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Omise lands $17.5M Series B to expand its Stripe-like service in Southeast Asia
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Jon Russell
| 2,016
| 7
| 20
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, a Bangkok-based payment enabler much like Stripe, has raised a $17.5 million Series B round to expand its reach across Southeast Asia. The company proves a payment gateway system that allows any retailer take credit card payments online. That’s long been a problem in Southeast Asia, which is compromised of six major countries, each of which requires a different payment solution — Omise is trying to offer a one-stop shop. Right now, its service is available in Thailand and Japan (the birthplace of CEO Jun Hasegawa), but there are plans to expand to Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, where it has carried out closed testing, in the coming months. Beyond that, Omise is looking at reaching Vietnam, the Philippines, and Mekong countries like Burma, Laos and Cambodia at a later date. This new round, which is one of the largest for a fintech company in Southeast Asia to date, was led by Japan-based SBI Investment, with participation from Sinar Mas Digital Ventures (SMDV) in Indonesia, Thailand’s Ascend Money (affiliated with mobile operator True), and existing backer Golden Gate Ventures. Omise has now raised over $25 million, including and last October, right after . Omise — which is pronounced ‘Oh-Mee-Say’ and means ‘store’ in Japanese — was founded in 2014 by Hasegawa and Thailand-born COO Ezra “Donnie” Harinsut, who became friends after meeting on a homestay trip. The startup is focused on tapping the potential of e-commerce in Southeast Asia. Right now, estimates suggest less than five percent of the retail in the region is done online but, with more than 600 million people in the region and an increasingly affluent middle class, there’s a huge opportunity for growth. That’s one reason earlier this year, while within a decade. Omise wants to be the payment solution of choice for anyone selling online across the region. There are many rivals, including and is Stripe, meanwhile, is in the region, but it appears to be , rather than going for a full-on localization approach. Unlike its local competitors, Omise is solely focused on digital payments and not cash, which counts for around 60 percent of payments online right now in Southeast Asia. Harinsut explained that Omise sees cash-less as the future, and it aims to be faster and better than other solutions, which take multiple days for payout and involve manual processes. “We’re focusing more on pay out solutions, not only about accepting payments but also paying merchants or vendors. It is currently next day [payment to merchants], but we want instant — we automate everything, batch files and submit to bank, there’s no human involvement in the process. We try to reduce human error, time and fees,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. E-commerce is the most visible opportunity, but Hasegawa said that Omise is focusing more broadly on online retail beyond startups — that’s one reason it has operations in Japan, because many Japanese retailers are moving into Southeast Asia. “E-commerce is growing but much [of our business] is from big companies,” he told me. “Small startups aren’t really making progress yet. It is up to us to make it a self-sustainable business, focusing really on enterprises like airlines, insurance companies, mobile network operators and other subscription services like BDO-on-demand, e-retail and e-government. That’s our target segment right now.” Omise isn’t releasing any figures for its business — we did ask — but Harinsut said the company can reach profitability inside the next year. He explained that the challenge is about reaching suitable scale. Omise makes its money by charging 3.65 percent on transactions, with a one dollar fee for up to 60,000 (1 million THB) withdrawn, but it offers flexible packages for larger customers. Southeast Asia is the first priority, but the startup’s founders are also looking outside of their immediate geography, including Australia, New Zealand, Korea and Hong Kong, for future opportunities. “We’re also really interested in India,” Hasegawa told me. “It’s such a big market and there is still a huge gap for e-commerce and financial institutions. I believe they have some space.” The company has also been bulking up on personnel too lately. June Seah (formerly Visa APAC) and Michael Bradley (ex CyberSource, a Visa company) have joined the Omise advisory board. Bradley has also become Omise’s Chief Commercial Officer, alongside two more new hires: Sanjeev Kumar, also formerly with Visa CyberSource, who has become Chief Product Officer, and Luke Cheng, ex Groupon APAC, who is Omise Chief Financial Officer.
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Tesla and Uber have more in common than you might think
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John Mannes
| 2,016
| 7
| 20
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Elon Musk’s catapults Tesla into a new market; car-sharing. While the idea of Tesla car-sharing seems new, it is not the first time the company’s cars, coupled with autonomous technology, have come up in discussions about the sharing economy. Back in 2015, Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Uber investor DFJ, that Uber’s Travis Kalanick had indicated he would buy every Tesla car produced if they could be made autonomous by 2020. These were the days when it appeared a Uber and Tesla partnership could be on the horizon. Musk himself to raise suspicions when discussing the possibility of such a partnership. These days, it seems that Uber has gone its own way in developing an autonomous car solution. And with today’s announcement from Musk, it appears Tesla is doing the same. “You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost,” said Musk in his post. Companies like Uber and Lyft have more in common with Tesla than would appear at first glance. Uber specifically has been quite vocal about its long-term vision and its need for autonomous vehicles. Both Uber and Tesla used an initial product or service to enter a market with serious barriers to entry. For Uber, ride-sharing required serious human capital and powerful regulatory influence. Tesla needed to build a mass-produced automobile from scratch. Uber is still burning cash in China and Tesla still needs to follow through on its costly Gigafactory, but for the most part, both companies have been successful in what they initially set out to do. Both companies have an expensive obsession with driverless cars. Uber and other top universities to develop and test autonomous technologies. This puts Uber on a collision course with Tesla, but this is not new. Tesla is only completing the puzzle by using car-sharing as a means to boost vehicle utilization rates. Both companies are betting on autonomous driving to reduce transportation costs. Uber needs costs low to open up transportation access to groups outside their current market. This means increasing availability in low-density regions, and ultimately convincing everyday Americans to ditch car-ownership. Tesla needs to decrease the cost of driving to increase access to electric vehicles and ultimately reduce electricity needs and the overall carbon footprint. The greatest benefits of the sharing economy have yet to be seen. On the surface, companies like Uber are providing income to previously unemployed segments of the middle class. In the future, when car-sharing becomes automated, the greatest market efficiencies will come from reduced transportation costs. Kalanick himself has noted in the past that the . Ride-sharing can only replace car-ownership if prices decrease further. Uber doesn’t need autonomous cars in the same way it needs market share in China, but the space provides long-term sustainability for the company. Similarly, Tesla could sustain itself on its current trajectory, but Tesla can achieve long-term relevancy with such an endeavor. For both companies, autonomous driving presents another high-growth opportunity that will continue to attract and retain top talent. The key for both companies will be ensuring that their core-businesses are not neglected by means of future investment. Musk made it clear in his plan that opportunities exist in the near-term that will ease the company towards its longer term goals. The collision between the two companies is still far off. Just because Uber and Tesla are riding the same trend, the contest is not a zero-sum game. As Google and others increase spending on autonomous driving, the entire ecosystem benefits. Keeping an eye on R&D spending overall will be quite introspective into the strategies of all companies in the space. Tesla can compete. Winning, on the other hand, is a matter of hedging the right bets on what the future of transportation will look like. Twenty years from now, it’s unlikely we will have an interest in outright purchasing an electric car or paying a hefty fee to be driven around in a gas guzzler. We have reached out to both Uber and Lyft for comment and will update this post if we receive word from them.
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Crunch Report | Early Niantic “Pokemon GO” Investor
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016
| 7
| 20
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Musk’s Master Plan has solar for everyone, but investors aren’t buying the dream — yet
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
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| 20
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published tonight by founder Elon Musk proposes numerous major projects, but perhaps the most far-reaching of them all is the plan to put solar panels on every house and a battery in every garage. And to do that, he not-so-subtly hints, Tesla and SolarCity will need to be more than friends. “We need to combine and break down the barriers inherent to being separate companies,” Musk wrote. “That they are separate at all, despite similar origins and pursuit of the same overarching goal of sustainable energy, is largely an accident of history.” That rather overstates it, of course, and he largely undercuts that position with the next sentence, which implies that both companies are only just now arriving at a position to work with one another. All the same, it’s clearly a plea to the shareholders and investors who are skeptical of the financial alchemy by which will produce a profit. They may not see as far as Musk does, but his long-distance vision seems to blind him to the difficulties right under his nose. What he and the others at Tesla have built is remarkable, but he only sees it as the beginning of a much longer journey, and there are plenty of people who’d like to get off — or at least take a breather. Even the ones who share Musk’s faith must surely want a few more specifics when it comes to next steps. I mean, here’s his pitch: “Create a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world. One ordering experience, one installation, one service contact, one phone app.” Sounds great, except each single aspect of that so-called plan is more than enough to fill any sane company’s plate! It’s an admirable goal, of course, and I don’t doubt the companies are capable of bringing it off in time. But it doesn’t make much of a case for the proposed acquisition — here, today. (Of course a more detailed plan has surely circulated internally, but if it were much more fleshed out than this, Musk is the type to say so.) Not everyone moves at the speed of Musk, which is no doubt endlessly frustrating to him. But his numerous and glittering successes should comfort him in his frustration. It’s unlikely that anything he has built will go to waste (the Hyperloop, perhaps, but mostly because he didn’t build it), but he’ll need to do more than dream out loud if he wants Tesla’s weary backers to follow his lead.
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Mark Lelinwalla
| 2,016
| 7
| 5
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Elon Musk addresses concerns around Autopilot and its ‘beta’ label
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Mark Lelinwalla
| 2,016
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| 20
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Elon Musk’s contains his strongest response yet to concerns around , the subject of an ongoing National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation. Unsurprisingly, Musk is standing by the merits Autopilot and its impact on driver safety. “According to the recently released 2015 NHTSA report, automotive fatalities increased by 8 percent to one death every 89 million miles. Autopilot miles will soon exceed twice that number and the system gets better every day,” the Tesla CEO wrote in a section of his Part 2 plan labeled ‘Autonomy’. “It would no more make sense to disable Tesla’s Autopilot, as some have called for, than it would to disable autopilot in aircraft, after which our system is named.” He then proceeded to explain why the term “beta” being attached to Autopilot is little more than a formality based on internal naming standards at this point. “It is also important to explain why we refer to Autopilot as ‘beta,'” Musk continued. “This is not beta software in any normal sense of the word. Every release goes through extensive internal validation before it reaches any customers. It is called beta in order to decrease complacency and indicate that it will continue to improve (Autopilot is always off by default). Once we get to the point where Autopilot is approximately 10 times safer than the US vehicle average, the beta label will be removed.” Autopilot has been under intense scrutiny since a fatal Model S crash involving the feature occurred this past May. That led the late last month. Consumer Reports followed last week by until it can be proved much safer, but NHTSA head Mark Rosekind also that “no one incident” will stop the organization from promoting the development of highly automated driving. From what Musk laid out Wednesday night, Tesla has no plans to discontinue its efforts towards developing automated driving systems, either. In fact, Musk described a desired future state in which .
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40 years after the first landing on Mars, this NASA scientist looks to resurrect Viking 1’s analog data
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
| 7
| 20
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It’s been four decades since the Viking 1 lander touched down on Martian soil, the first lasting human presence on the surface of the Red Planet. It beamed its unprecedented data back to NASA, where it was stored on the hot new format of the day: microfilm. Now one scientist wants to bring these analog records into the digital world — for posterity and for science. “I remember getting to hold the microfilm in my hand for the first time and thinking, ‘We did this incredible experiment and this is it, this is all that’s left,'” said David Williams, a scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center’s archives in Maryland, . “If something were to happen to it, we would lose it forever.” Many of us have surely felt the same way about a shoebox full of 3x5s, and we likely had the same instinct: get this stuff saved digitally ASAP. So that’s what his team started doing: digitizing the rolls one by one using the microfilm reader — a device old school library users will remember, perhaps not entirely fondly. The process of getting the information you want is pretty involved. It’s not just a sentimental gesture, though: missions to the surface of other planets aren’t exactly thick on the ground, and data from them stay relevant more or less forever. Williams had only looked for the microfilms, in fact, because a biologist had requested the data from them in order to look into certain hypotheses. “All the biology data was only on microfilm,” wrote Williams in an email to TechCrunch. “The microfilm was a copy of a computer printout, it was a combination of tables of numbers and text and numbers combined. Each frame was one page of printout, about 30 to 40 lines. We scanned all the frames, and for the labeled release we ended up typing the numbers in by hand.” Current missions like Curiosity and the upcoming will also want to compare their data with Viking 1’s and all the rest — after all, changes over decades could indicate interesting processes occurring in the soil or atmosphere, which in turn could suggest the presence (or absence) of life, among other things. “The capabilities of the Viking landers and instruments were very advanced for the technology at the time,” explained another Goddard scientist, Danny Glavin. “Viking data are still being utilized 40 years later. The point is for the community to have access to this data so that scientists 50 years from now can go back and look at it.” Because I’m curious about the process of digitizing all this cool old analog media, I’ve asked NASA for more details. I’ll update this post when I hear back.
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Tesla has a transport truck and a city bus replacement in the works
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016
| 7
| 20
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Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk , and two big parts of it are new vehicles, but not consumer models: Tesla is working on both a heavy-duty semi truck and a “high passenger-density urban transport” that would operate in cities and fit the role of a bus in city settings. In the post describing this next stage to the , Musk talked about additional consumer vehicles, including both a compact SUV separate from the Model X, and a “new kind of pickup truck,” both of which he’s alluded to before. But he said that besides their consumer offerings, two other kinds of electric vehicles are “needed”: the semi truck, and the so-called urban transport, both of which are going to be ready to show to the public as early as next year according to Musk. The reason the Tesla Semi (as Musk refers to the truck) is necessary is because it should help drastically reduce cargo transportation costs (fuel represents a significant portion of trucking costs, and that’s passed on to the consumer). It’s also key because a Tesla transport would increase safety, Musk says, as well as making it “really fun” for vehicle operators. As for the multi-passenger vehicle, Musk has something more ambitious in mind than just electric buses. He describes switching the role of bus driver to that of fleet manager, using autonomy to help one person conducting vehicles manage a number of vehicles, instead of just one. The design would allow passengers to also be taken directly to their destination of choice, instead of relying on fixed stops, and summoning vehicles would be handled either by phone (likely via app) or fixed summon buttons located at traditional bus stops. Of course, this anticipates a higher degree of autonomy than is possible in public transport in cities today, but Musk’s vision also describes a fleet of self-driving Teslas that let owners defray the cost by participating in the vehicle inventory side of an automated car sharing service. Multi-passenger urban transport is likely closer than that vision, but both will require a lot of intervening steps to become a reality.
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Elon Musk reveals Tesla’s master plan
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John Mannes
| 2,016
| 7
| 20
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Elon Musk plans to steer Tesla towards fully autonomous driving, car sharing, and cargo transport, . A fully solar power ecosystem driven in-part by SolarCity will help Musk and Co. get there. Musk has been teasing the master plan part II for days. What would be in it? Would Tesla cars fly? Would they go to space? Why is Elon Musk ? After a near infinite number of browser refreshes, we now know. Tesla is doubling down on not just autopilot but full autonomy. To get there, Musk expects a total of 6 billion miles of test-driving will be needed. Right now, fleet learning is happening at 3 million miles per day. Tesla is also . These products will be unveiled over the next year. The Tesla Semi specifically will support cargo and transportation services. The driver role is expected to transition to one of a fleet manager. A Tesla ecosystem of smaller connected utility vehicles including busses would be able to provide convenience, increase road safety and reduce traffic congestion. Such a system benefits everyone, not just the technocratic elite. Additional capacity, door-to-door service, and non-cellular methods to interact with the system would benefit groups yet to be touched by traditional ride-sharing. The company is taking a page from Uber and Lyft and raising them with artificial intelligence. Tesla sees itself taking on qualities of a transportation company but rather than a human driver, Tesla will come to you autonomously. To supplement an early lack of supply in vehicles, the company will operate a fleet of its own. “You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost,” said Musk in his post. “This dramatically lowers the true cost of ownership to the point where almost anyone could own a Tesla. Since most cars are only in use by their owner for 5% to 10% of the day, the fundamental economic utility of a true self-driving car is likely to be several times that of a car which is not.” Pushing to bring down costs for the average consumer appears central to the new plan. Like Ford before him, Musk is prioritizing manufacturing optimization to bring costs down in the upcoming Model 3 and forthcoming vehicles. In line with Tesla’s updated goals, the company quietly changed its URL earlier this week from Teslamotors.com to just . Tesla is no-longer simply a car company. Even before the URL change, Musk had been hinting at this shift. In the first part of the master plan released in 2006, Musk described that his draw to the company was a desire “to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy.” Musk deliberately said solar, not wind or but solar. Even on this alone, a could have been predicted. Musk expanded on his ideas to include a roadmap that has guided the company for a decade. Tesla has done a pretty good job at first targeting customers “prepared to pay a premium,” and then “driving down the market.” The new plan picks up where the old one left off and provides guidance on how electric power can move beyond the car and into the home. Tesla has already started moving into uncharted territory with regards to its development of Powerpack and Powerwall and the upcoming opening of the . Batteries were a small part of Musk’s plan but have grown to be a major focal point of the business. The new plan is to coalesce all of energy generation and storage around a single ordering and installation process. This means Tesla batteries are entering a long term intimate relationship with SolarCity solar panels. The new plan, focuses on the solar ecosystem as a whole. Lot of new artificial intelligence and machine learning technology has rolled into place over the last decade and Tesla wants to take advantage of that as well. The new simplified plan looks like this: Tesla investors have been patient so far, but that was called into question amidst Tesla’s plans to acquire SolarCity. The company’s stock is worth 13 times its IPO value, but lately has been categorized as a risky investment by analysts. Dreaming big is easier as a startup. The larger a company grows, the harder it becomes to steer the rudder. I’m not one to doubt Musk, and given how accurately he forecasted and accomplished his last plan, others would be wise not to either. [graphiq id=”cO9kpW17I2x” title=”Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”617″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/cO9kpW17I2x” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/12234646/Tesla-Motors-Inc-in-Palo-Alto-CA” link_text=”Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) Stock Price | FindTheCompany”]
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Why and how chatbots will dominate social media
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Cory Edwards
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| 7
| 20
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Since the early 2000s, brands have experimented with social media platforms and networks to communicate with customers and prospects — first through weblogs, then eventually through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Although the capabilities and sophistication have continued to evolve, at its core, social media has remained a platform to facilitate human-to-human communication. But then the robots moved in. Robots, though more specifically virtual robots or chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), are transforming the way brands do business with their customers. Domino’s was one of the first companies to dabble in AI, allowing customers to order pizza by tweeting a pizza emoji to @Dominos. On the backend, was not a hoax and processes the order. More recently, Taco Bell unveiled its messaging platform that allows busy workers to chat with a bot to order a taco. And at Facebook’s F8, 1-800-Flowers, CNN, Spring — a retail shopping startup — and others released . These bots offer new ways to shop, make purchases, read the news and more within the Facebook platform. While all this sounds exciting, what does it actually mean for consumers, and what’s to become of the “humans” on social media? The first thing to understand about chatbots is that most won’t introduce new capabilities; instead, brand chatbots will centralize where and how customers engage, using social media as an operating system. Consumers will : content consumption, customer service and productivity or transactional engagements. Social media is already part of many of these activities between brands and consumers, but social media acts as a gateway to direct consumers to the brand website, blog or separate channels. Instead of using social media as a portal, consumers can read and receive information, ask technical questions and even make purchases from one chatbot. Take for example customer support. already prefer using social media rather than the telephone for customer support, and most — if not faster. That’s a taxing load for brands, but the enhanced AI through chatbots makes it feasible to accommodate. This won’t be the painful automated voice response for most phone customer service — which is good news since consumers are . Chatbots will be able to quickly understand the contextual request or problem from the customer rather than force them through a series of selection menus to understand the problem. The second way consumers will benefit from chatbots is through personalization — and this is where social media plays a big part. Unlike the bot hosted on AOL Instant Messenger, the potential for bots is not just completing tasks you assign to it, but understanding the context of the user’s life. With Facebook integration, chatbots already have a rich data source to understand user habits around when they check their device, interests, most valued relationships and upcoming plans and schedule, so bots can deliver relevant updates, information and recommendations that are both location- and context-aware. Many brands already target content on social media to specific audiences and locations, but there is no silver bullet currently to fully personalize what, when and how messages are delivered to customers. Even the current chatbots available on Facebook have room to improve in this department. Try using one if you haven’t yet, and you’ll receive a flurry of push notifications and updates from the bot to continue to share news and updates. But there is hope: Bots should get smarter with more human interaction, and will learn which information individuals really want, and when they prefer to receive it. While there is no doubt this bot-driven social media system is the future, there is still need for improvements before the bots officially take over. Even beyond the need for improved contextual understanding of when to share updates, there is also no common language or intuitive way to . Kinks aside, the good news is that artificial intelligence learns, and the more we all experiment — both brands and consumers — the better these tools will become. Although a PR disaster, was in some ways a success in demonstrating the incredible speed that AI can learn and adapt. (And also raised the need for brands to find ways to code against or prevent AI from learning unsavory and offensive language.) Although bots are moving in, and likely to become mainstream within three to five years, humans will still have a place in social media. However, that too will change. As bots become equipped to handle text content, the human side of brands and consumers will gravitate toward new, richer ways to engage, including virtual and augmented reality. So despite the Hollywood horrors around bots versus humans, social media will remain — at least for now — a dual arena where both can coexist.
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Expedia acquires travel photography community Trover
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Lucia Maffei
| 2,016
| 7
| 20
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Online travel agency has acquired , an app and website where people share their travel photos. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. “At Expedia, it’s fair to say we believe in the power of travel,” an Expedia spokesperson wrote in an email to TechCrunch. “It can transform people. So an important part of our job is to inspire travelers. One way we do this is by igniting dreams through beautiful pictures of amazing destinations. We are excited to explore the compelling opportunities this partnership presents.” The deal was announced Wednesday evening “Expedia’s mission is to revolutionize travel through technology, and they believe Trover’s beautiful content and social experience is a great fit with this mission. We can’t imagine higher recognition for our community,” Jason Karas, CEO of Trover, explained in the post. In 2013, Trover it had raised a $2.5 million funding round led by travel booking and expense industry giant Concur’s Perfect Trip Fund. Seattle-based Trover was founded out of the remains of Travelpost, a travel review site that shut down in January 2011. We’ve reached out to Trover for further details, and we’ll update this post if they provide more information.
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Amazon patent proposes drone perches atop streetlights and other protruding infrastructure
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
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| 20
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: You’re a delivery drone with a flight duration of 20 minutes with your current payload, but because of delays (use your imagination) you’re never going to make it in time. What do you do, hot shot? What do you do? You land on a street light that’s been converted into a drone charger! Thank goodness Amazon patented those. Yes, the patent was granted today for a “Multi-use UAV docking station system” that lives at the top of one of a city’s ubiquitous street lamps — and really, when you think about it, that’s a pretty good idea. It must be said, of course, that this patent has about a snowball’s chance in hell of appearing in the real world: not only would Amazon have to pay good money to use city infrastructure, but that presupposes that the government would even go for it in the first place. A heavy, cargo-bearing drone making a landing on a platform hardly bigger than itself — possibly in bad weather, and almost certainly above pedestrians? Good luck getting anyone to sign off on that! It’s more likely that private property owners with roof space to spare would sign off on having a drone zone installed, although anyone who opts in will likely rue it in short order as the constant buzz of drones drives them mad. The package delivery mechanism — the action lines indicate the package is in an uncontrolled fall into the chute. Still, it makes sense, and something like it — with adjustments for reality — may appear in the future if we are to have the drone-based economy we’ve been promised for so long. It may look more like the other illustrations in the patent, which include a place to drop off packages, which are then consumed by the structure and dispensed via Amazon Lockers below, or held for another delivery drone. Actually, add a second door (and optional charger) to the top of a , and you pretty much have what Amazon is proposing here. And of course there’s also the possibility that it never appears, like so many patented ideas and objects. You can inspect the patent and its numerous illustrations and flowcharts .
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Qualcomm earnings beat with $6B in revenue and $1.16 EPS
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Lucia Maffei
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| 20
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Following the bell today, Qualcomm earnings that met analyst expectations in terms of earnings per share, and exceeded expectations in terms of revenue. The company attributed its results to progress with the number of licensees in China. For the quarter ending June 26, the San Diego, California-based semiconductor and telecommunications products maker posted net income of $1.44 billion, up 22 percent from $1.18 billion. Non-GAAP revenue surged 3.6 percent to $6.04 billion, or $1.16 cents per share, up from $5.8 billion a year ago. Analysts Qualcomm to report per-share earnings of 97 cents on revenue of $5.58 billion. “We are continuing to make progress in our licensing business and expect that momentum to continue,” said Steve Mollenkopf, CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated, during a conference call. Right after the CEO’s statement, president Derek Aberle explained that Qualcomm is continuing to execute new license agreements in China, and that the company is still actively negotiating with the key remaining Chinese OEMs. Mollenkopf added that regulators around the world are beginning to allocate spectrum for 5G consistent with the company’s 5G design and development effort: “Recent spectrum regulatory decisions and movement in the U.S. and Europe, combined with progress on the spectrum regulatory front in China, Japan and Korea, are good indications that the world is preparing for 5G.” For the nine months ending in June 2016, Qualcomm posted net income of $4.11 billion, or $2.74 per diluted share, down 2.4 percent from $4.21 billion, or $2.53 per share in the 2015 comparable period. Revenues decreased 12.4 percent to $17.37 billion from $19.83 billion the year before. In after-market trading, Qualcomm shares were up 6.8 percent after the earnings announcement.
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What the Pokémon Go hype train means for Nintendo’s value
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Matthew Lynley
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There’s been much talk about Nintendo suddenly creating an enormous amount of value for itself with the release of Pokémon Go, perhaps one of the most successful game launches of all time. Following Pokémon Go, Nintendo’s market valuation , passing Sony and quickly becoming one of the most valuable gaming companies in the world. This is a pretty amazing rise, but in the reference frame of the rest of the industry it could also signal a peculiar shift in mentality for how gaming companies are valued. Nintendo, compared to other publishers, is suddenly not being valued similarly against its revenue projections for the next year similar to other companies. This is really fascinating. If you compare it to other publishers, Nintendo is trading way ahead of what its projections are for 2017 that it set before the release of Pokémon Go for the industry. Nintendo’s value doubled since the release of Pokémon Go, and, prior to that, it was trading at a position that was even weaker than some other publishers and game makers in the industry. So, there are two ways to look at this: Nintendo, the publisher, and Nintendo, the hardware maker. Traditionally, Nintendo has fallen somewhere in between, with an array of strong first-party and published content. That content helps Nintendo sell more hardware units. The Wii was a classic example of this — the entry-level content, whether for hardcore gamers (The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess) or casual gamers (Wii Sports) was more than enough to produce a very large initial install base. For FY2017, Nintendo is , or around $4.7 billion. Given its current $40 billion-ish market cap, that amounts to around we’ll say 8.6 times next year’s revenue. At that same revenue projection against its market cap prior to Pokémon Go, it would only be trading at something around 4 times next year’s revenue. This, alone, is kind of incredible. Now let’s take a look at a couple of other publishers to put it in perspective: $23 billion market cap, $4.9 billion (~4.7x next year’s revenue) $30.5 billion market cap, $6.275 billion (~4.9x next year’s revenue) , prior to Activision-Blizzard’s acquisition, let’s roll back the clock a bit to when it went public. In August 2014, the company revised its fiscal year’s guidance to $2.25 billion, and was trading at around $14 following its lowered guidance, giving it a $4.4 billion valuation (a little less than 2x next year’s revenue) $3.44 billion market cap, $1.5 billion-$1.6 billion (~2.3x next year’s revenue) $4.22 billion market cap, $1.9 billion (~2.2x next year’s revenue). $38.5 billion market cap, $7.3 billion (~5.3x next year’s revenue) And so on, and so forth. To be sure, not all publishers are made equal, but this is just a little bit of perspective. So we have something really kind of incredible happening here. Nintendo is being valued way ahead of two of the largest publishers in the industry, in addition to its probably closest comparable, Sony. There’s surely a hype factor built into the company now given Pokémon Go’s success, but this could also signal that investors are expecting a outcome for Pokémon Go itself. In order to even bring that multiple back into the ballpark of other publishers (or even Sony), Pokémon Go would have to contribute a meaningful percentage of Nintendo’s current revenue for 2017 — and it doesn’t even own all of the game. That wouldn’t be unprecedented. If you look at King.com’s performance at the height, and gave a little leeway that the lion’s share of its revenue came from Candy Crush Saga, it would be contributing a meaningful amount of revenue to what could be Nintendo’s next year’s revenue. But if Nintendo were to be priced logically at the level of, say, Sony or Activision-Blizzard, Pokémon Go barring other releases would have to deliver an eye-popping amount of revenue in the several billions of dollars to Nintendo alone — and that’s even after revenue being divvied up amongst the rest, like Niantic and Apple. Clearly, investors are expecting much more than just Pokémon Go. Now looking at Nintendo, the game- and hardware-maker, things get even more interesting. If Nintendo stays at this current rate, it would appear that even a baked-in fear of cannibalization of hardware sales is getting mitigated by the future potential of its game development on smartphones. So you now have a company with incredibly strong first-party content, publishing on multiple platforms including its own hardware — which, even if potentially niche, still represents an additional business. This means there’s also another factor likely being built into this rise: a diversification of revenue streams. Apple is also facing this dilemma — its smartphone sales are sagging, and it needs to find additional avenues for growth like services and new devices. Nintendo, with the success of Pokémon Go, is showing there’s a lot of pent-up demand that it can unlock as a whole new stream of revenue that could come from smartphones. If its hardware business starts sagging, whether from cannibalization or a weak launch/bad hardware, it can point investors to its strong software revenue and keep them happy. Activision-Blizzard and EA both have a collection of brands that more than give them a heads up on the entirety of the game publishing market, whether that’s Madden or StarCraft. But it looks to be absolutely dwarfed by the sheer power of the brands and developmental capabilities of Nintendo — and its potential partners, like Niantic — that could be applied to smartphones. The potential for games like this, despite the possibility of hardware cannibalization, appears to be in the of revenue, not millions or hundreds of millions. In addition to the game having, fundamentally, , it just shows that there is such enormous overhead for — through partnerships, existing or future monetization — that it’s enough to really excite investors for the future of Nintendo’s presence on smartphones. The game and is littered with bugs and server issues, and yet still it’s been enough to double the market value for Nintendo. Nintendo is still despite the Wii U being a disappointment compared to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Consoles offer a completely different playing experience, and it’s not like they can’t coexist with game development on smartphones. The games will just have a different feel and experience — Pokémon Go really wouldn’t work on a 3DS, but it works great on a smartphone. Likewise, Mario Maker might not do well on a smartphone, but there are probably a bunch of very smart developers thinking hard about what a Mario experience would look like on a smartphone. All this comes back to a new, revived story of growth. Nintendo for a long time has been a holdout in keeping its brands off smartphones, and it’s suffered as a consequence of that. The success of the Wii wasn’t followed up and it simply wasn’t getting its first-party content into enough hands, leading to a perception of decline of the overall brand. And if recent moves have shown us anything, investors love growth and are now salivating over the potential of Nintendo’s properties making their way into the hands of billions of smartphone owners.
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Pokémon is getting a live-action movie based on Detective Pikachu
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Darrell Etherington
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Pokémon Go fever has definitely caught Hollywood’s attention: The franchise is getting a live-action movie, the rights to which were just won by Legendary Pictures. The movie won’t be focused on Pokémon Go, however. Instead, it’ll put the spotlight on , a sleuthing version of one of Pokémon’s most recognizable characters introduced in a franchise spin-out game for Nintendo 3DS earlier this year. Production is set to begin in 2017, with Legendary fast-tracking the usual process according to Variety, almost definitely in the hopes of catching the Pokémon Go hype wave before (if?) it dissipates. Universal Pictures is going to be distributing the movie in markets outside of Japan. Pokémon already has a storied animated filmic history, but this is its first foray into live-action movies. The film rights were reported as being auctioned last week, and Legendary probably paid a decent sum to win the glory, given how much hype the franchise is currently riding. A note for casting directors: I dressed up as an once for Halloween, and critics are still raving about the performance (aka, one friend remembers vaguely that this probably happened).
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Warby Parker is offering Snapchat-exclusive sunglasses
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Anthony Ha
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is offering its very first Snapchat-exclusive product — limited sunglasses that are only available for purchase to its Snapchat followers. The eyeglass retailer said it just shared a Snapchat story with its followers with a unique URL where, for a limited time, they can buy “head-turning Haskell in Crystal, now with new silver mirrored lenses” for $95. (I don’t have the URL to share with you, because that would kinda defeat the purpose; but if you’re interested, you just need to follow Warby Parker on Snapchat. Username: warbyparker). Even if you’re not looking for a sweet pair of new sunglasses, this still seems like an interesting example of how brands are experimenting with ways to introduce more traditional, business-y elements like marketing and commerce to Snapchat. Co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal told me via email:
Snapchat’s Lenses, Geofilters and Stickers separate it from other social networks by making communication more creative, fun and casual. These unique tools translate to commerce and align with our philosophy that shopping should be fun, especially when shopping for a highly social accessory like glasses which everyone immediately sees on your face and invites conversation. Offering this limited-edition pair of glasses to our Snapchat followers seems like a no-brainer as we strive to make buying glasses as enjoyable and convenient as possible. This weekend, Warby Parker also plans to introduce location-specific filters in Los Angeles and New York, allowing users to show their own followers “where and how you’re spending your summer.”
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Google unleashes DeepMind on energy-hungry data center, cutting cooling bill by 40%
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Devin Coldewey
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may be a master at one of the most complex games on Earth, but can it handle the day-to-day energy concerns of a Google data center? Yes, as it turns out, and with a vengeance. The power needs of a data center depend on lots of factors, from demand to the weather, and adjusting to or predicting these variables in order to achieve maximal power efficiency can be difficult indeed. Google has been applying machine learning to the problem, building a neural model with which its AI can keep all these factors in mind, so to speak. The researchers finally — and the results were immediately validating. Overall energy use for cooling dropped 40 percent and stayed there. Google is already fairly concerned with energy use, having taken many steps toward using renewable power and keeping things efficient. So it’s not like no one was paying attention to begin with. The streamlining DeepMind did could also be generalized to other systems and deployed to other data centers — which the company will surely crow about when it comes to pass. The DeepMind team plans to publish a more comprehensive description of their work in an actual paper; we’ll add a link when we see it.
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Lighter Capital takes a different approach to startup financing
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John Mannes
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The new world of startup finance is very strange. Private equity is increasingly dipping down to finance startups. Meanwhile, venture capital funds are being forced to use every financial tool imaginable to stay involved in the growing pool of late-stage startups. for Q2 2016 underscores this point. One fund, , is trying to get ahead of the trend, before the availability of early-stage capital hits an inflection point. The availability of early-stage capital is down this quarter with respect to this time last year. The fund wants to utilize an alternative financing structure to support a valuable niche in an evolving ecosystem. Interestingly, the average check from the fund is $200,000. To most, this is a seed-stage investment. Availability of seed capital is on the rise, and there isn’t much need in the market right now. However, while the checks are relatively small, the fund is looking for companies that have an average revenue of $1.5 million. In that sense, Lighter Capital might be riding a trend more than defining one. BJ Lackland, Lighter Capital’s CEO, explains his company’s model in the language of royalties. In exchange for capital, companies sign an agreement to pay a percentage of revenue, typically around 6 percent per month, until a pre-set multiple of the principal is paid off. The duration of the loan influences the multiple. A short loan of three years might be 1.35X, while a loan of five years might be 1.8X. In practice, if the fund made 50 loans for $200,000 over an average of four years with a 1.5X multiple, the fund would make an 18.4 percent internal rate of return (IRR). Not so shabby. To make its investments, Lighter has pulled together $120 million from Community Investment Management. Community is essentially a Limited Partner that is funded by large family offices. Lighter funded 53 companies last year and expects to fund 100 companies this year. As of today, only 20 percent of the companies Lighter Capital has funded have gone on to raise VC. Only two investments from Lighter have failed completely, which helps make the lack of VC follow-on seem less like a warning sign. Lackland noted that about half the follow-on VCs pay off Lighter upon investment; the other half simply continue to pay the royalties, especially if the round size is small. Eight full-time developers created a proprietary dashboard for use in evaluating companies. Lighter uses data from LinkedIn and bank accounts to initially screen companies, then follows up with a few phone calls. Initial funding usually takes six weeks, but follow-ons can occur within a week. In a sense, Lighter “tranches” financing across an investment period, but doesn’t set benchmarks that companies would feel pressured about hitting. Instead, Lighter just looks for general revenue growth. Lackland believes his model of revenue-based finance can help companies that: As with anything, benefits come with drawbacks: It’s hard to argue with a method generating exits no matter how bearish you are on alternative financing. Steelbrick, a provider of a customizable pricing and quoting system, raised four rounds of financing after a $200,000 loan from Lighter Capital and went on to exit to Salesforce for $360 million. It’s not a billion-dollar home-run, but Lackland argues that the industry should be less focused on that goal if it can get a greater number of smaller exits to make up the difference. On the backend, Lighter is VC backed, having taken on two rounds of financing for a total of $17 million. For these VCs, Lighter presents an opportunity to gain access to startup performance data. Lighter just hired a new head of community to work on connecting and servicing entrepreneurs in the way an accelerator might. Because of the data Lighter has, it can provide anecdotal feedback to founders about churn or budget by looking across their portfolio to similar companies. Ultimately, a solution like Lighter Capital will work for a company so long as priorities remain aligned.
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CrunchBase sees some slowing for early-stage venture in the second quarter
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Gené Teare
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U.S. venture investors tapped the brakes but did not carry out a sharp slowdown in Series A and B deal-making in the second quarter and first half of 2016, according to preliminary data from CrunchBase. Average Series A rounds in the second quarter increased year-over-year. Second-quarter 2016 Series A rounds averaged $9.5 million, up from $9 million in Q2 of 2015. Median dollars for a second quarter Series A raise in 2016 was $7 million, up from $6 million in 2015. The biotech sector drew the largest amount of Series B funding in the second quarter among industry categories tracked by CrunchBase, with $674 million invested. SaaS companies came in second, drawing $242 million in Series B fundraises, followed by healthcare with $201 million.
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Bubble wants to tap users’ social graphs for an on-demand babysitting app
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Natasha Lomas
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Who would you trust more with your kids: a person sent by a babysitting agency or the sitter who watched your friends’ kids last weekend? , an on-demand babysitting app ( and ) launching in London today, reckons most people would plump for the second option. So it’s built an app for booking a babysitter that’s powered by recommendations pulled from its users’ social graphs — such as their Facebook friends and phone contacts. “Users have the option of integrating their Facebook account with the app and allowing it access to their phone contacts. There is also a feature in the app which allows them to stamp their profiles with the schools and nurseries their kids go to. They also have unique referral codes which they can use to refer friends (parents or sitters) to the app,” says co-founder Ari Last, explaining how Bubble is intending to tap into users’ social graphs to power trusted recommendations. “We’ve built (and continue to iterate on) a social graph in the back-end that maps all of this data together to show for example a parent, how they might know a sitter via mutual friends. It could be that they have a mutual friend on Facebook, or it could be that the sitter was used by another parent whose kids go to the same school as our parent user. “We show the user the entire chain of connection between them and the sitter and we then allow the user to message each of those connections for a ‘vouch’ if they want.” So, in short, here’s (yet) another startup gunning to replace an old school agency model with a messaging platform plus user rating system. (We’re seeing something very similar quickly spinning up in the , for example.) Does Bubble do any vetting of sitters itself? Last says it runs an automated ID check on all users at sign up (both parents and sitters), adding that no one can use the app until their identity has been verified. After that, the vetting is crowdsourced — via users’ social graph contacts, users’ intuition when they message other users to do their own due diligence and, ultimately, the two-way rating process generated as a by-product of usage of the platform. “On every sitter profile, the parent can read more about them and what certifications they have. The app is providing the parent with the info on the relevant sitter and they choose what’s best for them based on their own individual needs,” says Last, who previously chalked up time in roles such as biz dev and commercial partnerships for online marketplaces including Betfair and MarketInvoice. “I saw from my time in fintech that there’s so much innovation happening in how platforms can smartly validate its user base instantly/automatically so we’re excited about leveraging some of these in the future — the social validation and identity checking is a good start,” he adds. Users are not required to connect their Facebook profiles to use the app, but Last says it is “strongly” encouraged so they get the best experience by being as “well-connected in the app as possible”. “As a parent, the more friends or sitters you have on the app the easier it will be for you to find a trusted sitter. And for a sitter, the more connections you have in the app, the more local families are going to want to book you. So it’s a win-win which we hope will encourage virality,” he adds. At this point Bubble is seed funded to the tune of £175,000 by angel investors, including Mark Davies, ex of Betfair — so Last and co have clearly been tapping their own social graph to get this startup off the ground. They have around 150 London-based babysitters signed up to the platform at launch. And some 300 users have signed up during an open beta running for the past 10 days. Bubble is not taking a commission from sitters for using its (free) platform, but parents are charged a £3.50 fee for every sitting session booked via the app (though they are not charged any other fees for using the platform). All payment is handled in app, via Braintree. In terms of competition, Bubble is aiming to disrupt traditional babysitting agencies, some of which Last notes are moving online and going mobile. He says the latter element is key to its strategy as the hope is to help time-strapped parents be more spontaneous about their social lives, rather than having to schedule a babysitter well in advance. (Last and his co-founder are both dads — touting their own experience of trying to pin down babysitting services as the inspiration for launching the app). “The concept of a purely mobile, transactional, on-demand app in this space is new in the UK — particularly one using social data to build trust as we intend to,” he says, discussing the competitive landscape. “There is and other smaller, similar type websites but that is more for longer term needs and it covers a lot of care verticals. “You can book a sitter in advance on our app but we’re placing a lot of emphasis on creating an engaging on-demand experience – giving parents that ability to be spontaneous again.” So what happens if something goes wrong? Who is liable? As with the vast majority of online marketplaces, the risks are in the hands of the users who have to judge whether they are comfortable with a particular transaction themselves. “We’re a marketplace platform and it’s up to both the parents and sitters on to choose who they interact with on the app,” says Last. “It’s important for us to stress that our ambition here is not to be ‘safe enough’ but actually be the safest way for someone to find a sitter. Social validation — using the people who your friends vouch for and use themselves is a great way to layer transparency and security into the process of finding someone to look after your kids.” He also points out that the transparency being two-way helps babysitters too. “Speaking to them it was really interesting to hear how lots of them often show up to people’s houses not knowing much about the parent or what to expect. After all they’ve often got the job via a text message from someone they don’t know saying “you sat for my friend Sarah last week so can you sit for me tonight”. And most of them would take that job,” he notes. “With bubble — the transparency is two-way. They get to view a parent’s profile and any mutual contacts before accepting a sit. Sitters are also rating parents at the end of the night (not just the parents rating the sitter) so they get to view that rating too. We’re encouraging the best behaviour all round.” Encouraging best behavior is one thing, but guaranteeing safety is quite another. So it remains to be seen how parents trust instincts vis-a-vis their kids safety will play out in the crowd-rating arena.
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Khosla-backed Lookup acquired by business discovery service NowFloats
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Jon Russell
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Lookup, an India-based chat service that connects consumers to local business and is backed by some notable U.S. investors, by business discovery service , which is also based in India. The undisclosed deal is a mixture of cash and stock, and Lookup said it will continue to operate independently. when it raised $2.5 million in funding from a range of top investors, including Vinod Khosla’s personal fund Khosla Impact, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Narayana Murthy’s Catamaran Ventures and Global Founders Capital, the investment fund from the Samwer brothers behind Rocket Internet. The company is focused on tapping the explosion of messaging and mobile internet to bring the long-tail of local retailers online. Many people already use WhatsApp to connect with local retailers they know, and Lookup sought to formalize this in India — the largest WhatsApp country on the planet — by building a directory to let you connect with stores via chat. Lookup claims 90,000 businesses on its platform and some 1.2 million users. Ultimately though, CEO and founder Deepak Ravindran told me that it was most logical to find a partner than continue to plod along alone for two big reasons. Firstly, there’s been a major shift away from hyper local services in India. Well-funded startups like , and have this year scaled back on ambitious expansion plans and pivoted as VCs showed a reluctance to continue to fund business with high cash burn and a long window to profitability. Second, Ravindran said also that sometime in the future added another challenge. “We attracted investment [last year], but this year turned out to be tougher for hyper local companies,” he told me over the phone. “What would be right strategy? It takes a look of time to build a network. If traditional VCs are not interested in the game, we wanted to find strong partner to give us the independence to grow on the right track.” NowFloats is a platform for local businesses in India. It claims to have over 250,000 participating retailer partners and, having been focused on the desktop web, it sees Lookup and its mobile focus as wholly complimentary. Likewise, with discovery on NowFloats centered around search, CEO Jasminder Singh Gulati is keen to embrace chat as a medium. “Over the past year, NowFloats has conducted three research sprints across India (that includes driving across the country and meeting people), and it was clear that chat is one of the most pervasive behaviors’ followed by search and apps,” . The two companies will remain separate but Ravindran said there are obvious areas where they can work together, for example on retail partners and users. He’s aiming to develop Lookup so that chat accounts for 10-15 percent of NowFloats’ traffic — it is currently at around two percent, he said. It seems like we can expect more consolidation like this in India this year with investors tightening belts. That’s for the lucky companies though, those who can’t find the right partner might be forced to close down altogether.
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Crunch Report | Uber hits 2 billion rides served
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Ford partners with Jose Cuervo to make car parts out of agave plants
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Mark Lelinwalla
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A tequila brand and car company joining forces isn’t exactly a marriage made in marketing heaven. So what brought Ford and Jose Cuervo together? On Tuesday, the two companies a partnership to explore how the tequila distributor’s leftover agave plant fibers can be used to produce more sustainable bioplastic parts in the automaker’s vehicles. Currently, Ford and Jose Cuervo are testing the agave-derived bioplastics for parts including wiring harnesses, HVAC units and storage bins. Initial feedback from this pilot stage shows that agave has strong durability and aesthetic qualities for the aforementioned interior and exterior parts. If the plant winds up being used on Ford’s cars permanently, it could further reduce vehicles’ weight and lower energy consumption across its lineup. And there won’t be a shortage, as Jose Cuervo harvests between 200 and 300 tons of agave daily. “They’re shredding, mashing and extracting the juice and what’s left over that nobody knows what to do with? The fibers,” Debbie Mielewski, Ford’s senior technical leader of the sustainability research department, told me. “They sent us some treated fibers and we were able to chop it and compound it into plastic.” Agave use continues Ford’s evolution of the greening of its plastics through use of “environmental, plant-based materials” wherever possible, Mielewski said. Back in 2008, Ford used soy foam as a replacement for petroleum oil in the seat cushions and headrests of its iconic Mustang. Today, Ford has soy foam in seat cushions and headrests in every single vehicle across its lineup in North America. Mielewski says Ford utilizes over five million pounds of soy oil annually. That served as a lesson to keep looking for even ‘greener’ plant-based materials. Ford pinpointed wheat straw to fortify plastic bins of its Flex SUV, which is built in the city of Oakville in Canada. If this pilot stage with agave is fruitful, the plant fibers could join soy foam, wheat straw, castor oil, kenaf fiber, cellulose, wood, coconut fiber and rice hulls; the eight sustainable-based materials used for car parts by the automaker today. And Mielewski says the company is “looking at plants that grow very quickly,” citing algae and bamboo to be used for greener plastic parts as well. Ford is even working with carbon dioxide itself. “Instead of releasing it into the atmosphere and greenhouse gas, you can build polymer molecules out of it,” she says. “We have made good foam — not in production yet — but 50 percent carbon dioxide. So, wouldn’t it be beautiful if one day, instead of releasing CO2, we could use it to make various plastics on the car?” Ford says there’s 400 pounds of plastic on a typical vehicle, so there are plenty of parts remaining that can incorporate materials from sustainable sources like agave.
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Line, the newly public messaging app, has funded at least 9 U.S. startups
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Connie Loizos
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Line, the popular Japanese messaging service that went public last week on both the NYSE and in Japan, partnered on a fund a couple of years ago with the New York-based venture firm in order to gain more of a foothold in the U.S. According to a that announced the pairing, the fund planned to invest less than $10 million and to focus on very early-stage startups. If all went as planned, it would also hopefully help Line find a way to compete with the likes of popular U.S. messaging services like Snapchat. Fast forward to today, and that fund, called simply Collab+Line, has so far invested in nine companies, all of which can “benefit from working with a mobile messenger and/or have aspirations to expand to Asia,” says Craig Shapiro, Collaborative Fund’s CEO. Its areas of focus include media, IoT, commerce, communications, and community. Collaborative Fund is the sole manager of the fund, but it works closely with Line to “ensure there is an alignment of interests,” says Shapiro. In fact, Shapiro had told Dealbook for its story that by investing in start-ups through Collab+Line, Line could get close to U.S. startups and potentially even acquire them. Asked if that’s still the idea, Shapiro tells us he “can’t comment.” Still, given Line’s new resources — its market cap is currently around $7 billion — some of its portfolio companies may be wondering. Some of Collab+Line’s bets to date include the live social video network YouNow (five years old, based in New York, has raised ; Particle, a prototype-to-production platform for developing IoT products (nearly five years old, based in San Francisco, has raised ); Slash, an iPhone keyboard that makes it easy to share things without switching apps (a year old, New York based, has raised ); and Zendrive, a startup that uses smartphone sensors to measure drivers’ behavior (three years old, San Francisco based, has raised ). Line also has a nearly two-year-old venture arm called Line Ventures that has said it will invest up to in online-to-offline, e-commerce, payment, media, and entertainment startups, though those bets appear more . Line does not have partnerships with venture firms other than Collaborative Fund, as far as Shapiro knows. Collaborative Fund is currently investing from three funds, including Collaborative Fund III, its third main fund, which closed with around $70 million last year, and Collab+ Sesame, a $10 million fund that Collaborative closed in February of this year. ( .) Line launched five years ago to enable Japanese residents to communicate after a 9.0 earthquake struck the country’s northeastern shore, creating a tsunami that wiped out many coastal towns and famously damaged a nuclear power plant reactor. Naver, a large South Korean company, controls the service, and says Line has 218 million monthly active users. Nearly one-third of Line’s revenue comes from advertising. Like China’s WeChat, it’s also evolving into a platform where users do much more than message one another. Among the it offers are music streaming, online payments, and ride hailing.
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One of Apple Music’s biggest problems is getting fixed
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Sarah Perez
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Apple is addressing a major complaint some users had with the way its Apple Music streaming service functions when it comes to matching your personal music collection to an online catalog – a feature that allows you to stream your tracks from the cloud, via Apple’s iCloud. The company is now switching from a poorer matching technology to use audio fingerprinting. By doing so, it will allow for more accurate matches, and – perhaps, most importantly – it means that Apple will no longer be applying DRM to tracks in your personal library when it performs this matching function. In the past, if you accidentally deleted a track or album from your personal library stored on your Mac, you could download it again from iCloud. But the track would then be copyright protected. Following this change, in the same scenario, those tracks would be DRM-free when you re-download them. This better respects users’ personal libraries and the rights they had previously associated with their files before the matching took place. In addition, Apple Music’s matching technology itself has been improved. One of the streaming service’s touted features is that it allows users to stream music from their own libraries as well as those that are a part of its subscription catalog. But it wasn’t always the best at matching your personal tracks to the right songs. That’s because, before, Apple Music was using metadata to match your personal files. This could lead to incorrect matches. As Jim Dalrymple explains on his blog , some people saw a live version of a song matched with the studio version because of Apple Music’s use of metadata over more advanced matching technologies. Oddly, Apple did have a better technology at its disposal in its . iTunes Match, which is available as a $25 per year alternative to Apple Music, allows users to sync their personal music libraries – including songs from ripped CDs and other unique recordings – to the cloud. However, instead of using metadata to match local tracks with a catalog, like Apple Music does, iTunes Match uses audio fingerprinting, which is far more accurate. iTunes Match works by looking at your files and comparing them to the over 43 million songs that are available in the iTunes Music Store. If the file isn’t an exact match with one of them, then it will upload those to the cloud directly. But by first trying to match files with an existing online version first, it can vastly reduce the time it takes to sync your music to the cloud – as it only needs to truly upload those it can’t match. Apple Music subscribers are being switched over to this better matching technology at a rate of 1 percent to 2 percent per day, and the process has not yet completed, says Dalrymple. Apple Music subscribers (who don’t also subscribe to iTunes Match) will be able to tell if they’ve been switched if they see “Matched” in the iCloud Status column in iTunes on their Mac, he notes. iTunes Match subscribers who also have Apple Music subscriptions could also now effectively drop their Match subscriptions, without losing the benefits of having their personal libraries available wherever they are, and – at last – DRM-free, too.
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Using digital screens to inspire better health
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Mark McDermott
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Digital signage is an industry that just keeps getting bigger. that digital signage adds a 31.8 percent upswing in overall sales volume. Digital video reaches more than of the public. However, while say they prefer to shop at stores that have video displays, digital fatigue is also on the rise. Perhaps there’s an answer. Most digital signage customers use screens to sell advertising space, provide information or assist wayfinding. The really good ones look to create dynamic signage that changes in response to day of week, weather or any other number of variables that allows them to personalize content and playlists. But recently, more are looking to use screens to inspire better health and mental well-being. Take , an organization that is using video art and digital signage to improve patient welfare in hospitals. Currently exhibiting at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, their installations are designed to either distract patients or inspire calm through the use of a new video art form they call “Living Photography.” The company, headed by CEO James Hope-Falkner, is working in partnership with (the charity for Chelsea and Westminster Hospital) to create department-appropriate hospital content using living photography. Their next installation, “The Zoo” (for the hospital’s new pediatric A&E department), will require the use of 14 screens that will each display a slide show of moving animal portraits, a subject they hope will entertain both children and parents. CW+ works to improve the patient experience and environment by bringing together research, innovation, art and design. The reason companies like James’ are so focused on art through screens and video content is because of the capabilities afforded by video that just can’t be achieved with painting, photography or sculpture. “Really it’s movement that makes video art such an effective format for hospitals,” explains James. “Movement can both draw the eye and keep it there. There is also a profound healing effect the observing of movement has on our brains. Like if you’ve ever looked at a fire, or at the ocean for long enough, it puts you into a different state of mind where time moves quicker and you’re not analyzing, over thinking or worrying. It’s more like a sense of daydreaming. A bit like a trance. It is this effect that we are trying to replicate in hospital wards and waiting rooms, almost tricking people into not worrying, by shifting their attention.” Using distraction in clinical environments has been shown to reduce perceptions of pain, lower anxiety and stress and benefit clinicians by creating a calmer environment for them to work — often resulting in quicker treatment times. CW+ has been able to demonstrate this with their initiative — a tablet based-app that provides art, music and games to help calm children while they are anesthetized before surgery. The app was shown to reduce anesthetic induction time, increase first attempt success at cannulation, reduce stress in anesthetists and reduce anxiety in children. The initiative won an NHS England Innovation Acorn Challenge Award, and CW+ hopes to see the same effect in the new pediatric A&E. Apparently, the idea isn’t new. As far back as 1918, to entertain and aid recovery of wounded soldiers. A well-known British artist, Samuel Begg, featured in The Illustrated London News, said: The meditative effect of art has been documented for years, and the art of cinemagraphs is no different. , who coined the phrase “cinemagraph” back in 2011, explain that the effectiveness comes from how moving photographs alter our perception of time and space. “There’s something about taking a brief moment in time and stretching it out forever that opens up new ways of thinking” they explain. “Sometimes the mind is fully present and aware of surroundings and other times, perhaps in a moment of emotional intensity, the mind will fully focus on one thing and essentially be unaware of anything else. With cinemagraphs we can explore these emotional states by juxtaposing movement with still imagery.” Used in applications such as fashion and beauty, as well as in-store interactive installations such as the one Burg and Beck have recently developed for a high-resolution 96-inch screen at a storefront in Massachusetts, the potential of the living photography format grows. Until now, producing this type of art within a publicly funded hospital would have been impossible. Historically, digital signage has meant expensive software installations, money-sucking IT resellers and commercial-grade screens — all things that are out of reach for most public-sector organizations, regardless of the patient/visitor benefit. This means that screens (if there are any at all) in these sectors are left with lackluster content and the same age-old videos playing on loops — far from engaging, exciting or providing benefit to anyone. Cloud-based digital signage applications give back the power to those within the sectors of healthcare and NFP. Without even needing a smart TV, these types of digital signage solutions allow anyone to get set up at a $20 cost for the software, plus the cost of an Amazon Fire stick or similar for around $35 — a far cry from the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of dollars previously required. If companies such as Accademia can use digital screens for the power of good, and the organizations coveting them can afford it, it could alter the dynamics of healthcare, retail and other industries now led by digital technology. Screens are everywhere, and are already a huge permeation of our everyday lives. They naturally draw attention in the screen-dependent world in which we live — and children especially, who are “born digital,” automatically fix their gaze upon them. If the screens can be used to calm patients rather than just fix boredom or sell advertising space, then they are truly becoming worth the brackets on which they hang. I, for one, am proud to be a part of that.
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Army Special Operations Command reportedly ditching Android for iPhone in the field
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Devin Coldewey
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While the ordinary proving ground of the smartphone may be the mean streets of the city, devices are to be found on the field of battle, too — and if is to be believed, Android may soon be giving way to iOS for some special operations forces. According to a source “not authorized to speak to the media,” the Samsung device that acts as the brain of the Android Tactical Assault Kit is a clunker. It lags, freezes, and needs to be restarted too often; the iPhone 6S, apparently, is faster and smoother. A split screen view of a drone’s live video and the map showing its route, for instance is better on Apple hardware, the source said: “It’s seamless on the iPhone. The graphics are clear, unbelievable.” If the switch took place, the ATAC would become the iTAC, at least for certain Army special operations field work. Now, the savvy reader may have questions, such as: just who made this garbage Android app that crashes all the time? What model is the Samsung they’re replacing? Is Android really the problem here? Reader, I had the same questions, and I’ve directed them to Army Special Operations Command. And even if the rumor is true, this is just one part of special ops, which, as the name indicates, is not the largest group in the Army, let alone the whole military.
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Now launching in Estonia, Cleveron’s PackRobot is like an Amazon Locker on steroids
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Devin Coldewey
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Estonian startup is looking to one-up Amazon’s Lockers with a more advanced solution, and today the company’s PackRobot makes its public debut in its home country. Not everyone can be home when a package shows up, and no one wants to wait in line at the postal office or FedEx place. Temporary storage lockers are a nice alternative, but there’s definitely room for improvement — are for their deliveries and partner services only, and the locking cubbies themselves are more or less the same kind of thing you’d find at a gym or school. Cleveron is aiming not only at non-Amazon services that may need to stash an item now and then, but also at deliveries that need a little special care. Packages may be too large to fit in an Amazon Locker, or perhaps can’t be allowed to sit in 85-degree humid heat all day. The towering PackRobot takes and dispenses every item through a single port, after which hidden systems measure the package and put it in a spot that’s exactly the right size, adjusting the height of internal shelves to fit the maximum amount inside. It’s kept cool and dry in there, and when you come to collect your item, it pops out at the same spot every time — no hunting around for Locker 23. They’re secure and can sit outside in pretty much any weather. This all came out over the last year or so, though: is that PackRobots are at last being placed in the wild for a few lucky Estonians to test out. Ten units will be spread through Viljandi and Tartu; any business can in one, and there’s no charge for the drop-off or retrieval. A second stage with more units (with more shapes and sizes) is being planned, but presumably how it looks will largely be determined by the successes and shortcomings of this pilot project. As for chances we’ll see Cleveron blanket the globe with PackRobots? Slim to none. But a local player with a unique and advanced solution is a great target for a friendly acquisition or partnership, and Cleveron seems to be just that. Expect to hear more about these guys when this test phase completes.
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Postmates aqui-hires team behind controversial Famous game
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Eager to throw its product development into high gear, snagged the team from . to boost its engineering bandwidth. Hey is best known for its ludicrously viral game Stolen, which was and later as . “The Hey team was introduced to us by , who’s an investor in Postmates,” says Sean Plaice, CTO and co-founder at Postmates. “He brought to our attention that the Hey team might be looking for a new home.” Hey was founded and headed up by Siqi Chen. He tells me that the company has been struggling over the past four years, trying — and never quite succeeding — to find a product/market fit. At Postmates, Chen takes the mantle as Senior Director of Product. Neither company is eager to discuss the exact terms of the deal. “The main thing we add to the mix is engineering firepower,” Chen says, especially highlighting his skills as a growth-stage engineer. “I was the head of product management at Zynga China for a couple of years. Postmates is just starting to scale aggressively and it feels as if the timing is perfect for us to join.” The process went at breakneck speed, with just about a month passing from the start of the conversation until the team had a new home under Postmates’ roof. “We started talking with Postmates late June,” laughs Chen, so it all happened very quickly.” “We already had a great team, but we wanted someone who can raise the bar and take our growth and product to the next level,” said Plaice. “Siqi and the team he brings with him make this decision a no-brainer.” The Hey team are taking on their new roles effective immediately. Postmates, continuing its focus on delivery services rather than branching out into gaming, decided to not take on any of the IP. “We will continue to operate Famous, but we’re looking for a good home for it as we speak,” says Chen, eager to not let the company’s creation die an untimely death. “We are talking to a number of interested parties.” Postmates today operates in 40 U.S. markets and has a fleet of over 25,000 Postmates delivery staff making deliveries on the platform. The company launched at the end of March.
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Microsoft and Boeing team up to streamline aviation through big data and AI
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Darrell Etherington
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Cortana is set to fly the friendly skies thanks to a new partnership between Microsoft and Boeing, bring the Microsoft intelligent assistant closer still to the . Microsoft and Boeing to move Boeing’s suite of digital aviation offerings over to Azure, and the end result is that said servers are going to begin to get smarter, according to Microsoft. “Centralizing Boeing’s digital aviation applications on Azure will allow Boeing to analyze a large set of data provided from multiple sources,” a Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch via email, explaining how the partnership is set to make Boeing’s offerings better for airlines that use them. “Boeing could use the Cortana Intelligence Suite to help airline operators more effectively manage inventory, more efficiently schedule pilots and cabin crews, or proactively schedule maintenance that might otherwise delay a flight based on the data intelligence they gather from the cloud.” That means that first, this is a very early partnership – the focus here is on the potential to expedite certain tasks in the future. Second, this is not about Cortana flying planes; instead, it’s a project designed to use data analysis on the likely gigantic set of info processed every day through Boeing’s systems with the end goal of eliminating time and effort wasted on frequently repeated processes. Imagine a centralized ‘smart scheduler’ that knows what planes need what maintenance and when, along with staff availability, flight schedules and cargo load-outs – it could be a lot more proactive than most human-run systems likely are now. Of course, the more connected systems operating in a world like aviation, the more people are bound to worry about the potential for hackers and other ill-intentioned people interfering with those systems. Both Microsoft and Boeing are obviously aware of that, and both told TechCrunch they make sure security is a key consideration in their system designs. We’d all probably like an AI that can help make sure that, for example, your checked bags are on the turnstile by the time you get to the baggage claim (or at least cut down on the time it currently takes), but we’ll have a wait at least a little while to see what concrete results comes out of this partnership first: Microsoft told us that they’ll have more to share about their “joint work” with Boeing “before the end of the calendar year.”
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The BOSEbuild Speaker Cube educational kit isn’t quite fully formed
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Brian Heater
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As the first entry in its planned line of educational products, has a lot hanging on it. The product will set the tone for the premier audio company’s somewhat off-brand foray into a wholly new space. So naturally, the company sticks fairly close to home, with a kit that promise to show kiddos the magical inner workings of a Bluetooth speaker. The $149 system relies heavily on the company’s Sound app, which essentially serves as an interactive instructional manual. Offering a step-by-step guide and videos, and doubling as a sort of control panel for the speaker in its various construction states, it’s a handy interactive guide that offers context for the creation and helps keep the builder on track. It’s easily the high point of the Speaker Cube’s design, and hopefully will serve as an integral part of forthcoming installments in the BOSEbuild line. As for the hardware, the company hasn’t figured out how much control to offer up to its users, particularly as ceding full control would mean that buyers might not end up with a working speaker when all is said and done. The system is divided into two separate builds. First, there’s a basic paper speaker that demonstrates the magnet and coil system at the center of the technology. The app offers a cursory understanding of how electrical currents create vibrations and produce sound, while letting the user manipulate different aspects through a series of sliders. Next up, the app asks the users to cut out a paper housing for the mini-speaker. Then it’s a bit of a jump to the final speaker. From here, it’s mostly plugging things in and snapping together the plastic shell housing with the 40 included clips. Once together, you can manipulate the sound levels and control a light show. Bose also offers up a nod to its own in-house sound engineering by showing you just how the speaker sounds when tuned up the right way. The Speaker Cube is a fun idea that fails to fully deliver on its promise. It’s more of a cursory peek into the inner workings of an electronic device than it is a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-figure-out-how-things-work educational product. Once you’re done, you’ve got a passable Bluetooth speaker and not much else. Customization is limited to a few paper stencils and a light show. As it stands, the system feels like a $149 Bose Bluetooth speaker with a little bit of education tossed into the mix.
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SeatGeek will calculate how much that ticket is worth
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Anthony Ha
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Have you ever bought sweet tickets for a ballgame, a concert or some other live event, only to find out that you couldn’t make it? The internet certainly offers plenty of ways for you to unload the tickets… but how much should you charge? Ticketing startup has launched a new way to help you figure it out. In a way, SeatGeek has been offering this since last fall, when it for users to sell and transfer their tickets — the marketplace would even recommend a price, one where the ticket could be sold relatively quickly without leaving too much money on the table. Now, the company has released . So even if you’re not selling your tickets on SeatGeek, you can see how much you might be able to charge for them. “The idea is to make it a utility,” said SeatGeek co-founder Jack Groetzinger. “It’s not just for sellers on SeatGeek — maybe they don’t even want to sell the tickets but just sort of see what they’re worth.” Apparently the recommendations work, with 85 percent of tickets listed on the marketplace selling within 12 hours. Users who take advantage of the recommendations see a 15 percent higher sell-through rate than those who don’t. Groetzinger added that analyzing the value of a ticket is something that his team has been working on “without exaggeration, for several years” — even before creating the marketplace, SeatGeek was analyzing ticket prices on other sites to tell users when something was a good deal. As an example, Groetzinger said that with a newer venue, SeatGeek can look at factors like the location of a seat, while with older venues, it can also draw on historical sale data. Either way, you just upload a PDF of your tickets and SeatGeek will give you a recommendation. (Groetzinger said SeatGeek also experimented with finding the best time to sell for the best price, but found that most users aren’t interested.) He added the broader vision is to turn ticket buying and selling into “this very spontaneous thing,” rather than always wondering “Can I really commit now?” before buying a pricey ticket. “We think it’s sort of a shame that people going to see live music, live sports, it’s a very encumbered, difficult life decision,” Groetzinger said.
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Everything Yahoo has going for it right now
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Matthew Lynley
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(See also: )
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Southeast Asia’s aCommerce raises $10M to prepare for Series B
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Jon Russell
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, a Bangkok-based startup that helps e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia run their businesses, has landed $10 million in new funding ahead of a planned Series B raise later this year. The company, which is currently active in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, said this latest raise is led by — a fund associated with mobile operator Telkom Indonesia — with participation from Australia-based fund and existing backer . Switzerland-based market expansion firm in December, which TechCrunch understands was worth between $20-$25 million. E-commerce is showing some serious potential in Southeast Asia, as evidenced by earlier this year. aCommerce plays the role of enabler, helping e-commerce companies, brands and traditional retailers manage their online business through a range of services that cover inventories, warehousing, logistics, fulfilment and digital marketing. The company was founded in 2013 and has now raised closed to $50 million from investors, including and , alongside today’s reveal and the DKSH injection. Like the previous bridge round, this new raise is designed to help the company “sprint” before a larger round in excess of $50 million later this year. In other words, aCommerce said it still has money in the bank but wants to spend to grow to secure a more favorable raise. Specifically, it plans to expand its business to Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore. “We want to get maximum valuation with minimal dilution,” aCommerce Group CEO Paul Srivorakul told TechCrunch in an interview. “Instead of raising Series B [now], we’ve gone back to investors to raise more capital before a Series B at end of the year.” (By the way, raising a Series B after already banking $50 million is certainly not the norm for Southeast Asia, and Srivorakul admitted that he doesn’t put a tag on the company’s funding efforts. “For us, we’re just raising it at our convenience,” he said.) Srivorakul, who previously and , said there had been discussions with investors prior to the company’s last round, so this new investment was already possible. For the Series B, though, he plans to pitch to look to new sources of capital. Talking up his new backers, Srivorakul said that MDI Ventures could be hugely strategic in Indonesia, which recently overtook Thailand as the startup’s largest revenue generator. “Their demand generation is massive,” he explained. “On the other side, customs and e-commerce laws are getting very complicated, these guys are the tech arm of the government so [we] find it exciting to build products around customs in Indonesia and keep building out our Indonesia play.” aCommerce expansion to Singapore will see it reenter the country having previously quit in 2014. Admitting that first entry was a little too early, Srivorakul argued that aCommerce is coming back with a “partner” — DKSH, which he said is helping onboard new clients from its roster — and demand from existing customers in other markets, which can make a difference this time. He noted also that he is observing a much greater focus on sustainability when it comes to scaling emerging market startups. On those lines, he said he is confident that aCommerce could sustain itself in the wake of any kind of funding crunch or downturn. “We can break even next year with the money we have now,” he told TechCrunch. “We can manage these [existing three] markets to profitability, but we need to capture three more markets [and] that’s where we’re looking to deploy this [new] capital.”
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How to watch the Republican National Convention
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Kate Conger
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The Republican National Convention is underway in Cleveland, where the GOP is expected to finalize its nomination of Donald Trump. The entire Trump clan is attending, plus Donald backers like investor Peter Thiel and UFC president Dana White. The convention runs through Thursday, with most of the events occurring in the evening. The RNC is sure to make for interesting viewing, so here are all the different ways you can stream the convention. The streaming platform popularized by gamers is trying its hand at streaming a political event. “We see this as a public service,” Twitch said when it announced it would offer live streams of the RNC and the Democratic National Convention. The company emphasized that it would bring the political process into the homes of individuals who might not otherwise tune into the convention, and pointed out that it would make the broadcast available to viewers outside the U.S. “We are aware that this is a bit unorthodox, and that politics can be a touchy subject. The channels will be carefully moderated so as to provide a positive experience that fosters genuine discussion,” Twitch said. The company is using a mix of live moderators and automatic moderation tools to keep the comments clean. Twitch is offering several cool ways for viewers to interact with the live stream — users can host the RNC stream on their own channel and provide commentary, or react with a special set of emotes. Twitch says Day 1 of the live stream has averaged between 2,000 and 5,000 users. “Based on what we observed today, the chat during Twitch’s broadcast of the Republican National Convention has been overwhelmingly clean-spirited and cheeky, without dipping into more contentious territory,” product marketing manager Brian Petrocelli said. The won’t be up and running 24/7, however. Here’s the schedule: 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. EDT 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. EDT Twitter partnered with CBS for a live stream, available . It appears that, like Twitch, Twitter thought ahead about the potential for spam and hateful comments on the hashtag — the timeline of tweets that appears next to the live video is moderated, so viewers will get information about the event without any nasty surprises. Twitter’s live stream is interspersed with normal CBS broadcast material, so dull moments at the convention are filled with news fodder instead of dead air. Like Twitter, Facebook partnered with a major news network to provide live coverage of the RNC. Facebook’s live stream is the result of a partnership with ABC News. ABC is hosting the stream on its own , where it boasts more than 8 million followers. In exchange, Facebook is providing the network with real-time viewer data to be used in the broadcast, . ABC will also take questions and comments from viewers via Facebook Live. Facebook’s partnership with ABC means that its live stream will be interspersed with news coverage, so viewers won’t ever be left without something to watch. Although ABC is Facebook’s official partner for live streaming, several other news organizations are hosting live streams on the platform as well: and both have plans for live coverage on Facebook. YouTube is the official live stream partner for the RNC, with a stream set up by the convention itself. YouTube doesn’t appear to have thought through the potential for inappropriate comments on its live stream, as early viewers complained that the comments were pretty vile. The comments section is now completely disabled, which means viewers won’t get the same interactive experience on YouTube as they will on Twitch, Twitter or Facebook. If you’re not interested in interactivity but want a high-def feed, this is the live stream for you. The official RNC app, , uses Google to offer an “immersive experience” of 360-degree convention video. RNC 2016 is available for iOS and Android, and it comes with maps and several other useful features for those attending the convention. The YouTube live stream will be hosted within the RNC 2016 app, along with the 360 video and other features. For the more traditional viewers who want to watch the convention on their TV rather than in a browser tab or mobile app, a number of news networks and TV platforms will have streaming coverage. Chromecast, Apple TV, and Roku are all expected to have live streams, and outlets like MSNBC, PBS, Fox, and NBC will be broadcasting on TV as well as online. Once you decide how you want to watch the convention, you’ll still need to tangle with the schedule. Each day of the convention is focused on a different theme, spinning off Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. Today’s theme is “Make America Safe Again,” with primetime coverage beginning after the Convention Business Session. The speakers are mostly focused on Benghazi and immigration (although Melania Trump and Willie Robertson, the star of , are inexplicably included in the safety lineup). The headliners are: Melania Trump, Lieutenant General (ret.) Michael Flynn, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Jason Beardsley and U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke (Mont.). Tuesday’s theme is “Make America Work Again,” and the lineup is filled with Congress members and other government officials. The ones to watch will be Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who has very reluctantly backed Trump in the run-up to the convention, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who angled to become Trump’s pick for vice president but was ultimately passed over for Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Two Trump kids, Donald Jr. and Tiffany, also made the list. They’re accompanied by some of Trump’s celebrity buddies, including UFC president Dana White and pro golfer Natalie Gulbis. Trump’s former opponent Ben Carson is also scheduled to appear. Tuesday’s headliners are: Donald Trump, Jr., U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (WV), Ben Carson and Kimberlin Brown. Wednesday’s theme is “Make America First Again” and primetime coverage is scheduled to kick off at 7 p.m. EDT. The schedule features another one of Trump’s VP contenders, Newt Gingrich. More of Trump’s former opponents are slated to come kiss the ring, including Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Trump’s VP pick, Pence, will also address the crowd. Although the themes of “safety” and “work” are pretty clear, it’s not easy to discern from Wednesday’s schedule what the “first” theme is all about. One thing’s for sure, though — the day wouldn’t be complete without an appearance from one of Trump’s offspring. Wednesday is Eric Trump’s time to shine. The RNC says Wednesday’s headliners also include Lynne Patton and Gingrich’s wife Callista. Thursday, the final day of the RNC, also has a confusing theme: “Make America One Again.” This is the day that TechCrunch readers will most likely want to tune in, as it’s the day when Peter Thiel is expected to finally discuss his support for Trump. The primetime program starts at 7:30 p.m. EDT. In addition to Thiel’s remarks, viewers can also catch speeches from Dr. Lisa Shin, “an authority on eye care and vision protection” who is also the leader of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump, RNC chairman Reince Priebus and Ivanka Trump. The Donald himself will close out the evening. For a , visit the RNC website.
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Katie Roof
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The real story behind how BB-8 works in The Force Awakens
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzzWmTIVv3c] Star Wars engineering experts have tipped their hand regarding one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets: Exactly how BB-8 works in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. While film-makers behind the movie have given some clues as to how the droid works, and people from of the rolling droid, this is the first time we’ve been told in no uncertain terms how the droid worked on set during filming. Force Awakens’ technical staffers Matt Denton and Josh Lee were on stage at Star Wars Celebration Europe this past weekend in London, and detailed the story of BB-8. The cute ball that briefly became America’s darling in 2015 upon the movie’s release was mostly a two-person operation, and was more tricycle than uni-roller in most of its appearances. Before you get too sad that BB-8’s balancing act isn’t the real thing, know that Denton and Lee started by figuring out how they could do it for real, without using any movie magic. But the realities of filming meant they also needed a BB-8 that could nail every take reliably — human actors are hard enough to direct without robots flubbing their blocking. In the two-person arrangement, one is controlling BB-8’s head, and one is controlling its body. But before it got that advanced, there was a proof-of-concept made of foam with what looked like a pair of ice cream scoop handles affixed to the back to control body rolling and head movement separately. The initial simple puppet already shows just how much character BB-8 can have with only really a few moving components, and that range of expression really delivers in the movie itself. The finished puppet was affixed to a large arm that let puppeteers push it over any terrain, including the sand dunes that caused so much debate (how does the smooth ball get traction on sand!) during the film’s original debut. The rigging attached to the puppet was edited out in post, and different arrangements for the handles were used to try to make sure the puppeteer was only minimally in-shot, so that they only needed to use a minimum of digital painting. J.J. Abrams and his team were looking to use practical effects wherever possible to capture the feel of the original trilogy, and BB-8 was no exception. Also in keeping with that desire to keep things looking real: Abrams generally insisted on using the actual functional versions of BB-8, instead of “stunt” doubles created by the effects team that were essentially big, durable solid models. There are seven rolling BB-8s in total, and each of these gets re-tread as they’re used during filming, which Lee and Denton said require “quite a large team” to “keep him rolling.” In addition to the rig-controlled rolling version, ILM also created a “wiggler” that kept its head straight ahead while the body “wiggled,” as the name implies. This was used in a lot of close-up shots in the movie, including many of the exchanges between BB-8 and Finn on the Millennium Falcon. Finally, there’s a remote-controlled version of BB-8 called the “Trike,” which is “all-terrain” and has a unique two-wheel caddy-style apparatus that pushed the spherical body (the third wheel of the tricycle or Trike apparatus). Another arm extending to the head controls its movement independent of the body, with ILM editing out the extra wheels and control frame in editing. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea__iCFjak8] The magic behind the movie may have been mostly varying degrees of puppetry, but a rolling BB-8 without training wheels was actually made for the red carpet premiere of the movie, and that’s where this panel is really pulling back the curtain, showing the internals of the working model they first demoed for Disney and then finished for the premiere once a rough working model unlocked some additional cash to follow through on the design.
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Google launches final Android Nougat Developer Preview
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Lucia Maffei
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Google today the fifth and last preview before the scheduled final release later this summer. According to the company, this preview includes the latest version of the Android Nougat emulator to do apps final testing, the final N APIs, the latest system behaviors and UI and the latest bug fixes and optimizations across the system and pre-installed apps. As far as we know, there are no new user-facing features in this release, though Google has occasionally made minor tweaks to the user interface between developer previews. The Nougat Developer Preview is now available for Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9 and Pixel C devices, as well as General Mobile 4G Android devices (both in the form of over-the-air updates and system images). To get the preview, no action is needed if you are already enrolled in the Android Beta program: Your devices will get the Developer Preview 5 update automatically. If you aren’t yet enrolled in the Android Beta program, you can still visit and opt-in your eligible Android phone or tablet. You also can download and . “This preview gives developers the near-final system updates for all of the supported preview devices,” the company wrote in a blog post. The name for Android 7.0 was chosen by fans . As usual, since the release of Android Cupcake, each version of the mobile operating system is named after something sweet: “Nougat” is a confection made with sugar (or honey) that usually contains nuts.
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Kim’s Snapchat Story, Taylor’s Instagram, and all the 1’s and 0’s in between
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Jordan Crook
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the world of celebrity gossip: And with this particular stage of the celebrity feud, we are given an amazing opportunity to look at how social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat can be used as weapons. As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Kim , posting a Snapchat Story of a phone call between Kanye and Taylor. In it, Taylor seemingly gives her approval on lyrics to Kanye’s song Famous on album (“for all my Southside niggas that know me best / I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / I made that bitch famous”). By giving Kanye consent to the lyrics secretly and then , Taylor has finally fully revealed just how manufactured a pop star she really is. This is the story of how Kim introduced Taylor Swift to defeat, for the first time ever, and put some sting on it. Snapchat was the perfect medium for Kim to land such a blow. And by responding on Instagram, Taylor Swift beat herself while she was already down. But let’s start at the beginning… Taylor and Kanye have been feuding since he interrupted her 2009 VMA acceptance speech to pronounce Beyoncé queen of all. Things had seemingly been mended until Taylor threw some shade in her 2016 Grammy’s speech for Best Album of the Year, saying that some enemies “will try to undercut your success.” Many considered the dig was pointed at Kanye for his “Famous” lyrics. This is where wifey Kim Kardashian West comes into the mix. Last night, in defense of her husband, she posted a series of Snapchat videos to the ephemeral network that show Taylor Swift agreeing to (some) of the lyrics in the song on a phone call between her and Kanye. Though Snapchats are supposed to disappear, these particular videos live on within the boundaries of the world wide web. You can check out the full series of videos below. Kim leaking Taylor Swift video is my Game of Thrones — Ziwe (@ziwe) It’s worth noting that Kim (in her short time on Snapchat) has really learned how to make the most of the platform. This video is pre-recorded material, which suggests a home-brew hack. From the looks of it, Kim recorded and edited the call, and then filmed it playing on another screen (her Mac) through Snapchat. Then, of course, there is another ‘hack’ with the recording of Kim’s Snapchat story for permanent consumption by the internet. But this isn’t where the story ends. Taylor Swift abruptly fired back with preferred social media platform, Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/BH_TCz4DeSj/?taken-by=taylorswift Check out that caption. In Taylor’s defense, no part of the video showed her listening to the actual song, and you never hear Kanye relay the “that bitch” lyric to Taylor. Each party has chosen their own platform through which they participate in this feud. When he was actually participating, Kanye was using Twitter. Kim has obviously opted for a lethal Snapchat attack, while Taylor has aired her beef on Instagram. Kanye is not one to shy away from a stage. Throughout his tenure as a music/style/attitude icon, he has faithfully used Twitter to voice… just about everything. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Axzxe1a78E&w=560&h=315] And this particular tussle was no different. In his own reaction to Taylor Swift’s reaction to the lyrics, he sent out a about the meaning of the word “bitch” and explaining that Taylor herself said that Kanye made her famous. https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/698146943927787522 She was allegedly the inspiration behind the tweets! Putting Kim entirely on Team Snapchat is a bit hyperbolic. Kim is known to on any social media platform, and she keeps things quite diverse. Now that she’s discovered Snapchat, however, she seems to be leaning more toward that platform. When we consider the context of this feud, Snapchat suits Kim quite well. More than the other two, Kim can be a bit underhanded when it comes to drama. She essentially subtweeted Taylor a few times to tease the Snapchat Story she posted. Wait it's legit National Snake Day?!?!?They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days! 🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍 — Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) do u guys follow me on snap chat? u really should ;-) — Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) In fact, Kim never said anything about Taylor. And yet, with the (truly brilliant) editing of the film via Snapchat’s 10-second limit, she’s able to paint Taylor as a liar a manufactured pop icon product instead of an authentic human being. In fact, you can see from that Taylor even brings up the specific number of Instagram likes on a post and mentions her “overexposure.” Of course, Kim also knows how many Instagram likes she has on certain posts and most certainly understands overexposure, but it’s part of her brand. Snapchat, as an outlet, is not only a smart strategy but an extension of Kim’s authenticity. In theory, Snapchat is supposed to be a platform where people can share who they really are, in the moment, and treat it like a real-life connection. Plus, Snapchat’s 10-second limit allows Kim to get away with editing the video to show the most honest Kanye moments and the most incriminating Taylor moments. Like Kim, Taylor uses many social media platforms to express herself. But Instagram is where she keeps up appearances. She’s built a powerful brand image, and the center of it comes down to being young, sweet and either heartbroken or in love. She wants you to believe she’s the girl next door, and Instagram is the medium through which she shows us her girl-power friends, her dreamboat boyfriends and her adorable, modest swimsuits at beach parties. In many ways, she treats it just like every twenty-something girl. She’s “announced” most of her personal news on Instagram, debuting relationships with various boyfriends on the photo-sharing platform. And when it comes to this latest Kimye controversy, Instagram is where she’s airing her side of the story. Fitting, considering that she’s paying such close attention to the number of likes she gets there. But perhaps Instagram was a mistake. At best for Taylor, Kim’s video paints her as a liar when it comes to the controversy over Kanye’s “Famous” lyrics. At worst — and this is much worse — it lifts the nearly translucent veil off of Taylor’s “good girl” persona. It shows that Taylor is a product of the pop machine, worrying about her brand image and her press and her social media following. And her response on Instagram, but built to seem personal and genuine on the Notes section of Taylor’s iPhone, all but confirms that. Kim’s Snapchat video is inconclusive enough that we may never know if Taylor knew about the “that bitch” lyric, or if she signed off on them, or if the entire thing is a co-conspiracy out of both camps to hype each other in the press. But we can still learn a lot from the way these celebs chose to use social media as a weapon in this battle. As the mastermind behind the video, Kim’s Snapchat has taught us that she’s clever and she’s for real (even if we’re already certain that the opposite is true). And for bonus points, she will go to great lengths and wage war against mighty foes in defense of her man. Kanye has taught us, through his performance in the video and his earlier tweet storm, that he is actually a pretty good guy with some strong opinions and he wants to get his art out in the world. For some bonus points, he was a smart man and stood around while a smarter woman handled the art of social media warfare. Taylor, on the other hand, has taught us a bit too much for her own good. Setting aside her (or anyone else’s) feelings about the word “bitch,” Taylor looked more than two-faced in this situation. She seems sweet enough on the phone call in Kim’s video, and grateful that Kanye even shared lyrics with her at all. Yet, her Instagram response makes it seem like she was entitled to hear the whole song for approval in the first place. And even if we forget the nitty-gritty details of these inconsistencies, there is the fact that she concludes the Instagram statement by saying she never wanted any part of this narrative in the first place. Even though she . And earlier this year. While Taylor has finally revealed that she is a product of the pop machine, Kim has solidified her place as the pop machine itself.
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With one atom per bit, this 1-kilobyte hard drive is only 100 nanometers wide
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Devin Coldewey
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Here’s an interesting milestone to talk up around the water cooler: researchers in the Netherlands have created a microscopic storage system that encodes every bit with a single atom — allowing them to fit a kilobyte in a space under 100 nanometers across. That translates to a storage density of about 500 terabits per square inch. For comparison, those 4-terabyte hard drives you can buy today are about terabit per square inch. That’s because, unlike this new system, they use hundreds or thousands of atoms to store a single bit. “In theory, this storage density would allow all books ever created by humans to be written on a single post stamp,” said Sander Otte, lead scientist at Delft University of Technology, . That doesn’t really give you an idea of how cool this tech is, though. The storage array (“hard drive” isn’t exactly accurate, but gets the point across) is remarkably elegant in its organization — as it has to be if it is going to work at an atomic level. “Every bit consists of two positions on a surface of copper atoms, and one chlorine atom that we can slide back and forth between these two positions,” explained Otte. Because chlorine on copper forms into a perfectly square grid, it’s easy (relatively, anyway) to position and read them. If the chlorine atom is up top, that’s a 1; if it’s at the bottom, that’s a 0. Put 8 chlorine atoms in a row and they form a byte. Then there are a few special marks that indicate things like the end of a line or file, or that the next space should be ignored (in case of damage, for instance). Altogether the system is efficient enough that they were able to store hundreds of letters into a 96×128 nanometer space (12 rows and 12 columns, each cell holding 8 bytes). And it’s easy enough to do these manipulations that the process can be automated. The data the researchers chose to demonstrate this was a fragment of a Feynman lecture, — fittingly, about storing data at extremely small scales. (You can see a high-resolution image of the array .) This is strictly lab-bound, though, at least for now. The chlorine-copper array is only stable in a clean vacuum and at 77 kelvin — about the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Anything past that and heat will disrupt the organization of the atoms. It’s early-stage research, but still promising. The idea of using individual atoms as bit storage is something many scientists have dreamed of, and the applications of such dense storage are, of course, innumerable. The research was published today in the journal .
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Samsung reports highest profit for 2 years thanks to strong Galaxy S7 sales
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Jon Russell
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Earlier this month , and today it delivered on that promise with . The Korean tech giant reported a 8.14 trillion won ($7.22 billion) operating profit on revenue of 50.94 trillion won ($45.2 billion). That profit figure is up 18 percent year-on-year, while the quarter’s revenue represented a five percent annual increase. The company’s mobile division accounted for more than half of the firm’s revenue and profits. Samsung said that, , sales of its flagship Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, which have , and a more “streamlined” approach to its cheaper phones — including the successful mid-range — helped it generate impressive financials. What’s particularly interesting to note is that the Galaxy S7 Edge accounted for more than half of Samsung’s Galaxy S7 sales in the quarter. Given the higher sale price and higher margins, that was a major boost for the firm. Looking forward, Samsung said that it will maintain its improved year-on-year results despite increased competition as “other companies release new mobile devices” — that chiefly means Apple, of course, which is said to be . But Samsung itself has new products coming — , while it said it has plans for more Galaxy A and J series devices and a new Galaxy C series that is just for China.
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Crunch Report | Trump asks Russia to hack Hillary
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Donald Trump addresses NASA and new media in his first Reddit AMA
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Brian Heater
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, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump for a spirited — though not on the official /IAmA subreddit — AMA. The session was light on policy specifics, but the candidate (also casually referred to as “God Emperor” by some participants), managed to answer 13 questions on topics ranging from NASA (pro) to media bias (against), three more than President Obama offered in The AMA, which unfolded the same evening both the President and Vice President were set to take the stage at the Democratic National Convention (and prior to him taking the stage at his own rally in Toledo), was tightly vetted by the page’s moderators, who announced beforehand, “Yes, the AMA will have tons of removed comments. That’s sort of a mark of pride for us.” After showing up to his own party fashionably late (by fourteen or so minutes), the Real Donald Trump kicked things off with a couple of softballs, responding to two questions in a five-part series, coming out strongly against voter fraud but supportive of NASA and space in general. Asked to respond to concern that Clinton will “try and steal this election through vote fraud,” Trump responded, “Voter fraud is always a serious concern and authorities must be vigilant from keeping those from voting that are not authorized to do so.” Asked by the same Redditor the role NASA should “play in helping to Make America Great Again,” he responded with, “Honestly I think NASA is wonderful! America has always led the world in space exploration,” echoing similar comments by Peter Thiel, whose recent Republican Convention address took issue with expenditures on war rather than space exploration, stating, “Instead of going to Mars, we invaded the Middle East.” While unequivocally pro-NASA and America, Trump’s response was decidedly less detailed than Obama’s answer to a similar question on his own AMA: Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. The passing of Neil Armstrong this week is a reminder of the inspiration and wonder that our space program has provided in the past; the curiosity probe on mars is a reminder of what remains to be discovered. The key is to make sure that we invest in cutting edge research that can take us to the next level – so even as we continue work with the international space station, we are focused on a potential mission to [an] asteroid as a prelude to a manned Mars flight. Trump’s next response was somewhat more measured. When one Redditor raised concern about media consolidation and sensationalism, the candidate condemned general bias while praising “new media,” saying, “I have been very concerned about media bias and the total dishonesty of the press. I think new media is a great way to get out the truth,” a clear nod to the candidate’s embrace of online platforms such as Reddit and Twitter that present lines of communication outside of traditional media channels. After this slow ramp up, the Republican nominee was off the to the races. As to what the candidate plans to do in order to help lessen money’s influence on politics, Trump once again responded in straight forward fashion, stating emphatically that he would “[keep] Crooked Hillary Clinton out of the White House!” Asked a similar question in his 2012 AMA, the President answered, Money has always been a factor in politics, but we are seeing something new in the no-holds barred flow of seven and eight figure checks, most undisclosed, into super-PACs; they fundamentally threaten to overwhelm the political process over the long run and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. We need to start with passing the Disclose Act that is already written and been sponsored in Congress – to at least force disclosure of who is giving to who. We should also pass legislation prohibiting the bundling of campaign contributions from lobbyists. Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t revisit it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change. The Donald, unsurprisingly, invoked his opponent, nickname and all, several more times during the AMA, telling a questioner that his immigration policy as outlined on his website (TLDR as per the AMA) is “the exact opposite of Crooked Hillary Clinton.” He also, naturally, made reference to Clinton’s ongoing e-mail woes and Benghazi. When asked why Secretary Clinton, “refus[es] to hold any press conferences for such a huge amount of time?” Trump responded, Crooked Hillary Clinton will not do press conferences because she cannot explain her illegally deleted 33,000 emails, or her disaster in Libya, or her role pushing TPP (which she would 100% approve if she got the chance), or her support for a 550% increase in Syrian refugees, etc. Trump noted his plan to “repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare” with an “amazing new plan” to be revealed at a later date, before praising, “our nation’s amazing police” and giving a shout out to presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, “all of whom I greatly admire.” Trump closed the session out in typical Trump fashion, with the candidate imploring Redditors, “Together, we will Make America Great Again.”
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Sales and marketing startup LeadGenius raises $10M
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Anthony Ha
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announced that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding. , LeadGenius helps customers find likely sales leads and reach out to them with automated emails. The company says revenue increased 6x in the past 20 months, with customers including eBay, Box and Weebly. LeadGenius has now raised more than $21 million in funding. The new round was led by Lumia Capital and past investor Sierra Ventures — Lumia’s Martin Gedalin is joining the company’s board of directors. Better Ventures, Bee Partners, Y Combinator, Kapor Capital, Initialized Capital, Fuel Capital, Scrum Ventures and Funders Club also participated. “LeadGenius solves a problem that every company from start-up to large enterprise faces – making sales reps more efficient,” said Javelin’s Noah Doyle in the acquisition release.
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How President Obama shaped the future of digital health
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Matt Joseph
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A new leader of the free world will soon be voted into office. Shortly thereafter, he or she will begin a minimum four-year journey to steer the country toward prosperity, safety and global leadership. With many changes undoubtedly coming, let’s take a look at the technological impact of one of the biggest initiatives that has championed: healthcare reform. Whatever your stance on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), there’s little doubt that it has been responsible for ushering into the U.S. healthcare system a new era of technology. The controversial law ignited an explosion of new offerings, and set the entire healthcare system on a path of advancement that will continue to extend access and increase the quality of healthcare administration for years to come. The ACA’s Information Technology for Economic and Clinical ( ) provisions created tens of billions of dollars in incentives for healthcare providers to implement federally approved IT systems. These systems, known widely as electronic records (EHRs), were key to healthcare reform and created the strongest platform to date for innovation. While EHRs faced significant barriers to adoption, namely resistance from physicians trained for years to document patients using pen and paper, they came with the promise of faster and more efficient care. For those not swayed by financial incentives and the improvement of patient care, the government baked in penalties for noncompliance. Obamacare’s incentive scheme was strikingly effective. Today, across the country have adopted EHRs. In 2009, before the ACA had been passed, of hospitals had adopted them, reporting up-front cost and maintenance expense, uncertain return on investment and inconsistent IT systems as the biggest barriers to adoption. Despite their rapid EHR adoption, healthcare providers have faced challenges along the way. Many EHR systems are not interoperable, preventing patients from seamlessly transitioning between different facilities and departments. Furthermore, security is a concern; 113 million individuals were affected by EHR breaches in 2015. Nonetheless, these challenges opened the door for a thriving ecosystem owing its existence to the ACA and : healthcare IT entrepreneurs. The ACA has unleashed a flood of entrepreneurs and startups into what to be a $233.3 billion industry by 2020. According to , more than 90 new companies related to healthcare have been created since the ACA was signed into law. Similar to the advancements of EHRs, many of the these firms are leveraging technology to increase education and transparency, link patients with doctors and support networks and improve overall communication throughout the healthcare system. The administration’s reforms created a golden age for healthcare entrepreneurs and investors alike. Venture funding in the sector , from $1 billion in 2010 to $6 billion in 2015. Massive deals are taking place between startups and some of today’s leading VC firms. Oscar raised more than and, last year, for its employee benefits platform. Another promising development is that a sizeable portion of new investments in over the past couple of years is coming from the healthcare providers themselves. In February, Virginia-based Inova System a $100 million venture fund focused on personalized medicine. Other systems that have recently established venture funds include Washington-based Providence & Services, which set up its $150 million fund in 2014, and the American Medical Association, which $15 million in San Francisco-based Health2047 earlier this year. While the incoming administration could curtail some of the progress that has been made, there are many positive signs that will continue to grow. New guidelines continue to require technology use in healthcare provision. In February, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a rule that went into effect on July 1 and allows “face-to-face” visits to be conducted using telecommunications technology for remote diagnosis and treatment. This practice of telemedicine is projected by some to become a $34 billion industry globally . Furthermore, healthcare’s shift to value-based healthcare all but requires physicians to lower costs by implementing new technologies. With the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) going live in 2017, will be based on healthcare record interoperability, information exchange and data security. Lastly, come January 2017, Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner may have competition from a new celebrity investor: Barack . The p , who has expressed and healthcare technology, , “If I think about what would stir my passions had I not gone into politics, it’d probably be starting some kind of business.” So perhaps the steward of the ship will continue to help navigate its course in the years ahead.
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Security experts have cloned all seven TSA master keys
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John Biggs
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Key escrow — the process of keeping a set of keys for yourself “just in case” — has always been the U.S. government’s modus operandi when it comes to security. From the disastrous Clipper chip to today, the government has always wanted a back door into encryption and security. That plan backfired for the TSA. The TSA, as you’ll remember, offers a set of screener-friendly locks. These locks use one of seven master keys that only the TSA can use — until 2014. In an , a reporter included a shot of all seven keys on a desk. It wasn’t long before nearly all the keys were made available for 3D printing and, last week, security researchers . At last week’s HOPE Conference in New York, hackers calling themselves DarkSim905, Johnny Xmas, and Nite 0wl explained how — and why — they cracked the TSA keys. “This was done by legally procuring actual locks, comparing the inner workings, and finding the common denominator. It’s a great metaphor for how weak encryption mechanisms are broken — gather enough data, find the pattern, then just ‘math’ out a universal key (or set of keys),” said Johnny Xmas. “What we’re doing here is literally cracking physical encryption, and I fear that metaphor isn’t going to be properly delivered to the public.” The keys, should you be interested, and can be printed on a 3D printer. The TSA, for their part, doesn’t care, telling that “The reported ability to create keys for TSA-approved suitcase locks from a digital image does not create a threat to aviation security. These consumer products are ‘peace of mind’ devices, not part of TSA’s aviation security regime.” In other words, you might as well not use locks at all.
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Groupon reports better-than-expected revenue, still not profitable
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Lucia Maffei
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Deal site saw its shares rising today in after-hours trading, following a better-than-expected second quarter earnings report. Analysts expected the Chicago-based company to report negative earnings per share of $0.02 on revenue on a non-GAAP basis, and $713.8 million in revenue, But Groupon beat Wall Street revenue expectations with second quarter revenue of $756 million. And it a better-than-expected net loss of $6.8 million on a non-GAAP basis, or $0.01 loss per share. In a phone interview, Groupon CEO Rich Williams said that the reasons the company did not make profits in the last quarter are essentially two: Groupon is still investing in marketing and other efforts to attract new customers, and they face other costs associated with company restructuring. Williams to CEO last November. To improve customer experience, Williams said that customer support staff now answers calls faster, because the company improved tools that employees have. The Groupon mobile app also saw changes, by making the notification system more targeted and location-based, Williams said. In the first half of 2016, Groupon revenue looked better than it did over the same period last year. But the company is not looking quite as strong as it did in the first half of 2015 in terms of profitability. Last year, through the end of June, Groupon had a net profit on a GAAP-basis of $94.8 million, or 14 cents per share. This year, during the first half of the year, Groupon had a net loss of $104 million, or 18 cents per share. Groupon revenue in the first half of 2016 reached $1.49 billion. In Nasdaq trading today, Groupon shares closed at $3.78. In the past year, Groupon stock 71 percent. Last year on November 2, the day before Groupon’s current CEO was appointed, shares in the company were trading at $3.83.
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Dunkers competes with one million downloads in its first week
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Felicia Shivakumar
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Dunkers, a new game by (known for and other fun sporty games), has racked up 1 million downloads since it was released last week. The success in large part is thanks to heavy featuring from Apple; it has been featured more than 150 times worldwide. Currently in iTunes, it sits at No. 1 sports app, No. 4 sports game, No. 8 free game and No. 34 free app overall. The game takes place in an 8-bit arena-esc basketball court; you flail about trying to be the best, and “boomshakalaka”’ your way to victory. The play of the game is your standard court 1-1, but the characters’ uni-pod body and protracted arms makes the game awkward and hilarious to play. The controls are simple. You can dunk, which moves you up and forward, or defend, which drives you backward. You can steal from your opponent’s arms, which adds to the competitive edge. [gallery link="none" ids="1360244,1360237,1360235,1360236,1360234,1360239,1360245,1360242,1360243,1360241,1360240"] Dunkers has three modes: arcade, career or two player. In arcade mode you can be dunked on by your opponent twice, then the round is over. For career mode, it’s the first to three buckets and you climb the ranks in a 10-game series. Two player mode is what you think, but on a single device, which seems tricky unless you are sitting really close together on a big phone or have a huge tablet or touchscreen. I will say it is really hard not to laugh, despite feeling a deep desire to annihilate your opponent. This game is all about timing, but definitely some skill is involved. The trickiest part is when you are under the hoop and can’t dunk. There is also some strategy to blocking and stealing, which overall is super clumsy but adds to the fun. So if you want to fuel your inner basketball star and add a few giggles to your day, Dunkers is a free download on and .
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Will Facebook be your next call center operator?
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Gregg Zegras
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How would you describe Facebook? Historically, it’s been the social hub of billions of global users looking to stay connected with friends and family through shared content. Yet in recent years, it’s become more difficult to describe Facebook in a few words — depending on who you ask, it’s a place for businesses to share information with consumers, advertisers to market to target audiences, media to deliver news and, as early as last year, it’s became a place to conduct real business. Full disclosure: I’m not an avid Facebook user. But when the site announced plans last year to socially sell to consumers through Messenger, I couldn’t ignore just how powerful this business transformation could be for both consumers and businesses. The announcement was a strategic move for Facebook, and an extremely attractive offering to business users, because it allowed them to tap into something that few have access to on their own: a billion-person global market. Other online platforms like Google and Pinterest quickly followed suit, launching “buy” buttons, allowing consumers to make purchases through these non-traditional e-commerce sites. Over the past year, you may have even made your own purchase through one of these platforms, reveling in a customer experience that is real-time, on a platform you have already adopted and that is more tailored to your location. But most importantly, it’s an experience that gives you complete control of your interaction with a business, because you choose when, how and where you’re receiving this communication. Just recently, Facebook launched a new capability within Messenger that experts believe will expand the site’s business offerings beyond social selling and into the world of customer service. Chatbots offer a new capability within the Messenger platform that will allow a consumer to chat with an automated system, similar to online chat support you may have previously used on an e-commerce site. Since the launch of chatbots, have shown a flock of business developers using the new capabilities, and end users adopting the developed applications. In just one month, almost 5,000 businesses have used chatbots to send order confirmations and automated alerts through Messenger. Even video game franchise has used a chatbot to send upwards of six million messages to its gamers. These numbers are no joke. With the widely accepted and hugely popular business application of Messenger, it begs the question: Absolutely. Here’s why: As I mentioned, Facebook has a global footprint unmatched by any other business online. More so, because of the vast amounts of personal data they’ve gathered about individuals, they have the ability to create personalized experiences that consumers today demand. But probably the most important technology they’re leveraging right now is video — which for online and offline businesses is now the hottest ticket to customer engagement. Video is the new communication channel everyone is trying to get their hands on. For Facebook alone, consumers are viewing 100 million hours of video a day via Facebook mobile. In fact, daily views have skyrocketed from one billion to eight billion in a single year. Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa was just quoted as saying Consumers want to consume through video. But consumers also want to through video. There are new video solutions available today that go beyond pause and play. Recently, , a video-enabled e-commerce marketplace, launched the first end-to-end shoppable video creation and streaming platform. For sellers, they can create a story behind their product. For the buyer, they can imagine what it means for them. They can see how a product actually works or how an outfit can come together. Real businesses outside the e-commerce space are using interactive and personalized videos to engage with consumers at unprecedented levels. These aren’t your static YouTube videos. No, these videos offer consumers a self-guided journey, giving all control to the viewer. Viewers can click through the video, choosing a journey they to experience. Some insurance businesses have returned an 80 percent increase in revenue after deploying the videos, and one telecommunications company experienced a 12-point jump in Net Promoter Score. A services company even saw through deployments of videos. So why haven’t e-commerce businesses begun to capitalize on this technology, too? Facebook is leading the charge for social commerce done right. They’ve proven success as both a social and business platform, but their success as both a social seller and customer service provider will depend on their ability to leverage new video technologies. The use of self-service video technologies that are interactive and engaging will digitally transform any social platform from what it is today to what it wants to be tomorrow. I believe we’re in the midst of a profound period of digital transformation. Through the integration of social platforms, e-commerce and interactive, personalized video, I will soon hear the words,
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Apple sold its billionth iPhone last week
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Brian Heater
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It would have been a nice piece of information to share , but Tim Cook and Co. were clearly too preoccupied with service revenues and R&D. And hey, no better way to kick off a midweek meeting than a little positive news — particularly if you can carry some of yesterday’s expectation-beating positivity into the following day to help rally the troops. iPhone sales may have declined for the quarter, but Apple’s still posting big numbers in the smartphone arena. During an employee meeting in Cupertino this morning, Apple’s CEO announced that the company moved its one-billionth phone last week. “We never set out to make the most, but we’ve always set out to make the best products that make a difference,” Cook said, holding number one billion aloft for the crowd, during a not especially understated address. “Thank you to everyone at Apple for helping change the world every day.” The news comes a little over two years after Apple was iPhone number 500 million — a milestone it passed without much notice nearly seven years after the launch of the company’s first handset.
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LivBlends renames itself Replenish and gives us a first look at its futuristic smoothie machine
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Sarah Buhr
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Nearly two years ago LivBlends was a Y Combinator smoothie delivery startup. The company has evolved since then, raised $3.8 million in seed from various investors and switched its name to . It’s also moved away from delivery and into manufacturing a line of Keurig-like self-cleaning smoothie machines. Replenish is still in the testing phase of the product, but founders and recently launched in some pilot locations around San Francisco — employees at SAP, Lucasfilm, SolarCity, Sephora, VMware, Uber and New Relic have been able to get the first taste of Replenish’s product for the past few months. Where does the startup plan to go from here? Just like the idea behind its smoothie delivery business, Replenish plans to go after the B2B market by placing its machines in offices for free through food delivery services, then charging customers for the pre-made food pods used with the machines. Each pod costs $3.50 to $5, depending on the recipe, and comes specially formulated with ingredients to make certain smoothie flavors. The founders also emphasized all ingredients are sugar-free and they try to pick organic ingredients where it makes sense. The pods are 100 percent recyclable plastic and Replenish says it is working on adding 100 percent compostable cups, as well. It works in a pretty simple way. All you do is pick a pod, pop it in the machine and Replenish does the rest. It even claims to be self-cleaning, so you don’t get the normal mess after smoothie-making. It’s easy to compare what Replenish is doing with juice machine startup , which raised a whopping and is also going after the office worker industry. However, Replenish differs in several ways. For one, it’s a smoothie maker, not a juice maker, which means it leaves all the fiber intact. The founders also provide pods that can make baby food, hot soups, hummus and other types of purees. The Replenish team hanging out in their R&D lab Spinach, mint, cucumber, pear, pineapple, cashew, coconut milk, honey, lemon juice Peanut butter, unsweetened pea protein, banana, almond milk, avocado, vanilla, honey, cinnamon, almond Blueberry, apricot, pumpkin seed, cinnamon Cold brew coffee, banana, cashew, almond milk, coconut milk, date, vanilla, honey, psyllium husk TechCrunch went to check out the latest design at Replenish’s R&D lab on the outer skirts of San Francisco’s Mission District and try some of its smoothies (I tried the Green Chakra). Check out the video above to get a look at our visit and for more on how it works. For those wanting a Replenish in their office, the startup has just launched so contact your company’s food vendor to sign up if you want to try out one of these machines in the near future.
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Hyperloop One unveils new manufacturing plant in Nevada
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Jordan Crook
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is today announcing the opening of its first manufacturing plant. Called Hyperloop One Metalworks, the 105,000 square-foot building in North Las Vegas will be the new professional home of many of the company’s 170 employees, including engineers, machinists and welders. These folks will build and test a number of components for the DevLoop, a full-system prototype of the Hyperloop, set for testing in 2017. Hyperloop is the brainchild of Elon Musk, (helmed by Shervin Pishevar, Josh Giegel and CEO Rob Lloyd) that uses pods in tightly controlled, tube-contained environments to increase speed, cutting out factors like friction and air resistance. The project, if successful, promises a , which is the equivalent of about 300 miles. The company plans to have a working prototype of the Hyperloop by 2017 thanks to this new plant. That said, Hyperloop One is still in the midst of massive drama since ousted co-founder BamBrogan in July. Earlier this year, Hyperloop One from Hyperloop Technologies and raised $80 million. If you want to check out Hyperloop One Metalworks for yourself, check out the video below: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwXzVv7j_OA&w=560&h=315]
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Facebook sees 2 billion searches per day, but it’s attacking Twitter not Google
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Josh Constine
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Facebook wants to be known as a place to search for mentions of current news in hopes of drawing more public chatter that normally ends up on Twitter. While Facebook stumbled with its natural language Graph Search, it refocused on keywords, and is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts. That’s compared to searches per day in July 2015, and in September 2012. That’s a 33% climb in just 9 months. What Mark Zuckerberg said on today’s call was that “The growing way that people use search is to find what people are saying about a topic across more that 2.5 trillion posts. Now people are doing more than 2 billion searches a day between looking up people, businesses, and other things they care about.” What wasn’t said but is clearly implied is that it that Facebook thinks you should talk about things on Facebook because your words will find new audiences thanks to its powerful search engine and massive user base. Twitter has ruled this space, but Facebook has been trying to catch since launching public post search last year. If Facebook can keep generating more search queries, it could open up new monetization opportunities through paid search ads that highlight a business or publisher, though Zuckerberg after cautioned that wasn’t going to happen immediately. After all, , raking in $6.44 billion in revenue and $2.05 billion profit this quarter For the first half of its history, Facebook’s search engine was primarily focused on helping you find people you’d met in real life and add them as friends. In 2013 it touted its new semantic as the third pillar of its service alongside the feed and profile. But users were confused by the complex search queries required, like “Friends of friends in San Francisco who work at TechCrunch”. A recent tell-all book from former Facebook employee Antonio Garcia Martinez called Chaos Monkeys who said the feature was mostly used by guys seeking single women in the network who lived nearby. Eventually, Facebook retreated on Graph Search and in late 2014 so you could find posts by you or your friends, and later expanded that to include all 2 trillion posts on Facebook. That was a big turning point for Facebook because it finally pitted its search engine against Twitter’s. When big global news events happen, people flock to the Internet to talk and read what others are saying. While Facebook had trending topics, you couldn’t find individual keyword matches until last year. Full post search appears to have accelerated query volume for Facebook. Facebook is now adding 20X more users per quarter than Twitter [Correction: That’s at a 3.7X faster rate, not 20X faster]. Facebook recruited 60 million users this quarter compared to Twitter’s 3 million. With 1.71 billion total users, Facebook simply has more voices, even if they’re not as trained to rapidly post publicly about current events. Facebook’s goal now will be to highlight why users should bring this talk to its social network. To that end, it built a , has focused on Facebook Live for citizen journalism, and has iterated on its Trending Topics feature. While Facebook has toyed with some search ads in the past, it currently concentrates on News Feed ads to drive revenue. When asked on the earnings call if Facebook would strive to better monetize commercial searches about products or businesses, Zuckerberg responded: “So when we talk about our strategy, I often talk about how when we develop new products we think about it in three phases. First, building a consumer use case. Then, second, making it so that people can organically interact with businesses. And then third, on top of that, once there’s a large volume of people interacting with businesses, giving businesses tools to reach more people…and that’s ultimately the business opportunity. So I’d say we’re around the second phase of that in search now. We have a pretty big navigational use case where people look up people and pages and groups that they want to get to, and look at, and search. One of the big growing use cases that we’re investing a lot in is looking up the content in the ecosystem and that is an area that we’re very excited about, which helps people find more content. But certainly there’s a reasonable amount of behavior in there which is looking for things that over time could be monetizeable or commercial…and at some point we will probably want to work on that but we’re still in the phase of just making it easier for people to find all the content they want and connect with businesses organically.” Facebook is keeping the search business model in a bottle for later. So while this announcement was about search, it’s not Google, but Twitter that should be concerned for now. Facebook Sports Stadium attracts public chatter
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Facebook crushes Q2 earnings, hits 1.71B users and record share price
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Josh Constine
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Coming off an all-time high stock price of $123.34, smashed earnings again. The social network continued steady growth just slightly slower at 3.63% compared to last quarter’s 3.77%, adding 60 million monthly users this quarter to reach 1.71 billion. It scored $6.44 billion in revenue and $0.97 EPS, blowing past estimates of $6.02 billion and $0.82 EPS. This is Facebook’s 16th beat out of 17 quarters since it went public at $38 per share. Wall Street reacted to the positive earnings with a 7.5% bump in after hours trading to $132.60. It also hit another milestone: 1 billion daily mobile user. On the earnings call, the most exciting reveal was that Facebook now sees , up from 1.5 billion a year ago. Zuckerberg said people searching for what others are saying about certain topics is driving that growth, which highlights Facebook’s on-going quest to win public chatter — as space Twitter has long ruled. However, Facebook doesn’t plan to rush to monetize search. Zuckerberg also noted that he believes . He said “the phone is probably going to be the mainstream consumer platform [where] a lot of these AR features first become mainstream.” Facebook’s Q2 was marred by several bouts of negative press. Allegations from anonymous sources suggested it was purposefully suppressing conservative news Trends. Facebook denied the allegations and its internal investigation found no proof, but it vowed to better train Trend curators to avoid bias. Later, on the behalf of its users, it changed the News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts from friends and family over stories from news publishers and brands. It’s still too early to draw conclusions on the size of the drop in reach and referral traffic for publishers, though Facebook admitted it’d be significant. Facebook Live continued its growth, pulling some attention from Twitter’s acquisition Periscope that beat it to market last year. Live got new and an API to help broadcasters use professional equipment. Meanwhile, video on Facebook continued its ascension, becoming a legitimate YouTube competitor. Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to shareholders that “We’re particularly pleased with our progress in video as we move towards a world where video is at the heart of all our services.” Facebook’s secondary products enjoyed big milestones. Facebook Messenger hit 1 billion active users, thanks to constant product iteration like the new addition of an end-to-end encryption option, though also the fact that Facebook removed chat from its main app and forced users to download Messenger. Meanwhile, Instagram reached 500 million users. Its community bristled at the announcement that an algorithmic feed would start highlighting the most popular posts instead of showing a purely reverse chronological stream. But that backlash hasn’t seemed to hurt Instagram too bad. Overall, it looks like Facebook keeps winning despite its massive size and old age for a social product. It’s got a diversified set of products thanks to acquisitions, and plenty of cash to buy more. The company has figured out how to squeeze more cash out of each user while still adding tons per quarter thanks to emerging markets and its internet access initiatives. While Snapchat might be pulling away daily life-casting, and Twitter is combining the first and second screens with its livestream deals, Facebook remains the core social network and messaging product of the world. —
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GoPro sales beat investor expectations but are still in steep decline
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Katie Roof
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[graphiq id=”faQAaDBeohD” title=”Gopro Inc. (GPRO) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”586″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/faQAaDBeohD” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/12123149/Gopro-Inc-in-San-Mateo-CA” link_text=”Gopro Inc. (GPRO) Stock Price | FindTheCompany”] The company posted revenue of $220.7 million, above analyst forecasts of $194 million. Adjusted earnings per share was negative 52 cents, when Wall Street was expecting them to be down 58 cents. But this wasn’t enough to appease some investors, who are concerned about declining sales. Revenue for the same period last year was $420 million. “GoPro is well-positioned for the second half of the year. We now have a simple product line, a clean retail channel and clear indications of strong consumer demand,” said GoPro founder and CEO, Nicholas Woodman, in a statement. And while positioning itself as an action sports company has been great for getting professional athletes to use GoPros, many consumers feel that they don’t have a regular need for this type of camera.
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AR in Mercedes-Benz’s Rescue Assist app gives first responders an inside look
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Darrell Etherington
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Mercedez-Benz has been putting QR codes on the B-pillars and inside the fuel door of new cars since November 2013, and those have provided a way for first responders and emergency personnel to quickly get detailed model info about any Mercedes-Benz vehicle involved in an accident using the Rescue Assist mobile app. Now, an , to the existing app, letting people involved in rescue operation get an even better overall picture of the situation when an accident happens. Through the new AR features, emergency personnel can see color-coded representations of internal components, including key areas to be wary of when doing things like cutting through vehicles to free trapped passengers. The app will provide insight into where things like fuel lines, batteries and other electrical components are located, in order to help reduce the risk of further damage or injury that arises when a car needs to be unconventionally dismantled in order to save lives. The Rescue Assist app will also still provide resources including rescue cards, which provide an overview of relevant safety info specific to each particular model (which includes not only Mercedes-Benz consumer cars and vans, but also some Fuso-branded commercial vehicles. This is the kind of AR use case that led a lot of people to think Google Glass had potential as a tool in specific industry verticals, among the most often cited. Baking it into an existing app for use with the smartphones that rescue personnel are likely to have on them anyway is probably a much better application of the tech, even if it isn’t hands-free.
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Donald Trump irresponsibly asks Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails
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Romain Dillet
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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump wants to steal some of the Democratic Party’s spotlight during the Democratic Convention with yet another puzzling declaration. At in Florida today, Trump invited Russia (yes, the entire country of Russia) to hack into Hillary Clinton’s inbox and release “the 30,000 e-mails that are missing.” If this sounds irresponsible, it’s because it is. Encouraging a foreign power to find out about state secrets isn’t in your country’s best interests. But it looks like Trump really, really wants to win this election. The rest doesn’t matter. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think that you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That will be next.” This wasn’t a misstep as he later the same thing. When Clinton a private server while in public office, she had to hand over around 30,000 emails with State Department information for the investigation. The other 30,000 emails were ignored in the investigation as those were personal emails. Trump is referring to these personal emails. And of course, Trump’s comment comes right after WikiLeaks thousands of Democratic National Committee emails. There could be a connection between this leak and the Russian government as Russian government hackers to DNC secret files for over a year, according to a . So in case you are living under a rock, the two nominees have been going back and forth about the role of the Russian government in this year’s U.S. election. The Democrats are accusing the Russian Government of influencing the election in favor of Trump. The Republicans are saying that they didn’t ask anything from Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Russian government should stay out of this election anyway. “This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent,” Clinton’s senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan said . “This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue.” Back in December 2015, Trump Putin, calling him a leader and saying that the U.S. should make efforts to get along with Russia. At the time, Putin also Trump was “bright and talented.” Now, Trump from his unconditional friendship with Putin. “I never met Putin, I don’t know who Putin is,” Trump said at today’s press conference. “He said one nice thing about me. He said I’m a genius. I said thank you very much to the newspaper and that was the end of it. I never met Putin.” Whether the Russian government is behind the DNC email leak or not, Trump knows how to divert the attention from the Democratic Convention and other important issues. But this could backfire if the FBI finds out that the Russian government is interfering with the election indeed.
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Tor Project announces new policies in wake of sexual assault scandal
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Kate Conger
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Nearly two months ago, the Tor Project promised a full investigation into the sexual assault allegations that led to the , Jacob Appelbaum. That investigation is now complete, Tor’s executive director Shari Steele announced today, and the Tor Project is implementing new policies and procedures to prevent future incidents. Although rumors about Appelbaum’s behavior swirled in infosec communities for years, he was also a prominent figure at Tor and a journalist who worked on the WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden disclosures. Appelbaum has remained mostly silent since descriptions of assaults from anonymous and named victims began to appear online in early June. In a statement, he denied the allegations, calling them “entirely false.” Since Tor announced its investigation into the allegations, several additional victims have come forward, Steele said. She said the inquiry, which was led by a professional investigator, also uncovered “inappropriate behavior” from two other individuals involved with the Tor Project. The individuals, who went unnamed in Steele’s , are no longer involved with the organization. “Many people inside and outside the Tor Project have reported incidents of being humiliated, intimidated, bullied and frightened by Jacob, and several experienced unwanted sexually aggressive behavior from him. Some of those incidents have been shared publicly, and some have not,” Steele wrote. The Tor Project, which replaced its entire board of directors in the wake of the allegations, will now institute anti-harassment and conflict-of-interest policies, and create a structure for reporting and addressing harassment complaints. The policies were approved by Tor’s , which includes University of Pennsylvania associate professor Matt Blaze and Electronic Frontier Foundation executive director Cindy Cohn, and will be rolled out this week. Tor relies on its employees as well as a broad community of volunteers to maintain its free anonymity network, and changes will be coming to the broader Tor community as well. The community will develop guidelines for its members, including a code of conduct. The new guidelines will be finalized by the group’s upcoming developer meeting in September, according to Steele. “I believe these new policies and practices will make the Tor Project and the Tor community significantly healthier and stronger,” Steele said, adding, “I want to thank all the people who broke the silence around Jacob’s behavior. It is because of you that this issue has now been addressed. I am grateful you spoke up, and I acknowledge and appreciate your courage.”
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Pandora will now recommend nearby concerts, thanks to Ticketfly
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Sarah Perez
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Spotify late last year suggesting nearby shows based on the listening habits of its users. Today, Pandora a similar move, aided by Ticketfly, which Pandora acquired last year. Now, the two are working together to bring personalized concert suggestions to Pandora users, also based on listening behavior. When an artist creates an event on Ticketfly, Pandora listeners who like the artist will receive a push notification that the artist has just announced a nearby show. If the Pandora user taps on the push notification, they’ll be taken directly to Ticketfly through an in-app browser where they can purchase concert tickets. If the event is announced, but tickets aren’t yet on sale, listeners can instead set a reminder after clicking through on the push notification. This will allow them to receive a second notification when tickets become available. Push notifications for mobile devices will be arriving soon, says Ticketfly, but feed alerts in Pandora’s app are already live. Here, the feed will feature event announcements and on-sale notifications. In addition, personalized live event email digests will also be sent out to users starting later this year. These emails may include special offers that encourage listeners to buy the tickets, notes Ticketfly. The news of the further integration between the two services follows – a move aimed at helping connect Pandora listeners to live events in their local area. At the time of the deal, it was unclear how tightly integrated the two products would become. With this new move, Ticketfly’s 1,600 clients can reach a targeted subset of Pandora’s nearly 80 million monthly active users, the company says. Meanwhile, all of Ticketfly’s service fees will be included in Pandora’s GAAP revenue 100%. By connecting the two services via Pandora’s widely used app, the combined companies should be able to boost their bottom line. “Pandora is the most-used app in the world—on average, listeners spend more than 24 hours on Pandora every month, logging around 1.83 billion monthly listening hours in aggregate,” notes Caren Park, Ticketfly’s Director of Product in an . “That means more eyes and ears than ever on your events, right when they’re announced and right when they go on sale. And this is just the beginning. In the coming months, Pandora’s live event marketing platform will be built out even further to help you market your events and build your brand, meaning you’ll sell out more shows with less headaches,” Park adds. Helping alert users to nearby shows is something a number of companies today are tackling, including not only but also Songkick itself, as well as Bandsintown, Reverbnation, Jambase, Eventful, and others.
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Good Eggs raises $15 million to expand across the U.S.
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Lora Kolodny
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A San Francisco startup that many people assumed was toast, , has raised $15 million in a new round of venture funding led by Index Ventures to expand its online, organic grocery business first in the San Francisco Bay Area, and later across the U.S. In recent years, Good Eggs tried to ramp up its eco- and farm-friendly grocery business only to face logistics problems, high costs and lagging customer satisfaction in some markets. It shut down all its operations outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, laid off employees and retrenched, expanding the assortment of products it offers by more than 1,000 items, and beginning to use third-party logistics services to supplement its fleet of truck drivers to ensure on-time deliveries. While Good Eggs founder and former CEO Rob Spiro, an ex-Googler, has stayed on in the capacity of a company adviser, the company is now led by long time food and consumer packaged goods executive Bentley Hall who late last year. Hall is an accountant by training who previously served in a number of senior executive roles at Plum Organics, and worked for other mainstream consumer goods manufacturers including Clif Bar and Johnson & Johnson. The CEO declined to comment on terms of the new deal. He said while not all of Good Eggs’ previous backers were in the new round, many were, including , which led the round. New investors also joined including firms with a depth of expertise in foodtech, including and , he noted. Good Eggs faces a huge amount of competition in its quest to link customers who’d fall into the “picky eater” and “foodie” category to all the vegan, gluten-free, paleo-friendly and other ingredients that they crave from local farms and sustainable producers. Online groceries today in the U.S. range from Instacart or Postmates, which both deliver from brick and mortar businesses, to services from tech titans like Amazon Fresh or Google Express, and other venture-funded sellers of produce like Relay Foods. Then, there are countless small businesses and regional players like Fresh Direct in New York, Crisp in Chicago, and others that focus on healthy and organic packaged goods snacks, like Thrive Market, LoveWithFood, Naturebox and Mouth.com to name just a few on the national scene. Beyond the online players, Hall sees traditional brick and mortar groceries like Whole Foods Market or Safeway as competition as well. “A majority of people still shop at brick and mortar. I eager to get people shifting to online grocery and accelerating that shift,” he said. Good Eggs investors also declined to comment on terms of the new venture funding round, including whether or not the company has taken a “down round,” or lower valuation than it had previously. Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer said his firm upped its investment in Good Eggs because the company has improved its operations, churn and “basket” size, and can consistently deliver with the level of service quality it needs to support expansion now. “The original value proposition holds true. Customers want to understand who are the suppliers and creators of the food that they eat and feed their families. They want a relationship with local suppliers and farmers. It’s no longer enough to sell a decent product at a good price,” Rimer said. In groceries online and off, the “basket” is of paramount concern, generally. The more people buy per order, the better the margins on that order. He compared Good Eggs to Etsy’s online marketplace for hand-made gifts, accessories and other items. Etsy now sells food but not fresh produce. Investors expect Good Eggs to focus on scaling in the Bay Area near-term and beyond it longer-term, hiring, and maintaining a high, average order value among customers, Rimer said. Hall said he believes the startup has an advantage over other players in the space thanks to the software that Spiro and the early Good Eggs team built to run the business including, especially, an app that helps the company conduct speedy sorting, tracking, packing and shipping of a high volume of goods from a wide variety of farms and local vendors.
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Crunch Report | Pokémon GO Mania
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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NYC Taxis are still giving twice as many rides as Uber
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Fitz Tepper
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After last summer’s between Uber and the City of New York there hasn’t been much talk about the state of ridesharing in the Big Apple. But today a research report from Morgan Stanley, shared by , shed some light on how ridesharing has been growing in the city. The report compares ride numbers from NYC Taxis (which are released by the city) to the number of Uber, Lyft, Via and Gett rides in NYC during April of this year. The data is slightly surprising, mainly because it shows that taxis are still by far the most popular method of transportation. According to the , there were 11.1 million taxi trips in April. Comparatively, Uber completed about 4.7 million trips, with Lyft providing about 750,000 rides during the month. While the number of taxi rides per month is a decrease of about 9 percent from last year, the number shows that yellow cabs are still doing about double the business as Uber. While Uber may very well continue growing at taxis’ expense, it’s nice to see that there is still some competition in the city. After all, taxi’s do have a few benefits over Ubers in NYC – mainly the lack of surge pricing, and ability to be hailed from the street. The report also gave statistics on how many rides per week the average driver was giving. A taxi driver was giving an average of 91 rides a week, while Uber riders were giving less than half that at 44 riders per week. This could allude to the fact that many Uber drivers are working part-time or just splitting their weekly rides between Uber and other car services like Lyft, which averaged 23 trips per week per driver. One last interesting tidbit – , the carpooling app that uses SUVs to shuttle up to five different passengers around the city is doing quite well, giving about 450,000 rides in April, with each driver completing an average of 108 trips per week (counting each rider in a carpool as a separate trip).
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MIT’s anonymous online communications protocol Riffle could beat Tor at its own game
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Devin Coldewey
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Tor has been the go-to for anonymous communication online for years now — and that has made it one of the juiciest targets possible to the likes of the NSA and FBI. A new anonymizing protocol from MIT may prove more resilient against such determined and deep-pocketed attackers. The potential problem with Tor is that if an adversary gets enough nodes on the network, they can work together to track the progress of packets. They might not be able to tell exactly what is being sent, but they can put together a breadcrumb trail tying a user to traffic coming out of an exit node — at least, that’s the theory. A team of researchers led by MIT grad student (with help from ) aims to leapfrog Tor’s anonymizing technique with . “Tor aims to provide the lowest latency possible, which opens it up to certain attacks,” wrote Kwon in an email to TechCrunch. “Riffle aims to provide as much traffic analysis resistance as possible.” In addition to wrapping messages in multiple layers of encryption (the eponymous technique of Tor, “The Onion Router”), Riffle adds two extra measures meant to baffle would-be attackers. First, servers switch up the order in which received messages are passed on to the next node, preventing anyone scrutinizing incoming and outgoing traffic from tracking packets using metadata. Then comes a two-part measure to prevent a malicious server from simply replacing real messages with dummies and tracking a single target one. Messages are sent from the user to all servers, not just one — and outgoing messages must be signed with an independently verifiable mathematical proof that they are the ones the server received. This way, any server tampering with messages will be spotted at once. Both these techniques — mixnets and dining-cryptographer networks, respectively — have existed independently for years, but serious drawbacks prevented either of them from being adopted, let alone both in the same system. DCNs didn’t scale well, requiring a lot of bandwidth, and the proofs needed for mixnets were too computationally expensive to keep latency low. The key advance made by Kwon and his team is was implementing both in such a way that those weaknesses are avoided. You can read about the technical details (PDF) but the gist is that it uses a mix of public-key and symmetric cryptography, not dissimilar to how it works on the web. With this change, the resulting network is not only resistant to both active and passive attacks, but scales well and doesn’t use too much processing time. File sharing with hundreds of users could theoretically reach 100 KB/s, according to the researchers’ estimates, and less bandwidth-intensive use like microblogging could handle 100,000 users with under 10 seconds of latency. That was done, Kwon wrote, on three servers running on a gigabit LAN. But adding servers, counterintuitively, would actually degrade performance in a way. “The more servers there are, the more secure it is,” wrote Kwon. “However, in terms of performance, since all messages go through all servers, the less servers there are, the more performant it is.” Small, secure networks rather than ubiquitous global ones is the idea, then, although 100,000 anonymous nodes is more than enough to serve many a country or community. There’s no downloadable version of Riffle right now — Kwon said he’d like to clean up the code a bit first, since it’s really just a prototype at present. There’s no plan to commercialize it, either, nor will it be a replacement for Tor, even though it does some things vastly better. “There are indeed some incompatible design goals,” Kwon wrote, “However, they could also be complementary to each other, taking advantage of both the security of Riffle and the large anonymity set size of Tor.” for further updates.
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Mobile events app DoubleDutch lays off nearly 25% of its workforce
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Lucas Matney
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Mobile events and conferences company announced today that it will be laying off 55 of its employees as a part of a company-wide restructuring. The company, founded in 2011, has raised over $78 million in funding to power its mobile tools which allow event organizers to create dedicated app experiences that give them the ability to easily share information with attendees while tracking engagement. If you’ve gone to a conference or music festival in the past year with a custom app, you’ve likely engaged with a product from DoubleDutch. Today’s layoffs represent the departure of approximately 25% of the SF-based startup’s global workforce. A statement from the company details that the move was part of a “decision to break hard for profitability and move up-market as we build out our enterprise platform.” This move is a far cry from the language emerging from executives less than a year ago that stressed the company’s speedy growth as an indicator of overall health. “We are growing well north of 100 percent year over year, and see no signs of things slowing down,” said Pankaj Prasad, DoubleDutch’s Co-Founder and Global Head of Sales in a press release accompanying . More of DoubleDutch’s statement on today’s layoffs is included below: Although this is the right thing to do for the business, it doesn’t make our decision any easier. Today is a very tough day for DoubleDutch as our action involves many people who have been part of the DoubleDutch family and contributed tremendously to our success to date. We want to thank them for all they’ve done for the company. We can vouch for all of them and we’re working hard to help them find their next opportunities within our personal, alumni and investor networks.
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USV’s Albert Wenger on converting our attitude on automation from foe to friend
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Harry Stebbings
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The zero marginal cost of information is turning everything upside down. Albert Wenger, Partner at Ventures asserts in our latest interview, “We are just at the beginning of this inversion.” Although the changes this inversion is bringing to many associated industries like traditional publishers, crowdfunding sites, and biotech companies are still in their infancy, what do we get if we extrapolate things a bit? According to Wenger, “a world of digital abundance.'” However, to achieve such a world, Wenger states we are going to invert our public policy and there are two areas in particular. It’s idea that the government should pay everyone above a certain age a specified amount of money every week. The largest inversion being; it used to be that you had to work in order to get paid. However, under the guarantee you get paid first and then you choose what to work on. This would allow for, as Albert suggested, “a floor to be placed under everyone’s income.” This would allow for a fundamental shift in human attitude to automation. Wenger argues that ‘humans would embrace automation instead of fear it.” Why is this important now? Despite numerous winters in the advancement of artificial intelligence, we have reached a stage where machines are able to carry out many functions currently carried out by humans. This leads Wenger to suggest, ‘it is not a case of if but when these jobs will be replaced by machines’. Despite this, Wenger argues this good. This gives us time and as discussed in the interview, ‘time is great in a world of digital abundance’. We already live in a world of technological deflation. Since the mid 1990s, the cost of consumer durables has been declining. While the cost of services, largely education and healthcare, have been increasing. As Wenger illustrates, “the implementation of a basic income guarantee would help to reduce both costs.” It will allow more people to contribute to free online education materials and online healthcare resources. For the small percentage of people that are not aware, a bot is a piece of software that acts autonomously, and, in many instances, on your behalf. Bots have the potential to invert the power relationship between networks and their participants. As Wenger addresses, “it also has the power to invert the current legal situation.” Currently, networks have the ability to restrict to what degree individuals can be represented by a bot. Networks have the ability to legitimize API’s, beyond that they can limit what you do. The ride sharing market on the supply side is a market full of friction. Today, each service has separate apps, meaning it is difficult for drivers to participate in multiple networks at the same time. However, if the driver had the right to be represented by a bot, they could simultaneously participate in many marketplaces. This would allow riders to apply a filter to the rides they accept. Some might prioritize for commission, some for closest distance. Regardless, the power is infinite. It would make it very hard for the dominant incumbents to charge to high a commission as new networks could arise. As Wenger suggests, “it is the threat of the creation of new networks, that would reduce the power of existing networks.” Ultimately, zero marginal cost gives us a promise of digital abundance and as a result physical abundance. The question remains; can humans convert our attitude of automation from foe to friend?
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On-demand sales force Universal Avenue closes $10M Series A
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Steve O'Hear
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, the Stockholm-headquartered startup that lets companies access a local sales force on demand, has closed a deal of its own. The company has raised $10 million in fresh Series A funding, adding to the $5 million “extension” to its seed round a and bringing total funding to $17 million. Leading the round is Eight Roads, the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International, with participation from existing investors Northzone and MOOR. In a call with Universal Avenue co-founder and CEO Johan Lilja, he described the startup’s marketplace as three-sided: On-the-ground sales people (or “brand ambassadors”) who wish to earn an income from local commission-based sales; B2B online/digital companies, such as those offering a SaaS, who wish to expand into or test new markets; and local businesses or venues that might benefit from purchasing digital services. More broadly, the problem that Universal Avenue aims to solve is that it is often difficult to reach decision makers in B2B sales without a face-to-face approach, which sometimes makes it hard to scale SaaS type companies, including startups. This usually means setting up a local outpost in every country or region you wish to expand to or outsourcing to a local agency. Both have inherent costs and risks, which Universal Avenue’s on-demand model is attempting to mitigate. Lilja tells me that, although Universal Avenue is designed to match the right level of sales person to the brands using the platform, sales people are on-boarded for each specific client. In this regard, you might conclude that the startup isn’t quite as scalable as pure internet marketplaces, since a lot of bespoke labor is involved. However, Lilja says Universal Avenue is able to replicate the further rollout of a particular brand relatively smoothly and efficiently once an initial trial has taken place. What isn’t in doubt is that Universal Avenue is set up to enable startups to scale, since it offers enough flexibility to test and launch in new markets quickly. That’s because an on-demand model, where users of the service typically only pay when customers are actually acquired, pushes a significant amount of risk onto Universal Avenue itself, and in turn its commission-based sales force. Meanwhile, Universal Avenue says it plans to use the new investment to continue its U.K. growth and expand into the U.S. market in the second half of this year. In addition to the U.K., the startup currently operates in Spain, Greece, Sweden, Norway and Finland, and claims customers such as Spotify Business, DripApp and Shopify.
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Moon photobombs the Earth in rare images captured by NASA
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Emily Calandrelli
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A NASA camera on board the Deep Space Climate Observatory ( ) satellite captured a rare lunar transit across the face of a sunlit Earth. The images, which feature a fully lit far side of the moon, were captured between July 4 at 11:50 pm ET and July 5 at 3:18 am ET. Lunar transit across the Earth / Images courtesy of NOAA This was actually the second time a lunar photobomb was photographed by DSCOVR; the first about a year ago, on July 16, 2015. Lunar transit across the Earth captured by EPIC on the DSCOVR satellite in July, 2015 / Images courtesy of NOAA Located one million miles away, DSCOVR acts like a solar storm buoy out in space. The satellite’s primary mission is to provide real-time solar wind monitoring, which allows the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to provide early warnings for potentially dangerous space weather events. To accomplish its mission, DSCOVR was placed in a unique location called the sun-Earth Lagrange point 1, or L1. L1 is a spot between the Earth and the sun where Earth’s gravity pull is equal and opposite to the gravity pull from the sun. DSCOVR stays within the L1 orbit as our planet moves around the sun, essentially hovering between the sun and an illuminated Earth at all times. DSCOVR location in relation to the Earth and sun / Image courtesy of NOAA At this location, the moon can be seen crossing the face of the Earth from DSCOVR’s perspective only once or twice a year. NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four-megapixel CCD camera and telescope, captured the images. Back in March, the same camera captured a unique view of a solar eclipse. During the eclipse, people on Earth looked up and saw the sun eclipsed by the moon. At the same time, a lunar shadow was seen moving across the face of the Earth from the perspective of EPIC. Lunar shadow moving across the planet during a solar eclipse in March, 2016 / Animation courtesy of NOAA Located on one side of DSCOVR, EPIC points toward the Earth at all times, providing scientific data on the ozone, vegetation, cloud height and aerosols in the atmosphere. On the other side of the satellite is another that points toward the sun, providing measurements of solar particles. Position of DSCOVR relative to the Earth and the sun / Animation courtesy of NOAA “DSCOVR will be our eyes on the sun, and give us early warning when it detects a surge of energy that could trigger a geomagnetic storm destined for Earth.” — Dr. Stephen Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. Keeping a watchful eye on solar weather is important to keep astronauts and technology safe from highly energetic particles that spew out from our sun. While these particles have the potential to generate beautiful, harmless events known as auroras, they can also cause serious damage to technology, including important national assets, and be harmful to people living in space. Brilliant lights of an aurora south of Australia spotted by on : — NASA (@NASA) Such storms inflame Earth’s ionosphere, disrupting various high-frequency communications used in the commercial aviation industry. Other particularly powerful solar events known as coronal mass ejections can send waves of magnetic plasma that can damage satellites and disrupt electrical power grids if they were to come our way. With DSCOVR, scientists can better understand how solar activity affects the environment in and around the Earth. Similar to terrestrial storm warnings here on the ground, NOAA uses DSCOVR to keep a watchful eye on the sun and inform the government and commercial satellite owners if a solar storm is coming their way.
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To succeed in IoT, hire a chief data officer
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Theresa Bui
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For many businesses, ownership of the Internet of Things ( ) lies within a number of C-suite titles. At , the CIO oversees . At , it’s the CTO. At GM, the Infotainment and CTO co-manage . But demands an interdisciplinary approach, whether the desired outcome is to streamline internal processes, introduce new customer experiences or uncover new revenue. This requires collaboration among multiple business units, some of which traditionally work independently from each other, such as . Many have proposed an addition to the C-suite — the — to ensure remains a top priority. Machina Research that at least one Fortune 500 company will appoint a “CIoTO” in 2016. But, aside from being a mouthful, the title is insufficient for narrowing cross-departmental divides. The C O that businesses need in today’s connected world is the . From sales and marketing to finance to engineering to actual customers, all parts of a business — no matter how divided by geography, culture or function — produce , often in larger volumes than they know what to do with. To make matters more difficult, the quantity of information gets multiplied with the connected revolution. Whether the world will have , or connected devices by 2020, the industry hasn’t reached a consensus. But analysts can agree that those devices generate massive amounts of to the tune of — so the more important issue is what companies do with all the information, whether they harness it to develop new services, improve internal collaboration processes or find fresh ways to interact with customers. Earlier this year, EVRYTHNG and Avery Dennison announced they will manufacture pieces of connected clothing. Will the apparel line take off? Only time will tell, depending on how effectively EVRYTHNG and Avery Dennison can put these billions of products (read: new sources) to use in a way that brings value to the consumer’s life. To move from simply producing toward deriving value from it, companies should establish a SWAT team within every business unit. Each team would be responsible for managing , analyzing it and collaborating with their counterparts within other units. The would oversee these SWAT teams, ensuring relevant gets in the hands of the people who need it most — whether that’s a developer working on a new product, the customer success team checking on the health of customers in a specific geography or IT verifying that systems are running properly. Effective big programs promote customer success tracking and accelerate iteration on existing offerings. These are well-documented advantages. A lesser-known benefit of big analysis is its role as a built-in R&D tool for generating unexpected new product ideas. Take, for example, home automation and security company Vivint and its , a video monitor that activates a live feed on the homeowner’s phone app when the doorbell rings. Vivint observed the doorbell camera’s popularity among families with young children, particularly those without cell phones, and found that usage spiked on weekdays in the late afternoon. This insight inspired an with proven market demand: Vivint Ping, two-way video chat for kids to talk to their working parents after getting home from school. The -driven mindset also can help streamline day-to-day operations, saving hours or even days of productivity. Efficiency and agility enable companies to make the most of their investments, while recovering valuable time, money and personnel that can instead be put toward developing new programs or expanding existing ones. relies on sensors and real-time analysis to track gas tank stock. Armed with precise inventory information, the industrial gas company knows where and when to send truckers for propane fulfillment. By eliminating unnecessary, time-consuming trips to remote tank sites, Air Liquide frees up resources that it can redirect toward improving and building new capabilities. Ultimately, what determines any company’s success is its ability to democratize information across all business functions, roles and levels. The right — across every source and connected device — needs to reach the relevant people, whether it’s within a company or directly to users. That responsibility is more difficult, yet more crucial than ever, in our increasingly digital, connected world. Today’s experts in management, governance and analytics are best equipped to bring about that success.
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Ashley Madison slips into something more comfortable to shake its bad rep
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Haje Jan Kamps
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The new Ashley Madison branding is a lot more subtle than before How do you rescue a brand like after it becomes synonymous with infidelity, poor security, a fateful hack, a massive breach of privacy and at least two suicides? That was the challenge thrown in the lap of the company’s new CEO and president. The new leadership team’s answer is a complete overhaul of the brand and what it stands for — but will it be enough? For a CEO, Ashley Madison’s situation is the stuff nightmares are made of, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. If you hadn’t heard of Ashley Madison before, you did when hackers managed to , , sending its . Why all the brouhaha? Well, Ashley Madison is a site where (mostly married) people turned to get a little something-something on the side. Needless to say, having the sensitive data out on the internet is a huge deal and police have . So, erm, not to be rude, Mrs. Madison, but I don’t think this chap eye-humping someone in the subway is the best way to rebrand your company. I spoke with Rob Segal, the company’s new CEO and started by asking him why the company decided to do a rebrand. “Wow… Really?” retorted Segal, to what undoubtedly was the dumbest question he’d ever been asked by a journalist. “Everyone knows about what happened in the past and what we have been through. But we also found that 45 percent of our users were single and we didn’t think the brand reflected that. We want to be more inclusive and especially more female-friendly.” But both the new CEO and its incoming president, James Millership, are confident that the site has life in it, still. “I think the rebrand is crucial,” says Millership. “It is going to help people take a second look at us.” Specifically, Ashley Madison is hoping to attract a broader set of people, representing a wider segment of the sexual spectrum. “We are hoping the rebrand In one of the new TV ads, Ashley Madison is attempting to appeal to poly audiences In the aftermath of one of the most spectacular hacks in recent memory, re-building the trust with the customers is front and center. “A strong focus on security was a condition on us taking over the company,” says Millership, with Segal agreeing enthusiastically. “We have implemented better, more discreet payment methods and are going through as we speak. This work will be completed by September and when it does, we’ll be a leader in the industry.” In addition to upping the security on a technical level, the company has been working to increase security consciousness on all levels. It has also enlisted the help from one of the top names in security to help shake its bad reputation. “We are now working with , who is doing our cybersecurity along with doing 24/7 monitoring,” Segal explains. In addition to a rebrand, the name of the company is changing from Avid Life Media to ‘ .’ “Yeah, we are changing our name to ruby, like the stone. We want to be reflective, multi-faceted, valuable,” says Millership. But the company isn’t changing the name of its flagship site. “We looked a the name carefully,” admits Segal. He won’t come out and say that the hack did them any favors, of course, but the fact remains that before the hack, a lot of people wouldn’t have heard of them and the company already revealed its site in the months after the hack. “Ultimately, the brand has tremendous brand recognition,” Segal says, concluding that the Ashley Madison name is here to stay. He also suggests that the company has several other properties in the pipeline. Overall, it’s all change for the company and its 140 employees — the company is moving to a new facility in Toronto and its leadership team is claiming continued rapid growth. Ashley Madison is launching its new brand and re-positioned message with a series of new advertisements (embedded below), which are aiming to re-shape how potential customers feel about Ashley Madison. I’m not sure how well it’s going to work. The adverts range from someone on the subway, of a couple in a passionless marriage and an admittedly polyamory-embracing clip. Look, I’m no advertising critic ( ), but I can’t help but feel that if Ashley Madison wanted to push for gender equality and appeal to women more, it could have done a better job than airing three adverts all centering around the basic premise of “sad man is made happy by attractive girl.” I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to separate Ashley Madison’s reputation as a site for cheaters, but that’s the genius of running the television campaign now. Re-activating the audience who found out about the site of the hack and thought, “Hey! I wish I knew about this site before. I’ll have to check them out once they sort out their security clusterclunge,” could potentially be big enough market to make it all worth while. Time will tell whether the company will be successful in changing the site’s reputation. Tech-savvy customers may think twice about voluntarily entering their contact details into a database of cheaters, but that may not matter. I suspect there will be enough horny non-tech-savvy people in the world to build a solid business case. https://youtu.be/sgEQqvsmuYc https://youtu.be/Bh0AujAgA0g https://youtu.be/yoWj1BdJq5o
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Tesla under investigation for possible breach of securities law, WSJ reports
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Lora Kolodny
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Tesla is under investigation by the , The Wall Street Journal , for a possible securities law breach. What’s at issue is whether the electric vehicle company should have notified shareholders immediately following a on May 7 that killed a Tesla Model S owner who was using Autopilot at the time of the crash. A spokesperson for Tesla said that the car company has not yet heard from the SEC regarding this matter. As TechCrunch previously reported, multiple state and federal investigations are ongoing, and it is not yet clear if Tesla’s Autopilot features contributed to or caused the fatal accident in any way. Laymen call Autopilot “self-driving” technology, and the company refers to this system as a “driver assistance system.” Numerous Tesla fan communities online share videos of drivers using Autopilot in a hands-free mode despite the company advising them against this. Among agencies investigating the fatal Tesla Autopilot crash are the National Transportation Safety Board, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Florida Highway Patrol. A non-fatal but also serious crash that followed on in Pennsylvania has contributed to heightened scrutiny of Tesla’s technology, shareholder dealings and stock performance. The July crash involved a 2016 Model X SUV, and a driver who was also using Autopilot features. The driver was charged with by Pennsylvania State Police. In the car company’s blog, itself against implications by Fortune magazine that it had misled its investors about risks associated with its business and, specifically, Autopilot technology. Tesla did not disclose any information about the fatal accident to the public until June 30 with a blog post called even though the crash took place in early May. It remains to be seen whether the company has violated financial or other regulations in delaying discussion of that, or any other accidents involving their cars. To-date, Tesla has not been sued for product liability. However, the family of Joshua Brown, the Tesla enthusiast killed in the Florida crash, has retained the services of a well-known personal injury law firm.
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Psst… it’s still okay to share your Netflix password
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Sarah Perez
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A Federal Appeals Court this month under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That has given many Americans pause, as sharing passwords to online services like Netflix and HBO GO is a fairly common activity these days — and now, thanks to the verdict, one that breaks federal law. But don’t panic just yet: Netflix is still okay with you sharing your passwords, as it turns out. And if the company isn’t planning to use the federal law to prosecute their customers, you can continue to share passwords without much concern that you’ll soon find yourself in legal hot water… at least for now. Of course, if it later decides it’s no longer cool with this behavior, things could change thanks to the frightening precedent set by this ruling. That being said, we understand from those familiar with Netflix’s stance on account sharing that the company has not changed . That is, it’s still basically fine with account sharing — particularly among family members who are using sharing as an alternative to buying an upgraded account. Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings clarified how the streaming service thinks about account sharing , and that same sentiment still holds true today, we understand. “We love people sharing Netflix whether they’re two people on a couch or 10 people on a couch,” Hastings said at the time. “That’s a positive thing, not a negative thing.” He later also added that the company sees account sharing as the first step in its broader user acquisition strategy. In other words, children share their parents’ accounts and eventually move out of the home and subscribe themselves. “As kids move on in their life, they like to have control of their life, and as they have an income, we see them separately subscribe,” Hastings explained to reporters at CES in January. “It really hasn’t been a problem.” The CEO didn’t comment then on non-family members sharing accounts, but it seems that the company’s consumer-friendly position — for now — is focused first on addicting people to Netflix with the hope that they’ll later subscribe. Netflix declined to comment. Meanwhile, HBO’s position is a bit murkier. The company today operates two streaming services — the authenticated service HBO GO for cable and satellite TV subscribers and HBO NOW for cord cutters. HBO sees account sharing as a “terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers.” However, these comments were made before the of HBO NOW. Given that today’s HBO GO moochers could potentially be HBO NOW subscribers, the company may no longer be quite so “cool” with sharing. But will it go so far as to prosecute its users? Probably not. That wouldn’t be good for building its brand. Plus, HBO NOW is still a relatively new service, and one that . HBO told us it doesn’t have a comment on the ruling. However, if either company eventually decides it’s time to crack down on account sharing, they’re not likely to go after users in the courts, but instead would consider technical solutions. There are a number of ways their software could prevent, or at least make more difficult, account sharing, like using geolocation or restrictions on concurrent streaming sessions, for example. In fact, both companies today already put limits on concurrent streaming — Netflix’s basic account for only one stream at a time. Its standard account limits you to two. HBO NOW, interestingly, is saying it’s “similar to HBO GO.” But a glance at the HBO GO FAQ also doesn’t offer a concrete number of allowed streams, The company had said it would allow streaming on up to three devices, but the FAQ’s language indicates it may not be strictly enforcing that rule. In any event, you’re probably safe from federal prosecution if you’re engaging in account sharing. You know, for now.
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The brilliant mechanics of Pokémon Go
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Matthew Lynley
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seen it already, you will soon when you are walking down the street. Every person you pass who is fervently looking at their phone is likely playing the No. 1 game in the country right now: Pokémon Go. You might think it’s popular because of the brand. Nintendo, which refused to make a Pokémon game for the longest time on a smartphone, has finally caved and brought its beloved franchise to the small screen. But what may be overlooked amid all that is that the game, on its own, is phenomenally well designed, despite myriad bugs and endless server outages. If you look at all aspects of the game loop — engagement, retention, virality and monetization — it nails pretty much everything on the head. Niantic managed to hit a very rare, exceptional home run on every textbook point of the game’s development. That’s not an easy feat. Only a few games in the history of the iPhone have managed similar success. The closest analogies are probably Minecraft and Candy Crush Saga, which also rocketed to not only the top of the App Store download charts, but also the top-grossing charts. Pokémon — much like Minecraft before it — launched immediately at the top of the charts. So its immediate success, based on the App Store rankings, isn’t necessarily unprecedented. So, what makes this game so engaging and, from what we’ve seen so far, potentially very addictive? Let’s break it down into its core pieces. Some of the most popular games have bite-time playing sessions. But the session time in Pokémon Go can essentially be as long as the player wants, because there is a constant way to increase the length of the session time by walking to more pit-stops. That’s a really hard thing to do in a game. Most session times are restricted to levels or gated with lives or energy. For Pokémon Go, there’s just enough friction to inspire players to potentially pay to extend the length of their play session with less work, but also offer them the ability to go out of their way to extend that session time without having to pay. When I think about the structure of the play sessions in Pokémon Go, I often think of a role-playing game called Persona 4 Golden for the PlayStation Vita. The overall unit of time in the game is a day in the life of your character. The sessions are built into bite-size chunks based on the time of the day — morning, afternoon and evening — and save points are littered through most parts of the game. And the combat sections of the game are also segmented into levels, with the option of leaving a dungeon at any point to save your game and end the playing session. In the same way as Pokémon Go, the game’s session time can basically be extended to as long as the player wants while still keeping the basic mechanics of the game intact. In the case of Persona 4 Golden, that friction isn’t necessary because the player has already bought the game, but for Pokémon Go it’s incredibly well executed. Pokémon Go, like other well-designed popular mobile games, offers a quick ramp up that teases a lot of front-loaded rewards to get the player to come through the door and shut it behind them. That’s important to grab their attention, but there are also multiple layers of rewards that keep players wanting to stay in the game. You can collect items in order to power up your Pokémon and evolve them, but it’s also important to level up your own character. There are different layers of currency built into the game that progress along different time curves, giving each layer of progression its own speed and flavor. In that way, players can hit rewards at different increments of the game without feeling trapped in a grind for everything to level up at the same time. Amid the entire play session, the game has to stay open. That keeps you from getting distracted and flipping out to other apps. I find myself walking with my phone in my pocket, but with the game open often enough while wearing headphones. Whenever there’s a chime, I take the phone out of my pocket and start playing — whether that’s collecting Pokéballs or trying to capture something new (or some crappy junk Pokémon for the sake of experience). The game world is vibrant and beautiful, making it something easy and fun to see. It’s filled with flair and flashes that are visually stimulating and signal new elements of the game. All this makes the player want to keep their eyes — or ears — glued to their phone, ready to engage with it the moment something new happens. All of this is great design, and doesn’t even mention the brand equity Pokémon has built up. Nintendo has . Pokémon X & Y alone . That’s an incredible nearly 25 percent penetration rate for all Pokémon enabled devices. If Nintendo were to barely scratch that with the nearly 2.5 billion smartphones in the world ( ), that alone represents a staggering install base. Pokémon already is a worldwide phenomenon, and that alone is probably enough to get the player in the door beyond simply encountering other players and hearing about it organically. Pokémon Go currently only supports the original 150 Pokémon as well, tapping into the untapped nostalgia for which players have been waiting nearly a decade. An array of user-generated gameplay experiences is critical to building strong retention, and all the pieces are already built into the Pokémon Go experience. Each capture session is unique — the angle of the Pokéball is different, the placement of the Pokémon is different and there’s also an opportunity to have a unique experience tied with the real world. You have probably seen on your Facebook feed screenshots of Pokémon sitting on other peoples’ heads or in their laps. Each capture moment offers a unique player session, and while many will be similar, there’s the tantalizing opportunity to have something truly unique that’s really exciting. There’s also an incredibly sticky part of user-generated content that exists alongside the game: the actual walk. Each walk a player goes for, in theory, is unique. The environment in the real world is different, the people you run into may be different, the weather may be different, or the time of day. The environment in the game is also different, with Gyms constantly in flux and new Pokémon appearing at different intervals and in different places. Each walk also actively engages the player physically — and exercise naturally triggers a positive feel for your body, adding an additional layer of delight to the gameplay experience. This is such a new mechanic for a popular game that’s unprecedented. For most games, the user-generated gameplay is restricted to an imaginary universe. It’s a level on Candy Crush Saga that you get that lucky explosive cookie. It’s a player-versus-player round in World of Warcraft where you get that lucky critical hit. It’s a round of Destiny where you are just on fire and keep getting headshots. But all of these take place inside a screen, interfaced by a controller — whether that’s a real controller or a touchscreen. The mastery curve is also smooth — over time you build a strong array of Pokémon that help you advance further in the game. The end of the game, like the regular Pokémon games, is a moving target, and there’s basically always someone out there that’s slightly better than you. That gives players a constant incentive to continue progressing along the mastery curve. What’s also unprecedented is Niantic’s spin on the game’s viral loop. In Pokémon Go, there’s no feature that allows you to extend the life of your playing session by inviting or reaching out to friends. In fact, the social graph is almost non-existent in Pokémon Go. Instead, your in-game social graph is an extension of a supplemented version of your real-world social graph. A smartphone owner sees someone playing the game, becomes curious, downloads the game and plays it — both interacting with other players and inspiring curiosity in other potential new players. And the rest of the time you’re looking at screenshots of what’s happening in the game in your Facebook feed, or texting friends when you managed to catch that rare Pokémon. You can read stories in many places on the internet of people randomly interacting with each other related to Pokémon Go. I experienced this already when walking around San Francisco, only to have a car drive by with one of the passengers yelling that there was a rare-ish Pokémon down the street (it was an Ivysaur, for those keeping tabs). This is table stakes for the Pokémon Go experience, and it’s what gets new players in the door. This kind of virality is especially powerful because it isn’t limited to an existing social graph. The whole viral loop is augmented in such a way that a non-connected interaction in the real world can lead to a new player, a download and then monetization of that player. That’s why I t\ink this interpretation of the viral loop mechanic is so fascinating and is going to be so successful. Never before has a game immediately achieved such popularity in such a way that it regularly intersects with the real world. A lot of people consider it to be an augmented-reality experience, and in many ways you could consider it to be that. But it’s not just an experience that uses your camera to play — it’s an experience that crosses the boundary between an imaginary universe and the real world. I think the proper term that should be applied to this would be mixed-reality. The phrase augmented reality just doesn’t give the game enough credit for being able to break that fourth wall and constantly move the player between an imaginary world and the real world. And it also represents an enormous opportunity for the game if Niantic decides to implement other important aspects of Pokémon, like trading. Without an embedded social graph the game has already grown to immense popularity. Just imagine if it began to add an additional layer of player interaction — even if, again, it only takes place in the real world. So it’s no wonder that the game has already hit the top of the App Store’s top-grossing charts. There’s a lot going on in the monetization component of Pokémon Go, but again, it nails nearly every angle of attack to get players to make a payment. You can extend the life of your play session with more Pokéballs. You can speed up your growth curve by getting Egg Incubators, further increasing your array of potential Pokémon to further progress in the game. You can increase the rate of the engaging capture sessions by buying Incense. The same can be said for Lure Modules, which not only represent accelerated progression in the game but yet another way to tap into Pokémon Go’s viral loop. Players congregate around areas — whether for catching Pokémon or building up their Pokéball stock — and that increases the probability that new, curious players will come by and discover the game independent of the App Store or other methods, like Facebook App Install ads. Users paying for this contribute to the entire community of players given the benefit it offers everyone else. The most important aspect of this is that the gameplay, unlike most of the most-popular mobile and social games, is gated. Paying Niantic and Nintendo money simply allows players to progress more quickly, but it doesn’t impede their progress overall. Players have an opportunity to progress through the game at their own rate. As the saying goes, you still need the slow boat to China if you’re going to be successful. Niantic here does such a good job of creating just enough friction that, at the exact moment, it can capture an opportunity for monetization. Players don’t feel compelled to spend money, and instead they’re offered a delightful experience when they elect to spend money. Those eye-popping visuals continue, they keep throwing Pokéballs and they don’t have to wait to see some of the most powerful Pokémon game. All this together creates a very powerful, sticky and accelerating game loop that is helping the game grow at such an incredible rate. But there’s another underlying thread amid all this: It bodes very well for holdout franchises to expand into mobile devices amid fear of cannibalizing devices or other parts of the market. Even Final Fantasy, in a way, has found its way onto mobile devices with Final Fantasy Record Keeper. A lot of these mechanics were pioneered in the company’s previous game, Ingress. But it’s hard to deny that all of these at the scale of Pokémon Go make it a completely different experience. Nintendo, amid the runaway early success of the game, . This is such a strong, powerful signal to holdout franchises that haven’t quite entered the smartphone ecosystem. And there’s a good reason to do so: if that 2.5 billion device number from Statista is accurate, it offers such an enormous opportunity that it may be well worth eating up some potential hardware sales. This is a transition that the advertising market faced in the not-too-distant past. Google is constantly hounded by the need to shift its advertising revenue to mobile devices, in the hope that less-valuable ads can be traded for a larger volume of ads on mobile devices. Facebook has built a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars off its mobile advertising products. Video game stalwarts will face the same dilemma: Do you trade hardware and console sales in favor of the incredible volume of smartphone users? Is it worth the risk to assume people will still buy your consoles when Mario is available on your phone? Can a company like Nintendo offer an array of experiences that span multiple devices? In this week’s blowout success of Pokémon Go the answer? For now it appears to be rounded up to a Yes. Alas, there’s no way to mash down+A+B. Get on that, Niantic.
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Can the Airbnb regulatory nightmare be solved with more tech?
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John Mannes
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mob of local government officials, taxi drivers and hotel operators trying to shut down your business? There’s an app for that. But can solving regulatory nightmares really be that simple? Sharing economy startups like Airbnb and Uber have gone nuclear to defend their business model, suing city governments or shuttering their services entirely when they don’t get their way. over legislation that would require Airbnb to boot hosts off its platform if they don’t register with the city. Uber and Lyft haven’t had much more success when flirting with regulators. The two ride-sharing companies after voters affirmed city legislation requiring fingerprint-based background checks and strict rules on drop-off and pick-up locations. These battles between tech companies and local governments have become formulaic: Municipality makes gutsy move, draws national attention for sticking up to industry giant, company refuses to compromise. The public rapidly grows tired of the laborious council hearings, judicial proceedings, settlements and votes. Rinse and repeat in hundreds of cities across the country. Instead of constant regulatory stalemates, what if companies and governments worked together to streamline the oversight process? One tech company hopes to become the collaboration platform where Airbnb and cities like San Francisco can set aside their differences. , a civic software company, says it has been in talks with companies like Airbnb and Uber to find a SaaS solution for their political woes. Accela believes it has the technology to solve regulatory problems — but implementing Accela’s tools will require bringing companies and governments to the table, a challenge that could prove difficult. Accela has quietly played a background role in issues like gun and marijuana licensing for quite some time. Its software is used by more than 70 percent of the 50 largest U.S. cities to manage permitting and open data. Founded in 1999, the private company has raised $300 million to date. Now, Accela is turning its attention to sharing economy regulation. Maury Blackman, CEO of Accela, believes that it’s going to take a tech solution to solve a tech problem. Blackman and his team are currently developing a product that will enable municipalities to accept digital permit applications for things like short-term rentals and transportation services. Such a solution is elegant on paper, but it’s unclear whether Blackman will be able to create something millennials will use and municipalities will accept. San Francisco, New York and other major cities often require rigorous documentation and registration before hosts can rent their homes on Airbnb. An efficient futuristic system could allow homeowners to upload time-stamped and geotagged photos and registration paperwork from their mobile device — but implementing such a system could require legislative change and extensive cooperation from tech companies that are often tight-fisted with their data. To make this kind of system work, Airbnb would need to share a list of its hosts with city governments, so it could be cross-checked with a list of those who have registered with the city. Governments would need to reduce barriers for hosts by allowing them to file for permits online and allowing them to submit their paperwork through the Airbnb app. Airbnb, Uber and others will also need to be flexible, as regulations are often made on a city-by-city basis. “The federal government is not going to regulate this,” said Matthew Yale, the Head of Regulatory Affairs at political strategy firm . Tusk straddles the roles of Olivia Pope, Patton Boggs and Marc Andreessen for tech companies that run into regulatory hurdles, and works with Uber and other major companies. “If there is not going to be some compromise or efforts made, I would question the longevity of the business,” Yale added. Accela wants to be part of backend integration for the sharing economy, and has done this type of integration before. The company worked with Yelp to include health inspection records into restaurant profiles. Accela also offers a solution for solar permitting that enables users to submit necessary documents and photos straight to inspectors and utility companies. A process that once took 30 days now takes one. Before change can happen in sharing-economy regulation, municipalities first have to lower the barriers to compliance. Applicants should not be required to send physical documentation to multiple government offices and wait for approval. Once compliance is attainable, tech companies have to stop letting users violate known regulations. The best way to accomplish this will be backend API integration directly with civic regulatory data. There is precedent for SaaS-induced societal change. Marijuana was made legal in Denver, CO in 2012. The city was hit with a wave of retail marijuana applications spread across seven types of licenses. Accela estimates that the city saved $3.5 million over the last five years by centralizing information on the company’s platform. Information sharing and modernized management systems enabled the city to respond to applications twice as fast as before implementation. Asheville, NC is one of a small number of cities using Accela to manage homestays. The system isn’t slick, but it works. Asheville hired an enforcement employee in another signal that the city is ready and willing to work with renters. The most advanced test run was in Dubai. Users in the city can use a web portal to receive regulatory approval to list their homes as short-term rentals. Taking the process digital only solves part of the problem, but saves time and provides scalable oversight to the wild-west sharing economy. The best catalyst for change will be government association meetings like the National League of Cities, where municipal leaders mingle and share best practices. It may sound comical, but summits like this actually do spark change. Accela is at a huge advantage because the company already has relationships with urban decision makers. Getting the sharing economy under control will almost certainly take longer than expected. Accela plans to work in baby steps with its lobbyists. Startups rightly should fight to maintain user experience so long as it doesn’t come at the price of safety. That said, it’s harder to disrupt laws than eager startups may think. Airbnb acknowledged the prospect of a platform to allow municipalities to accept permit applications for short-term rentals online was interesting when we asked the company, but decided not to comment further. We reached out to Uber but the company did not respond to our request for comment. My money is on an Airbnb-Accela partnership over the next six to 12 months. Taking permits digital will only go so far in solving the regulatory ailments of the sharing economy. Anything short of backend deployment within an app like Airbnb will be a disappointment. “Not going to rule it out, our tech can make that possible,” said Tim Woodbury, Director of Government Relations for Accela. “It’s a matter of whether cities and the sharing economy head in that direction.” Change is going to be minimal until government starts dreaming and tech gets realistic.
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A court ruled that it could be a federal crime to share your Netflix password
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Fitz Tepper
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Last week the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that an employee acted “without authorization” when he used a former co-worker’s login (with their permission) to gain access to “computer data owned by the former employer.” This led to the court upholding a decision that the employee violated the , a federal law traditionally used to prevent computer-related fraud. Judge McKeown, who write the majority opinion, acknowledged that this ruling could turn innocent conduct like “password sharing among friends and family” into a federal crime. However, she also said that the circumstances in the case “bears little resemblance” to more innocent forms of password sharing — like sharing a Netflix password, or giving your friend your Gmail password so they could download a document. Judge McKeown added that “the reality is that facts and context matter in applying the term ‘without authorization.'” Essentially, the court did agree that password sharing (in this specific case) violated federal law, but empowered future courts to consider the “facts and context” when determining if password sharing violates the CFAA. However, one of the judges on the court was slightly more concerned with the precedent it would set. In the opening paragraph of his dissent below, Judge Reinhardt explained the potential repercussions of the court’s decision: This case is about password sharing. People frequently share their passwords, notwithstanding the fact that websites and employers have policies prohibiting it. In my view, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) does not make the millions of people who engage in this ubiquitous, useful, and generally harmless conduct into unwitting federal criminals. Whatever other liability, criminal or civil, Nosal may have incurred in his improper attempt to compete with his former employer, he has not violated the CFAA. — Judge Stephen Reinhardt, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Clearly, Judge Reinhardt is concerned that his decision could open up the possibility of friends sharing Netflix or HBO GO passwords could constitute a federal crime. He continues, noting that his fellow judges claim that they do not have to address the effect of their decision on the wider population because Nosal’s infelicitous conduct “bears little resemblance” to everyday password sharing. Continuing on, Reinhardt concludes that the majority decision from the two other judges “does not provide, nor do I see, a workable line which separates the consensual password sharing in this case from the consensual password sharing of millions of legitimate account holders, which may also be contrary to the policies of system owners.” According to this ruling, it seems that anyone sharing a password “without authorization” could potentially be convinced of violating the CFAA. That being said, don’t expect the FBI to come knocking next time you stream on your boyfriend’s account. There remains some vagueness in what “without authorization” means. While providers like Netflix and HBO GO officially say that logins shouldn’t be shared, some, including Netflix, have , a statement that would presumably kill any “without authorization” argument if for some reason someone was prosecuted for sharing their Netflix account. Plus, this assumes that the government or a company would prosecute or sue a user for sharing passwords in the first place. The odds that you would face any legal repercussions right now for password sharing is extremely slim, especially because entertainment providers have taken a laissez-faire approach to password-sharing enforcement. That being said, a small possibility remains that down the line one company may want to make an example out of someone, similar to how a select few individuals were sued for pirating music. But until that happens, it’s safe to assume that you won’t find yourself in a federal court for giving your girlfriend your HBO GO login.
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Robbers target Pokémon Go players in Missouri
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Lucia Maffei
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Catching them all could be risky. Four men in O’Fallon, Missouri, have been arrested on charges of first-degree robbery and armed criminal action after having used the popular gaming app to target other users, lure them into isolated areas and rob them. Shane Michael Baker, 18, Brett William Miller, 17, and Jamine James D. Warner, 18 have been charged by the St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Bond was set in the amount of $100,000. The fourth suspect, who is a juvenile, was transferred to the Juvenile Justice Center in St. Charles, Missouri. Released in the U.S. , Pokémon Go allows gamers to pursue their quest of pocket monsters in the real world, by using the smartphone camera to show images of Pokémon in the exact place where people are playing, including their bedrooms, cars or famous landmarks. The app, which $9 billion to Nintendo’s value, was developed by Niantic. The four teens were taken into custody on Sunday morning following a call to 911, according to the O’Fallon Missouri Police Department. After having targeted a pedestrian using the geolocation feature of the app, the four men — all residents of St. Charles County — pulled him over and threatened him with a handgun from the inside of a black BMW. According to another statement from the police, “they all had the knowledge and intent of committing a robbery using a firearm.” Officers stopped the BMW near a CVS lot, where an occupant tried to discard the handgun from the car. Further investigation revealed that there have been similar armed robberies in the area over the last couple of days with a similar car. “The way we believe the app was used,” the department , “is you can add a beacon to a ‘pokestop’ to lure more players. Apparently they were using the app to locate people standing around in the middle of a parking lot or whatever other location they were in.” The San Francisco Police Department a list of guidelines to safely play with Pokémon Go. And the NYPD tweeted a reminder not to play with the app while driving. Yeah we know Charizard is rare but don't let Officer Monello & his new partner catch you! Don't & drive! — NYPD 19th Precinct (@NYPD19Pct) St. Charles County declined to provide more details on the Missouri case aside from the statements released by the O’Fallon Police Department. We’ve reached out to Niantic for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
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Frederic Lardinois
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Walt Disney Co. reveals 9 new startups in the Disney Accelerator spanning robotics, cinematic VR and AI
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Lora Kolodny
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is kicking off the third session of its corporate accelerator this week, and revealed 9 new companies admitted to the program. A full list follows at the end of this post. The companies are developing everything from cinematic virtual reality and holographic content, to robots with human-like facial expressions. Because alumni of the have scored big partnerships with the media and entertainment juggernaut in the past, it is seen as one of the more desirable corporate accelerators out there. According to research by Future Asia Ventures, there are 131 active corporate accelerators worldwide today, with 13 new programs launching in the first half of 2016. The U.S. has the most with 31 accelerators, representing plenty of competition for dealflow. Alumni of the Disney Accelerator include , which created the BB-8 droid Star Wars toy, a best seller for Disney in 2015; and , the sports data platform that now provides Disney-owned ESPN with statistical content. This marks the first year that Disney will be running its accelerator fully in-house without relying on , the outside partner that helped it get the program off the ground in 2014. Some changes are at hand, accordingly. The Walt Disney Company’s Senior Vice President of Innovation, , said that this year, one team participating in the Disney Accelerator is actually an internal project team, not a startup. Other participants span from seed- or very early-stage companies to those that have already raised a significant amount of funding and generated millions in revenue. In the past, Disney Accelerator admitted early stage businesses only and did not include in-house teams. It also applied one-size-fits-all deal terms to all 10 admitted companies. Deals will now be negotiated ad hoc, Abrams confirmed. “The program has evolved. But we’ve always been very media and entertainment oriented, obviously. What we can do better than other accelerators is to help [entrepreneurs] learn and refine the art of storytelling by working with some of the world’s best creatives, and help them understand the various business segments within media and entertainment from advertising to theme parks,” he said. Disney often connects startups in its accelerator with operating units of the Walt Disney Co., broadly, so they can pilot projects together or forge partnerships of another kind. Of the most recent applicant pool, Abrams reported an increase in AI and robotics startups, compared to previous years, and a drop in the number of companies working with GIFs.
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Indonesia will be Asia’s next biggest e-commerce market
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Hugh Harsono
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Indonesia presents much opportunity for e-commerce among other emerging Asian economies, with current projections putting this archipelago nation’s e-market at by 2020 (coming third behind China and India). With an estimated annual growth rate of 50 percent and strong mobile-first initiatives, retailers have a unique opportunity in Indonesia to focus on developing truly mobile platforms to help facilitate e-market growth, particularly in the consumer packaged goods (CPGs) sector. Indonesia’s current e-commerce market is similar to China’s online marketplace beginnings, with a large pool of entrepreneurial sellers providing goods purchased based largely on social media recommendations. Similarly, e-commerce in Indonesia also mimics the early U.S. e-market, which was flooded with customers wary to trust online payments and retailers. Indonesia is truly unique in that it has the potential to create a hybrid of the widest opportunities from America and China’s e-commerce economies, propelling the Indonesian online marketplace onto the global stage. Indonesia has established itself as one of Asia’s foremost mobile-first nations, with a report estimating that in 2015, more than 70 percent of Indonesia’s internet traffic originated from mobile devices. Further evidence that Indonesians have embraced mobile-first initiatives comes from social media, with Indonesians having the highest mobile Facebook usage rate worldwide, with 63 million users in 2015. Further projections put Indonesians’ future Facebook access via mobile being almost 99 percent by 2018, showing a true dominance over desktop platforms. The mobile-first path that Indonesia has taken also allows retailers to focus on creating truly mobile functionality, presenting unique opportunities to dominate in the retail space. E-commerce startups founded in Indonesia or targeting it as an untapped market are growing exponentially, something reflected in increased interest in startup fundraising within the archipelago nation. , an end-to-end e-commerce service provider, closed a Series A venture capital round of $10.7 million, while raising another $10 million in funding ahead of a planned Series B raise later in 2016; this action is being led by , a VC-initiative launched by Indonesian telecom giant . Jakarta-based grocery delivery app raised an impressive $12 million Series A round in 2015, with investors led by and . , another Indonesian e-commerce startup, closed a second seven-figure seed funding round from investors, including and . However, the behemoth of all Indonesian deals so far comes in the form of , an online marketplace that raised an impressive $100 million round led by and . Mid- and later-stage investors should definitely keep an eye on Indonesian startups, which are clearly having very little trouble finding early-stage interest and investment. Indonesia’s retail market currently consists of CPGs being sold in retail spaces known as “fragmented trade,” which is primarily made up of independent small business owners. E-commerce is currently growing at a rate twice as fast as fragmented trade, forcing many of these independents to turn to the e-commerce model. This in turn creates a sea of individual sellers eager to satisfy e-consumer demand, alongside mass retailers targeting this same demographic. Unlike other Asian nations, Indonesians currently do not solely rely on mass retailers to guide their purchasing decisions, allowing for these individual sellers to maintain market share. This in turn allows the e-market segment to be open to any competitor determined enough to form a market impact, something uncommon in other mobile-first nations. Many Indonesian cities are currently woefully underdeveloped, because of a lack of strong government and infrastructure to support retail construction. However, e-commerce’s rise in popularity exploits this challenge by allowing consumers to purchase CPGs previously unavailable in their specific locales. With lots of potential growth in rural and semi-rural areas, e-commerce specifically allows Indonesian consumers to source hard-to-find goods, as opposed to other nations, where rural areas would not have as high use of internet-capable mobile devices. In fact, popular Indonesian online site has more than one-third of its 2.5 million customers living in rural areas, providing goods ordered almost exclusively off mobile platforms to a population whose sole form of internet access comes via smartphone. This procurement of specialized CPGs to rural areas makes Indonesia a uniquely perfect place for online marketplace growth. Indonesia’s e-market also allows for retailers and participants in the fragmented trade space to focus on developing truly mobile-first platforms. This specifically targets the mobile user as the captured demographic, instead of simply re-tooling a desktop platform to a mobile one. This truly mobile-first scenario also allows sellers to use smartphones to their advantage, gathering hyper-personalized data to target individual Indonesian consumers as opposed to just specific demographics or groups among Indonesia’s more than 250 million population. Mobile-first also allows for the easier entry of participants into the Indonesian e-commerce scene, with startups having the flexibility to choose what CPGs they sell, and even who they want as a consumer, through market penetration via mobile apps. With other mobile-first nations being split between different social media sites (China: / / ; India: Facebook/Google+/Twitter; Philippines: Instagram/Snapchat/Facebook), Indonesia is unique because of its widespread use of a singular social media platform: (with more than 92 percent of Indonesians having a Facebook account). With so much of Indonesians’ current purchasing power being shaped through social media recommendations, focusing on developing integration with Facebook’s platforms offers companies a unique space to potentially profit through direct CPG sales, advertising or even partnerships. Tying Facebook into popular sites such as online forums like and Tokobagus, or even online stores like , could lead to the inclusion of high-quality videos, product comparisons and optimized images, alongside other mobile-first features, to encourage e-market growth. Indonesian consumers are very wary of online payments, much like Americans were in the U.S.’ early online marketplace days, particularly when compared to other mobile-first populations. Many e-commerce transactions are currently paid through either direct bank transfer or (cash-on-delivery), which is greatly limiting e-commerce growth through lost transactions. With Indonesian spend growing nearly , will soon be unsustainable. Creating a trusted solution to utilize online payments could lead to huge growth, with retailers both large and small being able to streamline their business flows for optimum efficiency. Indonesia currently also presents a unique opportunity for e-commerce growth because of the country’s weak infrastructure and poor logistics system. This provides a huge growth area for the e-market, with sellers able to vertically integrate their delivery systems with their ordering ones. In the age of companies developing in-house solutions instead of relying on outsourcing, the untapped logistics market also gives rise to the growth in Indonesian e-commerce. Companies have the ability to develop proprietary, or even simply more efficient, delivery systems as another form of competition in the online marketplace, with supply strength being a key component in e-commerce. Often underestimated as a driving economic force among its more well-known Asian brethren, Indonesia presents a variety of unique opportunities in becoming one of the largest e-commerce spaces. With so many mobile internet users, combined with weak internal infrastructure, companies and individual sellers alike have the potential to grow the e-commerce market to heights unseen. Additionally, a growing middle class with disposable income will only help spread e-commerce growth, alongside a rising influx of both individual sellers and corporations vying to compete in the e-market. Indonesia’s e-commerce market is on track to be one of the largest in Asia, utilizing mobile-first platforms to provide all Indonesians with convenient access to consumer packaged goods.
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Will 50K people turn up to catch Pokémon in San Francisco tonight?
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Over the past couple of weeks, you may have seen more people than usual walking erratically, stopping suddenly, all while clutching a smartphone. They were probably playing Pokémon Go, the game that ; it and has gone thoroughly viral in the meantime. The Facebook event for tonight (July 20th) has 8,800 people confirmed in attendance, with another 29K “interested” in the event and an additional 12K people invited. Yowzers! “I had no idea that this event would reach such a large scope of people. I made this event at midnight, invited my facebook friends, and fell asleep,” the organizer of the Facebook event, Sara Witsch, tells me. “ “Saw a crawl for Sacramento and thought hey, what better place than a crawl in San Francisco,” Witsch wrote on the Facebook event page, not realizing what was about to happen. The group came to life with suggestions of dressing up as your favorite Pokémon for the crawl. The event is set to start as a stroll through the city, before culminating in a bar crawl. It’ll be one hell of an overspill at even the biggest bars, however, if even a fraction of the respondents turn up. “I’m working on a route that will take in consideration the amount of people RSVPed as going and as interested,” she tells me. “The plan is to make multiple break-off points based on neighborhoods so that people can follow the route as far as they’d like, but also so that we don’t have thousands of people in one spot.” If the app still makes no sense to you whatsoever and you have no idea what the fuss is all about, perhaps the explainer video from the Pokémon Company will help:
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A status report on our digital freedom
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Chris Stone
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There are plenty of movies analyzing the yin and yang between destiny and choice — from to Serendipity — and even Final Destination. People are fascinated by the relationship between and a pre-destined path. This relationship has never been more interesting than in today’s world, where the ultimate goal of most companies is to personalize their web content based on your demographic data and known preferences. But, as personalization technology grows increasingly sophisticated, it raises an interesting question about the future of interactions: complex algorithms eventually engineer entire destiny online — guiding us to certain pages and influencing us to take specific actions? To be clear, we aren’t there just yet. As it stands, most companies merely add a customer’s name to the top of an email so they feel like a valued shopper, or feature localized deals on their homepage. It’s easy for users to poke holes in this approach and dodge any influence brands are hoping to achieve. But as we move toward an online “Adjustment Bureau,” where brands use behavioral patterns to infer a customer’s next step, I think we can all agree that many label this strategy as sinister — an approach that removes the of browsing online. Some could argue that it kills what’s about the web — a Wild Wild West where people can seek out whatever they want. No matter where you stand in the personalization debate, big changes are coming. And I’m a strong believer that they ultimately improve online experiences — not take away . After all, there are about in the world, and one could argue that we need some guidance to navigate all the content out there and sort through the clutter. Odds are, the average internet user hasn’t even begun to scratch the surface of relevant information on the web, spending hours searching when the right content could be presented quickly and in an organized fashion. For a hint at what the future has in store, look no further than major players like IBM, Google and Amazon who are investing in better data analysis with , and . As these big-name companies continue to evolve their technology set, I think we’ll see a wave of acquisitions happening, targeted at startups that have refined their approach to personalization. Combining a powerful background in data analysis with innovative approaches to crafting better online experiences bring users more of what they want and less of the “surface personalization” at which many currently roll their eyes. The fundamental way we interact with the web is changing, and better personalization is essential for the next wave of communication to be successful. Take the around the use cases of chatbots. The developers building bot interfaces know that responding with a user’s name but trying to take on too much functionality won’t work, either. Instead, bots have to make smart suggestions about what users want to see and hear based on intelligence they’ve gathered from previous interactions. Whether it’s automatically identifying preferred restaurants when a user asks Amazon’s Echo and Alexa to order a pizza, or suggesting that a user move a conflicting appointment to a different time when scheduling a meeting. There are few better arguments for better personalization. I believe the growth of bots accelerate an approach that infers and acts on anticipated next steps. I also believe that, once users see how personalization can impact their daily lives, the reaction be far more positive. But it’s not all about the technology. To ensure the future of personalization is more approachable than alarming, we first need to understand the “creepy factor” behind the tech. For those working behind the scenes to make personalization a reality, it’s easy to forget what the final product (or even the idea of it) feels like to the average online user. We need to acknowledge the common fear that companies have too much control over what users see, turning curation into censorship. Just look at the recent debate about of content in its Trending Stories section. Once a company loses trust, it’s hard to get it back. It’ll take getting over some major technological and communication roadblocks before personalization is accepted by the masses and understood as a way to engineer better experiences — not lead consumers down the wrong path. We have the opportunity to deliver users a far better online experience, and guidance become even more crucial as the number of websites continues to skyrocket. Ultimately, better personalization is essential and inevitable, but it require trust from all parties involved to work. For brands, it’s the best way to broaden outreach to potential customers, upsell existing ones and drive bottom-line business results. For customers, it’s a necessary way to sort through the clutter and improve the efficiency and relevancy of their online experience. Now, we just need to get there.
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Pokémon Go has an estimated 7.5M U.S. downloads, $1.6M in daily revenue
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Darrell Etherington
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Pokémon Go is off to a big start in the U.S., but just how big? The company hasn’t yet revealed any official numbers, but we have estimates to provide an idea of the scope of downloads and revenue the mobile game is generating. App analytics company used its predictive model of the App Store and Google Play, which takes hundreds of thousands of data points from its partners to generate an estimate of the download numbers Pokémon Go is seeing: it’s been downloaded a total of around 7.5 million times in the U.S. From Google Play and the iOS App Store, according to their numbers. In terms of earning power, the game is making around $1.6 million per day, according to SensorTower, and that revenue estimate is limited to iOS only. To put that into context, Clash Royal (which is among the biggest recent hits in mobile gaming) is currently estimated to be making around $350,000 per day on iOS, according to SensorTower’s data. Obviously, there’s going to be some drop-off when it comes to daily spend as the hype wears out, but Pokémon has a number of benefits that could add to its stickiness, including a beloved IP and ample avenues to expand its content offerings in order to keep users coming back. Consider, for instance, that Pokémon Go currently only includes the original stable of 150 Pokémon; there are still another 570 remaining as of the release of Pokémon X/Y (and there are more on the horizon with the next installment’s release in Pokémon Sun and Moon). Meanwhile, covered other interesting comparisons for the game so far, including a revelation that it already leapfrogged Tinder in installs on Android in U.S. Installs, and that it already eclipses various other social media apps in active use time on devices. Nintendo’s other recent mobile title had only 1.58 million downloads in its initial five days on iPhone and Android, which pales in comparison. That’s the power of Pokémon.
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Pokémon Go shouldn’t have full access to your Gmail, Docs and Google account — but it does
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Devin Coldewey
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When you use Google to sign into Pokémon Go, as so many of you have already, the popular game for some reason grants itself (for some iOS users, anyway) the highest possible level of access to your Google account, meaning it can read your email, location history… pretty much everything. Why does it need this, and why aren’t users told? [UPDATE: , and that it never accessed anything beyond users’ Google account information]. This was discovered right after launch, when decided to check whether the app had pulled a fast one when he logged into it with Google. And it’s a good thing he did! (You can too, .) Well, of course, Go already — but you can see the reasoning behind them. It needs to get your fine location, access the camera and motion sensors, read and write to the SD card, etc…. and, of course, charge you money when you run out of Pokéballs or eggs. But full access to your Google account? That’s the level granted to platform-level apps like Chrome. Google : When you grant full account access, the application can see and modify nearly all information in your Google Account (but it can’t change your password, delete your account, or pay with Google Wallet on your behalf). This “Full account access” privilege should only be granted to applications you fully trust, and which are installed on your personal computer, phone, or tablet. First of all, why does a Pokémon game need full access to your account? Second, why aren’t users warned that this is the level they are granting, and given a chance to reconsider? And third, why didn’t Google say a thing when it happened, like “are you sure you want to give a game about making made-up animals fight access to the confidential documents in your Gmail and Docs?” (Notably, Niantic’s previous AR game, Ingress, only required partial access.) We’ve asked for answers, but in the meantime, here’s a mystery , can help us solve. Full Google account access only happens some of the time. Previously, this post suggested that full Google account access could come from installs on Android devices, but that does not appear to be the case; the account we saw that happening on had full access granted from the iOS version, though there was an Android phone attached to it, as well. I asked Niantic about this and several other things but have yet to get a response. The article has been slightly updated to reflect this information.) For example, on two phones I installed the game on, running Android 5.2 and 6.0, it hasn’t requested any access at all! (Which may be why I didn’t get a 2-factor authentication notification) — but on one colleague’s phone, also running 6.0, full account access right off the bat. And it appears to happen on some iPhones but not others. Is there a pattern here? You can always sign up using a Pokemon Trainer account — except the servers have been so slammed that many people haven’t had that option, and opted for Google instead. Now, to be clear, we’re not suggesting Niantic or Nintendo is harvesting your emails or sucking up the files in your Google Drive. But there’s no reason why this access should be requested in the first place, and there’s no way to modify it (revoking privileges just crashes the game or signs you out). And perhaps more troubling is that it’s both asked for and given without notifying the user. It could be that getting some specific location or payment info couldn’t be figured out in time for launch on certain phone/OS combinations, and as a stopgap measure the developers just requested the whole account. We’ll know more soon, but in the meantime feel free to comment below with your phone and OS and whether full access has been granted ( ) — and, of course, brag about all the Pokémon you’ve collected. : , and that the app had not accessed anything beyond users’ basic account information.
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A glimpse inside Tesla’s super secretive Gigafactory
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Greg Kumparak
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up in California, I’m realizing I’m not built for this heat. We’re 30 minutes or so outside of Reno, but it feels like I’m on the sun. I can feel my sunscreen baking off. Why the did I wear black today? It’s okay; it’s worth it. I’m out here for a glimpse inside Tesla’s Gigafactory, days before its official grand opening. I’ll be one of the first people to step inside the building outside of those who helped build it. That’s worth a slight sunburn, right? A row of Model X parked outside the Gigafactory Tesla needs more batteries. Between the Model S, Model X, the upcoming Model 3 and its at-home solar energy storage product, the Powerwall, just about everything they put their name on uses a battery. But batteries like the ones Tesla needs are — and heavy. Even if Tesla could find a company in another country capable of producing the volume of batteries that it needs, just getting them onto a cargo ship and shipping them stateside would make up a sizeable chunk of the bill. Thus, the Gigafactory. A colossal, $5 billion structure smack dab in the middle of the Nevada desert, meant to help Tesla meet its battery needs. It’s “a machine to build the machines,” as Elon Musk refers to it. Left: Section A of the factory. Right: Designers laying out the later sections, currently under construction. We enter on one side of the building — Section A, as it’s called. To our left, row upon row of machines, racks and robotic arms responsible for assembling Powerwalls. To our right, separated from the factory floor by just a hip-height dividing wall, are the designers. Their project? . You see, Tesla is moving into the Gigafactory as soon as each section — of which there are currently four in progress — is complete. They’re working from the inside out, and it’s quite a sight to see. It’s like watching a robot build itself into a bigger, badder robot. Walking through the building is like viewing a timelapse; a gradient of construction. Section A? Up and running, designers in place. Section B? The walls are up and painted, but much of the clockwork — like two-story tall, gymnasium-sized machines that Tesla wouldn’t disclose the purpose of — are still being assembled. Section C? Lifts, hardhats, painters and drywallers. Section D? Raw steel beams as far as the eye can see. When all is said and done, the Gigafactory will have the . The still-raw Section D We’ve been invited in for an early look, but that doesn’t mean we have an all-access pass. Even in most of the areas in which we are allowed, cameras generally aren’t (I’d have brought more pictures back if I could, I promise). For every machine we’re able to see, two are shrouded under tarps. We enter a room with one machine that nearly scrapes the roof 40 feet above us — covered, of course, in 40 feet of tarp. “Are those tarps there because it’s not finished yet, or because the machine is secret?” I ask. “A bit of both,” replies someone from Tesla. “What does that one do?” “I can’t say.” “What part of the process is it for?” “Battery production.” (Essentially everything in this factory is ultimately for battery production.) “Can you tell me anything else?” “It’s part of either the cathode or anode process” — essentially a fancier way of saying that it’s for making batteries. “…” “Okay! On to the next room.” The next room has another 40-foot tall machine, still covered. They won’t tell us what this one does, either. So what’s the reason for the secrecy? Ultimately, the Gigafactory isn’t just big for the sake of being big. Tesla, in partnership with Panasonic, is putting $5 billion into this place to have a playground on which they can build all the things they can’t build elsewhere. They’re building new stuff here to help them drive down the costs of the batteries they need… and they don’t want anyone to know exactly how it all comes together. “[This factory] deserves more attention from creative problem solving engineers than the product it makes,” Musk would later tell us in a Q&A. “Over time… the majority of our engineering will actually go into designing the factory as a product itself… If we take a creative engineering person and apply them to designing the factory — this machine that makes the machine — they make 5 to 10 times the headway per hour than if they’re trying to improve the products it makes.” One of the few machines not shrouded in secrecy: a 10′ tall robotic arm used to assemble Powerwalls Everyone calls this thing Gigafactory — but that’s short for its official name, “Gigafactory 1.” As you can probably grep from that “1” tacked on to the end there, Elon doesn’t want this to be the Gigafactory. In a Q&A, Elon confirmed that he wants to build Gigafactories in other countries. And he wants to build Gigafactories that handle both halves of the Tesla manufacturing equation — building the batteries AND building the cars. Currently, that job is set to be split between its car plant in Fremont, CA and Gigafactory 1 in Nevada. This one is in the U.S. because that’s where it needs the most batteries; as other countries show demand, they’ll build Gigafactories there. Even on the walls of the factory, it’s “Gigafactory 1” But first, Elon needs to prove that this first $5 billion bet pays off. It needs to help Tesla hit that goal. It needs to produce more batteries, day in and day out, and for less money. Meanwhile, Tesla has to bring the Model 3 into production and fulfill hundreds of thousands of pre-orders, prove to the world that their autopilot is safer than human drivers and, as of last week, introduce and, of all things, a Tesla Semi. Oh, and in all of his spare time, he’s going to keep building spaceships and figuring out how to get people on Mars. No big deal, right? Elon Musk during a Q&A
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Charging startups to apply to an accelerator is exploitative and dumb
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Yesterday, a little birdie told me about , an accelerator (probably more accurately referred to as an incubator) for early-idea-stage startups. The idea is to take a napkin-stage idea and turn it into an MVP of sorts in six weeks. Not a shabby idea, but the insidious thing here is that Nextt charges $100 per idea. Not to participate, mind you — to put in an application. The Nextt website seems awfully cheerful. Calm down, chap, you’ll wear yourself out. Starting a startup is hard. It’s daunting. And especially if you haven’t been through the mill a few times, it’s really difficult to know where to even start. Of course, it all begins with the spark of an idea, but if you’ve ever been in a room full of entrepreneurs, you’ll know that any moderately smart person can churn out 50 problems worth solving and 15 viable business ideas before breakfast. What I’m trying to say is that ideas are cheap. Or rather, they used to be, until Nextt got their paws on them. Apparently aimed at first-time entrepreneurs and people dipping their toes in entrepreneurial endeavors for the first time, Nextt’s website comes across as a pitch-deck factory. The outcome of the program, they write, will leave participants with “a sleek highlight reel,” an “opportunity to connect with VCs” and some “testimonials from your project advisors.” “Our advisor community is made up of designers, data scientists, developers and attorneys,” says the founder of the Nextt accelerator, Ajay Rajani. “These advisors analyze data, write code, design mockups and dedicate many hours to the program in order to provide potential entrepreneurs the opportunity to validate their idea in a cost-effective way.” I don’t want to be disparaging of the deliverables of the program. Undoubtedly, all of those things are of great value to a startup. My issue is that it seems iffy. The startup world is meant to be a place where experienced entrepreneurs are taking care of the newcomers, not exploiting them in the process. “[The $100 application fee] signals that the applicant is serious about their idea [and] makes a commitment to their idea and our expert team and advisor community,” says Rajani. “We see an application fee as a fair and more accessible way to finance our program, and the implicit value of our program is objectively and exponentially more.” Nextt’s founder tells me that the company received 21 applications for its first invite-only cohort, before accepting four (19 percent) of the companies. For its second cohort, it received 42 applications and accepted another four (10.5 percent). It is currently trying to recruit an additional 5-15 successful applicants for a September cohort. A troubling aspect of this is that is a three-step process in the shape of a form. When I first heard of the program, my first port of call was to have a closer look at the sort of questions the accelerator asks its participants. I clicked on the Submit an Idea link in the menu, then the Jump to Form button. On the first page, I agreed that Nextt won’t sign an NDA. On the second page, I filled in all the details about my idea, the problem it solves and a competitor analysis. On the third page, I was surprised by a payment form. This is the screen that meets you after you’ve already filled in all the details about your idea. I agree that perhaps I should read more carefully than I did before pitching my next drone startup, but it’s worrying there are several ways through the website (including the one I took) where you won’t see a warning that this is a paid-for application until you hit the payment part of the application form. You’ve already agreed to not signing an NDA, but the data from page two — where you share the idea of your startup — is saved. If you at that point decide to not pay, Nextt still has access to your idea. Nextt keeps “a small stake” in projects that work out, but I couldn’t find anywhere on its website what that means. The most obvious place to go looking — the company’s terms and conditions — doesn’t appear to exist. If you’re panicking, wondering what is happening to your idea at that point, it is not particularly reassuring to discover that the company’s terms and conditions link doesn’t work; . As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, ideas are cheap, so Nextt having access to a startup’s ideas isn’t necessarily a big deal… But the problem is , because the target audience — very new entrepreneurs — don’t know that; they think their idea is . Which I think means that they are far more likely than most to reach for their wallets to cough up the $100. “Typeform by default collects data from all form participants, including those who do not fully complete the application process,” says Rajani. He claims that Nextt “does not review the application in depth” until a fee has been collected. “Justified by the return on investment if you get into Nextt” — but no word on what happens if you don’t. On the site, that it chooses to charge an application fee to ensure the founders’ commitment. The company claims it’s cheap and that it’s totally worth it, if you are accepted into the program. I completely agree — if Nextt delivers on everything it promises, $100 is a bona fide bargain, but only if you’re selected to participate. If you’re one of the 87 percent of founders who don’t make the cut, it’s hard to argue you received great value for your money. “Should an idea not be accepted, Nextt provides the applicant with a summary of their idea’s strengths and weaknesses,” Rajani explained to me, clarifying the accelerator’s position on the matter. The accelerator also offers feedback and suggestions on what an applicant could try next. Charging someone to apply for an accelerator — not to participate, just to — feels really exploitative. I have no problem with companies offering a service and then charging for it. That’s how businesses are supposed to work. Charging for a of being able to work with an accelerator is daft. “The $100 application fee is clearly disclosed on the and we have not yet received a single complaint from applicants,” Rajani says. My feeling is that at this point, you may as well just call it a pay-to-enter competition. If we do, there’s a problem, too: By not posting terms and conditions or proper contact information, Nextt’s site doesn’t appear to comply with . The question is whether inexperienced would-be startup founders would be willing to pay $100 to enter a competition for someone to tell them whether or not their idea has merit. If the choice is between spending $100 on a 13 percent chance of getting some help, or spending the same amount of money on , for example, I know what my choice would be. From the numbers the founder gave me, it looks like Nextt has had 63 applications to date, and accepted eight of them. That’s about $790 per idea — maybe a more honest way of doing this would be to make applications free and charge the startups $800 if they are selected to participate. It would certainly feel a lot less exploitative. Accelerators: Don’t charge for applications. You’re better than that.
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Research shows deleted WhatsApp messages aren’t actually deleted
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Kate Conger
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Chat logs from WhatsApp linger on your phone even after you’ve deleted them, according to new research published by iOS expert Jonathan Zdziarski. Forensic traces of chats linger on the phone even after a user archives or deletes them, Zdziarski found, and could be accessed by someone with physical access to the device or by law enforcement issuing a warrant to Apple for iCloud backups. Although the data is deleted from the app, it is not overwritten in the SQLite library and therefore remains on the phone. “I installed the app and started a few different threads,” Zdziarski wrote in a . “I then archived some, cleared, some, and deleted some threads. I made a second backup after running the ‘Clear All Chats’ function in WhatsApp. None of these deletion or archival options made any difference in how deleted records were preserved. In all cases, the deleted SQLite records remained intact in the database.” “The only way to get rid of them appears to be to delete the app entirely,” Zdziarski added. WhatsApp has been applauded for its security since the company, which is owned by Facebook, completed its in April. WhatsApp uses the well-regarded Signal Protocol for its encryption. But some onlookers were excited to see a dent in WhatsApp’s armor — the CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, took the opportunity to critique WhatsApp’s security. “Even for 10% of something like this security experts would tear Telegram apart with hundreds of NEVER USE IT tweets,” Durov . “Funny how conveniently silent all these ‘experts’ are now, after spending hundreds of hours bashing TG [Telegram] and promoting WA [WhatsApp].” However, WhatsApp certainly isn’t the only messaging application with this problem: Zdziarski noted that the issue exists with iMessage as well. Other apps like Signal and Wickr leave fewer forensic traces. WhatsApp users don’t need to panic — the ways this forensic data could be exported are relatively limited. Still, Zdziarski has some advice for users: Use iTunes to set a long, complex backup password for your phone. Do NOT store this password in the keychain, otherwise it could potentially be recovered using Mac forensics tools. This will cause the phone to encrypt all desktop backups coming out of it, even if it’s talking to a forensics tool. Consider pair locking your device using Configurator. I’ve for this; it will prevent anybody else who steals your passcode, or compels a fingerprint from being able to pair or use forensics tools with your phone. This is irreversible without restoring the phone, so you’ll need to be aware of the risks. Disable iCloud backups, as these do not honor your backup password, and the clear text database can be obtained, with a warrant, by law enforcement. Periodically, delete the application from your device and reinstall it to flush out the database. This appears to be the only way to flush out deleted records and start fresh. NOTE: This will not delete databases from existing iCloud backups from the cloud. WhatsApp did not respond to a request for comment.
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Instagram to roll out anti-harassment tools
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Online harassment is a big problem, with 40 percent of all people on the internet having reported experiencing some form of harassment online, . In order to combat harassment on Instagram, the photo-sharing platform is gearing up to let people with “high volume content threads” filter their comment streams, or just turn them off entirely, . For those who decide to leave on the comments, they can create a banned words list that will enable them to hide the comments that use those terms. Soon, Instagram will enable everyday people on Instagram — the ones with not as much action on their accounts — to moderate their comments. This comes less than a month after , which similarly lets accounts block comments with certain offensive words and phrases. Here’s what the functionality looks like for business accounts: It’s also worth noting that Justin Bieber’s selfie app, Shots, basically pioneered the idea of enabling people to block comments back in 2013. In fact, the app doesn’t allow comments at all. Anyway, it’d be really cool if this was a feature on Twitter… just saying.
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Dedrone partners with Airbus to bring drone detection to wide open spaces including airports
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Lora Kolodny
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A startup that helps businesses determine when drones are flying unwantedly or otherwise into their airspace, , has partnered with the electronics division of civil aircraft manufacturers to bring drone detection to wide open spaces and remote locations. Through their partnership, Dedrone will integrate Airbus’s long range radar technology into its systems which are comprised of ground-based sensors and data analytics and reporting software in the cloud. The radar (and data from it) expands the range of the startup’s drone detection systems to a radius of up to 3 kilometers in open spaces, according to Dedrone CEO Joerg Lamprecht. Dedrone’s standard hardware is more for distributed use. The sensors are set up all around data centers which are often surrounded by trees, embassies, corporate campuses, or stadiums where a small drone could fly not just overhead but indoors and near windows attempting to capture images or hack into internal systems. But if a business owns and operates something like an airport, water treatment facility, nuclear power plant, or test tracks where new vehicles are driven and safety-tested, Dedrone hardware with long-range communication capabilities via Airbus radar could allow a more centralized set up. Lamprecht noted, “We have always integrated the best available technology on the market into our systems. We have had surveillance cameras, mics, frequency scanners and now we have the power of the Airbus radar, which will allow us to reach into new industries.” Dedrone focuses on drone detection and monitoring, not counter measures to bring unmanned aerial vehicles down, or block them from entering a particular space. Opening up its systems, and integrating with new hardware and data sources like those from Airbus, allows Dedrone to work increasingly in conjunction with other physical and aerial security systems, for example, jamming units that could force a drone to land before crashing into critical infrastructure.
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There won’t be an ‘Uber for healthcare’ anytime soon
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Rick Bates
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The passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act created a perfect storm of disruption in the industry. All at once came massive systemic changes, from the expansion of Medicaid and guaranteed issue to minimum essential benefits and the creation of exchanges. In the wake of ACA, companies sprang up to fulfill the promise of Obamacare and make a consumer-driven, retail industry, where old work rules would be broken, novel business models established and new companies could command billion-dollar valuations in a short span of time. was a surge of excitement, and, as of June 2016, the U.S. space had eight “unicorns” (companies valued at over $1 billion), including valued at $1.03 billion, at $9 billion and at $4.5 billion. But is a stubborn space. Think of it like a Rubik’s Cube, where every move has a ripple effect, and solving multi-faceted problems is par the course. In these conditions, innovative models battle strong headwinds — a fact many VCs and founders overlooked as they rushed to build businesses following the patterns of technology-driven disruption that have transformed industries such as shopping, transportation and entertainment. Those companies that approach this three-dimensional problem with only two dimensions — by cutting corners or finding “shortcuts” — have found themselves lost. Theranos struggled to back up its claims and has been from U.S. regulators. Zenefits has been of selling insurance products without proper licenses. And not long ago, 23andMe to secure regulatory approval before making claims about the medical legitimacy of devices. All of these companies have since faced financial problems — Theranos is . This string of high-profile debacles reveals a simple, but crucial fact: Disrupting is not a sprint; it’s not even a marathon — it’s a grueling decathlon with hurdles every step of the way. In addition to nailing all the prerequisites of a modern startup (an emphasis on exemplary design, scalable technology and sterling customer support), new entrants wanting to move fast must navigate ’s laundry list of regulations, abiding by specific federal and state regulatory requirements and the labyrinthine rules of the FDA. Can we really expect true disruption, the game-changing disruption that companies like and Airbnb have brought to transform respective industries? In a space that demands that new companies file 50 different sets of forms each state, the regulation in is unrivaled by any other industry. Beyond the regulations, which are nearly damning to disruption in and of themselves, we have to realize that the environment is one in which trust is essential — which isn’ unreasonable, given purchasers are making decisions that literally involve life and death. Building the necessary level of trust, however, takes a lot of time, and startups too often project growth based upon metrics driven by adopters. But this category of customers is especially elusive in . As an example, telemedicine is a brilliant solution that delivers fast, reliable care at a fraction of the price of a normal doctor visit, and yet it’s taken years telemedicine to really register on the U.S. radar. The education and hand-holding necessary to achieve results might work a shoe or taxi company, but changing people’s fundamental behaviors is difficult, especially when it comes to health and well-being. Strategies like creating incentives to eat healthier meals, go to the gym more often or wear activity trackers produce exciting, flashy results, but don’ do much to create long-term improvements in overall health. Finally, consumer choice within is fundamentally limited to certain key decisions. They can choose insurance plan, but only from the options provided by an employer or through an intermediary such as an exchange. They still must buy an insurance plan or face a penalty. When you take choice out of the equation, when consumers aren’ empowered to select the most efficient and affordable option themselves, the challenges facing B2C startups are apparent. To be sure, have been signs of success in the industry. Despite the challenges of changing people’s behavior, has been tackling chronic disease with a slow and steady approach, which notably included Omada clinical two-year study in the Journal of Internet Medical Research demonstrating the efficacy of model. Such a move is slow and time-consuming, but it goes a long way in developing trust in product. , a New York City-based digital service, has itself by offering tangible cost-saving measures that promote patients’ using less-expensive care options such as telemedicine and emailing with doctors to diagnose a problem instead of booking a costly office or ER visit. As much as people agree that in America is in major need of repair ( found the majority of Americans would even prefer a “Medicare all” solution), startup founders can appreciate will never be an of . turned consumers from one transportation method onto another, effectively selling champagne to the masses. They’ve been able to change consumer behavior in a short period of time. But in the realm of , are too many regulations, constraints and basic laws of human behavior to overcome. But for the innovators who have the patience to follow through on their vision, and who don’t presume to cut the Gordian Knot of healthcare with a marketing gimmick or shiny app, there are fortunes to be made. Even more importantly, those innovations will facilitate lower costs, increased access and better outcomes to the U.S. consumer — what every American deserves.
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Clinton campaign breached by hackers
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Kate Conger
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Hillary Clinton’s campaign network was breached by hackers targeting several large Democratic organizations, . Clinton’s campaign spokesperson Nick Merrill confirmed the hack in a . “An analytics data program maintained by the DNC, and used by our campaign and a number of other entities, was accessed as part of the DNC hack. Our campaign computer system has been under review by outside security experts. To date, they have found no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised,” he said. The hack follows on the heels of breaches at the Democratic National Committee and at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee earlier this year. More than 19,000 were published on WikiLeaks just prior to the Democratic National Convention, casting a shadow over the proceedings. Some security experts and U.S. officials have attributed the breaches to Russian operatives, although . The DCCC is working with CrowdStrike to investigate the breach, according to Reuters. CrowdStrike also investigated the earlier breach at the DNC. The FBI said in a to the New York Times that it is aware of media reports of the breach and is “working to determine the accuracy, nature and scope of these matters.” “
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Microsoft awards hardware startup ENTy the 2016 Imagine Cup
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Devin Coldewey
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The festivities have wrapped for Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a global competition among students and young people to create new software and devices. was , a polished and highly practical hardware solution for tracking posture, helping with diagnosis and possibly treatment of diseases that affect balance. There were 35 teams in the finals, split evenly between three categories: games, innovation, and global citizenship. All of them presented to a panel of judges on Wednesday, after which a winner was selected for each category. Those three were each awarded $50,000, but the grand prize — prestige and a private mentoring session with Satya Nadella — was reserved for today’s final ceremony. It took place at my very own Garfield High School (go Bulldogs!) and filled up our newly refurbished Quincy Jones Auditorium. An energetic beatboxer opened things up, but with it being before 9AM and coffee not allowed inside, I was eager for things to get started in earnest. The teams await judgment. Eventually the finalists were ushered out, along with the three judges: Dr Jennifer Tang, a previous winner and founder of Eyenaemia; Kasey Champion, computer science education specialist at Microsoft Learning; and John Boyega, whom you might remember from 2011’s Attack the Block and some flick about a Star War. Not pictured: literally like 20 people dressed as Star Wars characters from the 501st, about 15 feet to my right. In the games category was clever mobile title, Timelie, that combines tactical stealth with control over time. In global citizenship was , which aims to prevent bullying with a VR experience that measures the user’s response to bullying-related media. And in innovation was ENTy. (the ENT stands for ear, nose, and throat — not the sentient trees) is a device and app that monitor balance and posture in real time, meant to help doctors diagnose and check up on inner ear problems like vertigo. The patient straps on a device the size of a pack of cigarettes to the small of their back, and a set of sensors sends data to an associated app. There’s a real-time readout of position, and you can see that over time as well for a test that, for example, requires a patient to stand straight for 20 seconds with their eyes closed. The live demo worked really well and certainly contributed to the team’s victory. The team is only three people, from Romania’s University Politechnica: Iulian-Razvan Mateșică on hardware, Cristian Alexandrescu on the app, and Flavia Oprea on business development. She took the lead in presenting the tech and fielding questions — extremely well I might add; in fact, all the presentations I saw were highly polished, especially for students for whom English is not their first, or even second, language. ENTy’s next step, presumably after getting some real talk from the CEO of Microsoft, will be to make the device a little more presentable. They’ve already tested it with several doctors and hundreds of patients, and the response has been very positive, but the device itself isn’t, as they say, ready for its close-up. “The doctors say they don’t want it any smaller,” Oprea said in a Q&A Thursday. “But we have a plan for B2C to make it smaller — it has to be, how do you say, a sexy wearable, for everybody.” To that end they are working with a firm in Bucharest to design and promote the device outside doctors’ offices, though the strictly medical side is also being pursued — but that seems to be mainly paperwork. Collecting data for machine learning is also on the table, but there’s even more red tape associated with that. After the ceremony, Oprea also spoke with great optimism about the prospects of young women in tech, at least in Bucharest. “The number of girls that are interested is growing,” she said. “We’re telling them not to be afraid, and not to listen to negative advice like ‘computers are for boys.'” As a final treat, Microsoft invited Garfield’s principal, Ted Howard, on stage to accept a donation: “$100,000 worth of” Surface Books, which I take to be 85 or 90 of them. The school is looking a lot better than it did when I was going there in the late ’90s, but you better believe GHS appreciates the gift — somehow I doubt they’re swimming in laptops. Here’s looking forward to next year’s cup and the fresh ideas that come with it. [gallery ids="1361441,1361440,1361439,1361438,1361437,1361436,1361435,1361434,1361433"]
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Gilded as charged
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Devin Coldewey
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skulks outside the periphery of every free site or service, but the more terrifying thought is that, to paraphrase “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” That’s what Reddit may be facing with a new form of advertising announced by the social news site earlier this week. Reddit doesn’t do well with change, so it’s no surprise that the immediate reaction from some quarters was hostile. On close inspection, though, the changes proposed aren’t either as heinous as some think, or as innocuous as others think. In both cases however, there seems to be apprehension at the possibility of being the proverbial frog in the pot. So what is this earth-shaking development? A new ad type called a Early reports made it sound worse than it is. This little exchange gives a nice flavor of the immediate reaction: They all got upvotes after the screenshot — I’m not a barbarian. (Love the gilding on the first one) A bit of damage control by starfishjenga and a helpful diagram spelled things out pretty well, though. At the top of many subreddits (those are the small, contained communities on the site, if you’ve never been or avoid the place) you’ll find a spot for simple, largely text-based ads. Maybe for a run-tracking app in r/fitness, or an upcoming title on r/games. It’s pretty straightforward and unobtrusive. Other small banner ads can be found in the sidebar on the right. Essentially, the change is that the sponsored slot at the top of any subreddit can have its content be a post from an ordinary user that an advertiser decides they like rather than an ad. The user is rewarded with Reddit Gold (a premium status that affords an ad-less experience, among other perks), and the advertiser gets to put a link on the far side of the post. Now, as the top comment on the points out, this really ain’t much of a change at first glance. It’s an ad people already see, and instead of content created by the advertiser, it’s stuff from the subreddit that, in all likelihood, many people already upvoted. But it isn’t the ad itself that’s making people nervous. It’s something much deeper than that. It’s the nature of advertising on the platform as a whole — and, to some extent, across the entire internet. The promise of social news services, the very essence of them, is one of control. In every other place, someone else is in control: the mainstream media, the politicians, the elite. But the trusty mob, armed with mice and keyboards rather than pitchforks (so 19th century), can exercise their will and create a counterbalance, a check to the establishment. That’s the story, anyway. It’s what draws us to these sites, that the story you’re seeing is there because lots of people like you (shout-out to the knights of the /new) thought you should see it, too. You probably know the feeling, and you understand why it’s valuable. Some pixel art of Mario and Yoshi created with beads by a user of r/pics is fun — and if, in a sponsored user post, House of Beads sends it to the top of the pile, well, that’s better than some copy from their ad team lamely trying to trick you into joining their bead of the month club. Or is it? The problem is not that the ad is itself good or bad, but that it blurs the boundary between advertising and content on a site, and a class of site, that has always prided itself on having a thick orangered line between the two. In short, what’s valued is sincerity, and monetizing sincerity is like pouring salt on a slug. People are weird. Add sponsored posts every 10 items in their Instagram feed and they take it in stride, but change the way the other nine are ordered and it’s war. Put a pre-roll ad on a YouTube series and they sit through it, but put them in video annotations and they unsubscribe. Show the world’s worst ads in the Facebook sidebar and they laugh it off, but put a relevant one with their friend’s face and watch the knives come out. What’s the logic? The latter examples all fall into a sort of advertising version of the uncanny valley — we’ll call it the unhappy valley for clarity. Make a plot of how effective stuff is versus its subtlety — which for simplicity we’ll define as 1/visibility (my algebra is rusty). On one side of the valley is straight-up ads clearly visible as such. We’ve lived with them for centuries and we understand they’re part of the media landscape. On the other side are the invisible ads — successful viral campaigns, for instance, or good product placement. We don’t even know we are experiencing them, but we absorb them anyway. In the middle, there? your problem. It’s where astroturfing, shady lifestyle blogs, and Microsoft ads generally fall. The thing is, people also have their pride. They want to know they’re being advertised to, so they can make an informed decision — the constrained dishonesty of banners and TV spots is now well understood by its target audience. Or, failing that, they take a sort of masochistic pleasure in being hoodwinked by a savvy marketer; it’s the same feeling as being shown a card trick, even if you lose a buck in the bargain. “Damn, you got me.” Got to respect the hustle, right? If you’re whether you’re being advertised to, however, it’s the worst of both worlds. You start being as skeptical of every piece of content as you would be of an ordinary ad. Because you know for sure coercion is masquerading somewhere in front of you in the form of ordinary content, you treat like a potential viral ad. Not only that, but you stop treating members of the community as such. You’re suspicious of the other people in your subreddit. Are they a plant from Big Bead? Did they make that post just to attract the attentions of Procter & Gamble? It was never a question before. Either it was a good post or a bad one — it couldn’t be an ad, because ads were at the top (though ). Now users will question the goodwill and impartiality of others they accepted implicitly before — others they may never have even given a second look. That kind of cynicism poisons the well. If users are potentially motivated by a material reward — of course, we’re talking Reddit Gold here, so this only goes so far — instead of by simply wanting others to see their post, that’s a blow to one of the fundamental attractions of social news. So where are the users left with this? It’s hard to say that this simple substitution is bad on its face, because it’s such an apparently harmless change. But the more important thing is the willingness on Reddit’s part to cross the streams of user-generated content and sponsored content. That’s a one-way street, philosophically at least, and it should be alarming to Redditors even if the new ad type isn’t. There isn’t much anyone can do, of course: there’s no credible alternative to Reddit right now, just some niche players, so there’s nowhere to go but nowhere. And although I doubt the powers that be at the company are really trying to ruin everything by monetizing you and spoiling the communities they’ve helped build, they must know that they’re crossing an important threshold here with what amounts to a captive audience. Reddit, like its predecessors, was always going to be living on borrowed time. That doesn’t make it a bad site (other things might, of course) any more than Twitter being unable to earn a dime makes a bad service. In both cases, and a hundred or a thousand more, reality has caught up with ambition and the end of the runway is approaching. Will they fly or die? Compromising a founding ideal is a great way to get a little lift, and it’s hard to find a company too proud to do it. Is this the end of Reddit as we know it? Well, Reddit as we it is a long time gone. It’s been a work in progress for quite a while. And it will be for some time to come. But the last year or two have offered a bit more insight on what its final shape will be. Personally, I don’t like the way it looks.
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Soylent founder’s abandoned “eco-living experiment” could land him in jail
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Sarah Buhr
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Soylent’s is facing criminal charges and fines up to $4,000 for allegedly refusing to remove a shipping container he placed on top of a hill behind his home in the Montecito Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. The head of the meal replacement startup weirdly named after a movie where they ground up and served people in drink form was charged with unpermitted construction, grading and zoning code violations in Los Angeles court today for a structure he dubbed on social media sites an “eco-living experiment.” Rhinehart built the structure on a hill within boundaries of his own property but failed to get the proper permits for the structure, according to the city attorney’s office. Rhinehart bought the property, which has no water or electricity hookups, for $21,300 at an auction in December, according to , which first reported the debacle.
The Department of Building and Safety conducted an inspection of the property in January after neighbor complaints and found the unpermitted 9’ x 30’ bright red shipping container on Rhinehart’s lot. According to prosecutors, Rhinehart abandoned the structure soon after placing it on top of the hill and let it become an “eyesore,” covered in trash and graffiti. The Soylent CEO refused several requests to remove what representatives from the L.A. city attorney’s office refer to as an “experimental living facility,” inciting ire from neighbors and raising safety concerns. “Unpermitted structures pose a safety risk. They also can be unsightly and erode the quality of life in a neighborhood,” City Attorney Mike Feuer . “My office will work to hold property owners accountable if they flout our building and safety laws.” Rhinehart, who could not be reached for comment, met with city attorneys last month and was asked to remove the structure but has so far refused to do so, according to the prosecution. He is scheduled for arraignment September 7th and could face up to two years in jail.
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Ticwatch 2 is a slick smartwatch that raised $500K on Kickstarter in just 3 days
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Jon Russell
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The Ticwatch, originally built for Chinese language users, will be available in English http://tcrn.ch/2aksBwV Posted by on Thursday, July 28, 2016 If you haven’t been tempted to buy a smartwatch yet, or have been disappointed by your purchase of an Apple Watch, one of Samsung’s (many) Gear wearables or others, there may be another option to consider. Last year , a Chinese smartwatch that really stood out from the competition. Impressive though it was, the watch was frustratingly only available in Mandarin. Until now: Mobvoi, the Beijing-based company behind the gadget, . Already it has attracted plenty of attention. After just three days on Kickstarter, more than 3,000 people have backed the project, propelling the Ticwatch 2 past $500,000 from its backers. The project smashed its modest $50,000 funding goal just 10 minutes after going live. That rush of interest means that the initial $100 “early bird” deal sold out, but the company is replenishing its other offers — which are priced upwards of $139 — to give latecomers the chance to grab a slice of the action. You may have never heard of Mobvoi, but it has plenty of links to Google — it was founded by ex-Googlers and . It made its name designing AI software and services, so the voice-control and commands on the Ticwatch are pretty impressive. Beyond functionality, the watch is well-thought-out, too. It uses a unique navigational setup wherein you essentially roll your finger along the side of the face to move between apps and screens, in addition to screen swipes and wrist movements. Yuanyuan Li, one of Mobvoi’s co-founders, told TechCrunch that the team is delighted by the initial reception the watch has received. “We’re working around the clock and watching new backers come in from across the world,” she said. The company sold the original Mandarin version of its watch via standard e-commerce channels in China, but, with the international model, it opted for crowdfunding to build a community of international users to help refine its software and services. “We love the community,” Li told TechCrunch in an interview. “This is the key reason we want to launch on Kickstarter. To have more early adopter tech users who have the vision to believe in true innovation.” An even earlier version of the international watch was actually seeded with a select group of users, who provided feedback via a closed Facebook Group. Li said that process enabled the team to refine and iterate the software — and in particular support for local services like Uber and Yelp — five times before its Kickstarter debut this week. “We have a big vision to ‘make AI empowered products with innovation,’ but also understand we must take every step very carefully and iterate with the community,” she added. Unlike some Kickstarter projects, the Ticwatch 2 hardware is proven, which makes the chances of receiving the product pretty high. Software and connected services are where the key development lies. Li said that Mobvoi is working to refine the English language software, stamp out bugs (we noticed a few during our demo with the watch) and lure developers to create apps for the home-forked version of Android that powers the watch. Getting the same level of support for apps and services that Ticwatch enjoys in China — where you can order a pizza, book a taxi or browse restaurants using voice commands — will define how useful its international version can be. Software is the area in which Mobvoi specializes, but operations is not. Li admitted that the steepest challenge right now is logistics, and ensuring that backers across the world get the product, particularly due to regulations around transporting products with lithium batteries. But, hey, those are far better odds than , many of which are pre-manufacturing or fraught with risk when investing your cash. Mobvoi’s eventual goal is to sell the watch, and other products like unveiled this summer, to customers overseas. Li said the company hasn’t gotten around to even working on partnerships yet since it is fully focused on developing the Ticwatch 2 for international audiences. Nonetheless, she hopes that it can become a major player in the global smartwatch market in the future. .
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Pokémon Go’s paying user base has reached a plateau
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Sarah Perez
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Pokémon Go may be and is said to be raking in , but a new report out on Friday suggests that the popular game’s paying user base may have already shrunk. According , the app’s paying users peaked mid-July when the game had 56 percent more paying players than all other mobile games combined — a remarkable figure. But since July 15th, the game’s group of paying players has shrunk by 32 percent, the report claims. Players spend real money to buy PokéCoins in Pokémon Go, which allows them to buy items that can be used in the game, like Poké Balls, Lure Modules, Lucky Eggs, Incense and more. Because of Pokémon Go’s massive footprint and traction, as of July 15th, the purchase of these PokéCoins accounted for 52 percent of the entire mobile gaming market’s revenue, making Pokémon Go potentially the most lucrative game ever. That being said, it’s common for mobile games to see its buying population decline at some point after launch. And even though Pokémon Go may have already hit that point, if Slice’s data is accurate, it still held out a lot longer than any other mobile game. For example, Clash Royale’s paying users topped out the fourth day after launch, while Pokémon Go grew an entire week before it reached its plateau. Slice’s data, for background, is extracted from e-receipts, including those that reference in-app purchases on iTunes and Google Play. For this study, the firm says it looked at receipt data from 237,484 players. In addition, Slice found that the game has been strong with repeat buyers — again, more so than its peers. Half of paying users who bought an item in the game during its first week returned the next week, and spent, on average, $20 each. Clash Royale, on the other hand, only saw 39 percent of its players make a repeat purchase. Also worth noting is the fact that Pokémon Go has managed to tap into a user base that historically hasn’t spent money in mobile games — at least, not in 2016. The report found that over 40 percent of those who spent in Pokémon Go hadn’t made even one other purchase in a mobile game all year. Slice’s report didn’t speak much as to why Pokémon Go may have reached its plateau, in terms of paying players, besides noting that it’s common for games to do so after launch. However, unlike other games to have hit the market, Pokémon Go saw a significant number of more casual players join, thanks to its viral spread. Some of these players may have checked out the game and played actively for several days, including spending money, before dropping off to less obsessive levels of engagement. That doesn’t mean they’re gone for good, however. Another factor that could have come into play is that the game has suffered from its popularity, with , and freezing, leading to . That could have impacted users’ ability to spend in the app, if not their desire. Unrelated to spending, Slice also looked at the demographics of Pokémon Go users, and discovered that its male-female split is nearly 60:40 — like the gender makeup of the total gaming population. Players are also largely millennial (now 44 percent of users), and Gen Xers (one-third are.) [gallery size="full" ids="1361342,1361341"]
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The Freewrite is the ultimate distraction-free writing tool
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John Biggs
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is awful. Without discipline – in my case, at least – an effort to get out 1,000 words of non-fiction usually ends up consisting of thirty minutes of web browsing before writing, intermittent Facebook trips while tapping out a few hundred words, and a nice jaunt through Hacker News at the 750 word mark. I get the job done, but I know my brain isn’t doing its best work. So what’s the solution? I’ve tried all of the distraction-free tools – , and I even bought an to pull myself away from the computer. None of them really worked. Then I got my hands on the and found some real freedom. The Freewrite looks like a little piece of hipster paradise. It is a mechanical keyboard connected to an E-ink screen and it has two honking big mechanical switches and a big, jolly power button. You have three draft “folders” – selected by the left arrow crank – and you can connect to Wi-Fi and upload your drafts to Freewrite’s service or almost any other file storage solution including Google Drive and Dropbox. There are no arrow keys and the assumption is that you turn it on, select a draft and start writing. A small window under the main editing window shows the time, the time elapsed, or word count. It has a massive, clicky mechanical keyboard and it’s designed specifically for writing. Your text appears on a fast-refreshing E-ink screen. It lasts a few weeks on one charge via USB-C.
It may look like a toy but the Freewrite is a serious writing machine. The fact that it is specifically designed to wean you off of distractions is massively important as a writer and I was able to begin a project quickly and I could foresee myself finishing a novel on this thing without much trouble and with a great deal of pleasure. The Freewrite enables a certain kind of, shall we say, violent writing. Because it has no filters your words can come out as a torrent. However, for serious writing you need to edit as you puke words onto the page. This is impossible with the Freewrite. It is designed primarily for the word excretion process and has no editing features. What you end up with is good if unedited copy, a simulacrum of what you used to get with a regular paper typewriter. In fact that’s exactly what they’re going for with the Freewrite’s hefty design. It is a piece of machinery, something less evanescent than a MacBook Air, and the mechanical keyboard offers just the right amount of clickiness to make you remember that you are writing, not putzing on Twitter. It’s a strange feeling to use a dedicated piece of hardware to write but it’s a welcome one. But we moved away from typewriters for a reason. Using computers gives you better, more readable copy faster, which is not a benefit if you’re trying to get your Zombie-fied satire of Remembrance of Things Past out the door before the end of NaNoWriMo but great if you’re trying to write a history paper or non-fiction tome. In that case, unless you have a powerful sense of the entire arc of your story, the Freewrite hobbles more than helps.
The Freewrite is also very big. It is 9×12 inches and about three inches thick – far bigger than any modern laptop. You can’t put this into your laptop bag with your laptop. You have to choose. Thankfully it has a big handle on the back so you can lug it from cafe to cafe.
What’s the bottom line? I could see myself writing a novel on one of these things. I actually did start one and found that the writing was more succinct and focused, a true benefit in an era of distractions. I wrote a bit of a horror novel on the Freewrite just to try it out and I found the lack of editing features quite freeing. I was able to scroll back and check on character facts as necessary but instead of skipping around I wrote in a sort of daze, one word in front of the other, until I hit my goal. It felt good. You’ll notice plenty of typos, however, and a few errors. The Freewrite assumes always that you will edit somewhere else.
Am I enough of a fan to abandon a computer for a Freewrite? Not completely, but it’s definitely a tool I would incorporate into my daily writing habit. The Freewrite costs $499. For that price you could buy a cheap computer or 40 nice notebooks. The decision you’re making when you bring the Freewrite into your writing life is whether or not you need – absolutely – the ability to sit in a flow state and just let words come out onto the e-ink screen. If you think you do – and I know I do – it’s a good investment and will truly help you get words onto paper (or hard drive). If you never find yourself distracted or don’t mind being distracted while writing fiction, the Freewrite would be just a toy that will make your writing less efficient if more focused. In the end the question remains: Is your brain such a muddle that you need a standalone hardware device to keep from clicking over to Facebook? If the answer to that question is “yes” then the Freewrite is the ultimate solution to that age-old problem. [gallery ids="1361127,1361126,1361125,1361124,1361123,1361122"]
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Apple’s Tim Cook is hosting a Clinton campaign fundraiser this August
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Sarah Buhr
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It’s no secret Hillary Clinton has a friend in Silicon Valley elites. Now Apple CEO Tim Cook will be helping the democratic presidential candidate raise some cash for her campaign next month, according to an invitation letter obtained by . Cook, who will be hosting the fundraiser for the Hillary Victory Fund as a private citizen, not as an Apple rep, will be joined by Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives Lisa Jackson. The fundraiser is slated for August 24 and Cook plans to address guests at the event. Neither the Clinton campaign nor Cook could be reached for comment on the fundraiser. However, Apple’s chief seems to be working both sides of the political table this election season. He hosted a similar fundraiser for Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Apple employees have donated to both Republicans and Democrats, including the Bernie Sanders campaign, according to the data. Trump, who , has not been extended the same warm hand from Cook or other Apple employees.
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Square Enix’s new RPG comes to the Apple Watch
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Brian Heater
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Because if someone builds a screen, Square Enix is going to bring an RPG to it – no matter how small or seemingly difficult such a proposition might ultimately be. is the gaming company’s – and it’s an exclusive no less. The title utilizes an accompanying iPhone app, but users need Apple’s wearable to play. The $6 game is set in “a dark and timeless world,” in which a hero must, naturally, travel through a rift to rescue the Goddess of Time. Easier said than done, as you might expect. Square refers to the role playing game as “an Apple Watch experience,” which betrays the somewhat limited interactivity of a game that does its best with limited gameplay possibilities, featuring automatic attacks among other hand-holding gameplay. At the very least, Square has filled the watch’s 1.65 inches of real estate with some beautiful looking and extremely colorful graphics – not to mention a solid diversion during important business meetings when you really ought to be focusing on the task at hand. But the Goddess of Time isn’t going to save herself.
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This is (very likely) the new Samsung Gear VR
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Lucas Matney
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As Samsung prepares to launch its next-gen phablet extraordinaire, the Note 7, at its special event this upcoming Tuesday, the leaks are continuing to flow. Today, photos of the new Gear VR were leaked from leaker (h/t ). The device is reportedly going to be sporting a USB Type-C connection which corroborates reports that the new Note 7 will be shifting to the new connection type. This headset is reportedly a bit bigger (207mm x 122mm x 98.5mm) if not just to accommodate the sheer size of Samsung’s ballooning devices. The Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge is a pretty snug fit in the old Gear VR headset (198mm x 116mm x 90mm) so it’s no surprise that Samsung’s new hallmark phablet might need some new digs to get in on the VR game. The new headset reportedly gets a boost in field-of-view (110-degrees compared to the old model’s 96-degrees) that brings its FoV up to par with higher-end headsets from Oculus and HTC. The color change from white to black is a very welcome one that goes beyond the aesthetic. The old white plastic Gear VR often fell victim to a slight amount of light leakage when played on sunny days which really just didn’t make any sense. That said, Samsung does lose a bit of its Gear VR brand power as a result of the color change since its a bit difficult to tell the difference between this and every other black mobile VR headset out there, but Samsung may very well continue selling a white version so ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Other than that, there’s not really that much to see here that’s changed. There aren’t any visual clues to what the other side of the device holds. The old headset sported a touchpad for rudimentary input controls, and while this one is highly likely to maintain that setup, there has been some talk of an external Bluetooth controller being included for compatibility with Google’s which Samsung has already signed on as a partner for. TechCrunch will be on the floor at Samsung’s Unpacked event next week checking out what Samsung ends up showing off, though it seems there won’t be a ton of surprises given how many freaking leaks there have already been.
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Genovation’s GXE breaks the land speed record for a street-legal all-electric car
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7REQyK3KlI&w=640&h=360] You probably aren’t trying to set a land speed record for an all-electric, street legal car, but if you are, I have bad news: The goalposts just got moved further out. ‘s Extreme Electric (GXE) car, which uses a Corvette Z06 chassis with a custom electric drive under the hood, broke its previous record of 186.8 mph by a margin of nearly 20 mph. The new record now stands at 205.6 mph. That’s fast. How fast? Well, not quite as fast as the fastest gas-guzzling legal production vehicle, which is the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super Sport which maxed out at 258 mph. But the GX’s record-breaking run at Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility is an important milestone for something that employs entirely electric power. The GXE isn’t exactly a mass-market vehicle, of course. Even though it can technically drive on the streets, you’ll need at least $300,000 to pick one up. But the performance overall might surprise you – I was expecting little to no range, but the vehicle’s 44-kWh battery will provide around 120 miles of range, provided you’re driving normally and aren’t, say, trying to break a land-speed record.
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