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Shippable Raises $8M Series A For Its Docker-Based Continuous Integration Platform | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | If you have a startup that touches , chances are somebody out there wants to fund you. There is no other buzzword right now that seems to open up a VCs pockets so quickly. , which offers a containerized continuous integration and delivery platform based on Docker containers, today announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A round led by , with participation from existing investors including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Divergent Ventures and Founders Co-Op. The company plans to use the additional funding, which comes after the company raised $2 million , to continue its push into the enterprise, which in many ways is only now starting to adopt continuous integration. The company says it has added over 20,000 users and 2,500 organizations since early September, when it launched version 2.0 of the service. What makes Shippable’s solution stand out is that it leverages containers to create a faster, easier-to-use and — maybe even more importantly — cheaper solution for its customers who can host its service both in their own data centers or on a public cloud. Continuous integration includes running unit tests on all of the code, and Shippable uses containers to allow it to quickly grow or shrink these virtual test labs depending on workloads. Because these containers are essentially replicas of the ones that are used in production, it’s easy to ensure that the development and test environments match the production setup. Overall, this approach could cut a company’s test lab footprint by up to 70 percent, the company claims. The company also argues that its systems allow for a far more automated approach. “The phrase ‘continuous integration’ is a misnomer. Traditional CI tools like Jenkins only help automate unit tests, and functional testing on staging environments is still predominantly manual and not really ‘continuous,'” says Avi Cavale, the founder and CEO of Shippable. |
Alcohol Scientists Exist And They Have An App | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | I wasn’t much of a wine drinker before moving to California wine country a few years back. Since then I’ve discovered I mostly like the red stuff and I like it to not burn while going down, but otherwise I’m still not sure what to choose among the myriad of options on the menu. is a new beer and wine recommendation app that uses science to determine if you will like a certain bottle of booze. Using a what it calls the “wine genome cellar” and machine learning, the scientists behind the app have tested the chemical compositions of thousands of brewskis and bubblies throughout the country to help you choose your next beverage. The higher the score from 0-100, the more a certain bottle is going to supposedly knock your socks off. Next Glass teased out a video last year to showcase what it was working on: It’s now out on the App Store until tomorrow afternoon. Next Glass certainly has entered into a competitive area. , , , and possibly a hundred others will give you wine recommendations on your smartphone. Though fewer in number, there are also some beer apps such as or . But what Next Glass aims to do is add intelligence based on a scientific breakdown of elements within the wine and beer. That is different from just a recommendations engine. I grabbed a few cold ones with COO Trace Smith while in Laguna Beach this last week to see how the app worked. To be honest, it’s a bit of an arduous process to first set up your taste profile. The app makes you swipe through a number of different bottles of wine and beer. It chooses those bottles for you. That’s not really helpful if you’ve never tasted any of them before. I had not tried most of the ones it forced me to rate before being able to use the app. Next Glass also didn’t have several of the bottles I had tried before in the search portion. I’m not entirely sure the recommendations I currently get are accurate because of this. Smith explained how Next Glass uses the “wine genome cellar” to set itself apart from all the other apps out there. Scientists on the team continue to add to this chemically sequenced database of wine and beer so users can get those recommendations on the app. Smith tells me to think of it as a sort of “Pandora for alcohol. The goal is to get every bottle sold in the U.S. into the database eventually. That’s going to be a mother of a task, but Next Glass is determined to do just that. Founders came up with a way to add thousands of beer bottles as fast as possible before launching the beta version of the app at least. . Next Glass rented a moving van and took it across America this summer to buy up every variety of beer they could along the way. So far they’ve been to 642 breweries, collected 15,350 bottles and tested over 12,452 of them. Smith and I grabbed a few bottles of beer and started scanning so I could see how it worked before the app came out. “This one I like a lot,” he says, swigging back some Heineken and showing me the score of 87.3 on his phone. Most beer tastes like sudsy, liquid bread to me. Still Smith encouraged me to try it. I’m still not a fan of that one. However, I did find out through the app that I might like the darker, chocolatey stuff. The app uses machine learning to figure out what you like as you scan and rate more bottles over time. It also incorporates social features so you can see if your friends on the app like or dislike a certain type of libation (handy if you are bringing something to the party). Something I like about the the app is that it provides the caloric content of each glass. It can also recommend a less expensive bottle of wine that tastes an awful lot like a pricier one. It simply cross-references the chemical compositions and then let’s you know it’s practically the same thing. Next Glass can also give you a “hangover rating.” It claims to have figured out a way to let you know how likely it is you’ll wake up with a headache if you drink something. I didn’t try to test out if this is true but do let me know if you do. The real application of this app isn’t that it potentially takes the guess work out of alcohol or that it caters to your own, personal tastes, it’s that it could use science to break down chemical compositions and make a predictive analysis about something your tongue will like. This can surely be applied to much more than just alcohol. Why not recommendations for cereal or perhaps vegetables your kids might like? Smith hinted that the company would expand beyond beer and wine, but that this was the major focus for now, “It’s a big area and we definitely have our work cut out for us in just the wine industry alone.” Smith told me as we sipped different varietals on the counter of the Laguna Montage hotel. The roadmap ahead includes an expansion of the database and inclusion of a wider array of spirits such as whiskey and vodka, according to Smith. But to be honest it seems pretty hard to get all the bottles in the whole country into one app in a timely enough manner to make it the number one wine and beer recommendation app. Opening up the database to other chemists or wine and beer labels is probably not an option, but there are hundreds of thousands of different types of wine and beer and more coming up all the time. Smith and his co-founders Kurt Taylor and Forrest Maready have raised a healthy seed of $3.8 million from undisclosed angel investors so far. Perhaps Next Glass could hire more alcohol scientists and trucks to help speed up the process. |
Tesla Delays Its SUV Yet Again | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Once upon a time — way back in 2012 — Tesla announced that it was building an electric SUV. It would be called the Model X. It would launch in 2013! The world* rejoiced. [* ] Then they delayed it until 2014. The Model S was selling like hot cakes, Tesla said, and they needed to focus on that model. Then they delayed it until “early 2015.” Tesla was busy expanding into China, it said, and their battery productions plants just weren’t cranking things out fast enough to support another model just yet. With a solid five months to go before the “early 2015” window starts seeming like a stretch, Tesla just dropped the news: the Model X is delayed once again. On the upside, it’s not another full year’s worth of delay — this time, they’re just bumping things back to Q3 of 2015. On the downside… I want a Model X already, dang it. So what’s the cause for delays this time around? Flaws that have popped up as the company ramps up production. “Making one of something is easy.” said Elon Musk on today’s investor call. “[But] we need to make a bunch to know [there’s a problem] there.” Tesla still hasn’t announced just how much the Model X will cost, though they’ve been accepting $5,000 reservations since they first announced the SUV back in 2012. It’s a bummer, but it’s the right move. When you’ve only released a handful of different models, all it takes is one not-so-perfect release to tank your reputation for good. [Via ] |
Lyft Accuses Former COO Of Stealing Confidential Documents Before Joining Uber | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | On-demand rides startup is taking its former COO Travis VanderZanden to court for breach of his confidentiality agreement and fiduciary duty weeks after the executive . In a complaint filed this afternoon in San Francisco Superior Court, Lyft claims VanderZanden downloaded a number of non-public company documents to his personal Dropbox account in the lead-up to his departure, including confidential strategic product plans, financial information, forecasts, and growth data. VanderZanden joined Lyft a year-and-a-half ago through the company’s . Due to his previous operational experience, VanderZanden was installed as COO and helped lead the company’s strategic roadmap as it expanded into a number of new cities over the course of the following year. VanderZanden after reported tensions with company founders John Zimmer and Logan Green. Several months later VanderZanden landed at Uber, where he was hired to aid with the company’s international growth. Before that, however, Lyft claims the former executive copied a treasure trove of confidential information on his way out the door. By doing so, Lyft alleges VanderZanden has breached the confidentiality agreement he signed at the time he joined the company. In its timeline of the events surrounding his resignation, Lyft claims VanderZanden informed the company’s founders of his plans to resign on August 12, and the three agreed to discuss the matter further on August 15. But VanderZanden cancelled that meeting and suggested they speak after the weekend. Over the course of that weekend, Lyft claims VanderZanden backed up a number of emails and confidential documents to his personal home computer and mobile phone before handing his company computer back. That information came about after Lyft conducted a forensics analysis of VanderZanden’s company-issued laptop, according to the complaint. The analysis revealed that in the months and days leading up to his departure, the former COO synchronized his personal Dropbox account with his Lyft laptop, copying a “significant number of Lyft’s most sensitive documents” in the process. According to Lyft, that included its “historic and future financial information, strategic planning materials like marketing plans and product plans, customer lists and data, international growth documents, and private personnel information.” Lyft says that during his employment, VanderZanden had access to the company’s Dropbox account, so there was no reason to back up those documents to his personal account. His access to the Lyft account was shut down following his departure, but Lyft claims VanderZanden can still access the confidential documents through his personal account. Says Lyft: VanderZanden’s possession of Lyft confidential information post-employment breached his Confidentiality Agreement. That agreement bars him from possessing, post-employment, any Lyft confidential and proprietary information, and prohibits him from using or disclosing such information to anyone. Lyft also claims the confidentiality agreement required VanderZanden to certify via termination certification, that he would continue to honor that agreement. However, the company alleges that he refused to sign that agreement and to return confidential information post-employment. Finally, Lyft accuses VanderZanden of soliciting Lyft employees to leave the company and to join Uber, including Lyft VP of operations Stephen Schnell and fellow employee Ryan Fujiu. According to the filing, the lawsuit was filed after Lyft reached out to Uber urging the company to conduct its own investigation into VanderZanden’s conduct. However, Uber counsel claimed on October 13 that he “[had] no Lyft proprietary information in his possession – not now, not when he started at Uber, and not since he left Lyft.” With the filing, Lyft is seeking to have the confidential documents returned, destroyed from VanderZanden’s personal computer or any other devices that might be able to access it, and be kept from soliciting other Lyft employees to leave the company, among other things. As with any big legal case, it’s anyone’s guess how this will all pan out. In the meantime, Lyft issued the following statement: We are disappointed to have to take this step, but this unusual situation has left us no choice but to take the necessary legal action to protect our confidential information. We are incredibly proud of the dedicated and people-powered culture that we’ve fostered to support drivers, passengers and the entire Lyft community and we will not tolerate this type of behavior. You can read the full complaint below:
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Concert Discovery Superstar Songkick Starts Selling Tickets | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | “The average American goes to one concert per year. If you double that, it has a profound impact on the lives of artists,” founder Ian Hogarth tells me. The problem is “It’s easier to buy a taxi to the concert than a ticket.” That’s why seven years and 10 million active users later, concert discovery app Songkick has . It’s a huge move that will let Songkick earn 20X as much as referring users to other ticket sellers, because Songkick gets a 10 percent to 15 percent fee for hosting the transaction. There’s just once catch: it can’t do this in the U.S. yet. Exclusivity deals between venues and sellers like Ticketmaster keep tickets out of Songkick’s hands. But after just a few months, Songkick is now selling tickets for 25 percent of the shows in London and is pushing hard to secure inventory in other markets. It took Spotify years to build up the leverage abroad necessary to barge into the American market with on-demand streaming. Now Songkick wants to do the same for ticket sales. It’s the culmination of a long journey for the London-based startup. Songkick was founded in 2007 as a concert database with the premise that “If you make it much easier to know what bands you like are coming, people go to more shows.” Songkick struck deals to show its concert listings on YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud and elsewhere. That was phase one. Phase two was personalizing that data so rather than sifting through all the shows in your area, you could see a list of just the artists you like and get alerts about the ones you love. You can pick your favorite musicians or Songkick can tap into your iTunes, Spotify and Facebook accounts to pull them automatically. There are few things that make a music fan’s heart sink like hearing their favorite band was in their city last night, but they just never heard about the show. Songkick was solving a real problem for people. Still, Hogarth didn’t plan on Songkick becoming a ticketing company. He was inspired by plane-ticket search engine Kayak, which helps you discover the best flights but passes you off to the airlines to actually buy the tickets. Similarly, Songkick would simply link out to wherever you could buy a concert tickets and then score a referral fee. “But the bigger we got, the more we got people asking if they could sell tickets with us, and we started to think we should reconsider,” Hogarth tells me. At the same time, the CEO saw what he calls “the Uber-fication of mobile services.” People began to expect to discover and buy within the same app. and needed a tune-up. Forcing people to click or tap away to another service to buy tickets was not only annoying, but it likely hurt conversion rates on ticket sales for artists, and left Songkick with just a small cut of the revenue. Instead, if it let users add their payment info, they could checkout without having to sign up and deal with a slew of ticketing companies. Hence, phase three: Songkick ticketing. Now 25 percent of London shows have tickets sold through Songkick. “Promoters are telling us we’re the second-largest ticket seller they work with,” Hogarth says. Indie band Caribou sold 40 percent of tickets to its 5,000-capacity show at Brixton Academy through Songkick. Hogarth beams: “We’ve really been able to move the needle.” Songkick still lists links to other ticket sellers so fans can purchase wherever they like, but its slick, native-app buying experience is more convenient than the often messy mobile websites of other vendors. By building a huge discovery user base first and then launching ticketing abroad, Songkick has avoided a problem that’s plagued U.S. ticketing startups like and : getting face value tickets for the hottest shows. In the U.S., most of the best shows are exclusively ticketed by TicketMaster or Ticketfly. TicketMaster earns a ton of money from convenience charges and the ads it shows on its site, so it’s highly incentivized to keep exclusivity deals in place with venues and event producers like Live Nation (which TicketMaster conveniently merged with in 2010). Without a ton of traffic to dangle in front of venues, it’s hard for startups to convince venues they’re worth working with. WillCall ended up to solve the inventory problem. Applauze has become more of a on sites like StubHub, and it deals with a lack of diverse inventory by only showing a “curated” list of nearby events. Now Songkick’s goal is to build up the clout abroad to break into ticketing in the U.S., where 60 percent of its users are. “If you look at what it took to bring Spotify to the U.S., it took traction elsewhere, and it took a partnership with Facebook. ow look. The labels are wholly behind it.” The huge up-front payment Spotify paid the labels surely didn’t hurt their willingness to allow on-demand streaming. Songkick might end up having to do a similar paid advance to wrestle tickets away from TicketMaster and Ticketfly. Until then it will be competing with everyone from startups like and , to ticket holders like TicketMaster, to secondary marketplaces like StubHub. “I’m going to scale it out wherever I can find partners, and eventually bring it to the U.S. when the time is right,” Hogarth says. He thinks it’s only a matter of time until music boils down to three apps. “A radio app like Pandora, an on-demand app like Spotify, and a concert app like us.” In fact, they all work together quite nicely. Big musicians like Coldplay or Taylor Swift occasionally about low streaming royalties and . They hope to earn more money from album and MP3 sales on iTunes, which they think get cannibalized by streaming. But whether or not royalty rates are high enough, that’s myopic thinking. First, album and MP3 sales are in free-fall so that won’t be a viable strategy in a few years. Second, the money in music is increasingly coming from concert tickets and merchandise that hardcore fans buy. “Most artists make 70 percent to 80 percent of their revenue from touring, and that’s just going to keep going,” Hogarth says. The way artists get discovered, turn radio hit listeners into fans, and turn fans into fanatics is through extended listening on streaming services. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but technology has changed the industry from a record business to a music business. There’s no going back. The best bet is to embrace streaming and other tech, mint a ton of loyal supporters, and tour. That’s why streaming apps and concert apps like have a huge opportunity to cooperate. Together they can change the average person’s habits from buying a couple of albums per year plus going to one concert to streaming dozens of albums, becoming a fan of more artists, and going to a bunch of concerts. Ticketing exclusivity deals and streaming stubbornness prevent that. Hogarth concludes: “The industry needs to get out of its own way and say ‘what would be best for the consumer? What would be best for the artists?’ Instead of ‘what’s best for the system in place?'” |
This Portable Raspberry Pi Console Will Bring Back The Arcade Games Of Your Misspent Youth | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | The hopes to capitalize on your misplaced nostalgia. Essentially a Raspberry Pi inside a cute case, the portable console promises to add online multi-player to classic games, thereby allowing you to Joust with players around the world or Mario Brothers your friends across town. The console is 3D printed and contains a fully assembled Pi with arcade inputs. Anyone can build one of these, obviously (I’m building with my kids) but the real secret sauce is in the software. “The eNcade started off as a concept of mine, initially as a portable online multiplayer capable retro console,” said Nicolas Wicker, creator. “However after analyzing the community I felt that the Raspberry pi could complement the product greatly for being popular in our demographic and capable of our application. From then on we have gone through three design/prototype revisions and we are currently working on finishing the beta release of our software.” “I conceived the eNcade first when i realized that there wasn’t any portable solution to playing retro games online with multiplayer in a user friendly environment, which was thought over a year ago. Also I noticed the void of a purchasable fully assembled portable Raspberry Pi gaming console. The eNcade was the perfect solution in bringing these two concepts together.” A fully-assembled kit can be had for $160 and Wicker he would be 3D printing the initial models and will then ship injection-molded units if the project takes off. His goal is to create a sort of Xbox Live for old ROMs, allowing you to invite other encode users to join you in games remotely. He is looking for $6,500 and has a ways to go, but it could be an interesting project if it takes off.
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Nintendo Announces Zelda: Majora’s Mask Remake For 3DS, Coming Spring 2015 | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Were you one of those kids who never got to play Zelda: Majora’s Mask for the Nintendo 64 because it required that damned expansion pack? Good news! Because everything old is new again, Majora’s Mask is coming back to the shelves 14 years later, but this time, it’s being remade for the Nintendo 3DS. Fans of the series have been clamoring for a remake for years. Hopes were raised after mentions of such a title leaked out of Target’s inventory system back in July. And then things went pretty much radio silent. Just announced straight-to-the-player , Zelda: Majora’s Mask will ship in Spring of next year. |
Cloud Encoding Startup Encoding.com Gets Strategic Investment From Harmonic | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Cloud encoding startup has gotten some validation from one of the big players in the more traditional video processing world. That’s because Harmonic has made a strategic investment in Encoding.com, which could lead to closer integration between the companies as more video processing moves to the cloud. Encoding.com has been around since 2008, long before anyone really wanted to do their video processing in the cloud. President Jeff Malkin recalls flying in to meet the CTO of a “major media company based in New York” and being told that the company would never use its service. “Thanks, but we could have done this over the phone,” Malkin recalls thinking. Still, over time Encoding.com ended up winning over that company as a customer, along with some other New York-based media companies and online video distributors, like AOL* for instance. Anyway, the company is being helped by what many organizations recognize as a need to “move all things to the cloud,” including things that they would normally save for their own internal operations like encoding. And Harmonic, which makes video processing equipment that is usually installed on-premise, recognizes the transition as well — which explains why it made the investment. Harmonic led the $3.5 million Series B round in Encoding.com, which included participation from the company’s existing investors. That brings total investment in the company to $8 million, with other backers including Metamorphic Ventures and Zelkova Ventures. So it’s not a huge amount of money, especially considering the size of the overall video processing market. Then again, Encoding.com has always run pretty lean, and Malkin says the company has been careful not to raise too much capital over the years. What’s more important is the strategic nature of the relationship, as it opens up opportunities for Encoding.com to more closely work with Harmonic’s product portfolio and introduce its cloud video processing offering to new customers. Malkin mentions the possibility of creating SaaS version of Harmonic products in an effort to provide more hybrid on-premise and cloud solutions to media companies. As part of the deal, Harmonic’s sales force will also begin offering Encoding.com’s services alongside its own products, which could drastically increase its sales reach. In general, the cloud encoding startup is looking to ramp up its sales and engineering teams with the new funding. According to Malkin, the company currently has a headcount of 50 and expects to double that over the next year. A large part of its investment will be focused on expanding internationally, he said. ==
* I had no idea TechCrunch’s parent company AOL was an Encoding.com customer before today, btw. |
TC Cribs: Indiegogo’s Colorful And Crowd-Pleasing Abode | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Today’s episode of Cribs brings us to the neighborhood of San Francisco, which is where the popular crowdfunding platform calls home. The company has just recently unveiled a new rebrand that was meant to focus on all the many varied projects that use Indiegogo to raise money, and its office definitely reflects that eclectic vibe — and is filled with lots of unique inventions that have been crowdfunded thanks to the company. At Indiegogo HQ it’s not unusual to come across things like or a , just hanging out on the common lunchroom table. It makes for a very colorful office that seems like it’s a little bit different every day. Check out Indiegogo’s creative and crowd-pleasing HQ in the video above. [gallery ids="1078943,1078944,1078948,1078949,1078942,1078950,1078947,1078951"] |
To Create A Habit, Focus On The Reward | Nir Eyal | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | On May 1, 1981, American Airlines launched its frequent flyer program AAdvantage. Since then, a flood of loyalty programs have attempted to bring customers back through rewards. Today, you can become a card-carrying member of just about anything: hotels, supermarkets, drugstores and pizza chains. If you’re in a store, chances are someone will ask, “Would you like to join our rewards program?” Marketing professors, store managers and executives are still not sure how effective these initiatives are. One puzzle is the link between participation and loyalty. It’s not that strong. Millions of Americans are enrolled in at least one loyalty program, but just a fraction of them are dedicated customers. Typically, loyalty programs work only to the extent that they reward customers . Another part of the mystery is the reward itself. Most loyalty programs offer additional perks to create a positive feedback loop — the more we shop in one store, the more we get in return, the less we’ll shop in another store. But in a world saturated with offers, it’s difficult to turn a reward into a habit. Here’s one idea. Instead of asking, “What rewards should we give away?” ask “ should we give away a reward?” It might not be the reward , but how the reward is framed, and the steps customers must take to obtain the reward, that matters. In 2004, marketing researchers teamed with a local car wash in a busy metropolitan area. For one month, the researchers handed out loyalty stamp cards every Saturday. They used two different cards depending on the week. Customers on the first and fourth week received a card with an offer to “buy eight car washes and get the ninth one free.” The second group of customers received a card with a slightly different offer. They were awarded one free wash for every ten purchases, but they were also gifted two free credits. In absolute terms, each deal was the same. Eight trips to the car wash earned one free wash. Yet twice as many people in the second condition completed the stamp card; having earned two credits, the feeling of progress nudged them to return. Nunes and Dreze term this tendency the : We’re more committed to completing a goal when we have made some progress. PayPal illustrates how complete my profile is with an easy-to-digest visual. By highlighting the progress I’ve already made — even though the “progress” is the mere act of signing up — I’m motivated to give them my phone number. No turning back now; I’m already 80 percent of the way there. LinkedIn, where I can gauge my “profile strength,” is similar. My profile is nearly finished — but not quite — a compelling reason to “strengthen it.” Yet LinkedIn is more sophisticated than PayPal. It informs me that six people have viewed my profile in the past 15 days adding an element of social pressure. Notice the copy underneath this notification: “Your rank for profile views improved by 11 percent in the past 15 days.” With the feeling of progress, I’m more likely to click on the aptly placed “LinkedIn Premium” offer. Candy Crush Saga, an addictive puzzle app, is different from PayPal and LinkedIn but employs a similar tactic to keep users engaged. If a user does not complete a level in the given number of turns, the game offers bonus items like “lollipop hammers,” “disco balls,” and more turns. However, there’s a price for the virtual goodies. Users must pay real money for a better shot at finishing the level. It’s unlikely players would agree to pay at the beginning of a level. However, after spending time and energy, it’s a different story. Given the chance to beat that level you’ve been stuck on, these offers are much more appealing. What’s true of Candy Crush Saga is true of other popular games and platforms — they convert the users’ investment of time into money. An important step in creating routines is the gap between variable reward and investment. Variable rewards (new tweets, specials at the restaurant, deals at a retail outlet) keep us coming back for more, but they don’t necessarily lead to investment unless the product is designed to get the user to, “put something of value into the service.” The variable reward on LinkedIn, for example, is the newsfeed and the notifications. Investment occurs when the user updates his profile, makes connections, and purchases LinkedIn Premium. Smart framing can convince users to invest further in the experience, making it more likely they will return. It’s a subtle but psychologically powerful maneuver. Instead of trying to persuade customers to invest in a product or service, why not show them they’ve already invested? Loyalty programs, in contrast, typically attract customers by offering better prices or superior products: ”Spend $100 and get $10 off!” or “Become a Platinum Elite member and get free upgrades!” are two familiar examples. Yet focusing on what a customer can acquire, instead of the time and money they’ve already spent, could be one reason these programs are ineffective. The trick is not strengthening the link between use and loyalty with better deals. It’s reinforcing the relationship between use and loyalty. That starts with smart framing. |
The Department Of Energy Needs Your Help To Cut The Soft Costs Of Solar | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | In recent years, incentives from the government to American solar startups combined with tough competition from Chinese manufacturers led to a steep drop in the price of commercial solar installations — roughly 50 percent since 2010, according to Victor Kane, manager of the within the Department of Energy’s . The initiative aims to make the price of solar energy cost-competitive with electricity derived from other sources by the end of the decade. As the portion of solar installation prices accounted for by so-called “soft costs” (like customer acquisition, which can come in at $2,000-4,000 for a $24,000 installation) increased, SunShot has shifted its focus to deal with removing these inefficiencies in the solar business. This year, SunShot’s Catalyst incubator crowdsourced 130 problem statements involving these soft costs in solar energy by . This drew attention to issues like the difficulty consumers have finding information about buying into solar or the price of inspecting large commercial installations. In May, the platform opened a secondary crowdsourcing effort to bring in new ideas from outside the solar industry, giving entrepreneurs and engineers alike for addressing those big issues. The window for submitting ideas is open until November 7 at 11:59 p.m. EST, so if you’re interested you’ve still got a shot. Once submissions close, the Catalyst team and external expert reviewers will look at each video and pick up to 20 teams to receive guidance from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and up to $25,000 in resources to build out early versions of their pitches. Most of those resources will come in the form of challenges submitted to , where hobbyist programmers and professional developers will be able to submit implementations of whole applications. SunShot leadership hopes this will encourage more submissions by removing the intimidation of needing to know how to actually build out a solution. In May 2015, those teams will reassemble for a demo day for investors. The top 5 teams will receive $100,000 to begin building out their ideas as full-on startups. SunShot Initiative director Minh Le tells TechCrunch that the Department of Energy’s goal is for these winners to come out of the program at a point where they’d be ready to join a more traditional Silicon Valley accelerator. |
VCs Look To The Future As IoT Investments Soar | Christine Magee | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | : From personal mobility device to wireless power transmitter , Internet of Things startups are amassing millions in venture dollars to make their way out of the conceptual future and into our homes, cars and offices. Crowdfunding platforms have made popular hits out of and , but the top venture-backed companies have been centered around the home automation and security space. Following recent acquisitions of connected-home startups by major players like and , investor interest is hitting an all-time peak. In the past year, investors have contributed over $300 million in 97 venture rounds for IoT startups. Nearly half of these deals were recorded last quarter, as seed rounds hit a record quarterly high. This is in part due to a rise in IoT startups emerging out of programs like R/GA and ‘ connected devices accelerator in New York, Microsoft Ventures’ in Seattle, and global hardware accelerator . Venture investors appear to be paying close attention as Series A rounds have followed suit, reaching a record high last quarter, as well.
“The largest informing factor for me investing in this space is the overall belief that this is where the future of life is going,” says Nick Wyman of . “It’s going to be centered around capturing data and around home awareness and intelligence.” Galvanize backed connected device startup last week in a round that included strategic investors American Family Insurance and communications company Comporium. Keen’s first product is a smart vent that allows home owners to control the temperature in each room of a house to reduce energy use and cut down on heating costs. “It’s not just investing in what the market is right now, but creating new markets,” says Wyman, whose previous investments include indoor home gardening startup and craft beer brewing kit . Startups like Keen Home represent a small piece of the larger puzzle, perfecting different verticals of home convenience or security. As these single-focus solutions gain traction, the need for a central hub that will integrate and facilitate communication between individual applications becomes even greater. “The biggest factor to me is that we haven’t seen exactly what Apple (Homekit) and Google (Nest) and Samsung (SmartThings) and GE (Wink) and other major platforms will really look like, so figuring out how to play in the IoT ecosystem is a total grey area,” says of . “Until that picture becomes clearer, identifying where the large companies will emerge in the space is very challenging.” Tisch contributed to the prior to being in July, but has yet to make any major bets on home automation startups since. The uncertainty in the space could explain the relative lack of larger investments, as investors are willing to help new IoT companies get off the ground but hesitant to take on too much risk. While a winner in this battle for the hub of the connected home could bring clarity to investors, it muddies the waters for consumers who aren’t interested in exposing their private lives to the likes of Google or Samsung. “Google is definitely positioning itself as a leader in the home IoT space with Nest/Dropcam and more,” says of HAXLR8R, “but there’s a bit of a pushback from people regarding what’s happening to the data and what’s happening to the privacy of their home.” That’s what HAX graduate seeks to tackle with its “soft security” model, an alternative to the more common “hard security” model that relies on cameras and microphones. this week, Form is taking the “invisible” approach to hardware, detecting irregularities in sound or air composition data as opposed to recording 24/7 so that home owners can retain a comfortable level of privacy. This is one attempt to preserve a homeowner’s peace of mind while still collecting data that allows connected devices to learn from consumer behaviors. And this learning and adjustment period is essential for IoT companies to eventually transition from the home into the industrial sector, where their effects will be felt on a much larger scale. “As we collect more data, there’s going to be a larger opportunity for industry manufacturers that can really analyze that data and change the way they do business,” says Jenny Fielding, head of the R/GA Connected Devices program. “The home, the car, the office, is where it’s going to start, and then you’re going to see the domino effect once the data is there which will have a huge impact.”
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Announcing The 8th Annual Crunchies Awards | Susan Hobbs | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | It’s that time of year again. One of Thanksgiving and … nominations for the . Once again TechCrunch writers will step away from their keyboards to celebrate the best of technology. As in years past, the tech community will give awards to the best and brightest startups, founders, investors and thought leaders in our industry. There are 20 Crunchies categories in all, including Founder of the Year and Best New Startup. . and they close on December 3rd at 11:59pm PST. The ceremony will take place on Thursday, February 5, 2015 at 7:30 p.m. at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. Davies is an elegant venue that has hosted some of the greatest musical performances in history, and the Crunchies will return for its fourth time this year. Following the awards, the Davies will also provide a festive playground for this year’s after party. As always there will be a hosted bar, hors d’oeuvres, intriguing interactive entertainment and other fun surprises. And tech bloggers. General admission . Seating is limited, and the event tends to sell out quickly. Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen; if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities for the ceremony or after party, please contact . For press credentials, please fill out this and confirmations will be sent via email. See you at the Davies!
Thursday, February 5, 2015
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA 7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire. . open: Wednesday, November 5th
Nominations close: Wednesday, December 3rd at 11:59pm PST
Finalists announced: early January List of Categories and most recent winners: Best Technology Achievement (2013: bitcoin)
Best On-Demand Service (2013: Airbnb)
Best E-Commerce Application (2013: Wanelo)
Best Mobile Application (2013: Snapchat)
Fastest Rising Startup (2013: Upworthy)
Best Health Startup (2013: One Medical)
Best Design (2013: Pencil by FiftyThree)
Best Bootstrapped Startup (2013: Imgur)
Best Enterprise Startup (2013: Zendesk)
Best International Startup (2013: Waze)
Best Education Startup (2013: Duolingo)
Best Hardware Startup (2013: Oculus VR)
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (2013: Candy Crush Saga)
Biggest Social Impact (2013: Edward Snowden’s NSA Revelations)
Angel of the Year (2013: Chris Sacca)
VC of the Year (2013: Peter Fenton, Benchmark)
Founder of the Year (2013: Arash Ferdowsi & Drew Houston, Dropbox)
CEO of the Year (2013: Dick Costolo, Twitter)
Best New Startup of 2014 (2013: Tinder)
Best Overall Startup of 2014 (2013: Kickstarter) |
Facebook Open Sources Its Proxygen HTTP Framework And Server | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Facebook today that it is open sourcing , the C++ HTTP libraries — including an HTTP server — that it uses internally. The company has quite a bit of its code in recent months, much of it on mobile developers. In many ways, today’s launch is more interesting, though, as it’s likely to reach a far wider number of developers. From the get-go, Facebook notes that it isn’t trying to replace popular HTTP and proxy servers like Apache or nginx with Proxygen. “Those projects focus on building extremely flexible servers written in C that offer good performance but almost overwhelming amounts of configurability,” Facebook engineers Daniel Sommermann and Alan Frindell write in today’s announcement. “Instead, we focused on building a high performance C++ framework with sensible defaults that includes both server and client code and that’s easy to integrate into existing applications.” Still, the framework allows you to quickly set up an event-driven server that can handle HTTP and SPDY requests. Chances are that other projects will look at this and use it as the basis to build their own web servers on top of this codebase. Proxygen evolved from an earlier project in 2011 that aimed to write a customizable reverse-proxy load balancer, Sommermann and Frindell say. While Facebook could have gone with Apache, nginx or Varnish as its HTTP stack, the engineers argue that building their own framework allowed the company to integrate more deeply with Facebook’s existing infrastructure and tools like the company’s version of (which is also now available on GitHub). Given Facebook’s size, the team was also looking for a solution that could scale beyond existing solutions, and the company wanted to be able to reuse the framework in other tools. Haystack, HHVM and Facebook’s load balancers also use Proxygen in some form or another, for example, as does the company’s mobile infrastructure. By now Proxygen has handled “many trillions of HTTP(S) and SPDY requests,” so this is definitely some pretty battle-hardened code by now. You can find the source code and a more in-depth description of how Proxygen works . |
Google Guarantees Inbox Invite By 5 PM PT If You Ask During Today’s ‘Happy Hour’ | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Google is expanding its Inbox invite program, having issued another collection of invites to existing members already today, with a new ‘Happy Hour’ taking place between 3 p.m. PT and 4 p.m. PT today. If users email them at inbox@google.com asking for an invite during that window, they’ll get access guaranteed by 5 p.m. PT today. Want an invite TODAY? 3-4pm PT. Send us an email at inbox@google.com between 3 and 4pm PT and you'll get your invite by 5pm — Inbox by Gmail (@inboxbygmail) If you’re still waiting for access, this is the most certain method yet for locking in an invite. Keep in mind that only personal Gmail accounts can access the Inbox while in beta, so even if your work email is run through Google Apps, you won’t be able to sign up, at least for the time being. Google’s thus far in terms of non-traditional email software, after other entrants including Mailbox failed to really light a fire in my belly. The app benefits by machine learning smarts that Google began developing and honed using its smart Categories feature for standard Gmail, and in its Google Now intelligent mobile assistant software. |
A New Bullet Can Make 3D-Printed Guns A Reality | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | 3D printed guns aren’t very compelling right now. Because of the vagaries of plastic and the methods used to manufacture weapons like the , your gun can turn itself into a hand grenade if you’re not careful. But might have a solution. He’s created a new type of bullet that essentially uses the case as a barrel reinforcement. This means that the gun can be made out of shoddy plastic and, as long as you use one of these long bullets, the barrel and body will stay together shot after shot. for the new bullets, called the .314 Atlas, on his website. His work alternates between cool guitar designs and cool gun designs and the Atlas bullets are still in the very early stages although he has tested them extensively and found they work well. Writes the engineer: Crumling says that these bullets are essentially a “barrel integrated into a shell” which takes all of the pressure off of the actual gun and uses the plastic barrel as a very simple guide. As you can see from the image above, you’e not going to get much accuracy on this thing, but, I suspect, it’s the thought that counts. |
Google Drive Now Works Better With Desktop Applications | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Google today a new feature for its online storage service Google Drive that will allow users to more easily launch the files they have saved in the cloud using their preferred desktop applications. The feature is not rolling out to the core product, however, but is instead available as . Once installed, users will be able to right-click on applications stored in Google Drive and open them using a compatible application on their computer. Users must also have the latest version of the Drive app for Mac or PC installed (ver. 1.18) and their files synced to the computer in order for the extension to work. It seems a bit odd that Google – a company pushing users to move away from desktop apps like Microsoft Office in favor of its own online office suite — is now trying to make it easier for web users to continue to use desktop programs. But the idea is more about blurring the lines between the desktop and the cloud. Desktop apps and Google’s Docs, Sheets and Slides are put on the same playing field, in a sense, with this addition. It’s also an acknowledgement of sorts that there are some users who, for whatever reason, can’t or won’t fully transition to a cloud application. Maybe they use a specific feature that Google’s office suite doesn’t support, or maybe they’re just comfortable using familiar tools like Microsoft Word or Excel. Maybe their job requires more complex software that Google doesn’t offer online. This extension, minor as it may seem, could help cajole these users into moving their workflow to the browser. Once there, they can begin to take advantage of the features that come with storing their files in the cloud, while still working in their favorite desktop programs — whether that’s a competitive office suite, more advanced video or image editing tools, 3D animation software, design tools or anything else. Google says is rolling out over the next several days. |
null | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 4 | null |
Publicis Snaps Up Sapient For $3.7B To Build A Digital Media Powerhouse | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | Global ad giant Publicis is spending big to position itself as the top agency for brands riding the digital wave, after it announced ( ) a deal that sees it acquire Sapient for $3.7 billion. Publicis is paying $25.00 per share in an all-cash transaction at a total valuation that is a 44% premium to Nasdaq-listed Sapient’s most recent share price, as of October 31. The deal, which is described as a merger, will see Sapient become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Publicis Groupe. The deal has been approved by both companies’ boards, but remains subject to the usual regulatory approval and other red tape. Once complete, Publicis intends to create ‘Publicis.Sapient,’ a new venture that will unite Sapient’s three arms — SapientNitro, Sapient Global Markets, Sapient Government Services — with Publicis’ existing digital services — DigitasLBi, Razorfish Global and Rosetta — and focus on “digital transformation at the convergence of communication, marketing, commerce and technology.” An official announcement explains that the additional of Sapient — which counts 13,000 staff across 37 global locations — will take the Publicis Groupe to combined annual revenue of more than €8 billion (approximately $10 billion), and over 75,000 employees worldwide. That, Maurice Lévy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, said will make it the largest digital marketing and technology organization worldwide. “Sapient is a ‘crown jewel,’ a one of a kind company born in the technology space with strengths in marketing, communications, consulting and omni-channel commerce, all of which are equally important to best help clients achieve their digital transformation,” Lévy gushed, adding that it will also expand the group into new markets, bring additional revenue streams, and consolidate expenditure. Publicis has targeted 50% of its revenue from digital by 2018, and Lévy told a conference call that this objective would be reached as soon as the deal closes. The group isn’t shy to spend when it believe it is called for, and last year it in order to cement its position within the digital marketing and communications space. Last summer, it in an undisclosed deal, and other purchases in recent years have included LBi ($450 million), Rokkan ($575 million), Rosetta ($575 million), Razorfish ($530 million) and Digitas ($1.3 billion), . This time around, the scale of the Sapient acquisition is far larger and at a more critical time. That because six months ago Publicis and Omnicom — two giants in their field — due to rumored political differences. The deal was largely thought to be a response to the growing power of the internet ad businesses of Google, Facebook and others who allow brands and companies to cut out traditional agencies and manage campaigns directly. |
Meetup Gets Into Crowdfunding With Launch Of “Contributions” | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Longtime social site for groups has been steadily rolling out new features to its service over the course of the year following of a secondary round earlier in 2014. This summer, the company , and now Meetup is rolling out its own crowdfunding platform called “ .” The new feature allows Meetup group members to fund various projects managed by group organizers in order to pay for things the group needs – like meeting space, supplies, equipment, drinks and snacks and more. At launch, Contributions will be available on iOS, Android and web. Meetup tells us the feature has been in beta testing for several months with 1,000 groups on its service. Next Wednesday, November 12, Contributions will go live for the majority of U.S.-based groups, the company says, with plans for international support arriving in the future. Organizers can choose to deactivate the feature on the groups they manage, however, if it’s not something they need. Though many people associate with “crowdfunding” with larger platforms like Kickstater designed to get ideas, and often, hardware, into production, Meetup’s implementation of crowdfunding, which is powered by Wepay, is more about group members pooling their money in a more accountable way. Organizers can turn on or off the setting under “Group Tools,” where they can also opt to send a message to their members that includes the group’s Contributions page. Here, members are prompted to “Chip In” to help fund the community and buttons for standard amounts are provided, or members can enter their own. In groups that don’t charge Member Dues, members can reach the Contributions page by clicking “Chip In” option which will appear on the group’s homepage. Asking for optional contributions may actually be a more viable way to build a sustainable group, since even small fees can turn off potential participants who would rather first test the waters by attending a few events before forking over an annual membership fee. Plus, it could allow for a fairer system as there will be those members who only attend a handful of events per year and others who go to each meeting – they shouldn’t necessarily be paying the same fees. The new feature gives Meetup another way to grow its revenues, too, as the company says it takes a “small transaction fee” from Contributions to keep Meetup ad-free. We understand that Meetup takes 4.5% for itself and 3.0% plus $0.50 for its payment processor. If Meetup could grow its revenues significantly through these crowdfunding campaigns, perhaps it could introduce a free tier to its pricing plans to keep smaller groups engaged with the company. Today, Meetup competes heavily with Facebook, which, through its own groups product, has shifted a lot of group-related activity away from Meetup – especially less formal groups who only meet occasionally. Though Meetup’s feature set is robust, Facebook works well enough for many. And “good enough” and “free” often win. |
Bharti SoftBank Acquires 36.5% Stake In Indian Media Startup ScoopWhoop | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | Bharti SoftBank, a joint venture between business group Bharti Enterprises and SoftBank Corp., announced today that it has acquired a 36.5 percent stake in , an Indian-focused media startup. Though financial terms were undisclosed, the deal is interesting because it’s the latest in a series of investments by SoftBank in Indian startups. The Japanese telecom giant recently said over the next few years. SoftBank also recently ramped up its focus on entertainment when it . Its investment in ScoopWhoop gives SoftBank a chance to add yet another entertainment company to its portfolio, albeit one that has a different model than Legendary Entertainment ScoopWhoop collects entertainment content that is meant to be shared over social media networks, a similar model to Buzzfeed and Upworthy. ScoopWhoop currently claims 20 million monthly page views and over 8 million unique visitors per month across its website and mobile app. About a half of its page views are accessed via smartphones. Last week, SoftBank , an Uber-style service based in Mumbai. At the same time, participated in a $627 million round in Snapdeal, an e-commerce business. Other investments in India include mobile ad startup InMobi and Bharti. SoftBank has enjoyed previous success from investing in companies located in fast-growing markets—its war chest is funded in part by returns from the $20 million stake Son invested in Alibaba back in 2000, which is now estimated to be worth around $75 billion. Other emerging Asian startup ecosystems SoftBank currently has a stake in include Indonesia, where it recently invested (along with Sequoia) in marketplace and Korea, . In a statement, Madhu Nori, CEO of Bharti SoftBank, said “About a half of India’s population are under 25 years old and the use of social networks with smartphones is growing rapidly among this segment. As a result, Media consumption patterns are rapidly evolving and this space is ready for disruption. The team at ScoopWhoop have demonstrated significant growth by leveraging their strength in understanding and creating locally relevant content for India’s young audience. We believe the partnership offers immense synergies for both parties to create great content experience for India’s mobile internet population.” (h/t ) |
Google’s Maps App For iOS And Android Gets Material Design And Uber Estimates | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | Google has to keep with the visual theme introduced with Android 5.0 Lollipop, which it calls material design. The new mobile apps now feature bold headers of solid flat colors and animations that evoke pieces of paper sliding over one another. The apps also offer new features, including reservations you can make at restaurants through the app via OpenTable, and both time and price estimates for the . The update will roll out over the next few days, so don’t be disappointed if you aren’t seeing it right away. Based on the previews supplied by the company, the visual overhaul here is as pleasant and well-executed as is the rest of Android 5.0, which I’m particularly smitten with. The additional features are also very helpful, with reservation integration eliminating the additional step of having to open a separate app or web page in order to book a table once you’ve used Google to see what’s available around you. The deepening of the Uber partnership is particularly interesting – it will admittedly help anyone who uses the transport service to get around, but it also means Google is getting even cosier with a company that is also a portfolio member in its investment arm, Google Ventures. Building Uber time and price right into the Maps app gives it a considerable advantage over other means of private transit, including standard taxi services. We’ll keep you updated on Google’s progress as it continues to put material design on everything within its considerable realm of software and apps – and of course we’ll be watching the Uber connection closely, as the next stage would presumably be offering Uber booking direct, without requiring a user to even leave the app. |
APUS Wants To Make Your Android Phone An iPhone With Its Launcher App | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | has been heralded by many as a sign of the increasingly sophisticated design of Android, but despite that advancement there still exists a feeling that Apple’s iOS is on the planet. But, with a new iPhone 6 costing upwards of $750 off-contract, many consumers — and particularly those in emerging markets where operators don’t subsidize devices — don’t have much of a choice about their operating system. Enter and that aims to bridge the gap between Android and iOS, with a particular focus on cheaper devices running the Google OS. Launched in early July of this year, APUS revealed that the launcher has now clocked 30 million worldwide. The company is based in China, as such it’s rather interesting to note that it claims less than 10% of these downloads have come on home turf. Instead the US, India and Brazil are its top countries, with Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia particular regional hotspots. Dealing in straight up user numbers provides just one angle since it gives no indication of engagement. An APUS representative claimed that 24 million people use the launcher each month, although we don’t have a figure for daily users, which would be more indicative of its traction. Nonetheless, the app’s initial growth and apparent engagement rate are impressive. Launchers sound ideal in theory, existing as a primary layer that lets users customize their phone to easily access their favorite services or features without needing to dig into their app draw or waste time tapping through screens. But, in reality, it isn’t easy to convince users to download app and rely on it to shape their experience. Just ask Facebook. The world’s biggest social network may have over 1.2 billion monthly active users, but its Facebook Home launcher — — has been downloaded fewer than 5 million times, . In short: it hasn’t generated anything like the adoption that was expected of it. So what has APUS done to clock 24 million active users in just four months? The launcher is basic by design and offers three core features: improved battery life, better app discovery, and enhanced search. APUS claims it can save as much as 80% of a device’s memory when it runs — thanks to its size, it takes up less than 2MB of memory. That means more juice and that’s always appreciated, particularly by those with lower-end phones. There is also a ‘boost’ button which it says “cleans up” a device’s use of memory to help games or apps run quicker. The ‘marketplace’ is essentially a curated selection of apps from the Google Play Store which is assembled based on the apps that a user has already downloaded. It also shows what apps are popular among users who are nearby. The overall idea is to help you sift through the hundreds of thousands of turkeys to find the apps and services that you’ll like. Finally, its search integrates Google, Baidu, Bing and Yahoo to provide what it describes as more powerful and accurate results. Most interestingly though, the general genesis is to make Android more iOS-like, as Penny Pan, Marketing Director at APUS Group, explained to TechCrunch in an interview. “iOS is known for being the easiest to use mobile operating system, and we want to be the iPhone for Android. Our goal is to make Android as cool as iOS,” she said. , which includes the addition of third-party launcher apps, but Pan revealed APUS will not be tackling the Apple platform. “There are no plans for iOS,” she said. “We want to make our Android system smaller, faster and more simple with more and more functions for our users.” An ‘apus apus’ is a type of common swift, in case you were wondering, and it symbolizes the lean, speedy launcher that APUS wants to offers, as its website : Apus (Swift Bird) is among the fastest birds in the world, with a speed of 170kmph. They never rest, spends the whole life in air. Pan refused to divulge specific details of what might come next, but she did confirm that — having added notifications for WhatsApp and Facebook recently — alerts for others services will arrive, as well as on-device and in-app search functions. With its impressive userbase generated after less than four months, APUS is not focused on making money yet. Given the way that messaging apps like via games, opt-in marketing and stickers, it would make sense for APUS to go down a similar route, or perhaps monetize its marketplace — though Pan said potential business models are not even being thought about at this point. “Our goal is to build a platform but we want to make sure we provide a good experience, that’s our first goal. Our focus is still on quality and user needs,” she said, adding that regional tweaks may be made to the service based on feedback from users in particular locations. On the subject of user growth, Pan said that the company has spent money advertising its service online, and it is using social media to build up word of the launcher and APUS itself. Facebook is a particular focus and is regularly used to run giveaways on — which counts more than 650,000 fans — including, somewhat ironically, iPhones as prizes. That, she says, again highlights the desirability of the iPhone, and the company’s aim to get Android on a par with it. Perhaps the most interesting part of APUS is the fact that it is a Chinese firm that is seeing success overseas. Founded by Tao Li, who was formerly a VP with Chinese internet security/browser giant , it has focused on the international market from day one, Pan told me. The company believes that its experience watching China’s smartphone boom gives it an advantage for catering to emerging markets that are a little further behind the curve. “Chinese companies are good at mini-innovation and localizing,” Pan commented. “In many countries smartphone adoption hasn’t peaked yet, and we believe that Chinese companies can take advantage of that.” With more money than ever floating around China’s tech crowd — thanks to , and this year alone, and — it will be interesting to see if other entrepreneurs take Tao Li’s lead and use their experiences to start new, globally-focused companies. Certainly, many are in a better position to know and serve the needs of emerging markets than their peers in Silicon Valley. : The article has been updated to reflect that APUS says it has 30 million users, rather than 30 million downloads. |
Nintendo Slowly Modernizes Its Online Strategy | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | In a released last week, Nintendo publicly discussed its evolving digital strategy. The Japanese video game hardware and software developer has spent years playing catch-up with rivals Microsoft and Sony, and it was good to see the company acknowledge some of its shortcomings and show that it is looking to improve. In one section of the briefing, Nintendo showed that it has finally implemented many requests gamers have had for years. With Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U, the company has given consumers the ability to pre-order the game and download it before its official release, so that on launch day you don’t have to wait for 8 GBs to arrive over a cable or DSL connection. The company has also rolled out a system for automatically downloading games purchased through Nintendo of America’s site to a gamer’s console, as long as they can remember their Nintendo ID and password. The company also indicates that this feature will soon come to Amazon.com. There are still some rough patches left in Nintendo’s digital sales strategy that make the experience worse for consumers. While the new online purchase system is tied to your Nintendo account, those who experience significant hardware issues with their consoles can’t simply get it replaced and re-download their games on the new consoles. The rights to games on Nintendo’s eShop are attached to specific consoles, and to get them transferred you have to call Nintendo support. This applies to both the kid who destroyed her 2DS and to the college gamer finally upgrading from the Wii to the Wii U for the new Super Smash Bros. Nintendo also hasn’t done the best job of getting the word out about its recent improvements. While the company touts its convenience for customers in a briefing for investors, its site for recent Wii U exclusive Bayonetta 2 has a Buy Now button that brings up this option: That “how to purchase and download” button brings you to explaining that you can get Bayonetta 1 and 2 together on the Wii U’s eShop on the console, not the actual digital store on Nintendo’s site. Thanks? As more gamers shift to buying their games digitally, there’s also going to be a storage crunch on consoles. Even if you were to only buy Nintendo’s offerings on the Wii U, the 4-8 GBs you have to download for each game quickly fill up the 32 GBs of storage built into Wii Us sold today. It’d be awfully nice of Nintendo to release an update for the Wii U that bumps that number up to at least 64 GBs — after years of disappointment, I know better than to expect something like the 500 GB hard drive built into the Xbox One. But until Nintendo surprises us with the Wii Ui or 2DU or LUX or whatever terrible name they come up with for their spec bump release, customers (read: the parents of children who want to play Mario games) are stuck with buying and managing external storage for the Wii U or continuing to use discs that can be scratched, cracked, lost, or stolen. |
Is Mobile Gaming The New Core Gaming? | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | Let’s talk about perspective. People’s understanding of “the games industry” is usually much smaller than it actually is. They tend to think in terms of the platforms that they play as the heart of everything and then extrapolate outward. And the groups of people who do that tend to clump together, forming subcultures. But not all subcultures are created equal. Many a games journalist or YouTuber, for example, operates largely within a dichotomy that considers console and PC gaming as “core”. All else (Facebook, web, mobile) is considered casual. Indeed some segments (casino, sports, gasification) are considered to verge on evil. This mental model of the industry has fed its media and developers for a long time. Go to the pages of any major gaming site and you’ll see it in action. , to take a random example, splits the topline of its blog content along platform lines like “PS4”, “Wii U” and so on. These are also the sites that prop up E3 for the most part, acting as the big press organs to spread the gaming evangel. The “core” mental model has just been the tradition of how games have grown up. Since the year dot it’s been consoles and computers, each vying for attention at one time or another. It’s been self-identifying gamers, and a rich sub-culture has grown up around them. Video games, the narrative tells us, are taking over the world. Games are bigger than movies. Everyone’s a gamer. Maybe so, but if they are then that takeover is not happening from the 150m or so “core” gamers that have more or less been an incrementally growing bloc for the last 10 years. They love the narrative of being the masters of the media universe but they’re not really. Consider that Sony PS4 is crushing other next generation consoles. The gaming media is very excited by this news. In many ways gaming reporters have a long love affair with Sony and had been waiting for the company to come out of the madness of its PS3 days, and when it indicated that the fever had passed they rejoiced. And they continue to do so. In the gaming world this number is a vindication of the Tolkien-esque rise, fall and rise again. King Sony has returned to Gondor, and such and such. (But King Sony is losing money hand over fist to get there). And yet, as I pointed out on Twitter, 13.5m’s all well and good until you consider that Apple sold 10m iPhones in a weekend, and it sells between 12 and 14m iPads per quarter. Then you have Samsung selling frankly hilarious numbers of its devices and even Microsoft selling nearly a . That’s 3m or more machines, or nearly half the number of Xbox Ones that it’s sold to date. Now I know many core fans are rushing to type that just because people are buying phones and tablets does not make them gamers. That there may be millions more such machines out there selling every year, but the heart of the gaming culture is still with the core. This increasingly looks like an outright fiction. Mobile is set to outpace the console industry in terms of revenue in 2015 . Yes, you heard right. Tiny little app games that may or may not be free to play are set to eclipse mighty console in terms of dollars and cents. And moreover to grow a full 30% beyond that into 2017, which pretty much eats PC gaming too. When you consider the money involved this is pretty staggering news, but even more staggering is what it says about reach. Console and PC games are often $40-$60 a pop, still seeking that premium dollar and working to get high ARPU. Mobile games are diminutive by comparison, with a $5 price point considered a big deal, and the usual value being more like $2. For mobile to eclipse premium products so comprehensively means there are potentially as many mobile game players out there than on older platforms. Now can we really still claim that console and PC are the “core” while mobile is casual? Isn’t it time to rethink that language? Mobile isn’t slowing down. It’s not a temporary bubble from which all will eventually recover their sanity and return to old faithful. It’s already had several periods of excitement and stagnation, rejuvenation and exploitation. But people are still downloading apps like crazy anyway. Their appetite is permanent. Mobile, I’m willing to say, is now the core. Analogies to cinema and television abound. Perhaps core as the big budget gaming experience and mobile and the make-do TV that isn’t available when it’s around. But I don’t think that holds much water. In the cinema/TV model there is a common user that chooses between the two depending on mood. This is not the case in gaming because platform selection requires platform purchase. The difference is more like the people who like music versus the people who like high end music hardware. It’s a harder choice. The old “core” thus becomes the new “specialist”. Gaming gains a mainstream while its old subculture reinforces its position in an ever-narrowing landscape. That’s how it works. Now what’s left is for the more artistic side of mobile gaming development and publishing to step up creatively and – as I said last week – provide the HBO side to mobile culture. This shift and its further potential brings up many interesting questions for developers. One is whether mobile is quietly building an army of new-gamers (as it were), folks for whom the past associations with gaming are tangental. Another is whether we’ll start to see a proper media develop around mobile gaming. That’s kind of a weird question given where we are today, but again that’s largely a matter of perspective. We only think it’s strange because we don’t see it yet. But a third issue is whether mobile will be the bridge to permit the broadening of games. If I were a woman in games I’d really be asking whether I wanted to build on the older platforms any more given the demons that apparently live there (indeed as a man in games I’m asking the same question). Would I want to bother with all the old platforms and their conservative perspectives, or just aim for a fresh start? Does it really matter what the Steam crowd thinks versus what the iPhone or Android crowd might go for? As I said at the start, it’s about perspective. As the wanders around looking for the means to regenerate and finding none it reveals a hardened quality of the old core that is both unsavory and increasingly intolerant. It’s also smaller than it appears, demanding and expensive. As mobile becomes “the new core”, do “the new games” really need to put up with any of that crap any more? |
[Update] Bitcoin Brothers Aim To Disrupt Bitcoin Mining With New, More Powerful, Supercomputers | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | After over two years in stealth mode, the bitcoin mining supercomputer manufacturer, is launching its hosted bitcoin mining services, powered by what are better, stronger machines to make the mining of bitcoin more efficient. is the process by which a transactions are approved in the bitcoin ledger known as the blockchain and how new bitcoins are minted. For every successful verification of a block of bitcoin transactions the “miner” is rewarded with 25 bitcoin (currently worth about $8,100). The new services means that bitcoin miners don’t have to invest in their own hardware, and can instead mine using the latest and greatest (at least according to the company) in bitcoin mining technology. While the explanation is simple, the process of validating transactions has become increasingly complex as the blockchain grows. , margins are shrinking for miners, who have to buy costly computing devices purpose-built for mining, and . Founded by an ex-German military cryptologist Mark Welle and his brother Maik, the Berlin-based company is offering to sell mining services using its supercomputers that have processing capabilities of over 6 petahash (bitcoin mining is measured in petahashes, ). Financed in part by money the Welle brothers made as bitcoin miners in the technology’s early days, Bitcoin Brothers is working with TSMC to manufacture its proprietary 3D 16nm FinFET application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which the company designed itself. They’re basically, smaller, more powerful chips designed for very specific functions. And while there are a number of companies that are already active in cloud mining, Bitcoin Brothers assert that their machines are the fastest in the industry. The number of bitcoin equipment manufacturers has been steadily shrinking, with players like getting out of the market of selling hardware and others, like Butterfly Labs, by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. “We basically have a business model in different stages,” says Thomas Ackermann, the chief technology officer at Bitcoin Brothers. “The first stage is selling people services for bitcoin mining. People can rent portions of the machines — starting at gigahashes, terahashes up to petahashes.” Currently, the bitcoin network has the capacity to process roughly 250 petahashes, using equipment that Ackermann said was outmoded and ready to be upgraded. “Once we hit the market, these existing 250 petahashes will be turned off.” If the first phase of the company’s business plan is selling cloud mining services, the second is providing priority services for transactions, so that certain customers can get their transactions approved ahead of others in the blockchain. If a network can manage to control a large chunk of approvals, they can add additional fees to prioritize transactions, Ackermann says. In the future, the chief technology officer envisions selling its ASICs in 10nm format for mobile devices to Apple, LG, and Samsung to support NFC replacement in mobile devices to enable crypto authentication at registers. And finally, if the blockchain for the internet of things, then processing transactions explodes, and powerful mining technologies become even more valuable. Each of the company’s supercomputers contains 256,000 of its ASICs, a lower energy, more powerful chip and the banks of computers the company is building can scale up to a point where 1.5 exahash is contained on a single console. “To put our machines in perspective,” said Ackermann in a statement, “while SHA256 integer calculations are hard to compare to floating point operations, on the common LINPACK Rpeak and Rmax benchmarks each of our MSEMs outperform the worlds’ fastest supercomputers. If you compare hasher gates to cores, each MSEM has double the number of the 3.1 million cores in Tianhe-2, the No 1 on the PetaFLOP list: and comes at a fraction of the cost, the floor space and 1/20th of its 18 MegaWatt power draw. Our Bitcoin supercomputers with a quasi-opportunistic massively parallel computing model for job scheduling establish a new exascale class – well beyond FLOPS and MIPS.” Bitcoin Brothers aren’t the first company to tout a new innovation in processing power aiming to reduce mining costs. made similar claims earlier this year around its new chip technology. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the company, which was changing its name to CoinBau, claimed it had developed an energy-efficient, low-voltage chip that could reduce the energy needed to mine bitcoin by half. Called the Wolfblood Extreme Efficiency, the chip would require only 0.19 joules of energy for a gigahash, which is a mathematical equation of bitcoin mining computing power. The current standard is 0.376 joules per gigahash, according to the WSJ report. |
ThriveTracker Gamifies Mood Tracking With Real World Rewards | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | Depression plays tricks on your mind, even when you are well. I’ve dealt with episodes of major depressive disorder since I was teenager and one thing I’ve noticed is that when I’m depressed, I find it almost impossible to remember what being well feels like, which makes me feel trapped and hopeless. On the other hand, when I’ve recovered, I tend to forget many of the warning signs and symptoms of an episode. My friend, mental health advocate Esmé Wang, calls this phenomenon Keeping a journal or regularly logging in on a mood tracking app helps combat phase blindness, but I find committing to both of those things difficult, no matter how I am feeling. , a new app developed by Adrian Cunanan, who has bipolar disorder, wants to encourage people to keep tracking their mood with a points system that can earn them real world rewards like gift cards and MP3 downloads. ThriveTracker originally started out as a side project by startup ThriveStreams, which at first was focused on a mobile goal tracking app called . By March, however, ThriveStreams had run out of money and was “transitioning back to bootstrap mode,” says Cunanan. The company decided to focus on ThriveTracker instead of Uptimal and spent six months working on it before it was ready for release. “I asked myself what community I would like to serve and turned inwards to reflect on my own challenges with learning to manage bipolar disorder over the past decade. ThriveTracker is our first attempt to utilize technology to assist the over 20.9 million individuals affected by mood disorders and the mental health professionals that support them,” Cunanan said in an email. When asked how helped in the creation of ThriveTracker, Cunanan explained, “I had firsthand experience with the challenge of learning to manage the condition. I was able to empathize with my target user and use the creative and productive juices that normally accompany my manic phases in a sustainable way.” “I was solving a problem for myself. Every time I meet with my therapist, the first thing asked is ‘how was your week?’ in reference to my mood. I am lucky if I remember how my mood was yesterday. Paper mood journals are impossible to keep consistently. But I am always on my smartphone. So my team started there.” There are already several mood tracking apps on the market right now, including , , and , among many others. ThriveTracker wants to stand out by allowing users to earn points that they can collect and trade for real world rewards from , including product samples, gift cards and MP3 downloads. This is meant to motivate users to not only use the app regularly, but fill in all sections, which include “mood,” “sleep,” “self-care,” and a space for journaling. In the mood section, you use sliders to rate your overall mood, level of anxiety, and irritability. Sleep lets you track the amount of time you slept and the quality of your sleep. Self-care includes sections to track counseling, medication, meditation, and exercise. I think gamifying mood tracking is interesting, though I’m not sure how effective it will be for motivating users. I know mood tracking is an essential part of taking care of my mental health. Keeping a journal, on paper or in an app, can help me see if I’m at risk for descending into a depressive episode. But, as I mentioned before, it’s a lot easier said than done. When I’m doing okay, I just want to pretend that depression isn’t an issue for me, which means I tend to ignore all notifications from the three or four mood trackers I currently have on my iPhone. When I feel depression coming on, I’ll start using them in an attempt to ward it off, but once I am actually in the midst of an episode, I just don’t have the motivation to track my mood—in fact, I don’t even want to think about my feelings. The possibility of free gift cards won’t change that. For people who deal with the same lack of motivation when it comes to mood tracking, Cunanan says that ThriveTracker’s rewards program is just its first step toward solving that problem. Other upcoming features include “reminders to both engage the user on schedule and randomly,” as well as “Mood Forecasting to both utilize the rewards engine to encourage mood entry when data is trending downward.” One of the other key differences between ThriveTracker and other mood tracking apps is an upcoming feature that will give users the option of letting their therapists and psychiatrists see their data. The dashboard, which is currently in testing, could potentially alert a mental health practitioner when their patient’s data shows that they are at risk for either a depressive or manic episode. “Although options exist for patients to self-track key mood data, no solution is available for mental health practitioners to track this data for proactive treatment for bipolar disorder and depression. This can result in the need for more reactive treatment and higher costs,” said Cunanan. “ThriveTracker solves this problem by pairing a mood tracking iOS app for the patient with a web dashboard for mental health practitioners to monitor their patients’ key mood data.” He adds that giving mental health practitioners more access to mood data means that doctors and patients can potentially avoid the challenges and costs of emergency treatments or prevent crises that can lead to risk of suicide. Of course, this means a certain trade-off in privacy, but as someone who has experienced recurrent episodes of major depressive disorder since I was in my early teens, including ones that have impacted my ability to work or keep up with relationships, it’s one that I would seriously consider making. ThriveTracker is currently pre-funding and is exploring three monetization options, including a freemium model with in-app purchases for advanced features (Cunanan suggests $1 per month would be the price point); a subscription-based dashboard for mental health practictioners; and a mental wellness software-as-a-service for health insurance providers. |
So You Want To Fix The Housing Crisis | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | So in the country are all in the San Francisco Bay Area, with Palo Alto topping the list, according to from Lovely that came out last week. Part of this is cyclical. We don’t know where we are in the cycle or when it definitively turns. However, there are lots of structural forces at play that have accumulated over the last 40 years to get us where we are today including growth controls from back in the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of the tech industry as an economic powerhouse and fragmented governance that often pits the Bay Area’s 101 municipal governments against each other. . These forces will almost certainly persist into the next economic cycle. Unfortunately, there isn’t a startup or a piece of tech that’s going to solve the housing crisis, unless Oculus Rift is so good that we all decide to decamp to sparsely populated rural areas and “commute” to work in our virtual tees. (Hah, even in Palo Alto should cost $50,000.) Actually, no. After geography, the constraints to more housing are largely political. They will not get addressed unless there is a broad-based, regional movement of people who consistently turn out to vote in favor of inclusive, in-fill development and deep investment in mass transit. The reason the San Francisco city government won’t fix things that seem obvious like the for housing development, which leads to , is because it fears a backlash from the that blanket the city and can reliably turn people out to the polls. On the other hand, the tech industry, which has 56,000 people in San Francisco, doesn’t. If you need an example of how intense this is, over the summer, , decided that we should all vote on every single project over the existing height limits on the waterfront by passing a ballot initiative. It was that didn’t want to lose their views, and they put it through in one of the in city history. It means that on Pier 70, which will create up to 2,000 housing units and after collaborating with 10,000 community members and undergoing a three-year design process, has to go to ballot this week. The San Francisco Giants, which have their own plans for a lot next to AT&T Park are closely watching this election, and they’ve about building a few housing buildings. Any delays and the cost of running all these political marketing campaigns will get passed onto buyers. Another , where Facebook and most of the industry’s major venture capital firms are based. While it keeps the existing residential cap at 680 units of potential housing downtown, it that include residential apartments. (It’s worth noting that one of them is from Marc Andreessen’s father-in-law and real estate developer John Arrillaga.) Keep in mind that Menlo Park is simultaneously allowing Facebook to expand its campus there to support a total of 10 to 11,000 workers with a new Frank Gehry-designed complex. Facebook also . ( So what do you do? You need to vote on Tuesday. If you registered by the deadline already, good for you. If you haven’t, . The whole process literally takes two minutes. The deadline already passed, but you’ll be in for what will be a very fascinating San Francisco mayoral race next year. None of these issues are simple. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population will be urban by 2050 and the population in many American cities on both coasts have rebounded over the last three decades after hitting a trough around 1980. Every economically and culturally vibrant city both here and abroad faces stress to their existing infrastructure and housing stock amid population growth and widening income inequality. While I definitely have my own opinions, I encourage you to read a range of viewpoints from the left at , which sadly went out of print last month, to to the and beyond. Google near its Mountain View headquarters for years, but the city council has blocked this for years. Bafflingly, they approved zoning for in North Bayshore without any housing back in 2012. This is important because if cities in the South Bay, where Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo are based, don’t build enough housing to match the number of jobs these companies are creating, it contributes to this weird reverse commute where tech workers live in San Francisco but work in suburbs down south. For the first time in years, the in Mountain View toward a more pro-housing stance. Here are the candidates that favor building housing in North Bayshore: Here are the ones that oppose it: This is the key race to watch this week. While it’s not explicitly about housing, it will be a broad political test of the city’s rising anti-tech sentiment and a precursor to Mayor Ed Lee’s potential re-election bid next year. Chiu and Campos, who are both Harvard-educated lawyers named David who serve on the city’s legislative body as supervisors, are duking it out to represent the city in the State Assembly. If you are a tech worker, it probably wouldn’t be very logical to vote for Campos. He has sided against tech on the key votes of the last several years , which kept Twitter downtown and from moving to Brisbane or South San Francisco, and the pilot to manage tech commuter shuttles. It’s not that I don’t sympathize very deeply with the some of the constituencies Campos has positioned himself to advocate for or think that his efforts to or aren’t important. He plays to his base, doesn’t reach across the aisle and tends to antagonize tech workers. Actually, we invited him to speak at Disrupt, because we do want to have a conversation that covers a range of viewpoints and he declined. At the same time, as someone who cares very deeply the availability of housing, I find that the Airbnb and short-term rental legislation that Chiu presided over leaves a lot to be desired. Chiu has positioned himself as someone who has the wherewithal to get difficult legislation passed and staked a lot on this very politically risky effort to legalize and regulate short-term stays. Indeed, regulating Airbnb is a total rat’s nest in a city that has a long history of incredibly contentious land-use debates. Chiu’s legislation , but caps stays where the host isn’t present at 90 days per year, asks that platforms like Airbnb remit taxes on behalf of their hosts and guests and creates a registry of hosts. Campos has made a really big stink about making Airbnb pay $25 million in back-taxes or else the new regulation doesn’t get enacted. This is pure politics. Realistically, it would be a legal and logistical headache that might take months or years through the court system to figure out whether individual hosts or Airbnb should pay back-taxes. Meanwhile, the city would be forgoing $12 to 15 million per year in current transit occupancy tax revenue and Airbnb would continue to be the unregulated, unenforced and untracked black hole that it is today. Personally, I think the back-taxes are far less important than data. Unfortunately, under current market conditions, $25 million might pay for 50 permanently affordable housing units. The city could lose many more residential housing units than that if it doesn’t have a properly enforceable and trackable regulatory approach to short-term stays. If platforms like Airbnb were required to turn over aggregated, anonymized quarterly or monthly data that could indicate how many units might be permanently taken out of the market, we’d have faster visibility into whether the housing stock is being cannibalized. The planning department actually suggested regulation that would require more data sharing but Airbnb apparently argued that you’d have to . Chiu argues that with a public registry where hosts will have to self-report stays under penalty of perjury, the city will be able to create its own version of this data in about a year’s time. Supervisor Jane Kim and the mayor also successfully pushed for a private right of action so that a select number of longstanding housing non-profits can directly sue violators of the new regulation. At a broader level, I think that both political approaches to the city are flawed in one way or another. The more pro-development moderates under Mayor Ed Lee are great at attracting businesses and tech workers, but there isn’t a very convincing set of programs or policies for how we maintain socioeconomic mobility in the face of rising income equality. There are programs like the , which are good conceptually, but seem largely cosmetic. Meanwhile, the progressive left is good at tithing an existing, very organized mix of longtime, lower-income and more vulnerable residents along with wealthier, anti-development homeowners with lots of protections. But I don’t see a long-term vision for how you make the region accessible to the middle or lower-class for decades to come beyond vigorously protecting whoever happened to get here first. Proposition G is the so-called “anti-speculation” tax, that penalizes the sales of particular kinds of residential buildings if they’re flipped within less than five years. It’s very narrowly defined and excludes both owner-occupied homes and large residential buildings, so . It’s intended to stop a particular strategy where people will buy rent-controlled buildings filled with tenants, evict everyone, and then re-sell the now vacant property at a profit. Here’s some background. San Francisco city law is strongly influenced by a very organized tenants’ movement that both won and strengthened rent control over the past 30 years, while California state law is more heavily shaped by real estate interests. The intersection of the two creates some pretty strange and unfortunate incentives. If you want to understand how the city’s rental market behaves, a little less than half of the city’s housing stock . Under the city’s rent control ordinance, rent on these units can only rise as much as 60 percent of CPI, so these rents are declining in real economic terms. Meanwhile, about 10 percent or 37,000 units of the city’s housing stock are market-rate rentals where rents can be raised as much as a landlord wants with proper notice. Most incoming tech workers are competing for the market-rate units or whatever rent-controlled units re-circulate back online at the prevailing rates. Over the past four years, the city has but has only in the same time period. That’s caused the price differential between market-rate rents and whatever longstanding rent-controlled tenants are paying to spiral way out of control. That creates this huge financial incentive for landlords to evict rent-controlled tenants and turn units into tenancies in common, which are totally unregulated. The longest-standing tenants, who tend to be older, are the most at risk because their rents are the farthest below market-rate rents. There are some pretty heart-breaking stories like , who was evicted along with her husband and disabled daughter from their apartment of 34 years. Lee’s former unit was recently remodeled and , or five times as much as it was purchased for back in 2012. Proponents of Prop. G says it’s so tightly designed that it will surgically prevent the most worst speculative cases and that it was the last piece of legislation that revered supervisor Harvey Milk was working on before he was tragically assassinated in 1978. Opponents say that it doesn’t give property owners enough flexibility in case of an emergency, and , not the overall sales price. This is a largely toothless commitment to build 30,000 units over the next six years with one-third of them being affordable to low and moderate-income San Franciscans and half being accessible to middle-class residents. It was originally a measure that into the development process if the city fell below a goal of making one-third of units affordable, but it was later . There was concern that the city’s development process is already arduous with many projects taking two to four years just to get permitted. Adding another layer of requirements would tack on another year of costs and delays. One of the in modern American urbanism is that the country’s . Cities that build a lot of housing like Houston, in the energy sector but admittedly isn’t ringed by ocean like San Francisco, offer the middle-class many more chances for homeownership than the Bay Area does. Houston than all of California throughout parts of this year. Meanwhile, San Francisco’s current approach to building affordable housing consists of making development so deliberative and politically unpredictable that it takes several years to entitle anything and just to build a single housing unit. Then housing activists go and complain that the 1,000 or 2,000 units that make it through this gauntlet every year are all “luxury.” Then these units get effectively taxed and made more expensive through an inclusionary housing requirement that then subsidizes a small number of units for lower-income residents. While it is really important to retain a socioeconomically diverse city, the current method doesn’t really produce a lot of housing for anyone. Inclusionary zoning is the method both we and because the federal and state sources of funding for affordable housing have all but disappeared over the last several years. To realistically build even a few thousand permanently affordable units, the amount of subsidies you’d need would get into the billion-dollar range. We haven’t figured out where any of this money will come from. Anyway, this measure is largely symbolic. It feels good, but doesn’t do anything. Pier 70 is into a mixed-use project with up to 2,000 housing units and 600 affordable ones. It preserves a longtime artist’s haunt called the and rehabilitates a number of historic buildings on the pier. The project, which has undergone a three-year design process, has widespread support across the political spectrum from SPUR to the Sierra Club. The project has to undergo an individual citywide vote because of Proposition B, which passed over the summer and requires that any development on the waterfront that exceeds existing height limits be tested on the ballot. Another candidate that’s received widespread support across the political spectrum is Nicholas Josefowitz, who is running for one of the two BART board seats representing San Francisco. He’s James Fang, who comes from a politically powerful family in San Francisco and . While he’s raised campaign money from a number of tech industry notables, Josefowitz has also racked up endorsements from everyone from Tom Radulovich, who holds the city’s other BART Board seat to almost all of the city supervisors. In conversations that I’ve had with him, he’d would like to build housing on BART’s land alongside its 44 transit stops, which could be a key way of building a lot more affordable housing that could support middle-class or lower-income Bay Area residents even if those units aren’t right inside San Francisco. As for all-night BART? That’s more complicated as the Transbay Tube doesn’t have redundancy built into it. That would realistically take a multi-billion dollar, multi-year (or even multi-decade effort) to upgrade. Oakland is the major spillover community for people who are displaced or priced out of San Francisco and into next given the current lack of commercial office space both here in the city and down on the peninsula in the popular cities like Palo Alto. Market rate rents for office space in San Francisco are close to where they were during the dot-com bubble and there are signs that the . Both front-runners Libby Schaaf and Rebecca Kaplan would like to entice tech companies to take some of the vacant Class B office space throughout Oakland’s downtown core, and both support building a substantial amount of housing. The consistent feedback I hear from the Oakland business community echoes what the , and Senator Barbara Boxer have already endorsed in Schaaf. Menlo Park, home to the venture capital firms of Sand Hill Road and Facebook, that will cap new office developments at a maximum of 100,000 square feet, and leave residential caps unchanged. Conceptually, I think that slowing the pace on office space growth to allow housing to catch up is not a bad idea. Menlo Park is allowing Facebook to build a campus that will house north of 10,000 workers and I don’t see a very clear plan for where these employees will get housed beyond putting additional stress on San Francisco or leaning on Redwood City, which is fairly pro-development. However, this that could make the city’s pretty dead downtown area more attractive to tech workers. It’s also “ballot box planning,” to design an attractive urban space near the city’s Caltrain station. Palo Alto, the city that originally gave rise to Silicon Valley and plays home to Stanford University, astoundingly doesn’t seem to think that it has a housing problem. It’s mired in this very old debate even as the median home price and the rents are . If you follow the city council debates there, there’s almost universal . The last year are also all running for city council. The housing shortage there is so bad that over the summer asking for more affordable housing. Then this and held up by a couple of poles sold for $1.8 million to an investor group a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, one of the city’s top real estate agents, Ken DeLeon, who gives tours to foreign Chinese real estate buyers across Silicon Valley’s toniest neighborhoods in a Mercedes bus, will go to overseas Chinese. On the office space side, the city . With very little capacity and Palantir consuming what is available on the market, prices per square foot can , which is actually about $40 higher than what you’ll find in SOMA. While there’s not too clear a recommendation I can give here, there is a new group forming that is advocating for more housing called that includes a mix of older and younger residents. Here’s about where various candidates stand on housing. In conversations over the summer before she , VMWare lawyer Kate Vershov Downing told me, “I do like living here. I don’t want to leave. There are these undertones that young people and tech workers are transient. But the reality is we don’t want to go. We’re leaving Palo Alto because there’s nowhere to live.” More broadly speaking, Menlo Park and Palo Alto’s slow growth policies are irresponsible from a regional and racial justice perspective. Because both cities are not building housing, they’re leaving adjacent East Palo Alto, Silicon Valley’s last pocket of affordable housing and a historically black and Latino community, incredibly vulnerable to gentrification. East Palo Alto is a 2.8 square mile piece of land that sits between Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and the emerging Facebook campus. Because Palo Alto and Menlo Park’s median home prices in the $2 million range are unaffordable to most post-IPO Facebook employees, that’s creating pressures for people to move into East Palo Alto, where the median home price is $500,000 and rents are significantly lower. The East Palo Alto community was formed back in the 1950s when African-Americans moving to California as part of the were shunned from housing in the rest of what would become Silicon Valley. Through exclusionary land-use policy, African-Americans were basically left out of some of the most striking American wealth, technological and cultural creation of the last 30 to 40 years, which was happening just miles away at Stanford University and in the heart of Silicon Valley. At the dawn of the commercial Internet in the early 1990s, East Palo Alto was dubbed the of the U.S.A., as a younger generation of blacks and Latinos who were largely left out of economic and job opportunities in Silicon Valley fell prey to drug and gang violence. The community has since recovered and thrived over the past decade. However, without a concerted regional effort that includes housing development in Menlo Park and Palo Alto, this community may get completely erased or gentrified out. This mirrors what’s happening in the rest of the Bay Area as wealthier primarily white and Asian suburbs refuse to build a commensurate amount of housing to match local population and job growth, creating pressures for the region’s historically black, Latino and vulnerable neighborhoods to face displacement. Indeed, the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas |
How We See Google Glass Around The World | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | is as common as a Tesla motoring down the 101 here in Silicon Valley, but it’s a novelty only read about through media outlets in most of the rest of the world. Sophia Dominiguez knew that novelty was wearing off fast in our city by the Bay, so the 22-year-old recent NYU grad says she decided to take Glass where most people had never had a chance to see it up close – the rest of the world. Dominiguez recently spent five weeks wearing the futuristic eyewear non-stop while traveling to five different countries and eight cities across the globe, gathering the reactions of everyone she met from Spain to Mumbai as they tried Google Glass on for themselves for the first time. In Berlin Dominiguez says people were way more concerned about privacy; in Mumbai they offered to build apps for the technology. In the UK Dominiguez tells me the people just couldn’t be bothered. In Paris, her unique eyewear gave her instant celebrity access. Some people had never seen the contraption and had to ask her what it was. Dominiguez, who was not sponsored by Google to do this but simply decided to find out what people all over the world thought of Glass out of curiosity, used the device to translate conversations, take pictures, and film footage of people’s reactions. She then wrapped her experiences into a short documentary for the New York International Film Festival and the , an event that encourages female talent and leadership in San Francisco. You can find out more about Dominiguez project and read her travel blog on |
Thoughtful.org Is Now A Crowdfunding Platform For Medical Costs And Emergencies | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | As part of the founding team at , Derek Rey helped build one of the first businesses focused on social media advertising. Now he’s doing something pretty different — his company recently relaunched as a crowdfunding platform for medical, memorial, and emergency costs. We wrote about the site two years ago, when it was — kind of like Adly, but with a focus on social good. Rey told me via email that the previous version of the site “had some success” (he pointed specifically to ), “but the dent we hoped to make in the universe was no where close to what we had hoped.” During that time, Rey also lost his mother to cancer. That, he said, made the shift in direction “obvious,” because he’d “lived the cancer journey.” He added: It’s a journey that exhausts all resources, as in the case for my family, and we had good health insurance and lived relatively close to our hospital in San Francisco. Meeting people from out of state without a caregiver or family member with them, or driving themselves to chemotherapy, or the people who were not seeking treatment because they did not have health insurance, or adequate health [insurance] … Those are the people that made the shift in direction obvious. I hope they use the site. Other crowdfunding platforms have also been used to fund medical fees, but as far as I know, Thoughtful.org is the only one that’s really focused on this area. That focus is important, Rey argued, because “when you share your story, you don’t want it to appear next to just anything (i.e. the go fund anything crowdfunding sites for a business, bachelor party, dream vacation, etc).” [ A couple of readers have pointed me to , which is also a medical crowdfunding site.] Plus, Thoughtful doesn’t charge any fees, instead asking donors to include an “optional gift” in addition to their payments. And if you’re raising money on the site, you don’t need to reach your funding goal in order collect the donations. To illustrate the kind of person he’s hoping to support with Thoughtful, Rey pointed me to , who has stage four pancreatic cancer, is facing treatment costs of $900 a day, and has currently raised $2,460 out of a $15,000 goal. It’s certainly a powerful idea, but I was a little concerned about fraud — I can think of at least one person who’s abused the trust of friends by feigning illness and collecting donations. When I asked about this possibility, Rey told me that people are asked to verify that everything in their campaign is true through a “declaration of facts,” and he said that Thoughtful conducts phone interviews before campaigns are approved. None of that, I suppose, is completely foolproof, but it should help weed out the obvious scams. Here’s a video with more of the company’s story. [vimeo 106323300 w=500 h=281] |
Defakto Detail Struktur Review: A Watch Designed With Design In Mind | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | German watchmaker that creates the cases for brands with more recognition and history, but which focuses on classic, modern designs for its own imprint. The case shapes themselves are largely traditional and without flourish, with smaller diameter faces that look good on most wrist sizes. Defakto’s watch faces are exercises in minimalism, but with enough detail put into the smaller indices that they still manage to convey the vibe of finely tuned avionics instrumentation. The new represents the brand’s design tradition well, but also adds in a small second hand for a little more mathematical complexity on the still simple front face. The Detail Struktur is one of Defakto’s newer explorations of quartz watches, after watchmaker Raphael Ickler began his brand with the automatic Eins one-handed watch, and followed up that stunning debut with the Akkord, a two-handed affair that still had mechanical guts. The use of a quartz movement means the Detail line (which include an original one-hand watch and this new three-hand version) is less costly than the rest (€255.00 or $320 U.S.) and has a much thinner case. The case has a 40mm diameter, too, making it ideal for even slim wrists, but true watch fans might be left wishing it came in a version with a Swiss ETA automatic movement like either the Eins or the Akkord. [gallery ids="1077879,1077880,1077881,1077882,1077883,1077884,1077885,1077886"] The Detail Struktur is a clear winner when it comes to looks, however. The watch is available in a number of different color combinations, with contrasting in-set small second hands in either black or white, and with silver and PVD-coated black case options. All combinations look excellent, in my opinion, though the review unit’s white-on-white with black case and band is a definite favourite. The black indicator hands and simple, unnumbered hour and minute indices are both functionally effective and wonderfully stark, and Defakto’s tasteful, small brand indicator actually adds to the overall appeal of the face, thanks to its lovely typeface. Defakto’s leather calfskin band is also equally attractive, and despite its basic design it manages to also retain small signature elements that mean you’ll know it’s a Defakto band when you see it up close. The clasp features a matte silver finish, and the brand imprint once again, and it’s perfect compliment to the watch itself, meaning this isn’t a case where you’ll get the watch and want to ditch the band for something aftermarket right away. While the brand built its early success on classic, relatively affordable automatic pieces, the Struktur Detail takes everything good about Defakto’s watches and puts those in a package and at a price suitable for a much broader audience of watch buyer, which extends beyond the collector to those who simply appreciate good design, and who might otherwise look at something from Uniform Wares, or Braun’s resuscitated watch lineup. The small second hand also should appeal to those looking for more accuracy than that found in just the one- or two-handed previous designs Defakto offers. All told, it’s a beautiful watch, and one that will get plenty of attention without having to scream for it. |
Fundraising Acceleration Is The New VC Investment Thesis | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | There was a quite a jolt on Friday from the news that Slack, a company whose eponymous enterprise communications platform was , from KPCB and Google Ventures. Even more eye-popping was the valuation: $1.12 billion. Although Slack pivoted from an earlier incarnation as a games company called Tiny Speck, such a growth in valuation in just the first 8 months of a new product’s existence is almost completely unheard of in the annals of venture capital. This is even more true in the lethargic enterprise space, where there is significantly more friction in adoption and sales than in the consumer market. What might look like a frothy bubble though, is in fact a much more fundamental change in the way venture capitalists perceive investments. These fundraising accelerations are here to stay, and represent a far more nuanced view of startup performance than we have ever seen before from VCs. VCs have always known that the big returns are made from the largest exits. What the industry has slowly accepted over the past decade is that the biggest winners win by staggering amounts compared to their competitors. What used to be perceived as a 5x or 10x gap in valuation between the winner and a runner-up is now more widely seen as between 100x or even possibly 1000x. For every 100 startups that exit above $100 million, only one of them will reach into the billions of dollars of capital. Facebook’s chief competition during its rise was from companies like MySpace, which are almost non-existent today. The person who most popularized this notion of investing was Marc Andreessen (who ironically also happens to be one of the earlier investors in Slack), as well as Peter Thiel, whose experience with Facebook’s growth encouraged his investment thesis for Founders Fund. The essential point is that if there are only a handful of startups a year where the vast majority of the returns go, then the only sensible investment strategy is to get into those startups and ignore the middling winners. This philosophy leads to the current investment strategy that I call fundraising acceleration. If price sensitivity on these top winners makes little sense, then we should be willing to project ahead of a company’s growth and buy early. We might value the equity of a company 12 months early, meaning that we would invest as if they had already secured the growth of the coming year. Maybe we are even willing to accelerate our price by 24 or 36 months. This absolute laser focus on the winners has led to the current data revolution in venture investing, where firms hire teams to scour the web for signs of startups breaking out, all in the hope of catching the next winner before any other firm realizes what is happening. We can see this new approach right in Slack’s own numbers. The company told TechCrunch that it is currently generating sales above $1 million per month, or (and I know VC math is complicated) about $12 million per year in run rate. Since the company is valued at $1.12B, that means that its revenue multiple is about 93x. In general, SAAS companies have run rates around 8–12x on the public markets, and possibly a bit higher multiple in private rounds. To put it another way, if Slack had the same annual revenues as LinkedIn at $1.5 billion in 2013, it would be valued at almost $140 billion and become one of the most valuable technology companies in the world. Compare this to Yammer, which was founded in mid–2008 and sold to Microsoft just a little under four years later. It raised $142 million in venture capital , and sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion. That means that in less than a year, Slack has raised more money and has a higher valuation than its immediate market predecessor. Some might call this a bubble, but Slack is literally the embodiment of the fundraising acceleration thesis. The company’s sales growth is incredible – achieving a $12 million run rate in the first year of the company’s product launch is among the fastest growth rates seen for a SAAS startup. Given the investors in the syndicate, it is clear that many have started to take this fundraising acceleration to heart. However, as the competition for these identified early winners becomes more keen, the valuations of these companies skyrocket. All of these investors are sophisticated and can see the same data, and when growth metrics are this good, everyone wants to get a piece. This is great news for some founders. Founders with high growth companies can now command a growth premium that gives them more resources earlier in the company’s life than before, without losing as much equity. That means startups that can find growth extremely early are able to build even more advantages over their competitors. The flip side of course is that founders who struggle to find growth early on may find raising funds even harder than before. Can you get 100 million users in the consumer world within three years? For enterprise startups, can you get $10 million in yearly revenue within the first 24 months of launching a company? As VCs seek the top 10 winners and recalibrate their expectations to the growth of companies like Slack or Snapchat in the consumer market, the bar is rising quite quickly. A few percentage points difference in growth can radically change the outcome of a fundraise process. And even for those startups that do hit that peak level of growth, there are still the very challenging scaling issues of building a business. Slack may be led by Stewart Butterfield, a highly-experienced entrepreneur, but he still has to recruit in an incredibly competitive labor market. With the company’s valuation so high already, he no longer has the promise of massive equity paydays to easily entice prospective new employees. How quickly can hiring scale with user growth? Those challenges for founders are nothing compared to the real challenge for VCs, who must show a return on these accelerated deals. As valuations grow, the multiples on investment that VCs can earn on the biggest winners is rapidly declining. If that happens consistently and VCs can also identify the winners with enough accuracy, much of the returns in the industry could be flushed out through competition. And we are still early for judging the accuracies of these large bets. While data has certainly improved the quality of VC decision-making over the last few years, we still have a few years to go before we can really see the results of this new investment thesis. Fundraising acceleration is the new modus operandi for top VC firms in Silicon Valley. So far, it has been carefully executed, generally targeting startups with strong growth potential. It’s not a bubble, and it is certainly not crazy. For founders who can take advantage of that early focus on success, the sky is the limit. |
null | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 5 | null |
This Device Could Make It Easier To Find Your Veins | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | Scientists have discovered a way to find your veins before poking around half a dozen times to find the spot. Now the is using the near infrared light device that locates blood to study whether being able to locate hard to find veins will result in reduced anxiety and thus make it more likely these types of donors will come back and donate again. The Blood Service says it will test 300 first timers and 600 returning blood donors between ages 18-30 on different devices from two separate Australian providers. The hope is that if this works on younger donors they will become lifelong contributors to the Red Cross. The vein visualization device works by waving a near infrared light source over naturally deoxygenated hemoglobin in the body. The deoxygenated hemoglobin absorbs that light and your veins show up in glowing green. The machines should be safe unless you stare directly at them (so don’t do that). They can also be adjusted for individual differences. Here’s a little more about how the technology works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlsohMj_IVA |
Building A Better Version Of Capitalism Is A Massive Startup Opportunity | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | Why, on a philosophical level, has Facebook been so staggeringly successful? A startup that swelled into a multi billion dollar revenue generating business in a relatively short span of years, one which every month? According to writer and philosopher the company’s success can be explained by the fact it tapped into a genuine human need that was being overlooked and underserved by the rest of the business community: the desire to have better relationships. Whether Facebook is actually serving that need is a whole other question, but the appetite it taps into is undeniable. And de Botton argues that other core human needs continue to be drastically underserved by the modern business community — providing a fertile opportunity for startups to fashion and forge businesses that are successful exactly because they serve the goal of increasing our wellbeing. He was making the comments in a last week, at London’s — beginning with the premise that we need a better, more virtuous version of capitalism. Not that capitalism itself is broken, with de Botton professing himself a capitalist with caveats, but that the current version is misguided and misdirected — with businesses all too often created to fix problems that are, as he put it, “nonsense” or “bullshit”. Rather than addressing areas of genuine human psychological need. No one in a developed economy can argue that selling bullshit is going to increase the sum total of human happiness. Not even in a mercenary sense — because, as de Botton pointed out, after a certain income threshold, rising wealth is not a psychological accelerator to happiness. “How are we going to go about creating a better version of business — a better version of capitalism?” he began, dubbing this “one of the most pressing issues of our time” given its contribution to social unrest and human unhappiness. “Capitalism has taken a real bashing over the last few years, is in deep trouble as a concept, assailed from all sides. Where we’re aiming to get to is a good version of business, a good better version of capitalism. “We’ve got to try and make headway because if we don’t make headway the mob will. We live in a world that’s dominated by social media. By instantaneous, mob, collective reactions to things and unless businesses, and people involved in business understand a little bit more about what they’re doing, and what they should be doing, and what they should be defending, and what they should be changing the system will be in trouble.” (Entrepreneur Nick Hanauer expressed similar sentiments about the need to address capitalism’s rising inequalities in a recent article for Politico, called .) “Many economists have noted in the past few years ever since Richard Layard’s landmark studies on happiness, we have recognized that increases in happiness do not directly follow from increases in national income. That a country can get ever richer and people are not happier. The magic figure is $36,000, above $36,000 increases in income do not translate very easily into any increases in happiness,” he added. de Botton went on to define human need as the core things that are elemental to our psychological wellbeing. And which are absolutely distinct from “vain desires” — aka passing fancies or things we wish for “in an idle way”. Things which we are all too often induced to wish for by the snake oil of the advertising industry.
“I think it is an absolutely fundamental basic philosophical distinction — that distinction between needs and desires. So needs are the things you really need, and desires are the things you think you need but in fact you don’t really, you only wish for them in an idle way,” said de Botton. He referred to the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, saying his recipe for human happiness amounted to an individual being able to gain three core things: community/friendship, the chance to be independent, and the chance to think continuously about an inner life in order to reduce personal anxiety. “Those who oppose business, those who say businesses corrupt, they latch onto something absolutely key. They will say that businesses are not satisfying our real needs, they are merely exciting us to vain desires. We don’t really need to go gambling, we don’t really need to go bowling, we don’t really need to eat greasy, unhealthy food, but we can be excited to do so with certain inducements and therefore business is evil; business it not virtuous because it is not properly satisfying people’s needs,” he said. “And because this is undoubtedly true that some organizations are satisfying vain needs and not real needs, this has cast a cloud over all business and it’s slightly muddled the perception of everyone working within capitalism.” But — crucially — it does not have to be this way, argued de Botton. And Facebook’s success in building a business that at least started out trying to address a real human need shows the huge untapped potential for startups that opt to “run a virtuous business” by seeking to fix genuine human problems. What then is the recipe for following in Facebook’s footsteps and building a business along de Botton’s more virtuous, capitalist lines? “You just have to start with human need. What is it that really makes people happy?” he said, adding that an area of particular interest for him is relationships. “How we relate to others. The single greatest contributor to people’s wellbeing is what sort of relationships are they in. And we are hopeless at relationships.” He cited statistics that half of marriages fail, and that not only that but of the half of couples that stay together 40 per cent have thought of leaving their partner more than one in the previous month. “We need to think about this area. It should be a major area of the economy. It should be a bigger area of the economy than running shoes,” argued de Botton. “Think of , at the bottom you’ve got material needs, as you climb up towards self actualization, meaning, friendship, connection etc. I would simply say that more of the economy needs to further up Maslow’s pyramid. I think that’s happening anyway — the fact that Facebook’s now one of the most important companies in the world. I don’t think it’s doing it that well, but it’s further up the tree than an oil company. It’s further up the pyramid of needs. “And I think this is going to be the direction as neuroscience makes advances, as we enter into a more psychological century, and as we realize that we’re still only at the beginning of capitalism. It looks like we’ve got everything. It looks like Apple’s invented every gadget but there’s so much that still needs to be done, the economy still has so much to grow for.” One area de Botton singled out as ripe for far more better businesses to be created is matching human talents to jobs. A mismatch in our skills and careers is the cause of much modern misery, he argued, saying far more innovation is needed here. “Most of us are still trapped in the cage that was chosen for us by our 17-year-old selves and we can’t get out of it because we are still at the dawn of really trying to understand how to match people with jobs which properly fit their talents,” he said. “One resource we waste inordinate amounts of all the time is human talent. We are still not matching talent properly.” Talking generally about opportunities that entrepreneurs can capitalize on within a more virtuous model of capitalism, de Botton suggested even something as basic as making a list of things that make you unhappy could offer the germ of a business idea. “There is a back to basics view that suggests that capitalism is sort of running out of steam because we’ve got everything that we need… I think that’s completely wrong. The world economy will only, as it were, have done its job when everything is perfect. So long as you walk down the road and one paving stone is slightly misaligned, so long as you’re look at a building and one tile is a little bit out of place, so long as there’s something you want and no one is quite selling it to you, so long as there’s an area of your life that’s a little bit unhappy and someone is not selling you a service to fix it the economy is not large enough, there is still unemployment that has no proper basis. “In other words there is a lot of need out there that is not yet being satisfied. I think we should and can have full employment if we focus on allocating our resources properly.” Unemployment is a consequence of “the wrong perception of what should be commercialized”, he argued, adding: “We haven’t begun to scratch the surface of human unhappiness. Every bit of human unhappiness is a business waiting to be born. Some people say what business should I do, what business should I go into? And I always say are you unhappy about anything in your life? Make a list of everything you’re unhappy about — from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, in an average day. Everything you write down is a business. “There are so many needs which we haven’t yet learned to satisfy and a full economy will be one which properly delivers happiness across so many areas. At the moment we are just scratching the surface. We have managed to satisfy people’s basic material needs… but we’re unhappy, we’re squabbling, we’re looking for meaning. These are all businesses waiting to be born. Waiting for the ingenuity of entrepreneurs to harness human unhappiness and connect it up to profit. “It’s only been done in a relatively narrow range of human activities. Running shoes, got lots of those. Pizzas, got lots of those. One of the largest businesses in the world should be psychotherapy. Given the contribution that psychotherapy can make it should be worth a hundred times more than BMW,” he added.
“Until Facebook came along we didn’t know how lonely we were. Or how much we wanted to connect with other people. We didn’t even know it was a need, we didn’t know it was a business. That need to send people messages all the time about more or less nothing — we didn’t know that was a need. That’s what businesses do, they latch on to our needs and there is an enormous area of opportunity waiting to be discovered.” In the talk de Botton also discussed philosopher and economist Adam Smith’s idea of the need to incentivize the very wealthy — the richest entrepreneurs who have already amassed their fortunes — to make more socially beneficial contributions. The problem, he argued, boils down to society using the shorthand of wealth to “keep score” on individual worth, which encourages the super rich to amass more wealth instead of looking for ways to use that wealth to help society at large. “We don’t honor people who do the right thing enough… The incentive structure is not there. There’s occasional reward but there is no reliable system of reward pegged to doing good in the world. And that’s why more people don’t do good. Because it’s literally irrational,” argued de Botton. “We need to understand human vanity. We need to understand the mechanisms by which love, respect, honor can be aligned with socially beneficial goals. It absolutely isn’t at the moment.” “We’ve got a very dangerous value system which rewards things it shouldn’t be rewarding,” he added. “But the useful thing is the rich don’t want money they want love. Therefore a good society takes that and does very interesting things with it.” |
Be Smarter Than That, Uber Users | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | Uber surprised a 26-year-old Baltimore woman with a spooky Halloween bill that hit $326 on a routine ride, resulting in her inability to pay her rent and general Internet outrage. Gabrielle Wathen , saying that she went out for her 26th birthday on the night of Halloween and, after taking an Uber an approximately 22-minute ride home around 3am, was charged $326. This means she can’t pay her $450 rent, and so she hit the crowd-funding site to ask for help. She raised upwards of $500 by using , which led to the story getting picked up by the media. To be clear, I’m unimpressed by this Gabrielle Wathen in every way except that she managed to pull off what is clearly a con catalyzed by irresponsibility. , Uber has made its surge pricing unmistakably clear within the app. In fact, you have to key in the exact amount by which your fare will be multiplied in order to even request an Uber during a surge pricing time. Sure, it might be surgier than you expect. 2.5x like a pretty small number, but it takes your $20 charge to $50. So on holidays, when the multiplier is around 7x or 8x in most cities, a 20-minute ride could jump to a $300 fare. I’m not necessarily defending Uber altogether. Though the company’s dynamic pricing has been through simple supply-and-demand charts and , there is some question over whether or not those huge spikes (especially when it ) are truly where they should be to make sure the company can fulfill requests. Still, this particular case seems more like an irresponsible girl, who was supposedly tricked by Uber, then turning around and using a sharing economy herself to fix her mistake. Here’s what she had to say on the : Last night was Halloween. Great time. Today is my 26th birthday. Not so great time. I live in Baltimore and went out with my friends to celebrate my birthday at midnight. When 3 AM rolled around, I suggested we take an Uber home to avoid drunk driving (#responsibility/#MADD). I live 22 minutes , tops, from the party I was leaving. When I awoke this morning, I heard a friend talking about how outrageous Uber rates were the night before (9x original rate). I checked my bank account when, unbeknowst to me, I see a charge for $362. Not only is it my 26th birthday, it is rent day. My rent is $450 and I can no longer pay it today due to this completely outrageous charge. I have had little to no luck in disputing this transaction. I waitress at two restaurants and freelance for a City Paper. I worked incredibly hard this week to be able to enjoy my birthday this weekend. This misunderstanding has cost me 80% of the funds I have to my name (embarrassingly so) and I spent a good two hours of my birthday crying over it.
I feel taken advantage of and cheated by the Uber name. $367 for a 20 minute ride should never be justified, even on Halloween. Please donate even just $1 if you think this is utter and complete bullshit and also hilarious and very, very depressing at the same time. Thanks for the ride, Muhammed. Although it’s hard to defend a company that gouges you on holidays, I think Gabrielle is the one who took us for a ride. |
Google’s Copresence Looks Like A Cross-Platform AirDrop | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 2 | Google has a new service in the works that could allow users of Android devices to share media with others nearby, even if those users are rocking iOS devices like iPhone and iPads instead of gadgets running Google’s mobile OS. The so-called Copresence feature, revealed by an source digging around in the latest Google Play Services APK, would allow devices to use location information or Bluetooth to authenticate based on proximity, without requiring contact list approval as does Android Beam. The Copresence feature would then share information using either Wi-Fi or Wi-Fi direct to actually shunt info back and forth, and would enable the sharing of maps, music, photos, websites and more, and would likely sport a strong integration with its Hangouts chat application, based on the graphics uncovered in the Services APK. It would make a lot of sense to see this housed in the Hangouts app itself, too, but there’s also an API for Chrome that’s been revealed previously, and Google has a broad patent, so this, like the Cast function for Chromecast, could be something that we see made available to developers to include in their own software on an app-by-app basis. [gallery ids="1077856,1077857,1077855,1077854,1077853"] Apple’s AirDrop on iOS allows for sharing between iOS devices that are near one another, across networks and with the option of sharing beyond your address book, but it doesn’t allow for sharing between ecosystems. The iOS 8 update and Yosemite mean that it can now shuttle things between mobile and desktop, but you still have to be an Apple device user to partake. Google’s Copresence feature would apparently go beyond that limitation, in the same way that its Chromecast abilities extend to the iOS ecosystem, while AirPlay remains an Apple-only affair. According to Android Police, Google Copresence will debut sometime in “the coming weeks,” so hopefully we don’t have to wait long to get our hands on what looks like a very useful feature. With the release of Google’s next-gen mobile OS Android 5.0 Lollipop just around the corner, it sounds like a good time for Copresence to make its debut. |
Nintendo 3DS Finally Hacked After 3 Years On The Shelves | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKjuy3-z054&w=854&h=510] It’s been well over 3 years since the Nintendo 3DS hit the shelves — and in that time, the device has proven itself remarkably resistant to hacking and modification. Until now. This evening, a hacker going by Smealum released an exploit that seems to allow 3DS owners to run unauthorized code — or “homebrew”, as it’s known — on their devices. Perhaps the most interesting part of the whole story: the exploit relies on a bug in a QR code reader built into a previously almost unheard of game called . A week ago, the easiest place to find was in your local game shop’s bargain bin. After hackers disclosed the name of the game involved with the hack, however, prices skyrocketed. Whereas a used copy may have cost you under a buck on Amazon a week ago, copies are now going for $40-70. It’s no sealed-in-box copy of Chrono Trigger (or, better yet, ), but that’s some pretty insane overnight inflation. Still wondering what exactly “homebrew” is? Think of it sort of like jailbreaking an iPhone. Nintendo likes to keep a pretty tight hold on what can run on their console — this opens the door to things they probably wouldn’t approve of. Things like emulators, one-off indie games, etc. What it allow for (or at least, isn’t meant for) is piracy. These “homebrew” hacks are often custom tailored to not run bootleg copies of retail games — though, more often than not, the pirates find a way. Given that Nintendo can flash the 3DS over the air, it’s likely that the company will move to patch this up pretty quickly. The video above demonstrates the exploit in action — but if you’re more interested in getting it up and running yourself on your 3DS, you can . Be warned: as is par for the course with things like this, you’re moving forward at your own risk. At the very least, you’re almost certainly voiding any warranty on your device. |
Singapore Will Introduce New Regulations For Taxi Booking Apps In 2015 | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Singapore will next year introduce new regulations to manage the numerous taxi-booking app services that are available in the country. The country’s Land Transport Authority (LTA) today a framework to “safeguard commuter safety and interests” in response to the rapid rise of apps like Uber, Hailo, GrabTaxi and Rocket Internet-backed Easy Taxi. The organization expects the regulations to be effective within the first half of next year. Singapore may be a relatively small country with a population of around five million, but there are nearly 30,000 registered taxi cabs and car ownership is expensive. In a recent interview, Hailo’s Ron Zeghibe told TechCrunch that it was “pretty clear” that taxi apps have taken off in the country. The proposed framework isn’t likely to cause much chaos for these companies. They will be required to register with the TLA, and provide the cost of fares upfront, which they already do. They must also offer “basic” customer support services, and all drivers should hold Taxi Driver’s Vocational Licences. That’s another thing each company already adheres to, even drivers of UberX — the ride-sharing service — . One clause may be problematic for GrabTaxi and Easy Taxi, however, and that’s a proposal that passengers should not have to disclose their intended destination as part of their booking. From the LTA announcement: Taxi booking services cannot require commuters to specify their destinations before they can make bookings While the taxi industry has shared that knowing prospective passengers’ destinations can encourage drivers to accept bookings, there are concerns that some taxi drivers may choose their passengers and avoid taking bookings to certain destinations. LTA has thus decided that it should be left to commuters to decide if they want to provide this information. Uber and Hailo adhere to this, but GrabTaxi and Easy Taxi may need to adjust their apps in response, perhaps making end location data optional. Neither company provided comment to TechCrunch at the time of writing. Uber and GrabTaxi both released positive statements when contacted. “Uber welcomes the LTA’s announcement to introduce a new regulatory framework for third party taxi booking apps; this is great news for residents and visitors to Singapore and especially for taxi drivers,” said Mike Brown, Uber’s general manager for Southeast Asia. In addition, an Uber representative told TechCrunch that these rules will apply only to taxi services, and not its UberX or UberExec services. A Hailo spokesperson told us the following: Hailo’s game plan has always been to constructively disrupt Singapore’s taxi booking and payment status quo through technology and partnership. We are not seeking to introduce unlicensed vehicles or impose prices that vastly exceed the regulated meter and we aim to innovate constructively within the current legal and regulatory framework. We’ll add other statements as we receive them. A GrabTaxi spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company doesn’t have plans to alter its app, but it will “continue to seek guidance” from the LTA. “There are no issues with implementation as we’re already compliant with most of the regulations. We believe that these regulations are a progressive development and a step in the right direction,” the spokesperson added. |
Social Betting App Youbetme Raises $2.7M | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | , the startup behind the social betting app of the same name, announced today that it has raised $2.7 million in Series A funding. Youbetme says it launched the app in January. The company bills itself as a way to “bet on anything, at any time,” either through its iOS app or it’s website. To be clear, it doesn’t support real-money betting, but rather tracking friendly bets with friends. (You could probably put money on those bets, just not through the app itself …) There’s also an Android app in beta testing. Investors in the round included SierraMaya360, DVG, and Abingdon Capital. Angel investor Brad Stroh is joining the Youbetme board of directors. back in 2012. |
China Tried To Get World Internet Conference Attendees To Ratify This Ridiculous Draft Declaration | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | This week, China hosted its first in Wuzhen. The irony of a country with holding an event with the theme was underscored yesterday, when the events’ organizers made a pro-forma attempt to get attendees to approve a draft declaration by slipping it under their hotel room doors late at night. TechCrunch has obtained a copy of the document, which is supposed to represent the consensus views of conference participants. A PDF is embedded at the bottom of this post. Among other things, the draft declaration calls for countries to respect each other’s “Internet sovereignty,” impose stricter restrictions on online pornography, and “destroy all dissemination channels of information of violent terrorism.” The document is both hilariously farcical and unsettling in light of China’s crackdowns on Internet freedom and its cyberattacks on media outlets and government organizations in other countries. Our source says that the draft was put under hotel room doors around 11PM, giving attendees until only 8AM the next morning to make revisions before it’s planned release at today’s closing ceremony [UPDATE: the ]. Furthermore, attendees began checking out last night since the conference’s main events took place on Wednesday and Thursday. Top executives from Chinese tech firms, including Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, as well as representatives from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, LinkedIn, and non-profit organization ICANN . The World Internet Conference, which started on Wednesday and ends today, was organized by The SIIO to coordinate various agencies . Here are the choicest excerpts from the draft. It opened with a cover letter, signed by the World Internet Conference’s organizing committee: “Thank you for your participation in the First World Internet Conference and your contribution to its success. During the Conference, many speakers and participants suggest [SIC] that a Wuzhen declaration be released at the closing ceremony. In light of the views of various sides, we have made this draft declaration. If you want to make revisions to it, please contact the organizing committee before 8 a.m. on 21 November 2014. (email: info@wicwuzhen.cn).” The draft declaration starts off by stating: “Participants in the Conference acknowledge that the Internet is increasingly becoming a leading force of innovation-driven development and is powering economic and social progress. The Internet has turned the world into a global village and made the international community a highly interdependent community of common destiny. While enjoying rapid development, the Internet has posed new challenges to national sovereignty, security and development interests, which requires the international community to meet urgently and seriously expand consensus and strengthen cooperation. We call on the international community to work together to build an international Internet governance system of multilateralism, democracy and transparency and a cyberspace of peace, security, openness and cooperation.” It then went on to list nine suggestions. The most ridiculous and mealy-mouthed are below. “Second, respect Internet sovereignty of all countries. We should respect each country’s rights to the development, use and governance of the Internet, refrain from abusing resources and technological strengths to violate other countries’ Internet sovereignty, and build an Internet order to equality and mutual benefit.” Translation? “Hands off .” “Third, jointly safeguard cyber security. We should actively cope with challenges to cyberspace security and reject all forms of cyber attacks and Internet theft. We should work together to fight cyber crimes, protect individual privacy and information security, and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of citizens.” This item is especially egregious considering China’s well-documented history of launching cyberattacks against international media outlets, military, and government organizations. The director of the U.S. National Security Agency (admittedly not itself a glowing example of good behavior), Admiral Mike Rogers, has the power to possibly shutdown the U.S.’s Internet infrastructure, including the computer systems of public utilities, aviation networks, and financial companies. Media outlets China has spied on recently and . Next Media, one of Hong Kong’s largest media companies, has long been a target of the Chinese government, but attacks on its computer systems have increased , which . “Fourth, jointly fight cyber terrorism. We should work for the establishment of an international cooperation mechanism against cyber terrorism to fight cyber terrorism together and destroy all dissemination channels of information of violent terrorism.” China has arguably used terrorism prevention as an excuse to exercise even tighter control on its residents’ access to online information and services. For example, in August the Chinese government , including Line, KakaoTalk, Talkbox, Vower, and Didi, claiming that the services were being used to spread terrorism-related information. But Line’s blockage by the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. As Qiao Mu, a professor journalism at Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Financial Times: “This alleged link between terrorism and these messaging apps is pretty far-fetched. On the whole, it sounds like they are using antiterrorism as an excuse to ban foreign apps, which are harder for the government to control.” It’s not just foreign Internet services and apps being targeted under the guise of counter-terrorism. The Chinese government also launched a campaign against popular microblogging platform Weibo (formerly Sina Weibo) last year, citing similar reasons. Last year, Weibo’s user base from 308.6 million the year before. This is partly because many users are shifting to more private messaging apps like Tencent’s WeChat, but also because of stricter laws like one that if a message that the government deems to be an “online rumor” is shared more than 500 times or seen by more than 5,000 users. “Seventh, widely spread the positive energy. We should carry forward and promote fine cultures and produce more digital cultural products of high quality, in order to meet people’s cultural needs and give a sense of belonging to mankind in cyberspace.” It must be a bit difficult to feel a “sense of belonging to mankind in cyberspace” when you are trapped behind the Great Firewall and have to rely on VPN services to access sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, Next Media, the BBC or the New York Times. “Eighth, dedicate to the healthy growth of young people. We should strengthen the protection of minors online, crack down on the spread of pornography and violence, and make sure that the Internet does not damage the future of mankind.” China’s regulations against online pornography have been particularly severe. In 2009, more than 15,000 sites with pornographic content were shutdown. The crackdown intensified this year. In the spring, called the “Clean Internet Campaign” that included the closure of three online literature sites that it claimed hosted obscene content. Penalties for posting pornographic content online for profit include sentences of up to three years in jail. This isn’t just about the “healthy growth of young people.” Anti-pornography laws make it even harder to share information on the Internet by giving the Chinese government more leeway in the kinds of sites it is allowed to target and shutdown. The “Clean Internet Campaign” , as well as the Weibo crackdown. We’ve emailed the World Internet Conference at info@wicwuzhen.cn and will update this post if we hear back from them.
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Dyson Invests $2.35B In R&D, Aims To Launch 100 New Products Over The Next Four Years | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Dyson is spending big on new products and product categories, the today. The maker of vacuums, fans, heaters, hand dryers, robots and more announced today that it would be spending a total of $2.35 billion across a UK tech campus, expansion of its manufacturing efforts, investment in British universities to foster talent, and $1.56 billion in new specific tech development projects. The British company wants to roll out no fewer than 100 new products, across four new tech portfolios over just the next four years – we’ve already seen it introduce the 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner this year, as well as announce its entry into the humidifier market, with a device that simultaneously filters bacteria out of the air while it works. In past interviews, founder and CEO James Dyson has hinted that the company might be interested in applying the work it has done in battery tech to other areas, too, and continuing to advance the field of domestic robotics. Dyson says it folds a full one-third of its total profits back into R&D, and notes that 2,000 of its roughly 4,500 employees worldwide are engineers, and 1,000 of those have come on board in the last four years alone. Its partnerships with academic institutions also help it funnel new talent into the company, as well as work out outside research projects. With this investment, Dyson is signalling a shift that could mean we no longer see it primarily as a vacuum company in four years’ time. Could it instead become synonymous with domestic robotics? Early yet to tell, since the Dyson 360 Eye has yet to even go on sale, but should arrive this coming spring beginning in Japan. |
VideoBlocks Launches New Stock Video Marketplace Where All The Money Goes To Contributors | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Stock video company is expanding beyond its subscription business model with the launch of a new marketplace for contributed content. The company has already built a library of 115,000 video clips, backgrounds, and effects, which it either created itself or licensed from others. Customers can use any of the content in that library for of $79 a month or $99 a year. According to founder and CEO Joel Holland, that averages out to less than $1 per clip for most customers. Holland described the VideoBlocks library “a very high quality archive of content” that’s “not super deep.” As a result, customers would often start their search for stock footage at VideoBlocks (after all, they’d already paid the subscription fee, so there was no extra cost), but they’d have to often have to go elsewhere to fill in the gaps. For example, Holland said VideoBlocks has footage of the Statue of Liberty during the day, but maybe someone wanted footage of the statue with the sun setting. That’s where the new marketplace comes in. It’s not yet open to VideoBlocks customers, but the company is beginning its outreach to potential contributors. The goal, Holland said, is to offer the same footage that you’d find on a site like , but at a 40 percent discount, and with 100 percent of the money going to the contributor. ( for every clip purchased.) “You’ve heard this saying, ‘Content is king,'” Holland said. “If that’s true, content creators should be treated like royalty.” So how does VideoBlocks make money from this? Well, you need an account to access the marketplace. And after a brief trial period, that means paying for a subscription. The company also earlier this year. |
How Limited Edition Scarves Fit Into Ryan Leslie’s Plans To Take His Music Straight To Fans | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | In about how the business model for musicians and other creative artists , one of the commonly repeated ideas is that you no longer have to reach a mass audience in order to make money — instead, you just need a small group of devoted fans. Musician Ryan Leslie told me he’s been pursuing that idea since he left his label Universal in 2010 — something he framed as an attempt to take ownership of his relationship with his fans. “I decided to go completely direct-to-consumer — not because I needed more money, but because I actually had a genine curiosity about who, on a precision level, was supporting my music,” he said. That access to consumer data is one of the big selling points behind , a startup that . The Gumroad folks were actually the ones who put me in touch with Leslie to discuss a Gumroad-powered promotion that he launched today — of 10 “ ,” costing $400 each. Those scarves doubled as VIP tickets to Leslie’s upcoming New Year’s Eve concert in Vienna, Austria, where he said he’ll be performing his new album MZRT for the first time. And in less than an hour — it may have helped that , and fans could could buy the scarves directly from the tweet. Why scarves? Well, I asked Leslie and he talked about how they represent the journey that he’s taken from growing up in a working class family to a successful music career, complete with trips to Fashion Week. His fans, he said, may have “big dreams”, even if they “may or may not be able to get that Fashion Week invitation,” and those scarves suggest they might be able to fulfill those dreams. (It probably seems a little less random when you recall that Leslie also offers apparel through .) Selling 10 $400 scarves is cool, but it’s only part of Leslie’s broader strategy, one that he said has brought him $400,000 in direct-to-consumer sales, plus $1.6 million in touring revenue since he went independent. (So the truism about musicians making most of their money from touring is holding true in this case …) Leslie’s isn’t just applying this strategy to his own career. He also a startup earlier this year called — it aims to help artists connect with their fans directly. “My crusade is to actually figure out what’s the algorithm, the minimum number of people that you need to create a sustainable business,” he said. The classic number is “1,000 true fans,” a term . In our conversation, Leslie was more likely to refer to “10,000 or 20,000 people,” though he also mentioned Disruptive Media clients who were able to turn virtually all of their fans, even if they were only 150 of them, into paying customers. Leslie also suggested one benefit that I hadn’t thought of when it comes to depending on a relatively small group of fans — it frees you up to experiment, because even if you alienate your existing fans, finding another 1,000 (or even 10,000 or 20,000) is a lot less daunting than trying to maintain a “massively huge” fanbase. In Leslie’s case, he said it allowed him to move away from the R&B that he’d focused on while with a major label to create “a fairly progressive rap album.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQHEmJWgN8A&w=560&h=315] |
About Those Uber Revenue Numbers | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Uber generates lots of revenue. Everyone knows it. The company’s roughly 20 percent cut of ride spend on its platform adds up to big numbers. How big, of course, is the real question. New helps put Uber’s revenue into perspective. However, before we get to the new sums, let’s rewind. Here’s , reporting on leaked Uber revenue figures — — from October of that year, emphasis is mine: The numbers span a period of between mid-October and mid-November of 2013 and allow us to form a picture, though incomplete, of Uber’s income and user statistics over the period. According to our calculations based on the information laid out in the dashboard screenshots — and assuming some similarity in numbers for the rest of the year — . At a rough 20% cut, a figure Valleywag notes , . So, Uber at the time was doing rides at about a $1 billion run rate, and bringing in a more than $200 million yearly cut. Damn fine numbers, really. Cut to today, when Business Insider published data from Uber’s December of 2013, just one month after the period the figures above were taken from. It was a big period for the firm, with New Year’s Eve revenue spiking year-over-year, and lots of markets doing high volumes of rides. Here’s how the Business Insider article frames it: If you assume annual run rate based on the December 2013 data, Uber’s top five markets (NYC, DC, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles) would generate about $1 billion a year. Again, that’s without taking Uber’s growth and expansion into account during 2014. That’s in line with rumored revenue estimates for Uber, which suggest Uber will generate $1.5-2 billion of revenue this year. Revenue isn’t revenue isn’t revenue, however. Just . Here’s the story’s first paragraph: Uber is a four-year-old mobile ride service company that could soon generate $10 billion of revenue per year. That is a huge number, certainly. But which revenue number is it, $1.5 billion to $2 billion, or $10 billion? Well, none of the above, I don’t think. Keep in mind the data from October that TechCrunch covered: If Uber was on tip to make just over $200 million in revenue in October of 2013, how by December of the same year was it prepped to generate company-facing top line of $1.5 billion, let alone $2 billion, or $10 billion? You pay Uber for your rides. It then takes a cut of that total spend, and that’s its take-home revenue. You can try and count the total spend on its platform as its revenue, but that’s as silly as Groupon trying to . Ask . So Uber’s 20 percent is its revenue, and on a run-rate basis, that figure was nowhere near the billion dollar mark mere months before it supposedly was. I think that we are seeing a conflation of the term ‘revenue’ here. If you repine for a moment, and scroll back to the initially leaked Uber slides, what was labeled as “revenue” was in fact considered to be total platform spend. To refresh you: That $20 million or so per week is around $1 billion per year, given the number of weeks per annum. That’s how we treated what Uber called “revenue” in the past. Now, we appear to be willing to take what Uber called revenue mere months after the above, and presume that it means actual income for the company, and not total platform spend. Again, revenue isn’t revenue isn’t revenue. Unless Uber saw a growth spurt between those two months that it grew several-fold, we’re misinterpreting revenue. So, that means that Uber’s prior $20 million plus weekly revenue run rate wasn’t platform spend, but was instead its and thus Uber was rocking a $5 billion platform spend run rate last October. Well that or we’re just getting this confused today. Uber’s growth of 20 or 30 percent from October to a perhaps more busy December isn’t outside the realm of the reasonable. But here’s Business Insider on the December data: In San Francisco, Uber generated $17.7 million, a run rate of about $213 million. This implies that the company’s San Francisco revenue that month was with its total forward revenue, calculated from October of that year. Or: That Uber’s ‘revenue’ in its slides concerning October was in fact total platform spend, and thus that Uber will likely collect around $40 million in revenue from the San Francisco market this year, extrapolating on a forward twelve-month run-rate basis from the new figures. So, Uber will see well north of $1 billion in total platform spend this year. Perhaps even $2 billion, or $3 billion if things go well. That would put its own revenue in the mid hundreds of millions. But keep in mind that Twitter is going to , and is . If Uber was set to spank Twitter’s top line, ? |
KinectKannon Is A Robotic T-Shirt Cannon That Can Track Your Movements And See In The Dark | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VG13IH3CSU&w=560&h=315] You can run. You can hide. Hell, you can even . Do what you want, but this thing get you… a complimentary t-shirt. Meet the KinectKannon, a semi-autonomous t-shirt cannon that can track your movements, go into night vision mode, and fire t-shirts into a crowd. It’s like ‘s dopey little brother. Built by Microsoft developer evangelist , the KinectKannon is largely built up out of store bought parts — including, as you might’ve guessed from the name, a Kinect. Add a few heavy-lift servos, some super snazzy solenoid valves, and a few thousand lines of code, and you’ve got yourself a robo-cannon. All in all, the project cost around $2,500. Given that this project deals with high-PSI CO2 tanks (which will quite happily blow your fingers/hand/face parts off if not handled correctly), this… probably isn’t the sort of DIY project most people should take on in their garage on a spare weekend. But if you think you’re up to the task, Steven is sharing . [Via ] |
This Week Some Japanese Startups Battled It Out At TechCrunch Tokyo | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Every year, our sister publication has its own tech conference called to bring together local investors and entrepreneurs and to introduce that crowd to some of the more successful startups from the U.S. and Europe. This year, speakers visiting Japan for the event included Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky and Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover, among others. TechCrunch Tokyo also has its own take on Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, pitting a dozen different early-stage companies to compete against each other for a series of prizes. This year, the competition boasted a wide range of startups across a number of different product categories. That included everything from education to small business backend tools to food delivery to outsourcing logistics for businesses. In many ways, what was most interesting to me was how many of the same businesses and concepts that have launched in the U.S. are also being tackled by Japanese entrepreneurs. For instance, it’s easy to see the parallels between food delivery startup Bento, which gets 500-yen bento boxes to customers in under 10 minutes, and San Francisco’s Sprig or Spoonrocket offerings. And Bizer, which provides cloud-based backend management tools for small businesses, reminded me of how Zenefits is providing a simple platform for SMBs to manage HR practices in the U.S. While many of the startups were trying to solve problems specifically for Japanese users, there were others that had more global appeal. The startup which walked away with the main prize — more on that later — had created a product that could be used by developers anywhere in the world. So with no further ado, here’s a summary of the startups that took the stage and “battled it out” at TechCrunch Tokyo is an app to help users studying English to quickly boost their vocabulary. Aiming to boost the number of Japanese citizens who are bilingual to 100 million by 2020, Mikan provides a flash-card like functionality for reviewing groups of words to understand their definition. The app separates vocab words into categories of those users know and those they don’t, and keeps serving up those they don’t until they get them. As a result, users are able to learn vocab words more quickly than traditional methods — up to 1,000 in just one 24-hour period, according to the founder. While a number of fashion apps out there are aimed at getting users to discover new fashions, is designed to help fashion-conscious users get more use out of the clothes they already own. Users simply take photos of their individual pieces of clothing and then can mix and match them to create new and interesting outfits and share them with others. There are already a number of smart locks out there, but is specifically targeting the Japanese market. The lock should work with about 80 percent of all locks in the country, and could be sold either to consumers or to rental businesses or hotels or even businesses. Unfortunately Akerun suffered from the dreaded live presentation “demo fail” so we didn’t get to see it in action, but the design looks cool at least! is a service that aims to make more websites accessible to a global audience. By adding one line of code to their sites, the product will automatically detect a user’s language settings and deliver a localized page to them. That will help Japanese website owners, in particular, reach the 95 percent of web users that don’t read Japanese. In addition to automatically providing a localized version of those sites, Wovn also helps site owners create those new versions, providing either machine translation (which is free) or work done by a professional translator (which it charges for). Mobile quiz app is an educational tool disguised as a game. Like QuizUp, the app lets users match up against one another and answer quiz questions about a variety of topics. By adding gamification to education, it hopes to increase user’s general knowledge of those categories over time, while also being fun. I mean, who doesn’t want to have fun while also learning? There are about 3 million small businesses in Japan, and wants to help the people who run those businesses with all the backoffice things they need to take care of. The company charges a 2980-yen monthly subscription for the service, which simplifies the process of doing paperwork needed to get employees onboarded and up and running. By doing so, it speeds up the process and could lower the costs associated with bringing on new hires. is a service that is focused on helping Japanese people live healthier lives through a mix of data and training. The service runs on a monthly subscription and connects users with private diet coaches and gym programs after assessing them for health and fitness, to provide a personalized program for improving their health. wants to be like Airbnb for meeting spaces, allowing businesses that have unique spaces to rent them out on its peer-to-peer platform. It hopes to enable its customers to book company meetings and retreats in places they wouldn’t normally have access to. It’s not a totally unique idea — there’s a startup in the U.S. called PeerSpace — but Spacemarket is looking specifically at the Japanese market. Yes, they have food delivery apps in Japan, too. The trick behind mobile app is providing ultra-fast delivery of ultra-cheap bento boxes that are priced at 500 yen each, which is less than $5 US. But the company is looking at other potential categories of food — like coffee, for instance — and is even considering moving into the broader logistics business with delivery of non-food goods. This startup wants to capitalize on the growth of YouTube and make the viewing of videos hosted there a little more social. By allowing people to watch videos in viewing parties is hoping to improve the online video experience and reduce the current loneliness factor. To do so, it’s also curating the videos, choosing longer-form selections for increased viewing time and engagement. wants to simplify the process of shipping for businesses who want easy way to fulfill orders that their customers have placed. OpenLogi has built relationships with multiple carriers to ensure the best shipping rates, which it makes transparently available on its website. The company has also built an easy platform for fulfilling orders and printing shipping labels, a process which takes more than a dozen clicks when fulfilled by Amazon. By contrast, there are only two or three pieces of information and clicks for a customer using OpenLogi’s platform. As a growing number of entrepreneurs are dipping into creating hardware, the desire to develop their own chipsets for controlling devices has increased. The only problem is that is a frustrating and time-consuming process. But not anymore… reduces the cost of chip development and the time associated with prototyping by allowing its users to print transistor designs to paper with conductive ink delivered via inkjet printer. The cost of the conductive ink cartridges would be about 20,000 yen or about 200 yen (less than $2 US) for each printout. The technology makes ASIC development easy, fast, and affordable. It’s tech that could be used around the globe, and it could open up development to a whole new group of entrepreneurs to create new and interesting hardware devices and applications. As a result, the judges thought AgIC had the best largest potential global reach and impact of the companies that presented. All of which is why they were happy to award the winning prize and 1,000,000 yen to the startup. [gallery ids="1086290,1086288,1086287,1086286,1086284,1086283,1086281,1086280"] |
Healthcare’s Big Data Opportunity | David Richards | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | The hospitals where my grandchildren are born will be unrecognizable to those we know today; they’ll be safer, cleaner and more efficient. And what is considered world class in 2014 will tomorrow be viewed with the same disdain we reserve for medical practice in the Dark Ages. Global healthcare is at a pivotal moment in its history, on a par with Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin and Louis Pasteur’s groundbreaking work with sterilization. As the quantity of data we generate rapidly expands and we continue to develop the computational power to store it, health authorities will be able to gather more information about their patients in a single year than has been open to them in all history. While today we rely on the well-trained eye of the general practitioner and the steady hand of the surgeon, tomorrow’s lifesavers will be the number-crunching data scientists, individuals with only a passing understanding of first aid. Thanks to advancements in data analysis, almost everything that determines our health – from our individual genetic coding to our particular retail habits – is becoming knowable. With all this information at its fingertips, the medical profession is capable of spotting patterns of disease, gauging the efficacy of treatments and identifying links between causes and symptoms. It has long been mooted that healthcare will be among the early big data winners. Intel recently announced that it is working with the on a new pilot initiative that is aimed at using data mined from wearable devices to detect patterns in the progression of the disease. The data will be collected on Intel’s software platform, and analysts will examine it to look for markers of Parkinson’s that couldn’t be perceived by the naked eye. And earlier this year the unveiled a radical scheme that is helping to reduce the number of deaths caused by medical error. My company, WANdisco, is helping the hospital use big data platform Hadoop to digitally collate, store and analyze all data relating to its patients’ conditions in real time. Electronic signals sent out by equipment such as heart monitors, ventilators or wearable devices can now be monitored whether the patient is in the hospital, at home or on the move. This means that hospital staff are now alerted if a patient’s vital signs cross a key threshold – easing the burden on doctors and nurses whose heavy patient loads prevent 24/7 care – and essentially providing the equivalent of having a doctor in every room. To this end the U.S. is leading the way. Across America we are seeing a steady increase in the number of data-driven strategies being implemented – progress that is transforming the standard of healthcare available to U.S. citizens. Many of today’s startups are at the heart of the action. recently teamed up with to improve the hospital’s ability to respond to emergency calls, where a minute can often mean the difference between life and death. The hospital now employs a system that collates geographic information system technology, wireless communications and GPS data to help response units arrive at their destinations more quickly, providing the emergency services with real-time analyses about where they are most likely to be needed. Response rates now average fewer than six minutes, significantly lower than the national average of nine minutes. Before the system was installed, regained a pulse after suffering a cardiac arrest – today it’s one in two. is now using ’s technology to capture obstetrics data and reports at 60 hospitals across the state. The group’s hospitals are using data analytics to monitor readmission rates for pneumonia and heart failure, identifying patients treated at multiple facilities to more accurately calculate readmission rates. This is allowing its members to better understand what they will need to do to improve the quality of care for their patients while reducing operational costs. But a look further afield suggests the appetite for big data hospitals is by no means universal. have gone on record to say that, with the data records of the , the U.K. has the potential to be the real leader for data-driven healthcare. “We think that over the next three years Britain will become the most interesting country in the world when it comes to health technology,” U.K. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt told the last year, adding that big data could “save thousands of lives … [driving] up our clinical standards to the very best in the world.” Dating back to the 1940s, the NHS possesses vaults of information that, if centrally stored, could provide British doctors with an unparalleled insight into patient wellbeing. Having access to whole-population data, for example, would allow drug side effects to be picked up where they would previously go unreported. Used effectively it could revolutionize treatments and help the U.K. take a lead in the bioscience industry. The U.K. has the potential to personalize healthcare for every NHS patient. The personal data that can risk score every NHS patient already exists. And it is already far more centralized and normalized than in countries such as the U.S., giving the U.K. the opportunity to become the world leader. Identifying people at risk of becoming ill or developing a serious condition and providing the foresight to prescribe preventive measures is a very real possibility. But big data’s British advocates are doing a terrible job at articulating its benefits. Unlike the U.S., Britain has fallen foul of a big data panic, fueled by a misguided belief that using anonymized patient records to offer improved healthcare would mark the first step on the road to the dystopian futures portrayed in and . Whereas the U.S. has managed to separate the revelations over spying and surveillance from discussions around big data, many in the U.K. view them as part of the same whole. Earlier this year, as a result of widespread public pressure, the NHS suspended its plans for Care.data, a central stash of patient records that researchers said could transform UK healthcare. The main problem seems to have been attitudinal in nature, with Britons struggling to reconcile the trade-off between individual privacy and the collective benefits of medical research. There can be no denying that the timing was unfortunate. Calls for Care.data to be shelved increased rapidly as people grew twitchy about data security, while Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA served as the ideal backdrop for civil libertarians arguing that citizens were signing away their privacy. Equally damaging was the way in which the NHS persisted in ignoring this climate of apprehension. As newspaper headlines focused on the ongoing fallout from the Snowden affair – one that soon embroiled the U.K.’s own intelligence service – homes up and down the country were flooded on a weekly basis with leaflets that focused on how the government was going to access confidential records. Only in the small print was it made apparent that patients had a right to withhold their records. A much more effective approach would have been to listen to the public fears and explain the life-enhancing implications of data-driven healthcare. How many millions could be saved by new treatments? How many lives currently cut short could be extended? And how many terminal diseases could be eradicated? New tech is frequently mocked or feared before, ultimately, it is grudgingly accepted. When Bill Clinton introduced his human genome project in the 1990s the initial investment of $1 billion from the U.S. government was met with public outcry. However, it created a $150 billion industry and one of the most important medical breakthroughs of our generation. We stand on the verge of an even greater breakthrough on a global scale. The more data that can be analyzed, the better the medical insights and the more lives that can be saved. In that context, it is everyone’s interests for big data to be embraced by the worldwide healthcare community – and not just the U.S. We tend to think of medical progress as something that happens in laboratories, but the reality is that future breakthroughs may have less to do with chance discovery than the systematic analyses of existing data. And while these are the early days of data-driven hospitals, the writing is on the wall for healthcare as we know it. |
GoPro Craters 9.3% After Pricing Its Secondary Offering At A Discount | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | GoPro fell more than 9 percent today, after it priced its secondary , a discount to its market price. The company ended regular trading today at $71.74 per share, or a several dollar negative delta to the proposed price. The company will sell 1,287,533 itself, while prior shareholders will sell 9,072,967. Underwriters of the sale may purchase 1,554,075 shares as well inside of a 30 day period. So, dilution to GoPro investors won’t be too heavy, but certainly seeing current shareholders get rid of more than 9 million shares worth — at the proposed $75 price — $680,472,525, doesn’t inspire confidence. In fact, you almost wonder why the company is raising new capital for itself at all. GoPro ended its with in cash and equivalents. The proposed sale of new equity would add just under $100 million to its accounts. GoPro has had a wild ride in the public markets since its debut. Priced , the company has traded as high as $98.47. You can see the spikes and declines : I called the company’s listed contact concerning the secondary offering, and left a message asking about potential pricing changes for the secondary offering, given the company’s steep slip in value over the past few days. |
PCH International In Talks To Buy Fab For $15 Million | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Multiple sources have confirmed that is in talks to sell to for $15 million, in a half cash and half stock deal. Another source put it at possibly as much as $50 million. Contractual agreements are in the very early stages between the two companies (and these things could always fall apart). However, if it does happen, we’ve been told that some assets will be rolled into Fab founder new furniture design company and the rest will be taken over by PCH. Fab was once a Silicon Valley darling. The likely purchase price is a paltry one, compared to the $165 million it raised (at a $1 billion valuation) just over a year ago. The cash remaining from Fab’s fundraising efforts has now been re-channeled into Hem, Goldberg told us in September. Fab has been operating at break-even and as of this month is cash-flow positive. It’s a big change: in October, Goldberg the company was burning through $14 million a month before its massive round of layoffs in June and the bigger restructuring that led to formation of Hem. Fab’s been on the market for a couple months, from what we’ve been hearing. This is a relatively recent development, however. Goldberg that in its early days the company was committed to building the business as a standalone enterprise. “We had an opportunity to sell Fab in the last couple of years, and I said, ‘I didn’t start it to sell it, I started it to build a great e-commerce business.” That effort is now being channeled into Hem. Fab has seen some drastic changes in its 3 years of operation. It started out as a dating site for the gay community and then relaunched as a flash sale site for home decor. Fab announced just six months after the pivot that it had grown its membership to 2 million, with sales averaging $1.5 million a week. But Goldberg has described the operational and financial challenges of building out a marketplace for third parties to sell their goods on the site. Hem is a shift towards a much small range of products, produced directly by the company itself and sold for a higher margin. A source close to the company tells us no one really works at Fab anymore. This is relative to the pre-June headcount, however. Goldberg told us in September there are around 25 people working there, and we understand that now the number is around 20. One could argue that technically most of what Fab was has been rolled into Goldberg’s new venture. He’s now shifted all focus to Hem and has moved to Berlin to manage everything there. Goldberg maintains his CEO title in both Fab and Hem at this time. We’ll be sure to update you on when and if this deal does go through. |
Heirloom App Preserves Print Photos With A Single Snap | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | My mom, ever the scrapbook aficionado, has documented every birthday, Halloween, dance performance, first bike ride and baby eats dirt moment me and my brothers have endured since I can remember. She hand-scanned every last one of those hundreds of pictures a few years back and then organized them into neat little labeled folders on her own PC. It took me eons to convince her to put it all in Dropbox. It’s finally all there, but it looks like this: My brothers and me. As you can see the technology has been somewhat limiting for her to do this in a way that is easy and efficient. is a new smartphone app that hopes to change that. You snap a picture of your old photos and the app uploads it into a private social network in the cloud that allows you to then share the pictures with your friends and family. is somewhat of a similar idea with the organizing and sharing of photos, but the hook with Heirloom is the scanning. It’s also a family business. Brothers Eric and Evan Owski came up with the idea after Eric’s wife complained that there weren’t any good scrapbooking apps for moms. Evan, a former programmer at TuneIn, worked on the code. Eric is Heirloom CEO and handles the marketing end of things. “Throwback is now a weekly ritual across the web. We believe that speaks to the human desire to relive treasured moments from our past,” says Eric. “Yet for many, the process of capturing old prints is clumsy and doesn’t result in high quality digital images.” If you are me, you scratch your head and start asking them how that is different from simply taking a picture with your iPhone camera and then sending it to the already created family photo album folder in Dropbox. “When you take a picture of a photo, you have to spend a lot of time lining up the edges and cropping if you want a decent scan,” explains Evan. “Our app can take a scan even if the photo is rotated or skewed. It will automatically find the edges, correct the perspective, and do a bit of color correction,” he tells me. Throwback Thursday is a social media phenom, though the brothers maintain that you may not always want to share those precious moments of your chubby former 13 year old self with the world. So Heirloom incorporates a more intimate network made just for loved ones. My mom on her wedding day. Great Grandma Davidson is right next to her. and and a group of angel investors led by (COO at Bright, Eric’s previous employer) have given Evan and Eric $1 million in seed to grow the company. The app is available for download on both the and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrGh1kg_vV4 |
Don’t Expect Urban Drone Delivery Soon | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | and might be chest-thumping about their respective drone delivery programs but the technology is still years out from being feasible in dense urban environments. Dr Mirko Kovac, director of ‘s current aerial robotics lab, suggests it could be as far out as a decade. “Drone delivery in cities is still something that it’s not sure how feasible it is in a big city like London for example,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch, noting that safety remains the key challenge for Amazon et al operating drones in urban areas. “Flying close to humans, flying close to buildings, flying close to other flying vehicles, and legislation, insurance, air traffic control, all this needs to be sorted before something like this can be demonstrated,” he added. “So central London might not be the best first step… It’s difficult to put a number on it but maybe in a decade we will have commercial drone delivery in cities. That’s maybe reasonable.” Kovac added that drone delivery will likely arrive sooner in other types of environments — principally where there’s more room for manoeuvre and fewer obstacles for drones to worry about. “Drone delivery in other areas such as in developing countries, such as Africa or Asia for example, there I think it’s much closer because there there is vast spaces and it could be much more feasible to test and implement something there.” Nearer-term commercial applications for drones will focus on rather more mundane tasks — at least from a consumer’s eye view — such as inspection and repair of structures, he added. “That is much more close,” said Kovac. “Already you can do 3D mapping of the environment [with drones], with something that is already on the market now — but the next step is the interaction with an environment. So anything that interacts with an environment, like sampling and flight in more constrained environments, like indoors, inside of mines, for examples, making 3D map of the mine structure, or making 3D map of buildings in different ways for the construction industry. These areas are much more close.” Earlier this month Imperial announced it will be building a shiny new drones research facility — due to open in 2017. Costing £1.25 million to build, the glassy structure will sit atop an existing building on its South Kensington campus so that students and others can peer up at drones being put through their paces and be inspired by the potential of the tech and the research being conducted. The drone lab’s visibility is absolutely intentional, says Kovac. “The flight lab will be a very good nurturing ground for actually developing the flying robots. We do that already but it will leverage the capabilities we have already now. What it will be also providing us with is a very high exposure — so it will be a very visible VIP type facility that will be very visible and good for visitors and also to see how the research is done.” The facility will include a glass-walled flight arena for testing drones in the air, a pool where amphibious drones can take a dip, 3D printing facilities to produce rapid prototypes, and an outdoor platform where prototype drones can take to the skies. There will also be 16 high speed cameras in the facility to enable 3D tracking of the drones in flight. “It’s a new space that is tailored even more to this type of research,” added Kovac, explaining what’s new with the incoming lab vs the university’s current drone research facilities. Imperial is not the only university to zero in on drones. There are dedicated drone research facilities at several others, including MIT, Harvard and UZH in Zurich, but Kovac said the Imperial lab will offer something different. Specifically hybrid drone research. “What’s novel about ours is it allows us to work on hybrids — so multimodal mobilities. So robots that can move in air, on ground, in water, in complex environments, in forests. This is something we are focusing on,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s the next step for flying robots.” A hybrid teaching and research model is also part of the plan, with “integrated teaching and research” planned — so “you can actually educate the next generation of aeronautics engineers that we know how to operate and have the skillset to work in this unmanned aerial vehicles space”. Given his long view on drone delivery, it’s no surprise that Imperial’s lab will be focusing its research on other areas. Specifically the aforementioned “aerial construction” inspection and repair tasks, and also on environmental monitoring use-cases such as pollution tracking. “Currently often samples are taken manually with people in the rainforest or in the sea or on ground so this can be automated,” said Kovac. “This is something we are working on — how to do that in an automated way using swarms of flying robots. This should then make it much cheaper for the operators or the industry to do, and it’s a very convenient and safe and quick way to do it.” Power and battery life remain key challenges for improving the performance of aerial robotics so the lab will also be researching new concepts for propulsion systems, energy storage, low power computation and high efficiency flight. “There are developments in fuel cells and different types of battery technology that have huge potential. The approach we take is that we optimize the aerodynamics of the platform so we use less energy for flight and like this we increase the range and flight direction,” he added. “It’s an alternative approach. We don’t work on battery technology ourself.” It will look at ways to improve drone aerodynamics by studying biology — so looking to flying creatures such as birds and insects for inspiration. “We can look at how nature solves some of those challenges. We can look at flying animals, birds, insects, and we can extract the key design principles that they use and apply them to robots to make much better drones,” added Kovac. “We’ve done this successfully in the past and I think this is one of the main pathways — how we’re going to make new flying robots very good.” Kovac said Imperial is looking for commercial partners for the lab as a way to accelerate marketplace applications of the research — and is “open for collaboration”, as he put it. The facility is also taking in funding from research councils, and applying for grants — with Kovac noting the U.K. drone tech as “an important area to invest in”. “We have a lot of interest from industry. How we do that is we use the It is a network that I co-founded with an industrial partner — which is Shadow Robotics — and Kings College London. We came up with this idea to create a network where these kind of collaborations and synergies can be built and executed,” he added. “We are now really looking for ways how to bring this technology to the market together with industrial partners.” Kovac said Amazon could “potentially” be one such partner — given the company is ramping up its — but added that he has not personally worked with them. “Drones are still very much perceived as being a military technology and only now they start to move into the civil space. And there many big companies are now really interested in that and they’re investing and exploring, prototyping, starting to adopt the technology slowly. But this is really just happening now. It’s not something that is very established already. The potential is now really being only discovered,” he added. |
The CIA’s Review Of Glenn Greenwald’s Snowden Book Is Hilarious | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Earlier this year, journalist Glenn Greenwald released a book titled chronicling the Snowden leaks, and on the NSA itself. The book garnered a grip of positive reviews upon publication, and has a 4.5 star rating on Amazon. Not bad, all told. But the most recent review of the book is by far the best. Hayden Peake, listed by the as the “curator of the CIA Historical Intelligence Collection,” reviewed three books on Snowden for the agency. His take on Greenwald’s tome — — is accidentally hilarious. Three highlights [Bolding: TechCrunch]: Bitter and ad hominem final arbiter indeed. Actually that would make a great ad for a journalism gig. I’m actually quite excited to see what the “last word on the subject” will be. Perhaps Greenwald will see the error in his ways and write a positive, complimentary book that follows the government’s own PR-approved narrative, ensuring that he arbitrates nary a thing. |
Twitter Now Lets You Share Public Tweets Via Direct Messages | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Earlier this month, where it discussed changes to the platform and revenue streams. One of those touted features – the ability to privately share (aka “direct message”) a tweet – has now gone live. “with today’s update you’ll be able to share a Tweet privately with any of your followers.” On the desktop web and in the TweetDeck application, the option will be available by tapping the “…More” icon then choosing “Share via Direct Message.” On mobile, including both the iOS and Android application, a long press on the tweet in a user’s timeline will offer the option to “Share via Direct Message,” as well. The person who receives your shared tweet will then get a push notification, and the tweet itself will display directly in the conversation. The new option is not exactly a hugely demanded feature among Twitter users, but it will be a nice addition for those who have private conversation on the network, as it will allow a way for users to transition from public content and open discussions to more private conversations. On mobile, private messaging is a growing trend where a large number of apps now offer users ways to communicate outside of the public web or public social media. Some even go a step further, erasing messages or photos when the conversation wraps. Twitter has been slowly venturing into this area itself, expanding its DM (private messaging) feature which more recently has added support for and, as of last winter, . The company has for a long time been incrementally improving DMs via other minor features like the addition of , too. “Twitter is already a great place for public conversation; now it’s also easier to privately discuss things you care about,” a company blog post proclaims, referencing the new Tweet-to-DM feature. The changes will be arriving today on nearly all platforms, web and mobile included, and on desktop through TweetDeck. TweetDeck for Mac, and apparently – as no mention was made – the Twitter desktop app are delayed in receiving the update, however. |
Beats Solo2 Wireless Review: Bluetooth Adds Considerably To The Solo Appeal | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Beats is taking its Solo line wireless, with a new set of Bluetooth cans that match the wired Solo2 almost exactly in terms of external design. Surprisingly, they also match their wired counterpart in terms of sound, both when used with the included aux cable with inline remote, and when they’re used with the Bluetooth wireless connection. And after Beats took its sound engineering back to the drawing board for the Beats Solo2, that means they sound surprisingly good. The Beats Solo2 Wireless comes as close to replicating the Solo2 signature design as possible, with just a few fractions of a millimeter different in dimensions due to the need for a battery within the case. The mirroring of the design of the two products was intentional, and a desired goal from the start, because Beats wanted these headphones to share all the same traits, except of the addition of wireless functionality in these new Bluetooth versions. [gallery ids="1086168,1086169,1086170,1086171"] The retention of the same design is smart not only to unify the Solo product line, but also because they have really top-notch fit and finish to begin with. The new design is a lot more visually appealing than the previous Solo, with fewer line breaks and softer angles. They’re still plastic, and contain little in the way of metal surfaces, but the high-gloss look works well with Beats’ bold colors (red, black, white and blue are options for the Wireless model at launch). Solo2 Wireless packs padded cups and headband, and both are soft and comfortable for all-day use. They’re lighter than the Studio version of Beats’ headphones, and the on-ear design will probably be preferable for some. They fold up into a decently portable package, and will stow in the included soft case when you want to take them travelling. The soft case itself also contains padding, so you can throw them in a bag without much concern about their overall safety. Beats has gone from a brand whose headphones I’d never recommend, let alone own myself, to one that is right up there with some of the better general consumer market audio companies in terms of audio quality. For them to have accomplished that between a single generation of hardware is impressive. What’s more impressive is that the Beats Solo2 wireless headphones deliver sound that is consistent regardless of whether you use them wired or wireless, and that in both cases, there’s a warmth out of the box that you don’t generally get from audio equipment without a decent break-in period. There’s no active noise cancellation here, but he ear cups do offers a certain amount of passive filtering out of surrounding sound, which is plenty for most use cases. The audio also doesn’t suffer from any kind of inherent background hiss or static, again regardless of whether you’re using either wireless or wired connection. The Beats Solo2 Wireless is rated at 12 hours of use on a single charge, and in practice I did get a good amount of listening out of them – definitely enough for a long day at the office, and for most flights you’ll ever have to take. Plus, they work with the included remote cable whenever you do run out of juice, so you won’t be left in the lurch. For a wireless pair of headphones, 12 hours of continuous use is a very respectable duration, and Beats has also included its LED light indicator to tell you how much batter you have remaining. And if you’re using them with an iPhone or iPad, there’s also a battery indicator icon that will show up in your status bar once you’ve paired them with your device. The Beats Solo2 Wireless Headphones are the first new hardware from Beats to arrive post-Apple acquisition, but they’ve been in development long before the deal came together, and they shared a development cycle with the wired version which debuted earlier this year. Beats staggered their launch to make sure the wired version got its own spotlight, and to refine the additional engineering required to make sure the wireless version had identical sound, without any kind of artificial enhancement or EQ trickery. Overall, the company accomplished what it set out to do with the Beats2 Wireless – these feel like they should become the new default option for customers shopping for a pair of on-ear wireless headphones. Price is still an issue, as it’s a 50% premium over the wired version, but there’s a lot more engineering involved, too. And thanks to that work, these don’t feel overpriced, per se – the added convenience of wireless features is hard to quantify, but if you’re concerned about budget, check out Solo2 or other wired option first. |
Technics Revived As High-Res Music Download Service | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | Famed turntable brand Technics plans to launch a high-resolution music download service. For what it’s worth, the service, unlike Neil Young’s high-res service Pono, will not hit the states. Starting in January, the platform will spin (get it?) 24-bit tracks to users in UK and Germany. Called Technics Tracks, it’s said to be launching with tens of thousands of tracks encoded in 24-bit FLAC. This isn’t your grandfather’s iTunes. The high-resolution file format doesn’t compress the files in the same way as a traditional music format like MP3 resulting in a better sound quality as long as the song is played through equipment that can take advantage of the larger files. Neil Young recently launched a similar service that also offers high-resolution audio downloads. Called Pono, the service complements Young’s , a portable FLAC player. MusicWeek that Technics Tracks was built by . The last Technics-branded turntable may have rolled off the lines in 2010, but Panasonic announced in September 2014 that it would revive the brand. This is clearly part of the larger picture. |
Seed Lab Creates A Seamless Connection Between You And Your Kettle | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 20 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6K_ErRNOMY] A few months ago, the guys at showed me an Internet of things product that piqued my interest. While the product isn’t quite fully-baked, it was essentially a low power Bluetooth chip that could fit into any device – a lightbulb, a kettle, a toaster – and report, without pairing, to a cellphone. In other words you could simply plug in a lamp and your phone would automatically find it and add it to your IoT network. It was, in short, amazing. The team was quiet for a bit but now they’re ready launch a dev kit that lets you and me connect our toasters, light bulbs, and anything else to our phones with an ease that is, in fact, startling. Their hardware solution is currently available in a Dev Kit that is . Why is this platform interesting? In the demo I saw, you could simply plug in an appliance and it would appear on your phone’s control panel. Unlike systems like WeMo which require extensive pairing or other more techie solutions like Spark, the assumption is you’ll have Seed inside your appliances and they will begin communicating immediately. Because of the limited range you won’t be able to connect to your neighbor’s Christmas lights or TV but you will be able to connect to your kitchen, configure all of the devices, and then start the rice cooker before you come home from work. The project is still in its infancy but it’s a very interesting platform and, because I’ve seen it working, one of the most compelling IoT plays in a while. Will it ever make it into production? The team, led by Rafal Han, said they are working on appliance partnerships that could lead to some true human-lamp communication in the next few years. [gallery ids="1086004,1086005,1086006"] |
Restaurant Discovery Service Zomato Raises Further $60M | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | , the restaurant search and discovery service, has closed a further $60 million in funding, giving the company a post-money valuation of $660 million. Investment comes from India’s Vy Capital, and Info Edge, and Sequoia Capital. It takes total funding to over $113 million. “We will use the funding to go into hyper-drive on our key focus — driving leadership across more markets,” Zomato co-founder Pankaj Chaddah tells me. “We will also use a large part of this round to go after some key strategic acquisitions which will help us strengthen our market share across various countries.” In addition, he says there are a number of “innovative” products in the pipeline, while the new funding round will help speed up development and scale these new products faster. “Overall, this raise enables us to be much more aggressive with every initiative we take – it gives us more room to try harder and fail faster,” adds Chaddah. Founded in 2008, New Delhi-headquartered Zomato began as a menu card scanning service in India, sending people out to collect menus from restaurants and then scanning them using OCR. It’s this “feet on the street” approach that attempts to differentiate the company from competitors, which include Yelp, IAC-owned , Priceline-acquired , and . In addition to restaurant and menu data, Zomato’s web and mobile apps offer various social features — including the ability to follow other users’ activity and write and read reviews — as well as letting you search for restaurants by location, dish and offering up other granular info like opening hours and services offered e.g. take-away, dine-in, and home delivery. The iOS app was recently updated, adding ‘draw-on-a-map’ and ‘plan your day’ features. Of note, Zomato’s menu data is re-checked in person by Zomato’s team every three months to ensure it stays relatively fresh, which is obviously more labour intensive and less scalable than a purely online data play. The company currently employs around 900 people, the majority of which work on content. It makes money via native advertising, something only recently implemented in its mobile apps, which now account for over half of traffic. Zomato claims 30 million visits across its web and mobile platforms every month. The company also recently launched ‘Zomato for Business’, an app built to help restaurants engage with customers and drive more business. Meanwhile, although India remains its strongest market, Zomato’s restaurant search and discovery service now spans over 100 cities in 18 counties, most recently adding a presence in Central and Eastern Europe by means of . In late August, it gobbled up the Czech Republic’s Lunchtime.cz and Slovakia’s Obedovat.sk — the leading restaurant guides in their respective countries — for a combined $3.25 million. At the time, Chaddah told me that Zomato was planning to expand to a further ten or so countries in the coming months, but said expansion to the U.S. wouldn’t take place until “the second half of 2015” and was reliant on the company raising another round, which, of course, has now happened. Asked the U.S. expansion question again, Chaddah tells me that there are a number “variables” to take into consideration. “One of them is that the potential of the untapped markets outside the U.S. is humungous and so is the opportunity in the U.S.,” he says. “We are currently thinking actively about this. If the planetary alignment is right, it might happen in the next three months. If we run out of luck, it might not even happen in 2015. But second half of 2015 seems reasonable to commit to right now.” Adds Chaddah: “We are entering Malaysia and Ireland in the next quarter and are looking at more markets in Europe and South East Asia. We are looking at launching Australia very soon as well.” |
Xiaomi And Shunwei Capital Make $300M Strategic Investment In iQiyi, One Of China’s Largest Online Video Platforms | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | , which announced earlier this month that it plans to invest $1 billion in online video content, has been very busy spending that money. The hardware maker confirmed today that it and Shunwei Capital have together made a $300 million strategic investment in , the video platform that is majority-owned by , China’s largest search company. Xiaomi said that this is its largest investment to date. Baidu also said that it had increased its investment in iQiyi, though it did not specify the amount. The investment follows Xiaomi’s , the value of which was undisclosed. Youku-Tudou says its monthly user base is now more than 500 million, with daily video views surpassing 800 million. For Xiaomi, partnering with iQiyi, which like Youku-Tudou is one of China’s largest online video platforms, means that it will have more content to provide as it tries to entice more users into its multi-screen ecosystem of mobile devices and smart televisions. In turn, iQiyi can potentially grow its market share by reaching users of devices made by Xiaomi, which . In September 2014, 450 million active users spent 2.2 billion hours watching videos on iQiyi’s platform, according to iResearch. Over 60 percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices, an amount that iQiyi hopes to grow by targeting the 85 million users of MIUI, Xiaomi’s Android skin, which is installed on its smartphones and smart TVs. Like Xiaomi’s deal with Youku-Tudou, its partnership with iQiyi will allow the two to create original content together. In a joint statement, Xiaomi and Baidu said the partnership will “deepen cooperation in developing content and innovative technology products, especially in the mobile Internet field.” In addition to its site, which screens TV series, news broadcasts, and other content, iQiyi also operates iQiyi Motion Pictures and Hauce iQiyi Company to develop original productions. Xiaomi’s smart TVs, which launched in September 2013, are part of a plan to create a hardware system that syncs between its smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and smart wi-fi routers. Before it launched its $1 billion investment fund and partnerships with China’s two reigning video sites, however, Xiaomi’s native content for its smart TVs was relatively skimpy. The two deals it announced this month means it no longer has to compete with Youku-Tudou and iQiyi for viewers. In terms of hardware, however, Xiaomi still has plenty of rivals. For example, Baidu has its own smart TV, called TV+, which already streams content from iQiyi. Alibaba’s smart TV operating system, meanwhile, lets users shop for goods from its massive e-commerce sites and pay bills through their TV sets. Furthermore, Youku-Tudou has also signed strategic partnerships with other major smart TV manufacturers in China, including Huawei Technologies, ZTE 9 Network Technology, Goldweb Technologies; and Jiuzhou Electronic Technology. According to Digital TV Research, China is now the world’s largest smart TV and OTT (over-the-top) content market, with 20 million to 30 million sets sold each year. |
Coin Is Finally Shipping To Early Backers | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | One year after exploding on the scene, it looks like , the YC-backed startup that wants to replace all your bank cards with a universal card, is finally shipping its product to some early backers after a long, long wait. The company previously said shipments would begin this summer. It is now the middle of November. Coin has not made a public announcement or statement at this point, but we picked up on a couple of revealing details on Twitter, which show that some backers have received order tracking numbers, while at least one had his card arrive already. We’ve contacted Coin to ask for more details. i got my tracking number today. Check your inbox maybe — ｓｗｉｎｇｓ2 ｒａｗ (@Swings2raw) Well it's about time. [pic] — — James Higa (@jameshiga) Coin representatives did not respond for comment, but a customer support agent confirmed that the product is shipping. Good news, Coin has started shipping to US Backers! At this point in time, I do not know when anyone will receive theirs as everyone is sent a personal tracking number through their email, and the shipment depends on when they ordered. We do know that some people have already received theirs, and we couldn’t be happier! Please let us know if you have additional questions or concerns as we are always happy to help. Going on the @Coin tweets, it appears that a selection of lucky (or perhaps chosen) few are at the front of the queue, which suggests that other beta customers who paid $55 for the card — many of whom have become disillusioned by the wait — will get theirs . That won’t apply to those located outside of the U.S., however. The company has international customers that its timeframe for addressing them is “Spring 2015” — though we don’t know if that date will only apply to a selection of international countries, or all users who are overseas in one go. If you’ve not heard about or seen the credit card replacement — which lets you switch between cards, and syncs with your smartphone for security — then you’ll want to revisit at TechCrunch Disrupt New York earlier this year. In addition to , Coin has raised over $15 million in funding from investors. It started out as within just 40 minutes, and it has bags of potential for changing the way that we pay and store our precious cards. That said, Apple has introduced its own payment service, while eBay is spinning out PayPal and Square has realigned its focus — payments is a hotly contested space today, and Coin needs to get out of the blocks quicker than ever before. We’re still waiting to hear back from Coin at the time of writing, but we’ll update this story as soon as we learn more. |
Smart Pipe Just Might Be The Best Waste-Based Startup Video Ever | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ] Have you been concerned about your waste? Is it full of enough protein? Full of too much weird stuff like metal shavings or cat hair? Now there’s Smart Pipe. The system connects to your plumbing and allows you to sense all of the good stuff leaving your body. It socializes feces. The product seems to be ready to ship and is about to Disrupt! your waste stream. Amazing stuff from an amazing company. UPDATE – Oh. This is all fake and part of Adult Swim’s late night Informercial series. And it’s also a perfect send-up of awful Kickstarter videos as well as the increasing convergence of news and PR. It’s a little long, but if you do any of this in your product – from the ring-ring-git-fiddle video music to the social media fame balls shilling for your product to the awful digital gifts you get for making poop – stop. |
Uber Says It Won’t Look At User Data Except For “Legitimate Business Purposes” | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | While much of from has focused on vice president Emil Michael’s suggestion that the company could dig up dirt on critical journalists, the story included something that could be equally concerning — the fact that Uber’s New York City manager accessed the profile of a BuzzFeed reporter without their permission. On some level, the fact that a company can access its customer data may not be all that shocking. But it’s a reminder that Uber has detailed information about your comings and goings, and probably has a pretty good idea about where you live. And it doesn’t instill much faith that the company is being careful about who gets access to that information. Not helping things: claiming that the magazine reporter had been warned by anonymous sources that Uber executives might access her rider logs. The company tried to address those concerns in stating that it has “a strict policy prohibiting all employees at every level from accessing a rider or driver’s data.” There is, however, an “exception” for “a limited set of legitimate business purposes.” What do those purposes include? The post points to solving community problems (?), facilitating payments, monitoring for fraudulent activity, and troubleshooting bugs as “examples.” The post concludes: Uber’s business depends on the trust of the riders and drivers that use our technology and platform. The trip history of our riders is confidential information, and Uber protects this data from internal and external unauthorized access. As the company continues to grow, we will continue to be transparent about our policy and ensure that it is properly understood by our employees. I think the question now is: What constitutes a “legitimate business purpose”? As the post itself acknowledges, the uses described above are just examples. I mean, I suppose it’s understandable that Uber isn’t going to fence itself in by naming every single instance where it might access user data, but “legitimate business purposes” seems pretty broad. And if the goal was to make sure people don’t freak out about privacy, I’m not sure this is the most effective way to do it. |
Merkle Acquires Loyalty Startup 500friends | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | Customer relationship management company announced today that it has startup . The startup’s LoyaltyPlus platform allows businesses to run customer loyalty programs in stores, online, and on mobile. It also allows them to . 500friends co-founder and CEO Justin Yoshimura told me he was gearing up for the company’s next funding round and talking to potential investors, including Merkle (which was already 500friends’ largest channel partner). The CRM company had a different idea: What about acquiring the startup outright? Yoshimura said the idea appealed to him because his goal is to turn 500friends into “the loyalty partner for retailers.” The acquisition will allow him to focus on growing the product and customer base, plus he said said there’s a big “product synergy” in tying loyalty programs into CRM. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Yoshimura said the entire 500friends team (which has more than 30 people) will be joining Merkle, and he’ll be taking the title of vice president of loyalty. from investors including Intel Capital, Fung Capital, Crosslink Capital, and Y Combinator. |
A Gift Guide For The Novice 3D Printer | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | This is the year you and yours should take up 3D printing. Why? Because it’s cool, because 3D printing is the future, and machines have fallen in price and risen in quality. In short, 2015 will be the year of 3D printing. Here are some amazing printers to help you ring it in in style. An inexpensive, European-made 3D printer? Yes, please. I reviewed this model : it’s missing a lot of the bells and whistles of better printers but for the prize I’ve been able to product some quality prints without much fuss. It’s still $2,000 so it’s not the cheapest model on this list but it’s still far from the worst I’ve seen. The is a super-cool 3D scanner that lets your capture your friends and family right on your computer. What can you do with it? I made this fun model with the scanner and now you can download and print him. Be warned: it’s not great for smaller objects. For that you need a turntable scanner like the . While the Zortrax is all business, the . This cool resin printer uses special fluid that hardens under laser light. The resulting objects, which are solid instead of hollow, are surpassingly high resolution and are the closest you’ll get to injected-molded parts. The but even at $3,299 artists and designers will squeal if they get one of these under the Festivus Pole . The $499 is the cheapest of this bunch and is more than acceptable for a beginning 3D designer. While it doesn’t have any of the fancy tools that Makerbot and Zortrax offer, think of this as the HP Inkjet of 3D printing – solid, dependable, and easy-to-use. The granddaddy all of all 3D printers, the is a complete printing package. The software, hardware, and on-board firmware – plus the connection to Makerbot’s Thingiverse – make this the easiest printer to use. Think of this as the Macintosh to Zortrax’s PC. $2,899 but well worth the investment. |
NSA Reform Dies In The Senate | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | Well shit. A vote to proceed with the USA FREEDOM Act failed in the Senate after it did not collect the 60 votes that it needed. It failed 58 to 42. Before the vote, I noticed a slight change in the tone of people that I had on the phone: There was optimism that it could make it. It didn’t. You can stick a fork in NSA reform for this year, and this Congress. And, as I’ve said recently, given the current tone of GOP leadership in the Senate, it doesn’t appear that we’ll get much done in the next few years. I’m not alone in that pessimism. So up your encryption, everyone, the United States government doesn’t see fit to change. |
Yet Another Reminder To Mind Your Words | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | “You can’t post that photo,” said the founder and CEO of a prominent, exited startup. He was talking to his PR agent in a W hotel suite in Times Square. I had just taken a selfie with the two of them, at the publicist’s request, and then excused myself to use the restroom. “Seriously, you can’t post that,” said the CEO. “I look so gay in that picture.” I made my way back into the main living room, having heard everything. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay,” he said, awkwardly laughing as I popped around the corner. I look pretty gay in that picture, too. Because I am gay. And I’ll admit that in my youth, I used that word in the wrong way, too. I’m ashamed of it. As someone who loves words, there’s absolutely no justification for using the word “gay” to describe something that is uncool, or outside the norm, or weak, or undesirable in any way. Why is this something that you’re reading on TechCrunch? Because I firmly believe that the tech industry is not just at the forefront of technology, but it will determine the future of everything, from healthcare to environmental awareness to social norms. It is inaccurate to call this community further evolved. Like any community, we are comprised of many different people. Some set incredible examples while others behave badly. However, I choose to hold myself and my peers in the tech world to a higher standard. We are a community that has , and I refuse to let this founder’s words slip by as a casual mistake. This founder was hooked up to a mic, with a camera pointed at him (though not recording) as he said these words. He was preparing to do an interview and was on the record. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an executive say something they definitely shouldn’t have in front of the press. Just this week Uber exec Emil Michael who have been covering the transportation startup, a statement that Uber quickly apologized for. In order for us to be true pioneers for the future, we have to set a leading example today. I have no idea what this man feels in his heart towards the gay community. But he’s the leader of a company that hires people. He is someone that other people look up to. And he was talking to press. It’s not enough to say “there’s nothing wrong with being gay” in a hurried attempt to make up for the fact that he had just insulted all gay people by saying that a photo is inherently unsharable… because he looked gay in it? What does that even mean? The word “gay” is a label for people interested in romantic endeavors with members of the same sex. I aim to stay away from as many labels as possible, simply because I find them restrictive to my own personality. However, I call myself gay and am proud to because I want to make sure that Jordan counts as a vote as we work towards greater equality as a community. But as we’ve learned from Tim Cook, and Jason Goldberg, and Peter Thiel, and Kara Swisher, and Sara Sperling, and Nick Denton, and Owen Thomas, and Keith Rabois, and Joel Simkhai, and Megan Smith (and the list could go on and on)… not all gay people are made the same way. Being gay is a small part of a person’s identity, and while it shouldn’t be a piece that excludes someone from basic inalienable rights, it also shouldn’t be a definition for who a person is. And it certainly shouldn’t be a definition for “I look bad in this picture.” |
U.K. Government Funds Free Online Courses Teaching Startup Skills | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | A tech industry-backed, U.K. government-funded initiative offering free online courses to those wanting to learn commercial digital business skills goes live today, aiming to upskill Brits to work for tech companies or even start their own startup. The wider narrative here is of course the need to reconfigure the skills of the working population to ensure they’re fit for a more digitally focused national economy. (And create a skills bolster as over the coming decades.) The newly launched is being overseen by , working in partnership with a range of educational institutions and tech mentorship organizations — including Cambridge University Judge Business School, University College London (UCL), and Founder Centric, which in turn works with tech accelerators such as Seedcamp and others. Tech City is a publicly funded body which initially focused efforts on but now generally advocates for entrepreneurship in the U.K. “This is a platform where not only are you able to learn the latest skills in digital business but you’re also getting access to potential employers as well as partners who will help you with your idea,” said Tech City CEO Gerard Grech, discussing the launch of the Academy in an interview with TechCrunch. “It’s the next wave in how we’re seeing MOOCs [massively open online courses] evolve in providing people with opportunities as much as possible.” At launch the Academy offers eight free online courses, covering areas such as setting up a digital business, sizing an idea, developing and managing digital products, making a marketing plan, understanding digital marketing channels and running a marketing campaign, building a brand, and grokking business finance. Courses are available to any U.K. resident and will each take between three to six weeks to complete, delivered via a mix of video, reading assignments and hands on exercises. The Academy’s online learning platform is being powered by UCL. The entire initiative is being funded by £400,000 in public money, specifically coming out of the U.K. government Business, Innovation and Skills department’s budget. Grech said the Academy — which he dubbed a “pilot”, noting it’s badged as being in beta and will aim to tailor what it offers to the evolving needs of the U.K. tech community — has a year’s funding secured at this point. The courses on offer deliberately eschew teaching coding skills to avoid overlapping with other education initiatives, according to Grech, who pointed out there are already several players offering coding courses. He added that the courses were formulated by Tech City and its partner organizations, factoring in feedback from the tech community on the skills most in demand from their point of view. “When we looked at the stats and the data we felt that marketing and product development and business development were just as important as coding,” said Grech. “We felt that creating the Digital Business Academy to meet the demands of the commercial skills needed by digital businesses, especially from the entrepreneurs and CEOs that I’ve been speaking to, it’s just as important. We felt this was a great way of addressing this particular area to complement everything else that’s going on in the marketplace around coding.” “The program lead put out a tender to various universities and in discussions with the partners we felt that those [courses] were the most appropriate to begin with,” he added. “We’re welcoming new partners for next year but those are the three we’ve started with.” There have been more than 1,000 registrations for the courses over the six weeks since the Digital Business Academy website went live, according to Grech. He’s not putting any numbers on how many people he’s hoping will sign up in the coming year but says Tech City’s ambition is for a very broad outreach — to “democratize access to tech-related skills”, as he put it in a recent . That said, the initial outreach and marketing efforts for the Academy appear rather narrow, leaning heavily on the scheme’s industry partners — aka existing businesses that have agreed to put up a series of reward “opportunities” which course completers will be able to apply for, such as paid internships, mentorship opportunities, free co-working space, specialist content and free startup support such as access to loans. Tech City said there are more than 35 of these industry partners for the Academy, including the BBC, O2 Think Big, Unruly, Ogilvy Labs and Microsoft Ventures. It’s not clear how many rewards will be handed out. “Everyone who completes a course will be eligible to apply for rewards,” said Grech, explaining how the rewards system works. “Different partners have specified different combinations of courses that participants must complete to be able to apply for the rewards. The more courses one completes, the more rewards they can apply for. “When someone becomes eligible to apply for a reward, if they choose to apply for it they have to fill out a standard application form, and the application goes to the reward partner. The reward partner will assess whether to take it further based on the application.” When asked specifically about its outreach efforts, and how Tech City is ensuring that less technologically savvy and less well-connected sections of society are being made aware of these free courses, Grech said Tech City is working with councils — “to see how we can get it in to colleges and also potentially Job Centers as well” — but added that the initial focus is on Academy partners as the “big endorsers”. He later confirmed that the London Borough of Islington is one council Tech City is working with on Academy outreach, but a full strength push to promote digital upskilling at the coal face of traditional U.K. unemployment services has clearly yet to take shape. “We’ve got quite a diverse group of partners that will help us get the message out to all their members and students and so forth,” Grech added. “We’re looking at Job Centers but first of all we need to get the platform out, we need to get partnerships in place… We’re working with one or two particular councils where we’re trying to address how to move this into a situation where it’s implemented in a different way. Because obviously the platform is an online platform. And we’re initially looking at our partners to manage the outreach.” “This is a pilot. We’re making sure that we’re going to iterate the platform, according to user needs, and then we’ll see how else we can increase the outreach,” he added. It’s a particular irony here that the government is fully funding a boutique set of free and highly niche educational courses, when the business of attending traditional U.K. higher education requires students to stump up ever increasing tuition fees. Tomorrow thousands of calling for the government to scrap university tuition fees — meanwhile a handful of commercially focused lessons in digital business skills go live online for free. Do the math. The difference — beyond the relative cheapness of online learning vs the high costs of face-to-face tuition — is that this initiative aligns with the government’s current economic and jobs priorities, and benefits from a snug (some might say ‘cosy’) working relationship with industry players who have a need for the type of skilled staff it aims to turn out. Is this Academy, then, an indication of how higher educational might be generally reformulated in the U.K. in future — i.e. by paying closer attention to the skills in demand from employers, and placing less emphasis on learning as a route to personal and intellectual development? (Related: Tech City’s Baroness Shields recently .) “We’re in this situation where universities are very much used to a certain business model, which is face to face tuition. Obviously technology is disrupting many industries… I think in this respect this is a welcoming way in which skills get taught in a very scalable way across the U.K. And then obviously being able to fast track people to opportunities from the things that they learn,” said Grech, rather torturously skirting around the issue when I put this question to him. “I think what we’re doing here is we’re looking at this space, and we had several meetings with entrepreneurs and founders. What we’re essentially trying to do is just address the gap — address the need that we’re hearing directly from the community. “What this platform allows you to do is not only be able to learn from the courses but also be able to do exercises and assessments and be able to share that with the community. So the community can then judge your work in that respect, which is kind of pushing the model that we’ve all been used to — which is going to university and getting a qualification. What we heard from entrepreneurs and CEOs was just give me proof of what you’ve done. We’re hearing that people want to see how people have judged your work. And your coursework.” So it remains to be seen whether the future of U.K. education — doubtless increasingly digitally delivered — will end up placing greater emphasis on demonstrable proof of work rather than on acquiring standardized qualifications, and on higher education success becoming synonymous with acquiring “commercial know-how skills” and securing a job rather than being awarded a degree, and all the individual and intellectual development achieving the latter entails. In the meantime the Digital Business Academy has arrived with its mission to use taxpayer money to disrupt the U.K.’s paucity of digital marketers and brand builders. “We very much have a first focus on commercial know-how skills, and enabling you to start, join or grow a digital business. We felt that’s where the need was, and that’s what we’re addressing with this,” added Grech. |
Ad Optimization Startup Boost Media Raises $19M More | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | announced that it has raised $19 million in Series C funding. The company allows advertisers to find the best version of their search ad — it tests variants created by a network of freelance copywriters and designers, identifies the versions with the most clicks or highest conversion rates, then promotes them in a broader campaign. I last covered the company about a year ago, under its old name BoostCTR, when . At the time, CEO David Greenbaum said that he was planning to shift his focus from small and medium businesses to enterprise customers. He told me last week that the strategy has paid off, with more than 100 large brands using the platform. “Enterprise advertisers feel that pain more acutely,” he said, later adding, “So in this enterprise use case, I hve 10 thousand, 100 thousand, 1 million skews that I’m selling — how do I be sure that I have the most persuasive monthly marketing spend?” Greenbaum also said that he’s interested in moving into display advertising eventually, but right now the opportunity in search is big enough that he wants to “double down” there. Boost has now raised a total of $31 million. The new round was led by Battery Ventures, with Battery’s Roger Lee joining the board of directors. Previous backers Javelin Venture Partners, Pinnacle Ventures, and Webb Investment Network also invested in the new funding. |
As BranchOut Team Goes To Hearst, 1-Page Buys BranchOut’s Assets For $5.4 M In Cash And Shares | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | Another chapter closed in the life of , the failed startup that attempted to create a “LinkedIn within Facebook” with . The company’s assets have been acquired by , an HR software company based out of San Francisco but listed on the Australian stock exchange. Based on today’s stock price, 1-Page is paying around $5.4 million — $2 million in cash and 7.5 million in 1-Page shares. These shares are currently . However, the company says that the payout of this portion of the deal will not be for another 12 months so that number could change. Prior to today’s news, the publishing company Hearst (news ), putting them to work as the core of a new Silicon Valley product development group. 1-Page confirms that the founder of BranchOut, Rick Marini, is selling BranchOut’s assets — not Hearst. When BranchOut first launched, the company raced to popularity with a Facebook app that filled niche in Facebook’s platform: it offered users the ability to use their contact book on the social network as a professional networking tool. It picked up 33 million users and $49 million in funding on the back of that growth, but then the app died a death when Facebook changed its policies on how apps could spam users (or “make their growth go viral” if you are feeling more charitable). As part of the deal, Page-1 says it is buying this very app. It will use it “to create the most powerful employee referral engine for enterprises globally,” the company notes. That will involve repurposing the app, modifying it and integrating it with 1-Page’s own technology and services. 1-Page’s business customers will in turn be able to let their employees use it to help in the recruitment process. “Employee referral ranked number-one as the most effective strategy in sourcing talent,” the company said in a statement. “With – , companies will enhance their talent acquisition efforts and automate their referral process, saving time, money and expanding their reach.” The other part of the acquisition appears to the be the data that BranchOut amassed in its life as a startup. “With this acquisition, – will combine the social graph data with proprietary technology to create detailed professional profiles,” the company says. “Enterprises will discover talent from their own employees’ connections instantly and automate the referral process with a highly targeted approach.” Part of what 1-Page will add to the mix are user profiles by company, position and location — giving as one example the – -BranchOut network in Australia, which “owns 11 million profiles, over 80% of the working population in Australia.” |
TC Cribs: Famo.us, The Startup Office That Feels Like Home (Because It Used To Be One) | Colleen Taylor | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | In this episode of Cribs, we headed over to , the startup that’s built a web platform for developers and designers. A lot of tech companies try to make their offices feel as homey as possible for the comfort of their employees, but Famo.us just might take the cake. That’s because Famo.us is actually headquartered in what used to be CEO home. A few years ago, he was looking for an office to house his growing company — but he couldn’t find a space that he liked as much as his apartment in San Francisco. So he eventually decided to just stay where he was, knock down the walls, and turn it all into one big office. The result is a really comfortable and quirky space, complete with kitchens, bathrooms, and even showers. It’s a place where Famo.us employees and community members can work hard, play hard, and also sleep it all off if need be– basically the full spectrum of working and living. See it all in the video embedded above. And here are some photos we snapped while at Famo.us:
[gallery ids="1085184,1085185,1085186,1085187,1085188,1085189"] |
Bipsync Has A Research Management Tool For Hedge Funders | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | Danny Donado spent years working for a hedge fund bemoaning the lack of a good document and research management tool that he could use to organize and share the copious notes he was making on potential deals, so finally he built one. Donado launched so other hedge funders wouldn’t have to. The former employee initially used Evernote, Dropbox, and Salesforce to manage his workflow, but found that his cobbled together system had too many holes. “At the end of the day, it wasn’t purpose built,” says Donado. Bipsync differs in that it operates on a single platform, he says. The company is now pitching its wares to Donado’s former colleagues in the hedge fund business, but intends to expand its reach to a broader base of investment managers. Helping Donado go to market are a clutch of well-known angel and institutional investors who have funneled $1.5 million into the company’s coffers. Some of the disclosed backers include Russell Siegelman, a partner emeritus from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, David Eisner, and . The company is now in an open beta for individuals to access its product for buyside investment teams. “The IT security and compliance requirements are beyond anything consumer-focused software hosted on the public cloud can provide. At the same time, traditional financial software is notoriously complex and clunky,” said Donado in a statement. “Amazingly, this means that a personal investor using a patchwork of easy-to-use productivity software like Evernote and Dropbox is better equipped than a professional investment analyst. That ends today.” Bipsync has already partnered with five sizable hedge funds – collectively managing over $20 billion in assets – to gather feedback for its initial enterprise beta. Fund tier subscriptions start at $3,000 per month for 5 seats while, big enterprise accounts pay $10,000 a month for 20 seats. Investors can get a reduced rate now with $2,000 per month for the fund tier, and $7,500 for the enterprise tier. That deal will last til the end of January 2015. |
Netflix Will Expand To Australia And New Zealand In March 2015 | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | In its last quarterly earnings video streaming service Netflix teased that it would be soon launching in more countries and today comes confirmation of that: the company will be expanding Down Under, to Australia and New Zealand, in March 2015. “Internet-connected users in Australia and New Zealand will be able to subscribe to Netflix and instantly watch a curated selection of popular movies and TV shows in high-definition or even 4K where available,” the company says. “At launch, the premium and unique Netflix offering will include such original series as Marco Polo, BoJack Horseman and, among many kids titles, DreamWorks Animations All Hail King Julien.” These two new countries come after the video company was already live 50 other markets, including the U.S., Canada, Latin America, the U.K. and Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. Netflix is currently the with just under 38 million streaming video subscribers. But perhaps due to a later launch and stronger offerings from local players, it has yet to repeat that trick elsewhere. Collectively across the rest of the markets where Netflix is active, it has just over 15 million subscribers. Still, in its , the company noted that the bulk of its growth was coming from international markets — adding — so it’s no surprise to see it expanding those services now. Other local content will include Virunga and Mission Blue, and stand-up comedy specials Uganda Be Kidding Me, Live, from Chelsea Handler and Jim Jefferiess BARE — and it will be expanding that to include original series Bloodline; Marvels Daredevil; Sense8; and Grace. |
Far Cry 4 Review: A Quirky Open-World Shooter You’ll Want To Explore | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | Launching today, is the latest in Ubisoft’s franchise of first-person shooters set in exotic locales. It takes place in a big, beautiful open world roughly based the area around the Himalayas in Nepal. As a player, you’re free to explore this environment through a variety of means, including driving ATVs, cars, and trucks to water vehicles, small helicopters, and even a wingsuit for quickly bailing from great heights. When navigating towards a specific mission or location, the game conveniently lets you turn on Autodrive so you can take in the surroundings or deal with enemies in vehicles of their own. Your motivation for exploring the game’s world is the central campaign, which pits you against an eccentric dictator as the son of two rebels who has returned to the country from America to bury his mother’s ashes. As you fight for the rebels (who you join within minutes of gaining control after the opening cut scene), campaign missions make you choose between options like capturing drugs so that their sale can feed the country’s poor or burning them on principle. The game makes it clear that there are shades of gray to each of these decisions, though making these choices often seems to only change how certain key characters act towards you temporarily. There are also missions tangential to the main story which introduce you to the game’s many quirky side characters. Whether its a preacher obsessed with guns or a raunchy radio broadcaster looking to take down the corrupt governments propaganda, these characters are entertaining and their missions challenging and unique from the rest of your time wandering around the countryside of Kyrat. Speaking of which, there’s a lot in Far Cry 4 that has little to do with your progress in the main campaign. In order to toughen yourself up for the harder battles, you can go around hunting wildlife, whose hides can be used to craft better equipment. That includes making yourself bigger bags, which you’ll need to collect all of the loot you get from taking down enemies. It’s worth it to do so, however, because you can periodically sell it for a huge boost in cash, which lets you buy more of the weapons you unlock. You unlock weapons (and discover new locations) by completing key missions and by taking over the bell towers scattered around Kyrat to play the rebels’s radio transmissions instead of government propaganda. Capturing these towers is usually more of a puzzle than a fight, pushing you through some light platforming and a stealthy assassination or two to reach the top. Rounding out the time you spend wandering around Kryat are random “Karma” events where you run into government soldiers on the roads between villages and military outposts. These might task you assassinating an officer or running a courier with intel or supplies off the road, and typically only take a minute or two to knock out. They’re a lot of fun because you never know when another group of soldiers or a pack of wolves will stumble upon you, forcing you to change tactics just as you get the upper hand. Far Cry 4 is the first big shooter since to focus on providing a fun single player campaign instead of tacking one on to a primarily multiplayer game. While there are some online modes, including ones that let you make your own maps, you’re going to want to spend the majority of your time exploring Kyrat on your own or with a friend visiting from their own campaign (though we’ve seen claims on Twitter that the game boots you to the menu without saving if you lose connectivity while playing in the online co-op mode). After recently putting 10+ hours last week into Assassin’s Creed Unity, which has , Ubisoft’s latest AAA release was a refreshing palette cleanser that kept me engaged in making steady progress. As with Assassin’s Creed, this follows the formula set by the previous game in the series, but here Ubisoft has managed to keep what works while updating parts of the game that detracted from the most enjoyable bits. If you’re looking for a break from leveling up in Destiny or the latest Call of Duty, Far Cry 4 is a fantastic open world shooter. |
Uber CEO Says Exec’s Threats To Journalists “Showed A Lack Of Humanity” But Doesn’t Fire Him | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to the suggesting the company , including PandoDaily’s editor Sarah Lacy. In a tweetstorm, he said that “Emil’s comments at the recent dinner party were terrible and do not represent the company…His remarks showed a lack of leadership, a lack of humanity, and a departure from our values and ideals” He went on to say how Uber needs to instead tell the story of progress and regain consumers’ trust. “I will do everything in my power towards the goal of earning that trust.” Kalanick stopped short of firing Michael publicly, though, which might have gone a lot farther than just words to repair the situation. 1/ Emil's comments at the recent dinner party were terrible and do not represent the company. — travis kalanick (@travisk) 2/ His remarks showed a lack of leadership, a lack of humanity, and a departure from our values and ideals — travis kalanick (@travisk) 3/ His duties here at Uber do not involve communications strategy or plans and are not representative in any way of the company approach — travis kalanick (@travisk) 4/ Instead, we should lead by inspiring our riders, our drivers and the public at large. — travis kalanick (@travisk) 5/ We should tell the stories of progress and appeal to people’s hearts and minds — travis kalanick (@travisk) 6/ We must be open and vulnerable enough to show people the positive principles that are the core of Uber’s culture — travis kalanick (@travisk) 7/ We must tell the stories of progress Uber has brought to cities and show the our constituents that we are principled and mean well — travis kalanick (@travisk) 8/ The burden is on us to show that, and until Emil’s comments we felt we were making positive steps along those lines — travis kalanick (@travisk) 9/ But I will personally commit to our riders, partners and the public that we are up to the challenge — travis kalanick (@travisk) 10/ We are up to the challenge to show that Uber is and will continue to be a positive member of the community — travis kalanick (@travisk) 11/ And furthermore, I will do everything in my power towards the goal of earning that trust. — travis kalanick (@travisk) 12/ I believe that folks who make mistakes can learn from them – myself included. — travis kalanick (@travisk) 13/ and that also goes for Emil .. — travis kalanick (@travisk) 13/ and last, I want to apologize to — travis kalanick (@travisk) Michael, Uber’s EVP of Business, made the alarming comments at a dinner in New York designed to help Uber improve its relationship with the media. The opposite happened. He discussed how Uber was being unfairly criticized by the press, and described turning the tables by surfacing damaging personal information. As : “Over dinner, [Michael] outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.” Disgust spread quickly amongst Silicon Valley journalists and Uber users alike. Uber’s PR eventually jumped in last night, tweeting: We have not, do not and will not investigate journalists. Those remarks have no basis in the reality of our approach. — Nairi Hourdajian (@NairiHourdaj) Michael himself then tried to apologize to Lacy: https://twitter.com/emilmichael/status/534580244095959040 https://twitter.com/emilmichael/status/534580635709759488 But those quick tweets weren’t enough to quell the fire. And in terms of public perception, Kalanick’s probably won’t be either. The crisis has cemented Uber as a corporation driven by greed, and willing to stop at nothing to grow. Personally, as a journalist who has railed against Uber while being a frequent user, Michael’s threat hit home. I’ve bashed the company for killed by an Uber driver’s car between rides (weeks later it changed this insurance policy), , and saying it’d be happy to fire its drivers and replace them with self-driving cars. In retaliation, it surely could dredge up my Uber log and out me for my late-night escapades (if I didn’t frequently out myself on Twitter). All that’s stopping it is a seemingly non-existent code of ethics. If Uber isn’t at least willing to fire Michael, it’s hard to believe it’s treating his comments as anything but a road bump, despite the company clearly needed a new moral engine. Here’s the full-text of Kalanick’s tweet-storm: “Emil’s comments at the recent dinner party were terrible and do not represent the company. His remarks showed a lack of leadership, a lack of humanity, and a departure from our values and ideals. His duties here at Uber do not involve communications strategy or plans and are not representative in any way of the company approach. Instead, we should lead by inspiring our riders, our drivers and the public at large. We should tell the stories of progress and appeal to people’s hearts and minds. We must be open and vulnerable enough to show people the positive principles that are the core of Uber’s culture. We must tell the stories of progress Uber has brought to cities and show the our constituents that we are principled and mean well. The burden is on us to show that, and until Emil’s comments we felt we were making positive steps along those lines. But I will personally commit to our riders, partners and the public that we are up to the challenge. We are up to the challenge to show that Uber is and will continue to be a positive member of the community. And furthermore, I will do everything in my power towards the goal of earning that trust. And that also goes for Emil. And last, I want to apologize to . |
Senate’s NSA Reform Bill Heads For Uncertain Vote | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | So much for bipartisanship. Earlier today, Senator Mitch McConnell attacked the USA FREEDOM Act, intimating that supporting it would harm the nation in its current struggle with terror-state ISIS. Also today, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Ron Wyden, from the other slice of the aisle, indicated that they would vote for the bill. A few Republicans appear set to support the Act, including the Senator Ted Cruz, but mostly it’s : “Let’s get started on this. I would characterize this bill as a beginning, but let’s get started. Tonight is the beginning of reform.” : “This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs. The threat from ISIL is real.” So that’s where we’re at. There is a . It will require 60 votes to pass. It isn’t clear if that many votes exist. I haven’t spoken to a single person today who was confident about what will happen, but the math looks tough. If the Senate’s bill fails to advance, that’s it for this Congress on NSA reform. And, given that Senator McConnell is signaling that this bill — — goes far, I’d posit that the chance of reform in the next congress isn’t high. Of course, what the house will do even if the senate passes the bill isn’t clear, though I have heard continued murmur that the lower chamber might pass the upper chamber’s bill to get rid of the issue, so that it won’t pose distraction in the new year. That’s speculation. Strap in, it’s almost time for the vote. |
BuzzFeed Jumps Aboard The Messaging App Train, Starting With WeChat | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | is a modern media empire that moves, or at least tries to move, with the times. The company was initially famous for its easily shareable stories and listicles, but these days it is more sophisticated than that, mixing Pulitzer Prize winning authors and serious journalism with the cats, dogs, and lols on its platform. But the most interesting part of the company isn’t its diverse content, but the strategic direction behind it. from Andreessen Horowitz in August, and since then it has , , and its publisher. The company’s next step is messaging apps, and to become a media partner on the Chinese firm’s app, which counts 468 million monthly active users across the world. BuzzFeed’s move into messaging has been on the cards for some time. that it was hiring for a person to manage its presence across a range of top chat apps — which the job description named as Kik, Line, Snapchat, WeChat and WhatsApp — and it has now filled that position. The staffer, who is based in its New York office, is charged with “growing and running editorial for WeChat and future messaging app partnerships”, the company says. Through this partnership, BuzzFeed will now have its own official account on WeChat. Readers are encouraged to follow the account, which will send out a number of messages per day, based on the top viral content or news that is deemed interesting. WeChat is a media-centric platform built for content dissemination. Many media firms in China, where WeChat is strongest, are on the app, but BuzzFeed is the largest international name that Tencent has snagged for the service to date. So, why the jump into messaging apps? Like the gaming and data strategies, the move about predicting the future of media, so , BuzzFeed’s globetrotting VP of International, told me in an interview. “As a media company, we have to be very sensitive to the changes in how people are consuming content online. There are so many people using messaging apps — our theory is that large numbers of people will use them to communicate and share media in the future. Mobile already accounts for more than 50 percent of BuzzFeed’s traffic, while a whopping 75 percent of traffic — which just hit 175 million unique readers per month — comes from social media. That might appear to bode well for messaging apps, but at this point there really is little evidence or knowledge of whether chat apps can direct significant volumes of traffic to websites. Earlier this year, that BuzzFeed’s WhatsApp share button generated more clicks than its tweet button, but that was only for users on iOS devices, and Twitter continued to generate more traffic. Those are significant caveats. A BuzzFeed representative told me that so-called traffic — which means the number of users visiting the site from unknown destinations online — is increasing. The company didn’t provide a concrete figure, but that rise be a reflection of articles being shared and clicked on via chat apps — but it could also be from other sources, such as email. Lamb didn’t get specific on when BuzzFeed will make similar moves with other messaging apps, but he did say that he hopes the company can “learn a lot” from its initial efforts with WeChat. It isn’t clear just how many users WeChat has in North America, which is BuzzFeed’s biggest market for traffic, since Tencent doesn’t break the numbers out by region. But Lamb said he believes the partnership will be an interesting asset in overseas markets, which account for 50 million unique visitors to BuzzFeed per month. Lamb specifically mentioned India, where WeChat has spend money on promotion and seen promising traction, while BuzzFeed has offered a local edition of its site in India since August. Yet, WeChat’s presence outside of China is really the critical point here for BuzzFeed. If few people in the U.S. are using the app — and in Western markets due to sluggish uptake — then the experiment may have limited value for BuzzFeed. For Tencent, however, this deal is a major coup. The company, alongside other Asian chat apps like , is going great guns at home, but in the U.S. market it is coming up against the likes of Facebook Messenger, Snapchat and Kik, and struggling to offer a compelling differentiator that lures users from these other, more locally incumbent apps. As I see it, the media features in WeChat, while sophisticated and cool — you can ping BuzzFeed with keywords like ‘cats’, ‘dogs’, ‘lol’ or ‘wtf’ to get “customized” content sent to you, for example — are really a bonus for people who are already actively using the app, rather than a draw that brings new users in. It stands to reason that this is particularly true if all your friends already use iMessage, Snapchat, or Facebook to communicate daily. Dragging them to WeChat just to get updates from BuzzFeed isn’t likely to work. Especially if they can get those updates on social media or the site already. Lamb says that this is “the first of many partnerships” and, with messaging the hot topic of 2014, I’ll be keenly watching to see what lessons BuzzFeed can learn, and whether other competitors will dive in and follow, and which apps they select. For now, there are more questions than answers, but that’s exactly why BuzzFeed is steaming ahead and looking at the potential of messaging. |
Nearly Half Of The Operation Onymous Takedowns Were Scam Or Clone Sites | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | While the FBI was able to take down a number of popular Dark Web sites including the , it seems the wide-ranging attacks targeted mostly fake sites. Friend of has taken a closer look at the sites the FBI attacked and found that 153 of the 276 them were spam sites or clones. “Of the 153 clone or scam sites, 133 were clones and 20 were scam or phishing sites,” wrote Cubrilovic. What are clones? A bot called [TOR Link] spent a number of months copying the UIs of popular sites. Hackers then used these clones to grab logins and passwords of popular dark web sites. This means that in addition to a few legitimate sites, the dragnet approach to take downs has attacked a number of outright fakes. “For the following sites, the clone or fake version was seized while the real site remains live: Cannabis UK, CStore, Dedope, Executive Outcomes, FakeID, Fake Real Plastic, Hackintosh, Pablo Escobar Drug Store, Real Cards Team, Smokeables, Zero Squad. Some of these sites were mentioned in the FBI press release or court seizure notice as having been taken down when in fact the clones were seized.” Interestingly, a number of legitimate personal websites were also taken down but went unmentioned in the FBI’s press release or court filings. Most damning, the FBI took down a on one TOR address while leaving the real site up and running. Cubrilovic is asking site admins to contact him regarding their sites in order to assess how the FBI found and shut down the affected sites. It is clear that the federal cops were using techniques more familiar to the Keystone variety. |
MOCAheart Makes Keeping Track Of Your Heart’s Vital Signs Easy | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | wants to make keeping track of your cardiovascular health as easy as pressing a button. The device, which is , was developed by a team led by Naama Stauber and Dr. Daniel Hong, who was a physician at National Taiwan University Hospital, one of the country’s top teaching hospitals, before becoming an entrepreneur. The two met while attending the at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which focuses on developing new software and hardware for healthcare. To use MOCAheart, you place your index fingers on top of the device and wait a few seconds for your health data to show up on the connected app. The lightweight but sturdy MOCAheart, which I saw demoed at MOCA’s Taipei office, contains several sensors within its stainless steel and plastic case. Two are light sensors: one red light and one infrared sensor that measure blood oxygen and blood velocity, respectively. Two EKG sensors track cardiac electronic activity. It also has a G-sensor, or accelerometer, so the MOCAheart can be used as an activity tracker in the future. The app uses pulse transit time (PTT) to estimate the user’s blood pressure. Instead of telling you your systolic and diastolic pressure measurements, like a blood pressure monitor does, MOCAheart uses a rating scale it calls the MOCA Index, which ranks your heart health (based on blood pressure, blood oxygen, and blood velocity) from 0 to 4. If you score a 0 to 1, that means your blood pressure is probably in the low to ideal range. Two means it is still normal but elevated, while 3 and 4 signify that it may be high enough to warrant a trip to the doctor. The app also lets you note the time, location, and weather conditions for each reading. The latter is important because or can put people who have heart disease at risk for heart failure. Hong says that the MOCAheart app uses its own index instead of giving people their blood pressure measurements because the device currently isn’t FDA-approved as a blood pressure monitor (though the startup might apply in the future). This is a potential drawback for people who need exact measurements, but on the other hand, if you just want an overview of your heart’s vital signs, the MOCA Index is easy to use and understand. The app does give you more precise measurements about your pulse and blood oxygen levels, and can be accessed by caregivers or family members.
The MOCAheart is targeted toward people, including the elderly, who need to keep track of their heart’s health, but can’t remember (or be bothered) to strap themselves into a blood pressure cuff everyday. MOCAheart can be slipped into a keychain holder or clicked into a specially designed smartphone case. Other cuffless blood pressure monitors out there include and monitor. MOCAheart wants to differentiate with the device’s sleek design and its app, which gives family members a quick way to monitor their love one’s health. The device was developed partly with people like Hong’s parents in mind. “When I was in the U.S., I’d call my parents and ask about their health. They kept insisting they were okay, even though my father actually had high blood pressure. Then he had a stroke. As a doctor, I felt I should have known earlier,” says Hong. “I wanted to create something that would make it easy for people to share track health data and share it with their families, so they can be alerted earlier if something needs to be checked out.” MOCAheart has reached about a third of its $100,000 goal, which it needs to hit by Dec. 25. The device starts at $119 and is estimated to ship in April, a delivery date Hong is confident MOCA will be able to hit because they already have a final working prototype and manufacturers lined up in Taiwan. For more information about MOCAheart, visit its . |
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The Uber Supper | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | As we in the U.S. sit down to holiday dinner tonight, we are reminded that we have oodles to be thankful for. For one, I am grateful that the news cycle is now slow enough that I can post stunning image of the infamous , depicted as Leonardo Da Vinci’s “ .” In addition to Emil Michael, Ben Smith, Michael Wolff, the dinner party that launched a thousand also featured Ed Norton, Chris Hughes, Mort Zuckerman and Arianna Huffington — all portrayed above (for names, below). Michael Wolff is in , because without telling him the dinner was off the record. This story was pretty much just over a week ago, and now has cycled out of in favor of Black Friday deals coverage and European Google news. Who knows whether once we Americans wake up from our food comas, or if it will be eclipsed by another ? In any case, Uber executives, it’s probably not the best idea to hire people to look into journalists’ private lives or even allude to it over filet. Please stick to offering convenient, inexpensive rides. Happy Thanksgiving. |
Thankful | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | Everything is awful. Terror is on the rise, the oceans are threatening our shores, humans are heartless, pitiless, and endlessly greedy. If we keep going the way we’re going we will be hollow ghosts haunting a corn husk moon, our civilization returned to dust.
 We fear. We long for escape. We all succumb to fire, disease, and sloth. There’s not a lot to be thankful for. But it’s getting better. We have mastered many infectious diseases and we can manage life expectancy and infant mortality with some degree of success. Most of us survive past the first few hours of life these days. We can be thankful for that. We control the skies. We can move humans from one place to the next in a few hours and we reap the benefits of a globalized economy. We are hard at work at lower-polluting cars and other vehicles. We are hard at work pulling our homes and cities off of the antiquated grid. Soon cities will glisten with photovoltaic cells and bristle will connectivity devices. If we are fair and kind we will share this technology with the world and pull millions out of poverty. We have machines that can build other machines. We have robots that help the elderly live full lives. We have systems that can spot strange attractors and cancers with equal precision. We have landed a little robot on Mars and then sent another on a comet rocketing through time and space. We are beyond our ken yet still yearn to venture further. We have created engines of change and commerce around the world. Spots that were once considered backwaters now have thriving entrepreneurial scenes. Men and women around the world have quit their jobs and taken their lives in their own hands. The corporations that strangled our creativity are now longing for our ideas. We are entering a strange new era of self-sufficiency and, thanks to nearly universal health care, we can escape the treadmill of a career and build something. Violence is hidden to most of us, most of us never know its victims. Many of us can eat. The enemies of rational thought are fading. We are entering an era that will bring us beyond superstition. We are growing and the outliers, the paroxysms of violence we see are few and far between – but no less jarring or tragic. Again, this is not to say that everything is perfect. If you’re reading this then you probably have the benefit of clean water, shelter, and technology. If you’re reading this you owe great thinkers for your success and your survival. Your goal is to be the next great thinker. Help others with your creativity and your skill. Help others as much as you can. Everything is awful. As I sit here on Thanksgiving Day I’m trying to not to feel afraid even though I fear for my children’s future. I’m trying not to feel angry although some media tells me to be furious. I’m trying not to feel despair although I know that despair is our lot. I’m trying to accept all of this work with you to solve it. I’m trying to appreciate what we all have. I want to relax. I also want to say that we here at TC love you all, all of you who work and strive and create to build a better world. You guys are amazing. Happy Thanksgiving. Things are awful but it’s getting better. |
A Gift Guide For Watch-Loving Ladies | Contributor | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | While almost anyone can wear any watch – some watch companies aim traditionally female watches at men with small wrists – a dedicated woman’s watch is beautiful, well-made, and timeless. Here are some of my favorites for the past year. Legible and elegant, the PrimaLuna collection by historic Swiss watch maker longines offers a variety of styles with both mechanical and quartz movements as well as all steel or two-tone cases. Many women’s watches are really just scaled down men’s pieces but what is nice about the PrimaLuna is that is feminine from the ground-up and nevertheless appropriately conservative. $1,100 – $6,400 Decorative items such as a mother-of-pearl dial and diamonds mask what is actually a very sensible timepiece in the Captain Ultra-Thin Lady Moonphase watch by Swiss Zenith. It begins with an in-house produced Zenith Elite automatic movement that also features an indicator for the phases of the moon. Legible and classy the 33mm wide steel case is elegant enough for evening attire but wouldn’t look out of place when worn casually. Think of it as a fashionable item for serious watch lovers. $9,600. While Chanel is mostly known for their popular ceramic-cased J12 collection watches, a solid favorite is the Premiere which blends French romance with a youthful style that tends to still look good on women of all ages and styles. The distinctive watch case is borrowed from the cap of the famous Chanel No. 5 perfume bottle, which is itself borrowed from the shape of the Place Vendome area in Paris. Offered in a few styles with or without diamonds and in steel or 18k gold, the Premiere on the newer chain bracelet is among the most attractive women’s timepiece of late. $4,750 – $31,000 “Tortue” means “tortoise” and refers to the shape of this iconic Cartier timepiece. New for the brand is the Tortue Medium size which marries a humble 39mm wide case with a Cartier manually-wound mechanical movement. Extremely demure, the Tortue Medium recalls traditional luxury with its gold case, classic Cartier dial with blued steel hands and Roman numeral hour markers, as well as a sapphire crystal in the crown all matched to a brown alligator strap. This is a watch that speaks luxury and status without wishing to show it off flamboyantly. $15,600 Widely considered to be Italy’s finest and most exclusive producer of jewelry and silver items, Buccellati also has a boutique watch making facility and craftspeople who hand-produce the cases of each model. Unlike French jewelry companies Buccellati products are typically more densely decorated with engravings and lots of details. Many of their jewelry items are also one-of-a-kind. For the ultimate classic timepiece visit one of the few Buccellati boutiques around the world or visit them in Milan to have a custom-made women’s timepiece complete with an elaborate design and a healthy amount of precious stones. Their prices are even more “reasonable” than those of the bigger names in France. For 2014 Bulova returns to the classic 1960s “Spaceview” collection in part of the fresh Accutron II collection. Those familiar with original Accutron Spaceview watches will recall that they contained electronic turning fork movements that pre-dated quartz movement technology. A hallmark was a sweeping seconds hand similar to that of mechanical movements. The Accutron II collection makes use of a modern quartz movement exclusive to Bulova known as the Precisionist. In short, it also offers a sweeping (versus ticking) seconds hand and actually more accuracy than most standard quartz movements. The distinctive shield-style case and open dial are reminiscent of the original 1960s models and while this is a men’s watch it gets a bit more girly on the white strap. $499 |
Startup Weekend On The Turkish Border Unites Two Countries’ Entrepreneurs | Elmira Bayrasli | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | It’s not unusual to encounter a Startup Weekend somewhere in the world. The trademarked event that brings together individuals eager to build and present it before a panel of entrepreneurship experts and investors is well known and widely replicated. Yet, when a Startup Weekend involves Armenia and Turkey – known adversaries – things change. Earlier this month, the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV), the Public Journalism Club (PJC) based in Yerevan, and Global Entrepreneurship Week in Armenia collaborated to host Startup Weekend Armenia-Turkey. It was the first Startup Weekend to involve entrepreneurs from two countries with no diplomatic relations. It was also a rare Startup Weekend to take place in two different cities. Kicking off in Armenia’s capital Yerevan, more than two-dozen men and women crowded into Elite Plaza, a sleek business center. The facilitators, Ece Idil Kasap and Emin Okutan, partners of the Turkish accelerator Viveka, eased the crowd donned in black Startup Weekend t-shirts into the weekend’s activities. It was a slow start, with more feet shuffling and hands in pockets. Soon enough, however, the room started to buzz. Armenians and Turks broke into six mixed teams and began to work on developing their startup ideas. By the time pitches came around on Sunday afternoon in Gyumri – a city 75 miles northwest of Yerevan – new ventures, along with friendships, had been formed. Mihran Babayan and Vahagn Hovhannisyan, both based in Yerevan, had come to the event with their plan for Home Planning, an online interior design business. “I thought I could develop a bigger network with Turkish people,” Hovhannisyan said, noting that Armenia is a land-locked country of just 3 million. “During the 24 hours of working with the Turks I got new ideas that are great and I made great connections.” Similarly Mariam Dilbandyan came to Startup Weekend Armenia-Turkey with Seeing Hands, a social enterprise that trains the blind to give massages, with the hopes of building her business. “I heard that a Turkish group was coming and I know that in Turkey there are many beaches,” she said. And where there are beaches there are people in search of massages. With 80 million in Turkey, Dilbandyan pointed out, she has a better chance of scaling her business idea than merely staying in Armenia. “My grandparents are from Western Armenia – from Erzurum,” she said. “So I feel a connection with them. I love Turkish people.” Hers was a view that was echoed. In fact, throughout the weekend, as Sinem Duman, a student at Turkey’s TOBB University noted, there was little if any talk about the historical enmities between Armenia and Turkey. “I thought the atmosphere would be more tense,” she said. “In fact everyone was eager to make friendships.” “This was an awesome chance to work with our colleagues from Turkey,” said Artavazd Barseghyan, the co-founder of a Yerevan-based software company. He noted that he didn’t think about his country’s bad relationship with Turkey. “I think that the younger set of minds are different; we are open and don’t find problems – we want to find solutions.” He noted that the Armenia-Turkey Startup Weekend proved that. “It doesn’t matter to which nation you belong to – we are united in technology.” Among the six teams at Startup Weekend Armenia-Turkey that found success, Home Planning and Seeing Hands earned recognition for their original ideas. It was, however, a startup that fuses the sharing economy to cloud storage – “an Airbnb for file sharing” that came out on top – WeCloud. WeCloud, an idea put forward by Berkay Akcora, Anita Alexanian, Umutcan Duman and Gor Vardanyan, addresses the increasing problem of growing data but little storage. The startup allows a user to “trade in unused local storage to provide low cost, unlimited hosting services.” The experience both Alexanian and Duman noted exceeded their collective expectations. “It’s amazing what you can do in 24 hours – how much you can learn,” said Duman. More important, he noted, was how much he bonded with his Armenian partners. “We weren’t focused on being Armenian or Turkish – just on being the best.” |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: BlackFriday! | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | We’re bringing this podcast to you a little early so you can arm yourself before going into Black Friday! Join Greg Kumparak, Matt Burns, and Darrell Etherington as we skewer Zelda and talk about the best laptops for your money!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by . |
Spend Your Black Friday Funds Helping Crowdfund A Mission To The Moon | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | You have enough already. And owning more gadgets just means more under-utilized stuff gathering accusatory dust. So why not spend the Black Friday funds you’d set aside to spend on sales tomorrow helping to instead? Yes, this is one very ambitious crowdfunding mission — with an estimated delivery schedule of, ooooh, a decade hence. You really gotta respect a that lays out a 10-year delivery plan. But this is not the average crowdfunding project, trying to drum up interest in a better kind of butter knife or a remote controlled cat toy. This is *science* that’s hoping to be majority-funded by public interest in space exploration. Governments aren’t overly keen on stumping up the cash to burn rockets into space these days, so getting the public to club together might be the best way to push forward space exploration. It’s either that or letting corporate mega-billionaires burn mountains of their own money trying to lift their egos into the upper atmosphere. The team behind the , as they’re dubbing their first probe, are looking for £600,000 (~$943,000) in crowdfunds for the initial planning phase of the project — which isn’t bad when you consider a which pings you when you have a new email raised multiple millions via the same funding funnel in recent memory. At the time of writing the Lunar Mission One team has pulled in more than £371,000 so there’s a ways to go to kickstart this Moon mission, and 20 days left for their campaign to get there. The mission’s aim is to send an unmanned probe to a previously unexplored region of the Moon — the South Pole — with a launch pegged for 2024 if the project gets successfully financed and all the technical stuff goes to plan (so that’s likely a pretty moveable feast — but hey this is The Final Frontier!). Once the probe lands the intent is to drill down further into the lunar surface than humans have drilled before. Boldly going and all that jazz. How far? Up to 100 meters, but at least 20 meters, so at least 10 times deeper than prior drilling. Samples will then be collected. And rock that’s 4.5 billion years old analyzed by the probe’s on board instruments. The probe will also put seismometers into the borehole to take geological readings. The scientists backing the mission want to improve the understanding of the link between the Moon and the Earth’s formation — so helping to illuminate the origins of life on Earth, much like the . They note: Studying rock from deep below the surface will allow us to understand, better than ever before, the geological composition of the Moon, the relationship it shares with our planet and the effects of the late heavy bombardment period on the inner solar system. Ultimately, the project will improve scientific understanding of the early solar system, the formation of our planet and the Moon, and the conditions that initiated life on Earth. The probe will also contain instruments allowing it to measure local environmental conditions on and above the Moon’s surface. And will be looking to assess the composition of the dust on the Moon’s surface — seeking to sniff out oxygen and hydrogen to consider the South Pole’s suitability as a location for a future human Moon base. The team also wants to investigate the viability of putting a future radio telescope on the Moon to conduct low frequency astronomy from the Moon — something they note is not possible from Earth. Of course they are going to need a serious amount more cash than the initial £600,000 Kickstarter goal. In fact the full mission cost is closer to $5 billion. But they have a plan for raising the rest of the money — by selling storage space in a “memory box” time capsule that will be placed below the lunar surface as part of the mission. The public will be able to buy digital space within the time capsule to store whatever content they fancy, text, pictures and so on, and also even purchase a tiny bit of physical space to store a strand of human hair. The capsule will be placed into the drillhole one the probe has done its analysis and the hole sealed up again, with the time capsule tucked out of harms way from more minor meteorite strikes. That memory box sale will come later, but current Kickstarter pledgers can reserve a voucher for the time capsule sale by pledging £60 or more at this stage. The more cash you pledge, the more storage space you reserve in the capsule. At this point, the Lunar One Mission has already been seven years in the making, funded by its founder David Iron, along with backing from the UK Space Agency — which originally commissioned concept studies and a technical feasibility report, plus a small number of private sponsors. It has also received support from companies operating on “a pro-bono and at risk basis”, according to a spokesman. The ambitions of the team stretch past just the one mission — to a Lunar Mission Two and beyond. For instance, if they can raise more funds in future they say they would plan to be able to return the rock core samples gathered by the probe back to Earth for more detailed analysis. But that’s going to require more money, and more patience from project backers. Perhaps the most exciting thing about Lunar Mission One right now — a decade out from any possibility of touching down on the Moon’s surface — is the potential the team sees for crowdfunding as a means to fund space missions. If you’re tired of waiting for governments to invest more resources in scientific endeavors, rather than pouring public money into vast surveillance infrastructures that spy on citizens or spending billions fighting ideological wars on foreign soil, well here’s a chance to bypass the politics and shoot for the Moon. Literally.
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Identity Wars: Why Apple Pay Is About More Than Payments | Patrick Salyer | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | There’s been no shortage of attention paid to the launch of the new iPhones, with their array of shiny new features, bigger screens and better hardware. Early reviews seem to indicate that the company has, yet again, come through with another massive success. Many of those who stood in around-the-block lines or refreshed their Internet browsers incessantly just for the pleasure of pre-ordering probably were thinking about the differences between the two new phones: All perfectly fair questions to ask when buying a new phone but not as important as this: When you buy the new iPhone, you’re not just purchasing your next phone; you’re making a decision about the future of your digital identity. Back in June when Apple at WWDC, the company shrewdly made its entrance into the consumer identity market. And with good cause. Apple is one of the world’s most trusted and revered brands (even after ), has over 200 million credit cards on file from iTunes accounts and a bevy of devices that users need to authenticate their identities on. Yet for the longest time, Apple was, , missing a huge opportunity by not offering Apple ID as an identity provider on apps and websites and gaining a share of a market by the likes of Facebook and Google. Now, with the release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple finally has the pieces together by combining NFC, seamless authentication and relationships with leading financial institutions. With this combination, it seems Apple has set its sights on ensuring that Apple ID is the identity of choice – not just for payments but for everything. Consumers have been longing to get rid of passwords for years. Ad nauseam, we’ve heard the clamors for the end of passwords because of the deluge of usernames and passwords we have amassed and the inherent security issues and frustration they create. Imagine never needing to create another user name or password again for any site or app by using your Apple ID. That’s what Touch ID promises. Ultimately, Touch ID and Apple Pay are proxies for Apple ID, which is becoming paramount to what is sure to be a strategy to overtake other identity providers. Consumers will love using Apple ID for authentication on sites and apps because of the seamless experience – imagine being able to authenticate quickly not only at point-of-sale systems and mobile apps using your thumbprint but also on third-party sites just by having your phone in close proximity to your computer. Businesses, or relying parties, will love it because they’ll get more registrations, identify more customers across devices, and have lower shopping cart abandonment. Apple, in turn, will establish more permanence with users, further entrenching them into the Apple ecosystem. Furthermore, Apple will gain more complete customer understanding by seeing how Apple users interact online. That’s potentially valuable if Apple ever wants to move into advertising to compete with Facebook and Google. All this while providing high security and a “non-social” option for authentication that ties hardware and software together – a critical combination that today’s leading identity provider, Facebook, doesn’t have. While this may not be the death knell for Facebook’s short-term dominance in identity, all one has to do is look around the industry to see where authentication is heading and see that Facebook is missing a piece of the puzzle. Google/Google+ ID has gained steady momentum over the last few years and the fact that it has tied identity to its own set of phones (Android) will be important in continuing that growth. Similarly, Amazon, which became an identity provider with the in 2013, has also taken on the hardware + software identity strategy with the launch of Fire Phone handsets. And while rumors have swirled for years, Facebook in launching a handset, instead opting to produce a layer for Android via Facebook Home, which has seen relatively paltry adoption thus far. Digital identity is evolving quickly, and as consumers are presented with a greater variety of authentication methods, the competition to become the de facto identity provider among some of the world’s biggest companies is heating up. Apple’s entrance, with Apple Pay/Touch ID as its Trojan horse will put pressure on many of these other providers to offer features like payments or even mobile phones, with features like biometric authentication. Facebook and Google might have a foothold on identity right now, but it won’t be long before people start logging into sites and apps with their Apple IDs, and when they do, I believe Apple will start to seriously challenge these players. Identity is a fascinating space right now and I can’t wait to see how Apple pushes the other players to get even better. |
These Aren’t The Drones You’re Looking For | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPf95aPMTWE&w=560&h=315] As we approach the holiday season, San Francisco startup has been getting a lot of attention from the press — after all, by , rather than when it’s convenient for the delivery service, Doorman should reduce the risk that your gifts will get stolen while they’re sitting on your doorstep. I was actually quoted in — not that I’m particularly knowledgeable about the industry, but I willing to blather about it on camera. Most of the coverage, however, has failed to mention a cool new service called . We’ve written previously about how, despite hype from Amazon and Google, . As you can see in the video above, Doorman has beaten those bigger players to the punch — not with advanced technology, but simply by slapping a propeller hat on a delivery guy and calling it a drone. Now, you might be thinking that this is just a goofy publicity stunt, and, well, that’s completely accurate. But hey, it’s Thanksgiving, and rather than give you real news, I figured I’d try to make you laugh. On a slightly more serious note, I should probably point out that at the moment, Doorman is only available in San Francisco. ( has launched in New York.) Oh, and the Doorman team wants me to tell you that it’s releasing an Android app next week, and that it’s working to add features like instant delivery and package return scheduling. |
Twitter Experiments With Engagement Stats Directly In Tweets | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | Want to know just how many people actually care about what you’re tweeting? A new Twitter experiment spotted by ex-Twitter platform head Ryan Sarver will show many you how users are clicking on the links in the updates you post, with a handy link directly in the expanded Tweet view in the iOS application. As usual with Twitter’s features, this is limited to a small sample pool of users at first, but could roll out more widely if deemed successful. Whoa. Twitter is now embedding your tweet stats into your tweets! Love it — Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) At the bottom of the tweet view, for those with this feature enabled, you’ll see a “View Analytics Details” link, which takes you directly to a synopsis of the overall interaction with said tweet, including overall impressions, and “engagements,” which includes how many people actually clicked on a link you shared, how many expanded the tweet and more. The quick glimpse at how your tweet is faring seems like something that would be very useful for brands and others who thrive on social media success – but the question is whether they might reveal a little more than Twitter is comfortable sharing with a general audience. The feature is out-of-the-way enough that it will probably go unnoticed or unused by most who don’t care about that kind of thing, however. Quick access to analytics without having to resort to an external dashboard is actually incredibly handy, but again, these tests don’t necessarily always bear fruit in terms of broad feature launches, so don’t hold your breath if you’re not already in this particular test bucket. |
Windows Phone 8.1 Finally Breaks The 50% Market Share Threshold | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | Windows Phone 8.1 accounted for more than 50 percent of all Windows Phone usage in November. It . Windows Phone 8, its predecessor, still controls 33.5 percent of the Windows Phone base. That amount will decline as more carriers update phones that were initially sold with an earlier version of the Windows Phone platform. Here’s the chart [Data: . Via: ]: Also worth noting in the above data is the 95 percent of the market that Microsoft controls. Microsoft wants both its gross sales figures to rise, and its percentage of the Windows Phone market to decrease. Microsoft would be far happier to sell twice the phones, at 80 percent of the market, than sell a few more, and control 95 percent — third-party OEM support is critical to the long-term health of Windows Phone. That’s not conjecture. The company wouldn’t be working to if it didn’t want to see a more diverse manufacturer base for the platform. At the same time, for us nerds, the 95 percent figure — and its likely only small change in December — means we’ll be able to quickly estimate the total Windows Phone handsets sold in the current calendar fourth quarter, Microsoft’s fiscal second. Extrapolating from Microsoft’s raw reported unit volume to the entire market’s size is simpler the larger the company’s personal market share remains. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if HTC can expand its own Windows Phone market share to the 5 percent mark inside of the first half of 2015. It’s 62 percent of the way there already. Or, if another OEM could race it to the mark and win. We’ll see. For now, stop reading blog posts and go hug someone you love. |
The Black Friday Survival Guide | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | research data displayed in the following guide. I saw horrific sights working retail for seven long years in both a big box electronic store and a major shopping center. I saw things that will haunt me the rest of my days. I watched two kids get trampled by what I call Double-Wides because Circuit City clearanced-out Dreamcasts for $80 on Black Friday. I once hid behind a massive video display just for a few moments during the chaos. I’ve seen people fight, bite, and trample other members of our human race just to save a few dollars. What follows is perhaps the most comprehensive Black Friday guide ever assembled. There are shopping tactics, buying guides, survival tips, and a thorough rundown of the different types of Black Friday shoppers you will encounter. Please, if you’re considering shopping on Black Friday, think about your family, your dog, your livelihood and reconsider. If you’re still convinced that it’s the right thing to do, be sure to thoroughly read The Black Friday Survival Guide. Your life literally depends on it. This type of Black Friday shopper is becoming more and more common, almost as if there’s an epidemic sweeping the nation causing more of these types. These shoppers are nearly impossible to avoid, so use their sheer size for your own gain. Think more NASCAR than football. You’re going to draft behind of them as they plow through Smokers and Big Papis (see below). Once the target is within sight, a quick bump should cause them to stumble just long enough for you to shoot ahead and snatch the last Kinect holiday bundle before they can get their sausage fingers on it — just watch out for a Big Papi if you perform this maneuver. A simple “Look, it’s cheaper on that endcap.” might be all it takes for a half-second distraction. Smokers are generally of the female orientation, but don’t be surprised to see some from the male gender either. This shopper generally spends 3AM to 4AM clam baking in their minivan, with the primary goal of creating a vile personal safety bubble that most will not dare enter. Be careful, these are wiry folks; hunched over from years of smoking three packs a day, they come prepped for Black Friday with at least one whole pot of Folgers Coffee in their gut. While they may be quick off the line, they also get winded quickly. It’s best to give them plenty of room to run with the goal of outlasting them. Big Papis generally sport either NFL jerseys or Real Tree hunting appeal. Both make them easy to spot. The best course of action is to simply avoid these beasts at all cost. They might seem mild-mannered from a distance, but they generally accompany a Double-Wide during her hunting spree and will protect their property at all costs. If you topple a Double-Wide, duck into the crowd immediately, because a Big Papi would like nothing more than to justify getting up at 3AM by making the local news after pounding your face. These dudes might also be shopping by themselves; this is where the NFL jerseys and camo come into play. It’s their way of maintaining a bit of manhood while participating in a generally female ritual. If spotted alone, use the same tactics for the Double-Wides as they are generally in the same mental state. This is by far the most deadly of all Black Friday shoppers. A Mothership’s primary goal is to hit multiple stores one after another by utilizing her teenage offspring and friends. These children will do anything to impress their mother and their small frame makes them perfect for ducking and diving through crowds while the Mothership waits outside the stores front door with the engine running. The teenagers are fine shoppers, it’s the Mothership that will kill wondering Old Timers when traveling between stores. She’ll peel out from a store with her eyes buried in her bags, inspecting each one to ensure the entire list was purchased. Scary stuff. These folks are more cute than they are dangerous. Old Timers can be either male or female; it doesn’t matter. Their Members Only jackets or London Fog overcoats generally give them away. The male Old Timers are generally found with their hands in their pockets, waiting patiently by the front door for their female counterpart. Women Old Timers might put up an angry front, but most of the time they’ll unknowingly handover a doorbuster to a teary-eyed Mothership offspring. Do the right thing, and side with the Old Timer. Black Friday is serious business; potential for danger is very real. Please, always travel in packs of two. You’ll have each others backs. Double-Wides tend to rush product displays like $7.99 food buffets, but remember, a nonchalant shove in their upper half will likely cause them to lose balance and could save the life of your partner — or at least net you the last half-priced Hannah Montana Dream Star Acoustic guitar. Another potentially risky maneuver: the “Blind Checkout”. This calls for sending one shopper into the fray while another immediately gets in line upon entering a store. It’s best performed if you’re getting to a store shortly after the doors open. Rude Smokers will generally cause a stink if this is noticed, but a person waiting in line can counter this by grabbing a random product to hold while waiting. Simply give this unwanted item to the clerk while checking out. Your timing needs to be spot-on though. If the line waiter gets in line too early, they’ll be left awkwardly empty-handed if the shopper doesn’t return with the items quickly. (Pro-tip: if you’re next in line and product-less, pretend to answer an important phone call, step out of line, and just jump right back to the end 30 seconds later.) Watches need to be synced and there should always be an open line of communication. Get Bluetooth headsets, learn how to use the conference call on your cell phones, even using two-way radios are worth the cost of your pride to ensure team members can communicate — for both safety and efficiency reasons. People die on Black Friday. If a team gets split up (intentionally or not), being able to locate other members dramatically reduces the chance of death by Double-Wides or Motherships. It instills a sense of security and clears a shoppers mind if they’re not frantically racing through the aisles. Those attempting the Blind Checkout can generally achieve success with a constant open line. The best doorbusters are at the largest stores. It’s best to scout out these locations the day before Thanksgiving as most of the time the stores are already prepped. Doorbusters are generally piled up on endcaps or in the middle of the aisles. Make a mental note of these locations and the best way to circumvent the hoard of Double-Wides and Smokers. If abiding by the Buddy System rules, take your partner with you. The worst thing that could happen is to scout the locations by yourself on Wednesday, only to suffer an early injury on Black Friday pushing you to the role of Line Waiting. If both members of the shopping party know the layout, each member becomes virtually identical and able to perform multiple roles. If shopping in the ‘burbs, pack your car with extra solid and liquid foods. It’s best to stay away from fiber-rich energy bars or greasy fast food breakfast sandwiches. Instead, pack lunch-type foods: ham roll-ups, peanut butter sandwiches, even your kid’s Lunchables will work. You need good protein from a substance that your body is more likely to hold on to rather than want to evacuate quickly. Don’t fall into the trap of coffee either. That is, of course, unless you’re well away of its effects on your bladder and can work a potty break into the shopping schedule. The same applies for large energy drinks. Don’t fuel up on an unknown drink as it may cause unknown consequences. Instead, drink plenty of water and let your body’s natural adrenaline provide the extra rush of energy. Plan for a nap the day before by ensuring your home is in the proper state post-Thanksgiving to allow such an activity. There’s no reason to get taken advantage of on Black Friday. Utilize online Black Friday sites now to make sure the deals are really worth it. Is saving $10 on a $100 item really worth getting plowed over by a Mothership? No. But saving $300 on a $1000 HDTV probably is. The most important thing to remember about Black Friday is that stores are out to make money, not save you money. Only buy doorbusters items. Retailers capitalize on the notion of a perceived sale and gently inflate the prices of other items in the weeks preceding the biggest shopping day of the year. Don’t wander into Best Buy on Black Friday’s afternoon with the goal of buying any ol’ HDTV. That’s playing into their hands. Wait until the following weeks when the entire selection goes on sale for real. If the Doorbusters aren’t your thing, save some stress and stay in on Black Friday with your Turkey Day leftovers. Then you can prepare for Cyber Monday. [Note: This was originally published in 2010, but it is a timely less post and deserved to be resurfaced. Enjoy!] |
We’ll Get Our First Look At Windows 10 Consumer Features In January | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | Windows 10 is already a known quantity to some degree thanks to the , but Microsoft is holding an event late in January to present its consumer features properly, according to a new report from . The January event will include discussion of new features for end-users, including an all-new touch input interface called “Continuum.” Also on the agenda for the event are discussions about how Windows 10 will work for phone and tablet hardware, as well as potential improvements to the Xbox One dashboard. Windows 10 is meant to unify Microsoft’s entire hardware lineup, including Xbox One, under a single platform, so this could be the first good look at how everything will work together once it all launches properly. Windows 10 is said to be launching sometime in “mid 2015,” so don’t expect the software to become available for the general public at said January event. More details should follow shortly about specific timing. |
Bio-Fuel Powered Electric Triplane Launches On Kickstarter | Mike Butcher | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | We thought Triplanes disappeared after World War One. But a new startup aims to bring them back in a new hybrid electric aircraft, powered by biofuel. FaradAir is now to achieve its initial funding goals for its plane. The Bio-Electric-Hybrid-Aircraft or BEHA for short, aims to be the world’s first ‘Hybrid’ eco-friendly aircraft, but won’t take to the skies until 2020. The Anglo/US venture involving several technology partners, including the renowned aviation engineering university at Cranfield, UK. Neil Cloughley, Managing Director says the near-silent aircraft negates night flight restrictions and pollution concerns. The key difference with the BEHA is its size. Most electric planes have huge, long glider-like wings which restricts where they can operate from, but by employing a tri-plane format, the BEHA can land on a normal airfield. Solar panel skins feature on all flight surfaces, and a wind-turbine will create battery-charging capability for both in-flight and when on the ground. However, the price comes in steep: $1m US Dollars per aircraft. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 18 | null |
The Most Popular Enterprise Sync and Share Product Might Surprise You | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | released a report this week with details on the enterprise sync and share market and what they found may surprise you. It certainly surprised me. That’s because the most popular sync and share tool in the enterprise today is not Box or even Microsoft OneDrive. It’s Dropbox, the The report, which surveyed over 1000 IT pros in October and asked them about the sync and share tools in use in their companies, found that Dropbox was the enterprise leader by far with more than 40 percent of responders saying their companies used that. The next in line was OneDrive with just over 25 percent followed by Google in third with over 20 percent and Box in fourth with just under 15 percent. All the rest had less than 10 percent. What’s more, just 18 percent of those surveyed currently pay for an enterprise sync and share product. It’s hard to know what this all means exactly, except that as the report indicated, we are still (surprisingly) in the very early days for this market and there is a lot of room for all the players to grow. Alan Pelz-Sharpe, one of the authors of the study told me that Dropbox comes up all the time when he talks to clients. “Dropbox comes up in virtually every discussion we have with buyers. To be honest with you my opinion is that firms are often consolidating on whichever is the most popular being used in their enterprise – its a pragmatic approach. If you have 5,000 active Dropbox accounts and would love them to move to your preferred enterprise class alternative – that’s a huge change management issue,” he said. 451 Research actually believes that as bigger companies turn their attention to this technology, customers will tend to focus on the more expensive and established enterprise players like EMC, OpenText and Citrix –in other words, the usual enterprise suspects and not the cloud upstarts. In fact, Pelz-Sharpe believes that the enterprise stalwarts who have been slow to react to this market may eventually be the big winners even though data shows they are far back in the pack at the moment. “Footprint does not equal revenue,” he said. What he means is that the traditional enterprise vendors tend to charge more than the newer players and that’s translating into more money for them even though they have a substantially smaller marketshare today. He added, “I think the survey data tells us a few things. It’s early days and this stuff is just starting to really play out in the enterprise, few folks have a ’strategy’ as such and brand visibility and strength is very important (Google, Dropbox etc). Also, I expect EMC Syncplicity and some true enterprise options to make good traction over the coming year and this space to look very different indeed in 18 months.” It’s worth noting, however that the report acknowledges that overall, most companies have no sense of what people are actually using outside of the IT (known as Shadow IT) and this could be skewing the numbers down because it’s looking strictly at the IT perspective –and they clearly have lost control to a large extent of what people are using. Sharpe says that, regardless, we are in the early days of this market and it’s going to shift dramatically over time. “Bottom line is these are both early stage markets – in 5 years time they will likely look very different indeed. But as of right now, too much of the information we are all getting, comes from vendors themselves, so it’s important to now validate a lot of these claims.” He’s right of course. It is, but it’s also important to ask the right questions and to ask the right people and I’m not sure IT is the place to find all of the answers to these questions right now, especially in regards to the cloud upstarts. At the same time, this is an area that calls for data because as the report aptly points out, this is a market that has received a fair amount of hype and we can’t just take the vendor’s word for marketshare. This report is a start, but it’s clear that we have a long way to go before we build a true picture of what’s happening here. |
Zano Is A Sky Selfie Micro-Drone That Flies Itself | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | Holy autonomous micro-drones batman! Wondering how you’re going to line up your next ? Aka a selfie taken from up high by a passing UAV so you don’t get a photo of yourself remote controlling a drone… Well, never fear: a U.K.-based firm is building a micro-drone that flies itself so you can stand around looking nonchalant/pull off some sick BMX/skateboarding/tombstoning tricks while being papped from above. Called , the micro-drone is currently a flying prototype, due to make it to market next summer. It’s being demoed on as its engineer makers, , seek to raise £125,000 to give their new baby lift off. At the time of writing they’ve already passed £100,000 raised and still have 42 days left on their campaign so expect Zano’s pledged funds to easily soar past the target. The Zano micro drone is just 2.5 inches x 2.5 inches (and 55g in weight), with a 5 megapixel on-board HD video camera plus digital microphone — and optical image stablizing tech — to take decent stills and footage. Video resolution is capped to 720p because of initial bandwidth restrictions, although the on-board camera is capable of 1080p 60 fps — in other words better quality footage may be offered/unlocked in a future update. To enable watchable footage and non-blurry dronies, Zano uses a variety of on board sensors for stable flight indoors and out. On board sensors include GPS, infrared for obstacle avoidance, echo sounding sonar and air pressure sensors for altitude control. It uses Wi-Fi to send footage back to the owner’s mobile device. Flight time per battery charge is slated as 10 to 15 minutes at this point. It has a 25mph top flying speed, and a 15 to 30 meter operating range (depending on the mobile device you’re using it with, and any local regulatory restrictions on UAVs). Having a mix of positioning sensors enables Zano to determine its position relative to objects around it and thus maintain a set distance from your mobile device — when used in a “follow me” mode. It also means it can autonomously avoid obstacles in the process, so this is a drone that’s designed to take away the strain of flying a drone. What’s not to love? Zano can also apparently be set to maintain a particular position, to give you a static bird’s eye view on your scene, or further controlled by tilting the paired mobile device or using other controls in the companion app. Zano’s app will support iOS and Android. Further micro-drone tricks in the works include tracking a set target via the follow me feature, a facial recognition capability, and swarming Zanos so a user could use multiple micro-drones to capture different perspectives on the same scene. These features will be offered as in-app purchases after Zano ships. The Kickstarter price-tag for the drone, which includes 12 months of “free capability updates” after its public launch, starts at £139 (~$220) . The engineers behind Zano began working on the concept back in October 2013, after developing drones for military and law enforcement scenarios. How far along are they at this point? They have this to say on their Kickstarter page: ZANO is up and flying, holding position, avoiding obstacles, streaming live video back to a smart device, capturing video and photos. However, with as much capability as we’ve packed into ZANO, we are continuing to refine the flight, avoidance, video and photo capturing and user interface, plus we have relentless testing and refining procedures prior to us releasing ZANO to the market. We will begin our BETA testing in March 2015. With a view to enter production in May 2015! A spokesman for the company elaborated on the outstanding developments for the project at this point — and it’s a pretty long list, topped off with the need to do a lot of testing next year. Technical stuff on the to-do list includes finalizing the flight frame circuit to include an SD card, finalizing obstacle avoidance systems, plus GPS and the audio board; finalizing production shape of the plastic components to send away for tooling and subsequent injection moulding; fitting in a pre-production pilot run of 500 Zanos to ironing out any production issues; plus about a month’s work on firmware adjustments and refinements to fail safes, optimization of image handling, object avoidance algorithms and more. Also on the slate: building the iOS and Android apps, and contacting regulators to get UAC guidelines and ensure the drone’s capabilities remain within the law. As with all crowdfunding projects — and especially those involving hardware — it’s worth stressing that estimated schedules routinely slip. So expecting dronie delays is the sensible option.
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Le Wagon Is An Impressive French Coding Bootcamp For Entrepreneurs | Romain Dillet | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | Coding bootcamps are nothing new, but they have always been more popular in the U.S. than in Europe. Last year, when started, it was a breath of fresh air. The team not only wanted to bring the concept back to Europe, but also wanted to add its own flavor. Le Wagon is a coding school specifically targeted towards entrepreneurs. It designs its own high quality content to make you learn coding in two months. “We all have the feeling that the world needs our students, and not the opposite. Our students can do more or less whatever they want after Le Wagon,” co-founder and COO Romain Paillard told me in a phone interview. “Starting next year, twenty CTO or CEO will graduate from our school every month.” And this is key to Le Wagon’s success. It is more than a coding school. Some students already have a strong business background because they graduated from a business school, or already went through a demanding engineering school. Yet, they don’t know how to use this theoretical knowledge to produce pragmatical code. Le Wagon dubs itself a product accelerator. Instead of helping you on the business side like most startup accelerators, Le Wagon will make you work on your product. You enter this school with your idea, and you will code it from scratch and produce an MVP. After two months, you will be able to take your project further if you want. is an app to order and deliver a bouquet of flowers on demand. is a sort of for vintage cars. is a Tinder for job recruitment. All these projects were released by Le Wagon students. And there are many more of products. Other students applied for engineering jobs and became engineers at Stripe or Finexkap after only two months of intense learning. It will cost you nearly $5,000 to attend Le Wagon (€3,900), which is quite expensive but can also be seen as an investment. And it doesn’t seem to scare people away — the next two batches are already booked. But how does a startup like Le Wagon scales? First, the company spent a lot of time this year on its own teaching process. The team developed its own to assign exercises, talk with teachers and see how other students are doing. It gets much easier over time to teach a new batch. Second, Le Wagon is opening its school in new cities, such as Brussels early next year. Third, Le Wagon is thinking about new course formats. “In 2015, we will work on shorter sessions on very specific topics, such as iOS development,” Paillard said. “Our idea is that we will be able to aggregate all this content and repackage it for online courses.” In other words, Le Wagon could start competing with , and more. All of its content is already in English. And testing it with bootcamps is great way to make sure that Le Wagon can provide quality content. |
Space Age Is An Old-School Adventure Built For Mobile | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | is an old-school adventure game built for the iPhone and iPad by the developers of It takes place in an alternate timeline where humanity (in 1976) has achieved the fantasy of the 50s: putting people on another planet. It’s almost overwhelming with the amount of nostalgia it inspires, an impressive feat considering the fact that I wasn’t alive when the games, movies, or comics that clearly inspired it were popular. You play as the youngest member of a group sent to explore a planet with alien life. At first, things are pretty calm. You learn the basic controls by finding the rest of your team and collecting some Nucleum, a material that’s rare elsewhere but so bountiful on this planet that it crunches under your feet as you walk. It soon becomes clear that your team is not the only intelligent life on the planet. As you encounter aliens, things get a little weird. Upon discovering some symbols in a temple delineating the history of these creatures, Space Age’s story takes an unexpected sharp turn into Twin Peaks territory as you experience a series of trippy visions that waver between the protagonist’s past and present. All of this is presented through gorgeous pixel graphics straight out of an adventure game from 20-30 years ago. Everything is drawn in a retro-futuristic style, with more detail given to the environment than the characters themselves (which means you get to use your imagination a bit). As Space Age loads, it recommends you play with stereo headphones. I agree — the game’s music is charming and the sound effects change slightly based on where you move the camera in relation to where sounds are coming from. It does a lot for immersing you in the world despite the fact that you’re playing on a small screen. None of the dialogue is voice-acted, so you’re going to be doing a bit of reading. The plot is interesting enough, though I do wish that the game would let you skip a few more interactions that you’re forced to watch over and over during some of the more challenging puzzle segments. Speaking of which, Space Age plays very much like the old adventure games that inspired it. You spend much of your time just walking around, trying to figure out what the game event wants you to do, tapping around the screen to reveal more of the map in the hopes that some clue will reveal itself to you (or that you’ll luck out by accidentally tapping the part of the environment that sets off the next plot event). Some of the more challenging puzzles put your character in harm’s way. Whether it’s an alien with a blaster or a vision that puts you at the edge of madness, most of these will require you to try at least a few times before you figure out exactly what you need to do to survive. Space Age has a checkpoint system, so most of these setbacks won’t waste more than a few minutes each. Still, this is a game best played when you don’t have time constraints. Despite being packaged as a mobile title, I enjoyed Space Age most when I was at home or on a long plane flight — failing a puzzle felt far more frustrating when I only had minutes left on the train during my daily commute. Fans of adventure games will find Space Age’s $4 entry fee well spent. Whether you’re playing on a phone or tablet, the game’s touch controls are a perfect fit to the style of gameplay, and there’s not much else like it out there in the sea of free-to-play games and action-heavy premium titles on mobile today. |
European Parliament Backs Investigation To Split Google Search From Its Other Businesses | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | A little from the European Parliament today: they support the idea of breaking up Google. While the search giant was not mentioned by name, members voted 384 to 174 (with 56 abstentions) in favor of a set of measures encouraged to drive more tech growth across the European Union. Among those measures: a resolution to enforce European competition rules against online companies that are deemed to be abusing dominant positions in search. Specifically, “MEPs also call on the Commission ‘to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services’ in the long run.” Other measures approved today included introducing cloud computing standards and fast-tracking new telecoms rules. The EU believes that these changes could help the region generate an extra €260 billion annually. To be very clear, , in that it doesn’t directly give regulators the mandate to force Google to break up. What it will mean is that European Commission and state competition authorities now have been given a green light to ask these questions of Google, and potentially lodge antitrust investigations that could result in more enforceable calls for Google to change how it does business in Europe, or potentially break up. Google, which controls around 90% of the search market in Europe, has its fingers in many pies, from enterprise services through to mapping and more. It is the maker of Android, the operating system that is installed on the majority of smartphones in the region. And its Chrome web browser is also the for consumers going online. Many of Google’s services are interconnected and integrated together. For example, you need a Google account to use an Android handset, which is preloaded and defaulted to run on Google’s services. The part of the resolution approved today that concerns Google has been the subject of much debate this week, and comes as a has been sent back for further investigation after now-former competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia failed to get enough consensus around his , solutions that were deemed not competitive enough, and too easy on Google. Almunia had rejected calls to look into breaking up Google — an argument that is now up to his successor, Margrethe Vestager, to either also reject, or decide to pursue with today’s mandate. Today’s statement makes a reference to how central search services are to the wider competitive area online: The resolution underlines that “the online search market is of particular importance in ensuring competitive conditions within the digital single market” and welcomes the Commission’s pledges to investigate further the search engines’ practices. It calls on the Commission “to prevent any abuse in the marketing of interlinked services by operators of search engines”, stressing the importance of non-discriminatory online search. “Indexation, evaluation, presentation and ranking by search engines must be unbiased and transparent”, MEPs say. Given the role of internet search engines in “commercialising secondary exploitation of obtained information” and the need to enforce EU competition rules, MEPs also call on the Commission “to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services” in the long run. |
Goldman Sachs Invests $36M In Korean Food Delivery App Baedal Minjok | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 27 | Seoul’s startup industry has been awash with major funding news over the past few weeks. Earlier this month, and game developer each disclosed that they had raised $100 million or more. Now Seoul-based startup , which operates food delivery app , has announced that it has raised a 40 billion won (about $36 million) round led by Goldman Sachs. The capital will be used to improve Baedal Minjok’s technology and fuel its international expansion. The amount is impressive because until last month, Baedal Minjok was focused solely on the domestic market. The app, which launched in June 2010, currently claims to be South Korea’s largest online and mobile food delivery service, with more than 140,000 restaurants registered on the platform and four million orders processed per month. Nearly all of Baedal Minjok’s orders, or more than 99 percent, are placed through its iOS or Android apps. Baedal Minjok, which means “Delivery Nation,” is focusing the first stage of its overseas expansion on Japan. Last month, Woowa Brothers formed a joint venture called Line Bros. Corp with messaging app Line. Line Bros. Corp currently operates a food delivery service called Line Wow in Japan. Line Wow’s app is separate from Line messenger, but taps into its base of 54 million registered users in Japan. For more information about Baedal Minjok, check out , which is about controversy over its fee structure as the app became increasingly ubiquitous in Seoul. Goldman Sachs is also an investor in GrubHub, a publicly listed food delivery service that operates in 700 U.S. cities and London. In a statement, Stephanie Hui, head of private equity investments at Goldman Sachs in Asia (excluding Japan) said that the firm’s investment in Baedal Minjok gives it the opportunity to tap into Korea’s growing e-commerce industry. “Korea is one of the most attractive e-commerce markets in the world. This investment in Baedal Minjok’s innovation and talented management team exemplifies Goldman Sachs’ aim to partner with Korean corporate leaders who are able to expand globally,” she said. (h/t ) |
Xiaomi Partners With Youku Tudou, China’s Largest Internet TV Company | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 11 | Just last week, fast-growing Chinese hardware maker Xiaomi . Now we’re getting a glimpse of how Xiaomi plans to use the money. , China’s largest online video company, . According to the companies, Xiaomi will invest in Youku Tudou by purchasing its stock on the open market, though it did not disclose how much. Other , which is owned by Chinese search giant Baidu. Baidu had no comment. In terms of content, the partnership with Youku-Tudou means that the two companies will develop content and technology together, including multi-screen online video services (that would involve, presumably, Xiaomi’s smartphones and smart TVs). Xiaomi will also license existing content from Youku Tudou and invest in the production and distribution of new movies and videos. In a statement, the companies said that “Youku Tudou’s ability in producing original content will provide strong support to the Xiaomi family of hardware by making the user experience more compelling, and will help to boost average revenue per user.” Youku Tudou says that its monthly user base is now more than 500 million, while its daily video views have passed 800 million. Youku’s app is also the secon most popular mobile app in China in terms of time spent by users, says iResearch. Meanwhile, Xiaomi currently has 85 million active users of MIUI, its Android skin. The partnership will be the first Xiaomi project for former Sina.com editor-in-chief and executive vice president, Chen Tong, who joined Xiaomi as vice president of content investment and content operation last month. Chen and Xiaomi co-founder/VP Wang Chuan are in charge of deciding where the $1 billion Xiaomi has earmarked for entertainment content will go. Xiaomi’s smart TVs, which first launched in September 2013, are part of its plan to create a hardware ecosystem around MIUI, its Android skin, which syncs between its smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and smart wi-fi routers. But its native content for its smart TV ecosystem is still relatively sparse, because did not have a partnership with an online video site. On the other hand, Baidu’s smart TV, called TV+, streams content from iQiyi and PPS, Youku Tudou’s main rival. In addition to online video, TV+ also gives users free access to movies and TV series. Alibaba’s smart TV operating system, on the other hand, has the advantage of the company’s e-commerce and online payment assets, like Tmall, Taobao, and Alipay, which allows users to shop for goods and pay bills through their television sets. |
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