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Yahoo reports flat earnings amid acquisition talks | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | Yahoo’s Board of Directors has been considering what’s called a “reverse spin,” to separate Yahoo’s core assets from its stake in Alibaba. The company reiterated that “management has worked diligently with the committee and its independent legal and financial advisors to engage with interested strategic and financial parties.” In other words, they are open to being acquired by both like-minded companies and private equity firms. While it is not yet clear what the final outcome will be for the troubled Internet company, one of Yahoo’s final earnings reports managed to stay slightly above investor expectations. $1.08 billion in revenue, close to Yahoo’s $1.087 billion reported. The Street was expecting adjusted earnings of 7 cents per share, just beneath the 8 cents reported. This is still well below the 15 cents per share reported in the same quarter last year. “I’m pleased that we delivered Q1 results in line with our expectations. Our 2016 plan is off to a solid start as we continue to focus on driving efficiency, lowering costs, and improving long-term growth,” said Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, in a statement. “In tandem, we made substantial progress towards potential strategic alternatives for Yahoo. Our board, our management team, and I are completely aligned on this top priority for shareholders.” Like most Internet companies, Yahoo has seen growth in mobile. The company reported $260 million in mobile revenue, compared to $234 million in the same period last year. Desktop revenue fell from $873 million to $774 million. Search revenue for the first quarter was $820 million, a 15 percent year-over-year drop. Paid clicks decreased 21 percent and display revenue fell 1 percent. Yahoo shares were in after-hours trading. The stock is down 18 percent in the past year and has a market cap of $34 billion.
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OneWeb will mass-produce historic number of satellites with new Florida factory | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | OneWeb Satellites, the joint venture between and , has selected Florida to be the home of their satellite manufacturing facility. Located in Exploration Park near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the factory will turn out most of OneWeb’s 900 satellites that will be used to provide global Internet coverage. OneWeb satellite factory to be located just outside gate to Kennedy Space Center. Active by end 2017. 250+ new jobs. — Stephen Clark (@StephenClark1) Under a partnership between the State of Florida and , OneWeb Satellites will invest about $80 million into the manufacturing facility. As part of the deal, the Florida Department of Transportation will match $17.5 million worth for the development of the plant itself during the construction phase. With an initial constellation of 648 satellites that could ultimately grow to 900 satellites — the largest constellation in history — OneWeb hopes to bring Internet to the entire planet. According to the , due to challenges with the way Internet is provided today, 57 percent of the world still does have reliable access to the World Wide Web. OneWeb founder Greg Wyler has worked to increase that percentage throughout much of his professional career. In his earlier pursuits, Wyler created , which helped bring fiber-based Internet to Rwanda, and , which provides Internet to a large portion of the globe through satellites in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO). OneWeb is Wyler’s most ambitious Internet company to date. Placing a satellite constellation in Low Earth Orbit reduces latency issues (time it takes for data to travel to a satellite and back to the user, important for streaming applications or gaming) and, with enough satellites, can provide true global coverage. To achieve this, OneWeb’s initial constellation will require more than 50 times the number of satellites than O3b’s MEO constellation. All of this means that before OneWeb can launch the largest satellite constellation in history, they’ll need to start by becoming the first company to mass-produce spacecraft. In addition to those required for OneWeb’s constellation, the factory could also manufacture satellites designed to meet other specifications for other customers. With that in mind, all eyes will be on OneWeb Satellites’ new 100,000+ square-foot Florida facility, the industry’s first satellite factory designed to mass-produce large spacecraft using assembly-line techniques similar to those used in aircraft production. The factory is expected to create 250 new engineering jobs and will ultimately manufacture 15 satellites a week. LauncherOne illustration / Image courtesy of Virgin Galactic To bring the satellites to orbit, OneWeb had to sign the commercial rocket deal in history. Arianespace will cover at least 21 launches with the Russian-made Soyuz rocket, which can carry up to 36 satellites at a time. Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne vehicle, which is still in development, will cover 39 launches with 1 satellite on board at a time. Wyler’s ambitious goal to bring low-latency, broadband Internet to the entire world has required a number of historic partnerships and firsts for the space industry. The ambitious Florida-based satellite factory is their latest important step toward that goal. There are still many challenges to overcome, but if all goes well, OneWeb Internet could come online as early as 2019. |
Banks and fintech in 2025: An unlikely alliance | Eyal Lifshitz | 2,016 | 4 | 19 |
Banking as we know it is in the midst of its first fundamental remaking in centuries. What’s driving this transformation? Two major shifts: our transition to interacting with money digitally instead of physically, which opened finances to tech disruption, and a tech wave that has changed the way consumers define ease and convenience. In just 10 years, we can expect banks (and other financial institutions) to look, from the outside, like a vastly different organization: a technology startup. That doesn’t mean branches will offer nap pods and catered lunches; rather, your bank will have placed newfound emphasis on the design and customer experience paradigm that has changed while retail banking has been playing catch-up. Banks have been caught asleep at the wheel in the Digital Age. It was left to , , and others to build the online services that are top of mind for consumers today. On mobile, more people default to Facebook Messenger or Venmo to transfer money to a friend rather than a bank app. But despite the proclamations of some visionary fintech founders, banks aren’t disappearing anytime soon. The engine under the hood of big banks — the compliance and money-transfer systems — are simply too difficult for any startup to replace, which is why tech plays like are still built on top of existing bank systems and payment rails. To maintain the dominance they’ve enjoyed up to this point, however, banks need a radical redesign of their customer-facing assets. If banks fail to overhaul their exteriors to offer a personalized, best-in-class product experience, they will be relegated to supplying the engine for sleeker-looking tech companies in 10 years. Thanks to steep regulatory costs and the need for physical infrastructure like ATMs and branches, banks have been shielded from the technological revolutions that have reshaped other industries. Without serious threats of disruption, most banks have focused on consolidating to drive down costs and cross-sell services, placing the customer-facing product experience on the back burner. Now, however, as our interactions with money have essentially become invisible, the traditional selling points of a money service — moving, storing or growing it — have become table stakes while customers seek the product experience they want. For consumers, convenience is no longer about being a one-stop shop; it is all about fitting seamlessly into existing behavior. The success of should not come as a surprise when money enables social experiences. Banks’ inability to keep pace with these customer expectations led . Technological advances have raised consumer expectations for a personalized, integrated service, while also reducing the barriers and cost for new entrants to do so, putting banks in a vulnerable position. While startups may not have the infrastructure and systems that give banks their staying power, they aren’t burdened by the legacy systems common in big banks. Consequently, upstarts like , and are stealing some of the most profitable segments of the market that big banks spent billions to consolidate. A Goldman Sachs report estimated the severity of this leakage, with and $470 billion in profit at risk of being displaced by fintech firms. Those leaks would leave banks hanging on to retail banking operations, the segment of the market. Neither mainstream consumer banks nor more obscure are insulated from the coming wave of fintech innovation. To stave off that leakage, banks will either need to build their own competitive solutions, buy those solutions or strike deals that make banks a critical part of the “plumbing” for those solutions. OnDeck and JPMorgan Chase’s is an example of the latter approach, and the first of many such alliances to come. To remain relevant, banks will also need to forge new kinds of partnerships. In their growing sprawl, Messenger and Snapchat are aggressively expanding their commerce capabilities, and these companies and others will continue building out their financial services infrastructure. They have attracted large customer bases by delivering best-in-class product experiences, and they will be highly motivated to add extremely valuable financial data to their endless customer data streams. A button in WhatsApp could wind up being your bank’s most important touch point. Some banks will strategically choose to invest heavily in building their own tech solutions, like Capital One with their Digital Lab. For many, though, it will make sense to leverage their infrastructure, deep pockets and formidable sales and marketing force while using startups as their R&D arm. Once the startup is user tested and approved, these banks will acquire or partner, then expand those services through the bank’s consumer base. These big banks will continue to use their large cash hordes and low cost of capital to pay a premium to acquire and leverage fintech solutions and exploit the banks’ brands, marketing know-how and distribution capabilities to package and deliver the solutions to ready customers. Just as , they’ll find willing partners in fintech to meet market demands. Although they are perceived to be antiquated in some regards, banks are an attractive home for fintech companies because they bring scale and turnkey regulatory compliance in all 50 states and beyond. Ultimately, this will continue to sustain a thriving fintech industry where innovative startups that begin competing with incumbent banks end up as partners in the arms race for superior technology and a streamlined user experience. The fintech industry has orchestrated in just a few short years a sweeping change in customer preferences and expectations for the modern “bank” experience. The next decade will demonstrate the impact of this disruption as customers choose financial services based on the product experience, not on the breadth of offerings. In 10 years, most banks will still be public-facing brands. Their role as a safe deposit box for our cash will continue, but consumers’ rising standards will force them to rise to the occasion, ensuring a best-in-class experience is a core component of their offering. This unlikely alliance is just over the horizon. Both the old and new worlds will have no choice but to find a way to join forces, looking like startups while working like banks. |
Intel announces it’s slashing 12,000 jobs | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | just announced it was slashing its workforce by 11 percent, calling it in all its corporate press-speak glory “a restructuring to accelerate its transformation.” Sure. What it means in real human terms is that 12,000 people will be losing their jobs worldwide, and that is never a good thing to hear. “These are not changes we take lightly,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in a call with analysts and reporters. “Acting now enables us to increase our investments in areas that are critical for our future success. This is a comprehensive initiative. We will emerge as a more collaborative, productive company with broader reach,” he said. The fact is that Intel is a desktop computer chip maker at a time when desktop computers aren’t doing very well, and as PC sales dropped, something had to give. Intel is trying to transform, as it so eloquently put it in its announcement, into a company that does more than provide chips for computers. In a time when people are buying more mobile devices and tablets, it’s not an area in which Intel has excelled. Clearly Krzanich recognizes this, even if the word choice left something to be desired. “We’ve talked about this transformation where we are moving from a client-centric [model] to a company that focuses more and more on a broader set of products — the cloud and all the connected devices that connect to that cloud and the connectivity that brings those devices to the cloud. That includes the PC but it’s much more than that,” he said. “We’ve made enough progress now,” he said, and added that this move now allows it to “push the company all the way to this transformation.” To a large extent he’s talking about the shift in emphasis to the cloud and Internet of Things, those connected devices that will be generating increasing amounts of data in the coming decade. Intel is hoping to get a piece of that cloud and IoT action. To that end, Intel announced at the end of last month. The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product set is designed to optimize software-defined clouds, according the company. Meanwhile, as 12,000 people see their jobs disappear, The Wall Street Journal reported in February that — including an $8.1 million signing bonus and restricted stock valued at an additional $ 8.1 million — to recruit former Qualcomm executive Venkata ‘Murthy’ Renduchintala to take over the ailing chip division. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Intel Capital, the investing arm of Intel, announced , looking to invest in companies that Intel Capital president Wendell Brooks stated “complement what we do.” In a statement Intel outlined the financial particulars of the decision: Intel expects the program to deliver $750 million in savings this year and annual run rate savings of $1.4 billion by mid-2017. The company will record a one-time charge of approximately $1.2 billion in the second quarter. The majority of affected employees will be informed within 60 days with all the job reductions completed by mid-2017, according to the company.
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Apple and the FBI spar at Congressional hearing on encryption | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | The over an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters was rehashed today before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which heard testimony from law enforcement officials and technologists about the role encryption plays in criminal investigations. The FBI’s executive assistant director for science and technology, , and Apple’s senior vice president and general counsel Bruce Sewell were among the panelists who offered testimony. Hess claimed that, since October, the FBI has encountered passwords on 30 percent of the devices it has obtained during investigations, and have had no capability to unlock the devices 13 percent of the time. Sewell emphasized Apple’s collaboration with law enforcement, saying that his company assists investigators on a daily basis and has helped rescue child victims from their abductors. Lawmakers pushed Hess to discuss the to crack the iPhone at the center of the San Bernardino case. The FBI asked a court to force Apple to develop custom software to help unlock the phone, which was used by San Bernardino attacker Syed Farook, but later backed down when an unnamed party showed the FBI how to access the device. Rep. Anna Eshoo, whose district includes Silicon Valley, engaged in a testy exchange with Hess, calling the FBI’s approach to Apple in the San Bernardino case “breathtaking” and criticizing the agency for resetting the phone’s iCloud password without first consulting Apple. Other members of the Congressional committee questioned whether the FBI would continue to rely on hackers going forward, or if the agency would develop its own hacking expertise. “I do think certainly we need people who have those specialized skills,” Hess answered. “That said, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this.” However, Hess also said that the agency is investing its budget into “possible tools we might be able to throw at the problem” rather than hiring technologists and called on the industry and academia to provide tools for law enforcement. However, Apple’s Sewell said that his company had prepared for a sit-down meeting with the FBI to address its concerns about evidence “going dark” behind encryption, but the meeting was cancelled when the FBI filed its San Bernardino case. He said that Apple is willing to help train law enforcement representatives, but that the debate would need to “get out of the lawsuit world” in order to be effective. Sewell also rejected claims made by one of the law enforcement panelists, Captain Charles Cohen of the Indiana State Police, that Apple had provided its source code to the Chinese government and that it had discarded its ability to access customer data with the . “We have not provided source code to the Chinese government. We did not have a key 19 months ago that we threw away,” Sewell testified. “Those allegations are without merit.” Although the hearing is over, the debate over encryption will continue. Last month, lawmakers formed an to address the use and regulation of encryption, and other members of Congress have already proposed to introduce backdoors into encrypted communication. |
Postmates launching 15-minute food delivery service in NYC tomorrow | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | On-demand delivery startup Postmates is launching Pop, its 15-minutes-or-less food delivery service, in New York City tomorrow at 11am ET. With Pop, , Postmates features a daily curated list of lunch items that you can receive in 15 minutes or less. Pop will be available from 34th street down to the Bowery in New York. Upon launch, there will be no delivery fee. The launch comes a few weeks after , a week after and two days after . “In order to bring you the most exciting selection, the highest quality food, and the fastest delivery time, we’ve decided to narrow our focus,” Uber wrote in an email to New York UberEats customers earlier this week. Even though Uber ditched the instant option, UberEats is maintaining its service in New York. That’s likely because Uber actually says that its food delivery business is growing and has doubled the number of users in the last month, . Given that the instant option in UberEats is basically the same as Postmates Pop — with the exception of Uber’s 10-minute delivery versus Pop’s 15 — Uber killing off the instant option in New York begs some questions. Were the logistics in New York just not working? Was Uber overbuying from merchants in New York? Were not enough Uber drivers in New York willing to deliver food? What’s interesting is that Uber is only shutting down the Eats instant option in New York, and keeping it alive in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the other markets in which it operates. “Since launching the standalone UberEATS app under a month ago, we’ve seen an incredible response and have more than doubled the numbers of users,” Michael Conti, general manager of UberEVERYTHING NYC, said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “The app has allowed restaurants across Manhattan to expand their reach and customer base. With these small updates, we can ensure we are providing the best experience for customers, restaurant owners, and couriers alike.” |
‘Steve – The Jumping Dinosaur’ is a simple game you can play from the iOS Notification Center | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | Casual gaming, say hello to casual gaming. A mobile game that you can play in your iPhone’s Notification Center — yes, without even unlocking your phone — is now the No. 15 top game in Apple’s U.S. App Store and is flirting with becoming a top 50 Overall app. Called “ ,” the game is a very simple experience involving a dinosaur that, as the name implies, you make jump to avoid obstacles in order to achieve the highest score. As a typical game, there wouldn’t be much to write home about here. But what’s clever is the integration with the iOS Notification Center — a place you don’t normally find entertainment experiences like this. It’s always interesting to see what app developers can come up with when they push the boundaries of what’s possible with the current technology, of course. In the past, that’s led to interactive Notification Center apps like Launch Center Pro, , or Workflow, , for example. To date, these sort of tappable widgets have been more purpose-based or utility driven, however. “Steve” changes that by offering a mindless time-waster of a game requiring little commitment on the user’s part. You don’t even have to launch an app. After installing the game, if you tap its app icon, it will just display the steps required to add a widget to your Notification Center, in case you’re not already familiar with how iOS widgets work. Once added, you simply drag down the Notification Center from the top of your iPhone’s screen and then tap to start playing. You can even choose to turn the game’s arcade-like sounds on or off right within the Notification Center, too. And when you die, you can tap to start over. (To be honest, the game is not complex enough to require an explanation, but there you go anyway!) [gallery ids="1309760,1309759,1309758,1309757"] The game was created by 22-year old founder Iván De Cabo, who currently works as an iOS junior software developer in Spain where he’s also involved in other startups, including one he co-founded. “Steve,” meanwhile, was a side project built in a weekend. “I wanted to do a simple game just to improve my code skills and decided to do so in the Notification Center for two reasons: to challenge myself and to see if it was possible,” says De Cabo. Oh, and yes — in case “Steve” looks familiar — the dinosaur character and the gameplay itself was inspired by the Google Chrome . In Chrome, a dinosaur appears when the browser can’t display a webpage — like when your Internet connection is offline. However, if you press the spacebar the Chrome error message turns into a simple obstacle runner game, just like “Steve.” De Cabo says his game is meant to be a “tribute,” and there’s no intention of plagiarism here. So far, Google has seemed willing to let this slide, we should note. And to be fair, it’s the mobile app to have copied the Chrome dino game — though it does appear to be the first on iOS. “Steve” takes the game a bit further than Chrome’s version, by offering the option to unlock other characters like Ninja Turtles or a for $0.99 a pop. In addition to the new character, the game will also go full color instead of black-and-white, as when you play with Steve. Fans are now sending around 2,000 emails per day asking for more characters, De Cabo says, and he’s already created 30 more to be released in future updates. Thanks to what’s now a ton of media coverage, the game ended up in Apple’s trending search section last week, helping it to go viral. By this weekend, the game was seeing more than 40,000 downloads per day, despite a lack of marketing. It’s all word-of-mouth, De Cabo claims. It’s now seeing nearly 50,000 downloads daily, we’re told. To date, the game has been downloaded more than 400,000 times. But one interesting side-effect of building a Notification Center game is that iTunes Connect analytics can’t track usage, as its analytics are based on the full-screen app usage, De Cabo notes. “For now, we know that users are playing and returning based on the growing players per day on the leaderboards, and basically how it keeps growing by the promotion of the users and their feedback emails,” he says. “Steve” has also since climbed from the No. 32 Overall Game a week ago to No. 15, currently. And it’s gone from the No. 105 Overall Free app to now No. 53 in the U.S. Plus, thanks to its traction, one buyer has been increasing their bid to acquire the game, going from $350 initially to $60,000. But De Cabo says he has decided to keep it for himself. Of course, things like this often tend to have a short lifespan in terms of maintaining their top ranks — , anyone? That said, for the time being, “Steve – The Jumping Dinosaur Widget Game” will be the thing everyone will be telling you that you’ve just got to try. Steve is . |
Mesosphere open sources its data center OS | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | ‘s Data Center Operating System (DC/OS) aims to allow developers and admins to treat a data center as a single computer that runs applications in software containers. It’s based on a number of open-source projects, including the Apache Mesos cluster manager and projects like the scheduler and the container orchestration platform. Now, Mesosphere is pushing its open-source strategy further by a (which also previously didn’t have that forward slash in its name). It’s doing so in partnership with more than 60 companies, including the likes of Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (both of which invested in the company, too), as well as NGINX, Puppet, EMC, Autodesk, Cisco and Accenture. Microsoft already baked this open-source version into its Azure Container Service. Mesosphere says “every DC/OS partner received early access to the code, and is committed to helping grow and shape the project in their own ways.” But what’s the point of open sourcing a project that is essentially already open source? While the core technologies of DC/OS were already open source, the company is now also open sourcing proprietary tools like its GUI and load balancer, so developers who want to hack on DC/OS now get access to a few features that were previously only available to paying enterprise customers. In one way, Mesosphere is mostly following the standard open-source business model of opening up most of its software and then selling specific tools and services on top of that. My feeling is that this move is really about these partnerships more so than about the open-source aspect of the announcement (which the company dropped in the middle of the night). With Kubernetes, Google has open sourced the core part of how it runs containers in production in its own data centers and there is a quickly growing ecosystem around it, including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with backing from Docker, Box, Intel, Red Hat and Twitter. Docker, which also offers its own container management system for data centers, has the name recognition and a large ecosystem around it, too. All of these projects currently target different workloads, but in the long run, all of their visions (though not necessarily their technical implementations of them) converge and they will have to differentiate themselves through the services and developer experiences they can offer. It’s no surprise then, that Mesosphere’s of DC/OS still includes some features that aren’t available in the open-source version, including monitoring tools, support for enterprise security and compliance tools, and advanced networking and load balancing features. With and , Mesosphere already offers additional tools on top of DC/OS for enterprises, too. Having Microsoft, HPE and others on board and establishing a more formal relationship with them may just allow Mesosphere to develop its core tools a bit faster. “At Mesosphere, we are big believers in open source,” the company said today. “Open source software helps its creators overcome the limitations of their own vision. Having a vibrant community of users, partners and contributors means we can continue to advance DC/OS as new requirements and use cases emerge.” |
Box CEO Aaron Levie weighs in on markets, privacy | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Despite its difficulties, Levie said that going public has ultimately been a good thing for Box. “It creates new challenges,” but “it’s also come with a lot of benefits.” “We are able to drive a lot of more transparency in our business that creates better recognition, better understanding in the customer base,” he added. Levie also spoke about why he firmly supports Apple in the FBI controversy and why he’s passionate about customer privacy. Check out the above video for more from Levie. |
Tech fatigue | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | post. But if you have worked in tech for long enough, you know this feeling — tech fatigue. At some point, everything new feels old, everything different feels dumb. If you get stuck in this circle of endless cynicism, you need to ask yourself the important questions. First, let me tell you how I feel about tech today. Everything feels derivative or silly. I’ve been there before, I’ve seen that. Tech companies are churning out new products that look like last year’s products, media outlets are giving me a and the current new trends have been the same trends for the past two years. A sounds anything but new. Slack — time to party like it’s 2012. Apparently, I need to update my USB Type C adapter now. And Snapchat more like Messenger more like WeChat, proving that at some point messaging apps are going to be derivative products of all other messaging apps. This is not the future I was promised. — John Collison (@collision) But it’s fine, you think, I just have to look at the future. So let’s head to Las Vegas. Another CES, and this time I bump into . I ask him how many times he’s been to CES. The number was so high that I forgot what it was. He’s counting in decades, not years. He was even in Las Vegas before CES was called CES. I probably have baby tech fatigue compared to him. So what does the future look like? We’ve been talking about virtual reality, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars for years already. Now these trends sound like random buzzwords more than anything else. Remember when the next big thing was supposed to be Meerkat live streams, Foursquare checkins and 3D printing? “Let’s put our best products, three random trends and call it Facebook’s 10 Year Roadmap” — Romain Dillet 🙃 (@romaindillet) I’m excited about most of these things. But then, I end up in a briefing room in Las Vegas, trying out the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive Pre. None of the journalists in the room were eager to try these things. We were all there because we all need to keep up with the new shiny. I try the . After literally one minute, I feel nauseous. I start sweating and take off the VR headset immediately. I didn’t feel well for the next two hours. We were promised flying cars, and all I got was a tummy ache. The next day, other tech reporters ask me if I think augmented reality is more relevant than virtual reality. All I can think about is all the useless connected objects around me. I’m thinking about making a Gmail filter that auto-forwards stupid pitches to . And then, there’s the current state of media. We’re drowning in a sea of access journalism puff pieces. The untold story, they said. But I didn’t learn anything. I have nothing against access journalism, but if you do access journalism, do it on your own terms. Otherwise that’s another thing that’s going to lead to . Soon, every article on every website ever will be anyway. Inside the Untold Story of a Secret Plan to make online tech journalism headlines out of corporate PR. — Quentin Hardy (@qhardy) More recently, I attended another with no apparent reason, another tech event with a bunch of new faces. I wondered whether it was time to rage-quit tech and work in the fashion industry. All of this culminated into my mood today. Sometimes, it’s good to take a step back and look at your industry. Good VCs have an investment thesis — it’s a good habit. Tech journalists should have a “why do I care” thesis. Tech fatigue is a good thing if you know what to do with it. And the reason why this post isn’t a rant is that I’m still optimistic about tech. There are just some conditions. In 2012, shortly after hired me, then TechCrunch co-editor asked me a serious question — why do you care about tech? At the time, I didn’t have a good answer. But when tech fatigue hits you, it’s important to ask yourself this question again — and refine your answer. I care about tech for two simple reasons. First, technology is incredibly powerful and can profoundly alter how we communicate, share information and learn. It has brought people, things and services together that couldn’t be brought together before. Tech has drastically improved productivity, created many jobs ( ) and, more importantly, reduced inequalities — at least for those who get access to these devices and services. Tech companies have an indirect effect on billions of people. While most people aren’t directly better off thanks to Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft, the evolution of computers and the Internet is the most important technological revolution of our lifetime. It affects the structure of our societies. Sure, there are unfortunate side effects, and governments will have to make sure tech companies don’t get too powerful. But I believe tech is slowly but surely improving the lives of many, many people. Second, the tech industry is a fascinating industry. I’m very fortunate that I love my job. Sure, the news cycles can be tiring sometimes. But I get to talk to smart people every day. I get to talk about the future with them. And I get to help those who have great ideas and need an audience. I also believe sharing knowledge about the tech industry is an important mission. Uncovering the next big thing before most people is exciting as well. And TechCrunch is the best megaphone to do this. Thinking that I have this unique opportunity to contribute to the public debate around tech is invaluable. I’m incredibly lucky. These seem like simple reasons, but they are the reasons why I wake up every day. Now that I know why I care about tech, it makes tech fatigue much easier to understand. Tech fatigue is a signal. Tech fatigue tells me that I have to challenge myself every day to find new things. If I get stuck talking about the same trends and products, I’m missing out on what’s going to make tech great tomorrow. Second, tech fatigue is a great bullshit indicator. If something feels dumb, it’s probably dumb. But it’s my responsibility to find interesting things. Every day, an interesting new startup is created. So it’s time to step out of my comfort zone and foster my curiosity, otherwise I’ll just become a cranky old man. And if you suffer from tech fatigue yourself, think about this as well — why do you like tech in the first place? And remember that everything new is already old, and everything unfamiliar is new. |
Rightspeed helps you devour audio books at a terrifying pace | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Podcasts and audio books are enjoying tremendous popularity at the moment, and the fresh-off-the-app-presses app that’s here to help you speed-listen your way through your audio library. Most audio book apps have the option to listen at 1.5x or faster, but have you ever wondered how quickly you can listen to an audio book? That was the starting point for Max Deutsch, the app’s creator, and the idea behind the app. “My top comfortable speed for audiobooks is currently around 5.3x” says Deutsch. “For podcasts, it’s around 4.5x. I gave it a whirl, and I’ve got to be honest, at about 3.5x my brain starts melting out of my ears, but I was surprised to see how quickly you get used to people whirling through paragraph and paragraphs at a speed Wile E. Coyote would be profoundly jealous of. How is that for a white glove to the face. Will the challenge stand unpunished? The app isn’t perfect, with the biggest challenge being related to getting content onto the app for listening in the first place. Without partnership and content deals, and without a library to tap into, the app feels like more of a technical experiment than a fully functioning piece of software — but maybe a partnership with a content provider will prove an elegant way out of that particular hole. The app being a bit rough around the edges didn’t stop me from trying it out, and I was amazed how quickly I was listening to audio at breakneck speeds. The really clever feature built into the app is the option to automatically increase the listening speed over time. If activated, the app will increase your reading speed by 0.1x every two minutes. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a fantastic frog-in-slowly-warming-water approach to training yourself to become a speed-listener. Another interesting aspect of this project is that from beginning to end, explaining the idea, design process, the tradeoffs made along the way, and how he ended up at the $2.99 price tag. For me, the big question is whether speed-listening is ever really going to be a thing. I’m a freakishly fast reader, but to me, podcasts and audiobooks are the antithesis of speed reading: It’s there to slowly be taken along with the storytelling, and some of my favorite podcasts (I’m looking at you, and ) use sound effects, careful pacing, and elaborate audio craftsmanship to their full effect. Speeding them up to get through a 20-minute podcast in 4 minutes doesn’t just mean you sacrifice enjoyment, it also defeats what I believe the point is of podcasts: Adding a layer of enjoyment and entertainment to my strolls through the city. Having said that, I’m all about lifehacks, and I can see how having the skill of being able to listen to audio recordings at 4-5x their natural speed would be very helpful indeed. For example, when trying to find a particular quote in an audio recording of an interview, or when scrubbing through an audio book to find a particular segment. |
Furbo is a dog camera that lets you share treats remotely | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | , created by startup Tomofun, gives owners a new way to interact with their dogs while away from home. The camera allows you to keep an eye on your dog, with two-way audio so that you can also talk to them and make them feel a little less alone. There are even push notifications that tell you when your dog is barking. , so what really sets Furbo and Tomofun apart is the ability to launch dog treats from the camera.
Lured by the promise of cute puppies, I tried out Furbo myself at a press event last week. It was straightforward to use the smartphone app to direct Furbo on where to launch the pre-loaded treats, and pretty great to watch a dog scurry across the room once they figured out what was going on. Furbo is currently available a pre-order price of $99 through , where it has already raced past its $50,000 target. The plan is to start shipping in July. |
Willow Hill Ventures will fund and connect agriculture tech startups with farmers | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | and have agreed to partner under the moniker Willow Hill Ventures to invest in growth-stage agricultural tech startups. International Farming Corp. owns and manages land that it, essentially, leases out to commercial farmers, helping them maximize the land’s yield and profitability. Finistere Ventures invests in early-stage tech companies building products for the agriculture industry. Its portfolio includes , and . Willow Hill Ventures intends to make land within International Farming Corp.’s asset base accessible to entrepreneurs who want to test their technologies and science in a real, commercial context. The idea is to save startups time and hassles in negotiating farm-by-farm to get pilots or beta testing going, explained Finistere Ventures Partner According to a statement from Willow Hill Ventures, the new fund will eventually invest in: “informatics and big data, novel farm systems, food quality and nutrition, genetics and seed tech that increase the sustainability, profitability and productivity of agriculture. “ Maughan said, “Tech is what propels the land’s value in agriculture, because it propels the yield and costs to operate a given farm. The genesis of this partnership was that we observed farmers increasingly need tech, and tech companies need help scaling their technologies. Right now they go farm gate to farm gate, looking for partners and pilot customers.” |
Practice safe financing | Joe Lonsdale | 2,016 | 4 | 26 |
The convertible note is a useful and common financing structure in Silicon Valley. It’s a form of debt that is really more a type of equity — one where the valuation hasn’t been determined yet. It’s helpful because sometimes you want to align a new investor or bridge a company with extra capital, but not argue about the valuation or have to price the round yet. Many bureaucratic institutions, for example, would make you do all sorts of studies to justify any particular valuation — and you are busy building your business. You want the investor aligned (or want their cash, at least), but prefer to price the round a little down the road. So the investor loans money to the company at some low rate of interest (usually 3-10 percent) and has all the senior protections of a debt-holder if anything should go wrong. When the next institutional round of capital is raised — usually defined by an investor coming in with at least several million dollars in a priced round — the note and interest converts into that round at some pre-determined discount to its price (usually 10-20 percent). The note holder becomes an equity holder with shares that have the same rights as those in the new round, at a slightly better price. At a high level, there are two types of notes: capped and uncapped. You should (almost) never raise a round on an uncapped note, as it pits the incentives of the investor and the company at odds with each other. We use convertible notes a lot at our fund, 8VC — so often that we just call them “notes” to save time. Capped notes are a great alternative to a priced seed round, and a great way to align relevant people in your community or business vertical in between your A, B, C or D rounds. They’re also sometimes a life-saver (or at least a cap-table saver) for companies who use them as a financial bridge to get their ducks in a row and give themselves a few (or more) extra months to hit an inflection point before pricing their next big round. Of course, companies will generally pretend they are doing the alignment thing rather than admit they needed a few extra months of runway. (Don’t tell anyone, but “We are looking for some strategic partners who can give us advice before we do our next round, and are using this convertible note to align them financially,” is often Silicon Valley speak for, “We need some extra cash so we have the runway to show some better progress before we try to raise a big round.”) A capped note means there is a maximum valuation at which the note will convert. A typical cap on a seed round note is $10 million. This is fair, as is $5, $8 or $20, incidentally, depending on the group and what they are doing. What’s ridiculous is an uncapped seed round. If the company doesn’t get strong early traction, the investment might be worth nothing, yet many of us have also heard of a company like this taking off and stories of the first priced round being raised at $100-pre. Instead of getting 10 percent or 5 percent for your first $500,000 if you’re an investor, you might now be getting less than 0.5 percent of the company. Of course, there’s nothing unethical about this — it just means you were bad at structuring your investment. You should have insisted on a cap, or else a priced round. Usually, a good entrepreneur wouldn’t have done this to you — it’s not how almost any of the top people in our ecosystem treat others, as the true talent knows this is a repeated game and that honor and reputation is worth more than whatever percentage points they can get from chicanery. But the thing that makes uncapped notes especially bad is that the incentive of the investor and the entrepreneur should always be aligned. When we invest in a company at 8VC, it’s our job to make that company as successful as possible — from an internal product and strategy perspective, but also in terms of who it is able to hire, what its customers think about its product and its mission, what the media says (but not until that matters) and what other investors think about it. The goal is to help the entrepreneur put their best foot forward in the way that’s the most positive and true to the company and its mission. Entrepreneurship is in large part about building something from nothing, which means creating a cause. And causes are not created in isolation — great investors are fully aligned with their entrepreneurs and do what they can to push forward the cause along with their most relevant touch points in the community at any given time. Backing a company is a serious business. Now go back to our $500,000 investor in that uncapped seed round. As he sees the company take off, what are his incentives? At some point, it’s not clear. Maybe he realizes these are amazingly talented entrepreneurs who are on to something, but he secretly hopes a couple of the early attempts will stumble so that they’ll have to raise money at a lower valuation than what they’d get otherwise, so he can convert in. What does he say to the star designer who is interested and who he knows by joining might drive their valuation even higher before his note converts? And maybe he looks down and mumbles instead of playing them up to a top investor who is excited to invest at a really high valuation, in order that he gets in at a lower price. Or maybe he doesn’t, because he’s honest to his principles and he wants to be aligned with the entrepreneur even against his own interests. With an uncapped note, you are often creating an incentive for an investor to hope you do well enough that you are going to win in the future, but maybe have some struggles and raise at a relatively low valuation next time. In our view, a great investor should never have to face that conundrum. It’s wrong to put an investor in a situation where they are deciding between helping their ownership stake versus helping the entrepreneur. I’d like to think I’d always side with the entrepreneur in this situation — it’s who we are and it’s our mission at 8VC — but I’m also driven to win for my LPs who are betting on me: I know my partners and I feel strongly about being good players and role models in the ecosystem, but we are also fiercely competitive to do as well as possible for our IRR. “Power corrupts” wasn’t just written about madmen who take over governments; it’s true for all of us, and it happens in small ways. Incentives and spheres of influence are powerful things, so it’s critical we keep them as aligned as possible. There is one scenario wherein it make sense to do an uncapped note, but even then the note should never be truly uncapped. This scenario is the insider-led bridge round, where the note is expected to be short-lived. If an investor already has equity in a company, she is aligned to make the company’s valuation go up, but she might want to bridge the company; that is, give it the money it needs to keep operating until it completes its next raise. If the next round is imminent (within the next month or so), the cap on the note can interfere with a pricing discussion. In this case, doing something that ladders is right. For example, you could offer a note with terms of no cap if the round is done within two months, but with a cap and a discount if the round is done within four months, a bigger discount at six months and so on and so forth. In general, the best solution is to place the cap at a valuation in which you are very confident you can hit that is likely below your next round. Contrary to popular belief, a cap is not always a signal for the price of the next round. It’s true that many rounds are raised near their caps, but I’ve had a note capped at $10 million to let helpful friends into my company that raised its next round at $45-pre, and I’ve seen many great entrepreneurs who value their community take care of allies this way. In our view, there is a huge misalignment with not having a cap on your notes if your investors have any real influence on your business or the technology and investing community — asking an investor to invest into an uncapped note is about the clearest way possible to tell them they are not connected to any community relevant to your success and don’t matter except for their money. And if they don’t, you should probably find better investors. |
Jaguar partners with Tile to make sure drivers never leave without their wallets | Lora Kolodny | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Automaker today announced a partnership with Silicon Valley startup to prevent drivers from leaving home, or any other place, without their essential personal items. Tile, which has raised in total venture funding to-date, makes small, waterproof tags that employ Bluetooth low-energy radio and GPS technology to locate objects to which they are affixed. Typically, users put Tiles on key fobs, wallets and purses, smartphone and laptop cases, gym bags and luggage. According to Tile CEO and co-founder , the company has shipped more than 5 million of its tags to customers so far, who often buy four at a time. Tile sales hit $43 million in 2015, he said, and the company expects to double that this year at least. Apple, Best Buy, Lowe’s and T-mobile stores are among retailers selling Tile. Users have tracked items in Antarctica and outer space with Tile, Farley said. The company locates half-a-million objects daily or more. When users lose track of something that’s tagged with a Tile, they can fire up the company’s mobile app to see if the item is within about a 100-foot range. If yes, they can make the Tile beep to guide them to items hidden from plain view. That feature could help drivers locate an item that may have fallen under a car seat, or that were forgotten after stowage in a glove box. But more importantly, given its new partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, the Tile app will be featured on the “InControl Apps” menu on the 2017 Land Rover Discovery Sport, a premium compact SUV. That’s a coveted position for an in-car app. The automaker only features about a dozen apps on its touchscreen system, including navigation and music apps. According to Cross Car Product and Strategy Manager for Jaguar Land Rover, Tim Phillipo, drivers will be able to set up a list of essential items and check it, every time they get into their vehicles, using Tile via the company’s InControl Apps system. Phillipo said for now customers will have to fire up the Tile app proactively to see if they’re missing anything before they drive away. But, he said, “In the next phase, you will get in your car, and when you plug in your phone, it will tell you if you don’t have something from your essentials list with you.” The partnership marks the first such engagement for Tile, Farley said. It is non-exclusive, and Tile is hoping to become part of the app layer in the connected cars market, more broadly. Competitors like and newcomers like may try to follow suit. But it remains to be seen how much integrations will drive sales or engagement for makers of tags that bring locate-ability to everyday objects. |
Why Apple’s stock fell off a cliff today | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Apple took a more than $40 billion hit today after reporting its second-quarter earnings — and it was . Shares of Apple were down more than 8 percent in after-hours trading at one point today. Things went about as poorly as you could expect: the company couldn’t hit revenue or earnings targets, iPhone sales fell off a cliff from the year-ago quarter, and its third-quarter guidance was pretty tepid. In short, it was not a good quarter for Apple, which blamed comparisons to a strong year-ago quarter and macroeconomic problems. First, the scorecard: There are a couple of bright spots against analyst expectations, but the miss on revenue and the very weak guidance really hit Apple very, very hard. So hard that its 8 percent drop in a single day is nearly unprecedented for the company — which has seen its shares decline 20 percent in the past year, but not really seen swings that dramatic. By Apple standards, they can sometimes be dramatic, but this was one for the books. Here’s the rub. Investors tend to reward a couple of things: profitability is good, meeting expectations is good, beating them is even better. But for larger companies like Apple, Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet, growth is an absolutely massive part of the equation. And Apple today showed that not only did its sales fall year-on-year for the first time in 13 years, its next quarter is also looking equally bleak. [graphiq id=”ejXEg8NAEDz” title=”Apple (AAPL) iPhone Unit Sales” width=”600″ height=”462″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/ejXEg8NAEDz” link=”https://www.graphiq.com” link_text=”Visualization by Graphiq”] Take Twitter today, for example. Twitter — and its user base actually Twitter has 310 million monthly active users, compared to 305 million in the previous quarter. But the company also said it would record revenue between $590 million and $610 million, well below the $678 million that analysts were expecting for Q3. For a company that does a relatively good job of monetizing its very slowly growing (and sometimes declining) user base, that’s a bad thing to report. Here’s another one: Alphabet. For a brief moment, Alphabet , because it beat in dramatic fashion what analysts were expecting from the company — and showed that it was growing, despite its cost-per-click (basically how valuable each click is to Alphabet) continuing to decline. Then the company that industry watchers were expecting, meaning it wasn’t growing as fast as what Wall Street sought. And so we return to Apple. Last quarter, — and everyone was curious if it would do it again, which it did. That’s the second straight quarter where it’s missed what Wall Street was seeking. Apple has historically been one of the strongest and most consistent growth stocks in not only the technology sector, but also the world. It’s basically a bellwether for the technology industry — if Apple is doing poorly, something must be wrong. But in the recent quarter, it becomes increasingly apparent that its growth engine — the iPhone — is stalling. Being a publicly traded company means that it’s beholden to the whims of public investors, which have their own agenda. It means that Apple can be , who can buy up a lot of Apple stock and pressure the company to do things that it might not otherwise have in its playbook. Obviously Apple is much larger than most any other company out there, making it more difficult to do that, but it does mean that Apple can’t strictly play by Apple’s rules — it has to make sure it keeps Wall Street happy. [graphiq id=”88HSGP7avPf” title=”Apple (AAPL) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”492″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/88HSGP7avPf” link=”https://www.graphiq.com” link_text=”Visualization by Graphiq”] And for Wall Street, that means it wants the company to keep selling more iPhones and iPads, and find new lines of business. Apple’s trying to do that by releasing updates to the iPhone and iPad in the form of new devices like the iPad Pro and the iPhone SE. It’s expanding its services with things like Apple Music, which can generate new lines of revenue for the company if they hit enough scale. Apple, for example, said that Apple Music now has 13 million paying subscribers, and services revenue hit $6 billion this quarter. It’s still a blip, but it’s something that represents the potential for growth. There’s another potential negative to shares dropping off a cliff: recruiting. When people join companies like Apple, often some of their compensation is locked up in stock. If that stock declines, it means their compensation was less valuable than when they started. Those employees are actually losing money for each point that Apple falls, which might make them more inclined to go to companies with steady growth like Facebook — or startups that offer the opportunity to cash out big if they are successful. If Apple is going to continue innovating, it still needs smart people, and it needs to be able to pay them well (and it doesn’t look like it’s using its massive cash pile any time soon). Apple can please Wall Street in a couple of ways. It can pay back dividends or buy back shares, giving investors a chance to actualize a return on their investments. But in order for that to be valuable, Apple has to keep going up. Sometimes a dividend or a share repurchase program helps with that, but for the most part it has to keep convincing investors that it’s going to continue to grow. If that happens, Wall Street’s happy — and Apple can keep doing what Apple wants to do. If not, Apple may have to reassess its strategy, or face off with investors that have punished the company’s stock in the past couple years. |
It isn’t just Uber: Carnegie Mellon’s computer science dean on its poaching problem | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Andrew Moore was a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University for a dozen years when Google hired him away in 2006 to lead some of its efforts around ad targeting and fraud prevention. CMU lured Moore back in 2014, making him the dean of its computer science school. But he still understands well what goes through his colleagues’ minds when industry comes calling, and he says the battle to keep them in academia grows fiercer by the year. Earlier today, we talked with Moore about Uber, which famously raided the school’s robotics department a year ago, of its researchers and scientists. We also talked about how Moore entices people to stay, and the newest new thing his 2,000-student school is focused on right now. Our chat has been edited for length. AM: This kind of thing happens from time to time, especially in fast-growing areas where academia and industry are advancing things all the time. In January 2015, Uber hired away four faculty and about 35 technical staff to start its Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh. By the school’s standards, this is one of many examples where our faculty disappear for a while into industry. It happened to me. Usually, every year, between five and 15 faculty members take a leave of absence for one or two or up to four years. Some never come back. Most do. AM: And that public perception is what really hurts. The truth is we have about 40 faculty and four took a leave of absence for a while to work for Uber. Meanwhile, this is such a growth industry that we’ve hired 17 new faculty in the past year, about half in robotics and half in machine learning. It’s frustrating. We’re trying to find space for new robotics people, not suffering from a lack of them. AM: We wish Uber the best. We don’t have an official relationship, but we’re friendly neighbors in the same city. It’s extremely good for Pittsburgh’s economy that blue-sky research is being turned into commercial products. It’s a version of a phenomenon that’s sweeping [artificial intelligence] and robotics at the moment. There’s just so much demand for people that most of us in the academic world are working to ensure that people in academia are motivated to stick around and train the students. The U.S. really needs them to power this new frontier, and part of my job, working for one of the top [academic] organizations, is to produce the best of the best. To do that, I have to ensure these super-star professors are inspiring students to do radical new technologies that are even too new for startups. The first is really just idealism. The fact is that both autonomy and AI algorithms for human assistance can save a massive number of lives and prevent people from being at risk. We have an expert who has applied game theory to the problem of matching donor kidneys with patients and is saving hundreds of lives a year. We have a group of faculty that’s determined to make agriculture more efficient so that by the middle of the century, when we have nine billion people and much less arable land, we’ll be ready. AM: It’s kind of crazy that these top folks on the faculty, most of their peers who go into industry are wealthy and don’t need to worry about money anymore, whereas [professors are often left] worrying about sending their kids to college. It’s very tempting to go, which is why I and the department heads here have actually begun encouraging them to do a startup for a few years, or else work for big companies, and come back. AM: Well, for two reasons. Our people are so much in demand that their overall wealth will increase even over a few years if they choose wisely. But it’s also inspiring to be involved in creating companies, and they often come back [to CMU] with big ideas. I’m not making light of the issue. How to retain people who are worth tens of millions of dollars to other organizations is causing my few remaining hairs to fall out. But we’re also proud that because of their world-class stature, that they can do the entrepreneurial thing if they want. AM: I’m not going to make comments about who has recruited whom. AM: In the world of AI, one thing that wasn’t on the radar at all 12 months ago and has solidified since is human emotion recognition. A lot of it came out of our computer vision programming and [the school of psychology and psychiatry] at the University of Pittsburgh. And the number of visitors we now get from corporations and the government who want to come to CMU to find out more about it is astonishing. There are many applications [to be developed] by being able to look at people’s micro expressions to see if they are stressed or happy or interested or sleepy, from better educational outcomes and medical treatments to security screenings. Thousands of people have worked on speech and written text, but reading human emotions is a big third part. |
Apple iPhone sees first YOY sales dip ever | Jordan Crook | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | For the first time in its history, the iPhone is experiencing a drop in sales. In 2015 at this same time, Apple sold 61 million units of the iPhone. This year, for the period ending March, Apple only sold , representing a 16 percent YOY drop. This shouldn’t come as a surprise for most folks who know that we are close to (if not already at) peak iPhone levels. There simply aren’t as many first-time iPhone buyers out there. This is particularly true in , the world’s largest smartphone market, which has finally reached saturation and started to see an overall drop in smartphone sales. For Apple in particular, total sales in China are down 26 percent, though it’s unclear how large of a role the iPhone plays in that dip. Meanwhile, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models don’t offer anything particularly compelling to force yearly upgrades, as features like Siri did for the iPhone 4s and TouchID did for the iPhone 5s. Plus, the newly unveiled , a smaller, cheaper version of the iPhone, is not included in this earnings report as it went on sale on March 31. Plus, the iPhone SE, which starts at $399, isn’t necessarily as competitive on price as it may seem. Apple has always seen a bit of a slow in upgrades on “S” years, when the company offers a new iPhone that has little to no physical change from the previous generation. Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed this on the earnings call today, saying that the iPhone 6s upgrade sales are actually slightly higher than upgrade sales to the iPhone 5s. Still, quite a bit hangs on the iPhone 7, as well as the newly released iPhone SE. Last quarter, the iPhone accounted for nearly 70 percent of Apple’s total revenue, which explains why Apple’s quarterly reported income is down for the first time since 2003. Without growing iPhone sales, the company is in for a bit of a rough patch. And it doesn’t help that both the iPad and the Mac division are also down from the year before. That said, Apple is betting big on its services business, which is showing growth. Services, which includes iTunes, App Apple Music, etc., is up 20 percent year over year. In some ways, the “peak-iPhone” problem is a boost to services sales. The greater the installed user base (Apple reached one billion registered devices earlier this year), the more purchases will come through Apple’s software ecosystem. Plus, these software-based businesses encourage consumers to purchase other Apple products, like MacBooks, Apple Watches and Apple TVs. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t break out “Other Products” in any way that offers transparency, so we can’t decipher which products are bringing in the cash. In any case, it’s unclear if Apple can make up for the higher margins of their declining iPhone business with revenue from services and other products. |
Apple Music hits 13 million paying subscribers | Brian Heater | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | During an earnings call , Apple CEO Tim Cook did manage to locate some bright spots in the company’s ever-expanding portfolio. Among them was a steady increase in paying Apple Music subscribers. That number has surpassed 13 million, up from the . Of course, the number still pales in comparison to the 800-pound streaming gorilla that is Spotify. Last month CEO Daniel Ek tweeted that the reigning champ of online music had hit the 30 million mark. Still, it’s steady growth for the service formerly known as Beats. At least we know that neither suffered in vain. |
Twitter’s woes continue on Q1 sales of $595M, a sluggish 310M MAUs and weak guidance | Ingrid Lunden | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Twitter its Q1 earnings today, and they’re not great. On the back of 310 monthly active users, the company posted revenues of $595 million, with Q1 GAAP diluted earnings per share of ($0.12) and non-GAAP diluted EPS of $0.15. This is a big miss on revenues but a beat on EPS. On top of this, the company issued very weak guidance for Q2, and currently Twitter’s stock is in the immediate aftermath of the results coming out. We’ll update this as it moves. Analysts’ for non-GAAP EPS averaged out at $0.10, while the average estimate for revenues was $608 million. The company remains unprofitable with the net loss it reported this quarter coming in at negative $79.7 million. GAAP EPS was expected at negative $0.17. Twitter itself provided revenue guidance of $595 million to $610 million. The company also issued new guidance on Q2 that spells bad news for the quarter ahead (or at least much lowered expectations). Twitter expects revenues between $590 million and $610 million, but this is a huge step down from $678 million, which is what analysts had estimated before today’s release. Ebitda is also taking a big hit: with Twitter estimating between $145 and $155 for Q2, while analysts had expected $173 million. Twitter’s 310 million MAUs is not great user growth, although it is up a bit. But this graphic with nearly-identically sized bars, from Twitter itself, sort of says it all when it comes to the topic of stagnating growth. As a recap, last quarter (Q4), Twitter on revenues of $710 million and adjusted EPS of $0.16 per share, with monthly active users 305 million, essentially flat on a year ago and notably a decline from the previous quarter. And a year ago, the company’s on poor revenue and user growth. A year ago, monthly active users were 302 million, with 80 percent of them using Twitter on mobile. The thing about Twitter is that it is growing in some of the key areas where it hopes to as a business, but just not enough, at least not right now. The company said that advertising revenues were up 37% over a year ago, representing sales of $530 million. But that number was down by quite some way on last quarter, when ads brought in $640 million in revenues. Part of this is because Twitter is still not pulling in as many big ad dollars as they expected or hoped to. “Year-over-year revenue growth from large brand advertisers was softer than expected,” the company noted, “although brand advertising remains our largest overall contributor to revenue.” The company in the last quarter has made some waves to try to extend out its position as a media engagement platform, such as its , tapping both into its ambition to do more in video as well as sports content. Its early move with Periscope, however, is now facing competition from the likes of Facebook with its new , and potentially Google, which is also building a live video service. “As we outlined last quarter, we’re focused on what Twitter does best: live. Twitter live: live commentary, live connections, live conversations. Whether it’s breaking news, entertainment, sports, or everyday topics, hearing about and watching a live event unfold is the fastest way to understand the power of Twitter. Twitter has always been the place to see what’s happening now and our continued investment in live will strengthen this position. By doing so, we believe we can build the planet’s best daily connected audience. A connected audience is one that watches together, and can talk with one another in real time,” the company said in its report. Earlier in the quarter, there was a lot of commotion around the company’s that serves Tweets to surface them non-chronologically, although we’re hearing a lot less about this more recently both from Twitter and users. Internationally, it’s made some moves to potentially monetise its audiences outside the U.S. a bit better. In the UK, Germany and Japan (and soon France), Twitter is to power location services (similar to the deal it has with Foursquare in the U.S.), although a recently appointed a new head of China has been spotted with . More to come. |
eBay shares rise 5% after beating earnings expectations | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | |
SpaceX’s next launch and the business of rocket recovery | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | SpaceX confirmed to TechCrunch that their next launch is scheduled for May 4 at 1:22 am EST with a two-hour launch window. The company is expected to couple the launch with another rocket landing attempt on a drone ship out at sea. It was less than three weeks ago that SpaceX made their first successful on a drone ship. Landing from the chase plane — SpaceX (@SpaceX) That launch, which took place April 8 , delivered supplies to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit (at an altitude of about 250 miles). For the May 4 launch, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 will need to deliver a to an altitude of about 22,000 miles. Because the launch requirements for this next launch, the accompanied landing attempt will likely be more challenging. In order to reach the significantly higher orbit, the first stage on May 4 will be required to accelerate faster than the first stage on April 8 , which may make a soft landing attempt more cumbersome. SpaceX currently has two recovered boosters in its possession: one recovered by land in and one by sea in April. Prior to April’s successful recovery on the Of Course I Still Love You ship, SpaceX had made four unsuccessful landing attempts on drone ships. By land and sea — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Just a few days after the rocket was soft-landed on a drone ship on April 8 , the Falcon 9 booster returned to port for testing. The recovered booster spent a week getting checked out at Port Canaveral and was then transferred to the SpaceX hangar at Kennedy Space Center (where SpaceX’s other recovered booster was stored) for further inspection. A post shared by (@spacex) on However, the two recovered first stages will likely have different destinies. Musk has previously stated that the rocket recovered in December would probably not be re-launched “I think we’ll probably keep this one on the ground, just… it’s kind of unique, it’s the first one we’ve brought back.” That second recovered rocket, though, may have a chance to fly again. Over Twitter, Musk stated that they hope to relaunch a recovered rocket in three to four months assuming all tests go well. Aiming for relaunch in 3 to 4 months, pending detailed examination and 10X refiring of a returned booster — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Reusing a recovered rocket will mark the next important rocket reusability milestone for SpaceX. As Musk’s company becomes closer to making this happen, have started to look more closely at what this will ultimately mean in terms of cost savings. Will a ride on a used rocket end up costing a customer less than a ride with a new rocket? In March at the SATELLITE 2016 , Gwynne Shotwell, President of SpaceX, joked that perhaps a recovered rocket should cost since it had already been flight tested. She later clarified and emphasized that they would not charge more for recovered rockets. Musk has previously that the first stage of a Falcon 9 accounts for 75 percent of its total price tag, which is why SpaceX has worked so hard to recover it. However, a recovered rocket requires some level of refurbishing which will accrue a certain cost. Shotwell has said that, with all things considered, the company expected a 30 percent cost savings by reusing the Falcon 9 first stage. Today, the advertised price of a Falcon 9 is $61.2 million. Assuming that savings would be passed on to the customer, the price of a Falcon 9 with a reused first stage could drop to $42.84 million. By going further and recovering the second stage of the Falcon 9 the cost of a launch could be reduced even more. But before that stage of rocket recovery begins, SpaceX will need to master first stage landings. Come May 4 , we’ll get another chance to see if Musk and company can stick the landing. |
FBI to keep Apple guessing on San Bernardino iPhone hack | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | The FBI plans not to disclose to Apple the method it used to access an iPhone belonging to the San Bernardino shooting suspect, or submit it for an internal government review, according to a . The FBI announced in March that it had from a third party that enabled it to access data on an iPhone used by Syed Farook. Farook and his wife allegedly killed 14 people during a shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. His iPhone became a lightning rod for the ongoing debate over encryption when the FBI demanded that Apple assist the government in accessing data stored on the device. Apple fought the FBI’s demand that it create a custom operating system that would allow investigators to crack the phone’s passcode in a high-profile court battle last month. The confrontation ended without a clear judicial ruling when the FBI announced its purchase of the hacking tool. So far, the FBI has refused to share details about the tool with Apple, except that it or newer models. Apple hasn’t publicly pressed the FBI to release details about how it accessed the phone, but would understandably want to know how the tool works so it can patch any vulnerabilities that persist in current iPhone models. Earlier this month, an Apple attorney said that the company would not sue the government to reveal how the San Bernardino iPhone was unlocked. The attorney said that whatever vulnerability the government had discovered would likely be fixed as the company regularly improves the security of its products. The government has some policies in place that govern the disclosure of security problems to companies, but the is shrouded in secrecy. The government is generally supportive of vulnerability disclosure because the quicker companies can patch security issues, the less likely they are to be exploited by malicious hackers. The FBI plans to argue that it does not know enough about the tool to substantively explain how it works during an internal government review of the hacking method, according to the Wall Street Journal. FBI director James Comey has revealed that his agency spent more than $1 million to obtain the tool. |
The restaurant OS | Chris Caliz | 2,016 | 4 | 26 |
So you’re a techie and a foodie. You’re having dinner and your phone buzzes to let you know you can pay for the meal you’re enjoying right from an app. It’s then you realize there’s something going on in restaurant tech. If you want to know more, or get involved, this is your primer — because there is a lot of new action in the restaurant industry and we’re going to break some of it down. Restaurateurs: Even though you have a wealth of resources dedicated to you, we hope this brief outline gives you a few ideas to consider if you’re looking to upgrade or switch your tech package. Just like the operating system (OS) for your computer, a restaurant needs a logical set of systems that allow it to do business efficiently. Well-known examples include OpenTable for reservations, NCR Aloha POS for check management and kitchen notification and Shiftboard to manage staff schedules. There are many operational requirements to run a restaurant; here we’ll highlight a few of the tech options that are vying to improve restaurant operations and consumer experiences. Restaurant tech is not new: the point of sale machine introduced in the 1980s revolutionized how orders were placed and fired in the kitchen. Later, online reservation systems removed the need to call restaurants during business hours to request a table. Now, foodies in some cities are getting meals from their favorite table service restaurants delivered at home in less than an hour. Last year we saw more people were eating out than shopping for groceries. Restaurants are working hard to upgrade their tech options in order to increase satisfaction, diner acquisition and retention, as well as optimize margins. Going out for a great meal is fun, but running a restaurant can be tough because of razor-thin margins and rising wages. There’s a lot of potential for dramatic growth for tech in the restaurant business. To run smoothly, restaurants require several areas of operations — but there’s the catch, because restaurants are crazy places. Restaurant systems need to cope and adapt to a constantly changing environment. Of the many demands to running a restaurant, we’re focusing on restaurant-specific tech and products that price on recurring operating expenses; not real estate, design and capital expenditures for large equipment purchases or leases where generic tech or alternatives exist. These breakdowns are by operational features, but there a few different feature alignments, producing repetition of some companies. Restaurant tech most heavily geared toward diners’ experience: Established: more years, ubiquity and market share. New Tech: fewer years, and more limited market share. (click to enlarge) Products and tech focused on producing and delivering great food: click to enlarge click to enlarge Even with all the pretty logos and feature slices, there is still a lot of room for innovation and growth. In particular, the back of house has not changed much, and offers a lot of room for modernization or optimization. In the discovery and reservation slices there are many players, but also plenty of overlap. With so many of them, the biggest stand out as very utilitarian and very expensive for restaurants. Meanwhile, the smaller ones are focusing on niche, but with a more competitive price package for businesses. One more example of future innovation that’s needed is that we need personalized recommendations. There are many recommendation systems, but none offer great personalization. Finding a restaurant and choosing menu items can still be a roll of the dice. There’s a data deficit, and overcoming it leads to great personalization. In other words, we need something like the Netflix recommendation system for restaurants and food. Just as not all restaurants are the same, not all technology or their product pricing structures are the same — and cannot be peanut buttered across all restaurants. If a restaurant experience is largely built on people and hospitality, tech is hard to implement and prove valuable. Fast, casual and quick service restaurants prove to be better environments for tech, in general. Finally, some restaurant tech products are geared for restaurant groups or chains. Tablets are everywhere, but they’re not quite ready to replace every POS system, printer or terminal out there. Even the legacy POS providers like Micros offer tablet-optimized versions of their software. The biggest benefit of this is that it significantly reduces upfront costs and footprint. Tablets also have a few problems that can impact some operations, like limited multitasking, a plethora of new devices to connect with, reliance on (potentially spotty) Wi-Fi, smaller screens and app competition with the host OS. These issues can actually lead to multiple tablets, with a single purpose each, taking up more room than promised. A restaurant’s choice of POS can impact and dictate a majority of other tech choices for it. The reasons are varied, from rich packages that include multiple features to limited integration options with other products. A key example is the Square POS that offers no choice in other payment processors but has a marketplace of integrations, whereas Micros and Aloha support many payment processors but have few external product integrations. Wherever there is a package of several features, there are also natural conflicts with other products. For example, if a restaurant integrates an entire Aloha package, which comes with staff-scheduling capabilities, they may not want to consider something like Hot Schedules because it would reduce the ROI of the package deal and incur additional costs. Furthermore, that additional package may not even integrate with the POS, and creates an extra item the team needs to learn and remember to use. Restaurant owners or managers who don’t have a great staffing and payroll analytics package have a hard time quantifying human labor versus tech products. They want to reduce labor costs, but also aim to improve their margins overall. So when considering a work-optimizing SaaS product, it can be tricky to figure out the value of the software to the time and effort. It is helpful that some providers have started talking about their costs relative to existing costs. A restaurant could consider itself similar to an early-stage tech startup, constantly managing a revenue and burn rate versus product/hire acquisition needs and likes. If you’re working on a new product for the restaurant business, we want to know! But you should have a few things in mind to help you succeed. First, please have a good grasp of the user journey of the decision-makers and the users. Any disruption in process/tools/tech can break a rhythm to service and be a cause for pushback from staff. Understanding the user journey and restaurant requirements should also help you understand that a normal consumer app MVP won’t cut it; you’ll need more thought and polish before you release. Along with hospitality and care for interfacing with people, a product must have a thoroughly considered user journey so that business decision makers and users’ needs are completely covered. This should be obvious, but it is surprising to see how many products focus on one end without looking at the other. Restaurant tech is not at all like consumer app development. Next, be mindful that not everyone in a restaurant will speak the same language or share the same level of tech savvy. On-boarding, training and support is paramount to success of your product, as well as the restaurant. You can’t get stickiness without constant pressure but keep it light and simple, because it will cut into overhead. Consider that staff turnover may impact your product usage and impact the restaurant’s desire to stick with something outside of the norm or established. Finally, always keep in mind that restaurants are in the hospitality and service business. Anybody who approaches a restaurant without that mindset is likely to be rejected — this is all about relationships and how you support the industry. As Danny Meyer says in , “Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.” When you reach out to a restaurant owner or manager to pitch them on your product, think carefully about when and how you reach out. Understand that restaurant owners and managers get a lot of solicitation for new things. I’d like to thank at the , Seth Hammond at , Jeff Trenum at and for their insight and support. |
Regulators order environmental impact study of Lyft Line and UberPOOL | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Remember when a California regulatory agency tried to throughout the state? Well, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Two years after its initial threats, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has decided that the services are legal and can continue to operate. However, the CPUC has ordered Uber and Lyft to provide specifics about how their fares are calculated and to study their impacts on traffic and the environment. “In the three short years since the CPUC took steps to recognize it, ridesharing has quickly become an important part of California’s transportation ecosystem. We are very happy that the Commission endorsed forward-thinking products like UberPOOL and listened to Californians advocating for programs to allow more drivers to earn money on their own time,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. In September 2014, the CPUC told Uber, Lyft and the that their carpool offerings that forbids so-called “charter party carriers” like cabs and certain shuttles from charging flat, individual fares. The law requires that fares be based on miles traveled, time the ride took, or a combination of both. The district attorneys of San Francisco and Los Angeles piled on, asserting that UberPOOL and Lyft Line violated California law. In response, Uber and Lyft argued that those seemingly flat fares offered in UberPOOL and Lyft Line are in fact based on time and distance, and disclosed information about the algorithms used to determine the fares to CPUC. Uber and Lyft also argued that the carpooling features should be allowed because they created positive social and environmental impacts by preventing drunk driving and reducing pollution. In a decision issued Monday, the CPUC finally determined that carpool features would be allowed to continue operating in California. “The facts of how the fare-splitting services operate and the absence of a public policy reason to cease such operations in California leads us to affirm the validity of these operations,” the CPUC wrote in its decision. Although the decision is a win for Lyft and Uber (and for customers who don’t like getting gouged by surge pricing), it will come at a cost. Starting next month, the CPUC will require the companies to report the specific calculations that go into carpool fares (Uber and Lyft may claim that the algorithms they use to calculate carpool fares are proprietary, in which case they can submit it to the CPUC under seal). The regulator is also forcing Uber and Lyft to back up their claims about the positive impact of carpool features by conducting studies of their own services. Each company will now be required to submit “evidence of the impact that their fare-splitting operations have had on reducing traffic-related injuries” to the CPUC, as well as “evidence of the environmental impact that their fare-splitting operations have had.” Uber and Lyft must submit plans to study their impacts on the environment and traffic by June 24. Uber has already made some information about the environmental impact of UberPOOL public as part of its Earth Day initiative. “So far in 2016, if Uber riders had driven alone instead of sharing their rides we estimate that over 90 million more miles would have been traveled — consuming 1.8 million gallons of gas and emitting 16,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide,” the company said in a . Since UberPOOL launched in 2014, the service has provided over 100 million rides, and that number is growing fast — customers in China take over 20 million UberPOOL rides every month. Both companies are currently participating in a study conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council and UC Berkeley that aims to provide the first comprehensive look at the environmental impact of services like UberPOOL and Lyft Line. “The CPUC’s decision allows Lyft to continue bringing innovative new features to market in California, such as Lyft Line which allows passengers to share rides for a reduced price,” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with the Commission to ensure that modern transportation options like ridesharing can grow across the state.” |
null | Ron Miller | 2,016 | 4 | 19 | null |
Teardown of HTC Vive highlights the headset’s differences from Oculus Rift | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Today’s VR headsets are marvels of miniaturization. And, as iFixit’s teardowns show, both the Oculus Rift and HTC’s Vive are also remarkably user-friendly when it comes to repair and customization. doesn’t have quite the novelty of the one , but it’s still interesting for anyone who likes to see how the sausage is made (and displayed). Although few will get much of a thrill out of the Vive-specific motion control chips and microcontrollers, there are other, more significant differences between the two flagship headsets. Most relevant is the room-level motion tracking system. The Oculus headset, as you may know, is studded with infrared LEDs that are tracked by a system of cameras. The Vive flips the script, with the detectors in the headset and the IR pattern being blasted out by a pair of laser-spewing “Lighthouses.” This reversed tracking technique (or perhaps it is Oculus that is reversed) has advantages, but also disadvantages — not least of which is needing to house the electronics necessary to run a set of 32 IR detectors rather than just LEDs. Each IR sensor has its own tiny, tiny board it sits on. When you’re as weight- and space-limited as the designers were for these headsets, that’s a significant consideration. Needless to say, HTC and Valve’s engineers rose to the occasion, however, as the Vive is just as, if not more light and comfortable than the Oculus. The lens system is also different; Oculus opted for a fancy asymmetrical fresnel lens to allow users to adjust the image by pushing the headset up or down on the face (this also saves space), while the Vive went for a more ordinary distance-adjustment technique with an apparently symmetrical fresnel lens arrangement. iFixit notes that the whole headset can be disassembled with pretty basic tools and without any irreversible damage like snipping ribbons or breaking seals. That’s good news, because early adopters are definitely the type to take things apart and mod them. Expect to see some crazy battery packs, adjustments for hardcore glasses wearers, and so on. |
HTC announces $100M Vive X virtual reality accelerator program | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | HTC is devoting more and more resources to virtual reality as it looks to outrun its mobile demons and catch the VR wave before everyone else. Today at a press conference in China, HTC announced that it will be devoting $100 million to a new virtual reality accelerator program for developers called , . Applications are live now over on . The accelerator will have locations in Beijing, San Francisco and Taipei. In addition to providing VR developers with cold hard cash (in exchange for a little bit of sweet, sweet equity), HTC is also selling this as a chance for accelerator participants to hobnob with investors and mentors with tons of experience in the VR space. Earlier this month, HTC its Vive virtual reality headset system. Other than a few order snafus early on, the launch has gone pretty smoothly for HTC, especially compared to the Oculus has been facing. The Vive highlights fully motion-tracked controllers and utilizes room-scale tracking which lets you translate your physical movements into in-game motion. “Virtual reality is changing the world, yet to do that effectively it needs a healthy eco-system to expand into the mass market,” said HTC CEO Cher Wang in a statement. “Through HTC Vive, we look forward to enabling global talent to create interesting and compelling content and to help shape the future of this industry.” |
ToyTalk renames to PullString, repositions as authoring tool for bots | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | ToyTalk, the startup that mashed together and let your kids chat away with for hours on end, is cashing out on the bot craze with a slight realignment of philosophy — and a new name. “When working with children,” the company’s CEO Oren Jacob said, “you are beholden to , and ToyTalk as a company had to work diligently to ensure we toe the line.” To do that, the company developed a whole toolset to enable writers to create narratives for children’s toys. The toolset was called , named after the string you can pull on some dolls to make them talk. The name is undoubtedly a nod to the Andy cowboy doll from Toy Story — Jacob did head up Pixar’s technical team as its CTO, after all. ToyTalk continues to exist as the company’s children’s brand. The change in name, then, reflects a change in direction for the company. The brand continues as before, and is the company’s COPPA-compliant brand aiming to make conversation with children’s toys easier. But the wider conversation that’s happening is in the space about conversational interfaces — or “chatbots” if you like — and by design or by accident, that’s where PullString finds themselves. With the tagline “If you can write, you can make a bot,” the company finds itself perfectly positioned to help make bots easier to create, and faster to deploy. What a lot of people are missing in the midst of the amazement of Apple’s Siri and is that for a lot of commercial applications, the interfaces you are talking to aren’t to be the be-all, end-all of knowledge. You don’t want your chatbot to just steam on. (sorry…) PullString started its journey making bots for children mostly because their limited vocabularies made them easier to understand (and, let’s be honest, children don’t mind as much if some of the answers they get in return are utter nonsense). But in the process, they also designed a world of rigidly scripted conversations that somehow manage to feel natural. With good reason, too: There are some things a child might ask about that you wouldn’t necessarily want the bot to google and give an answer to. The magic, then, is in how a chatbot deflects a question. “Maybe that’s something you should talk to your parents about,” for example, is a perfectly fine answer to some of the difficult questions — much like when Siri recommends when your line of questioning hits certain keywords. While the conversational interfaces have developed in leaps and bounds, and the PullString bots can now understand a far wider set of words and phrases, one restraint remains: You still don’t want a free-for-all for children. “We want a whole lot of people, talking to a whole lot of characters, a whole lot of the time,” Jacob likes to say, before adding, with a wink and a nod, “the best of which are ours.” The key here is “characters,” which a good way to look at meaningful interactions. If you meet with any random person on the street, you could ask them about literally anything, but you may not get a reply. That’s a good way to think about bots as well. Think about it this way: If you pull up to a drive-through window at McDonald’s and ask about the weather, ordering a pizza or whether or not the holocaust happened, you’re probably not there to engage in a fruitful transaction. For conversational interfaces to work well, these interactions need to happen on a similar plane: Whether you’re talking to a human or a robot at the drive-through window at McD’s, you’ll probably not be talking about pizzas: you’re ordering menu items from the fast-food chain’s menu. Jessie has gotten herself into a bit of a mess, and needs your help — via Facebook Messenger — to get her life back on track. A great way to experience this is . In it, Jessie just lost her job and got kicked out of her house, and is knee-deep in trouble. The story is good and worth playing through (but if you can’t be bothered and don’t mind spoilers, ), but what’s even more interesting is what happens at the far edges of the story, when you try to push the conversation off topic. Jessie simply just doesn’t engage. At times, she’ll simply ignore you when you’re being obnoxious. It definitely feels less interactive when you try to derail the conversation, but on the other hand, when you engage and drive the story forward, you get rewarded by the next twist and turn in the story. Taking a step back, keeping you on track is what you would from a chatbot on a mission, and exactly what you’d hope from every bot: It is there to accomplish a task (completing an order, helping you avoid fraud on your bank account, booking a table at a restaurant), and everything not pertinent to that mission is irrelevant. PullString, in explaining how their authoring tools work, resulted in a big lightbulb moment — the breakthrough for conversational interfaces isn’t going to be in creating bots that can be pretty good at most things, like Siri. Yes, there’s a place for personal assistants in the bot ecosystem, but by creating carefully scripted responses and walling in the confines of what’s expected of a conversation, you’re able to make much more efficient — and much easier to use — bots. What PullString has been able to do, then, is abstract the AI and voice-command-style software away from the task at hand, enabling good writers to create phrases, sentences and clarifications to help facilitate efficient conversations. Expect your bank, your online ordering and your drive-through window to get smarter and quicker very soon — and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a lot of those interactions will be powered by PullString going forward, especially when the company opens up its tools to developers later this year. |
Now some Ubers will only wait 2 minutes before charging you, not 5 | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 26 | Better sprint outside, because now Uber can ditch you if you’re just two minutes late for your ride, or start charging you before you get in the car. Previously, people got a five-minute grace period to get to the car after it arrived, or to cancel their trip after they sent a request. But now, Uber is telling some users to “Request When You’re Ready” or face fees tacked onto their ride, according to a screenshot by . Uber tells me it’s running a pilot program of the new no-show policy in NYC, New Jersey, Phoenix and Dallas, and will be evaluating results over the next few weeks before deciding whether to expand it to other markets. The pilot was just paused due to a bug but will be running again very soon. [Update: users will only be hit with a no-show fee if they don’t show up within 5 minutes of their driver arriving. But after 2 minutes of waiting, the rider will start to be charged the per minute rate for their city which will be added to their ride cost if they do get in. Drivers also incur no formal penalty for ditching passengers at any time before they get in the car.] The problem is that Ubers actually waiting for you was one of their key advantages over taxis. If you needed to use the bathroom or grab something you forgot, or if you lived on a top floor of your building with lots of stairs or a slow elevator, your Uber’s private cars would still be there politely parked for you. But with only of wait time, you practically have to be standing by the door or outside already to make sure you don’t miss your ride. That’s especially troubling when Uber ETAs can vary and aren’t always accurate and has cars marked as having “arrived” when they’re still a block away. You might expect the car to take four minutes to arrive, but if it shows up in two, you could get dinged with fees. If you expect it to arrive in two minutes and it takes six because of traffic, lights, one-way streets or other delays, you’ll end up standing on the street in what doesn’t feel like the comfortable experience for which Uber has become known. Senior citizens, the mobility impaired and parents trying to wrangle kids all might be a lot more likely to get left behind or charged. And if the driver leaves them, they’d have to wait for another Uber or other car service to send a new driver, which could make them late to their destination. As for the change to the , that seems more reasonable. Two minutes is plenty of time to realize you put in the wrong address, don’t need a car after all or could get a cheaper or faster ride from another service. The five-minute cancellation window likely hurt drivers who would waste time and gas beginning to drive to someone before getting cancelled with no compensation. But the driver cancellation policy feels rude and unforgiving. Sure, people shouldn’t be requesting cars when they’re not even close to ready to leave, forcing drivers to burn tons of time waiting for them. Maybe five minutes was too long; but getting ditched doesn’t seem appropriate, and two minutes feels too short to start charging people. Uber’s perspective is that this somehow makes the experience better for riders. The company tells me, “Drivers’ time is valuable, and while we expect riders to request a ride only once they’re ready, we know that waiting for a rider at their pickup location can be frustrating. In select cities we are running a small pilot so that drivers are compensated for their time even when riders are running a bit late or have a change of plans. When riders and drivers are respectful of each other’s time, the whole system runs more smoothly and the Uber experience improves for everyone.” Perhaps the change could trickle down to quicker ETAs for other passengers if drivers don’t wait for you, but it really just improves Uber’s relationship with its drivers that it has to fight to keep from straying to competitors. The tiny amount of extra cash granted to the driver for waiting a few extra minutes might not incentivize patience to wait for you. Hailed at 10:53, this UberX’s ETA was 10:56 but it actually arrived at 10:54. If the passenger showed up at the ETA, they could have missed the two-minute window, gotten ditched and been hit with a no-show fee. For reference, UberPool uses different policies because delays also hurt other people in the car or those assigned to be picked up next. There’s no cancellation grace period, and UberPool drivers only wait two minutes for you once they arrive — but the penalty was only $2. Uber’s competitor, and has to contact you by phone or text before they can leave you with a $5 to $10 penalty, though its UberPool-esque Lyft Line service will only wait an aggressive one minute. Uber is built to be reliable. Despite the hate it gets, the whole surge pricing system is designed to preserve that by discouraging demand to ensure supply. If there’s an emergency or you absolutely have to make it to a flight or meeting, you can trust there will be cars available if you’re willing to pay the surge. Yet if you have to worry you’re going to get ditched for any unforeseen delay, Uber’s reliability is destroyed. |
AstraZeneca commits ‘hundreds of millions’ to sequencing genomes of 2M people over 10 years | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca today unveiled a — with top-tier medical and tech partnerships and a nine-figure price tag. The resulting database would be the largest of its kind, and would be used to hunt rare genes that may contribute to diseases. AstraZeneca is dipping into its own stores for the first big source of data: 500,000 patients have participated in its clinical trials, and their biological materials will furnish the first quarter of the goal amount. The actual sequencing will be done by , a genomics company started by Craig Venter that has raised $300 million since 2014. HLI already has about 26,000 genomes, and has stated that it plans to get to a million by 2020. The will be contributing genomes as well, but also medical records for Finland’s geographically-isolated population. The idea is that interesting or rare genes shuffled or lost over centuries of humanity’s travel and intermarriage may still be present there. Scientific teams where the reams of data will be sifted through for correlations and drug targets will be established at AstraZeneca itself as well as at the in Hinxton, U.K. Although the full cost of the endeavor was not disclosed, AstraZeneca’s EVP of innovative medicines that it was in the “hundreds of millions,” and Science reported Venter’s comment that it had taken over a year of negotiation to settle. |
iBooks and iTunes Movies ordered closed in China by government regulator, just six months after launch | Catherine Shu | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | The New York Times reports that a government regulator of iBooks Store and iTunes Movies in China last week. The two services , along with Apple Music (which is still available). The shutdown was ordered by the , which oversees content in those mediums. TechCrunch has contacted Apple for comment. The company told the New York Times in a statement that, “We hope to make books and movies available again to our customers in China as soon as possible.” As the report points out, this may mark a turnaround for Apple’s business in China, since it has been given an unusual amount of freedom for a foreign tech company. As a result, Apple has been able to . This has been mainly driven by iPhone sales and iOS app revenue, but Apple is also keen to sell software services, like Apple Pay and its entertainment stores, to the country’s consumers. In fact, China, which is already the No. 2 market for iOS revenue, if its current growth rate is allowed to continue. At the same time, Apple is still subject to scrutiny. For example, Apple’s general counsel, Bruce Sewell, recently said during a Congressional subcommittee meeting that the company to access the iPhone’s source code. Furthermore, Apple is one of the eight U.S. tech giants as a “guardian warrior,” or companies that have a big enough influence on the country’s information infrastructure to warrant extra attention (the other seven are Cisco, IBM, Google, Qualcomm, Intel, Oracle and Microsoft). The closure of iBooks and iTunes Movies in China, however, may be primarily a business issue instead of cybersecurity one. The SARFT and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, recently designed to make it more difficult for companies with foreign owners to publish online content. Among other restrictions, they in addition to receiving government approval. This means Chinese Internet leaders like Tencent (which ), Baidu and Alibaba would have less competition. That doesn’t mean they get a free ride, however — all three are also under . |
Uber strikes $100M class-action settlement to keep drivers independent contractors | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Uber’s driver versus independent contractor debate just took a huge turn. from Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, the company announced that it has reached a settlement in two class-action lawsuits in California and Massachusetts. Both suits contested that Uber should be classifying its drivers as employees instead of independent contractors. And in a major win for Uber, both sides have agreed that drivers will remain independent contractors and not employees. To reach this agreement, Uber had to offer a significant amount of concessions, including up to $100 million in payments to the represented in the cases. Specifically, the company will pay $84 million now, with a second payment of $16 million if the company goes public and has its valuation increase 1.5X from its latest valuation (of $62.5 billion) in December 2015. The company has also pledged to be more transparent about driver ratings by providing drivers with more information about their own rating, how it compares to their peers, and explaining in detail the circumstances that will lead to a driver getting banned from the platform. Another big concession is that Uber has agreed not to penalize drivers who decline trips when logged into the app. Previously, a driver could receive a warning, or even possible deactivation, if they declined a certain percentage of trips. This policy change was likely a signification part of the settlement, because requiring drivers to accept a certain percentage of trips could be interpreted as a job requirement that would consider them employees and not independent contractors. Lastly, the company will create and fund a driver’s association in both states that will meet quarterly to discuss “the issues that matter most to drivers.” While the settlement seems large, it pales in comparison to the additional costs that would be incurred by Uber if it had to treat drivers as employees and not independent contractors. And while the decision only affects drivers in California and Massachusetts, and doesn’t resolve pending litigation in other states, it’s likely a precursor to similar settlements we may see in courts in other jurisdictions. |
The automation revolution and the rise of the creative economy | Aidan Cunniffe | 2,016 | 4 | 21 |
Only three main occupations were available to intrepid job seekers 10,000 years ago: hunting, gathering and procreation. Since then, the job market has advanced dramatically, developing into something not only more diverse, but also more abstract. This progress was the result of human evolution, but also human innovation — as the human race evolved, the scope of its needs changed (and so did the methods by which these needs were satisfied). Throughout history, we’ve always found ways to make our basic survival require less of our human focus, and we’ve witnessed subsequent booms in new professions — specifically, vocations that didn’t relate directly to merely subsisting, but thriving. In reality, the invention of flight, the moon landing and the digital we saw at the end of the 20th century would not have happened if so much of our workforce hadn’t been free to explore the frontiers of human understanding. We now stand on the precipice of a new we will see the complete of professions once thought to be inextricably human-operated when “take our jobs.” Truth be told, they’ve already begun. To better understand how will shape the future, look no further than the present. Intelligent machines are already being employed in ways we never thought possible a few years ago. Thanks to advancements like deep learning, is proving itself than humans at diagnostics and analysis. Companies like are already beginning to affect administrative work in the same way machines took over the assembly line; even the world of journalism is being by algorithms news stories. Automated functions are quickly becoming as qualified as humans when it comes to logic-based tasks, and as machines become smarter and more capable, they will continue to assume these types of roles in virtually every field, from accounting to transportation to to security. While machines may be able to match us in logic, when it comes to creativity, they are . There are really only two human enterprises: creation and implementation. We design things, come up with interesting strategies and ideas and then we execute them. Whether that means building a physical product, writing code or organizing a global supply chain, all are channels for expressing our ideas and manifesting those ideas in the physical world. We build technology to help us on the implementation side (for the most part). We haven’t yet managed to automate our creativity and critical thinking. The “ ” will change what it means to be employable. To have jobs, people will have to do work or work in a service industry that requires the human touch. The definition of educational success will have to change to account for this new reality. In the future, tests will be less about rote memorization and more about critical thinking that machines can’t yet replicate. So where will the next generation fit into this automated future? Several fields will still require the creativity and empathy of humanity — at least for the foreseeable future: Machines can bake the bread, but they can’t tackle the . Not only will film, television and video games still be dominated by human ingenuity, new areas will open up. Virtual reality, for example, continues to improve and has the to become the most addictive tech in history, offering fully immersive fantasy worlds people may never want to leave. Although machines might perform the actual services, humans will still be required for the social part of the equation. People will become ambassadors, so to speak. Their roles will primarily be to explain the benefits and safety of using at home and in the workplace. Along similar lines as service industry ambassadors, this job will require a combination of subject-matter experts and engineers who to do certain tasks. For instance, someone has to teach a machine the best way to paint a wall or repair an engine, then give it feedback. Machine trainers will act both as “zookeepers” and as mechanics to service the machines and care for the programs that operate them. will change everything about how we conduct business today, and entrepreneurship will quickly take center stage. Building a product and getting it manufactured at scale, marketed and sold will be the job of one entrepreneur (rather than an entire company). Right now, one person can design and 3D-print a better widget, but can’t sell it at scale. Automated assistants could help source components, create manufacturing processes, book transportation, launch marketing campaigns and even secure financing. Moreover, advantages that major corporations used to enjoy (like giant advertising budgets) will no longer be as important. An artificial intelligence assistant doesn’t care if you bought an ad; it will find the best product to fulfill your needs, even if it’s produced by a 12-year-old in her garage. This doesn’t mean everyone who is made redundant by will be able to pivot and find a new job in a different capacity — will indeed be gone for good, and many household incomes will fall drastically as a result. Machines will be able to do almost everything far more cheaply than humans. Average incomes will drop, but so will the average cost of production, the price of goods and services. This means that, even though unemployment will increase, the standards of living could actually , not fall. The transition to this new will happen quickly. Unlike the Industrial , which spanned centuries, the “ ” could happen in as little as 15 years. The only real obstacle will be people’s willingness to embrace change. This new paradigm won’t arise in a vacuum — politically and culturally, people will have to accept intelligent machines into their lives. And if we’re able to do that, we can move forward into a future that allows us to explore what makes us truly human: our creativity. |
Chameleon raises $1.9M for smarter product tutorials | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | is a startup that wants to help other startups and online businesses do a better job of explaining their products to users. It announced today that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding led by . Co-founder and CEO Pulkit Agrawal said that for many companies “user on-boarding is really painful” — they can work really hard and spend lots of marketing dollars to get new users, but those users disappear immediately when they find themselves confused by the product. In Agrawal’s view, how-to videos and other explainers aren’t the best solution either — it’s not great if someone’s trying to remember everything from a video or constantly clicking back-and-forth between the video and the product itself. (Not that he’s completely against promotional videos, as you can see below. He just doesn’t see them as the best way to explain the details of how to use a given web app.) With Chameleon, on the other hand, you can include tutorials in the actual product. So if someone’s trying out your product, you can tell them that they should be clicking in one spot to accomplish a certain task — then they can just go ahead and do it. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFMIeWvDB0I&w=560&h=315] Once you’ve added a few lines of JavaScript to your site, you can create these tutorials through a editor that appears as a sidebar on your website, no coding required. These tutorials can also be tied to certain triggers, appearing when a user enters a specific page or makes a specific mistake. And you can test out different versions. Customers already include and . Chameleon is web-only for now — Agrawal didn’t rule out creating a mobile version eventually, but he said, “The problem does exist on mobile. The problem is bigger on web and the solution is easier on web.” After all, he said, thanks to the smaller screen size, mobile apps tend to have a simpler, more understandable interface. |
Elon Musk has an idea for autonomous transit vehicles but he’s being coy about it | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Elon Musk has a plan to solve the traffic crisis in our cities. A vague, secret plan. He may not have a plan. But he did say something out loud in public about it, and he doesn’t usually do that unless he has at least a plan. that, speaking at a transport conference in Norway, Musk’s fecund imagination briefly overflowed. “We have an idea for something which is not exactly a bus but would solve the density problem for inner city situations,” he said. “I don’t want to talk too much about it. I have to be careful what I say.” He also said that “there’s a new type of car or vehicle that would be great for that and that’ll actually take people to their final destination and not just the bus stop,” adding that “autonomous vehicles are key.” I could speculate about what it is, but — actually, why not? A “new type of car or vehicle” that “is not exactly a bus” but would drop you off where you’re going. So it uses city streets, isn’t quite a car, and benefits especially from autonomy. To me, that sounds like an 8-10 passenger EV that automatically picks up and drops off multiple users on shared routes. This would be something about the size of an airport parking shuttle, with room to stand and stash your suitcase or bags of groceries. For longer rides they could even hook up for aerodynamism and (why not?) allow people to switch cars — a true road train. Smaller vehicles that hook up with others into a little autonomous vehicular centipede might also be a possibility. Of course, no one likes shuttles, because they make so many damn stops. But if the route and passengers were carefully calculated according to citywide efficiency systems, it wouldn’t be so bad. Anyway, that’s my guess. The only person who really knows is Musk and whoever he’s spilled the beans to. The best thing to do now is to alternately badger and butter up this genius billionaire until he publishes a big paper on it. Worked for the Hyperloop! “I wish I had not mentioned it,” at the time, in an interview with Businessweek. “I still have to run SpaceX and Tesla, and it’s fucking hard.” |
Medium raises another $50M | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | , the online publishing platform led by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, just that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding. It’s been less than a year since , but Williams wrote that the company decided to raise additional funding “to bolster our resources now given the demand we’ve seen for the vision we are building toward.” The round was led by Spark Capital, which had also invested in Twitter. Spark’s Kevin Thau (previously an executive at Twitter) , arguing that there’s an opportunity for more “verticalized” social media experiences and contrasting “the thoughtful, timeless nature of Medium” with the ephemerality of Snapchat. He added: This is why we are excited about Medium. The hardest thing for companies to do is focus, but when you do it aligns everything. Medium is solely focused on being the best place to read and write interesting stuff. A single purpose publishing tool, network, and ecosystem built to share the written word. Williams also said that Andreessen Horowitz’s Ben Horowitz and JLabs CEO Judy Estrin are joining Medium’s board of directors, while Greylock’s David Sze is stepping down. (Greylock’s Josh Elman will remain.) Earlier this month, the company revealed that hundreds of independent publications, including The Awl and Pacific Standard, had . |
Snapchat lets you Face-Swap with your camera roll, drops paid replays | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Snapchat is done selling you stuff. As of today’s update, every snap can be replayed once, but you can no longer buy extra replays. That means people with more money can’t break the rules of Snapchat any more. Snapchat launched on top of the one free one you got per day, but along with the shut down of the that launched in November and in January, Snapchat is refocusing on making money through ads. You might miss those paid replays because Snapchat’s latest feature will make you do a double-take. After the success of its Face-Swap feature that exchanges your face with someone else in your photo or video, it’s now letting you Face-Swap with photos from your camera roll. First, be sure to get the April 21st app update. Hold down on your face to open the selfie lens options and swipe over until you get to the Face-Swap From Camera Roll Lens. Tap it, and Snapchat will scan your camera roll for faces and surface options for you to swap with. That means you can easily screenshot photos as well as drawings or anything else that looks like a face, and then put that mug on as your own mask. It’s terrifying, hilarious, smart and sure to make the teens go crazy. I’ve been grabbing actors, cartoon characters and anyone with movie makeup, like this one of me as Arnold from Terminator. Just please, no offensive . |
California bill to give gig workers organizing rights stalls over antitrust concerns | Kate Conger | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | A controversial bill that would have given gig workers the right to collectively bargain with the tech companies they work for stalled in the California legislature today, meaning that workers will have to wait at least another year for the opportunity to bargain for higher wages, paid sick leave, and other perks. Uber drivers, TaskRabbit errand runners, Postmates couriers — they’re all members of the gig economy that’s behind half the apps on your phone. But these workers are not considered employees of the companies they work for; they’re classified as independent contractors who work for nobody but themselves. While this gives gig workers the freedom to set their own schedules, it deprives them of the benefits like healthcare, paid sick days, and minimum wage guarantees that come with traditional employment. In California, legislators want to change that structure by giving gig workers the right to collectively bargain with companies like Uber, a right that’s limited to employees under current law. Just yesterday, it seemed like gig worker unions were on the horizon: a bill that would require tech companies to meet and negotiate with organized groups of independent contractors passed the California Assembly Labor and Employment Committee with a strong 5-1 vote. But today, California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, who authored the bill, pulled it from its next committee vote at the Assembly Judiciary Committee, effectively killing the bill for this legislative session. The decision to pull the bill is a surprising about-face for Gonzalez, who rose to her position in the legislature through the labor movement and is a staunch union advocate. A spokesperson from Gonzalez’s office said the bill, known as the , contained “a number of untested legal theories” and claimed the assemblywoman’s decision was motivated by the desire “to really explore all the legal issues that could be involved with this bill.” So what went wrong? Since the bill was in December, unions and businesses alike have raised antitrust concerns about the legislation. Workers in the gig economy have never been allowed to collectively bargain, and its possible that allowing them to do so would violate federal antitrust law. Rather than allowing independent contractors to form their own bargaining organizations, unions would prefer for gig workers to be reclassified as employees so they can legally join unions. And sharing economy companies like Uber rely on gig workers to keep their costs low. It seems that those concerns reached the Assembly Judiciary Committee and Gonzalez pulled the bill when it became clear that the Committee wouldn’t allow it to move forward. Sacramento political consultant Richie Ross, who was a sponsor of the bill, told TechCrunch the hearing in the Judiciary Committee was unexpected — he and Gonzalez had hoped the bill would go straight to the Assembly floor. “This is so uncharted. Nobody’s ever done anything like this,” Ross explained. “We don’t need to go out of our way to make something this new more controversial. Because it’s new and uncharted, it naturally has elements of controversy.” However, Ross doesn’t believe the legislation would violate antitrust law. He says the Clayton Act, a century-old law that governs unions, doesn’t place the same restrictions on contractors who are selling their own labor as it does on those who are selling commodities. Because a Postmates courier isn’t actually selling you your lunch, she’s just selling her labor as she carries it from the restaurant to your doorstep, Ross thinks such workers can unionize without violating antitrust law. But he and his allies didn’t want to push the bill forward without being sure they were on strong legal ground: “We don’t want to bring the bill to the floor of the Assembly until it’s more cooked,” he said. Gonzalez said in a statement announcing her decision to table the legislation that she would continue to engage with Judiciary Committee leader Mark Stone to resolve the legal issues in the bill. However, she seemed to cast doubt on her own work, saying, “Assembly Bill 1727 may or may not be the correct answer.” “The issue is complex. The law is untested. The challenge is essential,” Gonzalez added. Ross says he and Gonzalez hope to redraft the bill and get a final version signed by Governor Jerry Brown before he leaves office in 2019. In the meantime, Uber drivers may in court — a group of drivers is suing Uber to be reclassified as employees. If they win, approximately 160,000 drivers would earn the right to join a traditional union. The lawsuit is set to go to trial this summer. |
Why go Live? Facebook’s head of video Fidji Simo will tell Disrupt NY | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | How will Facebook video change the physics of news publishing, app downloads, commerce, and what we point our phones at? Find out at TechCrunch Disrupt NY May 9th to 11th when Facebook’s head of video Fidji Simo joins us on stage for a fireside chat. By now, Facebook’s likely hit 10 billion video views per day. In a few short years, it became an 800-lb gorilla big enough to stand tall against YouTube and Snapchat. And with videos getting so much visibility in the News Feed, Facebook has created a ripple effect that impacts every type of business. At Disrupt NY, we’ll ask Simo what we should expect next from Facebook video, how companies can adapt, and why What’s working and what’s not for video publishers on Facebook? Will Facebook video widen the rift between big brands with huge budgets for video and small businesses who don’t know where to start? How will video ads for apps let great developers thrive and push crappy apps off the top charts? And can Facebook become a video destination, not just a serendipitous channel for discovery? Our Facebook expert Josh Constine (hey that’s me) will get you the answers at Disrupt NY. |
Beepi lets you buy, sell and now lease a car with an app | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | There are lots of apps that help you research prices for buying or selling a car, and they’ll even hook you up with a dealership when you’re ready to buy. But lets you buy and sell used cars in 16 metro areas in nine states without using a dealership — or a test drive — at all. “Every company starts with a group of entrepreneurs who think something is true but it disagrees with what everyone else thinks,” said Beepi founder Alejandro Resnik in a phone interview. “My belief was that there was this whole infrastructure of cars sitting on lots for one reason: to do a test drive.” He found that while most people would not buy a used car without a test drive, they warmed up to the idea if the car was inspected, came with a money-back guarantee and was from a brand they trusted. “That was the initial light bulb,” Resnik said. So how do you buy a car with an app but without testing it? “The same way you buy anything online,” Resnik said. You find a car you like at a price that works for your budget and buy it. A Beepi representative goes to the seller, gives her the money and delivers the car to you. Then you get what Beepi calls a 10-day test drive. If the car doesn’t work out for you, you get your money back. Each car goes through a 240-point inspection by professional, trained Beepi representatives who are both shareholders in the company and employees. They’re certified mechanics to begin with, and they undergo an additional three months of Beepi-specific training. When you want to sell your car through Beepi, an inspector will visit to check everything. They use a camera to look under the chassis, they take 200 pictures and they do a dynamic test drive to listen for weird noises, test normal braking and acceleration, and check the alignment. It’s a test drive done the way a pro would do it, Resnik said, rather than a consumer just trying to understand the noises they hear. He should know — he took a test drive of a used vehicle that burst into flames two days after he drove it home. When he was on the car lot, Resnik said, “I spoke with the dealer; he was a nice guy. I did a test drive. I thought I knew about machines. The engine looked amazing, the suspension looked amazing, the brakes looked amazing.” In trying to get his money back (and eventually succeeding), Resnik learned a lot about consumer protection laws and the process of buying and selling cars. He also counts himself as an older millennial, a generation that’s used to showrooming and cross-shopping online. “Car buying and selling starts online, using or or ,” Resnik said, “but when you get to the interesting part, you need to close your computer.” It also eliminates the ick factor of meeting strangers via Craigslist or dealing with used car salesmen. “Dealerships remain a scary place for women and minorities,” Resnik said. “Beepi is enabling a market that was hidden because those people were not transacting. This way, the market becomes larger and more connected.” Part of expanding the market is offering a streamlined financing process. Beepi has partnered with and credit unions to offer traditional financing and, as of this morning, to offer . You can even pay for the entire car with a credit card or . With Beepi, “there’s no break between online research and online buying,” said Resnik. “You start the process online and finish online. That gives us the advantage.” |
Microsoft’s Q3 misses with EPS of $0.62, revenue in line at $22.1B | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Microsoft today earnings for its third financial quarter of 2016. The company reported non-GAAP revenue of $22.1 billion for the last quarter and $0.62 of adjusted earnings per share (EPS) and $0.47 GAAP EPS. Wall Street Microsoft to report an EPS of $0.64 on revenue of just under $22.1 billion. Microsoft’s own guidance for the quarter was for revenue to be somewhere between $21.1 billion and $22.3 billion. Wall Street is obviously not happy with these numbers. Microsoft’s stock is currently in after-hours trading. As Microsoft’s director of investor relations Zack Moxcey told me after the earnings release hit, the EPS miss is mostly due to the fact that these numbers include Microsoft’s catch-up adjustments for its income tax expenses. Without these, he noted, the EPS would have been $0.04 higher and would have beaten Wall Street expectations. Previously, the company said it expected for this number to hit $20 billion in 2018. It didn’t reiterate this number in today’s press release, though Moxcey told me that the company is sticking with this number. “We feel this is a solid performance across the board,” he told me. “Certainly, the cloud continues to be a highlight for us.” “Organizations using digital technology to transform and drive new growth increasingly choose Microsoft as a partner,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “As these organizations turn to us, we’re seeing momentum across Microsoft’s cloud services and with Windows 10.” Microsoft started breaking out results for different business units with its Q1 2016 report and it continues this tradition with this quarter’s report. Here is what the rest of these numbers look like. Unsurprisingly, phone revenue declined 46 percent compared to last year. On the positive side, Surface revenue increased 61 percent year-over-year and Moxcey noted that this marked the second quarter in a row that Surface itself drove more than $1 billion revenue. At the same time, though, Windows OEM revenue was down 2 percent. Moxcey noted that this still outperformed the PC market, mostly because the first wave of Windows 10 devices was generally pricier and drove up Microsoft’s revenue per unit. One other number everybody was looking for in today’s announcement was how Microsoft’s commercial cloud business is doing — especially as the PC market remains sluggish. In the last quarter, Microsoft said this segment was on a $9.4 billion annual run rate, up from $8.2 billion in the quarter before that. Now, the company says the annual run rate has hit $10 billion. While Microsoft’s last quarter didn’t quite live up to Wall Street’s expectations, those cloud numbers and the increase in Office 365 subscriptions show that the company’s overall turn-around plan is working, though. |
To the Moon! Lunar XPRIZE team looks to send Wikipedia into space aboard homemade rover | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Quick: You can send 20 gigabytes of data to the moon. What’s it going to be? Time’s up! Wikipedia? What a coincidence — that’s what the , a team working on a homegrown lunar rover for Google’s Lunar XPRIZE, decided, too! And they’re really planning to . No, it’s not a joke, . PTS is an that’s one of several competing for the $30 million in prizes — of which it’s already won $750,000. This isn’t a spare-time project going on in someone’s garage. The ultimate challenge is to get a rover safely to the lunar surface, have it drive 500 meters and return some imagery. The rover designed by PTS looks like the real thing, and the team even has a launch window: late 2017, aboard a commercial rocket. That would only take them to orbit, though — getting to the moon would have to be done under their own power. It happens, however, that the payload of their rover has 20 GB to spare. PTS contacted Wikimedia Deutschland (the team is based in Berlin) and the two decided it would be just enough space to fit a curated version of Wikipedia — the entire thing with images and videos would take up several times that. It would be a sort of updated version of Voyager’s with Pokemon. The curation process, while not as difficult as sending a rover safely to the moon, is still nontrivial, and it’s that part with which the project is requesting help. There needs to be a selection of content, which reveals the true challenge behind the project: What do we choose? Who gets to decide? How do we do this? If you get the chance to bring the sum of all human knowledge to the Moon, should you not strive to represent the same diversity that has made Wikipedia the world’s most famous collaborative project to date? No doubt this will be the basis for a flame war the likes of which has never been seen. The is already heating up as people suggest, for example, using English only to prevent duplication, or including 30 items from each language, or not caring one way or another because aliens will be able to translate one into the other anyway. And are we really expecting aliens to find this disc? Unlike Voyager 1, which is now in interstellar space and would as such potentially be an object of interest to a passing extraterrestrial, it seems a bit of a stretch to think that an intelligence would come all the way here just to stop at the moon. The FAQ explains it better than I ever could: The Lunar challenge is mainly about pioneer spirit, curiosity, and visions for humanity. So, with the symbolic act of leaving a snapshot of human history on the surface of the Moon, we are thinking more about future generations than aliens… Our very special Wikipedia time capsule will be there, as a historical document. And it will be special, indeed, because historical messages to the future have never before been worked on by so many people, representing so many cultures and perspectives on knowledge. The plan is to have all this worked out by December 5, International Volunteer’s day — but if you want to take part, you’ll want to weigh in over the next few weeks. The team hopes to announce the final strategy and details at in June. To the moon! |
Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | For a split second, Alphabet was the most valuable company in the world. Not so much any more, however, with the company’s market cap continuing to slide after it reported its first-quarter earnings. Relatively speaking, shares of Alphabet are only down around 5 percent in extended trading. But for a company worth more than $500 billion, that’s erasing tens of billions of dollars in value — and increasing the gap between itself and Apple. Alphabet still continues to print money, but it fell under what people were expecting for its earnings report. The company posted earnings of $7.50 on revenue of $20.26 billion, while analysts were expecting earnings of $7.96 on revenue of $20.38 billion. Alphabet’s cost-per-click — basically how much it makes off each advertising click — continued to decrease, down 9 percent year-over-year for the first quarter. That’s continuing a trend that has seen that number decline for some time now. The theory is that as usage switches over to mobile, the increased number of paid clicks will make up for that declining cost per click. Paid clicks for Google were up 29 percent year-over-year for the first quarter, and the company’s revenue continues to increase. There has been a lot of talk about weakness in Alphabet’s “other bets,” like Nest, which, according to many reports by Alphabet’s standards. This quarter, the company reported $166 million in revenue off “other bets,” while that segment posted an operating loss of $802 million. Last quarter, revenue was $80 million on an operating loss of $633 million. Growing, but so far still losing a significant amount of money. Naturally, it’s Alphabet’s core business that’s carrying the weight of the costs of its other bets, which include properties like Nest. Facebook, too, has continued to print money off its advertising business while betting a lot on its own “other bets,” like its purchase of Oculus for $2 billion. So it’s not like Alphabet’s strategy is entirely unique. And again, Facebook’s portfolio of additional services and products hasn’t yet shown that each are a dramatic large business on its own, but it’s Facebook’s continued revenue growth — and regular positive surprises — that keep its shares climbing, like Alphabet. So, for the time being, Alphabet’s core advertising business — Google proper — remains its strength, while its other hardware bets seem to still be in the process of figuring out how to build a sustainable business. Google’s strategy has been to continue cranking on its ads business while throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what sticks, including buying Nest for $3.2 billion, but it seems like it hasn’t quite found an extra branch of revenue that will help it continue to grow, and potentially surpass Apple again. This year has been a good one for Alphabet, which has seen its stock grow significantly. On the year, shares of Alphabet are up around 39 percent. But that rise has slowed recently, with shares only moving up around 6 percent in the past three months. [graphiq id=”hrx4imYfbwN” title=”Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”492″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/hrx4imYfbwN” link=”https://www.graphiq.com” link_text=”Visualization by Graphiq”] For a brief moment, , dethroning Apple after handily beating its earnings expectations in the fourth quarter last year. Apple quickly regained that title and is now worth around $60 billion more as of the end of regular trading, and that gap widened after the company reported its first-quarter earnings. [graphiq id=”7VqTwf4vIzj” title=”Apple vs. Alphabet Market Capitalization Over Time” width=”600″ height=”521″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/7VqTwf4vIzj” link=”http://intraday-widgets.findthecompany.com” link_text=”Apple vs. Alphabet Market Capitalization Over Time | FindTheCompany”] Does this miss mean Alphabet’s strategy is working, or otherwise? Hard to say just yet, given that it only recently began breaking out its other bets, and some of those have only materialized in recent years — Alphabet acquired Nest in 2014, for example. These bets sometimes take time to materialize. |
Honeyfund launches app to crowdfund your honeymoon | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | A lot of people live with the idea that life is about experiences rather than things. A firm subscriber of that philosophy is — a company whose new Honeyfund app helps newlyweds bankroll their honeymoon, rather than stocking their house with half a dozen different bread makers. With Plumfund, fundraisers can ask friends and family in all sorts of categories. The company has been around the block a few times themselves, and today is a double celebration: combining an app-launch and its , 10 years down the road from its own honeymoon period. Honeyfund first launched in 2006 when the company’s founders, Sara & Josh Margulis, discovered their own wedding guests were strongly in favor of giving experiences and memories rather than trinkets, housewares and other doo-dahs. They set up a simple page to enable their wedding guests to fund their dream honeymoon to Fiji — and subsequently decided to turn the idea into a company. The new Honeyfund apps optimize the company’s on-the-go flow for setting up a honeymoon wedding registry. Fast-forward exactly 10 years and Honeyfund is the seventh-most-used wedding registry in the U.S., with a big boost following and an investment from Kevin “Mr. Wonderful” O’Leary. The company also further expanded to other verticals with , where users can raise money for anything ranging from charities, medical issues, sports teams, anniversaries, birthdays and much more. Plumfund even has the delightful appearance of a “divorce registry” category (currently featuring ), taking you the full journey, from the glow of the wedding, the honeymoon period of the, er, honeymoon, via gloriously festive anniversaries to the bitter, acrimonious end. Talk about a full-service approach. The new and apps make it easy to put together and share great-looking wedding registry pages with your friends. The company didn’t mention whether it is planning a divorce registry companion app, although your correspondent can see a fantastic Big Data marketing tie-in with Tinder on this front. |
FirstBuild launches Pique, a faster cold-brew coffee maker for the home | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Coffee has turned from a daily routine into somewhat of an art form in the last few years, with drip makers, the French press, single-serve cups, pour-over and an endless supply of the latest hi-tech machines that will whip up any bean-flavored concoction to your liking. Note most of what’s out there caters to hot-coffee connoisseurs. Cold brew is a fast-growing favorite among coffee drinkers — according to consumer food and beverage site Mintel, cold-brew sales popped up from 2014 to 2015. The problem is the cold-brew process takes much longer to make (an average of 12 hours) than a steamy cup of joe. The new Pique machine takes the process down to 12 minutes. FirstBuild hails from Louisville, Kentucky, but held a competition for the final coffee maker design from all over the world, and plans to use that design in an upcoming Indiegogo campaign to raise funds to get the machine to market. The company, funded by and in partnership with GE, has taken a similar route to market for many other of its smart home products, including the , the and the . FirstBuild doesn’t have a set price for the cold-brew machine just yet, but says it should be in the higher-end range for home coffee-making appliances. TechCrunch got to take a look at Pique in our studios before it hits the market this summer. Check out the video above with FirstBuild’s co-founder Taylor Dawson talking about his latest invention. |
Why startups can’t disrupt the mortgage industry | Aaron LaRue | 2,016 | 4 | 21 |
Home loans are the Holy Grail of online lending. They come with high loan balances, steady returns and hefty fees. There also is a healthy liquid market for the securitized loans, and the debt is asset backed, which reduces risk and opens up the investor pool. On top of that, “establishment” mortgage lenders are not leading the pack with innovation, which means there is a lot of room for improvement. So why can’t startups disrupt the mortgage industry? I can already hear you yelling — “There are plenty of companies!” And there are. But comparatively, even the companies that are doing well and gaining traction still have a ways to go. For instance, Quicken Loans is massive, but they are the exception, not the rule. They have managed to overhaul the lending process in a very innovative way, streamlining and simplifying the process — but they have had issues addressing the next wave of tech-enabled first-time home buyers. Many young, startup size companies wouldn’t have survived the from their Super Bowl ad. There are other companies doing innovative things, and they are definitely gaining traction — but they are a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the mortgage market. Let’s take a look at some technology companies I think are doing a great job in this space. My data here is limited, but I think it provides some context: Selling home loans is not an easy task; each company should be proud of what they’ve accomplished so far. But for a point of comparison, let’s look at the : I only point this out to provide some perspective. Every one of these companies offers a fantastic customer experience, has a solid marketing and sales machine and makes use of technology — so why is it they have a hard time outperforming some individual sales agents? I think there are three types of mortgage lenders in this space, and each faces a major issue. Mortgages are a hard product to sell, and with increasing regulation and scrutiny, they are only getting harder. The industry as a whole is also ripe for innovation and disruption. These factors have created three camps when it comes to mortgage companies, and they’re all fighting for market share: The problem is, each of these three camps is missing something critical. Mortgage companies have a hard time innovating. First, it’s hard to attract and retain the type of talent required to build an innovative market solution. Second, they are not the type of company to raise a large round of venture capital. With an operating business in an established industry vertical, they are valued on a much different metric, and usually have to free up cash flow for any type of investment (like building technology). With constraints on cash and expertise, most mortgage companies are left to piecemeal together an online lending solution. Using third-party providers, they string together a number of platforms in an attempt to cover the required features that the modern borrower has come to expect. The problem is these tools will have to integrate with the legacy systems the mortgage lender is already locked in to. So instead of tackling the entire process, and having to integrate with tons of complex systems, third-party providers focus on a narrow aspect of the experience (like document upload or taking the initial loan application). Each piece of third-party technology will also require its own user accounts, dashboards, verification/security protocols and workflows. This “platform overhead” only compounds as you add more features, leading to a fragmented and potentially frustrating customer experience. The other two technology-centered camps have the talent and can raise the money. They can build slick tech platforms, create a unified and cohesive customer experience and have the potential to provide market-leading customer service. The problem comes from operations. A scalable mortgage company needs a lot of infrastructure: This is not just a problem for companies coming from the technology side — established mortgage companies can struggle with these things, too. Innovation is great, but without nailing the fundamentals, it’s hard to scale. When faced with the realities of originating a mortgage, many of these technology companies will pivot. Instead of producing the actual loans, they’ll become sales and marketing vehicles that capture the customer, take the application then serve as a broker for an established mortgage company that can do the heavy lifting. If all three options have flaws, what’s the answer? I don’t think we’re doomed to live in a world of clunky and frustrating home financing. But I do think there is a large gap in the consensus way of innovating in this space. Ideally, an innovative mortgage company would combine a customer-focused, experience-driven product team with a group of seasoned mortgage professionals. This super-team would come together, surrounded by the infrastructure required to grow and fed with capital to invest in building a platform, and they could fundamentally change the way home loans are done. I think one way to make this happen is through VC or private-equity-backed acquisitions of existing mortgage lenders. Disruptive innovation doesn’t require a blank slate. Small mortgage companies, operating on a call center model, already do business without being face-to-face with their customers. Doing business online is the logical next step. They have the financial infrastructure in place and understand the operational requirements to do business. The best part is they might even make some money. A solid product team, backed by venture capital or private equity, could purchase one of these lenders for a reasonable amount of money (Series A-size capital), and at a valuation multiple that is much lower than your everyday technology company. Once in the door, they could overhaul the technological foundation of the company, work to build a better customer experience and add innovative technology that’s developed in-house. Instead of , they could focus on educating their prospects into being responsible home buyers. Launching features rapidly, focusing on the customer and unconstrained by infrastructure, they would be poised for tremendous growth. Wall Street has been dipping into the VC space, investing in and . Major banks have been buying, investing in and partnering with startups. BBVA has been , and Santander has small business lender Kabbage. I wouldn’t be surprised to see activity like this bleed into the online mortgage space. might also be interested in this type of approach because they focus on large, highly concentrated investments in “established companies that are leveraging tech in some way but are not necessarily tech companies.” Also, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the larger players in the space, like SoFi, acquire an existing mortgage lender to beef up their operations, staff up on area experts or eliminate some growing pains. Mortgage companies aren’t the only area in the financial world that are plagued with legacy systems, complex regulations and the need for robust infrastructure to scale. Could “M&A Innovation” be the logical extension of this trend? |
In Europe, Ford will read the speed limit signs, prevent your speeding | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Good news for those of us with a fast car, a lead foot and poor impulse control: is rolling out a new Speed Limiter feature. The car uses a camera to read the speed limit signs before giving you a heads up if your velocity is making you a police-magnet. Whoa, there, Jack. Take ‘er easy. For now, the technology is only being rolled out on the company’s European line of cars, including the Edge, Galaxy and S-MAX vehicles. The Euro-market is a particularly good match for the technology, given that there are more than 35,000 speed cameras across Europe, and speeding tickets turning up in the mail is practically a national sport across much of the continent. Smile for the camera, indeed. It’s yet another tiny piece of the self-driving car puzzle falling into place. In this case, in a car with the Intelligent Speed Limiter activated, a camera will read traffic signs ahead, adjusting the car’s speed without the driver needing to get involved. If the car you’re driving has a navigation package, it will augment the camera data with the speed limit data from the maps. Clever. In effect, the speed nanny combines two technologies into the new, wallet-saving feature. The first is an adjustable speed limiter, which is a bit like cruise control, but instead of keeping your car at a fixed speed, it lets you drive normally but prevents you from going faster than your set speed limit. The second — and, frankly, more interesting — technology is traffic sign recognition, which shows you right on your dashboard the most recent passing restrictions, speed limit signs and other information. You can see the technology in action in the video below. |
Norwegian PEN chapter sues its country to ensure Snowden can receive Ossietzky Prize in person | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | The Norwegian chapter of writers’ rights organization PEN International is in an attempt to make it safe for Edward Snowden to accept in person the prestigious Ossietzky Prize — without fear of extradition to the United States. The Carl von Ossietzky Prize has been awarded yearly by Norsk PEN since 1994 for exceptional work promoting freedom of speech. It’s named after a famous German pacifist who exposed the country’s illegal rearmament and faced charges of high treason — so he and Snowden would have had a lot to talk about. In fact, in the that Snowden was to receive the prize, Norsk PEN called the whistleblower the “Ossietzky of our time.” The problem is that Snowden is unable to receive the award in person, because, well, he’s technically an international criminal at large. He was also the winner of the Bjørnson prize in 2015, and despite a petition asking the Prime Minister to guarantee Snowden free passage, he ended up accepting the award via trademark Snowden video chat. Norsk PEN doesn’t want that to happen again — so they are attempting to force the government’s hand with a lawsuit. “A prosecution against Snowden under the US Espionage Act constitutes a political offense within the meaning of Norwegian and international law. Accordingly, the lawsuit asserts that extradition of Edward Snowden would be contrary to law, and that the court should so declare,” reads the press release. The law firm representing Norsk PEN and Snowden (translated from the Norwegian): “His actions are political in nature, and this means that under Norwegian extradition laws, he cannot be extradited.” People seeking refuge from persecution are often dogged by crimes “political in nature,” and it may be that Norwegian law does provide Snowden and others like him with the opportunity to apply for asylum before any consideration of extradition. The issue was not addressed in time for him to attend the Bjørnson ceremony last September, but the Ossietzky won’t be given out until November. Here’s hoping the Norwegian court system is more efficient than ours. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 04.21.16 | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | Gillmor Gang – Dan Farber, Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. LIVE recording session today at 11amPT/2pmET. Gillmor Gang on Facebook |
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Uber agrees to pay up to $25M for misleading customers in California over its safety | Jon Russell | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Uber has agreed to pay up to $25 million to California-based prosecutors to settle a case in which the ride sharing giant is accused of misleading consumers around the safety of its service. The civil lawsuit, filed in December 2014, took issue with Uber’s background checks of drivers in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Specifically, Uber billed its checks as “the gold standard” that made its service the “safest ride on the road.” However, at least 25 instances in which an approved Uber driver had serious criminal convictions, including identify theft, burglary, child sex offenses and even one murder charge. Uber was also accused of misleading drivers around fees for airport rides. The company began charging a $4 fee for passengers being collected from or going to California airports. Prosecutors found that the “toll” wasn’t being passed on to the airports, while it also worked at some airports were it was not authorized. The settlement money is divided into two: Uber must first pay $10 million to district attorneys in LA and San Francisco. The remaining $15 million will be waived if it complies with terms of agreement over the next two years. That mainly focuses around the company’s marketing of its service. that it has changed the misleading descriptions of its service, while it has also adjusted its airport toll charges and now only offers services at airports at which it is permitted. “We’re glad to put this case behind us and excited to redouble our efforts serving riders and drivers across the state of California,” the company added. Uber has raised multiple billions of dollars from investors, so $10 million — or even the full $25 million — is just a drop in the ocean. But the prosecutors argued that this case sets an important precedent: startups don’t have license to mislead consumers or ignore regulations. “The result we achieved today goes well beyond its impact on Uber,” . “It sends a clear message to all businesses, and to startups in particular, that in the quest to quickly obtain market share, laws designed to protect consumers cannot be ignored. If a business acts like it is above the law, it will pay a heavy price.” |
Hands on with Reddit’s new smartphone app | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | “Finally” is one of those words that gets overused in tech news stories, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s taken a pretty long time for to release its first official, native apps for iOS and Android. Until now, the company has made do with Alien Blue, which started out as a third-party app before being in 2014. But as Sarah Perez reported this morning, the company’s engineering team decided to make it “faster, more modern and more usable.” In the video above, I do a quick runthrough of the app. As with most other news apps, the content probably matters more than any individual features, but there are some things worth showing off, like the way the navigation has been redesigned for mobile, the new image view and the app’s overall speed — which is great until you’re trying to follow a link to another site and everything suddenly slows down. You can . |
GoPro goes all-in on VR without a winning hand | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Flat video is last century and GoPro is pulling out all the stops. Through a series of product launches — most recently the new — the company signals that it has your back in the battle against bi-dimensional consumption of moving pictures. The strategy confirms the obvious — i.e. that it knows which way the wind is blowing. But I think it’s too little, too late. With the new Omni, you can combine the power of six cameras to shoot full 360 degree video; perfect for immersive video experiences, VR and photometry use cases. GoPro Odyssey Omni was first announced at CES earlier this year, but is being demoed live for the first time at the conference in Vegas in a couple of weeks — one of the biggest shows in video and multimedia content production. Full-surround systems for GoPro are not a new thing — there have been quite a few attempts to string together a ton of the GoPro cameras to create camera arrays. GoPro itself has been promoting its solutions over the past year, too, with special channels dedicated to its GoPro VR kit on and more spherical video , as well. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Google’s platform in the form of the . The device looks sexy as all heaven (if you’re into that sort of thing). It comes with no fewer than 16 GoPro cameras and a bank-breaking $15,000 price tag. Obviously, the target audience veers deep into specialist markets that require stereoscopic 360 video (the Omni “only” does monoscopic video). If spending $15,000 on a surround video kit doesn’t fill you with tingly sensations, there’s also been the other extreme: Building your own. There are a lot of plans and guides available online for how to 3D print or build your own rigs out of metal, wood or perspex — with than others. The problem with these solutions has been the synchronization between the cameras, both in terms of frame rate (ensuring that each camera is shooting video frames at the same time at exactly the same number of frames per second) and alignment (making sure the cameras are adjusted to create a seamless 360-degree experience is an exercise in fine-engineering or some seriously hard-core post-processing efforts). Plans and CAD drawings for DIY, 3D printed rigs have been available for a while, such as this version of a “360 Video GoPro rig” by Friloba GoPro has kept a tight lid on the pricing and availability of Omni, but given that six GoPros on their own will set you back around $3,000 — and the fact that a — it’s reasonable to expect a price tag of around $3,500 for the full kit, including cameras. If you already have a ton of GoPro cameras kicking about, you’ll be able to save some cash by buying the Omni kit without the cameras, too. Samsung is going big on VR, too, with Google Street View compatible pictures spawned by its Gear 360 camera While it is exciting that it’s possible to use these relatively high-quality GoPro cameras for VR purposes, I can’t help but wonder whether it might be too little, too late; there are a lot of other VR cameras in the marketplace already, with more being launched on an almost-weekly basis. GoPro is going to be feeling the pressure from all sides. The bottom end of the 360-degree-video market is well-served by established players like , and . Got $150K handy? This 42-camera rig will give you a gigapixel worth of resolution. Woof. In addition to the incumbents, there are a host of smaller startups, including , the $800 , the upcoming $1,000 , the $500 camera, Sphericam’s $3,000 and Giroptic’s $500 . What all these cameras have in common is that they are all-in-one solutions that deliver video that’s ready to use. That makes them vastly easier and faster in a production environment: they don’t have the challenges inherent in multi-camera setups, and its operators won’t need to collect several memory cards, sync, stitch and render the video before it’s ready for editing. GoPro is going to be feeling the pressure on the high end as well. You can easily spend $150,000 on , and if you’re going the custom-built route, the sky is the limit: There are plenty of experts in Hollywood who will build anything you want. None of that might sound like a true challenger — $150,000 is a lot more than $4,500 — but the truth is that there are much more affordable solutions available — and they are dropping in price rapidly. Using the six 4k cameras in an Omni rig will give you a lot more resolution to play with than an all-in-one camera, and the product may just hit the sweet spot for the rapidly expanding VR video crowd, but in placing itself in this exact place in the market, the company is putting itself in a really scary place indeed: Not entry-level enough for mainstream, and not high-end enough for professionals. The problem GoPro is facing is that they haven’t done anything innovative in a long time. The cameras are good , and becoming synonymous with action cameras won’t have done their sales any harm, but at the heart of it, GoPro is essentially selling commodity hardware at a tremendous markup. Sales figures — and challenges — are telling a story all its own. Going after the VR market seems shrewd; it is the hottest thing in tech, and has been for a little while. There is some market fit as well: There a sub-section of VR that is related to the action sports market, which is good news for the company, but I doubt the once-mighty GoPro brand can save them here. Without a history of innovation on the camera side ( doesn’t count), and no evidence of a high-quality all-in-one solution in the pipeline, GoPro is between a rock and a hard place. The cheaper, simpler all-in-one cameras are a credible threat for many use cases, and as quality (and especially resolution) improves, defending a multi-camera set-up is going to get harder and harder. Simultaneously, the high-end multi-camera solutions will be dropping in price, and become a good alternative for users who are playing the quality game. Launching a six-camera setup rig like the Omni is a ballsy move, I’ll give them that, but I can’t help but feel that this is a short-term play in a long-term industry. It may help a little bit, but in order to survive in this market, they’d better have something far more impressive up their sleeve, and soon. |
Student-designed ‘FemtoSats’ aim to bring cost of satellite deployment below $1,000 | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Got a grand burning a hole in your pocket? You could get a new laptop — or you could send this tiny, palm-sized satellite to space. That’s what a team of engineers at Arizona State hope, anyway: their “FemtoSats” are meant to be as cheap a space-bound platform as has ever been devised. At just 3cm per side and 35 grams (that’s about 1.2 inches and 0.077 pounds, dogs of the Imperial system), . It’s powered by a salvaged scrap of solar panel (they don’t make them small enough off the shelf), the tiny unit includes propulsion, imaging, communication, and data collection. “The design standard bootstraps from the Cal Poly CubeSat standard and is extensible, allowing major customization,” wrote Jekan Thanga, the ASU assistant professor who heads up the project, in an email to TechCrunch. The larger 3F version stacks 3 of the cubes together, for a satellite about the size of a stick of butter. This one has room for a payload, though the increased mass and volume will end up setting you back considerably more than the 1F. The size is a mixed blessing. It’s cheap to send up, but finding space-ready hardware that fits in a 3cm cube is difficult. They’re working on that use sublimating powder to extend themselves, though the team has yet to find an X-band wireless chipset that fits in the FemtoSat (it’s UHF and S-band for now). At current prices, the team estimates a SunCube 1F could conceivably be sent to the ISS for under $1,000, where microgravity and other space exposure experiments could be carried out. Low Earth orbit would cost about 3 times that. Still, it’s a bargain compared with launching even the most barebones CubeSats, which could cost a hundred grand or more, depending on launch services and demand. (Here’s hoping will bring that down, though.) “Because of the low launch cost, we can test and space-qualify components without having to take it on a CubeSat or even dedicated spacecraft,” Thanga wrote. “I think that will lead to fast turnaround times in space hardware development and qualification.” Lowering the barrier to entry will almost certainly encourage experimentation and expansion, just as it has in many other areas of tech. But the team is a long way from, say, mass manufacture or commercial availability. They plan to make a dozen or two FemtoSats in order to test and qualify them for deployment. Eventually they hope to launch them as pint-sized science laboratories, or include them on larger spacecraft as essentially disposable general-purpose orbiters. If you’re curious, a standards doc is available . If you’re near the ASU campus and have the night free, consider to hear Thanga present the SunCube and other tech his Lab has been working on. It starts at 6, so hurry. |
The second round of Disrupt NY Hackathon tickets are now available | Matt Burns | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | May is right around the corner, and soon thousands of innovators, investors and entrepreneurs will make their way to Brooklyn for . While the main event may be the conference that runs from May 9-11, one of our favorite parts of Disrupt is , which takes place the weekend before. We’re thrilled to announce that the second wave of free tickets to the Hackathon are now available, and you can snag your tickets . As always, tickets are given out on a first-come, first-served basis, so you’ll need to act quickly if you want to get in on the Hackathon action. |
A lot of secondary buyers are apparently coming from overseas | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | We told you early last month that secondary businesses have been with sellers in recent months, and that’s not expected to change anytime soon. went public in the first quarter. There’s also the related issue of , which has both institutional and individual shareholders nervously wondering whether to hang on to their holdings or get rid of them. Helping to keep the whole flywheel going: secondary buyers who are coming from overseas to snap up startup stakes. So says , a partner in the emerging companies and venture capital group of law firm Morrison Foerster who got us up to speed on the market earlier today. Harris has his own agenda when it comes to secondaries — including helping startups decide whether to engage in transactions, how to structure them and to ensure companies have some degree of control over the process. But he spoke candidly about the good, the bad and the unexpected of what he’s seeing. Our chat has been edited for length. TH: That’s right. [The secondary market] is now one of the only ways that liquidity is provided to shareholders who don’t want to sit on their often highly appreciated shares. There were no IPOs in the first quarter. And some companies are still so highly valued, who can buy them? Meanwhile, you have people who joined these private companies thinking they’d go public and that [an IPO exit] was how they were going to pay their college tuition or for elder care or for the mortgage on their house. TH: I don’t think that’s true. I’ve advised some VCs [about] what I perceive to be incredible deals based on what I’ve read about these companies and what they are worth. It’s like an art auction when the artists aren’t yet dead or they’re recently dead and it’s not clear how much their pieces will be worth in the future. People took a gamble on Facebook before it went public; they gambled on Square. Others who are buying into unicorns are similarly hoping the companies will go public someday or else that they can turn around and sell the shares for more later. TC: Many of them are tourist investors from overseas — both high net-worth individuals, funds, and public companies — that are thrilled to return home and say, “We just bought fill-in-the-blank-hot company.” They show up quite a bit and they appear relatively price insensitive, which makes them attractive to sellers. You also see investment bankers who represent someone who wants to buy or sell shares of certain companies. The angels and VC are also buying and selling to each other. TH: It’s not like there’s an end of the chain. Every seller acknowledges that their stock could go higher, but they have cash needs. Meanwhile, almost everyone on the buy side becomes a potential seller in the future. The secondary market is becoming like Nasdaq but with a lot less activity and fewer participants. TH: There are a hundred ways that buyers and sellers can have access to different information; it’s something the SEC is very concerned about. In many cases, the seller is inside the company or left it recently or was an investor in the company and had information from board meetings. As a broad matter, sellers have an information advantage over buyers. But buyers legally acknowledge this information disadvantage. [When buying the shares], they release any claims they may make against the seller. Now, if you sell me shares of some hot startup, knowing the FDA is going to invalidate its new drug, heck yeah, I’ll come after you, even if I did sign that information disadvantage document. It’s like insider trading. So I do think we’ll see litigation between remorseful sellers and buyers in the future. But there’s no prominent stream of [lawsuits yet]. TH: When sales involve common stock, there is an impact on the company. The IRS views the sales as an arm’s length transaction between willing buyers and sellers who [then become] the best indicia they have [of the shares’] fair market value. So while companies are granting stock options to new recruits, they need to be figuring out what price to set. If they are granting options today, and they become aware of a secondary sale that occurred this morning, they have to [tie the options grant] to that price or risk running afoul [of the agency]. TH: By volume, more common stock sellers, just because there are many more common shareholders, including current and former employees. The number of shares they hold tends to be small, though, so the dollar volume tends to be small. By comparison, there are fewer preferred shareholders in the market, but when they do sell, they tend to be $50 million-and-up chunks of stock that they are moving. I scratch my head [over it]. $50 million [in a secondary sale] is pretty nice day, but [you wonder] what do they know that the buyer doesn’t know. That’s what the SEC wants to know, too. TH: Again, it’s a lot of foreign investors and sovereign wealth funds and publicly traded companies in Asia. Those are big dollar amounts, so they tend not to be one Silicon Valley fund selling to another. |
Mashable cuts staff as it shifts focus from politics and world news | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore (pictured above) announced layoffs today in a company-wide email that he also . As part of the cuts, Executive Editor Jim Roberts and Chief Revenue Officer Seth Robin will be leaving the company. that the layoffs affected about 30 staffers, including its entire political reporting team, plus “most of its global news desk and about half of its editorial video team.” The news comes just a week after in a round led by Turner Broadcasting. Turns out the two stories are connected. Cashmore wrote: Last week we announced a funding round to put Mashable on
more platforms, including television. This new focus means we have to
change the way our teams are organized, and involved some very tough
decisions. While such decisions are part of running a business, they are never easy. Change can often be hard, but we’re certain this is the right direction for Mashable. More specifically, he said as Mashable moves to TV and streaming video, it no longer makes sense to cover world news and politics separately, rather than from a digital-specific angle: “We’ll spend more time focusing on
our core coverage — technology, web culture, science, social media,
entertainment, business and lifestyle, all told through the digital
lens.” Lol stranded in Ohio and can’t even access my email to get my flight information to get back and clean out my desk. Thanks! — nadja oertelt (@nadjao) |
Now’s your chance to try Signal’s desktop Chrome app | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | The desktop version of Edward Snowden’s favored end-to-end messaging system, Signal, is now available to anyone who wants to check it out. Open Whisper Systems announced the desktop version back in December, but until today it was invite-only. It’s not a native app but a , meaning it installs in the browser but gets in its own little window — which is either a plus or a minus depending on how you work. You’ll also need to be using the Signal Android app — the iOS version isn’t supported just yet. Setup is largely automatic: you’ll add the Chrome app to the list of devices associated with your number with a text and a QR code. It’s just a tap or two to unlink, as well, in case you need to do so in a hurry. The app is still in beta, so it may not be feature-complete: the desktop version doesn’t support SMS, for instance, though texts will still appear in the mobile app. |
The Sacramento Kings just held the NBA’s first startup pitch competition | Fitz Tepper | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | At a game on Tuesday night, the Sacramento Kings held the National Basketball League’s . Four local companies (narrowed down from 32 semi-finalists and about 100 applicants) pitched to the entire stadium, which voted on Twitter for the winner. , an on-demand legal advice service, won the competition and took home a $10,000 cash prize. But perhaps more notable is that Kings chairman and tech entrepreneur will invest $5,000 in each of the four finalists. While the companies won’t gain much from the small $5,000 investment, having Ranadive on their cap table is probably a good consolation prize. When I spoke to Ranadive about hosting the NBA’s first venture competition, he was enthusiastic about the fact that this is just the start to more outreach between the team, the NBA and the startup community. One interesting aspect of the pitch-off is that the contest accepted startups from all industries. This is a different approach from pitch contests and accelerators run by other leagues, which tend to only solicit companies working in the sports entertainment and media space. Some examples are the and the pitch contest held by the NFL, Stanford and TechCrunch. So why would the King’s contest specifically omit a focus on the intersection between technology and professional sports? Ranadive explained that the Kings’ mission statement includes “enhancing lives, reaching the lives of those it touches, and [making] the world a better place.” Essentially, the only way to hold a venture competition that supports the team’s goal of making the world a better place is to solicit companies that share the same goal, regardless of which industry they focus on. |
Sen. Franken wants to know what Oculus is doing with its Rift user data | Lucas Matney | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Sen. (D-Minn.) has some questions for Oculus. The U.S. senator sent a this morning to Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe to inquire about how his virtual reality company is utilizing and sharing customers’ personal data. While Sen. Franken called VR technology “an exciting development,” he also expressed concern with how the company is collecting users’ personal data through the headset and its associated services. This letter, he said, is intended to help people “understand the extent to which Oculus may be collecting Americans’ personal information, including sensitive location data, and sharing that information with third parties.” Numerous complaints from users and media outlets have arisen over the past week regarding specific language within the Terms of Service (ToS) for the Rift. From seemingly creepy stipulations that the company reserves the rights to collect user movement data, to the always-on gathering of user data, there have been a great deal of pertinent questions that the company has stayed relatively quiet on. Oculus did clarify to earlier this week that language in the ToS was being misconstrued in regards to ownership rights of user-created content, but didn’t respond to other concerns. “Users and content developers own all the content and IP they create using Oculus services. We are not taking ownership. Our terms of service give Oculus a license to user created content so we can enable a full suite of current and future products and services on our platform, like sharing a piece of VR content with a friend.” Franken’s individual questions largely focus on some of the more vague sets of language in the ToS regarding user data being gathered and shared. He asks Iribe about how user location data, physical movement data and communication data are utilized and how long the information is retained. Furthermore, Franken presses the company to disclose what precautions are being taken to protect these selections of user data. One word that is notably absent from the letter is “Facebook.” Though Oculus, like Instagram, operates as a unique company under Facebook, there have been more than a fair share of privacy concerns regarding how information is shared between the VR company and the social media giant. Franken does not directly call out Facebook in this letter to Iribe, but he does frequently refer to Oculus’ “related companies.” Virtual reality as a technological platform raises more ethical questions than the average piece of hardware, thus, some of these early consumer products are understandably drawing major scrutiny. Sen. Franken seems to want Oculus to set a precedent of transparency while virtual reality is still in its early stages. I believe Americans have a fundamental right to privacy, and that right includes an individual s access to information about what data are being collected about them, how the data are being treated, and with whom the data are being shared. As virtual reality technology evolves, I ask that you provide more information on Rift and how Oculus is addressing issues of privacy and security. The senator ends his letter with a request that the company responds to his list of questions by May 13 of this year. Franken has had a of pressing tech companies for transparency in regards to their usages of users’ personal data. Hopefully a response from Oculus can allay some user concerns or highlight areas in the company’s current Terms of Service that may need some adjustment. If you’re curious, here’s the . |
Test drive: Self-parking in the 2016 Jaguar XF S | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | I recently had the opportunity to test drive the 2016 Jaguar XF S, which is a stately four-door luxury sedan with comfortable leather seats and supercharged V6 engine that could get a person in a lot of trouble. But not too much trouble — the new XF has the latest in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), which includes adaptive cruise control, traffic-sign recognition and automatic emergency braking (AEB) with queue assist. I wanted to try all these things. The tricky part of testing many ADAS features is that they’re designed for safety. Rather than focusing on the convenience aspects of autonomous driving, the sensors and computers work together to create a kind of force field around your car. The idea is that the car can detect and react to a potential accident before the driver can. You will not be surprised to learn that manufacturers are less than keen to have journalists raging around in their cars trying to nearly hit things in order to test these systems. But the Jaguar XF S I tested had ADAS features that were not only safe to try, they were fun. The best? Park assist. Searching for a space Say you’re crawling along city streets (under 18 miles an hour, in the XF) looking for a parking space. Hit the button in the console, and the vehicle’s sensors will look for a space along with you. As you pull past a spot that looks maybe a bit tight, a message will pop up in the dash telling you that the XF has located a spot into which it will fit. It will ask you to put the car in reverse and gently press the accelerator. The driver is still in charge of the gas and brake pedals, but the car does all the steering into the space. You can put your hands in your lap, clasp them in prayer that you do not ding your bumper or curb your rims or wave them in excited glee because you live in the future. But you do not need to steer. The system will tell you when to stop and put the car in drive to finish the job. When you’re ready to leave, it will steer you out of the spot. Preparing to leave a space This is not autonomous driving; I still had to work the pedals. It’s not like getting out of your Tesla and letting it park itself in the garage. But it is convenient driving, and the XF S does a good job. I never got stuck in slow enough traffic for queue assist to kick in, nor did I need the AEB to save me from a fender bender. (You’re welcome, Jaguar.) But the lane-keeping and forward-collision alerts definitely came into play. These settings seemed a bit sensitive, which can lead some owners to disable them. No one wants the car to be a nagging nanny, but turning these features off defeats the purpose of alerting you to potential trouble. All this cool tech does not come cheap, either. The MSRP of the 2016 Jaguar XF S (the S is for that supercharged engine) is $62,700. The Driver Assistance Pack alone adds more than $3,000 to the price tag. With some other luxury bits added to the already luxurious sports sedan, like the very useful head-up display, the car as tested was $73,035. If the XF’s price tag is already in your ballpark, the added safety and convenience of ADAS is probably worth the money. |
Litsy is a book-focused social network that goes beyond reviews | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | If you’re a book lover, might be the social app for you. The startup was founded by Todd Lawton and Jeff LeBlanc, who previously launched the book-themed clothing company . Lawton told me the idea for Litsy came from connecting with Out of Print fans at events like book festivals and comic book conventions. “We realized that there’s a really passionate conversation that happens face-to-face with readers that wasn’t necessarily captured digitally,” Lawton said. At first, that struck me as a strange thing say when exists, and when there are so many different places where you can post your opinion of a book. But as Lawton pointed out, there’s more to the conversation, and to building a community, than posting reviews: “What we wanted to do was take the best, the most fun aspects of other social media platforms and back it with an amazing book database.” So on Litsy, each post can take a number of different forms — a blurb (basically any short comment), a quote or a review. Even if you’re writing a review, you have to be concise, because everything’s limited to 300 characters. You can also include an image, whether it’s a photo of your copy of the book or something else that’s related. You can browse Litsy content by following different accounts, but all those updates are also tied to a specific book. So you can bring up a book’s profile, read what everyone has said about it (Lawton described it as seeing “the world’s collective marginalia”) and, if it seems interesting, add it to your to-read list. Other cool features include the ability to mark something as a spoiler, so it’s hidden from other users until they opt in to see your comment. You’ve also got a “Litfluence” score, which helps you identify the most influential people on the app and see how you stack up against them. The app (currently iOS-only) is free, and LeBlanc told me the team is more focused on building a community than making money, at least for now, though he also acknowledged, “We do know we eventually need a business model” — in this case it’ll probably involve some form of advertising. While the Litsy team is only starting to promote the app publicly, they’ve already brought on some high-profile users, including authors like Joe Hill, bookstores like The Strand and publishers like Penguin Random House and Harper Perennial. And to be clear, Litsy is a separate company from Out of Print, although Lawton and LeBlanc are still running both, and Lawton acknowledged that in some ways, “They definitely go hand-in-hand.” “We started out with T-shirts never thinking this is going to be a T-shirt company — we wanted to make an emotional connection,” he said. “Now we want to continue making that connection.” You can . |
Facebook will announce chatbot and live chat APIs at F8 | Josh Constine | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Chatbots could replace 1-800 numbers, and Facebook wants them on Messenger. But most businesses don’t have the resources or technical skills to build chatbots themselves. That’s why Facebook is currently providing developers with API tools to build chatbots and Live Chat web plug-ins for business clients, according to multiple sources and a leaked deck Facebook shared with devs. The tools will be announced at Facebook’s F8 conference next week. [ ] Facebook already has a directory for approved marketing partners. It lets businesses find technology and service providers that can help businesses with ads, content, measurement and community management. But Facebook doesn’t yet provide a distinction, badge or separate directory for partners that can specifically assist with messaging. Developers we’ve spoken to say Facebook hasn’t formalized or named a specific Messenger platform partner program. Still, it’s expected to refer businesses to Messenger developers and a more official partner program could come later. What we do know is that Facebook has been working with B2B developers of two types, with some overlap. It’s all part of Messenger’s big expansion into connecting potential customers with businesses via chat, which it . Chatbot providers will help businesses build automated response systems for fielding messages from potential customers. Instead of having to develop the complex technologies themselves, or fumble around the Internet trying to find someone who can help, they’ll be able to easily find ones Facebook’s given the thumbs-up. TechCrunch has reviewed a presentation sent by Facebook to some Messenger chatbot developers. It details how beyond just text chatbots will be able to respond with what it calls “Structured Messages.” These include a title, image, a description, a URL and calls to action such as visiting a website, viewing an e-commerce order or making a restaurant reservation. This Structured Message functionality essentially lets developers build systems similar to Uber’s and KLM’s integrations with Messenger. Here you’ll see a mockup we made based on the presentation Facebook shared with chatbot developers. This builds on the with developers that allows them to build bots. Facebook is also working with Live Chat developers who can build plug-ins for “Message Us”-style contact buttons for websites. This way, rather than pushing customers to email them or call them on the phone, they can interact with a human support agent over Messenger chat instead. When tapped, the Live Chat buttons will bounce users over to the Messenger app on mobile or Messenger.com on the web. Users should be able to see read receipts and “typing…” indicators, depending on how the integrations are built with Facebook’s Chat SDK and various APIs. Facebook declined to comment. previously reported Facebook will let news publishers distribute content through Messenger. A message from a business to a user via Messenger Currently, Facebook isn’t charging developers any sort of subscription or per-message feed for operating on the platform. However, Facebook could still make money from chatbots and live chat customer support. One option is for Facebook to push businesses running chatbots to buy News Feed ads that initiate conversations. We got to provide early details about “Click To Message” ads at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. But that was before chatbots and chat customer support were a big deal. Soon you could imagine businesses buying ads that when tapped, start a Messenger conversation with their chatbot that tries to sell you something. Making humans answer these pings might be too costly for businesses, but chatbots can scale efficiently, making the Click To Message ads worth buying. Another option is for Facebook to . That’s the plan, according to a leaked presentation attained by TechCrunch in February, sent by a Facebook team member to one of the biggest brands in its platform. The presentation says advertisers would be able to pay to send marketing messages to people who’ve already messaged that business. Facebook suggests businesses to chat with in Messenger, which could become an advertising opportunity. Image via Business Insider To get those conversations started, the presentation explained that Facebook had quietly launched Messenger shortlinks that instantly open a Messenger thread with the corresponding business. . One other possibility is that Facebook could let businesses pay for preferred placement in its list of suggestions of businesses to message, which spotted yesterday. Facebook can’t start a chatbot and chat customer service revolution on its own. By fostering an ecosystem of developers to help businesses the same way it did with ads and Page publishing, it could make sure every niche is covered. And the more of our communication that’s routed through Messenger, the closer to the Facebook family of apps we’ll stay. |
As globalization slows, new startup Globality raises $27 million to bring SMBs to world markets | Jonathan Shieber | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Global capitalism is in a bit of pickle right now. Goldman Sachs (either a or the , depending on your point of view) came out with a report earlier this year , while recently published an article The Journal’s Josh Zumbrun writes: Much of the world is struggling with a sluggishness that is clouding the U.S. outlook, driven by aging demographics, slumping labor productivity and policy makers lacking the tools or the will to pump more life into the global economy. Beyond productivity problems and geriatric Gene no longer working at the machine, there’s a sense that big multinational companies may have wrung all the efficiencies they’re going to wring out of the system. That’s where the stealth mode startup Globality is hoping to make a difference. Founded by Joel Hyatt, the former co-founder and head of Al Gore’s news channel Current TV and the founder of Hyatt Legal Services, the company is announcing a new $27 million round to bring to market his vision of a technology that can help take small and mid-sized businesses to global markets. “Small and midsize companies have largely been on the sideline when it comes to global business opportunities,” Hyatt said in a statement. “Making globalization work requires a new and robust platform that eliminates frictions in global trade and creates ‘micro-multinationals’ able to compete globally.” Globality declined to comment on what it is that the startup will actually do, and its press release is long on jargon and short on details, simply noting that it will use “artificial intelligence and human curation” to get small and mid-sized businesses into international markets. The money for this current round came from the same pool of heavy hitters and family offices that backed the Series A including: former Vice President Al Gore; Ron Johnson, CEO of Enjoy and a former Apple retail executive; John Joyce, Vice Chairman and CFO of Kony and former CFO of IBM; Michael Marks, Managing Partner of Riverwood Capital and former CEO of Flextronics; and Ken Goldman, CFO of Yahoo. Those captains of the tech and political worlds aren’t the only big names to sign on to the cause. With the new round, Globality has also added three new board members: Juliet de Baubigny, a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Mark Hurd, the chief executive of Oracle; and Mark Vorsatz, a managing director and chief executive of Andersen Tax. |
Rapchat makes me the rapper I always knew I was | Khaled "Tito" Hamze | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | We covered a little bit , and I finally decided it was time to take it for a spin. I know I’ve got sweet rapping skills, and I know when it’s time to lay a sick beat and spit some fire, so that’s why I’m doing this in-depth review of Rapchat. Rapchat is an app that lets you pick a beat from a library, rap over the beat and easily share it internally on Rapchat. People can then comment on your raps and “like” them, and you can try getting them to trend on the charts. You can also easily share your songs on SoundCloud or Twitter, or send a link to anyone. Watch this full video of my breakdown of Rapchat. Rapchat is a really fun app. There are so many beats to pick from, and if you like rapping and just doing whatever you want, it’s not a bad app to play with. You can view a couple of the full raps that I made , and to get a taste of the kind of raps that you’ll have to go up against. I’ll probably get some hate for my sweet sweet raps but that’s fine because you can hate the playa, but you can never hate the game. . |
Silicon Valley could gain $25 billion by narrowing gender gap | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Research has shown, time and time again, that diversity is good for business and the economy. If Silicon Valley can close the gender gap, the tech-heavy area could gain $25 billion (a 9% increase) in gross domestic product by 2025, according to a new McKinsey report. In San Francisco, the city could drive roughly $45 billion in 2025 GDP. Statistically compared to other metropolitan areas, Silicon Valley could improve in overall gender parity. Silicon Valley has a gender parity score of .57 compared to .69 in San Francisco and .61 in New York, according to McKinsey. [gallery ids="1303952,1303951,1303953"] That said, Silicon Valley is the best performing MSA in California when it comes to single mothers, meaning that is has relatively few single mothers compared to other areas. San Francisco is also a top performer around single mothers, but has a significant opportunity to increase the number of women in the labor force. Right now, there are just 80 women for every 100 men in the San Francisco workforce. [gallery ids="1304021,1304022"] In order to determine these scores, McKinsey looked across ten indicators: labor force participation rate, professional and technical jobs, representation in leadership and managerial positions, time spent in unpaid care work, single mothers, incidence of teen pregnancy, political representation, violence against women, maternal mortality and higher education. At the California state level, closing the gender gap could drive $272 billion in GDP by 2025. California could achieve this from higher female participation in the labor force, narrowing the gap between the number of men and women who work part-time and full-time, and getting women in employed in more productive sectors. Achieving full gender parity, where women participate in the economy at the same level as men, California could drive $648 billion in 2025 GDP. At a national level, the U.S. could add $2.1 trillion in 2025 GDP by closing the gender gap in work. Gender parity in the U.S. would boost that figure to $4.3 trillion. All of these stats, of course, are best-case scenarios that are highly dependent upon actions local government and big businesses take. The goal with this report, lead author Kweilin Elligrud told TechCrunch in an email, is twofold. One is for the government, businesses and nonprofits to take action around gender equality. In the report, McKinsey lays out several potential interventions to effect change, including providing financial incentives and support, creating economic opportunities and implementing laws, policies and regulations. It also notes how companies like Google and Netflix have set best practices to build upon in unpaid care work. At Google, when the company increased paid leave from 12 to 18 weeks, the rate at which new mothers left fell by 50%. The second goal is to “bring more people to the table to talk about this and act on this,” Elligrud said. “It is not just the right thing to do for half the population, it is the smart economic thing to do.” |
FBI says method used to unlock iPhone doesn’t work with iPhone 5s or newer | Romain Dillet | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | Slowly but surely, the FBI is releasing information about the method it used to unlock Farook’s iPhone 5c involved in the San Bernardino shooting. Now that the Justice Department , the FBI doesn’t have to disclose the mysterious method it used. First, the FBI disclosed this alternative method to some . And FBI director James Comey gave a few more hints. , Comey said in a speech that the method doesn’t work on all iPhones. In particular, he said that it doesn’t work with iPhone 5s or the newest models. So the FBI can’t simply just hack into an iPhone 6s using the tool it just bought. iOS 8 and later comes with encryption features that make it much harder to get access to an iPhone’s content. But Farook’s iPhone was running iOS 9 on an iPhone 5c. So it looks like the tool works with iOS 9, but not on recent iPhones. The iPhone 5c doesn’t have a Touch ID sensor or a secure enclave. The first iPhone with a Touch ID sensor was the iPhone 5s. So it could be related to the Touch ID sensor or not. But there’s one thing for sure — the FBI hasn’t told Apple. Given that the FBI might take advantage of this security hole for future cases, it doesn’t want Apple to fix it too quickly. “We tell Apple, then they’re going to fix it, then we’re back where we started from,” he said . “We may end up there, we just haven’t decided yet.” This is a shameful strategy as it exposes the data of millions of iPhone users to hackers and intelligence services around the world. Also, we have to trust the FBI’s word because no security expert has seen its method yet. And it’s hard to trust the FBI after this case… |
Clearbit Connect’s new Gmail widget can help you find anyone’s email address | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | LinkedIn’s of the popular email add-in Rapportive, and its subsequent demolition as its new owner some of its best features, left a lot of users angry and scrambling for an alternative. A of have since , but a newcomer called may be one of the best to hit the market yet. may not be a household name, but the company is today serving as the data backbone to , including Asana, Braintree, Slack, Stripe, Zendesk, Zen Payroll, AdRoll, Intercom, Bugsnag, Mention, Segment and hundreds of others. It offers a suite of focused on scouring the web and other data sources for publicly available information on people and businesses. This information can then be put to use for a variety of purposes by its customers – like generating data about new sales leads, as Asana does, for example. Or it can be used for risk and compliance purposes, as Braintree does when underwriting new merchants. Until today, the company did not offer a consumer-facing product. However, they realized there was room in the market for one after Rapportive’s closure – especially since “We were big fans of Rapportive back in the day,” explains Clearbit co-founder and CEO Alex MacCaw, “and we were pretty disappointed when all the features were taken out of it.” The company, a small team of eight based in San Francisco, decided to solve that problem for themselves. With the newly launched Gmail add-in , you get a sidebar widget like you once did with Rapportive. This widget offers details on not only the person you’re emailing with but also information on their company, when available. This information includes the person’s name, photo, title, location, URL, and social accounts as well as the company’s name, address, and other details like number of employees, type (public or private), funding, tags, and social accounts, among other things. If that’s all Connect did, it would already be better than Rapportive, which focuses more on the person you’re in touch with, and not the details of their company. However, Connect goes a step further. It can actually provide you with an email address for someone when you don’t have that information on file in your address book. Rapportive users probably already know a variation on this trick: you type in different combinations of an email format (like john.smith@company.com or jsmith@company.com or johnsmith@company.com) and see which one will trigger the Rapportive widget in the sidebar to show you the person’s profile. When it does, you know you’ve guessed the email correctly. Connect is so much easier. From the Gmail “Compose” screen, you click the Connect button and a new window appears. Here, you type in the company domain – which helpfully auto-suggests matching companies as you type. You then enter in a person’s name or title. In the list of matches that appears, you click the name of the person you want to email and – – there’s their email address. [gallery ids="1304094,1304095"] This, of course, is a double-edged sword. While super convenient for end users looking to send out emails, it also means that those who like to keep their email address more private will have some trouble doing so in the future. As with Clearbit’s APIs, this system works by scouring the web for public data. For companies, that means crawling websites, SSL certificates, Schedule D filings, government records, social networks, and more. But for people, it’s not only relying on what’s publicly available on the web and in some public data sets Clearbit buys – it’s also relying on Connect’s user base. The widget has a button (at the top right) that lets users flag and fix bad data. Now that Connect is exiting from its private beta of 7,000 testers, its ability to leverage the crowd to correct its database of people and their emails will now greatly improve. For the privacy-minded, you should know that, like Rapportive, Connect requires “read” access to your email so it can parse the metadata in the headers. “We’re very clear upfront when people install it.. We try to let people make an educated decision for themselves,” says MacCaw. “We never store any of the email, we just look at the metadata…it’s essentially a give-to-get model,” he adds. is free for the time being, with plans to introduce a premium tier offering more email lookups per month for paid users. Plans to address other platforms including Inbox, and Outlook and Apple Mail on the desktop, are also in the works. |
Managed services killed DevOps | Andrey Akselrod | 2,016 | 4 | 7 |
DevOps, as we know it, is dead. Perhaps not many people agree with me, but the age of DevOps is just about over. Then again, perhaps this won’t come as a surprise to some. While certain industries somehow manage to survive for years — decades, perhaps — without needing to make fundamental changes, that’s absolutely not the case in the software world. Developers consistently reinvent the wheel, and our tools and practices just keep getting better and better by building on existing technologies and constantly making improvements. These kinds of shifts are what have led to the rise of DevOps in the first place, after all. So why is DevOps, as it exists now, going away? It’s a “Perfect Storm” scenario in some ways. Lots of events coming together that drastically change the status quo. And where it all began was the concept and eventual widespread adoption of agile development and continuous deployment practices. DevOps was invented as a way to unite developers and IT operations (system administrators) to help them find a common ground. The premise was to automate the development and deployment tools that require collaborations between both disciplines. But someone still has to come in and write the required tool set. Thus, most companies resolved to create DevOps teams that combined the expertise of both sides to support their developers. The old model of throwing the code over the wall to system administrators who would deploy it stopped working with agile processes and continuous deployment practices. Whose responsibility is it when something goes wrong — the person deploying the code or the developer? Developers don’t know much about deploying and systems administrators don’t know much about how the code is supposed to work. In a way, this is the same antipattern (to borrow a term popularized by Andrew Koenig) that led to the QA team. And now QA is dying, too; no one can afford to have it in the middle of continuous deployment. Developers are responsible for full test automation and making sure their code works. Once code is verified and ready, it is pushed and enabled in production. Developers know they are responsible for what happens with their code as it hits production. Thus, we declared “all deployments shall be automated” and DevOps teams were born — not without quite a bit of confusion in the market over the definition itself of DevOps. The fat lady sang and system administrators were pronounced DevOps, and they started to learn Python to develop tools. Developers who knew a thing or two about operating systems and networking joined in to help them with development. For a time, all was good and peachy. DevOps teams were happily developing their custom tools, allowing developers to deploy the code to production with a push of a button; but they were still managing a lot of infrastructure the same way system administrators were doing it before — databases had to be expertly installed, replicated, clustered, cached, etc. But before long, another problem crept in. No one wanted to invest a lot of money into DevOps; they don’t write the product’s sexy features and they are, frankly, the cost center of your cost center. The teams were bare bones — they did the minimum work necessary, but it was tough to get the tools to the point of great reusability and give developers enough control to configure the tools themselves. Suddenly, DevOps became the bottleneck. And all wasn’t quite so peachy and rainbow-y anymore. So, who’s to blame for the demise of DevOps? That’s easy! It’s everybody’s friend, the cloud. And when I say the cloud, I really mean managed services. Today, developers are increasingly turning to managed services for toolsets and infrastructure requirements — tasks traditionally managed by DevOps teams. Amazon Web Services and other managed service providers have allowed for a dramatically simplified way of working, reducing complexity on the developer end and, thus, allowing them to focus on software development instead of installing databases and ensuring processes like backup, redundancy and uptime. In other words, managed services removed a lot of headaches with which DevOps teams were forced to deal. While it might be hard for some people to accept, the only conclusion can be that DevOps teams are creating the same problem they were initially built to solve. DevOps was established to speed things up, but because of the nature of managed services today, you no longer need a whole team to facilitate them — why not simply teach all developers how to utilize the infrastructure tools in the cloud? The truth is, like QA before it, DevOps has itself become an unnecessary step in the continuous deployment process. As such, it is obsolete. Does DevOps need to go away entirely? No! In fact, it will live on in existing development teams. DevOps at its core should really be a , and the very important skills it cultivated over the years should be imparted to all developers, especially those of the next generation. The DevOps role itself will live on in a different state, though — largely to manage governance issues like centralized security and cost management, because, while the cloud provides flexibility for instantly provisioning new software and tools on demand, the flip side is you have to be careful with it — otherwise you can unintentionally provision more than you need, and you’ll end up spending a fortune. DevOps as a team may be gone sooner than later, but its practices will be carried on to whole development teams so that we can continue to build upon what it has brought us in the past years. DevOps is dead. Long live DevOps! |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,016 | 4 | 21 | null |
A few things I learned about virtual reality after spending way too much time in it | Greg Kumparak | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | I’ve spent a lot of time in virtual reality. A whole lot. We’re in the middle of building a VR testing lab at the TechCrunch office, and I’m trying to iron out as many kinks as possible said kinks end up costing me money. Between the Rift CV1 and the Vive, I’ve spent more time in a VR headset than anyone who isn’t building VR stuff should have at this early point. I’ve come to realize a few things about VR in that time — things that weren’t immediately obvious when I was just pondering how neat VR could be, or during the many sessions I’d had with the early developer headset prototypes. None of this is meant to make any grand statements about the future of VR. Consider it more of a captain’s log from someone who has spent too many hours with a little box strapped to his face. |
The future of the car is not about propulsion | Mike Hoefflinger | 2,016 | 4 | 9 |
I’m to see breakthroughs in cars. I have and respect for . I agree with Peter Thiel on the thing, and with Larry Page, who that Silicon Valley doesn’t throw the ball down the field enough. So, with all the talk of the Chevy Bolt Tesla-killer, the will-they-or-won’t-they joint venture of Google and Ford, the Tesla Model 3 March unveil, the intrigue around Apple Car, GM’s of the 40-person self-driving car-kit maker Cruise Automation and $4 billion of federal monies for self-driving cars, it’s a great time to take stock. Somehow these lovable goofs in Detroit snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with the Chevy Bolt arriving this year (as Wired pointed out, they killed EV1 and sold a mere 80,000 of the hybrid Volt in five years), acquiring Cruise’s self-driving technology ingredients and betting $500 million on Lyft doing ground traffic control of the autonomous fleet down the road. After 10 years of Elon Musk predicting exactly this showdown for the Model 3, it will finally be time for him to compete in the brutal business of $30,000 cars with someone who’s been to that end-zone before (Mary Barra and GM) and figure out how he will create demand for 10x as many vehicles per year as he sold in 2015. By 2019 (and possibly 2020 if the with the internal Jony Ive review this January cause delays), Tim Cook will be three years behind Mary (and two behind Elon). While that’s not been a fundamental problem for Apple in the past, he’ll need to ship a v1.0 of Apple Car that’s more like v1.0 of iPhone than v1.0 of Apple Watch. To be honest, after the non-announcement announcements and non-denial denials, I’m confused about whether they’re building cars with Amazon or with Ford. Or both. Or neither. In the meantime, they’ve driven the most autonomous miles of anyone. By far. Then it hit me: At sub-$30 oil (a quarter of 2008 levels), they’re all screwed.
$2-per-gallon gas is so toxic to (at least U.S.) electric vehicle demand that sales in 2015 actually went down year-over-year (to say nothing of their utterly anemic 1.4 percent share of the market).
As gas prices eased, America’s consumers returned to buying Dodge RAM trucks with the 6.4L HEMI V8 (which is why Chrysler is crushing it). Turns out Mary’s surprise victory, all of Elon’s hard work, those 100 acres Tim bought in San Jose so he can cover them and do Project Titan R&D beyond spying eyes and all of Larry’s millions of autonomous miles driven are all pointless, because we just want to drive trucks. Sigh. But, wait. Don’t despair at the prospect of more of the same. This will be the disruption you seek. However, the coming upheaval in cars won’t be about metal, drive-trains or batteries (or even particular autonomous systems). It will be about the experience inside. For all but the car enthusiast, a car is not about the car. Or even about the act of driving. It is about getting somewhere in a way that does not suck. If Uber’s meteoric rise has taught us anything, it’s that if you could have someone (or something) drive you, you would. For more than 100 years, driving has been mostly about handling the car, some about your comfort and a tiny bit about your cabin experience. In the next 5-10 years, as we are increasingly — and eventually entirely — relieved of having to handle the car, driving will be nearly 100 percent about the cabin experience. Whether you are being moved by fossil fuels or electricity will be incidental (beyond Ben Thompson’s that electric vehicles are a playing field reset that enables the disruptors like Tesla, Google and presumably Apple). In the cabin, beyond your seating comfort — which has been commoditized — content, connection and physical and digital interfaces will make all the difference. Sound familiar? The car will be an accessory to the most popular device in our lives: the phone. When in the hands of Silicon Valley’s user experience experts, this will be so much more than large displays in the dashboard featuring the content, apps and interfaces a billion of us are already familiar with extended to the context of the car. It will be a re-imaging of the entire interior experience in which we will eventually consider things like windshields without wall-to-wall integrated transparent displays for information and entertainment as anachronistic as physical keyboards on our phones (don’t scoff, your windshield is smaller than a 65″ TV, 4K versions of which are already down to $1,500 today, and millimeter-thin transparent displays of that size have already been shown by LG, Panasonic and Samsung), and wonder where mixed reality glasses have been all our lives. pardon the terrible category name — is a smart car. Remember that ugly 2015 market share picture for electric vehicles? Replace “electric vehicle” with “smart car” and the picture may well be very different. I’ll admit to a lazy comparison, given the greater than 10-100x difference in price between cars, PCs and phones, but there is no reason that 2019 smart cars can’t be to cars as 2007 smartphones were to PCs: The beginning of a big share shift (although total volume will not go up as it did with smartphones and PCs) that will — in many segments — threaten incumbents. Not wholesale displacement (e.g. Nokia, Blackberry, Motorola), but a negative impact in desirable and profitable segments similar to what happened to PCs, which are to stabilize at 32 percent lower volume than their 2011 peaks. That could mean millions of vehicles less annually for incumbents. In the context of that shift, here’s another look at the players: Look at the interfaces inside your car. Do you love them? Turning the rearview mirror in the Bolt into a screen that shows the rear-facing camera is a nice touch, but the incumbents are bringing butter knives to an interface railgun fight in the segments of the market that will be driven by cabin experience. Low-end, trucks and performance will be spared, but the luxury badges need to watch out. Can the incumbents save themselves by turning a screen over to the apps we know? I’ve used Apple CarPlay and it’s a sad-face shadow of an Apple experience. Not quite Motorola ROKR bad, but not the winning move. Responsible for 80 percent of our smartphones and leader in autonomous car systems. Presumably the supplier to everyone who will not build a completely vertically integrated smart car. May win on volume, but like Android, will lose on profits. That’s a success for them here. The best in-cabin experience today (by a country mile). May become Google’s biggest future customer, beating all but … Never get involved in a . Never tangle with a Sicilian when death is on the line. And never, ever get into a user experience battle with the hardware/software integration — not to mention velvet handcuff ecosystem — of Apple. While they admittedly appear to be missing other large pieces of the smart car puzzle, including manufacturing, autonomous systems and retail and service, you simply cannot bet against them with three-ish years to go and Tim Cook . In the lucrative segments, Apple wins. Google supplies the rest — although a few will try to roll their own. |
GifGrabber re-emerges as Giphy Capture | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 9 | It looks like some of was burning a hole in its pocket: GifGrabber, one of the most popular apps for making animated Gifs on a Mac, is now part of the family, and the new version of the app . As you might expect, the company announced the launch … With a GIF: A GIF of GIFs playing on the GifGrabber website, captured with the Giphy Capture app that used to be called GifGrabber. I’m glad I could clear that up for you. Along with a name-change and a version-number-nudge to 2.2, the new version has a new capture system for high-definition GIFs, new editing controls making it easy to caption, resize and trim GIFs, and a revamped user interface to make the app a bit easier to use. The Giphy Capture app is ridiculously easy in use: Select what you want to record on screen, hit record, and, well, that’s it. The editing tools make it easy to select the size you want, and to trim the GIF so you get a perfect loop. As you might expect from what’s now , the new version makes it extremely easy to upload your GIFs to Giphy. If you’re otherwise inclined, however, you you can still save the resulting pieces of moving-picture art to your hard drive. |
The delayed revolution in digital financial services | Paul M. Schwartz | 2,016 | 4 | 9 |
Technology has transformed how we work, communicate and travel. In contrast, modern digital technology has not yet transformed financial services. Open data is the key to change in this sector of the economy. The time has come for the financial services industry to join the open data revolution. Open data means interoperability of digital information to increase its usability and accessibility. The Obama administration has done much to make . When open data is brought to the private sector, moreover, one of the benefits will be information portability for consumers. “Informational portability” means that consumers will be able to share and use their personal data in different individual services and products. Consumers and businesses have, of course, long shared their key financial information with trusted third parties, such as accountants, lawyers and financial advisors. Today, advances in technology have made it easier for customers of banks and insurance companies, among other financial institutions, to share their information with others. Rather than storing key documents in shoe boxes and file folders, consumers and small businesses can pass along digital online and mobile banking credentials. The promise of fintech is to bring consumer finance into the 21st Century. Fintech companies have already created products that enable consumers to budget, pay their bills, limit spending and identify fraudulent transactions on credit and debit card statements. These enterprises also offer sophisticated tools for facilitating individual investment, financial planning and portfolio management. Leading fintech names include , , , , and . This happy story of progress, however, is far from complete because of concerns around privacy and security, and the intermittent choke-points on data sharing. Financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, warn against the risks that would follow from allowing their customers to authorize access by third parties to their digital account information. Financial entities have also periodically taken steps to prevent their users from delegating such access to third parties. These steps are based on understandable concerns about privacy and security. In the , Congress took a major step toward ensuring open data. In its Section 1033, this law authorizes the (CFPB) to make rules requiring financial institutions to give consumers information upon request about their use of financial products and services. Congress also authorized the CFPB to develop standardized formats for information. In light of the current absence of cross-industry cooperation, the CFPB should act to enable consumers to get the digital financial services they desire and deserve. Three policy principles for CFPB rulemaking stand out. First, the law should enable mechanisms that safeguard and promote consumer consent. Consumers should be in charge of the conditions under which third parties can access their financial information, be provided with clear information about the terms under which such functionality is permitted and be able to turn access on or off. Second, the concerns regarding privacy and security have merit and banks deserve praise for their concern about them. At the same time, these issues are eminently solvable. Encryption enables firms to share information without making it visible to third parties. Identity management tools allow firms to build systems that provide access to some but not all information, much in the way that a valet key to a car allows someone to drive it but not open the glove box. The first move should be to seek broad industry agreement on best practices in these areas. Only if there is gridlock regarding self-regulation, the CFPB should develop regulations to establish strong privacy and security requirements. Finally, the CFPB should act to protect consumers from liability from data sharing, so long as they behave with reasonable care. This model already exists for electronic fund transfers due to measures such as the and . These regulations limit a consumer’s liability for unauthorized electronic transactions when using credit cards and debit cards. Similar regulations are needed in the fintech context to clarify questions regarding a consumer’s liability for harms following from delegated account access. The digital revolution will come to financial services only if consumers are guaranteed consistent, secure and up-to-date access to their financial information. The time has come for the U.S. government to take the first steps to guarantee financial data mobility. |
Sell your clothing and electronics with these apps | Katie Roof | 2,016 | 4 | 30 | Poshmark ThredUP OfferUp |
The funny things happening on the way to singularity | John Hauer | 2,016 | 4 | 9 |
A post shared by (@theeconomist) on [graphiq id=”7lW9Znz6F2B” title=”Cost per Genome Over Time” width=”600″ height=”555″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/7lW9Znz6F2B” link_text=”Cost per Genome Over Time | Graphiq” link=”https://www.graphiq.com/wlp/7lW9Znz6F2B”] YONGE STREET, TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA – 2015/05/27: The technology invading business to save jobs: McDonald’s self-ordering kiosk installed in a building. (Photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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Why image recognition is about to transform business | Ken Weiner | 2,016 | 4 | 30 |
At Facebook’s recent annual developer conference, Marc Zuckerberg outlined the social network’s artificial intelligence (AI) plans to “build systems that are better than people in perception.” He then demonstrated an impressive image recognition technology for the blind that can “see” what’s going on in a picture and explain it out loud. From programs that help the visually impaired and safety features in cars that detect large animals to auto-organizing untagged photo collections and extracting business insights from socially shared pictures, the benefits of , or computer vision, are only just beginning to make their way into the world — but they’re doing so with increasing frequency and depth. It’s busy enough that the upcoming , an annual conference dedicated to all things visual tech, from VR and cameras to medical imaging and content analysis, is already in its third year. “The advancements in computer vision these days are creating tremendous new opportunities in analyzing images that are exponentially impacting every business vertical, from automotive to advertising to augmented reality,” says Evan Nisselson of LDV Capital, which organizes the summit. As with other forms of AI — natural language procession, bioinformatics, gaming — the field of computer vision has benefited greatly from the expansion of open-source, deep learning technology, user-friendly programming tools and faster and more affordable computing. Many a headline references deep learning and artificial intelligence as the next big thing, but how exactly do these different tools work, and in what ways are businesses using them to offer image tech to the world? Is Google’s TensorFlow the same thing as Facebook’s DeepFace or Microsoft’s Project Oxford? Not exactly. To help clarify things, here’s a quick breakdown of current image technology tools and how businesses are using them. Thanks to techniques, a machine learning technique loosely modeled after the human brain, computers can be taught to accurately identify what’s in pictures faster than ever — but they need massive amounts of data to do it. Enter and . Years in the making, these massive and free-to-anyone databases contain millions of images tagged with keywords about what’s inside the pictures — everything from cats and mountains to pizza and sports activities. These open datasets are the basis for machine learning around images (the only way computers can accurately identify cats in photos is because they have already learned what cats look like by analyzing millions of pictures tagged with the word “cat”). Best known for its annual , ImageNet was launched by computer scientists at Stanford and Princeton in 2009 with 80,000 tagged images. It has since grown to include more than 14 million tagged images, any of which are up for grabs at any time for machine training purposes. Powered by various universities in the U.K., Pascal VOC has fewer pictures, but each one has richer annotations. This improves the accuracy and breadth of the machine learning and, for some applications, speeds up the overall process, because it allows for the omission of cumbersome computer subtasks. Now, everyone from Google and Facebook to startups and universities use these open source picture sets to feed their machine learning beasts, but the big technology companies have the advantage of access to millions of user-labeled images from apps such as Google Photos and Facebook. Have you ever wondered why Google and Facebook let you upload so many pictures for free? It’s because those pictures are used to train their deep learning networks to become more accurate. Once you have the data, it’s time to build a machine that can learn from it. Enter open-source software libraries. Freely available, these frameworks serve as starting points for building machine learning systems to service different kinds of computer vision functions, from facial and emotion recognition to medical screening and in cars. These machine learning systems are then fed pictures from ImageNet and its ilk, proprietary images (aka Google Photos) or other sources (like ). Google is one of the better-known libraries, if only because it was covered widely when selected parts were open sourced late last year. TensorFlow, some of which is still proprietary to Google, is used to develop many of the company’s AI initiatives, from autonomous cars and translation to Google Now and Google Photos. But TensorFlow is hardly the first — or only — open-source framework. UC Berkeley’s has been around since 2009, and remains popular because of its ease of customizability and large community of innovators, not to mention heavy use by and . Even . Created in 2002, is also popular, owing to its use by Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which in early 2015. Some of these tools are optimized to run on more than one graphics processor or computer to amplify capacity and speed up the deep learning process. Similarly, is an open-source software library that optimizes a computer’s graphics processing unit (GPU) performance, making machine learning even faster. These tools, while flexible and robust, require teams of computer vision engineers and hardware, so only companies that want to make computer vision a major part of their product strategy, where they’d want to own the software, need apply. Not every company has the resources, or wants to invest in the resources, to build out a computer vision engineering team. Even if you’ve found the right team, it can be a lot of work to get it just right, which is where hosted services come in. Carried out in the cloud, these solutions offer menus of out-of-the-box image recognition services that can be easily integrated with an existing app or used to build out a specific feature or an entire business. Say the Travel Channel needs “landmark detection” to show relevant photos on landing pages for specific landmarks, or eHarmony wants to filter out “unsafe” profile images uploaded by their users. Neither of these companies needs or wants to get into the deep learning image recognition development business, but can still benefit from its capabilities. , for example, offers a series of image detection services from facial and optical character recognition (text) to landmark and explicit content detection, and charges on a per-photo basis. (née ) offers a collection of visual image recognition APIs, including emotion, celebrity and face detection, and charges a specific rate per 1,000 transactions. Meanwhile, startups like offer computer vision APIs that help companies organize their content, filter out unsafe user-generated images and videos and make purchasing recommendations based on viewed or taken photos. Of course, it doesn’t have to be apples or oranges. Computer vision engineering teams don’t need to be Google-sized, and companies big and small that don’t want to build their own AI systems may still want robust, custom image recognition solutions. If a beauty or cosmetics company wants to find, say, pictures of people with high-volume hair to serve ads about body-minimizing shampoo, it’ll need someone to create a custom algorithm to search for high-volume hair, since that isn’t the first thing that the more commoditized solutions offer out of the box. Same with logos or car make and model, which are still niche commercial applications that currently aren’t available in the open-source arena. And if a closed dataset isn’t readily available, no matter, because a good percentage of the images shared on social media these days are public, anyway, making for a rich source of images with which to feed the machine learning beast. Some companies use combinations of open data and open-source frameworks, as long as they have a team of engineers, or they might just use hosted APIs if computer vision is not something on which they are staking their entire business. And for companies with a wide range of very specific needs, there are custom solutions. No matter how it’s approached, though, it’s clear that image recognition rarely exists in isolation; it’s made stronger by access to more and more pictures, real-time big data, unique applications and speed. The businesses that make the most of these connections are the ones that will be best poised for success. |
Dear Facebook, why are Facebook Comments so unremittingly terrible? | Jon Evans | 2,016 | 4 | 9 | For long months now, Facebook Comments have been riddled by some of the most transparent, eye-roll-inducing “I make a good salary working from home” spam you’ve ever seen. Every mail service can filter it out; but Facebook? Home to cutting-edge AI research, massively scalable services, some of the smartest software people in the world? Nope, spam appears to be beyond their capabilities. Facebook comments are a joke. — Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) FB wants to own VR. I'd settle for them fixing FB comments — Alexia Bonatsos (@alexia) I kid, I kid. Obviously Facebook could clean up comment spam if they really wanted to. (And, in fairness, Facebook Comments have .) Maybe they even will, on some executive whim. But, really, who can blame them for not bothering? Facebook has become a business which focuses on things that affect of users, and/or bring in in revenue. Comments don’t come even close to moving the needle on that scale. But Facebook Comments are an excellent object example of a curious tech paradox: the bigger the business, the less you can rely on its new initiatives. Consider the curious case of the Revolv, a home-automation controller which was bought by Nest, which in turn is part of mighty Alphabet … and is now by its controllers. This is numerous things: an instance of Nest apparently being a ; This is a great reminder that the “Internet of Things” is actually the “ “: if you don’t have root on a device in your home, then it is not yours. It is also a reminder that the bigger the business, the more you should fear it if it acquires something you love. Google, of course, was also home to much-beloved Google Reader, which it dispatched a few years ago as casually as if it were a mook in a martial-arts film: Annual reminder: the development effort spent adding an animated minion GIF to Gmail could have kept Google Reader running all year — Pinboard (@Pinboard) On the one hand this was simply a bad strategic mistake on Google’s part, at a time when they thought that Google+ was the future. (Cue the flood of people trying to claim that Google+ was actually a success, in some bizarre war-is-peace kind of way. It was a debacle, folks.) But on the other hand Gmail actually to Google; it would far rather make its billion users feel a little better about the service than cater to Reader’s tens of millions of users. Which in turn explains why the great Maciej Ceglowski aka Pinboard is not exactly shuddering in his proverbial boots now that Google has launched a new kind of bookmarking service itself: I encourage everyone to sign up for the new Google bookmarking site so I can have an influx of customers in 2 years — Pinboard (@Pinboard) It may seem that one would be better off relying on a service brought to you by one of the Stacks than something from a tiny, scrappy startup. But this is not so . (Unless it’s PayPal, in which case you shouldn’t rely on it at all, he said bitterly, fuelled by a painful recent dayjob project.) Otherwise, any BigCo service can and will be victimized by the vagaries of internal politics. Bit rot affects us all; being left to languish is just a slow death sentence in its own right. You’re arguably better off relying on a failed startup that dies a quick death than being dragged down by an abandoned service that slowly circles the toilet. At least that way you’re granted the gift of a known outcome. For further evidence, I invite you: just scroll down. |
Review: Grenco Science’s G-Pen Elite is the best vape of its kind | Stefan Etienne | 2,016 | 4 | 30 | rapid development of portable vaporizers for ground, plant-based material is hard to ignore, if you’re not living under a rock. Typically, an expensive gadget, Grenco Science has tasked itself with creating a vape for the people, with specs and science that punch above its sub-$200 weight class. Before I dive into the experience of using the G-Pen Elite, let’s talk about the science of heating elements. First: Convection heating, which is basically the heat transfer of energy through a medium such as hot air or water. In contrast, conduction heating is the “simpler” method, where heat energy is transferred through the collision of molecules — usually physical contact. The best vaporizers tend to use convection heating, but that solution not only means a higher cost (for both consumer and manufacturer) but is more difficult to pack into small, pocket vaporizers. Conduction is much easier, thankfully, since the material that will be vaporized just has to be thrown into an oven and heated at a desired temperature. Grenco Science technically used both methods of heating elements. This way, you get the both of both worlds, but how? The interior of the Elite’s oven is ceramic, so the heat transfer is more even and immediate (conduction), but there are also four small holes for air flow, which are used when you inhale (convection). Being in such a confined and hot space means that ground material isn’t only heated by physical contact (conduction), but also as if you were heating a brownie with a hair dryer (convection). It means that you can get a hybrid of both technologies, thus benefiting from the intensity that comes from heating up the contents of the oven, while also using hot air to make it more pleasurable to inhale. Besides getting the science mostly right, the Elite is very straightforward when it comes to the controls. Pressing five times on the main button turns the vape on, followed by setting a temperature from the rocker on the side, and finally pressing the main button for one second completes the process. Grenco Science advertises the Elite as being able to reach desired temperatures under 10 seconds, and that’s been the case so far. An important aspect of using a vape is the cleaning process. Thankfully, that isn’t overly complex: a brush included in the Elite’s box is good for clearing away burn material from the oven and the vent under the mouth piece. Once that is remedied there isn’t too much to worry about. Battery life? That’s solid as well, but dependent on how the vape is used. What’s most responsible is the quantity of ground material packed into the oven and what temperature setting is used. So, speaking to battery life can be somewhat subjective, however, I’ve found that when I packed the oven full and set it to maximum temperature of 428° Fahrenheit (220° Celsius), I could use it between two and three times without charging. That’s good performance, and since the Elite charges with micro-USB cables (which are practically everywhere), it’s easy to take out without worrying about forgetting a proprietary charging cradle or something similar. This is one of the best vapes money can buy — under $200. It not only comes with a charging cable, but with a grinder designed as a business card, a pen tool attached to a key ring for managing ground material, and finally that brush I talked about earlier, which is great for maintenance (a necessity). All in all, Grenco Science has a fine vaporizer with the Elite. Of course, there’s room for improvement,, like an even sleeker design or the addition of different colors, even a different style of mouthpiece for those that are interested. Overall, for the budget and performance, there’s really nothing that comes this close to being a reliable vape. |
According to its cofounder and CEO Snapchat is mainly “a camera company” | D.J. Sherrets | 2,016 | 4 | 30 |
Despite all of its new bells and whistles… and the billions of videos, ads, and effects that have been added to the service, chief executive Evan Spiegel still thinks of the new media juggernaut he’s created as “a camera company”. Speaking at Columbia University’s on Friday, Spiegel ran through a number of the defining features of the company that on various mobile devices. The runaway success of Stories, Snapchat’s video and photo watching tool, even caught Spiegel by surprise. “Stories blew us away,” he said. “What was envisioned at the time as an ephemeral profile — this is who I am right now — has become a lot more… To watch the evolution of Stories into more of a broadcasting platform [and] away from just a profile-based concept where it started is very exciting.” While Snapchat Stories may be the feature that brings the company the revenue model it needs to validate its $16 billion valuation, and while the ephemeral messaging feature may be what initially attracted the hordes of millennials sending digital ephemera to each other billions of times a day, Spiegel says that the camera itself remains Snapchat’s unifying feature. Snapchat opens to the camera, Spiegel said. Chat is available to the left of the camera, and Stories is available to the right of the camera. That not only differentiates it from other social media products, but allows Snapchat to straddle the line between the defining features of several of them. “The beautiful thing is it sort of sits in the middle, but more importantly it opens to the camera,” Spiegel said. “The thing that feeds a social network is content… Similarly with communication… So in our view, when you take a snap and you choose this path between talking to your friends or adding it to your Story we end up with this harmony where both of these businesses feed themselves. I don’t think it’s one or the other.” In a way, even the company’s movement into filters, stickers, and lenses such as face swap are further extensions of the original thesis of Snapchat as a photographic communication tool. “Now you can put the way you feel… in the moment you’re experiencing. For us that’s just the beginning of some fun, creative tools,” he said. Looking beyond the product, on which Spiegel said he spent 40% of his time, his other duties are recruiting (which occupies another 40% of his time) and then the other operational decisions that go into running a company. Columbia undergrads Mayank Mahajan and Karen Yuan interview Evan Spiegel Over the course of his conversation with students and interviewers Columbia undergraduates Karen Yuan and Mayank Mahajan, Spiegel reminisced about the early days of growing the business and the time of the key decisions that influenced its growth. From its earliest days, and in its earliest decisions, Snapchat and its college-aged executive focused on recruiting dedicated employees who would be committed to the company’s long-term success. Spiegel said that everything from the decision to move to and stay in Los Angeles and the creation of a backloaded vesting schedule which increased from 10% the first year to 40% the fourth year was designed to self-select employees who believed in the company and its project. “If you think four years is long-term, then we’re not really interested in working with you.” Spiegel said this aspect of company-building, the recruiting, is one of the critical attributes of a good entrepreneur. “Building a team is the most important thing you do, and if you don’t genuinely just love the people you work with and take care of them… and (care) about their families and their lives, then it’s a non-starter because you’re not going to be able to build a great team.” Snapchat’s young founder also had advice for budding entrepreneurs about accepting capital and the nuances of working with venture capitalists. A number of the questions focused on Snapchat’s early days, including about the first financing round. Spiegel advised to never accept if someone says terms are “standard,” and described a right of first refusal term in the Snapchat convertible note seed round of requiring access to 50% or effectively the majority of the Series A round that came the following year. Spiegel said this kind of term can discourage possible investors who seek to own a larger stake and so may not bid at all. This and other terms were unwound over time, he said. “The big, simple takeaway is anytime you hear ‘standard terms,’ keep asking why, and why, and why, and why,” he said. Asked about the difference between entrepreneurship in college compared to after college, Spiegel cited the need to balance but ultimately needing to make a choice to go for building a meaningful company. “I think some point as early as sophomore year my classes started taking a hit because I was working on projects all the time, but if you’re ok with getting bad grades, then it doesn’t really matter,” Spiegel said. |
New initiatives emerge to help refugees | Dennis Mitzner | 2,016 | 4 | 30 |
Prompted by the ongoing crisis affecting much of the western world, have to provide solutions to the many challenges facing the beleaguered masses. As Rahm Emanuel once famously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” In a sea of clueless government bureaucrats and fearful citizens, these startups want to tap into the potential of the newcomers. Privately funded — relying on the spirit of innovation coupled with a sense of altruism — may one day become the norm in tackle challenges such as the current crisis. Founded in the Autumn of 2015, Finland-based identifies skilled workers and entrepreneurs from the thousands of (who are ). The founders, Riku Rantala and Tunna Milonoff, believe that the have the potential to enrich and elevate the Finnish business scene. “There are all kinds of , but many have been entrepreneurs in their native countries. They might have thoughts, ideas, information and understanding of cultures that Finns might not have,” Milonoff . Startup functions as a combination between a startup incubator and a talent agency. The purpose is to map out the ’ — currently living in centers around the country — skills, professionalism and business experience. The top candidates will receive a funding allowance of 32.80 euros ($38) for the period of one month. The idea is to have the use the funds to elevate the accommodation and food conditions in the centers. To qualify as a recipient of the allowance, the candidate must have the right to work in Finland. Rantala and Milonoff believe that Finland, one of the many European countries in the throes of economic malaise, can benefit from the ’ potential. “Immigration is essentially the importing of brains. We want to harness the mental capital of and combine it with the mad brilliance of Finnish entrepreneurship to lift Finland from economic misery,” Milonoff said. who manage to obtain the right to work are faced with another problem: how to find a job and, more importantly, how to get paid. Because banks do not open accounts for , finding an employer who’s willing to pay salaries in cash is nearly impossible. , a Helsinki-based company, launched a pilot partnership with the Finnish Immigration Service in December to provide with prepaid MasterCards and customized mobile payment accounts so the can receive salaries and government benefits. “To remove obstacles we enabled a feature where the employer can pay the salary to a ’s MONI account. First salary payment tests were made in February this year and now there are several employers onboard,” said Antti Pennanen, founder of MONI. According to Pennanen both the companies operating reception centers and the are happy with the service. “Today almost 4000 , over 10% of all in Finland, are receiving their benefits to MONI accounts.” The next step for Pennanen is to turn into entrepreneurs. “Our big goal is to create a simple model for the to employ themselves as micro-entrepreneurs, with their taxation automated using smart contracts. This would mean decreasing the administrative burden for the government — less cost in tax collection since it is automated, faster employment for the and taxpayers for Finland.” In the context of the crisis, the term headhunter carries some unfortunate connotations. Unlike the , companies have that focus on headhunting in the more traditional sense. A social enterprise that connects with companies that look for specific skill sets, is another Helsinki-based company. Zharity’s stated goal is to 1,000 immigrants, newcomers or asylum seekers find work within a year from its launch earlier in 2016. Founded in November during the height of the crisis, Austria-based find jobs by creating profiles on its platform. Founder Dominik Beron the company has registered more than 130 employers so far, and has around 1,000 signed up to create a jobs profile to seek work. In Canada, a startup navigate the country’s complicated healthcare system. , a digital health platform, migrants with access to healthcare services; from information about walk-in-clinics that are open late to pharmacies and emergency rooms, the platform shows users their nearest healthcare option any time across the country. Nouhaila Chelkhaoui joined the company after living in Turkey, where she witnessed the chaos first hand. “We have identified many Arabic speaking healthcare professionals across Canada, plus Arabic is now one of five languages the platform itself has been translated into. We’ve also established a direct phone line for assistance in English, Arabic and French for two hours a week so who don’t have access to the internet or aren’t tech savvy can still get the information they need,” Chelkhaoui . Deviating from the plethora of tech , some newcomers are harnessing their cooking skills to make a living. Considering the demand for Middle Eastern cuisine, this might be a smart bet. Manal Kahi, a Columbia University graduate, launched a food startup with her brother Wissam Kahi, a graduate of Columbia Business School, to provide locals with authentic hummus — made and delivered by local . employs from around the world to cook their own family recipes and deliver the meals to customers in New York City. Seldom has the following been used as a marketing pitch, but authenticity sells. “[We want you to] feel like you’re in downtown Baghdad, for instance, or that you’ve been invited to a chef’s own home,” Manal Kahi. startups that have as a result of the influx of indicate a trend that is long overdue. Instead of reverting to the role of bystanders, the startup mentality, pervasive in cities across Europe and North America, is taking problem solving away from the public domain to the incentive-based domain of businesses. Profit-seeking companies with tech-savvy entrepreneurs at their helm are the perfect executioners of solutions that enable the integration of into their host societies. Cities and governments would be wise to cooperate with entrepreneurs who are able and willing to without adding to the tax burden. However, because governments control the agenda on immigration, successful integration needs to be a tango for two. “Without government participation and political will to solve problems in this scale, I think it is really difficult to achieve anything,” Pennanen said. |
Kindle Oasis is beautiful, pricey and still not like reading a book | Sarah Buhr | 2,016 | 4 | 30 | I’ve spent the last week trying to pretend the new is the same as reading a real book. It’s not. I love books. I love Kindle’s e-readers and was hoping this was the melding of the two. That real book feel was part of the inspiration for the latest Kindle in the family and why it comes with a protruding one-sided grip handle able to flip from left to right to give it that “book spine feel.” But there’s something about holding a real book in your hands, thumbing through and dog-earing the pages, underlining and making notes. Side view of Kindle Oasis. Super thin and comes with a handle for gripping like a book spine. You know your book, you know you can easily flip to the page with that one passage. You can spend your afternoon rapt in good literature, cupping the old book’s spine, smelling the dried parchment and traveling to far off imaginary places without moving anywhere at all. Kindle, unfortunately, isn’t there just yet. But it’s getting closer. The new, radically different, squarish Oasis design is beautiful and arguably enticing as the newest shiny e-reader, but like older versions, the latest Kindle also has a lagging touch response – forget about easily thumbing through pages, writing in the margins or quickly pulling up another title. Too tedious. The visuals aren’t much better than the earlier Voyage, either with the same 300 ppi resolution – though it does have 4 extra built-in LED lights. And at a starting price of $290, compared to a or , which does much more than an e-reader, it might be too much for most consumers. Though the e-ink display is easier on your eyes than an iPad and the added side buttons for flipping pages also seem to help speed up the process a bit. Oasis without the dual-battery cover. Here’s where Oasis wins me over – Travel. E-readers are better for hauling around than heavy books in general, but the lighter, slimmer, yet surprisingly sturdy Oasis is easy to throw in a bag – the molded polymer housing is made to take a beating – and can give you access to more than 4.4 million books through Amazon’s ever-expanding list of titles (up from 90,000 in 2007); along with a modest 4 GB storage on the device. The 60-day battery life (when hooked into the dual-battery cover system) also makes Oasis a great travel companion for long voyages. But Oasis isn’t meant for everyone, just those most devoted to a luxury experience. It’s niche, but a devoted niche of avid Kindle fans. It really comes down to whether or not you really care about the weight and sturdiness of your e-reader and believe it’s worth the price to pay for that luxury experience. While I like the upgrades, the difference is slight enough I’m personally okay paying $90 less for the $200 Kindle Voyage. |
Gillmor Gang: iPad Prose | Steve Gillmor | 2,016 | 4 | 30 | The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Frank Radice, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, April 29, 2016. Apple dips and Twitter flutters, but the Gang won’t bet against them as new media picks new winners. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Halley Suitt Tucker, Elisa Camahort Page, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek, @fradice, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=86205749 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302] |
Pushing back against sexism, this is a new era for women online | Claudia Cahalane | 2,016 | 4 | 30 | |
Startups need to do due diligence, too | Eamonn Carey | 2,016 | 4 | 30 |
I hear a lot of horror stories about investors. Many are misunderstandings. Some are just outright false. Then there are those that are true. Sadly, there are a lot of those. There’s the alleged angel in the Baltic region who committed (in an email) to leading a round and then refused to talk to the other investors and eventually seemed to bury his head in the sand and disappear. There are countless stories of mysterious Middle Eastern angels who put teams through painful pitch, due diligence and negotiation processes only to bail (post-term sheet) after months of promises and B.S. about the money being delayed/lost/stolen/on the way. This kills companies. I’ve watched great entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas sink because they’ve been fucked around and because they made poor choices. Many of the so-called “investors” involved are odious individuals. I wanted to write something that will help people avoid having to deal with them, so here are some tips. Financial institutions are bound by a regulation called (know your customer). It’s time we created KYI for investors. You should want (and probably need) to know who’s investing, why they’re investing, who they are, how they made their money, what else they’re up to, what they’re like to work with, what’s their temperament and risk appetite and other such useful tidbits. Do some digging on the people you’re going to target — creep on their , , and other profiles. Check to see if they blog, tweet, judge at Startup Weekends, mentor at accelerators, speak at conferences or do things that the vast majority of other investors do. Are they talking about their existing investments? Do they add value to industry conversations? Do they seem credible? Do they appear mostly sane? If they don’t have an online profile of any description, be a little wary. There are some super-wealthy people who obviously don’t want to be on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other such platforms as they’re too busy in their walk-in humidors. But in general terms, someone who has zero online profile makes my spidey senses tingle. If you’re constantly dealing through an intermediary, be wary. When you get into Series A/B/C, etc., it’s more natural for this to happen. This is what venture capital is, to a certain extent. In angel rounds, if you’re not regularly dealing directly with the angel, this is likely a pattern that will repeat. Also, you run the risk of Chinese whispers and subsequent misunderstandings. If someone’s going to give you anything between $5,000 and $500,000 that they could otherwise spend on a holiday, a car or a buy-to-let flat in Walthamstow, they should probably want to look you in the eye and talk face to face. Likewise, if you’re giving someone a single- or double-digit percentage of your company, you’ll want to spend time with them. If you ask to meet an investor and that never happens for various spurious reasons, don’t take their money. Ask to talk to companies that the investor has previously put money into. This leads us to If they refuse this, or are sketchy about it, you should be very, very wary. Talking to companies that your investor has previously put money into is pretty normal due diligence for a startup. You should be asking what the investor is like to work with; are they pushy, obnoxious, needy, anxious, cool, useful or just good/bad/indifferent to work with. The right investors should be happy to share this info with you. The bad ones won’t want you to find out that they are secretly tools. Incidentally, you don’t need an investor’s permission to do this — if they have investments listed on LinkedIn, AngelList and other places, just connect directly with the founder/CEO and ask. Watch out for loonie valuations. The less sophisticated the investor, the more of your company they’ll want. The classic instance is where the investor wants 51 percent of your business. In most funding rounds, you should be aiming to give away 10-25 percent of your company. The lower end implies you’re a hot deal or you’re doing something really well. The higher end implies it’s riskier or perhaps the traction isn’t that great. In early rounds, my personal feeling is that anything more than 25 percent is too high and can create a disincentive for founders, staff and current/future investors. Anyone who wants anything north of 25 percent is worth spending some more due diligence time on. Watch out for people who aren’t at least reasonably amenable to standardized term sheets. , and many others have produced great templates that are pretty standard. Watch out for things like participating liquidity preferences (1x liquidity preference is probably ok, others would argue it’s pretty standard). Watch out for warrants, vesting clauses that are overly punitive, full-ratchet anti-dilution clauses and stuff like that. If you don’t understand these terms, you need to. Do yourself a favor and buy and appear smarter than your lawyer. Also, get a lawyer. Watch out for people who only bring cash to the table. Introductions, advice, connections and guidance are the most useful things that early-stage companies can get. The right type of angel — usually one who’s been there and done that — is worth 10x their investment in this regard. They’ll shill for you at conferences, introduce you to people, act as an additional BD/sales/HR person and generally add way more than just cash to the equation. Ask not what you can do for your investors (you should know the answer to this already — make them a fuck ton of money), ask what your investors can do for you. If you’re feeling cheeky, send them . But seriously — be upfront about asking what else they’re bringing outside of cash — can they introduce you to potential clients or useful contacts? Can they help with hiring or international growth? Do they know the reporter covering your area at the biggest trade publication or at the FT? Can they connect you with bigger investors when the time is right? Watch out for people who want overly complex financial projections (or other ludicrous requests) when you’re pre-revenue or pre-product. Anyone with a brain in their head will know that it is A) guesswork and B) producing this material is a time sink. Smart early-stage investors are backing the team, the market and the idea — probably in that order. If someone’s looking for five-year projections, you’d be as well off reading the tea leaves with them. Definitely have your product roadmap in your head, and some ideas about how you’re going to scale into new markets, etc. — and have an idea of what you’d like to make, but you shouldn’t have to waste your time on projections. Watch out for people who drop off the face of the planet after giving you a soft commitment. As a species, we’re not great at saying “no” to people, so a lot of investors will simply break off contact instead of saying no. If someone drops off the radar after saying they are in, it probably means they are out. If they’re going on holiday, having surgery or doing something else that prevents them from replying to an email/WhatsApp, etc.,they’ll probably tell you. If your gut feeling is bad about someone the first time you meet them, pay attention to that. You don’t have to be best mates with all of your investors — in fact, you shouldn’t be. But, you do have to at least tolerate them. If you’re lucky, you’ll be talking to and emailing them once a month for the next five to 10 years. Gut feeling is important. I’m not saying discount an investment straight away, but if someone feels off, creepy or just not right, spend a bit more time figuring out why, and definitely do at least one more meeting to double-check that feeling. I have taken on investors in previous businesses who I really didn’t like when we first met, but they offered money. It ended like . These are just a small subset of the things you should be looking for when you’re talking to early-stage/angel investors. It’s equally as applicable to later-stage investments, but in the early stages of a business, this is serious stuff. The people you take on as investors at the start can be a huge predictor of the success of future funding rounds, or the company as a whole. I’ve heard stories of people who had investors who were supposed to put in the second tranche of funding, but couldn’t because their assets had been seized by a country as a result of various nefarious deeds in the past. I’ve met companies who’ve taken investments and then did their due diligence on the investor — only to find out they were one of the leading fugitives from a European country. As you can probably imagine, having someone like that on your cap table is going to make it a lot less likely that a tier-one VC will invest in your next round. Do your homework. Do it early. Do it often. Don’t be afraid to ask for references and more info about the person who’s investing. If they’re sufficiently motivated and interested in you, they should be happy to do it. If they’re sufficiently smart, they’ll respect you asking. If they’re sufficiently sketchy, you need to think about casting a wider net. |
Why the NRA hates smart guns | Jon Stokes | 2,016 | 4 | 30 |
push from President Obama to revive initiatives to develop “smart gun” technology, it looks like it’s time to revisit the issue once again. The most common question I got in response to my is, “even if you’re correct that smart guns are a bad idea, why is the NRA so opposed to letting the market even try to get it right?” So the question is, why? If smart guns as doomed to fail as I’ve previously argued, why not just let them fail in the market? Why try to prevent this technology from even having a chance? The simple answer to this question is widely known, but also widely misunderstood. Most who follow this issue know that the NRA hates smart guns because they’re afraid that once a seemingly viable smart gun technology exists, anti-gun legislators at the state and federal levels will attempt to mandate it in all future guns by comparing it to seat belts, air bags, and other product safety features. If you read my previous piece on the problems with smart guns, then you hopefully understand the differences between a seat belt and smart gun tech, and why the prospect of having smart technology forcibly included in all new firearms drives gun nuts into apoplectic fits. But maybe you’re thinking, “that’s fine, then. We just won’t mandate it. There will be no mandate. There, you happy now? Can we just get on with the smart gun innovation and let this play out in the market?” Here’s the thing, though: the NRA is actually right, in this case. If smart guns get any traction, then non-smart-guns will come under legislative assault. I realize some of you went into shock and stopped reading after you saw the phrase “NRA is actually right” appear on TechCrunch, but if you’re still with me then give me a moment to explain. Guns are a technology, and, like most members of the general public, gun control advocates are confused about how guns operate outside of Hollywood — as in, “ “-level confused. It’s hard for me to overstate just how bad it is out there, even among much of the gun-owning public. But maybe you grew up on a farm, you had a little hunting rifle, you went to the range a few times and shot a pistol, and so on. And you’ve seen lots and lots of movies with guns in them. Even so, unless you have a background in the military, law enforcement, or executive protection, or have undergone a decent amount of civilian training in real-world defensive use of firearms, then you know as much about guns as a teen with a brand new learner’s permit knows about steering an 18-wheeler through downtown Chicago in rush-hour traffic. It’s bad that the general public — including the majority of casual gun owners — are so confused about guns that they don’t know how much they don’t know. But what’s worse, at least if you’re a gun person, is that lawmakers and activists who know less than nothing about guns often find themselves in a position to confidently enshrine their technological ignorance into law. This, then, is what the NRA is terrified of: that lawmakers who don’t even know how to begin to evaluate the impact of the smallest, most random-seeming feature of a given firearm on that firearm’s effectiveness and functionality for different types of users with different training backgrounds under different circumstances will get into the business of gun design. And they’re right to be afraid, because it has happened before. To understand how gun control advocates’ high-handed indifference to basic gun knowlege feeds into to the visceral reaction that pro-gun folks have to smart gun tech, you have to go back to the original, Clinton-era Assault Weapon Ban. Whatever you think of the merits of the AWB, you have to admit that this ban put legislators in the business of gun design. And I don’t mean this metaphorically — legislators were doing gun design. Before they could ban “assault weapons” as a category, lawmakers (or lobbyists and interns, more likely) had to compile a list of cosmetic, ergonomic, and functional features that, when they appear on a firearm either singly or in certain combinations, turn that gun from an ordinary rifle into a deadly assault weapon. This process of looking at features and combinations of features and deciding what stays and what goes is pretty much what you’d do if you worked in product design at a Remington or a Smith & Wesson. But the people who put together the AWB’s feature lists not only were not professional gun designers, but they didn’t even appear to know anything at all about the guns they were designing for the public’s use. This article isn’t the place to catalog the insanity of the Clinton-era AWB, or the recently proposed AWB that seeks to take its place, but I do want to offer to the uninitiated one concrete example of what I’m talking about, so you can get a feel for just how mad and maddening the results of this design-by-lawyer process are. Consider the lowly vertical foregrip (VFG), a simple handle that hangs down from the front of a rifle and gives the weapon’s operator a place to put their off-hand. Photo courtesy of . Some shooters love the VFG for the same reason that the AWB’s authors presumably hated it — because it’s popularly seen on military guns in movies and violent video games. Other shooters prefer a halfway option called the “angled foregrip”, which is a small ramp placed under the front of the gun that can anchor the hand. Still other shooters put a vertical foregrip on their guns but don’t actually it when shooting — instead, the VFG gives such shooters a tactile marker that lets them quickly and easily place their off hand in the same spot every time without looking. Finally, some people use a VFG solely as a small storage compartment for batteries or cleaning supplies. Like all things ergonomic, the decision to VFG or not to VFG is ultimately a matter of shooter preference… that is, unless you were a shooter during the original 1994 AWB, in which case your preference didn’t matter because VFGs were totally illegal. Yes, that is correct — a that some people like to attach to the front of their gun because they feel it gives them a more comfortable hold on the weapon was considered a feature so deadly it must be outlawed. The lawmakers who added the VFG to the list of banned features not only declined to produce any sort of rationale for how the VFG makes guns deadlier or less safe, but it’s likely that they didn’t even know what it was or how it was used. This ignorance about all things gun-related is on painful display in the video below, in which a young Tucker Carlson goes down a list of banned “assault weapon” features with former congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, the original AWB’s primary backer, asking her what certain features do and why they had to be banned. The senator clearly has no idea what of the banned features actually do, and when pressed about one feature in particular — the “barrel shroud” — she takes a wild guess so hilariously wrong that it spawned an Internet meme: “the shoulder thing that goes up”. To take a more recent example, here’s Leah Gunn Barrett, the executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, on the VFG: For example, Gunn Barrett said a forward-leaning pistol grip might give a mass shooter better control over his rifle. “The gun is still lethal,” Gunn Barrett said. “Yes, it can still kill people. But it is not as easy to manipulate and fire accurately than it would be if you had a forward-leaning pistol grip.” The “forward-leaning pistol grip” in the above quote is Gun Barrett’s very confused way of talking about the above described foregrip. Again, she has literally no idea what she’s talking about. None. And yet again, here we have the spectacle of lawmakers and activists engaged in gun design without even the most superficial knowledge of or regard for how real-world firearms are actually operated in non-Hollywood and non-video game settings. Since the expiration of the AWB in 2004, even ardent anti-gun types like , the , and have recognized it as a misguided boondoggle that didn’t save lives and did serve as a powerful fundraising aid for the NRA and GOP. It was a totally irrational “own goal” on the part of the gun control movement, and in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings it’s happening all over again at both the state and federal levels. But enough on the AWB madness, which reminds me so much of the ‘net neutrality debate that I could write a book on the topic. I think you can see where I’m going with this in the context of smart guns. Given gun control advocates’ repeatedly demonstrated combination of unintentionally hilarious firearms ignorance and high-handed zeal for gun design by legislative fiat, it is totally rational for gun owners to anticipate that any viable-seeming smart gun technology will be eventually pushed as a required “safety feature” by anti-gun lawmakers at the state and federal levels. I wouldn’t even expect that a particular bit of smart gun tech would have to be particularly reliable or even fully baked to catch the eye of a zealous California congressperson, who wouldn’t wait for the market to sort out the technology’s viability before insisting that it be included in all future firearms sold in the state. (Just look at what CA did with their , mandating a technology that isn’t actually available in production guns.) And at the federal level, it’s a certainty that the same federal lawmakers who banned the vertical foregrip in 1994 and are will attempt to pass an equally clueless smart gun mandate of some type, the moment they get the chance. Gun buyers who value the freedom to walk into a gun store and walk out with a brand new non-smart-gun have therefore correctly concluded that the best way to preserve that freedom is to torpedo any smart gun tech before it gets out of the gate. As for gun makers, even if they wanted to introduce smart gun tech (they don’t), they wouldn’t touch it for fear of backlash from a gun community that sees the legislative writing on the wall. As long as we live in a world where a millimeter of barrel length separates a highly restricted “short-barreled rifle” from a regular rifle, and where a plastic gun handle is willfully misidentified as a dangerous aid for mass killers — in other words, where people who know zero about firearms nonetheless continue to design them through legislation — smart gun technology will be a existential threat to non-smart-guns, and people who don’t want to buy smart guns will do everything they can to strangle the technology in the cradle. If gun control advocates were to swear off gun design for a generation, and instead focus on the “who” instead of on the “what”, there might be hope. I’m not holding my breath, though. To someone who knows so little about guns that they don’t think they have anything more to learn, the “what” probably looks like the easiest thing to legislate. But the deeper you dig into this issue, the more you realize that, as with any constantly evolving technology, the “what” is a moving target, and the “who” starts to look like the more viable avenue. My guess is that a lot of gun people would be willing to compromise more than you’d realize on various aspects of the “who” question, in exchange for tossing most of the “what” restrictions out the window. But we’re a long way from that on both sides. And in the meantime, we’ll spin our collective wheels as one camp keeps trying to “patch” a technology that they fundamentally don’t understand, and the other side tries to block potentially threatening innovations. |
On the dark art of software estimation | Jon Evans | 2,016 | 4 | 30 | “How long will it take?” demand managers, clients, and executives. “It takes as long as it takes,” retort irritated engineers. They counter: “Give us an estimate!” And the engineers gather their wits, call upon their experience, contemplate the entrails of farm animals, throw darts at a board adorned with client/manager/executive faces, and return–a random number. Or so it often seems. It is well accepted that software estimates are frequently wrong, and all too often wrong. There are many reasons for this. I am very fond of by Michael Wolfe on Quora:
Let’s take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I’ll whip out my map and draw our route down the coast … The line is about 400 miles long; we can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we’ll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night, when we will roll in triumphantly at 6 p.m. They can’t wait! We get up early the next day giddy with the excitement of fresh adventure … Wow, there are a million little twists and turns on this coast. A 40-mile day will barely get us past Half Moon Bay. This trip is at least 500, not 400 miles …
Writing software is rarely a matter of doing something you already know exactly how to do. More often, it involves figuring out how to use your available tools to do something new. If you already knew exactly how long that would take, it wouldn’t be new. Hence “it takes as long as it takes.” Non-developers often seem to think that we engineers just look at a proposed task and think “ ” Sometimes it is like that. But not often. More typically, the thought process is more like: “ ” In which case, the result is: “I can confidently estimate that this will require less than two hours of typing. However, working out to type is going to take me/us anywhere from one hour to several days. Sorry.” Another analogy, from my sideline in novel-writing: publishers always want a synopsis of your unwritten novel. This is insane, because, as an extremely successful author friend puts it, “writing a synopsis requires everything that actually writing the novel requires.” It’s like asking for a map of what is by definition terra incognito. So it often is with software estimates. That said: if you’ve ventured into a lot of terra incognito in the past, and you’ve heard legends and tales of this new territory, and how similar it is to your past ventures, you can at least offer up an educated guess. (People seem to like the word “estimate” better than “educated guess.”) There are better and worse ways to estimate, and to structure estimation, and you can’t give up on the task just because software is hard. What’s more, the in which an estimate is requested is crucially important — and that’s often what managers, clients, and executives get so terribly wrong. More often than not, when a low-ball estimate balloons into a terrible reality, it’s their fault, not that of the engineers. First, some managers/clients/executives (hereafter referred to as MCEs) still think that task performance can be measured in fungible engineer-hours. Not so. It was never so. We’ve known for that, for instance, “ .” Second, some MCEs tend to think that they can increase the accuracy of estimation by adding precision and granularity — by breaking down large projects into as many small tasks as possible, maybe even of them, and asking for individual estimates of each small task. This is a catastrophically terrible idea. Increasing precision does increase estimate accuracy. In fact it does the exact opposite. Let me explain. Software estimates are always wrong, because the tasks being estimated are always, to some extent, terra incognito, new and unknown. However, sometimes the errors are in your favor; an obscure API, a third-party library, or an elegant hack condenses what you expected to be a week’s worth of work into a single day or less. Your hope, when estimating a project, is not that all of your estimates will be 100% dead accurate. That never happens. Your hope is that your overestimates and underestimates mostly offset each other, so that your total estimate is roughly correct. But the more precise and granular you get, the more likely you are to reduce your estimates — which is disastrous for your overall accuracy. What’s more, the estimation of a hundred-plus features quickly leads to “estimation fatigue.” Estimation is important. It is the basis for your schedule for the next weeks or months. So, like all important things, you want to minimize, not maximize, its cognitive load. Furthermore, a feature is not the work that goes into it, and not the unit that should be estimated. What engineers actually estimate is the size of the technical foundation building block that makes a feature possible, which is often/always shared among other features at that scale. It is very difficult — and doesn’t really make sense — to try and work out exactly how much of the work going into such a building block will be apportioned to individual features. This is all pretty abstract. Consider a concrete example. Suppose you’re building an app that logs in to a web service. Don’t have individual server-side estimates for “user can create account,” “account email address can be confirmed,” “user can log in,” “user can sign out,” and “user can reset password.” Have a single “user authentication” task, and estimate that. In hours? …Maybe, maybe not. I’m fond of using “T-shirt sizes” instead: S (an hour or three), M (a day or two), and L (a week or so.) Each project has its own pace, depending on tools, technical debt, the developers working on it, etc., so after a week or few you should be able to start figuring out how your hours map to your T-shirt sizes, rather than pretending to know that a priori. T-shirt sizing is especially good because it comes with built-in warning signs. If you find yourself with all Ls and some XLs, it’s a very visible sign that you probably do need to deconstruct your project a little further; if you have mostly Ss, it means you’ve fallen into the granularity trap and need to abstract your tasks out a little. If you have a roughly even mix of S, M, and L, you’ve probably structured things so that you’ll have pretty good — well, least bad — estimates. Which are, to belabor a point that needs belaboring, . The sad ultimate truth is that it takes as long as it takes, and sometimes the only way to find out how long that is is to actually do it. MCEs this, because they value predictability over almost all else; thus, they nearly always, on some level, treat estimates as commitments. This is the most disastrous mistake yet because it incentivizes developers to lie to them, in the form of padding their estimates — which in turn inevitably slows down progress far more than a few erroneous task estimates might. So: accept that estimates are always wrong, and your hope/goal/aim is not for them to be correct, but for their errors to cancel out; estimate by feature group, not by feature; and never even like you treat estimates as commitments. Do all these things, and while estimation will always remain a gauntlet, it will at least cease to be the lethal minefield it still is for so many. |
Watch SpaceX land a rocket in this awesome 360 video | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 30 | Have you ever wished you could stand on deck as a 160-foot rocket lands an arm’s length away from you, after a short trip into space? Yeah, me too, but given the rockets’ , perhaps watching it with a VR headset is a the slightly safer option. SpaceX just shared a gorgeous 360-degree video with the world, and if you happen to have a VR headset, now would be a good time to dig it out and strap it to your noggin; this video is definitely best experienced up close and personal, it’s quite the spectacle. If you’re on mobile, of showing it off even without a headset, but it’s as well, if you’re so inclined. Landing a rocket on a barge in the ocean is such a tremendous technological success that one can’t help but be agape and amazed at the feat. If SpaceX is able to consistently land all — or even most — of its first-stage rockets, it will mean a tremendous reduction in the cost of sending stuff up to the great, star-speckled darkness beyond. : “The Space Shuttle was technically reusable, but its giant fuel tank was discarded after each launch, and its side boosters parachuted into corrosive salt water every flight, beginning a long and involved process of retrieval and reprocessing. So, what if we could mitigate those factors by landing rockets gently and precisely on land? Refurbishment time and cost would be dramatically reduced.” It’s a fantastically exciting time to be a space fan, for sure. And with that in mind, why not enjoy another view in glorious 4k resolution below, of the same triumphant victory of engineering, ingenuity, and perhaps just a tiny little bit of good fortune thrown into the mix as well. |
6 insights into the French SaaS landscape | Clement Vouillon | 2,016 | 4 | 8 |
As a Berlin-based VC firm focused on SaaS, we often get questions about the current state of the European cloud software landscape. To be able to answer these questions more precisely we decided to analyze each major European ecosystem, starting with France. Our goal was to find all the relevant players in the French cloud ecosystem — from early-stage startups to large public companies — and put them on a map. The result, below, shows more than 200 cloud software companies across more than 15 categories. Our research revealed a couple of interesting insights. Here are six of them. The top three software categories (Marketing, Developers and Productivity & Collaboration) account for more than 50 percent of the companies in our data set. Marketing and developer tools alone account for almost 38 percent of all companies. When we only take into account VC-backed companies, we can see that the distribution looks very similar. The only big change is that the Marketing category jumps from No. 2 to No. 1, with 23.4 percent of the companies listed. This trend is confirmed by the median funding size by category: The median funding values for the Marketing and Developers categories are the highest of our batch, with $5.4 million and $4.7 million, respectively, followed by CRM & Sales and HR, both at $3 million. The rest of the categories stay under $2 million. If we only look at companies that have raised more than $15 million (15 companies in total), more than half (nine) have moved their headquarters to the U.S. Twelve have permanent offices in the U.S. This is an important trend, because, for a majority of these companies, the U.S. is their biggest market, and moving their headquarters to San Francisco or New York is key in capturing it. It also grants them better access to capital. That being said, they all keep offices in France (mainly for engineering). As you can see, there is a huge difference between the median and average funding values depending on where the headquarters are located. Interestingly, this trend does not only apply to well-funded startups. More and more early-stage startups take the opportunity to go to the U.S. thanks to programs like Y Combinator, Techstars or 500 Startups (e.g. ). The bridges between the U.S. and France are strengthening. Surprisingly, it’s not about the West Coast and San Francisco only; 44 percent of the VC-backed French startups with U.S. headquarters are based in New York. First, a few words on the distinction between vertical and horizontal software: Horizontal software: a product that is industry agnostic. Vertical software: a product built to answer the needs of a specific industry or vertical. Here is the percentage of vertical versus horizontal companies in our list: More horizontal companies are created and funded compared to vertical ones, which is normal because creating vertical software requires industry-specific knowledge and experience, which is more scarce. From a funding perspective, the median values for horizontal and vertical companies are almost the same ($2.5 million versus $2.3 million): But there is a huge difference for the average values ($9.2 million versus $5.4 million). The explanation is that, obviously, at the higher end of the spectrum you’ll find many more horizontal companies that have raised hefty rounds. If we look again at the 15 companies that have raised more than $15 million, 12 of them are horizontal and three are vertical. Clearly, big horizontal companies raise more money. When we dug deeper in this list, we noticed an interesting difference. In general, the successful horizontal companies were “global companies” earlier in their life. They get traction while still in France (or built a first version with their engineering team in France), then raise big rounds and move to the U.S. to compete internationally while keeping their engineering office in France (e.g. ). The playbook for vertical startups is different, as they often need to dominate their home market first before expanding in a region/country. They keep their headquarters in France and open offices where they expand. Becoming global takes longer, and capital access is slightly different. This is mainly because vertical software is much more geography-dependent (local legal specificities, local industry rules, customers, culture, etc). But things are changing with the maturation of the market. Of the three vertical startups that raised more than $15 million, two of them are relatively young companies ( , 2011 and , 2013), and they all received funding from U.S. investors while still headquartered in France. So, with the maturation of more and more verticals, we can expect this gap to narrow. One vertical clearly stands out when we look at our map: e-commerce. France is pretty strong when it comes to e-commerce tools, with promising companies such as Mirakl, Lengow, etc. This landscape provides an interesting picture of what a typical French SaaS company looks like. In terms of how this picture will evolve, there are two key trends: There are more connections between France and the U.S. thanks to startup programs like Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Techstars, etc. and initiatives like Stripe Atlas. With local French players (accelerators) building relationships with their U.S. counterparts, we’ll see more and more French SaaS going to the U.S. at an early stage. But because it’s so competitive to hire engineers (East Coast or West Coast), a majority of them will keep strong roots in France. We’re also witnessing the opposite trend with promising vertical startups that are growing fast while staying in France. As explained above, internationalization is much more complicated and geography-dependent for vertical software. And because many verticals are finally getting mature, we’ll see an increasing number of vertical SaaS champions staying in France and expanding in Europe first. |
Welcome to the post-app world? | Tom Goodwin | 2,016 | 4 | 30 |
We’ve fallen in love with apps. It’s hard to see something so popular fading into the past, but what if that happened? What if apps were simply an iteration of the mobile web, before something better came along? With the flurry of announcements that occurred around Facebook’s F8 conference, perhaps that time has finally come. Since 2010, “there has been an app for that”. However, such excitement appears to be diminishing. On your own homescreen (the most valuable real estate on earth), what new apps are using that space? For every iPhone sold, 119 apps have been downloaded. However, we use fewer than a quarter of those apps in any given month. The average app loses 77% of its users within three days after being downloaded. The five apps that we love the most take up 80% of our session time. Over the past few years, “click to download” display ads have littered feeds. It seemed like every retailers’ mCommerce strategy was to make an iPhone or Watch app. For many who were first to market, it seemed like a gold rush. On reflection, maybe our belief was more concerning the power of technology to change habits than empathizing with consumer needs. Of course, apps have limitations. Probably the best marketing Apple has ever done is turning the boring notion of a “computer program” into the excitement of an app. They work brilliantly for many uses. Banking or airline apps do a superb job of bubbling up personal, secure information rapidly, a sort of micro-portal to what matters. That said, again, as instant messaging and voice control takes off, it increasingly seems that apps are not the solution for everything. Apps provide an increasingly lousy way to get to what we want. Apple confidently says the future of TV is apps, which is stupid in the extreme. They merely replicate the false, anachronistic structure of the world of the TV channel. Do I watch AMC or Breaking Bad? Do I want to see Superbowl or tune into CBS? Modern relationships are with the content, not the curator or the pipe. Can you imagine downloading 20 record label apps in order to get our music, and then needing to switch between them? It’s the same with communications. Back in 2006, I could either call or text anyone in my contact list: a simple choice to make. Now with Viber, Line, WeChat, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Twitter and a million other ways to reach someone, I first need to pick the app before I select the person that I want to reach… and then hope that it’s the one which they’re on. When I want to travel to the airport, I unfailingly want a car to take me there. I don’t want to choose the provider, then the size of the the car, then its destination. This brings up the first mechanism for the future: aggregation. My TV is set up with four remotes, and watching John Oliver after broadcast requires me to press nine button via Kafkaesque menus. I long for a day where a single app can be the gateway to a content type. It would be similar to how I use Spotify to listen to all of the music that I care about, or Twitter to consume all the news I’m likely to need. I see apps that bring what we care about to the front. Apple TV wants to do this, but Apple doesn’t have the partnerships in place to draw upon all the content providers in the world. If business models can be developed, I see the rise of megaportals with maps as the primary access point for all travel, hotels, events, and places. This would be alongside another portal to access all of my networks and ways to reach them, and additional megaportals for retail and content. I then see our journeys within apps being one of linkage. A consumer may start a conversation on Facebook Messenger discussing movie times, before seeing suggested movies in the feed based on our locations. Buying and downloading tickets would happen straight to Passbook, with Touch ID and Apple Pay. They then may be offered dinner reservations in Opentable, book a time via in-app IM, and then finally order an Uber to take them there. Each of these experiences will be within an app environment:: seamless, secure and personalized. The Internet could soon become one totally personalized with apps. We may want to order items from retailers that we don’t care enough to use frequently, or a hotel site that only exists abroad. For this we’ll see app streaming as an emulator of an experience. Our Internet of apps may be formed of those that exist on our phone, but otherwise, we’ll use temporary apps that are streamed to provide such an interface. This is where artificial intelligence and bots come together. The notification layer might become a key way for us to skim the surface of the web, rather than deeply experiencing and discovering it. Combinations of technology like AI, machine learning, shared data and rich analysis from Google Now, Cortana and Siri could automate many parts of our lives. We need to think less of the Internet as something we go to, but more in terms of the notification layer as a place for suggested prompts of what our phones think are relevant to us. The cue to book an Uber as it’s raining and we’re running late; the weather forecast on our notification screen as we wake up; the rarely available dinner slot from a late cancellation; the late flight departure… all best served to us as a notification. We finally need to consider a screenless world. The Echo is an example of such a device, as are some wearables. How do we use sound, haptic feedback or other mechanisms to impart knowledge without large real estate? It’s this challenge that a whole new group of UI designers need to consider. Apps are here to stay. Bots won’t kill them, but we’re about to move to a hybrid time where some apps become gateways to everything: they will allow us to choose what we want, rather than who gives it to us |
With EmoWatch your Apple Watch knows if you are :) or :( | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,016 | 4 | 8 | Siri is good for a lot of things, but she generally doesn’t care much whether you sound your usual perky self. Launching today is , a new app for your iPhone and Apple Watch that will take care of that side of things, helping you track your emotional state. The EmoWatch app identifies and tracks users’s emotions from their voices, regardless of language, by analyzing vocal properties. EmoWatch is basically a technical demo app for ‘s . Well, I say ‘app’; it’s not a very advanced one: The iPhone app is sparse to the point of being on the right side of a minimum viable product. Frankly, I’m surprised they were able to get it past the iTunes App Store reviewers, but it does do what it needs to: offer a conduit to the Apple watch, and showing a read-out (in the form of a graph) of your moods throughout the day. And literally nothing else. If you don’t have an Apple Watch, you’ll be mightily confused, because the iPhone app doesn’t give you the slightest hint about what you’re meant to do. Extreme minimalism didn’t stop me from being absolutely fascinated, however. Most of the magic is happening server-side, behind the scenes. It works by taking a short sample of your voice. The app appears to be content after just 2-3 seconds, barely enough time to get a full sentence out. It then analyzes the audio sample for a number of parameters, including intonation, pitch, speed, and volume. The technology is related purely to a person’s voice, rather than the words they are using. The app attempts to measure four “dimensions” of emotion: Joy, sorrow, anger, and calmness. In theory, the company claims, this means that users of all linguistic backgrounds should be able to use it. As interesting as the app is, I found it far more compelling that is available to developers. The API is a tool for getting real-time feedback on the mood of a speaker, which has any number of interesting use cases. If the tech is accurate, this API could be a great addition to the numerous mental health tracking apps out there, and a ton of other use-cases besides. The technology is also being used in robotics (to help robots understand sarcasm, presumably) and call centers (possibly to detect the proximity of the customer to the terminus of their tether). Of course, Empath isn’t the only horse in this game; and offer similar functionality, but as far as I can tell, neither offer the same real-time feedback loop as the Empath API. On the topic of accuracy — I wasn’t able to test in depth how well the mood analyzing tech actually works, but it generally appears to be roughly in the right ballpark: I felt mildly stressed earlier today, and the app picked up that I was less than chipper. As I’m writing this, I have a bottle of , I’m relaxed, listening to some music and writing. And once I hit “publish” on this article, it’s the weekend. No wonder the app reports I’m hunky-dory. |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,016 | 4 | 7 | null |
White House announces the kids and projects of its 2016 Science Fair | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 8 | The annual White House Science Fair is always a heartening occasion. Watching President Obama ramble around and shoot the breeze (and sometimes ) with a bunch of smart, nerdy kids is entertaining, and the projects are often pretty impressive. is, of course, the last in the president’s term, and it promises to be a good one, if the list of exhibits and exhibitors is anything to go by. Among the participants: And a whole bunch more. Honestly, a lot of these are such cool ideas that it’s embarrassing I haven’t heard of them before. I’m really looking forward to the Science Fair, which will stream live at Whitehouse.gov on the 13th at 5 PM ET. |
New Facebook rules allow publishers and celebrities to share sponsored content | Anthony Ha | 2,016 | 4 | 8 | As more and more online content , it becomes more important for Facebook to provide ways for publishers and creators to make money. That’s why to the social network’s branded content and ads policies could be a big deal. Under the new rules, verified Facebook Pages can now share branded content (i.e., “any post — including text, photos, videos, Instant Articles, links, 360 videos, and Live videos — that specifically mentions or features a third party product, brand, or sponsor”) on Facebook. Who will be affected by this change? Well, verified Pages are usually owned by big brands, publishers, celebrities and other influencers, though . Facebook says it’s also introducing a tool that will make it easy to tag the sponsor behind that content — in fact, tagging the sponsor will be required. :
This update is something that media companies, public figures, influencers, and marketers have been asking for, as branded content is a growing and evolving part of the media landscape. People will now be connected to more of the content they care most about on Facebook as publishers and influencers gain an incentive to share more quality content — of all kinds — with their fans. We know that many of our partners have existing partnership deals with marketers, and this update gives them the ability to extend their branded content business onto Facebook. While the changes are rolling out today, Facebook says support for live sponsored videos is still to come. It also says that not all types of branded content will be welcome — persistent watermarks and pre-roll ads are still forbidden, as are sponsored cover photos and profile pictures. Because there was about this (and it doesn’t hurt to get a little more detail), Facebook confirmed that publishers running branded content on Facebook was completely against the rules before, unless they received approval directly from the social network. That doesn’t mean things didn’t slip between the cracks, but officially, it was against the rules. |
SpaceX just landed a rocket on a drone ship for the first time | Emily Calandrelli | 2,016 | 4 | 8 | At 4:43 pm EST, SpaceX successfully launched their next resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). In addition to a seamless launch, SpaceX landed the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket on an autonomous drone ship for the very first time. Landing from the chase plane — SpaceX (@SpaceX) This was SpaceX’s fifth landing attempt on a drone ship — all previous attempts ended in explosions. Although in December of last year, Elon Musk’s rocket company their first rocket, but that recovery took place back on stable ground. [gallery size="tc-article-featured-image-wide" link="none" ids="1304906,1304901,1304908,1304902,1304903,1304904,1304905"] Today’s rocket recovery was an entirely different beast. Soft-landing a rocket on a drone ship floating in the ocean is inherently more difficult than safely recovering a rocket on land. Definitely harder to land on a ship. Similar to an aircraft carrier vs land: much smaller target area, that's also translating & rotating. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Despite this increased complexity, SpaceX to recover rockets on drone ships rather than stable landing pads for missions that require the rocket to move at a high velocity. Depending on the necessary velocity for that particular mission, and the mass of the payload SpaceX is carrying, there may not be sufficient fuel to bring the rocket back to land. SpaceX first stage landing on Of Course I Still Love You For these reasons, a drone ship away from land may be the only option for rocket recovery for certain missions. As mentioned before, ship landings are needed for high velocity missions. Altitude & distance don't mean much for orbit. All about speed. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Today’s landing took place on SpaceX’s drone ship named “Of Course I Still Love You,” a nod to ships in the late Iain Banks’ science fiction novels. SpaceX’s autonomous drone ship / Image courtesy of SpaceX Recovering a rocket is the first step toward rocket reusability. However, in order to make a subsequent launch cheaper, that same rocket must be able to launch again without much refurbishment. It’s difficult to truly assess the condition of today’s recovered rocket just by looking at it. Further analysis is required to determine if this rocket can fly again. While the landing of the rocket is an exciting milestone on the path to rocket reusability, the primary goal of today’s mission is to bring 7,000 pounds of important supplies to the crew on the ISS. This was the eighth of up to 20 missions to the ISS that SpaceX is contracted to fly for NASA. BEAM inflation on the ISS / Image courtesy of NASA Most notably, in the trunk of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule for this mission is Bigelow Aerospace’s inflatable space habitat known as the (BEAM). BEAM will be attached to one of the nodes on the station and used to demonstrate expandable habitat technology in space. Dragon is currently on its way to the station now and will arrive on Sunday morning. Eventually, when Dragon leaves ISS to return to Earth, it will bring down trash, critical science samples and failed hardware in need of repair. |
Alphabet’s secretive Schaft Inc. shows off new bipedal robot in Tokyo | Devin Coldewey | 2,016 | 4 | 8 | There’s a new bot in town (Tokyo, specifically), and while it might not be as cute as , as creepy as or as anthropomorphic as , it might be more practical than all of them. It walks on two legs, but not like a man, or even a bear. This one, designed by Alphabet-owned Schaft Inc., has its own uniquely robotic form of locomotion. The nameless robot strutted onstage at the New Economic Summit in Japan, joining Schaft co-founder Yuto Nakanishi and facing a delighted crowd. A video then played showing robots like the one on stage, but different — but all with a few things in common. Most important has to be the walking system. Rather than imitate a human gait, which is a remarkably complex controlled-falling affair, these robots have rigid legs that slide up and down like rails. This allows them to lift without bending, while joints at the top allow them to be canted in or out and “ankles” at the bottom provide stability on uneven terrain. Batteries and motors are suspended between the legs, creating a naturally low center of gravity. No name yet for Google prototype bipedal robot, aimed at helping society by carrying heavy loads — Tokyotronic (@robotopia) It appears to be a very effective way of getting around: the video shows robots navigating a forest floor, rocky beach, snowy field and even the bane of ED209 and Daleks — . In fact, one robot is shown cleaning the steps with Roomba-like whiskers on its feet as it climbs. Let’s see Atlas do that! There’s also a clip of the robot repeatedly slipping on a metal bar placed under it by its human captors — but it keeps its feet under it with commendable alacrity. We’ll probably see this footage again when Skynet reminds us why we can’t be allowed to live. None of the robots have arms, or any type of prehensile gripper. A barbell is attached to the top of one sturdy-looking prototype, so we know it lifts, but other than that, no cargo or manipulative capacity was shown. Either the robots aren’t designed for that, or this was simply more of a demonstration of the motive platform. If this all sounds a little vague, that’s because there isn’t much specific information to go on. Schaft was acquired by Google in December 2013 and has been very quiet since, despite excelling in DARPA’s Robotics Challenge. They don’t even have a website any more, and their operations and projects are closely guarded secrets within Alphabet’s X division. on stage at ! — Rakuten Today (@RakutenToday) All we have to go on are tweets from Tokyo-based robotics writer and , and a statement . The statement? This “wasn’t a product announcement or indication of a specific product roadmap. The team was simply delighted to have a chance to show their latest progress.” We’re reaching out to this stealthy robotics maker for more information, but if they’re as forthcoming as they’ve been for the last three years, don’t expect much. But we do expect to see more of this innovative robotics platform in the near future — it’s too cool to keep under wraps. |
BMW just jumped into the U.S. car-sharing biz, with the help of YC alum RideCell | Connie Loizos | 2,016 | 4 | 8 | BMW just launched a new car-sharing service called that will enable Seattle residents to access 400 cars that they can pick up and drop off pretty much wherever they like, as long as that’s not on the outskirts of town. Eventually, the idea is to expand into cities nationwide. BMW’s isn’t a revolutionary concept at this point. Daimler has a similar service called Car2Go that’s available in New York, Austin, Minneapolis, Vancouver and Portland, Oregon. Audi also launched a car-sharing service in San Francisco and Miami a few months ago called Audi at Home (though it’s currently limited to residents of one luxury condominium complex in each city). BMW itself is already operating car-sharing services in 10 European cities, where Daimler is also making a big push. Not only are these services better for cities, but it looks like they can produce more revenue for the car companies than selling cars, too. What’s perhaps most interesting about this new ReachNow initiative is how BMW is getting it up and running: through a partnership with , a San Francisco-based company whose software serves as a kind of high-tech traffic controller. The company — formed in Atlanta by Georgia Tech grads who moved to San Francisco for Y Combinator in 2011 — describes itself as the operating system of numerous car-sharing, ride-sharing, fixed-route and dynamic transit services. It wasn’t always that way. Originally called InstantCab, , the company was originally conceived as a ride-share service à la Uber. But as time passed and it grew vastly out-funded, the company began looking to autonomous fleets. More specifically, the team decided to tackle the thorny issue of how companies will manage them, from knowing where each car is located, to which ride may have a low battery, to the vehicles that need to be washed or are damaged. None of RideCell’s customers are overseeing autonomous fleets just yet. These include UC Berkeley, USC, 3M and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which is using RideCell to ensure its shuttles aren’t running half empty. But RideCell will be ready when they are, says CEO and co-founder Aarjav Trivedi. “On-demand is here and autonomous is coming,” he says. “So we’re working with the first and helping our clients prepare for the second.” Indeed, for now, RideCell’s new partnership with BMW will largely allow BMW to operate its fleet of car-share vehicles — including 3 Series sedans, Mini Coopers and its electric i3 models — more efficiently. For example, if a driver hops in a car with a low battery, RideCell might prompt BMW to offer the driver a discount if he or she is willing to use a charging station as their final destination. (As it stands, the drives will cost 41 cents a minute for a promotional period, then move to 49 cents.) BMW likes RideCell’s tech so much, in fact, it’s putting its money where its mouth is. When RideCell this week closed on $11.7 million in Series A funding, it was BMW i Ventures, which has invested in the company previously, that led the round. Other participants included earlier backer Khosla Ventures; Gokul Rajaram, who’s a product engineering lead at Square; and Flutter co-founder (and now Nest product manager) Mehul Nariyawala. Altogether, RideCell has raised $17 million. By the way, those customers interested in signing up for ReachNow need only scan their driver’s license, then verify their identity by taking a picture of their face through the . BMW says the approval process takes two minutes or less. |
Chariot for Women is a new ridesharing service for women only | Kristen Hall-Geisler | 2,016 | 4 | 8 | Uber driver Michael Pelletz is launching a new ridesharing service with a twist: All the drivers and passengers will be women. will be active in the Boston area on April 19. But does the world need another ridesharing service? Especially one so specific? It turns out maybe it does. “The premise is the same as all the other ridesharing services,” Pelletz said in a phone interview. “There’s a driver app and a client app, except that what makes us unique is our safety feature that other apps forgot to do.” The service’s patent-pending technology gives the driver and the client a code in the app after a ride request has been made. When the car arrives, the driver and passenger make sure their codes match before the passenger gets in the car. Chariot for Women donates 2 percent of every fare to charity, and the company does not use surge charging. In addition to only having women as drivers, Pelletz uses Safer Places, which has a reputation for performing the most stringent background checks. Chariot for Women also requires that all drivers pass Massachusetts’ check, the same deep background check used in daycare centers and schools. Chariot for Women pays for the CORI check and will add fingerprinting for its drivers as soon as it’s possible. The service will also pick up kids of any gender under age 13, as well as anyone of any age who identifies as a woman. “If they’re trans and identify as a woman, they can drive and ride with us, no problem at all,” Pelletz said. There are likely ahead for a service that states outright that it will not serve men. That doesn’t worry Pelletz. “We look forward to legal challenges. We want to show there’s inequality in safety in our industry. We hope to go to the U.S. Supreme Court to say that if there’s safety involved, there’s nothing wrong with providing a service for women.” That safety issue is making headlines lately, especially for Uber. obtained screenshots in March showing thousands of complaints against the company seeming to involve rape and sexual assault. In December 2014, an in India was arrested on suspicion of raping a passenger. And just today, for overstating the thoroughness of its background checks. “We’re doing this because there is such inequality when it comes to security that afflicts driver and rider due to gender,” Pelletz reiterated. “Women are across the world the ones being harassed and assaulted by male drivers. In my eight months as an Uber driver, I didn’t hear any negative feedback from men.” There’s also the question of whether this is empowering women or patronizing them. So I put the question to social media and, to my surprise, got a unanimous response: yes, if there were a women-only ridesharing service, every woman who answered my question would use it. Women in my unscientific poll mentioned feeling anxious when they get in a car with a strange man, not trusting the vetting process used by current services and the “creep factor.” The enthusiasm for an all-female service ranged from “I would be all over it” to “HELL YES” [caps hers]. And one woman pretty much summed up the issue with her response: “Honestly, yes, probably. I do sigh in relief when I get into a car with a woman.” “Our goal is that in five years, we want this issue to not even be an issue anymore,” said Pelletz. “We hope other rideshare companies follow in our footsteps to make it safer. Right now, that safety is not happening.” |
General Catalyst’s Phil Libin eyes bots with his first investment in stealth bot startup Begin | Matthew Lynley | 2,016 | 4 | 8 | Phil Libin in a bot company called that’s co-founded by GDGT co-founder Ryan Block, who left AOL Alpha in September last year to pursue the new venture. This is Libin’s first investment in bots, but it certainly wont be his last, as he will be primarily focusing on bots for the next few years. Begin will be yet another startup that’s part of the explosion in bot activity, in which startups are betting everything on conversational user interfaces living inside messaging platforms. And we’re seeing those kinds of bets emerge more and more in the startup ecosystem, with Slack looking to make investments in bot companies that live on its collaboration platform and Facebook at F8 this year. Details for Begin are slim — one reference point we have is from Libin, who says Begin is “a bot for making it easier to get work done, for people, for teams.” The company didn’t announce any additional details about the fundraising round, either. Here’s what we got from Block: “The happiest people and the strongest teams don’t do more work — they do their best work. Begin is a bot that helps you stay on top of everything you’ve got going on.” But Begin — and many other bots that fit into Slack and Facebook Messenger — are just the first wave of what will be a big overhaul in the way people interact with technology, Libin said. Block says he doesn’t expect conversational user experiences to replace the traditional UI altogether, and that they’ll be complementary. Still, Libin says that bots will make up a majority of the way people interact with technology. “My perspective here is that software and especially bots are at their best when they work on our behalf to reduce stress and expand our capabilities,” Block said. “To me, the ‘bots are the new apps’ refrain doesn’t mean that apps are going anywhere,” Block said. “Many bots will live inside chat platforms like Slack or Messenger, while some bots will have apps of their own.” In a conversation with TechCrunch, Libin talked more about his investment thesis and focus on bots, and why he thinks that it’s the next frontier in technology for the next few years. What is Begin working on? They’re making a bot for making it easier to get work done, for people, for teams, Ryan will be ready to unveil things pretty soon, but it’s an idea that he’s been working on for a while. We talked about it a few months ago, it fit in with my investment thesis on conversational UI becoming one of the most important topics in the next few years. Why are we seeing an explosion of bot activity now? I think, the reason apps exploded the way they did, they made things much more natural by removing a lot of friction. The next version of those same forces are going to happen to bots. They’re gonna carry the promise of ease of use and frictionless computing further than apps did. The range of technology, it wasn’t ready even two years ago, it’s ready now and we’re seeing this exponential growth. What we went through with apps in 2007 is gonna happen even faster for bots. What is the underlying technology that’s available now that enables this? For apps in 2007, the underlying tech was a good enough and responsive enough touchscreen, networking everywhere, and good enough app installation and deployment. It was difficult to install software, the idea you could install on the web was novel. There was all this underlying technology that needed to happen that was around for 10-20 years, but was all early adopter until 2007 when it crystallized into the iPhone. That made mainstream adoption of that possible. The underlying technology for bots are like NLP, machine learning, these are things that have been around academically for decades. But just in the past year they’re getting to the stage where they’re good enough. They’ve gotten to the point that mere mortal developers can build on them. Other technologies like messaging, the ubiquity of messaging platforms, and none of them had APIs. Now there’s an API culture, messaging is everywhere. It feels exactly the same way as apps in 2007. Are bots going to replace the traditional user interface? The traditional UI is static. A designer says we’re gonna put tasks over here and buttons over here, both interfaces are really powerful but for narrow uses. Professional tools, you’re probably not gonna interact with Photoshop through a bot. On the other side of the spectrum you’ll still have entertainment stuff. Pretty much everything in the middle, almost everything we use at work and at home, that isn’t authoring or something complicated, 80% of the rest of it goes to bots. Is Alexa a good example of how this will work? Some bots are gonna be convergent and some are gonna be divergent. Divergent bots are bots that implement their own app. There’s one you download from the app store and it happens to be conversational, like reserve and Luca. Convergent is, there’s not app, it lives in Slack or Messenger or Kik. My feeling is most serious bots will be both, they’ll service and multiple entry points. Amazon Echo is an example of a convergent platform, there will be bots that live on Echo but many will have apps you can download. It’ll be slightly different capabilities, but it’ll be the same service, the same brand. So your primary focus will be on bots? My focus is primarily on bots, on conversational user experiences for the next couple of years. This is the most important development in the next couple of years. It’s gonna become so ubiquitous that in a few years it won’t make sense to be ‘focusing on bots.’ It’s like saying I’m focusing on mobile. It’ll be integrated into the fabric of everything, but in the next few years it’s a really big thing to focus on. Where did your interest in bots come from? About six months ago I had a similar experience to when I held my first iPhone, it was with the Amazon Echo. I was washing dishes, there’s a game you can play on it called word master, you can play that against Alexa. Of course she can crush you, she’s an AI, but she’s programmed to not beat you that badly. I realized I’ve never interacted with technology like this. I can take my time, she can take her time, she’s keeping score, it was a very natural-feeling technology. All sorts of lights lit up in my brain. Not just Echo, that’ll be an interesting part, but this idea of cognitively ergonomic, natural conversational UI. |
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