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Opera says its service for syncing web browser data was hacked
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Jon Russell
| 2,016
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Opera, which recently , has reset user passwords for one of its services after its servers were breached by hackers this week. that attackers gained access to , a service that lets users synchronize their browser data and settings across multiple platforms. It is investigating the incident, but initially believes the attack may have compromised user data, including passwords and login names. Opera counts 350 million users across its range products, but it said that a small portion of those use the Sync service. Last month, for example, it counted 1.7 million active Sync users, but more may have registered for it and, in doing so, provided Opera with data. The company has reset all passwords and emailed all registered Opera sync users with details. “Although we only store encrypted (for synchronized passwords) or hashed and salted (for authentication) passwords in this system, we have reset all the Opera sync account passwords as a precaution,” . News of the attack on Opera comes a day after for accounts that had not changed passwords since 2012. The cloud storage provider said the move came in responsible to security concerns that arose from where credentials for 117 million accounts were posted online. Opera’s problem doesn’t appear related to that, and is notable that the hack appears to have only impacted one of its services in isolation. No doubt Opera will have more details once it has finished investigating what happened. Word of the attack comes over a month after of its browser business, privacy apps and Chinese joint-venture to a consortium from China led by anti-virus firm Qihoo 360 for $600 million. The parties had previously but, while that gained , a new agreement was cut after the necessary approvals were not secured within a pre-arranged deadline.
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Crunch Report | Justin Kan Talks YC
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
| 2,016
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Tito Hamze, John Mannes
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski, Yashad Kulkarni
Joe Zolnoski
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Spotify might not suppress search, but that doesn’t mean artists with exclusives get treated equally
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John Mannes
| 2,016
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| 26
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Accusations that Spotify has been punishing artists for signing exclusives with other streaming services hit the internet in full force this morning, When confronted by TechCrunch, a Spotify spokesperson gave the same response they have been giving since the story broke — that the accusations about burying search results are “unequivocally false.” However, while Spotify has been clear about rejecting one part of the argument against the company, there is another piece of the story that remains unaddressed. Hidden in the details, the accusations are really twofold, including both the notion that Taking the statement from Spotify at face value, the company is incredibly clear about not suppressing tracks from artists that signed exclusives with other streaming services deeper in search results. That said, a representative of a singer-songwriter told Bloomberg that the artist turned down an appearance on an Apple Music show because of fears they would “lose promotion from Spotify.” This is not about suppressing search results, this is about promoting music differently on the Spotify platform as a direct result of exclusives signed with streaming services like Apple Music. The New York Times that executives at two major record labels said Spotify had instituted a policy similar to the one described by the artist who opted out of the Apple Music show. Spotify has long been against exclusives in the music industry, but ultimately hasn’t been able to do much about big deals from Apple Music and Tidal. The picture painted by the artist and record label executives is not unequivocal, but it is very close to it. The ethics of discriminating against artists for signing exclusives is murky at best. What’s particularly concerning is that exclusive deals can be used to finance albums, which means such policies can disproportionately impact up-and-coming musicians with respect to established artists that can more or less afford to do what they want. Such practices are a good short term strategy for discouraging the practice, but ultimately it’s users who suffer. If it’s true that Spotify is affecting promotion in this way, the decision cannot be with the listener’s best interest in mind. It’s true that exclusives are and bad for consumers as well, but the solution will not come from putting the average person in the middle of a fight over market share.
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The monetization promise and pitfalls of Pokémon Go
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Catherine Tucker
| 2,016
| 8
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more than 100 million times since its July debut, making it the biggest-growing mobile game ever. Naturally, the phenomenon has drawn much commentary about what this means for , but I am more interested in what it teaches us about making money. It’s not easy to make money in an ecosystem from unrelated parties. In spite of all the purporting that Pokémon Go offers local businesses unique marketing opportunities, there are, in fact, many limitations. The claim is that small from being a Pokémon “Gym” or “Pokéstop” — physical locations that players visit to collect rewards or battle virtual monsters. But not every business is a fit for Pokémon Go. Think about the ideal Pokémon Go commercial partner — the kind of company for whom it makes sense to invest in trying to attract Pokémon to its physical location. I propose a franchise company like Jamba Juice. Why? For starters, Pokémon Go and Jamba Juice have similarly youthful brand images. At the very least, it’s unlikely that Pokémon Go customers searching for Pokémon would inadvertently annoy Jamba Juice’s existing customers. It’s also not the case that playing Pokémon Go would detract from the Jamba Juice experience — which involves a lot of waiting to order a smoothie and then a lot of waiting to get said smoothie. Playing Pokémon Go might even enhance the Jamba Juice experience by enabling customers to amuse themselves during the wait. Contrast this to a potential Poké-partnership with a bank. Though there is a similar dynamic of waiting in line, there is a risk that Pokémon Go players would alienate the bank’s core clients, who likely have little patience for tweens and 20-somethings chasing pikachus with their smartphones. The point is, anytime there is a mismatch of target segments, or that playing Pokémon gets in the way of what customers usually do at a physical retailer, it limits the ability of the partner to monetize. Another assumption is that Pokémon Go is going to make tons of money from , and that marketers can easily use that data to drive sales. However, it’s difficult to see how this data is special. Many apps and smartphone operating systems collect detailed, specific location data at the user level. Consider , the real-time traffic app, which tracks users in their cars. Consider , where users reveal to their friends where they’re shopping and dining. Or Facebook, where users are constantly sharing their locations through status updates. To argue that Pokémon Go has something extremely valuable in its data, it has to be the case that the data is unique. But it’s not. In spite of these limitations, Pokémon Go does offer lessons about traditional pricing segmentation — specifically, the importance of understanding which features of your product may be price insensitive to the segments of your target market that has money to pay for them. Take, for example, the ability to purchase “incense” — vital and valuable trainer tools for catching more Pokémon and rare Pokémon — within the game. As a parent of children playing Pokémon Go, it appears you have two options: 1) Allow your children to hunt Pokémon around your neighborhood; when Pokémon appears in the middle of the road, your children try to catch the Pokémon in the middle of the road; or 2). Allow your children to buy incense and the Pokémon comes to them as they walk around your backyard. You don’t have to be a helicopter parent to see the value in keeping children out of the middle of the road.
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Microsoft announces new resources to reduce hate speech
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John Mannes
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Microsoft today pushed out for users of its consumer services new resources to reduce hate speech. Users will now be able to communicate directly with the company to report hate speech, and petition for reinstating content via new online forms. Most people are familiar with efforts by social networks like Twitter and Facebook to ensure safety within their respective online communities. Just last week, for promoting terrorism. While from propagating on its services, the company has received less attention than its peers. Services like Outlook, Skype, Xbox, OneDrive and Office 365 draw millions of users that are too easily forgotten with the rise of new platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. And while most interactions on these platforms are positive, even Microsoft is not immune to the distribution of hateful, inappropriate and sometimes illegal content. European “Right to be Forgotten” requests and filings for the removal of revenge porn, copyrighted content and illegal content. Tangibly, in addition to prior efforts, Microsoft is launching two new forms, one each and At this point, Microsoft already moderates content for inappropriate speech and allows users to request review of a content removal decision. “We will continue our ‘notice-and-takedown’ approach for removing prohibited content on hosted consumer services, and the new form aims to improve the quality and speed of our reviews,” said Jacqueline Beauchere, Microsoft Chief Online Safety Officer, in a blog post about the new forms. The new resources are aimed squarely at reducing hate speech and increasing community by giving both sides a much needed voice.
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HopSkipDrive wants to be the Uber for kids
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Katie Roof
| 2,016
| 8
| 26
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Kids are told to select a secret password to ensure that the right driver picks them up and parents can follow along with their journey through the GPS-tracking on the app. But McFarland said that she believes HopSkipDrive will prevail because the “authenticity of the brand and who we are as founders” inspires the passion behind the service. HopSkipDrive is currently available in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They hope to expand soon to other regions.
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Megan Rose Dickey
| 2,016
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| 10
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ShakeAlert provides earthquake early warning system
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Lucia Maffei
| 2,016
| 8
| 26
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The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and a series of university partners are developing an earthquake early warning system called , which aims to provide the general public with alerts up to 10 seconds before an earthquake hits. The system is not yet public, but it is now in California, Oregon and Washington. “There is a similar test effort for an earthquake early warning system in the region of Italy, run by the University of Naples,” said Richard Allen, one of the leaders of the ShakeAlert project and director of the Seismological Laboratory at UC Berkeley and chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Last Wednesday, central Italy was hit by a 6.2-magnitude earthquake. As of today, the death toll has risen to 281 people, according to Italian media. In a phone interview with TechCrunch, Allen pointed out that ShakeAlert is not about predicting earthquakes. “When people say ‘predict,’ they usually mean, ‘there’s going to be an earthquake in LA on Wednesday,'” Allen said. “We cannot predict earthquakes, and most seismologists would agree that we do not expect to be able to predict earthquakes in the foreseeable future.” Instead, we should think about what we can do; this is when ShakeAlert comes into play. The system provides a warning that an earthquake is on its way about 10 seconds beforehand; people involved in the project receive warnings on their phones. Allen explained that we think of an earthquake as being an instantaneous process, but it takes some time for the motion to reach us. ShakeAlert employs a network of seismic sensors buried in the ground. Instruments record the ground movement and provide data to UC Berkeley, the USGS or Caltech. The more dense the network of seismic sensors, the better the system performs. “In the Bay Area, sensors are between 10 or 20 kilometers apart,” Allen said. “The rest of California doesn’t have the same density of instrumentation.” According to Allen, there are about 550 sensors in California (about 200 in the Bay Area, 200 across LA and the rest across the state) that contribute to the prototype warning system. Allen said the federal and state governments have started the process of funding construction of the system. On August 15, it had awarded $3.7 million to six universities to support transitioning the ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system into a production system. Allen said they need $38 million to build it and about $16.1 million per year to operate the system in the long term. “We hope to be pushing out warnings to people’s phones in the near future,” Allen concluded. “There’s a hope to start having a limited public rollout in 2018 in specific regions, where we have the densest seismic network.”
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Growing up in the intelligence era
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Ash Fontana
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Information technology shifted 15 years ago from perpetually licensed, on-premise software to Software as a Service (SaaS). The shift created significant opportunities for startups, but led to the death of companies that ignored the change. These companies were stunned to find that traction was not enough to interest investors and, at best, they sold at low valuations to legacy technology companies. Today, information technology is shifting from the SaaS workflow applications that characterized the cloud computing era to those that help customers Characterized as the intelligence era, the source of competitive advantage is shifting from code to unique data + self-learning code. As with the previous shift, this brings a change in the expectations of investors. We are seeing investors outright ignore SaaS companies with solid traction in favor of companies that have a strategic position in the market granted by their “intelligent” software. This post generalizes the requirements of enterprise software investors in the intelligence era in the hope that it helps founders of enterprise software companies think about how to sequence their fundraising, product development and data strategy. The company characteristics below are what investors generally expect at the point of raising that round. For example, Series A investors generally expect to see annual contracts with examples of where you’ve expanded revenue with specific customers before investing. Seed investors focused on intelligent enterprise software generally expect to see that you’re collecting unique data before investing. We’re seeing that the bottom half of this table (shaded in tan) is increasingly important. Companies need to show they’re building a competitive advantage through unique data + self-learning code to raise a Series A from a world-class investor. SaaS without data is not enough. This means that companies need to pick seed investors that are savvy to the impending shift to the intelligence era, help them with this strategy and have the track record of attracting world-class Series A investors. The best seed investors play the role of a “Data Product Manager” until the full team comes together. Let’s define the characteristics on the left and explain the rightward progression, separating table stakes from what’s truly necessary today. The top half of this table includes the characteristics required to raise money from a world-class investor when the cloud was a new thing, and SaaS was the future. Today, deploying to the cloud is a given and you need more to break away from the competition. But first, let’s talk about the basics. How you reach potential customers. “Bottom up” means that you don’t spend money on sales and marketing, instead relying on word-of-mouth through social channels and free PR to build an initial base of customers. Companies now tend to graduate from here by hiring customer success and inside sales reps to mine that initial base of customers for those with big budgets. Outside sales reps are hired after exhausting this bottom-up strategy. The profile of a typical purchaser. This determines their level of sophistication, revenue potential and sales cycles. Some startups may start by selling to large companies. Small to medium businesses (SMB) are less sophisticated and have lower revenue potential but are easier to reach, have shorter sales cycles and are less likely to be using a high-quality alternative. Interestingly, a startup can gather a large volume of data across SMBs such that it can build machine learning models that compete with those built by larger companies. The basis on which revenue recurs. Companies get the leverage to negotiate for longer terms as they build stickiness with customers by providing better products. Average Annual Contract Value. Larger average ACV means that you’re successfully selling to larger customers, into more divisions and/or at higher prices. Some companies may keep ACV constant but significantly increase volume. There are many useful measures of revenue, but this is a universal number that you can calculate by annualizing last month’s revenue. This is not the same as annual recurring revenue (ARR). Churn is important here, but it’s hard to define a milestone. Seed investors will not have enough data to draw conclusions about churn. Series A investors, depending on the sales model, will dig into 12+ months of data to understand churn — and usually need to see negative churn. Rightward progression with respect to these characteristics, as represented by the tan shading in the table, means you’re building a competitive advantage through unique data + self-learning code — crucial to raising a Series A from a world-class investor. Those on your team who aren’t software engineers. This is probably just founders and a designer at the seed stage, adding sales/marketing (a strategic marketer, inside sales and customer success) by the Series A stage and rounding out the executive team (with BD, finance, operations and HR) by the Series B stage. The people making the software. Start with those who can efficiently get the product into your customers’ hands. Then, as you collect data, you can use data science talent to deliver insights to your customers in the form of predictive features. This is where hiring gets hard; you’ll need your investors to give you every advantage you can get. As you scale, you’ll need some infrastructure specialists and great engineering managers. A crucial part of your plan to build an intelligent software product. A clean, unique data set is a competitive advantage in itself (so don’t sell it!). From there, you can start building predictive models with your customers’ data and turning successful experiments into features that help them make decisions. Finally, you will have a product that uses incremental data to improve models; making the product better, attracting more customers, getting more data and so on — a “‘Virtuous Loop.” This compounding competitive advantage is something that only Google and a few others have built, but is within reach of today’s startups. As you can see, one has to be purposeful about this strategy from Day One. Great investors will focus on helping you create a coordinated data and business process strategy. They will guide data set, model and feature development to build a Virtuous Loop. Investors focused on similar companies will help you assess whether you’re collecting unique data compared to your competition. How are you different from everyone else in the market? Where you are on a Gartner map determines how many big enterprise customers take notice of your company — like it or not. Seed-stage companies usually have a workflow product that is better/cheaper/nicer than existing products, collecting data in the background. The addition of predictive features helps customers make decisions, making your product key to their strategy and giving you lock-in. A full-featured product will quickly expand to all lines of business within your customers’ companies such that it’s a “must-have.” Partnerships are a distraction before the seed stage. However, companies can leverage a few key marketing partnerships with complementary product companies to get enough traction to raise a Series A. Further, companies can form partnerships to get access to large data sets, bootstrapping their machine learning efforts. Hiring full-time business development talent after your Series A will help you form an ecosystem of sales, marketing and product partnerships ahead of a Series B. is a sales acceleration platform that automatically recommends prospects. InsideSales started as a SaaS company but is now a quintessential intelligent software company, using data to build a self-learning engine that drives up to 30 percent revenue growth for their customers after just 90 days. Here’s how they made this rightward progression. InsideSales tarted by signing up SMBs, gathering a large volume of data across those customers with which to build machine learning models. Roughly 100,000 sales reps at more than 3,000 companies, including ADP, GE and Salesforce, use their software today. InsideSales started with a team of generalist engineers and now have 30 machine learning engineers with PhDs working with well over 100 billion records of data, adding 5 billion per month — the largest sales database in the world. InsideSales started by collecting data on phone calls and emails, then built some predictive features to tell you when to call/email someone to maximize the chance of closing a deal. The software anonymizes and normalizes data from one customer, learns over that data, synthesizes the learning into a prediction and delivers that to another customer. They’ve closed the Virtuous Loop. The initial product was a Call Dialer that helped an inside sales rep crank through a prospect list. The addition of automatic recommendations saw InsideSales reposition as a sales acceleration platform and increase its average selling price per seat to be 2-3x that of complementary system of record vendors in the ecosystem. InsideSales has a marketing partnership with the leading CRM platforms — Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce — and strategic investment from both parent companies. The recent launch of the Neuralytics platform allows any company to feed their data into InsideSales’ core machine learning technology, opening up opportunities for InsideSales outside of the sales use case. uses data to give companies the confidence to offer monthly payment terms to their customers. Affirm initially provided merchants with a way to offer financing to customers based on public data. Now, it uses a combination of public data and individual lender data to manage repayment and buyer fraud risk. Additionally, Affirm uses that data to optimize the checkout flow for merchants, increasing average basket size. Affirm evolved its positioning from a widget on e-commerce websites to a company re-building core parts of financial infrastructure and an independent banking brand for millennials. Affirm built a strong set of partnerships as it grew. First, with Shopify to offer financing on any Shopify store. Then, with First Data to offer financing to customers in brick-and-mortar stores through the Clover Point of Sale system. These partnerships could also provide Affirm with new customer data that it can feed into its credit scores. Retail, quick-service restaurants and shopping malls use products to understand customer behavior in their physical locations to optimize marketing and operations. Euclid invented a novel way to identify and triangulate shopper behavior through Wi-Fi signals and mobile phones. It uses the combination of hundreds of millions of shopper events and external data sources to provide recommendations to its retail, restaurant and mall customers. For example, which marketing campaigns, staffing changes and menu updates increase restaurant visits? Euclid evolved from “Google Analytics for the real world” to “insights and personalization for the physical world.” That is, the company went from offering dashboards to offering insights by adding complementary data sources and enabling online-to-offline attribution and engagement in physical locations. Euclid partners with Wi-Fi OEMs, VARs and MSPs to integrate with major hardware providers. Further, the Euclid ecosystem analyzes location data alongside a range of additional data sources, including Door Counters, POS, CRM, MAP and staffing systems. started out as those iPads you see in meeting rooms and is now the leader in optimizing the workplace and workforce. Here’s how they made this rightward progression. The company signed up 300 SMBs before raising a seed round, and has since onboarded more than 1,800 customers, including Viacom, National Instruments and GE. The product now generates more than 150 million unique data points per month, combines that with data from integrated products and offers analytics on the workplace and workforce, e.g. room utilization, causes of meeting cancellations, re-booking rates, frequently skipped meetings and the cost of meetings. EventBoard evolved from conference room scheduling to digital workplace and workforce optimization. The product seamlessly brings together people, places and technology to create a better and more efficient workplace, and a more effective workforce. Apple recommended EventBoard to many large companies because it changed the value proposition of iPads in the enterprise. Today, EventBoard has strong strategic investors and solid partnerships with Apple, Google, Aruba/HP and GE. GE provides access to rich data sets that the company leverages to provide even deeper insights and analytics. EventBoard also started to build a channel strategy. Over the next decade, cloud-based software will require intelligent features to effectively help customers increase revenue, lower cost or be in compliance. This will be true for both existing lines of business in the enterprise and new markets such as the industrial internet, precision agriculture, smart cities and bioinformatics. The key question for an entrepreneur is the same as always: How will my investors add value? Today that means: How will my investors help me build a next-generation team, form a data strategy, position my company, make partnerships and keep me funded with the best syndicate for the marathon ahead? On top of being a great business partner, they need to be an expert in helping you create a beachhead in the intelligence era.
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Student projects leapfrog governments and industry in ‘Data Science for Social Good’ program
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Devin Coldewey
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| 8
| 26
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Big data is hardly new at this point — nor has it wrought anywhere near its potential effects on many companies and institutions insulated by inertia and red tape. A summer program at the University of Washington called shows that fresh eyes and good code can make more in 10 weeks than some have done in as many years. It’s all part of UW’s eScience Institute, and the program is based on similar ones at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech. Teams of students from around the country apply to take part, then travel to Seattle and work with experts who connect them with data and tools. This year the theme was “Urban Science,” so for three months, the four teams ground through hoards of data kept by transit authorities, municipalities and contractors. The results are impressive — and possibly lucrative. Here’s the story each team told during a demo day held at UW’s physics and astronomy department. Seattle is more than a little late to the game when it comes to centralized mass transit, but the advent of ORCA (One Regional Card for All) has started tying things together nicely. The system also produces a torrent of data, very little of which is put to good use, as I understand it. The team decided to dive into this data to see what they could see. ORCA tracks lots of stuff: where and when passengers get on, what type of card it is (subsidized, for instance, or senior), what business (if any) it is associated with and so on. This is augmented, theoretically, by in-vehicle sensors that register passengers by weight and the buses’ location reports. First came eight weeks of intensive input sanitizing and database wrangling. Differences and relationships between the numbers provide powerful insight into who’s riding where, when and — potentially — how to prevent problems like overcrowded buses. The city could also tap into this data to find out which companies are meeting certain “commute reduction” goals, like persuading X percent of employees to use transit. The team’s presentation was slick and the options many: a curious bus rider could easily find and avoid rush hours and commonly overcrowded lines — and a Department of Transportation researcher could just as easily look at city-level data as it evolves over months and years, finding trends and spotting impending crunches. I don’t say that hypothetically; in the audience (directly behind me, in fact) were two people from local transit authorities whose delight was obvious. For years, they told me when I asked, they’d been trying to do this kind of analysis and create this kind of tool. And a handful of students did it in one summer with next to no money. The project lead repeatedly turned in his seat to look at them meaningfully, and they obliged by inviting the team to present to both city and state officials. On-demand directions from Google or Apple are a godsend to those of us lacking basic navigational skills, but a major deficiency is an almost total lack of accommodations for people with disabilities. For instance, one route might be shorter — but take the user along sloped or ill-maintained sidewalks with no curb cuts and no marked crosswalks. That’s a serious obstacle to someone in a walker or with limited sight, and the ability to prefer other routes would be invaluable. The OpenSidewalks team decided to tackle this problem, but soon found it was even more difficult than they expected. OpenStreetMap allows for annotations such as those they wanted to add, but the standard edit tools are not suited to them. Municipalities must track their own sidewalks for maintenance purposes, and do, but that data (or at least the data the team had access to) was a total mess. The USGS maintains slope data, but it’s not easy to merge with the rest. Chaos! The solution isn’t a neural network or computer vision system, though: For now, it’s just elbow grease. The team created a custom editing app for OSM and established a set of schema for tagging the features they deemed most important: curb cuts, crossings, sidewalks and associated attributes like width, condition and so on. They presented their work at the State of the Map conference and later ran a “Mapathon” to test the effectiveness of their toolset; in a day, their volunteers annotated much of the University District. With luck, the editor and project will gain a bit of steam and friendly mappers around the country will start piecing together areas where this kind of effort is most needed. Food recalls are, while not exactly commonplace, at least expected now and then. But even with all the advances in supply chains and oversight by every company that serves perishables — after all, it costs a fortune to recall an item — usually even the quickest recalls seem to come well after the horse has left the barn. A tainted shipment of yogurt or frozen vegetables can be on the shelf or offered online for months before the company has enough evidence to spur a voluntary recall. But with all the people leaving reviews online, shouldn’t it be possible to catch these things before they spread too far and cause greater harm? That was the question asked by the Unsafe Foods team. And when you think about it, it seems almost strange that for all the sentiment analysis and trend watching that’s done online, this hasn’t been a priority. The team looked up recent recalls and scraped thousands upon thousands of reviews from Amazon’s systems. One obstacle they encountered right away was — you guessed it — the government records for recalls were incredibly messy. It took a long time just to figure out a way to extract the UPC from recall reports and match that to a product ID on Amazon. Fortunately, the tool they created for doing so is reliable and reusable, although let’s hope the authorities learn to package their data better soon. After that, the team started sifting through the reviews looking for reliable patterns that would indicate food-borne illness and not just an unsatisfied customer. They deployed machine learning algorithms and statistical models, but ultimately found that there just wasn’t enough data: Their processes successfully identified reviews relating to recalled products, but couldn’t predict those recalls with any accuracy. Still, while the data were insufficient and the methods need more investigation, the concept seems sound to me. In fact, as I told the team later, their presentation left me disappointed not in them but in Amazon. Amazon, after all, has unfettered access to much more data and is known to do all kinds of deep data diving; there’s no way this type of analysis hasn’t occurred to them. With all the info from Fresh and other services, it seems to me like a fairly serious lapse to not even attempt to do this kind of work. Either the company gave it a try and ran into the same problems, or decided it was more expedient to let things take their normal, slow course. Census data is used for all kinds of things and is often consulted when deciding where and how to deploy resources. But the census is labor-intensive, expensive and infrequent; surely there’s some way to get a general idea of important measures like poverty without going door to door and asking? Such a tool could be deployed by developing countries that can’t afford a manual census. The Crowdsensing the Census team aimed to find a cross section of easily attainable data that would let them estimate poverty levels district by district, and on a scale of months rather than years. There’s no shortage of information on all kinds of aspects of city life, so the question was not one of getting the data but sorting through it. Yet again the limitations of mismatched standards and record-keeping enter the equation: The team compared data from Mexico City and Milan and soon found that the two have very different ways of dividing the city, and recorded different data therein. They managed to tame it sufficiently, though, that their other measures could be brought to bear: “points of interest” from OpenStreetMaps, things like bike racks, bars, universities, banks, and such; call detail records taken from mobile providers; and an analysis of street layouts to determine their convenience and accessibility to other areas and resources. The results were mixed, but promising. Many correlations were found between measurements they extracted and socioeconomic status, but ultimately there was just too much to sift through, too many possible variables to explore. Why were more bars indicative of a nicer neighborhood in Milan, but not Mexico City? Should having a radial layout to the city change how accessibility is scored? Should transient cell signals be downplayed if there’s a university nearby? Essentially, they opened a can of worms and had only a limited time to… sort them, or whatever it is you do with the worms. I was more than a little pleasantly surprised at the quality and thoroughness of the projects in the DSSG program, and with luck others like it will start popping up around the country, like this one did at UW. If you’re interested in the piece-by-piece progress of the course, as they worked their way through the problems and solutions described above. And check back next year for another batch of promising data science — for social good, naturally.
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Tracking Instagram’s money-flipping scammers
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Kate Conger
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Trying to get more followers on Instagram? If you follow a few verified banks and financial institutions, you’ll suddenly end up with dozens of new followers. There’s just one drawback: Your new followers are trying to scam you. Instagram has become a hotbed for so-called “money flipping,” according to a by the social media security firm ZeroFox. Scammers will attempt to lure bank customers, military members, and people in financially desperate situations with pictures of cash, luxury watches or drugs, promising special knowledge of a secret investment that guarantees a huge payout. All the mark needs to do is put in a little cash and they’ll earn a 10x return on their money, the scammers claim. Some variations of money flippers ask for access to an empty bank account, depositing bad checks to make the mark believe they’re getting paid, then withdraw the money before the bank or the customer realizes the checks were counterfeit. Over two years, ZeroFox tracked Instagram scammers and even lured them using honeypot accounts. The firm found 4,574 unique scams perpetuated by 1,386 accounts and used machine learning to distinguish the scam posts from those by legitimate users calling out the scammers. Surprisingly, ZeroFox discovered that military members were a frequently targeted segment of Instagram’s user base. “We think that scammers target military members specifically because organizations tend to use military discounts to get PR action or attract new customers,” Phil Tully, a ZeroFox data scientist, told TechCrunch. “If you’re a military member, you’re kind of bombarded by these offers. Over time, military members are conditioned to expect this kind of behavior.” Because military members are used to getting special deals, the scams might not strike them as odd. ZeroFox also found that 80 percent of the scam posts it analyzed remained live on Instagram for more than 45 days, suggesting that scammers slip through undetected by Instagram’s own security algorithms. Instagram, through its parent company Facebook, is working with ZeroFox on strategies to stamp out fraud on the platform. “Instagram is working to remediate these issues but they are dealing with a huge user set, a huge amount of posts. It’s not their business level focus,” ZeroFox co-founder Evan Blair explained. “Social networks are concerned about these issues and we’ve worked with several platforms to build out an automated way to detect these, but their primary function is to grow revenue and drive ad sales.” But Facebook, which in 2012, says that it performs scam detection using different techniques than ZeroFox. ZeroFox’s analysis of scam posts is based on the images themselves and the captions, hashtags, and even emoji that accompany them. The security researchers found that hashtags like #fastcash and #money were often found in scam posts, and fine-tuned their algorithm to differentiate between those posts and do-gooder posts using the same hashtags to warn other users about scams. Overall, ZeroFox determined that the abundant use of hashtags is in itself a bad sign: “We found high separability between the number of hashtags in scam posts as compared to benign posts, meaning the number of hashtags was a powerful predictor to determine whether a post was a scam or not,” the company said in its report. However, Facebook has access to information beyond pictures and captions that help in its fraud analysis, such as IP addresses of scammers. Like ZeroFox, Facebook uses machine learning to find illegitimate accounts on Instagram — but the company looks at account behavior rather than content. “We look for other classifiers and signals. The behavior patterns are a better indicator than the content itself,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. Facebook encourages banks and security companies like ZeroFox to report scam posts, which helps feed them into the company’s own machine learning security systems. Since this spring, Facebook has been testing a program to share information about the scammers through its , which includes other social media and internet companies as well as several banks. “We look at IP addresses or infrastructure they use online and share it with the other companies,” the Facebook spokesperson explained. “We don’t want to take down individual accounts or posts, we want to take down entire organizations and campaigns.” Instagram isn’t the only social media platform battling with scammers, ZeroFox’s Blair noted. “It’s important to note that scams and fraud are a social media problem, not an Instagram problem. Money flipping is more prevalent on Instagram, but there are different scams on different networks. The whole idea of social media — the trust, the scale, the connectivity — makes social media ripe for targeting by scammers,” Blair said. In fact, ZeroFox doesn’t lay the entire responsibility of policing the money flipping scams at Instagram’s feet. Instead, the security firm says banks should take responsibility for protecting their customers on social media. The thousands of scam posts are a tiny fraction of the millions of photos posted on Instagram every day, but for banks, it’s a big part of the social media experience. ZeroFox’s honeypot account picked up 23 new followers that appeared to be in the money flipping business after following prominent banks on Instagram, and two of the new followers reached out to engage the honeypot in an attempted scam. Of course, getting banks to be more proactive about monitoring and reporting social media scams is a monetization opportunity for ZeroFox, which licenses its detection algorithm. But if banks get involved in tracking and reporting social media scams, they can prevent the scammers from ever dipping into customers’ accounts.
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Plowz and Mowz raise $1.5 million from LA-based Science for on-demand landscaping services
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Jonathan Shieber
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Launching with a marketplace for landscaping, snow plowing and other home care and repair services, has raised $1.5 million from the Los Angeles-based startup studio Science and undisclosed angel investors. On the heels of the firm’s successful exit from , Science has turned to the marketplace industry for its next investment. The idea for the company stretches back nearly four years to one of the big snowstorms that hit co-founder Wills Mahoney’s hometown of Syracuse, NY. Mahoney’s mother was stuck in the family house, needing a plow to get out of her driveway and watching spare snowplows drive by the house on their way to other jobs. From its first markets in Syracuse and Minneapolis, Plowz & Mowz has expanded to Boston, New York, Indianapolis and Raleigh, NC. “Sixty-five percent of homeowners have never hired a professional landscaper [and] it’s primarily due to the cost of a seasonal contract,” said company co-founder Andrew Englander. “We offer plows, mows, and leaves… outsource it directly to the smartphone and it’s done by the same provider base and fits seamlessly within the current route structure of the landscaper.” By providing services on demand instead of on a seasonal basis, the two co-founders say they can open up landscaping professionals to an untapped group of potential customers. The company has two pricing models; one that’s on a monthly basis for work, and another that’s one-off. The company provides estimates to both landscapers and homeowners for how much a job will cost using software and services that are built into the application. “Typically, someone would come out and quote the property,” said Mahoney. “We created an instant process to do that and the jobs get outsourced to our local landscape providers.” For a landscaper to be listed on the Plowz & Mowz app, the company has to have commercial-grade equipment, a team of employees and $1 million in general liability insurance. So far, the company has handled 56,000 jobs — the bulk of which are lawn-mowing services. “The way we’ve always thought about this business is that plows would serve as ‘lead-gen’ to lawn mowing, which serves as ‘lead-gen’ to leaf removal,” Englander said.
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Facebook ditches helpful Trending Topic descriptions for global scale
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Josh Constine
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Twitter’s “Trends” are often confusing. Why is #MPBMS or #TechMunch trending? You had to click through and figure it out for yourself. When Facebook copied Twitter’s trends in 2014, it vastly improved them by adding human-written descriptions right below so you knew if you cared or not. Today Facebook is , and claims it’s to increase the scalability and personalization of the product. This is a win for users who don’t browse Facebook in English and might get access to Trending Topics sooner. But it’s a loss for those English-speaking users who could previously much more quickly scan the descriptions of Trends for whether they were worth a click. Without humans slowing down and driving up the price of the product, everyone will get to see Trending Topics that are even better tailored to your interests based on Pages you Like, your location, Trends you previously interacted with, and more. It will also be able to bring Trending Topics to more languages. One other explanation is that Facebook is seeking to minimize human interaction with trends. Earlier this year it was by Gizmodo’s anonymous sources of suppressing conservative Trends, though an investigation found to support that. [Update: However, Facebook doesn’t have of curation choices from the time period questioned.] The allegations still riled right wing feathers during an election cycle when Facebook is seeking to seem impartial. Humans will still ensure Trends are about something newsy, not just #Lunch every day. Sure, if you’ve got some niche interests like an extreme sport, geeky academic pursuit, or B-list celebrity, the new Trending Topics will be able to show you more hashtags about them now. But you won’t be able to tell what the cryptic hashtags are about at a glance anymore. Instead, you’ll need to hover over the trends to see a news story, user post, or an excerpt from the original source about the trend. Why yes, Facebook, I’ve heard of those celebrities. But without context for why they’re Trending, I don’t feel compelled to care The strategy seems like a step backwards. Facebook makes tons of money — over $2 billion in profit last quarter alone. Financing the existing human description writers shouldn’t be that much of a problem. Hiring scribes for a few of the other most popular languages on the planet probably wouldn’t break the bank, either. Instead, Facebook could have chosen to keep descriptions for major Trending Topics shown to lots of people in English, and just drop them when the algorithms suggest a niche Trend or one for users with unsupported languages. At 1.71 billion users, Facebook has to do what’s right for the masses. Yet it’s rare to see the company quite clearly degrade the usability of a product a shortcut to scale.
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Russia’s Google equivalent is building a self-driving shuttle
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Darrell Etherington
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The Google equivalent in every major market where Google doesn’t really play is making a self-driving car of some kind, and Russia is the latest to join the fray. is the company in question, which operates Russia’s leading search engine, along with a host of other going concerns. Add to that list a driverless minibus, which the tech company is creating in partnership with Russian truck maker Kamaz, NAMI, a government-funded research organization focused on the automotive industry and Daimler, which is . As , the Yandex part of the puzzle will be contributions from its work in computer vision, AI and speech recognition tech, while NAMI will offer the testing and research facility and Kamaz will presumably lend its manufacturing prowess to actually building the micro-bus vehicles. Yandex isn’t wasting too much time getting its first foray into self-driving off the ground — Forbes says that NAMI will begin testing the bus on closed courses next year. The vehicles can seat 12 and have a max range of around 200 km (124 miles), which is about double the range of Olli, the self-driving operating now in Washington, DC. Yandex’s self-driving experiment will also let passengers specify their destination via smartphone app, making it a little bit more like an on-demand group taxi.
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Romain Dillet
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Google Wallet debuts automatic transfers so you can skip “cashing out”
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Sarah Perez
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Google today is stepping up its battle with Venmo, Square Cash and other person-to-person payment applications with an update to its mobile app, which now allows for automatic transfers to your bank account. That is, transfers will no longer require you to cash out money from your Wallet balance first. This will speed up the time it takes for Wallet users to gain access to their cash, something that has been slower in the past. The feature was announced in the app’s update text on Friday, but we understand the feature will actually begin rolling out gradually, starting next week. As you may recall, Google Wallet transitioned to last year following the Google’s Apple Pay rival now used at point-of-sale and for in-app purchases on Android devices. Earlier this year, the company associated with the app, as it continued its transition to p2p payments. Today, waiting to cash out your balance from Google Wallet can still take time, which is why Google is switching on this automatic transfers option. Users will now be able to select a bank account or debit card for automatic transfers within the app or via the web. Once enabled, you won’t have to manually “cash out” money from your Wallet balance – it will just automatically become available. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will be “instantly” available, however – that depends on several factors – like who you bank with, or whether you’re crediting the money back to a debit card. Transfers to debit cards will be instant in most cases, though some banks may take 24 hours to process those transactions. Meanwhile, transfers to banks should take 1 to 3 days. This change also means that when you send money to friends, those funds will also be able to go to their bank accounts automatically, without any waiting time for them. Of course, you’ll still be able to keep money in your Google Wallet balance if you want to – that option is not going away. There will still be times when transfers take longer, though, as with any other payments service. Google may need to run fraud checks or may need to perform additional verification of user accounts, on occasion. However, the move to bypass the “cash out” process could help Google Wallet better compete against the growing number of digital payment services, including PayPal and PayPal-owned Venmo, Square Cash, and even social networks like and , which have experimented with bundling in payments to their messaging apps. , as powered by Square Cash. Square Cash powers Snapchat’s payment system, too, but it . With the update, Google is moving like Square Cash in reverse. It already had the cash drawer option; now it can transfer the money more quickly, too.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 08.26.16
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Steve Gillmor
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This is a LIVE recording session of – today with: Robert Scoble, Frank Radice, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang’s Facebook page G3’s Facebook page
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Newly proposed rules for foreign entrepreneurs will help some, but not all, found U.S. startups
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John Mannes
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The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an office under the Department of Homeland Security, put forward that would allow the U.S. Government to offer parole (temporary permission to be in the country) to foreign entrepreneurs starting their businesses in the United States. The proposal specifies that a founder can qualify if they started a company in the U.S. in the last three years and meet investor, founder, and company criteria. The Secretary of Homeland Security holds the power to grant temporary parole for individuals who provide “significant public benefit.” The extension to entrepreneurs seems natural, though the criteria recommended presents interesting insights into how the government determines the public benefit of any given startup. To qualify, a startup must be: The new International Entrepreneur Rule is a step in the right direction for the Obama administration, but ultimately it will only serve a segment of U.S. entrepreneurs. Ventures that serve a public good but are not primed to scale or generate massive revenue will be overlooked in favor of companies that can offer more typical venture returns. The proposed rules would allow entrepreneurs to attain parole for two years with the potential for an additional three-year extension. Five years is still brief with respect to the timeline to exit for most ventures. The average IPO-track startup takes seven years to exit, and many take 10 or even 12 years. The extension requirement also puts pressure on founders to have achieved success by the check-in, and presents additional risk to investors that a company could be obliterated from the outside. This still puts startups run by founders granted parole at an inherent disadvantage to startups run by founders with full citizenship. Additionally, to qualify, entrepreneurs must have at least 15 percent ownership of their respective company. The definition of entrepreneur is kept vague, constituting anyone who “possesses a substantial ownership interest,” “has an active role in operations” and is “well-positioned…to assist the entity with growth.” While there are typically very few employees at any single company that have a 15 percent ownership stake, it could be possible under this rule for multiple people to get temporary parole from the same startup. Rather than stick to the more commonly used “Accredited Investor” definition put forward by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Homeland Security is proposing a new “qualification” dependent on “a history of making similar or greater investments on a regular basis over the last 5 years,” and “a demonstration that at least two of the entities receiving such investments have subsequently experienced significant growth in revenue or job creation.” Besides the fact that under this rule, a Y Combinator-backed startup that receives the standard $120,000 might not qualify, a requirement of having already raised money can force entrepreneurs into an awkward conversation with investors. Early-stage investors at the seed and Series A stage already have a lot of risk to deal with without fear that a founder will be denied parole status. Requiring $345,000 in previous investment, and even using investment as a metric for public good at all, is fraught with concern. Moreover, the requirement that investors have a track record of success ultimately appears to be an attempt to prevent a lone angel investor from essentially sponsoring parole for cash. Rules designed to prevent fraud, like requiring an investor track record of success and mandating that startups have previously raised funding, will restrict many companies from ever benefiting from the new rule.
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Flirtey flies pies for Domino’s in New Zealand
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Lora Kolodny
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has demonstrated delivery of hot pizzas by drone in Auckland, New Zealand. The company has a long history of embracing high-tech concepts. Last year, they tested out a four-wheeled, vehicle. And in 2012, Domino’s launched a casual build-a-pizza game that also let players order the pizza they built digitally for real life delivery. The company also uses e-bikes and electric scooters for delivery. In a press statement, Domino’s Group CEO and Managing Director Don Meij said: “We’ve always said that it doesn’t make sense to have a 2-tonne machine delivering a 2-kilogram order…drones allow us to extend [our] delivery area by removing barriers such as traffic and access [and] deliver further afield than we currently do to our rural customers while reaching our urban customers in a much more efficient time.” The provider of Domino’s aerial logistics service was , a startup headquartered in Reno, Nevada, that makes delivery drones and packaging to keep contents safe and hot as they travel through the sky. Flirtey’s drones were also used to in New Jersey and to to customers in Reno, Nevada for 7-Eleven, recently. In 2015, New Zealand’s government made commercial drone delivery legal in their lower airspace. The U.S. Government has not yet figured out the exact rules to enable mainstream adoption of commercial drone deliveries. But a new rule, Part 107, is going into effect on Monday in the U.S. that allows for commercial use of unmanned aircraft that weigh under 55 pounds by people and companies who have registered as operators and registered their drones with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The Department of Transportation and the FAA’s requires drone users, among other things, to always fly within the line of the operator’s sight and not to fly over people until further best practices and safety standards are researched and developed. Domino’s has said that it wants to become the first corporation– ahead of Google, Amazon and others who have invested heavily in drone delivery– to offer drone delivery to customers in a mainstream way. The Flirtey and Domino’s flight in Auckland was just an initial demonstration of what Domino’s calls its DRU Drone, or Domino’s Robotics Unit drone.
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StudySoup raises $1.7M to help students buy and sell class notes
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Lucia Maffei
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San Francisco-based education startup which calls itself “a peer-to-peer learning marketplace,” announced it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding. The company works as an online study group where students can sell or purchase class notes and study guides. “We realized that a lot of students come to college on very different levels,” Sieva Kozinsky, 26, co-founder and CEO, said in a phone interview with TechCrunch. “They’re all expected to hit the ground running and to get on the same page, and unfortunately it leads to a lot of failures, because people are totally unprepared and there isn’t the right support there.” Kozinsky said that the first spark for StudySoup was ignited when he was taking a Biology 1 class as a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara. According to him, there were 500 students in that class and the teacher would speak really fast. “Unfortunately, I was not able to listen and take notes at the same time,” Kozinsky recalled. “One day, I looked over to the young lady who was sitting to my side, and she had perfectly structured notes in different colors, very nicely organized.” After that, Kozinsky and fellow UCSB undergrad Jeff Silverman, co-founder of StudySoup, discovered that more than one in three students drop out college because of financial reasons or because they don’t get the support they need. This was the case for one of Kozinsky’s roommates, as well. Even if several of the bigger universities offer academic support to their students, these services are not available everywhere. What can really help students, according to Kozinsky, is learning from their peers. On one side of the marketplace — the supply — there are people who provide the content: excellent note takers who want to make some extra cash by selling their notes. StudySoup calls them “Elite Notetakers.” Students need to apply to become Elite Notetakers, and complete a training about what kind of materials they should post and how often. According to Kozinsky, Elite Notetakers can earn from $400 to $500 per course by posting once a week, for a total of about 15 pieces of content. The company shares revenue with the Elite Notetakers. “We keep about 30 percent of the revenue they make,” Kozinsky said. “But unlike Airbnb or Uber, we offer a guarantee for students. If you just sign up and you go through the training, you are guaranteed to earn money. And every time somebody uses your notes, you’re going to unlock new revenue.” On the other side of the business — the demand — there are students from a variety of backgrounds, from strugglers to top performers. They can search notes by note taker, class or professor. Subscriptions cost from $11 to $30 a month. StudySoup started on three campuses in 2014. One was the campus where the co-founders were studying, UC Santa Barbara. The others were the University of Oregon and the University of Washington. “We picked schools that were similar to UC Santa Barbara in size and demographics, but also that were across different state lines,” Kozinsky explained. “We wanted to make sure that students need this help everywhere.” According to the company, 2,000 Elite Notetakers, 150 schools and more than 500,000 students are part of the StudySoup network. StudySoup is primarily used by undergrads, but 20 percent of users are graduate students pursuing medical or law school. Participants in this round of funding were 1776 DC, , and a few angels such as John Katzman, Jake Gibson and Leonard Lodish. “Our focus at StudySoup is building an academic service department online,” said Kozinsky. “We wanted to make sure that our investors were aligned with this kind of long-term vision.” Thanks to the $1.7 million, the company is going to expand its product team by hiring a couple more engineers and to invest in marketing and advertising to let students nationwide know about StudySoup. “In the next five years, we want to continue our expansion across different college campuses. Also, we want to provide new products to our current students, so they can keep making money on the platform,” Kozinsky said. For example, a flash card study tool, which is currently in beta.
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Rheo, a personalized video app designed by ex-Apple product vets, scores $2.3 million
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Sarah Perez
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A personalized video channel for Apple TV, , has now closed on $2.3 million in seed funding, the company announced this week. It has also updated its application and expanded its content lineup, thanks to a new deal with Vimeo which brings the network’s catalog of short videos, including its “Staff Picks,” short films, animations, music and more, to Rheo’s service. The funding was led by Accomplice, with participation from Pathbreaker Ventures, Social Capital, SocialStarts, and Google Maps creator Lars Rasmussen. Rheo, by way of background, was founded by notable product development veteran Alan Cannistraro, who previously spent 12 years at Apple working on apps like Remote, iBooks, and Podcasts. He also worked at Facebook building auto-play videos and Year-In-Review, among other things. Rheo’s newly joined Chief Product Officer Charles Migos, meanwhile, also worked at Apple for over a decade, where he recently created Apple News, and Microsoft, where he designed the company’s home media experience. The idea for the startup came from Alan’s belief that media has become too difficult to access in our new digital landscape, compared with traditional TV viewing in years past where you could just switch on the set. “Media is everywhere. It’s scattered. To find it, you have to search. You have to remember. You have to act to get to it,” he says. “There was a time when media was effortless. When you just turned on the TV, and information came at you…Partly it was good information because you didn’t have to put any effort in to get it.” Unlike services like YouTube where content is organized by channel, Rheo organizes videos based on mood. For example, there’s a “Laugh” channel for comedy, an “Inform” channel for news coverage, a “Spark” channel for creative content from artists, designers and musicians, “Learn” for educational content, and “Chill” for music. With the updated version of the Apple TV app, Rheo has also added a new channel called “Move,” which features action sports content. The videos on Rheo come from a variety of sources, but mainly Facebook via API access. With the Vimeo addition, Rheo has around 16,000 total videos available and it adds around 1,000 more every week. Alan says the team curates the selection, whether that’s hand-picking select videos they come across, or pulling in all from a specific, trusted publisher. What’s interesting about Rheo’s service, however, is that it gradually adapts itself to the viewer’s own interests. Over time, the more you watch, Rheo gets better at identifying those you’d like. When you watch a video to the end, for example, that’s a signal that you like it, while skipping a video indicates disinterest. The app can also learn what time of day you tune into certain types of content, plus you can more directly indicate you like something by “boosting” it with a double-press on the Siri remote. In addition to the new Vimeo content, the updated app also now offered more controls to move through videos. While there are a number of video-viewing apps on the market, Rheo is betting on its product as being the way it wins. “Charles and I know how to build great products that people love. That is how we differentiate ourselves from the sea of other apps,” says Alan. In three months, Rheo’s viewers have watched over a million videos on the app, though the company declined to say how many users it has. It’s also not currently monetizing, nor discussing its plans on that front in detail. “I’ll say this about monetization: We are approaching peak ads. I believe it will mature,” says Alan. “It’s unfair to show a user a 30s pre-roll for a 2 minute piece of content,” he adds, “I think users will revolt.” In the near-term, Alan says the company will use the new funding for hiring, with plans to hire both industry experts and creative newcomers to round out the team. The app is The plan is to remain on Apple TV for the time being, then move to other platforms after they get the experience right.
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WhatsApp-Facebook data-sharing deal probed by UK privacy watchdog
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Natasha Lomas
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Well that was fast. Just one day after , by detailing plans to share the mobile numbers and last seen status of its users with parent company Facebook for ad-targeting and marketing purposes, the UK’s data protection watchdog has fired a warning shot across Zuckerberg’s bows by announcing it intends to investigate the arrangement. In a , fresh-in-post UK information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, who only took up the role last month, said: “We’ve been informed of the changes. Organisations do not need to get prior approval from the ICO to change their approaches, but they do need to stay within data protection laws. We are looking into this.” Denham said the regulator will be considering whether the two companies are being transparent with users about how their data is being shared and used. “The changes WhatsApp and Facebook are making will affect a lot of people. Some might consider it’ll give them a better service, others may be concerned by the lack of control. Our role is to pull back the curtain on things like this, ensuring that companies are being transparent with the public about how their personal data is being shared, and protecting consumers by making sure the law is being followed,” she added. A WhatsApp spokesperson had this to say when asked for comment on the ICO’s interest in its new privacy policy: “We look forward to answering any questions regulators or other stakeholders have about this update.” Discussing the legal implications of the new data-sharing arrangement between WhatsApp and Facebook with TechCrunch earlier today, Scott Vernick, partner and head of the data security and privacy practice at U.S. law firm Fox Rothschild LLP, suggested regulators will be keen to ensure the language used in the updated T&Cs clearly and accurately conveys the changes being made. “The question that any regulator will be asking is whether or not the new policies and the way in which you opt into them — or opt out of them — is expressed in clear to the average user,” he said. “There’s no doubt that a disclosure is being made, but it’s a question of whether it’s transparent enough to the average user so you know exactly what it is you’re giving up.” When WhatsApp users are prompted to agree to the new T&Cs in the app, the wording that describes the purpose of the setting where they can is as follows: “Share my WhatsApp account information with Facebook to improve my Facebook ads and products experiences. Your chats and phone number be shared onto Facebook regardless of this setting.” — Emphasis theirs. It’s possible that someone reading that wording quickly might think their phone number will not be shared with Facebook. When in fact it will be shared with Facebook . (But will just not be publicly posted onto their own Facebook page.) So there certainly looks to be some room for confusion, although it remains to be seen whether the ICO will view the phrasing as troublingly opaque or not. Vernick also suggested another area that might be problematic for the WhatsApp/Facebook data-sharing arrangement is if the two companies gave certain guarantees to regulators about how they would handle user data at the time of the WhatsApp acquisition — and can now be shown to be reneging on any earlier commitments. “The regulators have been much more active in looking at the M&A space, and looking at the privacy consequences for M&A activity,” he noted. “And so I could see a scenario in which if either Facebook or WhatsApp or the both of them made certain representations to the regulators, either in the States or in Europe, about what was going to happen with individual user information once the two companies hooked up and now they’re going back on that, then that could be a real issue.” Potential legal implications aside, Vernick argued there is an unavoidable “visceral” reaction to such a big change by WhatsApp on sharing user data, given how the company has previously positioned itself as a privacy champion — which in itself could have serious trust/reputational consequences if users feel betrayed. “I think there’s a real visceral issue here which in some ways is more important than the legal issue — not that the legal issues aren’t important, but it’s just this idea that as consumers, or as users, we continue — assuming there’s anything left to lose — we just continue to lose more,” he said. “It feels like a bit of a bait and switch. Or it feels like I’m losing more control even though my choices are ‘well if you don’t like it, just don’t use it’,” he added. In terms of ‘choice’, other encrypted messaging apps are of course available. One example, Telegram, offers end-to-end encryption via a secret chats features. Another, Signal, is made by the same company that makes the open source secure-messaging protocol that WhatsApp has rolled out to its own app — . Telegram founder Pavel Durov confirmed to TechCrunch the app has seen a small bump in downloads since the WhatsApp privacy policy change was announced, with an increase of new users in the region of 30 to 40 per cent over the past 24 hours. Although he added that it has not seen “millions” of downloads — , back in February 2014.
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Sony may unveil two new versions of the PS4 next month
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Jon Russell
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Sony will reportedly unveil two new versions of the PlayStation 4 at its upcoming New York press event on September 7. that the company is set to launch a more powerful version of the console — called ‘Neo’ — but now that it will also refresh its standard model. There are no precise details right now, but the Journal — citing sources — said that the two different versions of the PS4 are designed to broaden the appeal and “attract hardcore fans and more casual users to its videogame platform.” , and its games are continuing to sell well, too. While it has scaled back its loss-making mobile business and suffered the financial impact of the Kumamoto earthquake on its manufacturing operations, the PlayStation business is booming. The gaming division accounted for 75 percent of Sony’s profits in such is its importance to the Japanese tech giant. Additional games consoles aren’t the only notable new gaming development planned for Sony. that it will begin producing games for iOS and Android for the first time, , but it clarified that these titles would be focused on users based in Asia. That’s bound to disappoint millions of ardent fans elsewhere in the world — but they can at least look forward to new versions of the PS4. And, if they are partial to nostalgia, with a miniature version just in time for Christmas. Then there’s the Xbox camp, which , and — “Project Scorpio” — in 2017. Lots to look forward to!
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Designing for voice differs from traditional UX
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Stephanie Hay
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Two words: “all set.” People say them every day — after the waiter delivers food, when finishing a customer service call or before launching a rocket into space. (Or so I imagine.) These two words are just fine in the context of real life, human-to-human interactions. They’re also covered as a feedback loop in traditional UI design, where we can create a button that says “Done” or “Save” and know exactly to which touch point people are referring when they tap it. In human-to-robot interactions, however, that’s where things get tricky. Because when people say “all set,” we have to know if they mean (complete the use case for this interaction only) or (end the session completely and close the skill). How we react to those two little words — and the universe of similar phrases a person can say — makes the difference between intuition and ignorance. And because our goal as designers is to remove all friction, this is a challenge of epic proportions. Fortunately, plenty of nerdy people into data + design (me included) are absolutely thrilled to take it on. One of the key ways designing for conversational user interfaces (CUIs) differs from graphic user interfaces (GUIs) is that use cases are necessarily constraining. Because CUIs are voice-based interactions between a customer and a machine that’s learning to be human, we have infinite possibilities of what the human will say and need to design for all of them. How is this even possible?! While we may not be able to predict every potential rabbit hole, we need to at least design an infrastructure that mimics how conversations work and are contextually driven. However, human-to-robot interactions aren’t so free-form and deeply knowledgeable (though one day they will be, which is ultra exciting). That’s why if a virtual assistant (VA) asked, “Do you need anything else?” rarely would you answer with something like “Yes, tell me the color of your dog’s eyes,” or “Remember when Jon Snow [insert spoiler here]?” unless you were showing off to your friends or wanting the VA to fail for fun. Given this, we can start designing for a breadth of possibilities that are most likely to follow our use case — and that’s key here: Start with a use case, a reason for interacting in the first place. When we know that, we’ve got a framework to design from and measure against, retrospectively and in real time. We can design to say “If [constrained number of input statements] then [related output statements].” Then see how often each variable is returned and when. That’s a very tight and unnatural framework though — one that doesn’t answer the “why” very well. That makes context key to transforming a utility into an actually delightful experience. Without visuals or animation to introduce fun, we only have our words. But that’s the beauty of CUIs — there is a gigantic world of opportunity to explore. And if we are learning from the use cases we’ve designed in one, then we can more quickly nail it for different kinds of people. “Nailing it” looks different depending upon the context of the use case, and, more importantly, the person with whom we’re interacting: The one, single human being in real life, talking to us via some newfangled hardware and software mashup. So that’s where context reigns supreme. For example, if we know that you’re the kind of person looking to build a more personal and trusting connection, we can respond accordingly with more in-depth, conversational language and insights. But for the kind of person who just wants straightforward answers and that’s it, we’d totally blow it by going that route with our language. Knowing who you, the user, are — and your gloriously paradoxical, constantly evolving brain, chock full of patterns and anti-patterns alike — enables us to design for Not just you as a [insert wide-sweeping demographic data and generic percentages with labels], but actually . Your words are raw data that teaches us what you want from us, and your behaviors — like did you complete a flow, or where did you drop and pick back up again, and when — round out that picture. We can more fully understand your context in life and, as a result, refine your experience to be better and better. That is, the more you keep talking and interacting, the more we keep learning. If we don’t go from use case to context quickly — at the speed of machine-learning-meets-humanity — then you’ll stop interacting with us, and we’ll stop learning. After all, in the world of CUIs, we need to swap in and out of different modes of interaction in real time, responsively, just like in a conversation with a friend in real life. In this way, conversations don’t follow a hierarchy like UI on a page or navigation across many pages. They’re more like search behavior; input, results, pogo-stick in and back up, only go deep if we’ve found value (or got lost in reverie momentarily). That requires us to design systems at the atomic level; to ensure every single statement (if not the words individually themselves) is tagged for the hypothesis in which it was created. That is, to say “this word/sentence works for [these kinds of people] looking to do [these kinds of things].” In a conversation between a human and a robot, the robot needs to know the human, and have the language and responsiveness to anticipate react progressively and repeatedly, from moment to moment. Otherwise, it’s just not a natural conversation. When we put all of this together in a meaningful way, I imagine it’ll look like a tennis match. But not just any tennis match: a super dynamic one with Serena Williams. She’ll serve and sometimes totally nail it with a single swing; DONE. Other times we’ll watch a captivating back-and-forth unfold before our eyes until someone brings the volley to a close by reading the play and exercising And when that happens, we’ll really know what “all set” means.
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How the International Olympic Committee is using technology to educate future host cities
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Bérénice Magistretti
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As the Rio Games draw to a close and the competing athletes pack up, leaving the Brazilian metropolis behind, the is already hard at work laying the foundation for the future spectacle of Olympic games. Throughout the Games, the IOC’s has been collecting data and compiling reports to share knowledge of the Games with future host cities. The program, which was created to help prep the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, has added an immersive and interactive video platform to its numerous management initiatives by collaborating with , a Swiss-based startup that launched a few months ago. The Teleport team has developed a Random Access Video Encoding (RAVE) algorithm built in JavaScript using the framework. “We are always looking for ways to contextualize our content to make it more intuitive,” said Christopher Payne, Head of the Olympic Games Knowledge Management program. “The Teleport platform is an excellent way to do this as it positions content with an obvious visual reference that transcends language barriers.” This will obviously come in handy when sharing knowledge with future host cities like Tokyo, PyeongChang and Beijing. The meeting between the Swiss startup and the Lausanne-headquartered IOC was a fortuitous one — and the Swiss connection certainly helped. “We were in the right place, at the right time,” said Cem Sever, co-founder and Business Development Manager of Teleport. Their collaboration began with a proof of concept for the , which took place in Lillehammer, Norway in February. Satisfied with the result, the IOC decided to use Teleport for the Rio Games as well. But the Committee has chosen not to open up the platform to the general public at this stage, using it only internally as an educational tool. “We’re using it for B2B projects with future organizers,” said Payne. “We hope that Teleport will innovate our information management services, illustrating the many challenges of operating the Games.” For the Rio Games application, the IOC created three Teleport environments focused on different types of venues, which the observers will be able to reference when they plan their own Games. “For the first time, we will connect the huge volume of content we have about the specifics of operating the venues to ensure that the operational requirements of every space are well understood,” said Payne.
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How government can unlock three trillion dollars of value in the digital economy
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Andrew Keen
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The traditional Silicon Valley view is that innovation happens in spite rather than because of government. But according to Accenture Senior Director of Strategy, , government does have an important role to play in stimulating growth. But it’s not the old top-down New Deal kind of government focused on massive investment in infrastructure and the creation of “shovel ready” jobs. Instead, Shah – – believes that the role of government is now as a collaborator with industry. He says that government needs to work with partners on new innovations like drones, which – because of often archaic regulatory restrictions – are struggling to realize their value. The challenge, then, for governments is unlocking the value of innovative technologies rather than creating it from scratch. According to the WEF report, the quantifiable “societal benefits” of unlocked value over the next ten years is more than three trillion dollars. It’s doubtful that either Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump will read the WEF report. That’s a shame. As Anand Shah reminds us, innovation comes through collaborative innovation rather than building walls or trashing free trade deals. The challenge now is to create a government with the collaborative agility to be able to unlock value in our networked age. As always, many thanks to the folks at
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Tech and the presidential race
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Ayinde Alakoye
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For Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, the importance of articulating a vision for the technology industry seems to be lost. While Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton released a comprehensive in June that should excite software developers, Mr. Trump doesn’t pay much attention to our industry’s concerns and is, frankly, on the wrong side of many of the most important issues facing tech today. Over the course of his candidacy, Mr. Trump has questioned basic data security and privacy principles, called for the boycott of a trusted American innovator and wondered about the virtues of the internet. If elected president, Mr. Trump’s views on technology could wall off the industry, stifle job and economic growth and cede the United States’ long-held position as the world’s innovation hub. Over the course of the last year, there has been much discussion surrounding the merits of . The technology industry, law enforcement and civil society groups are engaged in a long debate with one another over the benefits of encryption and whether the government can require companies to deliberately undermine their products’ privacy safeguards in the name of security. Consumers and the tech industry oppose such efforts because they would expose to bad actors users’ most personal information, including health and bank records, personal conversations, photos and much more. Data security and online privacy are core principles in today’s digital arena, helping to spur innovation and economic growth. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump seems to ignore common sense calls for a balanced approach to encryption, going so far as of Apple products until the company complied with an to torpedo iPhone security. (True to form, Mr. Trump ignored his own statements and continues to more than a million dollars in Apple stock and to from an iPhone.) On the internet, Mr. Trump’s positions are just as irresponsible. He has “closing that internet up in some way,” saying “we’re losing a lot of people to [it].” Most recently, Mr. Trump has he is “not a believer in email,” and the military use couriers instead of “the wires where everybody’s probably reading it,” a proposal befit for a man who has foreign governments to hack American communications. By contrast, Ms. Clinton recognizes the importance of the online economy. She has a group of talented technology policy advisers, pledged to appoint a chief innovation adviser and developed a , in which she promises to fight for internet freedom and oppose “efforts to block internet access or shutdown social media.” The internet has enabled users to call attention to human rights violations, organize protests and otherwise tear down the divisive walls that he and others like him seek to build. It connects people in far-flung places and is without a doubt one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Yet, even against this backdrop, Mr. Trump has that he has “always been concerned about the social breakdown of our culture caused by technology.” As the descendant of African slaves and later American citizens who lived under Jim Crow laws, my ancestors risked their lives to experience the American dream. Today, having started my own technology company, I’m proud to count myself among America’s entrepreneurs, hopefully making those who came before me proud. My story isn’t unique — an unmistakable indicator, if there ever was one, that America is and has always been the land of ideas and risk takers. Nevertheless, by centering his rhetoric on building barriers for people, ideas and information, Mr. Trump is tearing at the very fabric of the innovation community. The internet and other forward-looking technologies are the foundation upon which today’s economy and society rest. Any serious candidate running for president must develop an articulate and inclusive policy agenda to ensure the technology industry broadly, and its developers specifically, can continue to innovate, grow and make our world a better place.
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The new, scary face of auto insurance
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Kevin Wang
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Technology in the mobility space has made travel safer, faster and more convenient. The results have been incredible: The Insurance Information Institute found a in the past three years. The same survey found that . Mobility has also become more accessible with ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft delivering more than . Despite the upside, there are consequences to innovation. On of this year, a Tesla owner died while using the Autopilot feature. His vehicle into a truck after his Tesla failed to differentiate the white color of the truck against the backdrop of the sky. This event may change the narrative and for autonomous driving. It puts into perspective how close the future actually is and whether or not society will fully embrace it. Autonomous driving promises to decrease the automobile death toll. Last year there were automotive-related deaths, accounting for .01 percent of the U.S. population. While it may not seem like a high number, those deaths are the result of people, not an algorithm that holds a passenger’s life within its source code. This brings us to question the liability programmers and the code they write be given the power to determine life and death for consumers who buy their cars. And ultimately, who is liable in the case of an accident or even death? The next critical step is the proliferation of autonomous driving and the task of safely embedding its utility within the framework of our society. With these issues in mind, private companies and governmental agencies are taking appropriate steps to address them. Google has been testing and building a fleet of self-driving cars that have completed . In 2014, the U.S. Department of Transportation approved that enabled vehicles to “talk” to one another and can help prevent human errors that often lead to collision. And this March, General Motors a startup called Cruise Automation for $1 billion. GM was already on pace to launch a highway-oriented, smart cruise control system in its Cadillac CT6 line. Technological and governmental infrastructure for autonomous vehicles is well on its way to maturity. But there are a number of factors that will decide whether the mass adoption of autonomous driving will actually happen. Consumer acceptance is one factor. Not everyone may want a self- driving vehicle. Americans actually love cars; Experian Automotive reports that each household owns . If the idea of autonomous vehicles were to become widely adopted, the end user will eventually need to view travel and car ownership as separate concepts, a concept highlighted in Elon Musk’s . Deloitte believes there are : incremental change, car sharing, driverless revolution and accessible autonomy. The road that our current model is headed down is a driverless revolution, where consumers may still own their car but the vehicle will have the capabilities to operate itself. While all four stages may exist simultaneously, they may not necessarily distribute evenly among every segment of the population. The driverless-revolution stage may indicate incremental change from what we have now, much like GM’s new self-driving Cadillac technology. Accessible autonomy will impact auto insurance significantly. For starters, fewer accidents will result in fewer claims and less in losses for insurance carriers. David Zuby, EVP and Chief Research Officer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety , “Vehicles equipped with front crash prevention technology have a 7-15% lower claim frequency under property damage liability coverage.” This is a win-win situation; not only will technology prevent accidents, insurance companies will pay out fewer claims. Insurance companies will also need to develop new, innovative products before autonomous vehicles become widespread. will play a huge role in lowering premiums during the driverless-revolution stage. Insurance companies will need to find new products they can sell. In the car-sharing stage, insurance companies sold gap insurance and ride sharing policies to companies like Uber and Lyft. Drivers needed coverage when they picked up and dropped off guests. The premiums from the new policies cost more, as well. Geico’s personal policies for a male living in Chicago would cost $1,140, while its ride-sharing policy for the same individual would . Autonomous car policies could follow the same pricing increase strategy. The Tesla incident may deter the public from fully embracing autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars may never reach accessible autonomy and might only be an add-on feature. It is very likely that the driver will still be liable for the actions of their vehicles. This means that drivers will still need auto insurance. Driving technology may never replace drivers, but it could help us become less injury prone.
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Africa Roundup: Kenya’s Safaricom takes on Uber, Orange expands Pan-African profile
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Jake Bright
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Uber drivers in Nairobi the company’s July fare cuts. The move comes amidst greater competition in Kenya’s ride-hail market since local telecoms company Safaricom entered with its own Little Cab app. Partnering with Kenya’s , Safaricom launched the new service to aggressively take on Uber—immediately offering cheaper pricing and better driver terms, as covered in this recent TechCrunch feature. In addition to lower fares, Little Cab debuted with a range of unique services, starting with free Wi-Fi in its taxis accessed through an interface that offers other Safaricom products. Little Cab also has a “female friendly” option called Lady Bug, where women can request female drivers, and a corporate option for companies to consolidate all their taxi services digitally through one account. Expect a tit for tat exchange around price and product offerings between Uber, Little Cab, and Kenya’s other viable ride-booking services. The first move was Uber’s 35 percent price reduction (post Little Cab launch), which prompted some Uber drivers to strike. Uber Kenya will likely find a resolution. As , Uber Africa has demonstrated notable flexibility in adapting to local markets. What happens in Kenya’s ride-hail market could have ripples across Africa’s fairly nascent online transit services market. One of the continent’s most recognized (and capitalized) telecom firms, Safaricom, has put up a homegrown app against Uber, the world’s highest valued startup. Mobile companies and online transit startups in other African countries will surely watch for pointers on how this plays out. Meanwhile, Orange has continued to up its Pan-African profile. Throughout 2016, the French mobile giant has increased its product presence, investments, and acquisitions across the continent. At Orange’s July 28 London strategy meeting Middle East and Africa CEO Bruno Mettling reaffirmed the company’s commitment to Mettling announced the launch this September of the Orange 51 4G smartphone in partnership with Google. Positioned as an affordable Android device, this is an upgrade to the Orange Rise 31, which launched in 9 Sub-Saharan Africa countries in February 2016. The Rise 51 device will first be available in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire before rolling out to other markets later this year, confirmed Orange spokesperson Vanessa Clarke. Such product initiatives drive one of the continent’s most significant IT market trends: the conversion of Africa’s large and growing mobile masses ( ) to smart devices. Orange’s Rise 31 and 51 smartphones also augment the company’s Africa fintech services. , a money transfer and payments service with a mobile option, operates in 12 African countries. Similar to Safaricom ( ), Orange will also use its mobile network to enter the energy sector. It plans to pilot low income solar power kits in rural areas in Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Cameroon in 2016. On the Africa investment front, Orange’s most notable 2016 move so far was taking an in a round (including Goldman, AXA et al.) that catapulted the e-commerce startup to unicorn status. Orange expanded its Africa presence from 16 to 19 countries with 2016 acquisitions of mobile operators in , Liberia, and . And investment arm Orange Digital Ventures (with input from its Silicon Valley office) joined the recent , a California based smartphone financing startup with an Africa and emerging markets focus. All in all, this is a fairly big commitment by Orange and could represent phase II of Africa’s mobile telecoms markets. Phase I, which minted some of the continent’s first IT billionaires (i.e., Mo Ibrahim, Strive Masiyiwa, Mike Adenuga), was pretty rudimentary to getting those never previously connected using mobile in any way, mainly cheap cellphones and pay by minute SIM cards purchased through curbside vendors. Phase II of African mobile will be marked by more global players, better connectivity, broader and more advanced product networks, subscription based packages, more fintech and e-commerce options, and a shift to affordable smart devices. Looking at Orange and other local and global movers in Africa’s mobile telecom markets, it’s striking how absent the big American names are. There’s been little news of U.S. mobile operators making any plays on the continent. A Google search for Africa and American carriers such as T-Mobile, Verizon, or Sprint leads mostly to notes about their subscriber roaming options. We’ll see how much longer U.S. wireless companies can bypass one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets.
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INNOVATE2016: Brewster Kahle’s call for a decentralized web
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Andrew Keen
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and an The problem, he says, is that the Internet is no longer either private or secure. So his argument, summarized in a He launched his new mission in June with a The technology now exists, he says, to create websites Finally, he says, we have the technology to build both a genuinely public and commercial Internet which protects rather than exploits its users. And his call is for start-up entrepreneurs to join his mission. As always, many thanks to the folks at CALinnovates for their support in the production of this interview.
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Walmart is buying Jet.com for $3 billion
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Jonathan Shieber
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Walmart Stores is buying Jet.com in a deal worth $3 billion dollars according to a source with direct knowledge of the deal, confirming . According to our source the signatures for the deal were dry on Friday and will be announced as early as Monday morning — echoing what was reported in both Bloomberg and Recode. The deal for Jet.com comes as big brand companies and retailers are trying to shore up their defenses against an all-out assault on their business from Amazon.com. From its launch in 2015 Jet.com set itself up to be an Amazon killer. The company was founded by Marc Lore, , to Amazon for $545 million. The operator of sites Diapers.com, Beauty.com, and Soap.com, Quidsi was part of an Amazon buying spree that included the retailer Zappos.com and Woot and established the online retailer as a huge competitor in sales of both clothing and consumer packaged goods. Now, brands and the biggest box stores are fighting back with their own billion dollar acquisitions. One of the reasons that Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club in last month’s big dollar consumer deal was to compete with the looming threat of Amazon… and Walmart faces similar pressures. The deal is a nice payday for Jet.com investors who had committed more than $800 million in financing into the company. Investors like Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, NEA, General Catalyst Partners, Norwest, Goldman Sachs, and others all stand to gain substantially from the Walmart acquisition. But the biggest winner of all may be Lore himself. With a 25% stake in the company Lore stands to make as much as $750 million from the sale. As well as take the helm of the ecommerce site of commercial retail’s largest player. A company that raked in over $15 billion in profit last year. Such a large payout sends a strong message from Walmart about Lore’s expected value-add to the brand. Since its launch, , but its growth was coming at a steep price. According to the report in Recode the company was spending $20 million to $25 million on marketing to fund its growth. Indeed, Jet.com’s CEO even noted at the time that the fundraising environment for his company had become “tough”. And the company’s own public statements indicated that it wouldn’t be reaching profitability until at least 2020. Even as Walmart latches on to Jet — and its superstar e-commerce CEO — as a potential savior for its online sales woes, it may be looking in the wrong direction. As our own Sarah Perez reported last year, Jet has not made much of a dent in Amazon or eBay sales: … if Jet’s strategy is to lure customers away from Amazon, that, so far, has not happened… they’re not yet seeing any cannibalization of Amazon or eBay sales at this time. In other words, people are buying on Jet, but their purchase rate remains consistent on Amazon and eBay. That could mean that Jet is succeeding instead in gaining customers who would have otherwise bought products via other discount marketplaces, like Costco or Sam’s Club, for instance. Notably, Jet.com started with membership fees similar to Amazon Prime. Prime has been a knock-out for Amazon with some predicting the company has in the US. Despite Amazon’s proven success monetizing e-commerce with a membership strategy, Jet.com ditched memberships and instead focused cutting prices for all. While a savings strategy would add depth to the brand image of most other retailers, Walmart is already well known for its mantra of “ .” A Jet.com acquisition doesn’t inspire confidence that Walmart will suddenly become more well known for savings. And even if it did, low prices don’t seem to be enough to fix Walmart’s e-commerce woes. Despite having a brand synonymous with savings, Walmart has seen The millennial user-base of Jet.com has the potential to add a spark to Walmart’s current brand image, but it’s unclear the degree to which such an effort differs from prior investments made by Walmart Labs in big data, open source, and cloud services. If the strategy is just to throw punches at Amazon, Walmart has targeted the company’s users with , , and . The company even wants to . Alternatively, for the Jet.com acquisition price, Walmart could have broken from the path of its rivals and bought five million Oculus Rift headsets to put users in a virtual reality capitalist paradise.
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How Google Analytics ruined marketing
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Samuel Scott
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Marketers in the high-tech world who use phrases such as “social media marketing,” “Facebook marketing” and “content marketing” do not understand the basic difference between marketing strategies, marketing channels and marketing content. And Google Analytics is to blame. In the just over 10 years since the , too many tech marketers now ignore the difference between strategies and channels, favor digital channels that often deliver lower returns than traditional channels and think that direct responses are the only useful ROI metric. And all of that is wrong. Imagine that it is the 1990s and I want to reach the people who watch “Friends” on television. I would have these three available strategies out of the five that comprise the traditional Promotion Mix: Advertising Publicity (in the form of a product placement) Direct marketing (in the form of a direct-response infomercial) I could run an advertisement during an episode of “Friends.” I could pay NBC to have the coffee house hold an event that would feature my product in an episode. I could hire a “Friends” actor to appear in an infomercial that would air directly after an episode. And so on. Now, none of this would be “television marketing” because “television marketing” is not a “thing.” “Television” is a marketing channel, not a marketing strategy. If I choose to advertise on television, “advertising” is the strategy, the advertisement itself is the content and “television” is the channel over which I transmit the advertisement. In the same way, “Facebook marketing,” “social media marketing” and “content marketing” are not “things.” “Facebook” is a marketing channel. “Social media” is a collection of marketing channels. “Content” is a tactic, not a strategy. “Content” is produced in the execution of strategies such as advertising, SEO and publicity. Here are two examples. If a tech marketer creates a video and spreads it on Facebook, here is what he is doing: Strategy = Advertising (one of the parts of the traditional Promotion Mix) Content = The video itself Channel = Facebook If someone creates informational material that aims to rank highly in Google search results, here is what he is doing: Strategy = SEO (which may need to be added to a new, modern Promotion Mix) Content = The blog post Channel = The company’s blog/Google search results Why is this important? The terms that we use reflect the assumptions that underlie our approaches to marketing — and bad assumptions lead to bad marketing at best, and spam at worst. This is what I believe that meant when he wrote his recent, controversial Marketing Week column stating that . After all — and as I think Ritson was implying — too many online marketers do not know basic principles such as the few that I have mentioned so far. And it was the introduction of Google Analytics that led to these poor assumptions and this bad terminology today. Marketing campaigns have always involved the creation of a message, the insertion of that message into a piece of content and the transmission of that content over a channel to an audience. And as I wrote in my prior, much-discussed TechCrunch column that discussed , that overall process occurs within the strategic frameworks of the five “buckets” within the Promotion Mix (“promotion” is one of the four Ps in product marketing): direct marketing, advertising, sales promotion, personal selling and publicity. , I described how each of these “buckets” has pros and cons, as well as best practices: When marketers brainstorm campaigns, they typically ask these questions, in this order: Who is our target audience and what are our goals? What is the best message for that audience? In light of our goals, which strategies within the Promotion Mix — advertising, direct marketing, sales promotion, direct selling and publicity — should we use to communicate that message? What are the best online and/or offline channels for that strategy to reach that audience? What marketing collateral and creatives should we create and transmit based on the answers to the prior four questions? How can we measure the results based on which metrics are relevant to each strategy within the Promotion Mix that we will use? The strategy, message and marketing collateral matter more than the channel. Here’s a publicity example. Say that someone uses the various tactics to get a New York Times reporter to write about his company. The resulting article will appear in print, on the website and on the Amazon Kindle. The article will be spread on social media and shared in online forums and news aggregators. And so on. This is why there is actually no such thing as “digital PR.” It’s just “PR.” The best publicity practices to get coverage never change, regardless of the channels over which the coverage will appear. Here’s a direct marketing example. Say that one writes advertising copy to generate direct-response leads. That same copy will often deliver similar results — subject to specific, individual format restrictions of each channel — across platforms, including direct mail, email, Facebook ads and Google AdWords, because human nature does not change. There is no “digital marketing” and “traditional marketing.” There is only marketing — just ask Campbell’s, which has now . According to , Google Analytics is used by 55 percent of all websites and has a traffic analysis tool market share of 83 percent. More than half of those websites . Google transformed the marketing industry. However, the introduction and widespread adoption of GA pushed marketers to change their focus from the strategy to the channel (this is a screenshot from an old client of mine back when I was a consultant): Traditional marketing allocates activities based on the strategies that comprise the traditional Promotion Mix: direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion and publicity. Google Analytics replaced those “buckets” with these entirely new ones: direct, organic search, social, referral, paid search, email and display. However, that shift in assumption has led to poor marketing because almost any strategy can be executed over any channel — and it is strategies, not channels, that have associated best practices and deliver results. Take “social media marketing,” a vague, useless phrase that refers to channels but not to any specific strategy: Direct marketing campaigns (that are inaccurately called “advertising campaigns”) get direct responses from a specific set of people on social media based on their demographics and what they “like” Advertising campaigns put paid media published by an identified sponsor in front of a mass audience on social media Publicity campaigns gain mass exposure through earned or owned media that is spread on social media Personal selling campaigns have salespeople contact prospects and leads over social media Sales promotion campaigns circulate coupons, discounts and codes on social media to generate immediate sales Each of these five things can be deemed “social media marketing” — but when a term means everything, it means nothing. The five traditional strategies have best practices, as well as times and places to use — and NOT to use — them within an overall marketing plan. By not using and knowing the traditional terminology that the marketing industry uses for precise reasons, marketers are only hurting themselves and their own campaigns. When one now looks at Google Analytics and sees the results, for example, in the “Social” bucket, it’s rarely clear which of these strategies and activities delivered which results. The same is true for almost all of the “buckets” that appear in online marketing analytics. The strategic activity matters more than the communications channel. The channel merely dictates the format of the marketing collateral and content that one creates within an overall strategy. To ask “What is the ROI of social media?” makes as much sense as asking “What’s the ROI of the telephone?” Activities, not channels, generate ROI. But after Google Analytics and every other marketing platform defined “social media” and other channels as buckets, and therefore as marketing strategies, people have confused strategies and channels ever since. The positive thing about GA is that we can know which channels tend to perform the best. The negative thing about GA is that we know less about which specific, overall strategies and activities over those channels lead the best results. Google Analytics did not only confuse marketers in terms of the difference between strategies and channels — the platform also trapped our industry into focusing more and more on digital channels at the expense of offline ones. Of course, GA can be a very useful tool. The basic version is free, so it is no wonder that countless tech startups use the platform. But it comes with a limitation: It can only track online channels. If someone, for example, runs a television advertisement, he will see zero information in Google Analytics on the results that he can attribute directly to the advertisement. So, people now have a subconscious bias toward using online channels — just like everyone else in the tech world. In just one example from the Internet Advertising Bureau in the United Kingdom, spending on digital advertising there increased . The more we rely on Google Analytics, the more we will use strategies such as direct marketing over AdWords that are easily trackable in GA rather than strategies that are less trackable — as I will explain below. A more cynical person might think that this has been Google’s intention all along. After all, the more time we spend online — especially over our commutes once — the more money that the search engine makes. But as Mitch Joel tweeted, prioritizing online channels : Booked a rental car. Now, all I see are ads for that company. Everywhere. Ugh. This is what will drive the use of ad blockers. — Mitch Joel (@mitchjoel) As Bob Hoffman : “The is not “Madison Avenue,” it is the maddening tackiness of direct response.” Direct marketing is the most annoying form of marketing over any channel. It’s the junk mail that people throw away. It’s the automated email spam that is now called “lead nurturing.” It’s the ads that interrupt you on social networks when you’re trying to connect with friends and family. It’s having the same advertisement follow you around the internet. For all of the excitement over , people should realize that all these platforms do is send and resend all of this direct-response material based on a predefined timetable and workflow. There is absolutely no creativity — and creativity is what builds brands and sells products. People tolerate offline advertising and publicity campaigns — and they even fondly remember . But people hate online advertising — which is actually almost always direct marketing by another name — and . The online advertising industry is committing slow suicide through the use of intrusive platforms that are so invasive that people are choosing to block ads altogether. Direct marketing may be the most annoying form of marketing, but it is the strategy whose direct ROI is the easiest to track. Here’s a basic and hypothetical example: I sent catalogues/emails/Facebook ads to 10,000 people for $5,000 and that directly resulted in 100 new customers (who are projected to generate a total of $12,000 in lifetime revenue). Such direct-response results online are easy to set up and see in Google Analytics. But the picture is more muddled when one uses other marketing strategies. To illustrate the point, here’s an example that I have seen in my company’s high-tech marketing work. I’m a who presents at marketing conferences such as and . My company’s executives frequently discuss the open source at tech conferences. It is very difficult to attribute the precise results of all of this specific marketing activity in Google Analytics: If someone sees us and types our brand into a search engine, the visit will be included under “Organic Search” in Google Analytics If someone sees us and types our brand into a web browser or takes a brochure and visits our site directly a week later in a city 5,000 miles away, the visit will be shown as “Direct” If someone sees us, searches for and visits our Facebook page, then comes to our website, the visit will fall under “Social Media” If a reporter at a conference meets with us and then writes an article about us, the traffic will be seen as coming from “Referral” What does this mean? In many circumstances, it is impossible to determine in Google Analytics what exactly and precisely happens as a result of a given marketing activity. The fault of marketing analytics platforms such as Google Analytics is that they track the source of traffic but not the cause of that traffic. In my conference example, we have four different sources of traffic that come from a single marketing activity. How does one quantify these results of that strategy? If there were software that could isolate the direct, organic, social and referral traffic that comes to our website specifically as a result of such conference activity (or as a result of any other marketing strategy), I would purchase that platform in a digital heartbeat. There are many other problems with typical Google Analytics data. In the interest of space, I will link to further information about them: Maggie Malek on Search Engine Land Annie Cushing of Annielytics Still, too many marketers view GA data as the digital Holy Grail because the Google Analytics API is used in countless other marketing platforms, and the same set of misleading “buckets” is used in other web analytics software, as well. Rightly or wrongly, the startup world cares mainly about direct-response metrics — and that is reflected in the “Goals” and “Events” triggers in Google Analytics. In “ ,” the memoir by former tech journalist and “Silicon Valley” TV show writer Dan Lyons that describes his ill-fated time at the marketing software company HubSpot, he describes their blogging strategy in this way (pg. 74-75): [HubSpot’s former CMO] has one goal: to get leads. If our software analytics were to indicate that our best conversion rate comes from publishing a blog post that just says the word dogshit over and over again… then [the former CMO] would publish that post… I realize there probably is a legitimate business model to be made from churning out crappy content. But that is not something you hire the former technology editor of Newsweek to write for you. This is the problem that arises when startups and other companies use direct-response metrics such as the direct sales, leads or downloads that are shown in Google Analytics as the primary or only success metric. Blogs, for example, have become one of the primary communications channels for many companies, so integrated marketing and communications strategies need to incorporate branding and PR into those outlets, as well. To use Lyons’ example, a blog post that just repeats “dogshit” over and over might actually generate the greatest number of marketing leads — but it would be terrible for PR and branding, and those metrics are not shown in Google Analytics. A focus only on GA metrics often leads startups to move toward publishing not informational material but rather more and more “clickbait.” And clickbait might get more traffic, but will only reflect poorly on the brand and cause other damage, as well. Besides, the number of pageviews is a useful metric only for websites whose main business model is online advertising (such as news websites), because each page view sends a server request for ad impressions. Companies, on the other hand, whose goal is to obtain more customers, often see that clickbait delivers a lot of traffic but fewer conversions in the end. Elsewhere, I have written on . Here is a flowchart that summarizes my process: The overall theory: Segment the target demographic and create a persona. Decide the 4 Ps. Create an overall strategy that assigns weights to each part of the Promotion Mix. Choose the messaging. Select the best online and offline channels. Produce the marketing collateral. Transmit to the audience. Measure the results. But the problem is when online marketers often drink their own digital Kool-Aid, ignore traditional channels and exaggerate the effectiveness of modern channels. (And I’m not even taking into account.) Remember Oreo’s famous Super Bowl tweet? Ritson ran all of the numbers and calculated that . And that example is held up as “social media marketing” at its very best. In another example from Hoffman, Pepsi lost enough market share when it moved its budget from TV to social media. But social media consultants and agencies are always going to say that “ ,” because their livelihoods depend on it — even though Ritson notes that and Hoffman says, perhaps too bluntly, that . Digital video platforms are always going to claim that “ ” because their success depends on it — even though . Few take the time to research the facts, and instead just regurgitate whatever spews forth from the digital marketing echo chamber. And most people are selling something. An advertising consultant or SEO agency is always going to say, respectively, that advertising or SEO is the solution to everything. As an in-house marketer, I have the luxury of not being forced to favor a given marketing strategy or channel. In my work life, I have no bias and will do whatever builds our brand and gains more users. Most consultants and agencies are tied to specific strategies, tactics and channels because of their singular expertise. As a former journalist in my first career, I also have the luxury of being able to use those past skills, turn a critical and neutral eye toward the high-tech and marketing industries and then write my thoughts in contributed columns here on and elsewhere on . The more than half of all commercial websites that use Google Analytics as their only source of marketing analytics will find that their options are limited and that they are applying faulty metrics to the wrong marketing strategies. That is what happens when people get locked into a single software platform — be it Google Analytics or anything else. Their entire worldview and business processes wrap themselves around that platform despite any limitations, flaws and mistaken assumptions. There is a whole world of marketing out there beyond attempts to answer the flawed question: “What content should I publish on my website to get the most traffic and customers?” Here is the real question to ask: How would you market yourself if the Internet didn't exist? Answer that, and it'll help your online marketing too. — Samuel Scott (@samueljscott)
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TechCrunch Tirana Meetup — Come meet us, Monday Aug 8
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Mike Butcher
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After an impromptu meetup in Prizren, Kosovo, where I met with local startups, I’m heading to Tirana, Albania where I’ll be holding an informal TechCrunch Meetup. soon on the details. There is also a . It will be on the evening of Monday Aug 8. I’ve been impressed with the growing tech scene in the Balkans, and it’s clearly one to watch. Founders are now thinking internationally instead of their own regional silos. I’m also also be scouting for Disrupt entrants for , in London, in December. This is a great opportunity to get in front of a TechCrunch staffer before the event. This will be an informal meetup where I’ll talk a little bit about TechCrunch and getting the attention of media outside your own country and we can talk startups, entrepreneurship, and funding. If you would like to sponsor the meetup email mike@beta.techcrunch.com. We just need a venue and some beer, and a projector / beamer.
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HR 2.0 is the poster child for the next wave of SaaS innovation
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Tarun Kalra
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The path for SaaS domination of a market segment has historically followed one of two routes: bringing previously offline workflows online, or moving on-premise software processes online. In short, SaaS would take over segments that previously were not SaaSified. As hotbeds of net new SaaS activity consolidate into market winners, widespread innovation within a segment gives way to incremental innovation. The focus of entrepreneurs and investors mostly moves on. Yet, the current wave of HR SaaS innovators entering the market over the past few years is proving that there can be more to the story even after a segment has been SaaSified. As we assess the market, product, competitive and talent dynamics, we see a perfect storm of enabling characteristics pushing beyond incremental innovation into the widespread disruption of the firmly established HR SaaS category. We believe HR SaaS is one of the first clear cases of a third, newer path of broad SaaS innovation — next-generation SaaS (SaaS 2.0) disrupting established previous generations of SaaS (SaaS 1.0). HR 2.0’s success, playing out over the coming years, will be a catalyst for increasing entrepreneurial and VC attention into the platform potential of this third path. We will begin to see waves of future SaaS innovation focused on attacking established SaaS categories. As the poster child for SaaS 2.0, how successful will HR innovators be? Our rough assessment of Next World Capital’s HR Innovators NextScape reveals a few $100 million of the $13-15 billion of annual HR software spend shifting to HR 2.0 innovators in 2016 (see the graphic at the end of the article). Over time, the strengthening force of key enabling dynamics discussed below will enable HR 2.0 innovators to battle for nearly all of the HR software market. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), manufacturing jobs in the U.S. peaked in summer 1977 at 19.5 million, then gradually waned over the next 23 years. Measured by decline in manufacturing employment, the full-scale transition from a goods-centric economy to an information or talent-centric economy occurred over the last decade, with manufacturing jobs dropping below 12 million by 2009 and remaining roughly at these levels today. Underscoring this shift, the cost of talent per unit of economic output has risen by a factor of nearly 3x from an indexed value below 40 in 1977 to over 110 today, according to Trading Economics. Said another way, the U.S. economy has firmly progressed to an information economy, where talent has replaced goods as the most significant and important determining factor. The past generation of HR SaaS platforms were all founded before the absolute shift to a talent economy began. They were largely products of a transitional economy where talent was but one piece of the equation. HR 1.0 placed a premium on administrative versus talent-centric value propositions, i.e. moving offline tasks online, automating processes and delivering compliance. But with the transition to a talent-centric economy, the market now has moved beyond a focus on administration and process. It desires a new breed of HR SaaS, one which aligns business goals with talent versus aligning business goals with process. A few examples help highlight the shift. HR 1.0 facilitates online application submission, progress tracking and record keeping; HR 2.0 facilitates locating, attracting and hiring the best applicants. HR 1.0 facilitates user-friendly, templated and streamlined performance reviews and company measurements; HR 2.0 focuses on growth, collaboration and goal alignment through review and feedback mechanisms. HR 1.0 enables users to query records and report on KPIs; HR 2.0 enables users to drive decision-making based on past results and, over time, promises to leverage data science and deep learning techniques to recommend, even automate, decision making. In 2015, millennials became the largest generation in our workforce per BLS. It’s millennials penetrating middle management on their way to upper management, it’s millennials responsible for purchasing decisions and it’s millennials who must be the product focus for software developers. But millennials, the first completely online generation, prioritize specific elements in their software that, coincidentally, are not often focuses within older software offerings. Clean and performant user experiences, intuitive processes that require little training, mobile-first, collaboration-first, try before you buy/freemium, APIs and integrations, powerful analytics, flexibility/configurability and consumerized interfaces can all be buzzwords that are thrown around when describing software. But for millennials, many of these traits are table stakes for positive software experiences. HR 2.0 innovators are effectively exploiting perceived weaknesses in 1.0 offerings as millennials look not so much for one single buzzword but rather for an overall software experience with which they relate. Before SaaS 1.0 arrived, only the most mission-critical client-server software made economic sense for mid-market buyers given the high up-front costs. SaaS 1.0 offerings initially battled in this largely greenfield mid-market. Here, they bulked up with functionality and enterprise chops before eventually moving up weight classes into the enterprise, where client-server offerings dominated. As successful SaaS 1.0 vendors increasingly focus up market, emerging SaaS 2.0 innovators emerge in their wake to take on a somewhat orphaned mid-market. HR software has followed this playbook with many HR 1.0 platforms almost exclusively focused on the enterprise opportunity. Yet, HR 2.0 innovators enjoy a second beneficial competitive reality. In 2012, the dominant HR 1.0 vendors were acquired — , and . As a result, HR 2.0 is stepping into a landscape largely devoid of independent 1.0 vendors. “No one ever gets fired for buying IBM” is a commonly heard phrase with the general idea being that buying servers, storage or even commodity applications from an established platform company is safe. These technologies are not a competitive differentiator for the buyer’s business, so why take risks on upstarts? HR2.0 aims to flip this script. HR 2.0 argues that Oracle, SAP and IBM are not a fit in a talent-centric economy precisely because they are not aggressively advancing innovation and differentiation. 2.0 offerings, on the other hand, uniquely enable organizations to attract, hire and maximize talent, a central competitive advantage in today’s economy. , , , , , , , , , , and are a few examples of HR 2.0 innovators that received Series A financings between 2012 and 2015. It’s no surprise that these emerging companies, which have forward-looking entrepreneurs and strong VCs, have recently stepped in. Together, the enabling dynamics and entrepreneurial community have converged to usher in the first widespread wave of SaaS 2.0 innovation against an established SaaS category. At Next World, we actively track 80+ HR SaaS players within our HR Innovators’ NextScape. This NextScape is not exhaustive, but rather focuses exclusively on players that are driving the HR 2.0 wave. We break down the market into the core HR functional areas of talent acquisition, talent maximization and HR administration. With innovators still commanding a small fraction of HR spend and new market entrants continuously emerging, we are perhaps in the second inning of this wave. Given the sheer breadth of activity, consolidation is inevitable. New market entrants must carefully consider the mission criticality and depth of workflow and use cases that they subsume. However, the foundations are in place for a new breed of enduring HR SaaS platforms. Their continued momentum will bolster the entrepreneurial community’s willingness to attack other established SaaS categories.
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How to tell if your small company needs to expand through acquisitions
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Chelsea Stoner
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The market for mergers and acquisitions, particularly in software, is red-hot: Big private-equity firms, flush with cash, did 170 software deals worth $27.22 billion in the first half of 2016 alone. Beleaguered Yahoo was by Verizon for $4.8 billion; Microsoft a blockbuster $26 billion purchase of professional-networking site LinkedIn. That deal prompted waves of speculation about just how Microsoft will leverage LinkedIn’s treasure trove of resume data to bolster its own products. But the software M&A frenzy also highlights how smaller tech companies can turbocharge their growth by pursuing highly strategic, add-on acquisitions. As a software investor focused on mid-sized technology companies, I meet many business owners in this segment who (unlike the executives at Microsoft!) don’t recognize the signals that their company needs to grow in a new way — chiefly, by acquiring other companies that can fill holes in their product line or offer complementary products and services. Spotting these signs is more than just smart leadership; it can help companies uncover growth opportunities — and lead to bigger possibilities long-term. What’s more, as valuations for some private technology companies trend downward these days, it’s an especially good time to consider this type of growth strategy. One telltale sign that you may need to consider M&A is a change (namely, a negative one) in your rate of month-to-month customer growth. This signal is tricky, though. As long as you keep gaining new customers, a dip in the growth probably isn’t a big deal, right? Isn’t that typical of companies as they grow in size? Sometimes. But a dip in your rate of customer growth can also signal a need to expand beyond your current market, and should at least prompt a re-evaluation of the products you’re offering. You should be asking: What else do your customers need? What are they buying elsewhere today? This could, in turn, lead to new ways to boost new customer growth. A rule of thumb in my business is that customers spend 1-2 percent of their revenue on software. If that amount for Customer X equals $100,000, and they’re spending $10,000 with you, there’s another $90,000 you’re missing out on. Figure out how to capture that spend. It’ll be a gain on both sides, as customers often find a one-stop shop makes their process easier. The old saying “one throat to choke” holds true. Brightree* is an instructive case here. Initially a business-management software company for home medical equipment providers, acquired C&S Billing Center in 2009 to expand its product offering. With C&S Billing, Brightree customers could get relief for their billing headaches pay Brightree for the add-on service involving skilled staff. The acquisition significantly boosted Brightree’s overall revenue. Not all new offerings are bolt-ons, however. Sometimes broadening your product line makes your company attractive to adjacent buyers, increasing your overall market. For example, let’s look at another Brightree acquisition — CareAnyware, in 2013. Similar to Brightree, CareAnyware was a cloud software provider but sold to two different post-acute markets: home health and hospice. By expanding into new segments of the healthcare continuum, Brightree greatly increased its potential size of the pie. (NYSE: RMD) acquired Brightree for $800 million in April 2016. Another key metric to track as you’re thinking about potential M&A is whether your product’s average sales price is staying the same, or declining. Perhaps it could generate more revenue if you combined it with another service to solve a bigger problem for customers. Start this evaluation by talking to the sales reps. What questions do they hear on repeat? What keeps customers up at night? WebPT*, which helps physical therapists run their businesses effectively, asked these questions a couple of years ago. Their customers told them that they knew Obamacare would eventually tie medical reimbursements to successful patient outcomes. looked for a way to help customers stay ahead of that requirement long-term — knowing that, in the short term, patient outcome data would also help therapists do their jobs better. Enter WebOutcomes, a firm WebPT bought in November 2014. What initially seemed like a one-off feature — outcomes data — is fast evolving into a core offering for the company. Finally, all companies should be closely tracking customer churn as a potential M&A signal. Better yet, you should be on alert for the very early signs that customers are simply unhappy, and may churn away in the future. Maybe you haven’t heard from them in a while, either on the customer-support lines or through email. Perhaps they downgraded their service plan, or — in the software business — their usage stats shift, indicating they’re not as engaged in your product, meaning not using it as often as they once did, or using as many features. Any of these could be an early sign of a customer who’s thinking of pulling the plug. But customer churn can also signal bigger opportunities if you’re open to smart acquisitions. Use this opportunity to find out if customers are thinking of going elsewhere, and why. Your sales reps might already have this intel, or you can ask customers point-blank. Once you know the competitors eating your lunch, size up their offerings. You can respond in one of several ways: You can buy them outright; you can invest in more technology to beat them; or, if you’re a larger player competing with some shiny new toy, you might opt to change your pricing or service bundle. A startup that isn’t well-funded might not outlast a competitor who can afford a canny pricing pivot. Even huge technology players often grow via add-on acquisitions — particularly as the entire industry shifts to newer cloud-based software. In fact, your next phase of growth may involve partnering with a big gun. has acknowledged the importance of the cloud-software trend, making several strategic acquisitions of companies like HR software company Taleo; marketing software companies Responsys and Eloqua; Big Machines, which provided back-end sales processing software in the cloud; and, more recently, Opower and Textura. Similarly, expanded from a CRM-only business into areas like cloud services and marketing through targeted acquisitions. The company gained even more wallet share by acquiring companies such as ExactTarget*, an email marketing platform, and Assistly, which it renamed Desk.com and leveraged to provide strong customer-service support. Salesforce in June it would acquire Demandware, a marketing platform for retailers. Think of your company like a shark: If it’s not moving forward, it could die. Don’t be afraid to look around your market, and remain open to partnering with competitors and complementary companies. If you stay aware and give your business the occasional boost, you will not only survive, you will thrive.
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Anthony Ha
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Pokémon Go crosses $200M in global revenue one month into launch
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Darrell Etherington
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While bugs and feature complaints are still causing a decent amount of negativity among users, Pokémon Go continues its upward trajectory in terms of overall revenue. App reveals that the game now have over $200 million in net revenue from players based on their estimates. The spending frenzy in Go compares favorably to in-game revenue generated by other huge in-app purchase-driven games, according to data also tracked by the firm. Pokémon’s star power has helped it nearly double the first month revenue of Clash Royale, the other big in-app star this year. And it’s made almost four times as much as Candy Crush Soda Saga managed during its first 30 days of availability. Data from Sensor Tower also reveals an important point to consider when trying to evaluate the game’s future revenue potential: Pokémon Go experienced a huge spike in revenue generation in mid-July – the day when it launched in Japan. Japan was bound to drive increase interest and sales, given that the market is the home of the Pokémon franchise and the site of its most engaged and loyal fan following. And while it’s unlikely that anywhere else can provide quite the same revenue pop, , which should lead to another sustaining boost. And the biggest Asian markets still aren’t live for Pokémon Go: Korea, India and China still have yet to come online. Those should help Niantic extend its revenue winning streak, giving us a graph with an even bigger delta between Go and its closest competitors next time around.
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Netflix launches iOS and Android apps for its internet speed test service
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Jon Russell
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Netflix began helping its users test their internet connection for streaming speeds in May . Now it is bringing that service to mobile with the launch of apps for and , as . Just like the Fast.com website for desktops, the “Fast Speed Test” apps give you a reading on the kind of speed you can expect Netflix to run at using your connection. There’s a gray counter clock which changes while recording the speed, and the app offers to show your connection speed on . When clicked, that link sends you to a page to download the Speedtest mobile apps. Its a super basic app with a clean UI and no ads because it is literally only about getting that speed reading. , the service tests downloads direct from Netflix’s servers and not upload and downlink speeds like others such as , to give a direct reading on your Netflix experience. The other side to the coin is that the readings are good for Netflix and the quality of its service. The company is a fastidious collector of data. Right from building algorithms to surface the right suggested content for users, to providing the best related recommendations and analyzing internet connection speeds. Netflix runs its own which is chock-full of data about which ISP are best to use its service, average running speeds, etc. With users increasing streaming via mobile devices, that adds new variable — including mobile carrier services — which these new mobile apps can help it measure and, most importantly for paying Netflix customers, learn from to optimize its service.
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Polish 3D printer company Zortrax lied about contract with Dell
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John Biggs
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Two years ago when was still a much-contended space a small Polish company called Zortrax made waves – and raised capital – on the news that it had signed a contract with Dell for 5,000 3D printers. I reported the news in 2014 and researched the implications more deeply later that year and found little that might concern an investor or fan: the company had a deal in place to supply printers to an Asian Dell R&D subsidiary but questions to that subsidiary were left unanswered and the co-founder of the company, Rafał Tomasiak, consistently defended the news with me personally. In April 2014 I approached him regarding the rumors that the order was false and he continued to lie. But by May I dropped the story and in many ways dropped the ball. For that I’m regretful and I’d like to follow the thread a little more deeply today. First, let’s understand the mentality of a small startup thrust on the international stage. The company, formed by a few friends in Olsztyn, Poland, grew in prominence after a successful Kickstarter. Their printer, which I found solid and usable, was a good one and they had a everything a small startup needed in the heady investment years between 2010 and 2015 – a charismatic front woman named Karolina Boladz, a heads-down CTO, the aforementioned Tomasiak, a good product, and a good story. Now they had a big contract. But they were still a startup. Their technique was to accentuate the positive and bury the negative. They ignored questioning about their methods and the contract itself and instead crowded about the deal in investment materials for months after the announcement. So if the contract wasn’t a lie it was a careful and optimistic elision. Startups are keen to paint every letter of intent and every curt nod of approval as a signed contract and clearly that was the case here. I was also willing to accept a certain amount of leeway. Things are done differently in Europe where valuations were (and still are) small and investments are often minuscule in comparison to the Valley. Good news from Europe was often tinged with a bit of hyperbole. Getting an acquisition or investment price for any round in Europe is like pulling teeth and when you do the math you quickly find that the reason is obvious: the numbers, in light of massive rounds in the US, were embarrassing. When I first heard about the contract in January I wrote a basic story addressing the potential sale. Tomasiak sent a quote – “Frankly speaking, we were surprised that any company, even a company like Dell, wants to place such an order! But after a while we realized how many printers we use in our own office… For a designer who prints a large number of prototypes it is much more useful to use 10 smaller printers on one desk, which operate simultaneously, rather than one with a larger build volume” – and the news percolated out into other sites, even appearing in a March 2014 piece in
. A month after the Reuters piece ran I received information that no one at Dell knew about a contract with Zortrax. I asked a PR person in the company who replied on April 4, 2014: Hello John – I received your inquiry from my colleague, Lauren Mauro, who is currently on vacation. According to our records, no transaction between Dell and Zortrax has ever occurred. We also checked with our Dell Asia procurement team and they also have no record of a transaction with Zortrax. Kind regards, Steve Howard
Dell | Communications Director, End User Computing I approached Tomasiak with the news who told me his contact at Dell couldn’t comment to the press. A few excerpts from the discussion follow. John Biggs
4/4, 9:57am
if it’s a misunderstanding you can have your guy solve it in a second
i’m not arguing this anymore
go ahead on your vacation Rafał Tomasiak
4/4, 9:58am
working not travelling
Nobody from Dell us send us anything
So if you say they have a deny so our guy will confirm them John Biggs
4/4, 9:59am
he can confirm to me
and it doesn’t matter anymore Rafał Tomasiak
4/4, 9:59am
You’re pr not Dell John Biggs
4/4, 9:59am
i’m not PR Rafał Tomasiak
4/4, 9:59am
Rafał Tomasiak
:) John Biggs
4/4, 9:59am
i’m press Rafał Tomasiak
4/4, 9:59am
You’re press not Dell :) I pressed him further: I sent Tomasiak the note from Dell and asked for comment and he continued to evade the question. It is a frustrating experience, to be sure, but par for the course with Tomasiak who, as recently as 2015 was still pitching their new printers and news to the press. At the same time the contract with Dell became a major point in their investment brochure even as Tomasiak carefully walked back the importance of the news. In March, Tomasiak told
: “The contract with Dell is one of contracts we are working on, but the key to our success is gaining as many customers as possible, including individuals. That’s our goal and because of this our order portfolio is very diversified – from the entire world and different industries.” He did say, however, that the deal would be very lucrative and that there was a markup associated with the sale to Dell implying, of course, that the deal would go through. Unable to confirm or deny the story in April I dropped it. In the end, it seems, so did Dell. The contract never reemerged after the initial buzz and Tomasiak didn’t comment further. Does it matter that this contract never materialized? In the end the latest anyone has been able to find mention of the contract was late 2014 and the company did not reflect the sale of 5,000 printers in its 2014 balance sheets. In short, the contract appeared and quickly disappeared, a blip on the news radar about a small Polish company that might have had a contract with Dell but, in the end, probably didn’t have on in any formal sense. But in Europe the rumored Dell contract was a big deal. It built the reputation of the company as a powerhouse in the region and gained them enough notoriety to sell 10,000 unsecured bonds worth 1000PLN ($329) each through Invista Brokerage House to raise a total of $3.5 million. The investment sale went off without a hitch and the company continued to grow and the good news continued unabated. In February, noted 3DPrint’s Michael Molitch-Hou, “Zortrax CEO Rafał Tomasiak received an honorary red-and-white flag from Andrzej Duda, the President of the Republic of Poland, for the contributions his company has made to the country.” So the failed Dell contract was a bit of good news for a small but growing company. While this is hardly a crime worthy of a Balzac quote, it’s clear that a lie built a small fortune. What is the moral of this story? That startups shouldn’t crow success? That Zortrax lied about the contract for personal gain? None of this may be true but all of it can be implied. By hiding the truth for two years the company ran unchallenged over smaller Polish rivals and raised money on good news. For its part Zotrax offered this explanation to
. My own email to them went unanswered. “In late 2013 and early 2014, prior to the commercial launch of our debut 3D printer, strong interest in the product provided a good outlook for our entry into the 3D printing sector. A potential contract with the Asian division of Dell, noted in the article, was communicated through various marketing channels, due to a mutual good faith effort to complete the deal. Due to confidentiality of the agreement, we are not able to reveal additional details of the contract, other than to say that it could not be completed on mutually acceptable terms and conditions by both parties. We want to clearly communicate that information related to this opportunity was, and has been clearly communicated to prospective investors. As the article noted, Zortrax discontinued communication efforts regarding the potential contract in our marketing communications, addresses to the market, and conversations with investors due to its unsuccessful conclusion. We would like to note that financial numbers quoted in the article do clearly indicate the usage of real numbers. Potential profits from unrealized contracts are not reported and were not formally included for the basis of establishing the valuation of the company.
Since 2011, Zortrax has focused efforts on providing the highest quality products and services in the field of 3D printing technology. This effort has been validated by, among other things, numerous honors and awards, and constant company growth creating new jobs, and the further development of innovative products and services.” Zortrax has closed ranks for now and is not talking about the contract. Wrote one
, “Zotrax first promised an answer regarding this matter on the August 5 but then Zotrax PR lead Marcin Niedzielski told me that the company is analyzing their confidentiality agreements [with Dell] after which time they can comment further, probably in the first half of next week.” “Tak czy inaczej, niesmak pozostaje,” he wrote. “Regardless, it still stinks.”
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Autopilot in Tesla Model X helps driver get safely to a hospital
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Darrell Etherington
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A Missouri man might not have made it safely to the hospital without the aid of his Tesla Model X’s self-driving features (via ). Joshua Neally, the 37-year old Model X owner, was on the way home from his law firm after work when he was struck by a pulmonary embolism. Neally allowed the Autopilot system to take over for 20 miles of highway driving, which brought the vehicle and its driver to an off-ramp close to a hospital, where he was able to finish the trip. Tesla’s Autopilot system may be under scrutiny after an accident in Florida earlier this year resulted in a driver death, but this is an example of where it definitely helped the operator of the vehicle. The obvious question that comes to mind is whether it would’ve been safer on the whole for Neally to pull over and call an ambulance instead of relying on his own car’s self-driving features, since Neally admits he didn’t “remember much of the drive” after his embolism began. But whether or not Neally made the right call in continuing to drive himself, it proves the importance and necessity of offering safety features like Autopilot: In clutch situations like a medical emergency where we feel like our life is on the line, very few people can be relied upon to make the sane, logical and most conscientious choice about our actions. Neally told Branson local that he “just knew [he] had to get [to the ER]” once he began feeling the symptoms of the pulmonary embolism – in other words, he was essentially panicking and his instinct kicked in, convincing his brain the best course of action was to get to the hospital as quickly as possible. Continuing to drive while under extreme physical duress might not have been the best choice, but it was the human one, and that’s what makes Autopilot’s role in getting Neally to the hospital in one piece so poignant. Plus, the fact that Neally had a choice at all is a chance outcome of the severity of the embolism: If it had been something more severe, and he wasn’t able physically to continue driving or make a decision, Autopilot would’ve engaged its failsafe mode, which decelerates the vehicle, turns on the four-way hazard lights and slowly moves the car to the roadside. You can argue about whether or not a driver in this situation is more or less likely to continue driving rather than pull over and call an ambulance since the system is present to begin with, but you can also debate whether allowing Autopilot to drive was more or less safe than other options. What you can’t argue is that people will always make the most rational and informed decision when their life feels immediately threatened, and that’s where autonomous technologies stand to make the most impact.
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Crunch Report | Facebook will bypass Adblockers
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Interactions nabs $56 million to improve your automated customer service experience
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Lucas Matney
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As the world turns, customer service seems to evolve much more slowly than most all other services. The problems that induce more hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing than solutions only seeming to be further abstracted by bad tech and the customer is these days left hanging up the phone after cussing out a robot. For how much effort has been paid to stepping up the subpar quality of Siri and Alexa’s voice recognition capabilities, the tech used on customer service lines that people call up seems even more frustratingly antiquated by comparison. , a 12-year-old virtual assistant startup based in Franklin, Mass., has been bolstering its natural language processing tech to bring phone calls beyond “press zero to talk to a human” functionality. The company announced Tuesday that it had closed a $56 million funding round led by Revolution Growth, NewSpring Capital and Comcast Ventures. The round was its largest to date, and brings the company’s total funding to nearly $167 million. Previous investors also include Softbank Capital and Sigma Partners. “Just having the endorsement of these firms really speaks to the credibility of what we’re doing in the market,” Interactions CEO Mike Iacobucci told me. Interactions has introduced a level of AI-powered complexity into its voice recognition software that gives callers a much less “robotic” experience on the phone. For example, in a significantly more complex type of experience that the company has developed with some Hyatt hotels, users are simply asked what they need and from there the Interactions virtual assistant is tossed into the deep end where its left to parse whether the user wants to make a reservation and how many are in the party based on the language expressed by the user. Things are still far from perfect, while Iacobucci tells me that some levels of their customer service experience tech show 98% accuracy in voice recognition, some of their more complex requests are yielding accuracy percentages in the high seventies. While Interactions is focused on bolstering its voice recognition, the company is also looking to improve the accuracy of text recognition in increasingly popular chat systems. All of these items are critical to keeping up with customers and ensuring that people don’t walk away from these touchpoints with annoying experiences that damage their perceptions of the brands. “Customer care is increasingly becoming a point of competitive differentiation, rather than a cost of doing business,” said Andrew Cleland, Managing Director of Comcast Ventures in a statement. “Through Interactions exclusive combination of automated natural language understanding, AI and human assisted understanding, the company surpasses its rivals and demonstrates unparalleled consumer understanding.”
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Only a few days left to save $1,000 on Disrupt SF tickets
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Contributor
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Disrupt SF 2016 is right around the corner, and time is running out to get tickets to the hottest startup show in the Bay Area for the lowest possible price. You have just four days left to snag early-bird tickets to Disrupt for $1,995 apiece, a full $1,000 less than what it will cost you when early-bird ticket sales end on Friday. Head over and get your deeply discounted tickets to Disrupt today. Go ahead — your wallet will thank you. That ticket is your all-access pass to everything that makes Disrupt great. You’ll get to connect with the hundreds of early-stage startups that are on display in Startup Alley and Hardware Alley, and check out dozens of companies in the Startup Battlefield competition, vying for $50,000, the coveted Disrupt Cup and, perhaps more importantly, the attention of the tech community at large. You’ll also get to learn from some of the best and brightest innovators, investors and entrepreneurs in the series of interviews and fireside chats that we have lined up throughout the course of the three-day event. People like SV Angel Managing Partner Brian Pokorny, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear and LinkedIn co-founder and executive chair Reid Hoffman, to name but a few. Plus, you’ll get to attend all the parties and after-parties to keep the networking and the good times going long after the show floor closes for the day. The best, most wallet-friendly way to get into Disrupt is by getting your Disrupt tickets at our early-bird price points, so save yourselves the headache and the $1,000 and get your tickets today. You can get them . Disrupt SF runs September 12-14 at San Francisco’s massive Pier 48, and we can’t wait to see all of you fine folks at Disrupt next month.
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For the ambitious ed tech company AltSchool, it’s time for phase two
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Connie Loizos
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Much has been written about the ambitions of , a San Francisco-based startup that’s aiming to change the way that school children learn. Its big idea, broadly, is that personalized learning is far more effective than the standardized education that most students are stuck with today. As important, personalized learning is scalable, believes AltSchool, which operates seven small private schools – five of them in San Francisco, one in Palo Alto, and one in Brooklyn – and, sorry to disappoint some of you, doesn’t intend to open many more. Instead, after several years of working closely with its kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students and iterating on its personalized learning approach, it’s gearing up to license its findings to other schools that want to embrace more individualized techniques but don’t have to test what works and what doesn’t. (That’s how much AltSchool has raised so far from its investors). The 160-person company, which describes itself as very much in the “building phase,” aims to raise more over the next couple of years, too. We talked earlier today with founder and CEO (and former Googler) Max Ventilla to get the full update. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity. MV: We’ll continue to run our lab schools with an emphasis on learning in a full-stack way and advancing a new model for how schools can educate children. That approach and the platform that we use to support our own schools is what we’re [using to] partner with other schools, and you’ll see the first of those partnerships in September 2017. MV: To start, they’ll be pretty similar [to AltSchool]: small, independent, private schools – schools that adhere to the idea that student agency is critically important. We’re starting in an admittedly easier setting. Private schools have less regulations and fewer constraints on their resources, [but it’s an opportunity] to prove the model works, then to incrementally expand the model to more and more schools. So the first wave will look like the schools we’ve been running successfully [ourselves], then by 2018, maybe you’ll see newer, progressive charter schools [adopt our approach] then maybe just progressive schools. If you keep improving the model and the gains compound and schools benefit from other schools in the network, it stops being about AltSchool trying to stitch things together. We do believe on a five-year time scale, it starts to be relevant for some smaller-district public schools; it may be 15 years before urban school districts benefit from anything we’ve built. MV: We’ll have a formal announcement at the end of September, but we’re pretty far along with a few schools that either already exist or are opening. MV: It’s not as if we operate in a vacuum. There are standards and best practices for how data is collected and secured [and further, AltSchool’s team has] deep expertise at Google and Facebook with how do you use data in a secure way that protects privacy and creates truly transformative value. Our ambition is to break even with our lab schools that we operate ourselves. [Editor’s note: tuition is $26,000 per year per student]. The broader business is where you’re taking approaches and techniques that work for students and parents [and applying them to the outside world]. We’re working with a couple of cutting-edge partners on research science [to determine] how you turn quick feedback about how a student did on an assignment, or what they got out of reading passage, into a prediction about how they’d do on a standardized test. If you don’t have to have kids taking these crazy standardized tests that get them completely freaked out and derail their education for a week but you can still predict their outcome on tests, that’s not a small gain. It can change a school’s ability to be rigorous and accountable and be humane. MV: When you have a real platform that supports a network and creates a network effect across any class of providers – from healthcare to entertainment companies – the effect is that everybody benefits from everybody else. If you [eventually] have 10,000 teachers accepting or rejecting recommendations every day or using the system to create better scores, that changes experience of educators; they’re now standing on the shoulders of everyone else. MV: Pricing will approach $1,000 [per student per year] — though it’ll probably be discounted below that [to high hundreds of dollars per student]. We’re still figuring that out. [Editor’s note: Ventilla has since elaborated that that number was a hypothetical and AltSchool is a ways off from understanding the market and setting the price.] MV: It’s not just software but also services. It’s a little like the OEM model where Microsoft would give Windows to Dell and Dell created [its own] experience — powered by Microsoft. Or the Intel Inside notion. You aren’t stamping out the same experience again and again. Different people are able to own [very different] education experiences, but they’ll [be using] a common platform MV: There are four components that we think are essential to being able to use the core technology platform. One is teacher training. If you just throw a bunch of tools at educators, it’s not really of value; you need to help them take what they’re doing now and work through those tools. You also need to address those issues that inevitably arise, which bleeds into customer support. We also want to help [our customers] use the data and content that they were using as much as possible. We’re a very open model in terms of how we approach the space and want to use the content and data standards out there, so integration is also going to be a key service. Lastly, there’s a parent engagement piece, bringing parents in to kind of bridge the home-school divide; that’s also central to making the platform work. We’d expect to provide a partner school a similar level of support to what we’re providing to our own schools, and not just through hardware and software. Software thrown over wall in school settings tends to land flat. When we provide some piece of solution, we won’t just be handing it to teacher, saying, “Here you go.”
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Yelp tops 2Q expectations, announces partnership with Nowait and names Jed Nachman as COO
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Lucia Maffei
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Following the bell today, reported a strong that made the stock soar almost 11 percent in after-hours trading. Yelp’s earnings release included better-than-expected revenue of $173.4 million and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.16. As part of the earnings release, Yelp made two additional announcements. First, the company said it partnered with and made an investment in , a mobile platform that allows restaurants to manage their waitlists. “In the coming months, Nowait will be integrated onto Yelp Platform, allowing consumers to conveniently view wait times at thousands of restaurants and even add themselves to the waitlists remotely via the Yelp app,” Yelp said in a statement. The company also announced that Jed Nachman has been appointed chief operating officer, effective today. An expert in sales, Nachman became chief revenue officer this year after having joined Yelp in 2007. Former COO Geoff Donaker will continue as a strategic advisor to the company. [graphiq id=”k3ytlIBczL7″ title=”Yelp Inc. (YELP)” width=”700″ height=”526″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/k3ytlIBczL7″ link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/13714922/Yelp-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”Yelp Inc. (YELP) | FindTheCompany” ] For the second quarter ended June 30, the company beat analyst’s expectations by a mile. Analysts surveyed by Yahoo Finance the San Francisco-based company to post a loss of $0.07 EPS, off revenue of $169.8 million. Instead, Yelp delivered a strong quarter. Profit was $449,000, compared to a loss of $1.3 million in the year-ago quarter. Even GAAP earnings came in positive at $0.01. “In the second half of the year, we look to execute against our three strategic priorities of growing the core local advertising business, boosting awareness of Yelp and driving transactions,” Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said in a statement. According to , the Yelp app was downloaded 800,000 times in July 2016. In New York Stock Exchange trading today, the company closed up 96 cents, or up 3.03 percent, at $32.64. About one hour after the announcement, the stock was up 10.29 percent, or $3.36, at $36.00.
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Sometimes the most qualified applicant is not the most obvious
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Kat Cole
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Hundreds of thousands of jobs that require both business and technical skills , which means it’s likely your company is hiring for an important member of your team. But if you are relying on typical tried-and-true measures to find candidates, there are many potential great fits with the right skills that won’t even make it past the initial screening process. Whether it’s that they couldn’t afford college, didn’t get their start in the “perfect” industry, started out running their own small businesses or even may have run into trouble with the law when they were younger, unfortunately, in hiring, skilled candidates who have taken a different path can be overlooked by even the best businesses. Hiring managers often give preference to (and even hold out for) those who have the “right” specific last roles, the “right” internships, a specific number of years of experience or graduated from the “right” university. Interestingly, those companies often state bold goals in improving diversity, yet their upstream talent practices diminish the likelihood of increasing diversity. In defense of slow improvement in diversity, companies often cite, and even complain, that the talent “pipeline” simply does not have enough diversity, so how could they possibly hire diverse candidates out of a non-diverse pipeline without compromising on skills? Of course the potential candidate pool is not diverse if the specs for candidates reflect exactly who you already have on the board! As someone who took the path less traveled myself, yet who has benefited from leaders and companies that saw past my untraditional background, I worry that others like me — and those with far more unique and challenging backgrounds — may not be “seen” for the awesomeness and potential they possess. Ironically, right under the nose of the companies that need specific skills are candidates who have relevant training and demonstrated skills, yet not the traditional experiences that meet typical hiring prerequisites. This is especially true considering the increase of graduates of innovative, on-demand education models and organizations like that rapidly provide 21st century skills to diverse populations around the world. Research shows that in hiring, the deck is often stacked against low-income and minority candidates — especially when it comes to the technology sector. Degree requirements alone drastically limit the candidate pool, with approximately 70 percent of American adults over 25 finding themselves without — particularly racial/ethnic minorities or low-income adults. For those employers specifically focused on top-tier or Ivy League graduates, their talent pool is further limited to graduates. Because companies often hasten to fill positions, it’s understandable that they use systems and processes to mitigate risk and find the best candidates. They may not realize, however, that those very tools may be creating barriers to accessing top talent. Even if they do realize it, they may not know a way to innovate the hiring practice to be more skill-centric while still mitigating risk and measuring for likely success. Luckily, some companies are pursuing new approaches, like skills-based hiring, to make the hiring process more open and equitable. Last year, EY recognized that a college , replacing its college degree requirement with pre-employment tests. Today’s hiring environment and business needs require tools to better identify competencies, skills and indicators of grit and potential, rather than typical interviewing practices based on what’s on a resume alone. An updated perspective on the value of, and specific skills and non-traditional backgrounds in, an organization, coupled with the best assessments, can broaden the view to more qualified candidates while simultaneously allowing a company to improve diversity and, accordingly, its performance. This perspective and approach is something that should be explored, iterated, used and scaled. To that end, I’d like to share this on skills-based hiring, a primer on using data to identify job candidates who can succeed, regardless of education and employment experience. If our processes let in only those like we have today, we’ll keep getting just that — and we’ll not make the progress that is possible in improving diversity. The good news is, there’s a better way.
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Instagram castrated Snapchat like Facebook neutered Twitter
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Josh Constine
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way when combined with network effect. You don’t always need to be better to win, you just have to rob your competitor of its appeal. Why would people stray if you provide convenience, even without quality? This is the strategy behind . Snapchat invented a brilliant format for sharing day-to-day life: photo and video slideshows jazzed up with commentary that disappear after 24 hours so you’ll share an unpolished window into what you see. It quickly eclipsed the popularity of Snapchat’s 10-second exploding private messages, and made the app grow to 150 million daily users. Snapchat Stories became the home for all your posts that weren’t perfect enough for Instagram’s feed. Their ephemeral nature starkly differentiated Snapchat from Facebook and Instagram’s permanency. With people sharing more and more, Stories looked like the next big social medium, and threatened to steal content and attention from Instagram. So Instagram dug up a plan from Facebook’s 2011 playbook. Back then, it was real-time updates from public figures that looked like the next big social medium, and Twitter was their home. The unfiltered feed of posts by strangers starkly differentiated Twitter from Facebook’s algorithmically filtered feed of posts by friends. And so Facebook launched , a way to follow public figures. It wasn’t better than Twitter. Updates didn’t appear in real time. Not all the best content creators turned on the feature so they could be followed. At the time, there were no hashtags and no trending topics. It lacked the off-the-cuff town-square-discussion feel of Twitter. But Subscribe wasn’t trying to win back diehard Twitter users. It was never a “Twitter-killer.” With Twitter at 100 million users compared to Facebook’s 800 million, it was still early, so it didn’t have to be. The goal of the good-enough strategy is to hinder your competitor’s future growth, not steal what they’ve already gained. For some, Facebook Subscribe was good enough that they didn’t have to join Twitter. Subscribe lived in the News Feed they already visited. You weren’t required to sign up for another account and learn a new vocabulary or interface. And you didn’t have to build a new audience or feed from scratch. It didn’t kill Twitter, but it seems to have made it less necessary for people who already used Facebook. Five years later, Twitter has only grown to 313 million users, while Facebook is now at 1.71 billion. Facebook is still trying to get better at real-time, public content, but Twitter’s problem is that it can’t make a compelling case as to why everyone needs it. Facebook’s good-enough clone removed some of that need. Now, Instagram is fighting Snapchat the same way. lacks the quality of Snapchat Stories. There are no geofilters, animated selfie lenses, 3D stickers, speed effects or screenshot alerts. The camera isn’t the default home screen for spontaneous recording. And uploads don’t go as smoothly. But Instagram Stories may be good enough to slow Snapchat’s growth, especially amongst existing Instagram users. Instagram Stories appear at the top of the feed, so there’s no way to miss them. The core drawing and text overlay tools are there. And most importantly, you don’t have to build a new audience on a different app. Again, most Snapchat loyalists probably won’t drop it all together. Dozens of my friends are already playing with Instagram Stories, and a few have in fact stopped Snapchatting. The real target for Instagram Stories, though, are all the people who’ve been curious about Snapchat’s fun creation tools and format, but either tried and abandoned it, or wrote it off as just for teens or too much work to adopt. If it doesn’t work out, Instagram could still scrap the Stories feature. The only cost will be some development time and the insults that it copied Snapchat… which Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom deftly deflated by fully admitting to me in an interview that With or without Stories, Instagram still dominates polished social media the way Facebook would have still dominated big life event and opinion sharing even without Subscribe. If Instagram Stories is a success, it may be able to defang its most dangerous adversary. Facebook’s previous attempts to clone Snapchat like Poke, Slingshot and Bolt all failed, largely because they tried to make an “even-better” version of Snapchat that could go toe-to-toe with it as a standalone app. Here, Facebook wised up and baked a good-enough version into an already popular app. Instead of trading on its core Stories format, Snapchat must instead compete with bonus features, authenticity and the strength of its early community. Instagram didn’t kill it with good-enough, but it may have hurt Snapchat’s ability to reproduce.
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Disney will invest $1B into MLB’s streaming video business
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Anthony Ha
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The Walt Disney Company just that it’s paying $1 billion for a 33 percent stake in BAMTech, the video streaming company created by Major League Baseball. As a result of the deal, BAMTech is also spinning out of MLB’s broader digital media business, MLB Advanced Media. BAMTech’s clients aren’t limited to baseball (they include HBO Now, the National Hockey League, the PGA Tour and the WWE Network), and Disney says it will be working on its own streaming efforts with the company. In fact, those efforts will include a new multi-sport subscription service from Disney-owned ESPN. “Our investment in BAMTech gives us the technology infrastructure we need to quickly scale and monetize our streaming capabilities at ESPN and across our company,” said Disney CEO Bob Iger in the . Disney says it will share more details about the new “ESPN-branded” service “in the months ahead,” but it notes that the service won’t include current content from ESPN’s TV channels. The $1 billion payment will be made in two installments, one now and one in January. Disney says it also has the option to acquire a majority stake in BAMTech. that the deal was in the works, while it’s inevitable that ESPN will offer a direct-to-consumer service.
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NanoRacks’ commercial space testing platform outside the ISS is now open for business
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Devin Coldewey
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Say you’ve got an experiment or prototype satellite that you want to expose to the ravages of space. Sure, you could launch it with a bunch of others, but what if you need it back afterwards? NanoRacks has you covered. The company — well, actually, the crew of the ISS — has , which will allow anyone with the cash to send something up to space, let it feel the effects of microgravity and radiation and then have it returned to Earth in one piece. You could do this previously, but it wasn’t easy. You’d have to work something out with NASA to have it placed on the space station’s exterior, or figure out some exotic reentry plan. Now you can just rent a space in the NanoRacks platform. The NREP is located on the Kibo module of the ISS, and the NanoRacks payloads can be slotted in and removed from their little cubbies without a spacewalk. Astronauts will install your project, perform any actions that need to be done and then load it in a capsule for its return trip. There are limitations, of course. This isn’t for schoolkids to send up a potato to see how it does out there. Your project needs to be in a Cubesat form factor, though you can rent several spaces in a row for bigger experiments — 2U, 3U, etc. Pricing starts at $100,000 for an exterior platform payload for commercial purposes — then power, insurance and stays longer than 30 days are extra. Expect a discount for educational programs. (This paragraph previously listed pricing that is for the NanoRacks lab, and has been updated.) Still, it’s a comparatively fuss-free way to put something in space. Specifics can be found at the . You might be wondering: What does NASA get out of it? Well, they can use it, for one thing — it’s a handy setup for experimentation, and NanoRacks told TechCrunch that there’s been interest from government organizations. Perhaps it’s easier to just pay up rather than fight through all the red tape and get it up there as an official NASA partner. There’s limited space on the NREP: two racks, each with 16U capacity. That said, they aren’t booked yet. NanoRacks said they have plenty of payloads booked for the next couple of years, but if you feel the need to send something to space, there’s still room up there.
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Can chatbots help build your next website?
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Dave Sloan
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Small businesses have their pick of affordable DIY website-building platforms: , , and , to name a few. But these “no coding skills required” platforms struggle to acquire and retain customers. While the UI of these platforms is often beautifully designed, it’s still too much work — and for business owners, who has the time? A fresh crop of website-builder startups noticed that the “build a website from your browser” pitch is not enough to attract non-technical business owners who have no interest in becoming their own web designers. These startups are leading a “death of DIY” movement that is putting the power of design and development back into the hands of experts. The bet is that the full-service, i.e. “do it for you,” model is a better approach than asking small-business owners to do all the hard work themselves. In addition to providing human expertise, these startups are employing new AI and chatbot technologies to optimize the website-building process. The goal is to provide enough time savings and professional design support to lift the burden off the small business owner, making them more satisfied and more likely to stick with the service. I’ve used some of these AI/chatbot platforms in beta and have found the chatbot experience to be convenient and fast. Admittedly, it’s fun to chat via a messaging interface about changes to my website. And the chatbot excels at simple tasks like responding to basic questions, such as how many visitors my site had today. But, so far, I’m not convinced chatbots and AI solve a real problem for small-business owners. As with all aspects of service, quality and personal attention through human conversations are more important than the convenience of quick answers to simple questions. During the website setup experience, responding to a chatbot’s questions is not that much different than filling out a form about your project. For example, what is the name of your site? What color do you want? What is some text you’d like on the home page? Answering these questions in chat format instead of via a web form did not necessarily save me any time or effort — it’s just a slightly different interface. And it’s not clear how to edit the decisions that the chatbot makes on my behalf. While it’s appealing to give the chatbot a command like “edit text” and write new text, it’s not clear to which line of text I’m referring. For initial setup of a website, the chatbot does a good job of simulating the experience of talking to a professional web designer about the goals of my business website. But getting to a generic first template and adding my title and text are not the hard part of the process. The hard part is customizing, polishing and fine tuning, which could be a stretch with a chatbot. Additionally, once the initial template is set up, a chatbot cannot compete with an intuitive WYSIWYG for editing existing content. The point-and-click experience is very intuitive and hard to beat. An ideal solution will most likely combine chatbot support for some uses cases, and a point-and-click editor for other use cases. But let’s be honest, many small-business owners have no interest in logging into their website and making changes themselves — they’d rather tell someone the changes they want. In that regard, the chatbot provides a hand-holding experience that is more approachable than the website editor interface. For those who have no interest in touching their own website, a chatbot has the potential to take your commands. Whether those commands are properly interpreted and executed remains to be seen. Perhaps those more difficult requests are escalated to a human support person who can better interpret and execute them. Here are a few new startups pioneering the chatbot-driven “death of DIY” movement: Opla uses Facebook Messenger to chat with you about your website project. Opla is “your friendly website ninja. Opla your virtual assistant handles your website using natural conversation with you.” Opla is in private beta. Webware uses an AI bot named “Harley” to chat with you over email about your website project. “Harley is your AI-powered personal assistant to help you build your website and grow sales. Chat with Harley over email to complete the initial setup of your website. Once your website is up and running, she will continue to be your point of contact as you manage and grow your website. No logging in. No useless dashboard. Just Harley.” Harley is currently available for paying customers. B12 is a freshly funded startup. “Machine intelligence and automation enable design teams to work faster, smarter, and better. Cost and time savings are passed to our customers.” While a few post-DIY startups like , and have in the past few years teased AI as the future of website building, it’s too early to tell if automated design approaches are proving effective for real customers. Many of these startups have not yet launched (The Grid); others are still in the experimental phase. While automated support via a chatbot may have obvious benefits, many traditional website building platforms are rejecting the notion of chatbots altogether. The secret sauce to relationship and technical support may be human touch, not impersonal AI support. , for example, promises that their support channels will always be manned by a real person. When I asked them about their chatbot strategy, they responded: “We do not utilize chatbots for support. You always receive a real live person. It has always been this way and always will be.” Indeed, chatbots could have the opposite effect of their intended benefits. Support from a robot may be as unappealing as talking to an automated phone support from an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system. In many ways, my brief experience with chatbot support was reminiscent of talking to the cable company’s IVR system — it failed to understand the context of my question, and couldn’t do anything other than basic tasks. As with any new consumer-facing computer system , there is a learning curve as the operator learns how to make the system do what they want it to do. Learning to interact with a chatbot instead of a DIY website editor interface could turn out to be more work in the long run — just another interface to learn. If chatbots are the future of telling your “web guy” what you want from your business website, we may all be typing “REPRESENTATIVE” at our chatbots just like we yell it at IVR support systems that are equally as difficult to use.
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Intel buys deep learning startup Nervana Systems for a reported $350 million
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Lucas Matney
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Intel announced Tuesday that it is acquiring deep learning startup in a move that looks to bolster the role of AI solutions within the company. Recode that the price tag of the deal is north of $350 million, adding to what has been a pretty active (to put it mildly) last few weeks in tech M&A. In a , Nervana CEO and co-founder Naveen Rao specified that his company is intending to continue development on efforts related to its deep learning framework, platform and hardware. The San Diego-based team of 48 will all join Intel’s Data Center Group once the deal has closed. “[Nervana’s] IP and expertise in accelerating deep learning algorithms will expand Intel’s capabilities in the field of AI,” Diane Bryant, EVP and GM of the Data Center Group at Intel said in a . “We will apply Nervana’s software expertise to further optimize the Intel Math Kernel Library and its integration into industry standard frameworks.” Furthermore, Bryant specified that the startup’s expertise would “advance Intel’s AI portfolio and enhance the deep learning performance and TCO of our Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi processors.” The two-year-old startup had raised nearly $25 million from investors including DFJ, Data Collective, Fuel Capital, Lux Capital and Allen & Co. The company captured attention early-on with its hardware-centric approach to AI solutions and has since pursued technologies aimed at training neural nets. Data Collective Managing Partner Matt Ocko, who directed the firm’s Series A lead investment in Nervana had nothing but praises to sing of the company’s potential. “Intel didn’t just buy something that is simultaneously faster and more power-efficient than Nvidia,” he said. “Intel bought something that it can sell on boards and systems and even supercomputers to its customers ready-to-go that out-punches anything that Facebook or Google or Baidu or Microsoft has.” Ocko believes that there was little standing in Nervana’s way from continuing to make waves in the space and going on to be worth “multiple billions,” but Intel’s scale and prestige offered Nervana the quickest route to getting their tech into people’s hands as quickly as possible. “This thing was a freight train,” Ocko told me. “[The founders] wanted to get the technology to the maximum number of people at the maximum speed and Intel came in and said, come on in, we’re going to give you guys the world’s best semiconductor process at the biggest scale with an effectively unlimited budget, marketing, customer support, you name it.” Ocko detailed. “And no one says no to Intel.”
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Auto manufacturers need stable startup partners
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Kristen Hall-Geisler
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, which analyzes the future of the connected, autonomous car, recently hosted a webinar focused on the relationship between automotive manufacturers and startups. SK Kim, venture capitalist and manager at Hyundai Ventures, and Liz Kerton, executive director of the Autotech Council, laid out the challenges of mashing together a century-old industry with nimble new companies. As Kim said, “We have a hundred-year-old business model, and we sell one thing: vehicles.” Startups are using business models that evolve on the fly to respond to the market and their internal needs, and the number of things they could sell are limited only by their imaginations and missions. Therein lies the first challenge: the nimbleness that allows startups to function in the fast-paced twenty-first century is seen as instability by the automotive behemoths. “[Automotive manufacturers] need to find companies stable enough and with enough investment to make it through the product development cycle with a car company, which everybody knows is not short,” Kerton said. Having just a year or two’s worth of funding isn’t enough, she added, since it takes longer than that just to get a car from drawing board to showroom. Kim noted that it can take five to seven years to develop a car, where it only takes a year to develop a phone and a few weeks or months to develop an app. Then there’s the fact that once those cars roll out of the showroom, they might be on the road for twenty years. “You don’t want your technology partner to drop off,” Kerton said. Kim acknowledged that startups expect fast decisions on equity investment and contracts for early revenue. “That’s the only way for them to survive,” he said. But the challenge of connecting the cautious, slow pace of automotive investing and developing with the timeline startups expect is “frustrating in both directions,” Kim said. So why on earth would an old-school automotive company want to work with an upstart, er, startup? Kim had three good reasons: car companies need technology partners to innovate, business partners that can instill some flexibility, and partners that are unafraid to explore the uncertain and unpredictable future of transportation. Making bold moves is not exactly the forte of major automotive manufacturers. “Automaking is a highly regulated business with a highly regulated product,” Kim said. For this reason, it’s risky for a startup to focus only on the auto industry as a market or potential partner for its products. Kim suggested that it would be better for a startup to develop something for another space and then expand into the automotive space. That strategy makes a partnership, when it does happen, less risky for both companies.
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Apple releases its 5th developer betas
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Sarah Perez
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Good news, Apple developers – Apple today has released its 5th version of the iOS 10 beta build along with new betas for watchOS 3, macOS, and tvOS. With this release, we’re getting closer to the final, public build of iOS – it’s likely that there will only be one or two more betas before its release expected in September. While the first few betas were buggy, as expected, Apple has been polishing up the code and fixing the broken bits with every subsequent beta release. In iOS beta 5, the company has addressed a number of issues with regard to iOS’s interaction with Apple TV, in-app purchases in the App Store, Bluetooth, iMessage, the Phone and Wallet apps, as well as accessories. Notably, the device will no longer panic when using the iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case, for instance. There are a few changes with this iOS build, however, as early testers have already discovered. The AI and facial recognition data in the Photo app has been reset, causing a new scanning process to take place, reports . In addition, the music Control Center has been tweaked, the Today view now includes the data and day, widgets have gotten darker backgrounds, and there’s a new lock sound, their report says. The iOS 10 beta also ships with Swift Playgrounds, The app arrives with Learn to Code parts 1 and 2, plus additional challenges users can explore. You can also create your own playgrounds based on the templates, create a blank playground, or open playgrounds in Xcode. The app also includes the new Graphing template, in addition to the Answers, Shapes and Blank templates. In case you’re curious what’s new in the other platforms, macOS Sierra brings Siri to the Mac, the Photos app is updated, Safari has picture-in-picture for video, and . WatchOS 3 is also a major update in terms of offering a redesigned users interface, with no more Friends screen, and faster launching apps. Apple TV’s tvOS update isn’t as major, but will get a new dark mode and sign-on for TV Everywhere apps. The device can also act as a HomeKit hub. The new macOS beta by discovering an Apple Pay-capable phone or watch, and addresses other minor issues. The watchOS 3 beta, meanwhile, that when the request involves a deleted app, Siri may not have provided the intended response.
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First round of Disrupt SF Hackathon tickets now available
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Contributor
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The wait is over, hackathon fans. With Disrupt SF 2016 right around the corner, we thought it was high time we released the first wave of tickets to the Disrupt SF Hackathon. The hackathon takes place September 10-11 at Pier 48 in San Francisco. Those of you looking to spend the weekend before Disrupt hard at work coding, tinkering and hacking together something pretty awesome can get your free hackathon tickets . The hackathon kicks off at 12:30 p.m. PT on Saturday, September 10, with networking and the forming of the hackathon teams. On Sunday, after a grueling 20-plus hours of hacking and coding, teams will have just 60 seconds to present their projects to a panel of judges on the Disrupt stage. In addition to the satisfaction that comes with building something cool, those teams have the opportunity to score a few tickets to Disrupt, a $5,000 grand prize and several gadgets, toys and other monetary prizes from our sponsors. All teams who earn a score of three or higher will win two free tickets to the on September 12-14. There, they’ll get to check out the hundreds of startups on Display in Startup Ally and Hardware Alley, take in the Startup Battlefield competition, hear from some incredible entrepreneurs and investors in a series of interviews and fireside chats, and connect with other conference attendees at the various parties and after-parties. The hackathon is a great place for both hardware and software companies — won the event at Disrupt NY 2016, and hardware company won the event at Disrupt SF in 2014. And it isn’t just small projects that do well at the hackathon. You could very well build the next big thing in just 24 hours. GroupMe, for example, was launched out of the first Disrupt NY Hackathon, and . All you have to do is bring whatever great ideas you may have in the ol’ noggin, and spend a hard, fun-filled weekend bringing your ideas that much closer to reality. We can’t wait to see what you all come up with. But first you’ll need to grab a ticket, and just in case you missed the link above, you can .
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Robotic legs could power up physical therapy for kids with cerebral palsy
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Devin Coldewey
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Kids suffering from cerebral palsy may soon have a powerful new physical therapy technique in the form of robotic assistance for their legs. A study is being conducted on the potential benefits of the system, newly adapted for the use of children. Lokomat is a “robotic gait training program” that’s been around for a couple of years, but mainly used by adults. As any doctor will surely tell you, treating kids is a whole different process — and not just because they’re smaller. Just like in school, motivation and attitude need to be considered more closely. “Robotic gait training interventions are becoming more and more popular, especially for parents who are seeking out the newest technologies and interventions,” explained Shanon Phelan, who’s helping run the study at the University of Alberta. “We tend to assume all children want to walk or use a robot because it’s cool, but that’s not always the case and it’s important to listen to the child’s perspective on this.” Today at the university, the researchers conducted a little photo op and press event to show off the device. 12-year-old Maggie Slessor, who suffers from a form of cerebral palsy, demonstrated the Lokomat with the help of her physical trainer. , Slessor is enthusiastic: “It’s great to be able to walk without having to hold on to anything. My friends think it’s really cool when I show them the pictures. They think I’m a robot!” Lokomat robotic gait training system enhancing walking abilities for people with CP — Jim Krysko (@JimCLKrysko) The legs support the user’s body weight while guiding them through the ordinary motions of walking; this reduces or eliminates the need for the person to hold onto something while they walk — potentially providing a big morale boost. That’s especially important with children. “We are interested in how the treatment affects walking,” explains the study’s leader, UA’s Lesley Wiart, “but also how it affects the child’s confidence to participate in physical activities and their participation in other activities in their homes and communities.” The study will be the largest randomized, controlled trial yet to evaluate the effectiveness of robotic gait assist, but the “qualitative” aspect of it is also new. Even if it were to only have a minimal effect on the physical side, it could still be a major success on the psychological front. Work has just begun, and the study is expected to last five years and involve at least 140 kids. Good science takes time, after all.
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Fossil’s new Android Wear smartwatches are up for pre-order
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Brian Heater
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Like many of its old school watch brethren, Fossil wasn’t exactly in a hurry to embrace the world of connected wearables – after all, when you make watches, you think you’ve got all the time in the world. Late last year, the , with a slew of new devices (not mention a along the way), including an Android Wear smartwatch, a sort of combo watch/fitness tracker (a la Martian) and a pair of shiny wristbands. This March, it followed up with two new takes on its Android Wear offering, the Q Wander and Q Marshal, both of which offered smaller footprints than their predecessor, the Q Founder. In fact, the specs of the two watches are pretty similar across the board, including built-in mics/speakers, a magnetic charger, notification vibrations and an always-on display. The key distinctions, really are stylistic, with the Wander offering up a softer frame to the Marshal’s more rugged case. Both watches on the 12 and start shipping the 29 starting at $295.
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No Man’s Sky is an immersive wonder for solitary wanderers
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Darrell Etherington
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you experience as a player coming back to your ship after a long trip on foot for the first time in No Man’s Sky is astounding. I crested a ledge and saw the ship I’d left a couple of hours ago sitting exactly where I’d left it, but from above, making it look small and almost insignificant among the colorful alien landscape. When I set out, it seemed like the center of a game world mostly bounded by a cave mouth and small clearing; when I came back, it was the fly on the back of which microscopic me would explore an inconceivably vast universe. And I’ve never been more excited about being insignificant. No Man’s Sky is a new game out for PlayStation 4 today, which is coming to PC on August 12. It’s a first-person science fiction game, but it’s hard to define its category beyond that. Calling it a “space exploration sim” probably comes closest, since a lot of what you’re doing is forging a pioneer’s path through worlds randomly generated by the game’s engine, tagging flora and fauna no other human player of the game is likely to ever see. But you could also play without doing any real identification of things you find – I actually didn’t even discover the mechanic until after about an hour and a half of exploring the surface of the planet I started off on. And you don’t really have to fight anyone to play either: I ran from virtually every confrontation I came across and made out just fine. The worlds in No Man’s Sky are, as mentioned, randomly generated, 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets to discover. That’s not a typo, either. And those planets could host alien animals and planets, or they might not; you basically have to travel to them to find out. The universe is also populated by aliens with their own ships, and you can trade with and fight them. It sounds complicated, and it kind of is; dropping into the game with no real knowledge about how it works or what was expected of me meant it took a while to get my space legs, so to speak. But soon enough, I was mining raw materials like a pro, collecting the ingredients necessary for me to effect repairs on my broken ship, fuel it up and broaden my horizons. Because of how much resource-gathering and crafting you do, No Man’s Sky is similar to survival games like Rust and Don’t Starve. But basic survival isn’t too hard to manage; it’s upgrading your gear and devices that take time, and that relies on a decent amount of repetitive action. No Man’s Sky also significantly limits your travel capabilities when on a planet’s surface: You do a lot of walking. You can shorten travel between points on a planet with your ship, but you still have to get in and drive – there’s no way to fast travel between locations, even after you unlock checkpoints that serve as respawn locations. Basically, No Man’s Sky involves a lot of work – and it’s lonely work, too. This is that rare thing in today’s console gaming world: A purely single-player experience. You can’t fly the endless skies with your pals, but there is an online component because players upload their discoveries to the No Man’s Sky servers to track their exploration That means there’s a (slim) chance you could find a planet among the quadrillions that someone else has already discovered previously. Generally speaking though, it’s you, computer-controlled NPC aliens, and your ship. And that’s what makes this game so great – it’s almost more of an exercise in guided, solitary meditation than it is a video game. No Man’s Sky’s loneliness is where this title is likely to divide players. For me, it’s a welcome reprieve from the frenzy and chaos of multiplayer shooters, including yes, even the vaunted Overwatch. And even though it’s a wildly different type of game in almost every way, No Man’s Sky is a kind of anti-Pokémon Go, providing a way for a solitary player to focus inward and satiate their curiosity without any kind of social pressure or acknowledgement that they’re playing a game. If Pokémon Go encourages players to ‘get out and play,’ No Man’s Sky encourages players to ‘retreat within and contemplate.’ Despite the lack of online synchronous multiplayer, No Man’s Sky also doesn’t have a storyline, which is generally a key feature of single-player titles. But it also doesn’t need one – a story in a universe this ripe for exploration would feel tacked on at best. It makes sense that a game where you spend most of the time wandering the surface of planets as the only bipedal humanoid being around would seem lonely, but No Man’s Sky makes this a virtue thanks to rich environments and color schemes that benefit because they don’t strive for false realism. The music is soothing and atmospheric, an ambience that brings the isolation to a place where it feels comfortable. In the end, this is a game that a few players, including myself, will love intensely and sink many, many hours into. You might fall into this camp if you spent a lot of time playing Skyrim while ignoring or after completing the main quest line. Or if you were a fan of the Escape Velocity series, and cared little about the plot. Non-gamers might also find something to love here, as a way into interactive media that diverges so stridently from other ‘games’ with more conventional mechanics. I haven’t played enough of No Man’s Sky to know for sure how long it’ll keep my attention, but I love what I’ve done so far, and I look forward to being able to continue feeling like a mite lost in a desert where every grain of sand has something unique and exciting to offer.
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You’re a travel agent! You’re a travel agent! Everyone’s a travel agent!
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Amsterdam-based is aiming to shake up the travel industry by turning you (and that guy, and the lady over there and that chap over there, too) into a travel agent. The platform is a sharing-economy approach to booking travel for your friends and complete and utter strangers. Startup veteran Jochem Wijnands is now taking on the travel industry. The pain point TRVL believes it will be able to relieve is that people are spending way too long dithering before firming up their travel plans. “Studies show we spend hours researching our trips online — just to cut through the noise, narrow down our choices and build up enough confidence to book,” says Jochem Wijnands, CEO at TRVL. “Recommendations go a long way, especially if they are coming from people you trust.” Which makes sense, but seems to make the assumption that only people with well-traveled friends travel, which may not be true for everyone. Even if the platform expands to accepting travel advice from friends-of-friends… well, let’s just say I am connected to quite a few people on social media whose friends I wouldn’t necessarily trust to give good travel advice. You booked me on Delta? This trip is off to a rocky start. The company is operating on an interesting business model. By using the TRVL platform to book the trips, agents are able to tap into the slightly discounted agency rates for booked trips. The traveler pays the same they would anyway, but the commission paid by the hotel chains, airlines and car rental companies is split between TRVL and the agents. The idea is that, in effect, travelers get TRVL’s service for free. It’s a tremendously interesting move. Whether the company will succeed will depend on if it manages to make the marketplace economics work in the notoriously slim-margined travel space. Either way, I think it will be one to watch. Wijnands is no rookie in the startup world; his previous startup was and later turned into the Apple News Format, which was subsequently integrated into iOS. The TRVL platform is currently in private beta and will launch to the public next month.
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A quick look at some of the artists who make Stranger Things so special
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Romain Dillet
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out for a minute and look at the names in the ending credits of . If you’re like me, you’ve been watching the Netflix original series and obsessively talking about it with literally everyone you know. I’m not going to spoil the show, but there are a few things that stood out for me and I wanted to share them all with you. Let’s start with the awesome opening title design. With a red neon-like design and an amazing retro font, creative studio is introducing the show with a strong show identity. The company is also the studio behind the opening title for Jessica Jones and other shows. Chances are you’ve seen quite a few of their designs. The subtle animation with imbricating letters as well as the black background is a modest opening full of mystery. You don’t really know what to expect, and yet, you’re able to say in a fraction of a second that you’re watching the opening title of Stranger Things.
And of course, it’s hard not to think about the Lucasfilm neon logo that we’ve all seen at the beginning of Star Wars movies. While Star Wars is a timeless movie franchise, the first three movies were released between 1977 and 1983. By referencing the Lucasfilm logo, Imaginary Forces is instantly projecting us back to the 1980s. What about the font? The Telegraph Ed Benguiat, the 88-year old typographer who created back 1977. It’s an iconic font that you may have seen on the covers of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Benguiat doesn’t have anything to do with Stranger Things, but it says a lot about his wide reach. He has created some of the most iconic fonts of the 20th century as well as some long-lasting logos — Ford, The New York Times or Estée Lauder logos were all created by him. Imaginary Forces settled on this font after the Duffer Brothers 15 book covers as an inspiration — most of them were Stephen King novels, who also happens to be a big inspiration for the show. Back in the 1980s, cover designers used ITC Benguiat to write Stephen King’s name on many book covers at the time. Let’s switch to the soundtrack for a minute. If you go on Netflix’s Spotify profile, the is by far the most popular. With 108,000 subscribers at the time of this article, it’s clear that many people want to hear The Clash, Joy Division or New Order more often. But I’ve been more intrigued by the original soundtrack, including the track in the opening title. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein have been in charge of this . The two artists are part of the Austin-based band and set the right mood for the most tensed scenes. I can’t wait for their new album this fall. Finally, the artwork of the show is like a time travel machine to the 1980s. It’s hard to believe that didn’t draw it himself. Struzan designed the artworks for Star Wars, Blade Runner, Back to the Future, E.T., Indiana Jones and many other popular movies. the artwork for Stranger Things, mixing together Struzan’s style with a sort of comic book vibe for the character design. Lambert also designed . Interestingly, Lambert started drawing this artwork on his iPad Pro using and an Apple Pencil. He later exported the artwork to Photoshop. You can’t make a show like Stranger Things without a big cast and crew with too many names to name — Malgosia Turzanska and Kimberly Adams-Galligan have done a great job on the costume design for example. But it’s nice to break out these little touches that make the series so special. And if you haven’t watched Stranger Things yet, go and watch it now.
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Nvidia and Baidu partner on a ‘top-to-bottom’ platform for self-driving cars
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Darrell Etherington
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Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed a new partnership on stage at Baidu’s annual Baidu World conference today. This partnership with Baidu will see Nvidia and the Chinese tech giant work together on building a comprehensive autonomous driving platform. “We’re going to bring together the technical capabilities, our expertise in AI, and the skills of two world-class companies,” Huang said, noting that the partnership will the AI and deep learning skills of both companies. “By combining these capabilities, we will be able to deliver a cloud-to-car architecture platform that promises to get cars on the road in the next several years.” Nvidia and Baidu will be building an end-to-end solution for self-driving cars, according to Huang. The end goal is a platform that allows Baidu to get a self-driving taxi fleet on the road, and the same platform is also designed for use in OEM cars, tied into the same network. Huang said this means it’s going to be available for branded car OEM consumer vehicle offerings, as well as fleets of driverless commercial vehicles. He noted it will be a “completely open” platform, meaning they’re very hopeful other automotive OEMs will come on board. Huang also talked about deep learning and AI generally, and Nvidia’s commitment to both across a variety of industries. He noted that beginning six years ago, even “before many people in Silicon Valley,” Baidu and CEO Robin Li and were investing deeply in this area. Nvidia has been partnering with Baidu on computer learning research for years now, Huang said. Nvidia introduced its PX 1 self-driving car development platform at CES two years ago, and debuted its of the same at CES this past January.
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Taking Sphero’s BB-8 Force Band for a spin
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Brian Heater
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Sphero’s BB-8 was arguably the most compelling bit of merchandising, which is, naturally, saying a lot. The latest Star Wars film was, as anticipated, a merch juggernaut, but there was no better bit of serendipity than a startup smartphone-controlled toy maker and the movie’s scene stealing droid. How does one go about improving up such a glorious bit of cross over marketing? Use the force, naturally. Back at CES, the company took the wraps off wearable used to control BB-8 without the aid of a mobile device, emulating Force-powered Jedi telekinesis. A month later at Toy Fair, it showed off the band’s final design, which looks it would be at home on the wrist of Boba – or, really, any of the Fetts. BB-8 has been upgraded to match. The new version of the rotund robot has clearly seen some stuff, matching the lived in/battle damaged aesthetic that has forever been a defining characteristic of the Star Wars universe. The band is pretty big, incidentally. It felt big on me and I’m a grown up – physiologically speaking, at least. As Sphero happily pointed out, though, you can hide it under a sleeve (of your Jedi robe, naturally) to get the full Force push effect. There’s also a built-in speaker, so you can get BB-8’s bloops and blops delivered right to your wrist. I’ll be honest, the band takes some getting used to. BB-8 is already a little tricky, given the fact that you’re essentially piloting a sphere around. Among other things, there’s no true front and back. By clicking the round physical button in the middle of the band, you active a blue glowing light, which you adjust by rotating your hand. This adjust’s the robot’s direction. Moving BB-8 around requires under and overhand motions – a sort of flick of the wrist. Raising and lowering the hand adjusts the robot’s speed. I’m glad Sphero was on hand during my first demo to, you know, really help get the ball rolling. You get the hang of it after a while, but controlling the ‘bot is still a lot easier with the Sphero app.
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Crunch Report | Instagram Zoom, Bill Nye and Aviato mobile
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Khaled "Tito" Hamze
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Tito Hamze
Tito Hamze
Joe Zolnoski
Joe Zolnoski
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Kim Dotcom’s extradition appeal has started and is being live-streamed
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Fitz Tepper
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More than four years later, Kim Dotcom’s legal battles (at least in New Zealand) may be close to an end. His final appeal to avoid extradition to face charges in the U.S started yesterday in Auckland’s High Court, and is expected to last And, in a for any case in New Zealand (and in typical Kim Dotcom fashion), the appeal is being live-streamed. All of the daily live streams and old footage can be but the hearing is actually live right now, and you can watch in the embedded stream below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0SuJonHLT4 Dotcom’s lawyers petitioned to have the case streamed because of the “unprecedented issues of public and international interest” – essentially arguing that the only way to guarantee that Dotcom had a fair trial would be for it to be live-streamed around the world. The judge agreed, under the that the stream is delayed 20 minutes (so the Court can potentially remove any material they don’t want made public), and that all recorded footage is deleted after the trial concludes. Breaking News: Judge has granted live streaming! Success! — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) Notably, United States prosecutors (who hope to have Dotcom extradited so they can try him in the U.S) were against live-streaming the case, saying it could taint a jury pool for a potential trial in the United States – since juries are supposed to come into a case with no knowledge of prior legal proceedings. While the stream went up yesterday for the first day of the appeal, there were some audio-visual issues which made the stream tough to watch, but Dotcom says that he has now had HD cameras installed for better streaming. Oh and before you get disappointed, it’s important to note that appeals like these are extremely procedural and not very entertaining. If you’re interested in the law (or have been following Dotcom’s legal battle) you may find it interesting, but don’t expect an O.J-style made for TV courtroom drama. But even though it hasn’t been a huge hit so far (current viewers are only ~200), the Megaupload founder has encouraged fans to continue watching, saying the best is yet to come. Live stream from court will be back in 1 hour. The juicy stuff is yet to come. Stay tuned. — Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom)
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Baidu gets approval to test self-driving cars in California
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Darrell Etherington
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Baidu received an Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permit from the California DMV, the company revealed today. This paves the way for Baidu USA to begin testing its self-driving car technologies on public roads in California, which it says it will do soon. The Baidu autonomous driving research team in the U.S. was announced earlier this year, saying it was targeting reaching a 100-person research team in Silicon Valley. Baidu also recently invested with , a supplier of key LiDAR components used in autonomous driving systems. The investment was designed to help improve the cost and yield of LiDAR components, which are currently expensive to make at scale, in the volumes you’d need for a proper production launch of self-driving vehicles. While Baidu does say that it’s going to “start testing… autonomous driving technologies on public roads very soon in California,” according to a statement by Baidu SVP Jing Wang, it doesn’t say how far it’s progressed in its Silicon Valley recruitment drive, but getting permission to start road testing in California should help its efforts overall. Baidu will still face the same requirements as other companies testing autonomous driving vehicles in the state, which currently means there must be a driver and driving controls present in the testing cars.
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Applying analytics to clinical data
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Sue Siegel
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Advanced technologies and the rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) are enabling the physical world to merge with the digital, leading to explosive growth in the volume and quality of clinical data. Cognified care is the application of analytics to transform this newly available digitized clinical data into knowledge that can revolutionize healthcare (see the example of Jamie below). The emergence of smartphones and the app economy have led consumers to expect convenient, high-quality service in multiple industries — retail, travel, education, media and entertainment, among others. This same revolution has not happened yet in healthcare, but it is imminent thanks to cognified care. The result will be a transformation of healthcare, leading to four major benefits: personalized care, a value-based system, care anywhere and improved outcomes. According to , only 13.4 percent of non-federal acute care hospitals used EHRs in 2008. By 2014, that percent had increased to 83.2 percent. In those six years, there has been a seismic shift in clinical data from paper records to digital files that are readily accessible to analytics. EHRs capture longitudinal data to track a patient over time, and include imaging data, physician observational workups, clinical diagnostics and all the “-omics” and information about a person’s environment and lifestyle. Coupled with sophisticated analytics, these patient data provide the foundation for “precision medicine,” an exciting new approach to disease prevention and management that will enable doctors to customize and optimize how they treat patients/consumers. Despite this promise, digitization of clinical data has limited value when medical records are confined within the walls of one provider or one machine. Combining pools of clinical data will enable researchers to develop new best practices based on insights gleaned from population-level analysis, extending the capabilities of precision medicine. A further benefit from digitization of clinical data is the fluidity with which patient medical records can follow a person from provider to provider and from hospital to clinic to home. This enables a truly two-way collaboration between patient and provider. The result will be better personalized care thanks to patients actively partnering with providers. In this election year, we are frequently reminded of the unsustainability of the old way of providing healthcare. for results that lag other industrialized nations in areas such as infant mortality and care of chronic disease. Cognified care will facilitate the shift to a value-based system of healthcare that should address some of this mismatch between outlay and outcome. The availability of better population data will lower costs (see example on alcoholism) and lead to better healthcare. We all recognize the cost advantages of prevention relative to treatment of disease. One of the key benefits of population-level data analysis will be the insights necessary to identify a patient before they develop disease. These shifts are already happening. We are starting to see insurers move away from traditional fee-for-service systems that pay providers per transaction based on the number of patient visits and tests ordered. Value-based pay is imminent, and is determined based on the overall value of care delivered — a world where outcomes matter. Providers are rewarded for keeping their patients healthier over the long term. This value-based care would not have been scalable without the digitization of clinical data and the cognification of healthcare. Another insight from the digitization of healthcare is the ability for patients to form communities. Until recently, patients with rare diseases were relatively isolated. Now there are online communities such as that enable patients and physicians to more easily collaborate on cases, diagnoses and treatment plans. This enables a more grassroots-level of cognified care that helps create and foster communities for the benefit of patient care. This, then, leads to my last two points: care anywhere and improved outcomes. In a cognified system, healthcare settings will move beyond the four walls of a hospital, giving rise to innovative new business models — a shift already in motion. Just look around at the growing number of “step-down” facilities, the use of in-home connected care and the rise of retail walk-in clinics. One of the more notable shifts has been how retail centers are now offering service delivery. Walmart, Walgreens and CVS have all conducted pilots of advanced healthcare kiosks or clinics in their drugstores. These are typically staffed by pharmacists, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, and do more than just administering flu shots and measure vital signs. They are increasingly expanding their services to perform annual physicals, help monitor patients’ chronic conditions, provide diagnostic consults and offer health-and-wellness coaching. These step-down facilities offer care to patients more conveniently and less expensively than traditional hospital-delivered care, while also adding a new line of business for the pharmacies. All these different care settings have been made possible through advances in technology, such as the internet, machine learning and telemedicine. These innovations not only help provide ubiquitous data availability but also enable healthcare continuity over time and across settings. This is helping the transition to the consumerization of healthcare: increased convenience, better patient tracking and behavior modification and, ultimately, improved outcomes at a lower cost. To appreciate the power of cognified care, let’s take a look at the , where a rapidly aging population has strained the resources of a national public health service. , older patients with chronic conditions drive 77 percent of the total health expenditures, and the cost of healthcare was expected to double by 2020. To stem those soaring costs, the region implemented a novel holistic care solution that was protocol-driven, moved the clinicians outside of the four walls of the hospital into the community and featured at its center essential cognified care capabilities. A cloud-based multi-modal communication hub captured remote sensing data, enabled on-call clinician access, drove pharmaceutical adherence and provided patient education. To effectively target the resources, a predictive analytics engine was used to identify those patients likely to land in the ER in the next three months, and a 24/7 call center ensured the coordination of clinician, therapy and patient to drive proactive care and respond to urgent needs. With the new system, nurses can now resolve more than 80 percent of the health issues, emergency admissions for chronic patients have decreased and home-based care has surged by nearly 50 percent. The result: annual savings of $77 million over two years and increased patient consumer satisfaction! Cognified care is not some pie-in-the-sky concept; it’s already here. New entrants in the market have begun to challenge healthcare incumbents, and they are sure to be followed by other startups. There is definitely room to improve healthcare, but for now it seems clear that the cognification of medicine — enabled by the internet, machine learning, artificial intelligence, sensors and the cloud — will disrupt our existing paradigm. Where healthcare was once dictated by “doctors’ orders,” we are now in the emerging era of “patients’ directives.”
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Secret ‘bursts into flames’ feature may be behind Samsung’s Note 7 delays
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Devin Coldewey
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The Galaxy Note 7 seems like a pretty decent phone if you like phones literally the size of the galaxy ( ) — but be aware that Samsung’s curvy-screened flagship device may be prone to, well, exploding. Fear not, however: Samsung is looking into it. That’s according to statements provided to and the , which have the company suspending shipments of the phone in order to do additional quality checks. With nearly half a million already out the door, the Note 7 is already a hit, but two users have already reported their phones . It’s not the first phone this has happened to — in fact, it’s a fine old tradition at this point. History has also taught us that it’s also quite possible that the problem lies in the charger or cable. We’ve asked Samsung for more details, but for now the halted shipments mean the already hard-to-get phone will remain so for at least a little while longer.
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Seattle angel investor Jon Staenberg on the state of startup investing
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Jasper Kuria
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Absolutely. Most investors like to pretend they add a ton of value and expertise but they don’t. I am clear about it. The value I add is in having a good enough relationship with the founder so that when things aren’t going well they tell me. I then open my Rolodex and connect them with people that can help. What value can an investor add? Help with hiring, firing, biz dev (sales), raising money and in some rare circumstances, coaching/mentoring. But if you ask most investees how many of their investors are engaged, available, and helping move the needle, most would tell you not many. Adding value is something I constantly think about. How can I be a better board member? How can I know a particular area or ecosystem? What area should I be deeper in? It is hard because if you don’t re-sharpen the saw, you get stale. Most people are stale in that sense. Nothing makes me feel as good as when I can honestly say some small success of the company was because of something I helped with beyond writing a check. You know, it makes a good CNBC commentary. It all depends on your time horizon. If it’s the next year we can talk doom and gloom. That’s not my time horizon. I’ve been in this business for 30 years and people love to jump on the boat and predict trends. We’ve had an unbelievably good 5-6 year run, so it’s natural to have a pullback. I prefer to look at the next 10 or 20 years. Buckle in as they say, but if you are in for the long-term there are great opportunities. I am really excited about what is playing out! Yeah, it pretty simple. If it is hard to raise money, figure out how you don’t have to — get to profitability. That discipline is healthy. There are very few companies that have the hyper-growth that allows them to forgo profitability in the short-term and everyone wrongly assumes those examples are the norm, whether it’s a Facebook or a YouTube. I want to be in a company that can have great growth, but it is important to know what your business model really is. I don’t invest in companies that say we are going to get to 10 million users and then figure it out. Here’s the practical answer: I am not in a fund right now but an angel investor. I don’t have the heft to fight it but I am disgusted that a lot of these valuations were artificially propped up. The market is going to speak and it is healthy. People should get an accurate view of what their valuation is, as long as the early investors are not completely wiped out. That’s what everyone says, but how many 100x’s are there really? I’ve been doing this a long time and there just aren’t that many. I don’t have the same pressures of a fund in liquidity, timing or the need for 100x returns. If I can consistently get 5x to 10x I’d take that all day long. If an entrepreneur tells me “we are going to sell in a year, you’ll double your money,” that would truly be a great outcome in IRR (Internal Rate of Return) terms. But if that is the only path or otherwise they are out of business, it is not okay. I want a certain amount of optionality, meaning that not only could the company be sold but maybe it is big enough to IPO or merge with other companies. Angel investor Jon Staenberg I don’t want to compete with everyone in virtual reality, big data, drones and health. My background is in the enterprise and I am interested in how the cloud is transforming the enterprise. I am also interested in food-tech and I am investor in Kitchen Bowl, a recipe company. I am fascinated by the convergence of technology and food and questions like “how do we feed 10 billion people on this planet?” There’s a baseball saying, “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the next big thing won’t happen as quickly as people expect. I am therefore willing to forgo those 100x returns and get 10x on things that are more certain and nearer term. The first thing I look for when someone pitches to me is, how good of a sales person are they? To me, it is always about selling of some kind; whether selling to raise money, to customers or to hire good people. Then of course there are the basics. You better know the market, have passion and be able to go off script if need be. The thing entrepreneurs need to know when pitching to an investor (and I’ve been told I am more honest than most) is most investors are going to keep it open-ended. They say things like “this looks interesting” or “keep me updated on your progress.” I tend to let people know if it is a no and why it is a no for me. It depends on how valuable you think your time is but I’ll tell you this. If I am the one pitching I want to know where I stand. If your time is not valuable to you, why should it be valuable to me? As an investor, I want entrepreneurs to ask me those hard questions. Oh gosh, I actually don’t think there is one. Marc Andreessen comes from a product background so he sees it from a product lens. And what does Bill Gross do? He is in the timing business. Other VCs may say it is about the team because they are very social or connected to people. It is literally the filter of the glasses you are wearing. It isn’t just one thing. Every single thing counts. If it was just one thing, this would be an easy business! We live in such an unbelievably interesting time. The rate of change is exploding and it has never been easier to start companies. The willingness of the world to accept new business models is also unprecedented. I would encourage more people to start companies. I am especially interested in seeing more diversity in the startup world, both in terms of gender and race. If anyone in these groups is looking for advice or mentorship, I’d be happy take a meeting.
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Instacart’s app has changed grocery stores for good
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Lora Kolodny
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TechCrunch got an aisle-side view of how the company’s people and technology come together on location at Costco in San Francisco. And one thing’s clear: The San Francisco startup has changed grocery stores for good. According to the company’s Chief of Operations , one of Instacart’s primary innovations isn’t all that high-tech. The startup secures exclusive lanes in grocery stores to which it sends a high volume of orders, and staffs them with a “CBT” (cashier-bagger-tagger). Instacart’s shoppers — who pick up all the items that customers order online, then pay for and pack them before delivery — breeze through Instacart-only express lanes at stores like Costco, Whole Foods and regional groceries like Mollie Stone’s, Andronico’s or Bi-Rite in San Francisco. Eventually, Instacart wants to offer a “bypass checkout” feature to its personal shoppers, and eventually to anyone who uses the Instacart app. This would let shoppers simply skip the register and instead scan and pay for items from their own phones, Gupta said. For now, the dedicated lanes speed the process significantly for Instacart personal shoppers.
On a high-tech note, Instacart also obtains inventory and store layout data from major grocery chains with which it partners in order to create “aisle mapping.” Aisle maps guide shoppers to the specific items on their grocery lists. This helps them navigate to items quickly, without hunting around and staring at shelves stocked with an overwhelming number of packages and labels, searching for something they’ve possibly never purchased. While Instacart hasn’t rolled out aisle mapping with all of its partners yet, the startup is expanding the initiative, Gupta said. According to Instacart Shift Lead Gloria Shu, aisle mapping isn’t live at the Costco in San Francisco yet. But it’s just one of many key features in the Instacart app that’s used by shoppers and drivers, and not seen by consumers. The Instacart app, on the backend, helps personal shoppers avoid melted ice cream, or hot prepared foods turning tepid, she noted. It guides them through the most efficient route in a store that will have them picking up frozen or hot items last. At stores where Instacart processes a high volume of orders, hot and cold items are bagged and stored in a staging area that’s temperature-controlled until a driver picks them up, Shu said. Next time you shop at a Whole Foods, Costco or other major grocery stores, keep an eye out for the company’s designated check-out lanes, staging areas and personal shoppers circulating with smartphones in hand, wearing the company’s signature green tee shirts. Instacart seems to have a competitive edge for now. But its competition is, no doubt, eager to secure similar express-lane arrangements and develop their own tech to get ahead. Competitors to Instacart include everyone from fellow venture-backed startups like Postmates to Google’s Shopping Express service and a bevy of regional logistics providers.
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NFX Guild’s James Currier’s journey from baiting hooks to baiting big deals
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Navin Chaddha
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James Currier focuses on building businesses with network effects, and he builds those businesses by choosing the right people first. Currier started as a schoolboy entrepreneur, selling worms to fishermen at six and later selling boxer shorts in college. After starting his career in venture capital, Currier founded a series of companies and incubators that took advantage of network effects to grow and create defensible value. He co-founded the social network Tickle in 1999 and grew it through the dot-com ups and downs until it grew its membership to a quarter of the existing internet population before it was sold to in 2004. “Why would you start a business without a network effect?” Currier asked. “The value that’s created when you hit a network effect is so vast, that that’s really what we’re all looking for.” Later, in the incubator and the accelerator and venture fund , Currier has looked to the power of network effects to grow successful businesses. But he also recognizes the importance of mentorship and of choosing the right team as keys to success in making those ventures successful. Currier looks for the humility to listen, as well as the grit and determination to never give up, as aspects of successful teams. “Choose your people first,” Currier said. “These are tough businesses. These are tough things to do. They are hard, emotionally and spiritually, and they’re hard physically. You’ve gotta get through it. So you gotta go through it with the people who you admire and respect and trust. And if you don’t have that, then start again. Go get those people and then move forward with them.” [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/279765507?secret_token=s-fpVOJ” params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false>” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
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The dream of the Courier lives on, but it’s still a dream
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Devin Coldewey
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Oh yes, young feller, that there sure is something. But why don’t you just set a while an’ listen to the stories of an old blogger. ‘Twas back in the old days — before the millennials took over. That’d be 2009 or so. Longer than most remember these days. Let me ask ya something, m’boy. Ever hear tell of a ? Perhaps the most exciting cryptogadget of all time, this never-released device may have been before you walked the Earth. But Lenovo remembers. And they just tried to summon its ghost. Back then, tablets were yet to have their moment in the sun. It was before Apple had revealed the iPad, and before TechCrunch had finished the ill-fated (and let’s be honest, ill-conceived) . Arriving in concept form to preemptively steal their thunder, however, came . These were strange days for Microsoft; the excellent but criminally mishandled Zune was at the zenith of its popularity (such as it was). In fact, just a few days before the Courier , I had just penned a review of the , still in my opinion the best portable music player out there. So it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that Microsoft would do something daring and unexpected like the Courier. Pictures of the two-screened, folding device were leaked to Gizmodo (it was big on leaks then). The Courier was framed as a sort of smart design notebook with sketching, browsing, text annotation and all kinds of productive and creative functions. It looked fabulous, and honestly, still does. Alas, it was vaporware, and despite great hue and cry from gadget bloggers (the most influential people on the planet), development was discontinued. But we still remember it fondly. There were two keys to its charm; the first was its fold-flat design, the second we’ll get to later. This book-like form factor is so natural for so many people, and for so many purposes, that it was surprising no one had done it before. I’m still surprised that e-readers haven’t assumed this form. Fast-forward 7 years. The tablet and notebook formats are merging, and the hardware is growing more sophisticated in how that happens. Flipping and rotating Yogas have shown up over the last couple of years, but they never quite enticed. Then the Surface Book showed up, with its unique (and uniquely flawed) hinge, hinting at a future version where the crumb-accruing gap between top and bottom half would be eliminated. Enter the Yoga Book. Lenovo’s talented engineers have clearly solved one of the obstacles to the Courier’s manifestation in the physical realm. The hinge is a beautiful little piece of engineering, and — presumably — allows the device to be used painlessly in a number of configurations (conformations, really). It’s light, touchable and meant to be used like a notebook (or even a real paper notebook). But while this is an admirable step toward the dream of the Courier, it’s still a far cry from the vaporware we fell in love with in 2009. For one thing, it’s huge. Part of the fun of the Courier was that it was supposed to be about the size of a trade paperback. It was meant to go in your jacket pocket, not in your laptop sleeve. A 10-inch screen and matching keyboard make it an ultra-flat laptop, not a smart notebook. For another, with one side dedicated to input and one dedicated to display, it’s still only partway to the dream of Courier, which envisioned both sides having both functions, but with subtle differences. And there’s the key to why Lenovo’s attempt, valiant as it is, falls far short of the (admittedly non-existent) Courier. The Courier was a great example of function preceding form. The device had a concrete goal: to digitize and expand the functions of . https://youtu.be/GlpftPSuXe4 All its functions were centered around this concept: most interactions were with a pen and finger; the interface used pages, tabs and other physical, paper metaphors for navigation and entry. Of course, some of this was alarmingly “skeumorphic” in its imitation of real physical items, but the interactions were nevertheless intuitive: They didn’t just look like sticky notes and pages, they acted like them. In addition, it added things that anyone who’s ever used a notebook wished they could do. Copy the contents of several pages onto one, or hold some quick notes on a blank page just until they can be inserted into the rest, or annotate a sketch or scrap without interfering with it. And instead of a weird fold in the middle where you can’t write, there’s a multi-functional clipboard and gesture tray! It let its two sides work together in interesting ways, ways that could only ever occur on a device like this. Critically, its designers were also unafraid to compromise functionality in pursuit of this concept. Hand-writing a web address? That’s a terrible idea! But the point was that you weren’t to have to do that. You’d have your usual sites and apps ready to open by more intuitive means. Go and do serious browsing on your desktop or something! This device is for other stuff! Do you edit photos on a smartwatch? The Courier wasn’t meant to replace your laptop any more than an e-reader or smartphone is today. It was a bold attempt to establish a whole new category of device equally distant from tablets as from laptops (and for that matter, paper notebooks). In contrast, the Yoga Book is hampered by its need to be a traditional laptop at some times and a traditional tablet at others, with some added edge cases where the ingenuity of the company’s engineers could be put on display. It’s a device seeking a purpose, while the Courier was a purpose embodied in a device. The latter is the better, which is why the concept still excites us. With luck, Lenovo or Microsoft will eventually make the leap — they’re both teetering on the edge — and give us the crazy, truly different device we’ve been pining after for 7 years.
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Relive Samsung’s incredibly awkward Gear S3 press conference
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Brian Heater
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Samsung knows how to throw a party. A really, really weird party. The electronics giant has put on some of the more bizarre events over the past decade, including, memorably, one at IFA 2012 that featured a real-life magician hired by the company to demonstrate just how magical the company’s new phablet really was. This year’s event, focused solely on its new wearable, , centered around an “interview” conducted by a watch writer, in which questions and answers were read pretty close to verbatim off a teleprompter, leading to the utterance of phrases like, “the case is the body, the face is the soul.” https://youtu.be/EBmhKLj4Jeg As the company noted from the perfectly round stage (a little on the nose, but what are you gonna do?) in the center of the room, the last few months have seen several high-profile Samsung product releases, including the Note 7, the new Gear VR and the Gear Fit2, leaving room for just the watch’s unveiling — which is just enough to fill half an hour, if you ask a lot of questions. It was mercifully short, given the fact that the air conditioning didn’t seem to be working in the Berlin event space, leading the audience to furiously fan themselves for the duration. Perhaps next time we can just stick to the VR version.
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IoT’s killer app is home security
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Chris Ciabarra
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I live in San Francisco, and I have a raccoon problem. If you’re a Bay Area local, chances are you’ve had a run-in with these not-so-small four-legged monsters. When I moved into my house, raccoons would run wild in my front yard almost every night, tipping over trash cans and scaring my dog. Being an IoT enthusiast, I decided to create a device to secure my yard. The result was a motion-detecting squirt gun, capable of sensing and scaring off the invaders. My raccoon problem was solved, my garden secured, almost immediately after setting up the device. The experience got me thinking about the relationship between IoT and security. Is there something more there? IoT is most well-known as a quirky way of automating your home, like some fancy or talking fridge. By and large, IoT has yet to have its “killer app” moment and become a mainstream success — mostly because people don’t recognize the tangible value in having a home full of connected devices. Then it struck me — perhaps IoT’s killer app home security. Full disclosure: I’m a bit of a mad scientist for security. I specifically chose my house because it has two flights of stairs to the front door. It’s a nuisance for me, but, more importantly, it’s a nuisance for any would-be robber. Just try carrying a tv down two flights of stairs — it’s awful. On top of that, I have embraced IoT platforms as my go-to for securing my home, inside and out. Inside, I’ve outfitted my entire home with the , complete with window and door trips, wireless motion sensors and cameras. Outside, I created a license plate reader capable of recognizing unfamiliar cars and sending me a text whenever a strange vehicle drives by. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m a bit of a security fanatic. Installing these systems, I came to the revelation that home security is a fantastic vehicle for the mainstream adoption of IoT. The addressable market is massive: Everybody wants to secure the things that matter most. And the benefits of an IoT home security system rival those of more traditional options; a state-of-the-art home security system built upon IoT devices costs as low as . It’s not chump change, but it’s a price point many families can afford. Unlike their counterparts, new IoT security platforms don’t require any wiring thanks to their reliance on Wi-Fi. The setup is as easy as placing the device in the room you want to secure and connecting it to the home’s routers. Then you can conveniently use an iPhone app to manage the settings and arm/disarm the system. If you’re looking for one, make sure to get one without a monthly subscription. The best IoT systems have made decentralized home security possible. There’s no longer a need for hundreds of security agents waiting by their phones, ready for an alarm. Now we homeowners can get alerted by our devices directly and take the necessary course of action. It’s innovations like these that make home security more accessible for the everyday person, as well as more innovative than prior solutions. As more people see the benefit in adopting IoT-driven home security systems, they will surely be interested in other IoT platforms, like home automation and media centers. Because the devices are interconnected, they benefit from the networking effect. The more devices you have in your home, the more useful they are to you. For example: When used in isolation, Amazon’s Echo is nothing more than a fancy music box you can talk to, but when synced with IoT devices around the home, it becomes a central point of communication between the user and their networked devices. Home security will pave the way for the mainstream adoption of IoT devices. The logic is simple: Every person values their security, and IoT is giving them the means in an innovative, low-cost way. Additionally, the future for development of these technologies is wide open. I wouldn’t be surprised if new systems offer or even connecting Fido, our original home protector, to security systems through devices like the . Secure your home, automate your lifestyle and live a richer, more interconnected life. That’s the IoT promise, and something I truly believe in. Now, if only IoT could build a moat around my home…
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HSN’s first pitch-off competition goes in search of the next big consumer product
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Sarah Perez
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is looking for the next big American consumer product. Today, 100 makers and entrepreneurs from around the U.S. will pitch their products for a chance to win airtime on HSN, a listing on HSN.com, a piece in Good Housekeeping magazine and its “Seal of Approval,” following testing. The products will come from across categories, like home, kitchen, toys, productivity, and yes, even tech. The result of winning could be a “make or break” moment for the right company and product, as HSN reaches 96 million cable TV homes across the U.S., and Good Housekeeping magazine has over 25 million readers. Its coveted “Good Housekeeping Seal,” meanwhile, was introduced back in 1909 as a means of backing a product with a limited warranty and a refund or replacement up to $2,000 if the product turns out to be defective within two years following its purchase. However, this is the first time HSN has ever held a pitching contest – something it says it plans to do more often. “We’re always going to trade shows, we’re always trying to find people but having a competition where people can come here, honestly it’s been a lot of fun,” says Neal Martinelli, VP Merchandising, Electronics, Entertainment & Home Services at HSN. He says the products are being judged on what they do and what problem they solve, but also on the presenters themselves. Contestants first submitted their ideas online, then finalists were chosen to fly into St. Petersburg, Florida to pitch in front of judges. This panel includes Rachel Rothman, Chief Technologist for the Good Housekeeping Institute and Director of the Institute’s Engineering Department; Jane Francisco, EIC of Good Housekeeping; Birnur Aral, Director of Beauty & Health Sciences; Matt Demers, VP, Quality Assurance, HSN; Chris Gassett, Assistant General Counsel, HSN; Heather Holdsworth, VP, Merchandise Planning; Adam Marland, Senior Buyer, Culinary; Neal Martinelli, VP of Merchandising, Electronics; and Dara Trujillo, VP, Merchandising, HSN. Judging will take place over three days, with 10 finalists selected in September to be featured in the December issue of Good Housekeeping, out on newsstands November 15. Then the public will be able to vote for their own favorite, which will be taken into consideration when HSN and Good Housekeeping select the final winner. Though many of the products are for household use or a culinary treat, there’s also a chance that a new tech product could earn the top spot. Unlike products on sites like Kickstarter, these tech products are ready for primetime – they already have an approved prototype and manufacturing partners in place, ahead of competing, HSN says. However, due to inclement weather, not all of the companies were able to travel to present today. That means they won’t be able to be reviewed by the Good Housekeeping team, nor win the overall contest. But HSN says they’ll still be considered as part of its broader “American Dreams” initiative. That means HSN’s buyers may decide to move forward with the products, which would allow them to go on air to launch on HSN and HSN.com. The tech product finalists are listed below. (Those below with the asterisk are able to compete for the final prize.) can turn any flat surface into a big screen. The projector includes a smart computer inside its attractive casing. But what makes it interesting is that it can be integrated with your decor, as you’re able to screw it into any light socket. You can also use its power cable to place it on a flat surface instead. Plus, thanks to its mobile app for iOS or Android, you can stream content from sites like Netflix or YouTube, or you can stream from your device using AirPlay or Miracast. includes built-Wi-Fi and a webcam, and allows pet owners to control the pet’s diet, medicine, and treat schedule from any device. The product, which has been in development for several years, includes six cup-sized feeding trays, and lets owners record their voice to talk to their pets. This is a toy aimed at kids…or college students and other adults who still play Frisbee. However, unlike other LED products, this one doesn’t require batteries to light up, because it uses Glowsticks instead. It’s also waterproof. You can mix and match the sticks, as well, for a more colorful experience. “It’s like a light show overhead,” says creator Angel Trichak, previously a surgical nurse. The $17.99 package comes with 16 glowsticks, which last 6 to 8 hours and are inserted into the top of the disc. You can buy extra sticks in packs, when those run out. The product, launched a year ago, is sold now in select sporting good stores, toy stores, museums, campgrounds, and elsewhere. Maybe not as sexy, but ask anyone with kids if dealing with lice was easy, and they’d start crying. aims to solve that problem by offering a chemical and allergen-free way to remove lice. The product, from ToLife Technologies uses a combination of a combing and vacuuming function to remove both lice and eggs. This lets you receive digital TV signals over-the-air through an antenna. The system is designed for both indoor and outdoor use, and is weather resistant. It supports HDTV, 1080P TV, and 4K Ultra HD, and features a compact design. The is designed to offer a source of backup power – perfect for use during storms when the electricity goes out, camping trips, and more. The product offers 110v and USB power outlets for charging phones, tablets, game consoles, printers, and even appliances. The device produces power via a special dry-powder fuel, supplied in cartridges. Users have to add water, which combines with the fuel to produce electricity. (Note that we have not been able to test this or any of the devices today.) Explains creator Mark Collins, an industrial chemist by trade, “other generators on the market are big, noisy and smelly…and most importantly, you can’t use them indoors…our energypod is completely emissions-free.” The pods are not yet available for sale, but full production is expected for October. Retail pricing is expected to be around $899. Cartridges, which last for a few hours, and come in a 3-pack, are $20. This smart hi-fi has an Android-based platform and embedded 5″ touch screen which you can use to navigate through applications, content and settings. You can also download apps directly from the Play Store, as well as connect to your big screen TV via HDMI. We’re not sure how this one slipped into the contest’s “tech” category, but the idea here is which include things like sidewalk chalk, craft projects, markers, and temporary tattoos. Creator (and mom) Nicole Jakob explains that kits are designed to teach kids altruism. Each kit contains a mask, because it’s about doing good deeds anonymously. For example, kids can decorate postcards to leave for people, or make tissue paper flowers to hang on fences that say “I made this for you…” “It’s a mix between random acts of kindness and street art,” says Jakob. Meanwhile the “tattoo” kit is meant to be the modern-day version of the lemonade stand, but where proceeds are donated to charity. The kits retail between $19.99 and $24.99.
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Frederic Lardinois
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You too can bid on Steve Jobs’ turtleneck and other random junk!
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Lucas Matney
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If you’re a founder who’s feeling hot after getting some new seed funding and want to treat yourself, may I recommend purchasing the entire wardrobe of Silicon Valley’s greatest Versace menswear aficionado and wearing it as you berate employees in your office? Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, famously posited that good artists copy and great artists steal, so why not apply this to your founder fashion sense? The estate of Jane Fonda seems to creepily own loads of Jobs’ personal effects, including , , , and the crown jewel: one hella fly that Jobs wore (starting bid: $500). The most expensive of Jobs’ clothing is the he was wearing in the photo below, where he’s flipping off an IBM sign (starting bid: $4,000). All in all there are 32 items up for bid. , an entity that prides itself on being “the auction house to the stars,” is handling the auction, which also includes such national treasures as a lock of Marilyn Monroe’s hair (starting bid: $5,000) and Keanu Reeves’ signed Wayne Gretzky hockey jersey (starting bid: $1,000). I’m partial to Jobs’ purple Apple duffel bag, but I don’t think I’ll have enough cash to grab it if I carry out a bidding war on his . Oh well.
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Glint raises $27 million to stop solid employees from bailing
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Lora Kolodny
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Redwood City-based has raised $27 million in a Series C round of venture funding for software that helps companies figure out how their teams are experiencing problems, or why and when solid employees may leave, undesirably. Glint replaces the traditional 360-review tools used by corporate HR teams and executives with short, anonymous surveys sent out once in a while to specific groups or company-wide to gather feedback. Then, Glint’s software-as-a-service uses machine learning, natural language processing and predictive analytics to identify key areas for improvement. Understanding what employees want more or less of, and how employees are feeling about management, perks or benefits, their industry and more helps businesses avoid internal problems and attrition. and co-led the round joined by returning investors , and , and bringing Glint’s total equity funding raised to $50 million. Glint CEO and co-founder Jim Barnett explained that Glint protects confidentiality, in part, by only allowing employers to slice and dice data down to a group of 5 or more people, and only giving certain people permission to read employees’ comments. “Only the right people see the right survey data, and employees can choose to fill those out or not. We do get get average response rates of 85% though,” he said. Companies can customize surveys to be longer or shorter, more or less frequently issued. Clients of Glint include Verizon-owned AOL (the parent company of TechCrunch), E-bay, Cognizant and Sky Broadcasting, among others. Medium to large enterprises are drawn to Glint’s software and analytics platform, the CEO said, because it helps them avoid attrition and performance issues, and allows them to take all employees’ comments into consideration efficiently, unlike a traditional process that involved manual reviews and reading of suggestions or complaints. The platform supports companies in 30 different languages, so far. Glint also helps companies understand how employees’ satisfaction with their work and their employers may be effecting their business. For example, a health care company may find that patient outcomes are highly correlated with happy employees, or employees who feel happy with the flexibility of their schedules, he said. Bessemer Ventures’ said she believes Glint has the potential to get to an initial public offering, eventually. But the HR-tech market is one of many mergers and acquisitions, historically. She believes that Glint’s technology is tapping into major trends reshaping the workplace, namely that millennial workers want to be heard, and that employers have woken up to the fact that losing good employees is very costly. Shen said, “For every employee you lose, you spend a lot of money on recruiting, hiring and onboarding . It just feels better and costs you less to figure out what employees really want, then bring it to them, versus losing a good employee.” Glint intends to use its funding for hiring, product development and to move into new market segments, after early customer traction in Silicon Valley and with tech companies.
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Salesforce shares face plant despite beating analyst expectations
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Matthew Lynley
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Salesforce earnings came out today! They’re not great, either, and it looks like a weak outlook for the company’s third quarter is doing some damage to its shares, which were down as much as 8 percent. For a company that literally defined the phrase “software as a service” — basically, running your business online — and one that’s had a decent year (shares are about flat), today’s numbers apparently don’t look very good for Wall Street. Salesforce has been aggressively spending on acquisitions, buying and earlier this year. Whether this will keep shareholders happy is predicated on that strategy being a healthy one to add to Salesforce’s growth, and while these acquisitions only recently happened, it looks like Wall Street may be having some doubts about Salesforce’s future. Here’s the quick scorecard: That share drop might not seem like a large number, but for a company worth tens of billions of dollars, a 5 percent slide can easily mean erasing more than $2 billion in value from the company. If it’s going to continue making aggressive acquisitions, it has to keep that share price healthy in order to make the pitch that the companies are getting their money’s worth when they make their sales. For any company that’s recently been bought by Salesforce — and there have been a lot — with shares as part of the deal, employees are watching their value drop in real time. It looks like that last part about missing slightly on guidance was not a happy data point with investors. This is still the first time the company has brought in $2 billion in revenue in a single quarter, but it’s not enough to keep its run going after aggressively spending on new businesses and talent. Shares of Salesforce are up more than 30 percent in the past two years, but for 2017 they’ve been mostly flat. And, there’s also this: SALESFORCE FY2Q BILLINGS GROWTH 13.5% Y/Y, EST. 18% — zerohedge (@zerohedge) With Salesforce under attack from literally all sides, it’s had to get creative — and that means pulling out the checkbook. Ultimately beaten by Microsoft with a $26.2 billion price tag, Salesforce made aggressive bids for LinkedIn, which would give itself probably one of the largest customer acquisition channels on the planet. It also shelled out $750 million for Quip, an online collaboration tool, that increasingly brings it into competition with online collaboration tools companies. (Oh, hey: Box also reported earnings today, and they’re not great!). Salesforce’s core business is increasingly finding itself in competition with other companies that are choosing to specialize in one area of its core business (like Zendesk in its customer service tools), where those companies try to aggressively outperform Salesforce’s all-in-one tools. So it has to invent new ways to continue driving its revenue growth in order to keep investors happy, and that means inventing new businesses or — in the past year in Salesforce’s case — spending billions of dollars on potential new businesses. The share price is continuing to fall, now down more than 8 percent in extended trading. [graphiq id=”g0Y1f188mXz” title=”Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) Stock Price – 1 Year” width=”600″ height=”463″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/g0Y1f188mXz” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/9286813/SalesforceCom-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) Stock Price – 1 Year | FindTheCompany” ]
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Box beats earnings expectations
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Katie Roof
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Box is seeing a “dramatic improvement in efficiency,” co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie told TechCrunch, pointing to lower sales and marketing costs relative to new customer acquisition. Investors had been skeptical that Box was spending too much in this category, but the company has been steadily improving this ratio. “ The company made an acquisition, buying the small team at , in an effort to improve their analytics. When asked if the company would make more acquisitions, Levie said he “would totally bet on it” and pointed to security and workflow collaboration. Box also raised its full-year guidance, expecting revenue to be between $394 million and $396 million. Their adjusted earnings per share is forecast to be at a loss, ranging between 67 cents and 69 cents. The company announced over 4,000 new paying customers, including Uber and Pfizer, saying it grew its total customer base to 66,000 businesses. Some of the company’s more recent initiatives include Box Shuttle, which is about migrating existing files into the cloud. They also touted their for enterprise apps. But it is a competitive landscape for cloud storage, with Dropbox, Egnyte and others competing to store documents online. Box has tried to carve out an edge in the enterprise space, securing many Fortune 500 companies as clients. The company has a market cap of about $1.75 billion.
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Lenovo’s got a snazzy new lightweight convertible laptop
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Brian Heater
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The poor Yoga 910 never really had a chance. Moments after Lenovo announced the laptop, the spotlight was completely absorbed by the strange new Yoga Book. It’s a shame really, because this is a pretty nice piece of hardware — one that surely would have been the talk of the company’s event, had it not gone and showed the aforementioned device and a Hasselblad add-on for the Moto Z. The Yoga 910 is an update to last year’s stellar 900, featuring the company’s signature hinge design that has also made its way onto the Yoga Book, letting the device contort into a laptop, stand or tablet. The new model also shaves some precious fractions of an inch off its predecessor, down to 0.56. And while the notebook is a touch heavier than the 910 at 3.04 pounds (versus 2.85), that seems like a small price to pay for upscaling the screen from 13.3 to 13.9 inches (along with some extremely skinny bezel action). Users looking to upgrade can also opt for a 4K version, which comes in at an impressive 3,840-by-2,160. Inside the thing is a seventh-gen Intel Kaby Lake processor, which is plenty zippy and should add some battery life to the laptop, thanks to increased power efficiency. The 910 has a premium look and feel as well — even if the aluminum version I looked at did have a certainly MacBooky vibe. If you’re so inclined, you can just go straight matte black if you want to stay true to your Lenovo roots. It starts at $1,299.
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Detroit’s music chops and auto shops could drive connected-car entertainment
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Scott "DJ Skee" Keeney
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On a recent episode of a podcast called “The Watch,” one of the hosts made a joke about “grabbing the aux cord” in a friend’s car to play new music. In an age when self-driving cars could be whizzing us around cities in the next decade, it’s strange to think that we haven’t yet come up with a great solution for a much simpler problem — how to make listening to digital music in the car a more seamless experience. Despite all the amazing streaming music, online radio and podcasting services launched over the years, using them in the car remains a largely clunky experience. Most still require either a Bluetooth or corded connection, and, of those, many require using the phone to interact with the service rather than the in-car dashboard. It’s not that far removed from the days of using a cassette adapter to get a Discman to play through the car speakers. The question is, who will solve this problem… Silicon Valley or Detroit? Both have a vested interest in making it easier to stream your favorite music app in the car. After all, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau, more than takes place in the car. And while traditional radio remains the go-to format for music in the car, its share is shrinking. , the time spent listening to radio fell 35 percent, to less than 14 hours per week, between 2007 to 2015. Meanwhile, according to the , 57 percent of Americans now use online radio monthly. The issue is control. With traditional terrestrial radio (or physical tapes/CDs), auto manufacturers controlled the interface and radio stations simply provided the programming. But digital music services place just as much emphasis on the user experience as they do the programming. The resulting struggle only adds to the already glacial pace of in-car audio progress. To be sure, there are plenty of technical reasons for slow progress. One is that cars take a long time to design and manufacture. That 2017 model you’ve been eyeing has been in development since 2010, before Spotify even existed in the U.S. In the last seven years, countless music platforms have come and gone, making it difficult for carmakers to cut deals with them and expect any type of longevity. While podcasts existed in 2010, they weren’t the global juggernaut they are now — and who knows if the format will hold up? Carmakers have to be great at predicting tech trends many years down the road — that’s something even VCs can’t do all that well. Connectivity is also a major challenge, and something carmakers don’t have much control over. Anyone who has tried to listen to satellite radio on a long drive has probably encountered a handful of dead spots — not a great listener experience. Because relatively few cars have Wi-Fi, building a dashboard that allows users to sample any online radio station or stream music or podcasts is quite difficult; the network simply isn’t there to support it. Both auto manufacturers and tech companies are attacking these pain points more rapidly of late. General Motors, for instance, says it had more than a million on the road last year, with more on the way. Ford says it plans to add the same to its SYNC in-car entertainment platform. But with more than 300 million cars on the road, we’re just barely getting started. Google, meanwhile, unveiled the Android Auto system in 2014 to ease the integration between Android phones and supporting in-car dashboards. Apple made a similar move last year with Apple CarPlay. But beyond that, streaming services and apps need to start designing products with an eye toward the in-car user. While a home screen with a million options might work on a laptop or a phone, it’s terrible for a driver who wants to make a split-second decision about which station or playlist they want to pick next (let alone the legal and safety regulations in-vehicle apps must go through from government safety boards). Simply releasing an API and asking the automotive world to “have at it” is not enough. Services need to work on in-car UI improvements themselves, not just focus on the phone. They also need to invest in curating content designed for drivers, making it easy for them to find and enjoy. There has been talk that at some point in the next few years, all the apps we use in the car will communicate with each other and simply pick music based on routes, weather and moods. But until then, a great playlist or show about hitting the road should suffice. Again, the issue is control. Detroit remains saddled with an image of crumbling buildings and poisoned water, but after a recent visit I have first-hand knowledge of the innovation taking place there to turn things around. Smart, savvy businesspeople like Dan Gilbert are investing heavily in the area. People have the wrong notion of the city, which is rebounding with a host of new tech startups and University of Michigan talent. If automakers get the connected car right, it could be a huge boon for Detroit. The city has always been a great music town, being the birthplace of Motown, Techno and more. It could very easily become a music tech hub, as well, as the rise of the connected car draws both companies and jobs to town to work with local carmakers.
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Dropbox employee’s password reuse led to theft of 60M+ user credentials
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Kate Conger
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Dropbox disclosed earlier this week that a large chunk of its users’ credentials obtained in 2012 was floating around on the dark web. But that number may have been much higher than we originally thought. Credentials for , as first reported by Motherboard and confirmed by TechCrunch sources. The revelation of a password breach at Dropbox is an evolution of the company’s stance on the 2012 incident — the company initially said that user emails were the only data stolen. Here’s the : A stolen password was also used to access an employee Dropbox account containing a project document with user email addresses. We believe this improper access is what led to the spam. We’re sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn’t happen again. Dropbox disclosed in 2012 that an employee’s password was acquired and used to access a document with , but did not disclose that passwords were also acquired in the theft. Because Dropbox stores its user passwords hashed and salted, that’s technically accurate — it seems that hackers were only able to obtain hashed files of Dropbox user passwords and were unable to crack them. But it does appear that more information was taken from Dropbox than was previously let on, and it’s strange that it’s taken this long for the breach to surface. According to a Dropbox source, in addition to the user emails initially disclosed in 2012, a batch of hashed passwords associated with those emails was also taken. At the time of the breach, Dropbox was moving away from using the hashing function SHA-1, a standard algorithm at the time, and replacing it with the more robust standard called bcrypt. Some of the stolen passwords were hashed with SHA-1, while 32 million were hashed with bcrypt, Motherboard reports. The passwords were also secured with a salt, a random data string added to strengthen the hash. Even though these passwords have now been dumped online, it does not appear that the hash protections have been cracked. , Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said the service had drawn around 100 million users, double from the same a year prior. The company most-recently said it , though it won’t say exactly how many of those are monthly active users. If Dropbox had roughly 100 million users at the same time the hack occurred, this breach represented a staggering three-fifths of the company’s user base. Hackers who used an employee’s password, re-used from the LinkedIn breach, to access Dropbox’s corporate network and steal the user credentials, sources said. So the fault doesn’t 100% rest on Dropbox, though it’s still a breakdown of security standards within the company and emphasizes the perils of password re-use that can extend into a corporate environment. Dropbox has taken steps to ensure that its employees don’t reuse passwords on their corporate accounts, Patrick Heim, head of trust and security for Dropbox, told TechCrunch. The company has licensed the password management service 1Password for all employees, in an effort to encourage the use of unique and strong passwords. Dropbox also requires two-factor authentication for all internal systems, Heim said. Given that Dropbox has continued to grow and there have been no colossal security snafus (that we know about) the company appears to have gotten by largely unscathed. And again, this happened in 2012, when Dropbox was still a young company (worth $4 billion, compared to its $10 billion valuation now). Hiccups like this occur, though for Dropbox to be so light on the details can be frustrating given the necessity of transparency during security breaches. PSA: please enable two-factor authentication :(
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Apple adds a 2TB iCloud storage option for $19.99 per month
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Fitz Tepper
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iCloud users can now access up to 2TB of storage, as Apple just added a new tier that provides 2TB for $19.99 per month. As a refresher, iCloud storage can be used by Mac and iOS users to store and sync photos and videos, documents, device backups, music, emails and more between their devices. Apple also offers a Dropbox-like service called iCloud Drive which uses also iCloud storage, and lets you sync any document between your iOS device, Mac, or PC. Since Apple is getting ready to release macOS Sierra with built-in Drive support, they probably added this new 2TB option assuming that bringing iCloud Drive to the desktop will result in some users wanting to sync more than 1TB of data. Plus, this increased storage option may also lend credibility to the rumor that Apple may soon release a new iPhone with 256GB of storage. Before this increase to 2TB, backing up a iPhone with 256GB of storage to iCloud could have potentially forced a user to bump up against his 1TB storage limit. This 2TB option joins iCloud’s existing 5GB free tier, 50GB tier at $0.99 per month, 200GB tier at $2.99 per month, and 1TB tier at $9.99 per month. In terms of price, Apple’s offering is pretty on par with competing services. 1TB for $9.99 per month (but then nothing until 10TB for $99.99 per month) while 1TB for $6.99 per month as part of an office 365 subscription. Dropbox also offers 1TB for $9.99 per month. Since pricing is essentially identical across platforms, the decision really comes down to convenience for users and what platform will most easily work between all of their devices. With these increased storage options and the upcoming integration of iCloud Drive into macOS, Apple may have finally build an iCloud-based storage option that is good enough for iOS and mac users to ditch their Dropbox or Google Drive subscriptions and commit to iCloud.
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Bang & Olufsen’s pricey new wireless speakers look like martini shakers
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Brian Heater
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If nothing else, Bang & Olufsen knows how to make an impression. The Danish audio company announced a pair of new wireless speakers — or rather, one speaker in two different sizes — with conical aluminium designs that, if nothing else, certainly stand out. The BeoSound 1 and 2 (names, interestingly enough, already used for a pair of shiny multi-room speakers about 10 or so years back) offer up a slew of wireless connectivity options, including Google Cast, AirPlay, DNLA and, naturally, Bluetooth, pumping out 360-degree sound in the process. The tops of the speakers are open for acoustic reasons, according to the company, and the metal shell doesn’t come in direct contact with the ground, so the bass gets a chance to escape from the bottom. There are also, interestingly, proximity sensors built in, popping up controls when a user is nearby. As far as differences between the two systems, the 2 is the larger of the speakers and needs to be hardwired to operate. The 1 and 2 feature Spotify and Deezer access without need for a mobile device, as well as TuneIn radio integration. The BeoSound 1 is available now, with the 2 arriving at the end of next month. And they’ll cost you, naturally, a jaw-dropping $1,495 and $1,895. That’s a lot of martinis.
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Happy birthday Iris Apfel, and thanks for making our messages mod
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Lora Kolodny
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Nonagenarian cover girl, designer and fashion icon turned 95 yesterday, and spent part of her birthday sharing with TechCrunch her thoughts about creativity and technology. If you you’re not familiar with Apfel, you probably are. Her influence in textiles, interior design and fashion is longstanding. As wrote of her: “Her originality is typically revealed in her mixing of high and low fashions – Dior haute couture with flea market finds, 19th-century ecclesiastical vestments with Dolce & Gabbana lizard trousers. With remarkable panache and discernment, she combines colors, textures, and patterns without regard to period, provenance, and, ultimately, aesthetic conventions.” Apfel is also an entrepreneurial success story. Along with her husband, Carl Apfel, who died in 2015, she co-founded a luxury textiles manufacturing business called now owned by Stark. Recently, Apfel partnered with , and along with the clothing, created a digitally forward-thinking accessory, Iris Meets I.N.C. emojis and stickers. The emojis are available for free download on iOS and Android. The “Iris Meets I.N.C.” collection includes 40 pieces, mostly staples like shift dresses and a-line skirts, along with patterned, black and white bangles in various sizes, bringing a couture and costume jewelry flair to a wardrobe that’s wearable daily. And the emojis and stickers go right along with that look. They are mostly illustrations marked by few bold colors, depicting Apfel herself in her over-sized, round eyeglasses, or the clothing and accessories she’s designed and included in her work. Apfel admitted, in a video produced by Macy’s, “I’m a little old for emojis and I didn’t know what they were. But everybody seems to like them, so I want everybody to have a good time.” In a separate TechCrunch interview, she said that new technology hasn’t impacted her design work much over the years, or allowed her to be more creative — not when the internet or 3D printing came along, not when emojis or Instagram did, either. “No. Big no,” she said to that question. The only technology she’s longing for today isn’t some new wearable or design app. “[I want] something to stop young people from pressing so many buttons. Why are people so lazy? Someday, there’s going to be technology invented to do everything for you. You won’t even need to think anymore,” Apfel said. She did really like her old mobile phone. Smartphones? Not as much. “I used to have a nice little clam shell phone, and it fell in a bucket of water, so people rushed out and got me this iPhone, which has so many things that I don’t need. It’s too smart for me. It does everything but dance.” Happy belated birthday, Ms. Apfel. We will take your comments to heart, and try to ignore our phones today in favor of offline interactions. Although, admittedly that’s harder to do now that your emojis and stickers are in hand. By the way, we’re not the only ones enjoying the Apfel emojis and stickers — Macy’s reports that the emoji keyboard has been downloaded 20,500 times and counting since it debuted early this month.
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Cozy raises $8.5M Series B to simplify life for property managers and renters
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John Mannes
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, a platform to streamline interactions between property managers and renters, closed an $8.5 million Series B today led by , with participation from , and all other investors that participated in the company’s Despite the fact that , the way in which we lease them is anything but smart. Many property managers still use their personal emails to communicate with tenants, listings are spread across dozens of sites and nearly every interaction between renters and property managers occurs on a different platform — or worse, no platform at all. Cozy simplifies the rental management process for landlords and takes the pain out of apartment hunting and landlord interaction for renters. The service powers recurring monthly payments and a suite of diligence tools. “We see people get Cozy set up and running, and we may not see them sign in for a year,” said Gino Zahnd, CEO and co-founder of Cozy. That kind of user metric would be scary for most any other startup, but for Cozy, it’s a sign its service is fixing the problem it set out to solve. Zahnd explains that property management software can be divided into two key target markets. While a quarter of property managers service large portfolios of properties, 75 percent of managers oversee fewer than 20 units. Zahnd launched Cozy to service the second group. Without a marketing budget, Cozy was able to get 75,000 landlords to sign up 100,000 properties on the platform. Instead of buying ads, Cozy bought another startup, Landlordology. The service is essentially Khan Academy for wannabe property managers. The move made a lot of sense early in the growth of Cozy because landlords were driving user growth . A renter couldn’t use Cozy unless their landlord was using Cozy. The service remains free, but new plans to monetize specific services has altered the original customer acquisition strategy. Cozy is now processing more than $500 million per year in rental payments as one of four revenue streams. The company also and background checks in addition to a new express payoffs service for landlords. For $2.99 per unit per month, landlords can get automated clearinghouse payments processed in two days instead of five. Landlords also can easily export transactional data directly to QuickBooks or Excel. All of this amounts to additional features that the company can use to target both renters and landlords. In addition to the above strategies, today’s investment from American Family Ventures, the strategic venture arm of American Family Insurance, is a strong signal that the company will roll out future services to serve the insurance needs of renters and property managers. With the addition of insurance to an already formidable collection of data, Cozy could power new features that could eventually match renters directly with properties. Zahnd agreed that the data being accumulated on the platform will ultimately allow for the creation of new services for both renters and landlords, but noted that the immediate road map doesn’t involve data just yet.
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Pusher pulls in $2.5M to push live web and app content everywhere
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Haje Jan Kamps
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London-based , the company powering The NY Times’ live election results and DraftKing’s fantasy scoring results, just raised $2.5 million to up its stakes further. The money came from , which focuses on debt financing aimed at the Software as a Service (SaaS) space. The company has seen strong organic growth so far, with more than 100,000 developers using Pusher to deliver content to their customers. It built a profitable business after raising . The company claims it is profitable, and has earmarked the funding for product development and marketing. “We reached product-market fit organically,” says Jordan Quigley-Jones, Pusher’s product manager. “Last year we began building our enterprise salesforce and we have seen rapid expansion of our commercial growth, so we will invest further in building a sales and marketing team to execute on this growth.” The company’s product is focused on making the web more real-time. Pusher offers some suggestions for when this might be useful: cars moving around on a map, scores updating on a web page or notification messages getting pushed to the users. “Any feature within an app or a website that should just update in real time without needing to be refreshed could be built with Pusher,” the company says. “NY Times uses Pusher to power live election results — their servers push the results to all of their connected client devices in real time as they become available,” says Quigley-Jones. By pushing instead of polling for results, the servers have to do less heavy lifting. “It reduces their server request overhead while decreasing the time it takes for each device to be synced to the current results.”
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California regulators warm up to the idea of driverless cars sans steering wheel
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Lora Kolodny
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Proposed rules that would allow for testing of truly driverless cars on roads in California are gaining steam in the state’s legislature. Specifically, in California was revised on Monday to soon allow: “the testing of autonomous vehicles that do not have a driver seated in the driver’s seat and are not equipped with a steering wheel, a brake pedal, or an accelerator.” Such pilot tests would be allowable only if other conditions were met. For example, self-driving vehicles couldn’t go faster than 35 miles per hour in pilot tests. And they would have to be operated within approved areas, i.e. “a privately owned business park designated by the authority, inclusive of public roads [there].” Silicon Valley tech companies, including Tesla, Apple and Google, but also lidar makers Quanergy and Velodyne, are vying to become the next generation’s automotive leaders. And even gigantic automakers like Ford have set up innovation hubs in California. A move by the state to make it easier for them to test what they’re building locally, and use their self-driving vehicles on local roads, could keep business around long term, rather than sending large employers, their R&D teams or manufacturing business overseas and to other states with a more favorable regulatory environment. Other regions that have enacted laws governing the use or testing of self-driving vehicles on their roads include Nevada, Florida, Michigan, Hawaii, Washington, Washington, D.C. and Tennessee.
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VR on the battlefield, to the couch and back again — sort of
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Yuval Boger
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Fifteen years ago, a team of scientists working at Johns Hopkins University was asked to do what seemed like the impossible: Design a headset that would create an image so immersive and realistic that it would allow anyone to experience what it feels like to be in a car — before that car actually exists. One of the most popular sedans in the U.S. was born this way. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that the . With video games, VR found a home in the world’s living room. Gamers were able to experience imaginary worlds, all from the comfort of their couches. There’s no sign of this slowing down: that shipments of VR headsets will grow at 99 percent annually between 2015 and 2020. Indeed, VR is finding widespread adoption in design, education and new forms of entertainment almost every day. You’ve probably been hearing about it online, in the news and on social media. But before VR hit the mainstream, it was first and foremost an incredibly important for our armed forces — and still is today. After decades of perfecting VR in military applications, we are finally making this concept of “inhabiting” a computer-generated environment work for home users. And, ironically, VR is going back out to the battlefield — but instead of training fighters, it’s being used to save the world from zombies. For years, high-end VR technology has helped soldiers. If it was too dangerous or too expensive, you trained in VR. You could of buildings before setting foot into a dangerous situation. You could train to operate machinery and weapons, acclimate to new social situations and . Your team could train in battlefield simulations to help reduce casualties. Many of the immersive features that make VR so compelling today were honed in these early days in military applications. Georgia-based has been training first responders, law enforcement and military personnel for many years. A wide-area, high-end tracking system determines the position of multiple trainees and their weapons in a large space. Motion Reality then uses this information to provide a training experience in hostile situations. The technology used by Motion Reality and others for military training has been critical to bringing VR to public spaces. While the popularity of VR has skyrocketed over the past year, it’s still inaccessible to many. Some don’t want to spend the money to buy high-end gaming PCs. Others don’t have the space in their homes to experience VR beyond a seated encounter. By bringing VR out of the home, the industry has infinite possibilities and new momentum. For the first time, VR is hitting our public theme parks, arcades and movie theaters. An estimated in theme parks across North America, Europe and Asia. And companies like and are debuting arcade-like that mix real life and VR. For decades, the industry has been building up the necessary knowledge and tools to take VR to the mainstream. The key ingredients that make VR so compelling are the same regardless if you are saving the world in an arcade or preparing for a real-life battlefield. Even more importantly, the technological requirements of public venues are almost identical to those used in military training. They require sophisticated multi-player tracking, easy cleaning between users, untethered experience functions and more. , an emerging VR company out of Australia, uses wireless weapons and VR headsets powered by powerful backpack computers to allow for untethered walking in a simulated VR theme park. This has been deployed in the SEGA Joypolis park in Tokyo. These systems track the movements of visitors in the game space and allow them to interact with their environment. With the addition of powerful fans and directional audio, users receive a full sensory experience while completing missions. Sound similar? VR will continue to advance in all application areas: gaming, enterprise, military and public entertainment — but the full, simulated sensory experience that was born out of military VR is what is truly going to take VR out of the living room and into our lives. From sci-fi concept to a true part of our reality, the VR market has undergone an incredible transformation. It might be hard to imagine being able to step into a completely virtual, foreign world during your next visit to Disney World or at your daughter’s next birthday party — but it’s coming sooner than you think. Some, including myself, would argue that it is already here.
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A few dozen Nest Labs employees just headed to Google; here’s why
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Connie Loizos
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, the maker of smart thermostats and smoke detectors, is parting ways with a few dozen employees who work on its Internet of Things platform. According to a report that we’ve independently confirmed, those employees are joining Google per a restructuring. Both companies are subsidiaries of parent company Alphabet. The move would seem to make sense. Like Nest, Google has delved into the business of the connected home, including with its OnHub wireless router and Google Home, a portable speaker that’s powered by voice assistance technology and will take at Amazon’s popular Echo product once it ships later this year. Nest’s thermometers and cameras promise to communicate with Google Home. Nest employs roughly 1,000 people, including in engineering, product marketing and product management. Though its platform team was responsible for building out Nest’s APIs (so Nest products can communicate with other devices), as well as Nest’s (which allows Nest devices to communicate with each other), Nest will continue to build and develop software around its app, site and other services. The decision to separate Nest’s platform team from the rest of the company comes almost exactly a year after Google created Alphabet in an attempt to make better sense of its core advertising business and the company’s other interests. These include life sciences (Alphabet’s standalone businesses include Verily and Calico), its broadband service (Google Fiber), its startup investments (GV) and its self-driving car business (Google X). Alphabet has gained more insight into these separate entities, though the transition has appeared rocky at times. GV has of late. Verily’s CEO has come under fire for being . Google Fiber has reportedly been ordered to to 500 people, owing to soaring costs. And Google X is said to be struggling to get . Nest itself underwent a major change in June, announcing that its and CEO, Tony Fadell, would be leaving the company. Fadell was subsequently replaced by Marwan Faraz, who has a background in the cable and communications industry. Faraz continues to lead Nest. Meanwhile, Google’s newly expanded platform team is being led by Hiroshi Lockheimer, who joined Google a decade ago and holds the title of SVP of Android, Chrome OS & Play.
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Donald Trump finally fundraises in Silicon Valley
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Kate Conger
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had a slow fundraising start in Silicon Valley. In the June lead-up to the final state primaries, Trump had raised very few dollars in the region that’s typically lucrative for political contenders. A of Federal Election Commission data found that Trump had only raised a paltry $30,556 from donors in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and even Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in tech, has . But the tide is turning for Trump as the general election draws near. Last night, private equity CEO Saul Fox of Fox, Paine & Co. hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his home in Woodside, a wealthy neighborhood near the headquarters of Google, Facebook and other major companies. It’s not quite a sign that Trump has finally cracked the seal on Silicon Valley — private equity investors aren’t as involved in the tech scene as their venture capital counterparts — but the is Trump’s first successful fundraising effort in the Bay Area. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in May, but cancelled the event after facing backlash. (Krzanich is known for his efforts to diversify the tech workforce, a position widely perceived to be at odds with Trump’s stance on immigration.) Fox, a frequent donor to conservative candidates and causes, began donating to Trump’s campaign recently when it became apparent that Trump would become the Republican Party’s nominee. During the primary season, Fox backed Trump opponents Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. He also made donations to , the Creative Commons founder and internet pioneer who ran a short-lived presidential campaign last fall. But on June 7, the day of the California presidential primary, Fox’s loyalties appear to have shifted: He gave $25,000 to the Trump campaign and an additional $19,600 to the Republican National Committee, according to FEC data. RNC spokesperson Lindsey Walters confirmed that last night’s Fox fundraiser would benefit Trump’s campaign and the RNC in a statement to , which first reported on the fundraiser. Although Fox is an active donor, he seems to have drifted away from investing over the last decade. His company, Fox Paine & Co., raised its last fund in 2001 and its portfolio lists primarily exits, not new investments. TechCrunch contacted Fox for comment on the fundraiser and will update if he responds. Trump’s fundraiser follows several weeks of fundraising in the area by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has had more success pulling donations from Silicon Valley. Clinton’s most recent trip to California may have earned her campaign as much as $18 million, according to Politico.
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Velocity raises $22.5M Series B to build ‘Uber for Experiences’
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Haje Jan Kamps
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Digital hospitality platform announced this week that, following its $16 million Series A last year, the company raised $22.5 million led by . The company creates curated dining experiences for time-poor diners looking to expand their horizons. The money will be invested in expansion to 29 cities over the next three years, with a heavy focus on the U.S. “So many of the great problems have been solved,” pontificates Zia Yusuf, Velocity’s co-founder and CEO, but he points out that our generation is poverty-stricken for time. Fixing that problem in style is his company’s mission. “We want to help getting the most out of your city and your free time. Velocity takes care of the full experience, from booking to payment.” In addition to DIG investments, the company was able to attract a star-studded roster of investors, including the founder of , , and , one of the largest concierge companies in the world. “This round of funding means we are now the best-funded startup in the premium dining space,” says Yusuf. Velocity has seen tremendous growth since its founding in 2014, with offices in London, New York, LA, Miami and San Francisco, and a world-wide staff of 59. The company’s growth plans will have it in 29 cities by 2020, mostly in the U.S. “The U.S. is the biggest hospitality market in the world,” Yusuf says, pointing out that for its challenges, it helps being powered by a homogeneous language and a single currency. “It’s a very difficult and unforgiving market to crack. Having said that, the reward for getting it right is exponentially more valuable than creating a brand in any other market.” The company’s business model is to charge the restaurants a per-head fee for delivering diners to the restaurants. In addition, Velocity takes care of the payment side of the dining experiences, with a small proportion of the money charged as its fees. “The biggest challenge for us right now is to continue to innovate, making sure to stay true to our brand as we grow,” Yusuf told me, explaining that the company operates in an interesting market, where a lot of its competitors are “features masquerading as businesses,” without sustainable growth plans. “We need to grow with unit economics that make sense, not at any possible cost,” says Yusuf. “We believe we are on a path to profitability with this fundraise.” The Velocity app is available on and .
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Google said to undercut Uber with expanded ride-share service in San Francisco
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Darrell Etherington
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Google is running its own ride-sharing service in San Francisco, . The move would put Google in direct, immediate competition with Uber, which helps explain even further the recent departure of . Google’s new offering piloted in May, according to the WSJ, and uses the Google-owned Waze app to connect commuters for shared carpooling. The plan is apparently to open up said program to all San Francisco residents starting this fall, with an eye toward expanding it further provided that works out. And unlike Uber, this is more of a matchmaking service, which brings together riders with drivers headed in the same direction. Fees are going to be low, too — the report says Google is intentionally keeping them low to keep this a peer-to-peer co-driving arrangement, rather than something that professional drivers will want to use in a dedicated capacity, like Uber and Lyft. Waze’s operational model to date has focused on connecting drivers via crowdsourced navigation information. Users report things like accidents, roadside obstacles, storms and traffic jams, and these are immediately available to other drivers. Shortly after Google acquired Waze in 2013, it started using its crowdsourced navigation data in the primary Google Maps app, as well. While the pilot originally , with a maximum of two rides a day, the new expansion will open up access to “anyone with the Waze app,” according to the WSJ, on both the rider and driver side of the equation. While the driver model employed by both Uber and Google is different, the ultimate aim of both might be the same: driverless taxis. Google is said to be considering including its driverless cars in a ride-sharing model, the WSJ notes, and recent business unit changes suggest it is . At one time, Google and Uber seemed to have a very close relationship, which included a sizeable investment from Google in the on-demand ride company, and an arrangement that brought Uber inside the official Google Maps app as an additional mode of transportation option. Lately, though, the relationship has changed. I’ve heard from a very reliable source that internally, Uber is getting increasingly serious about reducing its dependence on Google’s mapping products entirely, which is in line with what the . We reached out to Google for more information, but they did not immediately respond to our request.
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Startup accused of scamming employees scrubs its online presence
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Kate Conger
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A little-known startup is in meltdown mode after a former employee took to Medium to accuse the company of scamming her out of her wages and firing her in retaliation after she filed a wage claim to recoup the unpaid cash. The was widely shared online; in response, the company shuttered its website and threatened legal action against the writer, calling her “a disgruntled former employee.” Although the former employee, a digital marketer named Penny Kim, referred to the company as Startup X in her post, internet sleuths quickly discovered the company’s actual name: WrkRiot. Several other company advisors and employees have since come forward to share their own (largely negative) experiences with WrkRiot and its founder, Isaac Choi. Kim agreed to move from her home in Texas to California for a marketing job at WrkRiot, which would pay her “a $10,000 sign on bonus (relocation assistance), a $135,000 salary, equity, and a 3 month severance package if I were to leave for good reason and without cause,” Kim wrote. However, the money never came through. Choi constantly gave excuses for the late payroll, according to Kim, and at one point forged a wire transfer confirmation that he emailed to employees. Another employee told Kim that Choi’s money was tied up in an IRS claim. After months of late or missing payroll, Kim filed a wage claim and says she was fired in retaliation. The saga serves as a cautionary tale for startup employees: beware of founders who can’t back up their claims and ask to borrow money from their employees, Kim warned. But it’s also a warning signal for founders: Don’t mess with your employees’ money, or they’ll expose you on Medium. Medium has become a clearinghouse for tech employees to air their grievances and hold employers accountable. In February, a Yelp worker named Talia Jane wrote a accusing the company of underpaying its employees and setting them up for failure in the expensive Bay Area economy. The post stirred up controversy for Yelp (and dozens of Medium rebuttals and rebuttals-of-rebuttals). In Kim’s case, her post appears to have knocked WrkRiot completely offline — visitors to the WrkRiot website are currently greeted with a message that says the website is expired, and the company’s social media accounts have vanished. However, before making WrkRiot’s Facebook page private, the company posted a message denouncing Kim’s claims and threatening legal action. “WrkRiot is considering legal action against a disgruntled former employee who has launched a slanderous campaign against WrkRiot and some of its employees via social media,” the post said. “WrkRiot believes this former employee’s writings have led to dangerous situations for many of our employees through the leaking of personal information and through threats being made over social media from others who have taken the former employee’s misinformation as truth.” (There are not currently any lawsuits filed against Kim.) WrkRiot also claimed that Kim was fired “for cause” and that she wrote her blog post after being denied $50,000 in severance. Choi has not responded to a request for comment from TechCrunch. Kim declined to comment. An individual claiming to be the company’s CTO and using the Kim-assigned pseudonym “Charlie” backed up her account in a Hacker News comment. “The CEO stated he is putting in $2M to fund the startup in November. In December, with $400k or so in the company with the rest coming, we started to build. We grew steadily till about April with a prototype. At which point, the CEO kept mentioning money was coming with a few different reasons on why it did not arrive,” Charlie wrote. woweewoo, this just gets better and better. This from the CTO. — ⚡️ Owen (@ow) Daniel Tunkelang, a data scientist who advised WrkRiot and has also advised Pinterest and Etsy, denounced WrkRiot in a . “Effective immediately, I have terminated any association with the company, and I have asked them to remove me from their team page and anywhere else they may have referred to me,” Tunkelang wrote. “Nonetheless, I owe an apology to anyone who took the company more seriously because of my association with them. I should have gotten to know the company and its leadership better before associating myself with them and lending them my credibility. Lesson learned.”
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Facebook Offers gets revamped for mobile, now lets you track saved coupons in a dedicated section
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Sarah Perez
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Facebook’s goal of tracking ads all the way through to a customer’s purchase at point-of-sale is getting a big boost today with a makeover of the Facebook Offers program. Now designed to be more mobile-friendly, Facebook is allowing businesses to create two kinds of offers – those customers can redeem online and those they redeem in-store – while also making it easier for customers to pull up the coupon they need at the register. Facebook Offers as a way for Facebook advertisers to reach customers through campaigns designed to tap into the social network’s viral effect – that is, Offers could potentially be exposed to a broader audience than targeted, thanks to people sharing the deal with their friends. Now, Facebook says it’s making it easier for advertisers to reach customers on mobile. Offers can be designed to be used online or at point-of-sale, and they can be shared either via an Offers ad or via the business’s Facebook Page. The ads will appear in the News Feed on both mobile and the web, and can be customized as other creatives can be – such as by using carousel ads, for example. Meanwhile, businesses can use the Offer Page Composer to share an Offer on their Facebook Page. For Page visitors, there will also now be a new “Offers” tab available so you can browse through the business’s past offers in a single location. This will make it easier to find the current coupons and discounts, without having to scroll down the Page to see what you may have missed. Of course, tracking an Offer’s redemption online is easy, and the number of claims will be available to businesses in the ads reporting product, says Facebook. The larger challenge, historically, has been connecting a Facebook ad to a real-world purchase. In the past, Facebook has done this by to parse lists of consumers’ offline purchases. More recently, it announced , thanks to a feature that matches GPS, beacons, Wi-Fi, radio signals, and cell towers with a brick-and-mortar store’s coordinates. Today, Facebook is bringing a similar level of tracking in-house. From the new Offers bookmark, shoppers will be able to quickly pull up the discount and then show their phone at the register, where the business can scan the provided barcode or QR code. This definitively connects the Facebook ad to the purchase. Meanwhile, when shopping online, customers can easily copy the Offer code for use at checkout, and view the terms and conditions. The company says it’s now working on unique offer codes that allow advertisers to create specific offers for individuals, in order to prevent mass distribution, or select groups – like the business’s best customers, for example. Facebook also says it will remind people to use their Offers before they expire, and will be reminded on their next desktop visit about an Offer they claimed while on their phone. The online Offer ads are live now, while in-store ads will be available in the coming weeks, Facebook notes.
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Pebble update gives users more info at-a-glance and quicker actions
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Darrell Etherington
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Pebble is getting ready to start shipping new hardware, including the Pebble 2 and Pebble Time 2, but first it has something for both iPhone and Android based device owners. The new Pebble software update includes some big tweaks to how Pebble operates, both for end users and developers, including improvements to actions and a brand new health app. The key components of the update include basic tweaks to how Timeline operates (the main interface of the Pebble OS beyond your watchface) which actually lets you get an advance look at what’s coming up next directly on the watchface itself. That removes one step from getting a look at the next thing on your schedule, which is significant in a device designed to be usable at-a-glance on your wrist. The update also offers App Glances, giving users a quick look at info from their apps without actually requiring them to open them (a process that involves a fair amount of navigation in the existing OS). A 4-button quick launch feature also helps eliminate some of those steps, giving you a way to quickly open four different apps assigned to each physical button on your Pebble watch. Email actions now let users on iOS devices reply, delete and archive mail from Gmail accounts using the Gmail, Inbox and Mail apps, too. Pebble also completely redesigned the Health app from the ground-up, with a focus on making it simpler to use and easier to digest at a glance. It’s also accessible right from your watchface; the up button on your device now jumps directly into it, instead of paging back through your Timeline history for past events (not super useful when you think about it). The update now gives JavaScript devs a chance to play using Rocky.js for creating apps.
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Snapchat makes it easier to create your own On-Demand Geofilters
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Darrell Etherington
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On-Demand Geofilters from Snapchat let anyone build a custom filter for their event (or for whatever reason – I’m not judging your Snapchat filter needs), which was a petty good idea when the . Today it becomes an even better idea, thanks to new templates that let users create their own customized geofilters without any special knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator or any graphics software at all. If you’re looking to buy a geofilter, Snapchat will now provide templates right on the On-Demand website itself, offering a variety of themes, as well as customizable text and color options. Top-level category options let you choose between “Birthdays,” “Celebrations” and “Weddings,” which then leads you to a selection of overlay graphics choices, a color palette picker and the ability to insert text or even upload your own images. The workflow then takes you through choosing your tie frame and the area you want to cover before letting you confirm and check out. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZjEeEez_0] Before, the only option was to upload your own artwork, which is not necessarily an accessible activity to a wide group of users. Snapchat clearly doesn’t want to limit the appeal of this offering, given its pricing; Geofilter costs start at just $5 depending on how big of an area you want to cover, and how long you want the filter to last. This big improvement is making something from scratch and definitely goes a long way to broadening its appeal. My only real worry now that it’s this easy to create custom Snapchat geofilters is that I’ll bankrupt myself trying to troll my friends.
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Matthew Panzarino
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Nine-year-old boy prints a mechanical hand for his teacher
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John Biggs
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Calramon Mabalot is a pretty wild kid. He likes 3D printing and, along with his brother, he builds lots of cool projects – including a mechanical hand for a local teacher he met while building 3D projects. In an interview with , Mabalot described how he designed and built a prosthetic hand complete with full articulated fingers. Why did he want to build a 3D-printed arm? “I like learning it,” he said. 📣Project Update: [P6.3] sized HT final fingers! — Calramon Mabalot (@HabSkibbix) The project is part of the project and can be downloaded and printed by anyone online. Mabalot met a teacher, Nick, who needed a usable prosthetic so he took up the challenge of building and assembling the project along with fitting the arm for the teacher. Mabalot has his own and and he seems like the sweetest kid in the world. While we adults flit between Facebook and email while waiting for lunch to arrive in the break room, this kid is showing us all up with his verve, drive, and talent. Seriously: take a look at the video below and be amazed. 📣Project Update: The first with Robert! STEP 1: — Calramon Mabalot (@HabSkibbix)
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Wayfair snatches up Boston startup Trumpit to bring photo & video messaging to its mobile app
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Sarah Perez
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Online furniture shop has acquired a Boston-based mobile messaging application called , with the aim of utilizing its technology in order to expand its customer service offerings. So yes, that means messaging will be a part of the mobile Wayfair application in the future. Today, the app only offers users the ability to email or call the company when they click into the app’s “Contact Us” section. Trumpit, which offers a Snapchat-like group chat experience using both photos and videos, had raised from investors including BDS Capital, New York Angels, and DraftKings CEO Jason Robins. The app had been downloaded over 750,000 times on iOS and Android, but it apparently had trouble retaining users and keeping them engaged. The iOS app, for example, is unranked on App Annie’s charts, meaning it’s not even in the top 1,500 on any iTunes App Store chart. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but it’s being reported as a “good outcome” for the startup. The acquisition was finalized on Monday afternoon, says Wayfair. The acquisition gives Wayfair access to Trumpit’s IP and the right to hire its employees. Seven total are joining from Trumpit, including co-founders Bill Gianoukos, Carl Nehme, and Nick Lizotte, the company says. Gianoukos was previously the chief product officer at HeyWire, before Trumpit. While the deal includes the technology – making this not technically an “acqui-hire” situation – it’s clear that Wayfair was largely after the team. “Bill and his team at Trumpit have developed valuable mobile technology and expertise that is core to Wayfair’s overall product strategy,” said Ed Macri, Wayfair CMO, in a statement. “We are excited to welcome the very talented engineers and product leads from Trumpit to join Wayfair’s fast-paced, entrepreneurial workplace as we work together on breaking new ground in mobile innovation. Mobile is a key driver of our rapid growth and ongoing success as we continue to raise the bar on customer experience,” he added. Wayfair isn’t saying when the technology will be integrated into its own mobile application, but notes it will be put to use to better connect with Wayfair shoppers. Though it may seem strange for a retailer to pick up a photo-and-video focused messaging app, Wayfair has plans for utilizing the technology Trumpit developed so its staff and customers can exchange both images and videos. This would actually be a unique experience in terms of chatting with customer support, compared with most retailers today. “As we continue to build out our customer service experience, we will leverage this technology to greatly enhance communications between our customer service and sales teams and our customers,” explains a company spokesperson of how the technology will come into play. “This could range from helping in sales to helping customers who may have a problem with an order. We will be able to share visuals – photos and video – quickly and easily between customers and our service reps,” they noted. This deal is also now one of many examples of Wayfair tapping into the Boston tech community when in search of entrepreneurial talent. For example, the retailer the in May 2015, and it more recently hired , the founder and CEO of personal shopping app HelloShopper, following the app’s this June.
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Somebody at Apple thought the reality show ‘Planet of the Apps’ really needed Jessica Alba
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Romain Dillet
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Apple’s reality TV show keeps getting weirder. Every time Apple and Propagate release new information about the show, it gets harder to understand what they’re actually trying to build. This time, got a statement saying that Jessica Alba is joining the cast of the show as a mentor and adviser. In case you missed the , Planet of the Apps is an original reality TV show that is going to air exclusively on Apple Music, or the Apple TV, or maybe some other Apple service. The TV show should be about the app economy, featuring app developers from the original idea to the App Store submission and beyond. The teams will receive advice from mentors, funding from “top-tier VCs”, such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, and App Store promotion. Despite the unfortunate show name, it could be a fun show. And yet, it gets a lot weirder when we talk about the eclectic cast of mentors behind the show. Gwyneth Paltrow, Will.i.am, Gary Vaynerchuk and Jessica Alba will all help the teams. Sure they’re all talented and famous. In Jessica Alba’s case, she’s even behind a . Becoming a big star like her is no small feat either. But I don’t think any of these hosts are qualified to talk about design, engineering or even growth strategy when it comes to releasing a new app on the App Store. They’re no , , , , , , or . They’re going to shoot the show in Los Angeles starting on October 21. Applications are now open and you need to have a beta version of your app before then. 100 candidates will participate in this first season. Oh, and Product Hunt will meetups in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and New York. I find this teasing campaign pretty exciting already given that I have literally no idea who they’re going to announce next.
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