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WhatsApp Was Valued At ~$1.5B In Final Round Before Sale | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | did a great job of being surreptitious while growing into a messaging monster. But as they say, the truth always comes out. In this case, the truth is that the company had three rounds of financing, with Sequoia as the sole investor. According to documents unearthed by , WhatsApp went from a $250k seed round in 2009 to an The final round, which we reported as a Series C but was actually technically a Series B, was a $52 million round back in July 2013, at a ~$1.5 billion valuation. Guess the in scooping up the simple messaging app, as well as its exponentially expanding userbase (around 200 million at the time of ), drove the company’s worth up a couple of orders of magnitude. The filings add up to the $60 million we previously reported, with Sequoia eventually owning around 20 percent of WhatsApp (we’ve heard ). Its stake is now worth about $3 billion in cash and stock, around a 50x return on its investment in the company. What is most interesting about the filing is that the B is a with a 3x Participation Cap, which means that Sequoia could have received up to 3x its investment while participating on an as-if converted basis with common stock, after its 1x liquidation preference. This does not apply in the case of this particular acquisition, which is the largest buy of any venture-backed company in history, and is clearly more than a 3x return (hence Sequoia would want to covert its preferred stock to common). TGIF.
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Plan To Make Silicon Valley Its Own State Gets Green Light To Collect Votes | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | Back when plan to break California into six different states (including one for Silicon Valley), we weren’t sure how far the unorthodox plan would go. But, just this week, Draper got the green light from the state to go ahead and collect signatures to put his plan on the California ballot. To be sure, he’ll still need to to put it before the voters; and, even if it were successful at the ballot box, it could face opposition from federal authorities. Without a groundswell of support, Draper will have to pay an army of signature gatherers to stand outside grocery-store parking lots and bus stations to wrangle residents for their approval. Such campaigns can pay $3 a signature or more to signature gatherers (a.k.a. the folks that sit outside grocery stores with a clipboard), but Draper told me that he’s willing to put money into a campaign to see this project through. Earlier this year, the state of California put out of what would happen to California if Silicon Valley became its own state. Given the Valley’s high concentration of wealth, a lot of funding for schools and social services would be stripped away from the less financially successful parts of the state if it somehow succeeded. But Draper says that California has become too unwieldy in its current form and needs to be decentralized. Specifically, the proposed six new states are Silicon Valley, West California, Jefferson, South California, Central California and North California. It’s still a long shot, but Draper seems to have made it through the first hoop. |
Microsoft Adds 3D Imagery Of 15 New Cities To The Bing Maps Preview App For Windows 8.1 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | In December, that Microsoft had met its earlier promise to bring rich 3D imaging of several cities to Windows 8.1 through a new Bing Maps Preview application. Today, Microsoft that work to include 15 new cities. Why the gap between release and new content? The company had to go out and, well, collect the information contained therein. You can snag the app , if you are a Windows 8.1 user. What cities are among the newly added? Here’s the full list: Duisburg, Dresden, Spain, Marbella, Murcia Montgomery (AL), Bakersfield (CA), Sacramento (CA), San Francisco (CA), Gainesville (FL), Tallahassee (FL), Columbus (GA), Baton Rouge (LA), Shreveport (LA), Gulport (MS), Seattle (WA). Why should you care? The update signals continued investment by Microsoft not only in its set of Bing-powered applications for Windows 8.1, but also that Bing itself has the budget to spend on — presumably — expensive projects to highlight its own competence. That and given Microsoft’s work to harmonize the Bing app experience between Windows Phone and Windows 8.x, that this technology will land on smartphones in the future. |
Ask A VC: Vegas Tech Fund’s Jen McCabe On The Next Big Hardware Opportunity | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, VegasTechFund’s Jen McCabe joined us in the studio to talk hardware, and more. As McCabe explained, she’s particularly excited about hardware that can help turn ordinary interactions into a connected experience. With some consumers in “wearable fatigue,” there are many opportunities in other areas of health where connected devices can be game-changing. McCabe and I also talked about her newish role as a VC, and why there aren’t more women at traditional VC firms. Check out the video above for more! |
Changers Raises $1.5M To Turn Charging Your Phone Via The Sun Into An Infectious Game | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | Ever thought about what might happen if you got rewarded, not for a Foursquare check-in, but for generating electricity? , a startup that allows people to turn the creation of solar power into a game that encourages green behaviour, has closed $1.5 million in Series A financing. German government-backed fund BFB Frühphasenfonds Brandenburg led the round, with participation from Heliocentris, a specialist in clean energy, alongside additional private investors. The startup can now accelerate product, expand into the natural solar-rich markets of the Middle East and take advantage of consumers’ rising interest in energy, especialy in the wake of Google’s of Nest. Oliver Borrmann, CEO of BFP, says “We see huge potential for Changers as it combines rewards for energy-saving behavior with a proven community based on a gamified customer loyalty system.” That’s basically code for a rather interesting new model: turning everyday green practices into the kind of game that not only rewards the consumer, but also allows solar producers to put more redundancy into the system. Changers is known for the Changers System, a Social Energy Marketplace that enables people to produce their own energy, measure how much they produce, and convert it into a currency that can be used to buy sustainable goods and services from Changers’ commercial partners. The company markets the , comprising a portable PV solar panel and a portable solar battery that measures how much energy it captures and stores. It’s not been a gangbusters growth curve — only 5,000 kits in the last two years. However, that represents over 640 kWh and has saved over 6,000 kg of CO2. But if you scale that up, the numbers start to look a lot more interesting. And Changers has been through the wars to get there, . It has to be said that the fact that Changers is still around is a testament to the sheer grit and belief of co-founders Markus Schulz and Daniela Schiffer. |
Goldman Sachs Takes On Bitcoin | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | finance is finally turning towards cryptocurrency. Responding to requests from clients, Goldman Sachs has put out an early assessment of Bitcoin that says little about the bank’s official position on BTC investment. So far, the financial services firm is neutral regarding the currency and is not actively recommending it to clients in its broad assessment of the currency and its impact for merchants and consumers. The bank’s take on Bitcoin attempts to tamp down on some of the hype around the currency. The document, which we acquired through a source close to the bank, states: “2013 was the year when Bitcoin became a mainstay in mass media, to the extent that it has become hard to separate the effect of hype surrounding the currency from its fundamentals.” Goldman also found that “there is no liquid derivative market for Bitcoin; nor a large market of B2B suppliers which companies can use for spending Bitcoin” and reiterates that Amazon has no current plants to accept Bitcoin. Both of these facts point to little traction in the BTC markets for big banks. Without the imprimatur of a big name, Goldman warns, the currency is a bit dangerous to offer to the serious investor. Longtime followers of BTC will find nothing surprising in the document, but the fact that it exists at all – even in the guise of a discussion document – is an important step in mass acceptance. Their investor recommendations are particularly interesting: Their analysis also splashes cold water on its rate of adoption, noting that “despite media coverage and current trading levels, bitcoin remains orders of magnitude away from widespread adoption. “As a full suite of financial services build up around Bitcoin, there will be numerous (mostly commission- based) revenue opportunities investors can focus on, including providing exchanges, wallets, payment processing, lending, derivatives and other services,” the document notes. Final analysis: The jury’s still out. It’s not much, but to BTC fans, it’s definitely a start. |
Gillmor Gang Live 02.21.14 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | – John Borthwick, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording session has concluded for today. |
See You On Monday At The TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup + Pitch-Off | John Biggs | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | Tickets are officially sold out for the MWC Bubble Over Barcelona Meetup and we couldn’t be more pleased. If you’ve managed to snag a ticket, you’ll be able to join Mike Butcher, Natasha Lomas, Ingrid Lunden, and myself on February 24, 2014, at 10pm-midnight at the official TC MWC meet up held in cooperation with . This is a global mobile meet up designed to mix innovators and influencers in town for Mobile World Congress. We are doing this in a majestic, historic mansion in the Eixample district where all the nighttime action occurs away from the conference venue. There will be three open bars set up across the two-floor building to encourage mingling, along with a large terrace overlooking the city so you can enjoy the views. Date: Monday, February 24, 2014
Time: 10pm-12:00pm midnight
Location: El Palauet, Passeig de Gràcia 113 – 08008 Barcelona
We’re also going to hold a mini pitch-off at the event, inviting around 10 entrepreneurs to take the stage to pitch to a panel of expert judges. The five entrepreneurs will get two free tickets each and the winner will get a table at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York and two runners up will get a ticket to the event. Special thanks to our sponsors: |
Navigator Campus Hopes To Put Russian Hardware Startups On The Map | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | With hardware suddenly all the rage, accelerators devoted entirely to the genre are popping up all over the place. And that includes the far-flung regions of Russia. The will be the first private hardware technology park in Russia’s Kazan region. If you’re unsure where that is, well, it’s at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka Rivers in European Russia. Ok, nevermind. Suffice to say that the Navigator project will focus on consumer robotics, 3D-printing, smart electronics for “smart home” systems and wearables. And we are talking hard-core Russian tech expertise here. Navigator is launching with $4 million in backing by founders Ramil Ibragimov (Runa Capital) and Vasil Zakyev (shtrafy-gibdd.ru, Ohmymentor.ru). It may not sound like much, but you can do quite a lot with $4 million in Russia. And they are not stopping there. The GRAVIZapp angel fund, specializing in hardware startups, will co-locate there. And they plan to build a network of hardware hackspaces and accelerators in the region, hoping to raise that funding to top $30 million spread across the region. Thus, neighboring cities like Ufa and Perm will get their own Navigator spaces. Serguei Beloussov, Runa Capital senior partner and Acronis CEO, believes that access to scientific and business experts, VC mentors and hardware industry players like Dell, Samsung, IBM, Cisco, Intel and Foxconn will mean “we will soon see more venture-backed hardware deals in Russia.” Some 93 out of 120 spots have already been taken by startups, covering various fields including 3D printing, robots, healthcare hardware, and consumer electronics. A few hardware projects located there have already raised early money: • iBlazr – a crowdfunding startup from Kiev (with $150K+ raised on Kickstarter previously) is building a ‘smart’ LED-flashlight for smartphones and tablets.
• Krisaf – robotized gym equipment for accelerated rehabilitation of children with cerebral palsy.
• ENNOVA – a startup manufacturing NOVA 3D printers. “Our ambitious aim for the next 5-10 years is to launch this kind of projects in each and every Russian city with up to 1 million citizens in order to create a powerful hardware-community based on the Russian engineering history,” says Ibragimov, of Navigator. It sounds like they might just do it. The Russians are coming… |
null | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 26 | null |
Facebook Investor Peter Thiel Calls Technology A “Scapegoat” For Inequality | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | In a wide-ranging discussion with MIT professor Andrew McAfee, the two duked it out about technology’s role in social ills. “I think technology has helped,” Thiel . “You have things like Facebook, like Google–technology has helped to offset some of the brutal effects of globalization”. While globalization has flooded the low-skilled job market with ultra-cheap outsourced labor, technology has relieved the beleaguered middle-class with services in health, education and leisure that were once the exclusive domain of the wealthy, Thiel asserts. Indeed, he partly blamed the failure to recognize the contributions of technology on an American mindset that is “anti-technology.” For instance, he notes, there was no financial industry-like bailout of Silicon Valley during the first dot-com bubble. He also notes that the nation’s general animosity toward tech can also be seen in the movie industry, which inundates the masses with tech super villains from “The Matrix,” “Avatar,” and” The Terminator” in a period of high tech hostility (compared to more tech-friendly movies, such as “Star Trek” in the ’60s and “Back To the Future” in the 80s, which is when he thinks the U.S. was less anti-tech). As a self-avowed libertarian, Thiel wasn’t thrilled about the government bail-out of the financial industry. But he shocked the crowed when he openly supported more taxes in exchange for less regulation. “I wouldn’t mind paying more in taxes if I could do anything I wanted to do with the rest of the money, which I’m largely restricted in what I can do, from the FDA on down to the San Francisco zoning department.” San Francisco has an infamously restrictive policy on new housing developments, which has contributed to sky-high rents and evictions. Thiel’s comments were a transparent nod to the protests in front of , which have become a convenient symbol of the wealthy high-tech workers who have the free cash to cause upward demand pressure on San Francisco rents. In other words, while protestors blame technology, Thiel hints at other causes — namely government. For McAfee’s role in the discussion, he towed the traditional economist line on technology and financial disparity. “The observed rise in inequality across both developed and developing countries over the past two decades is largely attributable to the impact of technological change,” of economists for International Monetary Fund–a sentiment widely shared in the academic community. According to the economists, as technology automates jobs, it concentrates labor in a small slice of high-skilled workers. Thiel rebutted this line of evidence by arguing that computers are complementary to people: they augment workers; they don’t replace them. “LinkedIn does not replace job recruiters,” he said. Though he does admit that once computers begin to replicate humans (i.e. robots), he begins to get “scared” for the future job market. Overall, it was a very thoughtful discussion; it was nice to see politically powerful techies lay out their contentious views on inequality for the public. As soon as the video of the full discussion is available from FWD, we’ll embed it here. |
Fitbit Issues Voluntary Recall For Fitbit Force Due To Skin Irritation, New Version Coming “Soon” | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | Fitness tracking company Fitbit has just issued a recall (and stopped sales) of their popular product the Fitbit Force, a wrist-borne activity tracker that follows their Fitbit Flex but adds a display and more advanced features. The Force was a popular item according to most estimates, and was often sold out after its launch late last year. Complaints began to arise from users who were experiencing . The company previously offered to replace devices with other trackers, or refund the money of those affected, but now it’s going all in on a full-scale recall. Here’s the official word from the company on the move: We wanted to provide an update on our investigation into reports we have received about Force users experiencing skin irritation. From the beginning, we’ve taken this matter very seriously. We hired independent labs and medical experts to conduct a thorough investigation, and have now learned enough to take further action. The materials used in Force are commonly found in many consumer products, and affected users are likely experiencing an allergic reaction to these materials. While only a small percentage of Force users have reported any issue, we care about every one of our customers. We have stopped selling Force and are in the process of conducting a voluntary recall, out of an abundance of caution. We are also offering a refund directly to consumers for full retail price. We want to thank each and every member of the Fitbit community for their continued loyalty and support. We are working on our next-generation tracker and will announce news about it soon. For additional information, please contact our support line at: 888-656-6381, or visit www.fitbit.com/forcesupport. Fitbit cofounder and CEO James Park also released a letter to Force users and the Fitbit community addressing the issue. In it, he notes that only 1.7 percent of users have officially reported issues with skin irritation to the company. But he also details the results of an independent study conducted by an external group of experts contracted by Fitbit, which found that the problem is indeed allergic contact dermatitis, probably resulting from contact with either trace amounts of nickel or with strap materials/glue used in product construction. Here’s . Affected users send in their Force, and once it’s confirmed to be affected by the recall, Fitbit will send you a physical check for the total cost of the device, which should arrive between two and six weeks after the Force is received by the company. There’s no firm ETA on when a new (presumably hypoallergenic) version of the Force will arrive, according to Fitbit, but it’s already in the works. Fitbit isn’t the only company to have run into trouble with an activity tracker, resulting in a recall. Jawbone had to call back its first-generation UP wristband, but for entirely different reasons: That device was prone to fatal failures shortly after consumers got it home, leading the company to take it back to the drawing board for nearly a year. |
To Ensure Guest Safety, Airbnb Is Giving Away Safety Cards, First Aid Kits, And Smoke & CO Detectors | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | Over the years, peer-to-peer lodging marketplace Airbnb has been working to increase trust and safety for guests that stay in listings on its platform. That includes , and providing insurance for hosts who make their properties available. Today, it’s taking that a step further, with an initiative that will make emergency safety cards, first aid kits, and smoke and carbon monoxide detectors available to hosts. In a , Trust and Safety head Phil Cardenas announced the new initiative aimed at making Airbnb listings more safe for its guests. The initiative starts with the company providing emergency safety cards and first aid kits to its hosts. The emergency safety cards will be distributed to all eligible hosts in the U.S. who request one, and will include all the information a guest needs in the case of an emergency. That includes a listing of local emergency services, as well as trusted friends of the hosts who may be able to help in the event of an emergency. Airbnb is also offering first aid kits to ensure that guests have the tools that they need in the case of an accident during one of their stays. It’s giving away 10,000 of the kits on a first come, first served basis to hosts in the U.S. who request them. Finally, the company is trying to ensure that guests are safe and aware of fires or possible carbon monoxide poisoning. According to reports, about 60 percent of all North American homes don’t have carbon monoxide detectors, and smoke detectors aren’t always functioning. To combat those issues, Airbnb will require all hosts to confirm that they have the devices installed in their homes. And for those who don’t already have smoke or CO detectors, Airbnb will be giving them away to eligible hosts in the U.S., and hopes to expand the program elsewhere in the world. (Hosts looking to learn more can go to .) For Airbnb, the giveaways are one way to improve guest stays and to show that its listings are held to a certain minimum safety standard. By doing so, it hopes to win over more users, and hopefully get on the good side of local regulators in the U.S. |
Y Combinator-Backed Ambition Offers A Fantasy Football-Style Approach To Motivating Sales Teams | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | says it’s taking the process of tracking and motivating sales teams beyond white boards and gongs. The startup, which is part of the current class at incubator Y Combinator, launched its product last August, but has been “flying under the radar” in the press until now, said co-founder Travis Truett. He compared Ambition’s approach to fantasy football — he’s hoping Ambition users will be excited to log in every day and see how their team is doing. Unlike fantasy football, however, Ambition isn’t tracking professional athletes competing against each other in imaginary matches. (At least, that’s how I remember fantasy football — it’s been a long time since someone strong-armed me into participating.) Instead, it looks at the performance of different sales teams within the company, allowing them to compete for limited “seasons,” with rewards for the winners. Each team member is assigned an “ambition” score. The specific metrics that are used to calculate the score can be customized for each company and each position, so Truett suggested that it’s a way to compare people who are doing different positions. He added that Ambition integrates with phone and customer relationship management systems, so it can track the relevant metrics without requiring any extra work from the salespeople (though it may motivate them to keep the CRM updated). The idea of “gamifying” the workplace isn’t new, Truett acknowledges, but he said most companies are doing “gamification for gamification’s sake” or “Gamification 1.0”. More specifically, he suggested that many of the existing tools are too focused on leaderboards. “That’s relatively passive, it’s not sustainable,” he said. “You really only have the top 10 percent who are motivated, because I might say, ‘You know what? Anthony wins every single time, so what do I care?'” That’s why the team-focused system could be an important motivator — participants feel like they have a stake in their team’s success, even if they’re not No. 1, and it also makes the process “peer motivated, not manager motivated,” Truett said. Managers, meanwhile, can look at individual and team-wide data. While Ambition’s initial focus is sales, Truett suggested that it could eventually serve “anybody that measures their employees.” The startup was founded in Chattanooga, Tenn., and has raised seed funding from The Lamp Post Group, Y Combinator, and . |
Sam Altman Taking Over As President Of Y Combinator, Replacing Paul Graham At The Helm | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | After nine years at the helm of , is stepping away from his leadership role at the famed Silicon Valley startup incubator. Taking over as Y Combinator’s president is , the entrepreneur who was part of the first YC startup class in 2005 and has worked as a part-time YC partner . The transition will be finalized next month, when the current Winter 2014 Y Combinator batch holds its Demo Day. After that, Graham will no longer head up Y Combinator’s day-to-day operations, such as reviewing applications and serving as a public face of YC. He will, however, continue to hold office hours with startups in the program. In a phone interview this morning, Graham said that Altman has been tapped to lead Y Combinator into a new chapter of its growth. “Really, what’s going on is that YC needs to get bigger, and I am not really much of a manager. Sam Altman is,” he said. Graham says he first approached Altman about taking over the reins at Y Combinator in mid-2012. “When I realized that it would be a good time to recruit a successor, he’s the only one I thought of that would be perfect to be the next president,” he said. “I never had a title like that, but now we’re going to create the title.” Graham has often pointed to Altman as an example of an exceptional leader: In a 2009 essay, Graham named Sam Altman as one of the “ ,” alongside Steve Jobs, Cypress Semiconductor founder TJ Rodgers, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit. He wrote of the then 24-year-old Altman (whose web handle is Sama): “Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I’m advising startups. On questions of design, I ask ‘What would Steve do?’ but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask ‘What would Sama do?'” Going forward, Graham says that Altman will concentrate on growing Y Combinator’s scale. “Now that we’ve got this new structure that’s more sharded, all we have to do is hire more partners and get more startups. We could probably grow by 10x in our current form,” Graham said. “Sam is much better suited to running a large organization.” Growth is important now, he said, because of a larger shift in the startup landscape. “We are in the beginning of a secular change in the number of startups. Starting a startup is becoming a normal thing to do… for very ambitious people, it’s going to be something they at least consider doing,” he said. “Now, how many startups could there be? The limiting factor is the number of good founders, not good ideas. How many good founders are there? Maybe one in every 1,000 people? That is a hell of a lot of startups. If we’re going to fund these people, we have to keep growing.” As for Graham’s future, stepping back from day-to-day duties at Y Combinator will enable him to focus once again on . Before he started YC, Graham’s status as a thought leader was first cemented by on topics such as technology and entrepreneurship. “I would like to go back to writing some more essays. When we first started YC, I could still write essays. But that was when it was just small. Then it got bigger and bigger,” he said. “It’s not so much the time, but it’s the attention. It’s the thing you think about in the shower in the morning. Now I will be able to write essays again, and maybe about topics other than startups.” At a fundamental level, though, Graham says that the YC experience for startups will largely be unchanged. “A big misconception is that Y Combinator is Paul Graham,” he said. This change, he says, should finally dispel that public perception and build a bigger future for YC modeled in part after organizations that have stood the test of time. “It’s rare for a company to last 100 years, but for a university it’s nothing. The reason for the difference, I think, is that product companies always have in their DNA some assumption about the kind of thing they’re building, and about their market, and that eventually ends up becoming false. But a university is just a nexus of people… people go there because of the people that are there,” he said. “Now, I’m not claiming that Y Combinator is going to last for centuries. But it could.” |
Bye Bye, WhatsApp: Germans Switch To Threema For Privacy Reasons | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | Swiss startup probably didn’t expect this. In 24 hours, the startup has its user base, according to . It is now sitting at the top of the paid App Store chart in Germany. Interestingly, Threema’s key feature is its true end-to-end encryption — German users probably don’t want to use a Facebook-owned app anymore. “Unlike other popular messaging apps (including those claiming to use encryption), even we as the server operator have absolutely no way to read your messages,” the website says. While WhatsApp promises a great level of security, the startup faced in the past. And of course, it is now part of Facebook after the acquisition. Facebook is an advertising-based company, after all. Facebook that WhatsApp wouldn’t change. It would remain an independent entity without an advertising-based business model. But apparently, these promises are not enough for German users. WhatsApp currently has around 30 million users in Germany. It’s the indisputable leader. That’s why it’s interesting to see that a massive user base is ready to jump ship and switch to a brand-new service. Threema only has three employees and has been overwhelmed by support requests. The app looks and acts a lot like WhatsApp, except that the startup’s server admins can’t even see the messages because they don’t have the encryption keys. Thilo Weichert, data protection commissioner for the German Land of Schleswig-Holstein, said that the WhatsApp acquisition could create data-protection issues. “Facebook sees everything. And WhatsApp also sees everything,” he said to . According to Weichert, you should be careful with the services you are using. And he’s not the only one who thinks that — among the 200,000 new Threema users who paid $1.99, 80 percent of those live in Germany. As a reminder, Angela Merkel’s phone has been tapped for years by the U.S. intelligence agencies. It’s a very pragmatic example of a privacy breach. It probably resonated with Germans. Now, WhatsApp will have to make sure that its users still feel safe sending WhatsApp messages. It will have to prove that privacy is still one of the company’s top priorities, Facebook or not. |
LinkedIn Finally Lets You Block Other Members | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | LinkedIn has at last added a long-requested feature with the introduction of member blocking. This adds a new privacy control to the service, which lets you restrict access to your profile, direct interactions, and network activity from any other logged-in member who you don’t want to interact with on LinkedIn. The company that it introduced the option not only because of user feedback, but also because “it was the right thing to do.” While many of us will be grateful for the addition because it means we’ll now have a simple tool to block spammers who clutter our LinkedIn inbox with annoying requests and messages, blocking also has more serious safety and privacy implications, too – such as in the case of users who are victims of or domestic violence, for example. In an announcement about the change, LinkedIn also noted it has a variety of other tools for users interested in better protecting their privacy, including tools to disconnect from existing connections, tools to control your activity broadcasts, plus profile and photo visibility settings. LinkedIn suggests that before you block a member, you turn on “anonymous profile viewing” in your settings, so that – should you change your mind, close your browser, have a technical issue, etc. – you won’t leave your name in the “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” section of the would-be-blocked user’s account. The new blocking feature is available on the drop-down box on a user’s profile, next to the “Send InMail” button. It’s now the last item on the list, which reads “Block or report.” After a user is blocked, you won’t be able to access each other’s profiles, message each other, and if you had been connected before blocking, you won’t be anymore. Any endorsements and recommendations from that member will also be removed from your profile, and neither user will ever be recommended to the other again in the “People You May Know” or “People also Viewed” sections of LinkedIn. As someone who has mistakenly been perhaps a little too generous in responding to connection requests in years past, the blocking feature is a welcome change. Now, all those “maximize your SEO!” and “buy my stuff!” emails I receive can be met with a swift response. |
BufferBox Ending Standalone Service, Closing Down Pick-Up Locations And Rolling Into Google | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 21 | Waterloo-based in November 2012, is shutting down its standalone service. The company sent an email to members today alerting them to the news, stating in no uncertain terms that BufferBox will cease to operate as a service distinct from Google, and that the team and tech will be rolled into Google products and efforts to build out future Google Shopping products. From the email sent to BufferBox members: At Google, we’re constantly looking for new ways to help people buy their favorite products online faster and easier, and as always, it’s important to evaluate the areas where we focus our efforts. instead bringing the learnings, technology and expertise of the team to future Google Shopping products, like (currently available in the San Francisco Bay Area) BufferBox warehouses will stop taking in packages on March 31, and the last day that any deliveries will be available for pickup from any BufferBox locations, which are currently available to customers in the Greater Toronto/Waterloo and San Francisco areas. The , so it’s interesting to see the service shutting down so soon on the heels of that growth. Existing histories of parcel deliveries can be downloaded by BufferBox users for their records, but it’s still likely a blow to those members. The team will be devoting its efforts to building , however, which means SF shoppers at least will likely see some kind of service alternative made available soon. Early reaction to the announcement via comments on BufferBox’s official blog indicates there’s a lot of blowback from the service’s Canadian users. The sad truth is that those customers were probably not a huge consideration, relative to the benefits of rolling BufferBox’s talent, tech and resources into the search giant’s main commerce initiatives. |
Sony Looks To The Past To Move Forward | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | The PlayStation. The Walkman. The Trinitron. The transistor radio. All icons in Sony’s storied history from an era when the Japanese giants still roamed the earth. The Sony of today is not like the Sony of yesterday. For every memorable blockbuster, there’s an infamous flub: The late embrace of MP3, losing its hold on the digital imaging market and of course, failing to attract adoption to Betamax, UMD, MemoryStick, and endless other formats and systems. The Sony of today is a bloated industrial machine barely holding together. It’s worn out and slowed to a crawl. The once innovative company now follows instead of leads. It’s playing catch-up instead of breaking new ground. But things are changing. The Sony of tomorrow is looking leaner than ever. It doesn’t look like the Sony of old with total market dominance, but for the first time in ages, Sony is becoming a competitor. Sony’s harsh reaction to bloat is not the exception throughout the electronics world. HP is being crushed under its own weight. Samsung makes everything from semiconductors to home appliances to 50 ton war machines. Dell is shedding employees as it streamlines the only thing you get from a brand name PC these days – service. During the 1980s, after the launch of the Walkman and Trinitron, the market crashed. Sony was in crisis. But it weathered the storm, and as most companies that survive global recessions, emerged stronger than ever. Co-founder Akio Morita took the reins in 1989 and set about to diversify Sony’s business, likely as a shelter against future crashes. It was under Morita that Sony’s brand took a hit. New SKUs flooded the market as Sony grew. His venture into producing movies stumbled for a few years. The Sony name no longer held the same cachet it once did. Sony grew during these years, but not in a way that set it up for future dominance. Sir Howard Stringer took over the company in 2005. He was the first foreigner to take over the Japanese company. Attempting to tighten the belt of the bulging company, he cut 9,000 jobs under his tenure. When Kazuo Hirai succeeded Stringer in 2012, Sony’s brand was in tatters. Once holding over 20 percent of the digital imaging market, it had slipped to around 5%. Mobile was the future and at that time Sony was not correctly positioned in the market. Their events were strange amalgams of star watching (they’d trot out Will Smith and Tom Hanks and other greats at CES just to wake up journalists during their interminable presentations) and ham-handedness. Kaz quickly set to reinvent Sony by focusing the company on mobile, imaging and gaming. This ambitious strategy notably excluded some of Sony’s older strengths including TVs and home entertainment. Kaz also quickly set out to cut the company’s headcount, and during his first two years at the helm he eliminated at least 12,000 employees. On the heels of a disastrous financial forecast, Sony announced this week intentions to cut another 5,000. In late 2012 Sony killed its venture with Ericsson which had yet to acquire a competitive share of the mobile market. Sony announced the PS4 in early 2013, which saw a blockbuster launch later that year. Sony also offloaded Gracenote two days before Christmas 2013. In the early days of 2014, Sony sold its PC business, exited the ebook market and repositioned its TV division after 10 years of losses. Just this week Sony Corp. unexpectedly forecasted a $1.1 billion annual loss. Some investors and analysts have requested Sony completely leave the consumer electronics market, yet the company stands by its efforts in mobile, imaging, and games. Give Sony credit. Over the last few years, Sony has released notable cell phones, cameras and gaming advancements. The company states that it has seen a significant increase in sales of smartphones. Sony is currently the third largest camera marker after Canon and Nikon and its recent photo products are stunning. Then there’s the PS4, which launched to blockbuster numbers and is currently riding high on consumer sentiment. Sony still has cutting to do. The company is forecasting another $1.1 billion loss in 2014. It’s clear Kaz and Co. are willing to make the hard call and cut off underperforming divisions. But can they do it fast enough? There are still a gazillion SKUs sold under the Sony brand. With the right focus, the Sony of tomorrow could be as strong as the Sony of the past, but that takes dedication, a desire to slice and dice accreted business units, and a lot of vision. Sony had all of that, long ago. Can it get it back? |
Here’s A First Look At Mike Judge’s Hilarious Take On Silicon Valley | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Here it is. Mike Judge’s long-awaited and irreverent take on the tech scene in Silicon Valley — creatively titled — debuts April 6 on HBO. And we’ve got your first look at the show’s trailer, which debuts on the premium cable channel this weekend. The series, which was created by the along with co-conspirators and , is inspired in part by his own experience as a Silicon Valley engineer in the ’80s. Set in the present day, it follows a rag-tag group of founders as they navigate the world of startup incubators, venture capitalists, and yes, even the local tech blogs… all in the search for fame and fortune. The cast includes as Richard, an introverted programmer who starts out living with Big Head ( ), Gilfoyle ( ), and Dinesh ( ) in a so-called hacker hostel run by dot-com millionaire Erlich ( ). After a failed pitch to billionaire venture capitalist Peter Gregory ( ), wackiness ensues. Clearly I’ve given away too much of the plot already, and you should probably just watch the trailer embedded above. Anyway, the first episode premieres Sunday, April 6 and I, for one, can’t wait to see it. |
Ask A VC: Storm Ventures’ Jason Lemkin On Inbound Vs. Outbound Enterprise Sales | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Storm Ventures’ managing director Jason Lemkin joined us in the studio to talk about enterprise, sales models and more. Lemkin, who sold his e-signature company EchoSign to Adobe in 2011, talked about inbound sales vs. outbound sales in an enterprise company, and which types of sales model SaaS companies should choose. Lemkin also talked about the differences between being a CEO and a VC, and what he misses about being an operator. Check out the video above for more. |
Apple CEO Tim Cook Says iPhone Expansion Plans Include 50 More Carriers This Quarter | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | In an , Apple CEO explained his views on topics ranging from smartphones to cash return to shareholders. To understand how Apple will make decisions in the future, it’s important to parse his words and thoughts. Briefly below we’ll look at the financial and the strategic comments made by the technology executive. As has been recently pointed out by , Apple generates more than half its revenue from the iPhone line of smartphones. No other product group at Apple breaks the 20 percent mark. Given that reality, Apple’s work to expand the carrier base that it can sell iPhones into is key for the company. According to Cook, Apple will pick up 50 new carriers globally this quarter alone. That’s nearly breakneck pace. For the company, the Chinese market is a key growth opportunity. Apple is working with China Mobile to drive adoption of its iconic iOS smartphones in the country. Still, according to Cook, “even with adding China Mobile, we still only present our products to two-thirds of the subscribers in the world.” Next, the PC. Cook claims that Apple is still investing heavily in its Mac line of PCs. Said the CEO: “we haven’t given up on the Mac. A lot of people are throwing in the towel right now on the PC. We’re still spending an enormous amount on really great talent and people on the Macs of the future. And we have some really cool things coming out there. Because we believe as people walk away from the PC, it becomes clear that the Mac is what you want if you want a PC.” So post-PC? Perhaps not yet. Apple is more than open to potential acquisition deals that top the billion-dollar mark, its CEO TIm Cook disclosed. While rival firms, such as Google, have been using extra cash to reel in firms for sums in the 10-figure range, Apple has sat out. Ironically, almost, given that it has the most cash of any technology firm. Despite its lack of participation in this particular dance, Cook said that his firm has “zero” issue spending more than a billion dollars on a smaller company, provided that the deal is “in the best interest of Apple in the long-term.” With cash reserves north of the $100 billion mark, Apple could afford a grip of such deals. Google recently purchased . Lenovo recently . Yahoo tossed . Microsoft threw down , and Facebook for several billion. Apple, the Journal notes, has never spent a billion or more on a single purchase. Acquisitions aside, Cook also explained his views on how best to return cash to stakeholders in the company. It’s no small issue: Apple is so rich some investors want it to return more dollars, more quickly, to the distributed pool of owners of its stock. Apple’s dividend and share repurchase plans only started a few years ago and have returns in gross dollars more than most firms could dream of. However, according to , Apple’s dividend yield of 2.35 percent is lower than Microsoft’s 3.06 percent. To ask Apple to increase its cash return strategies is therefore not beyond the pale. In the face of questions regarding a $50 billion distribution proposed by activist investor Carl Icahn, Cook was demure: We think you want a cash-return program that’s flexible. We may see a huge company tomorrow that we want to acquire or something may happen in the stock market that’s unpredictable. You want to be able to adjust for the long-term interest of the shareholders, not for the short-term shareholder, not for the day trader. As far as subtle jabs at gadflies go, that’s not a bad one. Finally, is Apple’s growth slowing? Slightly, but that doesn’t mean the firm is no longer a growth firm in the view of its CEO: “So when you say $14 billion to $15 billion [in revenue growth] compared to those numbers, it’s clearly smaller and a smaller percentage, but, to put it in some context, that’s like adding three Fortune 500 companies in a year.” |
Firefox’s Chrome-Like Australis Redesign Arrives In Aurora Release Channel | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | This has been a long time in the making, but after almost of testing in the highly experimental Firefox Nightly release channel, Firefox’s new Australis user interface has now into the . The , which the company has been working on for , gives the browser a more Chrome-like look. As in Chrome, the settings and options are now behind the same kind of next to the URL bar as in Google’s browser and rounded tabs at the top of the screen. These similarities with Chrome is likely the first thing users will notice. Indeed, if you quickly switch back and forth between the two, you’ll likely get confused about which one is which. The team also completely redesigned the menu too, and added a large number of customization options that aren’t available in most other browsers. While Firefox was always pretty customizable, this new version makes it far easier to discover these customization options and use them. Just click on ‘customize’ in the menu and drag and drop menu items around to improve your user experience. If you always want to have the developer tools accessible in the URL bar, for example, that’s now easy to do. As Mozilla’s VP of Firefox engineering Jonathan Nightingale told me , the idea behind the redesign was to give users a browser that is simpler to use, with a cleaner and more intuitive design. As you open more tabs, for example, those that aren’t in the foreground fade into the background “to make it faster for you to find and focus on the tab you want.” Now that Australis is part of Firefox’s regular release channels, it will slowly find its way into the beta and stable channels, too. It’s unclear when exactly this will happen. Mozilla often holds back features from graduating to the next channel until it feels they are ready for a wider release, and this new user interface will surely spark some interesting discussions among Firefox’s users. As part of today’s update, Mozilla is also launching , which will offer access to the latest update of and other tools. While Mozilla has long offered users a way to sync their bookmarks, add-ons, passwords and open tabs across machines, it never offered users an easy way to just sign up and sign in to access all the integrated services across its products. Firefox Accounts are now available in the Aurora release channel, too, so if you want to try both the new user interface and these new tools, just head and install the Aurora release. It won’t overwrite your existing Firefox install. |
Today In Dystopian War Robots That Will Harvest Us For Our Organs… | John Biggs | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | A merry to you and yours! This week’s installment brings you some DIY, some dangerous, and some fun. Can you guess which is which? Probably not, because all of these robots will eventually eat your eyes like lychee jellies. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M57B0iqHBpQ] First up we have this autonomous Ardiuno robot that looks fairly harmless. Created by a cool , the robot can go around objects using a very basic bit of logic and some sensors. The and the video is unique in that the robot’s creator expresses heartfelt joy at his creation and he is not screaming in terror as the robot mauls his couch. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_XpgELNE9k] Then we have this autonomous boat that can map hard-to-access rivers and lakes and features an on-board laser scanner and autonomous quad-copter that can get a bird’s eye view. These robots can get into places humans can’t and, more importantly, a fleet of them coupled with an army of robotic sharks with laser teeth can terrorize most of San Diego (the wet parts). Created by in Portugal, the product … and deadly. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uXS1iGx03eg] Finally we have the UK’s Taranis, a search and destroy drone that is really and truly dangerous. Writes : To paraphrase that great old song, “Boom boom boom let’s go back to my room and hide from this grey-skinned helldemon from above!” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BRhuVUanGE] |
You’d Be Surprised By What Really Motivates Users | Nir Eyal | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Earlier this month, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone unveiled his mysterious startup . The question-and-answer app was met with a mix of and . Tech-watchers asked if the world really needed another Q&A service. Skeptics questioned how it would compete with existing solutions and pointed to the rocky history of previous products like Mahalo Answers, Formspring, and Aardvark. In an interview, Biz articulated his goal to, “make the world a more empathetic place.” Sounds great but one wonders if Biz is being overly optimistic. Aren’t we all busy enough? Control for our attention is in a constant tug-of-war as we struggle to keep-up with all the demands for our time. Can Jelly realistically help people help one another? For that matter, how does any technology stand a chance of motivating users to do things outside their normal routines? We hope a few insights gleaned from user psychology may help the Jelly makers improve their jam and provide some tips for anyone building an online community. In May 2007, entrepreneur and Internet celebrity Jason Calacanis launched a site called Mahalo. A flagship feature of the new site was a Q&A forum known as Mahalo Answers. Unlike previous Q&A sites, Mahalo utilized a special incentive to get users to ask and answer questions. People who submitted a question would offer a bounty in the form of a virtual currency known as “Mahalo Dollars.” Then, other users would contribute answers to the question and the best response would receive the bounty, which could be exchanged for real money. By providing a monetary reward, the Mahalo founders believed they could drive user engagement and form new habits. At first, Mahalo garnered significant attention and traffic. At its high point, worldwide visited the site monthly. But over time usage stalled. Google’s algorithm update for having a major negative impact but said Mahalo was, “growing very slowly” even before the change. As Mahalo struggled to retain users, another Q&A site began to boom. Quora, launched in 2010 by two former Facebook employees, quickly grew in popularity. Unlike Mahalo, Quora did not offer a single cent to anyone answering questions. Why then, have users stayed engaged with Quora but not with Mahalo, despite its monetary rewards? In Mahalo’s case, executives assumed that paying users would drive repeat engagement with the site. After all, people like money, right? However, Quora demonstrated that social rewards and the of recognition from peers proved to be a much more salient motivator. Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Quora’s rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s because the incentive to answer a question is driven by the anticipation of social, not financial, reward. When it comes to online communities, the need to connect and contribute turns out to be a more powerful motivator than collecting cash. Think of the products and services you would identify as “habit-forming.” Odds are most of these services are used daily, if not multiple times per day. For instance, in December of 2013, a remarkable returned to the site at least once per day. A revealed Americans checked Facebook an average of 14 times per day. When it comes to forming habits, frequency matters and studies have demonstrated that in the likelihood of creating a new routine. On Mahalo, only one person was awarded the monetary bounty, often days after submitting their answer. If payouts were meant to take the form of a game, then the rewards came too infrequently to matter. The same can be said for those asking questions. Relative to the results delivered by Google, Mahalo Answers took an eternity. Services that can deliver quick rewards encourage higher frequency of use and have an easier time forming new habits. Though still not as fast as a Google search, Jelly provides feedback relatively quickly. It is not surprising given his Twitter pedigree that Biz Stone understands the power of frequent interactions. On Twitter, the feedback is fast and often furious — a single tweet can generate favorites, retweets, and replies within seconds. For Jelly to succeed, users must receive frequent reinforcement. Within 60 seconds of submitting the question, “Why do you use Jelly?” four people responded, pulling me back to the app before my grip left my iPhone. When asking a question on Jelly, friends and friends-of-friends receive a push notification, prompting the recipients to help. Unfortunately, to get the notifications, users need to have the app. As one would expect of a fledgling service, Jelly has not yet reached the critical mass of people needed to provide the quick Twitter-like feedback users crave. For the reward to come fast enough, not only does Jelly need enough users, but it must also build the right kind of community. We are a species that depends on each other. Social rewards are driven by our connectedness with other people. Our brains are adapted to seek rewards that make us feel accepted, attractive, important, and included. Many of our institutions and industries are built around this need for social reinforcement. From civic and religious groups to spectator sports and “water cooler” television shows, the need to feel social connectedness informs our values and drives much of how we spend our time. Sites that leverage these kinds of rewards benefit from what psychologist called “social learning theory.” Bandura studied the power of modeling and ascribed special powers to our ability to learn from others. In particular, Bandura showed that people who observe someone being rewarded for a particular behavior are more likely to alter their own beliefs and subsequent actions. However, social rewards are not as meaningful if they come from just anyone. Notably, Bandura showed that when people observe the behavior of people most like themselves, or those who are slightly more experienced, social learning worked particularly well. This is exactly the kind of targeted demographic and interest-level segmentation that industry-specific sites such as Stack Overflow apply. , the world’s largest Q&A site for software developers, generates a staggering 5,000 answers to member questions daily. Many of these responses provide detailed, highly technical and time-consuming answers. Users invest effort into what others may see as the burdensome task of writing technical documentation. Like Quora users, Stack Overflow users are not rewarded with money, but recognition within the community. Each time a user submits an answer, other members have the opportunity to vote the response up or down. The best responses percolate upwards, accumulating points for their authors. When they reach certain point levels, members earn badges, which endow special status and privileges. Stack Overflow works because, like all of us, software engineers find satisfaction in contributing to a community they care about; turning a seemingly mundane task into an engaging, game-like experience. But on Stack Overflow, points are not just an empty game mechanic, they confer special value by representing how much someone has contributed to their tribe. Users enjoy the feeling of helping their fellow programmers and earning the respect of people whose opinions they value. Will Jelly succeed where other Q&A services failed? It is always hard to predict the success or failure of new still evolving products. We hope Jelly and other community-oriented sites will take lessons from the examples above to provide frequent, meaningful rewards from a community that users care about. By looking to insights from psychology, product designers can increases their odds of forming new user habits. |
Newly Discovered Snapchat Weakness Could Allow Hackers To Crash Your Phone | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | With great power comes great responsibility, and as Snapchat continues to grow rapidly, security researchers grow increasingly interested in the security of the platform. Security researcher has today exposed a vulnerability within Snapchat that opens up the app to a denial-of-service attack. By overloading an inbox with messages, hackers can freeze and crash the iPhone, requiring the user to reset their device. For Android devices, the attack doesn’t crash the device, but does make it noticeably slower, according to the Los Angeles Times. “We are working to resolve the issue and will be reaching out to the security researcher who publicized the attack to learn more,” said Snapchat in a statement. The explains that hackers can reuse tokens (that are generated by the app to verify user identity) to send hundreds of messages within seconds, which could be used by spammers to take down large groups of Snapchat users, or individual accounts. Sanchez notified the of the vulnerability before notifying Snapchat, claiming that Snapchat “has no respect for the cyber security research community.” And he kind of has a point. Over the holidays, Snapchat was notified by security researchers that a security hole opened up the app to hackers who might want to expose user data. When the notification was ignored, hackers proceeded to to prove their point. If you want to see the DoS go down, the LATimes has a demo video of the attack right . We’ve reached out to Sanchez for clarity, and will update the post as soon as we know more. |
Ephemeral And ‘Anonymish’, Wut Is About Mass-Texting Friends Without Revealing Your Identity | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Somewhere between Snapchat’s rise and the NSA spying revelations, it became en vogue to have our daily adventures and thoughts etched in stone on a timeline or profile page. Capitalizing on this trend were Whisper, Confide and then Secret. Now there’s , from one member of Square’s founding team, Paul McKellar. It’s a very, very, very simple app. Just a text screen with a fluorescent background. You type in what you want to say, and then it shoots out as a push notification to all of your friends. You never reveal who you are. (But people might be able to guess because they’re your friends, after all.) “It’s an ambient pulse of what your friends are doing and using,” said McKellar, who quietly launched the app a few weeks ago with . Like Secret, it riffs off Frank Warren’s . But Wut’s updates are even more transient than Secret’s. They live on the lockscreen, and then they disappear. You can’t go into the app to find them. “Wut’s messages don’t build up over time. You don’t have to go back and read 47,000 tweets. The most you can see at any time is five messages,” McKellar said. The app’s deceptively simple design — no content in a feed and nothing to look at inside — made it difficult for Apple’s app store reviewers to understand Wut’s purpose. They kept sending it back to McKellar until he had to literally record a video of himself using two phones for it to make sense. The messages I get on Wut are pretty frivolous (see the attached screenshot where I asked a bunch of people to send me messages. Wut wut?!). Occasionally, memes run through the community. Last week, it was about saying who you were having dinner or coffee with that day or night. Wut’s push notifications are also silent, meaning the app won’t interrupt you if you aren’t looking at the screen. “You’d never get woken up in the middle of the night by this,” said McKellar, who was most recently an entrepreneur-in-residence at SV Angel after leaving Square. The hope is that this might take off amongst teens, who are used to being bombarded with messages all day long and get the idea of self-destructing content from products like Snapchat. Wut is currently bootstrapped. |
Shutterstock Adds 4K Video | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | , the publicly traded stock photography and video site, has quietly launched . As the company tells us, it has already amassed a catalog of over 11,000 videos that are now available for anybody who needs ultra high-res images of somebody or having a . There is a very slim chance that you have a 4K screen on your desk or in your living room, but it’s really just a matter of time (years?) before you will. As demand for 4K content increases, demand for 4K stock video will also surely increase, and the company is trying to position itself as an early leader for users who need this kind of video content for their projects. At just over 10,000 videos, the 4K library is still a small slice of Shutterstock’s overall video catalog, of course. The site features well over 1.3 million HD video clips, after all, and about 150,000 low-res clips. The HD library is growing at about 12,000 videos per week, according to Shutterstock, and it is also adding 4K videos at a rapid clip. As for the content, Shutterstock tells me that the company expects it to mirror its HD collection, but with an increased concentration of time-lapse videos. It’s worth noting that 4K video on Shutterstock is significantly more expensive than other formats. A 10-second clip, which weighs in at about 600MB, can quickly set you back $299, while the HD version just costs $79. |
Game Frame Puts Pixel Art On Display In The Coolest Possible Way | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 7 |
Displaying pixel art at larger sizes in your house can be as simple as making a large print, but that means you’re stuck with a single image. San Francisco’s Jeremy Williams wants to make something a little more dynamic, so he has created the , a square box with 256 LED lights that’s designed to make it easy to show off pixel art and OG video game art. The Game Frame calls to mind a simpler time, when we used graph paper to create most digital art, and if you could assemble colored squares, you could help build a AAA video game title. It’s also a modern interpretation, however, and a way to display either your own original creations or those that live in your fondest memories. Pre-installed on the Game Frame are 40 new animations from pixelart legend eBoy, but you can easily move your own over via SD storage using BMP files with a maximum resolution of 256 pixels (or 16×16, though larger images are supported via panning). The SD card can potentially store thousands of images, according to Williams, and the frame itself is Arduino-based and works with all existing Adafruit libraries, plus it’s fully modable, and has a playable Breakout clone pre-loaded, so it’s not just for showing off pretty art. Backers can pre-order a unit at $210 fully assembled, or less if you want to supply some of your own parts plus some elbow grease. They’re going to ship in June, according to the project page, in batches of 300 per month. Ideally, someone buys a bulk order and opens a gallery using these things, because they’re pretty awesome. |
Secret Hits A Hot App Milestone With Discovery Of First Security Issue | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Well that didn’t take long. The new anonymous sharing app , which has morphed into ” (and a great place to , apparently) has been hacked. Don’t worry, it’s not that serious. The hack doesn’t expose who said what – though we’re sure someone is already working on that because, hey, nothing is ever anonymous. However, the hack does expose that Secret may have less than ideal security measures in place, which may be concerning to those spilling their guts or trash-talking on the service. (Unless all your friends already know which secrets are yours, of course.) The hack allows users to make requests under the context of another user, which is possible because the server doesn’t do any authentication to check that you have the correct user token. What that means, in practice, is that a user could do something like comment on another person’s post, despite it being clearly marketed as “Public Comments Disabled.” For background, the way Secret works is by obscuring the identities of those on its service. The app asks you for your phone number and email when you sign up, and then uses your address book to tell you when something has been posted by a friend a friend of friend, or if it’s something that just became popular on Secret which made it available for all to see. In the latter case, Secret displays the item’s location, like “California” or “New York.” You can’t typically comment on those items, since you’re not in the poster’s friend network, but the hack changes that. Here’s how it works: Here’s the hacked post, as referenced in the video: The person who pointed out these apps’ faults is someone who has an app in the same broader messaging space. That’s why they were poking around. “I’m not even a security researcher,” he admitted. “Anybody can do what I’m doing.” To be fair, the hack in question, in and of itself, is a significant threat. And finding security holes in social apps has become par for the course these days, it seems. Just at Snapchat, for example. In addition, as Secret.ly co-founder David Byttow points out when we alerted him to the findings, “public comments are disabled to uphold the quality of the conversation, not as a security measure. It may change at any time.” That may be true, but when companies are promising , we should hold them to higher standard. In other words, you shouldn’t be able to change the way software behaves in a matter of seconds with a rudimentary set of skills. (Note that manipulating and using Secret’s internal API is against its Terms of Service, would-be hackers.) But Byttow stands firm in saying that there is no security risk here. “This is not a security issue. It’s a product decision that was obviated by misuse of our internal API, and since been fixed. We may lift the product restriction at any time to enable people to comment on any secret, after we all learn a little more about the platform.” Lest this news has you running for Secret competitor , be aware they they might not be all that secure either. That company’s traffic is transferred un-encrypted over HTTP, including user tokens and location data. Sigh. |
Google Search App For Android Adds New Voice Commands, “Time To Leave,” And Olympics Google Now Cards | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Google is rolling out an update to its today, and with this, it is introducing a number of new features for Google Now as well. Google Now already tells you to leave for work so you can arrive on time, and it will now do the same thing for your trips to the airport, event and dinner reservations. Basically, any Google Now card that used to only remind you when you needed to be somewhere (flights, calendar events with locations and times, restaurant reservations, movie and concert tickets) can now also tell you when you should leave to get there on time. You’ll be able to specify whether you’re taking public transport or driving, and how early you would like to arrive (which comes in pretty handy when you’re driving to the airport). In addition to this, Google’s voice recognition feature now lets you make calls and send texts. Just say “call John” or “send text to my brother” and the app will pull the right contact up for you. If you have a few John’s in your contacts, it will check who you want to call and if you have multiple numbers, it will ask you about that, too. As Google has previously said, it wants to be your personal assistant. And just like some of its other voice features, these new features allow you to have a relatively complex interaction with your device without ever touching the keyboard. Other new features in this release include a new Google Now card for the Sochi Olympics, with easy access to medal standings, news and upcoming events. The team has also increased the number of languages users can use to set reminders by voice in Google Now. The app now supports, French, German, Japanese or Korean, so if you feel inclined to do so (and you are in Germany), you can now say “Erinnere mich daran um 12 Uhr Rolf anzurufen” and Google will indeed remind you of your call at noon. |
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TheFamily Launches Koudetat+, A Saturday School For Aspiring Entrepreneurs In Paris | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Paris-based startup accelerator and fellowship recently unveiled a side-project called . From March to July, anyone can pay and attend a day-long class targeted specifically towards aspiring entrepreneurs. As TheFamily’s baseline suggests, it “nurtures entrepreneurs with education, unfair advantages & capital.” According to the team, entrepreneurs are made, not born — and that’s why creating this special program makes sense for those who are not quite ready to make the jump to the startup world. Every saturday from 10am to 6pm, participants will attend very practical classes about fundraising, legal, business models, design and more. There will be pitching sessions, cases and more general classes as well to teach attendants the right mindset to become an entrepreneur. For $680 or $820 a month (€500 and €600, respectively, depending if you pay upfront or monthly), you can attend the classes in person. For $270 a month (€200), you get access to the live stream. TheFamily itself is a sort of accelerator that selects and takes a one percent stake in its startups in exchange for access to events, classes, contacts, mentors and more. Startups like , and come from TheFamily. In other words, it tries to provide a stimulating environment so that entrepreneurs can make the right decisions for their startup. With Koudetat+ you can get a taste of this environment. |
Russia Says Bitcoin Should Be Avoided [Updated] | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Russia doesn’t do things by halves — Bitcoin be used by individuals and legal entities according to a recent statement. If you have a Bitcoin wallet on your computer, the Government will be suspicious. The Central Bank of Russia reiterated that the official currency is the Ruble, and that it considers Bitcoin a money surrogate. That’s why the cryptocurrency should be avoided Here’s an abstract of the statement translated using Google Translation: According to Article 27 of the Federal Law “On the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Bank of Russia)” release on the territory of the Russian Federation of surrogates is prohibited. […] The Bank of Russia has warned that Russian legal entities providing services for the exchange of “virtual currency” in rubles and foreign currency, as well as for goods (works, services) will be considered as a potential involvement in the implementation of suspicious transactions in accordance with the legislation on counteraction to legalization (laundering) proceeds of crime and financing of terrorism. Here’s the article 27: The official currency (currency) of the Russian Federation is the ruble. One ruble is divided into 100 cents.
Introduction to the territory of the Russian Federation and other monetary units issue money substitutes prohibited. The Central Bank issued a clarification, not a new rule. In other words, with existing laws, transactions in Bitcoin are seen as “potentially suspicious.” The reasons behind this move is that Bitcoin is reportedly used for money laundering and other criminal activities. Moreover, the Russian institution thinks that it’s a purely speculative currency and that there is a great risk of value losses. Yet, telling people to avoid using Bitcoin doesn’t mean that people will stop using Bitcoin overnight. As Bitcoin doesn’t rely on any physical institution but the network of miners around the world, you can’t prevent Russians from using Bitcoin. But companies that are based in Russia and are working in the Bitcoin industry should at least consider relocating. They will probably be the first entities under scrutiny by the Russian government. While harsh, this decision shouldn’t come as a surprise. Bitcoin was designed to be unregulated. But over time, many countries and official institutions have decided to try and regulate it. For example, in August, a federal judge in Texas has declared that Bitcoin and should be regulated just like euros or U.S. dollars. Similarly, New York’s financial services stated that Bitcoin companies should the current financial regulatory guidelines. By doing that, the authority wanted to protect Bitcoin holders and companies. Moreover, New York’s top banking regulator is currently writing a new set of rules to decrease illegal Bitcoin activities. Finally, following a parliamentary inquiry, Germany stated that Bitcoin should be considered as “private money.” It has many implications, starting by paying sales tax (VAT). This rule is hard to implement, but it gives an idea of how the German government feels. For all these reasons, Bitcoin won’t be able to remain an unregulated currency for long. In Russia, today’s warning is another step in that direction, and it’s a radical step. |
Here’s What Would Make Google’s Smartwatch Awesome | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Google is reportedly and we couldn’t help wondering just what they’d add to the burgeoning technology. More than any other company, Google is positioned to solve the single biggest shortcoming in wearable technology: pattern recognition. What is it about our daily activities makes us fatter, more alert? What helps us get better sleep and be more productive? Buried within the big data of our everyday decisions are gems of truth about how we can become the best versions of ourselves. Last Summer, Google’s new head of engineering and artificial intelligence pioneer, Ray Kurzweil, let me know his . So, we know Google wants build the perfect lifestyle recommendation engine; a watch that tracks our vital signs and movement could do just that. Here are two things it would need: – If I walk an extra 2,000 steps per day, but get less sleep at night, do I still lose weight? It’s really hard to tell, because humans are not naturally good at intuitively assessing cause and effect when there’s more than one variable involved (i.e. we love a good and bad guy). Self-improvement tech has consumers up to their eyeballs in . Only a device that vacuums up this data and mines it for patterns could make these devices useful. In the (very) near future, health devices are going to able to assess our productivity and eating habits as well. The , for instance, is a brain-wave sensing headband that can monitor our levels of concentration throughout the day. Google’s watch could easily sync with the muse and let me know if my focus goes up on days that I do interval sprints or go to bed earlier. We hope Google puts the lion’s share of its brain power into the software of the Smartwatch. – Steps taken, body temperature, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, motion tracking–all of these measures can be combined to learn essential aspects of our fitness. For instance, the Basis B1 smartwatch is the only wrist health tracker on the market to measure the , since it has a laser that measures resting heart rate. Similarly, Polar’s smartwatch for athlete’s purports to know when users are under or overtraining based on the variability in heart beats. Samsung’s Galaxy Smartwatch can even automatically count reps during a workout. assigns users a calisthenic workout and can sense how many pushups are done during each set. I got an early demo and it did a pretty good job sensing my movements. Over the next year, there will be more devices that won’t even need to be told when users are working out–it’ll just automatically count each rep. Even better, it’ll tell users if they’re form is off. To date, wearables have been resigned to self-improvement nuts. To mainstream, it’ll have to do the heavy mental lifting for us. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. Every decision we make about our health and productivity is a data point–data points that desperately need simplification. [ ] |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Sony Vaio, Samsung Galaxy S5, And Wearables? | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Sony’s is no more, with the company confirming reports that it will sell the PC division. But a will soon arrive and comfort you during this very difficult time. After all, it’s smartphone season with MWC right around the corner. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the , featuring , , , and . Enjoy!
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HTC Will Pay Nokia Licensing Fees As Part Of Patent Dispute Settlement | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Smartphone maker HTC will have to pay up to Nokia to continue peddling its wares (via ), as part of a patent license agreement set out by the two companies today. The settlement means that all pending litigation between the two companies is dismissed as of today, and the extent of the payments made by the Taiwanese company isn’t being made public. Nokia has been racking up wins with regards to HTC’s use of what it views as its intellectual property. First, HTC was found to be in violation of a key microphone tech patent held by Nokia, and then the HTC One Mini was banned from sale in the UK over the use of certain chipsets (which was stayed), and finally the HTC One faced an injunction in Germany, too. The deal will see HTC also share rights to its own LTE patent portfolio, meaning Nokia probably just generally won overall. It also sounds like future considerations are included in the deal, as evidenced by the suggestion that the two companies will “explore future technology collaboration opportunities.” HTC is no stranger to paying up to use key mobile patents related to Android smartphones: It also signed a licensing agreement with to avoid similar infringement claims. This new arrangement with Nokia seems like it’s probably a sort of 11th hour concession of defeat, coming as it does on the heels of a which would’ve seen HTC forced to rethink its device design. HTC had indicated at the time that it would seek to appeal the decision, but now, with all ongoing cases resolved in the deal, that’s off the table. HTC can’t seem to catch a break, but with a rumored new flagship launch on the horizon, it’s probably best that the company take its licks and move forward rather than continue to be distracted by ongoing legal battles. |
Last Call To Apply For The ATL And NOLA Pitch-Offs | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | TechCrunch is about to roll into and . You only have a few days left to apply for each meetup’s 60-second pitch-off. If you’re a budding startup in these cities, apply below to pitch to close to a thousand of your local peers. It’s free to apply and pitch. The deadline for applications is Monday, February 10th. For the pitch-off, we will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt NY; second place will receive two tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt NY; and third place will receive one ticket. If accepted, you’ll meet with John, Jordan or myself the day of the pitch-off. We can talk about your pitch, your company, or my love of the Midwest. It’s your time. These meetups are an amazing time. They’re a mashup of networking event, drinking party and rowdy pitch-off. Load your pitch deck on a phone, stuff your blazer with business cards and come party with TechCrunch. Tickets are only $5 to attend. 21 and older only, please. Then, in March, we’re hitting the road again and holding similar events in DC and NYC. After holding close to 25 of these events over the last two years, we can attest that they’re unique and a must-attend for the local scene. Come meet your neighbors. Introduce yourself to local investors. It’s a great night.
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OpenIDFA, A Solution To IDFA-Related App Store Rejections, Debuts | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | Following Apple’s crackdown on mobile apps’ usage of (Identifier for Advertisers) – that is, – Appsfire is proposing an alternative solution. Called “ ,” the technology allows for the type of tracking use cases that Apple’s ban could prevent, while still protecting end user privacy by offering built-in expiration that prevents the possibility of long-term tracking. For background, starting last week, Apple began to that were pulling the IDFA identifier, but were not showing any ads. Likely, this is an effort to prevent apps from tracking their users and warehousing that data for a variety of purposes, ranging from retargeting campaigns to building user profiles. These are thing that Apple (and potentially the government’s regulatory bodies) could see as eroding user privacy. But the change affects other common uses of the IDFA too. Publishers are the only ones who are supposed to access the IDFA, not advertisers. But because ad networks charge advertisers based on installs that are run by end users, the advertiser passes the identifier to the ad network for tracking purposes, explained about the rejections. This use case, apparently, may not be okay. Also, as explained on the , “IDFA allegedly is ok for its initial intent: ad conversion tracking. Advanced advertising techniques, however, need to start tracking earlier, and therefore need the actual IDFA despite not showing an ad then and there.” Or, if you’re just following the news a high-level, OpenIDFA is aiming to offer a way for publishers and ad professionals to continue to perform various tasks surrounding ad tracking, while still taking into account the need for consumer privacy. In Apple’s world, users are able to reset their device’s Advertising Identifier at any time, but it’s an option in iOS’s Settings many users are unaware of, or don’t understand. With OpenIDFA, there’s built-in expiration which prevents data hoarding and long-term tracking – the very real privacy concerns Apple is presumably trying to address with its policy changes. OpenIDFA can only be accessed by those that call it within a day, making it more ephemeral than Apple’s counterpart, while respectful of Apple’s (supposed) intent surrounding these recent changes. The OpenIDFA technology itself is free to use, interoperable, decentralized, but is not open source. Instead, it’s distributed under the Creative Commons license (Attribution BY + NoDerivatives ND). Yann Lechelle, Appsfire’s co-founder and CTO, thought up OpenIDFA “over a few sleepless nights,” and has now shared his creation on . Appsfire, you may recall, has a history of quickly shipping solutions to the developer and advertising community following Apple policy changes to serve as interim solutions. For instance, it after Apple’s decision to phase out usage of this more unique identifier. A soon supported the technology, and later Apple released its own solutions, . |
Between, A Couples App, Pairs Up With Japanese Mobile Giant DeNA | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | Korean startup VCNC has received a strategic investment from Japanese Internet giant to turn its couples app into an open platform for third-party developers. The amount of the deal was not disclosed. DeNA (pronounced D-N-A) is . Its core business is , a social games platform, but it also offers e-commerce and other online services. VCNC, which launched in November 2011, has raised a total of $4 million in funding so far from investors including Softbank Ventures. Between, which has been downloaded 5 million times so far, is among a host of apps for besotted lovebirds who aren’t content with just exchanging texts or emails. Other couples apps include the aptly named , , , , , and . VCNC co-founder Edward Lee said in an email that Between’s competitive strategy has focused on enhancing its core features, chatting and photo-sharing, as well as adding special features for each market it enters. “We have been basically focusing on providing couples with a stable service that will help their relationship. To do this, we have gone through many updates that our users may or may not notice,” said Lee. “However, our metrics show that our users now stay on our service for 510 minutes per month compared to 300 minutes per month last year.” VCNC and DeNA’s strategic partnership will open Between to third-party developers. For users, this means that they will see more features on the app “that can help couples plan activities together, communicate and keep their memories better,” explained Lee. Third-party services will be localized for specific markets as Between expands to Southeast Asia, the U.S. and Taiwan. In South Korea and Japan, VCNC has already started working with different businesses, including restaurants, wedding service vendors, movie theaters, and sports teams to add content to Between’s “Event Box” feature. In Japan, the app also increased engagement by selling stickers specifically made for that market. Between currently monetizes through advertising and in-app purchases like animated stickers, but plans to add e-commerce as an additional revenue stream. For example, couples will be able to purchase gifts for each other, like flower deliveries, through the app, said Lee. In a statement, DeNA president and CEO Isao Moriyasu said “purpose-specific social networks like Between are rapidly gaining popularity worldwide, following the massive adoption of general social networks and communication tools. DeNA sees a great global potential in this highly sophisticated mobile Internet service.” |
Senior International Googler Debu Purkayastha Departs To Join UK VC Octopus | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | , for the last six years a powerful force inside Google’s international business working on M&A and investments, has departed the tech giant’s warm embrace to go solo. His first port of call will be as Entrepreneur-in-Residence with , one of the UK’s better known investors which has backed companies such as Swiftkey, YPlan and Conversocial. Alex Macpherson, head of the Ventures team at Octopus said would be working to identify new investment opportunities and support the entrepreneurs and management teams in the portfolio. Of course, what Purkayastha will also be bringing is a full contact book which, will help extend Octopus’s reach, as it were. At Google, initially as Principal of Corporate Development, Purkayastha spearheaded its global M&A and investment efforts with acquisitions such as ITA Software, Phonetic Arts, Green Parrot Pictures and Gizmo5. He then went on to become Principal of New Business Development, and was closely involved with Google’s Travel and Finance search products since their inception. Prior to Google, he led the M&A team at Sabre in EMEA building on his previous experience as an M&A banker with Salomon Smith Barney, part of Citigroup, in the U.S. and London. Purkayastha was also a prominent proponent of , Google’s project to create a multi-faceted building housing co-working companies and accelerators based in ‘Tech City’ in London, the city’s highest concentration of tech startups. He told us the European startup ecosystem has matured a great deal in the last five to six years and he hopes to “see the next Google emerge from Europe.” |
McGraw-Hill Buys Engrade For ~$50M As It Moves Away From Textbooks, Towards A Future Of SaaS | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | This week, put the finishing touches on an emblematic story in the world of education startups. In 2003, high school student Bri Holt decided he’d heard enough griping from classmates (and teachers) over the lack of a quick, easy way to view their grades online. So, like any budding web developer, he decided to build that simple, online gradebook for his high school. While the product found a number of eager early customers among teachers and classmates, adoption wasn’t exactly explosive. So, as it goes, Holt soon graduated and moved on to other pursuits. Meanwhile, left to its own devices, the gradebook slowly and deliberately continued to attract frustrated teachers looking for an online grading solution. So, thinks kept snowballing. By 2010, nearly seven years later, its user base had grown sizable enough that Holt felt justified to return to developing the product full-time. He decided to officially turn the gradebook into a business and expand its functionality — what would later become Engrade. Fast forward to this week, and publishing giant agreed to purchase Holt’s online gradebook — now better known as — for what TechCrunch hears from sources was around $50 million. To education entrepreneurs, it’s an enviable outcome and a path (albeit perhaps not a totally replicable one) worth emulation. However, all in all, the process, from founding to sale, took over 10 years. In part, it’s not surprising given that building and selling an education company (for any real return) takes years, maybe even decades. Of course, if you build something that solves a problem and that your customer really needs, adoption and customer acquisition will come. As it applies to education: Teachers love simple tools that make their lives easier, and if you build one for them, and work with them to improve it, they’ll be your evangelists. Ultimately, the acquisition appears to be a more-than-positive outcome for Engrade’s founders, its team and its investors. The company had raised about $8 million total over two rounds, including from NewSchools Ventures, Zac Zeitlin, Expansion Venture Capital, Kapor Capital, Javelin Venture Partners, Rethink Education and Samsung Ventures, among others. Granted, to go back a step: Saying that all entrepreneurs need to do is build an amazing product for their customers, which solves a nagging headache, and they’ll have it made, sounds like a piece of cake. Of course, it’s not, and in education, it’s even more difficult. Not only that, but building a simple, well-designed online gradebook is wonderful — if you’re the only one doing it. But, as you can imagine, Engrade was far from being alone. Others were trying to do the same — or join up with other tools to build an education suite. Furthermore, ultimately, a gradebook is more feature than startup, and teachers can’t always write big checks. So, when Hold picked Engrade back up in 2010, he started to turn it into an enterprise education platform, and begin selling Engrade to schools. Engrade quickly added enterprise-grade tools like attendance, discipline and parent-teacher conference tracking, standardized test score analysis, score messaging, report card printing, parent email, SMS alerts and so on. But the real keys: The team built an API that would allow schools to integrate their existing platforms and software into Engrade, and looked to tear down some of the barriers between educational data silos ( ) and aggregate them in one platform. The idea being that grade tracking, test scores, and the different islands of student data could then be accessed more easily by teachers, parents and students via API. In practice, it’s almost a direct parallel to are doing with Student Information Systems (SISes) and APIs. To attract institutions and districts to its enterprise-grade features, the startup has added an array of features, which includes attendance, discipline, and parent-teacher conference tracking, score messaging, standardized test score analysis, report card printing, parent email and SMS alerts, an API for integrating with existing software, and admin-level reporting, among others. With its new funding, the founder says, the team is now looking to tackle one of the biggest problems currently plaguing schools: They are producing a huge amount of data, but that data is spread across a fragmented group of learning management, grading, and tracking services. Teachers may use one service for grade tracking, and another for test scores. To combat this, Engrade is moving to integrate each segment of data into one centralized platform and make it accessible for teachers, students, parents, and third-parties via its API. While this is a positive outcome for Engrade, ultimately, the acquisition says more about McGraw-Hill and its future than Engrade, or really, other startups. Yes, the founders said that companies like McGraw-Hill beginning to acquire education startups is a good sign and could potentially have a positive impact on the space. And, yes, McGraw-Hill Education got a new CEO in January, and already the company’s acquisition pace has picked up. Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Macmillan and Houghton Mifflin becoming acquirers means exit opportunities for education startups that may not have had the capital or the distribution oomph to make any real impact. Maybe they would have instead quietly whimpered their way into the deadpool. The question is whether one believes that the big educational publishing companies can transform themselves from publishing companies into real education technology and EdTech services companies effectively — or in time to save themselves and those startups. Or, more controversial yet, whether it’s a good thing for them to survive at all. (Oh my!) McGraw-Hill gave Engrade a liquidity opportunity, which depending on where you sit, was deserved after 10 years of building, and if it hadn’t, maybe it would’ve been a long time before Engrade got there, if at all. So, from a startup’s perspective, it is a knight in shining armor. However, let’s step back and look at McGraw-Hill’s trajectory. It has a new CEO, it’s becoming acquisitive, and in becoming acquisitive, at least it’s being smart. It’s buying companies it knows. For example, in June, the , a 17-year-old math technology company, which was one of the early movers in adaptive learning tech focused on “the maths and ‘rithmetics.” McGraw-Hill had been working with ALEKS in higher ed for a decade, and had watched the company ramp up its focus on its research-based, A.I. student analytics tools. Not long after, it bought another old hand in (and math particularly), Key Curriculum, which has become known over the decades as a maker of math instructional materials and products. More recently, Key Curriculum’s print publishing side had begun to struggle mightily, and it decided to pivot to focus on its courseware and teacher training technology, etc. Because McGraw-Hill has a big footprint in K-12 and in STEM within primary ed, both were eager to join up rather than continue slogging it out. Together, so we can imagine the thinking goes, McGraw-Hill’s new tech suite for K-12 and STEM will be that much stronger with the addition of better artificial intelligence and adaptive learning tech. That was further made clear when the , the Danish makers of the adaptive learning technology behind LearnSmart, McGraw-Hill’s adaptive learning systems that now have over three million users. Next, it bought Engrade, giving it access to the startup’s data unifying tools, which it can then use to add more substance and functionality to its digital products. Just two days after buying Engrade, McGraw-Hill bought . What do you notice? Nary a publishing startup in sight. Instead, McGraw-Hill is buying up technology companies so that it can transform itself from a textbook publishing company into an educational technology services provider. Whether one considers this akin to the auto industry’s painful shift to a maker of more fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly cars or a painful Frankenstein-ing (or both), we’re watching nearly every publisher do it. See it reflected in the recent , one of the pioneers in free, open textbooks. They all couch these moves in fluffier language, but it’s happening across the board — it’s even some of the original textbook platforms, like Chegg. Once the online textbook and eBook rental hub, all Chegg wants to be now is the OS for students — or an academic services hub, in its PR shrink talk. It’s fascinating to watch the big textbook publishers try to become SaaS companies. In some cases, it’s going to work, and in others it’s going to look more like Mary Shelley’s monster. For McGraw-Hill, it got another great platform and suite of technologies in Engrade. Now it’s a matter of seeing what it can do with it, and its other tech toys. |
Ray Ko Is Social+Capital Partnership’s First Growth Partner | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | We’ve seen the list of value added services offered by VC grow from recruiting to PR to marketing and more. Growth hacking isn’t necessarily something that every VC is clamoring to offer, and there’s a lot of around , who is good at it and how . But the VC firm founded by former Facebook exec is planting its stake in the ground with helping startups create and develop for optimal growth. Part of this is bringing on Ray Ko, who was on as a permanent operational partner, with the title of Growth Partner. Ko was formerly the director of growth and analytics at Facebook, and worked under Palihapitiya, so he knows a thing or two about growth, and product development. When he joined Social+Capital Partnership as an EIR last year, part of his time was spent advising companies, like on making tweaks to the product to scale userbase and engagement. Remind 101, and others, benefitted from Ko’s help that the firm decided to make him a partner that is focused exclusively on teaching startups the discipline and framework for optimizing growth. “It’s about getting these teams to think about growth in a meaningful way,” says Ko. He explains further that his primary goal is teaching companies how to stay committed to a way of thinking around growth, and having implement that process on their own. Social+Capital Partnership and Ko make it clear that growth comes down to the product, and data, and how to create a service that helps and delights customers and users. It’s about creating real growth for startups, not just a temporary jump that can help boost a valuation for the next round of funding. He also cautions that his and the firm’s views are that growth isn’t necessarily just about getting users or viral growth. “It’s not just about getting user numbers up and to the right…growth can be around driving friending, or any interaction that is correlated with engagement for a service,” he says. Another area where Ko is working with startups is around data analysis, and helping read and use the data to understand and then execute ways to grow engagement. For Remind 101, there were a lot of little changes that Ko helped the team implement. Some were as small as creating a loading spinner at the bottom of a page, but others involved tightening the feed back loop and sign up process to activate users. In particular, Remind 101 changed the sign up process for teachers so that instead of going straight to the product, teachers engaged in a walkthrough of the dashboard for better clarity. Within two months of Ko working with the team, Remind 101 was able to double its user base, and now has For Ko, this new, permanent role involved working with five to 6 companies a week, to impart values and a process that can not only drive growth, but sustain growth. He’s currently working with a number of Social+Capital Partnership’s portfolio companies including Brilliant and CreativeLive. It’s definitely not common for VC firms to employ talent that focuses purely on growth. But a few firms in Silicon Valley have placed focus on this. primarily on helping startups create growth and network effects. 500 Startups is its portfolio around growth. Greylock former Twitter, Facebook and Quora alum Andy Johns, as Growth Strategist in Residence last year. Johns is now the director of growth and revenue at Wealthfront. Greylock partner Josh Elman has also been helping portfolio companies with growth and engagement, Outsourcing growth to a VC firm, the way one might with PR strategy, is probably the wrong move. The best way for growth execs in VC firms to add value is to teach the practice and framework around their experiences adding growth, and allowing the startups to learn and implement these skills and tools themselves. It’s similar to the way that Google Ventures design skills via sprints. It’s still early to see the long-term benefits of having a growth expert within a VC firm. Much will come down to whether these startups who are being taught can sustain growth, and use the education to create engagement in other parts of their business and applications. Photo Credit/ |
Make It Sing | Devin Coldewey | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | I have a Jeep about half my own age, and despite the creaks in both our joints, we somehow manage to create a semblance of grace now and then. The vibration of the engine, transmitted through my the bones of my foot as it lies on the clutch (lightly enough not to feather it), or the degree and delta of centripetal force (unconsciously, I lean left to align my head with this off-axis down) explain wordlessly to me the limitations of the tires’ grip as I round a frosty curve, the elusive triple point that lies between momentum, throttle, and gearing. And I’m no racing driver — you have this loop, too, whether you drive a manual or automatic, whether you maneuver aggressively or defensively. It’s something that happens when you and the car reach an accord, so to speak. A few Christmases ago I bought the family a great old axe, but at first its unfamiliarly short and straight haft made me more likely to split my own foot than the morsel of wood awaiting its sentence before me. Over the course of a few dozen swings I found it didn’t want to be wielded like an executioner’s axe, describing as many degrees of a circle as were warranted by the toughness of the wood, but it preferred to be brought down straight, like the guillotine. This necessitated a totally new movement of my hands and body but eventually it struck with greater power and precision than I had been able to muster with its modern, long-necked predecessor. Between me and my Cherokee, and between my hands and the tool, and between you and many of the things you use every day, there is a complicated but elegant feedback loop, a physical dialogue, the topic of which is harmony of operation. The relationship that you build with a device, whether it’s a car, a hammer, a brush, a cello, or anything else, is a self-optimizing relationship. First you make it speak, then you make it sing. Why does this matter? Because so few of the devices we are adopting today will ever sing like that. It’s not just that things are complex. Driving a car is complex; the forces, sounds, visual input, motor coordination and everything else that goes into driving become second nature because we learn to operate the vehicle as an extension of ourselves. And it’s not just that things are virtual. Anyone who has had a complicated workflow and found themselves the master of ten windows spread over three monitors and two operating systems has juggled a dozen tasks and ideas, performing as complex a task as an orchestra conductor or jet pilot. The problem is that we are introducing process that have maxima we can’t minimize, and minima we can’t maximize, by our own efforts. No axe is so difficult to use that you can’t master it in time. But no matter how good you are at using a smartphone, the elegance and quality of your process is, fundamentally, out of your hands. With what devices and services today can you achieve the same level of synchrony as that you enjoy with your car as you parallel park, your fork and knife as you herd peas around your plate, your keyboard as you tap out a caustic response to this article at five characters per second? I see exceptions for coders, who achieve a sort of second sight with the colors and symbology of their language of choice, for gamers whose thumbs make analog sticks and 256-stage buttons dance through a hell of bullets, and for photographers, their fingers blindly yet unfailingly seeking out dials and switches while the brain simultaneously calculates the arc of a ball or the fraction of a second left until the toddler’s smile strikes its apex. But the most ubiquitous device of the modern digital era, the smartphone, is not susceptible to such talents. It may be always in your hand, but it never acts as an extension of it. Oh, sure, you can learn the quickest way to get a picture through retouching and into Instagram — the “Save changes,” “Send to…” and “Submit” button positions memorized, the geotag set to automatic, the service sniffer set to repost and promote the latest item at the requisite SoLoMo watering holes. Congratulations, you’ve built a Rube Goldberg machine that mechanically duplicates button pressing. And what a profoundly inelegant series of arbitrarily-placed button presses it is, interrupted by unskippable dialogues, animations, and workarounds it is! Have you ever remarked on the grace with which an iPhone user closes down unused processes? The casual dignity of a flick to bring down a notifications shade, the inhuman rapidity with which a home button is double-pressed? Of course not. You could practice button-pressing and menu flicking for weeks and your flicks and presses would be little or no more effective than anyone else’s. Wearables? True, gestural tech and limb tracking like that of the Kinect or Myo adds an interesting new way to interact, but these things are meant to capture gross, simple, or repetitive movements; even if the nearly imperceptible twist of the wrist employed by a painter to add an ironic curl to the lips be detected, would it matter? The threshold for whatever gesture he has indicated was reached long before such subtleties were taken into account. You think a photo will show more detail because you pinch-zoomed exactly along the 45-degree line? You think a page will load faster because you clicked at the exact center of the link? As one last example: even in photography is the satisfaction of successful operation being eroded. Many lenses and systems do not actually connect the focus ring to the focal gearing, but instead read the position of the ring digitally, pass that information to the CPU, where its scale, jitter, and acceleration are weighed; this data is returned to the chip in the lens, which adjusts the focus approximately the amount it thinks you would have wanted it to move, had it been mechanical to begin with. Naturally this takes time and is rarely satisfying or accurate. But even if it were advanced to the degree it were imperceptible, it would still be inferior to the mechanical process because it is a simulation of it; if it advanced beyond this, and your focal point (let us, against all odds, assume this works flawlessly), it is no longer you operating the mechanism or the simulation of a mechanism, but rather using a ring-shaped to select from a list of subjects. Just try to make sing. There’s no room for finesse or subtlety in these things because we are not the ones performing the work, or rather, we perform only a small part of it and set into motion a series of events over which we have little or no control. The digitizer, the processor, the transceiver, the microwave repeater, and the server do their work following, but independent of, our input. And before we could even do our part, the developer of the app, the developer of the firmware, the developer of the OS had to do theirs. Layer upon layer of things that are not doing, that can never effect, only . I don’t pretend this is the end of , of course, or any other such absurd extrapolation. But I myself, and I suspect this is true of many others, get no little satisfaction from the process of doing things well, though, and here before us is a generation of tools which can only be instructed to carry out tasks, something you and I will never do better or worse than one another. Egalitarian? Democratic? That’s a charitable interpretation, if you ask me. Eliminating the of doing something well could be a positive change. Eliminating the of doing something well is a negative one. Still, it’s not so dire as I make it sound. The consequence of all this is that there is more room to excel on a different stage, a higher one. If everyone has access to the same resources, it is the one who makes the best of them who takes the prize. Given the finest ingredients and top-notch facilities, no two chefs will produce the same meal. With the same light and the same camera, two photographers capture images that are worlds apart. So this embarrassment of riches comprising (among a hundred other things) the Internet, the social media landscape, and our fantastically powerful mobile devices is nevertheless empowering — but it is no longer the tools with which we interact with that we must make to sing, but what we are making with them. No one can use the Facebook app better than another — but one may use the network to greater effect. No one can apply a filter with more finesse than another — but one may assemble a superior portfolio. No one can make an API return different data than another — but one may put that data to better use. No one can propagate an email through the network faster — but one may be more persuasive. The axe swings itself — but you can still build a better fire. |
Rep. Peter King: Security Reforms At The NSA Will Prevent Future Snowdens | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | Following a stinging report in explaining how Edward Snowden was able to collect his trove of top-secret government documents, (R-N.Y) this morning took to the Sunday show to make the following claim ( ): “A lot that have has been changed; there is monitoring now of what goes on. Snowden would not be able to do it again in the future.” How did Snowden do it? He used automated software that an intelligence official likened to a “web crawler” to the Times, meaning that his collection was, to quote the same individual, “quite automated.” So, over a period of time, Snowden was able to stash top-secret government secrets on auto pilot. That’s embarrassing. Rep. King has an explanation of how the country’s spies couldn’t spot the gap in their own defense: I think this is very reminiscent of what happened with Hanson, the FBI spy, where the FBI, the NSA are so concerned about outside forces penetrating their system that they just did not take the proper precautions internally. And part of that also is because people such as Snowden and others in his position, they want them to have the facility to be able to move quickly, to get things done. And so there were not the restrictions on them that there should have been. There are two elements to the above that are worth highlighting: First, that there was precedent that was ignored by the NSA in regards to the potential of internal threats to the integrity of its data. And, because the NSA wants its workers — internal, and external alike it would appear — to be able to move “quickly,” proper safeguards were not put into place. This is perhaps not as strong a defense as was intended. If your argument is predicated on the NSA being able to move quickly, admitting that “restrictions” that “should have been” in place were not due to an internal bias to action over oversight isn’t calming. (Rep. King , in the wake of the President’s speech proposing reforms that “So long as the NSA can move quickly to protect us against plots, that’s all that is necessary: That the data is there, and the NSA is able to move quickly.”) The takeaway from the above is that given the new strictures, provided competence at the agency in patching the holes in its own chicken coop, we should not expect more Snowdens in the near future. But, as Rep. King also pointed out this morning, it is “too late” to re-tube the Snowden toothpaste. |
Online Ad Company iSocket Raises $5M Round Led by Time Warner | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | , which offers tools for selling online ads, is announcing that it has raised $5 million in new funding. The round was led by Time Warner Investments, with participation from Condé Nast, R&R Venture Partners (a fund created by former Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons and Ronald Lauder), and investor Vivi Nevo. iSocket focuses on sales where publishers (including TechCrunch) have a direct relationship with the advertiser. The company says those sales can require up to 50 steps to complete, so it offers iSocket for Publishers to automate much of the process. “We’re very pleased to have Time Warner and Condé Nast, two of the biggest names in publishing, endorsing our model for advertising sales automation,” said CEO Richard Jalichandra in the funding release. (Jalichandra, formerly the CEO of Technorati, .) In addition to the funding, the company is announcing the launch of iSocket for Advertisers, an ad-buying tool for agencies and brands, as well as the hiring of Kevin McCabe, a former ad executive at Microsoft, as vice president of business development. |
SportPursuit, A Flash Sales Site For Sporty Types, Raises £5M Series B For European Expansion | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | As sites like Fab flash sales, with some VCs towards the longevity of the flash sales model, others remain bullish. Perhaps it’s a case of flash sales working better in some verticals than others. Today, the UK’s , a 1 million member-strong flash sales site for sports enthusiasts, is announcing a series B round of funding. Led by existing investor, London-based VC firm DFJ Esprit, with participation from Silicon Valley Bank, it’s raised £5 million in new capital (which presumably includes venture debt). Others who participated include angel investors William Reeve (chairman of Graze.com and co-founder of Amazon-owned LOVEFiLM), Alex Chesterman (founder of Zoopla), and Alex Saint (CEO of Secret Escapes). The round brings total raised since the flash sales site launched just over two years ago to ~£6.4 million. Following the familiar flash sales model — and similar to U.S.-based — SportPursuit members are sent time-limited “exclusive” offers, which usually expire after 7 days, for products from leading sports brands such as Marmot, Helly Hansen, Canterbury, Garmin, GoPro and Icebreaker. It counts more than 600 brands in total. It’s also talking up the sports category as attracting passionate consumers, making the spontaneity and discovery draw of flash sales a good fit. Meanwhile, the company says its Internet-based, data-driven approach allows it to “give each member something new, relevant and interesting every day”, and that this enables brands to use SportPursuit (and flash sales) as a platform for growth. The new funding will be used to bolster its product line in the UK, bringing on additional brands, as well as for European expansion. Scandinavia is name-checked in particular. Noteworthy, it already claims members outside of the UK, and says it’s shipped products to more than 40 countries. I’m also told that a third of new sign-ups come through organic member-to-member or word of mouth activity. User acquisition is likely one of the main challenges of operating a vertical flash sales site, along with getting enough new and enticing offers in the pipeline to keep those users converting, of course. |
My Secret Life | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | Open the app to see what’s new. Check updates that have been posted on the secrets I’ve commented on first. Click through each of them. Go into the main feed, read down to where I last left off. Scroll back to the top, pull down to refresh. Head back to updates. Lather, rinse, repeat. That’s been my life over the past week, as has become an all-consuming devourer of my time and attention. When I’m reading Secret I’m ignoring everyone and everything else around. When I’m not reading Secret, I’m thinking about Secret. I’m pretty sure this is how an addict feels, and I’m becoming increasingly concerned that if I don’t stop soon, my abuse of this app will have dire circumstances for my work and social life. Maybe I’ll open up too much, let slip something really damning in a moment of weakness, and someone will find me out. Maybe my friends will realize that I’m the one trolling them and they’ll cease to be my friends. Maybe people will just get tired of me ignoring them, while I scan for new secrets over and over again. Maybe I’ll miss an important deadline because I was neck deep in my friends’ gossip. It’s not even the gossip that gets me, not the mean-spiritedness or the trolling or the braggadocio, not the . It’s relating to other human beings in this weird, anonymous state where we’re stripped of all the . It’s being just another voice in the darkness, seeking to be heard for who we really are. |
bRight Switch Wants To Upgrade The Light Switches In Your Home To Android Touchscreens | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | Google’s Android OS is the dominant mobile platform , but it’s also increasingly pushing beyond portables and — including, if delivers on its promises, the boring old wall switches in your home. is a prototype project that’s within touching distance of its $115,000 Indiegogo crowdfunding goal (with less than a day of its campaign left). Its aim is to replace plain old light switch hardware with what’s basically a small tablet fixed to the wall, expanding the functionality of the switch interface beyond simply just switching your lights on and off. The bRight Switch actually plugs into a base unit to convert a wall switch from dumb switch to smart screen, but its makers claim the installation process is an easy job for an electrician. The bRight Switch tablet design is customised for a wall-mounted context to offer features that make sense in such a setting, such as people detection to automatically turn on lights on when someone walks into a room. Other features the smart switch is set to support include the ability to remotely switch your lights on and off via the Internet and a learning mode that gets to know your routines over time and automatically switches lights on and off based on prior usage. Also on board is a security feature whereby you can play back footage recorded by the camera on one of the switches in another room. Plus videocalling (via Skype, or similar) and streaming music via Internet radio services such as Pandora. Other features include a built-in alarm; temperature display; dimmer ability for certain types of bulbs; an intercom feature allowing for chatting between bRight Switches located in different rooms; plus other security features such as setting an alarm to be triggered by motion in a particular room. The units will also run standard Android apps, so you could presumably fire up Angry Birds on your wall if you’re really bored. bRight Switch’s makers are also planning to Of course, all these features are aspirations at this point with only a prototype of the bRight Switch in existence. If the device hits its funding target, which at the time of writing is looking pretty likely, its U.S. based makers reckon they can deliver to backers by July. How much will this smart light switch set you back? They’re charging $75 per switch for non-Bluetooth switches, and $90 for the Bluetooth version. Or $325/$435 for a five-pack of the two respective options. What’s the point of the Bluetooth addition? Added functionality such as the ability to link up to external Bluetooth speakers for “full spectrum sound” — or, getting even more customised about home automation, the ability to track your phone (and therefore you) around the house, providing a “custom personalized experience as you move from room to room.” |
Gillmor Gang Live 02.09.14 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/GillmorGang |
TC Droidcast Episode 21: Is Flappy Bird Really Gone And Are Contextual Launchers Useful? | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | The bird is the word this week on the TechCrunch Droidcast: That pixelated fowl from has wormed its way into everyone’s hearts. We discuss the game, and the strange circumstances surrounding its creation and apparent demise. Also, we debate the usefulness and potential of . This week is also , our annual awards gala to celebrate startups in Silicon Valley, so next week we’ll likely have updates from that event, where there doubtless will be some tangential Android news on display.
Intro music by Direct . |
Google Hopes Its Roadshows Will Help Normalize Glass | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | is still months from its public launch, but after the initial hype, most of the recent news around Glass has been negative. It seems like for every round of Glass gets, it soon gets hit by something negative soon after. Just a few days ago, for example, that the New York Police Department was testing Glass. Google’s problem is that only a very small number of people have ever tried Glass, while everybody seems to have an opinion about it. The company isn’t ready to launch it publicly yet, so since late last year, it’s been taking Glass onto a roadshow around the U.S. This weekend, for example, the team to give people there . The idea here is simple: let people try it, so they can understand how it works. Too many people still think Glass always records everything around you. They may even believe that it has built-in face recognition or other tools that will invade their privacy. The reality is far less interesting, up to the point where at the Atlanta event, Google now shows off a lot of the sports Glassware and so people can see Glass can actually be quite useful outside of showing you the weather and Google+ updates. At its roadshows, Google lets you try Glass, but it also ensures that local politicians get a chance to try it. It’s pretty easy for somebody who wants to make his name in politics to take on Google without ever trying Glass, after all, and get his 15 minutes of fame on local news (and maybe a few minutes on cable news, too). To change public perception of Glass (if that’s indeed still a possibility), Google needs to expand this kind of program before public launch. Until then, Glass will remain a privacy invading, face tagging, covert photo-taking headset for most. |
How NASA Prints Trees | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | Lynn Rothschild has short brown hair and smiley eyes. She cracks jokes about biology and microscopes with ease. Diana Gentry, her decades-younger Ph.D. student, loves classic video games and vegetarian cooking. She lives near Silicon Valley. The two colleagues have a funny banter, and have spent holidays together. But they share one unique goal. They’re trying to 3D-print wood in space. The Stanford University researchers have been working long hours honing a three-dimensional printing process to make biomaterials like wood and enamel out of mere clumps of cells. Pundits say such 3D bioprinting has vast potential, and could one day be widely used to transform specially engineered cells into structural beams, food, and human tissue. Rothschild and Gentry don’t only see these laboratory-created materials helping only doctors and Mars voyagers. They also envision their specific research – into so-called “synthetic biomaterials” – changing the way products like good-old-fashioned wooden two-by-fours are made and used by consumers. Here’s their plan: Rothschild, an evolutionary biologist who works for NASA and teaches astrobiology at Stanford, and Gentry, her doctoral advisee who is trained in biology and mechanical engineering, are working with $100,000 they received last fall from the space agency’s Innovative Advanced Concept Program. They say they’re on track to prove their concept by October: a three-dimensional printing process that yields arrays of cells that can excrete non-living structural biomaterials like wood, mineral parts of bone and tooth enamel. They’re building a massive database of cells already in nature, refining the process of engineering select cells to make and then excrete (or otherwise deliver) the desired materials, and tweaking hardware that three-dimensionally prints modified cells into arrays that yield the non-living end products. In short, your 3D printer could soon be your hardware store, your butcher, and your dentist. “Cells produce an enormous array of products on the Earth, everything from wool to silk to rubber to cellulose, you name it, not to mention meat and plant products and the things that we eat,” Rothschild said. “Many of these things are excreted (from cells). So you’re not going to take a cow or a sheep or a probably not a silk worm or a tree to Mars. But you might want to have a very fine veneer of either silk or wood. So instead of taking the whole organism and trying to make something, why couldn’t you do this all in a very precise way – which actually may be a better way to do it on Earth as well – so that you’re printing an array of cells that then can secrete or produce these products?” Rothschild and Gentry’s setup is different from using basic 3D printers that deliver final products. Instead, the NASA-funded researchers are using 3D printing as an enabling technology of sorts. Their setup involves putting cells in a gelling solution with some sort of chemical signaling and support into a piezoelectric print head that spits out cells that form a gel-based 3D pattern. This team is by no means the only one experimenting with 3D cellular printing. The publicly traded San Francisco company is using a lower-resolution type of printing to create living tissue for medical research and therapeutic applications. Columbia, Mo.-based firm is developing processes to 3D print leather and edible meat. A team last year unveiled a 3D printed synthetic ear. Academic researchers across the globe have been logging multiple related advancements, including making synthetic spider silk from bacteria. Andrew Hessel, a biotechnology analyst who is a distinguished researcher with San Rafael, Calif.-based , said the emerging field of 3D bioprinting is a “pretty wide open space” with different researchers “all dancing on multiple fronts at once.” And the research is not without controversy. Information-technology research firm Gartner, Inc. 3D printing of living tissue and organs will soon spur a major ethical debate. Hessel said the most-complex 3D bioprinting research is being done with the actual engineering of cells. Companies like Organovo, for example, aren’t actually engineering the cells, and instead are differentiating and laying them in a way that they can mature and grow in to functional tissue. Other groups are focused on finding ways to manipulate the print modules so they can manipulate the cells faster and cheaper. And then, Hessel said, are the researchers like Rothschild and Gentry, “who are really just learning how to manipulate cells to do completely new things.” They are using 3D printers because they are the best way to pick and place specific materials on a growth plate. Shaochen Chen, a professor in the Department of NanoEngineering at the University of California in San Diego, sees 3D bioprinting having a major impact on the medical community. “3D printing was not designed for mass production, like making computer chips,” Chen said. “It was designed for personalized, patient-specific products or customer-specific production. So I think it’s a perfect fit for medical, because everybody’s different, for each disease case is different.” Still, full-blown 3D bioprinting is not yet reality. Hessel said researchers are struggling with generating large amounts of bio-based materials in a way where 3D printers can deposit them and really have functional output. Gentry, indeed, said one of her team’s biggest challenges relates to demonstrating and quantifying the actual material yield. Nonetheless, Gentry is optimistic. She sees their work as not only making structural biomaterials through 3D printing, but making them better. “If you looked at a piece of plastic, by in large, a small piece of it is just like a large piece of it; this is not true of most biomaterials,” Gentry said. “They have very interesting properties and structures on a micro or sometime molecular scale that stack and create these sort of emergent macro-scale properties. So they behave differently in different directions. We are trying to show that we can manufacture these materials so that those really fine-grained properties work for us.” She envisions products like wood reinforced with carbon fiber, or equipped with copper nano-wires that change its electrical conductivity, sitting someday on hardware store shelves. “I want to see if I can add a new class of materials to the palette of materials that people make things out of,” she said. |
Flappy Bird Is Gone From The App Store | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | Yesterday, the developer behind Flappy Bird he would be removing the remarkably/mysteriously successful game from the App Store in just 22 hours. Sure enough, the game appears to be gone. And in its spot on the #1 spot on the iOS leaderboard? A Flappy Birds clone. Flappy Bird’s developer, Dong Nguyen of Vietnam, suggested that the many pressures of success had become overwhelming. I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' users, 22 hours from now, I will take 'Flappy Bird' down. I cannot take this anymore. — Dong Nguyen (@dongatory) It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore. — Dong Nguyen (@dongatory) He later followed up to clarify that the game was being removed for legal reasons, nor would he sell Flappy Birds to someone else. According to with The Verge last week, Dong Nguyen disclosed that the game was making upwards of $50K per day in ad revenue. Many internet commenters had suggested that the tweet was something of a ploy to bump downloads up even higher; that Dong would have a “last minute change of heart” after the tweet lead to a surge of downloads and further secured the game its #1 spot. Given that the game is seemingly gone from both the iOS and Android stores (with a million clones left in its wake), that doesn’t appear to be the case. The strikingly-similar game that now takes its place aboard the iOS App Store’s free games chart is called “Ironpants”, and the concepts are essentially identical: You’re controlling a flying thing. Tap to make flying thing go up. If your character touches anything, you lose. You’re a superhero instead of a bird, you’re dodging crates instead of Mario-inspired pipes — but at its core, it’s pretty much the same game. The main difference I’ve noticed so far: the ads are significantly more in-your-face. For the curious: according to , Ironpants was first added to the app store on January 27th of 2014, 10 days after Flappy Bird first reached the number 1 spot (January 17th) and roughly 2 weeks before Flappy Bird was removed (February 9th.) Could the bird return, if Nguyen decide to bring it back? It’s feasible. It depends on how it was “removed” from the App Store. If the app package was removed from iTunes Connect entirely, Nguyen would need to resubmit it and wait for Apple’s approval, and it will have lost its previous download count, reviews, etc. If he just turned off its country-by-country availability, bringing the game back could be a matter of ticking a few check boxes. If you’d downloaded Flappy Bird before it got the self-dropped App Store ax, you still be able to download it indefinitely if you ever delete it from your phone. The download button will be hiding in your iCloud “Purchased” list, which is in turn tucked away into the Updates screen in the app store. |
How CodePath Trains Developers To Build In A Mobile World | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 2 | 9 | TechCrunch Late in 2013, I stumbled upon two bootstrapped entrepreneurs with deep backgrounds in mobile development — and — who were on very focused, technical, educational mission: To take some of the best web developers and train them to develop for mobile platforms. Everyone knows it’s impossible to find good mobile engineers across iOS and Android, and with talent either locked up in big companies or fragmented across so many startups, their startup was born: , an intense, live, workshop-style bootcamp for engineers to work on mobile development projects. For this weekly mobile column, I invited the CodePath founders share their vision, as well as to explain the program to engineers and companies who may be interested. Our mission is to empower software developers, free of charge, to continuously expand their skillsets across new specializations and platforms. To start, we have designed an accelerated program that effectively ramps up engineers in iOS and Android development. The programs we offer are supported by paid training and sponsorship from mobile startups. CodePath was formed largely out of our shared passion for teaching and curriculum development. About a year ago after our startup was acquired, we had the opportunity to design and develop a project-based mobile curriculum for Yahoo. We ran hundreds of engineers there through this program and saw the opportunity to bring this unique format and structure to the startup community at large. Fortunately, there are a wealth of great programs and low cost curriculums that already exist for junior or aspiring developers. However, not many companies are addressing the needs of the professional developer community. We find that there are many inefficiencies in the way that developers today ramp up on the latest technology stacks. In addition, seasoned developers often find transitioning out of their existing specialties to be quite difficult. While we strive to keep our curriculum as open as possible to everyone today, there’s an incredible value in initially focusing our programs towards the professional audience. There is definitely an almost overwhelming amount of online resources and we certainly don’t miss developing in a pre-Stack Overflow era. However, there are many advantages to learning within a structured, accelerated program with an emphasis on best practices and standards. We think the programs are valuable in part for the same reason people find value from a personal trainer at the gym or for the same reasons an athlete has a coach. We think the weekly code reviews, well-designed curriculum and peer collaboration on real projects can make the learning process considerably more fun and effective. The courses are more similar than they are different. First and foremost our programs are about creating an effective learning environment and connecting talented engineers together so they can build interesting products. Both courses give engineers a chance to ramp up on the respective platforms, adopt the best practices surrounding mobile development, and explore how to design enjoyable user experiences. The iOS course is focused around the latest iOS 7 technologies and techniques. The Android course is focused on introducing the world of modern Android development with KitKat. In that sense, the development environments, tools, and platforms are what separate the two courses while the spirit and the format remain the same. Absolutely, we think part of the strength of Android in particular is the proliferation of Android-based devices that extend far beyond the phone. Automobiles, eyewear, tablets and even military helmets are quickly becoming a part of the Android ecosystem and we are interested in actively encouraging exploration of those platforms as they are adopted. We are currently exploring the various ways our programs can provide value to companies. We think increasing the pool of talented iOS and Android engineers is in the best interest of many local companies. We have been working with companies like Yahoo, Hulu, Zendesk, MyFitnessPal, and Riviera Partners to sponsor our past CodePath programs. For companies that need mobile training for their engineers, we allow them to reserve paid seats in our San Francisco courses. Any company interested in getting involved as a sponsor or inquiring about mobile training should contact us at to learn more. Right now we are very focused on providing the best programs that we can within San Francisco but we are committed to expanding these programs in time to other cities. Here are a few of our key stats: The average participant has a CS degree and 4 years of professional experience CodePath has a diverse group of students and about 30% of our alumni are female engineers Over 100 engineers have taken our program in San Francisco in small cohorts of 15-30 CodePath has trained 200+ engineers at Yahoo and helped many transition to the mobile team Our current volunteer mobile mentors include senior iOS and Android developers from Nest, Climate Corporation, Edmodo, Couple.me, Klout, Couchsurfing, and FlipBoard CodePath alumni projects include , , and As an experienced engineer, learning the nooks and crannies of any new framework takes a significant time investment. One difference in web and mobile is there is not really a distinction between a front-end mobile developer and a back-end mobile developer. A successful mobile developer must be full stack and must consider user interaction as much as technical implementation. As part of our program, we emphasize the level of visual detail required to create polished mobile experiences, which is often a new challenge for web developers that are currently focused on scalability and infrastructure. One other challenge is the difference in architecting, testing and deploying for embedded devices as opposed to applications in the cloud. Right now we rely on people to spread the word about our mobile courses to friends and colleagues. If you know any engineers interested in learning iOS or Android, have them sign up for the . If you know of companies that have mobile training needs or would be interested in sponsoring our initiatives, we’d love to meet them. If you are a mobile engineer interested in mentoring or teaching, we definitely want to talk with you. Feel free to reach out to us for any reason at . |
How To Keep Your Team And Make Your Startup Acquisition Succeed | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | As a founder, has had two successful outcomes. An expert in gaming, he cofounded , which merged with Sorrent then was renamed Glu Mobile. He also was cofounder and CEO of Playfish, which was acquired in 2009 by EA for $400 million. He is now a co-founder at , which led the seed round in Supercell among others. I caught up with Segerstrale to get his thoughts on how to manage acquisitions and make them successful. There are many facets of an acquisition, but Segerstrale focuses on the individual people involved and the often-overlooked things that can keep a team from leaving after an acquisition. First, when you combine your company with someone else’s, you are getting married in a very real sense. It pays to spend a lot of time courting first. “Spend as much time with the acquirer as possible, specifically the CEO,” Segerstrale says. “You should talk about the business, but more importantly about values and culture to understand whether the companies are likely to be successful working together.” It’s worth it to invest this time before an acquisition. If you don’t, you could end up being acquired and spending a couple “miserable” years with a company watching your baby gradually wither to nothing as a result of a poor fit, he says. “I’ve seen it happen, and I know that’s a horrible place to be.” Getting to know all levels of the buying company is critical. Not just the senior level management but as many of the people in the company you’ll be interacting with as possible. This can help you stay in control after the acquisition and help you decide which departments you would work with more closely and which to avoid. If necessary, find a way to split the task with a co-founder so that one of you can run your company, leaving the other to explore how to best leverage people and resources within the company you’ll be joining. Ultimately, what keeps founders and employees happy after they’re acquired is not just the financial considerations but other things like finding a meaningful way to contribute to a company’s direction and learning interesting things. “For entrepreneurs,” Segerstrale says, “at least as important as the monetary dreams and aspirations of an acquisition is: does the buyer have similar approaches to company-building and long-term vision?” Segerstrale also says that talent determines outcomes in rapidly changing marketplaces, which is where acquisitions most often occur. As CEO on either side of the transaction, you should look at everything through the lens of your key talent. Acquisitions often fail because the combined new management team fails to get the key talent engaged, he says. “When you structure your deal, keep in mind your star coder, artist or architect. How can you set everything up, financially and otherwise, to keep your star talent as long as possible? How can you make life post-acquisition as exciting as it can be?” Founders have to give employees something to believe in. Explain your new vision and how this is an exciting thing and make it real to your key talent. Star talent values the autonomy and impact they have at startups. Find a way to preserve that in the new set up and you will have the best chance at keeping them for as long as possible. “There are often a lot of empty words in acquisitions,” Segerstrale says. “Employees are going to look at you and try and figure out if you’re still calling the shots or not. Make sure you do. They’ll hear from the acquiring company CEO also so those messages have to match.” No financial retention package can replace or replicate the intrinsic motivation of a hungry startup. Sometimes it can be hard to get the buyer to agree to some of these culture issues. But often it’s just as important as the financial terms. It can be worth reminding the acquiring CEO that retaining culture and “how things are done” is critical to the talent and the performance of the newly acquired entity. “In the end, you set up your venture to change the world and likely to work with people you like in an environment and culture you enjoy,” he says. “Your employees likely joined you for the same reasons. Keep those things true and you have the best chance to succeed even post an acquisition.” One example of how an acquisition can stumble on a seemingly simple issue is integrating two companies’ levels, titles and compensation systems. People often don’t care about this pre-acquisition where titles mean little, but once you integrate, people do care about how they compare to peers. In other words: “Am I a director or senior director?” “Level 21 or Level 23?” Every ounce of energy spent worrying about that is lost from worrying about product or customers, Segerstrale says. He advises even keeping separate email addresses if possible. “Get a commitment not to touch those things. Or don’t integrate with the HR of the acquiring company until you are ready. The less you distract talent with a changing personnel situation the more likely you are to succeed.” This is not to say you shouldn’t integrate on some level with the acquiring company. After all there was some business logic in the deal in the first place – some reason it makes sense for these two companies to be one. And sometimes the right answer is to integrate everything on the first day, but sometimes it’s not. “In one of my companies I was so worried about disruptions that I ended up missing many opportunities to grow the business,” he says. Your level of integration needs to be consistent with your mission. For example, one reason for your integration may be to combine your startup’s tech expertise with a big brand buying you. But, Segerstrale says, delivery of that requires a certain level of integration that you will then simply have to execute on. Integrating too slowly will undermine your performance just as surely as integrating too rapidly will. Keeping your staff informed is key throughout the process. You want to create an honest narrative about why this acquisition is exciting and why you’re doing this, he says. “Don’t pretend tomorrow is going to be the same. Be honest and say: this one adventure is ending and another is starting. Celebrate the journey this far and then start again from scratch and take nothing for granted. Cajole them, seduce them and explain to them that this new thing is just as exciting and interesting.” The staff will look at you and implicitly think, “Is my CEO going to stick around?” and “Does what s/he says count?” So make promises you can keep, Segerstrale says. “The worst thing is to say that things are going to be just like they were before or to make a commitment you can’t keep.” The small things can make a big difference, Segerstrale says. Say you had free fruit at your startup and you told employees they will still get it at the new company. But then the acquiring CEO says you can’t. “If you have to break a promise to staff, you’ve lost. If you break a promise about fruit, what does this mean about all the other future big things like company strategy?” Segerstrale’s focus on talent also applies to his investments. With gaming companies, he looks primarily for the talent across the team. “In gaming you care more about the art director and the lead coder than the CEO. The CEO matters a lot once the company becomes successful, but before you have a product out the CEO only matters to the degree they can contribute to the first product and retain the key talent working on it.” The likelihood of a gaming startup being successful is much higher if the team worked together before. Especially for game companies, the product is the soul of the team. “Looking at the product is like looking the team in the eye – you get an intuitive feel for who they are and what they care about,” he says. Asked about how he deals with conflicts over selling a portfolio company, Segerstrale says his firm, which was recently involved in the $1.5 billion Supercell-SoftBank deal, always supports founders. “We are unequivocally supportive of what founders want to do. We try to be helpful. We give our thoughts on tactics and who’s worth talking to, and who’s not. But ultimately we’re entrepreneurs ourselves, so we think of ourselves as an adviser or helper to frame decisions. But ultimately it’s the founder’s call.” Initial Capital only invests its own money and doesn’t take outside capital, Segerstrale says. “We think of ourselves more as co-founders of companies we invest in than financially motivated investors. We don’t have any fund logic to worry about because we’re investing our own money. We don’t have to worry about raising another fund. That gives us complete freedom.” He’s still looking for gaming companies and believes you can still build massive businesses, pointing to examples like Supercell. But he says much of gaming is a mature market and requires a focused plan. “It’s no longer early in mobile. You can no longer raise a tiny amount of money and hope to get there.” Initial Capital also invests in the broader app ecosystem, including Internet of Things, consumer health and enabling technology-oriented companies. |
null | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 2 | 7 | null |
CrunchWeek: Microsoft’s New Leader, Twitter’s Stock Tumble, And The Secrets Behind Secret | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | It’s that time of week for an episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to chat about the most fascinating stories of the past seven days in tech! This week, Colleen Taylor, Alex Wilhelm and I chatted about Microsoft’s , Twitter’s and , and the , the new “anonymish” sharing app that launched this past week. |
Louis CK And The Hare Krishnas Can Make You A Better Entrepreneur With This One Trick | James Altucher | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | I once wanted to be a stand-up comedian but I was too afraid to even go on a stage. Then I wanted to do a TV show but kept getting rejected. So finally I switched industries and started an Internet business. Louis CK is my favorite comedian. He is the high priest of understanding our culture. I watch him every day. I watch the same routine over and over. I can spend hours breaking down every line of his routines. I watch him before I give talks because I get to borrow his confidence. I used to watch him before dates. I even watch him before I hang out with my kids. I first saw him perform live in 1995 or 1996 at the Aspen Comedy Festival. I went two years in a row. One time I bored Dave Chapelle to death. I kept talking and talking and finally he said, “Excuse me, I have to get out of here and find me a girl for tonight!” Another time there I asked Al Franken if I could interview him. He looked me up and down and said, “No” and walked on. Fair enough. Now he’s a U.S. senator, and I just write random stuff on my Facebook wall. They both said “no” and moved on. But I needed them to say “yes” and didn’t know how to get them to. — Louis CK did a bit in his last show that was sort of outrageous. It begins with killing kids and ends with justification for slavery. In it, to get laughs, he uses the exact same sales technique that has made the Hare Krishnas billions of dollars and should be used by everybody on a daily basis. He Everyone laughs and claps. He has funny delivery. He says “Of course not, Of course not, but maybe, but maybe,” and then he holds his hand over his eyes and says “if we all do this for a year we’d be done with nut allergies forever.” Everyone laughs. It’s funny. He has some compassion in it (“ , “), so he’s forgiven. I forgive him. He makes it funny and we clap. He does a few more. Then he says, “ … slavery was bad.” And suddenly he hit a third rail. Everyone stops for a second. They don’t know whether to clap or not. It’s against the rules! But then he hits the entire point of the joke. The reason the joke is so funny. The entire reason Louis CK is an artist and has risen to the top of his profession. He goes up against that awkward pause from the audience. He then goes past it and brings them with him. Society (parents, schools, colleagues, government, etc.) builds up walls. Evolution builds up walls. The walls are in our brain. Art bangs against them and forces us to go “OUCH!” or have some other reaction (laughter, creation, innovation, excitement). When people stop laughing for a second at the word “slavery,” Louis CK stops his joke and unveils the real joke: “Listen, listen, clapped for dead kids and the nuts.” He then mimicked the clapping. In every way he reminds them of how funny they thought kids dying of nut allergies was. And how ludicrous it is but they still laughed. Then he points out the whole audience: “So you’re in this with me now, do you understand? You don’t get to cherry pick. Those kids did to you.” And now the audience was laughing again. Even louder than before. Some people were cheering. He was ready now for his joke on slavery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkjmzEEQUlE This was what was funny. The reality is: they did have the right to cherry pick. But he used a clever psychological technique to make them think they didn’t. And it’s the same trick Hare Krishnas have used to raise billions of dollars. It’s a trick you need to be aware of if you want to succeed in life — to say “no” when you need to and to help others get to “yes” when you need them to. When the Hare Krishnas first started preaching in airports they had nothing going for them. Nobody would listen to them. They raised no money. They were failures. Who would give money to a strange-looking shaved guy dressed in robes with totally different beliefs who had his hand out? Answer: Nobody. Then everything changed and they became the fastest-growing religious movement in the United States in the 1970s. They raised billions of dollars. What did they do? What changed? Flowers. The first thing they did when they met you was give you a 5-cent daisy. In fact, since so many people threw out the daisies, they often gave you a used daisy because they would fish them out of the garbage cans. And yet, once you took that daisy, your brain flipped an evolutionary switch. You were ! You would now to listen and maybe even agree with the rest of their story and give them money. There are two rules at work here: If someone does something for you, the brain feels obligated to return the favor. Evolution weeded out the people who would not do anything for you. People learned to cooperate like this so they would survive in the jungle. covers this rule in his book “Influence.” That said, I do not believe this rule is applicable here but a slightly different and more critical rule. The law of reciprocity is really just a subset of the rule that governs almost every transaction and conversation in our lives. . If you say “yes” to something small, your brain has already decided, “this is someone I can trust and say ‘yes’ to.” For instance, in a study, if someone asks you “Would you be interested in hearing about causes that can help the environment?” (almost everyone says “yes” because that’s an easy “yes”) then you are about 50 percent more likely to donate when a donation is asked for than if you hadn’t been asked that simple first question. Commitment bias works because you had to know who was reliable in the jungle 100,000 years ago. You had to know if someone was on your side or not. If they demonstrated it once, then chances are they are on your side and were trustworthy. Do you want to know what the most popular article ever on my blog is? It’s the one where I say nobody should ever own a home again. People hate this article. They hate it because there’s probably nothing else in life with higher commitment bias. If you just put $100,000 (or $10,000) down on a home and more on maintenance, taxes, etc., you don’t want anyone telling you you made a mistake. You have commitment bias as opposed to the second before you put any money down. Louis CK made use of the second law (the first law is implicit – he is putting on a show for them so he is giving them something) in this joke. He got them to laugh to a milder version of the joke (peanut allergies, where even he says, “of course not. I have a nephew with peanut allergies and I would be devastated if something were to happen to him, so he shows his compassion. He’s one of us.) But now they are in. They took the flower. Now they have to hear the more extreme version of the joke (“slavery”) and they even have to laugh (like people would have to donate billions to the Hare Krishnas). He knew this (“You’re all in this with me now” even though they weren’t really) and their brains were sucked in and, when you listen to the video, they are actually laughing even harder now. When dealing with people in business or even in relationships, get them to “yes” on something simple. Then they are in. This is why learning the “Power of No” is so important. It fights our evolutionary tendencies that were important for 500,000 years but are no longer as important. I love this joke. I laughed. Because he also makes subtle reference to history. Each major language in the world — English, Spanish, Han Chinese, and Arabic — are the languages of genocidal empires that at one point or another conquered the entire world. So as much as you like to speak English, and as much as you like our culture and art and everything, it’s the result of centuries of conquest and killing and slavery. And we live in it and order take-out and watch “American Idol” and participate in the culture. So you’re all in on this now. You can’t cherry pick your history. Which is what Louis CK’s joke is really about without him explicitly saying it. It turns history upside down. It uses clever psychological tactics that are used (and often abused) in marketing, and he gets people to laugh all at the same time. That’s why Louis CK is the master. That’s why I love him. |
Book Review: In “Different,” Finding Better Ways To Build Brands In A Noisy (And Boring) World | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | While Silicon Valley and the rest of the tech world may not be in a bubble, it sure is quite a boisterous place. There are now millions of apps in the various app stores, and it seems that every day a dozen or more companies are founded. Yet, despite the deluge of funding announcements and product releases, few startups will capture the imagination of users and become breakout successes. Some founders, though, have been able to build spirited and successful brands in just the last few years, such as Snapchat, Nest, and Uber. What is the cocktail behind the success of these companies, and how can we replicate that in other startups? Some books age well, and “ ” is no exception. First published in paperback two years ago, the book is a lurid text that seems more applicable to startups today than during its actual publication. delivers a stark assessment on the current state of product strategy and marketing. Moon, who chairs the MBA program at Harvard Business School, writes that marketing experts “[…] have gotten stuck in a self-defeating cycle of competition. Or, to put it more forcefully, our competitive competence is killing us.” She decries this “competitive herding,” in which companies rigorously and slavishly analyze their competitors to determine their next product improvements, while losing focus on the unique strengths their products bring to a category. Moon argues that this competitive herding leads to two types of evolution within product categories. The first, augmentation-by-addition, is what happens when one-liter bottles become two-liter bottles, or more pertinently, when Apple adds a Touch ID sensor to its iPhones, or Samsung adds an NFC chip to its Galaxy smartphones. Every generation has to get smaller, slimmer, sleeker, lighter, and brighter as well as offer us more features than ever before. The other story is augmentation-by-multiplication. Rather than producing one well-designed product for a market, companies try to compete by building dozens of products to target every small niche in the category as possible. Think about gaming apps like Angry Birds ( of them right now in the Apple App Store if you include free versions), or Samsung’s entire phone, phablet, and tablet line (Samsung lists 32 Android devices ). While this multiplication tends to be beneficial to a point, as a product category becomes mature, the number of products start to become a bit ridiculous. The reality is, none of this should matter to startups, but founders often find it hard to completely ignore the contours of an existing product space. There is incredible pressure to focus — to find the MVP — that startups too often end up being part of the maturation of a product space rather than the driver of the next evolutionary step. While “Different” focuses on massive consumer brands, its first message can still be applied to fledgling companies: startups too often define themselves by comparison, hoping to find a small niche against an incumbent rather than to alter the underlying dynamics. Unlike so many critical analyses though, Moon provides avenues to pursue to avoid the competitive herd. She bundles three types of brand strategies that she believes provide alternative ways to change the brand conversation. And while Moon is writing for an established brand audience — which is unfortunate, since the tech startup world is so rich with possible case studies — her lessons are just as appropriate to startups, if not more so. Take “reversal brands” like IKEA and JetBlue, which build loyalty with customers by taking options and features away from us. It sounds almost repulsive to believe that consumers could love a company that removes choices, but that is precisely what these companies do. In the startup world, a great example of a reversal brand would be Snapchat. For years, social networks have tried to amass large stores of data on us, allowing us to publish and discover relevant content. Then along comes an app that completely throws away that entire approach, and tells the customer that their data will be quickly deleted. It sounded , but today, Snapchat is one of the fastest-growing companies in the history of venture capital. The second type of company Moon analyzes is what she terms “breakaway brands,” which are products that are defined using vocabulary from a different product space than we expect. Take a company like Nest, . Thermostats have been in existence for decades, and yet their features have barely changed. Then all of a sudden, Tony Fadell and his team redefine the thermostat (and also the smoke detector) as a learning computer at the center of the home. Suddenly, the way we think about that device on the wall is not just as a useless box to adjust once after moving in, but potentially the way we command our whole house. Hostile brands, Moon’s third and final category, are the most tricky marketing category. These brands actively polarize people into two groups, and they actively try to create a love-or-hate relationship with the company. The goal is not to be agreeable, and not to bother trying to make everyone your friend. It’s not just about gaining customers, but excluding customers who aren’t worth your time. Among prominent startups today, Uber is a decent example of this strategy. With issues like surge pricing repeatedly flaring up, the company could change its stance on supply economics to satiate complaining customers. Instead, it tries to please those who agree with its strategies, and those customers extend a deep loyalty to the business. To her credit, Moon doesn’t argue for a formulaic approach to marketing. Building great startups begins with defining difference with the companies already in a marketplace, but starting out different is not enough. Instead, the brands that break out are those that can maintain their products’ differences even under the most relentless criticism. The whole world wants you to become homogenous, and only an incredibly focused and formidable founder is going to be able to rebuff and harness that criticism while building something different – and fundamentally interesting. If Moon leaves us with any message, it is that “[…] we are forgetting to be different.” Perhaps that is why so many consumer Internet companies receive such press attention. The stories of these companies are fundamentally at odds with our perception of how brands should operate. How can Uber keep growing when it surges prices? How can Nest succeed at making the thermostat engaging? How can Snapchat compete in a market like social networking without any data? Yet, that disbelief is what defines these great companies, and makes almost all of their mundane competitors less appealing. For a petite volume, “Different” has a valuable and important message that should not be missed by startup founders. Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon. Crown Business, 2011, 288 pages. |
One Year Later, Unlocking Your Phone Is Still A Crime | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | . A year ago a by the Librarian of Congress that made it a crime to unlock your cellphone (changing the settings on the phone to be able to be used on a different phone carrier). When that ruling went into effect, there was public outcry across the technology community that such a basic technology was now illegal to use. Thousands of Americans became potential criminals for exerting their basic property rights by plugging their phones into their computers and running a simple computer program. The resale market for phones began to dry up and websites allowing unlocking to avoid liability or stopped servicing US phones: on behalf of some of the largest companies with the largest lobbying shops in Washington, D.C. (Though it should be noted that over 100 wireless carriers, including T-Mobile and Sprint, were always against the ruling). Many big companies use their lobbying might to go after their competitors – that’s not particularly uncommon – but the phone companies are perhaps unique in also going directly after their own consumers. The resulting public outcry, perhaps the largest online response since SOPA/PIPA, led the White House, FCC and Members of Congress to condemn the ruling by the Librarian of Congress and to support cellphone unlocking. One year later, despite an overwhelming consensus in favor of unlocking, unlocking your phone, without permission from your carrier, is still a crime. It’s difficult to find another issue that has such overwhelming and bipartisan support, and it’s difficult to understand why Congress still refuses to act. Today, legislation is sitting in Congress to fix this problem that they have chosen not to vote upon. A year ago the Atlantic published my piece Many people were repulsed by this misuse of governmental power. Within the next month, a White House petition, created by Sina Khanifar, on this issue reached over 114,000 signatures, the first time a White House “We the People” petition has received over 100,000 signatures. As a response to the petition, the White House came out in full support of cellphone unlocking which cascaded into support from the FCC, Members of Congress and outside groups. Our campaign on cellphone unlocking resulted in multiple pieces of legislation being introduced with bicameral and bipartisan support. Today, we, advocates of unlocking, have been unable to find anyone on or off Capitol Hill against fixing cellphone unlocking. This even includes the very organization that lobbied to make unlocking illegal: the Wireless Association (CTIA) fought to make unlocking illegal, and now, given the public backlash, claims publicly that they support legislation for unlocking (to effectively reverse their lobbying efforts). In a recent debate with Ben Sheffner (MPAA VP), he seemed to imply that even the MPAA, the organization that had been most involved in writing the underlying statute, would be supportive of efforts to solve this problem. The verdict is in: The stakes are the very future of the mobile market which is to be a $341.4 billion market in 2015. How should Congress fix the problem? FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai’s is on the solution is perhaps the most eloquent: “Let’s go back to the free market. . . [allow consumers] to take their mobile devices from one carrier to another without fear [and] those who help consumers unlock their phones [shouldn’t] be prosecuted either. . . These fixes should be permanent, so that consumers [and] developers don’t have to worry about the law shifting on a whim.” Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), H.R. 1123, has introduced one piece of legislation which is a stop-gate measure to reverse the decision of the Library of Congress temporarily and then allow for the Librarian to rule on this issue all over again. But, many organizations and supporters of the campaign on unlocking have argued that this legislation is insufficient as it would provide serious uncertainty to the market – in two years unlocking would likely be illegal all over again. Venture capitalists have discussed how they will not invest in such an uncertain market (included in my written ). Many advocates have argued: if everyone now agrees that unlocking should be lawful – then should it not be lawful permanently? Fixing this problem requires permanent legislation and ensuring that those developing the software and tools for unlocking are also free to do so (see my written and to the Commerce Department on this issue). For these reasons, few outside organizations and experts consider H.R. 1123 to be a whole solution to the problem. However, H.R. 1123 has passed the House Judiciary Committee and could be voted upon by the House under a suspension of the rules in short order – and Congress should do so immediately despite the legislation’s shortcomings (a stop-gate is better than the status quo). Alternative legislation has been introduced by Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Jared Polis (D-CO) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), H.R. 1892, which would legalize technologies like cellphone unlocking permanently but would also legalize other technologies without infringing purposes, such as jail breaking (rooting) of devices. This legislation has received widespread endorsements from activists, technology experts and think-tanks including R Street, FreedomWorks, Generation Opportunity, Cascade Policy Institute, Harbour League, Let Freedom Ring, Public Knowledge and Electronic Freedom Foundation. As the House Judiciary Committee is having a series of hearings on reforming copyright law, Congress should have a hearing on this legislation without delay – thus far none have been announced. This is the only legislation that permanently addresses the problem at hand and provides certainty to the market. Unfortunately, while the White House has claimed to support cell phone unlocking, the U.S. Trade Representative is currently negotiating for a major international trade agreement which could make any permanent fix on unlocking impossible. The Trans Pacific Partnership Treaty, being secretly negotiated by 400 industry representatives, affects and includes 12 countries. While the treaty has been shrouded in extreme secrecy (as a Congressional staffer I couldn’t read the treaty) from versions of the treaty we know that the US has been negotiating for a version of the TPP which would make any permanent solution on cellphone unlocking . If the TPP treaty is signed and ratified, with the current language still intact, it would make permanently fixing cellphone unlocking . This seems like a classic example of policy laundering – companies were losing this argument with the public and with Congress so now they are secretly inserting an anti-free market provision in a free trade agreement. At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has not waited for Congress to act. The FCC exerted significant pressure upon the phone companies: “Enough time has passed, and it is now time for the industry to act voluntarily or for the FCC to regulate.” As of December 12, the major phone companies agreed to allow their consumers to unlock their devices. While this development was terrific news for consumers and a massive step forward, it still kept the technology itself illegal. This means that if a consumer chooses to unlock his or her own device without permission, let’s say when they travel abroad, it is still a felony punishable by five years in prison. Which is why this unilateral decision by companies needs to be coupled with Congressional action to solve the underlying problem that Congress created. Further, some of the unilateral agreements that the phone companies agreed to may be more bark than bite. In the Wireless Association’s letter they claim that they already have “competitive and robust unlocking policies,” which was a similar claim that they made in 2012. That claim was shown to be by the Commerce Department when they investigated consumer’s ability to unlock their phones. If phone companies say that they will allow consumers to unlock, but then create burdens to make it effectively impossible as they have done in the past, then consumers are the ones who lose. Therefore, given the demonstrated duplicity of these companies, consumers must have the ability to use this technology with or without their permission. If consumers own the property, they should be able to use the property as they see fit. And there is other reason for concern. Businesses offering smartphone trade-in programs like Gazelle, the nation’s leading consumer electronics trade-in site, have found that purchasers of phones, acquired from customers that are eligible for unlocking, are being denied access to unlocking by carriers, even though the same phones are routinely unlocked when taken as a trade-in by those same carriers. The voluntary agreement with the FCC does not clearly address this circumstance. The Wall Street Journal has reported that this has been devastating to the independent resale market for eligible phones. As can be seen from this graphic in the Wall Street Journal (right), the lack of availability of unlocking has had a serious impact upon the resale market. A free market will empower a thriving phone resale market. It’s time to remove the legal and regulatory barriers. So today, one year after the Librarian of Congress’s ruling, Congress needs to act quickly. It’s been a year, it’s time to have its first real hearing on this issue and invite a number of different voices to express their perspectives. Since H.R. 1892 is the only legislation that has received wide support, it therefore deserves a real hearing. As the House Judiciary Committee is evaluating how to bring copyright into the 21st century they should investigate, how do old copyright policies affect technologies? Specifically: Why is unlocking your phone a copyright issue to begin with? And, should we continue to delegate decisions on what technologies to ban to the Librarian of Congress? |
Aol Gives Us Our Full 401K Matching Back, Calls “Babies” Comment A Mistake | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | Aol has backtracked on a matching until the end of the year, a decision that could potentially cost employees like myself thousands of dollars. Thank you. Aol announced the change by sending out a company-wide memo earlier today. Note: Somehow TechCrunch only gets a hold of the positive memos. AOLers – We began our journey together in 2009, and for the last four years have had an employee-first culture. As I have said before, the ability to change is a strategic advantage for us. With benefit costs increasing, we made a strategic, financial decision last year to revise our employee matching 401K program from a per-pay-period contribution to a yearly lump-sum contribution. We then communicated this decision in the fall through multiple channels to every AOL office in the US. The leadership team and I listened to your feedback over the last week. We heard you on this topic. And as we discussed the matter over several days, with management and employees, we have decided to change the policy back to a per-pay-period matching contribution. The Human Resource team will be in contact with all employees over the next week to explain the change and to answer any other benefits related questions you might have. We are proud to provide AOLers with a robust benefits offering that spans from exceptional healthcare coverage to 401K’s to AOL fitness programs and beyond. On a personal note, I made a mistake and I apologize for my comments last week at the town hall when I mentioned specific healthcare examples in trying to explain our decision making process around our employee benefit programs. Thursday we announced an outstanding Q4 and end to our fiscal year. More importantly, it validated our strategy and the work we have done on it. AOL is positioned for future growth and our long-term strategy to be one of the world’s leading media technology companies. Now, as we begin 2014, let’s keep up our momentum. Thank you for the great 2013 year and for your ongoing passion. And know that I am a passionate advocate for the AOL family – TA In the note, Aol CEO Tim Armstrong this week, first blaming the decision on “distressed babies” and then Obamacare. While, as Aol employees, we’re psyched and grateful to have our 3% per pay period matching back there are still a couple of questions left to be answered. What is a ? Why would Aol have to pay $2 million out-of-pocket for two individual’s specific medical conditions? It’s likely that, like many large companies, Aol is , but usually self-insured companies buy stop-loss insurance for outsize costs like a premature or otherwise “distressed” child. If Armstrong was referring publicly to corporate premiums or one-off costs going up by $2 million due to two specific employees, then isn’t that a possible ? As far as I can tell, insurance companies can’t disclose to CEOs what medical conditions employees have without employee authorization, unless it’s to “facilitate treatment, payment, or health care operations.” In those cases insurance companies are not supposed to disclose more info than they’re supposed to. Even if it’s not against HIPAA, it’s still pretty strange that Armstrong would say that on a call. Now all of Aol is worried about who this is and whether they are okay. Deanna Fei has identified herself as the mother of one of the “distressed babies” Armstrong was talking about. You can read more about her experience I have asked Aol all these questions, and have received a “No comment.” If anyone else has an answer, please or leave it in the comments. |
Tell SF’s City Government Where The Google Buses Should Be | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | Now that the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has approved a pilot program to oversee tech commuter buses from the peninsula, they’re asking for feedback from the community. A few weeks ago, the board of the SFMTA approved a program where tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook would have to pay $1 for every stop they made. Should certain stops be prohibited because the buses are causing too many congestion issues? Whoever you are — whether you a San Francisco-based tech worker that commutes down to Mountain View or Menlo Park or someone who feels their rents are disproportionately impacted by an influx of Silicon Valley-based workers or a bicyclist that has to get around these buses — There are also two open houses on and . Why? Because San Francisco city policy does actually get decided sometimes by whoever can pack a hearing room with the most people. (Really.) Even though the city’s supervisors and MTA board members are trying to represent the best long-term interests of people living here, they are human too and can be psychologically affected by people yelling at them in a room. There will be neighborhood organizations and local advocacy groups that will be rallying to eliminate or move stops. So if you really care about this issue, please have your say too. |
Flappy Bird Developer Says He’s Taking The Hit Game Down Tomorrow | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | The developer of the popular mobile game Flappy Bird just declared that he’s taking the game down tomorrow. Dong Nguyen, an indie game developer based in Hanoi, Vietnam, , “I am sorry ‘Flappy Bird’ users, 22 hours from now, I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.” He then , “It is not anything related to legal issues. I just cannot keep it anymore.” After his tweets first went out, others if he was willing to sell it, but . Nguyen also said that . TechCrunch a week ago, after Flappy Bird took off (it’s still the number one free app in both Apple’s App Store and in ). He said that he’s the only creator at his game studio , and he seemed to be as surprised by Flappy Bird’s popularity as anyone else, telling us, “I have no resources to do anything else beside uploading the game.” I’ve emailed Nguyen to find out more and will update this post if I hear back. Presumably, if you’ve already downloaded the game you’d be able to continue playing it, but again, that’s not something I’ve confirmed with Nguyen. As , Nguyen earlier this week that the press was “overrating” the success of his games: “It is something I never want. Please give me peace.” — |
Gillmor Gang Live 02.09.14 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Find us on Facebook at Facebook.com/GillmorGang |
One Silicon Valley, Under Libertarian Hero Senator Rand Paul | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | Internet-savvy Tea Party activists have shoved the once small-government fringes of the Republican party into the spotlight, . At the State of the Net Conference, I spoke with this new leader in the Republican party, asking about what life would be like for innovators if he and his small-government brethren continue their rise to power. I kept it deliberately philosophical to understand how Paul will view issues in the future. Here are a few take-aways. “The real explosion of the Internet was the lack of control,” argues Paul, in response to my question about if the proves that government is essential to American innovation. Paul maintains that we shouldn’t overestimate the need for government to support Silicon Valley. But, he’s a fan of federal-funded science and technology, just so long as it doesn’t add to the country’s trillion-dollar-sized debt. “I’d rather spend the money on R&D if there’s not a marketplace for that,” he says. Paul is admirably consistent here; scientists , but calmed down after he brokered a deal with Democrats that would slightly increase for higher education and research (by finding other programs to cut, of course). Paul infamously said that whistleblower Edward Snowden and intelligence director James Clapper (Clapper for lying to Congress). I pressed Paul on how he would treat information activists. “There do have to be some rules and there are some problems with disclosing secrets and people could die,” he warns. But, security hawks “are calling for the death penalty” for Edward Snowden, “and I think that’s inappropriate.” Paul wouldn’t commit to what punishment people like Snowden should receive. He is, however, to stop the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Internet and phone data. It’s no shocker that under Libertarian leadership, national defense would be dramatically cut back and civil liberties would take center stage. Paul thinks that Silicon Valley should have more leeway to invest in socially beneficial products. “There is a sense, particularly in young people, they still want to make money, they want to do things that are successful, but they’re socially conscious.” Paul says he’s supportive of legislation to give legal immunity to B-corps, ( ), which would allow for-profit companies to invest in sustainable products, even if it wasn’t the best way to optimize shareholder value. Stockholders “can always leave your company if they don’t like what you’re doing, but [business owners] should be able to do things, even if they’re not the least expensive thing, because you think this is good for the environment.” It’s a caricature of libertarianism to believe that it’s only about slashing the government into the smallest possible slice of its former self. “Federalism is that you devolve power, and the power is not all in Washington, it’s in different places,” Paul tells me, when asked about the future of small-government conservatism. Under a federalist government, San Francisco could allow a drone to airdrop you a piping-hot taco, while New York City could choose to outlaw Amazon’s new army of delivery drones. Silicon Valley has always had a ; a libertarian might give them more room to experiment. Though, in practice, Paul (and other libertarians) have valued no government over decentralized rule. Paul the law that would allow states to collect Internet sales tax, which would have effectively hiked up everyone’s pajama-clad Christmas shopping splurge about 7%. Federalism is a nice theory for now, but it’s unclear how it could impact the Valley. Does Paul see patents as a legalized monopoly? In a word, no. “There are libertarians that have written that you shouldn’t have any patents — the market will just sort it out,” he said. “I think there ought to be protection for intellectual property.” Recent attempts in Congress have tried to change intellectual property law, , but there are no bills with serious traction. Either way, this doesn’t appear to be of serious interest to leading Paul and his ilk. We’ve often noted that to work for, despite having no labor union. , largely because technology destroys jobs. Would Paul give beleaguered unions a helping hand, or does he think they’re past their prime? “I’m not opposed to the small guy organizing to have leverage against the big guy,” he explains. But, unions have gone overboard, he says. “Labor unions had their heyday; it was in trying to get rid of really horrific working conditions,” he continues. “I don’t think they really have a place in the high-tech industry.” The right-wing traditionalists of the Republican party are . Tea Party founder Mark Meckler once explained to me how individualistic principles make libertarians so powerful on the net, “Because folks who participate tend to be so individualistic, what started to happen is, without anybody telling them, they immediately started to spawn hundreds and then ultimately thousands and then millions of web pages dedicated to tea party activity.” Paul, whose father is an Internet political celebrity and former long-serving member of the House of Representatives, sees the same thing happening with his own base of support. “I think there’s a huge bunch of people who are a part of a leave-me-alone coalition,” he explains. Though Silicon Valley leaders overwhelmingly support President Obama, Paul argues the political tides could change in his favor. His argument is worth quoting in full: “When I’ve been out and visited Google or Facebook, when you go in, there’s an atmosphere of not of structure, there’s an atmosphere of, you know, not being able to go five steps without having food, or a nap, or play ping pong. It’s less rigidity and more openness. I think people are attracted to that; it’s sort of a libertarian sense, ‘as long as I’m not hurting someone else, let me do what I want to do.” Before I praise Paul, let me first note that I am not a fan of libertarianism. I find it an unrealistic social philosophy. Our personal success is inextricably linked to the lives of our neighbors and the rest of the world. If they suffer, we suffer. If they do well, we do well. That said, this modern strain of libertarianism is growing on me. Our government is terribly inept. The refusal of the White House to partner with the tech sector on the failed launch of the health insurance website, healthcare.gov, shows that we need a radical rethinking of government. So, as long as Paul and his ilk don’t recreate some Hunger Games-style version of ruthless capitalism that leaves the downtrodden without a safety net, and provides ample funding for education and research, perhaps our country could use a government diet. There is still much more we need to know, but the direction is promising. Watch the full interview below.
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Confessions Of A Flappy Bird Addict | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | Just a quick game. It only takes a second. I, I need to beat my high score. That stupid bird. DAMMIT! Ok this time I’ll do better. DAMMIT! Alright the ad distracted me. F*CKKKK! I was doing so good. NOOOooo! I don’t know why I want to play . Why it’s the first thing that pops into my mind during the cracks between day-to-day life, whenever something is hard or I have a moment to wait. But I just need to hear the sweet sound of those coins racking up, like playing Mario as a kid. Nothing else matters as long as I stay between the pipes. I mean, I’ve played others before. Yet after so many smooth difficulty curves there’s something so seductive about Flappy Bird. It humiliates me, but I like it. It’s the dominatrix of mobile games. The beauty is there’s no commitment. I don’t have to wait to see if I succeed. No investment lost if I fail. The reinforcement so utterly immediate, I crave the constant judgement. There’s no months of worry about a performance review like at work. There’s no necessary consideration about whether I saved enough lives to beat the boss like in other games. Each pipe passed washes away all the sins before it. Each time I start over, there’s no baggage to carry, no permanent record to weigh me down. Just that score, and the lust to exceed it. To beat my friends. To beat myself. To conquer something . But to what end? Where am I flapping to? Will I one day float out past the sea of pipes and arrive at that distant city in the clouds? My paradise? No. There is no congratulations. No secret ending. No cute victory animation to watch when it’s over. The pipes are infinite. There was no puzzle. No narrative. No point. It was designed to occupy our attention in the name of entertainment. For some, it delivered that escape. But there is no satisfaction. A new high score begets desire for a new high score. All we get is another . Perhaps that’s why Flappy Bird’s creator “I will take ‘Flappy Bird’ down. I cannot take this anymore.” [Update 2/9/2014: Dong has removed Flappy Bird from the app stores.] The only way to win is not to play, and he knew we couldn’t quit on our own. |
In 3.5 Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | I reckon it’s time to check in on one of my bolder predictions. Some 18 months ago, I wrote “ .” Let’s get this out of the way: most of the smart money thinks I’m wrong by at least three years. Worldwide, , smartphone sales exceeded feature phone sales in 2013, for the first time — but Africa remains a different story. Informa UK’s terrific Africa Telecoms Outlook ( ) projects 334 million African smartphone connections in 2017, maybe 30% of the continent’s population. IDC is ; it figures smartphones are currently 18% of the African mobile phone market, but they expect their number to “merely” double in volume by 2017. CNN : “feature phone penetration will continue to maintain its healthy lead.” Worst of all is : because Horace is brilliant and data-driven and you dispute his analysis at your peril. (Although I do note that he specifically says his graphs assume slower growth rates in Africa, without quite explaining why.) But wait, there may be worse news yet. last year “the most dramatic, and disruptive, period of emerging-market growth the world has ever seen is coming to its close,” undercutting the increasing wealth which is the basis of smartphone adoption in the developing world. (That article is about the BRIC economies, but lower growth there → lower commodity prices → economic headwinds for sub-Saharan Africa.) And an Ericsson report ( ) indicates that smartphone use and adoption in sub-Saharan Africa is still driven primarily by people under 30. So why do I remain so bizarrely, stubbornly optimistic? Three reasons. First, I’m still pretty comfortable with the argument in : the available data seems to indicate that feature-phone adoption shot from 6% to 40% of the African market over a five-year period, and I still see no reason to believe that smartphones will do worse, and many to believe that they will move faster. Second, when I look at the smartphone-sales numbers elsewhere in the developing world, my eyebrows shoot upwards almost of their own accord. IDC is talking about doubling African smartphone sales after four long years? In India, they , growing a whopping 229%. Granted, India is not Africa — but I grow increasingly suspicious of the all-too-common “Africa is a special basket case” narrative. That may have been true a decade ago; that may still be true in a few disaster-zone nations; but it is decreasingly true of the continent as a whole. And finally, because “GSMA forecasts smartphones will constitute 20 percent of the Africa market by 2017 as devices priced at below $50 become a reality” are still being written — when, in fact, sub-$50 no-contract smartphones are a reality today. No, really. I give you . It’s a pretty bad phone: Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, 2MP camera, single-core processor, 480×320 HVGA screen. But it’s a genuine smartphone nonetheless, with a 3G antenna, Google Maps, Gmail, Facebook, Opera, and YouTube. And it retails for (no contract.) What happens when try to undercut I don’t pretend to know exactly; but I do still believe that most people are underestimating the second derivative of smartphone adoption in Africa. I confess I’m tempted to back away a little from my previous prophecy, and say that in 2017, smartphones will make up the majority of African , rather than the installed base. That sounds like a safe bet; but I still suspect things will change faster than that that. So for the record, with some trepidation, I stand by my prediction. See you in 2017. yours truly, from my last trip to sub-Saharan Africa. (I am loosely plotting another trip there, probably to Senegambia this time ’round, later this year.) |
India’s MakeMyTrip Acquires EasyToBook In A Push To Grow Online Hotel Bookings | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 2 | 8 | Indian travel booking site, , has acquired , an Amsterdam-based hotel booking portal, for around $5 million. With this acquisition, MakeMyTrip is hoping to increase its proportion of revenue earned through online hotel bookings, and also target inbound customers traveling to Asia. “With the ETB acquisition, we are expanding our presence beyond South East Asia,” MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra told me. “One of our key company objectives is to continue growing the share of the hotels and packages business in our overall revenue mix,” he added. MakeMyTrip is among the early online businesses in India. It became the poster child for the country’s growing Internet population after raising $70 million in a Nasdaq public offering in August 2010. Since then, MakeMyTrip has experienced a roller coaster ride. In year ending March 2013, it even posted loss of $1.9 million. The company has been pushing to go beyond just online travel, and even explore markets outside India. In 2011 for instance, MakeMyTrip acquired Singapore-based Luxury Tours & Travels and picked 19.9% stake in travel search engine Ixigo.com. In November of that year, it also bought Delhi-based MyGuesthouse Accommodations for $1 million. As this , the Indian online businesses are facing challenges in growing the base of people who actually transact online. MakeMyTrip’s biggest challenge will be to not only grow its business in India by acquiring new customers, but also identify opportunities to expand beyond the country. “We have been open to inorganic growth and acqua-hiring. Other than niche travel tech firms and specialist travel firms, we also look for opportunities in ‘supplier disintermediation’,” Kalra said. |
Billionaire Jewelry King Launches TaskWorld, A Management Tool All About Performance | Alex Williams | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | Billionaire jewelry king Fred Mouawad has a different take on the world of task management. Most providers have some play on keeping a list or offer a schedule of reminders. But Mouawad, after hanging out at Stanford University to get in geek mode, has built something different. It’s called and it’s a task-management app that is all about measuring performance. In Mouawad’s view, the better you can manage performance, the better the projects will be. The projects will get done faster and the people will get better through the feedback they receive. has been in the jewelry trade since the late 19th century when David Mouawad learned the art of watchmaking and over time became known for his intricate work that became popular with wealthy clients. Today, Fred Mouawad and his brothers are the fourth generation to manage the Mouawad business. They have headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, with Middle East headquarters in Dubai. Mouawad himself has helped diversify the company’s holdings to encompass dozens of brands. He is the chairman and CEO of Synergia Brands, which serves as the umbrella organization for the Mouawad organization and assorted brands that includes Taskworld, his latest project. Fred Mouawad developed 15 brands for the company and founded seven of the companies. Taskworld now has a team of 50 people. His team has built a tool that helps companies stop using email as a way to do project management. Inefficient, time-consuming and tedious, email has no built in metrics, so tasks can’t be measured or prioritized. Interactions are shared, for example, when opening and closing a task. It’s this interaction data that serves as the foundation for measuring performance. Employees get their own dashboard to see how they are performing. There are dozens of task management tools in the market. , , , — the list goes on. Wrike, for example, has features for the professional project manager such as its Gantt charts. Asana has built-in reminders about the tasks that have been assigned and completed and are over due Taskworld’s technology plays to human emotions. As the feedback is continuous, people are compelled to engage with the service. But in some respects, Taskworld is fairly simple and still needing more to make it a potent competitor in the market. Regardless, the focus on performance is unique and gives Taskworld a foundation to build a service that can compete on the world stage. |
Perfecting The Enterprise End User Experience | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | Everyone talks about user experience. It’s often referred to in terms of how “sticky” an app is: how easy it is to use, how engaging it is, how relevant it is to what users are doing, etc. All are elements that contribute to a compelling experience, regardless of industry or app type. But while user experience is well understood and has always been core to the development and success of consumer-facing apps, the same is hardly true in the enterprise world. So why is that and what are we – as enterprise software companies – doing about it? To make a lasting impact and to drive change within it requires an entirely new way of thinking about software development and large-scale technology projects. It’s also one that suggests we look to our consumer counterparts for guidance on how to put the user first and build technology second. If we mimic companies like Uber and GoPro – resisting the temptation to simply recreate old experiences in a new environment – we’ll enable entirely new, powerful use cases. We’ll move away from the old standard of iteration to a new standard of true innovation. We’ll create business value that didn’t exist previously that ultimately makes companies more competitive. We’ll make the economy stronger. We might even make the world better. It’s a massive challenge, but it’s also a massive opportunity. Technology has gotten a lot easier and more efficient because many companies are moving to cloud computing and adopting more mobile devices. Traditional tasks are becoming automated, and apps no longer come with a user manual because experiences are just that intuitive. But it’s about more than that. As our world continues to evolve, we cannot continue thinking of technology in terms of dollars saved or hosting data outside company walls. It’s not just about cost effectiveness and the bottom line. We must break out of the traditional ‘technology view’ and start to think about what technology now makes possible, creating new experiences and delivering top-line value in the process. When the founders of Uber initially had the idea for the app, they didn’t think about a huge logistics network for routing luxury cars and cabs. Instead, they thought about making it possible to have a town car drive up to anyone’s location with a few taps of their iPhone. They thought about the user experience and innovated by focusing on delighting them versus the back-end technology to make it possible. The enterprise world needs to borrow a page from the playbook of the Ubers and GoPros of the consumer world. We must first focus on helping the user do what they want to do and then build the sophisticated technology to get there. Thinking about the user first is an entirely new way of thinking in software development. We’re pivoting from the concept of functional requirements focused on business processes and data flows and turning everything around so the focus is on the end user. We’re thinking about allowing them to do what they want to do no matter where they are or the device they’re on. The recent Healthcare.gov debacle is a good example of the old way of thinking. With Healthcare.gov integrating data from many different agencies, developers focused on looking at the data that needed to be integrated rather than the usability of the information. Focusing on usability would have led to making better decisions about how to best handle all of that data. Developers could have concluded that pricing information and plan details could be retrieved in infrequent batches, rather than in real-time, since that type of data is unlikely to change minute-by-minute. These issues could have been sidestepped if developers had focused on consumer use cases – and what they would try to do once they landed on the site – rather than back-end issues. As a result, the project was doomed from the outset. What’s possible when you focus on the user first and technology second? It’s still too early to really tell, but the future does look bright. It comes down to the opportunity for people to use apps and devices that make them most productive whenever and wherever they need them. It’s the ability to remove the barriers to getting business done so they can collaborate across companies – and so partners and customers can get access to the resources and information they need more easily. What’s especially exciting is that there’s an innovation ‘ripple effect’ that takes place. By delivering intuitive and powerful software that just works, companies will be able to focus on new projects that differentiate their organizations. They’ll create new ways to engage with partners and customers, build entirely new products that drive top-line revenue, and design innovative new workflows that set them apart from competitors. Ask any CIO what the biggest impact of cloud and mobile has been on their world, and they’ll talk about the transformation of their role within the enterprise to be “business enablers,” allowing employees and partners to be more productive, creative and competitive instead of gatekeepers. The user experience is essential to any modern technology project today, and how organizations prioritize usability to deliver new experiences separates the wheat from the chaff. If we enable our customers to simply recreate business processes and apps of the client-server era in new environments, we fail. We fail as an industry, as a community and as individual companies. There’s so much more opportunity than that and we need to go after those opportunities before someone else does. |
Bitcoin’s Emerging Price Stability | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | Earlier in January Bitcoin, as it receded as recipient of an infinite press, began to see its trading range tighten after months of wild swings. I as perhaps the start of new stability for Bitcoin, which in turn could help its platform mature, or indicate maturation thereof. There was some squawking that the time frame I had selected as ‘enough’ to indicate a trend was too short. It was a reasonable complaint. Happily, Bitcoin has behaved and exonerated me by tacking on another tranche of time of generally stable prices. The gist is simple: For nearly the entire month of January Bitcoin has traded in the 900s, with minor exceptions in 1,000s. For a currency that until very recently could see 50% of its value drop in a day and not have that day stand out all too much, it has been something of a calming of the seas. Here’s the D1 chart you need ( ): The white Y Axis here points to the 6th of Janurary, when things calmed down. Why does it matter if Bitcoin is seeing increasing price stability? Essentially the more wild the swings in its value, the less useful Bitcoin is as a tool of commerce. This goes both ways: The more real uses there are for Bitcoin, the smaller the percentage of speculative trades in the currency; and, the smaller the changes in its price, the more people may start to accept Bitcoin as a payment option. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. Marc Andreessen recently : “Bitcoin is a classic network effect, a positive feedback loop. The more people who use Bitcoin, the more valuable Bitcoin is for everyone who uses it, and the higher the incentive for the next user to start using the technology.” Marc’s piece — it’s mandatory reading, by the way — lays out a bullish case for Bitcoin arguing that its core technological tenets provide large incentive for its use, which will drive adoption and long-term use. Bitcoin volume on the Mt.Gox exchange is down sharply this year, a change I think that is roughly commensurate with the currency’s decline in media attention. If you were hoping for Bitcoin to shape up and fly right, it was a banner month. |
Required Reading: The Economist’s Special Report On Tech Startups | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | It’s not every day we here at TechCrunch just point to someone else’s work and say, “Here, you should go read this.” But today’s an exception, because The Economist has put together a on the rise of technology startups around the world. The report, which is written for the magazine’s general news audience, could serve as a sort of “State of the Union” for the industry. That means a lot of what’s reported there won’t really be news to those of you who are deeply involved in the startup world. There are no big surprises or gotcha moments, for instance, in its various stories on the , the , or the . But where The Economist’s report could be useful is in helping those of us who follow this world every day to . In so doing, it we could possibly better understand the broader global impact that the spread of technology is having, how we’ve gotten here, and what the big trends are driving us forward. What it really means when , as it were. And hey, maybe you don’t know much about , , or the . If any of that is of interest, it’s in there, too. Anyway, I highly recommend you , save it for a quiet moment when you have some spare time, and read it in its entirety. Because every now and then it’s good to take a big step back, re-learn the things you think you already know, and maybe see the tech world from another person’s point of view. |
Peek Is A Playful Calendar App, From An Ex-IDEO Designer, For People Who Aren’t Forever Busy | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | Peek is a new (paid) calendar that’s aiming to appeal to the social middle ground of people whose lives don’t consist of non-stop meetings from 9 ’til 9. So not a calendar app for professional calendar nerds, then. The app rethinks the calendar as a gesture-based playground, rather than a spreadsheet-esque chore. It’s an attempt at designed interaction, with a minimalist interface that incorporates a playful, gesture-based UI — itself flagged up by the cheeky name Peek. The look and feel of this calendar combines flat design — via rich blocks of colour — with a mischievous sense of dimensionality that allows subtly sign-posted calendar entries to fold open like origami when tapped on and hinge-closed again, simultaneously mocking the lie of flat design while embracing its seamless perfection. To the uninitiated user, Peek’s interface can appear enigmatic or even inscrutable at first glance — with a rack of icons swiping into view that look alien rather than immediately obvious, and a series of interface gestures required to navigate the app’s functions, which don’t immediately leap out as intuitive and absolutely require a little poking and prodding around to get into the swing of. Yet, spend some time getting to know Peek, unlocking its finger signs and flat symbols, and the interface transforms — or rather unfolds, revealing hidden depths of fun and functionality beneath an intentionally minimalist exterior. “Instead of using the conventional navigational elements, we decided to build Peek from the ground up,” says Peek designer Amid Moradganjeh. “We believe interfaces can be more about the content. Focusing on the content makes the conventional navigational elements less visible, and using gestural control allows the design to be cleaner, quieter and more ambient. This can actually speed up the process of using calendar. “There is also an element of play in Peek,” he adds. “We wanted to introduce new behaviors that are more fun to use. We believe that fun does not necessarily have to be less functional.” Peek’s sense of fun can be summed up by a shake gesture feature that allows the user to ask the app to come up with an idea for something new to do in future — such as ‘read something inspirational’ or ‘call someone you miss’ — which they can then choose to add to their calendar at a random time ‘soon’ (or not at all). So, yep: Peek’s got serendipity diarized. If you’re the sort of person whose heart sinks every time you have to call up and fill out a form to create a new event in Google Calendar (or its utilitarian ilk), exactly because it’s all check boxes and text input fields, then Peek’s purity of design is probably going to feel like a balm. Or a calendar panacea. But, on the other hand, if you’re the type of professional time segmenter who relishes absolute granular specificity in slicing and dicing each and every one of your half hours on this earth, well, Peek will probably bring you out in half-day hives. Here’s how the startup describes the it’s taking with Peek: Peek is about cutting away the overwhelming features of mobile calendars. It redefines an on the go experience for people to use when they need it, so that they are not consumed by its entirety and benefit from its existence. Peek is not just a minimalist and simple app, it is designed to be the right resolution for the context it is being used in. It is made to provide the necessary information in an easy to understand manner, without overwhelming you with data you might not need. The app is the first product from , a new startup co-founded by Moradganjeh last July, and Patryk Zoltowski (who has a background in enterprise web app development). Designer Moradganjeh previously worked at vaunted design firm , and also at Microsoft (the latter may explain Peek’s distinct whiff of Windows Phone — an early and ongoing champion of flat design). Square Mountains, which is based in San Francisco and Tallinn, Estonia, has a self-professed design focus clearly evident in this, its first product. A design ethos that’s hardly surprising given the connection. “We believe that there is an opportunity to apply design thinking to the existing products and make them more useful for bigger groups of people,” says Moradganjeh when asked what problem the startup is aiming to solve generally. “We do not want to just come up with a new idea and introduce another gadget that only a small group of people might find useful. We have an approach which is very simple: understanding what people really value, coming up with new ideas, and then pushing technology to bring those ideas to life. Our goal is to apply the same approach and principles to other experiences and create more innovative products for people by using design.” On Peek specifically, Moradganjeh reiterates that the aim is not to compete with calendar apps designed for power users, such as Sunrise, Tempo and Mynd. He argues that those are apps that “ Another goal for the app is evidently to act as a design showcase for what Square Mountains can do — to help it when it goes out seeking While Peek looks very nice on the surface, Moradganjeh concedes it is something of a “creative risk,” being as it’s so unconventional in its navigation — and thus requires users to put in the effort to learn it. Certainly I found my patience for figuring out the folds and foibles of certain sub-menus and deeper functions being tested. Portions of the design definitely felt as if they over-indulged at the expense of utility. That effort may ultimately be at odds with the more idle audience Peek’s creators are apparently aiming for, although the app’s gestural dare and flare — and purist good looks — will undoubtedly push the buttons of tech aesthetes and attract a style-conscious app-using niche. So Peek may well get cachet, even if it doesn’t manage huge reach. And if the app’s underlying aim is to plant a flag that puts Square Mountains on the map, and illustrates the calibre of design work this startup is capable of turning out, then Peek will probably have done more than enough work for one day.
from on . |
CrunchWeek: Microsoft’s CEO Hunt Heats Up, Google Says Goodbye Moto, Facebook’s Paper App | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | That means that Ryan Lawler, Alex Wilhelm and I had a lot to catch up on in this week’s , the weekly show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to chat about the hottest stories in tech. Check out the video embedded above to hear us discuss the latest in Microsoft’s hunt for a new CEO, Google’s to Lenovo for $2.9 billion (just a couple of years after it acquired Motorola Mobility ), and Facebook’s , launching out of its brand new . |
GoDaddy Updates Its User Protection Policies In Wake Of Infamous Twitter Account Extortion | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | GoDaddy has updated its account security policies in the wake of the now of a Twitter account. As TechCrunch , a hacker claimed to have gained the Twitter user’s last four credit card digits from PayPal, which was then used to convince GoDaddy to reset their account. The compromised GoDaddy account — and its requisite domain collection — was used as leverage to extort the user out of their excellent Twitter account, @N. In the wake of the hacking and ensuing outrage over lax security, denials of culpability, TechCrunch why Twitter itself hadn’t made @N whole. We spoke to @N, known to most as Naoki Hiroshima, after the fact and and he detailed a few things that GoDaddy should do to tighten its security, methods that might have helped protect his account: “[Two factor authentication] can’t prevent this from happening again,” says Hiroshima. “GoDaddy allowed the guy to reset everything over the phone. As long as a company only uses the last 4 digits of a [credit card] to verify [identity], this will keep happening. They should ask multiple questions.” GoDaddy has made steps that mirror what Hiroshima felt was needed. In a , the company said the following: @N_is_stolen Will do. We now require 8 card digits, lock after 3 attempts and deal with 2-factor authentication accounts differently. ^NF Requiring more credit card digits matters. If the hacker in question had been required to provide that quantity of information, the jig would have been up prematurely: The hacker claims that PayPal gave them the last four digits of Hiroshima’s credit card. If the GoDaddy threshold had been higher, we wouldn’t be talking about this now. It’s a bummer that GoDaddy was able to be compromised in the above way, but the new security policies should reduce future risk for its customers, of which I am one. |
Harvey Keitel, CEO, Or How To Pull Off The Impossible | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | In many of the old war movies, every elite unit has at least one member that has the critical talent to make something out of nothing: . You know this guy: when everyone is out of rations or ammunition and the truck is broken down, he quietly heads out. The next day, when all hope of completing the mission seems lost, the scrounge comes rolling up in a freshly repainted jeep, full rations, ammo, and, stereotypically, a case of cold beer. How did he do that? Where did it all come from? “Don’t ask,” he growls, “Let’s get movin’.” Harvey Keitel’s Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe in is another iconic fix-it guy. He comes directly from a party in his tux to “clean up” the situation. I love his “Can I get some coffee?” calm demeanor as he carefully assesses the situation, starts prioritizing, and then takes swift action to get Jules and Vincent out of their blood-soaked jam. During a crux scene in the engineers in Houston realize they have to somehow fit the Command Module’s square carbon dioxide filter in the Lunar Module’s round receptacles if they want everyone to keep breathing. They got together in a room, dumped the box of materials available to the astronauts on the table and said, “Here’s what we have to work with…” After working for a tense few hours, they cobbled together a solution with step-by-step instructions for the oxygen-starved astronauts. That scene always gives me goose bumps. All of the successful entrepreneurs I know are part-scrounge, part-Wolf, with a good dose of calm-under-pressure space jockey thrown in. In other words, they are ridiculously resourceful. It’s this magical combination of wicked-smart, tenacious as hell, works harder and longer than most people think is humanly possible, thinks way outside the box and is also unbelievably passionate and compelling. In short, they have special tools to just get shit done. Special, but not unobtainable. Over the years, I’ve noticed some patterns and methods that explain how great people manage to pull off the impossible. And with Mr. Wolfe’s permission, here they are: This was a quote from my VP of Engineering, Nawaf Bitar, at IronPort. When IronPort anti-spam wasn’t working and it looked like our partner Brightmail was going to terminate our contract, we had a complete “Oh shit!” moment. Nawaf moved the engineering team over to work on it. He called them all in to work nights and weekends until it was fixed, and urgently sought out every anti-spam expert on the planet to help or to hire. Other people would have done one or two of those things – he did them all simultaneously and immediately. Nawaf saved our bacon. When we were developing our first product at IronPort, we desperately needed to get feedback from email administrators at large companies. Our dream was to quickly talk to 50 of them to get to a critical mass, but how the hell do you do that when you don’t know any? We brainstormed, tested, stalked, and leaned on our networks. We made a list of the Fortune 500 and tried to line up anyone we knew on the inside. We all went through our school alumni networks. “Can you introduce me to someone who runs your email? Who do you call when email goes sideways?” Everyone we did get through to was pumped for information to get to more: “What conferences do you go to? What do you read? Who else can you introduce us to?” We reached 43 of the exact right people — not quite 50, but it did the trick. During a board meeting last year, Quirky’s CEO Ben Kaufman recounted a story about preparing for a critical Home Depot meeting. Quirky was just starting to build things for the “connected home” and Home Depot was a dream opportunity. When he got the call in New York one afternoon that the home improvement giant could squeeze him into a new product-review meeting the very next day in Atlanta, he brought nearly the whole company in for an all-night prep session. They split up into five different teams and came up with seven working products — overnight. They packed up prototypes of a Wi-Fi-enabled mousetrap, garage opener, smoke detector and water sensor, among others, and then slept on the flight down. A month later, Home Depot ordered $7 million worth of products. This is a phrase that I’ve heard used to describe Andrew Rubin, the CEO of Illumio. Andrew came out to Silicon Valley from the Midwest with virtually no connections. Within 18 months he raised two rounds of capital and hired one of the best leadership teams I’ve ever seen. How did he do it? Andrew “glows in the dark.” He is so charismatic, compelling, logical, and excited about what he is pursing that you can just feel the energy — even see it glow. Getting to the right person often requires a series of small baton passes or jumping from lily pads of different people to get to your destination. Andrew was unrelenting when it came to asking for suggestions and pursuing connections and introductions from just about everyone. And since he came across so passionate and compelling, people actually felt like they were building social capital by helping him. I wouldn’t suggest that being resourceful has anything to do with doing something illegal or unethical, but I’ve definitely noticed a pattern of being “creative.” When my then head of sales, Shrey Bhatia, was trying to close a $900,000 purchase order from DoubleClick in New York, he called up the CIO and said, “Hey, I’ll be in New York tomorrow, could I drop by for 15 minutes to discuss this?” Of course, he had no intention of going to New York unless the CIO confirmed the meeting. When the CIO finally did, at around 7 p.m., Shrey turned his car around, jumped on the red-eye, slept on the plane and brought home the order the next day. We had the check framed. ’s Winston Wolfe is obviously a fictional character, but the stereotype he represents is worth exploring. A guy that’s seen it all, he’s completely unflappable, methodical and decisive. How did he get that way? Like an old sea captain, he is the sum of so many hard-earned life experiences of living on the edge. While there’s no substitute for real experience, I believe it helps to hear and share stories of resourcefulness in action — almost like case studies in school. With every new account, we open our mind to a new path to take and learn the tactics that others have used to overcome much larger obstacles than the ones that are currently in front of us. I’d love to hear about more “great moments in resourcefulness” in the comments section. |
Boombotix Raises $4M For Its Wearable Action Speakers And Audio Sync Software | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | Kickstarter funding will often lead to the more traditional kind, and in the case of Boombotix, that’s exactly what happened. The California startup raised $17,000 for its music syncing app, which allows people to synchronize playback of music across multiple devices using mobile networks, and nearly $130,000 for its Boombot Rex mobile Bluetooth action-ready portable speaker. Now, it has also raised $4 million in venture funding from Social+ Capital, Baseline, Red Hills and many others. May of its partners in this round are strategic in nature, and Boombotix co-founder Lief Storer says they were chosen for their ability to help build the brand. “The investors’ interest is vested in amplifying our brand through product development and strategic marketing,” he explained in an interview. “There isn’t a single expense [in terms of using these funds] that stands out, but having key human capital in place to continue building the talent in the organization will be essential to the long-term strategy.” Boombotix isn’t saying how many speakers it managed to see since its launch back in 2010, but it has seen its sales grow by triple figures since the debut of its Kickstarter campaigns, which also led to deals secured with retailers including Amazon, T-Mobile, Microsoft and Apple.com. The selling point of the Boombot REX is that it can stand up to mud, dust and some water exposure, as well as take spills, while providing quality sound, portability and also speaker phone functions, including the ability to use Siri on the iPhone from the gadget. Its audio sync tech was designed to be an answer to user requests to broadcast to multiple speakers at once, which isn’t supported with standard Bluetooth. It isn’t perfect, but the app gets around this by allowing multiple devices (i.e. smartphones or tablets) to sync playback of music perfectly over a mobile network, which means that each can output music to their own attached Bluetooth speaker for what is effectively multi-speaker sound. Of course, you need more than one device to make it happen, but it’s a step in the right direction. Boombot has begun to position its speakers as a wearable play, in part to capitalize on the growing interest in that device category. It’s true that they’re small and clip-mounted, and can be easily attached to clothing, but the key to growth will be holding appeal beyond the current action sports group of core buyers. With fresh funding, perhaps that kind of expansion is exactly what’s in store. |
Developer Behind “Flappy Bird,” The Impossible Game Blowing Up The App Store, Says He Just Got Lucky | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | , a game you can barely play for more than a few seconds without throwing your phone across the room in frustration, is dominating the App Store and . In an App Store first, an indie game developer from Hanoi, Vietnam, Nguyen Ha Dong, has 3 apps in the top 10 rankings right now, which is not only odd because the publisher has seemingly come out of nowhere with these viral hits, but also because there’s no cross-promotion built into the games themselves. The other two titles, Super Ball Juggling (currently #2) and Shuriken Block (#6) instead seem to be benefitting solely from the word-of-mouth success of #1 free app, Flappy Bird itself. As for the Flappy Bird game, its deceptively simple appearance with graphics that harken back to the era of 8-bit gaming, is actually one of the hardest games you’ll ever play. And yet the gameplay involves nothing more than tapping your screen to keep a flying bird from running into green pipes that look like they’ve been snatched out of Super Mario Bros. Yes, that’s the extent of it. There’s no other challenge or story. But good luck, gamers, because if you can get a score in the double digits, you’re some kind of god here. In fact, it’s a game that’s so irritatingly impossible, and yet somehow so addictive, that it seems like it’s been designed more so to have its players run to tell their friends about it, rather than master the skill set it requires. (Though some, of course, .) After the hundredth time you play it, having only a score of, say, five, it’s like you’re unable to keep quiet about the darned thing. A simple built-in “Rate” button, one of only a few in the game besides “Start,” “Score,” and a pause button which you’ll probably die if you try to use, allows you to share your frustrations on the app store, while its “Share” counterpart helpfully lets you tell your friends on Facebook, Twitter, SMS or email. “This sucks! You have to try it,” is how those invites generally read. Overheard at TechCrunch, discussing the game: “Flappy Bird is the downfall of humanity.” To date, some 300,000 users have rated Flappy Bird, many leaving lengthy reviews with suggestions, requests, and general venting: “The only reason why I have not yet deleted this horrid game is the overwhelming sense of relief and accomplishment I feel when I finally beat a high score,” writes one. “I assume this feeling will soon consume you, too, but don’t say you were never warned.” “Let me start by saying DO NOT download flappy bird…People warned me about it, but I didn’t care,” wrote another. “My life is over. Your life is over. The world is over,” said a third with dramatic flair. So now the question is, who the heck made this thing? And why did it get so popular? What we do know is that game developer 29-year old Nguyen Ha Dong runs an indie game studio called based in Vietnam. (This appears to be true, given that the site is to someone with the same name in Hanoi, Vietnam.) He says he’s been making games for four years. Explains the website, “mostly, we’re making arcade games that are bite-sized, take no more than a few minutes of playing right on smartphones and tablets. Our work is heavily influenced by retro pixellated games in its golden age. Everything is pure, extremely hard and incredibly fun to play.” So yes, they mean to frustrate you to the point of insanity, in case you weren’t sure. Beyond that, Dong is intent on avoiding publicity, which of course, adds to the mystery surrounding Flappy Bird. He has turned down several requests for interviews, and when we sent over some questions about his background, he replied “I’m not comfortable with being exposed.” In an interview with TechCrunch via email, Dong says he’s the sole creator at .GEARS. He explains that the programming in Flappy Bird took 2-3 days to complete, and he reused artwork from other titles. “.GEARS is not a company,” he notes. “It is just myself now but I have to use term ‘we’ to prepare for changes in the future. Before ‘Flappy Bird’, none of my games have 1/100th of that popularity.” Meanwhile, as Dong remains semi-anonymous, mobile developers and marketers are going crazy over the game’s app store charts. How did a title, released back in May 2013, end up at the top of the App Store? When and how did the viral effects kick in? Well, the “when” part can be more easily answered, thanks to resources like . Sometime around the beginning of this year, the app stopped its usual rise and fall pattern, and hit the top charts in Family, Games and Overall. And there it has stuck. The game is ad-supported, and built using Dong’s own framework on iOS and on Android, he explained on Twitter. The ads run at the top of Flappy Bird, but the game doesn’t directly point users to Dong’s other titles. As for “how” Flappy Bird went viral, that’s a bit murkier. Flappy Bird is getting 2-3 million downloads per day on iOS and Android, Dong tells us. But the game doesn’t have the hallmarks of a paid promotion – that is, a top position achieved though ads or paid downloads. Dong, answering questions on Twitter, claims this, too. In response to someone wondering if Flappy Bird’s success is really organic, he writes: “It is hard to believe, I understand. I have no resources to do anything else beside uploading the game.” He also says the Flappy Bird Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts are not his. “The popularity could be my luck,” he to Chocolate Lab Apps, during an interview. ‘ Elaine Heney suggests that writing the ‘best’ review of Flappy Bird may have even become a ‘sport’ of sorts. People are competing to write the most ridiculous and descriptive reviews of the frustrating game — leading to a stream of reviews that . He reconfirms this to TechCrunch, adding, “I don’t know how my games can be so popular. Most of my players are kids in schools. I would like to thanks them for playing my game and sharing it to other people.” , saying basically, there’s no way these games could go viral the way they did, especially because of their age. As for the games’ difficulty, Dong claims that in his games, there are no impossible situations that players cannot pass. “In all my games, the score of Platinum Medal was my best score when I released the apps,” he tell us. The tip, he notes, is to not push “too hard and too fast.” Going forward, Dong says he plans to update Flappy Bird, Super Ball Juggling, and Shuriken Block right now. He’s also trying to release a new iOS game with the cat in his HTML5 game Smashing Kitty, but it will use different mechanism. “I hope you can see both updates and my new game on the App Store next week.” |
Gillmor Gang: Brand Royalty | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — seem perfectly willing to predict the futility of the next Microsoft CEO, and even perhaps the next Bill Gates. But we can only successor-surf so long before returning to the more heady war of the social stream. You can decide for yourself, but this feisty show was supercharged by @jtaschek’s minority report on the heir apparent and never really let up. From @kteare’s posit of Facebook devolution to everybody’s fascination with the mirage of brand loyalty, the emerging point is still elusive. Namely, that we’ll know it when we see it, and reward each and every app that fits into the puzzle with a notification seat at the table. @scobleizer is right: it will be close to impossible to dislodge Uber, as long as someone comes along with another key function that extends, and then absorbs, the current shareholders of the new economics of app magnetism. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Watch More Crazy First-Person Footage Of Felix Baumgartner’s Space Jump | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | There’s more eye-candy footage of Felix Baumgartner’s epic space jump. Sports video camera hardware startup, , released a 30-second Superbowl spot of first and third-person perspective of Baumgartner’s free fall from the stratosphere. Just to manage expectations, it’s not the full first-person perspective of his entire dive to earth that I think many of us have been waiting for. But, it’s still a human jumping from space to earth–which is objectively awesome no matter the perspective or length of coverage. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEsIMp67pyM] What’s the business case for GoPro to shell out all this cash for a stunt that only one (freaking crazy) consumer will ever use it for? It’s more than just ad impressions. As CEO Nicolas Woodman at our San Francisco Disrupt Conference, crazy stunts are a big part of product inspiration. Experimenting with GoPro cameras in crazy scenarios early on eventually led to a major market opportunities, even though originally the ideas just sounded like a lot of fun. Watch his full interview on bootstrapping a startup and his own inspirations below: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9-Q0Kboro4] |
BuzzFeed Is The Future (Whether It Lives Or Dies) | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | It’s time for a little inside baseball! Be still your beating hearts. But admit it: secretly you want to know about the success/failure of the myriad news sources whose stories flit disconnectedly across your Facebook and Twitter feeds from time to time, if only so you can tell your friends that you already knew who was doomed, on the day that long-fabled Great Shakeout finally comes and half of the world’s journalists find themselves surplus to needs. Old media! Right? Newspapers, magazines, and even, eventually, television: those shambling dinosaurs will be eaten alive by nimble new-media mammals, obsoleted by customized news feeds like Flipboard and Pulse and Feedly and Facebook’s new . As our collective news diet is slowly but inexorably shaped ever more by our social media feeds, rather than the TV channels we watch or the newspaper(s) we read, their audience will turn away from them and leave them to die. You’d think. And yet I am the proud possessor of some interesting data which indicates that the world is, as always, to some extent at least, more nuanced and complex than that. I’m talking about my pet social-sharing tool , which I built last year* to track, measure, and rank how often news stories from are shared on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. Scanvine now has a whole year of data under its belt, which points in some interesting directions. A whole lot of old-media sources are stagnating, it’s true. I give you the BBC World feed… …which is plenty jagged, but clearly shows a slow decline in shares-per-story over the course of 2013. (The red line counts average shares per story, the blue line how many stories Scanvine tracked.) The same true for Fox News: …at least until the week of December 2, after which there was a noticeable uptick. Hmm. What could possibly have happened that week? Oh, right. December 2, 2013: ‘ .’ And boom, all the major TV networks benefit — , , and all spiked near the end of the year. NBC less so, admittedly … but then, they were the only one of the Big Four who had been thriving already. It seems Facebook’s new feed gave a shot in the arm to some organizations who hadn’t quite figured out social media for themselves. Will that really matter in the long run, though? All of those graphs are still essentially flat. Consider those old-media mavens who thriving on social media, like The Atlantic: And above all, CNN who, to my considerable surprise, boast the second-highest shares-per-story average of any news source that Scanvine tracks: That’s legitimately impressive — until you compare the slope of that graph to, say, TMZ: Or most of all, BuzzFeed: I’m not sure what’s up with that anomalous dip at the end of the year, but that graph as a whole is . But still more sensible than , which doesn’t just top Scanvine’s , it it to such an extent that I actually thought there was some kind of bug in my code until their pre-eminence was (Which does what Scanvine does, sort of, albeit in a paid and slightly less idiosyncratic way.) So. My data indicates that a) old-media sources are thriving b) some new-media sources are thriving. (Other examples: and, I’m very pleased to say, .) But not everyone can win. People may be reading more news than ever, but there are still only so many eyeballs to go around. So who’s losing? Guess what? It’s not just old media. My data says that once-mighty Gawker saw a slight but distinct decline over the course of 2013: As did Jezebel: And in the world of tech news, which I know best, some former giants have developed feet of clay. , in particular, has seen far better days: And it’s hard not to feel sorry for poor , which seems to have essentially flatlined at a mere 100 social shares per story: Though on the other end of the spectrum, credit where it’s due, has had a spectacular year. I imagine you inquiring. Funny you should ask. I just might have an answer or two. What happens in the future is all about the rate of change today, and counting shares on social media seems a pretty good way to measure that rate of change. Television, newspapers, magazines — your s, your , your s — appear to have enormous momentum, meaning that their social readerships rise and fall only slowly. External forces like Facebook’s news-feed tweaks can influence this, but only a little. This isn’t a factor of sheer size, either; BuzzFeed pieces already get many more social-media shares than do most so-called “mainstream” media sources, and yet their share counts just kept on skyrocketing all through last year. Rather, the so-called “new media” tend to rise — but also fall — much faster than the old. I can’t help but wonder whether , in particular, will be here today but gone tomorrow. So will we see a few new-media titans rise to stand with , , , etc., and dominate the landscape for many years? Or will those colossi totter and collapse like Ozymandias, only to be replaced by an endless series of flashes in the pan, as new generations of media organizations just keep on evolving and emerging, faster and faster, each one devouring the previous? I think the answer is staring us in the face, one way or another: and I think its name is BuzzFeed. Immensely successful, hugely popular, everyone’s favorite source of online GIF listicles has quietly diversified to some impressive international and , as well as video. If BuzzFeed thrives and prospers, then we’re witnessing the rise of a new generation of titans; but if they fail and wither, if they are out-Buzzfed by something newer and hotter and hipper and catchier, then we’re seeing the news industry as we know it descend into an endless thrashing maelstrom of mayflies competing desperately for attention from an ever-more-fickle audience before they, in turn, are devoured. Let’s hope for the former. One other striking thing about Scanvine’s data: every single source that Scanvine tracks, without exception, has a shares-per-story distribution which looks something like this: Or this: In other words, all online news follows a : The scaling exponents may vary, but the fundamental distribution remains the same. A small number of viral articles get most of the attention, a long tail gets little to none, and the decay from the former to the latter is described by a surprisingly smooth curve. This means that allowing readers to view N articles/month for free, but requiring them to pay a modicum to see the rest, makes good business sense. Your viral articles still go viral, so you attract most of the free eyeballs you would have anyway, while your long tail makes money from subscribers. How big should N be? Well, that depends — — but this assumes, of course, that you can get anybody to pay you at all, which is a neat trick when there are a zillion other free news sources out there. And how do they pay for themselves? Via advertising, which is really only lucrative if you have a wealthy and highly targeted market like sports or tech news — or via sponsored content, such as…yep, you guessed it. BuzzFeed. So will the future be sponsored or paywalled? Again, for the answer, look to them. And watch very carefully. Because if I’m right, they are the future of news in miniature, in real time, right here before us, as we witness it. No pressure, all y’all over there: but please don’t screw it up. *Completely singlehandedly, he muttered modestly, right down to its Android/iOS apps. And its UX design. Which explains its UX design, in case you were wondering. |
Mt. Gox Temporarily Pauses Bitcoin Withdrawals | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Mt. Gox has temporarily suspended Bitcoin withdrawals in order to resolve a technical issue, the . The statement posted on Mt. Gox, one of the world’s largest Bitcoin exchanges, reads: During our efforts to resolve the issue being encountered by some bitcoin withdrawals it was determined that the increase in withdrawal traffic is hindering our efforts on a technical level. As to get a better look at the process the system needs to be in a static state. In order for our team to resolve the withdrawal issue it is necessary to temporarily pause all withdrawal traffic to obtain a clear technical view of the current processes. We apologize for the extremely short notice, but as of now all bitcoin withdrawals will be paused, and withdrawals in the queue will returned to your MtGox wallet and can be re-intiated once the issue is resolved. Customers can still use the trading platform as usual. Our team will be working hard through the weekend and will provide an update on Monday, February 10, 2014 (JST). Again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and ask for your continued patience and support while we work to resolve this issue.
We’ve contacted MtGox for more information. The increase in withdrawals may be related investor concern after Apple’s decision yesterday to drop Blockchain, the last Bitcoin wallet app, from the App Store. The price of Bitcoin , and is currently $722.86. Several , however, that Apple has taken a negative stance toward the digital currency for a while, and expect the drop in value to be temporary. |
Updated: Google Didn’t Pay $750M For A 5.94% Stake In Lenovo | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | [Updated: As , Google does not yet own Lenovo shares. Instead, the shows the number of shares Google own after its agreement with Lenovo to purchase Motorola goes through.] Google in Lenovo Group on Jan. 30, according to a disclosure on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The filing was made on the same day after Google for $2.91 billion, but will keep most of the handset maker’s patents. Lenovo agreed to pay a total of $2.91 billion, with $750 million in ordinary shares, $660 million comprised of U.S. cash, and the remaining $1.5 billion in a three-year promissory note. According to one of our sources, Google had wanted to sell Motorola for some time before striking the agreement with Lenovo because the handset brand has yet to live up to its purchase price, but had to hold off on selling the division for tax reasons. On the other hand, buying Motorola helps Lenovo build out its cell phone business. There were rumors in October that it had submitted a bid for BlackBerry, but was turned down. |
Adobe, WPP, Among Companies In Talks To Acquire Indian Social Analytics Startup Simplify360 | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | Indian digital media circles have been being looked at in the social media analytics space by Twitter, Adobe and even WPP, the world’s biggest advertising company. The latest to join the list of potential targets is , a Bangalore-based social media analytics startup that counts over 100 paying customers including big names such as Yamaha, Revlon, Target and Wipro. I reached out to Bhupendra Khanal, the startup’s CEO, who confirmed ongoing talks for strategic investments with several companies, but declined to elaborate any further. This is what he had to say: “At this stage I cannot accept or decline this news. Several companies have approached for strategic investment or acquisition, and serious talks are on. We will announce if something materializes.” Simplify360 is similar to Topsy, except that it goes beyond Twitter and crawls through terabytes of data that include Tweets, Facebook posts, etc., to offer customized analytics. Founded in January 2009, Simplify360 has been bootstrapped so far with an undisclosed angel investment from in December 2012. The startup has 25 people on its payroll, and it currently sifts through around 5 million posts and tweets every day that generates around 5 terabytes of data every week. Another key differentiator for Simplify360 is that it now offers analytics in over 27 languages and has customers in markets like Korea apart from India, where around one-third of 200 million Internet users are increasingly posting social media conversations in over 30 languages. From what I gathered after speaking with several people in companies that could be potential acquirers, converting millions of Tweets and social media posts into real insights is the Holy Grail for marketeers, and tools such as Simplify360 help achieve that. As , Adobe’s interest also comes from the fact that it really wants to compete with Salesforce better, especially in the social media analytics space. Both Salesforce and Oracle have been doubling down on their social media analytics strategy through acquisitions. While , Oracle acquired several companies . Simplify360 founders and officials at companies in talks with the startup declined to share details on revenues, valuation or anything related. The startup makes money by offering its SaaS analytics tool for a monthly subscription starting at $500. “The startup is profitable and should be able to decide on the strategic alliance or acquisition within 2-3 months,” a source familiar with the discussions said. He added that an investment banking firm has already been appointed. Whether Adobe or somebody big finally acquires Simplify360 or not, it’s increasingly becoming clear that Indian startups have started getting attention of potential acquirers. As we wrote this piece about recently, startups in big data space including and several others. We are reaching out to Adobe, WPP and others to get their comments. |
Meet The Eight Startups From StartX’s Fall 2013 Class | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | , the non-profit accelerator for Stanford-affiliated entrepreneurs, introduced the most recent eight companies to have gone through its program at a demo day held at Box headquarters in Los Altos, Calif. today. Those companies included everything from a non-profit dance program to a mobile tool for helping to treat autism in children presented to investors and press. Founded in 2009, StartX was launched to bolster entrepreneurship within the Stanford community. While independent of the university, Stanford has committed $3.6 million in funding toward the program, which also has backing from organizations like Kauffman Foundation, Microsoft, Blackstone Foundation, Cisco, Intuit, Greylock Ventures, AOL, Steelcase, Merck, and Genentech. Last year, the university announced that it would begin investing in startups directly through the . Since then, it’s invested $13 million in 29 different companies over a period of just four months. The program runs three session yearly, with about 20 startups per batch. Since the first class in Summer 2010, 134 startups have graduated from the program, and gone on to raise $2.1 million each on average. Recent fundings include a $37 millions Series B round for Genapsys, a $10 million Series B round for Kidaptive, and a $17M Series B round for InstartLogic. There have been 12 acquisitions since then, with nine of those happening over the last 12 months. Companies acquired include Luma Camera, which was bought by Instagram, WifiSlam (Apple), Loki Studios (Yahoo), Aviate (Yahoo), Shopwell (HarvestMark), 6Dot (ProxTalker), PeerCDN (Yahoo), Nutrivise (Jawbone), Stypi (Salesforce), Accevia, and Thinkbulbs. The eight companies presenting tonight include: [Image Source: ] |
Google’s Latest Doodle Shows Support For LGBT Olympians Heading To Sochi | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Hours before the 2014 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony is set to kick off, Google is putting some of its most valuable real estate — their logo — to good use: to show their support for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender olympians on their way to Sochi. As pictured above, the standard logo has been replaced with a rainbow of color, with each hue silhouetted by a winter sport athlete. In the off chance that you’ve somehow missed it, LGBT rights with regards to the Olympics happening in Russia has been a concern for quite some time. These concerns grew particularly strong last year, after the Russian government enacted a law banning the distribution of any material on the topic of gay rights. Meanwhile, homophobic violence in the region has reportedly The International Olympic Committee has gone and on whether or not Olympians were allowed to express themselves on the matter. A quote at the bottom of the page highlights a particularly poignant section of the Olympic Charter: “The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” –Olympic Charter Meanwhile, the logo itself links to a search for the Olympic Charter in its entirety. Good on you, Google. |
To Succeed, Growth Hacking Has To Focus More On Product Development Than Marketing | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 1 | I can’t think of a buzzier phrase in the tech industry these days than “growth hacking,” and in some ways I also can’t think of a more dangerous trend to glom onto. Sure, growth is good. But only if it’s real growth. If it’s a marketing campaign that goes viral and wins you a bunch of one-time “users,” it can actually do more harm than good. If it’s a product that is growing through spammy unsolicited social “sharing,” the growth numbers will massively misrepresent the health of the business. The really great growth hackers out there — people like Andy Johns, who helped Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Quora all reach record user numbers — understand that it’s not just about getting as many users as possible, but about helping to get the product experience right and ultimately amassing as large a user base as possible. Those are two very different things. Take what happened with as an example. In 2010, the Q&A site experienced the fastest growth of any site ever (as its top brass were on Twitter when TechCrunch awarded that honor to Pinterest last year). But within a year that growth had trailed off and eventually the site traffic/usage began to decline. Why? Because of its integration with social media sites, Formspring was able to generate rapid growth, but once visitors had taken a look at the site once or twice, they realized that there was very little value in the underlying product and, as a result, the vast majority of “users” that touched the site didn’t ever come back or engage in a meaningful way. I am starting to fear that is destined to be another such example: They did well early on by leveraging very aggressive viral marketing techniques and combining them with what was, at the time, cutting edge in-game monetization. However, it appears to me that the company has lacked something that I always look for as an investor: Product Soul. By that I mean a founder’s vision for the products he or she wants the company to create, a strong belief in the product’s ability to change the lives of its users for the better, and an unrelenting focus on making those products great and easy to use. For Zynga, this has never been the case. The focus on growth and lack of true product innovation (the company has largely been one that has created knock-offs of other games) has resulted in a company that appears to lack real direction and whose relevance has largely faded over the past year. Social video app is an even better examples. It was jockeying with and others to be “the Instagram of video” in early 2012 and its growth appeared to be exceptional. From May 2011 to March 2012, the company registered 10 million users, and by May 2012 it had 30 million. By December 2012, it had 40 million registered, but only 675,000 monthly users. In a six-month span the company’s growth plummeted 95 percent, not just because Facebook cracked down on spammy apps that required users to install them in order to view content, but because the underlying product didn’t resonate with consumers from an ongoing usage standpoint. As a result, tens of millions of users had “tried” Viddy and were left with an underwhelming experience. As any good entrepreneur will tell you, it’s much harder to acquire a user a second time after a bad product experience than it is to acquire them the first time. There’s no inherent problem with growth hacking, of course. Growth is great and ultimately can be a big driver of enterprise value. The problem is that right now, far too many entrepreneurs are focused more on that than they are on what I believe to be the most important thing of all and, ultimately a more successful driver of sustained growth: When a user touches a product, do they love it? Do they come back and use it again? And, overall, do they have a good experience with it? I recently had an entrepreneur that I really respect talk to me about the fact that he was considering hiring a growth hacker. They have a strong team, a great company mission and are the early leaders in a large addressable market with a product that is attempting to solve a major pain point for a set of users. But they have a growth problem. Why? First, their early growth has been driven by marketing spend as opposed to organic growth. And second, the vast majority of users who have tried the product aren’t engaging with it on an ongoing basis (even though the product is designed for repeat usage). Those are two key issues for me, and ones I don’t think a growth hacker can fix. When evaluating the “quality of growth” early on in a company, I look for companies that are growing largely through organic channels (in other words, 85 to 90 percent or more of growth is being driven by free channels). That sort of growth tends to mean that users are choosing to tell others about how great a product is. I also look at a company’s engagement metrics over time to see if users are trying a product or service out once and leaving, or if they’re choosing to engage with the product over and over again. Given what I heard from this entrepreneur, I strongly suggested that he improve both word-of-mouth endorsements and user engagement before trying to accelerate growth. Once the product is growing organically, and users are voluntarily engaging with it on an ongoing basis, then, sure, by all means hire a growth hacker to help ramp things up. The problem right now is that many companies seem to be operating under the total misconception that growth fixes all. That leads them to bring on self-proclaimed “growth hackers” who rapidly acquire more customers through spammy viral techniques, but when those customers don’t engage, or — worse — have bad experiences and tell their friends about it, that growth curve crashes. By that point your growth hacker is on to his or her next gig, and you’re left with what you had to begin with: a product that either hasn’t found its audience yet or hasn’t yet given people a reason to engage with it. So if you’re thinking about hiring a growth hacker, find someone who’s a great product person and who really knows user experience and understands user value, not just someone who knows all the tricks to ratcheting up your growth curve. |
Snippit Launches An App To Add (Brief) Soundtracks To Your Photos | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | is a just-launched app offering a twist on photo-sharing. The idea is pretty straightforward — instead of sharing a photo on its own, Snippit allows users to add a 4-to-10-second clip of their favorite song. The song can be something that’s downloaded on their phone, or they can select from the 30-second song previews that are available on iTunes (yep — a clip of a clip). They can also add text captions and location check-ins and tag friends. Co-founder and CEO Joe Grano said he first started thinking about this on a trip back to New York (he currently works in Los Angeles), when he realized that instead of just declaring “I’m in New York!” or posting an NYC photo on Facebook, he wanted to share a clip of . More broadly, he suggested that this is a way to give a picture more personality and emotion than it would have on its own. This is one of those social media ideas that might be a little too simple, but hey, simplicity can be an advantage, particularly in smartphone apps. The photo/music combinations that I saw in the app today were pretty fun, and the limit on the clip length makes it easy to browse the feed without getting bogged down. The length, Grano said, also means that Snippit’s usage falls under fair use, so the company doesn’t need to negotiate deals with the recording companies (and can therefore avoid the licensing costs that other online music services struggle with). At the same time, since users can buy the full song from iTunes (earning revenue for both the record company and a small affiliate fee for Snippit), he suggested the company could start making promotional deals with those same companies. Given Snippit’s dependence on downloaded music and iTunes, I asked Grano how he felt about the rise of subscription music services like Spotify. He replied that with the iTunes preview integration, users don’t have to own a song to use it, and that if Spotify or other services want to release an open API, “I think it would be great for the app.” The company has raised $500,000 in seed funding. It was basically “an internal family round,” Grano said, with investors including his father , CEO of Centurion Holdings and former chairman of UBS Financial Services. Apparently, Grano has been building Snippit while also working as an executive assistant at production company Leverage Management, whose include the TV show . It’s been like “doing two full-time jobs,” he said, but in about a month he’ll leave Leverage to focus entirely on the startup. |
PressFriendly Launches To Teach Startups How To Stop Sending Me Stupid Pitches | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Today in software eating the world: Software eating PR! As you might expect, I receive a ginormous number of stupid PR pitches each day, most of which come from people who are specifically paid to send me those pitches. But some of them are from well-meaning entrepreneurs who want coverage but just don’t know how to pitch. The result is a lot of emails that are pretty much instantly archived without a second thought. For startups, there’s usually a choice between hiring someone to take care of your PR — which usually means retaining an agency — or doing the work yourself. seeks to provide an alternative, in which startups can have more effective communications with the press through software. To do that, the company has built a platform that walks a startup through all the things they should do before they begin to do press outreach. It also builds custom media lists for startups based on what their product is and which reporters might be most interested in the story. The whole thing works like a kind of virtual agency. Rather than meeting with a human PR team, startups enter their information into a PressFriendly “pitch builder” which helps them to hone their messaging before they go out to press. And then there’s the media list, which I mentioned before. But it’s not all software-driven: PressFriendly also provides consultation with professionals who can help work out the kinks and generally provide more advice. But like other companies that are trying to make more efficient use of people’s time, those folks will talk less to more people, rather than the traditional PR model of having dedicated teams for specific companies. The whole point is to replace an agency as much as possible and do the work yourself, says PressFriendly co-founder Joel Andren. By doing so, founders can drastically reduce their costs: PressFriendly is a SaaS platform that costs a month, depending on how much consultation time startups plan to use. The platform was founded by Andren, who was a co-founder of Bitcasa and head of marketing and BD at HelloSign, along with Paul Denya, who was the second developer at HelloSign and worked at global ad firm Euro RSCG. The idea is that these guys and their software will be able to help get startups in line and ready to launch before they start emailing someone like me. Will it work? God, I hope so. |
Twitter Lost 12.14 Instagrams In Value Today | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Twitter had a day yesterday, reporting strong financial results but weak user growth. Some investors immediately . The company lost nearly $16 per share today following the news, or dollars in market capitalization. Let’s look at this another way. Facebook offered a deal once upon a time. But when that deal closed Facebook’s stock had lost value, and the little photo app was picked up for a . So, Twitter lost in value . Investors like growth, and Twitter didn’t have enough. |
Dear AOL, Get Off My Lawn | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | [Obligatory warning: There’s no tech news to see here.] It’s 4:56 here at AOL headquarters and the keg is a-flowin’, “ ” is a-bumpin’, and I’m filing this story. My corporate overlord has . There’re new products a-launchin, , and all around things are lookin pretty rosy for the media magnates in charge … Well, except . Me, I’m just trying to file a story about a company trying to take the “Internet-of-Things” to China (aside… Can we please kill the phrase “Internet of Things”?). Now I know my little would-be-story is nothing compared to a new Mapquest feature getting launched internally tomorrow (Sorry guys didn’t get the details, something about localization and commuting). But still, I need to concentrate. Here by my desk there’s a Mapquest branded Claw game where you can use a mechanical claw to grab some corporate schwag (folks can actually open up the display and grab whatever crappy T-shirt they want). People are currently milling around an astro-turfed open area — the newly christened “Brand Park” — drinking beer and munching popcorn while surrounded by upright desks (so hip) and more wasted electronics – like unused computer screens and iPads – than you can shake a stick at. The floor echoes with calls for “Where’s the beer?” Someone, somewhere is (full text below) to Business Insider. I’m a curmudgeon AOL. Get off my lawn. As we discussed at the town hall, we care about you and the company – a lot. This morning, I discussed the increases we and many other companies are seeing in healthcare costs. In that context, I mentioned high-risk pregnancy as just one of many examples of how our company supports families when they are in need. We will continue supporting members of the AOL family. We provide a wide range of benefits – including our 401k plan – and conduct open information sessions each Fall on all available benefits as well as any changes being made. We will continue to do that. The spirit of the town hall and the spirit of how we choose benefits are the same – we want to be open and transparent about the choices we make and why we are making them. As I have said over and over again, our employees are our greatest asset. Let’s move forward together as a team. – TA |
In Russia, Bathroom Mirror Watches You! | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | In Russia, spying on visitors is so pervasive, authorities don’t even seem realize that watching someone shower is cause for alarm. During a press meeting on the Winter Olympics, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak claimed that Western journalists were deliberately sabotaging the hotel facilities. As evidence, he said authorities had seen guests leave the water running in the shower. Yes, you read that right. Here’s the from the Wall Street Journal: “Dmitry Kozak, the deputy prime minister responsible for the Olympic preparations, seemed to reflect the view held among many Russian officials that some Western visitors are deliberately trying to sabotage Sochi’s big debut out of bias against Russia. ‘We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day,’ he said.” The conversation then took the an expected turn toward conspiracy city, as journalists started asking how many other people had been surveilled in the bathroom. Before he could respond, an aid told reporters Kozak had to take a “tour of the media center.” In truth, it’s not terribly surprising. The State Department travelers to come with “clean” electronics devoid of any personal information. Upon entering, journalists found that there were hacked within minutes of turning their computers on. “We took two brand new computers out of their boxes and connected them to the Internet. In a minute, hackers were snooping around,” NBC’s Richard Engel. Whether the hacking is from the government or mobsters is an open question. We’re previously on Russia’s vast video and Internet surveillance tactics that University of Toronto Professor Ron Deibert called “PRISM on steroids”. The idea that a senior Russian official would casually drop a reference to spying on journalists in the shower reveals all we need to know about the government’s mindset. |
Google’s $3.2 Billion Acquisition Of Nest Gets The FTC Green Light | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today officially for Google to acquire Nest, the connected devices company best known for making a smart home thermostat. Google first announced its plan to acquire Nest for $3.2 billion in cash . Sources tell TechCrunch that Google Nest’s technology and team as its “core hardware group.” Apparently as part of that strategy, two weeks after announcing plans to acquire Nest, the search engine giant sold off its Motorola Mobility segment to Lenovo for . |
OpenTable Buys Ness For $17.3M To Beef Up Mobile And Restaurant Recommendations | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Restaurant reservation platform today quarterly earnings of $52.3 million and used the day to put out some other news: the company has , makers of the personalized restaurant recommendations app Ness. It’s an all-cash transaction that OpenTable says is worth $17.3 million, although it comes with cash in Ness’s coffers that brings the net value to $11.3 million. OpenTable says that the Ness team will work in its San Francisco headquarters. The Ness app and site, meanwhile, will be discontinued with the technology getting integrated into OpenTable’s product “and other development efforts.” Ness had already been integrating with OpenTable but this will give it potentially a much bigger audience using its recommendation platform. OpenTable says it seats more than 14 million diners each month and covers some 31,000 restaurants and clocking up some 575 million diners seated since being founded in 1998. It might also mean Ness finally coming to the UK (yay). But it’s not a great return for Ness’s investors: in its lifetime the startup had raised with investors including Khosla Ventures, Alsop Louie Partners, Bullpen Capital, TomorrowVentures, SingTel Innov8 and American Express. Before today, we’d been hearing other names as possible buyers of the company. Ness started out its life in 2011 as that quickly adapted to a specific vertical — — but always had its sights set on eventually developing to cover other areas. That ambition fuelled its 2012, investment. It’s not clear if that wider idea ever found traction, or whether Ness simply decided that it was a stronger company by focusing its algorithms and platform on one subject in particular. Or whether Ness found it too much of a challenge to compete in the wider world against the likes of Google. It looks like Ness’s technology, and talent, will be tasked most immediately with enhancing OpenTable’s mainstay of restaurant recommendations. “The Ness team and I are incredibly excited to take the technology and insights we’ve developed over the last four years and incorporate them into the OpenTable product offering. As the world’s leading provider of real-time restaurant reservations, OpenTable will provide us the opportunity to introduce people to new and memorable dining experiences on a much broader scale,” said Corey Reese, CEO and co-founder of Ness Computing. OpenTable, which started out as a platform for the web, has been making a lot of moves to add more mobile cogs to its machine — a logical strategy, given that going to restaurants, by definition, implies being out and on the move. Just earlier today, the company announced a pilot of a mobile payments service in San Francisco. Diners in that city can now not only book a table, but pay for their meal through the app, too. Adding Ness to that is a way for OpenTable to extend a user’s time with OpenTable even more. “In the future, we believe that mobile will represent the vast majority of our reservations,” said Matt Roberts, OpenTable CEO. “Mobile is the cornerstone of powering great dining experiences.” And, given that Ness does have the technology to search and personalise recommendations for much more besides where to eat, you might see OpenTable tap into that, too. In all, the Ness technology should help OpenTable add more features to attract more restaurants to its platform and potentially take home more returns on the commission it charges them. In guidance for the next quarter, OpenTable says it expects sales of between $53.3 million and $54.9 million with non-GAAP EPS in the range of $0.39 to $0.43. OpenTable says that the Ness acquisition will be recorded in those Q1 2014 earnings. Ness is the latest in a string of acquisitions that have Quickcue in December 2013 for $11.5 million; JustChalo in June 2013 for $11 million; Foodspotting in January 2013 for $10 million; Treatful in August 2012 for an undisclosed amount; toptable in 2010 for $55 million and GuestBridge in 2009 for $3 million. |
Apple Said To Have Acquired Sapphire Display Manufacturing Components, Diamond Cutting Tools | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Apple is preparing for a big push in sapphire crystal display manufacturing, according to some new information unearthed by and told to TechCrunch via a source familiar with the company’s plans. 9to5Mac, with the help of analyst Matt Margolis, has obtained documents that report Apple placing an order with partner GT Advanced technologies for large quantities of furnaces and chambers used in making sapphire displays. Our source informs us that a (useful in handling ultra hard material like sapphire) was actually for Apple for delivery in 2014, though they aren’t named as a customer. Regarding the furnaces, Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac reports that GT Advanced has already taken delivery of 518 units, which could allow it to build as many as 116 displays of roughly five inches in size per year, with another 420 machines still on order, for a total potential capacity of around 200 million display panels at a size around one inch larger ( ) than the current diagonal proportions of the iPhone 5s screen. Apple sold around 150 million iPhones in 2013 to put that in perspective, so doing the math, it could indeed be the case that Apple is putting the pieces together for a production run that spans the entire next generation of iPhone hardware. Gurman’s report adds that GT Advanced has ordered a large quantity of Sirius Sapphire Display Inspection Tool components, which helps manufacturers using sapphire in displays specifically for smartphones and other mobile devices by increasing yield numbers and making sure only high quality sapphire makes it into the production stream. Back when the GT Advanced deal, which saw , our own Matthew Panzarino explained that it made sense for Apple to invest early in the tech should it plan to use it in large volumes later own. At first, it seemed likely that in the short-term, Apple’s focus would be more on small screen production with sapphire (for existing components like the camera lens cover and Touch ID sensor), but Gurman seems to believe iPhone displays are at least as likely. That’s backed up by a tidbit also reported by Matthew around the time of the revelation of the GT Advanced deal: , which can help greatly reduce the cost of production for use of the material in touchscreen devices. Now, Apple seems ready to build the infrastructure necessary to turn its R&D into a key component advantage for future iPhone hardware. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on these new reports around sapphire component manufacturing, but we have yet to hear back. We’ll update if new information comes to light. |
LinkedIn Snatches Up Data Savvy Job Search Startup Bright.com For $120M, In Its Largest Acquisition To Date | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Today, in which it beat Wall Street estimates yet again, LinkedIn announced its intentions to acquire data-savvy job search startup, Bright.com, for $120 million. The deal, which was 70 percent stock and 30 percent cash the company said, will be completed during the first quarter of this year. In a statement today, LinkedIn said that “several members of Bright’s team,” which now numbers over 50 –particularly those on its engineering and product teams — will be joining LinkedIn in the coming weeks. However, one notices that the announcement conspicuously leaves out any mention of Bright’s founders and whether or not they will be joining LinkedIn’s team in Mountain View. Either way, what is clear is that, unfortunately for Bright.com users and loyalists, as a result of the acquisition, access to the startup’s job search products will continue until February 28th, at which point it LinkedIn will pull the plug. Why did LinkedIn buy Bright, you ask, and whatever happened to that Monster.com fella? While we can’t answer for the latter, we do know that the Bright.com purchase is the latest in a fairly short string of acquisitions LinkedIn has made over the last two years. No Yahoo by any means, LinkedIn has been methodically and strategically picking off startups that will either help expand its growing professional content network or its talent solutions products. It more or less began with LinkedIn’s acquisition of popular email-embedded contact management tool, in early 2012. Since then, as LinkedIn’s public-facing product has put more emphasis on facilitating content-sharing rather than contact-sharing, it’s picked up popular presentation, slideshow and document sharing network, and made its big news reader play by . The Bright.com acquisition, at least in this context, appears to be a return to home base, and LinkedIn’s first acquisition of any product or startup operating on its home turf — i.e. the job search and professional networking market. As such, this could very likely have been a “defensive” play to acquire an increasingly popular “competitor” before it turned into a behemoth. Granted, generally speaking, Bright.com has traditionally competed more with the old denizens of the job search space like CareerBuilder and Monster, allowing users and job seekers to search for jobs that match their interests. However, Bright’s core value proposition has been that it goes one step further than simply using keyword extraction and comparison to “match” candidates to the right jobs, instead using a magical combination of data science and machine learning algorithms to offer better matches. Although, these days, I’m pretty sure everyone uses data science and intelligent algorithms for better matching — just ask Tinder. Though, to be fair, Bright also throws in a little Klout, ranking people by a “Bright score” which it uses to assess how strong the chemistry is between a user and a particular job. It also takes into account historical hiring patterns into its matching, along with account location, a user’s past experience and synonyms. Essentially, it’s what Identified.com wanted to be before pivoting into recruiting. By analyzing all of this additional info and using it to assign a Bright Score and to facilitate better matches, Bright has climbed its way into becoming the fourth largest job search platform, . Not bad for three years of work. As such, Bright was able to raise about $20 million in outside financing from Toba Capital, Passport Capital and a few others, and had signed on clients like Amazon, Samsung and Wells Fargo. When we last covered the recruiting platform, it had listed over 30 million jobs and was adding over 20,000 new job seekers every day. As the algorithmic foil to its Talent Solutions, the Bright.com acquisition seems to make a lot of sense for LinkedIn, and it seems that these days any company who has the money will gladly pay $120 million just to get access to a new haul of data scientists. For more, find Bright.com’s . |
LinkedIn Beats In Q4 With Revenue Of $447.2M, But Growth Concerns Dampen After Hours Trading | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Today, following the close of regular trading, LinkedIn reported its fourth-quarter financial performance, including revenue of $447.2 million and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.39 . Analysts had the company to report non-GAAP profit of $0.38 per share on revenue of $437.84 million. In regular trading, LinkedIn was broadly higher, besting the market and gaining more than 4 percent. In after-hours trading, LinkedIn is sharply lower. The company has previously forecasted that its revenue for the period would land between $415 million to $420 million. In the , LinkedIn had revenue of $393 million, and earnings per share of $0.39 (non-GAAP). LinkedIn reported that it now has 277 million members. In its own release, LinkedIn called the results “solid.” The company’s Talent Solutions division has revenue of $245.6 million in the quarter. Its Marketing Solution group had revenue of $113.5 million. And, finally, its Premium Subscription business took in revenue of $88.1 million in the period. Why is LinkedIn down so far in after-hours trading? It appears that the company’s current-year revenue forecast of $2.02 billion to $2.05 billion is under street expectations, inviting growth concerns. The company’s decline mirrors , in which the company also beat on both revenue and earnings per share guidance, but long-term growth concerns buffeted the stock. It appears that LinkedIn will decline less than Twitter, but the loss is steep.
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OpenTable Now Piloting Mobile Payments In San Francisco Restaurants | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | OpenTable is taking its restaurant reservations service into a new vertical today, the company says: mobile payments. According to a on the OpenTable blog, a pilot program is currently underway in San Francisco which allows diners to not just book a table, but also pay for their meal right in the OpenTable iPhone app. “Select restaurants” are testing partners for the new service, and more diners will be invited to trial the program over the next few weeks, as OpenTable opens up a way for interested users to request access. Some invites will also be sent out (most likely to frequent OpenTable users) via email. Testers may be invited to an in-person Q&A at OpenTable headquarters in San Francisco, as well. (In related news, did you know TechCrunch has a hotline?) If invited to the pilot, diners will just have to add a credit card to the OpenTable iPhone app before their meal. “There’s no scanning or bar codes involved,” explains the company via the blog post. You’ll also be able to view your check, line item by line item, within the app, a screenshot (see above) makes apparent. The company did not reveal its time table for a wider launch, as the program is still in its initial phases. That OpenTable is moving into the payments space is not surprising, but that also means it will face a number of competing restaurant-focused payment solutions already on the market today, like , , , and others, including, to some extent, broader payment solutions like Square. |
That Secret App Is Becoming Silicon Valley’s New Blind Item | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | “I work at Evernote and we’re about to get acquired… Watch this space” That could be the to have found its way onto , the new “ ” sharing app . But it won’t be the last. (FWIW, Evernote CEO Phil Libin . And claims he’s the one .) Forget about the that have found their way onto the app for a second. The real fascinating aspect, for me, is in determining how true that acquisition rumor is. And, true or not, who stands to gain by floating it. Secret, by design, obscures the identity of the people who post there — but only to a point. Based on your address book, the app tells you whether something was posted by a friend, or a friend of a friend, or if it simply became popular and thus is available for all to see. In that case, it can tells you the location of the person who posted it. And if posted by a “friend,” it then becomes a guessing game as to who you might know that posted something. In the last couple of days since launch, Secret has been graced with a slew of juicy tidbits from apparent insiders, relating the dark underbelly of the startup ecosystem. And those tidbits are causing some of us to do the mental guessing games associated with the typical you might find in the tabloids. I may have made a $100 million mistake. The author of that Secret follows up in the thread to say that he “let moral obligations from my LPs get in the way” and he should have invested personal money into a startup. That he didn’t actually have the money from LPs on hand yet, but decided not to invest out of consideration for them anyway. This causes me to think about which investors have recently raised funds, but could have made an investment in some hot new startup over the last few years. And which of those investors are in my circle of friends. If the boards of my last 2 companies let me sell when we had offers, those sales would be worth more than $1B now and I’d be hailed as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in SV. Instead I’m now [someone] that you ask, ‘what are you working on these days?’ For those of us who have been following the space for a while, it’s probably not difficult to narrow this one down: Serial entrepreneur with acquisition rumors floating about but never quite sold. Also in my friend circle. I know a startup CEO that illegally inflated numbers to raise a huge round of funding from a tier 1 VC. A commenter in that thread asks, “Does it rhyme with ?”* I have to be so positive in my public VC life now, I’m afraid that all I can offer Secret is my pent up rage. And that’s probably not good for Secret. Investor with public good guy attitude who has a dark side he doesn’t want to show? Ok, maybe that one will be tougher to narrow down. But the real “secret” to the app is that you can’t know what’s true and what’s not, who it came from and why. All of which calls to mind another post I saw on Secret just a few minutes ago: You could really fuck with journalists on here. The author of that Secret could also be Curtis. But the truth is, I’ll never know. ==
* I’m ashamed to admit that I was too dense to catch which company was being referenced at first. Alexia laughed at me. |
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