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Apple acquires Turi, a machine learning company
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Greg Kumparak
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Word just started going around the rumormill that Apple has acquired Turi, a company that describes itself as a “machine learning platform for developers and data scientists.” We reached out to Apple for confirmation, and sure enough — we got the standard reply they give when they’re confirming an acquisition but not saying much else: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” Apple declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal, but suggests that it was upwards of $200 million. This isn’t the first acquisition Apple has made in the AI/machine-learning space. It acquired , a company that specialized in machine learning and image recognition, back in September 2015. In addition to its machine-learning products, Turi also runs the Data Science Summit — a two-day conference focusing on, as the name implies, data science. Turi was previously known as “Dato” (and before that, “GraphLab”), but changed its name in July of this year after a trademark dispute. Turi began reaching out to its customers to let them know their products would no longer be available at the end of July, the first indication that an acquisition had occurred. Turi’s own blog, meanwhile, . We’re hearing that Turi’s team will remain in Seattle, rather than moving down to Apple’s Cupertino HQ.
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Christoph Waltz gets goofily patriotic in Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 7 spot
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Brian Heater
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https://youtu.be/GfUhExdNjK8 He’s won a couple of Oscars, he’s worked with some of the best directors in the biz, and he’s even played a Bond villain. So, where does Christop Waltz go from here? Phone commercials, obviously. The acclaimed actor has signed on with Samsung for a silly new ad touting the company’s eagerly anticipated phablet. In the spot, Waltz praises/complains about the American work ethic, while multitasking through a series of increasingly ridiculous costumes, as a housewife, car sales, short-shorted child and track and field runner, before launching into a love fest for American ingenuity. An interesting creative choice for a team-up between a South Korean company and an Austrian-German actor. But hey, whatever it takes to put Christoph Waltz in a Lincoln costume is certainly worth the effort. God bless America.
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Brian Heater
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The social app redundancy engine
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Darrell Etherington
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Tumbled glass has a definite appeal: It’s eye-catching, has a pleasant variety of colors, and feels nice in the hand. And making it just takes time, and repetitive motion – throw some glass in a rock tumbler for about a week and voila – what comes out is better than what came in. But it’s also ultimately just glass. The social apps we use every day are starting to look a lot like tumbled glass. If you subscribe to the notion that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, this past week has made Facebook the sincerest technology company in existence, and Snapchat the most flattered. On Tuesday, Instagram launched Stories, which didn’t even bother changing the name of the product it was copying, Snapchat Stories. Facebook-owned Instagram wasn’t shy about the similarity, either: for the concept, which if you’re out of the social loop, involves letting users post photos and videos strung together in a “story” that expires after 24 hours. Then, on Friday, Facebook proper began testing an experiment whereby the atop a user’s feed, which makes use of Facebook acquisition MSQRD’s selfie filters for an Olympics tie-in. Sure, it’s a special case tied to a specific event, and available only in Brazil (makes sense, Olympics are there) and Canada. Canada is the more interesting component, because the great white north is normally where companies run tests ahead of big U.S. rollouts, since the market is so similar but low-risk due to its much smaller size. Opening direct to a camera definitely drives that kind of engagement, especially with younger audiences. We know that because that’s how Snapchat works. Which is where Facebook got this idea. In an , FB product manager Sachin Monga explained it’s designed to give everyday users “this magical AR experience.” It’s no Systrom-style shoutout, but Snapchat is widely regarded as pioneering broad consumer use of augmented reality through its own dynamic selfie filters. These two examples so close to one other in time would probably be enough to make my point, but TechCrunch’s Josh Constine also found out that . Meanwhile, it’s not entirely a one-way street. Snapchat launched Memories earlier this month, which is a pretty directly comparable offering to Facebook Moments. It not only brings some Facebook style permanence to a social network that perviously leaned heavily on ephemerality, but it also introduced the ability to pull content from your camera roll to snap, which allows brands and publishers to treat it more like Facebook and Instagram as an audience engagement channel. I’m all for refinement, and I don’t think any technology company is wrong for identifying an effective interaction model or product, and trying to make it even more effective, or better suited to their own audience: . But I can’t escape the feeling that the social space is starting to feel like so much tumbled glass, with a lot of retread and few new paths. Sure, with more novel efforts, we’ve had some goofs. Beme. Peach. Twitter (I kid, sort of). It’s a list that includes some companies with a lot of early excitement, and founders who should know a thing or two about social. At least, though, they had some sharp edges, and it’d be nice to see a few more of those coming from the players who can stand to absorb the most risk.
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Playbuzz launches an analytics product to help publishers create viral content
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Anthony Ha
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has been offering publishers to create interactive/social media-friendly content like galleries, lists and polls. Now it’s giving them new ways to track the effectiveness of those tools. The company is announcing the launch of its analytics product, Impact — which was previously in beta testing with select partners, but is now available to all Playbuzz partners. Shachar Orren, Playbuzz’s vice president of content, told me that Impact can offer both a macro view (so publishers can see if one type of content is doing particularly well, or vice versa), while also going deep on each item. For example, if you published a quiz, you could see how many people answered each quiz question correctly, and also where they dropped off. (Apparently, a really hard question can drive a lot of users away.) “The life of our items don’t end when you publish it,” Orren said. “You publish it and then you can see how people are engaging … and make sure that you’re optimizing it to be the exact experience that you want it to be.” More broadly, she said publishers are becoming “more and more data savvy,” and thinking about a broader set of measurements (not just pageviews). Impact also includes weekly reports for each publisher on their overall performance, as well as the ability to browse a broader library of content that they can embed on their site. The product is launching with as a partner.
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Weekly Roundup: Didi buys Uber China, Instagram’s Snapchatty ‘Stories’ and new emoji
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Anna Escher
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This week tech companies worked their angles for the Rio Olympics, Uber China gave into Didi Chuxing and Instagram cloned Snapchat with an ephemeral new feature. Here are this week’s top stories in tech. You can receive the , if that’s your kinda thing. , its former competitor. The two companies will retain distinct brands, app and business operations, and it sounds like the backends will be merged. While at first this may seem like an admission of failure for Uber, Instagram shocked the social world by launching for imperfect, ephemeral sharing. We , and he claimed that “Snapchat deserves all the credit.” Facebook also went as far as adding in further examples of copying Snapchat. Still puzzled? Theranos is still fraught with possible criminal charges, lawsuits, test result recalls and Congressional inquiry. The blood analysis startup was supposed to reveal their tech this week, but instead introduced a whole new hardware product. – sending the scientific community into further skepticism. Facebook introduced a based on a ranking scale. Apple dropped a new iOS 10 beta with 100 new emojis. Some notable changes were new female athletes, a gay pride flag, and the gun was redesigned as a cute squirt gun. Major tech companies continued to report earnings. Highlights are as follows. , delivering 14,402 vehicles and reporting $1.56 billion in revenue. in its Q2 earnings report as merchant sales hit $669.7 million. LinkedIn posted a huge second quarter in its . Tech companies geared up for the Rio Olympics, including and in Brazil. We took a look at to help them go for the gold. We got a , the massive building where the company is building the huge amount of batteries it needs. It’s “a machine to build the machines,” as Elon Musk refers to it. The Gigafactory will cost about $5 billion and when completed, will be one of the biggest buildings on earth. Hot off the heels of its , Verizon announced another huge purchase: for $2.4 billion in cash. Say hello to the newest unicorn. Indonesia’s and Grab in Southeast Asia. The round values the motorbike taxi on-demand company at $1.2 billion post-money. We got mad science hardware lab. This is where Facebook will prototype its solar drones, Internet-beaming lasers, VR headsets, and next-gen servers. Salesforce continued its buying spree as it p . We got our hands on . The 5.7-inch smartphone has a dual-edged curved display, bringing the virtually bezel-free curvature to the line for the first time. Meet Samsung's new Note 7 http://tcrn.ch/2ax3moi Posted by on Tuesday, August 2, 2016
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Amazon wants more people to develop speech-based adventure games for Alexa
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
| 8
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Amazon’s plucky little voice assistant already has a fairly broad skill set – but gaming has never really been Alexa’s strong suit. Granted, the AI is no Xbox, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some potential for a little gaming fun. A few developers have already created titles for the platform, adventure games that are a bit of a throwback to the text-based titles that graced early home computers. is of particular note, a promotion written by DC Comics creators that managed to get better reviews than the big budget blockbuster it was tied into, asking users to help solve the mystery being the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents (spoiler. Also he’s Batman. Double spoiler). To help ease game creators into the process, Amazon is offering a tool to make it easier to create titles for its home-ruling robot voice. The , available now through GitHub, breaks game creation down into a graphical interface, providing a sort of decision tree to map out the turn-by-turn game play. The company’s got of the Interactive Adventure Game tool on its developer blog.
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Nike and Zeiss created a $1,200 pair of sunglasses for Olympians
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Brian Heater
| 2,016
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I recently spent $175 on a pair of Warby Parker sunglasses. I’m not proud of that, but my eyesight sucks now because I’m old and it’s sunny because it’s the summer. Suffice it to say, I now wear them indoors and at night both to get the most out of my purchase and to pay homage to Canadian songster Corey Hart’s seminal 1984 hit. Personally, I can’t fathom spending $1,200 for a pair of sunglasses that don’t turn me into the Terminator, but then, I’m fairly certain I’m not the target demo for the . For one thing, I’m not an Olympian. Heck, I probably won’t be watching the Olympics at all this year – not intentionally, at least. For the world class athletes among us, however, Nike teamed up with the optics experts at Zeiss to design a pair of worthy shades. You can watch a couple of moonshotty videos about what makes the sunglasses $1,200 worth of amazing, but the gist is a human anatomy-inspired unibody lens that wraps around its wearer’s face, while a silicone strap wraps it the rest of the way around the head. That has two key advantages. One is weight — a pair tips the scales at 26 grams. The other is a tight fit that eliminates pressures from the bridge of the nose and ears. It also helps cut down on wind drag, a key feature for people whose primary job in life is moving really, really fast.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 08.05.16
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Steve Gillmor
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– Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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Crunch Report | Instagram Launches Stories
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Bitcoin drops 20% after $70M worth of bitcoin was stolen from Bitfinex exchange
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Fitz Tepper
| 2,016
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, one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges online, has suffered a major hack. The company has posted a , and while it doesn’t mention a total amount, one of their employees confirmed on Reddit that the total amount stolen was 119,756 bitcoins.
That amount converts to about $77,000,000 based on a price of $650 USD per bitcoin, which is about what bitcoin traded at over the course of the last week. After news of the hack spread, the price of bitcoin dropped almost 20 percent, settling in around the current price of $540 USD per bitcoin. It’s not exactly clear why the price dropped, but it’s likely bitcoin investors got nervous about potential hacks on other exchanges and decided to sell off their bitcoin holdings, which led to a rapid decrease in price. So how exactly did the hack happen? It’s not really clear yet, and the exchange hasn’t released any additional information beyond saying they incurred a loss and are suspending operations, and that USD funds and other cryptocurrency balances haven’t been compromised. We do know that Bitfinex’s platform used , a Palo Alto-based bitcoin security company that allows exchanges to provide segregated, multi-signature wallets for each customer’s funds. This is a supposed security improvement over exchanges that merge customers’ funds into large, communal wallets. This method of maintaining segregated wallets for each user on the exchange also means that users can keep tabs on their wallet balance at all times, which is how some Bitfinex users have been . BitGo tweeted earlier today that they “found no evidence of a breach on any BitGo servers.” As we directly notified our customers earlier today, our investigation has found no evidence of a breach to any BitGo servers. — BitGo (@BitGo) That doesn’t really help tell us how exactly the hack happened, as neither service has yet claimed responsibility. Plus, the question still remains why neither BitGo or Bitfinex has working limits in place to stop rapid withdrawals of large amounts of bitcoin. Many exchanges will automatically restrict the amount of bitcoin that can be withdrawn at once, so even if they are hacked losses will be capped at a smaller amount. However, that “there were limits in place to restrict the amount of btc that could be signed for a withdraw [and they’re] still trying to investigate how these limits were bypassed.” While it’s too early to speculate next steps, many are wondering what the fate of their coins will be. Because of the segregated BitGo wallets, only some customer’s wallets were compromised. This means that some user’s wallets may be totally intact. The question then becomes do you let those users withdraw their funds, or pool the funds and proportionally issue refunds so every user incurs the same loss, even if their own wallets weren’t directly compromised. Bitfinex has said they have alerted and are working with law enforcement, which may complicate things further if the company needs to go through a bankruptcy proceeding, like Mt.Gox did after hackers drained the exchange of all operating funds. This comes just weeks after hackers stole $50M worth of Ethereum, which caused the currency to complete a “hard fork” so they could reverse the transactions containing stolen currency. The lesson here is once again that the safest way to store bitcoin is in , and not on a website or exchange.
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Elizabeth Holmes quietly stepped down from Obama’s business ambassador program
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Sarah Buhr
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Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and CEO of beset blood analysis startup Theranos, is no longer mentioned on the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) . Holmes announced she had joined the Obama administration’s entrepreneurial PAGE program, which notably includes AOL CEO Steve Case, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky and Stripe’s Patrick Collison, in March of last year. However, the site no longer lists her or shows her photo among these leaders. First reported in , Theranos confirmed Holmes has quietly stepped down from her position as a presidential role model for American entrepreneurs and will instead “spend all her time focused on one thing, and that is Theranos and its needs, especially as the company focuses on sharing its technologies with the scientific community,” the company said. It’s certainly a time for the company to get focused. Theranos’ founder has suffered a series of setbacks over the past year, including several scathing Wall Street Journal articles questioning the technology, misleading results, dramatic plummet in valuation, government inquiries and the fact that Holmes was recently banned from operating any of her labs. Despite all that, Holmes presented at the in Philadelphia yesterday what was implied to be a first glimpse into the technology her startup has been working on all this time. However, the audience got what many have called a “bait and switch” when Holmes instead showcased a new and Zika detection device. It’s still unclear if any of the new products presented were part of the old “Edison” technology as answers to audience questions remained vague. Theranos maintains Holmes will remain in a leadership role at her company, but the PAGE program, which relies on ambassadors’ support and encourages them to “inspire” entrepreneurship within their community, will no longer be something in which Holmes participates.
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Pokémon Go tops $160M in global revenue, time spent in-app remains high
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Darrell Etherington
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I’m still trying to , but Niantic’s recent changes to the game don’t seem to be putting a damper on player appetite just yet — new reveals that users are still spending, on average, around 26 minutes per day in the app in the U.S., which is actually a slight increase compared to the average play duration the week prior to the update’s arrival. And yes, users are still opening the app about the same amount of time, too — around six times per day, for the most part. Sensor Tower’s sentiment analysis on the latest update also shows what I’ve heard anecdotally: People generally aren’t thrilled with the changes. But remember that one of the surest signs you’ve done something right in apps with significant uptake is that any changes are greeted with massive, primarily negative outcry. Meanwhile, users have also spent a pretty penny on various Poké-accoutrements during its less than 30 days of existence: Sensor Tower estimates about $160 million in total revenue, which makes sense now says it’s netting about $10 million daily from its user pool, which has grown considerably since launch with the addition of new markets. While Nintendo is only going to see a relatively small direct upside from that net revenue figure, it’s benefiting in other ways from Go’s continued success: 3DS sales of the most recent Pokémon series installment for that platform .
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Green Commuter gets you to work in Tesla Model X
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
| 2,016
| 8
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A vanpool is like a carpool, but a van can take more people to work in one trip. It is also significantly less cool-looking. But vanpoolers in Los Angeles need no longer worry about the potential for being uncool during the ride to work: has launched in the city with a fleet of all-electric, zero-emissions SUVs. Green Commuter is a cross between a vanpool and car sharing. Company CEO Gustavo Occhiuzzo said in a press release that there are 1,500 vanpools with destinations in Los Angeles County, with twice that many total across the region. Each of those vans is only used 10-15 hours a week, Occhiuzzo says. The rest of the time, they’re sitting in parking lots. That’s where the shared-vehicle model Green Commuter uses comes in. Rather than paying for a van to sit for more than 90 percent of the work week, users can access an app via iOS and Android to share the Teslas and maximize their miles. A group of like-minded employees or a company can rent a Model X, which seats a van-like seven adults, by the month. A company could in theory replace its fleet of vanpool vehicles with shared Model Xs. The vehicles are also available for sharing through Green Commuter on weekends for trips to places like Las Vegas or San Diego, basically somewhere in the Tesla’s range with a place to recharge at the destination. The website shows that Green Commuter already has service in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as well, with plans to expand statewide in California and further nationwide in the future. Green Commuter was founded in 2014 and has been based at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator since 2015. It’s launching an Indiegogo today, August 2, to boost the user community with lower fees. Through the campaign, rentals start at $10 an hour or $150 a weekend, a discount from the usual rates of $18 per hour or $100-$250 per month. Green Commuter joins in using Tesla vehicles as shared and carpooling vehicles for chronically gridlocked Los Angelenos.
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Review: Leica T serves its purpose as a great artisan tool
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Stefan Etienne
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are few reasons why you or I would want to have a Leica camera. After all, it’s not a necessity: fast-shooting, high-megapixel and wide-aperture touting cameras all exist from the likes of Sony, Nikon and Canon — all with unique traits that make them suited for different photography styles. But Leica’s style is unique, and rightly so. What a camera like the model T does is invite the shooter to be creative; to entertain new ideas, and display them with the lighting, color and effects that some call the “Leica effect.” Characterized by shallow depth of focus, spherical aberration and just the right lens, the “Leica effect” is something only these German cameras produce — in hands that know how to use them. Design-wise, there’s a lot to appreciate about the body’s simplicity: two dials for controlling shutter speed and aperture, a recording button and the shutter/power/flash switch trio, which I haven’t seen with or the pro-level SL. I love that feature, because it’s useful. Coming from any other camera, you’ll be mystified by the lack of immediate inputs, only to realize that the Leica T’s touchscreen interface works very much like a smartphone’s. This makes it eerily familiar and fast to use. However, the touchscreen method falls short when you need to change settings very quickly, like you would on a DSLR or a pro-level mirrorless camera. With them, you’d have many dedicated buttons and dials to work with. For example, going from manual to auto-focus takes at least three taps, a process that might be assigned to a single button on a more traditional removable-lens camera. [gallery ids="1357871,1357872,1357873,1357874,1357875,1357876,1357877,1357878,1357879,1357880,1357881"] For the most part, I am satisfied with the performance of the slightly darker profile of the 11-23mm, f/3.5-4.5 lens. It’s still applicable to most scenes and generally a good choice for landscape and “everyday” shots. Turn the lens the other way and you’ll be greeted by a wide-angle view, where you can let perspective and scene mess with your photo critics. The 35mm (highly recommended for subject photography and some close-ups) is a stupendously bright lens at f/1.4, and is my favorite of the two. Albeit, it costs $700 more than the camera body does. While there isn’t too much hope for low-cost Leica lenses, keep in mind that an official adapter for M lenses exists — yes, full-frame Leica M from 2012. Now your lens choices can increase rather easily, and that’s somewhat cost-efficient. As for video: Like most cameras not from Panasonic or Canon, Leica’s video mode isn’t vlog-worthy and really is only a supplementary feature. Still, it works and might result in some creative 1080p clips. There’s likely a photographer out there interested in a camera like this just for shooting with “special gear.” But, I’d argue that an investment in the thousands of dollars like this one nets you good returns. If you willingly expose yourself to a style of photography where everything is sharp, correct and vibrant, you gain the freedom to create great images. It just takes practice — a lot. Leica has room for improvement with faster focusing, a ship-ready viewfinder, Android remote app support, better focusing in low light (it struggles here) and weather-resistance. For those of us who have shot with many Leicas before, this may not be as compelling as to someone who hasn’t. But, I can safely say there isn’t a smaller digital Leica that does this good a job, with just 16 megapixels and some good glass. The high cost might hurt at first, but what’s a sore pocket compared to skills you can further hone on a solid mirrorless camera? [gallery ids="1357498,1357507,1357496,1357495,1357493,1357882"]
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Navigating mobile content with app streaming
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Wally Nguyen
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People are very comfortable movies, TV, music, video games and more. In fact, Cisco 75 percent of the world’s mobile data traffic be video by 2020. However, the idea of apps on mobile devices, for better or worse, has lagged far behind. Since the introduction of the Apple Store in 2008, we’ve been conditioned to download an in order to access its content — there’s just no other way. Increasingly, however, people are becoming . They want content and services instantly, and they don’t want to wait three to four minutes to download a single that only offers a single function or service. The , for instance, can be attributed to people wanting other ways to access an ’s services beyond the store. Understanding consumer frustration, Google announced to let people access snippets of an without downloading the full thing. Rather than just getting a taste of an , as Android Instant promises, imagine never having to download, update or delete an ever again, but rather clicking on a link and instantly getting the same experience. The concept of is , but has the potential to completely transform how we engage with mobile content and services, with downloads no longer acting as roadblocks to discovery and access. Here are the next that be impacted by . There’s little doubt that mobile health apps can make it easier for healthcare providers to communicate with their patients, but until this point, the mobile healthcare industry has been plagued with tricky questions around patients’ personal information and how to deal with security and confidentiality issues. Obviously, the patient’s biggest fear is that their health information could get stolen. With apps, doctors and nurses fear their personal smartphones become roving access points for patient data. What if instead of a healthcare provider having to download an in order to communicate with their patient, they could stream the application in a secure, unique session that would end once the necessary information was shared? Doctors would no longer download or store any patient data on their personal smartphones, and patients would rest easy knowing that they could receive proper care without sacrificing their security and privacy. Brands and companies have a hell of a time trying to understand their customers’ experiences on their websites and apps. Now multiply those challenges by all the different devices consumers use. Large, dedicated customer service teams devote a lot of time and resources to troubleshooting errors and broken interfaces. The biggest upfront challenge is recreating the problem and what it looks like on a user’s device, whether it’s an iPhone, Samsung Galaxy or Windows Surface. At large companies and enterprises, customer service teams have to shuffle through multiple physical devices in order to recreate a problem while the customer is on the phone. could turn this customer service nightmare into a breeze. Rather than being forced to recreate a problem on the physical device, through , a customer service rep could select a device type and immediately virtualize the user’s experience in order to quickly understand and resolve the problem. Anyone who’s used their smartphone for a price comparison travel site while navigating an airline’s website and juggling multiple itineraries and other reservations for cars and hotels knows that the mobile travel industry is ripe for disruption. No one wants to use a different for each segment of any already labor-intensive search to plan a vacation. And if you’re like me, you’re not loyal to any travel brand or service, so downloading a travel generally means you’ll delete it shortly thereafter. could basically cut down on the waste and repetition built into the travel industry. Imagine if you streamed three travel search apps to see which one offered a better deal. Once you made your mind, a link would take you directly into the flight carrier’s , where the exact flight you were looking into was already loaded into your cart, with all of your personal information saved so you didn’t have to re-enter it. would allow travelers the ability to focus on the best deals, not the best apps. Even before big news events like when , consumers have been slow to adopt mobile payment apps, as security concerns remain the No. 1 roadblock. Just like the healthcare example above, trust is an essential component between a consumer and a mobile payment . However, trust is hard to cultivate when an that relies on your payment credentials lives in your smartphone like a sitting duck. Don’t get me wrong: The lion’s share of the work in mobile payments come from better identification and authentication technologies. Beyond these, however, mobile payment apps might see greater adoption if all of our daily transactions didn’t live in an , but instead in a session that was secured in the same way that we shop on the mobile web. would also help ease issues of interoperability. I may use Venmo, but my friend uses Wells Fargo SurePay and the parking meter may use its own city-wide payment . Rather than download all of them, I could just as easily stream each once to complete my payment or cash transfer. I love shopping, and definitely have a long list of go-to brands — but that doesn’t mean I want to download and manage a bunch of retail apps. RetailMeNot found similar results in a conducted last year: 60 percent of consumers who use a smartphone to shop online have fewer than two retailer-specific apps on their phone, and 21 percent don’t have any at all. From my perspective, consumers don’t want something as permanent as an for an experience as transient as shopping or browsing. It’s too much commitment. Shoppers may be more open to a retailer’s mobile experience if they didn’t have to download an that takes space on their smartphone. Instead, through , they could get the same benefits and perks — like coupons and in-store rewards — without any of the hassle that comes with retail apps today. That way, you could seamlessly move between different stores and get all the perks of the stores’ apps, without waiting four to minutes just to get a coupon that only saves you 15 percent. The impact of app streaming is not limited to the industries above, though I anticipate these five will be early benefactors, given their challenges on the mobile app front. More broadly, app streaming has the potential to disrupt the entire mobile experience as constructed by Apple seven years ago. It can cost developers upwards of $5 to $7 to “acquire” a user, or get them to download their app. But we all know that people regularly download an app, use it once then delete it or never use it again — making that $5 to $7 per user a complete waste. This is simply unsustainable over the long term. App streaming could crack the app-install model wide open, making the content and services in apps as accessible as the mobile web. In the end, this could benefit all industries participating in the digital economy.
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Tableau Software’s Q2 earnings fall short of estimates
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Lucia Maffei
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Data analytics provider reported second quarter earnings after the bell today. The Seattle-based company posted a loss due to higher than expected expenses for the quarter, while still beating analyst’s expectations in terms of revenue. For the three months ended June 30, Tableau total revenue of $198.5 million and non-GAAP net earnings came in at $0.00. Analysts surveyed by Yahoo! Finance revenue at $193.75 million and EPS at $0.05. In after-hours trading, the stock was down 5 percent but then recovered later. As for GAAP measures, net loss was $47.5 million, or $0.64 per diluted common share, compared to a net loss of $19.0 million, or $0.27 per diluted common share, for the second quarter of 2015. “In quarter two, our expenses came in higher than planned,” said Tom Walker, Tableau’s CFO, during a conference call with analysts. Sales and marketing expenses, for example, grew 41 percent, to $119.9 million from $85.1 million in the year-ago quarter. In addition, Walker mentioned that the company incurred higher than expected costs related to the company-wide meeting in Seattle, held during last quarter. “During the meeting, we made some extra investments in training, particularly around the launch of Tableau 10,” Walker explained. “These expenses will not be recurrent in the second part of the year.” During the conference call, CEO and co-founder of Tableau Christian Chabot said that more than 3,900 new customer accounts chose Tableau during the second quarter. Among these new customers are the California Department of Public Health, Bank of California and the City of New Orleans. Tableau Software went public in May 2013 at an initial public offering price of $31 per share. At the New York Stock Exchange trading Tuesday, the company’s shares closed down 4 cents, or less than one percent, at $56.40. A couple of hours after the announcement, the stock was down 65 cents, or 1.15 percent, at $55.75. [graphiq id=”i7GNs412Quh” title=”Tableau Software Inc. (DATA) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”617″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/i7GNs412Quh” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/14692592/Tableau-Software-Inc-in-Seattle-WA” link_text=”Tableau Software Inc. (DATA) Stock Price | FindTheCompany” ]
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China has actually built an elevated bus that travels above car traffic
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Fitz Tepper
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If you’ve ever been surfing through random videos on Facebook or another social media site you’ve probably seen the concept video of that Chinese train/bus hybrid thing that can travel over cars (and over traffic). But that was just a rendered concept. And, like me, you probably thought that even though it was an amazing idea, it would never actually move past the idea stage. But China’s . [gallery ids="1362997,1363001,1362995,1362996"] Today that the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) is not only a real thing, but had its first road test today. It happened in Qinhuangdao City, and consisted of a brake and power consumption test. The whole thing is powered by electricity, is about 72 feet long and 25 feet wide (so it can span multiple lanes of traffic) and can carry 300 passengers (but future versions could probably be coupled together to carry even more). And, when it’s actually launched and operating, it should hit max speeds of around 40 miles per hour, making it a pretty speedy mode of public transportation. While this version still isn’t ready for mainstream daily use, it’s pretty amazing to see China actually turn this thing into a reality. And, other countries like Brazil, France, India and Indonesia have reached out about potentially licensing their own versions of the TEB. You can check out a .
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Video distribution startup Zype raises $2M
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Anthony Ha
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has raised another $2 million as it helps publishers deliver (and make money from) video across devices. Added to that Zype announced last year, this brings the New York City startup’s seed round to $3.6 million. The round was led by Revel Partners, with participation from Point Nine Capital, Alpine Meridian Ventures, Berlin Ventures, Entrepreneurs Investment Fund and Terrapin Bale Ventures. Zype’s platform can be used to build video websites and apps for mobile devices and set-top boxes. It incorporates technology that will automatically select the best video player (including Zype’s own player) for each device and geography, and it also offers support for monetization through advertising, video purchases and rentals. Founder and CEO Ed Laczynski said that with Zype, publishers “don’t have to give up audience data and ownership — they can have complete control of their revenue stream.” Asked how the media industry’s growing dependence on Facebook affects Zype’s work with websites and apps, Laczynski argued, “Social media is amazing for promotion, discovery and short form.” However, when it comes to longer, more in-depth videos, “Smart content owners are leveraging those platforms to drive traffic to their owned properties.” The company says that over the past 12 months, it has seen its revenue grow by more than 40 percent each quarter. Laczynski said he’s also become increasingly focused on larger enterprise customers, with current clients including Mill Creek Entertainment, What’s Trending and conservative Canadian company The Rebel Media. Upcoming projects include Zype University, a program for training the company’s customers on how to best build a successful business around online video.
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MIT creates video you can reach out and touch
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Darrell Etherington
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Strictly speaking, video isn’t an interactive medium, but a new research project from MIT aims to change that: The school’s through which viewers can reach out and “touch” objects in videos, manipulating them directly to achieve effects similar to what you’d expect if you were actually touching the object live in the real world. Basically, that means that using this technique, if you were watching a YouTube video of someone playing guitar and it zoomed in tight on the fretboard, you could theoretically use your mouse to drag across the strings and watch them vibrate as if you’d strummed them in real life. Or, you could even load test an old covered bridge by applying virtual stressors like simulated wind, or a truck rumbling across. The new CSAIL model works by analyzing vibrations given off by every object, as captured using traditional cameras shooting video that is then analyzed by algorithms developed by the research team. These vibrations, when analyzed by the new technique from as little as five seconds of video of a given object, then provide realistic prediction models that anticipate how the object will react to other movement or forces acting upon them. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f09VdXex3A] Typically, to make this kind of thing possible in video games and other interactive media involves building a virtual model, which can be a costly, manual and time-consuming process. Plus, there’s the Roger Rabbit school of filmmaking, wherein virtual or animated characters interact with real surroundings. This new tech could make it easy to blend real video with CG creations, which of course has applications far beyond Roger Rabbit and the terrible, terrible spiritual successor Cool World, the 1992 movie Brad Pitt would like you to forget he was ever in. MIT actually calls out Pokémon Go, for instance, as a place where this new technique would produce interesting results: Imagine if the Bulbasaur you’re trying to catch actually appears to interact with the bush it just emerged from. And in blockbuster movies, this would make it a lot easier to visually demonstrate the impact of CG alien invaders wreaking havoc in real-life cities. This new method could be perfectly timed to ride the wave of interest and investment in virtual and augmented reality tech. The exciting thing is that it could greatly reduce the cost of development for a lot of interactive VR experiences, which might encourage a fresh round of interest on the content side of the equation. Ultimately, people want stuff to do that which proves VR is worthwhile, and this CSAIL project could eventually mean that VR video becomes a more engaging two-way interaction.
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The new age of empathy
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John Biggs
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past videos on Facebook and Twitter for a while now, wondering why social media is so fascinated by puppies being saved from floods, babies hearing for the first time and grandmothers who have something sassy and wise to say about body acceptance. And, recently, I’ve come to realize what is going on. Whether it seems like it or not, we are entering a new age of empathy. Our nervous systems, once self-contained and controlled, have expanded on essentially a global scale and every twitch on some distant shore is felt in the grey matter between our eyes. Although the internet is generally known as a cesspool of trolls and racism, it is also a way to connection to billions of people. On the internet you can find others like you and others who like you. On the internet you can talk to as if you were friends and they talk back. On the internet no one knows you’re a dog — and if they knew, they’d send an MP3 of a special ultrasonic whistle just for you. the fact that, on the surface, the internet isn’t much fun. It’s full of anonymous trolls and angry rhetoric and the most inane ideas quickly gain a cult following thanks to exponentially growing Twitter accounts. In short, the internet sucks. But even in my grumpy state I notice I tear up at nice things in the news. I tear up at people talking forcefully about politics. I tear up at school shootings and refugee crises and little girls who get 3D-printed arms. I’m not ashamed of this fact, but I was confused by it. Why was my nervous system so jacked up that everything had a real effect on me? What was going on? The internet is an emotion-generation machine. It sends a torrent of things at us, good and bad, and the hivemind bubbles the good things to the surface and buries the bad. This isn’t always the case, to be clear, but, most recently, I think the hivemind of social media is reacting to negative stimuli and building up defenses. I think the internet, as a whole, is trying to show us we’re not all bad. Before we start talking about SkyNet, perhaps there’s a biological answer to this odd behavior. First, we know that our brains are changed by internet use. A showed us that “internet savvy middle-aged and older adults showed dramatically greater brain activity when searching online compared with age-matched ‘internet-naïve’ volunteers.” “When these older naïve volunteers started searching online for an hour a day, after only one week their frontal lobe neural circuits showed significant activity increases during internet searching,” wrote the researchers. “Brains of any age seem sensitive and reactive to exposure to technology.” Further, another “going online had little impact upon empathy and improved face-to-face communication.” In other words, the internet doesn’t rot your brain and can make it better. In the market of ideas, hate rarely wins. The best books, the books that stay with us, are tinged with both comedy and sorrow, humor and anger. We remember things that make us feel. The internet, in its petulant and infantile glory, is slowly moving toward that ideal. I want to think that humanity is getting better. This is objectively true. Our access to 24/7 media blows war and unrest all out of proportion to its real effects and we worry far too much about things that will never touch us. We live in constant fear of a world that has, in the words of futurist , become overrun with cafes, coffee and croissants. Ask any Digital Nomad: You can interchangeably move from one country to the next and feel, if not at home, then safe enough to venture out for a soft drink. In the end, this new era of empathy might be a mirage, a calm before the dystopian storm. Or it could be a signpost aiming us forward, unto higher heights and better worlds. The answer is within us and how we choose to react in this moment. We are the ones who take the darkened hill and shout “Excelsior.” The internet is the lantern in our hands.
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Watch wall-walking spiderbots weave ‘impossible’ structures with carbon fiber
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Devin Coldewey
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Normally, the notion of setting a pair of spiderbots free in your house would seem alarming. But if you knew that they were weaving you a strange and mathematical hammock while you were gone? Suddenly that fear turns to wonder — and eventually, a nap. The Mobile Robotic Fabrication System for Filament Structures was developed at the University of Stuttgart’s . The concept behind it is “swarm construction”: many small robots working together to produce a single item. In this case, the bots are like wall-hugging Roombas weaving a carbon fiber nook that looks like it sprang fully formed out of a Spirograph. This project in particular was built on the work of ICD graduate student Maria Yablonina. “We are only at the very beginning of exploring the true architectural potential of this fabrication system,” . “But we are convinced that its main advantage is that you can build entirely new structures that would be impossible to materialize otherwise.” It is, at the very least, very cool to watch. The robots have spools of carbon fiber thread that they pass back and forth after affixing to points on the wall, like two hands putting together a cat’s cradle. (“See the cat? See the cradle?”) Being able to crawl along the walls and interact with one another in swarm fashion could indeed produce some truly unique structures and utilize spaces in quite a different way. Menges is inspired by nature’s economy and ingenuity; his team has based buildings on insect and lobster shells, and the bots described here clearly are influenced by arachnids and other silk-weaving animals. (There’s an amazing episode of Life in the Undergrowth dedicated to them, incidentally, which you should watch.) The plan now is to increase the number of robots and allow them to maneuver and attach the fibers to other surfaces, like ceilings or curved walls. That should allow for even more unusual creations. Whether you’d want to live or work in a mind-warping expanse of black yarn, of course, is a separate question altogether.
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Etsy shows signs of life in Q2 earnings with merchant sales hitting $669.7 million
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John Mannes
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If you’re an investor, you’re somewhere between ecstatic and off the rails after two days of gains totaling more than 23 percent. Fortunately for investors, the fun hasn’t stopped. The e-commerce site specializing in handmade goods posted its second quarter earnings just after the bell today. Investors reacted by trading shares in the company up in after-hours trading. This comes in the wake of that sparked the greatest spike in value for the company since July 2015. Initially after the earnings dropped, investors bid the Etsy share price up by more than six percent. Since then, the share price has dropped slightly, but remains above its closing price. [graphiq id=”bd1vwyIpV09″ title=”Etsy Inc. (ETSY) Stock Price” width=”600″ height=”628″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/bd1vwyIpV09″ link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/16266642/Etsy-Inc-in-Brooklyn-NY” link_text=”Etsy Inc. (ETSY) Stock Price | FindTheCompany” ] The company posted revenue of $85.35 million, above analyst forecasts of $80.6 million. Revenue for the same period last year was $61.37 million. This represents year over year growth of 39.1 percent. Earnings per share came in at a loss of six cents, while a Wall Street consensus was expecting them to come in at a loss of one cent per share. Gross merchandise sales (GMS) for Etsy came in at $669.7 million. This time last year, Etsy was running $546.2 million in goods. This quarter’s GMS is up 22.6 percent compared to 2015. This doesn’t match the 24.6 percent gains the company saw between Q2 2014 and Q2 2015. Moving forward, GMS guidance has improved to an expected growth of 15-17 percent, while revised revenue guidance indicates 25-28 percent growth. To accomplish this, Etsy plans to focus on mobile sales conversions, seller services and international growth. “During the second quarter, we expanded our global community to include approximately 1.7 million active sellers and 26.1 million active buyers,” said Etsy CEO, Chad Dickerson, in a statement. Etsy stock has struggled to find a foothold since the company IPOed back in April of 2015. Etsy ended trading today at $12.71, below its IPO price of $16 per share, despite a strong week. Amazon is on the heels of Etsy with . Etsy has also over the last month. Millions of transactions ended up being delayed for buyers and merchants in a saga that went on for weeks, although the issues don’t seem to have had a significant negative effect on gross merchandise sales.
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High-tech updates to the retail experience
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Michael Hsieh
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Sometimes one must look to the past to define the future. Once upon a time the milkman delivered milk directly to your home. The Avon and Tupperware ladies had private parties in the comfort of a neighbor’s house. The Hoover salesperson demonstrated the vacuum cleaner on your living room carpet. It was a high-touch, well-informed, personalized and customer-friendly experience. What changed all that? The automobile. When the majority of consumers could afford a car, they discovered the freedom of driving themselves to the store to see a vast array of products and evaluate them on their own schedule. The retailer also benefitted because the consumer picked up the product and took it home, thereby eliminating their cost of last-mile delivery. The reduction in cost was passed on to the consumer, which compensated for the elimination of high-touch customer service. This was taken to its logical conclusion by Costco and IKEA, which essentially had consumers purchase their products at its warehouse locations disguised as retail shops. Nobody complained about being the retailer’s laborer and deliveryman as long as prices were rock-bottom. Then came Amazon. It disrupted this cozy relationship by keeping prices low while delivering the product directly to one’s home at no marginal cost for those participating in its Prime program. Now customers could enjoy even wider product selection with Amazon without having to suffer the pains of driving to the store, waiting in line and hauling the goods back home. This particularly benefitted dual-income families, where time became an increasingly more precious commodity. But Amazon is about to be disrupted. Retailers will not stand frozen like deer caught in the headlights, and will use technology to leverage the unique assets of brick-and-mortar stores and sales associates. The key is turning idle sales associates into personal shoppers who can provide the high-touch, well-informed, personalized and customer-friendly experience of yesteryear. How is this possible? Say hello to conversational commerce and the autonomous car. Conversational commerce enabled by messaging platforms is rapidly becoming the marketing channel of choice in China, where customers are communicating directly with retailers and brands via WeChat. When a customer browses in the store, the sales associate asks if he/she would like to get information about new collections and/or special promotions. If the customer is interested, they exchange WeChat contacts and starts the journey of one-to-one personalized engagement. Today, this experience is primarily powered by humans, and the scope is limited to VIP customers. However, as artificial intelligence gets more sophisticated, such personalized engagement will be enabled by bots or a combination of bots and sales associates, and can be scaled to the entire customer base. In the U.S., chat platforms, including Facebook Messenger, Kik and Slack, have opened up to help retailers and brands launch chatbots to engage with their customers. It is a one-to-one conversation providing research (product recommendations, prices, promotions, availability, etc.) and post-purchase customer service (delivery, exchange/return, usage, etc.). Because the customer opts in, enabling the retailer to access a plethora of rich and explicit purchase-intent data, the bot or the sales associate can provide valuable advice and recommendations and build a personalized and meaningful relationship with the customer. More than 80 retailers and brands, including H&M, Sephora and Staples, have launched human-assisted chatbots on Messenger and/or Kik to provide services such as product recommendations and personalized beauty advice and, of course, the bots also facilitate transactions if the customer is ready to purchase the products. This new wave of conversational commerce has given birth to many startups, such as , and , which focus on helping brands and retailers engage with customers on chat platforms. Similar to Uber, which takes idle car drivers and turns them into concierge chauffeurs, conversational commerce will convert idle sales associates into personal shoppers who can convert casual browsing into purchases and build customer loyalty. Again, as AI gets better, much of the interaction can be handled by a bot, and the sales associate can focus on the niche cases and more valuable tasks, such as making sure the customer who visits the store gets full attention and truly experiences the store, and understands the value of the retailer’s chatbot and opts in. For multichannel retailers and brands, the store is a true differentiator in this Amazon-centric world. They must leverage their unique assets of sales associates to deliver an optimal in-store experience and start a one-to-one conversation with the customer after he/she leaves the store; when AI kicks in, it becomes a natural continuation of the experience. In the not-so-distant future, autonomous cars will enable the sales associate to load merchandise into a car that will drive itself to your home or office, delivering your orders within the same day. The customer can reserve a delivery window and track its location on a map in real time so there is no waiting during a “window of delivery.” The chance of theft of packages left at the door will also be reduced significantly. The transportation cost can be further reduced when multiple deliveries are carpooled by the driverless car to your location and sophisticated algorithms are developed to dynamically optimize delivery routes. London-based startup , started by Skype co-founders, has already developed a robotic cart to deliver packages from Hermes and Metro Group, and food from Just Eat and Pronto. Of course, this cart is not quite a driverless car yet, but it gives us a glimpse into the future. Ask any car manufacturer or tech giant, and they will tell you that autonomous cars will be the future of transportation. Almost all the automakers (GM, Ford, BMW, Volkswagen) and large tech companies (Google, Apple, Uber, Baidu) are working on driverless cars. Earlier this year, Google received a patent to develop a self-driving truck for package delivery. The automobile will once again change the face of retailing. By taking advantage of these emerging technological capabilities, retailers will be able to fight back and take advantage of assets that Amazon lacks. By offering advice via chat, the customer experience will return to the days of Avon, Tupperware and Hoover, where consumers can receive valuable advice and personalized service in the comfort of their own home, and benefit from low-cost delivery of products in a timely fashion with autonomous cars. Moreover, it will be prohibitively expensive for Amazon to replicate this service without hiring a large pool of sales associates and deploying an army of drones. This will not only level the playing field for retailers, but potentially tilt it in their favor.
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Watch 500 Startups’ Demo Day here
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Samantha O'Keefe
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TechCrunch is pleased to bring you 500 Startups’ Batch 17 Demo Day today, August 2nd, starting at 1:00pm PT. 500 Startups is a global seed fund and startup accelerator founded by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. 500 has invested in a variety of technology startups all over the world and maintains regional funds focused on Korea, Thailand, Turkey and North Africa, among other locations. According to 500, “Batch 17 is our most eclectic to date.” With 42 companies, this cohort runs the gamut from affordable housing made from shipping containers to digital SIM cards to free birth control and alternative burial products. Batch 17 has two tracks as part of the program, focusing on B2B and Fashion/Beauty. Demos start at 1 and are expected to last until 6pm. You can watch it live below:
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Sarah Perez
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Medium nabs Embed.ly to add to its list of publisher tools
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John Mannes
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announced today that it has acquired to support publishers with backend APIs for embedding content. Embed.ly supports writers by providing analytics on content and customized recommendations and promotions. Their APIs are currently used by an all-star list of publishers, including The New York Times, NPR and The Atlantic. Companies like Reddit and Airbnb also use the service. At this point, the company is servicing 500 million API requests per month. The team will continue to operate independently of Medium and is currently pursuing innovations in embedding native video. The analytics features of Embed.ly let publishers see who is clicking on what, and the number of plays and minutes watched for video. “We want publishers to understand why content is doing well,” said Kate Mason, head of communications for Medium. Medium is doubling down on publisher tools. Earlier this year , a company that produces APIs to help produce feeds quickly and push them to the right places. As part of its services, Medium program allowing users to promote stories as an advertising unit. Additionally, the company has a membership program that enables content creators to lock some content behind a paywall. At a greater level, Embed.ly has consistently strived to standardize embedded content to make life easier for both content creators and content consumers. “The problem with embedded content is that there are no good standards,” said Sean Creeley, co-founder of Embed.ly. “We want what appears amazing on Medium to look great on WordPress VIP and other platforms. Medium gives us the ability and platform to create really great open standards around embeds.” To date, the company has raised $1.02 million in both equity and debt financing from Y Combinator, SV Angel, Lowercase Capital and others. According to PitchBook, the company’s most recent valuation was $3.9 million in 2011.
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The NFL is the first sports league on Snapchat Discover
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Darrell Etherington
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The NFL and Snapchat heart each other, and will continue to heart each other for multiple years to come: The two an extension to their “strategic partnership” today, which includes Snapchat’s first official sports league Discover channel, an NFL-programmed collection of piping hot football fan service content. The NFL is also doubling down on its existing commitment to create Live Stories, promising one produced for every single NFL official season game, including the Super bowl, and for special events like the NFL Draft. Live Stories from the NFL blend behind-the-scenes content from insiders, as well as fan-created Snaps added via location-based contributions. Also in store for NFL fans are custom-created Snapchat Geofilters for each of the NFL’s 32 teams. These will appear for fans whenever they’re in proximity of NFL stadiums, as well as practice facilities and “select venues” — maybe your local sports pub, provided they’re committed enough to the home team? Basically, the NFL wants fans who also have Snapchat to never have to experience an NFL-less day on the social network, and they’re covering their bases (covering the field with zone defense? Sports metaphors are very challenging for me) with custom features in every conceivable part of the service. Snapchat’s redesigned Discover section was intended to bring more brands on board, and this NFL partnership gives them a marquee addition in a new area. It also provides another way for Snapchat to skew older and more mainstream, while the NFL might be able to reach a new generation of audience via the service. For Snapchat, at least, this is likely a revenue touchdown (nailed that “red zone” sports metaphor — and there’s a bonus one for you, too).
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Latest Amazon Elastic MapReduce release supports 16 Hadoop projects
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Ron Miller
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today, which includes, among other things, support for 16 open source Hadoop projects. As AWS continues to hone its various tools to help customers manage myriad enterprise functions in the cloud, this latest one is aimed at data scientists and other interested parties looking to manage big data projects with Hadoop. For those of you unfamiliar with Hadoop, “[It’s] fundamentally infrastructure software for storing and processing large data sets,” , a Forrester analyst who covers this space. It’s different from conventional data processing software in that it distributes both the storage and processing over a set of nodes (which can scale to the thousands), providing a much more efficient system for processing large amounts of data. What’s more, it’s a tremendously popular (with a really cute mascot) and a massive ecosystem around it, which is continually adding projects to help fill in holes and requirements. Hadoop is made up of these various projects to help users with the tasks they need to undertake when managing large sets of data, such as Hive, a data warehouse for Hadoop, and HBase, a scalable, distributed database — both of which are supported in AWS. Its popularity has given rise to several companies, such as Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR, which have created commercial versions on top of the open source project. AWS has actually been on a frantic pace since July last year to continually update this tool and provide support for an increasing number of Hadoop projects to give its customers the widest number of choices. Chart courtesy of . AWS has been using another , which, according to the project page, helps “Infrastructure Engineers and Data Scientists looking for comprehensive packaging, testing, and configuration of the leading open source big data components.” It has helped them accelerate the pace of development, according to . All of this should be good news for data scientists and other employees who work with large sets of data, who want to work in the cloud. What this release provides is an increasing number of options, making it easier for the folks working with the data to find Hadoop projects that matter to them on AWS. While Hadoop is about efficiency, big data remains a great use case for AWS, as it requires intensive use of tools like this and lots of storage and compute to process all of that data. For users, the elastic nature of cloud-based infrastructure means they can process as much data as they need and not worry about running into resource limitations, as they might on-premises.
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People.ai is using machine learning to rewrite the sales ops playbook
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Anna Escher
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, a company bringing machine learning algorithms to sales operations, is emerging from stealth. The platform uses machine learning tech to give sales reps what it calls a predictive playbook on how to close deals based on past success. People.ai also shows managers how well team members are doing in relation to this standard. The company is part of Y Combinator’s summer batch. The problem People.ai is trying to solve is the lack of data about salespeople. Co-founder and CEO Oleg Rogynskyy compares the sales success process to that of developers, explaining that “when you are looking at a developer’s work, you know how they think because you can look at their code and GitHub. You may not know exactly what they’re working on but you can see how they’re doing it.” Kevin Yang and Oleg Rogynskyy The process is often the opposite for tracking salespeople. You can see how many emails they send, how many calls they made and when — every step of the way toward closing a deal. Somehow, it magically turns into revenue — but there’s little visibility. People.ai wants to provide this groundwork for tracking crucial data across sales teams and identifying what leads to success. The service works by scanning email, calendar, phone, WebEx, conference tools and other data sources. It records all the events that happen across the different platforms used by salespeople, and identifies common threads. It then isolates what it deems to be the average best way to close a deal. So not only is the tech able to see what a salesperson did correctly, but also where they deviated from the playbook. The algorithms have been able to uncover unproductive behaviors, such as salespeople not spending the right amount of time at certain phases of a deal, for example. In addition to helping track sales progress, People.ai could be used to monitor onboarding progress, training trajectory and could prove a useful tool for recruiters to optimize hiring. So, doesn’t Salesforce already do this? Rogynskyy maintains that the pain point of using Salesforce is the manual data entry and time-consuming activity logging that no one actually does — making for analytics that are inaccurate and don’t tell the full story of a deal’s progress. People.ai automates the entry process. “We’re the first ones to get 100 percent coverage in all activities salespeople do. So the data is totally reliable, homogenized and normalized.” People.ai currently employs a small team of just over 10, and the product has been deployed by about 50 B2B companies. The endeavor is backed by Y Combinator and several angel investors.
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Paving the way for the autonomous truck
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Charles Chilton
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Google has long held the spotlight in developing driverless technology; however, with the emergence of and Elon Musk’s announcement of a , “driverless trucks” are coming to the forefront of the autonomous vehicle conversation. One major reason the trucking industry is so interested in driverless technology is a chronic shortage of truck drivers, which is threatening to get worse as the Baby Boom generation hits retirement age. But despite the increased spotlight on autonomous trucks, the reality is that trucking technology still has a long way to go before we see trucks on the road without drivers. In the meantime, many new technology advances are already helping with the driver shortage by expanding the impact of today’s drivers — while also making trucks and highways safer. These advanced technology systems, collectively referred to as “Advanced Driver Assistance Systems” (ADAS), begin with simple convenience tools, like power steering, cruise control and automated gear changing. These tools are so common in passenger cars that most of us take them for granted, but they are crucial stepping stones toward higher degrees of vehicle autonomy. Tools like traction control and anti-lock braking systems (ABS) go beyond mere convenience, and are especially helpful for truck drivers. They act as skill compensators, making it easier and safer for drivers to address challenging road conditions. The same goes for advances in electronic stability control (ESC) — the computerized technology improves a vehicle’s stability by actively assessing road conditions to adjust vehicle handling in order to reduce potential skidding and roll overs. Radar and digital-camera technologies further elevate ADAS by compensating for drivers’ blind spots and detecting lane departures. Even more impressive is what happens when these tools work together. The combined technology is capable of detecting objects in the truck’s path, alerting the driver, then automatically braking the vehicle — if necessary — in advance of a potential collision. Adaptive cruise control also uses laser- and radar-based systems to help trucks maintain a safe distance from the vehicle ahead. In the trucking business, beyond the obvious importance of assisting the driver in safer vehicle operation, risk mitigation is also a powerful motivator. Because trucks and the cargo they carry are significantly bigger than passenger vehicles, truck accidents can carry major price tags. By reducing the kinetic energy of an accident, such systems can mitigate both personal injury and property damage. Ultimately, the goal is to convert most accidents into near-misses — or better. In addition to an end goal of autonomy, risk avoidance is a powerful incentive for trucking companies to adopt such technologies. Combining these tools enables vehicle platooning — the ability to line up trucks in a row and automatically brake and accelerate them as one. Demonstrations of this technology in Nevada, and most recently in Europe, shows how close the industry is getting to fully autonomous trucks. This technology is continually being perfected through initiatives like , a public-private R&D partnership at the University of Michigan that is working to develop a commercially viable ecosystem of connected and automated driverless vehicles in urban and suburban environments. Frankly, there’s never been a more exciting time to be part of the trucking industry. Innovations in vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-anything communication will push the envelope beyond even these advances. By improving the flow of traffic, such systems can enable today’s highway infrastructure to be used more efficiently. As a result, beyond improved productivity for drivers, we’ll also see a reduction in the number and severity of accidents, greatly improved fuel economy and significant environmental benefit. While there is still time before on-highway driverless trucks are the norm, there are still several technologies available today that augment drivers’ skills to make the road smoother and safer.
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Gillmor Gang: Predictions
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 19, 2016. The Gang goes mobile as in cars, autocurated Twitter notifications, the real reason bots are important, and a tribute to the inventor of all things debated. Bye bye. @stevegillmor, @Scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare, @fradice Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Developing a global financial architecture
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Nik Milanovic
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An odd paradox exists in the way capital moves around the world — or doesn’t — from developed to developing countries. A few specific technology hurdles halt the flow of money, at the personal level, from transferring wealth to and investing in emerging markets. Issues with ledgers of exchange, unique identifiers, transfer costs and points of access all impact capital flows across borders. Innovative firms have made strides developing solutions for each, but a comprehensive technology answer still remains to be found. On a global scale, western economies are awash in cheap investment capital chasing anemic returns. Capital in the global financial economy is so plentiful that central banks in countries like Sweden, Switzerland and Japan now offer on deposits. This means that investors essentially have to pay to “park” the funds that they can’t invest — and choose to do so because the nominal losses from negative rates outweigh the potential significant losses from investment. Over time, capital pools up, and when attractive investment opportunities do come up, they’re quickly oversubscribed — look at the for evidence. Emerging markets, meanwhile, generally offer more investment prospects. A corporation based in Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, might offer higher interest rates when it issues debt to raise capital than would a similar company in the U.S. But that debt is priced to account for the increased risk of operating in a country without a well-developed “trust architecture,” which slows the flow of assets from advanced to emerging markets. The lack of trust architecture is the defining stumbling block that keeps money from moving more easily to the developing world. In their Insights article , Bain & Company define trust architecture as strong property rights protections, reliable legal systems and institutional depth. What this really boils down to is safety and transparency: People want to see that the money they send across borders is going where it is supposed to. Though the examples Bain uses detail larger foreign direct investments, these architecture problems persist even at the peer-to-peer level. (One thing to note: The World Bank recently started recommending against the use of the “developing” and “developed” distinction, because countries are stratified between so many levels of development that it’s tough to break them into two distinct groups. For this article, let’s assume that developing or emerging economies are those that are the net recipients of remittances, while developed or advanced economies are net remitters.) In the U.S., anyone can deposit a check to a checking account with the snap of an iPhone camera, pay a friend using Venmo and Facebook or buy goods online with PayPal, which provides fraud protection and arbitration. The trust we place in these systems doesn’t necessarily exist in countries without the institutions to support them. It’s harder to send remittances to family members in foreign countries, or make personal loans to friends across borders. To take the Bain analogy further, if you think of capital as a large reserve of water pooling up in advanced economies, the missing elements of trust architecture pile up to build a dam that stops the water from flowing downstream to emerging markets. So what obstacles does technology need to overcome to create a reliable infrastructure to move money to emerging economies? In his insightful article, , British journalist John Lanchester dives into why, historically, banks came about in the first place. When we spend money or get paid or give a loan, what we’re really doing is making an entry on a register. That entry says “this thing of value is being transferred.” Before the invention of common currencies, people would barter goods directly, or keep informal “IOUs” to log debts. The creation of banks allowed people to log their transactions in a centralized, authoritative ledger — the banker’s. Much of the developing world has a ledger problem. Unsurprisingly, checking account penetration is , where only 41 percent of the population have accounts, than in the developed world, where 89 percent do. The differences are even more stark when you look at adults with only primary education (10 percent) or credit card holders (7 percent) in the developing world. Though it’s difficult to paint heterogeneous markets in such broad strokes, the trend is clear — poorer people have less access to banks. This makes it hard to store and transact money. One solution, which Lanchester evaluates thoroughly, is that of digital currencies based on technology such as blockchain. Blockchain provides a distributed database that records every transaction users make of currencies, such as Bitcoin, based on that database. This allows people to exchange money peer-to-peer, instead of having to rely on a trusted intermediary like a bank. It also has the added benefit of insulating people from fiat currency fluctuations, which are more prone to volatility in developing markets such as and can make money essentially worthless to the note holder. A reliable, stable crypto-currency is still a dream to many, but the Bank of England has recently undertaken into making the dream a reality. It may be one day soon that both emerging and advanced markets transact in one global currency, which isn’t dependent on banks and states to guarantee its value. Another problem for the developing world is the failure of many countries’ trust architecture to provide reliable personal identification and credit underwriting. Would you cut a check and send money overseas if you couldn’t verify the recipient? How do lenders ensure that people will pay loans back if there is no data available on them in the digital sphere? These questions, salient in the developed world, are especially difficult in less-data-rich markets. To solve this problem, the Indian government has famously rolled out an initiative to give a digital identity to its 1 billion+ residents using biometric identification. Now, , Russia, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are all exploring similar programs. These identification programs, though not incorruptible, deliver the same value that social security numbers do in the U.S.: the ability to tell who is on the other side of your transaction and whether you can trust them. Another novel approach to creating credit files comes from Kenya, home to the wildly successful startup . In 2013, flowed through M-Pesa. The tech is built on a radically simple idea: If you have access to someone’s cell phone account, you have a way to identify them individually and a history of payments to tell if they’re creditworthy. Now, startups like (an Israeli peer-to-peer lender) and (started by a Kiva co-founder) are to let banks lend to people based off their phone subscription history, while companies like go a step further by creating a global, fungible credit score for anyone with a phone. In sum, these identification solutions could provide the trust needed in advanced economies to reliably lend to and invest in the “bottom of the pyramid” available in emerging markets. One of the more prohibitive elements of remittances, which adversely affects poorer users, is the high cost of sending money across borders. The lack of infrastructure in the developing world makes it prohibitively expensive in many places to receive money from friends and family overseas. The World Bank estimates that the global average cost of remittances is — and has been trending up in 2016. For all its stumbles, the now-defunct payments startup Clinkle was built with an idea that was radical for its simplicity: You shouldn’t have to pay to use the money you already own (an idea that has perennially eluded credit card and remittance companies). Exchange rates only complicate the problem. The idea of liberating people’s access to their own money led companies like and to create platforms to dramatically reduce money transfer costs, display fees transparently and guarantee fair currency exchange rates. Since its founding, TransferWise has helped people send $4 billion across borders to those who need it, and inspired regional remittance companies like , which helps overseas workers transfer money in southeast Asia, and , which facilitates bitcoin remittances in Mexico. Once the issues of identifying a recipient, controlling for currency fluctuations and fees and recording a transaction have been solved, recipients still face a vital problem: where to store and access their money? Point of sale technologies that work with smartphones, or even credit and debit cards, do not exist across vast swathes of the developing world. Getting one’s money is not meaningful if that money is irretrievably locked in its digital form. The issue of converting digital to paper currency is remarkably similar to that of transfers: ATMs, check cashers and exchange kiosks may charge exorbitant fees. Moreover, carrying large sums of paper money can be inherently less secure than accepting cash digitally. One firm tackling the “point of access” challenge is , a newer bitcoin startup that bills itself as “ .” Though bitcoin and digital transfers are nothing new to the payments technology world, Abra introduces a new feature: people who act as “tellers” on the sending and receiving end. Using the Abra platform, any “teller” can accept paper currency, charge a discretionary fee (part of which is split with Abra) and then transfer full funds to a corresponding “teller” across borders, who receives the funds and hands the paper equivalent to their end-recipient. The movement of capital around the globe is of paramount importance to an increasingly globalized society. As companies, workers and jobs become more fluid across permeable borders, it will become increasingly necessary to move money freely without arduous costs or constraints. Yet no comprehensive solution exists today that resolves the issues damming the flow of capital across borders. Innovative technology firms, well-versed in the challenges of the developing world’s financial trust architecture, stand to revolutionize the way money is sent and lent globally. These solutions could also “trickle up” from the personal level to larger-scale investments, as transfer risks are smoothed across geographies. The inertial build-up of capital pools in the developed world creates an almost limitless opportunity for those platforms that can overcome the hurdles damming it.
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How carbon nanotubes could give us faster processors and longer battery life
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Lucia Maffei
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Carbon nanotubes are one of those supermaterials — a cylinder with a diameter of one or two nanometers — that are full of dreamy applications, ranging from supercomputers to ultra-efficient smartphones. The problem is, they are difficult to manufacture, and commercializing these applications may require 10 or 15 years. A nanotube is a tube-like molecular structure made of one element, usually carbon. In particular, (which were accidentally discovered in 1991) are known for their exceptional electrical and mechanical properties. These properties arise from nanotubes’ structure. In nanotubes, carbon atoms are organized in a helix made of hexagonal arrays. Visualize the typical honeycomb structure: lots of hexagonal cells of wax. Then, imagine wrapping this honeycomb texture in a small cylindrical roll, more than 25 million times smaller than a sushi roll. There you have a wire of carbon nanotube. The symmetry of this “honeycomb-like roll,” along with its tiny diameter, introduces significant changes in the electronic density of states, and hence provides a unique electronic character for the nanotubes, professors Pulickel M. Ajayan and Otto Z. Zhou . The potential for applications is huge. based on a circuit loaded with carbon nanotubes. In a world where computers have to run faster at lower energy, carbon nanotubes promise better performance than silicon as a micro transistor. “Carbon nanotubes are excellent candidates to complement silicon,” said Subhasish Mitra, associate professor of Electrical engineering and Computer science at Stanford. Mitra and his Stanford colleague H.-S. Philip Wong, a professor of electrical engineering, and other collaborators to develop a new generation of computers that have processors based on carbon nanotubes. Their goal is to build a prototype of a computer that works with carbon nanotubes and shows improvements in energy efficiency. “If you replace silicon transistors with carbon transistors, the margin of energy efficiency improvement could go up to 1000X,” Mitra said. Smartphones are computers too, Mitra noted. “You could have a smartphone that has the computational capability of an ideal Watson machine. You can even have situations with millions of sensors collecting data, and the smartphone can do massive computing on that.” If you can offer a massive computer capability, Mitra said, people are going to pay for it. This new generation smartphone could be 30 times faster than today, and would only need one charge a month. After having mentioned applications in “Internet of Things and beyond,” Mitra is eager to draw a line between research on carbon nanotubes and basic incorporation in manufacturing. Even though research has seen progress, smartphone manufacturers don’t probably want to jump into new things “unless they’re absolutely sure,” Mitra concluded. “We hope they’ll start experimenting on this soon.” Ten or 15 years, Mitra said, could be a realistic schedule for commercial implementation. Any new technology, Mitra said, has a range of implementation of comparable size. Manufacturing carbon nanotubes is the issue, but other universities are working on the solution, as well. The lab of Rice University, for example, discovered to create self-assembling carbon nanotubes. “What we discovered is that nanotubes can actually string together and form wires by themselves under this electric field,” Paul Cherukuri, assistant professor of chemistry at Rice, said . “There’s new science coming out of this as we go.”
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The reality of VR porn
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John Holden
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Tech and porn are intimately connected. The porn industry has been an early adopter of new tech time and time again, and virtual reality is just the latest tech star the industry wants to get into bed with. Investment bank and asset management firm Piper Jaffray estimates that (after video games and NFL-related content). In a racket like this, the guiding doctrine must be: The more realistic, the better, right? But in virtual reality, maybe caution is advisable. Several prominent psychologists have raised concerns about the implications of adult entertainment becoming more and more like the “real thing.” And therein lies the first misperception: The kind of sexual activity portrayed in pornography isn’t all that realistic to begin with. “Because it’s professed as becoming increasingly like the ‘real thing,’ porn literacy is more important than ever,” , author of, , told me. “Consumers of porn — and their partners — need to understand how it’s made, and how what’s portrayed is not what real sex is like.” VR porn may still be new, but it is quickly moving mainstream, thanks in no small part to companies like Samsung and Oculus Rift (owned by Facebook) developing more affordable headsets that work with the VR video content being provided free of charge on adult sites such as . It is without question a more intimate pornographic experience than the traditional voyeuristic perspective from a magazine or DVD. Using a Homido VR headset with my iPhone 5 clipped to the front, I “sampled” various online VR porn videos. The number of options still seems fairly limited, especially when you consider a site like PornHub carries more than three million videos alone. But the experience, even on a VR smartphone headset, was still pretty impressive. UCLA’s Professor has been studying the effects of pornography for decades. He recently sampled VR porn for the first time, too. “I was most surprised by the extent to which the video felt more personal than any conventional porn I’d viewed before,” he told me. “You get a far greater sense that you are in the room with a woman and she is talking directly to you and looking you straight in the eye,” he said. “This naturally appeals on a more personal level than traditional videos, which have a voyeuristic quality.” But all that eye contact and direct communication is a one-sided transmission. And when fiction gets that close, you start hoping it’s real — or at the very least like a “choose your own adventure” story. Such a convincing level of faux-intimacy, therefore, couldn’t be without some psychological or social implications. In an he gave earlier this year, Malamuth compared the effects of porn with alcohol. “If you asked me, ‘Is alcohol good or bad?’ the answer is, well it depends. For some people it’s really bad — people whose lives have been ruined by alcohol consumption. For others, it’s neutral or it might allow them to de-stress, and make their sex life more interesting. I think the research shows similar conclusions for pornography depending on the cultural context, the individual factors, the amount consumed, and other features of a person’s life.” Following on from this logic, the impact of VR porn will also vary between individuals. As the experience becomes more realistic and certain elements are accentuated, there could be negative side effects, particularly for men already at risk of committing sexual aggression. “For this substantial at-risk minority, porn tends to add fuel to the fire,” Malamuth said. On the flip side, the illusion of intimacy portrayed though VR may in fact lead to more satisfying sexual experiences for others, without necessarily having negative effects. “For some it may become a preferred form of sexual experience that is more physically and psychologically satisfying than having sex with a real partner,” he added. Society has a long history of wild, groundless speculation when it comes to assessing the merits, or otherwise, of any new tech on the horizon. (At the turn of the 20th century, many in the medical profession believed bicycles turned women into lesbians.) So not everyone agrees that VR is any more significant a medium than the postcards, magazines, videotapes or DVDs that came before it. “I believe the fear of VR porn is simply more technophobia as we’ve seen so many times in the past,” clinical psychologist , author of , told me. Just like the fear that bicycle seats would turn women into lesbians, there have also been concerns over vibrators and how they could make women lose interest in men. People in Utah believe internet porn will herald the end of the institution of marriage entirely. “It’s doubtful that many people will pursue VR porn who don’t already pursue adult videos more generally,” Ley added. “In fact VR porn may flop as it requires viewers to be more active in situations where many are actually seeking a passive sexual experience.” There is one pretty novel aspect to this technology, however, which does separate it somewhat from porn’s more primitive guises of days gone by. VR technology can enable users to switch roles so they can view things from the perspective of their sexual partner. For example, a man may switch his viewpoint to have a woman’s body or vice versa. “You look down and suddenly see what is your pretty vagina and beautiful legs,” explained Malamuth. “It’s a totally new experience, which could be very disturbing for some people. Others, however, might appreciate it for opening up brave new dimensions to their own sexuality and sensuality.”
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Ads are bad, and also terrible
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Jon Evans
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Every so often, I find myself forced to use the Web on a browser without uBlock or an equivalent; and every time, I think to myself “How do people live like this?” The un-ad-blocked web is a miserable cesspool of autoplaying video and hysterical calls to action, slow to load, hard to look at. It’s even worse on your phone, where ads devour your battery life and . Apple, to their credit, supports ad blockers for Mobile Safari. But Google? Yeah, not so much. You can run a separate browser, such as . You can run through a proxy, or reset your DNS to use an ad blocker like . But you can’t just add an ad blocker to Chrome for Android. Surprising that a company with Google’s technical chops hasn’t made that possible yet. …Or maybe it isn’t so surprising. After all, most of Google’s money comes from display and search ads. Perhaps relatedly, Apple also makes it pretty easy to change DNS settings on iOS: it’s a much bigger pain on Android, whether via the Wi-Fi settings or . The fundamental problem is that users hate ads but sites need ad money. The most interesting initiatives in the ad-blocking world are the two I mentioned above, Brave and Optimal, because both are trying to attack this root problem. replaces “bad ads” with “good ads” that don’t track or annoy users, with a long-game eye on replacing ad revenue with micropayments. wants to replace ad revenue with subscription payments shared across all sites that Optimal’s users visit. Ad blocking have become a big enough deal to have gotten Facebook’s attention: the social giant is now , while promising to make the ads their users see nicer. As Josh Constine , “Facebook thinks if it can make its ads non-interruptive, fast, and secure, people won’t mind.” Now, this has attracted a lot of amused skepticism: Shorter Facebook: "We've decided to win an arms race." — St. Rev. Dr. Rev ☯️🏴😻 (@St_Rev) and indeed an arms race has . But I think Facebook is at least halfway right about this. Today’s ad ecosystem suffers from two fundamental problems: Bad ads are the ones which drain your battery and data. They are the pop-ups and pop-unders. They are the trackers and supercookies. They are the Outbrain and Taboola clickbait at the bottom of articles published by otherwise respectable media. We're in a world where social media has more comms-security than your bank, and porn sites have better privacy & integrity than news outlets — Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) But even ads which are not bad are still terrible. People who are paid by advertising, one way or another, inevitably wind up rationalizing that ads are somehow good for people, that they like seeing ads as long as they match their demographic and interests, etc etc ad nauseum. I cannot stress enough that this is not true. People ads; it’s just a matter of degree. We hate commercial breaks. We hate display ads. We hate billboards. We live with them, because we have no alternative, but we hate them — and ad blockers have taught us that online, we have an alternative. We don’t have to see them at all. Replacing “bad ads” with “not so bad ads” does not make the fundamental concept of advertising any more palatable. There are rare exceptions to this rule, of course. Movie trailers are ads, but we don’t hate them — quite the contrary. We don’t much hate search ads, because they : this is one major reason that Google is a gigantic money-making machine. Similarly, for the same reason, we don’t hate the “People who bought this also bought” ads on Amazon. (Even ads that would otherwise be appealing — eg Apple’s gorgeous “Shot on iPhone 6S” posters — can become hateful; not in and of themselves, but because they’re part of the ever-accumulating background of advertising, the ongoing transactionalization of our entire public sphere. No advertiser has any incentive to cut back, so advertising overwhelms us to the point that we are, on some deep level, numbed and disgusted by it all. Call it a tragedy of the cultural commons. This is what Facebook wants to prevent — but despite its best intentions, I fear that well has already been poisoned by advertising elsewhere.) Will eliminating bad online ads cause people to forget that advertising is terrible, and lapse back into our learned helplessness? I hope not. A subscription-based automatic-micropayment solution is a better way, I think, and Brave and Optimal are taking steps in that direction. On one hand, I’m not optimistic that we can get to that better world from the current one any time soon; on the other, though, in the long run, doing things your customers hate is always, ultimately, a bad strategy. Right now that’s a moot point. In the short term, the important thing is that Apple, Brave, Optimal, Facebook, and many others are hammering home the point that “bad ads” are becoming less and less acceptable. The online advertising ecosystem is, I hope, heading for a ruinous collapse. Organizations which continue to use bad ads will ultimately suffer for it, and some will die, sooner or later. Let’s hope it’s sooner.
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Rakuten buys struggling bitcoin startup Bitnet to create a ‘blockchain research lab’
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Jon Russell
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that it has acquired the assets of Bitnet, a bitcoin wallet startup it invested in, which will be used to create a ‘blockchain lab’ for the Japanese retail giant. The transaction is undisclosed but it follows in July which speculated that a deal was in the works. for Bitnet nearly two years ago, which was led by Highland Capital Partners. into some of its online commerce sites last summer. Bitnet was supposed to rival bitcoin payment heavyweights Coinbase and Bitpay, but after a spate of executives left and the startup reportedly laid off half of its staff to cut costs, it struggled to grow its business. That led to this strategic asset-stripping move from Rakuten. The Japanese e-commerce giant is taking Bitnet’s IP and “assets” and two of the startup’s key personnel to create a Belfast-located research facility to explore the potential of the blockchain. That makes a lot of sense given Rakuten’s empire of e-commerce websites and banking services in Japan and elsewhere in the world. Bitnet CTO Stephen McNamara and former VP of Engineering Fergal Down have come on board to helm the lab which “will be a dedicated research and development organization within Rakuten, focused on blockchain technology and its potential applications in the fintech and e-commerce sectors,” the company said. “Drawing on the significant IP assets and deep engineering expertise of the Bitnet team and combining that with Rakuten’s leadership in fintech and support of innovative solutions, the new Rakuten Blockchain Lab will be our first step toward unlocking blockchain’s potential to revolutionize the way that financial and e-commerce transactions are conducted,” Yasufumi Hirai, who leads Rakuten’s technology division, added via a prepared statement.
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Crunch Report | Uber’s self-driving cars
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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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Espresa wants to help companies pamper their employees
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Lucia Maffei
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The range of benefits that Silicon Valley companies offer employees may vary from dental, vision and 401(k) all the way to yoga massages, car washes and beauty services. With tech giants like and making a big deal about the benefits they offer, delivering and managing perks is a key part of any company’s strategy to attract talent now — and this is where comes into the picture. Founded in June 2015, the Palo Alto-based startup developed an online platform that allows companies to provide workplace services for employees. The company, which has 20 employees, has in seed funding from Crosslink Capital, Clear Ventures, TEC Ventures and angel investors. Let’s say, for example, that you’re an employee at a company that uses Espresa and you have a cracked screen on your phone. By logging into the Espresa app via web or mobile, you can select a phone repair service and a vendor will come to fix it. “Some of the services, like cell phone repair, are truly on-demand,” Alex Shubat, CEO and co-founder of Espresa, said in a phone interview with TechCrunch. “Some other services work on a schedule. Car wash, for example, may be available at the company on Thursday, so employees can book their slot.” The list of services that Espresa offers includes car washes, car refuels and general repairs, haircuts, manicures, eyebrow treatments, bicycle repair and team-building opportunities. Among all the options, phone repair is becoming very popular, Shubat said. Typically, users are able to get the service within 24-48 hours. Shubat said he got the idea for Espresa when he was an investor and an advisor at Odysee, a company in February 2015. During the celebration dinner, he heard the CEO and co-founder of Odysee, Raghavan Menon (who’s now a co-founder of Espresa), talking about how well Google treats its employees. “They can get a massage, they can get a car wash, they can get a haircut and things like that,” Shubat said. “So I started doing research in this area.” The name of the company is a play after the word “express.” “It just sounded nice. Later on we found out that it is actually in the Spanish dictionary,” Shubat commented. To deploy the platform, companies must pay a subscription fee, which depends on the company size (between $1 and $2 per employee each month). Espresa also collects a commission from every transaction vendors make thanks to the platform. For vendors, joining the platform is free. Who pays for each service depends on what the company would like to do. Once the company deploys Espresa, it has to decide which services are subsidized. Services can be 100 percent funded by the company, costs can be shared 50-50 between company and employee or the employee can pay 100 percent. Another option for the company is providing employees with $100 (or more) a month and letting them decide how to spend it on the platform. “The platform can take care of both models,” Shubat said. Espresa currently works with about 50 vendors that have all been selected by the company’s Vendor Curation and Management Team. “They’re looking for vendors based on companies’ requests, or vendors are soliciting us,” Shubat explained. “Once we decide to work with a vendor, we verify the quality of service. We check their reviews and we make sure they have all the paperwork, like insurance and proper background check. Only after they’ve passed the Espresa Pre-Check program, we allow them to enter the platform.” Employees who uses Espresa may also leave feedback about the services they used. By signing a contract with Espresa, vendors commit to maintaining a certain quality level. Espresa competes with companies like , which provides a platform to let companies deliver discounts to their employees. Last year, in new funding. “But they don’t focus on bringing providers to the workplace,” Shubat said. Currently, Espresa is used by 25,000 employees in about 15 companies. The platform is only available in the Bay Area, but the company plans to expand next year, likely to Austin, LA and San Diego.
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Analytics company Heap raises $11M
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Anthony Ha
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today that it has raised $11 million in Series A funding. We’ve written about before — it aims to collect data about every tap, swipe and other action that a user takes on a website or app. CEO Matin Movassate said this should allow anyone at a company to answer any question they might have about user behavior without having to go through an engineer. In fact, Movassate said Heap is “most successful when it’s adopted by basically everyone in the organization and becomes the foundation for analysis across teams.” He recalled that when he was a product manager at Facebook, there were many analytics tools available, but “despite all of that apparatus, it was really difficult for me to use data effectively.” “It was always bottlenecked,” he continued. “By the time I’d get the answer to my question, I needed to loop in three different stakeholders.” has now raised a total of $13 million. The new round was led by NEA, with participation from Menlo Ventures, SVAngel, Initialized Capital and Pear Ventures. Heap’s customers include Zendesk, Twilio, Optimizely and CrunchBase. Movassate said revenue has grown 4.5x in the past year, making the company cash-flow positive. “With the growth that we’ve been seeing, bringing on more customers requires us to invest a lot more in headcount,” he said.
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What the Fitbit lawsuit means for clinical researchers
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Daphne Kis
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Fitbit is facing a regarding the accuracy of their heart-rate data, which have been shown to be inaccurate by a margin of up to 20 beats per minute by at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. This news risks sending back to the drawing board many of us who have been optimistically experimenting with biotelemetry. We’ve been asked about the lawsuit nearly every day for more than a month. As tools for collecting research data, there have always been concerns about the utility of the data that wearables, sensors and monitors provide. Here we seek to present a balanced view of the state of these and other related issues, and, ultimately, chart a viable path forward. We are qualified to comment on this subject because our group at Litmus is currently deploying Fitbits alongside a companion mobile app in an IRB-approved study to 100 subjects at the University of Chicago Medicine. The principal investigator of the study is , a world-renowned gastroenterologist. David’s goal is to understand for the first time if and how both sleep and activity impact inflammatory bowel disease (IBD, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis) flares. Our work is being underwritten by ; read more about it . Until now, there have been plenty of articles examining the value and efficacy of the devices themselves, but there are very few efforts utilizing them in real, academic disease-specific investigations. We chose the Fitbit because of its ease-of-use, readily accessible API and substantial peer-reviewed literature documenting use of the device for measurement of sleep and activity. This lawsuit highlights our challenge — we must properly plan for and accommodate variance in remotely collected data, which we argue is a standard and well-known problem for any research data, whether it is collected in the hospital, clinic or at home. Many investigators and their sponsors consider it obvious that the information needed to create new therapeutic solutions for recalcitrant clinical problems is everywhere around us. “We’ve got to stop leaving so much of our patients’ data on the table,” Dr. Sam Blackman of Juno Therapeutics recently argued over breakfast at ASCO in Chicago this summer. “Quantifying patients’ health outside the clinic is essential to faster, more efficient pipelines.” While we couldn’t agree more, few of these hardware devices are FDA-approved, and despite their proven widespread appeal with consumers, scientific validation is often difficult, expensive and often intractable. The admissibility of these data is similarly in question, with data provenance front-and-center. For example, simple, consistent timestamp and time series protocols do not currently exist in ways that would suffice for a Title 21 CFR Part 11 audit, much less formal claims-making to the FDA. And that’s just the beginning. In a recent meeting at SXSW with a top-3 consumer-device manufacturer keenly interested in the research market, we were astonished to find how low-resolution their basic understanding is of the requirements for the collection of data in clinical trials. We don’t fault this particular company, or any other. If we want better devices, we must do a better job of telling manufacturers what kinds of measurements and outputs we need. It is critical that the research community develop, promote and use standards for data collection, storage and reporting that can be easily understood and adopted by everyone, including non-experts. A similar critique can be made of Apple’s ResearchKit. While Apple’s brand and public relations acumen are top-notch, an Apple-only technology worldview, coupled with its walled-garden approach and reported difficulties in adapting its research offerings to non-Apple platforms, may seriously hamper many research efforts. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is on this point. Standards are essential for these new data sources to be viable in the long term. Importantly, the all electronic data be submitted using standards, such as . is the administration’s official guidance, and the looming deadline is causing a gratifying flurry of activity. Early on, we expect pharma to invest primarily in later-stage data transformations instead of applying these standards throughout their data collection and storage pipelines — which will be big business for companies like , which can make quick wine out of dirty water. But over time, there will be a trickle-down effect, and we’ll start to see standards as a way of life, used throughout every pipeline, at every opportunity. It will become easier and easier to credibly innovate using novel data. , if you’re not familiar, is a global nonprofit dedicated to the creation and support of standards for clinical research data. While the big-picture electronic data reporting standards are very mature and becoming more widely adopted, the mobile device components remain under development. CDISC would, in fact, love your input this summer and fall as we convene a series of working groups on mobile data standards. We need to get it correct right out of the gate. Anything less will lead to a hampering of innovation and continued dependence on old, outdated methods of collection, storage and transmission. As we see it, the world will be a better place if we never see another patient in a clinic lobby furiously trying to remember several weeks’ worth of information while they scribble their data onto a clipboard form. Standards and data provenance aren’t sexy, but they are absolutely essential to any compelling future vision of clinical research. Google’s forthcoming is a harbinger of good things to come. A better breed of purpose-built, less-variant, yet thoroughly modern devices are en route. The Google X’s project and Alphabet’s Art Levinson-led longevity play, Calico, offer motivation enough for the internet giant to build a better remote monitor. Surely the Google team surveyed what’s available today off-the-shelf and found their options markedly wanting. We’re not at all surprised that Google decided to take the DIY approach. But Google’s clinical wearable is, to be clear, just a means to a greater end. Without a way to collect data at the point of experience, any large-scale study of disease is confined to outcomes that patients themselves remember weeks or months after the fact, placed alongside traditional clinician-observed realities in-clinic. Those two sources of information no longer suffice — not just for Google, but for all of us. As we’ve , quality-of-life is precisely that greater end — it’s the ultimate endpoint. Increasingly, new therapies for every disease category are focused not only on survival, but also on the quality of the patient’s life. A therapy that prolongs a person’s life for an extra six months but with significant pain and suffering may be an inferior option to one that extends life by three months but with better quality. Quality-of-life is the main endpoint for those with chronic disease, but even for those of us lucky enough to be healthy, the quality of our years will become increasingly more important as we grow older. We believe there is a confluence of factors — increasing attention to quality-of-life, the demand for personalized therapies, the growing need for lean clinical trials — that the group or company that becomes facile at measuring, interpreting and ultimately creating quality-of-life metrics will reap enormous financial benefits. There is no doubt that this motive is at least partially driving Google’s business decisions in this area. Jawbone, for its part, is to be working on a similar concept to Google’s, as evidenced by their acquisition of . We predict that we’ll continue to see new clinically focused entrants from usual and unusual suspects alike. Right now there is a huge technical and experience gap between modern, alluring consumer-centric devices and sensors and their hardened brethren on the traditional medical side, where user experience is at best an afterthought. This delta will steadily close. Very soon we won’t have to choose between usability and accuracy. But until such a time as the devices themselves have sufficiently evolved, and even with established standards in hand, we’re still left with the near-term reality that the accuracy and precision of these devices are sufficiently low, so as to render them ineffective for clinical decision-making. Moving data from a proprietary device into an analytics environment remains a difficult problem — more difficult than one might imagine. This issue is being slowly solved on a device-by-device basis. While companies like are betting on continued difficulties in connecting analytic endpoints to device data, most device manufacturers provide some way to extract information. But the most pressing need today lies in the modeling of errors, or what we affectionately call MOE. This is not something that any single device maker alone can accomplish. Even data aggregators like Validic are not producing these models, either because they are not motivated or because they do not have sufficient access to raw, non-transformed data. In fact, MOE is the most natural area for a data commons and the associated open-sourcing of software. Getting reliable device data into an electronic data capture (EDC) instrument is not an area of specialization likely to help any single health IT startup or large conglomerate. MOE is one of those classic areas where a rising tide floats all boats. Let us expand on that a bit. The great thing about wearable and other tracking devices — the new ones in particular — is the volume, velocity and variety of the data they create. While it is a clichéd term, “big data” is an important concept here, and collecting such torrents of information facilitates the application of machine learning and other modeling methods to build sophisticated models for each data type. By leveraging the information on normal subjects being collected by Google as part of their Google Baseline Study, the variance of each data type can be modeled and used to understand data collected as part of a research study. This is essentially what MOE is, and its public availability to clinicians and researchers will be critical to the use of wearables and other devices. Even just a rote comparison of Fitbit data to iPhone and Android accelerometer and GPS data is an opportunity to triangulate truth and quantify the margin of error. As such, heterogeneous sources are enormously preferable to homogenous stacks, which is why we recommend against hardware-specific solutions. Let’s not let the pursuit of the perfect device stand in the way of progress. In fact, any expectation of high accuracy and precision is unfair. Fitbit’s marketing personnel were perhaps a bit too optimistic in their copywriting, but the idea that a wristband sensor ought to discern reality in thoroughly unpredictable environments with only a few commodity sensors is ludicrous. As researchers, perfection isn’t the goal. Rather, our pressing need is to understand precisely how imprecise these devices are. We don’t need to eliminate variance; rather, we need to predict it. Effective modeling of device error will allow researchers to normalize data across different devices and, moreover, different participants. It is clear that we are in the very early stages of an important multi-year paradigm shift in how we collect and use data for our health and well-being. We are converging on a time when the whole world could become a big clinical trial, with patients contributing their own data in a way that respects their privacy and allows highly granular control of access rights and permissions. Don’t read the Fitbit lawsuit as an indicator that these technologies and the data they produce aren’t yet ready for prime time. Instead, realize they’re just another set of tools, to which we researchers must eagerly apply the same rigor we have everywhere else. Over time, the devices themselves will get better and better. We’re at best at the Apple evolutionary phase. Standards and modeling of errors, however, offer nearer-term help. Regardless, remember it’s not the data that matters as much as what we do with it. Patients tell us every day how they’re doing by their actions. Are we really listening?
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A pocket-sized power bank that’ll help your laptop stay alive
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Brian Heater
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I’ve lived through a lot of live blogs in my life, mostly by the skin of my teeth, desperately watching as my battery ticks down, hoping desperately that the company is nearing the finish line. Of course, the fact that both my personal work computers sometimes feel like they’re on their last legs doesn’t help much, but the fact remains: There are few things in this life as anxious-making as watching a piece of hardware die right in front of you when you need it the most. I’ve played around with battery extenders in the past, but when it comes to keeping a laptop alive, there’s not a lot of middle ground between big, bulky power banks and ones too small to keep anything beyond a smartphone alive for an extended period. Omnicharge promises some middle ground — and judging from which is a ridiculous 2,401 percent funded as of the writing of this, the internet community doesn’t need all that much convincing of the product’s viability. And for my part, I certainly had a “where have you been my whole life” moment when a demo unit arrived in the mail. The brick is small enough to be held in one hand or tossed in a backpack with little notice. Hell, you can probably fit the thing in your pants pocket, presuming you don’t dress like a member of a mid-00s indie rock band or American Apparel employee. It’s 0.83 pounds for the smaller of the two and 1.3 for the larger — so portable, but probably not something you want on your person all day, every day. I should note that the unit the company sent was the smaller of the two chargers — at 13,600mAh (versus 20,400). To put that into some perspective, the iPhone 6s Plus has a 2,750mAh battery. This, clearly, is a lot more than that. The Omnicharge sports three outputs — two USB and one three-prong AC/DC outlet. On the front is a small OLED display that offers a bunch of key contextual information, including: All handy info that you can turn on and off while the system is in use. It’s also nice to be able to see how the system’s status impacts the amount of time left; the minute my computer fell asleep, the number jumped up by several hours. To the right of the display are buttons that turn the flow to the USB and AV/DC outlets on and off individually. There’s a lot happening under the hood, but the main thing you really need to know is that the unit works. There are some suggested lifespans above. I used the system with my 15-inch MacBook Pro (against doctor’s orders) and got a couple of extra hours at full charge. I’ll be bringing my 13-inch work MacBook Air to IFA with me in a couple of weeks, and the Omnicharge will definitely be coming along for the ride. It starts at $99 on the company’s Indiegogo page.
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Tesla Model S aftermarket wireless charging is almost here
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZevHlvaE7A] Aftermarket EV charging company Evatran is almost ready to start shipping its to Tesla Model S owners who pre-ordered the product, and a new video shows the production system in action. As you can see, what the company offers is a way to create a drive-up wireless charging pad, which provides induction power via an add-on module installed on the Tesla itself. And before you even ask, Plugless has a network of installers who do this part for Model S owners, included in the cost of purchase (currently $2,440 per system). The add-on won’t affect your warranty, either — even though Tesla and Plugless don’t have any official relationship, and Plugless is strictly an aftermarket add-on, so long as the Plugless system doesn’t negatively affect the vehicle there’s no effect on your warranty. Plus, the company tells me it offers its own three-year warranty that will cover the cost of any impact its system has on your car, though it hasn’t run into any issues with its add-ons for other vehicles. Plugless charges at a rate of about 7.2kW, which provides a minimum of 20 miles of driving time per hour, and it’s rated for use either indoors or outdoors. The current version works with rear-wheel drive Tesla S models only, with plans to introduce support for all-wheel drive versions beginning later this year. Evatran says the first installations are going to start rolling out in a few weeks to a small group of initial reservation holders, with more broad roll-out ramping up in the fall. It’s a very different approach from , but one that’s probably more practical in the near-term.
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Nintendo 3DS sales up 80% year-over-year on Pokémon Go success
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Darrell Etherington
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Nintendo had a very good month in mobile gaming, according to . The 3DS won in both hardware and software sales for the analyst firm’s latest tracker report, with the 3DS and its family of systems (including New 3DS, 3DS XL and 2DS devices) up 80 percent for July this year versus July 2015. Pokémon Omega Red and Alpha Sapphire, the latest console titles in the franchise, were also up over 80 percent year-over-year. The halo effect doesn’t stop at the latest and greatest in Pokémon console games, however: Sales of Pokémon X and Y, which were first released in October 2013, were up a huge 200 percent compared to their sales in July of last year. Confession: At least one of those sales can be directly attributed to me, and a sample size of one reveals that said purchase was driven directly by Pokémon Go hype. Nintendo’s strong July wasn’t only a result of Pokémon Go carry-over interest, however; games for Nintendo systems took five of the top 11 spots for software sales overall, with Monster Hunter Generations coming in at a strong No. 1, and Minecraft: Wii U edition, Pokemon Omega Ruby and Sapphire (both games that came out nearly two years ago) and Kirby: Planet Robot also making solid showings. While Nintendo may not be making much directly from Pokémon Go in , the franchise’s big move to smartphones is still filling the sales of the game company in key ways, and that’s a great set up for the launch of .
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Microsoft helps Mac users ditch Evernote for OneNote with new tool
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Sarah Perez
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Microsoft is for Mac users to ditch Evernote in favor of OneNote, its rival note-taking app, and a part of the Microsoft Office suite. The company has today released a new app called the which allows Mac users to move all their saved items from the Evernote for Mac application into OneNote automatically. This is not the first time Microsoft targeted Evernote’s dissatisfied customers by making it easier to switch to Microsoft’s own software. In March, reminding potential OneNote customers that its app is free on all devices. Meanwhile, Evernote Premium was (then) $50 per year, the company pointed out. However, The Premium product is now $69.99 per year, while Plus is $34.99 per year. There’s a Basic plan, too, which is free, but it lacks a number of features, including customer support, search for text across PDFs and Office files, annotation support for PDFs, business card scanning, and more. It also only offers 60 MB of new uploads per month and will sync to just two devices. Evernote has been under some turmoil in recent months, have lost last December, which followed last year’s shifting of co-founder and CEO . In 2015, it also and killed off , Skitch (except Skitch for Mac), Clearly, its Pebble Watch apps, and . Aiming to strike Evernote when it’s struggling, Microsoft goes for the hard sell today, again pushing the advantage that comes with switching to Office. Evernote Premium’s $69.99 per year pricing is now the exact same price as , the company says. Office 365 comes with OneNote, as well as all the other Office apps, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Access. And it ships with 1TB of cloud storage, and 60 Skype minutes of calls to mobile phones or landlines. Plus, Microsoft points out that OneNote also has a like Evernote’s, which works across all major browsers. The software also supports typing, inking, embedding videos, recording audio, and digital scans, too. To use the new Mac OneNote Importer tool, you’ll need to have a Mac running OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) or higher, and it’s best if Evernote for Mac is installed and signed in. When your Evernote notes are imported, they’ll automatically sync across your devices, including your PC, iOS, Android and the web browser. Since the launch of the Windows version of the Importer tool, Microsoft has moved 71 million Evernote pages to OneNote, it says.
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Jobless in the self-driving economy
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Josh Constine
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Uber’s self-driving cars will hit the road this month, earlier than anticipated. That’s an exciting surprise…unless of course you’re a driver. They won’t be the only ones affected, though. The consequences of robot-induced unemployment could eventually ripple through the rest of the economy. What will happen to Uber’s 1 million drivers? And the 3.5 million truck drivers in the ? And the countless millions of delivery, bus, taxi, and other drivers around the world? These jobs won’t disappear overnight. It could take 20 years. But if we don’t plan for this labor shift, it could cause mass hardship for some even while delivering mass convenience to others. Self-driving cars are undoubtedly the future. They’ll be significantly safer and more relaxing. They’ll reduce traffic and carbon emissions. And they could free up productive time for knowledge workers that used to be spent stuck behind the wheel. They’ll also be a lot cheaper than paying a person to pilot the vehicle. writes, “Trips will be free for the time being, rather than the standard local rate of $1.30 per mile. In the long run, [Uber CEO Travis] Kalanick says, prices will fall so low that the per-mile cost of travel, even for long trips in rural areas, will be cheaper in a driverless Uber than in a private car.” Oh, and Uber just announced it has . The problem is driving constitutes one of the core forms of low-skilled labor alongside cashiers and fast-food prep. The robots are . Some argue that technology will create new jobs for these people. Though while it may create new jobs, they likely won’t be attainable by those losing their low-skilled ones. Think of it this way. When cars were invented, they threatened the low-skilled laborers that used to bring people and objects around: horses. As laid out by this fantastic Humans Need Not Apply video, the idea that “better technology will create more better jobs for horses” immediately seems ludicrous. Replacing “horses” with “humans” in that sentence shouldn’t inspire much more optimism. What this shift to autonomy will do to the economy is roll the earnings of the replaced low-skilled laborers up to the owners and designers of the self-driving fleets, cookdroids, and cashierbots. It’s a Marxist nightmare. Software has already been causing a similar effect, but the proliferation of autonomous robots will allow this revolution to grow beyond bits and invade the realm of atoms. That’s why the next President needs to start preparing us now, though hopefully without impeding the speed of innovation. Education, job training, and placement services will be essential. Hell, just recognizing and talking about the problem will be a good start. Long-term, we’ll need to take a long, hard look at how capitalism works in an era where technology replaces jobs faster than it creates them. Must everyone have a full-time role? Can we redistribute wealth from the top so the bottom doesn’t starve without devolving into inefficiency and stagnation? How would that impact the psyches of citizens raised to define their own value by how much bread they earn, not how much they receive? Those are complicated questions without definitive answers. We’ll need plenty of time to figure them out. But today Uber made it clear the future’s ETA is a lot sooner than we expected.
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At Rothenberg Ventures, the rise and fall of a virtual Gatsby
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Sarah Buhr
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nberg Ventures, the four-year-old, San Francisco-based seed-stage venture firm, may be on the brink of implosion, say several sources close to the firm. We that several high-level employees had parted ways with Rothenberg, including its director of finance and the head of its SF office, who happen to be father and son (Tom and Tommy Leep). We’ve subsequently learned that firm departures run far more widely. Other top executives who’ve left include the company’s chief revenue officer, who quit yesterday; the company’s chief financial officer, who left in June; general manager James Taylor, who left very recently; and Fran Hauser, a former president of digital at Time Inc. Hauser was brought in with some fanfare as a venture partner in May 2014. Yesterday she updated her LinkedIn profile to reflect that she left Rothenberg in July. Messages to Rothenberg have not been returned. According to one source, Rothenberg Ventures founder Mike Rothenberg has told those remaining that “very few people will be left.” In what appears to be a related development, the has been down since last night. Why the mass exodus? According to one source, Rothenberg Ventures is answering questions from the SEC after a lower-level employee alerted the agency to what this person reported as wire fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. This same source says the employee was subsequently fired and is now suing the firm for retaliation. All SEC investigations are . An investigation does not mean that the agency will file a case in federal court or bring an administrative action. Either way, a much thornier issue for Rothenberg Ventures, say numerous former employees, is founder Rothenberg himself, who has sometimes seemed to live more like a billionaire than the manager of a modest venture fund — spending lavishly to attract moneyed individuals as investors and, over time, growing increasingly focused on becoming as famous as some of them. It all began as a , proof that the American Dream can still come true. Rothenberg, an Austin native who says he comes from humble means — “no one in my family has any money,” he once told us — was smart enough to nab undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford, then bootstrap a real estate fund with his brother before moving on to Harvard to secure an MBA. Soon afterward, inspired by business leaders he had met while at Stanford, Rothenberg planted himself in San Francisco and got down to the business of trying to shake up the stodgy venture industry. Step one involved raising a $5 million fund from “ ,” as reported in a Bloomberg story about Rothenberg last year. His timing was ideal as these things go. In 2012, the market was in the middle of a three-year upswing, following the financial crisis of late 2008. Some newer faces were also beginning to gain prominence in the venture industry, along with the trust of so-called limited partners — the individuals and institutions that fund venture firms. Rothenberg is also a natural salesperson, and, as such, quickly evolved his pitch for Rothenberg from yet another seed-stage fund to a thought-leading outfit willing to make big bets on virtual reality before most people in Silicon Valley saw it as a major opportunity. Indeed, by late 2014, Rothenberg Ventures — whose more garden-variety bets include the clothing company and the floral delivery startup — announced it was launching a startup accelerator, River, that planned to provide $100,000 in seed funding to virtual reality companies expressly. Among its bets was , which makes an eye-tracking head-mounted display and went on to raise an Series A round earlier this year. But employees say that as the firm grew, so too did Rothenberg’s spending, and not merely on their paychecks. Among the expensive ways that Rothenberg found to market the firm to prospective limited partners, he race-car driver Collete Davis and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars more to maintain and transport her race car to events. Another $200,000 reportedly went toward a suite at the Super Bowl that was meant to woo investors. Rothenberg Ventures — which counts many people in tech and finance as backers, including Jeff Seibert, a former head of product at Twitter, and Michael Cronin, founder of the private equity firm Weston Presidio — also inserted itself increasingly into celebrity circles, say employees, including buying tickets to the Golden Globes, actor Chace Crawford’s 30th birthday party in West Hollywood and spending unsparingly to a for Coldplay. Says one source, “Mike wants to be famous.” They say he began to live as if he were, too, with many other examples of seemingly out-of-control spending. Among them, says one source, Rothenberg had hired up to three executive assistants at one point. He also employed a personal assistant for himself and a private driver. Further, employees say he refused to fly coach and instead maintained a $2,000-per-month membership with the young, subscription-only airline service . They also say Rothenberg began to spend an inordinate amount of time managing his reputation, as questions began to surface around how he afforded it all. When Bloomberg last year the firm’s ability to finance itself, Rothenberg sent two employees to SFO, purchasing them airline tickets so they could head to airport newsstands and buy copies of the issue in hopes that it wouldn’t be as widely read. All the while, Rothenberg was hiring, employing up to 60 people across Rothenberg Ventures at one point. For a firm that manages hundreds of millions of dollars, that wouldn’t be a startling amount of overhead. But Rothenberg Ventures has raised $47 million across four funds dating back to 2013, according to . Given that firms typically collect 2 percent of what they raise in management fees, that would leave just $940,000 per year for Rothenberg’s entire operation. In fact, most funds of a similar size are run by two or three people. What happens now is anyone’s guess, including whether Rothenberg will be forced to sell any stakes in the company’s to a secondaries specialist. When we asked a founder of a top secondaries shop for more information today, the executive declined to provide any information, saying only that Rothenberg Ventures “has been super nice to me.” Certainly, while employees paint a picture of an overly ambitious founder who paid too little attention to his firm’s finances, many outsiders like Rothenberg and have benefited richly from Rothenberg Ventures’ generosity. Among its most popular events is an annual at AT&T Park, where the San Francisco Giants play. In April of last year, the outlet Recode it to a scene lifted from “Silicon Valley” after the HBO show opened its , two weeks earlier, with a scene at the baseball park. Employees say Rothenberg loved it.
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The business side of the Karma reboot
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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In 2009, I went to what was probably the saddest auto show Detroit has ever seen. It was the January after the economy collapsed and auto makers were teetering on the edge of going bust. But there were a couple of bright spots in the hall filled with smaller car companies, where Tesla and Fisker Automotive both had vehicles on display. (There was also a Chevy Volt in the bigger hall.) The Fisker Karma was a plug-in hybrid luxury car with a high-tech solar panel on the roof. But if it was tough for the largest auto manufacturers in the world in the years that followed, it was really tough for a new car company to launch. Fisker Automotive raised $1.3 billion and made almost 2500 Karmas before ceasing production and then declaring bankruptcy in 2013. In February 2014, Chinese industrial conglomerate bought Fisker Automotive for . (It had purchased EV battery maker A123 Systems, which had also filed for bankruptcy, in 2013.) Company cofounder Henrik Fisker had already left, so the new company was rebranded as Karma. It made use of that billion-dollar investment by updating the technology of its new car, the , while retaining the crash-tested body of the Fisker Karma. “It gave us a huge jump on relaunching the car,” said Jim Taylor, Karma’s chief revenue officer, in a phone interview. “It’s a proven design that allowed us to make minor changes to it without huge risks.” Karma kept a low profile on purpose while developing the new car. “We wanted to wait until we had a production plan rather than setting off huge fireworks without anything to show for a long time,” Taylor said. The company is pursuing a low-key approach overall; the Revero is a niche product, so production volume of the premium sedan at its southern California facility will be low. Despite the anticipated reduction in costs of batteries and electric vehicle production over the past few years, “it’s still costly,” Taylor said. “[In the premium segment,] you have a better chance of recouping costs.” He also noted that cars like the Revero are an emotional purchase, not a practical decision. Often, cars in this segment are being added to a personal fleet of vehicles rather than being used as primary transportation. Karma is staying quiet on the details of the new powertrain and software in the , which will be revealed when the car is shown at an event on September 8. This launch has been the company’s focus up to now, with US deliveries to begin in the first quarter of 2017 and sales in Europe and China on the horizon. And there’s another car on the drawing board and very deep under wraps: “We can’t be a one-car company,” Taylor said.
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The art of interviewing 10x engineers
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Elisa Schreiber
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Today’s employees are being pursued by large technology companies and startups alike, making recruiting top talent highly competitive and difficult. Companies looking to gain a competitive recruiting edge need to create a thoughtful interview process that sets their organization apart and focuses on how candidates will perform and grow in the company. Greylock Talent Partner Dan Portillo sat down with Twitter Head of Revenue Engineering Wade Chambers to outline the best interview process to attract and retain talent. To find and retain the best teams, hiring managers should evaluate candidates on a more personal level by exploring their level of curiosity, applied intelligence and work values. Oftentimes, recruiters make the mistake of putting technical competency above all else during the recruitment process. While technical understanding is important, it’s not always the best indicator of how well a candidate is going to perform and grow in the organization. In an effective interview, the goal is to assess the candidate’s self-awareness while trying to understand their own strengths, and helping them better understand the company and the open role. Moreover, reference checks can be the most important part of the process. They uncover previous responsibilities and help determine what kind of environment has shaped the candidate’s most and least successful work in the past. They help the hiring manager understand how well the candidate takes feedback, if the candidate is open to taking on new challenges, and if any mentoring or coaching is needed. Recruiters and hiring managers should have open conversations about the candidate’s skills and how their skills will translate to the needs of his team. Lastly, culture fit is key to an employee’s retention and long-term career at a company. Culture fit is not about finding the perfect person, but finding someone who aligns with the company values. For cultural fit, I look for people who have similar values as the organization,” says Wade Chambers. “They value learning. They value growing. They value the struggle. They value the lessons learned that come from that. They value being able to lift where they stand and drive things forward.” [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/278682473″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
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Genesis owners can now start their engines with Amazon Alexa
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azHf-sKjIB8] Amazon’s Alexa skill set continues to grow, and owners of the Genesis G80 and G90 from Hyundai’s standalone luxury car brand are the latest to benefit. Genesis now uses lets Amazon Echo, Tap, Dot and Fire TV owners use voice commands to remotely start their engine, set climate control, lock and unlock doors and honk the horn or turn on the lights, all from the comfort of their own home. The Amazon Alexa features is available today, unlike similar Alexa skills in the works from other luxury carmakers ( ). G90 owners also get a free Amazon.com Gift Card they can use towards the purchase of an Amazon Echo, in case they want the voice commands but don’t actually have the hardware to do it. To ensure not just anyone can issue voice commands to your ride, you have to log into your Genesis Connected Services account inside the Alexa app to get this working, and Alexa will ask users for their Genesis PIN to make sure they actually should be able to do things like unlock the car or start the engine. Connected services from Genesis are included free for three years for new car buyers, and also include things like automatic collision detection and emergency roadside assistance. Alexa skills are still limited to commands issued by home-based devices to the car, and not in-car control, which remains a dream just out of reach for me.
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Devin Coldewey
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Realizing the potential of drones, yet preserving our privacy
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Brian Wynne
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Searching for a new home in a different city is hard, especially if you want a sense of the neighborhood and a true picture of what prospective properties look like. Wouldn’t it be great to have a close-up view of that seemingly perfect house on the market from all angles, as well as a bird’s-eye view of the yard? Good news: Drones are making that possible. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amazing potential of these flying robots (or, as industry folks like to call them, unmanned aircraft systems [UAS]). With drones, a groom can get the perfect group shot of his wedding party; a coach can closely monitor the progress of their athlete as she races a marathon; emergency responders can survey larger swaths of territory during disaster relief efforts; and a farmer can monitor crops in a remote corner of their land. Drones, much like smartphones and tablets before them, have the potential to revolutionize our lives in many ways. However, as with any new technology, some people have concerns. In the case of drone technology, one we hear often is the possible invasion of privacy. That’s why stakeholders from the UAS industry, civil liberties organizations and government agencies have been working together to help facilitate the safe, responsible and ethical use of drones, while still supporting the growth and development of this cutting-edge technology. In February 2015, President Obama directed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to convene a multi-stakeholder process to develop a set of best practices for privacy, accountability and transparency regarding both commercial and recreational UAS use. In other words, create guidelines for “neighborly” drone use. Together, we have worked to do just that. After months of discussions, this collaborative process resulted in a consensus set of that balance people’s rights to operate drones with all of our rights to privacy. These best practices represent clear, common-sense guidelines for anyone wishing to operate a drone, from a general hobbyist to an entrepreneur with an innovative business model. The guidelines discourage drone operators from invading people’s personal space by flying without permission over private property. They encourage those using UAS technology to not collect or record unnecessary information and to ensure that any data collected is used only for its intended purposes. Importantly, the best practices also promote transparency of usage — tell those around your drone that it is there and why. These best practices complement existing UAS privacy recommendations already developed by and for government agencies. Additionally, they provide a streamlined set of federal recommendations to commercial and recreational drone operators. It is estimated that , and already by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly. Now that the FAA has finalized long-awaited for small, commercial UAS, which will take effect on August 29, even more businesses will be taking flight. The time was clearly right for these guidelines to be created and we encourage all drone operators to adopt the recommendations we set forth. We can all agree that privacy must be protected without stunting the growth of the still-nascent UAS industry, just like many other technologies before it. Clear, consistent, national guidelines such as these are critical for the timely and safe integration of drones into the national airspace and unlocking the economic benefits of the technology. An by AUVSI found the industry is projected to create more than 100,000 jobs and provide more than $82 billion in economic impact in the first decade following UAS integration into the national airspace. These best practices are not the end of our collaboration. By continuing to work together, civil society, government and industry can ensure that civil liberties are protected, while taking full advantage of the economic and societal benefits that UAS offer.
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Dexter, the betaworks-backed platform for building bots, raises $2.3 million in seed
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Jordan Crook
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, the company that helps people build integration-based apps, has today . The funding round was led by Rakuten Ventures, with participation from Social Starts and betaworks. Dexter lets developers build integration-based apps without all the messy work of building the actual infrastructure. Using plug-and-play blocks, for integrations like email, Slack slash commands, and FB Messenger, developers can set up bots that alert them of the weather, sports scores, or whatever the heart desires. For example, creative agency created a FB Messenger chat bot that lets you interact with a robotic Donald Trump, ready to answer your questions with actual quotes. It’s called . Another fun one is this from . Since Dexter is an open platform, all of its users benefit from the work of a single developer. Folks can build out modules that don’t exist, or simply use existing modules to develop their own integration. Dexter originally launched out of betaworks’ most recent Hacker-In-Residence program almost a year ago. The company has since seen users send over 1 million messages on the platform. Founder and CEO Daniel Ilkovich says that Dexter’s greatest challenge is keeping up with existing (and always evolving) messaging platforms like Slack and Facebook Messenger, as well as building tools for writers in a space that has traditionally been dominated by developers. You can check out Dexter for yourself right .
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Goodbye, Gawker
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John Biggs
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While the fate of Gawker is still unclear – last-minute Hail Mary media saves are the norm when it comes to online properties (even if it does ) – what is clear is that Gawker as we once knew it is dead. The current staff probably won’t stick around only to fall under some less beneficent ruler and Univision doesn’t want what is perceived as a hive of snark and villainy. You don’t buy a business with a lawsuit hanging over it, especially if that lawsuit is bankrolled by a shark with legs and Hulk Hogan. I’m here to bury Gawker, and to praise it. “The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones,” wrote the bard. And Gawker, for all its faults, all of its obscenity, and all of its mistakes, did good. What few understand is that Gawker defined the modern media landscape. Everything from Huffington Post to the tendency for CNN to post stories titled “Are these the best airline meals?” and “Blake Shelton apologizes for tweets” can be traced back to Gawker’s decision not to play by any sane rules of rational discourse. I was there at the creation, as it were, and worked on Gizmodo while Gawker was coming up as a New York gossip site. Celebrity sightings were given extra frisson thanks to instant messaging and Gawker humor redefined the language of service journalism. Gawker changed political reportage to a degree unmatched by Strunk and White. Gawker broke language and put it back together again and our children are currently the beneficiaries of Gawker’s cynicism, humor, and suspicion. Gawker tore down seriousness and stiffness and created a world in which the U.S. Presidential candidates duke it out over Twitter instead of the Washington Post. They built a world in which the embargo, that benighted informational spigot, has been destroyed replaced by the well-placed leak. Gawker writers skewered the , , and the . Gawker begat Gizmodo begat Wonkette begat Valleywag and everywhere a Gawker writer went, the walls of tradition were assailed and sometimes fell. I still remember how Mike Arrington used to rail about Valleywag as if affable Owen Thomas were some kind of barbarian. This pearl-clutching and, later, Thiel’s mad quest were exactly what Gawker wanted – a reaction and some kind of change. No one else will shake the crown of power in the same way and Gawker’s antiseptic cleared the old wounds to make way for better writing, better thought, and a better world. Gawker did plenty of stupid things. The Hulk Hogan sex tape was just one of many feuds its writers had with the world and but it was their ultimate undoing. And I’m sad it had to happen this way. Gawker did these things because it had to. Gawker was a child of the post-dot-com boom, born in an era when old norms were imploding weekly and disruption became something more than just a rumbling of the bowels. You can laugh all you want, you can dance in the streets, you can say “Good riddance” but remember this: Gawker gave you exactly what you wanted and now you can’t get enough. You won’t pay for content and you expect it to be titillating, funny, and full of gossip. You complain about PR embedding itself in the news cycle yet you use the tools Gawker perfected to launch your products and make millions. And, before you congratulate Thiel for bringing down a pesky media property staffed by bright young things, remember: while he’s not the first titan to crush an ant underfoot, his cruel precedent is dangerous to us all. You’re next. Gawker begat modern media. Enjoy.
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Google will soon open a dedicated space for startup developers in San Francisco
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Frederic Lardinois
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Google today that it plans to set up a new space for developers and startups at in San Francisco, just a few blocks from its main San Francisco office on . The idea here is to provide a 14,000 square-foot space (which accounts for about one floor in the building) for the next class of Google’s equity-free and to offer an event space for , , , and . Dropcam, which Google acquired back in 2014, already has some office space in 301 Howard, but as far as I can see, the company doesn’t currently lease any other space in the building. “This dedicated space will enable us to regularly engage with developers and serve their evolving needs, whether that is to build a product, grow a company or make revenue,” the company writes in today’s announcement. The exact details about the project remain sparse and Google says it will share more details at an event in the coming weeks. The Launchpad Accelerator has 50 alumni in India, Indonesia, Brazil and Mexico already and a Google spokesperson told us that the company hopes that this space will help “bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and startups from emerging markets around the world to understand their local/global challenges and share resources.” The next Launchpad class will feature over 20 teams and the three-month program includes a two-week bootcamp at Google HQ. It’s worth noting that Amazon’s AWS unit also runs a similar space on in San Francisco where it, too, offers training and one-on-one help. Similarly, Microsoft’s space in San Francisco is also open to developers who want to know more about its cloud services, platforms and devices.
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Twitter is introducing a quality filter to clean up your notifications tab
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Romain Dillet
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Twitter just unveiled that will let everyone filter low quality notifications from bots and spammers. Twitter has had in the past, and the company is now taking actions to make it a more welcoming place. Twitter is wording this new quality filter as a tool to hide notifications from bots and duplicate tweets from spammers. But it could also be a way to prevent harassment from Twitter trolls before making a decision on an account ban. If you want to activate this new filter, go to the Notifications tab in the Twitter mobile app, hit the Settings button and turn on “Quality filter.” Two simple settings to give you better control over your Twitter experience. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) The company doesn’t say much about the algorithm behind this filter. “When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior,” Emil Leong on the Twitter blog. This filter won’t affect your timeline as you’ve chosen to follow the people who appear in your timeline. Similarly, you’ll get notifications from people you follow or people you’ve recently interacted with. This is a good move from Twitter. Twitter is a giant, open community, and without these tools, it could quickly turn into a hostile community. In other words, humans suck sometimes, and there are too many bots on Twitter.
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Reverie Classic is a crowdfunded watch with some beautiful bones
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John Biggs
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There are two kinds of crowdfunded watches – fashion accessories and real efforts at classical design and workmanship. Thankfully the holds the latter place. The Classic is made by Samuel Tay who previously crowdfunded and built the a handsome, nautical-themed automatic that did quite well. The Classic costs $350 and runs a Miyota 8218 movement – bog standard for this sort of watch. What I like – and why I’m featuring it here – is the throwback design and classic face combined with a nicely decorated automatic movement. All of these together make a delightful umami for the watch lover’s soul. The face is patterned with a guilloche, that is carefully etched with thin lines that catch the light and give a brightness to the face it wouldn’t normally have. This sort of decoration is complex and expensive and was originally designed for improved readability on old pocket watches. The blued hands are a bit anachronistic – hands are usually a little more sinuous than these broad arrows – but, for the piece, they work. There is also a day/date window and a classic signed crown. In all you get a really interesting package that makes for a compelling and quite striking watch for formal wear and, thanks to the classical throwbacks, is truly timeless. That it has a display back showing a slightly decorated movement and skeletonized winding weight is gravy. A watch like this isn’t truly high-tech but the fact that Tay was able to manufacture something like this using modern methods and at an acceptable price point certainly is. Like and , these boutique, small batch watches hit all the right notes and are affordable for those who might be getting tired of Android Wear or WatchOS. They’re well worth a second look. [vimeo 177001941 w=640 h=360]
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Startups will overtake enterprises in the new AI ecosystem
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Hossein Rahnama
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Artificial intelligence pops up as a buzzword every few years, but it has never moved beyond novelty status. This time, though, it is here to stay, and are poised to drive the economy forward. Indeed, we are beginning to see glimpses of it. Newcomer , for example, has gained law firm clients by developing a fully automated “lawyer” capable of of large offices. Developed on IBM’s Watson, ROSS is well on its way to becoming a fixture in the legal industry, automating tasks that could take days or weeks for humans to complete. Popular business messaging app — another startup — is working on incorporating to act as an intelligent personal assistant and answering questions that have been asked before, saving companies time. Now is the time for to truly take off. So what has changed? Limited computing power hindered research in the past, but our current infrastructure and can now support the processing power necessary for to “think.” Processing and memory capabilities, cloud computing, fiber-optic high-speed internet access, widespread Wi-Fi and a connected IoT world all combine to create the perfect environment for to exist — and have staying power. Twenty years ago, only enterprise companies with research and development teams could work on even then, most of the work was primarily theoretical. But now, every entrepreneur has access to quick connections, fast devices and the technological infrastructure built by large corporations. The rise of Facebook and other social media platforms has contributed, as well. Never before have we been able to harvest so much real-time and historical data about how people interact. In the previous millennium, access to this kind of detailed data was unthinkable, much less the idea of it existing largely in the public realm. Because data as a resource is more freely available than ever before, the ability to create an is obtainable by anybody willing to work toward it. The barriers are down. Like the original internet bubble of the 1990s (or even the current shift to mobile), represents a disruptive lane in which small can take the lead and drive innovation. like Microsoft, IBM and Alphabet are among the corporations that have been actively working on for some time. The machine-learning applications these have launched to the public have had varying degrees of success. Watson’s ability to answer natural-language questions makes it for professionals in complicated industries, such as medical and financial. Google’s search has long employed complicated algorithms akin to , and parent company Alphabet is already using its research and development to . Even Facebook is in . While these giants make mainstream media swoon with their platforms, it’s indie developers utilizing these platforms, like those at ROSS and Slack, who create the real innovation. According to Bloomberg, more than in 2014. By 2020, is expected to become a $20 billion business, including cross-platform search, voice assistance and proactive support. Gartner predicts 85 percent of customer interactions be . When we start seeing the disruptive technology come out of the industry, it emerge from the smaller players using the tried-and-true platforms in , focused ways. But while to capture the market, that doesn’t mean the larger corporations don’t have a role to play. They act as infrastructure providers, similar to the way cable companies have served as the foundation for to build and innovative services after the emergence of the internet. Success be with the that leverage technology for specific verticals, such as agriculture, manufacturing or insurance. may be able to provide established insurance companies like State Farm, Allstate and Farmers with technology that allow them to become more proactive in their policy planning. Consider a artificially intelligent insurance underwriter that can better forecast natural disasters and accidents, and adjust premiums. accounting and other financial services are sure to follow, as the technology can be used . The predictive decision-making capabilities move beyond just being a cool, novel technology. Even the food supply chain could be managed by . Consider that of the food in the U.S. is wasted. could create an end-to-end farming solution with predictions that would be able to move to Africa what used to be waste, for example. It have a huge impact in terms of how we tackle global hunger and famine issues. are already at the cusp of impacting agriculture. Consider the , a startup’s creation that pinpoints weeds. Instead of spraying an entire field with weed killer, the machine identifies weeds and kills them with precision. This not only takes the place of time-consuming manual weeding (reducing overall operation costs), it also increases yield. Farmers using this technology no longer have to over plant to compensate for lettuce lost by weeds, either. Whether serving as a research assistant supporting a large office, acting as a voice-activated resource in complicated medical procedures or proactively maintaining itself, is quickly becoming a reality. Like previous iterations of the internet and computing technology, the revolution reward players who learn to use it to their advantage. play a role as a fundamental predictive enabler to help us solve large-scale problems, and are poised to lead the way.
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Why founders should care where their VCs get their money
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Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson
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Fundraising for a startup is a notoriously stressful process. Vast amounts of ink have been spilled dissecting every aspect of what works when pitching a venture capitalist, and there are countless out there that promise to help entrepreneurs close deals. But for all the attention paid to venture capitalists, and for all the energy expended on getting inside heads, little attention has been paid to limited partners (LP) — the behind the that makes the venture world go ‘round. In other words, LPs are where VCs get . LPs come in all shapes and sizes: one person writing a check for tens of thousands of dollars, sovereign wealth funds writing checks for $100 million or more, family offices and “institutional LPs” — endowments, foundations, pensions and managed assets such as banks, fund of funds, insurance companies and corporations. Getting the right investors on board can play a pivotal role in a startup’s success. The reality is that without venture capital , most startups would remain stagnant, and without LPs, VCs wouldn’t have the to invest in those startups. Therefore, while one of the least talked about parts of the tech ecosystem, LPs play an essential role in helping to drive the engine of innovation. It’s also important that understand how venture finance works, at all levels, if they are going to depend so heavily on it. This includes getting to know LPs, who may actually be beneficial to startups. The modern venture capital system emerged during the 20th century thanks to the efforts of business titans like Arthur Rock and Laurance Rockefeller, who invested capital in high-risk, young enterprises grounded in science and technology. Since then, we’ve seen venture capital grow and take on new roles. In the last decade, we’ve seen a “value add” trend, where VCs have moved beyond just providing capital to tap networks and provide myriad benefits to the startups they fund. This trend poses the question: Will LPs follow suit? And if so, what unique value will they provide? I believe the answer is yes, and, in fact, they’re already well on way. Many LPs have recently emphasized the word “partner” in “limited partner.” They look to become trusted advisors, not just financial backers. In addition to providing capital, LPs are often able to provide entrepreneurs with another lens into understanding the larger trends in the tech world and investors. Very importantly, some LPs can provide business value by making partner and customer introductions, enabling startups to tap into an entirely different community and network than typically found on Sand Hill Road (or increasingly, South Park). To provide a recent example, , an LP in multiple funds and founded by Alan Feld, has impressively made some 200 customer introductions this year. Because LPs are further upstream in the market, they’ve often built a breadth of relationships that makes a range of introductions possible. These can include business connections for startups as well as connections to other VCs for follow-on rounds and LPs for future GP fundraising. Beyond connections, LPs may provide wider industry insights, distinct perspective and best practices. As investors in a range of funds, vantage point for the industry is at a higher level than others in the industry; thus, they’re able to observe and identify trends, and possess a long-term view that spans decades of information and experience. A diverse roster of VCs and LPs brings a wide range of perspectives to the table, and this knowledge can help startups make more informed decisions. For example, an LP who invests broadly in Europe or China may be able to share information about how fluctuation in those markets could impact Silicon Valley and make business introductions to help facilitate a startup’s expansion into Europe, if that is of interest. Many LPs are also more actively involved by doing direct deals along with GPs. , global LP direct investment and co-investment have climbed steadily since 2009, and for good reason. By investing directly and “doubling down” on companies they believe in, or by co-investing alongside VCs, LPs can boost returns, as well as sector-specific experience. An even better result of this trend is that the relationships between LPs and GPs, as well as between LPs and startups, have grown more intimate. With LPs making direct investments, the line between and LP may be blurring. This means that startups, particularly those at later stages, could have an LP lead next round. That alone is a great reason for to start paying attention to the LP world. Just as entrepreneurs carefully evaluate the history and strength of VCs before accepting term sheets, they can also benefit from knowing the LPs behind the VCs. Entrepreneurs need to know how strong VCs and LPs are because down periods are inevitable, and they need to trust that investors will last through those periods. LPs do not necessarily re-up for every future fund. Therefore, a firm with LPs who are less committed over the long term is likely going to be less successful than a firm with strong and dedicated LPs. A key factor ushering in this new era is the venture capital industry’s movement toward greater transparency. It’s common for startups to discuss the origins of funding. Similarly, we believe that VCs are becoming increasingly open about where they get because they recognize that greater understanding of the entrepreneur-to-LP tech ecosystem will lead to a stronger ecosystem overall. Our favorite, albeit self-serving, example of this came from , co-founder and managing partner of Point Nine Capital, who tweeted, “Do know our secret weapon? We have the best LPs.” In addition, some entrepreneurs who will ultimately benefit from returns, either for financial or moral reasons. A company with a strong moral mission may choose LPs for reasons that have nothing to do with capital, and some VCs and would be curious to know which LPs are required to publish numbers and which are not. If they sell company for a hefty sum of , LPs, as well as VCs, get paid, and entrepreneurs have a right to know who’s receiving the . It’s safe to say that when a startup brings a new investor on board, they aren’t just bringing on those VCs — they are linking themselves to an entire roster of LPs who enable VCs. The fact that LPs are taking a more active role represents a significant opportunity for entrepreneurs who know how to take advantage of it. There’s plenty of insight and value ’ve probably yet to uncover.
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We have an excess of mobile payment apps because of power, not money
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John Mannes
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is up with all the mobile payment solutions hitting the market? Hint — it has almost nothing to do with money. Every week it seems like another retailer, bank, or technology company launches a mobile payments solution. Apple Pay, Android Pay, , Walmart Pay…Pre Pay…Over Pay… …it’s all a bit much. Rather than money or hardware, the mobile payments battle is a fight for ownership of the customer. Retailers care a lot about the top 20 percent of their shoppers. For companies like Walmart and CVS, recurring revenue is worth the extra cost of developing and promoting an app even if and Android Pay end up being the most popular platforms. Retailers have reason to be worried, tech titans have for the better part of the last two decades. It’s a learned animosity and it isn’t going away anytime soon, especially when massive amounts of customer data are at stake. The rise of retailer-branded mobile payments is the side effect of wounds left open back at the turn of the millennium. Growing technology companies like Google made it possible for one-click price comparisons, explains Alex Muller, CEO and cofounder of GPShopper. — the apt early name for Google Shopping — scraped the internet for merchandise, letting Google get out in front of major retailers and threaten them with ownership of customer data. Google makes 97 percent of its revenue from advertising. Ownership of key retail data, control of the search engine direction of shoppers to brands, and domination of advertising is enough to strike fear into traditional retailers. Determined to never loose control of the customer again, companies like Walmart and CVS are stepping up their efforts. Walmart Pay and CVS Pay are not just about mobile payments, they are about creating an all-inclusive shopping tool for incredibly valuable yet vulnerable recurring customers. Our mobile devices are becoming more and more personal to us by the day. Nobody wants the same device that controls their TV to also have their credit card on it. As the use of mobile payments becomes more prevalent, tech companies and retailers alike are racing to own the customer as early in the shopping process as possible. The mobile payment wars have been mischaracterized by many as a zero sum game. However, it’s difficult to have a winner when the players are not even playing the same game. The “Pay” moniker is really a lazy bastardization of multiple technologies. Apple, Google, own their respective devices and for seamless omnichannel purchasing. Their mobile payment services will always win over brand specific solutions because everything about them is better. CVS Pay for example requires users to create an account to access what amounts to a clunky payment experience with a QR code. But CVS isn’t as much selling mobile payments as it is selling a brand. Users can find many traditional brand features in the app like reminders to refill prescriptions, a map to find local CVS stores, a list of ongoing sales, and an online shopping portal. The payment feature is really quite secondary to the other offerings. However, just because there isn’t a zero sum game for mobile payments doesn’t mean there isn’t still a battle over ownership of the customer. While it is true that Apple doesn’t collect specific customer data, they do to transactional data. Simply, transactions than from traditional transactions done at the terminal. Retailers lose almost arbitrarily and Apple gains location data that is aggregated to “improve Apple’s wider services.” Muller explains that in a traditional payments ecosystem, retailers can leverage what’s called “tender steering” to drive down interchange costs. This means merchants can point consumers in the direction of less costly payment services, as the reached between Visa, MasterCard and the Department of Justice. However, if Apple controls the sale, they then potentially benefit from tender steering and siphon off benefits from retailers. The key here is that it’s not so much about the lost money for large retailers . At first, many people think that the rise of retail specific mobile payments is the product of greed, but the reality is that it is about fear. Neither Apple nor Google, the dominant players in the space, charge merchants to accept transactions. Rather, Apple charges financial institutions and Google doesn’t even do that. “How does Apple make money from Apple Pay?” by Wigley & Company Hardware, another scapegoat, has also had a minimal impact. Most large retailers already have payment terminals that can accommodate NFC, and even many small retailers have access to the technology. For big box chains, software updates can present a larger challenge. Giving away control at the point of sale takes a lot of trust and most retailers are just not there yet with major tech companies. A botched software update can cost millions in lost revenue within minutes. Additionally, new technology has a learning curve, especially for chains that have hundreds of thousands of employees — Walmart employs over a million people in the United States. Training employees on mobile payments is a challenge, especially with so many different technologies. In this way, additional mobile payment technologies dilute the customer experience at the same time they dilute the retailer experience. Ironically, , they were industry and brand specific. The universal card didn’t come about for years because of massive security vulnerabilities and a lack of processing technology. Today, the system has flipped. Security is still relevant, but data has become everything. In today’s world, credit cards, loyalty programs and mobile payments are all fueled by data, and the most powerful brands are the ones that own that data rather than simply facilitate transactions. On the current path, stratification of adoption between SMBs and large retailers will continue. Walmart’s obstinance to accept third-party mobile payments doesn’t really matter much for either party. Retail specific solutions for mobile payments will continue to propagate for the fundamental reality that the future role of “brands” is at stake. Technology companies are breaking down barriers for consumers, aggregating information, and producing efficiencies. Retailers are struggling to retain the value of their individual brands in a world with increased transparency, but again this is nothing new — simply a rehashing of battles from the early days of eCommerce.
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The API for absurdity
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David Lee
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Every important technology goes through a hype cycle. You’ve probably seen the Gartner Hype Cycle diagram: inflated expectations, followed by despair and eventually a pragmatic understanding of the technology’s value. World-changing promises tend to turn into mundane reality — if they don’t fall off the roller coaster entirely. Cloud have progressed pretty far through this cycle, with the best of them powering essential business services every day. Still, the “ economy” suffers periodic hype eruptions. One bit of enthusiast rhetoric that concerns me is the “composable enterprise,” a do-it-yourself approach to piecing together entire enterprise solutions. Companies that have built successful businesses around the sale of discrete services that can be plugged into larger applications would like to see this trend carried to an implausible extreme, where enterprises will move from buying software solutions to assembling their own business applications out of myriad and microservices. The payoff is said to come in the form of ultimate, infinite customization. Let’s get real: That is not going to happen. At least, it’s not going to become the norm across the vast majority of enterprises. Most technology buyers, including the innovators, only go DIY with their IT when they believe they have no choice. Their need is for that let them plug holes and fill gaps without having to work too hard. They are looking for the simplest path to getting the results they want. There are exceptions. Uber famously incorporated a selection of premium into its mobile app for functions like looking up your location, notifying the driver to come pick you up and accepting payments. The ability to access third-party software features à la carte is perfect for an innovative business that needs to combine bits of functionality in a way that no one has before, without incurring the risks and costs of maintaining the necessary tech stack. In other words, composition of services can be a big part of what makes a killer app a killer app. While some enterprises are scrambling to foster Uber-like innovation of their own, the needs of businesses whose specialization is not software creation are invariably different. Starting from scratch, a company can piece together a custom call center or CRM that matches its exact needs. On an enterprise scale, that tends to look like reinventing the wheel. Most enterprises are not in just one business, and tend to adopt, rather than create, software. Problems like how to handle customer service calls or organize customer records have been solved over and over again by software companies whose systems address a wide variety of business needs. The typical enterprise buying strategy is to standardize on a technology platform that is the best fit for the lion’s share of their requirements. That doesn’t mean are irrelevant for software adopters, only that assembling a core enterprise system from scratch makes no more sense than trying to build your own car out of nuts, bolts and ball bearings. Smart technology buyers have a bias toward cloud platforms with strong that bridge the gap between the “best fit” and the “perfect fit.” In my work on for a cloud-based communications platform, the most common example I see is customers needing to access data differently than they can through our administrative dashboard. No matter how much we work on making reports customizable, there will always be customers who want to graph the data in a different way or combine it with customer records from another system. Or they might want to be able to send automated SMS text messages, such as shipping notifications, and allow the recipient to reply by text or phone. A software creator is more likely to need discrete services, whereas a software adopter (which is most enterprises) is more likely to need a whole software solution, supplemented by . An enterprise shooting for Uber-like digital transformation might be tempted to tap multiple and microservices to create custom applications, but is much more likely to do so by stitching together a set of best-in-class business software with highly accessible . Somewhere, sometime, I am sure there will be an exception to the rule — an enterprise that pieces together an important application from a grab bag of and does a great job of it. But even that wouldn’t make them a “composable enterprise” unless they start doing it routinely. We can embrace the economy without embracing this delusion. If software is “eating the world,” as Marc Andreessen famously said, cloud are its latest snack. They just aren’t the whole meal.
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Gillmor Gang: Unborn Child
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 26, 2016. Oh no, Volumetrics meets the Beatles in a trip forward down memory lane. Eventually we even discover the chewy center. Plus the latest G3 (below) with Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, Francine Hardaway, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @fradice Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=90831774 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
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What this month’s Jet.com sale means for the future of retail
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Toby Russell
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One in ten retail in the United States –- a projected $373 billion in 2016 -– happens online. Forrester total U.S. online retail will grow to $500 billion by 2020. That number will only continue to increase globally as more businesses take core operations to the web. Retailers grasp the web-focused future of the industry, but the of . to Walmart earlier this month has sped up the shift and validated the online marketplace approach to e-commerce. With the sale of . , traditional retail significantly moves into the business of online storefronts with global reach and locally-sourced logistics. The move by Walmart follows years of trying to compete with Amazon’s e-commerce success fueled by a fundamental shift in consumer behavior toward on-demand quality. More importantly, Walmart buying J and Macy’s decision to in order to boost online operations this month does confirm that the next generation of retail will be dominated by online sales and direct-to-consumer logistics companies. Global retail sectors once defined by brick-and-mortar, face-to-face customer interactions – selling items from electronics to books to automobiles – now need to consider incorporating the online marketplace model originally created by Amazon to differentiate during the dot boom. Next generation retailers will move away from storing goods in numerous local retail stores and into regional distribution centers. Consumers will browse those goods online and have them delivered directly to them, increasingly on demand, with easy return policies. This means less inventory, more selection and lower prices being delivered to an increasingly urbanizing America where retail space costs are rising and storefronts start to not make business sense. This model helped Amazon close to 60% of the U.S. online sales market growth in 2015. Retailers who successfully subscribe to a version of it will be able to capture some of that online sales market share. Retailers who don’t entertain adopting the model risk fading away completely. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Amazon, . and other leading online-first retailers create and continue to improve purchase-to-delivery models to reduce backend friction. The resulting supply chain efficiency delivers consumer access to goods at consistently lower costs. In order to succeed in this new environment, new, legacy and smaller companies alike will need to move beyond traditional sales to provide convenient, reliable and on-demand online service to customers looking for their next pair of shoes, suit, headphones – even their next car. Consumers with access to the web can search, find and purchase products from anywhere. They can use the internet and their own connected mobile devices to read product information, survey options and complete purchases. And third party review sites like Yelp and testimonials on company websites and consumer message boards enable shoppers to hold retailers accountable better than ever before. In the near future, retailers will need to incorporate consumer freedom into their sales models to meet the customer whenever, wherever to complete an online sale. Driving down the costs associated with buying and selling allows these retailers to spend more on technologies that will connect suppliers with buyers and shorten the distance between point of sale and delivery. A technology-powered focus on finding new products and securing logistics will allow online-focused companies to win over today’s device-wielding customers. Retailers should use the web to target consumers who care less about who delivers the goods, and more about their price, quality and convenience. Facebook did not create social networking. Mark Zuckerberg and his team created technology to do it much better. That’s what legacy leader Amazon and relative newcomer . have done for retail. They have built web-based models that cut costs for buyers and sellers. Models that other retailers can riff off of. Online marketplaces that allow consumers who value quality and convenience above all to search for goods and services they need from the comfort of anywhere. Walmart took note of . ’s prowess and scooped up a leading e-commerce platform that will help define how the company, and retailers in general, do business moving forward. Online, on-demand and on a consumer’s device screen.
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Weekly Roundup: Zero-day hacks rock Apple, WhatsApp changes privacy policy
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Anna Escher
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August, the weekend of months. This week a zero-day hack rocked Apple, WhatsApp announced a major privacy change and Tesla announced a new model that takes Ludicrous Mode to the next level. Would you rather get the Weekly Roundup in your inbox? Hackers are . The latest example was an Apple zero-day hack targeting activist Ahmed Mansoor that employed not one but . The investigation suggested these were the work of a shady cybersecurity company, and the software may have been used for years by governments looking to compromise political targets. So, if you haven’t done so yet, update your iOS devices to 9.3.5. WhatsApp came out with a huge shift in its privacy policy. The Facebook-owned messaging app will now . You have a few options: stop using WhatsApp, or take advantage of the partial opt out the app is offering users for a short period of time. Here’s a step by step on Google announced a major change to its search results. The company will start , by ranking them lower in search results. These are ads that appear right when you open a site, take over the whole page and have the smallest possible button for dismissing them. Good riddance! Can Apple social? that may be similar to Snapchat. There’s no mention of ephemeral content, but the app is supposed to be easy to use with one hand for video recording, and mentioned filters and drawing functionality. Tesla isn’t slowing down. The company’s after Elon Musk teased an announcement on Twitter, and then revealed a shiny new model. that is boosting Ludicrous Mode up by 0.1 second 0-60 mph time. Tesla’s new Model S P100D adds range and cranks Ludicrous Mode up a notch http://tcrn.ch/2c4pgop Posted by on Tuesday, August 23, 2016 Uber was just . A much lower profile company called NuTonomy launched the world’s first self-driving taxi as its autonomous vehicles hit the roads of Singapore. The three-year-old company had been privately testing self-driving cars in Singapore since April. Uber, What’s really going on at Hyperloop One – the futuristic transportation system proposing to shoot humans from point A to B at 750 miles-per-hour? (Besides a leadership shake up, lawsuit, countersuit and $80 million in funding.) The company is still in its early stages, but is – if the company can bring itself up to speed. For the first time, , Proxima Centauri. Proxima b is officially the closest exoplanet to Earth, but what’s important about this is that it’s at the right distance from its sun to support liquid water…and potentially alien life. Welcome to the neighborhood, Proxima b! This artist’s impression shows a view of the surface of the planet Proxima b orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. . It’s available for Google’s own Nexus devices (the Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player), the Pixel C tablet and the General Mobile 4G. The most apparent change is in the notifications system, with a closer look to Google’s Material Design guidelines. Y Combinator held its Summer 2016 Demo Days and , consisting of presentations from startups ranging from farming drones, autonomous security guards to next-gen tampons. In-flight VR entertainment and security guard drones were amongst our top pics for the Gunshot detectors, sales team analytics and credit reports for immigrants were some of . Harvard Business School students are taught about the art of venture capital. Among one case study the class learned last year was in fact , founded by a HBS graduate and .
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Tech and Trump
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Jon Evans
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I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending to be unbiased. I think exactly what you’d expect a Canadian who lives in San Francisco to think: …But my search for an answer has led me to the uncomfortable sense that the tech industry is partly responsible for Trump’s support. There exists a popular narrative that Trump’s support consists largely of white men from the so-called flyover states who have been left behind by our changing economy. It turns out this is not necessarily the case: Trump leads Clinton w/those making 100K+, she leads with those making below it: — andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) …but I do think it’s fair to say that his is a campaign driven by fear. (If you would question that, go .) The cited fears seem truly bizarre, however, to anyone actually conversant with the facts; violent crime is over the last 20 years, the number of illegal / undocumented immigrants has since Obama took office, Americans are to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist, etc. So what are Trump and his supporters really so afraid of, exactly? The easy left-wing answer is “women and dark skin,” and there’s some truth to that, but not everyone who supports Trump is racist or misogynist. (Though they do tacitly accept the support of those who are.) Yes, many Trump supporters live in a bubble wherein the other side is so demonized that Hillary seems like Satan in human flesh; but the demonization of those with whom you disagree is a pan-American phenomenon, not a right-wing one. Yes, fears of a entrenched parasitical ruling class, one shared among Trump and Sanders supporters who had little else in common, seem . But I think there’s more to it than that. Here’s my theory. A lot of people who support Trump aren’t really afraid of crime, or immigrants, or women, or Muslims, or The Establishment, or even higher taxes. They blame those targets for a much deeper, inchoate fear: a fear that their world is slowly being taken away from them; the fear their future belongs to others. I submit that this very message is one — inadvertently! — promulgated by the tech industry, more loudly with every passing day. To an extent this is inevitable. The tech world embraces change, especially ever-accelerating change; to the rest of the world, change means uncertainty, which means anxiety and fear. This is especially true of the unknown — and to most people, technology is already indistinguishable from magic. Every time an ordinary user upgrades their smartphone, every time they see a Tesla in autopilot mode or another movie featuring an instant Internet zillionaire — every time software eats another morsel of their world — they are reminded that they are muggles, and that the Ministry of Magic is growing stronger ever day. Some people respond by trying to break into tech. Hence a lot of the we’ve seen of late. Others respond by rejecting all forms of change: “some men just want to watch the world burn.” Including young men who, ironically, spend a lot of their time . After all, it’s not like people frightened by technological change don’t like technology. Pierre Trudeau, when he was Prime Minister of Canada, once to an American audience: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” The tech industry is becoming that elephant to more and more people, on . I’ve been arguing for some time now that a world devoured by software , where wealth and success follow a power-law distribution, rather than a bell curve or a straight line — a world of rising inequality, of 20% haves and 80% have-nots. I may well be wrong! …but even if I am, I think it’s fair to say that this is a thing of which many people are frightened. Especially relatively well-to-do middle-class white American men, who were, as a class, by far the greatest beneficiaries of the old order of things. While technology mints millionaires, they’re struggling to hold on to what they have, against a rising tide of baffling change. What’s sad is that many of them are better positioned to surf it than most, thanks to their pre-existing advantages; but they’re too frightened to try. Never mind Trump’s offhand asides about shutting down the Internet and requiring Apple to manufacture iPhones in the USA. What he’s really about is pushing back the great wave of change which his supporters feel threatened by. To them it apparently feels like a tsunami. That includes social change, cultural change, immigration, and globalization, yes — but it would take a blind fool not to identify technology as the proximate cause of much, if not most, of this wave.
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Blendle clocks up 1M signups for its pay-per-article journalism platform
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Natasha Lomas
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Pay-per-article journalism startup , which aggregates the written work of different publishers onto a single, ad-free platform where readers can pick and choose which stories to consume, paying a few cents per article, is touting passing one million registered users. It’s taken Blendle just over two years to amass this many sign ups. The journalism micropayments platform kick-started its attempt to reboot digital media business models in Europe in April 2014, offering an alternative to publishers’ content-gating paywalls. It’s not breaking out monthly active users but managing editor Michaël Jarjour tells TechCrunch that’s now in the “hundreds of thousands”. He adds that conversion into paying users remains unchanged, at 20 per cent. The startup began working with publishers in its native Netherlands and in Germany, before (in ). It’s grown its business by 300 per cent over the past year, and is projecting that users will have read more than 20 million articles on its platform by the end of this year. Jarjour says it remains focused on the latter two markets, with no plans to expand its market footprint further as yet. “The United States and Germany are our largest focus right now. These are tough nuts to crack,” he adds. On the age front, he notes Blendle’s largest age group is now 30 year olds; previously it was 35-year-olds so the platform is touting a readership that’s getting younger. One key feature is the ability of paying readers to get a refund on any story if they didn’t like what they read, although they are required to specify why they want a refund (and presumably refund abusers would soon be kicked off). Jarjour says Blendle’s refund rate is just under 10 per cent platform wide at this point, and a bit lower in the US — a rate he says is “basically unchanged”. Blendle also manages access so if a user pays for multiple articles from a particular publication and exceeds the subscription cost for a particular issue the rest of the content is automatically unlocked. Idea being they won’t be paying more just for the privilege of being choosy. Unlike social services with news streams powered by algorithmic popularity alone, Blendle touts human curation as core to its appeal, employing a team of in-house editorial staff reading content to surface what they deem ‘quality journalism’. However it’s now testing a content personalization feature, called the Blendle Premium Feed, that will push a tailored feed of stories at each user. The feed is being powered by a mix of algorithmic predictions, based on analysis of users’ past behavior and preferences, blended with human selections, via its own in house team. Its editorial staff are being used to identify and flag quality content to supplement algorithmic recommendations — with the aim of avoiding a content filter bubble scenario narrowing the horizons of its readers. The feed is majority algorithmic recommendation, with human choices comprising around three stories per day — as ‘anti filter bubble picks’ — vs around 12 machine selected daily picks. It’s going to be a balancing act for sure, as Blende notes in its announcing the new feature, which it says it’s still testing — adding that the first results are “encouraging”. If your USP is ‘quality not filler’ then applying any kind of filtering algorithm to generate more content in your app is absolutely going to require to a softly, softly approach if you want to retain the readers you wooed with promises of your different approach. So it will be interesting to see how Blendle’s personalized predictions fare. “For the Premium Feed we combine learnings we’ve collected from past behavior and predict how much you’ll like an article based on your preferences (that you tell us), based on what you’ve read before, and based on predictions we make. We make those predictions by analyzing each new story (story type, complexity, feel). Over the past few months editors have been training our algorithms to categorize stories better,” says Jarjour, explaining how the feature works. “We avoid the filter bubble by having editors flag certain stories to be sent to all people. In addition, the signals we use are also optimized for surprise, and not only to what’s most popular or what you’d like the best.” A purely algorithmic recommendation system is not something in Blendle’s “near future”, he says adding: “Human curation will remain a core component. We employ 15 journalists who read a combined 40 hours a day, seven days a week, to find stories that are especially worth reading, but are hidden on paper or behind paywalls currently.” The premium feed is due to be rolled out “in the coming months”.
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Crunch Report | Gasoline is so 2015
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze, Jason Kopek, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Yashad Kulkarni
Joe Zolnoski
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Heres the new Star Wars: Rogue One trailer that just dropped during the Olympics
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Greg Kumparak
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. While most new trailers tend to drop in the wee hours of the morning, Disney just blasted one out right as most people on the east coast were prepping for bed. Thanks, Olympics! Here’s the second trailer for , the first of Disney’s spinoff/origin movies, which is coming out on December 16th — or a little more than four months from now. I’m not going to do like we’ve done with previous trailers because that seems a silly for a prequel (IT WAS TOTALLY NOT SILLY BEFORE, SHH). Instead, my second-by-second thoughts while watching: 0:07: Hey! That’s Saw Gerrera (played by Forest Whitaker), a resistance leader. He’s not new to Star Wars canon — he appeared, albeit much more animated and much less Forest Whitakered, in the Clone Wars series — but he’s new to the movies. Most people won’t know him going into this. 0:30: This is Disney’s subtle way of saying “this is a prequel” without putting the word “prequel” anywhere near this one. 1:03: New robot! That’s K-2SO (not K-250 as people have been getting wrong). He reminds me of a mashup of C-3PO and the that patches up Luke in 1:24: “NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS!” 1:25: Oh hey, wouldn’t you know, EA is already 1:34: DEAR EA PLEASE LET ME SHOOT AT-ATs WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER THANKS 1:39: Hyperdrive in the trailer? That seems like something they could’ve left for a theater-audience-loses-it OH SHIT moment. 1:51: Oh, guess it’s over 1:54: OH MAN IT’S NOT OVER IT’S NOT OVER
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Understanding debt
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Paul McKinlay
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Without leverage, the private equity sector as we know it wouldn’t exist. While some tech execs and VCs recoil at the thought of using leverage, the truth is that the Innovation Economy has accessed debt for more than 35 years. , , and have all made headlines of late by raising enormous debt rounds. This has served to stimulate the thinking of first-time founders in particular: Let me assuage any fears. When starting a company and seeking that first customer, you’re not meant to take on a $1 billion debt financing (and the accompanying terms/bells and whistles) anytime soon. But for mid- to later-stage firms, the macro backdrop has never been better to prudently utilize leverage. “Debt” elicits a broad range of emotions amongst VCs and tech company founders. The “venture debt” moniker is often misunderstood and miscategorized. Simply put, “venture,” in this case, suggests that the capital is being used to fund growth and burn; “debt,” obviously, telegraphs that the capital comes at a substantial discount to the cost of equity and will have to be repaid eventually. As a product, venture debt is not to be confused with senior secured debt provided by commercial banks, which is primarily secured by the cash raised in a recent equity round that’s already on the balance sheet. If used in the right situations and for the right kinds of companies, venture debt is the perfect tool for raising growth capital while avoiding dilution and maximizing the potential financial return of the equity already invested in the business. It is also a very timely tool to finance acquisitions. Many growth-stage software companies have used debt very effectively; , Xactly Software, Maxymiser and all used forms of growth debt to minimize dilution on their path to IPO or exit. So let’s answer the first big question… Venture debt takes on many different forms, just like venture capital. There are the $1 million to $4 million debt financings for early-stage companies that usually come during (or immediately after) a larger equity round; the structure may also have a feature that allows it to convert to equity. One complaint about this form of debt is that some lenders are lending to companies solely based on which VCs are involved, rather than the underlying business itself. If you’ve got the Tier 1 VCs on your cap table, you’re far more likely to get debt (and probably more than you think) than if you have Tier 3 investors or have bootstrapped your business. I agree with : A company should take on debt based on its own market opportunity and creditworthiness, not based on who their VCs are. There are also senior lines of credit, which are secured by accounts receivable, minimum cash levels or the expectation that your VC investors will continue to support the burn in your business. These structures take many forms, and sometimes masquerade as monthly recurring revenue (MRR) lines, based upon the training three months of your business’ recurring revenue. To some, an MRR line looks the same as a non-amortizing term loan — something that bank inspectors traditionally frown upon. In a separate-but-related category is “growth debt,” which can be $5 million-$50 million debt financings that are truly growth capital for late-stage companies with revenue in the $10 million-$100 million range. The answer lies in the sector which you call home, the nature and quality of your revenue and the scale of your business. If you’re a consumer application without a monetized business plan, debt is not a good fit. Nor is debt a great fit, in my opinion, for earlier-stage companies with less than a few million dollars of revenue. Debt becomes a much better fit when you have a high degree of visibility into your revenue forecasts, have proven product-market fit and have achieved scale (as a rule of thumb, generally more than $5 million in annual recurring revenue). As a result of this, debt generally ends being a better fit for SaaS, enterprise and B2B technology and software companies. That said, if your business plan doesn’t pan out, whether you financed it completely with equity or a combination of equity and debt, the business will still hit the wall. I moved to Silicon Valley just under a year ago and in that short time the tone of funding conversations has changed dramatically. Eighteen months ago, Valley headlines quantified the number of newly minted “unicorns.” Today, the chatter is about how venture capital has become tougher to come by and the contraction of valuations for all but the most cherished of unicorns. These are not unsubstantiated claims, either (check out chart from Mattermark). The multiple on revenue upon which public SaaS businesses are valued (a proxy for what the private markets price off of) has nearly been cut in half since early 2014. That means that the dilution that founders, employees and current investors face raising equity today will be higher than expected, even for those businesses that are “shooting the lights out.” Many companies that raised equity 12-24 months ago and are back in market are likely to face a flat or decreased valuation, even if they grew the business. For example, if a company with $10 million ARR raised capital 24 months ago at 8x ARR, they were worth around $80 million and would have had to sell 12.5 percent of the company to receive that $10 million. Now they have $20 million ARR, but valuations are ~4x ARR, the business is still only worth $80 million… despite doubling its ARR. No one likes a “down round,” particularly when things are going well. This scenario is one where growth debt is a powerful tool. Whether you delay or even skip an equity financing altogether, this form of capital provides your business the financial runway required to wait for more favorable equity valuations, without suffering anywhere close to the same amount of dilution. As you’d see in an equity financing, with its ratchets and liquidation preferences, there are many components to a debt deal: term of the facility, whether the principal amortizes or not, interest rate, warrant coverage and what kind of covenants come along with it. And even that gets confusing, as some covenants are transparent and discussed up-front, while others are of the sneaky-hidden type, such as sudden amortization triggers, material adverse change (MAC) or “investor abandonment” clauses. If you have no existing debt and you’re securing a line of credit or senior loan, expect single-digit interest rates. These facilities are fairly cheap and carry lower (or no) warrant coverage. They will also have more restrictive rules around the use of capital, and be prepared for the available portion of the line to be lower than your cash on hand. If you’re seeking a larger amount of debt, or a subordinated facility (as in a senior bank line combined with a junior venture debt tranche), you can expect all-in cost of the junior debt to be low double-digit with higher warrant coverage. In general, you should be able to attract more capital this way (we see anywhere from 25-75 percent of annual recurring revenue, for example). The structure will certainly be more flexible and longer interest-only periods. In either case, your cost of capital is substantially lower than the 40-plus percent IRR that equity investors seek, with none of the same board roles or budget approval rights that you’d universally see via an equity term sheet. Equity-based venture capital is the most flexible and patient form of capital to start and scale a company, along with the strategic help that comes from a good VC. In the later stages, however, growth debt can be an incredibly impactful, lower-cost source of growth capital. Did I mention it will help you preserve ownership in your company, as well? When you do sell your unicorn for $1 billion, which is of course inevitable, the difference in saving yourself even just a few percentage points in ownership is tens of millions more in proceeds for you and your employees. Given that, debt is worth spending the time to understand.
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Brian Heater
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After China, India looms as Uber’s next battleground
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Ajay Chopra
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Earlier this month the ride-sharing world when Uber announced that it would sell its China business to primary competitor Didi for an ownership stake of 18% in the combined China entity, valued at $35 billion, with While some may focus on , the crux is that Uber was in a no-win situation in probably the largest ride-sharing market in the world, and now it can maintain a stake in that market without the continued financial bleeding it was experiencing ($1 billion in losses per year is nothing to sneeze at when you’re prepping for an initial public offering). Factor in the new regulations Uber was facing coming from the Chinese government that would tilt the scales even further into Didi’s favor, and Uber and its investors are probably more than a little relieved to become passive participants in China—even if it does bruise the ego a bit. Unlike Uber, Didi has been playing out a different global strategy—one of consortium building where products from each member interoperate so that travelers can avail ride sharing across the globe with a native country app, payment, and credentials. Didi seems to be addressing other markets — and has significant investments in all major ride sharing companies: Grab, Ola, Lyft and now Uber! After its experience in China, Uber too may decide that alliances are a better strategy. Or not. The big question that surfaces is aboutUber’s continued rapid growth. Where does Uber go from here, given that it has indicated in the past that international markets are its growth engines? With Didi’s alliance with Ola in India, another massive ride sharing market, the next international battleground looks like India. India reflects many similarities, as well as some differences, with what Uber faced in China. Ola, the country’s undisputed leader, , primarily because it is serving more cities in India and, early on, allowed cash payment, which is generally the preferred tender in India. Uber responded to this and now also accepts cash and expanding its presence. In addition, Uber stoked the competition by giving drivers incentives to join Uber (though these incentives have been recently reduced). As the competition heats up, I predict Uber will battle Ola just as fiercely as it did Didi, and this will come with significant costs to both companies. But, unlike Didi, ; it may have a harder time staving off Uber in India. This gives Uber a small window in which it can establish a decent business that could eventually be profitable. Aside from any one competitor, there is another very distinct hurdle for Uber to conquer in the form of regulatory issues. Uber has faced regulatory issues in the U.S. and China but nothing like they’ve seen in India. While Indian regulators are probably less nationalistic than China’s, India being a democracy, clarity on regulations may actually take longer. For example, regulators in India’s capital city, Delhi, require taxi services to use compressed natural gas (CNG) instead of petrol. If Uber and Ola are deemed to be taxi services (currently under debate) from a regulatory standpoint, the p2p part of ride sharing growth for both may be limited in certain important Indian cities. So how will the ride sharing battle in India ultimately play out? If Uber decides to apply the same dominance strategy in India that it initially used in China, the companies will continue to aggressively compete indefinitely albeit with better prospects of Uber becoming eventually profitable in India than it had in China, or Uber may even make a move to acquire Ola – though anti-trust regulators in India would probably balk at that. Alternatively, Uber could proactively opt to sell its India operations to Ola, take a large stake in the company, and still participate in the India market via the “Ola proxy” without all of the regulatory headaches and months of financial losses. This may not be Uber’s preferred style, but after learning some difficult lessons in China, and with mounting pressure to go public, anything is possible.
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How digital has redefined go-to-market strategy
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Babar Khan Javed
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We are all familiar with , and as disruptors. But how many of you know ? doctHERs is a healthcare company that is empowering women to fulfill their Hippocratic oath in the face of cultural and social constraints that leave many of them otherwise unable to practice medicine after marriage. In conservative areas, female patients often feel more comfortable dealing with female doctors than male ones. The clinics operated by doctHERs provide a medical service with which women feel more at ease. Within its first year, the startup established a collaboration to facilitate care for patients of all primary care diseases by upgrading 800 clinics under , an international social enterprise that manufactures family planning products. Co-founder and chairman , a TED fellow, views the startup as a catalyst for change that corrects two market failures: access to quality healthcare and inclusion in the professional workforce for unemployed, qualified health professionals. By using technology and finding the right collaborations, companies can disrupt new markets, solve customer pain points and distribute value across the chain. Here are the top four marketing principles of today’s disruptors, like doctHERs. By partnering with DKT early on, doctHERs was able to prove their idea and ability to execute, gaining access to several clinics. By partnering with the hygiene/hand wash category team at , the startup accessed additional market entry points and the ability to leverage a respected brand name to further their cause. The successes in doing so led the startup to win the HRH The Prince of Wales Young Sustainability Entrepreneur Prize, awarded by Unilever and the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Similarly, agencies like Lion & Lion recognized early that the barriers to entry and inability to test markets held back major international brands from entering the Southeast Asian region. This is why the direct marketing team at offers companies an end-to-end solution to test the waters with a low cost of entry point. Lion & Lion has helped a multitude of consumer brands like L’Oreal extend their offline strategy online, helping them get listed on all online marketplaces as well as connecting them to distribution partners that are willing to issue purchase orders. In removing the apprehension and costs of go to market with digital, they streamline a brand’s entry into an unfamiliar territory and convert the test into a success story. In doing so, Lion & Lion is taking their value proposition as an agency to the next level, helping brands enter, grow and also advertise. Digital paves the way for a variety of execution channels between intended customer segments. For tax-evading reasons, healthcare providers in developing countries have always been privy to their data and its release. As a nonprofit, doctHERs is incentivized to not only store its customer data efficiently, but also to make sense of it to keep them healthy. It’s incentivized to offer solutions and advice that keep its patients away from the clinic instead of coming back with repeat ailments that for-profit hospitals thrive on. With data, the clinics are able to spot new behavior and scientifically identify trends. As an agency, Lion & Lion helps international brands identify the customer segments in Southeast Asia by consumption patterns, as well as behavioristic composites around their interests. For Raya 2016, they tapped into customer data to decipher that Malaysian citizens that identify themselves as Malay were more inclined toward a particular range of Maybelline. Knowing this, a localization strategy targeted them with Raya-themed discounts and bundles, with which sales for their intended category rose by 20 percent. And it’s not just for one-off campaigns — they’re constantly assessing new opportunities for clients by analyzing category stats, how they are moving in the market, tracking the successes and delivering the right message to the right segment at the right time. Every company claims to be customer-centric; few really are. In many cases, a product is created and then the focus moves to selling it. While this approach may have worked for Apple (to some extent) and Ford (to a large extent), recent trends and fads indicate that the market saturation will not tolerate new entrants that do not at the very least consider need or demand. By focusing on consumer insights, successful market disruptors have blurred the lines that define their industry, redefining the scope of their impact. With their app, was able to be involved after the point of purchase, tracking and rewarding athletic performance of their buyers. As time progressed, the app synced with life insurance providers to offer better policies and terms to Nike’s fitness community. As an agency, Lion & Lion recognizes that online is not always the point of sale, and the consequences for conversions vary with every market, segment and psychographic. Uber is failing in developing markets because of its app-first approach, while Careem is dominating those very markets because of its understanding that not all are ready to order a faceless driver via an app. In a similar manner, digital agencies are now helping their clients convert online traffic into offline footfall as a means of introducing target segments to a fresh category. Patients visiting the clinics adopted by doctHERs can now access female doctors trained at the most elite medical colleges in the region. They also are spared from the long journey to their nearest hospital and the mental anguish that comes from dealing with a poorly trained male doctor. That aside, the participating stay-at-home female doctors offering advice via Skype are, for the most part, offering advice at a fraction of what the patient would pay elsewhere. The power of the internet and other technology that cuts out the middle man has drastically allowed companies to cut costs for their consumers. This is partially why agencies hire short-term staff from GoGet for online-offline campaigns, and why expatriates in Southeast Asia prefer EasyTaxi over regular taxi services in the region. We know from these experiences how much the middle man was taking and how little value we got in return as a result. True, disruptors are met with distrust and disdain by those affected, and the jobs market will adjust with time. Because of the colossal numbers of transactions it makes on a daily basis, can leverage scale capabilities to offer its services for a fraction of what traditional variations would charge — and still make a profit. Agencies like Lion & Lion serve companies within the Southeast Asian region, as well as those eager to enter it. Their go-to-market strategy connects clients to distributors willing to buy goods for as much as 40 percent off the selling price of brick and mortar retailers, while our online marketplace partners offer merchants up to 75 percent margins for the products sold, with inventory selling off in a week, give or take a day. Whether you’re an incubated startup or a growing company, the understanding and application of these principles to your business can drastically determine your ability to disrupt and make a profit. It’s a brave new world, an accepting world — and it’s waiting to be disrupted.
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Having conquered Chess and Go, the robots move to master Foosball
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Devin Coldewey
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We’ve come a long way since the days of selecting a CPU player for the other Pong paddle, tank or hand-to-hand combatant. Now the computers are taking it to us, in meatspace, and seemingly no tabletop activity is safe from their depredations. The latest to succumb to computer domination? Foosball. (Or “table football” as they quaintly call it… over there.) Robotics researchers at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne have , but not because of some deep neural network that has analyzed millions of previous games. In true conquering robot fashion, this system relies on superior speed and strength. “The system is like a bodybuilder with a tiny brain,” explained the project lead, Christophe Salzmann, in an EPFL news release. “It’s a very basic strategy, but it works surprisingly well.” The table is custom, obviously — in fact, you could say that the table the robot. Beneath a camera-transparent “field,” a camera tracks the position of the ball at 300 frames per second. The computer then moves the nearest player into striking range with sub-millimeter accuracy, and a separate motor spins the bar faster than a human, firing the ball off at great speed. A seasoned player will still take it to school, though. The computer doesn’t know any of the tricks of positioning, bank shots, blind spots for various setups or how to read its opponent’s positions and predict its moves. To that end, the team is applying laser range tracking to the opposing team’s handles, which will give the computer a view of the field without having to dedicate cycles to tracking the bars with its camera. This may enable a more sophisticated AI to be built — but the true test will be pitting two Foosball robots against each other in a robot tournament. That’s also in the offing. Really?! The project is ongoing; check out the robot in motion . You can also learn more about the lab’s work at its website, although I have to say I take issue with its logo: a pair of enormous Terminator hands cradling the planet. They’re not even to be on the side of humanity!
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Both Trump and Clinton are taking on carried interest, so why aren’t investors nervous?
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Connie Loizos
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During every U.S. presidential election season, at least one candidate vows to repeal deductions. Meanwhile, venture capitalists do their part and argue against it. The issue is near and dear to their hearts because carried interest treats investment partners’ salary as an investment and not income, taxing it at long-term capital gains rates and not as ordinary income (which is taxed more heavily). Many VCs also believe they deserve the tax break for taking risks and holding on to assets for what often becomes many years on end. The , which represents venture firms’ interests, is very much atop the issue again this election season. It issued a statement earlier today calling Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “misguided” after she presented an economic plan at a manufacturing company in Warren, Michigan that called for the repeal of carried interest. The NVCA also published a release on Monday, after Republican nominee Donald Trump presented a plan in Detroit that similarly suggests doing away with carried interest. It would “threaten [the] entrepreneurial ecosystem,” said the NVCA. Still, you aren’t seeing much outrage on the part of individual VCs, and we have a few theories as to why. Let’s start with Trump, whose tax plans have even top academics confused by what, exactly, he is proposing. (“It’s very hard to figure it out,” said Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner when we called him earlier this week to discuss it.) Part of the problem: While Trump is proposing ending the taxation of carried interest at long term capital gains rates (which are currently around 23.8 percent), and instead proposing it be taxed at 33 percent, which is the highest marginal tax bracket in his plan, Trump has thrown a separate wrench into the works. Specifically, he has said he wants a new 15 percent business tax for members of partnerships and other . This might give VCs reason to cheer, except that the tax is so low that pretty much every business in the U.S. would restructure itself into a pass-through business if it came to fruition, quickly destroying the economy. (Kansas passed a similar law in 2012. Now Bill Self, the head coach of the University of Kansas’ men’s basketball team, who reportedly makes more than $2.75 million a year, pays because he receives the bulk of his annual compensation through an LLC.) A Washington, D.C., tax specialist who asked not to be named calls it “not remotely practical when you consider the deficit challenges going forward. In fact, I don’t see any way for what [Trump] is proposing to be put into place. It’s so far to go from here to there as to render [his plan] little more than an aspirational blueprint.” What about Clinton? She has been clearer about her around carried interest, as well as her plans to tie more attractive capital gains rates to longer holding periods. For example, right now, assets that are held for more than one year are considered long-term gains. Clinton wants to push that out to two years. More, the current long-term capital gains rate of 23.8 percent would only apply to assets held for six or more years. Not last, Clinton says she wants to tax carried interest as ordinary income, and unlike Trump’s top rate, which he has capped at 33 percent, Clinton’s is 43.4 percent. Given Clinton’s lead in the polls, VCs may well grow louder about these aspects of her economic plan as the election nears. As Menlo Ventures managing director (and current NVCA president) Venky Ganesan tells me, “Taking on carried interest interest is a very populist thing. In most minds, it’s associated with hedge funds and private equity funds, which are Public Enemy No. 1.” But Ganesan predicts unintended consequences, saying that just one concern centers on access to capital for entrepreneurs in geographies where there isn’t a whole lot already. “In Oklahoma and Tennessee and other places [that are trying to nurture tech entrepreneurship], people might well say, ‘If I’m going to be taxed as much as a hedge fund, why start a fund? It’s not worth the risk.'” Yael Hochberg, an associate professor of entrepreneurship at Rice University, understands Ganesan’s point, but she suggests that historical concerns over doing away with carried interest — including that costs will be passed on to VCs’ institutional investors in the form of higher fees and higher carry (which in turn may stifle their investment in VC funds) — could be overblown. “Personally,” she says, “I expect the lawyers will simply find a different way to structure VC comp — i.e., partnership agreement revenue sharing arrangements — such that this is circumvented. I’ve spoken to a few lawyers at big shops who claim to already have new structures ready and waiting in their desktop drawers.” Hochberg also notes that while both candidates are taking on carried interest, the GOP is perfectly happy with the status quo, and Republicans currently control both the House and Senate. More, as Hochberg, recalls, according to the president’s and Congress’ , even a blanket increase of taxation on capital gains to ordinary tax rates would result in only $1 to $2 billion per year in additional tax revenue out of $3.4 trillion in revenue collected every year. Put another way, “It’s politically expedient to talk about. But I think there are bigger and better things for the candidates to focus on after the election,” she says. Judging by how quiet is it out there, VCs who’ve been through an election cycle or two seem very much to agree.
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Reddit is currently experiencing a major outage
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Lucas Matney
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I’ve gotten so much work done in the past 90 minutes or so that Reddit has been down. Like it’s almost hard to believe. I returned some calls, responded to a bunch of emails and worked on writing out some thoughts for another story. I did all this while refreshing Reddit’s home page that highlighted the “emergency maintenance” currently occurring over at the site. The “front page of the internet” is currently down across all platforms and it seems this “slight issue” may be a bit of a doozy. Some users are reporting that the home page is starting to spark back on, but it’s still down for this suddenly productive reporter. Identified: We had a slight issue with a routine software upgrade. We'll be back momentarily. — reddit status (@redditstatus) The site RedditStatus.com shows a lot of spiking and tanking going on at the moment. No word on whether this has anything to do with the “algorithm changes” that CEO Steve Huffman highlighted yesterday in a post which I’d totally link to right now if I could, but there’s not much communication coming from Reddit’s end which is frustrating a lot of people online. We’ve reached out to Reddit and will update if we hear anything back.
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The best apps to download before watching the Perseid meteor shower tonight
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Emily Calandrelli
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The Perseid meteor shower, which comes around every year at this time, will peak tonight and early tomorrow. This year’s event is particularly special because astronomers are an outburst of shooting stars at twice the normal rate. The best time to watch the show is between midnight tonight and dawn Friday morning. Before finding a good place to lay down and look up, there are a few apps worth downloading to make your stargazing experience even better. Although, keep in mind, you don’t actually need any equipment or app to enjoy the spectacular light show, just a relatively dark location and a clear sky. But, if you want to know what you’re looking at in the sky, find the point from which the meteors will generally radiate, predict how the sky will change throughout the night or impress your friends by pointing out planets, satellites and the location of the International Space Station — then there’s a few astronomy apps worth checking out. All the apps below were reviewed on an iPhone 5. A great free app that will help you identify stars, planets and constellations is . Like all the other astronomy apps in this article, you can point your phone to the sky in the direction you’re facing and the star-studded sky in the app will move to match it. This helps you identify objects you see in the sky just by comparing it to the real-time star map on your phone. What’s particularly unique about SkyView Free is that it has an augmented reality function that overlays stars and constellations over the sky as seen through your camera, making it easier to match the celestial objects in the map to the real ones in the sky. You can even hover a circular pointer over a star and it will tell you its name, what constellation it’s in and where it will move throughout the night. [gallery size="tc-article-featured-image-wide" ids="1367887,1367880,1367906"] Better yet, look around a bit and find the International Space Station. If you click on it, the app will show you where it’s heading. If it’s above your horizon, you might be able to look up and spot it. If you’re searching for planets, SkyView Free has an “increase planet size” feature that makes it relatively easy to identify where they are in the sky. And, like everything else, if you click on a planet, the app will show you its path around the sky over the course of the day and night. For $2.99 you can get an app with a few additional features. Essentially, you’re paying for the ability to find the point from which the Perseid meteors will radiate, a more visually stunning user experience, an easier way to search and identify objects in the sky and, in some cases, the opportunity to “fast-forward” and watch how the sky changes throughout the night. , (which is free, but the Meteor Shower add-on is $2.99), and are all great and generally do everything mentioned above. However, if I were only going to pay for one app, I would get Sky Guide. The interface here was simple, and easier to use than all the others. The two aspects of Sky Guide that I like the most are the fast-forward function and the search feature. Fast-forwarding at 1000x speed in Sky Guide In order to fast-forward through the night, you need to go to your Menu, select “Time & Date” and then check “Select Time.” Simply go back to your home screen and use the buttons at the bottom to move forward or backward in time. This is useful if you want to know which constellations, stars and planets you’ll be able to see later tonight during the meteor shower. Screenshot of Sky Guide app after searching for Perseids The search feature in the app also works really well. If you want to find the point from which the Perseid meteors will radiate, simply search for Perseids and an arrow will pop up directing you toward the location. However, you don’t actually need to identify this location because the meteors should be visible all across the sky. It’s just interesting to locate because meteor showers are named after the constellations the meteors appear to fall from. In tonight’s case, the Perseids appear to come from the area is the sky near the Perseus constellation. Screenshot of the search function in Sky Guide The search feature can be used to find just about anything else, including planets, asteroids, comets, satellites and the International Space Station. Once you select what you’re searching for, an arrow will pop up, directing you toward its location. Keep in mind that, depending on your sky conditions, it’s unlikely that you’ll find everything in the sky with your naked eye that you can see in the app. Of course the best way to watch a meteor shower is in a dark location away from light pollution while looking at large patch of sky with minimal cloud cover. If you’re serious about finding a particularly dark location in your city, you could get the app for $5.98 ($0.99 to download, $4.99 to upgrade to the Dark Sky Locations feature). Screenshot of the Dark Sky Map in the Scope Nights app The Dark Sky Map identifies locations with high levels of light pollution, which in general, are areas you’d want to avoid if possible. Although you’re still likely to catch a few meteors even if you are located in an area with high levels of light pollution (as long as you have a clear sky), you may just miss the fainter shooting stars. What if the light pollution is too bad or the weather is terrible in your area? Luckily, if you can’t see the meteor shower at home tonight, you can watch it on the .
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Facebook rolls out code to nullify Adblock Plus’ workaround again
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Josh Constine
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Adblock Plus launched a to Facebook’s today that ham-handedly removes posts from friends and Pages, not just ads, according to a statement provided by Facebook to TechCrunch. “We’re disappointed that ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook as these new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages. This isn’t a good experience for people and we plan to address the issue. Ad blockers are a blunt instrument, which is why we’ve instead focused on building tools like ad preferences to put control in people’s hands.” That “plan to address the issue” is coming quick. A source close to Facebook tells me that today, possibly within hours, the company will push an update to its site’s code that will nullify . Apparently it took two days for Adblock Plus to come up with the workaround, and only a fraction of that time for Facebook to disable it. [Update: A source says Facebook is now rolling out the code update that will disable Adblock Plus’ workaround. It should reach all users soon. Update 2 – Aug 12, 4:30am PT: Now Adblock Plus says they’ve pushed ] Update 3 – Aug 12, 10:05am PT: And Facebook has already broken the new workaround from Adblock Plus, which vows to strike back soon. In , Adblock Plus declared “Trampling on users’ free will is not sustainable — even if you’re Facebook”. The company writes “Anger or blame toward ad blockers is misdirected; we merely enforce “the will of the people” (via the open-sourced filter lists)…it’s disheartening that a company like Facebook would abuse everyone’s experience of their site by forcing that experience into a one-size-fits-all, see-the-ads-or-else tube. The internet just doesn’t work that way. At least it shouldn’t. In the meantime we’ll do what we can to keep users in control in the apparently endless loop” The cat-and-mouse game is sure to rage on. these new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages. We plan to address the issue. — Boz (@boztank) On Tuesday, Facebook announced it had blended the HTML of its ads on the web into its content so they’d still appear to users with ad blocking software. The company argued that by providing users with more opt-outs of ad targeting, it was addressing a top concern of ad block users, executing on its mission to connect people to businesses as well as each other, and that it’s wrong to avoid compensating websites for their ad-supported services. Within hours, the leading blocker software company Adblock Plus quickly vowed to crowdsource a workaround from its community. Today it released that update to its filter that it claims once again removes Facebook’s ads. But on August 11th Facebook accused it of ensnaring legitimate content from friends and Pages, and rolled out the code necessary to thwart Adblock Plus’ workaround. The next morning, Adblock Plus pushed a new workaround, but Facebook broke it within hours. Adblock Plus may be at a disadvantage because on some platforms it has to get users to update their software or edit their filter list manually in order to push its next move. Even a once daily update could be too slow. Facebook can unilaterally revise its website’s code for all users without them having to do anything. That means by the time most of Adblock Plus’ users have downloaded the update, Facebook may have already broken it and be one step ahead. Facebook also has a larger financial incentive since it loses more money per ad blocked than Adblock Plus gains. On the other hand, all websites are interpreted by users’ browsers, good giving people strong leverage to control what they see. Meanwhile, Facebook does need to make its ads identifiable to comply with FTC rules about not misleading people. That little “Sponsored” label gives Adblock Plus the scent of what it’s searching for. The battle has reignited the debate about the legitimacy of ad blocking software. Some users view it as a way to keep adtech in check and stop sites from serving them malware or tracking them in ways they perceive to violate their privacy. Others just don’t want to look at ads while they browse or wait for them to load. Opponents of ad blocking software, including social networks and news outlets, insist that it robs product and content creators of their fair compensation. They call ad block developers racketeers who don’t actually care about the user experience since they demand and accept ransom money in exchange for letting a site’s ads pass through their blocker. Some go as far as to equate blocking ads with stealing services. While adtech’s power has dramatically increased over the years, ad blockers are a blunt weapon that hurt the monetization potential of relatively benign sites in order to excise the malware and improper tracking. Neither side is likely to relent, though, so we’re in for a war between Facebook’s elite engineering team and a crowdsourced army of ad blocking hackers.
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise picks up SGI for $275 million
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Brian Heater
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The last decade-plus hasn’t been great for SGI. The company formerly known as Silicon Graphics declared Chapter 11 in 2009. That same year, it was sold to Rackable for a song, with that company somewhat confusingly changing its own name to SGI (short for Silicon Graphics International) during the process. Now former competitor Hewlett Packard Enterprise (which spun out from HP last year) is for around $275 million, a price tag that includes both cash and company debt. That all works out to $7.75 a share. In its current state, the server and high-performance computer maker employees 1,100 people internationally. In a statement announcing the acquisition, HPE stated that it believes the former competitors offer “complementary product portfolios and go-to-market approaches.” The deal, which is expected to close in Q1 of next year (subject to all the standard regulatory caveats), will combine the companies’ offerings into a single portfolio. Here’s SGI CEO Jorge Titinger on the deal: “Our HPC and high-performance data technologies and analytic capabilities, based on a 30+ year legacy of innovation, complement HPE’s industry-leading enterprise solutions. This combination addresses today’s complex business problems that require applying data analytics and tools to securely process vast amounts of data.”
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Simplenote, the planet’s most useful piece of software, is now open source on iOS, macOS and Android
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Devin Coldewey
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If you’re not using , you’re missing out. This… well, simple note app has been a standby and lifesaver for me for years, though occasionally I have worried about its future: Will it survive if , , goes under or gets bought itself? What if the servers go down? Is there a god, and if so, does he or she use Simplenote, too? At least a couple of those worries are alleviated with the news that Automattic is on iOS, Mac and Android. The Windows app was already open, so this doesn’t come as a total surprise, but it’s still good news. . It’s hard to say what could really be improved about the app, at least the functions that I use regularly, but it’s more than possible that it could do those core functions more securely or efficiently. So, code monkeys, get grooming! Notably, the server-side code is being open-sourced, so that part remains in Automattic’s control — though it too may join its friends in FOSSworld in the future. But for now, you won’t be able to totally clone the service onto your own servers. If you haven’t tried Simplenote, you really should. It’s just cloud-synced text documents, and it’s so much simpler and more lightweight than something like Evernote (which daily grows larger and more cumbersome) that I use it for just about everything, from shopping lists to the Great American Novel.
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Zenoti raises $15 million for spa bookings
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Katie Roof
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A cloud-based management platform, Zenoti helps spa chains with everything from billing to inventory management. They aim to create a tailored enterprise software experience for what they believe to be an under-served industry. “Wellness enterprises need an integrated solution to support new business models like monthly subscriptions, online booking/payment and loyalty management,” said Mohan Kumar, executive director at NVP. “Zenoti has proven their solutions work for large chains in the US and Asia.” Zenoti co-founder Dheeraj Koneru tells TechCrunch that the funding will be used to expand to new regions, including Europe. He said the service also benefits consumers because they can now “book their appointments online or through the mobile app.” While there are other software solutions for the beauty industry, the Zenoti team believes theirs is the most comprehensive.
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Deliveroo drivers hold protest in London over possible changes to the way they are paid
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Steve O'Hear
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Just days after , a popular on-demand restaurant food delivery startup in Europe, that it had raised another $275 million in funding, a number of the startup’s self-employed couriers in London have been holding a protest over possible changes to the way they are paid. It’s being that after trialling a new payment model, which Deliveroo claims has been a success, the company will begin paying riders a fixed fee per deliver of £3.75 rather than the current hourly rate of £7 per hour plus £1 per delivery. This has left some of Deliveroo’s couriers unhappy enough to hold something akin to a strike. riders in on strike — Jane Nellist (@janenellist1) That’s interesting, given that the so-called “gig economy” is one that is almost impossible to unionize in the traditional sense, because workers are typically self-employed and don’t have the shop floor to organize on. It’s also unclear how an autonomous group of freelance couriers . Deliveroo drivers don't have a union but some kind of "Deliveroo rebellion" underway in London — Gareth Furby (@GarethFurby) Regardless of the mechanism, Deliveroo says it’s always open to riders’ concerns and continues to listen to its contracted workforce. The London-based startup provided TechCrunch with the following comment: We started trialling a new payment model in London this week, which was designed to enhance flexibility and based on extensive rider feedback. Speaking with our riders and hearing their concerns on the new model is our top priority right now. We’re committed to an open conversation with our rider community as the situation evolves, so we can continue to improve our payment model and delivery experience. Deliveroo is also adamant that under the per-delivery payment model, couriers will still typically be able to earn over £10 during lunch and dinner times, which is when the service sees the most demand. “The 2.2km size of each delivery zone has been designed with delivery distance and time in mind. Following extensive testing, this zone size was found to be the optimum size to ensure that riders could complete 2-3 orders an hour safely,” a Deliveroo spokesperson tells me. Those protesting make the point, however, that since they are freelance they have to swallow other costs such as bike maintenance and things like tax and insurance, meaning take-home pay is a lot less. It’s a story familiar right across the gig economy, such as at companies like Uber, and not peculiar to Deliveroo’s model. Meanwhile, it is also worth pointing out that Deliveroo has 3,000 riders in London, and those protesting were only a small group by comparison. Whether or not that remains the case over the next few days and weeks remains to be seen.
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iTank: “A three-wheeled scooter is the future”
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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The Kickstarter campaign for the three-wheeled scooter began this week. It’s brought to you by Kartik Ram, the same guy behind the that debuted this spring. Before we get into the question of whether a three-wheeled scooter really is the future, as Ram said in a phone interview, here are the details of the iTank: “It’s not a scooter, and it’s not a motorcycle,” said Ram. The iTank is meant to take on neighborhood cruising, light trails and places where people don’t want to use their car but they don’t want to walk, either, like marinas, RV sites and golf courses. It’s able to climb a 15-degree incline without losing power, but “I wouldn’t take it off-road and climb rocks with it,” Ram said. Amazon has placed a sizable order through Launchpad (it’s already available on Amazon Prime), and Ram is pursuing relationships with police departments, private security agencies and businesses like Camping World. “Where Segway failed, we can do that,” he said. But the iTank’s Kickstarter early-bird price is not cheap at $4,000; the Amazon purchase order, Ram said, was for the full retail price of $5,500 per scooter. “As three-wheeled scooters go, it’s extremely cheap,” Ram said — and he’s not wrong. The Piaggio is $9,000, and that’s where the U.S. market pretty much ends. There are far-more-powerful trike motorcycles, like the Harley-Davidson , that start at $25,000, but that hardly compares to a scooter that goes 28 mph. What keeps the iTank from being just a toy for people tooling around the marina? “I believe this is the architecture of the future,” Ram said. “Cars are getting smarter and smaller. In general, the sharing economy requires you to think about smaller form factors that are personal for you. But two wheels aren’t right; I can’t tell my mom, who’s in her 70s, to ride a scooter. And four wheels signal cars or golf carts; it seems heavy.” Ram noted that scooters are cultural for a lot of people in India and Europe, and a quick search on China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba for “ ” turned up more than 1,000 results. Ram senses that scooters are perceived as being too dangerous in America. “I think little fiddly scooters aren’t going to cut it. You need something stable.” And so, on the heels of a well-designed electric bike, he’s introducing a well-designed three-wheeled electric scooter. “A three-wheeled scooter is the future,” he said. “I truly believe this is going to be the urban mobility future: interesting personal vehicles that can carry stuff. I’m totally committed to this architecture for the next 10 years.”
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Morrissey thinks his gory new anti-meat mobile game is more important than ‘Pokémon Go’
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Brian Heater
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Songster and perpetual master of subtlety Morrissey has teamed up with pals at PETA to produce , a mobile and desktop browser-based app that turns saving cuddly 8-bit farm animals from a gruesome death into a fun, Tetris-like puzzle game. Morrissey believes his bloody new anti-meat mobile game is more important than “Pokémon Go.”
The game features a jaunty chiptune-style interpretation of “Meat is Murder” that pulses away in the background like the soundtrack to an NES title as the player is tasked with swiping cows, pigs and chickens from four spinning saw blades. Failure to do so causes the screen to splatter with a low-res pool of blood. Fun! “This game is the biggest social crusade of all, as we safeguard the weak and helpless from violent human aggression,” The Smiths frontman said humbly in a statement issued by PETA. “You don’t get that from Pokémon Go.” Certainly not. At the very least, the anti-meat game has a decidedly more noble message than a game that involves storing monsters in tiny balls so they may eventually fight for our own amusement. Speaking of which, the animal rights organization released a way back in 2012, back when AR was mostly just a thing that pirates said. “If PETA existed in Unova, our motto would be: Pokemon are not ours to use or abuse,” the group wrote at the time. “They exist for their own reasons. We believe that this is the message that should be sent to children.”
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Test the security of your apps with Verify.ly
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Kate Conger
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It’s not easy for the average user to determine whether or not the apps on his or her iPhone are trustworthy. Some apps scoop up contact lists, others unnecessarily harvest your location data, and some even send your login credentials over insecure HTTP connections. But, if you’re not a developer, it can be difficult to tell which apps are collecting or leaking your personal information. Enter , a service that breaks down apps based on their security features — or lack thereof — in an effort to keep consumers informed about potential privacy risks. “Apps are essentially a ‘black box’ that users must trust with no way to know what it might do,” co-founder Will Strafach told TechCrunch in an email. He aims to change that by giving users access to information about how their apps function. Verify.ly, which launched in public beta last week, offers detailed rundowns of the third party code libraries and software development kits used in an app, links to source code, and information about the app’s transport security enforcement settings and system APIs. For someone with a little bit of technical knowhow, it’s an information goldmine. But even if the world of SDKs and APIs is completely foreign to you, Verify.ly breaks down the important points so they’re easy to understand. For example, the Verify.ly page for Snapchat shows when the app will encrypt your content in transit and when it won’t. Although you probably expect Snapchat to access your location data and contact list, you might not know that Snapchat also has access to your calendar and can read telephone call-related information. “I want anyone to be able to look at what their apps are doing. That’s really important information and people deserve that,” says Strafach. Strafach has a long history of testing and tinkering with iPhone security — he was while still in high school. Now, he’s turning his attention to apps themselves. “If an app was a book, the similar services [to Verify.ly] are only reading the ‘table of contents’ and getting a vague, okay understanding of things, while we are reading front-to-back and learning absolutely everything,” he explains. If explanation via metaphor isn’t your thing, here’s the dirt on how Verify.ly works, according to Strafach: “Other services look at the library imports, Objective-C class imports, and class/selector names within an app in order to make determinations. We also do this to gather some baseline information, but additionally perform a full and automated static analysis on the app binary. We record every function or selector that is branched to as well as the arguments for them, and if an input argument is obfuscated we will actually emulate the function with a simulated stack and heap to rebuild the contents and figure out what the app is trying to hide (usually private API use). This allows us to have a huge level of granularity, whether it is basic bits like URLs that are put together as format strings, or more nefarious uses such as building the string “LSApplicationWorkspace” and dynamically loading that API in order to view the list of installed apps on an iOS device (bad privacy invasion for casual users, potentially even more damaging for enterprises who are using internal and/or unreleased apps on their devices).” Although the public beta is free, Verify.ly has plans for monetization, including vetting apps for use on enterprise devices and debugging apps for developers. Check it out and see how secure the apps on your iPhone really are.
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Advice for Snapchat from the world’s first Pokémon Go master
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Nick Johnson
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With a nearly $18 billion valuation, Snapchat has decided it’s time to make money. The company recently launched a massive expansion of its advertising, including in-stream ads that now play in its Stories feature, as well as an API that will make it much easier for advertisers to buy ads. Given Snapchat’s aspirations of going public, turning on the money spigot is a necessity. But for a company that prides itself on constantly innovating, Snapchat’s monetization plans are surprisingly unimaginative. Monetizing via ads comes with a serious downside: There’s a strong negative between advertisers and Snapchat’s users. The more ads that Snapchat pushes to its users, the less value those users are likely to get out of the . Most users find ads to be an annoyance and little else — especially on mobile, where ads take up so much of the screen. Many would argue that Snapchat has no choice. Other social content platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram have all monetized via ads. How else can Snapchat hope to make money? For inspiration, Snapchat should look East. In China, has built a platform empire that Snapchat should hope to emulate. And, Tencent has done it without relying on ads. Unlike its Western counterparts, Tencent doesn’t primarily monetize its major platforms – the omnipresent WeChat and its desktop messaging predecessor, QQ — through ads. Instead, it makes the vast majority of its revenue through selling a combination of digital goods (like stickers and digital avatars) and Tencent-owned mobile games. In fact, by some estimates, Tencent is the largest gaming company in the world. By channeling users through its messaging platforms to these games and digital goods, Tencent is making bank. How much exactly? In 2015, Tencent kept pace with Facebook, with compared to . And it managed to do that without pushing away or annoying users with an endless stream of advertisements. Facebook itself tried to jump into the gaming industry back in 2012, just before it went public. But the company bungled the opportunity by allowing developers to constantly spam users with invites to and updates about their games. Anyone who was on Facebook at the time will remember the result: an endless torrent of notifications and News Feed items related to Farmville, Mafia Wars and other freemium games that encouraged their users to spam their friends in order to progress in the game. Facebook’s developer community died off quickly once the platform moved to stop these kinds of abuses, and it hasn’t really recovered since — even as Facebook has moved to mobile. However, even this short-term experiment with gaming was a huge boon to Facebook’s bottom line. Game-related revenue made up a notable percentage of the company’s revenue as it went public, with one gaming company, , accounting for 12 percent of the company’s annual revenue at the time of its IPO. Snapchat has the chance to succeed where Facebook failed. The company already has a number of augmented reality (AR) features built into its app, including the hugely popular face-swap feature, as well as other AR imaging features like fake mustaches, masks and dog ears that overlay your face as you take a photo or record a video. But as the mega-phenomenon of Pokémon Go has shown, AR has the potential to go much further. While Snapchat’s filters let you play with your world, the Pokémon game encourages users to get outside and explore the world around them and experience it in new ways. I would know — on my journey to becoming the world’s first Pokémon Go “master” who caught every Pokémon currently available in the United States, I walked an average of 8 miles a day. I explored areas of Brooklyn, Manhattan and New Jersey I never would have visited otherwise. And I met hundreds of people and made new friends that I never would have met if not for the game. As social platform of the millennial generation, Snapchat can do this and more. That’s why it’s time for Snapchat to go beyond the novelty factor of mustaches and dog ears and embrace the potential of AR gaming to change the way we interact with the real world and each other. As Tencent has shown in China, the revenue potential is there. Yet the U.S. is a very different market than China, and the path of monetizing via ads is tried and true. For a company likely to go public in the near future, the appeal of quickly building up its advertising revenue is obvious. But if Snapchat takes the leap, like Tencent in China, it has the ability to build a platform empire that would rival Facebook’s. Today, Snapchat is already the lens through which its users share experiences with each other. Now it can become the lens through which its users experience the world.
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Tesla’s Autopilot 2.0 said to add triple camera system and more radar
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Darrell Etherington
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Tesla’s Autopilot is set to get a major update soon, according to multiple reports, and a details some of the new hardware improvements that will pave the way for its arrival. The autonomous driving assistant for Tesla vehicles will benefit from a new front-facing triple camera array, Elecktrek reports, and will also add additional radar around the car, to supplement the forward oriented radar used in current models. Tesla is already installing the new three-camera system housing in cars, according to the report, and the radar detail fits with previous info about using radar in place of lidar to achieve lidar-like effects. New radar in each corner of the car would help with Musk’s goal of using radar to create a point cloud similar to the one used in lidar systems. New hardware will start out running current Autopilot software, the report claims, and will then add features over time based on improvements generated from additional data gathered through use of Autopilot 1.0 with the new equipment. Electrek points out that while Autopilot can and does use live data, it also leans a lot of GPS data and its own “high precision maps” built from data collected across the entire fleet of vehicles, which will be better informed though vehicles equipped with the new hardware array. While there’s no timeline for Autopilot 2.0’s introduction, Elon Musk has teased that very big improvements to its self-driving tech are on the way. On the company’s most recent earnings call, the Tesla CEO said that “what [they’ve] got will blow people’s minds,” and that “it’ll come sooner than people think.” He added that since the tech “blows [him] away, it’s really going to blow away other people, too, when they see it for the first time.”
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New Pokémon in Sun and Moon include sad fish, surfing Raichu
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Darrell Etherington
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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py2LxgWBaRQ&w=854&h=480] Please, please let me visit the room where new Pokémon are created. I want to know exactly what was going on when the team came up with Wishiwashi, a small, sad fish that becomes a group of slightly less sad fish when it reaches a certain level. Wishiwashi is one of three entirely new Pokémon revealed today for the upcoming Pokémon Sun and Moon games for Nintendo 3DS. The other all-new Pokémon include Pyukumuku and Morelull, one of which has an ability called “Innards out” which is also fantastic. But that’s not all we learned about the game; we also got a peek at three new variants of existing Pokémon unique to the Alola region, the setting for the upcoming Sun and Moon games. These include a Meowth that looks chilled out and fabulous, and a Raichu that just wants to hang ten all the time on its very own tail. There’s also a Marowak (big Marowak fan right here) with a flaming supernatural double-ended skull staff. [gallery ids="1367718,1367721,1367722,1367723,1367724,1367725,1367726,1367727,1367728,1367729,1367720"] Finally, The Pokémon Company also gave us a look at Team Skull, the villains of the piece. There’s always some kind of ‘Team’ up to no good in Pokémon, and the Skull squad are it for this generation. They’re led by Plumeria and Guzma, who have a kind of dysfunctional mother/father dynamic with the peons underneath them. If none of this makes sense then you’re in good company. Also Team Skull Grunts have to buy their own tank tops, according to The Pokémon Company. 🤔. Pokémon Sun and Moon arrive for the 3DS family of Nintendo mobile consoles on November 18. It’ll likely be one of the biggest Pokémon launches in the franchise’s history, thanks to Pokémon Go, so it hardly matters what absurd Pokémon this generation brings to the table. Hard to beat a .
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Some Pokémon Go players given lifetime bans are being let back into the game
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Jon Russell
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Did you get banned from playing Pokémon Go after downloading an app that you thought might make the game more fun? Well, it turns out that you might be able to get back into the smash hit title after all. A couple of weeks ago, with “lifetime” bans for those who used third-party “add-on” apps to get ahead of the rest of us. Now, however, it has backtracked a little and said it will overturn the bans for “a small subset” of users who may have unwittingly broken the rules. that some users who downloaded unauthorized apps, such as location spoofers or others that scrape data, “may not have realized that some add-on map apps do more than just show you nearby Pokémon.” Though they are giving these gamers the benefit of the doubt, particular since for a while, they will be banned if they resort to using any third-party apps in the future. This application of leniency is indeed limited. because, Niantic said, they place considerable load on the already stressed Pokémon Go servers — and then there’s the fact that they give an unfair advantage to those who downloaded them. “Our main priority is to provide a fair, fun, and legitimate experience for all players, so, aggressive banning will continue to occur for players who engage in these kinds of activities,” Ninatic said in a statement. There you go: you have been warned… once again! Here’s the update in full, for those who are curious: We continue to work to ensure the integrity of the game and the health of our servers by blocking unauthorized access and at times by banning offending accounts. This includes blocking bots, data scraping operations, and banning end user accounts associated with those activities. Some players may not have realized that some add-on map apps do more than just show you nearby Pokémon. Each end-user app can be used as a collection tool by the app creator, invisibly collecting and forwarding data to the app creator with or without the knowledge of the end user. These apps can have an effect similar to DDoS attacks on our servers. Because of this we have had to ban some accounts associated with using these add-on map tools, leading to confusion by some users about why they were banned. This is a small subset of the accounts banned. As a result of some changes made to our infrastructure, we are now able to unban this set of accounts. Add-on maps which scrape data from our servers still violate our Terms of Service and use of them may still result in an account ban going forward. Accounts whose sole purpose was to scrape data are not being unbanned. Accounts which used apps or websites to remotely capture Pokémon, battle or deploy on Gyms, or harvest resources from PokéStops are also not being unbanned. Our main priority is to provide a fair, fun, and legitimate experience for all players, so, aggressive banning will continue to occur for players who engage in these kinds of activities. Bonus: Niantic CEO John Hanke will speak at our upcoming Disrupt event in San Francisco next month — .
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You earn a million dollars a year and can’t get funded?
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David Frankel
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The funding environment is so overheated that it often seems like no idea is too silly to attract investment. might be surprised by how many companies struggle to raise money — even those that manage to bootstrap their way to a (or more) in revenue. Plenty of startups that are going concerns, led by compelling founders, have struggled to raise funding. They’ve done the hard work of building a revenue-generating business, but ’ seem to their pitches to stick — while others turn PowerPoint decks and prototypes into a payday. If ’re in the position of struggling to raise funds, here are some reasons why your pitch may not be resonating. The most common case of seemingly successful businesses struggling to raise funding is when they are paying $1.2 million to generate $1 million. With the rise of DNVBs ( ) and the expansion of e-commerce into ever smaller niches, the idea of VCs subsidizing the customer has become a cliché. If ’re an e-commerce business, generating gross revenue traction early on is essentially a requirement for investors, but they also will scrutinize your cohort analysis metrics. Once subsidize the original acquisition, are the customers churning or re-ordering? Do see average order sizes increase over time, or do they dwindle when the subsidy disappears? Is there evidence of organic growth from positive word of mouth? If those numbers aren’ appealing, and absent measurable monthly growth, GMV (gross merchandise value) alone probably won’ excite most VCs. Often, a startup build a content asset or a consulting business that generate a healthy revenue stream. The hope is to turn the audience they’ve acquired, or the work they’ve done for clients, into a product that has “venture scale.” These are both smart strategies, but the nature of the revenue tends to be assessed when discussing valuation. If your VC pitch involves pivoting to a new business model to achieve scale in the future, consider discounting the value of your current cash flow. This revenue isn’ worthless: It demonstrates a full marketing funnel, a clear understanding of your customer and the ability to generate demand — all of which should increase your valuation. Still, this is not the same as earning a with your new revenue model. There is “many a slip between the cup and the lip” and, while ’ve shown promise, there is no guarantee your new thesis will be borne out by the evidence — and that risk needs to be reflected in the price. We seriously don’ expect every company to be a billion-dollar business. Our model works with $50 million and $100 million exits, but if ’re going to raise venture capital, should also be able to explain how ’ll achieve step-function growth — convincingly. A hockey-stick growth path to a billion dollar valuation isn’ required; it be as simple as taking revenue from $1 million to $10 million. We’ve met CEOs who have figured out how to build impressive, profitable companies but are unable to articulate how an infusion of capital will take them to the next level. These founders are more steak than sizzle. Better at invoicing than inspiring is good — being good at both is even better. And being poor at both is a problem when ’re trying to raise institutional capital. If ’re not an inspiring pitch person, try to bring along somebody (ideally a co-founder) who is. Exciting investors and customers through pitches is a job requirement for startup CEOs who seek VC funding. Note: There is nothing wrong with forgoing capital to grow organically — just ask the founders of and , who grew billion-dollar businesses without investors. So… If ’ve built a dollar business and are struggling to convince VCs, we’d love to talk to ! Just know that when ’re pitching investors, not all revenue is valued equally, and it’s just one factor among many that investors will use to evaluate your business. Bryce Roberts put it well when he “Not all good businesses are good investments. Not all good investments are good businesses.” Your favorite neighborhood restaurant might generate a a in revenue, but it would be a bad bet for VCs. Facebook lost money for years before going on to dominate global communication. If decide want to play the VC game, just be sure to learn how the score is tallied.
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Alphabet’s David Drummond leaves Uber’s board amid mounting competition
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Matthew Lynley
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David Drummond, who joined Uber’s board of directors in August 2013, stepped down several weeks ago, Uber has confirmed to TechCrunch. first reported the news. At first blush: no surprise whatsoever. Earlier this month, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said the company’s first fleet of self-driving cars (as soon as this month, even!). The fleet consists of about a hundred modified Volvo XC90s, co-piloted by one engineer who can take the wheel when necessary. In other words: a straightforward competitor for Alphabet’s self-driving car. , both Alphabet and Uber have been working on their own variations of self-driving cars. Alphabet’s efforts have been considerably more public, but throughout both development processes Drummond has remained on Uber’s board. Now it seems that the reality that the two companies are increasingly becoming direct competitors is setting in, and a change of plans is in order. The Information earlier today reported that, . That’s not surprising — Alphabet’s efforts to build a self-driving car could be kneecapped by Uber’s rollout of its own self-driving car fleet. In an Uber-centric future, car usage is largely an on-demand model, and a constantly cruising fleet of self-driving cars powered by Uber’s technology removes a big potential opportunity for Alphabet. Alphabet for years has been working on this kind of technology, though it’s been focused on a much more radical, steering wheel-less cruiser. With Google specializing in software and machine learning, it seemed like the company was well on its way to becoming a standard for self-driving vehicles, but increasingly Alphabet is finding itself dealing with competition. In this sense, Uber is evolving beyond the simple ride-sharing application that GV (a mind-boggling share of the firm’s fund at the time). As it grows into its , Uber’s sights have to be set higher over time — especially as a future where cars are no longer controlled by humans starts to become increasingly real. Uber has for some time been experimenting with additional business lines, like with its , and it seems only natural that the company would want to find ways to bring in new lines of revenue and make its existing businesses much more efficient. While there , Tesla has aggressively pushed for this kind of a future in its vehicles, and it seems increasingly on its way to becoming the norm. This kind of experience also isn’t even new for Alphabet. In 2009, Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt stepped down from Apple’s board as the two companies began ruthlessly fighting out over whether Google (at the time) stole ideas from the iPhone and began to increasingly eat away at the early smartphone-maker’s lead. It seems that GV’s David Krane ( ) is still a board observer, though The Information . Again, while GV is an independent investment arm, it’s obviously linked to Alphabet proper and it would be strategically unsound to keep that information flowing freely if the two end up direct competitors. Uber confirmed the departure to us in a statement from Drummond: “I recently stepped down from Uber’s board given the overlap between the two companies. Uber is a phenomenal company and it’s been a privilege working with the team over the last two plus years. GV remains an enthusiastic investor and Google will continue to partner with Uber. I want to wish Travis all the best for the future.” And here’s one from CEO Travis Kalanick:
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Sufferers of iPhone 6’s ‘Touch Disease’ may soon have a class action lawsuit
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Devin Coldewey
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iPhones around the world are dying in a peculiar way, and Apple isn’t doing right by affected users, asserts . The plaintiffs are three in number for now but hope to elevate the case to class action status. It all concerns “Touch Disease,” a problem an unspecified but apparently large number of users (i.e. at least several thousand and perhaps far more) have encountered in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. The screen becomes unresponsive and a grey bar appears along the top of the display; it can be banished temporarily by manipulating the phone correctly (a bit like beating on the TV), but the disease is, ultimately, fatal. asserted that this problem is the result of a design flaw, essentially the same one observed when the phones came out: they’re . While “Bendgate” died down pretty quickly, the lack of rigidity may be the culprit in unseating a critical touchscreen control chip from the logic board. , filed in California’s Northern District federal court, alleges that Apple is aware of the design flaw and has concealed it from consumers by refusing to acknowledge or repair it. It also suggests that the 5s and 5c protected against this problem in various ways, so it’s not as if Apple didn’t know it was a possibility. The 6s and Plus got to prevent bending, as well. The plaintiffs are being represented by the law firm , and they’re clearly seeking to expand the suit to anyone who bought one of the affected phones. Whether that happens is up to the judge, of course. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.
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ET is that you? Astronomers detect intriguing signal 95 light-years away
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Emily Calandrelli
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Are we alone in the universe? An international group of astronomers has an interesting radio signal spike, one that could possibly be of alien origin, from a star system located 95 light-years away. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe, a field known as SETI, find the powerful signal unique enough to warrant permanent monitoring of the signal’s source. Few details have been released so far, but more information about the finding will be announced at the (IAC), which will be held in Guadalajara, Mexico during the last week of September. Of course, it is very likely that the radio spike was produced by something else entirely, like Earth-based radio interference or even a technical glitch in the observing equipment. To rule out other possibilities, follow-up observations will need to be made from various radio telescopes around the world. However, these follow-up observations from other organizations have not yet been possible because those who detected the signal sat on the discovery for over a year for unknown reasons. The signal was detected on May 15, 2015 by astronomers from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Special Astrophysical Observatory. Typically, scientists would publicize a finding like this so other astronomers could point their own telescopes toward the source and, in a way, “check their work.” RATAN-600 radio telescope used to detect the signal / Image courtesy of the Russian Academy of Sciences To search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, SETI astronomers listen for radio signals. It’s believed that if ET were to attempt contact, it would likely be through powerful radio waves, which travel through the universe at the speed of light. If we wanted to send a message to a civilization far away, this is what we’d do, so, for now, we assume that intelligent aliens would do the same. But electromagnetic waves, like radio waves, are also found naturally in the cosmos, making the work of SETI astronomers all the more challenging. Because of this, it’s important that SETI astronomers from around the world, using different radio telescopes, work together to rule out all other non-ET possibilities for the source of the signal. , senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told , “This is a bit of a puzzling story, as the Russians found this signal a year ago or so, but just didn’t let others know. That’s not good policy, as what you really want is confirmation at another telescope, but… Is it real? The signal may be real, but I suspect it’s not ET. There are other possibilities for a wide-band signal such as this, and they’re caused by natural sources (or even terrestrial interference).” But here’s what we know right now. The signal came from the direction of the star HD 164595, located in the constellation Hercules. HD 164595 is interesting because it’s considered to be a Sun-like star. It’s 6.3 billion years old (our Sun is 4.5 billion years old) and 0.99 times the mass of our Sun. More importantly, an exoplanet has already been identified orbiting HD 164595. Known as HD 164595 b, the planet is thought to be a warm-Neptune-type gas giant. However, HD 164595 b doesn’t meet the typical “potentially habitable planet” requirements: it’s not a rocky planet and of its star. Size of HD 164595 b compared to other planetary bodies in our solar system / Image courtesy of the Then again, nature has always proven to have a better imagination than humans, and life on this type of planet can’t be ruled out entirely. There’s also the possibility that other, more Earth-like exoplanets are orbiting HD 164595 and simply haven’t been discovered yet. For now, we’ll have to hold our excitement until other SETI astronomers can make follow-up observations. Luckily, there are projects like Yuri Milner’s $100 million to fund efforts like this. If the data from the Russian Academy of Sciences checks out, this could be the next — a similarly interesting radio spike detected in 1977 in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation, named because the astronomer who identified it wrote “WOW” next to the data. In the case of the WOW signal, the possibility of an intelligent source was never ruled out, but no other interesting radio signals from that origin have been detected since. So, is ET trying to contact us? We’ll just have to wait until the IAC conference in a few weeks for the astronomers responsible to release more information about their findings.
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In a first, FAA allows PrecisionHawk to fly drones where pilots can’t see them
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Lora Kolodny
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The Federal Aviation Administration has given permission to a drone tech startup called to fly its unmanned aerial vehicles beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) in U.S. airspace. The exemption represents a first in the country, and comes on the same day that the FAA implemented its governing the way that businesses can use small drones, up to 55 pounds, in their operations. PrecisionHawk, based in North Carolina, makes fixed-wing drones for use in agriculture, and cloud-based software called DataMapper to helps businesses save and analyze the aerial images and information they collect using drones. , an investment arm of TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon Communications Inc., is a stakeholder in PrecisionHawk. The company has raised $29 million in according to . PrecisionHawk’s Lancaster drones compete with the likes of so-called agridrones from , , and others. The company’s DataMapper product competes with an increasing number of map-tech and data analytics platforms catering to drone users, including and . PrecisionHawk EVP Thomas Haun said, “In agriculture, now that we have an exemption to fly beyond the visual line of sight, we can fly an entire farm, not just one field, efficiently.” The exemption does not mean PrecisionHawk can fly outside of other rules outlined in the FAA’s newly implemented regulation, Haun noted. The company will still have to yield to other aircraft, avoid flying over people, fly only during daylight hours and the like. Instead of giving drone operators a first person view with video cameras, PrecisionHawk uses what it calls a low altitude traffic and airspace safety system (LATAS) to help drone operators automatically avoid air traffic or any other obstacles during flight. That system is powered, in part, by air traffic data from The Part 107.31 waiver for PrecisionHawk was the first “VLOS” waiver the FAA granted. The administration issued 76 total waivers on the day that Part 107 went into effect, most of which applied to operators flying at night.
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uSens shows off new tracking sensors that aim to deliver richer experiences for mobile VR
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Lucas Matney
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Startups in the VR space are increasingly growing confident that consumers will want to interact with objects in the virtual world the same way they do irl — with their hands. is showing off the first line of its Fingo hand-tracking developer kits. The sensors have an eye toward mobile VR and integrate inside-out positional tracking tech, allowing an attached headset to track the user’s location within a space. Accompanying the launch of its Fingo hardware, the company is launching its network to assist developers looking to integrate uSens’ tech into their hardware or software. The sensor hardware the company is showing off is just for developers; uSens CTO Dr. Yue Fei assured me that the company has little intention of getting in the consumer hardware business and is entirely focused on having its hand-tracking software adopted by manufacturers. Ideally, these hand/positional-tracking solutions will be incorporated directly into the headsets themselves. This has so far seemed to be an oddly difficult sell to mainstream headset manufacturers, which have largely seemed to focus on building their own proprietary hand-tracking tech from the ground up. With Fingo, uSens will likely have an added advantage thanks to the inside-out positional tracking offered on the Color Fingo and Power Fingo models. When it comes to sensor tech, the only thing that can generally be better about one company’s solution over the other is the software’s accuracy. Leap Motion is definitely one of the main competitors of uSens in the field of hand-tracking tech. I had the chance to demo uSens’ software at VRLA earlier this month and the company has done a particularly good job at building an accurate skeletal tracking system. Leap Motion has had dev kits out in the wild for quite a bit, so they definitely hold an early advantage in terms of developer tools like their that they’re rolling out now, but uSens’ particularly strong focus on mobile may give the company more flexibility, especially as more and more OEMs start building headsets compatible with Google’s Daydream reference design. In the meantime, the Fingo suite of modules is compatible with Google Cardboard and Gear VR, as well as the “more serious” VR headsets like those from HTC and Oculus. The company is beginning to roll out pre-orders for the developer kits, though pricing was not announced.
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Recapalypse now
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Craig Hanson
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Over the last couple of years of boom times for venture capital-backed startups, round sizes ballooned and valuations filled with all that hot air. Valuations of new financings have started declining significantly since the beginning of the year, leaving a number of companies hanging on precariously high in the air without solid ground beneath them. What happens next is a sometimes painful normalization that tech companies and their VCs seem to end up re-learning about every eight years or so. CEOs and boards that recognize this sooner can adjust, if needed, with a thoughtful recalibration rather than later being forced into a disastrous recapitalization (a if you will). This article walks through what’s at stake, and what CEOs, boards and investors can do. How did we get here? From 2010 through 2015, median round sizes of venture capital financings roughly doubled for all series, from A-D, as Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures pointed out in a recently. All that capital pushed valuations higher for all stages of companies, from seed to late-stage. According to , the median pre-money valuation of a Series A rose from $3 million in Q1 2009 to $16 million in Q4 2015 (5x). Series Bs rose from $13 million to $70 million (5x), Series Cs rose from $27 million to $80 million (3x) and Series D and later rose from $30 million to a whopping $266 million (9x). As I discussed in my post on the , this led too many companies to raise at valuation multiples that were unsupported by historical standards and that put too much pressure on companies’ growth expectations. Beginning earlier this year, the market has been pulling back toward historical norms, though we’re only part of the way there so far. Financing statistics reported typically lag current market terms by a quarter, because deals reported today were likely off processes negotiated in the prior quarter, so we’re just beginning to see this pullback show up in the numbers. There are two ways that CEOs and their boards can respond to the market’s turn. First, in a planned recalibration, companies can recognize and accept the new reality and adjust their strategy accordingly. For companies that don’t need to raise additional capital now, they can focus on building a sustainable business, in many cases by doggedly improving the productivity and efficiency of the model and lowering cash burn so they have enough runway to hit big milestones before raising again. For companies that need additional capital soon, they will seek to raise whatever they can either from existing VCs and angels or from new, outside investors. Either way, companies can take control of the situation by raising this capital at a valuation that reflects normalized market conditions, even if that means a down round from the prior financing’s post-money valuation. As Bill Gurley from Benchmark Capital in April, “A down round is nothing. Get over it and move on.” These companies can also recognize the need to clean up their capital structure and terms so they’re in a healthy position to both (a) keep the team incented to build the business (or fix it), and (b) raise outside capital in the future without the cap table baggage of past mistakes. If you’re in this situation, there are three things you need to read. First, check out Brad Feld’s (Foundry Group) great post on this: , in which Brad describes the wisdom in recalibrating if you have too much preference stack (the amount of preferred stock investment into your company that gets paid before common stock does in an exit), too much complexity in your preference stack or misalignment-inducing features like carve-outs. Second, Mark Suster (Upfront Ventures) wrote a must-read piece on this wisdom the last time we had a significant correction post-2009: , in which he explains why companies with unsupported valuations usually get polite declines from prospective new VCs who don’t want to go through the time sink, brain damage and relationship stress to propose the right recalibration for them. Finally, make sure you read Bill Gurley’s seminal advice in this post: , where Bill walks through the behavior you see in a market reset and its consequences. What happens if companies don’t choose this planned recalibration? For 5 percent of the companies out there, they can grow so exceptionally and with such impressive metrics (productivity, margins, etc.) that they can grow their way into an up or at least flat round. This is the “we’ll grow into our valuation” strategy, nearly universally said in Silicon Valley and equally often untrue. The problem is that 95 percent of the companies think they’re the 5 percent. The market has been pretty clear, cycle after cycle. Companies with inflated valuations can’t defy market forces indefinitely, and those that fail to adjust proactively will ultimately get backed into a much harder adjustment: the recapitalization. Recapitalization can take many forms, but it’s essentially a restructuring of the amounts and terms between preferred stock and common stock. This could include moving prior preferred stock investors down to common, or, in the worst case, cramming down the preferred and common stock entirely — or it could involve adding structure to new, senior preferred stock to entice new investors into a tougher cap table (e.g. giving them seniority, multiple liquidation preferences, minimum return guarantees, dividends or redemption rights). It’s almost always a terrible situation for employees, founders and VCs alike, where nothing is sacred. Hence, a We’re already starting to see recapitalizations in the market, and we’ll see many more among companies that raised far too much capital at valuations their business traction doesn’t support. Here in Silicon Valley, we know of a couple of companies recently that had to raise new capital as part of a recapitalization, which reset the pre-money valuation below $5-10 million (a fraction of the prior post-money valuation). This is the recapalypse you want to avoid. In tough times (or, arguably, just normalized times), smart companies recalibrate their valuation expectations in order to secure new capital and don’t try to hang onto unsupportable prior valuations. These survivors lower cash burn, focus on productivity metrics and, if needed, raise additional capital at sustainable valuations. Not recognizing the new reality before it’s too late could leave too many companies in a recapalypse now.
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Updates to Apple hardware this year will focus on power users
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Devin Coldewey
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Apple’s roadmap for the rest of the year (and perhaps a bit beyond that) appears to take aim at big spenders and power users, if we can trust inside information — as one generally can. Expect updates to the iPad, MacBook Air and Pro and Thunderbolt display. The pendulum is swinging the other direction after last year’s move toward simplicity, with the iPhone SE and minimalist MacBook; Apple intends to entice “pro” users who may have been tempted by the highly capable Surface Book. Certainly the MacBook Pro is due for a refresh, and the Air is positively archaic when you compare it with the latest models (especially when yours, like mine, is four years old). , repeated for good measure in Gurman’s piece, suggest a thinned body retaining multiple ports and gaining an OLED “dynamic function row” in place of the useful but somewhat anachronistic F-keys. The Air will get USB-C and a spec bump, but possibly still no retina display. Those are supposed to ship this year — as early as October, even — but may not make it into . Gurman suggests that the 7th may be restricted to announcing and a revamped Apple Watch with built-in GPS and health-tracking features. iOS 10, of course, already in beta, will also feature prominently. Rumors swirled months ago regarding the possibility of a with its own GPU to help push pixels, but it never emerged. It may do soon, however, likely alongside the new Macs. This LG collaboration would be aimed directly at photo and video editors who don’t want to slum it with an iMac. The iPad Pro, which has been both loved and mocked, will be getting further improvements to stylus input, though whether in hardware, software or both is unclear. Whatever the case is, the artists and others who have warmly welcomed the crossover device will surely appreciate the update.
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Revelator raises $2.5M to build a business platform for digital music
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Anthony Ha
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Bruno Guez has — he hosted a show on public radio, founded Quango Music Group and even worked as the creative director of music at Cirque de Soleil. Over that time, he said he’s watched as changes in the music industry outpaced the tools available to artists and labels. “There were no modern platforms for the B2B segment of the market,” Guez told me. “It was really very antiquated, with record labels and distributors … not integrating with cloud services to manage their assets.” Guez’s startup is working to fix that with a platform for distributing, selling and licensing music online. The company announced it has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by Exigent Capital, with participation from Digital Currency Group and Israeli early-stage fund Reinvent (Revelator is headquartered in Tel Aviv). That’s on top of the $3 million the company has already raised. Revelator says that customers simply upload their music to the system, then Revelator allows them to make their songs available on digital stores and via services like Spotify and Apple Music. It also offers tools for marketing and analytics — Guez argued that one of the product’s main advantages lies in the data. For example, he said that thanks to Revelator, can now track each time music gets played in a podcast and then compensate the musicians and labels fairly. Revelator has also , providing some of the underlying technology allowing Wix Music customers to not just build a website but also promote and sell their music. Looking ahead, Guez said he sees opportunity for geographic expansion, particularly in Europe and Asia, and in using data to build a payments platform — so rather than waiting months for payment from music services, musicians might get an advance from Revelator. “If we can bring mobile payment to emerging markets, that will be a big win,” he said. “Today, artists are not getting paid on mobile. That’s part of our vision and part of what we’re working towards. And the conversation goes beyond music … How do we get people paid faster, with more transparency?”
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For law enforcement, the rule must be no implementation without representation
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Devin Coldewey
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that the police in Baltimore were working with a company called, appropriately enough, Persistent Surveillance, which deployed aircraft equipped with high-resolution cameras, recording entire regions of the city for hours on end for law enforcement to browse through. You should read of the program if you’re curious. But the takeaway is that once again a powerful tool has been implemented against the public without its knowledge or consent — which rather defeats the point of having a voluntary, civilian police force, doesn’t it? The tools ostensibly used to enforce the law are increasingly obscured behind a screen of private companies, non-disclosure agreements and obscure court orders binding the tongues of the few who could say what’s going on. It’s so lucrative to one side, and the capabilities so tantalizing to the other, that this seems unlikely to change. Baltimore’s use of surveillance aircraft is a familiar story in many ways — other cities have employed the same strategy, the same company even, with varying degrees of disclosure. Class it with Stingray-type interceptors, facial recognition databases, big data efforts to classify and predict crimes, NSA surveillance, crypto back doors and the other dozen or two military-grade techs being deployed against us. And those are just the ones we know about — the known knowns, as they’re known. It’s commonplace now for a law enforcement agency or government entity to receive pitches from companies like Persistent Surveillance, or more familiar names like Taser, or through funded fronts hocking software or hardware originally developed for use (and possibly still active) in warfare. The general idea is to augment existing systems with powerful tech while keeping certain sensitive parts — the servers, the patents, the devices themselves — out of the sphere of public scrutiny. Now, on a battlefield this is important. You don’t use an open-source drone to drop ACLU-approved bunker busters on a hardened target vetted by the community. The need for secrecy and tactical superiority in wartime are not in question. What’s in question is the employment of these tactics and technologies within our borders, against unknowing American citizens, creating a permanent state of war in what we might term the domestic theater. It’s one thing when we submit ourselves to these measures. We all tolerate certain encroachments on privacy, especially online but also in the physical world: One can hardly walk through a commercial district without one’s image being captured by dozens of private and public security cameras, and having one’s phone probed by searching wireless networks. We have authorized these things tacitly and officially, acknowledging their utility over years of development and slow growth. But the ever-shrinking scale of technology and its ever-expanding presence mean it’s not as easy to simply see and evaluate its risks and effects. Take the same in-store camera we’ve seen for decades that watches the register in case of robbery. Before, we could be pretty sure that it was recording to a tape on-site, and if the police or someone else wanted it, they would come and ask for it. Not necessarily simple, but simple enough. Now there’s a good chance that imagery is being sent to a central cloud location, managed by some company. In what jurisdiction? What’s the disclosure policy there? Do they ask for warrants, or do they provide footage upon request? What’s security like? Do they have agreements with third parties to share imagery or collate it with other cameras? Are faces being harvested and “anonymized” for sale to trainers of computer vision systems? That’s just a simple example of how unknowns, both banal and dire, multiply — I’m sure you could add a few questions of your own to the list. It gets much, much more complex. And most people don’t have any idea how to navigate Facebook’s privacy settings, let alone the machinations of secret courts determining whether a program or device can even be referred to by name, let alone discussed in detail. The result is that for want of transparency, our rights as allegedly self-governed citizens are being quietly but firmly and continuously trimmed away. What’s more, we don’t even know how much trimming has taken place until some “revelation” along the lines of Snowden’s leaks. Hard to say whether that’s a known unknown or an unknown unknown. Let’s be safe and assume a bit of both. What can we do? Alas, not a lot. Look at the the operation over Baltimore. No one asked for it, even within law enforcement; no significant amount of residents would have approved it; many would surely have opposed even the test flights. Because the populace was never consulted, of course, this is just speculation. But it illustrates how powerless we are. So if we don’t have the power, who does? Supposedly, our elected officials. But those officials are rarely savvy enough to understand even established technologies, let alone cutting edge ones that walk a hazy line between legal and “extralegal,” their administrators waving away ethical concerns. They’re not much help. I hope you didn’t get this far thinking I had some kind of solution. I don’t. In fact, I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. But if we’re going to start somewhere, it has to be local. We’re not going to accomplish a thing with a Change.org petition for the president to sign an executive order banning this kind of overreach or demanding civilian review boards for all new law enforcement technologies. Things are going to be slow, and they’re going to be piecemeal. A lot of the situations that have shed light on unexpected and unethical uses of technology — Stingrays, iPhone decryption, that sort of thing — have started small. Municipal court records and district-level public information officers can be as or more forthcoming than federal cases and police chiefs. If you’re in Baltimore, for instance, you might start with your city council member. Push for a public hearing on the subject with the people who authorized the flights or signed off on the contract. Ask why weren’t informed, or if they were, why they didn’t justify their support publicly. Contact your local paper or news and trouble them about why they didn’t hear about it (they’re likely already asking their sources) and how they’re going to report it. Local reporting of local issues is great, and often puts blood in the water to draw national outlets. The goal here isn’t so much eradication of these pervasive problems as reducing the areas in which they can operate without our noticing. As it stands, we may be at least partially excused for our ignorance by the fact that these institutions have been treating us as adversaries, enemy combatants, potential terrorists. We are being deceived systematically and deliberately; this much is on the record. No doubt that will continue, but that doesn’t mean no progress can be made to minimize that deception, in pursuit of the fundamental values espoused by this country. If we are to be surveilled, logged, categorized and profiled, it should be because we decided it was in our best interest to do so. The difference is between our own resources being deployed against us and us deploying them against ourselves. One is subjugation, the other self-regulation. The least we can ask for is no implementation without representation.
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NHTSA releases raw 2015 traffic fatality data, calls for tech companies to analyze
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Darrell Etherington
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The number of traffic fatalities in the U.S. in 2015 was up 7.2 percent from the year prior, to 35,092, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is doing things a little differently this year with respect to that data, since it’s a troubling departure from the overall recent trend of a decreasing total number of annual traffic-related deaths. The , three months earlier than it typically does. It’s also asking directly for input from outside organizations in analyzing said data to help identify what’s causing the significant and unusual increase, and hopefully provide some answers about what might be done to turn things around. The government agency is asking for feedback from pretty much anyone, be they “a non-profit, a tech company, or just a curious citizen,” and it’s outlined some specific questions that might help in determining how to go about sifting through the data: Already, the NHTSA has some committed partners, including Google’s Waze, StreetLight Data, CARTO and Mapbox. And while the bulleted questions it asks above tend to shy away from identifying automated driving technology as one possible solution, it does acknowledge this as one specifically interesting line of inquiry farther down in its official announcement of the news of the data set’s availability: We’re also looking to accelerate technologies that may make driving safer, including connected and highly automated vehicles. It’s clear that the NHTSA wants to do something as urgently as possible to address this disturbing change in the trend of the past few years. Asking tech companies and others to participate in this call to action, and providing the data to work with, could indeed be an effective first step.
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3D-print your own bones from everyone’s favorite fossil, Lucy
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Devin Coldewey
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Admit it: You’ve always wanted your very own Australopithecus. Unfortunately, they’re extinct — but the best known representation of our 3-million-year-old ancestor, the famous fossil Lucy, is now more accessible than ever. Researchers have so amateur paleontologists around the world can print their very own. The University of Texas at Austin team got their chance to put Lucy under a CT scanner way back in 2008, when the fossil was on tour around the country. Just as many laypeople are eager to get a gawk at such an interesting part of our evolutionary history, many experts want a chance to examine the remains in person for their scholarly pursuits. In this case, Team Lucy wanted to work out just how Lucy died. There’s significant controversy on this point, as there were no eyewitnesses, but the UT researchers have a detailed theory based on close examination of the bones and their 3D models. In short, that the bone breakage patterns show that Lucy died after falling out of a tree, probably from 30 feet up or so. A figure from the paper graphically explains Lucy’s last moments. Not everyone is having this explanation, though, considering Lucy is supposed to be among the first truly ground-dwelling apes. “It is therefore ironic,” with characteristic scientific dryness, “that the fossil that has been at the center of a vigorous debate about the role, if any, of arboreal locomotion in early human evolution can potentially be attributed to a fall out of a tree.” The debate will surely go on, but while the scientific community may not agree with the study, it’s hard to deny the side benefits. After checking with the National Museum of Ethiopia, where Lucy officially resides, the high-resolution 3D models of the bones scanned are available for free download to anyone who wants them. Although there is something to the argument that it may detract from the charm of the originals to have copies freely available, it’s surely more blessing than curse. Students from elementary to graduate school will appreciate the opportunity to handle faithful replicas and make their own observations as close to as they’re ever likely to get.
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