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Crunch Report | Facebook’s Election Hub
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107
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Are smart cities just a utopian fantasy?
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Tyler Edell
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Songdo, South Korea began its life as tidal marshland. Now it’s leading the charge into the future of smart cities. Once home to small-scale fishing operations, Songdo comprises massive, LEED-certified buildings, an efficient garbage collection system and even an island for rabbits. The project began in 2000, when 500 tons of sand were poured into the marshland, laying the foundation for architectural achievements like the Northeast Asian Trade Tower, a 68-story building that is now the tallest in South Korea. While Songdo is nearing completion and the flashy, meticulously designed buildings certainly suggest an eye on the future, much of what makes Songdo impressive lies under the surface. For example, the entire city is connected by an underground network of pipes that serve to funnel garbage directly from residents’ apartments into the highly automated waste collection plant. The garbage is automatically sorted and then recycled, buried or burned for fuel. This might be Songdo’s most avant-garde integration, and only seven employees are needed to handle the entire city’s garbage. Songdo has the benefit of being a greenfield deployment, meaning that the city’s infrastructure could be designed beforehand, based on the predicted needs of the architecture and residents, instead of being integrated reactively, as is the case with most smart city deployments. Integrating Songdo’s garbage collection system with cities like San Francisco or New York would take years of legislation and astronomical amounts of money. Not all of Songdo’s future-focused initiatives are out of reach for established cities, though. Songdo has sensors everywhere — to monitor temperature, energy use, traffic flow and the salt water canal that runs through the city. Sensor prices have dropped drastically over the past few years, allowing an unprecedented degree of connection even to established cities. Still, most cities have been reluctant to roll out full-fledged initiatives for smart city deployments. There’s great optimism surrounding the smart city discussion, but that optimism seems to wilt whenever someone asks “Who’s going to fund this?” The city certainly isn’t going to, at least in the case of San Francisco. While SF does have an outrageous $9.6 billion budget for the 2016-2017 fiscal year, most of that will be funneled toward the mismanagement of the city’s disastrous infrastructure. It’s a fair question to ask why they can’t dedicate a portion of that budget to smart city initiatives, but maybe they were relying on the $50 million award from the federal government, for which they were a contender. If they had won the award, private contributions would have been added to the federal award, bringing the total for the initiative to $200 million. The federal government has dedicated $80 million in new investments toward its smart city program, but that money will be spread out over 70+ cities, bringing the average to a whopping $1.1 million per city. That might sound like a lot of money (it is), but when you compare it to, for example, the average price of repaving one mile of a four-lane road ($1.25 million), it isn’t exactly breathtaking. And even if you think the SF municipal government could do great things with more money, keep in mind that it’s the same government that allows somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 people to sleep on the streets, while to keeping them off of them. Current funding for smart city initiatives is only good enough for proof-of-concept trials, which would lead, at best, to a piecemeal approach to smart city construction. The reluctance is understandable — Songdo cost roughly $35 billion to build from scratch — but without genuine investment in changing the infrastructure of a city to fit smart city needs, widespread deployment will be riddled with integration and adoption issues. Maybe the biggest obstacle to its full deployment is one question: Are smart cities profitable? There have been compelling waste-reduction efforts based on smart city sensor technology, like using sensors in the water supply to mitigate waste. While these efforts have resulted in corking budget leaks, they haven’t appeared to bleed over into other aspects of smart city deployments. Cities can use smart meters to make street parking easier, but that might actually work against them. If a driver finds a spot, they pay $2. If they get a ticket, they pay $72. That’s why some companies are offering cities analytics to optimize a police officer’s ability to hand out tickets — it’s all about profit. Another example: Let’s say a city opens its streets to autonomous vehicle rideshares, and that those rideshares catch on. And that they catch on to the point that it eats into the Department of Transportation’s revenue, so they have to slash public transportation frequency to a point where it’s no longer viable to maintain a robust public transportation system. They end up having to subsidize rides for low-income commuters, as well as lay off a slew of public transportation workers. In this scenario, the government not only doesn’t make a profit, but it has to deal with the headache of transitioning its transportation system and the social upheaval that comes with massive layoffs. The social factors of smart cities might be the most difficult to measure or engage with, which is probably why we haven’t heard very much about them. Smart cities seem abstracted from the cities themselves, as evidenced by the unwanted consequences of LinkNYC’s free Wi-Fi program. If you aren’t familiar with , the goal is to replace payphones around NYC with free Wi-Fi kiosks. These kiosks come equipped with tablet-like touchscreens that allow anyone to browse the web. At least they used to. A few weeks after the program went live, LinkNYC had to disable web browsing on all of its public tablets, for obvious reasons. If it doesn’t seem obvious to you, let me list some of the ingredients in this debacle: homeless people, substance abuse, free video streaming and a public space. One of my favorite headlines about this misuse of the project is, “Wi-Fi kiosks have become living rooms for vagrants,” which was in the . My favorite excerpt, though, is from the : “ ‘It’s free. That’s the best part about it,’ said a tall man drinking a beer out of a paper bag as he watched an R. Kelly video at a terminal in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.” That pretty much says it all. The unintended social consequences of smart city projects are a real concern, and a technological imbalance is at the heart of it. Smart cities are clearly not intended for the homeless, but homeless people are a reality of cities — you can’t just ignore them. Smart cities seem to be taking hold most effectively in areas where there’s significantly less income inequality and crime. For example, the United States ranks 63rd on a list of nations by largest income inequalities, while South Korea, where Songdo is located, ranks 129th. The United States’ intentional homicide rate is also more than five times greater than South Korea’s. Every smart city deployment affects different groups of people in different ways. While some drivers might appreciate the traffic flow optimization that comes with cameras on traffic lights, others will bemoan the surveillance state. A major question to grapple with is how to assuage (usually reasonable) fears while improving efficiency and standard of living. When the Songdo project broke ground, plenty of fishermen lost their way of life, but instead of giving them a bus ticket and wishing them good luck, the South Korean government handed them urban farm plots as a way to keep them going. This is the level of understanding and foresight that’s needed for successful deployments. A common complaint about greenfield smart city deployments is that they’re antiseptic — they lack character. When cities are designed and deployed as a single unit, they don’t carry the cultural vibrancy of a city built organically in response to the needs and desires of its denizens. As someone who moved to San Francisco because of its cultural fabric, the piecemeal approach to integrating smart city technology is more appealing than the built-from-scratch approach, even though it’s less efficient and more expensive. It’s the only way to preserve the character of the city. We just have to hope the people who compose the city aren’t forgotten.
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Google and Blizzard team up on a StarCraft made just for AIs
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Devin Coldewey
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AIs have more or less mastered chess, Go and a number of other highly cerebral games — how will they do on something like StarCraft II, which combines high-level strategy with the need for quick reaction times and tactical thinking? Probably great, honestly. And will ensure it. The project isn’t just an AI to play StarCraft II — many already exist, from the one in the game itself to bots programmed to manipulate units faster than any human possibly could. Watch these zerglings take on a bunch of siege tanks in what would ordinarily result in zerg-flavored soup (caution, loud music): No, the idea here is to actually create an AI-friendly environment for the game, something that integrates the features of AIs to access in order to understand this complex and visually messy game. You know, for instance, how to read health bars, and that human SCVs look different from Protoss probes, and can act accordingly. But an AI working just from the imagery on the screen would have to learn that from trial and error. Better that it plays a version of the game where it’s given hints under the table as to what’s an enemy, how to tell high terrain from low and so on. Above is an early version with different “layers” of meaning the AI applies to the actual pixels. Given this cheat sheet, the AI can focus on more important things: how many peons to make, when to stop mining gas, whether to upgrade weapons or armor first, that sort of thing. As they play and watch recorded games, the AI will build up knowledge about strategy, tactics, the so-called “macro” game, while learning how best to employ its superhuman actions-per-minute rate to dominate the “micro” in battles and skirmishes. A ton of information needs to be juggled and brought into play at any given time — perfect unit control means nothing if your enemy outwits you or crushes you with superior resources. Like a real player, the AI will have to navigate a “high-dimensional action space” while also demonstrating long-term memory and planning. It’s not just for the glory of the win (though that’s part of it) — the creation of an AI that can handle this level of visual and gameplay complexity will aid in understanding what our models have trouble with and what they excel in. Curious? for more information, or wait a bit and maybe you’ll even get a chance to deploy your own AI when the StarCraft II testbed goes live.
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The Happy Home Company shuts down, team members move to Google
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Anthony Ha
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is the latest home services startup to call it quits. The company was founded by Doug Ludlow, who , to AOL (which also owns TechCrunch). Its goal was to take some of the confusion out of the home maintenance process — when something broke in your home, Happy Home’s “home managers” would help you find the right service provider, and they also helped you develop a long-term maintenance plan. now carries a brief message announcing the shutdown, explaining, “Despite the many great things Happy Home had going for it — supportive customers, a large problem to solve, and great investors — ultimately we weren’t able to make the transition from a scrappy startup to self-sustaining company.” Happy Home last year (investors included Lowercase Capital, SV Angel and Box Group), but Ludlow told me the startup was unable to raise a Series A. The problem, he said, was that customers in home improvement turned out to be more price sensitive than he’d expected, while the margins remained low and repeat business was a challenge. “It’s very hard to build a home service brand that people regularly engage with,” Ludlow said. “There’s not a lot of love or delight in this space.” However, he said that a small number of his former employees are finding a new home as part of the Google Home Services team, where Ludlow is running operations and working to scale the product and develop strategy.
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Weekly Roundup: Tesla’s solar roof, Facebook’s killer Q3 and new emoji
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Anna Escher
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This week, Facebook’s Trending Topics system was notably late to a huge social media protest, Elon Musk announced new solar roof panels that the company hopes will change how we consume electric power and Instagram tested shoppable tags. These are some of this week’s top stories in tech. Want to receive the Weekly Roundup in your inbox? Elon Musk unveiled that the company hopes will revolutionize the way we use green power in the home. Also revealed was the battery unit that now packs twice the energy storage. The solar roof tiles come in four distinct styles, and are transparent to solar but opaque when viewed from an angle. And they’re — the new tiles could become more efficient, durable and cost-effective than existing solar panel options. These are Tesla's stunning new solar roof tiles for homes http://tcrn.ch/2fp4Rek Posted by on Friday, October 28, 2016 Samsung won’t quit after the exploding phone debacle. The company is focused on the The S8 handset will have a new design, a better camera and “an enhanced artificial-intelligence service.” After Apple’s big unveiling of the MacBook Pro, everyone is trying to make sense of the new Touch Bar. One take is that the Touch Bar is a . A massive social media protest exploded on Facebook, yet . People around the country were checking in on Facebook at the Standing Rock Native American Reservation in an effort to hinder local Morton County police from targeting protesters attending in person to fight an oil pipeline through historic tribal lands. LinkedIn called , which acts as a tracker to collect and analyze salaries globally. It will let users chart the connections between themselves, their career, their industry and the wider economy. Google finally officially launched its to the masses. Right now, it’s only available on Lenovo’s Phab2 Pro, which arrived in U.S. stores this week, but you can expect to see this in a bunch of Android phones in the next year or so. Instagram wants to integrate a shopping experience into its app without interrupting your scrolling with a browser window. That’s why the social network is testing . Retailers can tag products in their photos, which are hidden behind a “Tap to view products” button. There were two major earnings highlights: , earning $7.01 billion in revenue and $1.09 EPS. On the other end of the spectrum, as it missed revenue expectations by 23 percent and nearly $75 million. Microsoft as a preview, and we went , concluding that while the app does a pretty good job organizing a lot of content at once, Teams is late to the game. It was confirmed that Lazada, which earlier this year, is spending $30-40 million to , an online grocery startup. Amazon wants to strengthen its presence in Asia. The U.S. retail giant doesn’t currently offer local services in Southeast Asia, but it is working to New , including an astronaut, croissant and some redesigns. Also, the . George Hotz has , his autonomous driving startup’s first product that would’ve allowed certain cars to gain autopilot-like highway driving assistance abilities with an aftermarket add-on.
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Samsung will release a software update to stop unreturned Note 7s from charging above 60%
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Brian Heater
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This morning that it was issuing a voluntary recall to address some 700-plus reports of malfunctioning top-loading washing machines, including one very unfortunate case of a broken jaw. It was the cherry on top of what has already been a rough few months for the hardware giant, driven mostly by the prolonged saga of the Galaxy Note 7. Heading into the weekend, the company’s U.S. branch offered an update on the Note situation in an attempt to let everyone know that at least the recall is going reasonably well a little under a month since ending production of the troubled smartphone. According to a spokesperson for the company, “As of today, nearly 85 percent of all recalled Galaxy Note7 devices have been replaced through the U.S. Note7 Refund and Exchange Program, with the majority of the participants opting to receive another Samsung smartphone.” Of course, that means there are still a number of devices in the wild. As also reported this morning, is addressing the issue by cutting the handset’s access to cellular services. Here in the States, Samsung will issue a software update that will “limit the phone’s ability to charge beyond 60 percent.” The update, set to drop in the next couple of days, will also pop up a reminder to return the phone every time it’s powered on, charged or the screen is turned on, which may well annoy those clinging to the phone into giving it back once and for all.
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Finally, at long last, someone hacked Amazon’s Alexa into one of those singing fish
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Greg Kumparak
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the future Posted by on Thursday, October 27, 2016 Do you, like many others, wake up each morning, gaze upon your Amazon Echo, and think, “Damn it, Echo. Instead of a shiny cylinder, why can’t you be a singing fish?” Good news, friend. On his Facebook profile, artist briefly demonstrates what happens when you take one of those oh-so-classy singing fish — “Big Mouth Billy Bass,” as it’s known amongst those of us who saw the commercial 47,000 times in the early 2000s — and wire it up to be a scaled rubber embodiment of Amazon’s personal voice assistant. Want one of your own? Of course you do. Alas, the creator didn’t shed too much light on how it all works. Is it a Raspberry Pi running Amazon’s Alexa API? Or is it an Amazon Echo, gutted and stuffed into the fish, its every word converted into a twitch of Billy’s motorized muscles? That’s up to you to figure out, for now.
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PR analytics startup TrendKite raises $16.3M
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Anthony Ha
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announced today that it has raised $16.3 million in Series D funding. The company it helps businesses understand the impact of their news coverage and public relations strategy — like which articles are driving the most awareness of their brand, the total audience that’s being reached by the coverage and the sentiment of that coverage. TrendKite also shows you how much of the discussion you control versus your competitors. (Speaking of competitors: Another PR analytics startup, AirPR, this week.) The company says it works with companies including Nike, Campbell’s Soup, Hershey’s, Asana and Squarespace. It also says its annual recurring revenue has grown to tens of millions of dollars. The round was led by Adams Street Partners, with participation from Battery, Noro-Moseley and Mercury Fund. TrendKite has now raised a total of $35 million. “The use of proceeds will obviously go to continuing the amazing growth we have achieved by quantifying the impact PR has on the business,” CEO Erik Huddleston told me via email. “However, we see a bigger opportunity to tightly integrate PR into the rest of marketing. We see that as the key to redefining PR as the earned media leg of the integrated marketing stool.”
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Google Capital changes its name to CapitalG (Update: and quietly confirms it invested in Snapchat)
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Greg Kumparak
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And the Google rebranding continues. — the company’s venture arm that focuses on growth-stage companies (read: those that have proven their idea and are now growing) as opposed to earlier-stage startups — is now “CapitalG.” All this, it’s worth noting, is a separate thing from , Alphabet’s investment arm that focuses on that earlier-stage stuff and rebranded from “Google Ventures” back in December of last year. We’ve reached out to Google for some insight on the rebranding, but a few things confirm it: the old domain now forwards to , and the Google Capital Twitter account just announced that it’s being retired in favor of a new account. https://twitter.com/GoogleCapital/status/794632557165953024 Update: As , the portfolio on CapitalG’s new site confirms a previously unmentioned detail: they invested in Snap Inc./Snapchat.
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Pokemon GO finally gets a new Pokemon tracker in select places outside San Francisco
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Greg Kumparak
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Remember when Pokemon GO got a new system for finding nearby Pokemon (to replace the one that’d broke almost immediately after launch) … but it ? Well, good news/bad news time. The good news: more people outside of San Francisco are getting it now! The bad news: its still not for . The company just announced a small roll out on their Facebook page. That seems like a pretty small chunk of the world considering that they first rolled out the tracker in San Francisco — but I’ll take it. Progress is progress, and hopefully it snowballs from here. The hobbled tracking system has been one of the most complained-about issues in the game — it makes the game less about tracking nearby Pokémon and more about wandering aimlessly. The game had a tracking system at launch that seemed to work well enough, but it was disabled within the week as the game’s servers crumbled under the strain of the hype train. Players filled the gap with external Pokémon tracking systems that they’d built themselves — many of which tapped Niantic’s APIs in unofficial ways for data. The company moved to lock down their API, and many of these mapping services subsequently went down as a result. This newer tracker isn’t quite the same as the one that appeared at launch. Whereas the original system used a set of footprint icons to convey distance and thus allowed the player to figure out when they were walking in the right direction, the new system instead tells you which PokéStop a Pokemon is near. And if the Pokémon isn’t near any Poké Stop… well, you’re back to walking aimlessly. Between the Halloween event, the announcement of , and this — all within the last week — it seems Niantic has finally started to gain some speed when it comes to getting things into the game.
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Periscope Data pulls in $25 million in Series B
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Jordan Crook
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Periscope Data, the company that lets data scientists quickly build customized, highly detailed visualizations of their data, has signed the term sheet on a ~$25 million funding round, according to sources close to the matter. Sources told TechCrunch that the pre-funding valuation was at $100 million, and the round was led by existing Periscope Data investor DFJ*. DFJ also led Periscope Data’s . Periscope Data has reached out and confirmed the round. We mistakenly reported that DFJ led the Series B round when, in fact, Bessemer led the round. You can read the full scoop here. Periscope Data takes raw data from various sources — the most popular are MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift (which has a partnership with the startup but does not invest), Salesforce and Microsoft SQL Server — and with a few short commands, lets engineers create graphics to help make better sense of the numbers. But what’s more impressive is the speed at which Periscope Data is able to create these visualizations. The company claims that Periscope Data is 150 times faster than any other data visualization tool on the market. Part of that is due to the fact that the visualization feature itself was a bit of an accident. The company was originally architected as a site where engineers could enter data queries based on data in the cloud and get a fast answer, with a visualization tool as an add-on. Turns out, data scientists really enjoy the visual side of what Periscope Data offers and the company started to take off. was founded by ex-Googler Harry Glaser (now PD’s CEO) and former Microsoft program manager Tom O’Neill back in 2012.
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Uber and Lyft try to get out the vote
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Brian Heater
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Sure, for many of us next Wednesday can’t get here soon enough to finally put an end to this multi-year election cycle, but before that day arrives, it’s time for some civic duty. Uber and Lyft, for their part, are taking steps to remove a little bit of pain from locating and getting to the proper polling place. to offer up an in-app “Find Your Polling Place” feature that will perform the aforementioned task when a user enters in their address. From there, the “Uber to Your Polling Place” will present additional contextual information like hours and ballot info. The car service is offering a discount as well, but it’s limited to new users. If you’ve haven’t tried Uber yet, entering the promo code “VOTETODAY” entitles you to a $20 discount. So, that’s something. Lyft, meanwhile, will actually be offering a 45-percent discount in select markets on election day through its limited edition Deal of the Week email set for Sunday night, valid for one ride between 7AM and 8PM on election day. Zipcar will also for free to members on election night between 6 and 10PM to encourage subscribers to carpool to their polling place.
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Winning the race to the digital economy by cracking the code on the gender gap
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Paul Daugherty
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The facts are startling. The chasm between the number of job openings in today’s digital economy and the number of skilled workers available is growing in the wrong direction and threatening the competitiveness of the U.S. economy. In 2015, there were 500,000 new computing jobs available in the U.S., but as recently as 2014, fewer than 40,000 new computer science graduates to fill them. This shortage will continue to grow as rapid advances in mobile, cloud, analytics and artificial intelligence technologies continue to redefine business, society and the global economy. We are faced with a huge gender imbalance in technology that is only getting worse. Today, just 24 percent of the U.S. computing workforce is female. New research from Accenture and estimates that if we stay on our current course, the number of women in computing will fall to 22 percent of the workforce by 2025. The connection is undeniable and decisive action is needed. We get more girls and women into technology careers — it is critical to creating the talent pool needed for technology jobs of the future, it is essential to our competitiveness in the digital economy and it is simply the right thing to do to increase career opportunities for women. However, it’s not easy, and previous approaches just haven’t had sufficient impact. The challenge partly comes down to perceptions and biases within the working population that are hard to dislodge. But it’s during childhood and at school where they take root. The percentage of young women pursuing computer sciences in college has fallen from 37 percent in 1994 to just 18 percent today. Efforts to reverse this trend must start earlier. Working with Girls Who Code, we have undertaken research to explore the forces behind the continued decline in the proportion of girls interested in pursuing computing careers. Our research shows that merely increasing exposure to computing will not be sufficient for boosting the number of girls that select computer sciences in their later years. Because perceptions of computing as being a male-dominated field are deeply ingrained, exposing girls in the midst of these stereotypes can actually put them off and further increase the gender gap. Instead, more efforts must be made to tailor engagement with girls to suit the changing influences on their attitudes and preferences as they proceed through their education. , founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, commented, “The urgency around the findings in this research is undeniable. Despite unprecedented momentum and attention behind computer science education, the gender gap is getting worse, not better. We must invest in initiatives designed specifically to spark and sustain girls’ interest; exposure alone isn’t enough. By doing so, we have an enormous opportunity to reverse the decline and increase the share of women in computing from 24 percent today to 39 percent by 2025.” By identifying which factors influence girls at each stage of their education, we have developed a strategy that is far more precise, targeted and sequenced than those who have been tried in recent years. If followed through, we estimate that it could triple the number of women in computing to 3.9 million by 2025 and generate $299 million in cumulative earnings! The strategy aims to have an impact on three key stages of the education cycle: Our research shows that 69 percent of the potential growth in the female computing pipeline would come from changing the path of girls currently in junior high. To ignite this interest, schools and wider society need to introduce them to coding in fun ways. Girls who play computer games are four times more likely to be interested in studying computer sciences, suggesting that games manufacturers could do more to design games for girls. Our research shows that parents and teachers need greater guidance to show girls the full range of career opportunities available to computing experts, underlining the relevance of digital to solving real-world societal issues that girls respond well to. Our study shows that a large number of girls who were engaged in computing in junior high lose interest in high school. Girls are more easily deterred by social factors at this stage. We recommend schools redesign courses to appeal to groups of girls. The success of summer coding camps shows that creating a more supportive female environment makes a significant difference. There also needs to be a sustained grass-roots campaign supported by government and industry to dispel myths around computing (that it’s “uncool” or male-oriented, for example) and rebrand it for our digital age. The rebranding of computer science courses at some colleges has significantly increased the female share of course intakes, without deterring men. Other universities have created powerful mentorship programs with industry to inspire young women to take up careers in technology. Both approaches should be replicated on a larger scale. While the U.S. is clearly the global leader in digital innovation today, the skills gap threatens our competitive strength and future. We must act in more targeted ways to tackle the unique barriers that occur at each stage of a girl’s education. By working together across schools, businesses, governments and not-for-profits, we can unlock the potential of a large pool of female talent to not only become part of the computing workforce of the future, but to be leaders of it.
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Apple provides a soft(er) landing for MacBook Pro buyers with deep discounts on peripherals and dongles
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Matthew Panzarino
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Apple is addressing the sudden and wide inexplicable fear of dongles driven by the MacBook Pro’s USB-C only approach with a store-wide discount on adapters. The price cut that allow users to attach legacy devices to the new laptops, . The discounts range from 20%-40% on a variety of Apple and third-party products from both Apple’s online and retail stores. Other retail channels like Best Buy or stores that sell Apple products could offer the same discount but your mileage may vary with those external stores so check before you go. The discount will last through December 31st this year. In a statement to TechCrunch, Apple says that the discount is a result of an understanding that many users will face a fairly hard transition away from the old MacBook Pro’s relative cornucopia of ports to the new single-port-style world. “We are extremely excited about the new MacBook Pro, which is the best pro notebook we’ve ever made. It has the fastest CPU, graphics, memory, storage and I/O, best display, the innovative Touch Bar and more. MacBook Pro uses the most advanced industry-standard connector, USB-C with Thunderbolt 3, to provide maximum performance, expandability and compatibility. We recognize that many users, especially pros, rely on legacy connectors to get work done today and they face a transition. We want to help them move to the latest technology and peripherals, as well as accelerate the growth of this new ecosystem. Through the end of the year, we are reducing prices on all USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 peripherals we sell, as well as the prices on Apple’s USB-C adapters and cables.” The fairly vociferous pro crowd has been generating a variety of memes and chatter about the impending ‘donglepocalypse’. By their very nature, many existing MBP users are going to exist as living edge cases. They connect many and varied peripherals to their computers, often simultaneously and in odd configurations. Film, design and audio professionals often have arcane groupings of systems that all rely on a single esoteric connector to function correctly. As an anecdote, I once managed a $50,000 photo lab system that burned a dozen CDs at once while printing multiple formats across a variety of chemistries and inks. All of it hinged on a single dirty PS2-to-USB connector. I cannibalized a half dozen spares from old IBM machines and kept them in a locked drawer just in case. This kind of scenario isn’t all that rare among pro users and Apple is doing well here to make a gesture that indicates it is listening to the complaints slash needs of these users. It may be losing some potential profits in the near term but this acts as a pressure release valve that could tip the scales into convincing some folks to make the buy in Apple’s important fourth quarter. The deals are pretty solid. The SanDisk USB-C SD reader, for instance, actually gets a bit bigger than 25% cut and goes from $49 to $29. The USB-C to Lightning Cable that is needed to connect an iPhone to the new MacBook Pros goes from $25 to $19. The discount applies to Apple branded accessories across stores and online as well as third-party accessories and peripherals on Apple’s online stores and in its retail stores. The other side of the equation is that systems which use legacy connectors will take a while to switch to the new USB-C standard. Though everyone is headed that way, Apple’s penchant for keeping its plans close to the vest means that it was up to most external suppliers to accelerate their own schedule in rolling these out. The whole thing leads up to it being very beneficial for Apple to create a softer on-ramp for this latest bit of . No dongle needed for the audio jack, which sticks around because tons of audio professionals still rely heavily on analogue output and input.
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Facebook will test ads on Apple TV and Roku
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Anthony Ha
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Facebook’s ad ambitions are expanding to encompass Internet-connected TVs — it will be conducting a test of its ad network on Apple TV and Roku next week. Other online ad companies ( ) have explored TV advertising already. In Facebook’s case, the company will use Facebook data to target ads for A+E and Tubi TV — basically, what the Facebook Audience Network already does for websites and mobile apps. It sounds like this really is just a limited test. They will be US-only, and will not involve real ad campaigns, but rather house ads and public service announcements. The news was . A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the news and sent us the following statement: We are testing how to best deliver video ads through Audience Network to people watching content on connected TVs. Our goal is to bring relevant ad experiences to people both on Facebook and off.
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The Powerbeats3 bring some nice upgrades for iPhone owners
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Brian Heater
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The Powerbeats3 don’t look all that different from . There are a few tweaks here and there, mostly aimed at getting them to fit better. The primary distinction is tucked away inside, a happy addition to the Bluetooth earbuds that arrives as a result of the headphone company’s acquisition by Apple. While the brand wasn’t exactly front and center at the iPhone event back in September, it did get a little face time onstage. Its latest products also had a spot on the show floor, though in both cases, it unsurprisingly took a back seat to Apple’s own branded buds. But the new wireless Beats share one of the biggest selling points, the W1. The proprietary chip promises both more efficient battery life, moving from a stated 6 to 12 hours, along with the removal of one of Bluetooth headphone’s biggest pain points: the syncing process. Well, for Apple users at least. While the company has thus left branding untouched, the addition of the W1 chip is a subtle but unmistakable move by Apple to bring Beats into the fold. It’s the same old annoying syncing process with Android. If you own an iPhone, however, it’s pretty much instantaneous. When you first take the buds out of the package and hit the power button, a big white card pops up from the button asking if you want to connect. Press that big button where it says “Connect,” and boom, you’re connected. That’s pretty much it. Once that’s all settled, you get a small headphone icon at the top of the screen, between the battery and location icons. There’s no Bluetooth battery icon up there, but swiping up from the bottom gives you access to all of your connected Apple devices, along with their respective battery levels. The number also pops up each time you reconnect. It takes the pain out of the connection process and, while it doesn’t make things any worse for Android users, it certainly makes the headphones that much more appealing for iPhone owners. The headphones sound decent for a pair of Bluetooth earbuds — certainly good enough for heading out to the gym or taking in some music on the morning commute. If you want something more substantial and fuller, there are a lot of options out there at the $200 price point, but the Powerbeats3 are perfectly suited for those moments when you’re on the move and don’t want to deal with walking around in a massive set of cans. The over-the-ear hooks do a good job staying put, as well. They look a bit like exaggerated eyeglass temples, looping securely over the ear and not moving during a workout. It’s easier to manage and more comfortable than the spikey wings that ship with a lot of the competition and a nice solution to the fact that all of the weight it located around the ears. As for the fit, I had some trouble forming a seal with the buds, owing likely to the relative stubbiness of the tips. While they fit in the ears fine, I just wasn’t able to position them to a point to really get the passive noise-cancelling going. The headphone’s simple tie system — a plastic bead threaded through the cable — also beats the more complicated system Jaybird employs for altering the length of the cord for a better fit around the back of the neck. I wasn’t quite able to get the full 12 stated hours on a charge, but I made it through almost two days’ worth of standard music listening without having to recharge. And when that time does arrive, the Powerbeats charge up fast, promising an hour’s worth of use in five minutes. And hey, couple them with case and you’re good to go for a while. The control panel has been streamlined and the buttons are plenty responsive. The on-board microphone still leaves a bit to be desired, however. If you make a lot of calls, I would look elsewhere, though it’s fine for switching over into the occasional quick conversation, assuming you’re not walking down a windy street. At $199, there are much cheaper options out there. Take the new Jaybird X3, which run $50 less. But the Powerbeats3 deliver some welcome upgrades over their predecessors, and the W1 makes them that much more appealing for iPhone owners.
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Natasha Lomas
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Tribeca Enterprises brings VR to the Westfield World Trade Center
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Anthony Ha
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Visitors to the Westfield World Trade Center (the recently opened mall below the World Trade Center) will be able to get a hands-on virtual reality experience this month — an experience curated by Tribeca Enterprises, the organization behind the Tribeca Film Festival. Tribeca has , but programmer Loren Hammonds noted that those events are part of the film festival, and they usually attracted people who are “early adopters” or at least “very curious.” By installing , Tribeca can potentially reach a more mainstream audience. “They might be having their first experience with VR,” Hammonds said. The Virtual Arcade will feature four works — (an animated film), (a supernatural series created by and director Doug Liman), (a music video for OneRepublic); and (a martial arts story tied to Cirque du Soleil). Tribeca held a press event yesterday where reporters got to experience the films and hear from some of the filmmakers. Liman said his production company discussed as possible movie or TV show before settling on VR, which attracted him because of its immersiveness — a quality he said he’s aimed for in all of his films. Liman recalled trying VR for the first time and thinking, “This is way more immersive than anything I’ve been able to accomplish.” Liman and his producer Julian Tatlock acknowledged that they had rethink some of their shooting methods to accommodate the technology. For example, Liman said that shooting 360-degree footage is much more of a “team sport,” because you can’t just edit around weak performances. “It has to be great in every direction,” he said. Viewers can look in every direction, so “they’re probably going to look at your warts, at your flaws.” Tatlock added that they were told, “Maybe you [don’t] want to move the camera too much or too fast or cut too fast” — which makes it more challenging to create “a chase scene that’s exciting.” So their approach was to do “shoot static shots, safety shots — and then we would push the envelope.” The Tribeca Virtual Arcade will be open from Friday to Sunday, starting today and ending on November 20.
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Turkey blocks social media sites again to stall protests — here’s how to access them
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Devin Coldewey
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Turkey has once again blocked access to social media in an apparent effort to keep a lid on protests; many in the capital and elsewhere are demonstrating following the arrest of a number of opposition leaders. Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube are reportedly blocked or at least being throttled to the point of inaccessibility, . The outage started late last night and seems to be ongoing. The government also blocked internet access entirely for several days in some locations earlier this week. Turkey Blocks told TechCrunch in an email that based on its observations, the smaller ISPs don’t appear to be enforcing the block, suggesting a different methodology than the “more formal” one used for broader blocks in the southeast. The State Department has issued several warnings over the unrest in the country and planned protests in various locations today. In ? Demonstrations expected at Ataturk Park & Inonu Park in on November 4. Avoid areas of demonstrations; exercise caution. — Travel – State Dept (@TravelGov) Are you in Turkey, or know someone who is? Here are some methods we collected last time to help get around these blocks. VPNs are a popular resource for Turkish citizens trying to access social media during a blackout: Hotspot Shield reported a 322 percent growth in new installs in Turkey within the first two hours of the reported coup. Rather not go to the trouble? Check out , a service that automatically routes your traffic through a region where the site you’re trying to reach isn’t blocked. If you don’t need the proxy, it doesn’t step in, so normal traffic won’t be affected, only that which would potentially be blocked.
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The Here One smart earbuds are the coolest gadget I’ve tried in a while
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Lucas Matney
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I spend most of my days chatting with virtual/augmented reality companies, so the world of Black Mirror always seems a bit more imminent than it perhaps is. That being said, the future felt frighteningly close after my brief demo with Doppler Labs’ smart earbuds. At face value, the Here Ones are just another pair of expensive wireless earbuds that have been created because of Apple removing the headphone jack on the iPhone 7. But the $299 Here Ones, shipping at the end of the year, have a lot to offer outside the standard headphone features, most of that being a sense of futuristic wonder. I’ll hold my full impressions until I got some more time with the earbuds, but here are some details on the demo that I experienced. The thing about wireless earbuds is that if they have microphones they’re generally awful. It’s mainly because your mouth isn’t all that close to your ear and the earbud form factor doesn’t leave much space to integrate anything all that sophisticated when manufacturers are more focused on sound quality. I would imagine that’s largely why Apple went with the design they did for the AirPods, directionally orienting the microphone towards the user’s mouth to pick up more accurate audio. The Here Ones may not have the crazy shape of the AirPods but they pick up fantastic audio, largely because there are three microphones in each of the earbuds running the audio pickup and noise-cancelling functionality. In my demo the noise-cancellation seemed to work almost disturbingly well for headphones their size and Doppler Labs is aiming to provide features through their companion smartphone app that turn traditional noise-cancelling on its head. The craziest thing I got to demo involved isolating directional noise. With multiple people talking around me, the Here Ones focused on who was speaking directly in front of me, presenting them clearly while the others were muffled, this could work in a more stealthy capacity, picking up only a person behind you while every other noise seemed to be drowned out. Other features are more ambitious, if not a little premature. As I sat in a chair for a particular demo, speakers next to me blasted jet engine level humming to simulate sitting on an airplane, a pretty prime use case for noise-cancelling headphone. This noise was hushed by the Here Ones onboard tech, but then Doppler Labs CEO Noah Kraft started chatting with me and while the engines remained quiet his voice came in at full volume, albeit with a fair bit of digital distortion. Ever the showman, Kraft brought me to a different conference room once the demo had supposedly finished to show me “one more thing.” What Doppler Labs then showed off was an active language translation tool. I sat in a room with a Spanish speaker who started a conversation with me. A half-second after each phrase she uttered, a voice translated the message into English and I was able to respond in and her Here Ones translated what I said. Wow, the future. First things first, this feature is definitely still deep in development and won’t be shipping with the Here Ones, but it definitely highlighted how much is possible with the existing hardware. Ultimately a good deal of these more futuristic features will probably go unused. The most bizarrely cool features are meant for pretty specific use cases and Doppler doesn’t expect you to always have these things in your ears. The company’s more standard “ ” features will stay in your use case arsenal a bit more however, allowing you to tune out noises of a certain frequency and here everything else or vice versa. For someone biking to work, that could mean being able to listen to headphones while ensuring certain sounds like car horns are heard at full volume. For someone sitting in a downtown office that could mean not having to hear excessive sirens every time an emergency vehicle drives by your office. Kraft discussed how the companion app would be able to learn your habits based on your location and suggest appropriate sound filters. The possibilities are all framed by the potentially scary concept of being able to choose what you want to hear in the world. The Here Ones may be just as much of a proof of concept as the company’s earlier product, but this time they’re also a pair of powerful noise-cancelling headphones. I’m very intrigued by this product and the future it is geared towards, I’ll be curious to see how this future feels after spending a bit more time with them for a full review.
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What you need to know about startup boards
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Samer Hamadeh
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Every company has a board of directors — but few founders and entrepreneurs give the matter of board composition much thought. Samer has been on five startup boards and has founded and served on the boards of two of his own companies; Adam is a corporate partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a technology and startup law firm. We’d like to offer some advice to founders and CEOs seeking to learn more about their boards, as well as to people who have been invited to sit on a board. Yes. Every company is required by law to have a board of directors. The board doesn’t need to be elaborate, or even more than one person, but every company must have a board in place. A board must be put in place when you start a company. Interestingly, it is ok for the company to have only one board member, and it may be you. You must have a board to handle corporate matters like issuing stock, setting up a stock option plan, authorizing a fundraising or getting loans. In most startups, the founder will typically appoint himself or herself to the board. From there, others get added to the board as the company grows. To create a board, you should hire a lawyer experienced in board setup. There are many other factors to consider, so we’ve included other resources at the end of this article. The board will ultimately be responsible for making the critical decisions for the company, like whether to raise money, whether to be acquired, whether to enter into important strategic transactions and whether to hire or fire senior management. So make no mistake — who sits on the board is critical. It’s important to ensure these major decisions are made by smart people who are knowledgeable about the company and the industry in which it operates. While the composition of the board can and likely will evolve over time, and certainly will vary from company to company, standard approaches for startups do exist, depending on the stage of the company. While it isn’t necessary, many companies choose to have an odd number of directors. This reduces the risk of a tie vote, which equals a “no” vote in the board room. After your initial seed round, you’ll usually have to allocate a board seat to the firm or person who led that seed round. To ensure that the founding team still remains in control of the board, a fairly typical setup at this stage would be for the common stockholders (i.e. the founders) to retain two board seats and your new investor to have one seat. It is common to allocate a new board seat for the lead investor for each new round of investment. Keep in mind that when you accept an investor, you also typically will be bringing on a new board member. Some investors will attach a board seat to their terms of investment. If you do not want a certain person on your board, you may have to turn down that person’s investment. If you need the money, welcome your new board member. After the second round of financing, it is fairly common to also designate one seat as an “independent” seat. This person is typically not an investor or a founder or an employee of the company, but should have industry knowledge and valuable contacts. By appointing an independent after the second round, the composition of the board would be the two founders, the two investors and the independent. Hence, the independent potentially serves another important role — tiebreaker. While each “series” of investors typically get to appoint a board member, it’s important to know that the representative of that series represents all investors — not just that series. At some point, if the board is getting too big or if the investment size doesn’t merit a board seat, instead of giving out more board seats, the company might allow investors to act as “observers.” That is, they can come to and participate in the board meetings, but they do not get a formal vote. Sometimes the later investors become the observers, and sometimes earlier investors will become observers. (More about observers later.) The board is responsible for the overall direction of the company and for making major decisions, such as hiring and firing senior management, approving a budget and keeping the company financed through equity investments and debt financing. Key hires will need to be approved by the board, along with salary and other compensation, like stock. This last one includes your salary as CEO. Finally, board members provide connections with other helpful companies, individuals and resources, as well as offer overall advice and guidance. Board members are “fiduciaries” because they are entrusted with managing the business that is owned by different people — stockholders. Hence, they have what are called “fiduciary duties” to the company’s stockholders. In short, fiduciary duties are the obligations that the board has to act responsibly and in the best interests of stockholders. It’s a common misconception that the official role of board members is to protect the value of their own or their firm’s investment. In fact, the fiduciary duty of board members is to maximize value for all stockholders. The board can get sued by stockholders if board members do not satisfy their fiduciary duties, resulting in time-consuming and expensive litigation, potentially major damages and otherwise disturbing the business. To comply with fiduciary obligations, directors must satisfy what is called the duty of care and the duty of loyalty. The duty of care says that directors must be informed about what is going on and make decisions armed with the relevant facts. In other words, pay attention and don’t just show up for the quarterly meetings and do the crossword puzzle. Keep involved between meetings and stay abreast of what is going on with the company. The duty of loyalty states that the director must act in the best interests of the company and stockholders and not in his or her own self interests. If the director has a conflict of interest — for example, the company wants to sign a major contract with another company owned by one of its directors — the conflict must be disclosed to the other board members and the conflicted board member should recuse him/herself from the discussion and approval process. How often a board meets depends on the stage of the company, the needs of management and other factors. It is fairly typical for startup boards to meet in person once a quarter, toward the beginning of the quarter to review the prior quarter’s results. Early-stage companies might also hold more frequent informal board meetings, either in person or by phone. The more frequent, informal board meeting can be beneficial because the strategy at early-stage startups changes more often (such as the ). During particularly intense times, such as crisis situations or when the company is being acquired or is acquiring another company, the board can meet much more frequently, possibly every day or multiple times per day. A typical, regular quarterly board meeting lasts about three hours, but some go much longer. Compensation for board members varies by stage and by the identity of the board member (e.g. a renowned chairman); it also varies between companies. Normally, board members who are representatives of funds that invest in the company do not get compensated to serve on the board. However, it is typical for independent board members to get compensated for their time and services. Usually, the independent board members get equity for their services. For early-stage companies, a typical director might get somewhere between 0.5 percent and 2.0 percent equity. This percentage should drop as the company grows. In some cases, cash compensation is included. Companies will almost always reimburse the directors for out-of-pocket expenses, like travel expenses. Also, the company will usually indemnify directors from any liabilities they incur in their capacity as a director, like if they get sued by stockholders. Directors should also require the company to maintain a minimum of $1 million of directors and officers (D&O) insurance (and more as the company grows). As companies grow, it is fairly common for founding CEOs to move to different roles — or even get fired from the company. In such a case, the founder may find himself or herself removed from the board of the company he or she founded if that founder does not control the common stock vote. In such a case, the founder may find he or she does not have a voice in the direction of the company. When creating a board, assuming that you want to remain involved, try creating a permanent role for the founder separate from the CEO. That way, even if you, as the founding CEO, are removed from your position as CEO, you can remain on the board. This position is often a hotly contested point in a financing. Board members should work cooperatively and have vigorous discussions prior to any vote. Ideally, however, consensus will be reached before any vote. If you have a board where votes are frequently divided and contentious, then ultimately you have a serious problem at the company itself. That said, the issue may sit with one particular board member, in which case you should address that member’s issues separately, and not as part of a group meeting. Often angels or other investors have invested a substantial amount, but not enough to merit a board seat. If these investors are nonetheless demanding a board seat, or otherwise to attend board meetings, you might want to compromise and make them board observers. True to their name, observers attend board meetings but do not have a formal board vote. There are other major differences between observers and board members — for example, directors are bound by confidentiality requirements and have fiduciary duties and are covered by attorney/client privilege, while observers are not. So make sure you have counsel involved to put the proper agreements in place for observers in order to protect the company properly. If you’d like to explore more resources, here are a few suggestions:
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WhatsApp is testing a clone of Snapchat Stories, called Status
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Natasha Lomas
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Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp is experimenting with a new Status feature that lets users share mood-setting pictures and videos overlaid with other custom elements such as emoji, with the content disappearing 24 hours after it’s shared — so basically a copy of Snapchat Stories. The test feature was spotted on Friday by which says Status sharing is only currently available to registered public beta testers of WhatsApp who are using a rooted Android or iOS device. We’ve reached out to WhatsApp with questions and will update this story with any response. In the Android version of the beta the main WhatsApp message screen now has a tab called ‘Status’, sitting between ‘Chats’ on the left and ‘Calls’ on the right. And while it’s always been possible to set a status message in WhatsApp, which is visible when someone views your profile, the new Status tab does not replace that traditional status message; rather it’s a whole additional channel aimed at encouraging users to share ephemeral and primarily visual content with their friends. As with Snapchat Stories, once a user has snapped a photo or recorded a video to share within this channel they are offered a range of editing tools to augment the content — such as by drawing on a colorful scribble or adding and positioning emoji. Status also lets users add a caption to further explain whatever they’re posting. A send button shares the Status with the user’s WhatsApp contacts. The beta app shares Status content for 24 hours, according to BGR, with no way for users to manually delete a Status after they’ve shared it at this point, nor set a longer (or shorter) lifespan for the content. Users are able to specify which of their contacts can receive Status updates — either by selecting a handful manually or choosing all and excluding a few manually (or indeed selecting all contacts to spam everyone with all Status content). three years ago, and the sharing feature has proved hugely popular — driving massive quantities of daily video views for Snapchat (it reported as of this April). So it’s clear why Facebook is firing up its photocopiers. And while it’s taken Zuck & co a while to respond directly to their rival’s ephemeral sharing format, they now seem intent on rolling out a clone of the feature across their social board — with Facebook-owned Instagram launching a near carbon copy feature, , this summer; and a Stories clone called also being tested on Facebook Messenger this fall. In recent times Facebook has been , as part of a successful push to drive video ad revenue. So getting WhatsApp’s network of one billion+ active monthly users more accustomed to sharing visual content clearly feeds into that play. Especially after the Facebook-owned company — which implies it will start allowing businesses to show ads to users. That’s a massive shift for a company that had, up to then, been on its platform. Which just leaves the question of how WhatsApp will integrate ads into its platform without annoying users. And so enter the new Status channel, looking like exactly the sort of conduit where businesses on the WhatsApp platform could start pushing out marketing missives to users who are connected with them.
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How to facilitate the path to brownfield IoT development
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Ben Dickson
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As the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves toward becoming in the tech industry, a lot of focus is being given to greenfield development, the process of creating new devices from scratch. Many companies and startups are rushing to ship new connected products to store shelves in order to secure a share of this growing market. Meanwhile, the greater potential lies in brownfield development, the integration of connectivity and data collection into things and designs that already exist. But unfortunately, because of the obstacles that lie in its path, brownfield IoT development is moving at a much slower pace than it should, which can effectively hold back the industry from leveraging its enormous possibilities and present potential challenges and difficulties for the IoT industry as a whole. Greenfield development is conceptually easier than brownfield, which is why it is being embraced by so many IoT adopters and manufacturers. “You have a clean sheet of paper, you can design from scratch, and pick whatever tools you want to build your product,” says Joe Britt, CEO of . Greenfield manifests itself in the flood of new connected gadgets and devices that are being shipped to store shelves and . Because for the most part, these products and their manufacturers have no precedence, there are no constraints, limits or predefined parameters in their development and production. The same can’t be said of the well-established product categories and manufacturers, which already have production lines that have been working and evolving for years and decades. “For example, air conditioners are typically produced by established manufacturers,” says Britt. “A given manufacturer will have been building different models for years, and will have a number of proprietary internal designs (or chassis) to draw upon when a new model is needed.” Such a manufacturer will want newer models to draw from the legacy chassis as much as possible, in order to shorten development time and leverage investment already made in previous iterations. Modifications will be much easier to make for the design teams because past QA and testing efforts are at their disposal. The same applies to Industrial IoT (IIoT), in which you must deal with a lot of machinery and infrastructure that already exists, such as roads, bridges, buildings, factories, power plants, oil rigs, etc. where replacements can cost millions of dollars. That is why established manufacturers are more inclined toward incremental development and the desire to change as little as possible. “The manufacturer will prefer to find a solution which is additive rather than one which requires the replacement of core subsystems of the design,” Britt explains. “Established product developers that want to make their current production lines ‘smart’ don’t want to throw away all that IP and start from scratch — it’s too valuable.” Brownfield developers inherit hardware, embedded software and tool decisions that limit the flexibility of their design and development process. Many of those legacy components were made before the age of the internet, or weren’t designed with connectivity in mind, which makes the transition to IoT even more challenging. And, perhaps more importantly, most of these manufacturers don’t have the know-how and experience to develop for connected environments, and often overlook very , including security, and . “To achieve success in brownfield development, IoT companies will need to provide an easy, reliable solution that doesn’t intrude upon the design of the product,” Britt adds. Developers need tools, platforms and standards that enable them to securely and efficiently connect their products to the cloud without the need to rely on proprietary resources. Britt underlines the need for an end-to-end platform that takes care of the hardware and software underpinnings of IoT connectivity, security and interoperability, so that developers can focus on the core functionality of their products without the need to reinvent the wheel. This is an approach that can benefit both greenfield and brownfield development processes and help unify the currently dispersed and fragmented IoT landscape. This is the vision behind Afero’s namesake IoT platform, which constitutes a set of desktop and mobile apps, hardware, development tools, connectivity modules and cloud services and APIs with which the components of an IoT ecosystem can be defined, identified, monitored and interconnected. As Britt explains it, the idea is to “boil down concepts into high-level building blocks that any developer or enthusiast can immediately use.” Afero is a , coming out of stealth in late 2015, but it has already in a new round of funding within a few months of its launch. According to Britt, Afero has partnered with companies to use its flagship platform in a number of greenfield and brownfield IoT projects, ranging from connected toys and medical devices to detecting water leaks and sensing buildings and infrastructure. While holistic platforms will pave the way for easier brownfield IoT development, provisions also need to be made to integrate support for open standards in order to make possible interoperability and coexistence between different platforms and devices. is one of the companies that is taking strides in this field, encouraging and helping industries to adopt open standards, especially in the field of Industrial and Enterprise IoT. “In some industries, manufacturers are building things for IoT and we help them to consider open standards and interfaces and to create new ways to interact with their things,” says Bret Greenstein, vice president at IBM Watson IoT. One of the ways IBM helps integration is through , a visual wiring tool for IoT. Node-RED helps bridge the gap between conflicting, non-compatible IoT ecosystems by providing a visual interface that connects different protocols, clouds and platforms. And as an open-source project, it is being constantly extended by the IoT community to support more standards. “I think that truly open, no-cost standards and open-source technologies that are managed by the community without the risk of a company asserting control are the only way that they become widely adopted and interoperable,” Greenstein says. Openness also needs to be integrated at the connection and component level. “The initial challenge for many brownfield environments is simply getting connected,” says John Marshall, senior vice president at , a company that provides fog computing gateways. “Finding effective ways to connect devices to one another, to a gateway, to the network or cloud, all require interconnections that will allow communications to relay from one operating environment to another.” When developing brownfield IIoT solutions, platforms and tools need to be flexible to adapt and connect components at different levels, including physical devices, I/O systems, control systems and supervisory controls. However, the problem is that the technology is very fragmented. “Each automation company has their own set of protocols, which are proprietary but available to partners,” Marshall says. As Marshall further explains, some systems such as security panels can be replaced with new devices that support internet and cloud connections, while others are not replaceable and need the installation of a translation layer to adapt with the underlying protocol. “Which is why open, standards-based networking is the formula for success when you want to bridge from legacy environments,” he underlines. LILEE’s architecture promotes open standards across its gateway and cloud services in order to facilitate peer-to-peer communications. Devices that support a fog standard can register and send messages, and other devices can subscribe to those messages, regardless of their differences in protocol and transport methods. “The key for deploying brownfield solutions is to look for open standards solutions that will open up the potential of the legacy investment and allow room for ongoing future growth,” Marshall says. IBM’s Greenstein says, “We need the industry to join together over this.” If there’s a lesson to be learned, it is that IoT development — both greenfield and brownfield — needs a joint effort among the creators and adopters of devices, protocols, standards and providers in order to facilitate the work of developers and to provision for the future of the industry. This is how, Afero’s Joe Britt says, IoT manufacturers can make sure their products can “remain relevant and competitive for decades to come.”
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Five principles for building the next great video platform
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Michael Segal
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Video is eating the internet. It accounts for nearly 75 percent of internet traffic, with Americans consuming more than an hour of online videos each day — more than three times as much as in 2011. Established platforms like YouTube and Netflix capture a large portion of this traffic, but there also are a number of new players exploiting the video opportunity. Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, all originally photo platforms, are enthusiastically embracing the video format, and a crop of new video-first platforms like and are growing exponentially. As investors, we look for trends that reveal future opportunity. Increased appetite for video led Bessemer to invest in great companies like Twitch, and . As video continues to grow, we will continue to invest. In understanding where the next opportunity may lie, one question we ask ourselves is: What principles do transformative new video platforms have in common? Recently, we hosted Spotlight: Video, an event that brought together leaders in online video to help answer this question (and others). Through their perspectives and conversations with up-and-coming video startups, we’ve distilled a set of five principles critical to success in the video space. While no such list could be comprehensive, and every rule has exceptions, we are excited to contribute our thoughts to the ongoing conversation about the future of the medium. New platforms aspire to have millions of consumers creating and sharing videos in a uniquely compelling way. Most fall short of this goal for one simple reason: It’s incredibly difficult to create an interesting piece of content quickly. Your platform may have a dazzling array of features that enable creative expression, but if the average user can’t make a great video in 30 seconds or less (ideally a lot less!), chances are they never will. In a world in which tens of thousands of apps compete for consumer attention, reducing the “time to value” (i.e. the time required for a user to create something delightful) is critical. For example, Snapchat lets you easily record video, string it together and add filters and messages, creating complex content in seconds with a couple of taps, as illustrated by DJ Khaled’s lost at sea story. The best platforms minimize the social pressure and lower the barrier to creation. Making a video can be a stressful and challenging process — no one wants to make a piece of content that is uninteresting or embarrassing. Platforms like Twitch and Musical.ly cleverly lower the bar to create. Instead of an intimidating blank video canvas, they give you a simple prompt, such as “record yourself playing your favorite video game” or “lip sync to your favorite song” that makes it easy to produce fun, shareable content. All great video platforms are clever about minimizing self-consciousness. Fun features like filters, stickers and masks make it easy to create entertaining content. They also encourage “in the moment” content that isn’t meant to be polished.
If your model is driven by power creators, build for them. Our first two principles specifically address UGC platforms, in which a significant portion of users must create and share content for the network to thrive. Not every platform takes this form. Some rely heavily on power creators, a tiny subset of users who spend time and effort to create polished content for the rest of the community to watch and enjoy. The first step to building a power creator-centric platform is to acknowledge that goal: Platforms can fail by trying to cultivate a UGC network with a product average consumers will never embrace. Secondly, prioritize attracting power creators from day one by promoting them and enabling them to build, manage and engage a broad audience. Top creators have several platforms to choose from and are thoughtful about where they focus their efforts. A new platform must provide a novel way to engage a creator’s existing audience, enable a direct relationship with fans and deliver significant new viewership. Without these elements, top creators may not be motivated to risk trying a new platform — and without their content, the platform won’t thrive. The challenge of creating a great video within six seconds is difficult. However, some people, like King Bach with more than 16 million followers, are great at it, and Vine did a fantastic job at attracting these power creators to their platform. https://vine.co/v/eztZAqdEgAp Build a platform that can retain customers before focusing on attracting new users. As investors, we’ve witnessed countless examples of platforms that developed a clever viral mechanic that caused traffic to skyrocket, only to come back to earth or even disappear just a few weeks or months later. The reason for this pattern is simple: These companies activate a growth engine (or get some surprise promotion that throws them into growth mode) without first ensuring that the product is compelling enough to retain users over time. Churn itself is not inherently evil. Even the best platforms see a large number of users try their app and never return. But what distinguishes top platforms is that their user retention cohorts flatten quickly, with at least 20 percent of users engaging every week or month in perpetuity. “Leaky bucket” platforms often see cohorts drop to <5 percent long-term retention over the course of the first few months. Investing in long-term retention can be a time-consuming and challenging endeavor, and often one that is never fully complete. But platforms that don’t invest in retention from day one risk sudden death: They can show impressive growth numbers, and even attract significant investment, but may not be viable in the long run. Musical.ly is a good example. They started by building a fantastic video creation experience centered on lip syncing. Had they stopped there, their success might have been flash-in-the-pan. Instead, by focusing on retention from the start, and layering in features to get users returning daily, they created a lasting platform. A post shared by (@musical.ly) on Enduring platforms quickly move beyond creation to become content and social networks. Video platforms often start simply as a tool that enables the creation of a new type of video. The best platforms, knowing that a simple creation tool may not be sufficient to create a highly engaged network, move past this stage and incorporate one of two additional product layers: a content discovery system or a social graph (sometimes both!). The opportunity to follow friends or influencers, and to consume interesting content even when you don’t feel like creating your own, is the key driver of daily or near-daily usage of top video platforms. While building effective content discovery and a social graph into a new video platform is much easier said than done, companies that succeed in achieving this goal are more likely to join the ranks of the most valuable platforms on the internet.
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Boosted Board owners told to stop riding while the company investigates ‘venting’ batteries
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Stefan Etienne
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It hasn’t been a great year for batteries. Boosted Board CEO and founder Sanjay Dastoor asking owners of its newest electric longboard to stop riding them while the company investigates an issue with its batteries. Specifically, they’re investigating two separate cases where the lithium battery cell on the second-gen board “vented” — in which a battery cell shows sign of smoke or unusually high heat. The battery enclosure is designed to contain any fires in the case of a cell failure — the company says this containment system “worked as designed” in both of the reported cases, and notes that there were no injuries in either case. Users have been venting their frustration regarding the battery warning on reddit’s , where user details his board filling his NYC apartment with smoke. hasn’t shown any sign of troubles, I of course recommend that if you do have a Boosted Board 2 that you follow the manufacturer’s advice: power it off, don’t charge it, and keep it away from anything flammable until the company figures out what is happening. Users who have pre-ordered the Boosted Board 2 have also been alerted that the shipments are halted until things get sorted. TechCrunch has reached out to Boosted for comment. A spokesperson for Boosted declined to comment on the investigation, instead referring to the official statement mentioned earlier.
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Welcome to the hardtech era
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Jon Evans
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Good news, my friends! The day we have all ostentatiously longed for has arrived. I come to announce that the days of are over. The era of photo apps, messaging copycats, new niche social networks, “Uber for X”, and on-demand delivery of artisanal civet coffee is behind us at last. No more trivial apps and web services. At long last it is time to solve the hard problems. But be careful what you wish for… For nearly ten years “tech” and “Silicon Valley” have meant, to the casual observer, smartphone apps and web sites/services. Facebook and Twitter. Uber and Lyft. Postmates and Instacart. Snapchat and Instagram. WhatsApp and Slack. Shazam and Spotify. Dropbox and Evernote. AirBNB and Pinterest. Venmo and Square. Minecraft and Pokemon Go. Plus their associated infrastructure and tool companies: Atlassian, Stripe, Github, cloud computing companies, etc. I don’t want to minimize the scale, success, impact, or difficulty of those companies, but they all piggyback, directly or indirectly, on the promulgation of smartphones into half of all human palms, and the exponential growth in at-scale server technologies; they all exist in essentially the same space. And scores, no, hundreds, no, of vastly inferior competitors or wannabes exist in that space as well. This is in large part because that space is easily comprehensible. Anyone can join a boot camp and, six intense weeks later, be writing basic apps and web services. And has an app idea. And so lot of dumb money descended on the Valley, along with the — the MBAs and power seekers, who in a previous era who would have flocked to Wall Street, and who recenly gravitated towards the Valley because it was a new center of power, and they could that power. Smartphones. The web. Start up, cash in, sell out, bro down. How hard could it be? It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it? But it’s over now, my friends. The future is . VCs are always looking for the next big thing. Now, they themselves are wondering what it will be via — Scott Thurm (@ScottThurm) The future is unforgiving hardware trying to thrive in the arbitrary and vicious real world; brain-bending VR; RNA engineering; abstruse blockchain protocol disputes; and worse. As that linked WSJ piece puts it:
Veteran investor Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson said his firm is backing companies in agriculture, robotics, artificial intelligence and aerospace. “A ridiculous amount of money will be lost foraging into all these areas,“ he said. “But the greatest opportunities are in those sectors.”
When Steve Jurvetson talks, you should listen. He’s by some distance the most impressive venture capitalist I’ve ever met. So forget your app idea; forget about quitting your Wall Street job and coming west to found a startup. The next phase of our future belongs more to teams of experts, and PhDs with deep knowledge, than to crazy coders straight out of Stanford undergrad. https://twitter.com/mattocko/status/790388410015817728 Despite my hyperbole in the first paragraph, I don’t actually mean apps / web sites / web services will take off again. The occasional new app, maybe even new social network, will erupt and succeed beyond its creators’ wildest dreams. But that will become the exceptions among success stories, not the norm. Don’t believe me? Here’s a fun little compare-and-contrast. Google of course is the home of Android. Take a look at the at the Android Developers site. It’s friendly! It’s comprehensible! It’s broken down into simple, bite-size steps that anyone can follow! …Google is also the home of TensorFlow, an open-source AI/machine-learning library/framework. So now go take a look at , which is described as “a gentle introduction to multiclass classification.” Then pause to marvel at the vast difference between those two tutorials, in terms of depth, complexity, and mathematical density. On the one hand, this is great. Finally, after ten years of much-of-a-muchness, a whole lot of technology is finally on the runway to breakout success, cultural relevance, and ultimately changing our lives. Agritech. Biotech. Cryptocurrencies. Drones. Machine learning. Robots. Self-driving cars. Virtual reality and augmented reality. This is amazing stuff. But on the other hand, the colossal boom in web/smartphone software over the last decade is likely to finally come to an end. (Though I expect it to plateau, not diminish; smartphones and the Internet aren’t going to become important any time soon.) Hardtech startups require more expertise, probably larger teams, and more time and money; hence, there will be fewer of them, and to inferior VCs’ dismay, they will tend to grow more slowly. Furthermore, , they are more likely to be bought be large companies than to take over the world on their own. Perhaps of most interest to most of my readers, if you don’t have specialized hardtech expertise, there will be a fewer rocket ships around to grab a seat on. Sorry. But knowing how to write apps and web software is no longer the potential it was five years ago. It was a good run; it was fun while it lasted. But from now on, if you want to make a real dent in the universe, you’ll need to know a lot more than that.
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Gousto, the UK cook-at-home recipe kit service, serves up further £10M in funding
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Steve O'Hear
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, the U.K. cook-at-home recipe kit service that competes most directly with Rocket Internet’s HelloFresh, has raised a further £10 million in funding. Backing comes from BGF Ventures, Unilever Ventures, MMC Ventures, Angel CoFund, and Barclays — and is a mixture of equity debt financing. In a call, Gousto founder and CEO Timo Boldt tells me the startup plans to use the new capital to continue improving the experience for customers, in terms of recipe choice and turn around, and to further Gousto’s mission to reduce food waste as much as possible. That means better value for customers — Gousto is cheaper per meal than HelloFresh, for example — and better economics for the business itself. Zooming out, the thinking behind recipe kit services that send you perfectly portioned fresh ingredients matched to each recipe is that not only do you save money by only buying exactly what is needed to cook, but if executed well, the service itself can run a lot more efficiently than a national grocery store chain’s offline or online offering. Citing a potential 5-10 year road map and emphasising Gousto is in it for the long term, Boldt says the startup plans to invest heavily in data science, its tech stack, and operational infrastructure, which is what he believes already gives it an edge over competitors. Asked to elaborate and help me cut through the data bullshit that most startups push these days, Boldt says that Gousto has a centralised data warehouse, with hundreds of real time dashboards to help power its “amazing data science capabilities”. These include forecasting models that help Gousto have less than 1 per cent food waste compared to the supermarkets 20 per cent, warehouse optimisation in terms of the way ingredients are picked off the shelf, and the ability to design better menus. Regards the latter, I’m told this means determining factors that make a successful menu by calculating a similarity between each recipe in Gousto’s library “without human input”. “As we are the leader in recipe choice, we also lead in data capture which means our menus self optimise over time, and we truly have a data advantage over the models that don’t capture info on customer preferences,” adds Boldt, taking a swipe at HelloFresh, and Blue Apron across the pond.
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Twitter loses another exec in Asia — this time its head of India and Southeast Asia
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Jon Russell
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When it rains, it pours. That’s the case right now for Twitter’s business in Asia after a third senior executive announced their departure from the company. Parminder Singh, who oversaw the business in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East for the past three years, today announced that he is moving on to pastures new within the next month. Singh’s impending exit comes two days after Twitter’s head of India, Rishi Jaitly, . Karen Stocks, who headed Twitter in Australia, last week. An update. After leading Twitter in Asia's most exciting markets (India/SEA/MENA) for 3 yrs, time to move on to new passions — Parminder Singh (@parrysingh) In a notable footnote to Singh’s departure, sales in the region that he handled has been restructured. The Middle East business now falls into the jurisdiction of Twitter’s European team, with India and Southeast Asia now grouped into the general APAC remit. Those latter two markets had been broken out into their own division, which Singh ran, separate to the APAC management to prioritize a more localized approach. The INSEA/MENA region is now split with MENA aligned to EMEA and INSEA aligned to APAC region. Right time for me to step back. — Parminder Singh (@parrysingh) These changes look like part of a company streamlining process, announced last month, which includes . Other changes for Twitter’s Asia business have included the departure of in September, while cost-cutting measures will see from its Hong Kong office to the regional headquarters in Singapore. It is unclear whether employees from either office losing their jobs. Twitter provided the following statement: We thank Parry for his contributions and leadership over the past three years at Twitter. He has been instrumental in setting up a strong business foundation across Southeast Asia, India and MENA, including some of our most promising emerging markets. He has built and developed strong local teams across multiple geographies and established cross-functional operations that will have a long term impact on our business. Parry felt now is an appropriate time for him to pursue other passions and work on his next adventure to help a content-based start up in Singapore and India. Over the next month, he will be closely involved in transitioning the business to the new leadership for continuity and momentum. As part of our sales restructuring process, the MENA region will now be part of our EMEA business, while Southeast Asia & India remain part of our Asia Pacific business, headed by Aliza Knox, our VP of Asia Pacific. Maya Hari is our new Managing Director of Southeast Asia and India reporting to Aliza Knox. Maya previously managed Twitter’s Ads Product Strategy & Adoption for Asia Pacific, MENA and Latin America. For India: Taranjeet Singh continues to be Twitter’s Business Head for India and remains the key client contact for Indian brand marketers and advertisers. We wish Parry all the best and will continue to invest in these important regions to make Twitter the best way to see what’s happening right now around the world.
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Harnessing mobile technologies will help the next generation vote
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Maram Abdelhamid
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With one of the most controversial and important presidential elections in our country’s history –- of which issues important to diverse communities are especially front and center –- it’s imperative we encourage millennials to vote. It is safe to say either their participation or inaction will shape this country for decades and influence future generations of Americans. And while this generation is hugely influential, by-and-large it’s not active when it comes to voting. The good news is companies and entrepreneurs have taken notice and are rolling out new applications and services aimed at increasing millennial engagement. There are ages 18-35 in the United States, making up about a third of our eligible voting population. These individuals, known as “millennials,” will soon dethrone the baby boomers as the largest voting group in our country. Millennials are the most racially diverse generation of voters in American history. According to , young adults in 2016 make up around half of the record 27 million eligible Hispanic voters and over one-third of eligible African American voters. As anyone who has been on Twitter or Facebook knows, millennials are not afraid to openly voice their views on political or social issues. But surprisingly, less than half of eligible millennials actually showed up at the polls in 2012 despite fervent social media activism. Young adults are a mobile generation – more than own a smartphone. And according to a survey conducted earlier this year by Bank of America, with their smartphone than other people. Over the past few years, we have seen a number of new mobile applications launched targeting young adult voters –- some specifically targeting those in historically underrepresented communities who may feel disenfranchised. For instance, – an app launched by a 26-year-old entrepreneur dubbed the “Tinder for politics” – was named the “#1 up-and-coming app” by this year. Another great example is ’s partnership with to launch , an app specifically aimed at registering millennial Latinos for the upcoming election. We have also seen wireless providers launch new services that stand to make these voting apps more appealing. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint have released different versions of what are known as free data programs that allow certain apps or services to be used without counting against a consumer’s monthly data plan. By applying a decades-old business model similar to toll-free calling or parking validation to mobile, providers have found a way to shift some of the cost of data onto advertisers, allowing consumers to access more data at no additional cost. Currently, free data programs are still in their infancy, so most are aimed at more popular activities such video streaming. But, it’s easy to see how the free data model can be applied to all kinds of other worthwhile uses such as voting apps and informational resources like online workforce seminars. After all, it’s a great way to incentivize the types of activities like continued education, professional development, and civic engagement which remain important to our country. However, it’s become clear that traditional engagement methods don’t always appeal to them. Using the latest technologies to provide tools empowering young voters will make it considerably more likely for them to not only vote but also remain politically active. Young voters have never been as important to our country’s future as they are now, so we must do all we can to make voting and registration fit our 21st-century world.
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DJI sends invites for November 15 event, Inspire 2 likely to debut
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Matt Burns
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It seems DJI is about to announce the next generation of the Inspire drone. The company recently sent invites for a November 15 event in LA with the tagline of Control / Create, clearly a nod to the Inspire’s dual-controller capability and target market of Hollywood creators. The event would be two years and one day after DJI announced the original Inspire drone. The first Inspire was a marvel of drone technology when it launched in 2014. It packed DJI’s latest streaming technology, able to send 1080p video from the drone to a controller a mile away. This was later updated to a 3 mile range, but DJI’s new, tiny drone, the Mavic Pro, can stream video over 4 miles. Clearly the Inspire needs an update. It’s likely DJI will pack the Inspire with some of the features found in the Phantom 4 drone such as obstacle avoidance, improved downward facing location sensors and target following capabilities. Interchangeable cameras would make sense, too, seeing DJI’s build-out of its Osmo line of handheld gimbals. Hopefully the Inspire’s signature transforming design is retained for the new model, too. It’s just so rad. to be the next Inspire which seems to suggest the drone will keep its sleek shape, quick change rotor clips, carbon fiber arms and wide stance. The image shows the drone in what appears to be a foam shipping container. The Inspire line sits in an odd spot for DJI. With an MSRP of $3,099 (but on sale through DJI at $1,999), it’s between the company’s consumer line and massive, six-rotor beasts. It’s aimed more at creators with a need for precise aerial photographer but without the funding of a major movie studio.
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Adobe previews its next-gen photo editor
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Frederic Lardinois
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At its , Adobe today previewed Project Nimbus, a new cloud-native, Lightroom-like photo editor that takes away a lot of the complexity of Adobe’s flagship photo-managing and editing application and replaces it with simpler, smarter tools. For now, Adobe is sadly not releasing this tool to the public, but you can expect a beta next year. In recent years, Adobe focused strongly on its mobile apps. In many ways, Project Nimbus brings a lot of what Adobe has learned from mobile back to the desktop. As the company stressed during today’s demo, Nimbus is meant to work seamlessly with the rest of its tools. It shares the same cloud-based image and asset library as the rest of its Creative Cloud suite and image edits are non-destructive and reflected across applications. Indeed, one of the main design philosophies behind Nimbus is that users should be able to seamlessly move back and forth between the desktop and mobile. The tool also makes use of Adobe’s new machine learning-based services. That means you will be able to use natural language to find images in your library, for example. That’s similar to what Google is doing with Google Photos, for example, but in Lightroom, you always had to tag your photos if you wanted to find them again. Similarly, Adobe is using some of its cloud-based Creative SDK and Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence service to power features like Nimbus’ photo retouching tools. It’s clear that Adobe believes the way forward is to give its users the option to work on their projects across devices and applications. It’s already been doing that with its mobile apps and it’s now starting to bring what it has learned on those platforms back to the desktop, too. Project Nimbus itself still feels like a bit of an odd product, though, especially given how similar many of the features — and even some of the layouts — are to Lightroom. It’s not hard to imagine that Adobe could position Nimbus (or whatever it will call it when it finally launches it) as a more consumer-oriented version of Lightroom. But in some ways, it almost feels like the kernel of a next-gen version of Lightroom that could actually replace the older tool in the long run. Oh — and just to confuse things, this is Adobe’s .
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Self-healing electric ink refuses to die when cut
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Devin Coldewey
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Some clever researchers — perhaps too clever — have created a printable, self-healing conductive material that repeatedly fixes itself after being snipped in half. Perhaps this will lead to cut-resistant hunter-killer robots, but more likely it’ll just be used for smart jeans. The UC San Diego engineers were looking into making improved self-healing materials, which may take hours or days to repair serious damage, or require heat or some other catalyst in order to work. “We wanted to develop a smart system with impressive self-healing abilities with easy-to-find, inexpensive materials,” explained Amay Bandodkar, one of the researchers, . And that they did: printable ink was impregnated with microparticles of neodymium, a commonly used metal with strong magnetic properties, and carbon black, which is highly conductive. A clever fabrication process ensures that printed strips of the ink act as permanent magnets, and cutting them only separates them into two permanent magnets with similar orientations. The result is that when two pieces are separated, the north pole of one remains by the south pole of the other, attracting each other. If they aren’t far apart, or are brought near each other, the two pieces of printed material will join up — although they won’t form a permanent connection, unlike some more exotic self-healing substances. The magnet thing, illustrated. Even so, this could make for circuits and sensors that can instantly and easily heal simple damage — great news for flexible and wearable electronics, which are constantly being bent and broken. The proportions in the ink can be changed easily to make it more magnetic, more conductive and so on — and other, cooler microparticles can be added, as well. “The generic self-healing ink formulation technique discussed in this work can be easily applied for developing inks containing other fillers for printing self-healing devices that cater to a wide range of applications and printed electronic devices,” reads the paper. The researchers are currently looking into how to create a battery that self-heals, as well. You can read the full paper — if you’re up on your electrochemistry — .
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The Muse co-founders are writing a book about the new rules of work
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Connie Loizos
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and are proud of their careers, and no wonder. They’re co-founders of the New York-based career site , which offers job opportunities, skill-building courses, coaching and video profiles meant to show what it’s like to work at different companies. They’ve beefed up their own executive ranks with several new hires: Sharon Feder as chief content officer, Owen Adams as SVP of product and Kara Walsh as CMO. (Feder was previously chief digital officer at Rachael Ray. Adams led product, design and analytics at Wikia. And Walsh was most recently CMO at Kapow.) Their five-year-old startup has won over investors, too. To date, The Muse has raised . It hasn’t always been easy. In fact, it wasn’t so long ago that the two, who met while working for McKinsey & Co., didn’t know what they wanted to do or what steps to take. Since launching The Muse, however, they’ve learned a ton, and they’re now pouring those learnings — along with those of various experts on the site — into a new book being published next April by Random House. We talked yesterday with Minshew about the project, titled “The New Rules of Work: The Modern Playbook for Navigating Your Career.” KM: We produce a tremendous amount of advice and guidance on The Muse, but instead of going from A to B to C, people take a more eclectic approach, typically, and go down rabbit holes. That’s useful for certain kinds of topics, but we think there’s a percentage of users who could benefit from a more guided approach. We want to take them from A to Z, all the way through. There’s an emotional component to this, too. When I was still a bright-eyed McKinsey consultant, I remember hitting a point where I didn’t know what to do next and someone gave me the book, “ ,” and I read it and scribbled in it, and it felt like a guide in helping me figure out my career. I think there’s an opportunity here to help other people. KM: No, not at all. Most people think of The Muse as a platform for millennials, but about 40 percent of our users are over age 35, so it’s really not just for people at the beginning of their career anymore. We’ve found a lot of individuals are drawn to what we do. KM: We spend a lot of time talking about how tech is changing the way we job search; we have an entire chapter called the ‘New Rules of Building Your Personal Brand.’ The reality is that it’s no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘need to have.’ We stress the importance of how people talk about you, how to build a personal website, how to think about the impression you’re giving across different social media platforms, how to uncover how people already think about you. There are new rules for all of these things. KM: I don’t think everyone can read 15 newsletters, but the point is valid. Employers are looking for individuals who can tell a story about what they bring to a particular company, and people with an understanding of that have a much better chance of getting to where they want to go. The first and most important step is defining the attributes, topics and themes that you want to be known for. You might be a passionate stand-up comedian, for example, but whether you emphasize or minimize that has a lot to do with how you want to be perceived and whether it’s an asset or a liability. I’m also a huge believer in personal websites. It’s the best chance to build the story of how you want to be known. They also make you easier to find and can help build your network if people can contact you through the site. KM: LinkedIn groups and meet-ups can be wonderful. Following industry influencers and subscribing to newsletters can be a great thing, too, because the hardest thing can be picking up on vocabulary and understanding the jargon of an industry. [These things are] also helpful to keep your pulse on issues and trends of the moment and, when you see the opportunity, to share your thoughts and get on the radar of people you admire. Not last, creating original content is an incredibly powerful way to ensure that your voice is out there in the world, and that’s never been easier, thanks to platforms like Medium and LinkedIn’s Influencer platform and WordPress. KM: We spend a lot of time on Skype and other video interviews and it’s funny how many people will prepare for a Skype interview by wearing a formal suit jacket with pajama pants on the bottom. Then suddenly someone is at the door and you have to get up and you realize you’re wearing reindeer boxers. Just put pants on. [Laughs.] KM: People actually aren’t moving on from companies much more quickly than in the past, but there’s a perception that they do, so companies are investing less in talent on the assumption that young employees won’t stay long. At the the same time, we’re seeing the consumerization of the candidate, meaning individual job seekers aren’t just looking at the first five jobs that turn up in a search and meet their salary requirements. They consume a lot of information first, and employers that aren’t invest in training a junior workforce are starting to see the limitations of that. It’s never been so easy for someone to see what other options are out there.
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To IP or not to IP, that is the question
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Ankit Jain
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The rise and fall of Pokémon GO begs us to ask many questions regarding how to launch a game to position it for success. One specific question it raises is whether branded intellectual property is something game makers should consider prior to launch. Branded IP is one of the most time-tested ways to launch games that go on to become immensely popular. Two examples from the console gaming world are Ninja Turtles and The Simpsons. Why does it work? At the highest of levels, a game built with IP can piggyback its marketing and growth on the consumer sentiment for the associated brand. A few years back, one of the authors was at a company that licensed IP for a title on dinosaurs. The team brought in a great brand known for its coverage of history and put their name in the title. The product was built, and the launch included promotion via social media channels and a press release. The team expected a windfall as ROI for their licensing and development costs because it was still the early days of mobile. But that was not to be. The game didn’t get many downloads and the title faded into the sunset. To this team, IP didn’t have the value they thought it would. The biggest lesson learned from that experience is the importance of combining a game that has mechanics that can stand on their own with IP that can instantly create an emotional connection with users. A good sanity check is to browse social media for the engagement with the main entities in the IP you are considering. Check out how , , and are being interacted with on Twitter and Instagram. U.S. Android devices current install penetration for Pokémon GO. Source: SimilarWeb. , a longtime social and mobile gaming executive at Playdom and most recently CEO at Kiwi, Inc. puts it well: “Retention benefits accrue if you can tap into an organic population for your title that is excited to play it. For a game to be a good match for an IP, the game mechanics have to really make sense for it. Ingress predated Pokémon GO, but the power of IP really bought the location-based mechanics to life because of the symbiotic fit.” U.S. Android devices daily active users for Pokémon GO. Source: SimilarWeb Great intellectual property drives awareness and creates an instant emotional attachment with users. This helps in two concrete ways: (1) Apple and Google often feature IP-based titles in their app stores, and (2) people often search for the IP itself and can find such titles. When you market the title, consumers instantly recognize the brand and form an association with your game. This can significantly reduce your customer acquisition costs. When Pokémon GO launched, it instantly captured our imaginations. Didn’t you almost instantaneously associate Pikachu with the game? “It absolutely enhances the quality of the title as long as the developer understands how to properly integrate and bring the IP to life in the game world. In fact, a strong IP can also provide a level of authenticity virtual worlds sometimes fail to deliver by grounding the game in a more real-world experience.” — , lead product marketing manager at , the company behind the games Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Gordon Ramsay DASH. Evolution of an IP-based game: From Diner Dash to Cooking Dash to Gordon Ramsay DASH Your IP license will often cost as much as the game. IP licenses usually come with a minimum guarantee that the IP holder expects from the developer, as well as a revenue share. A game may cost $1 million to develop, though you may have a minimum guarantee of $1 million against a 20 percent revenue share. This both increases your capital requirements and decreases your margins. It also is almost impossible to get out of these deals once they are running, so you really want to be careful to value the IP correctly before doing the deal. Depending on the title, minimum guarantees can be as low as $50,000 and go as high as $10 million, with a package that includes promotion. We’ve also seen revenue shares ranging from 15-30 percent based on the strength of the IP. “It is very difficult to create and market new IPs. Games are no different from the movie industry. This is why I prefer to invest in the Atari properties, launching a sequel or rebooting an old IP offers a springboard and brand recognition. This does not mean a sure hit, because at the end of the day you obviously need a good game, but there is definitely a lot of IP awareness you can capitalize on.” — , CEO of Atari. IP based on television shows often can be bundled with a promotion. This could mean commercial time, in-show mentions or a more comprehensive integration with the television show. This provides an easier and more cost-effective channel to market into, as the user is literally focused on that IP at that moment of time. It has the ability to cut through all of the clutter of marketing messages. “Our goal is to create authentic products and experiences that extend our show’s IP,” said Dan Yang, executive vice president and general manager of Viacom Music & Entertainment Group Consumer Products. “Gaming is a powerful medium to interact with our fans and showcase our franchises in a way video cannot. Television can bring a lot to the game, as well, including a loyal fan base, an established universe, and of course promotion at various levels. The more natural the fit the IP is with the game, the easier or more natural the promotion becomes.” “IP can lower effective CPI for user acquisition for a game, both by improving click-through and installs, as well as improved organic interest, so there is significant benefits for the cost.” — Omar Siddiqui at Kiwi. Building a game based on IP is a huge bet. And the stronger the IP’s connection with your users, the more ROI there will be. So invest in your new partner’s IP and help them grow. It will have a direct impact on your bottom line. Plan events together, and invest in introducing your user base (potentially even from other titles you have) to the new IP. Create materials and strategies for your IP partner to market, as well. This two-way street can pay off big time. Plan online and offline events to engage your audience with your new IP. “For Gordon Ramsay DASH, we unlocked the full reach of Gordon’s fan base, sharing behind-the-scenes videos of the game to his 11 million social media followers, integrating digital promotions for the game at Gordon’s restaurants worldwide, live streaming a chef duel between one of Gordon’s top chefs and a YouTube influencer as if they were re-enacting the game in real life — we even conducted a highly engaging Reddit AMA where Gordon fielded questions about the game.” — Sangita Agrawal, lead product marketing manager from Glu Mobile. The Gordon Ramsay DASH team: Gordon Ramsay, Sangita Agrawal (lead product marketing manager, Glu), Tom Hall (senior creative director, PlayFirst Studios @ Glu), and Becky Ann Hughes (GM, Glu Play) You often will need to get approval of how you use the IP. As a developer, this can create restrictions on your creative freedom. It also slows down the process of development. If you want your IP holder to participate in the process and provide content, that may cost extra and take additional time, as well. Expect IP games to take longer to develop than non-IP-based titles. “Communication and motivation is vital. To ensure deadlines are met, developers must understand their IP owner’s approval process, how to interact with all key stakeholders, and set up a structure that will encourage their IP partners to actively participate. This will expedite the process and help grow the overall value of the franchise.” — , executive vice president and general manager of Viacom Music & Entertainment Group Consumer Products. Licensing intellectual property can be a powerful differentiator for your game. It increases the complexity of building and launching your game, but when it works, it can be exponentially bigger than an original title, even with the same game mechanics. While the higher price tag and legal complexities of partnering with the owners of strong IP can be daunting, the emotional connection such IP can create with your users can make it worth it. The question is, do you take the licensing leap?
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Elgato intros a standalone motion detector for Apple HomeKit
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Brian Heater
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Setting up a connected home is a piecemeal proposition at the moment. Apple, Google and Amazon all working to push out their respective frameworks as quickly as humanly possible, but for the time being, actually automating the process is a matter of picking up devices here and there. is offering an interesting take on the space with its Eve series of outlets, switches and sensors, the latter of which can be used to trigger different scenarios through the company’s proprietary app — and, more importantly, HomeKit. The latest addition to the line is — which, as the name pretty clearly implies, brings motion detection to the family. The device runs off a pair of AA batteries, detecting motion within a 120-degree field of view and 27-foot range. Once it spots movement, it can activate or deactivate power outlets and can set different Home scenes in motion. The accessory is available now for $50 through Amazon and Elgato’s store (and it’ll be hitting Apple’s stores soon) — a bit pricey for a standalone sensor. Probably a little much, unless you’ve already got a number of devices that can utilize the functionality. The Motion joins a number of existing Eve sensors set up to detect things like temperature, air quality and humidity.
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Blocking ad blockers boosted Facebook’s desktop ad revenue 18%
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Josh Constine
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Facebook’s recent is already earning it money. On today’s , the company said desktop ad revenue grew 18 percent year-over-year this quarter compared to around 9 percent in previous quarters, and that thwarting ad blockers was largely the cause for that boost. While Adblock Plus announced it would circumvent the ban, and , Facebook and has managed to keep ads flowing through Adblock Plus. Facebook’s position is that ads help pay for operating its service, so it’s reasonable to force users to see them as long as they’re not too interruptive. Adblock Plus and some users counter that Facebook’s ads are still distracting even if they blend into the feed. And they say that ad blockers help prevent people from being tracked, which raises privacy concerns. Facebook hit $1.1 billion in desktop ad revenue this quarter, up from $998 million last quarter. While Facebook makes 84 percent of its ad revenue on mobile, desktop still contributes a meaningful amount to its total $7.01 billion in Q3 revenue. Scoring ad revenue from ad blocker users could help offset the reductions in revenue growth Facebook expects now that it’s hitting maximum ad load. During the call, Facebook CFO David Wehner said, “ As long as Facebook’s elite engineering squad can stay one step ahead of the ad-blocking software developers and their army of open-source contributors, Facebook could squeeze more revenue out of its remaining desktop users.
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Phil Schiller justifies the compromises of the MacBook Pro
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Romain Dillet
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In an interview with , Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller looked back at last week’s Apple event and justified some of the decisions behind the . Let’s go through the new information in this interview. Schiller is saying that the MacBook Pro is the fastest selling pro laptop from Apple. “And we are proud to tell you that so far our online store has had more orders for the new MacBook Pro than any other pro notebook before,” Schiller told The Independent. “So there certainly are a lot of people as excited as we are about it.” But many people had probably been delaying their purchase in anticipation of the redesign. Apple also framed the 13-inch MacBook Pro as a MacBook Air replacement. Was the MacBook Air a pro laptop or a consumer laptop? Either way, using the sales argument shows that Schiller wants to tell everyone that the backlash against the MacBook Pro is limited to a vocal minority. The SD card slot is gone because “there are very fine and fast USB card readers, and then you can use CompactFlash as well as SD.” (I think I haven’t seen a CF card in 10 years.) A good chunk of the interview is about the Mac platform in general, as well. Schiller wants to be reassuring, saying that the company is committed to updating the Mac lineup regularly and keeping Mac customers happy. And Apple isn’t abandoning macOS in favor of iOS. The two operating systems will co-exist. While the laptop lineup is in pretty good shape right now, Apple hasn’t said a word about the Mac Pro, Mac Mini or even the iMac, which could use better components. This interview could have been an opportunity to drop some hints about these other computers. But maybe we’ll see an update sooner rather than later. While the new MacBook Pro looks great, the backlash against Apple has been for the past few days. People have been complaining about the lack of the Escape key, the fact that you have to use dongles for your existing devices as the new MacBook Pro only comes with four Thunderbolt 3 ports, the price, the fact that you to 32GB of RAM, the lack of a powerful GPU in the 15-inch model, the lack of a MagSafe port and the lack of an SD card slot. In short, many people thought the MacBook Pro has been designed backwards. From the outside, it looks like Apple started with the overall design of the machine and then tried to make a good laptop based on these constraints. Many extensive Mac users would have loved Apple to start with the best components out there and then design a laptop around these components. Moreover, it’s hard to realize whether is going to be useful in actual use — the MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar isn’t in the Apple store yet. Compared to the , having a second display above the keyboard doesn’t seem as intuitive as turning the display into a touch screen. The MacBook Pro comes with many different compromises. It’s a light and powerful machine. But many hardcore Mac users were waiting for the perfect update. Apple took some risks, and the backlash is real. Let’s see if people get around to liking this new MacBook Pro as it gets cheaper in the coming years and USB-C devices become widespread.
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Connie Loizos
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Facebook has connected 40M people with Internet.org
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Josh Constine
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Today on Facebook’s , Mark Zuckerberg said Internet.org has helped 40 million people get online. Indeed, 0.5% percent of the world’s population is now connected to the internet thanks to Facebook’s accessibility initiatives. The company even said Internet.org contributed to monthly user growth, which accelerated from 3.63 percent to 4.67 percent growth since last quarter to hit 1.79 billion. Facebook is driving connectivity via its carrier-subsidized Free Basics app and Express Wifi hubs. Eventually Facebook wants to use its Aquila solar-powered drones, satellites and other advanced technology to bring access to remote areas. The company is both targeting users who can’t afford data plans available in their location, as well as those with no access where they live. That 40 million user figure is up from in July 2014, a year ago and in May, representing 166 percent growth year over year. Considering Internet.org’s Free Basics app being banned in India, one of its biggest potential markets, that’s strong growth. Oh, and SpaceX’s rocket that exploded on the landing pad also blew up Internet.org’s first satellite that was meant to bring connectivity to Africa. If Facebook can continue making progress with Internet.org, it can simultaneously accomplish its mission of bringing the world together via the web while also getting more people online who will likely become ad-viewing Facebook users.
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Dell takes on Surface Studio with its dual-screen Smart Desk concept – it even has a dial
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Devin Coldewey
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: Wow, this concept is from . But Dell tells me it actually exists now and we’ll see it at CES in January. Stay tuned! Microsoft impressed a lot of people last week with its , a desktop-tablet hybrid with a clever and elegant . Apparently Dell has been thinking along the same lines, because they just teased something very, very similar — right down to the dial. A video shown ahead of a keynote speech at Adobe’s Max conference (captured by MS Power User) showed the being used in similar situations as the Surface Studio: illustration, photo and video editing and multi-hand media manipulation. “Our thoughts naturally transfer to paper. But there’s a gap between what comes naturally and how we create digitally,” the video explains. “Dell has changed that.” That’s a bit premature, since Dell’s device is still a concept and Microsoft’s is already in the hands of early testers, but they probably didn’t have time to redo the voice-over, so we’ll give them a pass. It’s not all the same, of course: While Microsoft’s solution is a desktop that converts to a high-definition touch and pen input slate, Dell has the two separated. It seems likely from the fact that the video only shows dual-screen setups that this touchscreen is an accessory, not a standalone computer. The video above shows the Smart Desk working with a specific monitor, but a second video shows a different one, so clearly it’s intended as an accessory, not a complete system. Adobe, no doubt, is a partner, and the two have likely collaborated on workflows and layouts that take advantage of it. Clearly this takes advantage of the new features found in the Windows 10 Creators Update, which Dell would have been privy to well ahead of release, but beyond that, we can’t be sure how much Dell knew about Microsoft’s Surface Studio and dial interface. A Dell press release describes the Smart Desk as a “workplace of the future concept,” so unfortunately, there’s no hard details on things like specs, pricing, and all that. Perhaps they’re waiting to see if anyone bites at the bait Microsoft put out.
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New MacBook Pro, the great dongling and Windows notebooks: TCBC 8 with Stefan Etienne
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Darrell Etherington
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Hardware reporter and reviewer Stefan Etienne joins me this week to share first-person impressions of the new entry-level , and we discuss ports — or the . Is a dongle-filled future really going to impact the ability of professionals to get work done with the latest MBP? Stefan has some thoughts on the issue. We also survey the field of recent Windows notebook competitors, including the , the Razer Blade line (and their — you know you screwed up an apology when it includes the words “to those who were offended”), and a few other PCs which aren’t so eager to go all-in on Thunderbolt 3. Ultimately, each has its own failings, however, which bodes well for Apple’s chances to retain its loyal Pro fans, port options or no. Finally, we briefly discuss the LG V20, a new flagship from a phone maker that isn’t Apple, Google or Samsung, who seem to take up all the air in the room when it comes to the smartphone market these days. You can listen via the stream embedded above, or (and leave a review), or in your podcast player of choice.
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San Francisco taxi company sues Uber for “predatory pricing tactics”
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Another day, another lawsuit against Uber. This time it’s coming from DeSoto Cab, the oldest cab company in San Francisco. DeSoto, which recently rebranded as Flywheel Taxi, has accused Uber of things like monopolization, illegal and unfair practices and predatory pricing, according to a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District court of Northern California today. “In reality, Uber has done little more than implement a business strategy that openly flouts the law while shifting many of the costs and nearly all of the risks of providing ride-hail services from itself to its drivers and passengers while forcing a race to the bottom through predatory pricing tactics — where, propped up by billions of dollars in venture capital funding, Uber will remain until its illegal strategy has forced all other competitors from the market,” the lawsuit states. In short, Flywheel Taxi says Uber has relied on its billions of dollars in venture capital to be able to offer rides to people at a price significantly lower than what it costs to sustainably run a ride-hailing service. To be clear, is not the same as , which develops a mobile operating system for the taxi industry. The suit also alleges that the taxi industry has experienced a 65 percent decline in ridership and lost more than 30 percent of its drivers as a result of Uber’s “illegal actions.” Flywheel Taxi is seeking greater than $5 million in damages. “We compete with lots of ways to get around, especially car ownership,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. “Our goal is to provide a credible alternative to the private car. Our technology lets us make our network more efficient over time, and innovations like uberPOOL are further lowering prices, making ridesharing more available to more people.” The lawsuit comes at a less than ideal time for Uber. Last week, . Meanwhile, Uber’s that aims to achieve employee status for drivers.
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Microsoft Teams feels like déjà vu all over again
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Ron Miller
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Microsoft introduced today to much fanfare and hoopla — as only Microsoft can seem to do these days. But when you take a close look at today’s announcement, what have you really got here — a 10-year-old idea on how to communicate and collaborate in the enterprise with a distinctly Microsoft twist. As I wrote previously about and more recently , Microsoft Teams is nothing new. About 10 years ago, a new kind of enterprise software emerged. Dubbed Enterprise 2.0, it was supposed to transform the way we work and “kill email” by giving us a space to collaborate and share work. It didn’t succeed — or at least wasn’t as transformative as once believed, and many of the early companies were absorbed (including ). You may also recall that in 2011. After spending almost $10 billion for two companies focused on communications and collaboration, five years later, we have a new product that appears to be influenced by these acquisitions. It’s interesting that Microsoft left Yammer on the bench for this one, and seems to have built Teams on Skype and the Office 365 platform. Regardless, this isn’t revolutionary technology, it’s just technology that Microsoft has begun to pay attention to… again. Who knows why those 10 billion dollars in investments haven’t amounted to much in the last five years, but with Slack making a lot of noise, and Microsoft riding a cloud wave, perhaps it felt it was time to revisit the idea. Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst at Digital Clarity Group who has been watching the collaboration space for many years, sees Teams as a kind of portal play, trying to get you to do all of your work in one place. That means that if Microsoft can build a space to communicate with your co-workers, while using all Microsoft tools, then we can return to the glory days of all Microsoft, all the time. The fact is that there appears to be some slick integration here among Microsoft tools (if you can believe the ), but the key thing here is that it’s built primarily for Microsoft. Surely there will be connectors out to other enterprise tools, because, in this day and age, there have to be, but Slack has an advantage that Facebook, Microsoft and even Cisco lack. Slack was built from the ground up as a neutral cloud company, meaning it has come up with a way to connect to various enterprise applications, and it has no ties to any other platform or business. It’s communications/collaboration Switzerland. These big companies are beholden to their own platforms, even if they profess to play nicely with others. Slack doesn’t have to care about all those external factors because it does one thing well. You might think we had progressed a great deal in 10 years — and we probably have — but the fact is that communications and collaboration remains mostly an unsolved problem. When you see a market opportunity, you try to use your resources to take advantage of it, and in this case we have Microsoft trying yet again to grab a piece of the communications and collaborations business in an attempt to do what it has always done: keep us using Microsoft tools.
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Ticketing’s distributed future is not only good for fans, it’s already happening
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Jesse Lawrence
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Since the dawn of consumer history, tickets have been a product defined by scarcity and lack of accessibility. The result is an abysmal category user experience that’s most often talked about with undertones of anger, skepticism and distrust. For evidence of scarcity in action, look no further than the World Series between the Cubs and Indians, which is the To frame the opportunity: When is the last time you heard anyone talk about the airline-ticketing industry? Sure, people complain about travel, but rarely do those gripes focus on tickets not working, or worse, being fakes. The airline-ticketing ecosystem works well because it’s controlled, from the distribution (email) to the fulfillment (phone scan or credit card swipe). For event tickets, however, closed isn’t a viable model for several reasons. Most importantly, teams need to manage their risk by moving inventory to third parties. With perhaps a few exceptions, that’s not changing anytime soon, which means that the challenge for ticketing 2.0 is simultaneously managing the three-headed monster known as transferability, access and security. While it’s a daunting challenge, there is more investment than ever trying to make it happen — and even more financial incentive for the industry to figure it out. ’s recent announcement of While distribution is a growing buzzword in the category, we’ve been thinking about, and managing, team and rightsholder distribution for almost seven years. During that time, we’ve worked with more than 50 clients to help them “get the right offer, in front of the right fan, at the right time.” While While the big publisher model didn’t work, it did have two lasting benefits. Firstly, it helped us sign a handful of teams that also bought into the vision. Secondly, over our first six years, in addition to the big publishers, we signed up almost 2,000 small and medium publishers, like According to the Sports Business Journal’s ticketing issue published recently, Ticketmaster will sell 10 million tickets through distributed channels in 2016. Along with a recent announcement of a Costco deal, deals with Facebook and Bands in Town have driven most of that growth — up almost 100 percent since 2015. Over the next few years, expect that growth rate to increase as quickly as Ticketmaster can make it happen. A simple look at the numbers shows why. Assume that the 10 million tickets sold by Ticketmaster in 2016 are worth roughly $500 million in gross revenue ($50 per ticket). If Ticketmaster gets 10 percent of that gross as the toll booth, it would turn Despite the early success, not all primary ticketing companies are rushing in. , which powers ticketing for about two-thirds of Major League Baseball, has not disclosed any distribution plans. While baseball needs open distribution more than any league, Tickets.com’s parent company, MLBAM, makes so much money streaming video for ESPN and WWE that incremental ticketing revenue may not be meaningful. They’re also technically protected by monopolistic immunity, which comes with it the nasty habit of controlling commodities like tickets. In the election to make ticketing good (not great!), MLB and Tickets.com are likely to play the role of Trump, at least for a couple of years. The other big question mark is , the second biggest ticketing company following the 2015 acquisition. Over the last 10 years, tried to tame ticketing with a closed system called FlashSeats. Since launching, they’ve gained only about 10 percent market share across the NBA, NHL, MLS and NFL. Veritix-AEG is now formulating their post-acquisition strategy, and it would be surprising to see them stick with a closed system, given all the money on the table. Regardless of the pace at which each platform moves, as ticketing makes the next push into digital efficiency, one thing will not change: the buyers’ claim to ownership, both economic and emotional. That claim includes the right to resell; without it, the ticket market can’t properly function. Despite efforts to reinvent tickets in subscription-based models that compress the supply chain, resale is here to stay. At the most basic level, teams and promoters need an active secondary market to manage risk and fund what are very expensive operations. While it’s different in every league, ticket sales can generate anywhere from 25-50 percent of a teams overall revenue, which means they can’t function without it. What makes open access even more critical is that the exact combination of risk management is completely unique for each team and market. If primary platforms dictate distribution rules, teams can’t optimize. Contrary to the opinion of some, the great ticket market rewrite is not about a world without the secondary market — it’s about a world where all inventory exists together, transparently. Over the last few years, millions of lines of code have been committed to the effort, much of it fueled by the $3 billion of recent investment — via acquisition or direct capital — in the category. Despite all the code and dollars, however, the 2016 ticket market remains in technology purgatory. is still one of the biggest ticket-selling platforms out there — perhaps second only to Google. For this to change, open and digital primary platforms are mission critical, as are clearly defined distribution and fulfillment channels in each market. With phones in every pocket, the box office only needs to be a couple of taps away. Just like you used to go to Tower Records, the future of ticketing will have many Tower Records, all in your pocket. By 2050, it’s possible that paper tickets will exist only as a commemorative upsell; and with the right cooperation and holistic thinking, Craigslist may also become a ticket-buying relic. For consumers, such a world would mean that every ticket purchased works, period. As simple and exciting as that prospect is, patience may be the biggest challenge in the current evolution. The first era of buying tickets online lasted almost 20 years, and it could take 10 years before it’s clear what the shape of the current cycle will become. The optimist might argue that with all the code being committed to the effort, it’s only five years away. If the major primary platforms, however, can’t agree to a relatively common framework of distribution and fulfillment, the industry will linger in technological purgatory for another 25 years. As the CEO of a ticketing company committed to the mission of making the ticket market better, I’m optimistic about the industry’s chances for two reasons, beyond the current investment in technology. The first is that distributed commerce is already a proven model in ticketing. Since the first ticket was purchased on the internet in the late-1990s, $5-10 billion of secondary market value has been created using the
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Pokémon GO introduces daily bonuses to keep players coming back
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Greg Kumparak
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Now that the insane, oh-my-god-it’s-everywhere hype cycle has tapered off a bit for Pokémon GO, Niantic gets to crack the classic startup conundrum: How the heck do they keep people coming back? They could introduce another generation of Pokémon to pacify everyone who’s already caught ’em all, but that’s got an inherently finite lifespan; give it a few weeks, and the demands for a third generation will be just as loud. Niantic needs to figure out things that keep people opening the app requiring a constant churn of new content. The company is about to take its first swing at the problem: daily bonuses. The more regularly you play, the more you’re rewarded. While it’s not the sort of change that’ll convert anyone who isn’t already a fan, these sorts of bonuses certainly help to make sure existing fans keep coming back (as proven by the Halloween event, ). The next logical step from here would be daily challenge quests — things like “Catch a fire Pokémon in the next 24 hours to get a new hat!” — but for now, they’re keeping it simple. Just catch a Pokémon, any Pokémon, and they’re happy. Alas, the daily bonus feature isn’t rolled out yet — but the team says it should come soon. Now, if they would just go ahead and fix tracking…
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Facebook scores big in Q3 earnings: $7.01B revenue and 1.79B users
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Josh Constine
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Facebook had a wildly , earning $7.01 billion in revenue and $1.09 EPS. That’s off of from 1.79 billion monthly users, up 16% year-over-year, and growing 4.67% this quarter, speeding up from 3.63% last quarter. Daily active users rose to 1.18 from 1.13 billion last quarter, and up 17% year-over-year. Facebook destroyed analyst estimates, which were $6.92 billion in revenue and $0.97 EPS. Still, Facebook’s share price is down because it says it’s hitting maximum ad load, which will reduce revenue growth. Mark Zuckerberg summed up the progress succinctly, writing “We had another good quarter.” The company has beat earnings every quarter since it IPO’d, except for one quarter of mixed results due to foreign currency fluctuations that also hit many other tech companies. Revenue was up a wopping 59% year-over-year, which compares favorably to Twitter, which saw just 10% year-over-year revenue growth. [Update 3:15pm PT: During the earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized Facebook’s focus on video and allowing people to share via the camera. He announced that , up from 15 million a year ago. The company also revealed that its effort to thwart desktop ad blockers has led to . Despite the successful quarter, Facebook share price sank about 7.6% in after-hours trading to around $117.40, versus an all-time high of $133.50 late last month. The cause was comments from CFO David Wehner, who reiterated his last quarter statement that Facebook is approaching maximum ad load, so it won’t be able to increase the number of ads it shows any more. Those increases, along with user count and engagement growth, were big drivers of Facebook’s total revenue growth. Because of that, Wehner says “we expect to see ad revenue growth rates come down meaningfully.” Meanwhile Facebook plans to make large investments in hiring and data centers next year.] While Facebook’s business continues to chug along, the company had a tumultuous quarter in the press. It dealt with allegations of censorship of graphic but newsworthy images like the The Terror Of War photo that depicts a nude Vietnamese child, though Facebook now vows to allow more of this kind of content. The company continues to refuse the label of a “media company” despite its algorithms and content policies having a huge impact on how over a billion people get their news. But Facebook’s investment and focus on video seems to be showing strong returns. Viewership is massive, and it’s allowing Facebook to slip more and more high-priced video ads into the feed. That dove Facebook’s 9.1% average revenue per user in the US and Canada this quarter. While video might have seemed like a long-shot considering YouTube’s dominance, the bet has paid off big time.
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Facebook’s fake news problem and fantasy sports: Listen to TCBC 9 with Jordan Crook
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Darrell Etherington
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Facebook’s issues with viral false news reports dominated headlines this week, so naturally it came up as a key topic of discussion when I spoke to TechCrunch’s special projects editor and internet culture reporter Jordan Crook on this week’s episode. The sheer scope of the issue is something that becomes very apparent as we found out in talking things through. We also cover the into a single online fantasy sports betting platform powerhouse, since Jordan’s a big fan of fantasy sports (I’ll stick to just LOTR-style fantasy, thanks very much). The issue isn’t really whether the two pairing up is better for either; it’s the nature of the business model itself, and whether there isn’t something ethically unsettling about the whole proposition. Fair warning: this is a pretty heavy episode, because we’re all still feeling a little raw after the U.S. election. But it’s honest, which is . You can listen via the stream embedded above, or (and leave a review), or in your podcast player of choice.
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Apple is replacing faulty batteries on ‘a very small number’ of iPhone 6s devices
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Jon Russell
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‘Tis the season for Apple replacement programs, it appears. Days after devices, so a battery replacement program for iPhone 6s owners affected by unexpected shutdowns. Apple said the problem impacts “a very small number” of iPhone 6s devices that were made between September and October last year. In those cases, the phone may unexpectedly shut down due to issues with the battery. Owners of affected devices can go to their nearest Apple Store to check the serial number of their device — which should identify whether it is part of the malfunctioning batch — and then get a free battery replacement, if needed. Apple said the battery problem doesn’t affect the safety of the devices like, say, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. In case you’ve been living under a stone over the past few months, and due safety fears over defective batteries.
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There is no IoT
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Ajay Kulkarni
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’s a general malaise growing around . After years of , and , people are now starting to wonder: Where is this shiny, artificially intelligent, fully connected future of things we were promised? Certainly has not helped. Part of the problem, like with any massive transformation, is because of the nature of exponential growth curves: Change takes time, and will come more slowly at first. But the other problem is us: Our stubborn attachment to a label that, for example, places wind turbine vibration sensors in the same jargon-bucket as a voice-activated home speaker that can control our lights. This giant market we call the “Internet of Things,” encompassing everything from wearables to autonomous vehicles to smart homes/factories/cities, simply does not exist. Yes, is change afoot, transforming our industries, lives and world. Change driven by fundamental technological shifts: cheaper, more powerful hardware; nearly ubiquitous connectivity; cloud computing. But is broad, homogeneous set of applications that we can call . Instead, are many, varied sets of applications, each enabled by the same tech trends, but manifesting themselves in different ways. In order for us to ensure that we develop a world where the benefits of connected devices outweigh their risks, we need to start looking more closely at what is going on. We are witnessing an evolution of computing, as it expands from mainframes (one computer for many people) to desktops (one computer per person) to mobile (multiple computers per person) to the phenomenon we see today (one-to-many computers per “thing”). But the devices in this latest computing wave are different in an important way from the ones before it: They’re incredibly diverse. PCs were nearly identical, almost all running the same OS (if you remember, we even called them “clones”). Mobile-phone hardware is somewhat more varied, but we’re down to two operating systems (and the need for app developers to have a consistent set of APIs has reduced hardware variability even more). “ ” devices, however, are defined by a variety of constraints: available power, connectivity/bandwidth, computation, cost. Often these constraints are entwined: less available power → lower power data transmission (or longer duty cycles between engaging the radio) → low available bandwidth. These constraints are set by the environment within which these devices are serving. For example, connected home products are often not energy limited (powered via electrical outlet) and enjoy high bandwidth (via Wi-Fi/Ethernet), but may be cost-constrained by consumer budgets. On the other hand, sensors used in oil and gas may have a larger budget, but with limited power and network access because of the remote nature of the work. These constraints can also translate into entirely different network topologies. For example, your Amazon Echo talks directly to the internet via Wi-Fi. But in a factory, low-powered sensors can communicate via a low-power protocol (e.g. Zigbee) to a local gateway, which then could use Wi-Fi/Ethernet to communicate upstream. And in a remote mine, sensors may communicate via multi-hop mesh back to a gateway, which may then use a cellular network to transmit upstream. And of course, these environments can also lead to entirely different businesses: e.g. a direct-to-consumer or retail model for consumer products, an enterprise sales model for industrial sensors or an RFP-driven process for smart-city devices. is a rich diversity at work here, far greater than what we have seen before in PCs or mobile phones. These “Internet of Things” devices represent a broad spectrum of reds, greens, blues, violets; yet we continue to lump them all under a bland white umbrella, losing what makes each color so unique. And this hampers our ability to understand and serve these markets. Let’s be clear: We are entering a new wave of computing, one that will engender even more change than the ones before, one driven by a world of connected devices. But let’s also recognize that this phenomenon is enabling change in many different ways, each of which is its own precious little snowflake: smart home, connected vehicles, preventive maintenance, precision agriculture, asset tracking, fleet management and so on. I have crystal ball: I don’t know how long it will take for this phenomenon to gestate across these various applications, nor which of these trees will bear fruit sooner rather than later. But I do know that more descriptive labels will only broaden our understanding: Just look to the Eskimos, Or, as the philosopher wrote, “the limits of my language means the limits of my world.” The sooner we expand our language, the sooner we expand our world.
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Harry Weller, a “Midas List” VC and the head of NEA’s East Coast practice, has passed away
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Connie Loizos
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Harry Weller, who has long led the East Coast venture practice of from Washington, D.C., passed away unexpectedly last night. He was 46. Weller had joined the firm in 2002, not long after nabbing an undergraduate degree in physics from Duke University and an MBA from Harvard. Neither his family nor NEA has released details of what happened; NEA just issued the following statement, however: Weller was recognized earlier this year by Forbes, which included Weller on its “Midas List” for the ninth year in row. (DCInno noted that Weller was the to make the list, which also included well-known Silicon Valley VCs Marc Andreessen, Jim Goetz, and Bill Gurley.) Known for his quick smile and relaxed demeanor, Weller’s track record of success as a VC was long and included the marketing software company Eloqua, acquired Oracle in an deal in 2012; the event software company Cvent, which in 2013 was earlier this year by the private equity firm Vista Equity; and the deals site Groupon, whose Series A round NEA led back in 2008; the company in 2011. According to his profile page on NEA, Weller’s greatest loves have long included his “crazy kids,” his “cool wife,” music, the Navy (where he served as a pilot before launching his business career), and surfing. NEA also credits Weller for cofounding the firm’s 13-year-old China organization.
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Why nature is our best guide for understanding artificial intelligence
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David Cheng
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In living organisms, evolution is a multi-generational process where mutations in genes are dropped and added. Well-adapted organisms survive and those less fortunate go extinct. This is Natural Selection. Resilience is great, but if you don’t grow gills in time for the flood, then tough luck. Engineering, on the other hand, is a deliberate process with reliable steps designed to reach a stated objective. With the emergence of a i , we are beginning to see the convergence of evolution and engineering as machine learning algorithms begin to evolve. For the sake of comparison (natural evolution to machine evolution), let’s consider data and how it is normalized as “the environment” and the training process as “Natural Selection.” The training process can be supervised or unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, clustering, decision trees or different methods of “deep learning.” Much like natural evolution, different organisms solve for the same problem differently depending on their environment, but ultimately reach the same outcome. Sharks and dolphins wound up with similar mechanisms to survive despite starting from completely different beginnings. In technology, we see similar patterns. The K-means clustering algorithm, a technique often used for image segmentation, for example, ingests essentially unlabeled inputs (usually images) and coherently grouped clusters are produced until a desired grouping is reached. If you gave 10 people the same data set and asked them to solve the same problem using different algorithms, it’s possible that they could each take a different approach and get the same outcome. Problem solving in and machines are, in a sense, quite similar. Why does this matter for companies? As machine learning techniques find their way into commercial applications, businesses are faced with the challenge of developing strategies to implement this technology safely and efficiently. Historically speaking, technologists have often looked to for inspiration. Here are a few ways businesses can use evolution to understand the potential implications of a i : There are a handful of brilliant AI companies helping us work more efficiently, (we have [in our DCM portfolio] helping us manage hectic lives, helping us intelligently organize the web, etc.), but these applications are still in their infancy and there needs to be a fundamental shift in how we anticipate their arrival. Perhaps it’s to place them into the context of a phenomena that we already understand — evolution. There’s great opportunity in AI, and natural evolution provides a framework for us to study and prepare for the future of machine evolution. In the meantime, it’s important that company leadership seriously consider their strategy for AI and invest in the requisite talent and infrastructure to turn their data into transformative solutions.
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Harmony Space wins top prize at MIT Hacking Arts for music learning app that feels like Pokémon GO
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Lora Kolodny
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In Boston this weekend, software developers, hardware engineers, artists and entrepreneurs gathered for the conference and hackathon at MIT. Of twelve finalists, the following teams took top honors. Hackathons are typcially hosted by corporations or schools to promote certain technologies, drum up new product ideas, and identify potential recruits. But the Hacking Arts in ent calls on participants to try something a bit more grandiose. Interdisciplinary teams are asked to “design and create a prototype that enhances the arts, [or] improves access to the arts,” and could “change the world through technology and the arts,” according to the Hacking Arts 2016 website. Hackathon organizer and candidate Helen Smith said this year, 250 people were invited out of a pool of 700 applicants. Ultimately, 177 participated, 58% of them women and 87% of them students, mostly undergraduates. Most were from Boston and New York, but others flew in from universities around the country. The projects they formed spanned from mobile apps and wearables to immersive entertainment experiences. A preponderance of hackers sought to use augmented reality, virtual reality and robotics to accomplish different goals, said Smith. A common theme this year was the idea of using tech to inspire empathy, she noted. The Artmatr painting robot was part of MIT Hacking Arts 2016 hackathon. Tech providers courting developers at the event and mentoring teams there included: Adobe, Autodesk, Shapeways, Jibo and Whoaboard. Participants flocked to demos and scrambled to learn how to use the Artmatr painting robot and JIBO personal companion robot in their projects, Smith said. CTO Daniel Doubrovkine, who participated on the judging panel for the Hacking Arts 2015 and 2016 Hackathons, said emphasis had shifted from virtual reality to augmented reality from 2015 to 2016 at the hackathon. This years’ participants had been very music-focused, with about half of the finalist teams incorporating sound design into their projects in some way, he said. Surprisingly, in a year when the Echo became mainstream, no finalists used voice recognition or voice control in their projects. The CTO said he was inspired by the prototypes built and demonstrated at the event, but would advise teams to be even more experimental in their work at school and on these projects. “People are always looking for purpose first. But we find purpose sometimes accidentally just through developing wild ideas,” the CTO said. Hacking Arts is organized by MIT Sloan School of Management’s Entertainment, Media & Sports Club, in partnership with The and the WINNER HARMONY SPACE: “ FIRST RUNNER UP REVIVE: system integrates virtual reality, tactile feedback, and music to teach Tai Chi. SECOND RUNNER UP urniture’ art project, möbel brings people together in public spaces. HACKER’S CHOICE AWARD
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Spectacle-selling Snapbot deployed at the Grand Canyon
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Darrell Etherington
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Not even 24 hours after we got the last Snapchat Spectacle vending machine location, there’s a new one: , closest to the small town of Meadview. The new spot is striking distance from Las Vegas, and should provide a beautiful road trip for anyone adventurous enough to make the drive. The Grand Canyon location follows hot on the heels of the Rose Bowl Stadium pop-up on Saturday, and has more in common with previous locales, which included Big Sur and the Santa Monica pier. Snapchat seems to be recreating some kind of great American road trip with its drop spots, and today’s location throws cold water on the theory that after yesterday’s college football game they might be targeting events more often. Assigning rhyme or reason to the location choice in a way that makes it possible to predict where it’ll hit next seems like a fool’s errand at this point, but some interesting fan theories have popped up. is pretty convinced that the unifying factor is “rose” somewhere in the location name or associated with the spot in another way. This doesn’t provide a reliable way to anticipate where it’ll arrive next, however, even if it is correct. This is the quickest turnaround between Snapbot drops, though, so hopefully that means they start popping up in more places and it becomes easier to actually grab a pair. But who knows – Snap doesn’t seem too concerned with patterns or predictability with this unique hardware product launch.
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Beyond Nokia: A love story
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Steve O'Hear
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2011. Verena Rentrop and Elsie Parumog, two Nokia staff stationed on opposite sides of the world, were having a routine work chat about the company’s IT processes when something more pressing came up. With another wave of restructuring underway, which would see Nokia lay off tens of thousands of employees over the next few years, conversations like these and the close but remote relationship that the two had established might soon come to an end. What they and their fellow Nokians needed was a way to stay in touch. And so, with little fuss or fanfare, Rentrop and Parumog set up the ‘Beyond Nokia’ Facebook group. Fast forward a little over five years, and by November 10th 2016 the closed group, to which Rentrop had continued to vet new applications, had reached a respectable but unremarkable 952 members. “In the afternoon I posted a message encouraging everyone to invite their former Nokia colleagues to the group, hoping that we would reach 1,000 members by the end of year,” she recalls. “[That’s] a mind-blowing number if you compare it to employee figures of Nokia. Soon it will be close to the amount of people fired during the last two years,” says Rentrop. But more remarkable than how fast the ‘Beyond Nokia’ Facebook group has grown in recent weeks (and despite laying relatively dormant for five years) is the affinity that ex-Nokians still have for the company. And, of course, for each other. “It’s a love story,” says Sotiris Makrygiannis, who was previously director of applications and site manager of Nokia’s Helsinki R&D center. “I’ve never seen such a large group of people adoring a company. It’s remarkable. All these tens of thousands of people lost their jobs and instead of hating the company, actually admiring the company”. To understand why, Rentrop points me to Nokia’s old company slogan: Connecting People. ”It was not just a marketing phrase,” she says, “for many members Nokia became a family”. That sentiment is echoed in the hundreds of messages and photos currently being posted to the group every hour. “It was a 120,000 person company, yet felt a lot smaller and I can’t put my finger on why that was,” says one of the group’s members. “The halls of any Nokia house resonated, for some years, with energy and belief that we could achieve anything. You would walk to a different floor and someone was planning something meaningful, and you could see it in their faces. I loved that,” adds another. Unsurprisingly, given that Nokia was once a prolific hardware maker, device nostalgia is also a recurring theme. Pictures of discontinued and cherished Nokia phones are being posted along with photos of dozens of models and prototypes that never made it to market. This is only dwarfed by the other types of Nokia memorabilia being shared. From pens used by various ex-employees to sign their original Nokia contracts, company swag adorned with sometimes undecipherable marketing jargon, to neon signs salvaged from Nokia factories since retired. Chocolate is another topic of discussion. European countries like Switzerland and Belgium may be best-known for their chocolate-making capabilities but Nokia’s home country can also hold its own. Explains Rentrop: “Travelling around the world was for some their primary job, for others cherished on seldom occasions. It seems one thing most trips had in common was Fazer chocolate from Finland. It was the most wanted travel gift among colleagues and has since turned into the most wanted taste for people who are beyond Nokia”. “It looks like a huge number of working hours were spent in phone conferences,” says Rentrop. “Sweet memories of ‘mute vs un-mute’, dogs barking, toilet visits, private chats on an open line, parallel chats with meeting participants, and who can forget the many times ‘James Bond’ joined routine calls”. But a love story wouldn’t be complete without at least one marriage. And at Nokia there were many. Multiple stories are being shared of Nokia employees who crossed borders and found love. From Denmark to Brazil, the U.S. to Hungary, Finland to China, and many other parts of the world, to connect with that one special Nokian for the rest of their lives. Those relationships have also given birth to a new generation of the Nokia family — quite literally. “The best Nokia ‘product’ is now 12 years old, our loving daughter,” writes a member of the group. Meanwhile, Beyond Nokia (and a spin-off site called ‘ ’) continues on its mission to connect ex-Nokians and the broader Nokia family. At last check, the group now stands at 21,000 members. And counting.
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Listen to Nested CEO on reluctant founders, fundraising, and why you shouldn’t do a startup
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Steve O'Hear
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Last week I caught up with Matt Robinson, co-founder and CEO of London-based property tech startup . Prior to this he co-founded , a fintech company also based in London. During our call we discussed to start Nested, how too many bad ideas are being funded, why not everybody should do a startup, and Robinson’s top fundraising tips. You can to the lightly edited interview below.
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Crunch Report | FanDuel and DraftKings Merge
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Chris Gates
Chris Gates TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107
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How the cloud, infused with analytic insights, impacts athletes and sports fans
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David Boloker
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Smart technology continues to streamline and transform nearly all aspects of our lives — monitoring our sleep patterns, allowing us to work from anywhere at any time and even helping to find cures for diseases like Zika. But more than optimizing tedious workflows or gamifying daily activities, smart technology has helped to increase our baselines and has made us better innovators and enactors of change. Besides providing the opportunity to go beyond old performance barriers, it’s opened up an entirely new way to experience the world around us. Consider how technology is being used in the world of professional sports. Sensors and wearables connected to the cloud are providing instantaneous access to data and analysis, providing meaningful insights that can be used to improve performance. Unstructured data can now become a driver for unmatched success. For instance, USA Cycling has for proprietary hardware and software that allows them to better gauge how the riders are training — a huge factor in the road to the recent Summer Games. Particularly, , the team harnessed emerging technologies to solve its analytics challenge. They are no longer extracting data manually from power meters and sensors after each training session. Instead, data is gathered in real time from multiple sources — including power meters, heart-rate monitors and wearable muscle-oxygen sensors from , which use a combination of LED lights and algorithms to generate unique athlete profiles, resulting in improved performance monitoring and training. The data is then sent to the coach’s iPad from the cloud in the form of a summary iOS dashboard that presents metrics such as W-prime depletion and matches burned in an intuitive graphical format. Using ’ smart glasses, riders also gain intelligence from new data generated via a personalized heads-up display of the most useful key metrics while they are actually on the track during a practice session. As mentioned above, data used to be collected from multiple sources and then analyzed by hand, so providing feedback on training sessions took hours or even days. Now a mobile app connected to the cloud changes all that, syncing in real time with sensors on the bikes and riders. So, for example, if an athlete spends unnecessary energy, she can take it down a notch to make an instant impact on her performance. Coaches can identify and address areas of weakness in a timely manner, which is especially important when gearing up for a big race. Cycling isn’t the only sport benefiting from cloud and analytics. The NFL it would use sensors to collect and analyze in-game data during the 2016 season. Custom chips inserted into the footballs used for field goals will be used to collect data on kicks — research that will have an impact on changes in officiating, specifically regarding narrowing the goalposts down the road. This is on top of the sensors NFL players are already wearing to track position, speed, distance and more. In addition to allowing athletes to train smarter and make marginal improvements that are game-changers to performance, access to data can also be a major benefit to the fan experience. Cloud and analytics technology have exciting potential for the fan experience, including the streaming of real-time data. Virtual reality is also gaining traction. On the racetrack, NASCAR drivers and fans are . Not only do the dashboards compile data for the driver, like lap times, tire pressure and pit-stop range, but NASCAR hopes to bring the same experience to the fans, as well. Fans will eventually be able to access the same dashboards on their mobile devices, seeing what their favorite drivers see and how they react to different situations. Virtual reality was to enhance the 2016 Rio Olympics viewing experience. users were able to view exclusive coverage of the games, including the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, the men’s basketball final and more, through the This new way of experiencing the world’s greatest sporting event helped fans a million miles away feel as if they were in Rio. These examples are just the first rumblings of a massive technological shift that will change how we experience everything — sports and beyond. Baseball fans will be able to see someone slide into first from any angle and hockey players will be able to perfect their slap shots using analytics. Players, coaches and fans will understand their game on a deeper level, allowing for new strategies and enhanced experiences. Outside of sports, we’re already seeing smart cities crop up that streamline processes from energy use to garbage disposal. In business, organizations across industries are turning the lens inward to optimize teams and boost productivity with data at the heart of the effort. It’s exciting to think of the opportunities emerging technologies can present across all industries. Are you ready for the cloud and data-driven future?
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Paint 3D is now a part of the Microsoft’s Creators Update test build
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Brian Heater
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You know you’ve been wanting to play around with that new version of Microsoft Paint — if only to see if it is, indeed, that big of an update to the long-maligned drawing application that’s been shipping with Windows since the mid-1980s. is unquestionably one of the biggest refreshes in the application’s history. In fact, it’s really a complete rethink, one that serves as a major cornerstone for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update, aimed at making 3D content creation an essential part of the operating system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxyufNrH4Mw Now Windows Insiders can , courtesy of the newly released Build 14971. The new version of Paint is currently available in English only and appears to have completely replaced the OG version in this build, bringing with it some dead simple tools for turning simple sketches into 3D objects. I played around with the application at Microsoft’s launch event a few weeks back and found it to be fun and elementary take on the world of 3D modeling. The tools are quite limited, as has always been the case with MS Paint, but they’re also simple enough for anyone who fires up the app to pick up in a few seconds, serving as a potential stepping stone into the world of CAD.
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FilmStruck is a streaming service for lovers of art-house films and foreign classics
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Anthony Ha
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It might be time for movie lovers to add another streaming service to their monthly subscriptions — , a new service created by Turner Classic Movies. Services like Amazon and Netflix are building up libraries of originals (starting with TV, but also including films), and they’re . But if you’re a particular kind of movie lover, you might still feel that they come up short when it comes to the real classics from Hollywood’s Golden Age, not to mention films from European and Asian titans like Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa. , and you can watch a quick walk-through of the app in the video above. The most exciting thing about FilmStruck is that it’s the new online home of the Criterion Collection’s library of art-house classics ( ). I still remember how my local video store used to have a separate shelf of Criterion DVDs (yes, it was kind of pretentious), and I guess we can think of FilmStruck as the online equivalent. Current popular titles include , and . FilmStruck not only offers films, but also curated, thematic collections and special features. The service (currently available for iOS, Android and Fire TV, with plans to add more devices soon) costs $6.99 a month for a basic plan with limited access to Criterion films, or $10.99 a month for full access to the Criterion Channel.
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Intel is laying off a major portion of its wearables group
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Brian Heater
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According to sources close to the company, Intel is about to step back from wearables in a big way. In 2014, the company purchased , a little-known producer of some truly excellent fitness watches. The acquisition was clearly a piece of a much larger puzzle for Intel, as it folded the brand into NDG — the New Devices Group — a new wing designed to make a big play for the booming wearables market, while hitting back against rival chipmaker, Qualcomm. In June 2015, Intel picked up Recon, makers of wearable heads-up displays for cyclists, snowboarders and the like. Here’s what Recon co-founder, Dan Eisenhardt had to say at the time: Intel is an ideal partner for Recon. Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, made his commitment to wearable technology very clear shortly after assuming his current role in 2013. He reaffirmed that commitment in his keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show this January. Brian and his team, including New Technology Group head Josh Walden, share our vision for the potential of smart eyewear in the consumer and enterprise markets, and this deal reflects that shared vision. This summer, however, cracks began to show in the company’s wearable plans. In June, Intel Basis Peak devices due to overheating concerns — effecting, according to the company, roughly 0.2 percent of users. Rather than replacing the units, the company simply stopped sales of the device altogether. Intel took it a step further and shut down the Peak’s software support (including cloud storage), effective by year’s end. It was clear at the time that this would prove a big setback for Intel’s wearable dreams. After all, the Basis acquisition hadn’t produced much for the company beyond the release of the Titanium, a snazzed up version of the Peak that looked a bit better with a business suit. Now, according to sources close to the company, Intel is planning to take a major step back from its investment in the space — or possibly even exit wearables altogether. The changes will include a large number of layoffs in NDG, along with the larger New Technologies Group into which it was folded back in April of last year — a move already viewed at the time by some as an early sign of Intel’s displeasure with its wearables division. The company has already informed a number of employees about the changes, with many expected to lose their jobs before year’s end. Reports thus far have been varied, but all point to a large job loss for those in the NDG and the possible shut down of the group altogether. Along with the layoffs, the move likely means that much of NDG’s work will never see the light of day, including , an unannounced fitness watch, which, at the very least, might have helped buoy the company following the unceremonious death of the Peak. We’ve reached out to Intel and will update the story as soon as we hear back.
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Here’s Intel’s abandoned wearable, the Basis Ruby
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Brian Heater
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Intel’s spent the last few years betting on wearables, but things just aren’t paying off. According to sources close to the company, there are major changes afoot at the chipmaker’s New Devices Group, including some major job loss. From the sound of it, some key projects will likely never see the light of day either, including the Ruby, a new fitness watch developed in-house by Basis, a wearable company . The Ruby — codenamed “Goblin” according to a source — would have been Basis’s first major new product, assuming you don’t count the Basis Titanium, essentially a dressed-up version of the company’s well-received Peak wearable. The Ruby was set to be a smaller wearable, designed to take on Fitbit’s Charge 2, rather than the Blaze, cramming the Peak’s specs into a more compact form factor, coupled with some overall improvements to connectivity. Originally developed for female users, due to its smaller size, the Ruby was ultimately going to be positioned more broadly. The wearable was also set to arrive with a revamped version of the Basis software. Ultimately, however, the device was canceled, another blow to a company reeling from the , and, according to our source, “the beginning of the end.”
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Hyperloop One has settled the lawsuit with former co-founder Brogan BamBrogan
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Sarah Buhr
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tells TechCrunch it has just settled brought against the company by its former co-founder Brogan BamBrogan and several former employees. BamBrogan, David Pendergast, William Mulholland and Knut Sauer filed the lawsuit against the company this summer, claiming the technology they built was being “strangled” by the venture capitalists who had majority control of Hyperloop One. Neither party disclosed the terms of the settlement. However, BamBrogan’s lawyers sent us the following statement, confirming the suit had been resolved: “My clients are pleased to announce that they have reached a confidential resolution of litigation with their former employer and look forward to moving on with their future plans.” BamBrogan and the other plaintiffs in the case accused investor and co-founder Shervin Pishevar, along with Joe Lonsdale, company CEO Rob Lloyd and Pishevar’s brother Afshin Pishevar of using the plaintiff’s own work to boost the defendant’s personal brands. The lawsuit also accused Shervin Pishevar of using company money to overpay a public relations consultant he was dating at the time and BamBrogan personally accused Afshin Pishevar of threatening him by placing a noose at his desk. H1 executives counter-sued for $250 million, accusing BamBrogan of launching a smear campaign and claiming he and the other employees had conspired to undermine the work being done, calling them a “gang of four.” However, these legal matters seemed to have been resolved today and Hyperloop One tells us it “looks forward to continuing to execute on its business plan.” A source close to the matter has also sent us an internal letter circulated company-wide this afternoon from CEO Lloyd addressing the lawsuit. “Lawsuits can be distracting for companies; they often halt momentum until they can be resolved. That didn’t happen here,” Lloyd wrote, following up with milestone achievements for H1 over the past year, supposedly to boost morale. As for BamBrogan and team, the former co-founder seems positive about the future, telling TechCrunch, “We are planning to build rad shit with rad people, starting with our take on hyperloop. More to come in the near future.” H1 has to us in the past that BamBrogan planned on building a competitor to H1, calling it Hyperloop Two.
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Romain Dillet
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Big data can’t bring objectivity to a subjective world
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Simon Chandler
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It seems everyone is interested in big data these days. From social scientists to advertisers, professionals from all walks of life are singing the praises of 21st-century data science. In the social sciences, many scholars apparently believe it will lend their subject a previously elusive objectivity and clarity. Sociology books like and work from are now talking about the superiority of “Dataism” over other ways of understanding humanity. Professionals are stumbling over themselves to line up and proclaim that big data analytics will enable people to finally see themselves clearly through their own fog. However, when it comes to the social sciences, big data is a false idol. In contrast to its use in the hard sciences, the application of big data to the social, political and economic realms won’t make these area much clearer or more certain. Yes, it might allow for the processing of a greater volume of raw information, but it will do little or nothing to alter the inherent subjectivity of the concepts used to divide this information into objects and relations. That’s because these concepts — be they the idea of a “war” or even that of an “adult” — are essentially constructs, contrivances liable to change their definitions with every change to the societies and groups who propagate them. This might not be news to those already familiar with the social sciences, yet there are nonetheless some people who seem to believe that the simple injection of big data into these “sciences” should somehow make them less subjective, if not objective. This was made plain by a recent published in the September 30 issue of . Authored by researchers from the likes of Virginia Tech and Harvard, “Growing pains for global monitoring of societal events” showed just how off the mark is the assumption that big data will bring exactitude to the large-scale study of civilization. More precisely, it reported on the workings of four systems used to build supposedly comprehensive databases of significant events: Lockheed Martin’s International Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS), Georgetown University’s Global Data on Events Language and Tone (GDELT), the University of Illinois’ Social, Political, and Economic Event Database (SPEED) and the Gold Standard Report (GSR) maintained by the not-for-profit MITRE Corporation. Its authors tested the “reliability” of these systems by measuring the extent to which they registered the same protests in Latin America. If they or anyone else were hoping for a high degree of duplication, they were sorely disappointed, because they found that the records of ICEWS and SPEED, for example, overlapped on only 10.3 percent of these protests. Similarly, GDELT and ICEWS hardly ever agreed on the same events, suggesting that, far from offering a complete and authoritative representation of the world, these systems are as partial and fallible as the humans who designed them. Even more discouraging was the paper’s examination of the “validity” of the four systems. For this test, its authors simply checked whether the reported protests actually occurred. Here, they discovered that 79 percent of GDELT’s recorded events had never happened, and that ICEWS had gone so far as entering the same protests more than once. In both cases, the respective systems had essentially identified occurrences that had never, in fact, occurred. They had mined troves and troves of news articles with the aim of creating a definitive record of what had happened in Latin America protest-wise, but in the process they’d attributed the concept “protest” to things that — as far as the researchers could tell — weren’t protests. For the most part, the researchers in question put this unreliability and inaccuracy down to how “Automated systems can misclassify words.” They concluded that the examined systems had an inability to notice when a word they associated with protests was being used in a secondary sense unrelated to political demonstrations. As such, they classified as protests events in which someone “protested” to her neighbor about an overgrown hedge, or in which someone “demonstrated” the latest gadget. They operated according to a set of rules that were much too rigid, and as a result they failed to make the kinds of distinctions we take for granted. As plausible as this explanation is, it misses the more fundamental reason as to why the systems failed on both the reliability and validity fronts. That is, it misses the fact that definitions of what constitutes a “protest” or any other social event are necessarily fluid and vague. They change from person to person and from society to society. Hence, the systems failed so abjectly to agree on the same protests, since their parameters on what is or isn’t a political demonstration were set differently from each other by their operators. Make no mistake, the basic reason as to why they were set differently from each other was not because there were various technical flaws in their coding, but because people often differ on social categories. To take a blunt example, what may be the systematic of Armenians for some can be unsystematic wartime killings for others. This is why no amount of fine-tuning would ever make such databases as GDELT and ICEWS significantly less fallible, at least not without going to the extreme step of enforcing a single worldview on the people who engineer them. Much the same could be said for the systems’ shortcomings in the validity department. While the paper’s authors stated that the fabrication of nonexistent protests was the result of the misclassification of words, and that what’s needed is “more reliable event data,” the deeper issue is the inevitable variation in how people classify these words themselves. It’s because of this variation that, even if big data researchers make their systems better able to recognize subtleties of meaning, these systems will still produce results with which other researchers find issue. Once again, this is because a system might perform a very good job of classifying newspaper stories according to how one group of people might classify them, but not according to how another would classify them. In other words, the systematic recording of masses of data alone won’t be enough to ensure the reproducibility and objectivity of social studies, because these studies need to use often controversial social concepts to make their data significant. They use them to organize “raw” data into objects, categories and events, and in doing so they infect even the most “reliable event data” with their partiality and subjectivity. What’s more, the implications of this weakness extend far beyond the social sciences. There are some, for instance, who think that big data will “ ” advertising and marketing, allowing these two interlinked fields to their “ultimate goal: targeting personalized ads to the right person at the right time.” According to figures in the advertising industry “[t]here is a spectacular change occurring,” as masses of data enable firms to profile people and know who they are, down to the smallest preference. Yet even if big data might enable advertisers to collect more info on any given customer, this won’t remove the need for such info to be interpreted by models, concepts and theories on what people want and why they want it. And because these things are still necessary, and because they’re ultimately informed by the societies and interests out of which they emerge, they maintain the scope for error and disagreement. Advertisers aren’t the only ones who’ll see certain things (e.g. people, demographics, tastes) that aren’t seen by their peers. If you ask the likes of from MIT, big data will be applied to everything social, and as such will “end up reinventing what it means to have a human society.” Because it provides “information about people’s behavior instead of information about their beliefs,” it will allow us to “really understand the systems that make our technological society” and allow us to “make our future social systems stable and safe.” That’s a fairly grandiose ambition, yet the possibility of these realizations will be undermined by the inescapable need to conceptualize information about behavior using the very beliefs Pentland hopes to remove from the equation. When it comes to determining what kinds of objects and events his collected data are meant to represent, there will always be the need for us to employ our subjective, biased and partial social constructs. Consequently, it’s unlikely that big data will bring about a fundamental change to the study of people and society. It will admittedly improve the relative reliability of sociological, political and economic models, yet since these models rest on socially and politically interested theories, this improvement will be a matter of degree rather than kind. The potential for divergence between separate models won’t be erased, and so, no matter how accurate one model becomes relative to the preconceptions that birthed it, there will always remain the likelihood that it will clash with others. So there’s little chance of a big data revolution in the humanities, only the continued evolution of the field.
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Watch Tesla Model S P85D’s instant speed avoid a potential rear-end collision
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRR31NaXoVw&w=640&h=360] Tesla’s focusing on its work on autonomous driving as a huge potential gain for driver safety, but a video from a Tesla Model S P85D shows that some current features not related to self-driving are actually already helping prevent accidents. Tesla owner Jason Hughes captured a narrow miss in his car using a rear-mounted dash cam, showing the moment a Prius coming up from behind clearly didn’t notice that he’d stopped to turn left into a parking lot. The distracted Prius driver realizes late that he’s going to plow into the Tesla, and makes a turn toward the curb to avoid it. But by the time he’s reacted, the P85D is actually already clear of the danger zone, something Hughes attributes to his car’s instant acceleration, which comes from its electric motors’ ability to provide torque instantly, unlike in a fossil fuel-burning vehicle. Hughes says he got back up the posted speed limit shortly after this clip ends, which gives you a sense of just how fast the P85D can accelerate. My own car definitely wouldn’t have fared as well in the same situation.
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Inside Google Shop, where Google is reinventing how it sells devices
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Darrell Etherington
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rethought its approach to hardware with the new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, devices designed and created by Google itself. It’s also rethinking how it sells devices, with the new Google Shop. This fall saw Google introduce its Pixels, the Chromecast Ultra and the Daydream View VR headset, and to help sell those devices and show customers what they can do, the company is launching a store-within-a-store debuting in North America at select Best Buy locations in Canada. When it launched the Pixel at an that also gave the first look at Google Wifi, Google Home and Daydream View, Google also revealed that it would be creating a pop-up Experience Store for users to check out its new wares in NYC. The Google Shops launching in Canada aren’t designed to be temporary, though; they’re places where Google hopes to not only showcase current and future devices, but also where it will seek to foster a sense of community among their users. Sound familiar? It should — Google Shop has an agenda of available activities open to the public, which is similar to the kind of in-store programming run by Apple. The decor is similar, too, but distinctly Google in its aesthetic, with light wood grain and gray fabric pairing up with playful hints of bright colors (the Google standbys). And because this is a shop within a shop, space is at a premium, but Google has actually made the most of limited space using custom-created modular furniture that nests when standing room is limited, but can easily accommodate, say, a small group of students with stool seating in a pinch. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xTyGtu-Ryo] Products are grouped together, but special stations combine them when it’s meaningful to present them together; Chromecast with Pixel, for instance, or Pixel with Daydream View. A multi-screen display with a dial control takes up a whole corner of the space, too, giving visitors a chance to take Google Earth for a large-scale spin, for instance, or to track and hang out with Santa during a seasonal special event. “We love it when people can come in, discover, play and have fun and it just happens to be with technology,” Janell Fischer, Director of Retail Marketing, Google. “So we’ve really tried to layer on lots of different immersive sorts of experiences, some that are direct demonstrations of the product and product features, but some that are more exploratory and fun.” Fischer’s referring to things like the “Portal,” the multi-screen interactive display I referenced above that lets shoppers fly over Google Earth or take a trip through the solar system. Google’s also bringing in YouTubers and others to run special workshops and sessions, including the debut event, an ugly sweater holiday-themed DIY event hosted by . Google Shops will host workshops and events, including an inaugural one from YouTubers TheSorryGirls. Fischer says they’ve made the space “super programmable” for this and product-focused tutorials run by “Google Guides,” full-time staff who are actually Google contractors rather than Best Buy employees. Sample classes include “How to plan holiday travel with Google Assistant;” Guides will also be able to help with more mundane tasks, including basic device use. Google launched three shops in the U.K. with Dixon’s, but Fischer says they’ve redesigned the entire experience because of their launch of Google’s own hardware devices. The Dixon’s stores were focused on software and services, Fischer says, but the introduction of hardware prompted and even greater focus on showing how they can use everything together. Again, it’s a model that sounds similar to Apple’s approach — and Fischer actually worked at Apple in their retail organization before joining Google three years ago. Google’s approach to physical retail sounds like it will have an additional, evolving hyperlocal element, however. “The great thing about this space is we can quickly update it when new products come out, we can also quickly remotely update all of the digital content, so we’ll also be creating new apps for the Portal area that are specific to this space,” Fischer explained. “We’ll learn a lot from the people that we have coming to this shop and we really want to look at adapting the content to the audience.” Beyond even local programming, each Best Buy’s Google Shop could have unique digital content tailored to the city wherein it resides — as with a large “Mississauga” digital sign adorning the Portal at this location, indicating the Toronto suburb where the store’s located. A retail presence is something that’s been key to building a premium mobile device customer base that’s sizable and loyal, and it’s not something Google has really had with its previous Nexus program. Google Shop looks like a good start to achieving that, with a lot of attention to detail clearly undertaken, and a willingness to learn from feedback as the company evolves its approach to retail going forward. While the approach is promising, it seems to be limited to the U.K. and Canada — at least for now. “We don’t have any plans to do anything in the U.S. right now,” Fischer told me, but the investment and care very much suggest to me this is a prototype for bigger retail plans to come. [gallery ids="1418538,1418537,1418536,1418535,1418532,1418531,1418530,1418529,1418528,1418526,1418522,1418518,1418506,1418516,1418517,1418519,1418521"]
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Facebook authorizes a $6B stock buyback
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Matthew Lynley
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Facebook today said it is authorizing a $6 billion stock buyback that will go into effect in the first quarter next year. Facebook in its last earnings call also said that its growth would likely slow as a result of the company reaching its maximum advertising load. While Facebook has historically grown at a very fast clip, the company is now in a position that it needs to find additional ways to create value for investors beyond just trying to expand its user base and gather more eyeballs to put ads in front of. For Facebook, keeping control of the company doesn’t necessarily seem like an issue. Earlier this year, Facebook that would essentially keep Mark Zuckerberg in control of the company, enabling him to outmaneuver any kind of heavy pressure from Wall Street. That means Facebook can essentially continue to make long-term plays — while that may be to the chagrin of industry watchers and investors. However, share repurchases can sometimes be useful for reducing the overall amount of outstanding shares. Companies can authorize a share repurchase for a number of reasons. For one, it represents an opportunity for the company to return value to shareholders (the company can also issue a dividend), which may be agitating the company to do something in order to build up good will with Wall Street. A near-term buyback can buy Facebook time to keep pressure off the company while investing in longer-term plays, such as growing its other platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp and investing in virtual reality. In fact, Facebook pretty much spells that out : “The timing and actual number of shares repurchased will depend on a variety of factors, including price, general business and market conditions, and alternative investment opportunities,” the company said in its filing. “The program will be executed consistent with the Company’s capital allocation strategy of prioritizing investment to grow the business over the long term.” In some cases, share buybacks may even be a result from pressure from investors. For example, around 2013 activist investor Carl Icahn pressured Apple to buy back more shares in an effort to return value to shareholders. Facebook shares are up around 9% year-over-year, but it hasn’t seen the crazy levels of growth it’s had historically (the shares are up almost 60% over the past two years). Facebook has been sitting on a large cash pile. With $26 billion sitting in the bank, investors may be impatient with the company’s use of that cash even while it invests heavily in growth and research and development. This is a perpetual optics issue with Apple, which has amassed a cash pile of more than $200 billion. [graphiq id=”dcPBRsCKHSR” title=”Facebook, Inc. (FB) Stock Price – Year to Date” width=”600″ height=”463″ url=”https://sw.graphiq.com/w/dcPBRsCKHSR” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/14143267/Facebook-Inc-in-Menlo-Park-CA” link_text=”FindTheCompany | Graphiq” frozen=”true”] Facebook, which saw its shares decline after its most-recent earnings, may have an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone as it picks shares back up at a lower price. There’s no specific schedule for the stock buyback, so it can essentially make a repurchase whenever it wants. Following the announcement, shares of Facebook were up around 2%, though they have dropped to now remain largely unchanged. The company also said that its chief accounting officer, Jas Athwal, would be leaving the company after serving at the company for nearly 9 years .
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Weekly Roundup: Facebook’s fake news, MacBook Pro reviewed, first human CRISPR-ed
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Anna Escher
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Facebook’s fake news frenzy continued as the company came under scrutiny for its debated influence on the U.S. election, LinkedIn was blocked in Russia and a person was treated with CRISPR technology for the first time. Also, according to Stephen Hawking. But do we deserve survival? The existence of points toward no. Mark Zuckerberg to accusations that fake news on Facebook influenced the outcome of the U.S. election. The Facebook CEO claims that at least 99 percent of news content on Facebook was “authentic.” However, many still argue that Apple and U.S. auto sales could suffer a setback if President-elect Donald Trump takes action on his pre-election comments about global trade. Back in September, Trump said he would impose a 45 percent tariff on imports from China. And now the country is threatening to A full four years after the last major upgrade, the . It’s slimmer and lighter than its predecessor, has a new Touch Bar feature and a larger TrackPad. Chinese scientists technology. This is the first time CRISPR has been used on a fully formed adult human, and scientists are hoping that this will help their patient fend off a deadly type of lung cancer. Snap Inc. appears to be early next year. The company reportedly filed confidentially for its massive IPO. Snap is already targeting as much as $1 billion in revenue for 2017. It has 150 million daily active users and has rapidly become one of the most enticing new advertising platforms for marketers. Snapchat also continued selling its Spectacles glasses to the public in the most millennial way possible — through pop-up vending machines across California and in Oklahoma. Microsoft and the Linux community often felt like they were at war with each other in the past. But this week, as a high-paying Platinum member. Shareholders in an important hurdle for the deal. Tesla expects the transaction to close in the coming days. Overall, the acquisition is pushed forward by Elon Musk’s vision of a unified sustainable energy track. It was confirmed that fantasy sports sites in what will be a dual-operating structure. DraftKings CEO Jason Robins will become CEO of the newly combined company and FanDuel CEO Nigel Eccles will become Chairman of the Board. WhatsApp is on its way to becoming the global multi-platform FaceTime. The Facebook-owned communication app . A red-hot new startup called led by Social Capital. The text-distribution tool’s goal is to let organizers quickly start individual, personalized conversations with huge groups of supporters. It has already been used by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Samsung is gunning to increase its focus on connected cars as it announced in an $8 billion all-cash deal. LinkedIn after the social network failed to transfer Russian user data to servers located in the country. This violates a requiring all online sites to store personal data on national servers.
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Cogito closes $15M Series B to improve customer support with science
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John Mannes
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, a real-time feedback platform for customer service agents, added $15 million to its coffers today in the form of a Series B. This brings the company’s total fundraising to $22.5 million. The MIT Media Lab spin-off is to call centers around the world to improve customer experiences. Cogito compares the characteristics of a current conversation to those of successful historical calls. Using traits like volume, pauses and speed, Cogito makes recommendations to agents in the form of gentle text nudges. The company touts a 20 percent increase in customer satisfaction among Fortune 500 companies, like Humana and CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, that utilize the service. The applications of behavioral science to enterprise are just beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible. As behavioral research catches up with the troves of data made available for machine learning, unique applications will emerge across untouched industries. is leading the round. The 10-year-old firm conveniently sits within walking distance of Cogito’s Boston headquarters, making it an easy trek for Scott Maxwell, the OpenView founding partner set to join Cogito’s board of directors. Maxwell brings a specialty in enterprise cloud-services to the existing board and is known for being quite hands-on. Existing investors, including and , also participated in the round.
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Hands-on with Play-Doh Touch, the app that brings kids’ creations to life
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Sarah Perez
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Play-Doh has come to the iPad. With , Hasbro has made a solid attempt at bringing the joy of Play-Doh to digital through an that brings kids’ creations to life. But the combination of physical play and digital is not a skill set that’s easily mastered even by top kids’ brands — . And while Play-Doh itself holds up as the engaging and fun toy it’s been for decades, the Play-Doh Touch app fails to amuse after only a few minutes. On paper, Play-Doh Touch sounds intriguing. The idea is that kids can use Play-Doh to create as always – using scissors, stamps and molds – then place their resulting creations on a white surface where they’re scanned and ported into a digital world where they’ll actually come to life. That means you can create a cute green dinosaur, for example, then see him begin to hop around on the screen. Clever, right? You can try Play-Doh Touch on its own just by from , then using the Play-Doh you already have around the house to test it out. However, the $40 offers everything you need to get started, including seven cans of the modeling compound, 10 character and action stamps, plus tools and 15 cutters. There’s also the “Shape to Life Studio” itself, which is really just a white plastic platform where you place kids’ creations before snapping your photo. [gallery ids="1418436,1418437,1418438,1418435"] Though the kit has a lot of pieces, the choice of character stamps seem a bit odd. Instead of commonly popular animals like cats, puppies or birds, you’re given things like a jellyfish, three-eyed ghost, turtle, and something I believe is a worm, though it could be a snail. The rest of the accessories are focused on world-building: trees, a cactus, leaves, clouds, a bone (for T-Rex, ostensibly, though my kid was sad to find there was no dog), etc. Of course, you can turn any ol’ misshapen blob (see pictures below) into a digital character using the Play-Doh Touch app, as it doesn’t criticize your tot’s artistic capabilities by failing to scan their weird designs if they don’t match up with one of the included molds. The app, however, was hard to use at the kitchen table because you have to hold the camera high above the creation, and little arms can only reach so far. Parental involvement may be needed. (Plus, these jars don’t open easily, I must note.) There’s some initial fun in seeing whatever funny creature your kid has shaped appear on the iPad’s screen and animate, and the gameplay is easy enough for even little ones to understand. But Play-Doh fails to create a compelling world after the whizz-bang glee of its digital trickery wears off. Most kids today have a host of extremely well-built apps at their disposal, and are fairly adept gamers in general. Even my kid – who’s still more into Toca Boca’s digital “toys” more so than Minecraft – became almost immediately bored with Play-Doh’s gaming experience. After not even five minutes, I kid you not, her comment was, : “Mommy, this is boring.” It appears she quickly figured out there was no advanced gaming technique needed to move through the world and jump over the obstacles. “All you have to do is hold the side,” she explained, showing me how she continually pressed on the screen to keep the character moving forward. [gallery ids="1418443,1418442,1418441"] In other words, the game itself was not challenging. And, beyond the fact that it was something you created jumping around on the screen, it wasn’t really interesting either. There are no big storylines to follow, character dialog, things to unlock, puzzles, or anything else that would make the game fun. [gallery ids="1418449,1418448,1418447"] At best, the app might interest toddlers – but Play-Doh has broader appeal, and should have tried harder on building a great game, too. As it stands, it’s pretty clear all the development effort was focused on the creation-to-life aspect. For $40, Play-Doh Touch Shape to Life Studio feels like too much to pay, considering the limited experience the digital component currently offers. Today, you can buy the best part of Play-Doh Touch’s kit for a lot less: a 10-pack of full-sized Play-Doh jars is under $10 and a 24-piece setting of models and molds is running around $14 on Amazon. If you still want to give Play-Doh Touch’s app a go, it’s . You can buy the other in-app worlds for an additional $1.99 each, if you choose. The app works on both iPads and iPhones.
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Running with the Apple Watch Nike+
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Megan Rose Dickey
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I’m not trying to brag or anything (I am), but I comfortably ran a half marathon wearing the first version of the 42mm Apple Watch with a classy, stainless steel band. So, when I heard about Nike’s version of the Apple Watch, it’s not like I thought, “Finally! I totally need this because running with the regular Apple Watch sucks.” That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed running with the Apple Watch Nike+. I’ve enjoyed the fact that it takes a lot fewer swipes to get started running, thanks to the prominent placement of the Nike+ Run Club app on the front screen. I also like that the watch elegantly displays how long I’ve been running, my heart rate, pace and miles run. The watch talks to me to tell me my pace after every mile, and also has a sweet auto-pause feature just in case I have to stop to tie my shoe and don’t want to mess up my recorded pace. What makes the Apple Watch Nike+ different from the other Series 2 Apple Watch models are the Nike watch faces; the quick, one-tap functionality to launch the running app; and the lighter, more breathable sport band that comes with it. The Nike+ version of the watch also comes with the Nike+ Run Club app, though, people without an Apple Watch can use the Nike+ Run Club app on their phones. In general, the Apple Watch Series 2 is better for running than the first batch of Apple watches because of its built-in GPS, which makes it so you don’t have to carry your bulky phone with you in order to track your pace, distance and route. Though, when I’ve gone on runs wearing the Apple Watch Nike+, I’ve still brought my phone so I can listen to my music. There a feature on the Series 2 watch that lets you download music to it, but you can only do that with music from Apple Music or iTunes Match. So, that feature is useless to me because my go-to music for running, and in general, lives on SoundCloud. The Apple Watch Nike+ costs $369 for the 38mm and $399 for the 42mm version — the same prices as the standard Apple Watch Series 2 devices. As a semi-legitimate runner, I’m into Nike’s version of the Apple Watch, but I can’t quite bring myself to describe it as a must-have, rather than just a nice-to-have smartwatch.
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Conan O’Brien tries VR and things get a bit scandalous
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Lucas Matney
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HTC had a pretty good PR moment this week as Conan donned a Vive VR headset on his show and got up to some antics during a tour of YouTube’s VR studio. After testing his artistic hand with a self portrait in Google’s Tilt Brush, Conan immersed himself in the world of and things got a bit crazy. Upon being plunged into an office environment, Conan tosses objects at his robot coworkers and scans his face on the copy machine. The blatant recklessness accelerates him to a virtual kitchen where he douses himself with olive oil and talks about the future of VR porn. ‘ Job Simulator has been one of the more hilarious titles out there to show off virtual reality to users for the first time. HTC was well aware of this and bundled the title for all pre-orders of their Vive headset when it was released earlier this year. Conan’s tour of YouTube’s VR studio accomplished what so many VR evangelists and tech journos have been unable to do, make VR seem accessible to the broader public that hasn’t tried it. A major help to this has been the pioneering effort of studios like Owlchemy Labs and Radial Games in creating the mixed reality capture tech that allows viewers to see exactly what the VR user is experiencing when they put on a headset. Even in the past several months the tech has improved greatly to the point that the VR user fades into the scene and can duck behind virtual objects even as the physical camera changes its perspective. For as geeky as virtual reality looks to an outsider, these capture technologies give a bit of credence to just how cool the experiences really can be inside the headsets for high-end VR users.
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This security camera was infected by malware 98 seconds after it was plugged in
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Devin Coldewey
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Here’s an object lesson on the poor state of the so-called Internet of Things: Robert Stephens plugged a Wi-Fi-connected security camera into his network and it was Stephens, a tech industry veteran, wasn’t so naive as to do this without protecting himself. It was walled off from the rest of the network and rate-limited so it couldn’t participate in any DDoS attacks. He monitored its traffic carefully, expecting to see — as others have — attempts to take over the device. But even the most jaded among us probably wouldn’t have guessed it would take less than two minutes. 8/x: Actually, it took 98 seconds for first infection — Robᵉʳᵗ Graham 🤔 (@ErrataRob) Ninety-eight seconds after it jumped on the Wi-Fi, the camera was attacked by a Mirai-like worm that knew the default login and password. The worm (its advance agent, really) checked the specs of its new home and then downloaded the rest of itself onto the device and, had Stephens not locked it down beforehand, would then be ready to participate in all manner of online shenanigans. , a cheap off-brand one from a company that sells smartwatches for $12, isn’t exactly best-in-class. This type of thing could be fixed with a firmware update or, in some cases, by simply changing the default password, but not everyone knows to do that, and even the most tech-savvy people might not get that done in two minutes. Better-quality devices will almost certainly be better protected against this kind of thing, and may for example block all incoming traffic until they’re paired with another device and set up manually. Still, this is a good reminder that it really is a jungle out there.
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BuzzFeed authorizes $200 million flat round
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Katie Roof
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Debug Politics says it’s time for the tech industry to help solve political problems
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Anthony Ha
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Silicon Valley has been as the place where entrepreneurs like to declare they’re “making the world a better place” when they’re actually just trying to make money. But now a new, nonpartisan initiative called is encouraging the tech industry to live up to the catchphrase — by helping to fix the political system. Jesse Pickard, CEO of “brain training” app , told me that after the presidential election, he and the other organizers of Debug Politics were discussing their frustrations and their desire to get more involved in the political process. “We don’t think we are the only ones that can fix the situation, or that we will save the world in a weekend,” Pickard said. However, they felt “the tech community can and should be engaged in things that are about more than monetary gain.” (I should mention that — thanks to the magic of Craigslist — Pickard was my roommate for about a year when I was first starting at TechCrunch.) Specifically, Debug Politics is organizing this weekend in San Francisco, followed by events in , and . Attendees (who could be developers, designers, marketers and others) are encouraged to figure out “one thing that you’re dissatisfied with in the 2016 election cycle” and build something to fix it — whether that’s something that could help a particular candidate in 2018, or could address broader issues like the divide between rural and urban voters. When I suggested that many of our political problems may not be fixable by a tech product, Pickard didn’t disagree, but he suggested, “Everyone has a different set of skills. What the tech community can do effectively is build products that can quickly affect people at scale.” He was also sensitive to the perception that folks in the tech industry might be presumptuous in thinking they know better than the people and organizations who’ve spent years dealing with these problems. “Another thing that Debug Politics also really encourages is not reinventing the wheel,” he said. “If there are groups that are potentially tackling the problem in a way that’s very aligned with you, we encourage people to reach out to those groups.” To be clear, there’s no formal organization here, just a group of friends and peers putting together some events. But it’s still very early days in an effort that could grow. “I might have a different answer for you in a couple of weeks,” Pickard said.
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Razer’s Blade 14 successfully merges mobile gaming with slick hardware
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Stefan Etienne
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Razer seems to have figured out how to squeeze in the most power per inch in a laptop. Now in its fourth generation, the Razer Blade 14 has never been more powerful as a personal computer — or better yet, as a gaming laptop fit for any battle station. It looks good, runs well and is brimming with specs in a unibody aluminum frame that competitors haven’t come close to matching. But then again, the Blade 14 isn’t going to replace a desktop gaming setup — unless you get creative (and costly) with it. One of the things I like the most about the Blade 14 is how simple it looks. The triple-snake logo that Razer is known for is illuminated in green on the lid, and is textured, adding to its aesthetic. While somewhat of an oily fingerprint magnet (followed by swirl patterns when cleaned), the entirety of the Blade 14’s surface area is matte and smooth to the touch. I really like that, and it’s amplified by the individually backlit Chroma keyboard, which can be programmed to display every color of the rainbow, or just one, if you prefer. As a gaming and productivity keyboard, it’s one of the best I’ve used this year. Actuation of the keys is resolute, and very easy to transition from a MacBook Pro or any other 2016 Razer desktop keyboard, for that matter. It’s a comfortable typing experience that I enjoy. Looking down from the keyboard to the touchpad, I found its tracking and touch performance to be surprisingly good. Instead of going with the usual “whole trackpad is a button” approach, the Blade uses dedicated left- and right-click buttons. This makes sense, as a different approach would be less useful for gaming. Even though you’d be silly to use the trackpad — and not an external mouse — in any fast-paced gaming environment, it’s comforting to know it works well. As for the 1080p display: I haven’t been so enamored with a regular HD display in a while. That’s because of three things: awesome color reproduction, clarity and a max 350 nit brightness. While Razer offers a glossy 3200 x 1800 touch display option, keep in mind it takes a higher toll on the GPU and will drop your average FPS in games. The dream would be to run games at the full QHD+ resolution, but that just isn’t possible on a GTX 1060. Razer gives you a single GPU option on the Blade 14: the mobile version of the GTX 1060 chip, with NVIDIA’s Pascal architecture. It’s a GPU capable of playing most current titles at full resolution (in this unit’s case, 1080p HD) on medium-high to full-high settings. You won’t be maxing DirectX 12 titles on the Blade 14, but then again, the fact that you can get so much out of such a slim machine is impressive, nonetheless. runs at full resolution on medium settings (DirectX 12 mode) at a comfortable 50fps. ran at a similarly decent 50-70fps on medium settings, dropping to 37fps on high settings. However, you do have another option — although it’s a pricey investment: the Razer Core dock. Using your only USB-C port (after spending $499 on the dock, plus the cost of a desktop graphics card), you can wield the power of just about any GPU on the market. The Razer Core dock also has additional ports, so it’s a single-cable solution to boost your gaming capability. What offsets this ascent to power is price, which is why I am personally against this approach. What about battery life? The numbers for the Blade 14 are between five and six hours. That’s all web browsing and videos, which is lower than most ultrabooks. But the Blade isn’t an ultrabook (despite having the looks), so six hours is reasonable considering the specs. However, you’d have to sacrifice another 2 hours if you’re gaming on-the-go, but you wouldn’t be getting max clock speed anyways because of not being plugged in. The greatest of the Blade 14’s pitfalls is probably something you’ve been wondering about: heat and airflow. Think about it: The whole system is black and contains of the most powerful specs available on laptops today. The result is as expected: If running at full capacity, it will get hot. To avoid the sweltering heat, keeping the Blade on a flat surface (i.e. not a bed) is a must. Under strain (e.g. playing ) you can hear the fans spinning. What I find funny about the Blade’s cooling is when it’s working at its peak, you can feel the cool air at your fingertips. Actually, this is air being sucked down for cooling and there’s nothing wrong with it; just a characteristic worth noting. Otherwise, there aren’t too many other deal-breakers here. The dual speakers are capable of filling a small room with loud, clear audio and a hint of bass, but aren’t enough for “immersive” PC gaming. In that case, external speakers or headphones would be your friend here — but that’s the case for most laptops. I would say testament to the Blade 14 being one of the best high-powered Windows laptops out there is that Microsoft has started selling it directly from its stores. Not every Windows machine makes the cut, but the Blade certainly does. Here are the scenarios where it makes sense to drop close to $2,000 (or more) on one: a) if you’re a gamer who wants your PC to always be with you; b) if you need high processing power in general in a slim frame; or c) if the idea of a single laptop powering your whole setup sounds exciting, Core graphics dock and all. Battery life isn’t really a deal-breaker here, so I’m willing to commend the Blade for it. Plus, the GTX 1060 is really the base requirement for VR usage, so take that as you may. Just remember: You can also build your own desktop with better specs for the same price, and get Razer peripherals to go with it. Your choice, player one.
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Disrupting the world of science publishing
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Bérénice Magistretti
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Every scientist wants his or her paper to appear in , or . In today’s scientific world, being associated with such publications is synonymous with prestige and excellence, opening doors to top positions and coveted awards. Nonetheless, these journals are typically known to have an acceptance rate of 5-10 percent, meaning that the other 90-95 percent whose papers have been rejected are forced to find other publishing outlets that simply don’t have the same alluring impact within the academic world. , a Swiss startup that launched in February, is trying to pave the way to a more democratized system by offering an open-source publishing platform to every scientist who wants to share his or her observations. “We are trying to publish the same way top science publications published 50 years ago,” explains Lawrence Rajendran, founder and CEO of ScienceMatters. “They used to publish exact observations, but now, competition for space is extremely high so there needs to be that wow factor.” In other words, scientists must not only present outstanding and unique results, but they also need to craft them within an appealing narrative that pleases the editors. Therefore what drives scientists today is no longer the curiosity of discovering something new, but rather the glorification of a high-impact factor (i.e. essentially an indicator of the number of times articles published in the journal are cited). “It has been repeatedly said that the impact factor of a journal cannot be considered as the only proxy for the quality of the work it publishes,” says Monica Di Luca, vice rector of the . “However, the fact is that universities and research centers all use this measure when hiring and promoting researchers. Even scientists consider it a useful means to assess the scientific status of a colleague.” As a neuroscientist himself, Rajendran experienced first-hand the biased and unjust system that constitutes the world of science publishing when he was a post-doc. “This publish or perish culture instills a hostile scientific environment, pressuring young researchers to outperform their peers, which can lead to data fraud,” he explains. Born in a slum around Madras, India, this professor decided to build an inclusive platform for all scientists, whether they’re full professors at Harvard or post-docs in Mumbai. To publish on ScienceMatters, the scientist needs to demonstrate two things. First, the research has to be technically solid (i.e. proper controls and execution). Second, it has to have a scientific context (i.e. neuroscience, chemistry, physics…). Once the paper has been submitted, it goes through a triple blind review process where both the authors and the editors are anonymous. “This prevents any form of bias as we believe science alone should matter,” says Rajendran. There are other open-access platforms that are on a similar quest of democratizing the world of science publishing. One of them, , was founded by Nobel Laureate Randy Schekman, who famously denounced Cell, Nature and Science for their selection criteria. : “Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of bonus culture, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals.” , also based in Switzerland, is another open-source publishing platform for scientists. “I don’t think journals like eLife or Frontiers are fundamentally different from, let’s say, Cell Reports or Nature Communications,” explains Stanford-based professor Tom Südhof, Nobel Laureate and chair of ScienceMatters’ board of advisors. “I think ScienceMatters breaks this mold, at least partly, by publishing short pieces that are not stories, but simply results.“ These results are incorporated in Matteric (patented in 2015), a metric system that provides scores on how impactful an observation is using network-based algorithms. “Taken together, the vision of ScienceMatters is to create an internet of validated science,” explains Rajendran. The hope, according to the CEO, is to become the “Google of Science,” indexing every research paper to render the whole system more transparent and accessible. “A new metric is exactly what we need,” says Di Luca. “But we also need this metric to be shared among peers and endorsed by scientific societies or structured funding agencies.” The Swiss startup seems to be on the right track, as it was recently accelerated by and recognized by the . Thanks to its recent seed round of $380,000, led by the , the team has managed to fund submissions — a stark contrast to other journals that impose a publishing fee. ScienceMatters has published around 60 papers since its launch, each from multiple authors and more than 600 editors behind the review process. “We are now negotiating with universities so that they can take care of the publishing charges for their authors,” explains Rajendran. They have already confirmed partnerships with the , the and the in Lausanne. The team now wishes to raise additional funds to expand the platform’s reach. “We are looking for VCs, impact investors, philanthropists or charitable foundations who believe in this idea and who don’t want a rapid exit,” says the CEO. “We want to keep growing and, who knows, maybe even become a publishing company.”
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Relax, artificial intelligence isn’t coming for your job
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Ron Miller
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There is a pervasive underlying fear from that artificial intelligence and robotics will be the undoing of humankind. Eventually, the conventional thinking goes — even the likes of here — artificial intelligence will become smarter than the organic variety and terrible things will happen as machines take over the planet. In reality, however, it’s much more likely — or even take our jobs. In fact, it’s very likely going to help us do our jobs better. Think about that for a moment. The idea that AI could help us work smarter is not nearly as sexy as the notion of robot overlords taking over Earth — but it is a much more realistic view of artificial intelligence technology in 2016. It’s worth noting, that’s as true for the line worker at a factory as it is for a salesperson or knowledge worker. While it may seem like every software engineer in Silicon Valley is trying to create the perfect algorithm to replace human workers, many are simply trying to find ways to make you a better employee by combining the power of the computer with your creative working brains. Paul Daugherty, CTO at Accenture, says in his company’s viewpoint, artificial intelligence will be about enhancing humans, not replacing them — and . While SciFi-fear mongering might make good headlines, it’s not what his company is focused on when it comes to artificial intelligence. “Our goal with AI is not to make super humans, it’s to make humans super.” While that might be a clever marketing turn of phrase, he insists the company is focusing on solving real business problems with AI — finding ways to simplify the complex. To that end, Accenture is looking at three concrete approaches to artificial intelligence: It wants to transform business processes by making them more intelligent, provide a more effective way for humans to interact with machines to allow us to take maximum advantage of the machine’s data processing capabilities (possibly as an interface), and finally, it wants to help surface unstructured data, a problem business has been working on for decades. Lest you think this is all about improving the lives of knowledge workers, Daugherty says that AI will reach down to the factory floor. He tells of a manufacturing client his company has been working with who combined AI with an augmented reality headset to teach low-skilled workers new jobs. The workers are fed very specific instructions through the headset — and they learn much more quickly this way. They found employees loved this approach, as did employers because they could distribute workers across a variety of tasks without a lot of costly training. When one looks at AI, one of the places we are starting to see it emerge in a big way this year, has been in , Oracle, SugarCRM, Base and others. The thinking is that sales teams can’t possibly keep track of all the factors out there that could be having impact on an individual sale — and that’s where the machine can help. Good sales people have an innate talent for communicating with their customers and knowing how to push and prod them to the final sale. What they often lack, no matter how good they are, is an understanding all of the underlying issues that could have a negative impact on a possible sale, says Rich Green, chief product officer at SugarCRM. That’s where AI can come in providing information about how the current deal relates to other deals, what’s happening in the news that could have an impact on a deal, what the tone suggests in the latest email exchanges, and so forth. A machine and good CRM software can process all of this external information, provide insight to the sales team, and let humans worry about the social interactions that are needed to close the sale. It’s certainly a point Salesforce was pushing earlier this year , its artificial intelligence platform — and it’s something you can expect to see in all kinds of software in the coming years. Regardless of how you feel about it, AI is going to be built into most software moving forward. It’s just the natural course of software evolution. If you can build smarter software, why wouldn’t you? Daugherty believes that, because of this, we will see a much more rapid adoption curve for AI than we did with cloud computing. That’s partly because, with the cloud, a company had to make a deliberate decision to switch from on-prem to an entirely new model, and it has taken some time for that idea to catch on. AI will simply be part of the fabric of much of the software being built from this point on. It’s also a technology that has been in development for years, waiting for the right moment. We now have the compute power and data to make it work in real business scenarios. As Amit Zavery, senior VP for the Oracle cloud platform told me, it’s not as though in the future, you can have the software with AI or you can save a few bucks and get the software without it. It’s simply going to be built in. When Zavery talks to customers, they ultimately don’t care about the underlying technology. They want some sort of business value — and if it’s AI delivering it, so much the better. That said, all of the major vendors — Google, Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, IBM or any platform vendor — are also exposing artificial intelligence programming tools in the form of APIs, putting this kind of technology within reach of every company. We don’t know how long it will take for organizations to start building more intelligent applications internally, but it would seem if they build the APIs, the developers will come. While things often tend to move more slowly in technology than many of us think, AI is a trend that should progress much more rapidly as the software vendors push it deeper and deeper into the software they develop. As this happens, it’s important to keep in mind, the goals of this approach are designed to help you work more efficiently and intelligently — not to remove you from the equation.
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Asia’s answer to ClassPass is pivoting to become a marketplace for local services
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Jon Russell
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One of Asia’s most-funded clones of U.S.-based subscription fitness service ClassPass is pivoting to local services. KFit, which has from , announced today that it has acquired the Groupon Malaysia business in an undisclosed deal. That comes less than six months after KFit, which operates a fitness-style ‘buffet’ for customers in 10 cities in Asia Pacific, . Why is a fitness-focused company buying Groupon, the much-maligned daily deals site? Let’s start with the official reason. Like the Indonesia transaction, which was completed in August, KFit said today’s news is about expanding its focus into local services. Earlier this summer it launched , a platform to help local retailers use the internet — and, in particular, mobile — to reach consumers. That model is often referred to as offline-to-online, or O2O for short, and it is a trend that has taken off in China. In a sign of its potential, earlier this year at a valuation of $18 billion, but the trend is yet to catch on elsewhere. That’s the wave that it appears KFit wants to surf in Southeast Asia. Buying Groupon’s businesses gives KFit a running start, although figures for the Malaysia operations are a little hazy — with an announcement claiming the deals site is “serving millions of customers and thousands of local businesses” in the country. KFit said Groupon Malaysia will transition to Fave, as Groupon Indonesia already did, in early 2017. That will essentially see it add new categories for fitness, wellness and other gym-related sectors to its current commerce business. KFit said it will retain around 90 percent of staff, with senior Groupon Malaysia executives likely to move on to new roles inside the company. “Millions of local businesses are booming in China thanks to the adoption of O2O services, with hundreds of millions of consumers embracing these platforms as part of their day-to-day lives. The convenience and value benefits of these platforms are key drivers of this new norm. This future is inevitable for Southeast Asia and we hope to be at the forefront of this exciting shift,” KFit CEO and co-founder Joel Neoh said in a statement. Fave is currently operational in three cities — Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Singapore — but KFit is available in 10 cities across Asia Pacific. Neoh told TechCrunch that KFit is focused on O2O in Southeast Asia, which could mean that the original fitness service is shuttered in the future. “It works well the way it is,” he said in an interview. “Once we are done with the Groupon integrations we will explore [the future of] KFit… there’s no rush right now, it works fine.” At this point, it’s important to connect the dots since there are many links between the two companies. Neoh started group-buying site GroupsMore in Malaysia which Groupon acquired within months of launch. Post-acquisition, he led Groupon’s operations in Asia before leaving to start KFit in 2015. Fellow KFit co-founder Yeoh Chen Chow was regional operations director for Groupon APAC, too. It’s also important to note that KFit has had some issues with its business which may be behind this pivot. , we reported that it had been struggling financially: Reaching profitability before the year is up would be notable, given that KFit was carding a fairly high monthly burn rate — negative $320,000 in Q3 2015, 80 percent of which went to staffing, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. (Our sources within the company have since left, indicating that there has been notable turnover in staff this year.) The Series A funding came just in time with little money left in the bank. So, an alternative theory for today’s news other than the one put forward by the company is that KFit didn’t find meaningful revenue in offering a straight-up ClassPass-style service therefore its founders went back to a business they know — quite literally — in Groupon to stay afloat. Neoh admitted that the “unit economics [of KFit] was a challenge” early on. But he claimed the company raised prices and discontinued its unlimited tier, moves that shrunk its user base but, he said, made the fitness business break-even/profitable. “It was quite painful when we had to adjust it but it was sustainable and profitable,” he added. That mirrors the struggles of ClassPass, which pioneered this model, certainly shows that it isn’t easy to succeed in with fitness subscriptions, even with a brand and first-mover advantage. The U.S. company which saw it in exchange for healthier margins. altogether in November to search of better finances. Today’s news will be of particular interest to KFit rival GuavaPass, which recently . GuavaPass’s founders are adamant that they have what it takes to make the model work in Asia Pacific. We shall see.
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We’re all screwed, but let’s not be nihilists
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Jon Evans
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We are so doomed it’s almost funny, and always have been. Don’t worry, I’m not being political! …well, not exactly. I’m talking about the State of Internet Security, which is, as always, disastrous-verging-on-cataclysmic. Are you worried about Russian hackers? Hah! You should be so lucky as to be hacked. We should all be so lucky as to have a functional Internet they can use to hack us. Well, OK, you should maybe be worried about Russian hackers, and ransomware, and certificate authorities, and — if you’re at all high-profile — spear-phishing and doxxing, and, well, let’s of other stuff. There’s a lot to be worried about. But what you should be worried about is despair, learned helplessness, and the apparent undying enmity between the best and the good in the security world. Maybe we can’t fix everything, but there’s still a lot of relatively simple stuff we can do — but aren’t doing — to make our lives better. Let’s start with the bad news: everyone loves a good catastrophe. Let’s start with the Mirai botnet and what it says about the Internet of Things. Briefly: a whole lot of IoT devices have essentially no security, and/or are deployed with publicly known factory-standard passwords, and hence are extremely easy to hijack. Malicious hackers can easily use malware named to take over enormous numbers of such devices, turn them into a botnet, and use them to shut down — or a of the — with distributed-denial-of-service attacks, ie flooding the wires with so much of their own traffic that nothing else can get through. There isn’t actually a whole lot that can be done about this. To quote Matthew Garrett’s postmortem: I wrote a thing on why this IoT botnet is basically a demonstration that we're utterly doomed: — Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) We can’t easily fix the already broken devices, we can’t easily stop more broken devices from being shipped and we can’t easily guarantee that we can fix future devices that end up broken. The only solution I see working at all is to require ISPs to cut people off, and that’s going to involve a great deal of pain. The harsh reality is that this is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg, and things are going to get much worse before they get any better. For an even worrying take on the subject, see security legend Bruce Schneier’s essay “ ,” written, with typical perspicacity, before the recent spate of attacks: Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services … It feels like a nation’s military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar … What can we do about this? Nothing, really. This is not a new category of problems. Schneier wrote another famous essay, , entitled “ “: As the world begins to conduct business over the always-under-construction Internet, we need to understand the real threats to the system … We need to fix security flaws when they become known, and not just give the problem lip service until the press coverage blows over. As the French : the more things change, the more they stay the same. The difference is that, unlike in 1998, so much of our lives are now predicated on the Internet. (Even, or maybe especially, politics: consider the major role that emails, Twitter, and fake Facebook news played in the recent US presidential election.) The popular image of hackers hasn’t changed much in twenty years: shadowy supervillains who can, with a few keystrokes, take down key global infrastructure, break into your emails, or hijack your phone and/or computer, and there’s nothing much you can do about it. The main change is that these days the supervillains might wear military uniforms. And, indeed, protecting our backbone online infrastructure over the next few years is going to be … challenging. But the frustrating thing is that, in general, there is so much more we could be doing, both individually and as an industry, to “fix security flaws when they become known.” Treat email attachments, even those apparently from people you think you know, as toxic unless proven otherwise, if you are an activist, journalist, political figure etc. Alternate take: regardless of your privilege, engaging in electoral politics now requires that you take opsec seriously. — Jeremy Zimmer (@jeremyzimmer) Favor messaging with end-to-end encryption, rather than emails without. At least consider using a password manager. And for the love of Zod, turn on , which is, astonishingly, still somewhat controversial advice. The security industry is currently in the midst of exmplifying : “the best is the enemy of the good.” The problem is that the “second factor” used in two-factor authentication often consists of numbers sent to your phone via SMS, and that SMS — like — is in and of itself. This is true. But for the majority of people, two-factor authentication via SMS is still a huge improvement on the status quo. I've said it before: SMS 2FA is still incredibly important. Gov actors can already usurp your mobile, they didn't need SMS 2FA to do so. — Don A. Bailey (@DonAndrewBailey) If your threat model includes governments, or highly motivated gangs of , then yes, of course, use something more secure. Yes, your providers should all move to something better like , preferably soon. But if your life does not resemble a Bourne movie in any way, don’t worry about that yet. Don’t take my word, take that of Facebook CSO Alex Stamos: https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/802010749811847168 It’s true that the fundamental Internet infrastructure is looking especially vulnerable to a particular kind of attack right now, and it’s not clear what we can do about it in the short term. But it’s also true that whole categories of security nightmares could be cleared right up with more widespread use of simple fixes: more frequent software patching, better password management (for people and IoT devices alike), ubiquitous two-factor authentication, and paranoid email-attachment avoidance. Hackers are not invincible supervillains. (Sorry, my hacker friends.) They only seem that way because we’ve collectively been so needlessly awful at security for so long. It is past time for that to change.
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Crunch Report | Facebook Made Us All Dead
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski TechCrunch C/O Tito Hamze
410 Townsend street
Suite 100
San Francisco Ca. 94107
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Kickstarter smash hit INSTRUMENT 1 from Artiphon is now available to buy
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Take a , add a lot of tech in its belly and jam a USB cable up its jacksie and you get something that looks vaguely like an INSTRUMENT 1. It’s a completely new type of musical instrument developed by . Funded through , the instrument is shipping now, and we can’t wait to see what people will be creating with it. The campaign has seen a number of setbacks and delays, mostly around a familiar theme: Going from prototype to mass manufacturing is really hard. Trying to figure out how to work with manufacturing partners, especially, can be tremendously difficult, as the company’s explains. It looks like the problems are now a thing of the past, however, and the company’s INSTRUMENT 1 is now available to order for a surprisingly modest $400. Trying to explain what the instrument actually is is easier said than done. It can be played as a guitar or as a keyboard, but it also has pressure sensitivity and an accelerometer built in, which can add a layer of creativity on top. In fact, just watch the video to get a feeling for why musicians are both scratching their heads and wetting themselves with excitement over this new cornucopia of creativity. To play the instrument, you can use the companion app that helps you pick sounds, tunings and so on. It’s also MIDI-compatible, which makes it compatible with a big fat pile of mobile and desktop apps for creative music creation, including GarageBand, Animoog, SampleTank, Ableton Live, ProTools, Logic, Mainstage and many others. It is actually quite hard to know what to make of the product. In fact, even is pretty funny. They recognize there is a new wave of creative potential hidden somewhere in there, but they also know that there’s a very definite learning curve to get to grasps with a brand new instrument. INSTRUMENT 1 delivers a steep learning curve, but also potentially boundless creativity. The only song you aren’t allowed to play on it is Stairway to Heaven. OK, just kidding, , and it shows off the versatility of the INSTRUMENT 1 beautifully, to boot. Early reports suggest that INSTRUMENT 1 is a jack of all trades. We can’t wait to see whether it becomes the master of a new generation of musicians, too. Timed perfectly for Christmas, we wouldn’t be surprised if this little beauty makes it to the wish lists of many a geeky musician around the world this year.
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Nintendowned: Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in (null) seconds
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Devin Coldewey
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We knew the , with its retro aesthetic and solid game selection, would be , but this is some next level, Tickle Me Elmo-style demand. Amazon, which made its supply of the console available at 2PM Pacific today, sold out in what appeared to be less than a minute. Clearly thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of gamers were sitting on the product page hammering the F5 key and some random selection thereof got their wish. Traffic on that page in particular was so heavy that either Amazon took it down, or it went down by itself — and considering the resources Amazon has at hand, that’s a pretty amazing feat. There’s no indication of how many consoles Amazon had to sell, but it had to have been a fair few. I can confirm at least was sold: I and pretty much everyone here at TechCrunch failed to secure one, though. Everywhere else seems to be fresh out, as well. The GameStop near me said it only received 17 units and sold them within half an hour of opening. There were plenty of reports of people waiting outside Targets and Best Buys in order to get theirs. More will be arriving, though: In a series of tweets this morning, Nintendo assured an agitated public that “there will be a steady flow” of the hot gadgets. So don’t buy a $1,000 one on the black market. Yet. The Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition system is a hot item, and we are working hard to keep up with consumer demand. 1/3 — Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) Thanks Nintendo. Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen with the though, okay?
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AT&T downgrades video quality on mobile with ‘Stream Saver’
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Devin Coldewey
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AT&T just introduced a new “feature” much like T-Mobile’s Binge On that will automatically throttles all video streams to a lower resolution and bandwidth unless you opt out of it. They call it , and yes, it applies to “unlimited” data plans. All video streams it detects, once it goes into effect next year, will be limited to 1.5 Mbps. This should help them — sorry, — conserve data and avoid running out of your limited unlimited data allowance. And really, who really needs better than “quality similar to DVD” on their phone or tablet’s 1080p screen? For reference. The data will still count toward your monthly usage, though. So while this qualifies as throttling, it isn’t “zero-rating,” which (as with programs from T-Mobile and Sprint) prevents that streaming data from counting at all. That means it’s less of a convenience, but also — although T-Mobile’s scary claims that it was picking and choosing which providers would be zero-rated turned out to be false (all video was being throttled, “partner” or otherwise). Of course, AT&T does zero-rate other stuff — just not here. Make no mistake, AT&T is trying to reduce load on their network by automatically cutting video streams down to a fidelity level we left behind years ago. You should receive a message when you’ve been opted into Stream Saver; you should be able to opt out with no penalty.
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Facebook Messenger launches its public group chat feature “Rooms” in select markets
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Sarah Perez
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Facebook’s experiment with semi-anonymous social networking centered around interests, via a , . But the learnings from that earlier experiment have now in Facebook’s Messenger application as a new feature called Rooms, which is rolling out now in select markets. The limited launch is meant to serve as a test to see if Facebook’s messaging platform could encourage broader, more public conversations focused on specific topics. There were already hints that Facebook was planning to trial Rooms on Messenger in the near future. In September, hidden in the Messenger app that referenced a feature by the same name, which also offered some explanation of how Rooms worked. At the time, text found in the code stated that “rooms are for public conversations about topics and interests. Each Room has a link that can be shared so anyone on Messenger can join the conversation.” Users could also create their own Rooms via the Messenger app, invite members, approve new members, set a nickname for themselves, configure notifications and more. Facebook said then Rooms was a small test, but offered no further comment. Now, Rooms is becoming available to a wider audience: Australia and Canada. These countries are often places where the social network trials new products because of their English-speaking user bases, before rolling out the feature to the U.S. and other international users. According to Facebook’s explanation of Rooms at launch, as reported by the feature is different from group chats because it’s focused on chatting around specific topics with people you may or may not know. Group chats, meanwhile, are only generally joined by family and friends you do know. However, users will be able to set Rooms to private, and only allow those to join when they are approved by an administrator. This could work well as an add-on for things like larger Facebook groups, where not all the members are also Facebook friends. (Or have even met in real life). But it could also help connect people around subjects they want to discuss via messaging, instead of the more formal structure of a Facebook group. Another use case could be organizing events or sending out alerts. That’s something that could be especially interesting in light of how the larger social network has already been used to organize social and political movements — including, most recently, that are occurring across the U.S. The company has been busy trialing a number of new messaging experiments in recent weeks, many with the goal of challenging Snapchat. This has included which was also in Australia and . It has also tested new for its own in-app camera on Facebook itself, Meanwhile, its , and Facebook confirmed to us the Rooms feature has just begun rolling out to Australian and Canadian users. At this time, only users in those regions will be able to create Rooms.
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Signups for encrypted mail client ProtonMail double after election
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Kate Conger
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The election of Donald Trump has lots of Americans worried about their privacy, and they’re turning to encrypted communication platforms to protect themselves. During an yesterday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden encouraged those concerned about the ramifications of Trump at the helm of the NSA to use — and it seems like people are listening. , an encrypted email service headquartered in Switzerland, announced today that it’s seen an influx of new users since the election. “Since Trump’s victory, the number of new users coming to ProtonMail has doubled compared to the previous week,” CEO Andy Yen wrote in a . “Given Trump’s campaign rhetoric against journalists, political enemies, immigrants, and Muslims, there is concern that Trump could use the new tools at his disposal to target certain groups.” However, Yen is quick to note that the mass surveillance apparatus that Trump will helm expanded and flourished under President Obama. “Today, we are seeing an influx of liberal users, but ProtonMail has also long been popular with the political right, who were truly worried about big government spying, and the Obama administration having access to their communications. Now the tables have turned,” Yen wrote. “The same terror the political right has experienced is now being felt in liberal bubbles such as Silicon Valley for the first time.” Like Snowden, Yen argues that Trump is just an example of how quickly governments can change and his rise to power demonstrates the importance of privacy, no matter who sits in the White House. Yen recommended his own service for those looking to avoid surveillance, as well as the encrypted messaging app .
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Instant apps are publishers’ newest ‘frenemy’ when it comes to monetization
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Mark Ellis
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Since the dawn of the iPhone, Apple has been designing, revolutionizing and, to some extent, controlling the way people interact with their mobile devices through a marketplace known as the App Store. When the App Store first opened, there were 552 apps. Today, there are 2 million iOS apps, and apps available in Android’s Google Play store. Needless to say, getting a single app noticed in a sea of 4.2 million is far from simple. What’s more, individuals tend to use only a per month, and most of their time in apps is concentrated across a very small number of them, making the job of app marketers even more difficult. Apps have become the foundation of mobile life. “There’s an app for that!” isn’t just a slogan, it’s a lifestyle. You want to easily book a hotel room from your phone? Download the app. This could soon change, however, with Google’s introduction of , which let people use apps without having to fully download the app. Google’s Instant Apps seem positioned to disrupt monetization efforts for Android developers by blurring the lines on how to define engagement and chipping away at the broader app store economy — making it publishers’ newest frenemy on the block. Let’s explore the hows and whys… says it’s “just a friend” trying to help developers , but more likely, Google is working to redirect people’s attention back to the mobile web. As the leader in advertising and search, Google made its name (and money) on the web and wants to keep as many people using it, whether on desktop or mobile. Currently, only , which is the third-ranking form of app discoverability behind friends and family and browsing the app store. By downloading apps, users are leaving their search engine, most likely Google, and giving the newly downloaded app their undivided attention. Up until a few years ago, Google was , so that content didn’t show up in search results and Google wasn’t able to fully monetize from apps. By distilling down to a single app feature, Google is not only providing a quicker way for users to access the best feature of an app while saving phone memory, they are also able to keep customers in the Google mobile web ecosystem, allowing them to collect more information, enhance their services and make money through advertising. In this respect, Android Instant Apps may diminish a publisher’s opportunities to monetize through in-app mobile ads because people no longer need to spend time installing and using the app on a regular basis. The for mobile publishers are paid (where someone buys the app), in-app purchases (where someone pays to unlock content or remove ads) and in-app mobile advertising (which includes the videos and banners that pop up every so often). If popularized, Android Instant Apps runs the risk of threatening these three monetization pillars: Why would someone want to pay for an app if they can access it quickly and ad-free via Google’s mobile browser? App developers face challenges larger than what falls under these three pillars, however. It’s no secret that app retention rates are low, with around . Some have argued the app boom is over, as people have been shown to . With Instant Apps, app sharing will involve less friction — when a friend shares a link to an app, you won’t have to go through the rigmarole of launching the app store and wondering if it’s worth using up space on your phone to install. Instead, users can quickly launch the Instant App and access its core features and content. For example, when sharing a link to a Buzzfeed recipe with a friend, that friend then clicks the link and it launches the Instant App, where they can view the shared recipe quickly and easily. Android Instant Apps could also help publishers expand their existing user base by modularizing their app into different Instant App versions — and in the oversaturated app marketplace, a chance to increase discoverability is always welcomed. Unfortunately, Android Instant Apps might simply discourage users from downloading the app altogether. And publishers may need to reassess the way they measure engagement — for a streamed instant app, publishers won’t be able to measure engagement by time spent using the native app, and so will have to measure by goal. For example, a hotel app may see more rooms booked, or Starbucks may find more customers paying through their mobile platform — why take the time and space to download a ticket-booking app you only use a handful of times a year for concert tickets when you could stream it on Instant Apps? Apps that offer a service of this sort, then, may see increased sales as a result of Instant Apps. While downloads might initially fall, user engagement and retention could increase once people are exposed to the value and usefulness of your app through the mobile web. And a more invested user may be more likely to make in-app purchases and stick around longer, increasing the number of impressions for ads. At this time, Android Instant Apps are available on select devices running Android 7.0 Nougat, and are being tested by several large companies, including Disney, Medium and Hotel . Instant Apps, so far, have been , than mobile web hyperlinks, while providing similar functions as an app. If the speed and product continue to deliver, the future of app development might include Instant Apps as part of their core code, changing the way apps are discovered and delivered. Apple may even include a similar capability for iOS apps to stay competitive with Android. However, every technological innovation brings with it new security concerns. Google has added pop-up permissions for apps that collect particularly sensitive information, but this feature could allow a malicious developer to run arbitrary app code on a device without prior user consent. What’s more, one may wonder if there’s an inherent inefficiency with web apps: The necessity to run JavaScript and the like instead of native code, the need for cross-platform compatibility and lackluster APIs compared to the ones available to native apps limit what can be done with web apps. Though it’s still too early to determine if Instant Apps are here to stay, one thing is certain: Users want their content delivered to them fast, and Google is on a mission to do just that. The definition of a frenemy is someone you remain friendly with, often for potential gain, despite a dislike or rivalry. Android Instant Apps may mean that users download less and potentially spend less time in native apps, but they also break down barriers to entry and expose parts of your app to a broader audience, which may ultimately convert them to your product — for the long haul.
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Sarah Perez
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Lyft denies report — okay, tweet — suggesting its COO is in talks with Trump’s transition team
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Connie Loizos
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Yesterday, former Fortune reporter Dan Primack reported that not only was billionaire investor Peter Thiel for Donald Trump’s transition team but that Thiel was, in fact, already on it as of yesterday. That report has since been confirmed. Now, a newer report from Primack — a , actually — states that Trump’s transition team is “looking at” Rex Tibbens, the COO of the ride-share company , as a potential candidate for U.S. Transportation Secretary. Asked earlier today about the claim, a Lyft spokesperson said Tibbens would “be a valuable asset to any organization, but he is not interested in pursuing a role outside of Lyft.” A source close to Tibbens separately says that Tibbens hasn’t had any conversations with anyone in Trump’s camp. That doesn’t rule out possible interest by the transition team, however. Certainly, such an appointment is interesting to noodle. Tibbens would represent the worst kind of crony capitalism, of course. Founders Fund — the venture fund co-founded a decade ago by Thiel — is a shareholder in Lyft, having led the company’s $15 million Series B round in 2013. Thiel has been among the company’s most vocal proponents, in fact. At a TechCrunch Disrupt event in 2014, he described its larger competitor, Uber as, “without question, the most in Silicon Valley.” One could easily draw a line from a Transportation Secretary Tibbens to policies or contracts that favor Lyft — and thus further enrich Thiel. And , Tibbens — or someone with a similar background as Tibbens — could be an interesting choice and represent the kind of outsider that Thiel seems to want to take over Washington. While Tibbens has spent the last with Lyft, presumably learning quite a bit about logistics, we’d guess he has had much to teach his colleagues, too. Before joining Lyft, Tibbens spent three years as a VP with Amazon where, according to his LinkedIn profile, he “led the technical and product development of the delivery feature of Prime Now, Amazon’s one-hour delivery service.” Tibbens also spent less than a year as a logistics manager at Dell about 16 years ago. (He stayed on with Dell for another 11 years in a series of what seem more like corporate development positions.) Leaving aside conflicts of interest, is that enough experience to be U.S. Transportation Secretary? We’d be inclined to say, nope. But let’s face it, the future of transportation is changing quickly; bringing in who has been working on the forefront of what’s expected to be a massive shift isn’t the worst idea in the world. Not to knock the current Transportation Secretary, , but before taking the job in 2013, he didn’t have vast amounts of related experience, either. A longtime litigator, he served two terms as a city council member of Charlotte, North Carolina, then served one term as the city’s mayor before receiving his federal appointment. As readers will already know, Thiel was widely vilified for his high-profile support of Trump before the election. This editor had thought it was all a at the time. In a on Wednesday, however, I suggested that Trump’s win might turn off entrepreneurs who tolerated Thiel’s involvement in the campaign and might be less forgiving now that Trump has won. That already Thiel’s Trump ties may well pay off for those already close to him, however. Notably, he appears to be the only person from the tech world on Trump’s controversial transition team. Others of its members include Anthony Scaramucci, a founder and the co-managing partner of investment firm SkyBridge Capital; ; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and Rebekah Mercer, a political novice whose hedge fund father was a to the Trump campaign. The full list is .
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Weekly Roundup: Trump victory casts shadow of despair over tech industry
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Anna Escher
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This week, the U.S. was shell-shocked and the tech world was in dismay from Donald Trump’s election victory. Silicon Valley lost its mind in a mess of tweet storms and public outcry. It was the perfect time for GoPro to announce it is recalling its Karma drone, and we escaped this harsh cruel reality with the launch of Google’s Daydream VR and the Nintendo NES Classic Edition. Technology was never an integral part of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign. But his presidency will inevitably in that he plans to cut climate change spending and force Apple to build computers in the U.S. rather than overseas in China. Trump has also called for NASA to leave low orbit and stop studying Earth. Let’s not forget that he isn’t a fan of net neutrality. Excuse me for a minute, my soul just shattered. Trump’s presidency will also . Gregory Autry, an assistant professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business predicts that “IPOs are going to seize and venture capital is going to slow in the short term.” In short, a President-elect Trump doesn’t mean anything good for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley after Trump’s ascendancy into the White House. Between tweet storms and public statements, here’s had to say about Trump’s victory. Peter Thiel made his big contrarian bet on Trump, . But now after backlash across the country, he may discover how incredibly unpopular it makes him. In the latest, Thiel is also . It’s Facebook’s world and we all just live in it. With the announcement of the election results, many minds began to question the on how America interpreted the election. Zuckerberg went onstage at Techonomy16 to speak on the issue, and . Sure, maybe Facebook didn’t control the outcome, but it certainly played a part in how we internalized it. Edward Snowden also gave an extended interview touching on how . “We should be cautious about putting too much faith or fear in elected officials…how do we protect the rights of everyone, everywhere, without regard to jurisdictions, without regard to borders?” Snowden said. This week was the perfect time for tech companies to bury bad news in the election coverage. after just 16 days on the market. GoPro says a power loss malfunction is the reason for the recall. Snap started in the most millennial way imaginable — through a vending machine by the beach in Venice, CA. The machine was only there for 24 hours and the lines were crazy. , according to a few early users. We got our hands on on it. All in all, this console is an awesome throwback; at $60 it would make a perfect holiday gift. Google’s Daydream View VR headset and it’s clear that it has become the leader in mobile consumer VR. The Daydream View is only $79 in the U.S. and it is going to change the way people access VR. Facebook might be moving in on LinkedIn’s recruiting business. TechCrunch on its Page, and Facebook confirmed it is experimenting with a slew of new recruiting features.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 11.11.16
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Steve Gillmor
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This is a LIVE recording session of – today with: Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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DJI says it’s learned its lessons from the Mavic Pro delay
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Brian Heater
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Timing is everything. And for DJI, the timing for the Mavic Pro, the stars seemed to align perfectly. A couple of weeks after GoPro’s big unveil, the company had a folding drone of its own that was smaller and more feature packed that the Karma. And, in spite of being late to the announcement part, DJI announced that it would be first to market with its device – a decided bonus of both controlling its own factories and having several generations of drone production under its belt. But in the world of hardware production, stuff happens. The company failed to his its aggressive October 15 release date, and eager pre-orderers began to complain. The company started issuing statements assuring customers that the kinks were being ironed out and the devices were on their way. As of the writing of this, some of those who pre-ordered the tiny drone are starting to receive their units. Of course, the whole situation is garnering attention once again as the Chinese drone maker readies what looks to be yet another major hardware launch at an event in Los Angeles. If the company is indeed set to launch the Inspire 2, will its professionally focused device suffer the same sort of delays as the Mavic? Or did the folding drone’s issues simply stem from being blindsided as the device was subject to more demand than it anticipated? In a conversation with the Adam Lisberg, the company’s head of North American communications director insisted that the delay was not a result of unanticipated demand, but rather some very basic production issues prior to shipping. “There were some bumps along the way toward ramping up,” he explained. He said that the issues were not a result of the drone’s complex folding arms, but refused to go into further detail, adding, “It’s safe to say that we’ve learned lessons from the delays that we experienced,” referring to future production. According to Lisberg, the Mavic Pro’s announcement just after the Karma was a coincidence, in spite of the fact that DJI had been partnered with GoPro when the action camera company first announced its intentions to build a drone for the specific purpose of capturing athletes on film. “We had our date in mind for months,” he explains. “We began scouting locations for the announcement back in July or August.” The communications director adds that that while the Mavic Pro was subject to unexpected demand, it was the fact that professionals have been eyeing the device that most surprised the company. But while photographers and videographers are looking toward the more affordable, smaller drone, DJI isn’t worried about the Mavic eating into its other more established produc t lines. “We’ve never been a company that worries about cannibalization,” Lisberg said. “We are the innovation company and we don’t care if a new product makes an old one look outdated.”
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DigitalGlobe’s new imaging satellite makes it to space
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John Mannes
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This morning, the sent an Atlas 5 401 rocket loaded with The satellite will create a new pipeline for sending high quality satellite imagery back to earth. worked with to build a satellite capable of taking crystal-clear photos from 400 miles away while moving at 17,000 mph. WorldView 4 will double DigitalGlobe’s coverage that already includes over 80 petabytes (80 million GB) of data. Limitations in granularity prevented too many imaging improvements from being made on WorldView 4, but companies looking to dive head-first into geospatial analytics will benefit from the increased coverage and access the satellite will provide. WorldView 4 was originally slated to launch on September 16th. The initial launch, however, was scrubbed because of a ground leak of propellant during the fueling process. From there, things got considerably worse. A wildfire began burning through the foothills surrounding the satellite’s launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Weeks passed as firefighters struggled to get the fire under control. In a twist of irony, teams used WorldView 3, WorldView 4’s predecessor, to take imagery of the damage. The satellite prevented planes from having to fly directly over top of the danger. Imagery from Worldview 3 used to fight fires threatening Worldview 4 launch A full two months later, WorldView 4 successfully made it into space. The Atlas 5 rocket carrying it also brought seven cube satellites up as part of its payload. With all the new data set to be available, the question of who has access to the imagery becomes paramount. DigitalGlobe sold priority access to WorldView 4 in advance of the launch. Contrary to previous DigitalGlobe launches, the U.S. Government opted not to purchase priority access to WorldView 4. Instead, DigitalGlobe is targeting this satellite at international defense intelligence customers and private companies. The proliferation of companies like and has created demand for satellite imagery to train machine learning frameworks. As models get faster and more accurate, the value proposition of companies that can consume imagery and spit back insights is growing. We can forecast crop outcomes with , annotate training sets with , and monitor the environment with . All of these companies and dozens more rely on data from satellites like WorldView 4.
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Facebook suddenly says a bunch of its users are dead. Don’t panic.
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Greg Kumparak
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Over the last half hour or so, reports have started pouring in from Facebook users that the social network has suddenly “memorialized” their pages, strongly suggesting that they are dead to everyone who stops by. Take the above profile of our own Darrell Etherington — who is very much not dead, as in I’m talking to him right now and I’m definitely not Bruce Willis. “We hope people who love Darrell will find comfort in the things others share to remember and celebrate his life” it reads. The issue seems to be fairly random; it’s not popping up on everyone’s profile, but it’s certainly happening on a lot of them, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. https://twitter.com/stevekovach/status/797177651261751296/ Probably , Facebook. We’ve reached out to Facebook to figure out wtf is happening. In a quote from a Facebook rep, the company says they’ve fixed it and they’re sorry. “For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts. This was a terrible error that we have now fixed. We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it.” FB talking to me like I’m already dead — Alexia Bonatsos (@alexia) in other news, Facebook's algorithm thinks that i ****died**** based on the messages i'm getting — Elaine Filadelfo (@ElaineF) Facebook just declared me dead, along with everyone else on Facebook. — Myke (@MikeWehner)
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Tencent is giving its staff $220M in shares to celebrate its 18th birthday
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Jon Russell
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November 11 — the date of the 11/11 shopping bonanza — is generally a day when Alibaba creates the headlines. While the e-commerce giant , selling a colossal $17.79 billion of goods inside 24 hours, its rival Tencent grabbed a share of the attention after it agreed to give its 31,500 staff company shares. Friday marked Tencent’s 18th anniversary, and the company announced [ ] that every employee will receive 300 shares — currently valued around HK$200 ($26) a piece; $7,735 in total — to celebrate the landmark. The total allocation is estimated at HK$1.7 billion, around $220 million. to become Asia’s most valuable tech company in August. It is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, where it currently has a market cap of HK$1.89 trillion, or around $240 billion. The firm is best known for WeChat, its blockbuster messaging app in China, but it also has a sizable gaming business, operates media properties, payment services, e-commerce sites and much, much more.
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Democratic Trump supporters were hiding in plain sight
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Kate Conger
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If you’re shocked by Donald Trump’s election, you’re not alone — the president-elect surprised many people, including the pollsters who predicted a Hillary Clinton victory by wide margins. Since election night, pollsters, journalists, voters, and probably the folks over at the Clinton campaign have been trying to figure out how predictions about the election went so badly askew. One of the surprises is the number of registered Democrats who supported Obama, only to cross over the party line this year to cast their votes for Trump. But the crossover shouldn’t be a surprise at all, according to Brigade. The startup, , lets its users pledge their votes to candidates and ballot measures, and has cross-checked the identities of nearly 200,000 users against voter registration databases to make sure their data is authentic. Back in September, Brigade CEO Matt Mahan says his team came across something unexpected. “We noticed this huge percentage of registered Democrats pledging to vote for Donald Trump,” Mahan explained. “We thought, we’re probably just getting conservative Democrats. What’s the big deal?” The big deal became apparent as the election results rolled in. Nearly 40 percent of Brigade’s Democratic voters had pledged their votes to Trump, and the pledges played out in battleground states like . Brigade’s data on certain states turned out to more accurately reflect the outcome than the polling data used by , which gave Trump only a 28 percent chance of winning the election. Trump ended up beating FiveThirtyEight’s prediction for North Carolina by 4.5 percent — and Brigade saw North Carolina voters who registered Democratic were 25 percent more likely to pledge their votes to Trump. The same thing happened in Pennsylvania: Brigade’s Democrats were 15 percent more likely to pledge for Trump, and Trump beat expectations by 4.9 percent. “It’s interesting because we were seeing this phenomenon up to three months ago. It might have pointed to the fact that Clinton was much more vulnerable in the Rust Belt states than anyone expected,” Mahan said. Trump also seemed to generate much higher enthusiasm among Brigade users than other candidates, which could explain the turnout among his supporters. Brigade lets its users write a short explanation of why they pledge to a particular candidate, sort of like an endorsement, that they can then share with friends. Usually, it’s a step in the process that users skip — only six percent of users normally complete the endorsement. Among Trump supporters, that metric skyrocketed to over 10 percent. If Brigade’s data was more accurate about this election than that published by the most respected election predictor in the country, why did the startup sit on it and not say anything? Brigade’s employees were so surprised by the revelations that they thought their data was wrong. “We were so shocked by what we found,” Mahan explained. “We didn’t really trust the data. It was hard to be such an outlier as a product. We just thought our numbers are so off from all the national polls that we must be wrong. We must just be interacting with some weird corner of the internet of conservative Democrats.” “I think the mistake was — we didn’t know until election night. We didn’t think there was information in our data that others had missed,” he added. It’s a bittersweet realization for a San Francisco startup that’s staffed largely by liberals, who stayed up late on election night fretting about the results. And it’s a lesson for other pollsters — Brigade employees might have been too blinded by their political beliefs to take their own data seriously. The app’s users tend to skew conservative, so it was easy for Brigade to assume it wasn’t hearing from enough liberal voters. Brigade didn’t go back to the data and unskew it to account for conservative bias until after the election results came in. I asked Mahan what, if anything, he would have done differently now that he knows Brigade’s data was accurate and Trump will be sitting in the White House in a few months. Even though Brigade is a nonpartisan company, it seemed clear to me that Mahan regretted keeping quiet. Publish the data, he says. “We first noticed Democrats crossing over in September; we should have watched that trend for a few weeks, done the analysis, published a blog post, and pointed people to it at that time,” he said. “The Clinton campaign severely underestimated the risk they faced in the Midwest. I think this notion of registered Democrats in that region crossing over at unusually high rates, plus the higher enthusiasm we noticed, would have been a pretty important indicator of how things were likely to turn out.”
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Scientists gain a versatile, modern search engine with the AI-powered Semantic Scholar
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Devin Coldewey
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Scientific papers come out with such frequency that keeping up with the literature is practically a full-time job for anyone at the cutting edge of a major field. is a search engine that reads the literature on its own, picking out topics and influences, ranking citations, and making it much easier to find both the latest and what you’re looking for. If you’re a scientist, you need something like this. And while Google Scholar and PubMed are helpful resources, they aren’t particularly sophisticated when it comes to metadata: how frequently has this author or paper been cited? What organism was this tested on? Does the paper mention this or that confounding variable? Semantic Scholar analyzes the full text of the article, looking for key phrases that it knows, from reading a hundred thousand other articles in the field, are important to track. It uses natural language processing so it understands when a paper is discussing its own results or those of another experiment, and from there can extract critical details like methods, materials, animal types or brain regions tested, etc. It pulls figures when it can, attempting to identify the contents so they too can be searched and sorted. And because it’s also juggling info from the many other articles on the topic, it can make intelligent judgments on, for example, which related or cited papers are most relevant, or what other work the current paper has helped lead to. Twitter is even linked in so you can go straight to the author or department and DM them or see followup discussion. Results are fast, relevant, and easily sorted or drilled down into. For a scientist who frequently consults such articles, this is a huge advance. And millions of searches have been done on the service since it entered beta last year. That was strictly in computer science, the first field Semantic Scholar was instructed to consume. But today it was announced that the engine is making its way to the biomedical community, focusing on neuroscience to start. After that, it will ingest the whole of PubMed’s biomedical library during 2017. Of course, there are also plenty of papers behind paywalls, which the likes of Elsevier and Springer seem unlikely to drop. Deals along those lines are under negotiation, however, I was told. Semantic Scholar is made by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), a small operation of several dozen, yet at the same time the largest nonprofit AI research organization in the country. The motto there is “AI for the common good,” meaning a focus on advancing the field with an eye to both pure and more directly socially beneficial research. “Medical breakthroughs should not be hindered by the cumbersome process of searching the scientific literature,” said Paul Allen in a press release. “My vision is for Semantic Scholar is to give researchers more powerful tools to comb through millions of academic papers online, to help them keep up with the explosive growth of science.” Eventually, explained AI2’s CEO Oren Etzioni, with whom I spoke on the topic while visiting the Institute’s offices in Seattle, the search engine could become a hypothesis engine. Not in any highly insightful way that would put researchers out of work, he added, but rather like that of a department head that sees the big picture and says, “This method was effective on the sensory cortex, but no one has tested it on the motor cortex — maybe we should try that?” Etzioni also oversees a bringing AI to bear on other topics, many involving natural language processing. , for example, understands mathematical queries in ordinary language — “what is the lowest positive number that is the sum of three cubes?” Another is working at taking on standardized testing, reading and solving problems exactly as they’re put to, say, fourth-graders. These are deceptively difficult problems, but interesting ones that could produce useful services — tutoring software, or automated test production. , though if you’re not in CS or neuroscience you may not find many results to your liking. If you are, however, it might prove a revelatory experience.
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Gadget Story Time with EPIKGO hoverboard
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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I have a love-hate relationship with hoverboards. They make me happy when I ride them but they suck to fall off of . The other day I saw a guy carrying his newborn baby while riding a hoverboard and I started having a minor anxiety attack. sent me their hoverboard to try out and they couldn’t have picked a more qualified and handsome person. At one point I had my own hoverboard company, and dove in head first selling them and marketing them. When EPIKGO came and said they had a better hoverboard that was faster, stronger and safer I was a little skeptical. On their website it says: “Created by our Silicon Valley based team, the EpikGo brand features the newest technology and is the SAFEST ride out there” All these hoverboards are created in mass quantity in factories in China, but it had been a while since I had tried a new hoverboard, so I was curious if anything was different. Here is my Story Time with the EPIKGO Hoverboard… Enjoy. Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski, Gregory Manalo
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Apple’s iBooks StoryTime app for Apple TV will read to your kids
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Sarah Perez
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Apple on Thursday released a new Apple TV application called iBooks StoryTime that brings children’s books to the TV’s big screen. Kids can flip through the pages of the books on their own, or switch on Read-Aloud narration which will sync the audio to the on-screen text and flip the pages for you. The app, which works on 4th generation Apple TV devices that have access to tvOS App Store, is a free download, but the books themselves are not. There’s one free giveaway at launch so you can test the functionality: a Read-Aloud title called “Dora’s Big Buddy Race Read-Along Storybook.” If you want to buy more books, you can do so from the StoryTime app itself, as well as via the iBookstore on Mac, iPhone and iPad. If you’ve already purchased compatible content through your Apple account, it will automatically show up here as well. There aren’t that many supported titles available at present, but the list includes a few classics like “Goodnight Moon,” “The Little Red Hen,” and “Green Eggs and Ham,” for example. Popular characters like Sophia the First, Grover, and Cookie Monster also have books available, among others. [gallery ids="1414815,1414814,1414810,1414809"] As you can tell by the titles, the app is aimed at the preschooler crowd who is just starting to learn to read. For parents feeling guilty about plopping their kids in front of the TV, it’s nice to have an alternative to videos and games as an option. The type of reading experience StoryTime offers isn’t new, but traditionally these sorts of apps have been limited to mobile and tablet devices. To what extent this will keep kids occupied, of course, remains to be seen. From my experience as a parent, it’s difficult to get kids focused on reading, when the books on a platform where video and games are also available. (That’s why we still buy physical books, and read two every night.) Apple, however, isn’t the only one thinking up new digital reading experiences in recent days. called Rapids, which uses a messaging-like interface to tell stories. The iBooks StoryTime app is available as a free on the Apple TV App Store, where it’s currently being featured in a banner at the top of the screen.
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PlayOn Cloud lets you record and download videos from streaming services to your iPhone
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Sarah Perez
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has long offered media server software that allows cord cutters to record from streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Hulu and others, in order to watch on any device – without ads – even when offline. Now, it’s taking this “cloud DVR” functionality to mobile through the launch of a new iOS application that lets you record and watch videos offline via your smartphone. , launched this week, iOS users can initiate and download recordings to their mobile device. The app will then keep a copy of the recording in the cloud for 30 days, so you can watch the video whenever you choose. The app also offers AdSkip technology, which lets you skip through video ads. I know what you’re probably thinking: wait, this is legal? Well, uh…that’s tricky. The streaming service providers’ For example, Netflix says that by using its service, you agree not to archive, download, reproduce, or distribute its videos. Hulu makes it clear that you should not use “any device, software, internet site, web-based service or other means” to do the same. The others follow suit, with similar language. That being said, recording the streams is possible, and for services like PlayOn to exist. The way the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) puts it, breaking or circumventing copy protection mechanisms is what’s illegal. And PlayOn hasn’t been circumventing DRM or accessing the encrypted stream – it uses screen capturing technology instead. This keeps it on the legal side by following the letter of the law, if not the spirit. But let’s be clear, this is a very much a gray, murky area, so buyer beware. The mobile app explains that when you’re recording from mobile, what’s really happening is that you’re commanding a virtual server to start a web browser session to play and record the content you’ve selected. In practice, what this means in terms of functionality is that recordings take place in real time, as they do on the desktop version of PlayOn. So if you want to save a movie for later viewing, you’ll need to account for two hours or so of recording time, plus the extra time it takes to later download to your device for offline viewing. In other words, it’s not something you can use at the last minute before your flight, for example – you’ll need to plan in advance. Also, to be clear, PlayOn can’t grab you an HBO show if you don’t subscribe. In order for you to record any videos, you have to first sign into the various services. The company generates revenue by selling “credits” which you use to buy a recording. A credit costs 99 cents, but a launch deal is offering 25 credits for $17.50, using the code “cheapsake.” You can purchase at this rate up to 100 credits. There’s also another deal that’s offering five free credits to anyone who downloads the app before Sunday, Nov. 13. At launch, PlayOn Cloud on iOS supports recordings from Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, Yahoo! View, HBO NOW, YouTube, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, PBS and The CW. The app itself was a little frustrating to use. After signing up, it got stuck on a loading screen for so long, there seemed to be something wrong. I had to force close the app to get it to work. The navigational buttons at the bottom of the screen are also very small, as are the other screen elements and fonts. Plus, the overall user interface feels very utilitarian. But people aren’t using PlayOn for its looks, they’re using it for what it does. Still, I ran into a few glitches. Some buttons didn’t work the first time I pressed them. And when I tried to record a show after buying a credit, I got an error message. However, when I checked the recording status in the queue – the screen that shows you the progress by the minute – the show was recording. PlayOn operates in something of an odd space in the streaming landscape. Right now, it’s filling consumers’ need for a service that offers them offline viewing. But offline access to video is already available for some shows on Amazon, and even Netflix has said it would consider the technology in the future. Meanwhile, the world is becoming more blanketed in Wi-Fi – even on planes – which diminishes the need for an app like this. The other advantage is that you could save a video to your device before it leaves the streaming service. PlayOn is available as a An Android version is in the works.
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