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Keen On… The Second Machine Age: Will Humans Still Have A Role In Our Economy Of Brilliant Technologies? | Andrew Keen | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | The hot new about the digital economy is and ‘s . It’s amongst the first books to seriously address the fundamental question of our digital economy: what will be the economic role of human-beings in an age of artificial intelligence, 3D printers and an Internet of things? While McAfee and Brynjolfsson acknowledge that we live in a time of “astonishing progress”, they also admit that our digital economy is increasingly made up of “winner take all economics” which is hollowing out the middle class and leaving many people behind. So what is to be done? Perhaps it’s no surprise that both McAfee and Brynjolfsson are economics professors at MIT. They say we have to go back to our Economics 101 textbooks to learn how to retool for this second machine age. Education, they say, is key. Both in terms of what and how we learn. So just as the Internet might be taking away our jobs, it is also – as a learning network – giving us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. But it won’t happen magically, McAfee and Brynjolfsson both say. Our fate, as always, depends on our ability to change. There may be jobs for those that adapt. But for those that don’t, there will be nothing brilliant our second machine age. |
Hungry For New Deals, Latin American Wireless Co. Movile Doubles Down On Delivery | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | Brazil’s mobile content developer Movile is on the hunt for new investments after committing a fresh $2 million to its online delivery service company iFood. That recent investment is a sign of just how spicy food delivery companies have become in recent weeks. announced that it is doubling down on its bet in – Brazil’s answer to GrubHub – with a new $2 million commitment just one day after FoodPanda to get its paws around more of the global online food delivery market. And Vinod Khosla’s investment firm Khosla Ventures i in the U.S., while gourmet food delivery company Munchery . Movile’s investment is part of a broader strategy to work closely with and invest in startup companies across the Americas. To that end, Brazil’s mobile is negotiating with five other undisclosed startups in seed investments ranging from $100,000 to $3 million, according to Eduardo Henrique, the head of Movile’s U.S. operations. At iFood the cash will be used to help pay for its acquisition of another Brazilian-based online food delivery service, Central do Delivery. The deal consolidates online and mobile delivery technology within one large player ahead of the World Cup and the Olympics. In all, iFood has raised $6.1 million in total funding from Movile and WH Investimentos. Since its , Movile said the company’s orders have tripled from 40,000 to 130,000 and traffic has shifted from the web to mobile devices. Roughly 60 percent of the company’s orders are made from mobile devices, up from 4 percent when Movile first committed capital to iFood. This is only the first step in Movile’s investment strategy, according to Henrique. While the company does not intend to become an investor, expanding the number of applications available on mobile devices is good for Movile’s business. Opportunities for investment in new mobile applications abound in the Latin American market, according to Henrique. Mobile adoption in the region over the next five years will outpace any other geography worldwide, with a compound annual growth rate of 23.7 percent over a five-year period, according to data from IDC Worldwide. Asia is next on the list with a five-year growth rate of 23.2 percent. “In my opinion no matter what crisis will come, Internet and mobile will grow like crazy in Brazil and Latin America,” Henrique said. “That’s why we’re positioning our apps and services business units in front. It’s a 600 million cellphone market [in Latin America] and people want to consume. They want to spend money on services; they want to spend money on games; they want to spend money buying food and on e-commerce in general.” Movile is backed by investors who know the global mobile and technology marketplace well. The company’s major backer is , a South African media conglomerate that also holds a stake in the Chinese Internet behemoth, . As it looks to increase its mobile portfolio, the company is angling to back companies developing transportation, e-commerce around fashion, and healthcare and lifestyle applications, Henrique said. Although the company is expanding its footprint and investment activity with the hopes of closing 10 deals in 2014, Movile’s U.S. head stressed that his company is not primarily an investor or financing company. “We are not a VC, we just make the deal when we’re sure we bring value to the company.” |
Google Launches Chromebox For Meetings, A $999 Videoconferencing System Based On ChromeOS | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | At a small media event in Mountain View today, Google the launch of , a $999 Core i7-based ASUS Chromebox setup with a remote, camera and microphone for conference rooms. The system uses Hangouts in the backend and is also compatible with existing conferencing setups from and (for ). The system includes all the components necessary to run a meeting, with the exception of a display. For the first year, users don’t have to pay any additional costs; after that, the cost is $250 per year. The product is available in the U.S. today and is coming to Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand, Spain and U.K. Businesses in the U.S. will be able to buy it through CDW, and resellers will be able to get it from SYNNEX. Both HP and Dell will make Chromeboxes for meetings available in the coming months. As Google VP for Product Management Caesar Sengupta noted during today’s event, despite all the advances in video conferencing technology, remote meetings are still too hard. Over time, Google itself has developed a variety of solutions for its own teams and now, the company has decided to make some of this technology available to other businesses as well. The system is deeply integrated with Google Calendar, which will also allow you to schedule conference rooms. The display will always show the schedule for the room (and rotate pictures in the background). If you’ve ever set up a Chromecast, the design will look very familiar. As for the hardware, the system comes with an Intel i7-based Chromebox with four USB ports and a Logitech HD camera that can do full HD and automatically switch resolutions based on bandwidth. It also includes a microphone with a volume controls, built-in DSP and a remote control that includes a full QWERTY keyboard on the back and connects to the Chromebox over a nano-sized USB adapter. On the software side, Chromebox for Meetings was designed to stay out of the way as much as possible. To start a meeting, users just pick up the remote and get started. There are no pass codes or PINs. If a room is available, users can also set up ad-hoc meetings, and whenever another meetings is about to start in the same room, the software will gently remind the current users that it’s time to wrap up their call. Unlike regular meeting software, whenever somebody joins the meeting, the system automatically mutes them instead of announcing their arrival with a loud ping. By default, everybody is muted and Hangouts just un-mutes them when they start speaking. Just like with large Chromebook deployments, these Chromeboxes can be managed remotely through the ChromeOS management console. Google tested the product internally, as well as with beta partners like Lytro, Gilt, SoftBank and Yelp. In the process, Sengupta said, it found that having more video conferences tends to help improve the corporate culture and increases trust in remote teams. Typical video conferencing systems, Google argues, tend to be expensive and too hard to set up. Because of this, they are often only available to high-level executives. The company hopes that its solution will be quickly adapted among enterprise. The price, after all, is less than a single ticket between San Francisco and New York. |
Paul Graham Shares Lessons Learned From 630+ YC Startups, But Don’t Expect Him To Launch His Own | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | After a long tenure at the helm of — during which a turned into a Silicon Valley institution, pioneering the “seed accelerator” model and inspiring a new league of tech-focused business incubators — Paul Graham that he will soon be passing the baton to the next generation. Taking the reins from Graham is Loopt co-founder Sam Altman, the YC grad whose company was one of the accelerator’s first investments and who later became its youngest partner. With the accelerator’s 18th Demo Day right around the corner, Graham took the stage at today to talk to Jason Calacanis about what his future at Y Combinator will look like — and to share some lessons learned after nine years spent guiding entrepreneurs through the mad science of startup creation and development. While departing a long-time role as the “don” of a Silicon Valley institution might seem like something that would only happen under duress (or at least something that would weigh heavily on one’s mind), Graham’s demeanor and his answers provided plenty of evidence to the contrary. His exit is a willing one. To say the least. And if there were any duress, it appears to have provided a good excuse. The conversation opened with Calacanis asking the YC co-founder a number of questions designed to elicit an explanation for why he and his partners are opting for a change of leadership. Graham said that while the new structure will “look the same to YC’s entrepreneurs,” it will feel very different for him personally. In other words, aside from continuing to advise companies and hold office hours during the program, Graham will no longer be responsible for making the big decisions or dealing with all the “internal crap” that requires a fair amount of time and hand-wringing in most organizations, he said. Basically, after nine years of being more or less the face of Y Combinator, which also meant being a lightning rod for criticism and for competitors, Graham seemed relieved to be stepping back from the spotlight. Doing so means “getting his brain back,” he said, and not having to spend so much mental energy agonizing over applications, business models, valuations, press outreach and so on. A prime example of Graham’s current, almost world-weary perspective: When asked about the range of valuations for YC’s current batch, he got the distressed look of someone overwhelmed by too much data, replying, “Who was even in the most recent batch?” Clearly, keeping tabs on over 600 graduates and the time and energy that goes into scaling YC’s seed accelerator model has taken its toll. With more free time on his hands, the logical assumption would be that Graham would use all the proprietary knowledge and data gained from his unique position at the center of Startup Hub U.S.A. to start his own business. Calacanis then asked him pointedly whether he had plans to work on his own startup in the future, and Graham gave a response that should be noteworthy for anyone thinking about taking the plunge into the world of entrepreneurship and technology startups. “No, no. Never,” Graham said emphatically. “Building a startup hurts.” It seems that the Y Combinator co-founder is also taking some of the advice that he and his partners have been dishing out for years. He explained that the YC team often tells founders that, if building a company doesn’t involve a certain degree of pain, then they’re “probably not trying hard enough.” So don’t be expecting an Airbnb for dogs or a Stripe for Bitcoin anytime soon — at least not one with Graham’s name on the co-founding roster. While he may not be gearing up to launch his own startup, however, that doesn’t mean Graham won’t continue to make angel investments in those coming out of both YC and the outside. Furthermore, another interesting reaction from Graham seemed to point to a different conclusion than the one that has to the choice over Graham’s successor. While there may very well be some anxiety and mixed reactions among YC’s network, Graham, for one, appeared confident — and not in a way that belied pretense. The Y Combinator co-founder said that he had actually been trying to convince Altman to take over for him for at least two years — since 2012. In this way, it almost seemed (at least to him) that choosing Altman to take the reins at YC was a foregone conclusion. When asked what he’s learned about the art of building a business and about startup founders themselves over the years, Graham’s answers were not totally unexpected for anyone who follows his essays, but are worth giving ink to nonetheless. For starters, for any entrepreneurs who hope to one day pitch Y Combinator’s partners on their own business, remember to mind your pitch. In other words, prepare, make it interesting and get to the point. Graham said that, after thousands of founder presentations and pitches, he and the YC partners are now able to tell “within minutes” whether a startup will pass muster or not. In fact, the YC team has developed their own silent messages to communicate to the other partners when a pitch is a snooze or in the process of bombing. So, probably best not to go into a pitch meeting at Y Combinator totally flying by the seat of your pants. Not to add more pressure, or anything. Another thing that Graham said that he’d seen proven out time and time again over his time at Y Combinator was the importance of having a co-founder. So, if you’re currently a one-man or one-woman show, you might want to start thinking about pulling yourself away from your computer screen, making some friends, and finding that catalog for mail-order co-founders. Graham said that he offered similar advice to Dropbox CEO Drew Houston when he applied to Y Combinator in 2007. Houston listened and recruited classmate Arash Ferdowsi a couple of weeks later, and . And it might go without saying, but the second key ingredient to the search for a co-founder? Find one you can actually stand. Building a big business is a long haul, and you’re going to be spending more than a few minutes with your co-founder, so find one that, even if you don’t send each other Valentine’s Day cards, you can see yourself working with over a long period of time. And not only working with, but sweating with, crying with and fighting with when they eventually try to dilute your shares. Graham then gave an example from his experience at YC, when, during a pitch, he watched one founder roll their eyes at their co-founder as they spoke — an immediate red flag, he said. Even if the founders are brilliant, if it seems like they’ll spend more time fighting than working, or solving problems, then they’re not worth the investment. The third key quality to a successful leadership team, or co-founder relationship: Each has their own strengths. As smart and pretty as you may think you are, don’t look for your clone. Try to identify your weaknesses and find a co-founder who has those things in spades. This could be as simple as finding a technical co-founder if you’re more of a strategist and business-type, or it could be hiring someone who, if you struggle in this department, is an amazing networker or understands sales better than you do. Dividing responsibilities is a great way to keep founding teams from stepping on each other’s toes during critical periods of business and product development, Graham said. Another noteworthy observation from Graham’s tenure at YC is that, in the early going, he and his partners put a premium on selecting for intelligence. Even if the business may have been half-baked, or lacked product-market fit, they were willing to overlook some of these deficiencies if the founders appeared to be whip-smart or had conspicuously high I.Q.s. However, over time, Graham came to understand that a founder’s intelligence was often a poor indicator of how successful the startup would become. Principally, he said, just because someone is intelligent, doesn’t mean they can actually run a business and go out and execute. “You can be surprisingly stupid if you’re sufficiently determined,” he concluded. Again, this may sound like old news to some, but its importance always seems to be worth re-iterating. In relating the ingredients or factors that are the secrets to — or most often point the way to — achieving that illusive hockey-stick-style growth curve, Graham said: “Start with a small, intense fire.” In other words, find a small number of people that want what you have or are making badly. In the beginning, Graham said, that number is going to be small, and that’s okay. Don’t be embarrassed. Graham related the example of Apple, which only produced a couple hundred units of Apple I, its first computer. However, Apple sold 175 of those 200 units within the first 10 months by finding and appealing to early computer hobbyists. More so than identifying who you want your users to be, your ideal customer, you have to understand who your users actually are, and who is really clamoring for your product. “You’ve got to know who those first users are,” Graham explained, “and sit with them, spend time with them, focus on them — have a party with them.” Your first goal is focusing on those first 50, 100, or 500 users, and make them really, really happy. If you can do that, you’re on your way, and you can go from there, he said. Graham gave the example of a YC company building a “better email client.” Knowing that he’s a perfect example of someone who spends a lot of time on (and is hamstrung by) email, they decided to use Sam Altman as their one and only beta tester. They know, Graham said, that Altman is a demanding enough user that if they can make him happy and “make him feel like he would be bummed out if they stopped working on it,” then they’ve passed that critical first stage. Lastly, Silicon Valley and Startup Land tend to put a heavy emphasis on investors and fund-raising. And while building relationships with investors and venture capitalists is an unavoidable (and critical) part of building a business, what’s most important? Focus. Founders, like everyone else, have a tendency to procrastinate and confuse their priorities. What’s more important, Graham said, is understanding that product development should most always take precedence. Entrepreneurs are always getting pulled in 17 different directions, so they really have to learn to focus — and not only to focus, but identify what’s important to focus on at that particular time. If you haven’t yet made those 10, 1,000 or 1 million early users happy to the point that they would weep if your product disappeared, then you should probably be focused on product and building that experience. “You shouldn’t be grabbing coffee with a VC in the middle of day when you could be working,” Graham said. “Instead you should be doing the most important things, like, say, optimizing software.” |
Bloomthat, the “Uber-For-Flowers,” Pulls In $2M From SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 6 | , the in San Francisco Bay Area in less than 90 minutes, just picked up $2 million in seed funding. Their new backers include SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s A-Grade Investments, Joe Montana, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Y Combinator partner Garry Tan, Ron Rofe, Oliver Jung and Baron Davis. The San Francisco-based startup and more or two succulents to have hand-delivered in San Francisco or Silicon Valley. They range from $35 to $65, and they’re throwing in in two weeks. “We’re trying to change the way people think about flowers — that they’re not obligatory,” said co-founder Matthew Schwab. The startup, , tries to take the friction out of delivering flowers so that customers won’t just think of them solely for birthdays or anniversaries. Schwab added that sales are doubling every other month. When you order from Bloomthat, you pick a bouquet, enter in the destination address and your payment information, then a florist will put the selection together and a bike messenger will deliver it in an hour and half. Down on the peninsula in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Menlo Park and Sunnyvale, Bloomthat relies on cars, not bikes. They’ll be expanding to other metropolitan areas soon too. Bloomthat’s flowers are delivered in burlap sacks or corrugated tins and the company has spent hours working on an aesthetic that’s not too formal and a little bit offbeat. The Valentine’s Day combinations (pictured below) and baby’s breath. “We believe very strongly in the curation we put into our products,” Schwab said. “We want simplicity, and we don’t want people choosing from 30 or 40 bouquets.” He said that customers typically order two bouquets in their first 60 days. Bloomthat is profitable per unit, but the company hasn’t reached bottom-line profitability yet. |
Telegram Saw 8M Downloads After WhatsApp Got Acquired | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | The App Store is a strange and whimsical bedfellow. It is a kingmaker, but with that comes the tears of the anointed, the displaced and the never-rans. As an example of the store’s fickle nature, Flappy Bird held the Free App pole position for so long that it , committing . Almost immediately three clones popped up to replace it, including “Flying Cyrus”, a Miley Cyrus-themed clone. The news of WhatsApp, the world’s largest messaging app, by the world’s largest social network also has birthed a new App Store star. , a messaging app of humble origins, has surpassed WhatsApp in the App Store rankings, just five days after the news of Facebook’s buy. Other messaging apps like TigerText and Confide could also see a related boost. It’s easy to attribute the exodus to a specific mistrust of Facebook, whose are not particularly favored and weigh in below Telegram, WhatsApp and even Snapchat in the App Store’s score chart. But it could also be a mistrust of large tech platforms in general, the result of that big companies like Apple and Facebook cooperated with the NSA’s tracking of user data. Telegram, created by , founder of Russian Facebook competitor , wants to be the safest — and most NSA-proof — messaging app in the world. Before the WhatsApp bomb dropped last week, the service was growing by 300,000 – 400,000 downloads per day, Durov tells me. Durov says that after the news, the app’s growth rate increased around 3x to 800,000 – 1 million new downloads a day across iOS, Android and Windows. On the day of WhatsApp’s , it added 1.8 million users. Yesterday it added 4.9 million, and propelled itself to its current No. 4 slot in iOS right behind three, yes three, Flappy Bird-inspired apps. “The No. 1 reason for me to support and help launch Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies, so I can talk about it for hours,” Durov tells me, adding that he stands by the app’s claim that its encryption is the most superior available, despite to the contrary. Like Secret, which also hinges on user trust, the bootstrapped product for those who can hack it. “No one won so far, but a guy from Russia in December and received $100,000 from me,” Durov says. The coolest thing about Telegram is that it combines elements of Snapchat and WhatsApp, allowing you to set a timer to “Secret” (extra encrypted) chats. To start a Secret chat, click on a user’s avatar and select “Secret Chat.” To set the self-destruct timer on the chat, click on their avatar again, and set the expiration time to anywhere from two seconds to one week. Then sit back and watch your chats automagically evaporate. The second coolest thing about Telegram is that the founder seems extremely non-plussed with the app’s newfound success. When asked how he would beat all three Flappy Bird clones to the top spot, he jokingly replied, “I don’t like the idea of beating birds. I’m vegetarian.” |
The Dark Legacy Of @Facebook.com Addresses: They Poisoned iOS Contact Sync | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Facebook may be killing off its email address feature, but their uselessness will live on in iOS contact books around the world. You see, right before iOS 6 and its Facebook contact sync feature came out, Facebook forcibly hid the real email addresses everyone shared with their friends. It only left the @facebook.com addresses it assigned everyone visible, so that’s what got synced by iOS 6. At the time in June 2012 and implored Facebook to it made without permission. Allowing users to choose to share their @facebook.com address that routed to their Facebook Messages Inbox would have been fine. If Facebook wanted to compete to be your email address, though, it should have done it on a level playing field. But to banish email addresses provided by its competitors like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft with hardly any notice was dishonest. One source even told me that as part of the deal to get baked into iOS 6. No matter the reason, it was a treacherous move. And it bombed. No one used the @facebook.com email addresses. Facebook thought it should be where you read personal emails. It created an integrated communication system designed to combine instant chat, asynchronous messages, and email. Turns out that last part was just too different to be corralled. So today the company . In a statement to TechCrunch, the company said: “We’re making this change because most people haven’t been using their Facebook email address, and we can focus on improving our mobile messaging experience for everyone.” Anyone who did use them will get messages sent to their Facebook addresses forwarded to their primary email account instead of their Facebook Messages inbox. People will be able to dig into their settings and disable this forwarding. But if you don’t, anyone will be able to get your Facebook username by finding your profile’s URL and sticking it in front of @facebook.com to be able to hit your real email address with a message. Facebook confirms it won’t forward blatant spam, but pings from strangers that would have been hidden in the “Other Inbox” of your Facebook Messages will get shot to your real email like that person knows you. Ugh. Yet we still won’t be able to escape the death-stench of Facebook’s defunct attempt to conquer email. Facebook tells me it won’t be changing any visibility settings in your profile or re-syncing with iOS contacts. That means your real personal email address is probably still hidden from the friends you once explicitly said could see it. And your iOS contact book will be full of synced Facebook profiles and @facebook.com addresses that people might disavow, instead of their real email addresses. Hopefully this whole crap carnival will discourage Facebook from making more prohibited changes to our profiles…or those of users of its acquisitions like WhatsApp. Facebook was just trying to make it so our personal emails weren’t drowned out by bills, receipts, and marketing spam. But it crossed the line, abused its power, and our contact books bear the scar. |
HackerEarth Raises $500K To Help Startups Find Great Programmers | Pankaj Mishra | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | , a Bangalore-based startup that helps other startups hire programmers through , has raised $500,000 in seed funding from incubator. Launched in late 2012 by former Google engineer Sachin Gupta and his IIT batch mate Vivek Prakash, HackerEarth helps India’s growth-stage startups find technical talent they so desperately need. Unlike in the Silicon Valley, where many engineers still find it more lucrative to work for a hot startup than an IBM, or even a Microsoft, Indian startups have to fight perception battles and work harder to attract engineers who mostly prefer to work with more stable, bigger tech companies. HackerEarth is like a GItHub, except that it’s not only about the Open Source projects. “For developers, LinkedIn profiles does not matter as much as a platform where they can showcase their work, and GitHub is mostly about Open Source projects,” Gupta told TechCrunch. “Back in 2008, Java was hot around here. But now, many newer startups are looking to hire programmers who know Ruby, Python and even HTML in Javascript for front-end applications,” said Gupta. And it’s not just the startups looking to hire programmers who are not just Java developers. Many bigger companies scrambling to get high-paying software projects from WalMart and Citi are beginning to hunt for such talent. Startups such as , which develops online clinic management software, find it even more tough to hire programmers they really want. “Finding a good developer is like looking for a needle in a haystack”, Sri Karthik Sayana, talent acquisition at Practo said in a statement. “By using HackerEarth, we have experienced greater than 80% fit between the candidates identified by the platform and the ones we offered a role at our company”. As we wrote in April last year, HackerEarth is able to help startups do . HackerEarth competes with YC alum InterviewStreet, apart from several others in the recruitment space. But the startup says its obsessive focus on finding the right technical talent is a differentiator. “We will be spending more on sales and big data matching engine,” said Gupta. HackerEarth was part of the GSF Accelerator’s first batch. GSF SuperAngels has also participated in the latest funding round. Unlike traditional recruiters, the startup evaluates programmers on some of the very basic parameters including the computing memory footprint and quality of code. All this is achieved by holding programming challenges. In one such recent challenge, HackerEarth heaped InMobi hire around half a dozen programmers in one day, a process that could have taken at least a week. With the latest seed round, HackerEarth joins a small, but growing alumni of startups incubated by Angelprime. Backed by Mayfield, and Chamath Palihapitiya’s among several Silicon Valley investors, Angelprime was launched in June 2011. As I wrote recently, , and many of them are beginning to work with late-stage startups without Y Combinator-like batches. For its part, Angelprime has always been focused on investing in fewer, but focused startups that have the potential to scale and become $10 million companies in three years. Since it was launched three years ago, Angelprime has incubated four companies — , , , and now HackerEarth. |
Report: NSA Bugged Top German Officials After Obama Ordered Cease Of Spying On Chancellor | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | The National Security Agency been surveilling senior German officials after it was ordered by President Obama to cease spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel. The report comes from German paper , which claims its informant is a “high-ranking NSA employee in Germany,” as described by UK Reuters, which translated the original report. Among the 320 target individuals are Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière. “We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor’s communication directly,” one NSA employee is reported to have said. An interior ministry spokesman declined to comment on the allegations. The US after previous leaks about surveilling the German Chancellor, which President Obama never officially disavowed. Part of the issue with this current leak is that it’s difficult to verify. The original NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, came out publicly and the NSA only months later admitted some details about the controversial phone record collection program ( , no less). An anonymous source leaking information about much lower profile activity may not incentivize agencies to release details either confirming or denying ‘s claim. Certainly, this new leak will not help US-European relations. For a bit of levity, let me leave our readers with Saturday Night Live’s take on the Merkel spying scandal: [hulu id=d5wi-ov-nwybkjmxfm_f0q width=512] |
Corporate Investors Move Into The Accelerator Market | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Big banks , big , and even do it: After years of neglect, the world’s biggest companies are throwing their weight (and a few dollars) behind new technology startups. It wasn’t always this way. Historically there’s been one big backer of early-stage companies and that’s the investment arm affiliated with the sultan of search, Google Ventures, according to data from .
There are several reasons for the surge in corporate accelerators launched in recent years, said Yael Hochberg, a visiting associate professor of finance at MIT Sloan School of Management. On one level, industry observers like Hochberg, say this new corporate activity is another example of corporations looking for the next new thing in investment. “Back in the 1990s during the first wave of corporate venture capital, there was a lot of talk about VCs making a lot of money and then the corporates piled in. Accelerators like TechStars and [Y Combinator] are the new hot thing,” Hochberg said. However, there are legitimate business cases to be made for corporate accelerators as well, she said. “Over the last few decades one of the things that has definitely been happening with corporations is that they’ve moved to an open innovation model or outsourced R&D. They’re doing less basic research in house and essentially looking to bring that in through acquisitions,” Hochberg said. With the cost of developing new technologies coming down so dramatically, it makes sense for corporations to take smaller bets on new technology offerings, according to Hochberg and her peers. These days companies from to to have an accelerator program. Even the has one. But the recent surge belies the fact that a preponderance of investment dollars from corporations goes to later stage funding rounds, according to CrunchBase. The chart below shows seed and angel-stage investment activity for corporate investors tracked by CrunchBase:
And here’s a graph of Series A and B stage investments from the same pool of investors.
Sometimes corporations start these programs only to pull back on them after only a few years. Facebook in the early days of the phenomenon within a couple of years. The jury is out on whether corporations can provide the right kind of support that an early-stage entrepreneur needs. For SK Telecom Americas, the business development arm of the Korean mobile telecom giant SK Telecom, the decision to launch its accelerator program was a matter of necessity as much as an invention. The company simply saw a lack of early-stage investment among venture capitalists in what its executives describe as “core technologies.” “There was a lot of frustration being created not only among the entrepreneurs but also the strategic companies weren’t getting access to new technologies from startups, because those companies were not being formed,” said Min Park, president of SK Telecom Americas. To help launch early-stage companies investing in core hardware technologies, SK Telecom Americas has put aside up to $10 million from its own balance sheet to set up the . The accelerator has already launched two stealthy startups – Pavilion and Etopus – which will receive up to $1 million in working capital, professional services, development tools, and workspace to develop their computing architecture and high-speed interconnection related technologies (respectively). SK Telecom is also arranging development partners for the startups that come through its program to give them guidance on how to develop their technology and begin to take it to market. It’s a plan that correlates to the thesis on corporate venturing that MIT’s Hochberg proposed. “A lot of what startups are about is experimentation. [Now] you can experiment at a cost of about a tenth of what it was a decade ago,” Hochberg said. “[Businesses] can actually go out and get a sense of whether these things are going to be successful a lot more quickly and at a much lower cost.” |
Ahead Of Stephen Elop’s Return, Microsoft’s Julie Larson-Green Picks Up New Internal Role | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Microsoft Executive Vice President Julie Larson-Green announced today in an internal memo that she is changing roles at the company (memo below). Leaving her role leading Microsoft’s hardware efforts, Larson-Green will now lead the My Life & Work group inside of the Applications and Services Group, which is in turn run by Qi Lu. She will also pick up the title of CXO for the division as well. Formerly part of the duo that oversaw Windows — along with Tami Reller — Larson-Green landed atop Microsoft’s nascent Devices and Studios group in the post-reorg landscape. When the Nokia deal was announced, her role become somewhat murky, given that Stephen Elop was to take the reins from her if the deal went through. She would have reported to former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, though she retained — at least in the interim — her executive vice president title. In Microsoft, that’s one step below the CEO. Her new role will see her one rung down from her prior job running hardware, but since she would have reported to Elop when he made the hop, the role change isn’t a demotion. Until the Nokia deal closes and Elop joins Microsoft — again — Larson-Green will continue to head hardware at the company. |
Google’s Eric Schmidt Will Give $1 Million In Tech-For-Good Grants | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said he is donating $1 million to help solve global problems through technology. “I think I should put my money where my mouth is,” Schmidt CBS, in a promotion for , his book co-written with Jared Cohen. “We identified a whole bunch of companies all over the world trying to solve oppressive censorship, empower individuals, and make these phones more useful.” Details will be forthcoming, and it should be noted that Schmidt isn’t the only tech billionaire to give to charities that foster innovation. Microsoft Founder Bill Gates has spent a sizable portion of , including the wildly popular Khan Academy YouTube lecture series. He’s also used his leverage to push the philanthropic world to become more data-driven, of charitable projects. eBay Founder Pierre Omidyar from open government group to micro-financer . Like Gates, he’s also tried to break the mold of traditional nonprofit philanthropy, with impact investing — innovations that do good and make money at the same time. One such investment is , a for-profit venture that designs solar-powered light to the developing world. There are a number of organizations and companies that build technology that help fight corruption and oppression. , for instance, uses statistical algorithms to help convict dictators by proving that they likely did, in fact, commit murder. The US State department has promote technologies that allow dissidents to thwart government crack-downs on the Internet. Details about which organizations or companies will receive grants will be announced March 10. |
LinkedIn Goes East For Growth, Opens Its First Site In China, “领英”, Teams Up With Sequoia And CBC | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Big international news today for LinkedIn, the social media site for professionals to network with each other: the company is launching its first official site in China — in Simplified Chinese, in beta. Derek Shen, president of China for LinkedIn, in a blog post that the site will be branded “领英” and will aim to offer more localized content for Chinese-speaking users. LinkedIn is not starting from zero: the company already has some four million registered users in the country from some 80,000 different companies, although they all currently only use an English language site that has been accessible in the country for over 10 years already. The state of affairs, Shen notes, is one of LinkedIn still in a “start-up phase” in the country. And this new venture will not be forged alone: Shen says that LinkedIn has established a joint venture with Sequoia China and CBC “to explore expanding our business here.” This potentially means not just how the the site itself will grow, but could include the launch of new services and potential investments into local companies that can help LinkedIn develop more localised services. Some of those local tweaks are already a part of the site: social platforms Sina and Tencent are already integrated — meaning users can link up their accounts on these to cross post with LinkedIn; users can import contacts from Weibo. Users of WeChat can also link their accounts to share content. For a company of 277 milion users that has been criticised of late for , the move is significant: China represents an opportunity of some 140 million professionals, or one in five of all knowledge workers globally, according to LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. And given how strong the GDP is growing in China — currently the world’s second-fastest — the number of potential users is sure to go up. “Given the rapid acceleration and development of China’s economy, the expansion of our offering in China marks a significant step forward in our mission to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful,” Weiner writes in a . While a move into China will help the company tap into a rapidly expanding base of new users, it will not be without its challenges. Weiner notes that the decision to move into China is one that the company has been weighing up for a while, balancing the opportunity against the fact that companies that operate in the country are subject to censorship and much more government control than they are in the U.S. For a company that effectively relies on user-generated content, conversations, and a general level of trust and engagement, this is a huge deal. Weiner says that its workaround is to put into place a list of requirements for how it intends to proceed: — Government restrictions on content will be implemented only when and to the extent required.
— LinkedIn will be transparent about how it conducts business in China and will use multiple avenues to notify members about our practices.
— The company will undertake extensive measures to protect the rights and data of our members. “Within this framework, I believe that the benefits of LinkedIn’s evolution in China will prove compelling to our members, who are based in China, as well as members around the world,” Weiner writes. He says that LinkedIn will continue to talk to partners, policy makers and others to reassess how it is proceeding in the country. Those parties include Sequoia China and CBC, and our President of China, and LinkedIn’s head of China Derek Shen. |
Qualcomm Cuts $100 Off Its Toq Smartwatch | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Watch out below! Falling prices! As the dust settles over Mobile World Congress, Qualcomm just announced for its Toq smartwatch from $350 to $250. With the , the , and the updated Sony SmartWatch, the Toq has stiff competition. It’s a fine device, although Darrell would argue otherwise. It’s comfortable to wear, has a nice screen, and works relatively well. Compared to the Pebble, it’s light years ahead in terms of possible functionality. But the Toq is also more limited than others. It only works with Android devices and doesn’t have nearly the amount of developer support behind it than competitors. When the Toq was released, it was widely speculated that it would quickly fail on the consumer market. Qualcomm simply doesn’t have marketing or distribution power needed to make such a device successful. Maybe a price drop will help move a few units. But probably not. |
Monster Acquires Recruiting Startups TalentBin And Gozaik | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Monster Worldwide today that it has acquired and , two startups offering tools for recruiting on social networks. “The acquisition of TalentBin and Gozaik completes one key component of a larger strategy designed to help our business grow,” said Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi in the acquisition release. The company says that both deals closed during the first quarter of this year, and that it will be sharing more details at its investor briefing on May 14. TalentBin describes itself as a “ ” that aggregates data about potential job candidates from Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and elsewhere, while also giving tools to recruiters so they reach out to those candidates. It’s actually the latest version of a company that , a site where professionals could anonymously review their peers. In its various forms, in total funding from investors including SV Angel, FundersClub, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Lightbank. (I should probably mention that co-founder Peter Kazanjy and I met more than a decade ago when we worked together at The Stanford Daily, and we’ve remained friendly.) (I should mention that he declined to comment on today’s news, so friendship will only take you so far …) There’s less information available online about Gozaik, especially since just points to the acquisition announcement. According to the release, the company allows employers to post targeted job ads on social networks. The financial terms of the deals were not disclosed. |
It’s The End Of The @Facebook.com Email Address As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Facebook is putting an end to its email project, which means your life will probably go on exactly as it had been with no discernible changes whatsoever. For future reference, don’t email me at darrell.etherington@facebook.com, unless you want to receive no response, which is exactly what would’ve happened before this change was announced anyway. The reason for ditching the facebook.com emails is pretty straightforward: They weren’t being used by many people at all, Facebook tells us. For those few who were, messages sent to your Facebook email will be automatically forwarded to whatever email you have on file with the social network, beginning in March when the changes go into effect. That’s on by default, by the way, so if you’re not looking forward to the prospect of receiving email from an address you may have forgotten you had, you can go into your account settings on Facebook to turn it off. That’s like the opposite of the move Facebook made in 2012, when it hid under the then-new iOS 6 contact sync feature. This led many to have to , just as this switch results in another requirement for manual intervention to make sure you don’t get a flood of new messages you weren’t noticing before. This likely isn’t going to result in any teary-eyed bad feelings from general users, but some people might be pretty happy: We’d heard that some Facebook employees had to change their @Facebook.com email addresses when the change was implemented back in 2010 to free them up for users, so maybe some of those will be cleared for staff once again. |
The Epic App Brings Kids’ Books To The iPad — And Makes Them More Fun, Too | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | Adults have great digital reading experiences thanks to iBook and other apps, but such programs are not exactly kid-friendly. So for many kids under the age of 12 or so, the iPad is for games and movies, and reading is mostly done on physical books. A new startup called aims to finally bridge that gap by bringing a totally kid-friendly bookshelf and book reading experience to the iPad. Co-founded by online gaming veteran and former YouTube exec , Epic is an all-you-can-read aimed at kids aged 12 and under that provides access to some 2,000 titles for online and offline reading. The subscription service costs $9.99 per month. Since Epic’s experience is so visual, we asked CEO Suren Markosian to stop by the TechCrunch TV studio to show us the experience hands-on — it’s got a lot of the fun graphics and incentives you’d expect from a kids’ game, with the tactile replication of what it’s like to read a physical book. There are also some great parental features for monitoring how much time your child has spent reading each book and his or her progress and tastes. It looks like Epic strikes the perfect balance between educational and fun, and should allow parents to feel more confident about introducing the iPad into their children’s daily lives as a tool, rather than as a guilty pleasure or time-wasting treat. Check it out in the video embedded above to see Epic in action and hear about why Markosian and Donahue decided to focus on the children’s reading space. |
Chewse’s One-Click Catering Grows Recurring Revenue By 10X In Six Months | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | While the , there are a bunch of next-generation food and catering startups that are aiming to fix meal delivery. is focusing on the enterprise market. They handle one-click catering for offices throughout Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their meal ordering platform lets office managers quickly pick and pay for meals for an entire company of people, whether they are paleo, vegan, lactose intolerant, or you know, allergic to lima beans. Started by Tracy Lawrence out of her dorm room at USC, the company has grown recurring revenue by tenfold in the last six months. They just passed 50,000 meals and are growing 50 percent month-over-month. The whole meal delivery space has become increasingly competitive in recent months with direct-to-consumer models like Munchery and . But Chewse is specifically focused on the business-to-business space. A lifelong foodie, Lawrence got the idea after working as an event planner in college. She saw how difficult it was to coordinate payments, people’s meal preferences and pick-up for large groups of people. It helped that she caught the entrepreneurial bug from her parents, who also ran their own business. Lawrence says even though the Grubhub-Seamless IPO is getting a lot of attention, the company only has 0.8 percent of the $43 billion catering market. (The , so we don’t know their actual revenue figures for 2013.) “There’s an insanely large market for growth,” she said, adding that Grubhub-Seamless will get distracted by the process of going public. Chewse has been working on a model to scale remotely, so they can add new markets without having people on the ground. They grew Los Angeles, with a full-time team based in San Francisco, and currently service companies like Activision, DocVacay and others down there. They face a number of competitors with different models. The Grubhub-Seamless approach is to partner with restaurants who use the service as lead generation even though they have to deal with the cost of delivery. Meanwhile, , is actually mostly in the food space. They make anything available on demand and they don’t need to directly partner with restaurants because they catalogue restaurant menus on their own. Then there is a . They partner with restaurants provide logistics and delivery for them while taking a cut of sales. Then the last model is more verticalized. , and Munchery have a limited daily menu and bypass the need for a ton of restaurant partnerships. They make money by pushing a larger volume of one or two dishes, which are generally pre-prepared. |
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Moviefone Is Killing Off Its Namesake Phone Number | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | ! The early 90’s was a strange time. Computers were becoming fairly commonplace, but the Internet still wasn’t. We pumped out new technology that defined our lives for a week, only to be forgotten the next. We were still trying to figure out what the future looked like. So many things seemed brilliant at the time, only to be rendered useless by the end of the decade. Remember pagers? Remember when we have a universe of information tucked into a little box in our pocket? Remember when dialing a phone number to get information from a robot was Remember calling 411? or POPCORN? or Moviefone? In the coming weeks, that last one will stop answering. In a statement to the , Moviefone confirms that they’re going to be shutting down the dial-in number that launched the company back in 1989. Why? Because, as you might expect, usage of the phone number has tanked. You can hardly get people to call any more, much less get them to call a number for something they could find online in a heartbeat. Moviefone as a company will stick around, albeit around its web services and apps. Alas, “Movieapp” doesn’t have the same ring to it. (While we’re waxing all nostalgic: Remember away messages? Remember when you used to be able to get from the Internet?) [Disclosure: AOL owns Moviefone. AOL also owns TechCrunch.] |
Know Thy Selfie | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | , or happy, or looking into the eyes of your sweetie, do you know what your face looks like? Probably not, according to Dr. James Kilner, neuroscientist at the University College London. that you know very little about what your face looks like most of the time, though you probably believe you look much more attractive and much younger than you actually are. Bummer, right? But, according to , you might find solace where you least expect it: in the front-facing camera of your smartphone. His studies show that our ever-growing affinity towards selfies stems from the fact that we can now doctor them to match the perception we have of ourselves as total hotties. In an experiment, subjects were shown various versions of a selfie, some edited to be more attractive and others to be less attractive. When asked to choose the original, most subjects actually chose the version that showed a more attractive visage. Our devices, and the services we use with them, encourage selfies. There isn’t a new phone on the market that doesn’t have a front-facing camera. Instagram lets us beautify and distort those phone images. Twitter, Viber and countless other apps offer similar filters. Snapchat lets us add a bit of reality to our camera snaps, by sending a fleeting moment through the ether the same way we would in real life. And then there’s . This, along with the intrinsic need to explore the self, may explain why selfies have grown so popular. Everybody selfies. President Obama takes selfies. The #selfie tag on Instagram has over 72 million entries and new are to capitalize on the craze. People are taking so many selfies, that doctors are seeing an increase in . More than ever before, we have the ability to capture our facial expressions, enhance them, and use them to communicate with each other with an unparalleled level of control over our appearance. No longer just a teen pop culture trend, Selfies have become fodder for philosophical and psychological discussions. The NYT’s Jenna Wortham wrote , arguing that facial expressions belong in our conversations. By showing your face, you’re offering a more realistic window into your existence. It’s not about vanity; but rather about expressing yourself the same way you do in real life, and having a record of that expression over time. But is it really “real life” that you’re expressing with an overly doctored selfie? , author of , sees it as self-exploration. Thompson believes that the narcissism theory — that those who take selfies are simply (and pathetically) self-obsessed — is an argument that’s been used for ages during each big technological shift. When mirrors first became cheap, there was a great deal of resistance from many who believed that mirrors would unnaturally focus our attention on ourselves. “Every time you take a selfie, you re-see yourself through a new set of eyes,” said Thompson. “Instagram did something even more interesting and added filtering. Not only are you looking at yourself in the original picture, but you can re-see the photo over and over and over again as you change filters.” Research has not yet determined whether or not our edited selfies, the ones that make us look super sexy, have some sort of long-term affect on our self-esteem. But if selfies are helping us see ourselves the way we want to, as suggested by Kilner’s research, is that really a bad thing? Many people out there, overwhelmed by Photoshopped super models and sexy studs in mainstream media, feel bad about their appearance. Selfies, whether through Instagram or Snapchat, might help with that in the long-term. Selfies could lead to more self(i.e.)-confidence. That’s not to say that whoever wears out their front-facing camera first will get higher grades, or a better job, or a hotter lover. However, the more conscious you are of way you look, the way you interact, and the way your body language speaks for you, the more you can improve it. Consider how much we pay attention to the behaviors and expressions of those around us. Body language accounts for the of our communication with each other. You know when someone’s distracted, or tired, or excited. You can tell the difference between how your girlfriend genuinely smiles at you and fakes it for her boss. You can tell when your mother or father is putting on a brave face for you, even though they’re really stressed. Now imagine what you look like in those situations. Do you know the difference between your genuine smile and your fake one? What does your brave face look like? Selfies, and every extension of them, offer an entryway into this era of self-exploration. FaceTime, or Skype aren’t vessels for selfies, per se, but they do share many aspects of the selfie apps increasingly becoming popular. Video chat is as close as we get to real-life, human interaction, but it’s not normal at all. We aren’t accustomed to seeing our own faces in the middle of a conversation. As a result, we spend a good deal of our time in Skype video chat looking at ourselves, and ultimately having a less in-depth conversation. Even trying to look the other person in the eye is impossible, because of the placement of the camera. If you look directly at the person, you appear to be looking just below them, from their perspective. If you look directly at the camera, you give the effect of looking directly at them, but you’re not. Even the technology built selfies isn’t necessarily perfect. Instagram gives you tools that give you total control over your appearance. With the right angle, blur effects, and filtering, Alf can start to look like Kate Upton. This enhancement gives you a confidence boost, but then you have to deal with the Instagram community, ever-ready to mete out judgement in the form of likes. One selfie may get five likes, and another fifty. Does that mean you should conform to the more “likeable” version of yourself. Snapchat, on the other hand, doesn’t offer any quantification. There is no “like count” on your snaps, but there is ephemerality, destroying any record of the photo you took. Though you can filter these photos, you can’t look back on them. Whether selfies will raise our self-esteem is still an unanswered question, but probably not for long. Selfies aren’t a passing trend. This is where communication is headed. My mother, years ago, only saw her friends and family in person. She only spoke on the phone to plan a meeting, at the mall or the movie theater or wherever. I’m not sure where people hung out in the 60s. The post office, maybe? She had absolutely no idea what she looked like when communicating with others. A generation later, you’ll find a 12-year-old Jordan talking constantly to her friends on the phone. And then on AIM. And on text. The barrier of location had been broken, permanently. At any time, in any place, I could communicate with just about anyone. Thanks, internet. Flash forward five or ten years, to my younger sister in her glorious college years. She spends more time looking into her phone screen than anything else. She’s texting and FaceTimeing and Facebooking. If she’s not Snapchatting, she’s Instagramming. The majority of her Facebook photos include herself. More so than ever before, we can see . During our conversations. During our time alone. Always. For better or worse, we should all start preparing ourselves for a good look in the mirror. My mother always said, “no one can love you until you learn to love yourself(ie).” |
Hands On With Reporter, An iOS App That Wants To Help You Understand Your Daily Life | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | If you are like me, life speeds by and you cling for something like normalcy as work and everything else swirls. Want a better grip on your daily activities, and how your habits are changing over time? , a new application for iOS, wants to help. Built by , a former Facebook designer, Reporter helps you craft a set of questions that pertain to your life — how much coffee you have had, are you working, did you go for a run, and for how long? — and graphs the results. How do you keep it up, answering the questions on the regular, and preventing slippage in your check-ins? pings you throughout the day to follow your own survey, preventing gaps. The app will set you back four dollars, but is a fun trip into your own banality if you want such a thing. Is it for you? Watch my review and decide: [tc_5min code=”518132612″] |
Video Discovery Specialist Rovi Acquires Voice Search Startup Veveo For Up To $69 Million | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | has announced that it will soon add advanced voice search to its portfolio of tricks, through the acquisition of video discovery startup . Rovi will pay $62 million in cash for the company and its IP at closing, and up to $7 million in additional payments based on certain performance milestones. With Veveo’s technology, Rovi will be able to add a whole new voice search capability to its video discovery platform. The startup, which was founded years ago, uses a mix of natural language processing and semantic technologies to plug intuitive search and recommendation features into video discovery applications. The voice search engine can follow a wide range of conversational commands and learns as it goes, so that users don’t have to keep repeating themselves when searching through a bunch of videos. It can understand when users are searching for a specific movie, cast member, or genre, and can refine searches within those parameters based on additional information that the user provides. Over time, it can even offer personalized recommendations based on previous searches. In short, Veveo is basically like Siri, if Siri actually worked. Already, Veveo is being used behind the scenes by a number of device manufacturers and service providers, and it has more than 80 patent applications filed, with 50 granted to date. It’s that combination of IP and customers that probably has Rovi really excited. By combining Veveo with its own metadata offering, Rovi should be able to get more customers to use its video discovery services, which can be embedded in connected devices, set-top boxes, and third-party video apps. Rovi announced that the acquisition will likely lower its adjusted pro forma income per share by 3-6 cents, but that it would contribute double-digit revenue growth and be accretive in fiscal 2015. |
WinZip Moves To The Cloud With Launch Of ZipShare, A Way To Zip, Manage & Share All Your Online Files | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | , makers of the file compression utility first launched in the that still sees north of 30 million downloads per year, is today making a shift to the cloud. The company is launching , a file zipping, management, encryption, and sharing service that works with the major online file hosting platforms. Currently, ZipShare lets users zip and share files both from their own computer as well as from Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, SugarSync, HighTail and CloudMe, with others in the works. However, it’s the file management capabilities that make ZipShare interesting. To be clear, ZipShare is not looking to become yet anther cloud storage service player itself. Instead, the company is thinking of the new service as a means of making its WinZip technology more relevant in today’s world, where many users are now creating, saving and sharing their files entirely online. WinZip had already been thinking about how the cloud will impact its business, of course. With the launch of WinZip version 17 in October 2012, it added in support for cloud services, like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive, among others. But of that product were somewhat . In addition, WinZip has, to a lesser extent, integrated with cloud services in its mobile apps, though that will change in time as the apps are updated with expanded support for file hosting sites. But until now, explains Jacques Lamontagne, Director of Product Management at WinZip, all the versions of the company’s software have been specific to single environments. “We wanted to create a product that was platform agnostic and to do that, we had to create a web app,” he says. He also notes that the company wanted to focus more on the sharing features of WinZip, over the compression aspects. With the new ZipShare service, in development since March 2013, you can quickly share a bigger file or files instead of attaching those items to an email – like the way you would use any cloud storage site, really. But the service is better designed to work more like a plugin to the various cloud platforms, rather than a tool that forces you to use its own storage option. That is, when you’re uploading files to ZipShare, you can specify which cloud storage site you want to use as those files’ final destination. The files are zipped up during upload, saving you storage space on your preferred service, and you can optionally add password protection. This introduces a second layer of security (AES-256 encryption is used) over whatever measures the destination service may already use, making the files safer from hacking attempts. After your upload is complete, you can choose to share the zip file to email, or to social networks like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. ZipShare will offer recipients a URL, which, when clicked, points them to the zip file to download. The service also tracks the delivery of those downloads, to allow the sender to know when the files have been accessed. In addition to its ability to quickly upload and zip files from the web, both desktop and mobile, ZipShare lets you manage all the files across your preferred cloud services in the website’s “My Files” section. That means you can use ZipShare to delete files, move files or entire folders between file hosting sites, as well as zip or unzip files in the cloud. The ability to zip up your cloud-saved files could be helpful for those looking to maximize the free storage all these hosting providers offer. “When you total up [the free storage provided], we’re up to 40 to 50 GB of free space,” notes Lamontagne. “And a free user could just keep using them until they fill up,” he says. The product is currently in beta while the company finishes optimizing the service for use on mobile platforms, with a commercial launch planned for later this spring. During the beta period, all the features including sharing, tracking, encryption and file management will be available, but later only basic file sharing will remain free. WinZip is currently thinking the will cost $39.95/year, though that may change. It’s also exploring the idea of a $9.95/month model, as well as partnerships with one or more of the cloud hosting companies. Interested users can sign up . |
It’s Not Magic, It’s Talent And Sweat. Ha, If Only Silicon Valley Worked That Way | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | That HBO Silicon Valley show has a new trailer out, which you can watch above. (Or, go to YouTube and . I don’t care, either way.) Anyway. This time we learn a little bit more about what’s happening with the group of engineers in the show. For instance, we learn that what they’ve built is some sort of a compression engine or algorithm for sending content over the Internet. “All those YouPorn ones and zeroes streaming directly to your shitty little smartphone, every dipshit who shits his pants every time he can’t get Skrillex in under 12 seconds — it’s not magic, it’s talent and sweat. That’s what the fuck we do,” says one character in the show. Ok, then. We also learn that venture capitalists are dicks. One offers $200,000 for 10 percent of this world-changing little startup company? Yeh, no thanks. We’ll hold out for a . There’s still the bit about Silicon Valley being the center of innovation in a *snicker* TED Talk, and the main character still gets beat up by a little kid. But thankfully there are no dick jokes in this trailer. The fun starts April 6. . |
Square’s Latest TV Ads Focus On Attracting New Merchants | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Payments company Square is debuting six new TV ads today, in a big marketing push towards attracting merchants on the platform. A spokesperson for Square tells us the ads will air on national cable channels (including during primetime hours). Some of the channels include Fox Business, CNBC, Discovery Health & Fitness, NBC Sports, History, Travel, Bravo, CMT, and AMC. We’ve embedded the ads, which run around 20 seconds each, below. Interestingly, the ads focus on attracting merchants vs. consumers using Square’s wallet app, which isn’t surprising considering the company’s to attract larger retailers, and enable custom pricing for merchants. Square has also been ramping up sales hiring efforts to bring on new merchants to the payments platform. Two years ago, Square did but since then the company has mostly seem growth-based on word-of-mouth marketing to target small to medium-sized businesses. Another interesting observation: The commercials feature Visa cards (Visa is ) and American Express cards. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PAt_QRiuQA?list=PL5k53WC8LA7MJH5ealOBIYTh_txYau5ED] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw5Qv2lwbVI?list=PL5k53WC8LA7MJH5ealOBIYTh_txYau5ED] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV8evI_Q3FE?list=PL5k53WC8LA7MJH5ealOBIYTh_txYau5ED] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWTu2xQ1rV8?list=PL5k53WC8LA7MJH5ealOBIYTh_txYau5ED] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OD10ZNebnU?list=PL5k53WC8LA7MJH5ealOBIYTh_txYau5ED] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViihrF-UgGc?list=PL5k53WC8LA7MJH5ealOBIYTh_txYau5ED] |
Nokia Forks Android In Mobile Services Push — $122 Nokia X Will Also Be Lumia “Feeder” | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | More proof, if proof were needed, that Android won the smartphone OS wars: Nokia, the former world No.1 smartphone maker and, nowadays, the primary OEM for Microsoft’s third-placed Windows Phone platform has just announced a new family of smartphones built upon the — confirming a slew of earlier rumours that Nokia was cooking up an Android device strategy. The first device in Nokia’s Droidy new family was unveiled today at its Mobile World Conference press conference in Barcelona, with both the forthcoming family and this its debut member known as the Nokia X ( : Nokia also announced the Nokia X+: the same handset but with additional memory, (coming early Q2, for €99/$136); and the Nokia XL, a larger handset with a 5-inch display, also coming in early Q2 for €109/$150). The twist is it doesn’t look like the standard icon-filled Android that the market is used to, being dressed up in a new Nokia UI. “The Nokia X software platform is built upon AOSP, Android Open Source Project,” said Nokia’s marketing director for its mobile phones division, Neil Broadley. “What we’ve done is we’ve built the Nokia X software platform on standard Android open source, and then on top of that we’ve built the Nokia user experience layer — so the Nokia UI — so Fast Lane and the homescreen. “The homescreen is tile-based, so it’s similar to a [Windows Phone-based] Lumia. It incorporates some elements of that — some limited live information into the tiles. We’ve also put in Nokia and Microsoft services.” “The sub-$100 price range is a massive opportunity for us,” said Nokia’s outgoing CEO Stephen Elop, describing the range as a “different but complementary opportunity to introduce a new family that strengthens our affordable [devices] family”. “The Nokia X takes people to Microsoft’s cloud, not to Google’s cloud,” he added. The 4-inch wVGA, dual-core 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon handset, which comes in Nokia’s now familiar spectrum of eye-arresting colours (including bright green, red and yellow) and also packs a 3MP camera, costs €89/$122 (excluding taxes & subsidies) — and is launching immediately, shipping as early as next week. Nokia said it is planning a global rollout for the X but the initial focus will be on “key, fast-growing emerging markets” — including India, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Russia. Aka, markets where low cost Androids are already well established. The Nokia X’s price-point undercuts the affordably priced handset, for instance, a relatively recent Android that is also targeting emerging markets. But the handset still doesn’t go as low as scores of hyper budget Droids (sub-$50 handsets are big in Africa, for instance). So expect other handsets in the Nokia X family to look to squeeze the price-point further south. The other twist here: no new Lumia smartphones being unboxed by Nokia, the , at the world’s largest mobile devices conference. What exactly is Nokia doing with Android? In a similar move to Amazon, with its Kindle Fire tablet interface (and — doubtless — with a future Kindle smartphone, should it launch one), it’s forked Android to build on top of Google’s mobile sprawl. This is a change in tack from Nokia’s previously attempts to compete with Android’s reach exclusively via (its own and others’) non-Android mobile platforms. This change of direction comes despite Nokia preparing to imminently hand off its mobile-making division to Windows Phone OS maker Microsoft — a business division acquisition . Ergo, Microsoft will soon be in the business of making Android phones. So, yes, Android really did win the mobile OS wars. And yes Microsoft must have at least been comfortable with this Android device-making strategy — when put on the spot about Nokia Android phone rumours during a Q&A at Microsoft’s pre-MWC press event. But there are of course plenty of ways to monetise on mobile — and controlling the dominant platform is just one of them. (If you’re still scratching your head about the logic, here’s a primer in I wrote covering earlier rumours of the Nokia Normandy project, as the Android phone was then codenamed. Bottom line: Nokia X is a Trojan horse stuffed with Microsoft services, pushed inside Android’s app-rich empire.) From the mobile user point of view, the huge draw of a Nokia handset built atop Android is of course access to the Android app ecosystem — and the circa one million apps that brings — albeit, not via the mainstream Google Play gateway. Nokia X users get access to apps via a curated (and entirely freemium) Nokia Android app store, and via any other third party Android app stores they choose to dip into. Nokia’s own low end mobile platforms have not been able to compete on the app numbers front with Android, nor, indeed, has Windows Phone, which still lags greatly in numbers and in (or ). So this is one way for Nokia to fight Android’s ecosystem dominance — by piggybacking on it. It’s worth noting that not all Android apps will be compatible with Nokia X, though. Nokia claims 75% of Android apps will work “out of the box”, and it’s hoping to persuade developers to make the necessary API tweaks to the remaining quarter (thanks to factors such as Nokia promoting in-app purchases via its Android app store, and its operator billing agreements with 160+ carriers globally which it argues will help developers expand monetisation opportunities for apps in emerging markets where phone users may not have credit cards, for example). One high profile Android app that will be in the Nokia store at launch is . The U.K. startup said today it has signed a deal with Nokia for its next-word predicting keyboard software to be a free download to Nokia X users for the duration of 2014. The SwiftKey app will be available to Nokia X users in 21 markets, including China, India and Nigeria. SwiftKey said the partnership will give it the chance to speed up its growth in emerging markets. Nokia said its thinking for the X family is to act as a “feeder” to its full-fat Lumia smartphones, i.e. when owners of these cheaper smartphones upgrade to more expensive handsets. Because Nokia has dressed Android in Windows Phone clothes, and stuffed it with Nokia and Microsoft services — such as HERE maps, Microsoft’s OneDrive, SharePoint and Outlook.com. The gamble here is that users will be better convinced to switch platforms from Android to Windows Phone than they have already — and when they can afford such an upgrade — once they have become accustomed to the Nokiasoft services the Nokia X Android flavour is laced with. So this is Mix Radio and HERE’s offline maps being used as gateway drugs to Windows Phone. “The Nokia X family… acts as the perfect feeder to our Lumia high end smartphone family, which is very much our premium and our flagship family,” Broadley told TechCrunch. “Whether it’s the signature Nokia experiences like Mix Radio and HERE, whether it be Microsoft experiences, like OneDrive, Outlook.com, or Skype, you’re going to be using your Microsoft cloud identity, your Microsoft login, and also in terms of our user experience [with Nokia X]… we’re using elements of the [Windows Phone style] tile-based interface… so that when people in time continue to upgrade within the Nokia family we’re continuing to build richer experiences,” he added. Broadley did not say this is Microsoft and Nokia admitting mainstream platform defeat with Windows Phone, but there certainly seems to be a strong thread of a plan B strategy here, that’s focused on acquiring users of mobile services, rather than relying on making money by flogging phone hardware. And with Nokia only shipping some 30 million Lumia devices in the whole of 2013 that diversification seems prudent. As well as not looking like a typical Android, and not including the standard Android swathe of Google services (such as the Play Store, Google Maps, Gmail and so on), the Nokia X software platform also replaces three Android APIs to facilitate Nokiasoft hooking its own services in place: namely the location API (with Nokia’s HERE mapping services); the in-app purchase API (with Nokia’s own Android store offering); and the notifications API. The latter tweak is required for the Nokia X to plug into notifications interface — which it’s porting over from its S40-based Asha range of low end devices, where the interface debuted in (its origin is Nokia’s , a Norwegian company that made mobile OSes for feature phones designed to give them smartphone looks and capabilities). There is a quiet irony in that feature phone software getting a new lease of life on a smartphone platform that’s itself dressed in the clothes of another mobile OS. Nokia’s range of Series 40 Asha phones already straddle the price-point and functionality gap between fully-fledged budget smartphones and very basic feature phones. But today’s Android foray does not mean Nokia is discontinuing its use of S40. On the contrary, also today it announced a new device in the Asha range: the Nokia Asha 230. This becomes the new most affordable handset in the Asha range — costing €45/$62 Euros (excluding taxes & subsidies). Nokia also unveiled a new addition to its bottom of the range web accessing feature phone devices (which run the S30 platform), with the Nokia 220 — the replacement for the Nokia 110. The Nokia 220 costs €29/$40 (before taxes & subsidies), and comes preloaded with Facebook and Twitter, with Nokia describing it as its most affordable “Internet connected device”. This handset will also use Bing search as the default in markets where that Microsoft service is rolled out, keeping the Nokiasoft services strategy on message — even here at the truly budget end of its device portfolio. Yet among all this non-Android low-end action, there is still apparently room for the Nokia X family — with Nokia’s new price-point increments being circa $40 (S30); $60 (S40); $120 (Android); and $180 (for its ) — which again underlines how successful Android’s platform reach has been. It really is a case of if you can’t beat them, join them, fork them — and then try to beat them on kick-ass services. One more thing: it’s unclear exactly how long this Android-plus-Nokiasoft services strategy has been in the works at Nokia — TechCrunch asked, but the company declined to comment. Nokia did claim the idea to build atop Android as its own though, rather than something that came out of Redmond. |
Sony Taps Its Display, Gaming, And Photography Might For Latest Mobile Flagships | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Meet Sony’s Xperia Z2 line. With the and smartphone, Sony clearly hopes impressive specs and waterproof technology will help the company gain market share in 2014. The tablet and phone are refreshingly similar. Qualcomm’s 2.3GHz 801 Snapdragon powers both devices. They both have class-leading cameras and displays. And following in Sony’s recent tradition, they’re both waterproof. The Sony of today is different from the Sony of even five years ago. The company is going lean with its product offerings with a strong focus on photography, gaming and mobile products. The Sony Z2 Tablet and Z2 smartphone are prime examples of the company tapping all its divisions to make the best possible product. The Z2 Tablet rocks a 10.1-inch display up front and LTE capability. Like the Z1 before it, the Z2 has a 8.1MP camera on the back and a 2MP around front. And even with the blazing fasting 2.3GHz quad-core SoC, Sony boosts that the Z2 has a 10-hour battery life — the same as its predecessor. A PlayStation DualShock3 can even connect to the tablet for mobile gaming. The 5.2-inch Z2 is Sony’s latest flagship smartphone. And with its specs, it’s easy to see why. The aforementioned Snapdragon powers the phone and assists the phone with photography, which is capable of 4K video capture. In fact, photography is a big part of the Z2. The phone packs a 20.7MP sensor capable of 4K video and 120 fps recording. Sony calls the high-speed shooting Timeshift and allows owners to select certain frames and slow down playback. Both products will ship worldwide in March. Pricing and specific target markets have not been announced. With these products, Sony is continuing down the road of producing stunning mobile products while eating its own dog food. But will anyone buy them? Since Sony’s split with Ericsson and after the demise of the Sony S and P tablets, the company has outed some fantastic products. They’re slim, solid and waterproof. Yet consumers have yet to respond in kind. Hopefully Sony’s 2014 plan includes increasing distribution, marketing and wireless carrier support for its products. It’s hard to sell products scarcely seen in stores or marketing spots. The engineers and the designers behind these products deserve it. The products themselves deserve it. Most of all, consumers deserve to know and have the opportunity to buy these products. |
Sony’s Waterproof Wearable To Be Available Worldwide In March | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Sony introduced the . The diminutive wearable is part of Sony’s push into an ever-connected experience centered around its Xperia products. Sony was mum about the release schedule back at CES, but today, at Mobile World Congress, the company announced that the device will be available in 60 markets next month. The SmartBand sports the standard affair of fitness tracking. But Sony is positioning this device as much more than a fitness tracker. According to the press release, it’s “a new user experience based around three core pillars – Lifelogging, ‘Wearing smart’ and ‘Life tools’.” Besides Lifelogging, the other two items are needless branding for standard functions found on wearables. This includes sleep monitoring, vibrating notification alerts, and remote control of media playback. Sony loves to brand things. The Lifelogging is a bit convoluted. From the sound of it, this function uses the SmartBand as a sort of life-tracking tool that somehow relates media to a location. Here’s what the presser has to say about it. Lifelog application – Communication and entertainment, staying on top of the things that matter to you Sony’s innovative new Lifelog application binds the SmartWear Experience together, enabling you to discover your past, enjoy your present and helping inspire your future. Together with SmartBand, the Android app enables you to effortlessly capture life and entertainment – places visited, music listened to, games played, books read – and presents it a beautifully visual interface. You can see how active you were, where you went, what pictures you took and how you have been communicating with your world. Lifelog will also help you set activity goals, monitor your progress and make recommendations to help inform future decisions. So there’s that. The SmartBand only works with Android devices, and from the press release, it seems some of the so-called Lifelogging functions require specific applications. At CES Sony stated the device would cost 99 euros. This release communiqué doesn’t state the price, meaning Sony is going to hold true to its aforementioned pricing or it could switch things up prior to the release. |
Mt.Gox Resigns From Bitcoin Foundation’s Board, Clears Twitter Account | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Mt.Gox has resigned from the Bitcoin Foundation’s board of directors. The foundation after the news was . In addition, Reddit users also from its . We’ve emailed Mt.Gox for comment. Mt.Gox CEO Mark Karpeles was one of three elected industry members who held seats on the board. The Bitcoin Foundation said that would release more details, including information about election procedures, soon. Problems faced by Mt.Gox since it on Feb. 6 have and focused attention on the instability of unregulated markets. Mt.Gox that it suspended withdrawals because of a “technical issue.” |
Next-Gen YotaPhone Follow-Up Unveiled, With Full-Touch E-Ink Rear Screen | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Russian mobile-making startup has just unveiled the next generation of its dual-screen smartphone, the YotaPhone. As with the , which in Russia and select European markets (Austria, France, Spain and Germany) last December costing €499/$684, the handset’s flagship feature is that it’s two-sided — with a full colour touchscreen display on the front and a low-power consuming e-ink display on the rear. The next generation YotaPhone, as it’s currently known, won’t go on sale until the end of this year but the company showed TechCrunch a working prototype of the device, ahead of the Mobile World Congress conference kicking off today in Barcelona. It’s also released a full specs sheet — flagging up the forthcoming processor improvements, from gen-one’s dual-core to quad-core; a larger full HD display and a larger, curved e-ink pane; a beefier battery; and more. Full details below. But the flagship upgrade is to the capability and utility of the e-ink screen — which is now a full touch panel, with support for poking and prodding anywhere, instead of requiring users to interact only via a small touch-sensitive pane below the screen (as with the 1st-gen device). This means users of the next-gen YotaPhone will be able to interact directly with content displayed on the e-ink screen, including, for example, responding to messages, calls and notifications, or even using it for playing thoughtful, slower-paced games like chess and sudoku. Another use-case for YotaPhone’s EPD (electronic paper display) is to act as a dashboard for displaying customised metrics — such as your sports’ team’s latest scores, or even to display quantified health info fed in from various wearable devices. Or that’s the vision anyway — if enough developers can be inspired to build for a second screen ecosystem. (There are currently around a dozen rear-screen apps for the first gen YotaPhone — although of course, the handset is a fully fledged Android smartphone too, with Google Play on tap.) “The [full-touch second display] brings the YotaPhone concept to a completely new level,” said CEO Vladislav Martynov, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Now you can not only get the information you need and see it but you can interact with one touch, and you can respond to messages. Or email. Or you can accept a meeting invitation. “The whole user experience with the backside of the phone becomes much better — this is full touch so you can swipe, you can up and down, it’s basically much more intuitive.” The device’s price-tag has not been revealed yet but Martynov said it will be “comparable” or 10-15% lower than premium Android smartphones from the likes of Samsung, HTC and Sony that are on the market at the time it launches. Yota Devices is aiming for the next-gen device to come to 20 markets in EMEA by the end of 2014, and is also working on versions of the device for the U.S. market and for China, also by the end of 2014 or for the beginning of 2015. The startup will continue its strategy of selling the handset directly online — but Martynov said it may look to work with carriers in markets such as the U.S. where the handset retail market is dominated by carriers and carrier subsidies. Owners of the existing YotaPhone will be offered a substantial discount via a trade-in program for upgrading when the next-gen model hits shelves, according to Martynov. He said they will also be first in line to get their hands on the handset.
What’s the point of a smartphone having a secondary, less colourful, less reactive screen if it has a perfectly good HD AMOLED pane winking at you from its shiny front? Why would a user even bother turning it round to use a monochrome EPD display? Martynov said the key advantage of the YotaPhone concept is that the handset has an always on display that does not destroy the device’s battery life. He argues that a display with visible information constantly pumped to it has the ability to change usage behaviour, by no longer requiring smartphone users constantly wake and unlock their phone just to check in on social feeds or other key content. In other words: it can solve the FOMO problem. “With all this information behind a dark screen you need to wake the phone up, you need to remember about this actually — to check — and even if there are some notifications and reminders they just pop up for a few seconds and you can miss it,” said Martynov. “The YotaPhone frees people from the fear of missing something important which is behind the dark screen. And also remove bad habits where you wake up the phone 150 times a day just for no reason — just to check what is there, in Twitter and Facebook etc… Snubbing people around yourself in favour of your smartphone becomes quite a bad habit.” Arguably Yota Devices is creating a new category of device here — one which rolls the functionality of a notifications’ focused wearable, such as Pebble’s smartwatch, right into the smartphone form factor — without the need for the user to carry and charge up two separate devices after all. And that’s a very neat idea indeed. Two functions, in the same handset. Look around you at the smartphones people are using everyday and it’s pretty plain that current handset hardware has been commoditized, with makers converging along similar form factor lines, churning out touchscreen slabs that focus on maximizing the available screen area and minimizing everything else. Slightly bigger screens — and the rise of a phablet category — is the most notable form factor evolution of recent years (along with the death of physical Qwertys). So it’s easy to assume that single-sided touch-sensitive slabs are the end of the road for handset hardware evolution in the near term — an unchanging constant for years to come. Well, Yota Devices wants to change the perception that a single screen that spends a large portion of its life asleep and unlit, displaying zero information, is the end of the road for smartphone hardware evolution. It’s on a mission to prove that two screens can indeed be better than one. The (pictured below) was unveiled all the way back in December 2012. That first gen device had a 4.3-inch LCD touchscreen display on the front, augmented by a 4.3-inch e-ink display on its rear — allowing for content to be sent from the primary screen to the back pane for easier-on-the-eyes e-ink reading. Other uses for the back screen that were flagged up at the time included customisation of the look of the phone (by, for instance, displaying photos/wallpapers on the back), as well as offering device utility even after the phone’s battery had died, e.g. by still being able to display content such as a map or mobile boarding pass on the back. The disruptive advantage of e-ink is its very low power consumption — meaning it’s possible to build a dual-screen smartphone that can still deliver a day’s use without requiring a charge. Battery life of the next-gen YotaPhone is much much longer if you only opt to read content via its e-ink pane (circa 58-68 hours). The device will also have a Smart Power Mode that can enabled which turns off the colour display entirely but still allows the user to perform basic functions via the e-ink screen — such as making calls and sending texts. “By doing this you really save the battery,” said Martynov. “It’s one feature of YotaPhone that’s quite relevant for people who like hiking, or for tourists walking around a lot, or people who forget their charger in the morning.” Mixed use of both screens will obviously result in less impressive battery longevity (but still likely eking out a longer useful life than the average single colour touchscreen smartphone), while heavy use of the colour screen will yield battery life that’s “comparable” with premium smartphones, according to the company. The first-gen YotaPhone a year after it was unveiled — and that long lead in time from prototype unveiling to shipping a commercial product is a conscious strategy for the handset startup, which Martynov said it intends to replicate with the next-generation YotaPhone device being announced today. Like the two-sided YotaPhone itself, the reason is two-fold: firstly Yota Devices is relatively new to making handsets, having been spun out of parent company Yota Group in 2012, a maker of LTE hotspots and modems (sales of which part-fund development of the YotaPhone; along with private investors); and secondly because it’s building what amounts to a new category of portable — which means there’s a need to both educate users on the advantages of having a second, e-ink screen at their command, and also listen to other people’s ideas for how to make this new concept really useful. “This is not just a smartphone. We introduced a completely new type of device where user experience is different. The biggest challenge was to educate people what is so cool about second screen?” said Martynov, discussing the length of time from the concept being unveiled to the startup shipping actual product. “We are a small startup trying to win a certain marketshare on a market where big brands are fighting. We can’t do what they do; we need to find our own way — and I strongly believe, with this concept, if we involve broad community of developers, media, bloggers, experts in the whole development process and do a kind of product development crowdsourcing, in a sense, that’s what will make us successful,” he added. One area where Yota Devices is relying on crowdsourcing ideas to pour into YotaPhone’s development is on the apps side. Apps are really needed to build out the utility of that second screen. Today, it’s making its previously selective SDK public so any developers wanting to take advantage of the back-side e-ink screen can download it and start building. Currently there are only around a dozen dedicated apps for the rear screen — including apps for reading, maps and navigation, social media/RSS, notebook/to-do list, organiser and wallpaper apps, plus YotaPhone’s own Put2Back software which allows the user to send info and images from the main screen to the e-ink screen. It’s going to need a lot more to really make its big idea shine. Over the past two+ years, Martynov said the YotaPhone concept has been steadily nourished by outside ideas coming in from developers and others inspired by the idea, and also — over the past two months — from YotaPhone’s first batch of early adopters. As with scores of makers taking to crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter to build products, leaning on a community for feedback and ideas is core to the philosophy of YotaPhone’s smartphone startup — albeit, it’s not taking the direct crowdfunding approach. “When we started YotaPhone two years ago, we had a few examples of why we’re doing this and what the applications might be but during the whole development process, since we unveiled this information, we’ve got tonnes of new ideas and proposals from the community. And we integrated and implemented quite a lot of them in the final commercial product,” he said, adding: “I strongly believe the future of any product development in high tech and devices business and software, any applications, will be crowdsourced.” How many first-gen YotaPhones have been sold so far? Martynov is not currently breaking out a figure, saying it’s too early days. But presumably the sales of the first device haven’t been huge, considering it such a nascent, recently launched leftfield product with limited market release. “We never target big volumes,” he says, when asked about sales figures. “Because it would be quite naive for a 2.5-year-old company [making] a quite unique smartphone to really hit the big volumes. It would be wrong strategy to do so.” Martynov says the first-gen device is really about proving the concept — to industry, to early buyers, and to Yota’s own investors. The next generation YotaPhone is where things are going to get serious. “Our shareholders and investors they believe and they provide long-term commitment to invest in a second, and a third generation of the product,” he tells TechCrunch, adding that the ultimate vision is an e-ink screen that expands to cover 100% of the back of the device, up from the circa 75% covered by the next-gen handset. Pushing the boundaries of EPD to improve its resolution and refresh rate are other aims as YotaPhone evolves. “We have proved there is a customer demand in many countries, we have proved people love it — for example we had a moneyback guarantee program (30 days you can return back the phone) and we didn’t have a single phone returned so far. And we are already unveiling information about second generation of the phone,” he adds. “The development of this phone is going to go full speed — it’s going to go EMEA, China and U.S. So we are getting into a new phase of our business development. We are moving from amateur into professional league, in this sense. We are building mass product with the second generation of YotaPhone. Where the first generation was more like proof of concept.” |
Microsoft’s Aggressive Platform Push | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Microsoft recently announced a number of changes to its Windows 8.x and Windows Phone platforms that underscore it is doubling down on Windows. Breaking Friday was the news that Microsoft will lower the per-device cost to OEMs to ship Windows 8.x on less expensive devices. Bloomberg’s for devices that sell to consumers for $250 or less, Microsoft will charge $15 for use of Windows 8.1, a 70 percent decline on previous rates. This allows OEMs to enjoy far stronger margins on low-cost Windows devices, making the Windows world more attractive to the ever margin-strapped device manufacturer world. Also, this brings the cost of Windows on cheap tablets more in line with the cost of Windows Phone on smartphones, an important change given the coming unification between the two core Windows platforms. Microsoft is still coy on the matter, but its executives have essentially publicly. This morning at Mobile World Congress a sheaf of new product changes to both Windows 8.x and Windows Phone, including improvements to the core desktop experience of Windows proper, and aggressive moves to extend the capability of OEMs to build Windows Phone handsets. In addition to a , and work to allow Android handsets to run Windows Phone more simply, Microsoft listed off a grip of new OEMs that are on board to work on Windows Phone itself; if the platform is to live and die by partners, as it has thus far (both flavors of Windows), making the lives of those partners easier is simple calculus. The announced Windows 8.x changes — detail remains light, expect more at Build in a few months — and the Windows Phone platform improvements continue the company’s bet on both Windows, and its ability to grow a platform of its own. This means Microsoft is wagering that it doesn’t need to retrench to lean on Android, for example, an idea that some externally have floated. What you need to keep in mind is that work Microsoft does now to improve Windows Phone is work proper to its strategy to unify that platform, and experience with Windows RT. So, the work that the company is doing to better support keyboard and mouse users is almost separate; that work is in a different use-case silo. Lowering the cost for Windows on low-cost devices could help the company foster a new cadre of devices that will eventually run whatever the Second Windows is; so the new OEM group supporting Windows Phone implies future hardware support for what comes next. That’s important. All the above — and I’ll have more for you in the coming days — indicates so far as your humble servant can divine from lumpy tea sediment that Microsoft hasn’t changed its course in betting that a unified Windows experience across device classes with a firm shared application development environment is a strategy worth following. Can Windows Phone take on Android or iOS in the short-term? No, at least not in terms of developer buy-in. But a unified Windows ecosystem that helps developers build once and deploy diversely to a growing set of devices could be something different altogether, in the medium and long-term. Microsoft is not out of the arboreal subset, but it is wagering on building something big of its own, instead of depending on others. In the platforms wars, there likely isn’t another option. It remains a question of execution. |
Android Remains The Outsized Giant At 70% Of Smartphone Sales, Phablets And iPhone 5c Make Waves: Kantar | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | When it comes to sales of smartphones, Android is the green giant that continues to tower over the competition. In the last three months that ended in January 2014, the Google-developed operating system accounted for around 70% of sales across 12 key markets, according to the latest figures from WPP market research division . In comparison, its most credible rivals either fell further behind, or simply stood still: Apple took 22.1% of sales (down nearly two percentage points ); and Windows Phone was flat at 4.4%. A mixed bag of “others,” which includes BlackBerry but also legacy, discontinued platforms such as Symbian, accounted for the rest. With Google’s mobile platform installed on 7 out of every 10 smartphones that consumers buy, Android seems almost impossible to beat. But with reports of , the question may no longer be which platform is dominant, but what the state of play is with OEMs building on top of that outsized leader. Samsung continues to sit on the top of that pile. Kantar director Dominic Sunnebo tells me that in the last three months Samsung took 32.6% of sales across 12 key markets — up slightly from last month’s 32.2%. But when you drill down into regional sales, you start to see specific manufacturers giving the Korean giant a run for its money. In the case of Europe’s big five markets of UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, for example, Kantar notes that “Samsung’s dominance of this market is being eroded” — much as it observed . “In Europe Android continues to move towards 70% share, and the real battle now is among the Android manufacturers,” writes Sunnebo. Samsung has over half of all sales at 39.5%, “but this is lower compared with last year.” In contrast, LG (6.9%), Sony (9.4%), Motorola (1.7%) and even new brand Wiko (2%) all are seeing growing market shares of sales — a trend that Kantar contends will continue with the launch of new devices at MWC this week. Meanwhile, some notable things about Apple. iOS-based devices saw sales declines in a few markets, but surprisingly, the biggest of all was in the U.S., a country where Apple has traditionally been strongest. In the last three months in the U.S., sales of Apple handsets were down 7.7 percentage points to 38.9% of sales compared to a year ago. But interestingly, Apple is also seeing something of a shift in terms of what consumers are buying. Whereas sales of its new 5s devices have been dominating globally, now the less expensive 5c is seeing a mini surge. In one example — the very saturated market of the UK, where smartphone penetration is 70% and 86% of all handsets sold in the past three months were smartphones — Kantar says the 5s model outsold the 5c 3:1. But with 5c sales picking up to become the number-three smartphone in the UK, now the ratio is 2:1. So: still outselling, but less so. The U.S. is seeing the same ratio, Sunnebo tells me, while Japan and Australia are still seeing 5s outsell the 5c at 3:1 and in China there are nine 5s devices sold for every 5c. The China proportion, when you think about it, is not that surprising: there, Android completely dominates the middle and lower end of the smartphone sales spectrum, so if you are going to put the cash out for a premium iPhone, you are likely to go for gold. Or: in for a penny, in for a pound, as the British like to say. Why the bigger shift to 5c? My theory is that now that the rush of early adopting iPhone 5s users have somewhat abated, the later wave is slightly more price sensitive, and that’s leading some to opt for the (ever so slightly) more economical model. Something else that Kantar points out with the iPhone is that demographics and usage vary depending on whether you are a 5s or 5c user: in the UK, 74% of 5c buyers are female, versus 36% for the 5s. It notes that 5s users are also more inclined to use their handsets for “data heavy” uses like video and music. In other platforms, Windows Phone continues to struggle in certain markets like the U.S. — where Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore today that the company continues to see a “tough market” with consumers, and Kantar notes it took just 5% of smartphone sales in the last three months. But in others regions like Europe its performance is more positive. Windows Phone’s share of sales in the last period was just over 10%, and it is the fastest growing platform in Europe, putting it ever closer to Apple — which is currently at 19% of all smartphone sales in the region. What gets the credit for Nokia’s success? Budget phones like the Lumia 520, says Kantar, which have become something of a gateway device for new smartphone owners. “Nokia has continued its successful tactic of sucking up remaining featurephone owners across Europe,” writes Sunnebo. “Even in Britain, where smartphone penetration is at 70%, there are over 14 million featurephone consumers for it to target. At some point Nokia will have to start making serious inroads into the smartphone competition, but for the time being its strategy in Europe is working. Crucial for Nokia will be its ability to keep low-end owners loyal and upgrade them to mid to high-end models.” But just as low-end is one entry point, so are certain form factors. In China, where handsets and tablets are rapidly taking the place of PCs as a consumer’ main internet device, Kantar says that “phablets” with screens larger than five inches accounted for 31% of all sales in the last three months. Screens bigger than 5.5% took 9% of sales. Sunnebo says that China is a standout in this regard. “Phablet sales across Europe and US have been gradually rising, but it’s China which is driving demand,” he writes. “Phablet owners are less likely than the average consumer to own a tablet, indicating that phablets are increasingly being used as the primary device to browse online in China.” Just as colorful 5c handsets have apparently caught the eye of female consumers, phablets are also skewing “heavily to women” in China. But it remains to be seen whether the phablet is here to stay. “It’s too early to forecast the long-term trends for China, but in Europe where the first wave of phablet owners are now coming to upgrade, over 40% are down-sizing to a smaller device,” writes Sunnebo. Photo: |
Technology Unlocks “Economies Of Unscale” For Small Businesses | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | It’s been an exhilarating time for small business owners. Twenty years ago, they lacked the tools to expand outside of their niche markets. Today, the Internet opens a flourishing global market of consumers ready and willing to engage with businesses of any size. As Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, once told me, the company’s largest customers may not even exist today. Anyone can turn a living room idea into the next Fortune 500 company. Yet for all of the Internet’s opportunity, small business owners have never felt more overwhelmed. The demands placed on them are mammoth, from effective search engine marketing to online payments, logistics, customer support, and operations. Even today, much of their daily work is done with paper and pencil, even while the world transitions to mobile-first. It’s little wonder that our nation’s small businesses face such tough odds. That’s why I’m excited about the development of next-generation business platforms that provide small business owners with simple and beautiful tools to compete. We’re finally moving beyond byzantine processes and complicated workflows to mobile-enabled software centered on clarity and accessibility. As a consequence, we are slowly ,” in which small businesses aided by these platforms can suddenly defeat even the largest of corporations – and become household names. We’ve seen this dynamic already in payments with Stripe and Square as well as in the back office with and . I believe payroll is next for disruption, which is this past week. All of these startups are taking advantage of this new world, offering us a case study on how to leverage economies of unscale to give small businesses a decided marketplace advantage. For those looking into the small to medium business space, there are three key lessons to focus on. The most prominent is that businesses are rapidly shifting to mobile. Small business owners are used to running their personal lives on Gmail and iCloud, yet when they arrive at work, they are forced to regress 20 years back to clunky desktop software (or worse). They expect the next wave of platforms to scale with their usage of mobile devices, and they are ready to adapt to new workflows. Square has vigorously taken advantage of this shift, offering a product that not only replaces the legacy of cash registers, but also offers whole new options for small businesses. As anyone walking by the Ferry Building in San Francisco can attest, artists and photographers can now accept credit cards right at their tables. This not only increases convenience for customers, but it also allows these artists to track their sales and easily analyze their profits. In this mobile world, we suddenly have access to a point of sale anywhere, at anytime. And with Expensify mobile, web workers, freelancers and road warriors can now easily create expense reports by snapping pictures of receipts and submitting them on the go. However, next-generation business platforms shouldn’t just clone ancient systems onto mobile devices. Instead, they must consider seizing the opportunity to expand the dialogue between technology and owners. For instance, we’ve learned a lot over the past few decades about what makes great companies work. The best startup founders understand that owners don’t have the time to consume all of that research, but instead bake those insights directly into the design of their products. The second lesson then is that these new platforms are focused on the person, and surfacing the human relationships which underlie how we work. ZenPayroll was designed to place employees and employers as equals in the compensation discussion, inculcating a culture of trust within a company. Furthermore, it enables employees to dedicate part of their paycheck to a nonprofit organization. That not only makes contributing to charity easy, but it also encourages a culture of giving, which can have positive ramifications for company performance. The final lesson is that new business platforms have to be open in order to be most effective. Small and medium businesses hate walled-off data stores and complicated workflows. Given the diversity of small businesses, no service can possibly hope to serve everyone with their own product. Instead, developing platforms for others to build upon is crucial. Take the small business accounting service Xero, which offers dozens of “add-ons” on its platform in categories as diverse as inventory management, time tracking, point of sale, and eCommerce. Xero gets to leverage the efforts of these other developers, while simultaneously building up its core value to business owners. Any one of the 28 million firms in America today could become a leading company using the economies of unscale created by these next-generation business platforms. Our work, though, is only partly finished. We need better platforms to handle worker training, recruiting, sales management, product development, intellectual property, customer service, and the list goes on. With more open platforms to grow upon, new companies can better grow quickly and sustainably, and that’s not just good for entrepreneurs, but for our nation. |
Someone Is Remaking Classic Zelda… in First Person 3D… in Virtual Reality | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Ready for a trip down memory lane? A nice little hike up Mount Nostalgia? Someone has set out to rebuild . As in, 8-bit, 1986, “It’s Dangerous To Go Alone” Legend of Zelda. But with a twist! These guys are recreating the game in 3D. And, in one of the world’s finest examples of “because we can” hackery, they’re building it for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Strap on a Rift, and you’ll see the game from Link’s perspective. The end result ends up looking like something straight out of a bizarro universe, where we’ve figured out things like 3D physics and virtual reality headsets, but for some reason are still using 8-bit sprites for all of our graphics. It’s not always , but it’s still by all means worth seeing for yourself. The developer behind the project has only finished select parts of the world (the main overworld, and the first dungeon), but estimates that the full game should be ready to go by March of 2014. If you’ve got an Oculus Rift handy, you can find the current beta release — otherwise, you can see a good chunk of what’s in the game right now in the playthrough videos (by Youtubers Vaecon and Martyn) below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gzXHUyfdyM |
U.S. Investments Surge For African Tech Entrepreneurs | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | From the to , American high tech companies and venture capitalists are increasingly supporting startups across the African continent. Whether it’s the in Botswana that Jim Goetz mentioned in his take on ; the launch of IBM’s new innovation centers in Lagos and Casablanca; in Africa, or the on how to engage the private sector more effectively, African entrepreneurship is on investors minds. In fact, 2013 was the most active year for technology investment on the continent, according to data from .
And Africa’s community of entrepreneurs is only growing. Those IBM Innovation Centers in Lagos and Casablanca will give founders of new tech companies access to IBM technology and expertise around big data, analytics, and cloud computing, as well as skills training and business and marketing support. “In the last decade we’ve seen a lot of transformation [in Africa]. There’s increased stability and a lot of bandwidth that’s come on line, tremendous economic growth, plus a lot of infrastructure being built and a lot of foreign investment,” said Solomon Assefa, an IBM researcher and vice president of Science and Technology. Assefa, who also currently serves as a Program Manager for Growth Markets and Strategic Initiatives in Science and Technology at IBM, said the goal is to create an ecosystem where entrepreneurs can create new products using existing technologies. “We believe Africa is vital and we think IBM is going to be very very essential for productive growth and development.” Other executives at America’s largest corporations agree. Microsoft, which launched its in February 2013, has recently instituted a new lending initiative which from across the continent earlier this month. The program began in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, but Microsoft expects to expand across Africa with the grant program and partnerships with African startup incubators, according to Amrote Abdella, the director for VC and Startups in Microsoft’s 4Afrika Initiative. While Microsoft’s investments in the continent will be in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, global technology investor is in the early stages of making multi-million dollar bets on continental African startups. “The growth we’re going to see here is tremendous,” said Marcin Hejka, a managing director for Intel Capital and head of its Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa and Russia/CIS investment group. “I’m quite positive about that because we’ve seen it before in other emerging markets, in Russia, in Eastern Europe, In Latin America and in China.” Hejka would not disclose how much Intel Capital is willing to commit across the African continent, but would only say, “This is the message I give my team in Africa: behave like there is no limitation [on capital].” Intel has two investments in Africa and has made three commitments to its portfolio since it opened its office in Lagos last year. In December 2013 the firm committed to follow-on financing for , an Accra-based company which sells mobile content delivery software. “I’m absolutely certain we will see multi-billion exits in the technology space in Africa in a couple of years,” Hejka said. Africa’s technology revolution is a function of the dramatic rise in access to and the s and the development of a home-grown market for and . “The availability of bandwidth in Africa increased by a factor of 200 over the last two years, and now this bandwidth is propagating inland from the coast” said Intel Capital’s Hejka. “Furthermore, wholesale prices of bandwidth have dropped 90% in the past two years.” Indeed, the development of Africa’s technology infrastructure and ecosystem is happening at breakneck speed. “Africa is getting everything at once… and there might be a risk of it being too much at once,” said Mbwana Alliy, the founder of the seed-stage investment firm . “A lot of things are happening at once: smartphones and undersea cables at once and private equity investors and startup accelerators at once.” The startups in Alliy’s accelerator have managed to ride the surge of interest. Five out of the ten companies he’s backed have already raised subsequent rounds of financing. “Is there a Series A crunch that I’m experiencing here? Not really,” he said. International investors, both private equity firms and technology-focused investors have already staked claims across the continent and are backing new companies. Private equity firms like , , , and have been active in the market for years, but tech investors like and have recently joined the fray. Some of private equity’s heaviest hitters like are investing in the continent now. Rocket alone will commit roughly $200 million to its African Internet Holding portfolio company.
Africa Internet Holding, which is backed by , Rocket, and Millicom International Cellular, is taking the platform approach to building African clones of successful internet enabled businesses like Amazon and others. “The reason why this is happening is because Africa is a very different place for the internet than anywhere else in the world,” said Jeremy Hodara, the co-Chief Executive of Africa Internet Holdings. “People in Africa will directly buy online [and] if you take all the big internet businesses, we can do them in Africa and we can do even more because there are no brick and mortar competitors.” Not only are African startups building the internet infrastructure for Africa, but they’re also building the physical infrastructure to support their businesses at the same time. “There’s a lot of wealth in Africa. A whole lot of wealth in Africa,” said Chris Folayan, the founder of , another e-commerce startup focused on the continent, which is backed by an undisclosed multi-million dollar investment form Helios Investment Partners. “[And] Nigerians even today can not buy items directly for over 90% of the global e-commerce sites,” Folayan said. “They have the funds and they have the means to buy these items, so why not create a platform where they can buy these items?” MallforAfrica has done just that. Using the company’s website or mobile app, shoppers can browse directly on web sites that do not allow consumers on the continent to buy goods, buy them, and have them delivered through MallforAfrica for a fee. There are 70 sites which have partnered with Folayan’s company, representing some 7.8 billion items. Since its launch the company has processed 25,000 transactions. “You have all of these things in place that literally create the foundation for a very advanced infrastructure,” Folayan said. “When those things are in place you can see this is a continent and [Nigeria] is a country that are ready to play ball.” |
Cleaning Startup Homejoy Opens An Office In New York City | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | offers its home cleaning services in , but it managed to expand without opening any offices outside of its San Francisco headquarters — until January, when it opened an office in New York City’s financial district. It’s been almost exactly a year since , following the same system it has used in other geographies — a network of contract cleaners overseen by on-the-ground city and regional managers. That approach makes for “an effective business model” by keeping costs relatively low, said Danny Rueda, the company’s northeast regional manager. However, this presents challenges when it comes to giving those managers “a connection to HQ, a connection to the company.” So one of the main purposes of the New York office is create “a hub” where Homejoy city managers across the northeast can meet up and share tips and experiences. In addition, Rueda said he’s hiring small teams for customer service and data science. If he’s successful, perhaps we’ll see Homejoy offices opening in other US cities and following a similar model. Apparently Rueda moved out to San Francisco from New York last year when he joined Homejoy, only to be sent back to the East Coast three months later for his current role. The bicoastal back-and-forth was “a little bit of a shock,” he said, but he was also “flattered” to be given responsibility over an important region to Homejoy’s business. Asked if there are any unique opportunities or challenges in the northeast, Rueda said he couldn’t think of any. Instead, he suggested that the obstacles tend to be more city specific — Boston, for example, doesn’t have as much public transit as some other large cities, so it’s important to recruit more cleaners with cars. Homejoy, by the way, late last year. Around that time, the team also gave me to run the company’s operations. [image via ] |
Relive The Magic Of The ATL Meetup + Pitch-Off | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Oh, what a night! For the second time in as many years, TechCrunch hit the streets of Atlanta this week to find some of the best and brightest startups that the south has to offer. Over 1,000 people attended the event, with 15 startups giving a sixty-second pitch to a packed house. Female-friendly wearable company took home the first place prize, scoring a demo table in TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley. Meanwhile, a Plated-type food subscription service called PeachDish got second, Kanga got third, and MyCluckCluck (for organizing babysitters and nannies) took home the audience choice award. It was a night to remember, which is why we recorded a bunch of it. Enjoy! |
Retail Software Company Ecommera Raises $41M From Dawn Capital, WPP And Others | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | a software company that helps retailers use their customer purchasing data and more to improve the retail experience, has secured $41 million in Series C funding led by Dawn Capital together with investors ePlanet Capital, Frog Capital, Westcoast Capital, WPP and WTI participating. This brings the company’s total funding to over $50 million. The company, which was founded by the former Chief Scientist of Amazon, and former Chief Strategy Officer of IBM Smarter Commerce, offers data analytics software that uses retailer data like views, inventory and purchase history to make better decisions around customer service, merchandising, fulfillment and more. Specifically, the company’s SaaS helps retailers to understand the what is driving sales and growth on an e-commerce site and what isn’t working. For example, the software will be able to tell which products a retailer is promoting are selling out, and how it is affecting customer satisfaction. In 2013, eCommera processed and analyzed more than $4 billion in online orders for 70 brands across 32 countries, including Neiman Marcus, Brooks Brothers, Clarins, Sur la Table, Calendars.com, and more. As John Squire, President, eCommera North America, explained to me, as more retailers put inventory online, they are looking for ways to understand merchandising, customer service strategy and more. In terms of competition, the company goes head to head with IBM and others. |
Netflix Reaches Direct Access Deal With Comcast [Updated] | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Netflix has with Internet service provider, Comcast, to gain direct access to deliver streaming video through its network. The deal will cut out third-party transit providers and enable Netflix to more efficiently stream video to Comcast subscribers. Netflix eats up an incredible amount of global bandwidth. In 2012, Netflix . This number probably spike last week, when 2% of Netflix’s 33 million views binge watched their new (ultra-addicting) political thriller, House Of Cards. “In exchange for payment, Netflix will get direct access to Comcast’s broadband network,” explains The Journal. If Netflix is indeed paying Comcast for direct access, it sets an important precedent for the future of the Internet. The deal will enable Netflix to connect with Comcast’s network directly, rather than paying third-party transit providers to offload its content. Previously, Netflix routed traffic through CDNs and transit providers that connected with Comcast’s network at select peering points. But as Netflix traffic has increased, those peering points have become overwhelmed with its traffic. The Comcast deal sets a precedent whereby Netflix could connect directly with other major ISPs such as Verizon and AT&T. The Federal Communications Commission how to advance new rules on open access to the Internet and pay-for-service deals between companies and Internet service providers; it’s unclear if they’ll find a way would prevent more deals like the one reportedly inked between Netflix and Comcast. Certainly, this will ramp up the political pressure to find some kind of solution to balance network congestion and open Internet access. |
Mobile Is From Mars, Facebook Is From Venus, And WhatsApp Is Ephemeral | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | You can only admire Mark Zuckerberg. If the game is Whack-A-mole he is prepared to whack them, small, medium or large – no matter the cost. Whacking moles is the only way to earn points and points translate into life. Think about it. Would you give up 20 percent of your worth and 35 percent of your cash if you got to live on in the face of an otherwise certain demise. Of course you would! By this criteria Facebook is brave, bold and right. And it definitely didn’t overpay. Bravo, Facebook (really!). But we have seen this coming, and it doesn’t end here. This is Act I, Scene 3 of a multi-act drama. Let’s recall the previous scenes. I have written about them on TechCrunch. Facebook has, through this acquisition, made the transformation from a web-based social network into a production studio and holding company for a portfolio of in-house productions like Paper and Messenger, combined with some outsourced efforts like Instagram and WhatsApp. When Facebook launched Facebook Home, it tried to change mobile into a Facebook world. Facebook has become the mobile-era equivalent of New Line Cinema or Electronic Arts. Like them, it has to now focus on audience and because of that, distribution. This is a new game. It is not the same as having a centralized social network with a captive audience. It involves the continuous production of hits, similar to HBO and Netflix. And for those it has to acquire, it turns the Facebook executives into players of whack-a-mole. Facebook is no longer a technology platform. It’s a studio. As a mobile studio, Facebook is just a developer with apps. It is dependent on the owner of the operating system and the device for distribution – just as companies in the heyday of Microsoft were dependent on the OS and device. Distribution deals were cut to get your “App” on the desktop. Microsoft might suddenly put a feature in the OS and kill the need for it in an app. Now Apple and Google sit in that position. For Facebook, Apple and Google represent its “Microsoft.” iMessage and Hangouts are already large competitors to WhatsApp and Messenger. Photos are the captive of the OS via Google+ on Android and PhotoStream on iOS. Survival is about innovating where the platform owners will not go – at least any time soon. Facebook has no track record of success in this world and will need to out-innovate both startups and the OS owners in order to prosper. To be clear, this was predictable and inevitable. The only other possible outcome was the Yahooization of Facebook – a company washed up on the shore as the tide goes out on the old era. This is the right thing for Facebook to do for its future and its investors. But unlike Investors, Facebook’s users don’t care whether it wins and survives or fails and dies. This is the other new element of Act I, Scene III. Users are truly in control on mobile. They adopt applications simply because they like them. This can be based on a social truth — their friends use them — or a feature they love, as with Snapchat and, earlier, Instagram. Users really care about features and friends. But they no longer need a holistic social ecosystem to provide them. A disappearing photo message today, an anonymous secrets app the next, and who knows what tomorrow. Mobile is not a place with a solid floor under the feet of an app studio any more than the movie-going audience are loyal to a specific studio. Mark Zuckerberg and his team are doing an excellent job, but in the long run they cannot win because, just like a Snapchat message, apps themselves are ephemeral. Which Windows apps from the days of Windows 3.1 still dominate the platform? Even platforms are somewhat ephemeral, as the emergence of wearables and context reveal. The pace of change is faster than at any time in history and the scale of the potential audience for the “new” is unparalleled. Entreprenuer’s should applaud Facebook’s instincts and execution and build the things that will make its attempts at survival difficult. They will be richly rewarded. The bigger they think, and the longer-term the implications of their inventions, the more threatening they will be, and of course more valuable. It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur. |
Wearables Attack! Huawei Announces A Fitness Band That’s Also A Bluetooth Headset | John Biggs | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | Your fitness band got into my bluetooth headset! No, your bluetooth headset got into my fitness band! Stop! You’re both right! In what I suspect will be a minor blip in the interstitial wearable world, China’s Huawei has announced a Bluetooth sports band complete with pedometer and calorie counter called the . Why is it called the TalkBand? You can remove the 1.4-inch flexible OLED-fronted lozenge of electronics on the top and stick it into your ear, making it a Bluetooth headset. The B1 works like any standard fitness band and pairs via NFC. However, because it can also act as a headset you could feasibly go for a run and take a call simultaneously, a boon to cardio-aware on the go. I doubt we’ll ever see this thing stateside so you’ll simply have to savor the strange idea of something you sweat all over going directly into your earhole. |
The WhatsApp Story Challenges Some Of The Valley’s Conventional Wisdom | Semil Shah | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | TechCrunch Silicon Valley and the tech world at large are filled with a variety of conventions. These conventions are now created, captured, and shared ad nauseam disguised as blog posts, tweets with links, and countless message boards. The benefit of such a canon is we all have access to a rich repository of knowledge — the cost, however, is we all, perhaps unwittingly, are exposed to the same suite of playbooks, which contain the same conventions, which could, if we’re not paying close attention, and especially when amplified in an echo chamber, trick us into believing a certain reality which, in turn, script our actions and lives down a path of predictability, or worse, mediocrity. Like many of you, the entire story around WhatsApp’s acquisition this week has . It might be easy to quickly dismiss this whole event as an extreme outlier (which it is). Of course, this is a big outlier event, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be examined. The reality is that this week’s news was like Haley’s Comet, a once-in-a-lifetime event where everyone who works in and around startups stopped what they were doing, went outside, and looked up at the sky to catch a glimpse of something they’d only read about online. In situations such as these, my mind scans back over all the “ ” or conventional wisdom that swirls around the atmosphere, and the story of WhatsApp does call on us to examine and challenge (yet again) some of those conventions: For a variety of reasons, Yahoo! gets beaten up by the press and in social media. The company has problems and is working through them, but as a result, employees and alumni have kind of been a soft target. The two WhatsApp founders worked at Yahoo! They built a native mobile product at scale, across many mobile platforms, and assembled a team to build a complex, global telephony system. One of the WhatsApp founders applied for a job at Facebook and was rejected. I’ve seen countless startups get star-eyed trying to recruit “so-and-so” from a big name company, but all that glitters isn’t always gold. Well, that’s largely true, but WhatsApp remained headquartered deep in Silicon Valley. They didn’t even have an office sign. Hidden from the city’s bright lights, the company didn’t seek out PR coverage or any of the other trappings in today’s startup lifestyle culture. The WhatsApp founders were in their mid to late thirties. I often shudder when I hear this refrain. Of course, apps should look nice, but at minimum, they should work to solve some problem or provide some service or entertainment. WhatsApp simply worked for people. It didn’t have fancy features. It solved a problem at scale, building products for the following platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, Nokia, S40, Symbian S60, and others. The Whatsapp team took on the challenge of building products for all sorts of phones, many of which readers of this blog wouldn’t ever touch, even those on older Nokia and Samsung handsets. The WhatsApp founders did not have any personal brand. I would guess if 1,000 tech insiders were polled, less than 5% could’ve named the founders or anyone at the company. In my opinion, many early-stage founders over-value the equity in their startups. Yes, a lot of sweat, blood, and tears go into starting even the smallest outfit, but an environment so competitive for products and so fragmented for talent, what was once conventional in terms of equity for early or key hires may now be outdated. Given this, I respect Zuckerberg’s aggressiveness to give up a really large chunk of Facebook to partner with WhatsApp, and to add one of WhatsApp’s founders to his Board of Directors. Instead of hoarding this equity, Zuckerberg realizes he must partner for the battles ahead. WhatsApp did both. Depending on what platform a user downloaded the app on, WhatsApp would charge them about $1 or, at times it was free — they also charged a $1/year subscription fee after the first year. WhatsApp was expensive to run, so it wasn’t breaking the bank in revenue, but they at least had cash flows, and one might conclude from this that such inflows helped them pace their operations and not get enamored, enveloped, and distracted by the pomp and circumstance of a modern-day fundraising process. There are more conventions that were broken here. How about the fact that WhatsApp was a tiny company compared to their footprint, at only about 50 employees, mostly split between engineering and support? Or, how one of the Valley’s most successful venture firms — Sequoia — was quietly the major outside investor across a few funding rounds at the company, electing to not use their networks and celebrity to announce such deals or trumpet the company’s growth trajectories? Or, speaking of venture, how this particular VC firm missed the first wave of social networks, invested a large sum in the debacle known as Color, and then, in about three years’ time, turned their investment in WhatsApp into one of the great IRRs in the history of venture capital? There are countless angles to examine, but the meta-point of this exercise is to use this rare, brilliant event to briefly hit the “pause” button and reexamine if we ourselves or our products or our companies are following a conventional path, one we’ve been told, or exposed to, or read somewhere. I’m not suggesting we throw out all the rules and engage in chaos. But, it is a good time to reexamine them. Do we take these conventional biases into our work, into our lives? Do these conventions inform our recruiting strategies, our paths for monetization and/or growth, how we think about product design? It’s easy to start to believe something once you’ve heard it enough, or if it shows up in your Twitter feed often. It has to be true! Or, perhaps not…perhaps WhatsApp became a mega-outlier because it either consciously bucked or unwittingly ignored so many of the popular conventions we hear of today. |
Opera Launches Its Max Data-Savings App For Android | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | About a week ago, Opera its new and allowed users to pre-register. Starting today, Opera will roll out Max to these pre-registered Android users in the U.S. on a first-come, first-served bases. Pre-registered European users can also install it today (there doesn’t seem to be a cap for them). Opera Max effectively takes the compression technology the company developed to power its Opera Mini mobile browser and the “turbo” mode in its desktop apps and extends it to all of Android. The app sets up a VPN connection to Opera on your phone that is activated every time you switch from your home WiFi network to the cell network. All your non-encrypted data is then routed through Opera’s servers and compressed there. If you’re on a metered plan, having Opera compress most of the images, videos and text you pull in over the cell network sounds like a great idea, as long as you are okay with the potential privacy tradeoff of having all your data go through Opera’s networks. I’ve been testing the app for the last week and it’s a pretty seamless experience. You install it once and just forget about it from then on. It just works. I did not notice any major increase in lag when using the app and Opera seems to be pretty conservative when it comes to image compression, because I’m having a hard time finding any compression artifacts. You can always go back into the app and turn it off, but I’ve never quite felt the need to do so. Otherwise, the Max app just sits in the background and keeps track of your data usage. Opera says if you are a heavy Flipboard, Vine and Instagram user, you can expect to save about 50 percent of your bandwidth by using Max. Based on my experience, that sounds about right. My savings in Instagram were actually quite a bit higher than 50 percent without any noticeable decline in image quality because of the compression. If you are mostly surfing the web when you are out and about, though, you may not see any major differences (unless you spend most of your time on very image-heavy sites). Of course, if you are mostly in the Facebook app or email, chances are you are on an encrypted connection, so all your traffic will bypass Opera’s servers anyway. In daily use, my savings averaged out somewhere between 25 and 35 percent. Still, Max can definitely help you get more mileage out of your mobile plans and may be especially useful if you are travelling internationally and only have a relatively small data allowance. One thing Opera didn’t quite clarify in its teaser, though, is that Max doesn’t quite come for free. During the beta period, Max will remain free. You may see the “days of savings left” meter in the app and you will have to go into the app to charge up for another week for free. After the beta period ends, though, Opera plans to give users the option to either see one ad per day of savings or to pay $1 per month. That seems like a pretty fair price and if you are on a metered plan, that $1 may just pay for itself. |
MEMI, Because A Purse Is Where Phone Calls Go To Die | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | A while ago, HTC came up with this , which had a little charm that hung out of a purse and notified women when they were getting a phone call or alert. The idea — that purse-carrying females need something besides their phone, packed deeply in their black hole of a purse, to alert them to incoming notifications — wasn’t all that bad. The execution, however, was abysmal. Which brings me to . Memi is a stylish bracelet created by Leslie Pearson that is meant to be worn by ladies with purse-bound phones. Through Bluetooth and an accompanying app, users can select certain people to “let through.” That way, when a child or boyfriend or boss calls, the Memi bracelet buzzes to alert the user of an incoming call or text message. But it doesn’t buzz for every little thing, allowing users to “unplug,” as Pearson puts it. Memi also buzzes for calendar event reminders, and comes with three distinct vibration patterns to let you know if you’re getting a call, text, or reminder. The Memi can hold a charge for up to five days, depending on use, and charges via a discrete micro USB port. It also packs an LED indicator light to let you know when it’s on, paired, and working. “Other devices (namely smartwatches) on the market are looking to get people more plugged into their phones,” said Pearson. “They seek to repeat as much phone functionality as they can on the user’s wrist. We are looking to help people actually unplug while staying connected to the people that matter. We want to help women be able to focus more on the moment and reduce the noise and distraction in their lives.” Memi beat its $100K and has gone on to raise $700K from friends and family. The company has received over 500 pre-orders, with shipments planned for the summer. The team is currently in the process of raising a seed round of $1 million. |
Kickstarter Coins | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | B. Levine is the Editor-in-Chief of the , an independent, original content platform focused on the future of money. He is also the Chief Visionary Officer at , a consortium working with brands and individuals to build customer cryptocurrencies for good. Contact Adam and follow him on Twitter . Crowdfunding has become increasingly popular over the last few years and the market somewhat saturated. One of the problems of crowdfunding is if you don’t need or want the reward offered in exchange for your donation, there isn’t much incentive to support a project. This is a problem we can change, and by doing so reinvent cryptocurrency as we know it. I’ll also describe “The Startup” that I believe many people will eventually create to provide the services described. Please steal the idea. Why are cryptocurrencies valuable? In the case of Bitcoin, because it was the first and is by far the largest, receiving the majority of monetary and media attention, with the one harmoniously building the other. Look at the second most popular coin, Litecoin, and the value is not as clear. The technical changes made compared to Bitcoin are slight. Unless you really value a larger monetary base (4x more than bitcoin) or faster confirmation times that provide illusory benefit (you just need 4x more of them for the same amount of certainty), there isn’t much you can do with Litecoin that you can’t do at far more places or with far more people than Bitcoin. This is because the only reason to buy Litecoin is an expectation that its value will increase over time due to more people buying them speculating the same thing. Lacking a good reason or first-mover and earned-press advantage, you’re relying on the greater fool theory of investing which is a recipe for long-term disappointment. Indeed, the great hope for Litecoin or any standard alt-coin (any cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin) is to find its way to an exchange that benefits from easier trading than in forums or chat rooms, where trust can be hard to find. The thing we’re missing is a reason. The greater fool suffers from there always being a limit to the number of fools before the gains start to slide and buyers turn to sellers trying to lock in gains. Once upon a time the value of dollars was secured by gold. You could trade in a minimum amount with the issuer of the currency (the federal government, or private banks depending on the time period) and this secured the purchasing power of the dollars. Fixing a price to gold isn’t because gold is the only thing you can peg it to, but rather because it’s thought of as something valuable and can be universal in nature. But not everything needs to be universal in nature, and some things that are universal in nature don’t need to be valuable themselves as money. Goods and services are valuable in monetary terms but not in a monetary sense. By fixing issuance of a custom cryptocurrency to a good or service, with a company ready to accept it at a fixed or floating rate, a single individual or group — even only capable of local distribution — can support a globally tradable cryptocurrency should the story be compelling enough or the private issuance small enough. This means that even in a currency with the entire money supply in circulation, you can have a long-term controlled deflationary trend simply by lowering the exchange rate at predictable intervals allowing people to buy or sell in advance of the change based on their situation. So mining really is a marketing decision; you pay the price of not being the first seller of the currency, instead relegating yourself to 50 percent while allowing those doing the work to run away with wild profits. They’re the ones who get to tell everyone how great it was doing it. Take any freemium software-as-a-service company; for premium features they could accept U.S. dollars as happens now. They could also issue their own cryptocurrency, a token that offers savings when used with the company it is associated with. The service would accept at 20 percent off the U.S. dollar prices for all their services. It would start off mined, and 50 percent of the block reward would go to the company, with 50 percent going to the miners. The miners have a coin that has real value because from minute one, you can use it to purchase these particular services. And yet as a cryptocurrency, it is tradable for Bitcoin, on exchanges, etc. The network will initially start because computational power is cheap and early adopters are more inclined to devote CPUs to mining cycles than they are to dollars on a service they might not even want. If your company only accepts dollars, there’s no reason for your customers to care about the company once their needs have been met. With a proprietary cryptocurrency, simply holding some of their value in your coin means they profit from the growth of your business and future price increases in the cryptocurrency value. This can be done naturally by adjusting to the market over time. Or it can be done via a long-term schedule published in advance to allow the market to price in the information and bias the customer’s mental math toward holding your coin for future gains. Since a project’s coin is really just a claim on future value from that specific project, anyone holding your coins is a stakeholder vested by their actions whether mined or purchased on a market. If more people are interested in your project or product later, a fixed-supply token will, seeing more demand and no change to supply, become more valuable both for the company and any users holding it. One of the most appealing things about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is their rules-based nature. The rules are set out in advance and apply to everyone evenly because the protocol simply has no capacity to accept anything outside the rules or to deny anything within the rules. Ideally this would be done on a schedule that causes slow, steady deflation in the currency over time. Each token becomes more valuable because fewer tokens are required to pay for the service that still costs the same amount of U.S. dollars. Once a customer spends the coins with the company, the coins don’t need to be destroyed; as the company receives them they should be sold back into the market. SaaS is an exceptional early use-case for this sort of proprietary-token service. Unlike most businesses, cost is primarily front-loaded with only maintenance and R&D as primary costs after the initial launch. Because of this, the per-user cost of providing premium features on SaaS is basically a rounding error rather than a relevant factor determining the sale price. The company could sell them back into the market to take profits in Bitcoin or another currency of choice. At the point you wish to stop trading with them (which should be at least five years in projected duration), there should be a final turn-in period either done surreptitiously, where received stock is simply not sold back onto the market, or be announced, which might lead to a rush against the price. If built on one of the upcoming Metacoin platforms like Counterparty, these tokens can be made “callable” at a contractually specified price on a contractually specified day. So where every Cryptocurrency used to live on forever once it was created, experiments and mistakes can now be unwound. Once the market is mostly cleared of the legacy coin, a new one can be launched and the cycle can start over again. You can create a price with anything simply because someone, somewhere is willing to trade something else for whatever you have. Obviously some assets are better than others, but instead of thinking about raw goods, let’s update our mindset. product, good or service offered by a company can be physically backed by a product, and the more popular the product the more attractive it is as a good to hold. With a -type product, messaging, financial or otherwise, the course is simple; it’s a rotating option that grants whomever holds the “share” (see and Daniel Larimer) a copy of the new blockchain product on a set date at a fixed rate. Even after a company has exhausted their potential ideas and abandoned such a coin, the very fact that it is so inexpensive could be its resurrection. Another company could opportunistically buy those very cheap and abandoned shares, then announce they’ll be honoring them for their service or product with the rate of exchange being the characteristic that defines the intrinsic value since they are one and the same. With physical products, you have the liability of existence, and that means the equation is different. You must project production and determine your monetary base based on a multiple of that number, with again a gradual increase in value over time to promote users to spread out spending over a slope rather than piling in all at once. Let’s say I can produce 10,000 high-quality rare wood-cutting boards in a year and I want to start redeeming at 100 woodcoins per cutting board, with each cutting board going for $50 when paid in dollars. That gives us 1,000,000 Woodcoins for a total money supply once mining is completed. Your production is such that you would rather ship more at the end of next year than the beginning, say because you need to ramp up production. Every month, you lower the price a little bit in woodcoins. These planned price drops are points around which the value of Woodcoins rise in advance because they will be able to buy more in the near future. Aside from reference products, in this case a cutting board, an entire offering could be built around this with the prices scaling to suit those with small amounts and those with large amounts. As you collect woodcoins in exchange, you have the ability to either sell them back onto the market, which lets you capture the market price they now represent, or hold onto them and draw down the money supply to further increase the value. The crowdfunding connection is inherent because a coin can be introduced, mined and traded in advance of the product being ready. The market price is derived based on the expectation of future value of the project the currency is built around. When the currency can be redeemed per the social contract by the issuing company for the product, the promise is fulfilled to those who bought the currency to pre-purchase the good or service. This allows people who don’t want the eventual reward to still purchase, evangelize and participate in your project. Even if they don’t want it, the more successful the project is, the more valuable the currency that interacts with it is and, therefore, they gain financially even if they don’t give a shit about the project themselves. It turns crowdfunding from something where you buy merely to support your passion into something you also buy because you speculate that lots of people will be passionate about it, therefore increasing the value when you buy early. So who can do this? Just about anybody. And anything that people pay dollar bills for can be used to imbue a company cryptocurrency with value. It is still decentralized, it is still out of the control of the company once created and it is definitely possible to fail with market forces at work. But it does change the way one thinks about crowdfunding projects. There’s no need for Kickstarter at all if the right pieces can be brought to bear. While many companies create products, very few create cryptocurrencies. The most common way a cryptocurrency is created is by forking another cryptocurrency, nearly all of which derive from Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a revolutionary and incredibly powerful tool for P2P monetary transactions, but its development legacy and the need for a continuous blockchain from its first launch means that it has many legacy issues and duct-tape fixes. Lacking knowledge and appreciation of these complexities, many talented developers find themselves running into repeated frustrations. Furthermore, Bitcoin is an all-in-one client which means individually desired functions can not be easily separated out. The startup will offer alt-coin creation services and economic consulting to best determine the fundamentals of the new coin and implement the vision. To that end, it would be desirable to use one of the metacoin platforms that can be easily modified and have a clean development history free of the legacy issues from coins developed early in the cycle. The whole ecosystem is open source so there is a wide array of tools to choose from already and many more on the horizon. Example platforms include , , , the and the . Results include a reinvention of crowdfunding and the ability for any industry from software as a service to brick and mortar to create a class of enthusiastic and invested consumers incentivized to grow your brand. It’s a way to leverage into the Bitcoin ecosystem, and it’s a reason to own an alt-coin that’s not the expectation of more fools piling in. And we’re just getting started. |
Kickstarter Hacked, Customer Addresses and Other Info Accessed | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | These days, it really seems we can’t go a week without some big site getting hacked. The latest target? Kickstarter. Kickstarter announced on its blog (and via an email sent to customers) that hackers had found their way into certain parts of their database. The good news: No credit card information was accessed — and even if it somehow would’ve been, Kickstarter doesn’t store full credit card numbers. The not-so-good-news: they’ve detected that the hackers were able to access a database that contained usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. That “encrypted” bit is a of a plus — but given that no encryption is uncrackable with the right resources, you should change your password anyway. Kickstarter says they were alerted to the breach by law enforcement officials (which law enforcement group, specifically, wasn’t mentioned) on Wednesday night, that they immediately closed the exploit that allowed the breach to occur, and that the last four days have been spent investigating exactly what was accessed. Kickstarter has its blog to answer a few questions that they were seeing a lot of. Here’s what we can glean from it: |
Daemon And Influx Author Daniel Suarez On Why Innovation Has Stalled | Klint Finley | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | self-published his first novel, , in 2006. The book and its sequel chronicled the rise of a botnet that uses self-driving cars to kill humans, crashes the stock market, and creates a new society in its own image. His next novel, , published by Dutton in 2012, was about aerial drones that could decide when to use lethal force independently of any human. After reading his books, you could be forgiven for thinking it was time for someone — the government, maybe — to put the brakes on technological progress for a while. But he wouldn’t agree with you. In fact, his latest novel, , explores the idea of trying to control technological progress. And it’s just as scary as his previous stories. , which will be out next Thursday, is the story of Jon Grady, a physicist who invents a machine that can reverse gravity. But before he can share his work with the world, a secret U.S. government agency called the Bureau of Technology Control seizes it and arrests him. He soon learns the BTC has seized many other inventions, including cold fusion reactors and quantum computing systems. Using the technology it’s stockpiled, the BTC has become more powerful than any government. And it’s completely out of control. I interviewed Suarez about , the real reason that technological innovation has slowed down and why he has reservations about Bitcoin. I’m not sure I would say that it’s a change of direction. Let me revisit how you describe what I do. I actually love technology. I worked for 18 years as systems analyst in technology. If we are going to be addressing the very major problems that you see before humanity, it is going to be technology that’s going to rescue us, basically. We are going to have to think our way through this and that’s going to involve obviously a lot of people and all these conflicting ideas. That’s why I push back when people describe my books saying that I’m showing the dangers of technology. Not just the dangers. I think that for all of the dangers of technology spreading, I think it is more dangerous in some ways that it doesn’t. My simple reason for that is we’ve got 7 billion people on the planet and we have these very serious problems and I think we don’t know who’s going to have the answers to the problems that are coming around the bend. That’s why we really need everybody thinking on it. We need every Einstein on this planet to help us. Who’s going to have the idea that modifies a technology that brings it to the next level or combines it with another technology? I think in the long run we’re going to be better served by sharing knowledge as opposed to creating silos of it. The role I see for my books is trying to think through the consequences of various things because a lot of the issues around technology and the nuances in it are not usually widely appreciated. That’s how I view my writing as I sort of explore this terra incognita ahead of us in an effort to try to understand where we might be heading. And I do that using the thriller genre because I think it’s a useful way to explore the territory in a realistic way without boring the crap out of people. Well, it’s funny that I showed them in the book as sort of hapless victims in a way of the BTC. There was something appealing of course about seeing the NSA being tapped and helpless, trying to figure out how to resist a technologically superior foe. I thought that that was an interesting way to look at things. It’s not just the NSA, but any unseen and unaccountable concentration of power that I’m trying to portray in this story. And right now that might be the NSA, but over time it might change. And I wouldn’t really put a specific nationality on it. It’s a story about progress and an effort to try to retain advantage. So, yes, it was partly about the NSA but then it’s also partly about the broader issues — the broader issues of control and transparency. And possibly interest. It’s been mildly infuriating to me to speak with even friends and people I know who shrug and say “Well, you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about surveillance?” And of course you and I would probably say well, actually, it’s not just people doing things wrong. For example somebody running for Congress 20 years from now I think is going to have a very detailed record to have to defend. “Why were you standing next to this person every day for five years and this person later turned out to be a criminal?” I think that is why these revelations were powerful. I don’t think that many technology or IT people were surprised by this, but I think it became much more personal with Snowden. Now, it’s dying down again but I think there will be more revelations that hopefully wake people up. We can’t just be passive. Being a citizen in a democracy really does require some interest. Well, that certainly is part of it. Although I would say that a billionaire in a third world nation lives very much like a billionaire elsewhere. I mean they create an enclave, and they have satellite uplinks and they have jets and things like that. So, yes, the great majority of people in underdeveloped countries would live a much more technologically backward life, although it’s a mix. Again, they might skip the hardwire telephone networks that we have. I’ve never been to Africa, but a number of people that I talked to who have been to various places in Africa talk about how great the cell service is. And here I am in a first-world nation having to seek a hill top to talk to you on the cellphone. I think technology is spreading and I think one’s experience of technology is going to relate increasingly to class, not so much to country. There are areas in parts of this country that look very technologically backward and abandoned by society in general. I wouldn’t say that they resemble the third world exactly, but they are not experiencing technology and its advantages like the rest of the country. I definitely, for the record, don’t believe that there is a BTC squelching progress. But to me it was a fun thought for a story. Back when I was a kid, the space shuttle was going up. We were going out into space, we were going to do these big things. Everybody assumed we’d have fusion and things like that by now. I think the difficulties of those tasks were certainly underestimated, but I think it is a function of a couple of things. One, I think there is sort of a cosine wave of innovation. I think a new field of innovation will occur, and then a whole bunch of technologies will spring up around that. You see the long mark of the internet and how it’s really starting to pay off and change society now. We probably thought it was doing that in the 90s, but it really kicked in just recently. But I think a lot of the innovation in Silicon Valley, sort of the venture-backed innovation is more incremental. And I think that’s because investors are looking for returns. Let’s say a new idea for a company is founded it kicks off rapidly. Very often what happens is a larger player purchases that company and then the founders work at the new subsidiary for a little while, and then they leave and then they start their own ventures that are typically variations on the big idea that they had. And then venture capitalists start investing in variations of that idea. Social media is a great example. There are hundreds and thousands of these social media startups. So I think a lot of this is chasing the same sort of incremental innovation. In that sense I do think that government, that nation states serve a really vital interest in innovation. The BTC that I was depicting in is really a distortion of it, a sort of a cancerous growth. It’s something that was allowed to get out of control because it was secret. But investing in just pure research and development, the US government, pretty much every major government, has been doing this for a while, and of course these are the types of things that result in the Internet. These things where we don’t see a pay off immediately, so venture capitalists are likely to put the money in. Low earth orbit, getting into space is another great example. I don’t think you would have seen a lot of companies investing in it in the 60s and 70s unless the government was investing in it. It was incredibly difficult and very expensive thing to do. We didn’t do it just for economic gains. We did it for prestige. We did it for the challenge. And also for strategic importance. And it was only decades later that we started to see venture capitalists talk about going to space. But I think that’s because the big, big problems were being solved at a governmental level. Now, why aren’t we seeing these huge things solved? It may be part of the innovation cycle, that the next things we’re trying to solve will require either some greatly increased computing power to model these things, some barrier beyond which when we cross it there will be another flowering of real serious innovation akin to the railroad or something like that. Just a few years after the invention of the piston engine, the Wright Brothers invented the airplane that actually flew. What I think it required was some form of energy that would be light enough to push airplanes into the sky. And almost the minute that was available suddenly that innovation started occurring. So, I think it’s going to be one of these keystone type technologies that opens up a whole new avenue that will result in innovation. The idea came first, and then I had to justify it. That’s not always the case. And of course it changes from book to book depending on how much I know about a topic. For instance cybersecurity I knew quite a bit about. But with , the gravity mirror was really a component of the bigger idea which was the BTC, the idea that you have that we’re really 60, 70 years more advanced than people commonly know, that technology is more advanced and how that would happen and coming up with an innovation that would really, really change things and modifying gravity came to mind. Not a lot. I’ve always been interested in it just as a curiosity. As a kid I read , watched documentaries. I’ve always been interested in science. Space exploration in particular. I’ve written software before that modeled orbital mechanics for various games and things like that. I’m aware of how gravitation projects outward, some of the formulas. But understanding how it might fit into the various models of the universe, string theory and brane cosmology, all those things, I wasn’t aware of those things prior to researching this book. Now that I’ve done it I’m more interested in it than ever. Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. If you ever do [write a book], be aware of this trap. Research is fun and you can spend an endless amount of time on research. After I wrote I was writing . I spent a bit too much time on the research. I probably had twice as much stuff than I could actually use. Research is a blast being able to go and pursue and learn something just because you want it because it’s part of a story. What I’ll try to do is block out the story and then I’ll see where my weak spots are in terms of my knowledge of various subject. And it’s not just technology. It could be knowledge of a country or culture that’s going to be part of the book. And then as I learn those things sometimes the story will change. Actually, pretty much every time the story changes simply because in doing the research I find something really interesting that I want to incorporate more fully or weave into the story. I’d say the research component is probably 50% of the book writing process. For me anyway. I’ve been full-time writing for a number of years. And it’s been quite a change because I used to work with teams of people on a very knotty, very complex technology problems and that was kind of cool in a way. I really miss that social element. I sort of mothballed my business a few years back just because the writing turned out very well. There’s a part of me that I do want to keep my hand in the game and of course I’m constantly learning about software and development tools but not in the same way that I did before, to solve a real meaty enterprise level, mission critical problem. It’s because I want to keep up or I see something interesting and I play around with new tools. I don’t actively consult right now, but I do keep up with these things. Something I’ve always wanted to do. I have an English literature degree, and of course when I was young I wanted to be the next great American novelist. And then I just got busy doing other things. Life intrudes. I tried to write a novel early on. I think I didn’t have the discipline at the time. I had wide-ranging interests. I was always interested in technology. As a society, America was just trimming every ounce of fat from our communications, transportation, logistics and other networks, that I started thinking of it that it’s becoming a monoculture. A lot of the same machines hooked together. When we saw things like Conficker sweep through, or Slammer sweep through all these systems, it started making me wonder whether or not we were building a house of cards, a very lightly constructed, not very resilient infrastructure. But if I wrote a whitepaper about that, who the hell would read it? So I started thinking, “Y’know, I’m going to write a thriller.” Because I liked entertaining stories. I would read thrillers occasionally and I thought that that was the best form to really explore the issue and popularize it. And thankfully it worked out pretty well. Yeah, I’ve been watching this pretty closely. I don’t mind Bitcoin. The idea I like very much. But one thing that concerns me is the idea that you are burning a valuable resource to create this fiduciary fiat currency. It is using electrical energy to create this artificial thing that doesn’t have inherent value. It has perceived value. If such a thing could be connected to something that represents inherent value, then I’ll be really, really interested in it. Like maybe it represents joules of electricity or whatever. Something that represents energy available to do work or something like that. I don’t have any carefully thought out solutions as the people who designed Bitcoin, but I wonder where that’s going to head because let’s say another Bitcoin-like currency were developed once Bitcoin tops out. I wonder if burning all that energy will somehow cause issues later on. I’m going to be going to various locations up north and pretty much west coast. I do a very abbreviated book tours. I’m going South by Southwest in March, I’m going to be on a sci-fi panel there that MIT Media Lab is hosting. And yes, I am working on another book. I never really talk about the books that I’m working on. It’s something I’ve always not done. But yes, I’m working actually on several books. I don’t know exactly which one I’m going to dedicate all my time to just yet. I’m at a crossroads there. But there are also other mediums that I’m looking into right now. I’ve done a couple of film deals now for my books and I’d like to try to pursue that as well. I love books, and yet I’m looking at the changes in the publishing industry and I’m thinking I may want to be in other mediums as well. Not exclusively in other mediums because I always love books, but I might try to branch out a little. |
CrunchWeek: Comcast’s $45B Time Warner Cable Bid, Bye-Bye Flappy Birds, Snapchat’s Smoothie Hack | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | In this episode, Leena Rao, Ryan Lawler and I discuss Comcast’s to buy its fellow cable behemoth Time Warner Cable, the of the simple and addictive mobile game Flappy Birds (and the shocking decision of its creator to at the height of its success), and how the latest Snapchat hack by an shows the importance of security for all kinds of apps. |
null | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 24 | null |
With Hackathons Taking Center Stage, The Coming Transformation Of The Computer Scientist | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | moved to the University of Michigan from his home in South Florida in the fall of 2011, he brought the standard equipment every freshman college student needs -– clothes, shoes, books, and a backpack. One item, though, was missing. “I didn’t own my own laptop,” he said. That didn’t stop him from attending his first hackathon several weeks later at , where he built his first website. The experience ignited his enthusiasm, and over the next two years, Fontenot would found and develop , last month hosting from across the Midwest and the United States to Michigan for a weekend of coding. “#hellyeah,” as Fontenot puts it subtly. For the first time next semester, more than 10,000 students are expected to participate in one of 10 mega-hackathons, in a discipline that . That could mean that a majority of CS students will have participated in a hackathon before graduation in just the next few semesters. Hackathons, though, are just one part of the coming transformation of computer science education. Once a theoretical subject to the chagrin of many undergraduates, computer science students are increasingly finding outlets like hackathons, open source projects, and startups to learn the applied skill sets desired by industry – and are getting the job offers to prove it. Yet, this rebuilding of the pipeline for new engineers poses deep questions about the future of educating software developers. What is the proper role of universities and degree programs? How should the maker culture, which exists at the heart of these projects, connect with the traditional education mores of research universities? And at a time when access, particularly for females and underrepresented minorities, remains a deeply salient issue, how can organizers ensure that programs lower rather than raise any barriers to new entrants? One of the defining moments for Dave Fontenot was . He had heard that the organizers were paying students to attend from other schools, and so he worked to recruit his fellow Michigan friends to join him, eventually convincing around 25 of them to trek to Philadelphia. The environment and atmosphere were rousing. “We came back and half the people switched their majors to CS,” Fontenot recalls. Alexey Komissarouk, who founded the PennApps Hackathon in fall 2010, believes that part of that excitement is the ability to create using one’s own skills. “They learn to make, as opposed to doing homework,” he says of the students attending these events. There is clearly demand. This semester, there are expected to be 10 or possibly more student mega-hackathons across the country, up from three last semester, and their growth appears likely to accelerate. To assist in that growth, Komissarouk helped to organize to teach student organizers how to run effective hackathons. Even so, Fontenot, a speaker at the seminar, notes that “the evangelism is spreading faster than we can scale the events.” Computer science majors have traditionally followed several different career paths, including corporate software development and academic research. That divergence between theoretical and applied work has been a key battleground in the development of computer science curriculum since the discipline was formed. Computer science is a relatively young discipline in academia, coming out of the emergence of computer technology for missile targeting near the end of World War II. Much of the education in this early period was informal, or attached to other academic programs like mathematics or electrical engineering. Progress moved at a much more torrid pace starting in the 1960s, with the rise of formal departments and divisions of computer science. It was clear in those early days that computer science had enormous potential, but there were deep concerns on the state of the discipline. For researchers at the time, the question was whether computer science should be seen as a technical and applied subject, or whether it should develop a coherent set of abstractions that would afford it intellectual legitimacy within the academy. The debate did not last long. Under pressure at universities like Stanford, the discipline quickly moved in a theoretical direction. This can be seen in the development of . Computer science education was focused on mathematics and data structures, with limited credit to be awarded for software development. That direction still underpins many of the top computer science programs in the United States. Since the publication of the landmark curriculum almost five decades ago, however, employers have completely changed their hiring standards. They increasingly desire engineers ready to develop software from day one, and target graduates who already have significant software experience under their belts. This is particularly acute at startups, many of which lack the mentoring and training infrastructure to bring new graduates up to speed. It is telling then that these hackathons are almost exclusively student-run, filling in the gap between their enthusiasm for building new products and their curriculum’s emphasis on theoretical constructions. Fontenot believes that “People are going to realize that this is more than just a hobby, but an educational revolution.” He emphasized that the skills developed at hackathons go beyond just pure programming, and include product design and working in teams, skills that have traditionally been excluded from computer science work. Komissarouk, though, cautions that the changes need to be seen more as additive to a traditional computer science education, rather than a replacement. “Hackathons are a reasonable adjustment of the CS curriculum. Penn’s IR [international relations] department has a huge MUN [Model United Nations] program, our creative writing program has a writing program, but all we had in our CS curriculum was a bunch of PhDs talking about advanced research. Which is cool, but it’s not what many students will be doing after college and it’s not why most of them came to CS.” Hackers hack during the MHacks Hackathon 2013 in the Big House on September 21, 2013 in Ann Arbor, MI. (Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering Communications & Marketing, All rights reserved. Used by permission.) Hackathons, though, are only one means to building a new product. Open source projects are increasingly being seen by both employers and students as a viable means to develop key skill sets in new graduates, and inculcate a long-term development mindset. Google has offered its since 2005, placing about 7,500 students on prominent open source projects around the world. But it is not just large companies that are focused on the potential of students in open source, but startups as well. Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu founded to help developers find usage examples of code across codebases. They see students playing a key role in expanding the company’s knowledge of development and its role in the open source community. Last month, they announced the selection of working on a range of projects, from MIDI input libraries to data-analytics tools for political analysts. They hope to shortly select a second class of fellows. “Working in open source gives students experience with real-world code, teaches them how to collaborate with others on software projects, and builds their reputation as a programmer. And it can be super fun,” Slack writes to me in an email. “By getting involved in open-source, students see how some of the best, brightest, and most passionate programmers actually do things.” For Julia Lee, a computer science undergraduate at Stanford and an inaugural Sourcegraph Open Source Fellow, she appreciates that the projects are more involved and closer to real-life software development. “A lot of Stanford CS courses have final projects, but projects tend to be smaller than many open source projects.” She also likes the flexibility to define her own project. “I’m teaching myself Android development in the process of building an app that public health researchers from Stanford will use later this year.” For companies like Sourcegraph, it also doesn’t help to get an early introduction to some of the top software engineering graduates out of Stanford, Berkeley and other schools. Indeed, everyone I talked to agreed that recruiting developers is going to fundamentally change in this new world. Fontenot from MHacks is very clear on this point. “One thing that is very concrete, the hackathons are killing the career fairs, particularly the engineering school ones. [Recruiters] want people who can actually build something,” and demonstrating that ability through hackathons or other projects gives candidates a “huge competitive advantage.” Komissarouk from PennApps believes that hackathons are becoming a sort of “ ” like the minor leagues in baseball. The two see VCs and other recruiters pouring into hackathons to find the best talent. Fontenot particularly noted the visibility of Andreessen Horowitz at these events. “I did a survey on where [participants] started their job search, and close to a majority said that A16z’s website was the key place they went through,” Fontenot says. “They have been very effective, since they bring a lot of top founders and engineers from their portfolios decked out in A16z swag and it gives a great impression.” Fontenot believes that hackathons are already starting to replace the process of interviewing at a company. “For companies, it is all about relationships. It is like a meritocracy, where you bring your best engineer [to these hackathons], and he actually has to help mentor and help a team to achieve some large problem. You don’t need to interview the candidates, you are seeing them right there at crunch time. You don’t need to evaluate them, because your engineer is experiencing the person live.” One benefit of these events is their democratized nature — anyone can sign up for a hackathon or work on an open source project and receive credit for their work. But Komissarouk points out the problem of access here. “On one hand, it’s great that hackathons are becoming more popular. The fact that more engineers are being exposed to the fact that theirs is a maker profession, and there’s more to CS than homework assignments and jobs, that’s wonderful. On the other hand, as the bar for what makes a great hack goes up, hackathons become more exclusionary and intimidating to exactly the kinds of people we want to attract.” Indeed, while students in the past needed only graduate and apply to a company (perhaps with a small portfolio of class projects), today’s students have significantly higher expectations set for them. For instance, many startups use GitHub to keep track of code activity for potential recruits. That may make the hiring process a bit more transparent, but it also raises the requirements for students, who must actively contribute code before they may have even reached their first algorithms class. Fontenot and other hackathon organizers are acutely aware of such concerns, and have actively worked to broaden the base of students in engaging in CS. “As you get bigger, you get more diverse,” he notes. Slack of Sourcegraph sees the changes as a positive development, giving students the ability to accelerate their learning. “Today’s CS students will be the future leaders of the tech and open source community, so if anything we’re just helping them get there a few years sooner.” That acceleration can already be seen in MHacks, where two of the seven top prizes were awarded to high school students. Indeed, Fontenot argues that if you want to get into college today, doing a hackathon is a particularly strong approach. “At Michigan, we sent over 50 names of high school students to the admissions office, because they all want the next 10 Mark Zuckerbergs,” and will look at their applications accordingly. But that acceleration comes at a potential cost. If students need to start demonstrating their aptitude for engineering well before college, that precludes a large number of students who may not even have access to a computer during their adolescence. And while the open and flexible nature of such programs are indeed positive for students, the more they become associated with recruiting, the more these programs will become about demonstrating recruitment potential rather than opening opportunities for further education. Like many professions today, software development is developing new rules for education and status identification. At one point, a degree from MIT or Stanford was the key ticket to a major Silicon Valley company, and from there, a start-up or a management role. The new culture around hackathons and open source projects is going to upend this forced march. Students increasingly are engaging with startups earlier in their careers, and they are building products rather than writing code samples. With a continued focus on education, there is an opportunity here to solve the engineer crunch, and perhaps even expand the range of people who are involved in engineering the next great startups. |
null | gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 23 | null |
Apple & Google Begin Rejecting Games With “Flappy” In The Title | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | The Flappy Bird phenomenon shows no signs of slowing down, despite the fact that the original title was of the App Store by creator Dong Nguyen, whose newfound fame apparently became too overwhelming. But though “Flappy Bird” itself may be gone, the App Store’s that mimic the addicting, frustrating game that became this year’s viral hit. However, that may not be the case for long. Word has it that both Apple and Google are now rejecting games that have the word “flappy” in their title. According to Vancouver-based game designer Ken Carpenter of Apple rejected an app of his called “Flappy Dragon” from the App Store. Apple told him “we found your app name attempts to leverage a popular app,” says Carpenter. Apple told him the app was in violation of the following section of the App Store Review Guidelines: Reasons: 22.2: Apps that contain false, fraudulent or misleading representations will be rejected
22.2
We found that your app, and/or its metadata, contains content that could be misleading to users, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.
We found your app name attempts to leverage a popular app. Clearly, the only app “Flappy Dragon” would be leveraging is “Flappy Bird” – which, to be clear, is technically no longer present in the App Store. This is just not my fucking week: Rejected. “We found your app name attempts to leverage a popular app.” Which app? FB doesn’t exist!?!?! — Ken Carpenter (@MindJuiceMedia) Carpenter isn’t the only game developer affected by the policy shift, it seems. A from Kuyi Mobile indicates that a small handful of developers attempting to launch their own “Flappy” clones have also been rejected for the same reason: I think you should resubmit. Besides Ken, I know 3 other devs who just got rejected. :S — Kuyi Mobile (@kuyimobile) This is somewhat odd, given that there are already several similarly named games on the market, including “Flappy Bee,” “Flappy Plane,” “Flappy Super Hero,” “Flappy Flyer,” and even “Flappy Bird Flyer,” Carpenter points out. Plus, there are clones that don’t include “Flappy” in the title, like “Splashy Fish” and “Ironpants” – #1 and #2 in the App Store’s top charts, at present. Meanwhile, others that include “Flappy,” but don’t lead with it, are also doing well: spot #3 is “City Bird – Flappy Flyer” and #7 is “Fly Birdie – Flappy Bird Flyer.” In other words, the App Store’s top charts are being absolutely decimated by “Flappy Bird” clones. And users are still eating them up en masse. But perhaps enough is enough? Apple may not want the App Store to be overrun with these spinoffs, especially because their proliferation is likely causing consumer confusion. The “Flappy Bird” craze reached mainstream media, which means everyday users who may not following each turning point in this ongoing saga are just hitting up the App Store and searching for a download. Unfortunately, if Apple was trying to prevent these “Flappy Birds” clones from taking over the top ranks in the App Store, they’re too late. Now the new rejections have the potential of being seen as unfair since there are those whose “Flappy” knockoffs are still live and well-ranked…and raking in plenty of extra cash, too. The fair thing to do is force to rename their “flappy” games, and/or pull “flappy” from their keywords. ( : That may be the case! See below.) Also of note, around the same time that developers were discussing the “Flappy” rejections on Twitter, movement in Apple’s Top Charts ground to a halt. Below is a chart that shows the average number of changes in the iOS Top Charts provided by . You can see it fell of a cliff, meaning the Top Charts were effectively “frozen” as of 2/14. The charts soon returned to normal, which MobileDevHQ says makes it seem more like a transient error on Apple’s end, as opposed to an algorithm change. Apple isn’t alone in deciding to bounce the “Flappy Bird” clones from the app store, however. Both and stated that Google is also rejecting app submissions that use “Flappy” in the title. Carpenter, “Yeah, I was rejected from Google Play, too.” “The first time I assumed it was because I included a phrase about ‘Flappy Dragon’ being the best flapping game to play now that ‘Flappy Bird’ is dead. My app was originally published with no issue and was online and searchable for a few hours,” Carpenter explains. Shortly afterwards, Google removed it from search, but it was still visible through its direct link. Around 24 hours later, he received a suspension notice. “There was no ‘Fair Warning’ email, which Google claims to send before taking such actions. I checked and rechecked my spam folder to be sure. They just arbitrarily removed the app with no warning,” says Carpenter. “The message they sent me simply referenced the ‘spam’ provision of the Google Play terms and did not specifically call out what my transgression was,” he adds. After removing the competitor’s app name in the description, Carpenter resubmitted the game. After a few hours, it, too, disappeared from search. We reached out to Apple and Google for comment, but given that it’s the weekend (and Apple doesn’t typically respond to inquires about App Store policy changes), there may not be an update on this post with the companies’ immediate response. , 2/19/14: Another developer reached out to say that his app was accepted with “Flappy” in the title after this article’s publication, but the app was never listed on ranked in any country. This fits with what we’re also hearing now: that these were not blanket rejections across the board, but were more nuanced in their nature. |
Despite High IPO And Solid First Quarter, Chegg Plummets As Investors Worry Over Long-Term Prospects | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | In November, eight-year-old education company under the ticker symbol “CHGG.” In the days prior, Chegg had priced its initial public offering at $12.50/share, high above its expected range of $9.50 to $11.50, and raised about $187.5 million in total at a valuation of close to $1.1 billion. One of the first to bring textbook rental online, over the years, Chegg found a wide audience as an online bookseller. However, more recently, with pressure from Amazon, Apple and others, Chegg has been undergoing a gradual expansion, and “re-positioning.” In spite of its survival and its high debut in its IPO, it seems that investors aren’t so confident — at least in its short-term prospects. Chegg debuted on the NYSE at $12.50, but quickly plummeted to $9.64 in its first day of trading. The following day, the slide kept pace, and Chegg was at $8.88 by market close. Three months later, the onslaught has continued. its first earnings report since going public, and in spite of Q4 revenues of $77 million, which represented a 12 percent increase from the year prior, Chegg’s stock has continued to fall. By Friday’s close, the stock had fallen 22 percent to $6.17, where it has hovered since. Nonetheless, Chegg Chairman and CEO Dan Rosensweig called 2013 a “banner year” for Chegg, referring one would suspect to the fact that digital revenue grew 70 percent year-over-year to $16.7 million — 22 percent of total revenues compared to 14 percent in Q4 2012. Meanwhile, the company saw print revenue of $60.5 million, a 3 percent increase compared to Q4 2012, while its gross profit came in at $39.5 million, flat year-over-year on a GAAP basis. On a non-GAAP basis, gross profit was $40.3 million. Its gross margins declined to 51.3 percent from 57.7 percent, while adjusted EBITDA (without textbook depreciation) was $18.6 million, relatively flat when compared to Q4 2012. This also included a $1.8 million loss on textbook liquidations during Q4 2013, and a $2.3 million loss on liquidations in Q4 2012. With a GAAP net loss of $5.4 million, investors don’t seem to be particularly confident. Chegg has only $76.9 million in cash on company balance sheets at the end of the year, and it’s still yet to prove that it can keep margins in check as it continues to attempt to increase revenue. The other issue is that Chegg’s forecast for the coming year expects lower gross margins and higher net losses — never a good combo — while print revenue increased only 3 percent over the same year. This is somewhat of a break from what it’s been able to do lately, as Chegg managed an about-face, growing revenue and keeping expenses flat. Part of the reason: The company now reaches 30 percent of college students in the U.S. and 40 percent of college-bound high school seniors. It’s a valuable demographic. Chegg was likely able to mask some of the holes in its playbook heading into IPO, but many are still worried about its long-term viability. And, while things weren’t too bad from an earnings report this quarter, it still has a long road ahead. |
Square Cuts More Custom Pricing Deals For Merchants And Ramps Up Sales Hiring | Leena Rao | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | This past week brought the news of a — the rollout of Square Stands in bars, Whole Foods restaurants, and other venues. This comes a year-and-a-half after the huge deal the payments company inked with the coffee and beverage giant Starbucks. The lengthy wait between these big deals was a signal to some in the payments world that perhaps Square wasn’t ready to attract large retailers to drop legacy systems and processing deals. But then the Whole Foods deal was announced. While the partnership isn’t for the grocery checkout side of the business, it’s still a lucrative deal. And we’re hearing that Square is aggressively working to do more custom pricing for merchants, especially chains and big names, in order to bring in bigger names and retailers. Square is also now crafting a big sales team; the company is staffing up on sales people, we hear, which is something CFO and operations head Sarah Friar that the company was trying to hold off on. Square’s pricing is 2.75 percent for swiped transactions, Square Wallet payments, and Square Market transactions, and 3.5 percent + 15 cents for manually entered transactions. The company cut a deal for custom pricing for Starbucks and we’re also assuming for Whole Foods, but previously this was done on an exclusive basis. Now, any larger chain merchant can apply for custom pricing via Square’s site. For example, Square tells TechCrunch that the Butterfly Studio Salon in New York City is processing millions in payments per year, and has negotiated a custom rate of 2 percent for each swipe using Square. The custom pricing allows merchants who are growing to stay with Square instead of moving to a POS system with better rates. As Adlin Palencia, manager of the Butterfly Studio Salon explains, “I switched to Square because it was simple and had a flat rate for all cards, including American Express, which is how many of my customers like to pay. As the business has grown, I’ve been able to stick with Square because my custom rate saves me more than $2,000 a month, which is money I can invest back into my business.” Palencia considered switching from Square to another POS system as her business grew, but she stayed with Square because of the custom pricing deal she got. Square commented on the change: “As our sellers continue to grow, we want to ensure we are growing with them. Custom rates, like many of our other new offerings, make Square a great fit for larger sellers.” The fact that they are open to negotiating with mid-size to large merchants, as well as large ones like Starbucks, is telling. It’s likely that Square was “encouraged” to start negotiating with some merchants on fee structure after the flat, monthly fee structure last fall. The question I have is whether Square is making any money off of the deals where the company goes down to 2 percent per transaction (or less in more high-volume deals like Starbucks). We’re also not sure what the exact criteria is for merchants to be eligible for custom pricing. And in terms of sales, it’s still not clear what Square’s beyond what the company is processing per year. Square has notoriously done little marketing beyond simple advertising. At one point the company , but for the most part, Square has prided itself on word-of-mouth marketing to target small to medium-sized businesses. As Friar infamously said at a Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, she doesn’t want to be involved with hiring sales people. But that tune has changed, and Square has been quietly building an army of sales teams focused on bringing small to mid-sized retailers onto the platform. It’s unclear how big the sales team will be, but according to this for a sales recruiter, “Square is beginning to build a world-class Sales team for the SMB and Mid Market marketplace.” The company has attracted the attention of large brands as well more recently, with the Whole Foods partnership, as well as small promotional deals with Godiva and Uniqlo. But it seems like with these deals, these larger retailers are dipping their feet into the pool, and not diving in. Whole Foods has not enlisted Square stands to replace its cash registers on the grocery line, and it’s unclear yet if the promotional partnerships will amount to a bigger deal. Burberry has been using Square to take payments at a few of its stores, but it’s not a widespread implementation. Another area where Square is beefing up in the hope of attracting larger retailers is in customer support. Square is adding phone support, which the company previously didn’t have available to merchants. The lack of phone support had been a pain point for many merchants, who want access to a live person to get problems fixed in real-time. If Square is pitching large retailers on switching from legacy systems, then phone support is a must. While Square still has consumer-facing apps (Square Wallet, and most recently peer-to-peer payments app Square Cash), these changes are squarely focused on the merchant services side of the business. And all of these moves aim to collectively accomplish the goal of attracting more large merchants to the platform. As the company matures, and is potentially , Wall Street will be looking not only at the number of small merchants and revenue, but also how many mid-size to large merchants are willing to forgo legacy POS systems in favor of Square. |
Gillmor Gang: Lip Sync | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — Boy, the way Glenn Miller played, those were the days. The Gang was a deck stacked against the Gillmor young versus old, Lorde versus The Stones. Just when we finally convinced everybody Beatles was spelled with a Capital T. The talent drought continues. Sure, there are great artists. And even greater records Et tu Get Lucky. The Gang circles the distribution, the locked up soundtrack of our lives, the Age of Streaming. And in the end, the love you make is equally to the haul you take. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor |
Was Y Combinator Worth It? | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | Almost any time someone asks about the Y Combinator experience they ask, “Was it worth it?” It’s a difficult question to answer concisely given the complexity of such a program. During Y Combinator we had a chance to make a lot of friends, learn from experienced entrepreneurs, pitch to investors, and even sign up valuable early adopters. While it’s difficult to quantify many of these benefits, one area we can quantify is fundraising. We have been collecting data on fundraising since day one and were fortunate enough to attract investors both before and after YC. We looked back over the data recently to see if we could quantify what Y Combinator is worth. Midway through the fundraising process, we realized that the single most important indicator of success (getting a check in the bank) was whether or not the investor was introduced to us (inbound), or whether we solicited them originally (outbound). On account of this we noted whether each investor was inbound or outbound. Also, since we were attempting to measure the value of Y Combinator, we broke the groups of investors into two segments: before we found out we were accepted into Y Combinator and after. The first we’ll refer to as Pre-YC, the second Post-YC. This not a division of round or terms, just whether they were before we were accepted Y Combinator or after. To date we’ve raised $3 million from , *, , Kevin Barenblat, Lars Kamp, Rahul Vohra, Ullas Naik, Shawn Bercuson, (Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, and Alexis Ohanian), (Ram Shriram), Alex Polvi, , Charlie Cheever, Mike McCauley, David and Ryan Petersen, Jenny Haeg, Jody Glidden, Dalton Caldwell, Funders Club, Adrian Aoun, Fritz Lanman and Hank Vigil, Charlie Songhurst, Bill Lee, David Sacks, , , A Grade, Matthew Cowan, Sean Byrnes, , , Greg Kidd, Jeffrey Schox, and more. This is excluding YC and YCVC ($20K notes from , , , and each). Being “accepted” into YC is synonymous with securing an investment from YC; so we’re going to say that one’s presence in Y Combinator has no impact on whether or not Y Combinator chooses to invest. In total we took 121 calls/meetings with potential investors, and received a check from 43 of them. That’s an average of $25,041.32 per call/meeting. As we alluded to earlier, the most important difference was between inbound and outbound investors. To be clear, we’re defining inbound as either the investor contacted us directly, requested an intro, or someone in our network introduced the investor to us without our asking. Anything else (e.g. requesting the intro, contacting the investor, etc.) we considered outbound. We realized what a critical signal this was midway through our fundraising and adapted to it, as you will see in the breakdown of the two rounds. All of our investors – every single one of the 43 – contacted us or requested an introduction through their network. Even when we were introduced by a friend at our request, these fared the same as all the cold outbound requests. What we realized is that when you request an intro the introducer is doing something they weren’t naturally inclined to do. If they had thought you were that hot of a deal they would have already introduced you. Not only are you decaying the relationship with the friend, but also that friend’s relationship with the investor, since they likely won’t invest in you (and won’t be as interested when they have a hot deal to show the investor). In our experience, the only intros that were worth anything were the ones that weren’t requested in any way. All others were a significant waste of time. One last point on this, almost any VC will take a meeting with almost any entrepreneur. Why? Because that’s their job, to meet with entrepreneurs. It also means that if they schedule it on, say a Friday in SF at 11am, they can: a) avoid driving down to Sand Hill altogether, and b) arrive in Tahoe in time for a few evening runs. Be wary in thinking it’s anything more than that. The trajectory of your idea or company has yet to be set, and you’re burning valuable time chasing capital from unlikely sources instead of doing the most attractive thing to investors: building a valuable company. We didn’t track time between meetings and close or money in the bank because we saw very little variance in that. Almost everyone that committed and signed the docs wired the money within two weeks. And if they didn’t they let us know if it was going through complaince or something (at larger funds). Additionally, with first contact to commitment, 90 percent of the time this was within two weeks. There were about 10% that waited to decide, or waited for other investors to join the round, but I could count them on one hand and there was no difference pre or post YC. Our first seed round began when SV Angel emailed us in September 2012, since that was our first fundraising discussion, and ended April 28, 2013 when we were accepted into Y Combinator. Although we had SV Angel in from very early on, and then a few others, it took six and a half months to raise $530K from eight investors. Had we stopped after our third investor, Mesa+, we would have been at $450K over three months. Better, but not by much. Our second round of funding began that day we were officially accepted into Y Combinator, April 28, 2013. With that we were able to raise a quick $250K, stopped talking to investors for the duration of YC, and then began raising again a few days before Demo Day. Unlike our first round, we didn’t raise at all during Y Combinator, so the period lasted only about a month and a half. As you can see, we had a much easier time fundraising after being accepting into Y Combinator. When it comes to fundraising the effect of Y Combinator cannot be overstated. In our case, Y Combinator meant raising more than four times as much money in a quarter the amount of time. We were able to attract more investors, and receive an investment from a higher percentage of them – spending less time in meetings and more time building EasyPost. Does this mean you’re out of luck if you didn’t get into Y Combinator? Absolutely not. In raising $3m from 43 investors we learned a lot of ways to stack the cards in your favor. And since we learned many of them before we were accepted, they amplified the effects of Y Combinator dramatically. |
Is Tech Money Good For San Francisco’s Middle Class? An Economist’s Perspective | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | The liberal wonderland of the San Francisco Bay Area has one of the highest concentrations of wealth in the country. . But, are the local residents catching any of the dollar bills being shaken from the post-IPO money trees? It’s been hard to decipher the broader impacts of technology on the average San Franciscan because heart string-tugging anecdotes have clouded the narrative. Critics of tech companies make headlines by protesting Google’s private buses and indirectly linking their existence with the surge in housing evictions. “There’s a war brewing in the streets of San Francisco,” wrote former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. On the other hand, tech champions like to trot out small business owners who have benefited from re-locating tech HQ’s to blighted areas of the city’s historic Market district. So, to cut through the cherry-picked anecdotes, I asked San Francisco’s local economists what their take is and, as you’d imagine, they fall somewhere between the techno-utopian dreamspeak that you sometimes hear in the industry and the dire descriptions of the activists. One thing is clear: they believe that the money flowing into SF is a good thing and is bolstering the local economy. There is a “but” in the economic optimism, and it’s big enough to need two plane seats: skyrocketing rents are pricing many locals out of the city. Some have managed to fasten themselves to rent-controlled properties, but many have been forcibly evicted from their homes. On balance, tech money has built one of the sturdiest economic shelters from the ravages of recession, but those who get hit, well, they get hit hard. “Our analysis suggests the tech sector is responsible for the vast majority of the economic growth in San Francisco since 2010,” said San Francisco’s Chief Economist, Ted Eagen. “In 2010-2012, the latest year we have complete data, local inflation has been 2.6%, while wages for all workers have increased by 4.5%.” About 2/3rds of those approximately 40,000 new jobs do not require a computer science degree or a closet full of expensive sneakers. Partly thanks to the tech sector, the San Francisco Bay Area enjoys (4.8%) of California’s 58 counties. What accounts for this? Berkeley Economist Enrico Moretti argues that technologists have a special bond with the local economy. “Anytime there is a job opening for a software engineer at Google In San Francisco, there’s an increase in the demand for local service workers,” he said. On average, Moretti says that every tech job creates five in other industries, as compared to just two from a manufacturing job. In part, because tech jobs just pay more there’s more disposable income to spend on maids, lawyers, and clothing. “There must be someone who brings in the wealth,” said Moretti. Additionally, unlike the specialized needs of a manufacture, all the hair dresses, car washers, and tax pros that Google brings in for its workers are local. As a result, San Franciscans have seen their paychecks swell about 2x faster than inflation can eat it, (4.6% increase in wages vs. 2.6% inflation). , San Francisco has fared slightly better than their surrounding California neighbors during the recession recovery. “So outside of the tech industry, workers have benefitted from increased employment opportunities and rising real wages,” Eagan concludes. However, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. I spoke to one local clothing store owner whose story is a microcosm of all the city’s changes. The owner, who preferred to stay anonymous, resides on San Francisco’s Valencia St., the super-hip drag that has become the dividing line between the poverty-stricken Mission St. just a half-a-block East. As chic restaurants with +$20 entrees began to swarm his business, it likewise brought with it new customers willing to shell out their ample recreational budgets on new forms of expensive Bay Area entertainment. “Burning Man, it’s like Christmas for me,” he jokes, referring to the drug-friendly arts festival held in the Nevada desert every Fall, especially popular among Googlers. But, his long-time regular clients were forced to move into cheaper parts of the Bay. “Most of my customer, they drove away,” he notes with a hint of melancholy. Sky-high rents have eroded both his additional income, as well as the regulars that used to grace his store. And, this is where the otherwise happy tale of tech money gets dark: housing prices. Technologists are fans of a , but they have yet to discover an app that can physically expand San Francisco, notwithstanding. Scarcity in housing has led to a rent-hiking arms race. San Francisco is burdened with . Just 14% of homes are affordable to the middle-class and two bedroom apartments are above $3,200 for families. , San Francisco housing is more than 3x as pricey as it’s windy city peer to the East, Chicago ($177K vs. $599,000). With sky-high purchasing prices and rents, housing costs are outstripping the pace of salary for some in San Francisco. “In 2012 average rents paid (as measured by the Census) grew over 7%, which is faster than the wage increases for most non-tech industries,” said Eagan. However, “The vast majority of rental units in San Francisco are covered by rent control, so workers who did not move out of such units since 2010 will have seen wages growing much faster than their rents.” Unfortunately, some landlords has found a way to , and the resulting fight has made the tech industry the target. One local bookstore owner in the Mission District told me the rent hikes have challenged some of the good that the tech industry has brought. “There’s less crime, which is good; rents are insane, which is very very very bad,” he said. Without rent control, he says, he wouldn’t be able to live in his current neighborhood. The mayor is calling for more cheaper units reserved for struggling middle-class families making less than the $72,947 (yes, that’s the median income in San Francisco, FML). But, it’s unclear how many are needed, if at all, since government assistance begets bureaucracy, and city bureaucracy tends to slow things to a grinding halt. Berkeley Economist Enrico Moretti tells me that increased housing supply does relieve rents in “every spectrum” of income. He observed that after Seattle significantly increased construction, rent hikes slowed even during a jobs boon that outpaced San Francisco’s. Most importantly, the impact is , meaning that every single new house affects the price of every other house. The faster we build, the faster rent gets cheaper, and faster techies stop battling locals for coveted rent-controlled units. Unfortunately, there is no plausible economic model under which prices go down, and homes are already beyond the reach of 86% of middle-income families. We love economists, but sometimes they discount the innumerable parts of life. San Francisco has a long history restricting housing to maintain the quaint Victorian look of the Bay. “Do we want San Francisco to look like Hong Kong?” asks San Francisco State University Professor and former city planner, Jasper Rubin. He says that the city has never really tried to quantify the demand, but describes it as “tantamount to infinite.” With enough housing to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of tech workers and wanna be entrepreneurs, San Francisco would be reshaped into a wall of skyscrapers. Indeed, the good folks at Firstcultural.com what the South Bay’s sky-line would look like if it housed all of the major tech company’s workers. It’s Hong Kong-ish: For most San Franciscans, tech’s presence has brought reprieve from a recession that ravaged the rest of the country. But, economists deal in averages; those who fall to the left of the distribution curve are subject to a game of capitalism Russian roulette, where their house and community are left to the whims of wealthier buyers. The defenseless ought not be discounted in our praise of the tech sector, but we should also not forget that without their presence, San Francisco would likely be much worse off. |
Dosomething.Org Taps Snapchat For Teen-Centric Valentine’s Campaign | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | , a not-for-profit focused on making volunteer work and social change exciting to people under 25, is going after its key demographic where they’re comfortable: Snapchat. The company used the photo-sharing platform, which has yet to launch a formal advertising or brand program, to run a Valentine’s-themed campaign in NYC. “We noticed that teenagers, our core demographic, were flocking away from Facebook,” said DoSomething’s Colleen Wormsley. “But they love Snapchat.” DoSomething first signed up for a Snapchat account in November of 2013, with Bryce Mathias in charge of the channel. The company alerted their Twitter following that they now had a Snapchat account, and simply waited for requests to come in. Mathias, a male model, mostly sent selfies to new friends making goofy faces. The team learned that they received more response snaps during school days, so Mathias began setting aside a block of time just before lunch to respond to everyone’s snaps. As February rolled around, DoSomething launched a campaign that encourages teens to create Valentine’s Day cards for homebound seniors. As a part of the campaign, the not-for-profit created a Snapchat story promising that Mathias would deliver these Love Letters on Valentines Day dressed as cupid. In the middle of New York. In February. All the followers had to do was text to vote for how he should deliver them: by bike, ice skates, or around Central Park. Once they voted, they would be sent a call-to-action to create their own Love Letter for a homebound senior. In the end, 11 percent of the people who viewed the story asked him to go ice skating. Of those who texted in to vote, 57 percent signed up to participate in Love Letters. Putting those figures in perspective can be difficult without much transparency into Snapchat’s monetization plan, but we may not have to wait too much longer. The interactive portion of the campaign might be just the ticket on a platform where social media responses and feedback can’t be shared or showed off by brands. But that works in those brands favor. Younger demographics would much prefer a more authentic relationship with the brands they like, and with 400 million snaps sent per day, there could actually be potential to build lasting conversations between brands and younger consumers. Snapchat was rumored to be building out a last summer, and the company certainly has people in place to communicate with brands behind the scenes. Snapchat’s Josh Stone responded to DoSomething shortly after they published the story to welcome them to the platform and lend a hand with any support or feedback they might need. |
On-Demand Ride-Sharing Startup Lyft Is Raising Another Big Round Of Funding | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | is raising yet another big round of funding, according to sources. The company, which is seeking to make ride-sharing mainstream in cities across the U.S. and around the world, is expected to use the new cash to fund expansion into new cities and territories. We’ve heard Lyft has pitched a number of venture firms and late-stage institutional investors, but hedge fund seems to be in the lead for the deal. Coatue has recently invested in hot companies like Box, , and , and is part of a growing trend of . Andreessen Horowitz, which , is also expected to contribute a large chunk of cash. Other investors in Lyft include Founders Fund, Floodgate, Mayfield Fund, K9 Ventures, Ooga Labs, fbFund, and Keith Rabois. The company was founded as Zimride back in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2012 — when it shifted from long-range to on-demand ride-sharing — that things began to really take off. With the launch of the , it broke new ground in enabling passengers to get rides from other people with a car and spare time on their hands. Due to the success of the on-demand platform, the company rebranded as Lyft and sold its legacy Zimride assets to Enterprise Holdings last summer. After its initial stint in San Francisco, Lyft began expanding to other cities early last year and now is offering service in 20 markets throughout the U.S. But like Uber, which also offers on-demand rides via mobile app, Lyft has plans to aggressively increase the number of international cities that it operates in beginning this year. The additional funding will be vital to getting it on the right track toward that goal, as it bulks up operations both in its San Francisco headquarters and in remote offices around the world. In the meantime, Lyft is trying to get more regulators and local officials comfortable with the idea of letting unlicensed drivers give rides to passengers around town. To that end, it recently hired Google X legal director David Estrada as its . The company also announced the creation of a that includes other transportation companies, as well as regulators and insurance providers, to figure out the tricky issue of insurance for its drivers. Lyft, Coatue, and Andreessen Horowitz all declined to comment. |
VCs On Inequality, Unemployment, And Our Uncertain Future | Jon Evans | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | The Great Bifurcation is underway. The American economy is polarizing between the minority rich and the majority poor; technology is a major cause of this; and the rest of the world will soon follow, if it hasn’t already. been , and by now you’re probably sick of my perspective — so I went to tech VCs and for theirs. Let me just set the table first. Not so long ago, the Great Bifurcation thesis was a minority view. Now it’s nearly the consensus. The recently : “The middle class is steadily eroding. Just ask the business world.” The : “Last year, the richest 10% received more than half of all income, the largest share since such record-keeping began in 1917.” that “around 70% of American families are receiving more from the government than they are paying in.” (Which is exactly what you’d expect from a progressive tax system in a time of drastic inequality.) , “those making $100,000 and up, a group that constitutes 45 percent of the region’s population, saw their incomes rise” last year … but incomes for those making less than that. Is tech to blame? Is technology destroying jobs faster than it creates them? A couple of years ago, that view was often dismissed offhand with a little contemptuous muttering about buggy whips; nowadays it is taken extremely seriously by , , , , courtesy of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s book The . OK then. Brace yourself. There’s a lot to chew on below. So. Steve Jurvetson. He sits on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX, among others. He’s a managing director of , which for its 11th early-stage fund, and he’s been pondering the accelerating divide between the rich and the poor for some time, as per his Solve for X talk from last year: John Frankel, based in NYC, is the founding partner of — across two funds — and sits on the board of Klout and Interaxon, among others. He followed up on our wide-ranging conversation two months ago by writing: Technological disruption seems to be accelerating and we think it is due to a secular confluence of advances in technology and development of platforms, which leads to more unemployment in the short term. The problem is that the Federal Reserve’s response was to cut interest rates to zero making capital even cheaper vs. labor. This pulls forward investment in technology that displaces labor and accelerates disruption, causing more unemployment, into a vicious loop. The Fed seems to have created half the problem here but cannot see that raising interest rates would slow down the rate at which jobs are being replaced. I am concerned that if robotic technology gets cheap enough we reach a tipping point where too many industries are disrupted at the same time, leading to massive unemployment and too long to retrain people. Theoretically, by extrapolating the trend, we might hit 60% unemployment. But, that is impossible, and the impossible does not happen. Something will break before then. But this is like a new Industrial Revolution, and though we know the outcome of that, which most would say was good, it was rough getting there. There are many dystopian outcomes you can see here, but I want to be hopeful. …which sets the tone nicely. You cannot accuse either Frankel or Jurvetson of trying to hide their heads in the sand and/or minimize the situation. They’re both extremely accomplished and intelligent men who have thought deeply about the subject from a variety of angles; in the long term, they’re both optimists (as am I); but the medium term seems uncertain, at best, to us all. Both of them talked about sociopolitical feedback loops a lot. Consider social media. On the one hand, Frankel argues that “social media empowers the people — Twitter in Turkey, Facebook in Brazil — and forms a tighter feedback loop among people and between those who govern and the governed in a way that takes power from those who govern.” On the other, Jurvetson suggests that since increasing inequality can obviously foster resentment, an important open question is: do social networks subtly aggravate that resentment, since envy is often their default emotion, as everyone tries to show off and paint the best possible portrait of themselves? Will Facebook and Twitter become subtle but potent equalizers of power, or will they breed a vicious cycle of jealousy and anger between the rich and the poor? Or both? In a similar vein, Jurvetson : “One tech-related concern with religion is that it appears to be a positive feedback loop to the accelerating rich-poor gap, as the disenfranchised opt out of modernity.” He Sam Harris: While most developed societies have grown predominantly secular, with the curious exception of the United States, orthodox religion is in florid bloom throughout the developing world. Religiosity is strongly coupled to perceptions of societal insecurity. In addition to being the most religious of developed nations, the United States also has the greatest economic inequality. The poor tend to be more religious than the rich, both within and between nations. And on almost every measure of societal health, the least religious countries are better off than the most religious. He also suggests that a similar feedback loop — the famous network effect, aka the winner-take-all nature of much of the tech industry — may perpetuate America’s pre-eminence. Even as and when China grows wealthier than America, America’s tech giants are likely to remain dominant for the foreseeable future. (At the same time, of course, technology will be an enormous boon to people throughout the developing world, and Steve is eager to invest in companies that can help capture/maintain/provide health information around the world; to paraphrase him, health is very low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and at the same time, so much of healthcare is simple information transfers. What’s more, another significant piece is pharmaceuticals, which, in a slightly more distant and misty-eyed future, can be delivered by drone.) But for a more stark and pessimistic view of the future of the developing world, see John Robb: There's a race to see if 2.5 billion people in the BRICs can reach the middle class before tech eats the economic system. I bet tech. — John Robb (@johnrobb) I was a little surprised by how open both Jurvetson and Frankel were to a drastic revision of our social / political / economic status quo, in order to accomodate a new normal. Frankel spoke approvingly of some form of a sizable replacing all of America’s existing welfare/entitlements/tax credits/etcetera. Jurvetson was more cautious with his enthusiasm, but was certainly willing to take the idea seriously, along with notions like Milton Friedman’s negative income tax, or the from one Shawn Joseph: I wonder what would happen if we had a tax system that organically responded to the wealth distribution in the country. Not meaning there is simply higher rate as you go up, but which is responsive to the rate of change of the shape of the distribution. Thus, the calculation is adaptive to a shape that changes too quickly. Both also agreed that reputation economies will continue to grow in importance. As Jurvetson pointed out, in an unofficial, unquantified way, a lot of us already spend a lot of time maintaining our reputation. (Indeed, if you ask me, all marketing is a kind of reputation-economy investment.) And Frankel, of course, is a director of Klout. One subject on which they do not agree: Bitcoin. Frankel speaks and tweets of it dismissively: https://twitter.com/john_frankel/status/432253516217057281
https://twitter.com/john_frankel/status/409544326767587328 whereas Jurvetson is a (long-term) believer in e-cash in general — he wrote an article about e-cash and its sociopolitical side effects for the Stanford newspaper 20 years ago, in fact — and, technically at least, admires Bitcoin’s blockchain solution of the Byzantine Generals’ Problem. (Also, his precocious son insisted more than a year ago that his allowance be paid entirely in Bitcoin, which has worked out well for him.) He is, however, a little concerned that semi-anonymous cryptocash like Bitcoin, if/when it becomes widespread, may be a double-edged sword; enormously useful to the developing world, where it could give financial tools to the unbanked and cut transfer fees/difficulties immensely … but, in theory, cryptocash could also be used for tax avoidance/evasion among the wealthy, which could undercut any basic income those taxes are meant pay for. (All in some indefinite future, obviously.) A solution which isn’t worryingly surveillance-state might be anonymous e-cash for small amounts but identified/tracked e-cash for large amounts / taxes etc … if that can be technically enforced. In the long term, both agreed, everything is going to be great: innovation and new technologies will make lives colossally better around the world. The question is how we get to that destination. As Steve put it: “The problem isn’t that jobs are going away, it’s that people need jobs.” After a difficult medium-term period of disruptive transition, this new revolution should benefit every human being on the planet…but the exact mechanism, the means by which we as a society morph from the difficult period just ahead into that quasi-utopian low-scarcity future, remains stubbornly unclear. “And then a miracle occurs!” Steve joked, describing that transition. Frankel agrees that we’re in uncharted territory: We are not the only people that see now as something similar to the Industrial Revolution with regard to job and social disruption, secular unemployment and rapid adoption of new technologies. What is new this time is that it is happening in every country, every imaginable political regime, every place at the same time. The Industrial Revolution burned through countries slowly: Great Britain first, then Europe, then the US, etc. Here it is all playing out everywhere at the same time. If software is eating the world, it is eating it at the pace of a World War Z Zombie! […] I don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody does. We need to just keep innovating for a better outcome. Food for thought. James Vaughan, . |
This iQi Hack Shows Why Apple Hasn’t Bothered With Wireless Charging | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 2 | 15 | iQi is a hardware add-on that brings the tech Apple hasn’t — wireless charging (using the ) — to your iPhone without the need to put it in a bulky case. Think of it as akin to Bill Gates’ quest for sensation enhancing . Or, er, having some cake and eating it. The slender iQi gizmo is designed to work with soft cases, including Apple’s leather iPhone 5 sleeve, so you don’t have to compromise the overall look of your iPhone just to be able to wirelessly charge it. Although, once this phone-hugging gizmo is installed, there will be a slight bump on your phone’s rear, i.e. where the case has to swell to accommodate its wireless-charge providing passenger. Visually, this is an all-but imperceptible bump if you’re using Apple’s leather sleeve, but it’s a bit more sticky-outy when paired with some soft plastic cases. The slight swelling does mean the handset won’t now sit entirely flat on a table or other flat surface. Wireless charging has huge potential, albeit much of that . For now it plays a relatively small role in the consumer electronics space — possibly making a few mobile owners’ lives slightly more convenient by allowing them to charge their device by sticking it on a charger plate, rather than fumbling around to plug in a power cord once per day. (Although wireless chargers still have to plug the charger plate in at some point, and make some space for it — and its unpleasing cable — on their desk.) Nokia adding wireless charging to its flagship Windows Phone Lumia smartphones wasn’t enough to convert legions of iPhone users to the platform and save the once mighty mobile maker from having to sell that business unit to Microsoft. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t appetite for the tech, even among iPhone owners. More Android flagships are adding built-in wireless charging (including ); yet . iQi’s for its slender, soft-case compatible iPhone wireless charger, concluded a successful crowdfunding run last December, raising over $161,500 (from 2,350+ backers) — more than 5x its makers’ original target of $30,000. So even though Cupertino hasn’t seen the point of wireless charging yet a portion of iPhone owners are clearly keen. Or keen enough to shell out $25+. ( The iQi is now on general sale available, via its maker Fonesalesman’s website, for .) But, is the iQi any good? Well, it certainly doesn’t look like much when my test unit arrives, being packaged in an envelope housed on a piece of card with a small paper user manual. But that’s a good thing: less, not more, is exactly the point of this iPhone wireless charger hardware hack.
It’s basically a couple of pieces of cardboard (smaller than a credit card in size), sandwiched around some low profile electronic innards, with a flexible connector sticking out one end that plugs into the iPhone’s Lightning connector port. Plugging the iQi into your iPhone is pretty straightforward, although it helps to have a fingernail long enough to push the connector snugly into the port. At that point you just bend the flexible plastic ribbon over so the main bulk of the iQi sits flush with the back of your iPhone (that’s bend, not fold; the ribbon won’t stand up to any kind of creasing). A flat silicon disk is also provided in the pack which you can stick onto the iQi’s rear to stop it sliding around on the phone’s rear. Simples. Of course you do need a Qi charger plate to use the iQi with — such as the KoolPuck or KoolPad — or another charger plate that uses the Qi wireless charging standard. You’ll also need a soft-case to help protect the iQi and keep it fixed in place — unless you fancy augmenting your iPhone’s rear with duct tape. Now to the main issue: does the iQi actually work? Not, I’m afraid to say, reliably. Which may well illustrate why Apple thinks this nascent tech isn’t worth bothering with (yet). Some of the issues I encountered while testing the iQi (with an iPhone 5) are likely those generally associated with the Qi standard. As my TC colleague John Biggs has , Qi is slow and finicky — requiring the user to align the device with the charging place in just the right place or no dice. Or rather, no juice. Which isn’t a hassle per se but it is a problem for a device that only offers an incremental convenience boost anyway. To add to the irritation, when it’s not aligned, the iQi beeps persistently, like a mournful robot child in need of a bottle feed. One time I left it charging — everything apparently going tickety-boo — yet when I returned to the house half an hour later I heard its urgent call. Turns out the phone was sitting there, where I had left it charging on the plate, now not charging but beeping. Stuck on 99% battery. Perhaps the iQi cuts out charging when it’s almost full and beeps to signify this but, if so, that’s going to get really annoying if the moment it chooses to pipe up coincides with the middle of your night. I did also have a missed call, which perhaps caused the charging function to cut out. Whatever triggered the Qi break, the iQi’s reliability evidently can’t be relied upon. It had been working prior to this point, but after this break it stubbornly wouldn’t resume charging — even after I tried draining the battery a bit to give it more scope for juicing. I also swapped out the KoolPuck charging plate for the KoolPad. But it still didn’t want to charge (even though the charger light on the plate switched to blue, as if charging, yet the battery indicator did not respond). Next I tried removing the iPhone sleeve. Still no joy. So, finally, I did the inevitable reboot of removing the iQi and then plugging it back in again. And lo it started working again. So, yeah. Another caveat: this is a hardware hack of the iPhone. iQi Mobile notes on its Indiegogo page that it’s not part of the MFi program, and “as such is not Apple certified” — so, while it claims the iQi “works well with iOS 7.0.4”, that statement carries an implicit caveat that it can’t guarantee smooth operation with future iterations of Apple’s OS. So, down the line, iQi owners might have to choose between their iPhone having a sporadic wireless charging ability, and their iPhone having iOS 8. So, yeah… If you really are desperate for an iPhone that supports wireless charging, and are willing to live with temperamental tech while you wait for Apple to take the plunge itself, the iQi does get around the need to stick a bulky, unattractive case on your iPhone. It’s certainly very visually unobtrusive, especially paired with Apple’s leather case. Just don’t expect your phone to sit entirely flush with any flat surface, ergo prodding a resting-on-a-table iPhone’s screen or pushing its home button will result in the handset rocking about or lifting up like an angry ouija board. But — above all — don’t expect the iQi-powered wireless charging to ‘just work’. Much like the nascent convenience of wireless charging generally, the additional functionality offered by the iQi can be marginally useful sometimes — but only when it’s not being a bit annoying. |
Comcast Makes Bid To Acquire Time Warner Cable For $45 Billion | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | The Time Warner Cable sweepstakes might be over. Just a few months after it was that the second-largest cable firm in the nation was looking to be acquired, Comcast, the number one cable provider, has made an for the company. According to , the deal is set to be officially announced Thursday, with Comcast offering $158.82 per share in an all-stock deal. The deal will make Comcast, already the largest cable company in the U.S., even bigger. Time Warner Cable has about 12 million subscribers, compared to Comcast’s 22 million. But not all of those customers will be joining Comcast, as the company plans to divest 3 million subs under the terms that the companies have agreed to. One of the markets it’s expected to hold onto is New York City, where Time Warner Cable is the primary provider in Manhattan. Comcast is already a majority owner of NBC Universal, which has its home base there. For Comcast, the crown jewel of @TWC is the New York City market. Soon will have its 30 Rock studios AND the cable pipes beneath. — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) There will be a ton of naysayers who believe that this consolidation would be bad for the industry, will lead to less consumer choice, and would give one company too much control of the market. And to that I say, there’s already pretty much a monopoly in the pay TV market, and one company owning more subscribers in a market it didn’t even compete in doesn’t make much of a difference. Oh, also: As someone who has been both a Comcast subscriber and a Time Warner Cable subscriber, I think Comcast is actually better positioned to make products and services that people like to use. So it’s not all bad for TWC subs. Interesting side note: The news popped up on the same day it was reported to bring the cable provider’s content onto the Apple TV. So there’s, uh, that. Photo Credit: via |
White House Unveils Cybersecurity Plan For Big Firms, Looks To Silicon Valley Next | Contributor | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | The Obama administration unveiled Wednesday a long-awaited plan for bolstering the cybersecurity of critical-infrastructure providers — including big information technology and communications companies — and is gearing up to try to enlist smaller Silicon Valley shops in its battle against hackers. Top officials at the White House presented the so-called , a 39-page plan for the federal government and critical-infrastructure providers (both private and public) to share more data with each other about cyber threats. It was spurred by an that President Obama signed in February 2013 calling for the and private firms to craft a voluntary framework for thwarting cyber attacks from nefarious hackers and nation states. The new framework “provides, for lack of a better phrase, a common language to discuss cybersecurity,” Lisa Monaco, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, said in an afternoon presentation. The plan has three main parts, starting with a “core” set of cybersecurity activities it says critical-infrastructure companies should carry out — which fall under five functions: identify, protect, detect, respond and recover. The other two parts of the framework include “profiles,” which are intended to help firms craft their specific security plans, and “tiers” that label the state of different companies’ cyber-risk-management processes. The program is voluntary, so the Department of Homeland Security is crafting incentives — which are not yet finalized — to make it sweet for critical-infrastructure entities to opt in. So, that’s what this new framework does for of critical-infrastructure providers — the sizable IT and communications companies, utilities, banks and the like. The administration, though, is not ignoring the smaller technology companies, according to Phyllis Schneck, the deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security. Schneck said Wednesday at a think-tank event in Washington, D.C., that the cyber-resilience of Silicon Valley companies that don’t fall under the definition of “critical infrastructure” is a “huge, huge part of what concerns me personally.” She cited the links such firms have to Americans’ lives and the innovation happening at them. “I would like to use this framework as a catalyst to — and we’re looking at this already — address that with the executives and the technologists out on that (West) Coast, to look at how we enable cybersecurity to be part of their decision process,” Schneck said at the event, which was sponsored by the and . “This is a key part of our country, I want to learn more about what drives those decisions.” Schneck, a former chief technology officer at McAfee, said she understands that Washington’s actions are not “a big part of what drives the thought process of Silicon Valley.” “But, we need to make sure that we take good things in cybersecurity, get their input … (from the innovators in Silicon Valley) … get their opinions, and make sure that we are addressing all that,” she said. Administration cyber officials will travel to northern California “within the next few months,” she said, adding she “will be personally involved.” The new cybersecurity framework is not as strong as actual law, which is why the administration is crafting the incentives. Those perks could include cybersecurity insurance, technical assistance and grant funding. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Wednesday said the framework’s success also will depend on salesmanship. “Our challenge is for the cyber geeks among us to be able to properly, in plain terms, convey the extent of concerns to the broader American public,” Johnson said at the White House. Obama issued the cybersecurity executive order last year because he was frustrated that members of Congress could not agree on legislation to either encourage or outright mandate the private sector and government to share more details about cyber intrusions. The new framework received mixed reaction on Wednesday. While trade groups including the lauded it, the said much “still remains to be seen in terms of how the cyber framework is implemented and revised, especially the roles that regulatory agencies and departments will play.” The chamber also said the framework will remain incomplete unless Congress passes accompanying information-sharing legislation. |
Uber Beefs Up Its Background Checking System | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | said today that it has expanded its system for conducting background checks on the drivers in its on-demand ride service network. In a on the company’s official blog, Uber said it will now perform federal and county background checks on all new drivers in all American markets. The company will also run federal and county checks on all its existing rideshare partners who have not already cleared them. These new checks will be performed in addition to the background check system that Uber has used in the past. Up until now, Uber has relied on the background checks already performed by state and local authorities as part of the commercial licensing required for Uber’s black car, taxi and SUV services. Drivers on the ridesharing Uberx service have been screened by Hirease, a third party background check service that uses something called the “Multi-State Criminal Database.” The changes are key, because Uber’s existing system relying on the Multi-State Criminal Database has not been foolproof. Last month, Pando.com that an UberX driver in San Francisco who had allegedly physically and verbally assaulted a customer had passed Uber’s background check system, despite having a criminal record that includes felony and misdemeanor charges and prison time. In its blog post today, Uber explained the flaws in relying solely on the Multi-State Criminal Database thusly:
“While many counties regularly provide their records to state authorities (who in turn make them available to the Multi-State Criminal Database), some counties do not participate in this reporting the way we and our users expect they should. Similarly, a check relying on the Multi-State Criminal Database may miss records that only exist in the federal database. In our experience, records appearing in one database but not showing up in another is a rare occurrence, but we consider this situation unacceptable all the same.” Uber has raised , including a whopping $258 million led by Google Ventures, since it was founded back in 2009. With this kind of big money comes big responsibility, so it is important to see Uber iterate on its safety processes. |
Marc Andreessen: Tech Is Still Recovering From A Depression | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | Venture capitalist , Palantir co-founder and Goldman Sachs COO sat down today at the Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco, to talk about the thing investors always talk about: Tech. The Netscape founder, taking the same stance he’s had for years, was ever the ebullient optimist. (Because what else are VCs paid to do?) He argued that advances in mobile and chip-making technology signaled exponential expansion of the market. He said tech isn’t overhyped and could have “decades” of growth ahead of it. Echoing , he said world-changing technologies like the web usually settle into a more mature deployment phase after an Andreessen was hopeful about how the Internet of Things could transform the way people live, and credited Moore’s law with the potential to put a chip in everything: “What if we chipped every kid? What if we chipped every dog?” Both Andreessen and Lonsdale said this explosion of software and hardware companies like Anki and Oculus VR (both A16z investments) is a boon for big data and security startups. Andreessen was basically repeating his famous argument that “ .” So Cohn took a moment to remind him that the financial-services industry was the only thing that Andreessen said software couldn’t eat. Cohn asked if Andreessen has reevaluated his stance, because the investor’s new pet technology is Bitcoin. Cohn said the crypto-currency was like “a pure attempt for software to eat the financial-services industry.” Andreessen is famously . “I would not encourage your grandmother to put her life savings in it,” he said. “[But] every single smart computer science person I’ve had look into it has reached the same conclusion — it’s a fundamental breakthrough in technology.” He gushed: “For the first 20 years of the Internet, you couldn’t do this … Bitcoin is the first Internet-native approach of dealing with money. He said that corrupt governments and flimsy central banking systems would be Bitcoin’s true test. “The prospect of a new technology is a big deal once you get out of the West,” he said. Lonsdale used Bitcoin as an example of “how industries work” and “how they should work” and views healthcare and education as some of the biggest targets for reform. “It’s very clear that all these systems were built back in the 70s and 80s. You’re seeing these giant gaps that are being filled in.” He was also weary of social media investments in 2014, because he wants entrepreneurs to make bigger bets. “Is this something that’s pushing the world towards the way it should be?” he asked. Andreessen said our current moment in time fits right into Perez’s model of technological and societal change. (She wrote a pretty influential book in the investor community called “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.”) Andreessen said we’re in “Tech is recovering from the depression,” Andreessen said, referring to the 2008 financial crash, and insinuating that we are now in a sweet spot. “The ratio of public tech PEs [price-to-earnings ratios] versus public industrial PEs, tech is undervalued. Relatively, tech PE ratios are really low. I know a tech company with a PE of six. We’re so far away from bubble territory that it’s unfair to compare this to the late 90s.” Andreessen touched briefly upon recent strife between the tech industry and longtime San Francisco residents. He called Neither can we, Marc. Neither can we. |
Creators Of ‘Super Hexagon’ and ‘Canabalt’ Build Fantastic Tributes To Flappy Bird | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | I told myself I was done writing about Flappy Bird. Really. I’m sort of sick of hearing about it too. But this… this is something special. The creators of Canabalt and Super Hexagon — two very loved games that helped pioneer the whole “simple yet absurdly difficult” category that Flappy Bird took to a whole new level of popularity — have each created entirely new games in tribute to Flappy Bird. These aren’t clones — these are homages. Terry Cavanagh, best known for creating the oh-god-I’m-so-close-to-beating-this-give-me-five-more-minutes titles and , calls his homage . Take the graphic styling of Super Hexagon, add a blaring techno soundtrack, and add a new control element (dive) into the mix, and bam: Maverick Bird. Adam Saltsman, the mind behind Canabalt (one of the first big forever runners), calls his tribute . Like Maverick Bird, it borrows the graphical stylings of its creator’s most popular game — but beyond that, it’s an entirely new experience. You’re a bird, bouncing back and forth across a screen like a ping-pong ball, doing your damnedest to avoid an ever-moving arrangement of spikes. Neither of the games are particularly complex, but that’s not the point. Both of these games were created as part of the , a speed-development showcase meant to show love for Dong Nguyen and his game, in the face of pressure/bullying/other circumstances that lead him to remove his game from the world. Or, as they put it, because “indie gamedevs are friendly and supportive, envy and teasing should not belong to our community, nor be a cause of suffering”. This is like seeing your favorite artist paint in the style of the new guy on the scene, as a sign of respect. It’s really quite amazing to see these guys show some love like this. You can find a of these tributes . [via ] |
Mt. Gox’s Original Creator Is At Work On A Secret Bitcoin Project | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | In what should be one of the greatest and weirdest pivots of all time, Jed McCaleb transformed Mt. Gox (short for Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange) from a card-trading platform into what became the world’s one-time leading Bitcoin exchange. Not wanting the legal hassle of operating a crypto-currency exchange, McCaleb sold Mt. Gox to a few Tokyo-based French entrepreneurs he had never met before in 2011. They presided over Mt. Gox as it went on to dominate Bitcoin trading for more than a year by volume. However, over the past six months, the platform has seen a fall from grace as users have had trouble withdrawing their funds. New troubles emerged in the last couple days again, as Mt. Gox said it was halting withdrawals. The company said it was having problems finalizing transactions because of a perceived flaw Other exchanges also halted withdrawals as the . In any case, McCaleb has been free of Mt. Gox’s troubles for years. Now he’s back at work on a new project. And here it is at the mysterious address of . It has just this short message: When I sold Mt. Gox a few years ago, Bitcoin was trading at less than a dollar. Today Bitcoin exists in a new environment. Mt. Gox is struggling to keep up. Now, I am building something that will be better for Bitcoin and better for you. I’m looking for alpha testers. -Jed We also hear from a source that he’s raised some funding solely through some instant messages and Skype. (McCaleb is a bit reclusive.) |
Keen On… The Hippies: How The Counterculture Ruined The Internet | Andrew Keen | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | The Internet has been getting a lot of lately. But there are few people better able to coherently explain what’s gone wrong than the Stanford University associate professor of communication, . As the author of two important books, and the recently released , Turner has spent much of his academic life studying the intellectual history of the Internet. And Turner isn’t happy with what he’s found. Hippies like , and created the idea of the Internet in their own image, he says. It reflects their dream of “living on the edge” and escaping the rules of society. The problem, Turner says, is that the hippie ideal of escaping authority and doing one’s own thing has spawned companies like Google and Facebook that are indifferent to everything around them. Thus, the , Facebook’s to its users’ privacy and the now more and more people have with Silicon Valley. But Turner hasn’t given up completely. The Internet can he saved, he says. Citing the positive example of , we just need to take back control of the Internet and build products which empower people rather than a few powerful and self-absorbed corporations. |
Please Come Pick Up Your Award, Edward | Gregory Ferenstein | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | and he can’t even give us the courtesy to show up and accept it. Sure, he’d be jailed upon entering US soil and set on a pretty much pre-determined course for life in prison. But, still, it’s a tiny statue of a monkey smashing a TV. We question his priorities. Accepting on his behalf was Trevor Timm, Executive Director of the Freedom of Press Foundation, of which Edward Snowden is a member. “It’s fitting that he’s won the award tonight,” said Timm at his acceptance speech, who organized to pressure Congress to rein in the authority of the National Security Agency. Watch the full interview with Timm above and listen to his call to action. |
Y Combinator-Backed Beacon Offers A New Approach To Crowdfunding Journalism | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | , part of the current batch of startups incubated by Y Combinator, gives readers another way to support (and get access to) high-quality journalism. Two of the company’s co-founders, Dmitri Cherniak and Adrian Sanders, told me that they previously worked together on a photo storytelling app for the iPhone, where they wanted to pay the photographers and give them an incentive to post more content. Given the relatively small size of the audience, Sanders said, “The digital ad model did not make any sense,” but the pair still wondered, “Man, wouldn’t it be great if these mobile photographers could earn real money with this niche community?” Then they encountered Dan Fletcher, formerly managing editor at Facebook and social media director at Bloomberg, who would become the third founder at Beacon. As they discussed the state of the journalism industry, they realized that they could solve a broader problem. Beacon’s approach is basically a form of crowdfunding. Journalism has previously been supported on general crowdfunding sites and through , but I haven’t seen a model quite like this one. Sanders argued that on its own, crowdfunding can accomplish a lot, but “it doesn’t necessarily deliver a great experience for a community of readers.” On Beacon, readers browse through different authors and their projects, and if they find one that they like, they can buy a subscription. There are different subscription levels but the basic price is $5 per month. The subscription actually gives them access to the full array of Beacon content, but the specific project that they support will get the “vast majority” of their payment, Sanders said. Meanwhile, around 25 or 30 percent of the subscription revenue is put into a bonus pool, which is eventually paid out to the writers as well — not based on pageviews or social sharing, but on how many readers hit the “recommend” button after they finished an article, showing that they actually thought it was worth their time. There are more than 70 journalists located in 30 countries on Beacon right now, with projects such as to release government documents around U.S. counterterrorism, and covering the threats facing North American deserts. There are even journalists grouping together to create micro-publications, such as . The site is currently strongest on overseas and public-interest journalism, since that’s an area that requires a significant investment (and one where many publications are pulling back). But Sanders said he doesn’t want to limit Beacon to any particular type of project. Instead, the goal is to experiment and find what readers are willing to pay for. In fact, Beacon could support other forms of content entirely, like photography or cartooning, as it does with . “In the future, there has to be some way for people with large followings on the Internet to really group together and … be supported,” Cherniak added, arguing that it’s “crazy” that the main way to do that right now is to “put ads up on something.” |
Meet Rise, The Diet App That Helped Me Lose 20 Pounds (And Keep It Off During The Holidays) | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | In fact, it’s pretty damn hard. Most diet plans have strict guidelines that are difficult to stand by. Hiring a nutritionist can be effective, but the cost is generally out of reach for most people. , a new , aims to connect users with their own personalized diet plans and daily feedback from nutrition coaches for a fraction of the usual cost. At some point last July, Homebrew Ventures founding partner Hunter Walk asked his Twitter followers if there was anyone who wanted to try out a new app for losing weight. I did. I weighed more than 190 pounds at the time. That wasn’t an all-time high for me, but it was close enough. So when I saw Hunter’s post, I was ready to give something — anything — a try. I asked for an intro to the founders of the app. I was referred to Suneel Gupta, who just happens to be my colleague Leena Rao’s husband.* The first , he moved back to the Bay Area with Leena about a year-and-a-half ago after leaving the daily deals giant to start something new. He began working with Stuart Parmenter, who he had known from his time at Mozilla, and they began dreaming up a way that they could help people live healthier lives through the power of peer-to-peer networking and mobile connectivity. It’s hard to imagine now, based on Gupta’s slight frame, but once upon a time he was an overweight kid with overweight parents. “When I was 14, I was 45 pounds overweight,” he tells me. That same year, both of his parents began having health problems that would require changes to the way they ate. After trying several different diets, however, nothing seemed to stick. Eventually they found a nutritionist with a South Asian background who was able to help them make a number of small, gradual changes in the way that they cooked and the way that they ate which were a lot more sustainable for the family than trying to stick to some one-size-fits-all diet. The concept behind Rise came in part from that experience. Having a diet coach to not only educate but to provide feedback on meal choices in a personalized way can drastically increase your chances of success when it comes to eating healthier and losing weight. It also helps dramatically in teaching you the necessary good habits needed to keep the weight off once it’s been lost. Nutritionists are not cheap, however — they can run upwards of $300 a month. Also, finding one who fits your personal diet needs isn’t always easy. With Rise, Gupta and Parmenter hoped to be able to more efficiently connect nutritionists with clients in a way that would make better use of their time and hopefully make personalized diet coaching affordable to users. The two set to work and launched a basic pilot of the app last summer. That said, when I first asked Gupta for access to try out the product six months ago at the August Capital party, he wasn’t sure. The app was in testing and wasn’t quite ready for public consumption, he told me, and it wasn’t ready for press. After some convincing,** I managed to get on the platform a few days later. Once I did get signed up for Rise, the first thing that struck me was how easy it was to use. There are no large catalogues of various fast foods or meal options to search through, as you might find with some diet apps. There’s no guessing how big a portion size is, or manually entering foods and trying to guess how many calories there were. Rise, by contrast, is simple: You take a photo of each meal and write a pretty basic description of what you ate. That’s it. Later, a personalized diet coach takes a peek and tells you what she thinks of your meal — i.e. what you did well and what you could do better next time. Over time, you start to take these little diet lessons to heart, which leads you to eat better eventually, oftentimes without even thinking about it. My diet changed dramatically over the course of the first several weeks. First came the obvious tweaks: Have a light breakfast every morning, usually no-fat Greek yogurt and fruit or berries. Substitute salad for fries when possible. Hell, try to have a salad with every meal. Don’t eat heavy starches, bread, or non-whole grains. Then there were other habits that were less obvious but got picked up over time. Instead of eating chips or other snacks we had around the office or at home, I started to stock up on fruits or nuts to munch on. I was never a big soda drinker, but I began to drink water and black coffee almost exclusively during the day. Changes started to be reflected in the restaurants I chose to go to, the meals I cooked for myself, and even how I chose to eat or what I ordered when I was at an event or dinner with a limited menu. Forever a plate finisher, I also began to leave portions of my meals behind or saved them for later. Part of the change was just pure education and causing me to re-think how I ate, but part of it also came from the accountability of knowing that I’d have to share each meal with my diet coach Kim. She was one of the earliest coaches to sign up, and has been kind and encouraging, while also nudging me occasionally when she knew I could eat better. When you first sign up for Rise, you’re asked what your objectives are, which helps the coach you’re matched up with to set objectives and create a diet plan that will work for you. You’re then given a choice of coaches to work with, and provided info about each, including their background and coaching style — which can range from “tough love” to encouraging to super encouraging. You’re then outfitted with a plan, outlining what you should eat throughout the day. My objective was to lose weight, and so I have suggestions for five different meals each day, including breakfast, a morning snack, lunch, an afternoon snack, and dinner. Each meal has a series of guidelines for what you can do to improve them day-to-day, and those guidelines change over time as you begin to meet your objectives and set new goals. All of that provides a level of personalization that you don’t get from typical diet apps. Rise has hired former nutrition editor of Fitness Magazine Sara Wells to find nutrition coaches and get them signed up on the platform. Each of the nutritionists is credentialed, and all have to demonstrate a level of one-on-one success working with their own clients before joining. Those coaches are given a dashboard through which they can view the meals of multiple clients and make comments. That dashboard is the key to the efficiency that Rise provides, enabling coaches to work with many more clients than they would connect with through weekly meetings. And because feedback happens more quickly — generally within a day — users are able to begin changing their habits more quickly. The platform also enables Rise to offer diet coaching at a much lower cost than if you went out and hired your own nutritionist. Typical one-on-one nutritionists cost more than $300 a month. Rise, by contrast, is $48 each month or $15 a week. (The first 100 TechCrunch readers who want to give it a try can get 20 percent off their first week or month with the code TCBETA.) But does it work? Well, it did for me. Between August and November I lost about 20 pounds. And despite travel and not-so-healthy eating during the holidays, I managed to maintain that weight. Now that things have calmed down, I’m hoping to lose another 10. The Rise team has assembled a pretty impressive group of investors and advisers. The company had raised $2.3 million in seed funding, which was led by Floodgate, along with Cowboy Ventures, Google Ventures, and Greylock. Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko, who’s also on the boards of companies like Lyft, TaskRabbit and others, is a director, and Cowboy Ventures’ Aileen Lee is a board observer. Meanwhile, Greylock’s John Lilly — who hired Gupta at Mozilla — is an adviser. Other advisers include Harvard’s Dr. Russ Phillips, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent (and Suneel’s brother) Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Mayo Clinic and White House Innovation Fellow Adam Dole, P90X founder Tony Horton, Uber COO Emil Michael, Flipboard CTO Eric Feng, OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque, and Facebook growth lead Alex Schultz. ==
* There are a few disclosures I should probably get out of the way: Suneel is married to Leena, sure, but my interest in Rise came more from trying to lose weight than the coworker connection. It’s also worth noting that I have been testing out the pilot app for free over the last several months, though I’ve been giving the founders (what I hope is useful) product feedback along the way. ** I basically promised not to write about the app until it was ready for the . |
Secret To Launch A Bug Bounty Program As Soon As Today | Matthew Panzarino | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | Today, for a brief time, a post on the secret sharing app Secret and an image on Twitter caused a twinge in the cockles of every user’s heart. The image appeared to indicate that your email — and therefore your identity — could be tied to your Secret posts. Given that the vast majority of posts on Secret are stuff that would end up being really, really awkward to explain to friends and employers, that’s a genuine concern. Twitter denizen Barce was one of the publicly that showed your own email (but not that of any other user) being passed as part of the stream of data from the app’s internal API. The fact is that there was a very remote possibility of this being a problem in the long run — as it required that the ‘sniffer’ own the network that the device was on and poll all of the traffic going back and forth. And Byttow mentions that the email addresses were not actually tied to specific posts anyway. With the help of professional app breaker , we took a look at the traffic that was passing in and out of the app and saw the email ourselves — and we saw it disappear from the feed. That disappearance was no coincidence, as Secret co-founder David Byttow tells us that they removed the email from the response stream even as he was chatting with Barce on Twitter. That the change was made so quickly speaks well to Secret’s proactive responsiveness to security issues that may crop up — which is probably a good thing given the nature of the app. In addition, Byttow tells us that they’re ‘dropping everything’ to work on setting up a bug bounty program that will encourage security researchers and tinkerers like Barce to reach out to them directly with anything they feel is a threat to user privacy. This is a common practice with larger companies like Google and Microsoft, who have hundreds of products and millions of lines of code that can be audited more thoroughly by the crowd. And not having an active bug bounty program and a proactive demeanor about security probably didn’t help Snapchat when a user was user phone numbers. The plan is to launch the program soon, even today if possible. The fact that today is Byttow’s birthday didn’t stop him from aggressively pursuing the report and responding, so credit to him for that. Image Credit: |
Yahoo’s Contextual Homescreen App Aviate Adds A Smart “Listening Space” For Music Lovers | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | , the contextual Android homescreen application Yahoo in January, has rolled out an update today which introduces a smart “Listening Space” that allows users to more easily find their music applications in one section, while also being pointed to relevant information about their music, including bios and recent tweets from the artist, upcoming shows nearby, and more. It also adds the ability to listen to top tracks in Spotify. The update was announced on Yahoo’s , which noted that the feature was something current Aviate users have been demanding. Explains Yahoo, Aviate is able to detect the song you’re listening to as you begin to play it, then delivers the related information in the “Listening Space” section. For those unfamiliar, Aviate is something of an Android launcher, but one where the smartphone apps presented to you change as you go about your day. For example, in the morning, you might see a weather application and your preferred news and finance apps, and while out-and-about, you may be presented with apps like Google Maps, Foursquare, or Yelp. Following the acquisition, Yahoo explained that it envisioned using Aviate’s technology to deliver content in ways that are “smarter and more personalized” to end users. The new “Listening Space” falls under that same general paradigm of wanting to make a particular experience more info-rich and contextual, but the new feature in and of itself is something which competes with other standalone mobile apps like Shazam or Soundhound. However, what’s really interesting about the new “Listening Space” is something that’s glossed over in the announcement: it’s also serving as an app discovery service which will drive traffic to the Google Play store by encouraging new app downloads. App recommendations are something Aviate had in the works already, and in this particular case, it seems that Aviate will work to recommend “related music apps” to end users who don’t already have other popular music apps installed on their Android phone. Though Aviate’s user base is today relatively small (Google Play says between 500,000 and 1 million downloads), over time, these sorts of recommendations could really impact an app’s user base size and rankings. The update is now, but Aviate remains in private beta. However, users can click to download, using the code “MUSIC” to get in. |
Fwd.us Adds A Paid Membership Model, With Access To Talks From Thiel And More | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | Fwd.us, the advocacy group initially backed by tech luminaries like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, is . The move is a bid to attract broader support from regular tech industry workers and people living in cities like New York and San Francisco who care about immigration reform and political issues affecting knowledge workers. At $35 a year, members will get invited to speaker events with Silicon Valley business leaders and other policy experts. The first set of talks includes one on “The Future of the Middle class and the American Dream in the 21st Century,” with venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and MIT academic Andrew McAfee. McAfee recently published “The Second Machine Age,” on how emergent technologies like self-driving cars could change the U.S. economy. Fwd.us president Joe Green said the new program wasn’t about raising money. “In my last company, we sold SAAS software. It’s valuable to have the customer to pay you directly. Then in the Obama campaign, while they had extremely wealthy donors, they also used the phrase — owning a piece of the campaign. Lots of people donated $25 or $50,” Green said. “I think there’s real value in having folks who have a real stake and buy-in behind the organization.” Last year, Fwd.us made some stumbles supporting projects like the Keystone XL pipeline. That prompted certain high-profile members like Elon Musk to withdraw their support. Green said that organization has been running hackathons and has kept its entire legislative focus on immigration reform. “We started this organization to be one that is very pragmatic politically. You need to work on both lines of the aisle. We knew that when you try and get something done in politics, not everyone agrees. Not everyone agrees with the tactics we pursued,” Green said. “But we launched quickly and had ads up by April. Since then, we’ve focused on communication and listening. Now we’re building a network out in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Chicago, Austin and in tech hubs around the country.” |
Zillow Reports Record Q4 2013 Earnings, Relaunches NYC-Focused StreetEasy As Free Service | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | today its Q4 2013 earnings. The company booked $58.3 million in revenue (up 70% year-over-year) for a GAAP earnings per share of $0.07 and non-GAAP EPS of $0.20. Net income was $2.7 million. In the year-ago quarter, Zillow reported earnings of $34.3 million and net income of $500K. For all of 2013, the company reported record revenue of $197.5 million, up 69 percent year-over-year. The analyst consensus ahead of the earnings was that the company would report revenue of about $56.18 million and earnings per share of $0.07, a 12 percent drop from the year-ago-quarter. In previous quarters, the company reported record traffic to its site, as well as large growth for its mobile apps. Despite record earnings, however, the increased advertising expenses that drove this traffic meant the company reported a net loss of about $1.2 million in the last quarter. For the full FY2013, Zillow today reported a loss of $12.5 million and once again, the company noted that this was “due primarily to previously announced investment in advertising.” This is pretty much in line with expectations, though, as Zillow has long decided to forgo short-term profit in order to grow its user base.
This time around, Zillow’s traffic once again grew to new record levels – which was surely also driven by the slowly recovering real-estate market. In total, quarterly traffic grew 57 percent year-over-year, to 54.4 million average monthly uniques on mobile and Web. In January 2013, the company says, it reached a new record with 70 million unique users, and in an interview after the earnings hit, CEO Spencer Rascoff stressed that mobile is now also a large driver of the company’s revenue growth. As for Zillow’s recent emphasis on rentals, Rascoff noted that it’s still a relatively small driver of the company’s revenue right now, but he expect this to grow fast. “This was a breakaway year for Zillow in which we repeatedly delivered record revenue, traffic, and mobile usage as we significantly grew our market share as the category leader. And we’ve had an incredibly strong start to 2014 with another traffic record of nearly 70 million unique users in January,” said Rascoff in today’s announcement. He also stressed that the site is now significantly larger than any of its competitors and that it will continue to invest in growing its audience rapidly. Besides reporting its earnings today, Zillow also announced that it is relaunching , the New York City-centric real-estate site it in August 2013. The service is getting a complete redesign, but maybe even more importantly, it is moving from its current freemium model to a completely free service. Previously, StreetEasy users had to pay $10 per month for access to advanced search features and information like recorded sales information, property records and real-time email alerts for new properties. Now, the service is making all of its tools available without the previous paywall. This is pretty much in line with how Zillow itself operates, too, so this move doesn’t come as a major surprise. Rascoff also noted that Zillow considers itself to be a media company, so the more eyeballs it can get on its content, the better it is for its bottom line. Given StreetEasy’s popularity in the New York market, the company has clearly decided to keep the brand itself going too, similarly to what it’s been . |
Disney Is Launching Its Own Startup Accelerator, With Help From Techstars | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | The Walt Disney Company is getting into the startup incubator business with the launch of a new program called . Disney says it’s looking for 10 “early-stage companies with innovative consumer media and entertainment product ideas.” Those startups will receive a $120,000 investment and mentorship from the tech and entertainment industries, as well as from leaders in various Disney divisions (including Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, ESPN, and Walt Disney Imagineering), not to mention Disney CEO Bob Iger. The company describes the program as “powered by Techstars.” (Other companies that have partnered with Techstars for their own startup accelerators include , , and .) Kevin Mayer, Disney’s executive vice president of corporate development, told me via email that the organizations are “working hand in hand” with Techstars bringing its accelerator experience and Disney offering its executives, intellectual property, and other resources. I asked Mayer whether the Disney Accelerator’s goals are primarily financial or strategic, and he said, “This is about identifying and mentoring startups with innovative ideas that could help transform the media and entertainment business.” He also pointed to Disney’s history of “firsts.” “By way of example, in 1928, Disney launched the first cartoon with fully synchronized sound,” Mayer said. “In 1932 it premiered the first full-color cartoon. In 1937 came the first animated feature film and in 1955 the first modern theme park was opened. We have also been leaders in entertainment technology development with inventions like the multiplane camera, audio-animatronics, circle-vision 360° and Fantasound. I see Disney Accelerator as an extension of this legacy and a new way of bringing together the creative energies of the media/entertainment and startup communities to inspire innovation.” A more recent sign of Disney’s interest in the tech world was , co-founder of Twitter and Square (he’s chairman at the former company and CEO at the latter), to its board of directors, where he joined Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and former Sybase CEO John S. Chen. The accelerator will be based in Los Angeles. Applications are due by April 16, with the program scheduled to begin on June 30 and an investor demo day planned for September. |
Mobile Game Developer Supercell Made $892M Last Year (Oh, And They Paid $345M In Taxes) | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | Here’s what a top mobile game developer can make in a single year: $892 million off two games across Android and iOS. That’s what Finnish developer Supercell said on a call last that night that it earned last year. Although Supercell is privately held, it still has to report earnings once a year in accordance with Finnish law. The company sold slightly over half of itself to Japanese carrier Softbank and . Their lofty valuation came from explosive earnings from two games: Clash of Clans and Hay Day. Those two titles helped the game maker go from earning $101 million in revenue in 2012 to nearly nine times as much the following year. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization worked out to be $464 million. The company is planning on releasing a third title, Boom Beach, next month. Surprisingly though, the earnings aren’t that much higher than the annualized runrate the company reported back in the first quarter of last year, when it in first-quarter revenue. (That would have worked out to slightly over $700 million per year, and that’s before Supercell launched the Android versions of its games.) There’s one other interesting thing from the call, too. What’s the difference between an American company’s earnings call and a Finnish one? Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen had to stress how much the company paid in taxes. (Imagine if Apple or Google did that.) Because of the company’s huge exit last year, Supercell has had to manage domestic press relations in a sensitive way before a country that prides itself on its socioeconomic equality. Paananen said Supercell paid $345 million in taxes to the government, including corporate tax, income tax and taxes related to the sale. On top of that, Paananen said Supercell was not using any international financial maneuvering to avoid paying taxes to the Finnish government. This is in contrast to companies like Apple, which have used subsidiaries in countries like Ireland, the Netherlands and the Caribbean to avoid billions of dollars in income taxes. , a former Treasury Department economist told the newspaper that Apple’s federal tax bill would have likely been $2.4 billion higher if it hadn’t used these accounting techniques. “We don’t use any tax optimization,” Paananen said. “We’ve gotten so much from this community here. Helsinki is the best place to set up your company, especially if you’re a games company.” |
MyHealthTeams Lands $3.3M To Bring Mobile-Friendly Social Networks To Those Living With Chronic Health Conditions | Rip Empson | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | Today, that there are more than 130 million Americans currently living with a “chronic disease” — in other words, the many types of long-lasting conditions that “can be controlled but not cured.” With Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer, arthritis diabetes and heart conditions among the most common (and costly) examples of chronic conditions, sadly, it’s no surprise that for 70 percent of deaths each year in the U.S. and accounts for more than 75 percent of the country’s healthcare costs. For younger generations, social networks and social networking businesses are old news. It may be hard to believe, but with social network marketshare increasingly dominated by a few gigantic players, many networks remain underserved. As forums and message boards fall out of favor as a result, this has become especially true for a wide range of “niche” communities — like those living chronic conditions, for example. launched in 2011 to provide a platform where those living with (or effected by) chronic conditions can go to quickly find, communicate and connect with others like them. Essentially, MyHealthTeams created a community for communities, or, in the company’s words, a “social network for chronic condition communities,” designed to make it easy for visitors to connect with those who can share their experiences and discover the people best-suited to help and offer advice. MyHealthTeams’ mission is to makes it easy for people to quickly find and connect with a network of other people who are in a similar position and can understand the challenges faced via its own condition-specific social networks. In addition, members can also easily find referrals of local providers and businesses best suited to help them — and this, presumably, is part of the business model. The startup’s flagship community, MyAutismTeam, a social network for parents of children with autism, launched in beta in June of 2011 with 35 parents in California. Today, more than 52,000 parents have registered to use the site from all over North America. MyHealthTeams co-founder Eric Peacock attributes this adoption to pent up demand created by the inadequate options available to the chronic disease community. “Most health sites don’t actually help these people connect with and learn from others who have been in their shoes,” he says, and “the majority feel like they’re trying to “re-invent the wheel.” MyHealthTeams set out to solve that by building social networks for specific chronic conditions that look and feel more like Facebook, Yelp and Quora than your average health website, he says. Since then, the proof has been in the pudding, or in the viral growth and high engagement levels of its users. The startup recently added two additional social networks, MyBCTeam, which is designed for women diagnosed with breast cancer and MyMSTeam for people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis — the latter of which is both its newest and fastest growing network. For MyHealthTeams, the key to providing a better user experience and increasing engagement across its communities has been staying away from becoming too editorially-driven or basing the entire experience around discussion forums, Peacock says. As a result the percentage of registered members on these social networks who are monthly active users is north of 50 percent. Since then, MyHealthTeams has been looking to leverage the pent-up demand within the chronic disease community to develop additional social networks to expand its coverage to a wider range of conditions and diseases. To do that, the startup announced today that it has raised $3.36 million in Series A financing led by The Westly Group. The startup’s existing investors, like Adams Street Partners — who led the startup’s $1.75 million seed investment in the summer of 2012 — also participated in the new round, along with 500 Startups, HealthTechCapital, Sand Hill Angels, TEEC and a handful of angel investors. With the new capital under its belt, Peacock says that MyHealthTeams will be looking to expand its team significantly over the next few months and begin accelerating the rate at which it launches new social networks and communities. The long-term goal, the founder says, is pretty straightforward, if not ambitious: Five years from now, I want to have launched 100 of these social networks. In the future, if you’re diagnosed with a chronic condition — like 1 in 2 Americans are today — the hope is that it will be your doctor, or another person with the same condition, that will tell you about, or ‘prescribe’ MyHealthTeams’ social network. While startups in other industries might be concerned with competitors or over-crowding, and MyHealthTeams may feel that way to a certain extent, the truth is that, for those living with or affected by chronic diseases, the more (quality) communities like these, the better. For now, the list remains small, by thanks to companies like , , and , MyHealthTeams isn’t alone. |
CircleUp Lands Virgin America Partnership | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | , a crowdfunding service for startup consumer goods companies, has landed as a partner for the food and beverage companies it backs. It’s the latest example of how corporations increasingly are embracing the wisdom of crowdfunding. The U.S.-based airline, which has a minority investment from Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, will use CircleUp as a way to identify new snacks and drinks that could be served on its flights. Virgin America declined to comment on the financial terms of its agreements with CircleUp-backed companies. More corporations are looking to have their voices heard among the din of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing startups, whether as investors – like – or as distribution and production partners for and now food. This interest from public companies mirrors a rise in venture investors’ activity as these crowdfunding startups begin to mature. In all, is tracking 250 startups that are using a crowdfunding model.
The brainchild of Ryan Caldbeck and Rory Eakin, CircleUp began after a conversation about how to solve the fundraising gap consumer products companies typically face. While private-equity firms focused on consumer goods are willing to write checks in the $25 million to $250 million range, there were few avenues for very early-stage food and beverage or consumer goods companies to explore for the first $1 million, according to Eakin. “All the funds in the consumer space tend to work with companies that are much larger,” he continued. “It’s not worth their time to invest under $100 million to $200 million.” For Eakin, a former employee at the looking at marketplaces, and Caldbeck, who was working at the consumer-focused investment firm , the solution was obvious – a crowdfunding investment platform. The model not only offers a platform for small companies to raise cash that otherwise wouldn’t, it also gives entrepreneurs launching consumer companies outside of major financial hubs an opportunity to grow their businesses. “If you’re a company in Boise, Idaho, or Austin, it’s difficult to find investors,” Eakin said. CircleUp has an internal staff that provides basic due diligence of the companies that pitch investors on the platform, before the companies are vetted by potential investors themselves. The company’s platform has also been vetted by investors like and . Both firms invested in the company’s $7.5 million Series A round last spring. The crowdfunding model , and companies in the industry, can raise huge amounts of money. Firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz are spending big dollars to back crowdfunding players, according to CrunchBase data. Since its launch, CircleUp has helped 30 companies raise $30 million, and with partners like Virgin America, Eakin said the firm has a potential to help even more companies take off. “Many people under-appreciate the depth that brands play with our lives,” Eakin said. “[Roughly] 20 percent of the overall economy is consumer products brands.” Other partners working with CircleUp include consumer goods giants General Mills and Procter & Gamble. Virgin America has selected two CircleUp-funded companies, the French vintner Le Grand Courtage and San Francisco-based granola bar and snack food company 18 Rabbits. CircleUp’s platform allows for more than just food and beverage companies to try to raise cash. It also has restaurants, retail goods, consumer products, and health and wellness product makers trying to raise new funding rounds. As venture investors become more interested in launching consumer companies themselves, more companies could find themselves raising follow-on financings, Eakin said. “[Right now] follow-on rounds are in the one to $10 million range,” he said. “The average round on our site is $1 million.” |
Tocomail Debuts An Email Service Designed For Kids | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | , a new iPhone and iPad application launching today, aims to be kids’ first email service. The app was designed not only with children in mind, but also in collaboration with kids who provided input as Tocomail’s early adopters. But more importantly, Tocomail offers parental controls that allow mom and/or dad to designate who the child is able to email using Tocomail, and who they can accept email from in return. The company was founded last year by Dennis Bolgov and Pavel Istomin, long time friends and former classmates at the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute. Bolgov came to the U.S. back in 1998, and ended up working for a company called Lobby7, acquired by Nuanace Communications in 2003. He later went on to work on Nuance’s speech-enabled mobile interfaces – technology that has since made its way to other mobile applications and services, including Apple’s SIRI. The two founders also previously built Says Bolgov, he came up with the idea for a kids’ email application when his son Michael, then 7 years old, asked for his own email account. “I agreed that everyone today needs an email account, but I wanted a safe email service for Michael which also had a good mobile app and was intuitive and fun to use,” Bolgov tells us. “But after a lot of research, I realized that there was nothing out there that satisfied all of these requirements, so Pavel and I decided to create Tocomail.” The app itself is easy to use. Parents sign up and create the account for their child or children, in a process that takes about five minutes to complete. At this time, they also configure a list of “safe contacts” who their kids are allowed to email with – people like grandma or grandpa, for example, plus other family members or close family friends. Once set up, kids can both send and receive emails on Tocomail using iOS, Android (soon) or the web. Since the idea is to offer a service that’s not just safe for kids, but one that’s appealing as well, Tocomail includes fun tools like a drawing board, custom avatar creation, a picture timeline and more. The app is also colorful in its design, which makes it feel more like something meant for kids, rather than a boring, professional email client. In addition to offering parental supervision over a child can communicate with, Tocomail also offers features that allow parents to keep an eye on the content of the email messages, too. There’s a profanity filter, for example, and a quarantine box where questionable messages will be relocated. Tocomail is currently free to use, but a more comprehensive set of parental controls are available for $2.99/month or $29.99/year. This includes a supervised general list of contacts, beyond the “Safe” list in the free version. Emails from these contacts go into Quarantine until a parent reviews them. Kids can also email out, but again, parents are able to review, then approve those messages. Quarantined emails can also be routed to a parent’s regular email account for ease-of-access, and they can approve or reject the message from the notification email itself, explains Bolgov. In a future release, Tocomail will introduce technology that will watch for bullying patterns – something that could be helpful to parents who don’t as closely supervise each and every message or don’t know what exactly to watch for. During Tocomail’s beta testing period, the company found that kids aged 6 to 9 mostly wrote very short emails, almost like messaging. Going forward, the founders are planning to further support this behavior with an optional messaging “bubbles” view, where kids can see their emails more like instant messages with their contacts. Other social networking features like status updates and a timeline will also be introduced in later versions. Boston-based Tocomail is backed by $500,000 in seed funding from angels and other private investors. The service competes with others in the space, like or . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRlOBtgUXFk] |
Google And VMware Make Accessing Windows Apps, Desktops From ChromeOS Easier | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | Google and VMware today announced that they are to make it for Chromebook users in the enterprise to access Windows apps and the Windows desktop on their machines. Using VMware’s (DaaS), which uses ‘s HTML5 Blast protocol, it will now be easier for Chromebook users to connect to a traditional Windows experience. Remote access to a Windows machine on Chrome OS is nothing new. Google offers its own for this, and there are a number of third-party options that offer the same kind of service. For the most part, though, these solutions don’t offer the kind of security features that enterprises look for in a remote access tool. According to the companies, today’s launch will bring an enterprise-ready solution to the growing number of businesses that have deployed Chrome OS devices. Using VMware’s Horizon Chromebook-optimized DaaS, Google says, enables “customers to centralize other desktop environments and manage these as a cloud service.” Right now, this service is only available as a fully managed, subscription-based offering by VMWare and its partners, both in the cloud and within hybrid deployments. VMware users will be able to use the service to access their Windows applications, data and desktops from a web-based application catalog on their Chromebooks. Soon, Chromebook users (or their IT admins) will also be able to install the service from the Chrome Web Store. Given that Google is now also putting more , the company is clearly positioning Chrome OS as an alternative to Windows. Indeed, in its announcement today, Google stressed that it believes that “as the countdown to Windows XP end of life continues, deploying Chromebooks and taking advantage of a DaaS environment ensures that security vulnerabilities, application compatibility and migration budgets will be a thing of the past.” Besides the obvious marketing-speak here, there are security issues with still running Windows XP, though Google is clearly going after a bigger market, too. It sees Chrome OS as an alternative to any traditional desktop operating system. |
Japanese Internet Giant Rakuten Acquires Viber For $900M | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | , one of Japan’s largest Internet companies, has that it will acquire Cyprus-based messaging platform and app maker Viber for $900 million. The deal is the latest and largest in an aggressive acquisition spree by Rakuten as it seeks to “become the world’s No. 1 Internet services company,” it said, and marks its entry into the global messaging market. Viber can now potentially add Rakuten Group’s approximately 225 million members to its existing user base of 300 million registered users. The Rakuten-Viber pairing may pose a significant new challenge to Line, which and is aiming for the 500 million milestone in 2014. Like Line, Viber users can also purchase and send stickers to one another, and it recently added Viber Out, which enables free calls to mobile and landline numbers. Viber’s apps do not currently have games, one of Line’s key draws, but CEO Hiroshi Mikitani hinted that games are part of Rakuten’s plans for the messaging service. In a statement, Mikitani said: I am tremendously excited to welcome Viber to the Rakuten family. Viber delivers the most consistently high quality and convenient messaging and VoIP experience available. Additionally, Viber has introduced a great sticker market and has tremendous potential as a gaming platform. Over the last two years, Rakuten’s acquisitions have included: e-reading platform ; Spanish streaming video service ; and . In addition to its shopping spree, Rakuten . It has to invest in startups primarily from Southeast Asia, which has one of the world’s fastest-growing mobile marketplaces, as well as Taiwan. The news comes just two days after that it was in talks to be acquired by an instant messaging company from Asia for $300 million to $400 million. Commenting on the acquisition to TechCrunch via email, Viber CEO and founder Talmon Marco declined to answer specific questions about the future of his role and Viber’s service under Rakuten, saying only: “We will continue focusing on building the best messaging and voice service out there. Lots of new things in the funnel for 2014. It’s going to be the most exciting year for Viber thus far!” |
Secret Launches Bug Bounty Program For Hackers Who Find Vulnerabilities In Its App | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | , which has fast become everyone’s favorite way to with , has launched a new program that is designed to find — and squash — bugs in its mobile app before being exposed to the general public. The launch of the program comes less than a day-and-a-half after a photo began making the , which appeared to link a user’s email address to posts that they had shared through the app. The Secret team not only squashed the bug almost immediately, but also announced plans to launch the bug bounty for hackers playing around with the app. And, well, . Saying that it is “committed to working with this community to verify, reproduce, and respond to legitimate reported vulnerabilities,” the team is asking for researchers to participate in the process of identifying those vulnerabilities and working with it to close them. In doing so, Secret is asking for hackers to “make a good faith effort” to not violate user privacy, destroy data, or degrade its service. That includes not accessing or violating any data that does not belong to the user, or sharing it with the public before it’s resolved. The launch comes after hacks and attacks on other apps which promise anonymity or ephemerality that expose user information. In late December, a exposed information connected to 4.6 million of its users. It took more than a week for Snapchat to and release further security features in an effort to ensure a similar incident doesn’t occur again. For Secret, the whole idea behind the program is to take a proactive approach to finding and eliminating any potential issues in the app that could expose users’ identity or link secrets to them. That protection is necessary in an app in which users can share what could be sensitive information anonymously with each other. For now, Secret says it’s hoping to “work with great people and learn from others” while closing any bugs and promises gifts to those who participate. |
Xiaomi Sets Singapore Launch Date As It Prepares For Global Expansion | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | just announced that it will launch in Singapore on Feb. 21. This is a significant move because it marks the company’s first expansion beyond China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan six months after . The company earlier this week. The only product currently featured is the Redmi, Xiaomi’s cheapest Android phone, which will cost just S$169 (or about $133 USD). Despite its very low price, the , like a quad-core processor, a 4.2-inch HD screen, and 8MP camera, that may help it standout from competitors. Xiaomi’s other handsets have also earned kudos for strong specs, attractive design, and Xiaomi’s Android skin, which it customizes by crowdsourcing user feedback. Singapore makes sense as Xiaomi’s first stop in its international expansion because the country has one of the highest mobile penetration rates in the world. According to Nielsen, 87% of people in Singapore have a smartphone, the same number as in Hong Kong. To put that figure into context, it beats the 71% mobile penetration rate in China, 72% in the UK, and 60% in the U.S. Xiaomi has grown extremely quickly since launching just three years ago. In 2013, for example, it . Though Xiaomi continues to face strong competition from domestic Android handset makers like Lenovo, ZTE, and Huawei, it has held its own thanks to the high profile of its founder, , as well as unique marketing strategies, like selling phones directly from Sina Weibo, China’s top microblogging platform. Xiaomi’s growth plan has worked very well so far: in August 2013, by a small margin, according to Canalys. |
Aerohive Networks Files For $75 Million IPO | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | , a company that sells Wi-Fi products to enterprise customers, has today . The company’s proposed $75 million public offering is not unexpected. It about a future flotation when it raised its Series E round of capital ($22.5 million) in 2012. Aerohive went back to the well a final time, picking up $10 million as a Series F in mid-2013. The initial public offering has not been priced, nor have the number of shares to be sold been disclosed. Aerohive . It will trade with the ticker symbol HIVE on the New York Stock Exchange. The company raised . Its investors include Northern Light, Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and New Enterprise Associates. Aerohive has experienced quick growth and widening losses, due in no small part to its growing marketing spend. That expense isn’t surprising, given that the company appears to have worked to expand its top line at the fastest pace possible, even taking on $10 million in debt along the way. Revenue at the firm was $15.6 million in 2010, $31.8 million in 2011, $66.6 million in 2012, and for the first nine months of 2013, $70.3 million. In the comparable nine-month period of 2012, Aerohive had top line of $47.3 million. So, for the first three quarters of 2013, Aerohive grew just under 50 percent. That quick top line ramp came at a price for the firm, which saw its net loss grow from $15.7 million in the first three quarters of 2012 to $25.4 million in the comparable period of 2013. Presumably, the company will update its S-1 filing with fourth quarter, and therefore full-year 2013 data. For now, we can only view dated information. Operating expenses were up 60 percent at the company in the first three quarters of 2013. The company indicates in its filing that it has never had a quarter, let alone a year, of profitability. Quickly expanding revenue and rising losses? Investors that buy into its offering will be wagering that its growth will not slow, and presumably dollars raised from the public markets will help the company grow all the more quickly. Aerohive is not the only technology company looking to go public at the moment. Box has , as well, albeit privately. |
Twitter’s Dick Costolo On What It Takes To Be A Good CEO | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | Backstage at the show, TechCrunch co-editor pulled Costolo aside for a quick interview to talk about Twitter’s success over the past year and what it means to be a good CEO. When Panzarino asked Costolo to share his “playbook” for leading Twitter, he had a really thoughtful response. He said: “I’ll say two things. We had the good fortune to have Adam Silver, the new commissioner of the NBA, in the office the other day, and someone asked him about the culture of the NBA. Adam said, ‘One of the great players in the NBA told me that championships aren’t won on the court, they’re won on the bus.’ And what he was referring to is that sense of team building, and making sure that it feels like a team, and that you’re all pulling for each other and working together. That is what makes something work. And I think that’s something I just really pay very careful attention to. Someone asked me once in an interview, ‘If you had to describe yourself as a CEO how would you describe yourself?’ And I thought about it for a second, and I said, ‘Well, I think I’m present.’ I try to be really present and there for the team, and to understand what everybody else understands. Because when you have that understanding of what everybody else understands, you can provide the proper context for the decisions that are being made, and help communicate those decisions. And then, it’s easier for everybody else in the company to feel like they have a sense of why decisions are being made… …If I could sum up my advice in one sentence, it would be to make sure that everybody understands what you understand.” You can watch that and the rest of the conversation in the video embedded above. |
TC Cribs: Zoosk, Where A Tunnel Of Love Leads To Coders, Cupcakes, And Puppies | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | It’s just about Valentine’s Day, which means love is in the air, even here among the workaholics in the tech industry. So for this episode of we headed over to the San Francisco headquarters of , the startup that started out as a dating-focused Facebook app and has grown into a full on matchmaking service. Zoosk’s office has a nice mix of business and pleasure: Engineers plug away at code just a few feet from a spirited game of ping-pong, and data scientists furrow their brows and crunch numbers alongside people playing fetch with a newly adopted puppy. And as you’ll see at the very end of the video embedded above, during my visit Zoosk definitely fulfilled its promise of helping people find true love. |
Yahoo Acquires Technical Recruiting Startup Distill | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | Yahoo just acquired a San Francisco-based startup called , which and programming challenges. They had raised $1.3 million in funding from investors including Felicis Ventures, China’s Innovation Works and DN Capital. The startup’s two founders, and , came from Tapjoy, StumbleUpon and Google. They created Distill because they had built up engineering teams before and were familiar with the frustrations that come with managing and scheduling technical interviews. Distill’s product paired the basic features of a video chat service like Skype, and put them alongside a text editor and file upload space so that an interviewer could walk a candidate through a collaborative coding session. We hear they’ll be working on mobile ads products for Yahoo. Here’s : |
Citia Raises $600K To Power “Card-Based” Websites And Content | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | The Internet is “melting,” according to Linda Holliday, founder and CEO of startup Citia. “I’ve been watching this movement from solids and pages to liquids and flows,” she told me. “Everything’s becoming atomic.” Holliday argued that when you look at sites like Pinterest, you can see how the web is shifting towards a more “card-based” structure. And Citia, which is announcing that it has raised $600,000 in additional funding, aims to help marketers and content creators take advantage of that shift. The company by offering card-based layouts for e-book publishers, but now it powers a range of web pages, including . When you visit the site, you can browse through cards representing each of the top albums, with the cards sorted into different stacks. Each individual card can be linked to and allows users to listen to music. Holliday, who was also an angel investor and co-founded Medical Broadcasting Company (now owned by Publicis Groupe and called Digitas Health), described Citia as a “platform as a service.” Ultimately, she wants to be the technology provider for these types of online experiences, although the initial projects “need more hand holding.” She also said that content management systems like WordPress aren’t competitors — instead, Citia can sit on top of a CMS. These fancy layouts and the platform powering them are supposed to help marketers in a few key ways. For one thing, they can automatically add and organize streams of content from services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. For another, it allows websites to “blow through the Z axis,” creating three-dimensional layouts that are more dynamic and allow users to browse through much more content. The company recently added support for Android, so a big part of my conversation with Holliday involved swapping between demos on a laptop, a tablet and a smartphone. Regardless of the device and whether we were on a website or an app, I found the experience was slick and engaging. As for the funding, it comes from angel investors including David S. Rose and Geoff Judge, and it brings Citia’s total funding to $2.8 million. |
TechCrunch Giveaway: A Bouquet Of Flowers | Elin Blesener | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | What is everyone doing tomorrow? You do know that tomorrow is one of the most romantic days of the year, right? Do you have plans? Dinner? A trip? Is dessert made? Well, thanks to , you don’t have to add flowers to your checklist! BloomNation has agreed to give a romantic bouquet of flowers to five lucky people. They will have the flowers hand crafted by one of their local artisan florists and hand delivered to your valentine. That means you have more time to do things for the night — maybe clean the house or scatter those rose petals on the ground. Whatever you’re into. Sadly, this giveaway is for the U.S. only. It starts now and ends tonight at 9pm EST. All you have to do to enter is comment below about what love means to you. We will go through the comments and pick five winners tonight, so be on the lookout if you enter. Alliny Magalhaes
Dmitry Shevelenko
Zach Bruhnke
Christopher Davies
David Chung |
Silk Road 2 Hacked, Over 4,000 Bitcoin Allegedly Stolen | John Biggs | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | Silk Road 2 moderator Defcon reported in a forum post that hackers have used a to hack the marketplace. The hackers stole over 4474.26 worth $2,747,000, emptying the site’s escrow account. UPDATE – Fixed estimate. The site used a central escrow service to send bitcoins from buyers to sellers. The hackers exploited the transaction malleability bug – essentially a way users can mask transfers and ask for the same amount of BTC multiple times – to clean out this wallet. This is the same bug that forced Mt. Gox to halt all withdrawals and recent updates have made average bitcoin wallets secure against this sort of attack. According to the site, hackers used the Silk Road’s automatic transaction verification system to order from each other and then request refunds for unshipped goods. Hackers were able to use the transaction malleability bug because the Silk Road used only transaction ID to confirm the transfer of bitcoins. You can read more about the problem . They supposedly run an automated refund system for their vendors that relies on the TXID to verify transactions. Their claim is that six vendors colluded to exploit that system by ordering from one another and then submitting circular refund requests. Defcon is calling on the hackers to return the bitcoin. “Given the right flavor of influence from our community, we can only hope that he will decide to return the coins with integrity as opposed to hiding like a coward,” the moderator wrote. The site’s users are currently attempting to track down the thief. Writes Defcon: News of the theft has driven the price of BTC down by about 50 points and it’s currently hovering at 600. We’ll post more information on the hack and the exploit as we get it. Defcon, for his part, is calling for further decentralization of online markets and currency. “No marketplace is perfect. Expect any centralized market to fail at some point. This is precisely why we must unite in the decision to decentralize,” he wrote.
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Apartment Listing Startup RentHop Opens Up Nationwide | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | Who likes Craigslist? No one! Who wants to see a startup succeed in providing a better alternative when searching for an apartment? Pretty much everyone! Will be that startup? I dunno, maybe. RentHop, which launched in 2009 and has spent the last several years refining its marketplace for apartment rentals, is now moving beyond just that market and has opened up nationwide. In doing so, it will (hopefully) make apartment hunting more bearable to people outside of New York City. The key to RentHop is in giving each listing a score, based on a lot of different data it has. That includes information about the apartment itself, its location, the property manager, the number of photos it has and how good they are. According to co-founder Lee Lin, Renthop also takes into account how new a listing is, and how many other people have clicked through on it. The thinking there goes that the longer a unit has been on the market, the more likely it is that there’s something wrong with it. And the more people have clicked through, the less likely it is that it will be available for rent. The goal is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and make it easier to find high-quality rentals that are actually available. While much of that is focused on the user experience for renters, the platform also makes it easier for property managers and brokers to gain qualified leads. RentHop charges just $2 per listing per week, which is low enough that there should be no barrier to getting brokers involved. At the same time, having just the tiniest cost ends up ensuring that brokers and property managers end up putting higher-quality listings on the site. In general, Lin says some have a habit of spamming Craigslist with bait-and-switch listings, which is something you can’t really do on RentHop. The algorithm behind the scenes does the work of filtering out most fraudulent listings, so renters are only served up the best. While RentHop is now working with some of the largest brokers in New York City, it’s relying on outside data providers to populate its listings in other markets. But the hope is that as users in those cities start using the site, it’ll become more attractive to local property owners and managers and brokers to list there. |
Microsoft Has Sold More Than 200 Million Windows 8 Licenses | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | Microsoft’s executive vice president Tami Reller announced today that the company has sold more than 200 million Windows 8 licenses. TechCrunch confirmed the data point with Microsoft. The company provided greater detail on the figure, stating that it does not “include volume license sales to enterprise,” while it does take into account upgrades to Windows 8 along with normal inclusion on new personal computers. Microsoft has been incredibly tight-lipped about Windows 8 sales in recent months, providing essentially no guidance since disclosing in May of 2013. Windows 8.x, both Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, have enjoyed the regular momentum of the PC market as sustenance to their sales figures. The last sales milestone, 100 million, was disclosed on May 7, 2013. So in 282 days, Microsoft moved more than 100 million more copies of the operating system. That works out to more than 350,000 licenses sold per day. Microsoft also disclosed that in January of 2013, Windows 8 had sold . Aggregate market share for Windows 8.x has been somewhat , as users shift from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1. With the Windows 8.1 Update 1 on the horizon, Microsoft may choose to scoot users more quickly from the original Windows 8 to the newer code to prevent a trifurcation of its traditional operating system base. Is 200 million a strong number? The pace of Windows 8 sales is lower than in previous periods. Between November 27, 2012, and January 8, 2013, Microsoft of Windows 8, or more than 450,000 per day. But that was during the time in which Windows 8 upgrades were discounted. I think that the 200 million figure doesn’t change the market narrative except that it shows that if Microsoft is able to better convert its extant Windows 8 install base to Windows Store customers, it has a potentially massive user base on its hands. |
Kinvey Launches Dedicated Backend As A Service Platform For Enterprise Developers | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | , the enterprise-centric backend as a service (BaaS) platform for mobile apps, is launching a new feature today that will allow its customers to run their apps in a dedicated private cloud or on-premise instead of on Kinvey’s regular multi-tenant platform. While BaaS platforms like Parse or StackMob (which is about to shut down after its acquisition by PayPal) remove much of the hassle of managing and scaling the server stack that powers modern applications, enterprises are still often hesitant to host their proprietary data on somebody else’s servers. In many industries, these companies also have to comply with government regulations (HIPAA/PCI) that effectively preclude them from putting their data into a public cloud service. Kinvey CEO Sravish Sridhar tells me those are exactly the kinds of industries this service is going after (pharmaceutical, insurance, financial services, etc.) with its on-premise solution. The company plans to get its own HIPAA and PCI certifications in the near future, too. Once a company has provisioned the on-premise servers for the Kinvey install, the service ties them into its release system and from then on it’s managed by Kinvey. As a part of the dedicated solutions, enterprises can then select which add-ons to make available to their developers and customize the developer portal for their employees. With this new dedicated service, Kinvey says, enterprise IT will be able to offer a company’s developers access to enterprise data, authentication service and mobile backend features without the risk of the data leaking out. This means enterprises can launch apps for their employees, partners and customers while staying in control of the data. The dedicated platform is firewalled and all data and network communication is encrypted. The company currently offers for native mobile apps on Android and iOS, as well as for HTML5 apps. In addition, the team developers who use tools like AngularJS, Backbone.js, PhoneGap, Node.js and Appcelerator’s Titanium. Customers that need support for other platforms like BlackBerry and Windows can use a set of open-source libraries. With StackMob shutting down in May and Parse having been acquired by Facebook, Kinvey remains one of the few independent BaaS platforms left. He reckons this is due to the company’s focus on the enterprise. He believes it’s difficult to create a sustainable and long-term business by “just” solving backend issues for individual developers – especially for companies that only have raised a Series A round. Because other platforms tend to tie pricing to the success of an app, they end up being very reliant on having startups that grow quickly on their site, but the majority of users remain on their free or low-end tiers. To scale independently, he believes these platforms need to go after the enterprise market. Kinvey, which is based in Boston, currently has 21 employees and is ramping up its quickly. The company has raised about $7 million to date, including a $5 million Series A in 2012. |
Betaworks Takes Another $10M In Funding Led By Japanese Incubator Digital Garage | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | NYC’s betaworks has taken $10 million in additional investment from Japanese digital media incubator and Twitter investor , which is tagged on to the round the company received in December. According to betaworks founder John Borthwick, Digital Garage is very similar to betaworks. “They’re a builder and an investor,” said Borthwick. “They’ve been operating for a long time in the Japanese market as well as other Asian and U.S. markets.” The partnership is meant to help Japanese startups expand into the U.S. The that $7.5 million of the $10 million investment is coming from Digital Garage, with the remaining $2.5 million coming from other angel investors, such as Adrian Aoun and Blake Krikorian. Borthwick said that after the $20 million round in December, the first time betaworks has raised money in four years, the firm received additional outreach from other investors who wished to be more involved with betaworks. Digital Garage joins an impressive list of investors, including Tumblr’s David Karp, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Ev Williams (Twitter), Abdur Chowdhury (Summize founder), Dave Morin (Path), and Gerry Laybourne, who . Betaworks is a startup factory of sorts, making seed-stage investments in existing companies (such as Airbnb and Kickstarter), as well as launching and creating new products, such as Digg, Dots, Chartbeat, Bitly, Poncho, Telecast and, most recently, crowdfunding-based equity platform . |
null | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 2 | 12 | null |
Wikileaf Is Like Yelp For Kine Bud | John Biggs | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | Dan Nelson has a dream. His dream is to offer an easy way to find the cheapest chronic in your pro-ganja neighborhood. While you could simply ask your buddy Badger how much he pays, Nelson thought, why not create a website? And is a price comparison engine for pot dispensaries. You put in your location and how far you’re willing to travel and the system scours the dank web for pot prices. Think of it as Expedia for herb or Kayak for Kush. “My background is in banking. I’ve run a successful banking website/blog full time since 2008 and have logged countless hours mulling over interest rate tables. To me, the parallels between banking and marijuana were surprisingly striking and the ways in which banks and credit unions compete against one another online provided an easy framework to apply to the emerging marijuana industry,” said Nelson. “As anyone who’s ever searched for medical marijuana dispensaries online knows there are dozens of websites that all do the same thing. They show where dispensaries are on a map and maybe have some menu options for dispensaries to update. These sites are great and work for a lot of people, but we knew there was a major opportunity in comparing prices openly from these dispensaries and thus forcing them to compete against one another in a completely open and transparent marketplace.” Nelson hopes to make dispensaries more transparent with his tool. Because each location can set its own prices – and because of the current density of dispensaries in towns like Seattle and Denver – it makes little sense for these companies to advertise their prices unless something like Wikileaf comes along and opens up the various costs associated with picking up a little bud. “I’m from Seattle, and here in certain parts of the city you can literally stand at the entrance of one dispensary and huck a rock to another dispensary. That’s how abundant they are. The only problem is their current prices and inventory aren’t out in the open. And to make matters worse their store fronts are generally discreet and vague. With wikileaf I wanted to hit two birds with one stone and solve both of these problems in one clean and tidy package,” he said. Dispensaries can update their prices and even add THC strength to their inventory descriptions, allowing users to fine tune their shopping experience. So far, Nelson has shied away from investment. “We’ve boot-strapped this with my own personal funds along with minor investments from family,” he said. “That being said, we’re being approached with investor inquires daily and in the coming weeks and months we will be weighing our options for additional funding sources. The company is still small – he’s only hired a few programmers – but the market has huge potential. Sadly, those in backwater cities like New York can’t yet use the service but here’s hoping that some day it will be 4:20 all day, every day around the world. |
True Ventures Is Raising $250M For Its Fourth Fund | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | An details that True Ventures is looking to raise a new $250 million fund, its fourth. True Ventures’ last fund clocked in at $205 million, . According to the filing, the raise is fresh. However, given the track record that True has racked up recently, I doubt that it will have too much trouble filling out the funding. Fortune in late January that True had more than $225 million in capital commitments in place for the new fund. TechCrunch has reached out to True Ventures for comment regarding the raise. True Ventures, founded in 2006, had more than $600 million under management before the new raise schedule, meaning that the firm will have taken in more than 80% of a billion dollars when the current traunch is settled. In terms of , True has invested in technology firms like Makerbot, About.me, Fitbit, Automattic, and TastemakerX, not to mention , an investment that some have called exotic. With new capital True can keep up its pace of investments, furthering the current technology blush we find ourselves. When the round closes, we’ll bring you the news. |
Meet Bellabeat, The Quantified Self Startup That Wants To Be The Fitbit For Pregnancy | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 2 | 13 | If there’s ever a time in a person’s life when she wants to keep tabs on everything that’s going on with her body, it’s while she’s pregnant. Every inch added to her waistline, pound gained, heartbeat she hears, and kick she feels is something to be monitored and celebrated. But even as the quantified self movement has become mainstream for counting steps and tracking calories, many expectant mothers still largely rely on their doctor appointments to chart out the progress of the lives growing inside of them. , a startup in the current Winter 2014 class of Y Combinator, wants to help change that by providing a “connected system” that enables mothers to track their pregnancies on their own, while in between doctor visits. Today the startup is its first product, a $129 pocket-sized digital ultrasound tool that connects to a smartphone app to let women hear, record, and share their babies’ heartbeat. Bellabeat’s , which is available on both iPhone and Android, also lets women easily track important data such as weight gain, nutrition, and fetal movements through a “kick counter.” There is also a social component for connecting with other expectant moms and sharing their stories. Bellabeat co-founder and COO told me in an interview this week that the goal of Bellabeat’s system is to give pregnant women the data and feedback they crave while in between doctor visits — and to make the visits they do have more satisfying and productive. During a healthy pregnancy, Srsen says, visits to the doctor can often seem short and unsatisfying for the patient because “from the doctor’s perspective, being pregnant is not a disease. It is a normal state. But for the woman, being pregnant is so exciting, and she wants to know everything that she can right away,” she said. Bellabeat’s goal is to bridge that gap. “We want for patients to be more calm, and for the relationship between doctor and patient to be more fluid and communicative.” There is also a cost saving component at play. “In the United States, we spend $98 billion each year on pregnancy and childbirth. That is a huge amount of money,” Srsen says. “Some doctors’ appointments are just for checking blood pressure, weight, and making sure the heartbeat is still there. If we could enable women to do some small routine exams at home, that could reduce the cost of healthcare so much.” The company’s longer term vision is to expand into more remote medical patient tracking tools, but for the time being, Bellabeat’s full focus is on the pregnancy space. In terms of competition, Srsen says that on one side, there is the world of mommy blogs, pregnancy web forums, and simple pregnancy apps; on the other side, there is a market that includes hardware for checking your own vital signs. “We bring it all together and make it all easy to analyze and process,” she says. It’s one of those ideas that makes so much sense, it’s a wonder that more Silicon Valley startups aren’t tackling it right now. It will be exciting to see how Bellabeat grows in the months ahead. Here’s a video that shows Bellabeat in action:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVwIP4m1GLs] |
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