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GoPro acquires Stupeflix and Vemory to beef up its video editing tools
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Matt Burns
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GoPro today of two startups to address one of the company’s sore spots: Video editing. Stupeflix and Vemory are the companies behind the mobile apps Replay and Splice, respectively. GoPro tells TechCrunch the company spent $105 million on the two companies combined and that all the employees from these companies will join GoPro’s ranks but work from their current locations of Paris and Austin, Texas. The two apps should bring new tricks to GoPro’s mobile offering. Replay, by Stupeflix, let’s uses select video clips and combine them into a single film complete with transitions and music — clearly something GoPro users would want. Splice, from Vemory, is a more robust mobile video application that provides a lot of tools not found in GoPro’s mobile editing app. Most GoPro users can agree, it’s a pain to edit and share captured content from GoPro’s own mobile app. It’s desktop app isn’t that much better, either. The company thrives at building hardware and developing a brand, but it’s clearly not great at building software — and with that the complete user experience that’s needed in today’s ecosystem. So $474 million cash in the bank, the company went out and spent a chunk of its cash and equity two companies that can hopefully fix the problem.
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Gmail Gets Improved Security Features For Business Users
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google a number of new security features for Gmail users in the enterprise today. Last year, the company launched its Data Loss Prevention (DLP) feature for users that helps businesses keep sensitive data out of emails. Today, it’s launching the first major update of this service at the in San Francisco. The DLP feature allows businesses to set rules for what kind of potentially sensitive information is allowed to leave and enter its corporate firewall through email. The most important new feature here is that DLP for Gmail can now also use optical character recognition to scan attachments for potentially sensitive information (think credit card numbers, drivers license numbers, social security numbers, etc.) and objectionable words (maybe a swear words or a secret project’s codename). DLP was already able to scan attachments before, but until now, it wouldn’t have been able to detect a social security number in an image-based file, for example. Now, DLP will also scan these files and admins can set up rules to reject or quarantine emails based on the settings they have decided on for their company. In addition, Google is also launching a set of new predefined content detectors for DLP that will make it easier for admins to scan emails for personally identifiable information in a number of new countries and, according to Google, “offer broader coverage of HIPAA data.” With today’s update, Google is also making it easier for admins to handle emails differently depending on the number of rule violations. Using this new feature, a company may decide that an email with a single credit card number will go into quarantine, for example, while one with fifty rule violations will be outright rejected. Admins can now also detection criteria for the many detectors based on their needs, which should help avoid false positives.
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Google’s Self-Driving Car Gets Into A Minor Accident While The AI Was Driving
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Greg Kumparak
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It was bound to happen eventually: one of Google’s self-driving cars has gotten into a minor accident – and, for once, it was while the AI was in control. Google’s cars have actually gotten into a dozen-plus fender benders over the years.. but in the previous cases, the government-mandated human driver was actually the one controlling the vehicle when the accidents occured. In this case ( ), Google says it outright: yep, the vehicle was in autonomous mode. Here’s what happened, straight : A Google Lexus-model autonomous vehicle (“Google AV”) was traveling in autonomous mode eastbound on El Camino Real in Mountain View in the far right-hand land approaching the Castro St. intersection. As the Google AV approached the intersection, it signaled its intent to make a right turn on red onto Castro St. The Google AV then moved to the right-hand side of the lane to pass traffic in the same lane that was stopped at the intersection and proceeding straight. However, the Google AV had to come to a stop and go around sandbags positioned around a storm drain that were blocking its path. When the light turned green, traffic in the lane continued past the Google AV. After a few cars had passed, the Google AV began to proceed back into the center lane to pass the sand bags. A public transit bus was approaching from behind. The Google AV test driver saw the bus approaching in the left side mirror but believed the bus would stop or slow to allow the Google AV to continue. Approximately three seconds later, as the Google AV was reentering the center of the lane it made contact with the side of the bus. The Google AV was operating in autonomous mode and traveling at less than 2 mph, and the bus was travelling at about 15 mph at the time of contact. The Google AV sustained bus damage to the left front fender, the left front wheel and one of its driver’s-side sensors. There were no injuries reported at the scene. tl;dr: Google Car tried to zip around some stopped cars, had to stop because of some sandbags in the road, tried to merge back into the other lane to get around them, and it hit the side of a passing bus which it assumed would slow to let it merge back in to the lane.. No injuries. It’s a weird fringe case, but it’s these fringe cases that makes building self-driving cars so damned hard. Hell, the accident was one any human could’ve gotten into — that is unless you’ve been driving in the Bay Area for a few years and have lost all faith that the buses here will slow down for you.
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Crosley’s First Direct Drive Turntable Doesn’t Disappoint
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Travis Bernard
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don’t have the best reputation among vinyl heads. Almost all of the record players the company makes are designed for first-time buyers. They’re cheap, both in terms of price and design. The first turntable I owned was a Crosley. Most of the parts were plastic, and it didn’t produce great sound. If you played anything with heavy bass, the tone arm would skip around. The plastic cover on the top broke after six months, and the device eventually only produced sound at half volume after being “active” for a year. It wasn’t a great device, but it got me hooked on vinyl. When I went to upgrade to a better deck, I didn’t think at all to get a Crosley. It’s the exact problem that Crosley the brand is looking to tackle with its newer C Series turntables, which includes three models. The first two models in the C Series came out last year (C10 and C100), while the newer C200 was announced at CES 2016 in January. The Crosley C200 might see some success, too. While potentially a tough sell for users like myself who’ve had a sub-par experience in the past with earlier and cheaper models, a test-drive easily argued the case for entry and intermediate level users. The Crosely C200 is easy to set up. All you have to do is set the turntable platter in the center, install the headshell into the front of the tonearm, balance the tonearm and stylus pressure, and put on the turntable lid. If that sounds super complicated, don’t worry. Everything clicks together like LEGOs, and the directions are easy to follow. Sometimes when you are setting up a new turntable, balancing the tonearm can be a bit of a hassle. That’s not the case for this turntable. The adjustable pitch control is a nice touch, especially for more advanced users. The pitch control allows you to adjust your pitch and tempo for DJing, and it should help the device appeal to the more veteran crowd. Most Crosley turntables look and feel cheap, but the C200 is an exception. The matte black finish, dazzling strobe dots, and more durable tonearm make for a sleek look and sturdy design. Crosley’s first direct drive turntable doesn’t disappoint http://tcrn.ch/1TM0IND Posted by on Monday, February 29, 2016 I tested the sound quality of the C200 with a number of different genres, including indie rock, pop, deep house, ambient, and trap. I also played all sizes of records to check for any variances in performance. I played everything through a Bose home theater system, and the sound quality didn’t disappoint (even at an excessively loud volume). At $279, the price is right. If you look at other turntables with similar features and design, you’ll find that this is a pretty good deal. Unless you are trying to be a professional DJ, this is a great deck to consider buying. The built-in pre-amp is good but not great. I tested this against my own pre-amp, and my pre-amp made the system sound significantly better. If you flip the phono switch on the back of the turntable and then run the RCA cables through your own pre-amp, you might have better sound results (as was the case for me). The sound is still good with the default pre-amp, but you might be able to make it sound even better with a little customization. I also wish the package came with longer RCA cables. The pre-packaged cable is pretty short, so you might need to buy something longer depending on your home stereo setup. Fortunately, I had spare cables so this wasn’t a huge issue, but I could see this causing frustration for some users. My biggest complaint about this turntable is what happens when you get to the end of a record. The record player doesn’t actually turn off, and the tone-arm doesn’t have a auto-return feature. This is a little irritating as it forces you to manually stop the record player after each listen. I’ve always liked record players that with stop when they finish or stay on and have the arm manually retract. The Crosley C200 is a great turntable, and I highly recommend checking it out it if you are in the market for a new record player. If the first turntable you bought was a cheaper, less sturdy one, and you don’t want to break the bank on a super high-end model, the C200 is a great upgrade. This is not a professional level turntable, but it’s not priced or designed to be that way. The design is great, the price is fair, it’s easy to set up, and it sounds wonderful. More advanced features like pitch control are there if you want them, and the devices shortcomings are minor. The only reason I’d pass on this device is because it lacks a auto-return tone-arm. Hopefully this is the start of something bigger for Crosley as they attempt to lasso more advanced users.
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Machine Learning Is Not The Answer To Better Network Security
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Matt Harrigan
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Machine learning isn’t a silver bullet for network security. I know, right now you’re saying “But wait Matt, All I hear is that every hot new company in the space is based on machine learning and that VCs are funding machine learning companies in record numbers, even with the economy in question.” And you’re right, they are – usually for very good reasons. I am not advocating against an entire field of study, only against its recent inappropriate application in analyzing the entirety of your network. Algorithmic learning theory, clustering, self-organizing maps and all that other neat sounding stuff –could- potentially be very useful in specific areas of security, under the right circumstances. For instance –UBA and EDR are very interesting and seem plausible from a volumetric standpoint. I think that what companies like Exabeam and Cylance are doing is very interesting and show a lot of promise. There are also very viable technology solutions specifically outside of the network security realm that are doing great things with ML. What I take issue with, is the notion that machine learning models can be effectively applied to network detection as the principal means of detecting complex attacks. I’ve sat through countless vendor presentations, evals and partnership opportunities over the last 2 years and have observed one of the following outcomes in all of them: The features that the data scientists who are looking at network protocol data we’ve captured typically choose to extract are byte and packet counts so that they can determine a deviation in network usage. The usual story here is that this type of algorithm can detect someone who is suddenly “working” in off hours. The assumptive overtone here is usually “someone else is on that machine!” or “Malware is exfiltrating the super secret sauce!” The reality is that it typically end in a conversation with the end user consisting of “yes, I have been backing up my entire hard drive to dropbox for the last 2 weeks” or “You, um, weren’t looking at which torrents I was seeding, right? Cool, then let’s just call them Nintendo ROMs.” The number of features we do want to analyze with ML cause a ghastly look of fear and loathing with most data scientists. This is because the values are wildly varying and there is a MASSIVE amount of data. PacketSled captures all network traffic from layer 2 to layer 7 and we retain it for a long time (our smallest customer ingests and stores about 100 million events per day). The typical response here is something akin to “doing this work across this dataset is simply cost prohibitive unless you only want to look for very specific problems.” Much in the same way we don’t want to look for overly broad false positives, we don’t want to look for specific, minute problems. That’s the problem that we had with signature-only approaches. They were too specific and only meaningful during a small snapshot in time. The promise of ML was supposed to be better. Even if platforms that use ML as a primary method of detecting bad stuff could ingest and process all the data, extract all the features we want, and cluster them all appropriately, there is a massive philosophical issue at play here – the sanctity of customers’ baselines. The same vendors who are pitching machine learning as their core technology advantage will be the first to cite the Verizon statistics – “nearly 100% of networks are compromised!” Ok, so then how does your model get a clean baseline of the network traffic from a dirty network? Show me that trick and I will show you how to moonwalk from North Beach to Alcatraz. “A 10 year-old with google would most certainly be able to answer questions with better accuracy, faster.” As if the depth problem, the feature problem, and the baseline issue weren’t enough, there is the issue of time. Machine Learning algorithms need to be limited by time in order to ingest data in sizes which can be processed meaningfully. Analyzing data for very lengthy periods of time, even if you’re only looking at a handful of attributes causes serious performance issues, if not outright failures. Long running and widely scoped memory is necessary. Imagine IBM’s Watson running on a palm pilot with only a SD card worth of knowledge – a 10 year old with google would most certainly be able to answer questions with greater accuracy, faster. Incidentally, it is important to point out that machine learning algorithms could never do the job that Watson does. So what happens when a user downloads an arbitrary executable off the internet, executes it, it lays dormant for 30 days, then phones home? I can tell you one machine that’s learning something there – the one on the other end of that command and control session back to somewhere nefarious. Without a long-term forensic data set telling you what happened 30 days ago, you’re in big trouble. Your network is a living organism that is constantly evolving, and it is chaotic. Baselining a chaotic moving target is not just impractical – it is impossible. That said, machine learning does have a place in network security. We need to use ML models as an atomic input to a chain of events that tell a bigger picture. We can’t ask it to sort through billions of objects in real-time, and historically to solve for any meaningful number of scenarios. What the enterprise needs is not a magic math robot that observes all things. We need to package the knowledge of security experts by automatically chaining micro-analytics, threat intelligence and metadata with forensically sound network traffic and files to understand and mitigate attacks in record time. We need to embed expert logic into our approach and make it possible for IR folks to stop running down false positives and do their actual jobs, responding to security events.
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A New, Standardized Way For Employees To Keep Their Vested Stock Options Longer
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Connie Loizos
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Amid headlines about billion-dollars valuations are many employees who unless their employers eventually go public or else sell to an acquirer in a cash deal. The problem centers on the option plan structure that startups use. Owing to a decades-old tax provision, employees have to exercise their options within 90 days of leaving or else lose them to the company. It’s worse than it sounds. In many cases, employees’ options grow so richly priced that they’re unaffordable. Their other options are stressful, too. Sometimes, departing employees can sell their options to secondary buyers, but not every company will allow that. Some people borrow money to buy their options. That can also prove disastrous, especially in those not-infrequent cases when the options prove to be worth less than the employee has already spent to buy them. Thankfully, a small but growing number of companies is trying to tackle the issue by giving employees more time to exercise their shares, including , , . Now, , a young company that was cofounded by former YC partner Harj Taggar and which at Y Combinator companies, is joining the battle against current stock option plan schemes. Specifically, the company has worked with (a YC-backed automated assistant that manages legal paperwork) and the white-shoe law firm , to create standardized paperwork that any company can use to give their employees 10 years to exercise their options. (Really. You can download them ) YC alums, including , have already implemented Triplebyte’s extended window option plan, and nine others have pledged to do, Taggar tells us. Perhaps even more meaningfully, Y Combinator has agreed to recommend that its companies use the Triplebyte extended window option plan documents, beginning with YC’s current Winter 2016 batch. The solution isn’t fool-proof — still. The so-called incentive stock options (ISOs) that employees are given used to be far more attractive before Congress changed the rules roughly a decade ago. Now some employees are subject to an Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) that they weren’t prior. This means the longer an employee waits to buy his or her options (and they often have to wait for them to vest), the bigger the tax hit. Also worth noting: 90 days after an employee’s separation from the company, his or her ISOs automatically convert to what are called non-qualified options (NSOs), which wind up resulting in even more taxable income. (Taggar plays down this issue, saying that “you pay more tax on NSOs than ISOs, but it’s not as much as people think.”) Companies with an existing option plan in place might not be in a rush to alter it, either, particularly given their other priorities, including weathering a market that appears to be turning. For startups that have yet to create a stock option plan, however, TripleByte has put together a long list of the arguments that founders are likely to hear concerning why extending their startups’ stock options exercise window is a bad idea. It also created a point-by-point refutation of each argument. and enjoy. (We did.)
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IBM Adds Post-Cyber Attack Planning With Resilient Systems Acquisition
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Ron Miller
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The is being held this week in San Francisco where security pros come together to discuss strategy. IBM made several security announcements this morning ahead of the conference, headlined by the purchase of . Instead of trying to prevent an attack, Resilient gives customers a plan to deal with a breach after it’s happened. While IBM offers pieces for protecting and defending the network, no security system is fool-proof and there will be times when hackers slip through the defenses (or the attack comes from within). “What happens when an attack happens, which unfortunately has become an inevitably. You need resilience to get back up and running and minimize the damage. There has to be muscle memory of what you will do and how you will react,” Caleb Barlow vp of security at IBM told TechCrunch. To help companies establish post-breach plans before attacks happen, IBM also announced a new services component called the IBM X-Force Incident Response Services team. The idea is to provide expertise around this type of planning in the same way companies plan for other types of disasters before they happen, so they have a set of procedures in place. The final piece is a partnership with , a company that provides a full incident record that lets a customer trace the incident all the way back to its origin (such as clicking on a phishing link) and see the impact it’s had across the organization. Barlow described the Carbon Black tool like rewinding a video tape. He says when you combine these three pieces, it gives IBM a comprehensive incident response package. Many companies don’t know what to do when a breach occurs or the responsibilities are too spread out across large organizations. This provides a post-breach planning tool, consulting services to help executive teams and IT think about those plans before an incident occurs and a way to do post-incident forensic analysis. Resilient walks companies through exactly what they need to do based on their state or country. This could include activities like informing the right law enforcement officials, contacting the insurance company, shutting down the affected workstations and so forth. As Barlow explained every company has an emergency response system for a variety of potential disasters, but they often lack a coherent plan for dealing with a cyber security attack. The IBM security division was formed 4 years ago with the purchase of . Since then the division has grown to 7300 employees and $2 billion in revenue. It added a thousand employees last year alone, Barlow said. With the purchase of Resilient, IBM gets 100 employees, who are post-breach subject experts and 30 of the Fortune 500 customers Resilient has in its portfolio (along with its other customers). million, but neither IBM nor Resilient would confirm that price with Barlow simply saying, “We never discuss the price of private acquisitions.” The purchase has to pass regulatory approval before it becomes official. This acquisition did not come out of the blue. There is a technical link between the two already. Resilient has been on IBM’s radar as a business partner that built an application on top of the QRadar platform. Today’s announcements have to be seen against the backdrop of IBM’s transformation strategy centered on cloud, analytics, Watson cognitive computing and security. The company has yet to see great financial results from this transition , but it keeps pushing along trying to beef up these different components through acquisitions. Today’s announcements are part of that overall approach.
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Amazon Acquires Emvantage To Build Its Online Payment Platform In India
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Catherine Shu
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Amazon will acquire startup Emvantage for an undisclosed amount to develop its Indian e-commerce site’s payment platform. In a press announcement, Amazon said the Noida-based company’s employees will start working for Amazon’s payment team after the transaction is completed. Founded in 2012 by chief executive officer Vivek Sagar, Emvantage’s platform includes a payment gateway for online transactions made using credit or debit cards, mobile payment tools that integrate into merchant apps, and a prepaid wallet. Making it easier for customers to pay for online purchases is a key point of focus for India’s top e-commerce businesses, which include Amazon, , and . India’s e-commerce market is expected to , but the country’s . Instead, many shoppers pay for e-commerce purchases using online wallets that can be topped up at brick-and-mortar stores, pre-paid cards, or cash on delivery. , an online payments company , is , but it competes with several payment gateways owned by India’s major e-commerce players. These include Snapdeal’s and ; FX Mart, which was ; and now Emvantage (Amazon is expected to close the transaction by the end of March). In a statement, Srinivas Rao, the director of Amazon Payments India, said “Emvantage is a valuable addition to our team as we accelerate our payment offerings, ensuring the best in class online payment experience anywhere that customers shop with us.”
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The Internet Of Medicine Is Just What The Doctor Ordered
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Brendan O’Brien
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Healthcare reform has eluded Congress for more than two decades. It seems technology, driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), could well make the biggest transformation of all. In many respects, IoT is just what the doctor ordered. It holds the key to lowering medical costs, improving quality and making healthcare more personalized, accessible and affordable for average patients. Call it the Internet of Medicine (IoM). From a financial standpoint, the annual impact from IoM could soon exceed a trillion dollars a year — revenue, by the way, that will increasingly rely on recurring revenue arrangements. The move toward IoM is gaining momentum. In fact, I believe its adoption is inevitable. Why? For starters, it serves the financial interest of key players in healthcare — the insurance industry, big pharma, hospitals and doctors. Secondly, it’s ideally suited to help meet the demands of today’s increasingly health-conscious and empowered patients. And where does recurring revenue fit into all of this? Healthcare is so expensive that the entire healthcare ecosystem — from insurers to hospitals to patients — prefers to do business through incremental payments. For example, many hospitals have begun storing medical images in the cloud on a pay-per-image basis, rather than maintaining costly on-premise storage systems. As medical costs continue to climb, these sorts of recurring payment mechanisms will become even more widespread. According to a from McKinsey & Company, the economic effect from cloud-connected health technology could range between $170 billion to a whopping $1.1 trillion a year in the next 10 years. The lion’s share of that impact, the study says, will come from using IoM innovations to more effectively manage and treat chronic illness. Chronic conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and stroke account for 86 percent of the more than $3 trillion spent on healthcare each year in the U.S. today. The report concludes that financial gains will come from helping patients with chronic diseases get better faster and stay healthy longer, while lowering treatment costs. When it comes to cost savings, the insurance industry stands to benefit the most from IoM. As a consequence, insurers will continue to push for technology innovations that reduce the amount of money they pay in claims, a figure that totaled more than $250 billion last year, according to the . Hospitals, responding to cost pressures from insurers, are turning to IoM solutions to trim expenses — solutions they will pay for on a recurring revenue basis. For example, they’re increasing their reliance on sensor-based technologies such as smart chips, RFID tags, real-time location systems (RTLS) and beacons to better orchestrate the flow of patients, doctors, nurses, medical equipment and supplies. In addition, sophisticated tools such as sensor-enhanced imaging systems enable doctors to diagnose disease sooner, while new wearable devices like the allow them to monitor patients remotely. Innovations like these are of vital importance to another segment of healthcare — the pharmaceutical industry. The reason is simple: The sooner doctors can detect illness, the sooner patients can start taking the drugs they need to manage or cure their conditions. New devices are in the works that will transform the treatment of many chronic ailments that comprise a large portion of recurring revenue for drug companies. For example, Swedish drug maker Novartis is working with Google on a that can measure blood sugar from tears. It’s a significant advancement over the uncomfortable finger pricks millions of diabetics must currently endure several times a day. The lenses will also provide continuous data about blood sugar fluctuations, knowledge that’s essential in helping diabetics avoid life-threatening complications. Indeed, wearable technology and the data it generates may well be the most revolutionary outcome from IoM. The insights they provide, purchased through incremental payments, (for the most part) will benefit everyone — insurers, drug makers, hospitals, doctors and, most of all, patients. By giving patients immediate and continuous access to information about the state of their health, IoM will help usher in a new era of highly personalized, self-directed healthcare. According to research firm Forrester, we’ve already entered the , a period in which technology innovation is tipping the scales in favor of customers and forcing businesses to become “customer-obsessed” as never before. The same market forces are playing out in medicine in what you could call the “Age of the Patient.” Faced with rising deductibles, insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, today’s patients are more cost-conscious about healthcare. And thanks to the Internet, mobile apps and wearable devices, they’re also more informed and more proactive about their health. As a consequence, the old order, where patients were at the mercy of healthcare systems, is giving way to a new dynamic, fueled by IoM, in which patients have more control and more options than ever to get healthcare that’s more affordable, available and convenient. Powered by IoM technologies such as telemedicine, emerging delivery alternatives give patients access to healthcare on terms and schedules. In many cases, they enable people to bypass trips to doctors and hospitals entirely. And, because most of these options employ recurring revenue payments, patients view them as a more affordable choice to traditional medical providers. The age of the patient will no doubt enhance patient care. But it won’t come without strings. Medical providers, whether in traditional settings or new subscription-based practices, will be motivated to find ways to deepen patient engagements, perhaps through loyalty discounts or specialized services for life moments like pregnancy. On that score, IoT will be invaluable. It can provide unprecedented, real-time access to troves of patient health data that doctors, hospitals and drug companies can use — responsibly and with permission, of course — to improve results and forge lasting relationships with patients. More broadly, IoT is poised to dramatically transform virtually every aspect of medicine while paving the way for incremental profitability across the entire healthcare landscape.
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American Airlines Sues Gogo Over Slow Inflight Wi-Fi
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Fitz Tepper
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Remember the first time you connected to WiFi on a commercial flight? It was awesome! But now, almost 10 years later, data-obsessed passengers are getting sick of the slow Gogo-enabled WiFi found on most domestic flights. Luckily, at least one airline is finally doing something about it. On Friday American Airlines filed a lawsuit in a Texas court asking a judge to allow the company to break its current contract with inflight WiFi provider Gogo. Essentially, the contract between the two companies has a clause that would allow American Airlines to switch providers if it can find another product that “materially improves” on Gogo’s current offering. The Star-Telegram has of the lawsuit, which says “After carefully evaluating the new technology and services in the marketplace, American has decided to exercise its rights under the agreement and recently notified Gogo that ViaSat offers an in-flight connectivity system that materially improves on Gogo’s air-to-ground system”. is a competing service used by United, JetBlue, and Virgin America, and offers a satellite-based WiFi experience that is “8 to 10 times faster” than any existing inflight WiFi solutions. For comparison, Gogo’s current offering on American Airlines is a ground-based system that provides a total bandwidth capacity of less than 10 Mbps for the . While Gogo has developed a satellite-based solution that offers up to 70Mbps per plane, the new technology (called ), hasn’t been rolled out to any American planes yet. Now either a judge will rule on the lawsuit, or the two companies will come to an agreement outside of the courtroom. However one thing is certain – if you are an American flyer, faster WiFi is in your future.
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How Standalone Apps Can Grow Twitter’s Stagnant User Base
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Jon Russell
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problem. Well, Twitter actually has a number of problems — employee retention, profitability and lack of trust among diehard users to name a few — but user growth seems to be its most critical area. Our own Josh Constine that Twitter burned bridges with prospective new users a long time ago because it was, and largely still is, difficult for them to quickly find value from the service, unlike almost every other social network on the planet — most importantly Facebook. Now, Twitter is adopting a major feature from Facebook: the option to in non-chronological order when you open its mobile app. B Indeed, offering differentiated services could boost Twitter’s appeal to those who don’t use it by solving the “Why do I need Twitter?” question while also providing a differentiated experience for those who have lost faith. Twitter’s latest quarterly report showed flat user numbers — that it had at the end of 2015. If you disregard users that accessed the service via SMS, and therefore aren’t exposed to ads, the from 307 million to 305 million over the last three months. Put simply, Twitter is still struggling to attract new users. What doesn’t struggle to attract new users? Facebook, Twitter’s biggest rival. To broaden its appeal and engagement, particularly on mobile devices, Facebook uncoupled a number of its services on mobile with, in some cases, great success. It launched Messenger as an optional standalone private and group chat app in 2011. by taking out Messenger functionality from its core mobile app altogether and forcing people to download a separate app if they wanted to use Messenger on mobile. Messenger now has . We’d also argue that splitting out a dedicated app has helped Facebook Groups reach 1 billion monthly users on that service. Instagram was never integrated into Facebook, and neither was WhatsApp. Even Facebook’s less successful projects — Snapchat-like Slingshot and other — provided lessons in how users interact and what kind of services appeal and don’t appeal. Twitter, like Facebook, has of course kept some of its key consumer app acquisitions (in Twitter’s case Vine and Periscope) as separate apps. But we think it could and should spin out even more services because it, too, is a social platform and there are many different use cases for it. Twitter’s biggest strength is its dexterity. Different people use it in different ways. Twitter’s biggest weakness is also its dexterity. An ambiguous use case confuses prospective new users who want to know exactly why they need to download a new app. That’s exactly where standalone apps, clear in their purpose, could leverage the strengths of Twitter’s platform and widen its appeal beyond those 320 million people that get the service in its current form. Messaging is probably the most obvious area where Twitter could spin out a standalone app, and there are some signs that point to this as a natural next step. A DM app has been , and there have been that have explored the idea, too. In the meantime, there is some momentum around DMs at Twitter. The company has grown the functionality of DMs by expanding beyond 140 characters and letting people send more than plain text. And over a year ago. Even though messaging has become a saturated space where a few players dominate, a Twitter DM app could differentiate itself enough from WhatsApp by using a username-based ID system and not phone numbers, as well as from Messenger, so people could send messages without the baggage of Facebook. A new messaging app seems like a no-brainer, as it speaks to the heart of Twitter’s DNA as a lean-forward creation tool. But what about the ? There is a completely different direction that Twitter could go with standalone apps that would help the company better hide some of the burden of tweeting, better aiming it at those who don’t want to use it that way without annoying those who love to tweet by compromising those features. Celebrity monologues and celebrity beef, like ; sports and news updates; and other information that doesn’t require a response from users all flow through Twitter. These can be developed into standalone Twitter apps. A Gossip app that is essentially nothing more fancy than a Twitter list of celebrities built out into a media news service; or a breaking news app for your favorite sports team are services that, if packaged in the right way, could appeal to a wider group of people beyond those who are Twitter’s core user base today. Throw in the opportunity to add opinions and voice ideas — essentially tweet through a different medium — and such apps could attract new Twitter users, not to mention also offer advertisers different kinds of opportunities to market themselves. This media play has been attempted to some degree with Twitter’s Moments feature, but it’s not a fair comparison. Moments feels half-baked and, since it exists only inside Twitter’s app — as a tab, no less — it doesn’t seem like the kind of feature that will ever be able to lure millions more users. The question is, will Twitter ever do any of this? Does it want to? Ironically, one way to test the market could have been to encourage more third-party developers to create services like these. Twitter could have probably created a micro-app ecosystem years ago if it had given the necessary tools to the developer community, rather than shutting developers out. These days there are few third-party Twitter apps of note, Tweetbot being the most visible example. Regardless of how Twitter does it, one fact remains: There’s an increasingly urgent case for the company to expand its efforts as a platform if it wants to truly grow into a media company beyond its state today as a somewhat stalled social network.
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A New, No-Strings Funding Opportunity for Ed Tech Startups Focused on Middle and High Schools
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Connie Loizos
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Last summer, the 18-year-old, Oakland, Ca.-based philanthropic venture fund decided to launch a virtual accelerator program that provides grants to founders whose tech is addressing languishing gaps in K12 education tech. It kicked things off with a batch of 15 teams, all of whom were chosen for their focus on . Today, the NewSchools Ignite program begins taking applications for its newest “challenge,” which will see it award grants to founders focused on creating learning experiences, assessments and digital tools that further students development, skills, and understanding of middle and high school math. There are no strings attached, either. Founders can have raised venture funding, or their company can be brand new. NewSchools isn’t averse to providing grants to companies working on similar concepts, either, including because no equity will change hands. Each recipient is eligible to receive up to $50,000 to $150,000, depending on product stage. Winners also get to participate in a two-day, retreat whose location is to be determined and is meant to help educate them and provide them with ample networking opportunities. They’ll also be meeting with entrepreneurs, educators, researchers, and other experts who can offer them some advice about user testing, designing for classrooms, and so forth. The criteria it will be looking for in startups include: the ability to address a particular student need identified by educators; companies whose tech is accessible to a wide range of kids (particularly underserved populations); startups whose products are designed to help students take ownership of their own learning; companies that support teachers’ delivery of tailored instruction; and/or startups that have the potential to achieve wide distribution and generate sustainable revenue. NewSchool Ignite funded that first batch of science-focused ed tech startups just four months ago, so it’s a little early to predict whether any of them will be breakout success stories. But CEO Stacey Childress tells us that “several” of the startups are in the process of raising money. As for other details, challenge winners needn’t relocate to participate. The program lasts six months and features targeted content and feedback delivered over the phone and in video meetings, along with web-based presentations. Also, in the end, winners will join a community of 150 entrepreneurs who are working to create new educational opportunities, which could be the program’s biggest benefit of all. Again, applications just opened today. To apply, .
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Google’s Think Tank Changes Its Name To Jigsaw And Becomes A Tech Incubator
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Catherine Shu
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Google Ideas, the company’s think tank, is relaunching as an incubator named (warning: autoplayed audio) to invest in and develop tech solutions to geopolitical problems and digital attacks. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and current executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s new parent company, : “Why Jigsaw? For one thing, the new name acknowledges that the world is a complex puzzle of physical and digital challenges. For another, it reflects our belief that collaborative problem-solving yields the best solutions. As a technology incubator, Jigsaw will be investing in and building technology to expand access to information for the world’s most vulnerable populations and to defend against the world’s most challenging security threats.” A Google representative told TechCrunch that Jigsaw will be under Alphabet, not Google. Jared Cohen, who has led Google Ideas since it started five years ago, is now president of Jigsaw and will continue serving as an advisor to Schmidt. Cohen previously worked in the U.S. State Department under former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. During the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests, Cohen despite a scheduled maintenance that would have temporarily shut it down in Iran, where it was being used by protestors to reach international media. According to The New Yorker, the move almost cost Cohen his job since it conflicted with President Barack Obama’s non-interference rule, but he had the backing of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Cohen joined Google Ideas then next year. During its time as a think tank, Google Ideas also supported ways to help people living in areas with heavy censorship or government corruption overcome those obstacles and get unfettered online access. Its products include , to protect news sites from DDoS attacks and contributions to . Jigsaw will continue to work on those projects, in addition to finding tech solutions for other problems.
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500 Startups Batch 15 Diversity Stats: 33% Female, 15% Black, 10% Latino
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Megan Rose Dickey
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A new 500 Startups batch means new diversity stats. In the startup accelerator’s 15th batch, 44% of the founders are international, 33% are female, 15% are black and 10% are Latino, 500 Startups Founding Partner Dave McClure announced today at demo day. 500 Startups has generally been pretty good around investing in female founders. To date, more than 400 startups in the 500 Startups portfolio have at least one female co-founder, McClure said. At the last 500 Startups demo day, that the accelerator made no mention of people of color when touting its diversity numbers. Batch 14, according to McClure, had 25% female founders and 39% international founders. According to our own count, 25% of the founders on stage were people of color. After McClure made the diversity announcement, I mentioned it on Twitter and McClure promptly apologized for not breaking out those stats. He said that he would aim to include those stats in the future, and that’s exactly what he did today. Thanks for keeping your word, McClure. Next time, it’d be cool if 500 Startups got even more granular and broke out the stats around black and Latino female-founded companies.
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Yello Mobile Raises $30M More At A $4B Valuation From Japan’s SBI Holdings
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Ingrid Lunden
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— the Seoul, Korea-based mobile apps business that has grown by and acquiring — has picked another $30 million in funding. This latest cash injection comes from , a digital financial services group based out of Japan that announced a . When we covered Yello’s recent , we noted this was a first tranche of funding and that there likely would be more coming into the same round. Sure enough, this is what is being announced today: this $30 million is at the same $4 billion valuation we reported last year This makes it a $73 million round so far: Yello says there is likely to be another, final tranche announced before this round is closed off, coming from SBI as well as other prior investors, which include Formation 8. “We are pleased to add a strategic investor of SBI Holdings’ caliber to our roster of high quality investors and simultaneously strengthen our partnership with Japan’s leading online brokerage,” said Lee Sang Hyuk, founder and CEO of Yello Mobile, in a statement. “SBIH’s financial support and global business network will be valuable assets to Yello Mobile as we continue to expand our geographic reach. We are intensely focused on driving sustainable growth and profitability and appreciate the vote of confidence that this investment represents. We look forward to continuing to work with SBIH to drive each of our businesses forward.” Founded in 2012, Yello Mobile has built its business around five categories of apps: Shopping, Media, AdTech, Travel, and Offline-to-online. Is also has a separate business called the Yello Financial Group, which Yello describes as “Korea’s leading accelerator for financial technology companies.” Citing quarterly financials at the end of February and a subsequent quiet period, the company declined to answer questions about how each of these individual segments is faring, or what apps are most popular at the moment. But it did provide some more general stats: revenues at Yello in the first three quarters of 2015 were up 338% compared to the year before, and Yello “has already achieved profitability in key segments.” Again, Yello did not specify which segments are profitable, but as a point of reference, in December, the company posted operating profits in AdTech, Travel and Offline-to-online, with negative EBITDA in Shopping and Media — areas that the company told me at the time were intentionally being run this way to help them scale faster. Indeed, Yello notes that its two most popular apps at the moment are Coocha and Pikicast — respectively a shopping search app and “the most entertaining app of the universe.” While Yello has been focused on getting its wider business into the black, the SBI strategic partnership is an interesting development. SBI Group — itself a profitable company — has more than a dozen products under its control, with the primary focus being on . In addition to a brokerage, these include a pure-play Internet bank, online insurance, financial media and content plays such as Morningstar Japan, and more. SBI has also invested in a number of startups that are working on the more cutting edge of financial services. These include stakes and strategic deals in four different alternative currency startups: ; ; ; and . All of these were disclosed just at the end of last month. Yello and SBI have been working on ways to leverage Yello’s app network and SBI’s services to build out each other’s businesses across Asia. But significantly, Yello tells me that this its work with SBI is not a signal that Yello will be doing more in financial services directly. “Yello has no intention to add more verticals for the time being,” a spokesperson said. This seems to be how SBI likes it, too. “By focusing on key strategic verticals, Yello Mobile has quickly become Korea’s largest mobile platform, with tremendous consumer reach. We see substantial opportunities for the company to expand both at home and abroad, and we share Yello Mobile’s vision of creating a dynamic mobile system across Asia. We are excited to support the company’s continued growth while leveraging Yello’s unmatched digital marketing expertise and loyal customer base to enhance SBIH’s own offerings,” Yoshitaka Kitao, President and CEO of SBI Holdings, said in a statement. “Starting with this investment, we will deepen our strategic business collaborations and drive sustainable growth for us and for Yello Mobile.”
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Instagram Finally Adds Two-Factor Authentication To Fight Hackers
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Josh Constine
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Instagram accounts are worth stealing. Now at 400 million users including celebrities, brands, and artists making a living, it’s time to add another lock to its doors. In November I wrote that , and a tipster just told me they’ve spotted it in testing. Today, Instagram confirmed to me that it’s beginning to roll out two-factor authentication. The tool allows Instagram users to verify a phone number. Then, if anyone tries to log into your account with your email and password, you’ll be texted an authentication code that must also be entered to gain access to your account. That means hackers need more than your email and password that could be guessed, stolen, or tricked out of you with a phishing scam. In one early, buggy test spotted by , Instagram offered users two-factor reset codes when they set up the feature. These can be screenshotted or saved so in case you lose the phone or phone number you’ve authorized, you can still access your account. Really, two-factor authentication is long overdue for Instagram. It’s been a commonly offered security tool for a long time. Instagram’s parent company Facebook has had a two-factor option for over four years. Neglecting to add it has put Instagram users at risk, and led to damaging hacks that caused financial losses and massive stress. If a hacker gets access to your Instagram account, they could delete your photos, attack your friends, and spam the feed with ecommerce products and scam offers. For the average user, this can be annoying, and without special treatment, recovering the account can be extremely tough. For celebrities, getting hacked could scare away followers, squandering promotional opportunities. And for brands, it can screw up their reputation with the public and hurt sales. I learned about just how bad the problem was from , an Instagram star who shares artful stop-motion animations drawn by hand. Occasionally she does sponsored animations that feature a brand. But after lining up a large sponsorship, she got by some jerk who spread spam through her account. She lost 35,000 followers and the brand pulled out, costing her a big paycheck.
Not having two-factor authentication was one thing when Instagram was a little upstart social app. But it’s grown into one of the most popular social networks in the world. even sprung up so you could add an extra pincode to open your Instagram. Officially lacking more safeguards had become downright irresponsible. Luckily, that’s changing. Instagram will surely monitor its test roll-out of two-factor authentication to make sure it’s simple to understand and bug-free. Once that’s settled, every account will likely receive the two-factor security. Your art, your vision, your window into your world deserve protection, so turn it on when you get the chance.
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Google Makes It Easier To Take Machine Learning Models Into Production
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google today, a new open source project that aims to help developers take their machine learning models into production. Unsurprisingly, TensorFlow Serving is optimized for Google’s own TensorFlow machine learning library, but the company says it can also be extended to support other models and data. While projects like TensorFlow make it easier to build machine learning algorithms and train them for certain types of data inputs, TensorFlow Serving specializes in making these models usable in production environments. Developers train their models using TensorFlow and then use TensorFlow Serving’s APIs to react to input from a client. Google also notes that TensorFlow Serving can make use of available GPU resources on a machine to speed up processing. As Google notes, having a system like this in place doesn’t just mean developers can take their models into production faster, but they can also experiment with different algorithms and models and still have a stable architecture and API in place. In addition, as developers refine the models or its output changes based on new incoming data, the rest of the architecture still remains stable. As Google notes, TensorFlow Serving is written in C++ (and not Google’s own Go). The software is optimized for performance, and the company says it can handle over 100,000 queries per second per core on a 16-core Xeon machine. The code for TensorFlow Serving — as well as a number of tutorials — is now available under the Apache 2.0 license.
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On Chatbots
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Lauren Kunze
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Chatbots, historically maligned as “ ,” are finally transforming from ugly duckling to beautiful swan. According to recent predictions, chatbots ( ) will be big. Like, Google-killing big, heralding the end of apps and search as we know it — or so proclaimed and . Much ink has been spilled. Startups are spawning and even in these uncertain times. But what is a chatbot, and what can they actually do? Here are five myths debunked: A stated: “Chat bots are small programs that integrate with a chat platform and provide some advanced type of functionality in a fairly easy fashion.” Technically, chatbots are programs that respond to natural language text and, optionally, voice inputs in a humanlike manner. They can execute tasks given specific commands (think voice control, or most Slack bots), but their raison d’être is that they listen, talk and seem to converse. Here are some recent euphemisms for chatbot: intelligent virtual/personal assistant/agent, Siri, “artificial intelligence,” X.ai (where X means insert-company-name-here if it registered a .ai domain), and Watson Dialog. The quasi-conversational “chat(?) bots” proliferating today are clearly a stopgap en route to a world of conversational interfaces that correctly interpret what we say. However, writing software that can understand human language is a very, very hard problem. Building a chatbot takes work. Or a ton of data (or money) which, unless you’re GAFA, you may not have. Even then, isn’t a panacea. ( answers “What is immoral?” with “The fact that you have a child.”) That’s why a company like Facebook, despite investing heavily in “ ” (deep learning, neural nets), is also using human trainers to build M. Most chatbots are that employ a form of “ ” called . Developers must hand-craft rules to govern the system’s response to given inputs. This entails guessing what a human will say, hard-coding, unleashing the chatbot, observing what people actually say, then: update, rinse, repeat. Wait — that’s work. Where’s the magic button for generating a fully functional chatbot from FAQ/transcripts/databases, deployed to Platform X/Y/Z? (Spoiler Alert: there isn’t one.) Don’t despair! The hand-crafted approach is not as hard as it sounds: Chatbots can engage and automate conversations with end-users at scale, across platforms. They live in messaging systems, robots, connected home hubs — connected anything, really ( ) — mobile apps, games and the good old web. Common uses include advertising, assistance, customer care, e-learning, entertainment and more. Chat itself has been hailed as a “ .” It could cure a real pain point: To provide information and services, companies maintain websites, native apps, live chat, forums, FAQ, shopping carts, social media, etc. Chat data is also analytics gold. Identifying what people really want through their queries is what makes search a multibillion-dollar business. But building a good chatbot isn’t easy. And a bad chatbot makes for a terrible user experience. Who hasn’t sworn like a sailor or screamed “OPERATOR! OPERATOR!” when a robot voice says: “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that. Please proceed back to step fifty-seven.” Chatbots are a long way from human-level conversational abilities. However, they can recall details from previous conversations, learn on the fly, keep context, change the subject and drive the dialog toward a goal. They also can interface with APIs to send and receive data, e.g., complete an order or check dynamic info like the weather. Sure, you can . Chatbots can’t — and, more importantly, shouldn’t — do everything. Booking an Uber with a single button takes fewer steps than doing so conversationally. Plus, texting your credit card details, address or other PII to an “AI” raises privacy and security concerns that will require careful consideration. Ultimately, as more developers tackle more constrained domains, chatbots will only improve. Historically, encouraged fooling human judges as an indicator of “true AI.” This is flawed; after all, enough typos, exclamations, smileys and non sequiturs can convince anyone . Why shouldn’t chatbots be upfront about what they are? The real question is: Do we want our devices to respond in a humanlike manner? (Let’s call the alternative “Shut up! Obey me.”) . We want humanlike interactions because we’re human, and of course we emotionally attach to machines. (Take your phone — likely your primary computing device and conduit to content, goods, socializing and services — do you scream when you drop it, as if it were an infant? I do.) People like to color outside the context lines. Pair an Airline Booking chatbot with a cute avatar and they will ask: “Where do you like to go on vacation?” and “Do you want to come with me?” Data indicates we desire personality from personable robots. For example, , an award-winning chatbot designed to entertain, not assist, has millions of conversations weekly via the , Kik and other applications accessing her “brain” . Like , Mitsuku is an exceedingly popular “cocktail conversationalist.” . Some have even said, “I love you.” People: . It’s robots (and other people) with guns you should fear. So, if “chat is the universal UI,” are chatbots “The Future”? Chat is huge and WeChat is king (from the POV of an app that never wants you to leave so they can sell all your data). Yet, despite media buzz, few platforms have progressed past the experimental phase. WeChat and WhatsApp currently shut down chatbot accounts. LINE and Kik are semi-open early adopters, Telegram is a chaotic free-for-all, Slack is killing it with developer-built bots (some with primitive chat capabilities), Twitter is a , Facebook might have a “ ” and Google is allegedly building another messaging app, this one . Not to mention . Messaging app fatigue, anyone? I believe the future lies not in a single consumer-facing assistant, but in an ecosystem where developers and content creators can easily build, deploy and reuse chatbots across many open platforms. Then again, like the messaging kingpins, I’m .
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Natasha Lomas
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Google Quietly Shutters Play For Education
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Frederic Lardinois
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Back in 2013, Google Play for Education, a program that made it easier for educators to purchase apps and books and distribute them to their students’ Android tablets. Now, this program is coming to an end. As first and also confirmed by us today, Google will stop selling Play for Education licenses on March 14. From what we understand, Google will continue to support existing Play for Education users until the end-of-life date of their tablets and teachers will continue to have access to Play for Education to find content and push it out to their students. “As of March 14 or later, Google will no longer sell Google Play for Education licenses. We’re committed to providing schools with the best-in-class tools for the classroom, including Chromebooks, which are the #1 selling device in US K-12 education, and a strong and growing ecosystem of educational apps,” a Google spokesperson told us. “We’ll continue to support our Google Play for Education customers and the devices that they have purchased.” Play for Education first launched in the U.S., but Google made a push to bring it to and the last year. While Google is discontinuing Play for Education, teachers and administrators can still use Google’s and its partners’ other device management services to push educational apps from the Play Store to tablets, as well. Unlike Google’s Play for Education program, which only supported a small number of tablets, these management solutions also support virtually all Android tablets on the market. It’s also important to remember that Google’s Chromebooks — including those with touchscreens — have made strong inroads into the educational markets. Android tablets, on the other hand, haven’t been quite the same hit with administrators and teachers. For the most part, Chromebooks are also cheaper and their keyboards probably make them a better fit in the classroom anyway.
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Shopify Debuts Shopkey, An App That Puts A Product Catalog In Your iOS Keyboard
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Sarah Perez
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A growing number of e-commerce businesses today are assisting their customers over SMS and mobile messaging. There are even SMS-based services, like , , , and others targeting the emerging “conversational shopping” market. Now, e-commerce platform is aiming to help its merchants better serve their customers via mobile messaging with the launch of a dedicated iOS keyboard app called that offers instant access to their product catalog. The company is currently dubbing Shopkey an “experiment,” and rightly so – this more casual sort of interaction between shopper and merchant is new to both parties. Many online shoppers still think the only way to reach a merchant is via phone or email, if not in person. The Shopkey app is carving out an interesting niche in the App Store. While we’ve seen for consumers who want an easier way to send GIFs or want to , those apps focused on a niche business crowd are still few and far between. That being said, today has a sizable user base to pitch its keyboard app to – the company has over 200,000 merchants, and the company tells TechCrunch these tend to be primarily iOS users. That’s why it launched Shopkey on iOS first, as it often does with other mobile app releases. After installation, Shopkey will allow merchants to search across their entire product catalog right from their smartphone’s keyboard, then send links to products along with product photos to customers via any messaging app they’re using. [gallery ids="1277903,1277902,1277901,1277900,1277899"] That means merchants can communicate with and sell to their customers on any platform that makes sense for their business – SMS/iMessage, or native messaging apps like Whatsapp, Messenger, Hangouts, or WeChat, for example. Of course, merchants could also use the app to more easily post links and photos to social media sites as well, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. The links lead to the merchant’s online store, powered by Shopify, which is mobile-optimized for easy checkout on smartphones. Being able to serve a mobile audience is more important than ever for online merchants, as the channel continues to see rapid growth. Case in point: , whereas the year prior, it was up only 25 percent. This growth is a – consumers are more comfortable shopping on their phones, and retailers have adapted to consumers’ need with mobile-friendly websites and apps along with streamlined checkout flows. Shopkey isn’t Shopify’s only recent effort in the m-commerce space, however. The company also recently that lets anyone create an online store from their phone. Shopkey is
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Kontakt.io, The Beacon Startup And Platform, Locates Further $5M Funding
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Steve O'Hear
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Beacons — the micro-location technology that lets your smartphone trigger events based on how close you are to a beacon transmitter — have many uses beyond simple proximity-based marketing. These include indoor navigation and points of interest, or more industrial use-cases, such as tracking the movement of items stored in a warehouse. One startup that’s been busy building out a full beacon platform to take advantage of these opportunities is , which, along with competitor , is headquartered in Krakow, Poland — a region fondly referred to as ‘Beacon Valley’. by Sunstone Capital, Kontakt.io is announcing that it has closed another $5 million in funding. Leading the round is new investor , the Prague-based VC firm. The Polish startup says it plans to use the new capital for product development — expanding the ecosystem and use-cases for beacons — and for further international expansion. Explaining some of the thinking behind the investment, Credo Partner Jan Habermann tells me he is particularly excited about the growth of Kontakt.io and what the startup has been able to achieve on fairly limited resources. He also points out that although the most prominent use case of Beacons is pushing discount codes to people as they pass by, there are many more lucrative use-cases for the technology. “Limiting beacons just to this particular use case is shortsighted since there is so much more to it,” says Habermann. “For me the indoor navigation use-case, providing relevant context to the user is great, but for consumers I guess the real killer app will emerge once there are more beacons deployed and the infrastructure is available for third party providers”. However, in the immediate term, there are a plethora of B2B applications for Beacons and this is key to Credo’s investment. “I think there is nothing better at the moment for creating solutions for asset tracking and monitoring,” he says, to give just one example. “You can use Kontakt’s beacons to track valuables in the warehouse or any premises, during transportation, trigger alarms if something (or someone) moves where it is not supposed to”. But perhaps even more crucially, argues Habermann, is that beacons are enabling all of these new applications to happen “at a price which no other technology offered before”. Something that, with today’s investment, Kontakt.io is better placed than ever to benefit from.
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These Are The Startups Pitching At The Boston And Atlanta Meetups Next Week
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Jordan Crook
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The and Meetups are but a week away, and we have finally confirmed the companies pitching in the Pitch-Offs. These startups will have exactly sixty seconds to pitch their product to a panel of expert VC judges, and after each presentation they will be subject to a quick Q&A. At the end of all the pitches, the judges will determine the winners. First place gets a table in Startup Alley at TC Disrupt NY in May. Second place gets two tickets to the conference, and the Audience Choice Winner will get one ticket. Applications are sadly closed, but tickets are still available to the meetups. We simply ask that you are 21 years of age or older. And without any further ado, here are the finalists for the Pitch-Offs: See you folks soon!
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ODately Is A Concierge Service Taking Aim At Cash Rich, Time Poor Online Daters
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Natasha Lomas
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Who has time to swipe Tinder these days? Or wade through the seven circles of weird messaging hell on OKCupid? Too many people, evidently, which is why the whole online dating thang can feel more like being forever stuck in digital dating limbo. But never fear! A bootstrapping London-based startup is preparing to fix this problem — for a fee. ‘s pledge is to take the strain out of digital dating foreplay by having its human staff take care of all that pesky pre-dating admin for you. You just go on the actual dates. So not at all a tech startup that’s going to scale into a unicorn itself but rather a self-confessed “niche business” (well, it hopes this is going to be a business… ) that’s aiming to latch onto and feed off of the massive online dating market by outsourcing digital dating admin. Indeed, the service offers to take care of the full shebang, from choosing which online dating services are most appropriate for your needs, to creating and operating various digital dating profiles on your behalf, seeking out potential dates, messaging them and trying, doubtless as quickly as possible, to get said dates to agree to go on an actual date. The service can even choose a venue for your date and make reservations, if you prefer. Because who has time for all that? ODately hasn’t launched yet. It’s waiting to get 500 sign-ups before flicking the switch on its digital dating outsourcing service. Founder Jack Kenyon tells TechCrunch it has a full time staff of four (including himself) at this point, who will be hammering keyboards and texting sweet nothings on others’ behalf. After all, on the Internet no one knows you’re a Romeo for hire. And at least the prospective mates will be talking to actual humans, rather than bots. ODately’s hired wooers are two males, two females, all in their mid- to late-twenties, according to Kenyon, so lets hope they brush up on their cultural references if they end up gaining a lot of non-millennials as clients. The proposition ODately is offering its paying customers is a guarantee of two to six dates per month for a fee of £500 to £1000 per month. So you pays your (hefty) fee and gets your two, four or six definite dates per month — and all without having to expend any thumb grease or mental energy yourself. Truly we are living in the future. So how then does ODately figure out how to match its paying clients with potential mates? It does this firstly via an initial “in depth” hour-long phone call, where it says it will: …discuss your personal background, clarify who you want to meet and the relationships you are looking for. This conversation will help us to choose the right dating sites for you and manage your entire digital love life. And then via a follow up pre-approval process, in which it asks users to vet all potential dates. “We summarise all interested matches and forward them to the client, asking who they would like to meet,” says Kenyon. “We then arrange dates in line with their responses. The first stage puts us on the right track and the second stage confirms that track.” Users will also always be able to check in on their online dating profiles themselves, should they wish. Or they can just leave it all up to ODately to take care of. They are asked to provide a selection of photos to get things started. And ODately even offers to arrange a professional photoshoot if required. Its website specifies that all its staff sign NDAs to keep clients’ info “confidential”. So presumably they’ll only what they know of your secret desires in order to score you the right types of dates, without ever actually revealing the true texture of your mental landscape. Or something. Sign ups for the service so far skew very male, as you’d expect. Kenyon says the sex ratio at this early stage is 81 per cent male, 19 per cent female. “We have always intended to work with both sexes and individuals of all sexual orientations, but the predominant user will most likely be heterosexual males,” he adds. No shit it will. We’ve seen a few dating concierge startups before. Back in 2014 there was , which promised to help its users build tailored dates for couples short on time/new ideas. Albeit that service after just three months. There are also traditional matchmaker services, which typically charge a lot of money — more even than ODately’s fee. So it’s betting that the digital will also have created an appetite for human-powered matchmaking services among the less-than-super-wealthy. “Our service is costly, but not if you compare it with traditional matchmakers, who charge upwards of $5000,” says Kenyon. “The price is a result of the time intensive nature of our service.” “We currently have a full time team of four, of which I am one… We won’t be expanding this core team in the short term, but we will be expanding our part time team based on demand,” he adds.
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GameStop CEO Says PlayStation VR Will Start Shipping This Fall
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Lucas Matney
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With launches already looming for both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, virtual reality fans have been earnestly awaiting details for the last major HMD to join the party, the Playstation VR. Yesterday, in an interview with ‘s Maria Bartiromo, Gamestop CEO Paul Raines declared that GameStop “will launch the Sony product this fall,” in reference to the upcoming PlayStation VR. Raines also detailed that the company is “in discussions” to begin carrying both the Oculus and HTC headsets. While the comments certainly suggest PSVR availability by the fall, it’s unclear whether Raines’s comments indicate that the PSVR will be sold at GameStop at its launch or whether the device will be available elsewhere earlier. Known as Project Morpheus in a previous life, PSVR offers a unique approach to VR gaming as it runs on a current generation game console, the PS4. The device, which also makes use of other existing hardware solutions including the Playstation Move controllers, is considered a major threat in the VR space due to the healthy ecosystem already surrounding the device. While the folks over at Oculus and HTC are having to convince consumers to invest in the headsets alongside expensive PC builds, there are already 36 million PS4’s on the market ready to work with PSVR. Though there’s still no word on final pricing for the headset, reported in September that the device will be priced as a “new gaming platform,” according to an interview with Sony exec Andrew House. If this information is true, Sony will have ample time to witness the reception of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive which launch in March and (most likely) April respectively. Sony had most previously suggested a release date of the first half of 2016 for the headset.
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HomeKit-Enabled Eve Energy Can Help You Cut Your Power Bill
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Sarah Perez
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, a company that makes a number of smart home devices under , including those that track and , is today rolling a new product for those more concerned with monitoring and controlling their home’s energy usage. The plugs into a wall socket, allowing you to control connected devices via iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch via Bluetooth. The device also works with Apple’s HomeKit, which expands the possibilities in terms of being able to personalize your setup. For example, you can group together several HomeKit-enabled devices (including those beyond Eve) in order to control them in one step, the company explains. This lets you design custom scenes for your home, like “Entertainment On,” for example, which could switch on your lights and TV, perhaps, or crank the music. You can trigger these scenes by asking Siri to enable them for you. [gallery ids="1277851,1277850"] It’s notable that Eve Energy uses Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi, to connect to your devices – that support makes it the first to do so among other HomeKit-enabled smart plugs. As our homes fill with more internet-connected devices, it’s nice to have the option of buying one that doesn’t add to our crowded home Wi-Fi networks. Plus, the device doesn’t require a bridge or a hub of some sort to communicate. The main purpose of the device is not enabling these scenes, though – it’s about getting a handle on your home’s energy usage. Via the accompanying Elgato Eve app, you can view energy consumption at a glance, drilling down into graphs by day, week or month. Plus, you can control your Eve Energy device when you’re away from home, if you have an Apple TV. The remote access lets you turn devices on and off, launch scenes, or simply check on your home’s status. The Eve Energy, was previously available in Europe. Now it’s an option for U.S. customers, and can be bought from the company’s website or Amazon for $49.95, starting today. The app, meanwhile, is a free download from the iTunes App Store.
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Instagram Spotlights vs Snapchat Stories vs Twitter Moments
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Josh Constine
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raging for curated social media supremacy. When big things happen, each of these apps wants to be where you see the best of and behind the scenes. They’ve all created their own features that take the work off your hands. Just sit back and watch, swipe or scroll. But how do they feel and what do they do best? Last night we got a rare chance to directly compare Instagram Spotlights, Snapchat Live Stories, and Twitter Moments since they all featured The Grammys. Here’s a look at their strengths, opportunities, and shortcomings. Instagram stays true to its success theater with Spotlight. The recently launched feature is linked to from atop the feed and promoted heavily on the Explore page (swipe right at the top if you don’t see it). Instagram Spotlights displays an auto-advancing feed of video clips around a theme, artist or, in this case, a live event. You can swipe up to see the next clip or let them slide into place at its own pace. Arianna Grande waves “Hi Instagram!” For the Grammys, Instagram puts you in the shoes of the world’s luckiest photographer amidst all the extravagance. You’ll see 55 clips like pop starlet Ariana Grande waving “hi Instagram!”, Taylor Swift and her friends freaking out in their dressing room when she finds out she won an award, and a close-up of Lady Gaga getting David Bowie makeup. At its best, Instagram’s Grammys Spotlight shows you the best moments that weren’t on TV. Yet they’re often polished or impressive enough that they’d fit there as little vignettes before commercial breaks. It’s about the visuals, just like Instagram, so Spotlight sticks to high-definition video the whole way through. The experience feels crisp and alive without being rushed. At its worst, the Spotlight seems cold and overly fabricated. The reliance on professional outside photographers like Polk Imaging that shoots for Getty makes you feel a bit detached. You’re so close to the stars, but most of the time they don’t seem to notice — like you’re watching through a one-way mirror. It’s corporate; it’s the version of the stars that the stars want you to see. A few more giddy, wacky views would humanize it. [gallery ids="1277933,1277936,1277937,1277938,1277940,1277941,1277942,1277943,1277946,1277947,1277949,1277954,1277955,1277956,1277958,1277959,1277960,1277961,1277965,1277967,1277968"] If you want a deeper look and exclusive access to special event, Spotlight does it well. But don’t expect to feel like you attended yourself. Snapchat retains its goofy, off-the-cuff vibe in its Live Stories. The oldest of these curated social media formats, Snapchat combines user-submitted footage, shots by the stars themselves, and clips from its own in-house correspondents. You can fast-forward through the 65 snaps that compose the several-minute sequence that’s promoted above your Story list. Snapchat’s Grammy’s story casts you as a celebrity’s best friend. You’ll see Justin Bieber warming up in his trailer, Diplo playing with Snapchat’s facial recognition selfie animations, and shots from the crowd and side stage of stars accepting their awards. Decorated with emoji and annotated with text exclamations, Snapchat’s story is funny and fawning. Done right, Snapchat gives a sense of the excitement of being there. It’s unfiltered and far from perfect. Grainy video and over exposed shots from the nose-bleeds aren’t always vividly entertaining. Instead, they’re relatable. Getting all the angles from stars shooting selfies and giving speeches to fans just trying to catch a glimpse of their heroes or cheering at home makes Snapchat’s Story immersive and well-rounded. Plus, seeing stars use Snapchat lenses and graphics gives it a uniqueness. This isn’t generic media reposted here. It was shot for Snapchat. The startup’s video editors deserve their own award. The best sequences seamlessly link related shots. [gallery ids="1278021,1278023,1278024,1278025,1278026,1278029,1278031,1278032,1278033,1278036,1278038,1278039,1278040,1278042,1278043,1278044,1278045,1278046,1278048,1278050,1278053,1278054,1278056,1278057,1278058,1278059,1278060,1278061,1278062,1278063,1278064,1278065"] Then again, Snapchat’s Story is the only of these curated experiences to include ads. Every few clips, you’ll be interrupted by promos for HBO’s new rock’n’roll drama Vinyl. Luckily you can skip right past them. These don’t fit as well as the Samsung-sponsored backstage shots from the American Music Awards Story. Yet overall even the low-quality shots give Snapchat an endearing roughness compared to Instagram’s manicured tone. Snapchat is vying to be the first screen for a generation that’s largely given up on television in favor of mobile. It captures both the behind-the-scenes and the stage so you feel like you consumed the Grammys without actually having to watch it. The fact that the Story manages to replace rather than just complement existing media is a testament to Snapchat’s ambition and potential. Immersion has never been Twitter’s strong suit. So rather than trying to transport you to the Grammys, Moments makes you feel like you’re watching alongside the world’s most talented peanut gallery of commentators. Promoted at the top of the Moments tab, The Grammys review cues up 50 GIFs, videos, photos, and reactionary tweets to swipe through. is the only of these curation formats to use still images, immediately making it feel less vibrant and coercive. You’ll see photos of Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s outfits in all their glory, GIFs of performances taken from the TV broadcast, hater tweets requesting you not compare The Weekend to Michael Jackson, and fans chastising CBS for screwing up Adele’s sound. The silent GIFs of people singing feel awkward and incomplete. Twitter’s attempt to crop landscape media into portrait mode leaves certain clips looking pixelated, and you wouldn’t know you were missing the sides of a video or photo unless you tapped. Twitter did the best job capturing the night’s most emotional moment: a long video of the Hamilton hip-hop broadway musical cast delivering a passionate acceptance speech in rhyme. Instagram missed it and Snapchat caught just a tiny snippet. Moments feels natural when it’s giving you the best of Twitter, not the best of the event. Bubbling up the funny reactions from people you probably don’t follow shows the network’s depth. By zooming out a bit from the chaos, Moments makes sure to cover the…moments that people will be talking about the next day. It’s more about laughing at or with the Grammys than simulating attendance. [gallery ids="1277977,1277978,1277979,1277980,1277981,1277984,1277983,1277985,1277986,1277987,1277988,1277989,1277991,1277993,1277994,1277996,1277997,1277998,1278000,1277999,1278001,1278002,1278003,1278004,1278005,1278008,1278016"] Still, Twitter’s size and deficiency in rich media drags down the Moments experience. It just doesn’t get as many great videos uploaded as the others, so it feels static by comparison. At least you can enjoy Moments even if you have to scroll without sound. But it feels distant and foreign, closer to a newspaper digest than virtual reality. Stronger video and more intimate content from the stars themselves would make Moments more enveloping. Twitter’s take will augment your experience if you watched the whole Grammys on TV, but being merely a second screen is limiting. Moments feels considered and intelligent, but might not be snazzy enough to addict people. There’s no one right way to curate social media, though I think Snapchat comes closest. Instagram’s Spotlight is stately and refined — perfect for the mainstream audience and TV ad dollars it’s trying to attract. Twitter’s Moments are a pundit’s paradise, sparking reactions and discussion of the triumphs and controversies. But Snapchat Stories feels like the future of secondary media consumption. You feel like you were there, but you also feel more special than if you were just stuck in the crowd. You see every perspective on the celebrity-paparazzi-fan spectrum. It’s both earnest and wise-cracking, offering immersion as well as context. And as Snapchat gets more popular, its Stories will just get better since they’ll absorb more custom-made content. More stars laughing in private, more front-row seats, and more zany Snapsterpieces that take advantage of its drawing, text and emoji tools. Snapchat just needs to stay real and risky to keep kids and everyone who wants to be as cool as them coming back.
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Reedsy Launches Book Editor To Seamlessly Turn Your Draft Into A Book
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Romain Dillet
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has been traditional publishing houses one step at a time. At heart, Reedsy remains a marketplace to find an editor, copy editor, cover illustrator and more. And now, Reedsy also provides to seamlessly interact with your editors and produce a final book. This isn’t the first book editor, but Reedsy’s book editor is all about collaboration. It isn’t as powerful as or , but it isn’t really the point. You can write your first draft in Scrivener, and then do the rest in Reedsy. You could think about this book editor as a Google Docs for books. It lets you write and edit in your browser and everything is saved in real time. Multiple persons can edit at the same time, make comments and track changes. It replaces the cumbersome back-and-forth process involving Word documents and weird file names. When everything is done, you can tweak the layout and export your book into a publishable ePub and PDF. After that, authors can self-publish their books on the Kindle Store, iBooks Store or do whatever they want with them. PDFs are compatible with most print-on-demand services. In addition to Reedsy’s , today’s new book editor is a great way to make people sign up and use the service. Many authors are looking for ways to have a simple online profile and tools that let them create ePubs and PDFs. And once you’re hooked up to Reedsy’s book editor, chances are you’ll want to work with an editor, a copy editor, an illustrator or a publicist. Reedsy lets you find freelancers who have been working for years in the book industry and are no longer working for the big editors. Reedsy lets you find people who have worked on books like yours, talk with them and pay them directly on the platform. The startup knows how this industry works and makes it easier for everyone involved. But you’ll still need to write a book first, and this is no small feat.
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Snapchat Debuts Stories Web Player For Academy Awards
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Lucas Matney
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Snapchat rolled out the red carpet for web users to catch up on snaps from tonight’s Academy Awards. Visitors to the site were greeted with an online player offering Snapchat Live updates on the awards show. This is the first time Snapchat has shown off content in this manner. This move fits in with a larger integration to bring access from across the internet into Snapchat content. Last month, the service to allow users the ability to access profiles via links to add users on the app. Still, for desktop users clicking on the links, they really only served to redirect snapchatters to an app download screen as previous to this release there has been no Snapchat content available on desktop. The web player puts Snapchat in more direct competition with cross-platform products like Twitter Moments which already have established desktop presences. It also opens up the possibility of web embeds for Snapchat content in the future where users will be able to engage with curated event experiences on third-party sites. Snapchat is obviously looking to keep content absorption on the same devices that promote content creation, i.e. mobile phones with back and front-facing cameras, but this is a major move that will allow Snapchat content to receive recognition from people who aren’t users of the service already. On desktop it will give web users a chance to see the content directly, while mobile users will be taken to a download screen for the app. This makes sense for Live Stories especially as it is a platform where everything is absorbed and nothing in the experience is inherently tied to user information. Users don’t follow or opt-in to receiving Live Stories, they are curated and presented at the top of the Stories screen for all users of the app. As Snapchat grows and looks to reach out past word-of-mouth downloads, linkable content will be a huge area for the service to conquer.
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Bill Maris Talks Uber, Zenefits, And Increasing GV’s Yearly Fund To $500 Million
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Connie Loizos
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On Thursday night, at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, I talked with GV CEO Bill Maris about a wide range of issues, including what happened with its , why GV didn’t invest in Zenefits, and why Maris alone makes every decision on behalf of the powerful venture unit, which now employs 70 people. I’m a venture geek and found much of what he had to say interesting. Hopefully, you’ll find the conversation instructive, too. (It’s been edited lightly for length.) BM: It’s getting scary. [Laughs.] BM: So all the investment decisions I make, going into a company or when and how to come out of it, is in collaboration with the partner who brings [the deal] forward. So we talk about all the opportunities as a team and everyone is invited to that discussion – not just the investing partners. And we don’t take a vote. It’s not like a democracy in any way. But everyone knows where people stand and we try and give each other good advice, and at the end of the day, the person who brings it forward and I decide whether to move forward or not. BM: I have no idea, because I’ve never worked as a venture capitalist before. I masquerade as one now . . . But basically it started out with just me. The buck stops with me. So if we succeed, credit all goes to the team. If we fail, the blame should fall all on me; that’s how management should work. BM: They never say anything. And that’s not a bad thing. We designed it specifically not to be influenced by Google. Larry and Sergey . . . are billionaires. Google has many billions of dollars. If they want to invest in something themselves, they have the opportunity to do that. Some people are surprised that they don’t or can’t influence [GV], but the idea was that they wouldn’t. So I never talk about ventures with them. The closest we get is an email from Larry with a URL of a company that he came across. BM: Sure. If you’re in a dark room and you need to find a way out, you can stumble around and hit your shins on a table and look for a doorknob, or if you happen to have a match and you can light it and get some insight into what the room looks like, that would be helpful. People like to think there’s not a lot of data and it’s unstructured, but that’s what we do . . . When the market is acting this way, what does that mean about valuations [for example]. So we have a lot of machine learning and statistics folks who are experts and Ph.Ds who help us make better decisions and can hopefully be that match in the dark room. BM: We put them in a room and tie them to a chair and we get all their information. No, it doesn’t really work that way. It’s more holistic in that we’re looking at the market and at economic indicators and the funding environment and who has gotten funded and it’s just one input into the decision-making process. [GV partner] David Krane brought in Uber and we pushed all in [financially] when people thought [Uber’s then valuation of $4 billion] was crazy . . . There was no computer that told us that was as good decision; I wouldn’t have 70 people on the team if we had a computer on the team that could do it. BM: If you’re a founder of a venture-funded company, your first chance of success is about 19 percent. If you succeeded with that first company, your chances of success with your second company will be more than 30 percent. If you failed the first time and try again, your odds of success are [still] roughly 19 percent. So your instinct, generally as an investor is that, ‘Wow, if you [the founder] have a history of success, then I should bet on you.’ That’s a good instinct. But some instincts aren’t born out by the data. So it’s a mix, and sometimes we get it right and sometimes we get it wrong and it’s not all intuition-driven. It’s not all computer-driven either. BM: There’s an old saying: Statistics lie. The reality of the data of the venture business is that the way the business is run now, in order to make money as a venture capitalist, you need to be in one of those 10 to 15 companies a year that are huge wins. But that’s not the way we run our business nor the way the business needs to be run. There are literally hundreds of companies that [produce] greater than 5x per year returns that are one of those 10 to 15, and if you invest in only those companies, you can be in the top 1 percent of all venture capital firms year over year over year. The reason the common wisdom is that you need to be in one of those 10 to 15 companies is because venture capitalists make so many bad investments that lose money. [And] the bigger the fund, the bigger the losses, so the more important it is to get into Facebook or Uber or Google, or what have you. My mantra to my team is always: Don’t lose money. It seems simple, but if you don’t lose money, you’ll be in the 75 percentile of all venture capitalists. So make no investments and you’ll be in the 75 percentile! [Laughs.] That’s how those investments work. BM: It depends on the year. We started in 2009, we have 300 investments. We’ve really dialed down the pace of seed investing, so I’d say this year maybe we’ll make 40 to 50, but it depends on what you [founders in the audience] do. BM: Wrong. We had $60 million the first year. We upped it to $100 million, then we upped it to $200 million [in 2012], then we upped it to $300 million a year, plus $125 million in Europe. This year, we’ve increased it to $500 million globally. BM: Turns out it’s easier to have one fund than two so we just combined them. BM: We didn’t close it down. The Financial Times, there’s some deep insecurity there, I’m not sure what it is. We’ve been investing at a pace since we started in Europe that outstrips the pace of when we started investing in the U.S. And we still have partners there. I think we have eight investments – six announced and more in the works . . . So instead of having two teams, I just mashed them altogether and said, ‘You’re all on the same team now.’ BM: I’m the partner in the cloud, so I can’t be in Boston, New York, London, San Francisco, Mountain View, Seattle, San Diego – all the places we invest. And if I need to be, then I’m doing something terrible wrong. I’ve been to London more frequently and more recently than I’ve been to Boston for sure. And we have incredibly capable people in London who are entrepreneurial and entrepreneurs, and so they are running that business. Despite the show I’m putting on for you, I’m incredibly introverted. I’m not the person who’s out meeting with entrepreneurs. I meet with my team, including by video, a lot, because they are out in the world getting germs and all the things that I don’t want to do. [Laughs.] Then they come and we talk and we meet all of us once a week on Monday, and I’d say at least half of those people are on video because they’re in all the cities I just named. There’s some insecurity in Europe that I don’t understand, about: We’re not good enough. That’s not the reality. There are great companies and entrepreneurs there and I’m happy with what’s happening. That’s difficult because we’re spread thin as it is. Frankly, I don’t want a bigger organization. We have 70 people, $2.5 billion [under management], hundreds of millions of dollars a year [to invest] and there’s a certain point where it becomes less fun. And when it becomes less fun for people, they will become less engaged. Also, you introduce political risk, currency risk, I don’t speak the language, and so those are very particular geographies. I’d say it’s not impossible. There’s nothing stopping us from investing in a company in Asia. One could come along in China or India that’s interesting— BM: We haven’t. As [VC] Heidi [Roizen] said earlier [during a ], roughly 80 percent of the venture returns are in the U.S., and 80 percent of that is in Silicon Valley. Add in Boston, and you’ve got a lot of it covered. I think we’re lucky in that, from this perch, we can see a lot of what’s happening in the world. . BM: Yes. BM: , we put in close to $130 million. It’s a health oncology company based in New York. It’s a great company [run by] former Googlers who are on an absolute tear and you never hear about them really. BM: What do any of us like less than unasked-for advice, especially from one of your investors, in public. That’s not what I do. If I thought they should do XYZ, then I’d send Travis an email and say, “You should go public,” and he’d either ignore me or say, “No thanks.” BM: I’m completely biased because we are very large shareholders. But I think when the time is right the company will go public. Who am I to second-guess? They’ve done such a good job so far; they’ve so far surpassed our expectations when we first invested that it would be incredibly ungrateful and I think obnoxious and arrogant to say, “Now you should go public,” because I don’t work there. BM: No, it’s completely rational. If you were the CEO of a company that was worth $50 billion and you could raise another $2 billion in two weeks or less on the private market with minimal meetings, disclose no financial information, and be done, rather than file an S1 and go through the pain of the medical exam that follows, would you do that? It’s a completely rational course that it’s following. BM: They don’t let us sell either. BM: Oh, I don’t know if it goes away when you’re public. You just have all new problems. They’ll have those problems eventually. But I think Travis recently said that two years ago, the company had 400 employees. Now it has 6,700. So a lot of those employees are new. I don’t think they’re pounding the table saying, “We need to go public because we need our money.” People I know who work there are super excited that they’re on this incredible ride. It’s good to be impatient, but not in public. It’s really distasteful, I think. BM: I didn’t meet with Theranos. Someone on our team went and had the blood test done, and we were super unimpressed with the results in lots of ways that I won’t get into. I believe that if you don’t have something nice to say about something, don’t say anything at all. I answered [the Theranos question] pretty directly because we’re not talking an app for sharing secrets; we’re talking about a company that’s trying to interact with a population of vulnerable patients, and I think you have to take the integrity of that marketplace very seriously. BM: I’d like to take credit for all the good decisions we make. We met with Zenefits. It just wasn’t a fit for us. We didn’t have any particular insights about the kinds of problems they’re having. We just didn’t go that deep. And they’re in, for me, part of the market that I don’t find super interesting. But it wasn’t like we had some genius insight that caused us not to invest. There are lots of companies that I wish we did invest in, including Airbnb and Palantir and Snapchat, so that’s a long list [too]. BM: People all weigh things differently on the team. Me personally, I do not weigh regulatory risks. I weigh the risk that the CEO won’t take the regulatory risk seriously.
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Mobile Companies Are Just Getting Started
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Michael Jones
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It takes a much heartier stomach to jump into the startup game now than it did a year ago. Zenefits recently became the latest unicorn to face devaluation after compliance issues forced the CEO to resign. Publicly traded tech companies like Twitter weathered layoffs and stock sell-offs. Those few companies that are doing well have created their own sets of problems, with and later making the case that today’s tech incumbents are too big to be disrupted. They have a point. It’s hard to raise money for a music streaming app in an environment where Apple can launch and acquire 9 million users in a matter of months. It’s hard to build image-editing software when Instagram or Facebook can promote a similar product to its billion users at no cost. The bar is high, that’s for sure; but there are also a few reasons why the industry’s pessimism is due a reality check. Mobile has survived several cycles of buzzword status, but the fact remains that it still represents one of the biggest opportunities for founders to target. The latest reliable numbers, from Pew, found that smartphone ownership . Globally, smartphone ownership is probably somewhere in the ballpark of 2 billion users, a figure that’s expected to surpass 6 billion . As far as market saturation, we’re still not even halfway there. And of the five giant companies that are doing well, none were developed to be mobile-first. Snapchat only recently got serious about monetizing, rolling out Discover in 2015 and signing a contract with Viacom’s ad sales team earlier this year. Cord-cutting has not affected entertainment; rather, the large mass of consumers using mobile phones and tablets as entertainment devices has impacted the lack of desire to own a TV. It is possible that the outcome will result in more connected screens providing higher volumes of entertainment than owned TVs. This will expand a greater industry with more consumers using entertainment products more frequently than traditional televisions. It’s true that there are a lot of apps in the App Store. The life cycle for apps has also grown swift, to say the least; by some publications less than a week after its launch. However, it’s important to note even the most snarky of the app’s detractors found nice things about it. More importantly, however, one or two years ago developers had one, maybe one-and-a-half places that were really popular for product discovery: the App Store. For a while, being featured by Apple’s secretive editors was seen as a make-or-break moment in a startup’s success. Increasingly however, the App-store effect is proving ephemeral, with the vast majority of app use focused on a core group of three-six apps that users frequently log into. Startups have many more paths to market now. There are robust communities discussing new products sprouting up every day in Quora, Product Hunt and Medium. There are publications devoted to technology now which are far more recognized than the blogs we had back in 2007. And open-source treasure troves like GitHub have made it easier than ever for small shops to collaborate and get off the ground. VentureBeat recently reported that while the market for IPOs has obviously cooled, the count of “unicorn” mobile startups worth $1 billion or more despite waves of media pessimism. There’s also a strong possibility that Silicon Valley’s battle for . Tech giants like Facebook and Google are better equipped to cover high salaries and relocation to their impressive facilities than a venture-backed startup. And that’s to say nothing of the technical founder who’s currently working out of a garage. Cheaper talent will make it easier to get fledgling companies off the ground, and there’s now an entire generation of technology employees who have lived through multiple cycles of booms and busts. For all those reasons and more, a lot of concern about our unicorns has been misguided. Many are building businesses outside of their core offerings: Uber has arguably been a logistics company for a year now and Amazon’s web-hosting business will likely be spun off before long. It’s certainly true that some big names are facing headwinds, but companies never should have expected the good times to last forever. Many will emerge from 2016 as stronger companies, and mobile’s best days are still ahead of it.
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How To Stream The 2016 Oscars Tonight
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Fitz Tepper
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The Oscars are finally here. Will Leonardo DiCaprio finally get his Oscar? Will we see another epic from Ellen? If you want to catch all the action but won’t be in front of a TV, here are all the ways you can stream the event tonight, starting at 5:30pm PT / 8:30pm ET. The show will stream live on and the Watch ABC app to cable subscribers in the eight markets with ABC owned-and-operated stations – Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, and Philadelphia. If you don’t subscribe to cable or aren’t in one of those markets, you’ll have to wait for the full broadcast posted on ABC.com the next day. Sorry cord-cutters. But if you do have cable and are looking for a good second-screen activity to keep you busy while you watch, check out “The Oscars Backstage” on . The site will let fans view footage from over 20 live cameras on the red carpet and backstage, letting you feel like you’re basically at the event. If you prefer a really immersive Oscars experience, ABC-owned TV station ABC7 in Los Angeles is offering a 360 VR viewing experience to get fans ready for the show. Beginning today at 2pm PST, viewers can experience a walk down the red carpet, the Hollywood sign, and a preview of the Oscars 2016 Governors Ball. The experience will be available , or via ‘s web, mobile, and Apple TV app. Unfortunately the show itself won’t be available in VR, but hey – there is always hope for next year.
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Director John Hillcoat Says The Film Industry Has “Lost Its Nerve”
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Anthony Ha
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While most of the current Hollywood headlines are , there were some new movies this weekend, too — including , a sprawling crime drama with a cast that includes (deep breath) Casey Affleck, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anthony Mackie, Aaron Paul, Kate Winslet, Woody Harrelson and future Wonder Woman Gal Gadot. I spoke to director about the film before its release, as well as the broader direction of the industry. Hillcoat’s had an interesting career in recent years, directing movies that are neither tiny indies nor big blockbusters — , for example, was a post-apocalyptic drama based on an award-winning novel, with and Viggo Mortenson in the lead. Hillcoat has described as his attempt to create “ ” sort of . The difference, he told me, is that “the stakes are much higher out there on the streets today’ — a reality he tried to reflect in the film, bringing on advisors from law enforcement and putting real-life gang members on-screen. “The police force is more like a military operation now, while the gangs and Latino cartels use virtually terrorist tactics in their neighborhoods,” Hillcoat said. “Everything’s been ramped up.” Hillcoat added that like his other films, he wanted to show “a very morally murky world” where it’s hard to draw the line between the heroes and villains. However, he’s found that’s it’s becoming “harder and harder to make” to make morally complex films aimed at adults. ( , by the way, is projected to have an .) “Actually, film has lost its nerve and given that audience over television, and instead, film is more focused on franchise and spectacle,” Hillcoat argued — so perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s looking at TV projects himself, though he said it’s too early to offer any specifics. The Oscars did come up during our conversation, if only obliquely. to direct , the frontier film that may finally get Leo his Oscar and is also . When I asked HIllcoat what he thought of the finished film he paused before answering: “I’m a bit too close. I would have done it slightly differently.” Still, he said he’s heartened by the box office success of two movies that usually aren’t mentioned in the same breath — and of . In Hillcoat’s eyes, they’re “two mature audience films that have found a massive audience.” “To me, that’s a good sign,” he said.
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These Are The Startups Pitching At The Brooklyn TC Meetup + Pitch-Off!
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Jordan Crook
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The crept up faster than any of us anticipated. In just two short days, we’ll head over to Output in Williamsburg and ten companies will have exactly sixty seconds to pitch their wares to a panel of judges and an adoring, primarily hipster audience. But which companies have been selected? Without any further ado, I’m pleased to introduce the startups pitching at the Brooklyn Pitch-Off on March 1 at 6pm: After their sixty-second pitches, judges will conduct a quick Q&A and eventually determine the winners. First place gets a table at Startup Alley at Disrupt NY in May. Second place gets two tickets to the conference, and the Audience Choice winner walks home with one ticket. Tickets are still available to the event, which you can . We simply ask that you are 21 years of age to attend. See you guys on Tuesday!
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Marketing Tech’s Bumpy Road: Consolidation, Growth And A New Frontier
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Ajay Agarwal
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Marketing technology has become big business over the last five years, and spawning more than 2,000 new companies. New channels, new data streams and new workflow have emerged to disrupt important aspects of marketing at big and small companies alike. And CMOs are buying — roughly $23 billion in 2015, according to IDC, and likely in 2018. So why is the mood in martech so bleak? I’ve seen dozens of articles in the last few months expressing pessimism about the state of martech in 2016. Many investors and entrepreneurs are lamenting how crowded and fragmented the sector is, arguing that it’s overfunded with too many point products. Others have pointed out that sales force automation produced a $50 billion company in Salesforce.com, yet marketing automation has produced only a few public companies collectively worth less than $5 billion. Both concerns are legitimate. There are indeed too many companies fighting for limited time and attention from busier-than-ever marketers — and equally true is that martech hasn’t hit the big time for public valuations. We expect to see significant winnowing over the next few years, driven by customer choice (CMOs don’t want to buy from hundreds of vendors) and lack of funding (investors will tighten the reins on Series B and Series C investments due to the broader economic climate). Regardless, I continue to be extremely optimistic about the martech opportunity, and believe someone will build a . As a long-time investor in this space, I’ve seen first-hand how technology can transform sales and marketing — and empower teams with better insight, more precision and, ultimately, more predictability. Moving forward, it’s important to remember that martech is not monolithic. I see very different prospects and paths ahead for the three macro categories in martech: B2B marketing, B2C marketing and advertising technology. Each has a set of characteristics and verticals and needs that are distinct from each other — and while there may be some overlap, each will require a different “stack” of software. Adtech has seen very few sustainable public companies — Criteo being the primary exception. Adtech’s challenges are well documented, but they fall into two buckets: The bottom line: There will be exciting companies built here, but it will be a much, much harder path to a multi-billion dollar exit. Let’s first look at Salesforce.com. While they now sell into consumer companies via the ExactTarget acquisition, their bread-and-butter business has been selling “sales force automation” solutions to medium and large companies with sales people. The concept of managing a pipeline, opportunities and accounts is very germane to B2B companies and a small segment of B2C — where the purchase is a large, multi-step, highly considered purchase. Similarly, the marketing automation companies have all grown up selling initially into B2B. The concept of managing “leads” and nurturing them through a sales cycle and then passing on a set of leads that are “sales qualified” is again very specific to B2B companies. If you look at the P&L of a B2B business, the bulk of their “front office” spend is in sales, not in marketing. In fact, a 10:1 ratio between sales and marketing spend is pretty typical. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the market cap ratio is also 10:1 between the leading sales automation company (CRM) and the leading marketing automation companies (MKTO and HSPT). With all that said, B2B will continue to be a strong market for martech startups with plenty of demand from CMOs; we expect to see several new $1 billion-plus companies emerge in categories like top-of-funnel marketing, account-based marketing and predictive analytics. B2C marketing is fundamentally different. The P&L within B2C companies (brands, retailers, consumer financial services, travel, etc.) is the opposite ratio: 10:1 in favor of marketing. Most B2C companies don’t have large sales forces, and if they have sales people at all, they’re focused on small segments of their business (very high-end customers or a B2B channel). Therefore, the software system to support B2C marketing is the biggest prize left in the front office. The big new opportunity and challenge for entrepreneurs is to create a system of record for B2C marketing. Historically, email was the closest thing to creating a B2C digital system of record, and the B2C software company exits (Responsys and ExactTarget) had multi-billion-dollar market caps reflecting the size of this opportunity. Where does the system of record start? With the customer database. In today’s environment, the customer database captures not only people who have purchased from you, but people who have not. It includes logged-in users and non-logged-in users. It includes rich data about those customers and their households, linking purchase data with browsing history, social data and detailed demographics. Historically, having one system of record that brings together Omniture website data, retail point-of-sale data, Teradata transactional data and social media data was next to impossible. Now, with advances in big data and cloud systems, the syncing of these data sources is finally feasible — and huge volumes of customer data can effectively be managed via the cloud. Once the core database is in place, a true B2C system of record doesn’t stop there. A next-gen system will use machine learning and predictive technology to identify and generate dozens to hundreds of useful market segments — more actionable than the three-five segments typically derived via demographic data. It will link directly into personalization platforms like BloomReach and Optimizely to power customized and relevant experiences for each consumer. And this system will be the foundation for all forms of channel marketing, whether that is email through SendGrid, social through Sprinklr or ad-targeting through Kenshoo and Turn. The entrepreneur who figures this out will create value for marketers on par with what Marc Benioff has successfully done for the sales function.
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Monetizing Mobile Gaming
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Nick Day
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The mobile gaming industry made in 2015 — and it is only set to continue growing (with estimates as high as $49 billion by 2018). But the mobile gaming industry is in the “wild west” phase of its history right now, with the constant improvement of mobile devices and so many variables to successful monetization. Though it’s difficult to know exactly what mobile will be like in a few years, here’s what I see influencing the mobile gaming space in 2016. Nintendo’s move into the mobile space by bringing their iconic characters and IPs to smartphones, such as , is going to have a major impact on the increased focus on brand recognition for mobile gaming companies moving forward. User acquisition costs are already skyrocketing per person; as a result, marketing budgets will continue to rise. To sustain the rising costs of this method across the board, and the congestion of new mobile games hitting the app store every day, we’ll see fewer games come out per publisher; instead, the focus will be on expandable and upgradable mobile games. This will allow game developers to leverage the most ROI from their user acquisition efforts and help build the brand in a more traditional sense (as console developer studios have done in the past). To expedite this tumultuous process of acquiring users, we’ll also see an increase in celebrity endorsements similar to what Glu Mobile pioneered with the “celebrity simulator” games like Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and the recently announced partnership they have with . These games not only bring powerful existing brands to the table, but have an easy initial target for advertising through social media channels where fans of these celebrities reach the multi-millions. Celebrity advertising for mobile games will continue to rise, as well, for this same reason. According to , they found in 2015 that a highly effective form of improving monetization was through multiplayer gaming design. Enhancing the competitive and social nature of the industry by adding features such as in-game chats became the industry standard in 2015; 2016 will see this trend continue, with more emphasis on single-server environments and more advanced live translation software. In-game “live-ops” events will be more heavily promoted, with higher reward value to promote this level of engagement. Clan engagement will be another large investment for any type of non-casual game on mobile. Companies will begin to allocate more resources to create a comprehensive clan ecosystem within the game to promote discussion. We found that many of our players take to forums and dedicated Skype channels to increase the immersiveness of their experience within the games. We’re already seeing clans in our games overcoming built-in friend and clan membership limits by developing their own website solutions, complete with back-end support and advanced organizational tools. Players are no longer content with of 150 friends or so, and are developing tightly coordinated hierarchies numbering thousands of players across different time zones. We expect this trend to continue. If you glance at the top mobile gaming charts for every month in 2015, what do you see? Nearly all are based on the free-to-play (F2P) model, with the exception of Minecraft. Minecraft also had the unique advantage of being explosive on other platforms before making its way to mobile. While other forms of monetization can be effective in rare examples, it is far more likely that 2016 will be the year developers find new ways to leverage F2P monetization around their games. As a shining example of what happens when even great games veer away from the F2P model, look no further than Monument Valley — an incredible game that caused outrage by charging for its expansion. Additionally, we are likely going to see an increase in genre-bending games that inherently support the F2P monetization model. As larger studios enter the game and bring bigger, more polished titles to market (with larger development and marketing budgets), developers will be under increasing pressure to meet shareholder expectations and deliver Clash of Clans-style success while still standing out. This suggests a lot of risk-averse titles that mix tried-and-true aspects of popular genres that have already demonstrated success on the market. MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games on mobile will also rise in popularity as a genre that has massive potential with F2P, because the short, simple nature of battles makes it perfect for the mobile platform, where users are constantly on the go. The compatibility of MOBA games with e-sports also looks like a promising driver — titles like Vainglory are already cracking this open, making e-sports available to anyone with a phone. There is a underrepresentation of this type of game in the console market because it is more adaptable to a mobile platform. League of Legends is a perfect example of a successful game that isn’t being monetized as well as it could right now (largely because they haven’t had to due to their player base), but with F2P variants, this has huge potential. As mobile devices become more powerful, developers will be pressured to invest more money into each mobile game. As a result, companies will begin to integrate F2P tactics more seamlessly into their games to create a level of immersion that is in line with their improved quality. Early examples that we see in the market are shying away from offering items or boosts, instead offering currency similar to how Ubisoft monetizes extra content in their Assassin’s Creed games. Mobile gaming always gives indicators of the direction it’s going, but it is still sifting through a maturation stage, despite how explosively successful it is right now. One thing for sure is it will continue to impress and surprise as the market evolves.
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How Smart Founders Can Take Advantage Of The Platform Shift
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Brian Feinstein
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About 15 years ago, the Internet triggered a platform shift in the delivery of enterprise software; a wave of cloud startups quickly unseated the kings of the server era. Now, another platform evolution — the mobile era — is upon us. For nimble and opportunistic founders, the shift toward mobile is a monumental opportunity to stake ownership in a newly dominant platform. Smart founders can build software for mobile from the ground up instead of populating it with scraps from prior infrastructures. As we contemplate where to expect pockets of innovation, we think the following trends are particularly exciting areas to build businesses. Startups without the baggage of an existing hardware or web application have the unique opportunity to dive wholeheartedly into mobile. Take the point-of-sale market. has reinvented the cumbersome POS to be mobile, tablet-based, intuitive and consumer facing. * and are doing the same in the restaurant world. These mobile-centric tools make it easier for servers to collect orders on foot and for restaurants to engage with consumers over the mobile web. Companies like (formerly Thinking Phones)* and are also transforming telephony from the ground up by moving telecom functionality to mobile devices. These tools enable mobile phones to act like full-featured enterprise phone systems, and make it possible for employers to replace the expensive PBX machines sitting in server rooms. As with any new computing platform, there will be an entirely new set of use cases and usage models that haven’t yet been addressed. Software has historically been tailored for knowledge workers behind a desk, but activities away from the desk are particularly ripe for mobile innovation. Take and * as examples. Before these applications arrived, field service teams completed all their paperwork on paper in the field. Office staff had to retype the information into a desktop invoicing system. Now, a technician armed with an app can collect data, pull product catalogs and file invoices in the field. This reduces administrative costs and enhances cash flow for field service businesses. The construction industry is another exciting case study. Before tools like * arrived, most construction projects would print paper drawings every morning, mark them up and communicate changes through phone or email. Workers would end up working off the wrong drawings, information would get lost and expensive mistakes would be made. Real-time, cloud-based drawings and communication through Procore’s tablet and web applications have rendered these problems obsolete. is able to operate more efficiently and reduce costly errors. It’s important to point out that tools for workers in the field aren’t limited to blue-collar industries. We expect mobile to serve knowledge workers, as well. All of us share a desire to get work done when we aren’t in front of a computer. Large horizontal software markets like productivity, collaboration, sales/marketing and data collection represent some of the biggest opportunities. Some of the most compelling startup activity is coming from API-based services that make it easier for mobile developers to build applications, including companies like *, , *, , and *, which provide best-of-breed telephony, payments, messaging, security, data sharing and authentication. We think that big businesses can be built selling metered services in any area that developers view as cumbersome, non-core and a cost center. The market for tools that help developers manage their apps has already seen explosive growth. Performance monitoring tools like and are . Analytics tools like and are taking a share from incumbents like (formerly Omniture) thanks to their mobile capabilities. Industry veterans and , along with startups like and , are buildings tools that help developers transition to a mobile world. We expect to see a new generation of development and administration tools become more relevant in a mobile environment. Messaging may prove to be one of the most dramatic examples of a new type of mobile interaction model. Instead of tapping through a series of fields and menus in a CRM tool, you could simply write (or speak) “Show me the notes from my last Bessemer meeting.” With all the innovation happening in NLP, machine learning and web services, this kind of experience should become increasingly likely. Messaging as the killer interaction model is still nascent. We may find ourselves messaging within the CRM application itself. Or we may find ourselves “talking” with the CRM application through a messaging platform like or . Both of these companies are investing heavily in platform. This could prove to be fruitful terrain for founders, and perhaps even more impactful than the platform. In the vein of the “ ” startups can now make it possible for enterprises to successfully tap into a distributed labor force. With mobile devices, enterprises can easily recruit and onboard workers, automate the dispatch and optimization of jobs, monitor activities in real time, benefit from constant feedback and provide workflows and tools to make the workers more efficient. Most of the companies chasing this opportunity are still at an early stage, but we’re already seeing breakout growth in areas like contingent labor ( , and ); trucking ( , and ); restaurant delivery services ( , and ); healthcare ( , and ) and home services ( , and ). Expect to see software incumbents dethroned by mobile-first — or mobile-smart — upstarts. Expect to see founders tackle entirely new use cases that haven’t been addressed yet. As investors, we hope to partner with the early movers in this new age of the mobile enterprise.
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After The Gold Rush
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Jon Evans
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The startup gold rush of the last ten years is over. Sorry. Those hordes of ambitious entrepreneurs still stampeding to the Bay Area in the hopes of building their Minimum Viable Product, getting into Y Combinator, and growing their app into the Next Big Thing–they’re already too late. That era is behind us. It was a good run, even a legendary one, but it is over. Time for the new new thing. Does that sound premature and apocalyptic? Maybe not. Over the last few months a slew of smart people have been sounding warning signals, identifying the half-dozen consonant factors bringing this epoch to an end: YES. Cannot believe how many VCs suddenly say they aren't taking meetings or doing deals. Ridiculous! — ☁️Michelle Tandler🌁 (@michelletandler) So should we all close up shop and go home? Of course not. That would be crazy. We have never lived in a more technologically exciting time. We’re developing . We’re building . We’re . Look at the ‘s . (Granted, , but it takes time for the uses of exponentially greater computing power to filter out into other fields; it often happens later, via unpredictable emergent properties. Even if and when Moore’s Law grinds to a halt, it won’t much affect our overall rate of technological progress for years to come.) It’s not that all startups are doomed. This is a matter of degree and proportion, not an absolute. As the pendulum swings back to larger organizations, they will take over a noticeably greater share of innovation — and innovative markets — than we have seen over the last decade. We’re witnessing that already with deep learning (Facebook, Google) and self-driving cars (Alphabet, Tesla.) Startups still have their advantages: clarity and purity of vision, instant decisionmaking, the ability to move fast and pivot on a dime. I’m sure occasional startups will still emerge from left field to conquer the world. But for the foreseeable future, as the odds against them get longer, and the competition fiercer, it will happen less and less. Again, we’re seeing that already. In 2011, Y Combinator’s poster-child alumni were — already — AirBNB, Dropbox, and Stripe. Can you think of any Y Combinator companies from the last five years as well-positioned today as those Big Three were then? Instacart, if their unit economics work. That’s it. Meanwhile, as the Lessins and Malik argue, the big tech dinosaurs, rather than graciously dying out, have evolved defense mechanisms against those vicious little startup mammals–and they have their advantages too. Unlimited resources. Metcalfe’s Law. Economies of scale. What’s more, as software eats the world, one side effect is that rewards accrue nonlinearly to those with the best software. This in turn leads to power-law outcomes; a few big winners…and a whole lot of losers. So what’s a poor startup to do, if we are transitioning into a new bleak world where the gold mines run dry?
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Apple Pay Goes Live In China
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Jon Russell
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, a move that takes Apple’s digital payments service into its fifth country worldwide. The service had been in China since December — this week — and now Apple has delivered in the country, which is its behind only the U.S. based on revenue. Apple Pay initially supports credit and debit cards from UnionPay, which counts 260 million users. UnionPay isn’t just relying on Apple though, it secured a similar partnership with Samsung last year and also already offers its QuickPass contactless payment technology, which to expand to cover alternative technology such as wearables. Apple Pay has been one of the pioneers of mobile payments in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia — the four other countries were it is operational — but it is playing catchup in China, where it must compete with services like Alibaba’s Alipay, which has over 400 million registered users, and Tencent’s WePay, which is available through blockbuster Chinese messaging app WeChat. Both are already widely used for online, offline and mobile-based purchases. Interestingly, Tim Cook is reported to have last year to discuss integrating Apple Pay with Alipay. A deal didn’t materialize, however. Taking a significant slice of this competitive market will not be easy, but Apple is confident that it can make an impression. “We think China could be our largest Apple Pay market,” Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, in an interview. It’s been a busy 24 hours for Apple. Aside from launching Apple Pay in China, the company has hit back at the government for into the iPhone. Disrupting payments in the world’s largest country and fighting the U.S. government — just a regular day then.
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IBM and SoftBank Launch First Japanese Language APIs for Watson
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Catherine Shu
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A year ago, SoftBank . Now Watson has learned enough Japanese for developers to take advantage of its new skills. The two companies launched six Japanese APIs today. In addition to speech-to-text and text-to-speech services, they include: : to create apps that can decipher intent and meaning when questions are asked in different ways : tailors app interactions to a users’ speaking style : uses machine learning look at “signals” in data to improve information retrieval : turns content in different file formats, like PDF, Word, or HTML, into formats that can be understood by other Watson services Watson’s most high-profile achievement since IBM and SoftBank announced their partnership is . The new APIs will allow other developers to tap into Watson’s powers for their own applications and potentially help IBM make more in-roads into the Japanese market. In a press statement, SoftBank president and chief executive officer Ken Miyauchi said “Since forging this strategic alliance, we launched the local IBM Watson ecosystem program in October 2015, formally selecting over a dozen ecosystem partners. We are also looking forward to introducing Watson internally, so we can propose various solutions and use cases to customers based on our own experience.”
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Google’s CEO Says “Forcing Companies To Enable Hacking Could Compromise Users’ Privacy.”
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Matt Burns
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Google’s Sundar Pichai has thrown his support behind Apple’s recent decision to push back against the FBI and not build a backdoor into iOS. In the Google CEO’s first tweetstorm, Sundar notes that requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices and data “could be a troubling precedent.” Could be? It would be. The CEO’s sentiments are laid out over the five tweets embedded below but the tl;dr is in the first one: “Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy” 1/5 Important post by . Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) 2/5 We know that law enforcement and intelligence agencies face significant challenges in protecting the public against crime and terrorism — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) 3/5 We build secure products to keep your information safe and we give law enforcement access to data based on valid legal orders — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) 4/5 But that’s wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices & data. Could be a troubling precedent — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) 5/5 Looking forward to a thoughtful and open discussion on this important issue — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) This comes a day after Apple’s Tim Cook published an open letter detailing why the company will fight a court order asking Apple for some very specific technical assistance in order to enable the FBI to access data on an iPhone 5c used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Tim Cook isn’t standing alone. WhatsApp founder Jan Koum , noting that “we should not allow this dangerous precedent to be set. Today our freedom and our liberty is at stake.” The and also released statements siding with Apple’s stance.
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Startup Battlefield Applications Extended for Disrupt NY
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Samantha O'Keefe
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Why Apple Is Fighting Not To Unlock iPhones For The Government
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Matthew Panzarino
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filed an order compelling Apple to unlock an iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the attackers in the San Bernardino shooting incident late last year which left 14 people dead. Shortly thereafter, Apple CEO Tim Cook indicating that Apple planned to fight the order. Apple was joined by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which said it would aid in the fight. We’ve already covered the nuts and bolts of the request, as well as Cook’s response and the White House’s . You can read those for a primer. There has been a lot of ink spilled and there will likely be a lot more, but there are a few questions that I think deserve a closer look — and there is a broader point to be made that will likely get obfuscated by people pursuing technical details rather than implications. This current order is all about Apple refusing to unlock a single device for the FBI. It is not to be confused with the related, but bigger, battle over the government forcing tech companies to weaken their encryption by introducing a ‘secret’ key that only they have. The key question of the day is this: Why is Apple fighting not to unlock a terrorist’s iPhone, instead of waiting to fight their big battle over encryption back doors? Let’s dissect it. The government wants Apple to create a ‘one-off’ version of iOS that it could install on this device with three key changes: The final condition there is the scariest, and the one that Apple objects to the most. Don’t get me wrong. Cook’s letter clearly states that Apple is opposed to all of the conditions, but that last one is different. It is asking Apple to to its software and devices, not just ‘remove’ a roadblock. There is a possibility that Apple could drag this out with the FBI for a very long time, arguing about reasonable demands or the costs of this to Apple (which could be prohibitive as signing firmware is an incredibly non-trivial process). One outcome could be that Apple grinds down the asks until they just disable the auto-erase function, which is an operating system option that already exists, and leave the rest of it to the FBI to figure out. But that final ask is what the entire objection hinges on. The , passed in 1789 (yes, a 200-year-old law,) is being used to force Apple to comply. The fact that the act is being used to try to make Apple do a lot of work to modify iOS to and their security will likely be at the core of Apple’s defense when this gets to the courts. It’s a huge ballooning of the scope of the AWA, and it sets a precedent for allowing the government to force Apple or other companies to modify their systems to allow access to your private data. And herein lies the rub. There has been about whether these kinds of changes would even be possible with Apple’s newer devices. Those devices come equipped with Apple’s proprietary Secure Enclave, a portion of the core processing chip where private encryption keys are stored and used to secure data and to enable features like Touch ID. Apple says that the things that the FBI is asking for are also possible on newer devices with the Secure Enclave. The technical solutions to the asks would be different (no specifics were provided) than they are on the iPhone 5c (and other older iPhones), but not impossible. If I had to bet, Apple is probably working double time to lock it down even tighter. Its reply to the next order of this type is likely to be two words long. You pick the two. The point is that the FBI is asking Apple to crack its own safe. It doesn’t matter how good the locks are if you modify them to be weak after installing them. And once the precedent is set then the opportunity is there for similar requests to be made of . Hence the importance of this fight for Apple. This is why the debate around this particular order should focus overmuch on the technical aspects — but on the fact that the government would be weakening the security of a private company’s product, potentially impacting the civil liberties of American citizens and foreign nationals worldwide that use those products. Apple has complied with government information requests for years, and likely did so in this case. It is technically possible, for instance, to retrieve data from iCloud backups of devices. Farook’s device was last backed up in October 19th of 2015, which means that the FBI already has access to that data. The agency can use other avenues (and likely has) to gather data about calls by issuing information requests to cell carriers, for instance. “From my crude testing in the past on an iPhone 5, a four digit passcode should be possible to brute force in less than an hour. A six digit passcode should be possible to brute force in less than a day,” says Will Strafach, ex-jailbreaker and CEO of mobile security firm . “I have not tested times for passcodes with numbers, letters or symbols, but it is fairly easy to understand why it would take substantially longer. With numeric passcodes, it’s 10,000 possibilities if four digit and 1,000,000 possibilities if six digit. But introducing symbols and letters drastically will increase the possibilities, considering you could even use multiple keyboards (for example: an English phrase, an Arabic phrase, and then. some numbers and symbols).” There are also already tools that the law uses to access passcode-locked iPhones. Many of these tools are bundles of programs that use jailbreak exploits to gain access to the iPhone’s memory, and then a suite of tools to access and analyze the data. These tools are then branded with a security firm’s rubber stamp and sold to law enforcement. When the exploits are repaired by iOS updates or patches, the tools become ineffective. https://twitter.com/JZdziarski/status/700085957643657220 The idea that a government-issued phone that the FBI says Farook used to talk to co-workers would be used to openly facilitate an act of terrorism is somewhat far-fetched. Instead, it is being used as a crowbar that essentially forces Apple to oppose the order. Regardless of the outcome, it’s likely that this case will be used to bolster the call for Congressional legislation that forces American companies to weaken their encryption by installing a ‘back door’ for the government. Which brings us back to a question of philosophy. There are other battles to come in this fight. Encryption of data on iPhones, for instance, is another whole technical gambit, one that Apple has made great efforts to remove from the equation by making it impossible for them to decrypt customer data even if requests were made. That would require that Apple modify its software and firmware on its devices to enable governmental agencies to bypass encryption. Once that method exists, there is absolutely, positively, no way for it to be kept solely for the use of the government. It also raises the question of how any international user of an iPhone would ever feel safe — especially given what we now know about the government’s electronic surveillance capabilities and its willingness to use them. Apple is choosing to fight this battle now, rather than later. Cook’s letter draws a line out on the beach, where we’re still talking about allowing brute force cracking of iPhone passwords — rather than right up against the fortress, where we will be fighting for our right to secure encryption. It’s a gambit with risks, for sure, outlined well by . If Apple loses this battle because the court sees a request for a terrorist’s iPhone to be unlocked to be reasonable, then it is going to be that much harder to fight the encryption battle later. But Apple sees this as the line — the modification of one of its products to weaken its security. To Apple, back door is still a back door, and an unacceptable condition. It doesn’t matter to Apple whether the fight is over a passcode or over encryption. Like I said, it’s a risk, but it’s one that Apple feels it must take. All of the various outcomes of this situation make alterations to the playing field. The government gets Apple to add a weakness to a product? A precedent for weakening all security. Apple fighting back successfully? A possible precedent for protecting the users of all smartphones iOS, Android and otherwise. A potential win in the courts? Precedent to protect security, but also possibly to force Congress to ruin American encryption. 1/5 Important post by . Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) Other tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft have yet to weigh in — though they have potentially just as much to lose or gain. Whether this is because they have facilitated these requests without a fight, who knows? For Apple’s part, this isn’t the first time that Cook has taken a strong stance on security and privacy, summed up how Apple has used it as a differentiation point before and since. This is a seminal battle between the biggest tech company on the planet and the most powerful government on the planet. This is why it’s important that we don’t get mired down in technicalities. For Apple, and for us, this is not a question of but a question of A question that will have implications for everyone from journalists to heads of state to private citizens of all countries.
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Twitter Fixes Bug That Compromised Some Users’ Emails And Phone Numbers
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Catherine Shu
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Twitter it has fixed a bug that hit its password recovery systems for 24 hours last week. Less than 10,000 active accounts were affected, but that the bug could have potentially exposed emails and phone numbers connected to those users. Accounts who were affected have already been notified. Twitter also said that they would call on law enforcement officials to investigate any users who they find exploited the security bug to access someone else’s account information. TechCrunch has contacted the company to see if that did indeed happen. Though the bug affected a tiny fraction of Twitter’s 320 million users, it’s yet another reminder to practice what the company refers to as “good security hygiene,” including .
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Thousands Of Chinese Residents Evacuated For World’s Largest Telescope
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Emily Calandrelli
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Over 9,000 Chinese residents will be evacuated from their homes in order to create a radio-quiet zone for the world’s largest telescope. The telescope, known as the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), will listen for radio waves in the universe, a common strategy used by scientists to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. https://twitter.com/XHNews/status/699506334073561088/ Families in the Guizhou Province living within a 3.1-mile radius of the telescope will, , be paid the equivalent of $1,837 to relocate. The justification for the evacuation is to remove any source of terrestrial radio signals that might interfere with FAST operations. Common technologies like cellphones, WiFi service and garage door openers operate using electromagnetic waves, which could make the process of “listening” for faint radio waves elsewhere in the universe difficult. Mandated radio-quiet zones are common in locations with sophisticated radio telescopes. In the United States, there is a 13,000-square-mile in the eastern half of West Virginia that exists to avoid interference with the Green Bank radio telescope. Astronomers use radio telescopes to listen for radio waves in the universe and work to determine the source of those emissions. Sources of radio waves could be natural (pulsars, quasars and black holes all emit radio waves), or perhaps more interestingly, they could come from technology developed by aliens. Because humans created technology that emit radio waves, scientists believe that radio waves may be an indicator for intelligent life on another planet. Currently, the largest operational radio telescope is the 305-meter-diameter Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. In addition to searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life, the Arecibo Observatory has been used the distances and masses of galaxies. It’s also responsible for discovering the fastest spinning known pulsar. China is investing $184 million to move ahead of Arecibo and take the title of world’s largest telescope. FAST will have a considerably larger aperture at 500 meters in diameter. Li Di, a chief scientist from the National Astronomical Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told that the dish is so large that “if you fill it with wine, every one of the world’s seven billion people could get a share of about five bottles.” For radio astronomy, the size of the dish matters because it allows scientists to have a larger, more sensitive “ear” on the vast universe. “With a larger signal receiving area and more flexibility, FAST will be able to scan two times more sky area than Arecibo, with three to five times higher sensitivity,” Li said. FAST isn’t the only ambitious space project that China has invested in lately. Back in 2011, China launched the Tiangong 1 space station and became the third nation to accomplish this feat. In January, China landed a rover on the moon and the first high-definition true color photos of the lunar surface. With a follow-up mission scheduled to launch in 2018, China also plans to become the first nation to land a probe on the far side of the moon . On the heels of the success of their lunar missions, there have been that China plans to send humans to the moon. If successful, they would become the first nation to step foot on the moon since the Apollo days. With impressive strides in telescope technology, human-rated space exploration and successful lunar landings, it’s clear that China is serious about becoming a world leader in the space industry. The construction of the FAST telescope began back in 2009 and is nearly complete today. Panel instillation for the 500-meter dish is scheduled to be finished by June of this year. Afterward, the FAST team will perform tests on the completed system and have the world’s largest telescope operational by September.
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Connie Loizos
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PayPal Overhauls Its Mobile App
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Sarah Perez
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PayPal’s mobile app is getting a massive overhaul today, representing the first time in the history that the company has rebuilt its app from scratch. With the redesign, PayPal is focused on offering a more extensible framework under the hood that will allow it to add new features in the months to come, while also offering a simplified experience for users who want easier ways to make peer-to-peer payments, pay in stores, order food, manage their account settings, and more. The company says that it built the new application with customer feedback in mind, as well, having even spent time with its 8,000 customer service representatives to learn what sort of problems come up most often. For example, while the old version of the application put a heavier focus on using PayPal in stores from the first launch, the new app puts the sending and receiving functions front-and-center. It makes sense that this feature would be better highlighted in the new application, as PayPal says it has seen over 100 percent growth in this area over the past couple of years. In addition, the company reports that now 1 in 4 of its transactions take place on mobile.
The most noticeable thing about the revamped app is the user experience, in fact. The app features a cleaner, more modern color scheme, iconography, fonts, and layout which makes it better resemble something a startup trying to compete with PayPal would build rather than something from an older and established payments company. In a blue section on the homescreen, users can quickly view their account balance, then jump into their account or view their recent activity with just a tap. In the Activity Hub, you can track all the money you’ve sent out or received, including funding sources when applicable – another feature users had been demanding. Buttons to actually send or receive money are in green below, then the bottom section focuses on PayPal’s other initiatives including the ability to order food through its app, use PayPal in stores, or access your store loyalty cards. Other changes to the app are less obvious, but equally important. For example, there’s a heavy emphasis on making the app accessible to a global audience. Specifically, the company’s new, iterative platform allows it to better customize and localize the PayPal app in the 145 markets where it’s now live. At launch, says Jo Lambert, VP of Global Consumer Product and Engineering at PayPal, the app is localized in 26 markets and supports 17 different languages. Other new features live now include expanded support for Android fingerprint authentication, separation of account activity by pending and completed transactions, the ability to add credit cards issued from other countries, and support for viewing your PayPal Credit balance from the homescreen. The new platform also allows PayPal to iterate on different feature sets to meet its various markets’ needs, as well as make it easier and faster to push those features live when it comes time to launch. That will help the company roll out improvements to PayPal on mobile at a quicker pace, to make it more competitive with any current or future challengers. Already the company has some changes in the works – like the introduction of tap-and-pay (NFC) support on Android which will be announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, for example. As new features are added, the new platform will allow PayPal to expand its navigation to support the additions, Lambert also notes. “We’ve been spending a lot of time talking about this big period of transformation, and how people shop, how people sell, and how people interact with their finances,” she says. “We’ve been talking about PayPal’s role in the ecosystem in terms of re-imagining money…This is one of our first, big product pushes where we’re really focusing on that mobile-first approach,” Lambert adds. Another idea on PayPal’s horizon is a plan to expand its focus on money management as a whole. Already, many users keep a balance in PayPal, and the company wants to help them do things like budget, set goals, and keep tabs on their overall financial health. “We do see a place where PayPal will be a more meaningful player in a customer’s everyday financial life,” says Lambert. “We’re looking at the transformation of PayPal as moving from a transactional brand to being a brand that stands behind people to help them manage and move their money more effectively.” The new PayPal application will be live on and .
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Fandango Buys Flixster And Rotten Tomatoes
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Anthony Ha
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NBCUniversal-owned continues to expand beyond movie ticketing, announcing today that it has acquired Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes from Warner Bros. Entertainment. Flixster allows users to learn more about movies, while Rotten Tomatoes is the best-known aggregator of movie reviews — it’s ubiquitous enough that people . Both services will continue to exist as standalone websites/apps, but the streaming service Flixster Video (which is not part of the acquisition) will shut down later this year. The ownership history is a bit complicated here, with Rotten Tomatoes changing hands a few times before being in 2010, which in turn was the following year. And now, as a result of the acquisition, Warner Bros. is taking a minority stake in Fandango. “Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes are invaluable resources for movie fans, and we look forward to growing these successful properties, driving more theatrical ticketing and super-serving consumers with all their movie needs,” said Fandango President Paul Yanover in the acquisition release. We’ve talked to Fandango in the past about its aim to be . It previously expanded its content offerings by and .
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Why Apple Is Right To Reject The FBI’s Push To Brute Force iPhone Security
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Natasha Lomas
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Apple is . The company is taking a public, principled stance on this, which is in line with its recent Yesterday it released explaining that it will fight the , which is asking for some very specific technical assistance in order to enable the FBI to access data on an iPhone 5c used by one of the . Specifically the court order asks Apple: to bypass or disable an auto-erase function that wipes iPhone data after a certain number of incorrect attempts to unlock the device; to enable the FBI to attempt to brute force the passcode on the device without having to manually type passcodes into the handset but rather by affording them the ability to submit attempts via another device connected to the iPhone; and to remove a time-delay between passcode submissions, again to enable the FBI to try to brute force the passcode without having to wait a certain number of milliseconds between each attempt. Apple couches this order as the government asking it to create a backdoor into its software. And so do … WTF! You are hereby ORDERED to design software to allow the FBI to compromise any iOS device. — Kevin Mitnick (@kevinmitnick) The government, for its part, is it’s . Apple’s counter to that is it ignores “the basics of digital security” — and also glosses over the significance of what the government is asking for. Basically backdoor one iPhone, backdoor them all — and invite all governments, everywhere to do so… If US does it, so will China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba. …and they won't limit themselves to terror attacks… — Alvaro Bedoya (@alvarombedoya) Or as Apple puts it: The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that’s simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable. Firstly Apple taking a public stance on this matter is A Very Good Thing because it encourages public debate on an issue where law enforcement requests have implications for the general public’s data security. It took Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing of the NSA to shine a light on state surveillance overreach in 2013 and provide the impetus for politicians to . tl;dr public debate about where the line should be drawn to protect citizens’ digital data from state-powered intrusions has become a core component of living in a functioning modern democracy. Secondly, there has been a fair amount of discussion already about the technical feasibility of what Apple is being asked to do — with one security company, Trail of Bits, that in its view it would be possible for the company to comply with the FBI’s requests for access to a specific iPhone and to “lock” the customized version of iOS to only work on that specific iPhone. However that viewpoint flies in the face of the — i.e. that you cannot create a backdoor just for the good guys; any vulnerability intentionally created for a specific purpose risks being found and exploited by bad actors. We see this principle in action everyday with software bugs and the hacks and data leaks enabled by such vulnerabilities. Government mandated vulnerabilities would be no different. It’s merely opening up more fronts for data to be stolen — with the added irony being that it’s your friendly state security agencies enforcing the public insecurity. The wider point here is that when you’re talking about system design there’s no red line protecting security. In this example the only red line against enforced backdoors perforating iOS security would appear to be Apple’s principles — and the wider interpretation of the letter of the law by the judiciary. Which brings me to the legal issue. The FBI has resorted to using a federal statute — the All Writs Act — to try to force Apple’s hand. This is to try to compel technology companies to do the bidding of government agencies. . Which likely explains why Apple was in a position to publish a very balanced and coherent on the matter yesterday. This low level federal court route of government agencies seeking to try to perforate iOS security is apparently a pretty well trodden path already. The AWA gives federal courts the authority to issue court orders that are “necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law”. But it does not give them the power to violate the Constitution. Nor can they impose an “ ” via Writ. Despite the judge in the San Bernardino case granting the writ, the judiciary is not universally comfortable with use of a general purpose law for such a specific purpose. As the , a federal magistrate judge in New York last year questioned the government’s authority to use the AWA to try to compel Apple to unlock a locked iPhone in another case. That judge’s reading of the matter is that a deliberate Congressional failure to legislate either way on enforced disabling of security/encryption might well be being exploited to enable government agencies to compel tech companies to do their bidding — i.e. without politicians having to win the public case for making a specific law for this. “This case falls in the murkier area in which Congress is plainly aware of the lack of statutory authority and has thus far failed either to create or reject it,” . So the implication is the government is filling a statutory gap that Congress has either failed to consider or specifically chosen to confer authority for. Either way, use of AWA for this purpose is not a sustainable position. Calls for a proper legal mandate — in the form of a law passed by Congress and signed by the President — have . Apple also understandably wants some legal clarity here. Last week, its counsel, Marc J. Zwillinger wrote to the aforementioned New York judge asking him to rule on whether it can be compelled to assist investigators to break the passcode on its iPhones — arguing that a court ruling on the matter would be more efficient than repeat debates each time the government seeks to compel it to crack the security on an individual device. “Apple has also been advised that the government intends to continue to invoke the All Writs Act in this and other districts in an attempt to require Apple to assist in bypassing the security of other Apple devices in the government’s possession. To that end, in addition to the potential reasons this matter is not moot that the government identifies, this matter also is not moot because it is capable of repetition, yet evading review,” Zwillinger wrote. “Resolving this matter in this Court benefits efficiency and judicial economy.” If, as Zwillinger writes, the government is intending to systematically invoke the AWA to bypass iOS security in different cases, it’s rather hard to see how it is also arguing that the San Bernardino case is a special national security exception. Either it’s “this one case” or it’s not. (And indeed, the AWA has already been used for a similar purpose in other such cases so… ) The wider point here is that legal grey areas have, for a very long time, been used as a tactic to enable state surveillance powers outgrowth without proper public debate and scrutiny of such ‘capability creep’. Indeed, actively bypassing democratic debate. Over in the U.K., for example, we’re seeing fresh government attempts to use an obfuscation tactic to try to workaround encryption. currently before the U.K. parliament includes a clause that requires comms service providers to remove electronic protection when served with a lawful intercept warrant. The legislation also states that companies must take “reasonable” steps to comply with warrants requiring they hand over data in a legible form — which would appear to imply that end-to-end encryption will end up standing outside the law. Add to that, according to sources, UK intelligence agencies have been informing US tech companies they intend to use exactly this clause to force the companies to decrypt encrypted data — and that despite repeat denials by the UK government that it is seeking to ban encryption. So, in other words, the UK government seeks to seize with its right hand what it claims its left hand can’t touch. The bottom line here is that obfuscation should not be a viable political position on the legality of encryption or system security. Data security is far too fucking important a matter to fudge. No one would try to deny that modern smartphones contain a truckload of sensitive personal data, as Apple underlines in its . And the rise of the Internet of Things is only going to increase the volume of sensitive personal data at risk of theft. (Indeed, the U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, made this very point — telling a Senate committee that: “In the future, intelligence services might use the [IoT] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials.”) So with the volume of sensitive data being pulled online continuing to increase, unimpeachable security is more — not less — important. Making Apple’s public defense of the security of its users the only viable position to take here. Because how will technology company be able to offer trusted services to consumers if government-mandated backdoors are being forced upon them? The is creating a world where citizens rely on to defend their rights, rather than the other way around. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) This is the most important tech case in a decade. Silence means picked a side, but it's not the public's. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) Oh and one more thing: when it’s patently obvious who stands on the right side of history.
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Bullish: Closing The Tech Divide Through Teaching Kids How To Code
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Megan Rose Dickey
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This week on Bullish, Mission Bit CEO Stevon Cook joined me in the studio to chat about computer programming and the importance of teaching kids how to code. In case you’re not familiar with Mission Bit, it’s a non-profit organization that works closely with the San Francisco Unified School District to teach coding to high school students. It ultimately aims to close the digital divide, which starts with a lack of access to the Internet, Cook told me. “A lot of people who come to Mission Bit, they come from low-income communities — African-American and Latino students — and the first time they use a computer, or are intimately involved in a computer is with us,” Cook said. “If you look at the public schools, not enough schools have the resources to keep up to date with the technology so they’re using outdated computers and not [offering] much time in the computer lab. So there’s a huge digital divide that starts with access to the Internet and people having access to a home computer, and then that continues with knowing what goes on behind the screen and how to make a computer do certain demands, so that’s what we do with coding.” We also talk about equity versus equality and how that relates to tech, as well as why kids should learn how to code. For one, Cook said, coding is where basically all of the top-paying jobs are, and a lot of our society is becoming increasingly dependent upon the Internet. Hit play at the top of this post to watch the full interview.
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Yahoo Is Shuttering Several Digital Magazines
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Matthew Lynley
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Yahoo today said it is shutting down a huge swath of its digital magazines as it rethinks its digital content strategy. A Yahoo spokesperson said Yahoo Tech was not affected by the changes. According to a , Yahoo Tech editor in chief Dan Tynan is leaving the company. Capital New York also reported that Yahoo is shuttering its tech vertical and moving some of its staff to Yahoo’s news vertical. It appears that some of Yahoo’s content verticals — launched at — were not successful enough to sustain their presence within the greater Yahoo company. “On our recent earnings call, Yahoo outlined out a plan to simplify our business and focus our effort on our four most successful content areas – News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle,” . “To that end, today we will begin phasing out the following Digital Magazines: and .” “In early February Yahoo shared a plan for the future, with this new plan came some very difficult decisions and changes to our business,” a Yahoo spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As a result of these changes some jobs have been eliminated and those employees will be notified today. We thank those employees for their outstanding service to Yahoo and will treat these employees with the respect and fairness they deserve. Taken together, this isn’t really surprising. Yahoo’s core business has been floundering for the past several years — so much so that the company has . Throughout this time, Yahoo’s stock has plummeted as the company has shown no clear signal to shareholders that it is returning to being a growth company. [graphiq id=”cFHo0fwKBsp” title=”Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”548″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/cFHo0fwKBsp” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/19200951/Yahoo-Inc-in-Sunnyvale-CA” link_text=”Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) Stock Price – 1 Year | FindTheCompany”] Marissa Mayer, a former Googler, took over Yahoo in 2012 — when there was a lot of hope that she could turn the company around as it transitioned to a primarily mobile-driven company centered around a portfolio of brands. The final goal was to return Yahoo, a powerhouse brand in the early days of the Internet, to being a household name. And, according to everything that’s happened in the past few weeks — including reports of a potential sale — all this is a signal that the strategy in place has not worked. Mayer and Yahoo are in the hot seat, with the company being somewhat buoyed by its big stake in Chinese commerce giant Alibaba, a company worth $163 billion. This could be part of a larger swath of layoffs happening within the company. During the company’s last earnings report, Yahoo confirmed that it would lay off about 15% of its staff as part of a greater restructuring. Yahoo’s core business has been struggling to the point that the company . Yahoo also shut down Yahoo Screen, its home for original content like the show “Community,” . : A Yahoo representative says it is not shutting down Yahoo Tech, . The story, which previously said that the company’s tech vertical would be shuttered, has been updated to reflect Yahoo’s comments.
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Not Another African Tech Article
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Clinton Mutambo
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The great continent of Africa seems to be the flavor of the month. As the world wakes up to its potential, I can’t help but cringe each time an “African tech” article is published on a popular medium like TechCrunch. The lack of data and “exotic charm” of Africa makes it an easy target for baseless, heavily flawed or downright ridiculous content. This benefits no one, as it has the effect of painting a false picture about the continent and each of its 54 diverse states. Everyone from potential investors to collaborators is made more ignorant by most articles. is a case in point. His intention of wanting to shed “additional light” about tech’s new El Dorado was a major disservice, in my opinion. Its failure, like many of its ilk, is rooted in the juxtaposition, or rather imposition, of Africa and China. A keyword search reveals he used the word “China” 34 times in that article. A number of comments at the bottom of it go on to accuse him of originally intending to write about China! As a kid born and bred on the continent, it bothered me for a while that amidst all the noise about great fortunes beneath and above, the continent as a whole wasn’t in a better place. I then dedicated a great deal of time to read and understand more about the continent, as well as technology as a conduit for change. Even then, Africa’s complexity became clear to me. Growing up in a hyper inflation-riddled Zimbabwe made it all the more interesting, as the nation rapidly experienced three of the four African economic clusters as . Part of this experience is what inspired Logan Green to embark on the venture we know today . If we are to understand African tech better, it’s important to understand the continent’s general evolution — technology doesn’t operate in a silo. When most African nations got independence in the 1960s, they were thrust onto a dangerous board of chess. Choosing between the West on one side and USSR on the other poisoned budding governance structures on the continent. Africa’s worst dictators — Idi Amin in Uganda, , and Mobutu in the Congo — . Conversely, . The game at the time was about spheres of influence and little else. Weak internal structures were further diluted with aggressive external pressures. Global corporations also latched onto this, dipping their hands in coups and other exploitative activities — Therefore, immediate post-independence Africa was nothing less than an epic screw up, built above a future sinkhole. Basic information and communications technology on the continent was almost nonexistent. A case in point is that in the early 1980s, Nigeria, as Africa’s biggest nation, had . As the Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, the failure of African states to get their act together became more apparent. The focus shifted from external and corruptive influences to internal developmental pressures. No longer could a dictator get away with the fact that he was aligned with the governments and ideology of the USSR, USA, France, Britain or other Cold War and/or post-colonial actors. The tug of war ceased and the international community collectively stared at Africa, Countries like Malaysia and Singapore were compared with African peers like Ghana and Ivory Coast. All four had obtained independence within three years of one another, yet the Southeast Asian tigers were roaring. When the emperor was revealed to have no clothes, nations like Tanzania did away with socialism and increasingly gravitated toward free-market fundamentals. This laid a sound foundation for entrepreneurship to flourish. The rise of mobile telephony from the late 1990s and into the 21st century happened at just the right time. Entrepreneurs like , and took the lead by building the continent’s first mobile networks. Strive Masiyiwa did so by taking the Zimbabwe government to court in a legendary five-year legal battle, sacrificing his house and entire savings in the process. By 2005, Mo Ibrahim had sold Celtel International to MTC for $3.3 billion, crowning what is arguably Africa’s first tech unicorn and turning into millionaires nearly 100 people from the founding team. It succeeded with the participation of U.S. venture capitalists like . Ibrahim now runs a governance initiative that . Today, more than 600 million Africans have a cell phone, giving rise to empowering innovation like the . By continuously presenting Africa as an either/or, narratives such as that espoused by Milanovic are crippling and shortsighted. Beyond being misguided, what they perhaps unintentionally do is force the continent into another tug of war; one in which “the West” needs to race to Africa before “the East” gobbles it up. The irony of this school of thought is that no Chinese Internet company has a significant presence in Africa. In fact, the flip side is true, as Naspers of South Africa was . It remains the largest shareholder in the world’s fifth biggest Internet company. Naspers turned a $32 million investment into a $58 billion equity stake. So much for China gobbling up Africa! Chinese investment in the continent’s nascent tech scene would be welcome, just as investment from the rest of the world is. This is a new Africa, defined by an urgency to come up with entrepreneurial solutions to our challenges and embrace our opportunities. Homegrown infrastructure players like , and get little credit for the enabling role they’ve played. Before 2010, Africa’s core means of Internet connectivity was through outdated satellite technology. These three companies, and others in their league, silently laid the infrastructure that underpins Africa’s connectivity boom. Mature startups like , , and early stage ones like my own are only emerging around this. Without their toil, there would be no nascent tech ecosystems to speak of. Whilst politics has generally improved from the Cold War era, it still has a long way to go — just like other continents have had to do during their first 50 years. We’re not waiting on politics to take the lead, but rather being the change we want to see. The mobile boom as Africa’s first mass contact with ICTs, was entrepreneur-led. According to Mo Ibrahim, GSM licenses in Africa were initially scorned by global telcos to the extent that . Today they’re worth more than gold, as telcos are paying up to $200 million for them. Conditions are becoming sufficient enough to enable entrepreneurship to take the lead. The type of entrepreneurship that made the U.S. the world’s greatest nation. As a young African, I believe that governance is becoming a bigger focal point for our governments, even notorious ones. Unlike before, external pressures are not the dominant influence. An informed, frustrated and ambitious youth bulge, from which I hail, is. In a post titled , Canadian entrepreneur, Barrett Nash basically authored what I concluded to be a positive and spirited but highly patronizing article. In it, he calls on “the world’s best and brightest” not to “build the next WhatsApp in America” but rather “come to Africa.” Instead of enlarging the opportunity to reveal a world in which Africans are taking to WhatsApp by the millions, for example, his simplification was flawed in its quest to hype an imaginary scramble for Africa. I have the added context of knowing Barrett, as we worked from the same office block in Kigali, Rwanda. Although I initially dismissed it, his article repeatedly popped up in numerous conversations I had with people at the coalface of African tech. Many felt insulted by its glaring innuendos, extending the harmful misconceptions that Africans need others to solve their own challenges. It makes no sense that out of all these , almost none are from actual Africans, the people naturally at the front line of Africa’s economic, social and tech scenes. A large part of the problem lies with us Africans simply not leading the discussion; how many have actually attempted to publish a post sharing their sentiments? With that said, just because anyone with a head on their shoulders can come up with snappy headlines like “African Boom,” “African Gold Rush” or “Scramble For Africa” doesn’t make their reasoning legitimate — it actually continues to dumb down Africa as a monolithic and internally lethargic structure. In the midst of a commodity downturn, it’s therefore not surprising to come across such abruptly pessimistic but revealing articles like . These are not called frontier markets for nothing. Uber’s are a drop in the ocean of challenges we navigate daily across Africa, that’s the reality. There shouldn’t be a tug of war this time around. Extending perceptions of such only advances exploitative tendencies that have contributed toward the challenges in Africa. Continued China or “savior” inferences are a wasted opportunity to build meaningful, wide-reaching and lasting value. Africans are indeed rising, although not at the supersonic pace at which Africa is supposedly rising.
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Chelsea Peretti To Rich People: “Save Twitter”
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Jordan Crook
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Twitter has been having trouble growing beyond its current user base of around 300 million. Because of that, shareholders are scared and the . Of course, the tech world is concerned about this issue. But we never stop to think about how this might affect celebrities like Brooklyn Nine Nine star and comedian Chelsea Peretti. Peretti hosted the Crunchies Awards Show earlier this month, . But she also created a PSA of sorts in the form of the following video. Enjoy! [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTDFZR5mbBU&w=640&h=360]
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X Prize And IBM Team Up On A New, $5 Million A.I. Competition
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Sarah Perez
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On Wednesday morning at TED2016, The X Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis and IBM Watson general manager David Kenny jointly announced the launch of a new X Prize competition focused on artificial intelligence. The $5 million “ ,” as the competition is called, will invite teams from around the globe to come up with their own challenges that demonstrate A.I.’s potential to positively impact people’s lives. The open-ended nature of this particular competition means that participants can choose to work with AI technology in a number of areas, from climate change to education to healthcare, the organizers noted. The goal is to demonstrate how humans can collaborate with cognitive and A.I. technologies capable of solving some of the world’s grand challenges. Three finalists will ultimately take the stage at TED2020 to deliver their presentations. The X Prize, as you know, has run numerous competitions over the years to help push the boundaries of what’s possible with technology, rewarding teams for coming up with new ideas in areas like spacecraft development, unmanned ocean exploration, or mapping the human genome, for example. Ultimately, the goal of these events is to incentivize technological achievements through various competitions. However, in the past, the foundation would typically detail specific requirements related to the prize at hand. This time, the AI X Prize is taking a different course, as it’s actually allowing teams to come up with their own challenges in the very broad field of “A.I.” That could make for an interesting and diverse group of participants. The ideas will be evaluated by a panel of judges who will decide on the winner based on a range of factors, including technical validity, audacity of their mission, and their ability to deliver an “awe-inspiring” TED Talk, the organization notes. Interested participants can to register their emails, but complete rules and guidelines won’t be available until May.
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California DOJ’s OpenJustice Platform Makes Local Law Enforcement Data More Transparent
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Megan Rose Dickey
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African-American people at the hands of police officers has created a lot of reasonable doubt in our criminal justice system. , an interactive web platform developed by the California Department of Justice and spearheaded by the office of the attorney general, has today released a new set of criminal justice data for the sake of transparency and accountability. It includes data from California’s 1,000-plus law enforcement agencies to allow for side-by-side comparison of agencies, like San Francisco Police Department versus Los Angeles Police Department. The new local data also includes information on the demographic information of both victims and offenders. The first version of OpenJustice, which launched in September 2015, included only statewide data on arrest rates, death in custody and arrest-related deaths, and law enforcement officers killed or assaulted. It was not possible to break down that data by specific law enforcement agencies. In OpenJustice 2.0, it is. The new version also features data on “clearances” in order to show how law enforcement addresses crimes (a clearance is when law enforcement makes an arrest or charges someone with a crime). In the new data, some takeaways are that crime is dropping overall, violent crime and property crime are at an all-time low, and homicide rates are down. It also exposes racial inequities in California arrests. While the OpenJustice team noticed striking disparities between the state population versus the arrest population in statewide data, the team was able to get even more granular in version two. For example, African-Americans across almost all California counties are continuing to be arrested at significantly higher rates than other races in those counties. The data also shows that African-Americans across those counties comprise a higher percentage of the arrest population than the general resident population in those counties, a higher percentage than the African-American population statewide. Sigh. OpenJustice is making all of this data accessible and easily digestible because “there is a real desire and need from the public to better understand exactly what was going on with law enforcement,” Justin Erlich, special assistant attorney general, in the office of Attorney General Kamala Harris, told me. “So the attorney general felt that we, as the Department of Justice, have a lot of data that we collect from local law enforcement and we could play a leading role in creating a fuller picture of what is going on.” The other reasons for doing this are about informing people, improving our criminal justice process and enabling the public to get a better sense of how big certain problems are — such as deaths in police custody — in the criminal justice system, Erlich says. OpenJustice also hopes that “the public will start to feel that there is a renewed attempt to build and strengthen the trust between law enforcement and the public they’ve sworn to protect,” Erlich says. By empowering the public with this data and making it easy to explore and understand, the public should feel more equipped to know what to ask for from policymakers and legislators. With the growth of data science and technology, and through OpenJustice, there is also an opportunity to identify areas where law enforcement agencies can try new interventions to improve public safety. And since OpenJustice is open source, other law enforcement agencies nationwide can join the California DOJ in its own transparency efforts. “Being open source is part of that key transparency,” Erlich says. “Data is a public good and what we’re trying to build is a public good.” OpenJustice has also partnered with the White House to try to create a model that other states can replicate, Erlich says. [gallery columns="2" ids="1278263,1278264,1278265,1278266,1278267,1278268"] The OpenJustice team — which includes anywhere from six to 20 people, since this is not a full-time job for anyone — ultimately wants others to be able to stand on its shoulders and continue building on top of it. In the last six months, OpenJustice has unveiled two versions of its platform and it’s not close to being done. “I think we’re going to adapt the startup model and bring it into government,” Erlich says. “This is an agile approach and we will be constantly iterating.” OpenJustice wants to focus on different parts of the criminal justice system. Next, the team will focus on juveniles and conduct a deep data dive around the school-to-prison pipeline. Then it will be the court system and compiling data around court prosecutions. The roadmap also includes exploring data around incarcerations and better understanding of what goes on in jails and state prisons, as well as ending the vicious cycle of , which involves returning to prison following being released. That roadmap, which also includes hackathons with designers and video artists at Stanford and engineers at Facebook, should take about six to nine months to complete.
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Get Your Extra-Early-Bird Tickets To Disrupt NY Before Prices Increase
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Matt Burns
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Extra-early-bird tickets to the show are available through Friday, February 19, so if you’re already planning on coming to Disrupt and want to save yourself some serious cash in the process, now is the time to act. In addition, you’ll be able to talk with the dozens of companies on the show floor in Startup Alley, and you get to attend all of the parties and after-parties to keep the conversations and networking going long into the night.
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Google Translate Now Has More Than 100 Languages And Covers 99 Percent Of The Online Population
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Catherine Shu
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Google’s hit a major milestone today as it nears its 10th anniversary. After , including Hawaiian and Kurdish, Google Translate now includes more than 100 languages (103 to be exact). Google claims that this means the service, which , covers 99 percent of the online population. The idea for Google Translate was first planted in 2004, when co-founder Sergey Brin after it translated a Korean email into “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!” Google Translate now uses a combination of machine learning and to make sure translations are accurate and not ridiculous. The company said in its announcement on the Google Translate Blog that in order to add a new language, it must be a written language with “a significant amount of translations in the new language” already online. That way, Google Translate can apply machine learning to the texts. Three million volunteers also correct translations and suggest new words. The new languages added today are Amharic (which is spoken in Ethiopia); Corsican; Frisian (the Netherlands and Germany); Kyrgyz; Hawaiian; Kurdish; Luxembourgish; Samoan; Scots Gaelic; Shona (Zimbabwe); Sindhi (Pakistan and India); Pashto (Afghanistan and Pakistan); and Xhosa (South Africa).
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White House Plays With Words, Says Department Of Justice Isn’t Asking Apple To Create A Backdoor
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Romain Dillet
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Following , the White House has reacted to Apple’s . , the White House has said that the Department of Justice isn’t asking for a backdoor to unlock the iPhone 5c in the San Bernardino case. Instead, the Government only wants help for one device. Reuters a media briefing in Washington and reported the White House’s answer on this issue. According to Reuters, the White House emphasized the fact that the Department of Justice is only asking for access to a single iPhone. The Department of Justice is not asking Apple to “create a new backdoor to its products,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said during the briefing according to Reuters. “The president certainly believes that is an important national priority,” Earnest also said. The entire point of Cook’s letter is that this case is a slippery slope. Apple has a few options. If it complies with the FBI and provides a new firmware to access the content of one iPhone, the FBI could use this firmware against countless of other iPhones (at least for ). “Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks,” Cook wrote. If Apple supervises this process, the FBI could reverse-engineer the firmware. If Apple makes sure the FBI doesn’t see this firmware, it creates a precedent. Nothing would stop the FBI from asking for other backdoors for just one phone, again and again. In other words, it’s a clear dilemma with only two options, and Apple has taken a stance against helping the FBI. Apple is saying that backdoors would compromise security and anyone would be able to exploit a backdoor. The EFF has written to support Apple as well as the . Also worth noting, other tech giants have been silent for the past 24 hours.
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Scientists Can Now 3D Print Otzi The Mummified Ice Man
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John Biggs
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Otzi, for those not up on their 5,300-year-old mummified men, died and was frozen in the Alps near Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy. His body is one of the best preserved human mummies in Europe and now he’s getting a 3D-printed makeover. Researchers and engineers have worked together with 3D-printing firm to perfectly scan Otzi. This allows researchers to 3D print his tortured frame over and over again and, in an interesting episode of Nova, an artist will create a perfect replica of the mummy for study by Otzi, for his part, his hanging out in a climate-controlled vault in Italy so he doesn’t degenerate. The engineers had to recreate some of Otzi’s parts from scratch, a feat possible thanks to 3D modeling techniques. From the release: The episode of Nova airs tonight on PBS. It is not clear whether or not Otzi will rise from the dead and attack the camera crew like a Game Of Thrones White Walker during the program, but all signs point to “no.”
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A Rant About Why Twitter’s Past Failures Make It Nearly Unfixable
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Josh Constine
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Twitter had a terrible, horrible, no good very and unfortunately, the only thing that might save it is a time machine. The company announced that it saw zero growth in its total user count. Excluding SMS-only users, it from 307 million to 305 million users. That’s despite it launching and buying expensive TV commercials promoting Moments, which was supposed to give Twitter mainstream appeal. So why is Twitter having such a tough time turning things around? Because it already left a sour taste in millions of mouths. For years, especially in the 2007 to 2011 era, Twitter did everything it could to get people to sign up. It invaded SXSW with plasma screens full of tweets. It pushed to get hashtags in TV commercials. and its founders went on talk shows like Oprah. But Twitter was pouring users into a bucket with a hole in it. The new user onboarding experience was thin and confusing. It ditched people on nearly empty Timelines with little idea about what or how to tweet or who they should follow. Unlike Facebook where they had a built-in audience of their real friends, most normal people found it tough to gain enough followers to make tweeting seem worth it. Celebrities and journalists had no problem developing followings, but average joes and janes felt like they were tweeting into a black hole. So they quit. Untold millions signed up, got frustrated, and left Twitter before they could realize its potential to make them smarter and more connected. Now, it’s not getting a second chance. Twitter finally revamped its broken onboarding in 2015 The growth problem came to light as Twitter IPO’d in 2013 and Wall Street wanted to know it would get bigger and monetize more people. Unable to boost growth rates since, Twitter’s share price is down an ugly 70 percent since a year ago. In the meantime, Facebook became almost inescapable, and while not great at real-time content, it’s got good enough for most people. Q4 2015 could have spurred a turn around, since . Yet today Twitter’s weak earnings report saw it stuck at 320 million monthly users, the same as three months earlier. It even lost 1 million users in the US. Twitter Moments didn’t move the needle This bodes poorly for Twitter’s next big change that launched this morning — the shift to an . This puts the most important tweets since you last opened at the top. That should make Twitter more entertaining for people who only check it occasionally. The algorithm could also surface tweets from new users and want to stick around. And finally, knowing the algorithm will bubble up anything they missed might make people more generous about following new users that will add more tweets to their chaotic feeds. But if Moments didn’t make a real dent in the growth problem, the relatively subtle timeline change might not either. Twitter also announced it plans to . Known as the “Twitter Canoe”, the username of each additional person roped into a discussion takes up characters, which are limited to 140, so people have to cram their thoughts into fewer and fewer words. But again, this is not the kind of fundamental overhaul that would make churned-out users give Twitter another shot. At this point, Twitter has three options. [Update: There’s also an option #4 — Twitter rears itself for acquisition or being taken private. Google seems like a logical acquirer, as it could use Twitter to enhance YouTube and fill the hole from Google+’s failure.] This last one is the only thing Twitter’s proven to be good at. It managed to this year. While hard-core Twitterers might not want to see more aggressive ads and more of them, it may be the only viable route to becoming a profitable company. Effectively, the same Twitter diehards that criticize every tweak and change might pay the price for the app’s growth problems. If they love Twitter as much as they say, they’ll put up with whatever ads it has to show them. Twitter will stay important. Plenty of people like me will love and use it no matter what. But it’s time to consider how Twitter could be a sustainable business without achieving ubiquity any time soon.
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Who Is A VC?
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Richard Kerby
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Last year, I dug into why there are so few black people in venture capital (you can see my previous post ). More recently, the folks over at Social Capital and The Information took a crack at providing the data around diversity among partners within venture capital (that data can be found ). I’ve now decided to take a more comprehensive look at diversity within venture capital across all levels. In total, I looked at more than 1,500 investment professionals across more than 200 venture firms and divided everyone into three tiers: partner, principal and associate. Similar to my previous analysis, I did not include EIRs, venture partners, accelerators or incubators. I also tried my best to determine who are the actual investing partners at funds that give everyone the “partner” title. Here is what I found: For those who are interested, the data for these charts can be found at . So what does it take to be a venture capitalist? People often point to the requirement of operational experience and/or an engineering background as to why they haven’t been able to hire a more diverse team. If we look at the success of folks like Reid Hoffman, Vinod Khosla and Peter Thiel (among many others), you might believe that to be true. Can non-operators also be successful venture capitalists? If we look at the success of folks like Bill Gurley, Peter Fenton, Fred Wilson, Michael Moritz, Bryan Roberts (one of my colleagues) and many others, they have proven that operational experience is not a prerequisite to being a successful venture capitalist. Some of the former operators studied engineering in college and some were liberal arts majors. Similarly, some of the non-operators had engineering degrees and some had liberal arts degrees. Below you can find further data on operational experience and college majors. The data show that the majority of venture capitalists don’t have operational experience or an engineering background. Therefore, it is important to focus on what all of the successful people listed above have in common. They are all intelligent, curious, driven, hardworking and a slew of other positive superlatives. But most importantly, they were given an opportunity to become an investor and access to capital to make investments. We should all care deeply about building a more diverse industry, because it will lead to improved performance, accomplishments and financial rewards for everyone involved. Study after study has demonstrated that teams that are more diverse lead to greater performance. (If you are interested in reading a few, take a look at these reports from and ). Given the dearth of racial diversity obvious in the numbers above, at least two questions arise. What accounts for these statistics and what actions would make venture firms more diverse? First of all, realize that a person doesn’t need an engineering degree or to have had mega success as an entrepreneur to become a successful venture capitalist. To the contrary, there are standouts in this field who hold liberal arts degrees and other types of degrees, or who have never run a company — let alone had a billion-dollar exit. What every venture capitalist does need are certain characteristics. An abbreviated list of those attributes would include ambition, curiosity and intelligence — traits that are obviously held by many people in every ethnic, racial, gender and socioeconomic category. It is time for venture capital professionals across the country to take action: to initiate difficult conversations with colleagues, to brainstorm ideas and to keep demanding and working toward a more diverse ecosystem.
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Student.com Bags $60M To Grow The Reach Of Its Student Digs Marketplace
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Natasha Lomas
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, an accommodation marketplace founded back in 2011 (as ‘Overseas Student Living’ before rebranding last year) to focus specifically on the needs of international students, is announcing a $60 million combined Series B and C round today, led by global investment firm VY Capital. Horizons Ventures, Expa, Spotify founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon and Hugo Barra from Xiaomi also participated in the round. The platform aims to simplify the accommodation search for international students needing to secure a base for their studies from a distance. And, on the flip side, it links landlords with a lucrative supply of overseas students who, given how much they are paying to study abroad, are probably more interested in knuckling down and studying on that in-room desk rather than throwing bedroom-trashing parties in their digs. Student.com sits in the middle of these two parties, taking its commission cut from bookings. It claims to have taken in $110 million in bookings last year alone, from students in more than 100 countries. Landlords using its platform pay a commission on the total rental period, which it says is typically an academic year, but can be shorter a shorter timeframe, such as a summer, or as long as three years. The company is not disclosing how many landlords it has signed up to its platform at this stage (nor will it confirm how many student users it has) but will say it works with “all major landlords in all key destinations” — a statement it says yields a total of 750,000 beds in its currently covered 426 destinations, which it says are in close proximity to more than 1,000 universities. “We provide landlords with global reach and scale which means access to international students in hundreds of countries across the world,” say the founders when asked how they incentivize landlords to sign up. “We also bring significant value in making the marketing and booking process much smoother from end to end.” The new funding will be used for market expansion, the company said today, with plans to expand across the U.S., Latin America and the Middle East in the coming months. The new financing will also be used to grow its team — currently more than 200 people strong, spread over seven locations — and to invest in its tech platform.
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Meta Hypes The Reveal Of Its ‘Futuristic’ Next-Gen Augmented Reality Glasses
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Lucas Matney
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, an augmented reality glasses company born around the same time as Google Glass, is getting ready to show off the next-gen version of their AR headset. The company published a video to on Wednesday which features a handful of tech influencers lauding their “futuristic” experiences with demos of the yet-to-be-publicly-revealed device. The video undoubtedly seeks to build on the excitement that AR-buffs got last week in hearing future tech soothsayer Robert Scoble with Meta’s latest demo, which offered him what he said was, “…the most interesting product demo that I’ve ever had in my life.” All of this comes as Meta hints at upcoming product news by way of a countdown timer on the company’s site, boasting that “the revolution” will begin in just over 20 days (though a post on Scoble’s Facebook page suggests the device will be revealed when Meta’s CEO speaks at next week). As the overtly dramatic background track on this teaser plays, you get to hear folks like Reddit founder (and extremely notably, a Meta investor) Alexis Ohanian talk about his experience with the Meta AR glasses demo. “This was the first time I’ve ever put something on and felt that I was living in that future that I had been promised for all these years,” Ohanian says. While I will say that the addition of Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am’s badge of approval about where this hype train is leading, it is kind of cool to see so many tech leaders/creatives discuss augmented reality in any capacity with this much gusto. This has been an interesting time for product mysteries in the augmented reality space. After announcing a , there’s been buzz circulating at what sort of crazy AR tech could possibly be powering Magic Leap’s $4.5 billion valuation. Meta differs from Magic Leap in that people have actually had the chance to try out their (much older) devices and see prototypes/developer versions functioning. The device was born during the age of Google Glass but has always been more focused on content manipulation through hand-tracking rather than simple AR absorption. Notably, the company also in a 2014 Kickstarter that provided developers with a somewhat clunky-looking early prototype. Meta also raised a $23 million Series A round last January led by Horizons Ventures, Tim Draper, BOE Optoelectronics, Garry Tan and, yep, Alexis Ohanian. TechCrunch had the chance to try out their later Meta Pro model almost two years ago after CES 2014 where we were able to walk through a demo with Meta CEO/founder Meron Gribetz. The company has clearly worked on further shrinking the physical footprint of its devices but it appears from the reactions of Scoble and others that it has also reached some breakthroughs in its core AR technologies, though with no new products publicly available to demo we may have to wait until the countdown timer runs out to know for sure.
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Bullish: A New Era
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Megan Rose Dickey
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After a short hiatus, Bullish has returned. The talk show is exactly how you remember it, except with a new host (that’s me, MRD!) and better music. Sorry I’m not sorry, ! Anyway, this week we brought in Matthew Schwab, president of on-demand flower delivery BloomThat, to shed some light on the on-demand economy, expectations around liability and delivery logistics. BloomThat, for example, initially handled the whole flower delivery process from end-to-end. The company eventually realized, Schwab said, that it didn’t make sense to do that, so BloomThat ultimately decided to partner with local and national couriers, like FedEx, UPS and Deliv, a startup that offers same-day delivery services. We also chatted about just how on-demand the on-demand economy should be. In other words, how fast on-demand deliveries need to arrive. “Where is that balance between the two-hour, four-hour window as compared to in forty minutes,” Schwab told me on Bullish. “And figuring out that balance I think is going to be really key in 2016.” It’s different depending on what it is a company is delivering, Schwab says. If it’s food, you’re probably going to want it within the hour, but with flowers, same day in a matter of hours will probably be good enough. Hit play up top to hear more about tackling the on-demand economy.
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Twitter Plans Changes To @Replies And Other Confusing Rules
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Matthew Lynley
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Twitter can be an incredibly confusing service for new and existing users, and Twitter says it’s now planning to address some rules that might make it unwieldy. In the company’s letter to shareholders, Twitter said that changes were coming to rules like the @reply and the .@name syntax. We don’t know what that looks like just yet, but that the company plans to address that seems significant and in-line with what the company has tried to do lately — make the service less confusing and more palatable to more casual and new users. “We have some really weird rules around conversations, around replies and .@name format that no one understands. We need to fix that,” CEO Jack Dorsey said on the earnings call. “We are focusing a lot of our energy on refining the core product and looking at what is confusing about the service.” Here’s what it says in the shareholder letter: This, in theory, will at least address the “Twitter Canoe” problem — as more and more people pile into a conversation, their @reply handles take up characters so each person’s reply has be shorter and shorter until it’s basically impossible to convey complex thought. Many think that @names shouldn’t take up character counts in replies. If Twitter made this change, people would always have 140 characters to use in their discussion no matter how many people are part of the thread. As more people join an @ reply thread, their handles take up more of the 140 character limit until people can only add tiny responses Similarly, it’s common to see less-savvy Twitter users accidentally start tweets with someone’s @name. This makes the tweet a reply that only shows up to their mutual followers with the people they mentioned. Users have to know to put a . or different character other than @ at the beginning of their tweet to make sure it goes out to all their followers. Twitter could give some obvious visual indication to people about whether they’re about to publish a tweet or a reply. Twitter reported its fourth-quarter earnings today where user growth was flat, and excluding SMS fast followers user growth, . That means Twitter has to do whatever it can to make it easier for new users to understand so it can revitalize growth.
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Twitter’s User Growth Goes Nowhere As It Meets Revenue Expectations Of $710M
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Matthew Lynley
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Twitter today reported its fourth-quarter earnings — one of the most important quarters of the company’s history — and basically fell flat on its face. Twitter’s monthly active user growth, on a quarterly basis, was flat, compared to a slight jump that what analysts were expecting. Last quarter, the company had 320 million monthly active users, and this quarter was no different. The company said that MAUs excluding SMS fast followers . The company reported 305 million monthly active users for Q4, compared to 307 million in the previous quarter, excluding SMS fast followers. “We saw a decline in monthly active usage in Q4, but we’ve already seen January monthly actives bounce back to Q3 levels,” the company said in its earning statement. “We’re confident that, with disciplined execution, this growth trend will continue over time.” The company reported earnings of 16 cents per share and revenue of $710 million. Analysts were expecting earnings of 12 cents per share on $710 million in revenue. Shares fell as much as 13% in extended trading, hitting another new low of around $13.75. As the earnings call progressed, the stock flattened out a bit and is now down around 3% in extended trading. The company said it expects between $595 million and $610 million in revenue for the first quarter, compared to estimates of $629 million. Still, revenue was up 48% year-over-year, despite stalled user growth. On the earnings call, Dorsey laid out five things the company wanted to focus on in 2015: “Refining our core service and making it more intuitive, investing in live-streaming video, giving creators and influencers the best tools, investing in making Twitter safer and better supporting developers.” This was a big one for Twitter. In the past year, the stock has fallen nearly 70%. Twitter has been repeatedly punished for failing to grow its logged-in user base in a meaningful way. Investors are looking for long-term growth from Twitter, and while its monetization engine continues to chug along, it needs to show that it can expand the total number of people it can monetize if it’s going to continue operating as a large, publicly-traded company. During trading today, shares were up around 4%, to around $15 per share. That falling stock, from its highs of at one point more than $53, has erased tens of billions in value for the company’s market cap. [graphiq id=”aOzDEfFNN2Z” title=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/aOzDEfFNN2Z” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/445483/Twitter-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=””] When CEO Dick Costolo stepped down and co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to run the company, there was at least some optimism. The product guy was once again in charge. But even under him, the incremental updates to Twitter — Moments, changing the fave to a like button, and potentially lifting the character limit for tweets — hasn’t meaningfully moved the service. Dorsey summed up the company’s issues in its Q2 earnings call: “Our Q2 results show good progress in monetization, but we are not satisfied with our growth in audience.” Twitter launched Moments in October so it’s had some time do its magic, if it’s going to. But while visually stimulating, Moments hasn’t seemed to capture the adoration of the mainstream that Twitter is hoping to attract. The perceptions from nearly a decade of Twitter persist — that it’s hard to use, is best for news nerds and celebrities, and that Facebook is a good enough place to share. As a stock craters, so too does morale. Employees at companies like Twitter often have large parts of their compensation locked up in shares, which ebb and flow with the stock price. With the crash that’s happened under Dorsey, Twitter employees that own stock have seen a huge chunk of that value erased. It’s definitely not a surprise that earlier today the company unveiled a new timeline that surfaces tweets Twitter recommends, rather than the typical time-order timeline. It’s designed to be a sort of upgrade to While You Were Away, helping users catch up on the most important tweets relevant to their interests. The announcement — and previous story broken by BuzzFeed — caused a little bit of chaos as people shot back at Twitter for changing its core service. Luckily, it’s begun to spin up some changes that could help. The launch of the algorithmic timeline could make each tweet at the top of people’s feeds more interesting. That could encourage them to actually digest the ads Twitter shows, boosting their performance and the price Twitter can charge. The company also just announced First View video ads that sit at the top of the Timeline. These are certainly more interruptive to the experience, but should command high rates since they’re so vivid. Twitter, for its part, says it is dedicated toward making the service less confusing in its letter to shareholders discussing its fourth-quarter earnings. Interestingly enough, . All this seems geared toward making the service more approachable and easier for newer and existing, more casual users — and help it continue to grow. And it appears that problem continues for the company. Twitter needs to find a way to re-ignite its user growth, which has now completely stalled.
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Twitter’s Monthly User Count Actually Shrunk If You Exclude SMS
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Josh Constine
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It was bad enough that Twitter’s total user count is stuck at 320 million with this quarter. But if you don’t count “SMS Fast Followers”, or people that only use Twitter via text message and don’t see ads, its monthly user count went down from 307 million to 305 million monthly active users in Q4. In the U.S., Twitter’s total monthly user count fell from 66 million to 65 million Considering this earnings report was all about appeasing Wall Street about Twitter’s growth and revenue prospects, this is a terrible sign. Twitter’s share price was down over 7% minutes after its before recovering a bit to be 3% down. SMS Fast Followers typically come from developing world markets like . While getting users hooked via SMS could make the service more ubiquitous and enhance network effect, Twitter will need to eventually transition them to a version of its service where it shows ads. For comparison, Facebook had blockbuster earnings in part because it’s , increasing revenue per user in its Rest Of World region by 29.8% to $1.22 in Q4, and quadrupling it since 2012. During the earnings call, CFO Anthony Noto said that daily active user count was flat and did not decline despite the core monthly active user decline. He insisted that this says “The users we lost from the MAUs were not as high quality”. He presumably means that since they only visited occasionally each month, they probably didn’t see many ads or drive much revenue or content creation for the service. Noto partly blamed the core monthly user count decline on the fact that “We made a conscious decision to reduce the number of emails to dormant users.” He also said that Q4 is historically Twitter’s worst quarter and “this quarter was no different”. Still, he says that engagement on the platform in the form of retweets, DMs, and other signals are positive. Plus, that “As of the end of January, we’ve seen MAUs return to Q3 levels”, meaning core Twitter has risen back to 307 million. The decline in users of core Twitter means Moments, its big push to make Twitter more instantly compelling to new users and the mainstream, hasn’t moved the needle. Twitter even ran expensive television commercials promoting Moments. But it seems many people still think of Twitter as a niche product for news junkies and celebrity watchers. We’re finally seeing all the years of poor new user onboarding and subsequent churn come back to bite Twitter. Even when it makes significant changes, many who signed up and couldn’t get the hang of Twitter won’t give it a second chance. Along those lines, today’s somewhat subtle change to the might not help either. Twitter may need a massive, instantly recognizable change to its fundamental mechanics to inspire growth. Otherwise, it will have to rely on making ads bigger, bolder, and more interruptive to squeeze more revenue out of each user it already has. Perhaps the only truly bright point in Twitter’s earnings is that it’s succeeding at this. It managed to raise its average revenue per user 35% this year from $1.48 to $2. Rather than trying to force growth, Twitter might be able to trade on the loyalty of long-time users by subjecting them to more aggressive advertising and hoping they stick around.
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The Mobile Health Paradox: Why Data Isn’t Nearly Enough
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Yusuf Sherwani
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Across most developed economies, healthcare costs are rising faster than inflation. In the U.K., the National Health Service (NHS) faces an estimated funding gap of £30 billion by 2020. In the U.S., the situation looks more bleak, with total annual healthcare spending surpassing , representing an astonishing 17.4 percent of the country’s total GDP. A key cause of the rise in healthcare spending lies in the spiraling costs of treating preventable chronic diseases (such as obesity, heart disease, stroke and cancer), which account for 88 percent of total healthcare spending. This figure isn’t surprising when you consider that approximately half of all adults in the U.S. have one or more chronic conditions. More worryingly, causes of deaths occur as a result of preventable chronic diseases, with cigarette smoking alone accounting for in the U.S. every year. These facts suggest that many of the key healthcare challenges of the twenty-first century lie in how we tackle chronic disease. This article will explore the role of mobile technologies in meeting these challenges, why they have failed to do so until now and what a solution might look like in the future. With almost five billion mobile phone users in the world, of which two billion are smartphones, mobile health (also known as m-health or connected health) has been lauded as an attractive solution to address the challenges of the rising costs of chronic morbidities. Moreover, the ubiquity of smartphones has led to a burgeoning market for m-health apps and wearable devices, resulting in more health data being collected than ever before. This has given rise to a phenomenon known as “the quantified self,” the process of tracking everyday activities to learn more about yourself. For example, it is now possible for individuals to know their average time spent in REM sleep over three months and whether their . One can now check their blood pressure, oxygen saturations and ECG in a , receive a full for less than $100 and soon be able to keep track of real-time glucose levels thanks to Bluetooth enabled . A simple look at Apple’s Health app yields no less than 79 different health records, spanning Vitamins A through E, variations in body temperature and caffeine levels. A takes the obsession to quantify into the bedroom, by helping individuals track their sexual encounters on their smartphones. The app collects information on the sexual duration and noise levels in order to quantitatively assess the user’s performance, presenting the data in a series of attractive graphs. Proponents of “ phenomenon argue that the data we collect is for self-knowledge and self-empowerment. Whilst there is certainly nothing inherently wrong with the notion, insights from teach us that simply knowing more won’t necessarily help us live healthier lives. Numerous experiments have shown that we human beings are not “ ” but instead place little emphasis on long-term rewards, tend to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains and, in general, are motivated by cognitive biases of which we are largely unaware. Failing to appreciate this, most health and wellness m-health apps have historically suffered from very short life spans, with engagement disintegrating soon after the novelty wears off — users are then free to return to risky health behaviors, negating any intended long-term health benefits. As a senior medical student at Imperial College London, I find myself exposed to a range of medical and surgical specialties during my clinical rotations — each of them presenting different problems, but managed in the same three stages: conservative, medical and surgical management. Despite the rapid pace of medical innovations over the past century, the first line treatment for almost any insidious chronic disease involves taking a conservative approach comprising “lifestyle and risk-factor modification.” This typically involves the doctor reciting their well-rehearsed spiel; for example, instructing arthritic patients on the mobility exercises which, if completed regularly, could extend the life of their joints by 5-10 years, or young diabetic patients on the importance of good glucose control. Yet that patient recall of the medical information delivered in doctor consultations tends to be poor and inaccurate, with most patients focusing on diagnosis-related information and therefore failing to register advice, ultimately affecting their ability to later act on it. Mobile devices offer a promising solution as a conduit for behavioral intervention programs. By combining the “big data” generated by health apps and devices with digital behavioral interventions, there is potential to pave the way for a new generation of m-health apps. The success of such an approach requires a radical transformation — from simply collecting, storing and relaying information back to users to intelligently processing the data collected to help recommend highly personalized, evidence-based techniques, designed to nudge behaviors in the right direction. For example, research shows that not all smokers confer the same benefits from smoking, nor have the same motivations for wanting to quit. A simple illustration would be that person A might smoke to help manage their stress and want to quit as a result of social pressures, whilst person B might enjoy the social aspect of smoking but may be looking to quit due to health concerns. The support required to address their reasons for smoking and motivations for quitting will vary drastically from person A to person B. To tackle this, we are developing our flagship product, , a behavioral intervention for smokers looking to quit, capable of intelligently identifying and adapting to all aspects of the user’s thoughts and feelings about smoking. There are also cross-specialty implications for digital behavioral programs. A developed at Imperial College now makes it possible for patients to accurately monitor their breathing and cardiac activity overnight at home to detect sleep apnea, a devastating sleep disorder estimated to cost the U.S. economy as much as . A promising application of this data could involve a targeted digital behavioral program specific to the individual, matching their weight loss to measurable improvement in their quality of sleep. Linking these lifestyle modifications to the individual’s chronic condition and consequently providing a personalized and highly structured digital behavioral intervention could have a transformational effect on the individual’s life, improving their quality of sleep and, as a result, their ability to function. There are currently some available on the market. Although that’s a highly impressive number, has revealed many mental health apps, as well as existing digital behavior interventions, are plagued by a lack of underlying evidence and scientific credibility and, most worryingly, confer limited clinical effectiveness. clearly illustrate what can go wrong when healthtech startups believe their own hype and refuse to engage the scientific community. As a result, there is an ongoing debate within academic circles regarding the level of clinical validation required for m-health apps. To tackle this, the Department of Health in the U.K. is looking to create a new endorsement model for evidence-based health apps. Embracing an evidence-first approach by building up a solid evidence-base through published clinical trials will confer additional benefits. It will give healthcare practitioners much needed reassurance when recommending m-health apps to their patients, laying down the foundations for clinicians to “prescribe” digital behavioral interventions to help tackle specific “lifestyle and risk-factor changes” in the future (similar to how a clinician might currently prescribe drugs). However, for this to occur, more work is required to help establish a framework for conducting rigorous clinical trials. A fine balance must be struck to ensure these apps can be clinically validated within a reasonable time frame, whilst maintaining validity in the scientific approach and the evidence-base that is generated. It is widely accepted that individuals can drastically reduce their risk of premature morbidity and mortality by avoiding risky health behavior, of which lack of exercise, poor nutrition, tobacco use and drinking too much alcohol are the four main culprits. To truly make a dent on a global scale, digital health startups must recognize the importance of creating highly structured and personalized evidence-based behavioral therapies to tackle specific risky health behaviors. To achieve this, one approach is to create a close cross-collaboration between clinicians, behavioral psychologists, designers and developers to conceptualize, build and clinically test behavioral interventions programs. The future of healthcare lies in how we tackle chronic disease and avoid health-risky behaviors. The opportunity is clear; the part m-health interventions will play in tackling this challenge has yet to be decided.
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Tesla Will Unveil Its $35,000 Model 3 On March 31st
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Greg Kumparak
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We’re just about an hour away from Tesla’s quarterly earnings calls, but the news is already starting to trickle out. The biggest detail so far: you know the Model 3? Tesla’s more affordable car, meant to bring their entry-level line down to roughly $35,000? We’re finally going to see what it looks like, and hopefully a bit about just what it can do, on March 31st. News of the scheduled unveiling comes by way of a , which mentions the Model 3 ever so briefly: These investments will help prepare the way for Model 3, which is on schedule to be unveiled on March 31st and to start production and deliveries in late 2017. March 31st will also be the date that pre-orders for the new vehicle open up, too. Word of that comes from the top, via a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who added that online registration will kick off on April 1st. Not a hoax, we assume. In both cases, would-be owners will need to lay down $1,000 to cash to kick the ordering process off. Model 3 reservations ($1000 down) will be accepted in Tesla stores on March 31 and online April 1 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
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Facebook Distances Itself From Marc Andreessen’s Statements On Free Basics
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Nitish Kulkarni
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Marc Andreessen is having quite a contrite Wednesday. Andreessen, who currently sits on Facebook’s board, caused a stir last night with his online response to . He took to the Twitterverse last night to express his irritation with the regulator’s decision with a statement that some on the Internet likened to colonialist attitudes. While this tweet (captured above by – the original has been deleted) is what drew the most ire from Internet users, the controversy started earlier around the TRAI announcement pertaining to ‘Free Basics’. Denying world’s poorest free partial Internet connectivity when today they have none, for ideological reasons, strikes me as morally wrong. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) Andreessen’s language drew quick comparison from Indian Internet users to the English East India Company. The EEIC was an English trading company which deployed a combination of mercenaries and guile to eventually come to rule most of what is now India from 1757 until 1857, when the British Crown assumed control. Facebook’s Free Basics has been the subject of significant controversy in India over the past few months, with it and similar zero-rate services under fire for allegation of violating net neutrality. Free Basics is a Facebook program that has the company partnering with Internet providers in developing countries and providing free access to specific websites. In India, the company had been partnering with Reliance Telecom until regulator TRAI announced a daily fine for zero-rated Internet services operating in India. While the fine itself (around $750 a day) is just a drop in the ocean for Facebook, the decision does mark a victory for supporters of net neutrality in one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets. To his credit, Andreessen (or the A16Z PR team) quickly moved to apologize in a customary tweetstorm. Andreessen’s latest burst started last night when he announced his withdrawal from future discussions about Indian politics, and made it clear (in so many words) that he was against colonialism. And for the record, I am opposed to colonialism, in any country. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) He wasn’t through, though. A more eloquent apology arrived this morning, also via Twitter, which bot @pngmarca has nicely summarized for us. Facebook also commented on the controversy. “We strongly reject the sentiments expressed by Marc Andreessen last night regarding India,” the company said in . While it’s hard to say if Andreessen’s Twitter behavior had any specific agenda in mind, statements like this by Facebook and members of its board will not help Facebook’s damaged public perception in India, where many see the Free Basics program as a poorly veiled attempt to acquire Indian Internet users as a captive audience for advertisements. : On his , CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an additional statement about Andreessen’s comments. I want to respond to Marc Andreessen’s comments about India yesterday. I found the comments deeply upsetting, and they do not represent the way Facebook or I think at all. India has been personally important to me and Facebook. Early on in my thinking about our mission, I traveled to India and was inspired by the humanity, spirit and values of the people. It solidified my understanding that when all people have the power to share their experiences, the entire world will make Facebook stands for helping to connect people and giving them voice to shape their own future. But to shape the future we need to understand the past. As our community in India has grown, I’ve gained a deeper appreciation for the need to understand India’s history and culture. I’ve been inspired by how much progress India has made in building a strong nation and the largest democracy in the world, and I look forward to strengthening my connection to the country. Andreessen further elaborated on his position with a series of tweets this afternoon. 1/Last night on Twitter, I made an ill-informed and ill-advised comment about Indian politics and economics. — Marc Andreessen (@pmarca)
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You Should Be Using 1 Second Everyday
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Greg Kumparak
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As a writer at a site that covers a lot of startups, I hear the same line a few times a week: “We just wanted to make something that makes peoples lives better.” 1 Second Everyday actually made my life better… and it’s done so without really having to do much of anything at all. The idea is just as the name implies: one second of video, every day. One second to represent your days adventures. One second to prove that day happened. At the end of the year — or the week, or the month, or whatever length of time you choose — it compiles all of those fleeting clips into one wonderfully erratic video. My original intention for firing up 1SE was to use it to help me remember each day a bit more clearly. As someone who works from home more often than not, the days can sort of… blend together. Wake up. Walk the dog. Fall into the Internet and work for 9 hours, only realizing my work day is over when my wife gets home from hers. Do that every day for years, and it can be a bit hard to remember what the hell you did last Thursday. With 1SE, I can scroll back to any day since my first clip back in September and immediately see the thing I thought best summed up that day. A few weeks in, I realized the app had a side effect I hadn’t really expected: I was somehow becoming more adventurous. The app was always there, silently nudging me to find something new — to do something that would add a bit of variety to the final product. A big compilation of one second clips is no fun if it’s just an endless series of Netflix loading screens. I’m not even sure what I’ll with the video in the end; perhaps I’ll share it with friends, but that quickly stopped being the point. If I wanted my video to be interesting — even if I’m the only one who ever sees it — I’d have to find new things to do. Maybe that means hiking a new trail. Maybe it means pulling my friends out to some new brewery. On a recent backpacking trip, it meant hiking a few extra miles through the rainforest to a rope swing we heard existed on the likelihood that I’d get a clip of me bellyflopping into the lake. Would I do this stuff anyway? Perhaps. But it’s just a little extra push to go outside, to go do something new, to fend off that whisper in the back of my mind saying “Yeah, you’re tired. That’s okay, it was a long day. And look, there’s new stuff on Hulu!” Jerry Seinfeld uses a wall calendar for productivity. For each day he chips away at a certain task he’s trying to complete, he gets to put a red X on that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day” , “You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.” Instead of a chain of productivity, I try to maintain that chain of adventure. Instead of a big red X, I get one more video to add to the story. And I love it. Thanks, 1SE.
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You Have One Day Left To Apply To TC Pitch-Offs In Boston And Atlanta
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Jordan Crook
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You have exactly one day left to apply for the TC Pitch-offs in Boston and Atlanta, which will be held on February 23 and February 25 respectively. Why have you put it off until now? Who knows? Maybe you procrastinate. Maybe you’re plagued by overwhelming self-doubt and would rather not try at all then try and fail. Maybe you’re just lazy. Or maybe you hadn’t heard about the Pitch-Offs at all until this very moment. Whatever the reason, it cannot be put off any longer. But what is a TC Pitch-off, you might be wondering. It’s an opportunity for ten pre-selected companies to hop up on stage and pitch their wares to their local audience and a panel of expert VC judges. Each will have exactly sixty seconds to complete their pitch, which will be followed by a quick Q&A from the judges. At the end, they’ll determine the winners. First place will get a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TC Disrupt NY. Second place will get two tickets to the conference, and the Audience Choice winner will get one ticket to the big show. But even if you’re not an entrepreneur, there’s still fun to be had at the TC Meetups. We’ll be holding the events at a bar (drinking is always fun, but 21+ please) and there will be plenty of time for networking after the pitches. Buy tickets and . See you soon!
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Acre Designs Wants To Change The Way We Buy And Build Houses
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Frederic Lardinois
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Most new homes that are being built in the U.S. today really aren’t all that different from those that were built 30 years ago. Some materials may be different, but most builders haven’t really kept up with the times. Y Combinator-backed wants to change this by building that are outfitted with the latest technology. Acre Designs is taking a page from the prefab home business, but puts a very modern spin on it. The company assembles all of the parts necessary to build one of its homes in a central warehouse and then packages them into a single shipping container. That alone removes a lot of the limitations of today’s prefab homes. Acre is also mostly an online company, and buyers essentially buy their homes online. They have to provide their own land, but once they make their purchase decisions, a container will be dispatched to that site and Acre will work with local contractors to build the house to its specifications. Building one of these homes, which currently range from 1,100 to 1,800 square feet, should take about three months. As Acre co-founders Jennifer and Andrew Dickson told me, they started the company out of their own frustration in finding a sustainable home that was built to modern standards. Specifically, they were looking for a zero-energy home that could use solar to power the entire house. “We realized existing homes were very difficult to get to any standard of efficiency without a lot of work,” Jennifer told me. “But we are still building new homes with the same standards as 60 years ago.” Andrew (an industrial designer with experience in working on everything from furniture to jet boats) and Jennifer (who has a degree in architecture and is Acre’s Chief Design Officer) co-founded the company with builder Don Newman (now Acre’s VP of Construction) and got accepted into Y Combinator. Building homes may seem like a bit of a stretch for a tech-focused accelerator like YC. In many ways, though, Acre represents the fringe of what could be considered a hardware startup, and YC has also recently started to think about projects that take on bigger societal challenges. Given how outdated the construction process and many of the designs and features of today’s new construction homes often are, it’s a bit of a surprise that nobody has really tackled this market yet. Andrew believes the reason for this is that the industry is very fragmented. Even the largest builders in California only build about 2,000 homes a year. “There’s tons of small guys and given the nature of how the industry works, the consumer doesn’t have a lot of choice,” he said. “You buy what’s on the market and what some builder cranks out. We are designers and we want things to be beautiful and functional as well. But then you see the process and quality — it’s atrocious.” He also noted that because there aren’t really any brand names in the home-building market, there is very little incentive for builders to keep improving their products. To fix this, Acre handles all of the front-end work of building the house and shipping the parts. Its containers include everything from windows to appliances and its smart-home technology. The local builders can then put these homes together in about 40 percent of the time it would take to build a regular home. Some of the time savings come from the fact that Acre already builds a tech and utility hub for the home, for example, so instead of having to have multiple trades come in to set these things up, the whole process becomes plug-and-play. Compared to prefab builders like , Acre doesn’t have the overhead of a central manufacturing facility, and its shipping costs are significantly lower. Instead, the company partners with local contractors who know the business and local regulations (and who can function as ambassadors for Acre’s brand). The company offers three plans. The smallest, a 1,200 square feet two-bedroom home, costs $400,000. A three-bedroom plan with 1,500 square feet costs $450,000 and the largest plan with four bedrooms and 1,800 square feet will set you back $500,000. That’s without the land. Depending on the local market, those are either relatively affordable prices (hello, California!) or extremely expensive homes. Acre has already finished a couple of homes and expects to get to 300 to 500 houses per year in the next couple of years. The plan is to get to 2,000 homes in five years. Once it gets a bit more scale, the team plans to launch a number of more affordable plans, too. The current ones are very much high-end homes with high-end appliances and finishes, so there is definitely some room for bringing down the price over time. How likely are people to buy a home online, though? Both Andrew and Jennifer acknowledged that this remains a tough question to answer and that things would get easier once Acre has established itself as a brand. To get to that point, though, people will first have to experience their homes. One idea the company has is to work with existing owners to use their homes as Airbnbs, for example, so potential owners can test drive their homes before buying them.
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Disrupt NY 2016 Cruises To The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal
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Matt Burns
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Now, 10 years after the Queen Mary 2 opened the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, the kings and queens of the startup and tech communities will soon make their way to the terminal for Disrupt. Disrupt NY 2016 will kick off with the Hackathon on May 7-8, followed by the main Disrupt conference which runs from May 9-11. The event will feature dozens of startups competing for tech glory in the Startup Battlefield competition, as well as scores of additional companies vying for the eye of the tech community in the Startup and Hardware Alleys during the show.
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Google Forms Gets Templates, Add-On Support And More
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Frederic Lardinois
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, the company’s tool for creating and analyzing surveys, is getting a major update today. Google is adding a slew of new features to the service that range from support for templates to new options for analyzing surveys. Google’s brought a design update and added the ability to add logos, videos and GIFs to surveys. With today’s release, you can now select from a number of templates for standard surveys like customer feedback, quizzes and event sign-up right from the Google Forms home screen. Until now, forms dropped you right into the editor when you started a new form, but you always had to start from scratch. These new templates should make it quite a bit easier to get started with the service. Also new in Form is support for add-ons and Google’s Apps Scripts. Just like in Docs and Sheets, for example, you will now able to use some third-party tools like , and right from the Forms interface. Google is also adding a few new features for analyzing surveys. Google Apps for Work and Education users can now easily see who has responded to a survey, for example (and prod those who haven’t with the help of the new “send reminder email” feature). Users can now also see individual responses from the Forms editor and they can choose to get notified in real-time when somebody responds to a form.
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HBO NOW, The Network’s Streaming Service For Cord Cutters, Has Just 800,000 Subscribers
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Sarah Perez
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HBO NOW may have scored as one of , but its subscriber count is falling short of analyst projections. Industry observers had expected the service, which allows consumers to stream HBO programming over the internet without a cable TV subscription, to reach 1 to 2 million subscribers. However, HBO CEO Richard Plepler confirmed that the over-the-top service has just 800,000 subscribers. The CEO rejected the idea that this indicates a weak start for the 10-month-old service, however, saying that the company is “just getting started.” He pointed out that HBO NOW still has room to grow, downplaying the less-than-stellar numbers. For example, he noted that the app had not yet launched on two major platforms, PlayStation and Xbox. Those two combined account for 20 percent of viewing on HBO GO, the company’s app for cable TV subscribers that lets them watch on other devices. Plepler also added that the service had not yet launched some of its more anticipated content that could help drive subscriptions. “We’ve not yet put out the content like Jon Stewart, Bill Simmons, Vice daily news show, that we think is particularly suited for those platforms,” Plepler . In addition to the fact that HBO NOW has not yet rolled out to all platforms, the service also began as an Apple exclusive, having been initially available only on Apple TV before arriving on other devices. Today, it’s accessible on the web, iOS, Android, Fire tablets, plus Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, Android TV, Fire TV and Fire TV Stick – but its limited reach could have hampered early adoption. Another issue that could be slowing subscriber growth is HBO NOW’s still heftier price tag, when compared with others in the streaming space – it charges $14.99 per month for its collection of movies, original programming, documentaries and more. Netflix, these days, charges $5 less for its standard plan – and that’s after . For some potential HBO NOW subscribers, too, the big draw for joining the service may be access to the network’s hit show “Game of Thrones” which just wrapped Season 5 in June, and won’t kick off the new season until late April. Consumers may have decided to hold off on joining until then, or they could just be turning to other means to watch the programming. After all, “Game of Thrones” has broken records as . The network has also set its sights on better competing with the likes of Netflix in recent months by expanding into different types of programming that could make it appeal to a broader demographic. For instance, that includes newly acquired content from Sesame Workshop like “Sesame Street,” “The Electric Company,” and “Pinky Dinky Doo.” With the launch, it began touting its parental control features, too, in an effort to make the service seem like something that’s more family-friendly. But it could be hard for the brand to change how consumers perceive it after all these years of offering more adult-oriented fare. As it stands, HBO NOW has far to go to truly rival the behemoth that is Netflix, . Hulu has over 9 million subscribers and Sling TV has 394,000 subscribers, analysts . It’s worth noting that Sling also resells HBO, but it’s not “HBO NOW” as those subscribers can’t watch via HBO NOW app. That means some portion of Sling’s user base of cord cutters are watching HBO without a traditional cable TV subscription.
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Romain Dillet
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Unity Announces Native Support For SteamVR
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Lucas Matney
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Two major powerhouses in the gaming industry announced that they would be working together to churn out killer VR content. Unity Technologies and Valve announced today that the Unity platform would be gaining native support for SteamVR, allowing developers to significantly expand their capabilities for no extra cost. Unity Technologies announced this integration at Unity’s in Hollywood, California. This is huge for game developers looking to sweeten the deal as they break into VR. Unity is already the primary game development software for most game creators with of all game creators using the platform as their primary development tool with more than 5 million developers now registered on Unity. This announcement comes after Epic Games announced its own VR updates to its Unreal Engine platform which it will be demoing at GDC next month. “Valve and Unity are both dedicated to creating the highest quality VR experiences possible,” said John Riccitiello, CEO Unity Technologies. “That means giving developers every possible chance to succeed, and our collaboration with Valve is designed to do just that.” A new VR rendering plugin for the platform was also announced which should give devs some more “enhanced fidelity and performance, bringing consumers more realistic experiences,” according to Unity. “We made many of our Vive demos using Unity, and continue to use it today in VRdevelopment”, said Gabe Newell, Co-Founder and MD, Valve. “Through that process, and in working with VR developers, we found some opportunities to make Unity even more robust and powerful for us and really want to share those benefits with all VR content creators.”
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Where Are They Now? Startup Battlefield Company PageCloud
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Samantha O'Keefe
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We are certainly looking forward to seeing what’s next from this former Battlefield finalist.
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Apple Executives Detail Scope Of FBI Request And Company’s Motivations For Not Complying
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Matthew Panzarino
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with reporters today, Apple executives spoke in response to a motion the Justice Department filed today to force Apple to comply with a to provide access to the iPhone of Syed Farook taken as evidence in the case of the San Bernardino terrorist killings. The executives — speaking on background — also explicitly stated that what the FBI is asking for — for it to create a piece of software that allows a brute force password crack to be performed — would Our had included statements to this regard, but it’s worth reiterating. This is a battle Apple is fighting for all iPhones, not just older models. Apple’s executives said that the methods the FBI are ordering it to use in bypassing the iPhone’s security could be used as a template or master key that could unlock more devices in the future. The FBI’s original order and the subsequent government filings have consistently stated that the kinds of access it is looking for would be limited to this single device. The executives said that they were speaking about these details openly now because the filing included numerous additional pieces of information, and characterized Apple’s refusal to comply with the order as a “marketing strategy”. A previous confidentiality agreement that Apple had been under prevented them from speaking of these details, but the public brief that the DOJ filed today openly talked about these items. The executives also reiterated that they abhor terrorism, but that have opposed the order because they care deeply about protecting the safety of the majority of people who are not terrorists. On the call today, a senior Apple executive said that they had been communicating with the government since January and had posed several different ways to get the information that the FBI says it needs. Those methods were rendered moot, said the executive, when the Apple ID password to the attacker’s account was changed less than 24 hours after the government took possession of the phone. One such method involved utilizing a feature of iOS that connects to known WiFi networks to access the data on the device. During the attempts to leverage this method, the discovery was made that the Apple ID password had been changed while in government custody. The reset may have been performed by Farook’s employer, the San Bernardino County public health department, according to . : Now, as noted by the , the San Bernardino County twitter account has piped up, placing the blame on the FBI, who it says it was working with when it reset the password. “The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI’s request,” reads . This counters the early implied FBI narrative that a county employee reset the password without their influence, as seen in the filing above. : In a statement on Saturday, the FBI confirmed that it worked with San Bernardino County officials to change the Apple ID password, preventing efforts to perform any further auto-backups of the device. “The FBI worked with San Bernardino County to reset the iCloud password on December 6th, as the county owned the account and was able to reset the password in order to provide immediate access to the iCloud backup data. The reset of the iCloud account password does not impact Apple’s ability to assist with the the court order under the All Writs Act,” said FBI spokesperson Laura Eimiller in a statement which was sent from her iPhone. You can read the full . A senior Apple engineer responded to the FBI statement on Saturday evening, noting that the statement admits that the FBI admitted to changing the password, that this prevented access to the backups and that the backups did have forensic value. This removal of a pathway to the iCloud backup on the part of the FBI, whether it was borne of impatience or some other motivation, could be characterized as willfully negligent forensic procedure. If, as the FBI statement indicates, they reset the iCloud password because they were impatient, then it did, as Apple characterizes it, cut off an avenue of investigation. This admission could come back to haunt the FBI in court, and forensics experts we’ve spoken to are shocked that this would have been allowed, much less encouraged. The FBI also states that iCloud backups are not enough, that it needs to extract data from the device: “Through previous testing, we know that direct data extraction from an iOS device often provides more data than an iCloud backup contains. Even if the password had not been changed and Apple could have turned on the auto-backup and loaded it to the cloud, there might be information on the phone that would not be accessible without Apple’s assistance as required by the All Writs Act order, since the iCloud backup does not contain everything on an iPhone. As the government’s pleadings state, the government’s objective was, and still is, to extract as much evidence as possible from the phone.” An apple engineer countered the narrative, characterizing iCloud backups as comprehensive. This last chunk of the statement is odd for a couple of reasons. First, if the FBI is able to crack the passcode with Apple’s help, the only way it’s going to get data off of it is with an extraction tool that basically dumps a backup of the device using the iTunes backup method. That means they will get than they will from an iCloud backup. There’s that they could get from an iCloud backup because of incremental backups. Second, if the FBI wants to truly extract more data from the device than a backup would give them, then it would need a second, more powerful decryption tool from Apple — and if it needs that tool, why didn’t it request it directly from Apple in the first order? Very strange. Either the FBI needs more than it is saying, or it is wrong to say that the iCloud backups are not adequate. Because the Apple ID password of Farook’s iPhone has been changed, the iPhone can not auto backup to iCloud, providing a new backup that Apple could access to extract the information that the FBI was after. Apple has already complied with requests for access to iCloud backups of the device, which can be accessed even though the iPhone itself is locked and encrypted with a passcode. The last backup was performed on October 19th, 2015, several weeks before the attack was carried out. It is important to note, however, that since the Apple ID password had been changed, there is no way to tell whether Farook manually disabled the iCloud backups or not. The backups were apparently sporadic, which Apple believes left the door open for the possibility that they were not explicitly disabled. The government’s request hinges on the information between the October 19th date and the date of the incident. In other words, if Apple could have triggered an iCloud backup, then it would have included the information that the FBI was after. These methods, said executives, would have made it possible to deliver the information that was requested without Apple having to modify a special version of its iPhone software to create a “back door” into the device’s contents, bypassing the passcode. Once the password was changed, those methods became impossible. Apple has a long history of providing to government agencies, but these methods do not rely on it breaking passcodes, and only apply to iPhones running iOS 7 or previous. Since iOS 8 was released, the vast majority of information on any given iPhone is encrypted using the passcode, and unable to be accessed via extraction. This is the case with Farook’s iPhone 5c. Apple did mention that the county agency Farook worked for installed some kind of management software on the phone, but specifics were not given. We are reaching out to the government to get characterization on what kind of device management software was installed on the iPhone and why it was not possible to use that software — common in enterprise environments like the agency that Farook worked in — to reset the password. The executives characterized the government’s efforts as anything but being about a single device, has stated that he has 175 iPhones that he would like to unlock. “This has become, ladies and gentlemen, the wild west of technology,” Vance said at a conference, as reported by ABC. “Apple and Google are the sheriffs and there are no rules.” The Apple executive also noted that no other government in the world — including China — has ever asked it to perform the kind of iPhone cracking that the FBI is asking it to do. But, if it were to comply, those requests would surely not be far behind. The executive also indicated that it was fair to anticipate that Apple would continue to harden iPhone security to protect users against this kind of cracking, whether by Apple or otherwise.
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Immersit Turns Your Couch Into A Vibration-Powered Immersive TV Experience
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Romain Dillet
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Meet , a new kind of connected device for your couch launching today . Immersit generates vibrations to immerse you in your movies or video games. And it works with your existing couch. Have you ever been to a theme park with vibrating seats? Immersit is trying to recreate that at home, and it’s not as easy as it seems. Instead of selling a brand new couch, the company has been working on tiny bases that you put below your couch feet. These bases are articulated and can move back/forward, up/down and side-to-side in very little time. At the center of the couch, a bridge controls each electric motor in the bases to make them work together. A full motion kit currently costs between $565 and $904 on Kickstarter (€499 to €799). There are many use cases for this device, such as pairing your couch with a movie, a video game or even a virtual reality headset. But there’s one issue. Immersit can’t simulate vibrations in real time. The company had to encode vibrations for a bunch of movies so that it knows when to vibrate if you’re watching the latest Hunger Games movie. The good thing is that the hub automatically detects which movie you’re watching — Immersit is probably using audio fingerprinting. It’s also worth noting that Immersit works with anything that has four feet, such as a seat or a bed. You can also control the intensity of the vibrations in case you’re about to fall asleep. And then, there is virtual reality. While a virtual reality headset is much more immersive than looking at a TV, companies have been looking for ways to make VR as immersive as possible with controllers, cameras and treadmills. Pairing Immersit with a VR headset would make sense. The company expects to ship in December 2016. As always with crowdfunding campaigns, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. Immersit showcased working prototypes at CES but the final product isn’t ready yet. And yet, I can’t wait to watch a car chase on this couch.
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The Mobile Electorate
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Nic Denholm
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In 2008, Barack Obama redrafted the electioneering script, becoming the first presidential candidate to use social media as a political channel. His opponents’ failure to grasp the significance of social media proved as catastrophic as Richard Nixon’s dismissive attitude to television in 1960 — an attitude that probably cost him the 1960 election to the more telegenic John F. Kennedy. That historic debate marked the beginning of a new political epoch in which mass media campaigns were the only game in town. For the next half century, presidents were made and un-made in a network television culture that was fervently centrist and uncontroversial — what Richard Wald called “cementers of idea, not disruptors of idea.” Since Obama dealt the first major blow to that monolithic approach with his inaugural campaign, election campaigns have slowly returned to the grassroots — albeit of a digital variety. Presidential candidates ignore online activism and fundraising at their peril — just ask Mitt Romney, who failed to learn the lessons of 2008 just as his opponent built on them to secure a second term. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — every online tool used by the Democrats four years ago is now in the arsenal of the current crop of candidates, but the electorate has changed the way it accesses those channels. Last year, mobile usage exceeded desktop for the first time. Not a blip — a tipping point. Now, voters are more likely to turn to their smartphones than to their TVs, laptops, PCs or print media. According to comScore, mobile usage in 2014 accounted for 60 percent of time spent using digital media. In a presidential contest that hasn’t resulted in a victory margin of more than 8.5 percent for 30 years, the huge-and-growing mobile electorate is not to be swiped left by anyone expecting to win. The full effects of a mobile-centric campaign culture may not be felt until 2020 or later. The candidate pool is still largely comprised of super PAC-powered establishment figures, some of whom have a dynastic leg-up, to boot. But can such an apparent head start continue to be enough? Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton might give differing answers to that question. Bernie Sanders’ campaign, funded by small personal donations, has given Clinton’s more traditional big money strategy a genuine contest. Then there’s Donald Trump. Figures released in December by NBC News showed the Republican frontrunner had spent ; the combined total TV ad spend for the three favorites (Carson, Cruz and Trump) was a tenth of the $28.9 million spent by Bush. Bush’s broadcast spending has now swelled to more than $40 million. Ahead of the South Carolina Primary this weekend, . Not that television isn’t still enormously influential. It’s just that Trump’s campaign is the only one willing or able to dominate the media without relying on ad dollars. According to , he racked up 234 minutes of network coverage between January and November of last year, compared with Bush’s 56 minutes. Based on the NBC campaign spending figures from December, that equates to $94 for every minute of Trump coverage, versus $714,000 for every minute of Bush coverage. Ninety-four dollars! To put that in perspective, Bush’s spend-per-minute is roughly what it would cost to place a 60-second commercial in a primetime network slot; Trump’s outlay would just about get you a black-and-white column inch in Minneapolis’ monthly North News. And yet, look again at those polling figures. With considerably less financial means at his disposal — and worlds away, politically speaking — there is one thing Bernie Sanders has in common with Trump: an avowed rejection of corporate influence (excluding the Trump Organization, natch!). If you had to reduce their popular appeal down to a single issue, would probably be it. This tack would have gotten them nowhere a few election cycles ago. Now it’s the basis of their respective campaigns, and it’s working a treat. Sanders and Trump have demonstrated that it’s a lot easier to live tweet your campaign travails with clean hands. Both candidates have veered so wildly off-script that mainstream media outlets can’t compute or comprehend — let alone compete with — the messages being delivered directly to the palms of voters. That those messages have veered off in polar opposite directions makes their job twice as tough. In what NYU Professor Jay Rosen calls two large, acutely structured organizational fields — news media and presidential campaigns — have rapidly and simultaneously had their basic assumptions discarded. If the message and the delivery system have both been switched out, where the hell does that leave the messenger? As the electorate moves toward consuming and sharing information via niche channels, and away from engaging directly with mainstream media, candidates are following suit (it’s no surprise that mainstream candidates are dragging their heels while niche candidates can’t quite believe their luck). It’s as if the aforementioned mobile-desktop tipping point is playing out on the political landscape, with Clinton and Bush as the familiar and powerful but static PCs, and Trump and Sanders the fleet-footed, flexible but small-time smartphones. This development doesn’t feel like a blip either. Network television is becoming a legacy platform because voters can engage with what it broadcasts via the same digital channels they use to access everything else. It doesn’t work the other way round. Mainstream media gatekeepers face obsolescence because the social Web simply opens its own gates, by the thousands, every day. This new, mobilized — and mobile-ized — electorate is a force to be reckoned with. As we head into the primaries, the sturdiness of these digital grassroots will be tested to their limit. Some of the most vocal campaigners in this race have never attended a rally, or even voted before. They’ve contributed every piece of their support — from fundraising to partisan point-scoring — via a screen. The significant change since 2012 is the size of that screen.
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Mental Health Startup Lantern Raises $17 Million Series A Round
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Megan Rose Dickey
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, a mental health startup that offers tools to deal with stress, anxiety and body image has raised a $17 million Series A round led by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s venture arm with participation from previous investors such as Mayfield and SoftTechVC. UPMC Enterprises, the hospital’s venture arm, has invested large sums of money in 12 other health startups to date, including health care software system dbMotion, which had a , and , a population health management services organization that went public last year. “As one of the leading integrated healthcare provider and insurance systems, UPMC was attracted to Lantern’s widely accessible, cost-effective behavioral health platform,” UPMC Enterprises President Tal Heppenstall told TechCrunch. “By working with our clinical experts, who are leaders in the mental health field, and our vast network that covers the entire continuum of care, we think that we can add value to Lantern’s technology.” Lantern plans to do a couple of things with the funding. For starters, it wants to focus more on integrating Lantern into employer insurance plans, so that employees can access Lantern as a benefit. The first step in that process would be to deploy Lantern within the UPMC health system. Lantern also wants to invest more into research studies to show the economic proof that symptom reduction positively affects the bottom line for employers in terms of health costs. That’s because, Foung said, people don’t access as many health resources (ER visits, involuntary psychiatric holds) if they have preventative tools to manage their symptoms along the way. This month, Lantern plans to launch a program around mood, as an addition to its programs on stress, anxiety and body image. Eventually, Lantern wants to broaden the set of categories, Lantern co-founder Alejandro Foung told me. For example, while lantern offers tools around stress, it would like to deepen and broaden that to differentiate between workplace stress and relationship stress. Lantern has been very deliberate and thoughtful in the way it conveys what its product can do, Foung says. Lantern maintains that it does not serve as a replacement to therapy, nor can it cure anyone of anxiety or stress. That’s because anxiety is not curable, but there are proven ways to reduce anxiety and better manage it. “The point is not to solve all your problems — it’s to feel better,” Foung said. Lantern is still a very small company, with just 17 full-time employees. By the end of this year, Foung says, Lantern will likely double in size. Prior to this $17 million round, Lantern had raised $4.4 million.
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Salesforce Acquires PredictionIO To Build Up Its Machine Learning Muscle
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Ingrid Lunden
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has made another acquisition to build out its technology in machine learning and big data analytics: the company has acquired , a startup based out of Palo Alto that had developed an open source-based machine learning server. Salesforce plans to use some of the tech to build out Salesforce’s own machine learning capabilities as part of SalesforceIQ, both in-house as well as in products for Salesforce customers, the startup’s CEO and co-founder Simon Chan said in a . But the company will also continue to serve third-party developers, he added. A Salesforce spokesperson has also confirmed the acquisition but without further elaboration. “Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire PredictionIO, but don’t have anything to share beyond [PredictionIO’s] blog post at this point,” she said. Chan noted that the startup’s team — which includes other co-founders Donald Szeto, Kenneth Chan and Thomas Stone — will be joining Salesforce after the transaction closes. You can think of PredictionIO as MySQL for machine learning, as Steve described it when the startup announced a . The company’s tech, as an open source and essentially free product, makes it more affordable and faster for developers to build machine learning-based products like recommendation or prediction engines. when it was founded in 2012 in London, the startup at first had built a product that it described as “Machine Learning as a Service” before pivoting to an open source model. Under that new direction, the company had developed some traction, with some 8,000 developers and 400 apps powered by its technology. As a point of reference, that’s double the number of developers in the community as of 2014. Two things will be happening post-acquisition, Chan says. First, PredictionIO’s tech will remain open source and free to use, while the team works on “evolving the project into a self-sustaining community.” As part of that the PredictionIO Cluster software on AWS Cloudformation will come down to $0. There is no word on whether Salesforce will plan to develop and support a paid enterprise edition of the product down the line. Second, PredictionIO will be put to work at a very large, specific company: Salesforce itself. Specifically, it will become a part of SalesforceIQ’s machine learning capabilities to “enhance intelligence across the Salesforce clouds.” “Being a part of Salesforce will give us an amazing opportunity to continue building our open source machine learning platform on a much larger scale,” Chan writes. Salesforce has been making several other acquisitions in big-data analytics and machine learning, including most recently , but also customer relationship platform in 2014 (which now forms the backbone of SalesforceIQ) and earlier this year, smart calendar startup . PredictionIO is Salesforce’s 36th acquisition. Terms of the sale are not being disclosed. PredictionIO’s included 500 Startups, StartX, Sood Ventures and CrunchFund (headed up by TechCrunch’s former editor and founder, Michael Arrington).
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Extra Early-Bird Tickets To Disrupt NY Extended To February 24
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Matt Burns
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Plus, you’ll be able to chat with the dozens of companies on display in Startup Alley, and attend all of the parties and after-parties to keep the conversation and networking going long after the show floor closes for the day. We can’t wait to see you at the show!
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Apple vs. FBI
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Contributor
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https://techcrunch.com/tag/apple-vs-fbi/
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Facebook Now Lets You Use Multiple Accounts On Messenger For Android
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Greg Kumparak
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Let’s say you’ve got kids. They like using Facebook Messenger to keep in touch with other kids to talk about Minecraft or bubble gum or whatever kids talk about these days (What? I don’t know. I’m 28, so I’m basically a million years old in cool-stuff years.) You’re happy to let them use Facebook Messenger in the evenings, but you don’t think they’re quite old enough for a phone of their own just yet. What to do? Facebook has just simplified things a bit, adding support for multiple Messenger accounts on one device. Facebook has designed this feature to be pretty flexible, in the sense that you can determine whether you need a password to hop into any of the other accounts. For example, you can set it so that you, as the parent, can hop into your kids’ accounts if you want to make sure they’re not chattin’ up a storm with any weirdos. Meanwhile, your own account can be locked down so Junior doesn’t stumble upon anything that’ll damage him forever. Or, if you’re just sharing a tablet with the roommates, you can lock down everyone’s account to keep everyone’s private stuff private and to keep life drama free. All anyone can see for other accounts is the notification count. We first spotted this feature , but now it’s officially rolling out. The catch? It’s Android only, for now — so if you’re sharing an iPad, you’re stuck logging-in-and-out-like-a-chump.
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The Next Billion-Dollar Insurer
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Jay Farber
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Venture capital-backed insurance success stories have risen at a regular drumbeat over the last few years: 2011 brought the billion-dollar Esurance acquisition, 2012 brought the wildly successful Guidewire IPO, 2013 brought the large Climate Corporation acquisition and 2014-2015 brought Zenefits to prominence. Each of these companies pulls a piece of the insurance industry kicking and screaming into a more modern age. This year, many more of these companies are poised to succeed. Insurance carriers have moved from resisting online and direct insurance sales to partnering with and investing in companies like , and . Complex data analytics tools like Hadoop and Spark now enable the use of more sophisticated datasets in real-time underwriting. Perhaps most importantly, consumers are increasingly open to interacting with financial institutions online. The Federal Reserve that more than half of us use mobile banking, and a recent suggests up to 30 percent of us will use modern fintech services this year. There has never been a better time for talented entrepreneurs to build companies that change the insurance industry. We can anticipate the emergence of three types of companies effecting this change: customer-driven health insurance in New York and upcoming launch as the first U.S. carrier to offer peer-to-peer policies suggest one path: starting a brand new insurance carrier. Starting a carrier presents a significant capital challenge, however. Witness the $70 million Oscar raised before launching, and Lemonade’s recent $13 million seed round. In both cases, a significant portion of that capital sits idle on the balance sheet as statutory reserves, mandated by each state individually. New carriers are also subject to the whims of regulators in each state in which they are active. These regulators review every product, mandate detailed premium rate filings and conduct thorough audits each year. Still, starting a carrier is the only way to have full freedom to design new products and processes without relying on external parties to validate and integrate. For new insurance carriers, success starts with offering a vastly improved customer experience — today’s carriers know a positive claims experience creates a far more loyal customer. Low-single-digit conversion rates among carriers selling direct online suggest there’s opportunity to vastly improve the conversion funnel, as well. Operating as an insurance broker instead of a carrier frees a startup from the capital and regulatory responsibilities; getting set up involves a much simpler broker license process. While brokers don’t touch the insurance product itself, they have the ability to reshape the way insurance is sold. Being a broker also provides fantastic unit economics. Commissions average 10-20 percent of premiums for the length of the policy, and usually avoid price compression. Outsized success as a broker comes from securing priority access to customers when they’re looking to buy. Most insurance today is bought in time-sensitive situations, such as closing on a new house or hiring a first employee for a small business. This means consumers often start and finish their search with the first broker they encounter. HR managers logging into Zenefits daily know where to go first to set up benefits, workers’ comp and other insurance, just as online travel sites present the option of travel insurance to every customer checking out. tool for lenders and selling episodic insurance at point of use are early examples of expanding this opportunity. The challenges for brokers are persuading the right carriers to appoint them to sell their policies, and influencing carriers to prioritize the building of any needed integrations. Brokers also can’t control the entire user experience, as the final underwriting steps and claims processes usually involve dealing with carrier legacy systems. For many entrepreneurs, the best option is to establish a special type of broker called a Managing General Agent (MGA). MGAs have the same regulatory light-touch as any other broker, but control much more of the value chain and usually find a single carrier to hold the risk. They have full flexibility to both develop an innovative product and craft unique distribution channels. Think the Climate Corporation’s crop insurance priced using advanced weather analytics, or Metromile’s pay-per-mile car insurance. Historically, MGAs have often struggled to maintain good relationships with their back-end carrier. Unexpectedly high losses, even in a single year, can cause the carrier to shut down a promising program. If the MGA is too small to have a material impact on the carrier, the carrier may decide to simply end the relationship in favor of focusing on its core business. Even if the relationship remains solid, insurers require oversight of many business processes and can restrict the ability of the startup to act flexibly in the market. Entrepreneurs running MGAs can work around this by partnering with reinsurers instead. Reinsurers are far more nimble, have experience building underwriting models for new or complex product types and are over-supplied with capital right now. The reinsurer and MGA can then offload the regulatory burden of holding the paper to an entity called a fronting carrier, which gets paid to issue the policy officially but passes all its risk on to the reinsurer. WebBank, a small bank in Utah, achieves one of the highest return-on-equity metrics of any bank by providing an analogous service for marketplace lenders. Insurance carriers are notorious for having inflexible and complex policies, caused in part by the legacy technology they typically use for policy management. Why has Metromile had no sizeable competition offering car insurance priced on a per-mile basis, even years after its initial launch? It’s a cost-prohibitive, multi-year effort for existing carriers to create a competing product — meaning most MGAs will have years to build their businesses before facing direct competition from incumbents. Look for more startups to simplify and customize coverage to better fit customer needs in this model. I am convinced that a new breed of entrepreneurs who build teams with superb product sense, industry expertise and marketing acumen will drive significant change in insurance over the next decade. A trillion-dollar premium prize awaits those that can find success. I can’t wait.
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Donald Trump Says You Should Boycott Apple
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Anthony Ha
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Presidential candidate Donald Trump is stepping up his criticism of Apple over its fight with the FBI. As you can see in the footage below ( shot at a campaign event in Pawleys Island, South Carolina), Trump was discussing the need to bring overseas jobs back to the United States when he gets sidetracked by mentioning Apple. “What I think you ought to do is boycott Apple until such time as they give that security number,” he said to scattered applause. “How do you like that? I just thought of it.” As you’re probably already aware, to create a version of iOS that would make it easier for the government to unlock an iPhone — specifically the iPhone 5c belonging to one of the terrorists involved in the recent San Bernadino shooting. The company it has cooperated with the FBI “up to this point,” but it’s unwilling to create software that “would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe9ydy_zwe8&w=560&h=315] We’ve tried to unpack , but Trump cuts through all that in typical Trump fashion: “The phone is not even owned by this young thug that killed all these people,” he added. “The phone’s owned by the government. Not even his phone, we don’t even have to go that far. But Tim Cook is looking to do a big number, probably to show how liberal he is.” I wasn’t sure how seriously to take the comments, especially since Trump literally shrugged and said “I just thought of it.” Others have pointed out that Trump (or someone on his staff) , but he , “I use both iPhone & Samsung. If Apple doesn’t give info to authorities on the terrorists I’ll only be using Samsung until they give info.” Boycott all Apple products until such time as Apple gives cellphone info to authorities regarding radical Islamic terrorist couple from Cal — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
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Announcing The Judges For The TC Pitch-Offs In Boston And Atlanta
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Jordan Crook
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The Pitch-offs in Atlanta and Boston are but a few days away. pitching at our events, but today is the day you find out who will cast judgement on those startups and determine a winner. Without any further ado, here are the judges for the Boston and Atlanta meetups: Gaurav Tuli is a Principal at F-Prime Capital, the venture capital firm affiliated with Fidelity Investments. He focuses on enterprise technology investing and currently sits on the boards of Neo Technology and AppsFlyer. Most recently, Gaurav was a Principal at Eight Roads, Fidelity’s international venture fund based in London, where he invested in European software and online services businesses. Previously, Gaurav was at EMC where he drove new growth initiatives and product portfolio management for EMC’s largest business unit, Symmetrix. Gaurav was a computer scientist by training and spent the early parts of his career advising software companies at Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank. Gaurav attended MIT for his bachelors and masters degrees in computer science, as well as his MBA. Chip’s investment interests and experience broadly cover companies and technologies in the information technology sector. Companies he has invested in at the firm include MongoDB, Mattermark, Redox Engine, Stormpath, Firebase (acquired by Google), and Stackdriver (acquired by Google). Before joining the firm in May 2002, Chip was a General Partner with Greylock Partners, a leading venture capital firm he joined in 1994. While at Greylock, Chip led or participated in numerous successful investments in the enterprise information technology field. Prior to Greylock, he was with Company Assistance Limited, an investment and consulting firm in Warsaw Poland; and Bain and Company, an international management consulting firm. Chip received a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar and a Ford Scholar. Dan joined Polaris as a Principal in 2015. He focuses primarily on growth equity investments in software and technology-enabled services. He serves on the Board of The Roberts Group. Prior to joining Polaris, Dan was a Vice President with H.I.G. Growth Partners, a private equity firm focused on recapitalizations of growth-oriented, lower middle market businesses. While at H.I.G., Dan was responsible for sourcing, executing and monitoring investments in software, internet, and business services. He also served on the boards of several companies. Previously, Dan served as an associate at Symmetric Capital, where he sourced and executed investments in software, healthcare and business services. He also was an investment banking analyst at Bank of America in San Francisco, where he worked with growth-oriented technology and healthcare companies on private capital raises and recapitalizations. Dan received his MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, where he was recognized as an Edward Tuck Scholar, and a BA from Yale University. Prior to entering the real world, Dan played 3 seasons of professional hockey in the US and Europe. He and his wife Chandra have two young sons. K.P. Reddy is a venture capitalist, angel investor, and AEC space expert with over 20 years of experience in disruptive innovation. He is a globally-recognized expert on advanced technologies including Building Information Modeling (BIM), Collaborative Communication, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Applications and Cloud computing. Currently K.P. is the CEO of SoftWear Automation Inc, a leading developer of robotic sewing automation that promises drive down the cost of apparel and textile manufacturing while increasing quality and speed to market for retailers. He also serves as Managing Partner at CTW Venture Partners, a venture capital firm investing in seed and early-stage technology companies. Additionally, KP is a cofounder of The Combine. K.P. is a respected expert in helping organizations accelerate change and growth through his highly sought after coaching and startup catalyst programs. IBM, Coca-Cola, UPS, and Cox Communications have all enlisted his services. He served as the Interim General Manager for one of the country’s top startup incubators, Atlanta’s Advanced Technology Department Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech. K.P. is also a prolific public speaker delivering addresses to audiences at universities across the U.S., various tech and startup events in the Southeast, and SXSW. Edwin Marcial brought Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) from a 6 person startup to a 22 billion dollar market capitalization within 15 years, as CTO and Senior VP. Marcial oversaw all systems development and ICE information technology strategy. ICE had one of the largest IPOs in Georgia history. Prior to ICE, Edwin joined the software development arm at CPEX in 1996. With 14+ years of experience in IT, he also led development and design teams at GE-Harris. Edwin holds a BS in Comp Sci from the University of Florida. Marc is the CEO and Founder of Road – the first “on-the-way” delivery network. The idea for Roadie struck him one day when he needed a couple boxes of custom tile from a warehouse a few hours away to finish a bathroom renovation, and had no economical or practical way of getting them the same day. Marc previously co-founded Kabbage Inc., which provides working capital to small and medium-sized businesses and has raised more than $100 million in venture funding and has a $270 million credit facility from Guggenheim Securities. In 1996, Marc was a co-founder and an original board member of Pretty Good Privacy (“PGP”), a company formed to commercialize one of the most prevalent security standards used on the Internet, and recently popularized in the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Marc assisted with the initial formation of PGP and oversaw the financing, growth and eventual sale of the company (to Network Associates (Nasdaq: INTC), a public company worth over $1 billion) in December of 1997. After PGP, Marc co-founded VerticalOne Corporation, a content personalization service that was sold to S1 Corporation (Nasdaq: ACIW) for $166 million. Marc was Executive Vice President of VerticalOne and worked in multiple areas of the company including financing, business development, sales, M&A and security issues. Marc is an active speaker on raising venture funding and has spoken at the Technology Association of Georgia, Internet Summit, Southeastern Venture Conference, and Finovate among other conferences. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia and remains an avid bulldog fan. The applications for the pitch-off are closed, but tickets are still on sale, so don’t wait.
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Virgin Galactic Unveils New SpaceShipTwo, The VSS Unity
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Emily Calandrelli
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Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic unveiled its new SpaceShipTwo rocket plane today. This is the latest version the company has revealed to the public since their deadly crash during a test flight with the previous version. In a , Virgin Galactic specified that the new vessel , the VSS Unity, was actually named by Stephen Hawking who also expressed enthusiasm for the future of commercial in a message shared via , “If I am able to go & if Richard will still take me, I would be very proud to fly on this spaceship.” Prof. Hawking names the new VSS Unity. "We are entering a new space age, and I hope this will help to create a new unity." — Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) In a yesterday, the company emphasized that the new SpaceShipTwo will not be used in test flights any time soon. If you are expecting SpaceShipTwo to blast off and head straight to space on the day we unveil her, let us disillusion you now: this will be a ground-based celebration. – Virgin Galactic After today, Virgin Galactic will begin full-vehicle tests on their newest version of VSS Unity. While individual components have been tested separately, this will be the first time Virgin Galactic will be testing SpaceShipTwo’s electrical systems and all of its moving parts together. With VSS Unity, Virgin Galactic hopes to become the first private spaceline, sending tourists into space and safely back down to Earth. To accomplish this feat, SpaceShipTwo is carried by Virgin’s twin-fuselage airplane WhiteKnightTwo to an altitude of 45,000 feet. At this point, SpaceShipTwo separates from WhiteKnightTwo and ignites its rocket motor to complete the rest of the voyage. VSS Unity is equipped to carry 2 pilots and 6 passengers into space in a suborbital trajectory, giving the passengers several minutes of weightlessness. In order to return to Earth, SpaceShipTwo employs a unique “feathering” system. By rotating its wings, the space plane can increase drag it experiences and slow its descent back to the ground. The design is based on its predecessor SpaceShipOne, the rocket plane that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize back in 2004. The contest challenged the public to build the first privately-funded spacecraft, capable of carrying 3 people, that could complete to flights to space within 2 weeks. Like SpaceShipTwo, SpaceShipOne was released at a high altitude by a plane, WhiteKnightOne, and completed the rest of the trip into space. Designed and fabricated by Scaled Composites, a company owned by famed aerospace designer , SpaceShipOne launched a new era of private spaceflight when it won the Ansari X Prize on October 4th, 2004. Tickets on a SpaceShipTwo flight are set at $250,000 and Virgin Galactic has already sold over 700 tickets, more than the total number of people who have ever traveled into space. Ladies and gentlemen, please meet the new . More photos and info coming soon. — Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) Many of these ticket holders were left with wondering what would become of their purchases when Virgin’s previous version of SpaceShipTwo, called Enterprise, experienced a fatal crash during a test flight in 2014. The crash, which took place in the Mojave Desert, left the co-pilot dead and the other pilot seriously injured. After a investigation, it was determined that the crash was caused by a co-pilot error related to SpaceShipTwo’s feathering system. During the test flight the co-pilot rotated SpaceShipTwo’s wings before the appropriate time, causing the space plane to break apart in the sky. The accident was a devastating setback to the company, but today’s unveiling demonstrates Virgin Galactic’s determination to move forward. After today, Virgin Galactic will begin running full-vehicle tests on its newest space plane. Our team’s job is to plan out not just the obvious tests but also the strange and inventive ones, to conduct those tests, and to use the data from those tests to re-examine everything about our vehicle to ensure we can take the next step forward. – Virgin Galactic
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Box’s Aaron Levie Defends Apple Amid FBI Controversy
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Katie Roof
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“Apple’s response to the government is something we completely wholeheartedly agree with,” said the CEO of the cloud storage company. “The world is going to get more complex, so you can’t create weaknesses in software that then will become vulnerabilities in the future.” If Apple were to comply with the FBI requests and create security loopholes in its phones, “it would create a level of distrust in technology providers,” Levie added. He thinks that the current situation could set a precedent for other countries. “This has massive implications to how other governments” will view technology privacy. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Google CEO Sundar Pichai also spoke out in defense of Apple. We stand with and Apple (and thank him for his leadership)! — jack (@jack) 1/5 Important post by . Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) “I am optimistic that we land on the right side, that the government will back down,” said Levie.
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Justice Department Files Motion To Force Apple To Comply With Backdoor Request
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Romain Dillet
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And we’re back with another episode of between . This time, the Department of Justice gets involved. The department has asking Apple to comply with the FBI order. The FBI originally ordered Apple to create a special version of iOS to access a work iPhone 5c from one of the terrorists involved in the San Bernardino shooting, allowing passcode submissions via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or the USB cable among other things. Apple then with the order citing privacy and security concerns. Today’s filing shouldn’t come as a surprise as the White House already that it was supporting the FBI. “The president certainly believes that is an important national priority,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said during a . But that was just a media briefing. Now it’s official, the Department of Justice itself is getting involved, and it doesn’t look good for Apple. Josh Gerstein from Politico shared on . “Apple left the government with no option other than to apply to this Court for the Order issued on February 16, 2016. The Order requires Apple to assist the FBI with respect to this single iPhone used by Farook by providing the FBI with the opportunity to determine the passcode. The Order does not, as Apple’s public statement alleges, require Apple to create or provide a ‘back door’ to every iPhone; it does not provide ‘hackers and criminals’ access to iPhones; it does not require Apple to ‘hack [its] own users’ or to ‘decrypt’ its own phones; it does not give the government ‘the power to reach into anyone’s device’ without a warrant or court authorization; and it does not compromise the security of personal information.” So the Department of Justice denies most of Apple’s arguments. It also says that Apple’s defense is a “marketing strategy.” But it’s hard to believe that given the mixed public reaction. “Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks,” Tim Cook wrote in . And it’s hard to trust the Department of Justice and the FBI on this issue. If Apple supervises this process, the FBI could reverse-engineer the firmware. If Apple makes sure the FBI doesn’t see this firmware, it creates a precedent. Nothing would stop the FBI from asking for other backdoors for just one phone, again and again. Nothing would stop secret services in Germany or China from doing the same. Later, the Department of Justice is also referring to other iPhones. Apple complied with previous All Writs Act orders for iOS 7 devices. But the filing doesn’t say that these devices . This filing also tells us a bit more about what the FBI is looking for. Apple already gave the FBI an iCloud backup of the iPhone 5c in question. But the last backup was on October 19, 2015. There were some text messages or iMessage conversations with victims of the San Bernadino shootings on this device — most likely because they were coworkers. The FBI wants to see the most recent conversations. But again, the FBI is also to ask for special treatment. It’s unclear why texts with coworkers would help when it comes to investigating a terrorist attack. Apple now has to comply with the order. At this point, it’s hard to say what Apple will do next. But it’s clear that this issue has opened an overarching debate on privacy and security.
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13 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week
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Anna Escher
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This week, Apple battled with the FBI amid an order to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the terrorists involved in the San Bernardino shooting, Kanye West made waves in the tech world when his new album launched exclusively on Tidal, the new Samsung Galaxy phones leaked and much more. These are the top tech stories from this week. Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the company will appeal to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the terrorists involved in the San Bernardino shooting. Following the request, Cook argued that adhering to it would Matthew Panzarino broke down . Natasha Lomas detailed why Apple is right to do so and warned of the privacy concerns that would arise if with the FBI’s order. If you backdoor one iPhone, you backdoor them all — and invite all governments, everywhere to do so. Throughout the week, Twitter and Google chimed in with support for Apple. Google CEO that “Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy.” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey weighed in, too. We stand with and Apple (and thank him for his leadership)! — jack (@jack) After scoring exclusive streaming rights to Kanye West’s new album, The Life of Pablo, . Kanye took it a step further, claiming that the LP will But things didn’t go exactly as planned. from consumers who said they paid for the album, but never received the download. Connie Loizos wrote that . While many investors last year were seizing the chance to take advantage of booming prices, they’re now apparently trying to wring what they can out of their positions. That leaves secondary buyers left to assess whether to buy now or wait to see if prices fall even further. There is a battle raging for curated social media supremacy. At events like The Grammys, which took place this week, each social app wants to be where you see the best of and behind the scenes. Josh Constine compared the strengths and shortcomings of when it comes to featuring events. Eye candy. — Evan Blass (@evleaks) Images of Samsung’s next Galaxy phones, the . Not to be outdone by the leak, ahead of the launch. Apple apologized and updated iOS to , a problem caused by unofficial repair shops replacing the connector that runs between the Touch ID sensor in an iPhone’s home button. including and , to focus on a new digital content strategy. that will allow anyone to take advantage of Gmail’s spam protection, inbox organization, Google Now integrations, and more, without needing a Gmail address. Popular GIF-making site round at a post-money valuation of $300 million. Now, it’s time to monetize. We learned that . A leaked document Facebook sent to some of its biggest advertisers reveals that Facebook will launch ads within Messenger in Q2 2016. IBM announced it will acquire . It is the fourth major purchase for Watson Health since the unit was established in 2014. on Android a few weeks ago, and now the company has formally announced that it is launching the Sarah Perez wrote about .
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Smartwatch Shipments Have Overtaken Swiss Watches For The First Time
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John Biggs
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So it begins: “worldwide smartwatch shipments” have hit 8.1 million units in Q4 2015 compared to 7.9 million for Swiss watch shipments. Strategy Analytics, a research firm, has found that smartwatch shipments “rose a healthy 316 percent from 1.9 million in Q4 2014.” Apple has an estimated 63 percent of the global market followed by Samsung’s 16 percent. “Apple and Samsung together account for a commanding 8 in 10 of all smartwatches shipped worldwide,” said Cliff Raskind, Director at Strategy Analytics. Strategy Analytics isn’t pulling any punches with the Swiss watch industry saying they “have been sticking their head in the sand.” “The Swiss watch industry has been very slow to react to the development of smartwatches. Swiss brands, like Tag Heuer, accounted for a tiny 1 percent of all smartwatches shipped globally during Q4 2015, and they are long way behind Apple, Samsung and other leaders in the high-growth smartwatch category,” said Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics. These are obviously estimates based on Strategy Analytics own research but even if the smartwatch and Swiss watch industries are reaching parity, things aren’t looking up for the time-honored tickers. In fact when a dedicated watch nut like it might be time for the Swiss to rethink their marketing strategies to capture the casual watch buyer once again – before Apple and Samsung do.
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Frederic Lardinois
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U.S. Government Says Hoverboards Are Verboten
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John Biggs
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The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has deemed hoverboards “unsafe” and, in a , all hoverboard manufacturers to gain UL certification before selling more boards. Makers, importers and retailers put on notice — US Consumer Product Safety Commission (@USCPSC) “Consumers risk serious injury or death if their self-balancing scooters ignite and burn. From December 1, 2015, through February 17, 2016, CPSC received reports, from consumers in 24 states, of 52 self-balancing scooter fires resulting in over $2 million in property damage, including the destruction of two homes and an automobile,” wrote Robert J. Howell, acting director of Office of Compliance and Field Operations. “We believe that many of the reported incidents, and the related unreasonable risk of injuries and deaths associated with fires in these products, would be prevented if all such products were manufactured in compliance with the referenced voluntary safety standards.” “Should the staff encounter such products at import, we may seek detention and/or seizure. In addition, if we encounter such products domestically, we may seek a recall of these products,” he wrote. This means a recall could be underway of the more dangerous hoverboards and we can expect to see a general sales stop nationwide as manufacturers realized that customers do not want to die in hoverboard fires. From the letter: I am writing this letter to urge you to make certain that self-balancing scooters that you import, manufacture, distribute, or sell in the United States comply with currently applicable voluntary safety standards, including all referenced standards and requirements contained in UL 2272 – Outline of Investigation for Electrical Systems for Self-balancing Scooters. The UL standard can be purchased from Underwriters Laboratories Inc. Additionally, all lithium ion battery products must comply with test requirements under UN/DOT 38.3 Transport of Dangerous Goods for Lithium Metal and Lithium Ion Batteries. Self-balancing scooters that do not meet these voluntary safety standards pose an unreasonable risk of fire to consumers. Consumers risk serious injury or death if their self- balancing scooters ignite and burn. From December 1, 2015, through February 17, 2016, CPSC received reports, from consumers in 24 states, of 52 self-balancing scooter fires resulting in over $2 million in property damage, including the destruction of two homes and an automobile. We believe that many of the reported incidents, and the related unreasonable risk of injuries and deaths associated with fires in these products, would be prevented if all such products were manufactured in compliance with the referenced voluntary safety standards. The CPSC Office of Compliance and Field Operations staff considers self-balancing scooters that do not meet the safety standards referenced above to be defective, and that they may present a substantial product hazard under Section 15(a) of the CPSA, 15 U.S.C. § 2064(a) or could be determined to be an imminent hazard under Section 12 of the CPSA, 15 U.S.C. § 2061. Should the staff encounter such products at import, we may seek detention and/or seizure. In addition, if we encounter such products domestically, we may seek a recall of these products. In view of the foregoing, I urge you to review your product line and ensure that all self- balancing scooters that you manufacture, import, distribute, or sell in the United States are in compliance with the above referenced voluntary safety standards. The CPSC staff will follow-up as appropriate in the future to ensure that the firms are meeting their obligations in this area. Hoverboards were a fascinating fad and akin to a Pet Rock or Wacky Wall Walker that forced demand to go briefly stratospheric as popularity surged. In the end, however, it looks like this year’s hot holiday present may be next year’s forgotten fire hazard.
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Microsoft Launches Plumbago, A Paper App Competitor That Lets You Sketch & Handwrite Notes
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Sarah Perez
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Microsoft’s Office suite already has a popular note-taking app with OneNote, but today the company is turning its attention to how note-taking should work on tablets that support stylus and touch-based input. The company has now released , a digital notebook application for Windows 8.1 and 10 tablets that allows users to handwrite text, highlight, plus sketch and draw using either pen or pencil strokes across a device’s screen. The app, like many of Microsoft’s new releases, is the latest to emerge from the company’s internal incubator, . And also like many Garage projects, it takes inspiration from well-known apps already on the market. For example, in Plumbago’s case, the app appears to be an attempt to compete with a top note-taking and sketching application for iOS devices. – whose name is Latin for graphite, in case you’re wondering – doesn’t simply capture and record your pen or pencil strokes, however. According to Microsoft’s , the app also utilizes a technology called “handwriting beautification,” which involves efficient stroke-matching across thousands written by users. These strokes are averaged to produce more consistent and easier-to-read handwriting, Microsoft explains, resulting in a more consistent look for your handwritten notes. In addition, Plumbago supports “infinite paper” – meaning your writings or drawings can span pages. “How do you naturally go from one page to another? With a notebook, you flip the page over. With Plumbago, you swipe the surface of the page as though you’re flipping the real thing to navigate throughout the notebook,” explains Gavin Jancke, Microsoft Research’s GM of Engineering, who served as the user interface software engineer for the app. “It gives a sense of fluidity moving throughout a notebook eliminating the need of having to create pages manually and scrolling like a traditional word processor, also allowing you to go directly to a page as you would by flipping a bunch of pages in a spiral notebook,” he added. The pages can also be other hues besides white. For example, the app offers yellow ruled paper with the pink margin line, grid paper, music sheets, and more. For inputs, you can choose between pen, pencil or highlighter, which all respond as they would in the physical world. That is, if you push harder on the tablet’s surface, the drawing tool acts accordingly, laying deeper into the virtual paper. Plumbago users can also add, trace, highlight and annotate images, as well as share their notebook pages as images or with other apps, including Microsoft Word and OneNote. Unfortunately, though, Plumbago’s notes don’t sync between devices – a challenge Paper also faced after debuting its iPhone version. Unlike some Microsoft Garage projects, which seem to be more casual endeavours, Plumbago has been in development for around two years. Its creation was a joint effort between Jancke; Larry Zitnick, who developed the and ink rendering technology; and others on Microsoft Research’s Advanced Development Team. However, not all of their time at Microsoft was spent building Plumbago – instead, they worked on it in addition to their regular day jobs. Jancke notes they chose to work within the Garage framework because it allowed them to try something new and experimental, while also managing expectations related to the app’s success. Plumbago is a on the . [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFAfaFdXFWg]
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Optimizing Analytics On Time Series Databases
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Sankalan Prasad
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When was restricted to a desk job because of a leg injury, little did he know that he was showcasing an impressive example of crowdsourced, open source and big data time series analysis (as the world knows it today). Soon after his injury he devoted his time to studying navigation, meteorology, winds and currents. He studied thousands of ships’ logs and charts and analyzed more than a billion data points to publish wind and weather charts. He made these charts widely available, which showed sailors across the globe how to use ocean currents and wind to reduce the length of voyages. Fast-forward about 150 years and we realize how important time series data is to today’s push toward data-driven decision making. Today, millions of data points are collected by sensors, smart meters, RFIDs and other sensors — every second of our lives. The world is becoming more and more connected, intelligent and device driven, resulting in the Three Vs of big data: Volume, Velocity and Variety. With storage costs coming down significantly in the past decade and the emergence of distributed computing, companies want to capture and leverage this data for conducting informed analysis. In modern supply chains, the entire journey from source to destination is tightly monitored through sensors, which continuously transmit data. Telematics data transmit vehicular information like engine performance, fuel consumption, braking performance, etc.; GPS data continuously relays location; RFID tags are used to track shipments at intermediate hubs and customer data collected at different interfaces. All this data is immensely valuable, and offers enormous opportunities of optimization and cost savings. For example, UPS proudly that their trucks never take a left turn. Similar examples are seen in manufacturing, power plants, energy and utilities and the financial services industry. Honestly, RDBMS in its natural format was not designed for storing and analyzing time series data. For example, a company like UPS has daily shipments. Even if data is relayed every hour, that is 16 million data points added every hour. That is more than 300 million data points added every day. Now, if the data was relayed four times an hour, we are already over a billion data points in a day. A regular relational database would store data in separate rows, which means the table keeps growing vertically. Moreover, there is a lot of duplication of data, like static shipment data such as customer information, source and origin data, etc. repeated in every row. Ideally you can prevent all that by normalizing into multiple tables and creating indexes. A good DBA would tell you how to do away with indexes and how de-normalizing is the way to go. However, even if we create tables to efficiently store such high volumes of data, querying the data is a different story. With more than a billion rows being added every day, matching today’s customer SLAs is indeed challenging. In a time series database, usual queries are a comparison of data points across different time intervals. Producing a lot of data is easy and producing a lot of derived data is even easier. Solution? Compress all the data. But how do you answer the queries then? Scan through the data. Will this be fast? Definitely NOT! Waiting for queries is never productive. We need compression, but not at the cost of speed. To reduce the querying time, the goal should be to minimize IO time by reducing the number of records read each time to answer a query. The solutions are a specialized time series databases based on open-source technologies and a smart data model to overcome said deficiencies. We at suggest as the file format. Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format available to any project within the Hadoop ecosystem, regardless of the choice of data processing framework, data modeling or language. Columnar storage has several advantages. Firstly, organizing data by columns allows for better compression, as the data is homogenous. Secondly, IO is considerably reduced because we can effectively scan only a subset of the columns. Thirdly, as data of the same type are stored in each column, it allows for effective encoding techniques. Lastly, Spark is to work better with Parquet. The columnar design of the suggested solution offers greater speed and efficiency. It is optimized for time series databases and vastly improves on performance of queries, aggregation and analysis. At the same time, it is not restricted to a particular data type or industry. The suggested solution uses HDFS and distributed computing at its core. As the data volume increases, more machines can be added to handle the increased load. Across industries like financial institutions, utilities, telecommunications and oil and gas, more and more companies are adopting columnar storage for time series optimized databases. Time series databases typically have two challenges; the rate at which new data is added is very high and the historical data on which queries are made keeps building. So any solution should be able to combine fast ingestion and fast response times. Combining for analysis and Parquet for storage helps on both those fronts. Using open-source technologies and cloud infrastructure helps in drastically reducing the total cost of operations, especially when we compare much more expensive alternatives. Now that technology is capable of storing and analyzing huge volumes of data, what does that enable us to do? There are a variety of use cases, including BI, exploratory analytics and classification and detection of anomalies. Open-source technologies and distributed computing have opened doors to new possibilities and new frontiers in BI on time series databases.
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