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Cheers Raises $2.5M Series A To Expand Its Positivity Network And Make The Case To Brands
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
, the app and social network built around , has raised a $2.5 million Series A funding round led by MindFund and including Charles River Ventures, Trinity Ventures, AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and others. The startup launched just over a year ago in February, and is still very much experimenting with its positivity-based social network, according to founder Farhad Mohit. The funding will help Cheers continue to explore and expand that experiment, Mohit says, and build on recent additions to the platform. This includes the addition of “Celebrations,” a feature introduced in an update a few weeks ago that allows users to build collections that are open to community contribution about any topic. This new feature was designed to address an audience focus issue by giving users ways to find and engage with content they’re specifically interested in, instead of having to wade through the firehose of the general feed. The Cheers app is similar in concept to apps like Oink, the Kevin Rose project that closed up shop not long after launch after it failed to attract much of an audience. While Mohit admits that the membership numbers aren’t quite where Cheers would like them to be, he still feels the app is now doing something fundamentally different from Oink and others, and addressing a problem that still needs tackling. The key will be continuing to evolve the app’s approach in order to get it to the point where it’s striking a chord with a broader user base. “If you look at the kinds of decisions that need to be made, there are several layers,” Mohit (who previously founded BizRate) explained. “There’s the purchase layer, when you want to decide whether or not to buy from somebody. For those, BizRate and its ilk were very satisfactory. Then one level above is sort of vendor choice. That’s where Yelp comes in. They [Cheers and Oink] come in at the awareness level – they help you decide whether something is even on your radar to consider.” Other services in this category have failed because “they failed to realize what this simple text and picture and information is really good for.” They’re not good for comparison, he said. They’re good for generating awareness. Cheers, if it accomplishes its mission, will succeed by enabling a lot of fans and followers of things to create awareness about the people, places and locations that its network members are favoriting, instead of acting as localized, limited-scope comparison tools on the ground around specific locations. To do that, Cheers hopes to eventually become a funnel for brands looking for sponsored content. The idea is that with Celebrations, brands can curate content from actual users and fans that is positive in nature while at the same time being genuine and spontaneous. It is essentially tailor-made for use in social media campaigns like Facebook promoted stories. Cheers has a couple of advantages for organizations and groups. It provokes the kind of engagement you can see here in a , which was started by a user – not anyone associated with the brand. And the network is remarkably good at self-filtering, maintaining an overwhelmingly positive vibe. Mohit says that’s mostly due to the company’s dedicated core users, rather than any direct influence on the part of Cheers or its employees. Brands will soon be able to take advantage of tools designed for organizations on Cheers, Mohit says, which is in part what the funding is designed to help with. Mohit is surprisingly candid about Cheers and the startup’s chances, saying that this Series A is mostly designed to set the company up to see if there should be a Series B or not. The company has an excellent model for helping organizations turn their biggest fans into a fount of quality user-generated advertising. Now it just needs the user-acquisition strategy to make that happen on a larger scale.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 4 | null |
Home Cleaning Service Pathjoy Becomes Homejoy, Raises $1.7M From Andreessen Horowitz And Others
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
Pathjoy, a Y Combinator-incubated startup that makes it easy and affordable to have your home cleaned, is announcing that it has raised $1.7 million in seed funding. It’s taking on a new name that sounds like a better fit for its mission — goodbye Pathjoy, hello . The funding came from , , Mike Hirshland/ , Max Levchin, Paul Buchheit, Saba Software CEO Bobby Yazdani, and Pejman Nozad. CEO and co-founder Adora Cheung told me that the investors seemed to be particularly excited about connecting unemployed and underemployed people with work, and about a service that’s spreading thanks to word of mouth. The company offers a simple web interface for booking cleanings. It charges $20 an hour, and before the appointment, you can view the profile of the person who’s going to be cleaning your home. (Cleaners are also background checked and rated by customers.) Cheung previously said that the company has done a lot of work behind the scenes to take some of the inefficiencies out of the system, so that it can offer cleanings that are significantly cheaper than most other services. I’ve actually become a big fan of the service myself, and I’ve used it several times since I . (I converted , too — the last time our apartment started looking a little scruffy, he was the first one to suggest using the service again.) It takes only a few clicks to make an appointment, and I was also impressed by the cleaners. On the other hand, I’ve never actually paid someone to clean my apartment before, so I don’t have much to compare it with. After the initial coverage, other people seemed a little skeptical, basically asking: Really? You just built a website for a cleaning service? When I asked Cheung today if people are misunderstanding the company, she responded, “I’m less worried about whether we’re a tech startup. We’re certainly not building a search engine, but we are using technology to make things more convenient and much simpler.” (It’s also worth noting that Exec, which started out as more of a general assistant/errand service, , particularly cleaning.) One of the things that Cheung highlighted last time we spoke was the process that the company has developed for moving quickly into a city, recruiting cleaners, and finding demand. In fact, Homejoy is now available in every major West Coast city (San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Seattle, and Los Angeles), and it’s launching this week in New York.
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Microsoft Adds Android Support To Windows Azure Mobile Services
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 |
Last year, Microsoft , a cloud backend for mobile applications. But at the time, it only supported Windows 8, and the team then added iOS and Windows Phone 8 support a short while later. , Android users can also connect their apps to Azure Mobile Services and use the platform to store their structured data, use its and send out . The Android SDK is now and as Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie , the team welcomes community contributions. The SDK was actually developed by the Microsoft Open Technologies team, while the Azure team focused on the push support and the portal integration. To enable push notification to Android apps, developers still have to sign up for . Developers who are interested in getting started with connecting their Android apps to Azure can find a tutorial , and Microsoft’s Channel 9 (the company’s long-running video site for developers) also features a of the new tools. With this update, Microsoft is also expanding Mobile Services’ reach to the East Asia Region. This, the company notes, will help developers to “reduce latency for applications with customers in Asia.” These enhancements to Azure Mobile Services are part of a wider Azure update that also includes support for creating and managing SQL Reporting Services, Active Directory integration, availability monitoring and other enhancements across the platform. You can find more details about these changes . This release also brings the Azure Store, which gives developers the ability to easily add Microsoft and third-party add-ons to their Azure apps, to 22 new countries (up from the original 11 it previously supported). Here is a full list of the new Azure features :
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Marc Andreessen And Ben Horowitz ‘Decode’ Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s Farewell Memo — On Rap Genius
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
When invested into this past fall, they were keen to that the platform can be used for decoding more than song lyrics, and extend to other forms of wordplay — literature, historical texts, political speeches, and the like. The venture capital firm has really put their mouths where their money is. and have both logged onto Rap Genius to add of the issued this past week by Groupon’s founder after he’d been . Andreessen Horowitz was in the frothy , so seeing their insights is particularly rich. Really, you should just head over and , because it’s fascinating. For example, when Mason refers to “controversial metrics in our S1,” Andreessen : “Andrew is referring to the use of non-standard financial metrics in the company’s SEC filings, particularly in the IPO filing (S1). As someone who was in the room as an observer at the Groupon board when the decision to use these metrics was made, I think Groupon was honestly trying to provide additional information that investors would find useful, which mirrored the way management thought about running the business. However, no good deed goes unpunished, and widespread media paranoia about business metrics still lingering from the 2000 dot com crash combined with other missteps on Groupon’s part combined to make the use of those non-standard metrics highly controversial and ultimately negative for the company.” So far Groupon how many may have hoped it would, especially for its venture capital investors. This is a very good way to roll with it — and show off a newer portfolio company in the meantime. Well played, Marc and Ben.
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This Facebook-Twitter Marriage Proposal Shows Social Media Might Not Be Killing Romance After All
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PniRBD1Kx1U] There’s this video making the San Francisco and tech industry this weekend, of Facebook staffer proposing to his longtime girlfriend, Twitter employee . It’s called the “ ” since Park incorporated the products built at both his and Wong’s day jobs into the whole thing. The result is pretty amazing. We all know that social media can sometimes ironically be more than anything, but this is really an example of Twitter and Facebook at their best, bringing people together and helping them chronicle the special moments in their lives. It also shows that social media might not be after all. The Twitbook Proposal is proof that it’s possible to incorporate Twitter and Facebook into a relationship in ways that are actually tasteful, relevant, and even romantic. You might think that you’ve become totally desensitized to the of Adorable Clever Wedding Proposal videos, but this one might just thaw out your cold heart. Seriously. Watch it and try not to crack a smile (or if you’re me, cry like a baby.) Congratulations and good luck, you crazy kids.
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The Story Behind Qualtrics, The Next Great Enterprise Company
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Derek Andersen
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
I met Ryan Smith about nine years ago in a college apartment in Provo Utah. We were both attending school, and after asking him what he was working on he replied, “I’m building an online research company with my dad called Qualtrics.” Nine years later Qualtrics has 5,000 customers, $70MM in funding, and turned down a $500MM acquisition offer last year in a bold attempt to build a billion dollar company. Qualtrics was well described last year when Sequoia Capital partner Bryan Schreier called them the “largest software company you haven’t heard of yet.” That is changing quickly. If you don’t know, was created by Ryan and has dad as a way to help schools and companies gather feedback and data on students/customers through surveys. They have 5,000 customers including FedEx, Hewlett-Packard, JetBlue, Microsoft, PepsiCo and Zappos. I and learned how it all happened. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK5zZKA2058] In the summer of 2001 while doing an internship at Hewlett-Packard, Ryan’s dad Scott called him and said he had throat cancer and would begin treatment immediately so Ryan returned home and took a semester off school. While at home he found that his dad, who Ryan describes as a “super early adaptor,” had built the technology that was the beginning of Qualtrics. Each day after Scott returned from chemotherapy they would work on the product. By the time Scott had returned to full strength, Ryan had signed up 20 customers and they had hired a small team to build out the product. The first customers were in academia. Ryan realized that he could easily find key decision makers’ contact information online, and since it worked for one it seemed only natural that it would work for others. The first customer was a professor at the Kellogg School of Management. Ten years later the first 10 Qualtrics customers are still customers. All of this was literally happening from Ryan’s parents’ basement in Provo Utah in 2002 and 2003. Ryan’s first big hire was a friend that he convinced to turn down a $60,000 job to make $8,000 at Qualtrics. Don’t worry – after over delivering he made $12,000 the next year. By 2004 they had 20-people and there were so many cars on their street that neighbors complained and the garbage trucks couldn’t pick up the trash. Eventually they were making $100,000 a month. Five years after inception and making more than a million dollars. The product and company stayed focused on the original vision and customers. Ryan would call his brother Jared at Google to talk about ideas and possible directions and Jared would hammer home focus. “Don’t talk to me about anything other than 250 school.” They stayed focused and eventually did get to 250 schools, using the product usage volume and virality to double as the marketing plan. The first press they ever did was just 9-months ago after their funding was announced. They’ve turned down Inc. Magazine’s fastest growing companies list for six years in a row. “What’s wrong with making money quietly? Actually there’s a lot of upside to it.” With the team and business growing, Ryan had maxed out in his technical capacity to manage and build the engineering team. “I thought to myself, ‘Who is the best engineer that I know?'” There are few in the world better than his brother Jared who built a 180 person engineering & product management team at Google and had worked there since 2004. Jared Smith is one of these elite Valley tested engineers that every founder dreams about joining their startup but deep down knows there’s only a 1% chance he/she ever actually will. In Ryan’s case it actually did and the effect was dramatic. Ryan estimates Jared’s engineering impact on the same team was a 7X increase in productivity. Meanwhile customers and revenue continued to march ahead. The first VC calls started coming on strong in 2008. The team would politely decline and grind ahead. By 2010 they had 100 employees and were receiving three investment inquiries per day. I’ve spoken with a half dozen VCs whose offers were flat out turned down by Qualtrics. I get the impression that many had never experienced anything quite like it. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8fGDLBfv-k] Finally in May of last year it was announced that Accel Partners, who had been reaching out for three years without giving up, and Sequoia Capital were investing $70MM into a company that had never raise $1. So why even raise money? “One plus one has to equal five. If one plus one doesn’t equal five this deal doesn’t work. It has to be so compelling to achieve our objectives that we’re all in. We got Sequoia and Accel and that’s exactly what happened.” With 300 employees and no basement big enough to hold them, Qualtrics now has a ‘spared no expense’ headquarters in Utah whose culture, perks and creative design would go toe-to-toe with anything you find in Silicon Valley. “The Smith’s have managed to build an organization in Provo that is focused on performance, and a culture of performance driven by complete transparency,” said Patrick Llewellyn, President and CEO of who recently visited the office. Ryan is surprisingly level headed about his own future and the company’s. With $70MM in funding, the pressure and expectations couldn’t be higher. “Billion dollar opportunities are rare. What we’re trying to do is very big and I’m working harder now than I ever have.”
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What Games Are: Real-Money Gaming Is Really Boring
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Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
It seems that the United States may be becoming more open to the idea of real-money online gaming. Real-money gaming has been very successful in certain areas, and among investors it tends to be contrasted against trends like social games in very positive terms. The average lifetime value of a real-money player is generally thought to be far higher than a social gamer, for example, and the expected ARPUs can get pretty crazy. The smell of cha-ching is in the air. In particular, the U.S. has long been considered a kind of El Dorado because of its size and potential. A variety of companies used to providing gambling in the UK, Europe and Asia, as well as domestic suppliers in the physical casino business and social game companies like Zynga are hovering. Legislation in several states and some people are forecasting that real-money will be the next big thing for the games industry. And yet, for me at least, the news that real-money online gaming might come to downtown Des Moines, Columbus or Omaha is totally uninteresting. Like, so what? Professionally speaking, the world of casino, slot, bingo and poker is just as valid as any other sector of the gaming universe. I know several people who work within that sector, and have consulted on a couple of projects over the years – which were as much an education for me as for them. They are busy solving problems of player satisfaction, retention and technical issues just like anyone else, and they take pride in their work. Several parts of the online gambling universe host cultures of players who behave just like any other gamer. The sector is no more dark or seedy than any other kind of game, and it has its fans and whales just as every other kind does. There are debates within its various communities over who are the best providers, and as a whole the sector has its hardcore genres (sports betting, poker, etc.) and its more casual (bingo, slots) counterparts, too. Even the whole addiction thing is largely handled with the same levels of responsibility as any social game, massive multiplayer game or other provider. And yet, meh. It’s hard to want to write about it. My reason is that, although it may have an active subculture all its own much like sports, online gambling is probably the least innovative sector of the games industry. It’s always the same few games repackaged endlessly and the movements within that space tend to be very narrow. Unlike, say, indie games where cool weird bubbles up on a regular basis to teach us all the meaning of play all over again, there’s really very little to say when all you have is poker, slots, bingo and so on. That’s why online gambling remains largely a margin- and customer-acquisition business, and why it rarely generates any real enthusiasm among the gaming press. Games are an entertainment business like TV where the fiction and the mechanic are just as important as one another, but online gambling comes across as about as genuinely exciting as watching QVC. They are so un-innovative largely because of the philosophy that drives them. I don’t just mean a focus on the bottom line. I mean that gambling companies . They think of games in terms of predictable outcomes and measured rewards, guided user experiences and some degree of manipulation. Behaviorist game design is very popular among investors these days. The prospect of being able to measure everything is perceived to reduce the guesswork of what is fun, but – – it doesn’t really. Instead, metrics tend to be good at helping to maximize the effectiveness of a game dynamic which is already fun, but is no good for invention. Successful game dynamics always come from that weird creative place that method can’t quite access, and – not really trusting in that sort of thinking – that’s why gambling companies tend to stick to what they know. So they are timid, and timidity encourages incrementalism like “inventing” a variant on slots, or a slightly turned-around version of bingo. Sure, fine, but that makes for some incredibly dull product. Bingo with extra numbers and a daily reward schedule may be exciting within certain frames of reference. But outside those walls it’s all very whatevs and the most important consequence of that is that the race to win online gambling is only about marketing spend and distribution. As a sector it’s fundamentally unlikely to lead to a Minecraft equivalent, or even a FarmVille equivalent. So I find it boring because it feels like it’s over already. Online gambling is already clogged with undifferentiated products competing over small incremental differences, so – if/when the laws do pass in various states – the gold rush will quickly go to whoever can afford to compete. It’s just not the sort of thing that sparks marketing stories and causes revolutions. It’s just too small-minded. That’s why I’d rather check out The Room because it seems kooky and weird, or play Eufloria. These are games that carry the potential of a marketing story, of gathering attention and excitement based on what they are and what they represent. A game like Minecraft is the sort of thing that spawns a revolution because it becomes a passionate game that folks talk about. Exciting games marry both creative and business requirements in novel ways. Whether it’s an app, an online game like Spry Fox’s or an old-school Steam game, genuine interest comes from taking big risks over little ones. In all philosophies there are conservative game makers who tend to try and increment their way to success (and largely fail to do so), but behaviorists are more conservative than most. That’s why they got dull and the came to an apathetic halt a while ago. I’m still waiting to hear the story about a gambling company that invented a whole new game. Not some adaptation of an existing game, some recasting or re-theming of stuff we already know, but something brand-spanking new. Whether your business is in selling single-shot games, virtual goods or cash payouts, the demand to invent and be weird is one that never goes away because the future of games is all about surprise. So if you want to get me excited, don’t just show me something that’s 1 percent different from everything I’ve seen before.
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Kleiner Perkins Has Now Put Over $450 Million In Nearly 40 Mobile Investments
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
This week, Kleiner Perkins partner joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC series. As we discussed on the show, Kleiner Perkins has been making a solid bet on mobile for the past few years. In fact, we’ve confirmed with the firm that it has put more than $450 million in 40 mobile companies. As Murphy explains, these investments include both the $200 million iFund (launched in 2008) and separate investments. So now the $450 million in mobile investments are part of the firm’s digital investing in both consumer and enterprise companies. For background, the iFund was initially a $100 million collaborative initiative with Apple that focuses on funding and building applications on the iOS platform and the mobile Internet. The company doubled this to within a few years. But Kleiner has expanded the mobile focus to include enterprise, as well. And Kleiner has built a pretty impressive collection of consumer-focused mobile investments including Shopkick, Path, Spotify, Pinger and Square. Of late, the focus has expanded to enterprise with companies like Apperian, Crittercism and Egnyte. Check out the video above from Murphy for more.
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If You Are Reading This Here You Have Already Failed At Unplugging
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
Are you noticing that some things are a bit different today? People in cafes are actually talking to each other, no laptops in sight? Drivers at stoplights are accelerating as soon as the light turns green, without that “oops I was this text” lag? Don’t panic, you haven’t been somehow transported back to 1995 (though that might be , .) We’re in the middle of the , an annual 24-hour event that and starts at sunset on the first Friday of each March, inspired by the ancient ritual of observing . If you’re reading this, you’ve obviously failed at the whole thing already. But there’s always next year, or even next week. It’s a pretty straightforward idea, and you don’t necessarily need to to do it. The National Day of Unplugging’s says the goal is simply to “unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and connect with loved ones.” According to the of the event embedded below this post, signing the pledge means that you vow to put down the phone, shut your laptop, light some candles, and open some wine. It might sound easy on paper, but thinking about putting it into practice can be pretty difficult. This week I had a drink with a very successful web entrepreneur who told me she observes a full day of unplugging with her family . She’s a bit older than me, though, and has already had a lot of success at work and built a rich personal network of friends and family. I told her that I couldn’t see myself being able to completely unplug on a weekly basis without having negative repercussions in my career or personal life. “What if someone is inviting me to some amazing last minute party?” I asked. “What if a source emails me with Twitter’s secret IPO documents?” “It’s ultimately about creating boundaries for yourself, which everyone should do,” she said. “Your career and life will actually be better for it in the long haul. Trust me.” She makes a good point. For decades before the current “always on” era, many people were able to build great lives and careers for themselves despite not being accessible for 24 hours a day. Though right now working harder, faster, and longer , it might be worth remembering that the people who have historically made really big impressions on the tech industry and the larger world spent a few more hours each day than we typically do today. Stepping away from the gadgets and the web for a few hours here and there might not be a after all. If for nothing else, it will prove that we can still without them. Here are the ten principles of the National Day of Unplugging:
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Gillmor Gang: Pinch and Spread
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — spent a beautiful Bay Area day chatting amiably about Android, Apple, and the GUI formerly known as the Lock Screen. With notifications becoming the default interaction point with email, social, and app inputs, the Gang is split down the middle. On one side is @scobleizer and @jtaschek and partially @kevinmarks; on the other more correct side is @kteare and me, @stevegillmor. We think Apple has the more elegant if slightly hamstrung solution, while the rest are Android fanboys waiting desperately for the latest Samsung phone. And of course, @scobleizer sees everything through his forthcoming Glassware, or as he joked, being a Glasshole about it. Oh, the humanity. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Iterations: Much Ado About Yahoo!
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
TechCrunch Over the past few weeks, I’ve been genuinely surprised by the depth and reach of the reaction to any moves made by Yahoo! As someone who hasn’t been around the this place for too long, my sense is Yahoo!, despite its recent history of countless missteps, is still vitally important to the cultural memory of Silicon Valley. And, as a result, the moves its new CEO makes becomes the subject of ridiculously intense, global scrutiny, armchair speculation and analysis, and a deafening level of peanut gallery twitter blabber devoid of any reason or context. Let’s *briefly* recap the multiple serious issues facing Yahoo up to mid-2012. There were years of board mismanagement. Musical chairs in the CEO’s office. The company abandoned search. The portal still resembles a digital media site while today’s hottest properties delivered personalized newsfeeds. An identity crisis of whether its a media company versus a technology company, the one which gave Hadoop to the world. An activist investor who rightly blasted the original board of directors and leadership. While their display ads are profitable, they won’t be able to target them as much as other properties. While Yahoo! may still wield a huge global Consumer Internet brand and act as the portal to the web for a massive audience worldwide, it remains unclear how much growth is left for a company already worth around $20B and one that turned down a juicy $45B from Microsoft in 2008. Yahoo! has a secret weapon, however, and her name is Marissa Mayer. I say “secret” for a specific reason. Now, it’s obvious to point out the company’s powerful CEO – given how well-known Mayer is, but the following bears repeating: Very, very, very few people in the entire world possess her level of operational experience, product intuition, and deep technical networks. People seem to forget these facts, instead choosing to focus on cafeteria policies. Put another way, more bluntly — only a very small handful of people possess the depth of experience she holds, building products for hundreds of millions of consumers and growing up inside one of the Valley’s most iconic, storied, and successful companies from the the beginning. Period. The reason I’m devoting my column to this tired, overplayed topic to remind all of us just how rare her experience is. Now, let’s briefly review what Mayer has accomplished in less than a year as Chief Yahoo, in no particular order. She recruited a new CFO & COO. She added Max Levchin to the Board (which again, was originally shaken up by Loeb). She helped engineer a partial sale of Yahoo’s position in Alibaba, netting the company much-need liquidity. She helped steer a redesign of the main homepage and taken steps toward personalization of the newsfeed — anyone who has helped a site even for a small company knows how political this task can be. She closed the acquisitions of Stamped, Snip.it, and OntheAir, smartly scooping up excess talent, especially for mobile, in an environment that has too many fledgling and inconsequential startups to begin with. She is drawing more positive attention for Yahoo! than anyone before her, even using Twitter and Flickr herself to communicate with the community. She improved cafeteria conditions (which also makes it more inviting for visitors). She gave employees iPhones. In about eight months since her installment as CEO, Yahoo’s market cap is up roughly 25% with around $4B in liquid assets and fewer than the 14,000+ employees she began with — and that number may come down again as her new “Work From Work” policy takes effect. The facts above speak for themselves. In less than a year, Mayer has a series of small victories on what could be a very long journey to turning around the big ship that is Yahoo. It may not even be possible to turnaround, but things are much better now. In the future, I’d broadly expect to see further downsizing (including parts of international), more data partnerships alongside their existing relationship with Facebook, many more talent acquisitions as seed-funded companies slowly die off, which will hopefully tie-in to investment in their mobile app ecosystem to extend their consumer-facing brands globally. For instance, given how hard mobile app distribution is today, Yahoo’s audience and brand could drive even more downloads on both iOS and Android if the company properly invested in this direction. Of course, on Quora there are great, detailed threads with for Yahoo’s CEO and if it can be at all. Yahoo is a $20B that makes about $1B/year in profit. And, it has been in turbulent waters for years. Now, for the past eight months under the stewardship and steering of Mayer, Yahoo seems to be a good track relative to years past. This isn’t your average turnaround situation. Yahoo is a big ship that will take many more months to turn direction. We don’t know where the winds will take the company, but if the last eight months are any indication, I’m optimistic. Interestingly, it’s Mayer’s presence that intensifies all the chatter. The Valley — and the world — cannot help but watch, which reinforces the fact that despite what popular sentiment may say, Yahoo! still matters to the web and still matters to the Valley, at least for now. But, Yahoo! needs to be turned-around and reinvented. This is Mayer’s clear purpose, and therefore she has the implicit mandate to engineer this by any means necessary. She’s trying to fix morale and culture in her own way. We can expect further reductions in force. She and the company are also under pressure to create a new property to demonstrate Yahoo! can still create. From my point of view, it will be exciting to see unfold, and I have no doubt when her tenure is complete, Mayer will have left Yahoo! in significantly better than shape than we she inherited it. /
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A Look At Karma, A Tiny Wi-Fi Hotspot On A Mission
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Scott Merrill
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
We wander the streets with tiny computers in our pockets and in our hands. We talk casually to these computers, just like Captains Kirk and Picard talked to the computers on their Enterprises. With the push of a button, our computers give us unprecedented access to the bulk of human knowledge. These computers sometimes talk back to us. But underneath all the noise and chatter of speech, the computers in our pockets communicate with one another in an endless stream of ones and zeroes. Packets whiz through the air, unseen, unappreciated. Those invisible ones and zeroes floating through the air cost real money. Proletarians like you and I enjoy a small allotment of ones and zeroes that we’re allowed to send and receive. The robber barons who mediate our access to the bulk of human knowledge grow rich even as they reduce the quantity of ones and zeroes they permit us to send. The computers in our pockets yearn for more ones and zeroes, but we, like over-protective parents at a pizza party, cautiously step in to prevent a binge. There are some, though, that seek to make it easier — and more affordable — to send ones and zeroes through the air. offers a lilliputian device with simple, easy-to-understand pricing. There are no onerous contracts. You are not required to commit to exclusivity to Karma for several years, unlike what the robber barons demand of you. The Karma device creates a WiFi hotspot that moves around with you, and connects your WiFi connected devices to the Internet. This is just like the tethering option available on your pocket computer; but Karma sends data through Clearwire’s cellular network. Use it at airports and hotels to avoid exorbitant access fees. Use it with your WiFi-only tablet while you’re riding a bus or a train. The nifty thing about Karma is the notion of “social bandwidth”. It seems a little extravagant to have a device dedicated to getting your little tablet onto the Internet. The same access point could easily service multiple devices. And that’s just what Karma does: it creates a public WiFi hotspot, with your name right there in the SSID: “Scott’s Karma”. Complete strangers can connect to your hotspot, and the Karma service handles all the account creation and billing nonsense. You just say to the world “Hey, here’s a WiFi hotspot you can use” and you’re done. When someone new starts using your Karma hotspot, they get 100 MB of free bandwidth to consume; no need to pay anything at all. You also get a bonus 100MB for sharing your connection. Early adopters of Karma can probably accumulate a substantial pool of megabytes to use. After your freeloading guests consume their 100MB, they can purchase additional megabytes at reasonable prices. There’s no need to for these folks to own their own karma device: they can just keep using whatever Karma hotspots may be nearby. Users of Karma get a dashboard display from which they can review their data consumption, see who has connected to their hotspots lately, and buy additional data as needed. It’s all very easy to use. Karma is not a perfect solution, though. You must have a Facebook account, which for some may reduce Karma’s utility to zero. Twice while testing Karma I had a real opportunity to offer connectivity to someone who needed it, and both times the offer went unfulfilled because the other person didn’t have a Facebook account. The other strike against Karma is one of simple security consciousness. I think most people are aware of the dangers of connecting to unknown and untrusted wireless networks. Right now, Karma is brand new — it’s not a household name — so when someone sees “Scott’s Karma” in the list of nearby wireless networks, there’s nothing to really encourage them to connect to it. If Karma devices can proliferate, maybe this situation will change. In the high-tech metropolis of Columbus, Ohio, the Karma device worked just fine, as long as I was outside. Standing at a bus stop on my morning commute, my transfer speeds were just fine. The device reported a 4G connection, and I certainly had 4G-ish speeds.
As soon as I walked into a building, though, the connection would immediately drop to 3G, if it remained connected at all. In most buildings, the connection light blinked on and off, forlornly looking for a signal. This may be due to the quality of the Clearwire network in Columbus. Or maybe all the lead paint blocked the signal. I don’t know. Sitting in a coffee shop, I connected all of my devices to the Karma network at the same time: Samsung Galaxy S3, Nexus 7, and laptop. Running a speedtest on all three simultaneously produced very disappointing results: During my tests, only one other person ever connected to “Scott’s Karma”, and that’s only because I asked my wife very nicely if she’d do so. No strangers connected, so I honestly can’t say how the device will operate in its intended use case. In all other respects, the Karma was an absolute delight to use. It’s small enough to carry in your shirt pocket. I never completely depleted the battery, even after several continuous hours of use. The signal was strong enough for all the tasks I needed to perform while out and about. A little more than a week’s worth of daily commutes consumed only a couple hundred megs of data. I checked email with wild abandon, trounced friends in Words With Friends, and destroyed an impressive number of Resistance portals while playing Ingress. If nothing else, Karma provides an inexpensive option for getting WiFi-only devices online in the absence of freely available WiFi. Quit paying the robber barons excessive fees for the privilege of tethering devices to your pocket computer. Bypass the hotel’s rip-off WiFi. Be a nice person and help others avoid rip-off WiFi.
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Evernote Saw First Signs Of Hacking On Feb. 28: Emails, Passwords And Usernames Accessed But Not Your Data Or Payment Details
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
is requiring its nearly 50 million users to reset their passwords after the popular personal note-taking app became the latest high-profile victim of wide-scale hacking attempts. The breach follows malicious activity at , and in recent weeks. Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch in an email everything is running, although if you try to access the site things may not work as normal at the moment: “We just pushed out a password reset, so the servers are going to be saturated for a bit,” he wrote. “Everything is up, although response is choppy. There’s no threat to user data that we’re aware of.” In a , the company said that “individual(s) responsible were able to gain access to Evernote user information, which includes usernames, email addresses associated with Evernote accounts and encrypted passwords,” but that no payment details were accessed. “We don’t store any user payment info, so no payment info can be compromised,” Libin told TechCrunch. Asked if this was in any way connected to what happened at Zendesk the other week (that breach affected several other sites), he said that is not yet know. “We don’t know about all the details at Zendesk, so it’s premature to comment on that.” A spokesperson tells us that the suspicious activity was first noticed a couple of days ago, on February 28: On February 28th, the Evernote Operations & Security team became aware of unusual and potentially malicious activity on the Evernote service that warranted a deeper look. We discovered that a person or persons had gained access to usernames, email addresses and encrypted user passwords. In our ongoing analysis, we have found no evidence that there has been unauthorized access to the contents of any user account or to any payment information of Evernote Premium and Evernote Business customers. The spokesperson says that in addition to the blog, the company is sending out direct emails and social media. “[We] encourage any user with questions or concerns to contact Evernote support directly,” she said. Changes to passwords will need to be made across all Evernote apps that you may use, including Evernote Food, Evernote Business, and Evernote Hello. With news of data breaches now happening on a regular basis, it remains to be seen what kind of an impact these breaches are going to have of overall consumer confidence of these services — the question is whether users will become desensitized to the idea, or whether they will turn away from them for more seemingly secure pastures. The fact that they continue to happen certainly does put a dark lining around some of the optimism we’ve seen about the evolution and promises of putting our life in the cloud.
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Andrew Keen
| 2,013 | 3 | 5 | null |
Counterfeit Is The New Real
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Devin Coldewey
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
Here’s a rather unfortunate development: The proliferation of recording devices and instant distribution is matched by our ability to falsify the information they produce. While they don’t exactly cancel each other out, they do have the awkward effect of turning an age of the most rigorous documentation into an age of jaded (and justified) suspicion. Take this business of the meteor. I don’t mean the imperturbable Russian who lowered his visor against a cosmic event of beauty and sublimity. I mean the rest of us. Be honest: How many of you, upon first seeing video of the meteor, immediately began thinking of the ways this could be a hoax or viral stunt? Would there be several more videos like this, and when they investigate, it turns out the meteorites were huge Skittles? That’s certainly what I thought, or along those lines. Or perhaps you remember the published by Reuters of the becrutched Libyan rebel firing an RPG. It was so incredible that to many, it was literally incredible, and immediately a campaign was waged to expose this obvious fake. Of course, it turned out to be a completely genuine (and stunning) piece of photojournalism. On the other end of the spectrum, consider the fabricated video of the golden eagle snatching a kid. A similar skeptical effort was engaged in over that, but it had its defenders as well. After all, it looked quite real, even if in retrospect one can pick out some slightly stiff animation. Indulge me in a little thought experiment, though. What if the video was a little better-done, and for some reason the creators and their friends agreed to never speak of it again? I don’t think it’s such a stretch to suggest that the video would be entered into the ledger of history as fact. Golden eagles would be on the record as having attempted to carry off children in city parks. Their fabrication would have become truth. Of course, that didn’t happen. But do you really think it never has? Sure, we catch a few in the act. War photographers, or their editors, have been attempting to tart up scenes for years with a little extra smoke, or cropping out a McDonalds, or what have you. Sometimes their clone-stamp antics are detected — good for us. But it won’t always be that easy, and the stakes aren’t getting any lower. How long before a murder case turns on a faked photograph that can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to be so? How long before a politician loses his seat because someone made a sex tape with his face superimposed skillfully enough that no one would doubt it? How long before a war is touched off because of a set of “leaked” photos of a plutonium-enriching facility? The truth has always been something of a matter of trust rather than absolute knowledge. But that distinction has always been somewhat academic — a matter for epistemologists to discuss with ethicists. The day is not far off, you can be sure, when the inability to tell the difference between a fake and real document (in the broadest sense of the word — a record of an event) is something we have to deal with every day. Counterfeit is the new real, and vice versa. In a way, we’re no worse off than we were before. It didn’t take long for the photograph, for a time unimpeachable in its veracity, to be abused and made a tool for fiction as much as anything else. Fakes and frauds are a part of nature. But it’s getting to be difficult to accept the validity of any event or piece of media whatsoever, a situation that may stress our organs of skepticism to the point of harm. It’s likely a wild goose chase, going after things like authenticity, truth, and permanence at a time when those are increasingly relative terms. But they happen to be important, at least to me, so we should at least keep an eye on the state of things (sad as it may be). To paraphrase that great epistemologist, Donald Rumsfeld, we must question our known knowns and admit our known unknowns.
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Why Nokia Is Calling “Here” Here, The Curious Rebranding Of Their Maps Product
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
As Nokia tries to separate out its mapping business and make it a standalone entity earning more than 1 billion euros per year, it has stripped its name entirely out of the unit. This past week, the company — as in HERE Maps, HERE Drive and HERE Transit. Yes, it does sound a bit strange. The that partners like Amazon and Mozilla, which license Nokia data for their hardware, might be touchy about having “Nokia” branding inside their products. But in bureacro-speak, Nokia’s reasons are a bit different. “HERE is a name that I think signifies what I call an ethos in cartography. HERE is about a sense of location,” said Michael Halbherr, the Nokia executive who oversees the company’s location and commerce unit, in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. “If you look at the brand, it’s the same font and the same color logic,” he said. “There are other companies that do it successfully with Microsoft having the X-Box, Bing and Skype brands.” With , the company brought in a licensing business that helped the unit bring in 278 million euros ($364.7 million) in the fourth quarter of last year. That business handles four out of every five cars with an in-dash navigation system, Halbherr said. It also recently , and partnered with Mozilla to bring location and maps to the Firefox OS. Nokia views the model for maps as one that’s mostly about licensing with partners like Amazon and Ford, although they’re exploring commerce partnerships with companies like Groupon and recently launched a direct-to-consumer maps for iOS. They face a competitive field including Google Maps, Microsoft’s Bing Maps and MapQuest among others. Halbherr thinks they got a boost from the Apple Maps debacle, although he wouldn’t specify if it actually contributed to new deals. “What happened when Apple launched maps was that the focus moved to quality and that’s clearly, clearly what is good for us,” he said. “To be a full mapping company, you have to drive the streets, you need data centers. It can look very simple and automated but the last 20 percent takes 80 percent of the work.” He added, “You will end up in the content business if you want to build a great maps product.”
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It’s The End Of The News As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 3 | 2 |
The downside to pet projects is that they invariably teach you something you didn’t really want to know. This time, it was that most of the people who do what I do are doomed. Let me explain. Mostly for fun, I’ve recently built a I call Scanvine, which ranks and and by how often they’re shared on social media. (TechCrunch does , thanks for asking.) So I’ve been paying attention to a much broader spectrum of news during this last week…which was also the week that Marissa Mayer announced that Yahoo! would no longer condone working at home. Oh, that ensued. The hosted a special on the . had argue the issue; neither of them, remarkably, even mentioned the possibility that perhaps not all companies are alike. The sheer intensity of massive overextrapolation from a single data point really began to feel like: https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/307295045776715776 The and and and nearly everyone else fell back on context-free speculation. (And in , -free as well.) Only a tiny minority — notably and Business Insider’s — actually dug out some of the reasons why the decision was made. So was it the right decision? Well, as an expert on the subject by virtue of having worked at home for many years, both as a full-time novelist and as a software developer, let me explain: . Working at home has some benefits and some disadvantages, for both employers and employees. Over time, the benefits have been increasing and the disadvantages diminishing, but Marissa Mayer judged that for the very specific case of Yahoo! today, the latter were outweighing the former. Was she right? Does it really matter, because it’s a trend-signifying bellwether? Is all this handwringing completely ridiculous bordering on insane? What’s really highlighted here is not just that many traditional ‘journalists’ are phenomenologically indistinguishable from ‘bloggers’ these days, if there’s any distinction at all any more: it’s that many are not even particularly bloggers. I’m beginning to realize that the scattered collection of one-off blog posts I find via sites like Hacker News are both more interesting and more thoughtful than most mainstream-media opinion, context, or analysis pieces. Passionate part-timers with a deep knowledge of the subject matter who also happen to be good writers are a lot more interesting than most mere scribes. Of course this doesn’t apply to what I call High Journalism: investigative journalists digging out hidden stories, international journalists reporting from wars and disasters, the fifth estate holding the feet of power to the flames of publicity. But the problem is that most High Journalism (which is expensive and has a limited audience) has historically been financed by Low Journalism: entertainment, sports, classified ads, etc. Which is pretty bizarre, when you think about it. It’s as if the space program and Medecins Sans Frontieres were funded by the profits from Chicken McNuggets and Big Gulps. So, of course, the Internet inevitably targeted this economic discontinuity, and Craigslist killed the classified ad, and the Entertainment and Sports and Life sections of magazines and newspapers are being eaten alive by TMZ and Gawker and Deadspin and Buzzfeed–the media equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup–and now everyone’s writing empty pieces about Marissa Mayer’s decision because it’s a hot-button issue and they need the pageviews and the mindshare and the ads. But that’s a loser’s game. “Will Journalism Go The Way Of Whaling?” asks the title of a recent between David Brooks and the great Gail Collins, and I fear that the answer is mostly yes. A few of its dinosaurs will evolve into eagles, but most will be eaten alive by the modern mammals–not just because they’re faster and cheaper and more nimble, but because, as this whole Marissa Mayer work-from-home kerfuffle shows, they’re , within their particular domains. I hope High Journalism finds a new way to pay for itself soon, because the Low Journalism on which it’s riding, once a colossus, now has feet of clay. I’m only a part-time journalist: by day I write software. Whew. Advancing Gingerly, .
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March Madness Gets A Full Court Press From The Tech World, As Pickmoto, IFTTT, & More Cater To Hoop Lovers Online
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
As you’ve no doubt heard by now, March Madness is upon us, with the NCAA tournament officially kicking off tomorrow. Yes, March Madness brings April gladness, as the saying goes. In fact, difficult as it may be to fathom, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament turns 75 years young this year. There are many ways to celebrate and commemorate this annual event, which I would argue is one of the best in all of sports. Of course, there’s bracketology, betting and making enemies in your office by stealing the pool; in short, there are a number of tech-related threads floating around the NCAA Tournament this year, and below we’re taking a quick look at some of the more memorable examples. But first, you’re probably wondering how to watch the madness live, online. The officially sanctioned way to do it is via , a digital offering from the NCAA, which includes and apps and gives you audio and streaming video access to every game in the tournament. Unfortunately, the experience is a little bit different this year. Last year, whether on the web, iOS or Android, users could pay for access to all 67 games, but in 2013, you’ll have to authenticate with your cable login info before you can watch games appearing on TNT, TBS and TruTV. On the bright side, games airing on CBS will be available for free — as these are the later and arguably more important games in the tourney. You’ll be able to view games via , or . A young Bay Area startup called wants to make it easier for basketball fans to create pools, make picks and goad their friends into making horrible picks. The free-to-play app, which is and in a mobile-optimized web app for non-iPhoners, adds a spin on the familiar NCAA Tournament bracket, allowing fans to make picks round-by-round instead of having to pick the winners of every game before the tournament starts. As I’m usually scrambling to make all of my picks at the last second (Thursday right before the first game starts), I, for one, am a fan of this approach. It levels the playing field by allowing you to adjust after each round — meaning there are no more first-round bracket busters with Pickmoto. Users get to make picks after seeing how teams are playing and form pools mid-tournament just for Sweet 16 games, for example. Pickmoto initially launched its app in the fall as a way to offer simpler sports betting for the mobile experience, beginning with NFL and the NBA. Rather than designing a more detailed, stat-centric app à la awesome predictive tools for journalists and fantasy sports enthusiasts , Pickmoto wanted to avoid replacing the fantasy experience and make a simple sports betting tool for everyday fans. The new app goes for the same ease-of-use feel, offering an easy way to run your office pool, replacing the old group email and spreadsheet approach. Now the startup offers pools, chat functionality and wager management, prizes, stats, leaderboards and curated news, which have led to 15K downloads in the last two weeks and over one million picks to date. Pickmoto . Other bracket managers include, beyond , for the bracket-focused gamers (which includes news, video analysis and game stats) and for those who want simplicity, an experience devoid of ads and no gimmicks. You will need a Twitter account, though. IFTTT, which stands for “if this, then that,” is an awesome service that allows you to connect all your accounts to its service (like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Dropbox, etc.) and create recipes that make them work together in clever ways. Basically, you can set triggers for specific actions (like, if I post an Instagram, automatically save it to Dropbox) in umpteen different ways. This week, IFTTT announced that ESPN had that, once activated, allows you to follow and get automatic updates on breaking news from ESPN’s writers, along with your favorite teams. The channel is your “source for in-game updates and final scores for all your top teams,” the channel’s description reads. Of course, you see where this is going: There are tons of ESPN-related recipes therein, including those focused on the NCAA Tournament, like for example. Pretty cool. Thanks, IFTTT. Bless you. You’ve probably already noticed this, but just in case you’ve been using Bing or Yahoo, Google is at the top of results for a number of tournament-related search terms. The bracket pops up first if you search for keywords like “Basketball bracket,” “March Madness,” or “NCAA tournament,” for example. As you would imagine, the embedded bracket instantly “gives you each game’s round, teams, rankings, date, and time, score, and winner.” TC’s YouTube recently launched a new channel called NCAA OnDemand, which is set to become home to scores of clips and highlights from this year’s tournament. What’s more, the channel will also include a bunch of playlists, including upsets, best dunks, buzzer beaters, etc. While March Madness will be streamed live to viewers in the U.S., international viewers may not be so lucky. And, for the sake of productivity, there’s a chance your friendly local employer may block access to some of those sites. So, the same could go for you if you’re looking to watch the game while on the job. The word is that 30 percent of corporate IT workers have said their company will block streaming this year. One option for both scenarios is to use AnchorFree’s Hotspot Shield VPN, which sets up a virtual private network to hide your IP address and allow you to access CBSSports.com, etc. The company said that visits to NCAA.com and CBSSports.com through Hotspot Shield increased in average by 710 percent during March Madness 2012, for example. . Nikolai Yakovenko launched Chadwick, an AI-based app that attempts to reduce the noise of our social feeds and deliver immediate coverage of live games to your phone via text and push notifications. Chadwick has been updated for the NCAA tourney, and it shows a whole ton of improvement. Check . is another great app if you’re looking for that realtime, second-screen social media experience. The app feeds you a stream of tweets, video, Instagram photos, Facebook posts, play-by-play, and box scores on the games you’re following. A useful tool for March Madness fans. [ .]
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Game Of Thrones Creator George R.R. Martin Blames Australians, Distribution Delays For Show’s Most-Pirated Status
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
Game Of Thrones is one of the most popular shows on HBO, but it’s also become the most-pirated series around the world. In an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher Wednesday evening, Game Of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin lamented the rampant amount of piracy that the show faces, particularly in international markets. (Full video .) But the author of the popular fantasy series, who is in the process of writing the series’ sixth book, said the distribution strategy for TV series is quickly changing. The interview was arranged as part of a series of screenings HBO is having for Game Of Thrones, this time in San Francisco. The cable network is taking a group of cast members and series creators on a tour of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle to appeal to tech-savvy audiences who love the show. Of course, being tech savvy also could mean knowing how to pirate the series, something that Martin acknowledges plenty of people are doing. “We do have to contend with the fact that our show is the most-pirated show in the world… I think a lot of it coming from Australia,” he said. For whatever reason, Australia seems to be a hotbed of piracy for the show, Martin said, attributing it to the window between when the show appears on TV in the U.S. and when it is licensed for airing in other international markets. Martin estimated that there was a six month lag-time between U.S. broadcast and appearing in Australia, but a representative from HBO tells me that last season there was a ten-day delay between the two. This season, the delay will be much shorter, as the Season 3 premiere will appear on Foxtel in Australia on April 1st, just hours after the U.S. airing. But as in the case of Australia, Martin sees the windows narrowing over time, due to a highly connected international market for content. “I think we’re moving toward a thing where there will be no more delays. It used to be, you’d make a show in America, and the producer or studio or whoever’s responsible for it sells it into foreign markets and each foreign broadcaster puts it on six months later, six years later, whenever they feel like putting it on. That’s gone now, it’s becoming a global type of thing and our show is now airing pretty much all around the world… the same day it airs in the United States, or a day later.” Overall, the changing international strategy is part of a bigger change in how content is delivered. “We’re in the middle of a huge period of change in the entire entertainment industry, and television and film and even books, and how these products are delivered,” Martin said. While a reduced window for international release should reduce piracy from international markets, it doesn’t do a lot to stop people who don’t subscribe to HBO from downloading the content for free. Since HBO is a premium cable channel, its series are prime targets for pirates who don’t pay for cable — let alone the additional $10 or $15 a month that is required to subscribe. And what about that sixth book? When can we expect it? “It’s not done yet… it’s not going to be done next week. I’m going to have to work on it. It’s going to be another giant 1,500-page book, but I’m making progress,” Martin said. “I’ve given up predicting when these things are going to be done, because when I do, I end up being wrong. And then everybody gets all upset.” In the meantime, there are several more seasons to tackle the existing books. Season 3 is like, just the start of that. Oh yeah and look, dragons!
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U.S. Department Of Defense Reportedly Planning To Buy 650,000 iOS Devices After Nixing BB10 To Cut Costs
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
The U.S. Department of Defense will order 650,000 iOS devices to replace older BlackBerry devices that are incompatible with the new BlackBerry 10 operating system after the sequester is over, . The DOD will order 120,000 iPads, 100,000 iPad minis, 200,000 iPod touches, and 210,000 various iPhones models. Electronista has been told that “more than half are headed to the battlefield, afloat, and to associated support commands. Most of the rest will stay [at the Pentagon].” There are currently 470,000 BlackBerry devices in daily use by the DoD, none of which operate on BB10 because funds originally earmarked for the new OS have been eliminated by the sequester. The DoD estimates that there will be 8 million smartphones in service over the next three years, and most devices used to handle classified data have been subjected to pricey modifications that increase their final cost up to four times. BlackBerry devices using the previous OS were also expected to be incompatible with the DoD’s new mobile plan , which issued a “device agnostic” memorandum meant to help DoD smartphone users, ranging from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to soldiers on the battlefield, more smoothly share classified data. The memo came nearly four months after the U.S. government said that the company, then known as RIM, for smartphone devices at the Department of Defense.
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Google’s Play Store Android App May Soon Get Another Facelift
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
Google’s been awfully busy these past few weeks, but it seems that between (and pissing off most of the Internet in the process) and rolling out new services like the company has been working on a redesigned version of the Google Play Store for Android. That’s what the folks at claim, anyway. They appear to have obtained and installed the unreleased 4.0 version of the Google Play Android app ahead of a wider release. The Play Store’s current mobile design first rolled out in , and while Google has seen fit to rebrand and tinker with a few things since then, more than a few bits look essentially the same as they did back then. If this is the real deal (and I strongly suspect that it is), then Google Play is about to get quite a facelift. Gone are the gloomy blacks and dark grays that used to permeate the app. This new version returns to a lighter color scheme that’s highly reminiscent of the old Android Market days. On the whole, the new app also looks much cleaner and more spacious than the Play Store that so many of us have gotten used to. It’s not hard to see some similarities between the updated Play Store app and the Google Now design — there’s a more pronounced focus on bigger images and italicized text. What’s more, individual app listings are separated into little cards rather than being displayed in a more traditional list, yet another sign that Google’s Play Store developers are cribbing UI flourishes from Google Now. If anything, the unification of design between these two services makes me wonder just how far Google plans to go here. After all, Google Now and the Play Store are cornerstones of the Android experience. It wouldn’t be a huge shock to see the next version of Android take a similar approach to aesthetics. At this point there’s no firm word on when (or if) this update is slated to go live, but it’s very possible that Google could wait until I/O to officially pull back the curtain on a redesigned Play Store app. In the meantime, major mobile players like are exploring ways to bypass the Play Store completely and push new updates to users, so here’s hoping Google pushes the update out before others follow suit. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VL-R4RPx3Q&w=640&h=360]
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YouTube Announces That It Has Hit One Billion Monthly Users, Which Is Roughly Ten Super Bowl Audiences
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
Today, that it has hit a billion monthly users, which is an extremely insane metric. We know that YouTube is the go-to place for silly, interesting and important videos, but these numbers are something that even TV networks dream of. The great part for YouTube is that this means that online video ad spend will go up since the eyeballs appear to be ready, willing and able. It’s not only advertisers that are rushing YouTube, budding music artists are heading there too, and that they get. Fueling this insane growth is the availability of YouTube on all devices, plus a which happens to love to curate. That content curation means that people are sitting in front of their device and watching video after video with genres that range from politics to cartoons. Here’s what YouTube had to say about the milestone: In the last eight years you’ve come to YouTube to watch, share and fall in love with videos from all over the world. Tens of thousands of partners have created channels that have found and built businesses for passionate, engaged audiences. Advertisers have taken notice: all of the Ad Age Top 100 brands are now running campaigns on YouTube. And today, we’re announcing a new milestone: YouTube now has more than a billion unique users every single month. Content creation is getting easier now, with every mobile device able to upload videos in minutes. Even YouTube caught on to this and launched a stripped-down version of its , which lets anyone grab video and upload it with two taps. To give the news some more color, YouTube broke the numbers down a bit:
– Nearly one out of every two people on the Internet visits YouTube.
– Our monthly viewership is the equivalent of roughly ten Super Bowl audiences.
– If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India.
– PSY and Madonna would have to repeat their Madison Square Garden performance in front of a packed house 200,000 more times. That’s a lot of Gangnam Style! These numbers, along with the adoption of YouTube by seemingly every generation, means that Google’s gut feeling on . $1.65 billion certainly feels like a steal now. That’s a little more than what? A dollar for each monthly user*? [Photo via ]
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Payroll For Collaborative Consumption Startups Gets Easier With New Braintree-Venmo Service
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
Braintree’s seems to be paying off once more for the Accel-backed company. The company is launching an easier way for collaborative consumption startups — which could include Braintree’s best-known clients like Uber and Airbnb — to pay their contractors or users. Basically, the headache is this: these companies work with hundreds or thousands of drivers, TaskRabbits or users on their platforms and paying them with checks can make accounting logistically complicated. They have to mail checks. People have to cash the checks, and that can take between seven to 10 days. Because Braintree already has a relationship with these bigger companies and then Venmo, the startup it acquired, makes payments easy via e-mail addresses and phone numbers, sans checks. “Sending out checks is painful,” said Braintree CEO Bill Ready. “All you need now is the phone number. These companies have many, many providers behind the scenes and paying these people is a severe pain point.” , the product includes an API that lets businesses pay their workforce from any bank account to any Venmo user via a Venmo account, e-mail or phone number. Workers get notified immediately when they’ve been paid and they can cash out from their bank account or through Venmo. It costs $0.25 per payout, without other fees. During the beta, Braintree is giving away the first 1,000 transactions for free. Developers . They’ll be granted access on a first come first serve basis. Braintree’s already tapped Venmo a couple of times for different products. The company kept the branding because they wanted a better direct-to-consumer relationship, which could prevent them from becoming a commodity payments platform. They , which is a way for consumers to quickly sign up to pay for goods and services without having to re-enter their credit card details. Braintree is a payments platform that works with Angry Birds’ maker Rovio, Airbnb, Fab.com, OpenTable and Uber. They process at least $1 billion in mobile payments per year. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUeVWM8Y4B0]
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To Improve Conversations, Facebook Will Launch A Reply Feature And Most Active Threads On Pages And Popular Profiles
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
is preparing to roll out a new feature on Pages and popular Profiles that will help increase interactions with fans and readers: Replies. Up to now, visitors could comment on a post but others, including the Page owners themselves, would not be able to respond directly to them in cases of multiple people commenting on a post. Facebook has been running tests of the new feature since ; now a source tells us it will be rolling out the feature more formally as an opt-in on Monday, March 25, before turning it on for everyone in July. : Facebook has now confirmed this story and rollout plans. “We think this update will allow for easier management of conversations around posts, which is a better experience for people interacting with Pages and public figure profiles,” a spokesperson said. (original story continues below) To the right is a sample screen shot of how it looks from a page that has been testing the comments already. (Update: this is replacing the grainy picture used previously.) Another feature that will be launched at the same time is active-thread sifting, which also had been in beta testing. Here, the most active conversations will be ordered at the top using an algorithm to appear higher in the posts. Replies and the algorithmic sorting won’t work everywhere. They are being rolled out only to Page posts and Profiles with more than 10,000 followers, not personal accounts. Also, they will not work on mobile, although the intention is to make Replies part of the Graph API and mobile in the future. Replies are already a part of Facebook’s commenting plug-in, which runs on third-party sites (TechCrunch used to use it; it doesn’t anymore). But this is the first time Replies will be appearing across Facebook itself. The most important reason for introducing Replies is that it gives Page owners the ability to engage directly with individual commenters, and other Page visitors will then be able to see the most active conversations. This will not only improve the quality of the conversation but will mean more engagement for the Page posts overall. Engagement remains a key metric for Facebook as a way of quantifying how much time users spend on the site, important data for those deciding how to invest marketing budgets. Facebook will let Page owners opt in to using the new Reply feature from March 25, and it intends to make the change universal by July 10. In a FAQ that Facebook has been circulating, it gives a little bit of an explanation about how the conversation threads will work, and it’s a little more sophisticated than simply putting the comments with the most replies at the top, and ties in with how Facebook generally prioritizes content for you based on your own social network and likes. They “may appear differently to each person based on their connections,” Facebook writes. So, for example, if you as a viewer happen to know some of the people in a particular thread, that thread will jump to the top for you, as Facebook assumes you’ll be more likely to want to jump into that conversation. Apart from this, weight is also given to posts that have a lot of likes and a relatively high number of replies. Conversely, threads or comments flagged as spam will drop down the list, and Facebook says it may also “down-rank” comments made by frequent spammers. And if you think the Reply feature brings Facebook a bit closer to Twitter, there may also be another social media outlet that Facebook has in mind to target. The Reply feature will also let Page and Profile run Q&A’s and open polls, by way of people responding to questions created as posts. This brings to mind also the format of “Ask Me Anything” posts — the idea here being that the Page and Profile owners can control those themselves. But for a company that has made several proclamations of putting of what it creates today, there will be a little inconsistency with Replies. Because Replies initially won’t work on mobile, users of the native iOS and Android apps will see Replies as regular comments. The same goes for how the threads will appear via the Graph API. This will also mean that third-party page management apps for now will get the short end of the stick because they will also not be able to write Replies — only comments.
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British Airways Launches UnGrounded ‘Innovation Lab In The Sky’ To Solve Problems By Putting Techies On Planes Together
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
British Airways today announced the first of its innovation lab flights that will assemble 100 Silicon Valley luminaries on a flight to London to devise a platform for connecting tech talent with big problems around the world. A partnership with the UN, the inaugural UnGrounded flight will fly on June 12th with 100 leaders from Google, Andreessen Horowitz, RocketSpace and elsewhere on board. “Great innovation happens when you bring people together face to face, not when you have people sitting alone in rooms” explained EVP of Simon Talling-Smith today at a press conference about UnGrounded. BA’s plan is to fill the 100 seats on the flight with founders, funders, engineers, academics and a couple of journalists, and give them 10 hours to work on a big problem. The plan is for the UnGrounded “innovation lab in sky” flights to become a somewhat regular occurrence with different destinations. On the first one, though, the passengers will address the problem of mismatches between where technology innovators live and where the problems they could solve reside. Upon touch down in London, the UnGrounded flight’s assembled team will present their progress to the United Nations’ sponsored and the Secretary General of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union. Todd Lutwak of Andreessen Horowitz, Leor Stern of , Celestine Johnson of Innovation Endeavors, Duncan Logan of , Gerald Brady of , and Marguerite Gong Hancock of the are among the passengers, and the rest will be selected based on their potential for contribution. BA will get help from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors fund and the RocketSpace startup accelerator, and IDEO will be designing the in-flight experience. That’s a huge challenge, as smart people can be tough to corral, and if the organizational structure for turning ideas into solutions isn’t right, the whole flight could be a waste. There’s also talk of pulling out seats along with the reduced 100-passenger cap to make sure the plane is a decent working environment. So why is British Airways doing this in the first place? Talling-Smith says that “We’re a premium airline. We exist as a product and service business, which means we’re an innovation company. So innovation has always been at the heart of what we do. The spirit of innovation has changed. A lot of the activity is happening in the technology sphere. We asked ‘what could we do to play our part?’ The airline had a eureka moment when it realized its fuselages could become crucibles for progress. Plus, UnGrounded can’t hurt the company’s image among anyone who fancies themselves an ‘innovator’.” Now “connecting talent to opportunity” might sound vague, but it’s a real issue we see at TechCrunch all the time. There are so many techies in Silicon Valley that they’ve started chasing small inconveniences instead of truly changing the world for the better. Forcing great minds into close quarters to focus on a problem could help address this issue and more in the future.
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Facebook Retargeting Startup Perfect Audience Launches A Reporting API For Agencies And Developers
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
When Y Combinator-incubated launched last year, its stated goal was to make it easy for small advertisers (startups, small agencies, and others) to run retargeted ads on Facebook. Turns out, however, that there’s been much broader interest in the startup’s tools, with customers including enterprise companies and larger agencies. According to CEO and co-founder Brad Flora, it’s part of the broader “consumerization of enterprise” trend, where companies want simple tools that they can “operate themselves” without technical assistance. However, some of those customers want something more customized than what Perfect Audience already offers. That’s why the company is launching a new reporting API today. Flora said that customers can now get their data out of Perfect Audience into their own apps and campaign reporting tools. That means developers can build their own tools that incorporate Perfect Audience data, and that ad agencies can import the data into their existing dashboards. This is actually the company’s second API; it quietly launched a JavaScript Tracking API last fall that allowed companies to drop cookies and target ads based on actions rather pages. Flora said that between the APIs, the company has now covered the main use cases: “They can get data out and get data in.” Overall, Perfect Audience has now signed up 2,500 advertisers and is serving 4 billion ad impressions per month. Flora said the company is cash-flow positive; with its current run rate, it would bring in several millions of dollars in revenue per year. And it’s also expanding into other types of ad retargeting, including web banners and email. You can and .
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Ears-On With Spotify Social, The New “Follow” Feature Now Available To Everyone
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
Spotify today confirmed to TechCrunch that it has finally completed the rollout of its new social following features that model music discovery after offline behavior — where you find songs through tuned-in friends and influencers. Here’s our hands-on demo and review of Spotify’s move to discovery through actual humans instead of algorithms. Back in November, I wrote that sources told me a Twitter-esque following feature for music discovery. Then at a flashy event in New York featuring performers like Frank Ocean and an after-party with Vampire Weekend, its “music graph.” But the rollout has been slow, and the redesigned Discover tab and instant previews features aren’t yet available to everyone. But influencer following is, and it’s a big step up for the on-demand music service.
Discovery is Spotify’s biggest problem. Its search box can be paralyzing. When you can listen to all the world’s music, where do you start? Spotify’s answer is “with what your favorite artists and most music-savvy friends are listening to” through the new Follow tab plus revamped profiles and an activity feed. By now you should have received a prompt to update to Spotify version 0.8.8. When you fire it up the first time, you’ll get walked through the Spotify Social on-boarding. Congratulations, you’re now automatically following the artists you listen to most and people whose playlists you’ve subscribed to (though you can ditch them if you want). Next, Spotify recommends you follow some Facebook friends, in contrast to the old version where your feed was clogged with listening activity from all your friends. This update makes a lot of sense, since just because you’re friends with someone doesn’t mean you respect their musical tastes. If you dig pop, don’t follow your hipster friends. If you aspire to be the first on your block who knows about the new buzz band, follow music blogs or buddies who live in London. Finally, you’ll see suggestions of artists and influencers to get updates from, including bands like Pearl Jam, news outlets like Pitchfork, and celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg or Barack Obama. The process is breezy and doesn’t default you into too many connections. If you’re ever looking for new people to get recommendations from, you can click on the Follow tab in Spotify’s left navigation side. Woo! Alright, now let’s listen to music — socially. These subscriptions populate the redesigned social feed in the Spotify right sidebar. It shows songs listened to, tracks shared, playlists updated, and more from the people you follow. At the top is a recommendation of a featured influencer to follow. The bar is a bit narrow so it cuts off track names but at least it wraps text to show you the full message when people purposefully share. A single click of the play button in any story instantly plays that song or playlist without changing the page you’re viewing so you can quickly sample what people are bopping their heads to. There’s this oddly intimate feeling when you see that a rock legend like Lou Reed is listening to a song and you can join him. You feel immediately closer to them, like you’re getting a personal tour of their tastes. If you want to dive deeper into someone’s style, you can visit their redesigned Spotify Social profile. For verified artists, this will show their standard discography and their most popular songs according to the Spotify user base. It’s a bit too subtle (I missed it at first), but you can click the “Spotify Profile” button below their name to switch to see their recent Spotify listening activity and playlists. The latter is all you’ll see for non-musicians. In days of old, you’d discover music from professional DJs broadcasting their picks on the radio and at clubs, or through one-to-one interactions. Though modeled after this behavior, Spotify evolves it by turning everyone into DJs without the need to do anything different. You, your friends, journalists, and celebrities simply continue the one-player Spotify experience by listening to songs and building playlists. But similar to the Facebook news feed, Spotify’s new social features create of sense of ambient intimacy around music. It’s like a town square, except filled with your personal music influencers, and they’re all holding boom boxes above their heads. There’s plenty of room for improvement, though. Spotify used to let you “favorite” non-friends to add them to your feed, but there was no way to find these people. The social on-boarding and Follow tab are a step forward, but they don’t offer much context. I’d be a lot more likely to trust recommendations if Spotify told me we love the same artists, or their playlist contains the song I have on repeat. Considering their latest listens are in the feed, its strange and dysfunctional not to have someone’s listening history on their profile. The subscription recommendations atop the feed seem ill-targeted. I rarely listen to pop music, but I get suggested Katy Perry and Bruno Mars. When I was recommended a band I hadn’t heard of called The Script, I gave it a shot. What I heard was FM dial slime I imagine was concocted by removing anything edgy from Coldplay and replacing it with album filler by American Idol semi-finalists. Social is relegated to the sidebar and feels disconnected from the What’s New homepage. Luckily, Spotify will eventually roll out its redesigned Discover tab, which combines tips from those you follow with hits and new releases from artists you don’t. Until then, discovery still feels a bit marginalized on Spotify. That’s a big contrast to competitor Rdio, which features multiple tabs of charts and personalized recommendations. Despite these shortcomings, I’m already discovering new music through Spotify’s new social feed. Subscribing to Los Angeles indie radio station KCRW and British music blogger Stuart Dredge has helped me expand my taste. If an algorithm had recommended a sleepy crooner like Escondido’s , I’d have probably skipped it 15 seconds in. But since the recommendation comes from someone I trust, I gave it an honest chance and fell in love with the lullaby. That’s how social music discovery should work, and it’s making Spotify sound sweeter than ever.
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ImageBrief, A Crowdsourcing System For Stock Photos, Closes $700,000 Round
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
, a request-based stock photo marketplace that aims to give Getty a run for its money, has raised a $700,000 round from Square Peg’s Paul Bassat and Justin Liberman as well as other Australian investors. The company, originally based down under, has thus far raised $2.2 million. Imagebrief uses a real-language search and request system to find or commission photos. Users can request pictures (“A goat riding a motorcycle” or “a woman dressed in traditional Ewok battle gear”) and photographers can respond with photos they believe match the request. Photographers can also take and submit new photos if they don’t have anything in their library. Most photography sites current offer basic keyword searches which are problematic. For example, one user may label something as a “video game system” when photo buyers are actually looking for an NES. ImageBrief was founded in Australia in 2011 but moved its commercial headquarters to New York towards the end of last year. The Company announced that in this most recent investment round, just over $700,000 had been raised from some of Australia’s most highly regarded internet entrepreneurs and investors including Square Peg’s Paul Bassat and Justin Liberman (who were already backers of the Company), Adrian MacKenzie and Anthony Klok. Total investment capital raised to date is now over $2.2 million. The company launched in February 2013 and offered a Pinterest-like experience that many stock photo services are missing. Users can also follow photographers they like. The company has already sourced photos to Conde Nast, DDB, and BBDO.
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The TechCrunch ‘Lean In’ Roundtable, Part 2: Guilt And The Myth Of Doing It All
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
As we mentioned yesterday, we took an in-depth look at COO new book with a number of Generation Y women who are part of the Silicon Valley’s rising new guard. You can watch the first segment of the conversation, where we addressed fear and its effect on our careers It was a four-part discussion in all, and we’ll be posting a new segment each afternoon until Friday. Those who participated in the discussion around : , the former IBM engineer who is now the founder and CEO of , the startup that has for outsourcing errands, tasks, and deliveries; , the senior director of communications for cloud-based enterprise storage technology firm ; , the and alum who last year into the venture capital world as a partner at ; and , the Stanford MBA and former engineer who is now the of educational Q&A platform . In this segment we tackled Sandberg’s statement on “The Myth Of Doing It All,” and the guilt many women feel as they sacrifice time with their families for their careers. As Sandberg writes, “guilt management is as important as time management for mothers.” As our panelists discuss, though, it is not just mothers who feel that guilty pull. Megan Quinn shared an interesting point about guilt and how she has adjusted her attitude towards it. She said: “If you are with your family or your friends, and you’re having a life, there’s always that nagging question of, ‘Is there more I could be doing at the office?’ And if you are at the office and you’re there late, especially in startup culture, and it becomes your life because it is your life, you start to have friends who drop off, and your family starts to say, ‘You never call anymore.’ So the guilt actually goes both ways. For me personally, I’ve never been a big believer in ‘work life balance’ — the phrase, not the concept, to be clear. I believe that if you really enjoy your work, and you work really hard, it becomes your life. And if you enjoy your family, and you love your family, and hopefully you do, that becomes your life. And so, it’s more about weaving the two things together than having a clock that you clock in and out of. Especially with mobile devices, it feels like you’re always on now. But you’re always on as both a friend, a sister, a parent, and a partner, and you’re also always on as an employee, a manager and a boss. So I actually think it’s not so much the guilt of one or the other, but sort of the [feeling of], ‘I wish I could be in many many places at once.’ And in some ways, we’re lucky that with phones, we can be.” Check out the video above for much more.
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GoPro Sends Reviewer A DMCA Takedown Notice, Internet Explodes — But Wait! It Was An “Unfortunate Miscommunication”
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
Word travels fast on the Internet. Especially when you don’t want it to. Early this morning, (a hybrid blog/photography store/photo sharing social network) replaced a review of GoPro’s Hero 3 with the text of a DMCA takedown they’d received. “@GoPro is bullying us with DMCA. We’ll have to remove this article soon”, they tweeted. According to DigitalRev, GoPro was claiming foul on the site’s use of the “GoPro” and “Hero” trademarks. (That’s ignoring that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act only applies to infringement. Hence, uh, the name.) Within a few minutes, the sharpening of pitchforks could be heard from all around. Tweets started pouring in pledging to never buy another GoPro product. Word of the notice shot to the top of r/photography, r/gopro, and a few other relevant sub-Reddits. People were angry. I reached out to GoPro’s head of communications for confirmation and comment, who responded “Hey Greg, We are posting to Reddit.” Er, weird. But okay. A few minutes later, went up:
Hey all- I’m out at X Games Tignes right now with the Director of PR for GoPro. I showed this to him as soon as I saw it (it had 3 comments). He dropped everything to address this issue, and it’s an unfortunate miscommunication. Below is the blurb he just wrote out for my favorite GoPro community.
tl;dr: Whoops — we weren’t trying to have the review taken down. We just didn’t want them using the images they were using when selling GoPro cameras. GoPro quickly went into damage control mode, firing off links to their reddit comment to just about anyone who’d mentioned the matter. Expanding on their comment further, GoPro later tweeted that they only meant for them to take down the images being used in the sidebar: it's actually a positive review. The notice wasn't about the review: — GoPro (@GoPro) Not the review, the product on the sidebar. Please read this, there's a lot of confusion out there: — GoPro (@GoPro) “But wait!” yelled the crowd. If GoPro only wanted a few images to be taken down, why did they seemingly target just the review? According to GoPro, they didn’t: We also included 5 other urls, which they scrubbed from the email they posted. We are pro free speech and fair use. — GoPro (@GoPro) What a mess. If someone chopped up the DMCA in a way that changes the implications, that person screwed up. Whatever GoPro’s actual initial intent was, however, someone seriously screwed up there too. Wanting to protect your brand is great, but DMCA notices aren’t meant to be thrown around like friggin’ parade candy. If you’re tossing them out to the point that it’s not even clear they’re being sent, you might want to tighten the lawyer leash a bit. How easily could this have been avoided by just the guy?
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Google’s Keep Could Take On Both Pinterest And Evernote, If It Gets The Google+ Social Plumbing
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
Google today, after it . The product is as expected, a place to save notes, lists or photos on the fly, for safe…keeping. One of the things that jumped out at me after giving it a quick try is that you can switch to a layout that’s very similar to Pinterest, another app that wants you to hoard a bunch of things. The only difference between Keep and Pinterest is that Pinterest is social. While Pinterest isn’t the only social bookmarking site in the world, it’s the one that has the most consumer appeal. That can’t be lost on Google. Social is something Google could turn on with a flick of the wrist, thanks to the plumbing it has built with Google+. Imagine being able to bookmark and share things you find on the web, specifically things you find within Google searches, then throw them on a “board” and share them with all of your friends. Sounds like Pinterest. Most of the chatter about Keep is that it’s , which it is in a way, but I think that Keep could be the groundwork for something much larger. Here’s a look at Keep’s simplistic design: And now Pinterest: Sure, the items that you can “keep” are limited to photos, notes and lists right now, but whenever you spend time pumping content into any service, users are going to get the itch to share them, even with a family member or close friend. That’s what’s lacking from Keep, other than being stable, right now. It’s not a stretch to invision all of Google’s social backbone being woven into Keep, much like it has in Drive and YouTube. The social guts that make up Google+ are very applicable to a bookmarking and note-taking service like Keep. If you are to assume that Google is only launching things it has a grander plan for, something that has become as CEO, then it’s safe to say that the service won’t stay this vanilla. Another thought that comes to mind is that Google Reader just wasn’t the service for the masses, as far as collecting things. Perhaps we could see some of the Reader functionality in Keep one day. Of course, it’s early days and Google isn’t keen to speak about Keep just yet, other than , but this is a space to watch for many reasons. There’s always more than meets the eye with Google. [Photo credit: ]
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TC Cribs: HotelTonight’s Sleek New San Francisco HQ — And Dangerously Well-Stocked Bar [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
It’s time for another episode of , the TechCrunch TV series that takes you inside the hallowed gates of the tech industry’s hottest companies to get a first-hand look at what they’re really like. This time, we headed to the shiny new San Francisco headquarters of , the company that makes the for booking same-day hotel rooms at discounted prices. HotelTonight is very choosy about the hotels it offers on its platform, showing deals only from higher-end places with strong reviews and good design. Being that the company’s staff is on a first-name basis with some of the most gorgeous hotels in the world, HotelTonight had a pretty high bar to meet when it came to designing its own digs. As you’ll see in the video embedded above, HotelTonight’s new office does not disappoint. Taking cues from some of the top properties available on its app, such as the hipster hotspot , HotelTonight has created a very cool space that’s a cut above the typical startup scene, with sophisticated furniture and amazing art. They’ve also kept it funky, with some very eclectic elements — I never thought I’d bang a real gong and play a round of cornhole within the same ten minute period, but somehow it all works out at HT HQ. And a real perk is the company’s fully-stocked bar with a view of the iconic , which would give many real hotel bars a run for its money. Pro tip: If you ever find yourself at HotelTonight, don’t turn down an offer to have a drink mixed by CEO . That man can make a mean martini.
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Google’s Keep Note-Taking Web And Android App Gets Its Official Public Launch
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
After a , Google Keep, the note-taking app from the search giant, is now live. Google has officially unveiled , complete with a video detailing how it works, and there’s an , available through Google Play for devices running Android 4.0 and up. Keep was created by Google to satisfy the need of having to take down info quickly without a pen or paper handy, software engineer Katherine Kuan explains in the official blog post. The app is simple, allowing you to either type or quickly record and transcribe voice memos and lists, as well as take and pin photos, which are synced to the web-based dashboard for easy retrieval later. The Android app has a widget to let you easily create and access notes from your home screen, and there’s also a lock screen widget for handsets with Android 4.2 or higher. The interface in the app itself is simple enough, presenting notes created with Keep in a mosaic layout, complete with color customization entries for individual entries, and drag-and-drop rearrangement for prioritization.
If anyone will be looking closely at Keep and how it succeeds with users, it’s Evernote. The note-taking company has built its entire brand on letting users quickly and easily create cloud-stored memos and notebooks. Evernote’s product is much more full-featured than what Google offers today with Keep, and available on a lot more platforms. But Google is at least staking out its claim in this territory, which is a bit ironic given that Evernote grew quickly on the back of once upon a time. Eventually, Google says that it will add support for creating and viewing Keep notes directly from Google Drive, which could help spur adoption among users already on Drive for its document creation capabilities and cloud file storage. The app also has a search function, as well as the ability to switch between multi-and single-column view, and note archiving. It’s a small but flexible addition to the Android toolbox, and the lock and home screen widgets make it particularly useful in that context. Sarah made vocal her doubts about track record on Monday, however. And as mentioned, Google has explored similar territory before. Will that keep (pun definitely not intended) users away? It seems unlikely to have a strong impact either way, given the apparently casual aim of this service, but it’ll be interesting to see if there are trust issues with Keep’s launch. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbvkHEDvw-o?feature=player_embedded]
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Vine, Tribeca Film Festival Launch #6SecFilms Vine Competition For Viners Obsessed With Vining Vines
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
Vine has steadily made waves ever since its launch in January. First it was a porn scare, and then it was widening growth against competitors like SocialCam and Viddy. And throughout it all, we’ve watched stars like Adam Goldberg vine their hearts out. But with today’s announcement that Vine is powering a new , the app has most certainly graduated into a new tier of awesomeness. The contest is called , and it’s a “mini festival just for Vines.” Just in case you’ve missed the past two months, that lets you record six-second looping videos (like Gifs) which you can then share with friends on Twitter, Vine and Facebook. Contestants can shoot and enter as many vines as they want in the competition, as long as they’re within the following topics: #Genre, #Auteur, #Animate, and #Series. The panel of judges hasn’t quite been solidified, but director Penny Marshall and “King of Vine” actor Adam Goldberg, whose made quite a name for himself on the video-sharing network, have both confirmed. When you’ve finished shooting your submission(s), share them on Twitter with the hashtags #6SecFilms and your topic (#Genre, #Auteur, #Animate, or #Series), and be sure to follow on Twitter. Vine’s , according to recent reports, but we can’t forget that most people are hesitant to be creative in new forums. In , he explained that many people feel very nervous when creatively approaching a blank slate. The same may be true for Vine, but with promotion from other creative outlets such as the Tribeca Film Festival, Vine and it’s easy-to-use UI should squash those fears.
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Oracle Q3 Misses Wall Street Expectations With $9 Billion Revenue, 65 Cents EPS
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
this afternoon announced the financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2013, a report that seems to have disappointed stock market investors who were projecting a stronger performance from the company. The enterprise-focused software and hardware technology giant said it earned $9 billion in revenue during the quarter, reflecting a sequential decrease from the , when it earned revenues of $9.1 billion, and a year-over-year decrease from Q3 2012 when it made revenues of $9.04 billion. In regards to profit, Oracle reported GAAP net income of $2.5 billion for the third quarter, and non-GAAP net income of $4.2 billion. That reflects GAAP earnings per share for the quarter of 52 cents and non-GAAP EPS of 65 cents. Both at the top and bottom lines, those results did not meet the expectations of Wall Street analysts. According to FactSet, the analyst consensus was that Oracle would post Q3 revenue of $9.37 billion and non-GAAP EPS of 66 cents. Oracle’s stock took a quick and steep fall just after the Q3 earnings report was released. Within the first minutes that the earnings results hit the newswire, was down 6.8 percent in after-hours trading. For its part, Oracle is looking at the silver lining, emphasizing the quarter’s strong points in its prepared earnings release. Oracle’s president and CFO Safra Katz is quoted in the press release accompanying the Q3 results as saying: “Our non-GAAP operating margin increased to a Q3 record of 47 percent, and we expect it to reach an all-time high for the fiscal year. Both operating cash flow and free cash flow were at record levels for a Q3, with operating cash flow of $13.7 billion over the last 12 months.” Here is Oracle’s Q3 report compared to its recent past performances in visual form, courtesy of TechCrunch illustrator and graphic designer Bryce Durbin:
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VC Firm E.ventures Makes Its Internal Tracking Tool, The Daily Gieselmann, Available To All
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 |
A few years ago, co-founder Tom Gieselmann decided to try to use data to give his firm a competitive advantage. And so he built a tracking tool to keep tabs on how different web properties were growing over time. , named after its founder, has been used by the company internally over that time. But it’s now being opened up for anyone to use. Rather than rely strictly on metrics provided by the companies that E.ventures was looking to invest in, the Daily Gieselmann gave the firm a more objective look at how potential and existing investments were doing. The platform also keeps screenshots of every new site indexed, so that users can quickly see what they are. Using third-party data from Alexa and other providers, the internal dashboard helped the firm determine which companies were adding users and increasing engagement, which were stalled, and which were actually declining. It’s also a great way to discover under-the-radar companies to put money into. The platform enables folks at E.ventures to get updates on these companies daily. But more importantly, it sees the effects of user growth over time. Gieselmann sends out a weekly newsletter with new entrants to the growth index, and also makes note of companies and websites that are already on it, but have hit record highs. While Alexa is generally an imperfect tool for absolute traffic or page rank, E.ventures has found that it does a pretty good job of measuring growth over time. That said, rather than rely solely on the company’s trending data, E.ventures actually captures the rankings daily and does its own trend analysis based on the data over time. Also, it’s not just Alexa — the Daily Gieselmann also takes into account data from iTunes: the App Store, eBooks, Movies and TV purchases. (Gieselmann says he’s not that interested in music, which is why the dashboard doesn’t also track music sales.) Using the CrunchBase API, the Daily Geiselmann also lets users cross-reference ranking and trend data across company and investor info that has been collected over the years. While the internal E.ventures dashboard was useful to people like Gieselmann, who knew the right tags to tease data out of it, it wouldn’t be very useful to the average user. That is, until recently, when the team threw a more useful user interface on it. Now, other data junkies can mine the data that E.ventures has collected over the years.
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Microsoft Opens Online Flagship Store On Tmall, The ‘Amazon Of China’
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Microsoft launched its in China today on Tmall.com, in a move that could help bolster the market share of its hardware, including tablets and smartphones in that country. Operated by Alibaba Group, Tmall.com is China’s largest consumer e-commerce platform, with more than 50,000 merchants. According to market research firm Euromonitor, as the largest Internet retailer in the world. Microsoft’s Tmall site follows , which it launched last October. The new site will offer over 50 products and be directly operated by a team in China which will oversee merchandise, offers, and promotions based on local consumer demand. Items available include: Microsoft Surface and accessories; Microsoft online store’s Up & Running service for Surface; Microsoft Office; Windows Phone devices; Microsoft hardware and accessories; and Microsoft Online Store’s signature PCs, which will be available soon. Giving Chinese consumers easier access to Microsoft products online is one way to help boost Microsoft’s market share in that country. According to IDC, shipments of the Surface RT tablet in China only reached 30,000 units during the fourth quarter of 2012, and its . In comparison, Apple had a 62 percent share of the tablet market in China, while Android devices held a 36 percent slice. Other efforts Microsoft has made to grab more consumers in the world’s largest smartphone, PC, and tablet market include with China Unicom, the country’s third largest wireless operator with over 70 million subscribers, to boost sales of the Windows Phone. According to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International, the Windows Phone holds less than 3 percent of the market in China.
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Google Chromebooks Go Global: Now Available In Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland And The Netherlands
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Google has learned all that it needs to learn about the reception of its Chromebook laptops in the U.S. and UK and of Acer, HP and Samsung flavors of its device in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. As we’ve spent time with and OS, it has become apparent that the goal of the operating system is to focus on what people do on a computer the most, which is surf the web in a browser. Since Chrome has become the No. 1 browser, building an operating system that showcases it . In addition to this global rollout, Chromebooks will now be available in all 1,000+ Best Buy stores that sell PCs in the U.S. Basically, that’s twice the number of stores that Chromebooks were sold in previously. This in-store rollout will take place over the next two weeks. As far as the rest of Google’s line of laptops in partnership with Acer, HP and Samsung, there is indeed a niche that has gravitated towards the machine as a lower-cost alternative to the Macbook Air and Windows machines, specifically schools and small businesses. Google recently , which has come with mixed reviews. One thing that most technologists can agree with is that while this machine might not be the end-game for consumer computing, it includes quite a bit of technology that will eventually be priced for mass-markets. I’ve been using the machine for the past few days and the idea of touching your laptop screen is still something of a mind-melt. It’s going to take some time to consumerize this product. It’s been an active past week in Google Chrome land, as it recently , moving Andy Rubin on to Some think that this means the eventual merging of Chrome with the Android OS, which is something . Can Google get past the “cheap” label? It remains to be seen, but I can say from experience that the machine does exactly what you need it to do, and it does it well. During my trip to India, it’s the only laptop that I had with me, and it did the trick. The only downside to Chrome OS is the lack of popular applications available, such as Skype. That will come in time, and global expansion will help speed that up.
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1Q Global PC Shipments Will Be Even Worse Than Expected, Thanks To Slowness In China, Says IDC
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Global PC shipments are expected to decline even more due to slower-than-expected growth in China, the world’s top PC market, during the first quarter of 2013, according to . 1Q shipments will decline by 7.7 percent, two percentage points more than what IDC had expected as vendors and the supply chain adjust to the Windows 8 transition. Furthermore, unless PC makers come out with competitive new products with pricing comparable to tablets, shipments are likely to drop even more. “Our February monthly data suggest that we could see a drop touching double-digits in the first quarter and a mid-single-digit decline in the second quarter before we see any recovery in the second half of the year. Even getting to positive growth in the second half of 2013 will take some attractive new PC designs and more competitive pricing relative to tablets and other products,” said IDC Worldwide PC Trackers program vice president Loren Loverde in a statement. It’s no surprise that tablets continue to eat into PC shipments. A week ago, IDC for the worldwide tablet market to 190.9 million, up from its previous forecast of 11 percent between 2013 and 2016, because of a predicted increase in shipments of smaller, lower-priced devices. The Chinese market accounted for over 21 percent of global shipments in 2012. Slowdown in PC shipments is partially due to the timing of the Chinese New Year holiday and other expected factors, but budget cuts introduced by the government as well as anti-corruption measures also decreased purchases more than expected. Though shipments should recover somewhat in China, it will not be enough to make up for the dip in shipments during February, said IDC. In comparison to China, IDC expects that Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific regions will all see close-to-forecast market performance.
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Bowers & Wilkins Intros The Zeppelin Air And Z2 Wireless Speakers With iPhone 5 Owners In Mind
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Bowers & Wilkin’s is one of its best products, but as times evolve, so does the company and its products. That’s why the British Speaker manufacturer is introducing the Zeppelin Air wireless speaker and the brand new Z2. Not too long ago, B&W released the A5 and A7 speakers, for consumers who are truly wireless. Neither speaker has a dock of any kind, but rather stream music wirelessly through Apple’s AirPlay. But with the A line, B&W realized that, regardless of wireless play or not, people enjoy having a dock on their speaker. “When you walk into your home, the speaker is always in the same place, and we’ve heard from customers that they like slapping their phone down on the dock and letting it charge,” said Brian Devlin. “That way they always know where it is.” Both the Zeppelin Air and Z2 have both wireless functionality as well as iPhone 5 docks. To start, the Zeppelin Air hasn’t seen much of an update in the design department. And perhaps rightfully so, considering the speaker has one of the more iconic designs in its class among competitors. The Air has been updated with a Lightning dock, and the company even made that dock flexible. Because it bends, you’ll never have to worry about damaging the Lightning port on your iOs device or the dock of the speaker. The Zeppelin Air is available in May for $599.99. The Z2 is instantly reminiscent of the , B&W’s shot at a Zeppelin spin-off. Bowers & Wilkins insists the Z2 is not a next-generation Mini, but a brand new product line. Just like the Zeppelin Air, the Z2 offers Airplay streaming, a lightning dock, and B&W’s flexible dock technology. The Z2 comes in a considerably smaller package than the Air, and the dock almost seems invisible until you’re hovering over the speaker. The Z2 is available in April in both black and June in white for $399. Both products are made for the high-end listener, but if you can pick up an A5 or A7 along the way, Bowers & Wilkins will have truly completed its goal. The focus with all new products out of the company is that the music should follow you, and not the other way around.
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Facebook Hires Co-Founders Of Trustworthiness Verification Startup Legit
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
, a startup working on a universal reputation system that could help sharing economy services verify whether users are trustworthy, has its team will join Facebook. Specifically, co-founders Jeremy Barton and Rob Boyle will now work for the world’s top social network. Legit’s exit blog post from a few days ago offers little details on the move, but we’re awaiting a response from the founders. Facebook confirms with me that it has hired Boyle and Barton. However, they were brought in through more tradtional hiring procedures and not Facebook’s corporate development squad, so this is more of a standard set of hires than a typical acqhire (as this article originally stated). Legit’s site and development of its service has shut down, but you can see its old site . The startup’s investors included Ben Narasin of Triple Point Ventures, William Smith, Craig Shapiro of Collaborative Fund, Thaddeus Jampol, Clint Korver and Miriam Rivera of Ulu Ventures, and JTH. Amongst its advisors were Othman Laraki of GeoAPI.com / Mixer Labs and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Legit went through a series of pivots, first trying to be a user-facing repuation service and later an embeddable reputation widget. Eventually, the team settled on building a reputation API that pulled in info about people from across the web. Third-party services would be able to implement Legit’s API to instantly know more about one of their users, plus give their peers that interact with them on the service confidence that they were dealing with a real person that wouldn’t scam them. The company described itself saying “We correlate data across marketplaces, creating a holistic picture of a user’s reputation. Legit measures real, transaction-based accountability without relying on social network data. Overall behavior improves when everyone is held accountable…the good reputation that users build on other marketplaces empowers them on yours.” Trust is a huge problem on the web, where people can easily hide behind pseudonyms and one-off accounts. This hampers many startups, especially peer-to-peer services where users have to trust each other. If you were buying something from someone, you might feel a lot more confident about meeting them at night or sending them money if you could see they’d be rated well and done plenty of transactions on other websites without an issue. Legit wanted to build a service so even newbies on sharing economy services could rely on their past trustworthiness. It outlined its thoughts on the need for such a system in its blog post Facebook already helps many startups with trust verification. It works well because a large friend count of real people is tough to fake. Facebook aids Airbnb users to see if they have any mutual friends with people they might stay with, and both Lyft passengers and drivers must sign-up through Facebook to authenticate their identity. This makes the deal a smart fit. One would expect the Legit team to work on Facebook’s personalization platform, which is becoming a backbone for plug-and-play trust on the web. Not necessarily, though. Legit’s co-founder Jeremy Barton explains, “While we will be working on other initiatives within Facebook, we remain huge advocates of the Sharing Economy / Collaborative Consumption and are confident the movement will continue to grow.” You can read the full note about .
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Singaporean-Finnish Startup Nonstop Games Raises $2.9M For Core Gaming On iOS, Android
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
, a Singaporean-Finnish gaming company (yes, really), just picked up $2.9 million from two Scandinavian venture firms, Creandum and Lifeline Ventures, to build out core games for iOS and Android. The company’s team has an interesting backstory. was a head of studio at one of Europe’s biggest social gaming companies Wooga, and a director at Digital Chocolate Finland before that. The company’s CEO, , doesn’t have a long gaming career, but he previously ran Asia-Pacific business development for Nokia out of Singapore so he has lots of experience working in the mobile industry. Random fact of note: Juha is also the brother of Ilkka Paananen, with two top-grossing games in the top five. We’ve heard from multiple sources that the company is making more than $1 million a day on average, but they decline to talk about updated revenue figures since acknowledging a $500,000 per day revenue rate last fall. “Supercell is a good target for success,” Juha Paananen said. “When we pass them on the top list, I’ll send my brother a note.” Nonstop Games is also a pivot. The company, , was working on HTML5 titles. But we all know the end to that story: many developers have shifted away from HTML5 because of the technical difficulties associated with creating a great user experience from existing browser capabilities. “It’s never that black and white,” Paananen said. “The press wants to paint it as you have to go either native or HTML5. HTML5 might happen at some point but realistically, the app stores remain the main distribution channel at the moment.” With the funds, the company will launch its first game, a synchronous strategy title called Heroes of Honor, later this spring. It’s a fantasy world with three different factions fighting for power. Players in the game can build towns and armies and attack enemies in massive real-time battles between thousands of player armies. They say they’re testing the boundaries of real-time multiplayer with supporting thousands of player armies simultaneously. They also plan to grow out a San Francisco office and expand its development capacity out of Helsinki, Finland. They currently have 11 employees out of Singapore. Paananen said he chose Singapore in part because of its strategic location in Asia, which has been a pioneering region for free-to-play games. Many of the business models used today in the West borrow from the virtual goods economies that were established by early browser games in China and mobile titles in Japan. “China has never had any other business model other than free to play,” Paananen said. He added, “The other reason is talent. Singapore is still an emerging startup hub. The gaming community is not so established here but you can hire really, really smart people.”
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Google’s New Nexus 10 Tablet Commercial Focuses On Its Multiple Account Feature, And That’s An Advantage
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Google has been on a bit of a roll with its commercials lately, especially for its gadgets. Today, the company unleashed its latest commercial for the , its iPad competitor. The video tells the story of a couple who has just found out that they’re having a baby. Google has woven the Nexus 10 Wi-Fi-only device into the story quaintly. The feature that Google decided to focus the commercial around? Its multi-user Android one. Yes, Google’s competitive advantage is apparently the fact that you can share the device with someone else. Is that enough? Have a look at the commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDCED88IZP4 We’ve talked about Apple needing a “ and “ ” mode for the iPad, but are these very personal devices something that we want everyone’s grubby little hands on? It sounds good on paper and perhaps in a well-produced commercial. But alas, the answer is yes, people really do want to purchase a device like this and let other members of their family have a play, too. The great part about having multiple-account capability is that you can pick up the device, log in and then instantly have access to your own home screen and apps. Since Google’s syncing capabilities are pretty robust, you could have a few of these devices sitting around and just log into whichever one is closest to you. Plus, the 10 costs about $399. Now that Google is settling into its role as a player in the mobile and tablet space, it’s interesting to watch what they pick to focus on. In the video above, you’ll see how they fit Google Play in, watching movies, searches with Google Now, doing Hangouts on Google+ and reading a book. The story is starting to develop for Google’s devices and services. It’s not all hearts and hugs for Google, as Apple could, and probably will, roll something like this out in the near future. For now it’s an advantage, but Google has to continually roll out features within its OS that are just a bit better than iOS. A complete side-by-side war won’t work; it’s going to have to be incremental upgrades and changes that catch your eye…like sharing your device seamlessly with anyone who wants to use it. This time, you won’t get your iPad back with tabs full of porn on it. Not that it has happened to any of us. Much. Will we see upgrades at the I/O conference this year for Google’s 10-inch tablet? One can hope. The only problem for me with the Nexus 10 is that outside of my home, it’s pretty useless. Is the 10 perfect? Not even close. Is it better than the iPad? That’s a matter of personal preference. Google just wants to nudge you with some of its own unique features, and that’s smart.
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Welcome Back, Me!
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
My phone buzzes. It’s a message from Eric Eldon. He, Alexia, and I had been talkin’ for a few weeks about the idea of me returning to TechCrunch, and we’d just locked in the following Monday — that is, today — as my (re)start date. “Start thinking about your intro post,” read the text. So I thought about it. A lot. I drafted it probably a dozen times in my head, crumpling up each version and tossing it in the trash before the figurative ink had even dried. Monday’s here. Intro post time. Screw it , we’ll do it live. You see, I suck at talking about myself. Need me to break some news? Done. Need me to liveblog an event with a few hundred thousand people waiting on every keystroke? Hell yeah, I’m down. Opinions? I TOTALLY HAVE THEM! Need me to write a few paragraphs about myself? lolnope. [Insert joke about me being doomed because TechCrunch writes about itself here.] For those who know me: I missed you, too. To make up for not calling for the past year, please accept the above picture of me snuggling with a puppy as a form of penance and/or hitting on you. For those who don’t: I’m Greg. I first joined TechCrunch as Mobile Editor back in early 2008 — which, if I recall correctly, is before we moved things out of Arrington’s house. I spent the next few years breakin’ all sorts of stories and generally loving life. Then my boss got and things got weird, so . I spent a few months helping to get the ball rolling at PandoDaily before recognizing that I had a pretty ridiculous urge to go learn to build (be they virtual, physical, or a ). I did some coding. I did some wood working. I did some 3d printing. I fired lasers (lots, and lots of lasers.) I had an itch, so I scratched it, and I return a smarter dude and a better writer because of it. I watched from afar as Eric and Alexia took up the reins at TC, quite certain that they’d smoothen out the myriad bumps and bruises that popped up after the acquisition. They’ve done — so when the question of whether or not I’d come back came up, I jumped at the opportunity. I love TC, and I love this team. I’m glad to be back. Oh, right, [** I almost made it, too.]
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Security Expert Brian Krebs Faced A Real-Life SWATing After Posting About Russian Cybercrime Site
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Security writer Brian Krebs’ phone was spoofed and by hackers who apparently took offense at his investigations into various online hacking organizations. His website also suffered a denial of service attack for a short period. The attacks came after Krebs wrote about that specialized in selling credit reports and credit information for unsuspecting victims. The site sells full reports for $15, and lists of records “which include first, middle and last names, plus the target’s address, phone number, SSN and DOB” for 50 cents each. The attack began when from someone claiming to be from the FBI. A few days later, on March 15, his provider reported a DDOS attack that possibly came from , a network stresser with a bug that let where the attacks were coming from. The source of the attack was a user at the “[email protected]” email address. At the same time Krebs received a knock on his door at home and was greeted by armed police who were responding to a spoofed call claiming that Russians had shot Krebs’ wife. The police detained Krebs briefly and then let him go once they were able to discuss the matter and previous threats that the researcher had already reported to the police in 2012. He writes: In short, Krebs suffered a virtual and “kinetic” attack simultaneously which, to be honest, is a fairly rare occurrence. While SWATing – the act of calling the police for a false alarm – is often talked about it’s rare to see it play out in actuality. It’s lucky that Krebs was calm and collected and the police response was equally sanguine. Writing about hackers has always been a dangerous game and has clearly gotten more dangerous. While many whom Krebs exposes are little more than petty thieves, the damage they can wreak on an unsuspecting researcher could be immense. It’s lucky, then, that this didn’t turn out much, much worse.
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How A YouTube Sensation Beat Justin Timberlake And The Music Industry
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James Altucher
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
I wish I had been smarter when I was 23 years old. I did everything wrong: I felt like I needed a college degree. I felt like I needed a graduate degree (I was thrown out of graduate school ultimately). I felt like I needed a publishing company to “choose me” to be a writer. I felt like I needed a big corporation to hire me so I could validate that I was going to be successful. I needed none of these things. You need none of these things. I’m going to explain how in a second. The world has become different. You can choose yourself now. and the Choose Yourself Era is fully here. A great example is . I’ll get to the meat of his story in a second. But basically, with no record label and mostly just the support of his YouTube fans, he released his latest album in the UK the same day Justin Timberlake did. How the hell did that happen? Justin Timberlake is like the crown prince of the music industry. The labels love him. The radios love him. He tours everywhere. He has a massive marketing machine behind him. And he’s married to Jessica Biel. That’s all pretty good. But not enough. Alex Day beat him. So I called Alex up and asked him how he did it. Your album released the same day as Justin Timberlake’s right? I think mine might’ve been the day before. And he’s got the entire music industry machine on his side and yet you beat him in the charts. How the hell did that happen? I know you started posting videos in 2006. But it’s 2013. Did you just suddenly get 10 million fans? Did you have fans to your videos and music right away? How did you know in 2006 when you were just 16 years old that your music was going to be big? Right from my first 30 subscribers, I began talking to the audience that was there and making videos directly for them and replying to comments, but I never saw it as a ‘fan base’ – I mainly just figured we were all bored kids. My first experience of being treated like a celebrity of sorts was not until four years later in 2010 when I did a few gigs with a band I was in (comprised of YouTubers) and would go to really small parts of the UK like Norwich and there’d be 200 people there all screaming for us and going crazy. Ultimately, you need money, though, to be an artist. You can’t be a starving artist forever. When you don’t go with a big label you have three choices: YouTube ads, iTunes downloads, and performing. Which of these avenues worked for you? Performing wasn’t an avenue for me – the only gigs I’ve done are one-off launch events (to launch my album, for example) or gigs with friends (as I mentioned). I really don’t feel the need to gig when I can reach my audience online and hit everyone at once, all over the world, and not exclude anybody, which a tour doesn’t do. [ Of the other two – I released my first musical thing (a compilation of YouTube covers called YouTube Tour) in 2007 I think it was, and it made a couple hundred bucks. Then in 2008 they introduced the YouTube partnership program, and I was one of the first partners. Back then I made maybe $300 a month. Then it slowly rose, and at the same time my first album came out in October 2009, so with the money from that plus YouTube I moved out in March 2010 to a place with my best friend and we paid £600 each on rent so it wasn’t too bad. It used to be about equal what I made from YouTube and what I made from music, but since Forever Yours got to No. 4 in 2011, my music sales have been way more than my YouTube. Typically I make around £3500 a month from YouTube (I’m on a network so they can sell the ad space higher) and at least £10,000 a month from music and merch sales. I’ve also done other projects – I co-created a card game with my cousin which we sell online, I have a business called Lifescouts I launched this year – which add a bit of extra cash to the pot also. Isn’t this a little like what Ani DiFranco did? She never signed with a major label. She just did her own thing. I think the main difference was she was constantly touring and I never have. Also she got her independence by forming her own label. I don’t have a label at all. Have the labels ever reached out to you? Labels have never known what the hell to do with me. I always went in with an open mind – I don’t like the idea that being proudly unsigned/independent instantly means I’m white and they’re black and we have to duel to the death or whatever. There are a lot of things I do on my own because I have to, so I’ve got good at them, but it would definitely be easier with outside help! So I was willing to hear what they could offer and how we could work together and I still would be, but I don’t think labels are ready to be that humble. They want to control everything. I like being able to decide my own songs and film my own music videos. I’ve had several meetings with Island Records in the UK, the last of which ended with the guy saying he doesn’t think I’m ready to be on a label yet because “we only sign artists we can sell at least a million copies of in the next three months” – but if he’s waiting for me to get to that point without him, why do I need the label ever? I’ve also met with Warner, Sony, EMI – they were all the same, none of them expected to justify themselves and at best they were just trying to ‘figure out my secret’ and at worst they were completely uninformed and lazy ( , which sums it up better than I ever could. But what would you use the labels for now? I guess it would be great to get their help. I’ll give you an example. I write my music, play my music, make my videos, design the albums, and so on, but it does provide some validation to be in physical stores. So a 10-year old kid who liked my stuff told his dad he should work with me. The dad was with distribution with Universal. So I did a one-off distribution deal with Universal where I did everything, but they got me in every HMV. It was great. Nobody said I could sell physical CD singles but I sold 10,000 in the UK. You clearly have a long-run view of what artists should be doing and where the industry is going. Where do you think the music industry will be in 10 years? I don’t think it matters where I see the music industry in 10 years. I look at where the music industry is now and it’s not helping me, so I’ve learned to exist without it! What I’d like in 10 years is for the music industry to be in a place where it supports me more, but that’s a long time to hope for that. The thing with the long-run view is that it’s actually a series of short spurts. It’s more like the general public are on the second floor of a building and every single/music video I release affords me a bounce on a trampoline outside. So for a second I’m up to the window saying “heyguyslookatme” and then if they don’t see me I just fall down again and make a new song and try again. If one of my tracks catches fire, it’ll all happen very quickly, but when it doesn’t you just have to try again. What should most artists/creators do to keep going when things look their most frustrating. Most people give up. And, frankly, most people are no good. How did you keep going from 2006 to now, even when things looked bleak? [ ] You have to have someone who either knows the industry or knows what’s commercial or successfully experimental or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve with your music and can tell you honestly whether or not you’re meeting that standard. I have a now-very-close friend who used to work in the industry a lot, broke songs like Who Let The Dogs Out and I Get Knocked Down (But I Get Up Again) – we met through a mutual friend and I would just send him songs and he would say “not a hit, not a hit, not a hit” until eventually I sent him Forever Yours and he said “you’ve done it! Now break it.” He didn’t help me, he just advised, but you need someone like that who you trust. The other thing with giving up is that I simply can’t. Sometimes I have low points and I spend a month or two not working on music at all, but then someone will play me an amazing new song, or I’ll watch one of my music videos back, or watch the Grammy’s and I think “I have to be doing this.” I can’t give up because I want it too much, and however hard it might be, it’ll be worse if I wasn’t pursuing what I love. How did you get into all of this. How did you build the so-called “10,000 hours” to be an expert? I grew up with my mum listening to the radio whenever we were around the house, driving to and from school, etc. Music’s always been a huge part of my life. And there’s so much more to learning about good songwriting than the actual writing, in the same way writers tell you to read a lot if you want to be a good writer. My favourite part about developing as an artist is spending hours listening to music, listening to every Michael Jackson song and looking for commonalities, patterns, the way the production sounds, how the style varies. I’ve been known to draw out graphs that plot the melody of a chorus so then I can see visually how a song moves and how it varies from track to track. I started writing songs when I was 13. I started writing not-bad songs when I was 17. I wrote Forever Yours when I was 22 and the rest of the songs on my new collection last year at age 23, so I’ve been doing it 10 years now and I know I still have a lot to learn. In a way that’s the most exciting thing – to hear the difference in the songs I’m making between this year and the last, and then think “what will I be making by NEXT year?” – there’s always room to grow and that’s exciting. How do you engage your fans outside of your music? How do you “build the tribe” in Seth-Godin-speak. It’s just YouTube. I have Twitter and Facebook only because I sort of feel I have to, because I need to reach people in those places. That’s not to say I’m just on auto-pilot on those places, but I’d much rather not have to use those services. Part of why it’s necessary right now is that I don’t have enough reach in the “real world” for me to allow other people to promote what I’m doing on my behalf, but my Twitter and Facebook are effectively work accounts that just update people on what I’m up to. For the personal connection, it’s all YouTube. I love it there. It’s such a creative outlet. I’ve been making videos seven years and never got bored of it — one or two videos a week regularly all that time. It genuinely saddens me when YouTube isn’t lumped in as one of the essential social metrics with Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr (I do have a Tumblr too but like the others I don’t really know how to use it). I understand YouTube and it’s changed my whole life. The main thing is that I don’t always talk about music, in fact I try to keep a 3:1 ratio of music videos to non-music videos. Other YouTube musicians spend all their time just doing covers or videos from tour, but it means what you can enjoy about that channel is reduced to whether or not you like that person’s music. I just released a new music video and loads of the comments say “I never got into your sound/liked your music before but I really love this song” and those are long-term subscribers of mine – they’ve stayed because I can offer them other stuff, but it also means they’ll give each new song a listen and sometimes they like it. . It’s not enough to master your art form. You have to personally master how you will distribute through some social media, engage with fans, etc. I admit I’m jealous of Alex. And I’m a big fan. So… Congrats to Alex for choosing himself and not being shy about explaining the specifics, even the money, on how he did it. Everyone is going to eventually have to follow that path in the new economy we live in.
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The Basis B1 Fitness Band Is Amazing But Still Needs Polish
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Being as chiseled as I am is tough. You have to eat right (brownies only every other day), exercise (take the stairs to the attic), and keep tabs on things like your heart rate and body temperature while playing Sim City. That’s why the Basis is one of the best “general purpose” body monitors I’ve seen. The band, which senses your blood flow, body temperature, and perspiration along with steps and motion, is a small, discreet watch-like system that works surprisingly well as a standard pedometer but offers a way to break bad habits and make new ones. I’m a longtime fan of quantified health devices for the simple reason that they offer immediate feedback on my current activity level and health. I’ve been using Fitbits for as long as they’ve been available and I’ve managed to lose 20 pounds by keeping my activity up and not eating like a slob. The Basis is different in that it offers the same features as a Fitbit but with a few improvements. For example, on the bottom of the watch there is an optical BPM heart sensor as well as leads for perspiration sensing and temperature. Because it is a watch you can wear the device overnight and monitor your sleep habits as well. The device itself is about one inch on each side with an integrated rubber band. Four spots in the corners activate various features and there’s a central button that is not yet activated in this incarnation of the device. Pressing the right buttons displays steps take, calories, and current heart rate and you can activate the clock or data by pressing the left “buttons.” A sensor turns on the backlight when you move the watch towards your face (this happens intermittently but it works in principle) and you can also turn on the backlight by pressing the left touch button. As a watch, the Basis is fairly basic and I’d even say sub-par. You can tell the time and the date, but traditional sports functions are missing. Viewing it in low or bright light is difficult and the backlight pops on for a mere five seconds, giving you just enough time to forget what time it is. It lasts about five days on one charge and connects to your computer or charger via a sort of USB-powered “frame” that connects to the watch body. It’s a bit cumbersome but it improves the water-fastness of the watch. The real magic happens on the back end. The Basis watch syncs with , a dedicated website for the device, as well as a forthcoming mobile apps for Android and iOS. It is here that the Basis shines – and confuses. Basis uses the concept of “habits” to motivate you to get off your duff. Some of the habits are simple – one asks you to simply wear the watch – while others encourage you do take a certain number of steps a day or spend a certain amount of time sleeping. You unlock various habits by completing challenges over time and you begin with only a few possible “goals” during your initial set up. This system is both ingenious and frustrating. While open-ended health devices like Fitbit and the Jawbone Up reward you after you’ve completed a certain number of steps with an email or notification, the Basis forces you through a set of gamified steps to gain your “reward.” It encourages you to visit the website often and unlock new rewards but the rewards themselves are so open-ended that it’s difficult to remember some of them. Unfortunately, the Basis band won’t remind you and the only indication that you’ve hit a certain step count is a little winner’s cup icon at the end of the readout. A bit more info – “You completed the Sleep For Eight Hours Challenge” – would be immensely helpful. The system also offers a number of interesting graphs including comparative activity and “heat graphs” of your various vital statistics. You can, for example, see when you tend to sweat the most (I found sweat when I eat) and when you tend to wake up. “Insights” offer little snippets of information about your day including sleep quality and the like. Being a watch nerd I usually wear the Basis on my right hand and a real watch on my left. Because the watch is fairly small and dark it looks more like a Fuel Band or an Up than a Timex. I think that depending on this watch as a daily wearer would get immensely frustrating and I wouldn’t recommend it. However, as a window on your body it is superior even to my beloved Fitbit and I’d say it’s even better than the Up. Simply having my heart rate available at all times is a valuable bit of data and the step counter is as accurate as the Fitbit in most situations. The Basis is obviously bigger and more conspicuous than other devices, but the battery life and form factor make it a slightly superior choice if you’re willing to wear it on your wrist all the time. The market for quantified health devices is definitely huge and entrants like Basis keep pushing the envelope further and further. The B1 seems like a strong first try, and the company expects to release firmware upgrades that will add more functionality to the watch over the next few months. The ability to pair the watch with a mobile app is also a much-needed addition as the syncing system is a bit wonky via USB. For $199, I think this band gives most any other health device a definite run for its money and I’d even recommend the Basis over more complex offerings by Suunto and Polar. Rather than making a kitchen-sink sports watch, Basis has produced a cool, streamlined monitoring device that is, for the first time in the space, eminently usable and promises some interesting potential.
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Philadelphia Startup SnipSnap Finally Brings Its Mobile Coupon Clipping App To Android
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
The team at has been quietly plugging away on an Android version of its popular mobile coupon app for what seems like ages now, but the wait for all you cost-conscious Android devotees is over. After some seven months in development, the Philly-based startup has finally pushed its eponymous app into the . If you’ve missed our , here’s SnipSnap in a nutshell — it’s an iOS and Android app that lets users digitally save and share their coupons. In addition to just storing those coupons, users can seek out friends and popular couponers to follow, as well as accept deals from a slew of retail partners. The last time we spoke, SnipSnap founder Ted Mann told me that the official Android build of the app would be out the door in August 2012. That little deadline came and went with little fanfare, but as it turns out the past few months have been kind to the company. SnipSnap officially tiptoed past 500,000 registered users a ways back, and saw user engagement (measured by coupon snippings in this case) jump four-fold since the more of the SnipSnap iOS app. SnipSnap’s Android app is nearly identical to its iOS cousin when it comes to functionality (save for obvious bits like the lack of Passbook support), which is always sort of refreshing to see. When a small company with limited resources is working on two versions of an app, there’s a tendency for one build to pull ahead of the other in terms of features and polish, and that’s not the case here… mostly. There’s a very neat Android-specific feature that hasn’t yet been implemented, but could greatly increase the efficacy of the app in certain situations. The issue with simply displaying barcodes on a smartphone’s screen is that it just doesn’t always work — depending on the retailer’s point-of-sale setup (it seems to happen most at grocery stores), the scanner may not be able to get a bead on the barcode image. To help combat that (albeit in a limited way), SnipSnap has also revealed that they’re working with the team at Mobeam to bring greater accuracy to the process by way of . Sadly, that particular feature is slated to remain a Galaxy S4 exclusive for the time being since it’s the only device that lets apps take over the front-facing infrared proximity sensor, but that may not be the case for long. Mobeam CEO Chris Sellers confirmed to TechCrunch last week that the company has been in talks with multiple handset manufacturers, so the promise of scanner-friendly digital coupons for the masses may not be too far off after all.
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iPhone Still Ranks Far Above Samsung Galaxy Line In Mobile Ads, Says Velti
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
A lot of headlines have focused on the new Galaxy S4 as a potential iPhone challenger in terms of hype and mindshare, but mobile ad firm offers a different perspective in its February summary of global exchange data from its network. The company still sees iOS and iPhone dominating among mobile advertisers, despite the rising tide of Android devices. Velti saw that 8 of 10 devices on its global ad exchange were iOS-based, including the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S and iPhone 4. Samsung managed to take two of the top 10 spots, but placed relatively low on the list with the Galaxy SII and Galaxy SIII at 7 and 10 respectively. The Galaxy SII is the only one to crack the top five in any region, coming in fifth overall in Europe, and while in general older phones ruled (there’s generally bound to more of them active out there), the iPhone managed to already crack the top 3 in Asia. That’s good news for Apple, which is focusing more attention on that region with recent launches. Apple’s iPhone and iPod devices ruled overall with a 38.1 percent share of Velti ad impressions, with the various iPad models making up 17.2 percent. By comparison, all Galaxy devices together only managed less than 5 percent of ad traffic in February. iOS ads were also better performing in terms of effective cost per thousand (ePCM), garnering 20 percent more than their Android counterparts. That’s in spite of a higher click through rate on Android: ads on Google’s mobile platform earned around 50 percent more clicks than those on Apple’s. Taking tablets on their own, there isn’t even remotely any competition for iOS. Android tablets as a whole account for only 0.7 percent, according to Velti, with the iPad making up 97.5 percent, with its share mostly shifting from standard iPads to iPad minis between January and February of 2013. Overall, the picture on the advertiser side doesn’t look to be changing very much at all, despite Android growth in worldwide sales. iOS actually gained share between January and February according to Velti, though only a very small 0.3 percent, but the firm said that iOS has earned more than 60 percent of advertiser demand for the past six months running. Samsung’s Galaxy S4 will be watched for a number of reasons, but it may be most interesting to see if it can help sway the needle with mobile advertisers. He who controls the spice controls the universe, after all, which in this case means that Apple’s domination of the mobile ad world definitely give it a leg up among developers and media content providers.
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Top Hat Monocle Takes Its Classroom Response System International, Signs Up 25K Students In Asia-Pacific Region
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
, the Toronto, Canada-based service that provides a web-based clicker and online homework tool that aims to make large lecture-based classes more engaging, just announced that it is expanding its reach to the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on Australia and New Zealand. The company also announced that more than 25,000 students are currently signed up to use the services in the next semester. These students, the company notes, come from 27 of Australia’s and New Zealand. “Top Hat Monocle is the first cloud-based classroom response tool brought to Australia, and we look forward to capturing a significant share of the APAC higher education market,” said Rok Kopp, sirector of International Sales at Top Hat Monocle in a prepared statement today. Australia currently has about 1 million students who are enrolled in its universities. So far, all of the companies that used Top Hat Monocle were in North America, with the exception of one school in Namibia. “A traveling professor from Canada brought it over, and they’ve adopted it for their whole school now,” Top Hat Monocle COO Andrew D’Souza told me earlier today. Today’s announcement marks the company’s first official international expansion. Top Hat’s web-based tool allows students to use their laptops, phone and tablets to provide instant feedback to teachers through polls, quizzes and open-ended questions. Teachers can also use it to show students interactive demos. Beyond these features, the service also offers a homework tool, gradebook and a file-sharing tool. The company currently has an office in Sydney and seven sales representatives who will support its operations in the region. Top Hat Monocle recently announced that it raised $1.1 million in , on top of the $8 million it announced . The company currently has over 70 employees, and its technology is currently being used at over 250 universities worldwide. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/37617921 w=641&h=361]
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EA CEO John Riccitiello Steps Down Over “Shortcomings” In Financial Performance
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
EA’s CEO John Riccitiello has just submitted his letter of resignation to the company’s board. He’s stepping down on March 30 and Larry Probst is stepping in as Executive Chairman. Probst will lead the hunt for a permanent CEO. The company announced the changes shortly after markets closed in New York and EA’s shares are up 2.1 percent in after-hours trading. He that he’s resigning over EA’s poor financial performance this quarter. The company suffered a big black eye over the last few weeks with the botched launch of Sim City, which left paying fans frustrated over the performance of the game. “My decision to leave EA is really all about my accountability for the shortcomings in our financial results this year,” he said. “It currently looks like we will come in at the low end of, or slightly below, the financial guidance we issued to the Street, and we have fallen short of the internal operating plan we set one year ago. And for that, I am 100 percent accountable.” EA said in the release announcing his resignation that its revenues and earnings per share for the current quarter will be at the “low end” of the guidance it gave last month. The company said its net revenue would come in this quarter at between $1.115 to $1.215 billion. The Sim City game wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back though. “No one was dying internally about it,” says a source who worked closely with Riccitiello. “It was the most successful Sim City ever. It was more that there have been five years of soft quarters and missed opportunities.” EA said today that Sim City sold 1.1 million units sold through its first two weeks. Riccitiello has led EA since 2007 and through a dramatic transformation in the industry as the gaming world has moved from selling expensive console games on the shelves of big-box retailers to one in which mobile phones and tablets are fast-becoming a platform of choice for many developers. Riccitiello was hired into the role after he left EA to co-found and lead Elevation Partners. Another source who worked closely with Riccitiello on shaping the company’s strategy over the last few years said, “The truth is that the game industry continues to pivot very rapidly. EA is in a good place but it requires a lot of energy and laser focus…. He’s been pivoting the company hard for many years, but the industry keeps pivoting faster.” Mitch Lasky, a partner at Benchmark who , chief operating officer Peter Moore or president of EA labels Frank Gibeau up as interim CEO. It appears that the board is looking for fresh blood to lead the company. But it will be incredibly hard to find someone who both understands the diversity and breadth of EA’s businesses across consoles, mobile and social gaming platforms and simultaneously can see where the industry is heading. Electronic Arts Announces Change in Executive Leadership
Larry Probst Appointed Executive Chairman, Effective Immediately
Company Updates 2013 Fiscal Outlook
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – March 18, 2013 – Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced that John Riccitiello will step down as Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors, effective March 30. The Board has appointed Larry Probst as Executive Chairman to ensure a smooth transition and to lead EA’s executive team while the Board conducts a search for a permanent CEO. The Board will consider internal and external candidates with the assistance of a leading executive search firm. Mr. Probst has played a leadership role at EA since 1991. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Board since 1994, he previously served as the Company’s CEO from 1991 to 2007. As CEO, Probst successfully grew the Company’s annual revenues from $175 million to approximately $3 billion, led EA into new platforms such as mobile, online and other emerging markets and expanded its international presence to more than 75 countries. “We thank John for his contributions to EA since he was appointed CEO in 2007, especially the passion, dedication and energy he brought to the Company every single day,” said Mr. Probst. “John has worked hard to lead the Company through challenging transitions in our industry, and was instrumental in driving
our very significant growth in digital revenues. We appreciate John’s leadership and the many important strategic initiatives he has driven for the Company. We have mutually agreed that this is the right time for a leadership transition.” On behalf of the Board, Lead Director Richard A. Simonson stated, “As we begin the CEO search, we are fortunate that Larry, who has a proven track record with our employees, partners and customers, has agreed to assume a day-to-day leadership role as Executive Chairman. He has 16 years of experience as CEO of EA and a deep understanding of the Company’s strategy, management team, business potential and industry trends.” Mr. Riccitiello stated, “EA is an outstanding company with creative and talented employees, and it has been an honor to serve as the Company’s CEO. I am proud of what we have accomplished together, and after six years I feel it is the right time for me pass the baton and let new leadership take the Company into its next phase of innovation and growth. I remain very optimistic about EA’s future – there is a world class team driving the Company’s transition to the next generation of game consoles.”
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Zynga Looks To Revive Draw Something With A Sequel That’s Much More Of A Social Network
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Zynga’s biggest acquisition to date — — was the one it ended up being the most pilloried for. At its peak, Draw Something was beating Zynga’s longstanding Words With Friends franchise, a sore point for a company that positioned itself as the dominant social gaming company in the world. After it was acquired, the hit game plateaued then declined — as titles often do in the hits-driven world of the business. But just because , it doesn’t mean it is writing it off. (Seriously, sorry for the terrible pun.) In fact, Zynga is re-investing in the franchise . OMGPOP head From what we hear, it sounds like it will be much more of a social platform where players get to keep and show off their drawings instead of having them disappear into the game. This way the very best artists can accumulate followings inside the game and the content will become a lot more long-lasting for the players. It’s a smart move for the company because it may make the game a lot stickier. Plus, it gets Zynga into game genres that are much more creative than its casual sim, Farmville history would suggest. On top of that, it looks like Zynga’s also involving a lot more celebrities. That’s in keeping with what Porter originally wanted to do with the game when he started exploring TV game show and transmedia opportunities. He has a long and unusual career in the music business and ties to the media world out of New York. Zynga has a mixed track record with sequels. Farmville 2 has done well, but Cityville 2 and Mafia Wars 2 both flopped. This is the first time they’ll be doing a major sequel purely on mobile platforms. The original still apparently has between 10 and 20 million players every month, so there’s a base that they can cross-market the title to. Presumably, they’ve gotten a lot savvier about doing early beta testing to make sure users don’t fall out of the game.
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Twitter Now Lets Its Self-Service Advertisers Access Advanced Campaign Tools, Target Based On Interests, Device Or Sex
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
Twitter wants brands to be able to target their ads effectively, otherwise why would you spend money to spray and pray your message to every single person on the network? Since the micro networking site can trap a lot of information about you based on who you follow and what types of posts you interact with, it only makes sense that these would become targeting options for advertising purposes. Today, the company to advertise to, two new ways based off of interests and by device. For example, if you are promoting a new iOS app, you’ll be able to target iOS users only, rather than hitting up Android users who won’t care or click. Up until now, could do things like this. In addition to the targeting options, Twitter has opened up its to US advertisers: For interests, Twitter now lets advertisers choose any account to base its targeting on. The example that Twitter gives is if you’re a golf shop, you might want to target users with the same interests as those who follow say, Tiger Woods. This gives brands a whole new “social graph” to scrape for potential clickers and buyers. It makes a lot of sense, actually. The only flaw with this approach is that you have no idea why someone followed Tiger Woods in the first place, as it may have nothing to do with golf. Having said that, this is a logical starting point. In addition to starting with the interest graph of followers of any account, you can choose from 350 interest categories that will line up with a subset of users. Again, this isn’t perfect, but it’s a good starting place. All of this targeting allows better-tailored messages so that there’s a better shot of actual success. The device targeting is quite brilliant, since this is data which Twitter can easily collect. Where this will be really handy is when advertisers are setting up landing pages and will now have an easy way to make sure that the right devices are seeing the right pages, without having to worry about sniffing out what user agent people’s devices are throwing back. Want to show off more colors to an iOS user? Go a bit more boring with BlackBerry users? Now you can: Tie this to the fact that you can now target ads to men or women, which Twitter says it figures out using “public user signals,” and Twitter’s advertising platform is shaping up to be pretty attractive to brands. Simply being on Twitter isn’t enough anymore, knowing who you’re talking to and advertising to is where it’s at. Facebook had to shape its advertising offering up quite a bit before it went public, and it looks like Twitter is doing the same thing. Does all of this targeting sound creepy? Too bad, that’s what happens when you use free services. I’d rather see ads that have something to do with what I’m interested in, personally. [Photo credit: ]
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 20 | null |
Cheezburger’s Ben Huh On Why Founders And Companies Should Be More Funny [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 |
We sat down with Huh this past week at the festival in Austin, Texas to hear a bit more about what it means to be funny at work. Watch the video embedded above to see Ben talk about his personal definition of what humor is, why businesses should make fun of themselves more often, how people who aren’t necessarily blessed with comedic talents can still bring humor into their businesses, and what it was like for Cheezburger to have some laughs on a nationwide scale with its Bravo reality show .
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New U.S. Cyber-Security Law May Hinder Lenovo’s Sales Growth
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
The President Barack Obama signed this week didn’t just prevent a government shutdown. It also requiring that U.S. government technology purchases first go through a cyber-espionage review process–a move that could potentially impact the sales of Chinese tech companies like Lenovo, which relies on sales to U.S. government agencies and schools as an important part of its North American growth strategy. The provision came to attention by lawyer Stewart A. Baker, a former Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. Baker wrote that the sanctions “[demonstrate] remarkable bipartisan angst about Chinese hacking and the risks in Chinese high tech equipment.” The law means that NASA, the National Science Federation, and the Justice and Commerce Departments, need to get approval from federal law enforcement officials before buying information technology systems in order to assess “cyber-espionage or sabotage” risk. In particular, federal law officials must first assess “any risk associated with such system being produced, manufactured or assembled by one or more entities that are owned, directed or subsidized” by China. Baker writes that the legislation “could turn out to be a harsh blow for companies like Lenovo that have so far escaped the spotlight trained on Huawei and ZTE.” In 2011, the U.S. imported a total of $129.5 billion in “advanced technology products” (ATP) from China, according to a May 2012 report on China-US trade by the Congressional Research Service, or 33.5 percent of total U.S. ATP imports that year. Lenovo the U.S. military and several government entities, including NASA. Last August, Lenovo said that a key part of its growth strategy is to U.S. schools and government offices. Thomas Looney, vice president and general manager for Lenovo North America, told Bloomberg that Lenovo of more than 20 percent a year in computer sales to elementary and secondary schools as well as local, state and federal agencies. But Chinese tech companies may not be the only ones impacted by the new law. Baker also wrote that the legislation may bring “some surprises for American companies selling commercial IT gear to the government” because they might not know which suppliers and assemblers are directed or subsidized by the Chinese government. As Baker , the new law restricts purchases from Chinese state-influenced companies, no matter where they manufacture their products. “This means that the provision could prevent purchases of Lenovo computers manufactured in Germany, or Huawei handsets designed in Britain,” Baker said.
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Chinese Consumers Scoff At The State-Run Media’s Heavy-Handed Swipes Against Apple
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
Tim Cook has , but the government is not as besotted as Chinese consumers. China’s state-run media has taken several swipes at Apple this month, moves which may be part of a (heavy-handed) public relations strategy to pave the way for locally grown operating systems as the Chinese government seeks to move its IT industry away from Western software. But if popular response to the anti-Apple articles is anything to go by, Chinese consumers and their iOS devices won’t be so easily parted. Earlier this week, People’s Daily, the Chinese government’s official newspaper, calling Apple’s customer-service practices arrogant. The People’s Daily article followed a story earlier this month by official government press agency Xinhua, which for an increase in high-interest loans taken out by students to buy “fancy electronic products, most Apple devices.” And just a few days prior to the Xinhua story, China Central Television’s investigative program “3.15” , saying that the Cupertino company discriminates against Chinese iPhone owners by offering shorter guarantees than in other countries, using refurbished components, and refusing to honor after-sale obligations. China observer Gordon G. Chang that “executives in Cupertino should get worried that the 3.15 show is not a one-off.” What’s at stake for the Chinese government is its efforts to decrease dependency on foreign software by upping the profile of locally developed operating systems. Apple is just one of several foreign tech companies targeted by the Chinese government. Earlier this month, for example, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a white paper declaring that China is on the Android smartphone operating system (though it ). The Chinese government is in partnership with Canonical and Chinese developers. The Linux-based OS, called “Ubuntu Kylin,” is set for release next month, and a China-specific version of Ubuntu Touch for smartphones and tablets may also be in the works. Most of Huawei and ZTE’s handsets are Android-based, but both Chinese companies are working on their own smartphone operating systems. Huawei Device CEO Wan Biao last September that the company is “devoting resources into coming up with a phone operating system based on our current platform in case other companies won’t let us use their system one day.” Though ZTE’s operating system , it’s also meant to help the company move away from Android. Other major Chinese tech companies creating their own OSes include and . The Chinese government’s PR tactics have been too over-the-top, however, for consumers to swallow. After the CCTV program, posted to his 5.3 million Weibo followers: “#315isLive# Actually, Apple has so many tricks in its after-sales services. As an Apple fan, I’m hurt. Have you done right by your founder Jobs? Have you done right by the young people who sold their kidneys? It’s really true that big stores bully customers. Post around 8:20.” The strange last sentence of Ho’s post was proof to many observers that he had been instructed to post that message at a specific time. In response, Ho claimed his Weibo account had been hacked. Very few people believed his story and the backlash . Furthermore, when independent financial magazine Caijing the People’s Daily story about Apple’s customer service by asking readers on Weibo “which arrogant company or companies do you want to smash?,” the Cupertino-based company didn’t even crack the top of the list. Instead, the top offenders named by respondents were mostly state-owned monopolies, including China’s three major telecom-service providers (China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile), three largest oil companies, and its four major banks. Many of the complaints called out the irony of criticizing Apple’s customer policies when most state-owned companies aren’t exactly known for their friendly service. The quoted one user writing under the handle Planet Virus, who said “If we say Apple is arrogant, then most state-owned enterprises are shameless.”
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ZTE Posts Second Straight Net Loss Of $183M In Q4 On Emerging Market Woes
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
As it already warned, ZTE posted its second-straight quarterly loss, due to vastly trimmed margins in emerging markets, as well as contract delays and falling handset sales in China. It made a net loss of 1.14 billion yuan ($183 million) in the three months ended Dec. 31, compared with its net income of 991.16 million yuan a year prior. Sales in the fourth quarter also fell 16 percent to 23.5 billion yuan ($3.78 billion). In all, this makes it the first time ZTE has posted an annual loss, at 2.84 billion yuan ($456 million). The company blamed the decrease in profit margin on low-margin contracts in emerging markets like Africa, South America and Asia, as well as its home market of China. ZTE has spent the last 20 years aggressively expanding overseas, but often at the cost of profitability because of its slim profit margins as it undercuts European equipment makers in emerging markets such as India. It recently said it will and make a profit in the first quarter by focusing on developed markets, instead. ZTE has been lagging behind fellow Chinese rival, Huawei Technologies. The former recently announced it will in 4G infrastructure, in order to catch up with Huawei, as the two compete for most 4G contracts from the three major carriers in China—China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom. Huawei is the global maker of telecoms equipment, while ZTE is fifth-largest. As for its handset play, nobody is really staking a claim on the Android market the way Samsung is. According to Gartner’s latest report, Samsung has of the global Android market, with the next vendor at just 6 percent. And it grew this share in , eclipsing Taiwanese competitor HTC to leave it trailing by 30 percent at the end of 2012. Across OSes, Samsung and Apple have the number one and two slot respectively atop the global share, at 29 percent and 21.8 percent, respectively, . Huawei has 4.9 percent, Sony has 4.5 percent, and ZTE is fifth at 4.3 percent. But ZTE has more to worry about than just the Samsung juggernaut. Its general focus on the low to mid-range Android handset market means that thinner and thinner margins make it less worthwhile to duke it out in emerging markets. Its new the high-end market is testament to that. The definition of a “smartphone” is changing to include a lot of lower end devices now, and isn’t just reserved for premium handsets anymore. And with about this year to sell for less than $100, makers will have to sell an awful lot just to keep above the water.
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Questionable Entries Prompt Google To Retract Some Glass Explorer Invitations
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
Google made plenty of nerds happy earlier this week when it began reaching out to the that would have the privilege of spending $1,500 on the company’s head-mounted Glass display, but that thrill wound up being short-lived for some. About seven hours after announcing that the outreach to would-be Glass Explorers began, the Glass team once again took to the project’s to admit they needed to rescind some of those invitations. After noting that the #ifihadglass program yielded applicants from all walks of life, a representative noted that “it’s become clear that a few applications that don’t comply with our terms have slipped through the cracks” and that those applications would have to be disqualified. It’s not clear exactly how many people ultimately got the boot from the Explorer program, but a quick Twitter search yields two viewable tweets breaking the bad news directly from the Glass account. In both of those cases the applicants (hopefully jokingly) said they would engage in some ill-advised behavior while wearing Glass — the of the two applicants said “#ifihadglass I’d cut a bitch!” which definitely flies in the face of the Explorer program’s . The other was mild in comparison, but still pretty pointless: [tweet 304276459554480128 align=’center’] Of course, there’s still the question of how those people got selected in the first place — it doesn’t seem like whoever was at the helm was being very selective in the first place. According to the terms of the Explorer program, entries were “evaluated and scored by a panel of independent content moderators” who aren’t employed by either Google or its promotional partner, a New York-based marketing firm called . Either someone on that jury found those, erm, colorful entries funny and gave them a pass, or the jury just wasn’t paying attention at all. Either way, Google was left to deal with the aftermath publicly. It’s also unclear how many more applications (if any) will wind up getting the boot as well. Entries like were earnest and potentially very cool, while seemed to have their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks when tweeting their original applications. [via ]
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Boundless Vows To Continue Disrupting The Textbook Market, Even As Second Founder Departs, Litigation Drags On
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
Since emerging on the scene in early 2012, the Boston-based has been on a mission to give students of all ages a free, open-source digital alternative to the pricey world of hard-copy textbooks. But when you try to rock the boat, the powers-that-be will likely have something to say about it — especially when thousands of beta testers across 2,000 universities are using free, open alternatives. Pearson, Cengage and Freeman & Worth , and the startup has been battling these lawsuits ever since. The startup has since evolved from the original product that became the subject of these lawsuits ( ), which the team hopes could expedite what is often a seemingly un-ending legal process. Nonetheless, we’ve learned today that another co-founder is exiting Boundless. , co-founder Aaron White, who has up until now served as Boundless’ CTO, will be stepping down after this week. He will stay on as a member of the board. White offered some elucidation and context to the decision , though did not say what he plans to do next. However, we’ve been hearing that it was in fact a mutual decision between himself and fellow co-founder (and CEO) Ariel Diaz, who said that White’s skills and talents are better suited to the early-stages of product and company building — which is likely a sign that White may be cooking up a new startup of his own. In the meantime, the co-founders said that White will be leaving his responsibilities as CTO in the care of Matt Hodgson, Boundless VP of Engineering. Hodgson has already been running engineering for the last year, White said in his blog post. The CTO’s departure follows co-founder and CMO Brian Balfour’s exit last year, leaving Diaz as the last of the three founders standing at Boundless. Balfour has since become an EIR at Trinity Ventures. Just because two founders have departed a startup still in the relatively early stages, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the sky is falling. Boundless raised $8 million in April of last year from Venrock, adding to the $1.7 million in seed it raised in 2011 from Nextview, Founder Collective, Kepha, and SV Angel. So it still has runway left in terms of capital, and Diaz says that the litigation isn’t really affecting the day-to-day business at this point. “Of the whole team, I’m pretty much the only one dealing with the legal stuff,” he tells us. Plus, as , Boundless believes that it has a real case against the big three publishers, because its current product, “which we have significantly enhanced and improved based on student feedback and our own editorial efforts, [does] not infringe the copyrights in the publishers’ static and outdated products.” Boundless believes that the lawsuit against its beta product is baseless, and since the beta is really no longer in use, that the publishers don’t really have a case. Boundless also claims that its open textbooks, which it , have been used by over 500K students at over half of colleges in the U.S. However, that also doesn’t mean that everything is sunshine and daisies. Boundless may not be headed to the deadpool in the next 24 hours, but it’s also never a good sign when two co-founders leave without much in the way of an explanation. Especially considering that both Balfour and White are product-oriented entrepreneurs, and White especially is known as a talented engineer. Startups are dying to hire great engineers — not watch them walk out the door. Diaz followed up with his own explanation of the leadership changes . Find it here, excerpted below: I understand Aaron’s decision to get back to an early-stage role, but will personally miss having him on our team. I look forward to seeing what adventure he attacks next. Aaron is one of the best early stage startup technologists out there, and we are very pleased that he is staying on as a member of the company’s board. We, Aaron included, are committed to changing higher education for the better, and look forward to helping even more students and professors in the years to come.
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Surprise: Europe’s King Now Has Nearly As Many Daily Users As Zynga
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
Around four years ago, said he was close to selling , the arcade gaming company that he had co-founded and bootstrapped six years earlier. The company, which has a destination site at , had lost about 45 percent of its traffic as one of its biggest partners Yahoo! Games cut back. Facebook, the next big platform King was eyeing, had started to curb the cheap virality that fueled the rise of Zynga. But after two big pivots onto the Facebook platform and then iOS, King has staged a revival. Today, the company has the #1 grossing game in the U.S. on iOS, and possibly in the world. The company said this week that it has 50 million daily active players, which is . About 49 million of their monthly actives are playing King games on mobile phones and tablets. “Zynga’s competitive advantage in the past was the size of their network and I think we’ve closed the gap,” Zacconi said. Because of that big shift, they’re dropping the “.com” from their company’s name. So it’s King, not King.com. Unlike many competitors that jump on new platforms right away, King has been cautious. The company only started launching mobile titles last fall with Bubble Witch Saga and . They only came to Facebook in early 2011 — when many other companies started putting the platform on the backburner. Zacconi said that the success of their hit mobile game Candy Crush Saga took him by surprise. “You read the stats in reports from companies like IDC. But when you experience it, it’s mind-blowing,” he said. Zacconi said his board of directors had approved a budget for 2013 at the end of last year. By the end of January, Candy Crush Saga had done so well that the company had already blown through their December targets. A little more than 24 million people play the company’s mobile games every day. He says that Candy Crush is played by 1.3 million people a day in Hong Kong. That’s almost 20 percent of the city’s entire population. The reason the King has been able to be late to market and still do well has to do with the building blocks it has laid out over the last 10 years. King has a portfolio of about 150 games on its destination site, which operates like a lab for titles it can later bring to Facebook and mobile phones. They test out titles with their “hardcore casual” group of gamers on King.com, who play about five to six hours a day. The games that do well get brought over to other platforms. To date, King has brought seven titles to Facebook and two to mobile. It’s how they help hit-proof their business in a hits-driven industry. “If some games fail, we needed them to learn and understand what works. It’s really about probability,” he said. They’re bringing over two more games to Facebook and/or iOS soon: one is called Papa Pear Saga, which is a Pachinko-style game, and another called Farm Heroes Saga that’s a classic Match-3 style game. King was rumored to be exploring an IPO back in 2011. But the performance of big consumer IPOs like Zynga have made growth-stage gaming companies more reluctant to test the public markets. “There’s a bright future for us. We’re not planning to be acquired. I don’t know whether we will do an IPO or not,” he said. King raised $45 million back in 2005 from Apax Partners and Index Ventures. Zacconi acknowledged it was largely a secondary round, which he believes was ultimately good for the longer-term health of the company. “We don’t need to sell, and we can build for the long-term,” he said. He added that he didn’t think that Zynga’s post-IPO performance should have too much a shadow over the industry. “Savvy investors understand the difference,” he said. “A company is not a sector. Mobile content this year should be a $12 billion market and games is the #1 category by reach and time spent. We are at the heart of this huge tectonic shift.”
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Shutterstock Launches Offset, A New Brand For Its Curated Collection Of Licensable Images
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
The leading online stock photography company launched a in January, which allowed users to search through the site’s 22 million images with keywords and specific colors. Today Shutterstock officially announced Offset, its new brand for its collection of top notch images that have been specifically curated for creative distinction and quality. “These are images you’ll want to spend time with,” says Scott Braut, VP of Content at Shutterstock. Offset is currently running as a private beta, and its users are able to browse through 25,000 images that Shutterstock promises were hand-picked for authenticity and artistic direction. What this means, simply put, is that Offset won’t feature your run of the mill stock photography. Shutterstock promises that Offset will be a consistent source of quality. Agencies, magazines, and photo buyers will visit Offset precisely because they’ll be able to find good images there. According to Shutterstock representatives, they’ve assembled quite a few notable clients in their private beta, but they wouldn’t disclose who they were. However, their launch party at the Leila Heller Gallery tonight did feature some of the images in their collection. Offset also worked with curators for the preview event, who were elected for being “disruptive in their respective categories”. The event had eight kiosks which projected each curator’s selected imagery unto the wall. Amongst the eight featured curators was Cliff Kuang, design editor at Fast Company, Liz McDaniel, writer and comedian, and Annie Werner of Tumblr. And as I visited kiosk to kiosk, I’ll be perfectly honest, none of the images I browsed through were boring. If Offset’s aim is to reliably provide a collection of engaging artwork and photography, then it seems they know what they’re doing. Offset will also offer royalty free licenses with unlimited print and web usage once purchased. They’re also boasting simplified pricing terms. Small files of pictures will go for $250, whereas large files will go for $500. Shutterstock’s reps said that they would open up Offset to the public in the coming months, although they didn’t give any indications as to exactly when that would be. For now, you can request an invitation at their website .
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Introducing MOX, A 24/7 Dance Music Web TV Channel
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
“Electronic dance music is what rock ‘n’ roll was decades ago. It’s a ‘fuck you’ to your parents.” “A lean-back, TV-like experience on the Internet is the future of television.” MOX.tv is a web tv channel built on these two ideas that’s coming out of stealth today. It broadcasts dance music videos, concerts, and news hosted by VJs 24 hours a day. Just open and start grooving — no clicks necessary It’s that simplicity that could make MOX a hit. Right now, the Internet is exhausting. You constantly have to decide where to click next. That causes what’s known as “decision fatigue.” You get tired of weighing the options and just tune out. Founder Carter Laren, who gave me those quotes above, explains “The Internet today is really good at giving you exactly what you want…but often you don’t know exactly what you want to listen to or watch. MOX’s human curators make those choices so you don’t have to. Instead you can just let it play. Browse the rest of the web, and MOX becomes a passive electronic dance music (EDM) radio experience. Hear something you like and you can watch the video then resume surfing when it ends and the next video starts. To try it for yourself, or watch this quick sample of what it looks like: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBv09k8yEb4] That doesn’t mean MOX wants to sacrifice the interactivity which is the Internet’s strength over television and the FM dial. Scroll below the video channel and you’ll see related content about whatever artist or festival is currently on the air. And if you really want to tune the experience you use buttons on the left to watch just a stream of news presented by human video jockeys, Bass (aka dubstep), Chill (downtempo EDM), or Dance (uptempo non-dubstep EDM). That way if you really hate the dubstep or peppy trance anthems, you can avoid them. Laren started working on MOX about 18 months ago after working for Cryptography Research, scoring some exits in Blu-ray technology, and investing in a few projects, including San Francisco dance club Monarch. Now he’s funding MOX until it closes a seed round next month. In the meantime MOX acquired , and its founder is now MOX’s CTO. At first the startup planned to help bring the live music experience into the living room before pivoting into EDM web TV a year ago. The team started testing with 16-24-year-old focus groups and found they loved the 24/7 video stream but were confused by too many configuration options. So MOX ditched the DVR-style timeline that originally let people skip around in the stream. The kids also loved MOX’s focus on dance music. Which differentiates it from music video site Vevo’s new “MTV for the web” service. Turn on Vevo.tv and you’ll see tired pop music like Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift. That leaves plenty of room for MOX to become the home for a younger generation obsessed with EDM. Its focus on video, another favorite of the youth, could give it an edge on text-heavy sites like Turntable.FM co-founder Seth Goldstein’s new DJZ that is also vying for raver eyeballs. Laren confesses MOX is very much in beta and its nine-employee team still has a lot to do. “The news is still really ghetto right now” he admits, referring to the haphazard DJ interviews and concert features played at the top of the hour. Mox is also planning to build an embed tool so you can host its video stream, as well as a search box so you can play certain music videos on demand. Luckily it doesn’t have to go crazy with monetization too early. Since music videos are essentially marketing, record labels typically give them to MOX royalty-free, so it doesn’t have to pay out huge sums like Pandora or Spotify. MOX does have some advertising already, like the Absolut commercial that doubles as a Swedish House Mafia music video. Laren hopes to keep ads on the main channel highly curated and in a similar content-as-marketing vein. It might look into more aggressive advertising, but only in the lean-forward parts of the site like search where people are more tolerant because they’re asking for something. Premium concert streams are another opportunity. Honestly, I’m really enjoying MOX. It’s a great combination of a passive and active experience that fits into my web browsing habits. I turn it on, watch a little, then go on with my day as it plays in the background with the consistent beats keeping me in a state of flow. If I hear something that grabs my attention or the news comes on, I pull up the window and watch again. That gives MOX an edge on radio, on-demand streaming, blogs, Turntable, and most other music experiences. Knowing there’s a human choosing what plays, and that other people are watching/listening to the same thing at the same time gives me this subtle feeling of community. And that’s really what EDM is about — a pulse that synchronizes everyone in earshot, that breaks the ice and makes people feel part of something bigger. If can just get us to turn it on, we’ll let it stream through our stereos all day long.
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AlumniFunder Launches A Crowdfunding Platform Where Alumni Can Back Student Entrepreneurs
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
launched in beta this week with a simple mission: Help create a deeper relationship between current students and alumni, while supporting collegiate entrepreneurship and creativity. To do that, AlumniFunder wants to give alumni a platform by which they can invest in innovative projects created by students at their alma mater. Whether it be for a new science lab, natural language processing research or a documentary film, the startup also wants to help give students access to the capital they need to get their ideas off the ground. Riding the crowdfunding wave, the startup is essentially putting a spin on (or splitting the difference between) Kickstarter and education-focused, P2P funding platforms and . Not unlike these platforms, AlumniFunder has no affiliation with a specific college, instead providing a marketplace for those with ideas that need funding to connect with those looking to open their wallets to a worthy cause. In other words, the platform works like this: Those registering for AlumniFunder are split into “Doers” (those looking to create a project) and “Alumni” (those looking to browse and fund projects). Doers are required to register with a “.edu” email address to set them up as part of a particular collegiate and alumni network, and then, like Kickstarter, their projects are posted to that network for a specified duration — usually between 30 and 60 days. If the team or student hits their funding target, the money is then transferred via Stripe to the team; if not, no credit cards are charged. AlumniFunder provides a layer of oversight during the process to make sure the projects meet a minimum level of decency and appropriateness, while providing students with tools from Prezi and Vimeo, for example, to help them build and share their presentations with alumni. The core value behind AlumniFunder, co-founder S. Ryan Meyer tells us, is to create a more direct and transparent channel for alumni to connect with students, in turn supporting alumni engagement in on-campus programs and entrepreneurial initiatives. Rather than crowdfunding being the focus of the platform, Meyer sees it as a technological tool for pooling resources — not a panacea for every capital-raising scenario and every hobby project out there. Meyer started AlumniFunder last July as an “elaborate work-around,” he says after experiencing problems raising money for “the technology spinoff” of his brick-and-mortar, children’s brain-training company, Minds-in-Motion. Looking into crowdfunding as an alternative and, after considering using Crowdtilt’s white-label product, Meyer and team decided to create their own solution. Meyer has raised $125,000 thus far, mostly from friends in his alumni network, he says, “crowdfunding it the old-fashioned way” through phone calls and in-person meetings. Crazy, I know. The team has since grown to five, including CTO and co-founder Brandon Goldman, who was the 13th employee at Box and is building the site in Node.js. As for pricing, at launch, the site is free to all users, save for the requisite credit card processing fees. Going forward, AlumniFunder plans to launch an equity investing platform (set to launch at some point this summer), which will also be free-to-use. The team is currently raising a fund (at an undisclosed amount) that it will likely use to co-invest one-third with the accredited investor crowd in equity-based campaigns, “using crowd-vetting as a way to deploy capital to early-stage investments,” Meyer says. Although much of the crowdfunding regulation is still in limbo, Meyer says that the team has been working to build its equity model in such a way as to both be efficient while operating within the present regulatory environment. “Hence the summer launch,” he concludes. For its beta launch, AlumniFunder started by holding contests at Georgetown and Princeton for the most disruptive crowdfunding campaign, with Greylock COO Tom Frangione and Elevation Partners MD Adam Hopkins judging for Princeton and Ellie Wheeler from Greycroft judging for Georgetown. So far, the co-founder says, 22 campaigns are live, which are collectively seeking over $400,000 in capital. The first two contests ran for three weeks and offered $1,000 cash prizes to the best campaign submitted by March 20th. “I was thrilled to see that entrepreneurship is thriving at Princeton,” Frangione observed after the contest. “The caliber of projects entered into AlumniFunder’s contest is pretty revealing about the ambitions of students and other alumni to innovate while also bettering the world.” Rather than working directly with either university, AlumniFunder approached a variety of both undergraduate and graduate “entrepreneurship clubs” to get the word out. Today, the startup announced the winners, and you can find and Next up, AlumniFunder will look to continue pushing its contests onto more campuses to help spread the word, beginning on April 9th at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford on April 18th and USC at the end of April, with more schools to be added in the near future. “We aim to be a marketplace for ideas, using crowdfunding as a tool to change the dynamics of university education and alumni relationships, creating untold opportunities for experiential learning,” Meyer tells us. “And we want to fund some kick-ass startups, too.”
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BioShock Infinite Creator Ken Levine Says He Doesn’t Believe In Utopias (Including Peter Thiel’s)
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
When my friends found out that I was going to interview ‘ Ken Levine, who led the development of the acclaimed video game , as well as its just-released sequel , everyone said I had to ask him about , a group that has been jokingly referred to as “ .” The institute was co-founded and funded by famed entrepreneur investor Peter Thiel, and it’s looking to build communities at sea that are independent of any government. To gamers of a certain mindset, that seems pretty reminiscent of Rapture, the libertarian undersea community featured in . So I asked Levine what he thinks of the idea, and he said: What I was trying to do with was to say, ‘Okay, well, [in ] that’s a utopia where Ayn Rand, who made the philosophy, made all the rules, and all the characters were under her control. What if things under everybody’s control?’ And I think that’s the problem with utopias — we bring ourselves to it, you know? We think we’re leaving our problems behind but – I don’t mean this in a cynical way – we are the problem. Like whatever social problems that occur come out of us. It’s not like they fall out of the sky. I think people think they’re going to go to a utopian society, and I think it’s not really possible. (To be fair to the Seasteading Institute, the organization says , and it even published a blog post about .) We also talked about the setting of , which takes place at the turn of the 20th century. Levine said he was attracted to the period because it was a time of enormous technological change, with the introduction of electricity, cars, airplanes, radios, phonographs and more, all within a few decades: “We’ve really only had one piece of technology in our lifetime which has been that substantial, which is the Internet. They had 10 Internets, effectively, in terms of things that just changed their world completely.” Not that the new game takes place in a realistic historical setting. Instead, it’s set in a floating city of the sort that people imagined they would live in, and one that’s dominated by religious fundamentalism, nationalism and racism. Those can be pretty sensitive topics, even today, and while Levine said he’s mostly trying to tell a good story, he also has to follow that story wherever it leads: If you start getting scared of what story you’re telling, it’s going to show. You have to be kind of stupidly fearless, I think, to do this stuff, because otherwise you’re going to try to please people. And that’s not what we’re in the business of doing. Which is weird, because we’re in the video game business — we want to please people so that they’re going to have an entertaining experience, but we’re not trying to make people super-comfortable with everything. We want to challenge people, and we want to challenge ourselves, too. Lastly, I asked Levine about whether he’s interested in making the move from consoles to mobile or tablet gaming. He said he certainly plays those games, and he’s open to the idea, but he hasn’t figured out his next project yet. “I think that whatever I wanted to do, I would make sure it’s something that embraces the platform that it’s on, rather than fights the platform it’s on,” he said. In other words, he doesn’t want to take a console game and try to squeeze it onto an iPad.
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Amazon Studios Greenlights ‘Betas’, Another Comedy Show About Silicon Valley
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
Still feelin’ all ragey about the way Bravo portrayed the Valley in ? Worried Mike Judge won’t do it right (wait, does Mike Judge ever do anything not-right?) with his upcoming HBO comedy series? A new challenger approaches! Amazon has just announced that they’ve greenlit a pilot of ‘Betas’, a show about “four computer geeks and their quest for nerd fame”. Please don’t suck. Please don’t suck. Please don’t suck. This is the 8th comedy pilot that Amazon has greenlit so far, following and, of course, that was just announced earlier this week. Amazon is planning on throwing all of these series into the ring and counting on user feedback to determine which ones carry on…. which, given that the show is about the Silicon Valley and we tend to be a pretty critical bunch, means they’ve got a bit of an uphill battle here. Unlike Zombieland, which pretty much just has to not be terrible. (If all else fails, they can add one more T to the name and make it a show about . I’d watch the hell out of that.)
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Google Launches Maps Engine Lite, Makes It Easy To Create Advanced Custom Maps
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
For years now, Google has offered its to enterprises that want to visualize their custom geospacial data. Starting today, anybody will be able to use a subset of this functionality, thanks to the of (beta). This new tool, Google says, will allow any mapping enthusiast to “create and share robust custom maps using this powerful, easy-to-use tool.” Maps Engine Lite allows users to with locations and visualize them on a map. They can also compare up to three different data sets for, the company stresses, non-businesses purposes. These custom maps can have multiple layers, and users who don’t have spreadsheets to upload can also manually draw lines, mark specific areas and set place markers. Google offers a total of nine base maps, including its usual satellite and terrain maps, as well as styles that emphasize city boundaries, political boundaries and highways. Maps Engine Lite also offers about 150 different icons that can be used to mark specific places. To help new users get started, Google also published a that offers a few sample data sets and a step-by-step guide to publishing a custom map. Google says it will still offer , its earlier custom mapping tool, for the time being and My Maps users can import their maps into the new Maps Engine Lite. Over time, however, Google product manager Beth Liebert writes in today’s announcement, My Maps will be “incorporated into Google Maps Engine Lite.” For now, Google is officially labeling Maps Engine Lite as a beta, and it’ll only be available in English for the time being.
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Store Charging Patrons $5 For ‘Just Looking’, To Offset Losses From Internet Shoppers
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
To make up for pesky competition from the Internet, the owner of an Australian retail store is $5 for “just looking”, in order to offset losses from shoppers who browse and then buy online. “If you’re going to be asking bucketloads of questions, you’ve got to pay for the information,” Celiac Supplies owner, Georgina, to the , who asked that her last name not be published, after her store’s policy inadvertently went viral and led to . On her window, she posted the following notice: “As of the first of February, this store will be charging people a $5 fee per person for “just looking.”
The $5 fee will be deducted when goods are purchased.
Why has this come about?
There has been high volume of people who use this store as a reference and then purchase goods elsewhere. These people are unaware our prices are almost the same as the other stores plus we have products simply not available anywhere else.
This policy is line with many other clothing, shoe and electronic stores who are also facing the same issue.” According to the , 4 people have coughed up the $5, meaning her policy has earned a solid $20, which I’m sure is more than enough money to make up for harassing most of the customers who walk through her door. Watch the full interview between the shop owner and the below, complete with awesome Australian accents.
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Encoding.com Adds Dynamic Text Overlays To Its Cloud Encoding Platform
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
You might think that video encoding — and specifically cloud-based video encoding — is a commoditized market. After all, it’s difficult to differentiate a service that basically just takes one big file and makes it into a lot of different smaller files to be watched on a lot of different devices. With that premise, the decision to go with one vendor or another usually just comes down to speed, reliability and, most importantly, cost. While cloud encoding startup Encoding.com thinks that it competes well in all of those categories, the company is trying to add a few features that will set it apart from the competition. One of these features is dynamic text overlays, which it first showed off as part of a Google Hangout campaign late last year. The campaign, which the search giant hoped would convince users to use , included one bit with that included a personalized message to viewers. The holiday-themed video worked by gathering data from users and later presenting them with a personalized message that was added dynamically. For the Google campaign, the dynamic text overlay was part of a custom workflow that Encoding.com worked on to enable the custom message. Due to the large number of viewers, it was necessary for the company to ensure that the video upload, transcoding, text overlay, and delivery were all done in fewer than 30 seconds. At its peak, Encoding.com and Google were delivering 50 videos per second as part of the campaign. Encoding.com is making that capability available to others now, allowing clients to place custom text within their videos. By connecting their workflow via API, publishers will be able to programmatically add custom text to their own videos. The feature will allow them to select different time and frame positions within a source video, and then have videos dynamically created. The feature could be used to create personalized commercials integrating user data, or by inserting images into the storyline of a video to make it more suited to the user.
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Google Street View Launches Imagery Of Deserted Town Next To Fukushima Nuclear Plant
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
Two years after the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Google has made available of Namie-machi in the Fukushima exclusion zone. The area encompasses Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Plant, which after the disaster was . The 360-degree panoramic imagery, showing ruined buildings on empty streets, is both eerie and heartbreaking. Namie-machi has been empty since its 21,000 residents were evacuated on March 11, 2011, the day of the earthquake. Google began photographing the area earlier this month after an invitation from Namie-machi’s mayor Tamotsu Baba. The imagery is part of Google’s digital archive project . “Many of the displaced townspeople have asked to see the current state of their city, and there are surely many people around the world who want a better sense of how the nuclear incident affected surrounding communities, said Mayor Baba in an entry on . “Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering. But in Namie-machi time stands still,” he added. “With the lingering nuclear hazard, we have only been able to do cursory work for two whole years. We would greatly appreciate it if you viewed this Street View imagery to understand the current state of Namie-machi and the tremendous gravity of the situation.” Other areas impacted by the tsunami that have been photographed as part of the initiative . Google started of tsunami and earthquake damage a few months after the disaster. The project seeks to be a testament to the scale of the tsunami as different areas are gradually rehabiliated. In addition, Google’s post-earthquake intitiatives in Japan, where is still the top search engine, have the company after several cultural missteps, including earlier negative public reaction to Street View in the privacy-conscious country. Earlier this month, Google also , after the emergency response platform first . Earthquake and tsunami warnings for Japan appear on Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Now when users search for information during a crisis.
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gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 18 | null |
Google Gives Tablet Video Viewers A Taste Of Its Knowledge Graph With Play Movies & TV Update
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
We’ve all been there: you’ll be watching a movie when someone familiar enters the frame, and you just can’t place a name to the face. Well, if you’re watching said movie on an Android tablet, those days may soon be over. Google has just pushed out an update to its app lets users tap into the search giant’s Knowledge Graph as soon as they pause a flick. Long story short, users who pause in the middle of a supported film or TV episode will be treated to “info cards” that display related information like related films and actor profiles. It sounds novel enough, but it’s really the little touches that seem the most impressive — tapping on a character’s face for instance prompts the app to identify the person’s face to populate the info card with the right actor info, and it’s even savvy enough to identify background music. Granted, this isn’t a strictly new concept (the Google Play Books app has been able to this for ), but it’s certainly a welcome addition to the Google video fold. A brief aside: for all the ink (digital and otherwise) spilt on the promise of tablets as an entertainment companion, this is easily one of the neater steps forward for mobile video that I’ve seen. Maybe it’s just me, but I hardly ever feel the compulsion to socially share my media consumption habits — well, beyond dropping the occasional Doctor Who reference in the TechCrunch backchannel that is. Other apps may focus on bringing those conversations to the fore, surfacing context-sensitive information in an unobtrusive way is a more substantive addition in my book. Sadly, the scope of the feature is pretty limited for now — according to Google’s list those info cards will only appear in a about 192 movies (though its working to build out its library of supported titles), and even then the cards will only appear if you’re using the app on a tablet running Android 4.0 or later in the United States. Yeesh. Google eventually aims to roll out this feature on a wider scale, but there’s no word yet on when you trivia-hungry international types will be able to get in on the fun.
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Duo Is A DIY 3D Motion Sensing Controller
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
The is a 3D motion sensing controller, much like the and the – but with a DIY twist. Whereas the Leap Motion Controller comes in a small and elegant package, the Duo is meant to be tinkered with. A $20 contribution on their Kickstarter page is enough to nab detailed instructions, a comprehensive list of the off-the-shelf components, and CAD files – enough for hardcore DIYers to jump right in and assemble their very own motion controller. For the less courageous, a $140 contribution will get you a fully assembled Duo, ready for plug and play out of the box. The Duo uses two PlayStation Eye cameras (a webcam for Sony’s PS3 gaming console that is readily available in stores) to detect motion. The demo videos on Duo’s website show that the webcams, coupled with Duo’s motion tracking software, work just a well as the Leap Motion Controller. The minimum operating range seems to be further away than the Leap, although that’s purely based on observation and I couldn’t find any concrete specs on their website. The video also shows the Duo breezing through Windows 8’s gesture based interface, just as you would with a Kinect. And of course, the Duo passed the prerequisite Fruit Ninja test with flying colors. Given that the Leap Motion Controller will soon be , it’s true that you’re paying a premium for a device that has pretty much the same functionality. Motion sensing technology is red-hot and there are plenty of we’ve chronicled that are also worthy of your attention. If anything, the one thing that Duo has going for it is that you can take it apart and mod it to your heart’s content. If you’re willing to pay a premium for that ability alone, you can check out Duo’s Kickstarter page . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U180f3XG20o?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360]
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Google Glass Will Be Made In The U.S.A., Report Claims, At An Assembly Facility In Santa Clara
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 |
Google Glass, the advanced head-mounted computing project the company is gearing up for a possible launch later this year, will be assembled in the U.S., according to a new report from the . The assembly will take place in a facility located in Santa Clara and managed by partner Hon Hai Precision, also known as Foxconn. Google is building the first run of its ambitious close to home so that it can be close to the action in order to tweak the process and easily add last-minute fixes into the mix, the FT’s unnamed sources say. Assembly will take place in the U.S., but will use components supplied mostly by partners in Asia. Google has a rather checkered history when it comes to making gadgets close to home, however: its , but the project was ultimately shelved without official explanation after it baffled early reviewers. As of today, of its #IfIHadGlass competition for early access to Project Glass devices, which will give 8,000 lucky people the opportunity to pay Google $1,500 for the device months before it launches to the general public. Production for those devices is said to be ramping up “in the coming weeks” according to the new report, at the facility located near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters. The effort to manufacture Glass at home likely has a lot to do with quality control for a product that for now will have an extremely high price tag and an extremely low unit count. But Foxconn has in the recent past talked about , and Apple got a specific callout during this year’s State of the Union address for , so this could be about more than just wanting to make sure the first production runs go very smoothly. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation or additional comment, and will update if they provide a response.
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Y Combinator-Backed GetGoing Helps You Find Big Discounts On Airfare — If You Let It Choose The Destination
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
Sure, socially-powered recommendations or good old-fashioned serendipity can be useful tools for discovery, but, when it comes to deciding where you’re going to take the family on vacation, you’re probably not going to just throw a dart at a dartboard and wing it. You’re probably going to spend some time researching and try to make an informed, democratic decision. If that’s the case, would you trust a travel site to pick a destination for you? Probably not. But what if relinquishing part of that choice meant you’d be able to purchase tickets for up to 40 percent less? , a San Francisco-based startup that launched last week, is betting that it can get you to roll the dice by doing just that. GetGoing on a mission to help travelers find discounted airfare. But that’s a difficult proposition. Of course, nearly all travelers are familiar with the seemingly ever-escalating price tag that comes with flying, and the struggles of the are well known. The high price of fuel, along with the high costs of building, operating and maintaining equipment and the unpredictability of weather and other exogenous events on businesses make for slim margins for airlines. In combination, they’ve forced airlines to charge for every conceivable convenience and raise ticket prices. But another contributing factor to the unprofitability of major airlines — something they’re not eager to report — is that they lose billions of dollars every year on unsold inventory, GetGoing co-founder and CEO Alek Vernitsky tells us. Nearly 20 percent of all airline seats fly empty, which translates to about 160 million unsold tickets each year and approximately $25 billion in lost revenues for airlines in the U.S. While airlines would like to offer discounted tickets, as they realize the high price and extra fees at every turn makes for a crappy customer experience, the dirty little secret is that they don’t do it more often because they don’t want to lose the extra revenue they get from business travelers. They want to offer discounts to the Average Joe, but they’re so cash-strapped that they feel they can’t include business flyers, who typically pay higher rates to fly, because their travel dates, itinerary (and general demand) is relatively fixed. What’s more, airlines also don’t want to cannibalize business from their digital lead-gen partners, like Expedia, which send them a lot of traffic. So, writ large, providing the right incentives for airlines to offer significant discounts is a tall order for startups and businesses inclined to tackle the problem. The decision to provide their data or partner with third-parties is something that happens at the board or C-suite level, Vernitsky says. It’s not a decision that’s made lightly, and doesn’t happen overnight. While most of its fellow startups from Y Combinator’s Summer 2012 batch have already launched, GetGoing had a longer road because it had to create a model that would appeal to both airlines and consumers — and hold the hands of airlines through a slow partnership process. At launch, however, the startup has deals with more than 10 of the major domestic and international airlines — deals that it has been able to ink because its technology allows carriers to distribute discounts to flexible, leisure travelers — and leisure travelers only. That is where this aforementioned element of choice (or lack thereof) comes into the picture. Here’s how it works: Users sign on to GetGoing via the usual process or through Facebook (I recommend the latter), at which point you can search for routes to over 1,000 destinations in 50 countries (and growing). The service allows you to select from particular regions (like “Africa & Middle East” or “Mexico & Caribbean”) and custom lists and categories (like “Adventure & Outdoor” or “Beaches & Sun”), or you can create your own. Once you’ve specified your dates and chosen your general destination category, GetGoing populates results with destinations (usually less than 20), which you can sort based on price or by those recommended specifically for you. Users can also filter based on how many stops the flights will make and by departing and arrival times (a la Kayak and Hipmunk). After whittling your picks down to two destinations (and after customizing the arrival and departure times, price and duration and so on), GetGoing then randomly books one of those two itineraries, only revealing the final destination after it has processed your payment. The idea, of course, is to get you tickets at prices that are significantly discounted. For example, I chose two tickets to Nassau (Bahamas) for $825 and San Juan (Puerto Rico) for $555, which GetGoing says saved me $250 and $195, respectively. The cheapest comparable ticket I could find via U.S. Airways (with 1 stop) was about $980. Definitely favorable in comparison, though not quite as much as GetGoing advertised. The startup claims to be able to get 20 to 40 percent discounts on its tickets on average, and to its credit, follow up searches all yielded discounts in that range. In theory, this model allows airlines to provide discounts only to those flexible leisure travelers, while selling unsold seats and protecting existing yield from business travelers. In turn, it enables to find better deals (nationally and internationally) across a growing set of carrier, to travel more often, spend less and explore destinations that may have otherwise been unaffordable. In addition, the GetGoing co-founder says that the selling point for airlines has been that if the service can find at adoption at scale, it could help them add $200 million to their bottom line, while providing an alternative distribution channel. “To be able to lower the price for a particular segment of their customer base is huge for airlines,” he says, “but they haven’t done this before because of the friction and the cost to build the infrastructure.” What’s more, airlines wouldn’t create a third-party service that offers customers the ability to fly with one of their competitors. While there may be plenty of incentive for airlines, GetGoing’s model still requires a leap of faith from everyday flyers. If you’re willing to be more serendipitous in your vacation planning, the service could be appealing, but the fact of the matter is that not everyone will be comfortable with giving up that control. The service does include some nifty, Gogobot-like features in its destination search, allowing users to explore the destination on a map and view pictures, and see which friends have been there (if you’re logged in via Facebook). Users can do this from within search results, and the more information and ability to explore the destination GetGoing can provide, the better the experience becomes. To that point, one of the biggest missing pieces is that GetGoing does not yet offer travelers the ability to book hotels and travel packages alongside airfare — nor can you apply frequent flier miles because you don’t know what airline you’ll be traveling until you book. But the GetGoing co-founders tell us that hotels and travel packages are next on the to-do list — as are cruises. Adding these features (and mobile apps), stands to make the experience significantly more appealing for leisure travelers. And, from my perspective, the addition of this functionality has a big chance to override the difficulty of having to give up control of your final destination, especially if it can offer a way to apply frequent flier miles once booked. Today, the co-founders tell us that the startup has raised several “large seed rounds” from Yuri Milner and a host of other investors, and is in the process of closing its series A financing. With new capital in the bank, GetGoing plans to add to its team of 30+ and continue growing its roster of airline partners. The startup definitely has one of the more interesting models in the travel space, and it will be interesting to see if Average Joes like you and me will be willing to take the leap of faith in exchange for discounts. The more features it has, the more it can be cross-platform and provide transparency around pricing, the better the chances become. For more, find
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Pinterest Launches New Data Analytic Tool For Businesses As It Prepares To Monetize
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
Pinterest has started rolling out Pinterest Web Analytics, a tool that will allow businesses to see how many visitors the content-sharing service is referring to their sites. The first feature, which shows data on how many people have pinned from a site, the number of views each pin has, and how many users have visited a site from Pinterest, is available for free today for companies with a . These new features make good on Pinterest’s promise to businesses late last year that it will introduce data analytic tools for companies to track Pinterest traffic. Pinterest, which began offering , is focusing this year on “building foundations to monetize,” founder Ben Silbermann . The Web site does not currently have paid ads, but it’s looking at a potential advertising system, as well as working with businesses to learn how Pinterest can result in sales of merchandise, a potential revenue source for the site. Pinterest recently , which includes case studies from companies including Etsy and Allrecipes. Other features Pinterest may unveil later this year include “suggestions” for users based on what they have already added to their boards. The company also plans to launch international sites this year. Despite its current lack of revenue, Pinterest from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, in round that put the company’s valuation at $2.5 billion. The Web site has already shown that it is a potent marketing tool for businesses. Last July, that Pinterest beat Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google in referral traffic. Furthermore, Pinterest users don’t just click over to e-commerce sites to ogle merchandise–they are 10 percent more likely to make a purchase than people who come over from other networks, .
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Enterprise Software-Defined Storage System SwiftStack Raises $6.1M From Mayfield
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
Enterprise storage company has raised $6.1 million in Series A funding led by Mayfield Fund with additional participation from Storm Ventures and UMC Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $7.6 million SwiftStack is building a software-defined storage solution specifically for object storage. The platform decouples the management from the underlying storage infrastructure, enabling customers to build pools of storage on hardware. As a result, the company says the storage system helps organizations with considerable amounts of data simplify operations to reduce overall operational costs. What this means is that application developers and operations teams can attempt to bring the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud inside their own data center. CEO Joe Arnold explains that more applications can also be supported using SwiftStack’s platform. Navin Chaddha, managing director of Mayfield Fund, explains the power of SwiftStack’s strorage-defined solution: “With SwiftStack, application developers and operations teams can leverage the power of the public cloud storage inside their own data center, kind of like Amazon S3-in-a-box.” The funding will be used for expansion of the company’s sales team, operations and product development.
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Russia’s Avito Becomes World’s 3rd Biggest Classifieds Site After $570M Deal With Naspers
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
South Africa’s Naspers has agreed to merge its two Russian online classified Web site with Avito in a $570 million deal that will make Avito the world’s third biggest classified site after Craigslist and China’s 58.com. As part of the deal, Naspers’ Web sites Slando.ru and OLX.ru will be merged into the Avito brand, . Naspers will also invest $50 million in cash into Avito, giving it an 18.6 percent stake in the newly created group. Other investors include Kinnevik Investments and Vostok Nafta, both Swedish investment funds, Northzone Ventures (an early investor in Spotify). Avito, which launched in 2007, is now expected to hold 25 percent share of the Russian classified market in terms of traffic and 15 percent share in terms of revenue. Last year the company generated $30 million in sales. Now that it has secured a large and stable user base, the company plans to start focusing on revenue generated from users and advertisers. The Web site currently has 140,000 users listing items each day, 40,000 of whom have never used the Web site before. In order for Avito to boost its revenue, it needs to have more sales coming from professional sellers who set up “stalls” to sell used goods on the site. About 4,000 small businesses currently pay for that kind of service, while it is free for consumers to list an item (they can pay for extras such as highlighted ads or more prominent search results). Boosting its reach is also an important part of Naspers’ growth strategy because one of the major challenges facing Russian e-commerce businesses is the lack of online transactions, since most deals are completed offline. Avito’s main opportunities for growth comes from increasing Internet penetration in regions outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Last May, Sonali de Rycker, a partner at Avito investor Accel Partners, said that 90 percent of Russia’s growth in Internet usage will come from the regions–and that users outside of major cities will be especially keen on Avito. “Classified works well because of the urban concentration and lack of retail services in the regions,” de Rycker . “We like the model because once you are number one it has a snowball effect–it’s really a winner-takes-all market.” Russia to become the largest Internet market in Europe. Domestic companies–including search engine Yandex, Mail.ru–dominate in Russia, similar to that of China’s. Investors are eager to grab a slice of the Russian pie–last May, Avito raised $75 million from local private equity firm Baring Vostok and Accel, along with existing investors Kinnevik and Northzone.
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TCTV Presents Highlights From The SXSWi Trade Show
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
From to , the SXSWi trade-show floor is a mixed bag. While not everything lent itself to an in-depth visit with the TCTV camera, we did find a few interesting companies in the mix. The trade show is an interesting admixture of media companies (WordPress had a nice presence) and apps alongside hardware and software startups. Visiting the trade show is sadly often an afterthought for most of the SXSW crowd – the lines to get into the keynotes are huge this year and you spend most of your time in them – so it was nice to get away from the show floor and see what was up. I don’t want to add any spoilers but let’s just say we got to meet a few weird characters, including the aforementioned yam and a very lost interstellar traveler.
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The Gigabot 3D Lets You Print Things That Are Bigger Than A Few Breadboxes
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
Austin-based re:3D just started a campaign for the Gigabot, a large-format 3D printer designed to build things on a 24x24x24 inch built envelope, allowing you to make much larger objects than you can with similar printers like the . You can get the bot kit for $2,500 or a pre-assembled unit for $4,000. The company was looking for a $40,000 pledge and has already surpassed $60,000, so there’s a good chance this thing will ship in time for when you need to build a 13,824 cubic-inch Christmas present. The team launched the project at SXSW, and the company is founded by Samantha Lynne Snabes and Matthew Fiedler and a number of others with experience in manufacturing and design. They write: It prints primarily in PLA right now because it does not have a heated build plate, but there are plans to offer that option in the future. While PLA isn’t ideal for some industrial situations, the plant-based plastic is still very usable and workable. You can check out the or just imagine what it would be like to print out your own head, to scale, in corn-based resin.
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Gina Bianchini On Leaning In So Hard You Fall Flat On Your Face
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
, the community website dedicated to women (and men) leaning into their ambitions, recently launched in conjunction with of Sheryl Sandberg’s conversation-sparking book Lean In. LeanIn.org co-founder , who is also the CEO of and an advisor to the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, says her inspiration to start LeanIn.org along with Sandberg came from her personal desire to be a better entrepreneur and build better teams. And you know, LEAN IN. Practical education around skills training for women and men together was missing, Bianchini says. “What if you could actually do something like what Khan Academy has done but with better teams and better dynamics in terms of being able to achieve innovation?” Bianchini says that although there is still a long way to go to achieve gender equality at the top, there is a burgeoning focus on what women can do as opposed to what holds them back. “I’ve grown very tired of the question, ‘Why aren’t there more women in technology?,'” she said. Bianchini admits to leaning in so hard that she has at times fallen on her face, but she insists she learned just as much from her failures as her successes. With LeanIn.org, Bianchini and Sandberg want to create a community that will enable members to take those sorts of chances as they with support from their peers. Watch the entire interview above.
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With Spotify On The Web Horizon, Rdio Takes Its Browser-Based Music Service To 7 New Markets; Now Reaching 24
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
The land grab for online music streaming services continues. On the heels of that is planning to take its web-based music player global to complement its desktop and mobile apps, competitor is extending its own browser-based music-streaming service to . Today, the company — founded and backed in 2010 by Skype/Kazaa/Joost co-founder Janus Friis — announced availability in Mexico, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, and Austria, taking the total number of countries served by Rdio to 24. Now, users in these seven markets will have access to Rdio’s catalog of 18 million tracks free of charge for six-month trials — no card payment details needed. Other features include many of the same ones that Spotify has been introducing more recently, including the ability to follow friends and “tastemakers,” collaborate on playlists and share tracks on social networks — in this case Facebook and Twitter. Rdio also today announced that it has extended the six-month trial to Brazil, which was not included with other Rdio markets in the original rollout of the . Germany, the other market excluded in January, is still left out. Users can also test the mobile service on a 14-day trial. That mobile service has also been updated, by way of a new with more social features and a few other features, and an . Rdio uses the free trial as a way to introduce users to the service without asking them to pay fees up front. There is some logic behind this. While Spotify, with an ad-based freemium model, has announced some 20 million users overall, with 5 million of them paying, it’s questionable whether Rdio has seen that same scale of growth for its service, which charges the local equivalents of Up to now, Rdio has been able to differentiate itself from Spotify in part because of its ubiquity on the web. But competitive pressure on Rdio could get a little heavier in the future. Spotify is currently testing out a web-based player in the U.K. “We’ve been letting a small number of users try out a beta version of our new web player. We’re now letting more U.K. users try out the player as we gear up for a wider rollout,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email. But we’ve also heard that this is just the test market ahead of a wider, global push. With Rdio already serving key markets like the U.S., much of Western Europe, and Brazil, the expansion to countries like Ireland and Lithuania is clearly a secondary-market expansion. But what it shows is that the company continues to build out its service in the overall streaming music land grab — a strategy that it plans to complement with new discovery tools in the months ahead. “Rdio is the best product on the market for discovering music, and we will continue to improve that discovery experience by developing smarter tools to surface artists and songs our users love,” said Drew Larner, CEO of Rdio, in a statement. “By opening the social circle to seven new international markets, we’re making Rdio an increasingly global way to play, discover, and share music.” Beyond discovery and geography, Rdio’s growth will also come in the form of new media, with Rdio’s employees currently working on a new video venture, called . This is not a pivot, but rather an expansion: Vdio will sit alongside the existing Rdio music service. Todd Berman, the VP of engineering at Rdio, describes it as a “sister offering,” created by Rdio’s people and existing on shared infrastructure. “We’re not moving away from music in any way, shape, or form,” Berman said in an interview, noting that the reason for the expansion is not as a statement of how well the Rdio offering has done against music streaming competitors like Spotify or Pandora, but because “people are interested in consuming content, not just music.” Berman himself is actually stepping down from his role this week.
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Agile Project Management Software Development Company Rally Software Files For $70M IPO
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
, a company that provides Agile project management applications for software development, has filed its initial S-1 for a public offering. According to , the company will raise as much as $70 million in the offering (but often these numbers are just placeholders). Rally’s products and services help businesses implement Agile software development and Lean practices with the right combination of tools, services and best practices. According to the filing, as of October 31, 2012, the company had 154,982 paid users and more than 1,000 customers, including 36 of the Fortune 100 companies. Rally’s clients include Cisco, Microsoft, Aol, and Hewlett-Packard. Rally currently employees 285 staffers. In terms of revenue, fiscal 2011 sales came in at $29.7 million. This grew to $41.3 million for revenue in 2012, up 29 percent. For the nine months ended October 31, 2011 and 2012, total revenue grew from $30.1 million to $41.4 million, up 38 percent. For Fiscal 2012, Agile Software’s renewal rate among existing customers was 129 percent, taking into account paid seat nonrenewals, upgrades and downgrades. The Boulder, Colorado-based company is not yet profitable, and recorded net losses of $9.9 million, $11.6 million and $6.7 million in fiscal 2011, 2012 and the nine months ended October 31, 2012, respectively. The company has been fairly acquisitive over the past few years, buying and among others. The company, which competes with another fellow IPO hopeful Atlassian, has raised close to in funding from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Greylock, Boulder Ventures, and others.
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Google Shopping Express Test Partners Include Target And Other Local SF Stores
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
We’ve been getting all sorts of new info since we first ran our story about ,” its same-day and competitor. While we originally reported that the service would be $10 or $15 cheaper than Amazon Prime – so $69 or $64 a year – we’re now hearing that the pricing is still in flux. While Google irons out the kinks, we’re hearing, Googlers are getting the product for free if they sign up for membership — with non-members paying $4.99 per delivery. The company has lined up eight stores in the Bay Area, according to our sources, and we’ve heard from two sources that omni-store Target is part of the coterie. We were also forwarded the email below, supposedly from Google PR, that names Babies”R”Us and Nob Hill Foods as other Shopping Express partners, with the focus group including local stores of all sizes. I’ve emailed Google, Target, Nob Hill Foods and Babies”R”Us for confirmation. I’m pretty sure this will be the first and last time I email Babies”R”Us for confirmation for anything. While we still have little idea when Google plans on launching the service, the below email does say that the test is now available for all Googlers. And might be coming soon to a Babies”R”Us near you. Hi, As you may have seen, there was a leak last night about Google Shopping Express, including several very specific product details. Our PR team is working to quiet this down, but we need your help — please don’t add fuel to the fire by discussing or even confirming Google Shopping Express. If you are contacted by a member of the press, please follow normal procedures and refer them to [email protected]. But wait, you asked me to ship to my home to help you test … so what about spouses and roommates? We trust your judgement. If your roommate writes a tech blog or works for a company in this space, please don’t ship it home. But if you feel it’s safe, then by all means, we still really need your help dogfooding this. After weeks of testing, we’re now excited to open Google Shopping Express to every Googler in the bay area including temps, vendors and contractors. Save yourself a trip to the store and stock up at places like Target, Nob Hill Foods, Babies “R” Us and more. Googlers who sign up early for a free membership will receive free same day delivery for one year! Non-members pay $4.99 per delivery per store. *************
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AnyPerk Raises $1.4M From Digital Garage And Others To Help Startups Offer Perks To Employees
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
which aims to provide companies and startups with discounts on web services and employee perks, is announcing $1.4 million in new funding from Digital Garage, Ben Lewis (a founder of Tapjoy and Karma), Michael Liou, CyberAgentVenture and Shogo Kawada (founder of DeNA). AnyPerk is an easy way for any company to provide perks for employees. By signing up for $5 an employee, companies can offer discounts on AMC and Regal movie tickets, money off on cable services like Dish Network, deals on Dell computers, 1800 Flowers and free coupons for Costco. Companies like Pinterest, Klout, GetAround, BirchBox, Seamless and Pandora are all using AnyPerk to power employee perks. The company, which also just redesigned its site, originally launched out of Y Combinator last year. AnyPerk’s founders, Taro Fukuyama, Atsu Takahashi, and Sunny Tsang, have a history of starting successful startups. Takahashi co-founded Nobot, a smartphone ad-network company acquired for $19 million by Japanese company KDDI.
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Google Details Glass Mirror API At SXSW, Shows Off Gmail, NYT, Evernote And Path Integrations
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
At SXSW this afternoon, Google provided developers with a first glance at the Google Glass Mirror API, the main interface between Google Glass, Google’s servers and the apps that developers will write for them. In addition, Google showed off a first round of applications that work on Glass, including how Gmail works on the device, as well as integrations from companies like the New York Times, Evernote, Path and others. The Mirror API is essentially a , which should make developing for it very easy for most developers. The Glass device essentially talks to Google’s servers and the developers’ applications then get the data from there and also push it to Glass through Google’s APIs. All of this data is then presented on Glass through what Google calls “timeline cards.” These cards can include text, images, rich HTML and video. Besides single cards, Google also lets developers use what it calls bundles, which are basically sets of cards that users can navigate using their voice or the touchpad on the side of Glass. Here is a brief video of the Glass demo at SXSW today (via ): [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGVFMWvBSA?feature=player_detailpage] It looks like sharing to Google+ is a built-in feature of the Mirror API, but as Google’s Timothy Jordan noted in today’s presentation, developers can always add their own sharing options, as well. Other built-in features seem to include voice recognition, access to the camera and a text-to-speech engine. Because Glass is a new and unique form factor, Jordan also noted, Google is setting a few rules for Glass apps. They shouldn’t, for example, show full news stories but only headlines, as everything else would be too distracting. For longer stories, developers can always just use Glass to read text to users. Essentially, developers should make sure that they don’t annoy users with too many notifications, and the data they send to Glass should always be relevant. Developers should also make sure that everything that happens on Glass should be something the user expects, said Jordan. Glass isn’t the kind of device, he said, where a push notification about an update to your app makes sense. As part of today’s presentation, Jordan also detailed some Glass apps Google has been working on itself, and apps that some of its partners have created. The New York Times app, for example, shows headlines and then lets you listen to a summary of the article by telling Glass to “read aloud.” Google’s own Gmail app uses voice recognition to answer emails (and it obviously shows you incoming mail, as well). Evernote’s Skitch can be used to take and share photos, and Jordan also showed a demo of social network Path running on Glass to share your location. So far, there is no additional information about the Mirror API on any of Google’s usual sites, but we expect the company to release more information shortly and will update this post once we hear more.
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CAA, William Morris, Kevin Rose & More Back Hot Online Classroom CreativeLIVE, Flickr Founder Joins Board
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
, the startup looking to bring a live, online classroom to creative entrepreneurs, announced today that it has raised $8 million in series A financing from Creative Artists Agency, William Morris Endeavor, CrunchFund and Google Ventures. The new investors join Greylock in backing CreativeLIVE, which , bringing the startup’s total (series A) funding to just over $8 million. Greylock’s investment saw James Slavet joined CreativeLIVE’s board of directors, with Mika Salmi, the former president of Viacom Digital, joining the startup as its new CEO at the same time. Today, as a result of its latest round, the startup announced that Flickr founder and Etsy chairwoman Caterina Fake would become the newest addition to CreativeLIVE’s board of directors. Part of the excitement is due to the fact that CreativeLIVE is attacking a newly-hot space within education. Massively open online courses (a.k.a. MOOCs) were the most buzzed-about topics in EdTech last year. However, while the market for free, online education is potentially enormous, CreativeLIVE is hardly alone in its attempts to bring quality online classes and lectures to the masses. Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, Udemy, EdX, StraighterLine, 2U, Instructure, SkillShare, Lynda.com and many more recognize the market opportunity. In fact, Accel and Spectrum into Lynda.com in January for this very reason. Taking a page out of Lynda.com’s book, Chase Jarvis and Craig Swanson launched CreativeLIVE in early 2010 to bring the same kind of quality video instruction one would find on Lynda.com for Adobe products or technical education to the more creatively-inclined (and entrepreneurial) students. Like Lynda, the startup takes video quality seriously and has become a production operation just as much as a virtual video (hosting) library, developing its own studios in Seattle and San Francisco. CreativeLIVE then uses those studios to film (and offer) live, streaming classes in HD video, which students can access for no cost. If students want to watch the class again or missed the live airing, they can buy the video for between $29 and $149, . The founders believe that this combination of live instruction and the ability to re-watch at any time via a pay-as-you-go pricing model will give them a leg up on the competition. The startup has also been going in a slightly different direction from companies like Udemy or ShowMe, which want to make it easy for any teacher to put their own lessons or classes online, instead curating both its content and instructors — through a high-touch process . In October, the startup told us that its learning platform had been used by over one million students from over 200 countries, which was impressive considering the pace of its growth, which was completely organic. With its strategic investment from Creative Artists and William Morris — two of the largest talent agencies in the world — CreativeLIVE will have access to a sizable pool of talent from which to draw its instructors. With new talent and seeing as it’s all backed by its simple revenue model, the founders want to make CreativeLIVE into the largest online classroom on the Web. Since October, growth has been encouraging in that regard, they say, with revenue increasing 400 percent year-over-year and a 500 percent increase in course offerings in 2012. The average class size on CreativeLIVE is 60,000, the founder said, and one class saw over 150,000 students participate. That traction has allowed them to pay “some teachers up to six figures for just three days of work,” they said. Not bad for three days work. Find [ ]
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BandPage Helps Any Musician Get Richer By Selling One-Of-A-Kind Experiences To Top Fans
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
Whales are big spenders, the ones that prop up casinos and social games. In music, whales are bands’ rabid fans. ‘s new “ ” feature lets artists sell them seats on stage, unique merch, or even a trip to the bowling alley with the band. The shift from MP3s to streaming means monetizing the long tail that earns musicians cents not dollars, but BandPage Experiences could keep them afloat. Whether you’re a chart-topping artist or a garage band, somebody loves you, and they’re willing to pay a ton to get closer to you. creates a marketplace and an embeddable e-commerce widget where artists can offer less-scalable VIP access, meet-ups with band, and limited-edition merchandise. It’s a smart new experiment from BandPage. Once known as RootMusic, BandPage lets artists set up a profile app on Facebook full of streaming music, tour dates and media. At one point it had 500,000 bands and 32 million monthly Facebook users. It made money on a cheap subscription to extra customization and virality options, and raised a total of . But Facebook’s Timeline redesign a year ago . Without the ability to be a band’s default landing page for non-fans, traffic plummeted to around 1 million users. Since then it’s tried to unshackle from Facebook with BandPage Everywhere and Connect, which lets musicians create synced websites and widgets so they can publish once but update all their online presences. BandPage CEO J Sider explains that most artists are missing out on huge revenue by restricting themselves to standard touring, merch and music sales. “It’s like a coffee shop that’s only open two or three times a year. We want to open it up year-round. If they gave you more experiences, you’d be willing to spend more on the [artists] you really love. It’s for well-known acts down to bands that are just starting out [for who] earning a couple hundred extra bucks per show can make a big difference.”
Along with helping artists get richer, Experiences turns BandPage into an e-commerce company that will earn a 15 percent cut of what bands earn by offering special treatment through Experiences. By definition, artists can’t sell too many of these . BandPage has to hope the idea of hyper-monetizing the short head rather than focusing on the long tail catches on. Sider likens this new chapter in BandPage’s evolution to aggregating what fans waste time wishing and searching for. “There are fan clubs across the Internet, but as fans it can be hard to reach them. We can create a marketplace the way Airbnb and Kickstarter did. We see a huge potential for musicians to make a living off of it.”
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Sprint To Get A ‘Version 2.0’ Of The All-Touch Z10 Later In 2013, Reports Claim
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
It was something of a black eye for BlackBerry when it came out that Sprint wouldn’t be carrying the all-touch Z10 BB10 smartphone. A huge relaunch, integral to the company’s future success, and one of the four major U.S. carriers was taking a pass on the first hardware. But the carrier is going to sell the keyboard-toting Q10, and will also sell what could be a Z10 successor, complete with touch-only interface, later in 2013. that Sprint would have an all-touch device, which it described as not just a slightly modified Z10. This new phone is being launched in the second half of the year, according to AllThingsD’s sources, likely well after the launch of the upcoming Q10 with its hardware keyboard. followed up this earlier report with a supporting claim that describes the Sprint handset as a “version 2.0” of the Z1o, according to its sources. Sprint’s decision to pass on the Z10 while all its competitors look poised to offer both that handset and the Q10 makes a little more sense in light of this rumor. The device may be a carrier-exclusive variant, which is something BlackBerry has been known to do in the past in its former guise as RIM. But both sources of these new reports seem to indicate that what we’ll see won’t be simply a refreshed Z10 with some different specs, but a different all-touch device. No word on where it might fit in term of appealing to upscale or more budget-minded consumers. A Z10 follow-up might actually be worth waiting for those interested in BB10, since the Z10 itself was impressive, but nonetheless a . Some more time to bake might be just what the doctor ordered for an all-touch BlackBerry 10 device, and Sprint might be banking on that to help it become the carrier of choice for RIM’s next-gen mobile OS. We’ve contacted BlackBerry to see if there’s any official comment about device release plans for Sprint, and will update if any is forthcoming.
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More Layoffs And Downsizing At Vostu, South America’s One-Time Frontrunner in Gaming
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
, the onetime darling of the social gaming world in South America, appears to have just had a fresh round of layoffs over the last few weeks. Multiple sources who have worked with the company said that Vostu laid off about 100 people and is now down to somewhere between 50 and 70 employees. Vostu has not replied to multiple requests for comment. This is a huge decline for the company, which took at least $46 million in funding from investors including Accel Partners, Tiger Technology Global, Intel Capital and General Catalyst. At the end of 2011, the company had around 580 employees spread across Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and New York and claimed that 25 percent of Internet users in Brazil played Vostu games. So the company’s headcount is now about one-tenth of what it was two years ago. It looks like a perfect storm of factors created headwinds for the company. Orkut’s gradual decline to Facebook in Brazil meant that Vostu had to play on a more competitive field against established social gaming companies from the U.S. and Europe. The company apparently started spending in an ROI-negative way on marketing and user acquisition on the Facebook platform, according to one source. The Facebook platform has also changed dramatically over the last two to three years, in curbing virality for certain kinds of games. Many developers like Kabam and Zynga have transitioned to focusing on mobile platforms to reduce their exposure to Facebook, although other companies like King.com and Wooga have thrived in this new environment. At the same time, Zynga’s weak post-IPO performance has put a damper on valuations and large-scale acquisitions across the board for the gaming industry. That meant that any expectations for an exit had to be seriously downscaled. Two sources said that the company had been negotiating a sale for either the whole company or a fraction of it as of last month. There were also internal management and political issues with the engineering and product teams unable to come to a consensus on specs that would work for various games. That left the company organizationally unable to add features or service games in a way that would keep players engaged. “Essentially, Vostu was unable to take risks and that brought the company down,” says one source. Two of Vostu’s co-founders Mario Schlosser and Daniel Kafie left their positions as chief scientist and CEO early last year, while Matias Recchia and Andres Bernasconi were left in charge. It just left this month , according to their LinkedIn profiles. They may be room for hope, though. , said that Kafie may be back in the ring as CEO. One of our sources said this was possible and if that’s the case, Vostu would be “in good hands.” “I have lot of trust in Daniel Kafie,” they said. “They will reinvent the business of this company.”
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Julie Uhrman Recalls Being ‘Scared Shitless’ When She Launched OUYA’s Kickstarter Campaign
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
When launched campaign for its Android-based gaming console, CEO Julie Uhrman said she had “no idea” whether it would succeed. “I was scared shitless,” she said. Uhrman, who gave a keynote interview this afternoon at South by Southwest Interactive, admitted, “our path to market was unique” (though thanks to Kickstarter it’s becoming less unique). After all, when the campaign launched, there was no product — just an idea and a team. There wasn’t even really a website, but instead a URL that redirected to the OUYA kickstarter campaign. On the first day of the campaign, Uhrman said she was awake at 5:45 in the morning to hit the button for the Kickstarter page to go live. That, she said, was “the moment where we no longer had control.” The team had no way to know how people would respond to the idea, or even if someone might decide to copy it: “There is no special sauce here.” For the next few hours, Uhrman said she was busy sending out emails. Her family and close friends came over a few hours later, and they all called in sick as they kept refreshing the page to get the latest numbers. By lunchtime, she said they knew that “this was something” and there was “a void in the marketplace” for a more open, affordable game console supporting a broader ecosystem of games. Eight hours and 22 minutes after launching, OUYA had raised $1 million, shooting past its $950,000 goal. In the end, it raised $8.6 million. Uhrman said that amount is enough to run the company and to deliver the first big wave of consoles to Kickstarter backers ( . However, she said that the real key was enlisting the support of 63,416 Kickstarter backers — if she’d raised the money from a single investor, it wouldn’t have been enough to get OUYA to where it is today. In fact, Uhrman said that she’d tried to raise money through more traditional avenues, but no one wanted to invest in a hardware startup. Not that the response to the campaign was entirely positive. For the first two or three months after it launched, Uhrman said the top Google result was a PCMag article titled “ .” The skepticism, Uhrman said, came from that aforementioned non-traditional path. So why didn’t she even bother with the website? “The reality is, I just focused on one thing, which was the campaign,” she said. The Verge’s Josh Topolsky, who was conducting the interview, followed up by joking asking, “ OUYA a scam?” To show that it’s not, Uhrman called out for anyone who had already tried out the developer units ( ). One audience member said that they had, and that it definitely wasn’t a scam. (Whew.) Uhrman said that what OUYA has already accomplished in terms of creating the console was hard, but the real challenge is building an ecosystem of game developers. There are 481 titles announced so far, she said — they include some notable wins, including for Double Fine Adventure, Tim Schaefer’s Kickstarter-financed game. Beyond recounting OUYA’s history so far, Uhrman also talked about her broader vision for the company, .
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 27 | null |
Unicorn Apocalypse Is Real And It Sucks
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
Unicorn Apocalypse, the mobile game Samsung promoted in its TV ads that began airing at the , isn’t fictional after all – it’s a real, playable game . Generally speaking, the Samsung ads, designed by an agency called 72andSunny, were both relevant and memorable – they even featured cameos from Tim Burton, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd at times. For those unfamiliar, the commercials , by touting the enterprise-friendliness of Samsung’s devices. An ongoing series, they feature the team at a generic startup shop, where a group of young people is working to put out a mobile game called “Unicorn Apocalypse.” As it turns out, Samsung which was used in the TV commercials, and the winning entry game from the developers at . The plot, apparently, has to do with a unicorn described as the “harbinger of the apocalypse.” Players will run the unicorn across an urban landscape, jumping over rooftops and avoiding the “deadly unicorn traps” that soldiers from the Anti Unicorn Force has deployed. There are also three “boss” levels to beat, and metal soundtrack to accompany said unicorn’s spree. Or something. But as much fun as that sounds, as it turns out, the game is actually…well…it’s rather bad. The app currently has a 2.1 star rating in Google Play, where 228 users out of 375 have given it the lowliest 1-star review. The game appears to be buggy, according to users’ comments, who also point out that it feels like a rip-off of the more popular Robot Unicorn Attack. “After a minute of playing the unicorn just runs off an edge into an endless pit of fire. Points are still collected, but the unicorn isnt [sic] even on the screen,” reads one review from user Darshan Mand. “Thought It would be good when I saw the commercial but the game is like it was made by a 5 year old,” says another, Michael Robb. “I wish it was possible to give this game negative stars,” says Maurice Coleman, “It’s THAT bad!” The general sentiment here is that Samsung squandered its opportunity to impress, after touting the game so much in its TV commercials. But Samsung has also played a risky game with its brand here by making a low-quality game whose development was outsourced to others. people are going to download and try this thing. And the whole point of the commercial series was that Samsung devices helped the Unicorn Apocalypse team work better together to make the game a success. So is the lasting takeaway from the actual game’s launch, and subsequent suckiness is…what? That maybe they should have used iPhones? [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbF0rOokvF4?feature=player_embedded] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fcUf4d-Y3s?feature=player_embedded]
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After Previously Blocking It, Microsoft Now Enables Flash By Default On IE10 For Windows 8 And RT
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 |
Today, Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8’s Metro/Modern UI mode and on Windows RT and only allows sites on Microsoft’s curated Compatibility View (CV) lists to play Flash content. Tomorrow, : all Flash content will run by default and the CV list will now be used to block sites from playing Flash content. Windows 8 users previously had to switch to the desktop mode to view Flash-enabled site. Now, however, Microsoft says only about 4 percent of the “thousands of domains tested” are still incompatible, so the team has decided that switching the policy around was the right thing to do. That’s a pretty unexpected change, but Microsoft that after thorough “testing over the past several months, the vast majority of sites with Flash content are now compatible with the Windows experience for touch, performance, and battery life.” More sites should “just work” in IE10, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group manager Rob Mauceri writes, and “the primary device you walk around with should give you access to all the Web content on the sites you rely on. Otherwise, the device is just a companion to a PC.” Before the launch of Windows 8 and RT, Microsoft worked with Adobe to develop a version of Flash that is optimized for touch – obviously one of the central features of Windows 8. Microsoft, however, worried that Flash would degrade battery life, security and reliability, so the first version of IE10 in Metro mode for Windows 8 and RT relied on the CV list to just allow sites that were touch-enabled and didn’t have any obvious negative effects on other aspects of the experience. Starting tomorrow, Microsoft’s site, which it last month to help developers ensure their sites work on Internet Explorer 10, will also feature a tool that allows developers to check whether their sites are on the new Flash block list.
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Sequoia Capital In Singapore After A Year, Has Yet To Invest In A Local Startup
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
When landed in Singapore quietly in 2012, the buzz around town was that a big-name US fund being in the country was going to really jolt the market and provide serious cred to the startups here. The Indian team running operations here, however, appears to have spent the last year of its time in the island state helping startups in its India portfolio expand into Singapore, rather than directly investing in startups here. However, the company just moved into a fancy new co-working space called , and is its anchor tenant, so it could be a sign that it’s trying to get closer to local startups. Previously, it operated out of a service office in High Street. Singapore is a popular choice as a base for foreign companies looking to expand into Southeast Asia, because it’s a mature market with plenty of infrastructure available. But as a tiny country, it’s not often the main addressable user base, and startups originating from Singapore are also taught to have expansion plans charted. Early last year, Sequoia Capital India MD, Shailendra Jit Singh, expressed interest in having the fund’s companies . Sequoia Cap in the US also appeared to have been eyeing activity in Singapore for a while—it had its first offsite meeting in the country in 2011, and was with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong about its presence here. The Prime Minister’s Office oversees its R&D arm, the National Research Foundation (NRF), which has been busy backing local venture capital firms here over the past few years. Its Technology Incubation Scheme is a program that distributes seed funding to startups picked by 11 NRF-appointed VCs. The NRF matches investment values in the proportion of 85 percent to 15 percent—the larger portion dished out by the government. This allows the VCs here to provide bigger sums of seed capital to startups, with much of the risk absorbed by the NRF. Former NRF projects head, Yinglan Tan, was also pulled over to Sequoia Capital India’s team in July last year, where he is now a venture partner based in Singapore. When I ran into Tan in Manila a couple of months ago, he was evasive about Sequoia’s activities in Singapore, but was happy to try to set up meetings with their existing portfolio companies in Singapore—all Indian-based startups, except for Airbnb and Evernote. Some of these companies that are being incubated in Singapore by Sequoia Cap include Via, Druva, Mu Sigma, Idea Device and Practo. Two months on, those meetings have yet to happen, but word on the street is that Tan has been meeting with some Singapore-based startups that are looking to raise Series A or B rounds, and are looking to expand beyond the island. One that I know of provides Wi-Fi infrastructure. As for its current startups here, is pretty sizable. It operates a flight booking portal similar to Expedia and Zuji, and has about 1,200 employees, the bulk of which are in India, with some in Indonesia and another team in the Philippines. It also lists hotels, and has about 45,000 listings, with plans to add more. started in Pune, India and is now operationally HQed in Sunnyvale, according to Jaspreet Singh, its CEO and founder. The company provides a backup system for mobile devices in the enterprise. is a Bangalore-based data analytics company. Last month, it struck up a deal with MasterCard that valued the company at $1 billion, according to in India. is also a Bangalore startup, and makes a runbook automation system. Runbook automation is a set of technologies that helps take out some of the manual system administration tasks for IT departments. As for the two US-based firms, Airbnb opened its Singapore office late in last year, and Evernote has been in the country for a . Sequoia Cap US declined to comment further on its plans for Singapore.
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The Dash Car Dongle Wants To Make You A Better Driver By Syncing With Your iPhone
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
I love my tiny little Mazda, but I’ll be honest — I still don’t completely understand how it . That’s never really bothered me before (I’d much rather geek out over a phone or something) but a from a has me itching to pay more attention to what’s really going on under the hood. Long story short, Dash combines a Bluetooth 4.0-enabled dongle that plugs into your car’s on-board diagnostics port with an iPhone app that gives you up-to-date information how on your car is holding up. Yes, I know that probably sounds very familiar. We’ve seen a few startups tapping into that particular port recently — inked deals with local auto dealers to more broadly distribute its always-on diagnostics and tracking gadget earlier this year, and got plenty of attention for taking a similar concept and combining it with an awfully handsome iPhone app interface. Dash’s approach seems to resemble the latter slightly more than the former, but at their core they’re all trying to accomplish the same mission: to improve the driving experience by shining light on data that wasn’t always easily accessible. So should you consider Dash over something like the ultra-slick Automatic when both devices are both slated to cost around $69? That all comes down to how you feel about the little tricks that set Dash apart from the oft-hyped California startup’s service. In addition to tracking fuel usage, passing along notifications when your car’s components have gone awry and letting people locate their cars on a map, Dash users can use their smartphone as a secondary display of sorts for realtime information like current speed, engine RPM, and fuel economy. The big idea behind latter is that you’ll be able to find an environmentally-friendly sweet spot while cruising along, though chances are you’ve already got some sort of indicator telling you how fuel-efficient your driving is if you’re driving a more recent car. Still, since U.S. cars from as far back as 1996 have ODB ports there are plenty of drivers who could stand to benefit from this sort of info. Oh, and a side note: if Dash appeals to you because your car’s built-in speedometer and tachometer don’t work, you should get that taken care of first. In case you were hoping to bring your social fixation into your car too, all that driving data can be automatically uploaded to an associated online Dash account. From there people can compare their own metrics to their fellow Dash users and pick up on best practices for squeezing optimal performance out of their rides (sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a way to mock them mercilessly for driving like your grandmother). What’s more, users can also record and share in-car video with speed and engine information overlaid on top of it, well, just because. Those of you looking to make your iPhone an extension of your car have to consider that the Dash still seems like a long way from fruition. At time of writing the team’s Kickstarter campaign has raised just over $15,000 from backers, and is ultimately shooting to top $750,000 before May 11. Should the Dash team meet that lofty goal though, they hope to get the first batch of dongles out sometime this June — just in time for summer roadtrip season. Sadly, just like with Automatic, Android users will have to wait until later in the year to get their mobile car diagnostics on.
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Business Insider’s Owen Thomas Is In Talks To Be The New Editor At ReadWrite
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
My old boss is very close to becoming the new editor-in-chief at the -owned tech site , according to sources with knowledge of the company. I’m hearing that it’s not quite a done deal, but that it’s looking very likely. Naturally, I called Owen to ask if this was the case, but he declined to comment. A SAY spokesperson told me, “There’s obviously a lot of interest in ReadWrite. There are a lot of good candidates in the mix, and no one’s been hired yet.” (Just to reiterate — I’m not saying he’s been hired, just that the discussions are pretty far along.) Owen may still be best known in startup circles as the former editor of Valleywag. He’s currently the West Coast Editor at Business Insider, and he was also the founding editor at The Daily Dot, executive editor at VentureBeat, editorial director at NBC, and a reporter/editor at Business 2.0. He’s definitely drawn his share of controversy (I was working for him at VentureBeat when Elon Musk called him “the Jayson Blair of Silicon Valley”), but he’s also a funny, well-connected writer, and an editor who I learned a lot from. Earlier this month, we got the scoop that then-EIC . After the post went up, SAY VP of Social Ted Rheingold called to reiterate that it’s “a very open position with lots of interest and lots of candidates.” It sounds like I may have been a little premature in saying “probably” in the headline, so I changed it to “in talks.”
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With Alternative Offers From Blackstone & Icahn On The Table, Dell Filing Shows It Will Push Ahead With $24.4B Silver Lake Merger
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
Dell that it has filed its initial proxy materials with the SEC in connection with a merger agreement between Dell, its Chairman and CEO Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners. Under the terms of the deal, shareholders would received $13.65 in cash for each share of stock, which would be valued at about $24.4 billion. In the rather lengthy filing, some of Dell’s biggest shareholders like activist billionaire Carl Icahn have urged the company to turn down the deal proposed by Dell and Silver Lake and allow shareholders to stay on as active investors, . The company has essentially been publicly shopping itself around to private-equity firms as part of its negotiated agreement with Silver Lake, during which it received “two non-binding alternative acquisition proposals,” including one from and one from investors affiliated with Icahn. Blackstone’s offer would allow portions of the computer maker to remain a publicly traded company, and Icahn (and JPMorgan’s supporting review) necessarily indicate that that this agreement would limit Dell’s financial flexibility and would not be the optimal road to take. In its letter to shareholders, Dell said that it will continue to work with Silver Lake and Icahn towards what would constitute a more appealing offer for the company and its shareholders, but the letter basically signals that the company will look to move forward with its agreement to merge with Silver Lake. It has yet to see a better alternative. The letter to shareholders from The Special Committee of Dell’s board of directors, which was included along with Dell’s filing today, is included below. March 29, 2013
Dear Shareholders, Today, at the direction of the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Dell Inc., the company filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission a preliminary proxy statement relating to the proposed acquisition of Dell by affiliates of Silver Lake Partners and Michael S. Dell. Full Range of Alternatives Evaluated
When the Special Committee was formed last August, we set out to evaluate the full range of strategic and financial alternatives available to the company, including a potential going-private transaction. To assist us in this effort, we hired an experienced group of independent legal and financial advisors and, in addition, retained a top management consulting firm to help us evaluate the risks and opportunities in both the PC business and the company’s effort to transform itself into a more enterprise-centric business. That process, which included more than 25 Special Committee meetings over a period of approximately five and a half months, has highlighted to all of us the significant risks and uncertainties that the company faces as a stand-alone public company. As a result, we as a Committee believe strongly that a transaction that shifts to the buyer the risks associated with Dell’s business, at an acceptable valuation, would be beneficial for Dell’s shareholders. Silver Lake/Michael Dell Transaction Shifts Risks While Providing Attractive and Certain Cash Premium
The current Silver Lake and Michael Dell transaction delivers $13.65 per share in cash – a 37% premium to Dell’s 90-day average price and a 25% premium to the unaffected price prior to reports in the media about the proposed deal. We believe that this significant, immediate and certain premium offers superior value to owning Dell as a stand-alone entity today. As part of our agreement with Silver Lake and Michael Dell, we negotiated a robust “go shop” process, which included a 45-day period during which the Special Committee actively sought alternative acquisition proposals as well as a period thereafter in which interested parties can assemble and negotiate acquisition proposals. We are pleased to report that our process has generated two non-binding alternative acquisition proposals, one from a group affiliated with Blackstone Management Partners, L.L.C. (“Blackstone”) and the other from entities affiliated with Carl C. Icahn (“Icahn”). We intend to work diligently with both of them to assist them in their respective due diligence reviews of the company and to seek definitive proposals that would constitute a superior proposal to the current Silver Lake and Michael Dell transaction. Michael Dell has confirmed his willingness to explore participating in alternative acquisition proposals. However, there can be no assurance that either non-binding alternative acquisition proposal will ultimately lead to a superior proposal. Seeking the Best Outcome for Dell Shareholders
Having conducted a thorough review of Dell’s challenges and opportunities, we remain convinced that the risks and uncertainties of a stand-alone public company are high. While we continue to recommend the current Silver Lake/Michael Dell transaction, and to work toward completion of that transaction, we will also work with Blackstone and Icahn to seek to develop a definitive alternative proposal that provides an even more compelling value proposition for Dell’s shareholders. Our goal was, and remains, to ensure that whatever transaction is consummated is the best possible outcome for Dell’s shareholders. We are pleased to be serving the Dell shareholders during this important process and we urge you to carefully consider the materials in the preliminary proxy statement. Sincerely yours, THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE OF THE
BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF DELL INC.
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Stranded In SF? Corral Rides Shows Uber, Lyft, Sidecar And Muni In One App
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
Super Awesome SF Party A has just ended, and you need to figure out how to get to Super Awesome SF Party B … and preferably by spending as little money as possible. So what do you do? Muni? Uber? Lyft? Sidecar? Hoof it? You could switch between half a dozen different apps and try to figure out which of the options is cheapest and fastest… Or you could just open Corral Rides. (“Corral” as in the thing that holds a bunch of cows, not “Coral” as in the amazing ocean animals) is a transportation aggregator. You punch in where you are and where you wanna go, and it breaks down the prices and times for each of your options. Walking? It’ll take you a while, but it’s free. Bus? The next one leaves in 10 minutes. Need to get there fast? There’s an Uber driver 2 minutes away, but it’ll cost you about $40 bucks. ( Because of the services the app focuses on, it really works best in San Francisco at the moment.)
“But wait!” shouts a developer back at home. “Uber and Lyft and Sidecar don’t have public APIs! How are they getting this information?” Yeah… about that. In a nutshell: it’s a bit of a hack. But don’t panic! It’s the good kind of hacking. Or, at least, the not-terrible kind of hacking. The Corral guys had to sniff out the APIs that Uber and co. are using to grab data in their own apps, and use those. They stop short of tapping any private APIs that require user authentication for security reasons, which means that the app has to switch you over to the appropriate app when you actually try to summon a car. “But wait!” shouts the developer who seems to really enjoy shouting things at his screen. “Isn’t there a chance those services will get upset about this?” Yeah, of course. But Corral is willing to play friendly: “If any of them email us and ask us to stop,” says co-founder Noam Szpiro, “we will. The way we see it though, we’re just sending them free traffic and customers. If they want to be the option listed, that’s up to them.”
Corral Rides was built in about a month by Noam and his co-founder Snir Kodesh, both ex-Ooyala engineers. Corral Rides is actually a spin-off — a pivot, if you will — from a project they’d started a few months prior, which was meant to do a similar sort of aggregation across a broader array of apps (including things like restaurant reviews and reservations, movie times, etc.) When they looked at the data and realized that the vast majority of their test users were looking for transportation info, they decided to slim down. Corral is thus far entirely bootstrapped, and they’re not searching for funding just yet (though they mention that they might look into joining an accelerator or incubator in the upcoming season). It’s worth noting that this one app isn’t their entire long-term vision — it just plays a small part in it. They’d only fill me in on the big picture off-the-record, so I can’t say much — but what I say is that if it all comes together, it’s going to be pretty great. These two guys are ones to watch. You can find , with an Android app being the next thing on the team’s to-do list.
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