title
stringlengths 2
283
⌀ | author
stringlengths 4
41
⌀ | year
int64 2.01k
2.02k
| month
int64 1
12
| day
int64 1
31
| content
stringlengths 1
111k
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bonobos’ SF Engineers Split Between NY Relocation And New Company Led By CTO Mike Hart
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
‘ newly hired San Francisco engineering team is fracturing, but there’s no disaster. Bonobos CTO has departed the company to become a co-founder, along with Cory Hicks, of a brand-new business. After cooking up some hot new personalization technology at Bonobos, Hart and five other engineers from the team will be spinning out that technology into a standalone company separate from Bonobos. Meanwhile, half of the remaining engineers at Bonobos will be relocating to New York, while the other six have left the company. To be clear, everyone in Palo Alto was offered a relocation package, but some chose New York, while others chose to stay and work on the Hart/Hicks venture, and the rest decided to leave. There were zero layoffs. Here’s the story: In late January, Bonobos CEO and founder began to realize that the bi-coastal situation wasn’t working out — the Bonobos brand and retail teams worked out of New York, while the engineering arm remained in Silicon Valley. Not only was traveling back and forth all the time financially taxing on the company, but it was also physically exhausting. “It was a different world in 2011, when we were looking to build out our engineering team,” said Andy. “We got the impression that NY was light on engineering talent.” For that reason, Bonobos built out an engineering office in Palo Alto and staffed it with 18 amazing engineers, including Hart and Hicks from Netflix. But after seeing the cross-coastal offices play out, Andy soon realized that Bonobos required co-located employees, and decided to relocate the Palo Alto engineers to New York. As Andy worked through this dilemma, Hart was also coming to a realization. He and his PA team were working on a new personalization product for Bonobos based on his years of experience at Netflix handling the same type of curation issues. After a little A/B testing on the site using the new personalization tech, Bonobos saw a “really strong revenue lift,” according to Dunn. Within a few weeks, a decision had been made: Hart would stay in Palo Alto with a handful of developers from Bonobos who were truly passionate about this new venture, and Dunn would try to persuade the remaining engineers to head out to NY. According to Dunn, the relocation package was a “meaningful one,” including a few five-figure checks. However, not everyone wants to pick up their life and move to New York, especially once they’re entrenched in the Valley, so the 18 developers in Bonobos Palo Alto office split three ways. Six, including Hart and Hicks, will be working on the mysterious personalization product. Six product team members will come to New York, and the remaining six are no longer with the company. But that’s not to say that Bonobos is reducing its engineering efforts — the opposite, in fact. The company plans to have 20 full-stack engineers on the team by the end of this year, and from there grow the engineering team to 30 over the course of the next two years. Bonobos has also promoted Jon Czaja from VP of Operations to Chief Operating Officer. He was formerly Director of Supply Chain Operations at Walmart, and is the first COO at Bonobos. “We just raised a , with which we will become fully profitable,” said Dunn. “We want to make this shift at a time when we’re financially healthy and ready.” As for this new personalization product, Mike is keeping pretty mum about the whole thing. So far very little is known about the new company. According to Hart, this product is actually in A/B testing on Bonobos right now, though you’d be hard-pressed to notice it. It works a lot like personalization on Netflix, but “far more subtly,” says Hart. The team is currently focused on product development, but Hart mentioned that he’ll probably start looking to raise very soon, and Dunn said that Bonobos would love to be a shareholder, considering the project is Bonobos-bred technology. Hart confirmed that Bonobos will most likely be a participant in upcoming funding rounds, and that Bonobos will probably be the first real customer on the platform if all goes as planned. The Hart/Hicks Venture will be a platform-as-a-service company, handling the personalization algorithms for its clients. The product is quite a ways away from a launch — the Hart/Hicks venture (as I like to call it) doesn’t even have an official name yet — but you should certainly expect to hear more out of Hart Bonobos in the future.
|
Kicking Off Our Flip Off — Meet The “TechCrunch Weekly” Magazine On Flipboard
|
Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
Flipboard this week that allows anyone to make a “Magazine,” which is a curated collection of stories based on any topic that you can think of. The company has shared that over since the feature launched. We’ve decided to put together our own magazine called “ ,” which will be full of the best TechCrunch stories from the past week, refreshed every Friday afternoon. As you know, our staff works hard to write about every technology topic imaginable, and it’s hard to keep up with all of it. Along with the really great “flipping” experience of Flipboard on mobile devices, using the app is one of the best ways to catch up on news that you missed because you were working, or to give yourself a chance to re-read something that you only skimmed the first time. Just to give you an idea of what you’ll find in this week’s edition, there’s possibly a Facebook Android OS coming out, Bitcoin’s worth a billion, Google Glass explorers got the boot, BlackBerry did things wrong, OUYA is a real product and paying for things with fingerprints is a thing. We’ll also be sharing some of our more interesting guest posts from the weekend. That’s a pretty full week of news, and now you can sit back, relax and flip through all of the stories with Flipboard and TechCrunch Weekly on your iOS or Android device. to check it out, or search for TechCrunch on Flipboard. Under the main navigation up top, find the magazine, subscribe, read and wait for a new edition to show up with new content every Friday afternoon. This is the future of publishing and it’s fun to be involved.
|
Ask A VC: AngelList’s Naval Ravikant On The Currency Of Silicon Valley And More
|
Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
joined us in the TechCrunch TV studio for our Ask A VC series, where we put VCs in the hot seat. Ravikant talked about the currency of Silicon Valley, which he says is deals shared, talent referred, and acquirers introduced. He explains that AngelList, a service he co-founded that matches early-stage startups with investors, puts these transactions online. We also chatted about his secret to picking the right startups for angel investments (Ravikant invested in Twitter, Foursquare, BranchOut, Codecademy, Uber, Heyzap and Disqus). Check out the video above for more!
|
Facebook’s Home On Android Could Give You A Sixth Sense For Your Social Life
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
Constant, close contact with your friends. That’s the promise of a “Facebook phone.” The modified Android OS and mobile homescreen replacement that sources tell us pushes your social life to you so fetching it isn’t interruptive. The news feed brought us ambient intimacy, but Facebook’s homescreen could turn that social graph awareness into a sixth sense. While it only takes a quarter of a minute each time, reaching for your phone, waking it from sleep, firing up the Facebook app, and loading your latest notifications does pull you out of the present. Checking the news feed for the latest photos and stories from your friends is a conscious decision. You’re either living your life or reading Facebook. The social network would surely prefer those to be one and the same. If that data automatically fed right into your homescreen, every time you opened your phone you’d be instantly up to date on conversations with friends and get a peek into their lives. And if Facebook can pipe this content into the lock screen, it’d be even more immersive, like a true heads-up display. It’s a deeper way to plug in, where the shell disappears and you gain a more visceral connection to the people you care about. This is the purpose of what Facebook plans to launch next week, which . It’s a Facebook-ified homescreen that will be shown off on an HTC handset running a version of Android modified by Facebook, similar to what Amazon did to create the Kindle operating system. Making Facebook an indigenous resident of your phone’s homescreen could accelerate your social life. It might reduce the time it takes you to respond to messages or continue a comment thread. If a friend is down the street, Facebook could have a better chance of advising you to join them. Giving Facebook a way to tell you more directly about what’s going on in your immediate vicinity could be important as it focuses more on . If this all seems like Facebook overload to you, you probably won’t buy the HTC phone just to sport this new homescreen. In the past, and of sentiments about a Facebook-integrated handset have shown little demand of a ‘Facebook Phone’ with a capital P. But if it didn’t interfere with or detract from your other apps and overall smartphone experience, but just augmented it with live social info, a ‘Facebook phone’ with a lowercase ‘p’ and its social homescreen could become something you wouldn’t mind having. Maybe it wouldn’t be a priority when buying a handset, but “Facebook Home-enabled” could be another feature in a device’s “Pros” column. And if Facebook made a more basic version of the homescreen replacement available as a traditional app download for all Android phones, I think a fair amount of hardcore social networkers would install it. After all, it would put you on the cutting edge of Facebook’s technology. Similar to how Facebook uses its like Messenger and its new to field test new features with a set of guinea pig early adopters, Facebook Home could let people experience the next wave of social before it trickles down to iOS and the rest of the world. That, combined with the immersive, non-interruptive experience I describe above are why I see Facebook’s new “Home On Android” as its version of the iWatch or Google Glass. It might not appeal to everyone just yet, but some will want to experience Facebook’s vision for the future of friendship. —
|
LivingSocial Co-Founder And CTO Aaron Batalion To Leave The Company
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
, the co-founder and CTO of daily deals site , is leaving the company. He announced his departure in published Friday afternoon. Here is the full text of his blog post: “Moving on to new adventures… What an incredible journey it has been since June of 2007, when the four of us knew only our direction, but definitely not our destination. After much soul searching, I have decided to leave LivingSocial to pursue some new ideas. No new adventure to announce yet, just a urge to go create… that there is more to do. As I look back today, we have processed billions in commerce transactions and have sent tens of billions of emails on technology we created. We took a simple two-week prototype and scaled it to an international business with thousands of fellow employees around the world. We built a culture I am proud of and millions of consumers around the world have experienced their local cities because of our products. More importantly, we created an incredible team with many more strong moves yet to come. Knowing this makes me confident in LivingSocial’s future and the vision of local we have all been fighting for. I am incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished to date and have been so fortunate to play a role in this amazing journey. My decision to depart has in no way been easy. The experience and, most importantly, the friendships… have been the best of my career. Always live hungry, Aaron” And here is the internal memo regarding Batalion’s departure from LivingSocial’s CEO :
“Hey folks, I wanted to pass along an update. Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Aaron Batalion, first at Revolution Health, and then as a co-founder of LivingSocial. Now we’ll get to see what else is in store for Aaron in the future. He’ll be moving from a day-to-day role as an employee to an outside advisory role, where he’ll help me and the company with hiring senior technologists and act on a consultative basis with the technology team, among other things. Aaron has been an important part of LivingSocial’s story since there wasn’t even a LivingSocial, just a Hungry Machine and he’ll continue to be important moving forward. I’ve tried to emulate his consistent drive and passion, but with limited success because there is only one “Tank”. We owe him a great deal of thanks for the long days, nights and weekends he has given to this company and in helping to grow and scale our technology team. Please wish him the best of luck as he moves on to whatever is next outside of LS and transitions to an advisory role at the company. If you’re ever in SF, where he’s been based since last summer, don’t hesitate to drop him a line. — Tim” Batalion’s departure comes just one month after LivingSocial in a massive new round of funding. The company has raised more than $800 million since it was founded in 2007. It’s been a complicated road in some ways lately for the company, which back in November. While its 2012 revenue was $536 million, the company is not turning a profit, posting a net loss for the year of $650 million. The fresh funding secured in February (which was raised ) is sure to kick off some new projects for LivingSocial in the months ahead, but it seems that one core member of LivingSocial’s team will not be a part of them.
|
Microsoft: jQuery 2.0 Will Add Full Support For Windows Store Apps
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
The , the popular JavaScript library, will drop support for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft isn’t very bullish about getting developers to use jQuery 2.0 and HTML5 to develop “a new wave of jQuery-based Windows Store applications.” As Microsoft today, , the company’s wholly owned open source-focused subsidiary, and the JavaScript experts at , have been working with the jQuery community to ensure that the next version of the framework offers full support for Windows Store applications. Developers could obviously build Windows Store/Metro apps with jQuery, but thanks to this cooperation, the process for developing jQuery 2.0-based Windows Store applications should now be smoother, and more streamlined. As appendTo’s director of support wrote in today’s announcement, jQuery always met the language criteria for Windows Store applications, but “Windows 8 exposes all the WinRT APIs within the HTML5 development environment, which comes with a new security model that made some code and common practices of jQuery flagged as unsafe in the context of a Windows Store application. AppendTo reviewed and re-authored portions of jQuery core to bring it into alignment with the Windows security model, as well as identified key areas where alternative patterns would need to be substituted for actually-used conventions.” Even though Microsoft has always stressed this in the run-up to the Windows 8 launch, quite a few developers are still unaware that they can use their web development skills . Developers, by the way, can already use a number of other open-source JavaScript frameworks, including , and . As Deve Methvin, the president of the jQuery Foundation noted in a prepared statement today, that’s also something his organization is interested in. “The jQuery team is excited about the new environments where jQuery 2.0 can be used. HTML and JavaScript developers want to take their jQuery knowledge with them to streamline the development process wherever they work. jQuery 2.0 gives them the ability to do that in Windows 8 Store applications. We appreciate the help from appendTo for both its patches and testing of jQuery 2.0 and MS Open Tech for its technical support.”
|
Gillmor Gang Live 03.29.13 (TCTV)
|
Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
– Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor.
|
Treasure Data Projects 500 Percent Growth This Year, Launches New “Plazma” Distributed Database
|
Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
It’s only been six months since cloud data warehousing company , but they’re already reporting some impressive growth figures. achieved month-to-month profitability last year, and they’re well on track to achieve a 500 percent increase in revenue this year. They’ve also amassed 50 high-profile clients, which include a leading social gaming company, a mobile advertising platform based in France, and some other Fortune 500 companies – unsurprisingly, Treasure declined to name names. Treasure Data is basically a massive warehouse in the cloud for companies to store their data. Big companies like IBM, Oracle, and Teradata offer data services as well, but with their rates going as high as $5 million, that’s not something every business can afford. Treasure Data, on the other hand, costs $1,500 to $2,500 a month with a year-long commitment. That’s a low enough price point for companies that can’t afford or do not have the resources to roll out services of their own. They’re also launching a new distributed database called Plazma, which offers significant improvements over HDFS (Hadoop Distributed Files System). Plazma is significantly better than HDFS precisely because it’s more efficient and is able to compile and parse data at a much faster rate. “The reason we did this was for robustness, reliability, and performance,” says Kiyoto Tamura, VP of Product at Treasure Data. “Hadoop distributed several problems around reliability, and we knew we could do better.” With Plazma, Treasure Data boasts that their systems are processing more than 300 billion data points every day.
|
TechCrunch Giveaway: Fitbit One, Aria Smart Scale And A Ticket To Disrupt NY
|
Elin Blesener
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
Happy Friday, everyone. As you know, we love giving things away here at TechCrunch, and this week, we have a and an to give away. But that’s not all! is right around the corner and tickets are going super fast, so we want to give away another ticket to a deserving person who would like to attend (and then party with us). The winner of this giveaway will win all three — the Fitbit One ($99.95), the Smart Scale ($129.95) and a free ticket to Disrupt NY (valued at $1,995 right now). Want a shot to win all three? Follow the steps below. 1) 2) The contest will start and end April 5th at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet or comment once, or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. Please note the winner will only receive one (1) free Disrupt ticket, and it does not include airfare or hotel.
|
null |
Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 11 | null |
Video Q&A Startup VYou Is Shutting Down Its Consumer Site To Focus On White-Label Opportunities
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
Video question-and-answer site launched with a unique premise, allowing users to create video responses to questions posed to them by other community members. But now, about two-and-a-half years later, the company is sending an email to its community members informing them that its site will be shut down next week. In a message being emailed to users, VYou says that it’s “no longer possible” to keep the consumer-facing side of the business running. And so, next Wednesday, April 3 the company will cut off the ability of community members to record new videos. On April 5, the site will be taken down entirely. After April 5, users who wish to receive an archive of the videos that they’ve recorded over the last few years need just email [email protected] from the address that they created their account with, requesting a copy of their videos. The company says that it will send an zip file with all their content in MP4 format, with videos titled after the question that users were answering. The shutdown is happening after the consumer-facing side of VYou failed to take off, and also as the team is pursuing opportunities with publishers and brands as a white-label platform. VYou to allow users to answer questions from their friends and other community members. But what made VYou different was that all of its responses were done by video, creating a whole new interaction model for community members. Over the past few years, the company has tried a bunch of things to , from allowing users to follow one another and to pose broad questions to the community, to enable users to take questions posed to them on Twitter and to . Even so, the company never really got the traction it was hoping for, particularly after . While VYou never got huge, it did have a loyal community of users who would post videos all the time. But like Daily Booth, Formspring, and other startups who had a small number of very active users, it was enough to keep things going over the long term. And that’s a bit disappointing to VYou founder Steve Spurgat, who thinks the VYou model might have just a little bit too ahead of its time to hit mainstream America. “Video hasn’t been adopted the same way we thought it would be two years ago,” Spurgat told me by phone. And so, keeping up a consumer-facing site just didn’t seem worthwhile. But the company has built some cool technology and is working with partners to keep that alive through embeds on third-party sites and other integrations. The team of five will continue working on the technology for clients who wish to use it to engage with their fans. While Spurgat says that’s not as fun as the consumer site, it makes more sense now for the company to focus on an enterprise model. Full text of the email to the VYou community is below: Dearest VYou Community, Video answers to life’s questions, spread all over the web. VYou was founded on that simple idea and generated millions of videos, from YouTubers falling off of chairs to Martin Luther King III sharing stories about his father. Now, sadly, this email comes with unfortunate news. VYou is shutting down. Keeping the website running is no longer possible. Next Wednesday, April 3rd, the website will no longer allow you to record videos. On Friday, the website will come down entirely. You will be able to receive all of your videos at that time ( ). Through all the peaks and even the outages, the tight knit VYou community has meant so much to us. The VYou team is still together and working on awesome stuff – this won’t be the last you hear from us. We’ll still be around, always. Feel free to email us at [email protected]
|
Jun Group Launches HyprMX To Help Mobile Publishers Manage Their Video Ads
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
Video ad distribution company has launched a new, wholly-owned subsidiary called , offering mediation tools for mobile publishers and developers manage video ads from multiple sources. HyprMX CEO Corey Weiner said that Jun Group runs its ads through hundreds of publishers, and it found that some of those publishers needed more help managing their inventory: “They’re just not in the ad business — they’re in the content business, they’re in the games business.” So HyprMX helps those publishers run ads from multiple sources, including Jun Group. There are a number of mediation options when it comes to standard display advertising, but Weiner said it’s an unmet need in video. The other challenge on mobile is delivering video ads in a way that doesn’t annoy users. For example, preroll ads are even more annoying on mobile, because you can’t just ignore them — they take over your phone for the duration of the ad. That’s why HyprMX focuses on incentivized ads, namely videos that users are rewarded for watching. Of course, there’s a potential conflict of interest there. In some situations, HyprMX will be determining whether to run an ad from Jun Group or from one of its competitors. But Weiner said, “We’ve formed a Chinese Wall between the two companies.” The only thing the HyprMX platform cares about is maximizing the amount of money that the publisher makes on each ad view, and if an ad from another source will be more lucrative than an ad from Jun Group, HyprMX will choose the competitor. At the same time, Weiner said the new company has an advantage in signing up publishers, since they’ve usually heard of or have a relationship with Jun Group already.
|
Backed Or Whacked: Baubles For Your Bike – Part I
|
Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 3 | 16 |
Back in , Backed or Whacked looked at three crowdfunding projects that were aimed at getting novel takes on bicycles off the ground, or at least on the ground. But not every crowdfunded bicycle project involves reinventing the wheels. In fact, bike accessories have been such a popular target for crowdfunding efforts that they’re fertile ground for a two-part look, this first one of which covers smaller clip-on and snap-on accessories. Feel free to ascribe them symbolically to each wheel as you see fit. Thankfully not a bike horn controlled by your smartphone, the smart horn, or “smorn” as no one will call it, is the brainchild of Tory Orzeck, or “Torzeck” as he likely doesn’t like to be called. While the portmanteau may sound whimsical, the smart horn addresses a serious issue. Bicycle riders are relatively invisible and inaudible at night, particularly when riding to the right of a vehicle looking to make a right turn at an intersection. Thus, the Orp, which wraps around a bike’s handlebar, combines a bright LED headlight with a piercing 96 dB horn that Orzeck claims is similar to a Vespa’s horn in practice. A softer 76 dB mode is also available, so you don’t need to scare the pedal pushers off pedestrians who meander into the bike lane. Over 1,500 backers supported Orp, with the most pledging in the $45 and $55 tiers to put a lot more cannon in their Cannondale. The smart horn is due to ship in September. Especially till then, let’s be careful out there. New York industrial designer Nicholas Fjellberg Swerdlowe spends a lot of time with his bicycle, heaving it up and down stairs and taking it to the grocery store. There, he invariably picks up too many ecologically indifferent plastic shopping bags to carry home on his two-wheeled steed. His entrepreneurial epiphany to deal with the baggage in his life was the Bag Buddy — a small hard piece of rubber flanked with two hooks designed to carry food and whatnot back home. Fully loaded Bag Buddies look practical if a bit silly. Swerdlowe articulates three main Buddy benefits mostly related to the placement of the bags — safety, maneuverability and decreased risk of wheel pinches. Unfortunately, less than $4,000 of the requested $20,000 for this “necessary accessory” was collected and so for now the Bag Buddy has been bagged, buddy. Like the equally alliterative Bag Buddy, Pub Pedals are simple appendages that cover part of the bike to increase its usefulness. In this case, the slip-on pedals are intended to slide securely on to a certain brand of pedals called Eggbeaters, which are designed for mountain biking but are challenging to ride on with ordinary footwear. Pub Pedals, however, make them more suitable for transport to the pub or presumably even destinations where one might not become inebriated. In its Indiegogo campaign, Pub Pedals collected just over 8,000 of 20,000 Canadian dollars requested. However, this “whacked” campaign has a happy ending. Taking advantage of the site’s Flexible Funding option and about $10,000 in offline contributions and preorders, designer Jeff Thom was able to get close enough to push ahead and Pub Pedals are now available for preorder for that person in your life looking for a way to beat the Eggbeater for less-demanding terrain.
|
Apple’s Long-Rumored Game Controller May Soon See The Light Of Day
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
I’ve long believed that touchscreens leave a certain something to be desired when it comes to playing games, and if a new (and very curious) report holds true, Apple may feel the same way. According to , Apple has been meeting with developers on-site at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to talk about a forthcoming Apple game controller. Jordan’s multiple developer sources claim that the Cupertino company has booked a meeting room under an assumed name to talk about the game-centric device, though they weren’t able to shed any light on what the thing will look like or when it will actually see the light of day. That said, Apple is expected to hold an so it’s possible that this controller may be officially unveiled in just a few weeks. At first glance, the prospect of Apple churning out a game controller of all things seems downright silly, but after chewing on it for a while the notion doesn’t seem quite as outlandish. You’d be hard-pressed to think of OS X as prominent a platform for gaming as Windows is (though some big-league developers are working to change that), but iOS plays home to a staggering number of games and it’s not inconceivable to think that Apple would want to enhance the sorts of gaming experiences available to iPhone, iPod and iPad users. As such, a game controller seems like the sort of thing that Apple would agonize over getting right, and it appears that Apple may have been doing just that. In the site’s 2012 review of the 3rd generation iPad, let slip a tantalizing tidbit when discussing the iPad’s faculty as a gaming machine: “I know of an internal Apple project to bring a physical controller to market, but whether or not it will ever see the light of day remains to be seen,” the review reads. What’s more Apple has been seen bulking itself up with patents that relate to a potential gaming push for at least a few years now. This describes an accessory that wraps around a portable electronic device with touchscreen (sound familiar?) and includes a standard D-Pad and button, while takes a slightly different approach. Either way, these patents plus the AnandTech comments make it rather clear that Apple has been mulling over a physical game controller (or something like it) and it may be time for those ambitions to come to fruition. I’ve reached out to Apple, but the company has declined to comment. (Also, here’s hoping it looks nothing like the controller pictured above.)
|
This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: 3D Printing, Ouya, And The Facebook Fone
|
John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 |
This week on the we celebrate episode number two of everyone’s favorite audio file! We also talk about 3D printing, the console, and the Facebook Fone AKA the FF. This week we are joined by our quiet intern, Michael Seo. We are slowly by surely working the kinks out of this process, so bear with us. However, we invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and appreciate all those who listened to our inaugural effort last week. 17,000 listens is nothing to sneeze at and we sincerely love you for putting up with us.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
|
Don’t Let Your Hype Write A Check That Your Product Can’t Cash
|
Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 3 | 16 |
Everywhere you went around Austin this past week, there were people queuing up for things, the GroupMe Grill, the Twitter party, Salt Lick BBQ. One startup fête was so packed even a founder couldn’t get in immediately. “If only all these people were daily active users,” one person at the same party quipped, on the app’s lack of popularity relative to the line outside. “The most valuable part of a trade show is seeing where the lines are,” told me at KPCB’s private SXSW lunch event, which didn’t have a line on purpose. Like a Petri dish of demand, the was a good, if flawed, gauge of which brands could generate “buzz.” Hence flew to Texas to hawk their wares, with Oreos and Cap’n Crunch joining Uber and TaskRabbit in a four-day-long exercise to acquire unique users. The equivalent of startup steroids, hype isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As a new startup you’re judged by where you are today — nowhere. When you’ve got nothing, hype, manufactured by blog posts and marketing gimmicks among other efforts, is a tried-and-true way to raise venture capital and capture the imagination of early adopters. Not that many early-stage startups can tell a VC “Look at what we did”; but quite a few can say “Look what we’re going to do.” The gulf between that promise and the satisfaction of that promise is driven by hype, and it creates a situation in which a company’s or person’s brand is further along in the market than their product is. Hype = potential. This works for all new entrants to a space — hype for a VC means access to better deals. See , which, at four years in, is already considered a top-tier VC despite not having a decades-long roster of returns (they do have a , though). The trick is building a brand where people want to work with you; there’s a reason a PR person has become the best accessory for many venture folks. While hype’s network effect can help you acquire customers, if you court it you’re taking a bigger risk — you have to eventually fulfill expectations. When you go creating hype, the clock starts ticking. The pressure is on to satisfy the gap between what your brand promises and your actual product/value add. Don’t let your hype write a check that your product can’t cash, because the pressure can cause your company to lose focus. The road to the is filled with startups whose products never lived up to the noise they made, most recently . The overhyped Color, which sold to Apple for , was compared to Google by Sequoia, which led its $41 million dollar funding round. But let’s not pick on whipping-boy Color; Foursquare, Zaarly, Highlight, Path and countless others, all for one reason or another, made a big headline splash and, for one reason or another, failed to live up to initial expectations and had to recalibrate along the way. “Being overhyped means you have the wrong product at the right time,” investor noted. “The brand and PR got too far ahead of the product, or they built the wrong product, or a bad product, or didn’t execute well.” Perhaps the idea that hype can harm you if you don’t manage expectations is the strategy behind Snapchat’s shunning of the media spotlight. It had no presence at SXSW despite being the social app of the moment (or at least one of them). The management team even ditched the Crunchies, where it won The founders are as surreptitious as their products. shows us that whether intentional or not, avoidance can at times be part of the hype strategy. And that hype is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of success: Success will lead to hype — blog coverage, awards, etc., but hype won’t necessarily lead to success. , a startup that eschewed the tech media early on, is even further proof of this. At , the company has convinced investors that it will eventually have a commerce ability and will eventually bring in meaningful revenue. Pinterest’s hype is writing a big check. But many believe that its product will make good on its vow, and that is where the magic happens. As Foursquare its hype, , an app that has over half a million people still lined up just for the privilege of using it, on what was perhaps the most lucrative product relaunch in tech news history — getting Dropbox to place a nine-figure bet on the hope that the app will one day be able to expertly handle email attachments. It doesn’t at the moment. One could argue, as Gartner , that the tech industry on a macro level is an example of hype, promising that emerging technologies will actually create the future world we want to live in. We’ll see.
|
Smartwatch Developers Rejoice! Pebble Will Release Proof-Of-Concept Watchface SDK In Early April
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 16 |
After much fanfare the Pebble smartwatch made the leap from fanciful concept to full-fledged product earlier this year, but now that units have started to ship and people have started to wear them, what’s Pebble’s next step? Why, enticing developers, of course. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky noted in a released earlier this morning that an early version of the smartwatch’s watchface SDK would be made available to would-be Pebble developers during the second week of April. And when I say “early version,” I mean . At this stage it’s being looked at as more a proof-of-concept release than anything else, and Migicovsky points out that there’s a “99% chance” that the team will revamp some of the underlying APIs involved. What’s more, anyone expecting the ability to use the SDK preview to tap into the Pebble’s sensors and radios (like the accelerometer for tracking movement) will come away disappointed — the release is geared strictly toward new watchfaces, though Migicovsky says that games are also fair game as they rely mostly on button inputs. The early SDK has been in testing with “hacker” backers — a group of about 100 people who pledged $235 or more for the privilege of early tinkering rights — for the past few months, and some of the apps they’ve created will be released alongside the SDK. The most notable new app? A low-res (and therefore faithful) reproduction of Snake that hearkens back to Nokia’s feature phone glory days. Granted, new watchfaces may not seem like the most crucial addition even to Pebble buffs, but the impending release marks a pretty dramatic shift in scope for the Pebble team. What once started as a company whose daily operations were completely dictated by the need to manufacture and ship over $10 million worth of gadgets is now a company gearing up to focus on the next stage of the Pebble’s life cycle: building up the app ecosystem so the value of owning a Pebble extends beyond the wow factor of wearing a tiny e-paper display on your wrist. Migicovsky concedes that Pebble hasn’t “done the best job so far of communicating with developers,” but the team looks very willing to change that — hopefully a full-blown version of the SDK shows up sooner rather than later. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/61941694 w=640&h=360] from on .
|
Gillmor Gang: Attention Surplus Disorder
|
Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 3 | 16 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — enjoys a week of actual tech news for the first time in quite a while. Samsung’s latest big screen phone comes with a suite of Android add-ons, some of which tickle @scobleizer’s shiny bone while making it clear his rationale for switching to Android has more to do with pocketing his Google Glass base station. @dbfarber rejects the notion Google will take over our eyeballs with Glass; everybody will have a say in this wearable moment. @kevinmarks sees Google moving toward unification of web and Android in Andy Rubin’s resignation, and @kteare sticks with me on Apple’s Strategy of Doing Nothing strategy. That bulge in my pocket remains iOS, or are you just glad to see me. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
|
HealthTap’s Q&A Service Sees 7.5M Uniques Per Month, With MDs Spending An Hour Per Session Providing 581M Answers
|
Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 16 |
What do you do when you have a health question? You likely either search Google or WebMD, try to call your doctor, or set up an appointment. For most people, the latter two options would be preferable, because, after all, you’re more likely to trust a human being than Dr. Robot or some crowdsourced health resource. Of course, visits to the doctor’s office will cost ya. Oh, will they cost you — both your patience and your wallet. In 2010, Wellsphere’s Ron Gutman founded to leverage the scalable distribution afforded by the web to connect you with real, live human doctors in realtime — for free. When I first heard the idea, I pictured a dark call center filled with ill-kept quacks giving questionable medical advice to the ailing masses. But has been on a mission to buck the WebMD trend for health databases and become the web’s go-to repository for health info that’s actually reliable. Not only that, but HealthTap’s real success has been its “Quora for doctors” — the Q&A portion of the platform that allows anyone and everyone to ask a health question and have one of the 35,000 licensed, U.S. physicians in its network (which also includes 128 specialties in all 50 states) respond to their question. The difference with Quora, Gutman tells us, is that all of HealthTap users’ questions get answered within 24 hours. Quora is a terrific resource, but anyone familiar with the platform knows it can be hopeless in this regard. Thanks to its Q&A network, which provides patients with near-same-day answers to their health questions, the has been growing fast. However, HealthTap has yet to give much of a peek behind the curtain, but today we’ve managed to convince Ron to share a little more about the startup’s growing traction. The founder tells us that people are now asking doctors more than 10 million questions on HealthTap every month and that the site is serving more than 7.5 million unique visitors each month, with its mobile apps having been downloaded by more than 2 million. But what’s really encouraging for HealthTap is that doctors are excited about it and spending time interacting with the platform. “They actually want to take the time to answer people’s questions,” Gutman says. Which, admittedly, was not what he expected — at least to this degree. As of now, doctors are spending an average of over one hour per session (61.2 minutes to be precise) each time they log in. They’re not only answering questions, but engaging in peer reviews of other doctors’ answers, building transparent referral networks and voting on one another’s expertise. (HealthTap is far from being the first to go after these concepts, by the way, as Doximity, QuantiaMD and many others will attest.) Cumulatively, HealthTap has served more than 581 million answers to users seeking health advice from their mobile devices and browsers. But, what really makes a difference is that over the past five months, 2,963 people have sent HealthTap thank-you notes saying that these doctor answers had saved their lives. Whether you buy into HealthTap’s concept or not, if someone were to ask you why healthtech is important, this is it. But, for HealthTap, though it may sound like vapid cheerleading, it’s hard not to admit that this growth is impressive having launched its beta less than two years ago and its mobile health platform eight months ago. The platform has added more context around its Q&A platform, creating an interactive “Health Journey” so that all topics on the platform are now connected through a network of semantic relationships, doctors and interactive images, along with creating a repository of wellness topics and doctor-created tips. As Obamacare incentivizes more people to go to the doctor’s offices, those aforementioned lines are only going to get longer and doctors are going to be inundated by more people than they can handle. “The more we can create mechanisms that help make doctors more efficient and reduce wait times while saving people money? “That’s a win,” Gutman says. HealthTap has to date raised $13.9 million from investors including Esther Dyson, Mark Leslie, Aaron Patzer, Mohr Davidow Ventures and Mayfield fund. What’s more, based on this growth, we’ve also been hearing that HealthTap is in the process of raising a substantial Series B. So stay tuned. Find
|
Dennis Crowley Of Foursquare On Social Search, Platforms And Rivals
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 16 |
TechCrunch interviewed CEO Dennis Crowley a couple of weeks ago during in Barcelona (referenced ). It was his third time visiting and speaking at the event, and perhaps Foursquare’s most engaged visit of all in terms of going there. Crowley says that, all told, he met with 33 different companies this time around. It’s a sign of how the company is looking for new business and new partnerships, and trying to extend itself as more than an app. As it gears up for whatever comes in its future, Foursquare is positioning itself as a location platform. Crowley: It’s not about the decline of the check in but the emergence of search and discovery. It’s just new users just understanding Foursquare in a different way. I still see this as analogous to what Twitter does – you don’t have to tweet to use Twitter. Now we have over 3 billion check-ins and you can imagine a point in the future where people can just get value out of those 3 billion check-ins already have in the system. That’s a lot of signal that a lot of other people don’t have. That’s the secret sauce at Foursquare that we can do what others cannot. We still get 5 million check-ins per day, and the influx of new check-ins is something that we can rely on. So we’re constantly getting signal of what’s interesting and not interesting. All sorts of things. People will leave tips on venues, people will ‘like’ checkins, they will shout out. We can start to learn from that sentiment. There are six or seven of them: check ins, likes on venues, tips that people leave, the people who like the tips left by people, people saving things to their list, sending those to other people. There is a lot of activity around places. I think we’ve got most of the pieces that we want. The app has a lot of features and complexity and the challenge is to make it simpler for people to use. If you look at the current Android app, it’s a lot simpler than the app before that. There’s a search at the top; there’s a map right under that. It’s very clear to users, more clear than in other apps, that Foursquare is an app for search and discovery, and we’re very good at delivering you a social map. That will show you friends’ faces on the map and things that you might like.
I really enjoyed the post. It was really nostalgic. The thing I remember is how he raised $8 million. I remember that moment. I thought, oh my god what are they going to do with Gowalla that we haven’t done with Foursquare. So then we went out there and raised $20 million a couple of months after. The hindsight now is that if you have check-in data you can make great recommendations on that. But I don’t think anyone knew that at the time. I think it was 2011 when we rolled into SXSW with the Explore recommendation engine where I got on stage and had our moment. We were taking the check-ins, but what we were really doing was feeding them back to you and telling you about places where you’ve never heard about but are going to like. And that’s a big deal. That was the big idea that we had, even when we were working on Dodgeball and we knew we had to build a Foursquare. I think everyone now takes it for granted that of course check-ins make an amazing recommendation engine. But back in 2011 that was a really big idea. We knew that we had to get a lot of check-ins from people, and we knew that game mechanics would help get us there. We knew if we got enough we would be able to turn those recommendations on. We found out along the way that those check-ins would turn into great incentives to deals and loyalty. That’s something we didn’t anticipate but figured out along the way. People used to pooh-pooh the idea of a check-in, saying that this wasn’t interesting. But when you have 3 billion of those data points, you can take any latitude and longitude anywhere in the world and I’ll tell you what is interesting now, 20 minutes from now and 6 hours from now. No [contentious answer: Foursquare says there are 5 million today, but later I checked and this was the same number mentioned ]. We’ve doubled in size from last year: we went from 15 million users to over 30 million. The service is still growing great. We pick up more than 1 million users every month, and are around 60% international at this point. The users built the data base and the users curated it. In 2009 there were zero venues in the database now there are more than 50 million places. that’s crazy. This is like the Wikipedia for places. It’s crowdsourced knowledge. It’s working well. The biggest challenge is to take revenue-generating products that we launched in Q3 last year and take them out to the market. The businesses using these are mostly national retailers. But we’ve got over 1 million merchants who have claimed their businesses on Foursquare, running specials and doing other things. What we want to do is take these tools used by the 50-100 national retailers and make them accessible to our 1 million merchants. Then you’ve got something really powerful. [note: these tools currently do not integrate with other point-of-sale systems, and Crowley declined to discuss whether this is something that Foursquare is discussing integrating with such services at this time] We don’t have a sales team. We have a small sales force internally who deals with the large retailers. [Update: Crowley says in fact there are 10 people dedicated to both small and large retail sales.] So question is, what do we do to get out to those 1 million merchants? But then again, those 1 million merchants came originally to us on their own. That implies that self service should be a big thing for us. [So to target them more] I think self service will be a big part of it. If you look at what we’re doing in terms of harvesting intent from users, we have millions searching for things, and we’re helping them find places. It doesn’t look that different from what google has done with AdWords. If you search for “Hawaiian vacation,” Google shows you websites to get you there. And “Italian tasting menu” will bring you a list of venues on Foursquare. I think that’s why people flock to our API. That’s why we have 40,000 developers using it, from Instagram to Jawbone, Evernote, Uber and Flickr — any app that does anything with location is polling from our location data. We’ve always pushed it. Now, I don’t want to say it’s on autopilot but it used to be a tossup if i’m a location startup which data set do I want to use. Now there’s enough traction behind us, where people think Foursquare is the one to use. iI’s self-healing, places close and people delete them. Our apis are very easy to work with. I don’t think I have heard anyone say we’re trying to beat Yelp, I hear people saying we are better than Yelp. I think the biggest challenge for us has been in telling the story of the product to people. We’ve known all along a lot of check-ins makes for amazing recommendations. The best way to get a lot of check ins to make it fun. But as the app starts to evolve and you see search front and center, and the map front and center, people are starting to get it. This idea is that I’m going to use Foursquare because the results are customized to me. We are a four-year old company. We’ve been talking about this. Of course how do you get to what Facebook or Twitter have is the finish line for us. It’s what we shoot for, but you’ve got to work your way up there, and every year this is different for us. We don’t talk about any specific partnerships. But guys like Nokia and BlackBerry know they need specific apps on their platform to succeed. [No comment on whether they were paid to develop apps for those platforms.] There are a lot of android handsets here. They all run slightly different software because people are trying to differentiate. You know how you can differentiate? Foursquare makes maps special. We take maps that are blank and put dots on them to help you figure out what to do. We can launch widgets so that when you open them on your phone you know stuff that’s going on, where you can save money. We do that on our own Android apps. But when people want to talk about customizing and how do you make your phone stand out in the market, that’s one the things that we can offer. Any good product person will tell you that it’s easier to add in features than it is to remove them. Jack Dorsey has a great quote about being the product editor at Square, and I think that’s a good way to think about it. We’ve built a lot of stuff. I keep telling the team that we don’t need to build anything new. We need to put it together in ways that are simple. I love all the features that we have in there; we just need to make them more accessible.
|
Foursquare Aims At A Moving Target As It Tries To Close Another Round Of Funding
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 16 |
This year’s SXSWi did not herald the next Big Thing in tech, as some , but it wasn’t always this way. In 2010, a year when people were a bit more optimistic about the new new thing, Foursquare was the boss. First appearing in , by 2010 it came into its own as the with its app based around checking into places and then sharing that information with your friends. Fast forward to today, and the picture has changed. Foursquare’s Gowalla has to Facebook and is making products like to challenge Foursquare’s dominance in social location. People are starting to focus more on how consumer apps may make returns. And Foursquare has had its share of changes, too. at Foursquare have from the , some starting . The company has faced (unconfirmed) it is running out of cash — estimated to have a burn rate of $2 million and only $2 million in revenue last year, and (again unconfirmed) reports saying it has had trouble raising its next round of financing amid claims of a too-high valuation and question marks over its business prospects. One part of the problem appears to be that check-ins, the cornerstone of Foursquare’s early growth and its traditionally main source of data points, are no longer what they used to be. A year ago CEO Dennis Crowley Foursquare was noticing more people using Foursquare but not checking in. In fact, as the company has doubled its user base to 30 million people in the last year, growth of check-ins appears to be flat: today, Crowley says Foursquare sees 5 million check-ins per day, but that’s also what the company said a . For some, the novelty may have worn off of game-play elements, like getting badges and points — part of a for challenges in app gamification. Location is, funnily enough, a moving target. And yet, there is another story going on here, too. We are now hearing from more than one source that Foursquare is finally close to closing a Series D round at a valuation that may not, after all, be less than its last C round in , when it raised $50 million at a $600 million pre-money valuation. The company has to date from investors that include Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, CrunchFund* and more. To be sure, we’ve been hearing stories of a D round for a , and if its C round was anything to go by, Foursquare will try to keep things quiet until they have some actual news to share. But however that information finally comes out, it seems the bottom line is this: Foursquare’s backers are not going to let it die, and Foursquare has set out on a mission to prove all the wrong. Foursquare has been trying to move with its moving target. Because it started noticing people using the app but not checking in more than a year ago, it has acted accordingly, shifting its service into taking advantage of all the data that it has already amassed, and continues to amass, to position itself as a location-based search engine. Its aim is to couple this with a mobile commerce play — not in the area of payments (not yet at least) but in bringing would-be consumers into places where those payments will be made, and encouraging them to buy stuff. Of course, if Foursquare was breaking new ground with its check-in service back in the day, then the area where it is playing now is more dug up than a freshly plowed field. That is to say, there are a ton of companies coming at the idea of charting user location via mobile, and what to do with it once you have that information, including Yelp (thought of as what Foursquare seems to resemble more and more), Google, Facebook, Groupon, Square, Instagram and more. You could even argue that just about most information apps, and quite a lot of others, are potential competitors. But this hasn’t been necessarily bad news for Foursquare. By way of its API, used by some 40,000 developers at the moment, it powers search in a wide range of third-party apps, including Evernote, Uber, Flickr and Jawbone. On the commerce side, recent deals to offer discounts to cardholders with participating merchants being one way that Foursquare can earn commissions. (All the same, it still has a hurdle in rolling out its dashboard to smaller merchants beyond the bigger national retailers that have signed on.) On the consumer side, a deal with BlackBerry to is one advance for the company in its elusive goal of easier device integration. This is one area where Foursquare would like to do more in the future, judging by the 30 or so meetings Crowley says he had during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. That’s because, in the quest to continue sourcing new data, Foursquare is always trying to make its check-ins into a more automated process, or “a machine that generates check-ins and then uses that data to create the recommendations,” in the words of Crowley. (At least one new player, , seems very receptive to the idea of a Foursquare phone.) And yet, and yet… while it’s moving ahead in all these areas, Foursquare remains in jeopardy of losing some of its credibility among its most loyal users. One — who has asked to remain anonymous — told me this when I asked him to tell me why he decided to delete the Foursquare app from his phone: I’ve been a heavy 4sq user for a bit more than two years now. I’ve enthusiastically evangelized the product and the company. But, today I decided that it was time to stop and deleted the app from my Android. 4sq has changed from the product I started using. It has started out centered on check-ins. They did a great job of creating a game-like system that encouraged you to “score” points…But that has changed. The app has gradually been evolving to subtly de-emphasize check-ins and instead look more like a local search product… The incentive for me to use it has gone, along with the game element. I had added a lot of new places to 4sq and a number of tips. I’m not going to do that anymore. I understand why they’re doing this – the existing product didn’t have an obvious monetization strategy beyond maybe ads and sponsorship…I wish they had thought about how they could harness their existing users to help them create and curate their recommendations product…They never, for example, gave you points for adding new places, photographs or tips. That would have been an obvious way to use their “players” to build out the content for the new system. I will be very interested to see if they can accomplish this “pivot”, but right now it will be without me as a user. The key will be to either figure out how to bring those skeptics, and more, back to its core service, or come up with many other ways of growing Foursquare to make up or surpass the difference. I caught up with Crowley recently and asked him about some of the recent changes and what lies ahead. That interview is .
|
null |
Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 29 | null |
Who’s Afraid Of Google Glass?
|
Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 3 | 16 |
“First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be video.” — , Sheesh. A whole lot of people who presumably have never actually seen Google Glass in action appear to be really upset. “People who wear Google Glass in public are assholes,” Gawker’s Adrian Chen. “You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it,” Mark Hurst. Seriously, people? DARPA has built drone-mounted 1.8-gigapixel cameras that can recognize people waving . software is good enough that they probably don’t even need to see your face. Oh, yes, and they’re working on legions of , too, while they’re at it. There’s already one closed-circuit camera in the United Kingdom. And the NSA is building a in Utah to parse this brave new world of big data. Meanwhile, everywhere you go, hardware is getting faster, software is getting better, everything is being networked. We’re marching boldly into a future. been about for . And now, suddenly, you’re irate about the potential privacy repercussions of a few geeks bearing glasses? What is with you people? Where have you been? I think cameras on the glasses of random passersby are among the least of your privacy concerns. At least there’s a red LED that winks on when Google Glass is recording, so you’ll know that you’re suddenly starring in your interlocutor’s home video. As panopticons go, the Google Glass version is pretty mild-mannered and half-hearted. The recent spate of furious privacy concerns are enormously overwrought compared to how much we should be concerned about our governments. But there’s something about being caught on video, not by some impersonal machine but by another human being, that sticks in people’s craws and makes them go irrationally berserk. If these were glasses that recorded audio and took still photos when the wearer double-blinked, would anyone be near as upset? Hell, no. But video is somehow primal; video hits us where we live. (That’s why it’s so insanely popular. Did you know that YouTube is arguably the world’s ?) To a limited extent I actually Google Glass surveillance, in an uneasy Pandora’s-box kind of way. I want police officers, border guards, and other authorities to be required to wear them every moment that they’re on duty, and I want that data to be available to those who report police brutality or other abuses of authority. (I’ve been saying that for five years, ever since I was . Pretty sure it would have made a big difference to, for instance, my friend .) I want street protestors to be videoing the authorities at all times. I do not trust the powers that be. If pervasive, ubiquitous networked cameras ultimately make public privacy impossible, which seems likely, then at least we can balance the scales by ensuring that we have two-way transparency between the powerful and the powerless, rather than just a world where the former spy on the latter; and we can give people the tools required for online and/or personal privacy, such as pseudonyms and easy-to-use strong cryptography. That’s not to say I’m feeling all Panglossian about Google Glass. (Panglassian? Sorry.) My concern is far more petty: it’s that other people’s videos are almost uniformly terrible. I know a little about moving pictures. I’ve done camerawork for TV shows, just helped build , and , if I do say so myself. But video is . Much harder to do well than pictures, which anyone can get right now and again via trial and error. Take a look at , or : one reason they’re only a few seconds long is that, if they were any longer, almost all examples of the form would quickly be revealed as nearly unwatchable crap. Don’t get me wrong, putting new tools in everyone’s hands, and making them easier, inevitably leads to some awesome outsider art, and that’s always been doubly true for video. Take my friend Count Jackula’s , for instance, which increasingly have become hilarious short films in their own right. So let’s hope the next generation, born in video, will use it more fluently, and find ways to make use of the petabytes of data that Google Glass or its ilk will generate. And that’s “will” not “may.” Yes, it’s entirely possible that Google Glass is like Apple’s Newton, 10 years ahead of its time, but — https://twitter.com/hunterwalk/status/311855462985392128 — something like it is coming, sooner or later, almost inevitably. We may ultimately need augmented reality glasses in order to filter out all the bad videos of other people’s mediocre augmented realities. Maybe that’s what Pat Cadigan meant by “then you eat video.” On my bad days I feel like we’re all about to drown in a sea of awful home movies, while being tracked by drone- and signpost-mounted surveillance cameras 24/7/365; like we’re all sleepwalking onwards into a really tacky dystopia. Brace yourselves. I for one welcome our insect-drone masters, by yours truly, on .
|
Sprint Nextel and SoftBank Agree Not To Use Huawei Equipment After Merger
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Sprint Nextel and SoftBank have pledged not to use equipment from Chinese telecommunications company Huawei Technologies after they merge. Congressman Mike Rogers, a Republican state representative from Michigan who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said today that the two companies told him they would not use gear manufactured by Huawei in their networks. The Chinese company has in the past. Though an of spying for China, concerns over Chinese cyber-espionage have ramped up recently. Back in October, the House Intelligence Committee that equipment from Huawei and its main domestic rival ZTE can potentially give an opening for Chinese intelligence services to use U.S. telecommunications networks for spying. More recently, a included in the funding bill signed into law by President Barack Obama this week requires U.S. federal law enforcement agencies to get approval before buying information technology systems made by Chinese companies. “I have met with SoftBank and Sprint regarding this merger and was assured they would not integrate Huawei into the Sprint network and would take mitigation efforts to replace Huawei equipment in the Clearwire network,” Rogers to the Washington Post. Sprint owns a share of Clearwire, which currently uses Huawei gear at the edges of it network, with its core network supplied by U.S. companies Cisco Systems and Ciena. In response, Huawei spokesman William Plummer “if government approval of the transaction is somehow contingent on an agreement to restrict purchase of equipment from any vendor based on the flag of heritage, then it is a sad day for free and open global trade, and it does nothing to secure the network. Everyone is global and every company faces the same cyber-challenges.” Sprint Nextel, the third largest U.S. carrier, and Tokyo-based Softbank are currently awaiting approval for , and are being reviewed for national security implications by the Federal Communications Commission, the Justice Department, and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
|
Backed By General Catalyst Partners & First Round Capital, Chloe & Isabel Offers A Modern, Tech-Savvy Take On Direct-Selling
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
When many people think of direct-selling, they envision Tupperware parties or pink-suited women lugging cases of cosmetics door-to-door. New direct-selling companies, however, are using social media to disrupt the industry. is part of the currently re-defining direct selling, and giving people with an entrepreneurial bent–in particular young women–a way to leverage their social medial contacts into a business. Launched in 2011 by Chantel Waterbury and based in New York City, Chloe & Isabel stands out with a strong focus on branding, a selling platform with data analytics that integrates social media networks, and a business model that gives the company’s hand-picked merchandisers opportunities to move into management roles. Waterbury’s first experience with direct selling was during her freshman year of college when she sold Cutco knives door-to-door to pay her tuition. She became one of Cutco’s top sales representatives on the West Coast, selling almost $30,000 worth of knives in three months, and kept the gig for three years. After graduating, Waterbury spent 14 years working in the fashion industry, developing jewelry brands for retailers including Target, Macy’s, Gap, LVMH, and Kenneth Cole. While on maternity leave, Waterbury began working on a business plan for a direct-selling startup that would target Generation Y college graduates, who were hit with particularly high rates of unemployment during the global economic crisis. Thinking back on her own direct-selling experience, Waterbury realized that the industry could offer new opportunities for social media-savvy entrepreneurs. “In the past 20 years, even the past 125 years, there hasn’t been any innovation within the industry. That shocked me,” said Waterbury. “I had experience building brands and I thought this is an opportunity to do something I love and, more important than that, create an opportunity for young women to become their own bosses.” Chloe & Isabel quickly gained traction among investors. The company has raised $11.75 million so far. That amount includes $3.25 million in a seed round led by First Round Capital, Floodgate Fund, and angel investors including SV Angel Ron Conway, Founder Collective’s Caterina Fake, Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, The Consigliere’s Mike Duda, Red Swan Ventures’ Andy Dunn, Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green, and Ashton Kutcher, and a $8.5 million Series A round led by General Catalyst Partners. Chloe & Isabel finds its merchandisers by interviewing potential sellers, and only selects 10 percent of the people who apply. The company gets 70 percent of an item’s selling price, while the seller gets 30 percent cut.
Each seller gets access to a proprietary platform that helps them set up an online storefront, and leverage and monetize their online social capital with real-time data analytics that look at click-throughs from their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Chloe & Isabel’s strong emphasis on branding helps merchandisers attract buyers. The company is named after the two kinds of consumers the company wants to reach: “Chloe” is a fashion-forward trendsetter, while “Isabel” represents the brand’s more classic and timeless side. Another way the company sets itself apart from traditional direct-selling models is by moving away from multi-level marketing. “There is a pyramid multi-level marketing compensation structure where you refer your friends, but then you no longer have a business because they’re also selling merchandise or getting it at a discount,” says Waterbury. “So that industry is plagued with incredibly high turnover in their sellers and it’s become a massive recruiting game.” For consumers, the advantages of shopping with a Chloe & Isabel merchandiser include getting exclusive designs (the company does not purchase ‘open-line’ products from suppliers, meaning all jewelry is unique to the brand) and savings off retail prices because there is no middleman. Some sellers make almost all of their sales through their online boutiques, while others host Chloe & Isabel events that they promote through their social networks. “At the end of the day, I see it as an omni-channel approach: offline, online, social retail,” says Waterbury. “However you want to sell it, it can happen in any channel.”
|
Office-As-A-Service RocketSpace Doubles Real Estate To Accomodate Bigger Startups
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Startups around the world are desperate for office space in the San Francisco Bay Area, so tomorrow will announce the lease of a new 50,000 sq. ft. office so it can house startups with up to 60 employees instead of capping them at 30. Along with this RocketSpace Suites project, the “office-as-a-service” plans to lock down another 100,000 sq. ft. spot and open a space in London this year. RocketSpace currently provides plug-and-play office space for 130 startups and their 600 employees at a per-person, per-month rate. It lets founders concentrate on their businesses while RocketSpace handles leases, security, bandwidth, firewalls and other office hassles. Its relationships with venture capitalists and corporate accelerators have kept at least one of its residents securing funding every week, and it runs inspiring events featuring speakers like Peter Thiel and Vinod Khosla. CEO Duncan Logan told me in a meeting today that one of RocketSpace’s biggest problems is that due to space contraints, “we kick out companies when they get to 3o employees.” Fast-rising startups like Uber, Spotify, Kabam, and Leap Motion have all gotten the boot. It’s also receiving far more qualified applicants than it has room for. RocketSpace needed more, well, space. Meanwhile, its current real estate is literally about to get steamrolled. Tomorrow, the city of San Francisco will announce RocketSpace’s current 181 Fremont location will be demolished to make way for a new transportation hub. So after a year of searching, tomorrow RocketSpace will announce the lease of a 50,000 sq. ft. space just north of Market Street at 180 Sansome. Eventually it hopes to take over that whole tower. But RocketSpace Suites is just the start of its expansion. It’s currently looking at a 90,000 sq. ft. Bay Area space to replace the Fremont home it will have to vacate. Logan says it will be able to host 2,000 people in its combined 140,000 sq. ft. space. By the end of 2013 RocketSpace plans to have added a London space. And even though it’s completely bootstrapped, after that it’s eying Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Vancouver for additional locations. Logan says RocketSpace aspires to become an “innovation campus” that he calls a “Stanford for startups.” He explains that “young companies are like young people. They’re a product of their environment. We can build the best possible environment for startups.” By surrounding themselves with similarly ambitious makers, Logan believes startups can be more creative and productive. Just watch out for your neighbors poaching your engineers.
|
Bitcoin: How An Unregulated, Decentralized Virtual Currency Just Became A Billion Dollar Market
|
Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Hang around in the tech industry long enough and you or someone you know will be heard saying, “that’s so crazy it just might work.” Two years ago, if you’d have told me that an open-source, P2P currency would soon be a thriving, billion-dollar market, I would’ve told you that you were on a lonely bus headed to CrazyTown, U.S.A. But today, officially became a crazy idea that’s actually working. Today, all the Bitcoin in circulation — some 10.9 million of them — have collectively crossed the billion-dollar mark. As it is wont to do, the value of Bitcoin (and its exchange rate) has fluctuated wildly today. At one point, it hit a dollar value around $78, then pushed into the mid-nineties. As of this minute, it’s hovering around $90. Okay, it’s still a tiny fraction of Google’s market cap, but this is something — especially for a largely unregulated, decentralized virtual currency. (Say that three times fast.) The world’s most popular controversial crypto-currency, mind you. Bitcoin supporters will scoff and tell you that this is no news, and that Bitcoin has been alive and thriving for years. In fact, it first appeared back in 2009, and has been slowly gaining steam since. But Bitcoin has largely remained outside the realm of mainstream media attention, because no one has been quite sure what to make of it. Is it a passing fad, a hilarious geek-driven phenomenon, or the real deal? In fact, it has really been relegated to the realm of the uber geeky, or seen as the currency of anarchists or crazy digital libertarians. The black market marketplace known as , which allows pretty much anyone to anonymously sell “alternative products” (i.e. large quantities of one’s drug of choice), uses Bitcoin for its currency. Something which hasn’t exactly helped Bitcoin’s “cross over” appeal. And geeks have had a point: Eventually, with the increasing popularity of P2P networks, virtual currency and digital marketplaces, it was only a matter of time before these entities would collide and a virtual currency of record would emerge. No government control?! Even better! Bitcoin crossing the $1 billion threshold may not seem like much, but if anything, it seems to be a sign to anyone listening that the crypto-currency is ready to be taken seriously. Of course, there are still a lot of concerns, as . But why has Bitcoin become a billion-dollar market? First off, startups are beginning to carry the torch. As , Expensify announced that it is now supporting Bitcoin “to give international contractors an alternative to PayPal and the high fees associated with the service.” Reddit has , too, along with WordPress and Namecheap, among others. Adam Draper, the founder of Menlo Park-based accelerator, Boost VC, recently announced that the team would be focusing on Bitcoin-focused startups for its summer class. As he , one of the other big reasons Bitcoin is beginning to take off — besides, of course, that it allows secure digital transactions without transmitting personal information — is that investor confidence is growing. Bitcoin startups are beginning to raise, and Draper claims that their fund is far from being the only one that’s interested. What’s more, the government has finally realized that it needs to start taking virtual currency seriously and develop a strategy for dealing with these types of currencies. FinCEN recently put out a series of which will inform future regulation, but also works to establish trust and credibility for virtual currency, particularly Bitcoin. There’s also the climate of the global financial markets, particularly the panic in Cyprus, after the government following its bailout. Many believe that the tenuous financial markets in Europe and beyond create an atmosphere that’s ripe for a digital panacea like Bitcoin. Of course, the other side of the Bitcoin argument is that the confluence of unsteady financial markets, and skyrocketing growth of virtual currency (plus hype), is creating a perfect storm that equates to Bitcoin just being one giant bubble waiting to pop. What’s more, as my colleague Greg Kumparak pointed out today, Bitcoin itself is still in a tenuous place, policy-wise. There’s a good chance that a decentralized, unregulated market is going to scare the pants off the government once it’s fully cognizant that Bitcoin is a billion-dollar market — and growing. “It’s the easiest ‘this funds terrorism’ scare argument the government will ever try to make, so a big battle within the next year or two is pretty much guaranteed,” he said. Whether one sees it as a phenomenon or a legitimate institution, Bitcoin is working on all cylinders to become the latter — and now has a real case for our undivided attention. Either way, feel free to marvel at how a virtual currency that appeared practically out of the ether (created by some ) just pulled a billion-dollar market out of its hat. See you on Silk Road?
|
OUYA’s Julie Uhrman Unveils The Android Console’s Interface And Games
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Today is a big day for , the Kickstarter-backed, Android-based game console. The company is announcing that its $99 console will be available on June 4 ( ), and it’s also holding a big unveiling party in San Francisco tonight. We actually met with founder and CEO Julie Uhrman yesterday, and she gave us a quick peek at the final hardware and at the actual interface. My main impression of the (Yves Behar-designed) hardware: Despite the low price point, it looks great. My main impression of the interface: OUYA really is trying to make it as easy-to-use as possible. That simplicity is important because OUYA isn’t just aiming for hardcore gamers. It’s also trying to create a console for a broader audience and to offer a more diverse set of games. “We’ve really opened up the last closed platform, which is the television,” Uhrman said.
One of the most impressive things is the fact that OUYA was just an idea nine months ago. I asked Uhrman how close the product is to her initial idea, and she said, “Surprisingly, it’s very close. We knew what we wanted to do.” Of course, the key to a great game platform is great games. There are more than 8,000 developers who have signed up to create OUYA games, including Square Enix, Inc., Double Fine Productions, Tripwire Interactive, Vlambeer, Phil Fish’s Polytron Corporation, and Kim Swift’s Airtight Games. You’ll get a few glimpses of the games in the video — Uhrman said the one she’s addicted to right now is Stalagfight, which is also showcasing a new monetization model, where gamers just donate however much they think the game is worth. (OUYA games have to have a free-to-play option, but other than that monetization is up to the publisher or developer.) Uhrman also confirmed that the company plans to release an OUYA 2 next year. She said OUYA will follow a release cycle that’s closer to that of mobile phones than game consoles, but without adding a bunch of expensive hardware that isn’t necessary for the current set of games: “We’ll have a tempered, thoughtful release cycle.”
|
Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope Brings The Universe To Your Fingertips
|
Greg Barto
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
The Microsoft Research team is building an epic map of the universe using data and photographs collected from the many telescopes around the world, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. They call it . There are roughly 300 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, and about the same number of galaxies in our universe (give or take a couple). With the WorldWide Telescope, scientists and developers have pieced together a detailed 3D view of the universe that lets a user do a fly by of any planet, star or galaxy known to man. You can even view the entire universe in a single frame, which makes us all seem insanely insignificant. But the WorldWide Telescope is more than just a neat exploration tool for astronomy and physics nerds. Program Director Dan Fay hopes NASA can use it as a research tool and that students from the elementary to graduate levels can use it as an educational resource. The Microsoft Research team has made it simple to manipulate data on a touch surface or desktop. With the touch of a couple of buttons and pinch to zoom, you’re off and flying through the universe. The team plans to bring this magic to mobile devices soon. Microsoft has also released an API to allow developers to build custom tours and lessons. I was fortunate enough to be given a tour of the nebula of the Milky Way Galaxy, and admittedly it was beautiful. The lessons can be as simple as a fly by of every planet in our solar system, or as complicated as analyzing photographs of the deepest known space objects. The map also lets you look at any part of the sky in a number of light wavelengths, including infrared and X-ray. After the demo, I took a tour of a scale model of the , which is due to launch in 2018. The telescope is about 100 times more powerful than Hubble and about seven times as big. It includes a 21-foot reflective mirror and a slew of instruments to study the sky. NASA hopes to look through dust clouds surrounding the formation of stars using the onboard infrared instruments to finally see how stars are born and to look far enough through the universe that they will get a better sense of how all of this madness is shaped. It will also be able to detect water vapor in atmospheres outside our solar system, and where there is water, there’s a significant chance at life. (mind = blown).
|
Delicious Becomes A Bit More Social Again, Adds Twitter And Facebook Logins
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
It’s recently been very quiet around , the social bookmarking service Yahoo bought in 2005 and then in 2011. Back then, the AVOS team said it was relaunching Delicious “ ,” but Delicious hasn’t made all that many waves since then, nor has it added all that many features to the relaunched service. But after four months of slumber, the Delicious blog sprung into action today and launched a few new features that could make the site a bit more interesting for those of us who long ago abandoned social bookmarking for social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Indeed, today’s update is all about Twitter and Facebook: Delicious added the ability to log in with your credentials for those two social networks and connect. It’s now easier to use Delicious to automatically save all those links you share on Facebook and shared and favorited on Twitter directly on Delicious, too. Delicious to power this feature in November 2011 and and for . Using Twitter and Facebook logins isn’t exactly innovative, but it does point toward a more social future for Delicious, especially in combination with the new “Friend Finder” tool that lets you friend and follow people you know on Twitter and Facebook. The team also made other small improvements – the bookmarklet and site now load faster, for example, but the main feature Delicious power users will surely appreciate is that every link now includes a “first saver” attribution. I’m not sure that any of this will really rescue Delicious from its current obscurity. Saving the links you share on social networks doesn’t exactly feel like the hot new thing, after all. It’s good to see a sign of life out of Delicious, however, and if Digg is still around and kicking, why shouldn’t del.icio.us be, too?
|
Under Amazon’s Wing, Goodreads Plans Closer Integration While Retaining Its Indie Status
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Following this afternoon’s announcement that , I had a few minutes to talk to the Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler and Amazon VP of Kindle Content Russ Grandinetti. They stayed pretty vague about the two things I was most curious about — how the deal came together, and the specifics of the planned Kindle/Goodreads integrations — but they did drop a few hints about future plans. Chandler (pictured here with his co-founder and wife Elizabeth) said that Kindle integration has been a popular request among Goodreads users, and Grandinetti said he wants to make it “super easy” to have a social experience on the Kindle device and apps. As for what that will look like, he said, “We prefer to talk about features when we ship.” One of the points highlighted by TechCrunch’s Drew Olanoff when he covered the news was the fact that this gives Amazon a social advantage over its e-bookselling competitors, particularly Apple. When I asked if the Amazon acquisition precludes building Goodreads integrations with non-Kindle devices, Grandinetti said the Amazon team “worked hard at Kindle to make the app work on iOS and Android,” so you’ll be able to access Goodreads features on, for example, your iPad through the Kindle app. (That doesn’t take away from Drew’s point, which was more about the iBookstore. It’s also worth noting that Amazon has , and that hasn’t led to big breakthroughs on the social front.) I asked if Goodreads will continue to be closely integrated with Facebook, or if it’s going to be building more of a standalone social experience on Amazon. Chandler replied that Facebook “will continue to be an important part of Goodreads — our mission is to help people express themselves through what’s on their bookshelves,” and leveraging Facebook’s enormous user base makes it easier to do that. Chandler also wrote in that Goodreads will “continue offering you everything that you love about the site.” For one thing, he told me that the entire Goodreads team will be staying on, and that it will remain in San Francisco. He said it will operate as an independent subsidiary similar to “how Zappos and IMDb are run.” “We’re going to keep hiring and and growing the team,” he added. Amazon and Goodreads have had some bumps in their relationship in the past — most notably, back in January of last year, from Amazon to Ingram as its primary source of book data, because Amazon’s data “came with many restrictions.” When I brought that up today, Grandinetti said, “I don’t think any side took any pleasure at the point that [Goodreads] stopped using the API.” Now is the chance to bring Amazon data back to Goodreads and to “explore whole new areas of discovery and reading,” he said. Chandler added that one of the downsides of moving away from Amazon was the loss of international data. With the acquisition, Goodreads will have access to that data again. Speaking of APIs, that Goodreads will continue to offer its own public API and to continue offering a review feed to Kobo.
|
Jack Dorsey Fights Robots In His Own Unauthorized Comic Book
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
He might not be bulletproof, but simultaneously running Twitter and Square qualifies Jack Dorsey as a superhero. This week a new unauthorized comic book about him was released, called “Jack Dorsey: Co-Founder of Twitter #1”. Check out these page scans posted by that preview his quest to recover stolen quantum networking technology. In the first issue from now , Dorsey hunts for the kidnapped inventor of the futuristic computer chip that could power “the Internet’s next evolution.” Along the way are plenty of cheesy, dumbed-down references to how Twitter and Square are changing the world. There are also some subtle references to Jack’s quirky personality, like his preference for taking the bus, plus a goofy scene where he mind-melds with a bison. Oh, and he battles a robot spider. Dorsey isn’t the only tech superstar immortalized in a graphic novel. BlueWater has also made comic books about , , , and Google co-founders . It all might seem ridiculous, but who would you rather have kids looking up to? Fictional caped crusaders? Or real inventors and entrepreneurs?
|
Facebook To Reveal “Home On Android” Sources Say Is A Modified OS On HTC At 4/4 Event
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Facebook just invited press to an event at its headquarters on April 4th to “Come See Our New Home On Android”. Sources tell us it will be a modified version of the Android operating system with deep native Facebook functionality on the homescreen that may live on an HTC handset. The evidence aligns to say this is the Facebook Phone announcement people have been speculating about for years. One source recently told us to be on the look out for a Facebook mobile press event in early April where the social network would reveal an altered Android OS running on HTC. It’s said not to be a full-on rewrite of Android, but rather a “flavor” that will have all sorts of extra Facebook functionality built in. We’ve also heard it referred to as an “application layer”. Imagine Facebook’s integration with iOS 6, but on steroids, and built by Facebook itself. It could have a heavy reliance on Facebook’s native apps like Messenger, easy social sharing from anywhere on the phone, and more. Rumors we’ve heard say that the project could actually be called “Facebook Home”, and it’s hallmark would be a heavily Facebook-ified mobile phone home screen. This could include Facebook news feed stories and data splayed out right on the home screen, along with easy access to Facebook apps. Now we’ve received the invite to this supposed event we were told to watch for, and other signs seem to verify what our sources are saying. The announcement would align with what in January. It looks like MG might have been right about what was happening, but just with the wrong timing. [Update: Since we published, that Facebook and HTC have been developing a joint ad campaign.] Finally, it meshes with ‘s 2011 report that Facebook was building a phone with HTC. However, one source says that several key members of the Facebook OS team have left the company including who recently went to Dropbox. That may have prompted Facebook to scale back its ambitions from true fork of Android to this more subtle modification. In addition to a modified OS, I think Facebook could launch a more basic homescreen replacement similar to the , Nova, or Go launcher for Android that would be compatible with standard versions of Android. This would give users a Facebook-heavy homescreen experience with much of the features described above, but without deeper operating system hooks and data access. As a complement to its modified OS, this Facebook Home Launcher would let Facebook’s new mobile developments extend to a wider range of devices beyond HTC. If Facebook really wanted to play it safe it could reveal this launcher instead of an OS modification, but more likely I see it as way for its work to gain greater reach. Some think Facebook may be too small and young of a company to manufacture its own devices without thoroughly distracting itself, but it’s already got many building blocks of a mobile operating system. Its recent could let it develop a Phone app alternative. When possible, Facebook could route calls over its self-built open sourced Skype alternative, and use normal a cellular connection if a call’s recipient isn’t equipped with the right Facebook app. [Updates: This story originally published about Facebook launching a modified version of Android that creates a Facebook content-heavy home screen experience that will debut on an HTC handset, but has since been augmented with references to other sites who later reported their sources had heard similar details about the event. It’s also been fleshed out with more info later drawn from our sources, specifically that the project may be called “Facebook Home” and that Facebook may have scaled back its Android modification ambitions over the years as some team members left the project and company.] With deeper control of a modified operating system would come huge opportunities to collect data on its users. Facebook knows that who you SMS and call are important indicators of who your closest friends are. Its own version of Android could give it that info, which could be used to refine everything from what content you’re shown in the news feed to which friends faces are used in ads you see. This announcement might not be a Facebook Phone, but rather a Facebook phone — one where everything the user sees is social by design, even if the handset’s innards are made by someone else.
|
The $99 OUYA Console Will Make Its Retail Debut In The US, UK And Canada On June 4
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Didn’t get a chance to back the ambitious to lock in your pre-order? Considering how much press the thing has gotten, you don’t have much excuse for missing that particular window, but never fear — OUYA intends to sell the $99 pint-sized gaming gadget through retail partners like Amazon, Gamestop, and Best Buy starting on June 4. The folks at obtained the full press release, which goes on to note that Android gamers in the U.K. and Canada would be able to pick up an OUYA that same day. Of course by then most (if not all) of the people who shelled out money when the project was in its early stages will have already received their devices. points out that OUYA began passing shipping notifications to its users earlier today. While the hardware inches ever closer to its mass-market release, there’s still a question of content to contend with. OUYA hasn’t provided much insight on how many game submissions it’s received since it began accepting them a few weeks back, though quite a few developers have already behind the little console that could. Of course, there’s a tendency for some gamers to cling to proven hits from years gone by, which is why it comes as no surprise to see some developers taking up the task of making the OUYA a first-rate emulation device. It was revealed earlier this week that NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64 emulators would be available in OUYA’s storefront at launch. And emulator developer Robert Broglia that he plans to bring his existing Android emulators for consoles like the TurboGrafx-16 and Sega Saturn (!) to the OUYA before too long. The OUYA’s journey from kooky idea to full-fledged product has been a long one, and it’s not over yet. Getting the device onto store shelves is certainly a milestone for the young company, but the true test lays in how run-of-the-mill consumers will react to it. Granted, its price point may give it a leg up on more prominent rivals like the Xbox 360, Wii U, or PlayStation 3, but we’ll soon see if the gamers of the world wind up warming to it.
|
A Look At The ‘Downtown Project’ That Wants To Bring A Tech Renaissance To Old Las Vegas [TCTV]
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
You’ve probably heard something about the , the $350 million initiative spearheaded by CEO that’s aiming to bring a renaissance of sorts to Downtown Las Vegas, the several miles away from the touristy . But unless you’ve been there and seen it with your own eyes, it’s hard to really grok what’s happening there — the scope of the project is so grand and its aims are pretty ambitious. So TechCrunch TV headed there in person a little while back to see how things are going and tell a bit of the story in video form. The first part of this published last month in , one of the most prominent people in the Downtown Project movement. And now in the video embedded above, you can get a more comprehensive look at Downtown Vegas of yesteryear and today, and hear Hsieh and other people involved talk about their vision for the area’s future.
|
Social App MeetMe Introduces In-Feed Advertising With Flurry Partnership
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Social discovery service is ramping up the advertising in its smartphone app. CEO Geoff Cook told me via email that the app was already running ads, for example at the top of the screen, but its mobile monetization efforts have been more focused on payments. The new ads, which are being introduced through a partnership with , will appear in the Live Stream, offering a more “native” approach, Cook said: “This is the first time we are placing ads within the context of the application itself, where the user encounters advertising while scrolling. The ads look and feel more like content with social cues like ratings and comments surfaced.” A lot of companies are talking about native ads nowadays, and the format can be particularly important in a mobile context, where there’s not a lot of screen space for extra banners. For example, the screenshot below will probably remind you of the ads in Facebook’s mobile news feed. (I’ve also , which is all about introducing native ads into news feeds.) When I asked how MeetMe’s approach differs from Facebook’s, Cook said: While I think today our native feed advertising solution is inspired by Facebook’s in many ways, I expect it to evolve differently in 2 key ways. First, we will be launching incented app-install feed advertising units in the next few months, leveraging the strength of MeetMe credits. MeetMe credits have helped make MeetMe one of the top-grossing social apps on both iPhone and Android, and our users clearly demand them. Also, we don’t view these native units as limited to being placed in the Feed. We view them as contextual units and may expand them, with some UI changes, to other popular areas of the app where the user scrolls the mobile screen like our Photoboard and Messages. MeetMe says its live feed is now seeing 2 million posts per day.
|
Well-Funded Gaming Startup Booyah Confirms Layoffs And New CEO Brian Morrisroe As It Shifts Focus To Tablets
|
Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
It looks like some changes are afoot at , the location-based gaming company best known as the maker of the . MyTown and MyTown 2 attempted to evolve the location-based check-in model in gaming, allowing users not only check into locations within a city-building sim, but also scan and check into products in the real world. With the and, to a lesser degree, its location-based riff on Second Life, InCrowd, Booyah has been able to raise nearly $30 million to date in three rounds, with the most recent being its $20 million Series C from Accel, Kleiner Perkins’ iFund and DAG Ventures — in the summer of 2010. Since then, however, Booyah hasn’t been able to sustain the early success of MyTown, leading to some big changes this week. First, Booyah is getting a new CEO. Chief Creative Officer and co-founder Brian Morrisroe will be taking the reins this week, replacing Jason Willig, the former EA and Hasbro exec who had been acting as CEO since co-founder Keith Lee stepped down in 2011. Morrisroe tells us that Willig will be stepping back into an advisory role and will no longer be involved in day-to-day operations, though he will continue to advise the company on game development and strategy. The management shuffle comes as a result of a broader, more fundamental directional shift for Booyah. The startup likely raised too much money too early and had a difficult time deciding on which platforms to attack, without diluting efficacy or over-extending. Now, having seen the emergence of tablet gaming, the new CEO says, which is defined by longer sessions, takes place at home, and now that connected play is appealing to more traditional core and mid-core gamers, Booyah is “shifting focus to this huge opportunity,” he says. “We’re going to continue releasing our products on many mobile devices, but focusing efforts on tablets first gives us the best opportunity to deliver exceptional, original experiences to our users,” he continued. Morrisroe is stepping into the CEO’s chair to lead the company in its new direction, and, although Willig will now only be advising the company, the rest of the leadership will remain intact, including co-founder and CTO Sam Christiansen. In addition to its change in leadership and direction, Booyah has also made some significant reductions to its staff. We’ve been hearing from sources this week that Booyah had made as much as an 80 percent reduction in its staff as a result of these changes. After some digging, this estimate may be a bit high, but it’s fairly close. While the co-founders would not give specifics, Morrisroe did say that (as of today) the company does have about 20 employees. And , Booyah had about 50 employees, so it’s at least a 60 percent reduction of its staff. “These moves are always difficult, but it’s about positioning the company for future success,” Morrisroe said via email, “and we believe moving aggressively toward the emerging tablet market provides the biggest opportunity.” While layoffs, management changes and pivots don’t a success story make, the co-founders did say that they have some new, original games in development that will be tailored to the tablet gameplay experience and continue to push its evolution forward. As of today, Booyah has a total install base of around 25 million users across its portfolio, which includes the MyTown, Early Bird and No Zombies Allowed franchises. The company also saw strong revenue growth last year, Morrisroe says — about 5x from 2011 to 2012, although he wouldn’t say more. More on the
|
Dwolla Is Latest Victim Of DDoS Attacks – Site & API Down For Second Day
|
Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
While the media to debate the severity of the denial-of-service attacks taking place across the web this month, they appear to have claimed another victim: payments startup announced today that it, too, is now experiencing a distributed denial-of-service event (DDoS attack). The attack, which is still underway, began yesterday, resulting in either limited or no availability to the company’s website, Dwolla.com. In , the company says that the event is still ongoing, and is preventing people from viewing the site and accessing Dwolla’s service. Also affected are third-party developers, who are using the company’s APIs to integrate Dwolla’s payment technologies into their own sites and services. These developers were notified today, and Dwolla says that it’s working with service providers to resolve the issue. Responding in the comments section of the post, the company told concerned users and developers that the consumer-facing API is unavailable at present, but as far as the company knows right now, actual fraud is not involved – that is, there’s no risk to users’ money, nor will this have affected transactions that took place before the attacks began. “Funds are fine, and we do have our fraud team actively monitoring the entire situation,” wrote a Dwolla company representative, addressing a commenter’s complaint. The company says that the attack is actually affecting its hosting provider, and they’re unsure at this time if it’s related to . One of the service providers that Dwolla is working with is , the Internet security firm that’s stepped in to protect a number of companies in the wake of these recent attacks. (You can see a CloudFlare message appear upon visiting the Dwolla.com domain at present). quoted CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince this week, who equated the DDoS attacks to the Internet’s version of a “nuclear bomb.” on this report and another from the BBC, downplaying the scale of the attacks – they’re not affecting the entire Internet, Gizmodo claims. Full text of the Dwolla.com blog post below, in case you’re unable to pull it up yourself (or choose not to, out of kindness): — Dwolla’s web app is back online. Mobile and API are being tested. More to come.
|
Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads, Which Gives The Company A Social Advantage Over Apple
|
Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Today, Amazon has . Specific terms of the deal weren’t disclosed and it should close by the end of Q2. Goodreads had raised $2.75 million in funding from the likes of True Ventures since launching in January 2007. , the site had over 10 million members and had catalogued more than 360 million books, adding 22 million each month. Now, the site boasts over 16 million users. This type of social integration could give Amazon a major advantage over e-sellers like Apple, who have no social components to their product whatsoever. With people actually discussing and sharing the books that they’re into, having an Amazon direct connect makes complete sense. The site can offer special deals to Goodreads users, which in essence is now Amazon’s book-reading social network. Here’s a look at the spike in books added per month in a graph from last August. With a connection to Kindle, those numbers will skyrocket: Amazon VP of Kindle content, Russ Grandinetti discussed how important this integration could be for its e-book division: Amazon and Goodreads share a passion for reinventing reading. Goodreads has helped change how we discover and discuss books and, with Kindle, Amazon has helped expand reading around the world. In addition, both Amazon and Goodreads have helped thousands of authors reach a wider audience and make a better living at their craft. Together we intend to build many new ways to delight readers and authors alike. Goodreads’ CEO and co-founder Otis Chandler discussed the acquisition and the opportunity for the site to infuse some social elements into Amazon’s bookselling strategy: Books – and the stories and ideas captured inside them – are part of our social fabric. People love to talk about ideas and share their passion for the stories they read. I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity to partner with Amazon and Kindle. We’re now going to be able to move faster in bringing the Goodreads experience to millions of readers around the world. We’re looking forward to inspiring greater literary discussion and helping more readers find great books, whether they read in print or digitally. Goodreads has also , going a bit deeper into why the deal makes sense and making it clear that Kindle integration is a top priority, as it’s something that users had been asking for. Chandler said: I’m excited about this for three reasons: 1. With the reach and resources of Amazon, Goodreads can introduce more readers to our vibrant community of book lovers and create an even better experience for our members. 2. Our members have been asking us to bring the Goodreads experience to an e-reader for a long time. Now we’re looking forward to bringing Goodreads to the most popular e-reader in the world, Kindle, and further reinventing what reading can be. 3. Amazon supports us continuing to grow our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with our unique culture. In addition to bringing more social to Amazon, Goodreads has over the years, which is something Amazon always froths at the mouth for. The closest that Apple has come to socializing the sale of digital goods was Ping, its music “social network” that never took off and . If Amazon were to acquire sites like Goodreads for each massive vertical, the company could really ramp up reviews, suggestions and of course, sales. The amount of data that Goodreads has on its users alone makes the acquisition a slam dunk. People love to talk about books, people are creating groups on Goodreads to discuss the books they read, and that means everyone has to buy the book to participate. Apple , which is another area where social can really kick up sales for Amazon. The company also shared an interesting stat, which might have sealed the deal for Amazon: In the last 90 days, Goodreads members have added more than four books per second to the “want to read” shelves on Goodreads. With over 16 million users? You do the math.
|
Hot Gaming Startup Supercell Is Closing A Round Above $100M At Valuation Around $800M
|
Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
Supercell is a . Unlike their brasher, Angry Birds-making brethren a 15-minute drive away in Espoo, they don’t like to talk much about anything beyond making games and about the company culture they’re deliberately cultivating. All of this belies what has become a phenomenal business over the last nine months — one that makes around $1.3 million per day off two iOS games called Clash of Clans and Hay Day. After about three months of considering whether to do a huge secondary round with the help of , we’ve heard they sold somewhere between 16 and 20 percent of the company’s common shares in a deal that would value the company at around $800 million. We’re still trying to figure out the exact amount. It’s somewhere between $100 and 150 million, but closer to the lower end of the range. We heard they got close, but didn’t quite get to a $1 billion valuation, not that this should be the goal anyways. Supercell declined to comment on the financing round. “We simply will not comment on market rumours,” said spokesperson Heini Vesander. “We’ve never really done that and will not do that now.” We’ve heard that Institutional Venture Partners, Atomico and Index Ventures are the new investors. Tencent and DST had done some due diligence on the company in February, but didn’t end up going in for whatever reason. Index declined to comment, and Atomico and IVP did not reply for comment. It’s a bold, ballsy bet for what is basically a two-product company in a notoriously hits-driven business. While the macro trends behind mobile gaming are hard to argue with, the business is unpredictable. Several of the companies that were leading the charts two years ago are now much farther down, even if their businesses are still profitable. Last year, the whisper numbers for top grossing titles ranged in the $40-80 million range annually. At around $1 million a day, the industry is looking at mobile gaming franchises that could gross between $200 and 400 million in 2013. A few days ago, , the maker of what is probably the most valuable iOS game in the world today — Japan’s Puzzles and Dragons. That deal valued that company at $4.1 billion, and Gung Ho’s financials . So when you have a hit, it’s insane. But how many businesses can keep it up? Supercell didn’t find its hits until two years after it was founded. Before it unveiled Clash of Clans in the middle of last year, it had to kill several early projects like Gunshine and Battle Buddies that weren’t testing well. That said, the company has a very seasoned team. The company’s built early feature-phone gaming company Sumea and , and went on to create and lead Digital Chocolate’s Finland studio for several years. Because of his reputation in the local Scandinavian gaming community, Accel Partners took a in 2011. This was well before Supercell had even launched its first game, which is a big sign of faith from a top-tier fund in the team. So far, he’s built the company carefully. Even though the company raked in somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million per day this past fall and winter, Supercell only grew its headcount by slightly over 20 people in the last four months. In contrast, Zynga was adding at least a person a day through its heady growth period in 2010 and 2011 — which made it harder to manage and preserve the company’s culture. Supercell looks for self-directed people who have long histories in game design and development. Basically, people who are genuinely into the craft. Each team or “cell” in the company is . Their monster hit Clash of Clans was built by five people and is now supported by a roughly 10-person team. The company’s roughly 90 employees are intensely loyal to Paananen. They crack open the champagne bottles for all the games that they kill, just the way they do for the ones that succeed. In a recent company party, Paananen was and a bunch of paid actors staged a fake zombie invasion to chase everyone out of the office. (Really. See below.) The other thing to note is that this is yet another big round where founders and early stakeholders are likely taking cash off the table. Rovio had a similar deal back in 2011 . But that was mainly a liquidity round for Kaj Hed, the father of CEO Mikael Hed. ( ) Supercell , with Paananen owning just under 20 percent of the company before this round. (Finnish companies are obliged to make filings about their ownership and financials every year, even if they’re privately held. Expect to see some kind of release around earnings from Rovio and Supercell in the next month or so, which is why there might have been some pressure to close a deal now.) Secondary rounds are a complicated and controversial issue in growth-stage financing rounds. Supercell clearly didn’t need the cash. They’re extremely profitable right now and only have about 90 employees. Secondary rounds, which let early employees and founders take cash off the table, can relieve pressure for a short-term exit. But the criticism is that they can take some fire out of the belly, and make teams less hungry. Yet exit opportunities in gaming are arguably not that appealing right now. The IPO door is closed because of Zynga’s performance last year, plus you’d need a much longer track record beyond two games to prove long-term value to public shareholders. At the same time, it’s easy to see why an acquisition wouldn’t be attractive. The big buyers are either still digesting their last deals or are in the midst of politically complicated changes. . Even though Hay Day is basically the Farmville of mobile, Zynga’s culture isn’t really that compatible with Supercell’s. The Japanese gaming giants are still figuring out their Western strategy while facing threats at home from emerging mobile gaming platforms like Line and monster games like Gung Ho’s Puzzles and Dragons. Given how quickly the iOS ecosystem is growing, the better mobile game developers can control their own destinies. Supercell is choosing this way.
|
After Raising $2.1M, TiKL Opens Their Mobile Chat/Voice Calling API To Developers
|
Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
For a company that has somehow stayed mostly off the tech press’ radar, TiKL has had a pretty friggin’ good year. With $0 spent on marketing, its two mobile apps, TiKL Touch To Talk and Talkray, have nabbed a total of 28 million downloads. After taking part in Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 class, they raised a $2.1 million Series A from some of the biggest names in the Valley. Today TiKL is unveiling the other half of its business strategy: the Talkray API. (Before we dive much deeper, a quick bit of background on what their apps actually do: is a walkie-talkie app, bringing cross-platform push-to-talk-functionality to Android and iPhone. is a broader communications app, with things like group calling and voice mail.) Using their new API, TiKL says mobile developers will be able to easily add text chats (both one-on-one and group chats), voice calling for groups as large as 25, voice mail, image and video transfers, and just about any other feature from the into their own applications and games on iOS or Android.
Speaking of games, that’s actually where TiKL says they’ve seen the most demand for an API like this — hence the timing of the launch, which coincides with this week’s Game Developer Conference. They’re keeping the API generic enough to work in any app, but they expect a pretty big chunk of their customers to be game devs. TiKL still hasn’t settled on exactly how they’ll charge for the use of their API, but it’ll be completely free during the initial beta stage. . Now, about that $2.1 million Series A: TiKL actually closed the round a few months ago but kept it under wraps until mentioning it in passing during our phone call. TiKL says the round was funded primarily by General Catalyst, and was backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. Of their 28 million app downloads, their first app, TiKL Walkie-Talkie, accounts for 27 million and has found most of its user base in the U.S. and South Korea. Their second app, the Talkray app from which their new API gets its name, makes up the other million and is most popular in the Middle East. Alas, TiKL declined to comment on how many of their 28 million downloads were active users.
|
SEC Greenlights One Style Of Equity Crowdfunding For Startups
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
The SEC today paved the way for a new era of venture capital investing by it won’t pursue enforcement action against , whose platform lets any accredited investor fund startups in exchange for equity. Before, some thought FundersClub’s founders could face jail time for violating finance laws. FundersClub’s model could be used by others to raise capital online for startups before the JOBS Act goes fully into effect. is a Y Combinator-incubated startup that has to build its online venture capital system. Its website hosts profiles of different startups looking to raise money. Any accredited investor (someone who earns over $200,000 a year or has a net worth over $1 million) can choose to invest as little as $1,000 in startups with open rounds on FundersClub. These investors can cash out if the startup is acquired or IPOs, or if they do a stock offering on the secondary market, and FundersClub gets a cut of the money. However, FundersClub was thought to be operating in a murky legal grey area because it’s not a registered broker-dealer. FundersClub maintained its innocence, saying it never directly handles the invested money, which is kept in separate custodial accounts for each startup it hosts. Technically, it’s not crowdfunding, but rather a venture capital advisor that raises funds online through a streamlined process rather than offline with traditional paperwork. Now the SEC has issued it a “No-Action” letter, vindicating FundersClub. The SEC statement explains “The Staff will not recommend enforcement action to the Commission under Section 15(a)(l) of the Exchange Act if FundersClub and FC Management engage in the proposed activities described in your letter”, referring to a plea from FundersClub outlining how it operates. FundersClub CEO Alex Mittal tells me: “The letter is a win for accredited investors, startups, and the VC industry, and strong validation of the business model of FundersClub–to bring the transformational impact of the Internet to venture capital. It allows FundersClub to do something online that historically venture capital advisers have only done offline. Via the no-action letter, the SEC has officially recognized the legitimacy of online VC, a field we’ve pioneered and are leading with FundersClub. For accredited investors, they are now allowed much more flexibility in how they invest in venture funds that support start-up companies. For startups, they are gaining easier access to an important source of capital and value-add.” The letter creates a roadmap to legal online fundraising for startups that other platforms could employ. There’s also the alternative route to legal online VC where operators become standard broker-dealers, which is the approach taken by newer YC startup . The SEC’s decision could make it easier for startups to get funding from large swaths of independent investors, rather than a small group of angels or VC firms. With crowd backing comes an army of evangelists, marketers, recruiters, and business development assistance. It could be an appealing complement to old school venture capital that comes with mentorship and insider connections. Later this year, the JOBS Act is expected to go fully into effect, allowing non-accredditted investors to back startups in exchange for equity, and startups to publicly promote that they’re raising money. But until then, online fundraising by accredited investors just got a critical thumbs up from the regulatory body that could have shut it down. : [scribd id=132861718 key=key-17dr1rj3hfv8iz732d4v mode=scroll] : This article has been edited to clarify the difference between standard equity crowdfunding, and FundersClub’s online venture capital model.
|
“In The Studio,” Live Nation’s Joel Resnicow Muses About The State Of Digital Music
|
Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 |
TechCrunch “In The Studio” welcomes a digital media who has hustled his way up through the music world by interning for Rolling Stone, The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum, MTV Networks (through Viacom), Hulu, and Twitter, worked as an editor and analyst for ABC News and Fuse TV, and eventually embarked down the path of entrepreneurship to be recently by Live Nation. , now the Mobile Product Lead for San Francisco offices, has invested his entire career in both old and new media platforms. Before joining Live Nation, co-founded a music application company (disclaimer: I worked with Joel there) called Rexly, which sought to aggregate digital media tastes and help users discover new content through their friends but across mediums and channels. Rexly committed to a product direction, but was timed to coincide with Spotify’s U.S. release and was never able to gain elusive mobile distribution or enough investment to continue, as music startups have created scar tissue among investors. In this conversation, Resnicow recalls the insight that led him to help create Rexly, how Spotify’s model has disrupted iTunes in many ways, the lessons he’s learned by trying to create a product in a difficult category when big incumbents were launching competitive services, and how the Rexly acquisition by Live Nation now gives him and his team a new platform by which to create more and more tools to help artists make deeper connections with their fans. As a larger vision, Resnicow sees music discovery on mobile devices as a way for bands to find and engage with fans and eventually drive ticket sales for live shows, where the real money is. Resnicow also touches on the new seed fund by Live Nation Labs, which is looking to push innovation broadly in the music space, ranging from discovery, ticketing, social media, photography, and video. Finally, Resnicow is brutally honest about his experience in pitching Rexly to many investors and the challenge with iOS distribution, a pain point many app makers acutely feel.
|
Jawfish Games Goes For Real, Synchronous Multi-Player On iOS (Really!)
|
Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Although playing against someone else in real-time has a kick that nothing else can quite mimic, turn-based multiplayer games have thrived on iOS and Android. That’s partly because slower data connections prevented studios from having enough confidence that they could provide a fast, twitchy user experience. At the same time, it was questionable whether there would be enough of a critical mass of players to match them in real-time. But one Founders Fund-backed company called says it has a multiplayer platform that can pit up to 16 players against each other in a single tournament at the same time. They’ve partnered with , to distribute a game called Match-‐Up! The title is really a collection of several well-worn classics like a word unscrambling game, a puzzle game that has players match items of three colors in a row and Mahjong. Players advance through a bracket that matches 16 players, then eight, then four, and then — you catch the drift. In keeping with short attention spans on mobile devices, each round is 30 seconds, so a full tournament is only a few minutes long. At first, the title will be more of a proof of concept. Then the two companies will build it out with more games going forward. Since Big Fish has a library of more than 300 mobile games, there are plenty of titles they could work into Match–Up! Jawfish took an $885,000 seed round in January of last year and . (Yes, I was surprised that Founders Fund — — backed a gaming company.) But they did it because of Jawfish’ CEO’s track record and it comes out of a separate seed fund that the firm uses to support talented founders they really like — even if they don’t align with the broader fund’s overall track record of investing in futuristic technologies. . He was the first employee at Netsys, a company that Cisco later acquired for $95 million in the first dot-com era. Then he went onto a championship professional poker career that included stints as a broadcaster on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown and The World Series of Poker and five books on the game. “We believe we’re the best in the world at supporting mobile gaming in real-time,” he said. He’s facing down a number of other companies eyeing this area. Zynga while other startups like Israel’s Nextpeer partner with third-party developers to offer multiplayer support. Nextpeer often matches up players with a “replay” of their opponent’s gameplay, however. Jawfish’s platform shows you your opponent’s screen and performance in real-time in a small “Spycam” in the corner of the game. “It’s such an obvious idea, but it’s an extremely difficult technical challenge,” he said. Gordon says he’s only partnering with Big Fish Games and isn’t looking to expand his platform to work with other big gaming companies. Match Up! is naturally free-to-play. If a user wins a tournament, they’ll start accumulating virtual chips that they use later on. They’ll have special tournaments that more experience players can wager more in. “As you build up your chips, you can imagine where this is going,” he said, hinting that players might be able to top-up on extra chips through in-app purchases. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz2N98FDhLo&w=420&h=315]
|
Messaging Service WhatsApp To Extend Subscription Model To iOS This Year, But Don’t Hold Your Breath For A Desktop App
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
, the popular mobile messaging app that eschews advertising in favor of a paid model, is getting ready to bring its iOS app in line with the apps it makes for other platforms by turning it into an annual subscription service. Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s CEO, says that the company is planning this year to shift its iOS app to one where new users would pay annually to keep using, taking it away from a one-off download fee and bringing it in line with how it is distributed on the Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Phone platforms. The comments were made to Dutch journalist Alexander Klopping, and reproduced in part in two Dutch blogs, and . Klopping also provided us with recording of the interview, in English. The new subscription model would apply to new users, Koum said, and would likely follow the same pricing structure as its other apps, which are free for the first year and then cost $1/year, compared to the single, for-life $0.99 purchase that users make on iOS today. “We’re relaxed on dates, but definitely this year. It’s on the road map,” Koum said. There are signs that WhatsApp is already making the necessary tweaks to implement the change. On an area of the site where users can contribute translations for future WhatsApp services, a points out it’s already to renew a subscription on an iPhone. Koum did not spell out too much of the logic behind why WhatsApp is changing its model — “We want to keep things simple,” he explained. On the competitive landscape, WhatsApp is currently one of the most popular messaging apps around, with 17 billion messages transmitted daily (7 billion inbound and 10 billion outbound), with over 100 million users on Android alone. But it is also facing challenges from the likes of messaging apps like Line, which in January passed across multiple platforms. Line is free to download and it makes its revenues through in-app purchases for stickers and virtual currency for games and other content, alongside other services like messaging and free voice calls, part of a strategy of presenting itself as a . Making WhatsApp free for the first year doesn’t match that feature set, but it at least better matches what Line (and others) offer to App Store browsers looking for messaging apps. And of course free downloads are what drive many of the most popular apps today. Some other noteworthy details from Koum’s short interview: — He says that WhatsApp is not likely to be making a desktop version of its service any time soon. “We get that question asked a lot,” Koum said of desktop apps. “We feel strongly that the world is moving to mobile and [so] we want to be mobile-only. Your phone is with you all the time, and desktop is to many becoming a secondary experience. [So] our answer is no, not anytime soon.” — Similarly, adding live streaming video to WhatsApp is “definitely not this year,” said Koum. (Also on the list of feature speculation is gaming. A over the weekend claimed that WhatsApp was making a move into gaming on its platform, per a deal with gaming company WeMade, although later the for that report was pulled citing wrong information.) — No comment on but a wider statement on exit strategies in general. “We don’t discuss exit strategies internally,” Koum said. “A lot of companies in Silicon Valley talk about exit strategies. The way we look at it, is it’s like entering a marriage and talking about divorce. We just don’t have one. We don’t have one because we don’t plan or want to think about it. We want to focus on good products.” — On cannibalizing carrier revenues. “We actually have really good relationships with a lot of carriers. We’re doing some revolutionary stuff. The world is switching to data [and we have] some good partnerships, for example with Three in Hong Kong.” That partnership gives Three subscribers access to WhatsApp when they travel internationally for the equivalent of about $6/day. “We understand that a lot of people are switching to our product instead of SMS but we look at it as evolution.”
|
Uber, Lyft, SideCar, And The So-Called Safety Problem
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Uber is unsafe. Lyft, SideCar, and other ride-sharing services are unsafe. At the very least, there is the question of their safety for passengers. And why? Because they represent a new type of technology, a new way of doing things, and that is inherently scary. Never mind that it’s more difficult to commit a crime using these new transportation services than it would be for a regular old taxi or gypsy cab driver. And never mind that these fears are being stirred up by the emergence of a single allegation over the past six months of one individual acting badly. Never mind all that, because a few people are apparently over the potential for new ride-sharing services to enable widespread criminal activity. These fears are being driven by the resurfacing of a , where one of Uber’s drivers was accused of sexually assaulting a customer after driving her home. The allegation, which first , resulted in a driver contracted by one of Uber’s partners being arrested on Thursday. But he was soon after released without being charged. And as a result, Uber itself has been accused of “letting the issue of safety slip.” The problem is, the company typically partners with third-party limo and taxi services to pre-vet drivers, doing background checks and ensuring that they have all the necessary licenses or permits. City to city, Uber drivers are required to abide by whatever local regulations are in their jurisdiction. If driving for UberBLACK, that means having whatever license or permit is required to operate a livery vehicle. If it’s UberTAXI, drivers need a local medallion to operate. Only in San Francisco — and last week, in Austin — does Uber operate a so-called “ride-sharing service,” where drivers don’t have those types of licenses or permits. And that’s where things start to get tricky, when making the argument that Uber is somehow delinquent in its hiring practices. For the most part, Uber and its partners follow the same regulations all the usual cab or limo services do. Which is to say, if Uber’s regulations are soft, so are those that are followed by every other taxi or limo service out there. Do a quick search on Google or Google News for “ ” and you’ll find . What stands out about the news stories in those links is the unfortunate and sad truth that sexual assaults by taxi drivers are not as unusual as they should be. But Uber’s got something that regular taxi or limo services don’t have. So do SideCar and Lyft. They have an identity system that connects a driver to a ride. They have rating systems to help determine which drivers are doing a good job, and which aren’t. They have feedback systems through which unhappy passengers can report something that went wrong. And, in the case of a crime, they have time, date, and ride logs so they can quickly identify perpetrators. Which means, if you were a criminal and somehow got through the pre-vetting process for any of these new services, you’d have to be an absolute idiot to commit a crime while on the job. Hopefully, if you’re the type to try out new things, and you’re not scared by the idea of using technology to make your life better, that will provide some comfort to you. TechCrunch founder and current columnist Michael Arrington is a general partner at CrunchFund, which is an investor in Uber. Photo Credit: via
|
Sharp’s Financial Woes Continue As It Misses Deadline For $120M Qualcomm Investment
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
In another setback for the Japanese electronics giant, for the second half of a $120 million investment from Qualcomm after failing to complete a plan to begin fabricating power-saving screens. Though jointly-developed by the two companies, the screens are based on developed by Sharp, Japan’s leading LCD maker. Qualcomm paid half of the $120 million back in early December, when it acquired a stake in Sharp one month after the Japanese electronics company about its ability to keep operating. At the time, Qualcomm said Sharp would also have to make an operating profit in the second half of its business year and have at least $1.05 billion of net assets. Sharp spokeswoman Miyuki Nakayama that the financial targets are not the reason for the delay, and that the two companies are now working toward a June 30 deadline to meet conditions for the second payment. Sharp is already under financial pressure as it looks to repay a $2.1 billion convertible bond in September, and is having difficult raising capital since its credit rating was by Standard and Poor’s and other ratings agencies last fall. In order to meet its financial obligations, analysts told Reuters that they expect Sharp to resort to equity financing. The Osaka-based company has already put up all the land and buildings it owns in Japan (except for properties it is trying to sell) up for up to US$1.9 billion in loans. Sharp also failed to renegotiate an agreement for Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co to buy a 9.9 percent stake, with Asahi newspaper reporting that a March 26 deadline is expected to pass with no new agreement in place. The stalled after Hon Hai demanded a degree of management control while also seeking to lower the $708 million Sharp was seeking. Earlier this month, Sharp did after the Korean giant agreed to invest $110 million in Sharp in return for panel supplies. Sharp, however, also declined an offer from Samsung to buy its copier business as part of that deal, though the Japanese company did not disclose why it refused the offer. Sharp is not the only Japanese electronics company facing financial difficult due to a decline in flat-panel display sales, competition from Samsung, and a strong yen, which makes product pricing less competitive overseas. In January, Sony for $1.1 billion, after four straight years of losses and cutting 10,000 jobs.
|
Note-Taking Service Google Keep Briefly Appears Before Disappearing Again
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Note-taking app Google Keep briefly went live earlier today at before disappearing, but not before and took screenshots. A Google spokesman said the company has no comment. As Android Police notes, Google Keep resembles , which allowed users to clip and organize information from the Web but , and Evernote (which was to former Google Notebook users). This isn’t the first time that Google Keep has been spotted, either. Last July, Google in an official Google+ post that included “save to Google Keep” label. If Google Keep does indeed officially go live later, it will compete with other note-taking services like Evernote, Pocket, and Onenote. Other apps that might potentially join Google’s ( ) roster include and the to the company’s Chrome browser.
|
Military ID Verification Service, Troop ID, Raises $2.1 Million
|
Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Iraq War veteran and founder Blake Hall has scored a cool $2.1 million from notable investors, such as David Tisch and Mark McLaughlin. The former elite soldier has raised a total of $5.7 million for his identity service that verifies military credentials and partners them with brands. [vimeo 49918152 w=400 h=300] “The concept of the business is simple. We noticed that brands were relying on offline channels — and largely neglecting their digital channels — to offer active military and veterans commercial discounts, employment opportunities, skill training vouchers, etc,” writes Hall to TechCrunch in an email. “When we talked to the marketing and corporate citizenry teams, we discovered that marketers were afraid of fraud and abuse if they offered an exclusive discount via their web and mobile apps — read a military discount URL getting shared on RetailMeNot or Fat Wallet — so we developed a Single Sign On that accesses authoritative data stores on the back end so that merchants can offer exclusive discounts, employment opportunties [sic], skill training, etc to service members, veterans, and their immediate family members via their digital channels. ” Hall’s success with brands, such as Under Armour, has even gotten a rare nod from the White House. “Companies like Troop ID answered First Lady Michelle Obama’s appeal to ‘Do what you do best’ in connecting service members, veterans and military spouses with the resources they deserve. Joining Forces applauds Troop ID, the companies with whom it partners to offer military deals, and all companies that find ways to honor the service of our military and their family members,” White House Fellow at Joint Forces, U.S. Army Captain Archie Bates, on an official White House blog. Beyond Troop ID’s consumer aims, “trusted identities” are an important part of the Administration’s approach to online verification. The United States has eschewed the creation of a single national online identification, instead attempting a decentralized approach through multiple, compatible private companies, the so-called “ ” (NSTIC). Troop ID, or a company similar to Troop ID, could potentially serve as a model for the ecosystem of verification companies. “People want to help and to take some of the burden off the less than 1 percent of Americans who wear the uniform, and we’ve created a channel that lets them do that through Troop ID,” concludes Hall.
|
Samsung Grows An Ego
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
For the first time in the six years of the iPhone’s life, Apple seems to be going on the defensive, and with good reason. Apple’s global marketshare is slowly shrinking alongside the growth of Android, and Samsung is leading the way as smartphone king, shipping over 50 million Galaxy S IIIs since the phone launched. And remember, that’s just one of dozens of phones Samsung launches on the Android OS every year. The , the latest generation of Samsung’s flagship series, was debuted on Thursday, March 14. It was . Two days later, Apple erected the page, which lists all the reasons why the iPhone 5 is better and everything else is… well, not. The “Why iPhone” page talks about how the A6 chip and the iPhone 5 battery were carefully crafted by “Apple Scientists” to offer lots of power without sacrificing battery life, as opposed to “settling for a large, off-the-shelf option,” like competitors. “Why iPhone” also mentions how the iPhone’s camera is the most popular camera on Flickr. “And while other smartphones simply tout large amounts of megapixels, taking great pictures is about so much more,” reads the page. Interesting how major Android competitors, like Samsung and HTC, just recently graduated past the 8-megapixel zone into 13-megapixel territory. Coincidence? The page talks about how iPhone’s content comes from the Apple iTunes Store, “the world’s most trusted entertainment store.” By buying content from Apple, the page promises, you don’t need to worry about dreaded malware. This jibes quite well with a very rare tweet out of Apple’s Phil Schiller. After citing a recent security study that in the fourth quarter of last year, “96 new families and variants of Android threats were discovered,” Schiller told Phandroids to “be careful out there.” Be safe out there: — Philip Schiller (@pschiller) Apple usually finds a way . The company has been known to drop press releases during CES or send out invites to iPad events during Mobile World Congress. Yet, there hasn’t been a bold, prideful interruption this year, but rather defensive interviews and tweets. Phil Schiller even did one day before the Galaxy S4 unveiling to slam Android as a whole. “When you take an Android device out of the box, you have to sign up to nine accounts with different vendors to get the experience iOS comes with,” said Schiller. “They don’t work seamlessly together.” And that is but just a taste of the Android bashing. What’s perhaps most interesting about this newfound defensiveness from Apple is Samsung’s attitude. During the massive Galaxy S4 announcement, it was hard not to notice Samsung’s ego in the whole thing. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but it was more of a sense I got. Samsung officially knows its the top global smartphone maker in the world, and more and more you’ll see it start to act that way. For one, the show was held in a massive venue at Radio City Music Hall, complete with minor celebrity appearances and full-on Broadway skits. Usually, the press gets special front-row seats to these events, with semi-solid WiFi to cover the event. At Samsung Unpacked, we were herded in with general consumers and struggled to get a connection to cover the Galaxy S4 announcement. It’s Samsung’s big phone, and it’s so big they don’t even care if we can cover it. Meanwhile, Apple seems to be backsliding into a defensive position, no longer surprising us with news in the middle of an Apple-free conference or scoffing at cuts from Google or Samsung. And it’s real fun to watch it go down.
|
Checking Facebook Has Become Too Much Like Checking Email, And The News Feed Redesign Might Fix That
|
Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Do you enjoy checking email? Probably not, since the word “checking” is something that sounds like work. Whenever you have to continually go back to a place to see if anything new is there, it starts taking a toll on you. Checking things is boring. I spent some time at Facebook last week to learn more about the changes that the company is . Some of the things that the social network made clear during its announcement was that all of its changes would now be taking cues from the experience users are having on mobile devices. That very specific design, with so little real-estate, makes designers focus on specific aspects that will cause people to , rather than scroll through the feed endlessly out of sheer boredom. I sat down with , who has only been with the company for the past six months. I remarked to him that he joined the company at the right time, to which he agreed. His previous experience came from working at Amazon on the Kindle apps team, so he knows exactly where mobile is headed and how much it is taking over everyone’s time as their main computing experience. Reckhow tells me that desktop users complained heavily about the News Feed experience being “cluttered,” and this probably has something to do with the fact that most of these people are using Facebook’s mobile apps most of the time. When you headed to Facebook on the desktop, it was a huge contrast in experience and turned quite a few people away. One of the phenomenons I’ve been tracking over the past few years is that there seems to be a certain point where social networking apps and communities become a chore to participate in. I”ve found that many people mention having to “check” Facebook, much in the way that they’d “check” email. That change in mindset shows that Facebook has gotten away from highlighting content to simply aggregating it in one place, much like an inbox. When you have over a billion users it’s very difficult to make sweeping changes without irking a huge chunk of core users, but this is what Facebook is faced with every time it wants to better its nearly ten year old product. Why is mobile leading the way when it comes to making these changes? Reckhow explained it in a way that I hadn’t heard it explained before: The best design is happening in mobile phones. On mobile phones you’re constrained and constraints make good design. It makes you think about what’s good to put on the screen and what needs to be left off. Addition by subtraction is clearly where Facebook is going. In previous versions of its mobile app, the company wanted to jam as much as it could onto your News Feed and make everything load as quickly as possible. Speed is still important, but it seems that showing as much content as possible, in a way that’s not engaging, was causing a bit of exhaustion in its user base. Take a look at this before and after, the before being on the right hand side: By throwing in visual queues to grab your attention, Facebook appears to be slowing down the mindless scrolling that most users are doing right now. Instead of “checking” your News Feed, Facebook wants you to stop and participate. When I watch people use Facebook now, it appears that they’d see a small image and take note of where it was taken and who took it and then move on. Sure, maybe they’ll “Like” it as a way of letting the person know that they saw it, but rarely do they open the image or drop a comment in. These recent design changes should help change that. To make sure that Facebook is headed in the right direction, Reckhow tells me that that the company is taking its slow rollout seriously, doing quite a bit of user testing along the way. It is possible that the designs that were announced a few weeks ago might not be the end result that the entire community gets to use, and Facebook is OK with that. One example of a feature that clearly wasn’t having the impact that the company had hoped was the Ticker. This is the little box that infinitely scrolls all of the activity happening in your circle of friends. Since this isn’t a feature that could be fit into a mobile experience, it never really picked up on the desktop. With this new design, the Ticker is nearly impossible to find when you’re sitting at your computer. It’s just another example of how much of a mobile company Facebook has become, not because it wanted to, but because it had to. As we discussed the need for personalization on Facebook, Reckhow told me why mobile is the perfect place to take design queues from: The personal nature of your phone is obvious, it’s with you at all times. Because of this, the things your friends are sharing are with you at all times. We see that people on mobile are so active, they use it every day and that means they’re going to build a deep relationship with the product and identify Facebook with mobile. It’s available everywhere, and it’s a great thing to play with when you’re in a line at a store. Now you can spend more time on mobile with multiple choices of feeds. You can go deeper. Going “deeper” means slowing your roll when it comes to scrolling and “checking” and taking a few moments to actually see what your friends are up to. It’s a mindset that Facebook sorely needs its users to change. If Facebook users are in a mode of endless scroll and passive interaction, how will a Facebook ad ever perform in a way that will cause brands to buy again? By making News Feed items more robust, letting you see a full video preview or joining an event from a story, Facebook is trying to get its users to spend quality time on the site, not just time. Reckhow explained: One of the interesting parts of doing this project is that we have so many stories and links and friend stories, and News Feed is a very complex thing and we tried to design it in a way that honors each type of content. We went through all of the different stories and Chris Cox would say “how would we handle type of story”. We didn’t know. This let us go back to the drawing board and look at things differently. Additionally, by being able to take a look at different cuts of information, like photos, all friends and music, you’ll be able to drill down to the information that interests you at any given time, rather than having to scroll to find a photo hidden amongst a bunch of random status updates. The company says that it wants its users to rely on the service to not miss anything, which their current product isn’t conducive to. By showing you everything, in an algorithmic-only way, you are pretty much set up to miss everything. The fact that Facebook recognized this, and went ahead to fix it, is a good thing. It’s interesting that mobile is teaching designers and engineers how to capture people’s attention on any device. If you ever find yourself “checking” a social service again, it’s probably a sign that the company is doing something wrong. You should be engaging, learning, enjoying and connecting. When you get your hands on the updated Facebook News Feed, take note of whether you’re actually getting something out of it, or if you feel like it’s taking something out of you. Consume less, engage more. [Photo credit: ]
|
Sometimes, I Like To Wait
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
So I finally finished watching the first season of this weekend. Which is crazy, right? It’s been a full month and a half since all 13 episodes went live on Netflix. How could I wait so damn long to finish the story, especially since traveling to South by Southwest meant that I had to wait before I could find out what happened to [REDACTED] after [REDACTED]? After all, there’s been so much writing about how the show represents the future of distribution, . And it’s part of a broader conversation around how media consumption is changing, with . At least, that’s what I keep hearing and reading: . Yet when I watched , I really enjoyed the space between the episodes, when I could wonder about what happens next and anticipate the next time I’d have an hour or two to catch up. That’s not a new idea — in fact, it’s one of the main pleasures of television. But I think it’s something people lose sight of when they talk about bold new distribution models. There are tech companies pushing in the other direction. For example, last fall, in which novels are published an episode at a time, rather than all at once. A startup called ran to support its own serialized fiction efforts ( ). And serialization is at another digital publishing startup called . Now, these are still early, experimental efforts. Plus, comparing TV and novels is a bit apples-and-oranges, because TV is much more expensive to produce and therefore needs a much bigger audience. But I was still impressed by the mere fact that companies want to experiment with giving audience members new ways to wait. My friend is actually part of those efforts — he’s writing a Kindle Serial called (which is being published by Amazon imprint 47 North). I emailed Schwartz to ask why he believes there’s still an interest in serialized fiction, and he said: The part of the serials program I’m confident about is that we’re putting out a good story, and that there are readers who enjoy the anticipation of built-in suspense. It’s not as though we’re completely re-inventing the wheel, because comics and TV still do serial storytelling. The instant gratification faction is definitely out there; a social media consultant analyzed the forum feedback thus far on Gooseberry Bluff and found that while the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, the main negative that was mentioned was that the episodes were too short, which leads me to conclude that they wanted to read more right away. And just like there are people who would rather wait for a DVD set of Doctor Who or a trade collection of last year’s Avengers comics so they can consume them all in one sitting, there will be some readers who opt to wait until the full e-book is done, or to buy the physical copy. That’s fine! I’m determined to put something out that works no matter whether you read it in chunks or all at once. Besides, I’m not Dickens, but I’m guessing he had readers write in to complain about waiting to find out what was going to happen to Nicholas Nickleby, too. I’ve been rediscovering the pleasures of serial novels myself, primarily through a science fiction novel called . It’s set in author ‘s universe, with a new chapter is coming out every week, and . Scalzi is a New York Times-bestselling author (as well as one of the teachers when I attended in 2008) and is coming out from his regular publisher , not a startup — though, yes, as an experiment. Not everything about the serialization is perfect. I have to admit I feel a little annoyed when I get a particularly short chapter that doesn’t include any of the book’s major characters. And the model fits a bit awkwardly in Apple’s iBookstore, where every chapter is released as a separate book. Nonetheless, it’s become a nice ritual for me every Tuesday, when I download the latest episode and revisit the setting, characters, and story in bite-sized chunks. I actually like stretching the experience out over a few months. It’s almost like … watching a television show. And . To be clear, I also enjoy a good binge watch, and I think Netflix is smart to experiment with new models. But I’m also grateful that someone else thinks there’s something worthwhile in waiting.
|
What Games Are: Where Did Wii U Go Wrong?
|
Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Two years ago I was very excited by the possibilities of the Wii U. I instantly fell in love with the idea of the tablet/joypad game controller and saw all sorts of possible uses. It seemed like it might well be the console that could do it all, from first-person shooters to real-time strategy, and also lots of funky stuff like drawing games, things to do with cameras and so on. I also loved the notion that I might finally be able to play Call of Duty without having to fight over TV time with my wife. I wondered aloud whether this play for an Ultimate Platform could be both the start and the end of something, and privately hoped that it would overcome some of its initial confusion and become interesting. Having largely mined the casual market to death with wibbly-wobbly party games and yoga simulators, it felt like a good time for Nintendo to start talking to its fans again and regenerating the marketing story that had got it so far. Concerns had long been raised among gamers that Nintendo had turned its back on them, and they felt that the company was not interested in them anymore. So Wii U seemed to be all about Nintendo finding its way back to them, but also dragging all of its newfound casual friends along for the ride. But it seems the fans have already decided that for themselves, and Nintendo’s attempt to reignite the old flame is falling on deaf ears. Not only are sales of the platform , it just has no buzz. Aside from the usual anticipation of a new Zelda, all the column inches about Wii U these days are about how poorly it’s selling, how shoddy some of the technology in it is, and how the premium games that it’s trying to attract all look cut-down in comparison to “proper” versions. Nobody, it seems, thinks that the controller is a big enough deal to really get excited. And to make matters worse, the casual market of Wii isn’t particularly interested either. Like that other recent dud, the PS Vita, you know it’s all gone wrong when a platform is just not featuring in any conversations. Nobody’s thinking of making games for it, fans are generally not getting excited for it, and folks forget that it exists. Oh that, they say. Did that ever come out? What I find myself wondering, however, is why this has happened so fast to Wii U. The console has only been available for three months and its first titles were mostly well-received. ZombiU was interesting, and many a Twitterite noted how Nintendoland was perhaps a little odd but full of user-created art and other neat stuff. The prospect of games on the horizon was also welcome. Then in the wake of Christmas it was all very silent. Sony started rumbling about PS4, Microsoft about Xbox, and the whole microconsole idea started to gain traction. Somewhere along the way we just kind of forgot about Nintendo entirely. Outside of the usual fan circle, nobody seems to be factoring the system into their thinking. It’s possible that this is all because of the Wii/Wii U brand mixup. Six years ago the Wii was the hot ticket, and you could not buy one without sacrificing your firstborn. It was based on a very simple yet compelling idea (wave hand, something happens on screen) and extended this idea out with some very smart accessories like the Wii Fit. And yet three years ago, developers were already grumbling that Wii felt like it had peaked. Third-party games didn’t really sell well, and the technology was more limited than it initially appeared. Worse, the scuttlebutt around the campfire had it that most users who were buying Wiis were really only playing them for a week or two and then shelving them until birthdays and Christmas rolled around. In many ways then, Wii may have already been a dead brand to most players, and selling them something that connected to that brand may have felt quaint. What certainly didn’t help was that the system seemed like (and still seems like) an add-on for your Wii. When the console was first announced in June 2011 there was mass confusion over what it actually was. At first it seemed to be a peripheral, much as Wii Fit had been. Then it slowly came to light that, no, it was a console. But not exactly a successor to the Wii, as it was aiming for a much more sophisticated kind of gamer. So we had the vision of the Wii brand trying to be all about fighters and shooters, and yet hold onto its casual roots. Wii U is not the first Nintendo system in recent memory to try and fail to extend an existing audience. The 3DS tried much the same trick, building on all that DS love and hoping to convince the world that 3D was going to be the next big thing. The world remains unconvinced about that and is not inclined to pay a premium to find out. However Nintendo was able to backtrack via a large price cut and save the DS market. With Wii U, though, it feels different. Pivoting toward the core was probably a decision made from knowing what the attach rate and margins of casual games tend to be compared to fanfare, and yet still. Perhaps the Wii brand had already aged so much that the new system just needed a new story to tell. Then there’s the technology. Although one of the big differences between the companies is that Apple has always tended to build sweet systems for the upper end of the market, so their devices are more expensive but also of better quality. Nintendo, on the other hand, tends to be cheap. In areas such as battery life, the number of gamepads the system can support, the slapped-together feeling of its online offering, difficulties with transferring saved games and so on, Nintendo created an air of ineptitude around the Wii U launch that refuses to go away. There’s also the sensation that the competition has passed Nintendo by. While Sony’s recent conference may have produced mixed impressions (from those who think it was a great console launch, to others like me who think it showed a stark failure of vision), there’s a sense that the game is now Microsoft’s to lose. For all its woes, Kinect largely became the more interesting peripheral story, and many expect Microsoft to make a big announcement that will win the next generation soon. Nintendo, perhaps, needs to be bolder than it has been with Wii U. Perhaps it should have cut the console chord entirely and been a purely portable system (with better battery life). Perhaps Nintendo should not have worried so much about backwards compatibility (does anyone use their Wii Fit any more?) and instead focused on one core verb to define the new system. Or perhaps it’s because Nintendo didn’t think small enough. Those pesky iDevices are becoming near universal, with their free games and such, and the taste for gaming, which is even more portable, is only growing. Likewise, microconsoles are emerging as a potential super cheap console with all the fun games you could imagine for cheap. Perhaps Wii U needed to be that simplistic and inexpensive. It feels as though Wii U is the result of a company becoming trapped in a box of its own making. Nobody seems to want an ultimate console, or if they do they don’t want Nintendo’s version. The question before the company is whether the system can, or should, be saved. With only three months on the market, it is extremely unlikely that Wii U will be shelved, but it certainly needs adjustment. Whether in terms of a large drop in price or a revision of the technology, something big needs to be done.
|
Good Riddance, Google Reader
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
turned into a zombie a long time ago and it’s good that Google finally . For years, Google Reader has been sitting on Google’s servers without any appreciable updates. Sure, it got a bit of a facelift , but it only lost functionality since Google decided to rip out its social features in an effort to drive people to Google+. Its core features hadn’t changed for years, its overall design wasn’t really up to snuff anymore and even after eight years on the market, it would still often take hours before some feeds finally updated. I can’t help but think that a lot of the current outpouring of support for Google Reader is more about nostalgia than anything else. A , ‘shares’ on Google Reader were the equivalent of today’s Facebook Likes and Twitter retweets. It was the hot new way to measure how popular a story was, and a bunch of services ranked stories accordingly. Displaying the number of subscribers to your RSS feed was a point of pride for bloggers. But even then, Google Reader was mostly a tool for information junkies. It never caught on with mainstream users who were barely able to figure out how to subscribe to a feed. As Google Reader inventor noted in a post bemoaning the , however, that “market and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent).” Google – especially under the leadership of Larry Page – simply decided that going after small markets wasn’t in its best interest, so Reader was left to die. For mainstream users, Flipboard, Zite, Pulse and all the other news-reading apps now represent a far superior solution (and they are all mobile-first, while Google Reader never got a chance to do something innovative on mobile at all). And that’s okay. The total dominance of Google Reader meant that nobody else was really trying to improve these inbox-like RSS-based tools that we information junkies love so much because they give us a relatively unfiltered view of what’s happening. , a Y Combinator-backed company, probably got the closest to replicating the old Google Reader when it launched last year (including the “share” feature and comments), but it barely reached a thousand paying users until the Reader announcement last week (now it has almost 3,500 paying users over 11,500 who signed up for a free account). The pull and comfort of using Google Reader was just too strong, even with projects like the virtually replicating the Google Reader experience (it would be interesting to see how many users Google Reader got in the last few years, by the way). Now that Reader is on its deathbed, we are also suddenly seeing a renaissance in services that want to provide information junkies with better tools than just scanning Twitter feeds. Unlike Google Reader, Newsblur emphasizes speed and is under active development. , which was always popular but never quite had a breakthrough, offers a far more appealing visual experience than Reader. Even to get in on the action. When Google launched Reader, it essentially the market for RSS readers. Now that it’s gone, maybe we’ll finally see some innovation in this space again (especially once we get past this slightly awkward phase of just trying to replicate Reader). Who knows, the way things are going, we’ll be talking about again in no time.
|
Focusing On The Google Reader Shutdown
|
Taylor Buley
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Last week Google announced the shutdown of Google Reader as part of its company wide bid to “focus” on “fewer products.” “We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go,” wrote the company in a . comScore estimates that as many as 665,000 different people used the mobile app in recent months, according to the . The product appears to have been well-loved among users, with a monthly active user base estimated to be around one million according to a competitor. Given the relatively small impact a Google Reader sunsetting could have on the company’s , a highly visible shutdown like that of Google Reader seems to be at least in part to send a message (among the vocal blog readers seem to be the bloggers themselves). The message is that Google is not just focusing on fewer products, but focusing on the things that . And if that’s the new standard by which things will be measured by Google, expect more changes to come as Google’s executive leadership continues to change. “Powering down” Google Reader effective July 1 was a tough decision and the arguably the biggest property execs have felled since the shutdown of Google Wave (in addition to closures, several products have been ). The move is reminiscent of Yahoo’s of beloved bookmarking service Delicious, and the public response seems to be the same as then, too: given strong and the mature stage of product development there might have been more peripheral ways to other ways for the Internet giant to rationalize its operational belt, such as a sale or targeting . Although the shutdown of Google Reader would seem to message focus for the Internet advertising company, it’s in fact the focus from elsewhere being mainstreamed into the fold. Google started to leave RSS discovery out of Chrome , opting instead to make it a 3rd party feature for which you’d need to use a plugin. A Chrome developer explained at the time the decision was “based on our philosophy of trying to limit ourselves to adding only the UI features that a vast majority of users need.” (In fact, Chrome is not the only browser maker to come to have doubts over the continued role of RSS. Firefox independently came to similar conclusions, discovering that, according to heatmap data, only 9.1% of beginning to advanced users interacted with the RSS button.) So why shutdown Google Reader now? Last week Android chief Andy Rubin abdicated in favor of “VP of Chrome and Apps” Sundar Pichai. Neither change was likely to have been made precipitously. As the Wall Street Journal’s : Mr. Rubin has a reputation as a fierce competitor who sometimes clashed with others regarding the Google services that would appear on Android, said people familiar with the matter. … That sometimes led to conflicts with other Google units that tried to get their products to be preinstalled on Android devices or be more tightly integrated with the software, these people said. Mr. Pichai is likely to be more accommodating and willing to integrate Android with more Google services, these people said. Some people familiar with Google have said the Android and Chrome units had a difficult time working together to bring the Chrome Web browser to Android devices in 2012. It replaced a Web browser that the Android team had built. According to this reporting, it appears Pichai is admired for his ability to amicably work out difficult partnerships both within and outside of Google, a challenge he’ll face amid pressure from without over growing Samsung power and from within over maintaining Rubin’s “focus” on finding the right amount of Google services to pitch to Android users. Will Pichai be able to make the tough decisions when, for example, it comes time to reconciling the differences between Google TV, Chrome OS and Android? In the meantime, readers’ loss of Google Reader is a gain for its competitors. Feedly, a service that offers a magazine-like experience atop feeds, is to have seen by a half-million users. Newblur, which charges $24 per year for a premium account, has seen more than 3,000 such accounts purchased in the past day alone. When Yahoo sunset Delicious in 2011, paid bookmarking service Pinboard saw 700 signups an hour. Newsblur founder welcomes the exodus of Google Reader’s faithful. The developer and sole operator says his company gives users the option to pay 50% more by choice and that, because “the more users I have, the more capacity I can have,” some “15% of those who go premium are paying the $36 per year.” “This is better than my Delicious moment,” says Clay. “The number of people who use Delicious is eclipsed by the number of people who read blogs.” For Clay, as likely for others, Google’s “focus” away from Google Reader is a bittersweet victory. What happens when David challenges an Internet Goliath and that giant decides not to fight? Clay believes a challenge will be making sure the audience sticks around: “I’m competing against the back button,” he says. And as for the rest of competition, fortunately for Clay there are plenty of giants to take on — namely “the stream” he says, “this algorithmic stream of content” from Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and others.
|
Facebook Opens Early Adopter Club To Reignite Mobile Experimentation
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Ditching HTML5 cost Facebook the flexibility to tinker and quietly try out design or feature changes on subsets of users. But now it can experiment again. Thursday a beta club offering some Android users early access to new features. Thanks to silently downloaded software updates, Facebook can field test evolutions of its mobile experience so it doesn’t screw up for hundreds of millions of people. Between hackathons, lock-ins, and constant code pushes, experimentation is core to Facebook’s product development. It designed the system so it could simultaneously test tons of different versions of Facebook on tiny fractions of its userbase. New features are often tested in remote areas like rural New Zealand or on specific demographics like people with few friends to pull in feedback without alerting the public. If initial tests go well, Facebook pushes changes to 1 percent of users and monitors for bugs, qualitative feedback, and usage fluctuations. When an update proves stable and popular, it’s rolled out to 10 percent and eventually 100 percent of users. This lets its miasma of services on the web evolve intelligently. That’s not how it works on mobile. Typically with native apps, updates go out to all users at once in the form of software downloads manually pulled from the App Store or Google Play. That means everyone gains access to new features at the same time, and it’s harder to gauge impact without changing everyone’s experience for better or worse. Facebook worked around this by wrapping HTML5 pulled live from its website within its iOS and Android apps. HTML5, while flexible, wasn’t fast enough to satisfy Facebook’s hundreds of millions of mobile app users. Switching to a native infrastructure doubled the speed of its apps. When the quicker iOS app launched, Facebook’s iOS mobile product manager Mick Johnson , “We deliberately made a trade off to get to scale. We used HTML5 to test and try things out.” In a Facebook engineering , Jonathan Dann wrote “We chose to use HTML5 because…it allowed us to iterate on experiences quickly by launching and testing new features without having to release new versions of our apps.” Mark Zuckerberg had recently announced onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt that too much dependence on the mobile web standard before it was ready was one of Facebook’s biggest mistakes. However, backtracking on HTML5 robbed Facebook of some ability to experiment. One way Facebook made up for it was . More popular amongst early adopters than its main apps, Facebook tries out features like audio messaging and bulk photo uploads in its Messenger and Camera apps. Those that are well-liked graduate into features in its flagship mobile products. Now thanks to silent updates, it can meddle with its most popular app, Facebook for Android, which had 192 million monthly users at the end of December. Thursday it prompted some users to download and opt in to early access to beta features, as first reported by . This update is only available to some users who’ve enabled a setting on their Android to install apps from outside of Google Play. Those who oblige silently download beta updates over Wi-Fi from then on. Beta testers do have to manually confirm installation of the updates, though. If Facebook thinks all its users would benefit from a beta feature, it pushes a standard Play update to everyone. It all works a bit like . The silently downloaded updates are one of the bonuses of Android’s less restrictive ecosystem for developers. Facebook could potentially do something similar on iOS, but that would require a clumsier system like where users have to manually drag in updates. This article isn’t meant to say Facebook ever stopped experimenting on mobile. It moved to updating its apps every two or four weeks. It just couldn’t do so as stealthily. The new beta club could be an exciting opportunity for some hardcore Facebookers. After all, we’re living in a world where having the newest apps or technology can make you seem cool like knowing about underground bands used to. I frequently see people asking for how they become guinea pigs for Facebook. The company has only offered limited opportunities to volunteer for testing in the past. It for its product to get it off on the right foot, and accepted applications to become a beta tester, though it no longer does. Now there’s a clear route to be the first on your block with the next Facebook features: get an Android and enable sideloading app updates. Facebook is striving to redefine itself as a mobile company. Yet it’s still pushing major changes to the web first, including the recent launches of and the which have both yet to emerge on iOS or Android. To avoid disruption by nimble startups that are truly mobile-first, Facebook will need to continue aggressively iterating on its apps. Luckily now it’s found a new way to fire up the bunsen burners and cook us the future of social on the small screen.
|
Apple’s Forward Stance
|
John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Apple doesn’t need a miracle, but clearly the marketing department thinks the company needs to step things up. To wit: Apple’s latest , which touts “There’s iPhone. And then there’s everything else.” It’s a brassy, ballsy statement worthy of Steve Jobs himself and it seems to show an Apple undaunted yet clearly aware that it can’t just say nothing about the competition. For most of the past few years, Apple has ignored other manufacturers. Except for the Mac vs. PC ads, there has historically been a sense that Apple is above the fray and is not fighting down. They produce, others imitate. However, now that Samsung has finally figured out how to build a phone that everyone (who doesn’t have an iPhone) wants, they’re in a slightly more offensive stance. I’ll call it the forward stance – that stance in Karate where you stand sideways, arms up to block, knees bent. It’s not as rigid and obvious as, say, , but it suggests a certain readiness. Where am I going with this? Well the fact that Apple is ready to fight at all – albeit the the same cold calculation as they usually express in their advertising – is important. It means that people can now point to the Samsung line of mobile devices and say, “Oh, hey, you can multitask on that big phone thing” and that “You can print a book right from your photos and it makes an album from everywhere you are!” It shows that finally, after a decade of fumbling around in the dark, Samsung has finally switched on the light. I won’t give my opinion on the Galaxy S4 yet – I’m still slightly high from the time they apparently – but I will say this: They figured out that people didn’t care about specs. Instead, they care about use cases. For years, Apple talked up the features: The iPhone can make , , play Angry Birds and take fun videos. With the Galaxy Note you could be kind of a or . Apple was aspirational, everyone else was confrontational. Samsung was dysfunctional. I would argue that the S4 marketing is a step away from that tone (although it’s still pretty rough). The idea, however oddly implemented, is that this is the phone that works and does lots of cool stuff and you can, for one shining moment, use a Samsung product to woo the girl or make your mom happy. That’s important. Apple’s response is to remind us that nothing Samsung (or anyone else does) is new or particularly noteworthy and that no launch can diminish the laurels iPhone receives on a daily basis. As , Apple’s response page is all about how iPhone was better before Samsung (or anyone else) was even in the game. Apple wasn’t rocked back by these launches. But Samsung is pulling something off that it has never pulled off before: accessibility. It is a human product, not a product for robots and, barring further missteps, I suspect the S4 will sell very well. Does Apple care? Clearly it does, but it’s been in the game a lot longer and has a lot more to lose. I think the company under Tim Cook still has a lot of tricks left and getting into fighting stance is just the first one.
|
Line: We’re A Social Entertainment Platform, Not Just A Free Calls Messaging App
|
Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Line, an app made by , which has grown rapidly, amassing over 100 million users since its launch in summer 2011, is typically labelled as a messaging app – and compared to the likes of WhatsApp, Viber and Skype because it offers free calls and texts. But in reality Line’s feature set positions it closer to being a social network. In other words, Line is going after disenchanted Facebookers as much as it’s hoping to woo Skype-calling addicts. Download Line’s app and you’ll find a of other apps and services nestling inside. From games to play with your Line buddies, to utility apps such as Line Camera, which lets you add filters and graphics to photos – à la Instagram. There’s also ‘Official Accounts’ in order to follow verified celebrity Line users to receive their updates; Line Café for forums for chatting to other users by topic; and your own Facebook-esque timeline/wall where you can post updates, photos, videos to let chosen friends know what you’re up to. In the U.S., a market which Line entered at the start of this year — having built its initial user base in Asia (it’s especially popular in Japan, with “close to“ 50 million users there) — Line sees an opportunity to take advantage of the space between basic mobile messaging and traditional social networking, says its U.S. CEO Jeanie Han. “I feel that some people are kind of getting tired of being too open on social media,” Han tells TechCrunch. “Although we have several strong competitors in the U.S. we feel that Line serves a need or fills that gap that’s not being fulfilled at the moment. “Line is more than a messaging app. It’s sort of like social media but it’s not too open. It’s just enough for people to feel comfortable. You get to choose how you want to communicate with your friends and family. You have complete control over that. You don’t have to worry about your picture being taken last night and now the whole world is going to see it,” she adds. “So it’s more than just text messaging — you can communicate in a fun way — but without ever worrying about your identity being shared or revealed or being sold and not being too open about it. That’s really the selling point of Line. And in the U.S. the timing is great because I do feel that need and that gap has not been fulfilled.” Han does not specifically name-check Facebook but that’s obviously the social networking elephant in the room – not least because it has its own messaging app, Facebook Messenger, which includes the ability to send free texts/IMs, and also (but not currently in all its markets). There’s no doubt Facebook is the Goliath to Line’s youthful David. But Line’s focus on mobile messaging to generate momentum for a platform/social network (really the opposite of Facebook’s evolution) has proved a successful formula in Asia – and Han says she’s optimistic about the U.S. market, too. “It’s been very well received. Although we don’t have the critical mass in the U.S. just yet, the word is getting out there that Line is really a platform that can make your life more fun, not just a simple messaging app,” she says. In keeping with this platform approach, Line is available on multiple mobile platforms and also has a web app for use on PCs, Macs and tablets. And its sense of fun is evident in the stickers it offers users as part of the communications mix – some free, others paid in-app downloads (a key revenue stream for the business, although the company isn’t currently breaking out any new revenue figures). Line hasn’t just recycled the standard yellow-faced emoji/emoticons that are the very definition of a digital cliché. Rather it has created its own set of cutesy cartoon characters to star on stickers and also in the games and apps that live on the Line platform. These characters effectively act as recognisably brand mascots for Line – to the point where it has been able to create spin-off merchandise, such as and physical stickers in some of its Asian markets (in much the same way that Rovio’s Angry Birds have flocked forth from the small screen to land on toy shop shelves, in books and their ). The core recurring Line characters, such as Brown the bear, Cony the bunny and Moon, have a cutesy appearance that brings to mind an enduring Asian IP such as Hello Kitty. But Line is not limiting itself to cartoon styles that play best in the Far East – rather it’s localising its sticker content by market and even by user community. It’s also not restricting itself to its own creations but is actively licensing other companies’ IP — so it can offer things like Hello Kitty stickers, too. Han says Line employs people in each of its markets to specifically follow local trends to help localise sticker content. We’re customising it to each country and each culture,” she says. “In Spain we’re making specific stickers that are just relevant for the Spanish people, what’s going on in society at the moment, what are the hot topics. We’re going to do the same for the U.S. We already have special [free and paid for] stickers for Snoop Dogg. It’s doing really really well actually. The response has been phenomenal.” Line is not the only messaging app to offer stickers, of course. Viber has its own purple-haired sticker character Violet, for instance (as well as the usual line-up of yellow-faced emoticons). But despite Viber’s 175 million+ users there’s no sign of spin-off merchandising momentum for Violet plush dolls or games (not yet anyway). While , Line has clearly ploughed in a lot more effort into fleshing out its cartoons and developing fully formed characters that can become IP properties in their own right, not just 2D stickers – a key difference in emphasis. Han, who joined Line after 10 years working in the movie business in Hollywood, is adamant she has joined, first and foremost, an entertainment company – rather than a technology company. “I didn’t go into technology. I went from one entertainment industry to another,” she says. “I know how to bring happiness and how to market entertainment to people and that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Stickers and cute cartoons obviously play well with young users – and that’s Line’s initial target demographic. In fact 18-to-29-year-old females are its “core target,” says Han, explaining that in Asia, once girls were using Line, boys followed – and then this young “hip” user base helped bring in older users “like a domino effect.” “People, especially young folks, are really adopting our stickers,” she says. “The ratio of people who are buying things online like our stickers is actually quite high in the U.S., as well as the people who are using our games inside our platform relative to the total number of users, so we’re quite optimistic in terms of our market in the U.S.” Spain is now Line’s biggest market after Asia – something Han puts down to the cultural appeal of communicating with added visual panache via Line’s stickers since Line did not do much marketing initially. It has now just kicked off a high-profile TV campaign starring Spanish actors Michelle Jenner and Hugo Silva — plus its core sticker characters: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E6_aGbthjE] “In Spain it just kind of grew organically,” says Han. “I think it had something to do with the fact that the Spanish people are very passionate, and they’re very expressive and they really loved using our stickers to communicate with each other so it just took off.” Han is hopeful Line will have strong appeal in Latin America, for similar reasons – so that market is another priority for Line this year, along with the U.S. where she reckons ethnic diversity should also work in its favour. Line intends to create dedicated marketing campaigns for different ethnic communities of U.S. users, she says. “[Line’s appeal] really depends on the culture, and the kind of communication style of the people. The U.S. works really well because we have a lot of mixtures of cultures. We have a huge Hispanic market that I think will take to our Line app as well, so we’re focused on many different ethnicities in the U.S. Certainly we have enough population in the U.S. to go after each community.” Part of its content-localising efforts is likely to involve licensing popular U.S. cartoon characters – to help it to bridge any cultural divide. “Whether they’re Disney characters or Angry Birds or whatever – I think there’s a lot of opportunities for us to co-produce games ourselves with different characters,” she says. “Our characters are very beloved, but if there’s another character from a country or a different company that people love we can put them together into a new game. “People at Line are very busy every day talking to these IP owners because there’s a lot of synergy that we can have with our characters combined with some of the other characters… Now that we have over 100 million users, lots of companies actually want to do business with us, they love taking our calls. In the beginning it was a little bit tougher but now the conversation is much easier.” While Line’s surface focus is on building out its social entertainment network, this is underpinned by the tech nous of its parent company NHN Naver – a search engine and online gaming company. When it comes to staying ahead of me-too messaging competition, Han argues that Line can win by being faster and quicker as a result of Naver’s long-standing expertise at building digital products. “Naver is really a technology company so they are very good in terms of product development and they are very fast and nimble, so when it comes to localising for a huge market I think we are probably one of the fastest,” she says. “We have a lot of people and resources dedicated to knowing exactly what each country wants and needs and I would say that differentiates ourselves.” Han was speaking to TechCrunch from Spain but was due to return to the U.S. soon to ramp up the company’s marketing and promotion efforts here – to continue growing the Line user-base from its current standing of “way above” 100 million users globally. Line’s U.S. marketing efforts have initially been relatively minimal, says Han – with “grass routes marketing” and some official accounts using celebrities such as Snoop Dogg rather than a full “360 degree campaign.” But that’s going to change. “The demographic is so large in America that I think we’re going to pick some of the metropolitan areas, New York and L.A. and some of the bigger cities and really go after our young demographic,” she says. “As soon as I get back to the States we are going to engage a big agency to help us out in terms of doing more – not just below the line but also some above-the-line marketing campaigns – including radio and more online and more mobile and we’ll do more events. “We’ve been watching how the market is evolving because we have a lot of competition in the U.S., more so than other countries, so we were just kind of seeing what the right timing would be to really start ourselves so you can expect to see a lot more of Line — not only in the press but also probably in terms of our celebrities that we’ll be using and more marketing efforts in the coming months.” Han says Line doesn’t have any plans to start charging for its app – referencing some of the rumours around rival WhatsApp adding subscription fees (it does already charge for its iOS app) and saying the rumours have helped Line grab more attention in markets like Spain. Its freemium approach of selling stickers in app, and offering official accounts to celebrities and brands, seems to be working just fine for Line. “[Sticker revenue is] growing very nicely but we’re not disclosing any numbers for our revenue just yet,” she says. “But we are making revenue and every month it’s growing quite nicely.” Line’s B2C co-marketing platform – via its official accounts feature — is also a key part of its monetization strategy, giving brands and celebrities their own marketing channel to talk to and sell directly to Line users who have opted in to receive their messages. This channel lets brands reach fans directly, with the ability to push out promotions, coupons and disseminate their news. “We’re creating a completely different B2C marketing platform. I don’t think this has really been done in the past. Unlike your traditional marketing channel like TV or online you can directly go after your consumers at once, so this has been a very effective platform for us,” says Han, adding: “I don’t have enough time right now in Spain to have a meeting with all these companies that are asking to be a part of our official accounts.” Could Line be spun out from Naver? It’s certainly “a possibility,” according to Han who notes that it fits with Line’s plans to open an office in each of the territories it’s successful in. “It’s certainly something that we’re considering,” she says. “It’s nothing official at the moment but like any company that’s doing well, there’s no reason why not to spin off — so it’s absolutely something we’re contemplating.”
|
YC-Backed Lollipuff Is An eBay-Like Marketplace For Authenticated Designer Clothing And Accessories
|
Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
One of the main problems with buying designer clothing off of eBay and other auction sites is that there is really no guarantee that the item you are purchasing is actually what it appears to be. Despite a crackdown by eBay on counterfeit designer goods, the site still has a problem with fakes (though eBay will refund you if an item is fake). YC-backed is an auction site that fully authenticates any designer clothing and accessories it sells. On Lollipuff, the founders employ a combination of human expert authenticators with a patent-pending process to ensure that the goods on the site are real. For now, Lollipuff focuses on three of the most designer brands on auction sites: Chanel bags, Christian Louboutin shoes, and Herve Leger dresses. When a seller applies to sell on the site, the startup asks for specific photos that will be able to show whether a dress, bag or pair of shoes is a fake. All the items sold are either lightly used or brand new. Often times, scammers will upload fake pictures to their eBay listings, so that buyers will believe that what they are purchasing is the real deal. But on Lollipuff all pictures have a specialized code number that ensures that seller took the photos themselves. The startup also asks for specific, detailed photos that would not be able to be found on a fake bag. Lollipuff takes around 7 percent of every transaction. Lollipuff launched in December in beta and with no marketing, is now seeing over $15,000 worth of clothing and accessories sold every month. The idea for Lollipuff grew out of founder Fei Deyle’s fashion blog where she would write guides about avoiding counterfeit items, and the industry in general. Many consignment stores started coming to her to authenticate resale items, and readers began to ask to purchase and sell the clothes she was blogging about on her site. The idea to provide an authenticated site for designer goods was born. The market for designer goods amounts to around $50 billion in the U.S. Many brands like Chanel and Christian Louboutin hold their value extremely well, making the resale market also significant. In fact, some designer goods actually appreciate. For example, Chanel bags have historically gained about 20 percent in value annually. And despite the efforts made by eBay to crack down on counterfeit items being listed, it still does happen. Deyle says she recently saw a fake Chanel bag selling for $2,900, and still had a day left for bidding. The startup’s other founders include Travis Deyle, who holds a PhD in Robotics from Georgia Tech, and David Mohs, a former software engineer at Google. Fei says that she and her co-founders will soon expand to verifying and selling other designer goods.
|
null |
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 28 | null |
CrunchWeek: Google Kills Reader, Samsung’s Galaxy S4, Dropbox’s $100M Mailbox Buy
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
Watch the video embedded above to hear , , and I discuss Google’s decision app (and the tech press’ about the decision), the new , an apparently with a very , and the surprise Friday announcement that , the 13-person startup behind the super popular Mailbox app, for some .
|
Iterations: The Improbable, Captivating Pivot From Orchestra To Mailbox
|
Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 |
TechCrunch On Friday, Dropbox’s acquisition of Mailbox marked the first time the tech community lit up in amazement and awe of a consumer transaction since Facebook acquired Instagram back in April 2012. The attention is well-deserved. For a variety of reasons beyond the high ticket price of the deal, the acquisition of Mailbox contains many interesting sub-stories that captured the tech community’s interest: , Mailbox only raised money in the summer of 2011. When the funding was in November 2011, the company was known as “ ,” a to-list app that you could share with others. At the time, raising $5m pre-product and right off the bat for an A round would seem high, and perhaps the quality of the team afforded the company the chance to raise enough money to have more than one shot on goal, which goes against some conventional wisdom that startups should stay lean and not raise too much dough upfront. I don’t know the specifics, but probably safe to assume their $5m cost them about 20% of their company. , Mailbox was an incredibly well-executed pivot. The Orchestra team calculated that its product wasn’t going to breakout and be a mainstream hit. This is a to make because its often easy and logical to think in terms of sunk costs. In transforming from one product to an entirely different one, the Orchestra team quickly readjusted and started from scratch to build Mailbox, taking their initial learnings but essentially starting a new company from within their core. , Mailbox was iOS-first. Even though Orchestra worked on iOS and web — and worth noting that Orchestra’s design and cross-platform sync technology was also quite itself — Mailbox was released on Apple’s platform and ginned up significant buzz to get acquired without expanding to other platforms first. Instagram waited a while before building for Android, which was released a little while before they were acquired and drove a huge increase in their overall install base. While Android is (or in some eyes, surpassed iOS), value at the application layer still resides with iOS. , Mailbox added extra buzz to their recent reinvention and re-launch by creating a to get around the ornery posed by the iOS App Store. Mailbox’s infamous “Reservation System” allowed consumers to download the app from the store but wait in line until their number was called up. This gimmick also became the subject of chatter around many pre-launch mobile startups (see: Tempo) trying to concoct their own special velvet-rope tricks. , Dropbox’s move in this transaction also shines a light on the acquirer’s potential strategy. After raising $250M cash in the fall of 2011 at a very valuation, Dropbox is on a tricky journey to transform from a commodity service into something more. Skeptics, for instance, wonder if Dropbox can make this turn, as the size of their valuation may have taken some exits off the table. I’d recommend two bloggers here: One, TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden a smart piece on the direction Dropbox is headed in, and a few months ago, analyzed its earlier purchase of ; and two, Spark Capital’s Andrew Parker wrote an looking back on the history of file systems and where Dropbox could be headed. , while Mailbox received accolades for its user interaction elements of “swiping away” and “snoozing” email, much of the inspiration for those gestures might have been sparked by , the colorful iOS to-do list app. While many may credit Mailbox with inventing these gestures, the phrase “good artists borrow, great artists steal” may be fitting in this case, and the team should get credit for recognizing a great gesture and bringing it to a product category (mobile email) that desperately needed a new client. And, finally, …this all went down so quickly. Just as it seemed Instagram launched, exploded, grew fast, and then sold two days after closing a $50m Series B, the story of Mailbox can be told in months, not years. Orchestra’s founder an op-ed in August 2012 analyzing why email is still a problem. In what seemed like a very long Beta test, influential tech users had access to the product and were publicly raving about it, indirectly generating and demand for the app as 2012 ended. It was a great v1 product despite the fact it didn’t allow for search or always have consistent sync or push notifications. In early February 2013, Mailbox officially, but consumers had to wait in line, a tactic which became its own story. And, as we all know, on March 15, Mailbox was acquired by Dropbox for what many people believe is quite a healthy sum of cash and stock. For these seven reasons, this story is captivating. We all may say that the product wasn’t that great, or that startups don’t seem to want to remain independent anymore and go big, or that startups are just meant to be flipped, but what Orchestra and Mailbox accomplished is nothing short of remarkable. Deciding to pivot is a really hard decision. Getting the team to buy into that is really hard. Throwing away all the previous bits of work can be demoralizing. I have seen a small handful startups with real funding and product used by millions try to pivot like this, and each one has failed so far. Actually creating a new brand and product that matters is close to impossible. Devising a product-marketing plan into the launch with a long beta and a reservation system was pure marketing genius. And, while many dreamed of what Mailbox could do for email on different platforms, the team decided to take a generous offer from Dropbox, one that would make all shareholders happy and, considering all the circumstances above, would turn coal into a diamond. That is why the story of Orchestra to Mailbox to Dropbox captures our attention. Building big, durable companies and going public is one pinnacle we see on magazine covers, but for many others, finding that one sweet exit — their own “Inbox Zero” — is a dream come true. /
|
Philips Debuts Open APIs And An iOS SDK For Hue Connected Lighting System
|
Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
Philips Hue is a lighting system that changes the definition of what your standard home lighting setup is, and now there’s an for the innovative Wi-Fi-connected bridge and bulbs, so that third-party apps and hardware can pick up what Philips has started. To be clear, people have developed apps for the Philips Hue system already; we covered one two Hue hacks just last week, including an iOS app that turn your Hue home lighting into a , and a software add-on for Minecraft that in the world building game. But those, and other Philips apps to date, have been built mostly by developers who are reverse engineering their own solution. Philips recognized that devs wanted to do different things with the Hue, and decided to help them out, by opening up an official developer program, complete with an SDK for iOS developers, and APIs that allow both software and hardware makers to take advantage of the Hue’s connected features. The official tool means that developers can depend on it as a stable channel through which to build Hue integration into their products. Hue uses the ZigBee standard for home automation, which means that they can talk to each other, as well as motion detectors, connected thermostats, connected appliances and more. The new developer program will mean that hardware makers using these standards can build in Hue-compatible features, so that the lights can be triggered by various actions. You could have a specific light recipe come on whenever you open the door, for instance, or when a thermostat is set to specific climate setting. Other potential uses of the developer tools include apps for amateur and professional photographers, which could help them optimize lighting for a shoot with a simple app attached to a device with light level detection capabilities. Philips also plans to release future features around geo-fencing, scheduling and other smartphone sensor capabilities that could expand what developers can do with them. “We’re now at a point where there are already about 10 applications that have been shared and built from the unofficial developer community for new applications around Hue,” explained George Yianni, HUe System Architect in an interview. “Now what we want to do as Philips is we actually want to help and grow and encourage this community, and give them tools and proper documentation. Also, we want to give them commitment that this is the API and we’re going to support it and it won’t change overnight.” Yianni says that’s been the big roadblock stopping bigger developers and companies from creating apps and accessories for Hue so far. Specifically, it’s been holding up hardware development, he says, and that means you can probably expect to see some big names start to integrate Hue into their own lines of connected home devices. The developer tools will be available free to anyone who wants to create applications and devices that connect to the Hue system. Philips will also continue to work on expanding the Hue line, Yianni said, with new lightbulb types to follow soon. With new third-party investment in the Hue ecosystem, as well as more from Philips itself, it’s about to become a lot more than just a different kind of lightbulb.
|
LovePalz, The Real-Time Virtual Sex Toy For Long-Distance Couples, Will Launch On March 29
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
, the virtual sex gadget designed for long-distance couples, has finally set a launch date for both its products and Web-based control center. On March 29, you can get your hands (and other parts) on Hera and Zeus, the two devices designed by Taipei-based company . The titillating wireless gadget has been generating buzz since . Winzz says that they received over 5,000 pre-orders within two months, back when the LovePalz set of two devices was available for $94.95 each. Now that the pre-order special has ended, each piece, called the Hera and the Zeus, is available separately for $189. Despite the higher price, Winzz reports that they have sold 1,800 items since February 28. Lovers can control their LovePalz devices during a cybersex session by using the LovePalz Web site, which also has a mobile version. A spokeswoman told me that the company is still working on launching a LovePalz iOS app, but progress has been delayed because of the App Store’s restrictions on selling adult-themed content. The Hera resembles a dildo, while the Zeus is like a sleeker, high-tech version of the infamous . (The names are interesting because although ancient Greek deities/husband-and-wife Zeus and Hera were often separated by long distances, that’s because Zeus was off having sex with everyone in the universe besides Hera). Both toys have multiple pressure and speed sensors that work without buttons and allow partners to feel what each other is doing to them in real time. The devices are waterproof, rechargeable, and are engineered with an air pump and automatic piston. Why, you ask? Well, the air pump means the Hera toy can “get bigger when you are bigger,” as the LovePalz Web site puts it, and the air pump allows the Zeus to “tighten up.” The company ensures users that it has tested the air pump many times to make sure “the speed is ideal and stops when it’s getting too tight,” so there will be no news headlines screaming “LovePalz, the genius of penis explosion.” The LovePalz’s painstaking engineering sets it apart, but there have certainly been other virtual sex toys. The set (yes, that was its real name) was designed back in 2007 as one of the earliest “teledildonics” products. Web site bills itself as “the premier online destination where you can find the necessary tools that allow you to control another’s personal massager over the Internet.” Other virtual sex toys have been a bit more one-sided, like the , which allows users to interact with porn.
|
Samsung Tops China’s Smartphone Market For The First Time As Sales Triple, Says Strategy Analytics
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
Samsung Electronics topped China’s smartphone market for the first time in 2012, according to data from Strategy Analytics ( ). The Korean tech behemoth nearly tripled its sales in the world’s largest market for smartphones: in 2012, it sold 30.06 million smartphones in China, up from 10.9 million handsets a year earlier. According to Strategy Analytics, Samsung now holds a 17.7 percent market share–an astonishingly rapid climb considering that the company only started selling mobile devices in China in 2009. Chinese company Lenovo took the second spot with market share of 13.2 percent, up four percent from 2011, while Apple came in third with an 11 percent market share, followed by China’s own Huawei Technologies with 9.9 percent and Coolpad with 9.7 percent. Samsung’s fast ascent mirrors Nokia’s quick plummet–the Finnish company is now number seven in China, with 3.7 market share, compared to 29.9 percent in 2011. Despite Samsung’s dominance in China and its current position as the world’s top smartphone maker, it’s still too early for the company to rest on its laurels. Data from that Samsung’s fourth-quarter sales lagged behind Apple due to stronger demand for the iPhone 5. In Q4 2012, Samsung Electronics took 28.7 percent of the global smartphone market, much less than Apple’s 42.7 percent–but it’s important to note that a direct sales comparison is difficult because the iPhone 5 , allowing it to take advantage of the holiday buzz, while Samsung’s Galaxy SIII and sales may be dwindling because users are waiting for their . In China, however, Samsung will have to ward off ambitious competitors like Xiaomi, which is busy building up its and plans to sell this year and Lenovo, which recently as China’s top smartphone maker.
|
Alibaba Names Insider Jonathan Lu As New CEO, Replacing Founder Jack Ma
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
, China’s e-commerce giant, today named insider Jonathan Lu Xaoxi as its new CEO — filling a hole that he would be stepping down from the position. The move is another step in the company’s wider restructuring, which saw the creation of some to account for the company’s various interests, which range from the Taobao online marketplace to group shopping (Juhuasuan), online payments Alipay, mobile plaform Aliyun, and more. When Ma announced he was stepping down as CEO, one of the reasons he gave for his move was his age. Ma said that 48 was too old, and that younger people at Alibaba had a better grip on the change that is needed at the company. That was probably more smoke and mirrors, or a little humor, than anything else. Lu, who is 43 (so not so much younger than Ma), will take over May 10, and Ma will continue to be involved in strategic decisions as executive chairman. “Serving as Alibaba Group CEO is an extremely challenging and difficult job, especially succeeding a founder CEO like me,” Ma writes in an internal memo to staff announcing the change. For the Ma-ists out there, we have embedded it below. Some stand-out points about the new CEO: — . He’s been at the company for 13 years — joining when Alibaba was only a year old. His current title is EVP, and in his time there he has run three different divisions of the company, including running Alibaba.com and the Taobao shopping platform — which Alibaba points out on its will be turning 10 on the same day. — . In a sense, he’s Alibaba’s , someone who is focused not just on making sure what the company does today is continuing to go well, but that it will be in the center of the action for whatever else comes next. All the same, he is a safe company man. “Jonathan and I have worked together for 13 years,” Ma wrote in an internal e-mail quoted by the company’s blog. “During that time, he founded the Alibaba.com Guangdong sales team; was the founding president of Alipay; served as president of Big Taobao; stepped in as CEO of the then-listed Alibaba.com. He is currently the Group’s chief data officer and president of Aliyun Mobile OS. — . One of his other responsibilities at present is chief data officer. Putting him at the top of the pyramid is a signal, perhaps, of how Alibaba will also be putting this idea — as applied both to its own company and potentially as a business unit to help enterprises, Alibaba’s core customer base — as a key part of its business. — . “Lu, 43, has a reputation as a low-profile leader, an operations whiz with the ability to get things done,” the blog notes flatly. “Lu has an entrepreneurial streak. Before joining Alibaba, he worked in the hotel industry, then co-founded a network communication company. But he shuns the spotlight—unlike his predecessor Ma, a well-known Chinese Internet entrepreneur who built Alibaba Group into the world’s largest private tech company with 24,000 employees and an estimated valuation of more than $40 billion.” — : he will be overseeing all 25 new business units and the nine presidents that run them. The one exception will be the company’s financial services business, Alibaba Small and Micro Financial Services Group, Alibaba’s financial services arm. That is run by Lucy Peng, Alibaba’s current chief human resources officer and previous head of Alipay, who was appointed to this position last week. [scribd id=129676591 key=key-1a1lot7mme5q5mne2x6r mode=scroll]
|
SXSW Keynote Speaker Olivier Bau Talks About Creating Invisible Objects Using Electricity
|
John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
Electrostatic interfaces – systems that make your fingers “feel” textures on a smooth metal plate – have been around for a long time. They haven’t quite caught on because the sensation is a little creepy and it’s not quite foolproof. However, a researcher at Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, , has created a unique system that creates these sensations on any surface using a special wearable system that actually controls the electricity sent to nerves in your skin. His is an example of this technology in action. An object is treated with a special paint and then a “generator” attached to the body. As you move your finger along a surface, the system changes the way the surface feels to the touch and can recreate ridges, etched lines, and other sensations. It’s the first step in true universal interaction with objects. Bau also discussed other projects in the works including one in Tokyo that allows you to create invisible physical objects by controlling the muscles in your hand. That’s right: you could pick up an invisible chess piece and your fingers would freeze at just the right spot so it would feel like you’re holding something sold. Bau now lives in Los Angeles but is continuing work on the “invisible” for Disney’s research arm. I asked him if he had to wear mouse ears at work and he very demurely refused to answer.
|
The Weekly Good: ProBueno Lets You Offer Up Your Talents And Skills For Good
|
Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
Imagine that you’re a pretty good drummer, you’re in a band, and you’d like to give lessons. You could charge for these lessons, of course, but you’re really into helping out charities. A site called is a marketplace, founded by MIT alums, to shop your talents in exchange for charitable donations. When you think about it, all this really is is technology-empowered volunteering. It’s a brilliant concept and the site has just announced that it has signed up Khan Academy for a pilot program. Here’s how co-founder of ProBeuno, Michel Rbeiz, explains the site and its mission: ProBueno’s goal is to transform the way people think about pro bono work and use technology to make it easy. Pro bono work is generally reserved to a very small and elite subset of the population, who can offer their professional expertise for free to nonprofits. It comes with a number of constraints: finding a nonprofit one cares about, that also needs particular talents at a time and place that’s mutually acceptable. While you might not have had the time to give those drumming lessons to someone who needs them, now you can, but feel good because the money is going directly to charity, like say, the Red Cross. It’s hard to help fundraise for a charity, because you never know what it is that you can do to help. It’s easy to help a non-profit like LiveStrong, because you know that you can help out with a bike race to raise funds. Other non-profits with less-defined themes aren’t so easy to get involved with. Another co-founder, Ryan Kabir, shared the reason why the site was built: We developed ProBueno because we realized how difficult it was to make a difference for the causes we cared about. We could not write a large enough check, or drop everything to volunteer. We felt there should be an easier way for people to use their talents for good. The company has raised $340K in angel funding from friends, family and a few investment funds. This recently launched fund-raising tool is best shown off on the . There’s a dropdown that lets you choose a task that you could offer time for, and once you’re connected with a willing donor, you perform the task and the money will get right to Khan Academy. The individual task pages look a bit like what you’d find on Kickstarter, letting you set the number of “spots” that are available for the service that you’re providing. If you were to offer up looking at someone’s resume, you could have five spots available at $20 each, and that would be $100 going to your charity of choice. I can already think of quite a few things I’m going to list on ProBueno, I bet if you took a few minutes to think about it so could you. I imagine that will be adding more non-profits and options of services to offer as time goes on, but it will be interesting to watch this community grow. They’re on to something, and it’s something quite special. You don’t always have to be the one giving money to do good.
|
null |
Devin Coldewey
| 2,013 | 3 | 17 | null |
Michael Arrington Is Newest Aol CEO’s Favorite TechCrunch Writer
|
Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
Much like this Aol added another layer of management last week. Aol Brands got its own CEO, , to round out the triumvirate of Aol Networks CEO Ned Brody and interim Membership CEO Bud Rosenthal. And, in an impressive sleight of hand, the company also , with COO Artie Minson out, perhaps due to Patch’s performance. Because Aol reorgs are , Arianna Huffington and HuffPost CEO Jimmy Maymann get to be the bosses of Huffington Post, not answering to Lyne even though HuffPost’s and HuffPost Live’s traffic and revenue will be listed as Brands revenue on Aol earnings reports. Being one of the more recognizable brands, TechCrunch too will get the kid-glove treatment, with Lyne promising we’ll retain editorial independence. “You’ve increased your traffic massively with little or no input from Aol. You don’t need help,” she told me in an interview, above, on her very first day in her new role. And on Arianna in the room? “The Huffington Post has a well-developed plan for growth, including Huff Post Live and more international expansion. There’s lots we can do together, but my time is better spent on areas that are not growing as fast.” What else? Other than there are, as of yet, no plans for a TechCrunch “Swimsuit Issue”? Well, Michael Arrington is her favorite TechCrunch writer. Just wait until she gets .
|
The Implications Of The Interface That Watches You
|
Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
This coming week, we’re likely to get a peek at , and by most accounts, it’ll have an to detect when you’re paying attention to what’s on the small screen, and when you look away. There’s no word on just how specific it will be, but others are prepping tech that detects eye movement with a high level of accuracy to determine not just when someone’s facing a screen, but also where exactly their attention is focused. Phones that pay at least as much attention to a user as a user pays to them are coming, whether in the form of the Galaxy S IV or not. And when they do, they’ll bring a tremendous amount of innovation potential to the application market, lucrative opportunities for mobile advertisers, and privacy concerns that make those around the rise of mobile location services over the past five years look like a minor concern. Auto-scrolling is just scratching the surface of what an app could do by detecting where a user’s attention is focused. It could definitely be useful, and make the notion of “pages” and even scroll bars completely irrelevant on mobile devices. But it’s also minor compared to how software interfaces might change based on the availability of new data about when and where people look and focus when they’re using an app. Imagine a dynamic interface that can change on the fly depending on a user’s habits: given enough data, and enough clever engineering, the layout of an app might actually become the next frontier for personalization. Just as developers today are concerned with building recommendation engines and algorithms to help make sure that every time a user opens an app, they’re greeted with the most relevant and engaging content possible, tomorrow we could see apps that eschew the “one design fits most” ethos in favor of a strategy that really can be everything to everyone. And speaking of content, when a device knows where your eye is naturally shifting, it also has a much better idea of your content preferences. And not just what kind of content you like – what specifically about each thing you seem most interested or drawn to. It’s not far-fetched to imagine the creation of heat map models even for motion video, which could analyze what caught a viewer’s eye in individual scenes; which characters are testing well; what types of objects in a scene with many strike the viewer as most interesting. All of which can help sharpen the edge on existing personalization engines for apps like Flipboard, putting a finer point on the personalized web. Knowing where someone’s looking is like a marketer’s dream: it can tell you exactly where the best place to put an ad in an app is, give you remarkable insight on what’s working and what isn’t in terms of attracting consumer attention, and, when aggregated with other demographic data, make targeting types of buyers that much more effective. It’s no secret that companies and advertisers have been looking for a way to boost the ROI of mobile ads, . Gathering facial feedback data could act like a cheat code to help marketing get to the next level – provided it isn’t wielded like a heavy, blunt club. The possibility for abuse is tremendous here: imagine ads that periodically migrate to occupy the places where you find the choicest content in an app, or autoplaying video ads that wait until you’re paying close attention before launching into a sales barrage. Like with any marketing tool, we’ll see both good and bad uses with face and eye-tracking tech. But both will have to contend with the privacy tangle that this new mobile data source entails. Location information has raised a ruckus on more than a few occasions with consumers, and it still isn’t a technology everyone is completely comfortable with. Data gathered from sensors in cameras designed to detect eye and face movement crosses a whole new boundary when it comes to personal privacy, and its use will be watched closely by watchdog agencies, concerned users, and likely legislators, too. The question will be whether gathering this type of data raises enough red flags to actually merit widespread resistance to its use. Location data managed to mostly squeak by, and is used by nearly every new mobile app that comes on market it seems, even when there’s no clear benefit to users. Will facial tracking pass the same test? Can even claims that it’ll be used in an anonymized format even be enough to assuage concerns? I have no immediate answers, but the mobile-first generation seems more willing to share personal data than older users, so it may very well manage a pass after an initial knee-jerk reaction. Ultimately, a phone that knows you is better than one that doesn’t, and a phone that can ‘watch’ you will know you better than those that don’t. Expect this tech to take its first few wobbly steps over the next few years before properly finding its footing, but we’ll see plenty of interesting use cases between now and then.
|
Just 3 Weeks After Launch, Mailbox Is Already Delivering 50 Million Messages A Day
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
Since , email management app has been a pretty big hit — so big that more than 1.25 million people have signed up for the waiting list. The downside to that early success is that new users are added to a waiting list as Mailbox tries to keep up with demand. The company has processed about 500,000 applications so far, but it expects the number of people on the waiting list to increase according to its current growth curve. To , Mailbox checks your email from the cloud and reformats it before sending it to users. As a result, the service needs to ensure that it has enough capacity to scale up with demand as new users are added. But the number of users and number of messages that are processed has been huge. “We’re delivering about 50 million messages a day right now,” Underwood told me. That’s after just three weeks into its public launch. Just to put that into perspective, he said it took Twitter three years before it had the infrastructure to process the same amount of messages. Of course, that’s because Mailbox is trying to manage a whole lot of existing content in people’s email inboxes. We spent a few minutes with Underwood to chat about the company’s launch and its growth over the last several weeks, and to get a quick demo of the app. Check out the video above to see what you’re missing out on, if you haven’t already signed up for Mailbox.
|
Senator Moran On Filibustering Drone Policy And How To Influence Congressmen
|
Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
Senator Jerry Moran ( : A) left his tie back in Washington, D.C., and sat down with me for an informal, yet candid discussion at the SXSW Interactive conference. The folksy Kansas representative has been one of the Senate’s few tech wonks, spearheading a bill to for immigrant entrepreneurs, the Startup Visa Act 3.0. We’ve included highlights below. From filibustering drone policy to how to influence his fellow congressmen, we’ve included the highlights below. “If the federal government can kill a U.S. citizen without due process of law in the United States, what can’t the federal government do?” said Moran, who helped Rand Paul on his epic 12-hour filibuster this week to protest the nomination of John Brennan as CIA Director. Paul had invoked the U.S. Senate’s fire-alarm procedure, the filibuster, which permits any representative to hold up all political activity so long as he or she continuously talks (no bathroom breaks). Moran joined his Republican colleague on the Senate floor to bring attention to Obama’s ambiguous stance on being able to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil with a drone. The filibuster was front-page news most of the day and (Paul’s own following swelled roughly 3,500 followers each hour he talked). Thanks the national attention the filibuster received, the Obama Administration has agreed to clarify its position and it does not have the authority to kill non-combatant citizens on U.S. soil. “Most importantly, it educated the American people who are too often tuned out and tuned off of what’s going on in Washington, D.C., about an issue that I think is of fundamental importance.” While Moran admitted that lobbyist money does influence politicians, he argued that it was . Rather, Senators are most influenced by personal conversations, which money often buys through fancy dinners. “I think this is true of almost all humans: we kind of crave the connection with people. And if you get to know somebody, you can influence the way they think based upon that connection,” he said. To equal the playing field between average citizens, Moran advises activists to use social media to get on policymakers’ or their staffs’ radar, which then peaks enough interest to begin personal conversations with the small guy. “The best way to connect with people still today, despite the value of social media, is human relations. The massive online protest against the (SOPA) was especially important to Moran. “It was very appealing to me to find that there is an issue and a medium of communication that gives me the opportunity to have a relationship with a whole new set of Kansans that otherwise would not have been involved in my life. The upshot from Moran’s talk seems to be that the influence is as much about education as politicking, if not more so. Both the public and policymakers are drowning in information. Those who can get face time, no matter the size of their bank accounts, have the opportunity to be the most important source of information upon which everyone bases their decisions.
|
WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg On Working From Home, Making Money Without Ads, And More [TCTV]
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
And there was quite a bit to talk about. Mullenweg has some pretty informed opinions on the recent hot topic , as 130 of the 150 people who work for ( ‘s parent company) work remotely from outside of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. And with his growing activity investing both in and along with the of WordPress as a publishing platform, there’s no shortage of things to discuss. In the video embedded above, you can watch Mullenweg talk about how in the future every knowledge company could have a distributed work force, WordPress’ unique ad-averse revenue strategy, how he balances tech life with his creative interests, Automattic’s , and more.
|
SXSW Has Become The Bootcamp For Tech’s Soldiers
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
When you get the smartest people in technology to distill a year’s worth of knowledge into hour-long talks and minute-long chats, the less informed masses are brought up to speed. Rather than wait for the past to proliferate, SXSW lets the crowd grasp today so tech’s leaders can focus on tomorrow. Not everyone can see the future, and that’s okay. Tech needs soldiers — growth hackers, designers, developers, and even PR who work tirelessly to push their companies forward. These people gain from what SXSW gives. Without it, knowledge of new models and best practices could stay bottled up in select circles of tech’s elite. That retards innovation. If this knowledge is not dispensed, those with the crystal balls spend their days dragging everyone along instead of leading the charge. It’s like math. The truly creative and fun part is at the edges. You have to know the basics before you can start to experiment. SXSW raises the bar for the common denominator. It helps us to answer and therefore stop asking some of the big questions about where the industry is going and what works. If you’re going to SXSW to gain new users, you’re missing a lot of the point. As the conference has grown, the influence of the average attendees has dropped. And anyways, scoring 10,000 downloads through expensive stunts won’t make you win any more. Yes, SXSW is marketers marketing to marketers and zombified cross-town walks staring at your phone on the way to the next brand money bonfire. But if you come to SXSW, you should be coming to learn. That doesn’t mean all the education happens in the convention hall. It’s also in the beer line, on a rickshaw, or in a hotel lobby. That’s because SXSW imparts that the default conversation should be about what’s new. Small talk is what’s the latest app you fell in love with or the startup you’re inspired by. People say SXSW is over, but really its audience has just changed. While it’s still about two-way sharing of information, it’s maturing into a broadcast platform that ensures insights are trickling down. It’s gone from a handful of tech’s generals to almost 30,000 of its grunts. Because that’s what we need right now. If tech is going to disrupt every industry and take over the world, it needs an army.
|
Hangtime Looks To Be The Watercooler For Events At SXSW And Beyond
|
Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
OK, so maybe this year. But that isn’t stopping several startups from trying. One startup called , from serial entrepreneur , is looking to be the comprehensive Rolodex of events at SXSW and beyond. It pulls in events from Facebook that you have permission to see, ranks them by overall popularity, popularity among your friends and distance among other factors. When you open the app, you can use Facebook to find friends and pull in hundreds of events. You can say you’re “interested” in going to them by clicking a button in the app. The idea is to get people to interact without necessarily committing to going to something. “People don’t necessarily know what they are going to. Nobody likes to commit,” he said. “So we had to make it lightweight and make it super easy for people to share things with each other, but not commit.” In Hangtime, there’s a way to say you’re publicly interested in an event, and then there’s a way to privately share an event with a friend. “That creates this bifurcation,” he said. “It’s a lightweight way of saying that you’re interested in something — but behind the scenes.” Hangtime follows a long line of events-related startups like the now-defunct Plancast and another startup Sosh that try to help people figure out what to do on nights and weekends. Jacob says that other events startups might have just been too early on the market. “The biggest mistake in the past in the core event discovery space was that we had a data problem,” he said. But he said now that social platforms like Facebook have solidified, it’s become a nicely centralized source of data. In fact, the issue now is that there’s too much data and there needs to be better personalization and recommendations, he argues. “A hallmark of these mobile applications is that they shouldn’t require work,” Jacob said. “They shouldn’t require you to enter in things. You have to give people a good experience out of the box.” To get that, Jacob used a pretty ingenious seeding and testing strategy. The company bought ads on Facebook targeted at colleges in the Midwest, such as the University of Missouri-Columbia and others in Arizona, Nebraska and Alabama. They want to see if they could remotely seed an app on a college campus and have it grow organically. So they bought Facebook ads targeted at freshmen who wanted to find out what was going on on campus. Once a few people joined, they could pull in publicly shared events on Facebook and offer a better first-time experience to others who joined. When they felt the retention metrics were good and that they could predictably make the app popular on college campus after college campus, they decided to launch it publicly. The app has an Open Graph integration that puts a box on your Timeline of events you’ve been invited to and publicly expressed interest in. Whenever you interact with a Hangtime post on Facebook and like it, the person who submitted it will get a notification. That early testing helped set up a good base for SXSW this week. As of Friday, Hangtime already had 2 million invitations for at least 1,700 SXSW events with 285,000 RSVPs. Next on the roadmap is improving personalization. Currently, Hangtime ranks events by overall popularity and timing by the hour, which means events that are more socially relevant but later in the day can show up lower in the feed. “We’re in the process of building machine learning systems that literally take what you’re seeing and present new events that are more to your liking,” he said. The 10-person company has $3.5 million in funding from investors, including SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, Greylock, Intel Capital, Interwest, 500 Startups, Crosslink Capital, Freestyle Capital, Ignition Venture Partners, Science Inc., Disney’s Tugboat Ventures and Webb Investment Network along with angels like Path CEO Dave Morin, Facebook alum and Pinterest monetization head Tim Kendall, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, One Kings Lane’s Ali Pincus and Data Collective’s Matt Ocko. Jacob previously founded Keen, which , and Dimension X, which was acquired by Microsoft. He was also CEO of , a
|
4tiitoo’s eyeCharm Kinect Add-On Lets You Control Computers With Your Eyes
|
Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
After I shelled out something like $200 for a Kinect bundle that I ended up shoving in a closet, the team at may have finally given me a reason to dig the thing out. The Munich-based company recently kicked off a to let Kinect owners control their PCs with little more than some subtle glances, thanks to a $50 add-on they’re calling the eyeCharm. But first, a bit of back story — 4tiitoo is the company behind NUIA, a software suite that makes it possible for PCs to interpret eye movements and staring as valid inputs. 4tiitoo has shown off a slew of applications that have been modified to accept this new kind of input, from eye-tracking versions of games like and perennial geek favorite to utilities like VLC Media Player. So far, though, those eye-friendly apps have mostly been demoed with pricey hardware courtesy of the Swedish camera buffs at Tobii. They’re not exactly meant for consumer use, so crafting a reasonably inexpensive add-on for a popular console accessory is a rather savvy move. Speaking of the add-on, the eyeCharm itself is actually rather modest — it’s essentially a large plastic clip that sticks onto the Kinect to provide “the necessary optics and special infrared illumination” to properly track people’s eyes. Once the included setup software has been run, users can attempt to navigate Windows 7 or 8 (Windows 8 and some of its touch-tailored UI elements seems to be easier to deal with), or fire up some of the included NUIA-enabled apps that backers get as part of the deal. More importantly, all but the cheapest backers get access to the NUIA SDK, so they can (hopefully) get cracking on the next generation of eye-tracking PC apps. 4tiitoo is looking to collect a total of $100,000 in funding and is currently hovering just under $10,000 in contributions after two days. I’ll be the first to admit that Microsoft’s original vision of full-body gaming is one that hasn’t yet been fully realized, but the Kinect has emerged as an intriguing tool for developers and entrepreneurs alike — startups like and Disrupt Battlefield alum were quick to embrace the technology, and Microsoft has sought to nurture those . If some particularly sticky rumors hold true, the next Xbox will be so reliant on the Kinect concept that an upgraded Kinect will come with each console, so 4tiitoo’s vision for reshaping how the masses interact with computers could become a reality sooner rather than later.
|
Marvel Adds A Dynamic Soundtrack To Its Digital Comics With Project Gamma
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
The digital team from is at South by Southwest Interactive this year to show off some new comics-reading experiences that they’ve created. At their session today they’re demonstrating a technology that’s currently called Project Gamma. Basically, it’s a way to add music to the experience of reading a digital comic — music that actually adapts to the pace at which you read. As a result, every reader could have a unique experience, said Peter Phillips, the senior vice president and general manager of Marvel’s digital media group. You can see and (faintly) hear an advance demo of Project Gamma in the video above. The main thing to notice is that the music seems to transition from panel to panel pretty smoothly — if you’re reading the comic, you’re not necessarily going to be aware that the soundtrack is adapting to your speed. Phillips said it works similarly to the music in a video game. Project Gamma was created in partnership with music company . When I asked why his team thought comics were crying out for an experience like this, Phillips said that this is very much an experimental technology, in the vein of : “We’re not afraid to fail. We want to show that we’re looking to be innovative and different and enhance the experience.” He also said that we can expect to see this technology in some Marvel comics later this year: “If our editor in chief [Axel Alonso] were here, he’d say he’s got specific stories that he’s already thinking about for this.” In the video, Phillips also offers his thoughts on Marvel’s new subscription comics app, . (TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington )
|
Iterations: The Diamond Is In The Comments
|
Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
TechCrunch . People often ask me some variant of this question: “What’s a startup out there that will be a great investment hit but no one really thinks of that way yet?” There are many possible answers, but I’ll focus this week’s column on one: . Now, there are many smart folks who believe online comments are either dead or worthless, and they have some valid points. Some believe online comments should exist apart from the original content, whether on Twitter as tweets or Facebook as sub-conversations, or through re-blogging on Tumblr, and so forth. And there are others, like me, who invest time in Disqus as a user because they believe it’s the single-best commenting system out there. (Disclaimer: I use Disqus on my , and all the billions I make my blog are kept in the Caymans.) And now, here’s the rub — before you wonder why I’d select Disqus, a nearly 6-year old YC startup as a sleeping giant, slyly hibernating while everyone else frantically scurries to grab attention here and there, we must let go of one overlying assumption tied to the company: It’s not just the comments themselves that matter. In the subterranean world of Disqus, the currency is social- and interest-based relationships. For me, most of the individual bloggers I follow closely and interact online with use Disqus, and they all reply to most of their comments. Disqus, then, knows who reads my stuff, knows who influences me, how often we interact, what we talk about, whether my thoughts are moderated in or out of a discussion, and how others interact with my comments. Put another way: Disqus is really a data company sitting on top of a goldmine of graph information with millions of channels and entry points to target advertising or other forms of marketing, yet it masquerades as a simple comments plug-in. Disqus is immune to the vagaries of whatever happens with Facebook or Twitter, it allows conversations between blogging platforms like WordPress and Tumblr, it isn’t yet picked up by the web “ ” like Instapaper or Pocket, and is quietly under-the-radar, just like this scrappy startup wants to be. It’s only raised $10.5m in its long life and, in my opinion, will be worth many, many multiples of this, if it isn’t already. Finally, there are two channels I truly pay attention to for meeting and getting to know new people: Twitter, and Disqus on my blog or other folks’ blogs. I’ve had discussions with new people over years now on Disqus and slowly built up trust with them through this medium. It’s a way to meet new people around interests, and they can be who they are, or take up a pseudonym as someone else, or blocked out through moderation if they abuse it. Yes, the companies do need to make it easier for any would-be blogger to integrate and upload their offers, they need more creative partnerships, and will hopefully integrate natively with mobile devices or apps, but their head start, focus, and deep experience confers many opportunities. For all of the noise around new startups, the “me-toos” and copycats, the endless pivots and stealing each other’s work, for me it’s a company like Disqus that captures my attention and imagination. It is not new and shiny. It hasn’t raised lots of money. Its mission is simple yet deep. I learn by using it, and I meet through its web of notifications. It allows users to build a reputation slowly, over time, for good use. And, it has survived other commenting services, Facebook’s social plugin, new publishing platforms that don’t even integrate comments, and much more. For these and the reasons listed above, Disqus is a diamond in the comments rough.
|
Jifiti Lets You Teleport Products To Your Friends…Sorta
|
Jay Donovan
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
The idea for came about because Shaul Weisband — one of the creators of the app and company behind it — wanted to “teleport” gifts to friends. While teleportation is still not really possible, the team at Jifiti has done the next best thing and is aiming to incorporate this into a new way of shopping. And I think retailers are going to like it. The concept behind Jifiti is quite simple; go shopping in a participating brick-and-mortar store and when you see an item you would like to purchase for someone, you scan that item’s standard retail barcode with your smartphone. Next, you pick a friend you would like to send the item to and a gift code is created and emailed to that friend so they can download the app, redeem the code and pick up that same item at a participating store near them. For example, I want to buy my friend a hat. But I live in Columbus, Ohio, and he lives in Brooklyn. I go shopping at a store in Columbus and I see a hat that he would like. So I scan that item’s standard barcode with the Jifiti app. I select John’s email and he gets sent a redemption code. He can then download the app, go to the nearest Lids store in Brooklyn and pick up the hat I just bought for him out of the other store’s inventory. This is an interesting way to shop for others. Browsing in a real store, the instant gratification of a physical purchasing experience and yet the item can be redeemed as soon as the redeemer wants to pick it up. Pretty nifty…um, I mean pretty Jifiti. The app has also already caught the attention of . Jifiti also has a fairly slick website design courtesy of an agency called , which also calls Columbus home. I should add that Jifiti is not constrained to only brick-and-mortars. You can still search for select items displayed within the app and send the redemption code that way without having to visit a physical store yourself. It’s just not a complete list of items. Additionally, the app also has wish-list functionality, so you can broadcast the gifts you want people to buy for you as well. They are even incorporating the ability to donate gifts to charitable organizations. So really, the team at Jifiti is aiming for a fairly comprehensive retail shopping solution. It’s pretty interesting.
So why are retailers going to like this? Well, obviously there is a “drive-to-store” component to the scenario. You can browse physical store items and buy them instantly for others — capture that feeling of instant gratification. However, chances are that if you are browsing in a physical store, you might pick up something for yourself. Retailers will be fond of that. Another thing is that the mechanics behind the system is actually based on gift cards. When you scan an item and send that item to a person, you are essentially buying a custom gift card and sending that gift card to that person. It’s just that no plastic card is ever involved. It is all worked into the app. Jifiti, buys these cards in bulk at discount and is essentially reselling them, which is how they monetize. In this way, retailers will see it as an instant purchase on their books. Pretty smart. Also, Jifiti has developed this system without altering typical store operational procedures. Retailers don’t really have to alter point-of-sale systems or anything like that. Basically, they just have to be able to process the gift card codes. This lowers the barrier of entry for retailers to get involved.
|
Makerbot’s Bre Pettis And OK Go’s Damian Kulash On The Addictive ‘Rush’ Of Making Stuff That Works [Video]
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjRClg2MQ1M]
One of the reasons that coming to continues to be worthwhile despite is that it still attracts some of the most intelligent and fascinating people to the same place at the same time. Getting to bump into brilliant people leads to some wonderful conversations, and often gives just the boost you need to go back to ‘regular life’ with a fresh pair of eyes. Yesterday morning was one of those times for me, as I had the opportunity to have brunch with seven of those types of people — Tumblr’s , author and comedian , OK Go’s , Vimeo and Elepath’s , roboticist , Makerbot’s , and GE’s — for a roundtable discussion organized by . We had a wide-ranging discussion over the course of the meal, which was all filmed, but it all started out with the group talking about the original sparks of passion that led them to their current vocations. In the video clip embedded above, you can see both Pettis and Kulash talk about their first brushes with building and making things that actually worked — and the addictive rush that brought that continues today.
|
An Interview With Firefighter, Techie, And E-Publisher John Sundman On What It Takes For Creatives To Make It In A Start Up
|
John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 |
is best known for his seminal dot-com-boom cyberpunk novel, but in his long career he has been a truck driver, a fireman, a construction worker, and an early employee at Sun Microsystems. Sundman’s cult following has brought him world-wide acclaim. Now, however, he’s working at a startup. Tasked with managing software quality at Zola Books, an ebook reseller that aims to add a cool social aspect to the process of discovering, buying, and reading books, Sundman took a moment to discuss what creative types can do to make a dent in the startup ecosystem. Sundman: I’m a 60-year-old bald guy, married to long-suffering Dear Wife; I’m a member of the company of Tisbury 651 (ladder) on Martha’s Vineyard, currently on leave of absence while I work in New York City as Director of Quality for Ebook startup Zola Books. I’m a long-time, if accidental, geek, and a novelist of some talent, slight output, and preposterous literary ambition. Since 1980 I’ve worked mostly for computer-makers and software startups in Silicon Valley and the Boston area as a technical writer, manager of publications, and similar. I’ve also done stints as a forklift operator, construction laborer, furniture mover, and agricultural development worker in West Africa. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the first person to ever have the title “Manager of Information Architecture” on a business card (Sun Microsystems 1987). My wife says I snore but she has never adduced evidence. My novel, Acts of the Apostles, which I published in 1999, is a thriller about nanomachines, neurobiology and brain-hacking, Gulf War Syndrome, and the cult surrounding a Silicon Valley tech genius bent on world domination. It’s not a perfect book, but I’m proud of it. Some people have said it’s the scariest book they’ve ever read. It’s been called the “greatest hacker book ever” and “the first great novel of the age of synthetic biology.” It’s also properly read as a lampoon of the whole hipster-geek messiah thing, Steve Jobs as Jesus or whatever. Hence the title of the book and the Christian allegory all through it. In any event, it’s a geeky book in the sense that those readers who have a working knowledge of VLSI design, Unix internals, and the music of Frank Zappa will have an easier time guessing the surprise ending. Some of the science fiction stuff I made up for it in the late 90’s is actually happening now. The book has kind of a cult following. George Church, one of the pioneers of synthetic biology, is a fan. Acts is part of a trilogy that I call “Mind Over Matter” (or “Mind Over Matter/Overmind”). The other two parts are the novellas Cheap Complex Devices, which is a meta-fictiony homage to Douglas Hofstadter and a lampoon of academic AI, and The Pains, an illustrated dystopian phantasmagoria that looks at chaos theory and Christology by way of a Reagan/Orwell 1984 mash-up. These three books relate to each other kind of in the way that the various “books” in David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” relate to each other. But I better shut up now, lest I sound even more literarily pretentious than I actually am. It’s worth noting perhaps that I’m the publisher of my books, and I’ve peddled them at geek conclaves from Usenix to Defcon. Upon reading one of my blogs posts about this, (“Traveling Geek Self-Publishing Novelist Blues”), the cyberpunk impresario Bruce Sterling was moved to write that I’m the “future of printed fiction.” Which, he may have been being snarky, but I’ll take what I can get. (Sometime this spring my (e)books will be available from my employer, Zola Books. In the meantime, you can them from the competition. [I’ve sold out of printed copies of everything except The Pains. Maybe I’ll do a reprinting of “Acts” and “CCD” if I have some kind of Patrick O’Brien style resurgence; until then they’re ebooks only. Acts and CCD used to be available print-on-demand from Amazon’s “CreateSpace” but I just noticed that they’re no longer there. I must make it a point to look into that.])
S: My sensibilities have always been more novelistic and literary than technical. My undergraduate degree is in anthropology — I didn’t take any programming or math classes in college — and my graduate study was in agricultural economics — my master’s thesis was on West African farming systems. (That’s not exactly literary territory, but neither is it the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.) Somehow I stumbled into a career in the computer biz, and I found it quite congenial. My first high-tech job, in 1980, was as a junior technical writer at Data General, in Westboro, Massachusetts, which some of your older or better-read readers may recognize as the setting of Tracy Kidder’s epic book The Soul of a New Machine, and indeed at DG I worked closely with Tom West and some of the other people mentioned in that book. I have no idea how I got hired, having spent most of the prior six years living among or studying subsistence farmers in northern Senegal. When I started out as a technical writer I was in way over my head; I had no idea what the hell I was doing. But I dove in and studied hard and within a decade I had written a few dozen hardware and software manuals. And I liked it a lot. I still do. In order to be a good technical writer you have to be comfortable with not understanding stuff. You get an assignment to write about some subject you’ve never even heard of, something complicated and subtle. Your deadline is looming. And so you set off to educate yourself the fastest way you can, which often involves asking questions that expose just how pig-ignorant you are. And then you write your piece, presuming to instruct people in this very subject, as if you were some kind of expert, because you like finding out about stuff and explaining it. Journalists for TechCrunch know what I’m talking about, certainly. Anyway, I think this willingness to be ignorant has led to some of my best essays, like the ones I wrote for Salon. I like programming languages and I like logic and I like being part of software engineering teams and I like hacker/geek culture. I’ve had a few opportunities to move out of engineering into, say, marketing, but I never have. I prefer engineering. But I’ve never really been the kind of person who programs for recreation. I am, on the other hand, a person who reads literature for recreation, and even literary theory. I believe very much in literature as a civilizing agent and I am pro-civilization. I want to write great novels that hang together really well and that people find profoundly moving, and I think that my experience as a technical writer serves me there, at least the “hang[s] together really well” part. When you’re writing a software manual, for example, you have to always ask yourself, who is my audience? What do they know already? What are they trying to accomplish? What do they need to know *right now*? This mode of thinking is helpful to novelists, I think. It’s helpful to me, in any event.
S: I consider myself a toiler on the sea. That’s a joke. But everybody *should* take this opportunity to go listen to “A Toiler on the Sea” by the Stranglers, one of the great punk songs of the 1980s. As for the rest of your question, I think I’ve droned on enough about myself already. What’s the best way for a creative to enter the high-tech job market? Should they want to? Oh gosh I have no idea. In all honesty, I would think that somebody who is 21 years old and trying to get into the high-tech market should talk to people who are 25 or 30. My knowledge is very stale. I’m just glad I have a job.
S: For a bunch of reasons that I won’t go into (well, it was for a contract with a publisher, which both parties later agreed to walk away from) I spent a year re-imagining and updating “Acts of the Apostles”; in its new incarnation it’s called Biodigital. It shares most of the plot and most of the characters with Acts, but in many ways it’s an entirely new book. It has a lot more brain-science in it than Acts does, and it’s even scarier, I think. If I can ever get off my duff and finish the last tweaks to it, it will be published as an ebook “exclusive” by Zola Books. You can expect that before the end of April. I’m also working on my epic novel Creation Science, which I launched in a Kickstarter campaign in 2009. I feel kind of guilty that I haven’t finished writing this beast yet, especially after so many people took out their wallets to help sustain me. However, like many novelists before me, I’ve found it hard to capture the story that’s running around in my head. I do sincerely count on finishing and publishing it in 2013. Creation Science deals with all my usual preoccupations: the convergence of biological and digital technology, sex, vast evil conspiracies, sex, Christianity, Overmind emergent, Christology, sex, language, fundamentalism, class warfare on Martha’s Vineyard, and a secret tunnel to the center of the earth marked by stelae left by Vikings (and/or possibly by Cherokee visitors from a nearby solar system).
S: Have fun. Keep in mind that life is short, therefore your ultimate goal should be to create something meaningful. Do not be afraid to make an ass of yourself. As Gertrude Stein allegedly said to her dog, “Be like Hemingway. Be fierce.” And study the wise words of when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He offered some very cogent advice for all artists. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0PJzVPl92g&feature=player_embedded] [Photo Credit: ]
|
Jawbone Releases Android UP App, Makes Wristband Available In European Apple Stores
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Jawbone today that its app for , the company’s movement-tracking wristband, is now available as a free download for Android on Google Play. The $129 UP was previously only compatible with iOS. The wristband can also now be purchased in European Apple stores, and will be made available in Asia and Australia next month. “We are excited to expand the UP community by introducing support for Android, 11 new languages for iOS, and product availability in more than 25 additional countries around the world,” said Travis Bogard, Jawbone vice president of product management and strategy, in a statement. When coupled with its app, the UP wristband allows users to track their sleep, movement, food, and mood. Apple Stores in Asia and Australia will begin carrying the gadget next month, along with other retail locations in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. While Android users can now use Jawbone UP, the company says it currently has no plans to release the UP app to BlackBerry 10 or Windows Phone.
|
China Telecom’s 4Q Earnings Boosted Above Analysts’ Estimates Thanks To iPhone Usage
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
China Telecom, the third-largest telecommunications company in that country, better-than-expected 4Q profit as customers using the iPhone helped boost sales of wireless data. Net earnings fell 17 percent to 2.36 billion yuan ($380 million USD) from 2.84 billion yuan a year earlier, but outperformed the 2.04 billion yuan average by analysts asked by Bloomberg. 4Q sales rose 17 percent to 73.1 billion yuan, from 62.6 billion yuan, in-line with the 73.2 billion yuan expected by analysts. China Telecom as part of its campaign to grab more higher-end 3G users. Up until that point, the larger China Unicom had been the first and only carrier to offer Apple’s smartphone (China Mobile ). China Telecom said when it first started carrying the iPhone that the device would increase long-term growth, but put “short-term pressure” on profitability. Indeed, since releasing the iPhone, China Telecom has reported in quarterly profit. The company’s focus on its 3G coverage means that its selling expenses, including handset subsidies, are higher than usual. Last August the company said that it was acquiring 3G network infrastructure from its parent, China Telecom Corp., for an initial $13.3 billion to cut future costs, and that the final value of the deal would be more than 117 billion yuan.
|
Amazon Launches ‘Send to Kindle’ Button For Web Developers & WordPress Blogs
|
Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Amazon just , which clips Web content and saves it to Kindle readers and apps, for and . The button is also now available on , , and . The , which Amazon with its Send to Kindle button for Google Chrome, is being positioned as an alternative to content-clipping services like Pocket and Instapaper, making it easier for users to read content besides e-books on their devices: The Send to Kindle Button lets you easily send that content to your Kindle to read later, at your convenience. Just send once and read everywhere on any of your Kindle devices or free Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones or tablets. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye — just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there. The Send to Kindle Button is also great for those who want to collect content from the web to use in work projects, school assignments, or hobbies.
|
Survata, VidIQ, And Five Other Startups Take The Stage At Founders Den Demo Night
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
I’m at Demo Night, where seven startups are making their pitches to investors, press and other members of the tech community. As with most other demo events, these aren’t launches per se (we’ve covered most of the companies already), but it’s a good opportunity for us to highlight these startups and the fact that they’re part of the Founders Den community. Founders Den describes itself as a “clubhouse” for entrepreneurs. In addition to the offices and co-working desks that it offers startups in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, it does indeed have a clubhouse-style space. It’s also club-like in the fact that it’s invite-only and is usually looking for experienced entrepreneurs/more established startups — in fact, a number of the companies demonstrating today went through other incubators. Here are the seven companies that are on-the-record (there are two that are still in stealth mode, so I’m not allowed to write about them yet). I’ll update with more details from their presentations. offers , so that they can monetize their content without putting up a paywall, and in doing so it finds survey respondents for brands, agencies and universities. It was incubated by Y Combinator. The company says that more than 1 million survey questions have already been answered. is . It was co-founded by Brian Rue, former CTO of Lolapps. Rue said that there are already 200 companies actively using the product. offers analytics and other tools for video producers on YouTube to improve their distribution. It recently . Customers already include a number of high-profile publishers, including TechCrunch-owner Aol and Revision3. allows users to mix-and-match different outfits through its fashion website and iPad app. Users can also browse the outfits created by others in the community. The iPad app doesn’t include many of the social features (they’re coming in April), but nearly 60 percent of users are already creating content, and 46 percent of them stay engaged from month to month. is a management and collaboration system for all your cloud storage services. It allows you to import your contacts and to share documents with them. The current version is Google Drive only. It has 15,000 users, and 30 percent of them are sharing more fields through Archy than through the native Google app. offers tools for creating content for multiple screens, particularly smart TVs. It . Movl showed off a number of products created on the platform , which has been downloaded more than 300,000 times. aims to build better mobile advertising by focusing on “native” ads that appear in apps’ streams of content. It has from investors, including Google Ventures. Co-founder Gabor Cselle was actually the only presenter tonight to take the stage for the second time — he at the last demo day, which . Managing partner Michael Levit also offered a “Founders Den report card,” where he said that in total, Founders Den companies have raised $140 million. However, he was only able to get data from 43 of the 85 total companies, so he estimated that the real number is probably “zeroing in on $200 million.” He added that “not all companies are created equal,” and in fact the top five companies (Dotcloud, Tout, Kaggle, Wanelo, and DataSift) account for more than half of the reported results. As for exits, he said that there have been five successful exits so far, including , and three shtudowns.
|
Google Embeds March Madness Bracket In Search, Because Screw Sports Sites
|
Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Who wins basketball games is an immutable fact. No one owns that information, so why should some random sports sites get the windfall of traffic as millions of sports fan search Google for the NCAA March Madness bracket? In Google’s latest application of making the world’s information universally accessible, it’s now at the top of a variety of search results. Once upon a time, websites would fight SEO wars to be the top result for the most basic questions like “What time does the Super Bowl start?”, or “When is St. Patrick’s Day”, or “San Francisco weather”. But taking answers that no one technically owns and burying them behind an extra click made Google an unnecessary kingmaker. It was also a waste of time for everyone. Wasting time and playing favorites isn’t Google’s jam. Well, except that it has no problem crowning itself king of information. So Google software engineer Dan Vanderkam and his team right into results for “Basketball bracket”, “March Madness”, “NCAA tournament” and other related searches. The embedded bracket instantly gives you each game’s round, teams, rankings, date, and time, score, and winner. The expandable embed is even richer than plan for last year. Meanwhile, buries a janky looking bracket deep down in the results, and just gives me a list of links when I search for “March Madness Bracket”. If you want deeper information, skip down to Google’s results from NCAA.com, Huffington Post, and SBNation. But if all you want to know is who’s playing when and if your winner predictions came true, Google’s got you covered instantly. Google does the same for a variety of information, from flights to to biographies through its . And I’m totally fine with that. Publishers should seek to succeed through depth, commentary, visualization, analysis, research, and personality, not just SEO. I don’t search because I want links, or results. I want answers, and as long as Google stays dedicated to giving them to me, I’ll keep coming back. Information just wants to be free, man.
|
null |
Hassan Baig
| 2,013 | 3 | 10 | null |
Y Combinator-Backed Terascore Launches To Help Teachers Bring Testing Online
|
Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Teachers and students have suffered through the same model of educational testing for years. Sure, the SAT has changed — it’s now out of a possible 2,400 points, not 1,600 — but both standardized testing and good old in-class quizzing are still in the dominion of paper and pencil. , a Y Combinator-backed startup that launches today, is on a mission to help bring testing online. To do that, the startup aims to provide teachers with tools that can help them create, administer and manage tests online, while making scores and results available immediately after testing. The platform also offers instant analytics for teachers to help them dig down into question quality and difficulty, along with providing a question bank for easy storage and re-use — all collectively as a way to better evaluate student performance and make testing easier on teachers. This comes at a good time for education, as teachers are increasingly on Pinterest, students are on mobile phones, Facebook and everything in between — and even schools are beginning to be connected into various networks. Yet assessment remains offline, and teachers are left to shuffle paper and use hole-punched manilla folders to grade multiple choice tests. Terascore, in turn, wants to shorten the feedback loop for learning. A quick and dirty way to do that? Make it easier for teachers to create new, compelling and, more importantly, factually correct, test questions. This process is a huge time sink for teachers. If you need further proof, just check out the popularity of marketplaces and BetterLesson that enable educators to save themselves from the time-sink of creating Common Core-compatible lesson plans. Some teachers have netted over $1 million from selling their lesson plans to other teachers. And Terascore thinks the same opportunity exists around assessment. The startup makes it easy for teachers to recycle questions that work and offer a browser-based, WYSIWYG-style test authoring tool for educators. Just as Mosaic was the first browser to make the Internet engaging by merging text and images, Terascore wants to be the same for teachers, allowing them to integrate images, links and videos into test to give them a level of interactivity — and keep them relevant. It also supports the inclusion of mathematic equations, and, to that point, will hopefully soon . Students, on the other hand, can self-register, making the process easy to get started and use on an ongoing basis. Up next, the startup plans to release an iPad app that offers a higher level of security, specifically for cheating prevention, allowing for locked-down secured testing that takes away students’ ability to look up answers. Of course, students can still take a peek at their neighbors’ tests or use other devices, but it’s a step in the right direction. And this kind of proctoring, cheating prevention will become even more imperative as online course and learning platform proliferate — especially for those looking to offer credit. There has to be a better way to verify that students have done their own work. Ultimately, Terascore is taking a three-pronged approach to bringing testing online through authoring (WSYWYG, the ability to embed images video, equations and question banking), delivery (control access, timing, locked-down browser app) and test results (scores and normalized grading automatically, reporting and self-assessment info after submitting). It seems an advantageous strategic approach to cover all the bases, especially given that Terascore’s competition seems to emanate largely from point solutions, and stalwarts/incumbents like Pearson. Terascore was initially released in beta to select schools in mid-February and is being used in five different schools, which are collectively creating 500 tests per week. The platform is free for now; however, once they get some traction, the founders see themselves offering a freemium pricing model with premium features (like more robust collaboration, SIS integration etc.) offered for $7 or $9/month. The company was founded by Balazs Moldovanyi, Adam Helybely, Zsolt Muller and Viktor Takacs, who began developing Terascore after selling their health education-focused startup to a multinational healthcare provider. The company is backed by Y Combinator and the YC-VC fund, but, because of the founders’ prior exit, Moldovanyi says, they have some runway and are looking to improve on the platform before worrying about raising more venture capital. Love to hear that. More on
|
Groupon Puts Co-CEOs Lefkofsky And Leonsis On Combined Salary Of $410K; Holden Gets $500K Bonus For 2014 & ’15
|
Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
As the last of the dust settles on the departure of founder/CEO Andrew Mason, the daily deals and local commerce service today with the SEC to detail how it would be compensating his interim co-CEO replacements Eric Lefkofsky and Ted Leonsis; and also giving a sweetener bonus to one of its key staff, Jeffrey Holden, in 2014 and 2015. Leonsis will be on $210,000, and Lefkofsky $200,000 — both on an annual basis, meaning that only a portion of that will be paid, should a permanent CEO be found sooner. Groupon notes in the 8-K that these salaries match the amount that each would have been paid had they remained directors of Groupon, as they had been before the co-CEO appointment. (That appointment invalidates them from receiving the Director Compensation Plan.) Holden’s salary, meanwhile, is not noted in the 8-K, but the form does specify that he will be paid a guaranteed bonus in 2014 and 2015, $500,000 for each year. There are a couple of interesting things to read into these figures: The compensation for Holden, SVP of product management, is presumably being made to make sure that he stays on board to see the company through its continued transformation — Groupon had been trying to diversify under Mason to do more in local commerce services, specifically using mobile technologies; to complement the business it has already built up in daily deals — which has come under some pressure in recent times. Holden, one could argue, holds the key to a lot of where Groupon . He had once been an Amazon executive overseeing consumer websites, and had joined Groupon in 2011, along with the of his company Pelago, makers of a Foursquare-like app called Whrrl. That deal will be coming up to its two-year anniversary next month. Holden will not get either year’s bonus if he leaves the company before December 31, 2015. Meanwhile, the compensation for the two co-CEOs is at the same moment very generous and relatively tiny. On the one hand, if you compare it to what Mason had been making, it’s big money: Mason’s last annual salary was the princely sum of $756.72, giving him a . Compared to that $410,000 is out of the ballpark. Then again, if you recall that Lefkofsky cashing out on Groupon shares pre-IPO, suddenly those hundreds of thousands seem as ephemeral as a daily deal. Groupon posted quarterly revenue of $638.8 million, slightly beating analysts’ expectations, but an operating loss of $12.9 million and a loss per per share of 12 cents, both failing to meet estimates — precipitating Mason’s departure after several past quarters of poor performance.
|
The TechCrunch ‘Lean In’ Roundtable, Part 1: Controversy, Fear, And How To Fight It
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
There has been a about COO new book , which made its on March 11th. Many reporters, thought leaders and others have weighed in on the book and the being born out of it, especially from established women in Sandberg’s generation and above, and that’s been fascinating to watch. But we at TechCrunch wanted to hear from a different perspective. So we assembled a small group of Generation Y women who are part of the Silicon Valley’s rising new guard — people that are arguably the perfect target audience to hear and respond to Sandberg’s message that women should “lean in” to their careers even as they start to think about building their own families and personal lives. It was a big honor to be joined in the TechCrunch TV studio this week by four very accomplished women for an in-depth discussion of : , 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 . We’ve split our discussion into four parts and in this first segment, we talk about how the controversy that has surrounded the book squares away with its actual content. We also get into the element of fear that Sandberg describes as one of the primary barriers women face when leaning into their careers. Sandberg writes: “Fear is at the root of so many barriers women face….Without fear, women can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment—and freely choose one, or the other, or both.” Tune in above to see whether we agreed with Sandberg’s thoughts on fear and how we’ve confronted fear in our own careers.
|
To Expand Into Seattle And Beyond, Postmates Has Raised $5 Million From Founders Fund And Others
|
Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Mobile delivery startup is gearing up for expansion, and it’s raised a bit of funding to help it along the way. The company, which recently , has raised $5 million in new funding to aid in its expansion, TechCrunch has learned. Sources say the round was led by Founders Fund, with follow-on participation from angel investor Scott Banister, among others. Representatives from Postmates wouldn’t comment on the round, but the new funding is not surprising, particularly as the company adds employees to lead its operations in new markets. The company wants its ‘Get It Now’ app to be the go-to delivery service for its users to get anything delivered in their city, whether it be food, , or even electronics from the Apple Store. But so far, the app has only been available in two cities — San Francisco and Seattle. And it just a month ago, after a lengthy but extensive test run in San Francisco. The company has about 200 Postmates couriers in its home market, making thousands of deliveries a week. In Seattle, it had just 35 couriers at launch, but is looking to quickly add more as it ramps up service there. Once Postmates refines its service in Seattle, we expect the company to add more cities over the coming months, as it seeks to introduce its one-hour delivery service in other parts of the country. When I spoke with co-founder Bastian Lehmann around the time of the Seattle launch, he said that if all went well, the company could launch its third market in April. So what does the company consider when entering new markets? Back then, Lehmann told me it looks for a highly compressed metropolitan area (duh), and a high penetration of Zipcars, among other things. In other words, it looks for markets where people are packed in close but don’t necessarily have transportation of their own to pick up food or whatever across town. Postmates is following a number of other startups seeking to enter new markets with on-demand services powered by web and mobile apps. Most notably, transportation apps like SideCar and Lyft are seeking to plant a foothold in new cities. And of course, there are companies like Uber and TaskRabbit, which also expanded city-by-city over the past few years. In all these cases, operations and nailing the culture and consumer experience are paramount to success. A little extra funding doesn’t hurt either. Postmates had previously raised $1.75 million in seed funding from a list of investors that included Scott Banister, David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Paige Craig, Jawed Karim, AngelPad, SoftTech VC, Matrix Partners and Crosslink Capital.
|
SecPoint Will Allow You To Access The Secretive Silk Road Black Market From Any Browser
|
John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Needs some pharmacologicals? Dirty deeds done dirt cheap? There’s an app (or website) for that. For years, the Silk Road has been a source for black market dealings. Hidden on the Tor network, is technically unreachable from the “normal” Internet without special secure software. Now, however, a few hackers who are attempting to remain nameless are working on a secure version of the Silk Road to bring it out of the dark Internet. Take their claims with a grain of salt, but everything they described is technically possible right now. The new site, , will “move to a new level of quality services using new technologies” and will not use the It is, in short, an Etsy for illicit substances. “We are a group of people interested in the free flow of soft drugs. National governments are cunning, prohibiting distribution of marijuana. We are businessmen,” said one of the founders in an anonymous mail translated via Google Translate. “Access to the site is free. Sellers will give a commission of 5.10% of the transaction,” he said. The infrastructure is apparently distributed and the servers will hold no data – only temporary information regarding current transactions. “All the traffic and all the contents of the virtual machine is encrypted,” he said. “The main server is in the cloud.” “If the cloud server can not contact the load balancer for eight hours, it will automatically turn off and on again only with a key.” The site will obviously attempt to sell pot and other soft drugs, yet the secrecy of the participants and the popularity of Silk Road suggests that this could be used for all the things for which the Tor site is used. At least, I suppose, it will be nice for folks to finally be able to see what the Silk Road has to offer but, like the goings-on at Fight Club, it’s probably not a good idea to talk about things that are sold there. We’ll have more from these lads as they roll out their service. Until then, have fun downloading the and checking out the Darknet.
|
Keyboard Cat Creator Nabs $200K On Kickstarter To Make A Geektastic Card Game
|
Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Remember ? Of course you do. It’s pretty much the Citizen Kane of the YouTube generation. The meme’s creator*, Brad O’Farrel, has managed to raise $200K+ on Kickstarter for , a card game that sits somewhere between Cards Against Humanity and Dungeons & Dragons. In Story War, teams pit mythical creatures against each other in a variety of legendary environments, then scream and yell at each other over which would win a fight. Which is perfect, because there’s nothing us geeks love more than arguing about stuff that doesn’t exist. [See: any gadget blog’s comments ever.] I’ve embedded a video of a couple of people playtesting the game below — but for all of you who might not have time to watch strangers play cards for 10 minutes (psh), here’s the gist: In other words, it’s the Cards Against Humanity concept applied to storytelling. Except with monsters and goblins instead of, you know, dildos and poop. You could say it’s more like Apples To Apples, in that case, but everyone knows Apples To Apples slipped down the ranks long ago, from “BEST PARTY GAME EVER!” to “Decent party game for when you want to play Cards Against Humanity but you’re with your family.” O’Farrel and his three-man team are just about to pass the $250,000 mark on campaign, which puts them more than 10x past their original $20,000 goal. According to , O’Farrel had quit his day job by day 2 of the Kickstarter. I love living in the future. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6e9uxwAZzI&w=560&h=315]
|
ReadWrite Editor-In-Chief Dan Lyons, A.K.A. Fake Steve Jobs, Is Leaving For Hubspot
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Dan Lyons, the editor-in-chief at tech blog , is leaving for a position at marketing software company . We heard the news from knowledgeable sources, and the part about Lyons’ departure for HubSpot was confirmed by a SAY Media spokesperson: Yes, Dan will be leaving his position as editor-in-chief of ReadWrite effective April 1. He made this decision based on the challenges of telecommuting and the daily distance from his editorial team. We are still very invested in ReadWrite – it’s an important brand in our portfolio. We’ll continue to invest in and support the team and develop the property as part of our commitment to the future of the brand. We’ve also reached out to Lyons and and will update if we hear back. last October, at the same time that it was rebranded from its old name of ReadWriteWeb. He was previously technology editor at Newsweek and also worked at Forbes, though he’s probably best known as the author of . Since in 2011, it has been revamping the site with the new name, a new design, and yes, a new editor. When Lyons joined the site, he praised it as a “smart, thoughtful site” but said he was “turning the dial” and hoping to make it more fun. He was also a bit ambiguous about whether he’d be moving from Boston to the main office in San Francisco. HubSpot’s Mike Volpe has offering some more context for the move. It starts off with some pessimism: Simply put, the advertising revenue stream that used to support traditional journalism is trending sharply downward. And with consumers tapping into even more tools to block out and avoid advertising, the downward spiral is only growing. This is why Dan was interested in getting out of the media industry and working for a software company. As a result, Volpe writes that companies need to change their approach to marketing. In HubSpot’s case, that means becoming “the absolute best resource for all marketing professionals in the world” — and that’s why they hired a journalist.
|
Departing Adobe CTO And Cloud Guru Kevin Lynch Joining Apple To Become VP Of Technology
|
Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Now former , the company who famously blocked out Flash on the iPhone and likely precipitated that technology’s long slide into relative obscurity, Adobe has confirmed to TechCrunch in a statement. Lynch once wrote a , but lately his role has been all about ushering Adobe into the future, not dwelling on its past. Lynch has been instrumental in spearheading and helping Adobe’s Creative Cloud efforts get off the ground in recent years. Both Creative Cloud (and Marketing Cloud, which Lynch also led the development of at Adobe) were about moving Adobe away from boxed sales and building its products into primarily cloud-based offerings, with an SaaS approach to sales. You could say that Lynch helped Adobe succeed at becoming a cloud-first company faster than any other technological giant currently trying to master the same shift. Apple has made no secret about its belief that the cloud will become the center of the computer user’s universe, and iCloud, which it announced at WWDC in 2011 during the keynote, was meant to be just that for Apple and its ecosystem. To some degree, it has taken strides to make that happen, by making iCloud the glue that ties iOS to OS X in terms of keeping information and media available to all devices. In others, it hasn’t fared so well: Apple constantly faces complaints about the performance of cloud-based products like iCloud and iTunes Match, and outages are not infrequent. Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue is currently in charge of iCloud at the company, and has been since he was given control of its predecessor MobileMe, which was even worse in terms of its reputation. Cue heads up a host of Apple’s other offerings, however, including iTunes and the App Store, as well as Siri, Maps and iAd. It’s very conceivable that Cue could use some support from a proven cloud services veteran to shore up iCloud’s continued deficiencies. Lynch is also responsible for championing Adobe’s commitment to multi-platform product development and responsive product design. He’s the reason Adobe has done much to address user demand for full-featured products on mobile devices, with the launch of Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad, and more recently, Photoshop Touch for iPhone. AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski and CNBC’s John Fortt reports that Lynch will be as . Mansfield’s areas of expertise are wireless and semiconductor tech, but his official title gives him a wide berth at the company. Lynch’s software role at Adobe may not seem an immediate match for Mansfield’s team, but Mansfield was said to be staying on to help oversee development of “future products” after reversing his decision to retire last year. Apple is a company that rarely silos hardware and software products, so if it is planning a big cloud push that works across all its devices, Lynch could be a good candidate for that no matter who he ends up reporting to.
|
biNu Opens Its Feature Phone Platform To Third Party Apps, Starting With Romance Publisher Harlequin
|
Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
, a startup that brings apps and content to feature phones and lower-end smartphones, is announcing the first partner in its third-party platform. And that partner isn’t just another tech company — instead, biNu is working with the UK division of romance publisher Harlequin to offer 8,700 books, including the romance titles published by , in the biNu app. The startup is backed by . The company says it brings apps like Facebook and YouTube to an audience of 5 million active members, but for the most part it builds those apps itself. Now other companies can use biNu technology to bring their apps to the feature phones that remain dominant in parts of Asia, Africa and South America. Even though biNu has been , its initial focus was on distributing content, so from that perspective the Harlequin partnership makes sense. Through the deal, Mills & Boon now has a branded store in the biNu app, and people can use biNu Credits to make their purchases. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkNiBy15N0o&w=560&h=315] In the press release announcing the partnership, Tim Cooper, commercial director for Harlequin (UK), described this as “a real opportunity for us to reach women in global markets who don’t have access to high end tablet or smartphone technology.” And biNu co-founder and CEO Gour Lentell said there’s “an immense hunger for books, and particularly romance fiction” in the developing world. Other companies interested in partnering with biNu should email [email protected].
|
Art-Obsessed 4chan Founder Chris “moot” Poole Opens Up About His New App DrawQuest
|
Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
After spending most of his life tackling the world of digital media, and founder has gone back to basics with a gamified iPad drawing app called . The idea is that you spend most of your childhood representing and expressing yourself through art, whether it be pictures or words or some combination. But after a certain age, the majority of us become consumers, trying to pack the maths and sciences and spread sheets and meeting planners into our brain. “Putting an adult in front of a blank piece of paper and a pen and ask them to do something with it is one of the scariest situations you can put them in,” explains Poole. After founding Canv.as (post 4chan), Poole found that around 10 percent of users were using the remix feature, which lets you add text, drawings, and essentially meme-ify pictures and re-share them. They worked for a long time refining the webapp’s image editor, and realized that it wasn’t the quality of the editor, but a general insecurity to start creating that hindered growth of the feature. That’s where DrawQuest comes in. DrawQuest offers a daily challenge, with a question and a template to start off the creative process. The editing tools are relatively simple, offering a marker, pencil, paintbrush, and eraser, along with a color wheel with the basic ROYGBIV + BW spectrum. Every picture you complete and submit into the daily pool is an opportunity to get stars from friends and accrue coins, which can go toward more colors and other add-ons. [gallery columns="4" ids="780937,780938,780939,780940"] The most interesting feature is the ability to watch a replay of any given drawing, to see how the artist set up the shot and went step by step. The whole motivation is giving people a place to start drawing and learning. Poole told TechCrunch that he never imagined how good some of the drawings would be, but that DrawQuest is more about giving people the tools they need to express themselves. At the end of the day, it’s not as much about having a beautiful work of art that you frame on your wall, but about having an artistic outlet. In its first two weeks of availability, the DrawQuest app has seen over 500K downloads with over 1 million quests completed by users. The app is available now and can be found in the Apple .
|
Adobe Loses CTO But Beats Q1 Estimates: $1.01B Revenue, $0.35 Non-GAAP EPS, 479K Paying Creative Cloud Subscribers
|
Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Adobe just announced its , which generally beat analyst estimates. Overall revenue for the first quarter was $1.01 billion and GAAP earnings per share of $0.12 and non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) of $0.35, ahead of the of $0.31 non-GAAP EPS on revenue of $986 million. Overall operating income was $240.7 million and net income was $177.9 million on a non-GAAP basis. Just as the company released its earnings, however, an that it’s long-term CTO Kevin Lynch is leaving the company on March 22 “to pursue other opportunities.” that he is leaving for Apple, which would be an interesting move for somebody who long against Apple and once likened Apple’s walled-garden approach . Maybe the most important metric of today’s earnings, however, wasn’t about the financial details but the face that the company’s offering now has more than 479,000 paying subscribers, an increase of 153,000 compared to the end of the last quarter. Adobe also announced that it now has 2 million free and trial subscribers to its Creative Cloud. “We exited the quarter with 479 thousand paid subscriptions, and recently we crossed the half-million mark. With this momentum, we are on track to reach our goal of 1.25 million paid subscriptions by the end of this fiscal year,” Adobe CEP Shantanu Narayen said in a prepared statement ( ) during the company’s earnings call today. The , another cornerstone of the company’s product line, achieved quarterly revenue of $215.4 million, a 20% year-over-year increase. For the whole year, Adobe expects its Marketing Cloud revenue to increase 25%.
|
Halfway Through Its 100 Day Voyage, Checking In With The ‘Unreasonable At Sea’ Startup Ship
|
Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 19 |
Unreasonable At Sea’s around the world voyage Watch the video embedded above to hear Epstein talk about the perks of the journey so far, how the startup folks are mingling with the Semester At Sea students aboard the ship (and getting some work out of them too), what the biggest lessons and surprises have been so far, and what’s in store for the rest of the journey ahead.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.