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As A Cohort of Bus Startups Emerge, Chariot Looks To Source New Routes Through Crowdfunding | Kim-Mai Cutler | 2,014 | 11 | 10 | After Uber and Lyft emerged to fundamentally challenge taxis and change on-demand transit, a wave of bus startups has cropped up to address group and scheduled transportation. , a bootstrapped San Francisco-based startup that got off the ground earlier this year with a line from the Marina to downtown, is taking a slightly novel approach to generating ideas for new routes. They’re . What’s on deck? A . If 120 riders pre-commit to the idea of this route and buy monthly passes upfront, the campaign will tilt and Chariot will launch the route. “We think this is a great way to take the risk off our table and get the community involved in putting together better commuting options for themselves,” said CEO Ali Vahabzadeh. The discounted monthly passes for the proposed route range from $96.75 to $116.10, which is lower than the typical $129 they would plan to charge. With Chariot’s existing two routes, the company is doing about 2,000 rides per week and has provided roughly 35,000 paid rides to date. Prices generally run about $4 a ride, but they can dip lower if consumers go for a full monthly pass. The company also just launched a mobile app last week that will let people check in to their rides or check to see where buses are in real-time. While it is definitely a politically sensitive time to be launching anything in San Francisco around buses, given the Google bus blockades from the last year, there is historical precedent in the city for a mix of both public and private solutions to transit. Many of the city’s older MUNI streetcar lines were , then were later purchased and absorbed into MUNI after the emergence of the private automobile challenged their financial viability. Then, , covering inter-city transit gaps that were later addressed by the regional BART system. Crowdfunding routes is an interesting strategy toward quickly generating profitable new routes, compared to the complex science and art of transit planning. The city’s process of adding or removing bus stops is a very lengthy, deliberative and often politically contentious one. Bus rapid transit routes, or BRT, for short would help speed MUNI buses through the city at a faster pace with specially designed stops and lanes. They in San Francisco, but they won’t be up and running even though they’re tried and true in Latin American cities like and Mexico City. There’s just a lot of opposition from drivers who want to preserve parking spots and traffic lanes. Then, while MUNI has stops every few blocks that slow lines in aggregate, it’s politically difficult to reconsider any of them. and walk the extra distance. The city has been working on a transit effectiveness project for six years that painstakingly collected data on where people get on and off MUNI, cost millions of dollars and made a series of recommendations that still have yet to be seen through. (If you want to read an epic explanatory piece about MUNI’s various issues, ) Some critics have raised worries that these bus startups, like Chariot and competitor Leap Transit, will cause the broader public to disinvest in the city’s municipal transit system. (Back in the 1970s, the city and voters backed a ballot initiative protecting MUNI on this very concern.) Vahabzadeh said, “I would say actually we’re taking a lot of the overflow. A lot of our customers are actually waiting three or four buses which are overcrowded. I think we’re actually bringing more commuters back into the transit-first fold as opposed to having them drive to work and congest the streets even more, or commute through Uber, Lyft or Sidecar.” He pointed out that Chariot’s daily ridership is a fraction of of a percent what MUNI does on a daily basis with . “We’ve got a long ways to go before that debate makes sense,” he said. (To be fair though, Chariot’s crowdfunding campaign does specifically lines for being too slow.) For the moment, it appears that San Francisco voters are actually very supportive of mass transit. They last week with 71.3 percent of the vote. It’s the first bond supporting MUNI that the city’s been able to pass . Voters simultaneously shot down backed by Sean Parker that would have preserved free parking. Furthermore, once BRT launches in the next few years, these city lines have dedicated lanes that other vehicles, including these private shuttles, shouldn’t be able to legally use if enforced. It could be an interesting mix. |
Google’s Chromebooks Rule Schools As IDC Pegs Them As Top Sellers In K-12 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 10 | Google’s Chrome OS may be a long-term sleeper hit thanks to a – IDC’s new figures for tablets and laptop sales in K-12 education finds that Chromebooks as a category constitute the best-selling device across the entire category in 2014. Chromebooks are probably succeeding in schools due to a few factors, including Google’s commitment to selling and distributing in these areas, and its institution of programs to help proliferate its Chrome OS notebooks. The company launched a program that offers a among higher ed institutions this fall, for instance, but Google has also targeted K-12 which special that offer big bulk discounts when purchased in volumes of 20 or more licenses at a time. Google also touts its easy device management capabilities when explaining why Chromebooks are a hit with school deployments; they don’t require extensive IT department support to manage, per the search giant. But the real key to the success of Chromebooks in the K-12 tablet and notebook market is almost certainly cost – with bulk discounts, the browser-focused computers are likely far more affordable than either traditional Windows notebooks or iPads, and with the growing prevalence of web-based apps and tools, including core productivity software like Microsoft Office, Chrome OS’s deficiencies vs. traditional desktop computing platforms become less pronounced every day. K-12 uptake is a good sign, but Google still has work to do in order to reinforce the idea that Chromebooks can follow students throughout their educational career, and into the working world. |
UpWest Labs Nurtures Promising Israeli Startups In Silicon Valley | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 11 | 10 | was founded in 2012 with a simple idea. Israel has tons of startup talent, but much of the funding is in the U.S. The founders decided to put the two together and bring a small group of promising Israeli entrepreneurs to the U.S. for four months to meet customers, partners and investors. Today marks the 8th graduating class. Today’s graduating group is comprised of 7 companies including , a big data platform for storing genetic information, , an online 3D design tool and , a cloud-based development environment. Co-founder Gil Ben-Artzy says in the first few classes it was evenly divided between consumer and enterprise ideas, but over time it’s shifted to the pointed this class has 6 enterprise products and just one aimed at consumers. UpWest deliberately keeps the classes small with only 6 or 7 teams participating. According to Ben-Artzy, the program has graduated 39 startups to-date (not counting today’s group) with 70 percent receiving at least some seed funding, a majority of which came from Silicon Valley investors. In fact, their graduates have received more than $50M in funding to-date. Among their biggest wins were Series A financing rounds of $12M for endpoint security firm and $10M for , and event planning service aimed at professional event planners. They also have three exits to their credit including , which was acquired by Gartner, , which was acquired by Priceline and , which was snagged by Google. Of course, not everyone who participates succeeds and of the 39 previous graduates, Ben-Artzy said that 7 flamed out without funding. Ben-Artzy explains that Israel has a very active startup scene, and they sort through hundreds of applications before selecting the group that comes to the U.S. for their program. He says, even though Israel is a very small country, it has a highly educated population and it’s not just formal education. The mandatory military service also contributes because Israelis get exposure to technology that most folks don’t get to see at such a young age, he pointed out. He says they started the company because they saw a problem. Many Israeli startups would come to the US after a couple of years and not have the connections or skills to get in touch with funders, partners and customers. As Ben-Artzy pointed out, it’s hard to come to the Silicon Valley cold and expect to get any major results on a trip that lasts a couple of weeks. They decided to start a program to nurture the most promising group of startups they could find and help them with all the logistics including housing, visas and making introductions to the right people. They give them $25,000 to help get settled for the time they are in the U.S. “We reduce friction and give them a boost,” Ben-Artzy said. They look for folks, not just with a good idea, but with a high degree of dedication and a willingness to learn and work hard. They also have to be willing to take negative feedback from customers and change the product accordingly. He says one of the reasons he believes they’ve had such a good success rate is that they keep it small and don’t try to do too much. What’s more, the model produces mentors from the graduate pool who can work with the newer classes, so the three founders aren’t stretched too thin. Ben-Artzy says they don’t want to simply shake hands with the graduates and leave them on their own. They want to be a resource for the long term and the mentors can help with that, especially as the program grows. “What energizes us is that this is a long process, not just a one-time thing,” he says. And so far, judging from their track record, it seems to be working. |
Uber Wants To Replace India’s Iconic Auto Rickshaws With Chauffeured Hatchbacks | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | , but it continues to ramp up its efforts in India — its second largest market — where it a low-cost service aimed at beating the country’s icon auto rickshaws. The company said Uber Go, its new service that includes small vehicles like the (image below) and , is now available in all ten cities that it services in the country. The company believes it is now in a position to challenge India’s near ubiquitous fleets of auto rickshaws for cheap travel. Uber is in a constant state of price reductions and offers across its markets in Asia as it aims to accelerate mainstream adoption of taxi booking services across the region. It’s no surprise, then, that it is giving all Uber Go passengers an immediate and ongoing 35 percent discount on their rides. An Uber Go journey has a $0.65 base rate, with a minimum fare of around $1.20 — the service is priced at $0.17 per kilometer or less than $0.02 per minute. Auto rickshaws aren’t universally priced, of course, but Uber claims it can beat them for many urban journeys. So exactly how cheap is ? Cheaper than a black and yellow for sure. Here’s a quick look at how we stack up: — Uber Mumbai (@Uber_Mumbai) Uber is usually limited to people who own a credit card, which accounts for a small minority in India, but now it has a — introduced in response to regulation — it has the reach to open up for cheaper rides. “There hasn’t been a smarter, cheaper and safer way to get around your city,” . The company added: Uber Go signifies a speedy, utilitarian and simple solution to get around quickly; without the need to have second thoughts about choosing it! It’s perfect for absolutely any kind of ride, especially the short hauls – think quick bank runs, short trips between meetings, jaunts to the mall and the movies; with Uber Go even the mundane daily commute to work can now be stress-free and relaxing. All this for a price lower than an auto-rickshaw. This is seriously aggressive pricing, which once again raises the question of just how much money Uber is hemorrhaging in markets like India, where demand for its services is still nascent. It is clearly slashing prices to help drum up awareness of its service, not to mention undercut the competition, and is almost certainly far from break-even in these markets. When we asked the company when the pricedrop will end and Uber Go costs will increase, a spokesperson dodged a direct response with the following statement: Uber’s technology makes for a very efficient marketplace. One where we bring down average ETAs and enable drivers to do more trips per hour they spend on the platform; this increased efficiency means drivers, make more money and allows us to provide cheaper prices to riders. More riders continue to use Uber, the longer we can sustain lower prices. Well, that clears that up then, or not. Beyond the dubious price drop, rolling out to ten cities in one go is also a large-scale operation that is doubtless resource-intensive and no easy feat to organize. But Uber is very much focused on taking upping the ante in India, where the anticipated growth in smartphone adoption is tipped to ignite demand for e-commerce and other mobile-centric services. Uber’s main rivals in India include Meru Networks and Ola. The latter is available in 19 cities in the country, and just scored — led by SoftBank — to expand. That money is all the more important because, as news like today shows, Uber is relying on its vast piles of investor money to cut its prices to levels that may be unsustainable for less-minted competitors. India is, nonetheless, becoming a major focus for the U.S. company, which covers more than 100 cities worldwide. In addition to its wallet payment solution, it also to help drivers buy their vehicles outright. Many, , are asking major questions about the ethics and morality of Uber right now, but it is clear that the company’s global focus is to “Uber On” as usual. |
Mattel Pulls Sexist Barbie Book “I Can Be A Computer Engineer” Off Amazon | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | The makers of Barbie seem to apologize A LOT for underestimating young women. This time the Internet’s buzzing over a pretty cringe-worthy Barbie book, “I Can Be A Computer Engineer,” published out of Random House. Barbie is featured in the book as a stylishly pink-clad computer engineer that somehow breaks everything and doesn’t know how to code. She does draw puppies though. This lady hacker needs the help of two dudes named Steve and Brian to do the real programming work cuz she’s just, “creating design ideas.” Ha ha ha…what? In another section, a supposedly intelligent engineer Barbie (who should be familiar enough with technology not to do this) puts her flash drive into Skipper’s laptop and accidentally infects it with a virus. Skipper didn’t back up her homework and loses all her files and music, too. Silly Barbie. The two then get into a pillow fight. A pillow fight! Of course. Because women actually do that. Don’t worry, Steve and Brian are here to save everything. All the outrage over this book caught Mattel’s attention. It’s . A blogger who writes for Disney, Pamela Ribon “I Can Be A Computer Engineer,” after picking it up at a friend’s house and reading horrific page after page. The traffic from her blog was so intense that she last night. The social blew up and people took to the Twitters to let Mattel know what a lady hacker can accomplish: Dear , The boys are the ones who ask me for help. via — Pam-Marie Gx (@PamMarieGx) Barbie's good at many things but her first love is product. — Paul Ford (@ftrain) . Who needs Computer Engineer Barbie? JEM HAS BEEN CODING SINCE 1985. — Kelaine Conochan (@Kelaine) Love, love that last one about Jem from . She’s a rockstar and a programmer. Mattel has since apologized for this completely sexist garbage on , promising it won’t do it again: The portrayal of Barbie in this specific story doesn’t reflect the Brand’s vision for what Barbie stands for. We believe girls should be empowered to understand that anything is possible and believe they live in a world without limits. We apologize that this book didn’t reflect that belief. All Barbie titles moving forward will be written to inspire girl’s imaginations and portray an empowered Barbie character. This is not the first time in Barbie’s more than half a century history something like this has happened. I clearly remember when Barbie held an aversion to math. Mattel released a back in 1992. The chattery doll would say things like, “Math class is tough,” and “I love shopping” right after, implying young girls would be better off skipping homework not suited for them.
Mattel offered to recall the 1.5 percent of all dolls programmed to say the phrase and promised to support girls in school from now on. This may have been the inspiration for Lisa Simpson’s rant on Malibu Stacy in the fourteenth episode of ‘ . Lisa challenges the Malibu Stacy creators to make a less sexist doll. Mattel also came up with a in 2009, complete with tramp stamp. Barbie’s features – slim hips, tiny waist, permanently arched feet, giant boobs that would topple any life sized woman – have been widely criticized as causing little girls to have unrealistic body image issues. There was even a Barbie that came with a weight loss book in the late 60’s. The book gave suggestions like, “Don’t eat.” Barbie’s bathroom scale from 1965 is permanently set to 110 pounds. There are several Barbie-like dolls out there. Nicolay Lamm created a successfully crowdfunded Kicstarter campaign last year to make the , a proportionally realistic 12″ figure you can add freckles, zits and glasses to. Tag line, “Average is beautiful.” He’s since added clothes and accessories for this normal lady. It does appear Barbie has made some strides over the years. Mattel widened her waist in 2000 and has since given her dozens of different careers including doctor, lawyer and astronaut. The computer science book was published in 2010. Mattel says it has since “reworked” it. Hope it’s as good as blogger . Those who believe in supporting the equal treatment of young women can do anything, including get Mattel to think about its impact, apologize, recall products and (hopefully) change direction. Right, Barbie? |
Developers In China Can Now Make Money Via Google Play Apps (But Not In China) | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | that developers based in China can now make money from apps listed on the Google Play Store. The update covers 130 international markets but not China itself, however. Nonetheless, the move will give Chinese developers exposure to the hundreds of millions of Android devices on the planet, opening up opportunities to make money via in-app purchases or subscriptions within free applications, and by selling paid-for apps too. Google said that China-based developers can receive payment direct to Chinese bank accounts, although the revenue will be wired across in US dollars. As it stands, Android developers in China can make money from their apps, but they need to use third-party app stores (which are popular in China since Google’s app store is not pre-loaded on Android devices in China), or an overseas-registered Google developer account. This move will open things up a lot more. As and have both found with sales efforts in China, the country’s tech community has an interest in leveraging large global networks to reach customers and users overseas, even for services that are blocked or unavailable in Mainland China. Today’s news follows (paywalled) which claims that Google executives are in discussions with potential partners and the Chinese government with a view to launching Google Play services in Mainland China. Google declined to comment when we asked about the allegations, but any such move would represent a remarkable about turn for the company, which relocated its search engine and other services outside of the country in 2010. China is the world’s largest smartphone market based on shipment volumes, which means Google is losing out on potential revenue from millions of smartphones and tablets that don’t have access to its services and app store. Even if it did make a spectacular late arrival, China’s smartphone ecosystem is highly evolved and that means plenty of competition. |
Motorola’s New $25 Dongle Helps You Find Your Lost Keys, Unlocks Your Phone | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | I don’t know what’s going on at Motorola lately, but I dig it. Between that looks like something straight out of and making temporary tattoos that , they’ve been getting all sorts of experimental as of late. Their latest random one-off project: a key fob that let you use your keys to find your phone, and vice versa. Called the Motorola Keylink, it’s a $25 Bluetooth-enabled dongle that you strap on to your keys. Lose your phone? Squeeze the Keylink, and it’ll make your iOS or Android phone ring from up to 100 feet away. Lose your keys? Open the Motorola Connect app, tap a button, and your keys will start singing. Lose both? YOU’RE DOOMED. Or, at least, you’ll have to find your stuff like a schmuck the good ol’ fashioned way: with your eyes and an hour of wandering aimlessly around your house while getting more and more frustrated before realizing your keys are in the cereal cabinet and there’s a box of cereal sitting where your keys usually go. Motorola says the user-replaceable coin cell battery should last up to a year, and that the device is splash-resistant (though not waterproof). As an added bonus, the key fob can be set up to automatically unlock your phone (disabling the PIN/swipe gesture/etc.) whenever your handset and your keys are near each other. Seems like a bit of a security concern if you ever get mugged. (And, for what it’s worth pretty much Bluetooth device …) Keylink is on sale for $25 through Moto’s site Aaaaand it’s sold out. |
TC Droidcast Episode 27: Nexus 6 Is Too Big And Nokia N1 Is Too iPad | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | This week on the Droidcast, it’s Darrell Etherington, Greg Kumparak, and Engadget’s Chris Velazco, and we’re talking in more detail about the Nexus 6 now that the full reviews are out. Bottom line: It’s big. We also tackle Nokia’s return to hardware with an , and . Next week, we’ll have more to talk about in terms of the first devices beyond the Nexus program to get a taste of Lollipop, including the M7 and M8 HTC One GPE smartphones and the Nvidia Shield Tablet.
and check out past episodes . Download it directly here: |
Tech Reacts To The Demise Of Partial NSA Reform In The Senate | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | The in the current Congress isn’t too popular with the technology community. The demise of the USA FREEDOM Act — a half-measure at best — in the Senate is another loss for the technology industry, which saw many of its leading companies repeatedly . The FREEDOM Act was aimed at ending the NSA’s collection of American’s telephone metadata, a controversial program that the Snowden leaks uncovered. The Act was no panacea, but it did appear to be an achievable piece of legislation. The House passed a version of the bill that was mocked after it was neutered before passage. The Senate’s variant was stiffer. It was called a first step. Even that couldn’t pass. Reaction by tech industry groups to the 58-42 has been negative. The group , which counts Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook as members released a saying that it was “disappointed in the Senate procedural vote.” The influential Business Software Alliance a “missed opportunity.” The big tech companies appear content to speak through groups that they are members of, sparing them the need to directly criticize member of Congress that, in many cases, are about to take the majority position in the upper chamber. Companies that have strong cloud focuses are particularly unhappy with the situation. , the CEO of Box told TechCrunch that the vote was “extremely disappointing.” What is needed, according to the executive, is “any sign of progress that shows that the Senate and the government in general understand the gravity of the surveillance situation.” He continued, stating that the “United States government failing to lead is leading to other governments thinking about Internet management.” In the wake of the NSA revelations, there have been fears that the Internet could split into regional pieces, with different rules and carving the larger Web into splinters. That wouldn’t be so good for companies that want to sell their services around the world. , co-founder and CEO of Egnyte, a company that provides cloud collaboration services to enterprises told TechCrunch that the failure of the FREEDOM Act sent “very strong message” to Americans “about our right to privacy.” He went to state that by “continuing to allow NSA surveillance, there is a new level of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt)” in the market that “is inhibiting [the technology industry] from progressive innovation.” Jain also said that if privacy was better protected from government intrusion through legislative action, companies in tech could “reallocate valuable resources that have been put into NSA countermeasures.” , the CEO of HighQ, another company in the enterprise collaboration space, told TechCrunch that the failure of that Act implied that “U.S. policy on collecting individuals and corporations private information isn’t likely to change anytime soon.” He noted that United States-based companies will lose some business, as “corporations and governments will seek to contract with non-U.S. technology based companies that do not use U.S. domiciled data centers to escape the long reach of the Patriot Act.” Not everyone is worried, however. I spoke to a number of venture capitalists this morning, and the tone of response was that the vote wouldn’t change much in the short term. Given that the failure of the FREEDOM Act is a continuance of the status quo, this is perhaps not too surprising. But while the capital folks might not be looking to shake up their investment strategies, it doesn’t mean that they enjoy the government’s position, or actions. , a partner at Storm Ventures told TechCrunch that “the current environment is creating a ‘tax’ on many start-ups, especially [business-to-business] ones, where customers outside the U.S. are deeply concerned about trusting their data to U.S. web companies.” That impact, he argued is “hard to see in the numbers,” given “the explosive growth of so many companies the past” two years. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, certainly, or that it might not become an increasing point of friction in the future. Not everyone is downcast, however. Several important voices in the privacy debate have been critical of the FREEDOM Act, and have thus been less perturbed over its defeat. Given that, there is perhaps some hope to the point that if the Act had passed, it could have blocked better reform in the next year, or Congress. and are the two must-reads here. Technology companies with more than $1 trillion in market cap — more — threw their weight behind a bill that many called too small, and it failed. When you additionally take into account the fact that the party that was most in opposition to the Act in the Senate will take up the majority in that chamber next year, the picture becomes a bit more dim. Never say never, but for this year here’s where we ended. It’s been 531 days . |
Senator Al Franken Asks Uber’s CEO Tough Questions On User Privacy | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Senator Al Franken, Chairman of the Subcommittee On Privacy, Technology, and the Law, has posted a public letter to CEO Travis Kalanick in which he addresses many of the claims made over the past few days that the company has consistently compromised user privacy as a matter of course. “I am especially troubled because there appears to be evidence of practices inconsistent with the policy [Uber spokesperson] Ms. Hourajian articulated. It has been reported that a tool known as ‘God view’ is ‘widely available to most Uber corporate employees’ and allows employees to track the location of Uber customers who have requested car service. In at least one incident, a corporate employee reportedly admitted to using the tool to track a journalist. The journalist’s permission had not been requested, and the circumstances of the tracking do not suggest any legitimate business purpose. Indeed, it appears that on prior occasions your company has condoned use of customers’ data for questionable purposes,” wrote Senator Franken. Franken went on to ask eight questions, which will probably be answered on the Senate floor in the coming weeks. “Your policies suggest that customers’ personal information and usage information, including geolocation data, is maintained indefinitely — indeed even after an account is terminated. Why? What limits are you considering imposing? In particular, when an account is terminated, why isn’t this information deleted as soon as pending chmges or other transactional disputes are resolved?” he asked. “Where in your privacy policy do you address the ‘limited set of legitimate business uses’ that may justify employees’ access to riders’ and drivers’ data, including sensitive geolocation data?” The letter is a reaction to a number of stories that surfaced recently regarding as well as accusations that a so-called “God View” had been used to track users (among them journalists) as they used the service. The company stated that it would only look at the data it collected for . The company addressed these concerns in a post: Silicon valley playing fast and loose with data is nothing new but coupled with a trove of data is dangerous. We users trust services like Uber because they are at once familiar and also terribly high tech. When a company abuses that trust, everyone loses. While a draconian (and EU-like) policy isn’t imperative, common sense and a dedication to the humanity and privacy of customers certainly is.
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Researchers Train Computers To Make Up Magic Tricks | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic but what if the technology actually creates magic? A group of researchers at the Queen Mary University of London have trained a computer to create magic tricks using puzzle pieces and cards that are reproducible by humans. This isn’t HAL sawing a woman in half, however. The tricks are very basic mathematical problems – reorganizing a puzzle so certain images or parts seem to disappear, for example – but they allow for the simulation of creativity on the computer’s part. Another trick, a mind-reading card illusion, allows a magician to reorganize a deck and then, using “a few seemingly innocuous pieces of information from the audience,” pull certain cards out of the deck to amaze the audience. Again, this isn’t David Copperfield qualuty stuff. In fact it’s more like Robocop learning to tell a joke by offering up permutations of “Why did the chicken cross the road?” until someone laughs. From the : The mind reading card trick involves arranging a deck of playing cards in a specific way then, based on a few seemingly innocuous pieces of information from the audience, identifying a card that has been seen selected from the deck and using an Android app to reveal the card on a mobile phone screen. The computer was used to arrange the decks in such a way that a specific card could be identified with the least amount of information possible. The program identified arrangements for the deck that on average required one fewer question to be asked before the card was found than with the traditional method. The app simply avoids the magician having to remember the order of the cards. You can actually the mind-reading trick by for Android. “Computer intelligence can process much larger amounts of information and run through all the possible outcomes in a way that is almost impossible for a person to do on their own. So while, a member of the audience might have seen a variation on this trick before, the AI can now use psychological and mathematical principles to create lots of different versions and keep audiences guessing,” said co-creator Howard Williams. |
How China Is Disrupting The Mobile And CE Markets | Noah Herschman | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Anyone in the tech industry has heard of and by now. And if you have been in a media black hole, here is a quick education on these Chinese smartphone companies: Xiaomi has surpassed both Apple and Samsung as the No. 1 smartphone in China, and OnePlus this month announced U.S. pre-orders for its ultra-low-cost, high-quality smartphone OnePlus One, which is winning rave reviews. But there are thousands more phones, tablets, smartwatches, wearables and accessories coming from China into the U.S. market. Unbranded, unlocked and built by the same factories that are making the world’s top mobile and consumer electronics devices, these devices provide top-notch manufacturing and design for a fraction of the cost of global brands we’re familiar with. And it’s not just electronics. The industry is seeing strong and increasing sales of direct product imports across health and beauty, weddings and events, fashion/apparel and even automotive. Two of the highest-volume products imported will definitely surprise you: hair and wedding dresses. That’s right, there is a huge market for human hair, and for women with extensions and weaves, and it’s expensive to upkeep. But not when you source directly from China. Custom-fitted wedding dresses from China will set brides back a few hundred dollars, not thousands. The commonality again is pricing and affordability, while still buying quality products. So why should big brands be worried? The world’s top brands already source their products from China. It is the largest exporting nation to the tune of . We’ve created a manufacturing mecca in China – driving world-class facilities and manufacturing expertise. No other nation has the breadth of experience and facilities to build the volume and quality of products driven out of China today. Consumers are already realizing they don’t need to spend premium dollars for branded goods, and these cost-conscious consumers now have options. OnePlus is offering its 64 GB unlocked OnePlus One phone, with a 5.5” screen, 13 MP Sony Exmor camera and 5 MP front camera for just $349. Compare that to $849 for Apple’s iPhone 6 Plus equivalent. Currently, Xiaomi does not sell into the U.S. market, and OnePlus is taking preorders – but with direct access to China goods via cross-border e-commerce channels, U.S. consumers and small businesses are now sourcing products directly from China, with no markups, no marketing overhead, no middlemen. Right now, any U.S. consumer or SMB can source essentially any product they can imagine direct from Chinese manufacturers with fast and reliable shipping through e-commerce sites. Is the average consumer today aware of cross-border e-commerce options? No, not yet. But as Chinese brands continue to become more savvy in their marketing, and innovative in their design and feature offerings, cross-border trade will continue to allow them to gain mind and market share with consumers and small businesses. In the meantime, domestic distributors and wholesalers are getting squeezed out as SMBs are directly sourcing bulk Chinese electronics to stock in their U.S. storefronts nationwide. Armed with quality electronics for a fraction of the price, the little guys can offer unique products and price points to compete with big-box and big brands. |
Square Register, Sans Payments And Hardware, Now Works Globally On Android And iOS | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Last week, when started pre-orders for to upgrade its older mag-stripe readers, we noted that it seemed only a matter of time before the company would finally turn on more international services, where the newer chip-based system reigns supreme. Now it looks like that’s just what Square has quietly started to do. Updated apps in the and app stores — part of the company’s bigger solution that lets merchants turn their iOS or Android smartphones and tablets into payment processing devices — note that the point-of-sale app supports 130 currencies and “support for worldwide use of Register, even in countries without integrated Square processing.” But it’s still babysteps for the company. While the Square Register app has now been turned on internationally, the hardware, and payment processing, have yet to arrive. “If you are in the U.S., you can also take payments with a Square Reader or Square Stand,” the company notes in the app description. Sources tell us that Square has been in talks with merchant acquirers and others in the payment processing chain for at least six months now in Europe. What the company could be doing, therefore, is testing the waters to see where Register is picking up usage and how it’s being used, as well as start to build up a base of merchants who it can then eventually convert over to payment services. Square Register is Square’s virtual component to its payment business. It lets users keep track of sales and inventory, manage items, and view analytics about a business, as well as manage an online storefront Square offers you free when you become a customer. Before now, Square, founded in 2009, only had services live in the U.S., (October 2012) and (May 2013). And as such, Square Register apps did not appear in app stores outside of the the U.S., Canada and Japan. I have been able to register for Register (!) under a UK address, with a pop-up menu listing the 129 other territories and languages now online. It reconfirms also what the app says: so far no card processing possibilities. “Square does not currently offer card processing in your country, but we will let you know if it becomes available.” As we noted last week, Square’s payment hardware and payment services are in a state of flux right now. It has now started pre-orders for new chip-based devices, which will be shipping early next year. For now, it looks like these devices — which operate on the EMV standard (jointly developed by Europay, Visa and Mastercard) and scan a chip embedded in the card for the duration of the transaction process — will . (EMV was built to allow for one of the two options.) This could become problematic: At one point , the mobile-based payment services based out of Sweden that competes with Square, found itself because chip-and-signature is considered more liable for fraud than the chip-and-PIN combination. That leads me (and observers) to suspect that Square may, in fact, include PIN-based functionality too sooner rather than later. This could come in the form of an updated or separate piece of hardware. Square will be coming into the mobile payments game in markets like Europe after several would-be competitors have launched. Other companies that offer mobile-based, dongle-based point-of-sale services in Europe include PayPal’s Here, Rocket Internet’s Payleven, Orderbird (backed by Mastercard and PayPal), SumUp (backed by Groupon), and others. iZettle, which this week expanded its European footprint to , has also made some inroads into Latin America in partnership with investor Santander. Jacob de Geer, iZettle’s CEO, tells me that the shifts in the U.S. market that are seeing a move to the EMV system are creating an opportunity for it to look at entering North America as well. By and large, however, in regions like Asia (excluding China) or Latin America, where smartphone adoption is growing fast compared to more saturated and mature markets, the number of companies offering such services are still few and far between. Yet Square’s expansion also comes at a time when there is still a lot of room for growth in general, with no single mobile payment service as-yet managing to ignite and comprehensively swing a critical mass of merchants to take up the services. (The latter state of affairs is what Apple, a very recent mover into payments with Apple Pay, also hopes to tap into. Square in the future.) It’s not a surprise to see Square finally making a move to grow outside the U.S. for another reason. The company has raised , but with its business model based around getting a very small cut on each transaction, it needs to gain more critical mass to improve its returns. It’s not clear what it’s current growth rate is in the U.S. but it’s notable that earlier this year the company apparently . Why? Problems with its revenue run rate, according to reports, which hasn’t justified Square’s valuation. That valuation was $5 billion at the time of that story getting reported in February 2014. A source close estimates it is now closer to $6 billion. This puts the company under more pressure for an exit: either to go public or get sold (reports of the latter have been denied by the company; accurate or not, we keep hearing names). In either case, a larger international component to its business (beyond Canada and Japan) will be essential. The margins on the product are relatively thin. Square only lists fees for transactions in the U.S. and Canada on the app in Google Play. The company takes a flat commission of 2.75% per swipe for Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express cards. This is likely to be repeated in other markets, as it is similar to the commissions that other services have been taking. Square says payments are deposited into a merchant’s bank account in 1-2 business days. Part of that has been around how Square spread its products and marketed itself. Square first picked up stream on its U.S. home turf by shipping dongles free of charge to small businesses. The carrot was a service that was portable and easy to implement, aimed at merchants who were either already paying high fees for more traditional payment card point-of-sale solutions, or simply only taking cash. With the new devices, Square will be introducing fees for the hardware, and potential way of improving its margins on the service. for the readers start at $29 for the dongles that plug into handsets or iPads, and $39 for a less portable table-top version that looks a bit more like a traditional card reader. We have reached out to Square to get more details and will update as we learn more. : “We don’t have anything to share at this time,” a Square spokesperson says. : Corrected to note that Square has so far only opened pre-orders for EMV devices that work with chip-and-signature, not chip-and-PIN, authentication. (H/T IDC payments analyst ) |
Salesforce Slips On Weak Guidance, Despite Beating On Both Revenue And Profit In Its FQ3 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | In its fiscal 2015 third quarter, Salesforce revenue of $1.383 billion, non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.14, a GAAP net loss of $38.92 million, and a GAAP loss per share of $0.06. Analysts had $0.13 in adjusted profit on revenue of $1.371 billion. The percentage of its revenue that came from recurring, subscription sources — a key metric for any SaaS business — totaled 93 percent for the firm, unchanged from the year-ago quarter. The company’s GAAP losses were down steeply year-over-year, when the company lost $124.434 million, or $0.21 per share. For the period, Salesforce’s total revenue rose 29 percent compared to its year-ago quarter. For its current fiscal fourth quarter, Salesforce expects revenue of $1.436 billion to $1.441 billion. Those figures would push the company’s revenue up between 25 and 26 percent on a year-over-year basis. Salesforce expects its revenue growth to slip further in its rapidly-approaching fiscal 2016, during which it expects to generate top line of $6.45 billion to $6.50 billion, which according to the firm will represent growth of around 20 to 21 percent compared to the preceding fiscal year. That Salesforce is seeing slowing percentage growth is not surprising. The law of large numbers drags harder every time you increase your revenue compared to a prior-year quarter. Salesforce’s predicted full-year 20 to 21 percent growth doesn’t appear to have greatly enthused investors — its shares are off after-hours, after all — but I don’t think that the number is too soft either. Analysts had expected a few hundred million more for its fiscal 2016. The company had cash and equivalents of $1.83 billion at the end of its fiscal third quarter. Salesforce has been extremely busy this quarter making a flurry of announcements around their mega Dreamforce user conference. The big news was . In addition, Salesforce announced that they were extending the partnership with Microsoft announced last Spring and there was a major overhaul and rebranding of the mobile app development program, which is now called Salesforce 1 Lightning. They also . |
Nest’s CEO Calls Its Tech The “Conscious Home” Because “It’s Not Smarter Than You” | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | The leader of the “smart home” industry doesn’t want to call it that any more. Nest CEO says his company uses the term “Conscious Home” because its connected thermostat and smoke alarm create a two-way relationship with users where both help and teach each other. “We call it the conscious home. Smart is overused. It’s not smarter than you” he told interviewer Om Malik on stage at the in San Francisco. That more touchy-feely terminology relates to Nest’s respect for customers who bring its technologies inside their home. “We are only invited into a house, just like a house guest” Fadell explained “We have to earn that trust just like any other guest.” Malik kicked off the talk by asking about . “The courtship took a long time. We started discussing it [in] August of last year, and the deal didn’t close until February” Fadell recounted. “There were many, many conversations about things other than finances”, including culture, organization, resources, and why the companies would be valuable to each other. One big advantage of getting acquired by one of the world’s richest companies has been the extra marketing budget. Nest just began running (you can see a hilarious one below), and also buys billboards and more to introduce people to its products. Fadell noted Nest could have taken more venture capital instead of the acquisition, saying “We had a lot of cash on the table, and could have gone the investment route.” [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxOukh_Ma6o] Fadell was cagey about just what product Nest would build next. I’m betting it has something to do with locks and security. But Fadell did note Nest was assessing opportunities around sleep. However, he wants to wait until current products demonstrate they actually improve people’s slumber before Nest invades dreamland. |
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Yahoo Will Soon Become The Default Search Engine In Firefox | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Starting in December, Firefox in the United States on mobile and desktop. As a part of this five-year deal, Yahoo will also launch for Firefox users in the U.S., which should go live at the same time Firefox makes the switch away from Google. The new search experience will feature “a clean, modern and immersive design that reflects input from the Mozilla team.” Here is what that will look like: In Russia, Mozilla will use Yandex Search and in China, it will use Baidu as the default. Google, DuckDuckGo and a number of other local search engines will remain as built-in alternatives. The has long made through its search partnership with Google, which has always been the default in Firefox. Indeed, in 2012 — the last year we have data from — 88% of Mozilla’s income came from Google. That contract with Google was set to expire this year, though, and it look like either Yahoo made an offer Mozilla couldn’t refuse or Google decided to walk away from the deal. “Google has been the Firefox global search default since 2004. Our agreement came up for renewal this year, and we took this as an opportunity to review our competitive strategy and explore our options,” said Chris Beard, Mozilla’s CEO in a statement today. “We are excited to partner with Yahoo to bring a new, re-imagined Yahoo search experience to Firefox users in the U.S. featuring the best of the Web, and to explore new innovative search and content experiences together.” Likewise, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer today noted that she believes that “search is an area of investment, opportunity and growth for us. This partnership helps to expand our reach in search and also gives us an opportunity to work closely with Mozilla to find ways to innovate more broadly in search, communications, and digital content.” Yahoo Search, in its current form, is powered by Microsoft Bing, of course, though the company heavily modifies the results it gets from Microsoft, both in terms of layout and ranking. There have long been rumors that Yahoo could end this deal and bring back its own search engine, but that seems unlikely given the investment the company would have to make after it dismantled its old search engine infrastructure. This partnership with Firefox will surely give Yahoo — and Microsoft — a stronger presence in the search market, however. While Firefox usage has declined over the last few years, it still accounts for at least 15% of the U.S. browser market. Yahoo currently owns of the U.S. search engine market. Switching the default back to Google only takes a few seconds, but most users will likely stick with the default. |
Logitech’s New AnyAngle iPad Case Gives It A Surface-Style Kickstand | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Logitech is slowly but surely turning the iPad into a Microsoft Surface – which is good news for those who envy some of the Windows device’s productivity features, but not its software or overall form factor. The new feels a lot like the keyboard included in the Microsoft Type Cover, and now there’s a stand/case called the that essentially mimics the Surface’s variable inclination kickstand. The AnyAngle will provide protection to your iPad, with a front cover flap, full coverage of sides and edges, and a back panel with a see-through window so that you can enjoy your huge expanse of gold, silver or space gray even with the case on. The iPad Air 2 fits in it snugly, and yet is also easy to remove and insert whenever you want. Passthrough buttons give you access to all switches, and openings let you charge, take pics and get sound from the speakers. [gallery ids="1085681,1085680,1085679,1085678,1085677,1085676"] AnyAngle’s multi-material front cover provides a nice bit of visual flair, and a folio-style look that should suit office use, and the key feature here is the folding kickstand that’s clearly aimed at productivity nuts. You can adjust it to prop up your iPad at an analog range of different stances, with the motion of the stand combined with flipping your gadget altogether. AnyAngle’s prop powers make it a formidable companion for frequent travelers, and for those wanting to type with the Keys-To-Go, Apple’s own Wireless Keyboard or any other BT companion input device that doesn’t come bundled in a case of its own. It’s nice having the option to either use it with or without keys, too. The AnyAngle still feels like it adds a decent amount of bulk to the iPad Air 2, however, and it costs $59.99 on its own. It’s cheaper than a keyboard case if you just want a case, and no keyboard, or if you just want a keyboard, it’s cheaper to get the Keys-To-Go than a keyboard case – but if you want both all the time, a keyboard case is a better option. If you’d rather have choice, or just one or the other, Logitech’s new lineup has you covered. |
Microsoft Updates How The Surface Pro 3 Handles Wi-Fi | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Microsoft released a set of updates for its Surface Pro 3 tablet today, including fixes for the tablet-hybrid’s Wi-Fi connectivity, a part of the device’s performance that some have flagged as problematic. I’ve had some Wi-Fi issues with my loaner Surface Pro 3, but haven’t been sure if they stem from Windows 10’s nascency, or the device itself. Paul Thurrott “ongoing issues many users have with Wi-Fi on Surface Pro 3” in a post today on the patches, implying that there is some level of market discontent that could be solved with the new code. Here’s Microsoft’s , in an entry released before the code itself shipped: Enables better throughput after waking from sleep and connecting to an 802.11AC network. Ensures Infra scan list is not empty while connected to a wireless display adapter. Resolves an issue connecting to Cisco 1242 access points. Ensures device reconnects properly to a hidden SSID using a 5Ghz DFS channel after waking from sleep. Adds customer-requested functionality to prefer 5Ghz connections when both a 2.4ghz and 5ghz connection are present with the same SSID. Later today I’ll update my Pro 3 and see if it solves the intermittent issues I’ve been having. As an aside, I don’t meant to sound overly negative. Wi-Fi has been the only sticking point I’ve had with Windows 10 and the Pro 3 thus far in using them together. Well, aside from Windows 10 occasionally doing some thing silly, but, again, it’s preview code, so you have to take quirks in stride. Microsoft’s Surface project , and inched towards profitability. The company in the current period. |
YouTube Adds Netflix Content Chief And Ad Exchange Architect To VP Ranks | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | YouTube is continuing the spate of recent executive-level hires begun under with two new additions to the top-level team today, according to sources familiar with the matter and confirmed by YouTube. The new hires include Netflix VP of Content Acquisition Kelly Merryman, who takes on the VP of Content Partnerships role at YouTube; and Eyal Manor, who was most recently in charge of Display Infrastructure and Mobile at YouTube Engineering, and who spearheaded the development of Google’s Ad Exchange. Manor’s new VP role will see him lead development efforts designed to help creators make and share videos, as well as manage their channels and engaged with their fan base. Merryman will be based in Beverly Hills and will report to her old boss at Netflix Robert Kyncl, who heads Content and Business Operations at Google. Her tenure at the streaming video site included the acquisition of , and , to name a couple hits, and last year she spoke to the about how . Merryman should help with improving relationships between YouTube and established media makers, while Manor’s role will likely be more related to making sure that YouTube’s existing roster of amateur and homegrown streaming celebrity talent have the best tools available to serve their content (and that of YouTube’s advertising partners) to the best possible audience, with the maximum potential impact. Merryman and Manor join other recent internal staff additions at the executive level, including Engineering VPs Venkat Pankapaschesan and Udi Manber, as well as UX lead Fred Gilbert. Wojcicki is clearly committed to making YouTube her own, and are a clear product example of that beyond the ongoing reorganization efforts. |
Sproutkin Ditches Its “Netflix For Kids’ Books” Service, Moves Into Digital Subscriptions | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Parents weren’t interested in , apparently. A company called , which launched in spring of 2013 offering shipments of just under a dozen books which parents paid for on a monthly basis but could return at any time for a new batch. The idea was that, in their younger years, kids quickly outgrew their books, and this would be a more affordable option than running out to the bookstore or buying new books from Amazon all the time. But Sproutkin recently offloaded its book rental service, and is now focused on going digital instead. The company sold its service to the online toy rental service in an all-cash deal which saw the acquirer gaining the physical books and the customer base, but not the Sproutkin team or technology. Sparkbox already has the infrastructure to continue to service Sproutkin’s customers, as it runs a service that lets parents rent toys which are shipped out via the mail. (4 toys per month for $34.99, or 4 toys for 8 weeks for $19.99 per month.) The acquirer itself is a small company of just five people and only 1,000 subscribers, though owner Max Gover says they’ve doubled in size over the past year. Sproutkin, however, was even smaller. Its customer count was about 5% of Sparkbox’s subscriber base to give you an idea of how little the company had grown. “Netflix for kids’ books” was a total flop. “[Sproutkin was] much smaller and had scale concerns – the real overhead is the rent, the physical product and the team to fulfill,” explains Gover. “Obviously, we have all that, so we can pretty easily tack on another rental service, which is complementary to our existing educational toy rental.” New York-based Sparkbox now has Sproutkin’s over 200 titles across 20 curated book rental sets of 10 book each, including a few baby sets with toys. Sproutkin, meanwhile, is launching a digital children’s book subscription library for mobile devices. Its app is in beta, where it’s disingenuously using media quotes (including ours) to tout the company’s app. (To be clear, we . And we were fairly critical – pointing out that the price point of $25/month was not likely going to work.) App users will be able to trial the new Sproutkin service for free, then upgrade to via in-app purchase for $4.99/month. This is where competing services like Farfaria, MeeGenius, and PlayKids (books, games and shows) clock in for their monthly subscriptions, though it’s more expensive than buying one-off books in apps like Read Me Stories or iStoryTime. Sproutkin isn’t the only Netflix for Kids’ Books service to bite the dust. is also no more. (It, too, was $25/month.) The problem with both of these services is that they thought by adding curation and a bit of technology they could convince parents to pay for a problem most already consider solved. We’re not in desperate need of new books – they arrive as birthday and holiday gifts, from grandparents and other relatives. We buy them at yard sales, and get them as hand-me downs. We order them from school book fairs or from Amazon. And, sometimes, we even buy a few from the local B&N. And then there’s the original book rental service that hasn’t quite gone out of style just yet: the public library. |
HackerRank Expands Its Technical Recruiting Platform To Mobile With DroidRank | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | , a technical recruiting platform and former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist, today announced it is expanding into mobile with the launch of . Recruiters could already test for Java skills on the service (in addition to 15 other languages). While that’s the basis for programming Android apps, being able to write Java apps doesn’t necessarily mean you are a great Android developer, too. With DroidRank, developers can now specifically test for Android programming skills that involve not just Java but also the Android SDK. The service aims to give recruiters a lot of flexibility in how they build their tests. They can either have candidates start from scratch or upload a folder structure with a partial solution, for example. With that, they can tune their tests for exactly the kind of skills they are looking for. Candidates can then choose to either work in HackerRank’s IDE or write and test their solutions in their own IDE. “The talent pool of Android developers and systems administrators is global, and with our open, equal opportunity platform, we’re plugging them into great jobs regardless of where they live or went to school,” said Vivek Ravisankar in a statement today. According to the latest data, the demand for Android developers is than that for iOS developers. Still, there is obviously also lots of demand for iOS developers and the team tells me it is planning to launch a similar tool for iOS developers in the near future. |
RelativeWave Gets Acquired By Google And Starts Giving Its $80 App Design Tool Away For Free | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | RelativeWave, creators of an $80 “interaction design and prototyping” Mac app called Form, has been acquired by Google. As a result, . In case you’ve never used it, Form is a visual editor meant to help designers/developers make visually-functional prototypes of apps without writing code. Form an app maker. That is, you don’t end up with an app that’ll do much on its own, or that you can distribute. Instead, you’ll get a rough prototype — a feel for whether or not a potential design (and many of its nuances, like the specifics of how an animation flows) are heading in the right direction. If doodling on a napkin is a 1 and actually coding the app is a 10, building a prototype with Form is somewhere around a 6. Form is actually two apps: one that runs on OS X, and one that runs on an iOS device. You design your prototype in the OS X app’s visual editor, and those changes are instantly reflected in the pseudo-app running on the device without the need to recompile anything. At launch, Form was $150. In September of this year, they dropped the price down to $80. With today’s news of the team joining Google, however, Form goes free. You can find it on the Mac app store . In a somewhat irregular (but appreciated) move, the company says they’ll be refunding those who previously purchased the app. Details of the acquisition weren’t disclosed (we’re digging, as usual), but it doesn’t seem like a classic “Hire the team, kill the product” situation. RelativeWave says they’ll continue to work on Form at Google — presumably working on an Android version, as Form is currently iOS only. Still not sure what Form is? We’ve embedded an intro video below. It’s a bit long, but it should start to make sense within a few minutes. [vimeo 105085107 w=500 h=312] |
Apple Relabels “Free” Download Buttons On iTunes And Mac App Store To “Get” Following Pressure from EC | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | Across the iTunes and Mac App Stores today, a minor but also notable change is taking place with regard to how Apple is marketing its iOS and Mac applications. Instead of free apps being labeled as “FREE,” the download button now reads “GET.” The change likely has to do with increased pressures from the European Commission, which , succeeded in forcing Google to relabel apps that offer in-app purchases. In EU countries, Google the label of the Top Free Apps to read “Top Apps,” and changed its Top Free Games section to just “Top Games,” as it moved towards compliance with the new guidelines. The problem, , games labeled as “free” could mislead consumers about the true costs involved, and they should not directly market in-app purchases to children, nor pressure them to ask their parents to pay for the additional features. At the time, Apple promised it would also be making changes at some point in the future, while pointing out that it had implemented several protections already, especially around in-app purchases. In a statement provided to , the company said that, “…over the last year we made sure any app which enables customers to make in-app purchases is clearly marked. We’ve also created a Kids Section on the App Store with even stronger protections to cover apps designed for children younger than 13.” In iOS 8, Apple said it would be rolling out even more features that would strengthen the protections it had in place. For Apple, it seems the company has decided not to make an E.U.-specific change related to the concern over the labeling of “free” apps. Instead, it has simply relabeled all free apps across its desktop and mobile App Stores with “GET” buttons, regardless of whether or not they offer in-app purchases. This was probably easier than making a regional adjustment, and is also a little more truthful about the nature of some of these apps. You can them, but they may not be . At this time, Apple’s Top Charts sections remain unaffected – there are still Top Free Apps and Top Paid Apps listed in both stores. |
Mobile Marketplace Carousell Raises $6M Series A Led By Sequoia Capital | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | , a mobile app marketplace that lets sellers upload items with a few taps on their smartphones, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. The Singaporean startup’s existing investors, Rakuten Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, 500 Startups, and serial entrepreneur Darius Cheung, also returned for this round, which brings Carousell’s total raised so far to $6.8 million. TechCrunch profiled the company last year, when it . The company plans to hire more growth and web engineers to support its expansion into Indonesia, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Eventually, Carousell’s founders hope to take it further into the Asia-Pacific region. “In Taiwan, users are already used to buying peer-to-peer on existing desktop platforms, but there is still a gap in mobile. We took a trip there recently and realized we need to make a move immediately. Malaysia is similar and it is just across the border from us,” says co-founder and CEO Siu Rui Quek. “We made the decision with a few markets, but we also have global ambitions. I would say that in the larger APAC region, markets that could be interesting are Australia, New Zealand, and even Hong Kong.” Carousell has held the number one shopping app spot in Singapore’s iOS App Store since June. It launched in 2012 and founder Siu Rui Quek says that over 8 million listings have been created. Two million transactions have been successfully completed, and the app now sees an average of eight transactions closing every minute. Of course, the rapid growth of any new peer-to-peer network comes with some downsides. Carousell already has its own active parody Tumblr called which chronicles the misadventures of users as they deal with flaky (or just plain nutty) sellers and buyers. Quek says he finds the Tumblr funny (“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry”), but adds that Carousell will be adding several moderation tools as it scales up. As the startup’s team grows, they will be able to delete fraudulent users and trolls more quickly, and improve its feedback system. As Carousell expands, it will also have to deal with continuing competition from online classified sites, marketplaces, and forums, as well as Facebook Groups and Instagram, where many people make informal transactions. The team says they will test out new strategies in different markets, including desktop-first platforms, and try to win over users with Carousell’s ease of use. To use the app, sellers take pictures of their item, clean them up with Carousell’s photo-editing features, write a few details, and then list them for sale. They communicate with potential buyers through the app’s private messaging system. Carousell is still exploring monetization strategies, but potential sources of revenue include premium features for sellers, including extra photos and management features for vendors who list hundreds of orders. Though most sellers are individuals who want to get rid of used or unwanted items, small businesses and brick-and-mortar stores have also begun using Carousell, says Quek, giving the startup a chance to tap into the SMB market. In a statement, Shailendra Singh, managing director of Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said “Carousell is one of the most exciting young companies we have encountered recently. The company has grown with practically no marketing to become a leading destination for consumers to buy and sell goods across all categories. Tens of thousands of of products are listed and sold on Carousell everyday by consumers.” |
Tiger Global Raises $2.5 Billion For New Deals | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Investment firm Tiger Global has been all year, and now it has a lot more cash to run down new prey. , the firm closed $2.5 billion in new funding, that comes a little more than 6 months after it in April. that the money will split between a new $1.5 billion ‘Global Internet Opportunities’ fund that launches in January 2015, and a $1 billion ‘Global Long Opportunities’ fund. Back in September, that Tiger Global was raising another fund, and the speed with which it has turned around this (its eighth) new fund is unprecedented. It isn’t clear how the new money will be used at this point — beyond the general names of the funds — but for Tiger everything is fair game. The firm is deeply committed to India’s startup ecosystem, where it has investments in startups across a range of verticals and is well-positioned in two of the country’s hottest segments: e-commerce and taxi-booking apps. Its most recent big investments have included participation in Amazon-like and , which was led by SoftBank Ventures — both times as an early-investor. Ola and Flipkart are capital-intense businesses and both are in stages of rapid growth, which will likely require new funding on a pretty regular basis. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son this summer in startups in India over the coming few years and , so it stands to reason that a large portion of Tiger Global’s new war chest could go towards doubling down on and expanding its portfolio in India. Outside of India, Tiger Global participated in , an Uber rival in Southeast Asia. This year alone it has closed a string of investments in the U.S. and beyond, including , , , , , , and Tiger Global’s past and long-term investments include big names like Facebook, LinkedIn, Russia’s Yandex and China’s Youku. The Information ( ) has a thorough overview of its portfolio. |
Microsoft Appears To Pre-Announce Its Purchase Of Email Startup Acompli | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Whoops. Welcome to literal . A short, unfinished blog listed as written by Microsoft corporate vice president hit . Here’s what it looked like: It led to the following URL: . In case you missed it, the URL slug says “Microsoft Acquires Acompli.” Microsoft declined to comment. The chance that Microsoft wrote a blog post about an acquisition that wasn’t far along doesn’t seem high. No point in prepping a post with a URL if the deal isn’t far along, I’d wager. So the Acompli deal is probably iced. What’s ? A mobile email application that as “for professionals.” It focuses on helping people find the most important emails in their box, quickly. TechCrunch of this year, when it launched on Android. The company . That makes the timing of the purchase hardly surprising — companies often raise around 18 months of capital. Acompli may have been looking for new cash, and found Microsoft instead. The following tweet, now nearly two weeks old, must be among the funniest I’ve read for some time: Acompli is a great iOS email app with Exchange compatibility. Microsoft should buy it and rename it Outlook Mobile. — Zach Collier (@zachcollier) We’ll see if Microsoft does that. |
9 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | It’s been a shorter week because we’re heading out early for Thanksgiving festivities, but a newsworthy one nonetheless. We give you our best stories of the week (11/22-11/26). 1. Matt Burns wrote a piece about Comcast, and why the company is so largely disliked, arguing that . 2. We analyzed the , and why it seems people are disassociating from the services for the wrong reasons. 3. Elon Musk issued a minor tweet storm in which he detailed a that could help spacecraft navigate upon re-entry after delivering personnel or cargo to an orbiting space station. 4. Former Tinder employee Whitney Wolfe launched a 5. , and it’s time to start talking about it. 6. Braxton Jarratt wrote an article about the start of standalone streaming services, and whether or not they signify . 7. , a photo startup. 8. with a Samsung-branded look at The American Music Awards. 9. , and finally concluded that its too big for right now, but right-sized for the future. |
The Snowden Effect, Quantified | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | The failure of the USA Freedom Act in the Senate earlier this month was a disappointment to many in favor of reforming the National Security Agency. The bill, far from perfect, and certainly incomplete in its scope was thought of by some as a possible first step. To others, it was a way for Congress to pass something that merely looked like reform. It , making the argument about its potential efficacy moot — not even something lightweight could make it through Congress. So what damn effect has had on privacy, now far more than a year after the first revelations from the documents? Well as it turns out, we have some new data to measure that. A provides us with two data points that we can use: Some have dismissed those percentages as weak. The Hill covered the study with the following headline “ .” I read the data slightly different. First of all, the 60 percent figure comes from . In Germany, it’s 94 percent, in Brazil, it’s 84 percent, and in the United States 76 percent of respondents had heard of Snowden. I highlight those countries, and they have been among the three most rocked by Snowden’s leaks. In Germany, it became known that the NSA had , Brazil was roiled by , and in the United States tales of found a large audience. Presuming that the 39 percent figure — the number of those “aware” of Snowden who have “taken steps to protect their online privacy and security as a result of his revelations” — is flat across all countries, a conservative way to view the data, we can actually do a little math and see how many people the leaks have led to better run defense for themselves. 39 percent of Germany’s 94 percent awareness figure implies that more than 36 percent of online Germans are taking greater pains to protect their security. Various statistics put German Internet penetration at at least 70 percent ( implies a greater than 80 percent rate, but, again, let’s be conservative). Germany has . So, in a single country, the Snowden effect is that at least 20 million people are trying to be safer and more private online. I wouldn’t call that small. In fact, that’s pretty damn impressive. |
Jigglist Lets You Find Places For Meetups Without Leaving Your Group Chat | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | If you’re regularly scheduling meetups with friends or colleagues you don’t see regularly in person, you know the routine: you either decide to go to the same bar, restaurant, or coffee shop every week, or the group relies on the one friend willing to use Yelp ahead of time. Launching today, is a group chat app centered around finding places to go that are appropriate for the group that will attend. The idea is that you start a conversation for each new event, adding the people that might want to go. As you work out the logistics as you normally would through chat, you can embed pages for places that might work as easily as you would send a photo to everyone in iMessage. These pages pull location data from Google, reviews from Yelp, and proprietary data from Jigglist centered around whether the location is appropriate for the size of the group as well as the context: are you going out for drinks with friends, or a professional meeting for networking? What time are you meeting up? Once suggestions have been thrown into the chat, everyone participating can vote for their preferred venue. This data is the base upon which Jigglist plans to build out its monetization scheme: restaurants, bars, night clubs, and other venues will eventually be able to sign up for premium accounts where they can see when potential customers chose them over other options and what context they chose them for. In addition to receiving access to that data, Jigglist’s premium users will also be able to host a forum-like page on Jigglist that lets customers ask questions through the app (“Who’s DJing tonight?”), kind of like Jigglist is building out that premium feature set yet — it only really makes sense once there’s a network of active users — though Jigglist CEO Rohey Livne says the four-person team is using that longer term goal to inform the design of its app at launch. Like many social apps today, Jiggliest builds its network on top of your phone contacts: you register your phone number and the app pulls your circle of friends and associates from your address book. It’s better than having to register with an email address, though you still have to bug your friends to install yet another chat app. |
How To Opt Out Of Twitter’s New Thing That Tracks Which Apps You Install | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Twitter is of which apps you have on your phone, and sending that data back to the mothership (birds nest?) Is it the worst offense in the world? Nah — they’re not exactly perusing your browsing history and sending it to your grandmother, here. But it’s still irksome, particularly given that Twitter pitches it as something they’re doing but makes the whole thing opt-out instead of opt-in. (You’ll see a notification letting you know that the feature has been enabled once it goes live on your account. Scroll past it, and you’re opted in.) Fortunately, turning the whole thing off right out of the gate is pretty straight forward. Flip that switch, and voila! You’re done. |
Twitter’s New App Tracking Capabilities To Help Personalize User Experience, Benefit Advertisers | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Starting today, Twitter users on iOS and Android devices will be alerted to a change in the type of data the social network is collecting on them, and will be offered the option to opt-out by adjusting their settings. The data in question is a list of the apps you have installed on your mobile device – a collection of data Twitter is calling the “ .” The company says it’s using the app data to help “build a more tailored experience for you on Twitter,” which includes things like improving your “who to follow” recommendations by connecting you with those who have similar interests; showing your relevant promoted content; and adding content to your timeline like tweets and accounts that Twitter thinks you’ll find interesting. The change comes at a time when Twitter has been working to personalize users’ timelines with better content as it struggles to convert its numerous passive users – meaning, those who don’t sign in, or those who have accounts but rarely tweet – into active, more engaged users. The problem, according to Wall Street at least, is that . In an effort to correct the problem, Twitter has been testing ways to make its service more usable from the initial sign-in, even if you don’t have a network of friends to follow, or aren’t sure how to get started. For instance, Twitter’s will give people something to see as soon as they sign in for the first time. Now, with the ability to peer into the apps that are installed on your mobile device, Twitter will also immediately have a better understanding of who a user is, and be able to customize that person’s Twitter timeline with relevant content. That could potentially make for a more compelling Twitter experience, and ultimately draw users back to the network more often, allowing Twitter to grow and retain its user base of signed-in account holders, which translates into an improved bottom line. However, the “app graph” will serve a secondary purpose as well, a bit further down the road. It will also improve the interest-based ad targeting capabilities the network currently offers, allowing advertisers to reach very specific “buckets” of users based on a better understanding of what those users like, what apps they have and use, and which games they like to play. That could mean in the future, Twitter could allow for smarter app recommendations – app install ads, or app engagement ads like those app publishers can run today. Twitter is able to access this “app graph” data more easily on Android, whose users will start seeing the prompt in a few weeks’ time. On iOS, it’s a bit more difficult but, at a high level, would involve running a check of apps on the device and comparing it to a list of apps Twitter already has. In this scenario, Twitter is not likely to be diving into the long-tail of the million-plus iOS apps in existence, but rather focusing its energies on the those ranked on the top charts across App Store categories. Though some may react to Twitter’s move as being something of an over-reach – after all, it’s scooping up data about things that have nothing to do with your use of Twitter itself – the reality is that many companies do this sort of thing today, they just don’t disclose it to their users. In fact, a number of analytics’ providers’ SDKs, for example, track users across apps where they’re installed, giving the app makers a similar data set in order to identify the “persona” of a user, which in turn allows them to draw broader insights about their own customer base. Facebook is also able to see which apps users have installed on their phones, if the apps use the Facebook SDK (as many do). Twitter, meanwhile, is implementing the app tracking data in a way that’s fairly visible – showing a user a large, blue prompt that points users to their settings. It will also honor settings a user previously had configured – including the “Limit Ad Tracking” on an iOS device or the “Opt out of interest-based ads” on Android. If you already opted out here device-wide, you’ll never see the Twitter prompt. And if you haven’t seen the prompt yet, Twitter isn’t collecting your app data. That being said, a number of less technically sophisticated users may see the prompt, not understand it, and choose to ignore it. That gives Twitter the ability to begin collecting data, and potentially sets a precedent for other companies who may follow in Twitter’s footsteps one day, opting to do the same. |
Cooling Tablet Market Turns To Low-End Devices For Growth | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Never in tech history have so many bought so much in such a short time. Such was the market excitement for the category-creating device. The growth in the tablet market that followed was explosive. But then something odd happened: The tablet market matured all at once, and fresh consumer appetite for small, touch-based slates tempered as regular folk held onto their devices longer than expected. Here’s my new favorite chart, , showing off the steepest decline in growth rate I have ever seen: Tablet market growth will be moderate for the foreseeable future. The compound effect of the yearly growth rates that IDC predicts actually keep unit volume growth somewhat healthy for a bit, but as that red line tapers to the right, you’ll note that the delta between blue columns starts to look pretty slim. As , IDC expects Apple to see sales of its iPad fall, and then recover to end up with 24.5 market share in 2018. Android, which will see the largest expansion of its unit volume in gross terms over the next few years will endure its market share slipping from 67.7 percent this year, to 64 percent in 2018. And Windows-based tablets will triple their unit volume and more than double their market share by 2018. That last expectation surprised me. What would drive Windows tablets up so quickly — aside from its modest numerical starting point — in a maturing market? I think that we’re starting to find out. Today the Microsoft-watching community is buzzing about a that, while limited in terms of their technical specifications, . Microsoft, it isn’t hard to see, wanted something like this to happen — when it , it made these devices possible. Allow me the : Just what the hell is Microsoft doing making Windows free for small tablets and smartphones? Buying market share. By cutting the cost of Windows for smartphones, Microsoft is sweetening its pitch towards OEMs, providing new incentives to adopt its mobile platform. OEMs, often paying a per-device fee to Microsoft to ship devices running Google’s Android, now have a separate option that includes no software payments. That’s interesting. How can Microsoft afford this decision? It’s worth keeping in mind that the revenue streams that Microsoft is deprecating were small. [Its tablet OEM revenues, are meant here] […] So Microsoft’s move doesn’t harm it financially, and could reap it precisely what it needs: market share. So we have Microsoft in the market, via its partners, with incredibly cheap devices, and Google pressing ahead with low-cost Android units that have become massively popular. Apple’s unit volume will drift higher as Microsoft and Google combat more fiercely for the majority of predicted growth in the market, according to IDC. I think that we’ll therefore see a real fight in the low-end of the tablet market. Put more simply: Apple’s ownership of the high-end of the market won’t budge, implying that open unit shipments viz IDC’s expectations are likely cheaper devices. So, that’s where the brawl will be. Over the next 6 months, what will be most interesting to see if lower-cost Windows tablets can attract more consumer attention than expected. If so, IDC’s 2018 numbers might start to yaw. For now, you have quite a number of options on the cheap. |
Applause Raises $765K From Salesforce CEO For Its Revamped Weight Loss App | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | If you’re worried about blowing your diet over the holidays – or perhaps, thinking about making a New Year’s resolution to “eat healthy” (you know, again) – an app called , now seed funded by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, may help. The startup aims to bring to market a more lightweight food and activity tracking service combined with virtual support groups that offer you feedback and encouragement from others like you. The app itself is not exactly new, however. According to co-founder and CEO Durga Pandey, he worked on it over the course of a couple of years before leaving for Salesforce.com in early 2014 – which is how he ended up scoring the angel funding, as you may have guessed. Initially, he was bootstrapping the app, then called FitFrnd. But the original concept was something that was more akin to a “Facebook for fitness,’ including a variety of social features including friending, a news feed, likes and comments, plus other social mechanisms designed to help it go viral. What he found, however, is that people didn’t to add their friends and family to witness their weight loss struggles – they wanted that to remain somewhat private. Pandey actually gave up on the app for a while as he worked at Salesforce, until he came up with a new idea: he could take the idea of Weight Watchers and its support groups, and put that into an app format. Instead of being identified with your name, users could enjoy semi-anonymous support and encouragement from others in their same boat. While some anonymous sharing apps like Secret and Whisper can lead to people saying nasty things or trolling, Pandey thinks anonymity makes sense for an app like his where users are sharing personal, emotional and potentially embarrassing things about themselves, their progress and their setbacks. He’s now rebranded the app as , raised seed funding, and is returning to actively work on it. The new app is launching on January 1st, just in time for everyone’s resolutions. (The current version, however, is ). In the updated release, Applause will feature a step counter, health quizzes, blog content, weigh-ins, and a simplified meal tracker where you only indicate if the meal was healthy (green), regular (yellow) or unhealthy (red). That same red/yellow/green system is often used in weight loss programs focused on fighting childhood obesity as well, as it’s simpler to use and still gives you a sense of how well you’re doing. A forthcoming meal finder feature also leverages menu data from to help you quickly track your favorite meals and their nutritional impact from local restaurants. Conceptually, the idea of a simplified weight loss/dieting app combined with virtual support groups is a good one, but where Applause falls short is on its design. Its App Store screenshots don’t help new users get a good sense of how the app works and come across as juvenile. Meanwhile, the design of the app itself is pretty rough and uneven, and even dated-looking – a testament to the old code Applause re-used when it rebranded ahead of its relaunch. Unfortunately for Applause, the market for health trackers/mobile coaches is ripe with competition, including big names from older companies like MyFitnessPal and Lose It, plus well-designed newcomers like , and simple logging tools and motivators like , , or , and just dozens of . Compared with the rest, Applause’s lacking design sticks out like a sore thumb. But with the additional funding, its possible that Applause can correct that. We’ll see…but it needs to act soon. These apps will be in high-demand in only a matter of weeks. Applause has $765K in seed funding, led by Marc Benioff. To date, the app has seen 423,000 downloads on the App Store. |
Quikkly Wants To Be A Better QR Code | Steve O'Hear | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | You’ve all used a , right? Those weird-looking barcodes you’re supposed to scan using a mobile to open a related web link. Nope? I thought not. For one reason or another, the technology, which was originally developed for the automotive industry to track parts in vehicle manufacturing, has never really gained critical mass from a consumer point of view. Enter , which thinks it’s figured out why. The U.K. startup — whose founders are Ken Johnstone, former founder and CEO of INQ Mobile (the company that punted the first so-called ‘Facebook phone’), and Fergal Walker, the ex-Head of Mobile BD for Facebook EMEA — is another attempt to bridge the physical and digital worlds via your phone’s camera and accompanying mobile app to trigger an online action, but in a way that solves many of the pain points of QR codes. Using the Quikkly iOS or Android app, you scan what the company is calling an Action Tag — its own proprietary barcode-esque tech — and this immediately invokes an online action, such as listening to a track on Spotify, adding a contact to your address book, following someone on Twitter, or even connecting to a public WiFi spot. The clever aspect of a Quikkly Action Tag is that, unlike most uses of QR codes, it’s better sign-posted so you know what action to expect, and the barcode itself is in-part based on image recognition of the related service’s icon, meaning it’s a lot more human-readable as well a being machine-readable. “When you see interesting stuff online and there’s a button to interact with it, you can click on it and something happens immediately. ‘Like’ on Facebook, ‘Follow’ on Twitter, add to Basket, listen to the song. In the physical world, it’s considerably more difficult,” says Quikkly CEO Fergal Walker. “If you’re interested, you would have to manually search for the item, hope you find the right one, and hope it works on your mobile. Quikkly removes the hassle and makes it as simple as it is online.” Quikkly also makes it pretty easy for anyone to create their own Action Tags, to be included on, for example, a business card, flyer or poster. This can be done via the website mobile app. In fact, Quikkly is talking up its mobile-first play. To create an Action Tag, you simply select from a grid of pre-defined actions and fill in the needed details, such as URL and custom message. On Quikkly’s competitors, Walker concedes there are “loads of QR based companies and image recognition companies out there”, but argues that the startup is doing something quite different. “People know exactly what will happen before they scan a Quikkly Tag. When they scan it happens straight away. It’s just like pressing a button,” he says. One obvious drawback of Quikkly — and similar to the shortcomings of Beacon technology, which also tries to bridge the physical and online worlds — is that users are required to have an accompanying app. In this case, one that can scan and interpret an Action Tag. The plan, however, is to let third-party app developers also get in on the action. “You need the Quikkly app to create your own Tags on mobile, but for scanning you can use any Quikkly enabled app (the scanner is available to partner app developers),” explains Walker. “Also, Quikky Tags make it clear which app people need to use. Remember, the average consumer doesn’t know that ‘QR Codes’ are called ‘QR Codes’ so they don’t even know where to start. Quikkly really is ‘do this to get that now’.” Quikkly is free to use, both scanning and creating Action Tags. However, a paid-for version of the service, with things like additional analytics, will be available to brands and agencies through a subscription model. |
Gift Guide: The Razor Crazy Cart | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | While it’s well worth a closer look if you have the space and safety equipment to send your kids careening around your driveway at about twenty miles per hour. That’s right: this is your dream go-kart from the folks who made the Razor scooters and, if you have the space and helmets it’s the best fun your kids will have this year. What is it? It’s basically a rugged go-cart with a low center of gravity and a crazy braking system that lets you swing around in very sharp turns. It runs for about forty minutes on a charge and can go quite fast. It’s for kids 9 and older – smaller kids can’t reach the pedals – and you absolutely need safety gear. My kids rode the cart for a few weeks when it was warm and they literally skidded out in controlled slides for hours. They’d run down the battery, charge it, and keep riding. It’s the best of bumper cars coupled with some amazing speed and, because it is so low to the ground, the system can’t flip and fall on you. It’s great fun. I suspect this will be a hot toy this Christmas but I’d suggest waiting until it’s warmer to pick one up (unless you live in Florida). The Crazy Cart is a summer fun machine, not a sleet and ice machine. Razor is working on a model for adults, called the XL, which should be fun to ride provided your insurance is up to date. You can and unnerve the neighbors with one of the coolest toys this year. |
Expressiv Is An Irish MIDI Guitar With Some Groovy Light Effects, Man | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Hey, man, is that a MIDI guitar with amazing internal lighting effects? Well turn it up! Hot on the heels of the and the we present the , a guitar designed by Rob O’Reilly. The Kickstarter, which ends today, sold the guitars for about $450 and aims to ship in March. Does the world need another MIDI guitar? Sure. This model scans the fretboard to see where your fingers are and, like the GTar, it is a full-sized git-fiddle. It also has a set of infinity lights in the body so you can look like the ghost of Carlos Santana on stage. Most important, however, is that the Expressiv is a real electric guitar. Unlike some other systems, you actually have to tune this thing and you can plug it into your amp and play without depending on MIDI. The MIDI features are an added bonus, thereby expending your potential sound repertoire immensely. While it appears the Kickstarter is over, to get more details. I’d love to see this thing in action as I am a hoodoo man out-hoodooer and intend to go down to Louisiana, this guitar strapped to my back, to acquire a mojo hand. A guitar like this would surely allow me to out-hoodoo the Hoodoo Man.
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GoPro Could Go Robo With Consumer Drones Launching Next Year | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | GoPro is working on a lineup of consumer drones to supplement its action camera lineup, according to the . The new product category would offer aerial drones like the and DJI Phantom and . The drones would reportedly retail in the $500 to $1,000 range, and come with GoPro action camera tech onboard, which is a natural fit given that outfitting drones with GoPros is already a popular option among hobbyists and videographers. Drone sales could help GoPro diversify its product lineup, too – right now it has the majority of its eggs in one basket, with its action camera line. GoPro has done a terrific job of creating a vibrant first-party accessory lineup to accompany its core camera offerings, but many established camera makers are entering the market, or else focusing on improving their existing efforts. GoPro has made the right moves to maintain its leadership, with a new entry-level Hero camera that costs only $129.99, but achieving an early foothold in the burgeoning consumer drone market could make a lot of sense, given its existing popularity in that realm. WSJ’s information pegs the launch window for these devices at “late next year,” which means I likely wouldn’t anticipated seeing them ahead of holiday 2015. GoPro will also have to offer something that differentiates it from the competition – both Parrot and DJI, two market leaders in consumer aerial drones, have launched next-generation hardware with advanced camera features, including advanced onboard software image stabilization and 4K recording. Drone-makers like DJI also seem to be increasingly interested in including their own camera hardware built-in to drones, which likely allows them to up the average asking price. GoPro can stand out not only by promoting the use of its tried-and-tested industry-leading action cam tech, but also by offering price benefits compared to some of its potential competitors. The DJI Inspire 1 retails for $2,800, for instance, so if GoPro can offer optics with similar quality on drones that retail for less than half, it could stand to grab a much wider market. We’ve reached out to GoPro for comment and will update if we receive any additional information. |
Unity Finally Releases Its Long Promised User Interface Creator | Greg Kumparak | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Good news, everyone! Once upon a time, Unity promised to overhaul the way developers would build user interfaces in their Unity-powered games. This was roughly around the time man discovered fire*. At long last, Unity has shipped version 4.6 of its visual game development system — and with it, the long promised UI editor. If you’re not a Unity user, here’s what you need to know: Unity is a super powerful game creation engine that allows developers to work in a WYSIWYG-style interface. Games built in Unity work on nearly any platform (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, all the next-gen consoles, etc.) with minimal tweaking. You still need to know how to code to make things work the way you want, but the whole system is considerably more visual/drag-and-drop than the game engines of yesteryear. Unlike most aspects of Unity, a seemingly (/deceptively) simple thing like making a settings screen or a pause menu was a painful task. Until now, Unity developers had two main choices for building in-game interfaces: ( ) With today’s release, however, UI creation gets the support it deserves. Interfaces are designed right within the game editor itself, and “smart anchoring” and smooth resizing systems keep everything where it should be regardless of screen resolution. Unity’s fantastic animation system has been integrated into the UI workflow, allowing for things like bouncing buttons or things that fly into view. Meanwhile, the whole thing has been built with performance in mind, and to work across any platform that Unity supports. On a slightly less exciting (but still good!) note, Unity 4.6 is also the first to support x86 processors for Android. That means you can now build Unity games for devices like . This update is a free one for all Unity 4.x users, though it’s said that it’s the last major update before Unity ships version 5.0. |
Firefox Redesigns Its Search Interface Ahead Of Yahoo Switch | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Last week we that Mozilla had made a pact with Yahoo to switch Firefox’s default search engine to a yet-to-be launched new version of Yahoo’s Bing-powered search experience. At that time, we already noted how easy it is to switch between search engines in Firefox and now the organization is making it even easier with the of a new search experience in the Firefox . Instead of burying the ability to switch search engines somewhere in the settings, Firefox now puts it front and center. Whenever you start typing a query in the browser’s dedicated search box, you’ll now see a link to the search settings right underneath the suggestions. In addition, you now get the ability to execute your search in another search engine (or on another site) right underneath those suggestions, too. So if you know you’ll want to go to Wikipedia anyway, you don’t have to do a Google (or Yahoo) search first and then click on the Wikipedia link. Instead, you simply click on the Wikipedia icon in the search suggestions box and move on with life. By default, Firefox now features built-in one-click search for the likes of Wikipedia, Amazon (with Mozilla adding its affiliate link to the search), Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, eBay and Twitter. As with all things Firefox, it’s easy to customize this list by removing some options. |
Emojiary Is A Mobile Diary App Where You Visualize Your Feelings With Emoji | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Regularly journaling your thoughts and feelings is a good way to “check in with yourself,” raise your self-awareness and connect with your intuition, but it can also be a time-consuming activity that most of us don’t have time for, given our busy lives. A company called wants to change that, by offering a quick and arguably more fun way to track your feelings with a new diary app called . The app seems a little silly, initially. To translate your day into diary entries, you pick out a few emoticons that help you visualize your abstract thoughts and feelings. After entering these in your app diary, the Emojiary bot then chats with you to ask follow-up questions. it says. The bot also tells you how the app’s other features work instead of putting your through a “walk-through” like some other apps do upon first launch. For instance, the bot explains how you’ll receive “awards” as you continue to use the app, which include special emoji that help you express different emotions. Upon my first entry, for example, I received a “unicorn” emoji that Emojiary said was for helping me with my “far-out, mystical feelings.” Okay then! My initial impression of the app is that it was something that would make the most sense for a teenager, sitting in their bedroom dramatically documenting their youthful concerns, and I’m not entirely convinced there’s a big market for the app beyond the young adult demographic, or other navel-gazers and quantified self enthusiasts. The exception would be those suffering from mood disorders, of course, who want to chronicle emotional changes for the purposes of better understanding their triggers and other medical concerns, like how a dosage change has affected them. That being said, the app could still prove valuable for those in these groups by helping them draw out their feelings in new ways, and then, further down the road, help them to see the patterns of their ups and downs. That’s something the company is working toward currently, but it doesn’t have anything to test in this area at the time. For that reason, it’s hard to analyze whether or not Emojiary’s long-term game plan of supporting your emotional well-being and delivering insights will hold up. Explains co-founder Albert Lee, previously of design and consulting firm IDEO, the All Tomorrows team does a lot of product research and prototyping before it releases an app publicly, and what they found was that people were “hungry for support in understanding, processing, and channeling their emotions,” he says. That’s how they came up with Emojiary. “Journaling has been proven to be beneficial in this way, but it’s extremely high friction. You get a blank page in front of you and it’s hard to put non-verbal feelings into words,” Lee says, describing the problem they wanted to solve. “Although people often think of emoji as fun and silly, it’s actually a really robust library of potential emotional states and it’s already used in conversation to add emotional context to words, making it a natural fit.” During a month-long beta tests with 1,000 users, more than 75% inputted daily – pretty impressive engagement, though it’s too soon to say if those numbers will scale. The company is now wrapping up work on an in-app dashboard that will share some basic insights about how you’ve felt over time, and expects to roll this out in a few weeks. Emojiary’s app is . |
Google.com Domain Should Be Covered By Search De-Listing, Say European Regulators | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | Google has kicked against it. Eric Schmidt was doing so in public only . But European regulators are now stipulating the so called ‘ ‘ ruling should apply to search results displayed on Google.com, not just on European sub-domains such as Google.co.uk. The reason the regulators want this expansion is to avoid an easy circumventing of the law, based on Google’s current implementation, which allows users to bypass the ruling by searching for private individuals’ names on Google.com. It’s then trivial to compare results on a sub-domain with results on Google.com for discrepancies. So far, in the roughly six months since the ruling, the search engine has received just under 175,000 search de-listing requests covering just over 600,000 URLs. It has agreed to less than half (41.5%) those requests, de-listing just over 208,500 URLs. The search de-listing request right stems from a judgement by Europe’s top court which ruled that search engines are data controllers and therefore subject to existing European data protection legislation. The ruling does not extend to public figures — so it requires search engines to weigh up any public interest component attached to a de-listing request. This can lead to complex judgements being made by search engines, albeit plenty of search de-listing requests do not require a degree in ethics to navigate — such as victims of abuse wishing their name to no longer be defined by news of their abuse. (For those interested, Google reveals some details about the requests it receives via its .) Speaking in a public debate forum back in October, organized by Google to generate debate about the ruling, Schmidt argued that since the law focuses on European users Google is going to focus implementation on European sub-domains only. “A very small percentage — less than 5 per cent — of European traffic goes to .com so 95 per cent or more are to these sites, I don’t know the exact number, and that’s where the action is,” he said. During the debate Schmidt was also asked a question specifically about whether the public should move to searching Google.com rather than searching sub-domains such as Google.co.uk in order “to remove edited or removed information”, as the questioner put it. “I am not recommending that, however we have reported that some people do it,” Schmidt answered. Well, the window of opportunity for people to trivially circumvent European law by switching searches to Google.com looks to be closing. The Article 29 Working Party, which is composed of representatives from the data protection regulators of individual European Union Member States, issued a today noting that the group has adopted guidelines on the implementation of the European Court of Justice ruling. It has not yet published those guidelines — TechCrunch understands they are due later this week — but the release notes specifically that the law can’t be implemented effectively unless de-listing is also applied to .com domains, not just on EU domains (as Google has been doing). The regulators write: The WP29 considers that in order to give full effect to the data subject’s rights as
defined in the Court’s ruling, de-listing decisions must be implemented in such a way that
they guarantee the effective and complete protection of data subjects’ rights and
that EU law cannot be circumvented. In that sense, limiting de-listing to EU domains
on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains
cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data
subjects according to the ruling. In practice, this means that in any case de-listing should
also be effective on all relevant .com domains. A Google spokesperson contacted by TechCrunch declined to comment in detail. “We haven’t yet seen the Article 29 Working Party’s guidelines, but we will study them carefully when they’re published,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. The WP29 press release also notes that EU law affords “everyone a right to data protection” — which sounds like a shot across Google’s bows, since it could mean a non-European resident could apply for personal data to be de-listed by a search engine. However the WP29 adds that national data protection authorities will be focusing their energy where they see “a clear link between the data subject and the EU, for instance where the data subject is a citizen or resident of an EU Member State”. The forthcoming WP29 guidelines on implementing the search de-listing ruling will include a list of 13 main “common criteria” which data protection authorities can use to handle appeals where a search de-listing request has been refused. It emerged that the regulators were working on appeals criteria . Despite this list incoming to help steer national DP regulators, the WP29 noted that the stress remains on dealing with appeals on a case-by-case basis. “No single criterion is, in itself, determinative. Each of them has to be read in the light of the principles established by the Court and in particular in the light of the ‘the interest of the general public in having access to [the] information’,” it adds. |
iPhone 6 And 6 Plus Are Shifting Reading Away From iPad, Study Finds | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | When Apple unveiled the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, it seemed likely that the larger screens on the devices would naturally lead to them assuming some of the functions of the iPad, giving users fewer reasons to turn to their tablets. Now, data from save-for-later reading and video app that indeed, users of Apple’s newest, larger smartphones do spend more time perusing their saved content on their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, even when they also own and use an iPad. The data gathered by pocket is drawn from the millions of articles, videos and other items from the web saved by users to their platform every day, and this particular study used a sample pool of over 2 million “opens” of articles and videos, comparing behavior specifically for users who upgraded from the iPhone 5 and 5s to either an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, to see if there was any observable change in their behaviour before and after the switch. Pocket found that among users who upgraded to iPhone 6, they now spend 72 percent of their reading time on their smartphone, vs. just 28 percent on their iPad, which compares to 55 percent of their time spend on the iPhone 5s prior to the switch. iPhone 6 Plus users leaned even more heavily on their large smartphones for reading, spending 80 percent of their time on their iPhone, and only 20 percent on the iPad. Users with the new 6 Plus opened a whopping 65 percent more items on their device than they did on the iPhone 5/5s they upgraded from, and iPhone 6 owners opened 33 percent more content, which means that users were not only preferring their smartphones to their tablets for content consumption, they were also just more likely to consume content in general. Pocket’s data suggests that users are eager to pick up larger-screened devices when it’s time to read or watch, but it’s also possible these numbers are skewed by the kind of early excitement that comes with any new device – people always lavish the most attention on their newest toys, after all. But this is one of the first solid data-driven indicators that new big-screened iPhones could be cannibalizing iPad sales, so it’s worth watching to see how these numbers evolve over time. |
null | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 11 | 19 | null |
15 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | This week’s tech news saw a new payments deal between Snapchat and Square Cash, the death of the Netflix API, the failure of the USA FREEDOM Act and a sexist Barbie book. Here are our best stories from this week (11/15-11/21). Following a PR disaster involving an Uber executive’s remarks about a Bay Area journalist, Uber quickly became the most unpopular company of the week. to question their use of data. Google acquired RelativeWave, creators of an that is now free. Snapchat made a game-changing entry into the peer-to-peer mobile payments market with a . It was reported that , and are no longer developing for the device. Mike Butcher compares Glass to the Segway: hyped as a game-changer, but ultimately used by warehouse workers and mall cops. A cringe-worthy Barbie book called “I Can Be A Computer Engineer,” published out of Random House, featured Barbie as a lady hacker who can’t code and needs the help of two dudes named Steve and Brian to do the real programming. The book was pulled from Amazon, and . , and it took a few applications down with it. Local and anonymous social media messaging app in new financing. Its been a long time coming, but this week, the after it did not collect the 60 votes that it needed. It failed 58 to 42. So what does this mean? Up your encryption, everyone. Matthew Panzarino did an and how the company has evolved through mobile, and gave a few standout observations from last week’s Disney press event. We reported that starting in December, in the United States on mobile and desktop. that could be a huge help to admins and improve the experience for Facebook users. Uber integrated with Spotify to create which allows users to become backseat DJs while they take a ride with a driver. Danny Crichton described the new algorithm-driven hybrid market in Guest columnist Marat Ryndin wrote a piece answering the question of . |
Social Marketing Startup Tiger Pistol Raises $3.1M As It Plans For US Growth | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | , a startup offering social marketing tools for small businesses, is announcing that it has raised $3.1 million in Series A funding. The company started in Melbourne, Australia, and I first covered it in 2012, when . Since then, Tiger Pistol (named after has moved its headquarters to Los Angeles, though it retains an office in Melbourne. Co-founder and CEO Steve Hibberd told me that the business is already “slightly profitable” in Australia, but the move and the new funding signal growing ambitions in the United States. “We’re going to invest primarily in our growth into the U.S. marketplace,” he said. “That’s driven by our own understanding that there’s a real gap that our product meets.” Tiger Pistol helps businesses maintain their presence and monitor their reputation on sites including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Instagram and Yelp, and also to promote their content through ad campaigns (the company earlier this year). And for small businesses that want to make things even easier, Tiger Pistol offers a “Do It For You” service package, with pricing that starts at $249 a month. Asked how Tiger Pistol stands out from other social marketing tools, Hibberd pointed to the breadth of its offerings, its focus on “real business outcomes” and its technology, which looks at past data and produces “recommendations on exactly what to be doing and the configuration of how to be doing it.” The company will also be working with partners who will resell a new white label version of Tiger Pistol’s products to their customers. The first partner in this vein is Melbourne IT, an Australian Internet company that focuses on domain name registration. Hibberd said Tiger Pistol is working to strike similar deals with U.S. companies. Melbourne IT also led the Series A, with participation from individual investors including Liberty Financial’s Sherman Ma. [vimeo 105104153 w=500 h=281] from on . |
Makerclub Helps You Learn 3D-Printed Robotics | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | Want to make a giant 3D-printed spider robot? A humanoid help-mate? A robotic scorpion with a powerful, electrified tail? can probably help. Created as a place for makers to come together and discuss 3D printed robotics, the service is now part commerce site, part repository, and part educational resource. Interestingly, the service is also offering a to help build the creations. “As far as we know, no-one else is creating a 3D printed library of parts such as ours, or building an educational platform to bring the technology to the mainstream,” said the founder Simon Riley. Reilly has also created a board, called the MakerConnect, that makes it easy to build the creations on the site. Called the , it connects an Arduino board with on-board Bluetooth so you can wirelessly control the creations on the site. While you don’t need to use the MakerConnect, the $50 board makes it much easier to build many of the robots on the site. “We create 3D printed robotics projects which teach invention and product design. Each project is powered by our Arduino based chip, and controlled by your smartphone,” said Rielly. Users can download plans and programs and then print all the parts needed for the robots. There are even lesson plans using the models so kids can learn how to create robotic projects with a minimum of fuss. “I studied Electronic Engineering with Computing at Nottingham, with my 3rd year in UNSW, and then went into Software Development,” said Rielly. “I’ve worked for a number of companies, big and small, including Experian, eBay and Brandwatch and have become a relatively proficient programmer. However, it always niggled me that I came out of University with a 2:1 and almost no real understanding of or passion for my subject, and I had to spend the next 5 years catching up before and after work.” “This all started from my frustrated efforts to make a remote controlled car 2 years ago. I could work out how to program everything but my woodwork and general craft skills are so below par, that everything I made would either fall apart or be so clunky that nothing would move. I was then lucky enough to meet up with my old boss at a Christmas party where we discussed the beginnings of my idea and get brought a 3D printer for my combined Christmas and Birthday Present two weeks later,” he said. Reilly describes the project as “everything I would have wanted as a 15-year-old kid.” Throw in some Stephen King books and a Victoria’s Secret catalog and I think he might be right. |
Yahoo Acquires Photo Startup Cooliris | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | Photo app-maker just announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo. It’s been a long road to this exit. Cooliris was founded back in 2006 and was initially known for creating a “ ” for navigating photos and other media content. It also created a platform for mobile ads called Adjitsu, which in 2012. More recently, the company shifted focus to a mobile app (also called Cooliris and with an interface reminiscent of the old 3D wall) that allowed users to browse photos from across services like Facebook, Flickr, and Dropbox. The team told me last year that thanks to partnerships with companies like Renren, Yandex, and Baidu. This summer, Cooliris also . The company has from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, The Westly Group, and DAG Ventures. On , the company wrote: Yahoo has a clear vision and unwavering commitment to making mobile an intuitive and effortless experience. This makes Yahoo the perfect partner for Cooliris, and we are excited to come together to bring indispensable products to a worldwide audience. Under CEO Marissa Mayer, Yahoo has indeed , and just last month it . Cooliris’ acquisition announcement doesn’t say anything too specific about whether Yahoo plans to do anything with the existing products, or if this is more of a talent acquisition — all it says is that the Cooliris for Mobile app and BeamIt Messenger will continue to operate “for the time being.” And here’s a statement from Yahoo: We have acquired Cooliris. In order to build inspiring products, grow engagement, and ultimately revenue, everything starts with having the best people to help us accelerate our transformation in our growth areas. As such, we are focusing on acquisitions that align with our key growth areas: search, communications, digital magazines and video. We are excited to welcome 17 employees from Cooliris to Sunnyvale, where our core communications team is located. Nothing will change with the Cooliris products in the immediate future. |
Crunchweek: Uber, Uber, Uber And Barbie | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | Here’s a protip: Don’t do what . That’s the main topic of CrunchWeek this time around. Bad behavior, however, wasn’t just Uber’s purview: The corporate entity behind Barbie was exposed for that undercut the idea that women can be software engineers. So that wasn’t very good. Happily, TechCrunch’s and were on hand to tell a few jokes, and riff on the news. Have a boppin’ weekend, everyone. |
Mikme Is A Portable, Multitrack Recording Rig For Your Cool Band | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | If you got your first real six string at the Five and Dime and you and you and some guys from school got together to record some songs primarily during and around the summer of 1969, you probably could have used the . The Mikme is a box-shaped microphone that can sit anywhere in the room and record, the creator claims, audiophile-quality sound wirelessly. It connects to a phone or tablet and streams the audio to a recording app live. The creator, Philipp Sonnleitner, is an electric engineer with six years experience at AKG. He is building the Mikme in Munich and will be shipping in May. “I am a musician,” said Sonnleitner. “I was frustrated by how long it took me to get something recorded. I wanted to have fun while making music and not time wasting setup stuff up. And all microphones looked boring and old fashioned. I wanted something which looks nice beneath my stuff.” The microphone itself has a 1-inch gold-plated condensor that converts 96kHz at 24 bits. It has a cardioid polar pattern and is good for recording voice or instruments – even a whole band, if aimed correctly. “Microphones are pretty old fashioned. They look, feel and behave like the ones 30 years ago. We are concentrating and focusing on the creative workflow, meaning artists should be able to focus on writing songs and being creative. Right now setting up a microphone takes too long. Even if it is a USB microphone you still need a cable, setting up a software, making updates, setting gains manually, selecting inputs and drivers… and then your inspiration has gone,” said Sonnleitner. He is looking to raise $217,000 – a pretty hard-core amount – and he’s selling the units for $179 for early birds. The device has 8GB on board and can record directly to the on-board memory or an 8 track recorder. Who knows? Maybe you can stand with it on your momma’s porch and sing about how the summer feels like it could last forever (the summer of ’69, that is).
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Fire TV Stick Review: A Great Streamer For An Amazon Household | Matt Burns | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | The Fire TV Stick works. That’s about all there is to it. It streams videos from Amazon, Netflix and more. It plays simple games and streams from local network shares. But it’s not for everyone. There are better products on the market for some users. That said, the Fire TV Stick is well worth its $40 price tag.
The price is right at $40
Access to Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, Hulu Plus and others
A clean and logical interface
Slightly laggy interface
Voice search is not available through the remote, only the app (which is out for Android, iOS is coming soon) This is the Fire TV Stick, not to be confused with the Fire TV. It’s $40 and another device in Amazon’s growing stable of Trojan horses. While appearing innocent and offering a bevy of 3rd party streaming apps like Netflix and ESPNgo, the Fire TV Stick is just another device to sell Amazon content. But a damn good one, too. The Fire TV Stick is the little brother to the Fire TV. Where the latter is a full-fledged streaming device complete with optical output and a quad-core CPU, the Fire TV Stick takes a decidedly more casual approach. As the name suggests, it’s just a stick like Google’s Chromecast or the Roku Streaming Stick. It plugs into an HDMI port and is powered by microUSB. The device works as advertised. There’s not much to say besides that. Plug it into an HDMI port and it powers up. After sitting through a 5 minute video explaining the ins-and-outs of the system, the Fire TV Stick is ready to go. Click a movie or TV show and it starts streaming. Select an app and it works. Sadly, it doesn’t work as well as the big brother, though. There’s a bit of lag and hesitation while navigating items on the Fire TV stick. The navigation is smooth enough, but not silky smooth like on the full fledged Fire TV. The lack of the quad-core CPU will be noticeable to users of the Fire TV. The Stick also lacks the Ethernet port, optical output and the ability to search by voice from the remote (although Amazon will happily sell Stick owners the voice remote). The Fire TV Stick shares an operating system and user interface with the Fire TV. It’s logical and easy to jump right in — if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber. The Fire TVs are foremost a way to watch content from Amazon Instant Video. All the content displayed throughout the main menu is from Amazon. The search function only returns results from Amazon as well. If you want to watch or search within Netflix, the app has to be running. Only having access to Amazon Instant Video from the homescreen isn’t a big deal, really. The library is comparable to Netflix and now has HBO’s back catalog. And Netflix and others are just a click away. Have a Fire TV in the living room and a Fire TV Stick in the bedroom on the same account? They will share a watch history and watchlist as long as their on the same Amazon Prime account. Start a video in the livingroom and you’ll be able to finish it in the bedroom. Amazon packaged a basic remote with the Fire TV Stick (right). It sports the necessities such as navigation and media playback buttons. A dedicated voice search button is absent, but will be available on the upcoming Fire TV companion app. During my testing, I found the lack of the voice search startling. Having used a Fire TV since its release, I never knew how much I leaned on that function. It’s still possible to search on the Fire TV Stick, but only with a clunky on-screen keyboard. The Fire TV Stick is directly competing with the Roku Streaming Stick and Google’s Chromecast. But they’re for different people. Chromecast is great for the mobile aficionado — someone who lives on their mobile device. It’s not ideal for a multi-person environment with children where a dedicated remote and an interface on a TV is just easier to navigate. The Roku Streaming Stick stick is a great alternative to the Fire TV Stick. It offers more streaming stations than Amazon’s device. If a person just has Netflix or Hulu Plus, the Roku is the best bet. But if a person also has Amazon, the Fire TV Stick simply has a better interface for viewing Amazon’s selection and the rest of the apps are available like on a Roku device. At $40 the Fire TV Stick is a great buy for an Amazon household. The library selection rivals Netlfix. It’s true, the $100 Fire TV is a better device, but for $60 less, a person gains access to the same content and experience. And I can deal with a touch of lag if I’m saving $60. |
Gillmor Gang LIVE 11.21.14 | Steve Gillmor | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: Nokia N1, Intel MICA, And The New Parrot Drone | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | News is picking up in time for the holiday season, with Nokia . Meanwhile, Intel got into the fashion game with the new , complete with a Sapphire OLED touchscreen. Plus, Parrot just , and Matt can’t get enough of it. We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
We invite you to enjoy our every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right .
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Intro Music by . |
Leading Digital Transformation | George Westerman | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | . Digital technologies — from social media to mobile computing to big data to the Internet of everything — are transforming businesses in every industry. Do you want to have conversations with your customers in ways that surveys and focus groups never could? Social media can make that happen. Do you want to make your employees more productive anywhere and anytime? Try mobile computing. Do you want to understand what’s really happening in your company so you can make informed decisions rather than just working by instinct? Big data analytics can do that. Do you want to kick the pants off your competitors through digital customer engagement or business model innovations? That can happen, too. In my research on digital transformation, I’ve been amazed to see how many digital activities companies are undertaking, especially in non-digital industries. But despite all of this activity, relatively few companies were really doing it well. Why are some able to do amazing things with digital technologies, while others just do “more of the same”? What makes some firms “digital masters” while the majority of them lag behind? You might think it has to do with technology expertise. So many accounts of successful digital businesses focus on Internet startups or companies in the tech industry. You also might think you need to hire a hundred employees from Google or Facebook or Amazon. That thinking is reasonable, but it’s wrong. For digital masters, technology is important, but it’s not the most important thing. The critical factor turns out to be leadership. In a new book I coauthored with Didier Bonnet and Andrew McAfee, , we looked at how more than 400 large companies in traditional industries like finance, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals are using digital. We identified four key leadership practices for driving digital transformation. The first practice involves creating a transformative digital vision for the company. Just saying you’ll adopt digital isn’t enough. You need to describe how the company will actually change: How will you engage differently with customers? How will you rethink your operations? What new business models are possible? , the world’s largest copper company, is a good example of a digital master with a strong vision. Codelco executives are envisioning a radically new kind of copper mine – one where humans will never need to work in the dangerous underground environment again. There will be plenty of jobs for miners, but all of them will be above ground. This vision is well on the way to reality, with autonomous trucks driving around mines, mining control centers located hundreds of miles away from the mines, and strong collaboration with vendors to push the limits of technology. As a result, Codelco is also pushing the economics of the industry, making it possible to harvest copper ore that would be far too dangerous and costly for humans to mine. Codelco is not alone. P&G’s vision is to create digital dashboards for everything in the company, enabling employees to make decisions based on real-time data. And Boeing’s vision puts the airplane at the center of a digital airline for which Boeing will provide many services beyond the airframe. Great leaders know that they can’t change businesses on their own. They need to convince their employees to change. Once you have a strong vision, you need to help people figure out what it means to them and how they can play their part in making the vision a reality. Engaging employees in a new vision can be a tough task. Many employees have seen visions come and go. For digital masters, top leaders focus on communicating the vision and helping people know what it means to them. They use every channel possible from meetings to internal collaboration platforms. And they focus on making it a two-way conversation, where employees suggest ways to build out the vision, not just follow orders to implement. You can see this type of engagement at the technology giant , which holds an annual innovation conference to gather great ideas for moving the company forward. Each year, employees share more than 4,000 ideas. Winners get recognition across EMC, but all participants gain from being part of the conversation. Of course companies can’t fund every new idea. Leaders need to be clear about what is appropriate and what is not. If your vision says you will be a unified company and someone wants to fund an idea that runs counter to it, you need to think long and hard about it. Global media company is a good case in point. It built capability so that an interview with a soccer player in Argentina could be played on the news in Spain that same day. The company had to be very strong in saying that each business unit must work with this system; if a unit tried to do its own process then the company wouldn’t fund it. But governance is more than just standards and investment processes. , Starbucks, and other companies have appointed a chief digital officer, a role responsible for steering governance and driving the digital conversation across the firm. Other firms like Nike and Lloyds Banking Group have created digital units that provide capability and some resources, making it easier to work with governance rather than against it. In all of the Digital Masters we studied, top business executives work closely with IT executives. IT leaders find ways to speak the language of the business, and business leaders find ways to include IT leaders in strategic conversations. This doesn’t mean that IT goes unchanged. In many companies, IT is seen as too slow or stodgy for the fast-moving digital realm. IT leaders must find ways to improve the performance and speed of IT. Some companies choose to practice dual-speed IT, where one part of the IT unit does digital and coordinates with the rest of IT as needed. Others like Lloyds Bank have a digital division co-led by IT and business people. And in some firms like Codelco, the CIO leads digital transformation. Becoming a digital master isn’t an overnight process. Digital transformation requires a long-term commitment and, above all, a focus on strong leadership. Companies that profit from digital see it as a leadership challenge, not a technology one. They understand the opportunities that digital can provide, and strive to make them real. And they find that each new action creates new possibilities to digitally transform their companies and industries. |
null | Natasha Lomas | 2,014 | 11 | 26 | null |
DataFox Brings Private Company Analysis And One-Pagers To Mobile | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | , the online research platform that allows anyone to track information about private tech companies, has now brought its service to mobile in the form of . The free app provides DataFox subscribers with access to over 500,000 company one-pager’s, private and public lists, and an events stream detailing recent news on companies tracked, like new hires, turnover, acquisitions, IPOs, new product releases, and more. As you may recall, DataFox its “intelligence platform as a service” at TechCrunch Disrupt 2014, promising to put the capabilities of professional analysts into the hands of anyone interested in the same sort of information, research and insights. Except, unlike analysts who manually dig for information then enter it into spreadsheets and databases for further analysis, DataFox collects information automatically and in real-time using data-mining and machine learning technologies. It pulls in data from the web, RSS feeds, YouTube and other API partners like CrunchBase, AngelList, LinkedIn, Alexa and more. It also creates its own data in order to surface new information other providers might not have, like who a firm’s top competitors are, for example. One mobile, the new app offers many of the same features as the DataFox website, though it doesn’t load up the deeper insights, data tables and graphs on the web client. Instead, co-founder Bastiaan Janmaat describes the app as something akin to a “Refresh for companies.” If you’re not familiar with , it’s just ahead of your meeting time, allowing you to quickly catch up on what’s been going on with them and their business, while also potentially offering you common ground to connect over – like having mutual friends, for instance. Similarly, DataFox’s company “one-pagers” can also quickly catch you up on the specifics of a company as a whole, detailing recent news, M&A activities, funding rounds, and more. [gallery ids="1086611,1086612,1086613,1086615,1086616"] You can also track your own lists of companies in the app, or those public lists you follow. To date, users, including DataFox team members, have created 16,000 lists, but users’ lists are private by default. There are, however, some 760 public lists that can help you get started, including selections like “The Billion-Dollar Club,” “Sharing Economy,” “E-commerce,” “Internet of Things,” “FinTech,” and more. On DataFox, an investor may be tracking potential investments or their portfolio, as an example, while a large company may be tracking its Silicon Valley-based startup competition. “One thing I’ve been happily surprised to see is that every large company in America has a team who are focused on the Valley, and the high-growth tech companies coming out the Valley,” says Janmaat. “The innovation is occurring at such a high speed, it’s really hard for these people who don’t have an office on Sand Hill Road or in SoMa to keep tabs on the companies that are up-and-coming, to prospect for interesting businesses, or to do research on them.” Janmaat declined to say how many total customers DataFox has signed up since its launch, but he did say that it now has over 30 paying corporate customers ranging from single seat to 50-seat deals. He’s not allowed to disclose the name of those customers, either, but characterizes them as large corporations, including large tech companies, banks and investment firms. The company also offers individual accounts for $50/month or professional accounts for $400/month. Those customers find the company on their own and sign up, while the corporate clients interact with DataFox’s sales team who also sell additional services and customizations. Now that the app is live, DataFox is focusing on growing its sales team and working to deliver customers’ other big request: in a future release, DataFox will begin integrating with customers’ CRM systems, like Salesforce. The new DataFox app . While Android is on the roadmap, it has not been in high demand. Android customers can use a mobile website instead. |
Makerbot CEO Jenny Lawton On Ramping Up A Fast-Moving Company | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | 3D printer company experienced almost exponential growth. After a few years in a cramped Brooklyn warehouse, the team grew from 20 to 600 in a few short years and the company was bought by Stratasys, a major player in the professional printing space. Makerbot’s new CEO, Jenny Lawton, sat down with us to talk a bit about what it meant to be a global company and how it felt pushing Makerbot’s engine from 0 to 100 in what seemed like seconds. “It’s cool to be the CEO of the coolest company in Brooklyn,” said Lawton (after some coaching). Lawton and her team are currently working on interesting character partnerships with brands like Sesame Street and Hello Kitty. The company is also working on newer versions of their software and hardware which Lawton was a bit reticent to describe. “We’re super-excited about growing the ecosystem,” she said. They have a number of interesting announcements coming at CES, she said. The worst thing about Makerbot’s growth? The fact that she can’t be sure who works at the company anymore in the elevator, she said. |
FCC Expects Cable Companies To Fight Back Over Net Neutrality | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | The FCC anticipates that large cable companies will sue the agency after it votes into place net neutrality regulations. This would be a . It will have the clarifying impact of forcing hands: Companies that tried to split the fence will be decidedly on one end of it or the other. Here’s Chairman Tom Wheeler from earlier today, : “The big dogs are going to sue regardless of what comes out. […] We need to make sure that we have sustainable rules, and that starts with making sure that we have addressed the multiplicity of issues that come along and are likely to be raised.” Read simply, Wheeler is pointing out that anything his agency puts into place that can’t withstand a well-funded lawsuit is moot. This makes the current tussle concerning what legal foundation to base new net neutrality regulations on a bit more important than it might appear at first glance. Wheeler continued: “I want to move on open Internet rules with dispatch.” The FCC now expects to move on net neutrality in 2015. A vote in December had been widely expected. The President recently with a call for strong net neutrality rules, and use of Title II, which would most certainly draw legal ire. We know that because it’s . Two quotes, for flavor, from two ISPs [Bolding: TechCrunch]: that would in and of itself threaten great harm to an open Internet, competition and innovation. Moreover, if the government were going to make such a momentous decision as regulating the entire Internet like a public utility, that decision is more properly made by the Congress and not by unelected regulators without any public record to support the change in regulation. So Wheeler isn’t blowing smoke. This is going to happen. |
The Internet Is The Best Thing Ever To Happen To Songwriters | Ron Miller | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | Ever since, , under the auspices of helping songwriters, there has been a conversation suggesting that there was somehow a golden age for songwriters when they controlled their own destiny –and the Internet killed all that. I’m here to tell you that there was never any such time and if anything, the Internet was the best thing that ever happened to musicians. Here’s a simple truth: The Internet is the best distribution channel ever created and it’s up to musicians and record companies to figure out how to exploit it. And here’s a hint: It’s not the old way of selling records. Let’s look back at the reality of the music business for a minute, shall we? The business is littered with stories of exploitation. In the 1950s, black blues musicians and early rockers often never saw a penny for their work, even when they were covered by white rock musicians a decade later. ~Pink Floyd, Have a Cigar in the 1970s while he fought to get out from under an exploitive contract he signed before he understood the music business. The Beatles lost control of their publishing catalog when . Billy Joel’s accountant (who was his brother-in-law) . Sting’s accountant did something similar. ~Tom Petty, Hard Promises There are countless tales of contracts signed outside nightclubs on the trunks of cars in the dark of night, which gave all the rights to the manager and of managers and accountants running amok and cooking the books, so to suggest there was some sort of golden age for singer-songwriters is a bit disingenuous. As Bono said recently in an interview with David Carr on stage at Web Summit, “The music business has historically involved itself in quite considerable deceit.” Now that we’ve burst that myth, let’s look at what the music industry was like in the late 1990s. The record companies had been living the high life for years (mostly on the backs of musicians) and the gravy train was coming to a fast halt as the digitization of music made distributing it on the Internet easy-peasy. Then a couple of college kids created Napster and figured out a way to share music without paying for it. There would be no turning back. The response was predictable as record companies circled the wagons and tried to sue their way out of the problem, but what they failed to realize is they had lost control of the distribution. It was all hunky-dory for them when musicians came begging at the door because they controlled the means of production, the recording facilities and they controlled distribution through the record stores and radio stations. It was a great deal for the record companies, they raked in millions and gave a small percentage back to the musicians (so much for golden ages). ~Byrds, So you wanna be a rock and roll star The Internet took that control away from the record companies and where did it put it? It put it in the hands of the musicians themselves. They no longer had to beg at the door because they had their own distribution channel and they could get their music out through social media and YouTube and other huge mostly free platforms without the record company help. Sure, there are still record companies and musicians as popular as Taylor Swift who can afford to play the system and thumb their noses at the likes of Spotify, but when Spotify’s owners suggested they had helped stem piracy and gave people a legal way to listen to music, . The same goes for iTunes before that. Both of these systems provided a legal way to distribute music and make money. saying Spotify was not the enemy here. “When people pick on Spotify: Spotify are giving up 70% of all their revenues to rights owners. It’s just that people don’t know where the money is because the record labels haven’t been transparent,” he said. It’s worth noting that when Bono was asked about his recent deal with Apple to distribute U2’s latest album on iTunes for free, he made it clear he doesn’t work for free and he negotiated a big pay day for the band in exchange for allowing Apple to do that, but he also said it enabled them to reach 30 million people in 3 weeks, a number it took 30 years and relentless touring to do with The Joshua Tree. One other point Bono made is that there is a trade-off when it comes to artists. Of course you want to be paid, but you also want to be heard (or read), and the idea that nobody would ever hear your songs is, in his words, “terrifying.” These channels let you be heard and he gets that (but of course like Swift, his band is wildly popular and he can afford to look at this intellectually). I’m not suggesting these new channels didn’t come with their own set of problems, but they provided a way for musicians to distribute their music and get paid something, rather than having no hope of getting paid when people went the way of Napster and other illegal download sites. But, it’s also important to remember that the Internet also changed the notion of the song itself. It wasn’t any longer about getting paid for every play. It was about getting the word out about your music and using those channels like YouTube to whet the appetites of your fans. Not everyone is going to be as big as Taylor Swift and in fact very few people are, so they have to use the system and get their constituencies excited about their music, so they show up at concerts and buy merchandise and give them different ways of making money. The Internet changed everything, but not the way that Swift would have you believe. In fact, she manipulated it to perfection. When she removed her music from Spotify, she (or her handlers) knew that it would spark a conversation and get people talking about the new album and were they ever right. We are still talking about it several weeks later. And if you look at the core of that strategy, it’s taking advantage of social media and the Internet while trashing that same channel as exploitative. Oh the beauty of irony and the Internet. It worked perfectly. Swift is one smart cookie who understands the power of the Internet and used it to drive more sales of her album and sell more tickets to her concerts. And unlike Miley Cyrus she didn’t even have to twerk on national TV to get us talking. She just went after a streaming music service. Both strategies were brilliant, worked to a “T” and took advantage of the Internet to get us talking. Seems this Internet thing actually does pretty well for musicians when they can figure out how to take advantage of it. |
A Gift Guide For The Tech-Friendly Kitchen | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | Kitchen gadgets are always a good option if there’s someone on your list that likes to cook, craft, bake and do whatever else in the culinary way. There’s a lot out there that can help simplify the cooking process, enable the creation of new types of dishes, and just generally improve the overall quality and health benefits of the food you eat. Will it blend? That’s the tagline and video series that turned Blendtec into a viral hit among tech enthusiasts, but these blenders can handle a lot more than just smashing expensive gadgets to bits. In terms of foods, they can puree just about anything, and if you’re a fan of smoothies, soups or juices, the Designer 725 hasn’t met a root vegetable or frozen pear it couldn’t turn into a smooth, deliciously drinkable meal. If you’re looking for cold pressed juice, which is all the rage in coffee and dedicated juice stops popping up just about everywhere, the new Juicepresso is a good pick, thanks to dishwasher friendly parts, a juicing method that will produce up to 40% more juice and and a finished product that doesn’t immediately separate in the fridge. Slow cooking is already pretty easy, but the WeMo-enabled Crock-Pot created by Belkin and the industry leader in slow-cooker tech makes it even easier thanks to smartphone control over time and temperature. Running late? Turn down the heat from the board room. A good diet involves balanced nutrition, not anything else – regardless of whatever cleanse you may currently have been swindled by. The Orange Chef Prep Pad will help with that balancing act, as it packs a scale that can tell you the nutritional breakdown of virtually any kind of food or even entire meals placed on its surface. An oldie but a goody, this under-cabinet mount for your iPad (any generation) will let you use your device while you’re prepping food, so you can watch instructional videos or read recipes and instructions with ease. Hop over to Netflix if you’re in clean-up mode and waiting for the cake to rise. Cooking with a thermometer is a great way to allay the fears of family members regarding whether or not the turkey is properly cooked, without having to err on the side of caution and dry the damned thing out. Tea enthusiasts will have boiling water ready for their morning or afternoon cup without having to think about it, with remote boiling and variable temperature control, as well as automatic boiling based on geofencing and morning wake up time. |
Photo-Sharing App Memoir Snags $5.5 Million To Help You Recall The Past | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | Photo-sharing application , a Timehop competitor that allows you to rediscover old photo “memories,” has raised an additional $5.5 million in a round led by Redpoint Ventures’ Ryan Sarver. Others participating included prior investors Founder Collective, Box Group, Lerer Ventures and Thrive Capital. The company had previously raised $1.2 million in seed funding. Formerly the head of platform at Twitter, the new round is Sarver’s first as a VC, and is representative of investors’ increasing interest in funding more private social networks. Memoir, for background, , offering users a variety of ways to uncover their old photos, including a time capsule-like function that’s a lot like Timehop’s. But Memoir tacks on several other features, too, including the ability to ask friends for photos you and they both snapped while at the same place at the same time. , the company rolled out an improved feature it calls “predictive photo sharing,” which co-founder Lee Hoffman explained involves using data to figure out when you’ve arrived and left a location, and which friends were there. The app visually prompts you with suggestions of friends you can share with, making the process easier than having to go around asking everyone to text you their photos. It’s a clever trick that relies on an iOS 8 feature called “Visit Monitoring,” which is part of the iOS 8 Core Location Framework. While technologically interesting, the app can still be more challenging to explain to new users because it’s not quite as simple a concept as something like Timehop’s “this day in history” complication of old photos and social media posts. That being said, what Memoir is doing is a worthwhile challenge for a startup to take on. Users are snapping more and more smartphone photos these days, but most get abandoned to the ether after they’re taken. The photos are only sometimes shared on public social networks, like Facebook, and eventually, users clear out their photo galleries on their smartphones to make room for new photos – sometimes without even backing up first. Hoffman says users today only share 20% of their photos publicly on social networks today, down 10% from three years earlier. Meanwhile, the app’s users are taking around 5 photos per day, up 75% year-over-year. While the company won’t talk about specific download numbers or active users, Hoffman would say that one of the factors in the raise was the app’s “incredible stickiness” and its engagement numbers. “Specifically, greater than 35% of users that have ever registered are active on the product,” he says. The company is now rolling out a number of new products, including web signup and a full OS X experience, . For now, Memoir remains free, but eventually the plan is to introduction a premium subscription option to help the company generate revenue. The original version of this story was updated to correct Ryan Sarver’s previous role at Twitter. |
Aereo CEO: Court Made Incredibly Wrong Decision, Cord-Cutting Is Inevitable | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | This morning, , marking the end of the road for the cloud-based TV startup. The company launched in 2012 using micro-antennas and cloud DVR technology to provide near-live TV access to 30 channels to subscribers for as low as $8/month. But after losing a fierce legal battle with broadcast networks, that went all the way to the Supreme Court this summer, the company is looking to figure out next steps as it shuts down. We hopped on the phone with CEO and founder Chet Kanojia to discuss the news. Check out the full transcript below: It’s been about five months since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the broadcast networks and deemed Aereo illegal. What’s been going on with Aereo during that time? As the law changed, it took us a while to figure out the possible ways that we could look at the future of the company. Our team was patient for long enough to figure out which avenue made the most sense, and that took a while to sort. There was a lot of interest in figuring out the value of the technology, the partnerships, and the components of the company. As we explored more, knowing the toll litigation took and the additional costs, we determined that the right thing to do was to go through Chapter 11 restructuring. Obviously, once we made that decision, it took us a while to get the details of that figured out, which brings us to this morning. What is the process moving forward? With the restructuring, we can either recapitalize the technology with a new business plan or sell the assets. We’ve brought someone on, Lawton Bloom from Argus, to make sure it’s a clean and fair and balanced process. What have you been hearing from your investors over the past few months and leading up to today? Everybody is deeply disappointed — the team, investors, and a lot of consumers. Our board obviously helped us come to this decision, after exhausting all possibilities and scenarios and going down every branch of the decision tree to plan the probability of success for each. Based on all that, we decided that the restructuring was the best was to make sure our assets are maximized for our shareholders. But we’re deeply disappointed. The court made an incredibly wrong decision, but be that as it may, we can’t appeal that decision anymore so it’s time to take next steps. How do you think Aereo, its outcome as a company and in the Supreme Court, will affect the future of the TV industry and its disruption? I think we played an integral role in bringing to the forefront the imbalances of the industry — the Archaean business models, the lack of focus on consumer interest. I think we brought that dialogue even more attention. Once a day there’s a story in the news about cord cutting. There is evidence that around 10 million households are internet only in the United States. We didn’t create the phenomenon, but we rose to fill that opportunity. It’s inevitable that we’ll get there. Even now you can see CBS and HBO making moves in this direction, but those are just band aids. Aereo was positioned in the same place that we’ll find the TV industry in the next five to seven years. If you could go back and do anything differently, would you? Hindsight is always 20/20. I’d go back and look at all the decisions we made, and very honestly, I think we executed flawlessly. There isn’t much we could have done to avoid this other than not starting Aereo, and starting this company is something I’d never regret. I learned to create something that touched a chord in people, so there are few regrets on that front. Would we tweak one or two percent of the decisions? Sure, but in entirety our decision-making was pitch perfect. We were a startup taking on a $130 billion+ industry, and I think we executed flawlessly. I go back and ask the investors and the board and everyone’s consensus, the resounding verdict, has been that our decisions were made carefully and cautiously. We were taking on a big idea and a big risk and everyone understood that. We were willing to take those risks to chase the dream. What would you say to startups who are looking to break into the TV industry or encourage cord cutting? It’s inevitable that cord cutting is going to happen. There are immediate opportunities and there are even bigger opportunities in the future to serve consumer need, and that won’t come from incumbents. Their business model won’t permit it. People have to make their own assessments, but there is a lot of innovation in the space, which is exciting. I look at Aereo as a huge success on a lot of different fronts. The financial outcome might not have been a success, but that is just one piece. We raised the dialogue around the problems in the industry, creating a great product that connected consumers to incredible technology. And we did it with a great team. If you measure us by any of those standards, we’re a success. The financial outcome is just one aspect. And so there are a lot of interesting things happening in this industry for anyone willing to take the risk. What are your plans moving forward, Chet? Right now I have to see Aereo to its last conclusion, so that’s the focus right now. But people like me have a hard time setting things down. I’m not sure whether I’ll get into media again, but one thing I promised myself is that whatever I do next, it has to have a similar level of meaningfulness and relevancy for it to be exciting and worth putting my energy into. |
Ears-On With Spotify In Uber: Fast, Fun Backset DJing If Drivers Have It | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | Uber now lets you for your car’s sound system . On my demo ride-along, I was impressed by how easy and seamless it works, as long as the driver is equipped. Music selections made on your phone quickly start playing through the driver’s app connected to the stereo, and there’s no data cost to the passenger beyond the premium Spotify subscription. The integration demonstrates both how Uber could allow more in-car personalization and control, as well as how Spotify could strengthen the value of its paid subscriptions . Obviously, the partnership comes at a tough time for Spotify, as no one would want to tie their brand to around one of its execs suggesting the company dig up dirt on journalists who criticize it. But beyond that, the deal makes sense as both companies are trying to change how you spend money by touting convenience. Spotify tells me the Uber integration will roll out globally in the next few months, but is now live in : London, Sydney, Singapore, Stockholm ,Mexico City, Toronto, NYC, LA, SF, and Nashville. Uber is aggressively trying to get all its drivers equipped to run Spotify, and teach them how the system works. Until then, perhaps the worst part of the integration is that not all drivers have it, and you won’t know if your driver does until they confirm you ride. That could lead passengers to cancel on drivers without Spotify if they were really hoping to rock out. This problem will solve itself with time, though. Here’s my hands-on video, that I stupidly shot in portrait mode. Feel free to make fun of me on Twitter at . [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC4V9ZrRdLA] To use Spotify in Uber, you go into your Uber app’s profile page and “Connect Spotify” to your $10 a month premium subscription. Once you request a ride and are assigned a driver, if they have Spotify set up you’ll see a Music bar at the bottom of the Uber screen. Tapping that gives you quick access to your own Spotify playlists or a set of city-specific playlists that feature great driving jams. Once you select a song, it will go into a holding pattern until your driver presses the Uber button to start the ride. Their phone will immediately start playing the song through the car’s system. This works nicely so the second you get in the car, you have control of the soundtrack. While riding, you can choose different songs at any time, and they only take about one to two seconds to start playing in the car, which feels very snappy. If you want to pick a song outside of your playlists or Uber’s, you can tap the Spotify shortcut button in the Music bar on Uber to pop over to your Spotify app. There you can search or choose any other song. Since the music doesn’t actually stream from your phone, you won’t be hit with data charges for playing music in Uber’s, and the companies are covering the data charges for drivers too if they use an official Uber phone (though they’ll be charged if they run the Uber app on a personal phone.) Overall, Spotify + Uber feels like a natural, graceful collaboration. It’s not sluggish, confusing, or limiting in terms of music choice — all ways they could have screwed it up. One of the big complaints ride-sharing services sometimes get is that drivers are too chatty when passengers want a quiet ride. It sure won’t be silent, but at least now you can ride in peace with a cabin full of your favorite jams instead of small talk. |
Livefyre Studio Puts The Company’s Focus On User Generated Content And Social Media Curation | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | At this point, I should probably stop calling a commenting platform. Actually, the company has been expanding beyond comments for a while. It , which included more social media widgets, back in 2012. And it last year. But the company is taking another big step in this direction with the relaunch of its core platform, which it’s now calling Livefyre Studio. The idea, basically, is to allow online publishers (whether they’re news organizations or brand marketers) to gather user generated content from anywhere online, and then to republish it anywhere in turn. In some ways, it’s similar to what Storify already does, but it sounds like the aim here is to provide that kind of social media curation on a bigger scale, with more automation, and often for more marketing-centric uses. (This could also turn Livefyre into more of a competitor for startups .) In a quick demo, founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer showed me how a customer could search for different types of content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and across the web; hand-select the content or set up rules for automated gathering and filtering; then publish it to a customized media wall on their own site, their mobile apps, or in an ad. (The search part, by the way, is powered by Storify — Kretchmer said it’s the first integration of Storify into the main Livefyre platform.) Livefyre Studio also includes the ability to ask users for the rights to their content, and analytics capabilities to see how these campaigns are actually performing. The company has actually been testing the platform for months, Kretchmer said, and it went live for all customers last week. For example, it was used to create highlighting content from the PlayStation 4 community, as well as . It can be useful for news organizations, too — Fox News took advantage of the ability to include this content in custom apps, creating highlighting related tweets and Instagram photos. But judging from our conversation, as well as (which does mention comments, if only very briefly), the emphasis seems to be pretty clearly on the marketing side. In fact, Kretchmer told me that in the past year brands have grown from to 0 to 30 percent of Livefyre’s revenue. And he argued that all the user generated content posted on social media presents a big opportunity for companies to connect with consumers, both on their own sites and elsewhere, but “brands don’t have internal resources for managing this stuff.” “We have to make it as easy as humanly possible to let brands access all of these great applications,” he added. [vimeo 112351597 w=500 h=281] from on . |
A New App Called Milk Helps You Save On Groceries, Without Clipping Paper Coupons | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | The creators of , which helps online shoppers save at checkout, have now launched a new app called (mmm…milk and honey…) that lets you save at the grocery store. The app is now one of many aimed at helping consumers save on consumer packaged good purchases, even if they don’t have time for clipping coupons from a newspaper. Today, there a lot of apps like Milk to choose from, including SavingStar, Shopmium, ibotta, Checkout 51, Shrink, and more recently, Groupon Snap. These sorts of applications have emerged as a way to transition paper coupons, a marketing effort reliant on the dying newspaper industry, to a more usable, mobile format. Honey co-founder George Ruan explains why there’s been such a rapid increase in grocery rewards app in recent months, saying: “Each year, 315 billion coupons worth well over $400 billion dollars are distributed. But only a tiny fraction is redeemed – 0.8% – and usage is dropping.” Not only are newspapers struggling to maintain readership, people’s free time is also dropping, while their time spent using social media is increasing. “For millennials, the time spent on social media each day is a staggering 5.4 hours,” Ruan notes. “The time commitment to keep track of, acquire, manage, and use grocery coupons is a hassle that is no longer worth it for most consumers.” I consider myself an extreme couponer, so I understand the complaint. (I save half or more on my grocery bill using coupons, but don’t “stockpile” mass quantities of deals, like on that .) However, it does take a lot of time to clip, match-up, stack and organize your deals. Most people would be happy with just saving a little bit more at the register. And for people like me who go all in, these apps are just icing on the cake. In general, most of the grocery rewards apps work similarly. After shopping, you typically confirm your purchases matching offers in the app by scanning the product’s barcode, then uploading a photograph of your receipt. In the case of stores that offer store loyalty cards, some apps, like SavingStar, will apply the discounts automatically at checkout. The new Milk app fits into this latter group as it, too, only handles digital coupons that are “clipped” to store loyalty cards. Other apps that credit you after you scan your receipt are really offering rebates that are presented like digital coupons, and Milk avoids these. That arguably makes it less useful to a wider audience, since many grocery stores have done away with loyalty cards in favor of systems that work only via phone numbers plugged in right at point-of-sale. (Loyalty card stores also allow you to enter your phone number at point-of-sale, but they still require the card as the first step to account creation). However, for those who do shop at one of the over dozen chains that still use loyalty cards, like Kroger, Safeway, Vons, Fry’s, Tom Thumb and others, Milk is easy to use. You simply add your card to the app, then shop its deals. The app organizes its digital coupons into various sections, like baby, beverages, bakery, etc., allowing you to easily find relevant offers. You can add the deals to a shopping list in Milk, too, to help you remember what to buy when in the store. While apps like ibotta use a pay for performance model to earn commissions on sales, Milk creators plan to charge a monthly fee for its service, which I think is a mistake. Couponers, whether digital or otherwise, are interested in cutting costs, not increasing them. Ruan says that beta testers saved on average $27/month using the app, which means regular users could still save more than they paid to subscribe, but this misunderstands the mentality of those who clip-and-save. And with a half-dozen plus competitors on the market, including web couponing giants like Coupons.com, SmartSource.com and others, many consumers may choose to skip the app that charges them directly. Ruan notes that Milk doesn’t represent a pivot for Honey, whose browser extension has now been installed over a million times, has 300,000+ weekly shoppers, and has processed through $750 million of transactions. Honey’s users have saved over $20 million to date, he says. “The only challenge was that the consumption behavior of grocery is different from what Honey users are used to and it was sure to cause confusion,” says Ruan. “For that reason, we decided to give the grocery app a different name. It’s an expansion of what we do at Honey – to save people money in fun and serendipitous ways.” Milk is and, soon, Google Play. |
Springleap Brings A New Model For Creative Design To Madison Avenue And Beyond | Jonathan Shieber | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | has traveled from its offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa, to Brooklyn to set up its global headquarters and bring a new model for crowdsourced design to the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue. The company started as a design competition website, allowing brands to post competitions and offer prizes to the best designers for various campaigns. “That in itself was quite remarkable,” says Springleap founder Eran Eyal. Springleap won a slew of awards, including the United Nations World Summit Award for innovative e-business; MentorCamp Global Finals in Canada, and a most valuable presenter by Microsoft. But now the company’s won something even better — cold, hard cash to the tune of a $400,000 round which brought it to New York to try to shake up the world of design. Financing for the initial round came from local South African and U.K. investors, including Colenso Capital, Clearwater, Kevin Gaskell and Crystal Bay Capital. Founded in 2007 as a crowdsourced platform for T-shirt designs, the company has since become a way for clients to access creative and design talent. “The pivot at Springleap made a lot of sense, but we are also backing Eran’s ambitions and vision here,” said Colenso Capital’s Tim Leclecrq. “In a short time, he’s brought a world-class team and advisers together around Springleap and positioned the business for huge potential.”

In addition to being part of South Africa’s thriving economy of technology startups, the investment interest in Springleap comes at a time of increasing attention from the global advertising industry on acquiring local advertising, communications and digital agencies, Springleap said in a statement. “The model Springleap is developing can sit at the heart of any agency to help them flexibly scale and access new varieties of talent and skills across Africa,” said Clearwater chief executive, Derek White. The company’s clients include Samsung, SAB, Nestle, Kraft and Ogilvy. “What we see is a marketplace of creators and brands and agencies having a much more scalable creative model,” Eyal says. The company is currently raising a larger round of financing to pursue a more robust vision than just design and talent competitions (although these days, with hiring and developing talent so competitive — running competitions is probably not a bad business). Eyal says that the competitive aspect at the heart of Springleap’s model is better for companies. “A business doesn’t get one design, they get five radically different designs.” In the beginning, designers were paid to pitch and the company offered high-end rewards for winning designers, but the company’s vision is expanding. “We’re figuring out constantly with the creators who have looked at our history. We have a bigger vision, which we believe will fundamentally change the way stuff works in the design category and the research category,” Eyal says. The company is currently raising a new round of capital to bring that vision to market and has been in talks with investors on both coasts. Already the company has a sales pipeline of $3 million, Eyal says. The advertising market is huge, with companies spending some $580 billion on the production of new ads. Springleap has a way to go after what Eyal estimates is one-third of that total spend (which is a pretty massive market). “We’re interested in how the agency-class creator thinks,” Eyal says. To that end, the company will look to build out an analytics and research component to its business to institutionalize the thinking of the best minds at the best advertising firms. Think Don Draper on-demand. “We’re tapping in to the meta-consumer. The guy who tells the consumer what they like and don’t like.” |
ReservationHop Ditches Restaurant Reservations, Launches Scheduling Tool OK Shift | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Hey, remember ReservationHop? You know, the much-criticized service that promised to sell restaurant reservations to users? Well, founder Brian Mayer is officially abandoning the idea. The service seemed to (or at least the ones I follow) back in July — in fact, it spurred our own Josh Constine to write a post asking startups to “ .” It’s probably not worth going into all the pros and cons of the idea at this point — let’s just say that Mayer told me he was trying to address “San Francisco’s love of both food and instant gratification, which I share,” while others found it “ ” and compared it to ticket scalping. Anyway, shortly after the brouhaha, Mayer made what he called a “ ” — he still planned to sell reservations, but now in partnership with restaurants. That, in turn, has been replaced by a “ ” away from reservations entirely. The new product is called , and it’s a text message-based service that helps hourly workers find replacements and secure manager approval when they can’t make their shift. You can — maybe at some point we’ll take a closer look. In the meantime, here’s how : Why did we decide to ultimately pivot away from ReservationHop? It became clear that the marketplace amongst restaurants wasn’t as big as we had hoped, for a couple reasons. First, after personally speaking to many of the best restaurants in San Francisco, as well as elsewhere, we could see that the value add we were bringing to the table wasn’t compelling enough to inspire a change in behavior. There was a real hesitance on the part of restaurants to mark up their prices in the form of paid reservations, for fear that they would lose control over dictating the value of their product. And there were, of course, branding concerns for many restaurants beyond simply maximizing revenue. |
Drawbridge Now Supports Connected TVs With Its Cross-Device Ad Targeting | Anthony Ha | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Ad tech startup has been for a couple of years, but now it’s adding another device to the mix — Internet-connected TVs. This follows Drawbridge’s earlier announcement that . Co-founder and CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan told me that while connected TVs are a “niche” platform for now and will only see “a fraction of the kind of spend you see” on other devices, they also appeal to high-end, “premium” marketers. “We see that marketers … still look for spend in that television screen and that big form factor,” Sivaramakrishnan said. So this is meant to be an option for delivering TV-style ads with the sophistication of online targeting. Drawbridge’s targeting, in particular, works by examining user behavior on different devices, then determining when those devices are likely used by the same person — so an advertiser could take advantage of desktop/laptop user data to target ads on mobile. Sivaramakrishnan acknowledged that when it comes to TVs, “It’s much more a static device. You don’t take your connected television out with you.” What Drawbridge is able to get from those TVs, Sivaramakrishnan said, is “a reasonable sense of what would be a home location,” though she added that it’s not personally identifiable. I also asked about the growing interest in cross-device advertising, both from startups and from . Sivaramakrishnan replied that there seems to be “a certain degree of noise” in the market right now, but she said she finds the interest from bigger players to be “validating.” Sivaramakrishnan also pointed to the fact that Drawbridge’s device graph now includes more than 3 billion devices that are connected to 1 billion users, and she argued that her company’s approach, which doesn’t use user login data, is taking “the moral high ground” because it’s “keeping the separation of church and state — consumer privacy is kept sacrosanct.” (Patrick Salyer, CEO of social login service Gigya, m when I talked to him on the same day.) |
CrunchWeek: Taylor Swift Shakes Off Spotify, Sean Rad Gets Demoted | Kyle Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | This week we diverted from our usual approach to filming CrunchWeek with three hosts from our San Francisco office. Instead, New York-based TechCrunchers and Skyped in to chat about and . Instead of meandering around topics for 15 minutes, we got right to the core of the issues this week: can artists push back against the massive shift in user behavior from buying songs and albums to paying for unlimited music subscriptions? How does leadership at Tinder affect growth? And what does it mean when IAC says they want a CEO like Eric Schmidt? |
11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week | Anna Escher | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | This week saw some major tech feuds: Uber vs. Lyft, Taylor Swift vs. Spotify, and Pirate Bay vs. the police to name a few. TechCrunch also brought you coverage of the new Amazon Echo, the latest from Tinder and the new Microsoft/Dropbox partnership. These are our best stories of the week (11/1-11/7). 1. , a connected speaker that is always on and always listening for your voice commands, pegging itself as a virtual assistant that can respond to you with information or by triggering a task. But we must be reminded that Amazon is not in the business of telling you what the weather is going to be like. Greg Kumparak called the Echo out for what it really is: . 2. A lot of news has been circulating around Spotify this week, including pop icon from the popular streaming service. Ingrid Lunden reported that in Europe, . Streaming-1, downloads-0. Spotify has also updated its Connect feature, now enabling you to . This #firstworldproblem has been solved. 3. . So far, we know that Fredrik Neij is facing jail-time and a hefty fine back in his homeland, Sweden. In 2009, he and the two other founders of the file-sharing site were found guilty of copyright infringements and had gone into hiding. Neij is the last of the three to be arrested. 4. Ron Miller gave us a . He describes the road block that many companies are facing during this fast-paced digital era, and provides a few case studies and strategies that businesses can draw from to move past this initial panic and become more innovative. 5. Some changes are happening over at Tinder as the social dating app rolls out : “Undo” enables users to go back on an accidental swipe left, and “Passport” connects you with matches outside of your general region. , but will remain at the company as president and board member. 6. . The deal will see Dropbox better support Microsoft’s Office suite, and a better editing experience of Office docs from the Dropbox mobile app; accessing Dropbox docs from Office apps; sharing Dropbox links of Office apps; and the creation of first-party Dropbox apps for Microsoft’s mobile offerings. 7. Vik Singh, CEO of Infer, gave us an , and what this could mean for companies like Salesforce. He points out that through LinkedIn, you can educate and advocate for your customers rather than just sell to them, while having clear access to valuable information about them. While LinkedIn claims that companies like SalesForce and Marketo aren’t competitors, it is certainly beginning to close in on the space in a way that these other companies cannot match. 8. Danny Crichton breaks down Slack’s sales growth in He argues that the company, which has seen some of the fastest growth rates of SAAS companies and is now valued at $1.12 billion, is an embodiment of the fundraising acceleration thesis. 9. More news from Facebook: The social network giant announced that it is (including an HTTP server) that it uses internally, which could affect a wide range of developers. and answered questions about forced Messenger app downloads, organic page reach, and women in tech. Facebook also launched that shows the friends and Pages that post the most, and allows users to unfollow over-sharing friends without actually unfriending them. 10. It was election week and we addressed the continuing integration of tech and politics in relation to the housing crisis. We heard from David Chiu in a . Also regarding the housing crisis, explaining that after geography, the constraints to more housing are largely political. She also provided a helpful guide to the key races to watch during election week. 11. Uber is in the spotlight again, for two incidents. On Halloween, a on a routine ride due to surge pricing, resulting in her inability to pay rent. She raised more than $500 on GoFundMe.com to correct her mistake. Uber and Lyft are also at it again, as , accusing him of stealing private company documents including confidential strategic product plans, financial information, forecasts, and growth data. , calling them an “audacious attack on his reputation.” In other news, we published a gallery of , China built designed to shoot down low flying drones, and with the alpha launch of its Google Container Engine, a service for building and running Docker container-based applications on its cloud platform. |
Investors Are Backing A Recruiting Revolution | Christine Magee | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | : Hiring is going high tech thanks to a crop of new venture investments. Recruiting can be a nightmare for companies of all stages and sizes – it’s a time suck for current employees, often a shot in the dark in terms of candidate search and interview logistics, and if done haphazardly it can really screw up a company. It’s an issue that has spawned a new class of startups tackling a variety of recruiting obstacles. With over $400 million raised in 120 venture rounds this year, investors are finally directing their attention and cash toward one of the largest pain points for any company – hiring. As companies like , and secured sizable rounds in the past few quarters, total capital committed this year has already surpassed 2013’s total of $275 million by a long shot.
“I think what’s happening right now is the realization that bringing top talent is critical to the success of every company, and the competition for talent is fiercer than ever. So there’s a lot of focus on how to gain a competitive advantage,” says of , backer of recruiting tech companies like and . Ling is on the board of , a relatively new startup in the hiring tech space that is leveraging neuroscience to help companies source, assess, and internally staff in a better way. Pymetrics co-founders and met in a post-doc program at MIT, and built the company around 12 brain imaging games that they applied to differentiating job seekers. Launched in September, Pymetrics counts over 30k active users and has an active presence on over 60 college campuses. Students can play the 12 games and receive free access to insights about what careers they are best suited to, and Pymetrics connects suitable matches to companies with open positions. “These are big, long-term trends,” says , founder of recruiting optimization platform . “People have way more jobs than they ever used to. When our grandparents got their first job it was most likely their last job, but these days people have 7, 8, 9 jobs throughout their lives and it’s very much about finding something great, learning from it and moving on.” Chait, who began his career as a programmer, founded Greenhouse three years ago as a solution to his own hiring frustrations at his last startup. “We needed to hire talent and I took it on as my responsibility,” Chait says, “so not really knowing any better I did what an engineer would do and set up a system – and over time I realized you really need to tune and optimize the system if you’re going to be competitive.” Greenhouse secured early adopters like Airbnb, Uber and Pinterest, all fast-growing tech companies looking for a competitive edge in talent acquisition. With over $11 million in venture dollars raised, Greenhouse is quickly becoming the platform of choice for a wide span of companies, integrating with other HR tech startups like , , and to provide managers with the latest innovation in hiring tech. “When we were trying to raise our first angel round three years ago there wasn’t a lot of excitement around HR and hiring – there was this kind of reflexive ‘ew HR’ reaction from investors,” says Chait. But this is changing. “HR software has been kind of like the step-child of the family – it doesn’t get a lot of the budget or support,” says of , “but the realization has come that human capital is the most important capital you have.” Menlo Ventures led a Series B round in June for , a San Francisco-based startup that has raised over $25 million to apply analytics and machine learning to the recruiting process. “The old HR software is forms and workflow – it isn’t smart. All of the applicant tracking systems in the market today are out of date the moment that an applicant takes an interview,” Ganesan notes. Launching “the first intelligent hiring platform” next month, Gild has already seen phenomenal adoption, which according to Ganesan is because there’s been so much frustration in the market with the existing toolsets. While various job posting and resume platforms like or collect massive amounts of data on employers and potential recruits, the data is not being fully utilized to inform the hiring process. “Most decisions companies make around recruiting are made in an information vacuum,” says Chait, “they don’t know what the best way is to advertise their job, what a good number of applicants is for an opening, how many interviews they should hold, how long each one should take, how large of a recruiting team they should have…” and the list goes on. Despite the growing number of successfully venture-backed startups in the recruiting tech space, there is still plenty of room for improvement. “It’s an incredibly imperfect experience,” says Pymetrics’ Polli, “it’s like travel agencies before Kayak – so inefficient and suboptimal for everyone – and we think there’s a ton of room for innovation.”
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Okta Catches SpydrSafe In Its Enterprise Web | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | , the enterprise startup whose cloud-based platform lets enterprises manage and authenticate user identity across multiple applications, may have quietly made an acquisition — its first, or at least the first that we have uncovered. It looks like it has purchased a company called , a mobile security startup that built a platform for companies to manage access to data across the mobile apps used by its employees. The acquisition appears to signal an intention by Okta to expand the kinds of services it offers to its users beyond identity management. That would help it better compete against others in the space like , which provides authentication but also mobile device and app management services for enterprises directly and via partners like Samsung. It comes on the heels of Okta , possibly its last before going public. Its include Khosla Ventures, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Altimeter Capital, Janus, Floodgate, SV Angel and more. Okta is gearing up for its , when it’s going to be unveiling new products and updating the public on its business strategy. Okta CEO Todd McKinnon would not comment for this story (even when I tracked him down in Dublin, Ireland), and no one contacted from SpydrSafe responded to enquiries about the deal — which we heard about through a tip. But digging around, we found conclusive proof of a sale of SpydrSafe, and a subsequent connection to Okta: — One of SpydrSafe’s investors, ScaleFinance, that “SpydrSafe’s assets and team were acquired, the details of which are highly confidential and undisclosed as of the closing of the transaction in early 2014.” — Another investor, the Center for Innovative Technology Fund, simply that the company exited. — A more direct link to Okta lies in SpydrSafe’s IP. A listing for one patent originally assigned to SpydrSafe co- and , is now . The patent is for “Systems and Methods for Providing and Managing Distributed Enclaves,” and describes “a method for operating a distributed data management and control enclave comprises providing a policy that identifies a set of data to be managed and controlled. The policy further identifies devices upon which the data may be transferred and the conditions under which that data may be transferred to the identified devices.” — Both Sapp and Ronin — who had worked together at Trust Digital (before and after it was acquired by McAfee) now list themselves as located in San Francisco, where Okta is headquartered. SpydrSafe was founded in 2011 in McLean, Virginia. My guess is that these two moved to join Okta with the sale. (SpydrSafe’s CEO and other co-founder, Michael Pratt, was the COO and CFO of Trust Digital when it was sold to McAfee, and had been involved in a number of other startup sales before and after that. He’s now a , a VC firm that focuses on East Coast investments.) , and public profiles in places like have not been updated since January of this year, confirming the timing noted by one of the investors. The wider picture of the mobile enterprise space has seen a growing trend of consumerization among business users. That is to say, the enterprise world is turning off cumbersome, legacy enterprise apps and locked-down, antiquated mobile devices and laptops and bringing in their own phones and other gadgets to help them work. Along with that, those users are adopting and adapting consumer apps, and businesses are also jumping into the ring, developing and buying in apps to give their employees products that they want to use. This mix has in turn given rise to companies to make sure that whatever ends up getting used, it’s secure. This is where Okta fits in with its single sign-on service, which has been described as the “Facebook connect” for the business world, letting users log into private company data on the intranet as well as into third party apps and platforms like Box, Google Apps and so on, with IT admins able to administer this across a range of devices. Now it could be that Okta is looking to go deeper by helping its customers manage data within those apps once users have been signed in. While McKinnon wouldn’t talk about SpydrSafe, he did repeat to me that Okta has high ambitions and is seeing a lot of demand from its customers. This would also be part of a bigger consolidation trend within mobile enterprise services. “I think what’s happening is that identity vendors are realising that the bigger challenges of mobility are more important than ID alone, so those vendors are following the lead of companies like Centrify and offering more mobile and device management solutions,” one observer says. |
This Week On The TC Gadgets Podcast: The Elvie, Nexus Player, And Parrot Headphones | Jordan Crook | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | It was a highly argumentative morning with the old gadgets gang, as we all have incredibly strong feelings towards media streamers and headphones, apparently. We start out with a relatively docile conversation about , which is surprising considering the Elvie is a pelvic fitness wearable for women to get more out of their Kegel exercises. Then we move on to the , Android TV, and , before really duking it out over . We discuss all this and more on this week’s episode of the featuring , , , and . Have a good Friday, everybody!
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Accounts Launches A New Address Book For iOS That Tracks Your Many Identities | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | An application called , live now on iOS to start, is a new attempt at developing a universal address book. While many competitors that have gone before it have focused on aggregating user accounts from the major social networks – like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Accounts is interesting because it’s trying to catalog the long-tail of users’ social networks. On Accounts, you can add social accounts as niche as Yo, Steam, Fitbit, Reddit, Tango, Venmo and much more, and then determine which group of contacts (Work, Home, School, etc.) are allowed to view that information about you. The app has been in development for some time, and has gone through a number of revisions since founder Ben Guild first shared his idea with us back in May. This week, it’s launching out of beta on the iTunes App Store, after having iterated on the concept following user feedback. The idea in and of itself is intriguing. With the rise of mobile messaging apps, many of which we associate with different aspects to our overall identity – Yammer is for work, Snapchat is for fun, for example – our social presence has become fragmented. Few address books out there today allow us to identify, aggregate and connect with all our many accounts. With the new app, that changes. After sucking in the contacts on your phone, you can go into your profile in the app and add in your username for dozens accounts ranging from social networks to mobile messengers to gaming networks and more. Each account you add can be toggled to be visible or invisible to a particular group, or you can set the account as visible or invisible to “everyone.” As you make changes to your own accounts, others connected with you have their address books updated too. This automatically-updating address book idea, of course, has been tried before. From the spammy Plaxo service years ago to more recently, apps like Cobook ( ), or . Accounts doesn’t have the polish and user-friendliness of these newer apps, though. Its dark black background makes it seem as if it would be more at home on an Android phone, while the manual effort involved with setting up your own information in Accounts is tedious. Then there’s the ever-present challenge that faces any address book newcomer: your friends won’t be on this thing, which ultimately limits the usefulness of any proprietary feature that gets built-in. (For example, in Accounts, you can instantly connect with new people in wireless range if your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth is turned on. Nifty, but who’s around to connect with? The app could also alert you when friends join new apps, the company says.) At the end of the day, Accounts leaves me wondering if the big-picture vision is ultimately flawed. Do I really want to aggregate my multiple, niche social identities under one roof then worry about who has access to that information? Maybe it makes more sense to mentally associate the many apps themselves with one identity and develop unique contact lists within each one. Your gamer self is on Xbox Live. Your gym buddies are on Fitbit. Your family is on Apple’s Find My Friends. And so on. There’s less configuration and permission setting to be done this way, and all you have to think about is the activity at hand: photo-sharing, texting, video chatting, etc., not The former I.T. nerd side of me was initially drawn to the permissioning options within Accounts, but just like dragging people into Google+ circles, it’s a cool concept that just doesn’t scale. Accounts, in my opinion, is an interesting experiment in managing identity, but not one that makes sense for me personally. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. Accounts is . Android is coming soon. |
Withings Activité Pre-Order Puts A New Price On The Undercover Activity Tracker: $450 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | French health and fitness device-maker Withings has kicked off watch/activity tracker, with a special pre-order page it publicized today to customers who registered interest in availability. The website is available to all, however, so head on over if you have an inkling for one of these beauties. Note up front that good looks come with a cost, however: Withings is looking for $450 each for these babies in the U.S. Withings had discussed a $390 price tag back in June, but it’s not uncommon for these things to change. To put that $450 in context, Apple is going to be charging $350 to start for its Apple Watch, while most Android Wear devices retail for around $200. Competing activity trackers (this isn’t actually a smartwatch, remember, but more or less a Fitbit or Jawbone UP contained in the classic lines of a (admittedly well-designed) analog wristwatch. It has a Swiss-made dial, Swiss-made sapphire and stainless steel case, calf leather strap and a quartz watch movement powered by a standard watch battery for over eight months of usage. The caseback is designed to allow for easy user replacement of said battery, which you can pick up basically anywhere, so it’s actually more convenient int that regard than your average wristwatch. At $450, Activité isn’t priced for everyone, but it’s also not necessarily the wrong move by Withings, in my opinion. High-end quartz watches often retail in this range, without any embedded activity tracking functions, and Withings also includes Bluetooth LE connectivity to not only sync activity measurement data back to your iPhone, but also to automatically update the time when you travel and switch time zones. Withings’s device can also automatically track running and swimming, and can be cued to monitor sleep information. It includes a vibrating alarm to let you know when you’ve met your goal, and it includes a silicone strap in the box for switching out when you go on runs. The spring bars will fit standard straps, but they don’t require the use of fiddly spring bar tools to change out. The 36.3 mm diameter face should also look good on both large and small wrists, and the dark and white color options for the face both look good, as does the domed sapphire crystal. Dedicated activity trackers don’t have much of a future in my estimation – things like the Fitbit Flex have had their time, and will likely give way to smartwatches and the like. But a premium watch that also happens to provide activity tracker functions might just strike the right balance for a market of higher end buyers that don’t want to forfeit their wrist real estate to something that has to charge every night, but that are interested in some of the lifestyle benefits of basic health monitoring tech. The Withings Activité has a stock bar indicating that there are still quite a few units available for reservation, but we have no idea how large the overall pool is. Those that pre-order will get their devices before those in the general launch pool, Withings tells us. I don’t see this device, at this price, being a massive runaway success, but it may carve out a niche in a market that’s about to be very changed by the introduction of Apple’s wearable entrant in 2015. |
More Dark Markets Shut As Authorities Lead Crackdown | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | The UK National Crime Agency has posted a notice describing a series of six arrests that coincided with the takedown of the Silk Road 2.0. Authorities have also taken down two other dark markets, Hydra and Cloud 9, both hidden on the TOR network. The seizures are part of an effort called Operation Onymous (the ) and coordinated teams in the US and Ireland to bring down the sites and arrest admins. According to a source close to the proceedings, Irish police also arrested a Silk Road admin called TheHulkster in Dolphin’s Barn, Dublin, Ireland. He was caught by the Garda after a fake overseas bank account piqued investigator’s interest. It is believed this discovery led to further evidence against the Silk Road 2.0. Why did these sites fall? That is still unclear but the FBI admitted to planting volunteers onto the sites who were given maintenance access. The sites were also apparently less secure than even the original Silk Road. As one user on the Silk Road Reddit noted: The full release is below: The six people arrested on suspicion of being concerned in the supply of controlled drugs were a 20-year-old man from Liverpool city centre, a 19-year-old man from New Waltham, Lincolnshire; a 30-year-old man from Cleethorpes; a 29-year-old man from Aberdovey, Wales; a 58-year-old man from Aberdovey, Wales; and a 58-year-old woman from Aberdovey, Wales. All six were interviewed and have been bailed pending further enquiries. A large amount of computer equipment was seized at all the addresses searched and will now be forensically examined. The action yesterday by the NCA and partners across Europe and America is part of continuing operations to target the use of online market places to trade in illegal commodities such as class A drugs, firearms and false documents. Anyone who tries to access Silk Road 2.0 will now see a notice highlighting the site has been seized. |
Google Brings Its Dart Programming Language To App Engine | Frederic Lardinois | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Earlier this year at its I/O developer conference, Google quietly plans for supporting its Dart Programming language on . It’s taken a bit longer than many expected, but , developers can run their Dart server-side application on Google App Engine’s . Dart is often seen as Google’s answer to JavaScript and, hence, mostly meant to run in the browser. But as Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, the inventors of Dart, told me back at I/O, the idea behind Dart was always to create a general purpose programming language. Using Docker, developers were already able to deploy Dart on Google Compute Engine. App Engine, however, gives developers easier access to a wider range of features out of the box, including Google’s Data Store and caching services, as well as monitoring and logging tools. All developers have to do — besides write their Dart apps — is upload their applications and App Engine will handle scaling and data storage as needed. It can even auto-scale your application for you in response to traffic. Google says it will continue to improve Dart support on App Engine in the near future. This means adding support for more App Engine APIs, for example. This new service is now available in beta and you can find more information about how to get started . |
Mac Achieves Highest U.S. PC Market Share Ever In Q3 2014 According To IDC | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Apple’s Mac marketshare hit record highs during the third calendar quarter of 2014, according to research firm IDC. Official numbers from the firm’s show that Apple’s Q3 shipments topped 2.34 million Macs moved during the quarter in the U.S., giving it 13.4 percent market share and putting it in third place behind HP and Dell. That’s the best market share Apple has every achieved in the PC market, which for IDC’s purposes, doesn’t even include tablets like the iPad. Mac market share rose from 12.9 percent tin Q3 2013 to, with sales up from 2.07 million units during the year ago quarter. Growth among the top five vendors in the U.S. was up in general, without Acer and Dell both posting higher increases in terms of percentage, but across the rest of the field, sales were generally down – 22.6 percent in fact. The overall market in the U.S. rose 4.5 percent, with the gains from the leaders outweighing other losses. Apple’s share grew 20.5 percent between Q3 2013 and Q3 2014 on the global stage, with 5.51 million units shipped in the most recent quarter, making up 69 percent of all sales and putting it at number 5 overall among the top PC makers. That share is up from 5.7 percent during the same period last year. |
Unfollow Your Most Annoying Facebook Friends And Pages With “News Feed Settings” | Josh Constine | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Face it. You’ve accepted friend requests from some weirdos and over-sharers. Luckily, today Facebook’s that shows the friends and Pages taking up the most space in your Feed, and lets you quickly unfollow them without unfriending. There’s also a new flow for hiding specific posts from your Feed that lets you tell Facebook whether it’s the author, or a person, Page, or app mentioned that you want to see less of, and then unfollow them if necessary. Both and have spent years trying to grow our social graphs with suggestions of who to follow, even if it dilutes our feeds. Yet feeds full of boring or annoying posts are amongst the top complaints about social networks. Finally, Facebook is combatting this irrelevant information overload, even if that means helping you silence brands that paid for your Likes. Facebook’s News Feed Settings, Circa 2009 Once upon a time, about 5 years ago, Facebook had a set of powerful sliders you could use to tune the presence of different types of posts in the feed like photos, links, or relationship changes. Some hardcore users like me loved them, but “the challenge with the sliders is it’s hard to know when they’re working” Facebook News Feed PM Greg Marra tells me. “One of the things we don’t want is to have this control space be a chore.” He says striking a balance between powerful settings that can be complicated and simple settings with less control is “the hardest part”. That’s one thing Facebook learned from backlash against its confusing privacy settings. So after the sliders, and 2012’s controls on individual profiles to see more or less of certain people or their types of posts, Facebook settled on a dead-simple unfollow button. It lets you stay friends with people without having to see them in your Feed. You never know when a friendship might come in handy, like if you’re traveling or looking for a job. Severing connections doesn’t help you much. But muting those people can be critical to keeping News Feed interesting. With the addition of the News Feed Settings bookmark on the desktop home page and a “Manage News Feed” option in the iOS and Android app settings menu, you can see a ranked list of the chattiest friends, Pages, and Groups you might want to unfollow, plus a list of things you’ve already unfollowed in case it was by accident or you want them back in the feed. Marra tells me this should come in handy as his girlfriend once mistakenly unfollowed him. Sure, Greg. “Mistakenly”. Before now, Facebook’s Feed setting merely showed an alphabetical list of those you’d unfollowed, and didn’t help you send anyone else to the negative zone. Facebook’s low-utility News Feed Settings up until today It’s also much quicker to stick people in that Unfollowed list. When you see an annoying post in the Feed, you can tap the drop-down arrow in the top right to hide it, which tells Facebook to show you fewer posts like that in the future. But now you can go the extra step of saying it was the person who posted, or something they posted about you want to see less of. Then if you really want to banish them from the feed, Facebook shows the unfollow button. And if they’re really being a jerk, you can report them for abuse. So now it’s time to get catty and weed out the baby photo-sharers, braggarts, drama kings and queens, and link-share addicts. One group that might hate these new settings, though, is Page admins. Never before has Facebook made it so easy to remove the brands, bands, celebrities, and websites you’ve Liked over the years. Those left might get more engagement, but Pages that share too much or are too self-promotional could get swept under the rug to the detriment of their business. But as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his : “There’s this inherent conflict in the system, though. Are we trying to optimize News Feed to give each person, all of you guys, the best experience when you’re reading? Or are we trying to help businesses just reach as many people as possible? And in every decision that we make, we optimize for the first, for making it so that for the people that we serve that use Facebook and are reading News Feed get the very best experience that they can.” Facebook isn’t designed to put businesses first, or even put all your friends first so you see all their posts. It’s centered around each individual. Because if Facebook prioritizes anything else, people stop visiting, and nobody gets any attention to their posts. As long as the end user is happy, at least someone will get the attention 1.35 billion people pour into News Feed. |
null | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 21 | null |
Biorobotic Roaches Can Use Microphones To Search Rubble For Survivors | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Another day, another insectobot connected to a small, audio-sensing cyborg harness. Two researchers at the North Carolina State University, Dr. Alper Bozkurt and Matt Shipman, have mounted a small circuit board to a live cockroach and connected leads to the bug’s brain. By playing special tones, the board can trick the cockroach into moving left or right, essentially turning the bug into a remote-control biobot. There are two types of bugs in this creepy army: the drones and the sensors. Drones move left or right based on signals received remotely and the sensors tell the drones where the sound is coming from. This way you can set a bunch of bugs loose in rubble, for example, and have the sensors listen for noise. Once they’ve homed in on the sound, the drones will all come together and signal rescuers. Presumably you can also eat the bugs.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJXEPcv-FMw] The researchers have also created a sort of invisible fence that keeps bugs within a rescue area by controlling their motions. They are also adding solar power cells so the wee beasties can work autonomously for days at a time. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWGAKd7_fAM] |
FiLIP 2, A Smartwatch For Kids, Arrives Today At AT&T For $100 | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Will Santa stuff children’s stockings with smartwatches this holiday season? That’s the hope for which is today launching its at AT&T stores and online at for the discounted launch price of $99.99. The watch, which is essentially a small smartphone strapped to the wrist, is one of the first “wearables” aimed at kids to hit mass production. The company offered an earlier version of this same device, just called the FiLIP. The watch is enormous, which, though I don’t have one yet to test with my own child, looks like it could become uncomfortable to wear after some time on little wrists. But strapping something onto a child makes more sense than asking them to remember to carry around a phone – kids often forget and lose things, so a wearable item at least addresses that problem. That said, though clunky it’s also sort of cute with its slip-on style enclosure, two big buttons, and an array of bright colors to choose from. In emergencies, kids can press and hold one button to trigger an automatic location beacon, kick on ambient sound recording, and call and SMS the primary number associated with the account stored on the FiLIP 2. If that person, likely mom or dad, doesn’t answer, the watch immediately begins calling the remaining contacts one at a time until someone does. Parents can also set up “SafeZones” (geo-fences) around places like home, school, the playground or neighborhood, and be alerted when the child enters or leaves the area. A “smart locator” function also continually tracks the child’s location and plots it on a map using a combination of GPS, GSM and Wi-Fi. Beyond the safety features, the everyday usefulness of the device is that the FiLIP 2 smartwatch functions as a phone. Parents can pre-program in five numbers that the child can call and receive calls from. The child can scroll through the contacts and then pushes the button to phone them, as needed. Meanwhile, the device can be configured and controlled through the accompanying mobile app that works with the FiLIP and FiLIP 2, the later model launching today. This newer watch has improved durability, a redesigned, closeable wristband and comes in new colors, the company explains. The iOS app that works with the FiLIP watches has been updated, but the new Android app won’t arrive until later this year. The watch is on sale for $99.99, but will eventually retail for $149.99 when the promotion ends after the holidays. Meanwhile, the monthly AT&T data plan for the watch is an extra $10/month. Customers can add the FiLIP 2 to an AT&T Mobile Share Value Plan (minimum plan starts at $20/month) for additional $10/month, or activate on a Data Connect Plan for $10/month. The FiLIP 2 is meant to fill that gap in between the time when a child is too small to sent out to play by themselves, and yet still too young for their first smartphone. It’s aimed at kids under 11, the company has said. The decision to electronically leash up your child like this can be a bit controversial, too. After all, many of today’s parents remember a childhood with a lot more freedom and much less supervision. But thanks to the web and 24/7 news channels and sensational reporting on violent crime and sexual predators, the world seems scarier today than in the past – even if . Parents today are overwhelmingly concerned with the safety of their kids, but outside of those whose children have special needs, it may be right to at least question if the convenience of devices like this outweigh the downsides of a world where children never get to experiment with true independence – if only for a 20-minute bike ride around the block. It’s the choice each parent has to make for themselves, and neither side should judge. |
Rocket Internet-Backed Ride-Sharing Startup Tripda Comes To The US | Ryan Lawler | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | It’s not often that you see European startup factory launch one of its companies in the U.S. More often than not, its businesses take ideas that have been successful here and then leverage its massive development and distribution network to bring them to markets where a U.S. version hasn’t yet launched. But that’s not the case with , which is a new ride-sharing marketplace that Rocket Internet has decided to bring to the states. Tripda was founded to connect passengers who wish to go to a certain place with drivers who are traveling in that direction. But unlike Uber or Lyft, Tripda isn’t about short rides in a particular city — it’s more about long-range trips between cities. In that way Tripda is a lot more like Europe’s BlaBlaCar or Zimride, the ride-sharing startup that eventually became Lyft. Through its marketplace, users will be able to sign up with their Facebook accounts and search for a route between New York City and Philadelphia, for instance, based on when they would like to travel. The company doesn’t specify the cost of rides — those are set by the driver — but eventually it will take a small cut of the transaction, just as Airbnb does when someone completes a stay in a host’s home. Tripda first launched in May, initially going after emerging markets in Latin America and Southeast Asia. It’s currently available in 10 countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, The Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and India. But opening up operations in the U.S. was always a part of the company’s plan, according to CEO of North America Adi Vaxman. That’s because the company sees a huge opportunity to serve a part of the market that Uber, Lyft, and other companies have largely left behind. Vaxman notes that the trend of car ownership going down amongst millennials is creating a largely untapped market segment for people needing to find ways to travel between longer distances. If that idea sounds familiar, it’s because others have tried it in the past. San Francisco-based Zimride before deciding that it was easier to get users to adopt ride-sharing for intracity travel and launched Lyft as a result. But Vaxman believes there will be more demand as time goes on, particularly among college students and young professionals who are increasingly moving to urban areas without buying cars. She recounted her own struggle trying to find rides back home from Ithaca, N.Y. to New York City while in college. That’s a route, she says, that hasn’t gotten any easier over time to book. But Tripda could change that, particularly for trips around the holidays and school breaks. Tripda has a team of two co-founders based in New York City and two in Brazil. Vaxman, who previously worked on bringing Israeli transportation service GetTaxi to the U.S., shares the co-founder title with former Deloitte consultant Joe McFarlane in North America. Meanwhile, the emerging markets group is being run by co-founders Pedro Meduna and Eduardo Prota out of Latin America. The company’s initial focus on the U.S. will be on trying to get users in the Northeast and Midwest to start using the service. It hopes to benefit from launching around the holidays, when a number of people travel home to visit family. But marketplaces are hard, and this type of travel is largely seasonal in nature, so it could take a while for the company to really take off. The good news for Tripda is that Rocket Internet is no slouch when it comes to backing companies that are founded under its umbrella. Vaxman wouldn’t say how much Rocket Internet has invested, but the young company already has a distributed workforce of around 70 employees and it’s looking to hire more. |
Confirmed: Yahoo Loses Amit Kumar, Its Small Business VP And GM | Ingrid Lunden | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Yet more personnel changes afoot at . Amit Kumar, pictured here, the company’s GM and VP running its small business division, has left the company. first reported earlier today sources saying that he would be leaving, and now we have confirmed directly with Kumar that he has already left: “Yes, I have left Yahoo and am now planning my next steps,” he writes in an email. “I have a feeling I’ll start something new but I’m keeping my options open. I might consider joining a VC firm or a product or operating role at a pre-IPO company reporting to the CEO. That’s oddly specific, I realize as I write that, but the last few years at Lexity and Yahoo have certainly clarified to me what my strengths are and what I like to do.” Currently, , an ex-Googler who joined Yahoo in March 2013, lists himself on LinkedIn as VP of search products, small business and partner platforms. : Yahoo has provided us with its own confirmation and an update of who is replacing him. Kumar joined Yahoo in 2013 when the Internet portal — part of CEO Marissa Mayer’s very long string of acquisitions to boost the company’s talent and product ranks. Lexity was subsequently rebranded as Yahoo Small Business and run by Kumar. It was his ; he had been an engineering manager and then director of product management at the company between 2005 and 2008. The news comes after Yahoo reported a that were buoyed less by a turnaround at the business and more by healthy returns in the IPO of e-commerce giant Alibaba. Last week Yahoo also announced the appointment of a , Lisa Utzschneider, who it hired away from Amazon. Lexity came to Yahoo with customers, which it continued to serve, although there haven’t been a lot of other new launches to build out the original product line, which offers e-commerce, website creation, and marketing/advertising services. Separately, we heard that Yahoo at one point considered selling off its small business division. More broadly, Yahoo has also been going through a gradual series of closures, layoffs and consolidations. A lot of those most recently have been focused on in its international operations. It made , and it has downsized elsewhere, too, with executive and other workforce departures in , the closure of offices in and Hungary and confirmation that there may be yet more consolidation in the . |
We Need Your Hardware Battlefield Submissions Right Now | John Biggs | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Look, people, we’re giving you the chance of a lifetime here: this is where participating startups getting free exhibition space at the 2015 International CES and competing for $50,000 and the coveted Metal Man trophy. For the first time, TechCrunch has partnered with the CEA to be an official media partner of the tradeshow. This means companies selected to participate in Hardware Battlefield will get even more attention from the press, investors and hardware distributors. The complete list of rules can be found , but essentially, if you’re a hardware company looking to launch your first product around CES, we want you to launch on our stage. But first you have to . And you only have a week left. The application deadline is next Saturday, the 15th. Entry is free and is open to all hardware companies planning to launch (crowdfund or ship) product in a two-week window before or after January 10. We highly encourage launching your product for the first time on our stage so it receives the biggest impact. Email , or TechCrunch’s Battlefield editor, with any questions. |
Asus To Begin Selling Android Wear-Powered ZenWatch In The U.S. Nov. 9 | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | The Android Wear smartwatch collection is expanding, with a host of new devices hitting pre-holiday season after their initial debut this summer. The will be the next to go on sale, with a street date of November 9 for Best Buy initially, with a later launch date on Google Play in the U.S., at a price of $199. We first got wind of the Asus Android Wear device at Google’s I/O in June, via an , but customers will start getting their actual hands on hardware soon. The Asus project is interesting for a couple of reasons: First, it manages to offer a unique design compared to other rectangular Android Wear watches, and one that might closest resemble the Apple Watch coming next year from everyone’s favorite fruit company, at least on a surface level. Second, it’s the first Android Wear watch to include UI features and more customized software. Google has said that it kept the initial release of Android Wear devices pretty basic and essentially all locked on providing the same experience, but also that manufacturers wouldn’t always be so handcuffed, so it’ll be interesting to see what Asus does with the first taste of a bit more freedom. While all the Android Wear devices to date have managed to perform admirably in terms of nailing the basics, I’ve yet to test one that struck me as anything other than a passing fancy. The Moto 360 probably comes closest, but the fact that its circular display isn’t a perfect circle is almost heartbreaking from a design standpoint, and despite marketing bluster, Android Wear seems better suited to square or rectangular displays. Asus is offering a look that should be a good mix of fashion and function, with a battery-friendly AMOLED display and easily customizable strap options. There’s no built-in GPS, however, which means it can’t take advantage of the latest software offerings in the Android Wear platform firmware. At $199, the Asus ZenWatch is on par with most current devices, but its unique customization of Android Wear might start to show us how OEMs can differentiate Android wearables outside of hardware design considerations. |
Activate Your Red Zones: Verizon Has A Football Leather Moto X | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | Just like the song says: Are you ready for several foot falls? Verizon’s ready, ready to snap your halfback some yards after carry with its new, exclusive . You heard right, Bob Dikta freaks and Peyton Randolph fans – the same material used to coat everyone’s favourite roughly ball-shaped professional athletics thing is now on phones! And what’s more like sports than smartphones?! I don’t know about you, but come Wednesday I love to grab a large crate of V8 juice cans and some buddies and sit around the video tube watching all the action. My squad of choice is the New England State Legislature, and their star WB Jan Brady. No one knows quite how to run such a tight nickel and drachma defense, and their ability to move the goalposts up and down the field with no regard for halftimes or pass inference penalties is truly remarkable. The only thing that could make it even sweeter when Rob “Groot” Gronkowski scores a roughdown is if I was clasping a football-like pocket supercomputer I use to check my email and post vaguely off-color remarks to Facebook at the same time. So kudos to you Verizon, and as the crowds supporting my home team always chant, “Get Up, get up! Let’s Go Bats!” (they really like bats). |
99.co Wants To Make Property Searches In Singapore’s Lucrative Real Estate Market Easier | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | Despite having a population of just 5.4 million, Singapore is one of the top 10 real estate markets in the world. New startup wants to grab a slice of the pie with a site that it says makes listings more transparent and navigable for potential renters and buyers. 99.co soft-launched last week, but had its beta launch in May. Since then, 1,200 agents have signed up, listing 11,000 properties. The startup, founded by serial entrepreneur Darius Cheung, has raised $560,000 in seed funding from Fenox Venture Capital, 500 Startups, East Ventures, and Golden Gate Ventures. There are already two leading real estate listing sites in Singapore, and , but Cheung says 99.co differentiates by taking the focus away from sponsored listings, which real estate agents pay extra for, and making search results more relevant to users with its ListRank algorithm. Founder Cheung already has a proven track record. In 2010, Cheung in a deal that was reportedly worth $25 million. Since then, Cheung’s other projects have included , a mobile app that lets friends split restaurant bills and other expenses, which . Bill-splitting apps and real estate listings may seem very different, but the ideas for both came from problems Cheung tackled in his personal life. “Last year about this time, I was searching for a new apartment. I’d been renting in Singapore for 20 years, but this was the first time I searched for myself, because I used to outsource the work to my roommates. My roommate left, and I had to search for myself. I found it was really painful and as a software engineer, I didn’t understand why there wasn’t a solution,” he says. By using a business model that focuses on premium listings, sites like PropertyGuru and iProperty “encourage behavior where no one really cares about the quality of the search results,” claims Cheung. He says that 99.co’s ListRank makes search results more relevant to the needs of individual users by focusing on 30 data points from listings. These include listing quality, which looks at how complete and specific the information provided is, as well whether or not agents have copied-and-pasted the same text for different ads. ListRank also examines user behavior. For example, if someone spends a lot of time looking at condos with a certain kind of floor plan (like a large living room) or within a specific price range, the search engine will start to find and return similar listings. As the site grows, agent ratings will become an important factor, too, says Cheung. For the next six to twelve months, 99.co will stay focused on Singapore. Despite the relatively small size of the market, Cheung believes that it has plenty of growth potential for a startup in the real estate sector. Late last year, due to too much inventory in some property sectors. But, it added that “the city holds considerable investment and development appeal, due to its vibrant economic growth and strong emphasis on community livability.” In addition, Cheung notes that iProperty, which is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, currently has a market cap of $371 million dollars, pointing to 99.co’s potential worth if it manages to succeed against its well-established competitors. In terms of monetization, Cheung says that 99.co, which is currently free to use, will adopt a similar revenue model as its competitors, by charging real estate agents for listings. But it will take a different approach, perhaps with a flat subscription fee. “Every agent pays the same price to be part of the board listings and there is no way to influence search results based on that pay model,” he says. |
Evernote Raises $20M From Japanese Media Giant Nikkei, Forms Content Partnership For Evernote Context | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | announced today that it has raised $20 million in new capital from , the Japanese media conglomerate that publishes the influential financial newspaper Nikkei, as well English-language Nikkei Asian Review. In addition, the Nikkei will also start feeding articles into Evernote’s Context feature, which . Context brings information from third-party sources into the app so users can read news articles and other content alongside their own documents and notes. Nikkei is the first international news source that has been integrated into Evernote Context and the partnership is expected to become available to Evernote Premium and Evernote Business subscribers by early 2015. Evernote Context looks at data in your files and feeds you news articles and other information that it thinks you will find relevant. As , this builds into Evernote’s attempt to build its content discovery play, a similar strategy to the ones taken by Facebook and Twitter as they seek ways to encourage people to spend more time on their sites. Libin has said that Evernote is . Evernote’s partnership with Nikkei is also interesting because it’s a reminder that a good portion of its international user base comes from Japan. At , CEO Phil Libin said, “About 20% of our users and 30% of our revenue comes from Japan. The Japanese aesthetic really influences us. We have said from the beginning that we want to make it a 100 year startup, and that was influenced by Japan. Japan understands this idea of long term thinking, and we hope to combine that with the best of Silicon Valley.” The content integration with Nikkei comes at the same time as full Japanese-language support for Evernote Context on Mac and iOS, which will be expanded to Android and Windows next. |
Digital News Asia Raises $300K To Bring Old School ICT Journalism To The Web In Southeast Asia | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | A tech news site writing about another tech news site has the potential to get very insider baseball-ery, so I try to carefully pick and choose which of our peers to shed light on. With that in mind, (DNA) — a small but interesting collection of unashamed “old school” journalists — has as it aims to expand its brand of reporting across Southeast Asia. Started by three experienced tech hacks based in Malaysia and with , the two-year-old company netted its first funding round from IdeaRiverRun (IRR), a Malaysian private investment firm with a track record of working with digital media startups. There are plenty of tech blogs covering news from across Asia — including us here at TechCrunch, of course — so what makes DNA so special? Well, the founders believe their identity is a little different. Rather than focusing on tech news, DNA wants to cover the entire ICT pie — including the very much trade and B2B aspects of tech news. Oh, and it isn’t a blog. So they say. “Bloggers serve a very important function in disseminating news and views, but we also believe that the ecosystem has matured to a point where tech journalism can also play a role,” Asohan Aryaduray, the publication’s Executive Editor and co-founder explained to TechCrunch over email. “We also believe that while the consumer tech space, and more recently the startup scene, have been garnering a lot of media attention, there are entire aspects of the ICT ecosystem that are being neglected,” Asohan added. Recent examples of that editorial focus include stories on , and a strong focus on , but there are also more general stories — such as with 500 Startup’s Southeast Asia head Khailee Ng and a . Not only is the focus on the unsexy unique, but DNA isn’t rushing out to be regional or global. To date it has focused on Malaysia with some regional stories, though it recently expanded its team to Singapore and intends to staff up in Indonesia next. Thailand and the Philippines are also on its radar. That slow rollout is very deliberate and part of an approach that Asohan called “multiple-market”. That, he argued, allows DNA to provide a “localized, in-depth perspective” on ecosystems as a whole. Aside from expanding the team and its geographical scope, DNA is also planning to widen its coverage into consumer tech topics — or “personal technology,” as Asohan referred to it, with more than a hint of old school print-ism. Again, rather than overly focus on gadgets and gizmos themselves, the site’s editorial team hopes to communicate “how such technologies are changing society, communities, and business, etc.” DNA has been part of my regular reading for some time now and, while it doesn’t necessary race to publish stories first and I don’t read many of the enterprise/trade-oriented articles, there is a print journalism quality to its work. But the rise of click bait media and the ease in which stories can be sourced mean DNA’s approach goes against the grain and flies in the face of strategies used (successfully) by other tech media. There’s plenty to like about an old school, boots-on-the-ground approach to reporting, but can some (frankly, dull) niche topics bring in enough readers for sustainable revenue via advertising, particularly when the website is not particular consumer friendly? (The company says a website revamp is on the cards, for what it’s worth.) Asohan declined to reveal the site’s traffic numbers or revenue volumes. Asked on plans for the immediate future, he said that an exit isn’t something that the company is thinking about. “We’re more intent on ensuring that technology journalism plays its proper role in terms of serving the community: Which is to act as the Fourth Estate,” he explained. Crucially, he added, the site’s editorial focus will remain independent — that’s something that IRR has agreed to. Top blogs and websites today have become media companies in their own right — taking — yet sites like subscription-based show that, in the U.S. at least, there’s an appetite for tech trades. I’m fascinated to see whether DNA can pull off a very different approach in Southeast Asia’s nascent online media space. |
Momo, A Flirting App With 180M Users, Is Latest Chinese Tech Firm To File For A U.S. IPO | Jon Russell | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | This year’s been notable for Chinese tech IPOs in the U.S.. , close rival and — China’s Twitter equivalent — have listed on North American soil, but there’s another incoming. , China’s top hook-up app, has for a $300 million public listing, . The company intends to list on the Nasdaq. Earlier this year to be considering a U.S. IPO at a valuation of around $2 billion. It’s valuation isn’t clear at this point. Momo claims 180.3 million users in China and 60.2 million monthly active users, which puts it second to behemoth in terms of Chinese mobile social apps. The service’s particular strength is location and it allows users to connect with others based on their proximity to each other, the idea being that you can find people who are in the same pub, club, party etc. So, in terms of Western comparisons, it is more of a Grindr for all genders and sexual orientations, than a Tinder. The three-year-old service, which clocked 25.5 million daily active users on average in September, is free to use, but makes money via a membership subscription and, as of the second half of 2013, it also sells digital content. That latter category includes in-app purchases in third-party games, premium stickers/emoticons, and mobile marketing services — companies set up business accounts which users can opt-in to follow for information and promotions. Still early days for its money-making, Momo says it recorded $13.9 million in revenue during the first half of this year — of which 63% came from its 2.3 million membership subscriptions — but incurred a net loss of $8.3 million over the six-month period. That said, revenue was up from $3.1 million in the second half of 2013. The company says it recorded a $3.8 million net loss in 2012, and a $9.3 million net loss in 2013. Image via Technode The app is Chinese-only after an English language version of its service earlier this year. Momo teased plans for a new service focused on non-Chinese folks back in the summer, and its IPO documents make mention of such an app but the main focus is on China and Chinese users overseas, according to its IPO prospectus: The most critical element in our growth strategy is to rapidly expand our user community. China has the world’s largest smartphone population and is currently our biggest market…. We will continue to build our presence among Chinese speaking populations around the world and seek to foster a broader and more engaged user community. We also plan to launch a new mobile application designed to attract English speakers. Momo isn’t being particular specific about how it will use the capital raised. It intends to invest in research and development to improve product, sales and marketing to increase its userbase and widen the number of developers on its games platform, and to potentially make acquisitions. Essentially, this seems to be about riding the messaging wave that has propelled WeChat close to 500 million active users (mostly in China) and U.S. confidence in Chinese tech firms. One thing to note may be China’s current crackdown on messaging apps. Viber, Kakao Talk and Line are among the overseas services to have been banned this year, while Chinese apps have been forced to crackdown on ‘unsuitable’ content. over apparent links to prostitutes, while as many as 20 million accounts related to pornography, prostitution and fraud. From the Momo prospectus: Under [Chinese] regulations, internet content providers and internet publishers are prohibited from posting or displaying over the internet or wireless networks content that, among other things, violates PRC laws and regulations, impairs the national dignity of China or the public interest, or is obscene, superstitious, fraudulent or defamatory. Furthermore, internet content providers are also prohibited from displaying content that may be deemed by relevant government authorities as “socially destabilizing” or leaking “state secrets” of the PRC. Failure to comply with these requirements may result in the revocation of licenses to provide internet content or other licenses, the closure of the concerned platforms and reputational harm. Momo revealed that it has content censorship measures in place, but stated that it is difficult to track such a high volume of users — it says 655.2 million messages are sent per day — while it is not always clear what kind of content that the government is cracking down on and when. Its low rates of revenue allow Momo to take advantage of the Jobs act and hide some of its financial figures for now, so we will need to wait on further details, such as its proposed valuation. Momo raised a in August 2012, with Alibaba reportedly among the list of undisclosed investors. Prior to that it raised $2.5 million, according to data from . |
Here’s How To De-Register iMessage If You’ve Switched Platforms With Apple’s New Tool | Darrell Etherington | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | Apple has added a to its website for removing phone numbers from iMessage registration, even if you no longer have the iPhone in question and can’t toggle iMessage off in settings. The website lets you simply enter a phone number, where Apple will send you a code via text message, which you then enter into a field on the same site to confirm your desire to remove your number from iMessage. The system will help users who’ve switched platforms to Android devices make sure that their phone number is no longer registered to iMessage. That should solve the issue of users who part ways with their iPhones missing messages which still make their way to iMessage, but don’t end up on any target device. It’s a problem many people who’d switched over to Android without fully deactivating iMessage often reported, and was even the cause of a lawsuit Apple faced from users encountering said issue, and . Apple’s new website also includes instructions for deregistering your phone number before you divest yourself of your iPhone, which involves simply navigating to Setting > Messages and then toggling iMessage to the off position. The new web-based tool for those who’ve already migrated and are facing frustration at lost or missing messages should be a big help however, and also comes in handy for users who might switch between platforms, say when travelling, or developing and testing mobile software. If you’re in the predicament of no longer having an iPhone but needing to remove your number from the iMessage servers, go head and and follow the two step process for an easy resolution. |
NSA Reform Drifts Sideways In The Senate | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | According to , the White House would prefer not to pass NSA reform in the coming lame duck Congressional session. Current chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, , is trying to press forward with a vote on the bill that he authored — the USA FREEDOM Act — this year. The legislation . A bill with the same name passed the House previously, but was scorned by privacy advocates as having been . The Senate’s USA FREEDOM Act would end the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. However, some have noted that it of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. , at the time, said that the bill “falls short” by not addressing Section 702. That said, there is general consensus among technology companies that the Senate bill is worth supporting — . The White House’s apparent reluctance is said to be joined by that of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has other priorities for the legislative session. It isn’t clear if Senator Leahy can fight the combined obstinance of the two. The Hill quotes Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, who intimates that the White House may prefer a more intelligence community-friendly bill. And the next Congress might supply it. Given that, it seems that for the USA FREEDOM Act, it’s 2014 or bust. Something to chew on as we head into the week. |
What Is Journalism Anymore? | Tadhg Kelly | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | It’s weird how our sense of things change. In the early blogging days it was often apparent that the market was about personal branding, audience building, maintaining integrity within that audience (such as disclosing whether posts are sponsored), building authority and posting frequently. The exact same mechanics apply to micro-blogging, tweeting and YouTubing, with the result that there are so many new voices replicating the functions of a traditional press. Are they journalists? In the past we’ve often made distinctions between “journalists” and “bloggers” etc. to enforce an impression of authority. But I’m not sure that really holds true any more. One example is the active media presences of . Some of these fans have very large followings and have created jobs for themselves doing things like running Lets-Plays of popular games. Some of them make serious money doing so through advertising and sponsorship deals, paid plays and so on. They argue for “ethics in game journalism” while claiming to not be journalists themselves. But clearly they’re sort of in the same space, and increasingly have a much greater reach or influence than any official channel. The question of “what is a journalist” is personal for me too. Because I write this column I’m often emailed by PR people who say they love my work before quickly segueing into asking whether I’ve heard of the thing that “everyone’s talking about” (i.e. the product they’re representing) and asking would I be interested in covering it. I get maybe 10 of these emails a week and always say the same thing: I’m a game designer and columnist, not a journalist or reporter. But that distinction doesn’t seem to matter. If journalism means (1) reporting on news, (2) disseminating opinion, (3) building a readership and (4) a business model off the back of it, that model applies to so many kinds of outlet these days that the distinction of “journalist” feels irrelevant. The future that we predicted is coming true. Back in the olden days we foresaw the rise of the citizen journalist and the destabilizing of the old order. Then blogging happened, and with it came numerous voices from across the spectrum. Some of those voices landed book deals, TV shows and so on. Then the same thing happened in microblogging and podcasts, and is now happening on Twitter and YouTube. We live in a world awash with self-made voices, from the to the narrow-and-focused, and largely at the cost of our traditional understanding of journalism. The difference is in the balance of advocacy versus information. Culturally we retain the idea that a journalist should be someone who reports objectively, who provides a critical eye or otherwise represents a voice of reason. That the sort of principled navigator of shows like The Newsroom or movies like The Insider should still be real. But that’s not really what we reward. Ever since Rousseau’s claim that Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake” the capacity for media to play up to emotion first has been known, and online we reward it far more often than the coolly neutral. Successful journalism is often about the advocacy of narratives because the audience has long flocked to the subjective over the objective, to emotion and identity and expression of belief over information. The nobler part of the press used that knowledge to build front-to-back products, with leader and support articles or segments. The newspaper model. And in building such a product the sense of integrity mattered to particular audiences. Tabloid journalism asserted that integrity didn’t matter so much, and was often more successful for it. Yet it too was built on packages. Many sites try to do something similar as the noble or tabloid press, but they find it hard going trying to make it work. Readers can say that they want objectivism and the like, but when they vote with their clicks they tend to do so with their hearts. They reward the sole advocate more, discarding all sense of a need for a package. The information is already out there, but the audience wants to know what to feel about it. Objective presentation is an inefficient externality in the Information Age. This online world that we’ve embraced disrupts everything by eliminating inefficiency and externalities. From taxis to postal services, purchasing to libraries, its greatest advantage is generally in removing intermediates. This, it should be of no surprise, has caused a great deal of pain in the media. Online the audience flocks to the advocate and largely stays with her as long as she continues to advocate. Regardless of whether said advocate is the highest of the high or the lowest of the low, it’s the same. And this is why I’m saying that I don’t really know what a journalist is any more, not in any real sense. The effect of advocacy is so strong at this point that it’s overwhelming. A single YouTuber getting paid to play a game and be enthusiastic about it – even while being open about that fact – is on the verge of carrying more weight than the whole of IGN. So why bother with the regular press? Especially if advocates are willing to be uncritical and not try to add their own spin? Online the audience always flocks to the advocate because the advocate represents them. For example YouTubers often represent certain kinds of gamer, and they tend to attract echo chamber communities that in turn develop a sense of “normal” and “objective” that can stand in opposition to other groups. A lot of the Gamergate fight over ethics, for example, stems from this disconnect. In their world an “objective” journalist is actually a representative. That’s what they think of as fairness and balance. These days the reporting of real news happens outside of journalistic organs, direct to the public or through social media. Meanwhile the reporting of company news (such as Blizzard’s new game) is so co-ordinated that multiple sites post coverage within minutes of one another. Thus it’s all equivalent, essentially just marketing. Meanwhile the other functions of the press (opinion, readership and business model) are so disrupted by advocates that the only option seems to be to follow the advocate model. I know that I’m largely speaking from a games perspective here, but I feel the same pattern is repeating everywhere. We don’t seem to really know what a journalist is any more, nor particularly care. |
The Race To Zero Is Awesome | Alex Wilhelm | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | It’s Sunday, so let’s stretch our legs a little bit. Earlier today Julie Bort of Business Insider detailing the rapidly approaching end game of the storage wars: The prices consumers and businesses pay for cloud storage are racing to zero, and that’s forcing new jockeying inside the crowded industry. It’s a trend that’s been underway since Google ripped the cap off the email market by offering a gigabyte of storage in Gmail. Now, cloud providers Box and Dropbox offer their business customers unlimited storage. Microsoft does that as well, extending the offer to its lower-paying consumer subscribers. And the amount of storage offered to consumers that pay nothing continues to rise inexorably. Anyone can see where those two lines cross — eventually cloud storage of any needed size will come stapled to business and consumer accounts, provided by large cloud companies that are incentivized to grow their lock-in among developers and users. It will be part of the cost of just showing up. That’s easy enough. Let’s go one step further: Cloud power will eventually become free for most, or so ubiquitously cheap that its price won’t be far from zero. Current free tiers on Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platforms are equivalent to the free gigabyte in Gmail, if you will. And the price of compute is skyrocketing downwards. The large cloud players — Microsoft recently as its only competition at scale in the space — are pouring billions into their cloud platforms, building out capacity around the world. Who knows if they are building too much, but they certainly track usage, and prices are falling. And if you want to see increasing usage while prices decline, well, I’d suspect it creates even more negative price pressure due to the competitive landscape; everyone is pulling on the same levers. In cloud storage, the large players are working to build apps on top of their storage stack, so that they can have a unique value proposition when the price of storage itself finally reaches nil. In cloud computing, it could be that the value add that the large players will use to compete will be their app environment. If you build for, say, Google’s app ecosystem, your cloud compute might be free. If Google’s app ecosystem is the best, you’ll want to work over there, but you wouldn’t if Google didn’t offer competitively priced cloud computing; smaller players could use that to their advantage, and potentially hem in on Google’s business. So compute prices would be pretty uniform across the industry, falling in near unison. That is, of course, precisely what we have seen with cloud storage prices. I’m not going to say any of this will happen by any certain date, but as the major platforms continue to distinguish and define themselves, the cost of compute keeps falling, and the competition for developer attention only increases, offering more value on the services end will be a weapon available to all. The race to zero is awesome. |
Cory Doctorow: Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free | Cory Doctorow | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | The technical implausibility and unintended consequences of digital locks are big problems for digital-lock makers. But we’re more interested in what digital locks do to creators and their investors, and there’s one important harm we need to discuss before we move on. Digital locks turn paying customers into pirates. One thing we know about audiences is that they aren’t very interested in hearing excuses about why they can’t buy the media they want, when they want it, in the format they want to buy it in. Study after study shows that overseas downloading of U.S. TV shows drops off sharply when those shows are put on the air internationally. That is, people just want to watch the TV their pals are talking about on the Internet—they’ll pay for it if it’s for sale, but if it’s not, they’ll just get it for free. Locking users out doesn’t reduce downloads, it reduces sales. The first person to publish a program to break the digital locks on old-style DVDs, in 1999, was Jon Lech Johansen, a fifteenyear- old Norwegian teenager. “DVD Jon” took up the project because his computer ran the GNU/Linux operating system, for which the movie studios wouldn’t license a DVD player. In order to watch the DVDs he bought, he had to break their locks. Seven years later, Muslix64 broke HD-DVD’s DRM for similar reasons—he wanted to watch a legitimate out-of- region DVD that he’d purchased. Both of these seminal figures in the history of digital locks were inspired not by “piracy” but by frustration with the limitations put on the legitimate media they’d paid good money for. In 2007, NBC and Apple had a contractual dispute over the terms of sale for Apple’s iTunes Store. NBC’s material was withdrawn from iTunes for about nine months. In 2008, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University released a paper investigating the file-sharing impact of this blackout (“Converting Pirates Without Cannibalizing Purchasers: The Impact of Digital Distribution on Physical Sales and Internet Piracy”). What they found was that the contract dispute resulted in a spike of downloads on “pirate” sites, and not just of NBC material—it seemed that once people who had been in the habit of buying their shows on iTunes found their way onto the free-for-all file-sharing sites, they clicked on everything that looked interesting. Downloads of NBC shows went up a lot, and downloads of everything else went up a little. More interesting is what happened after the NBC-Apple dispute ended, and the shows returned to iTunes. As the CMU paper showed, download rates for those shows stayed higher than they had been before the blackout. That is: Digital-lock vendors will tell you that their wares aren’t perfect, but they’re “better than nothing.” But the evidence is that digital locks are much worse than nothing. Industries that make widespread use of digital locks see market power shifting from creators and investors to intermediaries. They don’t reduce piracy. And customers who run into frustrations with digital locks are given an incentive to learn how to rip off the whole supply chain. If you’re a publisher, label, or studio, the answer is simple: don’t let companies sell your goods with digital locks on them. And if a company refuses to sell your goods unless they can put their locks on your products? Well, you can be pretty sure that those locks aren’t there for your benefit. It’s harder if you’re a creator, because many of the biggest investors have bought into the idea of selling with DRM or not at all. When it comes down to negotiating DRM, you just have to make a decision about whether you’re willing to let your creative work be put in some tech company’s jail in order to make your investors happy, or whether you’ll keep shopping for a saner, better investor. A few years back, I sold a children’s picture book to the largest publisher in the world (which will remain nameless here), which then spent a couple of years developing it with me, commissioning rough illustrations and going through several rounds of rewrites until it was something we were all excited about. One of my editors at Nameless Giant Publishing was also the head of its UK digital strategy, and he and I were very sympatico, as you might expect. After several months had gone by without a contract showing up at my agent’s office, he called me up and explained what had happened. He’d gone to the contracts people and requested a no-DRM guarantee for the digital editions of my books. None of us thought it would be a problem, since Nameless Giant is my publisher in several other 34 formats, languages, and territories, and in every case, it sells my work without DRM. But Nameless Giant had a new directive, from the very top of the business. From now on, all books had to be acquired with e-book rights, and all e-books would have DRM on them. My editor tried to negotiate (“Can we not acquire the e-book rights? No? Okay, how about we acquire them, but promise not to use them?”), but it was in vain. Finally, my editor explained to the contracts person that the expected return from the digital edition was -£80—that’s negative eighty pounds. In other words, the company expected to lose eighty pounds on the digital edition, based on the performance of its other digital picture books. The contracts person told my editor that the DRM was non-negotiable, and that if it was going to be a problem, he should cancel my contract. So my editor quit. It’s very hard to get angry with an editor who has just quit in protest over your book getting canceled, even in the face of your book getting canceled. The story has a happy ending. Nameless Giant sank thousands into developing a book that I can now easily sell to one of its less doctrineblind competitors, and I don’t have to let DRM companies lock up my copyrights. Also, my editor got a much better job. |
null | Sarah Perez | 2,014 | 11 | 7 | null |
The MBAs Are Fleeing, Should SF Be Worried? | Danny Crichton | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | Bubble, bubble, bubble. Are we in one, are we already done with one, are we getting closer to one? These questions have the dual benefit of being completely impossible to answer while having a high enough salience to tech readers to ensure that the almighty advertising machine gets stoked for another cycle. Let’s throw some more coal into the fire. We already had our massive discussion of and the great , but now we need to engage with the next possible sign of the apocalypse: MBA students. Or more specifically, whether these spreadsheet-wielding graduates are turning up in the Mission these days or heading back to marble-covered offices in places far to the east. Representing perhaps the most glaring trailing indicator of San Francisco bubble excess, the percentage of graduating MBA students who decide to give up a career in finance to join entrepreneurial ventures represents perhaps the most conservative risk-adjusted judgment of the potential for startups to make the world a better place (or at least, to make petabytes of cash). MBAs flocked to San Francisco in increasing numbers in 2013, driven by a mix of idealism (not really) and the sense that startups were about to conquer the world. As Kevin Roose , “Now, many of the hottest startups in the Bay Area bear the distinct mark of Wall Street’s profiteering impulse,” and that familiarity encouraged a Wall Street exodus to the West unlike anything seen since, well, the last bubble. Well, there is good news my friends: the MBAs aren’t arriving anymore, and that means cheaper tee times for all of us. That’s according to , which is a particular bellwether of the state of startups given the school’s proximity to Silicon Valley. About 24% of MBA graduates in the class of 2014 headed to tech jobs, down from 32% in 2013 and equal with the proportion back in 2012. Of course, those profiteering graduates are returning right back to where they belong in finance and consumer products, which each saw notable upticks in employment. The silver lining (depending on your perspective) is that the rate of entrepreneurs coming out of Stanford GSB has remained mostly stable the past two years at about 17% of students, up from 13% in 2012. As the Great MBA Bubble of 2013 comes to a close, it is worth considering just what the costs are for going into the technology industry. For the median employee coming out of the business school, technology employers paid about $165,000 ($125,000 in salary, $20,000 signing bonus, and $20,000 in other guaranteed bonuses). For those going into finance, the median compensation was $290,000 ($150,000 in salary, $40,000 signing bonus, and $100,000 in other guaranteed bonuses). Ok, I think it’s time to move from Python to Excel macros. Granted, there is a lot more leverage for an MBA to make money in finance, where the right investment and technical wizardry can essentially provide a key to the mint, while the same hours at a startup might generate a couple of sales leads. But I think there is something more fundamental about values that describes why people are making these career decisions. I know very few engineers or product friends of mine that would willingly accept the harshness of a suit and tie at an investment bank or private equity firm instead of of plaid shirts. Nor do I know many who would sacrifice their cooked-to-order meals using all organic ingredients like quinoa and almond milk rather than Chinese takeout delivered to the bank lobby. That sense matches Sam Altman’s, who about what makes Silicon Valley work. “The focus in Silicon Valley on long-term compensation is also important. Nearly everyone wants to get rich but they’re willing to wait to do so. Conspicuous consumption isn’t that cool; not too many people drive Ferraris or talk about their vacation homes.” Altman is speaking from his experience as President of YCombinator, but he could be describing any creative industry. In Hollywood, young workers wait tables while developing their screenplays or acting in plays, dreaming of one day making it big in a blockbuster. In Washington, young graduates filter into politicians’ offices as vastly underpaid aides in the hope of securing a plum job with the Congressional leadership or the President. And in Silicon Valley, young entrepreneurs forego current income to build companies they hope will one day grace the front page of the Wall Street Journal in a a splashy IPO. Judging creative prowess is fundamentally qualitative – it’s practically impossible to distinguish between the masses of young scriptwriters, young aides, and young entrepreneurs since there are initially very few metrics for success. But some of these people do win in the end, and they win really big. , as they would say in economics. It’s finance and New York that is an aberration here, where the pursuit of cash and compensation outranks nearly every other ambition. In finance, every person and every team can be rank-ordered based on profits and losses. And while there are certainly qualitative aspects to the job, ultimate success is just making more money, more profit, and repeating that as much as possible. That transparency is one of the reasons why labor compensation costs are so high at banks, . So while it might be fun to rejoice that the pesky MBA students are once again heading to greener, more financial pastures, consider that the MBAs who are still coming to tech companies probably had more lucrative options, and yet made the decision to come to Silicon Valley anyway. These are people who share the values of a creative industry like tech innovation, and are definitely not the sign of the next bubble. Instead, we should use their skills however we can – we certainly know the engineers aren’t going to build models in Excel. |
Early Warning Labs Partners With USGS To Create An Earthquake Warning App | Sarah Buhr | 2,014 | 11 | 9 | The ability to predict, detect and warn about an earthquake in time to save lives is in its infancy. But a small startup out of Santa Monica is apply modern cloud computing technology to do just that. Early stage earthquake detection startup has partnered with the to build , a system that can warn California residents that an earthquake is about to happen 30 seconds ahead of time. This could be pretty useful for the Golden state, where faults run up and down the entire coast and earthquakes are common. Most of the quakes aren’t really much to write home about, but you never know when a big one will hit and do some real damage. According to the California Geological Survey, a total of six 7.0 or greater magnitude earthquakes have hit the California coast in the last 100 years. But even small earthquakes every year and threaten lives. While 30 seconds doesn’t seem like much, founder of EWL, Josh Bashioum says that is enough time to take shelter and save lives. There were Twitter came out with a video to show it could warn people about earthquakes before they hit, but this would only with user input and is not based on seismographic or other data. It also means you’d have to be on Twitter at the time to get the warning. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UFsJhYBxzY&w=560&h=315] The state of California and the USGS had previously partnered with CalTech on a similar idea in 2012 called . This was basically a demo that used the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN) to create a warning system for the West Coast of the United States. The idea was to use this network of about 400 ground motion sensors to replace an older detection system that simply let us know there were seismic tremblings after the fact. But ShakeAlert requires the use of the physical hardware from the network in order to send out a warning signal. EWL co-founder Josh Bashioum explained that QuakeAlert doesn’t require hardware. Instead it connects to a cloud-based system to send warnings via an app to your smartphone. It can also be programmed to connect to other systems such as the speaker system at a large concert venue or to a hospital system so that it automatically switches to emergency power to protect patients. EWL is now working with the USGS, , universities and private institutions to build on top of what ShakeAlert has been doing and offer a system that can send signals digitally to anyone with the app. This would be the first time anyone would be warned that an earthquake is coming a few seconds to minutes ahead of time from a message on their phone. While the app doesn’t require hardware, there is a physical detection and warning device being developed. Bashioum wants you to think about it like a “Nest Thermostat for earthquake warnings.” His team is working with the USGS to install and test those devices in California in order for EWL and the USGS to demonstrate its findings in real-life scenarios. EWL has already been working with NBC Universal in L.A. to do just that. Bashioum estimates that the accompanying home/office device will be about $100 when it hits the consumer market. The QuakeAlert app, which does not require the hardware, will be free. |
Taiwan-Based Educational App Developer QLL Raises $450,000 For International Expansion | Catherine Shu | 2,014 | 11 | 30 | , a Taipei-based developer of educational mobile apps, has raised $450,000 in funding led by B Dash Ventures, with participation from Incubate Fund, Pinehurst Advisors, Viling, and Coent Venture Partners. The startup is an alumnus of accelerator program AppWorks. Since its launch in 2007, QLL has developed about 150 iOS and Android apps, which it claims have been downloaded 6.5 million times in Taiwan and now have over 300,000 monthly active users. Its products include , which corrects users’ Chinese pronunciations, as well as several bilingual storytelling apps for kids. All of QLL’s apps leverage user analytics to deliver personalized learning sessions. Now QLL wants to expand into international markets, including Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Canada, and the U.S. with an online platform that will allow educators to develop and exchange digital learning materials, even if they don’t know how to code. The platform will be available on multiple platforms, including mobile devices and smart TVs. QLL will first launch its apps in Singapore as a test market, before moving onto the U.S. and Canada, where it will seek local channel partners. In Indonesia, QLL will likely work with Huawei as a distribution partner. The company focuses on apps for children aged two to six and has previously partnered with hardware makers like Sony, Huawei, Foxconn, and Fuhu to put its software on tablets, smart TVs, and smart watches. Co-founder and CEO Lulu Yeh says QLL is comparable to Duolingo because the startup also focuses on language learning, but unlike Duolingo, which is geared towards individual users, QLL’s target market is educators and schools. It is also similar to Khan Academy in that it offers video content and tests, though QLL differentiates by focusing on Asian language courses, which Khan Academy currently does not offer. QLL monetizes by licensing its content to businesses or online educators; through app sales and in-app purchases; and advertising (Yeh says QLL’s in-app ads currently get 10 million impressions per month). |
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