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When’s the best time to share on Facebook?
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Antoine Amann
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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There’s all manner of advice and guidance on the web for online publishers looking to optimize their social media efforts. , , , , , , and others all claim to have the answers to such seemingly simple questions as “When is the best time to post on Facebook?” and “How often should you post stories on Facebook?” However, many of the strategies used by publishers for optimizing engagement and boosting referral traffic from social are flawed. Using data from leading publishers, we will dispel the myths and demonstrate that there are no universal “best times” to share content on Facebook. We analyzed the median traffic that articles received from Facebook three hours after they were shared. Using the median for all stories and a year’s worth of data helped ensure the analysis wasn’t skewed by outliers. Our analysis garnered some fascinating discoveries. Firstly, when we compared three major publishers of national and international news based in South America, France and the U.K., we found significant variance in the shape of the traffic profiles for each publisher. As can be seen in the above chart, the South American publisher achieved best performance when sharing between 11am and 4pm, and poor performance at other times. The British and French publishers, meanwhile, achieved more consistent results throughout the day, although both experienced peaks in referral traffic at different times. It’s clear there is no one-size-fits-all approach for publishers, even if they are in the same category — optimal times vary depending on the location of the audience. One explanation for this could be that daily routines and behaviors vary between countries and cultures, which therefore impacts media consumption patterns. The natural next question is whether there are country-wide best times for posting stories on Facebook. Could it be that readers in France all consume content more consistently throughout the day than the South Americans? Can there be specific guides per country? We compared traffic data from that same French news publisher with a top-10 French sports publisher of similar size and found that while before 10am they achieved similar results, the curves then diverge. By early afternoon, the news publisher is enjoying a strong peak in traffic, whilst the sports publisher is in a pronounced trough. Overall, the sports publisher’s traffic is more consistent, with fewer dramatic peaks and troughs, while the news publisher has clearly demarked periods when more readers are clicking through to their stories. Even for two publications of equivalent size working in the same country, there are stark differences in audience behavior depending on the subject matter of the content. We also compared two similar publications in the same country and looked at the traffic profiles of two top-10 French news publishers. There were still crucial differences — when one publisher experienced a peak in share performance at 11am, it is in fact one of the worst times for the other publisher to be sharing. Interestingly, there also seems to be significant variance based on article topic. We looked at 220,000 Facebook posts made by our publisher clients between March 20 and July 10, 2016, and sorted them according to the time of day at which they were shared. We then compared performance of posts based on whether the articles were about sports or technology. All shares were obtained using local time, in order to compensate for time zone differences, then normalized by average client performance and volume. Again, there are important differences, and these nuances help us understand the characteristics of audiences and their varying appetite for particular content types at different times of the day. But even these descriptions of the individual publishers do not do the subtlety of the data justice. To get the most accurate picture, a publisher would need to perform this analysis again on a real-time basis due to strong daily fluctuations. Indeed this is why many publishers now commit very significant resource to optimizing their performance — with large social media teams and even data scientists.
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Slowly but surely, Congress will join us in the 21st century
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Lorelei Kelly
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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With Congress’ approval ratings in the single digits, and in the midst of an ugly political season, our legislature might not appear as a hopeful place to start putting U.S. democracy back on track. And shows like “House of Cards” that depict Congress as sinister and conspiratorial don’t help its dismal reputation. The truth is less dystopian, if not as entertaining: Congress isn’t organized enough to be devious. If you look past the headlines to the slow but persistent , you’ll see that the organization of Congress is changing in ways that will help it be a more informed, inclusive and effective democratic institution. Congress is in the process of adapting to the disruptive and data-driven demands of the 21st century. It is difficult to detect this progress on the outside, because, unlike the president and the executive branch, nobody speaks for Congress as a whole. The institution can’t defend itself, and therefore suffers disproportionately in today’s angry political discourse. The unhinged rise of social media in public life, plus the Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited anonymous money into politics, has hit our democratic institutions at a vulnerable moment. Moreover, neither major party has made the modern institutional case for the importance of our first branch of government (Congress). If the political parties cared about democracy as much as they do about raising money, they would devote themselves to renewing our governing institutions and championing Congress. The Democrats would give Congress ways to experiment like the Brazilian Parliament, which features a hacker lab. The Republicans would be the guardians of the institution; they would insist on respectful codes of conduct and fact checking, like true conservatives. Both parties would seek out best practices in other legislatures that are modernizing representative democracy. The leadership would set aside campaigning to encourage their members to engage, experiment, learn and share on behalf of the institution. While valiant efforts exist on both sides of the aisle, helping the institution evolve in this way is not yet a high priority. More obvious is our legislature’s self-inflicted damage, primarily to its ability to engage in critical thinking. Congress’ problem managing knowledge is not an accident, it is an outcome. just a few years after the end of the Cold War, and on the cusp of the internet revolution. In the process, the GOP majority eliminated much of Congress’ capacity for critical thinking. The legislature’s science forecasting agency (the Office of Technology Assessment) was defunded. Seeing public sector infrastructure as competition to the private sector, the new leadership then wiped out the shared issue caucus staff — which performed much of the continuing education on complex policy for members of both chambers and both parties. Keep in mind, these global public interests — things like hunger, disease and nuclear security — don’t have strong domestic constituencies, so they can’t compete with well-funded private interests or narrow advocacy tactics. The policy-relevant entities who thrived inside Congress after this lobotomy were ideologically aligned “think tanks” that took over substantive policy tasks and K Street lobbyists who began to have more and better policy intelligence at their fingertips than Congress did. The GOP also cut back the committees, diminishing institutional memory by getting rid of permanent committee staff. Finally, the Republicans “consolidated” the Congressional Research Service (CRS) — the world’s premier legislative knowledge bank — to severely restrict specialized knowledge. In fact, CRS did not have a dedicated intelligence expert on staff during the 2013 Snowden revelations, having never replaced their expert when he retired. Congress needs a democratic content strategy. Like tech innovators in Silicon Valley, citizens who want to help build a 21st Congress can start by thinking about how technology can tap the excess capacity of our democracy. The first steps for Congress will be organizing the knowledge of geographic constituencies so that it is trusted and relevant, and then integrated into the stodgy, old processes of lawmaking. What is a new division of labor for civics when information is participatory? What are the rules of engagement for expanded inclusion? For disclosure of conflicts of interest? What new constituencies can you offer your member of Congress and your senators? Are you a technologist? How about checking in with the local staff and introducing them to the hacker community. Are you a data nerd? Develop a micro-media press list of district-based tweeters and Facebook or blog posters who are reputable, follow it up with a meet-up to authenticate participation and determine how to create usable formats (bonus if you can match expertise to the members’ ). Are you an events organizer? Help your member discover new ways to safely and productively engage with constituents on policy issues. Are you a community journalist? Create a dashboard together with your representative’s local staff that organizes relevant information. Tailor it for the members’ institutional responsibilities or for surge capacity in a crisis. Are you a low-tech online reader? Click through your member’s website and contact the front office with a list of dead links. Last year, a member office called me seeking Midwestern veterinarians with goat-herding knowledge for the Ebola hearings. Those veterinarians’ minds are the excess capacity of democracy. We need to create a decentralized decision support system for our legislature using this abundance — one that complements the great work of Congress’ own knowledge resources. How about a question and answer site that lives through a season of hearings, maintained in the chair’s district by a public university or community college? Moreover, if the committees are falling behind on Capitol Hill, let’s move some of the hearings into the states so local experts and experienced constituents can weigh in. Thoughtful deliberation and learning can happen anywhere, after all. Across the globe, governance is in crisis. The reputation of democracy is at stake. Not just Americans, but the world needs our democratic institutions to do more than survive the present chaos — we need them to thrive. How the United States moves forward to scale inclusion in the coming years counts more than usual. If we can meet these changes inside of Congress with a helpful, ready corps of citizens, we have a chance to build a system based on 21st-century power, where reputation, location, information integrity and ethical conduct are stronger than angry voices and endless money.
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App platform Kinetise aims to bring app building to the enterprise
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Jay Donovan
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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, an app building platform and Disrupt hackathon favorite, aims to democratize the the the process of creating native mobile apps for iOS and Android in the enterprise. Using a drag-and-drop interface, the system essentially lets you build and deploy native apps, visually. In this way, non-developers are able to create and deploy mobile apps. The company originally focused on selling app development to startups but soon found that “citizen developers” inside of big enterprise organizations were using the platform to make one-off apps for data collection. The company recently added a number of enterprise-ready features as a result including encrypted connections, powerful database tools, and improved GPS location management. This means that a lay user in a corporation could use the platform to track deliveries, collect insurance claims in the field, or simply create time-tracking apps. Historically I have been suspect of platform approaches like this. When I first encountered these kinds of tools a few years ago, their main use was for developers to be able to build mobile apps for multiple operating systems (like iOS, Android, Blackberry) from a single logical base of business rules and then publish multiple apps simultaneously. Not being a hardcore developer myself, I heard different opinions from different developers at that time. More traditional developers I spoke with loved the idea and were hopeful that there could be massive time savings. Mobile developers I spoke with were pessimistic and thought the tools would be brittle and inflexible for solving true mobile solutions in native languages. But system is far more robust than others I’ve seen and honestly what interested me the most about it were some of the outcomes the team discovered. In a quick skype call with Kinetize’s CEO Piotr Pawlak, he described a key insight he and his team noticed prior to one deployment.
“We started our product as an easy way to make native apps. We were pretty popular with startups and experimenters but we saw something really interesting: enterprises were using our product to make one-off apps,” he said. “We did a little research and it looks like enterprise is following what Gartner called the “Citizen Developers” model: they’re building internal apps instead of web pages.” Therein lies one of Kinetise’s strengths. It is a rapid development program for internal, enterprise apps. Granted, the platform still has a way to build apps for regular public deployment in app stores too, but enterprise seems to be a major target and strength. I can see this advantage, as there are definitely many, large workforces of remote, mobile, enterprise workers out there who need mobile tools that have the ability to function “offline” when network connectivity is not possible. For these scenarios, native mobile apps are a great solution and would have an advantage over mobile websites. “Kinetise is not another template-based apps creator,” said Pawlak. “We are not building apps for restaurants, beauty-parlors, etc. We offer real, custom apps, but without coding. Our customers put those apps together like kids put together LEGO bricks but when they’re done they have a working app on Android and iOS. No one else can say that.” The client responses they are getting are fueling their confidence that their approach is robust enough be a legit development tool and are aiming to disrupt the the status quo of mobile app development.
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After more than a decade, the fire still burns for Box CEO Aaron Levie
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Ron Miller
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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Box CEO Aaron Levie has been at it for more than a decade. For a guy barely past 30, that means it’s all he’s done professionally for his entire adult life. You could forgive him if he were thinking about another challenge, but even after all this time, the fire still clearly burns for Levie. When I asked him about possibly getting bored in an in-person interview this week at BoxWorks, he paraphrased Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who is a Box customer, saying “if you’re bored, you’re not being creative enough.” I’ve been having regular conversations with Levie since 2009 when he was trying to get his young startup some attention. Today, as a public company and all the responsibility that entails, it still seems to me that he’s in it to win it. He wants to continue to build his company into an enterprise powerhouse, one that can take on the biggest software companies in this space. He wouldn’t comment about rumors that there have been large companies sniffing around Box about an acquisition, but he said he’s still very much focused on being an independent company. “I think if you look at past 3-6 months, and look at the M&A market, there is more of an appetite for tech companies, for disruptive fast-growing companies. We will do $396M in revenue, which is our guidance for this year. We are disrupting a $30-40 billion market. We are maybe one percent of the way to where we want to accomplish. We’ve been doing this for over a decade, but we are so early in this mission and journey. We remain focused on staying independent and building the company ourselves.” Part of the problem seems to be that even after all this time, many people still don’t get what Box does, yet he doesn’t seem frustrated by this. He just keeps plugging away and says, while the general public and Wall Street may still have trouble identifying what he’s trying to do, he doesn’t let it affect his ultimate mission. “We’ve been very consistent with our long-term view,” Levie told me. “If you measured your value by stock price, you would be frustrated, but we hear from our customers and they see the value. That’s why we build technology,” he said. He says the company is continuing to change, grow and evolve because it sees the way people work changing, and that’s what keeps it interesting for him. “We were on the disruptive side for a number of years, at the same time when we look at the next decade about how companies will work, trends of today will be more broad and significant — big data, machine learning, analytics — much bigger tends than what drove Box in 2005. We have to build a product for the future,” he said. He understands that it’s his job to explain to Wall Street and the broader world beyond the customers that are on board already, what that vision entails and how the company plans to get there. If they don’t understand, he needs to refine his message to be more clear. That said, there’s plenty of room to grow and change and that is what seems to keep driving him. “What’s great about this, is there is always something to get excited about. Change makes it impossible to become bored. We try to focus on things that are exciting and transformational,” he said.
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Anthony Ha
| 2,016
| 9
| 28
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Gillmor Gang: The Enterprise Show
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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From Gillmor Gang Studios: The Enterprise Gang — Paul Greenberg, Esteban Kolsky, Brent Leary, Denis Pombriant, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Monday, August 8, 2016. This enterprise-focused version of the Gang features four leading independent analysts in a discussion about the changing nature of industry influencers, thought leaders, and the media. The growing impact of realtime social networks is changing the nature of television, politics, and the business world as consumer technologies and the mobile revolution intersect with the digital economy. @stevegillmor, @pgreenbe, @ekolsky, @denispombriant, @BrentLeary Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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The Beginning Of Protest
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Jon Evans
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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The most provocative book I’ve read this year is , by Micah White, one of the two initiators of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Remember Occupy? Those crazy days when, giddy with the apparent success of the previous year’s , independent, decentralized groups of protestors, connected by cell phones and social media, seized public spaces across America and… …nothing, really. In the end Occupy was a complete failure which accomplished nothing. To White’s credit, he writes with brutal frankness about this, and, more generally, about how political protest as we know it — marches, speeches, slogans, “clicktivism” — has been completely ineffective for decades, and is growing even less so with every passing year. Next week is the fifth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. That was a great buy signal. — Eddy Elfenbein (@EddyElfenbein) White does raise the interesting notion, though, of a form of protest; one with an actually meaningful “theory of change”; an inchoate spectre that could haunt, chill, and even overthrow Establishment capitalism as we know it. A timely subject, in this election and Brexit year. It’s fair to say that we live in a time of growing ambient discontent. People want political freedom and economic freedom, but there exists a widespread perception that politics are ruled by and economic gains are increasingly going to a , as tech leads us all . Will robots eat the jobs? Maybe. Sure isn’t happening yet. But, , the rise of AI and automation “is qualitatively different from previous episodes of technological change. Will it have different consequences…? How can anyone know yet?” The :
But there is another conversation happening in the valley today. Its premise is that, when it comes to populist revolt, we may have seen nothing yet … If you think globalization, immigration, trade and demographic change have contributed to displacement and political anger, wait until robots take away millions and millions of jobs, including those requiring the use of a well-trained brain.
I’ve argued that myself, in the past, but the lack of any actual evidence of automation-driven net job destruction now gives me pause. It may be a moot point, though. The question of whether robots will eat all the jobs is orthogonal to the question of whether people robots will eat all the jobs — and whether the tech industry will be viewed as the oppressors of the masses. “I really think the pitchforks and torches are coming for us in tech,” mused a member of Business Insider’s “ ” to me over dinner a couple of months ago. (To his credit he’d be the first to roll his eyes at the existence of such an appellation.) I’ve certainly noticed, during my five years living in the Bay Area, a distinct rise in the use of “techie” as an epithet. My point being: it seems reasonable to expect the rise of new protests, and new of protests, aimed not just at political institutions à la Occupy; not just at injustices à la Black Lives Matter and the current pipeline protests in North Dakota; but aimed directly at the tech industry. We’ve seen some of that before, with stones thrown at Google buses, but that was really more about housing than tech. I’m talking about protestors who believe that the tech industry is a greedy, exploitative, and increasingly powerful behemoth which uses its power to reify rather than repair existing social inequalities and injustices. I don’t believe that’s true, on the whole, but I do think there are uncomfortable grains of truth in that accusation. As Andrew Yang of Venture for America writes in , “ .” The annual diversity reports from such wildly successful and progressive companies as Apple and Google make grim reading each year. Certainly the Occupy people think the perpetuation of unfair advantages is fault, not ‘s, but, er, the distinction between “capitalism” and “the tech industry” grows pretty fine in an era in which the world’s five most valuable public companies are Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft — the same five tech titans that Bruce Sterling singled out as “the Stacks” . , after putting Occupy in (fascinating) historical context, identifies the reason that protests fail as a kind of entitled naivete — the bizarre belief that if you get a million people out onto the street demonstrating, then governments will to respect that and change course, because it clearly represents the will of the people. Interestingly, a lot of what White says about protests and revolution is what tech VCs say about startup. That the real secret to success is timing: every so often, the zeitgeist will sweep you along on its tidal wave (which is actually what happened to Occupy, which quickly grew beyond its wildest initial dreams — and yet still failed.) That “the best methods of protest are unrecognized because they defy our expectations of what a protest should look like,” which echoes VCs’ lament that many of the best ideas sound crazy at first. That “if we innovate, we win.” (I would remiss not to note that White also writes at length about spiritual paths and spiritual process; this being anything but my area of expertise, I’m going to refrain from commenting on that.) There will be a certain dramatic irony if the tech industry finds itself facing protestors who adopt the very meta-algorithms of the modern tech industry: ignore history, try many different ideas even if they sound crazy, fail fast and pivot, scale sideways, accept that timing dictates success, etcetera. (Shades of the notion of left-wing .) I think that such a future is likely, though, in the light of the heightening awareness, or at least perception, of inequalities and injustices today — and the ever more prominent role of the tech industry.
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Camorama records 360-degree 4K video for your VR pleasure
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John Biggs
| 2,016
| 9
| 10
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While the promo video is a bit, shall we say, racy I think the product is pretty solid. It’s basically a 4K action cam that doubles as a 360-degree camera. This means you can record 360-degree videos for a mere $239 for early birds. Who would want such witchcraft? 360-degree video is pretty cool stuff and it could mean that we can expect more VR video on Youtube and other services. Because the camera films at 4K you can also grab some nice video of your various exciting activities and stream them live to YouTube and Facebook. If you have Google Cardboard you can check out the film below for an example of what this can do. If you don’t, enjoy the weirdly distorted future of video. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbgvSxn63y4] The produce ships in November and the creator, James Sung, has been known to deliver on time and on spec. I don’t much like Kickstarter projects these days – too much overpraise – but this looks to be just under the realm of impossibility and the company has already raised $150,000 for the product. I, personally, want to VR stream my life as a blogger. The video would consist of hours of silence punctuated by trips to the coffee maker and random howls of horror at how deeply sad my life has become. Plus the opening of beers.
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StarOfService raises $10 million for its service marketplace
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016
| 9
| 19
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French startup just raised another $10 million for its European alternative. Andrea Piccioni and Silvio Pagliani, ENERN Investments and Point Nine Capital participated in today’s round, as well as various business angels. When I StarOfService, the company didn’t even try to hide from me that it was a Thumbtack copycat. The main difference is that Thumbtack is still only available in the U.S. StarOfService has used this opportunity to get customers in untapped markets. Here’s a quick recap in case you aren’t familiar with the Thumbtack model. If you need to hire a plumber, a guitar teacher, a photographer and more, you can tell the platform what you’re looking for. Over the next 24 hours, professionals can bid on your request. The client can finally pick a service provider based on reviews and quotes. While this system might not be efficient enough if there’s a giant leak in your bathroom or you’re in the middle of a power outage, many projects require you to find the right person — for home improvement, event-based and teaching jobs, waiting a day or two before connecting with the right professional seems fair. And it seems to be working as the startup has generated around $900 million (€800 million) in business volume — StarOfService takes a cut from this number. The startup has developed specific websites for Italy, Spain, Germany, the U.K., Poland, Australia, Canada, Turkey, Brazil, India and France. Even though StarOfService started as a copycat, it looks like the startup has bigger ambitions now. It seemed unrealistic a couple of years ago, but maybe the startup now has a shot at becoming the global leader in this market — minus the U.S. While Thumbtack has , if the company doesn’t expand internationally quickly enough, there might not be enough room to compete properly with StarOfService outside of the U.S. With today’s funding round, StarOfService plans to expand internationally more aggressively. This kind of companies require a lot of capital for search engine optimization, online ads and recruiting professionals. And if this expansion is working, it’s just step one as there should be more expansion pushes in the future.
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French online restaurant FoodChéri raises €6M Series A
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,016
| 9
| 19
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French food delivery startup , which operates an online only restaurant along the lines of in the UK or Munchery’s original model in the US, has raised €6 million in Series A funding led by 360 Capital Partners, and Breega Capital. Spanish VC Samaipata Ventures (a fund managed by the founders of online takeout ordering marketplace La Nevera Roja) also participated, along with food and beverage “growth fund” Ambrosia Investments. Also noteworthy is that Samaipata Ventures is already , the Europe same-hour delivery startup, which counts food delivery as one of its most popular categories. Currently serving 1,000 meals per day to “busy professionals” in Paris and various suburbs, including Neuilly-sur-Seine, Levallois, Boulogne-Billancourt, and Issy-les-Moulineaux, FoodChéri lets you order fresh chef-prepared meals that are chilled and ready to reheat and consume upon delivery. It’s a model that avoids some of the pitfalls faced by restaurant delivery services, such as UberEATs and Deliveroo, in that orders can be pooled for delivery as food doesn’t need to be delivered hot. FoodChéri also enables orders to be placed “on-demand” or days in advance. “[We help] city dwellers eat fresher, healthier home-style meals with the convenience of fast food delivered to your doorstep,” explains FoodChéri co-founder and CEO Patrick Asdaghi, who was previously CMO of La Fourchette. “We solve it with a ‘full-stack’ food operation, from creating the recipe and preparing the ingredients to last-mile delivery, and everything in between”. Asdaghi tells me the initial focus for FoodChéri was serving dinner for busy professionals, but in April 2016 added lunches. The startup also targets smaller companies that don’t have their own cafeterias or are looking to provide an alternative and healthier lunch option for staff. “Many of our customers work full-time and don’t always have the time or energy to make their own meals, or want a change from the local cafeteria or snack shop, but still want to eat well without exploding their budget. In France our main competitor is Frichti even though they have a slightly different positioning in terms of the food offering”, he adds. Meanwhile, FoodChéri says the funds will primarily be used to extend delivery areas within the Greater Paris region before potential international expansion. In addition, the startup plans to spend on recruitment to add a further dozen or so staff to its current 40 person headcount, and for further product development.
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Chevrolet Bolt EV starts at $29,995 U.S. with federal tax credits
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,016
| 9
| 19
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Chevrolet’s new Bolt EV is a vehicle that has dubbed “Tesla-walloping,” and its pricing seems like a direct shot at Tesla’s lineup, including the forthcoming Model 3, which is set to be the dedicated electric carmaker’s more “affordable” option. Chevrolet revealed specific pricing and trim details for the base model Bolt EV LT, which begins at $37,495 US and which drops to $29,995 with the maximum $7,500 federal government tax credit applied – just squeaking under the stated $30K post-credit ceiling Chevy has been touting for a while now. The official price details are more or less just Chevrolet filling in the remaining digits for a $29,XXX.XX price-after-incentives we’d all generally come to expect, then, but we also now know what you get standard in that Bolt EV trim level in addition to an EPA-rated 238 mile range on a single charge (the Model 3’s base model range is currently set at 215 miles). It also has a “Regen on Demand” steering wheel paddle, which is Chevy’s trademark tech for letting the driver slow the vehicle, and regenerate some battery power via friction at varying rates controllable right from the wheel. The regen paddle helps drivers looking to perfect a single pedal driving technique, which is possible in EVs like the Bolt where regenerative braking triggers as soon as you let your foot off the accelerator. [gallery ids="1388940,1388942,1388943,1388944,1388945"] Other standard features on the Bolt EV’s LT trim include a rear-vision camera, a large 10.2-inch touchscreen for infotainment control and Michelin self-sealing tires to counter minor perforations. On the top trim package, dubbed the Bolt EV Premier (that does sound fancier), you get everything that’s in the LT plus leather, front and rear in-seat heating, a surround camera and an in-set backup camera display in the rearview mirror. The Bolt with Premier trim has an MSRP of $40,905. On paper, both the Model 3 and the Bolt EV have advantages over the other – the Model 3 will be priced at $35,000 to start pre-incentives, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said, which represents a savings of $2,500 when compared to the Chevrolet. The Tesla will also have supercharger capabilities, which will mean faster fill-ups on the road. Tesla’s car will also manage 0-60 in six seconds or less, while the Bolt will do the same in under 6.5. Bolt has better range, however, and will probably have more interior space thanks to its hatchback design. There’s one more thing about the Bolt that’s undeniably better than what the Model 3 can offer: it’s shipping date. Bolt EV goes on sale in “late 2016,” Chevrolet says, while the Model 3’s timeline has the first units going out in late 2017, with full production really only starting off in 2018.
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Crunch Report | GoPro releases the new Karma Drone
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016
| 9
| 19
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Sony asserts its place at the grownups’ table with new flagship SLR camera
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Haje Jan Kamps
| 2,016
| 9
| 19
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At the Photokina trade show, Sony launched a long-awaited followup to its aging flagship SLR camera. The Sony A99 II sports high-resolution sensors, 5-axis image stabilization, a raft of high-end video features and a hefty price-tag to match. The camera is putting its proverbial foot down as a force to be reckoned with in the high-end SLR market that has historically been dominated by Canon and Nikon. When Sony originally launched its flagship A99 SLR camera six years ago, at the height of the digital camera boom, the product was largely met with a “Oh, you guys still make cameras? That’s cute.” Barring a small number of ardent enthusiasts who clung on to Minolta’s legacy, Sony had all but lost the battle for the hearts and minds of photographers. Let’s just say a lot has changed in half a decade. Whereas other camera makers have been leading the charge on the SLR front for decades, Sony’s A7 full-frame mirrorless series have given Canon and Nikon something to truly worry about. With incredible low-light capabilities, Wi-Fi connectivity that, y’know, works and top-shelf quality images out of a diminutive camera platform, Sony has singlehandedly reinvented the mirrorless camera niche, nudging it into the professional space. It is no surprise, then that a refresh of the company’s flagship SLR model is making people sit up and take note. Sporting a beefy 42-megapixel sensor? Nice, but ultimately nobody is paying attention to the megapixel race anymore. What is interesting is the other innovations the company have crammed into the new camera body. The camera includes a 3-axis articulating OLED display to facilitate shooting with a frog or birds-eye perspective. Shooting full 4K video will be a boon to fans of moving pictures and the camera introduces a “slow and quick” mode. One frame per second is effectively a time-lapse video mode that will spit out a fully assembled time-lapse, whereas the 120 fps mode is a 4x slow-mo mode.
Taking a leaf out of the company’s high-end mirrorless cameras, the A99 II includes 5-axis image stabilization built into the body. In effect, all your existing A-mount lenses get a cheeky upgrade to full image stabilization. The image stabilization is available for stills, of course, but most interestingly, perhaps, is that it’s turned on for video, too, enabling more steady video shooting, even when filming hand-held. A propose stills, shooting at 12 frames per second and with a revamped super-speed autofocus mechanism, it’s no slouch either. “We are continuing to innovate with each new camera body, lens and accessory that we bring to market, offering compelling choices to both existing and prospective users of the Sony α system” said Neal Manowitz, Vice President of Digital Imaging at Sony Electronics. “With the α99 II, we’re delivering an industry-leading level of performance to A-mount owners and enthusiasts. Its powerful combination of speed and resolution is simply unmatched in today’s market.” With a price tag of $3,200 for the body on its own, the new camera won’t be cheap. Canon and Nikon, of course, will probably ignore its existence as they always have, but the moment of truth will come when it ships in November — maybe there’s finally a serious third player in the high-end SLR space worth worrying about.
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Cross-channel ad startup AdStage raises $2M
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Anthony Ha
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today that it has raised an additional $2 million from Verizon Ventures. The company offers tools for businesses to manage their ad campaigns across Facebook, Google, Bing and elsewhere, and it says it’s currently managing $100 million in quarterly ad spend. CEO Sahil Jain recently told me that including content marketing, marketing automation and sales automation, as well as ads. Verizon Ventures previously led . (Verizon owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch.)
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Uber rival Grab raises $750M led by SoftBank at a $3B valuation
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Jon Russell
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Grab, the largest company rivaling Uber in Southeast Asia, has that it has raised $750 million in fresh capital. This is the company’s Series F round, and it was led by existing investor SoftBank with participation from undisclosed existing and new backers, Grab said. One of those is almost certain to be China’s Didi Kuaidi, which , but neither side is confirming that right now. A source close to the company confirmed that the round gives Grab a $3 billion post-money valuation. , which pegged Grab’s pre-money valuation at $2.3 billion. Grab operates in six countries in Southeast Asia and . This new financing has been sometime coming, and , with some media suggesting the total could reach $1 billion. That hasn’t happened but Singapore-headquartered Grab did claim that it has over $1 billion on its balance sheet courtesy of this new raise. Grab said it 400,000 drivers on its platforms and it has seen over 21 million app downloads to date. In an announcement, the company added that it sees “up to 1.5 million daily bookings,” which a Grab spokesperson confirmed means ride requests not completed rides. Uber doesn’t provide business data for Southeast Asia so it is hard to compare them, but and there seems to be little to choose between the two. An arsenal of capital is clearly necessary when you are taking on Uber, but Grab did sketch out some areas of priority that it will focus on. Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country and the largest economy in Southeast Asia, is top of its list. Grab CEO Anthony Tan said in a statement that he believes that Indonesia’s ride-hailing industry is worth $15 billion annually — that goes beyond taxi and cars and into motorbike taxis — which Grab offers there — and services such as food delivery, logistics, and more. Indonesia is no easy market and, alongside Uber, Grab is rivaled by GoJek, a motorbike taxi on-demand service that recently . Beyond a push into services, Grab is also looking to expand its ecosystem into payments. This summer it — GrabPay — available to third-party services, and this new funding will go towards making that happen. The GrabPay push will initially focus on Indonesia, where Grab has partnered with national bank Mandiri, but it will also be extended into the company’s other focus markets, too. Another more obvious area of focus is technology. Grab has R&D centers in Singapore, Beijing and Seattle and its priorities include refining its algorithm to help drivers become more efficient, building out its mapping data and technology, working on demand prediction and user targeting. Grab is also looking to add pooling to its existing vehicle categories, . There’s no word on autonomous vehicles, however, which with a view to rolling out more fully. Self-driving cars aren’t just for the U.S. market though. so you could argue Grab is already playing catchup or might need to get its checkbook out if it wants to enter the race. “Grab has grown tremendously over the past year. This round of funding shows the confidence and optimism investors have in Grab’s market leadership and long-term potential in Southeast Asia,” Tan, Grab’s CEO, said in a statement. “We are blessed to have great partners like SoftBank, many of whom have unparalleled track records of investing in leading internet businesses in emerging markets, and seeing those companies through to become the core of internet ecosystems in each market,” he added. Despite much to be bullish about, Grab is up against a tough rival in Uber and in a market that shows little sign of profitability right now. We previously reported that the company was burning as much as $30 million per month in 2015. While Grab has consistently claimed that it has not touched its Series E round yet, it is looking at a long path to profitability in Southeast Asia. Likewise, — and, in doing so, take equity in Uber Global — . Nonetheless, this new funding is a major milestone for Grab, and the largest raise for a tech startup in Southeast Asia to date.
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Insider, a marketing platform for emerging markets, secures $2.2M to expand
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Mike Butcher
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, a unified online marketing platform out of Turkey, has secured a $2.2 million Series A round of financing, bringing its total funding since launching in 2012 to $3.3 million. That may not sound a lot, but it’s a lot for the region and considering it’s targeting a global market, especially emerging markets outside the US. Assuming its product is competitive, it can therefore use its capital efficiency to take on bigger and better-funded competitors that wouldn’t be able to make emerging markets their worth-while. The 107 employee startup now has offices in London, Moscow, Singapore, Dubai, Warsaw, İstanbul, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. The platform is aimed at optimizing marketing spend, and targeting online campaigns. Competitors include ($41M raised), ($6.5M raid) and ($9.5M raised). The round was led by , with participation by and Dogan Group’s venture capital firms, alongside existing investors from (Melih Odemiş, Emre Kurttepeli and Erinc Ozada). , the CEO and co-founder, said the funding will be used to invest in predictive modelling, segmentation and auto-optimization. “Unlike others we help marketer optimize spend from the get go, rather than just promising higher conversions and revenue,” she said. Marketers can use it to post campaigns with AdWords and Facebook, and to send a discount only to those customers who are less likely to buy/or subscribe (based on the sector), rather than sending it to those customers who were already planning to make a purchase. The model is subscription-based for a monthly fee, or does “benefit pricing” (charging a commission based on the revenue generated on a campaign). It claims to be able to access 600 million unique users/month across partners. The startup has 6 co-founders: Hande Cilingir, Serhat Soyuerel; Arda Koterin; M. Sinan Toktay; Okan Yedibela; and Muharrem Derinkok. The startup was initially a true bootstrapped project. Hande and Serhat built Insider after making their money via an English-language school in Turkey.
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U.S. federal guidelines for self-driving cars say they will lead to safer roads
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Darrell Etherington
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The U.S. government revealed its much-anticipated Federal Automated Vehicles policy on Monday evening, detailing its 15-point Safety Assessment to be rolled out fully on Tuesday, which is designed to give manufacturers hoping to build and ship self-driving vehicles proper expectations around what will work for regulators in terms of meeting safety requirements. The Obama administration’s primary goal in setting out these guidelines is outlining policies that will encourage safe operation of autonomous vehicles, as well as guidance about including proper safety measures in their design; but it’s also designed to be flexible, giving companies and researchers working on self-driving tech the room they need to try different approaches and evolve their systems as needed. What might be most interesting about the U.S. Department of Transportation’s overview document outlining its policy choices are that they begin by unequivocally expressing the view that the DOT believes “that automated vehicles hold enormous potential benefits for safety, mobility and sustainability.” Picking up on that thread, President Barack Obama wrote an op-ed published in the that includes the following passage: Right now, too many people die on our roads – 35,200 last year alone – with 94 percent of those the result of human error or choice. Automated vehicles have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year. And right now, for too many senior citizens and Americans with disabilities, driving isn’t an option. Automated vehicles could change their lives. Obama goes on to talk about not only safety and accessibility benefits, but also corrections to urban congestion and pollution as benefits that can come out of self-driving tech, but he adds that getting there must be handled safely and responsibility, and with transparency between the companies creating the technology and American citizens. The President also notes that Government can often over-regulate when the pace of technology moves too quickly, and this policy is derived to avoid that and provide room for growth and innovation. The that the DOT is asking automated carmakers to opt into when devaluing their systems includes a request to document how, where, and when the car should operate, what happens when it fails, how its object detection system works, what its testing process includes and data captured by its onboard crash sensors, cybersecurity measures included in the system and more. Already, private industry players are responding to the new guidelines, and much of the response seems to suggest Obama’s administration hit the right balance in crafting the new policy. Lyft’s Joe Okpaku, VP of Government Relations, provided this statement to TechCrunch, for instance: Very soon, autonomous vehicles will improve the way we live and travel. As regulators begin to focus on this exciting technology, Lyft believes that safety must be of paramount importance. Flexibility and innovation must also be preserved as this entirely new form of transportation comes to market. Much work remains ahead, but NHTSA’s guidelines are a step in the right direction. The new policy also includes a model pointy that the DOT is hoping will help individual states craft legislation that’s more harmonious and consistent with its own national framework, and regulatory tools that can help interpret existing laws of the road in light of automated vehicle use, as well guide the creation of new regulation and statutes in service of safely deploying self-driving tech. To discuss with private sector stakeholders how the policy will impact their work, the Obama administration is hosting a White House Frontiers Conference on October 13.
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How blockchain will grow beyond bitcoin
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Ben Dickson
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Since its advent in 2009, bitcoin’s decentralized, broker-less and secure mechanism to send money across the world has . Of equal — if not greater — importance is the blockchain, the technology that supports the cryptocurrency, the distributed ledger which enables trustless, peer-to-peer exchange of data. Every day, new companies and organizations, including big names such as and , take strides toward or show interest in . But the fame of blockchain has also given rise to two new challenges, namely that of interoperability and flexibility. There are now , each optimized for different purposes, with different exchange rates, verification and consensus mechanisms, performance, distribution function, block size limit and degree of anonymity. And none of these currencies are compatible with others, making it hard for users to transfer money between them. Also, there is now a general inclination to use blockchain in other fields, including , , , and other domains where secure data transactions are important. However, the original blockchain used in bitcoin was not designed to scale to all possible use cases, making it difficult to use it in these domains. Overcoming these challenges can unleash the full potential of blockchain, enabling it to support and connect many of the technologies that we use today, as well as the developing technologies that are promising to conquer the future. First, we have to find a way to connect different blockchains. Every one of the available cryptocurrencies work fine in their own respect. But things get complicated and frustrating when you want to move money between different ledgers. There’s little or no service that allows you to accomplish the task easily, and you’re usually left on your own to sign up with different payment networks and move the money manually. There have been efforts in the past to remedy the situation. and are two cryptocurrencies introduced with the goal of enabling users to exchange different digital and fiat currencies through one ledger, but which have enjoyed limited success. Now, a group of veteran bitcoin and blockchain programmers are creating a technology they believe will unite all digital currencies and the companies and individuals who use those currencies. Dubbed , the technology is being overseen by Ripple, the company that is otherwise known for its own namesake cryptocurrency and its participation in the , another initiative that seeks to facilitate web payments. As the name implies, ILP is not a ledger but a protocol, and it holds no balance or funds. Balances will remain in source and destination ledgers during transactions, a characteristic that, according to Stefan Thomas, Ripple’s CTO and co-founder of Interledger, will obviate the impossible-to-reach goal of having the entire world agree on one payment system. As Thomas described to , ILP is a top-layer cryptographic escrow system that allows funds to move between ledgers with the help of intermediaries, called “connectors,” which understand the underpinning of each ledger and perform the cross-ledger transactions transparently. The ledgers don’t need to put their trust in the connector. Instead, they use cryptographic algorithms to create an escrow of funds and exchange the money when certain conditions are met. The design was inspired by the success of the web, as Thomas explains in a — the idea to have a minimal protocol that allows nodes to evolve and change independently. Thomas maintains ILP can work with any online ledger and only small changes would be required in order to use it. He hopes that ILP will someday enable money to be transferred over the internet as easily as information, realizing a dream that has been sought by tech leaders since the 90s. Whether Interledger will become the sensation its developers are promising is yet to be seen, but for the moment, it has managed to draw the attention of some of the giants of the tech industry, including Microsoft, . The idea of an immutable database that stores transactions securely and transparently, and which is controlled by no single entity, is an interesting concept that can be applied to several different domains. But the blockchain needs to undergo changes if it is to meet the requirements of every possible industry. This is why many such as JP Morgan, IBM and Intel have rallied to the project, an effort overseen by the Linux Foundation aimed at extending blockchain to create an industrial-strength ledger that meets the changing requirements of the world of business. IBM has already contributed thousands of lines of code to the project and is establishing its name as a key contributor to the effort. Hyperledger will bring together a set of open protocols and standards in a modular structure that will support different components for different uses, enabling adopters to tune it to meet their different requirements. The project will serve as a development library that firms can use to build their own distributed ledgers without needing to rely on public blockchains such as those used in bitcoin and Ethereum. As Jerry Cuomo, vice president and chief technology officer of IBM’s software group, , it is “an idea that can be implemented and extended in ways that are consistent but enhanced.” A posted on the internet describes the key ideas and use cases of Hyperledger in different financial and industrial domains. While some think these technologies to be at odds, they will likely not be competing and will in fact be cooperating and complementing each other. In a future where machines, services, humans and companies will be exchanging information and money in various sizes and at various speeds, we’ll need flexible and interoperable systems that can communicate and offer transparency, security and convenience all in one place. The directions of events and efforts indicate that the new and improved generations of blockchain will have an important role to play in this regard.
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Google sends out invites for its October 4 Pixel phones event
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google just sent out invites for an event in San Francisco on October 4th. Rumor has it that the company will reveal its next smartphones at the event. While the invite itself only features Google’s own logo, the company also just posted a and that both strongly hint at a new phone. The URL for the teaser site is , and unless something has changed, the Pixel brand still stands for devices that are made by Google (and not in cooperation with its partners like LG or Huawei). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNnCtmyujLA According to the latest reports from , we’ll likely see two Pixel phones (one large, one small — and Google will do away with the Nexus brand). The last time Google held an (almost exactly a year ago), the company also announced the next generation of its Chromecast device and rumor has it that we’ll see a 4K-capable Chromecast this time around. At the same event last year, Google also showed off the Pixel C tablet, though it only launched it a few months later. Maybe we’ll see a new Pixel C, too. At its I/O developer conference earlier this year, Google also debuted Google Home, it’s answer to the Amazon Echo, and the Daydream VR device. Even if all we see is the new Pixel phones, though, this should turn out to be a pretty interesting event. We will obviously be at the event, so now is probably a good time to set that Google Now reminder for 9am PT on October 4th.
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Airbnb faces fresh crackdown in Barcelona as city council asks residents to report illegal rentals
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Natasha Lomas
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Airbnb is facing a further squeeze on its activities in Barcelona, the Catalonian capital that’s hugely popular with tourists — ramping up tension with local communities dealing with inflating rents and rowdy behavior by visitors facilitated by the rapid rise of sharing-economy platforms. The city has been trying to crack down on illegal tourist rentals for some time, with the incoming mayor Ada Colau putting a temporary cap on the number of new registrations for rentals last year — a moratorium that was extended this summer. It is not currently possible to legally get a license for a new holiday rental in Barcelona. But the council is now stepping up enforcement activity, sending letters to residents asking them to report a property if they suspect it is being illegally rented to tourists. The municipal mailshot, which has begun with residents of barrios Eixample, Gracia and Sants-Montjuïc but will extend to the whole city by next month, follows an announcement by the council that it would be stepping up its crackdown on illegal home rentals in the city. Earlier in the summer the city government also elected to raise ten-fold the maximum possible fine for apartments rented to tourists that are not on the Catalan Tourism Register (RTC), from €60,000 to €600,000. It’s using a regional tourism law to try to control home-sharing activity in the city. At the end of last year the Airbnb and another home-sharing platform, , €60,000 each for advertising homes not registered with the RTC, and for not responding to requests to provide details on homes advertised without RTC numbers. Earlier this month commissioned by the council suggested that almost 40 percent of the supply of tourist apartments in Barcelona is illegal. It also noted sharp rental rises (of 33 percent) in the city in the last three years — the largest rent inflation in Spain — which it blamed on vacation tourists restricting the supply of accommodations. “Barcelona City Council works to ensure that tourism activities are compatible with a sustainable urban model,” the council writes in the letter it is sending to residents, adding that it wants to be a city “open to tourism, but with clear rules of behavior.” It goes on to say it will be stepping up its activities to combat illegal tourist rentals, and asks residents to help it identify illegal rentals by reporting any suspect properties — either by phoning a freedom telephone number or using a (available in Catalan, Spanish, English, French and German). The website also allows residents to check whether an address is legally rented for tourism purposes or not. It’s a similar move to Berlin’s city council, which encourages residents to file (anonymous) reports online if they suspect neighbors of operating illegal rents — although Berlin has taken an even tougher stance against the likes of Airbnb. A 2014 housing law change in the city, which came into force this , bans operating short-term tourist rentals of entire apartments without a permit — allowing Berlin’s government to shut off all new activity on the home-sharing platform. (Although the renting of private rooms in apartments is still allowed without a license). A quick search for a weekend rental for this month on Airbnb yields more than 300 results for Barcelona (and for Paris), but far fewer for Berlin, with Airbnb noting that “only 11 per cent of listing remain for those dates” for Berlin. So while the latter’s crackdown appears to be having a major impact on Airbnb’s inventory, Barcelona’s efforts to reduce illegal tourist rentals that have flourished on platforms such as Airbnb appears to have been fairly ineffective thus far. Paris’ city council has also released a map of in an effort to combat illegal activity. Last month, Barcelona’s town hall ordered 256 apartments to be removed from home-sharing platforms such as Airbnb, according to , and said it was investigating more than 400 other potential offenders. It remains to be seen whether a mailshot to all residents asking them to inform on neighbors illegally using the platform will cause a substantial number of hosts to think twice. (Or else get more creative about how they use the platform — such as by and cancelling after a few days once a tourist leaves). In its , the city council estimated that Barcelona has 15,881 tourist apartments, 9,606 of which are licensed — meaning 6,275 are illegal. In a today, the council provided an update on its activities, saying it issued removal orders against 615 illegal flats during July and August — meaning a total of 1,290 cases have been opened following the announcement that it would be stepping up inspections this summer. It added that a total of 960 complaints about illegal rentals have been received since it opened up the web complaint form two months ago, although it said the total number of complaints and suggestions is higher still, at 1,123. According to , the number of people using Airbnb in Barcelona has tripled to 900,000 in the three years prior to 2015. Responding to the city council’s latest action, Airbnb in a statement accused the council of having a contradictory policy toward tourism, and called for “clear rules” to define “bad actors.” It said: Airbnb is part of the solution in and it is disappointing to see City Hall intimidate locals with archaic rules that threaten an economic lifeline for thousands. There is a contradiction at the heart of tourism policies in , which favour commercial operators and apartments turned over solely for tourism in tourist hotspots. Home sharing puts money in the pockets of locals, makes efficient use of space and spreads guests and benefits to middle class families and their communities. needs clear rules that distinguish between home sharing and bad actors, like other major cities around the world. For its part, Airbnb claims it has around 21,000 active listings in Barcelona, with the typical host in the city earning €5,100 per year, and the majority (73 percent of hosts) listing just one property — although that leaves close to one-third of Airbnb hosts in the city renting multiple properties, suggesting plenty of residents are using the platform to act as professional landlords, rather than sharing their actual home. In its press release today, Barcelona city council warned that platforms that continue to advertise tourist rentals without RTC will be asked to collaborate with the administration and withdraw the ads. If they do not, they face being slapped with the new higher fine of up to €600,000. In addition, tourist rentals that do not respond promptly to resident complaints relating to activities at their property also face disciplinary procedures under the crackdown, including fines of up to €1,000. The council has set up a dedicated call center to field such complaints. The city council confirmed to TechCrunch it is not currently regulating tourist rentals where a person rents a room or rooms in the address where they also live. Its actions are being targeted against entire apartment rentals. However a spokesman noted that it is currently drafting new tourism regulations which will include room rentals, and allow for each municipality to regulate this type of rental in future.
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What reset? Both seed- and late-stage valuations just hit record levels, says new report
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Connie Loizos
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Investors are valuing seed-stage startups at the highest levels ever, according to a new report published by the private deals database . According to its analysis, the pre-money valuation for a seed-stage company reached $5.9 million in the first half of this year, an 11 percent increase from the end of 2015 and a whopping 84 percent increase from 2010 figures. At the same time, the median seed round size increased 50 percent year-over-year to $1.5 million, up from $480,000 recorded in 2010. So what’s up? Pitchbook has its theories. It points to the wave of dedicated seed-stage firms to emerge on the scene in recent years, right alongside a growing number of accelerators, the most famous of which remain , and . (You may not be surprised to learn that there are roughly now up and running in the U.S. alone, according to biz school professors Yael Hochberg of Rice University and Susan Cohen of the University of Richmond, who’ve taken up the daunting task of starting to rank them every year.) Pitchbook also notes that while valuations are up, the number of seed-stage companies getting funded is down, suggesting that those companies that do attract funding have better businesses than some of the startups that raised seed funding in recent years. Perhaps more surprising about Pitchbook’s newest report on valuations is its conclusion that valuation levels for later-stage companies are also at their highest levels on record. According to its findings, the median Series C valuation in the first half of 2016 reached $90 million, which is 16 percent higher than it was in the first half of 2015. The median Series D valuation is similarly higher: 13 percent year-over-year to $200 million. What about the narrative that the down rounds are on the rise, particularly as mutual and hedge funds and other non-traditional sources of venture capital retrench from the market? Pitchbook suggests there has been a “considerable” decline in Series D activity, but that valuations for the perceived winners mostly just keep increasing. In fact, it says the number of down rounds in the first half of this year are up just 1 percent over the number of completed deals by this time last year. In addition, it says a whopping 76 percent of venture financings have involved a higher valuation than the company’s previous round. The optimist in us wants to proffer that these statistics suggest a so-called flight to quality. Just as likely: Despite feeling more trepidatious than in recent years, those with capital aren’t sure where else to invest it right now. Pitchbook estimates there was $95 million in “dry powder” available to VCs as of the end of 2015. Meanwhile, the first quarter of this year — when 67 U.S. venture firms raised more than $14 billion — ranked as the strongest quarter for dollars raised since the second quarter of 2006, when 79 funds raised $14.3 billion. You can check out the full report if you’re also interested in trying to figure out what’s happening.
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Bower & Wilkins’ P7 wireless headphones are all luxe and great performance
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Stefan Etienne
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It was announced on , and, well, here it is: The wireless version of Bower & Wilkins’ P7 headphones. Well, how are they? As great as I’d hoped, but there are some changes that were made that seem out of place. But rest assured: Despite being tailored to the mid and high frequencies, they still have those warm, roomy lows for bass. Price as reviewed: Taking them right out of the box, you’ll understand what you paid for. Leather, metal and plush memory foam ear cups are the basis for the wireless P7’s aesthetic. Like, look at those hinges! Being worn for extended periods of time, I find that they’re comfortable. You might think this is a very subjective opinion, but over-ear headphone comfort can be boiled down to three points: not causing an immense amount of pressure on the temples; encapsulating the ear (and not resting on it); not leaving a massive imprint (again, pressure) on the top of your head. A delicate balance between these three characteristics usually means that the headphones can balance themselves on your head, rather than being worn like some sort of audio helmet. Now, with comfort out of the way, let’s talk about audio quality: It’s what $400 in audio hardware should usually provide. Punchy bass, clarity and a feeling of isolation that is not to be confused with noise-cancelling headphones — after all, these aren’t — but more akin to being in a very quiet room that’s always filled with music. No matter the genre of music, it sounds like it’s been enriched while not losing any of the inherent qualities of the music. And all of these observations are made using the Bluetooth mode, which is important if you’ve purchased an iPhone 7 recently. Speaking of which: battery life. B&W says the P7 wireless lasts 17 hours, and it turns out they’re not entirely wrong: Depending on whether or not I make calls using the (very solid) built-in microphone, I find myself squeezing out 15 hours of collective — not continuous — usage. Now that I’ve praised the auditory experience of Bower & Wilkins’ P7 wireless headphones, it’s time to take it down a notch and come to terms with its shortcomings. There aren’t too many, but they are there. While not an immense setback, the lack of touch-based controls can be considered bland, considering the variety of “clever” solutions that rival companies like Bang & Olufsen and Harman Kardon employ in their higher-end headphones. Here, B&W gives you three rather indistinct buttons: volume up/down and play/pause. The sliding power button also doubles as the pairing button if you hold it down for three seconds. None of these approaches are inherently wrong or non-functional, but they’re not novel, and not what I expect from a company like Bower & Wilkins. While some might argue that touch-based controls are hit-and-miss, they’ve become accurate nowadays, even with the threat of wireless interference from the Bluetooth headphones they are mounted on. Now it’s time for honesty: Not everyone is in the market for a $400 pair of headphones. But, if you happen to be, love the color black (which you should) and are conscious about Bluetooth’s inevitable rise (hopefully), then they’re worth a look. Or, perhaps you haven’t a choice, because you bought an iPhone 7; woe is you. Regardless of what your reasons are for buying into Bluetooth headphones, B&W has a winning product with the P7 wireless. I’ll be glad to keep using them until I find something better. Or maybe, something with touch controls.
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The evolving road of beacon tech
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Kjartan Slette
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When launched its protocol at the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2013 it laid the foundation for an entire new industry — the proximity industry. , close to 500 proximity companies operate globally, and between 6 and 7 million beacons are deployed in commercial settings with . Not bad for something that was really only launched as a side note amongst several other new technologies at the conference. Beacons are cheap, easy to use and can run on batteries. They quickly became the de facto technology to connect the physical world with the digital due to beacons being able to inform a phone of their precise physical location and context. This is something marketers globally have dubbed “the holy grail of marketing,” and no wonder – as the physical world and how we use it has been largely unchartered territory. To not only finally discover that world, but to also connect it to our digital footprint has immense value both product wise and economically. knew this, and so Google. Google’s competing beacon standard, , which is interoperable with , could do something that couldn’t or wouldn’t — open URLs directly from the beacon interaction. This, coupled with the fact that favors closed environments, propelled Google’s Eddystone — with its openness to the developer community — onto the proximity scene. Eddystone was launched mid-2015 and has seen immense growth since then. As seen in , the industry support for Eddystone from proximity companies has grown from nothing to 50 percent in just one year, while is losing ground. being largely quiet since its 2013 release has led to widespread speculation around the launch of “ ” — an improved protocol that mirrors Eddystone’s web capabilities while pushing the boundaries for how to integrate the physical world more deeply into the OS itself. is in a prime position to do precisely that, and yesterday we might just have seen the first signal of what is to come. Beacons require Bluetooth to function, and while , there is still a way to go to reach a market adoption that makes sense for most large global advertisers. And guess what is one of the main drivers for Bluetooth adoption? Yes, Bluetooth headsets. And what just kill? Headphones that are not Bluetooth-enabled. Interestingly enough according to NPD, and the timing for to accelerate that growth is perfect. So, is this a sign of being determined to fix the Bluetooth adoption issue before they release and push back toward Google? Or, more radically, a sign of backing a wireless technology standard that is superior to the Bluetooth we know, spearheaded by its new wireless AirPods and W1 chip? Both are interesting thoughts, and while nobody really knows but , two things are crystal clear: Bluetooth adoption is going to increase, and the war of ownership over the physical world has just begun.
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Etsy buys Blackbird Technologies to bring AI to its search
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Ingrid Lunden
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It’s not just gigantic search engines that are looking to around emerging areas like speech recognition. Even design and craft marketplaces can use a little machine learning and artificial intelligence to make their wheels turn a little better. Today, the popular handmade-goods site announced it has a startup called , which developed algorithms for natural language processing, image recognition and analytics — similar to those used by Amazon and Google for product and other searches — and then “democratized” them to be used by any company of any size. At Etsy, the tech will be used to improve its own search features. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but we’re asking and will update if we learn more. The company’s employees — it appears — will all be joining Etsy. “The team possesses a deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence, search, and distributed systems and has direct experience working in these areas for some of the largest technology companies in the world,” Etsy said in a statement. Little is known about Blackbird — no listings on Crunchbase or AngelList, a fairly unspecific website for Blackbird itself — and even Etsy’s announcement of the deal is light on company details. According to LinkedIn, though, the two co-founders are (CEO) and (CTO), who collectively had worked on similar technologies across places like Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Oracle and Yahoo. Because Etsy is going to be using Blackbird’s tech for its own platform, it seems that Blackbird’s , which deployed its tech by way of an API, will shut down. Customers had Nasty Gal, ThredUP, and Tophatter. Etsy has had a , beating analysts’ expectations in two consecutive quarters on the back of growing sales and customer base. But at the same time, it’s facing some heat in the form of other competitors hot on Etsy’s crafty tail with their own marketplaces. The biggest of these is Amazon (perhaps every e-commerce company’s worst nightmare) with its own storefront that will vie for the same producers, the same customers, but throwing in some attractive Prime shipping (and one-stop shopping) into the mix. This is why buying Blackbird is a smart move. It will essentially help Etsy improve its search and discovery to point shoppers to items better matched to their tastes, and keep them from abandoning their shopping carts, a common pain point for any e-commerce enterprise. “Buyers come to Etsy.com for items they can’t find anywhere else and our goal is to help them discover exactly what they want among our 40 million unique listings. Leveraging Blackbird’s technology, we believe we can enhance the buyer experience by making search quicker and easier and by surfacing even more relevant, tailored product recommendations,” said Chad Dickerson, Etsy, Inc. CEO, in a statement. “Our team has already made substantial enhancements to the search & discovery process on Etsy, especially through features like Exploratory Search, and we are excited for Blackbird’s world-class team and technology to accelerate our progress in this key area.” Longer term, it seems that Etsy will look to use some of Blackbird’s tech in other areas beyond search, too. “In addition, longer-term, we believe there may be opportunities to deploy Blackbird’s Artificial Intelligence technology in areas beyond search that will help strengthen our markets and seller services platform,” the company said. This is Etsy’s , but only its first since going public in 2015. Interestingly, it looks like the first Etsy has made that points directly to its technology around its product (Adtuitive, Etsy’s first buy, was a move to bring in some adtech to the business).
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Voice is chat’s next battleground
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Josh Constine
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Sure, they’ll get better. But the upcoming innovation in chat is about being more human, not less. With the proliferation of adequate speech recognition, AI assistants and wireless headphones, the tech is ready to unlock the potential of our most basic form of communication. Soon, we’ll talk and listen to our messaging apps when it’s more convenient than typing or reading. The age of voice is about to arrive. When we’ve got our hands full. When we’re on the move. When we don’t want to fumble through menus. When we’re driving, or working, or just don’t want to dig our phones out of our pockets or purses, voice will be there. Tech fortune-teller , calling it the “most efficient form of computing input.” We can speak 150 words per minute compared to typing only 40, and voice interfaces can learn context about us to improve prediction of our intent. Instead of always browsing starting at the home screen, we can dive directly into the functions we want. Why we’ll use voice. “As speech recognition accuracy goes from say 95% to 99%, all of us in the room will go from barely using it today to using it all the time,” says Baidu’s Chief Scientist Andrew Ng. Voice assistant and search usage are rapidly climbing as Amazon’s Alexa captures the imagination of consumers and developers. Right now, however, our access to voice interfaces for chat is limited. There’s basic dictation through Android and Siri in iOS, but getting anything read aloud to you can be cumbersome. VoIP calling is growing, with 300 million of Facebook Messenger’s 1 billion users firing up its audio and video calling features each month. But in most apps, there’s still no way to quickly hear your chat push notifications or messages read aloud to you, have your voice messages transcribed, bounce between message threads or interact with chatbots via voice. I believe that’s poised to change. Facebook in 2015 but hasn’t done much publicly with its technology outside of text bots. One thing it’s still testing is the ability to send a voice clip message and have so the recipient can read it instead of listening. Last week, the head of Facebook Messenger David Marcus said voice “is not something we’re actively working on right now,” but added that “at some point it’s pretty obvious that as we develop more and more capabilities and interactions inside of Messenger, we’ll start working on voice exchanges and interfaces.” Yet Facebook-owned WhatsApp just rolled out iOS 10 integration with Siri so you can ask it to call someone for you or message them something, . I’d bet we see something similar come to Messenger. What’s more ambitious could be Facebook’s interest in understanding how humans speak differently when we talk to each other versus when we talk to computers. Over a year ago, a source told me Facebook’s secretive Language Technology Group was investigating this opportunity. Ask Siri to send a message for you on WhatsApp. Image via VentureBeat. Our tone, vocabulary and cadence becomes more professional when we address a computer. When we talk to friends, we use slang and colloquialisms while speaking quickly and full of emotion. Just think of how you would say “OK Google, show me restaurants nearby with a four-star rating” versus how you’d ask your best friend, “Yo, where’s an awesome place to eat that’s close?” For Facebook to be able to transcribe, read aloud and analyze how we speak to friends, it may need to build a different speech recognition engine. Google’s upcoming Allo voice chat app. Meanwhile, Google is preparing to launch a whole . It’s designed for rapid-fire voice clip messaging. It also lets you talk to Google AI assistant right in the app and get help with making dinner reservations or finding directions. Combined, Allo could potentially make it easy to simply say who and what you want to message, and have the assistant route it to the recipient in the most convenient medium. [Update: As this article was being published, Google announced its . This could allow Google to better parse people’s voices and structure their words for accurate interpretation of intent.] Frequent voice usage could give tech giants like Facebook and Google insights into our mood and sentiment, which could help them personalize their services. As voice and AI assistant APIs proliferate, I’d expect more and more messaging apps to embrace speech commands. Developers will build custom bots designed to interpret your voice prompts on platforms like Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Slack. And none of this will even require you to open your phone. A new generation of Bluetooth headphones will equip us with a persistent microphone. Apple’s AirPods could popularize the practice of leaving wireless earbuds in for long stretches of time because they’re finally sleek and stylish enough. Once all you have to do is bark at your AI assistant or tap you ear to compose and send a message, voice could go from a nice add-on like stickers or GIFs to an essential piece of any chat app. And that means we’ll spend less time staring at tiny screens, and more time experiencing the world through reopened eyes.
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The Ripple Rug: You know, for cats
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John Biggs
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Of all the products I’ve seen this year, none are more worthy of our time and attention than the . Created by Fred and Natasha Ruckel, the Ripple Rug is a rug with holes and lumps in it. Your cat can climb inside, stick its paws out, and generally get all up inside that business. It’s 35 inches on each side and made of recycled plastic bottles. Why is the Ripple Rug so interesting? Because after creating the product the Ruckels began dealing with drop shippers, eBay buyers who sold the product for a massive profit while saddling the creators with dissatisfied customers and returns. Day after day they had to send cease and desist letters to a legion of resellers who weren’t doing their customers any favors by charging $20 over their retail price and simply shipping the product through Amazon. The effort was taking its toll on the couple and they were losing money. Their only recourse? To pull their product from Amazon and sell it themselves at a loss of almost $40,000 a month. You can and read It’s a fascinating look at the other side of building a product. In fact the Ripple Rug is a perfect example of where we’re headed on the Internet. Manufacturers like Apple control their pricing through extremely careful policing and big legal teams while small makers like the Ruckels face drop shippers by the eBay-load. If the customers looking for Ripple Rugs had only gone to the official Amazon store – a matter of running a quick search – they wouldn’t have cost the Ruckels all of that revenue and paid far less for the same product. But because we the consumers are lazy we will click to buy anywhere on the web and then whine when we spot things cheaper. Further, it shows us why some industries – car dealerships, watch manufacturers, and luxury good makers – work so hard to control their markets. It makes no sense on the surface but it becomes increasingly clearer once you realize the ramifications of drop shipping. So hats (or cats) off to the Ripple Rug, the little rug that could. It’s tale as old as time: one cat, one rug, and a wobbly paw pranging hard against the tide of eBay. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bLZ9-CUwQ8]
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Black female founder raises $7 million for renewable energy tech startup
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Megan Rose Dickey
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I’d like to tip my imaginary hat off to Jessica O. Matthews, the black female founder and CEO of renewable energy tech startup . Her company just closed a $7 million Series A round led by the NIC Fund with participation from Kapor Capital, Magic Johnson Enterprises, BBG Ventures and Lingo Ventures. With the new injection of funding, Uncharted Play plans to build out the team and better equip itself to support the partners the company is bringing on in the coming months. Uncharted Play’s mission is to spread awareness about global energy and clean power through technology and play. The $7 million investment in Uncharted Play makes Matthews the 13th black female founder who has raised more than $1 million in outside investment. Earlier this month at Disrupt SF, . DeBaun was the 12th black female founder to raise over $1 million. In the tech ecosystem, black female founders receive basically zero venture capital. Of the several thousand venture deals that went down from 2012 to 2014, less than 1 percent of them went to black women, . And the black women who received outside funding on average only got $36,000, while the average seed deal size in February of this year was $4.5 million, . At the time of the #ProjectDiane report, only 11 black female founders had raised more than $1 million in outside funding. Uncharted Play’s first product, SOCCKET, is a soccer ball that doubles as a power generator. The SOCCKET uses the rotational energy that gets generated every time the ball rolls to produce three hours of light for every hour of play. Uncharted Play’s second product is the PULSE, a jump rope that doubles as a light. Both the SOCCKET and PULSE are powered by MORE (motion-based, off-grid, renewable energy, Uncharted Play’s proprietary technology for micro-generator systems. Those systems can integrate into anything that moves, which is what transforms the product, like a soccer ball or a jump rope, into a source of off-grid power. Uncharted Play’s goal is to better utilize kinetic energy in order to complement or even replace other energy systems. Uncharted Play’s business model entails partnering with product manufacturers across industries like consumer electronics and infrastructure to put the MORE technology inside the everyday products we use, like strollers, shopping carts and suitcases. The idea is that you could then use the energy produced by that product to charge your cell phone and other things. “We not only aim to disrupt how energy is generated, but how it is consumed,” Matthews said. “We envision a world where people shift from a ‘hoard & save’ energy mentality to a ‘continuous and on-demand’ energy experience.”
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Google acquires API.AI, a company helping developers build bots that aren’t awful to talk to
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Greg Kumparak
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Google has just that it has snatched up the team behind API.AI. API.AI provides tools to developers to help them build conversational, Siri-esque bots. As humans, we’re pretty good at communication. If someone says “the girl saw a man with the binoculars,” we can generally use contextual clues to figure out if they meant that the girl saw the man by binoculars, or saw a man who was binoculars. Teaching a robot to do the same is a bigger challenge. Add in ambiguity (by “get me a lift” do you mean any old car, or a Lyft, specifically?) and there’s an endless number of ways to say pretty much any one thing… and, well, the challenge becomes huge. API.AI helps developers who are building bots tackle this by providing them with tools to keep them from endlessly reinventing the wheel. Their APIs handle things like speech recognition, intent recognition and context management, and allows devs to provide domain-specific knowledge (like that “deep dish” and “Chicago-style” can probably mean the same thing to your pizza delivery bot) that might be unique to your bot’s needs. API.AI currently plays friendly with 15 languages/dialects, including English, Chinese, French, German and Spanish. According to a running counter on its homepage, API.AI has processed a little over 3 billion API requests to date. Meanwhile, Google says over 60,000 developers have built stuff with API.AI’s toolset. The price and terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed yet, but API.AI had raised
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Crunch Report | Snapchat Releases Spectacles
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Gregory Manalo
Gregory Manalo
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Exclusive TechCrunch survey reveals startups and investors are divided over Brexit
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Mike Butcher
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On Thursday 23 June 2016 the world changed. On that day a referendum was held to decide whether the UK should leave or remain in the European Union. Leave won by 52% to 48%. The referendum turnout was 71.8%, with more than 30 million people voting (though not 100% of the electorate). The campaigns on both sides had issues in terms of what they promised, to put it mildly. But on the issue of the impact of ‘Brexit’ on business, no-one really could claim to have ‘called it’. That’s why TechCrunch has put together a survey, which we sent out to investors and startups, to gauge their sentiment about Brexit. The impetus for the survey was to get information that would shape the discussion at (December 5-6). The survey size is small, but highly influential. We asked 300 people in total, and 70 replied — but the people surveyed each represented some of the biggest investors and startups in Europe. The immediate effect has been a devaluation in the UK currency. Many have leapt upon the idea that the weakened Pound has had a big effect on startups. On the one hand, for investors, it’s generally made UK startups ‘more affordable’. A cheaper Pound technically means lower costs; it’s easier to raise money abroad; and easier to sell your startup. But on the other, startups have found themselves paying much higher fees to external services like hosting on Amazon S3. And a cheaper Pound means less buying power for Brits. Indeed, this week the Pound fell back to . Ultimately, the opinion is as divided over the effects of Brexit as the vote itself was in the Referendum. The split is fairly equal in terms of the positives and negatives, indicating that, once again, no-one really knows what ‘Brexit means Brexit’ actually means, or knows what the real effects will ultimately be. One thing is for sure, almost every major European city ranked above London in terms of a positive future. As a result of the Brexit vote, London may well lose its status as the startup capital of Europe. Respondents amongst startups were primarily based in London. Over the next 1-2 years, the outlook from startup founders in the following cities is (ranked in order of ‘positivity’): Overall startup founders are quite pessimistic about the startup climate in London but feel that the status quo will remain stable or improve significantly in other markets. They see Amsterdam and Tel Aviv as cities that are on the rise. Similar to investors, human resources (recruitment, visa/travel) are some of the primary concerns that Brexit brings along with concerns about the financial impact (weaker GBP and ability to raise funds). They remain quite pessimistic as almost 45% do not see any advantages in the shadow of Brexit. But almost as many say there is a silver lining with the weaker GBP and the possibility of tax incentives and cheaper real estate that might arise. Select Startup Founder quotes: • “We need, ASAP, a confirmation from the UK government that EU nationals which are currently working/living in the UK will be able to remain here after the Brexit becomes effective.” • “I’ve heard a theory that the UK could become a safe haven in the years to come as a result of the aftermath of Trump being elected in the US, and Germany and France having to cover the money they will no longer get from the UK in the EU. The EU is now in deep shit if other countries leave. Germany can’t pay for everything. So being in the UK with a Right wing government who will do whatever it can to attract investment post-Brexit with a currency that’s not $ or € might not be such a bad thing. I voted to Remain because I’m not a fascist but business-wise I’m more confident than I expected to be.” • “I’m sad it has occurred, but if we can protect financial services and keep visa friction down, it could actually play to our advantage; The main issue is that there is no legal or societal system not to mention unifying language in Europe that is as compelling; I’m positive that Sadiq Khan [Mayor of London] and May [Theresa May, Prime Minister] will keep making London a great place to live and it may or may not be cheaper.” Respondents were primarily based in London (75%), then Paris (11%), New York (7%), Berlin (5%), Tel Aviv (2%) Over the next 1-2 years, the startup outlook from investors in the following cities, ranked in order of ‘positivity’ is: Overall most investors have confidence that the status quo will remain in most other markets, but see Berlin as an area on the rise. Interestingly, investors aren’t bullish on London but they are more optimistic than the startups are for London. Top challenges that are faced in the UK startup scene center around concerns about human resources – recruitment challenges, visa/travel restrictions, and rising social intolerance (to some degree). Also high on the list is a perceived decline in confidence in the UK market and Brexit’s effects on FinTech operations due to passporting restrictions for European banking licenses. Surprisingly not many investors considered the weakened pound a challenge but rather as an advantage. Additionally, some anticipated advantages of Brexit include more foreign investment money from mainland the EU and the US, cheaper real estate and the potential for regulatory innovation. While there are still those who don’t think Brexit will bring any advantages, there are still many who see opportunities for investment and growth. Selected Investor quotes: • “Fundamentals for London are still strong, but uncertainty around immigration and visa issues is hugely damaging. Once the uncertainty is gone, London is likely to recover quickly.” • “While the GBP might be weaker so you might get more foreign investment (as they get more for their money if valuations stay the same); then there might be lower confidence in the UK and other disadvantages. So this might net out and hence make little difference overall on raising foreign capital.” • “Dublin stands to gain the most of any city in Europe. Already a European centre for tech companies, since Brexit it has received the most US VC investment into startups. Will be the only English-speaking country in the EU, and the only country left in the EU with an Anglo-based legal system. Many large and small fintech companies based in the UK are heavily looking at moving there and I already know some who are moving substantial operations there. Brexit will make a boomtown out of Dublin.” • “The most important issue is that we still have no idea what Brexit means or when it will happen. Two years of negotiations starting early next year. Until the outcome is clear one can’t predict the effect on the economy or on the startup scene.”
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Apple adds Sonos speakers to its stores as it focuses on wireless audio
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Matt Burns
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Did you hear? — at least to Apple. And to that end, Sonos, perhaps the best wireless speakers available, are now available in the Apple Store alongside speakers from B&O, Logitech, and Apple’s Beats. Apple but the Sonos speakers would be the first multi-room system available. The Sonos PLAY:1 and PLAY:5 are available online today and in stores starting October 5th. It’s unclear where this leaves Beats, Apple’s own audio company. Sonos’s wireless connectivity is proprietary and does not work with other speakers. The microprocessor Apple built to power the wireless AirPods seem to state that Apple is all-in with wireless audio, but it does not have a wireless speaker system of its own. Apple could be a little gun-shy on producing another speaker product. The last one sounded fantastic, but a retail flop. It’s likely, though, if Apple were to integrate its W1 wireless audio processor into a product, it would do so in a Beats product — or buy Sonos and integrate it there, too.
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Climate change and cleantech provide unlikely first flashpoints in Presidential debate
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Jonathan Shieber
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In the opening moments of the presidential debate, some of the first flashpoints came over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s push for clean energy and clean technology in her economic development plan. While both presidential challengers, Secretary Clinton and Donald Trump, support infrastructure spending, Clinton came out during the debates with a full-throated support for renewable energy. “It’s important we grip this and deal with it,” Clinton said of the threat climate change poses to the nation. Her solution, as part of a push for economic prosperity, is to deploy a half a billion solar panels and “build a modern electric grid.” “That’s a lot of new jobs. That’s a lot of economic activity,” Clinton said. Meanwhile, Clinton accused Trump of claiming that global warming was a hoax created by the Chinese government to sabotage American business interests. That led to a heated exchange in which Trump denied making the claim and accused Clinton of rehashing policies that led to the loss of millions for the U.S. government. Unfortunately, Trump tweeted this. The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) Although some Twitter users claimed Trump’s campaign deleted the tweet, it appears to still be live as of this writing. “She talks about solar panels. We invested in a solar company. Our country. That was a disaster,” Trump said. Trump is likely referring to the tax credits and other assistance that the Obama Administration in the years from 2008 to 2012 during the cleantech bubble.
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Hofstra bans private Wi-Fi, charges $200 for network connectivity during debate
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John Biggs
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In an exciting bit of pre-debate frisson, journalists are now Tweet they have to pay $200 for Wi-Fi access on site and, more importantly, the ones who have paid now have no Internet at all. Aaaaaaaaand the $200 Wi-Fi Hofstra forced the reporters to buy at the ? It's down. — Emily Dreyfuss (@EmilyDreyfuss) Journalists attending the event were required to “rent” the Wi-Fi for $200 for five devices – not an uncommon or unprecedented request. What truly galled, however, was the suggesting that Hofstra dongle police would confiscate and shut down anyone trying to run their own hotspot, an act that borders just on the edge of . Plus as of this writing the Wi-Fi seems to be spotty at best. Obviously it’s not Hofstra’s responsibility to pay for a news outlet’s power or Internet. However, and the Internet goes down immediately it’s a little hard to claim moral superiority over the poor hacks hunched over liveblogging rigs tonight. In the end this is a tempest in a Long Island Iced Tea as we all know that the instant a journalist is banned for firing up a personal hotspot we’ll enjoy a delightful and embarrassing Periscope from the show floor. In the end it will be business as usual – journalists will suffer with bad Wi-Fi while event organizers scramble to reboot a Cisco router that is on the verge of melting into a silicon pancake and thus the great wheel shall spin. There was just an announcement in the debate filing center that personal wifi dongles are prohibited, instead you must buy their $200 wifi — Jim Newell (@jim_newell)
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Fishing in the dead pool
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Josh Rochlin
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I have used my free time this summer revisiting a childhood passion: fishing. My father loved to fish. He would take me to Central Park’s with a hook and lure. I would inevitably catch something very small, put it in a cup and hope it would survive overnight to show my friends. As I grew older, we graduated to fishing boats launching from City Island and Sheepshead Bay. My yield was a bit bigger, but most fish failed to meet the required size. The “keepers” were the prize; we brought them home for Sunday dinner. Too often on Sundays, we ordered pizza instead. These fishing trips came to mind recently on a farewell call with Steve (maybe not his real name), a former IBM colleague. When IBM three years ago, the value was more than just Xtify’s mobile engagement platform — the “keepers” were my senior management team. Each of these executives were destined to become stars at Big Blue. They had successfully helped pioneer an industry (mobile CRM) and met the challenges of persuading large enterprises to adopt a new engagement channel (push notifications). They were creative and passionate innovators. This particular IBM sales executive was calling to ask how he could recruit talented leaders similar to the ones I brought to IBM. He was essentially asking where he could find the keepers. It’s not that IBM doesn’t have keepers; it does. But notwithstanding the taxonomy, it’s very hard for a large company to find and keep the keepers. And that’s when I told him about fishing in the dead pool. If IBM, or any company, is looking for talent that can inject passion, creativity and energy into their efforts, the is a fertile (and well-stocked) pond from which to fish. In fact, IBM has a history of success fishing in these waters. The executive who built its content and search business came from the pool, as did the strategic team now growing IBM’s cloud offerings. The Xtify team succeeded with equal parts talent, hard work and luck. Our timing was fortuitous. We matured in the mobile space just when everyone was talking “MobileFirst,” and we grasped the significance of SaaS apps for the CMO just as the market was shifting toward cloud-based offerings. We had the right story at the right time, and a receptive and acquisitive audience in IBM. But it didn’t have to work out that way. And if it hadn’t, Michael, Gil, Josh and Dan (maybe not their real names) would have been no less keepers. They would just have been keepers floundering in the dead pool. The energy and passion needed to lead (and live) the startup life is tremendous, and the setbacks can be exhausting. Often those talented executives who did not realize an exit are looking to get off the treadmill — if only temporarily — and enjoy the stability (and balance sheet) of a more established enterprise. Many of these creators, disruptors and innovators are looking to come up to the surface and breathe the fresh air in a more hospitable and stable environment. This is Steve’s time to go fishing. The challenge is to set his lure just right and cast his rod in the dead pool.
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76ers get into e-sports with purchase of Dignitas and Apex pro gaming teams
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Devin Coldewey
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The Philadelphia 76ers became the first American professional sports franchise to own an e-sports team with the purchase of pro gaming outfits Dignitas and Apex. If this isn’t proof positive that online pro gaming is big business, I don’t know what is. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but they’re not paying in Mountain Dew, that’s for sure. Dignitas, which will absorb League of Legends team Apex as part of the deal, now has about two dozen gamers on its payroll and CS:GO, Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm and Smite. . welcome to the family — Scott O'Neil (@ScottONeil) It’s been in the works for a year or so, and Michael O’Dell, who’s owned Dignitas since 2003, is optimistic. “I’ve seen the good times. I’ve seen the bad times,” he told . “The fact that the 76ers are coming in now will help me legitimize what I’ve been doing for such a long time.” Scott O’Neil, meanwhile, CEO of the Sixers, hasn’t played a video game . But you don’t have to play the game to play the game, if you know what I mean. “We were smart enough to know what we didn’t know,” he told ESPN. What they did know was that tens of millions of people (young people, with disposable income!) were regularly watching e-sports, paying for tickets, buying merchandise and so on. The purchase is really just dipping a toe in the market, considering the quantities of cash pro franchises handle regularly, but it sets an important precedent and, if it’s successful, will likely be the first of many such moves by the big teams. For instruction, they would do well to look to Europe and Asia, where pro gaming has been mainstream for years and structures for partnerships, events and publicity are well established. The deal is full of possibility, but everyone involved is speaking only in the most general terms; if you like enthusiastic quotes.
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U.S. Department of Labor sues Palantir for racial discrimination
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Megan Rose Dickey
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The U.S. Department of Labor is , the software and data analysis company contracted by the federal government, for alleged racial discrimination against Asian people in its hiring and selection processes. The aim of the lawsuit is to put an end to ‘s alleged discriminatory hiring practices, . The suit also seeks relief for those affected through the means of lost wages, interest, retroactive seniority and all other lost benefits of employment. The suit comes after compliance review by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The office’s review determined that Palantir has violated , which details equal employment opportunities and non-discriminatory practices, from January 2010 to the present day. Palantir allegedly used a hiring process that discriminated against Asian applicants for software engineering roles, “routinely eliminated” qualified Asian applicants in the resume screening and telephone interview phases and hired a majority of people from its discriminatory employee referral system. In one example cited in the lawsuit, the Labor Department says Palantir hired 14 non-Asian applicants and 11 Asian applicants from a pool of more than 1,160 qualified people, 85 percent of whom were Asian. The likelihood of that happening from chance is one in 3.4 million, according to the lawsuit. “Federal contractors have an obligation to ensure that their hiring practices and policies are free of all forms of discrimination,” OFCCP Director said in a statement. “Our nation’s taxpayers deserve to know that companies employed with public funds are providing equal opportunity for job seekers.” Following the review, the OFCCP asked for Palantir’s voluntarily compliance in resolving the issues found in the review. Palantir declined to comply, which is when the Labor Department filed the suit. The federal government has contracted services from Palantir since January 2010. Those contracts are worth $340 million, according to the lawsuit. If Palantir fails to provide relief to those affected, the company stands to lose those contracts with the FBI, the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Army. Palantir has raised over . I’ve reached out to Palantir and will update this story if I hear back. For now, : “Talented and ethical people come from all walks of life, and anyone talented and ethical is welcome here.”
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Lenovo’s gutting of Motorola is nearly complete
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Matt Burns
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My first cell phone was a Sanyo. But only because I couldn’t afford a Motorola. I wanted a StarTAC. All the cool kids had a StarTAC. My Sanyo said loud and clear I was not a cool kid. Sometime later, I spent around $650 to be one of the first people to get the RAZR. People didn’t stand in line back then, but I purchased it at the store the first day it was available. I was finally a cool kid. I stuck with Motorola through the Droid years. I loved my Droid X, X2 and still think the RAZR M is one of the nicest-feeling phones ever made. But now the cool kids have iPhones and Galaxys. Motorola’s days are numbered. Lenovo announced another round of layoffs, leaving just several hundred people working at Motorola — 3,500 people worked at Motorola when Lenovo bought the division from Google in 2014 and 20,000 worked there when Google bought the company in 2012. Motorola was an American icon founded in 1928. It was the United States’ Sony and Philips. It was the pride of Chicago. Like other early mobile icons, BlackBerry and Nokia, the company failed to innovate quickly enough and fell behind Apple and Samsung. Eventually Google bought part of the company. It wasn’t a good fit, so a Chinese giant bought the brand and engineers off Google in 2014. At the time there were soft cries about a Chinese firm buying a historic American brand. But this was Lenovo, which years earlier purchased another iconic American brand, IBM’s laptop division, and managed to become the world’s largest PC vendor. If anyone could turn around Motorola, it could be Lenovo, most hoped. That hasn’t happened. Motorola’s market share has dwindled to a tiny percentage, though it continues to produce stellar devices. The Motorola of today is not the Motorola that made the cell phone or m68k or even the RAZR. That Motorola is gone, and all that’s left is a shell and empty cubicles in its Chicago headquarters.
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Lenovo undergoes another big layoff round, mostly impacting Motorola
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Brian Heater
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Late last year, Lenovo following a quarter of bad financial news. The company let 3,200 employees go, as decline in PC demand, increased smartphone competition and currency fluctuations apparently created something of a perfect storm. The company is at it again, and while the number is less than list time, it’s still fairly significant, primarily impacting its Motorola Mobility smartphone business. In a statement issued early today, the company is looking to downplay things a bit in contrast to its overall numbers, noting that the moves “[impact] less than two percent of its approximately 55,000 employees globally.” It’s still a significant number, however you do the math, that point to some volatility as the company attempts to negotiate Motorola’s position under its leadership. In the statement, the company notes that most of the jobs being eliminated are “part of the ongoing strategic integration” between the companies as Lenovo attempts to “streamlin[e] its product portfolio to best compete in the global smartphone market.” The company added that, in spite of this latest move, it remains committed to keeping Motorola Mobility’s headquarters in Chicago.
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Zenly raises $22.5 million from Benchmark for its location-sharing app
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Romain Dillet
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French startup has raised $22.5 million over the summer from and a few other investors. Business Insider first the round and TechCrunch got an official confirmation. Here’s what we know. Benchmark is leading the round with Peter Fenton joining the board of the company. Fenton has invested in a few social network companies and also is a board member of Twitter. Existing investors Idinvest and Xavier Niel also put a bit more money into this round. Insight Venture Partners co-founder Jerry Murdock also invested personally. More interestingly, Benchmark invested directly into the French company. This is significant, as many American VCs prefer to invest in an American company, even if it means that French startups have to do a costly relocation. Benchmark didn’t want to waste time. Zenly managed to raise this round in just 28 days from intro to money in the bank account — it was a quick one. The company had raised an $11.2 million Series A round last year (€10 million) and still had plenty of money in the bank. But it’s hard to say no to Benchmark. “Being able to see where your friends are and who they are with opens up a world of product opportunities, which if executed successfully will lead to one of the iconic companies of our lifetime,” Fenton said. “We were immediately won over by the Zenly team’s depth of technical expertise and their vision for the map as a basis for a whole array of social engagement.” In case you missed the first episode, I already wrote a about Zenly, a promising location-sharing app. This isn’t yet another check-in app, this isn’t just a “Find my Friends”-type app. It goes further than that. Zenly wants to make location sharing cool again. The company spent a lot of time getting the basics right. In its current state, Zenly is an easy way to share your current location with a handful of friends… or dozens of them. It turns out that teens loved it — 2 million people have downloaded the app so far. And it’s just the beginning, as Zenly will add layers of useful data on top of this basic premise. For instance, what if you could get a notification when your friends are hanging out together so that you don’t miss out on a great party? Similarly, Zenly knows before many other apps that a place is trending because it knows when people actually go to this place. It’s going to be a long road, as Zenly is playing in an incredibly competitive industry. Tech companies like Google, Apple and Uber have been hard at work to build the best map you can use. As Zenly wants to go beyond putting pins on a map, the company will have to build its own mapping data. Zenly has 35 employees right now, and plans to open an office in San Francisco over the coming weeks. The company plans to keep most of the engineering team in France and operate with two offices. And now, the startup has a lot of money to worry less about money and more about the product.
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Edie Windsor coding scholarship selects 40 LGBTQ women to learn how to code
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Megan Rose Dickey
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There’s a shortage of people from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer community in tech — not because they lack skill, but because they lack equal opportunity. , the organization for lesbian and queer women in tech, has selected 40 people to receive scholarships to attend coding bootcamps at schools like General Assembly, Dev Bootcamp and Turing. Over the last few years, coding bootcamps have emerged as an alternative way to access the skills needed to get into the tech industry, without needing to attend a traditional college or university. The caveat is that these programs can be pretty expensive, averaging about $11,000 per student, , a database of information and reviews on coding bootcamps. Enter Lesbians Who Tech’s Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship, which has more than doubled its reach from five to 40 scholars in five to 12 coding schools across the U.S. in the last year. Lesbians Who Tech was able to do that thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $100,000 from 722 people and . Of the 40 people selected for the scholarship this year, 67 percent are people of color, 10 percent identify as trans and 100 percent are LGBTQ. “To have my name in the same sentence as Edie Windsor’s would be incredible. It inspires me to be a fighter, no matter what,” Natalie Ruiz, a scholar who will participate in Dev Bootcamp, said. “Her efforts accelerated a positive shift towards my rights, our rights — her story is remarkable. Also, having the opportunity to go full throttle with my learning and development is a blessing. This really is changing the trajectory of my life. I am grateful that I will be able to attend Dev Bootcamp as well as join and become involved with this wonderful community.” In addition to being the person behind the lawsuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor is a computer scientist. She kicked off her career in the tech industry in 1958, when she started working at IBM. During her time there, she ultimately became a senior systems programmer, which was the highest technical rank at the time. She was the first person in New York City to receive an IBM PC. “The second I heard about Edie Windsor’s technical background at IBM, I knew in that moment, that Lesbians Who Tech had a critical role to play in telling her story,” Lesbians Who Tech founder Leanne Pittsford told me. “So that future generations of LGBTQ women in technology will know not only her heroic defeat of DOMA, but to know that just like them, she’s a techie. We named our coding scholarship after Edie to ensure her story will continue to inspire LGBTQ women everywhere. Because together with support like the Edie Windsor Coding Scholarship fund, we can change the face of technology.” Check out the scholars below.
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GM’s Maven starts offering one-way car sharing
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Darrell Etherington
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GM’s has begun rolling out one-way car sharing for its members in Ann Arbor and Detroit, letting users pick up vehicles and use them to get between Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, and between Detroit and the Detroit Metro airport. The one-way service is a big advantage for car-sharing services, as it means users don’t have to worry about planning their return trip. One-way means members can pick up their rental vehicles in one location and drop them off somewhere else, rather than having to bring them back to where they originally began their rental. Zipcar and has been offering one-way service for a little while now after beginning as exclusively round-trip, rolling out first in Boston in 2014 and then gradually adding other cities over time. Maven’s rollout is starting where its service first began, but COO Dan Grossman tells me via email that the company will “assess city to city” and expand gradually from that beginning point. Asked whether or not this was always on the roadmap, or whether it was launched in response to user feedback about the service, Grossman said that it was the result of both. “[W]e assumed we could layer this service on top of round trip,” he said, but the possibility of one-way also got great feedback when floated with members. Other car-sharing services rely on even more flexibility for rentals as a key competitive advantage. Daimler’s car2go, for instance, offers not only one-way, but also free parking at specified locations and drop-offs in city-run lots, depending on the system in place for a particular city. Any kind of one-way offering is a vast improvement over a rigorous round-trip-only offering, however, so Maven’s move today is definitely smart. Maven also continues to grow, since launching earlier this year.
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Cognovi Labs will study the presidential debates tonight with their emotional sentiment tool
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Jay Donovan
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when correctly predicted the outcome hours ahead of the final vote — and counter to what traditional polling had suggested was going to happen. Tonight, the company is partnering with Applied Policy Research Institute and the Kno.e.sis Center at Wright State University and has set up a war room of 30+ political and technical experts to study the presidential debate, in real-time, to track how Twitter chatter is expressing the emotional mood of the nation. I found this pretty interesting, so . The tool the company uses to determine emotional segmentation is called Twitris. It was developed at Wright State University and is able to take large swaths of Twitter data and not only deduce sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) but can also add a layer of emotional response on top of that sentiment. Many companies already do sentiment analysis, but Cognovi Labs’ emotional analysis is what they claim to be their novel technology. For example, the startup can suck in all the Twitter data that is expressed as a reaction to an event, like a presidential debate, and then determine how many people felt positively about that, negatively about it or neutral. Then, within those sentiment divisions, they can determine emotional response that lay in each division. Here is a data sample they took about how people are expressing emotion about each presidential candidate over the last 8 days: Cognovi Labs is also able to segment by location, as well, so they can see where on a map these specific emotions are being felt. So load up this page while you tune in tonight and I’ll update it with emotional data that’s being pumped out as this debate happens. 8:05 pm Ahead of the debate, the emotions being expressed on Twitter about the candidates are listed above in aggregate. With Trump, the emotion being most expressed is Joy (40.05%). With Clinton the emotion being most expressed is Anger (43.59%). I have questions of course like, I heard back from Cognovi Labs about this. The logged info is based on single emotions. For example it could be the same user that issues a tweet that says “Hillary rules and Trump sucks”. However that will be counted as Joy for Hillary and Anger for Trump…two separate emotions would be logged. 9:06 pm And here we go. The debate has started. 9:26 pm Latest update. When it comes to Trade–in terms of general sentiment…positive, negative or neutral–Donald Trump is receiving higher positive sentiment on Twitter, following the discussion, according to Cognovi Labs. 9:43 pm Latest update. Here is the general Twitter sentiment tracked by Cognovi Labs, based on the first 20 minutes of the debate that focused jobs, trade, budget (prosperity). 9:58 pm Latest update. Emotional sentiment data for the debate so far. Some changes are visible when compared to pre-debate emotional sentiment in the chart at the top. 10:06 pm This is a sentiment update that shows a drop in sentiment for Hillary Clinton that corresponds with her comment that “I have prepared for the debate, and you know what I have also prepared to be president.” 10:13 pm Mostly negative tweets for both candidates. Cognovi Labs points out that Trump supporters are way more active on Twitter. 10:58 pm The faction on the right not persuaded by performance this evening. — Cognovi Labs (@CognoviLabs) 11:00 pm Here's the wrap. When normalizing for volume dominated throughout from the opening bell at 9. — Cognovi Labs (@CognoviLabs) 11:07 pm Here is the post-debate emotion analysis. 11:23 pm While Cognovi Labs was analyzing Twitter data as early as 6 pm, you can see in the tweet above that they are calling the debate as a win for Clinton (after normalizing for volume). From 9 pm on, the data shows a steady incline for her in sentiment, derived from Twitter traffic. In terms of a wrap up on how their emotional analysis culminated the team provided this summary: “What the Emotion component tells us is that the debate began with Hillary in a negative position. Anger comprised almost half of the tweets for and about her. This factor decreased throughout the debate and toward her slightly increased. On the other hand, Trump started with as a high factor and eventually he settled into a position where / / were equally distributed. This shows us that, though his fan-base is strong, there is still a significant wing of opposition toward Trump. Also, it appears that enthusiasm ‘toward’ a particular candidate is not as strong a driving factor as emotion against the candidates.”
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on how AI will transform his company
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Frederic Lardinois
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stage at his company’s massive Ignite conference to lay out his vision for how deep learning and artificial intelligence will transform the company. “AI is at the intersection of our ambitions,” Nadella said, noting how it will allow us “to reason over large amounts of data and convert that into intelligence.” He likened AI to the arrival of books and the web and joked that we will soon create so much data that “we are getting to a point where we don’t even know what to name things.” That’s also creating problems, though. “In this information explosion, what remains scarce is human intention and time — our ability to make sense out of all of this information,” he said. At Microsoft, this transformation is currently happening in a few different areas, with agents like Cortana, applications like SwiftKey and Office 365, and developer tools and platforms like the Cortana Intelligence Suite and the Azure cloud computing platform. As for agents, Nadella noted that the ambition here is to create an intelligent assistant that “can take text input, can take speech input, that knows your deeply. It knows your context, your family, your work. It knows about the world.” He also stressed that this agent will have to be unbounded and available on every platform and in every application — even those not controlled by Microsoft. “With Office 365, we are not just moving to the cloud,” Nadella said. “The most profound shift is in the fact that the data underneath the applications of Office 365 is exposed in a graph structure. And in a trusted, private-preserving way, we can reason over this data and create intelligence. That’s really the profound shift in Office 365.” He also noted how tools like the focused inbox in Outlook, Skype’s real-time translation, smarter spelling correction in Word and new tools like Tap in Word, tap into this intelligence. Nadella specifically stressed how Dynamics 365, the company’s CRM tool and one of its major revenue drivers, can make use of these technologies. “Take something like sales,” he said. “In any business application you always explicitly modeled the world. […] But there is one real problem: most of the sales activity happens outside of a CRM system. And so the goal of intelligence is to be able to reason about your sales data model. Not just inside your CRM system but outside.” In this context, Nadella also mentioned how the company could use relationship data from LinkedIn, which it in June. For developers, the way to access this intelligence in their own applications is through the Cortana Intelligence Suite. This suite of tools includes a bot framework now, too, and Nadella believes all businesses will at one point use a conversational agent to interact with their customers. Microsoft is currently working with the NFL to create a fantasy football bot and Uber is now using the Cortana Cognitive Services’ face recognition tools to veryify drivers and passengers. Nadella also noted how Microsoft is working with Volvo to recognize when drivers are distracted (and then warn them). Combine these technologies with Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed-reality headset and you bring together “the two most magical technologies of our time.” Lowe’s, for example, is working on an application that allows its customer to design a kitchen using HoloLens, for example, but the company also today talked about how it can then use the data it aggregates from multiple sessions — including the data it gathers from tracking people’s gaze — to improve the experience and be smarter about ordering items. Given that Microsoft loves to talk about how we live in a “cloud first, mobile first” world, it’s no surprise Nadella also talked about Microsoft’s Azure cloud. He stressed how Azure offers developers access to GPU-based machines to train deep learning models and how it recently started using FPGAs. Nadella calls this FPGA-enabled cloud the “first AI supercomputer” (though Google, which is actually using , may actually claim the crown of being the first, if not the largest, of these kind of deployments). Some of Microsoft’s cognitive services already run on this platform and Azure is using it to speed up its networking infrastructure. “It’s never about our technology,” Nadella said in closing. “It is really to me about your passion, your imagination, and what you can do with technologies that we create. What societal problem, what industry will you reshape. That’s really what we dream about. We want to democratize AI just like we brought information to your fingertips.”
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If Google buys Twitter, there’s a perfect spot for it in YouTube
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Josh Constine
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If you combined the fastest and slowest types of social media, the result could be both must-see and never-forgotten. YouTube lacks short-form, frequently updated content, but is synonymous with video and that popularity brings in lucrative ads. Twitter is struggling with growth and monetization, but it’s the pulse of the planet, generating tons of real-time content and engagement. Together they could be a powerful team if Google’s willing to pay the price, which reports could be around $30 billion. YouTube’s new Twitter-esque Community tab Twitter is also in talks with Verizon, Salesforce, and Microsoft, TechCrunch reported following a story by about . And a bid . But of all those potential acquirers, Google seems like the best fit. It has products that would mesh well with Twitter. It’s proven unable to build its own successful social products beyond its acquisition of YouTube. And it has its insanely profitable search advertising business to support the financially unstable Twitter. Google would get to further its goal of organizing the world’s information by ingesting Twitter’s data firehose, which could give Google’s AI extra insights into what’s going on in the world and everyone’s reactions. Plus it might be able to monetize all that data better by combining Twitter with everything Google knows from AdWords and AdSense. But the best synergy lies in uniting YouTube’s sporadic video content with Twitter’s constant chatter. A strong integration into YouTube could increase the frequency of return visits to the channels of content creators by offering a one-stop-shop for fandom, encompassing off-the-cuff tweets and polished videos. And it just so happens that YouTube recently built its own Twitter-style feature called YouTube Community that it could replace with the real thing. is a sidebar/tab for YouTube Channels that lets creators share text, photos, GIFs, links, and more to stoke a deeper form of connection with their viewers. The strategy is to get users to come back to those channels more often than just when the creator publishes a new video, which might only be once or twice a week. With all of YouTube’s algorithmic suggestions, it could then get those visitors to watch other new videos or older ones by their favorite stars. That would allow YouTube to better compete with Facebook, which has built an enormous audience for . Users come to the News Feed to see what’s up with friends, but end up watching random videos. That gives Facebook lots of opportunities to serve high-priced video ads, since users weren’t trying to watch something specific anyways. YouTube has historically been more of purposeful viewing destination that users visit because they followed a link to a certain video or wanted to see the latest clip from creators they follow. Meanwhile, Twitter could dramatically benefit from exposure to YouTube’s mainstream and teen audiences. Many people are still confused about why they would want to sign up for Twitter, especially if they’re not a public figure and might . But YouTube could teach them the joys of Twitter lurking, where users follow stars or thought leaders and perhaps reply, but don’t necessarily have to produce original tweets. An acquisition by Google would also take the pressure off with revenue growth sinking fast. Many of Twitter’s ad units, like Sponsored Tweets, feel easily skippable. People already skim rather than meticulously read their Twitter timeline, making it easier to pass by the ads than ones on Facebook, where algorithmic sorting and a focus on real friends encourages people to read each post — and the ads in between. Twitter’s best performing ads are videos, and YouTube’s experience and advertiser connections could give them a boost. In any case, something has to change for Twitter. Except for investors trying to capitalize on a potential sale, its share price has sunk lower and lower. Each earnings report has seemed more hopeless than the last as a user growth problem has festered into a revenue growth problem. Some fresh management and cross-promotion from a proven tech giant like Google could mend its wings.
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The New York Times invests in theSkimm
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Anthony Ha
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Big media companies are backing newsletter startup . Following that was announced in June, theSkimm announced today that it has raised an additional $500,000 from The New York Times, Yannick Bolloré (CEO of ad giant Havas Group), strategic advisory firm MediaLink and actress Mariska Hargitay. The company says it now has 4 million subscribers (mostly women between the ages of 22 and 34) for a newsletter that distills the day’s headlines into a few key points, conveyed in a conversational, friendly style. It’s also been expanding beyond newsletters with , that costs $2.99 per month. In addition to announcing the funding, theSkimm is also unveiling its latest product, Skimm Studies, which the company describes as offering “an inside look into what female millennials think.” Basically, they’re reports drawn from surveys of Skimm readers, which the company says will be made available for free. For example, their first Skimm Study , finding that 56 percent of respondents say they’re supporting Hillary Clinton, compared to 24 percent undecided and 8 percent for Trump. This also ties into , where theSkimm says it has already helped 60,000 people register to vote.
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Movie pirate? Don’t trust Plex Cloud
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Matt Burns
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Plex is a pirate’s best friend. It’s by far the best way to get movies downloaded illegally from the computer to TV. Sure, Plex has a handful of useful, legal features, but let’s be honest, its big claim to fame is hosting and serving downloaded movies. And now the company behind the software where users can stream movies, photos and music stored on Amazon’s cloud as if the content was streamed locally. But don’t tell Amazon about the pirated stuff. The Plex Cloud, as the new service is called, got a fair amount of coverage when it launched earlier today. On the surface it’s exciting. No longer would users have to constantly run and maintain local servers to host. Plex Cloud essentially lets users create their own Netflix. All the movies and photos and music are hosted in the cloud — the same cloud Netflix uses, actually — and they’re called down to devices on demand. Even the Plex server software is streamed from the cloud. Users just have to pay the $60 yearly fee for unlimited storage on Amazon Web Services. And this is where it gets hairy. Amazon — content such as downloaded movies. I haven’t tried the service yet, though Plex offered to get me a beta pass as soon as they’re available. I expect it will work even with movies downloaded from The Pirate Bay and countless other sites. Amazon Web Services does not prevent users from uploading such content. But AWS will likely remove it as soon as it’s identified. Amazon is not alone in this stance. Uploading such content to cloud services has long been a point of debate. Some users feel as long as the content is not publicly shared or advertised, the content will run under the radar of Amazon, Google, and the rest of the cloud providers. Plex’s stance on uploading illegal content to AWS is predictable: “Those who use Plex Cloud should abide by the Terms of Use of both Plex and Amazon,” a company spokesperson told me when asked specific questions about AWS’s policies around downloaded movies. Even operating in a gray area, Plex Cloud is an interesting step in personal computing. It removes the need for personal infrastructure to achieve the same outcome as if the Plex software was running on a home computer. And this is the promise of cloud computing. As for the Plex Cloud, if I relied on Plex to serve downloaded movies and TV shows to my family, I would keep that content stored safely and privately on a server in my basement next to the crock pot and Halloween decorations. If I did such a thing. But I don’t.
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AirServer can now transmit your iPhone screen to your Xbox
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John Biggs
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AirServer, makers of software that essentially turns anything into an AirPlay sever, has announced the availability of for the Xbox One. That means you can transmit your AirPlay screens to your gaming console, thereby creating a black hole of Microsoft-on-Apple madness. Air Server also lets you transmit via Google Cast and Miracast. The and “transforms your Xbox into a high performance AirPlay receiver.” This means you can transmit iOS or MacOS screens to your Xbox as well as send multi-room audio to your Xbox via an AirPlay transmitter. AirServer has over 2 million users and the founder, Pratik Kumar, said the company is self-funded. “It is a European success story,” he said. The app also works and Macs. It’s popular in the education and business space because it allows for instant mirroring of displays from multiple devices at once.
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John Mannes
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This is probably Google’s 4K Chromecast “Ultra”
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Greg Kumparak
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If you’ve been waiting for a Chromecast with 4K video support, good news: it’s looking more and more real with each passing day. Rumors have been floating around for a few weeks now of an upcoming “Chromecast Ultra”, which says will make its debut at Google’s October 4th event. Now we know what it looks like. Posted by gadget soothsayer Evan Blass (otherwise known as evleaks) , these newly leaked renders show a Chromecast that looks… well, a whole lot like a Chromecast. One thing of note: if these renders prove accurate, it seems Google is stripping the Pokeball-lookin’ Chrome logo off the Chromecast in favor of a “G”. Beyond that, no real surprises on the design front; it’s a little puck with an HDMI cord sticking out of it, much like the 2nd generation Chromecast. And that’s okay! It’s hard to come up with much the Chromecast needs added to its hardware. Everything it needs to do is done at a software level, and that’s sort of the whole point: the hardware isn’t to be fancy, or pretty, or particularly complicated. It’s supposed to disappear behind your TV and push any functionality it can onto your phone/tablet/etc. The only thing missing, then, would be 4K support — and that’s apparently coming here. Rumors say the Chromecast Ultra will cost $69, and sell alongside the standard, $35 non-4K model.
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Crunch Report | Chan Zuckerberg $3 billion investment to cure disease
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Virtual reality in Japan
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Sunny Dhillon
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I spent a week in Tokyo last month as a speaker at the gaming conference. Had you asked 10 year old me about Japan, I would have conjured up images of Godzilla, Dragon Ball Z, and ninjas. Funnily enough, day trips to and brought some of these to life through arcades, cosplayers, and stores full of manga collectibles. Walking around Tokyo, I saw virtual reality poised for blast off. The legacy of arcade and console games is evident all over Tokyo. Walking through Akihabara, I saw a culture that praised gamers and geeks. Trendy hipsters played the games of my childhood: Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Bubble Bobble, Wonder Boy, Dynamite Dux, Streets of Rage…and, of course, Super Mario. For those who don’t know, Akihabara is an entire district of Tokyo solely dedicated to consumer electronics, tech, and arcade gaming. So…many…neon…lights! Tokyo’s Akibahara gaming district Akihabara, or wider Tokyo in general, has never had an abundance of internet cafes like China, nor a large PC gaming audience like in the West. Wifi and broadband enabled homes have negated the need for the former and consoles and arcades have done so with the latter. Without a PC gaming culture, high end VR headsets don’t have a natural place in Japan. That said, the HTC Vive has emerged as a front runner in Japan’s fledgling experiential VRcades. Spectators surround folks playing VR games in these VRcades and they’re able to watch the player through viewpoints other than the gamer’s first person view. VR gaming becomes very watchable for spectators in VRcades as a result of mixed reality filming. Mixed reality filming (like that seen below) allows viewers to see what gamers see in VR, without having to watch through a ‘first person view’ (which can make folks nauseous and dizzy). It’s an innovative way to move a camera around the VR world and film gameplay for real world spectators. I think there will be arcade VR and living-room VR in Japan, but the far more real world, social experiences around VR gaming will come from the arcades, not the living room. Furthermore, mixed reality theme parks are a ‘thing’ in Tokyo. Really worth checking out are Melbourne-based Zero Latency VR’s mixed reality with Sega Live Creations at the Yokohama Joypolis theme park or Bandai Namco’s VR arcades in Odaiba. Both of these are great, but reportedly do not compare to the well funded darling of Western mixed reality, ‘ . The Void was noticeably missing from Tokyo’s VR landscape, despite its theme-park-like success in New York’s Time Square with the Ghostbusters IP (where they charge gamers $50 per 8 min ‘ride’). Japanese living room gaming has been dominated by Nintendo and Sony for decades. While Nintendo has been silent on VR to date, Sony’s Playstation VR headset will be very popular in its homeland. While PSVR’s positional tracking solution or hardware specs aren’t quite as good as the Vive’s, it does not require a cleared, separate room for operation, nor a powerful PC to run. I expect that Sony’s branded homeland strength, its robust pre-installed Playstation user base, and its deep understanding of AAA game development position PSVR for success in Japan. Outside of gaming, VR’s presence in retail is evident too. At Shinjuku’s high end department store, Isetan, I saw 2 separate designers using . These were part immersive advertising (with trippy art/fashion shows), and part commerce (for exploring new season inventory). It was interesting that these mall installations didn’t have technicians on hand to shepherd folks through the VR experience as is the case in a US Best Buy store, for example. Instead, shoppers were expected to pick up the displayed Vive headset and start cycling through fashion content without explanation. Finally, I can’t talk about Japan and NOT talk about augmented reality. Over the last year smartphone augmented reality facial filters were the hot ticket; Snapchat obsessed over and Facebook went soft in the knees for , with each paying a rumored ~$70m and ~$150m to acquire each, respectively. With smartphone AR becoming the norm in America, I was surprised to see that AR photo booths were such a big deal in Tokyo. Not just that, but there were long lines for each booth. Patrons had separate areas for putting on makeup, which I didn’t really understand, as the AR ‘beautification filters’ kind of made any prior prep irrelevant. I could show up looking scruffy and the part glamour-shot, part ‘Hello Kitty / Barbie doll’ filters would fix everything. To see what I mean, Google me to see what I look like regularly…it’s not like this: Continuing on AR for a minute, Line’s messaging app has smartphone market leadership in Japan and it’s fairly light on computer vision entertainment applications. The filtered wizardry of apps such as and will become globally commonplace as will the face masks mentioned above from MSQRD and Looksery. These are presently missing from Line. So, I wonder if these filters’ rising success in Japan will diminish the popularity of AR photobooths, though I’d predict going out to take selfies with friends is about the social experience as much as it is the end result, so perhaps the booths are part of Japan’s AR future. Pending the (likely) success of Playstation VR, Japan’s domestic VR market is going to be huge. Japanese VR startups such as Fove have raised $11m to date and it counts Softbank’s among its investors. Fove has been a pioneer in eye tracking and its CEO, Yuka, has become a literal poster child for Japanese VR (see ). Japan’s home turf VR investors include , , and , the latter of which has already made ~30 investments to date. Everything is in place for Tokyo to become a true global VR hub and it was a privilege to visit at ground zero this past week. Playstation VR will kickstart living room VR and social VRcades will become an extension of Japan’s arcade culture today. I can’t wait to go back and write another VRticle.
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Weebly updates its website builder with a focus on e-commerce and marketing
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Anthony Ha
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launched a new version of its platform today. While the company started out as an easy-to-use website creator and editor (I used it to ), CEO David Rusenko said that with Weebly 4, “We feel like for the first time we’re past a website builder — it’s something substantially different.” To be clear, the website editor is still a core part of the experience, but Rusenko said the biggest improvements this time around were on the e-commerce side. Those improvements include abandoned cart functionality (allowing stores to message customers when they leave without completing their purchase), as well as a rebuilt engine for calculating taxes in different cities and countries, plus real-time shipping prices (most of the time, apparently, stores are just estimating what the shipping will cost rather than pulling the most recent data from the shipping companies’ APIs). Rusenko argued that Weebly is now strong enough to compete against e-commerce platforms like Shopify, but in his view, the product’s real strength is the way it ties the website, e-commerce and together. For example, businesses edit their online storefront using the same interface as they do to build their website. Or when they’re adding new items to that storefront, Weebly can prompt them to send out an automated email highlighting the just-added products, and then it gives them a report on how many sales that email actually drove. Weebly says it now has 40 million customers whose websites are visited by 300 million people each month. Among other things, these new features could help Weebly remain a feasible choice for customers who have grown into large businesses. “We have customers doing many millions of dollars a year in sales on our the platform who are very happy with it,” Rusenko said. “But a lot of those people, where our e-commerce platform in the past was reaching its limits, this extends it out.” He also noted that the new features all work on mobile, and they’re further complemented by third-party integrations available through . [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ3TbIrFryc&w=560&h=315]
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McKinsey says digital finance adoption could add trillions to high growth economies
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Jake Bright
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Adoption of digital finance could add $3.7 trillion to the GDP of emerging markets economies, including $1.1 trillion in China alone, according to a new McKinsey & Company report. The strategy consulting firm’s Global Institute released , at a New York event featuring a keynote by Gates Foundation co-chair Melinda Gates. “The motivation for this report was to better measure the value of digital finance and greater financial inclusion in emerging markets,” McKinsey’s Susan Lund, a co-author said. “Few doubt that financial inclusion and mobile money dramatically reduce costs or boost economic growth. We wanted to apply our analytical tools to more accurately size what it’s worth to these regions.” Compared to advanced economies, many of these areas can be data desserts when it comes to statistics on particular consumer behavior or business sectors. In Africa, for example, several recent revealed outdated statistical methods were missing billions of dollars in economic activity. Most of the blame for the missing numbers falls squarely at the feet of the cash-based economies that comprise the majority of financial activity in these markets. Roughly 90% of transactions in high growth markets are done with cash. Cash does not leave the “rich datasets created by digital payments,” which can expose statistical blind spots and spur greater lending by creating more complete credit reporting. McKinsey’s report emphasizes the greater lack of financial inclusion in its focus regions. It pegs 45 percent—or two billion individuals—as unbanked “and 200 million micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) with “no or insufficient access to credit.” McKinsey’s survey then offers compelling projections on the potential of digital finance—defined as “financial services delivered over digital infrastructure…with low use of cash…”—to transform emerging market economies. Some of the highlights of fintech adoption across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East include the following: McKinsey views mobile based financial services as the most effective conduit to reach the unbanked. Mobile phone penetration, which stood at 80 percent in emerging markets in 2014, is expected to increase to 90 percent by 2020, according to GSMA data referenced in McKinsey’s report. “When it comes to access to financial services, mobile provides a leapfrog option in emerging economies,” said Lund. She highlighted a report finding that access to traditional financial accounts in emerging markets is strongly correlated to higher income, while access to mobile digital banking products is not. “Because mobile money based services are 80-90 percent cheaper, they can be offered at lower income levels.” An estimated 880 million women in emerging economies could gain first time financial account access through adoption of mobile and digital finance, according to McKinsey. Fintech services could open up $2.1 trillion in credit to individuals and MSMEs. McKinsey’s report offers several country case studies where it estimates the “GDP boost” potential of digital finance to each economy: China ($1.1 trillion), India ($700 billion), Brazil ($152 billion), Mexico ($90 billion), Nigeria ($88 billion) and Ethiopia ($15 billion). Meeting this potential requires governments to create “risk-proportionate financial-services regulation” and environments that foster “widespread digital environments.” While the emerging markets digital finance report does not offer investment advice, McKinsey’s Lund thinks U.S. tech actors will take note of the findings and offered some advice. “This is a profitable business opportunity and the door is wide open. But local partnerships will be important in navigating these markets strategically,” she said.
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Flickr is shutting down Marketplace, its commercial photo licensing program
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Greg Kumparak
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Flickr rolled out Marketplace, a photo licensing service that was meant to help Flickr users get paid by big websites and media properties that wanted to use that user’s photos. As of today, Flickr Marketplace is going away. It’ll take a few months for Flickr to wind things down, and Flickr notes that any royalties due to users be paid, but the program is effectively over. Flickr announced the closure via an e-mail sent to Marketplace users, citing “consistent feedback” that the service wasn’t up to par. We haven’t heard much about the service since launch, suggesting it wasn’t getting much attention within Flickr — meanwhile, competitors like and are raising millions of dollars to battle for the space. “Thank you for being a valuable member of the Flickr Marketplace licensing program. Over the past year we have received feedback from several of you regarding your experience around licensing and royalties. It was our hope to create the right Marketplace for our contributors, but based on consistent feedback, we understand there is more work to be done. As a result, we have decided to close the Flickr Marketplace licensing program. This closure will take place over the next few months. Once all licensed photos are removed from our distribution channels, we will communicate the completion of the closure to you. Until then, your images may still be licensed, and you will receive any royalties due to you under the current licensing terms. If you have thoughts and feedback about your experience in the program, we encourage you to fill out the attached survey. Your response could help shape possible decisions for any licensing opportunities in the future. [url removed] Thank you for your participation in the Flickr Marketplace. We wish you all the best in your future licensing endeavors. Sincere regards,
The Marketplace Team | Flickr” And in case anyone is hoping that someone is just trying to prank the handful of Marketplace users out there with a fake shutdown email: Flickr has confirmed the email’s legitimacy to us.
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Y Combinator signs up to Founders Pledge charity scheme for social causes
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Mike Butcher
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There’s always been an ongoing conversation amongst successful tech entrepreneurs about how to “give back.” Not everyone can afford to found an entire hospital, and yet many feel a desire to do something more than move on to the next startup. What probably needs to change is not so much the conversation around the “big exit” but the “conversation” with philanthropy. Mark Benioff’s to good causes has piqued the interest of many, but could appear to some as being more complicated than it needs to be, especially for serial entrepreneurs. has from Europe as an alternative idea. In the scheme, founders commit to donate a minimum 2 percent of their personal proceeds to social causes following an exit. That’s it. They’ve now taken this idea to the U.S. and the first partner is going to be Y Combinator. In a , YC Partner Sam Altman said more than 500 founders have already pledged with Founders Pledge, including those from Jawbone, Shazam, SwiftKey, AvantCredit, DeepMind, Huddle, Farfetch, Hampton Creek, Funding Circle, Blockchain, Zesty, Vicarious and Unruly, as well as 10+ YC companies. David Goldberg, director of , said: “Every pledger has signed a legally binding contract to give at least 2% of the aggregate gross value of what they receive pre-tax in the event of an exit or liquidation of shares in the company. The pledge is individual and is not tied to equity.” “They give their donation to our donor advised fund and we pass 100% of the gift onto the charities of their choice. Our operational costs are supported by a set of private donors who believe in the work we’re doing,” he added. The pledge will be encouraged and recommended across all new batches and YC alumni, with the idea that every YC-backed company could be involved, if the founders so wish it. It’s not compulsory, it’s just being encouraged. Given that the pre-money valuation of a YC company is over $10 million out of the gate, this is not an insignificant pledge. To be clear, Founders Pledge is a charity through which founders, investors and VCs commit to donating a small percentage of their personal proceeds to a charity or social cause of their choice, following an exit. Launched in the U.K. in June 2015, it now operates in 21 countries. To date there have been 540 pledges, with $140 million committed to charity across over 420 companies worth a collective $40 billion, says the organization. And in its network, there have been 14 exits with $10.3 million in deployment. This is clearly not insignificant, and the fact that YC has signed up is a very interesting indicator that this idea might take off across Silicon Valley.
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Aria Systems launches automotive recurring revenue platform
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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Aria Systems is bringing together the chocolate of usage- and subscription-based revenue opportunities with the peanut butter of increasingly connected automotive systems. The resulting candy (to complete this metaphor) that launched this week is . This is a cloud-based monetization platform for connected cars, on-demand transportation, telematics and more. Basically, Aria can help facilitate any service that users pay for based on usage (like car sharing) or a subscription (like in-car Wi-Fi). For more than a century, auto manufacturers have built vehicles to be sold once. One car, one customer, one purchase — until they’re ready to buy another car in a few years. Connected vehicles, IoT and automotive services are opening up these recurring revenue opportunities, but manufacturers aren’t moving quickly enough on their own to take advantage, according to Aria. has been around since 2003, which can seem like a century in the San Fransisco area, where the company is based. The company has been specializing in secure, cloud-based software for recurring billing since then. Aria for Connected Vehicles can be used by the manufacturers themselves — Subaru and Audi are already on board — or by third-party device manufacturers or services, like Zipcar and Edmunds.com. It works with smartphone apps, payment processors and existing accounting systems. When used with a smartphone app, Aria also holds customer credit card information with “bank-rate security,” for easier , according to the press release. The system has as many uses as there are usage models, it seems. It can facilitate hourly on-demand access to vehicles, whether that’s a fleet of shared cars or heavy machinery. It can track mileage for usage-based vehicle taxes. It can also sell analytics of driver patterns to “cities, planners, DOTs, insurers, [and] consumers.” Aria for Connected Vehicles can help transition from cars as owned objects to mobility as a service.
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Scientists teach machines to hunt and kill humans — in Doom deathmatch mode
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Devin Coldewey
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You know how sometimes you look at a piece of research and think, “I suppose it’s an interesting technical problem, but isn’t teaching an AI to hunt and kill humans a pursuit fundamentally dangerous to the continued existence of mankind?” This is one of those times. Some traitors to the species at Carnegie Mellon have applied the ever-applicable neural network approach to create an AI that is literally a killing machine. Or perhaps I should say fragging machine, because it’s only doing the killing in a Doom deathmatch. Now, you can of course say it doesn’t count because the death is virtual, but why should that matter? To computers, is virtual. Think about it. You have a question: How does this differ from the bots we’ve had in games since forever? Computer players have been around forever! You are an acute observer, reader, but consider: Those bots are programs running within the game itself, aware of all the variables, coordinates, edges, the locations and specs of guns and health kits. Like any non-player character, they are programmed to act in certain ways in reaction to certain in-game variables. The AI created by Guillaume Lample and Devendra Singh Chaplot plays the game the way we humans play: by looking at the screen, identifying our character’s situation and orientation, finding our way around the map and shooting at anything that moves. It’s essentially a level up from the AIs that use similar methods to learn the methods governing simpler games, like Space Invaders, and find the inputs that maximize score in those. Here it is in action: The network was trained mostly on pixel data — that is, what you actually see on the screen — but its creators had to cheat a little by giving it some basic insight from the game engine on whether there was an enemy or item on screen. Its reinforcement strategy was this: It got attaboys for picking up items, moving a lot and racking up kills, but was reprimanded for taking damage and dying. There was also a light rap on the wrist for shooting, since otherwise the machine decided firing indiscriminately and waiting for enemies to wander into its crosshairs was the best technique. Reassuring! The system that resulted from this setup outperformed the in-game computer players and humans alike. The former weren’t exactly advanced when Doom came out, so they’re pretty much cannon fodder. It’s actually split into two systems, or lobes if you will. There’s a navigation side, which drives while moving around and collecting things, and presumably learned how to interpret environmental imagery. Then there’s a shooting side, which takes over when there’s an enemy on screen, pointing the gun at the right place and pulling the trigger. Are we witnessing the birth of Skynet? Or, perhaps, a startup that will soon pitch us with a universal adversarial AI for multiplayer games? Both are pretty scary. Lample and Chaplot’s paper describing the FPS-playing AI is .
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Joby proves that selfie sticks can, indeed, get sillier
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Whenever you see wide shots of a TV audience, you see huge contraptions with cameras on them, enabling TV folks to create fantastic swooping shots. If you want some of that in your life, Joby can help with its . It’s great to get close to the action and to make the people around you think you’ve lost your mind by sporting the most outrageous selfie stick ever. Jokes aside, and while the Jib kit be used as a selfie stick, there’s a reason why jibs are a thing in television; being able to get down low and up high from a safe distance is a fantastic tool for photographers and videographers alike. Joby’s simple rope-and-pulley system to tilt the jib head up and down means that you can create some really cool effects along the way, too. Pictured: the Jib kit, and how far it bends when you connect two kits together. Obviously, it wasn’t quite built for that. Not pictured: My deep shame and complete lack of self-respect. The kit can hold a small smartphone (although it handled my oversized iPhone 6+ relatively securely), an action cam or a compact camera (remember those…?). Retailing at just under a hundred bucks and available now, the kit consists of three aluminum poles that screw into each other and the ropes and hardware needed to make your next action-film inspired masterpiece. The multi-pole approach means that you can buy several kits and make the pole as long as you like. It collapses into an easily portable size and at 23.5 oz (660g) it’s hardly going to break your back. It does take a while to assemble all the pieces, however, and the string-and-pully system is a lot more fiddly to assemble than you’d imagine. Also smart: The pole threading is the same as you find on a standard painter’s pole, so if you have one of those lying around, you can add some additional distance to your photographic shenanigans. Silly? Absolutely, but for the right photographic projects, it might be just the tool to lift (yes, I’m going there…) your photography to the next level.
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ReplyBuy brings an AI concierge to the sports and entertainment market
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Samantha O'Keefe
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Whether you’re a high school student or an NFL team owner, everybody texts. , a finalist in the , wants to use the text message to get you tickets for sporting events. 1st and Future is a sports-centric startup competition produced as a joint effort between the NFL, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and TechCrunch. The current version of ReplyBuy works like this — the company sends a text message to all San Francisco 49ers fans; whoever replies “Buy Now” the fastest gets the tickets. Today, the company is making the platform immensely more useful with the launch of ReplyBuy.ai. Indeed, ReplyBuy is introducing artificial intelligence to the sports and entertainment vertical. Dubbed ReplyBuy.ai, the AI is a VIP concierge service that will make it even easier for users to get their hands on tickets to major events. Instead of just receiving text messages when tickets are available, users will now be able to send a text message with a request to buy tickets for whichever event they want; the chatbot will ask a few follow-up questions, like “how many tickets do you want?” and “what’s your price range.” From there, it will automatically buy tickets for you and deliver them instantly via text. ReplyBuy’s client list includes several top NFL, NBA, NHL and MLS teams using the service, as well as several major universities like UCLA and the University of Arizona. You can check out the full roster of current clients on . ReplyBuy plans to enhance the ReplyBuy.ai experience so it does more than just buy tickets. CEO Josh Manley also tells TechCrunch that in the future, ReplyBuy.ai will be able to be leveraged not only through SMS, but can also be integrated into apps with chat capability and messaging based services like iMessage and Facebook Messenger, along with IoT devices like Amazon Echo and others. Since the company was founded in 2011, they’ve raised $2.65M. The company was recently nominated for the “Best in Mobile Fan Experience” award held by the Sports Business Awards, and also for the “Move to Mobile” and “Product Innovation” categories at the Ticketing Technology Awards.
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Cybersecurity is threatening America’s military supremacy
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Paul Martini
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The sparsely populated Spratly Islands, a collection of hundreds of islands and reefs spread over roughly 165,000 square miles in the South China Sea, are very quickly becoming the center of one of the most contentious international disputes between world powers since the fall of the Soviet Union. Alarmingly, the use of cyber attacks in this dispute suggests we might already be in the midst of a new Cold War playing out in cyberspace — where America’s advantage is not as clear as it is with conventional armies and navies. The Spratly Islands are of economic and strategic importance. All of the countries in the region — including China, Vietnam and the Philippines — have made competing territorial claims to the region. In recent years, China has become increasingly aggressive in its claim, rapidly building artificial islands while also conducting military operations in the area. Beyond this conventional military build up, however, are complex and brazen cyber attacks by China that are leaving America and its allies increasingly concerned. A massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack knocked offline in July, apparently in response to an international court ruling that denied China’s territorial claims in the region. Just days later, in a series of attacks by the Chinese hacking group 1937CN. Those are just the latest examples of related to the Spratly Islands. (In another attack, the website of the aforementioned international court was last year.) While these “nuisance” attacks — and continued cyber espionage by China — are serious, targeted Chinese cyber attacks designed to impact America’s physical military systems in the South China Sea are the most substantial evidence that we may be on the brink of a more tangible cyber threat to American military power. China appears to be moving forward with plans to use electronic attacks designed to either disrupt or take control of American drones. With that the Chinese attempted to interfere with U.S. military drones at least once in recent years, the country has shown a willingness to use GPS jamming to prevent U.S. aircraft from conducting surveillance missions in the Spratly Islands. That 2015 instance appears to fit China’s public posturing on the ways it says it could use electronic GPS jamming to disrupt U.S. drone networks. One 2013 report in the Chinese journal notes in technical detail how its military can “ ” by disrupting the connection between satellites and aircraft. This sort of GPS jamming could be the largest electronic threat to the U.S. drone program. In fact, it has been widely speculated that Iran used a similar GPS “spoofing” technique . The American military says it is preparing for these sorts of attacks with its released last year. In addition to outlining how cyber will be included in military planning, the report calls for a hardening of the military’s cyber defenses to prevent the theft of military technology or cyber attacks against military infrastructure and weaponry. The challenge, as any expert in the cybersecurity world would tell you, is that the capabilities and sophistication of the Chinese, Russians and other state-sponsored and non-state hackers are increasing exponentially. One only has to read the news to see nearly daily evidence of this (e.g. the recent suspected , , the or the ). The relatively inexpensive cyber options being employed today by both state and non-state hacking groups make it an incredibly efficient “leveler” of power. A small group of hackers using simple spear-phishing tactics, for example, can have massive impact on military installations, government operations, critical infrastructure and potentially even weapons systems. The unconventional battle playing out in the South China Sea — where cyber attacks are taking the place of conventional fighting and other forms of diplomacy — is a new model of warfare. The growing cyber threat from China may pose the most immediate threat to America and its allies because, while the U.S. continues to have a clear conventional military advantage, our advantage in cyber is not as clear.
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The Trade Desk finishes strong at $30.10 per share after its first day on NASDAQ
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Anthony Ha
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Things are looking up for adtech companies on Wall Street — or at least for one of them. debuted on NASDAQ today at a price of $28.75 per share, up nearly 60 percent from its IPO price of $18. And while there wasn’t a dramatic pop, it continued to climb and closed the day at $30.10 per share. That’s a good start, particularly considering that adtech companies have struggled recently on the public markets, which has made of the industry, as well. Ventura, Calif.-headquartered The Trade Desk, which offers tools for ad buyers, was probably helped by its — the company is profitable, with 2015 revenue more than doubling year-over-year, to $113.8 million. Chief Client Officer Brian Stempeck told me that investors are also warming again to the possibilities of programmatic ad technology (where ads are bought in an automated fashion, usually in real time). “This is a $640 billion industry that is in the very early stages of transforming,” Stempeck said. “It’s a pretty unique moment — industries don’t transform like this more than once.” He also argued that The Trade Desk stands out because it has built real self-serve technology: “A lot of our people are engineers, building products, and when someone works in client services, they aren’t managing ad campaigns — they’re teaching others how to run the software.” Looking ahead, Stempeck said The Trade Desk will continue to expand internationally while also building more products for programmatic buying of TV ads. After all, he noted that while most ad dollars are going to TV, most TV advertisers don’t have a way to learn how many times they’ve shown someone the same ad. “Advertisers can actually show fewer ads, they can be better targeted, the publisher or content owner gets a higher rate because it’s so targeted, and it’s a better experience for the consumer” because they aren’t bombarded repeatedly with the same ad, Stempeck said.
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Twitter’s new transparency report is disclosure done right
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Kate Conger
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It’s common practice these days for companies that hold significant amounts of user data to publish transparency reports. Google, Facebook, Dropbox and Slack all put out their numbers on a regular basis, breaking down government requests for user data by country and type (platforms typically receive requests for law enforcement investigations, as well as copyright takedowns and other removal requests). But the question always remains — what are users supposed to do with this information? It’s commendable that tech companies chose to make information about government requests public, but transparency reports often feel too nebulous to be useful. We know, for instance, that the U.S. government requested information on 30,041 users’ accounts during the final six months of 2015. But we don’t know which government agencies asked for the data, or whether our own account was among those snooped on by the government. We don’t know if all of those 30,000 people live in the U.S., or if our government is more interested in the accounts of people who live abroad. All we can really do with the data is draw the conclusion that, as one of Facebook’s 1.71 billion monthly active users, our odds of having our personal data exposed to the U.S. government are extremely low. The transparency reports don’t give us many options except to shrug, go about our business, and hope it doesn’t happen to us. (Google and Facebook are starting to give users the option to encrypt their messages, which is a nice step toward privacy, but not having this option enabled by default means that most users aren’t going to reap the benefits of encrypted messaging.) Twitter’s , released today, is different. Twitter is giving users more detailed and useful information than ever before. For the first time, the platform is outing the specific U.S. law enforcement agencies that are the most data-thirsty. The U.S. is Twitter’s biggest data requester, submitting 44 percent of the total requests received by the company, so it’s a useful case study into how Twitter protects or surrenders user data. Twitter receives 46 percent of those requests under seal, which prevents the company from notifying users. Only 7 percent of users received notification of a U.S. government request for their data. According to the of Twitter’s report, the U.S. agencies requesting the most information are the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and the New York County District Attorney’s Office. In an unprecedented move, Twitter breaks down the data requests by state and shows whether the request came from a federal or local agency. This is a subtle change, but it’s something more companies ought to do. It enables users to transition from tinfoil hat “the government is after me” territory to informed and engaged advocates for their own data. It allows users in California, for instance, to think about whether federal agencies like the FBI should be making 281 requests for their data over a six-month period, and push for reform if they think a specific agency is asking for too much data. It gives users insight into how state and local law enforcement agencies request and access their data, which is valuable information that they can then present to their city council or local police commission. It lets users make more informed decisions about the conversations they have over DM (which, by the way, still doesn’t offer users an encrypted option) and the tweets they publish. It also allows international Twitter users to better understand how the U.S. government seeks their data, and how it shares that data with their home countries via mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) requests. The decision to name specific law enforcement agencies also might give Twitter users a window into how Twitter is monitored during the U.S. election cycle. The Secret Service is responsible for responding to online threats against the presidential candidates, and it’ll be interesting to see if Secret Service requests decrease after the November election. (Of course, Twitter hasn’t broken out the number of requests it receives from particular federal agencies, but the Secret Service might drop off the list of most prominent requesters if election-related requests made up the bulk of their overall demands for data.) Twitter didn’t stop at outing its major U.S. data requesters — it’s also giving users lots more details about how their information is requested, including “the number of preservation requests received for user data, more insights into requests that we formally or informally challenge, a breakdown between emergency and non-emergency requests, and the percentage of requests where basic account information is provided versus the production of the contents of communications (e.g., Tweets, DMs, media, etc.).” Together, these new disclosures make up a transparency report that’s actually somewhat useful for the people who use Twitter. Now, if we could just get encrypted DMs.
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Hulu’s VR app is getting new comedy and news programs
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Brian Heater
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Virtual reality needs content if it’s ever going to take off in a meaningful way. And while thus far that’s largely been focused on gaming, we’re finally starting to see studios make a major push into the space. What shape that content will ultimately take is another question entirely. Certainly comedy and news aren’t the first two genres that immediately spring to mind when assessing the way the medium will impact future storytelling, but if you’re going to be stuck in a VR headset for an extended period, you might as well be watching something you’re into. , Hulu made a major play in the space with a new app offering up its regular 2D content in a 3D setting, along with 25 pieces of VR-specific content. Now the company is making a platform specific push with the launch of two new shows produced by HuffPo’s RYOT Studios. The service has ordered 10 episodes of , which, one suspects, is pretty much what it sounds like. The other, five episodes) features Nora Kirkpatrick, an actress probably best known for playing Dwight Schrute’s love interest on . Kirkpatrick described the show thusly to , “I think we’ve come up with a way to break down the wall between performer and audience member, and explore comedy in 360 degrees.” The shows are arriving on the platform this fall, accessible through the Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift. Hulu is opting not to offer them on its non-VR platform.
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Bots are waging passive-aggressive war on Wikipedia
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,016
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| 21
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Bots are a useful tool on Wikipedia: they identify and undo vandalism, add links and perform other tedious tasks set by their human masters. But even these automated helpers come into conflict, reverting and re-reverting each other on the same topic — sometimes for years. It’s not exactly all-out war: This is more like the kind of war you have at home over the thermostat. One person sets it to 70, then the next day the roommate sets it to 71; the next day, 70, then 71 again, on and on. While it isn’t exactly urgent, it’s still worth studying, according to researchers at Oxford and the Alan Turing Institute. Simple bots, they found, can still interact in unexpected ways. They tracked edits over a 10-year period and found that bot activity differs from human activity in several ways. The simplicity of their functions means they have no real insight into what they’re doing, and a pair of bots may routinely undo the other’s work for years, producing no net change whatsoever and effectively canceling each other out. Humans, on the other hand, tend to have a mission, and rather than mutual reversion, one human will change hundreds of instances of another’s work with little or no response from them. English Wikipedia is by far the largest, and has the most total, but Portuguese bots reverted more often. Different countries also have different revert rates: Over the 10 years, German bots were relatively polite, only reverting each other about 32 times on average per bot. Portuguese bots, however, were at each other’s throats, producing an average 188 reverts per bot. Take from that what you will. In the end, these little spats are of little consequence, but the researchers warn that this is largely because Wikipedia is such a carefully controlled environment. Yet even with a relatively small population of well-mannered, approved bots, conflict was constant, complex and variable. In the wild it could be even more so. The artificial intelligence community, the researchers suggest, would do well to learn from this example: It is crucial to understand what could affect bot-bot interactions in order to design cooperative bots that can manage disagreement, avoid unproductive conflict, and fulfill their tasks in ways that are socially and ethically acceptable. The full paper, “Even Good Bots Fight,” .
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Blizzard kills the classic Battle.net brand after 20 years
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Devin Coldewey
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| 21
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Blizzard is killing Battle.net just a few months shy of the online gaming service’s 20th birthday — killing the name, anyway. No, Overwatch and Hearthstone aren’t going permanently offline or anything, you’ll just be calling the service that hosts and updates your Blizzard games something else from now on. , Blizzard announced that it is “transitioning away from using the Battle.net name for our gaming service and the functionality connected to it.” Instead, it’ll use the considerably more boring convention where it just puts the name Blizzard in front of things, like Blizzard Streaming and Blizzard Voice. So presumably Battle.net will be Blizzard Gaming? Blizzard Launcher? The original Battle.net interface. The reasoning is that back in 1996, when Battle.net was established (for the original Diablo — good times) it was necessary to make it clear that this was a new and distinct online service. But over the years, “confusion and inefficiencies” apparently resulted from having a separate name for the service, and multiplayer is just an ordinary part of games these days, not something that requires separate branding. Kind of true, but I still think this is a bad idea. Battle.net is an established and respected brand, known by gamers young and old. It’s synonymous with online matchmaking and gaming — I mean, it’s right there in the name! Throwing away years of history like that is generally a bad idea, even when there are benefits to be had — and I don’t really see any benefits here. What if Steam was renamed Valve Store? Everyone would know Valve is behind it, sure, but you lose a household name in the process. Well, there’s no arguing with it. Blizzard has clearly made its decision and we’re all going to have to call Battle.net something else soon. We had some good times, Battle.net. RIP.
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Waze launches Bluetooth beacons to avoid tunnel blackouts
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Darrell Etherington
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| 21
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Waze’s engaged community is definitely its most powerful asset, and now the company wants to broaden its community to include tunnel operators who want to fill in the current gaps in wireless navigation tech. These roadways have typically been frustrating to all manner of wireless communication, posing a problem for everything from AM radio to modern GPS navigation. It’s that later issue Waze wants to fix, and it’s using Bluetooth beacons to get the job done. The isn’t looking to get help from individual-driver Wazers in this case, but is looking for cities and tunnel owners who might be fans of the service to step up and apply to its program. The program is powered by Eddystone, a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon profile created by Google that works with cheap, battery-powered BLE Waze Beacon hardware to be installed in participating tunnels. These beacons would be configured to transmit signals to Bluetooth-enabled smartphones on the user end, taking over for GPS to provide location data when a car passes through a tunnel. There is a cost to participate — each beacon is $28.50, Waze notes, and a typical installation requires around 42 beacons per mile of tunnel. But for municipalities and tunnel operators, this would actually be a service they can provide drivers, which might actually eliminate frustration and traffic because it could help ensure people don’t miss their exits, or are otherwise hesitant when navigating because of direction drop-outs. Waze also isn’t being overly protective regarding use of the resulting data from its Waze Beacons, despite the name — the company says other navigation systems are free to use the tech from the program, without cost, to provide tunnel navigation features via Bluetooth to their own users.
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Apple could also be in talks to acquire Lit Motors
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Romain Dillet
| 2,016
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| 21
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Apple is to be in talks to acquire McLaren, but that’s not all. While was digging on the McLaren story, they also found out that Apple is also talking with for a potential acquisition. Now you might be thinking “Lit who?” While Lit Motors is nowhere as big as McLaren, it’s another interesting company in the automotive space. The company participated in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF back in 2012. At the time, the team had an impressive on-stage demo, allowing them to finish at the second place. The San Francisco-based startup is developing a new kind of electric vehicle. It’s a sort of electric motorcycle with a few tricks up its sleeve. In particular, you can’t tip it over because it uses gyros to stabilize itself. Sure, gyros have become quite common with the so-called hoverboards. But it’s still impressive to try and kick over a big vehicle like this one and see that it doesn’t move an inch. According to , the company has only raised $2.2 million in total. It’s unclear if the company still has money today to survive as an independent entity or if it has been looking for an acquirer. Apple has been working on a for a few years now. While it’s still a secretive project, there are plenty of rumors going around. In particular, the company is fighting with many other car and tech companies for talent. Acquiring Lit Motors could be a great way to have a few talented engineers join the car project. We’ve reached out to Lit Motors and will update this post if we hear back. In the meantime, please enjoy Lit Motors’ 2012 pitch:
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Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announces $3 billion investment to cure disease
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Josh Constine
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The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative just announced a new program informally called Chan Zuckerberg Science to invest $3 billion over the next decade to help cure, prevent, or manage all disease. The money comes from the $45 billion organization Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan started last year to advance human potential and equality. The project will bring together teams of scientists and engineers “to build new tools for the scientific community” Priscilla Chan said on stage at an event in San Francisco. You can watch the announcement here: Live with Priscilla from San Francisco for a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announcement. Posted by on Wednesday, September 21, 2016 Part of the $3 billion will go to a $600 million investment in Biohub, a new physical location that will unite researchers from Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF with elite engineers to find new ways to treat disease. Mark Zuckerberg came out on stage to identify the core health problems facing the world, and how the new program will address them. The majority of deaths are caused by heart disease, infectious disease, neurological disease, and cancer, so those are the areas where the program will concentrate its efforts. The roadmap for the program includes three parts: Zuckerberg showed visible gusto, noting how our country spends 50x more on treating people who are sick than curing diseases so people don’t get sick. Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist from The Rockefeller University and the new head of Chan Zuckerberg’s science program, came out to explain how the $3 billion will be spent. Cori Bargmann walks the audience at UCSF through the CZS playbook Biohub will be located at 499 Illinois St. in San Francisco’s Mission Bay district, next to UCSF and relatively accessible to the other universities. The space will be led by UCSF’s Joe DeRisi and Stanford’s Stephen Quake, professors known for their expertise in biophysics and bioengineering. All the research and output from the organization will be openly available to all doctors and researchers everywhere. Biohub will also staff researchers and keep equipment on hand for rapid response to emerging dangers like the Zika virus. That way, rather than having to wait for debates about how to fund a cure or vaccine for a new threat, the CZS can instantly start finding a solution, explained DeRisi. The CZS will focus on building “transformational technologies” that could drive significant leaps in treatment and prevention. Zuckerberg said “It’s actually pretty easy to imagine what new tools we need to develop to make progress on the four major disease categories”. The technologies Zuckerberg listed were “AI software to help with imaging the brain…to make progress on neurological diseases, machine learning to analyze large databases of cancer genomes, a chip to be able to diagnose any infectious disease, continuous bloodstream monitoring to be able to identify and catch any disease early, or a map of all of the kinds of cell types in our bodies and the different states that they can be in so that people who are designing drugs can reference that to quickly design something for any given disease that’s out there.” Zuckerberg and Chan That last one, called a cell atlas, would be an important breakthrough. “Nobody really knows how many cell types there are in the human body” said Quake. Understanding them through singular cell sequencing technologies and genome editing could improve treatment for cancer, diabetes, infection, and more. The CZS will fund virtual institutes called “challenge networks” that unite experts from around the world to work on especially urgent problems. For example, genes have been discovered that have an impact on neurodegenerative diseases, but it’s unclear which genes map to which results. The challenge network will find the top doctors, scientists, and engineers in the field and build communication channels between them to exchange research, both for remote collaboration and in-person summits. The challenge networks will be assembled to address certain diseases, build specific technologies, and long-term investigations like why neurons die due to neurodegenerative disease, or how the immune system attacks viruses but not the body. Reward and incentive structures will be developed to allow researchers to turn their work for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative into a career. Bill Gates commends Chan Zuckerberg Science “This will work”, Bargmann concluded. And to allay fears that Chan and Zuckerberg will be spending money in areas they don’t understand, a core criticism of the $45 billion organization, Bargmann said they will constantly confer with experts about the best projects to work on. Mark concluded the event by introducing his mentor and philanthropic inspiration, Bill Gates, who called the initiative “very bold, very ambitious”. He said “We need more science!”, encouraging more philanthropists to get involved. Gates explained that the world got lucky that Ebola didn’t spread, but we need organizations ready with funding to fight back quickly. We spoke to Gates after the event, asking his advice to other philanthropists looking to make an impact. He recommended speaking to both care providers on the ground, and solution-makers and researchers who know where there’s potential to do good. “Some people come at it from going to Africa and seeing the need, and some get it by hearing about great science. Clearly Mark and Priscilla do both of those things, and I think that helps a lot, where you see both the possibility and that unbelievable need.” Today’s new programs all draw funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which was first announced in December alongside the birth of the couple’s daughter Max. Structured as an LLC, Mark will donate 99% of his Facebook shares, or about $45 billion, to the organization during his lifetime. By setting up as an LLC instead of a traditional charity, Zuckerberg still controls his shares, and can make investments in for-profit companies, political campaigns, and policy lobbying as well as non-profits. The group’s goal is to advance human potential and equality.
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Talking self-driving cars, IPOs and what’s next, with True Ventures
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Connie Loizos
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| 21
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A few weeks ago, closed its newest, early-stage fund with , which is just a slight step up from its last, $295 million fund, despite some enormous wins like Fitbit, whose first check came from True. (As you likely recall, the wearable device maker staged a public offering last year.) We weren’t able to catch up with firm co-founders Phil Black and Jon Callaghan at the time, but we talked this week about the firm’s strategy and how it views the startup world right now. For example, we discussed its $100 million “opportunity” fund, Select One, which True has been investing since last year to take outsize positions in roughly eight of its portfolio companies. Among them is four-year-old , whose stationary bike with built-in console allows users to live stream instructional cycling content; , the four-year-old video doorbell company; and , a nearly five-year-old HR, benefits and payroll platform. “All three are achieving a level of operational excellence that we’re just thrilled by,” says Black. True — which is currently raising a second Select fund and this time targeting — also talked about what it sees as the next big frontier; whether there’s too much money in the market; and why WordPress parent , which is one of True’s earliest and most richly funded portfolio companies, has yet to announce any kind of plan to go public. JC: We’ve been in that category for a while now. We invested in Renovo, , in 2011. We also invested in , an app that lets camera phones video and monitor and intelligently score in real time all the cars on the road around you, so if a Blue Prius cut you off yesterday in Palo Alto, [everyone on the platform] will know not necessarily that that Prius is bad but that you should watch out. It’s AI for hybrid roadways. [Editor’s note: More on the company .] JC: Yes. We start small, but we don’t think small. We’ve been the first investors in a lot of very big markets. JC: I guess neuroscience might be perceived as out there, but we’ve invested in four neuroscience applications that are really fascinating, including [which gives people new senses via haptic feedback] and a stealth company that’s doing more neuroscience in entertainment. We also love , which specializes in brain acuity, and there’s another out of MIT that we haven’t announced yet. PB: Valuations have gone up over the last 10 years [since we launched True] but not unreasonably so. I kind of feel like there’s a bit of a stasis in terms of good companies getting funded. Meanwhile, it’s becoming rare for high-value late-stage companies to go off at some price that’s well outside of [where their public market counterparts are trading]. [whose devices combine storage and computer servers in one unit], just set its IPO price at [ its last private market valuation] and it doesn’t take many of these for late-stage investors to say, “There are limits on the price I should pay.” So I think the market is self-correcting, I think we’re in a fine spot — which could change in two months. [Laughs.] Solid companies don’t have a hard time getting funding, but it’s not being done in two calls, either. JC: I’m not sure the same sources of late-stage capital are there, but yes, it’s still comparatively easy and cheap for companies to raise money privately, and that’s not the best thing for companies or the economy and the country, by the way. It’s important for investors to get more democratic access to healthy, small, growing private, risky companies. PB: I do think we’ll see many more IPOs in the next five years than in the past five years. It’s a function of supply and demand. There was and remains a tremendous supply of capital for privately held companies in the system, but I think everyone would like companies that have raised a lot of capital to go public. Liquidity is an element of investment. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a company going public with a market cap of $750 million to $1.25 billion, but it seems like that’s a late-stage venture round now, and I don’t think that’s right, particularly given the many good reasons for going public: You’re better managed, you enjoy better liquidity, you likely have more capital on your balance sheet… PB: [Founder] Matt [Mullenweg] is continuing to build a very large and successful company. It now has north of 500 employees; it made a very successful last year of WooCommerce, so it’s now in the e-commerce business and doing something very similar to what does, and they did a big product revamp called that’s allowing them to do new things that they didn’t before. WordPress now powers more than 26 percent of the Web. We’re in a situation where there’s no need for outside capital. We raised $160 million in 2014 and we’re only slightly negative on a cash flow basis; in the meantime, I think we want to get our proverbial ducks in a row [before contemplating an IPO]. Calypso was a huge undertaking, and [between] that and Woo, which is producing revenue on a slightly more rapid pace, and having [renowned designer] John Maeda [away from his last role as design partner at the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers], there are a few things operationally that the company wants to nail down. JC: Do we want to own a fund of funds? No. But Foundry is one of our investors, and we’re very glad to have them in the mix.
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Eventbrite cofounder Kevin Hartz joins Founders Fund as partner
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Connie Loizos
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Serial entrepreneur Kevin Hartz has joined the San Francisco-based early-stage venture fund Founders Fund as a partner, he revealed in a post on Medium. Hartz was most recently the co-founder and chief executive of event and ticketing startup . He’s the second high-profile hire that Founders Fund has made so far in 2016. , it also brought aboard as partner renowned angel investor Cyan Banister. Eventbrite, founded a decade ago, has raised roughly $200 million from investors over the years, shows CrunchBase. The privately held company, which was valued at more than $1 billion at its in 2014, has been run for some time by Julia Hartz, Hartz’s wife and Eventbrite’s cofounder. She was president until last November, when, citing a non-life-threatening medical condition that needed attention, Hartz handed over the reins as CEO on what he said at the time would be a . Partly, he may have just needed time to decompress. Eventbrite is Hartz’s third business, having previously founded Connect Group ( soon after it was founded in 1998), and the money transfer company Xoom Corp, which went public in 2013, a dozen years after its founding. It was last year by PayPal. In his post today, Hartz noted his considerable experience making angel bets, including on Airbnb, Pinterest, Thumbtack, Yammer, and PayPal. He also shared that “after founding and operating two companies day-to-day for 15 years, I’m looking forward to a new chapter where I can prioritize an old and growing passion of mine — investing in people and transformational technologies. I can’t wait to get to work on finding and supporting the next generation of great founders.” Hartz remains executive chairman of Eventbrite. Founders Fund closed its sixth venture fund with in March.
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Frederic Lardinois
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Intel spins out Intel Security with TPG to form new McAfee valued at $4.2B
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John Mannes
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that it has plans to spin off its security unit into a new company that will be owned in-part by private equity firm TPG. Intel will retain a 49 percent ownership stake of the entity with TPG taking the majority stake. In exchange, Intel will be receiving $3.1 billion in cash. Intel’s security unit originated from its acquisition of McAfee. The $7.68 billion transaction closed in 2011 and in the years following, . Intel wanted to create an integrated full stack security juggernaut but instead was caught in open water with shrinking PC sales and low margins. Despite a market that isn’t ideal for Intel’s strategic interests, Intel Security Group has still grown revenue by 11 percent in the first half of the year. The group works with two-thirds of the world’s 2,000 largest companies, according to the statement from the company. When the dust settles, the security entity spun out from Intel will be renamed McAfee. In a fun twist, the ever-interesting bedtime story character earlier this week over the rights to use his name in new ventures. Intel obtained the rights to the McAfee name back when it acquired the company. TPG is putting $1.1 billion into the company to help smooth over the transition and accelerate growth. The new company was valued at $4.2 billion by combining a $2.2 billion equity value with $2 billion of net debt. For the time being, the debt will continue to be financed by Intel. and security is no exception. Just this summer, Vista Equity Partners kicking off a fast paced season for those of us energized by PE deals. As with most deals, TPG expects to benefit from the increased efficiencies of a company uniquely focused on security. The firm also led security investments in and for $120 and $100 million respectively. will be taking over as CEO of the new company when the deal closes in Q2 2017.
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Reflections on a historic few months for online video
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Ashu Garg
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| 7
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This has been my Summer of Video — several months when it became clear to me that we’ve reached an inflection point in the transition from linear TV to online video. It started at the beginning of the season with the release of which discussed the shift and how it’s transforming media and marketing. From studying these trends for the past five years, I understood that the video revolution was imminent. What I hadn’t anticipated is that real-world events this summer would make a born-again believer out of me. A few weeks later, I went to my first VidCon, the annual convention devoted to all things video. Of the 25,000 attendees, the majority were teenaged (and tweenaged) girls. They were there to see their favorite YouTubers — video megastars like Nigahiga, Jenna Marbles, PewDiePie and countless other, um, names(?) that made me feel irreparably out of touch with pop culture. There were panels by creators on VR storytelling, shooting drone footage and running a gaming channel. On the industry floor, large brands like Nestlé and eBay gave presentations on how they were doing video marketing for today’s consumers. It was an amazing experience — like seeing the IRL instantiation of our whitepaper. Then, for the rest of the summer, it seemed as though every time news broke, there was a video aspect to the story. A military coup in Turkey was thwarted in part because its president was able to rally his supporters via video sent from his iPhone’s native FaceTime app. Shootings and arrests were captured and shared instantly by private citizens on Facebook Live and Periscope. We witnessed the first widespread use case of AR, as millions of people around the world shambled along streets playing Pokémon Go. On the business side, legacy media invested as never before in and in . CNN launched , its drone-video-newsgathering operation. Twitter made eyebrow-raising forays into live programming, inking deals with , and the . Meanwhile, Instagram decided that rather than beat Snapchat at video, it might as well them. Netflix released its first piece of original VR . Finally, as a too-perfect coda to this video summer, the last-known manufacturer of VCRs just production. There have been a few moments in my life when it felt like the world was in the middle of installing an update; this is one of them. Not to get too carried away, let me temper my enthusiasm by saying that the future hasn’t arrived whole and in its shiny entirety. The innovations are out there in the real world, but these are still Wild West days for the new era of video, and realizing the transition won’t be without its difficulties. But I believe if you’re an entrepreneur, you should be excited that the online video landscape is inchoate, because that means there are enormous rewards awaiting anyone who can solve the challenges. I’ll elaborate on a couple of areas of great opportunity… One thing I took away from VidCon is that human needs and motivations are consistent across time — the adolescent attendees weren’t so different from my peers when I was a youth. But the expression of those desires takes different forms in different generations. New media platforms are pervasive among the millennial generation and Gen Z. In her keynote presentation at the convention, Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO, reported that more millennials watch YouTube during prime time than network broadcast TV. For Gen Zers — who are growing up with Snapchat, Vine and Pokémon Go — I’m not sure it makes sense to say that traditional TV is dying, because I doubt it’s ever been a meaningful part of their lived experience. Therefore, to start with, there are countless direct-to-consumer opportunities to innovate with content creation tools for these new media. Consider that only just this year have we seen (maybe) breakout tools for live streaming, in the form of Facebook Live and Snapchat Stories. Some early successes, like Vine, appear to be . Creators and audiences remain agnostic as to platform and application. They simply want frictionless means to create and view — which is why YouTube rolled out new features in its app to make it effortless to go live. In other words, I don’t think any tool has an insurmountable lead yet. And that’s just live streaming — a form of video that has analogs in old-school TV. When we turn to more novel forms of video content, like VR and AR, there are no household names in apps, even in the homes of Silicon Valley. One marketer colleague thinks there’s a need for a content production hub, one that allows people to make video and distribute it simultaneously across the various channels. Personally, I’m skeptical. Past indicators are that no one-tool-fits-all model will do. You can’t take video made for Snapchat and simply “dub it” for Periscope. Consumers demand authenticity, and that now means being true to the platform. Even legacy media is abandoning its afterthought approach of either lazily dumping leftover TV scraps into digital, or halfheartedly cranking out B-side video. ABC, for example, recently it is producing dozens of digital shows that are viewable only via mobile or TV apps. Audiences won’t sit for second-class content. They want video for Snapchat Stories, or Facebook Live, or VR that was specifically made, and appropriately well-made, for each particular platform. Speaking of makers, video creators — at least the more serious ones — are a market waiting to be served. At VidCon we met many who made their living producing videos for YouTube and other platforms, and what they wanted was a) easy ways to create and share, b) to be paid for their work and c) to be treated like professionals with real jobs. Amazon.com is trying to address the monetization and professionalization issues with recently launched Amazon Direct. But there’s little other innovation in the payment platform and creator services ecosystem. We wrote in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” that when CMOs achieve video nirvana, “scalable personalized content will be ever present.” Well, easier said than done. But within each piece of that prediction is a promising marketing tech opportunity. . A particular challenge that marketers face is simply how to produce compelling video, and enough of it. Agencies are prohibitively expensive for most businesses, and too slow to respond to the social web. Native advertising looks far less promising than a few years ago, as it’s become clear that even the biggest players in the space, BuzzFeed and Vice being prime examples, are running into trouble trying to scale — and Facebook continues to eat their lunch as content distributors. Taking it all in-house might be an option for the largest brands. But for SMBs, what are reasonable ways to staff up in order to be able to create myriad kinds of video for myriad platforms? . Figuring out what kind of video content individual consumers should be served and when/where they should see the content is another opening for startups. Data has transformed the rest of modern marketing, and it will do so with video marketing. By collecting and analyzing data from mobile, payment systems, wearables and the Internet of Things, marketers will be able to build a 360-degree profile of particular consumers in order to educate their content and micro-target potential customers. Individuals will only see videos that are of interest to them, in the channels most appropriate for them. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the industry that’s taken a lead on mining data to deliver (intimately) video content is the online pornography business. . The new mechanisms for distributing video are also still being worked out. I’ve already mentioned the scaling issues with media outlets. Blogs continue to have currency, but are not nearly as influential as a decade ago. So-called “influencers” have grown in importance as channels for content distribution — but does a viable business model exist for harnessing the power of these disparate individuals who hold sway over millions of loyal followers? Perhaps it’s still the medium itself — with a twist — that’s the message: Pokémon Go, case in point, recently launched in Japan with its first major sponsor, McDonald’s. Or maybe there’s a way to work with creator communities to make, test and distribute content via their channels. There’s a danger, however, that a brand working with a creator will erode the trust that their fans place in them, which brings me to my final observation. If I were to boil down to one key point all the developments I’ve witnessed in video over the last few months, it would be that the power has shifted to consumers. Gone are the days when three TV networks dictated what everyone watched; when news anchors were the trusted authorities on what’s happening in the public affairs; when slickly produced commercials were all you needed to sell your wares. TV viewership is in steady and irreversible . The police-shooting videos were captured by ordinary citizens. The celebrity YouTubers who fans were screaming for at VidCon weren’t like the big record label-manufactured boy bands of the recent past. Susan Wojcicki shared a remarkable survey finding that 60 percent of teenagers say YouTube stars understand them better than their friends. Contemporary audiences won’t be dictated to by faceless institutions anymore. They only trust real people, and they insist that their content be authentic. Or at least that the content and its creator do a credible job of passing for real. Even global celebrities like Taylor Swift have had to manufacture verisimilitude, despite maybe being, in actuality, . Nor are the most engaged consumers satisfied with passive entertainment. Amusement will always be welcome, but today’s audiences also value media that allow them to connect and to have a say — be that through chance meetings with other Pokémon catchers, finding a nurturing YouTube subculture of one’s own or tweeting in solidarity with digitally enabled social justice movements. The most potent content is the kind that says something compelling is a psychic echo of who its audience is or wants to be. The people rule. The populi demands that the vox be theirs. And what that voice is calling for — on many different levels, from viewing habits to voting preferences, from consumer behavior to civil disobedience — is revolution. Entrepreneurs and marketers would do well to listen — as well as watch.
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Everything you need to know from Apple’s iPhone 7 event
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Anna Escher
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Apple held its annual September press conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, unveiling the iPhone 7 at long last. CEO Tim Cook took the stage (after a charming bout of Carpool Karaoke) to introduce everything new with Apple — from new iPhones to new Apple Watches. You can dig through the , or read the play-by-play of the , but here are the main takeaways: Everything you need to know from Apple’s iPhone 7 event http://tcrn.ch/2ciV6gO Posted by on Wednesday, September 7, 2016 After a where Apple seemed to have accidentally leaked its own video of the iPhone 7, the . The iPhone 7 has stereo speakers, is water and dust resistant and has a longer battery life. The redesigned home button is now a touch surface — it’s not really a “button” anymore at all. It relies on the haptic engine to make it feel as if you’ve pressed a moving button, a bit like the current Mac trackpads do (and eliminating the need for tons of repairs). While the body is similar to the 6s, there are now two different black models: a matte black model, and a shiny new “Jet Black” variant. Oh, and you should get at least two extra hours of battery life for an average day for the iPhone 7 compared to the iPhone 6s, thanks to the new A10 Fusion CPU. While markedly faster, the iPhone 7’s A10 chip uses two-thirds of the power of the previous generation. The iPhone 7 battery won’t be significantly bigger in its actual capacity, but its chips will consume significantly less power to run. The iPhones are staying at the same price points, but upgrading storage capacity . The iPhone 7 starts at $649 unlocked and iPhone 7 Plus starts at $769. Pre-orders start Friday, and store availability starts on September 16. As rumored, the iPhone 7 Plus has two 12-megapixel cameras on the back. One lens is a 1X wide-angle lens; the other is a 2X zoom telephoto lens — allowing for true optical zoom (albeit only 2X), not just grainy digital zoom. The dual-lens camera, along with the “Portrait” feature that will ship with the next update, will offer DSLR-style depth of field. The new generation has optical image stabilization on both devices, RAW image capture, improved color gamut and a sensor to eliminate rolling shutter artifacts from flickering lights. Apple needed room for the taptic engine, speakers and dual-lens cameras, so . EarPods will connect via the Lightning port, and Apple is including a 3.5mm to Lightning adapter in the box. In a , presenter Phil Schiller explained that Apple was leaving the audio jack behind because of “courage.” Fighting the FBI in favor of encryption is courage. Coming out in favor of civil rights is courage. Nixing the audio jack is . Regardless, these are the new . The new buds come with a built-in chip for audio processing and pairing, and automatically pair with all of your iCloud-synced devices. The idea is to be able to seamlessly listen to music on all of your Apple devices using the AirPods. You can double tap to activate Siri, and they offer up to 5 hours of playback before needing to charge. You’ll be able to get your hands on them, in late October. Beats is also releasing brand new headphones with the same W1 chip and the same pairing mechanism. The BeatsX will be available this Fall for $149.95. These are in-ear earbuds with a cord behind your neck. There’s a built-in Lightning port so you can charge them with your iPhone cable. The Powerbeats 3 Wireless will also be available this Fall for $199.95 The second iteration of the Apple Watch is pretty similar to the first, distinguished mainly by its newfound water resistance. There are now three options — aluminum, stainless steel and a gorgeous new white ceramic, which is four times as hard as stainless steel. Apple is continuing their partnership with Hermés, but also introduced a . Say goodbye to the gold Apple Watch Edition (not that you had one, or anything). You can also expect to see a ton of new health-related In a huge get for Apple, Nintendo is bringing Super Mario to iOS by way of a new game called “Super Mario Run” coming this December. If this doesn’t solely boost iPhone sales, I don’t know what will. As the name implies, it’s a continuous runner game you can play one-handed. Is it December yet? The most popular game on the planet has found a place on your Apple Watch. Niantic CEO John Hanke introduced the new Pokémon Go Watch app, which will allow Pokémon trainers to see how far they’ve walked, how many calories they’ve burned, how close your Poké eggs are to hatching or when there are nearby Pokémon or Pokéstops. Not an early adopter? Either way, iOS 10 is coming on September 13, watchOS 3 on September 13 and macOS Sierra will arrive on September 20.
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VideoBlocks wants stock media to keep it real, launches “The Authentic Collection”
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Lora Kolodny
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, the stock media company that gives subscribers unlimited access to its catalog of images, videos and audio clips for an annual subscription, wants stock media to look less whitewashed and more like the real deal. But no stock media marketplace can purge every image that reflects “conventional” beauty or caters to other stereotypes. (Those images have their time and place.) Instead, VideoBlocks has launched its “Authentic Collection,” featuring media that reflects, among other things: people of color or of different ages and body types, homes and events around the world and the family life of people who identify as bi, gay, lesbian or transgender. VideoBlocks’ CEO TJ Leonard told TechCrunch that the company curated and published the diversity-focused in response to search data on the company’s marketplace. In the past year, he said, users of VideoBlocks increasingly searched for images or clips somehow representative of “diversity,” “LGBT,” “technology” and “fitness.” The Authentic Collection caters to the demand evidenced in those searches. The stock media marketplace has also seen a spike in requests for images from locations beyond the U.S., with Turkey as its most searched-for geography so far this year. The new library is relatively small, containing a few thousand , photos and audio tracks. But Leonard is hoping it will inspire marketers, advertisers and creatives to break away from “staged, heavily produced material,” at least some of the time. VideoBlocks competes with stock media marketplaces, from Shutterstock, Corbis and Getty to other growing startups like SmugMug, Pond5 and Unstock.io.
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Crunch Report | Everything Apple 2016
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Playing around with the Apple Watch Series 2
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Brian Heater
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Maybe there’s a theme emerging here — behind-the-scenes tweaks while maintaining aesthetic consistency with past generations. Like the new iPhone, the Apple Watch Series 2 is pretty much aesthetically indistinguishable from its predecessor. Heck, even the new AirPods look nearly identical to the company’s EarPods, albeit with their wires snipped off. But while the Series 2 (as the name, perhaps implies) doesn’t feel so much like a full refresh as it does an upgrade, there are some key differentiators here. The biggest, sadly, is one that we weren’t allowed to try out — apparently putting a swimming pool in the middle of the demo room at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium just didn’t make logistical sense. So much for pulling out all the stops. The waterproofing, which opens the wearable up to swim tracking, among other things, contained a key element that actually elicited an audible gasp from the crowd when the company showed it off: a speaker port that expels water from the device, which is something I really want to try out in person. Here’s hoping we find ourselves around a major body of water when we actually review the thing — I’m told San Francisco has a few. Of course, if you really want to let the world know that you’ve got the new wearable, you can opt for the Nike version. The latest team-up between the two giants is actually pretty good-looking, with brightly colored rubberized bands that have holes punched out, letting the world know that you fully intend to go fast and won’t let something like a fully intact watch band slow you down. However, it’s not the kind of thing you’ll want to wear to a business meeting, unless you work for an energy drink company. There are a few other small differences between the Nike and standard versions, including branded watch faces and shortcuts, but otherwise they’re pretty much the same. That said, the new watch is even more fitness focused than its predecessor. Along with waterproofing comes a new swim app, which offers lap count, distance and calories burned. Also on-board — the biggest addition aside from waterproofing — is GPS. It’s hardly the first wearable to get the functionality, but it should make the device a more compelling buy for runners. Still no cellular connection, however, so users waiting for a fully functional untethered device will have to keep holding their breath (which should also help their swim careers). As with the iPhone, the screen has been brightened, which might not be immediately apparent at first glance. There are also some new cases, including a pretty stunning ceramic one that perfectly matched the snow-white demo room where we got to play around with the device after the event. It may well be the best-looking version of the watch Apple has produced to date. The processor has been upgraded, so performance should be improved along with the addition of watchOS 3, which also brings some nice new features like the Breathe app, which plays into the recent trend toward meditation-themed functionality on wearables like the latest Fitbit. The new watch will run $369 when it arrives September 16. Also, you know, .
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Trying out Apple’s fully wireless AirPods
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Brian Heater
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The AirPods were as close as we got to an honest-to-goodness hardware surprise at today’s big Apple event in San Francisco — though anyone who heard tell of the untimely demise of the headphone jack probably could have seen this coming. Pre-Beats, at least, headphones have traditionally been something of an afterthought for the company, as anyone whose ear canals have smarted from its first-generation earbuds will gladly tell you. These new headphones feel a bit different in that respect — after all, if you’re going to do something as drastic as killing the headphone jack, you ought to offer up more of a consolation than an in-box dongle (the first, and hopefully last, time I’ll ever write that phrase). As the name implies, the new headphones look pretty much exactly like the company’s EarPods line, with the obvious distinction of being wireless. It’s an interesting aesthetic choice, one that bucks the recent trend of fully wireless Bluetooth headphones, which are largely circular. These maintain the EarPods’ long tail, which actually goes a ways toward helping them fit better in the ear. As far as how well they’ll actually stay in there if you, say, go for a jog, it’s hard to say, though the buds could certainly benefit for some sort of anchoring system akin to what you get on sportsbuds from companies like JayBird. The sound quality isn’t bad, though we’ll have to hold off full judgment until we’re able to listen to the things in a less chaotic environment than a press area after an Apple event. There’s some interesting functionality on-board, as well. There’s a certain benefit to the Apple synergy here — in this case, they pair pretty instantly with your iPhone the moment you open the charging case (which, incidentally looks almost exactly like Glide dental floss, because good design is timeless, etc.). They feature touch functionality, as well, so you can, say, double tap to activate Siri, who will take commands via the built-in mics. The music also stops automatically when you pull them out of your ear — definitely a nice feature that should save on battery life. Speaking of which, the company is promising five hours of life on a charge, which is actually quite good, if true, beating out the estimates of a lot of other fully wireless buds. That’s augmented by the promised 24 hours of life offered up by the charging case. At $159, they’re not exactly cheap for a product that will feel like a must upgrade for many iPhone 7 upgraders, but it’s certainly in line with other wireless models.
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Football is definitely back because Twitter now has an emoji for every NFL team
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Fitz Tepper
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As if Twitter’s didn’t convince you that the social network was going all-in on the NFL, maybe this will. Twitter announced today (a day before tomorrow’s NFL season opener) that they made a custom hashtag emoji for every NFL team. There is also a #TNF hashtag for Thursday Night Football that shows the NFL logo on a helmet. Like Twitter’s other emojis, these can be activated by tweeting a certain hashtag. You can see all of the hashtags and emojis below, but not in the actual tweet, because for some reason Twitter doesn’t support these emojis within their Tweet embed product. The and release new emojis for all 32 teams. — Good Morning America (@GMA) It seems that Twitter and the NFL decided to let each team pick their own hashtag, which may have backfired because most teams decided to use phrases that are super vague and probably only known to hardcore football fans. For example, the Carolina Panthers choose #KeepPounding. While every Panther fan knows this is a motivational phrase the team has used , most people probably have no idea what it means. Same with (which doesn’t even have the Seahawks’ logo as the emoji) and . Thankfully some teams decided to keep it simple (or had a really lazy social media manager) and just use their team’s name and logo for the hashtag and associated emoji, like the Super Bowl 50-winning #Broncos. Anyways, hopefully these emojis will get you in the mood for football tomorrow. But if you want to watch on Twitter, you’re out of luck until next week, because even though Twitter will be streaming all Thursday Night Football games, tomorrow’s season opener isn’t considered part of the Thursday Night Football series (even though it’s on Thursday), so the game will only be on NBC. #confusing
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise to spin off software assets in $8.8B transaction
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John Mannes
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In an $8.8 billion transaction, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also known as HPE, will be spinning off its non-core software assets, according to . The assets will be merged with , a British software company, to form a new combined corporation. After separating from Hewlett-Packard last year, HPE forged a business model centered around providing both infrastructure and software to support enterprise server, cloud and network needs. The company’s hybrid approach involved so much software that the HPE website even had a dedicated with packages spanning every letter but J, X, Y and Z. HPE will be retaining tools that support the company’s cloud and infrastructure businesses but will be spinning off tools for application delivery management, big data, enterprise security, information management, governance and IT operations management. “I want to be crystal clear — HPE is not getting out of software,” said Whitman. The new merged company operating these software platforms will be owned in part by HPE shareholders. Shareholders will retain a 50.1 percent stake in the company after HPE receives $2.5 billion in cash from the transaction. [graphiq id=”cHiXb6WF5dj” title=”HP Enterprise (HPE) Stock Price – 7 Days” width=”600″ height=”530″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/cHiXb6WF5dj” link=”http://stock-screener.findthecompany.com/l/9615/HPE” link_text=”HP Enterprise (HPE) Stock Price – 7 Days | FindTheCompany” ] HPE made a similar move in May of this year by spinning off and merging its enterprise services division with Computer Sciences Corporation to form a new company. HPE shareholders also retained 50 percent ownership of the combined company in that transaction. Both deals are expected to bring increased cost synergies. In addition to HPE and Micro Focus, German open-source software company will also be getting a boost from the deal via a new commercial partnership where SUSE will provide HPE with Linux tools. . poised for more growth on the back of and merger announcement: — SUSE (@SUSE) The deal is expected to close in Q3 of 2017 with Kevin Loosemore, executive chairman of Micro Focus, taking the helm of the combined company.
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Up close with the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus
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Brian Heater
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Here we are in a post-headphone jack world. I don’t know about you, but I expected thing to feel different, like that part in the when Dorothy sees color for the first time. But there you have it. These things take time. And we’ll see whether other companies follow suit – though the company certainly has a pretty strong track record for ushering out other technologies. That shift is really the key aesthetic differentiator here – the kind you have to turn the phone around to see. The other thing that immediately sets the handset apart from its predecessor at first glance is the new “Jet Black” finish – a sort of piano gloss that’s every bit as shiny in-person as the company led us to believe from the Bill Graham Civic Center stage earlier today. It’s pretty nice, actually, managing the so-rare feat of looking classy whilst reflecting everything in sight – and yes, it’s every bit the fingerprint magnet you’re currently imagining. Personally, I’d opted for the decidedly less creatively-named “black,” which is a matte finish from which no light can possibly escape, and honestly, it might be my favorite look the iPhone has sported thus far. The first thing you’ll likely do when you get your hands on the new phone is fiddle around with the new home button. It’ll take some getting used to. It’s not a bad sensation, but it’s certainly different. And getting haptic feedback courtesy of the Taptic Engine with a press is decidedly less satisfying that press an honest-to-goodness physical button. And unlike the trackpad, the technology hasn’t approximated the feel of the real thing. There are three haptic levels you can toggle through in the settings menu, with #3 serving as the closest to the real thing – but still not the same. But hey, plenty of us never thought we’d be cool with typing on a screen, and this is a decidedly less intense adjustment. It’s also one of those tradeoffs that probably brings more good than bad, with the button less prone to breaking (a relatively common complaint as far as hardware failures go) and helping the handset achieve its long-awaited IP67rating , protecting it from water spray, should you get caught in a rom-com style sudden downpour. That, along with an increased battery life may well be the two strongest additions to the new handset – though Apple isn’t really leading with either, as they’re not quite as sexy as other aspects. Speaking of, Apple also took care to improve the audio – an often sadly overlooked aspect of handset, as manufacturers are generally far more focused on the on-going display resolution arms race. The company’s added stereo speakers to the iPhone that sound a fair deal better and loud than past models – though, we’ll have to check them in a setting that’s not swarming with loud Facebook Liveing bloggers to really say for sure. The display updates, on the other hand, are fairly minor. The phone gets brighter and has a wider color range, but you would be hard pressed to pick up on that at first glance. Performance has been improved, courtesy of the A10 Fusion, another in-house chip, this time sporting a four-core CPU. Again, probably not the kind of thing you’ll notice immediately, though the company was showing off some pretty solid mobile gaming demos after the event. The camera has the same 12 megapixel sensor as its predecessor, but the camera’s speed has been improved, and optical stabilization should help you get better shots. The Plus sports a much bigger change on that front, adding a second megapixel camera for wide angle and telephoto shots, along the lines of what was introduced with last night’s unfortunately timed LG V20 event. That paired with a new Portrait feature bring some pretty impressive imagery – and offer a compelling reason beyond size to go for the Plus. All in all, the iPhone 7 doesn’t feel like a quantum leap over its predecessor, but there are certainly some welcome changes on-board that help make it a more well-rounded handset, including water resistance, a large battery and improved sound quality. There will be some more growing pains on this handset than other upgrades, including the end of the headphone jack and a shift in the home button. Those elements aside, the handset is definitely a step forward for the company. The handsets go up for pre-order this Friday with retail availability on the 16 .
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Apple also doubles storage on old iPads and makes high-end iPad Pro models cheaper
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Romain Dillet
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Apple hasn’t mentioned the iPad during its , but it doesn’t mean that the company has no news for the device. The iPhone 7 finally with 32GB of storage, and the iPad is also receiving a storage bump. The 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros already start at 32GB, so only old iPad models are getting more gigs. In particular, the $399 iPad Air 2 now has 32GB instead of 16GB, and the $399 iPad mini 4 also comes with 32GB. This move also simplifies the lineup a bit, removing some options for the iPad mini 4 and the iPad mini 2, which is still around. As for the iPad Pro, some options were quite expensive, so Apple is making the most expensive Pro models a bit more accessible. All devices still start at the same price with 32GB, but now you can upgrade to 128GB, 256GB and LTE for less money. Here’s the new lineup:
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A view on VC from a realistic optimist
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Ryan Armrbust
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During the last year there has been considerable discussion regarding the current state of the venture capital industry: Are we in a bubble? Did that bubble pop? Why has there been a dearth of major technology company IPOs? How much higher can valuations skyrocket, yet why does it seem increasingly difficult for earlier stage startups to raise their Series A and B rounds? All good questions. But I am a “ ” and a technologist, and I see the advancing pace of technology development as a positive signal for the market. I believe we are entering one of history’s best markets for investing in emerging technologies, and that astute investors will focus on the smartest and most innovative technology leaders. So, I prefer to follow the technology, not the market prognosticators. I also agree that market history should not be ignored; we have learned quite a few lessons from the 2000 technology crash and the 2008 economic crises. These events have helped shape our mindsets and paradigms, and the best investors have applied these lessons well. We’ve become more informed, more sophisticated, more discerning, more capable of assessing risks and more insightful in identifying the next major technology. We’ve collectively learned and disseminated more about technology and entrepreneurship in the last seven years than has ever occurred in the history of modern technology. And it’s been a wild ride: We’ve witnessed a variety of new technologies and new industries and more than 168 new unicorns. It now costs less than $100,000 to start a company that could be worth $1 billion dollars . The leading college majors are computer science and entrepreneurship, and it seems like everyone wants to start or join a venture-backed company. We’ve also gotten smarter on granular company-building details: the logistics of manufacturing; selling and delivering a product directly to an end consumer; the measurement and monetization of mobile viral growth; the impact of each percent of churn for an enterprise SaaS product at $100,000 or $1 million MRR; the cost of customer acquisition versus the lifetime value of the customer; and the incorporation of new software and data analytics capabilities into business processes. Importantly, we have learned how to recognize the lifecycle of these companies and how to extract value for our investment as we seek to provide returns to our limited partners. While there’s always going to be uncertainty in venture capital investing, my is that we are entering one of the most exciting times in history to be investing in and building technology-enabled companies. New companies are being created to exploit new technologies to become world leaders: Look for key developments and new applications in technologies relating to artificial intelligence, machine learning, UAVs (drones), cybersecurity, crowdsourcing, data analytics and visualization, computational imaging and recognition, virtual reality and software-defined processes. These aren’t safe bets. These are highly risky investments — but with the potential for seismic societal shifts, let alone massive returns. This is proper venture capital. Yet many investors new to venture capital remain nervous, and we still must address the questions that continue to resonate in the technology media: Will the high valuations hold and properly return capital down through all investors on the cap table? Will early-stage companies be able to raise capital for product development, product-market fit and pre- and early-revenue phases? Will technology deliver on its multitude of promises? Which big unicorn investments will flame out and which seemingly genius technologies will go bust? The venture capital industry itself is more bullish. funds are on track to bring in another $30 billion in 2016 — more money than at any other time; we’re poised to push the future forward. New companies will use the technologies mentioned above to build safe autonomous vehicles, advance drug development and surgical robots, improve efficiencies of employees in the workplace, create a space exploration industry, increase the productive use of massive stores of data for decision science, enhance manufacturing with 3D printing, lower the cost of communications, develop new materials and composites and expand the universe and use of connected hardware both in the smart home and in our communities. As we push the boundaries of technology and science, increase the connections between venture capital and corporate development, apply new knowledge of best practices in company building and develop the next generation of technology leaders and visionaries, the simple fact is there will be huge value and wealth creation. The side of me forces a disciplined regimen of hard work, comprehensive due diligence and relentless oversight; the optimistic side of me is just super excited to be a part of our industry.
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Apple Pay comes to Japan, New Zealand and Russia this fall; hits the web on September 13
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Sarah Perez
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Apple Pay will arrive in three more countries this fall: Japan, New Zealand and Russia, and will hit the web alongside . The web version of Apple’s payments service will be made available to Safari users on any Mac introduced from 2012 on, which is also running the latest operating system, macOS Sierra. The company detailed the Japan launch of Apple Pay on stage today noting in particular how the service had to be made compatible with a different version of contactless tap-to-pay technology used in the country, FeliCa. Developed by Sony Corp., FeliCa chips are commonly used by Japanese smartphone users who tap to pay for things like public buses and train passes. had previously reported on Apple’s plans to roll out its payments technology in Japan, noting also how it would work with major players like the Suica and Pasmo networks. Apple the Suica news today, saying that Japanese users can commute and pay for everyday items with Suica from JR East, as well as make payments in stores, in apps and on the web. An upgraded version of Maps in iOS 10 will also help Japanese transit riders see ride details, including fare breakdowns that will automatically show Suica pricing on their device, says Apple. Japan’s major financial brands will support Apple Pay, too, meaning it will work in the country’s largest stores, as well as neighborhood shops and restaurants. Apple Pay will come to Japan with the launch of the iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus and Apple Watch Series 2, Though not announced on stage, Apple will also expand Apple Pay internationally this fall with a New Zealand launch in October, and a Russia launch pegged for “this fall.” These countries will join the recently added France, Switzerland and Hong Kong, which went live in July. With those additions, Apple Pay is now live in nine markets, and sees over half of its transaction volume coming from non-U.S. markets. The payments technology itself is gaining traction, too. It now has more than five times the volume from a year ago, and is adding one million users per week. Consumers have spent billions with Apple Pay, with accelerated growth taking place in the second half of 2015, in particular. At that time, Apple saw a growth rate 10 times higher than in the first half of the year, while its usage in apps more than doubled in the second half of 2015 as compared to the first half of the year. The technology today counts tens of millions of users, with estimated monthly active users up more than 450 percent year-over-year in June. Apple Pay is live at more than 11 million contactless locations worldwide, with 3 million in the U.S. alone. The technology also has the lion’s share of the mobile payments market in the U.S., at present. As Phil Schiller touted on stage today, more than 90 percent of wireless transactions are made with Apple Pay. Apple Pay will arrive on the web alongside the launch of iOS 10, which rolls out September 13. At that time, on a Mac introduced in or after 2012. To use Apple Pay online, you’ll look for the button at checkout on supported sites, then complete your purchase via TouchID on your iPhone or by using your Apple Watch. By paying with Apple Pay, your transactions are encrypted between your devices and Apple Pay servers, and the online merchant won’t need to save your actual credit card number, adding another layer of protection.
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All the ways you are probably going to lose an AirPod
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Matthew Lynley
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Apple has some wireless earbuds! . They go right into your ear when they aren’t in a case that’s charging them. The battery lasts for 5 hours or so, and the case can charge them for 24 hours. Really cool, right? It’s like, straight out of the movie . But in the characters are only wearing one wireless earbud. Here’s my theory: . And that’s probably what’s going to happen to your AirPod — you’ll lose one, but not both, and then have to pay Apple for the replacement (which will be like $79 or something, I dunno?). Here are some of the ways you are probably going to lose one of your AirPods: Happy AirPod-ing!
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Here’s your first look at Mass Effect: Andromeda gameplay on PS4 Pro
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1hBNALUk4w&w=640&h=360] If you’re not familiar with the Mass Effect series of sci-fi role-playing games, then you’re missing out. The new PS4 Pro that Sony unveiled today can handle 4K, and Bethesda used the opportunity of the event to give us our first look at Mass Effect: Andromeda gameplay, which does take great advantage of the added resolution capabilities. The latest Mass Effect game will support 4K and HDR10 via the PS4 Pro, and is set to launch in “early 2017.” Based on this brief glimpse, it looks like the visuals will definitely deliver. And based on previous instalments in the series, it like won’t disappoint from a gameplay or story perspective, either.
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No, Apple, digital zoom still sucks
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Apple continues to dance a sexy dance for photographers all over the world, launching better cameras with more features and higher quality. But when Phil Schiller, VP of marketing at Apple stands on a stage saying that digital zoom is a good thing, real photographers won’t listen to him. Neither should you. Here is why. Two lenses. Twice as scrumptious. A 28mm equivalent and a 56mm equivalent. Yesss. The thing that had me jumping up and down on my chair throwing swearwords at my computer was Phil Schiller’s claim that digital zoom was somehow a good thing. It really isn’t. It never has been. It never* will be. Y’see, the problem is that your photos are limited to the amount of light your camera is able to gather. When you use digital zoom, you’re no longer using the full imaging sensor; instead, you are using fewer and fewer pixels. You usually still get the same number of pixels, which is accomplished by a lower number of pixels to cover the full image. You don’t have to be a professional photographer to realize that’s not great. Even if you don’t need all twelve megapixels for your photo — say, if you’re just uploading them to Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat — there are other problems with using digital zoom. The image stabilization is optimized for full-frame images, so when you start zooming in, you don’t even get the full benefit of the IS. In other words: You’d better have rock-solid hands. Worst of all — cameras have flaws. There is no way of avoiding that. When you start , those flaws become oh-so-very-painfully obvious. “But Haje,” you cry in frustration and disappointed rage, “How will I get my subjects bigger in my frame?” Simple. Zoom with your feet. If you want something to get bigger, It’ll do your photography a world of good. Don’t get me wrong, I’m hella excited about . Adding a longer focal-length lens is a brilliant move. It means that you can get up close and personal with your subjects. It’ll make a tremendous difference for smartphone photographers, for sure. Schiller, I love you, man, but now you are just being silly. Having two whole different camera assemblies rather than an optical zoom feature is smart, too. Moveable parts in a camera this small means that the manufacturing tolerances have to be ridiculously precise. Moving parts are also susceptible to knocks and bumps and mechanics eventually wear out. So yes; two lenses is smart. In fact, I have no doubt that Apple’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will be some of the best cameras available in mobile devices. But… if you want to make the most of ’em, don’t listen to people spouting marketing bollocks on stage. Shun digital zoom like the bubonic plague and stick to the zooms provided by the cameras. On Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus, that means you should shoot at 1x or 2x zoom, nothing in between and nothing beyond. If you really want to “zoom” your image, you can always crop it later, with much the same effect. *There is one tiny little super-geeky caveat here: If you are using digital zoom to zoom to somewhere between the two extremes, you could in theory use high-end light-field calculations to get a zoom ratio that is better than the sum of its parts. In that case, the camera use a cropped version of the wide-angle camera, augment it with data from the other camera and create a composite image that could, in theory, be a happy medium. That’s the route is going down, after all. There’s no evidence currently that this is the case for Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus, however.
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Steven Hillion
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Apple unveiled the $159 wireless AirPods
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Romain Dillet
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If $159 sounds like a lot of money for 8 grams, it’s because it is. Shortly after introducing the , Apple unveiled the . If you’re familiar with the existing EarPods, you’ll feel right at home. The AirPods are like the EarPods, but without wires. These earbuds come with a built-in W1 chip for audio processing and pairing. According to the , they use Bluetooth to transmit audio from your devices. But it’s unclear if you can use them with any Bluetooth device or just Apple ones. After pairing them with your phone, they’re going to be automatically paired with all your Apple devices that use the same Apple ID. So you’ll be able to seamlessly listen to music on your Mac, iPhone, iPad or even Apple Watch using the AirPods. When fully charged, you can listen to up to 5 hours of music. You’ll have to put them back in the casing to get some battery life as the case doubles as a battery. Fifteen minutes of charging gives you three hours of battery life. The case holds up to 24 hours of battery life. There are sensors so that the AirPods know when you put them in your ears. This way, Apple can save battery life. Similarly, the built-in microphones only work when you’re talking. And if you really like the movie yes, you can double tap on an AirPod to trigger Siri. The AirPods will ship in late October. The iPhone 7 comes with the usual EarPods, but with a Lightning cable. [gallery ids="1381565,1381559,1381560"] But that’s not all. Beats is also releasing brand new headphones with the same W1 chip, the same pairing mechanism with your Apple ID. The BeatsX will be available this Fall for $149.95. These are in-ear earbuds with a cord behind your neck. There’s a built-in Lightning port so you can charge them with your iPhone cable. The Powerbeats 3 Wireless will also be available this Fall for $199.95. They charge via micro-USB. And the Beats Solo 3 Wireless are available for pre-order now and cost $299.95. It also relies on micro-USB. Welcome to our wireless future. Do you miss the headphone jack already? [gallery ids="1381741,1381742,1381743"]
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Don’t cry because the headphone jack is over, smile because it happened
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John Biggs
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Let’s get this straight: Tim Cook doesn’t read your tweets. He doesn’t care about your thoughts on iPhone vs. Samsung and he definitely doesn’t care about your headphones. Apple is an apex predator and it acts like one, shedding fat for muscle and eating entire swathes of the CE industry as it goes. Like the 1,000-pound gorilla or the the proverbial elephant, it sits wherever it wants. It did take courage to remove . It’s not the kind of courage we talk about when people rush into burning buildings or save kittens from tall trees. It’s the kind of courage that accepts that your actions will change the status quo and will be, in the end, insanely unpopular. And, after the digital dust settles, the technology will move into the mainstream and we’ll forget this ever happened. Apple does mean things to electronics. They destroyed the DVD drive. They cut out serial ports and Ethernet jacks. They made switch manufacturers cry when they added haptics to their MacBooks. In the end do you really miss any of this stuff? And if you do, you’re probably not using MacOS anyway. Your point-of-sale system probably runs a receipt printer from 2002, so Windows it is. I am here to bury the headphone jack, not praise Apple. That jack needed to go. It was a point of failure, it was prone to wear, and except in a few rare occasions I’ve gotten better sound via Bluetooth than via a direct plug-in. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if more wireless gear doesn’t appear on the horizon including – this is going to be hard – the death of the XLR audio standard for music gear. Where Apple goes, manufacturers follow. There’s another reason you’re going to like wireless earbuds. As notes, the point of wireless earbuds is to get you used to having something inconspicuous in your ear at all times that can talk to you. In other words services like Siri will be a little Jiminy Cricket, constantly offering advice, directions, and updates. I guess you’d call it AAR – augmented aural reality – and it will be the step before actual implantation of electronics into our heads. Wild, right? But you can’t get there without getting rid of wires. So let it out. Let out the anger, the grief, the rage. Lie on the floor and do breathing exercises. And wait until CES when you’ll see enough wireless headphones to choke a blue whale and then watch as that other apex predator, Samsung, slowly but surely begins to remove its own headphone jacks because Apple, mean old Apple, finally said it was OK. i gasped when they didn't stop and the tube thing got longer and longer lmao — it me jeff meltz (@thecultureofme)
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Box introduces “New Box” at BoxWorks
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Ron Miller
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has always been known as the irritant in the content management industry, that plucky cloud upstart ready to take on the staid and conservative on-prem competition, but after more than a decade in the business, , perhaps the company felt it was time to disrupt itself. Today, at the customer conference, it announced a “new Box” with an updated file system design, new Notes collaboration tool functionality and . The three taken together provide a range of content management functionality that puts it on par with its more mature competition. When you combine it with the announcements over the last year around , , (the ability to store Box in-country, even on another storage service) and (to move legacy content to the cloud), you have a much more complete set of services, one expects from a fully developed content management vendor. None of the updates announced today with the exception of the are all that innovative, but they do simplify the act of working with files and collaborating with team members around content stored in Box. In general, they talked about things being more streamlined and running much faster (but of course we won’t know how fast that is until the final products are actually released over the coming months). They are also improving search and using metadata associated with files to help understand, locate and move content inside of Box. Box CEO Aaron Levie on stage at BoxWorks 2016. Box announced updates to all three of its access points on the web, the desktop and mobile. The web gets a new media viewer including the ability to view 3D and 360 degree images (mobile gets this too) and HD video. There’s a new Excel viewer too and real-time co-authoring in Office 365. The desktop also will get its share of enhancements including new favorites and recents folders to make it easier to find the documents you work on most frequently. It’s not fancy, but it’s useful and the idea here is to improve the end user experience. The morning keynote also emphasized its partnerships with IBM, Microsoft and Google. In fact, representatives from all three companies appeared on stage including Diane Greene, head of Google Cloud. Google announced a fresh partnership with Box , something they had been able to do in the past, but the new integration is being billed as much smoother. Diane Greene from Google onstage at BoxWorks with Box CEO Aaron Levie. The companies also announced integration with Springboard, Google’s search tool. Some of the web enhancements will be available today, but most of the other changes will be rolled out over the next six months with the mobile changes coming in October or perhaps later, and the desktop won’t be ready until some time next year. That delay has to disappoint users hungry for the updates now, but substantive change doesn’t come easily, and this level of updates will take some time to come to market. Box is shooting for transformative change, and apparently that takes time to bring to fruition.
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Crunch Report | Who will buy The Honest Company?
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Military veterans provide a new competitive advantage for tech companies
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Craig Hanson
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Ask any Silicon Valley CEO what some of their biggest challenges are and you likely will hear “finding and retaining great people.” Tech is booming, yet even now that valuations and financing rounds are , it remains incredibly hard to attract and keep talent amid a competitive ecosystem where there are so many companies going after massive ideas. A few companies, however, have figured out a competitive advantage through a relatively untapped source of talent: military veterans — and the idea is starting to catch on. While the tech industry has been rapidly expanding, the U.S. has seen large numbers of military veterans returning to or looking to enter the private sector. Tech companies can’t find enough skilled people, and veterans are looking for exciting careers to utilize their skills. It should be the perfect match. But as I talked to a number of veterans looking for jobs in the tech industry, many were frustrated that employers often didn’t know how to interpret the relevance of their skills or appreciate their capacity for such all-purpose skills as rapid learning, leadership and pure smarts. That realization nearly three years ago led me to cold-call a group called . I’m not a military veteran myself, but I wanted to help; as a venture capitalist, I get to work with a lot of people in tech companies. At the time, VetsinTech was just a small operation with a mission to help train, connect and find jobs for military veterans wanting careers in tech. What happened next inspired all of us. Led by the indefatigable and a host of champions from the tech community, such as and (to be clear, you don’t have to be named “Craig” to help veterans, but we don’t mind the name either), VetsinTech started hosting career networking events with top tech employers. This included training workshops, mentor sessions and even hackathons to introduce to some of the most exciting tech companies across the country talented men and women who had served in our armed forces. Katherine pointed out recently that over the next five years, . We also found that veterans make some of the best entrepreneurs. A concluded that “veterans are at least 45 percent more likely than those with no active-duty military experience to be self-employed.” Mark Rockefeller, CEO and co-founder of (and a veteran) noted that : the U.S. military. So we ran entrepreneurship programs to mentor, educate and network veterans. We even launched a new national initiative out of a White House and Joining Forces working group that we named “VetCap” (capital for veterans), with a workshop program to . A number of titans in the tech world have stepped up, such as Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of . They have a great heart for helping veterans, but they’re also doing it to bring exceptional people into their companies. For a while, these efforts went unnoticed, but that is changing, and a growing number of companies are seeing this competitive advantage in talent acquisition. recently worked with VetsinTech to sponsor an employer meet-up at . In May, , under the leadership of First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden, convened tech companies and over the next five years, primarily in the fields of aerospace, telecommunications and tech.” VetsinTech and its partners, like Intuit, Salesforce, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, HPE, Ten-X and Accenture, were all in attendance to support the Joining Forces initiative. and VetsinTech piloted a cybersecurity training program for veterans. is running a training program for veterans called . Facebook has hosted a couple of hackathons for veterans, including the . Overall, VetsinTech has grown to 12 veteran-led chapters across the U.S. in just three years, and gained support from more than 20 top tech companies to hire veterans and develop training programs. Military veterans are growing and, in some cases, transforming their careers at technology companies in Silicon Valley and the rest of the country. There is more work to do, and still far too many qualified veterans looking for an opportunity. But if there’s one thing the tech industry is good at, it’s recognizing the power of extraordinary people, and tech companies have started to tap into a new talent source that will bolster them for the next big innovations ahead.
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The drone race is off and running, with Israel in the lead
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Yoav Leitersdorf
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Audiences around the globe enjoyed all the action of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games thanks in large part to the drones hovering above the events ( ), capturing every movement, from every angle. Athletes and spectators didn’t give a second thought to the presence of these drones — which shows how rapidly they’ve become commonplace. Indeed, drones can be found in almost every industry. For years, the military has used drones, which they refer to as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/Systems (UAV/UAS), to get a birds-eye view of complex operational missions and perform intelligence gathering. And recreational use of drones has soared, as individuals use them to take aerial photographs, explore, race, etc. (In January 2016, only 30 days after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued that required drones to be registered, hobbyists had registered more than 181,000 drones). More recently, however, drones have come onto the radar of commercial enterprises and public sector agencies as a way to help them tap into new opportunities, improve services, increase visibility and cut costs. The media and entertainment, mining, oil and gas, retail, construction, agriculture and real estate industries, among others, have already successfully put drones to work for them. City and state governments, first responders, educational and environmental agencies, etc., also have started identifying ways to use drones to enhance their capabilities and efficiencies. As a result of the many potential applications, the drones could create 100,000 jobs and generate $82 billion in economic activity over the next 10 years. Given Israel’s pioneering work with military drone technology, it is no surprise the country is the in the world, supplying almost 61 percent of the drones sold since 1985. Commercial drones are a natural extension of Israel’s strong defense and aerospace industries, which are led by global visionaries such as , , and . Israeli aviation, robotics, autonomous systems and computer vision experts have been taking their military experience and translating it into commercial applications that companies, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook and DJI are implementing to the benefit of the overall civilian drone industry. As new drone applications are identified, Israeli experts are optimally poised to deliver the military-grade capabilities needed to succeed. We, as seed investors in many of Israel’s technology startups, have seen firsthand the explosion of Israeli drone companies. Source: YL Ventures In fact, there are close to 40 Israeli commercial drone startups addressing a variety of needs for a wide range of sectors. The overwhelming majority of the companies were established in the last two to three years. Interestingly, 42 percent of these early-stage companies have secured capital, totaling $80 million. In general, the Israeli commercial drone startup ecosystem can be divided into four main categories: autonomous platforms, anti-drone and cybersecurity solutions, systems and components and drone providers. End-to-end autonomous platforms are the future of the commercial drone industry. They enable drones to complete activities without needing any human intervention. Israeli startups are leading the world’s development of autonomous capabilities. For example, they are creating drones that deliver packages to their destination and intelligent navigation and advanced computer vision technologies that identify and circumvent potential issues. Some of the companies to watch in this category include , , and . Airobotics ; the company is developing an autonomous drone capable of recharging its own batteries. Flytrex offers a drone for parcel delivery that is already operating in five countries. Arbe Robotics, the winner of the , and AerialGuard, the runner-up in the are focused on developing intelligent navigation and obstacle avoidance systems. There are risks created by drones that need to be mitigated. To ensure safe, appropriate usage, regulatory bodies are requiring individuals and commercial entities to register their drones. This is only a first step, however. The public needs to be protected from unregistered, “rogue” drones, and the drones, themselves, need to be protected from hackers trying to tamper with, disrupt or, in extreme cases, take control over their operations. Israeli entrepreneurs, renowned for their defense and cybersecurity expertise, are developing systems that can intercept drones that pose a threat to public safety and prevent attacks that attempt to use a drone to carry out an exploit. Companies to look at in this category include , and . ApolloShield, a recent Y Combinator accelerator participant, is developing an anti-drone system capable of detecting and intercepting drones. Cybermoon offers a detection system that uses an advanced audio analytic algorithm to locate drones. RegulusX, a finalist in the , is building a protection solution for drones that encrypts communications and detects jamming attempts to ensure the integrity of their operations and safe usage. Varied use cases require varied drone capabilities. To meet this market need, startups are emerging that offer different drone systems and components. The offerings can be almost anything, ranging from sensors and communication solutions to 3D mapping and drone insurance platforms. Examples of companies in this category include and . ParaZero is developing a recovery system for malfunctioning drones, in the form of a parachute, and Sensilize is creating a multispectral sensor for agricultural applications. Specific drone applications have given rise to specialized drone providers that can offer solutions tailored to fit a particular industry’s needs. For example, inspection drones, agricultural drones and disaster recovery drones. Examples of vertical drone providers include , and . Fitch is developing the first ever drone for fishing, Sky Sapience is creating a drone suited for security and safety applications and Colugo is designing a lightweight, low-power-consumption drone for delivery and inspection purposes. All these commercial drone technologies are driving new and exciting applications. We feel Israel’s deep military and defense expertise puts Israeli entrepreneurs at an advantage, giving them the highly valuable skill set needed to introduce military-grade capabilities that can grow and enhance the value of the drone market. Thanks to Israeli innovators, we expect to see many more use cases for drones that can benefit us all.
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Five lessons for founders
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Amy Chang
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Fundraising is something all of us as entrepreneurs worry about constantly and discuss pretty much whenever we meet. A lot of people think you should meet for the first time with a VC or a potential investor with your pitch in hand, ready to start the process. I disagree. Scrap around and find a way to get warm intros early. It’s like picking a partner for anything important – tapping into your network and doing your homework on who is interested in your space, who’s actually insightful in the space and good to work with, means you’ll have a lay of the land before you desperately need money. Why would they want to meet with you? Well, figure out what you know about the industry that’s interesting to them, what’s intrinsic to their portfolio companies, and make that the hook. Once they understand your capabilities, you’ve started the process. Like any relationship, it takes some care and nurturing, but it’s worth it, because the relationship sets the foundation for them to take that leap of faith when you’re bringing them an idea to fund. Even if they’re interested in the space and the product is intriguing, the leap of faith is team x product x market. It’s not additive, it’s multiplicative and if any of them are zero, it takes the entire equation down to zero. So, especially in this anemic macro-economic environment, it’s a lot less risky for them if they feel like they already have a sense of the team. If you know them before you take money from them, it’s good after the money hits the bank too. You start with higher credibility and a better understanding of one another’s working styles before the first board meeting. You have a more acute understanding of their beliefs around the space and there’s a foundation of trust and benefit of the doubt in the face of any conflicts. In short, if they know you and trust you, they’ll be a lot more open to your ideas after the funding hits and a lot more likely to make that leap and write you the check in the first place. It’s not rocket science, but it does take a good amount of elbow grease up front and a substantial amount of prep and time. I have yet to hear a CEO or founder say they regret firing someone too quickly. Seriously. We have a rough rule of thumb – if there’s a team member I’ve had a conversation five or more times in about the span of a month (and that includes other people coming and giving feedback, me having discussions on what to do for them with co-founders, etc), we know we have a serious problem. The worst thing we can do is let that problem fester. We know we either have to resolve it fast, or let the person go. There are a hundred reasons we wait too long. It’s the part of my job that I hate the most. I hate it so much it triggers a physical reaction for me. I know and care about every single member of our team. I know about their sick parent, their spouse that’s having trouble finding a job, all of it, and I take all of it home with me. The decision to let someone go is never made lightly and it always costs something emotionally. The key indicator for me is if thoughts of the situation or person come flooding in right before bed or right when I get up, I already know what needs to be done, I just don’t want to do it. But that’s exactly when the team needs me to suck it up and get it done for them. I get 6-8 miles a day by walking during my one-to-ones and pacing during calls. Headsets are a great thing. This is most of my exercise for the week, and my doctor says I’ve never been in better cardiovascular shape. Seriously, my resting heart rate is in the low 60’s now! But, the biggest benefit is that people feel more free to talk about the hard things if you’re not sitting across the table, staring at them. If I really want to hear what someone thinks, I’ll ask them to walk with me. Now the whole team does this with one another and it’s become part of our culture. I also think people have better ideas when they’re walking and the blood is flowing. I find that walking side-by-side, facing the same direction, it has the effect of making it feel more like we’re solving a problem together, or that the solution or idea is ours as opposed to mine or theirs. Most people think of an advisory board as just advising on functional areas along with some strategy. Of course, we’ve included domain experts to help us in areas where we need it – and there are plenty of those – but there are less obvious benefits to an advisory board, too. The first is recruiting. The referral aspect of this is obvious, as advisors all have their own extensive networks. The bigger bonus is having them help you close on a candidate you really want. From the candidate’s point of view, they’re more objective than an employee or an investor in the company. They’re also a great conduit for ongoing correspondence with the candidate after you’ve made the offer. You can have contact with a potential hire every 24-48 hours without making them feel like someone from the company is bugging them or pressuring them to make a decision. The second benefit is on the fundraising side. Every investor has people that influence their opinions and if some of your advisors happen to be those people… That they’re willing to go to bat for you and support you is a massive reputational benefit, which is something that can’t be overstated when you’re asking a person to make that leap of faith. The third benefit is that they’re usually more than happy to spread the word when you go to press, a time when it’s important that all the talking doesn’t come from you. You need as many different types of advocates as you can get. The right group of advisors is chomping at the bit and raring to go at press time. There’s only one CEO but there are a lot of team members. There are days where you give and give and end up feeling a little emotionally tapped out. That’s where my ladies come in, my Kitchen Cabinet. It’s a group of women that acts as an unofficial group of advisors. It’s really a safe place where we understand each other and have permission to be be vulnerable. Problems become a lot less scary when you can talk them through. We’re available to each other by phone pretty much anytime and we get together for slumber parties once a quarter. We spend a whole day and night just kicking back. We eat, drink, talk, and decompress. We support each other. These get-togethers aren’t just a couple of hours of light conversation – having a large chunk of time to relax into means you can really get into things and help each other. I’d urge you to pick a handful of savvy, awesome, and trustworthy women you feel would gel together, kick your significant other and/or kids out of the house for a night, and slumber party it. Spending a day and night away is big investment but it has a massive payoff from an energy and happiness perspective.
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Roku lands its first streaming deal in Asia with Philippines-based PLDT tie-up
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Jon Russell
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Roku, the streaming media company, has netted its first deal with an operator in Asia after it announced an agreement with Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT). PLDT is no stranger to deals with tech companies, and , which also operates in Southeast Asia. Now, through its deal with Roku, PLDT will sell a dedicated, own-branded Roku streaming player and offer an accompanying streaming service from Q2 2017. The company said the content will include programming from its Cignal network, iFlix and “content from global providers”, although a price has not been revealed yet. That represents a similar deal to , which also sells its box and service , . “We’ll be able to offer consumers a low-cost device with access to the best content from the Philippines and around the world through an easy-to-use user interface,” PLDT’s Oscar Reyes Jr. said. “In the past, operators first had to build or lease dedicated infrastructure in order to deliver TV services to the home, but with streaming that is no longer the case. As a result, we see a lot of interest from all over the world for our Roku Powered program from both telecom and pay TV operators,” Andrew Ferrone, vice president of pay TV at Roku, added in a statement. Despite that interest, a Roku spokesperson confirmed to us that there is no immediate plan to expand its coverage in Asia at this point. The PLDT offering won’t go on sale until mid next year, so we may see increased activity close to, or after, it goes live.
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Every single part of this camera is 3D printed
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Devin Coldewey
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We’ve seen 3D printed cameras before, but they always include some prefabricated part: a hinge, a spring, or more complicated bits like shutters and iris mechanisms. But designer Amos Dudley has done what I’ve always hoped someone would do: make a camera — yes, including the lens. He used a Form 2 SLA printer, which can put out objects using a variety of resin types — a flexible one for one piece, a rigid one for another, a colored one for one piece, a clear one for another. It prints at a high enough precision (sub-millimeter) that things like small gear teeth or other interacting machine parts can be produced without the need to do lots of manual post-work knocking off pieces or sanding them down. The enclosure, film sprocket, and iris are all more or less straightforward — the latter has a rather organic look from the way its resin blades slide past each other. For the shutter, Dudley rejected a few common mechanically simple designs and found a solution in a camera from 1885. Two mirror image planes swoop past one another when the shutter button is pushed, moving from blocking the aperture in one position to blocking it in the other — but while they move, the way is clear. In Dudley’s design, you end up having to press one shutter button to switch them one way and another to switch them back, and there are no set exposure times, but it works. The amazing part is the lens. First Dudley worked out exactly what optical qualities he’d need, simulating the parts and distances involved in a ray tracer. Then he actually printed it out using a high-quality transparent resin and sanded it down with a custom machine. Then a dip in liquid resin fills in the tiny valleys and flaws, making the lens, if not optically perfect, at least functional. It’s spherical, so there’s problems towards the edges of the frame, but with the aperture limited and other factors accounted for in the body of the camera, ! Pop a little film in there (Fujicolor Superia 400 — can’t 3D print that… yet) and it’s ready for its close-ups. Because it has a fixed focus, and not a very distant one. The rest of the photos are in . It’s quite an amazing accomplishment, and hopefully it will spur others with similar ideas to create similar devices of their own. Or you could just follow Dudley’s process for practice; .
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PayPal brushes-off request from Palestinian tech firms to access the platform
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Mike Butcher
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Some people might be wondering why a hashtag to do with Paypal has been blowing up on twitter in the last two days. The has been making waves on social media after 43 companies and organizations in Palestine to Paypal asking for the payment platform to work there. The move came only after PayPal ignored their requests for a formal meeting. PayPal currently does not work for Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, but for Israelis living in settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal by international law. Israelis and Palestinians also all use the same currency, the Israeli Shekels. But quite how an Internet platform could work in some areas of a country but not in another — where the areas in question are are in some cases literally meters apart — is puzzling to say the least. The group behind the hashtag and the letter, Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy (A4VPE), ask PayPal CEO Daniel Shulman (pictured) to consider the fact that PayPal operates in 203 countries, many of which could be considered far less stable than Palestine, including Somalia and Yemen. Yemen is currently engaged in a devastating civil war, while Somalia has been war-torn for many years. “We have been told that PayPal is concerned about the compliance investments required to enter the Palestinian market. We believe such costs have been greatly overestimated. The U.S. Treasury Department has spent a great deal of time working with the Palestine Monetary Authority to strengthen safeguards against abuse. PayPal currently operates in over 203 countries including places with major problems of corruption and terrorism like Somalia and Yemen. We are confident that Palestine will prove a much easier place to profitably do business than these and other markets that PayPal has already entered,” the group writes in the letter (which is reproduced below). A spokesperson for startup accelerator Gaza Sky Geeks (GSG), one of the signatories to the letter, said: “GSG is a major work hub for startups and freelancers in Gaza — payments are one of the toughest issues for them. After working tirelessly to win business in the global marketplace, they then have to pay steep fees for wire transfers or foreign banks to get paid. PayPal opening here is one of the most immediately impactful moves that could be done to support the economy here. Gazans we work with can’t understand why PayPal serves Israelis living in the West Bank and is open for business in counties like Yemen and Somalia, but not here. Businesses in Gaza and the West Bank just want access to the same opportunities PayPal affords to the other 200 countries and territories they serve.” TechCrunch contacted PayPal for its response and they sent us this statement: “PayPal’s ambition is for everyone ultimately to have access to our services for digital payments and commerce, in accordance with applicable regulatory requirements. We appreciate the interest that the Palestinian community has shown in PayPal. While we do not have anything to announce for the immediate future, we continuously work to develop strategic partnerships, address business feasibility, regulatory, and compliance needs and requirements, and acquire the necessary local authority permissions for new market entries.” PayPal has a major operation in Israel . Palestine produces roughly 2,000 IT graduates per year. Both the West Bank and Gaza now have a number of technology companies which, ironically, see tech as a way of developing their economy, just as the Israelis do. August 23, 2016 Mr. Daniel H. Schulman
President and CEO
PayPal
2211 North First Street
San Jose, CA 95131 Dear Mr. Schulman, We are writing to urge you to extend PayPal’s services to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza thereby removing a major limitation on the Palestinian technology sector, one of the only bright spots in the overall economy. More importantly, extending PayPal services would resolve the current discriminatory situation whereby PayPal’s payment portal can be accessed freely by Israeli settlers living illegally (per international humanitarian law) in the West Bank while it remains unavailable to the occupied Palestinian population. PayPal’s absence is a major obstacle to the growth of Palestine’s tech sector and the overall economy. While other payment portals are available, there is no replacement for the trust and familiarity that PayPal inspires among potential users, particularly those that are unfamiliar with Palestine-based companies. Without access to PayPal, Palestinian entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and others face routine difficulties in receiving payments for business and charitable purposes. Moreover, PayPal’s absence is problematic for the overall Palestinian economy as tech is one of the only sectors with the potential to grow under status quo conditions of the Israeli occupation which severely restricts the internal and cross-border movement of goods and people. Indeed, by entering the Palestinian market, PayPal has the opportunity to make a significant contribution toward alleviating the destabilizing unemployment rates of over 25% in the West Bank and 40% in Gaza. We have been told that PayPal is concerned about the compliance investments required to enter the Palestinian market. We believe such costs have been greatly overestimated. The U.S. Treasury Department has spent a great deal of time working with the Palestine Monetary Authority to strengthen safeguards against abuse. PayPal currently operates in over 203 countries including places with major problems of corruption and terrorism like Somalia and Yemen. We are confident that Palestine will prove a much easier place to profitably do business than these and other markets that PayPal has already entered. In addition to business reasons, there are also ethical reasons for PayPal to enter the Palestinian market. PayPal’s decision to launch its service in Israel for Israeli bank customers means that it inadvertently made its services freely available to Jewish settlers living illegally in the occupied West Bank. Palestinians living in close proximity to those settlers do not, however, have access as PayPal doesn’t work with Palestinian banks and Palestinians are unable to establish Israeli bank accounts. We believe a company like PayPal, whose actions in North Carolina reaffirmed its commitment to equal rights, would agree that people living in the same neighborhood ought to have equal rights and access to its services regardless of religion or ethnicity. We understand that entering a new market can be complex and would be more than happy to work with you, the Palestinian Monetary Authority, and any other necessary officials to pave the way for PayPal’s entry to the Palestinian market. We very much look forward to hearing from you and working with you to ensure that Palestinian entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and others are free to participate in global commerce. Our point of contact in this matter is Ehsaneh Sadr, 408-306-2559, ehsaneh.i.sadr@gmail.com. Sincerely, Gaza Sky Geeks
Partners for Sustainable Development
Jaffa.Net Software
iConnect Technologies
Applied Information Management (AIM)
National Beverage Company
Palestine Tourism and Investment Company
Ibtikar Fund
Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy
Bethlehem Business Incubator
Advanced Technologies for Business
Kenz
BarakaBits
Al Nasher Technical Services
Leaders Organization
Bedejob.com
Netaqe.com
Indiepush
RedCrow Intelligence
Wirez
TechWadi
PinchPoint
Fadfid
Mashvisor
Arabreneur
Baskalet game studio
5qhqh.com
Myndlift
Nudge
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Peeks
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Content Tech Inc.
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Judge a book through its cover with this terahertz camera setup
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Devin Coldewey
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What do you do if you want to peek inside a book, but you’re pretty sure it’ll crumble into dust if you even crack the cover a little bit? Well, nothing: Opening a book is a critical step in finding out what’s inside. Or at least it was until someone at MIT decided that shouldn’t be the case. The researchers combined a couple of powerful techniques to make this possible. Terahertz imaging passes through paper and cover but the radiation is also reflected differently by paper and ink, unlike longer wavelengths like x-rays. Then there’s femtophotography, a clever way of capturing certain types of imagery just trillionths of a second apart. This lets extremely fine distinctions be made, such as whether a reflected image comes from one page or the next one a fraction of a millimeter down. The result is terahertz femtophotography, and the researchers were able to make it determine the distance to the first 20 pages of a book, and it could pick out individual letters printed on the first 9. There was only one letter per page, but still, how well can read through the cover? “The Metropolitan Museum in New York showed a lot of interest in this, because they want to, for example, look into some antique books that they don’t even want to touch,” said Barmak Heshmat, one of the authors of the paper, . There’s much improvement to be done, perhaps combining the terahertz radiation with other frequencies. This is already done with visible and near-visible light in what’s called , and has discovered secrets buried beneath layers of ink on century-old manuscripts. The tech could also be used on things other than books: layers of paint, for example, in a famous piece of art, or materials stacked tightly in archaeological samples. It’s all out of MIT’s . A more technical breakdown of the process can be found in or in the paper published today in Nature Communications. (Note: In my defense, I thought of the judge a book through its cover thing before I saw MIT’s headline. It’s just too apt not to use!)
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The progressive case for replacing the welfare state with basic income
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Scott Santens
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It appears some establishment voices have picked up on a way of opposing the idea of the monthly citizen dividend of about $1,000 per month, known as universal (UBI), in a way that successfully leaves some progressively minded people afraid. The fear inspired is that those with the greatest need may be left worse off with UBI compared to the existing status quo of more than 100 government programs that currently comprise the U.S. safety that UBI has the potential to entirely or mostly replace. The argument goes that because we currently target money to those in need, by spreading out existing revenue to everyone instead, those currently targeted would necessarily receive less money, and thus would be worse off. Consequently, the end result of could be theoretically regressive in nature by reducing the benefits of the poor and transferring that revenue instead to the middle classes and the rich. Obviously a bad idea, right? This new argument has been made most notably by the , perhaps after himself reading the words of . The problem is that those who make this particular argument are building somewhat of a straw man, not only because of the blanket assumptions they are making around a very specific tax-neutral design, but also because they aren’t publicly acknowledging just how poorly our present means-tested programs are targeted by virtue of their applied conditions, and just how unequal one dollar can be to one dollar, however counterintuitive that may seem. Basically, this particular argument would only make sense if we in no way altered our tax system to achieve UBI, and if our programs worked as we assume they work because that’s how they should work. The problem is they don’t work that way. Assuming things work as we think they work is exactly one of the biggest obstacles we’ve always had to improving anything, because to fix something we first need to understand it’s broken. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Well, guess what? Our safety is broken, and it’s broken at such a fundamental level, there’s no fixing it, because it is by design. A full of holes must be replaced by a free of holes and that is unconditional . In the United States today, on average, just about one in four families living underneath the federal poverty line receives what most call , which is actually known as . It gets worse. Because states are actually just written checks to give out as they please in the form of “block grants,” there are states where far fewer than one in four impoverished families receive cash assistance. In Oklahoma, . In Wyoming, merely . Where does the money go instead? It goes to educate the children of those earning over six figures. It goes to programs trying to convince women to get married. And it goes directly to government treasuries so they can cut taxes on the rich. The fact is that cash , as it exists today, is not given to the overwhelming majority of those living in poverty who need it. Single adults without children know this better than anyone. They even have their own moniker: ABAWDs (Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents). ABAWDs have the lone distinction of being the only demographic in the U.S. to be literally taxed into poverty, . Because they earn and because they do not have the child necessary to qualify for virtually any assistance — even the earned tax credit (EITC), which is meant as a boost for low- workers through the tax code — those earning enough to be above the federal poverty line can end up beneath the poverty line after paying taxes. And those already beneath the poverty line are pushed even deeper, effectively punished for being childless and working. Combine all of those without dependents with all of those with dependents but without sufficient to qualify for EITC and living in states averse to cash assistance, and the reality is that tens of millions of adults and children fall straight through the purportedly designed to catch them. Any is mostly nothing but holes, and nowhere is that more true than in the United States. Everyone living beneath the poverty line receives cash assistance. Most don’t. The same is true of housing assistance. There is a belief that poor people galore are sitting on easy street with affordable living conditions, where housing vouchers are given away like Halloween candy to anyone with a hand out. The truth is that , and getting it can mean years of waiting on lists. Here in New Orleans, where I live, the wait list is opened about every seven years or so, and when it is, tens of thousands apply despite fewer than 1,000 people becoming new recipients of vouchers each year. Additionally, vouchers are not at all “just like cash.” Cash is accepted in payment by all landlords everywhere. Section 8 vouchers, meanwhile, are accepted only by those who choose to accept them, which is few and far between, and certainly not in what are considered to be “high opportunity” neighborhoods. This is true even of “ ” that are specifically designed for that purpose. Everyone living in poverty receives housing assistance. Most don’t. Food stamps, too, are not given to everyone living under the poverty line. , and of those who do, for added assistance because the amount given is nowhere close to being sufficient to get people through each month. Estimates point to food stamps lasting on average about three weeks of every month. Worse yet, food stamps can even have harsh time limits (e.g. three months of SNAP every three years), growing restrictions on how they can be used (sorry, no seafood allowed) and work requirements (30 hours per week). This is food we’re talking about. Why should any bureaucrat ever exist between the most human need of all — the need to eat — and access to food? Everyone living in poverty receives food assistance. Some may temporarily, but the amount is insufficient and full of costly strings. However, one of the best examples of all the vast differences between the assumption and the observation of how government benefits work is how we target those with disabilities. It has been estimated that . At the same time, age 18-64 in the U.S. are receiving disability . So again, about one-quarter of those we say we should be targeting actually receive anything, while the bulk get nothing. The absolute worst thing though, and what too few people seem to know, is that when it comes to disability , you are essentially not even allowed to earn additional . . That is the steepest of “benefit cliffs” and it’s the equivalent of taxing those with disabilities at rates far greater than 100 percent as a reward for their labor. It’s also the exact opposite of a that is never taken away. It is this clawback of means-tested benefits with the earning of that is possibly the single greatest flaw of all targeted assistance, and also the single most ignored detail when people defend the current system over the introduction of a that would replace it. Simply put, $1,000 per month in is not at all the same thing as $1,000 per month in . It’s not just apples and oranges. It’s rotten apples and ripe oranges. With , because it is targeted and therefore withdrawn as is earned, people on are effectively punished for working. Their total incomes don’t really increase with employment. functions in many ways as a ceiling. With , because it is unconditional and therefore never withdrawn as is earned, people with incomes are always rewarded for working. Their total incomes always increase with any amount of employment. therefore functions as a . Do you see the difference? So when someone says the details matter when it comes to the idea of and suggests the possibility that it could be regressive, and even increase inequality by taking money being targeted at the poor and giving it to the non-poor, understand that the details of the details matter even more than just the details. The regressive argument operates on the myth that for every four people living under the poverty line, four people get an amount of assistance that lifts them far above the poverty line, and that $1 of is exactly equivalent to $1 in . The argument operates on the reality that for every four people living under the poverty line, only about one person gets an amount of assistance that does more to trap them in poverty than to lift them out of it, and that $1 of is worth far less than $1 of . It’s really important to understand this, so let’s zoom in a bit on a worst- scenario. Let’s assume we replace all of our programs targeted at the poor with UBI, including even Medicaid (which I don’t recommend unless we replace it with universal healthcare instead), and that we provide the UBI to adults only, with nothing for kids ( ). Using within the current system, we could regressively replace around $45,000 of benefits (if we also eliminate child care, which is yet another detail I don’t recommend) with $12,000 in cash. That is a worst-design scenario and totally regressive right? No. It’s actually partially regressive and mostly . Although true that one in four would be worse off in such an inferior UBI design, it’s also true that three of four would be far better off because they would no longer receive little to nothing. As an oversimplified example for the sake of clarity, that means instead of the distribution across four adults being $45,000/$0/$0/$0, it would be $12,000/$12,000/$12,000/$12,000. That is more as a whole than it is regressive, and inequality is reduced overall, not increased, because the total at the bottom went from $45,000 across four people to $48,000 across four people. And that is for basically the worst possible, most unrealistic of UBI designs. But again, those numbers cannot be compared dollar for dollar. dollars disappear with work and dollars are kept with work. That same parent receiving $45,000 for nothing, if they got a job paying $30,000 right now would receive $20,000 in benefits. That would be a gain of $30,000 combined with a loss of $25,000. That’s a gain of $5,000 for a $30,000 job, or in other words, an tax of 83 percent. Who else is taxed at 83 percent? No one. In fact, the richest are taxed the least because their which isn’t derived from work, is special. It’s simply capital gains, which is taxed at 20 percent. Even more troubling, dollars themselves are not equivalent to each other. Despite it being against the law to vary dollars along racial lines, that’s exactly what we do. How? It’s again due to the nature of block grants for states. When Bill Clinton signed his reform into law, he agreed to write checks to the states and let them handle how they dish out . As a result, just five years after was reformed into what it is today, 63 percent of those in the programs with the least-harsh conditions were white and 11 percent were black, while 63 percent of those in the programs with the most-harsh conditions were black and 29 percent were white. In other words, a dollar in has about three to five times as many strings for someone who is black than someone who is white. These strings absolutely affect end results. Joe Soss, co-author of describes his findings thusly: “The stringency of the rules matter tremendously for outcomes. The tougher the rules — and the more frequently people are punished for breaking them — the worse the outcomes are for people after they finish the program. In fact, in the toughest programs, people actually end up in worse shape after they get through them than they were before they got the benefits to begin with. And remember, they were in such a bad situation that they had to turn to a program that’s been so stigmatized that pretty much everyone wants to avoid it. We also found that people who go through the toughest programs learn lessons about government that lead them to retreat from participating in politics. They become less likely to make their voices heard, and less likely to participate in elections and community organizations.” Does this sound like a just and equitable system? Or does it sound more like a racist meat-grinder? The bare naked truth of our present system is a racially biased, overly paternalistic, unnecessarily controlling, grossly exclusionary system of punishment and blame that limits opportunity and taxes working beneficiaries more than any other worker in any tax bracket. It doesn’t abolish poverty. It helps sustain it. And this is the system establishment voices wish to improve upon in piecemeal fashion, possibly because they’re not the ones being chewed up and spit out by it, or even neglected by it entirely. However, even if all of the above is clearly understood, there is one absolutely vital thing remaining to understand about that cannot be replicated in any other way, by any other means. Because lacks conditions and is paid regardless of work, it provides recipients the power to refuse to work. This is the real fear of those who worry a will result in people working less, but it is also its greatest strength. The ability to say no to an employer provides people the bargaining power and the choice to determine how they work, where they work, for how much and for how long. No other policy does that. A minimum wage certainly doesn’t. Wage subsidies certainly don’t. Without , the labor market is coercive, and that means people accept what they can get. With , wages for low-demand jobs must go up and/or hours must go down in order to attract people with incomes independent of work to do them, or those same jobs must be automated to be performed by machines instead, whichever is cheaper. A is most simply a minimum . It’s a new starting point above the poverty level instead of below it. There will still be jobs for people to earn additional and those jobs can pay more if people hate doing them. Additionally, considering a potential future where there’s half as much employment, that also means just as many can be employed if we all work half as much so as to better share the remaining employment. And with the increased bargaining power provides, that can also mean getting paid more for less work. is not some regressive conspiracy of the Silicon Valley elite to create a neo-serfdom where the entire population only earns a maximum of $12,000 per year. That is the exact opposite of how it works. With , $12,000 becomes the new absolute minimum for everyone and no one is a serf because everyone’s needs are covered. Poverty is eliminated. Inequality is reduced. Additionally, everyone is free to earn any additional , and on their terms. For the first time, everyone will have the individual negotiating power to dictate terms to employers that must be met. People who have this fundamental power are those who can then make further desired changes in the economy, in their businesses, in their governments and in their lives. So you tell me. Would you prefer conditional nets or would you prefer an unconditional ? Because one of these options is a relic of history, and the other is a road to the future.
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