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This Gadget Tests Food For Gluten In Under 2 Minutes
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Matt Burns
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| 6
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More people than ever are realizing that bread isn’t supposed to make a person bloated and sick and perhaps they have a sensitivity to gluten. Or worse, they’re allergic. The Nima from could change the lives of these people and not just those with a gluten allergy. “Mason, I just want to know what Cheez-its taste like,” my daughter told my son a few months back. It was just a musing of a six-year old, but the comment breaks my heart. She was diagnosed with Celiac when she was 14-months old after a series of tests trying to determine why she was critically under-developed. Now she’s a healthy six year old, but like many others, struggles with food on a daily basis because she’s allergic to gluten. Most people with allergies are pretty good at identifying risky items. The Nima is designed to be an extra safeguard for questionable times (are those french fries gluten free?), instead of something a person would use for every meal. The Nima takes two minutes to identify if there’s gluten in food. This is done using an antibody-based test that the founders say produce results on par with what’s done in labs. The device uses disposable pods that breaks down a sample of a food item. Each pod costs $3.99 and the device will retail for $249. The pods will be sold in packs of on a monthly basis. The pods can be configured to test for other allergies, additives and pathogens. Peanut and dairy pods are already in development. After the Nima determines the results of the test, the data is uploaded to a database the company is building that could be added to discovery apps like Yelp or Foursquare. It’s important to note that 6SensorLabs does not need FDA approval for the Nima. The device simply tests for gluten and the company does not make any claims on the impact of a person’s health. 6SensorLab is currently for the device.
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Guy Kawasaki On Startups, Entrepreneurship And The State Of Social Media
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Zach Abramowitz
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One of recurring pieces of advice to entrepreneurs is to create a mantra, not a mission statement. A mantra is three or four words that captures the essence of your organization e.g. Wendy’s: healthy fast food or FedEx: peace of mind. Guy even created a helpful mantra that sums up his career as the chief evangelist at Apple, now , a venture capitalist, an advisor, a brand ambassador, a speaker and an author: empowering entrepreneurs. Guy’s advice isn’t specific to tech startups, or even startups broadly speaking. I have personally recommended to people launching everything from startups to non-profits, podcasts, bands and books. Over the past week or so, Guy was nice enough to give me some of his time to chat and answer a few questions about the startup ecosystem, entrepreneurship and the state of social media. What follows is our unedited exchange.
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Why SoundCloud Will Be Worth More Than Spotify
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Alex Moazed
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| 24
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SoundCloud recently it struck a long-awaited licensing deal with Universal Music, whose hit roster includes Kanye West, Adele and Taylor Swift. This latest deal provides SoundCloud with 50 percent coverage among the “Big Four” — Warner Brothers also has a deal with SoundCloud; Sony BMG and Sony/ATV are still holding out. The Universal deal, in addition to SoundCloud’s latest round of funding, is a strong indicator that the Berlin-based music-content is a serious competitive threat to Spotify. While SoundCloud usually gets much less media buzz than Spotify, you wouldn’t know it based on their numbers. First, while both SoundCloud and Spotify have large user bases, Spotify has only 75 million active users compared to SoundCloud’s more than . Why does SoundCloud have twice as many registered users? Spotify is more of a paid service for streaming music. The total number of users matters less to Spotify than how many of them are willing to pay. In contrast, SoundCloud is less focused on monetization (for now) and can afford to provide free content in the name of growth. Second, SoundCloud has much better unit economics than Spotify. Why? SoundCloud’s producers, the users uploading content, are there to build a following and are not as focused on monetization. The agreement with Universal simply wards off any potential lawsuits over copyright infringement. In contrast, Spotify pays out As this stat suggests, the Spotify and SoundCloud business models are radically different. SoundCloud has a platform business model where its content is created by its network of users, not acquired through licensing deals. For SoundCloud, the more audio producers that join the network, the more listeners will want to join. This increase in users, in turn, incentivizes more creatives to post their music or podcasts on SoundCloud, and the continue to build from there. In contrast, Spotify is primarily a reseller of music inventory owned by record labels and publishers. It’s simply a distributor for the latest releases, sort of like a Walmart for music streaming. Most of the songs on Spotify you could find on Apple Music, Pandora or another streaming service. As a result, Spotify lacks the network effects that SoundCloud enjoys. Consider the difference between YouTube and Netflix. The distinction is the same here, but with music rather than video content. Given Netflix’s relative success, you might think this is a favorable comparison for Spotify, but it isn’t. YouTube is valued at $85 billion, or . And you only need to understand one number to know why: Netflix will spend more on content in 2016 than any of CBS, Viacom, Time Warner or Fox. Like Spotify, the vast majority of what Netflix earns goes to license owners. If you dig deeper, this analogy makes a lot of sense. Just like Netflix, creatives don’t build their own following on Spotify. Instead, they get famous on SoundCloud, just as the best users do on YouTube. Fetty Wap started as a SoundCloud sensation before dominating the . DJ titans Diplo and Skrillex each built their presence and notoriety by remixing already famous songs on SoundCloud and using their following as a jumping off point to produce original music. This also helps explain why SoundCloud has a much better relationship with its creatives than Spotify seems to. Additionally, finding new songs and podcasts is an important part of the listening experience. But on Spotify, most of the music is content you can find elsewhere. The majority of Spotify’s content comes from major record labels and is freely available on other streaming services, like Apple Music or Pandora. But if you want to find the latest hot tracks outside of the mainstream, you’ll only find them on SoundCloud. SoundCloud is increasingly becoming a place where users can discover unique content, such as new music and new artists. Users can follow each other, which allows you to find music based on another user’s musical taste and preferences. The platform provides a simple like-and-repost feature, which exposes troves and troves of activity that enables discovery by other users. Once you find an artist you like on SoundCloud, you can then see which songs that artist likes and get lost in a rabbit hole of music awesomeness. This kind of musical serendipity is very specific to SoundCloud because of the platform’s unique content. This unique content gives SoundCloud network effects that improve everyday as more and more new artists (who aren’t ready for Spotify) and content producers upload their content. While the inventory on Spotify is finite and expensive, SoundCloud has the potential for YouTube-like hyper growth. As long as the platform continues to attract talented new artists and content producers, its future is very bright. Spotify, on the other hand, may struggle to stay profitable. Like Netflix before it, Spotify faces a continual fight with rights owners over its streaming revenue. At the same time, other popular streaming services will provide constant competition. If I had to bet on one of the two companies today, I’d pick the “YouTube of Audio.”
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Dataminr CEO On Whether He Regrets That Giant Fidelity-Led Round
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Connie Loizos
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On Friday, CEO Ted Bailey of Dataminr swung by our temporary studio set-up in Davos, where Bailey appeared to having a highly productive trip. As he told us then, he’d already met Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, enjoyed a one-on-one dinner with Cisco’s legendary former CEO John Chambers, and was on his way to meet for the first time with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. While we had him, we asked Bailey for a little more detail about how his real-time information discovery platform works; whether he worries about Twitter, on which Dataminr is heavily reliant; and if he at all regrets letting Fidelity Management lead a $130 million investment in his company last March. (Last November, at the same time that it slashed the value of numerous other investments, Fidelity marked down the company’s value by 35 percent.) You can see the entire interview below, or you can just read the lightly edited highlights here: TB: We do look at social media, but we differentiate ourselves by being real time, so we identify early information when people tweet and other sources before the news wires. We’ve pioneered real-time information discovery, meaning discovering information before it’s a trend. TB: It runs the gamut. Our customers run from investment professionals, [including] hedge funds and investment banks, to 250 news organizations, to public safety professionals, like major cities, fire departments, offices of emergency management . . . What Dataminr tries to do is enable our customers to know about things sooner. Last year for example, there was a big gas explosion in New York City, and when that happened, people around it — acting as a real-time sensor for what was going on — took photos and tweeted pictures, and there was a signal we found in that. And we sent an alert to the [NYFD], and they said, “Oh, wow, there’s a huge fire; we’re going to send out the fire trucks.” After that, they received the first 911 call. TB: It’s a different science than emotional analysis. We use many unique machine-learning models, and if you think about social media, it’s an archive of everything that’s ever happened and how the world reacted to it. Did [people] care? Who cared? You look across that archive, see those events and which ones got various responses, then we actually have an algorithm that looks for the same pattern as the beginning of things that were significant. So it’s a different approach . . . a very unique proposition. TB: Twitter has been incredibly pervasive on the real-time front. There are many companies, many social platforms, that have a lot of interesting information in them— TB: When it comes to real time, Twitter is dominant, and for me, I really view Twitter as one of the most revolutionary companies of the century. In the context of Davos and thinking about [its theme this year of] the fourth industrial fourth revolution and [which] companies are bringing about systemic worldwide shifts, Twitter has changed the worldwide information flow in real time. TB: For us, I’m very bullish on Twitter. I believe in that fundamental value. I think one of the things that’s lost in the mix of PR is that Twitter is still growing. TB: True, but we had enough information [to cull from Twitter as of] two years ago. I’m not saying I don’t want it to grow; I want nothing more than for it to continue to flourish. But it’s just getting bigger and better. So for us, it’s been adequate for a while to serve a real-time sensor network. I also think its [woes] are overblown. TB: Then they marked it up. TB: A few percent, but the point is it will go up; it will go down. TB: Quite honestly, I didn’t know when I signed the term sheet, but if I had to do it again, I’d pick Fidelity again. I think the investor who led our investment has been tremendously [valuable], and [Fidelity is] a very long-sighted investor. Ironically, because they have to disclose short-term valuation, it leads people to believe they might be a short-term-oriented investor, but they’re extremely long term. They want to support you not only until the IPO but after the IPO. For us, what I’ve focused on more than anything is not to be distracted by the marketplace. It’s cyclical, [and] like any publicly traded company, it will be a journey over the years. The interesting thing is there’s no marketplace for the valuation. We’re not raising. No one is selling. We have a tremendous amount of money. We don’t need to raise any more capital for years. So in some regards, it doesn’t impact anything, other than the fact that there’s a valuation that’s publicly displayed. TB: They aren’t concerned. It takes some messaging. This is a market where no one is going to sell and no one is going to buy. [We tell them] “Let’s build a business and it will be five times [its value today].” We can increase sales, we can drive innovation, we can drive revenue. Those are the things that in our control. And there are models that, we have no idea what they are based on, that value stocks based on public market comps that, we don’t know who they are. TB: It’s important for companies not to be distracted by it. There’s no impact to it other than that somebody knows.
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Seedcamp’s New Portfolio Analysis Maps Europe’s Flourishing Tech Scene
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Mike Butcher
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Back in September 2007 I attended a startup pitch event held in a London university lecture theatre. The surroundings weren’t plush. The slightly musty lecture theatre didn’t hint at the ambitions of the people present. But when Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder of Skype walked in, and joined in a panel of other seasoned tech entrepreneurs, everyone knew something important was happening. What we saw of course, was the birth of , the first truly pan-European accelerator which went on to become a dedicated early-stage fund. Eight years on, it’s now releasing an updated portfolio analysis, on the occasion of passing 200 invested companies. Of the 206 companies it’s so far invested in, 149 of them are still operational, 45 ended up shutting down and it’s had 12 exits of one sort or another. Thus its failure rate is less than 25%, a decent figure for most investors. Its companies have raised a total of $365M in funding, with the pace of investing speeding up. The last two years saw it invest in 95 startups. Co-founded by Reshma Sohoni and Saul Klein, and now led by Sohoni and Partner Carlos Espinal, Seedcamp held multiple events across Europe to network Founders, Investors and Mentors. And the pace was, in those early years, blistering. Although I went on a few of their trips, their programme was intense. The largest sector it’s now invested in is FinTech, with investments such as Transferwise, Revolut, Curve and Monese. And a €20M seed fund launching in mid-2014 now has 29 companies in its portfolio. Sohoni said: “Seedcamp was born out of a need to connect the best parts of the European tech ecosystem to build businesses that could be world-class. Since we launched, the tech scene has changed dramatically. We have multiple tech hubs that are creating multi-billion dollar businesses. We have an influx of capital, particularly in London, with sizeable capital available that you didn’t see in 2007.” Carlos Espinal, Partner at Seedcamp, added: “We’ve always been sector agnostic when considering companies for investment, but there are waves of innovation that emerge, and we do our best to get ahead of them and invest early. For example, 15 per cent of our portfolio is FinTech, a growing and exciting space in Europe, and recently we’ve made more investments into PropTech which now makes up 7 per cent of our companies.” It’s also invested in blockchain, cyber security and artificial intelligence. Other data points include: • 84 per cent of Seedcamp backed companies have received further funding. • Number of investments per year: 2007 – 6, 2008 – 7, 2009 – 9, 2010 – 14, 2011 – 19, 2012 – 28, 2013 – 28, 2014 – 35 (7 were Seed), 2015 – 60 (22 were Seed). • Top sector per year based on number of investments: 2007 – Analytics, 2008 – Analytics, 2009 – AdTech, 2010 – Cloud/Saas, 2011 – Cloud/Saas, 2012 – FinTech, 2013 – e-Commerce, 2014 – Media, 2015 – FinTech. • Portfolio includes: FinTech – 15 per cent, Cloud/SaaS – 13 per cent, Analytics – 10 per cent, e-Commerce – 10 per cent, Media – 8 per cent, PropTech – 7 per cent, Developer Tools – 5 per cent, Social – 5 per cent, Marketplaces – 5 per cent, Gaming – 4 per cent, Communications – 3 per cent, IoT/Hardware – 3 per cent, HealthTech – 2 per cent, AdTech – 2 per cent, Travel – 2 per cent, Security – 2 per cent, EdTech – 2 per cent. • Seedcamp companies have created over 2,500+ jobs in tech. • It’s reviewed startups from 70 different countries and backed startups from 37. • Seedcamp has co-invested alongside over 500 VCs, angels and corporate investors with 34% of the Seedcamp portfolio being backed by at least one US-based investor. The latest 15 companies (pre-seed and seed) to join the Seedcamp portfolio include: – Investment management platform
for marketplace finance – Strong authentication without the
passwords – Smart navigation for bicycles – Construction management tool – Subscription management platform – Insurance comparison and
advice application – Cloud-based continuous integration
service for mobile app developers – Online rental management platform – An Internet of Things company
providing public and private infrastructure for real-time data. – Find genomic data relevant to your
work, collaborate on data projects and make your datasets discoverable and
accessible – Discover
talented stylists & salons then book online – Real-time workforce management – Third party keyboard to access and
share your photos, documents, calendar and more – Revolutionizing the rental market by
creating a platform for flexible, medium-term sublets. – World=E2=80=99s first and only
Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform Applications are currently for pre-seed investment and will close on January 31st.
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Report: Twitter Losing Its Product, Media, Engineering Heads; Adding New CMO
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Ingrid Lunden
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Yet more personnel changes are afoot at Twitter. According to reports in Recode ( and ), the social media site is about to lose not just one but several senior executives as soon as tomorrow. Most immediately, Katie Jacobs Stanton, the company’s VP of global media; Kevin Weil, SVP of product; and SVP of engineering Alex Roetter are all set to depart Twitter, according to the report. At the same time, the company is gearing up to announce a new chief marketing officer — it will be a high-profile female executive from a “big brand,” according to the report. Twitter is also going to announce some new board members, as well as a new head of PR, according to Recode and a separate report in the . We have reached out to Twitter for a response and will update as we learn more. : The departures of Stanton, Weil, Roetter and head of HR Skip Schipper have now been . Separately, the head of Vine Jason Toff announced he is to work on VR. In Dorsey’s note, he makes it clear that the three “have chosen to leave the company” and that he is sad to confirm the news. The departures are coming at a tumultuous time for the social network. Faced with stagnating user growth, Twitter under new CEO Dorsey has long been grappling with the best way to evolve its business — namely, how to make its real-time stream of news, status updates from your Twitter connections, videos and other content more appealing to a mass-market audience. This has led to the company launching new products like Moments, which aggregates Tweets and other content around specific events; considering how to expand its famous 140-character limit on updates; and much more in the names of more traffic and more advertising. But it’s not clear if any of Twitter’s changes have been a huge hit (or are at least convincing the public that they are). Last week, as the company faced in several parts of the world, its stock . Whatever the exact reason behind these latest departures, the fact that they are of senior people and across three such big areas of the business will likely mean they will be felt. Both Roetter and Stanton had been with Twitter since 2010, and Weil had been with the company since 2009. It will be interesting to see who else goes at Twitter (and who arrives in their place). Dorsey, a co-founder at the company, took on a role as its after having the job on an interim basis. Many hoped that Dorsey would set the company on a more even keel, both by injecting the place with new ideas but also by providing the kind of deep understanding of a company that perhaps only a founder can have (essential for a company that seems to have lost its way). The results, however, have been . Dorsey is trying to navigate Twitter through tricky waters at the same time that he is CEO of another company. Square, which he also co-founded, only went public in November 2015 and is . Twitter is due to announce its quarterly results on .
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Facebook’s Second European Data Center Is Coming To Ireland
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Frederic Lardinois
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Facebook today officially that it plans to open its second European data center in Clonee, Ireland. The town, which sits will play host to Facebook’s sixth data center overall. Construction will start soon and the new facility will go online sometime in late 2017 or early 2018. Facebook’s first European data center opened in Luela, Sweden . When that facility went live, Facebook stressed how it would be able to run it on 100 percent renewable energy and use “the chilly Nordic air” to cool it. In Ireland, Facebook will also only use renewable energy to power the new data center. As for cooling, Clonee will use a system that’s similar to the one Facebook currently uses in Sweden and other locations, but because there’s too much salt in the air, it’ll have to filter the air more thoroughly than in other places before it can be used inside the building. In addition, the company also notes that the new location will be powered completely by hardware and software from its own . “Clonee will be packed full of cutting-edge technology, making it one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world,” Tom Furlong, Facebook’s VP for site operations, writes in today’s announcement. “All the racks, servers, and other components have been designed and built from scratch as part of the Open Compute Project, an industry-wide coalition of companies dedicated to creating energy- and cost-efficient infrastructure solutions and sharing them as open source.” By going to Ireland, Facebook is joining a list of other companies that operate at least some of their European data centers in the country, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and (soon) . Facebook has also used Ireland as its own international headquarter since 2009. It’s worth noting that today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise. Facebook already that it was looking at Clonee last June, but it didn’t make the decision official until today.
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How I Raised A $1 Million Seed Round When I Was 9 Months Pregnant
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Rachel Kaplowitz
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The last time I needed a doctor’s note was in elementary school. That was, until last September — I needed a note from my OBGYN proving I was only 31-and-a-half weeks pregnant so I could board a plane to San Francisco with fair odds I wouldn’t give birth to a mile-high baby. The first thing my doctor asked when I made the request was if I would prefer he write a note to my boss saying I shouldn’t fly at this stage of my pregnancy. As the CEO of my company, I kindly explained that I didn’t think it would help the situation. I was in the middle of raising a $1 million seed round for my startup, . We are reinventing the corporate intranet with a product that is fast, inexpensive and fun to use. I was excited about an investor in San Francisco; after a series of great Skype meetings, he invited me out to meet the rest of his team as the final step of the process. At seven months pregnant, even a subway ride was challenging — the prospect of a six-hour flight was daunting. But how could I let that stand in my way? I booked a last-minute ticket and prayed I’d be able to swap my assigned middle seat with some compassionate person. I didn’t get the funding in California. I’ll never know why, and I didn’t have time to worry about it: The final days of my pregnancy (and my company’s runway) were quickly approaching. The first day my morning sickness set in, I presented to 800 people at NY Tech Meetup. I won the startup pitch competition at Internet Week while wearing maternity jeans. And I landed first place at July’s UltraLight startup competition despite my baby kicking me in the ribs throughout my presentation. The true fundraising didn’t start, though, until just around the time I started showing. For months I struggled with the question of whether I should bring it up in meetings. How would investors react? How do you casually slip something so personal into something so professional? Would I sabotage opportunities if I didn’t tell investors and they found out later? In this image-obsessed world, would investors critique me less harshly if they knew I was pregnant and not just 40 pounds overweight? Yeah, 40. Could I really get away with wearing Supergas and maternity jeans to every meeting? What would I do when investors wanted to meet for a drink? Was it my responsibility to help pave the way for other women who will face similar challenges? At a certain point, my body made the decision for me. Reactions were all over the place. Some investors just wanted to talk about their children and grandchildren, others gave me a hard time about drinking coffee, working too hard or being out in the cold. A few told me I should really take the time to stay at home with my child and worry about work later. Others just got awkwardly quiet and stared at their notebooks for the remainder of the meeting. Three weeks before my due date, I got an email from Nicolas Wittenborn of Point Nine Capital. He was in New York City for a few days and wanted to meet. I booked an hour with him the following morning, nervous that if we scheduled it for any later that week I may need to cancel from the delivery room. He walked in unfazed. We spoke about how wonderful building a family is and how great it is to have love for two babies — my company and my soon-to-be-daughter. The rest of the meeting was spent in product and cohort analysis. He was able to embrace the fact that I was about to become a mom and also see that my team and I were building something incredibly special. He never doubted both could happen at the same time. When he walked out, I knew we had found the perfect partner. We had a term sheet from Point Nine in less than two weeks. I took six weeks off for maternity leave. By some miracle, that time period overlapped with Christmas and New Years. I barely missed a beat. I ended up staying in the hospital for four days after my daughter was born. When friends called to ask what they could do, I asked them to bring printouts of redlined contracts from my lawyers and pending sales agreements. I closed $60,000 of new sales from my hospital bed. At the same time, my co-founders were launching Honey 2.0, which they had been laboring over for months. December was one of our biggest months. As for my daughter and me? I’m not the ramen-eating, stay-at-the-office-until-2-am, HBO-fiction kind of CEO. My daughter is very much center stage. I watch her learn how to do new things every day, and I’m amazed by every breath she takes. I’ve learned that it is possible to leave the office at 5 p.m., spend quality time with my daughter and jump back on email and late night calls with clients in California and New Zealand after she falls asleep. I’m not naïve enough to think this would be possible without an incredible support network. My husband, David, is the Chief of Staff at Birchbox, and is on a team with incredible women and men who run a badass company, raise beautiful children and share our belief that men should contribute just as much as women at home. The support extends beyond my husband. My mom flew in from Ohio to take care of Roya for a month, my team worked triple duty while I was recovering, Work-Bench dedicated office space to a full-time nursing room and Point Nine begins every conversation asking about parenthood. At the end of the day, it’s not about work-life balance. It’s just life.
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Gillmor Gang LIVE 01.24.16
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Steve Gillmor
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– Frank Radice, Keith Tere, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Gillmor Gang on Facebook Our other show from Gillmor Gang Studios –
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Why Tech Entrepreneurs Should Support A Bloomberg Bid For The White House
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Richie Hecker
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According to The New York Times yesterday, Michael Bloomberg is considering running for president. Following on last week’s news of a leak that he commissioned a to determine the feasibility of such a presidential bid, he has now requested that advisers create plans for an independent campaign. It may be the first time since the founding of our nation that an independent candidate could have the opportunity to carry the vote into the Presidency. The political parties are in shambles and more divided than at any other time in our nation’s history. This void could create an opportunity for someone to part the seas and walk through the center. Bloomberg has a of action and results, is not beholden to any party, can fund his own campaign and grassroots movement and is pragmatic on most issues, uniquely positioning him in a polarizing election year. If there’s one sector in particular that should rally around Bloomberg and that stands to benefit from him at the helm — it’s the tech industry. Bloomberg has long been a booster of the technology industry in New York City and has voiced his support for Uber in NYC and its ability to break the hold of the taxi industry. in the city In fact, he is also a key investor in Andreessen Horowitz, one of the main backers of Lyft. Bloomberg literally None of the other candidates really understand technology and its power for global impact. Some of the candidates don’t know how to use a Blackberry and others think that a giant wall will protect our economy. The reality is that we are globalized through the means of communication. A smart phone eliminates all borders and social media carries the good word, amplifying the soap boxes of one onto the global theater. We want a President, who not just understands tech, he lives, he breathes it, he is it and will use it for the benefit of our nation. Furthermore, he is an entrepreneur. At the end of the day, the tech industry is about entrepreneurship. And unless you’ve done it yourself, it’s very difficult to understand the trials, tribulations, challenges and hurdles that come in our way as we create, disrupt and transform. As a successful entrepreneur, Bloomberg understands the issues of entrepreneurship and venture capital better than any candidate in the election. He bootstrapped a multi-billion dollar startup, which happens now to be the largest tech company based in NYC, a global business with 15,000 employees. He also has a track record of to public policy to find ways to make it easier for others to start and grow their own businesses. As Bloomberg , “The media and tech sectors are engines of job creation, and attract new business and new investment… Growing tech sectors also help us harness data that innovative governments and businesses can use to make communities better places to live and work…” From 2007-2012, jobs in NYC’s tech sector grew by about 74%, making the city second only to Silicon Valley in venture capital funding for tech startups. It was Bloomberg who moved the agenda forward and helped the city build its community. As Mayor, he generated a record level of job placements in the midst of a major national economic recession. He is also pro-immigration and will likely help us import much-needed engineering talent. We want someone who believes innovation is the engine for growth in the globalized world. Talent is the driver of innovation, and talent comes through education and opportunity. He will be able to ensure that our country is the epicenter of global technology by focusing on education and training from the ground up. “In the ultra-competitive global economy, the U.S. is facing a terrible mismatch between high-skill jobs and our labor pool,” Bloomberg has . “Nothing is more important to our nation’s future – and to spreading equality and opportunity – than improving public education.” Realizing this, a group of concerned citizens have banded together to create a grassroots movement to support Bloomberg. We believe that the tech industry is uniquely positioned to help Bloomberg ride the waves of modern communication into office. The tech industry is the driving force of innovation and will bring our country into its next era of sustainable growth. By backing Bloomberg, we could be helping to ensure we have the support, intelligence and track record to make sure the technology industry’s agenda is heard not just nationally, but globally.
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Gillmor Gang: Verbal Hashtags
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Steve Gillmor
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The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, Frank Radice, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Sunday, January 24, 2016. Tech, media, and politics collide in the Global Streaming era and the birth of the VPN Party. Plus, the latest G3 (below) with Mary Hodder, Francine Hardaway, Elisa Camahort Page, and Tina Chase Gillmor. @stevegillmor, @fradice, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=81861379 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302]
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The Startup Landscape For Cybersecurity Companies In Israel
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Yoav Leitersdorf
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There are more than 300 cybersecurity companies operating in Israel, making it an industry second only to the U.S. in size. In 2014, exports by Israeli cybersecurity companies reached $6B, equating to approximately 10% of the global cybersecurity market. In 2015, that percentage should increase, baed on 2014’s numbers when the industry grew almost 25%, with 81 new cybersecurity startups founded over the year. These cybersecurity startups hold a premium position within the investment ecosystem, making up 16% of all the investments completed in Israel, which is more than double the share of investment that cybersecurity startups receive globally. And these Israeli startups are raising capital. To date, approximately 15% of all startups established in 2015 have already secured seed funding, raising on an average $2.5M (U.S. dollars). This represents a 25% increase over the average $2M seed raised by startups in 2014.This increase may be related to the growing participation of U.S. venture capital (VC) firms, who have traditionally invested in companies in later stages. The average seed round in 2015 for a cybersecurity company with participation by a U.S. VC was approximately $3.7M. Companies increased the capital they raised across all investment stages, but the largest increases occurred predominantly in B and later rounds. 2015 saw a 218% increase in “B and above” cybersecurity funding, over 2014 to reach a total of $360M. , , and are examples of companies that raised substantial amounts of capital, in 2015, demonstrating an ongoing vote of confidence from investors in Israeli entrepreneurs and cybersecurity companies. The 2014-2015 data shows us that Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneurs are specializing in advanced persistent threats (APT), Web, Mobile and Cloud Security fields. While 2014 was dominated by Mobile Security and incident response, with startups like , and ; 2015 was the year of the Internet of Things (IoT) security, with a special emphasis on automotive security, although most of the entrants in this field haven’t raised substantial capital, yet. 2015 also witnessed the emergence of Container Security startups, such as and others, who successfully secured seed funding. In fact, the most funded fields in 2015, across all stages, were: Mobile Security ( , , ); Deception ( , , ); and Web Security ( , ). Since Mobile Security was a hot field in 2014 and then a top raising field in 2015, we can predict that 2016 will be an IoT Security funding year. In looking at the success of cybersecurity exits in comparison with general Enterprise Software exits, the return on investment is faster and greater with cybersecurity companies. Although the average exit in both cybersecurity and Enterprise Software was around $88M, cybersecurity companies raised 44% less capital and were acquired three years faster than Enterprise Software companies.Another difference is in the makeup of the teams – of the companies that exited, younger teams were more likely to run cybersecurity companies than in Enterprise Software ones. In 2015, 39% of the cybersecurity teams that completed a successful exit were made up of Young / Post-IDF entrepreneurs; in comparison, Young / Post-IDF teams only made up 10% of the Enterprise Software companies that exited. The presence of young teams in the cybersecurity companies that exited could possibly help explain why these companies have a better ROI; another is the fact that cybersecurity tends to be an industry that innovates and builds through acquisition. Large security vendors are accustomed to acquiring startups, as a way to gain new, disruptive technologies and exceptional engineering talent. Both can be found abundantly in Israel. The 2015 data reveals that investments in younger teams were lucrative. Young teams yielded an ROI that was 4.5 times higher than the average ROI yielded by companies with more experienced entrepreneurs, and they did it in less time – an average of 2.5 years faster. We suspect this is partly due to the “acquihire” strategy mentioned earlier, but it may also be influenced by the fact that many first-time entrepreneurs are tempted to sell early and less likely to refuse an attractive acquisition offer. The 2015 cybersecurity exit map presented two Israeli corporations as dominant buyers – (acquired Lacoon Security and ) and (acquired and Cybertinel). We feel this trend well represents the continuing maturity of the Israeli tech industry. Microsoft remained an active player in the Israeli market, with two acquisitions ( and ). The world’s attention is on the cybersecurity industry, as cyber threats and hackers continue to evolve and perpetrate devastating breaches. Everyone wants to avoid being the next headline, which means they need new and innovative ways to establish an effective defense. Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneurs continue to innovate and place the Israeli cybersecurity industry on the front lines of this war. The statistics show that Israel is a vibrant market, fostering companies that will be changing the global cybersecurity landscape long into the future.
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The Evolving Nature Of P2P Lending Marketplaces
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Matt Heiman
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In March 2014, The Economist published declaring that peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms were set to disrupt banks and other traditional sources of capital by directly connecting borrowers to individual lenders. In the past few years, the so-called P2P lending industry has certainly experienced tremendous growth, with origination volume doubling annually, reaching $24 billion globally in 2014. Morgan Stanley forecasts that global originations will grow at a 51 percent CAGR and reach a staggering $290 billion by 2020. P2P lending startups also have attracted an enormous amount of attention from venture capitalists: According to Dow Jones VentureSource, U.S. lending startups raised $2.4 billion in the first three quarters of 2015 alone. Yet despite all this excitement, there are many things that are misunderstood about the industry. While the earliest lending platforms (e.g., Prosper, LendingClub) began with true “peer-to-peer” models, the majority of lending capital is now provided by institutional investors, such as hedge funds, insurance companies and, yes, even banks. Institutional investors have been drawn to the asset class by strong unlevered yields and highly predictable credit performance across a large portfolio of loans. In 2014, 81 percent of LendingClub’s loan originations came from institutional and managed investors. This shift explains why many participants now refer to the space as “marketplace lending,” reflecting the wider range of investors. As the capital supply is now more concentrated with institutional investors, the two-sided “network effects” boasted in the early years of P2P lending may not be as important today. This phenomenon — the shift of suppliers from many small providers to fewer large ones — is not unique to P2P lending. The same trend can actually be seen on many other types of Internet marketplaces. For example, on eBay, power sellers control a disproportionate percentage of transaction volume, and a recent report found that on Airbnb in New York City , the 6 percent of hosts with more than three rooms (i.e., commercial users) accounted for almost 40 percent of transaction volume. The term “marketplace lending” implies a meeting place where investors and borrowers can be freely matched. But new lending platforms actually employ two new business models: technology-enabled lending (a new distribution and underwriting model) and 100 percent off-balance-sheet financing through a “marketplace” (a new funding model). These two models are often conflated, and many new lenders actually have traditional sources of capital, but use the Internet as a distribution channel to issue new loans. While platforms such as LendingClub, Prosper, Peerform and CircleBack are actual marketplaces, other platforms coined as marketplace lenders, such as SoFi, Earnest and Avant, are for the most part traditional lenders using their balance sheets or similar credit facilities. The success of those businesses using traditional funding models points to the fact that the explosive growth is due more to the strength of the new distribution and underwriting models. Originating installment loans (a much better product than credit cards for long-term, higher-balance lending) through an online channel (a much more convenient option that traditional lenders offer) has meant a much stronger value proposition to the consumer versus existing unsecured consumer finance products. The marketplace funding model is also valuable, because it allows a single platform to serve more customers (wider range of risk tolerances among investors) and grow more quickly (less capital-intensive model), but, ultimately, the technology-enabled distribution and underwriting has been the predominant driving force. Most marketplace lending today, at least on the major platforms, is for refinancing old loans, not issuing new ones. For example, about 70 percent of origination volume on LendingClub is for refinancing or paying off credit card debt. With most consumer lending platforms addressing refinancing, an enormous opportunity exists for emerging platforms to focus on the even larger market for purchase finance (i.e., directly helping consumers to finance new spending), where today, credit cards are the status quo. Startups have begun to emerge to address this opportunity across many verticals of consumer spending: e-commerce (Affirm, Bread), elective medical procedures (PrimaHealth Credit), coding academy tuition (Climb, Earnest, LendLayer), automotive financing (AutoFi) and weddings (Promise Financial — in which I am an investor). The point-of-sale opportunity is also specifically suited to marketplace lending in a way that refinancing is not; retailers need high approval rates, which the marketplace lending model is uniquely suited to offer because of its ability to find investors for a broad range of borrower credit profiles. “Purchase financing is a logical evolution of marketplace lending,” says Brad Vanderstarren, co-founder of Promise Financial. “Marketplace lending allows a single platform to make financing offers to a wide variety of borrowers by operating a marketplace of credit investors with various risk/return preferences. This is critical for point-of-sale lending, where it’s important to have high approval rates to meet the needs of retailers.” Lastly, point-of-sale borrower acquisition channels may also be more defensible in the long-term than the channels used in consumer refinancing, such as Google AdWords, Facebook ads and direct mail. P2P startups have enjoyed enormous success over the last 10 years. Looking forward, the evolution of the market implies new opportunities and challenges. There are now deeply entrenched platforms, rising interest rates are putting pressure on refinancing activity and it is much more difficult for smaller players to attract borrowers. The characteristics that enabled success for the first-movers in P2P lending are not the same as those which will determine the next generation of successful startups. Instead, look for companies with a differentiated borrower channel strategy addressing needs beyond refinancing.
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The End Of The Big Venture Formula
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Danny Crichton
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Well, do I have the deal of the century for you! Investors – the smartest investors in the world – are throwing billions at it! The price can only go up! People are flocking from around the globe to get their share! Time is very limited, so you have to act now! It’s so exciting, I even forgot how to use normal punctuation!!! Then there’s the crash and suddenly, the exclamation points all seem to quietly melt back into the puddle of periods from which they came from. Since the financial crisis, Silicon Valley has been running on what might be called the Big Venture Formula. It goes something like this: burn capital as fast as it comes to drive growth. Build momentum by hiring employees as quickly as possible. Dominate the media. Sell the vision to each new set of investors (albeit not the numbers!). Avoid disclosures. Stay private as long as possible. Get scale. Go from unicorn to decacorn to centicorn. Prosper. It’s that last one where things start to go awry. We all know how the Big Venture Formula is turning out. Just in the past few months, , , , , , , , and have all announced layoffs, in some cases amounting to hundreds of people. , with some like Etsy down almost three-fourths from their post-IPO peaks. , , and and each managed to blow through hundreds of millions of dollars for essentially zeros. In short, the Big Venture Formula is really just the inverse of medieval alchemy: it turns gold into rock. What’s needed is a sustainable approach to startup growth and venture capital. That means much less (whatever the heck that ever was), and lots more heads-down quality thinking to build products that customers actually want and will eventually pay for. We need a new disruptive capitalism that is designed for a much more mature internet market, one that can bring founders, investors, and employees together. We can’t create a new model of venture without understanding what went wrong with the last one. At its core, the flaw with the Big Venture Formula can be summed up in one word: frenzy. Founders face incredible pressure to keep up with the fundraising of their peers, so they are constantly seeking capital (or finding it foisted upon them!) Investors race to put money into companies before their valuations spike into unicorn territory, so they are willing to forego certain things (aka metrics) to get ahead of their competitors. Employees are constantly interviewing to seek out the best opportunities. Undergirding this frenzy are three myths that have percolated through Silicon Valley, but even the slightest critical thinking would alert us to their fallacy. The first myth – and perhaps the most pernicious – is that the disruption economy has no bounds to its growth. “The internet is going to take over everything, and better yet, more than five billion people are still unconnected!” (there’s that exclamation point again!) Yet, there are obvious limits to growth. Consumers and companies cannot rapidly change their routines, which means that innovations can take generations to diffuse into the real world. Many industries still use paper as their main means of information sharing, despite decades of access to computers and the internet. It’s a mark of shallow product thinking to assume that simply adding an iPad or “the cloud” to the equation will suddenly change that behavior. With emerging markets, it is not even clear that U.S. companies will have access to them, or even want access. I still hear investors say that companies need to spend more time in China, . Billions of other people around the world live in extreme poverty with no education – how exactly are they going to participate in the digital economy and drive unicorn valuations? The reason why this belief is so pernicious is that it has completely demolished financial discipline among startups and VC firms. It’s the second major myth that created this Big Venture Formula. There has been a belief among a certain group of venture capitalists that it is worth getting into a startup “at any price,” since the returns in venture are driven by a handful of winners every year, and of course, the internet has no limits to growth. This is tautologically false, and yet, I still constantly hear language in the Valley like “we just need to pay up for this startup” and “ on the website.” Photo courtesy Flickr/ . What ever happened to adjusting investments to risk? Valuations for startups should reflect the risk in building the company, and yet, we have seen pre-launched products reaching a unicorn valuation or higher. That is what a frenzy does to otherwise intelligent investors. The third myth is that scale is everything, and everything should be sacrificed for it. Capitalism may have taken a beating in 2008, but it is amazing to watch the efficiency of the exit market for startups. , both in terms of new issues, and in the performance of the small number of issues that were actually launched. , but you wouldn’t know that looking at the tech’s stable of unicorns that remain waiting for a buyer. Investors outside of venture are not “stupid” nor are they “too conservative.” They see the high growth and increasing scale of our startups. They just don’t see the profits, or even just the sustainability of the business long-term. So founders and investors try to avoid the public markets by staying within the private market herd. At some point though, all assets eventually return to their fundamental value – even startups. The biggest mistake was to assume that reality would never enter back into the equation. Of course, the Big Venture Formula is not always wrong. There are some founders – it’s not polite to point them out – who are absolute Big Venture geniuses. They have sold a vision much like Donald Trump has sold real estate and that Mexican wall. Bigger, higher, better? Absolutely not! Biggest, highest, best! (plus, someone else will pay for it!) I don’t doubt that there are going to be some immensely profitable returns from unicorns. – they can’t all be disasters. The question is whether there is an alternative model that better aligns founders, investors, and employees for growth. I believe there is. The new model starts with founders being much more conscientious about their products and their businesses. The internet has been open for business for a little more than twenty years. Startups today are increasingly competing not with the slow technological behemoths of yesterday, . Your new CRM platform isn’t competing against paper – it’s competing against Salesforce. That maturity means products are much harder to whip up in a weekend and launch . The best startups I see today often spend months with design customers carefully crafting a product capable of competing in a much more intense marketplace. Product quality can’t be something that is simply a priority. It really has to be life itself. Founders also need to be much more attuned to the dynamics of their business. They need to be more cautious of expenses, whether that be prime San Francisco real estate, or hiring too aggressively in expensive urban areas. You don’t need to outsource the company to Antarctica to save dollars, but it makes sense to be thoughtful on what is necessary versus what is desirable. Scale is really important, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the company’s viability. Along the same lines, founders need to think about how to compete effectively. As Reid Hoffman likes to say around his concept of blitzscaling, startups need to move at a blindingly fast speed in order to compete. But that is a work harder, not smarter mentality. There is a peak speed that even the best startups can perform. Try new tactics to acquire customers, and focus on building more compelling products. The sign of a great business is that it is growing rapidly its employees go home at 5pm. There is one other component that matters here, and that is the problem of liquidity. Technology companies are taking longer and longer to exit, with . No one can wait this long, not investors, and certainly not a company’s employees. It’s time to actively fight the trend of staying private longer. Employees need to have more insight into the company that is paying their bills, and investors need to have more options for liquidity, especially angel investors who often are putting up their own wealth to invest. Yes, Sarbanes-Oxley is a pain, as are value-driven hedge fund raiders, . There are always trade-offs involved, and I think it’s time to reconsider the balance we have struck. In short, this new model of venture is about being more thoughtful, more deliberate, and less frenzied. This new model may not sound as sexy, and it isn’t. However, it has the potential to build the next great companies, ones that can finally bring the internet to billions more, or can finally erase those last vestiges of paper. Now that sounds like a great deal!(!)(!)
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Living Off Hackathons: The Possible Rise Of The Pro-Hacker
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Simon Lightstone
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Hackathon prize money keeps rising each year as organizations learn to take advantage of their value. Runner-up cash prizes are now in the thousands, and grand-prize payouts are . There is now a compelling argument for ambitious programmers to live off hackathons: They can forget the long-term slog of building a startup and instead focus on the fun part — the first few days of innovation. Another motive to becoming a “pro” hacker is to find the perfect idea. Rather than marrying an idea without investor backing from the start, potential startup founders can attend hackathons until they win a big investment deal — essentially removing much of the risk of a startup. For example, Brian Clarke, a young entrepreneur, which are helping “fund his startup journey.” In one case, he claims to have won $5,000 for an app that took him four hours to build. The potential of generating around $100,000 per year from hackathons is becoming a possibility. Similar to being a pro gamer, it’s hard, but possible (some hackathons with large payouts are listed at the bottom of this article). Strategically, programmers would need to go where the money is big and play the numbers. The smaller prizes could pay living expenses. The idea is to get so good at hackathons that you eventually win big, like the $90,000 or $800,000 hackathons. Sometimes it makes sense for hackathons to offer big prizes to attract the best talent. There are many hackathons where the organizers are looking to crowdsource creative solutions that are low-cost to implement. For example, in cleantech, big data, fintech and medtech, the results of a hackathon can save tons of money — and sometimes lives. Hackathons also are an effective way to advertise, and major online media tend to flock to them. The better the final products of a hackathon, the more media buzz is created. This would suggest “pro” hackers are welcome. That being said, there is a growing category of hackathons where a “pro” might be unwelcome. The competitiveness causes people to stop helping others, unless they are on their team. This is against the original spirit of a hackathon. Competing against “pros” also makes it harder for the average Joe to win prizes. For this reason, there is a growing divide between hackathons that offer very basic prizes, often targeting students or hobbyists, and those that are trying to attract seasoned programmers. We could be approaching an age of pro-league hackers: Experts in rapid prototyping who consistently win big prizes and flaunt their winning inventions to the awe of their fans on social media. This is, after all, how major league sports started. According to the book , long ago, paying hockey players was seen by some as a disgusting affront. Some people thought that hockey should be played for the love of the sport, not for money. Over time, however, a market was created; different leagues were then made for pro and non-pro players. Perhaps the same will happen with hackathons. Here are some hackathons from 2015 that involved big prizes: Sponsored by Samsung, this hackathon is designed to help solve California’s water crisis.
Winner: $90,000 cash prize
Finalists: $10,000 cash prize for 10 finalists This hackathon was sponsored by . GlobalHack hackathons often offer large cash prizes.
Winner: $30,000 cash prize
Finalists: $15,000, $5,000 and $5,000 for runners-up Last year, there were two top prizes of $800,000. This is run as part of the regular startup event. Winning includes some serious business connections. This hackathon is geared toward financial, payments, banking or investment-based tech. The grand prize was $20,000 in cash, and it was given to four teams. The $5,000 prize was given to five teams. The pure odds of winning were 9 out of about 155 teams, or a 5.8 percent chance. RootsTech is about promoting the use of family history in a creative way.
1st prize: $20,000 in cash, $25,000 in-kind
2nd prize: $14,000 in cash, $15,000 in-kind
Judge’s choice: $6,000 in cash, $10,000 in-kind
People’s choice: $10,000 in cash IBM has been sponsoring lots of hackathons to promote their and Spark investments.
1st prize: $15,000
2nd prize: $7,500
3rd prize: $5,000
Plus various smaller prizes.
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When Virtual Reality Meets Education
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Elizabeth Reede
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Since the 1950s, virtual reality (VR) has been hovering on the periphery of technology without achieving accepted mainstream application or commercial adoption. Since 2012, VR startups have raised more than $1.46 billion in venture capital, including more than $100 million in funding during the last four consecutive quarters. According to Citi analyst Kota Ezawa, in earnest, with the VR market expected to grow to a $15.9 billion industry by 2019. Citi also anticipates the market for hardware, networks, software and content will reach $200 billion by 2020. The content share of this market is of particular interest, as this segment of the tech industry has historically been dedicated to gaming — but the world is changing. We are shifting from the now relatively benign universe in Aldous Huxley’s to Ernest Cline’s VR paradigm as described in . Like Huxley, Cline has written of a dystopian environment wherein technology has overtaken humanity. For our purpose, let’s consider VR as a useful tool, and perhaps even a productive enhancement to human interaction, bringing together people from around the world to engage and interact — regardless of social, economic or geographic disparities. In the abstract as well as the applied, modern education is poised to take advantage of this latest tech innovation. Over the last several years, VR has moved from being the purview of the military and aviation to the mainstream of professional development, as managers, instructors, coaches and therapists have claimed increasing benefit from immersive experiences. While statistics on VR use in K-12 schools and colleges have yet to be gathered, the steady growth of the market is reflected in the surge of companies (including , and ) solely dedicated to providing schools with packaged educational curriculum and content, teacher training and technological tools to support VR-based instruction in the classroom. Myriad articles, studies and conference presentations attest to the great success of 3D immersion and VR technology in hundreds of classrooms in educationally progressive schools and learning labs in the U.S. and Europe. Much of this early foray into VR-based learning has centered on the hard sciences — biology, anatomy, geology and astronomy — as the curricular focus and learning opportunities are notably enriched through interaction with dimensional objects, animals and environments. The , a biology lesson at a school in the Czech Republic that employed a Leap Motion controller and specially adapted Oculus Rift DK2 headsets, stands as an exemplary model of innovative scientific learning. In other areas of education, many classes have used VR tools to collaboratively construct architectural models, recreations of historic or natural sites and other spatial renderings. Instructors also have used VR technology to engage students in topics related to literature, history and economics by offering a deeply immersive sense of place and time, whether historic or evolving. In what may turn out to be an immersive education game changer, its in September 2015. Under this program, thousands of schools around the world are getting — for one day — a kit containing everything a teacher needs to take their class on a virtual trip: Asus smartphones, a tablet for the teacher to direct the tour, a router that allows Expeditions to run without an Internet connection, a library of 100+ virtual trips (from the Great Wall of China to Mars) and Google Cardboard viewers or Mattel ViewMasters that turn smartphones into VR headsets. This global distribution of VR content and access will undoubtedly influence a pedagogical shift as these new technologies allow a literature teacher in Chicago to “take” her students to Verona to look at the setting for Shakespeare’s , or a teacher in the Bronx to “bring” her Ancient Civilizations class to the ancient Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza. And with VR platforms like and (an initiative of Immersive VR Education), entirely new possibilities are available for teachers of all kinds, as the technology of making avatars and supporting “multi-player” sessions allows for an exponentially scaled level of socialization and outreach. Potentially, a collaboration between these innovative VR platform offerings could result in a curator or artist guiding a group of thousands around a museum exhibition or cultural site, or an actor or professor leading a virtual master class in real time with students from all over the world. Perhaps the most utopian application of this technology will be seen in terms of bridging cultures and fostering understanding among young students, as it will soon be possible for a third-grade class in the U.S. to participate in a virtual trip with a third-grade class in India or Mexico. Despite the fact that VR is still developing, real progress has been seen in the economic scaling of the technology. The cost to the consumer of VR hardware (headsets, in particular) has steadily declined, as noted in the head-mounted displays (HMDs) commercially available today: for $20 and for $99 (at this writing, , a desktop VR device, is available for pre-order for $599). The fact that headsets to access its newly launched VR experiences has further advanced accessibility and mainstreaming of the device, as well as this innovative means of media consumption. Overall, access to some type of mobile VR device is affordable for many more individual users and, in turn, many more schools. Some forward-thinking instructors are even using 3D printers to print their own customized HMDs with their technology students, a solution that dovetails with the popular maker-trend philosophy. So maybe we are ready for the futuristic world of Cline’s But perhaps the utopian rather than dystopian construct is not only more appealing, but also more relevant in this global community. Educators and students alike are seeking an ever-expanding immersive landscape, where students engage with teachers and each other in transformative experiences through a wide spectrum of interactive resources. In this educational reality, VR has a definitive place of value.
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The Repeat Political Madness Of Never-Ending Crypto Wars
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Natasha Lomas
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What is it with politicians and encryption? There are now two bills in different U.S. states, one in and one in , proposing that smartphones sold in the state must be able to be decrypted on demand by either their manufacturer or OS provider. Ergo the full disk encryption feature offered by Google on Android or Apple on iOS would — if these bills are signed into law — be outlawed in the two respective states. As, presumably, would sales of iPhones and (plenty of) Androids. The prospect of politicians outlawing the iPhone does not have ‘great vote-winning strategy’ written all over it. And yet politicians on both sides of the Atlantic apparently cling to the notion that encryption can be magicked out of existence on their say so. You have to hope lawmakers are at least not so stupid as to end up passing laws that attempt to outlaw math — even if individual politicians persist in the fantastical belief that the general public’s security can be enhanced by weakening, er, the general public’s security… Over in the U.K., currently before parliament, aiming to expand intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ surveillance capabilities, contains some weasel words on encryption — with a clause that comms providers should be able to “remove electronic protection” and provide legible user data in response to a lawful intercept warrant. While the UK government claims it’s not asking for device makers and service providers to create backdoors or hand over encryption keys, it has also the law will require comms providers to provide data when served with a warrant. So the implication is the same: with a little legislative sleight of hand, end-to-end encryption is made to stand outside the law. Frankly this is a really tedious debate, since it’s indefatigably cyclical. We are apparently doomed to rehash the same arguments every few years as a new swathe of politicians arrive and set to, at the urging of overstretched security and law enforcement agencies, to find new ways to circumvent unbreakable encryption. The fact things had gone a little quiet on the crypto wars front, in the pre-Snowden era, was evidently not absolute victory but rather a creeping commercial workaround — as the NSA et al tapped into poorly secured but widely used consumer services to acquire the troves of public data they had sought. But since the Snowden revelations tech giants have tightened up their act — and so we arrive, once again, at politicians trying to tighten the legal thumb-screws on encryption. Not so much a crypto war then, but a continual arms race between technology services and a powerful industrial surveillance complex that evidently still has a huge pull on the political strings in countries like the U.S. There is a very long history of U.S. government agencies seeking to perforate encryption. The NSA even designed a chipset with a backdoor — the Clipper Chip — in the 1990s and tried to get U.S. phone makers to use it. (Yep, you can … ) So it seems the tug-of-war between tech and politics is a struggle of Sisyphean duration; where futile actions are continually demanded, despite being all too apparently and hopelessly opposed to the laws of physics. And we’re supposed to call this progress? The argument that national security is enhanced by perforating secure encryption has been roundly and consistently condemned by the security industry. You don’t enhance the public’s security by making everyone’s information more easily accessible to hackers and other bad actors. Period. Yet here we are again. In this instance the bill in California is specifically making the argument that breaking encryption is a necessary measure to combat human trafficking. In the U.K. the examples routinely brandished to justify mass state penetration of secure systems are terrorism and/or pedophilia. The problem with such arguments is they have no boundaries. Where do you draw the line? Should every home have government-installed security camera in every room on the off chance that a person living there might one day do something criminal? Sure you might catch some criminals but it’s a massively disproportionate response to invade the privacy and weaken the security of everyone in the country in order to achieve that result. Policing can’t be absolute. It needs to be balanced against other considerations. And if we want to live in a free society, where civil liberties and personal privacy are enshrined as fundamental values which help to define who we as individuals (and as a collective), then we need to have some indelible red lines. Yet mass surveillance rides rough shod over hard won democratic boundaries in the name of an ill-defined and apparently eternal ‘war on terror’. If the goal is absolute defeat of terrorism then politicians are going to need to do a lot more than ban iPhones. Probably some kind of universally implanted mindreading chip would be necessary. So yeah, good luck with that. Returning to reality, attempts to outlaw encryption are doomed to fail on the grounds that it’s not possible to control people’s access to encrypted technology. In one very , the so-called Islamic State has built its own encrypted chat app. So what was the point of politicians trying to enforce backdoors in mainstream apps and services? Bad actors will always finds ways to route around the damage. Meanwhile everyone else’s data security gets screwed. In all likelihood terrorists find this situation entirely to their liking — given they are causing massive damage to public security with minimal action on their part. They’ve outsourced mass hacking to government agents whipped into the chaotic vortex of power politics and the peculiar potency of terrorism to flip political levers. Meanwhile truly major threats to human civilization (e.g. climate change) apparently take years to even register as a political issue, let alone make it onto the legislative radar. Such is the strange logic of politics. So if the states of California and New York end up deciding to outlaw sales of modern smartphones — and you really have to hope that’s pretty darn unlikely, given how crazy the logic of this is (I told TC’s editor I would eat my proverbial hat if the NY law comes to pass, so I confess to having some teeth in the game… ) — you’ll undoubtedly soon see a whole lot of U.S. citizens daytripping to the next state to buy their next Nexus or iPhone. And the question will remain: what exactly will politicians have achieved? The overarching problem appears to be that security services have become addicted to catch-all surveillance as their modus operandi for intelligence gathering. Instead of focusing their resources in a more intelligently targeted way. (If you need access to a suspect person’s encrypted data you can always install malware on their device. Instead the security services prefer to demand tech platforms do the intelligence work for them by providing backdoor access to everyone’s data. So perhaps they’ve forgotten how to do core police work to figure out who are suspects in the first place. Possibly because they are …) This structural problem appears to be compounded by some cosy relations between politicians who are proposing encryption-perforating legislation and the security agencies seeking it. For instance, notes that Jim Cooper, the California Assembly member who is proposing one of the aforementioned bills, is a . While, in the New York state example, the bill has been proposed by Assembly member Matthew Titone — who has taken campaign donor funding contributions from police unions and associations in recent times. So long as politicians remain most comfortable outside the digital world, and so long as they need to raise money to finance their own re-election campaigns, we’ll get technologically illiterate laws being proposed, either from out-and-out stupidity. Or (more likely) to placate other interest groups who are more organized when it comes to greasing the right set of political wheels — and the next round of crypto skirmishes will rat-tat-tat up again. Is there any way to stop the madness of repeat history? The most positive sign in this latest crypto battle is the . Such a high profile company is in a position to raise public awareness and apply substantial political pressure. And loud enough objections can act as a counterweight to moves to quietly slip new loopholes into encrypted services via vaguely-worded legislature — or attempts to pass off intellectually dishonest arguments as inarguable logic. Say by claiming the “safety of the citizenry” depends on outlawing iPhones. Even so, the cycle remains terribly tedious. We can but hope that eventually, in some moment of blinding future revelation, there will be a political tipping point into a general understanding that the “safety of the citizenry” actually depends upon the sanctity of the citizenry’s data. Perhaps the proliferation of an Internet of Things — whereby are routinely streamed to the cloud, direct from people’s homes and even from their bodies — will be the catalyst for a much needed shift of mainstream perspective. So let’s hope we don’t have to wait too long before the crypto wars are finally, finally won.
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How Solar Software Can Save The World
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Jake Saper
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VCs have avoided solar deals ever since Solyndra became a four-letter word. But while their attention has strayed, the industry has been on a tear. In 2010, U.S. solar installers hit a milestone of 1 GW per year. Five years later, they’re installing more than 1 GW per month. This tremendous growth has fed a swelling herd of solar unicorns populated by the likes of SolarCity, SunEdison, SunPower and more. Recently, the industry has been buffeted by a variety of tailwinds that should drive even faster expansion. The landmark Paris climate accord promises stronger regulatory support across the world. Concurrently, a group of billionaires led by Bill Gates announced the to fund this roll out. And the U.S. Congress has extended the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which has . Add to this mix innovation in large-scale battery manufacturing and the future of distributed power generation looks bright indeed. It’s also creating an opportunity to build the first SaaS unicorn focused on distributed generation. As this industry grows, so does the need for software to improve efficiency and lower costs. “Soft costs,” like permitting, financing and customer acquisition, now represent roughly two-thirds of installed costs of residential deployments. , the best way to address such soft costs is with software. As an example, the manner in which solar developers identify, track and quote potential customers today is decades behind other industries. The leading solar players today use a “spit and glue” combination of Salesforce, homegrown code and Excel. It’s not shocking, therefore, that while installation costs have plummeted. Other industries have solved this problem with software tailored to the specific needs of industry users. In the pharmaceutical space, Veeva Systems (an Emergence portfolio company) built a customer relationship management (CRM) solution focused exclusively on solving customer acquisition problems in pharma. This vertical-specific solution improved sales productivity by an average of 66 percent. A similar tool for solar could marry building data with customer demographic information to make developers substantially more effective at closing deals. Solar needs a Veeva-like tool to accelerate the path to grid parity (the point at which solar electricity costs the same as average grid electricity and growth skyrockets). The good news is that a lot of folks are working to build this type of industry cloud application. The Department of Energy’s SunShot Catalyst program is funding a . , a solar-focused accelerator, is incubating still more. And even the VCs have started to put money back into the sector, including . This momentum has resulted in an exciting emerging ecosystem of SaaS providers focused on the distributed generation (DG) opportunity created by the rise of solar and energy storage. I’ve taken a stab at illustrating it below. I’m sure I’ve left folks off, and others will become miscategorized over time, so feel free to ping me with hate (or love?) email. Distributed generation software landscape This is a great start, but it’s still very early innings. Most of these companies are addressing important problems, but doing so as point solutions. To scale, they’ll need to expand beyond these entry points. Here’s my stab at a recipe for how to build the first solar/DG software unicorn. Start by solving a revenue problem (lead generation, CRM, proposal generation, etc.) versus a cost problem (error reduction, headcount reduction, etc.). It’s typically easier to get in the door with top-line-focused solutions, which is particularly important in industries that are relatively new to significant software spend. Sell by showing a clear return on investment (ROI) of increased sales relative to software spend. Ensure you are used every day. Get to a point where an important employee group literally can’t do their job without your software. Further, it’s critically important to make sure this is true recurring software revenue and not professional services. I can’t emphasize this point enough. Do not become a software consulting firm doing custom builds. Write flexible software that customers can configure themselves. Become a suite (expand products). Once you’re sticky in your core product and have become your customers’ most trusted technology provider, expand to solve other pain points. Veeva (the pharma-focused CRM I mentioned earlier) did this and built a nearly $4 billion company in the process. To capture the largest possible market size, it will be important to sell not just to today’s distributed generation players but to service the much larger utilities and independent power producers (IPPs) moving into the space — and which desperately need help selling to customers. Remember, these are the folks that have traditionally viewed their customers as “rate payers.” Aim to be the software platform for each component of the distributed generation ecosystem (not just solar). Elon’s Gigafactory will only accelerate the coming of distributed storage, which will also require smart software to be sold and integrated effectively. To clear the mythical $1 billion valuation hurdle, today’s DG software players will need to expand their addressable market. The good news is that the overall solar industry is growing at a rapid clip, so the underlying trends are favorable. Getting a firm grasp on total potential market size is much more of an art than a science, but we can take the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) global renewable energy employment forecasts as a basis for estimation. I’ve roughly assumed 15 percent of IRENA’s global employment forecast will be distributed generation professionals in roles like sales, finance and diligence. I’ve also assumed these professionals would buy SaaS software at $100/seat/month. This rough math gets us to an addressable market today of roughly $1 billion, scaling to $2.25 billion by 2020 and more than $3.5 billion by 2030. This would be a very exciting future for today’s incipient DG SaaS market. But I see a critical element missing from most of the current players, which will prevent this scale: enterprise SaaS talent. Most DG software executives today have tremendous experience in renewable energy, but they haven’t built and scaled large subscription-based software companies. Getting this talent in the door and pairing it with the solar pros is the only way I see companies scaling the mountain. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of cross-pollination going on today. Solar folks tend to hang with solar folks and SaaS folks with SaaS folks, like they’re on different planets. We have to find a way to bridge these worlds to birth a unicorn. Thus, I’ll leave you with a challenge. If you’re on the solar side of things, open up LinkedIn and find your buddy or your buddy’s buddy who works at Salesforce, Box, etc. and offer to buy them a beer. If you’re on the SaaS side of things and interested in applying those skills to solving the biggest existential crisis of our time, drop me a note and I’ll be happy to connect you. Speeding the transition toward clean energy is our best bet at averting a catastrophic temperature increase. With a little interplanetary collaboration, we can build the software necessary to do it.
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Google Working On Its Own Consumer VR Hardware, Latest Job Postings Suggest
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Lucas Matney
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Google appears to be doubling down on virtual reality as they look to begin building “multiple” consumer hardware devices, according to new VR job postings on their site. Google’s current consumer VR offerings are confined to its Google Cardboard program, which allows consumers to experience rudimentary virtual reality with a simple system involving cheap headsets attached to smartphones. Now it appears that Google is working on hardware devices that do more than just act as bare-bones viewers for smartphones. Google’s VR ambitions were just last week when Clay Bavor, its VP for Produt Management, left his work on other Google products to exclusively focus on managing the company’s VR offerings. The new job postings, , give a variety of hints suggesting Google’s future VR plans. This posting (for a ) points to the employee leading a team in building “multiple” consumer electronic devices while directing “system integration of high-performance, battery powered, highly constrained consumer electronics products.” As the Hardware Engineering Technical Lead Manager for the consumer hardware products, you will drive the design and execution of our ever increasing product portfolio. You will be responsible for the building multiple CE devices and will put together the right team that will scale with our product offering. A posting for a for VR details the “development and sustaining of actual products,” while also discussing the hardware team’s overall mission in regards to the devices. Google custom-designs hardware for consumer electronics applications. The Hardware Engineering team ensures that this cutting-edge devices are reliable and robust. As a CAD/PCB Layout Engineer on the hardware team, you will be working on fast-paced boards for consumer devices. The company currently has over a dozen hardware and software-focused positions centered on the company’s virtual reality efforts. Essential to note is how all of this falls when considering Google’s massive Magic Leap investment. The augmented reality wearable company has not given the public a look at what it’s been working on (other than the very interesting/mysterious YouTube video below) but Google has shown a major interest in its technologies; Google led the company’s massive $542 million Series B in October 2014. While Magic Leap’s AR tech seems to be more of the Hololens variety, it seems interesting that the company is simultaneously investing such major resources in that company, especially as Magic Leap is reportedly raising an even larger $827 million funding round. The production of dedicated VR consumer devices would be huge as Google has mainly focused on ventures seeking to promote VR content production from others, like its . It’s unclear whether all of this points to a Samsung Gear VR-style device that is compatible with a greater slew of Android devices, a dedicated HMD or a device that isn’t even a headset. The tidbit about the devices possibly being battery-powered certainly seems interesting, and appears to limit suggestion that Google might be building a dedicated HMD offering similar experience to those from Oculus, Sony and HTC. Google was not immediately available for comment.
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Katie Roof
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Blue Origin Launches and Lands Recovered Rocket
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Emily Calandrelli
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Without any notice, Blue Origin made history once again when they completed a successful launch and landing of a suborbital rocket yesterday. What made this flight particularly notable was that they used the that had been launched into space on a flight in November. The recovered New Shepard rocket launched from Blue Origin’s test site in West Texas, brought a capsule to space at an altitude of 101.7 kilometers, and then both the booster and the capsule returned safely back down to the ground. The Karman line, the generally agreed upon line of space, is held at 100 kilometers. The booster was directed back to the Earth where it made a propulsive soft landing. The capsule returned at a different location using 3 large parachutes and retro-thrust propulsion to slow its descent. Video of the launch was titled “Launch. Land. Repeat.” A simple concept, but a truly revolutionary strategy for the rocket industry that is just now taking shape with companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX leading the way. In November, Blue Origin performed a similar suborbital launch and landing with the New Shepard rocket to an altitude of 100.5 kilometers. The New Shephard vehicle will be used to bring tourists and researchers into suborbital space, competing with similar rides offered by Richard Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic. In a blog post on the company’s , Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos explained that a few hardware replacements and software adjustments were necessary after their first New Shepard launch. In addition to replacing the crew capsule parachutes and the booster’s pyro igniters, the Blue Origin team made a “noteworthy” software improvement related to landing on the pad. Back in December, SpaceX successfully launched and landed their Falcon 9 rocket in an orbital mission to space. Many, including Elon Musk himself, were quick to that SpaceX’s rocket recovery was slightly different than Jeff Bezos’ rocket recovery. Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO orbit requires ~Mach 30. The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) It’s unlikely, however, that we’ll be able to watch SpaceX’s recovered Falcon 9 fly again. Musk has stated that “I think we’ll probably keep this one on the ground. Just, it’s kind of unique, it’s the first one we’ve brought back.” Bezos obviously didn’t share that mindset and it ended up paying off. Recovering a rocket is one (completely amazing) thing, but showing that you can actually use that rocket again is another. What good is a recovered rocket if you can’t use it again? “Our Vision: Millions of people living and working in space. You can’t get there by throwing the hardware away.” – Blue Origin Bezos noted that their New Shephard vehicle is the smallest booster that they will build. Larger, orbital vehicles are next on the Blue Origin to-do list. “We’re already more than three years into development of our first orbital vehicle. Though it will be the small vehicle in our orbital family, it’s still many times larger than New Shepard. I hope to share details about this first orbital vehicle this year.” – Jeff Bezos Reliability is everything in the rocket industry where companies are betting millions, sometimes billions, of dollars on the expectation that their ride to space will be safe and seamless. The stakes are even higher when you have humans on board. All companies involved in the rocket reusability game still have a ways to go to prove that they can consistently launch recovered rockets. But if the past three months are any indicator, Blue Origin and SpaceX are well on their way to changing the rocket industry as we know it.
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Is VC The Right Money For Fintech?
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Micah Rosenbloom
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Financial technology has never been a more exciting or innovative category — especially in New York City. Oddly, tech is not the driving force in many of these ventures. The Blockchain and Bitcoin notwithstanding, most of what we’re seeing now is financial product evolution and the unbundling of the large bank. Most of these companies could have been built 20 years ago. Outside cryptocurrency and a few tools that enable better trading decisions, most of these startups developed a proprietary model to score the credit risks of potential customers and paired it with a clever go-to-market strategy that will appear to a new class of debt holders. In the consumer space, this could be financing for home flippers, school loans, high-deductible health plans or even Uber drivers who want to buy new cars as a means of earning income. On the B2B side, companies have formed to help small business get financing by creating obscure products, like securities based on accounts receivable financing. As a seed-stage VC that invests across many categories, these are hard businesses to assess. The industries they serve are varied, obscure and almost impossible to do due diligence on. Their technology typically feels like a black box that requires blind faith in their assertions. On the surface, this would make them seem unattractive. But often these businesses have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in “transactional volume,” with promising metrics, like repayment rates and customer acquisition costs. So, from the standpoint of initial traction, there is evidence of a product market fit, and they look attractive. Almost all of these startups make sense as businesses, but I think founders and investors need to spend time thinking through two key questions. First, as an investor, would I want to buy the debt OR the equity? Do I want to be a customer or an investor? Second, from the founder standpoint, would it be better to take venture money or run the business from cash flows and keep the profits — the typical approach for Wall Street finance firms. From an equity investment perspective, one must start by looking at the financials. In these types of ventures, the gross loan portfolio appears large — but consider that the actual net revenue or return from these businesses is anywhere from a tenth of a basis point, topping out at 1-2 percent. Thus, to be a venture-worthy investment, literally billions of dollars must be loaned. In finance, size matters. The yields are generally double-digit; as a retail investor, I’d love to invest in clever debt structuring products that can return 10 percent a year with little volatility. Perhaps that’s why a lot of “smart” hedge fund and institutional money is flowing to these platforms (like Lending Club, OnDeck, etc.). Demand outstrips supply of loans on many of these platforms. So they’re clearly good businesses. But it’s often harder to see how these deals become attractive from an equity perspective. As a VC investor, do I see the potential for 10X returns in under a decade? A few lucky winners will IPO, but it’s hard to envision who these businesses will ultimately sell to — the lion’s share of our returns come from M&A. Even if the startup does find a buyer, these kinds of companies often have low valuation multiples, making them less attractive venture capital investments. The question for founders is, do they really want to play the VC game? Many come from Wall Street and, contrary to popular belief in the startup ecosystem, many of these folks are quite entrepreneurial and almost definitionally risk takers. They see opportunity in the seemingly lucrative land of tech startups. As Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, “That’s where the money is.” While the motivations may be different than others drawn to startups, these folks seek to enact the same sorts of disruption in the market they know best, finance. All that said, fintech entrepreneurs (and I’m certainly generalizing here) are less focused and experienced in product development. Finance is centered around transactions rather than building cumulative experiences. This is probably the right focus for such ventures — and sometimes I wish other company founders had such focus on generating profits! — but it runs contra to building a business where you have to put off a dollar today to make 10 next month. The founders get this conceptually, but sometimes they can be fixated on making the company grow linearly by getting more “paper” under management, rather than developing a solution that unlocks exponential growth. This mindset is even reflected in the way they incorporate their businesses. Further compounding the challenge for equity investors is that some of these attractive companies are incorporated as LLCs. This is because of the nature of these cash flows, the losses from these ventures can be used to offset gains from the founders, and from other investors in the venture. Most VCs, ourselves included, almost exclusively invest in C-corporations. This isn’t to say these are bad businesses. We’ve made a number of investments in this area, including , , , , and other yet to be announced startups. We don’t take a one-view fits all approach when we’re reviewing a business opportunity, and there will be some big winners in this category. This segment is just too large a part of the U.S. economy to be ignored by VCs. I believe there will be a new generation of Bloombergs, consumer financial products and B2B financial instruments in the coming years. Just as the ETF revolutionized the way consumers can index a plethora of investing strategies, so too will a whole new class of innovation come to the fore. I sure wish I could have seed funded Vanguard! In many cases, such businesses will come down to whether they can buy capital for less than they can lend it out. This arbitrage can form the basis of a financial firm that could leave principals and agents pleased for years, even decades. But some great businesses will lack the combination of volatility, speed and scale that are the marker of great VC investments. In such cases, I’d rather hold the debt than be an equity investor. Maybe it’s time to start a debt fund?
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iAllocate Is A Robot That Helps You Invest Your Cash
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John Biggs
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Robots are everywhere. They help lawyers , they after our parties, and now they can help you figure out how to invest your money. In fact, an Atlanta-based company called is using artificial intelligence to suggest where you should be stashing your millions. “Currently, iAllocate.me provides investors of all levels a DIY set of tools to not only educate themselves about the investor inside them, but also take away a personal and strategic Asset Allocation Strategy. The user/investor can then instantly build a diversified Tactical Investment Portfolio with ETF (Exchange Traded Funds) recommendations, which have been intelligently optimized using a proprietary iA algorithm from a selection universe of more than 400 different ETFs,” said the co-founder Tom Pair. Pretty basic stuff, right? He is working with Dr. Sudhir Sharma, a portfolio manager of 20 years with a background in nanotech and machine learning. Pair worked at Goldman Sachs, UBS and Barclays. They have self-funded the project to the tune of $200,000 and they are looking into further equity funding. The team has seen over 100 registrations and they are adding brokerage partners to help users act on the advice the robot gives them. They are also exploring offering the service as a white-label addition to investment house websites. “Comparable systems / software packages are expensive and not really an option for many upstart independent advisory firms,” said Pair. “Pure objectivity, one of the most important factors in investment advice. We do not earn fees from trades. We do not require personal data (such as SS# or $ annual income). Nor are we ongoing stewards of important personal data,” he said. By using machine learning and some nice design, Pair and Sharma have created a robot that makes it easy to pick your future. That’s pretty cool. Sadly, the robot can’t take you aside during a summer pool party, look you right in the eye, and say That’s coming in version 2.0.
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Bitcoin Is Dead (Again), Long Live Bitcoin (Again)
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Jon Evans
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Oh, the drama, such . Last week longtime Bitcoin developer Mike Hearn “the Bitcoin experiment…has failed,” and marked his resignation from that community with a fusillade of verbal grenades (and a of his dissent.) This in turn provoked a whole torrent of hot takes and reactions, which mostly had one thing in common: contempt for all who disagree. Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent, off as “whiny ragequitting.” Greg Slepak posted a detailed, point-by-point of Hearn’s accusations; a redditor did on /r/Bitcoin, as did Ron Gross . Vivek Wadha “R.I.P., Bitcoin. It’s time to move on,” for the , and posted the same article under a slightly less inflammatory title, er, . Which in turn provoked another angry by Sam Patterson. Are you exhausted yet? Beneath all that sound and fury, though, I promise you, something interesting is happening. Bitcoin is, in fact, far further from death than it was all the (many) other times its demise was gleefully, and wrongfully, proclaimed. (Hearn’s central argument boils down to: “Bitcoin is failing because it has grown too popular!” Uh-huh. “Nobody goes there any more, it’s too busy.”) What seem dead, however, is one particular vision of Bitcoin’s future; Hearn’s. Hence his parting broadside, which was roughly 70% sour grapes … and 30% valid concerns. The cause of the Great Bitcoin Schism Of 2015 was a technical dispute over Bitcoin’s block size. Long ago, Bitcoin’s implausibly mysterious progenitor Satoshi Nakamoto added a last-minute size limitation to the cryptocurrency’s “blocks” of transactions (which in turn make up its now-famous “blockchain.”) This was intended as a anti-spam measure. But that also limits the overall capacity of Bitcoin, which has grown so popular that is beginning to approach that hard limit — a limit that cannot be modified without a “hard fork,” which could ( ) split the Bitcoin blockchain in two. As long as a supermajority of the Bitcoin network quickly adopted the new code, this wouldn’t be — but it would still be , and one that would inevitably leave some of the existing network behind. If this were only a technical dispute, though, it would provoke far less rancor. What’s really at stake here are two far more contentious things: what is the future of Bitcoin? And who gets to define it? 1/ People are conflating two separate debates in Bitcoin blocksize discussion: which technical measures to take and who 'decides' — Antonis Polemitis (@polemitis) 8/ In any case, I think the 'debate' would benefit from an explicit separation into proposed approach for tech and governance — Antonis Polemitis (@polemitis) As the always-perspicacious Fred Wilson , describing the first debate, “I liken it to this. Should Bitcoin be Gold or should Bitcoin be Visa.” Hearn’s vision was Bitcoin-as-Visa; a single vast transactional network. The alternate vision, now apparently in the ascendant, is Bitcoin-as-Gold … with, , a built atop it. Personally I too think the latter is the right decision. But the most important question, the crux of this Great Bitcoin Schism, is: who gets to make it? In theory, the Bitcoin miners who have put many millions of dollars into their custom hardware decide what happens to the Bitcoin network. But they’re not expert developers. They can only choose whether or not to run the code presented to them. In practice, as is so often the case, an enormous burden of authority and responsibility accrues not to they who own the hardware, but they who write the software. Bitcoin is an open-source project, but it’s fair to say that its core development has been largely conducted by a fairly small number of developers. This team–call them “Bitcoin Core”–is frequently accused (albeit on Reddit) of blatant conflict of interest, because several of them co-founded a startup called , which is building, and presumably planning to monetize, . Bitcoin Core is staunchly opposed to the plan by Hearn (and Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen) to immediately introduce the “hard fork” described above. Bitcoin Core favors a to increase Bitcoin’s capacity. I don’t think they are afraid that a hard-fork capacity increase will interfere with Blockstream’s business model; I think they genuinely (and correctly) believe that it is a (currently) technically unnecessary and strategically dangerous idea. But I think they have with the kind of dismissive all too common among brilliant engineers, and have misinterpreted and misunderstood the of the rest of the Bitcoin ecosystem. As a result, while Hearn may be gone, the hard fork lives on. A new alternative called , introduced by a group of technically inferior but politically wilier developers, appears to be winning (though not ) support. I suspect things would have gone very differently if the Bitcoin Core folks had made what Ryan Shea calls “ .” And I suspect that, as heads observe, these are , a of that will be good for the Bitcoin project and ecosystem in the long run… …but let’s not all sing Kumbayah together just yet. As I noted above, Mike Hearn’s swan song may have been 70% sour grapes–but it was 30% completely valid concerns. Bitcoin’s runaway success, and the Great Bitcoin Schism Of 2015, have heightened the two uncomfortable fundamental contradictions still lurking darkly at its heart like Grendel. The Bitcoin network must be decentralized, permissionless, and trustless. Otherwise it literally has no reason to exist. . should bitcoin be controlled by you personally? or andresen horowitz? it's a p2p currency with decentralised control — Adam Back (@adam3us) A Bitcoin where only a small no. of large companies use the chain is not really Bitcoin anymore. It's inefficient Visa. — Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) But Bitcoin “mining,” the process of forging and securing the all-important blockchain, has become an industrial rather than artisanal activity, which (for technical reasons) only makes financial sense for companies who run their own custom-built mining chips in places with extremely cheap electricity. Hearn’s outrage that “the block chain is controlled by Chinese miners” may be one step removed from xenophobia, but the larger issue — that this decentralized system unfortunately happens to incentivize, maybe not centralization, but something a lot like oligarchization… On stage right now: people representing approximately 90% of the Bitcoin hashing power. Truly an historic moment. — Jameson Lopp (@lopp) …is very much an internal contradiction, and one that won’t go away any time soon. The Bitcoin Core folks know this. Indeed, their opposition to increasing the block size is partly rooted in a concern that it will centralize mining even further. But, unfortunately, the internal contradiction is that the decentralized Bitcoin project needs form of technical governance and guidance. “Rough consensus and running code” sounds great; but rough consensus among Miners don’t have the technical chops to guide and evolve the Bitcoin codebase. Very few people do, right now — and most of them are part of Bitcoin Core. Which means that “decentralized” Bitcoin, especially now that the influential Hearn has flounced away, arguably already have a de facto governance group… one that happens to be unwritten, informal, and largely employed by a single for-profit company. However well-intentioned Bitcoin Core may be (and I personally completely believe in their good intentions) and despite the “rough consensus” from the , it’s easy to see why many others find the situation awkward at best, and unacceptable at worst. I don’t have a solution for the first contradiction. But I do for the second. I submit that Bitcoin has grown in size and importance to the point that it now needs some equivalent of the or . (Before anyone brings it up: no, like the .) That’s a deeply staid, boring, bureaucratic notion, I know, especially for a revolutionary anarchic decentralized cryptocurrency. But technical decisions made under that kind of political aegis would be easier to accept for all concerned. Perhaps the time has finally come for Bitcoin to become just a little bit more boring.
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NASA Spacewalk Cut Short After Spacesuit Malfunction
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Emily Calandrelli
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NASA terminated a spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) today due to a spacesuit malfunction with one of the American astronauts. NASA’s Timothy Kopra and British astronaut Timothy Peake were scheduled to complete a six-and-a-half-hour spacewalk to switch out an electrical component in the ISS’s solar power system. 3 hours into today's , the failed power unit is successfully replaced and stowed. Now, cable routing. — Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) The spacewalk had been underway for four hours and 43 minutes when Kopra reported water in his helmet. Kopra was able to move the water around to determine that it was about a half-inch wide and two or three inches long, didn’t taste like his own sweat, and was cold. NASA was concerned with the amount of water and the fact that it was cold because it indicated that the leak had come from the spacesuit’s cooling system, rather than from his sweat or drinking water. When it comes to potential spacesuit leaks, NASA doesn’t take any chances. Back in 2013, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano experienced a severe water leak that caused one of the scariest close calls in NASA’s spacewalk history. The leak in Parmitano’s helmet was so severe that floating water had covered his eyes, ears, nose, and part of his mouth. By restricting his air passages, Parmitano almost drowned before he had time to return to the station’s air lock. After Parmitano’s close call, NASA takes any indication of a spacesuit leak very seriously. Astronauts are now required to conduct routine water checks inside their helmets during spacewalks. Although today’s water buildup was much smaller, it was enough of a concern to terminate the mission early. Both astronauts were able to safely return to the airlock with 15 minutes. Luckily, by that time they had already accomplished the primary objective of the spacewalk by successfully restoring a lost power channel to normal operations. The astronauts were in the process of accomplishing secondary objectives when Kopra noticed the water in his helmet. Today's has ended early. The crew was never in any danger. Listen to the NASA TV commentator for details. — NASA (@NASA) Today’s mishap is not likely to cause delays for the next spacewalk, scheduled for early February, which will be performed by Russian cosmonauts who wear a different type of spacesuit. NASA’s next spacewalk was previously slated for later this spring. Unless NASA can come up with a solution to prevent future spacesuit leaks that date will likely get pushed back. Since the 2013 incident, NASA had performed a detailed assessment of their spacesuit design to prevent similar malfunctions on future spacewalks. However, in February of 2015 NASA astronaut Terry Virts also a small amount of water floating in his helmet upon returning from his spacewalk. Thankfully no astronauts were hurt and the primary mission of the spacewalk was completed, but today was certainly a small setback for NASA. The agency’s spacesuit engineers now have some serious homework to do in order to understand why these water leaks seem to continue to happen.
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iTunes Radio Is No Longer Free
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Katie Roof
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Apple Music has also been an integral feature of CarPlay, the company’s new auto dashboard. Apple, which first popularized portable MP3 listening with its iPods, has been vying to remain a top contender in the digital music space. Its $3 billion acquisition of Dr. Dre’s Beats Electronics in 2014, exemplified this push. The purchase brought famed record producer Jimmy Iovine on board, who has been involved with developing Apple’s new music initiatives.
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Get Small To Get Big Through Microservices
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Matt Miller
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If we trace a path that starts with Gutenberg’s use of moveable type to Malcom McLean’s invention of the shipping container, we start to recognize a very interesting pattern: Each new layer of abstraction and standardization creates tremendous value out of the resulting increases in scale and efficiency. Today’s digital innovators can trace a similar historical path that starts with mainframe computers and monolithic applications and then, step-by-step, reveals software’s interchangeable parts until we arrive at today’s cloud-based era of . Microservices is an approach to building software that shifts away from large monolithic applications toward small, loosely coupled and composable autonomous pieces. The benefit of this abstraction is specialization, which drives down costs to develop and drives up agility and quality — while operating much more resilient systems. This approach is not new; Amazon and Google have been using it for more than a decade. Container technologies (like Docker), APIs and the availability of cloud infrastructure have made microservices something that is now practical for a much broader set of companies. Companies like Airbnb, Disney, Dropbox, GE, Goldman Sachs and Twitter have seen development lead times cut by as much as 75 percent when using microservices. The concept sounds simple enough, but doing it is harder than it looks. This has given rise to a whole new ecosystem of companies and open-source software to help people with this transition. Click to enlarge Sixty engineering leaders gathered recently at Sequoia’s Microservices Summit to share stories about what it took to implement microservices at companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Netflix, Disney, Wells Fargo, Dropbox, Amgen, Citi, Nasdaq, Medallia, HP, Okta, Gilt, Instacart and many others. Here are the 10 best practices for building and deploying microservices. Not every application is complicated enough to warrant being broken into microservices. Martin Fowler and Ryan Murray from Thoughtworks cite a “microservice premium,” where in many use cases the complexity of microservices hampers the productivity of your team. There comes a point when your application becomes very complex or your team begins to grow past 50-75 engineers that the benefits of this architecture begin to take off. Continuous delivery and automation are more important than microservices. Small, agile teams who can integrate their work frequently, at least daily, are an important precursor to microservices. Being able to automate your systems and push code updates regularly are critical to deal with the complexity you will incur with this architecture. If you do not design and manage your evolution to microservices, the result can be an uncontrollable sprawl. It is critical to have a person or a small team responsible for controlling architectural decisions and helping to ensure standards adoption. Google has a small team of master artisans who understand how pieces fit together and help guide the creation of new services. Twitter’s refers to this oversight as “applying the right amount of salt.” You never want to overpower the great innovation that is coming from the bottom up. Teams should have bounded context and systems should follow the ordinary flow of business. Melvin Conway first came up with this principle in 1967, and it holds true today. When your services are not directly mapped, it makes troubleshooting or re-architecting in the future far more difficult. It is impossible to know the best way to divide the monolith until you can observe its usage. Once you have a sense for how your product will be used, you can decompose from there. Today, there is a bit of trial and error on sizing your services. There may be an opportunity in the future for someone to help with this process through software. Don’t throw away the monolith. This can have disastrous results. Take one piece at a time and break it off. Once that piece is working, move to the next natural piece. A few companies have found a more aggressive approach can lead to lost functionality and can make diagnosing issues difficult. Consider creating one large shared repository of all services for teams to use in application development. You don’t want to have two or three active versions of a common service in use. Your artisan(s) should help in managing this repository. More pieces to manage make telemetry very important. The microservices monitoring landscape is very fragmented. There is not a clear winner, and some companies are building their own products. Microservices require a much more comprehensive monitoring effort than you have had with your monolith. More surfaces and complexity increase the need for security and governance. Consider how you will authenticate who can speak to whom and identify illegitimate traffic. Who has the authority to work on certain services? Can all services be used for all tasks in your company? How are shared services billed or managed? When successfully implemented, microservices deliver huge increases in the speed and agility in which companies can build and deploy software. The cost to deliver an application is much less, and your systems will become more resilient. Development time can go from months to weeks. If this sounds daunting, consider the alternative: longer development cycles, more brittle infrastructure and slower innovation than your competitors. Microservices are not for everyone, but — if implemented effectively — the results can be transformational in the creation of enduring companies.
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When Will We See A New Apple Watch?
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Matthew Panzarino
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We will get new Apple Watch hardware at some point. The possibilities of better battery life, lighter casings and un-tethered utility are self-evident and Apple will capitalize on those. But when? This week, rumors from Chinese site ( ) said that early production of a next generation Apple Watch was beginning at supplier Quanta later this month. Late last year, could appear at a March 2016 event. I’m not so sure that we’ll be seeing it that early. Several things that I’ve heard (from several sources) indicate to me that we won’t see a major new hardware model of the Apple Watch in March. Design partnerships, accessories, that kind of thing but not a “Watch 2.0” with a bunch of new hardware features. I could be wrong, of course, but I’ve heard enough to put it out there. : I’ve now heard a bit more that suggests that Apple might ship a minor revision of the Apple Watch that includes a FaceTime camera and not much else — but still that it would not be a full “Watch 2.0” with casing changes and major improvements. Still no word on timing but that could explain the reports of a camera have been showing up. Like I said, tea leaves! I spoke to Creative Strategies analyst , who says that supply chain checks are showing no movement that would indicate a new Watch model in production as of yet. “With the supply chain cuts from the usual suspects of Apple component providers, the timing does seem suspect for a new product given orders would have taken place in the latter part of 2015 if a new product is shipping first half of 2016,” says Bajarin. “We are observing some interesting new patterns in Apple’s supply chain that are making the waters more murky than before. As with the current edition of the Apple Watch, no one really saw that coming via supply chain so it is possible to not see it. However, the Apple supplier warnings of soft revenue ahead do seem to cause one’s eyebrow to raise when thinking about a new product supposedly shipping in a few months.” I’m also not hearing any major action on the software side of a new Apple Watch model. Shipping hardware well in advance of a even beta software that developers can use to take advantage of new features isn’t something that usually turns out well. The iPad Pro and Pencil are recent examples of a situation where the capabilities far outstrip the support so far from developers. What I have heard, though, is that Apple Watch had a big holiday quarter, which is backed up by research from Juniper that indicates over 50 percent of the smartwatch . Additional sources have indicated to me that is in at least the early planning stages for March, so there still be an event. But what would be launched there I don’t know. Perhaps a and a new iPad model? When asked about the Watch and event, Apple declined to comment. The larger question is really about what the replacement cycle of the Apple Watch will shape up to be. Even Apple doesn’t know that answer (it doesn’t even really know what the iPad replacement cycle looks like, besides the fact that it is really long.) The Watch, as a lightweight extension of the smartphone, rather than a standalone piece of equipment in its own right, has the potential to be than it is now as an accessory. But the lightweight interactions and necessarily low-key hardware requirements could mean a much longer replacement cycle than, say, an iPhone. If a major new Apple Watch were introduced in September, along with the very likely introduction of new iPhones for the holiday season, that would put the gap at close to two years between the initial introduction and the announcement of a new model. Though the hardware shipped later, the gap between introductions seems like it could be a better bit of breathing room between versions. This would allow for more significant advances in hardware, and also could prevent customer exhaustion. As with anything related to Apple hardware announcements, the tea leaves are hard to read and the companies plans can change (the advantage of never publicly announcing hardware). But as of now, March seems like it’s a bit too early to count on Watch 2.0.
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Will Robots Save The Future Of Work?
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Alastair Bathgate
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Is a robot coming for your job? It’s not a novel question, but if are correct, the answer could be leaning more definitively toward yes. The analyst firm’s research suggests one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025. What is new, however, is that the influx of robots in the workforce is no longer just a concern confined to manufacturing floors filled with mechanized assembly lines, one of Google’s driverless concept cars passing by or the notion of a drone soon replacing the friendly UPS delivery man. The entire robotics chain has evolved beyond traditional hardware robots and into a new era that will support end-to-end automation of much of our daily lives. It will have implications stretching across all professions, from blue-collar factory workers and their white-collar equivalent in , to those employed by the growing on-demand economy. Even the mere definition of “robot” has had to evolve to keep pace with the progression of robots’ form and functionally. Historically, the common definition has centered on a machine resembling a living being in some way that is able to replicate certain movements and functions automatically — like the ADAM robot for transporting products or , who manages facilities tasks spanning from package handling to machine tending and line loading. However, artificial intelligence applications have pushed the boundary of what a robot is and can do, as evidenced by IPSoft’s cognitive agent Amelia or, better yet, the now-famous Jeopardy battle between Ken Jennings and IBM’s Watson. And more recently, a third wave of robotic evolution has given rise to , the ethereal cousins to their mechanical counterparts that mimic humans in conducting rules-based tasks, but live in the cloud or data center. “The integration of software and hardware robots will happen, not least because of the connectivity offered by moves toward cloud computing, but also because of the exponential advances we are seeing in technological capability,” claim professors and , authors of the forthcoming book “But do not believe all the hype, it is never seamless, and some of it will go in directions not yet thought of — at least that’s the history of technological progress!” This new era is what MIT faculty members Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call “ ” — a time in which technological forces are driving this reinvention of the economy and businesses and individuals must learn to race with machines in order to ensure future prosperity. What many may consider a race against the machines is more realistically going to play out as a relay race — with teams comprised of both a human and virtual workforce seamlessly working together on assigned tasks for which they are ideally and respectively suited to complete an end goal, be it building a car, processing a payment or deploying a service. Ultimately the benefit will be to the humans, who can eliminate rote, mundane tasks from their daily routines in favor of more engaging and thought-provoking tasks. Businesses will also benefit from a workforce that can be available 24/7 at a more affordable rate than their human counterparts — and without security or data entry error risks. What ATM machines did for tellers, customers and overall bank operations, companies like leading mobile network provider , for example, is doing for tasks like transferring SIM card data to consumers’ new phones, reducing a more than 24-hour process into a matter of minutes. There is perhaps no better example of where robotics could benefit today’s workforce and drive future prosperity than in the white-hot on-demand economy. Take Uber or any one of the related ride-booking apps as an example. People used to call a taxi company, speak to a dispatcher and be picked up by a driver, who would take them to their destination and expect cash payment. Today, the ride is booked via an app and back-end credit card processing covers payment, with the driver remaining the only personal interaction. It’s likely only a matter of time before a robot replaces that human element. Fueled by a number of factors, including ubiquitous communications, very low transaction costs and a desire among consumers to get they want they want it, on-demand startups have raised nearly $10 billion in funding since 2010 according to . This growth rate — and the hours required to meet the demand created by these 250+ largely service-driven companies — cannot be sustained by humans alone. Moreover, training, managing and motivating human on-demand workers has proved challenging to many of these companies, not to mention the mounting regulatory and political problems associated with labor laws and staffing such businesses. Robots, to whom these issues do not apply, will be essential to the on-demand economy’s survival. As professors Willcocks and Lacity note, “Corporate work systems, in our experience, are frequently highly flawed, either through indifferent design or having grown in an ad hoc manner in reaction to problems and various demands. Humans very often fill in as flexible resources for the failings of such systems. What technologies do is provide the opportunity to relook and enhance the relationships between process, technology and people, and that is where the higher productivity will come from.” Be it in these new on-demand applications or fitting into legacy workflows and processes, in our lifetime we will see the reality of humans truly, seamlessly working alongside robots. A virtual workforce of hardware- and software-driven labor will act as the thread to stitch digital components together, touched by human hands in limited ways — if at all — and eliminating the mundane, boring tasks that make up much of both office work and manual labor as we know it today. Ultimately, what the first era of robots did for the auto industry starting in the 1960s — improved efficiency, flexibility, quality, safety and the enablement of mass customization — the next era of robotic automation, in the form of a virtual workforce, will do for the modern-day business in the 21 century.
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Meet Airbus Ventures, A “Pure-Play” Aerospace Venture Firm
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Connie Loizos
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In late spring last year, the Netherlands-based aerospace and defense giant announced a $150 million corporate venture capital fund. Today, that fund, Airbus Ventures, announced its first bet, on an eight-year-old, Phoenix-based company called that uses 3D printing to make appliances and . Our interest piqued, we talked earlier today with Airbus Ventures CEO Tim Dombrowski — who earlier worked as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and as a director of global business development at Hewlett-Packard — to learn more about what he’s up to. Our chat has been edited for length. TD: I was recruited into Airbus Group. They had a big executive team come out to the Valley to investigate what else they could be doing around innovation and they came away with a couple of ideas, including that starting a venture business would give them a real purview into the venture ecosystem. They also wanted to start this innovation center where they could work on projects. TD: We talk if I have deep questions having to do with technical diligence. If they’re building projects that may some day have an exit, I want to talk [with them] about those sorts of things. TD: I think about one in ten people came from Airbus, but they really scoured the landscape for talent. They’re largely engaging with universities and the government and the industry across Airbus’s supply chain to work on projects. TD: We’re an independent, financially-driven venture outfit, full stop. Airbus is my sole LP, and [I’m interested in technologies that are complementary to its interests], but I the investment committee. There are no other committees that sit above me. No sponsorship is required. We have the freedom to move quickly. TD: I am still looking to hire a GP. In the meantime, there’s one other GP, Heikki Mäkijärvi, a Silicon Valley veteran who was long a venture partner with Accel Partners and who was more recently chairman of T-Venture, the corporate venture fund of Deutsche Telekom. We’ve known each other for five years — we met while I was at Andreessen Horowitz — and he has a great understanding of both independent VC and corporate venture. TD: We may be the only pure play aerospace VC that’s out there. That said, we’re interested in any company that wants to penetrate that marketplace, so anything having to do with aircraft — meaning commercial, military, helicopters, launch vehicles, rockets, satellite constellations — as well as hardware, software and systems, cybersecurity and safety, the Internet of things, connected factories, data analytics associated with sensor systems, the networking and telecommunications associated with connecting those things together . . . TD: We’ll mostly be investing into Series A and B deals, and the check sizes will have to be appropriate to the overall size of the round. But we want to build a sizable portfolio. We don’t want to be left with three or four investments. TD: As part of our investment thesis, we think about advancements happening in product development, and one of those is 3D printing. As we’ve looked into that, Local Motors just kept popping up. 3D printing isn’t the core of what they do, but it’s a big part of their manufacturing process and lets them build products rapidly. So we think the company is a great financial investment, but we also like that what they are doing could be accretive for our LP. [Local Motors] has already begun talking with Airbus about advancing its product development and how to speed product introductions. We’re getting very excited by the road ahead. There’s so much untapped opportunity in the future of flight that we hope not even the sky is the limit here.
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Lyft Lowers Prices In Latest Rideshare War With Rival Uber
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Sarah Buhr
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Earlier this week I benefitted from a drop in Uber Pool pricing, noting my ride was a whole Starbucks medium-size latte less than Lyft Line. Lyft, fresh with a new billion dollars in funding, is . Uber announced a in more than 100 cities in the U.S. and Canada last week, most likely prompting Lyft to figure out the measures it would have to take to not lose new ground. Pool currently a Starbucks tall latte cheaper than Line. — Sarah Buhr (@sarahbuhr) It’s currently cheaper for me to take Line home – $5 vs. $8.21 in Uber Pool (God bless that VC money!). Lyft tells me this is about resolutions, neglecting any mention of rival competition. “At Lyft, we want to remain the most affordable option for passengers. We also know that in January many people make resolutions to save money. So starting today, we are lowering prices in 33 markets to get people back on the road at a lower cost and help ensure our drivers are in high demand,” read an emailed statement to TechCrunch Despite the lowered cost, Lyft maintains it still pays drivers more than Uber, but the new pricing will affect drivers’ commissions. The new, lower prices will touch 33 cities nationwide and will affect D.C., Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Detroit and Baltimore the most.
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13 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week
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Anna Escher
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After some of our staff , TechCrunch is back reporting the hottest tech stories. This week, the U.S. government got serious about self-driving cars, Apple rolled out new software betas, and we uncovered evidence that Facebook has built a Messenger for Mac desktop app. These are our best stories. President Obama announced that the , and it’s to invest $4 billion over the course of the next 10 years “to accelerate the development and adoption of safe vehicle automation through real-world pilot projects.” We obtained photographic evidence and an eyewitness report that Facebook has built an as-yet-unreleased . The founder of Vine launched a , and it’s pretty slick. Is it groundbreaking? No, but it looks and feels pretty fresh. . GoPro stock and disappointing Q4 guidance. Josh Constine wrote about in that action cameras are like tablets: Lots of people want one, but very few need to constantly update to the latest model. Account sharing is kind of a gray area in the world of online streaming. People are unsure if they’re breaking the rules, , if they log in using someone else’s account information. At CES, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that consumers sharing The . Tesla released version 7.1 of its software for the Model S and X that includes a “Summon” feature that enables the car to drive itself without anyone inside. More specifically, using their key fob, Tesla owners can now direct their cars to park themselves in a spot within 39 feet, and to drive themselves in and out of their parking garages. in over 100 U.S. and Canadian cities. January is a slower month for the car service, and the company says it’s reducing fares in order to increase demand. for each of its platforms, including the desktop (El Capitan 10.11.4), mobile (iOS 9.3), Apple TV (tvOS 9.2) and Apple Watch (watchOS 2.2). Drew Olanoff reported that over 200,000 people have signed a digital to keep . Rumors have caused confusion and from people who don’t want to have to buy new headphones and hardware to go along with the next generation of Apple’s phone. We learned that , with its VP for product management, Clay Bavor, dropping his responsibilities for other apps like Gmail and Drive to focus solely on and VR. Our new space reporter, Emily Calandrelli, wrote that on its next launch on January 17, and why the landing location has changed. Connie Loizos wrote about the (and the 50 that are losing the most employees). It was a big week for Skype. The company announced and and that it also .
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Welcome Space Gal Emily Calandrelli To TechCrunch
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Matthew Panzarino
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We’re super pleased to say that Emily Calandrelli has joined up with TechCrunch to cover space, science and everything STEM related. Emily, known as on Twitter, has an authoritative and entertaining voice in the space arena, something I’ve been wanting more of on TC for a while now. You may have seen Emily’s articles around as she’s been a Crunch Network contributor for some time, writing pieces like this , why and how . Please welcome her and follow her on Twitter !
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Twitter, And Pretty Much Everyone Else, Had A Bad Day
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Matthew Lynley
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Today was not a good day for tech stocks. Universally, tech stocks crashed today alongside everything else, erasing billions in value across the board, as part of a bad day overall for the market. There’s not a whole lot of confidence throughout the market, but tech — even bellwethers like Apple — weren’t safe today. That being said, some stocks got particularly hammered as part of a continued downward trend — like Fitbit, which is , and GoPro, which . This is not a good sign for technology companies, which need their stocks to perform well if they’re going to continue attracting talent with compensation packages that also include shares and keep activist investors off their backs. For some of the companies seeing poor performance lately, a continuously dropping stock price — like in the case of Twitter or Fitbit — can make those companies attractive acquisition targets. Here’s how a couple of stocks fared: And that’s just to name a few. But the standout here is clearly Twitter, which has had a continued march south for the past month or so, bringing it to continuous all-time lows. Twitter is facing a lot of challenges with its core business. While its revenue growth doesn’t seem to be a massive problem for the company, it has to grow its user base in order to continue expanding its business — something it’s had serious problems with for some time. [graphiq id=”fWdCYt77t8F” title=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 30 Days” width=”600″ height=”490″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/fWdCYt77t8F” link=”http://listings.findthecompany.com/l/445483/Twitter-Inc-in-San-Francisco-CA” link_text=”Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Stock Price – 30 Days | FindTheCompany”] Does this make Twitter look like a healthy target for a larger company to snap up? Perhaps. Any larger company, by buying Twitter, would be picking a relatively healthy advertising business and a large platform with a huge reach beyond monthly active users. For all of these companies, fluctuations with the rest of the market can be a common occurrence. But that doesn’t make it any less significant for the employees at those companies carefully paying attention to how their net worth — a chunk of which is often locked up in shares — flows (this time south) with their employer’s worth in the public market’s eyes.
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BMW MINI Teams Up With HAX To Build A NYC Accelerator Focused On Connected Cities Of The Future
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Sarah Buhr
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What will the city of the future look like? We’re starting to see new technologies capable of helping future urban populations share more resources, reduce costs and communicate in new ways and BMW’s MINI would like to be at the forefront of this movement. That’s why MINI says it teamed up with , an existing hardware accelerator within SOSV (formerly SOS Ventures), to build a new accelerator dedicated to startups working on the city of the future called Urban-X. “We wanted to experiment with something in the city and think of it as a bit of a playground,” Cyril Ebersweller, head of HAX told TechCrunch. It’s a bit confusing to have an accelerator within an accelerator within a venture firm, but Ebersweller believes this will bring focus to the city of the future – something HAX does not concentrate on. MINI and other automakers have had to adapt to a changing industry. We saw quite a few all-electric prototypes on display at CES this past week and autonomous vehicle seems to be the buzz word for those at the Detroit Auto Show this week. For its part, BMW has already started to move beyond mere car sales and into car-sharing with , a peer-to-peer car sharing platform available in San Francisco and several cities throughout North America and Europe. The U.S. government has also started thinking about the smart city of the future. The Department of Transportation recently unveiled the , a $40 million initiative designed to help cities use innovative ideas to connect transportation assets within the urban environment. MINI and HAX will give $60,000 in equity to each startup in the three-month program and tells TechCrunch it could further invest in the strongest ideas. “If we see exciting teams, working on products and services with a potential strategic fit for MINI and its future direction, we can absolutely envision to strengthen our commitment with a follow-up investment,” Bahne said. Applications are open now for the program, which starts March 2016. Those interested in applying can do so at .
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Necessity Is Driving Agricultural Innovation Indoors
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Joshua Bateman
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According to the United Nations, the earth will house an estimated 9.7 billion people by 2050. Consequently, more food will need to be produced over the next four decades than has been produced over the last 10,000 years. And with more than 99.7 percent of global food coming from land, and most of the arable land already accounted for, increasing yields per surface area is essential. One crop production solution creating opportunities for investors, entrepreneurs and multinational companies is vertical farming, aka plant factories. Although nomenclature varies, the concept involves growing crops on urban rooftops or in high rises or other controlled, indoor environments, which build vertically in stacks as opposed to spreading horizontally. Vertical farming uses fewer water and land resources while limiting pollution and the impacts of oft-volatile Mother Nature. It also moves production closer to urban consumers, which reduces transport distances, minimizing waste and extending shelf lives. These soil-less systems employ hydroponics (where roots are marinated in nutrient solutions) or aeroponics (roots are sprayed with nutrients). LED lights and metal reflectors magnify illumination and advanced HVAC systems maximize production. Recently, dozens of vertical farming companies displayed their technologies at the four-day Taipei International Plant Factory and Greenhouse Horticulture Product Exhibition. A range of enterprises participated, from startups to global conglomerates: plant factory design and engineering companies, irrigation and artificial mist suppliers, LED manufacturers and sensor technology developers. Lu Wen-Yuan, a Taiwanese representative for Japanese-based Toyobo Engineering, talked about the ability to keep food safe in plant factories and how year-round growing seasons increase per land area output manifold. He said, “because it is a closed system, daily production is stable and not reduced by the weather — such as typhoons, rain and wind.” Lu also highlighted the reduced costs and environmental impact from converting unused buildings into vertical farms (as opposed to constructing new structures). Recognizing indoor farming’s potential, Taiwan electronics manufacturer, Advanced Connectek, started a plant engineering unit, ACON Pure. Within Taiwan, ACON Pure markets factory-grown crops. Globally, the company assists third-parties to construct controlled-system farms by designing facilities, transferring technology and providing training and management. Senior Director Sandy Wu extolled the benefits of vertical farming — no insecticides or herbicides, a 90 percent reduction in water usage relative to traditional farming and an even greater cutback in mineral nutrients. Similarly, Priva, which has approximately 500 employees operating in more than 100 countries, designs and constructs sustainable vertical farms that enable agricultural producers to control interior temperatures, irrigation, humidity, CO2 concentration and light. Priva’s Beijing-based General Manager, Julia Charnaya, said, “With droughts and the climate changing, production is switching from growing in open fields to closed operations in greenhouses or plant factories.” In Holland, Priva partnered with technology company Philips on urban farming research facilities. Philips’s 75-person horticulture LED division customizes lighting solutions for closed agricultural systems. Gus van der Feltz, Global Director of City Farming at Philips, said, “There are opportunities all around the world, particularly where people care about their food and have capital to invest…like with any new technology, we are looking at early adopters.” Given favorable economics, most vertical farming plants are lettuce varieties (e.g., coral, leaf, curly, wave, antler, sweet romaine), herbs (e.g., coriander, mint, basil), and cruciferous vegetables (e.g., broccoli, cabbage, bok choy, sprouts). Some plant factories raise strawberries, tomatoes, mushrooms and peppers. And as the industry develops, cropping possibilities widen. Functional and medicinal crops are also grown in factories. According to Wu, many Japanese hospitals have on-site plant factories producing specific crops for patients. For example, hospitals are experimenting with low-potassium spinach for patients with kidney issues. Others are experimenting with ways to lower food nitrate levels. Wu said, “In the future, we can distinguish products by individual medical needs. By controlling the quality of the nutrient solution, we control the quality of plant nutrients.” Van der Feltz said, “We can stimulate development of desirable compounds in fruit and create high-quality produce in vertical farms.” Startups are also capitalizing on industry opportunities. Taipei-based LED lighting company, Asensetek, was founded in 2013 and has 30 employees today. Although indoor farming only represents a fraction of their revenue, marketing representative Vincent Tsai said, “Business opportunities are expanding.” To attract agricultural clients, Asensetek developed a spectrometer that links with smart devices and enables growers to remotely monitor and analyze light wavelengths and intensities. Although many product suppliers target large-scale vertical farms, others are retail-focused. After three years of research and development, the five-person team at Taiwan-based Fresh Intake is marketing its mini-garden cabinet to households, cafeterias and restaurants. The 3′ x 6′ cabinet is an enclosed system that enables year-round growing of crops, which can be immediately eaten after harvesting. One criticism of indoor farming is the increased electricity usage, but supporters view the advantages as outweighing the negative externalities. Addressing the issue, van der Feltz said, “It’s a fair point on the light when not using the sun, but we think we can make the value chain more efficient and shorter.” To lessen the environmental impact from lighting, heating and cooling, many vertical farms use renewable energy. Fresh Intake’s engineer, Chia-Yu Yen, also acknowledged the trade-off, and said, “Hydroponics uses few nutrients, but if we plant crops in the earth it uses a lot of nutrients. This is a waste of the earth’s ground. Hydroponics also uses a lot less water.” He continued, “The planet has more and more people and hydroponic output is extremely high. I believe hydroponics will become more widespread as people learn about its benefits.” Yen also highlighted the value in growing crops in the markets in which they are consumed. He said, “Lettuce in Taiwan is imported. If we use hydroponics we don’t have to import it and it is less expensive and the quality is better.” Beyond Taiwan and the Netherlands, research and commercial vertical farms exist in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Sweden, the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, China and Singapore. In the future, vertical farming may be further explored in land-scarce (e.g., China, India, Korea), water-scarce (e.g., California, the Middle East), non-temperate (e.g., Alaska, Scandinavia) and other markets where producers are trying to limit environmental influences. “Vertical farming has lots of potential and a new and emerging market,” Priva’s Charnaya said. “And with land becoming more scarce and more expensive, it probably the future.”
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Twitter Updates Polling; Touts 1.7 Billion Votes
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Katie Roof
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Twitter is making an update to its recently released ; instead of a default 24-hour timeframe, poll lengths can range from five minutes to seven days. Launched in October, the company also touted the success of polls, announcing that 1.7 billion votes have been cast so far.
The revelation comes as Twitter shares sink to a , with investors expressing concern about user growth. The company has steadily increased its revenue, but Wall Street initially valued Twitter on the expectation that it was becoming a much larger company. (The social media service boasts a massive 320 million monthly active users, but this pales in comparison to Facebook’s 1.55 billion). While Twitter polls increase engagement, it’s unclear whether this will ultimately get new users to sign up. But recently returned CEO Jack Dorsey has been tasked with improving the product, and is experimenting with various tweaks including a tweet length, and . Polls have been a favorite of mine. I like to get a sense of who I’m tweeting to and view their input on the latest news. Peach app 🍑 — Katie Roof (@Katie_Roof) It could also come in handy for this year’s U.S. presidential election. And brands may want to pay for promoted polls. So…what do you think? Do you like Twitter polls? [polldaddy poll=9274427]
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OurMix Is Social Music Discovery Done Right
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Sarah Perez
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Spotify does a great job at helping users find music they’ll like, thanks to features like its popular “ , and sections that point you to trending tracks and new releases. But over the years, it’s moved away from its earlier emphasis on which leaves room for other apps to come in and fill the void. One such app is the newly released – a music discovery service for Spotify users that helps you find what friends are discovering, then matches that up with your own interests to offer better recommendations. This addresses one of Spotify’s failures in the past: simply being friends with someone on Facebook doesn’t mean that you also share their taste in music. That being said, having a network to draw upon is a good way to tap into the “word-of-mouth” buzz around emerging artists, as well as help more casual music consumers broaden their horizons when it comes to music discovery. tackles the discovery problem by continually analyzing your Spotify library to see what music you like to listen to, then it picks out songs from friends’ libraries that match your tastes. You can also choose to follow “OurMix curators” – individuals who help you connect with music from certain genres they listen to, like Jazz, Rock, Hip Hop, Indie, Electronic, etc. – in the event that your personal network is lacking. Once a day, the app will deliver a special mix of music suggestions, and can notify you at a time you specify. You can tap on the tracks to play them in the app, then swipe left or right to indicate whether you don’t like the track or want to save it Spotify, respectively. You can save the entire mix to Spotify, too, plus share it on social networks or via text message. The suggestions include songs friends have saved, but you don’t already have in your own library. And no one has to manually share their songs for them to show up in OurMix – the recommendations are based on the activity already taking place in Spotify itself. [gallery ids="1263581,1263577,1263576"] The app, of course, requires a Spotify account to work. Free users will only hear 30-second samples, while paid subscribers can listen to full tracks. However, co-founder and CEO Kishore Doddi tells us that further down the line, the team would like to expand OurMix to work with other music services. “Our main goal, both short-term and long-term, is to help people discover music they love,” Doddi says. Having , the co-founder also spoke about why the team wanted to work in the competitive music space. Beyond simply having a love for discovering music, they hadn’t found a solution like this, he said. “Spotify’s native social features feel like an afterthought. Everything else requires that you manually share,” wrote Doddi at the time. “We think we’ve created an effortless way to discover music from your friends.” The bootstraped New York-based startup currently includes four co-founders, whose collective backgrounds includes an understanding of music, design and algorithms. Doddi and Richard Mai both previously working on , (now shuttered); designer Mark Kizelshteyn worked on Ted.com and HBO GO; and data scientist Dimitri Ranos’s background includes work on financial trading algorithms and on Dstillery’s ad exchange. For an app that’s just now launching, OurMix is really well-built. Using the app is intuitive, and it introduces its features during the onboarding process in clever ways. Instead of a clunky overlay or annoying tutorial, for example, the app just launches the timer for you, so you can set your notification preferences. It then later quickly demonstrates what the left and right swipes do. The only problem I have with OurMix is not the fault of the app, but rather an issue of my own making: I share my Spotify account with others – including a 6-year old girl – and this greatly affects what Spotify thinks I like. Oh well! OurMix is a free download for and .
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Meet The Startups Vying For The Crunchie For Fastest Rising Startup Of 2015
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Matt Burns
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Up for grabs are highly coveted Crunchies in 12 categories, and today we’ll be taking a look at the finalists for the Fastest Rising Startup of 2015. This award goes to the company that has risen from the depths of obscurity to become a household name. There are several amazing startups up for the award this year, so let’s take a look at those startups and the ones who have won this highly coveted award.
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Venture Capital Is Terrible At Online Shopping
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Jess Kimball Leslie
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Another day, another series of Silicon Valley e-commerce explosions: Gilt Groupe for a fraction of its valuation (and its capital raised) and One Kings Lane is reportedly the next to die. Previously it was being sold for nothing after severely underperforming — ah, Fab, the first billion-dollar retail “unicorn” born with crossed eyes and a trick knee. Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley’s Brobdingnagian Sloth Fratelli overlord, called Fab an “ ” just 24 months before Fab itself was killed. Prior to Fab, Groupon had its hyper-embarrassing tango with the stock exchange, losing 90 percent of its worth. Then there’s Living Social, which I believe is in the middle of some super sad business pivot where it now sells maps to celebrities’ homes or something like that. Online shopping failure abounds. So how could so many retail startups with so much VC money be so ill-fated? Let’s peruse the offerings in these digital junkyards and find out for ourselves. Behold this “Don’t Fret Coffee Table™” from the wizards at One Kings Lane. Because clearly someone with to spend on an ottoman would say to themselves, “Why go to a reputable store and get great customer service when I could blow my wad here, in the unproven land of One Kings Lane, and save 11 percent!?! After all, like most people in the $3,400.00+ faux-Victorian ottoman price range, I’m a discount shopper.” Nailed that customer mindset, 1KL. Nailed it. What’s for sale on Gilt in 2016? Why these fugly, shiny shoe-boots that look like they got trapped in a factory conveyor belt. Ugg boots — much like Gilt’s flash sales themselves — were popular exactly nine years ago. Come to Groupon for your discount bikini waxes! Because if a stranger’s going to pour hot lava on your bikini area, nothing assuages your fears like knowing you paid them less than his or her worth. Up to 66 percent less, in fact. Now we meet the junkyard e-commerce category’s supreme leader — . Wish is doing the previously impossible: raising a shit-ton of money without even to be fancy or good. Forget the legends of a rebellious young Mark Zuckerberg showing up to meet with venture capitalists sporting a instead of a suit. Wish didn’t even shower or wear clothes. There is no Don’t Fret Coffee Table™ for sale on — oh, hell no!! is a multibillion-dollar-valued company. Here’s its homepage, which I consider to be the Andreas Gursky of giving up: Is that dog dying? Can somebody call a vet? And what the hell kind of watch is a, I can’t even see the logo, wait let me zoom in, a Is this a place to shop for your worst enemy? Want to know how much of that $578 million they’re going to lose? My guess is, all of it. I can’t imagine a world that needs Wish, not even during the first intergalactic war. Why do I blame venture capital for most of these failures and not the founders themselves? Because most of these sites (stupid tech-bubble-byproduct bullshit not included) were once interesting offerings. There was a time when Gilt absolutely ruled NYC. There was a time when Fab was the greatest, prettiest thing we’d discovered on a screen. And there was an interesting and viable idea behind One Kings Lane — at one early juncture. The trouble for all of these businesses came in the steroidal scaling process, the business inception process. Sometimes a great idea for a small-to-midsize retailer is a terrible and impossible idea for a huge one. Another reason for this loud series of abysmal failures may have something to do with gender. One commonality through all of these e-commerce sites is that they sold to women: What does Silicon Valley’s vainglorious venture capital system lack? Women! . Perhaps in the hubris of backing but not comprehending a category in which women play a very significant role, Silicon Valley is now getting its just desserts. All Silicon Valley VCs with egos great and greater: Shopping is trickier than you thought. Admit defeat and quit while you’re behind.
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F.lux Asks Apple To Let Its Screen Color Adjustment App Back Into App Store
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Sarah Perez
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As many noted when , one of the mobile operating system’s newest features, a nighttime reading mode with reduced blue light emissions, looked awfully familiar. The ability to adjust the screen brightness on iOS devices is something software maker has been developing for years. Its technology, which even briefly worked on iOS without jailbreaking, lets users adjust the screen’s lighting for daytime and nighttime use. Now that a similar technology which Apple dubs “Night Shift” is an official feature in iOS 9.3, to allow its app back into the iTunes App Store. In case you’re unfamiliar with the problem: studies have shown that blue light keeps people’s pineal gland from releasing melatonin – something which normally occurs a couple of hours before bedtime. This hormone reduces alertness and helps signal to the body that it’s time to sleep. But as we cuddle up with our smartphones and tablets before bed these days – as opposed to books or magazines – we’re inadvertently making it more difficult on ourselves to fall asleep. F.lux also notes that research points to links between this exposure to light at night and cancer, that state disruption of our circadian rhythms by way of night shift work or disturbed sleep-wake cycles may lead to an increased risk of breast cancer and other diseases, for example. The company was among one of the original pioneers in the software space with a solution to this problem. Its app, originally designed back in 2009, now works on a range of devices, including Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and , if they’re jailbroken (meaning, a way to hack the device to run unapproved applications.) In November 2015, , which was a brief, but welcome respite from the need to jailbreak your device in order to take advantage of its software. The iOS app offers settings that adjust your screen’s color temperature. Unfortunately, , as the app was in violation of Apple’s Developer Agreement. The wasn’t really the method of installation – Apple now lets anyone with an Apple ID load apps directly from Xcode – but rather with F.lux’s use of private APIs. However, with “Night Shift” now officially supported as an iOS feature, F.lux believes its app should be allowed back into the App Store. That is, Apple should open up access to those private APIs so that the app is no longer in violation of Apple’s terms. A good handful of iOS users agree – following the ban, over 5,000 F.lux fans signed asking Apple to reconsider its position. It’s a reasonable request, now thanks to “ .” If Apple is officially offering a feature that will automatically shift the colors in its display to the warmer end of the spectrum at a given time, it seems there would be little harm in allowing a third-party to build on top of that functionality to offer a more advanced feature set to power users. Of course, while F.lux deserves credit for being an early solution provider for this issue with blue light emissions from our computing devices, addressing the problem is something that the device makers are now solving for themselves. Amazon, for example, , and just last month, too. In addition, it’s worth noting that there are that offer the same blue light reduction functionality today, indicating there is a market for third-party software in this space. However, it’s not uncommon for Apple to borrow ideas from the jailbreak community, having taken “inspiration” from a number of unapproved tweaks to do thing like enhance notifications, implement Wi-Fi sync, add support for widgets and dynamic wallpapers, improve multitasking and app organization, and more.
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In Q4, VCs Kept Funding Young Companies But Slowed Later Bets
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Connie Loizos
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Call it the Fidelity effect. According to a new MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, there appears to have been a chill in late-stage funding in the fourth quarter of last year, while investors continued stuffing money into seed- and early-stage investments. According to PWC and NVCA data, investors poured $375 million in 52 seed deals in the fourth quarter, and the average seed deal rose from $4.1 million in the third quarter to $7.2 million in the fourth (which is a lot of money for a seed-stage company!). Early-stage deals also rose slightly, garnering an average of $10 million per deal, up from $9 million in the third quarter. For all of 2015, the average amount invested for both seed and early stage deals was up 23 percent over 2014. Expansion-stage investments — likely impacted by the very made by investors like Fidelity — were meanwhile down 53 percent in dollars and 10 percent in number of deals from the previous quarter, with $3 billion going into 247 deals. Similarly, investment in late-stage companies dropped 33 percent in dollars from the third quarter, with $3 billion going into 169 deals in the fourth quarter. Altogether, in the fourth quarter, U.S. VCs poured $11.2 billion into 962 deals, marking the eighth consecutive quarter that VCs have invested more than $10 billion in startups in a single quarter. That’s a lot of capital, though the numbers are down 32 percent in terms of dollars and 16 percent in number of deals compared with the third quarter, when $16.6 billion was invested in 1, 149 deals. (Note: Fourth quarter numbers are usually down from third quarter numbers, as people start shutting things down for the holidays, etc.) Altogether, says the new report, U.S. VCs plugged $58.8 billion into startups last year. Software companies attracted the most funding in the fourth quarter, garnering $4.5 billion across 369 deals. For all of 2015, says PWC and the NVCA, software nabbed 8 percent of venture dollars. Life Sciences companies (meaning biotech and medical device startups combined) received the second largest amount of for the quarter, with $2 billion going into 172 deals. For all of 2015, life sciences companies attracted 12 percent of all venture dollars. In third place for the fourth quarter: media and entertainment companies, which garnered $881 million across 114 deals. For all of 2015, media and entertainment startups garnered 13 percent of all capital invested. You can check out many more stats from the new report .
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Google Play Adds Support For Promo Codes, Including In-App Purchases
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Sarah Perez
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Promo codes are coming to Google Play! Android developers will finally be able to market their applications, as well as distribute copies of paid apps for free, and more, by way of promo codes – a feature Apple has supported for years. Thanks to a new option spotted in the Google Play Developer Console, it appears that app makers will now be able to distribute codes for both apps and in-app content. The addition was first uncovered by the blog , which noted that details surrounding the implementation is available in , too. Developers will be able to distribute up to 500 free codes per quarter, says Google, and those that are not used will not roll over to the next quarter. However, developers can set start and end dates for the codes, and they can pause promotions at any time. With 500 codes quarterly, Google’s implementation of promo codes is more generous than Apple’s, which that developers can request up to 100 promo codes for every version of their application. In addition, Apple’s promo codes don’t work for in-app purchases, states. (Though it apparently for some developers at one point.) Google’s promo codes can be used for apps and content, but not for subscriptions, however. In order to use them for in-app purchases, developers will first need to , notes Google. For Google Play developers, the long-awaited support for promo codes is more than welcome, as these codes are a key way to get apps in the hands of early adopters, press and the media, and can be used to market applications through promotions, giveaways, and more. Of course, because Google didn’t yet offer its own official implementation for this, many developers already created their own workarounds for the problem in order to offer promo codes for upgrades and in-app content to their users. However, in these cases, developers would have had to implement their own systems, which takes time and effort away from working on their application itself. Using the new option in Google Play will be much less of a hassle. : Google has now promo code support.
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MicSwap Turns Your iPhone Into Rock And Roll
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John Biggs
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If it’s been a long time since you’ve rock and rolled and it’s been a long lonely time since you did the stroll, it might be time to model some old-fashioned microphones on your iOS device. An app, , makes it easy to do just that. Two musicians, and , created the app to offer microphone modeling for mobile devices. It can mimic famous mics – a ribbon Mic for Led Zep fans, a more NPR-style for podcasters – and can even model environments so it sounds like you’re in a studio or a cozy booth. While you’ll never get absolute quality out of a small iPhone mic, you can get darn close. [gallery ids="1263442,1263444,1263445,1263446,1263447"] The app lets you try microphones on the fly and there are two versions – free, with a few mics, and a Pro version with about nine microphones to try. It’s a good tool for musicians or podcasters who want to record and edit audio right on their iPad or iPhone. While these apps are often more fun than useful, I was actually impressed with MicSwap when I saw it working live. Modeling microphones is a big deal for some people – you want to get just the right sound – and using this lets you become a one-(wo)man recording studio. While the pro version is a bit expensive at $20 it’s well worth a quick look if you are looking for something to carry you back, carry you back
carry you back, baby, where you come from. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7cnA_yysV0]
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With Detroit Taking A Lyft In A Driverless Car, What’s Next For Cities?
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Brooks Rainwater
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Transportation and geography have always been intertwined. Specifically, the auto industry, with Detroit being the prime example, was once more tightly tied to place. The same can be said for the tech industry, which still maintains a dominance largely in Silicon Valley. Until very recently, these industries were distinct: tech was tech and transportation was transportation and never the twain shall meet. A number of disruptions have shaken this stability, but ridesharing companies Lyft and Uber, as well as the entrance of technology companies like Google into the autonomous driving space, have driven right through it. Over the course of five years, ridesharing services have expanded rapidly, moving these services from the periphery of transportation options to a mainstream means of getting around. In fact, cities are beginning to regard transportation network companies (TNCs) as significant parts of their transportation networks, and the distance between Detroit and Silicon Valley is rapidly decreasing — so much so that auto behemoth General Motors has struck a deal with Lyft, ridesharing’s nice guy. GM and Lyft are to develop a new network of self driving cars, and additionally, GM invested $500 million to Lyft’s latest fundraising round. This type of unprecedented investment aligns the auto and tech industries’ interests and has enormous potential to drive TNCs even further into the mainstream and continue to normalize the use of ridesharing services in American cities. It wasn’t until the onslaught of TNCs, Tesla, and self-driving automobile technologies that the West coast even dabbled in the driving business. This is only the beginning of the burgeoning relationship between the Midwest and Silicon Valley, as there are also reports of a developing partnership between . This melding of technology and transportation is furthered by other collaborations. While Google Ventures was one of the early major investors in Uber, the two companies now seem to have split. Uber moved on fast, though, by teaming up with Carnegie Mellon, and also sending the university’s robotics laboratory into a tailspin by . As you can imagine, this new partnership between Uber and CMU is also interested in dominating the driverless car realm, creating ever-growing competition with the newly established (potential) Ford/Google and (existing) GM/Lyft clans. With all of these major automakers considering partnerships with tech companies, we can only imagine the possibilities. Automakers provide the physical stock, essentially managing the complex and expensive production part of the business. Technology companies and/or TNCs provide the technology and logistics to deploy those vehicles to the American public in a way that makes using them incredibly easy. One system feeds the other, which produces demand for the former. This has the possibility of being as revolutionary to transportation habits as the assembly line was at the beginning of the 20th century. Most surprising is the acknowledgement by the auto industry, which has been locked into the security of Americans’ love for the single occupancy vehicle for a century that transportation is changing. Automakers are astutely aware of the changes taking place in the transportation sector. They are now using them as a leverage point to reclaim their industry and taking on the role of . The potential implications for urban transportation are enormous. Autonomous vehicles present a transportation model that is very different from what we are used to. Depending on whether we largely see a model of shared or personally owned driverless cars, the future of cities could look very different. Shared autonomous vehicles will make roads less congested, in part due to their more efficient movement around a city and the fact that don’t rely on parking space during idle times. The reduction of parking space alone could free up a vast amount of land currently devoted to parking for redevelopment into more productive uses. Removing parking and redeveloping cities in a way that enables higher density is only one potential path cities could take. By traveling more closely together and improving the flow of traffic, driverless technology may also enable commuters to cover greater distances with greater comfort and reliability. Instead of continuing to flock to cities, many Americans may move even further into the suburban and exurban communities for cheaper homes. In the end, these two options are not mutually exclusive. Both will likely occur in metropolitan areas throughout the country depending on policy choices made. Leadership will matter in this coming shift. While much of this may be speculative today, the partnerships and decisions made among big auto and big tech now have the potential to definitively impact the future of cities. Transportation is changing. The auto industry is officially along for the ride, and at least for the near future, how mobility rolls forward can be found somewhere between Detroit and Silicon Valley.
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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Announces $100M Philanthropic Education Fund
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Lucas Matney
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Reed Hastings took to Facebook Tuesday to announce that he would be personally funding a new $100 million philanthropic fund, focusing exclusively on education-related projects and organizations. The mission on the details a commitment to enhancing the educational experience of children. Currently, too many children do not have access to amazing schools. Our aim is to partner with communities to significantly increase the number of students who have access to rich and holistic educational experiences. The fund, called the Hastings Fund, will be kicking off its giving with two gifts totaling $1.5 million for the United Negro College Fund and the Hispanic Foundation of Silicon Valley in order to help “support college education of Black and Latino youth,” Hastings . Hastings said that Neerav Kingsland will be leading the Hastings Fund as CEO. On his , Kingsland noted that he felt “very grateful to be working with such extremely thoughtful philanthropists.” Kingsland will continue to work with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation where he has served as a Senior Education Fellow since July of last year. “There are a lot students in this country who don’t have access to amazing schools,” Kingsland continued. “Hopefully, this can change.”
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RIP Threadflip
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Sarah Buhr
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, an online consignment marketplace for women’s clothing, is no more as of Wednesday at midnight. An email sent to users explains that the startup, founded in 2011, will shut down operations and roll into clothing rental startup, Le Tote. With Threadflip, users were able to take photos of their items and list them for sale via its app. The company covered shipping costs but took commission from the sales. The San Francisco-based startup says it had over 1.5 million members, but that wasn’t enough to keep its business flowing. Co-founders Manik Singh and Jeff Shiau sent a note to users on Tuesday, updating them on the status of Threadflip: “We have decided to cease operations at and join fashion forces and partner with our friends at . Through this partnership with Le Tote, our community can now have access to an exciting and exceptional fashion experience. …As of , will be officially closing operations, including all buying and selling activity.” The note added that Threadflip users will be able to get a 60 percent discount off their first month of Le Tote, using the coupon code, THREADFLIP. Le Tote, which markets itself as the “Netflix for fashion,” loans its members a handful of garments and accessories each month. “We’re both attacking Threadflip has faced a lot of competition from similar sites vying for consumer attention – including Vinted, Depop, Yerdle, Tradesy, Poshmark and others, leading to a saturated market in the re-commerce space. Threadflip attempted to set itself apart with a “white glove” service allowing customers to ship their old clothes and sell them on the site. However, the much larger eBay soon introduced a similar service, which bit into Threadflip’s offerings. Sites such as Twice and now Threadflip, haven’t fared well for that reason. TheRealReal seems to be standing out as a winner among these sites, with a sizable $83 million in the bank. However, it targets a more niche luxury consignment market that helps differentiate itself from the rest of the pack. Threadflip raised in venture capital from notable investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures and Lowercase Capital. Its most recent funding was a $13 million Series B in the summer of 2014. “It
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NASA Formalizes Efforts To Protect Earth From Asteroids
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Emily Calandrelli
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Last week, NASA a new program called the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) which will coordinate NASA’s efforts for detecting and tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs). If a large object comes hurtling toward our planet, it will be this office’s job to identify it, determine a way to deflect it, and give the public a heads up. Most asteroids and comets in our solar system are small and stay safely in orbit within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Others, however, are large enough to do damage and are in orbits that bring them close enough to our planet to make NASA nervous. NEOs include asteroids and comets whose orbit brings them in close proximity to the Earth. In order to protect the Earth from these potential hazards, the PDCO has two main roles. First, it is responsible for finding and characterizing these NEOs. Second, the PDCO is in charge of coordinating emergency efforts with other agencies and governments a large NEO was predicted to impact Earth. In preparation of an impact of considerable size, NASA has long-term planetary defense goals that include the development of asteroid deflection technologies. So far, effective asteroid deflection strategies have not been decided upon, let alone developed. NASA stated, however, that they do have an asteroid impact and deflection mission concept in the works with the European Space Agency. This mission, “if pursued” (funded), would “demonstrate an impact deflection method.” In the event of an unavoidable asteroid impact, PDCO would work in partnership with FEMA, the Department of Defense, and other U.S. agency and international counterparts to coordinate emergency efforts. NEO encounters themselves are not rare events, but usually they are small enough to burn up in our atmosphere. NASA released the diagram below to show the frequency of NEO encounters. Between 1994 and 2013, NASA measured 556 bolide (bright explosion caused by an asteroid impact) events. The vast majority of these asteroids were small enough to completely burn up in the atmosphere. We probably saw them as bright shooting stars. The notable exception was the 2013 Chelyabinsk event (the large yellow dot in Russia on the map) which was the largest asteroid to hit the Earth during this time period. The scary part was that NASA wasn’t aware of the Chelyabinsk asteroid because it was relatively small (about 60 feet, or 19 meters, in diameter) and in the weeks before it hit us it was too close to the Sun, making it difficult to detect. But the Chelyabinsk asteroid is the exception, not the rule, and with improved technologies NASA has been able to detect smaller asteroids over the years. NASA notes that “more than 13,500 near-Earth objects of all sizes have been discovered to date – more than 95 percent of them since NASA-funded surveys began in 1998.” Astronomers detect NEOs using ground-based telescopes around the world that constantly take pictures of the night sky. If an astronomer detects an object that moves from one image to the next, they can notify the Minor Planet Center, which keeps track of all known asteroids and comets. NEOWISE, the space-based infrared telescope, can also search for NEOs. Through these efforts, more than 1,500 NEOs are detected each year. To date, over 90 percent of NEOs larger than 3,000, or 1 kilometer, have been discovered. Moving forward, NASA is focusing on finding NEOs larger than 450 feet, or 140 meters. Today, only 25 percent of NEOs of this size are known. To put those sizes in perspective, the Chelyabinsk asteroid was only 60 feet across and caused an explosion equal to about 500,000 tons of TNT detonating. This type of event reminds the world of the importance of NASA’s asteroid detection efforts. The government seems to have recognized its increasing importance as well. In the 2016 federal budget, NASA received $50 million for NEO observations and planetary defense. In 2010, that budget totaled a mere $4 million. Large asteroid impacts, while uncommon, can be a large threat to national security and to the human race. Here’s hoping our asteroid detection and deflection strategies improve (and are well-funded) more quickly than the fast approaching NEOs that may be hiding in the darkness of space.
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Unlocking Trapped Engineers
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Vivek Ravisankar
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Millions of software are caged. Their talent remains unseen behind the iron bars of the misconception of a shortage of software . An estimated 1 million technology jobs will go unfilled by 2020, according to a report put forth by Microsoft in 2012. Publications like The Wall Street Journal and even the White House repeatedly cite this projection, ringing a nationwide alarm of a severe shortage in technical talent. This alarm comes with good intentions, aiming to nurture more through education and immigration reform. Political agendas aside, it’s worth scrutinizing the basis of this projection. Using statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), it’s projected that 1.4 million positions will be open in computing with only 400,000 computer science grads. Hence, there will be a shortage of 1 million programmers. Many citations incorrectly say that BLS projects the shortage when, in actuality, BLS economist Jennifer Chi clarified in an email that all of these attempts are made by third parties. “[It is] an incorrect comparison of the total employment and total labor force projections, which are two separate and fundamentally different measures.” This projection does not account for the vast number of non-traditional programmers who are self-taught, never graduated, dropped out or simply have a different degree. How can we base a talent shortage on CS degree production when 59.8 percent of those with software , programmer or computer scientist titles in did not carry a CS degree; 36 percent of IT workers do not hold a college degree at all, according to the ; 40 percent of programmers on Stack Overflow, one of the largest developer websites, are ; or 14 percent of the members of some teams at Google alone ? A looked at patterns between 10,000 resumes and job performance over 14 years, and found that there is simply no correlation between having a degree and being a good software . How can we claim there’s an enormous mismatch of supply and demand when a significant portion of isn’t accounted for in the infamous labor projection? Ironically, the outcry of an talent shortage is indirectly reinforcing the problem. Despite the clear evidence that proves otherwise, we’re perpetuating the false notion that there’s only one entry into the world of programming. There are many great out there. But the unprecedented speed at which software technology moves means by the time you need more , your systems are already strained. There’s no time to validate hundreds of applicants blindly. One wrong could change the whole equation. So you use blunt instruments, like prestigious alma maters and CS degrees, as a proxy for talent, potentially overlooking an endless supply of who don’t fit the profile — and thus the perception of a talent shortage. Software leaders’ deep-seated fear of hiring anyone that will slow them down is systematically locking out millions of skilled lack a high pedigree while forging a so-called talent shortage. Some will say that market economics tells us that programmers wouldn’t have notoriously high salaries if there weren’t a skills shortage. But for software tells us their overall average salaries haven’t increased more than half a percent per year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. But there’s one exception that’s often amplified in the media. Extraordinary , who sit at the top of the bell curve of talent, are rumored to earn . But this concept is nothing new or unique to . Just like any other profession or creative skill, there’s a limit to how many people are the best-of-the-best. The economic modeling specialists looked at median earnings for programmers and computer software from 2000-2010 using the BLS’s Current Population Survey database, and found little growth in the last decade: It’s a curious case. On the one hand, executives say they struggle to find the technical talent. Meanwhile, computer science programs have been exploding with student applicants at an unprecedented rate over the past few years. In a previous piece on how with the pace of technology, we found that programs actually have to turn away students: Plus, oddly enough, for grads in the field (engineering: 7 percent; computer science: 7.8 percent; information systems: 11.7 percent). Wouldn’t you expect these numbers to be much lower in a field suffering from a so-called talent shortage? And it’s not just new grads. If there’s a shortage in talent, then why has the unemployment rate been rising for software overall? It grew from . This is interesting, considering the average unemployment rate for college-educated people usually hovers around . Good are plentiful. But there’s a palpable misconception about what credentials a “real” programmer should have next to their name. Programmers who took alternative paths to are overshadowed behind with CS degrees. Jacob Kaplan-Moss, a contributor of the web framework Django, at Kansas University who did a great presentation on predicting seasonal floods using flow analysis with tools like Python, Linux and Django. When Kaplan-Moss was looking to hire Python programmers, he naturally approached her. Despite having just written thousands of lines of Python while inventing an original cluster distributed geographic pipeline, she said: “Oh, no I can’t do that. I’m not really a ‘programmer.’” If even an accomplished, impressive researcher feels a barrier to enter the field, there’s clearly something wrong with the perception of . Rather than focusing on what programmers do, there’s a persistent myth about what programming must be like. How do we skilled programmers, coming from nontraditional, but equally legitimate, paths, into our field? Given that it can collectively take well over to hire a single , the obsession with computer science degrees makes sense. Why go through hiring cycles to vet blindly? So this is what it all boils down to: This pressure to hire fast is baked into the DNA of companies. Driven by an ingrained fear of slowing progress, managers’ use of blunt instruments to save time in finding talent is perpetuating the facade of a talent shortage. But considering that a major chunk of programmers don’t have CS degrees, and degrees are no predictor of success, companies should stop relying on resumes to vet candidates. Instead, they should ask candidates to prove their programming skills. Benchmarking talent by pure programming skills would hundreds of thousands of . While everyone else keeps amplifying their budget to play tug-of-war with the same few , smart managers have a major advantage by focusing efforts on seeking out, testing and hiring large subsets of non-traditional who are less sought-after. One million programming jobs may go unfilled by 2020, but only if companies aren’t willing to pause and rethink the barriers that are locking out programmers who entered the field without a CS degree.
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Uber Might Owe Tens Of Thousands Of California Passengers $1.8 Million In Class Action Lawsuit
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Sarah Buhr
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Several Uber customers in California received notice today they’re involved in a class-action lawsuit against the rideshare giant. Uber agreed to the terms of a $1.8 million suit alleging it inappropriately charged customers an “airport fee toll” late last year. The lawsuit, filed in November 2015, accused Uber of charging customers the “airport fee toll” several months before the airport required it, letting drivers keep the fee instead. The lawsuit, which affects an estimated 355,000 customers, was a surprise to many folks who had no idea they were involved. Apparently I'm part of some Uber class action lawsuit. I'm set, no need to buy Powerball ticket. — David Ebbo (@davidebbo) Got email about class action lawsuit claiming Uber charged CA riders $1.8M in airport fees didn't pay airports — Baratunde (@baratunde) California charges passengers a separate fee for using rideshare services going to and from the airport. This is because the California Public Utilities Commission classifies Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing services as transportation network companies, separating them from taxi services and imposing a separate transportation fee of $3.85 to transport customers. Passenger Vamsi Tadepalli, who initiated the class action lawsuit, accused Uber of fraudulently charging him a higher $4 fee in late November 2015, and of letting drivers keep the fee instead of passing it onto SFO, where the fee was intended to go. According to the suit, Tadepalli said Uber told him the fee would be used to reimburse drivers who were charged SFO’s transportation network company fee. But according to the lawsuit, Uber was charging the fee earlier than the airport started requiring payment. Uber charged Tadepalli the fee in July 2015; SFO didn’t start charging drivers a transportation fee until November 2015. The lawsuit alleges customers were improperly charged an airport transportation fee between June 1, 2010, and November 20, 2015. None of these fees were reimbursed to the airport but were kept by drivers, according to the suit. The suit also accuses Uber of excessively charging passengers by rounding up to $4 instead of the $3.85 fee. “Although, SFO announced that in the future it will charge Uber $3.85 to pick up and drop off passengers – Uber’s $4.00 SFO Airport Fee Toll will be excessive and result in customers paying more than they should pay under the circumstances,” the class action lawsuit stated. Not everyone using the Uber app within that timeframe may have received an email notification of the settlement. However, tens of thousands of passengers may have been affected According to the lawsuit, Uber denies any wrongdoing and maintains it stayed within the law. We’ve reached out to Uber for comment and will update this post as soon as we hear back. The case is still pending.
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Didi Kuaidi, The Company Beating Uber In China, Opens Its API To Third Party Apps
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Jon Russell
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One day after Uber to add ‘content experiences’ for passengers, the U.S. company’s biggest rival — Didi Kuaidi in China — has opened its own platform up by releasing an SDK for developers and third-parties. Didi Kuaidi, which is following a recent $3 billion funding round and , gave an initial 30 apps access to its API — including chat app WeChat, Alibaba’s Alipay, Tencent Map and more — but now it is open to all. The APIs include access to the “Hail a Didi Ride” button, but also cover its other services which include registered taxis, private cars and test drive services. WeChat, China’s largest messaging app with over 500 million active users, already includes a feature that lets you book a Didi car from inside the messenger — much like in the U.S. — but now this functionality is likely to make its way into many more popular apps in China. If you believe that platforms make the strongest grow stronger, then this news is likely to heap even more pressure on Uber in China, where Didi Kuaidi is the market leader by a long shot. UberChina, which recently landed funding at a $7 billion valuation, claims to have completed one million rides a day across its 22 cities since the summer of 2015. While China is expected to become its largest global market this year, according to Uber data, Didi Kuaidi is completing some seven million rides each day in the country. Indeed, this week it revealed that it did 1.43 billion rides across its seven businesses (not just taxi rides) during the whole of last year, including 200 million during December alone. “This [annual] number is nearly twice the total number of taxi rides in the United States in 2015, and 1.4 times Uber’s global rides in the past six years since its launch in 2009,” a Didi Kuaidi spokesperson handily pointed out in an email to media.
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Ron Miller
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Citrix Is The Latest Enterprise Tech Firm Under Pressure From Activist Investors
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Ron Miller
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Technology companies, particularly those with an enterprise bent, appear to be coming under increasing pressure from activist investors who want to squeeze out profits at the cost of products and jobs. Last year EMC pressed by an activist investor eventually . Citrix is the latest company facing this issue –and from the same investor as it turns out. It’s been a busy week for Citrix, a company focused on desktop virtualization and networking. Just yesterday, , and on the same day announced that for Citrix users. What these moves show is that Citrix is in the midst of a pivot where it is trying to shed products that it sees as outside of its core mission, while making the occasional acquisition to augment that mission. That means products like Citrix CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager are out of here and the Comtrade SCOM management packs are coming into the fold. Last November, the company announced such as GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC and other products into a separate company. There are also layoffs involved here from the GoTo move alone. The company had over 9000 employees worldwide prior to the layoff announcement. Citrix has indicated it wants to concentrate on core products such as XenServer, NetScalr and perhaps Citrix Workplace Cloud, but it’s not necessarily making these moves because it wants to change direction. Instead, it turns out that . If you’re not familiar with Elliott, they are the same firm that bought , and immediately began putting pressure on the company to . Eventually including the VMware piece to Dell for $67 billion. That sale is expected to close later this year. In a case of ‘Deja vu all over again’ Elliott has taken an activist investor role with Citrix as well, pushing the company to make some moves it might not necessarily have made otherwise. These are not the only tech firms in which Elliott has shown interest. As eWeek reported in October, . The MO is often the same. Elliot buys a stake, then secures a couple of seats on the board and starts pushing for substantive changes in direction. The question is why a private equity firm like Elliott is suddenly smitten with these large enterprise tech companies. R Ray Wang, who is principal at Constellation Research says it’s because it can extract some money from them. “The private equity firms are targeting tech companies because their growth rates of 10 to 20 percent may seem slow for tech, but are high [compared to] other industries. They are in the midst of squeezing these companies for cash and forcing M&A across the board,” Wang told TechCrunch. EMC sold the company before it was forced to make other moves it didn’t really want to make. Citrix wasn’t so lucky, dumping product lines, cutting jobs and much more. These companies could be the beginning of other similar activity by investors like Elliott as large tech companies become targets of these types of firms.
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Visa Checkout Announces Walmart, Starbucks As Merchant Partners
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Lucas Matney
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Today, Visa Checkout announced that some major new companies would se starting to utilize the service. Starbucks, Walgreens, NFL Shop, HSN and Match.com have all signed on and will be joining Checkout’s more than 250,000 merchants using the express online payments service. Walmart.com integration will also be coming later this year, according to the company. The online payments platform has shown some pretty rapid growth for the company, with consumers signing up for more than 10 million accounts since its launch 18 months ago. The service is now available in 16 countries and is used by 600 financial institutions. Visa Checkout’s rollout has been among the fastest and most successful Visa consumer product launches in company history, as merchants and their customers seek easier, more convenient ways to pay with their cards in an increasingly digital world. The PayPal competitor similarly allows customers to complete payments across payment platforms with a single login and most importantly without having to leave the merchant’s website to do so. Starbucks, Walmart and the other major merchants announced today offer Visa a chance to increase visibility of their product over competitors in collaboration with some rather well-trusted brands. A new comScore report from Visa details the successes they’ve seen with enrolled consumers completing 86 percent of transactions from their Visa online shopping carts. What’s more notable for merchants is that the survey details that the Checkout customers have a “51 percent higher conversion rate when compared to customers using a merchant’s traditional online checkout.” “Delivering a seamless payment experience for our customers is a priority for us,” said Ryan Records, vice president of Starbucks Global Card, Commerce & Payment, in a release. “Integrating Visa Checkout as a way to reload your Starbucks card in our world-class digital platforms is a great way to provide our customers with the reload options that are most convenient and relevant to them.”
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Google Focuses On Virtual Reality With New Lead For Cardboard
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Drew Olanoff
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According to a , Google is doubling down on virtual reality, with its VP for product management, Clay Bavor, dropping his responsibilities for other apps like Gmail and Drive to focus solely on and VR. Bavor has been with Google for over 10 years, so trusting this budding unit with him is a massive signal that Google is in it to win it as far as VR goes. Its success with Cardboard, bringing the likes of the NYT into the new medium, is paying off. According to Re/Code, Bavor’s app responsibilities now fall under SVP Diane Greene. The focus on VR will help all of Google’s consumer products, such as YouTube, which is of course dabbling in 360-degree video. When Cardboard came out ~1.5 years ago, people wondered if it was a joke. Last month, it helped save a baby's life. — Clay Bavor (@claybavor) Keeping up with the Facebooks (Oculus) of the world in VR will be essential if Google wants to be considered when it comes to the immersive technology. While the size of the team isn’t known, we do know that a few acquisitions have been clustered together to work on the Cardboard platform. A Google spokesperson confirmed Bavor’s move but declined to offer more specifics.
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Meet Square’s Gloria Kimbwala, An Engineer Dedicated To Advancing Diversity In Tech
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Megan Rose Dickey
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, Gloria Kimbwala, a campus program specialist at Square, is an engineer. She went through Square’s College Code Camp exactly two years ago. Today, she’s running it. , now in its sixth session, is a five-day program at Square designed to immerse young female computer science or engineering majors in coding workshops, leadership sessions and a hackathon. Kimbwala attended Code Camp when she was pursuing her master’s degree, in which she was the only female engineer in her program. Gloria Kimbwala, head of College Code Camp at Square “Because I’m an engineer, I like to look at problems and things I see are problems,” Kimbwala told me. “My path through technology and through computer science — I was always very aware I was the only minority and the only woman in all of my classes. But I thought it was a problem that only my class was facing, or maybe my college was facing. I wasn’t aware that it was a problem that my whole industry was facing.” When Kimbwala got to Code Camp, it was her first time meeting other female engineers, she said. It was also her first time meeting another African-American engineer. While at Code Camp, Kimbwala learned that the lack of diversity is a problem within tech as a whole, and not just at her school. “So I started to look at it very technically and think, “Ok, what are the problems that we’d like to solve?” and for me, it was diversity,” Kimbwala said. “It’s something that very directly affects me and I thought that I at least had a perspective and an insight where I could make some true headway if I tackled this specific problem.” When the opportunity to run Code Camp came about, Kimbwala jumped on it because she saw it as a way to make a big impact on diversity in tech from the inside. Before Kimbwala officially started running Code Camp at Square, she assisted Square Head of Diversity and Inclusion Vanessa Slavich, who started Code Camp, in running the program this past August. The most recent Code Camp, which took place earlier this month, was Kimbwala’s first time doing it all on her own. Kimbwala selected 20 young women currently enrolled as full-time students at either an American or Canadian university pursuing computer science, computer engineering or some other related technical field. As part of the program, campers had the opportunity to work with Square engineers building code, meet with Square executives like Jack Dorsey and Square CFO Sarah Friar, and participate in a hackathon. Square CEO Jack Dorsey with Gloria Kimbwala and Code Camp participants at Square’s San Francisco headquarters. During their five-day trip to San Francisco, the campers took tours of tech companies like Yelp and Twitter. They also participated in workshops around iOS, Ruby on Rails, hardware, data science and security. On the last day of the program, the campers presented their hackathon projects. The assignment was to build a web app that helps connect past, present and future Code Campers. “When you’re in college versus the outside world, the two computer sciences are different,” Camille Ramseur, a Code Camp participant and recent graduate from the Florida Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science, told me. “So I wanted to do more professional development. I thought it was a good opportunity to better myself in computer science and connect with other females. In my graduating class, there was only one other girl in computer science. I had never been around 20 other female computer science majors.” Through Code Camp, Kimbwala wants to help every young woman who goes through the program realize that they have a place at Square, and in the tech industry in general. As part of Code Camp, Kimbwala hosted an hour-long imposter syndrome workshop. Imposter syndrome, an , is the feeling that you’re not as qualified for the work as people may think you are, and will be found out as a fraud. “I feel like a lot of people experience it but don’t know what it is,” Kimbwala said. “The more you can expose people to what it is, the more they can work out strategies to overcome it.” To kick off the workshop, Kimbwala had the Code Campers watch on imposter syndrome. Next, everyone, including myself, dove into the workshop’s first exercise. Part one asked each of us to write down three things we value, write a sentence about why one of those values are important to us, and what the last topic was that someone asked us for advice on. That last part is especially important because if someone asks you for advice, Kimbwala explained, they’re essentially telling you that they respect your opinion and find value in it. We later discussed the effects of imposter syndrome, which include not applying for certain jobs or promotions, as well as strategies for combatting imposter syndrome, such as keeping a record of your accomplishments and reviewing them often. During the workshop, Kimbwala spoke about her own struggles with imposter syndrome. She described how during her first week at Square, she was waiting for the company to realize it had made a mistake in hiring her. I asked her to elaborate on that when we sat down to chat. “I thought, ‘At some point, they’re going to realize they made a mistake and that I really don’t have the skills they’re looking for and whatnot,’ so I really didn’t dive into anything,” Kimbwala said. “I was doing a lot of self-reflection and looking around, and then I had that moment with my mom, when she called and got all excited and asked me what I was doing. I said, ‘Well, I’m just kind of hanging out, waiting for them to fire me.’ She was like, ‘Why would you even be doing that?!’ I said, ‘Well, they had to have made a big mistake. I’m surrounded by some of the most brilliant people I know, and they’re going to figure out that I’m not as brilliant as they think I am.’ She said, ‘Well, I strongly suggest you get to work.'” Ruth Simmons, board member at Square Since joining Square in July 2015, Kimbwala said that she has come to terms with the fact that Square hired her because of her knowledge, talent and skills. She eventually realized that she’s well-connected and has a unique perspective to offer Square. But the profound moment for Kimbwala — when she realized that Square is where she should be — happened shortly after . Before her post at Brown, Simmons, an African-American woman, was the president of Smith College, where she established the first engineering program at an American women’s college. Simmons joined Square’s board in August as one of the only black women on a tech company’s board of directors. “My mind blew,” Kimbwala said. “When she walked through the door, I started to cry. It was a physical manifestation of everything I’ve ever dreamed to be and it was something that I didn’t have to specifically try to figure out how to be it, but I could see it. And that’s when I realized this was the best place for me to be. That made the imposter syndrome and everything else just kind of go away.” This year, Kimbwala has committed to spending 500 hours doing service within underrepresented communities. If she hits those hours by June, she’s going to bump it up to 1,000. Ultimately, Kimbwala sees herself pursuing computer engineering as a career. “This year I’m learning Swift and iOS design,” Kimbwala said. “It tends to itch — the coding part of me — and then I start to see problems I want to solve. I’m always looking for the next hackathon that I can work on. I’m an engineer and even when I interviewed [with Square], I let them know I’m an engineer first and foremost. You’re not really going to be able to take that away from me, so at some point I’ll probably transition into engineering. I think the world needs to see that too.” Across the board, the number of black female engineers at tech companies is very, very low. Although several tech companies have released diversity reports, Square has not done so…yet. But, for Kimbwala, it’s not about the numbers. “I don’t really care too much about the number, but how do I feel in your home? Is this a place where I’m safe?” Kimbwala said. “I feel safe here being the person that I am and I know whoever I invite into this space will also feel safe in this home, and that’s more important than general numbers.”
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Get Your Crunchies Tickets Now, And Remember The Crunchies Of Yore
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Matt Burns
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The are a little over a month away, and we’re gearing up to make this show one of the best ones yet. In the lead up to the Crunchies, we thought it’d be fun to take a trip down memory lane and revisit some of the Crunchies of yesteryear to see what the startup and tech scenes were like in the past. In this piece, we’ll look at the second and third Crunchies shows in 2008 and 2009, respectively. One constant in the first three Crunchies was Facebook. The social network scored a hat trick by taking the Best Overall Startup or Product award three years in a row. During that time period (and still today, in all honesty), Facebook innovated and added new features at a staggering rate, and that innovation paid off big at Crunchies time. A few other winners and runners up were gobbled up by Facebook, including Gowalla (Runner Up for Best Mobile Application at the 3rd Crunchies) and FriendFeed (Winner of the Best new Startup of 2008 award), which are both now part of Zuck’s growing army. Other notable winners from this era included GitHub (Best Bootstrapped Startup – 2nd Crunchies), Evernote (Best Mobile Startup – 2nd Crunchies), Dropbox (Best Internet Application – 3rd Crunchies) and Foursquare (Best Mobile Application – 3rd Crunchies). For as little as $115, your Crunchies ticket gets you into the main show, as well as the festive after-party that includes a hosted bar, hors d’oeuvres, networking and other fun surprises we have in store for you.
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Skype Brings Group Video Calls To Mobile Devices
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Sarah Perez
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In celebration of its 10-year anniversary, Skype today the launch of free group video calling on Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows 10 mobile devices. The has been available for a couple of years on the desktop, for both Mac and PC, but had yet to make its way to mobile. The addition, says Skype, will roll out to the company’s hundreds of millions of mobile users over the “coming weeks.” Though the company didn’t provide an exact launch date, interested users were offered a way to sign up for early access to the feature by filling out a provided The form only asks for your email, Skype name, country and device. After registering, Skype says it will send you an email after it has set up group video calling support on your mobile device. It’s unclear at this time whether that means it will distribute beta software you have to install, or if the upgrade will take place in-app. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t20MzFcwWVM] The company also shared a few metrics detailing Skype’s growth over the past 10 years, noting that since its launch in 2006, it has grown to support over 750 million people who use the application on their mobile devices, including both phones and tablets. The company additionally touted the fact that it had seen 10x growth in under two years, which could be attributed to the app’s continued popularity as a mobile communications app. Skype has seen a number of improvements over the past several years as well, including not only the launch of group calls on the desktop, but other features like , real-time speech and instant message , its , and more. It also now lets anyone join chats — — and for Microsoft’s older communications tool, Lync. Over the past decade, Skype says it has generated nearly 2 trillion minutes of free Skype calls worldwide. With the rollout of group calls on mobile, that figure will certainly continue to grow. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5xbkmLZEGY]
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Lyft Announces Partnership To Help Seniors Without Smartphones Get Around
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Lucas Matney
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Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft have always been awesome at empowering people without viable forms of transportation to get around. A key demographic that’s been left out of reaping these benefits, however, is the nation’s senior citizens. Today, Lyft announced a partnership with the that will provide seniors in NYC a simpler way to get rides to non-emergency medical appointments. To do this, the Lyft at Work team has introduced a slick-looking, third-party web application called Concierge that allows its partners to call Lyfts online on the behalf of someone who may not have a smartphone to do it themselves. For seniors that have a tough time getting around or are maybe staying behind the wheel a little longer than they should, Lyft could be a major opportunity for them to maintain a bit more independence. Here’s the problem, though: More than a quarter of Americans that are 65-plus don’t own a smartphone and that percentage only increases as ages do. Apps are also generally a difficult concept for some elderly people to get used to no matter how intuitive the UI is. In a , Lyft says that around 3.6 million Americans miss or have to delay medical care because they don’t have the transportation to get where they need to go. With this effort, Lyft hopes to help seniors in NYC get used to the lingo their grandkids have been using when they talk about grabbing a Lyft. But more seriously it may also give Lyft an opportunity to see the full potential of Concierge, which could plausibly have major market potential as Lyft for Work looks to increase their partnerships. Lyft says it’s already fulfilling 2,500 rides a week through the service, but Billy McKee, president of National Medtrans Network, details in the blog post that he plans to increase that number. “Using transportation-as-a-service like this, the health plans and government agencies we partner with are significantly reducing fraud, saving costs, and improving the patient experience,” said McKee. “We provide over 25,000 livery trips per week in NYC, and our goal is to push all of those through Lyft.”
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Delicious, Former Web 2.0 Darling, Is Now Managed By New Alliance, Rolls Back Most Recent Changes
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Frederic Lardinois
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Once upon a time (maybe around 2004), the social bookmarking service was the hottest thing on the web. It hit all the right buzzwords of the time (collaborative tagging, folksonomy, AJAX), but like so many other services, Yahoo simply let it whither after it acquired the company in 2005. Since then, it has changed owners twice — first to , a company owned by the founders of YouTube, and then in 2014 to . : Just like YouTube and AVOS, Science also clearly didn’t quite know what to do with this living fossil of a web service. According to an update on the , the service is now managed by Delicious Media — a new alliance between and Science Inc. Domainersuite founder Tony Aly is now Delicious Media’s CEO. “Science has transitioned control of Delicious to our new entity so that my team and I can dedicate ourselves to the long-term success and stability of this wonderful, useful, trailblazing site,” Aly writes in the , which was quietly published yesterday. In an email later today, Aly also told me that his intent is to “honor the site’s core functionality (the saving and sharing of bookmarks) while attempting to make the site more SEO-friendly.” He also noted that “monetization of the site will be primarily ad-driven,” as the premium features introduced by Science “had minimal usage and costs more to support.” To do all of this, the new owners are rolling back many of the changes the latest set of owners made to the site. Aly, who has a background in SEO, notes that the JavaScript front-end framework the recent owners used to rebuild the site isn’t great for making content visible to Google and Bing. “My primary specialty is Big Data SEO, and Delicious has a HUGE amount of data,” Aly told me. “In many ways, it’s an archive of the web. I’m incredibly excited by the opportunity to make this data as accessible as possible.” Turns out, the former owners left the lights on, though, and kept the old version up and running under , so reverting back to that old version should be pretty straightforward. In a far weirder move, though, the site is also moving back to its original URL: . That’s the domain Delicious launched with, but it later moved to the easier-to-remember Delicious.com. Aly says this move is “one of the terms of the transition,” which makes me think the plan here is to sell the delicious.com domain to the highest bidder at some point. As Aly tells me, Science remains in control of the Delicious.com domain name. On a more positive note, at least for die-hard del.icio.us fans, Aly also promises to bring back Stacks. This was a feature that allowed users to collaborate on link collections. AVOS in 2012, about a year after it acquired the site from Yahoo. None of this immediately makes me think that its best days are still ahead, to be honest, but let’s give the new owners the benefit of the doubt for the time being. Aly,
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Sketchfab Adds ‘View In VR’ Button To Its 3D Model Sharing Platform
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Natasha Lomas
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In its latest feature expansion, 3D model repository has just added a VR button, allowing owners of to don their VR goggles to get a more immersive view of the content on its platform. While starting with VR’s bargain basement headset (aka Cardboard), Sketchfab it plans to expand support to “all major headsets” — with Facebook-owned Oculus Rift next on its list. Support in Sketchfab’s context entails building a smooth and natural navigation system for those using VR headsets to view its 3D content. It also says it’s working to improve content categories and to improve the browsing experience for VR. The ambition is to be able to offer “a huge interactive library of content for all the VR headset owners out there to explore”, says co-founder and CEO Alban Denoyel, in a announcing the new VR button. The Sketchfab platform hosts more than 500,000 “virtual things” at this point — all of which can now be viewed via Cardboard.
2016 is the ‘year of the great VR reboot’, with multiple consumer headsets slated to ship this year, including the Rift — and therefore also the year of the scramble to create compelling VR content. Given how much hype there is around VR, and how relatively little bespoke content there is for this emerging kit, a 3D model platform spotting an opportunity to step into the content breach by turning its existing pixels into a browsable catalogue of ‘VR experiences’ seems like reasonable logic. Certainly when looked at from Cardboard’s budget VR point of view, where you wouldn’t be expecting powerful VR gaming experiences anyway, given the stuff you’re looking at is powered by a smartphone. An educational perspective is more in keeping with the tech’s capabilities — and something Sketchfab reckons it can help provide. “You can find a digital preview of pretty much anything on Sketchfab: people, places, objects,” writes Denoyel. “You can go ahead and discover how a works, teleport yourself inside , or go back in time to confront this ” Google itself added the with Cardboard last fall. Which is a clever way for the company to expand content for the goggles by repurposing an existing digital asset — at the same time as offering a potentially compelling budget VR feature, given that viewing StreetView in 2D can be a fiddly process. Lifelike 3D scenes should naturally lend themselves to improved viewing in VR. While, in Sketchfab’s case, if you’re just dipping in for a quick look at a particular animated artifact or 3D scene you’re perhaps less likely to experience the sickly side-effects of spending too much time noodling around in VR.
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Google I/O Will Hit Mountain View On May 18-20 At Shoreline Amphitheatre
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Drew Olanoff
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We don’t have too many details yet, but Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai just let the world know where and when Google I/O will take place this year. I/O'16 coming to neighborhood where it all started 10 yrs ago: Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, May 18-20. More details soon. — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) https://plus.google.com/+SundarPichai/posts/Gi7EcHRTrNc The conference usually takes place in San Francisco at the Moscone Center, but it seems like the company wanted to bring it closer to them — and have it outdoors. The company will no doubt be showing off new hardware and software initiatives like they do , but this will be the first event under its Alphabet overlords and with Pichai at the helm. Why a developers conference outdoors? Well, maybe we’ll see Google Wing in action, or some drones, or Loon…or ya know, self-driving cars. And maybe Dave Matthews Band? A boy can dream. The Shoreline Amphitheatre can hold up to 22,500 people and fun fact, it’s marked as “permanently closed” on Google.
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The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-Off Is Coming To Atlanta And Boston
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Jordan Crook
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It’s that time of the year again. After a restful holiday season, filled with Disrupt Europe and CES, we’re ready to hit the road again and visit some of our favorite cities. The first TC Meetups of the year will go down in and , on February 23 and February 25 respectively. We’ve visited both cities for the past few years, and have never been let down by the tech sprouting up in these markets. This year should be no different. But in case you’re new to the game, let me fill you in on what exactly a ‘TC Meetup’ is. The TechCrunch Meetup + Pitch-off is an event we hold in different markets where we have the chance to hang out with the local tech scene. But beyond basic networking, we also hold a pitch-off, where ten startups will have exactly one minute to pitch their product to a panel of local VC judges. At the end, we crown our winners, with first place getting a booth in Startup Alley at the upcoming TC Disrupt and two tickets to the conference. Second place gets two tickets to the big show, and the Audience Choice winner gets one ticket. To participate in the pitch-off, startups must . If you simply want to attend the event, you can purchase tickets for Atlanta and for Boston. Can’t wait to see you!
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The First Virtual Reality Roller Coaster Will Take You To Space
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Jordan Crook
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Following CES in Las Vegas last week, VR is on the minds and lips of everyone in the tech and gaming space. But even though virtual reality is more immersive than any form of entertainment previously known, it still can’t manipulate all the senses at once. Alton Towers Resort has developed a way to make the VR experience even more true to life… By strapping you to a roller coaster while you wear a VR headset. The idea is that you can experience flying through outer space not only with your eyes and ears, but with your whole body. The roller coaster is called and it’s a part of UK amusement park Alton Towers Resort, set to open in April. As the name implies, it tells the story of being the first customer to travel to space with space tourism company, Galactica. For three minutes, riders will feel like they’re blasting off into space, traveling through warp tunnels into new galaxies, and touring various planets and wormholes. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu35v2kDL30&w=640&h=360] The coaster was originally the ‘Air’ roller coaster at Alton Towers, and is being repurposed through the simple application of VR headsets. The resort says it will be adding special shoulder straps to the belly-down ride, limiting users’ head movement for fear of motion sickness. explains that this will allow the park to track the roller coaster itself, though users’ headsets will also be tracked individually to sync imagery perfectly with the movements of each rider’s head, limited as they may be. The headsets will also be equipped with special sweat-resistant straps to ensure they stay in place. For folks who just want to ride a roller coaster, in real reality, Alton Towers says that a non-virtual option will be available to riders.
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SmashFly, A Service That Looks To Snag New Hires More Effectively, Raises $22M
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Matthew Lynley
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Mike Hennessy thinks finding potential recruits is just like marketing — you have to keep them interested and snatch them at the right time. That’s why he started , a startup that manages inbound interest from potential recruits and keeps them engaged with a company that’s eventually hoping to convert them to an employee. To do that, SmashFly has raised $22 million in a Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners to double its staff and invest in research and development. “Marketing is all about getting a brand out there. How do you find people? How do you move them through the funnel to the point where they become a qualified lead?” CEO Mike Hennessy said. “If you take the same funnel and apply it to recruiting, we’re providing the top of the funnel. How do you find them, how do you attract them, move them through the funnel through a qualified lead?” SmashFly starts by powering a company’s career site. That page is built to engage potential recruits, wherever they are coming from — a tweet or a Facebook post or directly, for example. If the person decides to signal some kind of intent, like giving their contact information, SmashFly will continue to remind them with a combination of content marketing and communication from the company. Recruiting — especially in the tech world — is incredibly difficult, and being able to catch the attention of a potential candidate and hold onto it is valuable enough to build a whole company around it as a service. So if it works, companies (100 are using it today) are going to want to pay for those kinds of tools. SmashFly has an overall pipeline of potential recruits that have signaled their interest in a role at the company. Then, all that “marketing” is fed into the service and automatically distributed throughout the pipeline that the company has built. It’s designed to keep the connection with a potential recruit warm and active in case they decide they want to work at the company. “The idea is that cold-calling is very problematic,” Hennessy said. “When you publish information that’s relevant to the audience, they become warm. They’re more introduced to your brand and opportunity. Through that content marketing you can move that down the funnel to a better consumer experience when you do that versus when you pick up the phone and call people.” There are a couple challenges to this type of recruiting, however. There are that power job sites like Greenhouse, which help optimize the hiring process. And at a lot of companies, warm introductions trump applications — though, for SmashFly it’s about getting the attention of recruits who might not want to join right at that moment. Hennessy got the idea after leaving Brassring, a recruitment software startup he sold in 2006. Instead of simply just managing potential recruits inside a service, there was an opportunity to help manage potential recruits that hadn’t yet applied to the company, Hennessy said. So in 2007, he left the company to start SmashFly — which in total has raised around $31 million.
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Uber Is Finally Creating A Dedicated R&D Team On The Ground In India
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Jon Russell
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Uber is increasing its focus on India, the country that it behind only China in the coming years, with plans to establish its first dedicated engineering team in the South Asian country in the coming months. Right now, Uber has a section of its team in San Francisco dedicated to shaping its service to the needs of Indian consumers, but it is actively working to open a base on the ground in Bangalore that will focus on local tweaks and modifications for India — where it is challenged by Ola, its . Uber has debuted new features in India, such as its , but a team on the ground will enable locally relevant features to be created and deployed far quicker. “When Uber sets up engineering offices, our goal is to give the teams high impact projects and a considerable amount of autonomy. Currently we have engineering teams travelling to India and once this Bangalore team is established they will be aligning frequently,” Satish Shah, head of India recruitment at Uber, said in a statement. Uber confirmed that the team — which will be called the ‘India growth product engineering team’ — will consist of software engineers and products managers and will be up and running in the first quarter of this year. So that’s before the end of March. This important news for Uber’s India business initially dropped between Christmas and New Year, getting relatively little coverage from press. While Uber declined to be specific on the potential headcount, TechCrunch can confirm from a company source that the India growth product engineering team will initially be 20-25 people in size, with the potential to increase that number “significantly” in the future. Uber currently covers 26 cities in India, where it reportedly completes 250,000 rides a day. Ola, by contrast, services 102 cities and does close to one million rides per day, so an Ola company source recently revealed to TechCrunch. Despite early difficulties in India, which included in New Delhi following , Uber is bullish about India. to grow its business in India, but — — it is up against a formidable opponent in the form of Ola, which has . Outside of its headquarters in the U.S., Uber also has four engineering bases in Europe — Amsterdam (Netherlands), Sofia (Bulgaria), Aarhus (Denmark) and Vilnius (Lithuania) — which makes this Bangalore outpost its first in Asia.
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Snoop Dogg Would Like Bill Gates To “Fix His S*&t”
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Drew Olanoff
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When something happens like, I don’t know, Xbox Live going down, what do you do? A lot of us run to Twitter to complain about it. Not because our complaints will be heard, but because hot damn sometimes it just feels good. Today, one Xbox Live user was particularly miffed. His name happens to be Snoop Dogg. He had a message for Xbox, the Live team, EA sports, Microsoft’s janitor, the world, and Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates…who I’m pretty sure isn’t that involved in the business anymore: A post shared by (@snoopdogg) on Mr. Dogg called Xbox’s servers “wack” and suggested that he may switch over to the PlayStation platform if the company doesn’t get itself on a more stable course for online playing. We know how you feel, Snoop. We know how you feel.
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A Millennial Mom’s Guide To CES
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Randi Zuckerberg
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I attended CES in Las Vegas last week doing quadruple duty as radio host of my radio show on SiriusXM; as judge and MC of The Bump Best of Baby Tech Awards Show; as co-host of a lively karaoke party with AmpMe, and as tech collaborator with HSN. I was wearing a lot of hats at the event, but what I loved about approaching CES that way is that it gave me a unique ability to take a look at the year’s largest technology showcase from several different perspectives. From the newfound consumer tech power of women’s wallets to family-friendly tech and apps to the emergence of audio as the next frontier in innovation, this CES wasn’t without surprises. Here are the most notable things I took away from the big show. When I first started coming to CES years ago, if you saw another woman, the immediate assumption was that she was a publicist or a “booth babe.” So you could imagine my delight to see a huge increase in the presence of women this year: Female executives from top tech companies spoke on panels; female investors and entrepreneurs held court; female coders gathered for hackathons; and giant rooms the size of football fields were filled with products designed for and targeted to, you guessed it, women. While there is still a very long way to go before we achieve true gender parity in the tech industry, it was evident that the massive consumer power of women is recognized across the board. It was eye-opening to be at CES with HSN, a network and retailer that knows and understands women’s consumer desires, and get an inside perspective into how important technology is for their female customers of all ages and all early-and-late-adopter profiles. This year marked the first year that baby tech had a huge presence at CES. Where was all of the baby tech last year when I was hiding out in the bathroom, pumping for my three-month old and desperately trying to balance being a tech professional and a new mom? Why now? Entrepreneurs will always be drawn to solving problems for themselves and their friends. It’s just that the same millennial entrepreneurs behind social media in the early aughts are now all grown up and have young children of their own. What happens when an entire generation of entrepreneurs and inventors with access to capital, data and engineering talent all have babies at the same time? You get the rise of baby tech. A few of my favorites were the , a baby monitor and tracker that is built into a onesie; , a toy caterpillar from Fisher-Price designed to help kids learn how to code; , by VersaMe, which allows you to see how many words your baby hears per day; car seat that installs itself; and , a bootie that a baby wears that sends information and updates to parents’ phones. I expect to see much more in this space. Fisher-Price Codeapillar As a radio host, singer, performer and frequent public speaker, I know one universal truth: You are only as good as your sound engineer. While there have been huge innovations on the visual frontier with camera technology, virtual reality, selfie drones, 12D television (okay, I made that one up) – sound really seems to be lagging behind. A well-known VR/AR blogger told me that audio is where many VR developers get caught up. Speakers on our smartphones seem to be going, well, backwards and considering how much time we spend in our cars listening to music, radio, podcasts, etc., it’s surprising that we haven’t seen more innovation in audio until now. Spending time with the team — which produces an app that syncs the same song across your friends’ phones, turning everyone’s phones into one giant speaker — opened my eyes to the opportunity and potential in this space. The business of joy is booming. From an alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell of fresh-baked croissants, to a machine that allows you to print any of the photos from your photo library onto a latte, I was delighted to say that delight itself was a huge business trend at CES. Are the vast majority of these gadgets designed for the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent? Well, sure. But I got a lot of joy out of just seeing them and knowing they exist, and knowing that there are entrepreneurs trying to bring a touch of whimsy and fun to the grind of our daily lives. Don’t get me wrong, I am as obsessed with the smart home tech gadgets as everyone else, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “do I actually need this? Does anybody?” A laundry machine that saves me 15 minutes on my laundry time is great, but it isn’t exactly a problem that keeps me up at night. I don’t lie in bed thinking, “If only I could save 15 minutes on my laundry! Then my life would be amazing!” Or Or “If only there were 10,000 different kinds of Fitbits on the market! Or a scale that tweeted my weight out! Then I would finally get healthy!” While I loved oohing and aahing over the thousands of gadgets and demos at CES (side note: when have you ever seen grown men crowd for washing machine demos or gush about refrigerators? That alone is worth attending CES for!), I couldn’t help but feel like way too many entrepreneurs and companies were trying to solve problems that aren’t really problems.
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Obama’s New Cancer Initiative Could Use A Shot Of Silicon Valley Innovation
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Sarah Buhr
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Silicon Valley should have a stake in the U.S. government’s moonshot initiative to cure cancer. President Obama announced this initiative in his last State of the Union address Tuesday night, placing Joe Biden in charge of “Mission Control” for the effort. Biden started reaching out to hundreds of the world’s top cancer experts since his son passed away from brain cancer in May, according to a . Biden plans to involve both the public and the private sector in this quest; hopefully those plans also include some of the breakthrough technology coming out of Silicon Valley. From Google[x]’s to , a machine-learning platform working on finding the cure to orphan diseases, the Bay Area offers several startups and organizations coming at the problem in a different way. “The science, data, and research results are trapped in silos, preventing faster progress and greater reach to patients,” Biden wrote in his post. There are plenty of startups based in Silicon Valley (and beyond) that provide research and information which could combine in a powerful way to further understand the disease and how to tackle it. Y Combinator has backed several software-based startups such as Benchling and Transcriptic helping to run experiments, store and analyze large amounts of information that can be shared on the platform. Much good research and technology is also coming out of Boston and San Diego in the biotech space. And there’s already cross-country collaboration happening here. Redwood City-based Guardant Health with New York-based Flatiron Health last summer in the race for the cure. Guardant uses a commercially available blood cancer screening product, Guardant360 to collect data from patients. Flatiron, a cloud-based platform that aggregates data from cancer treatment centers around the world, pledged to offer the structure and all of the clinical trial information for a database used to store and analyze the information. Many larger health tech companies sprang out of the Bay Area to help in this endeavor as well. 23andMe helps people discover their genetic roots. It recently to deliver scientifically validated reports about genetic health – and while it does not currently offer information on certain cancers, it has the potential to do so on a massive scale. Google, Inc., now Alphabet, introduced the in 2014 to genomically map 175 healthy human individuals in order to understand the baseline for perfect health. That study will connect with a much larger study in conjunction with Duke and Stanford’s medical schools. Government is often slow to progress, as are the institutions it supports. Silicon Valley is used to moving fast and has the mindset to approach problems a different way. It could be just what the U.S. needs to move forward in this endeavor. Will any of these tech companies take part in the new White House initiative? I’ve reached out to Biden’s team to see if the VP plans on including some of San Francisco’s offerings but have yet to hear back. “For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,” Obama said in Tuesday’s . The cure for cancer is not a far way, impossible goal. It is right at our fingertips and likely a matter of hooking up larger U.S. government institutions with the innovation already happening in America’s tech center. Hopefully, those working on this new moonshot cancer initiative recognize Silicon Valley’s potential to help in this endeavor.
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Car Buying Platform Carwow Raises £12.5M Series B Led by Accel
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Steve O'Hear
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, the U.K. site that claims to offer a better way to buy a new car, has stopped off for some further funding. The four year-old startup has raised a £12.5 million Series B led by Accel, who I understand tried but failed to get in on the . Previous investors Balderton Capital, Samos Investments and Episode 1 Ventures, the company’s original backer, also participated. It follows a £4.6 million Series A investment in December 2014 and brings total raised by Carwow to £18.4 million. Founded in late 2010, Carwow originally launched as a car review aggregator before hitting on the idea of providing a platform to improve the experience of buying a new car. It allows consumers to compare offers online and buy directly from ‘trusted’ dealers that are registered with the platform, specifically avoiding the arduous but otherwise necessary requirement to haggle over price and in a way that potentially introduces a lot more transparency. That because, says co-founder and CEO James Hind, car buyers traditionally turn to their nearest dealership who provide a headline price and follow up with a claimed discount. However, as a customer you rarely have much data with which to compare that offer and can’t be sure if you’re getting a good deal. Instead, Carwow turns the model on its head. Users “build” the car they would like to buy — specifying make and model/features etc. — and then receive offers direct from dealers through the Carwow platform. They can then quickly compare offers by price, location of the dealer, reviews of the dealer and what’s actually in stock. It’s then up to the buyer to decide whether to contact a dealer based on their offer, which they can do via anonymous messaging through the Carwow platform. In addition, Hind tells me dealerships, perhaps after a little resistance, have taken to the model because the leads that Carwow sends them are of extremely high quality. Once a customer has gone through the site’s funnel they not only have a much better idea of the car they want to purchase and any extras but their ‘intent’ to purchase is absolutely beyond doubt. To that end, with fresh capital in the bank, Carwow is planning to significantly increase spend on marketing as it continues to build awareness of the brand. This includes TV advertising — which has — to compliment other channels such as online. Hind says that the startup’s typical customer tends to be older and of course affluent enough to buy a new car but it isn’t always easy to reach them via online alone. In a call with Accel’s Fred Destin, he described TV ads as a great way to increase brand awareness, while online is still the place to convert, but that the two work well together. The impact of television advertising, he says, is also more measurable than it used to be in the past and that, perhaps compared to other VCs, he enjoys investing in startups where after finding market fit the biggest challenge is building a consumer brand. On that note, he draws similarities to another company he has been heavily involved in: Zoopla, the property listings aggregator. As with Carwow, the startup champions the consumer but also had to build partnerships with legacy players on the supply side in the form of estate agents. Destin says, like Zoopla, Carlow’s main consumer proposition is about cracking open the data on pricing and making the buying process much more transparent overall. Interestingly both Hind and Destin say that in the new as apposed to pre-owned car buying space, Carwow has little or no direct competition, not withstanding the traditional dealerships it also partners with. And it’s those partnerships, along with the Carwow brand itself, that makes the startup’s offering somewhat defensible.
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Babylon, The U.K. Digital Doctor App, Scores $25M To Develop AI-Driven Health Advice
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Steve O'Hear
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Hot on the heels of , another U.K. startup playing in the digital health app space has picked up funding. , which like PushDoctor, lets you have video consultations with a doctor (and a lot more), has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Investment AB Kinnevik, the Swedish listed investment fund. Others participating include Babylon’s original backer , and the founders of BXR Group. In addition, Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jon Wright (co-founders of Innocent Drinks) also joined the round, as did Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Suleyman, founders of Deepmind, the AI group for $500m, who were already advising the digital health startup. That two of Deepmind’s founders contributed is noteworthy given that Babylon says it plans to use the additional capital to add a significant AI component to its mobile app that will employ AI to help patients pre-screen health conditions before or if they choose to follow up with a text, phone or video consultation. That’s eminently more scalable than relying solely on the 100 or so doctors Babylon currently employs to serve its users who pay a monthly subscription service or get access via their employer’s healthcare provision. A few months back I was given a demo of Babylon’s AI feature — you basically talk to the app as it walks you through your symptoms — but felt it was a little too early to write about the experience. AI is the promise that keeps on promising so it will be interesting to test out Babylon’s offering once it’s ready for a full commercial launch. No doubt the Deepmind connection will help with hiring, which is one area the startup plans to use its Series A funding. Meanwhile, Babylon is staying mum on the company’s valuation. , who appear to have jumped the gun on the funding announcement yesterday before it had technically closed, cites it as “in excess” of $100 million, though one source close to the company tells me it’s significantly higher than that.
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Jeb! Gets! Phone! Call! On! His! Apple! Watch!
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Lucas Matney
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The walking embodiment of the “I’m a PC” guy just discovered that his Apple Watch can make phone calls and he couldn’t be more excited :D Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush was doing an interview with when his Apple Watch started going crazy. USA Today of Jeb’s reaction. “My watch can’t be talking,” he said incredulously. Bush has been a big fan of the Apple Watch, valuing it above such great American pastimes as apple pie, yet it doesn’t seem he has a full handle on the device’s feature set. They asked me to choose between my Apple Watch and apple pie. Wasn’t a tough choice. — Jeb Bush (@JebBush) The unelectable Eeyore, who apparently likes to refer to his Watch as his “batphone,” was reassured by those journalists around him that the Apple Watch does indeed make phone calls. His reply? “That’s the coolest thing in the world.”
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AWS Launches Schedules Reserved Instances
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Frederic Lardinois
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Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform is a new pricing tier today that will make its service more for customers who only need to run their cloud-based applications during certain hours of the day or only on certain days of the month. With this new pricing tier, called , AWS users can reserve instances for pre-defined blocks of time on their own daily, weekly and monthly schedules. You simply tell Amazon when and for how long you will need a machine and it’ll be ready to go at those times. To do this, you have to lock yourself in to a one-year term, but in return, you get a discount that brings rates down by about 5 to 10 percent compared to Amazon’s standard on-demand rates. The size of the discount depends on when you are using your scheduled machines. During peak hours, you get a 5 percent discount, and during off-peak hours (which are basically the weekends), you get a 10 percent discount. The new pricing model is currently only available for machines in Amazon’s US East (North Virginia), US West (Oregon) and EU (Ireland) regions. Overall, this seems like a smart move. A lot of cloud workloads aren’t constant, after all. Maybe you only need to run a certain calculation every weekday afternoon, for example. Or you only run your billing calculations on the first day of every month. If you use AWS, Azure or Google’s Cloud Platform, you’d spin up a machine on those days and then shut it down again once you’re done. Until now, you’d just pay the standard on-demand price while you were running those machines.
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Wealthfront Launches Portfolio Review, An Advisory Tool For Avoiding Fees And Maximizing Savings
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Jonathan Shieber
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Ever year investors pay out hundreds of billions of dollars (that’s billions with a “b”) in fees to money managers that, essentially, they really don’t need to be paying. Things are so bad that companies like have raised over $12 million in financing to provide a service that gives people a window into the fees they’re paying to their advisors. Now , the robo-advisory wealth management service, is offering a tool of its own to help people get a window into the money they’re losing on fees. According to a study from BCG and State Street that the company cites, investors could pay out $13.2 trillion over the next thirty years. That’s money going from investors’ pockets into money managers’ bank accounts. The company says that 80% of fees investors are paying could be avoided if they switched to the type of index funds that Wealthfront offers. And they’ve set up the to prove it The company’s data is based on an analysis it conducted based on accounts it controls that had made the switch from traditional wealth management shops to Wealthfront’s service over the past four years. What the company found was that amateur investors who were using wealth management services weren’t as good at structuring their portfolios and managing their money as WealthFront has been (shocking). Using the new WealthFront tool folks, whether or not they’re customers, can get a window into the product fees, transaction fees, and advisory fees that they’re paying; can take a look at potential strategies to optimize tax savings; see what the right amount of cash savings a person should have; and finally ensure that their portfolio of investments is sufficiently diversified.
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Uber To Allow Some People With Nonviolent Convictions To Become Drivers
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Megan Rose Dickey
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Uber is going to ease up on some of its driver-screening requirements in California in order to make room for people convicted of nonviolent crimes, . , a California ballot measure that passed in 2014, people with low-level, nonviolent felonies for things like theft, check fraud and possession of drugs can apply to remove the felony from their record and change it to a misdemeanor. Uber’s process has previously ruled out people who may qualify to drive under Prop. 47. Starting February 1, an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch, the company will notify disqualified drivers and let them know about the process for having their felonies reclassified as misdemeanors. Uber has also partnered with Defy Ventures, an organization that provides job readiness training to felons, to help people who don’t qualify under Prop. 47 to find jobs. Uber will continue to reject people with felony convictions for violent crimes, as well as those with DUIs or misdemeanors related to intoxication. “California voters told us when they overwhelmingly passed Proposition 47 that people with nonviolent, low-level offenses must be given a chance to get back on their feet,” Uber Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan said in a statement. “To do our part, we can make sure people have a fair chance to earn a living with Uber. Moreover, as a technology platform, we can focus on safety before, during and after each ride in ways that are more fair and effective than relying on criminal records alone.” This means two things. People who are trying to rebuild their lives now have an opportunity to get back on their feet, and make a good amount of money while driving for Uber. This is great news for groups of people who face systemic oppression and discrimination. Black people, in case you didn’t know, , . Secondly, Uber can potentially increase the number of drivers it has on the road, though, the company told the Journal that growing its driver base is not what this is about.
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Startups.co Acquires Zana, A Site For Educating Entrepreneurs
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Anthony Ha
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has been busy buying services like like and to build a network of connected products for entrepreneurs. Next up: , a site that says it’s “democratizing entrepreneurship.” The acquisition was reported last week by . Startups.co CEO Wil Schroter told me today that the deal was a mix of cash and stock, with a price in “the single digit millions.” Zana was founded by Shea Tate-DiDonna, who previously created the True University program at . It covers topics like fundraising and product development, with video lessons from speakers like Steve Blank and Matt Mullenweg. While Tate-DiDonna moves on to start something new, Schroter said he plans to fold Zana’s content into the main Startups.co site, which will become the “content hub” across the company’s various services (also incorporating stories from Startups.co’s ). With 1 million startups and a total of 20 million registered users across the platform, Schroter said Startups.co can already bring this content to a broad audience. “Our startups are dying for education,” he said. And while most of the existing Zana videos are focused on tech startups, Schroter said it’s relevant to a broader group of entrepreneurs, and he’ll be moving the tutorials further in that direction. After all, he estimated that only one-third of Startups.co users are tech startups — another third sells consumer products, while one-third are brick-and-mortar retailers. This marks Schroter’s fifth acquisition of a venture-backed startup in the past 18 months. (He said the last two deals valued Startups.co at more than $100 million.) He said he’s been seeing more startups “trying to find a home at an M&A and partnership level.” “One of the downsides of everybody funding the unicorns at crazy valuations is that the just okay companies, companies doing a few million dollars in revenue, aren’t getting a lot of love right now,” Schroter said. “There are good, interesting companies that are all getting basically ignored.”
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GoPro Stock Drops 23% After Announcing Layoffs And Disappointing Q4 Guidance
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Matt Burns
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GoPro’s stock dropped 23.34 percent to 10.87 Wednesday afternoon after the company announced its Q4 was worse than expected. The stock was already trading at an all-time low. The stock briefly jumped to 11.20 before trading was halted. The company has a market cap of about $2 billion in after-hour values. This came after the company announced it expects fourth quarter revenue will be $435 million and $1.6 billion for 2015. That’s under what the company had previously forecasted. GoPro’s stock was already dropping as the company faced mounting pressure from investors to sell more cameras and find new revenue streams. As such, the company is laying off 7 percent of its 1,500 people — about 105 people. As today’s press release states, GoPro had previously experienced an explosion of new staffing, growing at a 50 percent rate over the last two years. GoPro notes that it will incur about $5 million to $10 million as it restructures. GoPro went public in mid-2014 with a stock price of $35 and quickly shot up to $89 a share. But since that high, the stock gradually dropped until the summer of 2015 when it lost over half of its value over several weeks. Investors are worried about the company’s ability to keep growing after its latest camera, the Hero 4 Session, failed to outsell previous models. GoPro’s CEO and founder Nick Woodman was the fifth-highest paid CEO among U.S. public companies in 2015 with a total compensation package of $77 million, an increase over the previous year of 4,079 percent.
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Uber And Lyft And The Debate Over Fingerprints In Austin
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Dan Graham
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It is self-evident that ensuring public safety is a city’s job. In a sane world, a public official would never choose between reducing sexual assault and reducing drunk driving. Ridesharing policy is increasingly being framed as either/or brinksmanship, presenting a false choice. I reject that polarity, and I urge you to, as well. Austin has become the latest testing ground in the debate between transportation network companies (TNCs), such as Uber and Lyft, and city governments. This debate has played out in many cities over the past couple of years, with local governments attempting to ensure proper regulations and safety procedures and TNCs leveraging their value to the community and orchestrating justified public support. First, some background on what is happening in Austin and why it matters. In December, Austin Mayor Steve Adler and the city council amid the heated rhetoric of the TNC regulation debate. Mayor Adler presented a plan that would provide incentives for drivers to participate in fingerprint-based background checks, while gradually growing the overall percentage of required checks that TNCs must perform over the next two years. As part of the program, the city has agreed to help pay for the fingerprinting and expedite the process for background checks. Uber and Lyft in turn argue that such checks are redundant, don’t enhance safety because they only represent a single moment in time, and create an undue operational burden whose sole purpose is to hamper their growth. Uber and Lyft do their own background checks on their drivers, but law enforcement officials tell us that fingerprint background checks would make passengers even safer. As such, Uber and Lyft insist they will leave Austin if the city requires fingerprinting. In Austin it’s impossible to know whether this is a bluff. When Houston mandated fingerprinting, Uber stayed and Lyft left. Other places, including San Jose, Broward County in Florida, and the entire state of Georgia had to back off from fingerprinting to keep ridesharing. Fingerprinting drivers doesn’t seem to me like it should be an obstacle. Most drivers, in fact, tell us they would have no problem getting fingerprinted. It’s not particularly costly or time-consuming, either. We saw a very productive compromise in this direction in San Antonio. Uber proved more than willing to incorporate successful fingerprint background checks into their application, as long as the requirement was not mandatory. Unfortunately, adoption on the ground in San Antonio has been stagnant, which is why Austin isn’t willing to simply mirror our neighbor to the south. Voluntary fingerprinting can work, I have come to believe, but only if coupled with certain rewards. It can’t just be a hopeful gesture. Incentives have to be well-aligned. Something that many people miss is that Uber and Lyft’s objection to mandatory fingerprinting is really about their vision for the future in which their technology is used not only to transact ground transportation, but nearly every shareable service imaginable. They want to avoid being regulated as a taxi company, because in five years they plan to offer dramatically more. We’re already seeing experiments like this with , for example. That’s a valid consideration for these companies’ resistance to regulation. From a business standpoint, being locked in (and regulated) as a TNC may seriously complicate future growth in other verticals. Yet right now these companies are TNCs, and of course need to be treated as such. Without a shadow of a doubt, our cities are safer with ridesharing companies because they take drunk drivers off the streets and provide more transportation options. These are not theoretical concerns. Both Austin’s police chief and the county sheriff say that ridesharing companies dramatically reduce drunk driving. At the same time, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the FBI say fingerprinting drivers will make passengers safer, and dismissing their analysis is a non-starter for key members of our city council. Their point-of-view is confirmed by and two studies conducted by and the . In short, both positions are compelling when you put aside your preconceptions, dig into the data, and speak candidly with subject matter experts. As such, I think that we need to say “yes” to measures that prevent both dangerous driving and physical violence, simultaneously. The question of how local governments regulate business in a sharing economy is of course about more than one company, one industry or one city. The sharing economy is changing business for the better, and how Austin collaborates with Uber, Lyft and others could provide a template for how governments can successfully change with it. Getting into a stranger’s car presents some danger, certainly. How much is hotly debated. It’s a very complicated issue. If you want a balanced view of the back-and-forth from a national standpoint, Atlantic article is a great start. Read about what has here in Austin, but look also to Boston, Chicago, the District of Columbia, Los Angeles and San Francisco. incident was particularly stunning, not just for the offense itself, nor the assailant’s felony history, but also the fact the case was ultimately dropped for lack of evidence (though several lawsuits remain). What’s also important to remember is that many violent crimes are not reported. Austin nonprofit , which victims of sexual and domestic violence, has emphatically testified before our city council that behind the statistics lie real and recurring risks. The potential costs of the sharing economy are not fun to think about, of course. Is even one rape or assault too much? If you are or know someone who has been affected by such a crime, the answer to that question is immediate and visceral. I’m certain that ridesharing brings with it risks that government has a responsibility to guard us against. On this point I am crystal clear. Beyond that, we’re still figuring things out. We can’t reasonably aspire to prevent all crime. And over-regulation has its own, often dire consequences. We, therefore, have a pressing obligation to exhaust ourselves looking for a more intelligent solution, a “third way” forward beyond the stark, contrasting options that have been offered to-date. Austin is really a proxy for a larger fight, but perhaps the highest-profile battleground yet. This debate is about more than Austin. Moreover, with Uber in over independent contractors, Austin’s new city council learning how to govern on a 10-1 system, and SXSW right around the corner, tensions are running particularly high. Ours is a prototypically free-market state, and one that has softened the ground for Google’s Fiber and self-driving cars in recent memory. We intend to be a proving ground for a wide variety of new techniques and technologies, and yet we are grappling like everyone else with thoughtful protections that keep our citizens safe. I think that the national media have seized upon this debate here in Central Texas because we are perceived to be a harbinger of things to come. Our city’s brand is also built on progressiveness and forward-thinking; the council’s recent vote was emotionally jarring for some, and cognitively dissonant to many. The dilemma is nonetheless unacceptable. No city should have to choose between sexual assault prevention and reducing drunk driving. Each side would have you believe that the other’s been co-opted by special interests and hell-bent on a game of political chicken. I don’t see it that way. We won’t be forced into a choice in the way so many others before us have. The mayor is determined to avoid picking a side or a winner between the taxi companies and TNCs. That’s not his job. Rather, our mandate is to design and implement an alternative. And while the pressure cooker is intense, the options currently on the table each aspire to live up to our mantra of “what starts here changes the world.” As I wrote, the city council recently voted to create safety incentives to increase the number of fingerprinted ridesharing drivers in Austin. Contrary to popular belief, neither the mayor’s office nor the city council voted Uber and Lyft out of Austin. But we do have a very real deadline of January 28 by which time the specifics of such a plan must be outlined; the ordinance does not yet have provisions for enforcement. We have at least a few weeks to figure out a solution that works for everyone.
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PrintABowl 3D Prints Beautiful “Elevation” Devices For Your Pleasure
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John Biggs
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If you enjoy a bit of the old Weed O’ Gandalf then you’re going to get a kick out of these smoking systems by . This company makes specially -designed smoking paraphernalia that is 3D printed using a ceramic molding method. While the bongs themselves aren’t 3D printed – that would be a bit difficult given the state of things – the molds used to make them are and this allows the team to make multiple bong styles quickly and easily. The bowls come in three styles – Alpha, Ferro, and Tessalate – and cost about $300. They’re shipping now. The team, Al and Saul Jacobs, are brothers and hail from Washington. They created the company at the University of Washington in Seattle while taking a course on “creativity and innovation.” The team hoped to “nourish their shared appreciation of design in lieu of Washington state’s recreational cannabis legalization” which is another way of saying that they wanted to make themselves some sweet bongs so they can smoke some dank nugs. The brothers also frequently collaborate on musical projects because they are clearly cool brothers. I would love to a see a truly 3D printed bong – I have but nothing waterproof – but I think we should all let the guys who know ceramics build our pipes rather than lighting a pile of extruded ABS on fire while watching .
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Southeast Asia’s GrabTaxi Opens Office In Seattle To Attract U.S. Engineering Talent
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Jon Russell
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, the billion-dollar on-demand taxi service that rivals Uber in Southeast Asia, is opening its first office in the U.S. as it seeks to widen its hiring efforts. The growth of unicorns worldwide has made the sight of overseas companies hiring on U.S. soil fairly common, particularly targeting potential returnees home. But this initiative isn’t about GrabTaxi moving U.S.-based hires to its Singapore HQ. It already does that. Instead, it is setting up a fully functional engineering office in Seattle which will house a portion of its tech and data team on a full-time basis, offering an alternative location for those who prefer to remain in the U.S. rather than move to Asia. Seattle-based staff will work in tandem with GrabTaxi’s existing data team in Singapore and its smaller offshoot based in Beijing, China. Seattle is home to Amazon, Microsoft and other tech firms, and GrabTaxi, which is operational in six countries in Southeast Asia and , hopes that it can skim that talent pool to boost its ranks. “We are excited to announce our new engineering center in Seattle, which will help attract top talent in the U.S. and expand our global talent reach. As we continue our work on building an on-demand ecosystem in Southeast Asia, it is important to look all over the world for innovative ideas and people that will help us continue to succeed in that mission,” Anthony Tan, its co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. GrabTaxi said it has already made hires in Seattle, including 23-year Microsoft veteran Raman Narayanan, who will lead the office and its general hiring efforts in the U.S. Narayanan, formerly part of , has joined as Technical Advisor and will work closely with Arul Kumaravel, GrabTaxi’s Singapore-based VP of Engineering. (Kumaravel also has a Seattle connection, having previously been Head of Engineering for Amazon’s mobile platform.) “GrabTaxi has been rapidly growing and is working on large scale infrastructure and data problems. We’re trying to solve complex problems using big data and were thinking about hiring talent all over the world,” Kumaravel told TechCrunch in an interview. “There’s a great talent pool [for these kind of jobs] in the Seattle area.” GrabTaxi currently has around 80 engineers located with a further dozen located in Beijing. Kumaravel said there is no specific target for the headcount in Seattle. The company plans to spend 2016 picking out the right candidates to come aboard at its U.S. base. “We feel this is a That’s in fact one of the core reasons that Narayanan said drew him to this new challenge. “On-demand services have changed the way people move, commute, shop and consume, and I am excited to be a part of this transformation at such an early stage,” he told TechCrunch via email. “GrabTaxi has a highly advanced technology platform, and I look forward to helping build a team that will further the development of its cloud computing, storage, big data management, predictive analytics and machine learning capabilities,” Narayanan added. GrabTaxi will hope that the challenge resonates with other engineers and data specialists based in the U.S., although it is already getting some help from North America in the form of Lyft. GrabTaxi, Lyft, China’s Didi Kuaidi and India-based Ola — all of which rival Uber in their respective markets — palled up recently when . That coming-together will, in time, allow users of each app to use any other alliance company’s app when they go abroad, but Kumaravel said that the collaboration extends to general business knowledge and information sharing, particularly around engineering and tech. “We agreed to share best practices and technology-related work. We regularly share notes with the other companies,” he explained.
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Programming Trends To Look For This Year
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Martin Puryear
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There has never been a more exciting time for technologists and developers worldwide. The number of active development languages and frameworks, as well as development tools and learning avenues, continues to soar. Despite all these resources at our fingertips (or perhaps because of this abundance), it may not be obvious where industry are leading us. In my role as a coding bootcamp instructor, I’m constantly exposed to what’s empowering the latest and greatest technology. Here is what to look out for in over the next year. , the latest version of ECMAScript (ES6) – better known by most as JavaScript – is poised to make one of the biggest splashes in web development since the previous version (ES5) was released in 2009. JavaScript is the world’s most prevalent language, with nearly every personal computer and mobile device with a web browser capable of running JavaScript. Thus, the impact of ES6, and the slew of new features it brings to modern web development, is likely to be quite massive. Among these features are and functions, , , , , and much more. This latest version of JavaScript is quickly . leads the way with nearly 80 percent of features supported. will certainly see feature support within Edge, Chrome and Firefox continue to climb dramatically. Meanwhile, developers can begin using the majority of what ES6 has to offer by using a transpiler, such as , to compile ES6 code into fully compatible ES5 JavaScript that works in modern browsers. Over the coming years, modern development will continue to shift away from creating fully enclosed, totally self-managed applications. Rather, development will increasingly concentrate on utilizing third-party services to handle a large chunk of the monotonous yet necessary aspects of the project, such as cloud storage, push notifications and user administration. (BaaS) is a common nomenclature for these utilities, and their popularity is guaranteed to rise, particularly in the enterprise space where scalability poses a huge burden for large applications. With a BaaS like , engineering and operations teams can focus on setting the company apart from its competition, while baseline features and their associated overhead are handled by another party entirely. Although Backend as a Service is meeting the developer need to easily link projects to cloud storage and social networking APIs, many applications still rely on localized development stacks and well-provisioned servers to function properly. Unfortunately, server provisioning is inherently difficult and time-consuming. Not surprisingly, we see a meteoric rise in automated provisioning and containers. Services such as and allow engineers to quickly generate machine images with explicit versions of OS, libraries, languages and frameworks. These machine images, called are easily replicated to expand existing services or to quickly create new ones. If your operations team isn’t already talking about this topic, it should be. If it is, and you haven’t been listening, you should be. As modern applications require ever more bandwidth, storage and processing, it is clear that single-machine models cannot scale to match these requirements (and haven’t for some time). To truly scale a system, one should parallelize it as much as possible, leading to a rising need for languages such as , , and . Accordingly, there is increasing need for developers who are capable and productive in these technologies. Where relies heavily on mutable state (changing an object’s value during execution), functional focuses on immutable state, in which a declared object retains its value throughout the process. Functional languages, therefore, provide a benefit over common imperative or object-oriented languages: they are inherently designed to support parallelism and heavy concurrency. If you, as a developer, know with certainty that your data isn’t altered during execution, and that your functions are transitive (effectively unchanging), your application can benefit from the increased scale and distributed computing made easier by a functional language. Object-oriented will remain an industry staple for years to come, but there is little doubt that, as users expect faster search results and researchers expect more accurate calculations, functional will gain limelight as a clear and obvious solution. has been all the rage in recent years as a minimalist approach to modern UI creation, but may bring a focus toward . Apple has been a big proponent of flat design, which shies away from stylistic elements that appear three-dimensional. Microsoft got there first with the “Metro” design introduced 10 years ago by Zune, then Windows Phone 7 and today with Windows 10. It is fitting then that one of Apple’s and Microsoft’s biggest competitors, Google, launched material design. With three-dimensional depth effects such as gradients and lighting design, this new look gives a bit of depth back to digital components. Drop shadows, for example, allow applications to more easily indicate whether an element is clickable or inactive. As material design shifts to the forefront this year, we’re likely to see a proliferation of new UI design patterns, as (software designers) continue to embrace responsive design. Web UI in particular may become more and more similar, but this isn’t a bad thing. On the contrary, designers are embracing an understanding that common tasks, such as login screens and navigation menus, need to look and feel familiar to users of all sorts. This will be an exciting year for web software, from the bottom foundation technologies all the way to the user experience. With ECMAScript6, a ubiquitous web language gets an update. With BaaS and deployment containers, much of the cost and headache of basic features and provisioning can be removed. Functional languages move toward the mainstream and reframe how we approach parallelism. Material design aims to give more life to user elements, and new common frameworks may unite user experiences across devices. Regardless of engineering focus or industry, take a good look at the benefits these new developments might offer you.
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From AI To Robotics, 2016 Will Be The Year When The Machines Start Taking Over
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Vivek Wadhwa
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For the past century, the price and performance of computing has been on an exponential curve. And, as futurist Ray Kurzweil observed, once any technology becomes an information technology, its development follows the same curve, so we are seeing exponential advances in technologies such as sensors, networks, artificial intelligence, and robotics. The convergence of these technologies is making amazing things possible. 2015 was the tipping point in the global adoption of the Internet, digital medical devices, blockchain, gene editing, drones, and solar energy. 2016 will be the beginning of an even bigger revolution, one that will change the way we live, let us visit new worlds, and lead us into a jobless future. Yes, with every good there is a bad; wonderful things will become possible, but with them we will also create new problems for mankind. Here are six of the technologies that will make this happen, and the good they will do. In the artificial-intelligence community, there is a common saying: “A.I. is whatever hasn’t been done yet”. They call this the “A.I. effect”. Skeptics discount the behavior of an artificial-intelligence program by arguing that, rather than being real intelligence, it is just brute force computing and algorithms. There is merit to the criticism: even though computers have beaten chess masters and Jeopardy players and learnt to talk to us and drive cars, Siri and Cortana are still imperfect and infuriating. Yes, they crack jokes and tell us the weather, but are nothing like the seductive digital assistant we saw in the movie . But that is about to change—so that even the skeptics will say that A.I. has arrived. There have been major advances in “deep learning” neural networks, which learn by ingesting large amounts of data: IBM has taught its A.I. system, Watson, everything from cooking, to finance, to medicine; and Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have made great strides in face recognition and human-like speech systems. A.I.-based face recognition, for example, has almost reached human capability. And IBM Watson can diagnose certain cancers better than any human doctor can. With IBM Watson being made available to developers, Google open-sourcing its deep learning , and Facebook releasing of its specialized A.I. hardware, we can expect to see a broad variety of A.I. applications emerging—because entrepreneurs all over the world are taking up the baton. A.I. will be wherever computers are, and will seem human-like. Fortunately, we don’t need to worry about superhuman A.I. yet; that is still a decade or two away. The 2015 DARPA required robots to navigate over an eight-task course simulating a disaster zone. It was almost comical to see them moving at the speed of molasses, freezing up, and falling over. Forget folding laundry and serving humans; these robots could hardly walk. As well, although we heard some three years ago that Foxconn would replace a million workers with robots in its Chinese factories, it never did so. The breakthroughs may, however, be at hand. To begin with, a of robots is being introduced by companies such as Switzerland’s ABB, Denmark’s Universal Robots, and Boston’s Rethink Robotics—robots dextrous enough to thread a needle and sensitive enough to work alongside humans. They can assemble circuits and pack boxes. We are at the cusp of the industrial-robot revolution. Household robots are another matter. Household tasks may seem mundane, but they are incredibly difficult for machines to perform. Cleaning a room and folding laundry necessitate software algorithms that are more complex than those to land a man on the moon. But there have been many breakthroughs of late, largely driven by A.I., enabling certain tasks by themselves and what they have learnt. And with the open source robotic operating system, ROS, thousands of developers worldwide are getting close to the algorithms. Don’t be surprised when robots start showing up in supermarkets and malls—and in our homes. Remember Rosie, the robotic housekeeper from the TV series “The Jetsons”? I am expecting version 1 to begin shipping in the early 2020s. Once considered to be in the realm of science fiction, autonomous cars made big news in 2015. Google crossed the million-mile mark with its prototypes; Tesla began releasing functionality in its cars; and major car manufacturers announced their plans for robocars. , whether we are ready or not. And, just as the robots will, they will learn from each other—about the landscape of our roads and the bad habits of humans. In the next year or two, we will see fully functional robocars being tested on our highways, and then they will take over our roads. Just as the horseless carriage threw horses off the roads, these cars will displace us humans. Because they won’t crash into each other as we humans do, they won’t need the bumper bars or steel cages, so they will be more comfortable and lighter. Most will be electric. We also won’t have to worry about parking spots, because they will be able to drop us where we want to go to and pick us up when we are ready. We won’t even need to own our own cars, because transportation will be available on demand through our smartphones. Best of all, we won’t need speed limits, so distance will be less of a barrier—enabling us to leave the cities and suburbs. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber) In March, Facebook announced the availability of its much anticipated virtual-reality headset, Oculus. Microsoft, Magic Leap, and dozens of startups won’t be far behind with their new technologies. The early versions of these products will surely be expensive and clumsy and cause dizziness and other adverse reactions. But prices will fall, capabilities will increase, and footprints will shrink as is the case with all exponential technologies, and 2016 will mark the beginning of the . Virtual reality will change how we learn and how we entertain ourselves. Our children’s education will become experiential, because they will be able to visit ancient Greece and journey within the human body. We will spend our lunchtimes touring far-off destinations and our evenings playing laser tag with friends who are thousands of miles away. And, rather than watching movies at IMAX theatres, we will be able to be part of the action, virtually in the back seat of the car chase. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced plans to create his own artificially intelligent, voice-controlled butler to help run his life at home and at work. For this, he will need appliances that can talk to his digital butler—a connected home, office, and car. These are all coming, as CES, the big consumer electronics tradeshow in Las Vegas, demonstrated. From showerheads that track how much water we’ve used to toothbrushes that watch out for cavities, to refrigerators that order food that is running out, they are all on their way. Starting in 2016, everything will be —including our homes and appliances, our cars, street lights, and medical instruments. They will be sharing information with each other and perhaps gossiping about us, and will introduce massive security risks as well as many efficiencies. And we won’t have much choice, because they will be standard features—as are the cameras on our Smart TVs that stare at us, and the smartphones that listen to everything we say. Rockets, satellites, and spaceships were things that governments built—until Elon Musk stepped into the ring in 2002, with his startup SpaceX. A decade later, he demonstrated the ability to dock a spacecraft with the International Space Station and return with cargo. A year later, he launched a commercial geostationary satellite. And then, in 2015, out of the blue, came another billionaire, Jeff Bezos, whose space company, Blue Origin, launched a rocket 100 kilometers into space and landed its booster within five feet of its launch pad. This is a feat that SpaceX only achieved a month later, so Bezos one-upped Musk. It took a race, in the 1960s, between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to get man to the Moon. For decades after this, little more happened, because there was no one for the U.S. to compete with. Now, thanks to technology costs’ falling so far that space exploration can be done for millions rather than billions of dollars, and the raging egos of two billionaires, we will see the breakthroughs in space travel that we have been waiting for. Maybe there’ll be nothing beyond some rocket launches and a few competitive tweets between Musk and Bezos in 2016, but we will be closer to having colonies on Mars. This surely is the most innovative period in human history, an era that will be remembered as the inflexion point in exponential technologies that made the impossible possible.
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Apple Watch Scooped Up Over Half The Smartwatch Market In 2015
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Sarah Perez
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Despite a late arrival to the wearables market, Apple claimed the top spot in terms of device sales, according to new research from out this week, which stated that the Apple Watch accounted for over 50 percent of smartwatch sales in 2015. Even more impressive is the fact Apple’s Watch only at the end of April – meaning it claimed the majority of the market with less than a year of sales under its belt. Meanwhile, rival smartwatch platform Android Wear earned less than 10 percent of sales in 2015, the report said, even though the software now powers watches made by a number of companies, including Huawei, Motorola, Sony, ASUS, LG, , and . Meanwhile, Samsung’s Tizen-based Gear S2 didn’t achieve strong sales since its November launch, despite being well received, the report also said. “Most other smartwatch sales are currently coming from cheaper, simpler devices from a range of smaller players, such as Martian, X and Razer, the latter with the recently-announced Nabu Watch,” Juniper, detailing its findings. (For what it’s worth, the Nabu Watch is barely a smartwatch – even the company it as a digital watch with ‘smart’ features.) Apple’s presence in the smartwatch market is also making it harder on its rivals to compete, as evidenced this week by The fitness tracker maker had unveiled its new smartwatch, the at CES, and was immediately punished by Wall St. for daring to compete with Apple. Almost immediately, indicating investors’ lack of confidence in the device manufacturer’s ability to take on Apple on the high-end, as well as other established smartwatch makers further down the spectrum, such as Pebble. Fitbit’s stock continued to slide this week, only weeks after it had been riding a post-holiday high. (The earlier bump was due to the discovery that its Fitbit app had to the top of the App Store – which likely meant great holiday sales.) However, just because Apple is running away with the lead thanks to its 52 percent market share, that doesn’t mean the smartwatch market itself is anywhere near established, Juniper also warned in its report. “The smartwatch is now a category waiting for a market,” wrote Juniper research analyst James Moar. “Newer devices have offered more polished looks and subtly different functions, but no large changes in device capabilities or usage. With smartwatch functions established, it is now up to consumers to decide if they want them, rather than technology companies providing more reasons.” In other words, the future of the market is in the hands of consumers – who may or may not feel the need for wrist-worn technology to invade their lives. Juniper’s findings backed up , which also said Apple would lead the smartwatch space in 2015, with Android Wear coming in a distant second. IDC had actually estimated that Apple’s share would be higher at 61.3 percent, versus Android Wear’s 15.2 percent share. Pebble, IDC also noted, would cede market share to both Android Wear and Apple’s watchOS platforms, but not disappear. Samsung’s Tizen, meanwhile, was pegged as the “dark horse” in the space, thanks to its compatibility with Android smartphones and large app selection. Additionally, IDC estimated the wearable device market would reach a total of 111.1 million units in 2016, up 44.4 percent from the 80 million units shipped in 2015. While Juniper and IDC’s reports largely focused on smartwatches, Apple’s share is growing in the overall wearables market as well. also from IDC, had pegged Apple as the number two wearable worldwide, coming in just behind Fitbit and gaining quickly.
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Frederic Lardinois
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CoinDesk Gets Acquired By Digital Currency Group
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Lucas Matney
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CoinDesk, one of the leading bitcoin news sites, has been acquired by Digital Currency Group according to a . A source close to CoinDesk tells TechCrunch the price of the deal was around $500-600k. The bitcoin news site, which launched in 2013, had raised around $2 million in undisclosed funding from investors and according to our source had been trying to sell for months, aiming to find a buyer for a price more in the $800k-$1M range. Digital Currency Group (DCG), which is a leader in the blockchain/bitcoin scene, had previously invested in CoinDesk. DCG used the opportunity of the acquisition to also reveal the dates and location of their annual Consensus 2016 digital currency event. Our source tells us that this acquisition was largely done as a means of boosting the visibility of the event. CoinDesk delivers news on the trends, events, technologies and people/companies making major moves in the digital currency sphere. CoinDesk’s Bitcoin Price Index has also served as a popular up-to-the-minute reference for those checking in on the volatile currency. The blog post says that this sale will allow CoinDesk to scale more quickly to meet the needs of its readers. “As this industry evolves and new players emerge, it’s clear that the informational needs of the individuals and companies in this space are increasing.”
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In Letter To Google CEO, Sen. Franken Raises Questions Regarding Student Data Collection
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Lucas Matney
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In a letter sent Wedesday to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) sought to raise questions regarding Google’s use of data gathered from their EdTech initiatives. While I commend Google’s foray into education technology (“EdTech”), I am concerned about the extent to which Google may be collecting K-12 students’ personal data and using that information for non-educational purposes without parents’ knowledge or consent. A report from the Electronic Foundation Frontier (EFF) surfaced last month suggested that the data being gathered by Google’s educational programs (used in schools by over 50 million students) was being used to track students. The EFF that Google’s Chromebook and Google Apps for Education (GAFE) had been deceptively tracking students and had been storing student activities taking place on all of Google’s products and had been doing all of this by default. More so, the EFF alleged that the company’s actions had violated the , which Google has signed. Sen. Franken touched on these reports and expressed concerns that the company was violating the privacy of students in schools across the country. …I understand that there may be a discrepancy in how Google treats student data obtained through its core Google Apps for Education (GAFE) services – products that are deemed educational – versus how Google treats student data obtained through other Google services that are not deemed educational, such as Google Search, Google Maps, or YouTube. As a result, Google may be tracking and storing students’ Internet browsing activity, passwords, and video viewing behavior when a student is logged in to their GAFE account or using a Google Chromebook but isn’t actually using GAFE services. I am concerned that this collection of data may enable Google to create detailed profiles of the students and ultimately target advertising to them or use the profiles for other non-educational purposes without the students’ knowledge. Furthermore, I understand that unless a school administrator bars students from accessing non-GAFE services, users may have limited ability to consent to this collection of data or its possible use for non-educational purposes. Google responded to the claims of misuse of student data in , Director of Google Apps for Education, who wrote that, “While we appreciate the EFF’s focus on student data privacy, we are confident that our tools comply with both the law and our promises, including the Student Privacy Pledge, which we signed earlier this year.” Still, Sen. Franken had a laundry list of questions for Google to answer, largely focused on the type of data being collected and whether that information was being shared with third-parties or being used to target ads at students. The full list of questions he asked in the letter is listed below:
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Netflix Says It Will Crack Down On Customers Using VPNs To Access Its Global Catalog
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Jon Russell
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Netflix went global earlier this month, and now it will crack down on customers who use VPN software to access content that is not available or licensed in their country. “Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory,” Netflix said in a statement. “In coming weeks, those members using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are.” Many Netflix users — yours truly included — have long paid for the service and accessed it via VPNs from countries that weren’t supported prior to the huge international expansion. Netflix launching worldwide — in every market but China, Syria, North Korea and the Crimea — opened the service to new audiences, but there’s still a good reason to use a VPN: to gain access to the full Netflix international library rather than limited local selections, . Netflix has traditionally been sympathetic to VPN users, but, now that the stakes are global, it has little option but to push back in order to appease content producers and the licensing agreements it holds with them. That said, policing VPNs is a whack-a-mole game. Content services and VPN software providers are both continually “evolving” — to use Netflix’s term — their technology, so there will almost certainly continue to be ways to VPN into global Netflix content, it just won’t be as easy as it is right now. Ultimately, Netflix wants to remove the need to ever use a VPN by offering a universal catalog to all users worldwide, regardless of their location. But it admitted that it has “a ways to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere.” So, to recap this week — using a VPN to watch Netflix is not ok, but sharing .
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PolicyGenius Raises $15 Million For Its Online Price Comparison Insurance Brokerage
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Jonathan Shieber
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Brooklyn-based has raised $15 million in a new round of funding to expand its price comparison insurance brokerage service. Increasingly, old line industries are coming online, and insurance, one of the last holdouts, is no different. Founded by a former McKinsey consultant who worked with the insurance industry in 2014, PolicyGenius provides users with price comparison information on life insurance, long-term disability insurance, renters insurance and pet insurance. Offering content and advice, online quotes for policies, and an easy application process for consumers to get insurance, PolicyGenius has already reached 800,000 users by the end of 2015, according to chief executive Jennifer Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald would not comment on how many of those users are policyholders or acquired policies through PolicyGenius. That’s actually the key metric, because no matter how many people the company advises, it doesn’t get paid by the insurers (who the company charges a commission for every policy it brokers). No matter the actual revenue numbers, the company’s traction was enough to convince veteran investor and serial entrepreneur Steve Case and his Revolution Ventures firm to lead the Series B round for the company. Previous investors Karlin Ventures, Susa Ventures, AXA Strategic Ventures, Transamerica Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Massachusetts Mutual Life, also participated. “It’s a $2 trillion dollar industry and it really hasn’t changed that much,” says Case. “[PolicyGenius] is taking an industry that’s huge and hasn’t changed much in a long period of time and bringing internet dynamics to it.” Indeed, PolicyGenius is a potential solution to the industry’s coming labor shortage, according to Fitzgerald. “The average age of an insurance agent in the U.S. is 59, and a fourth of those are going to be retired in a few years.” On top of the industry’s staffing problems, there’s also a disconnect between the insurance that consumers need and the number of folks who actually have policies, according to Fitzgerald and industry analysts (keep in mind these are insurance industry analysts). Citing data from reinsurer Swiss Re, Fitzgerald says that the life insurance gap in the U.S. is about $20 trillion dollars. That’s a freaking big number. Life insurance, in fact, is the company’s most popular product, followed by disability insurance. And while the company is currently operating solely as a brokerage, it could soon white-label insurance products from insurance companies and sell those products under its own brand, according to Fitzgerald. For now, though, it’s primarily about the company’s content and its .
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Xiaomi Confirms It Sold “Over 70M” Phones In 2015, Falling Short Of 80M Target
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Jon Russell
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China’s Xiaomi has finally revealed how many smartphones in sold last year. Kinda. The company said in a statement today that it sold “over 70 million” devices in 2015. That’s a 15 percent jump on the , but it is short of the 80 million projection it set for 2015 — which was reduced from an initial 100 million target. been from for slowing sales growth, with coming into question. The company seemed to feed into negativity that when it bucked its usual New Year tradition by not releasing sales figures for the previous twelve months… until now. We asked Xiaomi for an exact figure but it declined to provide one. A representative also told us that Xiaomi would not break sales out by region, so we can’t be sure how many phones it sold in China, and how it is performing in emerging markets like India, Indonesia and Brazil — where demand is promising but there’s plenty of competition in the sub-$300 phone bracket. Analysts are generally agreed that fellow Chinese phone maker Huawei eclipsed Xiaomi in terms of performance in 2015. that Huawei became the first Chinese company to ship more than 100 million smartphones in a single year, thanks to impressive 44 percent shipment growth. Late last year, that Huawei overtook Xiaomi as China’s top smartphone seller in the third quarter of 2015, and there’s a growing feel that Xiaomi’s online sales model has been duplicated by the competition, taking one important factor it had on its rivals away from it. Likewise, Xiaomi’s services business — long seen as a potential money-making organ — has yet to kick in and show signs of delivering on its potential. Nonetheless, Xiaomi today claimed that it, not Huawei, was “the top smartphone manufacturer in China in terms of market share for the year of 2015.” Even though Huawei ‘won’ in terms of shipments, it’s quite possible Xiaomi topped its rival in China. For one thing, Huawei discloses shipments (to retailers) and Xiaomi deals in sales to end-users, both companies figures are global (Huawei made a big U.S. push last year) not China specific, and Xiaomi led Huawei in China according to analyst reports for the first half of 2015. But the rivalry is really a distraction from the main point: the development of Xiaomi’s business. At the end of the day, Xiaomi’s sales are still rising but it has reached a level of relative maturity and its closest rivals have upped their game too. The big question for 2016 is whether Xiaomi has enough in its locker to justify its colossal valuation, or whether it may to readjust its goals and expectations.
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NASA Adds Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser To ISS Supply Vehicles
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Emily Calandrelli
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Today, NASA the winners of the second round of commercial resupply services (CRS-2) contracts. The winners, Orbital ATK, SpaceX, and the newcomer Sierra Nevada Corporation, will be responsible for providing new cargo, disposing of unneeded cargo, and safely bringing back research samples from the International Space Station (ISS). While the financial details of the contracts will not be revealed until later, each company will be responsible for a minimum of six supply missions from 2019 through 2024. This is a big win for Sierra Nevada, which lost to Boeing and SpaceX in the 2014 NASA competition to send astronauts to the ISS. Among the CRS-2 vehicles, Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser stands out as the only winged vehicle that has the ability to land horizontally on a runway, similar to the Space Shuttle. Dream Chaser Vehicle / Image Courtesy of Sierra Nevada Corporation Boeing and Lockheed Martin also offered proposals to NASA for CRS-2 contracts but were not selected. Exact details of the selection process will be released once NASA has discussed reasons for selection with each of the companies in consideration. The first round of CRS contracts (CRS-1) was awarded back in 2008 to Orbital ATK for their Cygnus vehicle and to SpaceX for their Dragon vehicle. CRS-1 covers ISS resupply missions up until 2019. In CRS-1, SpaceX received a $1.6 billion contract for twelve Dragon missions, while Orbital received a $1.9 billion contract for eight Cygnus missions. Dragon Vehicle / Image Courtesy of SpaceX Kirk Shireman, manager of NASA’s ISS Program, said that the experience with CRS-1 helped NASA redefine the requirements for the CRS-2 selection process. The new contracts under CRS-2 will now impose both mass and volume requirements for the resupply vehicles, whereas CRS-1 only imposed volume requirements. Because of this, NASA would often “volume out” before maxing out on mass. With the new requirements, NASA intends to be more efficient with each launch. Each of the three companies offered different types of “standard missions” that they could provide to NASA. Most notably, SpaceX and Sierra Nevada have the ability to safely bring back cargo within three hours of leaving the ISS. Dream Chaser can return with a soft landing on a runway within three hours. SpaceX can return their Dragon capsule to land within three hours or drop it in the ocean within six hours. Historically it has taken over 24 hours to retrieve cargo from the ISS. Cutting that time frame to three hours will open up new possibilities for research on board the space station. This would include experiments that involve living organisms, certain microbiology and plant studies, or anything else that may be quickly affected by the change in gravity upon returning to the ground. Cygnus Vehicle / Image Courtesy of NASA Shireman also emphasized the importance of having three separate supply companies for NASA to select from for purposes of redundancy and flexibility. Redundancy is especially important considering two of the three companies experienced failures during resupply missions to the ISS in the last two years. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 exploded in June of 2015, and Orbital Sciences (before its merger with ATK) experienced its own launch failure on an ISS resupply mission in October 2014. “It’s important to continue the work on the ISS,” Shireman said today during NASA’s press conference. “These contracts will enable us to do that.”
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Uber Fined $7.6 Million In California
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Megan Rose Dickey
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The California Public Utilities Commission . Uber has 30 days to pay the penalty, otherwise, its operating license will be suspended in California. The CPUC also held the company in contempt and imposed an additional $1,000 fine. According to the CPUC, Uber failed to provide information “in a full and timely fashion” around the number and percentage of customers who requested accessible cars, and how often it could provide rides for them. It also failed to provide information around service information, like the number of rides passengers requested and drivers accepted within each zip code, as well as driver safety information. The purpose of providing that information is to help the CPUC ensure that Uber is providing services “in a non-discriminatory manner enabling equal access to all” and that the services are “being provided in a manner that promotes public safety.” “While we are disappointed by the decision, we look forward to making our case to the California Court of Appeals,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. “In the meantime, we will pay the fine and continue to work in good faith with the Commission.” Uber has since given the CPUC all of the data it has requested. Although Uber plans to pay the fine, the company disagrees on how the agency calculated the fine, which is what Uber plans to appeal. , Uber is worth $62.5 billion.
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Orbital ATK and SpaceX Receive Air Force Contracts For New Engine Development
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Nitish Kulkarni
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It’s been a good few days at Orbital ATK and SpaceX. Right on the heels of major contracts from NASA to resupply the International Space Station, both companies were the first recipients of the Air Force’s first ‘Other Transaction Agreement’ for rocket propulsion system development. Orbital ATK’s contract, worth $46.9 million, is for the development of new technologies to serve the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, a US Air Force space launch program. Previously reliant on the legacy Atlas V and Delta IV launch systems, the program was re-opened to competition late last year. In a yesterday, the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base stated that the contracts were part of a broader Air Force plan to move away from the controversial use of Russian-supplied RD-180 engines in the Atlas V. “Having two or more domestic, commercially viable launch providers that also meet national security space requirements is our end goal,” said Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, the Air Force’s Program Executive Officer for Space and SMC commander in the statement. The need for a replacement engine solution is currently very high, as tensions with Russia rise. Last year, Congress banned the use of the RD-180 engine for military launches as a response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Orbital ATK’s contract will fund the development of several propulsion system technologies, such as the Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM) 63XL strap-on booster, the Common Booster Segment main stage, and an extendable nozzle for Kent, WA-based Blue Origin’s BE-3U/EN engine. The GEM 63XL booster is a solid-fueled motor intended to replace the Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-60 booster, currently used on the Atlas V, and is intended to be used on the under-development ULA Vulcan launch system. Details on the Common Booster Segment aren’t known yet. The development of an extendable nozzle for the BE-3U/EN engine, which burns liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, represents a novel direction for Orbital ATK. Extendable nozzles, if able to change the rocket nozzle in flight, can improve efficiency of the engine over a larger envelope of altitude. Traditionally, de Laval nozzles (traditional bell nozzles) are optimized for a specific altitude and atmospheric pressure and operate sub-optimally for a large part of their flight. Altitude-compensating nozzles are an integral part of many new space launch vehicle concepts, and represented a large part of the development effort behind Lockheed Martin’s failed X-33 demonstrator. The OTA also included a $33.6 million contract to SpaceX for the development of the company’s new Raptor upper stage engine. The Raptor engine will move away from the traditional liquid oxygen and kerosene used in other SpaceX engines, instead using liquid methane as the fuel.
In addition to the large awards given to Orbital ATK and SpaceX, the Air Force is also considering offering further awards to other bidders in the EELV competition later on in the year. The Air Force funding certainly breathes a fresh life into rocket engine development in the United States. In recent times, the industry has become increasingly reliant on engines from Russia and the Ukraine. While cost-effective, they do come with their problems, as was seen most clearly when an Orbital Sciences Antares Rocket powered by adapted Soviet-Era Kuznetsov NK-33 engines
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Buzzy Social App Stolen Shuts Down Amidst “Concerns” From Users
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Drew Olanoff
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Amidst concerns over the gaming mechanics of a popular buzzy app called , its creators has decided to shut down. They tweeted out the news today. Basically, the app allowed you to “own” peers with Twitter accounts, whether they signed up for the service or not. It was meant to be a fun game, but rubbed many people the wrong way. We've decided to shut down the Stolen! app and service until further notice. Thank you for everyone's support. — i died (@getstolen) The app is no longer available in the App Store. We've heard everyone's concerns and have decided the best thing to do is to shut down. — i died (@getstolen) After , the team created an opt-out page that let people remove their profiles if they didn’t want to participate. It oddly required you to log into Twitter and authorize the app. The team then made sure that it only asked for read permissions, in case people were worried. That apparently wasn’t enough to appease those who felt uncomfortable with the whole thing. Concerned parties include US Representative Katherine Clark, who wrote a letter to both Twitter and Apple (Jack Dorsey and Tim Cook specifically) about Stolen and how it allows abusers to harass people: My letter 2 Twitter & Apple abt my concerns w/ "Stolen!" – an app that enables online abusers 2 “own” ppl’s profiles — Katherine Clark (@RepKClark) The Hey Inc. team had built something like this before, but for Facebook. It fizzled out. Some actually enjoyed the app, with Many Twitter employees participated in playing the game as well, with Twitter COO Adam Bain “owning” some of my colleagues at one point. Of course it was all to be fun. However, I decided to remove my own account. It just felt uncomfortable. In-app purchases gave you more currency to spend in the app, and you could “steal away” users if you had enough fake cash. I played around with it for a bit, but it was pretty much a time waster: I just stole for §54,116 on . — drew olanoff (@yoda) The company is directing people to iTunes for refunds: If you have done IAPs, refunds are available through iTunes. We appreciate all the support but shutting down the right thing to do right now — i died (@getstolen)
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A Guiding Light Into The Future Of Marketing
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Tom Goodwin
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The Consumer Electronics Show is a feast to the eyes, but an overload of the senses. Separating the profound from the gimmicks and the trends from the distractions is vital but hard. For me, there is one just one takeaway from CES this year: Everything around us is becoming digital. So while our industry cares about digital media, digital budgets and digital strategy, we need to retool and restructure for an age when the Internet is the connective tissue behind everything, where most media is digital and where new personalized experiences are possible. CES gets us talking about hardware when we should be focussing on the software. Forget the drones and ignore the 3D printers. Marketing won’t be changed from these developments for the foreseeable future, nor will robots, smart spoons, connected umbrellas or hoverboards. This year it became clear how slowly hardware is changing the world, but how rapidly software is changing everything around us from business models to consumer behavior to products. In fact the biggest change to CES this year wasn’t a TV or fridge but the introduction of Lyft and Uber. The event suffered from a lack of software integration. It was impossible to talk about the connected home without thinking of the software protocols or the user interfaces that hamper them. It was odd to talk about future TVs without thinking about over-the-top platforms. And to consider connected cars and not have Apple or Google there felt like a miss. The event also missed companies like Microsoft, Tencent and Facebook, in a world where AI from Cortana, Siri and Alexa, or instant messaging from WhatsApp, Viber and WeChat will probably affect business in incredible ways in 2016. I’m now more sure than ever that it’s the profound and rapid effects of software that we underestimate in our roles and the short-term changes to life from hardware that will disappoint. From CES we did see some glimpses of the future. There were developments that seemed to shine a light into this post digital world, and these give us new ways to think about marketing and business in the modern age. To take advantage of them we need to start putting digital thinking in the core of what we do, not keep it at the edges. From VR to AR a mere inches from our eyes to screens on our , to in our kitchens, smart screens in retail, smart TVs on walls, connected photo frames to screens, everything is becoming a cloud-connected screen on which to play videos. Our world will soon become a series of screens, projected images, paper-thin displays and — everything will become a media moment. We need to start considering marketing and advertising for this world. An environment where any vaguely flat surface is a place to shine bright, high-resolution videos: screens you can gesture control, voice control, interact with our phones on. Like the smartphone, these moments are incremental; we are growing the media pie and in more places than we ever expected. The future sees seemingly endless, personal, immersive media moments. Moments like virtual reality, to the intimacy of our wrist to the near endless marketing potential of an in-car environment where our attention could finally focus as cars drive themselves. Our personal device system will soon include a variety of opportunities we’ve not yet thought through. What should adverts look like in VR? On the fridge? What does the app store for the car look like? We need to consider this the new canvas for advertising. Each is an incremental media moment. Each has no real precedent. We need to reconsider advertising for this post-digital world where screens allow media to be bought programmatically, with dynamically formed creative. How can advertising build over screens? How do we interact with people in new ways? How do we lead people from awareness to purchase? How do we make any surface personal and buyable? What implications does this have on privacy? Forget big data. We now have something far more powerful — intimate data. From wearables to smart clothing to VR to even more data capture from smart spoons and smartphones, we’re about to enter a world where our heart rates, stress levels, food intake, exercise levels and intended actions are all in theory accessible by brands. If we can trade data for value, if we can be transparent about our intentions and gain trust, we should enter a new era of personal, helpful marketing. If the Holy Grail is getting the right message to the right person at the right time, we just found the best data set imaginable. We’re about to see VR and new platforms like Facebook and 360-degree video create a paradigm shift in how we see the possibilities of advertising. Already immersive social networks like have recently begun to showcase gyroscopically related images that create 3D experiences. And thanks to improved cameras and software, we’re about to see way more. For so long we’ve made lazy assumptions about what video and images are, but we need to assume that all display units can be more rich and immersive. We need to reimagine mobile ads based on what is now possible. Why can’t mobile ads not move with our wrists to appear 3D? Why can’t all images on screens move? Powerful new possibilities await. We’re seeing this post-digital age pan out in many places. From car companies becoming mobility providers that you buy access to and Teslas and phones that improve with over-the-air updates to fridges that order food for you and homes that make decisions for you, we’re on the edge of software becoming the connective tissue to all products. It’s this new world that I can’t wait for the creative brains of marketing to start creating for.
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Microsoft Drops Prices For Some Azure Instances By Up To 17%
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Frederic Lardinois
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Microsoft has long said it would AWS’s prices for compute, storage and bandwidth. Earlier this month, Amazon of some of its general purpose, compute- and memory-optimized EC2 machines. It doesn’t come as a major surprise then that Microsoft is now also for some of its virtual machines by between 10 and 17 percent. Microsoft’s price cuts focus on its updated D-series instances. Current for these so-called Dv2 compute-optimized instances start at just over $100 per month and top out at around $1,800 per month. Microsoft says these updated Dv2 machines use CPUs that are about 35 percent faster than its older v1 instances. For the time being, Microsoft isn’t changing the prices of its more general purpose A-series machines. These start at $13 per month for an instance with a single core and 0.75 GB of RAM. Microsoft’s prices for these machines are mostly still in line with Amazon’s. Google Cloud Platform still many of these prices, though, especially after you apply its . As Microsoft rightly notes, though, instance pricing should only be one reason to opt for a given cloud computing platform. It notes that its customers often opt for Azure because of its hybrid capabilities or because they want to utilize some of Azure’s Platform-as-a-Service offerings. The same, though, can probably also be said for Microsoft’s competitors. And with projects like , AWS is now also offering some service that do away with having to provision servers to begin with.
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Peach Gets An Unofficial Web And Android Version Called Nectarine
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Drew Olanoff
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If you haven’t tried out because you don’t have an iOS device, a developer has ginned up which is an unofficial Android and web version of the service. It’s limited as far as what you can do and how you can interact, but you can definitely view your stream (in flipped order), like posts and comment on posts. It’s pretty handy if you’re still using the service…ya know, since I’ve found to be pretty sticky, with its command-line interface or “Magic Words” an intriguing approach to social messaging. Peach’s creator, Dom Hoffman, jumped into Product Hunt to give it the “cool” nod, so that’s good. Maybe there’s potential for some fun creations to be made for the service down the road from third party developers. The official Android app is being worked on, the Peach team has said, but this will get you your non-iOS fix for now. ( )
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Dating App Zoosk Destroyed By Tinder, Drops 1/3 Of Staff
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Josh Constine
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Despite $61 million in funding, is getting swiped to death. A source told TechCrunch the dating startup is laying off a huge chunk of its staff, and now the company confirms over 40 people will be let go. That’s one-third of the whole company. The mobile era has not been kind to the old-school web dating app. Founded in 2007, Zoosk found success by building extensions for MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, and Bebo. It reached 40 million registered users and 12 million actives by 2009. Zoosk made money by selling subscriptions for premium features like extra ways to contact potential dates. That helped it attract from Bessemer Venture Partners, ATA, Crosslink, and more. But the rise of Tinder and Hinge on mobile sucked the wind out of Zoosk’s sails. It in 2014, and its founders stepped down. Former CFO Kelly Steckelberg became CEO, but despite cutting costs with a of the company in January 2015, Zoosk continued to sink. Now it’s laying off over 40 more team members. Steckelberg gave TechCrunch this statement: “In our continued mission to operate as a sustainable, profitable and innovative company, we’ve made the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our headcount. Regretfully, this move impacts many colleagues who have shared our vision and made valuable contributions to Zoosk. This reduction will increase operating efficiencies and streamline responsibilities as we prepare to bring several innovative product announcements to market in 2016. Our optimism for these developments that we expect to positively impact our growth does not diminish the reality of today’s news felt by our staff. We are committed to treating the impacted colleagues with respect and support during this transition.” that are having to lose employees to stay afloat as new funding gets harder to come by. Unless it can come up with some new mechanic to drag it back into relevance, Zoosk could be doomed. The only other hope is for some bigger dating company like Tinder parent IAC to buy it in a fire sale.
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Intel Beats The Street On Q4 Sales Of $14.9B, EPS Of $0.74
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Ingrid Lunden
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Intel — the world’s largest chipmaker — today after the close of trading. The company appeared to beat estimates with revenues of $14.9 billion and earnings per share of $0.74. Analysts on average were EPS of $0.63 on revenues of $14.8 billion. Despite the surprise boost especially on EPS, Wall Street is not happy with the numbers: the company’s stock is more than 5% in after-hours trading. One clue might be in the forecasts: Intel also posted a weak outlook for the quarter ahead, with GAAP revenues of only $14.0 billion, plus or minus $500 million, and a weaker gross margin of 58% and some other weak growth points. For comparison, today’s figures are level with EPS of $0.74 and only slightly above sales of $14.72 billion for the quarter a year ago. Intel’s full-year results — also posted today — were $55.4 billion. This is also down compared to a year ago, with operating income of $14.0 billion, net income of $11.4 billion and full-year EPS of $2.33. As PC sales globally, Intel has been in the midst of a transition to a new generation of products, which it says is bearing fruit. “Our results for the fourth quarter marked a strong finish to the year and were consistent with expectations,” said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO, in a statement. “Our 2015 results demonstrate that Intel is evolving and our strategy is working. This year, we’ll continue to drive growth by powering the infrastructure for an increasingly smart and connected world.” Intel said that it expected Q4 revenues of $14.8 billion, give or take $500 million. It also anticipated a restructuring charge of $25 million as it continues to transition to new waves of business. While Intel says it is making the transition to newer areas of business, it’s slow going. For the quarter, Intel’s business units break down like this: The Client Computing Group posted revenue of $8.8 billion, up 3% sequentially but down 1% year-over-year. The Data Center Group had revenue of $4.3 billion, up 4% sequentially and up 5% year-over-year. The Internet of Things Group had revenue only of $625 million, up 8% sequentially and up 6% year-over-year. Software and services operating segments had revenue of $543 million, down 2% sequentially and down 3% year-over-year. The Non-Volatile Memory Solution Group revenue was flat sequentially and up 10% year-over-year. The world’s biggest chipmaker is making a big bet on putting itself at the core of a number of other devices beyond the PC. During the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, the company opened the show with its , where its CEO showed off Intel’s many advances in building processors and other technology to work on anything but a PC — from wearables through to music and industrial equipment. Intel’s stand at the show — a huge installation with multiple hands-on demonstrations of the technology — continued to relay the message. You can see the PC trend playing out in Intel’s other activities. The company’s VC arm Intel Capital has been making investments in areas like , , and drone makers (sometimes those investments) — all areas that are strategic for the company as potential platforms for Intel’s products, from chips to imaging technology. But while products like RealSense — Intel’s powerful image and gesture recognition tech — give Intel a shot at diversifying into more areas down the line, the company is also continuing to double down on its core product. Earlier this month the company its biggest-ever acquisition, paying $16.7 billion to buy Altera, which also makes processors for a variety of products. For Intel, Altera may be a chipmaker, but also part of a new generation that could help Intel advance further into another emerging area of computing: connecting disparate objects in the Internet of Things. More to come.
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Foursquare Gets $45M And A New CEO To Build Out Enterprise Business
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Matthew Panzarino
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Foursquare has been a fantastic idea in search of a business plan for as long as it’s been alive. Efforts to monetize the platform via ads in its app (now apps) have not made the grade. Now, the last of the cool standalone Web 2.0 companies has a new hit revenue stream in its business and enterprise location services and it’s looking to capitalize on that with some restructuring and new funding. Foursquare has raised $45 million in equity financing. The Series E round is led by Union Square Ventures, with Morgan Stanley and previous investors including DFJ Growth, A16z and Spark Capital participating. In addition, co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley is moving to an executive chairman position and Jeff Glueck has been appointed the company’s new CEO. Glueck had been serving as COO and overseeing the enterprise businesses that have become the majority revenue stream for Foursquare. Chief Revenue Officer Steven Rosenblatt has been appointed Foursquare’s president and, Crowley says, Glueck’s ‘co-pilot’. Rosenblatt had previously been at Quattro and at Apple as a director of iAd. During a chat today with Crowley, Glueck and Rosenblatt, Crowley said that “[Foursquare] has become much more than just the two mobile apps.” He pointed to deals that Foursquare has signed with companies like Apple, Twitter and Pinterest to use its location data. These, Crowley says, have contributed to Foursquare’s biggest revenue year. Freshly minted CEO Glueck says that the “maturing” revenue lines are growing at ‘triple digit rates’. More specifically, its media businesses like Pinpoint — digital targeting with location info for businesses and ads — are 170 percent over 2014 revenue. Combined, the enterprise side of Foursquare, which includes its Places API customers and its newer Place Insights business, has seen 160 percent growth, says Glueck, though no hard revenue numbers are forthcoming. Glueck stressed the importance and uniqueness of Place Insights: “It’s the world’s largest opt-in foot traffic panel, with no check-ins required.” Place Insights has grown out of Foursquare’s new location system — called Pilgrim — which is able to place users at locations with confidence even if they don’t check in. This allows Foursquare to provide serendipitous recommendations to users of its consumer apps, but it also provides a wealth of foot traffic information that can be offered to the enterprise. Place Insights allows enterprise customers to access aggregate anonymous trends — which can tell them where they should locate their next physical business, where to move inventory and invest in growth and more. For a practical example, see Foursquare’s with its accurate prediction of iPhone retail sales based on historical sales traffic data recorded by Foursquare. [vimeo 140255052 w=500&h=280] Glueck says that the Pinpoint and enterprise revenue lines now make up the majority — over 50% — of Foursquare’s revenue. That’s up from 40% last year. Glueck is also careful to note that the financing round was oversubscribed. In advance of this round, TechCrunch and that it would be at a lower valuation. Foursquare declined to speak to valuation, but its previous round in 2013 put it at a reported $650 million valuation. In response to a question about what portion of the funding will go to developing the enterprise product, Glueck said “we will continue to launch innovations with our consumer brands. This is our foundation of the map of the world and our living breathing members that discover [it]. In , Crowley said: “I will be stepping up into the role of Executive Chairman. This new role will allow me to focus full-time on vision and innovation, long-term strategy and creating new consumer products. If this sounds more like my job from 2010 than my job from 2015… well, that’s the point. It frees up my time from operational and management duties and lets me get back to the “let’s just make something awesome that people love’ spirit that got us here. There are a lot of things I still want to build at Foursquare. And there are a lot of things that should exist in the world that only Foursquare can build—for both consumers and app developers. My new job is to make sure those things get built as projects, and that the best of them get pushed into the real world as products.” This is essentially a move back to a purely product role for Crowley, with the majority of the responsibility for revenue falling to Glueck and Rosenblatt. “This will allow us to meet the demand out there from our customers and potential customers. We want to accelerate growth of business as leading location intelligence company,” says Rosenblatt. Foursquare says it is hiring 30 new positions, mostly in enterprise media sales and engineering. “Making sure that everything we ship is something that we’re really proud of — making sure that the whimsy and magic of everything we built in 2010 is still in the product,” is how Crowley characterized his new role to me. “It’s Foursquare’s duty to build these new products — we can build things that no one can because of the technology that we have and it’s my responsibility to make sure that we build those.” The location confidence business that Foursquare has built up, both in support of other platforms’ location efforts and in the vein of an enterprise intelligence suite, provide it a unique opportunity. Those of us who have followed the company for some time have been waiting for it to utilize these differentiators efficiently — mostly to avoid it going away or for it to end up as a fire sale of data to something like Microsoft or Yahoo. If Foursquare is able to take this latest lease on life to make a booming business out of its Pilgrim data, then the consumer ‘cloud’ of users that get enough benefit out of it to continue contributing to that pool will finally be able to rest easier. Of course, there is another path, one which has been a danger for years. Under its new leadership, Foursquare could build a solid enterprise business that is just ripe enough for a company in need of its location intelligence — say Salesforce — to pluck for a choice sum when its runway runs out of asphalt and into the weeds. Now it has $45 million more to figure it out. The clock is ticking.
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Matt Burns
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