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Is it time to invest in IoT? | Tim Chou | 2,016 | 4 | 11 |
I published my first book, in 2004. At the time, I was president of Oracle On Demand, which served as a starting point for Oracle’s billion-dollar cloud business. In the book I discussed the fundamental economic reasons software should be delivered as a service. As an example of new startups in the field, I discussed four companies, , , and OpenHarbor. None of them were public companies when the book was published. Salesforce was still under $86 million in revenue. While I didn’t get all four correct, three of the four have gone on to be major companies driving the second generation of enterprise software. It’s 12 years later. Some have said that enterprise software is a mature business; CEM, ERP, HR and purchasing software are now all being delivered as a cloud service. So is it the end? I don’t think so. While second-generation software has helped reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of some enterprises, it has done little to transform our physical world. Power, water, agriculture, transportation, construction and healthcare have barely been touched. But that’s about to change. Industrial machines or enterprise things are increasingly being instrumented and connected. John Chambers, former Cisco CEO, says . While you may question that, we already know 100,000 wind turbines are connected with the capacity to send 400 sensors’ worth of data every five seconds. So we’re going to end up with a lot of smart, connected things. Unfortunately, all our connection, collection, analysis, learning, middleware and application technology has been built to support applications for the Internet of People. Things are NOT people. Things exist where people aren’t. Things have much more to say and things talk much more frequently. A Joy Global coal-mining machine has vibration sensors that sample 10,000 times per second. We need a new generation of enterprise application, middleware, analytic, collection and connection cloud service products to build precision machines for mining, transportation, healthcare, construction, power, water and agriculture. Some have begun to make the investments. GE Software was founded in 2011 with a $1 billion investment. CEO Jeff Immelt has declared that GE needed to evolve into a software-and-analytics company, lest its industrial machines become mere commodities. Immelt has set an ambitious target of $15 billion in software revenue by 2020. GE plans to achieve this through its new software platform under the leadership of CEO of GE Digital, Bill Ruh. has taken an M&A path and invested more than $400 million in a series of companies: for $112 million, a $105 million acquisition of and for $170 million. On the venture side you may not have noticed, but , a Chicago-based IoT startup, beat Slack and Uber to become . They raised $45 million at a $1 billion post-funding valuation. I’ll let you be the judge of whether it’s time to invest in IoT. But if you’re an early-stage or even late-stage investor, it would be wise to be a student of this area as it promises to create as big a disruption as the second generation of enterprise software. And if you’re a startup with a vision to build products for things, not people, get started. Maybe in 12 years we’ll talk about you like we now talk about VMware, NetSuite and Salesforce. |
Cloud-based video production platform 90 Seconds lands $7.5M Series A led by Sequoia India | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | Despite the , making a professional-looking one is still a complicated process that usually involves chains of emails and uploads. wants to fix that problem with its cloud-based platform, which lets users handle almost every part of the video production process in one place. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $7.5 million Series A led by Sequoia India. Other investors in this round include pay television provider SKY TV New Zealand, Airtree Ventures, Beenext and Oleg Tscheltzoff, founder of stock image agency Fotolia.com. Now based in Singapore, 90 Seconds was launched in Auckland in 2010 by CEO Tim Norton after he struggled to find an online video production service for shoots in different places. “It was hard to get things done,” he says. “The process varied widely and it was a big deal to go between countries.” Now the startup’s goal is to make video production “super fast, as fast as Uber,” no matter how geographically scattered its creators are. “It might not need to arrive in two minutes, but videos need to be published within anywhere between 24 hours to two to three weeks. We want to make the workflow real time,” Norton says. 90 Seconds started with online production tools before launching its marketplace, which now lists 5,000 video professionals from 70 countries. The company plans to continue adding to the mobile version of its software until clients can manage every part of the production process — from commissioning a video to reviewing footage and uploading to YouTube and social media platforms — on their tablets or smartphones. Timeliness is important for 90 Seconds’ users, who have included Visa, Samsung and Microsoft, because they need to take advantage of trending topics and search terms. More companies are also using the platform to handle longer shoots, like TV spots. Hooking up companies with creators and giving them all the software tools they need to produce a video is how 90 Seconds differentiates from other video production sites (which include , and ) and also what it hopes will future-proof its business model from new competitors as demand for online videos grows. The startup plans to open offices in San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong and Berlin this year. Norton says its international expansion started “organically” based on where its customers needed to find people for shoots, instead of recruiting in advance. 90 Seconds’ take rate currently includes in-house project managers who work with clients, but it wants to be able to outsource that role to its marketplace, as well. |
NASA troubleshoots Kepler spacecraft from 75 million miles away | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | NASA experienced a close call this weekend with its planet-seeking Kepler space telescope. On April 7 , during a scheduled contact, mission operations engineers discovered that Kepler was in Emergency Mode (EM). It was the first time the spacecraft had been in EM in its 7-year lifetime and NASA is currently working to understand why it happened now. During a scheduled contact on Thurs, 4/7, Kepler was discovered in emergency mode. — NASA Kepler and K2 (@NASAKepler) Because of Kepler’s orbit, engineers had to remotely troubleshoot the spacecraft from 75 million miles away. Making matters especially difficult, any signal sent from Earth takes 13 minutes traveling at the speed of light to travel to the spacecraft and return back home. Luckily, three days after the EM status was identified, NASA successfully recovered the spacecraft and Kepler is now stable. According to , “EM is the lowest operational mode and is fuel intensive.” While Kepler already outlived out its intended mission lifetime, the emergency state troubled scientists because the telescope has remained an incredibly useful tool to the astronomy community. Goldstone Observatory, one of the DSN antennae in California, Image courtesy of NASA Upon the realization of the space telescope’s state, the Kepler team declared a spacecraft emergency, which allowed them to have priority access to the Deep Space Network (DSN). NASA’s other missions had to surrender their scheduled telemetry time on DSN in order to provide the Kepler team the resources they required. Developed over 50 years ago, the DSN is a system of 3 large radio antennae strategically placed around the world that enable communication with spacecraft in deep space. The antennae are situated in the United States, Spain, and Australia; each approximately 120 degrees apart in longitude so that constant communication can be maintained as our planet rotates about its axis. The antennae in the Deep Space Network / Image courtesy of Wikipedia/SimonOrJ After recovering Kepler, the team cancelled the spacecraft emergency and the DSN ground communications returned to normal scheduling. Illustration of transit method / Image courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center Launched in 2009, Kepler’s primary mission was to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems in our own Milky Way Galaxy. The space telescope identifies exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system) using a technique called the transit method. When planets transit in front of their host star, the brightness of that star will dim ever-so-slightly as we view that transit from a telescope. Kepler can detect the existence of a planet, as well as its size and orbital characteristics, from these dimming events. With the transit method, Kepler has already over 1,000 exoplanets in our galaxy. Most notably, Kepler recently the first Earth-sized planet in the of a another star: the zone where water wouldn’t freeze or boil off, but could potentially exist in a liquid state – a key ingredient for life as we know it). In total, Kepler has cost around $600 million. Most of that cost was required for development and launch. Today, it costs around $18 million each year to maintain operations and scientific research. Now that Kepler has been recovered, the team is conducting an investigation to identify the source of the EM status and plans on returning to science operations soon. NASA stated that the spacecraft checkout is to continue through the week. |
Venture firm Accel just raised a new $500 million European fund | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | is on a roll. Shortly after a $500 million seed fund and a $1.5 billion growth fund for U.S.-focused investments, the venture firm has yet another fund. This time, Accel raised $500 million for Accel London V, a fund focused on Series A and B investments in Europe and Israel. The firm announced Accel London IV — it was a $475 million fund. Despite an increasingly uncertain economy, it looks like Accel has no issue raising new funds. Raising a new fund every two or three years is a healthy cycle for VC firms doing well. Recent European investments include , , and — so the fund can invest in anything from marketplaces to fintech startups and enterprise software solutions as long as the startup is based in Europe or Israel. When it comes to exits, Supercell to SoftBank and was a spectacular exit for Accel. More recently, went public in France. In total, Accel’s London team has generated $15 billion in exit market value in 2015 and taken a cut of this big cake — not too shabby. Maybe you’re an entrepreneur and you’re thinking that today is your lucky day! Accel now has plenty of money in its bank account, and here’s what the team is looking for. The firm wants to focus more on marketplaces, software-as-a-service business models and infrastructure projects. Accel already has a well-established reputation in Europe. And you may already know that the firm tends to shy away from seed rounds and start investing in Series A rounds. The firm doesn’t plan on changing any of that with the new fund. I’ve asked Accel partner Harry Nelis a few questions about Accel’s strategy in Europe. Yes, we’re going to continue to focus on Series A investments. Early stage is our sweet spot and where most of our investments are made — we typically invest in Series A and Series B rounds. Although, sometimes we go in a bit earlier when we meet an exceptional entrepreneur with a great idea or we’ll write larger checks when there’s a strategic opportunity to do so. We typically make Series A and Series B investments, which are between $5 million and $10 million for the first round, and ultimately invest about $15 million per company over time. In certain areas, private market valuations are out of kilter, and there will be an adjustment. This is particularly pronounced in the U.S. However, a private market valuation is really a glimpse into the future. Any meaningful valuation takes hard work, and Europe’s entrepreneurs are working hard to build sustainable businesses. From the start, our strategy has been to partner with the most extraordinary entrepreneurs and companies from their earliest stages through their growth. This has served us well, leading to investments in some of Europe’s most successful enterprise and consumer technology companies, including Avito and Showroomprive, Supercell and Qliktech. |
Together, we can make this auto-Facebooking camera harness for dogs a reality | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | Look at that face. The problem with Facebook isn’t the amount of pictures of dogs, it’s the of pictures dogs. Finally someone is addressing this scourge — unfortunately, it’s an ad agency. So this isn’t a sponsored post, but it may as well be. “The Posting Tail” is a ridiculous prototype device created by Saatchi & Saatchi Madrid for Pedigree. A Raspberry Pi monitors a tail sensor, waiting for excited wags — which it can, the creators claim, tell apart from ordinary wags. When it detects one, a camera mounted on the stable “croup” area on the back half of the dog (look it up) takes a picture and immediately uploads it to Facebook via an attached mobile data dongle. You’ll probably want to create a new account for your dog, or page anyhow, since dogs aren’t technically human. On the plus side, the new means that dogs can’t participate in the copyright process, leaving any viral earnings to you. There’s only one of these rigs, alas, though any of our readers located in Spain can apply at to try the Posting Tail for a week. As much in jest as this product may be, it actually seems like something many pet owners would love — pet wearable companies are already being , and devices like the are likewise gaining popularity. A social media platform actually mounted on a dog is surely the next step. At least… it’s the step we deserve. Please, tell Pedigree to make this gloriously dumb idea a real product. |
Americans are afraid of autonomous cars | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | In January of this year, conducted a phone survey of nearly 2,000 drivers over the age of 18 and found some surprising results: 75 percent of respondents “would be afraid to allow an autonomous vehicle to drive itself with them in it.” Another 20 percent were cool with the idea, leaving 5 percent who are apparently abstaining in favor of waiting for flying cars. We’ve got a few years to adjust to the idea of fully autonomous vehicles like driving us around without any human input. In the meantime, we do have advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), which are semi-autonomous, coming to market as we speak. About half of the respondents in AAA’s survey trusted lane-departure warning and lane-keeping systems, as well as adaptive cruise control. Only 44 percent trusted the systems that will be included on , and a mere 36 percent trusted self-parking systems. Not surprisingly, people who already have these systems in their cars are far more likely to trust them. The numbers jump by 25-30 percentage points for respondents who have used the technology in their own vehicles; for instance, 84 percent of people with lane keeping trust it, versus 50 percent of those who don’t have it in their cars. While fully autonomous vehicles still worry most of us, we do want the ADAS features mentioned above in our next cars if we don’t have them now, according to the survey. But we don’t all want these features for the same reasons. Baby boomers cited safety as their reason for wanting semi-autonomous technology, while millennials wanted convenience and the latest technology. Interestingly, women were more likely to say they wanted these features to help reduce stress. For those grumpy holdouts against even ADAS tech, more than 8 in 10 said it was because they are better drivers than any robot overlord. (The would beg to differ with these folks.) Another big slice of the respondent pie, especially younger drivers and drivers with kids of their own, said they didn’t want to pay extra for the technology. And women were more likely to cite not knowing enough about the technology or worrying that it would be too complicated. No matter how worried people are today, these systems are going to become more and more common. As the survey shows, once drivers have experience with ADAS features, they trust them more. Once you trust lane keeping, it’s a short hop to trusting . And from there, it’s only a matter of time before we’re comfortable watching movies in a vehicle without a steering wheel. |
Legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin lays out his hopes for colonizing Mars | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | When I met with Buzz Aldrin to discuss his new book , he described himself as possibly “among the luckiest guys.” After all, his mother was born in 1903, the same year the Wright brothers made their first flight, and Aldrin himself was born less than three decades later. Yet in the span of his own life he’s seen the beginnings of the American space program, he went to the Moon and today he’s still advocating for the next step — Mars. (In fact, , a virtual reality project in which Aldrin participated.) “I’m playing everything I can to serve my country the best I can,” he told me. “Who are we serving? Generations in the future.” Much of the current excitement in space travel comes from private companies , so I also asked Aldrin about how he sees the government and the private sector working together to get us to Mars. “It’s government competing with the private sector,” he said. Noting that many private sector efforts are government-subsidized, he added, “The government is going to be strongly involved in going to Mars, but they will be relying more and more on contracting industry and telling them what we want. Then the private sector will be in charge of making it happen. But the prescription will not be, ‘Hey, Elon, go do what you want.'”
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Lyft and Didi Kuaidi launching cross-platform service this week in U.S. | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | and are gearing up this week to launch a public beta of its collaborative service in the U.S. for Chinese travelers visiting America. This is by way of interlinking APIs so that customers of one app can hail cars in the other’s market. In the next few weeks, Lyft and Didi will launch a public beta for Americans traveling to China. Lyft and will also launch in the coming weeks cross-platform services for Southeast Asians traveling to the U.S. and Americans traveling to Southeast Asia. What these public betas make possible is the ability for travelers to keep using the local, ride-hailing apps they’re used to. That means, for example, Chinese travelers can continue using the Didi app in the U.S. to request rides, with the main difference being that the drivers will be from Lyft. Chinese passengers can also pay in the same method they’re used to (WeChat or Alipay), see the estimated cost in their local currency and have the option to communicate with the driver — even if they don’t speak English — via an in-app translation service. Drivers will make the same amount of money as they usually do in the U.S., Lyft said. The same goes for Didi in China and Grab in Southeast Asia. Lyft would not disclose the revenue deal they’ve worked out with partners, though one reporter in the room said they heard that Didi is allowing Lyft to keep 100 percent of the revenue. Lyft would neither confirm or deny that rumor. Ultimately, these partnerships are in place because Lyft, Didi and Grab believe these types of services need to be localized and account for cultural differences. That said, Uber takes an entirely different approach. Instead of partnering with local providers, its strategy is to aggressively expand into countries, including China, and try to battle the current ridesharing leaders there. Didi’s platform, which includes taxis, buses, private cars and more, facilitated 1.43 billion rides last year in China. Daily, Didi sees 10 million rides, with 14 million car owners and drivers. Grab, which operates in Southeast Asia, currently has 250,000 drivers, operates in six countries, 40 cities and sees 1.5 million bookings a day. [gallery ids="1305707,1305708,1305694,1305693"] The launch of Didi’s service in the U.S. via Lyft and impending launch of additional cross-platform services comes a few months after Lyft, Didi, Ola and Grab to work together on technology and services. Although executives from Ola were not present today, Lyft says Ola, which is based in India, is still involved in the partnership. |
Review: Boosted Board Dual+ flourishes in the streets of NYC | Stefan Etienne | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | project, the Boosted Board Dual+ is an electric skateboard with a top of speed of 22mph — I’ve nearly gotten killed plenty of times riding it, mainly because it’s insanely fun. I’m not the only one who thinks this way about riding a piece made it his main form of transportation around the city. If you’re a daily watcher of his vlogs, then you’re all too familiar with the Boosted Board, specifically this exact model. , $1,299 or $999 for slower models Its design is every bit as functional as it is fast. Even if you were a passer-by and had no idea that the Boosted Board was an electric skateboard, there’d have to be some compliment offered toward its appearance: after all, it’s not ugly. The board itself is designed to be sleek, with an outward curvature (on either side) originating from both ends, which evens out toward the middle. Despite being a large deck (it’s a longboard, after all), Boosted opted to keep the battery and motor enclosures as sleek as possible. This is also done for rider comfort: both sections are mounted slightly above the deck’s surface, so that when it flexes nothing else is damaged. The result: better absorption of shocks. Note: Boosted Boards aren’t waterproof, something I’ll speak about later. As for the Bluetooth remote: there are three inputs: a safety button (must be pressed to move), scroll wheel (the throttle) and a multi-function button (turns the remote on, shows range and switches between riding modes). It uses a rather old USB plug to charge (the mini B) and I can’t understand why it does. Otherwise, it’s the least impressive part of the kit, something I wish the designers paid more attention to. But it works well and that’s most important. The Boosted Board became my primary means of transportation for most of my errands and obligations, and that’s how I learned to live with its varying mileage. It felt adventurous and irresponsible, which is how I’d describe riding the board to friends and strangers. To cope with the fact that new riders might be thrown off, or that existing skateboarders (like myself) would yearn for more acceleration and speed, the board has four speed profiles. Pressing three times on the main button switches between the following speeds: How far does it go on a single charge? That’s subjective — the range depends on which mode, the incline, weight of the rider and throttle usage. Moreover, I ride exclusively on “Pro mode,” so I am not conserving as much energy as I should; the trade-off is getting from point A to B in no time flat. My swiftness is not only because I’m comfortable riding it, but because I have the best version of the board: $1,299 and $999 versions only have top speeds of 20mph and 18mph, respectively. More often than not, with “Pro mode” activated I would reach the top speed of 20mph, and make use of the bike lanes, main streets and the Westside Highway. My range is between 6-8 miles on a single charge, meaning that the board will only last a one-way trip. Solution: bring the fast charger. It’s not incredibly heavy or large, and charges the Boosted Board from naught to full juice in one hour, or 85 percent in 30 minutes. Of course, bringing a two-prong charger everywhere might feel counter-productive to some, but it’s a fact that you’re racing through town (at near the city speed limit) and it’s awesome. Of course, there are things I wish the Boosted Board was better at: riding in the rain (it’s dangerous, messy and ill-advised) and better range (or an interchangeable battery?). But, then again, for a first-generation product, the Boosted Board is as refined as can be.
Should you buy one? Absolutely. But, have you ridden a skateboard before? Do you have some backbone to filter between cars or take some bumps along the way? Even for experienced riders, the Boosted Board takes some learning curve to master fully (go slow!) and only then can you start cycling through the riding modes and really start flying through the city. The short range leaves something to be desired, but a fast-charging battery takes some of that inconvenience away. After all, the reward of beating (and avoiding) the NYC subway can’t be beat. Riding the Boosted Board is about style and speed; the result being pure fun. As for personal sentiment? If I see a fellow rider in the street, be ready to race: I can beat Ubers off the start line. |
Lady Gaga’s startup Backplane burns out and sells assets | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | “Why do you need money from me when you have every great investor on earth?” That’s the question that caused to buckle under the weight of its own early buzz. Lady Gaga’s social network builder startup has run out of money, gone out of business and sold its assets to a group of previous and new investors who will try to restart it. That’s according to multiple sources, the legal firms that handled the sale and its former CEO. Backplane’s legacy will serve as a warning of the dangers of fundraising at too high of valuations with exploitative terms in party rounds where no investor takes responsibility. The company is also emblematic of the trouble caused when lavish lifestyles drive up burn rates and bleed companies dry. Five years and , the two issues combined to destroy the startup. Founded in 2011, Backplane raised a Series A of in Silicon Valley. Sequoia, Google Ventures, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Greylock, Menlo Ventures, Formation 8 and Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures all poured money in at around a $40 million valuation. That was despite basically just being a fan site for Lady Gaga with hopes of launching social networks for brands. It eventually raised $5 million more. But after three years of jet-set founders running two fancy offices, the company had failed to make progress on product and I reported multiple sources saying . Backplane tried to pivot into , cutting its burn rate $160,000 per month, bringing on new CEO Scott Harrison and restructuring as a self-serve social network maker mobile app. It grew to 15,000 communities and planned to build apps for Burning Man and LSU. The problem was that Harrison says the big-name VC money came with tough liquidation preferences that would give those investors returns first if Backplane had a successful exit. When the cash recently ran out, the firms wouldn’t put more in, and their reluctance and the bad deal terms scared away new investors. Harrison tells me my article on the company’s previous stumbles also hurt its fundraising abilities. A Chinese backer was supposed to spearhead a $2.5 million round to keep the startup alive, but they dropped out last-minute. Backplane went belly up. A source says Backplane defaulted on loan obligations to lenders, and Sherwood Partners confirms it worked with the company to sell its assets through Dorsey & Whitney LLP. The law firm confirms to me that the business shut down and all the assets were recently sold to investors with plans for “restarting the concept” of Backplane. A source provided this notice of the sale of all of Backplane’s assets, including patents, software, code, office equipment, trademarks, URLs and other intellectual property. Harrison explains, “Essentially, a number of the Series A investors have started a [new company] to continue the business. They are investing to get the business started and a couple of new investors have come on board to provide additional seed funding. The goal is to restart with a clean cap structure, great product, strong partnerships, great team and lean business.” This restructuring could let the VCs save face, and potentially get a second shot at earning off the money they already sank. But now, without the baggage of the original funding structure, Backplane/Place is more attractive to investors. Harrison notes, “The system continues to operate and efforts are under way to continue business operation and release a number of new apps. Partners like Gaga and others will become paying clients and not simply strategic partnerships.” Place is still in the app stores and some of the communities are quite active, yet it’s unclear who will run the company. A rare photo from 2011 of Lady Gaga meeting some of the early Backplane team The Backplane tale shows how much can change in startup land in just four years. During Backplane’s heyday, VCs were willing to throw big sums and valuations at unproven companies. Few winced as lean teams ballooned in plush offices, and founders flew to conferences and events instead of building products. If the implosions of Backplane, and are the brutal hangover from those frothy times, hopefully they’ll teach the industry to sober up. But as with every drunk, “Never again” often quickly turns to “Another round!” |
Tim Draper has raised $190 million for his newest venture fund | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | In late 2013, Tim Draper the decades-old firm he’d co-founded, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, but he suggested he might be back some day. Specifically, he , “I am not leaving DFJ. Ever. I am just skipping a fund to do some work building Draper University” — which is Draper’s for aspiring entrepreneurs — “and experimenting with new models for venture capital.” He’d added at the time: “I will of course be an investor in any new fund we create.” That last part is true; Draper remains an investor in DFJ’s funds, including its newest, , vehicle, closed in February. As for just skipping a fund, it looks more permanent than that. In fact, Draper is announcing today that he has just raised a brand new, $190 million early-stage fund that he will co-lead with his son, Billy, as well as Andy Tang. The brand the trio are using: , which has historically been a personal investment vehicle for Draper. This new fund represents the first time outside investors are involved with it, though Draper remains its biggest limited partner. Before joining Draper Associates, Billy Draper was most recently a designer at the online rental marketplace . Tang, meanwhile, was a longtime managing director at ; he has also served as the CEO of Draper’s co-working space, . Another son of Draper, Adam Draper, separately co-founded and remains very involved with an early-stage accelerator called . Draper’s father and grandfather were famously VCs. Draper’s own bets have included Skype and Baidu. He has also invested a in bitcoin on the belief that it might one day be the for investors. Of his newest fund, he says the capital has already been used to invest in a dozen companies, including , a four-year-old, San Francisco-based logistics company for the waste management industry. The company, which has raised an undisclosed amount of funding, puts its sensor into dumpsters, enabling garbage companies to increase the efficiency of their routes based on how full the dumpsters are. Draper Associates has also recently backed , a San Francisco-based Y Combinator alum that raised in seed funding in November and aims to analyze multiple genes at once to find drugs for neurodegenerative diseases. In an email exchange late last week, Draper said Draper Associates has a wide array of interests. He said that for now, however, it’s particularly focused on big industries that “haven’t budged,” including finance, healthcare and government. |
Facebook says it doesn’t have a gender pay gap | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | Apparently, Facebook, which is just 32% female worldwide, doesn’t have a gender pay gap, according to Lori Goler, head of people at Facebook. In the United States, women make about 76 cents for every dollar men earn, . The tech industry’s gender gap is close to the U.S. average (5.4%), falling in the middle among industries. That said, the tech occupations with significant gaps include computer programmers (28.3%), computer aided designer (21.5%) and video game artist (15.8%). But, it seems that those stats don’t apply to Facebook. “We regularly review our compensation practices to ensure pay equity, and have done for many years,” Goler wrote on the Facebook blog. “We complete thorough statistical analyses to compare the compensation of men and women performing similar work. I’m proud to share that at Facebook, men and women earn the same.” While Facebook may not have gender pay gap, it still has a gender hiring gap, as well as a lot of other gaps in its workforce. Facebook is 55 percent white, 36 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black in the U.S., . “There’s always more work to be done, of course,” Goler wrote. “But we’re proud to be a leader in pay equality, and look forward to a time when we don’t even need to call it out.” |
Smartphones are the latest invisible ally of the Fed | James D. Robinson III | 2,016 | 4 | 11 |
Throughout my business career of some 60 years, I have always been fascinated by change — the dynamics of change and how businesses, governments and people respond to change. Or fail to respond. Throughout history, major technological trends have had a profound, and often invisible, impact on governments and traditional institutions. In the digital era, this pace of change is amplified and relentless. While the tech and business communities are naturally immersed in these dynamics, many institutions are not reacting fast enough to how technology is changing our economy — and their own destiny. I’ve been a student and a fan of the since the 1960s. Having been involved in the banking and financial sector, including as the former Chairman/CEO of American Express for many years and now as a venture capitalist, I’ve always had to think about how the broader policy decisions were affecting the markets. From the business vantage point, it has been fascinating to watch how technology has both complicated and helped the Fed’s policy decisions. For instance, one of the main missions of the Federal Reserve is to keep inflation low. Yet, it’s important to remember that for inflation to happen, someone has to raise prices. In this regard, over the last couple of decades, Walmart and then Amazon have been invisible allies of the Fed in accomplishing this goal. The latest invisible ally of the Fed in this regard is the smartphone. With the smartphone, the power of pricing has shifted into the hands of the consumer even further, keeping downward pressure on retail prices. Today, represents 30 percent of all U.S. e-commerce, but, moreover, a recent found that 90 percent of retail shoppers use their smartphones in-store to check prices, product information and reviews. This translates to an environment where everyone can compare prices and features, both online and offline. So, unless you are in a unique luxury category, your ability to increase price is limited. Moreover, when you think about the growth of price comparison engines in other sectors outside of retail, such as for travel, * for credit cards, * for insurance and others, it really drives the point home that the mechanics of price adjustment are more and more driven by transparency and choice in the marketplace. So in effect, everyone with a smartphone becomes a deputy central banker…helping to keep prices in check. That’s just the example using the smartphone. The broader point is that many of the old models and beliefs on which our fundamental economic and monetary policies are built need to be inspected through a different lens, embracing how technology will impact the economy of the future. One example of this is the old equation economists have considered for years, MV=PT, where the money supply x velocity of money is equal to price x transactions. Most of the monetary policies in the last 50 years have been based around the money supply being the main driver for things like inflation, currency appreciation/depreciation and interest rates. The reality though, is that money velocity is extremely important, and virtually impossible to impact directly, let alone control. For instance, the long-held adage that too much money chasing too few goods and services will cause inflation must be questioned. In the last few decades, the money supply itself has embraced so many definitions. The ability to trade or move money without an actual tie to the money supply seems endless. Given this, it makes sense to question the underlying assumptions around how much money supply itself can drive economic policy. This is just one example demonstrating how the implications of change can challenge fundamental beliefs. Over the past couple of decades, technology has been a major driver of change and, although change can be scary or frightening, one thing is for sure: Change is inevitable. So whether it is technologies that have been around for many years or new technology challenges, such as blockchain and cryptocurrency, change is not going away. This means institutions, central bankers and governments need to be paying attention to how the economy around them is changing. How and when will all this affect their own modes of operation or assumptions? The question is whether many of these institutions are reacting fast enough. If I have learned anything from my experience in the private sector, the slower you are to react to change, the more painful it is to adjust once you must. Do you lean into change or risk being disintermediated by someone else? That’s a question all businesses must address — so too must the government, their agencies and political leaders. |
Aydin Senkut on scaling Felicis Ventures from $4 million to $120 million | Harry Stebbings | 2,016 | 4 | 11 |
In 2006, Aydin Senkut was an unlikely candidate for a venture capitalist. A Turkish immigrant who arrived in Silicon Valley by way of Boston, Philadelphia and Istanbul, Senkut held product positions at Silicon Graphics and a small startup named Google. Now, a decade later, Senkut has raised four funds with Felicis Ventures and invested in 150 companies with 55 exits — three of them initial public offerings. Despite his unconventional entrance into the investment world, Senkut has made a name for himself by establishing Felicis as a boutique investment firm whose hustle has landed the firm investments in companies like Rovio and Shopify. For Senkut, hustle and relationships are the two determinants for being a successful investor. And despite the fact that initially many investors “did not want to give him the time” Senkut has thrived alongside his firm.
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Analog photography lives! The Impossible Project debuts I-1 camera for Polaroid 600-type film | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | Who doesn’t like instant film? The rest of you, stay and marvel. The Impossible Project, which started the, well, nearly impossible project of reverse-engineering Polaroid’s instant film manufacturing process, has graduated to . The I-1’s photos are analog to the core — no tiny thermal printer inside — but the camera makes a few concessions to the digital era. Like the mass-market Polaroid systems of old, the I-1 includes very little in the way of on-camera controls. There’s a shutter button, a dial for exposure compensation, and a very approximate focus selector. Composition is achieved by putting your eye to a charmingly old-school square frame. The built-in ring flash uses an ambient light sensor and the focus distance to brighten up the subject. Naturally, however, there has to be an app involved. This one will allow you to make finer adjustments to settings, hit the shutter from a distance, or manage multiple-exposure shots. We’ve asked for more info (and screenshots) and will update the post if/when we hear back. One other concession to modernity is the ability to recharge the camera via USB. Thank god for that, although it would have been pretty great too if you had to wind up the flash. You’ll be shooting Impossible Project type 600 film, . But if you want to have that full-size Polaroid experience and don’t want to go hunting in vintage camera shops for old film packets in refrigerators, it’s a good option. The I-1 will cost $300 when it hits on May 10, which is in line with the nicer instant systems. Be ready to spend at least that again on film over the years, though. Hey, I only said analog was alive — not that it was cheap. Bonus: a photoshop I did in 2009 to celebrate the resurrection of Polaroid film. Can you name the game? |
Botlist is an app store for bots | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | A new site launching today wants to be the app store for bots. , as it’s called, is a third-party database that’s a catalog a lot of the bots currently available across platforms, including email, web, SMS, Slack, mobile, apps, and more. There’s no question that bots are all the rage. this week; that let developers build bots for any platform; popular communication apps like , , and have their own apps stores filled with bots; and so on. Why bots, not apps? For starters, we’ve reached a saturation point with the mobile app stores in developed markets. While there are new apps arriving all the time, , according to studies. They’re basically happy with – Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Instagram, etc. Plus, many mobile apps, while arguably easier to use than a mobile website, are accessed so infrequently it doesn’t seem to make sense to have them saved on your phone indefinitely. Bots, however, are capable of reaching users on the platforms they’re already on – like SMS, iMessage, chat apps, or work communication apps like Skype or Slack. In fact, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is so enthusiastic about bots, that at Microsoft’s BUILD conference this March. So what’s the deal with , an app store for bots? Explains co-creator Ben Tossell, a community manager at Product Hunt, the idea is to offer a centralized directory. (Not surprisingly, Botlist is at the top of Product Hunt today, too.) “All current directories are owned by the platforms themselves, having one central place not owned by the platform just made sense,” he says. “People can find all types of bots across a variety of platforms.” Tossell says he came up with the idea in January. But freelance developer Mubashar Iqbal and Seth Louey, a creative developer at a software agency, actually built the site as a side project over weekends. Everyone still holds their day jobs, but will continue to work on Botlist as they can. At launch, the site currently lists around 400 bots from services like Slack, Telegram, Kik, and Messenger as well as platforms like SMS, iOS, Android, email and web. Bots are manually reviewed ahead of inclusion. And while submissions are free, the team is charging $50 for expedited – 7 day! – bot reviews. (Bot fever? Apparently.) This fee structure may change in the future, and the founders are also considering charging for the spots in Botlist’s “Featured” section, notes Tossell. As it stands now, Botlist is very much an MVP – meaning it still may have some bugs, and a lot of features and functionality is still in development or at least in flux, Currently, not all bots linked to the appropriate “bot” store where they’re hosted. For example, several Slack bots have links to their company home page, but not their listing on Slack’s app store. In other cases, it’s the reverse. Because of the inconsistency here, it’s hard to use Botlist as a “real” app store – that is, you can’t click a button and get to an install page for the bot. The directory is also fairly bare bones in terms of content. It has brief descriptions of the bots, photos or screenshots, and there’s a section for reviews below. Sometimes the screenshots are merely page from the bot’s Product Hunt listing (also linked), which isn’t as useful as seeing the bot in action. Bots are organized by category (e.g. Productivity, Marketing, etc.), or you can filter Botlist by platform. In other words, it’s a simple directory at present, but not much more. Still, the fact that Botlist exists at all – even as a side project – speaks to the growing bot ecosystem now in development, and demand for an organized resource for finding bots that work across platforms, as many today do. Now that it’s live, the team is looking to see what feedback users have regarding its future development. One early piece of advice from the community is to allow bot creators control over their own pages – that way they could have design their own listings, upload better photos, and could more reliably point visitors to download links. For the time being, Tossell says the team will update the site daily with new bots. |
null | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 27 | null |
Tesla recalls 2,700 Model X vehicles over potentially dangerous seat flaw | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | Tesla is voluntarily recalling 2,700 of its Model X vehicles over a flaw in the third-row seat that may be dangerous in an accident. In the meantime, the company has advised owners via email that they should not use the third row seat until it is replaced. The issue was discovered while doing seat strength tests ahead of releasing the Model X in the European market, a Tesla spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email. It seems the locking hinge that allows the rear seat to fold forward could fail, causing the seat back to go down during a crash. That hasn’t happened in the wild, fortunately, and Tesla is issuing the recall to make sure it never does. This isn’t the first Tesla recall by far: the company has previously (and voluntarily) recalled the , , and a . Owners will be contacted further in order to schedule replacements, which should be completed over the next five weeks. Any Model X made after March 26 won’t have the issue; replacement hinges are already in place. The seat backs were provided by a manufacturing partner, Futuris, which which Tesla will continue to work. The two companies co-developed the new design that is currently being installed. Production won’t be affected, the spokesperson wrote — 750 (and growing) Model Xes are now rolling out of Tesla plants per week, which means the backlog of nearly 30,000 orders may actually be cleared this year. |
Digital magazine company Issuu is now a collaboration platform, too | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Digital media company has been trying to offer a better way to present content online. Now it’s a promising a better way for teams to work together on creating that content too, with the launch of a new product called . Issuu, for those of you who don’t know, allows publishers to create digital publications. They may resemble glossy magazines, except freed from the limitations of print, with support for multimedia and interactive content. The company said that in a survey of more than 1,300 publishers, it found that 64 percent of publishing teams work in different locations, and they rely on everything from email to spreadsheets to Google Docs to InDesign to coordinate. Collaborate is meant to replace many of those tools, creating a central location where a team (particularly a small to medium-sized media team) can create a digital publication together. When you build something in Collaborate, you start with a flatplan, where you can create the layout of your publication and move different pages around. You can also pull layouts from Indesign, if you prefer. Naturally, you can invite other users to participate, so they can upload images and add their own content. There’s an approval system, as well as the ability to track the status of each piece of the publication as it inches towards completion. You can even place ads. Once you’re done, you can just publish directly to the Issuu platform, which the company says reaches 100 million readers each month. Collaborate is currently available to customers of Issuu’s Optimum subscription plan. Oh, and you don’t even need to be on a desktop computer to use it – it works on tablets, too. [vimeo 163230508 w=640 h=360] |
Hyping vulnerabilities is no longer helping application security awareness | Chris Wysopal | 2,016 | 4 | 11 |
It used to be a vulnerability was disclosed, a few people who paid attention to such things blogged about it, patches were made, and we went about our day. During this time, not enough people understood the importance of application security and remediating vulnerabilities. It wasn’t mainstream, and it certainly wasn’t considered major news. Application security just wasn’t getting the attention it deserved, and it was frustrating. Then happened. It was a big deal. It disrupted productivity, caused breaches and shone the light on the fact that open source components are increasing risk in the application layer. Major media outlets covered the news, and the public began to better understand the need for application security. While Heartbleed led to significant negative impact on businesses, the security industry was glad that at least application security was to receive some of the attention the seriousness of the issue required. By simply giving the vulnerability a name rather than a number (CVE-2014-0160), researchers made Heartbleed instantly recognizable and memorable, helping to put a spotlight on the issue. The buzz forced companies to evaluate their own exposure because the name was more real to boards and senior management than a number could ever be. Soon, security companies started using Heartbleed as a marketing opportunity, because it was widely recognized and easily explained. As they began seeing success with this model, companies also started to do research into vulnerabilities so they could receive press coverage for finding them. . This resulted in the branding of even minor vulnerabilities. At first, the increased exposure for this problem was positive. But, the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way, and I fear this over exposure will cause a backlash. Do you remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? A young shepherd boy became bored and lonely tending to his sheep, so he yelled “wolf!” and the townspeople came running. When they arrived and noticed there was no wolf, they grumbled and went back to their homes. Amused with himself, the boy repeated his cry several times. Each time, the townspeople came running. Until finally a wolf actually showed up. This time when he called out for help, no one came running because they thought he was lying again. The situation did not end well for the boy. We’ve all been told a variation of this story. So, I’m watching in almost disbelief, minor amusement and a bit of fear as the same scenario is playing out in the security world. Case in point: late last month, security researchers pre-announced the disclosure of a vulnerability they call . The vulnerability isn’t being disclosed until , but for weeks it has had a website ( ), a logo and marketing/PR hype galore. Pre-announced? It’s like Badlock is a new Apple product, and the researchers expect us to camp outside their offices waiting for the official announcement. Though Heartbleed and subsequent major vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Ghost did help improve exposure for the critical issue of application security, it still doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. I fear that overhyping minor vulnerabilities by branding them, pushing the topic with the media and yes, pre-announcing them will cause people to go numb to these announcements. After all, any journalist will tell you, when something happens too often it ceases to be news. Today, the hype is about Badlock. , the vulnerability disclosure could be akin to “the next Heartbleed” – a widely distributed, remotely executable vulnerability with mass exploitability. But because the frenzy around Badlock, or or or the other minor branded vulnerabilities, has caused companies to react quickly in the past, only to figure out later this overreaction cost them productivity too, companies will ignore the vulnerability and go about their day. When that happens, the state of application security will be worse off than before vulnerabilities started getting national attention. All the work we’ve done in the security industry to get attention for this critical area will be all but undone. |
Puma’s got a tiny racing robot that can move as fast as Usain Bolt | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Its story is that of an epic battle. Mankind versus machine in a race for dominance. Only one can win. In practice, thankfully, it’s much, much more adorable. A four-wheeled robot that looks remarkably like an RC car crossbred with a shoebox , programmed to give athletes something to race against. A sort of free-roaming robotic rabbit to their inner-greyhound. BeatBot was created for Puma by the J. Walter Thompson ad agency — and a bunch of MIT engineers. The sporty little robot has nine built-in infrared sensors designed to follow the lines of a race track as it zips along at a pre-determined pace. The ‘bot is capable of hitting Usain Bolt levels of speed, but runners can slow it down via a mobile app in hopes of actually having a chance against the little box, which monitors the revolution of its wheels to figure out how fast it’s going. The BeatBot also sports front- and rear-facing GoPro cameras and LED lights on its tail for easier viewing after it leaves a runner in the dust. For now, the shoe company is only making the BeatBot available to its own athletes (such as the aforementioned Bolt), but there are plans to introduce it to a number of athletic programs later this year. |
Windows 95 on the Apple Watch features the world’s most twee Start button | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Big, complex things running on tiny things is a common theme this week. Earlier we had a hack that put Counter-Strike on Android Wear, and today some maniac has installed Windows 95 on his Apple Watch. At last it’ll do something worthwhile! That is, of course, if you can find the Start button. is behind this absurd and hilarious endeavor. He appears to be a natural joker: he it was who snuck a flashlight app into the App Store with a hidden tethering tool. And amazingly, it was I who wrote that up 6 years ago. When you think about it, the Apple Watch is massively more powerful than pretty much any computer that was running 95 back in the day. So it should be able to handle the classic OS with ease, right? Well, it’s not that simple. Apple Watch isn’t exactly an open system. It’s not like you can boot into the command line, format, and pop a new OS on there. That would be way too easy. But the difficulty of a thing is often positively correlated with the desire of developers to achieve it — with a scalar modifier based on stubbornness and an exponential multiplier for nostalgia. It seems there’s a way to get a WatchKit app to load arbitrary code, even if that code happens to be a port of a port of an x86 emulator apparently held together with chewing gum and a desperate prayer. ( Windows 95, 8 GB of storage and half a gig of RAM is an embarrassment of riches. It’s an embarrassment of riches. Only problem is, you’re not going to get the cycles you’d like out of that 520Mhz processor, since it’s an emulator, not a virtual machine. Result: Lee had to affix a tiny motor to the crown to spin it constantly during the boot process. But once that’s done, you’ve got a Windows 95 machine on your wrist! If you don’t mind it running at approximately 2% speed and controlling the cursor with dozens of tiny finger movements, you can play Minesweeper on the subway — ad-free, and you don’t even need your iPhone around! Congratulations to Nick Lee for making my Friday — this is magnificently dumb. |
Kentucky Derby attendees can now order food, place bets from their seats | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Getting around, drinking and dining at the this year should prove a lot easier for fans and employees. According to Churchill Downs’ General Manager Ryan Jordan, the famed horse racing venue on Friday launched a Churchill Downs Racetrack app, powered by , to give attendees a better experience on-site. The new app, available and , will let users buy and split up a group’s tickets by phone, navigate the venue, “pin” their parking spot on a map or find the nearest restroom or concession stand. It will also allow users to order their mint juleps, hot dogs and other concessions from their seats, either for delivery or pick-up without waiting on line. The venue installed 1,600 beacons around the venue in preparation for the app’s launch and their biggest week of the year, including the Derby Week and Kentucky Derby races, Jordan said. The iOS version of the app is also integrated with Churchill Downs’ affiliated which lets users wager on horse races and collect their winnings remotely. The app store on Google Play doesn’t allow betting apps, so the feature is not included for those users. Finding your way proves challenging for first timers at the Louisville, Kentucky venue because Churchill Downs lacks the standard bowl shape of modern stadiums, Jordan noted. It is sprawling, with a 1-mile racetrack and 1.6 million square feet of covered indoor hospitality and dining space. The CEO and co-founder of VenueNext, told TechCrunch that Churchill Downs is the largest sports venue to adopt his company’s technology to-date. is also behind mobile apps used to buy tickets, navigate and order concessions within the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium, Yankee Stadium, the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, the Orlando Magic’s Amway Center and will soon be available at the Minnesota Vikings’ new stadium. But even the largest NFL stadiums have a capacity around 90,000, while Churchill Downs last year saw 170,500 attendees at the Kentucky Derby. VenueNext aims to eventually expand use of its tech to campuses of every kind — from college to corporate, hospitals to hotels. Besides giving attendees and staff a bit of help getting where they need to go on-site, VenueNext also gives its customers detailed data in real time and other reports about how people use their venue, and where there may be room for operational improvements and different uses of their space. While Churchill Downs doesn’t report total concessions and merchandise sales publicly, Jordan said, last year the venue served 127,000 of its signature mint juleps during the Kentucky Derby, as well as 163,000 hot dogs. Offering navigational help, express delivery and pick-up may help increase those sales. But the company is mostly seeking to make repeat customers of all ticket holders with the launch of its mobile app, Jordan said. |
Frame.io releases video collaboration extension for Adobe Premiere Pro | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | Frame.io today launched , an extension that will enable video editors to use the video collaboration tool inside the video-editing program. When Frame.io CEO Emery Wells asked me to join the beta program for the company’s Premiere extension, I jumped at the chance. export directly from my edit sequence to Frame.io and add collaborators easily. After using Frame.io for Premiere Pro for the past month I’ve been really impressed. Frame.io has really nailed the experience and the functionality that editors need and want. [gallery columns="2" ids="1305772,1305771,1305770,1305769"] After installing the extension I barely use the actual web application anymore. I can export and upload with one click, which is my most used functionality. The Premiere extension is perfect for editors, and the web application is great for customers/clients. The two work really well together. I’ve been using since it first came . Over that time I’ve gotten the entire TechCrunch video team on board with the platform, because it is just such a better alternative to products like Dropbox, Box or Google Drive. And it’s built by editors specifically for editors. Last year I edited probably over for TechCrunch and so I have to be as efficient as possible when it comes to cranking out video after video. Every key click and mouse move counts, so anything that reduces steps that I have to gather feedback, distribute media and collaborate with people across the country is something that is needed in my profession. In short, I probably use Frame.io every single day. The company made a pretty snazzy video to highlight the features in the Adobe Premiere extension. Check it out below. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 04.29.16 | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Gillmor Gang – Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session has concluded for today. Check back on Saturday for the released version https://techcrunch.com/video/gillmor-gang/ Gillmor Gang on Facebook Other Gillmor Gang Studios shows:
G3 : on Facebook The Enterprise Show : |
Sci-Hub is providing science publishers with their Napster moment | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | shows that academic paper piracy site Sci-Hub is not a niche product catering to cheapskates and isolated mad scientists: It’s as popular as it is illegal, and its millions of users span the globe, from Tehran to Boston. For those not aware, Sci-Hub is, in the X for Y startup lingo of our days, The Pirate Bay for research. Millions of papers, many of which require a fee or institutional subscription of some kind to access, have been downloaded in full and added to the Sci-Hub database. You can get just about any paper you want with a few keystrokes — and, naturally, publishers are furious. Alexandra Elbakyan, the young Kazakh grad student who founded Sci-Hub in 2011, provided Science reporter John Bohannon with six months of usage data — which, incidentally, the journal is kindly for anyone to download themselves. The stats, which have been scrubbed of personally identifying information, are impressive: There are more than 50 million papers stored, with between 4 and 6 million downloaded a month. There are users on every continent but Antarctica — but I’m sure someone down there will fix that before long. This contrasts with the ideas some had about the conditions when researchers were likely to turn to Sci-Hub instead of ordinary legal access. One would expect people in economically unsound countries with no university affiliation to pirate these papers. But what’s with the 110,000 downloads or so from Fremont and Mountain View? Not exactly impoverished regions! The pattern isn’t that hard to figure out. There’s no pattern; is doing it. And they’re doing it for the same reason they started pirating music back in the 2000s (or earlier, if you were cool): It’s easier. Having had to wrangle a few institutional permissions and the like before, myself, and hearing my dad talk about the administration at the university he worked at for nearly 40 years, and considering how overworked most professors and grad students already are, I’m not surprised at all that this simple, effective tool has found purchase in the academic community here and worldwide — anything you can do to save a few hours or bucks, avoid a laborious back-and-forth with the department head and generally accelerate the process of actually doing research. Although Elsevier, the publisher whose papers seem to be by far the most pirated, has filed a lawsuit, and although Elbakyan must remain in hiding for the present in face of potential indictment under U.S. law, Sci-Hub is proving to be as powerful and divisive a tool as, surely, it was intended to be from the start. The site had its original URL removed, but you can still find it easily. And Elbakyan has taken measures to make sure it stays up should she be arrested or if it is otherwise interfered with. And anyway, the data’s already out there: Several copycat sites already exist. The cat’s not going back in the bag. Be sure to check out the over at Science; the journal’s editor in chief also on the topic, and Bohannon . All worth reading today — or you could wait and download them from Sci-Hub tomorrow. |
Tech companies can make retention of female employees a priority | Alaina Percival | 2,016 | 4 | 29 |
The technology industry has a problem with retaining qualified female employees. According to , 56 percent of women in computing jobs will leave their positions at the “mid-level” point, right when it is most costly to the companies that employ them. This is due to a number of factors that can be alleviated by corporations adopting mindful practices that will create better and balanced work environments. The tech industry is growing so quickly that it is outpacing the number of qualified technical employees available to fill open positions. , the United States will have nearly 1.4 million job openings in this industry by 2020. However, more than two-thirds of these positions could go unfilled. While efforts need to be made to encourage more women to enter tech, it is also effective to take steps to ensure that talented women remain at their positions and eventually take on leadership roles. This is not only important for staffing, but also for the health and innovation of technology companies. , teams that comprise both men and women produce technology patents that are cited 26-42 percent more often. Another of more than 100 teams at 21 companies showed that those with equal numbers of men and women were more likely to experiment, be creative and fulfill tasks. Companies will simply perform better if they are able to develop and sustain a diverse team. The best way for companies to hold on to female tech talent is to create a work environment that is fair, even and open for advancement and reward. Professional women currently earn .73 cents to the dollar versus men. That adds up to a difference of $333 a week, and $17,316 a year. It’s hard for a person to remain passionate about a position when they aren’t being fairly compensated for their work. An effective way to handle this is for companies to implement regular salary audits in order to determine if there is a discrepancy in pay between male and female employees. This will expose any unintentional gender bias that exists in compensation, allowing these organizations to take steps to resolve the issue. While salary is important, it is also necessary to eliminate any bias that may exist in the promotion process. Studies have shown that women are less likely to ask for more responsibilities at work than men are. This can lead to a situation where the majority of leadership roles are held by males. That, in turn, perpetuates the problem, making it increasingly difficult for qualified women to rise to through the ranks. The best way to combat promotion bias is to make the process as transparent as possible. Companies should lay out the specific steps that need to be taken in order for a person to transition to a higher-level job. By making the system impartial, with easily recognizable goals, it is possible to not only remove the human error that can lead to skewed decisions, but also provide a clear path for shy and reserved employees to take on more responsibility. Another important step that needs to be taken if tech companies want to retain female employees is for management to recognize the accomplishments of women, even if they are not in a position where they can readily be promoted. The simple act of giving praise to those who deserve it can be a powerful tool that can help counter a culture that often feels harsh, isolating and cold to women. The tech industry is growing, but the only way it will be able to maintain that growth is by creating an environment that is open and inviting to women. This can be done by eliminating unintentional bias in compensation and promotions, while also recognizing the contributions of women at work, and praising them for their accomplishments. This will in turn lead to companies that are more dynamic, diverse and able to take on creative challenges. |
Home Chef raises $10M for meal kits and “taste algorithms” | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | , one of several startups delivering recipes and ingredients to take some of the hassle out of home cooking, is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding. Founder and CEO Pat Vihtelic told me that Home Chef stands out from similar-sounding companies in a couple of ways. The big one is flexibility — customers get to choose their meals from 13 overall choices on a given week, and the service even uses a “taste algorithm” to recommend meals that they’ll probably like based on their preferences. “We listen to our customers —that tends to dictate what ends up on our menu, versus trying to be exotic or something like that, ” Vihtelic added. Since launching in 2013, Home Chef has grown to more than 400 employees and serves more than 540,000 meals each month. The new round, which will allow Home Chef to , was led by Shining Capital and Guild Capital. The Chicago-headquartered startup has now raised a total of $12 million — a significant amount of capital, but it pales in comparison to that Blue Apron raised last year. Vihtelic told me that as Home Chef has grown, he’s remained focused on capital efficiency. In addition, he doesn’t see companies like Blue Apron as his direct competitors. “We’re all competing with status quo of going to the grocery store,” he said. “I still feel like we have a long ways to go before we actually start running into each other. The market’s huge, the demand is there, everyone eats and customers are now embracing a new and better way to do that.” |
Phil Schiller takes to Twitter to remind everyone not to pluralize Apple products | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Last night a single tweet on everyone’s favorite was heard ’round the world. No, I’m not talking about the that cost an NFL draft prospect . Or Drake’s tweet , Views. I’m talking about Apple marketing boss taking to Twitter to finally answer the age-old question of how to correctly refer to multiple er iPhone devices. It all started when Benedict Evans posted a podcast with a caption referring to “iPads Pro,” pluralizing the device like one would pluralize “Attorneys General.” After a brief back and forth, someone summoned Schiller to end the debate once and for all. One need never pluralize Apple product names. Ex: Mr. Evans used two iPad Pro devices. — Philip Schiller (@pschiller) Hmm. So according to Schiller (and by association, Apple), it’s wrong to say something like “I have two iPhones.” Instead, we should say “I have two iPhone,” or “I have two iPhone devices.” 2. It would be proper to say "I have 3 Macintosh" or "I have 3 Macintosh computers" — Philip Schiller (@pschiller) But this sounds so awkward! Unfortunately, like most things Apple, the company seems to be set in their ways, and will always say something like “iPhone devices” in their press releases. In all seriousness though, it’s great to see Schiller interacting with Apple fans and developers . Not only is it a useful source of information, but shows customers a more personal side of Apple’s executives that is usually reserved only for keynotes. |
Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and every other letter had a wild week on Wall Street | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | This week was completely loaded with earnings reports from some of the biggest tech companies in the world — and it was a crazy week of swings for most of the companies that reported. There’s a running theme here: growth is being heavily rewarded — and lack of growth, punished — by Wall Street. And that’s especially true when it comes to more mature companies. While Facebook handily beat expectations on earnings and revenue, it also showed that the company still continues to grow at a healthy clip in terms of both generating cash and adding new users. Looking back at Apple, it’s clear that the company isn’t growing. It’s, in fact, . Here are the ups and downs for the end of the week. We’ll wrap in Microsoft and Alphabet for this one as well: And then there’s the big one. In short, the week was pretty mixed, and showed off a couple of key points. First, Twitter’s loss is basically Facebook’s gain. Any concerns that there would be softness in the advertising market after Twitter said brand marketers did not increase spend as quickly as expected in the first quarter were probably thrown out the window following Facebook’s blockbuster earnings. Twitter reversed its user number decline by adding a few more million users than expected, but its revenue is not growing as quickly as expected — so the stock got hammered, while Facebook soared. Second, and more importantly, is that Apple’s growth engine has slowed down. The company said it sold 51.2 million iPhones this quarter, compared to 61.2 million iPhones in the last quarter. Apple has become a bellwether for the tech industry — if it’s down, something must clearly be wrong — but this time around it’s Apple’s woes that caused Wall Street to erase tens of billions of dollars in value from the company. And finally, Amazon is appears to be turning into the monster that Wall Street expected it to be all along. The company is rapidly scaling up its Web Services business — now generating $2.57 billion and, as Bezos says, hopefully on track for $10 billion annually. But perhaps more noticeably, Amazon posted four straight quarters of a profit. For a company that’s traditionally been pretty meh when it comes to generating profits, this seems like a pretty significant moment for the company as it continues to expand its new line of business, and grow internationally. Stock prices tend to move quickly on earnings reports — and whether or not companies are performing to expectations of industry watchers and investors. These companies are all, in many ways, beholden to the people who have bought up some ownership of the company, whether that’s a duty to increase the value of the stock or return value to shareholders. (Though, Facebook .) If stock prices continue to go down, it increases risk for companies on a couple of fronts. First, stocks are a key part of compensation for many companies trying to attract talent, and if the price keeps dropping the amount of money a company can offer a recruit drops with it. Second, it can attract investors that will buy up a lot of stock in a company — like Carl Icahn, who pressured Apple to return more of its massive cash pile to shareholders — in order to push companies to shift their strategies. Many of these companies are still printing money. Apple and Google generate billions of dollars in profit, and Twitter is still generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But the point everything always comes back to is growth — can these companies show that they can grow at a sustainable pace and continue to increase their value. That’s going to determine whether investors are going to want to own shares of the company, which will drive up the stock price and make it easier to get things done without facing pressure from Wall Street or having issues attracting talent. There are still a few more earnings reports to come — they’re mostly small fry compared to these companies — but we should probably expect to see the same trends: growth will be rewarded, and companies with a lack thereof will see their value challenged by Wall Street. |
Fitbit scores win against Jawbone in trade dispute | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Chalk one up in Fitbit’s column. An International Trade Commission judge ruled in Fitbit’s favor on a series of patent disputes brought forth by Jawbone. This ruling seems to make it less likely that Fitbit would face an import ban of its wearable fitness trackers. In this case ITC Judge Dee Lord invalidated the last of Jawbone’s patents the two companies are fighting over. A previous ruling invalidated another set of patents. Yet the judge is allowing Jawbone to pursue claims Fitbit stole trade secrets. that Jawbone intends to appeal the recent ruling. Fitbit and Jawbone have been going at in the court system for some time. Along with patent cases, Jawbone has accused Fitbit of anticompetitive conduct including luring employees who then brought key data with them to Fitbit. Likewise, Fitbit has filed patent-infringement actions against Jawbone. The next case in this tangled mess is scheduled for May 9 in Washington. Get some popcorn. It should be good. |
Twitter quietly retires Magic Recs, a DM bot that recommended viral accounts and Tweets | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | As Twitter tries out bigger things to spur growth activity — like and of tweets — it is turning away from others. Twitter has quietly retired , a strikingly effective bot account that used to send you DMs recommending viral accounts or Tweets to follow, run by an algorithm that measured how many others you knew were following an account or Tweet in quick succession. Twitter confirmed to TechCrunch it had stopped sending Magic Recs. It is now channelling recommendations through only one channel — native push notifications on your phone. (And since I enquired, it’s also made a small update on its notifications help page.) “@MagicRecs is no longer regularly sending recommendations through Direct Message. Recommendations that were previously shared via Direct Message are now delivered via push notification,” a spokesperson noted in a written statement. Magic Recs first started to appear around , and the push notifications — essentially alerts that are not tweets but appear in the notifications tab on your mobile, activated through your notifications settings — were first some months later, in . Push notifications and Magic Recs coexisted side-by-side for 2.5 years until very recently. (My last one was in February; Sarah Perez tells me her last Magic Rec was in March.) Magic Rec’s Twitter public account was never very active: its (a reply to someone) was just over a year ago. Magic Recs was the first and perhaps the best known of Twitter’s DM-based notifications, but there were others. Another Twitter experiment built on the same premise — — also is no longer sending DMs. The news comes at a key time for Twitter. This week the company reported that highlighted how the social media platform continues to face challenges when it comes to attracting users, with user growth virtually flat. At a time when Twitter is looking for catchy things to capture more audience, it’s ironic that Magic Recs bot would stop working just as bots were starting to become a thing. Doubly ironic is the fact that Magic Recs was a bot that actually worked when have . Like many others who followed it, I praised Magic Recs for being uncannily accurate in predicting interesting accounts to follow and tweets to watch. Twitter could have turned it into something that people could even pull for more Recs. Why do I do whatever tells me? — Anil Dash (@anildash) There is some sense in why Twitter might have wanted to push those recommendations into push notifications, so to speak. You had to follow Magic Recs to get it to work for you, which was probably a barrier to entry for most users and defeated the idea of pushing stuff to less active people. @MagicRecs had just under 112,000 followers. Push notifications, on the other hand, are open to all mobile users, of which there are now 257.3 million ( ). And it seems they are in iOS. (You can turn these and other notifications off in Settings on the app.) Weirdly, I can’t recall seeing any alerts in recent times that fall into the category of recommended push notifications to replace it (yes, I’ve checked and I had it turned on). I’m not the only one, it seems. Apparently push recommendations may come at different rates for different people. |
Samsung’s VR bedtime stories are cute, but really? | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Samsung worries about your child. Are they sleeping well? Do they miss you when you’re away on business? Can they put on a VR headset without their parents’ help? That last one is pretty important. Because Samsung wants your kids to experience the joy of VR just before bed instead of a regular bedtime story even though First, let me say in all seriousness, though, that any work by a tech company focused on connecting kids and parents should be encouraged. It’s good that they saw a problem — kids missing their mom or dad — and thought, “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” Good on them for that. But there are a few things here that — and maybe I’m just out of touch — kind of bother me about this. For one thing, we’ve all been warned about staring at LCDs right before bed. It can mess with your sleep, or so the theory goes. For that matter, bedtime stories are supposed to be a relaxing, wind-down time — the sound of a parent’s voice droning on about journeys in and out of days, the familiarity of the story and imagery. A dynamic, interactive 360-degree virtual environment seems like the total opposite of that, and a pretty poor bedtime activity. On top of that, there is very little in the way of studies of how VR and early childhood interact. I’m guessing five minutes a day isn’t going to rewire any kid’s brain, but I am not a medical doctor. This just feels like one of those things that, for now, there’s no reason to take the risk on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjwazpmS-w Also, and this is just tangential, but why isn’t dad or other mom reading a story to the kid? Isn’t that a solution too? Maybe with a video call to mom that shows her actual face and not a big plush lump? Maybe that happens afterwards, but I’m just saying! VR is really happening, and I feel confident that parents and teachers are going to find ways to integrate it positively into their kids’ lives. But this particular application seems a little forced and premature. |
Hear AI play Beethoven like The Beatles | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Here’s what it sounds like when artificial intelligence learns to play “Ode To Joy” in the style of EDM, Brazilian guitar, and The Beatles’ “Penny Lane”: The in Paris was challenged to re-orchestrate the theme song of the European Union. Using the max entropy approach of machine learning, they taught a computer how to recognize the core features of different types of music. The team then tasked the AI with playing the pattern of Beethoven’s classical classic “Ode To Joy” but with the characteristics of more modern genres. [Correction: Beethoven, not Bach] You can watch the lead scientist break down how they did it here: Sony’s CSL believes their program could be a stepping stone to making AI that can compose original melodies we find catchy and memorable. If you think the radio sounds like music made by computers, just wait a few years for cyBerthoven. |
Chris Sacca says there’s “a greed case for diversity” | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Chris Sacca, the angel investor in companies like Twitter, Uber and Instagram, gets it. He understands that diversity is simply good for business. “There is a greed case for diversity,” . “Diverse perspectives bring us into markets we didn’t know existed.” It’s true. There’s a very strong business case for diversity that can affect a company’s bottom line. If you have a gender-diverse company, it can result in a 15 percent greater financial performance compared to a company that is not diverse, . Meanwhile, ethnic and racial diversity at the leadership and board level leads to a 35 percent greater financial performance. In Silicon Valley specifically, . It’s been common knowledge that diversity is good for business for a while now, but many tech companies can’t seem to get it together. Twitter, for example, is 66% men worldwide and 59% white in the U.S. Twitter also doesn’t have a single black person on its — something Sacca mentioned — despite the prevalence of black people on Twitter and the power of Black Twitter. “Twitter is ‘Black Twitter,'” Sacca said on stage. “That is a brand that Black Twitter has given itself. That’s where the hashtags happen … where the excitement is.” Twitter users are disproportionately people of color, according to . Of all the people on the Internet, just 23% of them are on Twitter, as of August 2015. Of that 23% of the Internet on Twitter, 28% are black, 28% are Hispanic and 20% are white. This is not the first time Sacca has spoken about the lack of diversity in tech, and explicitly at Twitter. Back in November, that it’s weird that Twitter’s management looks nothing like the people who use the product. “Look at the user base of Twitter: You have black users over-indexed on Twitter, but you don’t have any representation of that audience in the upper management of the company,” Sacca said in November. “That’s weird.” Twitter, of course, is not the only tech company failing at diversity. We can’t forget about Apple, Google, Facebook and many others. [graphiq id=”64qJZnNleQd” title=”Minorities in Tech Company Leadership” width=”665″ height=”536″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/64qJZnNleQd” link=”https://www.graphiq.com/wlp/64qJZnNleQd” link_text=”Minorities in Tech Company Leadership | Graphiq”] |
Tall poppy syndrome and the Canadian opportunity | Gideon Hayden | 2,016 | 4 | 29 |
There’s an epidemic in . That epidemic is a mentality that leaves top talent with no option but to flee the nation’s borders and take with them everything they’ve learned. It undervalues breakthroughs developed and paid for by taxpayers. It’s a mindset that resents the success of others. It’s a bad case of . I have deep pride in being ; the quality of life is high, the public services and institutions for healthcare and education generally serve the nation well and we’re welcoming to people in need with open arms. However, as a venture capitalist in the tech industry, I often come across incredibly talented individuals who either are thinking too small or have had their ambitious thoughts beaten out of them by their environment. The World Economic Forum releases an annual global competitiveness index; consistently performs well, largely driven by its strong performance in providing basic requirements and efficiency enhancers ( ). However, the nation underperforms in the categories of business sophistication and innovation. To be more specific, doesn’t do well in: The nature of its competitive advantage globally (a disastrous run for oil has directly impacted the strength of the dollar). Value chain breadth ( s verging on a one-trick pony with its dependence on resources). Company spending on R&D (every major tech company has a sales office in , but rarely an engineering office). Government procurement of advanced technology. Capacity for innovation. Looking at these statistics, one might infer that there’s an innovation problem in — and there is, but not in an immediately obvious way. ’s problem isn’t lack of talent, or an inability to create innovative, world-changing technologies. In fact, ’s proven time and again that it can do that (Nortel, Blackberry, Shopify to name a few). Rather, it is ’s inability to support those innovative technologies locally, tell its stories globally and legitimize products and ideas in first without needing the stamp of approval from our neighbour to the south. I see us failing at this all the time. One of the most recent examples is a company named (f.k.a. Chematria). The company was born out of the Computer Science Machine Learning department at the University of Toronto with the audacious goal of better predicting which molecules have a higher probability of being developed into approved therapeutics and medicines, all using machine learning and big data techniques. The company took full advantage of the R&D resources available in (SRED and accessing the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer through Ontario Centres of Excellence), but when it came time to commercialize, it had a tough time raising money in . Atomwise was then accepted into , and later raised a large seed round from some of the world’s top investors ( , , and ) on the condition the team move to California. They did just that. ’s institutions helped them develop the IP, only to lose them to the U.S. — along with the jobs and value creation that inevitably will come along with it. This trend is similarly evident in the story of the in Winnipeg. You may have heard that this institution was behind the creation of the world’s first Ebola vaccine. What you didn’t see in the headlines was that the government funded the R&D for this vaccine, only to sell it in 2010 to American biotech company for . In 2014, Merck this drug from NewLink for $50 million, plus royalty payments. Although the lab needed to license the vaccine to bring it to market, no one will care or know that it was the government that funded the pioneers who made this breakthrough. It also appears that the government struck a deal that grossly undervalued the innovation it funded. This is not to say that everything good leaves , but there are certain realities about living here. We have a smaller population than the state of California, dispersed across a landmass that is 23.5 times the size. If any company or person wants to achieve something of global consequence, they cannot just be a story. They need to have a global context and traction to make it happen. However, too often that value leaves because they don’t believe that is possible to create it here. The good news is that has the talent, the knowledge and the capability to develop world-leading technology. The Toronto-Waterloo corridor is emerging as one of the world’s leading tech clusters, and there are some exciting companies moving quickly toward IPOs. But to create serious momentum, it needs the gumption to double down when it counts and help bring their creations to the world as creations. The nation needs to have the confidence to tell its stories, the self-confidence to help others tell their stories and, collectively, we need to be bold enough to invest in the innovation happening in now. We need to channel our inner Drake. |
Fullscreen’s new streaming service aims to be the MTV for the YouTube generation | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | It’s not exactly a Netflix or YouTube rival, but AT&T-backed is hoping to carve out its own niche in the now-crowded subscription video market with its new service, launched this week. The $5 per month offering includes a mix of shorter, original content alongside full-length Hollywood movies and TV shows, like “Hitch,” “Dawson’s Creek,” and “Saved by the Bell,” for example. At launch, the company says there’s over 800 hours of content available for streaming, in an app that works across iPhone, iPad, Android smartphones, Chromecast, and via the web at Fullscreen.com. Unlike YouTube, where the majority of content comes from user-generated videos, Fullscreen’s original lineup involves several scripted series, like its reboot of a 1970’s TV series, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl,” featuring YouTube stars Grace Helbig and Hannah Hart, which focuses on the lives and adventures of two under-appreciated crime fighters. Other shows speak to familiar and popular formulas for teen fare. For example, “Filthy Preppy Teen$” may appeal to the demographic who watches things like “Pretty Little Liars,” or the CW network. “Making Moves” combines the popularity of dance shows and their creative choreography with a scripted series about trying to make it in L.A. Unscripted series include “My Selfie Life,” plus unfiltered conversations on shows like “Shane & Friends,” “Zall Good with Alexis G. Zall” and “Kingdom Geek.” Meanwhile, nods to teen and millennial culture are rife throughout Fullscreen’s app and its videos. For instance, its docu-series called “My Selfie Life” has an episode featuring a subject who lost 200 pounds via Instagram; “#O2LForever” follows a YouTube supergroup as they embark on their North American tour; and within the first 5 minutes of “Electra Woman…,” the main characters have dropped pop culture references to both Tumblr and Snapchat. Plus, the app cheekily organizes its content into sections whose titles reference the way teen and young adults watch videos today. That is, if they’re not watching a few-minute short piece of content on their mobile, then they’re spending hours bingeing their way through a multi-season series. Fullscreen’s app almost too-cleverly calls this out, with sections like “I’ve Got Like 10 Min,” “Hurry, Make Me Laugh,” or “Binge On This.” Other section titles are also written as if penned by teens who don’t . In fact, one featuring dramas is actually called “Dark AF.” Other sections include “Girls Run the World,” where you’ll find everything from “Daria” to Beyoncé, “Romance Me,” “LMFAO,” “How Dramatic,” and more. And if you don’t want to browse by section, you can pick a show based on mood by selecting whether you want to “snack” or “binge” and then how you want to feel (e.g.”laughing till it hurts,” “getting weird,” etc.) One of Fullscreen’s defining features is its in-app video player, which offers a button that, when tapped, lets you create GIFs that you can add captions to then share across social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. This GIF-making function is amazingly simple to use. It’s clever too – making and sharing GIFs of TV shows and movies is a popular way that today’s young adults socialize around content, and Fullscreen has made this activity a core part to its streaming service. In addition, a social section in the app lets you follow other people’s GIFs, where you can flip between streams of the most popular items and those that were just created. You can grab these GIFs, too, and share them with your networks. And you can give them a Facebook-like “thumbs up” or leave a comment. Like everything else on Fullscreen, the GIFs speak to the young audience on the app with jokes about Coachella, Tinder, internet outages, “Becky with the good hair,” Uber, texting and finals. Yep, this isn’t your mom’s Netflix over here. And that’s the point. According to comments from Fullscreen CEO George Strompolos, the goal with Fullscreen is to function as something like an MTV for today’s generation, who grew up watching online video, not traditional TV. “If you were to relaunch a network like MTV today, how would you do it? You would probably do it in an over-the-top environment,” “You would probably do it with the new generation of creators who have captured the hearts and minds of the youth, and you would probably deliver it in a mobile-first experience.” [gallery ids="1315170,1315172,1315173,1315171,1315179"] Fullscreen is owned by Otter Media, a joint venture between AT&T and Chernin Group, and represents AT&T’s attempt to enter the mobile video market. AT&T will not only help to distribute the app to its subscribers, it’s also co-producing premium content for the service. That makes Fullscreen a competitor to [TechCrunch parent] Verizon’s newly launched mobile video service. But the biggest differentiator here is the fact that go90 is ad-supported instead of paid. But similar to AT&T’s strategic partnership with Fullscreen, to flesh out its own exclusive, original content. Comcast also has its stakes in the streaming market with its mobile-friendly, over-the-top service , , and its . The question now is how many of these niche competitors the market has room for under Netflix, Amazon and YouTube’s shadow. At a press event earlier this week, Fullscreen COO Andy Forssell said the company believes it can reach 5 million subscribers, The WSJ , but it didn’t offer a time frame as to when it expects to meet that goal. |
null | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 11 | null |
Hear AI play Beethoven like The Beatles | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Here’s what it sounds like when artificial intelligence learns to play “Ode To Joy” in the style of EDM, Brazilian guitar, and The Beatles’ “Penny Lane”. The in Paris was challenged to reorchestrate the theme song of the European Union. Using the max entropy approach of machine learning, they taught a computer how to recognize the core features of different types of music. The team then tasked the AI with playing the pattern of Beethoven’s classical classic “Ode To Joy” but with the characteristics of more modern genres. [Correction: Beethoven, not Bach] You can watch the lead scientist break down how they did it here: Sony’s CSL believes their program could be a stepping stone to making AI that can compose original melodies we find catchy and memorable. If you think the radio sounds like music made by computers, just wait a few years for cyberBeethoven. |
How to deal with the rising threat of ransomware | Ben Dickson | 2,016 | 4 | 16 |
Of all the money-making schemes hackers employ, the most prevalent is perhaps , a malware that is usually delivered through infected email attachments and or . Ransomware encrypts files on a user’s computer and renders them unusable until the victim ransoms the key for a specific amount of money. Cybercriminals are . According to , the threat of ransomware will continue to rise in the months and years to come. Recently, several organizations were badly hit by ransomware, including , a , and several medical centers in and , one of which ended up . Attacks on individuals seldom make the headlines, but in 2015 alone, related to ransomware attacks, which amounted to approximately $24 million in losses to the victims. Technologies such as modern encryption, the TOR network and digital currencies like bitcoin are contributing to the rising success of ransomware, enabling hackers to stage attacks with more efficiency while hiding their trace. In many cases, victims are left with no other choice than to pay the attackers, and even as the only recourse. Traditional methods and tools no longer suffice to deal with the fast-evolving landscape of ransomware viruses, and new approaches are needed to detect and counter its devastating effects. Most security practices rely largely on regularly updating your operating system, software and antivirus tools, which are effective to protect yourself against known ransomware viruses — but are of no use against its unknown variants. The other safeguard against ransomware is to keep offline backups of your files, which will enable you to restore your hostage files without paying the crooks. This is a very effective method, but for many organizations, , which warrants the need for methods that can help avoid ransomware altogether. The high success rates of ransomware attacks are directly attributed to the shortcomings of antivirus software that rely on static, signature-based methods to detect ransomware. With several variants of ransomware being developed on a daily basis, there’s simply no way signature-based defenses can keep up. Udi Shamir, Chief Security Officer at cybersecurity firm , explains, “With minor modifications a cybercriminal can take a well-known form of ransomware like CryptoLocker, and make it completely unknown and undetectable to antivirus software.” that fighting ransomware needs a new approach, one that should be based on behavior analysis rather than signature comparison. “Behavior-based detection mechanisms are now playing a key role in detecting and preventing ransomware-based attacks,” Shamir says. “While there may be many ransomware variants in the wild, they all share a common set of traits that can be detected during execution.” Most ransomware can be detected through a set of shared behavioral characteristics. Attempts at deleting Windows Shadow Copies, disabling Startup Repair or stopping services such as WinDefend and BITS are telltale signs of ransomware work. “Each of these actions are behaviors that, if detected, translate into a ransomware attack,” Shamir explains. This is the general idea behind some of the newer security tools — instead of making signature-based comparisons, processes are scrutinized based on their behavior and blocked if found to be carrying out malicious activity. “Once detected, any malicious processes are killed instantly, malicious files are quarantined, and endpoints are removed from the network to prevent any further spread,” Shamir says. Aside from Sentinel One, other big players such as , and are also offering behavior-based security tools. “These new ‘next-generation’ endpoint protection solutions have proven to be effective against all variants of ransomware,” Shamir says. One of the methods ransomware developers use to evade detection is to force their tool to remain in a dormant state while it is under examination by security tools. This enables new variants of the virus to get past antiviruses and even some behavioral-based security solutions without being discovered. Once out of the sandbox, the ransomware is in the ideal environment to unpack its malicious payload and deal its full damage. The workaround to this technique, as discovered by an Israeli cybersecurity startup, , which will convince it to remain in the “sleeping” state and never wake up to deploy itself. , which came out of stealth this January, presented a solution that uses the ransomware’s own evasion techniques against it. “We figured that in order to fight malware, we have to think like the hackers that develop it,” says Eddy Bobritsky, CEO of Minerva Labs. Minerva has introduced the concept of that “prevents targeted attacks as well as ransomware before any damage has been done, without the need to detect them first or to have prior knowledge,” Bobritsky explains. By simulating the constant presence of different sophisticated cybersecurity tools, such as Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS), the ransomware becomes trapped in a loop that prevents it from knowing where it is. The malware cannot differentiate between the simulated environment and real security environment that it tries to evade, and thus it stays inactive, “waiting for conditions that will never materialize,” Bobritsky says. “Per se, new products, tools or technology and processes may not solve the challenges individuals or organizations face when infected with ransomware,” says Jens Monrad, consulting system engineer at security firm . “Above all we need a fundamentally new way of thinking about cyberattacks.” Monrad suggests the , which instead of focusing on total prevention recognizes that some ransomware attacks will get through and aims at reducing the time to detect and resolve threats. “In the adaptive model, security teams have the tools, intelligence, and expertise to detect, prevent, analyze, and resolve ever-evolving tactics used by advanced attackers,” Monrad explains. Adaptive defense should encompass three core interconnected areas of technology, intelligence and expertise, which, according to Monrad, are fundamental for enterprises, governments and organizations that want to develop their capabilities to minimize the time it takes to discover a threat and recover from it. At the technology level, Monrad proposes the use of sophisticated security tools. “Simple sandbox solutions aren’t enough though,” he explains, “because in many cases a piece of malicious code and an attack can happen over multiple stages, which makes detection and prevention more challenging, if your sandbox is just relying on a single object.” This includes viruses that download and execute their malicious payload after getting past the sandbox. That’s why sandboxing should occur at the network level, Monrad argues, where you can “focus on the entire stream of packets, in order to analyze what is happening, in a similar way, as normal users are exposed to the code when they browse the Internet, click on a link in an email or open an attached file.” At the intelligence level, “data should be gathered and shared across many endpoints and should be managed by a dedicated research team that knows attackers and how they operate,” Monrad says. The right solution should “provide intelligence before a ransomware attack happens, while it is happening and also explain why it did happen,” he says. The expertise discipline includes experience in responding to data breaches, unique insight into how attacks are happening and knowledge on what sort of operational methods attackers employ in order to carry out successful attacks. |
GoDaddy CTO and cloud VP heads to Google | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 16 | GoDaddy’s chief technology officer — amid a time when the company is expanding its cloud-computing operations — is departing, . Elissa Murphy will be leaving the company later in May. Her departure comes as GoDaddy has , helping it evolve from a simple hosting service to something more robust. These kinds of tools help convince small businesses to stick around with GoDaddy services, rather than just register and host a domain. To be sure, executive departures happen — especially as companies grow and go public. But it’s still an interesting time for her to leave given the company’s expansion into cloud services. , Murphy is joining Google. Chief information and infrastructure officer Arne Josefberg will take over, according to Fortune — giving him a pretty important job for the recently-public company that has to find ways to expand its core business. There are no hints as to what she’ll be doing at Google, but Google too has been winning big clients for its cloud service, . GoDaddy has had somewhat of a rocky year, share-wise. But so far, on the year shares are up around 20% — signaling that, whatever the company is doing, it seems to be working and growing. Revenue for the company was up 14% in the fourth quarter year-over-year, and last quarter . [graphiq id=”dq8F2CNktcp” title=”Godaddy.com LLC (GDDY) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”548″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/dq8F2CNktcp” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/20778419/Godaddycom-LLC-in-Scottsdale-AZ” link_text=”Godaddy.com LLC (GDDY) Stock Price – 1 Year | FindTheCompany”] Still, if the company is going to continue growing, it has to find new lines of business — which means expanding into new areas that give small businesses tools that make them want to stick with GoDaddy, rather than moving to other services. |
The new-world insurance agent | Peter G. Colis | 2,016 | 4 | 16 |
Silicon Valley is building the new-world insurance agent. My grandfather started selling insurance in the 1950s and insurance eventually granted him the American dream. Today, the industry accounts for 7 percent of U.S. GDP, with more than of net premiums paid annually. The aged way of conducting business is pushing the Valley to disrupt all layers of the value chain. Insurance agents are under the most visible attack because the profession has not changed or adapted since my grandfather was in business. Buying a policy is still a pre-PC experience. There are 1 million insurance agents in the U.S. today, the most in history (even though the profession is largely replaceable with software). 100 percent of commercial policies, 95 percent of home policies and 70 percent of auto policies. Why isn’t your broker made of silicon yet? Incumbent carriers cannot turn their backs on the agent and go direct-to-consumer without the risk of offending their agent networks. So much existing and referral-based business is at stake that most carriers do not allow consumers to purchase insurance online — they make consumers purchase through an agent. To keep the peace with agents, most carriers will provide an online quote, then direct you to the nearest agent instead of an online checkout (driving you from online to a retail location, what a horrible experience). Insurance carriers’ channel conflict is the Valley’s gain. Online intermediaries like , and have emerged with venture funding and a mission to sell insurance online (this is a natural, because of consumers begin their insurance research online). Online originations is a much cheaper cost of acquisition than an insurance agent, allowing the carrier to compete with lower prices and higher underwriting losses. But these originators cannot yet transact policies directly, and still pass the consumer to the respective insurance provider to complete a purchase. is an Indian startup that can sell policies direct-to-consumer. They recognized that only of Indian consumers have any non-health insurance and only 2 percent of that 4 percent bought their insurance online. Just look at the U.K. for inspiration, where more than of auto policies are originated online and the online intermediaries are to thank for this. But intermediaries can come in much more creative forms than standard quote generation and policy comparison. (a graduate of the 2016 Y Combinator batch) built an app that quotes insurance for any personal property (jewelry, car, house, drones, etc.) based on a picture of the object. The app currently routes customers to a broker, but Cover will be licensed in the next few months to provide an end-to-end in-app solution. It’s a compelling solution that lets consumers interact with insurance in a very different way. “Today’s brokers are not suited for mobile-sourced customers who expect instantaneous results from interaction: namely quotes and the ability to convert,” says Cover CEO Karn Saroya. “Our goal is to do more for the mobile consumer, because they expect more. If they have downloaded our app and entered their information, their intent is very strong and we want to satisfy that intent.” Saroya also mentioned getting creative requests that Cover never envisioned, like people taking selfies to try to get a life insurance quote or insuring a racehorse with a snapshot: a glimpse into the possible future. Some startups are getting rid of brokerages entirely. is building a cloud-based, end-to-end mobile insurance platform, scheduled to launch later in 2016. Today, the Trov app keeps track of your valuable possessions (bicycle, skis, laptop, etc.). Soon, with the introduction of on-demand insurance, you’ll be able to insure your laptop, skis, bicycle or other possessions, for however long you like, with a single swipe in the app. Premiums for these micro-duration policies are paid in-app, and claims are filed using a simple, mobile chat interface. Trov CEO Scott Walchek explains, “Trov’s on-demand insurance gives unprecedented control to the mobile generation — empowering them to protect just the things that are important to them, whenever they want, and for as long as they need — entirely on their smartphone.” This is only the beginning of what could be possible after on-demand insurance is introduced in the market. In the future Trov might enable people to insure their things by date, (skis are insured during winter), locality (laptop insured when it leaves the house) or by event (golf clubs insured when traveling). The spotlight is on consumer insurance, but commercial insurance also presents a large opportunity. is a tech-enabled commercial broker built on the premise that it can serve small and medium businesses better than the status-quo insurance broker. “Broker workflows and processes are all manual in nature. Because manual processes don’t scale, smaller customers receive worse service outcomes,” says CEO Matt Miller. Embroker is currently focused on improving efficiency, transparency and UX of commercial insurance for SMB clients. “Brokers serve as market makers, but each individual broker manually calls or emails carriers based on their intuition about which one will be a good match. It’s an extremely inefficient market,” says Miller. Embroker uses predictive analytics to recommend coverage and optimize pricing. Clients save time and money, and get coverage that’s better matched to their actual risks. Incumbent carriers are asleep at the wheel of innovation and will likely stay asleep for the next few years. But taking a selfie to get life insurance is not far away — the innovation will come from the Valley. I’m bullish on insurance startups. New carriers will be born and incumbent carriers will hopefully wise up. |
Handcuffed to Uber | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | Plenty of people would give everything to be an early employee at seven-year-old . But Uber employees who’ve been with the ride-share company for at least a few years have discovered a considerable downside to their ride with the transportation juggernaut. They can’t afford to quit. Startup employees have to exercise their options within 90 days of leaving a company or else lose them and at Uber, that cost is simply too high. A quick scan of LinkedIn for former employees underscores the point. Of Uber’s roughly 6,700 employees, only a tiny fraction have left, and in most cases, those hires weren’t around long enough to be worrying about vested options. Employees of privately held companies have long wrestled with this issue. (We wrote about it last summer.) With valuations of many privately held tech companies having soared so dramatically in recent years, the amount of capital needed to buy employee options has escalated at an unprecedented pace for employees at a variety of places. Uber appears to be the most extreme example, however. In a completely hypothetical example, let’s say an early, top Uber engineer was given .5 percent of the company. Now let’s say this person was awarded options in 2011, when Uber raised $11 million in Series A funding at a reported valuation. His ownership stake at the time would have been $300,000. Yet today, that same stake (undiluted) would now be worth $300 million at Uber’s reported current post-money valuation of $60 billion. That’s a paper gain of $299,700,000. It’s very hard to cry about that, it’s true. But there is bad news: at a 40 percent tax rate for short-term gains, if the engineer opted to leave Uber, he’d confront a tax bill of $119,880,000, not including that earlier $300,000 needed to exercise the options. And leaving Uber would start the clock. He’d have just 90 days to come up with the $300,000, and he’d have to come up with the rest of the money for the much larger tax bill by the next April 15. Maybe Uber will be publicly traded by then. Maybe it won’t. Some highly valued companies have tried to ease this issue for employees by allowing them to sell some of their shares to preapproved secondary sellers at certain points. Not so Uber, which to restrict unapproved secondary sales. Not only does it not allow employees to sell their shares to secondary buyers, it also won’t allow them to use services like those offered by , which makes loans to founders and early employees using their stock as collateral. (Snapchat, Dropbox, and Airbnb have similar policies.) Our sense is that the company doesn’t mess around, either. Four secondary players have told us of employees who’ve tried to find ways around Uber’s regulations, only to be stymied. “We’ve been approached by big groups of early employees, and I know a lot has been written about loans or hypothetical products to get around its policies,” says one source. “But Uber’s position is that if it learns [of a sale or loan] that goes around its share-transfer restrictions, there will be consequences.” It may seem uncharitable on some level, but it’s very much by design, according to insiders, who say Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has two primary motivations for keeping his company’s shares on lockdown. The first dates back to Facebook, whose IPO was widely considered a bungled affair. In small part, errors in Nasdaq’s computer programming created problems. (Nasdaq later paid out to both the SEC and to brokers who lost money because of those glitches.) The bigger issue was the vibrant secondary market that sprang up around Facebook shares when the company was still private. By the time Facebook went public in May 2012, many retail investors had already shelled out several hundred thousand dollars for its privately held shares. There was “no pop,” says one longtime Uber employee who asked not to be named. “Uber doesn’t want everyone in the deal” because, unlike Facebook, “it wants a spike” when it finally has its public market debut. Uber’s second motivation is to retain the company’s talent. Whereas some companies like Pinterest have opted to make give employees when it comes to managing their vested options, Uber has chosen instead to make it hard, if not impossible, for its employees to move on to other companies. “If you had the ability to sell a portion of your shares to pay the tax on them, that would be one thing,” says one longtime Uber employee. “But you can’t. So unless you’ve already made a lot of money or want to walk away from very valuable equity, you stay.” Uber management is “all former Google and Facebook execs,” notes this person. “They’ve seen the pitfalls of letting people exercise early, and they made sure, early on, that it wasn’t going to happen. Unfortunately, many [employees] who walked in here and received options didn’t really understand all these sophisticated systems.” Despite employees’ immobility, morale inside Uber remains high, according to our sources, a sentiment that the jobs site Glassdoor seems to confirm. Roughly 1,600 people have reviewed Uber on the platform; the 490 who’ve rated CEO Travis Kalanick collectively award him a . As Uber investor Bill Maris of GV to us, too, “a lot of [Uber’s] employees are new. I don’t think they’re pounding the table saying, ‘We need to go public because we need our money.’” Indeed, one source says the number of employees who’ve been with the company for more than four years and whose options are fully vested is in the low double digits. Nevertheless, being handcuffed to the company can mean missed opportunities, both for employees to work for other companies (or themselves), and in their personal lives. As one sympathetic early investor who asked not to be named tells us, “Giving employees liquidity doesn’t mean they leave. Sometimes they want to buy homes or cars or whatever, and providing ways they can improve their lives seems like a good move.” Questions about Uber’s future, and how much everyone owns, is likely an ongoing distraction for employees, too. Though Uber’s success to date has been unrivaled, a variety of on-demand apps have been closing down owing to their thin- to non-existent margins. Uber isn’t immune to financial worries, either. Just this week, it agreed to shell out at as much as to drivers in California and Massachusetts to settle a class-action lawsuit. It’s unlikely the case settled the prospect of other lawsuits stemming from disagreements over how Uber should classify its drivers. Meanwhile, the company has already raised at least $9 billion in funding from a wide variety of capital sources. That gives it room to grow and experiment. At the same time, later-stage rounds typically come with preferred terms that aim to protect those new investors — often at a cost to earlier backers and employee shareholders. In fact, some last week that a authored by VC Bill Gurley of Benchmark against “dirty terms” was aimed at Uber management. (Benchmark led Uber’s Series A round.) Gurley didn’t respond to related questions last week. Asked for this piece about employees’ inability to sell or transfer their shares, Uber also declined to comment. Given the many other initiatives that Uber is juggling on that’s not surprising. In the meantime, Uber continues to chug along with the help of many employees who “feel really good about the company.” So says one Uber employee who, it’s worth noting, has worked for Uber for less than a year. At Uber, as with all startups, the big question is how long that goodwill will last. |
How Silicon Valley can put local businesses back on the map | Tony Xu | 2,016 | 4 | 16 |
I come from a small-business family. My mom has owned three small most recently, a medical clinic in the South Bay. But it was in her first business, a Chinese restaurant outside Chicago, where I saw firsthand the challenges facing small-business owners. When politicians say that “small are the backbone of America,” it’s no exaggeration. The latest U.S. Census data shows that 90 percent of all in the U.S. have fewer than 20 employees, and 99.9 percent have fewer than 500. Small provide 55 percent of the jobs in the U.S., and that number hasn’t changed significantly in the past century. It’s safe to say the U.S. economy wouldn’t run without small . Unfortunately, for most of its life, has failed to address this critical segment of the economy. Sure, there are the few exceptions: helps them take money without relying on cash; lets smaller companies act a bit bigger; (formerly ZenPayroll) helps them with benefits and payroll; helps them build a site. All these services add value to a small business’ bottom line. But these are all supporting ongoing business operations and finding ways to cut costs, rather than adding a real way to make money. And many startups aren’t even focused on small, at all. So why is ignoring the biggest segment of in the country? First of all, chasing small-business customers generally isn’t in a tech startup’s best interest. The problem facing many startups is the need to scale; selling to takes too much work. You’re much better off selling 1,000 licenses of your SaaS product to a larger company than trying to sell those licenses two seats at a time to 500 different companies. Second, whether you’re selling to consumers or , it’s much easier to convince customers when you’re offering an incremental, iterative improvement to an existing state of affairs rather than trying to create an entirely new behavior. For consumer companies like Lyft, Shyp, Luxe and many others, taking an established transaction and improving the experience is the way to go. Third, helping a small business dynamically grow their business is incredibly difficult. Sure, you trim costs in one place and improve efficiencies in another, but if your business is selling blue jeans or burritos, you’re limited by the capacity of your store and the amount of your inventory. A restaurant could make a little extra money by turning over a table a few minutes quicker, but it won’t transform their business. With little innovation in the small-business space, the fact of the matter is that the backbone of America is starting to break. In 2012, . In 2013, the number was down to . In 2014 it was . Recent retail research sheds even more light on that downward trend, showing that as national chains continue to grow, are disappearing. For example, data from retail research house NPD reported a . That kind of change is surely having an impact on overall GDP growth. Washing dishes in my mom’s restaurant as a kid, I realized that when you run your own business you’re always worried about 50 different things at any given time. As a result, the way to support is not by cutting a few costs. Rather, it comes from creating an entirely new business line and growing their sales, all without adding a 51st hassle for the business-owner to worry about. Nowhere more than here does the new adage “ ” apply more perfectly. economies need a new wave of bright, innovative minds seeking as potential customers, finding ways to add revenue to their top line rather than just shaving off cost at the bottom. Those ideas will come from thoughtful solutions to age-old problems and from taking the time to meet with your small business customers one on one. That’s how we built our business, and I know more entrepreneurs in our community are beginning to think that way, too. With such potential in , a small shift toward solving problems would have a big impact on small and help to build up our economies again. If are empowered to grow the same way as tech startups, we could reverse the declines we’ve seen in the past few years. Surely we help solve that problem. |
Microsoft’s new tool for building line-of-business apps is now in public preview | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 29 | allows anybody to build basic business apps without having to touch any code. These apps can run on the web and on mobile (through the PowerApps apps for iOS and Android). Microsoft first announced a private preview of this project but , it’s open for anybody who wants to give it a try. Building apps in PowerApps is mostly a drag-and-drop affair. While the service offers an online dashboard, the design work happens in a Windows 10 desktop app. Most line-of-business apps rely on being able to connect to a variety data sources. Thankfully, Microsoft makes it easy to connect to both its own tools like Excel, Office 365, SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Dynamics CRM, but also to third-party tools like Google Drive, Salesforce, Dropbox, Slack and Twitter. If you rely on a service that isn’t integrated into PowerApps yet, you can also connect your apps to any RESTful API. To get new users situated, Microsoft offers a number of templates for a couple of standard use cases. For the most part, though, building new apps from scratch is pretty straightforward — though maybe not quite as trivial as Microsoft’s marketing wants to make it look. PowerApps also includes some basic integration with — an IFTTT-like service for connecting apps that don’t usually talk to each other the company quietly . Thanks to this, you can trigger Flow actions from your PowerApps apps, for example. Flow, for the most part, gives you a bit more flexibility in how you want to than similar tools like IFTTT and Zapier do, but for the time being, it doesn’t offer anywhere near the amount of services you can connect with each other. Unsurprisingly, Flow’s focus is more on business tools like Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Yammer, MailChimp, Slack, GitHub and SalesForce, but it also supports a few standard Facebook and Twitter actions. |
Making sense of enterprise security | Tom Seo | 2,016 | 4 | 16 |
Until recently, I knew nothing about enterprise security beyond some of the more widely publicized breaches in the United States. That said, after spending most of 2016 immersed in the space, I’ve come to appreciate just how challenging and broad an issue security has become to enterprises. I’ve also come to believe that our best hope for solving security is by understanding humans — the perpetrators and victims of cyberattacks — and, as a result, I’m convinced that security is fundamentally a human identity problem. Human beings have a tendency to do things with technology that go beyond original intent, and this inclination should be celebrated. After all, technology continues to drive radical innovation, whether in the form of new applications, use cases or platforms. Unfortunately, it’s also this type of behavior that makes security such a difficult problem. As individuals and organizations leverage technology for intended unintended uses, it becomes virtually impossible to foresee all threats and vulnerabilities that surface in the process. In other words, the issue with enterprise security is that, by nature, it’s reactive. No system or asset can ever be fully secure. Economic theory also highlights why security has become so problematic, as it explains both market and buyer/seller dynamics. An obvious takeaway from is that the market has become incredibly saturated and fragmented. Enterprise security companies — incumbents and challengers alike — claim to offer nearly identical solutions, and collectively crowd around a handful of themes (e.g. “endpoint security leveraging machine learning”). Moreover, buyers base decisions on an established set of “signals” — most of which do more to satisfy compliance checklists than address underlying security vulnerabilities. The saturation, fragmentation and herd-like activity is symptomatic of the uncertainty that governs market forces in security, which I think leads to irrational buying and selling behavior. A slew of offerings for practically every market segment exists because we’re still nowhere near to figuring out how best to protect enterprises. Buyers are still willing to pay for ineffective solutions in the midst of massive breaches, and sellers continue to champion product infallibility in their marketing brochures, even though they, too, are unsure of their products’ ultimate value. So while it’s abundantly clear that there isn’t a single silver bullet in enterprise security, we’ve reached a point where, taken in aggregate, there are apparently hundreds, if not thousands, of distinct silver bullets. Though unusual, economics suggests that this occurs when buyers and sellers operate within an environment of extreme uncertainty. Cloud and IoT further complicate the issue, namely by altering and expanding the total enterprise attack surface. . The traditional (and clearly outdated) approach to security involves a single enterprise firewall that encompasses the entirety of an organization’s IT infrastructure. This approach has been made largely obsolete as companies embrace the cloud, with assets no longer centrally housed and structurally isolated. Not only that, but with increased adoption of cloud applications, companies face unprecedented levels of IP, data and identity sprawl beyond the enterprise firewall. What is frequently touted by cloud evangelists (i.e. distribution of IT assets) creates a nightmare scenario for security professionals. . An influx of connected devices entering the IoT ecosystem exponentially increases (1) the number of entry points exposed to breaches and (2) the permutation of paths attackers can exploit to arrive at targeted assets. The notion that existing endpoint security solutions can effectively mitigate IoT-borne risks is hard to accept, as connected “things” are by design very different from desktop and mobile devices. IoT hardware and software come in many more shapes and sizes than those of traditional endpoints, and the absence of standardized protocols in deployment today makes it difficult to secure all assets within the IoT ecosystem. A shift toward verticalized applications and use cases suggests that even if standards are put into place, they will be somewhat federated and industry-specific. Also, because IoT devices face limited system resources, they are incompatible with most endpoint and antivirus solutions in the market. And even if they are compatible with existing offerings, security professionals must deal with the lion’s share of devices that currently run on legacy operating systems unable to support cutting-edge technologies, Yet what makes IoT the single biggest security risk of our generation is that attacks are no longer constrained to IT assets. Because the foundational value of IoT lies in bridging the physical-digital divide, attackers can now target operational technology (OT) to cause actual physical damage. Again, because humans have an inclination to do things with technology that go beyond original intent, the possibilities are endless for hackers. Recent attacks targeting control systems and physical assets (e.g. , , , , ) only scratch the surface — it’s very possible to see how future attacks can be carried out by organized crime groups to exact injury and even death. None of this should come as news to security professionals, who know much more about the space that I do (and probably ever will). Still, I’ve observed that in most organizations, security is defined as a largely operational function, which in turn leads to reactive, incohesive decision-making. These dynamics have become institutionalized to a point where there are now established “religions” in security, which include: Relying entirely on the “religions” above to secure enterprises is dangerous, not least because attackers and threats are constantly evolving. Tactical decision-making is effective only to the extent that it’s guided by an overarching, unified enterprise security strategy. So how should companies think about approaching security at a broader strategic level? To address this question, it’s worth re-emphasizing that: The recurring theme in all this is that there are countless moving parts in enterprise security. A natural corollary to this point is that because the challenge is so dynamic, committing technological, organizational and financial resources to a specific tactic is counterproductive — and bound to fail. It’ll only be a matter of time before the next major breach renders an approach ineffective. There is, however, an element that remains consistent throughout — that despite the uncertainty that governs market forces and recent advances in IT/OT infrastructure, human beings have been, and will always be, the ones carrying out cyberattacks. Notwithstanding the varying motives and approaches pursued, attackers — whether they be rogue actors, corporate insiders, industry competitors, organized crime groups or nation states — can only operate within the constraints dictated by human tendencies and behavior. With that said, I’d like to argue that security is really about understanding human beings. While there’s no shortage of attention around incorporating the most advanced technology into security solutions, I’m bullish on innovation for the sake of innovation. I feel strongly that advances are only helpful to the extent that they shed light on the attackers are, and they behave both inside and outside the enterprise. This means that when addressing potential insider threats, a company needs full visibility into every employee, contractor and customer with access to its underlying assets. Growing mindshare around is an encouraging trend, as it goes beyond solutions that are focused exclusively on the application layer. Because identity is no longer abstracted from IT infrastructure and networking components, enterprises are able to achieve full visibility and provision, assign and manage privileges in a seamless (and hopefully automated) fashion throughout the entire stack. To more effectively address external threats, this means that enterprises shouldn’t rely solely on a blacklist of attackers and vulnerabilities — which is as reactive as it gets — but also should proactively scour the entire threat landscape to identity attackers and their recognized patterns of behavior. is starting to address this challenge, and I’m optimistic about solutions that systematically profile and contextualize attackers with a level of detail and granularity that has never been achieved before. While my role in enterprise security is to invest in the most promising products and technologies, my biggest takeaway over the last few months has been that security, as technical a space as it may be, is about better profiling and understanding the attackers, thus making the problem fundamentally about human identity. |
Nokia and Skype strongmen invest in Finnish food delivery app | Dennis Mitzner | 2,016 | 4 | 16 |
Even with billion dollar behemoths already in the food delivery market, Helsinki-based food delivery app has managed to raise $11 million fresh funding from heavyweight Nordic investors including the founder of Skype and the chairman of Nokia as the company announced its Stockholm launch on Friday. “We are now expanding in the Nordics and in the Baltic region. The funds go to the expansion – hiring the launching teams for the new cities and expanding within new countries – and product development at the HQ,” said Juhani Mykkänen, Wolt’s COO and co-founder. led the new round with new high profile backers Niklas Zennström, the founder of Skype and Ilkka Paananen, the CEO of Supercell. Nokia’s chairman Risto Siilasmaa who participated in the company’s previous round, was part of the illustrious investor lineup. As a result of the new investment, Kees Koolen, the former CEO of Booking.com will join the company’s board of directors. In all, Wolt has raised $14 million. Wolt’s previous rounds included Inventure, Lifeline Ventures, Pii Ketvel, Supercell co-founder Visa Forsten and Poju Zabludowicz, a real-estate tycoon and one of the wealthiest people in Finland. Wolt operates in a crowded space with companies such as – valued at $3 billion, – , , , , and all competing for the market share. “There are a number of more established players globally. I’d say our biggest competitor is really the corner grocery store where people go every week without really thinking about it. The food industry is around 0.5% digital in any form (US data). I’d say it’s a pretty unexplored market still outside delivery of pizza,” said Miki Kuusi, the CEO and co-founder of Wolt. The delivery space has attracted big investments recently with Alibaba investing $900 million on Chinese food-delivery app and earlier in April, London-based on-demand delivery service . In late March, French delivery service to invest in its own infrastructure to serve more clients. Although Wolt faces some formidable competition, the company has achieved a significant market share in Finland, a country of only 5.4 million people. “We have 100 000 registered users and 450 restaurants,” Mykkänen said. That matters in a local market in the frozen North, where delivery apps are a shoo-in for cities and countries – such as Finland – with long winters and comfort-loving populations. The US alone has a bustling $70 billion takeaway and food delivery market of which only $9 billion is currently online. Wolt, like most delivery apps, takes a cut from each delivery. “We take a cut of a few percent for every takeaway transaction and a larger cut for every delivery transaction. There are no monthly fees or signup fees for the merchant. For the customer the app is free and everything costs the same than in the restaurant”, said Mykkänen. As part of Friday’s investment news, Wolt also announced its expansion to Stockholm where it will start with 32 restaurants. Stockholm is the company’s first city outside of Finland. “We have a great launch team now in place in Stockholm and are looking to hire people in other Nordics as well. It’s an exciting time for us”, said Kuusi. |
We should be worried about job atomization, not job automation | Jon Evans | 2,016 | 4 | 16 | In the future, machines will do tedious, repetitive work for us, and do more of it than humans ever could, simultaneously increasing economic output and liberating humans everywhere from drudgery. We all know what that means: Disaster! Dystopia! Catastrophe! Everybody panic, the robots are stealing our jobs! We’re dooooooomed! Does it not seem completely insane, when you take a step back, that we’re actually collectively about this prospect? And yet we are. “What should you study to stop robots stealing your job?” . “AI And Robots Are Coming For Your Job,” . As if it would somehow be far better if this future did not come to pass. Dwight Eisenhower once : “If you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it.” I submit that the problem we face is not that robots will produce more than people while freeing us from mind-numbing, back-breaking toil. I submit that the problem is that full-time jobs are assumed as the fundamental economic building blocks of our society, and that we lack the flexibility or imagination to consider, much less move towards, any alternative structure. Don’t blame the robots. Our brave new economy is already winnowing jobs as we knew them, while the great tsunami of automation still gathers on the horizon. In 1995, 9.3% of the American work force had a so-called “alternative work arrangement” — temporary, gig, or contract work — as their main job. By 2005 that rose slightly to 10.1%. But by 2015 that had skyrocketed to a whopping 15.8%. Indeed, “net employment growth in the U.S. economy since 2005 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements,” . The that “an expanding share of the workforce has come untethered from stable employment and its attendant benefits and job protections” but points out “this shift away from steady employment has taken place largely in the shadows … most of that growth has happened offline, not through apps such as TaskRabbit and Lyft.” So you can’t blame the servants-as-a-service apps for this…yet. But the notes that the ‘“Online Gig Economy” has been growing very rapidly.’ Does anyone doubt that this, plus rising automation, will do anything other than accelerate the existing trend towards “alternative work arrangements”? This is not job , but job — the replacement of long-term, full-time work with benefits, and a career path, with occasional, short-term contract gigs without benefits or any escalating career structure. For some people this is great! Including me; my employment history is best described as “checkered,” and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I think it’s important not to ignore that many people prefer “alternative work arrangements.” But, generally speaking, most people want benefits, consistency, predictability, and predefined career paths. Not least because if you do not have any of these things, and you’re not lucky enough to be, say, a successful novelist or a software engineer, then society frowns on you, and your prospects are frequently bleak and deeply uncertain. You become part of the —
This is not just a matter of having insecure employment, of being in jobs of limited duration and with minimal labour protection, although all this is widespread. It is being in a status that offers no sense of career, no sense of secure occupational identity and few, if any, entitlements to the state and enterprise benefits that several generations … had come to expect as their due.
Tech inadvertently contributes to job atomization by making it easier. Individual jobs can more easily be partitioned, subdivided, outsourced, and made fungible with the assistance of software and smartphones. Again, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this; it reduces wastage and makes work more efficient. Think of the horde of part-time Uber drivers who pour into the streets when surge pricing ratchets up to 2x or 3x; everybody wins, albeit at a cost. The problem is that the growing precariat is ill-served by an economy built around the assumption that every able-bodied adult should have a full-time job. So what’s to be done? Well, a will help people who do have atomized jobs, and discourage a race to the bottom. It will also , but if that destroys jobs faster than it creates them, a minimum wage won’t make much difference. In the long run, though, the solution is to ensure that a decent portion of the fruits of what should be a golden future — a world in which machines do ever more work for us — are shared with the precariat on an ongoing basis. That way its growing numbers have some semblance of security, hope for the future, and real opportunity for their families. Those should not be reserved only for writers of software, owners of robots, and inheritors of wealth. A may seem like a drastic change — but I submit that when technology ushers in what should be a giddily wonderful future, and we react as if it’s a terrifying horror to be feared, a drastic change is exactly what is called for. |
Epic Foundation’s new app helps donors understand where their money is going | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | is a nonprofit aiming to improve charitable giving — an approach that encompasses the way people select, monitor and “experience” their donations. Founded by serial entrepreneur (among other roles, he was CEO at Phonevalley, a mobile marketing agency , where Mars became head of mobile), Epic is trying to bring a more tech- and data-driven approach to the nonprofit world. Specifically on the monitoring side, Epic is launching a new Impact app for smartphones and the web that should allow donors to stay up-to-date with the organizations they’ve contributed to. Most nonprofits communicate with donors with annual reports — thick volumes that many people probably don’t bother to read. With the Impact app, on the other hand, it should be easier to keep up thanks to ongoing updates and data coming in straight from the field. That can include simple things like social media updates, or more in-depth stories about the people who have been helped by the organization. Mars suggested that this will allow donors to monitor the groups they’ve supported, almost like a stock portfolio. That means you see how much you’ve donated, and also the quantified impact of the organization, whether it’s number of beneficiaries or meals served or hours taught. (Epic works with each group to determine the most meaningful data to share through the app.) To be clear, the Impact app isn’t trying to attach any strings to the donations or influence the work these organizations do — it’s just providing a window into that work. Mars argued that introducing more transparency isn’t just a nice little feature — it could actually make people comfortable with donating larger sums of money. He recalled that before starting Epic, he talked to many people who said they’d supported worthy causes, but also admitted they hadn’t done as much as they could. With these kinds of tools, he said, “We want to drive them to do more.” While this isn’t really part of the Impact app, it’s worth explaining how Epic selects these organizations. The foundation is focused on nonprofits that work with youth, and it examines 45 different data points to find that it thinks are worth supporting. It takes those groups on a tour, connecting them with philanthropists, entrepreneurs, investors and others, who then choose which nonprofits they want to support. Everyone, not just the rich, should be able to donate, Mars said. You can , but over time there will be more e-commerce-type features (like the ability to donate as a gift for someone else) that could increase small donations. Mars, by the way, is fully funding Epic, so there are no hidden fees included in the donations. He told me that he might look at outside funding models in the future, but he remains committed to the idea that “100 percent of what you give will go directly to the organization you’re selecting.” |
MediaXchange, U.S. newspapers’ biggest industry event, will be an echo chamber without solutions | Matt Mitchell | 2,016 | 4 | 16 |
The Newspaper Association of America’s annual MediaXchange conference is this weekend. And while I won’t be at this year’s event, I’ve been a “member”, attendee and sponsor in the past, and will attend again in the future. Like the 17th iteration of Groundhog Day, sessions will focus on digital issues newspapers continue to face. (Advice: if you want to live, don’t play a drinking game at MediaXchange where the sip trigger is someone saying “In the new digital world…” It was the “new world” 20 yearsago. Now it’s just the world.) By now we all know the problem. U.S. newspapers are losing a billion dollars in revenue a year. Many have gone out of business and those that remain have 40% smaller staffs than they did in 1989. The most frustrating part of newspapers’ downward spiral is that it’s happening while they have the greatest competitive advantage in the crowded “new digital world.” (Drink.) In our cluttered digital landscape consumers are less trusting and more cynical than ever before, making strong brands hard to build and harder still to sustain. Digital native publishers would kill to have the brand awareness and trust that newspapers have cultivated over decades. Even if they’ve cancelled their subscription, people still have an attachment to their local newspaper that the Huffington Posts of the world can’t replicate. The idea of newspaper brand trust isn’t all that novel and won’t be overlooked at MediaXchange. According to David Chavern, NAA’s new CEO: “Legacy newspapers actually have a huge advantage [because] if you have high-value branded content with growing engagement by valued consumers, then your ad inventory is both scarce and valuable.” The problem, which I think newspapers would be the first admit, is that they have barely begun to leverage this advantage. Trust is everything if you want to make money. Blue chip brands only work with and pay premiums to trusted blue chip content creators. MediaXchange will again look to leverage that big “S” in their SWOT discussions (they won’t call it SWOT because that’s lame but they’ll have the discussion). Unfortunately, what will then ensue is a massive ad-tech and social media echo chamber — copied, pasted, repackaged amalgams of the same intransigent formulas from a playbook that’s been dusted off, recycled and sold for more than it was initially worth. This dynamic isn’t happening because of industry or management incompetence. I’ve worked with hundreds of newspapers and they are an incredibly smart group. So why are newspapers failing to right the ship? It can be boiled down to two problems. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism did a study not too long ago called The Search for a New Business Model. In exchange for anonymity, newspaper executives gave startlingly candid commentary. More than three-quarters said their single biggest challenge was their newspaper’s internal culture. One said, “You can change CEOs, executive VPs, digital VPs. You can wave this magic wand all you want. But at the end of the day, the troops in the field hunker down.” After years of being pitched seven-minute-ab ideas from the young smooth talking “new media” and reading how bad things are, who wouldn’t lose some mojo and freeze a bit? I’d like to hear more ideas that are completely new models for newspapers rather than attempts to better optimize what they’re already doing. For instance: There is tons of competition in flash sales, daily deals, subscription fashion boxes and other e-commerce plays. All the funding in the space has resulted in robust API’s and players with the resources to create interesting partnerships. Sites like Shopify, Zulily and Gilt should be jumping at the opportunity to partner with newspapers. Conversion rates are directly proportional to consumer’s level of trust. According to Pew Research, customers terminate 70% of online purchases because of a lack of trust. If only there was an industry group with 100+ years of built-in brand equity! Mobile proliferation works in newspapers’ favor too. Mobile commerce is growing nearly 3 times faster than all other e-commerce. 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding local results, and 61% of those searches result in some sort of purchase. (Search Engine Watch). According to NAA, half of the 180 million unique newspaper visitors use a mobile device exclusively. Hmmm…. Dipping their toes in e-commerce isn’t a completely foreign idea to newspapers. Okanjo, a start-up that allows for Facebook style “Buy-it-now” buttons in ads, was selected as a winner in NAA’s Accelerator Pitch program in 2015. While a good start, this is still following the leader. “Facebook is doing what? Can we do that?” Giving readers the ability to purchase a half second after seeing an ad has been around for years. Buy-it-now buttons inside ad real estate provides a more storefront feel, giving newspapers the hope that they can capture more of the shared economics of a purchase. But effective RPM (Revenue per thousand impressions) data proves that it’s nothing more than ads repackaged with some interactivity. The pitch is appealing but at the end of the day all it will do is shift business to a different ad-tech startup, only marginally improving ad revenue for newspapers. Ideas like this are still “inside-the-box” thinking. Not metaphorically, I mean literally inside the same div or iframe ad-box where newspapers currently mine the majority of their insufficient digital revenue. Remember, their cheese was moved to Mars; looking under the seat cushion in the living room isn’t going to uncover a transformative revenue stream. It needs to be deeper. With the right partnerships digital papers can be a destination. They don’t need to be just another distribution channel for e-commerce companies. Consumers have to be nurtured through each part of the buying funnel and be made aware that newspapers are now their trusted source to for products and deals. Inform your users (over and over) that you are supporting your community by finding and partnering with the best deals and products, with the best service, from the best companies. You’re opening a Seattle Times store! Instead of hoping your users buy a hoverboard while they’re reading about city council initiatives, you’ll have branded yourself has a place to go for deals and potentially even general online shopping down the road. You should even have a separate Curated Deals app. Then you’re not just catching up to Facebook, you’re leveraging an asset Facebook doesn’t have. Facebook’s only similar market option is relying on its users to market products to their friends. They can’t be a trusted commerce brand because they lack that whole, you know, trust part. Fewer than 20% of people ages 25-34 read the newspaper daily, down from 41% in 2003. Incredibly though – defying the laws of everything – while newspapers are in a freefall, applications to journalism schools are skyrocketing. This will leave millions of writers so starved to be printed that they’ll likely give their content away to Demand Media. Wait, this is already happening. Who do you think young journalists who speak millennia would rather have on their resume – Demand Media or the Los Angeles Times? You don’t even have to wait until they graduate and need to make a real salary. Give them beat gigs and brand them “Ground Troops.” It will be a prestigious position. And don’t take applications: organize a contest where you select a few for each section of your paper. These ground troopers will be writing with nothing to lose, and everything to gain from making a splash. If you pick the right ones, they’ll bring the millennials to you. Millennials who buy things and influence others. They’ll also bring a contagious new energy and challenge the old guard to step up. Growing up, every time our family dog would get old we’d buy a puppy. Guess what? Damn it if that old dog didn’t get a second wind! He sure did. What I’m saying is, buy your family a new pup. He’ll be annoying and you’ll have to potty train him but he’ll also be amazing. Give them podcast and videocast platforms too. The number of annual podcast downloads is over 3 billion now and growing by more than 50% per year. You don’t have to create the next Serial. These are low risk, high return investments, so throw a bunch of them on the wall and see what sticks. The only reason newspaper content has been exclusively article-based the last 100 years is because delivering tape recorders on subscriber’s lawns every morning wasn’t a cost effective distribution strategy. According to intense research I did scanning headshots on the NAA’s Board of Directors webpage they don’t have one member under the age of 45. As boards go, this is common and generally there’s nothing wrong with it. But if attracting youth is your greatest problem this seems like low hanging fruit. I would go so far as to elect 2-3 university student representatives on a rolling basis. The NAA should allow all journalism schools accredited by the ACEJMC to elect a student representative to attend MediaXchange for free each year. That’s fewer than 150 students. Allow them all to apply to be on a new student panel at MediaXchange as well. The board should have every director pick an exhibitor they’ve never met to have coffee or a beer with at MediaXchange. You can call it “Spicoli meets Mr. Hand” (working title). Those exhibitors are the people trying to solve newspaper problems. 90% of them are digital monetization and engagement people, right? Sounds like a good opportunity to me. The NAA board members could hold an internal draft every year to decide who gets to meet with which each exhibitor. Newspapers will never enjoy an oligopoly again. We live in a world where the series finales of Breaking Bad, Mad Men and The Office combined had fewer viewers than the series finale of Alf. As Chris Rock says, “people are only as faithful as their options.” Consumers are still into you, newspapers, but big, sweeping changes have to happen now. Newspapers are reaching a critical point. Their brands are on the precipice of significant value and opportunity loss. When the tail-end of the millennials who don’t have fond memories of their parents reading the paper enter their 30’s and control the most coveted brand demographic, it will be over. Nobody has a stopwatch on exactly when that will happen but I do know the needle needs to start moving faster now. |
Waze downplays exploit that let researchers track users | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | has responded to security concerns raised yesterday in a documenting an exploit found by UC Santa Barbara researchers. In short: it’s legit, but not as dire as it’s made out to be. The exploit leverages the Waze feature that shows you nearby users, showing that the data you’re seeing is live and giving you options should you need help. The researchers created hundreds of fake driver profiles, which would keep tabs on a given real profile and track its location more or less in real time. “We appreciate the researchers bringing this to our attention and have implemented safeguards in the past 24 hours to address the vulnerability and prevent ghost riders from affecting system behavior and performing similar tracking activities,” read the addressing the issue. The company pointed out, however, that the reporter had given the researchers her username and starting location (a nice head start), and that the exploit only worked when the app was open and active — at which point your location is being shared with people around you anyway. You can also defeat the exploit by turning on “invisible mode,” which seems like the first step you’d want to take if you were worried about being tracked. More details on the exploit and others like it will be presented by the researchers at in June. |
Employee found dead at Apple headquarters identified | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | The Santa Clara County coroner’s office identified the at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters on Wednesday as 25-year-old Edward Mackowiak, Reuters reports. BREAKING: Apple employee found dead at company headquarters identified as Edward Mackowiak- coroner — Reuters U.S. News (@ReutersUS) Mackowiak’s body was reportedly found in a conference room Wednesday morning. The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office described the death as an “isolated incident” and declined to discuss how Mackowiak died or whether any weapons were involved. suggested that Mackowiak suffered a head wound and that a gun may have been found along with his body. Apple confirmed that Mackowiak was an employee of the company, and a now-deleted LinkedIn page listed him as a software engineer. “We are heartbroken by the tragic loss of a young and talented coworker,” an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Our thoughts and deepest sympathies go out to his family and friends, including the many people he worked with here at Apple. We are working to support them however we can in this difficult time.” Mackowiak’s death has been ruled a suicide by the medical examiner. Medical Examiner determined 25 yr old employee Edward Mackowiak's death was a suicide. — Matt Keller (@MattKellerABC7) |
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A Dyson engineer explains why the company spent $71 million and four years developing a high-tech hair dryer | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | Hair dryers are everywhere. Bathrooms. Gym locker rooms. Open a drawer in your hotel room — boom, free hair dryer. It usually requires a lot to get me to really notice a hair dryer. But Dyson has succeeded, and all it took was $71 million and four years of development. It’s a logical progression, really. Between its vacuum cleaners, bladeless fans and the hand dryer ominously known as the “Airblade,” which makes moisture wish it had never been condensated, the British company has really made a name for itself moving air around. The new applies that knowledge to the beauty category, filtered through the company’s strict quality control. That sort of focus on high-end engineering doesn’t come cheap — to Dyson or the consumer. When the Supersonic launches in September, it’ll run a cool (read: hot) $400. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the target audience. I get a pretty good dry from a towel or a brisk walk. I solicited a response from a long-haired colleague who was somewhat skeptical about the product’s ability to fully deliver on its pricey promise, but added that if it is indeed as silent as the company claims, there’s potential appeal for salons and mothers of small children. Librarians with damp hair might get on-board, as well. Dyson’s long search for the hair-drying Holy Grail goes a ways toward explaining the premium price tag. As Tom Crawford, the Head of Product Development for New Categories told TechCrunch, “When Dyson goes into a new category, we always think about how we can make it better. Part of that challenge is making sure we invest in the right technology and testing to do so. The first part of this was to learn the science of hair. How to test it, how to make it repeatable, and then how to measure it. We built our own state of the art laboratory dedicated to investigating the science of hair.” Dyson’s not messing around here. According to Crawford, the company spent a staggering £40,000 ($58,000) on hair tresses alone. “We carried out tests on a variety of real hair types in order to get a full understanding of its performance,” he explains. “A single hair tress costs between £12 and £20, depending on the length of hair we are using. On average, Dyson engineers used 40 hair tresses for every test — so that’s up to £780 a test and 640 inches of hair.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw6iillnXbk That’s a lot of money for a lot of hair. But he insists that the space was long overdue for an overhaul. “The traditional hair dryer design hasn’t changed in more than 60 years,” says Crawford. “Conventional hair dryers often have large motors, and because of their size they have to be put in the head of the machine. As a result, they can be bulky, and they can blast air at extreme temperatures, all with the risk of hair being sucked into the filter and being trapped. We created a Dyson digital motor V9 just for this machine.” And sometimes a hair dryer isn’t a hair dryer. Hey, we wouldn’t have memory foam or freeze-dried ice cream if NASA weren’t so obsessed with going to the boring old moon. “Dyson will always invest in new technologies, even when we aren’t sure of their application yet. Sometimes we see a bit of technology working in one application and wonder whether that might solve a problem in another,” explains Crawford. “That’s exactly how our Airblade technology was born. Dyson engineers were exploring new ways to use our digital motor with an air knife — forcing high-speed air through minuscule apertures. It wasn’t working. But then one day, someone’s hands happened to be wet and the air knife dried them brilliantly. Our motor technology paired with other breakthrough technology has helped us create our very first hair dryer. Just imagine what it could create in five years.” Whatever it is, wetness clearly doesn’t stand a chance. |
Video consumption on Snapchat more than doubled in less than a year | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | may have started out as the ephemeral messaging and photo-sharing app, but a majority of users now consume video there too, according to a report from today. Daily video views on Snapchat have spiked to 10 billion, the report said. That’s up from on Snapchat in February this year, 6 billion daily video views in November 2015, and 4 billion in May 2015, as TechCrunch reported earlier. The new numbers represent a 150 percent increase in video consumption on Snapchat in just under a year. By comparison, Facebook reported daily video views of 8 billion in November 2015. While outlets like Vanity Fair have suggested Snapchat is “ ” Facebook in the video arena, it’s important to note that Snapchat is not using the same measure to count a single video view as Facebook. And the video snaps consumed via Snapchat stories are limited to 10-second takes. That leads to Snapchat users creating video “snap storms,” short segments threaded together in a user’s Story. If you haven’t experienced a video snap storm, investors and are big proponents. Video snap storms and a time limit on videos would inevitably drive up the counts of videos created and viewed on Snapchat. Meanwhile, videos on Facebook are usually longer plays by design. Snapchat’s 100 million-and-growing user base, while truly impressive, still pales in comparison to Facebook’s reported 1.09 billion daily active users on average as of March 2016. And it remains to be seen how much video views on Facebook may have increased following the company’s push into live streaming with and related initiatives. |
You don’t always have to be a coder to build something | Hossein Rahnama | 2,016 | 4 | 28 |
We live in a world where, because of technology and access to information, people can cultivate expertise and contribute on projects or in industries where previously they would have needed formal schooling. The first great example of this was about 10 years ago when we saw “citizen journalism” born from the rise of blogs and social media. Today’s movement is something we’re calling “citizen development,” meaning development is no longer just about developers — it’s about communities and the dynamics of information and innovation flow. Several circumstances of today’s society have allowed citizen development to flourish in the past few years. Affordable access to the Internet and high-performance devices has resulted in a general increase in digital literacy. This means many everyday citizens can articulate the requirements for an innovative digital service that could help them in their daily lives. And because of access to low-code tools and online education, they can actually be involved in the process of getting ideas off the ground. Additionally, class gaps are fading away in communities as access to data and devices is becoming more uniform. A kid in Africa (ideally) has access to the same digital resources as a kid in California. This opens many opportunities for citizen engagement and inter-community collaborations with fewer cultural and linguistic barriers. This increasing uniformity will also contribute to the formation of more powerful, synergistic social networks whose purpose goes beyond finding and connecting with friends. Think about, for example, a micro-financing course in the U.S. can help Maasai tribes in Africa connect with a school in California to sell their beautiful jewelry in the U.S. and avoid middlemen. The two groups have access to the same digital platform and can connect with each other and use the platform differently on each side to achieve a common goal. Another important, and slightly more technical, condition to note is the standardization of APIs and their interoperability. It is one of the core open-data policies that is driving citizen engagement and citizen development. For instance, over the past five years, governments have opened their data to allow citizens to build useful applications and services for their communities. Initiatives like by the U.S. government and from MIT are great examples of how core assets are becoming available for citizens to contribute to a collective intelligence ecosystem for their community. The U.S. government even has a recently established CTO’s office run by , who is enabling an ecosystem of interconnectivity. With most consumer-focused Internet services (like , and ) following suit and opening their data to large groups of developers, it is now up to the citizens to connect commercial and government data sources together and create a mashup of useful services for their communities. There are already great examples of these around the world. For example, in Israel, there are reliable apps developed solely by citizens that alert their community about the threat of a rocket attack. One key aspect keeping citizen engagement and development from taking off is a lack of intuitive experience design tools. With the data needed for development becoming more and more accessible, these sorts of tools will be crucial in the movement’s progression. Think about early web days, when building web pages was only for developers. As more and more tools became available for others, first visual development tools like Microsoft Front Page, then blogs and platforms like WordPress, everyone gained the power to publish content online. Next, we saw unifier platforms like emerge, allowing millions of people to express their opinions online. A similar analogy may be applied to citizen engagement, with mobile devices being at the forefront — except now you need tools (especially on mobile devices) that allow you to go far beyond publishing content and incorporate concepts like privacy management, contextual awareness, sensor integration, etc. That said, the real key to the continued progress and success of citizen development and engagement is having tools that bring different groups of people — like designers, developers, artists and government officials — together in a community. This is the biggest obstacle I see to citizen development becoming our new standard, where almost anyone can bring an idea to the table and connect with all the people they need to make it a reality. So in a sense, citizen development is about much more than just the developer. It’s about building a community around the developer where each member will amplify the value of the core service. Citizen development has the power to bring together a community of designers, developers, governments and corporations, enabling them to solve key issues and innovate collaboratively. And as long as we all keep pushing to develop the tools needed for the movement to flourish, we’ll see it continue to gather steam for years to come. |
SpaceX is awarded its first national security contract | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | The U.S. Air Force has awarded an contract to launch their GPS-3 satellite into orbit. This is the first National Security Space (NSS) contract for SpaceX, who won essentially by default since ULA, the only other viable competitor, to bid in the competition. “This GPS III Launch Services contract award achieves a balance between mission success, meeting operational needs, lowering launch costs, and reintroducing competition for National Security Space missions.” Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, Air Force Program Executive Officer for Space SpaceX winning the first competitively sourced NSS contract is evidence that the . For more than a decade, ULA enjoyed a monopoly over these Air Force military contracts. Over the past two years, however, much has happened between SpaceX, the Air Force and ULA that changed that situation. In April of 2014, SpaceX suit against the Air Force in an effort to break ULA’s monopoly and gain the ability to compete for national-security-related launches. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, argued that ULA’s monopoly of Air Force launches was unjustified. Musk stated, “This contract is costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars for no reason, and to add salt to the wound, the primary engine that’s used is a Russian engine.” In January of 2015, the Air Force agreed to work with SpaceX to certify their rocket for military satellite launches and SpaceX dropped their lawsuit. Musk’s rocket company ultimately received certification from the Air Force later that year. Air Force certifies to compete for launching national security satellites — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Today, ULA and SpaceX are the only two companies certified to compete for military launch contracts. So why didn’t ULA bid for this one? SpaceX’s competitive prices and the fact that ULA’s rocket requires a Russian-made RD-180 engine are two of the main factors that led to that decision. ULA’s use of a Russian engine to launch national security assets has been the source of for a while. Congress has even gone so far as to place a purchasing ban on RD-180s altogether. ULA’s RD-180-powered Atlas V launch of an Air Force GPS asset in 2014 / Image courtesy of United Launch Alliance photo / John Studwell Some saw this ban as unfairly singling out ULA since NASA has been paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the Russians to send U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station for years now. With the purchasing ban in effect at the time (it has since been temporarily lifted), ULA declined to bid for the GPS-3 contract, stating that they couldn’t guarantee that they would have a rocket available come May, 2018. Last month, ULA’s engineering vice president, Brett Tobey, spoke on the situation between ULA, their RD-180 engine and the competition with SpaceX. Among other controversial things, Tobey suggested that ULA didn’t bid for the GPS-3 contract because they couldn’t compete with SpaceX’s prices. “Along came Elon Musk and changed the game completely…we can’t afford [to bid] any more because the price points are coming down as low as $60 million. The best day you’ll see us bid at $125 million or twice that number.” Brett Tobey Tobey was later forced to resign from the company. . These ill-advised statements do not reflect ULA’s views or our relationship with our valuable suppliers. We welcome competition — Tory Bruno (@torybruno) But price isn’t all that matters. The fact is, ULA has a longer and better track record of launches than SpaceX and, in terms of launching national security assets, that’s an incredibly important trait. Unfortunately for ULA, their RD-180 engine will continue to be an issue until they find a reliable engine to replace it. In an effort to do just that, ULA Blue Origin and Aerojet Rocketdyne to pursue two options for an American-made engine. However, it may take until 2019 to have a launch-ready engine to replace the RD-180. The satellite for this week’s GPS-3 contract will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in May, 2018. This is the first of nine competitive launch services form the Air Force, so there are many more opportunities for SpaceX and ULA to go head-to-head and compete for these contracts. |
Solar startup M-KOPA leapfrogs Africa’s electricity grid | Jake Bright | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | Across East Africa more than 300,000 households previously without electricity are powering homes and devices with solar panels and using mobile money to pay for it. , an energy startup with IPO ambitions already backed by $52 million in VC. Co-founded by Canadian Jesse Moore, the company offers solar-power home systems targeted at lower-income and rural customers without electricity. M-KOPA’s baseline box-kit comes stocked with a solar panel, multi-device charger, lights, radio and a pay-as-you-go SIM card. After a $35 deposit, those looking to illuminate their homes have one year to pay for the package through mobile money transfers as low as .50 cents. The company traces its origins to the work of co-founders Jesse Moore and Nick Hughes at Vodafone. The European telecommunications giant is the parent of the Kenyan telecom — which provides the digital finance product. “M-KOPA’s germination goes back to those early days of M-Pesa. We began to see that …mobile money would set up the rails upon which other businesses like ours could develop,” said Moore, M-KOPA’s chief executive. After its first funding round, M-KOPA launched in 2012, forming a U.S. LLC for investment purposes while opening subsidiaries in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. In East Africa, the company has its own distribution network, including a 1,500-agent sales force and 100 service centers. To date, M-KOPA has sold more than 300,000 household kits: roughly 260,000 in Kenya, 40,000 in Uganda and 20,000 in Tanzania. Safaricom and M-Pesa remain finance partners in Kenya and Tanzania, while M-KOPA’s Uganda customers can pay their kits off through either or Airtel Money. Moore sees M-KOPA as more than just a utility company. “We don’t fit into a conventional box. We are a mix of a micro-finance, technology, and energy company wrapped up in one,” he said, underscoring the venture’s leasing function and that “kopa” actually means “borrow” in Swahili. M-KOPA plans to expand its country, client and product base over the coming years. One unique opportunity is building additional leasing offerings around new lending profiles. “We are creating credit histories for a large number of customers…[who] didn’t have access to formal financial services before M-KOPA,” said Moore. He noted the company has partnered with Kenya’s Credit Reference Bureau, “creating 75,000 positive credit ratings” from which M-KOPA itself can draw upon. Moving forward, M-KOPA looks to pair new financing options to more powerful solar charging capacity and additional product packages. In February the company offered its first s. Moore said to expect solar-powered leasing options geared toward Internet access, smartphones, and tablets. As solar technology improves, this could extend to refrigerators and other household appliances. M-KOPA projects it will reach one million clients on the continent by 2018. It recently started selling in Ghana through its first licensing arrangement and a local mobile partner. “This is a different approach for us than having our own offices and staff, but it’s what we are testing toward further expansion,” said Moore. As for Nigeria — Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation — M-KOPA’s CEO noted the “tremendous potential” but listed a couple of constraints to entry. “It’s a combination of the country’s kerosene subsidies, which make our price point less competitive, and we haven’t seen the same uptake of mobile money, which isn’t a showstopper for our model but definitely something we’d prefer to have,” he said. M-KOPA’s Moore believes the company will attract more investment toward a billion-dollar valuation and a future IPO. “We’re moving beyond startup stage, have significant revenue, and we definitely use the possibility of going public as motivation toward building our business.” M-KOPA backers already include Al Gore’s London-based ($19 million) and individuals Sir Richard Branson and Steve Case. Its first three rounds came from (GGV), a $60 million impact venture fund headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. “We saw early on M-KOPA’s model could be a game changer for low income people. It takes care of their lighting needs, solves the financing problem, and frees up household resources to invest in other things like small businesses or education,” said GGV investor relations manager Jennifer McReynolds. Many M-KOPA customers were previously paying more per month to light their homes through kerosene. GGV has an active relationship with the company, according to McReynolds, maintaining a board seat as M-KOPA’s first institutional investors. Moore views Sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastructure gap as an opportunity — only of the region’s 800 million have electricity — and believes solar power presents more than a substitute to traditional energy. “We should look at electrifying Africa differently than we did for places like North American 100 years ago.” M-KOPA’s potential to scale up, Moore believes, is significant because the growth of Africa’s off-grid population will continue to exceed expansion of its conventional power infrastructure. “From a capital and environmental perspective, solar energy is a more cost-effective and competitive option with the potential to leapfrog grid power on the continent,” he said. |
Microsoft restricts Cortana on Windows 10 to Bing and Edge | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | is Microsoft’s version of Google Now and Apple’s Siri digital assistant. It’s built right into Windows 10 and, while I’ve generally not found it all that useful, it’s a core component of Microsoft’s attempt at making its operating system smarter. , whenever you use Cortana to do a search on Windows 10 that would typically take you to a search engine in a web browser, you will only be able to use Microsoft’s Bing search engine and its Edge browser. Until today, you could choose which browser and search engine you wanted to use, but Microsoft is now changing this. Why? It’s all about giving you a better search experience (and surely has nothing to do with getting a bit more market share for Bing and Edge). “Unfortunately, as Windows 10 has grown in adoption and usage, we have seen some software programs circumvent the design of Windows 10 and redirect you to search providers that were not designed to work with Cortana,” Microsoft says in today’s announcement. “The result is a compromised experience that is less reliable and predictable.” To some degree, that’s true, of course. Bing does offer some features that aren’t available on Google, and Microsoft wants to tie its operating system, personal assistant and web-based search engine closer together. And some search hacks that moved Cortana searches away from Bing and to other search engines probably made Cortana less useful. All of this is really more about Bing than Edge — and Bing isn’t exactly restricted to a specific browser. Still, Microsoft argues it’s all for the good of the users. “The continuity of these types of task completion scenarios is disrupted if Cortana can’t depend on Bing as the search provider and Microsoft Edge as the browser,” Microsoft writes. “The only way we can confidently deliver this personalized, end-to-end search experience is through the integration of Cortana, Microsoft Edge and Bing — all designed to do more for you.” Personally, I don’t like it when an operating system restricts me from using it in whatever way I want to. I don’t use Edge as my default browser, so a program that opens it by default — with no way of making a change — is mostly an annoyance. You can, of course, still set any browser and search engine as the default in Windows 10 — all of this only applies to searches from Cortana. It’s still annoying. |
On-demand private chef startup Kitchit shuts down | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | Kitchit, , is shutting down because “investment runways are finite, and unfortunately ours reached its end at a moment of substantial upheaval in the food-tech world,” Kitchit founders Brendan Marshall and Ian Ferguson . Marshall and Ferguson detail the entire story of the company — from the “first bite” to the “bittersweet finale.” Here’s a key nugget: Over the past few weeks alone, companies with substantial war chests have been shaken up. Instacart and Munchery, among others, have made substantial changes to their models to buoy their margins. Less capitalized peers have fared worse. Spoonrocket, Dinner Lab, and most recently Kitchensurfing, at times our closest rival, have all failed to garner sufficient investment to extend their work. Today Kitchit joins their ranks. While Kitchit’s business fundamentals have always been strong, our scale has been too limited to outshine the tumult around us. So we close our doors with a mix of sadness for our customers, chefs, and employees on one hand, and on the other a recognition that our market is simply not ready to sustain a venture-scale business. Reflecting upon where we are today, we have much to be proud of. After serving more than 100,000 diners, we have a net-promoter score of 87. Statistically, Kitchit ranks among the most trusted brands in the world. Personally, it means even more. It means that we fulfilled our founding desire to bring people together over food for truly memorable experiences. It means that our chefs honed their craft and pursued their ambitions on their own terms. And it means that our path to this point was lit by raucous laughter, full stomachs, and memories that will outlive this endeavor by many, many years. Kitchit had previously raised $8.1 million, . Since its launch in 2011, Kitchit had served 100,000 meals. In the last several months, there have been a bevy of food startups experiencing rocky waters. due to a lack of funding and . Earlier this month, Kitchit competitor after it couldn’t find a sustainable business model. Just one day later, . Here’s the email Kitchit sent to customers today: After five years of cooking up great meals and even greater memories, Kitchit has closed. We’re honored to have been invited into our customers’ homes, and we’re so proud of the many accomplishments of our team and our chefs. Just recently, we served our 100,000th meal. While we’re hungry for more, the realities of our business leave us no choice but to conclude this chapter. Thank you to our customers, chefs, partners, and supporters for your love and appetite along the way. For ongoing inquiries, please email support@kitchit.com |
COVR Photo is perfect for stalkers and street photographers everywhere | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | Ever wanted to grab your smartphone to snap a quick photo, but didn’t want to be obvious about it? has you covered with a freshly launched iPhone 6 case that includes a tiny periscope. It enables you to use your phone and camera as usual most of the time, but if you want to slip into sneaky, spying sleuth mode, slide the mirror assembly across the lens and you’ll be able to pretend to text while snapping your photos. With COVR Photo, you can look like you’re merrily texting away, when you’re really taking photos. Developed by seasoned photo journalist Thomas Hurst, the COVR Photo device is marketed as the perfect tool for street photography. Which sort of makes sense, but I can’t help but think that even with the rapidly increasing quality of smartphones, the iPhone isn’t really the right tool for the job. Be vewwy, vewwy quiet… I’m hunting candid photographs. As a street photographer myself, I’m a little bit torn about this innovation, too. Yes, candid shots are often better than semi-posed photos on the street, and there is definitely something to be said for capturing moments unobserved. , you can already achieve a similar effect with cameras that have an articulating screen, enabling you to shoot from the hip with a quick glance down to help you frame your images. There is a point, however, where your photography slides from sneaky to downright creepy, and as a candid photographer, you’re always toeing the line between capturing a genuine moment and being just a tiny bit creepy. To wit: In some countries, and South Korea, sneaky photos became enough of a problem that they passed a law that a phone camera has to make a sound (even if it’s switched to silent mode) so it’s clear to the people around you. That slight ethical niggle aside, the COVR Photo case looks like a solid design, and the prism element doesn’t really do the photo quality much harm. The design has been around since it launched for iPhone 5 a little while ago — and the original design should still work fine on . It’s a shame the prism doesn’t fold up into the phone case. There are two small problems with the COVR Photo accessory. One downside with the prism is that when you use it, the image on your phone will be flipped upside-down (that is how mirrors work, after all). There is a companion app that helps you flip your preview image right-way up again, but it does mean that if you prefer to shoot with the stock app or another photography app, you’re out of luck. The other minor issue is that the prism only points up, which means you’re stuck with shooting portrait-orientation photographs. Maybe it’s the old-school photographer in me showing, but I prefer my images in landscape orientation, something COVR Photo doesn’t allow without doing some heavy cropping after the fact — at the cost of image resolution, of course. The bigger problem, in my mind, is that the prism juts out from the case. It would have been nicer if it flipped out of the way; it like that should have been possible, but then again, I’m not a product designer. With the little triangular sticky-outy-bit (forgive me for the technical jargon here), your phone effectively doesn’t go in your jeans pockets anymore, which would be a deal breaker for me; it’s a shame they didn’t revisit that design decision when re-designing the device for iPhone 6. |
Researchers propose theory on why touchscreen controls in mobile games are the worst | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | I know we’re supposed to be all done talking about Flappy Bird, but I think it’s justified to bring it up when it appears in a research paper about why games like Flappy Bird are so hard — and so frustrating. Turns out the controls are fundamentally bad. That may not come as a surprise to — well, anyone. Angry Birds and Neko Atsume work fine, but action games on mobile tend to suffer from unresponsive controls. And it turns out you can only blame the developer so much. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland, probably after dying for the 10 millionth time in Flappy Bird and pledging to find a way to justify their failure scientifically, that a number of factors combine to make controls unreliable. “We can finally explain why games that require accurate timing are annoyingly hard on touchscreens,” said co-author Antti Oulasvirta in a accompanying the paper. First: “users cannot precisely control how high they hold their finger,” which isn’t the case with a physical button, something you maintain physical contact with. This introduces variability in timing. Second: “the timing of the sensor event is uncertain.” A player can’t reliably tell when the touchscreen will actually register a touch. Is it when the finger makes the slightest contact? Is it when it passes some other threshold? Further variability is introduced. Third: latency is unpredictable within games and apps. Sometimes a registered touch will take effect quickly, sometimes not — depending on a number of factors, only some of which are under the control of the game designer. More variability! There are some solutions: minimizing and regularizing latency, for one thing, is always a good practice. And by making touch events only take place at a certain “touch-maximum” threshold, reliability and accuracy were increased and error rates dropped by 9 percent. As for finger height — unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a solution for that. At least we’ve got a better handle on the problem. For now, stick to real buttons when you can. The paper, by Oulasvirta and Byungjoo Lee, will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s next month. |
This guy built a working hoverbike and somehow managed to not chop his legs off | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | If I made a list of “People I admire greatly but that I’d probably never hang out with for fear of my life and limbs,” would be right at the top. He is a living, breathing mad scientist. This dude has built functional , and His latest project: a hoverbike. An actual hoverbike. Sure, he has no real engineering qualifications. Sure, if he messes up he’ll chop off something that won’t grow back. And yet… He did it. It has no steering system and is dangerous (watch around 0:50 and 2:10 marks for some moments that could’ve gone much, much worse)… but it works. After a few hours of training to ride it and after hacking just about everything off the frame, he can actually get it to hover. Madness. |
Past, present and pending photography meet in Leica’s screenless M-D | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | Footloose and LCD-free — that’s how Leica made the . The new camera is actually old in several ways: It’s essentially 2015’s M packaged in the chassis of the limited, and also screenless, Leica 60. But the very fact that Leica is pursuing this almost absurd form of digital purism is suggestive of the future of photography. The last 15 years of photography have been dominated by a familiar form factor: big lens on the front, LCD on the back and, possibly, an optical or electronic viewfinder. The cameras themselves have also grown more powerful as platforms: you have all kinds of in-camera settings and filters, automated eye-tracking focus, on-screen peaks, zebra stripes and so on. A gold rush for the old compact 35mm look and feel was set off by the success of Fujifilm’s X100. I talked with the company’s design head and he noted that “there is a good reason why the analogue cameras were designed that way.” And there’s a good reason digital cameras have been designed the way they have been. The X series, Nikon Df and others call back to a golden age, but also are careful to be the modern top-shelf digital cameras. Leica gleefully does without nine out of 10 of the features offered by a modern compact system like an Olympus OM-D or Sony a6300. No video, no scene modes, no focus assist, no shot review, no JPEG, even. Just “das wesentliche” — the essentials. Look through the rangefinder and shoot, then experience “the joy of anticipation.” What a line! Of course, Leica can do that because its cameras are priced to sell to people with more money than sense (oh, to number myself among them!), but the company’s philosophy of “purity” isn’t devoid of reason — and it’s just one philosophy among many that photographers and camera makers are free to pursue. Specialization is the privilege of a device class that has achieved saturation. For years the most popular cameras have been very similar to one another: the Rebel and DX00 series. Jacks of all trades, and really, masters of them, too. But choosing between them was done on the slimmest of margins — a fraction of a millisecond faster focus, or slightly less noise at very high ISOs. It’s no wonder people have retained brand loyalty and focused on tribes rather than features. With a few exceptions, any camera you buy these days is going to be really, really good. When every camera is good, why do you choose one over the other? Especially when, if you just want to snap some pictures, a smartphone is usually all you need? You differentiate: you offer a unique experience specific to photography, or specific to a personality or profession. Leica is in pursuit of the luxury of simplicity — “perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away,” as Saint-Exupery put it. In Leica’s case, it’s the removal of features that surely are only valuable to the hoi polloi — video? Smile shutter? Live view? How plebeian! These things get in the way of photography as much as they add to it, or so the company would have you believe. Meanwhile other companies pursue other philosophies. For , it’s a professional video camera that fits in your coat pocket. For , it’s upending the entire idea of “flat” photography. For , it’s questioning the necessity of using a single lens. For the , it’s bridging the gap between digital and analog. For , it’s autonomy. For wearables and life recorders, it’s removing the photographer from the question entirely. Camera makers have the latitude now to let the user decide what photography means to them, and, when there are enough adherents to a certain philosophy — and the number really doesn’t have to be that high — a device can be made that is a coherent and desirable experience for those users and those users only. It’s “interesting times” for photography, which is really more than you could say for many a year of the last decade. Want to know where imaging is going next? Wherever you like. |
TechCrunch Disrupt NY will be the first major media conference to stream on Facebook Live in full | Travis Bernard | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | We’re excited to announce that we’re using Facebook Live to make Disrupt NY the first major media conference live streamed in its entirety — with TV-quality production — on Facebook. Delivering a real-time video feed of Disrupt to TechCrunch’s more than 2 million Facebook fans is a first for all of us and we can’t wait to see what happens. We’ll have non-stop coverage of Disrupt on our Facebook page from May 7-11, but we’ll also be embedding a live stream on the front page of TechCrunch.com from May 9-11 (9 a.m.-6 p.m. ET). The feed will be easy to find and, more importantly, it will be easy to share. Check out the Disrupt agenda and learn more . |
Supreme Court moves to expand FBI’s hacking authority | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | The Supreme Court approved hotly contested amendments to federal criminal procedure today that, if accepted by Congress, will expand the FBI’s ability to hack into computer networks. The rule at the heart of the debate is Criminal Rule 41, which limits judges’ authority to authorize search warrants. Magistrate judges can usually only approve warrants within their jurisdiction — for instance, a magistrate judge in San Francisco typically can’t authorize a search in Brooklyn. Today’s would allow judges to “issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media and to seize or copy electronically stored information located within or outside that district.” Simply, it will allow an FBI agent sitting in Virginia to hack into a computer or network in Nevada — or anywhere in the world. The Justice Department has been eager to change this rule as it works to keep up with crime online, but advocacy organizations like the and tech giants like have opposed the change, arguing that changing Rule 41 would give the FBI unconstitutional hacking authority. The FBI wants the ability to go to a judge in their area and get a search warrant for a suspect’s computer, even if that suspect is located thousands of miles away. If a suspect has taken steps to anonymize themselves online, an investigator might not know where a suspect is located when he asks a judge for a warrant. The problem has been illustrated recently by several controversial cases brought by the Justice Department against men suspected of possessing child pornography. The FBI seized the server of a child porn site called Playpen, then, in an unprecedented move, and used a hacking tool to reveal the identities of users. A Virginia judge gave the FBI a warrant to implement the hacking tool, but judges in and have ruled this week that the warrant did not give the FBI the authority to search computers in those states. Tech companies and civil liberties organizations have argued that changing Rule 41 would infringe on Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches. Google has also argued that the rule change could allow U.S. government officials to search computers and networks worldwide, undermining international treaties. The change to Rule 41 “carries with it the specter of government hacking without any Congressional debate or democratic policymaking process,” Google’s legal director for law enforcement and information security Richard Salgado wrote in a . However, these objections were apparently not compelling to Supreme Court, which submitted its approved changes to Rule 41 to Congress this afternoon. “ New America’s Open Technology Institute and other civil liberties organizations are now . “Instead of directly asking Congress for authorization to break into computers, the Justice Department is now trying to quietly circumvent the legislative process by pushing for a change in court rules, pretending that its government hacking proposal is a mere procedural formality rather than the massive change to the law that it really is,” said Kevin Bankston, director of OTI. If Congress does not act, the changes will take effect on December 1. At least one Senator, Ron Wyden, has already he will attempt to block the change of Rule 41. |
LinkedIn up 5% after beating earnings expectations | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | surprised Wall Street on Thursday, with better-than-expected first quarter results. Shares jumped about 5 percent in after-hours trading. The company reported adjusted earnings per share of 74 cents, significantly higher than the . Revenue for the quarter was $861 million, above the anticipated $828 million and a 35 percent year-over-year increase. This was a much-needed boost for LinkedIn. The company’s last earnings report disappointed, sending the stock “As a result of our new mobile experience, members are increasing their activity on LinkedIn, helping drive strong levels of engagement across the platform,” said CEO Jeff Weiner, in a statement. In particular, the recruiter product saw revenue increase 41 percent year-over-year to $558 million. Sponsored content or “marketing solutions” revenue was up 29 percent and premium subscriptions brought in 22 percent more in sales. Cumulative members increased by 19 percent to 433 million, seeing the most added users since the beginning of 2014. LinkedIn shares are down 53 percent in the past year and closed Thursday at $122.94. The company has a market cap of $16 billion. |
Mercedes home batteries are a potential rival for Tesla’s Powerwall | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | The batteries developed for the high demands of all-electric Mercedes-Benz cars are finding a new application as in-home energy storage units. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s a lot like the . Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler AG announced that the storage units are being manufactured by its subsidiary Deutsche ACCUMOTIVE (Daimler has a real love of all caps). The batteries are being sold, installed and supported by partners like utility and solar tech companies. That makes sense, because the storage units are usually installed along with solar panels. The units are already available in Germany, and Mercedes says it will be expanding the program internationally. Up to eight of the columnar 2.5 kWh lithium-ion battery modules can be combined, with a maximum capacity of 20 kWh all together. According to Mercedes, this is enough to capture surplus solar power for later use with “virtually no losses.” The price of the units hasn’t been disclosed, since it can include several components: the unit itself (or two or three), maybe some photovoltaic panels and the installation. Deutsche ACCUMOTIVE has been making units like this since 2015 for industrial uses. The systems were designed to be scalable; thus the quick entry into the private home market. Daimler is banking on its energy storage subsidiary in a big way — it’s invested more than $500 million in a second battery factory at the Deutsche ACCUMOTIVE site that will begin operating in the summer of 2017. As a comparison, the serves the same purpose, with arguably more style. The Powerwall has 6.4 kWh of energy storage “for daily cycle applications,” according to the website. Like the Mercedes units, these can be installed in multiples for solar systems that need to store more energy. We do know how much the Powerwall costs — $3,500. We also know that demand was high, with a when the Powerwall was announced last year. That level of demand seems to leave plenty of room for a competitor like Daimler AG to jump in with its road-tested battery technology this year. |
Gametime now lets users “snap and sell” printed tickets | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | Mobile ticket sellers added a new feature to their app this week that could draw a larger supply of concert and sports tickets to their marketplace. Designed to make it easier for users to sell old-school printed tickets via mobile, the “snap and sell” feature in Gametime feels something like check scanning in mobile banking apps. A user who clicks the “sell” button within Gametime can now use the smarpthone’s camera and the company’s optical character recognition technology to upload all their relevant ticket info to the mobile marketplace automatically, no data entry required. According to Gametime founder and CEO Brad Griffith, using most ticket sellers’ apps or mobile sites requires about 75 taps’ worth of data entry for people who have a printed ticket to sell. Gametime wanted to eliminate the friction. Its new feature requires 3 taps to get from holding a ticket in your hand to listing it on the market. After that, tickets are automatically priced with data from Gametime. The app gives sellers “surge pricing” capabilities without having to do any price comparison research themselves. Gametime has raised $13.3 million in venture capital to-date. It started out selling sports tickets to people who wanted to buy them at the last minute, but has since expanded into selling concert tickets as well. According to the company, more than 1.5 million people have downloaded the app to-date. And the company has sold tickets for 485 sports teams and 455 artists at more than 400 venues to-date. |
Be kind to artificial intelligence | Mike Finley | 2,016 | 4 | 17 |
Big innovations come in unexpected bursts. We grow accustomed to life and work as we know it, until something apparently simple brings about bold change. For example, we used phones for 100 years, but making them mobile transformed the world; we had the Internet for decades before the Web browser put digital education, entertainment and shopping in the hands of billions; and we documented our lives with physical pictures, paper records, CD-ROMs and thumb drives until Jeff Bezos brought us “the cloud.” When individual creativity is enhanced by technical ingenuity, new behaviors and capabilities emerge. Of course, every new idea has a band of detractors predicting the worst-case scenario. Like the notion that mobile phones will give us cancer. Or that Big Brother is tracking your every move online. We do need to be smart about innovation, but usually the detractors are the people who have the most to lose. Just look at how Big Oil and Big Auto struggled to make electric vehicles work before Tesla proved a technical path and viable market existed. Artificial intelligence is the next obvious controversy. It’s around us every day, helping singles find a mate, or routing traffic or diagnosing disease. But will it one day take over like the Terminator? Make us obsolete and slothful like WALL-E? Enslave us like The Matrix? Leave the blue pill for the Doomsday preppers and take the red pill of reality with me. Intelligence has delivered all of the progress we enjoy. And, artificial or not, we must be careful with intelligence, or indeed any kind of innovation. Alfred Nobel understood this when he harnessed the destructive power of dynamite, yet later funded a legacy of progress for mankind through his namesake prizes. In a world of truly challenging problems like famine, terror and disease, it’s hard to argue that more intelligence will leave us worse off. On a smaller scale, it’s also hard to argue away machines that help us drive cars when we know they see better, react faster and have more information than we do. Most of us have retirement accounts that are directed, at least in part, by non-human decisions. Machine-assisted surgery promotes faster recovery and better outcomes. Man-machine symbiosis is already used in thousands of applications where a curious mind found an unsolved problem and thought of extra-human intelligence as the right tool. It’s just another extension of mankind in a long chain that started with club, fire and wheel. What’s new in this chain is the precise way in which the new AI tools (and robots in general) extend us. realized nearly 50 years ago that tools appearing to impersonate people in any way could provoke hate. Just a few recent examples: Humans aren’t exactly raging against the machine. But some are feeling frustrated, anxious or hostile about artificial intelligence. How we perceive AI at work may not be so blatantly destructive — but still illustrates our unease. In 1934, wrote that people can’t understand new ideas if their livelihood depends on the old ones. The intelligence revolution may be just that kind of idea for today’s white-collar staffers. It was easy to embrace automation when it took away mundane tasks, but the new breed of big data applications looks a lot more like a smart co-worker than a fax machine. Once again, people face a choice between fearing the unknown and plunging forward with progress. The choice for progress now is as clear as it has ever been. A better competitor, or a clever new employee, or an economic downturn could spell disaster for an unprepared knowledge worker, regardless of the role of extra human intelligence. Those who learn new ideas and become better at their jobs will stand out and succeed as they have always done. It’s about value creation, not about entitlement. Machines won’t replace the need for business or profit or growth. That’s why entrepreneurs will always lead us toward the best use of new technology. And they will need curious employees who understand Sinclair’s paradigm to power their dreams, no matter what tool comes next. |
Making sense of the lending industry’s rapid changes | Mike Lobanov | 2,016 | 4 | 17 |
“A horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.” This was what the president of Michigan Savings Bank said to Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, in 1903, discouraging him to invest $5,000 in the new car company. Sixteen years later, Rackham sold his Ford shares for more than $12.5 million, earning IRR of more than 150 percent per annum. Lending, one of the biggest industries, is currently undergoing a transformation. As it was with the automobile industry transformation, a number of modern innovators will probably face serious difficulties, some will merge with competitors and some will just disappear. Of course, the emergence of a new huge and rapidly growing industry has always attracted the attention of journalists. At the same time, as all the changes happen very quickly and there are few experts who really understand the issues, news headlines are often absolutely misleading in respect of the developments. One of the news items that have received considerable attention recently is the possible downgrading of bonds (securitization of loans issued through the Prosper platform implemented by Citigroup). Such statements create an impression that something has gone wrong with the alternative lending market in general, and P2P loans in particular. Without trying to understand the actual nature of P2P loans and not having the necessary statistics, many investors tend to believe publications of that kind. Reading the news makes one feel that the situation around P2P lending reminds us of the subprime crisis in the U.S. in 2008 — but if you look at the facts, you can see that is simply not the case. I suggest looking at the facts and trying to understand the reason for the possible downgrading of CHAI securitization rating by Moody’s. The graph below shows cumulative delinquency on Prosper loans, issued by the platform itself, on a quarterly basis. It is easy to notice that since the introduction of the Prosper 2.0 scoring system, the delinquency curves are almost identical from quarter to quarter. The graph clearly shows the stability of credit quality of loans issued by Prosper; 2015 is no exception. Next, we should examine the graph of delinquency on 60-month term loans charted by MonJa ( is the link to the complete study). On this chart, you can once again see very clearly that delinquencies on loans behave the same way as in the previous years. Next, look at the figure below, provided by , which shows delinquencies on loans issued by P2P platforms in general — we can clearly see that delinquencies do not grow and have remained at average levels for the past few years. If the overall situation with delinquency is stable, can there be something wrong only with the loans that are the security in CHAI securitization? Let’s examine in more detail what is the underlying of CHAI. The average FICO score of the borrowers in CHAI underlying is 703, which means that the loans are granted to mostly prime borrowers. The average rate on the loans is 13.2 percent, 63 percent are loans with 36 months maturity and 37 percent are loans for 60 months. Let’s look more closely at the cumulative delinquency on securitization of various alternative lending platforms as of this writing. The chart above (the source chart is suggests that the delinquency on most securitizations are at their planned level, and the spread between the actual cumulative loss value and trigger value at which the cash flows received on loans begin to be withdrawn from the holders of junior classes of bonds in favor of the holders of the senior classes remains unchanged (except for a few securitizations). Prosper’s securitizations, which include CCOLT, as well as CHAI PM1, CHAI PM2 and CHAI PM3, all demonstrate a predictable and stable performance. The only securitization that fails to go as planned is the one undertaken by Jeffries for CircleBack Lending (marked in red in the lower left corner of the chart), but CircleBack issue loans to borrowers with lower FICO scores. And yet, if everything is going as planned, why did Moody’s place the rating of bonds on CHAI securitization on review with the possibility of its downgrading after only a few months upon its assignment? Moody’s explains that this is due to the increase of expectations from 8.5 percent to 12 percent in respect of the level of defaults on the portfolio of loans that serve as underlying for bonds. It looks very strange if we take into account that the initial forecast of Prosper on defaults on this portfolio was 9.5 percent to 11 percent. Why did Moody’s assign the rating based on the default rate of 8.5 percent if the platform itself considered that the level of defaults will be higher? MonJa that Moody’s simply made a mistake in their initial assessment; this seems very convincing if we analyze the data presented in the charts above. The fact that rating agencies and investors still do not completely grasp the issues involved in pricing and rating assignment for securitization ratings in alternative lending is also illustrated in the chart below (prepared by ; link to the full report ): As regards P2P loans, this chart takes into account two securitizations: CCOLT and CHAI, both with loans issued by Prosper as the underlying asset. Despite the fact that the average FICO score for CCOLT is 706 and 703 for CHAI (FICO scores for credit cards range from 679 to 710, and for Auto Subprime Loans the value is from 650 to 678), the ratings assigned by Moody’s for securitization on P2P lending are significantly lower compared to the ratings on other asset classes with weaker FICO scores of the borrowers. In case of car loans, this can be explained by the fact that the car is used as collateral, but it should only have an impact on lower tranches, not the senior classes of securitization. I believe the difference in the rankings is because rating agencies do not have an opportunity to calculate the risks of P2P lending, as this sector has not completed a full loan cycle with sufficiently large amounts. I think this is also largely because rating agencies were miles out in their calculations back in 2008 when they assigned high ratings to some securities, which became almost worthless afterwards, and now they are skeptical about anything new. It is a negative factor for P2P lending platforms such as the LendingClub and Prosper (as the funding of loans is becoming more expensive), whereas those who invest in loans may benefit from lower ratings as the rate of return is greater than the actual risk of the instrument. As a result, we again have a situation where we need to thoroughly analyze the details to make a conclusion that everything is going exactly as planned — but reading the headlines can make one sure that alternative lending is heading to a collapse. There is no collapse, and no signs of deterioration of loan quality or increasing loan delinquency, and I think those who will understand the mechanisms of operation of alternative lending and the real risks involved — instead of just relying on the data presented in the press — will get an opportunity to achieve superior returns on their investment. Fintech and alternative lending are now in a situation similar to that of the automobile industry at the beginning of the 20th century. |
The next version of OS X could be called ‘MacOS’ | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 17 | It’s a small branding change, but it would make a lot of sense. Many different signs point to Apple abandoning the name “OS X” in favor of “MacOS”, or maybe “macOS” without a capital letter. Apple SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller at this change last year at WWDC in an interview with John Gruber. Then a configuration file macOS instead of OS X. And finally, a page on Apple’s own website said MacOS instead of OS X to describe Apple’s environmental initiatives. That’s a whole lot of smoke. And TechCrunch has also heard that this could be announced at WWDC in June. This isn’t the first time Apple has rebranded its operating system for Mac. When the successor of Mac OS 9 was first announced, it was called Mac OS X. Apple dropped the “Mac” part . At the time, Apple wanted to differentiate the device from the software element. iPhone OS became iOS in June 2010 as iOS runs on iPhones and iPads. But, since then, Apple has released two new platforms based on iOS. The Apple TV now runs tvOS, and the Apple Watch runs watchOS. You can see the trend, right? OS X now seems like an outdated brand compared to Apple’s other platforms. Similarly, keeping “ten” in the name suggests that OS X’s version number has been stuck for 15 years now. The reality is a bit different as Apple releases of its Mac operating system every year. But the thing that makes me believe that OS X is on the way out is much more obvious. Apple is about to announce iOS 10 at WWDC in June. Developers, journalists and Apple itself are going to talk about iOS 10 for months. The iOS 10 and OS X names sound way too similar, especially when you hear someone about these operating systems. Rebranding OS X to MacOS would unify Apple’s operating system naming scheme, but it would be a much welcomed change to keep everyone on the same page when talking about new operating systems. |
Etsy’s latest diversity report recognizes gender as a spectrum, not a binary | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | Peer-to-peer marketplace Etsy has released its first since going public last April, showing that people who identify as women make up 50% of the leadership and management roles at the company. In 2014, women held just 37% of leadership roles at the company. What’s also notable about this report is that it represents gender in a non-binary way. As of December 2015 at Etsy, 53.9% of employees identify as female, 45.6% of employees identify as male and 0.5% identify as “other.” Employees had the option to self-report gender from a list of more than 60 options. Those that fall into other are the ones who did not identify as cisgender male/man or cisgender female/woman. “This reflects our belief that gender lies on a spectrum, and follows operational changes we’ve made in the last year, such as converting our bathrooms to be gender inclusive,” Etsy Director of Culture & Engagement Juliet Gorman . Regarding racial diversity, Etsy has slightly improved since 2014 — meaning the company is slightly less white and more inclusive of Latino/as and blacks — but still has a quite a bit of work to do. Etsy is currently 78.6% white compared to 79% white in 2014. In leadership roles, white people make up 76.9% of the population. “While we’ve made improvements to how we measure and report our diversity data, we think there are ways we can better showcase how a full range of identities often intersect and affect each other,” Gorman wrote. “We hope to explore different methods for measuring and reporting that will contribute meaningfully to the larger public dialogue around tech and diversity.” Acknowledging and reporting how certain identities intersect and interact is important because they can, and do contribute to societal inequalities and injustices. As , we need to look at diversity in tech through the lens of how all of our intersecting identities contribute to our experience. That includes race, gender, age, disability status, sexuality and so much more. |
The investor psychology and why VCs aren’t immune | Nav Athwal | 2,016 | 4 | 17 |
One of the most oft-repeated quotes about investing goes something like this: While Warren Buffett may not have had venture capital in particular in mind when he offered up that bit of sage advice, it is a fitting way to describe the current climate of the VC industry. Over the last year, venture capital has undergone a paradigm shift of sorts with regard to the approach investors are taking in choosing where to put their money. Instead of playing it fast and loose with capital, VCs are now taking a more conservative stance when it comes to funding, much to the chagrin of fledgling companies. When you consider what’s behind the shift, it can all be boiled down to one thing: Fear and investing are a bad mix, and history has shown time and time again what happens when emotions come into play. Take the last real estate boom, for example. As home values continued to climb, investors were scrambling to cash in — but when the market crashed, there was a mass exodus. In the midst of the boom, there was a large volume of capital pouring into real estate, even as it was becoming clear that values were inflated and a correction was on the way. Once the bubble burst, that same capital virtually disappeared. This was a direct reflection of the fear factor at work. Value investors, on the other hand, saw the real estate market’s impending nosedive as an opportunity to scoop up undervalued properties or capitalize on unforeseen opportunity. Think Michael Burry and Burry caught a lot of heat from his hedge fund investors for going against the grain and taking a short position against mortgage-backed securities because it didn’t fit with the norm. In the end, he generated billions of dollars in value from that move because he took to heart the maxim of being fearful when others are greedy. When you look at where venture capital is right now, it’s easy to spot some similarities. Once again, it can all be traced back to an underlying sense of fear that has seeped into the market and taken hold. The venture capital industry is constantly evolving, but it has been in the last two years that we’ve seen some of the biggest changes. Venture capital funding declined in 2013, but just a year later it bounced back in a big way. According to a market analysis from , venture capital funding increased by 65 percent in 2014. In terms of late-stage funding, 2014 set a new record, with $33.2 billion in capital being poured into these investments. At the same time, valuations for late-stage companies jumped by a jaw-dropping 107 percent, despite the fact that many of them are choosing to stay private longer. According to TrueBridge, startups are now waiting an average of eight years before going public, compared to five years a decade ago. Deals were being funded left and right in the first half of 2015, but over the last few months, we’ve seen a virtual 180º shift, largely driven by rumblings of a correction in the tech industry. At the root of the decline in deal volume is a fear of uncertainty that’s pushing rationality right out the window — and for startups, the funding outlook isn’t nearly as rosy as it once was. That pullback on the part of VCs is something we’ve experienced here at RealtyShares firsthand. In October of last year, we began to pursue a $30 million Series B funding round. We set $30 million as the goal because of the trends we’d seen in valuations, but, at the same time, we were conscious of this growing atmosphere of pessimism and over-cautiousness surrounding venture capital. When we began approaching VC firms we noticed that instead of looking at hard numbers and what the positives were from an investment perspective, the focus was on what could go wrong. In some cases, investors were saying no without even taking a glance at our fundamentals. Those early conversations threw into sharp relief certain doubts and fears that weren’t evident in the venture capital industry six months prior. To counter those fears, we decided to regroup and adjust the amount of funding we were going after. The result was a successful bid for a ; if we had stuck to our initial $30 million goal, it’s entirely possible that we wouldn’t have been able to secure funding at all. The key takeaway for startups, based on what we’ve experienced at RealtyShares, is that the old rules of VC fundraising no longer apply. Entrepreneurs who are on the hunt for capital need to know that things like valuation sensitivity and check size are luxuries that aren’t readily available to startups in the current environment. Simply put, going after a huge funding round is no longer the objective — reaching the next milestone and surviving is what matters most. What’s happening presently with venture capital parallels what happened in real estate during the last boom and eventual bust. Investors rushed to fund startups, many of them in the tech sector, because there was an artificial sense of pressure to not miss out on the next big thing. This deal-chasing led VCs to assign inflated values to startups based on top-line growth numbers versus tangible data, such as the company’s road to profitability, unit economics and burn rate. Overvaluation spawned a legion of “unicorns,” which are taking increasingly longer to go public. That means VCs are also waiting longer to see returned any of the money they’re investing. At this point, investors are realizing too late that they should have taken a step back, and now they’re dialing back on risk. In the meantime, startups are finding it more difficult to get funded because the venture capital pendulum has swung back on the side of extreme caution. If VCs had taken a page out of Michael Burry’s book and moved against the tide instead of flowing with it, the current situation might look very different. Investors could have found themselves in a more profitable position; but instead of seeing their returns grow, they’re seeing worries climb over the viability of deals involving these overvalued companies. So where does venture capital go next? Despite 2015 being a record-breaking year for VCs, a slowdown in funding and deal activity is already underway. According to the , global VC investments dropped from $38.7 billion in the third quarter to $27.2 billion in the fourth quarter. In the U.S., total VC funding came to $13.8 billion, the lowest point since Q3 of 2014. Serious questions are being raised about the sustainability of the current valuations of the unicorns, many of which are concentrated in the tech industry. As VC firms continue to move away from that “fear of missing out” mentality and view the market through a less bullish lens, the byproduct is a closing of the capital floodgates. Ultimately, the latest developments in venture capital are pushing the market back toward where it should be — with valuations grounded in real numbers rather than pie-in-the-sky projections. For the short term, that’s not exactly great news, but a correction lays the groundwork for investors to find some real opportunities for backing quality companies. That brings us back to where we started, with the wise words of the Oracle of Omaha. VCs aren’t bulletproof and, just like any other investor, they’re susceptible to the same periods of craziness where the market is concerned. As we saw in housing and are now seeing with venture capital, the FOMO effect can be disastrous if left unchecked. Going forward, the key for venture capital is being able to balance the potential for growth against the potential for loss without allowing unjustified fears to dictate investment decisions. Bottom line, unless investors are able to rein in their irrational fears, it’s the startups and entrepreneurs behind them who are going to suffer the most as long as a lockdown on funding remains the status quo. |
The 3 factors behind Uber and Lyft’s regulatory win in California | Lisa Rayle | 2,016 | 4 | 17 |
It’s a common gripe: Outdated regulations obstruct innovation; government regulators move too slowly or, worse, try to block technological progress. But when conditions are right, regulations can sometimes change quickly, often in a way that promotes innovation. That’s what happened in the case of ridesharing in . Companies like and Lyft now have such sophisticated political strategic machinery it’s easy to forget that, only a couple of years ago, ridesharing faced a very real possibility of being shut down. In 2012, regulators in the companies’ home city of San Francisco existing rules, effectively quashing the ridesharing business model. Ridesharing was indeed banned in some places, like Las Vegas, Seoul and France. But many more places have followed San Francisco’s lead in legalizing it. In 2013, policymakers for ridesharing after a relatively short rule-making process. What explains this friendly response? We investigated this question last year through a series of interviews for the project at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. We found three main that explained why regulators were so supportive of ridesharing in San Francisco: political support for local industry, a dysfunctional taxi system and gray areas. Most obviously, , and were headquartered in San Francisco, and regulators beholden to elected officials felt pressure to support local industry. At least one of the companies’ investors was active in local politics. In 2012, San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, had on a platform of creating jobs, important to a city still climbing out of the Great Recession. “Sharing economy” startups such as were seen as a way to energize the local economy and create a “local” export. Further, local and state politicians were keen to maintain the reputation of both San Francisco and as founts of innovation. In particular, local support for the tech industry would bolster San Francisco’s rising position as the new hub of Silicon Valley. Political support for industry was important, but not sufficient. Cities don’t allow just any local startup to break the rules in the name of innovation. Other were at play. For decades, getting a cab in San Francisco was a miserable experience. Our interviewees on all sides agreed that the city was a place where “you couldn’t get a cab.” Outside of the downtown area, one could not expect to hail a taxi on the street, while telephone dispatch would — if the taxi showed up at all. Jordanna Thigpen, Executive Director of the city’s Taxi Commission from 2008 to 2009, told us, “We did studies that showed taxis never went out to Bayview. These communities didn’t have a voice. Elderly and disabled people… couldn’t get a cab.” Source: under There were too few taxis. Studies conducted in , and all reported serious shortages in taxi supply because of permit caps originally designed to benefit taxi drivers. No other major city in the U.S. had such severe shortages. The city had been trying to reform its taxi system since the late 1990s, with little progress. Part of the problem was that, unlike in other cities where large taxi companies dominated the market, San Francisco’s unusual permit system had created a fragmented industry where medallion owners, taxi companies and drivers all fought for their own interests. So when and Lyft appeared on the scene, the improvement in mobility was obvious. More so than in other cities, in San Francisco the companies could convincingly argue their services benefited residents ill-served by taxis. They could also more easily rally customers to their cause. Moreover, the city’s politically fragmented taxi industry was uniquely unprepared to defend itself. Ridesharing companies and their political advocates exploited a gray area in the regulations and — perhaps more critically — a gray area in jurisdictions. This is important: In , state law governs black cars and carpooling, while municipal laws govern taxis. Ridesharing fell somewhere in between. Image credit: Lisa Rayle with icons created by Laurent Canivet, Luis Prado, Gregor Cresnar and Stanislav Levin from Noun Project According to law, black cars must be “prearranged,” whereas taxis can be hired on demand. But ’s smartphone app sped up the prearrangement process such that it was effectively on demand, blurring the distinction between a black car and a taxi. ’s first product, later known as UberBLACK, fell into this gray area. Lyft and Sidecar, meanwhile, created products that blurred the lines between a black car, a taxi and carpooling. Like a black car or taxi, the traveler could request a ride, but, like carpooling, the ride came from a “friend,” paid for by a “donation.” ( as well, with UberX.) Ridesharing violated regulations for whatever it was considered (black cars, taxis or carpooling). But it didn’t fit neatly into any box. More importantly, because it didn’t fit the existing boxes, it was unclear who should regulate it — the city or the state. The question of who would regulate was critical because the city offered a very different political context than did the state. San Francisco in 2012 and 2013 was a battleground between the city’s leftist progressives, who prioritized protecting existing communities and sympathized with local taxi interests, and centrist moderates, who welcomed economic growth and development brought by the city’s booming tech industry. (It’s a debate that .) Source: Tensions between San Francisco’s progressives and moderates played out as protests against Google’s employee shuttle buses in 2013. (Photo credit: Chris Martin) Local elected officials historically favored strong labor protections and strict rules for taxicabs — not good news for or Lyft. Although the city’s centrist mayor, Ed Lee, generally supported tech companies, the legislative branch (the Board of Supervisors) was split. Some supervisors liked ridesharing, but others vocally supported taxi interests. That same year, the Board of Supervisors threatened to impose tough regulations against Airbnb, whose operations were clearly within the city’s jurisdiction. If the Board took up the debate over ridesharing, the companies would face an uphill battle. The State of , in contrast, offered a much more supportive environment for ridesharing. State-elected officials, while liberal by national standards, were largely pro-business and pro-innovation. The taxi industry was not a player in state politics. The state regulator (the ) was likely to be more lenient too, since regulating for-hire transportation was a minor concern in relation to its far greater responsibilities for overseeing energy, telecommunications and oil and gas transmission. Both San Francisco and regulators to reign in ridesharing. But ridesharing companies had friends in the mayor’s office, and Lee’s advisors concluded the state CPUC offered a friendlier venue than the city’s Board of Supervisors. The local taxi regulator was blocked from cracking down on companies. The city’s strategic inaction effectively pushed the issue to the state, where it found a more receptive audience. In the end, the ridesharing model in some form probably would have eventually succeeded, even with only one or two of the above . San Francisco had all three: support for local industry, an especially dysfunctional existing system and gray areas. Other helped too, like a population of high-income early adopters who appreciated not having to drive. The combination of so many favorable conditions helps explain why change happened when it did, and why it happened so fast. In little more than a year after and Lyft rolled out, the controversial product — hired rides using “regular” drivers — became legalized. This case shows that it’s simply not true that government regulators always get in the way. The reality is much more context-specific. If you’re a young startup with few PR resources deciding whether to risk confronting the existing rules, it’s good idea to understand not only what the regulations are, but who is responsible, and the political context surrounding them. |
Now that’s a suitor! The Daily Mail talks to private equity firms as it FLIRTS WITH YAHOO BID | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 4 | 10 | The parent company of U.K. tabloid may make a bid for Yahoo’s news and media businesses. According , the has held discussions with several private equity firms to partner on an offer. A DMGT confirmed the report in an emailed statement, writing, “Given the success of and Elite Daily we have been in discussions with a number of parties who are potential bidders. Discussions are at a very early stage and that there is no certainty that any transaction will take place.” If you only know the Daily Mail through its website’s singular blend of celebrity gossip, xenophobic rants, and “real” ghost sightings, then you might be wondering what it wants to do with Yahoo. The DMGT, however, is a conglomerate with a portfolio that pulls in annual revenue of almost £2 billion (about $2.8 billion). Taking over Yahoo’s assets would boost DMGT’s U.S. expansion plan. In fact, when DMG Media (DMGT’s media unit) , its then-CEO for North America, Jon Steinberg, said the acquisition was to compete with Yahoo and AOL (owner of TechCrunch). In addition to the Daily Mail, the Mail Online, and Elite Daily, its media holdings include The Mail and Metro. The WSJ reports that DMGT has already talked to about six private-equity firms, including General Atlantic. After years of struggling to , Yahoo has . This might give it time to ward off , which has criticized the slow pace of Yahoo’s sale process, to replace its board with its own candidates. About 40 companies are and have already signed non-disclosure agreements. Other (which owns AOL, which, as mentioned, owns TechCrunch). |
Buying @Haje: How I got my given name as my Twitter handle for $250 | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 10 | You’ll never guess how I succeeded in getting my first name as my Twitter handle. It involved a six-month campaign that included some light Internet stalking, badgering staff at Twitter, $250 and a visit to the patent office. I’m celebrating my 10th anniversary on Twitter. I was to join the social media platform, which, given that there are now more than 974 million accounts, puts me in the first 0.007 percent or so of people to join. In addition to being an early adopter, I’m an idiot. I failed to realize how big Twitter was going to become in the next decade, and, more importantly, what people would be using it . I registered the Internet handle I was using at the time, rather than my first name, which was pretty daft, considering that my unusual first name probably would have been available. Before setting off on my quixotic crusade to obtain my new Twitter name, I’d already built up with more than 55,000 followers — but that one was focusing on photography, and I was doing a lot of non-photography stuff. My followers on the photography account were getting increasingly impatient with my non-photographic exploits, such as , righting my and . In the summer of 2014, I decided it was time to do something to try to annoy my photography followers a bit less. To do that, I re-activated my old account and decided to see if I couldn’t get it renamed to something a bit more recognizable. Such as, say, my first name. I typed, fingers-a-trembling, the four characters of my name into the Twitter search box, and my heart sank. Not by much — I’m not off my rocker. I was unsurprised, but more than a bit disappointed, to find that someone had registered @Haje, not because his name was “Haje,” but because his first and last names started with “Ha” and “Je.” Clever. Dammit. The good news was that the account wasn’t in use. It didn’t have a profile picture. It had also never tweeted a single tweet. Interesting. To me, that indicated that perhaps the person didn’t have much of an interest in Twitter, and that he could potentially be persuaded to give up his account. With apologies to Lloyd. So I crossed my fingers and tweeted at him, which was every bit as complicated as you’d imagine (have ever tried typing with crossed fingers?). There was no response. I tracked down his LinkedIn profile, and sent him an InMail. Nada. Finally, through some pretty spectacularly dedicated Internet stalking, I found a couple of email addresses for him. My new Twitter handle now in reach, I emailed him and waited a couple of weeks. I emailed him again. And again. And, y’know, just one more time. Just in case. I’m not sure what I’d have said to him if he replied. The plan was to ask nicely, along the lines of “Hey, you’re not using it, would you mind if I did?” But honestly, I thought I’d probably just end up offering him money to give me the username. Which was making me nervous, too: It’s against Twitter’s rules: “Attempts to sell, buy, or solicit other forms of payment in exchange for usernames may result in permanent account suspension,” and on this sort of thing. As it turned out, I was never given the chance to flout Twitter’s rules: The chap never replied; after several months, I gave up. Well, I didn’t give up. That would be crazy. Meanwhile, I was pretty active on the startup scene in London, and through going to a lot of events, I had met quite a few Twitter employees. My Bond-villainesque plan was that I could just ask one of them to sort me out. All they would need to do is to change the email address associated with the account, I’d be able to do a password reset and Job done. Excellent; what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a few things, as it turned out. The conversations went an awful lot like this: “LOL nice try, kid,” came the replies, one after the other. “I couldn’t if I wanted to, they stopped doing that even for Twitter staff years ago.” Well damn. I do remember Twitter being a bit more lenient with their handles back in the early days (I did successfully procure a couple of Twitter handles for various uses just by asking), but with the company growing and there being a stricter set of rules, things eventually changed. I suppose I ought to give Twitter credit for having rules and sticking to them (and my friends deserve credit for unceremoniously shooting down my harebrained idea), but it turns out that Plan B was a dead-end street. I had failed yet again, and was no closer to my Twitter handle. Alas. I feel morally obliged to point out that this is the point where people who aren’t verging on obsessive would have given up. I am, evidently, not one of those people. Okay, time to try something else. I scoured the rules on Twitter regarding under which circumstances they might hand over a username, and spotted something in the documentation around the Trademark policy around … Which gave me an idea. I had a plan, which had taken shape when I was emailing the Keeper of the Handle (as I had mentally started referring to this mythical, unreachable creature). If they’d gotten in touch, I’d have been happy to pay anything up to $500 for my first name as a Twitter handle. Yeah, it’s a lot of money, but I rationalized that people spend similar amounts on fancy vanity plates on their cars. “I don’t have a car,” I thought. “I totally deserve a vanity handle.” Yeah. . Anyway, I decided that this particular vanity handle actually something to me. Twitter is a major source of news and entertainment, and I’m building a brand there, so being able to use my actual name seemed to make sense. (“Whatever you need to do to sleep at night, dude,” I hear you muttering under your breath.) Anyway. I registered a web domain for my first name to strengthen my case (in case the trademark people decided to look any deeper), then forked over my £170 (around $250) to the Intellectual Property Office, registering my first name as a trademark. Trademark: In progress. Yes, that’s me taking a photograph of my screen showing a PDF. No expenses spared in the production of this article. Even if it’s not strictly speaking necessary, I decided to register it in a category where I had a legitimate claim to a trademark, and where having one might actually come in handy at some point beyond snagging a Twitter handle. As it turned out, the Intellectual Property Office gave a negative integer of fucks about I wanted to register the trademark; from their point of view, as long as nobody opposes the application, it’s an ocean of gravy. I filed a trademark application in : “Education and Entertainment Services.” Seems fitting, as I’m occasionally educational and (admittedly very rarely) entertaining. Most importantly, a trademark search told me there was nothing even remotely like my name already registered in this class. There was a good reason for that; if someone opposes your trademark, that’s when you need to get lawyers involved, and where things can get really expensive really quickly. A few months later, and I was the lucky owner of trademark registration number UK00003077635; Class 41. Haje™. Catchy. Anyway, armed with my trademark, I put on my finest suit, combed my hair, ate a couple of breath mints and contacted Twitter’s customer support. Of course, given that Twitter’s support team is , there’s no way for them to know what I was wearing, but damn it, this was a big moment. I sent them a link to the approved trademark application, and the ball was rolling. This is my business card. The color is True Blue from Twitter’s brand guidelines, and the only thing written on the entire card is my Twitter user name. Because, clearly, I’m guy. About a week later, I received an email saying that I could either create a new account or move the username to an existing account. Holy actual bingo jackpot home-run slam-dunk, Batman. The actual name change was a huge anti-climax after all that; I went into a meeting for work, and when I came out I noticed that I had been logged out of Twitter. To log back in, I needed to do a password reset, and there it was: my name, with a little at-symbol in front of it. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it dawned on me that I was expecting nothing: Even after spending the money, I didn’t really expect my plan to work. I figured I would get a good story out of the attempt, but actually succeeding? That is a pretty alien world I hadn’t considered. I’ll forgive you for thinking, “What the hell is wrong with this guy? Who pays $250 to register a trademark to get a name on a website?” I’ll even agree with you: It’s a spectacularly vain and dumb thing to be doing. And yes, I’m ludicrously aware that actually caring this much about Twitter and the way I’m portrayed on the platform makes me come across as a complete and utter wanker. But I’m sort of OK with that. In fact, I had business cards made in the exact correct shade of Twitter Blue, containing only my Twitter handle. No right-thinking individual would do that, and I’ve never been able to give anybody my business card without apologizing for it at the same time. And yet… Can you think of any other way of handing over your contact details, a short biography and context about who you are, all in five characters? By the way, if you’re still reading this, 2,000 words later, you’re the last person to criticize me for my Twitter addiction: You’re obviously an unusually big fan of the platform, so you may as well give me a follow. You know where to find me. |
Tagging may be the best way to make IoT contextually relevant and usable | Jim Hunter | 2,016 | 4 | 10 |
Before the iPhone, we lived in caves. And it was easy to organize things in our cave. Rocks went in the rock pile. Clubs went in the club pile. Bones went in the bone pile. We sorted, organized, and classified to manage our things. As more people came to live in our cave, managing things got a little more complicated. Ringo brought multiple rocks. One was for banging, one was for fishing, and one was for sleeping. Suddenly, a single rock pile was not enough to organize our rocks. When it was time to go fishing, @Ringo only needed his #rock that was used for #fishing. When we began cultivating human language—so we could talk about how we use our rocks for fishing and sleeping, for example—our organizational challenges were met head on. We developed structures in our communications to identify our things (a.k.a. nouns), descriptors of our things (a.k.a. adjectives), what we do with or to our things (a.k.a. verbs), and even descriptors for how we do what we do with or to our things (a.k.a. adverbs). We happily moved forward as a species through the years using language, in all its many variations, to describe our interactions with the world around us. There was wide diversity in the sounds, symbols, words, intonations, and dialect used to communicate, but the basic structure remained. Our brains worked well with this form, and we told amazing stories about people, places, and of course things. Explore The Cave Our stories inspired us to create and build, and we eventually invented things that can also tell stories. But our new creations were less capable than our brains, so we developed a much more basic language to allow them to speak. This language was not centered on organization, nor was it about storytelling. It was really just for messages. Its “stories” were short and concise, carrying the minimum information required to convey the simple message of a thing. This language became the standard for technology, and technologists used this message-based way of thinking in many of their designs and interactions. Even when it came to the matter of how other actual people use the things, technologists did little to elevate the language to “people speak.” For the most part, this is where we are today. Our caves have been upgraded, and our things are now in rooms. In many thing-management schemes, rooms are the full extent of our organization—they are our only piles. But we can do better. Sure, the amount of things per person has increased greatly, but the principle of organization hasn’t changed much. For example, thanks to the good people at Facebook, one of the “things” we now have most is “friends.” While it is ill-advised to put friends in piles, we can and do them in photos and put them in groups to keep track of their relevance to us. Now, as the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes part of our lives, more and more of . As with our friends, some things are more chatty than others and the importance of the stories they tell varies greatly depending on the thing in question. So, in addition to sorting and grouping and organizing the actual things, we also find ourselves needing to sort and group the tales that our things tell. Sound complicated? As it is with sorting our friends and neighbors, sorting stories is also nothing new. Newspapers (they came after the cave, but before the iPhone) sorted stories all the time. They sorted them by category, by time, by importance, by author, by season, and by whatever the layout and editorial staff felt were good organizational sorting choices. Of course, as news moved into the ether, the sorting and organizational options increased dramatically. Tag clouds became a thing to show how people think, search, and ultimately feel about all of these associated groups of information. Now with our things, and their stories, we can leverage Thing Association Groups (or TAGs—because you can never have enough of abbreviations in your pile of acronyms) to reduce the aforementioned language barrier between people and technology. Where to start, you ask? Consider, for the sake of conversation, that the things in your life are like employees. They are hired by you to do a job. Imagine how you might organize your own company to manage these employees, their assignments, their responsibilities, their productivity, etc. TAGs can be helpful in doing this. For example, if you hire three light bulbs—regardless of their origin, language of choice, or lineage—there are key TAGs you might employ to make them relevant. One notable one is, of course, “light.” You might also include where each light bulb is located, like “bedroom.” If one light can change colors, you might add the TAG, “color.” If it belongs to me, I might add the TAG, “Jim.” If I use it for reading, I might use the tag “reading.” If I particularly like it, I might tag it “fun.” You get the idea. An important note here: A TAG is not to be confused with hierarchal organization structures, such as the traditional file+folder systems on computers. Despite the TAG acronym, a group is not actually created or maintained. TAGs are simply any number of keywords associated with any number of things that results in naturally grouped query results. For example, take the query: “Show me all my things that have the TAG ‘party.’” This should obviously return a list of things that have the TAG “party.” Actually, there are potentially two tags in this example, since the word “my” can be an inferred tag if there is an implementation of ownership in use and the requester can be identified. These keywords can be added and removed extremely easily by annotating a TAG to a thing. Your thing employees can change responsibility, location, ownership, and application—just by changing key words. By now I’m sure you’ve caught on that this way of thinking is nothing new, and it’s really not at all complicated. It’s simply a matter of defining adjectives that I can use to identify my nouns to which I can apply verbs. It’s human language—grammar and basic concepts that many billions of us apply effortlessly in our daily lives. However, it is not the way we commonly communicate with our creation. And it should be, because it’s the foundation for a long and happy coexistence. An example of better living through TAGs becomes apparent when it comes time to assign tasks to your thing employees. If you follow traditional task or rule creation flows, you assign things to logical arguments via their unique ID. Doing so can be pretty easy these days: Drag and drop to connect one thing to another and you have rules created for you. Do this a few times and you can easily build some power into your thing world. However, get a new thing—or worse, replace a thing—and you now have to become the of these rules. Or, perish the thought, a . If, however, you used TAGs instead, then the association to the thing is inherently much less rigid. In fact, rules can be created and never visited again, even as you grow and evolve your network of things. Here’s an example: “At #dark turn on the #fun.” Simply add or remove TAGs on your things to change their behavior. Don’t see that bulb as “fun” any more? Remove the TAG and it’s no longer part of the “fun” rule and void of any rights and responsibilities thereof…until you change your mind later and put the “fun” TAG back on it. With language like this, social networks become a natural point of interaction between people and things, and TAGs will make it seem effortless for us all. This is already the way existing entities on the Internet (including Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) create relevance and context for digital elements of graphics and text; it just needs to be extended to the things in the IoT. There is so much more to talk about here regarding the value of TAGs, but I don’t want this article to get “tagged” as #exhaustive or #wowhewouldnotshutupaboutTAGs, so I will close with one important statement. As an industry, we have to lower the friction that we create between people and technology. As a “thing” veteran with over 24 years in this space, it is my sincere hope that this kind of thinking catches on and helps make our IoT world more usable, finally. |
Black Panther’s artist and editor on diversity in comics and relaunching the iconic superhero | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 10 | Marvel Comics just launched , written by (that’s right, the well-known journalist and author of New York Times bestseller ) and drawn by Brian Stelfreeze. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the character, he was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s — as a black superhero, he stood out at a time when comics were a lot whiter. White characters still dominate the superhero world, but that’s beginning to change, thanks in part to Marvel characters like the Kamala Khan incarnation of Ms. Marvel and the Miles Morales incarnation of Spider-Man. Which is great, but how does the Black Panther stand out now, when he’s no longer black superhero? Well, Stelfreeze said he’s still “definitely the OG of black superhero characters.” He also pointed out that from his debut, the character was noteworthy as the king of a (fictional) African nation, Wakanda: “He wasn’t a prisoner, he wasn’t someone’s sidekick or something like that, he was introduced as a character of majesty.” Series editor Wil Moss suggested that since Black Panther no longer has to “carry that burden of being the only black character in the line,” the story can deal more with Wakanda, its politics and how the character reacts to a rebellion that threatens his rule. “What Ta-Nehisi is doing, he’s charging me with making Wakanda a city that you recognize, that you can go to,” Stelfreeze added. “You not only get the feeling of the country, you get the feeling of the people.” For a nonwhite superhero fan like me, it’s also exciting to see a comic that’s written and drawn by black creators. When I asked whether hiring a diverse lineup of writers and artists is important to Marvel, Moss said that it’s more about finding the right talent who can tell the best stories. At the same time, he acknowledged that for a character like Black Panther, bringing on black creators is “natural” and represents the comic “finally catching up a bit.” “Marvel just wants to reflect our audience, our readership, our talent pool,” he said. In his eyes, Coates was the right person for the job, and not just because of : “He’s definitely a guy who knows comics.” Also giving the title a boost: Black Panther will be featured in the upcoming blockbuster , and he’ll headline his own film in 2018. Moss said the comics are very much a separate story from the movies, but they’re also aiming to make the title accessible to new readers. (I’ve read the first issue, and I think they’ve succeeded — Coates’ writing is dense and complex, but it also catches you up as it goes along.) I also wondered how Stelfreeze (who created some of for ) is adapting his art style as digital comics become increasingly important. It turns out that he still thinks of comics as “primarily a print medium,” and he draws with print readers in mind. At the same time, Moss said that thanks to digital distribution, could reach a lot of new readers. “Ta-Nehisi has such a large audience outside of comics, and with digital, we can reach anybody who doesn’t know where to find the comic store nearby,” he said. |
7 lessons CEOs can learn from President Obama’s video strategy | Vitaly Shter | 2,016 | 4 | 10 |
Regardless of your political orientation, it is hard to argue against the success of the digital media strategy that President Obama and his team implemented to engage millions of Americans over the past two terms. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s famous radio in the 1930s, presidents have always aimed to engage the American people by speaking directly to their hopes, dreams and fears. But President Obama was able to leverage (such as the Internet, social networks and online video streaming) to become, seemingly, the most engaging, transparent and communicative president the world has ever known, reaching audiences that ordinarily would not be paying attention. CEOs of companies, while dealing with challenges of different scope than that of the president, are in essence trying to achieve similar goals, such as: aligning the masses behind a strategy or an initiative, communicating and explaining decisions to other stakeholders internally or publicly, encouraging individuals to work hard toward common goals, communicating confidently at times of crises, defending strategies and agendas and portraying a positive self-image. Therefore, many CEOs and corporate communications teams could borrow a few best practices from the president, and apply these examples to their corporate communication strategies. The most important part in jump-starting an effective video-centric communication strategy is assigning clear ownership with an adequate amount of empowerment and resources to reach video strategy goals. The White House, for example, appointed Silicon Valley veteran Jason Goldman as the first-ever White House Chief Digital Officer, which showcased the emphasis the White House put on digital media for its overall strategy. By emphasizing the importance of video and assigning clear ownership and resources, the White House has essentially become its own media production company, using cutting-edge technology to advance the president’s agenda, policies and initiatives, such as . Most enterprise customers assign the video production task to corporate communication departments, which are equipped with visionary and expert personnel, appropriate budgets and the backing of the CEO (as well as the IT department) to help them achieve their communication and engagement goals. For previous U.S. presidents it was mostly about working with the traditional media (i.e. news agencies, TV networks, newspapers) and occasionally addressing the nation over the TV during the State of the Union, or from the White House during special occasions. Not so for President Obama. Leading up to his last State of the Union address, which was streamed over the Internet, the White House published a series of its own videos — including one video of Obama aboard Air Force One announcing a community college tuition reform plan (8.4 million views). Additionally, they used less-traditional video communication, such as a Google Hangout session where Obama was answering questions submitted by regular people at home over video. Such direct video-based communication worked well for Obama. Videos that support initiatives like the “It’s On Us” pledge (to prevent sexual assault on college campuses) and climate change have attracted millions of viewers and pledgers online (one video had more than 42 million views on Facebook, making it the by a U.S. government or political entity). Similarly, corporate communication departments representing the CEO must implement a progressive video strategy that goes beyond streaming quarterly investor relations and downhill presentations. While these are crucial and must be flawlessly delivered to the global employee base, these are “table-stakes” for today’s modern internal corporate communication strategies. Enterprise video content nowadays often includes everything from live and on-demand video addresses from senior management, to “ video fireside chats” with the CEO or other senior managers (similar to Obama’s Google Hangout sessions), to video news flashes about what is happening in the company, informational videos about new product launches, deep-dives into introducing specific departments or projects, video contests, diversity initiatives videos and many more creative projects that drive engagement and provide a back wind to the corporate pride and a feeling of being “in the loop.” For CEOs specifically, this means using video where it drives the most value, such as promoting initiatives, communicating in crisis situations, showing transparency by sharing information openly and authentically by recording video addresses from anywhere on any topic and connecting with employees on a personal level and recognizing them for their achievements. In 2015 alone, White House officials posted more than 400 videos to and ; the videos have been viewed for a total of more than 174,497,605 minutes. The CEOs of America need their own enterprise video portal to engage their employees — employees who are increasingly expecting consumer-grade experiences at work. To that end, many leading enterprises deploy internal video portals where all communication videos are centrally hosted, accessible by all employees with varying permissions levels, segregated into channels and categories and where all content is easily searchable — which is very similar to the way it is on Vimeo and YouTube, only with the addition of enterprise-grade capabilities such as SSO integration and tight security. Such portals are extremely effective for communication and knowledge sharing, not only for the CEO and senior management, but also for the entire organization, where departments like training, HR, Sales, Finance and IT all have found unique use cases to drive their day-to-day business with video. Obama’s digital strategy team is using all social venues possible — including YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, etc. — to target specific messages to specific audiences, while vastly increasing the overall reach. Similarly, as our workforce is becoming increasingly digitally native, senior managers must adapt to the social trends and communicate with employees via social mediums within the organization. It’s not just about the aforementioned enterprise video portal; progressive organizations have also been deploying Facebook-like social business software such as Jive, IBM Connections, Yammer, Slack and, most recently, Facebook at Work. These tools provide advanced knowledge sharing capabilities within the social context, while all sensitive content remains behind the firewall. Progressive corporate communications departments are increasingly using these tools to communicate with employees and to create a more transparent corporate culture. When you combine these social tools with video content, you maximize engagement. Social media is all about a two-way conversation — people share information and their contacts consume it, comment on it, like it, share it and so on. It’s no different when it comes to video, but it’s not only about streaming videos to relevant audiences and soliciting their feedback via comments, shares and likes. It must be a two-way conversation, whereby your audience can respond via their own videos, by producing “low production” UGC (user-generated content) videos — these often bring the most value and maximize the effectiveness of many-to-many communication. One example is what the White House did with a video contest — the on “The Impact of Giving Back.” Similarly, in the enterprise, it is not only about professionally produced videos but also about the videos produced using a webcam by the senior managers or by any employee. Great examples from the corporate world are video messages to the team, how-to-videos, white-boarding sessions (here is an of one of Obama’s staff members), video contests, etc. This content is much easier to produce but is significantly more authentic than the professionally produced videos; hence, it becomes the “one tail” that drives value and scales video communication and knowledge sharing. For example, President Obama encourages not only his own staff to get in front of the camera to talk about policy topics ( ), but to engage their followers with policy-related topics. The key is for CEOs to leverage other influential members of the organization to use video for driving impact and aligning employees behind the CEO’s strategies. Obama “humanized” himself by participating in videos that show him in the day-to-day routines of his position. He essentially opened his office to the nation by producing the show — a weekly episode that informs the audience about what is happening in the White House and in the Obama family life. This doesn’t mean CEOs should open their personal lives for the entire employee base to watch, but a few videos that show their personality and authenticity, outside of what employees hear in a quarterly call, can certainly help establish more trust in the CEO and help employees relate to him/her. Connect with people at a personal level to become authentic and likable. Show them what you are like and what your interests are. For example: in the White House or . The U.S. is going to elect a new president this year; it will be interesting to see what digital strategies and video practices the new president will adopt to engage with the masses. But for me it is equally interesting to see how the CEOs of America are increasingly leveraging video technologies to achieve their communication and engagement goals. It is very clear that nowadays you either engage at scale or quickly become irrelevant, as CEOs and other leaders in the business world can no longer afford communicating with their employees via traditional means (quarterly calls, emails and an occasional blog). Instead, they need to put themselves out there by adopting a modern video-based communication strategy à la President Obama. |
Uncle Sam wants you… to hack the Pentagon | Christopher Lynch | 2,016 | 4 | 10 |
The name, I was told, was a non-starter. There was simply no way we would call it Hack the Pentagon. None. You simply can’t call it that. Here’s a tall glass of Nope. So naturally… we called it Hack the Pentagon. So with much fanfare and press, on March 31 , 2016, the Department of Defense unveiled . A day later would have been April Fools Day. Perhaps that would have been a bit more amusing, but in a world where the Department of Defense invites white hat hackers around the United States to come help us better secure our technology and warfighters… we played it safe and opened it up the day before. It felt like the right thing to do. That being said I’ve seen . Good news: it’s not. Digital Service in the United States government is a precious thing. With an office in the Pentagon and a team consisting of former Google, Shopify, and Palantir employees, we’re coming together to transform one of the world’s biggest bureaucracies. This is an amazing moment in time. My team, the Defense Digital Service (DDS) exists to bring in the best processes, talent, and technology from private sector into the DoD. An offshoot from the United States Digital Service (USDS) at the White House, we’re tasked with transforming how the Pentagon builds and delivers digital services and products to the three million civilian and military employees in the U.S. and around the world. I regularly get confused with the IT guy, an AV camera operator, or a vending machine supplier at the Pentagon because I wear a hoodie, and that’s okay. We exist to bring in new ideas and to challenge the way things have been done because some of our approaches to technology need rethinking. This program is my team’s first public initiative and we couldn’t be more proud, despite making parts of the five-sided box that we call the Pentagon feel a little uncomfortable at times. And why wouldn’t they feel that way? After years of policy built around punishing those from the outside who would research or test our defenses, Hack the Pentagon feels antithetical to the way things have been done for many, many years. The team behind hack the Pentagon. Photo courtesy the . Taking Hack the Pentagon to market has been exhilarating, scary, and challenging. Sometimes all of those emotions would hit at the same time. We built the concept and program in DDS knowing that what was most important was to provide a new way to let Americans help make us all safer at the end of the day. See, the bad guys aren’t waiting around for us to announce a bug bounty or to win an award… the bad guys are constantly hacking away at our systems looking for weaknesses. Today’s adversary can be comfortably sitting behind a keyboard sipping coffee but their impact can be devastating. In 2012 alone, DoD public websites had 4 billion visits and 25% of them were nefarious in some way. Think about that – a billion attempts to undermine security. And that’s just a couple of websites. It’s a mind numbing challenge that we have to step up to. But we have to step up to that challenge in a way that respects our responsibility to the American taxpayer. The $150,000 cost of this program is a mere drop in the bucket when weighed against the $6.7B budget at the DoD for digital security, but we need to ensure that, like all federal funding, the payouts don’t go to convicted sex offenders or other felons. So while any U.S. taxpayer can play Hack the Pentagon without fear of prosecution, those with serious issues in their past must know in advance that they won’t get paid if they fail a background check. And while we recognize that there is a lot of talent in the world, we have to limit participation to U.S. taxpayers only. And so it was on the day before April Fools, Hack the Pentagon opened its doors. Just over 24 hours after announcement we had over 500 registrations with over 10 qualified hackers signing up per hour. That shows the desire to help and be a part of making the US Defense Department or the Pentagon better, stronger, and more secure. We’ve had an outpouring of support from people all over the world looking to help because it’s something that many of us believe in dearly. To say the DDS team is proud is an understatement – this is a big gain for how the United States Government can improve security and we look forward to seeing other agencies use this model. The next big date is April 18 , 2016, when the bounty actually starts. If you have the skills and care about making America more secure, I hope you’ll sign up and give it a shot. Bringing in best practices from private sector will help us truly transform the federal government, and I’d like to have you come along with us. Come hack the Pentagon. |
The iPad Pro is the most accessible computer Apple has ever built | Steven Aquino | 2,016 | 4 | 10 |
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with traditional laptops, like the MacBook. I own one of the . It was my first Mac, and despite being ancient in computer years, it’s still serviceable. I don’t use it much anymore, but it’s fun to think that a machine I bought in 2008 is capable of running OS X El Capitan in 2016 (albeit not well). My MacBook may be slow and technically obsolete, but it still *works*. Its longevity speaks to Apple’s hardware prowess—design-wise, today’s MacBook Pros are direct descendants—and the Mac’s value proposition. Though the MacBook chugs along, it’s not all roses. In my experience, I’ve found the laptop’s form factor to work against me in terms of accessibility. , the problem is that a laptop’s screen has always felt “far away.” Being visually impaired, I need to get as close as possible in order to see comfortably, and a laptop’s screen makes that difficult. I have to lean in to see, almost the point where my nose is touching the display. It’s not only ergonomically terrible but I look pretty silly doing it. I try to compensate for this by adjusting the position of the screen and using software tricks like increasing the size of the mouse pointer, but its benefits are nominal. The fact of the matter is that laptops are harder for me to use because I can’t get as close to the screen as I need to work effectively. It isn’t that I * * use laptops; it’s that using them has always felt like an uphill battle I can’t win. The iPad, particularly the 12.9-inch Pro, offers a vastly different experience. It’s roughly the size of the , but the tablet’s form factor and interaction model make it so much better for accessibility. It’s for these reasons (as well as my familiarity with iOS) that has made me a believer in . Unlike my old MacBook, I can hold the iPad Pro as close to my face as necessary, and I can do things simply by touching the screen. My enthusiasm for the iPad is why I disagree strongly with Tech Insider’s Tim Stenovec, whom I feel was off the mark when the iPad Pro “isn’t as versatile as a computer,” as it seems his comment overlooks a niche but not insignificant demographic: the accessibility community. I contend that the iPad is in many ways *more* versatile than a laptop for people with disabilities. Computing and productivity isn’t always about a spec sheet or raw power or Photoshop. The iPad *is* a full-fledged computer, no question about it. After using a review unit for a while, I believe the 12.9-inch iPad Pro is the most accessible computer Apple has ever built. From an accessibility standpoint, the iPad Pro’s killer feature is its screen. In [writing about why I switched to an , I said this about the iPad Pro: At 12.9 inches, the iPad Pro’s display is the best thing to happen to my vision in a long time. Its effects aren’t only about pixel density or color accuracy; it’s about sheer size. The iPad Pro’s screen is huge and has completely transformed how I work. Everything I see on the iPad is better simply by virtue of the big screen, from managing email to browsing the Web to typing on the virtual keyboard. The key takeaway I have from using the iPad Pro is that bigger screens are better for my vision. The Pro’s huge screen is a glory to behold because my eyes don’t have to work as hard to read text or find buttons; everything I see is more visually accessible. The great part is that it’s the same iPad experience I was used to on the , only now it’s super-sized. There was no learning curve or period of adjustment in moving to the Pro. Suffice it to say, moving to the iPad Pro from my iPad Air 1 has been a considerable upgrade. While it may seem trite or overly simplistic to assert that the iPad Pro is great mostly for its screen, it makes sense in an accessibility context. Using the iPad Pro has been nothing short of a revelation. It’s taught me to embrace the ginormous iOS devices *because* of their ginormous screens, their overall unwieldiness be damned. It’s worth noting, too, just how much of an effect the iPad Pro’s screen has on one’s perception of other devices. After only the first few hours with my review unit, my old iPad Air felt comically small. Compared to the Pro, using the Air made me feel as though I were holding an iPad Mini. It’s a stark contrast, to be sure, but I can’t see myself returning to the “small” 9.7-inch size after using the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. When it was first announced, I worried the iPad Pro would be uncomfortable to use while sitting on the couch, to read or watch videos, because the device is so large. As it turns out, holding the tablet hasn’t been an issue. It is heavier than my iPad Air 1, but its weight is commensurate with its size. It’s not heavy overall, but like the iPhone 6s Plus, is better when held with two hands. Nonetheless, also like the 6s Plus, the Pro’s awesome screen trumps any concern over its physical size. If I’m not holding the Pro, I’m typing with it on my lap. Though I do like the Smart Keyboard (more on it later), most of my “working hours” (i.e., writing) are spent using the virtual keyboard. I like it a lot, even though for me to do. The larger screen naturally allows for a larger keyboard, and I feel like my hands have more room to move. I feel like the bigger space is more forgiving on my two-finger, hunt-and-peck typing style. As I wrote previously, iOS on the iPad Pro is instantly familiar to me. The difference is that iOS has never before been thrust onto a display as large and packed with as many pixels as the iPad Pro’s. That I can see more at a glance is undoubtedly a good thing, but it doesn’t mean everything is perfect. Let’s first accentuate the positive. One of the advantages of using iOS as a primary platform is the operating system’s lack of cruft. Conceptually speaking, where OS X was conceived around keyboard-and-mouse input and multiple windows, iOS is radically different. It’s built for touch, gestures of all sorts, and, until recently, showed only one app at a time. This lack of complexity is partly why iOS devices are loved by people of all ages and abilities, and why iOS is so great for accessibility. As I wrote at the outset, this simplicity is a key reason why I choose to work from an iPad rather than a MacBook. Of course, iOS has grown more mature and complex since “iPhone OS 1.0” in 2007. One of the [marquee features of iOS 9](http://www.apple.com/ios/) is the multitasking support for iPad. Being able to see two apps at once has greatly improved my productivity, as I’m now able to have Safari open beside my text editor, which saves me from constantly switching back and forth to research information and grab links. It’s so nice. As I familiarized myself with iOS 9’s multitasking features, one thought that persisted in my mind was how accessible the Split View model is. With desktop OSes, I’ve run into a lot of trouble trying to manage windows on screen—resizing them is especially troublesome because of the difficulty in finding a window’s edge and judging an appropriate size. By contrast, Apple has regarding how much of their screen an app can occupy. This lessens my cognitive load because I no longer need to struggle in deciding where I want to put things; I only need to decide if I want an app to take up a quarter or half of the screen. More importantly for accessibility, the mechanics by which you invoke Split View or Slide Over are infinitely more accessible than fiddling with a mouse pointer. All I do is move my finger to drag the divider where I want it; it also helps the divider is dark enough that I can easily see it on screen. I have only one complaint about iOS on the iPad Pro. It’s likely Apple is going to preview iOS 10 in the next few months, and I’d love to see the company push even further at enhancing the experience on iPad. The multitasking improvements notwithstanding, iOS is effectively an OS meant for smartphones, and it really shows on iPad Pro. It would be awesome to see Apple rework iOS on the 12.9-inch model to take even better advantage of the screen real estate. Buttons and other user interface elements could be made more pronounced without requiring Display Zoom, for instance. Likewise, the insertion point, magnification loupe, and cut/copy/paste menu all sorely need a visual upgrade. On a display as large as iPad Pro’s, these elements’ small size is untenable for the visually impaired. At the very least, iOS 10 should include an setting under Accessibility where users can adjust the size of the insertion point, similar to the mouse pointer option on the Mac. Gripes aside, I’m pleased by the overall experience of iOS on the iPad Pro. I think it’s important to clarify, though, that for as much as I laud iOS, I don’t mean to imply that OS X is inaccessible or a worse system. I like the Mac very much, but the accessibility benefits to using a touch-driven OS are so obvious that it feels right to spend the majority of my time on iOS. First, the Smart Keyboard. I’ve written practically the whole of this article on it, and it’s been great. Although , I’ve grown to really like the Smart Keyboard. It looks good, feels good to type on, and isn’t too bulky. I’ve tried several third-party iPad keyboards in the past, but none match the niceness or features ( ) of Apple’s solution. My favorite thing about it? Hitting Command-Tab to quickly switch apps. That said, the Smart Keyboard would be better if it had two things. First, I’d love backlit keys. I don’t know how practical this is, engineering-wise, but the keys as-is are tough to see in low light. I spend several seconds looking for the right keys to press because it’s hard to tell what I’m looking at, and more often than not, I end up hitting the wrong key(s). The extra light would in helping me more easily spot keys. Secondly, the Caps Lock key needs an indicator light. One great aspect about my old Apple wireless keyboard is it has a little green light that tells you whether caps lock is on or not. That visual cue is a valuable, however subtle, accessibility aid. Even in writing this piece, I’ve lost count at how many times I’ve pressed Caps Lock in order to see if it’s on or off because I can’t tell which state it’s in, and I keep making typos. It’s frustrating. Finally, a note about attaching the keyboard. My review kit from Apple included both accessories, and I had the hardest time in the beginning trying to get the Smart Keyboard and iPad together. This is due to dexterity issues caused by my cerebral palsy, as well as my low vision. (In other words, folding the keyboard and seeing where the Smart Connector is supposed to dock.) After a few expletive-laden attempts, it took a how-to video by a friend sent over iMessage for me to finally grasp the proper technique. Regarding Apple Pencil, there aren’t enough superlatives in the dictionary to describe how great it is. In fact, I would say a solid argument could be made that the Pencil, on its own merits, was the most impressive product to come out of Cupertino last year. It’s quintessential Apple: their classic mix of hardware and software integration that works so well, you’d swear it’s magic. It’s that good. Using the Apple Pencil with iPad Pro feels to me like the digital equivalent of the analog pen (or pencil) and paper. The Pencil feels good to hold and to write with. Like with the Smart Keyboard, I’ve used with iPads in the past, but none come close to delivering what the Pencil can. It’s one of those “only Apple” things that Tim Cook often boasts about, because Apple controls the whole stack by designing their products in concert. The best part about using Apple Pencil is that it’s gotten me to explore my creative side. I envy (and admire) [ who have than I, but I do enjoy doodling and coloring. One of the first App Store apps I downloaded for the iPad Pro was by Pixite, an “ that’s become one of my favorite apps. As with printed coloring books, you’re presented with black-and-white “pages” of pictures spanning various categories to color. It’s a well done app; I especially like that you can pinch-to-zoom to better see the lines. It’s a big help for me in seeing more detail and making sure my work is neat. Most of all, I like Pigment because coloring is therapeutic. When I’m stressed or get a case of writer’s block, I find it relaxing to grab my Pencil, open Pigment, and color away for a few minutes. It’s fun, although I’ve yet to finish a page. It’s more about process than product. I have no qualms over the Apple Pencil itself. The only issue I have is that I’m paranoid about losing the cap. It’s tiny, and I fret over it falling to the floor and rolling into the abyss because, given my eyesight, I’d probably never see it again. I’ve jokingly tweeted a few times that Apple should make a Find My Apple Pencil Cap app for iPhone, so as to help people find the cap when they inevitably misplace it. I cringe whenever I see others in the tech press who, like Tim Stenovec did, say that the iPad isn’t a real computer. I think this line of thinking is shortsighted and does the iPad a disservice. I concede that a MacBook remains better than an iPad Pro at performing certain tasks — — but the iPad is now that the list of things it can’t do is growing ever more esoteric. At this point, I think to perpetuate the tired “laptops are for creation, tablets are for consumption” rhetoric is disingenuous. In terms of accessibility and ease of use, however, the iPad Pro is the clear winner over a laptop. As a person with , I am keenly aware of the tablet’s strengths and weaknesses. Yes, the experience of using iOS on the iPad can and should improve, but whatever faults that presently exist doesn’t entirely deter from its obvious and far-reaching benefits. This applies to the disabled and non-disabled alike. Today’s iPad Pro is a powerhouse, and its future potential feels limitless. John Gruber astutely pointed out in concluding that “the future of mass market portable computing involves neither a mouse pointer nor an x86 processor.” I sincerely believe that. The iPad Pro may not be a laptop replacement for everyone, and that’s okay, but it surely is for me. The allure of iOS and the tablet’s form is irresistible, and its combination makes computing much more accessible. While I’ll forever lust over the 12-inch MacBook’s svelte design, the 12.9″ iPad Pro is absolutely the better “laptop” for my needs. |
Embracing the sharing economy for growth in China | Hugh Harsono | 2,016 | 4 | 10 |
‘s track record for economic has been impressive in the last several decades, with accounting for up to one-third of global in recent years. However, is slowly transitioning from a manufacturing-reliant to one focused more on services, with the service sector accounting for 46 percent of GDP in recent years, doubling its size over the last two decades. The has become a large part of the service sector, with ’s National Information Center projecting that the will be worth 10 percent of ’s total GDP by 2020. Despite these projections, the faces a variety of different challenges moving forward, including major litigation issues, legal regulations and social misunderstandings, among others. How can fully embrace the to turn it into a fully fledged vehicle for economic ? |
Apple is going all-in on celebrities to sell new Apple TV | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 10 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CxQW3bzIss After , , , Apple is releasing a new ad featuring a couple of celebrities. This time, basketball player Kobe Bryant and actor Michael B. Jordan are sitting on a couch watching a Bryant biopic. And things don’t go as smoothly as expected. While Bryant is still a young fella, the biopic features his youth, fame and… old days. Bryant’s reaction is as funny as you’d expect. Once again, Apple is putting the emphasis . The new Apple TV remote isn’t perfect, but Siri is a good UI addition for this device. For example, you can say to jump ahead in a program so that you don’t have to scroll and scroll and… scroll. It’s interesting to see Apple working with so many celebrities to sell its latest devices. You’re going to watch celebrities with your Apple TV, so Apple is breaking a barrier with this ad and showing celebrities of an Apple TV. But maybe you’re watching this on a TV? All of this is for the TV age. |
The open web is not going away | Zack Rosen | 2,016 | 4 | 10 |
, the founder of Drupal, and , the founder of WordPress, recently posted calls to arms (of sorts) in defense of the “open web.” I, too, am a believer in the open web — a platform that anyone can hack on powered by standards (http) and great technology (servers, devices, browsers). It delivers on the promise of the Internet: a world in which everyone is connected, and you can command as much attention as your content deserves (no matter your budget or connections). But I agree with them that it is threatened by dominant technology companies such as Facebook, Google and Apple who have an economic interest in creating their own “walled gardens” of Internet content that they control and monetize. In Facebook’s “walled garden” there is only Facebook content posted by your Facebook friends, so why venture anywhere else? Evan Williams (founder of Blogger, Twitter and Medium) has gone so far as that in the future, “individual websites won’t matter.” In the future Internet, he believes there will only be large, closed Internet-company-controlled walled gardens. This is the raison d’etre of his new company , a curated walled garden for content. The advantage of services like Facebook and Medium is that they provide a great experience for users over the messy Wild West of the open web. The disadvantage is their content algorithms control what is distributed, and publishers are limited to the services they choose to build. It’s a trade-off of ease of use and utility over freedom and creativity. Shouldn’t there be a way to have both? There absolutely is, but it will take a lot of effort, time and money — billions of dollars — to build. Unlike Dries, I don’t think this is a problem of regulation. It’s economics. Until the open web industry can muster a level of investment in our technology appropriate for our importance, we will be at a competitive disadvantage to our competitor industries — and a source of frustration for our customers and users. But in the absence of this, the open web remains earth’s most powerful communication tool. More money is invested in websites ($190 billion) than all of digital advertising ($154 billion). But Facebook, Medium and other closed-distribution platforms would prefer to command that attention and budget. The better Facebook is relative to open web, the more time is spent on Facebook instead of the web, and the more their business gains at the expense of other destinations on the Internet. I like Facebook as much as anyone else, but I think it’s important for the open web to thrive, as well. For the open web to survive, website owners will need to be able to create more and more compelling experiences that can compete with the experiences walled gardens can provide. But the truth is, the open web is not keeping up with the wider technology industry. In fact, it’s falling further and further behind. Here is a small example: Here in San Francisco for some amazing reason you get decent LTE coverage on BART (the subway). More than once I’ve been on the train reading Twitter and have had the experience of clicking the link and having 1) the website be down spewing 503s or 2) the website be so horribly unoptimized for mobile that the content was impossible to read. Slow down and think about this for a second: You can get Internet on a subway! And it’s fast too! Twitter didn’t exist until 2006, and smartphones didn’t exist until 2007. Phone speed, battery life and Internet bandwidth gets continually better every year. And the weakest link in the entire stack of technology is the BROKEN website at the other end. A technology that has been around since 1989. Hey, open web friends! We’ve been doing this for 27 years. How is it that we are increasingly becoming the weakest link in the entire Internet technology stack? Here’s the problem with the open web — economics: Internet: $2.4 trillion global industry; market leader, AT&T (revenue $147 billion/240,000 employees) Smartphones: $272 billion industry; market leader, Apple (revenue $233 billion/115,000 employees) Social platforms: $24 billion industry; market leader, Facebook (revenue $18 billion/12,600 employees) Open web technology companies include Automattic, Acquia, WPEngine and Pantheon (my company). Combined, our yearly revenues are < $300 million (0.5 percent of Google’s). Add in companies like Wix, Weebly, SquareSpace and GoDaddy and you are still just scratching the surface in terms of market share. No one web company has achieved critical mass (yet), by which I mean billions in revenue and the ability to employ thousands of engineers who can invest in building truly great, scaled technology products and platforms. In the absence of large, direct investment in open web products, there is no way we should expect our industry (the open web) to keep pace with the walled-garden products and services built by Facebook or device makers like Apple. In the arms race of technologies and consumer attention, the platform companies have mechanized weaponry and the open web is still armed with bow and arrow. The open web has gotten a huge boost from the rise of open-source content management systems, Drupal and WP specifically. Combined, 65 percent of all CMS websites use these platforms, double what it was five years ago. That number is quickly rising to 80 percent. How did they do this? These open-source ecosystems are some of the largest in the world, right up there with Linux. The rise of the open-source CMS systems (Drupal, WP) has been the single biggest technology contribution to the open web. Huge credit goes to Dries Buytaert and Matt Mullenweg; without their leadership and the communities they spawned, the open web would be much worse off. But here is the difference between Drupal/WordPress and Linux: of Linux contributors (9,000 developers) are paid contributors. Intel, Samsung, IBM, Google and more than 1,000 companies pay for these engineers. These companies are sponsoring billions of dollars’ worth of technology investment into Linux. Why? Because >$1 trillion of market cap relies on this core technology. Google, IBM and RedHat’s businesses could not exist in their present form without Linux, so it’s in their economic interest to invest in the technology. How many paid contributors to WordPress and Drupal are there? Maybe a few dozen. WordPress and Drupal lack the corporate sponsors of Linux because our open web companies have yet to get to critical mass. That’s the difference between Linux and the open web. I believe the open web is too important, too vital and too large of an industry (at $190 billion it’s bigger than digital advertising) to wither on the vine. It’s not going away. But it does need to get better. And not a little better — a LOT better. The same expectations you have for modern software (think Gmail, Twitter, Slack) should apply to your company’s website. It should be intuitive to use and update, and should be fast, stable and scalable. Creatives, website designers and developers should all have an amazingly powerful set of tools that automate ALL the plumbing and grunt work so they can focus their precious time on creating amazing fast, responsive, web experiences. To get there will require billions (not millions) of dollars of technology investment, combined with the limitless talents and vibrancy of the amazing open source web ecosystem. |
Autodesk looks to future of 3D printing with Project Escher | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 4 | 10 | Like so many organizations these days, is a company in transition. It was until recently a traditional boxed software company selling licenses. Yet its own business model disruption is only part of the story. As a company steeped in the manufacturing design process, it’s seeing its customers looking to change as well — and it wants to be part of the leap to whatever is coming next. Autodesk sees solving problems around 3D printing as a way it could add value to its manufacturing customers who are looking for ways to use this new technology in the product creation process. There are in fact a lot of difficult problems to solve around this approach and Autodesk is hoping to help by coming up with some clever solutions and acting as a resource for their customers. To that end, they have launched to help deal with a sticky 3D manufacturing problem around the limits of a single nozzle approach to printing complex parts. The difficulty is that you can only push so much material through a nozzle before you reach its physical limit, Corey Bloome, hardware lead at Autodesk explained. The answer to overcoming the single nozzle barrier is surprisingly simple. You just add more. The devil, however, is very much in the details. Coordinating those nozzles, it turns out, is a very sticky digital problem, one Autodesk is hoping to help solve with this project. The challenge is making sure that the nozzles don’t crash into each other, which is harder than it sounds. It’s in fact a complex programming exercise to make sure that doesn’t happen. Project Escher is a study of sorts in speeding up the 3D printing process and providing the fastest output possible, to take what once took hours or days and reduce that timing dramatically. That speed issue has been a real challenge for manufacturers, Keith Kmetz who covers 3D printing at IDC, explained. “Project Escher provides the brains for multiple tools to work in tandem, so that multiple sources are working on the same object at the same time. This exponentially increases the productivity of the entire system by combining the efforts of multiple tools to work on one job together. It’s another way to address the perceived speed drawback — in this case, via the coordination (the brains) of the software and multiple printing sources,” he said. The printer manufacturers themselves have struggled to search for ways to overcome this limitation, says Kim Losey, product marketing manager at Autodesk. “Big industrial companies [have been] spending tens of thousands of dollars developing 3D printers specific to their applications, and if we use our control systems (Project Escher), it allows them to have a more compelling product to sell [more quickly],” she said. Autodesk is well suited to this task, says Tim Caffrey, senior consultant at , a firm that tracks the industrial 3D printing space. “Autodesk sees 3D printing and additive manufacturing (the terms are used interchangeably) as part of a larger digital manufacturing ecosystem. The software that Autodesk sells is a key enabler to that digital manufacturing ecosystem,” he explained. The move might seem like a shift to another business from making the software to design the products, but Autodesk doesn’t see it that way. They are trying to look around the corner and see what the future of manufacturing could look like. “This is not necessarily a pivot. This is us looking at the manufacturing business and how we are going to play a role with these customers in the future as we look ahead a few years and try to come to market [with products and solutions] to help them before they become problems,” Losey said. And lest you think perhaps they are too far ahead of the curve, they have designed the underlying architecture to be as flexible as possible, so if the technology changes, the software can adapt. “We design for what we can anticipate and leave openings for things we can’t,” Bloome said. He rightly points the vision gets blurrier the further out you look, and they have tried to build in flexibility into this system to compensate for that. |
Ex-Rocket Internet execs raise $800K to battle Foodpanda for business customers in Asia | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | Two former Rocket Internet executives are out to beat Foodpanda, the food delivery startup backed by the German incubator-cum-investor, at its own game — and they’ve raised $800,000 to get to it. Hong Kong-based was founded in January of this year by (its CEO and former MD of Foodpanda in Latin America), (its CPO and ex-COO of Hellofood Latin America) and (its COO and formerly with HSBC Australia). This funding round, which was led by with input from , is aimed at building out its operations in Hong Kong and Singapore, its two markets right now. Rocket Internet has essentially bought itself a monopoly on food delivery in many parts of the world. Last year, and swallowed up no fewer than nine other startups. It hasn’t stopped there, and new businesses since then to consolidate its empire. Despite that, Caterspot’s founding trio see some gaps that can be attacked in Asia. Principally, Caterspot is focused on the B2B, or business customers, rather than serving consumers as Hellofood, Foodpanda and others do. With some 150 caters on its platform, and 50 more joining imminently, Paredes explained to TechCrunch that the company is scaling carefully to build loyalty among users and a sustainable model. “80 percent of our sales come from corporates, and we’re crafting our platform to make it very easy for secretaries, offices managers, receptionist, HR, etc to order food for their teams. After speaking to many companies, we see there are a lot of pain points and no solution that meets their needs so far, including platforms like Foodpanda’s corporate accounts,” he said. , which is rolling out across Asia. At the launch in November 2015, Foodpanda co-founder and CEO Ralf Wenzel told us that there’s a huge opportunity in Asia, with the typical order size of businesses far higher than consumers, and plenty of repeat business. Caterspot CEO Paredes sees the same potential. “We never take on orders that are less than 10 people and so far we’ve realized that once a secretary or office manager discovers our platform, they love being able to have many options and information at their fingertips. We’re very pleased with our low churn rates,” he told us. It isn’t just about typical restaurants coming online. Caterspot includes some quirky options, like which might be suitable for events or a company do. On the business side of things, we know that food ordering is challenging. The unit economics are stacked against many businesses ever pulling in a profit, while the customer experience is hugely dependent on third-parties who can control the quality of the final product and delivery time. Paredes didn’t say if the business is close to unit profitability (the buzzword of 2016 for delivery companies), but he believes that healthy commissions and keeping costs low will help Caterspot “become profitable in each city we launch within a reasonable amount of time.” On the subject of launches, he said that the company is locking down its business model and blueprint in Hong Kong and Singapore — two bustling and Westernized cities in Asia — before moving into new locations. “Next year, users will definitely be able to use CaterSpot in several major markets across Asia and Australia,” Paredes said. “We plan to raise [funding] again this year to help fuel our expansion.” |
Ground delivery robots: Passing fancy or next wave? | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 10 | “Every failed on demand startup will reappear as a successful robotics driven business in five to 10 years.” So Jeremy Conrad, founding partner of the San Francisco-based hardware fund , one recent afternoon. Conrad apparently means what he tweets, having investing in , a new, San Francisco-based ground-delivery robot that will focus on ground-based last-mile delivery for business, then consumer, applications. (Conrad wouldn’t discuss the still-stealth startup’s funding picture, but another source tells us it’s currently meeting with investors.) He’s hardly alone in thinking that ground robots will be bringing us everything from canned goods to Christmas lights sooner than we think. For example, this past Wednesday, Andreessen Horowitz announced it had led a in , a company whose self-driving ground delivery robots look like minibars on wheels. And Dispatch’s machines look an awful lot like the robots of , an Estonia-based outfit created by Skype cofounders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, who their still-in-beta machines late last year. The robots, which also look like little refrigerators, are designed to deliver goods like groceries – about two bag’s worth – in 30 minutes of less. In each case, the idea is to save money on deliveries by cutting out costly humans. Starship is also promising to give customers more control over the delivery process. It says it will enable residents to schedule deliveries only when the timing works, as well as track in real time the whereabouts of the robots, whose tech includes GPS, gyroscopes, and nine cameras. (As an added bonus, its robots will produce zero emissions, says Starship.) Whether these new ground-based robot couriers represent the beginnings of a broader trend or a series of one-off bets remains a question mark. We’d bet on the former, though. It’s true that have investors have already made an enormous bet on unmanned aerial vehicles. , VCs plugged $450 million into 74 drone deals last year, up fourfold from the $111 million they invested in drone companies in 2014. But Amazon’s in drones means it will be difficult for many related startups to compete on the consumer delivery front. That’s saying nothing of lingering regulatory considerations. The FAA is expected to issue rules by the end of June for flying unmanned aircraft that weigh more than 55 pounds, but the proposed rules don’t apply to drones that would eventually handle consumer delivery because they don’t permit drones to fly at night or beyond an operator’s line of sight. Another obstacle: growing concerns over a world peppered with annoying drones flying overhead. You might be astonished by quickly how residents can come together when threatened with noise pollution. San Francisco’s denizens have all heliport and helipad proposals since the early 1960s, save for a year-old helipad at a new San Francisco hospital that’s meant for carrying children and pregnant mothers facing . Perhaps it’s no wonder that Conrad told us he’s “very bearish on [air] drone delivery,” when we gave him a call last week. In fact, though Lemnos Labs helped incubate – a company that raised recently to sell drone hardware and software to enterprise customers – Conrad goes so far as to call “drone delivery in cities maybe the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Even if you can get past the safety issues – and you can’t — the idea of 10,000 drones buzzing around is idiotic.” That’s not to say ground-based robots are a no brainer. For starters, consumer-facing ground robots represent new territory for regulators, who haven’t had much reason to consider them just yet. Even if robotic ground couriers come to be viewed by regulators as friendlier than unmanned aerial vehicles – which seems likely, given they can’t fall out of the sky and onto someone’s head –- not everyone agrees that ground-based delivery robots are a huge opportunity. “It’s a complicated value proposition,” notes Ben Einstein, managing director of the hardware-focused seed-fund . “Certainly, there are some companies whose problems are really hard to solve with humans and whose unit economics would make more sense with robots.” At the same time, says Einstein, “I think a huge percentage of items will still be delivered the old-fashioned way. The [new ground-based delivery] businesses where there will be a high degree of robotics and automation that cause other companies to go out of business – I think that’s a little more on the margin.” As happened with air drones, many investors are betting first on industrial applications to see where they might lead. In the highest profile bet to date, Amazon in 2012 paid for Kiva Systems, a maker of robots that move items around warehouses. A younger company, two year-old of San Jose, is similarly producing ground-based robots that look like oversize Roombas and feature autonomous navigation, automatic distance following (so they can trail behind a warehouse worker who can pile products atop it), and warehouse monitoring and statistics. The company has raised in funding so far, and it’s signing up warehouse customers left and right, suggests Rob Coneybeer of Shasta Ventures, a seed investor in the company. The reason is cost savings for enterprises. “[Fetch’s] customers look at this as the equivalent of paying three bucks an hour” for an employee, he said during a in San Francisco last week. Entrepreneurs and investors are beginning to take more seriously the cost savings that automating direct-to-consumer delivery could produce, too. “Obviously,” ground robots could “dramatically alter the economics of service delivery,” notes Niko Bonatsos, a managing director at General Catalyst Partners. “If you have a person in the mix, it’s expensive; you need to have [them making] at least two to three deliveries per hour, or you have no business. “There’s hope that some of these technologies will take care of a niche part of the service deliveries landscape,” he adds. “But it’s early days. It’s like talking about self-driving cars a few years ago. It’s not going to be next year but seven or eight years down the road.” For Bonatsos, that means it’s time to start looking. More investors (and inventors) might be wise to do the same. |
Can Israel build big, sustainable companies? | Zach Abramowitz | 2,016 | 4 | 10 |
The Israeli start-up ecosystem is a well-oiled investment machine that has been turning out companies for the better part of two decades. The country has its own homegrown angels like Gigi Levy-Weiss and Eilon Tirosh, venture capital firms like Carmel, JVP, Pitango and Canaan, equity crowdfunding firms like OurCrowd and iAngels, and Silicon Valley firms with offices on the ground like Battery Ventures and Sequoia (that’s not to mention the new wave of Asian investors ). But, for all the “Start-up Nation” fanfare, Google’s acquisition of Waze – Israel’s highest profile start-up exit to date – was valued at just $1.1B. And, while Israel officially has two on the CrunchBase list (more if you count companies like Taboola and WeWork), only a handful of Israeli companies have actually exited in the billion dollar range. This is, at least in part, by design. Yossi Vardi, one of Israel’s most successful angel investors, has advised Israeli entrepreneurs to that can, like his portfolio company ICQ (which sold to AOL), be acquired by bigger companies in Silicon Valley. Eden Shochat certainly knows something about early exits. Facial recognition company Face.com, which he co-founded, sold to Facebook for a reported $60M after raising just $5 million in investment. But now, as a founding partner at , a $150 million early stage VC in Tel Aviv, his goal is to fund Israeli entrepreneurs who want to build global businesses. Some of his portfolio companies include Meerkat, FreightOS and Lemonade. Recently, I sat down with Eden at WeWork (one of his portfolio companies) in Tel Aviv where he shared with me his vision for what he and others refer to as the “Scale-up Nation,” an Israeli ecosystem made of companies that are built to last, rather than Vardi’s vision of products that are built to exit. After our meeting, we exchanged notes about the feasibility of building Google sized companies out of Israel, the impact of regional violence and how, if at all, Aleph really differs from the older guard of Israeli investors. |
Tech coalitions pen open letter to Burr and Feinstein over bill banning encryption | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | This Venn diagram created by TechCrunch summarizes the provisions of the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016. A group of tech coalitions has to Senators Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), concerning their bill on command, which achieved infamy in record time following earlier this month. The highly diplomatic letter begins: We write to express our deep concerns about well-intentioned but ultimately unworkable policies around encryption that would weaken the very defenses we need to protect us from people who want to cause economic and physical harm. It goes on to point out “unintended consequences” such as compromised security being compromised for bad actors as well as good, and also that any national attempt to hamper the operation of a global industry is foolish and bound to fail and, in failing, damage the reputation and economy of the U.S. (I’m paraphrasing). The letter is signed by four groups: , the , the , and the . Between the four, most of the major internet and tech companies are represented: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Verisign, and dozens more. (Aol, which owns TechCrunch, is a member of the first two listed.) It’s likely that the bill, which is completely impracticable and ignores basic facets of the industry which it means to regulate, does not require the opposition of all these companies. It’s not expected to gain any traction in the Senate, and Reuters reported that President Obama won’t be offering his support. Still, a letter like this does no harm, and possibly some good. |
Snapchat’s crazy “3D Stickers” just came to iOS. Here’s how to use them | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | About a week ago, : the ability to “pin” emojis to objects in your videos, and have those emojis track that object and move around with them. They call these “3D Stickers” (a weird name, sure, but hey, not my call.) It was only for Android users when it launched last week, but it’s hitting iOS today. Sound silly? A bit. But, like much of Snapchat, it’s as oddly addictive as it is silly. |
How paid journalism must work online — and why Blendle can’t | Max Tatton-Brown | 2,016 | 4 | 19 |
I write. I with writers. Many of my friends are journalists. The future of being able to charge for quality material is really important to me. However, to make progress in this area, I think the industry needs to stop pinning its hopes on the same dead ends that come up again and again. To me, one of these is microtransactions for material. Leading this field, has recently been on a PR push around its U.S. launch. Twenty U.S. publications will share with an audience of 10,000 test users articles for between $0.09 and $0.49 (9-49 Basically, none of this matters. It’s a wasteful diversion. Because to make real impact on this challenge, you need three key things — and has none of them. tries to tackle the problem head on — and 100 percent as a service to help people find and support writing. While this keeps publishers up at night, it is evidently a concern that the vast majority of consumers don’ think about and don’ show any interest in fixing. By contrast, , I wrote about a different approach that would lead adoption with a service that readers already show an appetite and demand for. In that suggestion, Amazon could open its Kindle platform into a “read it later” feature across the web. Writers could add the feature with a line of code or simple plug-in, and Amazon could then aggregate all that material in an “app store” of sorts — or directly on Kindle devices. Some of this has come true with features released since, such as Apple News. Then, with one flick of the switch, it could let the writer charge money through this network of buttons. Or not. Or under a freemium model. And this brings me to the second major requirement for success here. How many services currently have your credit card details? Almost certainly Amazon, then very likely Apple/Google. Beyond that, you’re less in platforms and more into subscriptions like Netflix (which you ’ access at all without paying). Getting people to add payment details is hard enough — let alone when the main benefit doesn’ go to them. Apple Pay may represent one route out of this problem for companies like , but it hits their margin and only puts them on an even keel with everyone else. If it’s possible, it’s possible for all, simply eliminating this battlefront instead of entrenching one player in victory. has made impressive progress attracting top publications to the platform. But content owners, from music to movies, have become increasingly cautious about to whom they tie their future. Negotiating with , publishers may have more power than in negotiations with people like Apple and Amazon. But once the big boys come to the table, things are going to get interesting. Those tech giants have existing relationships and bring audiences hundreds of times larger — an essential factor when returns will scale with reach and participation. However gloomy this sounds, I don’ actually believe a solution is insurmountable. I’ve suggested two in the past already: the Kindle platform approach and another where and provide a different dimension of value. Publishers will get there. But we need to think more credibly and start forgetting about the dead ends that have been tried (and failed) over and over again. Yes, I don’ think has the secret sauce to make this — but nor does almost everyone else. The sooner someone steps up to bat with a real solution, the better. |
Samsung Pay will launch in Singapore “as early as Q2 2016” | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | Samsung has , but today it set a more definite timeline–sort of. The company announced that the service will be available in retail stores “as early as Q2 2016,” the day after rival Apple Pay . To be sure, Apple Pay is currently available only for American Express cardholders in Singapore, while Samsung Pay has . Singapore is an important market, however, because it represents the first step into Southeast Asia for both services. Samsung Pay’s partnership with American Express, MasterCard, and Visa, and major banks in Singapore–DBS/POSB, OCBC Bank, and Standard Chartered–means it should work at most retail stores that already take credit cards once it finishes rolling out. Apple Pay, of course, also . In its , Samsung said that based on its own research, 71 percent of Samsung user “have indicated interest in using Samsung Pay once it becomes available.” Success is still far from certain, however, for Samsung Pay (or Apple Pay, for that matter). Gartner research director Manjunath Bhat that only 23 percent of Singaporean consumers are currently willing to use mobile payments and that when they do tap their smartphones at checkout, it is for small transactions. |
PillDrill is a home medication scanning system for keeping track of prescriptions | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | The fight to drag the healthcare system kicking and screaming into the 21st century often overlooks the little picture in favor of larger systematic fixes. But for many users on multiple meds, the only thing standing between them and an incorrect or missed dosage is a big, plastic box from the drugstore sporting embossed letters of the days of the week. Now up for pre-order ahead of its May shipping date, smartens up the home medication process with a connected system built around a small hub that scans NFC tags so users can keep track of daily doses. The Wi-Fi-connected device features a display that issues reminders and alerts when it’s time to take a pill. Users scan tags when a pill is taken and then scan the Mood Cube, a sort of emoji-covered die that indicates how they’re feeling once the pills are down. The system syncs with the optional PillDrill app for scheduling and remote monitoring by friends and relatives. The PillDrill system includes the hub, a pill strip, 12 scanning tags and the aforementioned Mood Cube for a launch price of $199. |
Apple is finally adding full web previews for tvOS apps | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | Apple is finally getting around to adding web previews for tvOS apps — correcting this rather baffling and prolonged omission. The addition was first noticed by Jeff Scott, who, having a tvOS app himself, was surely thrilled at the news. Hey, look at that, Apple TV apps now showing up in web preview pages: When did that start? cc: — Jeff Scott 🥃 (@TheAppivore) were previously accessible if you knew where to look, but they were limited in functionality: no screenshots, no metadata, no download link. And there still isn’t a download link on the newly activated pages. For now it appears to be only tvOS native apps that show up like this; universal apps with tvOS versions (Netflix, for instance) still don’t show screenshots in Apple TV format. Kevin MacLeod, creator of third-party web app browser , told that the API is returning similar data. This should make it much easier to browse apps for your Apple TV from… well, somewhere other than your Apple TV. You can probably expect a more complete rollout of the new app pages over the next few weeks; we’ve asked Apple for more information. |
Apple’s head of legal says it refused China’s request for its source code | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | a long-standing rumor that it has collaborated with the Chinese government to provide its source code. There’s been plenty of speculation over this issue, since China is one of Apple’s most important markets and the country’s government has a reputation for its tough stance on tech companies — into the country’s top businesses, for example, and blocked Western services that it sees as a threat to its regime. In the case of Apple, which saw revenue from China grow 14 percent year-on-year to reach , there is much ambiguity over its relationship with the state. Beijing somewhat cryptically praised Apple in January 2015 for allowing “security checks” the implications of which, , were unclear. has agreed to accept China's security checks, 1st foreign firm to agree to rules of Cyberspace Admin of China — People's Daily,China (@PDChina) Some speculated this was a case of Apple capitulating to the demands of the government in order to maintain its lucrative business in China, but, speaking under oath at a congressional hearing around encryption on Tuesday, . Responding directly to an allegation raised by Indiana State Police Captain Charles Cohen, Sewell admitted that China had asked for the code, but said that Apple declined. “We have not provided source code to the Chinese government. We did not have a key 19 months ago that we threw away,” Sewell said. “Those allegations are without merit.” Apple's Sewell: "We were asked by the Chinese government [for source code] and we refused." Says the request came within the last 2 years. — kate conger (@kateconger) Apple also stressed the point in court filings: Cohen claimed to have cited media reports, rather than providing his own intel, but Sewell’s response is the highest profile (public) comment Apple has made on the issue to date. The phone maker has previously kept quiet, perhaps to avoid the risk of spotlighting the sensitive issue with Chinese authorities, but there are other examples to suggest it is safeguarding user data in China with the same vigor that we’ve seen in the U.S. — , in particular. Apple moved to secure its data in China when it for the first time in August 2014. And while its have thwarted the U.S. government’s efforts to access user data, they also make Chinese user data more secure. Perhaps related, to deceive iCloud users into providing access to their data and accounts. |
Mad scientist shrinks Arduino to size of an AA battery | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | The hardware tinkerers and prototype mavens out there will invariably have stumbled across . Completely open source and always pushing the limits for collaboration, there are a ton of different development boards available, but none are as awesome as . Behind the delightfully punny name, you’ll find an Arduino-compatible board the size of an AA battery. Growing up in the bad old days, you’ll remember what an epic pain in the rear-end it used to be to get started with electronics and embedded circuits. That all went away when the Arduino team sprinkled a generous helping of user-friendliness across the proceedings, making it easy to (re)program the processors, and using a Java-clone and made it ridiculously easy to develop software for hardware applications. Based on the , AAduino takes the platform to its sexiest form factor yet: Turning a three-AA battery holder with two batteries in it — the third battery compartment holds the AAduino — into a powerful, yet diminutive computing platform that fits in the palm of even the smallest hands. Two AA batteries and an AAduino side by side, in a display of effortless cool we haven’t seen this side of Hollywood in a decade. The truly ingenious thing about using the form factor of an AA battery is that by wiring it in “backwards” (i.e. with the + and – poles reversed), the AAduino can pretend to be a battery itself, and be powered by the batteries that are resting by its side. Elegant, cool and not something I’ve seen done before. If you want to get your hands dirty and build your own, Johan has embraced the spirit of Arduino fully, and made schematics and all the other fun things you need available . |
EFF sues DOJ for access to secret court orders on decryption | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | Does the government secretly force companies to decrypt their customers’ messages, build backdoors or hand over their source code so that law enforcement officials can pick through it for vulnerabilities? Those are the questions at the center of an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit filed today against the Justice Department. The suit seeks the disclosure of documents that would show whether DOJ has ever secretly forced a company like Google or Apple to provide technical surveillance assistance in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a federal court that issues secret surveillance warrants in national security cases and has been criticized for . EFF requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, but has been rebuffed. Until a few months ago, the idea of a court ordering a tech company to build special software that would help law enforcement decrypt a customer’s communications might have seemed far-fetched. But now, of course, this is a familiar scenario — the FBI recently sought this kind of order in its against Apple. EFF wants to find out if the government has sought similar court orders that have been hidden by the secrecy of the FISC. The FISC claimed in a response to EFF that “no responsive applications” for warrants exist. EFF contends that the court did not throughly search for records in response to its request. Congress recently attempted to break down some of the FISC’s secrecy by requiring the court to declassify any significant decisions or new interpretations of the law. “Even setting aside the existence of technical assistance orders, there’s no question that other, significant FISC opinions remain hidden from the public,’’ EFF senior staff attorney Mark Rumold said in a regarding the lawsuit. “The government’s narrow interpretation of its transparency obligations under USA FREEDOM is inconsistent with the language of the statute and Congress’ intent. Congress wanted to bring an end to secret surveillance law, so it required that all significant FISC opinions be declassified and released. Our lawsuit seeks to hold DOJ accountable to the law.” You can read EFF’s full lawsuit . |
null | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 28 | null |
TechCrunch launches a personalized news recommendations bot on Facebook Messenger | Travis Bernard | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | We’re excited to announce the launch of our cross-platform and personalized news recommendations bot on Facebook Messenger. The bot is part of Facebook’s Messenger program revealed at F8, and it will help our readers get the news they want from us in a more conversational way. You can activate the bot on our , or . [gallery ids="1306417,1306418,1306420"] Similar to our , our Messenger bot will help you stay on top of the topics and stories you care about. You can subscribe to different topics, authors or sections of the site, and the bot will send you news articles from TechCrunch about the things you are interested in the most. The bot will send you updates once a day, but if there aren’t any stories about the topics you subscribe to, you won’t hear from us. You can also ask the bot questions like “What is Disrupt?” and it will give you an answer. There are two main things that make our bot unique compared to the other ones out there. First, it works on both Telegram and Messenger. We like to give you choice. Second, there’s a personalization element right from the start that’s connected to your behavior on our website. If there are certain types of articles that you read more frequently on TechCrunch.com, we’ll use this data to serve up recommendations from within the bot. For example, if you always read Snapchat articles on TechCrunch, you are more likely to receive updates from our bot about Snapchat. This feature is something that no other Messenger bots currently have. If you rarely visit TechCrunch.com or you regularly clear your cookies, the bot will send you the top stories of the day instead of the personalized ones. You can also subscribe to individual topics to personalize the experience even more (instead of relying on our personalization algorithm). We teamed up with the folks at to make the magic happen, so a big thanks to them for all the help. We’d love to hear your feedback on the bot in the comments section, so don’t be shy. |
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