on Android and iOS for free, users can start a group VoIP audio call from any group chat. Just tap the Phone icon, select which of the group chat members you want included and they’ll all receive a Messenger call simultaneously. If you miss the initial call but it’s still in progress, you can tap the Phone icon in the group chat to join the call. At any time you can see who’s on the call and send another ping to anyone who hasn’t joined. Facebook tells me there’s , so if you think you’re popular, you can try maxing it out. You’ve got more than users to hit up. [Update: Now Facebook says it was wrong and that there’s actually a maximum number of 12 participants on a call. Update 2: Facebook seems to be in utter disarray after F8, as now it’s apologizing and saying the participant limit is 50.] After being late on several launches like QR codes and an internal camera, Messenger managed to release a core communication feature before Snapchat. One cool feature I hope Messenger launches is dynamic muting or quieting of background noise of people who aren’t talking. Facebook began offering VoIP in 2013, fully rolled out one-on-one audio calls in April 2014 and, a year later, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Messenger already made up . A Messenger spokesperson tells me, “There are situations where typing isn’t enough and when people prefer talking to one another.” While there’s no group video calling yet, you can expect that to come eventually. When I asked Messenger’s head of product Stan Chudnovsky last year about group video when , he told me, “Group video calling is definitely a use case that a lot of our people might be interested in at some point…[and] it would be a big deal if the whole [shakes hand to simulate lack of video stabilization] thing goes away.” Messenger’s goal as of late has been to replace your phone number. Last year it started allowing all Facebook users to chat with each other even if they aren’t friends, though strangers’ pings can sometimes be hidden in the Filtered Message Requests section under Settings -> People -> Message Requests -> See Filtered Requests. (If you don’t know about Filtered Requests, it’s worth checking out — I’ve found Facebook filtering to be too aggressive and hid some messages I wanted to see.) Unlike phone numbers where you have little control once someone knows your digits, Messenger lets you easily block people, the ability to message you can’t be sold and, thanks to Facebook’s spam detection systems, it’s tough for someone to create a new Facebook account to harass you. Now, Messenger could serve as a better replacement for Skype, and even let you set up easy conference calls with people whose numbers you don’t have. The more use cases Messenger can encompass, the less likely you are to stray to one of its competitors or its age-old foe: SMS. |
BMW and Daimler abandon Apple Car talks | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 20 | If Apple really is working on a car, it won’t be the Ultimate Driving Machine™. BMW and Daimler have discontinued talks with Apple over a potential automotive collaboration, . Things fell apart (last year for BMW, more recently with Daimler) over questions of leadership and ownership, the German newspaper’s source said — and given what we know about Apple, that seems like a perfectly likely sticking point. The idea of integrating the car closely with Apple services rather than their own may have rattled the car makers; of course, automotive brands are among the most powerfully guarded and promoted in the world. Rumors swirled about a year ago around the idea of an Apple Car, and have been more than suggestive. But no one seems to agree on whether it’s an actual car, a collaboration with auto makers or something more subtle, like a carOS to be integrated with existing systems. One thing everyone is sure of, though: with working on the project, whatever it is, it isn’t just a hobby. So who’s left for Apple to work with? The latest rumors point to Magna, a Canadian-Austrian specialty electric vehicle maker that works with multiple badges to produce limited editions and one-offs. With top-shelf cred, less brand jealousy and probably less-demanding terms, Magna sounds like a good match for a well-heeled dilettante like Apple. |
Theranos under criminal investigation | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Piling on to Theranos woes, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California have started probing into the blood analysis startup for possible criminal activity. The microscope under which Theranos found itself for over the last year prompted both agencies to question operations. Theranos sent a letter to outside partners earlier alerting them to the SEC’s investigation and that the Justice Department had also requested documents. Theranos spokesperson Brooke Buchanan shared that letter with TechCrunch, adding, “The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations.” Investigations also don’t mean Theranos did something unlawful and these types of inquiries often go nowhere. But where there’s smoke there’s often fire and the investigation is part of a growing list of concerns over the way founder Elizabeth Holmes is running her company. The startup promising to detect hundreds of diseases using a device requiring only one drop of blood has fallen hard and far in a short time. The FDA has accepted only one test for herpes using Theranos proprietary ‘nanotainer’ technology so far, but the startup stopped using to get results at Wellness Centers covering Arizona. Then there’s the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which began a federal investigation last fall for quality control issues at Theranos’ main facility in Newark, California involving erratic test results and unqualified personnel. A redacted CMS report said Theranos’ labs put patients in “ .” Safeway grocery stores also pulled out of a potential partnership and Walgreens halted testing at Theranos’ Palo Alto, California location for further examination. Theranos started farming tests out to other facilities, including ARUP and Intermountain Healthcare in Utah to get patients’ accurate results. Holmes spoke to before the news broke of the criminal investigation this afternoon, saying she was ‘devastated’ about the blood test issues. The company says it is working on the compliance issues with CMS, and in an effort to turn things around recently brought on medical professionals to the board and hired a new director for the Newark facility. Will that be enough? Theranos has become a cautionary tale for med tech startups. You can’t hype the product on unsubstantiated claims when it comes to our health. |
Apple Pay is now available in Singapore | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Apple has launched Apple Pay in Singapore today, making it to get the digital payment service. Apple Pay lets customers pay for physical and digital goods using their iPhone, iPad or Apple watch, but it is initially somewhat limited in Singapore. That’s because it is only open to American Express credit card holders first. Apple said in a statement that “credit and debit cards from Singapore’s most popular banks, including DBS, UOB and Standard Chartered will work with Apple Pay in the coming months” — that’ll be thanks to support for Visa which is listed as “coming soon” on . Singapore is one of the world’s most advanced payment nations, with among the mainstream thanks to government initiatives and programs from banks. But some analysts believe that, even here, there will be a learning curve before wide adoption occurs. “I think that consumer adoption of Apple Pay will be slower than expected in Singapore. The use of contactless card payments is increasing in Singapore, and consumers are comfortable with using it. While there are still significant barriers to consumer adoption of digital wallets today, it will take time before these wallets become more convenient for customers and as customers realize the benefits and additional value that digital wallets bring,” Forrester researcher Zhi Ying Ng said in a statement. Apple Pay is also supported in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and China. Beyond becoming Apple Pay’s second market in Asia, Singapore will become the first country in Southeast Asia to get an official Apple Store. it has plans to add the store, while adding that its operations in the country will be powered entirely by renewable energy. |
Don’t want your startup to fail? Arianna Huffington tells founders to go to bed | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Sleep deprivation is the undoing of startup founders, according to Arianna Huffington. “There is this kind of founder myth that if you are a founder you can’t afford to get enough sleep,” she told me over the phone while catching a plane back to New York. “The truth is three-quarters of startups fail and if founders got more sleep they’d have a better chance of succeeding.” Wanting to get more sleep isn’t the problem for most of us. It’s fitting in the recommended seven to 9 hours of sleep with work, eating, exercise, relationships and a social life – and on top of that founders need to spend a lot of time growing their fledgling company. But sleep is “non-negotiable” in Arianna’s world – and to prove it she invited me to sleep in her $8 million Manhattan sleep paradise (complete with a hot bath, candles, and “luscious pillows”) to get some much-needed shut-eye. Ok, not me exactly, but whoever the lucky winner is on her (now closed) . I applied right under the wire and will let you know if I win (I’m told I’m up against Kara Swisher), but clearly Arianna is serious enough about our lack of sleep, she’s willing to let strangers (and stray reporters) into her bedroom to get some zzzzz. But she’s been on the sleep train for a while. Arianna several years ago. The Huffington Post and AOL (parent company to TC and HP) both have nap rooms. Sounds dreamy but never happened here. I But we’re working too many hours and giving up on sleep and it could be affecting America’s bottom line, says the Huffington Post founder. She rattled off half a dozen executives who’d collapsed or traumatically suffered from a lack of sleep last year – including United Airlines CEO and JP Morgan’s head of M&A (who died unexpectedly). The Huffington Post founder herself a few years back, leading to her sleep obsession. “We now have the most amazing science that proves without doubt sleep deprivation affects every aspect of our health and our productivity,” she told me. Easy for a famous, jet-setting CEO to say but proper sleep is treated as more of a luxury for many workers of the world. And there are plenty of examples of successful executives who – Jack Dorsey, Donald Trump and Martha Stewart among them. These people are the genetically exceptional “ ” probably designed in a secret Russian space lab. But, according to , most of us do need to spend a third of our lives uninterrupted under the covers to function. Arianna seems to be making headway among Silicon Valley’s elite – She Uber’s Travis Kalanick recently. But you don’t need to win a contest or be a successful founder for some help. Arianna’s new book “The Sleep Revolution” outlines how we can sleep better, too. The advice is obvious – no caffeine after 2 pm and keep your bedroom dark and quiet – but like exercise and eating right, a lot of us probably don’t do it anyway. And sacrifices will be made – no tech in the bedroom and you might not get through all of those critically acclaimed Netflix dramas – Arianna tells me she’s only seen one episode of House of Cards because sleep is the priority. But then, maybe you’ll think clearly and your startup won’t fail. |
Apple rolls out a new App Store developer site with guides and videos for growing app businesses | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Apple today is unveiling an overhaul to its developer website, a resource available to the 11 million registered developers worldwide who have helped grow the App Store to now more than 1.5 million applications. The updated site will include new articles and videos aimed at helping developers better understand how to grow their businesses and engage users. For example, some of the topics will include things like getting an app discovered on the App Store, using freemium business models (meaning, free with optional upgrades to a paid tier) and how to engage users via app updates. These articles and guides are arriving at a time when it’s become increasingly more difficult for App Store developers to get their new applications noticed amid a sea of competitors, and when industry insiders suspect we may have reached a point of “ .” Apple is clearly aware of the problem, as Bloomberg last week the company has been quietly exploring ways to revamp the App Store, and was even considering features that would allow developers to pay to have their app promoted in search — a model similar to Google’s. Of course, there’s no doubt the App Store economy has had an impact over the years — Apple says it has paid $40 billion to developers since the store opened, and the . But , some say. That’s why it makes sense that Apple is now rolling out more educational resources to its developer site to help address these concerns. The content on the new site will include a mix of more straightforward how-to’s and explanations — like the “Discovery on the App Store” article which details how editorial collections work and how Apple selects apps to feature — while others will be more of an article-format case study. For example, in the “Releasing App Updates” article, Slack, Smule and BuzzFeed share how they plan their roadmaps and release their updates to re-engage existing users and attract new ones. Other topics will include “Choosing a Business Model,” “User Acquisition Marketing with App Analytics” and “Choosing a Category.” Combined, they offer guides to running a real app business aimed at generating revenue. Developers will also be able to submit apps for feature consideration through the new site. In addition to the articles, the App Store site will now include a case study video series called “Developer Insights,” which will involve having some of the more successful developers sharing their knowledge on various topics. For example, one video from a company called Seriously, whose first game “Best Fiends” surpassed 1.5 million daily users and gained a million social media followers in its first year, will focus on using social media to build a brand and community. Another video from Evernote will highlight the approach the productivity software maker took to localize its app for Japan. Localization, obviously, is a key topic today’s App Store developers should understand, especially given the opportunity to reach non-U.S. users in . The new developer resources are being rolled out now, but the collection will be expanded in the future. |
Please welcome Brian Heater, Kate Conger and more to TechCrunch | Matthew Panzarino | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | We . We’ve got some more new faces for you here at TechCrunch, and they’re good ones. First up, has worked at a number of tech pubs, including PCMag, Laptop and Engadget, where he served as the Director of Media. Most recently, he was the Managing Editor of TechTimes.com. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor, won a pair of Webbys, and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Lucy. Brian is joining TechCrunch as our Hardware Editor, guiding our overall hardware coverage that includes consumer electronics and gadgets. But most importantly for us, he’ll be on the lookout for emerging hardware technologies that will resolve themselves into household names and cultural touchstones as they are developed by young companies and adopted by the masses. Next up, is sharp writer who has covered a variety of topics like , and . She’s joining TC as our full-time security, privacy and policy writer — and indeed is . Everything from cyber security to encryption to the way that the cogs of political machinery link up to those of tech. “I started out writing for the SF Weekly and still have a bit of a soft spot for alt-weeklies — there aren’t many other outlets that will let you write back-to-back features about nail polish and police misconduct,” says Kate. “Since then, I’ve been the online editor at the SF Examiner and the managing editor of Ratter. I’ve also written about politics and security for Daily Dot and Motherboard, and contributed to San Francisco Magazine and PAPER.” She’s coming to us after a stint doing some copywriting for Google and freelancing for a variety of publications. Kate will be writing about a variety of things including ‘weird internet,” but with a focus on security and privacy with a mix of policy thrown in for good measure. Next, a returning face. is a writer and photographer based in Seattle. He joined TechCrunch’s dearly departed gadget site CrunchGear in 2007. Five years , he left to join MSNBC.com’s tech and science section – shortly before the site was resorbed and repurposed by NBC. Now he’s back, covering emerging tech and research – think robots, lasers, AI, and self-aware laserbots – while reviewing the latest gadgets. is writing freelance for us in a return to journalism of sorts. He’s recently been off in startup land and has many experiences from his battles on the bloody fields of crowdfunding and hardware manufacturing. Haje started his career by getting a journalism degree, taking an oath never to work as a journalist, and then promptly breaking that oath by spending the next decade launching websites, writing a stack of books about photography, and founding a couple of companies related to photography and content creation. is joining our audience development team under Travis Bernard as a social media analyst to help us craft content for social sites and to make sure we’re staying in touch with the incredible stories that our audience themselves has to share. In addition to new editorial voices, we’re building out our product team. has brought on some great additions recently and you will see their efforts bear fruit in new functionality on the site, new looks and a more modern TC overall. Since joining the team last summer, – our mobile product manager – has been steering the development of our upcoming iOS and Android apps. is our new iOS developer, joining Mischa and the mobile team to create our new mobile apps. She hails from Canada and has been with us for two months. loves developing mobile apps, and that’s a good thing, because he joined our team this month as our Android developer. Originally from Haiti, Dwight moved with his brothers to Florida after the earthquake in 2010. And he’s been reading TechCrunch for five years. joined TechCrunch last fall as our first UX/UI designer. She brings with her seven years of experience creating digital experiences for advertising firms and technology startups initially in Miami now in San Francisco. joined TechCrunch last month as a software engineer. He’s passionate about creating engaging user experiences. |
Rebuilding retail brick by brick | Mike Hsieh | 2,016 | 4 | 18 |
In 2016, Walmart plans to close 269 stores. Macy’s plans 36 closures, and Kohl’s 18. Is this the beginning of the end for brick-and-mortar retailers? There has been much speculation about what retailers should do in an omni-channel world. How do they compete in a world where Amazon is undercutting them in prices and offering free delivery? How should they respond when brands are increasingly ignoring channel conflict and launching their own e-commerce stores? Rather than trying to predict the future with a crystal ball, retailers can learn from other industries that preceded them with disruptive technology and innovators. What steps did the incumbents take to fight off the digital onslaught, and what worked to keep them not only competitive but gave them an advantage? There are numerous lessons that can help formulate a long-term growth strategy for retail stores. After the demise of music retailers and bookstores, movie theaters were in the crosshairs of the digital revolution. Netflix, Red Box and Video on Demand had already put most video rental stores out of business. With home entertainment systems becoming more and more sophisticated, why should consumers drive to theaters and pay $12 to watch a movie when they can enjoy the same fare in the comforts of their own homes for $4? It looked like movie theaters would follow the same path of self-destruction. Yet in 2015, movie box office sales increased 7.4 percent — and show no signs of slowing down. Why did technology not put movie theaters six feet under? The answer lies in understanding what benefits a theater provides that a DVD, Blu-ray, Roku or Hulu cannot. At its core, a 90-minute movie is a fantasy experience, best enjoyed in an immersive environment. The big screen and surround-sound system with state-of-the-art speakers delivers a far more powerful entertainment experience than any home system — where there may also be numerous interruptions by family members or pets. This realization led theater owners to invest even more to differentiate themselves from home entertainment systems, i.e. IMAX screens, 3D technology and Dolby sound systems. They also have reduced the pain points by installing bigger and more comfortable seats, serving healthy and more delicious food and providing advanced ticket purchase with pre-selected seating. As a result, movie theaters have stemmed the tide of entertainment streaming directly into the home and regained the upper hand in convincing Hollywood studios to extend the exclusivity periods for their products to be in theaters. Another prime example is in sports. Improvements in LCD technology with bigger flat-screen TVs offering high-definition pictures should have induced fans to watch more games at home instead of going to the stadium. Yet ticket prices have continued to climb, with no shortage of demand for season tickets and corporate boxes. Once again, the key is to understand that the core of sports entertainment is fanaticism. People love their teams and want to be immersed in environs where they can celebrate with other fans in a mob environment. This cannot be replicated at home, even while watching with a group of friends. As a result, team owners are upgrading their stadiums to offer better seating, food and alcohol. They also are removing pain points by adding more parking spaces and access to public transportation. Brick-and-mortar retail stores are facing the same challenges from the digital revolution. There is little technology or innovation in-store to make it a more compelling experience over purchasing something online. It is equivalent to an old-style movie theater on Main Street: The screen is small, the sound system is old, the seats are hard and only popcorn is available at the concession stand. On top of that, there is no parking lot. Why would anyone go to that theater if it doesn’t provide an immersive experience that a home system cannot? Retailers need to understand the benefits of the in-store experience to a consumer. At its core are discovery, trial and instant gratification. Retail stores need to delight the customer by suggesting merchandise options that are unexpected yet appropriate once the consumer enters the store. This means utilizing data collected about the customer online, offline and mobile, including past searches, purchases and abandoned carts. Sales associates must be more knowledgeable about products and their benefits and understand customers’ needs and preferences. One of the tools to empower sales associates is , which integrates product, inventory, e-commerce and purchase data to give sales associates the best information to deliver the most seamless experience to the customers. With more data, sales associates can answer customer questions, upsell and cross-sell more effectively, and truly delight customers. If the products are not in stock in one particular store, sales associates can look up inventory on their e-commerce site or other store locations so that customers can still complete the transaction in-store and have the products delivered to them. No more lost sales. If the customer opts in, sales associates also can communicate with them after the store visit. Retailers such as Toys R Us, Coach and Bonobos are leveraging Tulip to improve the in-store shopping experience and increase sales. Additionally, pain points such as long lines must be reduced by adding comfortable fitting rooms and mobile checkouts. Seattle-based startup solves these problems by equipping the fitting rooms with tablets where the customer can pick different sizes and other products, which are then delivered into the fitting room through a chute. This solution eliminates the pain point of having to leave and come back to the fitting room. Hointer also provides mobile check-outs to complete a seamless shopping experience in-store. A seamless and magical in-store shopping experience can only be accomplished with greater investments in technology and data. Retailers are already investing in in-store data analytics solutions such as , but they need to go beyond traffic counting to truly transform the in-store shopping experience. Similar to theaters and stadiums, these investments will turn the tide against the digital onslaught and help differentiate brick-and-mortar retailers from e-commerce and mobile commerce competitors. Close to 90 percent of purchases still occur in-store, although e-commerce and mobile commerce are growing at an accelerated rate. Rather than retreating, retailers should learn from the entertainment and sports industries to push technology and data analytics into the stores to enhance the benefits of shopping in a physical environment. Consumers should be delighted by new discoveries of products, instant trial and immediate gratification of bringing it home. These are key benefits that Amazon cannot replicate. |
The Shade Room is in Facebook jail, missing its 4 million followers there | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Facebook 86’ed from its platform today for unknown reasons. The celebrity gossip and news publisher attracted about 4.2 million followers on Facebook. We reached out to The Shade Room and to Facebook to learn why its page disappeared. Facebook did not yet reply to our inquiry, but we’ll update this story as it develops. Angie Nwandu, The Shade Room founder, and other employees declined to comment, as well. However, earlier in the day, the startup responded to the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, confirming that the take-down was Facebook’s responsibility, versus say hackers, but “ ” by Facebook for the account’s suspension. From upstarts to traditional newspapers, publishers today rely on a blend of their own branded sites and mobile apps, along with platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and others, to generate brand awareness, audience and ad revenue. This year, Facebook has been courting publishers to increasingly use its format to reach readers and generate shared ad revenue. Companies that publish through social platforms may be able to build huge communities there and reach new readers. But posting their materials there “natively,” or otherwise, they are also subject to the various terms and conditions of the platform providers, not to mention search algorithm adjustments, data collection and design changes over time. Today, The Shade Room also temporarily set its Instagram account to private, requiring requests from new followers to be allowed in to the community. On Twitter, an investor in The Shade Room, cautioned, “All the publishers who say they’d start their next media company as a Facebook page take note…” Among others, new stories posted to The Shade Room site today included one lamenting the torrential downpours and flooding in Houston, Texas; and a story about a forthcoming documentary on R&B singer Chris Brown, which attempts to paint him in a sympathetic light after he was convicted of a domestic violence felony. Sites, including Buzzfeed and Jezebel, have speculated that The Shade Room could face various problems thanks to its alleged use of photos without attribution or proper licenses. Pages for The Shade Room competitors, like World Star Hip Hop and PerezHilton.com, were still accessible to users on Monday. |
As VCs enroll the startup class of 2016, it’s RIP for ‘me too’ companies | Niko Bonatsos | 2,016 | 4 | 18 |
Many of the world’s legendary tech companies got started just as the public markets were cooling off; Microsoft, Apple, HP, IBM, Oracle, FedEx, etc. The most recent case in point is the startup class of 2008-2009: Dropbox, Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber and Tiny Speck (Slack) all in those dismal years. And, while not everyone agrees that there is a massive downturn in the startup world right now, many are acting as if there is. This herd mentality is both a crisis and an opportunity (or a “crisi-tunity”) — just as in the last cycle, I believe the category-defining companies of the next decade will be launched and funded in the next couple of “less exciting/slower” years. I meet with hundreds of ambitious, passionate and insanely talented tech founders every year. They are all working hard 24/7 to make their dreams come true. But it breaks my heart when I see talent wasted on solving derivative problems a bit too late in the cycle. I understand if a given problem is a founder’s passion, and respect that. However, if they aren’t crazy about the idea in the first place, it’s better to give up the “Uber for X” ghost and instead focus on more original inventions — ideas that could create new markets and enjoy infinite runway in terms of growth. That ambitious founders learn from the successes and failures of other category-defining companies is of paramount importance. However, even if a young startup executes flawlessly on all the tactics of an incumbent company, it won’t work out as well. Why? Because you can never step into the same startup zeitgeist twice. If something isn’t original, but well-understood as a successful strategy (e.g. for distribution), the barriers to entry will be low — and many will jump in to take advantage. The strategic visions outlined below would have been revolutionary five years ago. In 2016, they would be the quickest route to failure. The good news is that in 2016 the field is level again. Startup folks have ideas about what may be coming next, but nothing is as obvious now as it was for the last cycle, e.g. AWS, cheap and fast Internet connections, Facebook for distribution, mobile. So now is the time to innovate… If you do something hard and break new ground, you’ll have the chance to build a category-defining company. That is what you should aim for: The “it” company in a new space enjoys a huge premium over its competitors. However, the next Facebook and Snapchat will look nothing like Facebook and Snapchat. And if you are lucky enough to build this cycle’s Uber, be forewarned that it will serve as inspiration to many more founders who would love to emulate your success. They’ll replicate it in other verticals and markets ad infinitum until the cycle resets … But for now, I can’t wait to meet the startup class of 2016. |
Netflix shares take a dive on a rocky forecast | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Netflix just posted its first-quarter earnings, and it looks like for investors it was a whiff. The company’s shares are diving more than 10% in extended trading, which more or less fits in with the usual behavior of Netflix — big spikes, up and down, all over the place and all the time. , and we’re seeing that big reaction once again on its first-quarter earnings. Netflix is just one of those companies, it seems. [graphiq id=”e87Gc4hRgV” title=”Netflix Inc. (NFLX) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”492″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/e87Gc4hRgV” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/16808888/Netflix-Inc-in-Los-Gatos-CA” link_text=””] So what’s the culprit here? Even though the company added a record number of new subscribers, it looks like its growth isn’t going absolutely bonkers even though the company is expanding to 130 new countries. The company said it would add 2 million new international subscribers in the second quarter, along with 500,000 new U.S. subscribers, after posting a record Q1. There’s an aspect of seasonality here, so it’s definitely not apples to apples, but still: 2.5 million doesn’t seem like a huge number — and especially after adding 3.3 million new streaming members in the second quarter last year. International expansion is going to be a huge uphill battle, for sure. While international subscribers make up more than 40% of the company’s subscriber base, as it goes to newer countries it’s going to have to find ways to capture local content and fill out a library that culturally fits with the country that it’s growing into. And while it’s investing in a ton of original content, that might not be a good fit for new countries either. Eventually Netflix is going to run out of room to expand in countries that culturally overlap with the U.S., and that’s going to require a different playbook. But Netflix isn’t the only company that’s offering a huge library of content for a subscription fee. Amazon is offering a standalone video streaming service separate from its Prime subscription, and of course there’s Google Play and iTunes, among other services, that have big libraries of content available. All this increasing competition and change in market dynamics means Netflix has to continue to show growth and show that its strategy is working. It did that this quarter with a record number of new subscribers, but it has to keep doing that, and show that it’ll be a sustainable public company that can outlast the influence of larger companies that treat video streaming as just one part of their empires. Are these extended libraries of content becoming more and more commoditized? Perhaps. And that may be part of the reason why the company is betting so much on original content, which will in theory help persuade people to go with Netflix instead of Amazon. As time goes on, that’s what’s going to be the differentiating factor between these services. These dynamics are in play increasingly in newer markets. As time goes on, even music streaming is becoming commoditized, for example, with Apple releasing Apple Music and sparring with Pandora. They both stream music and have similarly large libraries, so Pandora has to show it can differentiate itself from Apple — and meanwhile Apple is securing huge exclusives, . Whether Pandora can be a growing, independent publicly traded company . Is Netflix’s strategy working as it faces increasing competition from behemoths? That, like Pandora, is a big question for the company. And for the $46.4 billion dollar company that just shaved off a tenth of its value, it’s one that it seems like it doesn’t have an answer to today. |
Supreme Court affirms Google Books scans of copyrighted works are fair use | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | A Supreme Court order issued today closes the book on (or perhaps merely ends this chapter of) more than a decade of legal warfare between Google and the Authors Guild over the legality of the former’s scanning without permission of millions of copyrighted books. And the final word is: it’s fair use. The order is just an item in a that appeared today, and adds nothing to the argument except the tacit approval of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals — itself approving an even decision, that of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2013. So in a way, it’s old news. The 2013 decision found that the scanning of books (provided for that purpose by libraries) was not a violation of copyright, owing to its being “transformative” — in a technical sense. The books were not simply being resold or the like, but were being used for a new and creative purpose: a search engine for books that were frequently out of print or copyright. It doesn’t provide a “substitute” for the original work, and the court accepted Google’s argument that it was in fact doing a public service as well as providing authors with new audiences. The Appeals court found that decision sound, and now the Supreme Court has, at least, declined to examine it, which is as much as saying it’s fine with them. No SCOTUS for AG v Google. Thx to our supporters, we'll keep fighting to protect copyright & authors' interests. — Authors Guild (@AuthorsGuild) . Executive director Mary Rasenberger lashed out in a press release: Blinded by the public benefit arguments, the Second Circuit’s ruling tells us that Google, not authors, deserves to profit from the digitization of their books… The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture. The vituperative tone may cause eye-rolling in some who find the fair use case to be an obvious one, but Rasenberger does go on to make broader, more philosophical observations that are food for thought: Authors are already among the most poorly paid workers in America; if tomorrow’s authors cannot make a living from their work, only the independently wealthy or the subsidized will be able to pursue a career in writing, and America’s intellectual and artistic soul will be impoverished. The denial of review is further proof that we’re witnessing a vast redistribution of wealth from the creative sector to the tech sector, not only with books, but across the spectrum of the arts. It’s fuel for the ongoing argument about whether and how technology enables and damages the creation and distribution of art, be it literary, musical or visual. This decision is, I think, the right one, but there are hard questions that it doesn’t answer. Copyright is at best a deeply flawed system as it stands legislated today, though few will argue with the concept of legal protections of creative works. That said, any copyright policy (or lawsuit) that fails to acknowledge the vastly different world those works enter into today versus even a few years ago is bound to crumble in time. And, for that matter, any effort sufficiently advanced of concept will certainly invite legal scrutiny and obstruction. Not every such effort can wage a decade-long legal battle, so alas, many a far-reaching project will be (and has been) smothered at the earliest stages. The Guild will “keep fighting” and promised to act as watchdog over Google (although the Books project isn’t nearly as active as it once was) while pursuing its own solution to the question of mass online distribution and indexing. |
Longtime Facebook VP Mike Vernal joins Sequoia Capital | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Mike Vernal, a Facebook VP who has spent the last eight-plus years at the company, most recently leading its search, profile, local and developer platform product groups, is leaving the company to become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital. Before joining Facebook, Vernal spent nearly six years at Microsoft, first as a product manager and later as a development lead. The Harvard grad (two degrees) wrote in a tweet this afternoon that “Facebook is an exceptional company with amazing people. Thank you to Mark and everyone at @facebook for the past eight years. I’ll miss you.” Facebook is an exceptional company with amazing people. Thank you to Mark and everyone at for the past eight years. I’ll miss you. — Mike Vernal (@mvernal) Vernal joins 10 other partners in Sequoia’s Menlo Park office. One of those partners is Bryan Schreier, who joined Sequoia in 2008 after being a senior director at Google. In an email provided to us by a Sequoia spokesman, Schreier writes, “You don’t recruit people like Mike. They choose you and we are thrilled to have him join.” Schreier says the firm got to know Vernal through his work fostering startups when he was leading Facebook’s platform initiatives. “His experience scaling engineering, product, and design teams at Facebook will be invaluable to Sequoia founders working to build similarly transformative companies.” Like all Sequoia partners, Vernal is expected to be something of a generalist, but it’s likely he’ll be focusing on consumer and developer tech to start. Sequoia recently parted ways with another longtime partner, Michael Goguen, when it was revealed that he was being accused of breach of contract in one of the more to hit Silicon Valley in a while. Sequoia’s West Coast partners are exclusively male, though it employs one female investment analyst, Stephanie Zhan, who has worked previously at Google, Andreessen Horowitz and Nest Labs. Sequoia’s chairman, Michael Moritz, was roundly criticized last year when, during an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, he said Sequoia is working hard to find more women to hire into its ranks but that it isn’t willing to toward achieving that end. Sequoia Capital China has three female partners. Sequoia Capital India has one female investor and a female principal. |
Verizon and Hearst team up to buy Complex Media | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Chalk this up as the latest major bet on the importance of mobile video for the future of digital media. Verizon Wireless and Hearst Corp. are set to jointly acquire . The “video-first” lifestyle site, focused on pop-culture trends and general entertainment, will continue to operate independently, albeit with Verizon and Hearst now each owning 50 percent stakes in the company. Complex CEO and co-founder Complex Media has raised more than $60 million in investment over several rounds, most recently gathering a $21 million investment from Hearst Corp. this past September. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The reports that the deal values Complex Media between $250 million and $300 million. “This is a tremendous opportunity for us to have a very good initial return for our shareholders, but now it’s really about the second act,” Antoniello told TechCrunch. “We really could not have chosen better strategic partners.” Few companies have seen their landscape evolve and drastically shift as much as Hearst Corporation. The transition from print to web has been a shift that many publications have had to pursue retroactively. Hearst Entertainment and Syndication co-president Neeraj Khemlani told me that today’s move offers the company a chance to get ahead of mobile video trends with Verizon’s assistance. “Part of this is a feeling that history is repeating itself here and every time there is a technological change, new brands are created for new generations,” said Khemlani. “We believe we’re in the early days of internet video channels.” Complex has seen “hockey stick growth” over the past several years, Khemlani says. The site sees more than 50 million unique visitors monthly, powering more than 300 million page views. |
Netflix posts a mixed Q1 but adds 6.74M new subscribers | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Despite adding a record number of new users in the first quarter, Netflix is having a no good, very bad day. The company reported earnings of 6 cents per share — a beat — but missed on revenue targets with $1.96 billion in revenue. Analysts were expecting earnings of 3 cents per share on $1.97 billion in revenue. But that miss on revenue might not be the only thing weighing on Netflix today. International was a huge part of Netflix’s subscriber growth — with the company rolling out the service in 130 additional countries. This is the first quarter where we saw the results from that big international push, and it looks like the push is working and propping up the company’s subscriber growth. The company said it added around 4.5 million new international subscribers. Here’s the kicker on that one though: The company only expects to add 2 million new international subscribers in the second quarter this year, along with 500,000 U.S.-based subscribers. The company said its international forecast for fewer additions is because of its very successful launch in Australia and New Zealand. It seems like investors are not liking that international expansion number, given that the service is launching in so many new countries. After reporting its first-quarter earnings, the stock is getting absolutely slammed in trading right now, down more than 10 percent. As expected, Netflix had nothing to say about expanding into China. The company now has 81.5 million subscribers. Netflix passed 75 million users at the beginning of the year. The company previously forecast growth of 6 million new members for Q1 this year. It beat its own forecast with 6.74 million new subscribers in the quarter. That came in way above what people were expecting. Netflix is also going to be in a weird spot now that Amazon is per month, for which there is a lot of overlap when it comes to movies and shows. That split from its standard Prime service, which is a yearly subscription, is going to be a significant headwind for Netflix going forward — especially if Amazon decides to aggressively undercut Netflix. With all this competition, Netflix has had to increasingly bet on original content like Marvel’s Daredevil, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and other Netflix originals. That’s also going to be increasingly important as the company expands internationally while it works to expand its limited libraries in new countries. |
3 reasons New York City is the best place to start a tech company | Mona Bijoor | 2,016 | 4 | 18 |
In terms of venture capital dollars, it’s still hard to beat Silicon Valley. The latest figures have Bay Area companies gobbling up about . Factor in San Jose and Los Angeles and that share climbs to nearly one-third of the all the money raised by private companies in 2015. By contrast, companies raised just 5 percent — despite being eight times as populous as San Francisco the headquarters of many of the world’s largest banks. And yet, that’s proving to be something of a double-edged sword. Despite bountiful jobs at many of the world’s most covetable companies, almost half of San Francisco’s residents believe the is headed in the . Many San Franciscans have gone on the record, writing open letters, that even the good jobs can’t cover rent, and saying that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the proverbial bubble was to let out a little air. on the other hand, is in the . Though housing is by no means inexpensive, it’s a lot cheaper than San Francisco. is also adding jobs and growing wages faster than almost any time in its history, despite a mayor who almost everyone assumed to be less-business friendly than his predecessor. Here are three why I’m confident is the in the world to a business (and it’s only going to get better). In terms of raw dollars, Silicon Valley attracts significantly more, but ’s share of the pie is actually . The main driver behind that growth is ’s successful self-fashioning as the capital of so-called “hyphen ” — the numerous sub-sections of startups that align themselves with various industries: fin , fashion , media , and so forth. These companies benefit from proximity to industry players — my ’s position as a middle-man between major retailers and the brands that sell to them is a perfect example of this competitive advantage. has the corporate headquarters for Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Coach, Ann Taylor and countless other global fashion companies. This ability to live and work in the same as major players makes it easier to build super-specialized products. A major advantage of ’s scene is its greater diversity. While far from perfect, companies are considerably more diverse than their Silicon Valley counterparts. Forty percent of the ’s employees are women and a fifth are people of color. This isn’t simply the doing of the ’s diverse population; part of the reason has more diverse workers is because the companies here than they do out west. This also is one area that may only just be beginning to pay dividends; according to , diverse companies are 35 percent more likely to generate industry-beating returns once they go public. There is no energy like energy. The itself serves as a fuel for rebels, creatives and free-thinkers, giving them the drive it takes to build interesting, great companies. has a greater student population, more cultural offerings and a greater expat community than any other American , making it easier to attract almost any kind of talent (and developers are ). The non-American startups almost exclusively use as their American or North American headquarters, bringing in talented workers with international resumes and perspectives. The abundance of people and ideas creates an energy you don’t really get in the Valley. It fuels innovation and gives us the wherewithal to tackle those 60-hour work weeks. ’s first European settlers were scouts for the Dutch East India , and the British fought tooth and nail to keep it during the American Revolution because of its attractiveness as a major port and to do businesses. The most prominent Founding Father from , Alexander Hamilton, was America’s first banker. wealth funded the Panama Canal and the Marshall Plan. As ’s community continues to grow, it’s not inconceivable that its prowess as an incubator for rapidly growing companies could someday rival San Francisco. It’s not that fanciful, Michael Bloomberg projects that ’s engineering school could produce as many as in its first 30 years, to say nothing of the fact that the already has more college students than Boston has people. In the meanwhile, anyone who’s ever ridden the subway knows that Yorkers know how to get stuff done while we wait. |
Jay Z, Tidal & Kanye West sued for misstatements about ‘The Life of Pablo’ exclusivity | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Kanye West’s on whether or not his new album, “The Life of Pablo,” would be an exclusive to music streaming service Tidal, has now been met with a class action lawsuit led by consumer tech privacy law firm Edelson PC. The artist originally promised the album would only be on Tidal, but “Pablo” to competitors, including Apple Music, Spotify, Google Play Music and Pandora. Jay Z’s S. Carter Enterprises, Tidal and Kanye West were named as the defendants in the suit, which claims that consumers were duped into signing up for Tidal subscriptions under false pretenses. Besides having big names attached to its streaming music service, Tidal was hardly a true rival to Apple, Spotify and others. In fact, . The fact that it scored this much-anticipated exclusive was the sole reason the app saw a massive number of downloads that West’s fans flocked to the service because the artist had In other words, those who wanted to acquire the track legally felt they had no choice but to turn to Tidal. However, West made a number of odd decisions surrounding the album’s release. He pulled the album shortly after its launch, saying he wanted to make a few last-minute changes. Tidal customers were enraged, saying . Some were even accidentally double-charged due to billing glitches. After the album finally returned to Tidal, . Tidal, as it turned out, had no exclusive after all. It just got first dibs. Meanwhile, Tidal benefitted greatly from West’s initial comments about the album’s exclusivity. The company that “Pablo” surpassed 250 million streams on its service in its first 10 days of release. Its subscriber numbers also jumped from 1 million to 2.5 million in just 10 days. Edelson PC is representing Plaintiff Baker-Rhett in the matter. The suit makes the case that millions of consumers were lied to, then duped into signing up for subscriptions and providing credit card information, email addresses and other personally identifiable account information to Tidal because they believed it would be the only way to hear the album. Had they known the truth, they would not have become Tidal subscribers, the suit argues. It also puts a dollar amount on the benefit of West’s misstatement: The 2 million new users acquired by its “purportedly exclusive access” are worth $84 million, based on “publicly available acquisitions as a comparable metric.” Presumably, this would include Rdio’s by Pandora for $75 million, but the company never disclosed its paid subscribers or user figures. In actuality, the firm used Instagram and WhatsApp — social services — for acquisitions involving little or no revenue and a known per user value to come to this figure. It also takes into consideration . Jay Z is claiming $15 million based on them allegedly inflating user numbers to 540,000 at the time of purchase. In other words, if Jay Z believes that a number of users less than 500,000 is worth $15 million, it can be inferred that 2 million users could be worth at least $60 million, Edelson PC believes, from our understanding. Bringing litigation against major Silicon Valley tech firms is something Edelson PC is very familiar with — the company claims to have recovered more than $1 billion in settlements since its start in 2007, but this can’t be fact checked because many of its settlements are private. In the past, the firm has filed actions against big names like Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This has not won the firm any friends in the Valley — , tech incubator Y Combinator’s president Sam Altman referred to Mr. Edelson as “a leech tarted up as a freedom fighter.” (Yikes). That being said, a number of consumers likely do feel frustrated about being lied to — though whether that’s because West and Tidal intentionally deceived them versus West just being generally flaky may be something that’s harder to prove.
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Bill Campbell, go-to advisor for Silicon Valley’s brightest, receives loving tributes after his passing | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | There’s an old saying in football: It isn’t the hours you put in but what you put in the hours. Apparently, Bill Campbell — a widely revered former Columbia University football coach who went on to run Intuit for four years in the 1990s and only retired as its chairman in — put something magical into his hours with entrepreneurs. A great many of them are grieving today, following Campbell’s passing early this morning at age 75. The cause was cancer, says his family. Earlier today, founder-investor Ben Horowitz seemingly captured what many founders have tried to describe when characterizing their relationship with Campbell, , “Whenever I struggled with life, Bill was the person that I called. I didn’t call him because he would have the answer to some impossible question. I called him because he would understand what I was feeling 100%. He would understand me. I have never known anyone else who could do that like Bill. Be the person who would understand me all the time. I must have called him a 100 different times, because I knew he would feel what I was feeling.” The sentiment was widespread. Campbell, a Pennsylvania native who donated nearly to his hometown school district over the years and later in life coached eighth graders at Sacred Heart in Atherton, Ca., was known as “Coach” to many of the smartest people in Silicon Valley. These include Alphabet chair Eric Schmidt (who tried over the years and without success to talk Campbell into a board seat at Google) and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who had more luck. Indeed, according to a with Campbell, Jobs and Campbell were neighbors in Palo Alto and Jobs would frequently walk to Campbell’s house and either knock on the door or sit by the pool in his backyard. Shortly after his return to Apple in 1997, Jobs “came by one day, and we sat on a bench by the pool,” Campbell told Fortune. “And he said, ‘I’d like you to join the Apple board.’” Added Campbell, “The only time I’ve had a rush like that was when I was asked to be a trustee of Columbia University. I said, without hesitation, ‘For sure.’” Said Jobs of Campbell in a in Fortune, “There’s something deeply human about him.” In a statement Apple gave us earlier today, the company called Campbell a “coach and mentor to many of us at Apple, and a member of our family for decades as an executive, advisor and ultimately a member of our board. He believed in Apple when few people did, and his contributions to our company, through good times and bad, cannot be overstated. We will miss his wisdom, his friendship, his humor and his love for life.” Wrote Schmidt earlier, in his to Campbell: “Bill Campbell, our very close friend, died this morning. A man with a huge heart, who hugged everyone he met with, was more than a mentor. He helped us build Google and in countless ways made our success possible. We started with him as an external coach but he quickly became the internal management expert. He attended our staff meetings, met with management, and spent countless hours with our leadership. He helped build our Board of Directors, and helped build our culture. He worked very very closely with our founders in every possible way. “His contribution to the success of Google and now Alphabet is incalculable. His legacy is the smile that he created on everyone’s face, and the great leaders of the Valley whom he coached. Bill was a truly gifted man, and the world lost a great leader this morning.” |
ABI Research predicts no more night vision for vehicles | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Technology market analysts at predict that advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are going to be big business in the next decade — to the tune of $132 billion. But they also predict the decline and fall of night vision in our cars. Night vision systems have been available for vehicles since the early 2000s. They use either infrared or thermographic cameras to scan the dark road ahead for people or animals and alert the driver to the problem. ABI Research calls this vulnerable user detection, or VUD. Some systems show the outline of the pedestrian in the center console screen or a heads-up display, or the system might just show a warning in the dashboard to tell the driver there’s something out there to watch for. The , for instance, has Night Vision Assist Plus, which uses both thermal and infrared imaging to display in the instrument cluster a real-time view of the road. It also scans for pedestrians and animals along the side of the road (whitetail deer, I’m looking at you — thermographically) and will flash the headlights to let pedestrians know there’s a car coming. This seems pretty cool, but ABI Research notes that it’s not as cool — or as useful and forward-thinking — as the ADAS tech that’s becoming more available. The idea behind things like automatic emergency braking (AEB) and the related VUD systems is that the car’s cameras and sensors will take in this information and act on it before the driver even realizes there’s a problem. Rather than taking the time to show you the outline of a pedestrian and wait for you to brake, the car will just do it. AEB will be in , and companies like and are rolling it out widely, even in inexpensive models. Analyst James Hodgson said in an ABI Research statement, “Within the next decade, the focus will migrate away from augmenting driver perception and toward sensors that can enable autonomous control for both navigation and emergency collision avoidance. Therefore, there will be a limited need for car OEMs to provide a system that allows the human driver or car occupant to see in the dark.” Given that just navigated desert roads in the dark and without a human at the wheel, Hodgson makes a good point. Technology is going to move away from getting the driver’s attention and toward taking over quickly and, we hope, correctly. |
ISS beams down 4K footage of Earth shot with the RED Epic Dragon | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | We get to see the Earth in high definition every day with our high-def eyes, it’s true, but we’re limited to a certain ground-level point of view. Not so much the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. And they’ve just sent down a batch of stunning 4K footage of the Earth taken with their fancy RED Epic Dragon camera. This isn’t actually the first footage from the Epic Dragon, or even the first 4K video of the Earth from space. The crew has been shooting interior shots of science experiments and bagpipe playing, and they were savvy enough to capture an orbital sunrise right away — but the new cut has a better one. If you’re looking for close-up views of Earth, the astonishing camera has you covered. (If you want to watch in 4K, you’ll need to put it in a new window — on a 4K display, of course — and choose the correct resolution from the drop-up menu.) But this quick reel of “Crew Observations” is still special in its own way, like all my readers. These are carefully planned and properly exposed exterior shots, and it’s certain this is just a taste. Of course, the resulting files are so huge that beaming them down takes ages. No word on whether any 6K (6144×3160) video, of which the Epic Dragon is capable, is being shot. At that point it would probably be faster to put a hard drive in a Soyuz capsule and drop it into the ocean — which would be the coolest possible implementation of sneakernet ever attempted. On that note, NASA is under a Public Domain license, so feel free to use this in your next space epic home video. |
Samsung posts strong first-quarter results thanks to the S7’s success | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | delivered strong results for the first quarter of 2016, thanks to sales of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, its flagship smartphones. The company’s operating profit grew 12 percent from the same period last year to 6.68 trillion (about $5.84 billion). Quarterly revenue was 49.78 trillion won, up 5.7 percent year-over-year. The final results were slightly better than , which it issued earlier this month. The S7’s before competitors like Apple had unveiled their latest smartphones. Samsung’s first-quarter results stand in contrast to Apple’s disappointing second-quarter report yesterday, when it and a decline in iPhone sales for the first time ever. But to be fair, Samsung had about two years of almost unremittingly blah quarterly results before it finally got a break. During that time period, Apple hit very high highs, including a that broke records for the highest quarterly results ever posted by any company. In contrast, Samsung suffered as other Android smartphone makers wooed consumers away, especially in and . It was also for the S6, which the S7 has managed to avoid so far. The Korean electronics giant, however, says it expects it current momentum to continue into the second quarter, thanks to S7 sales and it mobile and chip businesses. Samsung believes worldwide launches of the S7 phones, as well as increased shipments of Galaxy A and J smartphones, will boost sales even as the because many consumers aren’t particularly captivated by new releases and don’t want to upgrade their current device until it dies. Samsung also said that its decision to had successfully reduced the company’s costs. Demand for chips is usually weak in the first quarter, but Samsung’s semiconductor business still managed respectable earnings by selling more high value-added products. The semiconductor unit made 2.63 trillion won in operating profit this quarter on consolidated revenue of 11.15 trillion won. Sales were driven by its memory business, which accounted for 7.94 trillion in revenue. Samsung’s display panel business did not do as well, posting an operating loss of 0.27 trillion won on revenue of 6.04 trillion won because of a “sharp decline” in LCD panel earnings, but strong sales of the Galaxy S7 was good news for OLED panels, since they are used for their displays. Samsung says demand for OLED panels will continue as more companies produce mid-to-low-end smartphones. have also pegged Apple as an OLED buyer. |
Amazon has built a subscription launchpad with Amazon Prime | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | It looks like incremental news, but the fact that Amazon now lets you subscribe to Amazon Prime Video from the rest of Amazon Prime signals a bigger shift. Amazon wants to turn the company into a subscription business, one subscription at a time. Amazon remains the dominant e-commerce platform in the U.S., but the company has been looking at ways to diversify its core business with more products and services. For instance, Jeff Bezos recently investors that Amazon Web Services is reaching $10 billion in annual sales — not bad for a side project. But the cloud hosting platform is just one element of the subscription puzzle. The company is also targeting end consumers with another kind of subscriptions. Amazon Prime started as an expedited shipping option for regular Amazon customers. Instead of paying for deliveries, you can pay an annual subscription and get your packages a bit faster. It also quickly became an all-you-can-eat library for all sorts of digital content. Amazon added the confusingly named the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, music, photo storage, movies and TV shows. Once you pay $99 per year, you can access all these services. The strategy was clear — once you try Amazon Prime for 30 days because you’re impatiently waiting for your , chances are you’re going to watch a video or two, and maybe start a book from the Lending Library. Once you’re hooked, you won’t cancel your trial and you’re stuck with Amazon Prime. And yet, there’s been a significant shift over the past few years with an identifiable pattern. Amazon is spinning out subscriptions from Amazon Prime by creating more generous subscription offerings. You can subscribe to for $9.99 per month if you want to read more recent books. You can store an unlimited amount of data on Amazon Cloud Drive (and not just photos) for $59.99 per year. And now, you can to Amazon Prime Video for $8.99 per month. For now, there isn’t any difference for Prime Video subscribers and regular subscribers. Arguably, Amazon Prime Video is the most interesting part of Amazon Prime besides expedited shipping. So Amazon is treading carefully as it doesn’t want to remove Prime Video from the good old Prime subscription overnight. But you can be sure that at some point Amazon will want to decouple Amazon Prime from Amazon Prime Video. If you want expedited shipping , you’ll have to pay for two subscriptions. For instance, Amazon could create a two-tier system. The company could restrict original content to standalone subscribers and Prime subscribers could still watch the (older and less interesting) movie and TV library. Even more important, it looks like Amazon has built a subscription launchpad with Prime. The company can try out new services and see if they work. From day one, these new services will have millions of subscribers. And Amazon certainly spends a lot of time tracking what its users do with these new services. Amazon data and analytics. I’m sure the company knows everything about your viewing habits on Prime Video. If you stopped watching Transparent after episode 6, Amazon knows that. If you couldn’t go past the first episode of Downton Abbey, the company knows that and can now consider stopping paying for the distribution rights. And if you’re a Prime subscriber who rarely orders stuff but spends a lot of time watching videos, Amazon also knows that. A data-driven company like Amazon can greatly benefit from these insights. And once the stars are aligned, the company can create standalone subscriptions and ramp up its recurring revenue streams. Slowly but surely, Amazon could turn its on e-commerce products into substantial subscription revenue. And this would be Amazon’s smartest business trick. |
Apple’s WWDC will be held June 13-17 | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | Apple has yet to , but we now know the dates of the next Worldwide Developers Conference. When you ask Siri “when is WWDC,” Siri already has an answer for you. Apple will hold its annual developer conference from June 13 to June 17. This is in line with Apple’s previous conferences. The company will very likely present a bunch of new stuff during its inaugural keynote on Monday June 13. Apple usually books the Moscone Center for its conference. While WWDC doesn’t appear on the Moscone Center schedule, the conference center is still “available” . In the past, Apple has sold tickets on a first-come, first-served basis. But, more recently, the company has switched to a lottery system. When the website is live, developers will be able to register for a chance to go to WWDC. You need to enter your credit card information and your card will be charged if you’re selected. Apple won’t ask you twice to confirm you want to go. This way, Apple is sure you’re serious about going to WWDC. Apple’s WWDC keynote usually focuses on software more than hardware. In the last few years, the company has unveiled the new features in iOS and OS X — and maybe Apple will even OS X to “MacOS.” But we haven’t heard about Macs in a while. So Apple could use this opportunity to launch some updated MacBook devices — and, let’s be crazy, why not an external retina display. But first, let’s wait for Apple’s official WWDC announcement and see how the conference is going to work. |
Drivy grabs $35 million for its car rental marketplace | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | French startup has raised another $35 million (€31 million) from Cathay Innovation, Nokia Growth Partners and existing investors Bpifrance, Via-ID and Index Ventures. If you don’t already know Drivy, the company wants to rethink the way car rental works today. If you have a car, chances are you don’t use it every day. Sometimes you can even spend long periods of time without using it thanks to public transportation. Instead of having a useless car, you can rent it to someone else. In other words, you become a sort of car rental company for your own car. On the other side of the equation, if you live in a big city, chances are you don’t need a car. Having a car could even slow you down. But sometimes, you want to go on vacation and a car would be useful. Sure, you could rent a car from any of the existing car rental company. But Drivy lets you rent a car from someone else for less. This way, you could find big cars, small cars, give back your car on a Sunday and more. Drivy wants to be more flexible than your average car rental company. And the good thing about Drivy is that the bigger it becomes, the more convenient it is. Like other marketplace startups, Drivy becomes more interesting when you have more options around you. That’s also how Drivy can beat rental companies — it’s easier to rent from your neighbor. Available in France, Germany and Spain, Drivy has been doing well with 1.4 million days of rental and 850,000 users ever since the platform was created in 2010. Even more telling, you can find 36,000 cars on the platform today. So what’s next for the company? With today’s funding round, Drivy plans to expand to other European countries, starting with the U.K. It could be a bit harder to convince British people given that they care a lot about having the right insurance when renting a car. Drivy takes care of that with a partnership with Allianz. And with so much money on the bank, Drivy is certainly looking at other potential countries as well. |
Let’s define “container-native” | Salil Deshpande | 2,016 | 4 | 27 |
What a narrow use of a beautiful term! There should be a new definition for container-native that aims to better represent the magnitude of impact that containers will have on software development and operations. Just as in other once-a-generation shifts, legacy players rarely make the transition in a meaningful way. This happens for a few reasons: either (a) they don’t understand the magnitude or significance of the shift, or (b) they understand it but are stuck selling the wrong architecture and have incentives to treat aspects of the new architecture as check-box items in their messaging to the market, or (c) they are annoyed or disillusioned by the early overhype. |
NASA makes it rain with $243M in contracts to institutions and small businesses | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | NASA is spreading the dough around like a pastry chef. Today the agency announced to nearly 300 different recipients, from small engineering firms to big-time research institutions. And then it truly shelled out, awarding a $193 million contract to Universities Space Research Association in Maryland. The smaller cash infusions are from the programs. These are grant competitions, basically, and NASA received 1,278 proposals, of which it accepted 399. Each has to explain the potential benefits not just for NASA, but for everyday (or at least not space-related) applications as well. You can read the complete lists and (incredibly long page warning). Try searching for cool keywords like “laser” and “robotic.” The projects run the gamut: flight-control software for drones and landers, LIDAR and other imaging systems, autonomous air-dropped sensors and, I kid you not, a “Planetary Vacuum Cleaner.” It’s exactly what it sounds like. These proposals get six months of funding, up to $125,000. If they seem promising in this Phase I period, the contract can be extended with a $750,000 Phase II award. There’s a better chance of that happening with these projects, by the way, than with the , which were for stuff like repurposing an asteroid into a huge cosmic engine. The SBIR and STTR ideas are the kind of things that get bought up by aerospace giants for millions — but without much fanfare. The $193 million is for “project support” from USRA, which is one of these huge organizations that quietly does all kinds of basic research and testing. USRA will be helping out with everything from science to field testing to recruitment. Considering the amount involved, the NASA is incredibly spare. Got an idea you think NASA might like? Maybe you should submit it! Consult the . |
Users average 50 minutes per day on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | Facebook’s “family of apps” strategy is a wild success. While some might have expected it to roll Instagram into Facebook and leave chat in its main app, keeping Instagram independent and splitting off Messenger into a companion app has helped it solidify itself as more than just a ubiquitous utility, but as a downright addiction. Today on the call, Mark Zuckerberg said, “Today, people around the world spend on average more than 50 minutes a day using Facebook, Instagram and Messenger…and that doesn’t count WhatsApp.” That’s amongst people who use any of those apps globally, Facebook clarified for me. Back in July 2014, Zuckerberg said American users spent on its service, but now it’s grown that stat while expanding it whole-world. As an advertising-driven business, that huge volume on time spent on its apps translates into enormous numbers of ad views. But that business model also incentivizes Facebook to push people to spend as much time as possible with it. Image Credit: The question is, when will Facebook start seriously considering the impact of the social networking juggernaut it’s created. While some amount of feed reading, photo sharing and messaging brings people together, usage can also become an endless quest for little hits of dopamine — excitement from consuming new information even if we’re never satisfied. It’s easy to resort to digital, asynchronous connection rather than having to expend the mental energy to leave the house or put down your phone and interact with people in person. And as Facebook’s Oculus division rolls out its virtual reality headsets, there’s the issue of ditching the meatspace for the digital realm. Facebook has an entire research division that studies how memes travel through the network or how usage can impact people’s emotions. But with it now earning about $6 billion a year off our eyeballs, it’s time for it to consider what could be done to minimize the harm of losing one’s self in “connection.” |
A Silicon Valley VC says investors from China are joining Series A deals, and they’re playing “hardball” | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | As a venture investor for the last 20 years, George Zachary has witnessed plenty of trends develop and fizzle. Yesterday, we talked with him about what he’s seeing right now. One of the newest wrinkles he noted is a growing number of Chinese investors who’ve grown aggressive about getting into Series A deals, and who seem to be playing by their own rules. Our chat with Zachary — a general partner at who has led the venture firm into bets on , and , among others — has been edited for length. GZ: You definitely have to worry about whether your company can be financed later on, no matter what everyone says. In fact, a lot of Series A companies that have to do an extension of the Series A are raising at lower valuations. One of our founders has done two startups before, but valuations in the space where he’s operating all went down 50 percent, so he’s just accepting that he’ll have to raise his (extension) round with a lot more dilution than he wanted. It is what it is. GZ: Well, for celebrity founders, they are staying high.We’re doing a celebrity-founder deal now that has a high price tag, and everyone wants into it. For repeat founders with a good exit the last time, the price is always going to be high, plus or minus 10 percent. This particular team is at concept stage. We’re basically handing them a near-blank check. But valuations are down elsewhere. The average thing coming out of Y Combinator is probably a half to three-quarters of what it was [in terms of valuation in recent years]. The average seed-stage deal is half. I should mention that for celebrity founders, research supports that if they’re operating in the same space [as their last company], they have a higher rate of success [than other people]. If they move from databases to clean tech or from cell towers to social networks, they usually don’t do super well. GZ: Not explicitly. We’ve committed to three things in the last month that are in the docs stage. Docs are taking longer because there are new investors coming in, and they want more stuff in their terms. These are newer investors, often foreign investors, who are basically saying: “I want senior preference to [a company’s earlier] investors,” and that’s adding two or three weeks as they usually ask right as the docs are closing. GZ: They’re almost all from China, and they want all of their preferences to be senior to everyone else’s. What’s happening is, since they know the startup’s financials, they just wait it out. By that point, we’ve already signed a term sheet and turned off a lot of other people who wanted to invest. These things never come up in the term sheet phase but later in the docs. They’ll say, “We did our diligence, and we need XYZ to invest.” It’s not a great way to start a relationship. People in the ecosystem around here are playing for the long term; they realize that sooner or later, they’ll be on the other side of the table and don’t want this stuff applied to them. This is mostly coming from Asia, where they play much harder hardball than here. And [these investors] do it with a happy face. That’s just the environment [to which they’re accustomed]. GZ: Their networks are pretty broad. When I started in the business, there were a lot of engineers from China but fewer VPs and directors, and that’s changed. So that information flow is really high in the background. GZ: It’s actually happened in our last three deals. There was one group that wanted to invest in one of our portfolio companies that’s doing well and growing quickly and at the last minute, [they] wanted warrants in the company that were priced at the founders’ stock price [so nearly for free], whereas this company’s valuation is very high. They said, “Because we’re in China, we’ll help you get through the governmental and regulatory frameworks and so forth, and so we’re effectively acting as a founder and should get warrants like one.” The obvious problem: If we gave them what they wanted, other investors would naturally want the same deal, so we said no. They were irritated. GZ: We don’t know if letting them into the round would have affected anything. Everyone always says, “We’re value add; we get you to all the important people.” The only way you can check that is through references, but almost all of these new investors have no track record of investing in startups. They do, which is why they’re concerned. They’re concerned about [the U.S.’s] overall public market valuations. They’re freaked out by what’s been happening in the Chinese public markets. It’s affected their psychology. Frankly, I think it’s affected the psychology of U.S. investors, too, though most venture people like to say that’s not so. They say, “I’m independent, I’m super smart, I look forward.” But if you map people’s thinking — from worrying that the sky is falling to more recently deciding that everything is coming back — it looks a lot like what our public market just went through. GZ: I don’t expect it to pick up any time soon, which is a function of retail and institutional investors looking for high-growth stories with profit associated with them. They want profit and growth. Meanwhile, a lot of companies that have strong revenue can’t show that growth, and vice versa. There just aren’t a lot of companies that could sustain being public right now. |
PayPal beats the street on Q1 sales of $2.54B and EPS of $0.37 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | Payments giant PayPal posted strong Q1 earnings today, counter balancing some of the weaker showings from other tech stocks yesterday and outstripping the overall growth rate of e-commerce, in its own words. Following in the footsteps of its former parent, which also strong results for Q1, PayPal posted revenues of $2.544 billion with non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.37, rising 19% and 28% respectively on a year ago and both beating analysts’ projections of $2.5 billion and $0.35 EPS. “Our first quarter results continue to demonstrate the power of our global payments platform to attract and engage consumers, increasing our global scale and in turn attracting new merchants and partners to PayPal,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal, in a statement. “Our focus on payments and ability to innovate for merchants and consumers continues to differentiate PayPal and drive our growth in a dynamic and competitive environment.” However, a graphic in its presentation also points to the fact that sequentially, payment volume was down on last month: Revenues were also down slightly sequentially. The company says it has 184 million customers now, up by 4.5 million, with 1.4 billion transactions in the quarter up 26% on a year ago. Services like Venmo and the company’s expansion into credit and other services has given the company a life on average transactions per customer, which were up 12% to 28 payments per user, and $81 billion in total payment volume. That $81 billion in TPV, it said, “was faster than the growth rate of e-commerce.” On the merchant side, there are now 14 million active accounts. When it comes to new-wave revenues, PayPal is showing some of its legacy: the company only completes 26% of transactions on mobile devices today, versus 22% a year ago. The company also said that it was keeping full-year guidance and for Q2 expects revenues of between $2.570 and $2.620, up 12%-14% on a year ago; with non-GAAP EPS of between $0.34 and $0.36. More to come during the call. |
Facebook expects VR will have no material impact on 2016 revenue | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | If you think Facebook will get rich on Oculus, you better be patient. Mark Zuckerberg said on the call he sees VR as a long, long-term bet rather than a way to make a quick buck on 3D games. “This is early and it’s going to take a long time. There’s a lot of hype around this.” He explained that while VR, like AI and Internet connectivity are “important to our mission of connecting the world,” they may not pay out for years to come. For the first few years, Zuckerberg believes gaming and video will be where money gets made on VR, judging by the huge console and PC gaming business. For example, today Oculus released a . Oculus could eventually earn profits from selling headsets, peripherals, games and video content, as well as charging a tax on developers whose apps it sells. But first, Oculus will need greater demand and a bigger install base. Until then, it’s more of an experimental foray into the next computing platform than a cash cow. |
DeWalt — yes, the drill maker — gets into the mobile business with rugged MD501 smartphone | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | DeWalt, a name familiar to anyone who loves power tools (and who doesn’t?), is jumping into the mobile market with . It’s waterproof, has a good variety of high-end features and looks like you could use it to pound nails. The feature list is actually pretty impressive: dual SIM, micro SD slot, glove-friendly 5-inch HD screen, wireless charging and an expanded array of sensors. It’s even “resistant to chemical spillages and vibrations,” for those of you who work with acids or vibrate a lot. This thing isn’t small, and it isn’t meant to be. It’s twice as thick as an iPhone, and weighs nearly twice as much. But that’s kind of the point. It’s part of a trend, and a welcome one I might add, of making phones that won’t shatter into a thousand pieces if you so much as look at them wrong. Cat (née Caterpillar), known primarily for diggers and backhoes and the like, has led the way with an increasingly attractive series of devices — the latest of which is the , which even includes a thermal camera. I think we can all agree that is awesome. The tool makers don’t make the phones themselves, or at least not quite. Cat licenses its brand to Bullitt Mobile, and DeWalt did the same with Global Mobile Communications. With any luck we’ll see phones branded with Stanley, Black & Decker and John Deere soon, as well. DeWalt’s phone is due to debut in the U.K. this month or next, and is coming to other countries an unspecified period afterwards. We’ve contacted the company for more information, and will get a hands-on as soon as possible. |
House unanimously passes Email Privacy Act, requiring warrants for obtaining emails | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | The U.S. House of Representatives has passed , the , sending it on to the Senate and from there, hopefully anyhow, to the President. The yeas were swift and unanimous. The bill, which was introduced in the House early last year and quickly found bipartisan support, updates the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, closing a loophole that allowed emails and other communications to be obtained without a warrant. It’s actually a good law, even if it is arriving a couple of decades late. Representatives used the 40 minutes of debate time on the floor to hearken back to 1986, when “Top Gun” was new and “Cabbage Patch Kids were flying off the shelves.” Times have changed since then, pretty much every legislator explained, and this amendment is “long overdue.” “Under current law, there are more protections for a letter in a filing cabinet than an email on a server,” said Congresswoman Suzan Delbene (D-Wash.) during the debate period. Note: 3 more votes were added to the Yea total after the time ran out, for a total of 419. An earlier version of the bill also required that authorities disclose that warrant to the person it affected within 10 days, or 3 if the warrant related to a government entity. That clause was taken out in committee — something trade groups and some of the Representatives objected to as an unpleasant compromise. Compromises, however, make popular bills, it seems: H.R. 699 had a whopping 314 co-sponsors. An oral vote after the debate was all yea and no nay, but the official vote was put off until the end of other business so a proper tally could be done and the broad bipartisan support of the bill put on the record. |
Facebook swells to 1.65B users and beats Q1 estimates with $5.38B revenue | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | Facebook continued its winning streak as other tech companies floundered, reaching 1.65 billion monthly users and surpassing estimates in its Q1 2016 with $5.38 billion in revenue and $ earnings per share. Facebook’s share price climbed more than 8 percent in the moments after earnings were announced, reaching more than $117 in after-hours trading. Revenue was up 52 percent year over year, and Facebook is still operating with strong efficiency, coining $1.5 billion in profit in Q1, up 195 percent year over year. Average revenue per user was up 32 percent YoY. Analysts expected $5.25 billion in revenue and $0.62 EPS, which Facebook handily exceeded. Facebook is also adding a to let the public buy in without getting voting rights that could disrupt Mark Zuckerberg’s iron grip on , including long-term bets on artificial intelligence, virtual reality and Internet connectivity. Overall, Facebook’s family of apps strategy is working. Facebook is now at 1.65 billion users, Messenger has 900 million and Instagram has 400 million. Users of these apps now spend an on these three. One problem spot for Facebook’s earnings was that average revenue per user for the Rest of World region, which includes developing countries where Facebook’s core growth comes from, saw a steep decline. It fell to $0.91 per user, expectedly down from $1.10 in the Q4 holiday, but also down from $0.94 in Q3. The region’s ARPU was up just 13.75 percent compared to 32 percent worldwide. That indicates Facebook may be adding users in the developing world faster than it’s able to effectively monetize them. Facebook also said it , including its Oculus division. While not reported in the earnings release, it’s possible that Facebook Messenger has hit 1 billion users, with that ubiquity helping it box out competitors and the SMS standard. While the company had some trouble with its LiveRail video ad division, it’s still showing strong user growth and revenue momentum in its 12th year. |
Facebook is adding a new class of stock that will help keep Zuckerberg in control | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | Facebook today, as part of its earnings release, said it would add a new class of non-voting stock for the company, which will keep Mark Zuckerberg in control of the company. “This proposal is designed to create a capital structure that will, among other things, allow us to remain focused on Mr. Zuckerberg’s long-term vision for our company and encourage Mr. Zuckerberg to remain in an active leadership role at Facebook,” the company said as part of the release. With the restructuring, people who are buying into Facebook with what’s called “Class C” stock will not have any voting rights. That gives Zuckerberg, who has control of the company, increased protection against agitation from investors and . Wall Street often focuses on near-term earnings results, and this gives Zuckerberg the ability to focus on more long-term goals that he has. It also means that Zuckerberg can make drastic moves — like buying WhatsApp for $19 billion or betting on virtual reality ( ) — without much in his way. Of course, that strategy has been working so far — . But if Facebook were to ever turn south, this would ensure Zuckerberg is in control of the company’s strategy moving forward. This isn’t unfamiliar territory. Google (now Alphabet) has also issued a dual-class structure that includes non-voting stock, further helping Sergey Brin and Larry Page maintain control of the company. A move like this gives Facebook a way to pay for acquisitions through stock, and also pay employees, without diluting Zuckerberg’s control of the company. It also means, as Class B shares liquidate over time, Zuckerberg gets more and more control of the company. Here’s Zuckerberg’s rationale for the change in structure: Everything we do at Facebook is focused on our mission to make the world more open and connected. To maintain our focus on this mission, we have always been a founder-led company. This structure has helped us resist the short term pressures that often hurt companies. It has helped us grow our community, build our business and create shareholder value. It has given us the freedom to prioritize your product experience and invest in new apps like Instagram — decisions that don’t always pay off right away, but that we believe help us serve our community and our shareholders. When I look out at the future, I see more bold moves ahead of us than behind us. We’re focused not on what Facebook is today, but on what it can be, and what it needs to be for our community. That means investing in areas like spreading connectivity, building artificial intelligence and developing virtual and augmented reality. I am committed to our mission and to leading Facebook there over the long term. While helping to connect the world will always be the most important thing I do, there are more global challenges that I feel a responsibility to help solve — like helping to cure all diseases by the end of this century, upgrading our education system so it’s personalized for each student, and protecting our environment from climate change. That’s why Priscilla and I created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and committed to give 99 percent of our Facebook shares during our lives to advance human potential and promote equality. Today, Facebook’s board of directors is announcing a proposal to create a new class of stock that will allow us to achieve both goals. I’ll be able to keep founder control of Facebook so we can continue to build for the long term, and Priscilla and I will be able to give our money to fund important work sooner. Right now, there are amazing scientists, educators and doctors around the world doing incredible work. We want to help them make a bigger difference today, not 30 or 40 years down the road. |
‘Europe by rail’ booking platform, Loco2, finally gets an app | Natasha Lomas | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | Pan-European train travel booking website has launched its first smartphone , letting iOS users book and pay for trips via a dedicated app. Launching an Android app is also on its roadmap for this year. The London-based site, which was founded all the way back in 2006 and was one of the first European travel startups to gain access to major train company booking systems, now has more than 120,000 paying customers, according to co-founder Jamie Andrews. (It does not break out an active user metric as it does not require users to register in order to make a booking.) “We made well over £10m of sales in 2015,” he tells TechCrunch. “[We] took the decision in July to raise further investment rather than go for profitability at this stage. We’ve subsequently expanded our team and marketing efforts — for example we just launched an advertising campaign on the London Underground.” While he says France was Loco2’s best market by far initially — unsurprisingly so, given the country’s size and investment in high speed rail infrastructure — Andrews says growth is coming from more areas now. “Spain and Italy have grown strongly since the beginning of last summer,” he says. “Recently we’ve seen a big increase in UK sales, demonstrating the appetite amongst our users for domestic UK bookings, and in part providing the rationale for developing mobile applications.” It may seem an oddity that a digital business with so many years’ operation under its belt is only now getting around to launching apps but given the complexity of hooking together multiple European train companies on a single booking platform, Loco2’s initial focus was on fundamentals like securing access to real-time train data and integrating with operators’ booking systems. tl;dr pan-European rail booking platforms are not built in a day. “Following the launch of our we now have the ‘big five’ in Western Europe (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy) so our geographical coverage is largely complete,” he notes, adding: “We’ve also doubled the size of our tech team in the last nine months, so have been able to focus on mobile/UX in addition to ongoing improvements to the back-end.” In terms of user demand for mobile, Andrews says Loco2 has been seeing a substantial increase in the number of people booking domestic trains via its platform – which in turn has made having a mobile app more of an imperative. “A year ago 95 per cent of customers were booking trains outside of their home country; this has now dropped to closer to 70 per cent outside of peak holiday-booking season, demonstrating that users want to use Loco2 for all their train travel not just their holidays,” he says. “Domestic bookings are much more frequent and more suited to apps.” Last month almost a third (31 per cent) of Loco2 sessions were booked via its mobile site. “We expect mobile to increase now that we have an app and are catering more to the domestic travel market,” he adds. Interestingly, while the Loco2 founders’ for launching the business was to simplify booking and routing challenges involved in specifically planning long distance train travel across Europe, Andrews does not rule out adding additional modes of transport in future – “if we see demand for that”. There are now multiple multi-modal travel booking startups operating in the region, such as GoEuro and Rome2Rio, aiming to serve demand and grow usage by combining transport options to offer people more choice on routes, timings and price. Loco2 has stuck steadfastly to rails so far, although it has also with multi-modal player Rome2Rio. Meanwhile, other travel startups, such as car sharing platform blablacar, are also bringing private transport options into the European travel planning mix, to further expand the ways and means travelers can use to carry out a trip — while also, inexorably, expanding the competitive mix. The prices of long distance trips on blablacar are typically far cheaper than the cost of traveling by rail (although trips may well also take far longer). Discussing the competitive landscape, Andrews names KKR-owned Trainline, which , as its main rival but flags up that Loco2 does not take booking or payment card fees from users, unlike Trainline. He also name-checks GoEuro as a rival, at least in part. But goes on to say he is confident Loco2 has superior routing options vs its main competitors — thanks to greater market reach (such as covering Spain’s rail network). “Loco2 excels at genuine pan-European travel thanks to the big investments we’ve made in routing — Loco2 returns results for searches like Edinburgh-Milan or Cologne-Madrid. Despite the funding and acquisition fanfare, both Trainline and GoEuro fail at such itineraries, and no-one else in the market comes close,” he argues. Loco2 raised a further £670k in angel investment back in July 2015, although its funding levels are far more modest than others in the space — with only around £1 million in seed funding raised from business angels prior to its last raise. Whereas GoEuro, for example, pulled in a , led by Goldman Sachs. Andrews says Loco2 is now considering taking in more from investment to continue to grow the business — including by expanding into new markets. “We could choose to head for breakeven now but we don’t want to throttle our considerable growth potential, so we’re currently looking at possible VC/private equity options,” he says. The advantage of being an early digital mover in a very traditional industry, which required securing hard-won agreements with slow-moving rail companies to access data and booking systems, is likely to count for less as other startups who came later to the market benefit from a more general opening up of core systems. So Loco2 will likely need to accelerate its product focus — such as by adding mobile apps — to keep being able to claim advantages over better resourced rivals. There’s certainly little doubt the market is heating up now that it’s been opened up, and competition is going to get increasingly fierce — even if more people are tempted to book more European trips online. One Loco2 feature Andrews flags up as a personal favorite is a times/seats overview enabling users who are booking complex travel itinerary to get an easy overview of “sophisticated journeys spanning multiple rail operators” at the point of purchase (pictured right) . As well as aiming to smooth out travel planning wrinkles for its users, Andrews dubs customer service as a big priority for the business, with Loco2 — for instance — applying for compensation on behalf of users who book via its platform and go on to experience train delays. (On customer service generally, he points to the site achieving an average rating of 9.2/10 on Trustpilot after over 8,000 reviews — asserting this is “a claim that cannot be made by anyone else in the market”.) In terms of growth potential from here on in, he says Loco2 is eyeing selling more tickets for European rail trips to people who live outside the region. While, within Europe, he notes there are some key national rail operators outside the five countries it covers that have not yet released APIs for third parties to integrate with. “We would love to work more closely with these rail operators to help them open up new sales channels,” he adds. |
Acqui-hire experts Tasman acqui-hired by consulting juggernaut Ernst & Young | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | So you wanna buy a startup? But how do you get the deal signed and roll their team into yours? Consulting behemoth Ernst & Young wants to have the answers and rule M&A advisory services in Silicon Valley. So today it acqui-hired , Bay Area specialists in integrating acqui-hires and acquisitions into their new parent companies. Tasman’s founders Niki Lee and Shari Yocum will now be Principals in EY’s People Advisory Services squad, and most of their 10-person team will come with them. They’ve worked on tons of Silicon Valley deals since launching in 2011 with Salesforce, eBay, Lenovo, Autodesk, American Express, VMWare, and more. Tasman also won the 2015 M&A Service Of The Year award from M&A Advisors. The Tasman Consulting Team with Niki Lee bottom left and Shari Yocum bottom right was the 11th largest privately owned U.S. company as of 2015 with 212,000 employees. It’s one of the “Big 4” audit firms that provides professional tax and consulting services, alongside PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte and KPMG. “Ernst & Young is really serious about being a big piece of M&A in the valley,” Yocum tells me. Despite a chilly IPO market and trouble for unicorns, overall tech exits were up 21% in 2015 due to increased M&A, according to . But startup founders tell me the biggest problem with M&A is figuring out how to combine the teams to avoid a political infighting, overlap leading to misused resources, and deterioration of company culture. “They need to find a way to make the acquisition successful and execute on an overall integration plan” Yocum says. Lee calls this “HR transformation.” If not orchestrated well, the best employees can slip out of their golden handcuffs, and the deals can become wastes of money. “What we focus on is helping larger companies retain the technical talent and leadership talent when they come on board,” Yocum says. Tech giants are realizing that they can’t build everything themselves, and even if they could, it’s tough to build community for products when you’re known for something else. Acquisitions can be the answer to staying fresh and relevant, but can require nimble management to allow as much independence as possible while still taking advantage of the parent company’s resources. Successful purchases like Facebook’s buy of Instagram, where it kept the product separate but lent engineering, recruiting, anti-spam, internationalization, and advertising muscle, have re-proven the potential of M&A. And with these billion dollar deals come lucrative fees for services like EY that advise acquirers. Now the international consulting titan has some hometown heroes to get them into the best buyouts. |
null | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 4 | 18 | null |
Minecraft on Gear VR is available now for $6.99 | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | Get ready for lots of virtual cubes in virtual reality! Minecraft: Gear VR Edition is now available on the Oculus Store for $6.99. The blocky blockbuster was met with major fanfare when it was revealed last month that it was landing on the Gear VR. I had a chance to try it out and wasn’t , but it is undoubtedly a major development to have such a triple-A title landing on a virtual reality device. Before you head to the Oculus store on your Samsung Galaxy and buy it right up, wait! To play Minecraft on Gear VR, you’ll need a separate bluetooth gamepad first. Gameplay takes place in two flavors: cinema mode and full VR. In cinema mode you’re basically sitting on a little bench looking at a screen that you’re playing Minecraft on. Cool, but kind of a waste of the platform. Tap the Gear VR’s touchpad and you dive into Full VR gameplay. Awesome, but odd. There are a couple of things that inexplicably make this game especially dizzying. First, because of the gamepad, movement is much more dynamic than most Gear VR users might be used to. Second, the game utilizes snapturns, which are jumpy little camera rotations designed to make gameplay dizzying. In reality the movements are pretty jarring and kind of downplay the overall immersiveness of the experience. Though the app is in the Oculus Store, it is not available for download on the Oculus Rift VR headset quite yet. No official word on when the Rift port of Minecraft will be arriving, though that’s probably fine because Rift users should be used to waiting by now. |
Elon Musk plans ‘Red Dragon’ Mars mission for as early as 2018 | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | Somewhere, Elon Musk is bored; you can tell because he starts tweeting like crazy about colonizing the solar system. “Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018,” this morning, apropos of nothing. More details followed, in typical Musk style. Dragon 2 is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system. Red Dragon Mars mission is the first test flight. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Anywhere? Perhaps Venus, someone suggested. It could land on Venus no problem, but would last maybe a few hours. Tough local environment. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Musk did say that with propulsive landing (as opposed to parachute or impact padding) and the company’s own high-performance heat shield, setting down on the surface of a planet — be it Mars, Venus, or Neptune — would be a cakewalk. But getting there is a different story. But wouldn't recommend transporting astronauts beyond Earth-moon region. Wouldn't be fun for longer journeys. Internal volume ~size of SUV. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) In other words, the first SpaceX missions to Mars will definitely be uncrewed — but that was a given, considering the risks involved. Musk will certainly provide more details later, but there will be as many test runs and supply missions as it takes to bring risk down to an acceptable level. The Red Dragon concept isn’t new — it’s been talked about for years, but this is as official an announcement as we’ve seen in that time. SpaceX actually put up of what a Red Dragon mission would look like late last year. The cabin will have to be upgraded, as well. Being stuck in an SUV-sized space for even a few hours here on Earth isn’t a pleasant experience, let alone months or years with nothing outside but hard vacuum. No, the current generation of Dragons will stay relatively close to the planet for now, at least when they’ve got people in them. |
Samsung’s Gear 360 camera is going on sale in 2 days and we still don’t know how much it costs | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | Samsung unveiled the Gear 360 virtual reality camera at Mobile World Conference. People were generally impressed, but without a price tag most withheld judgment. Well today onstage at the Samsung Developer’s Conference, the company revealed that the 4K 360-degree cameras will be going on sale April 29 in select countries and….. we still don’t know the price. We do know the device is in Europe, which is about $400 USD. If Samsung can stick in that general $350-$400 area than this could be a big development. Now, $350-$400 for a little racquetball sized camera sounds pretty expensive (and let’s be honest, it is), BUT that amount for a 4K 360-degree camera is actually a pretty great deal these days. Add in the fact that the Gear 360 plays so nicely with Samsung handsets and the Gear VR, which is the most popular decently-powered VR headset on the market, and you’re left with pretty killer potential for a great VR ecosystem from Samsung. The 153-gram camera hosts a pair of fisheye F2.0 lenses that can capture near-4K (3840 x 1920) quality video or 30 megapixel photos. It can hold up to 128GB of content on its internal microSD slot and can record for up to 140 minutes of active use. The camera has some cool playback features that play well with the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones. You can live-preview content captured on the Gear 360, and, after recording it, you can opt to save footage to a phone over WiFi for 2D viewing on the mobile app or a true 360 experience through the Gear VR. Past that, you can also share your captured content directly to 360 video-compatible services like YouTube or Facebook. This thing comes out in two days so hopefully we find out the price soon. Given the emphasis Samsung has placed on marketing VR in the US, I wouldn’t be shocked to see Samsung drop the price a bit lower than $350-$400 and give all of those new Galaxy owners sporting Gear VR headsets one more reason to buy into virtual reality. |
That time when we ate super-powered hot sauce live on Facebook | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | I’ve officially been at TechCrunch for a week and a half now, which I’ve been informed is the hot sauce anniversary. You know, the one where Thrillist sends you a bottle of scientifically-engineered hot sauce made from peppers with names like the Trinidad moruga scorpion, Carolina reaper and the only slightly less ominously named ghost pepper. And I’ve been assured that the only appropriate way to mark the hot sauce anniversary is to consume the stuff on live video streamed directly to Facebook. So I did that, along with Anthony Ha and , who partnered with GE to concoct , a hot sauce (and extremely effective promotional gimmick) they’re calling “apocalyptically hot.”
The “K” is short for Kelvin, the full name serving as an homage to “the temperature at which physicists believe all things start to break down and everyday matter no longer exists.” “All things” being a broad and comprehensive list that almost certainly includes the delicate insides of my mouth, which, aside from moderate amounts of Sriracha and Thai food, don’t often dabble in the dark, peppery arts (this is me bracing you for the , in which I cry on camera). For the record, the “all things [that] start to break down” also includes glass bottles, which is where GE steps in on the promotion. The company, currently in the throes of an image revamp charged with bringing more millennials on-board, provided packing materials comprised of silicon carbide and nickel-based superalloys, not coincidentally some of the same materials it uses to construct jet engines (on its downtime from the more important work of making hot sauce), ensuring that the hots stay hot. The materials are also said to preserve the sauce’s taste, which, I can now confirm is “a little sweet,” courtesy of the apple, cane sugar and garlic also included in amongst the pepper party. Little consolation, in a sauce containing multiple strains of peppers capable of reaching more than two million on the (compare that to the garden variety jalapeno, which rates around 5,000), which may or may not have been grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum I don’t know why I agreed to this? Peer pressure? Probably. An attempt to attain legendary TechCrunch status by dropping dead my second week on the job? Perhaps. In the faint hope that I might meet a ? Almost certainly. Find out whether or not I die in the above video and am in fact now writing this a blogging ghost. Hopefully I’ll make it to the end of my first month, which I’m told is the eating-broken-glass anniversary. The limited edition hot sauce is already sold out, but if you’d like to be as brave as us, you can . |
The state of election technology is… improving | Joe Kiniry | 2,016 | 4 | 27 |
With the U.S. knee-deep in what has been an unusual presidential primary season, to say the least, many eligible voters are highly engaged in the process, passionate about their preferred candidates. But when it comes to voting trends, a reality check is in order: Voter turnout in the U.S. during the last midterm election hit the lowest point since the 1940s. In fact, the number of Americans heading to the polls each election has been declining for the last 50 years, which helps explain a concerted push by election officials to deploy technology that simplifies the process of, and increases participation in, elections. Before delving into the current and future state of election technology, let’s summarize how we arrived at this point. Most jurisdictions today are using election technology developed in the 1990s, and the typical voting system is running an operating system that is no longer vendor-supported, no longer has security updates (which couldn’t be applied anyway because of certification requirements) and relies on technology that wasn’t considered “cutting edge” even when it was purchased. All of which begs the question: Why are these outdated systems still in use? Unsurprisingly, the answer comes down to money and contracts. Jurisdictions entered long-term buy/lease contracts with technology vendors and, due to significant budget constraints that have persisted the past decade or more, have not been in a financial position to write off these investments or engage in protracted, expensive upgrade projects. And on the vendor side, massive consolidation has left just a handful of vendors controlling the entire market. Election officials tend to hit the pause button during presidential election years when it comes to ambitious new technology deployment. While there is an understandable risk aversion to trying something different when the stakes and voting volume are at their highest, traditional vendors are evolving their technology portfolios, and a set of emerging vendors with technical depth is entering the market with modern software solutions. The emergence of new vendors is mainly about (1) recognizing the new business opportunities afforded by the evolution of jurisdictions’ voting methods (e.g. Colorado’s move to vote centers) and (2) witnessing the end of life for existing equipment and the expiration of contracts, which produces potential clients for the first time in years. The emerging vendors will offer election officials and municipalities more competition and choice. Advancing election technology has proven to be an incredibly vexing proposition for all stakeholders — state and local election officials, voting technology vendors, voter integrity advocates and, of course, the voters themselves. That said, there are several election technology developments that we expect to see play out leading up to the 2016 November elections. Three counties — Travis County, TX (which includes Austin); Los Angeles County; and San Francisco City/County — are now taking steps toward open-source election technology. As 2016 progresses, we should start to see the impact of these efforts, as other jurisdictions will be watching closely. More widespread deployment will require addressing common misconceptions around the security of open-source technology. The fact is that open source introduces much needed transparency to elections and voting, and a fundamental tenet of secure systems is that they should be open and transparent. Increasingly, influential jurisdictions are demanding that products and systems built for them are open source. These demands pressure vendors that have a vested interest in continuing to build proprietary, closed systems where they believe it is easier to protect their intellectual property. If open-source deployments go well in leading jurisdictions, it will open the floodgates to widespread adoption. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology boils down to ownership and control. Current voting systems are vendor-controlled, built with proprietary hardware that election officials must rely on the vendor to maintain over time. As jurisdictions move away from these proprietary vendor-controlled systems to COTS products and technologies the jurisdictions themselves can own, the dynamics of voting will change. The use of COTS hardware will provide much-needed flexibility and cost transparency for election officials in purchasing and supporting their equipment, and the resulting deployment of iPads, Android devices and other COTS products will provide both voters and election officials with technology with which they are more familiar. Ultimately, election officials would rather use an iPad than a proprietary black box to check voters into a polling station; eventually, jurisdictions will want to simply hand voters a tablet or mobile device for ballot casting. User experience (UX) plays a very important role in our digital lives. Although security and reliability guarantees are most important, UX is a critical aspect in elections: Dramatic UX failures, such as Florida’s infamous “butterfly ballot” in the 2000 presidential election, have the potential to confuse voters and affect election results. Elections are infrequent and important, and an enduring pain point for voters is that they are asked to vote using unfamiliar and unintuitive user interfaces that do not incorporate state of the art in UX practice and research. The advent of technologies like highly responsive multi-touch displays and voice recognition has made many computing systems dramatically more understandable and easier to use over the last decade, but computerized election technology has not kept up. Expect 2016 to be the beginning of a sea change in election technology user experience. Pressure will come from jurisdictions, election workers and voters from all demographics. Aging baby boomers will look for an intuitive user experience that works well for those with failing eyesight and arthritic hands, and others will expect voting technology to be at least as intuitive as an iPad or Kindle. At no time in history have more adversaries been using information technology to affect national security. As election technology ages, security risks increase — particularly with closed, proprietary systems that offer limited visibility to outside parties able to identify vulnerabilities. While defending election technology against cyberattacks is critical, it is even more important to be able to detect such attacks, mitigate them and attempt to identify the attackers. Unfortunately, computerized election technology has been repeatedly shown to be insecure. The closed nature of election systems makes it difficult to detect compromised election results — and next to impossible to mitigate or attribute the associated attacks. Cyberattacks against computerized voting systems will inevitably increase, given the high stakes associated with elections. Awareness of this inevitability among election officials has grown; as a result, expect more attention paid to security and the need to view election technology as a “critical system” that demands high assurance (i.e. the ability to make certain provable guarantees about its function and reliability). Spacecraft, weapon guidance systems and passenger airplane control systems are among the technologies built using high-assurance methods, because they must be resilient to cyber threats and function correctly at all times. In 2016, we will see more companies claiming they’ve figured out how to securely conduct elections over the Internet. In reality, we are far from that point. Last July, the U.S. Vote Foundation released a comprehensive (of which we are co-authors) on the security of Internet voting systems, and challenges that remain to put in place end-to-end verifiable Internet voting systems that are transparent, secure, auditable and usable. Before that, Galois published a paper, “ ,” which explains an attack against common home routers that enables a hacker to intercept a PDF ballot and silently modify that ballot before sending it along to an election authority — an attack that is almost undetectable. Worryingly, PDF ballots have been used in remote voting trials, and, in some cases in binding elections in the U.S. over the past decade. Election and voting technology remains of significant interest to a broad range of stakeholders, and in 2016 there will be meaningful movement toward ensuring these systems have the correctness, security, user experience and transparency required to ensure trustworthy elections. |
Court holds Amazon liable for years of unauthorized in-app purchases made by kids | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | In an entirely unsurprising , a federal judge has sided with the FTC in the agency’s lawsuit against Amazon, which had said that the company did not do enough to safeguard customers against unauthorized in-app purchases made by children. According to the FTC’s original , Amazon billed its customers millions of dollars in these charges. The problem came about because the way its software was designed – it allowed kids to spend unlimited amounts of money in apps and games without requiring parental consent. The FTC had previously settled with both and Google on similar charges, so it’s no shock that Amazon now finds itself in the same boat. Amazon introduced its in-app purchasing system in its Appstore in November 2011, but it didn’t require passwords on in-app purchases, including kids games. Taking advantage of this fact, game developers would then often blur the lines between what’s free and paid, offering kids the chance to buy in app currencies, coins, or other items to enhance gameplay. In one particularly egregious example, a game called “Ice Age Village” included an in-app purchasing option that cost $99.99. Amazon updated its in-app purchasing system in March 2012 to address this problem, but it only required passwords on purchases over $20. Children could continue to make individual in-app purchases of less than that amount without a parent’s approval. Of course, these could still add up. In early 2013, the system was updated again, this time requiring passwords, but allowing for a 15-minute window where no password was required – but this wasn’t properly disclosed. Amazon didn’t obtain “informed consent” for purchases until an update in July 2014, the FTC says. In the meantime, thousands of parents had complained not only about the unauthorized in-app purchases but also about the complicated refund process. Amazon didn’t explain how to request a refund, and even suggested that refunds weren’t possible, the original complaint stated. While this new ruling favors consumers in the matter, the exact amount of monetary relief has yet to be determined. Representatives from both sides will present their arguments, and the court will decide on a figure in the “coming months.” The FTC is making a case for full refunds, however. The settlement figure is likely to be sizable. According to the FTC’s , its settlements with Apple and Google resulted in refunds to customers totalling over $50 million. |
Facebook adds Dropbox support and video Chat Heads to Messenger | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | Good news, everyone. Facebook Messenger has two new features! The first inches it (as happens to all messaging apps) one step closer to just emailing someone: you can now . Just hit the “More” button in a conversation as if you were going to drop in one of those horrible Bitmoji. Dropbox should be right there, and you’ll be able to go through your files and directories. Photos and videos will appear instantly in-chat, while the others will act as links to the Dropbox app (or, failing that, the web location, as if you’d shared it from your desktop). So Facebook won’t be hosting your sensitive PowerPoints and PDFs, just linking to them. Should help reduce friction and keep users in-app under a greater variety of use cases. Facebook actually made a file-sharing solution for Groups . Josh said Dropbox should “worry about growth,” which is always good advice, but in this case the worm has turned. Next up: Video chat now has the option of switching to a rather than full screen. On Android, that means you’ll be able to have a floating video chat circle on-screen follow you anywhere on your phone — perhaps even to different video chat apps. iOS users will have to stay inside Messenger, sadly. Both features should be available within a few days, so watch for updates. |
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