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Nextdoor Hits 10K Neighborhoods, Gets Me To Stop Running At Night
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 3 | 30 |
After I had been running at night for more than a decade, a relatively under-the-radar startup called got me to start running during the day. Almost nobody likes to exercise, and for many, overcoming the motivational hump of putting on your shoes and gym clothes can be trying on even the best of days. One evening late in January I had finally overcome this initial barrier to entry, and was just about to stop blogging to do my usual 30-minute nightly sprint when I got the email. “Woman robbed at gunpoint in Dogpatch, San Francisco” the subject line screamed. Unlike many of the emails I constantly receive, this was highly relevant to me, especially because, upon further inspection, the robbery had happened one block from my house. Until this email, I hadn’t given too much thought to , a service that I signed up for at the Allen & Co conference last summer, where co-founder had given a talk about the local social network. The company started out as Fanbase in 2009, and was an attempt to create a user-generated content version of ESPN. Founders Tolia and Sarah Leary decided to pivot around May of 2010, and spent the next four to five months testing out different ideas. Fanbase officially pivoted to Nextdoor in September of 2010, starting out its pilot in Lorelei, a neighborhood in Menlo Park. Now a Facebook for your neighborhood, about half the Fanbase funding ended up carrying over, and Tolia and Leary ended up raising an additional $40.2 million for the new Nextdoor product. Initially enthusiastic, I had also invited my neighbors to use the platform, which had resulted in a de facto neighborhood support group (including the services of a pet psychic) when their adventurous cat Kiki went missing. I it for TechCrunch and then sort of forgot about it, rarely logging on to peruse the listings of free stuff and garage sales. Well I was certainly giving the service some thought now: “What if I had been that woman who was robbed?””What if I had ventured out of my house just 15 minutes earlier?” I was still in my gym clothes, after so much effort, and feeling antsy from my day of work. Worse, I was now worried about a random stranger I had only heard about through the Internet, and I still needed a run badly. A flash of insight led me to explore Nextdoor for answers, and I asked, in the comment thread on the same post, “I just saw this as I was about to go jogging. Do you guys think it’s still unsafe? NEED TO JOG.” Almost instantaneously someone responded, “@Alexia — Lots of cops in the neighborhood right now. They are still walking the scene, looking for clothing or a disposed weapon.” Okay. Great. After a few seconds of contemplation, and, being relatively brave, I decided the police presence diminished the likelihood that I would also be robbed by the same perpetrator looking for more victims. I stepped out my door and went on one of the scariest jogs I’ve ever done. I haven’t jogged after sunset since. A service on the Internet had changed my decade-long, and arguably unsafe, habit of jogging at night almost instantly. Online behavior had had an effect on offline behavior — again. But this time at a local level in a way that I personally had never experienced. “It’s very cool to have that kind of user story,” Tolia and said when I shared my experience, “because it’s different than ‘I shared my photo and I got 1,000 likes on it.’ In , where you live is very important. Your neighborhood is important not only because you can share a ladder, or borrow a cup of sugar, but also because you’ve got 100 to 1,000 eyes looking out for you.” In an investment environment that has cooled on consumers, and scrambling to understand the frontiers of hardware , it might be easy to miss the appeal of bringing those eyes online. Investors and did not. With Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (and Instagram and Snapchat) between their firms, Sze and Gurley know a thing or two about online social networks. And both recently plunked down into this unlikely candidate that connects a group of people based on where they live. “The magic is happening,” Sze says, confirming what I’m seeing in my Dogpatch Nextdoor as a widespread phenomenon taking place in communities as socioeconomically diverse as the lower 9th ward in New Orleans and suburban Denver. “People are trusting each other and want to help. There’s a sense of community being brought back. If there’s a cat lost in the neighborhood, all the cat people are out looking for the cat. I’m a dog person and I’m caring about the cat. ” Sze refers to the individual connections made through the service, like the borrowed tiki torches or the found lost pets, as Nextdoor’s “aha” moment. “On LinkedIn, the ‘aha!’ was when someone needed a job and found a job through their network. Facebook’s ‘aha’ wasn’t one thing, but the core aspect of Facebook that allowed you a greater sense of the lives of people whom you knew in the past. That’s magic.” Magic aside, Nextdoor is facing several challenges: namely social network fatigue, stickiness and competition with real life analogues. It’s tough having to grow as a service that has friction in place on purpose. Invites are spread through tricky, word-of-mouth mechanisms like postcards to neighbors. Unlike Facebook, the service is not tied to a given identity, but to a given location — you have to provide physical proof of your address. The service also involves a number of trust and safety buffers like preventing people who live at the last known addresses of registered sex offenders from joining. Despite these challenges, Nextdoor has grown from 3,000 to 10,000 neighborhoods since July, hitting the 10K milestone just last week. A Nextdoor community doesn’t launch until it’s got 10 members committed, and the median community has around 750 households. While the founders wouldn’t give me exact DAUs or MAUs, one could do back-of-the-napkin math and assume there’s somewhere in the neighborhood of over 1 million households signed up for the platform. Over three-fourths of its members are active, either opening an email message, posting or visiting the site at least once a week, Tolia says. A Nextdoor neighborhood is considered mature when it’s reached over 70 percent household penetration — Dogpatch, San Francisco, which has a lively enough community by my estimation (or this post wouldn’t be happening), has just reached 20 percent. That doesn’t come as a surprise, as the service maintains its stickiness through very liberal, and sometimes heavy-handed email alerts. Nextdoor started allowing users to post to adjacent neighborhoods two months ago in an effort to further bolster engagement. The founders hope that the company’s “Instagram moment” will be 30K neighborhoods, or 20 percent of all neighborhoods in the U.S., though they also have their eye on European expansion within the next year. “Something [is] there, and starting to work,” said Gurley, “but it [hasn’t] become a broadly based phenomenon yet.” “Investors get accustomed to the rocketship thing,” Sze says about the company’s slow growth slog, taking a entire first year to get to 176 neighborhoods. “Facebook was everyone’s darling, growing like a weed. LinkedIn, like Nextdoor, was slower. It’s easy to laud the growth curve of a Facebook style and miss the LinkedIn style. Investors say, ‘It’s not growing fast, it won’t scale,’ and end up missing out on LinkedIn.” The opportunity is undoubtedly big (Tolia and Leary ). Every vehicle used for local advertising — the Yellow Pages, radio, newspaper — is currently on the decline, yet nothing viable has emerged to take their place. Instead, the space is littered with countless failures, with Everyblock, Yardsellr, Neighborhood.com and Neighborland either stagnant or in the deadpool. And don’t get me started on Aol’s Patch. The problem, as Sze says, is that many companies approach local from a top-down perspective, using the editorial model where people broadcast local news to the masses. What Nextdoor and fellow Benchmark company Yelp have gotten right is that they nurture a populist, bottom-up model, created by individuals on the platform who form a marketplace where value can be created. “It’s hard to get there if you don’t start in the right direction,” Sze informs me, giving my boss Tim Armstrong this piece of advice on Aol’s : “Keep your eye on Nextdoor because you may need to buy it — or at least partner with it.” According to Gurley, the startup has already seen about a thousand inbound biz-dev requests, which it’s tracking in a spreadsheet for when it comes time to extract that value, asserting that the utility of the discussion on Nextdoor will likely result in a higher conversion rate for businesses than photosharing. While the cofounders maintain that they’re focused on growth, they tell me that once monetization does get incorporated into Nextdoor, it will look more like Google Adwords than traditional display. The platform could appeal to anyone from startups like Angie’s List, and that depend on local distribution, to a neighborhood pancake house that would normally advertise in something like the Yellow Pages or a throwaway direct mailer. Tolia brings up a startup called , where aggregated local businesses like plumbers and contractors pay you to listen to their pitches as a litmus test. “That tells you how much demand there is. And we can go a step further than Homeadvisor — target only people who live in Dogpatch, for example. And there is a very strong emotional element that people want to support the businesses in their area.” The age-old manifestation of a local community, which is represented in analog by the welcome wagon, the PTA, the Neighborhood Watch and even the pole where people could post fliers about their missing dogs and cats, has slowly eroded as we become more isolated by television and the Internet. The cup of sugar example may have struck you as a cliché. Who does that anymore, right? The trust is gone. And every time someone brings up this example, I get these visions of the sugar being poisoned. Nextdoor is perhaps the first step in reversing this process. “Technology has done a great job of making us closer to things that aren’t in close proximity,” says Tolia. “It’s time technology did a better job of connecting us to things that are literally right outside our front door.” Even when those things are a robbery. Especially then.
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Report: US Patent And Trademark Office Denies Apple’s iPad Mini Trademark Application, Deemed “Merely Descriptive”
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 30 |
Right after it launched the iPad mini, Apple for the name with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). As Patently Apple , however, the USPTO will likely refuse Apple’s trademark filing because, the reviewer argues, “the applied-for mark merely describes a feature or characteristic of applicant’s goods.” The was mailed to Apple on January 24, but only made public in the last few days. Apple can still respond to this notice and correct its application, though it’s hard to see how Apple could argue against the USPTO’s argument that ‘mini’ is ‘merely descriptive.’ The word ‘mini,’ the reviewer argues, just describes that the iPad mini is indeed “a small sized handheld tablet computer” and just describes the mini’s features. It is not, the reviewing attorney says, “a unitary mark with a unique, incongruous, or otherwise nondescriptive meaning in relation to the goods and/or services.” The USPTO would only grant Apple the trademark to the full iPad mini name if the company could show that the word ‘mini’ has now acquired a “distinctiveness.” In addition, , the reviewer also denied the application for now because Apple should have provided the USPTO with a specimen other than its own product website, even though Apple always uses these for its trademark applications and this was never a reason for a denial before. The reviewer also believes that there is a “likelihood of confusion” between Apple’s existing iPad trademarks and this new iPad® mini application, which, to be honest, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Here is the letter the USPTO sent to Apple in January:
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Where Have All The Physical QWERTYs Gone?
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,013 | 3 | 30 |
It’s approaching three years since I emailed and got a reply from the late Steve Jobs. The topic of my caffeine-fueled missive that sunny day in June 2010 was the industry’s move towards touch-based interfaces and, specifically, Apple’s one-size-fits-all approach regarding the iPhone’s lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard. I have a disability that can make touch and other physically demanding interfaces more challenging, I explained to Jobs, and whereas the mouse-driven GUI that he helped usher in with the Macintosh had inadvertently put me on a level playing field, were touch to ever become the dominant mode of input, it had the potential to turn that world upside down. “That’s obviously a bit dramatic”, at the time. “There will always be lots of different products on the market, but it’s a possibility nonetheless.” Fast forward to 2013 and what was only a possibility has all but become a reality. Survey the mobile landscape and it’s filled with people fondling their giant slabs of touch, happily typing away on glass. At this point I know I’ll likely get ripped apart in the comments. In the battle of the physical vs virtual QWERTY, the market has spoken, they’ll say, and those who don’t favour touch are squarely out of touch. And sadly, the evidence is heavily stacked on their side of the argument. In the first few years of the iPhone’s existence, a ton of hybrid physical QWERTY/touch smartphones from competitors entered the market, ready to differentiate themselves from Apple by talking up their superior typing experience. But they failed to stop the Cupertino juggernaught. Typing on glass, while not ideal, was good enough. Arguably it wasn’t until Android OEMs ditched their, largely, clunky slide-out keyboards and wholesale copied and then supersized Apple’s all touch form-factor, did they begin to turn back the tide. Meanwhile, continues the argument, the likes of Nokia fell by the wayside, plagued by an antiquated user interface that, in a desperate and confused attempt to respond to the market, tried and failed to crowbar in touch before the company finally jumped onto Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, sans physical QWERTY. Furthermore, BlackBerry, which seemingly built its whole business off the back of its physical QWERTY-touting credentials, chose to release its first comeback device as the BB10-powered Z10, another all touch grey slab, rather than the Q10, which combines touch with in the best BlackBerry candybar tradition. It’s also been that the Canadian handset maker may even view the Q10’s hybrid approach as a way to wean its traditional customers off a physical keyboard entirely, a gateway device if you will. So yes, putting aside the fact that the market can only speak to what is put in front of it — I can’t recall a single candybar QWERTY powered by Android that was anything more than a mid-tier or low end device — it would seem that the market has indeed spoken. But it may not have had the final word yet. That’s if — and it’s a if — the BlackBerry Q10, when it finally hits the market next month, surprises everybody and sells in sufficient numbers to smash through the totalitarian all touch screen. And just like the Mac had ensured before it, for this hack and others like me, 2013 like 1984 after all.
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Bing Gordon’s Founder Checklist: Animal Energy, Blind Confidence, And A Toupee.
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Derek Andersen
| 2,013 | 3 | 30 |
As an Electronic Arts’ intern eight years ago, I asked Bing Gordon then the chief creative officer and the only remaining early founding team member, a question about vision. “How can I know where the puck is going to be?” While he delivered a satisfactory response, two weeks later I received an email from Bing saying, “I answered that question poorly a few weeks and I wanted to try again.” A few weeks ago Bing joined me at in Silicon Valley where he delivered some great advice that has become one of his trademarks. In 2010 (look for a bald guy on the front row) one of the world’s “great CEO coaches” supporting founders on the boards of companies like Amazon, Zynga, Klout, and Zazzle. Here are some excepts from our recent . : So I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. My dad was a first generation Scotsman and his dad was a janitor. And he was somebody that believed the grass was always greener and didn’t have, kind of, context or resources. Thanks, Dad! We were the first to move in to a subdivision built out of farmlands surrounding Detroit, so I grew up kind of in the creek. Playing sports with my brother who remembers growing up in the . So I had a good Midwestern upbringing. I didn’t work in an office before going to Stanford business school, but I did think I was a pretty damn good teenage caddy. I played hockey and lacrosse at the university level and played both, kind of, for most of my adult life. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL0XW0MBF7s] : Well I went to Yale thinking I was going to be a math major and a writer, and I got there and Yale was lousy at math and it seemed socially irrelevant, so I kind of became an athlete-near-college-dropout. I realized I was flunking a third of my classes going into the final. My proud accomplishments in college other than sports achievements was I wrote poetry. Kind of light verse, in a coffee shop, and Peter Faulk when he was doing came, and liked it so much he took me out drinking that night. That was kind of fun. And my other one is I hitchhiked to 49 states in the U.S. while a college student. I wasn’t able to hitchhike to Hawaii. : I was an actor in New York City. And at the same time I was a busboy at , kind of the first glitter bar in New York where Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls played…I did that for a year and I realized that professional theater kind of sucks because you don’t get to work when you want, and you make your name in bad plays. After that I kind of always wanted to be a writer. I still think that book-writing is the most honorable avocation. I think it’s a pretty shitty business. And even though fewer people want to read all the time, I still think that is the product that carries the most honor, in my mind. So I started doing various odd jobs trying to make enough money that I could afford to write. After a couple years commercial fishing and tree planting, I got enough money, I had a ’56 pink Pontiac Chieftain and an electric typewriter, and I sat down to write and I realized, I hate writing. I only did it because teachers needed it for school. It’s better than doing other stuff in school, but any of you who are writers know it’s like ripping your heart out one word at a time. : I’m at Stanford Business School, and I went there because I was good with math, and otherwise I was going to be dead-ended. And Peter Keane, a decision science professor, asked, “Okay, you Stanford MBAs, let’s have a real decision: If money were no object, what would you do?” And I said, “You know that movie I would like to create, inside computers, an adult Disneyland where you play out real stories.” The room went silent, and the MBAs kind of were embarrassed. The professor comes up to me later and says, “There’s somebody with an answer that sounded like that in one of my other classes, and you should see him.” That was Trip Hawkins. I played on the university champion touch football team with him, but I’d never talked with him because he placed out of all the classes I’m in. He was not the 100 SAT point-deficient MBA. So we went and talked at Stanford. We ended up living together, played a lot of games together on our free Channel F, and I made so much money fishing that I bought a hot tub, so we had a hot tub and a Channel F. Let me tell you, we were party central for Stanford Business School! BING: You know, it wasn’t any worse than what I was already doing. I left Stanford Business School…I worked half-time at Intel while I was in business school…and the other half of my time I drove to Moor End to date the woman who’s been my wife ever since. My avowed goal was, in five years to start a consumer tech ad agency to replace Regis McKenna. Regis McKenna was a great PR guy. But I thought, okay, whatever, get a couple years of experience and eat their lunch, because they do everything wrong. And then Trip said, “I’m going to start a software company in five years.” Well, I actually did start an ad agency six years later – it’s called Goodby-Silverstein, it’s in San Francisco – and I pulled them out of their work and joined them for one day, and then I realized that grown-up businesspeople in advertising give up their self-respect about age 40, and I intended to live past then. But the game business in the ‘80s was pretty low-creative. I realized early on that I like being with world-class creative people, and they were not in the video game business in the ‘80s. BING: We did a million-unit seller, and the first time I realized it was different I was getting in a cab in New York. This is a little later, but it was a cab in New York with an EA sports logo, and the guy turns to me and goes, “EA Sports. It’s in the game!” And here I am sheepishly counting the quarters to make sure I’ve got enough to tip the dude – I don’t know if 15% is enough in New York – and he turns to me and loves the logo; kind of gives me an emotional bear hug. So that was when a million seemed like ubiquity. Even five years ago when I started a venture – venture capitalists, if you had 500,000 people coming to a web site, that seemed like a tipping point. The bad news is, the new tipping point’s ten million. Back then one million was an unheard-of number. There was so much friction in distribution. BING: I talked to you about the kind of blind confidence. We believed in interactivity, and we believed in learning by doing, as opposed to learning by listening and sitting there. And we thought there would be this crossover from the magic of movies to games. And the games had interactivity. We didn’t know exactly how. We thought it was going to be based more on visual fidelity and audio fidelity and maybe stories. But where that started from was that games are going to be a new art form. You can start with a big vision that electrifies people and let other people around you help invent it, then check in. If you’ve got a vision, you have to check in: Are you delivering it in new ways? Are you still focused on it? Are you still taking risks to try to get there? BING: You need charisma and animal energy. Way more important than intellectual savvy and great memory. Animal energy is the ability to bend the will of other people while standing up. I think Steve Balmer’s got it. A lot of leadership is kind of like a tuning fork – getting everybody on the same wavelength. There’s just no substitute for the ability to work hard and be in a good mood. So when I see somebody in a workplace that can’t help but smile and compliment people, I just tell them, “Don’t ever lose that.” Startups and the creative process is so hard. You don’t want Nervous Nellies and Snarky Sams. Somebody who is uplifting – that’s worth 20 IQ points. And if you’ve got the 20 IQ points, you owe it to yourself to be really happy, because then you get 20 more. I work with John Doer, over at KPCB who kind of runs up and down the Grand Canyon. Sounds kind of crazy. I work with Mark Pinkas who surfs every weekend. Most people that I work with around here who are leaders have extraordinary energy. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWRZv291_PE] BING: Most of business can get explained by high school. If you were a fan of how things worked in high school, whether you were in the middle of how things worked or not, the same kind of, you know, nervousness and vying for attention and having trouble getting your needs met, and being overworked and over social – it’s still what’s driving the people you’re doing business with. So anytime you run into a complicated situation, imagine it’s and it will all be explainable. The next thing is – the most important thing for people in their 20s – my experience is everyone in their twenties wastes a year. You do it from bad choices. Kind of working in local maxima. Everyone in their twenties should have a mentor who – all they’ll want from you is thanks and feedback for when it’s working, and they have to believe they have your best interests at heart. It’s hard to get that from an investor. It’s hard to believe or even test that an investor will put your needs ahead of theirs. Most won’t. Money is very corrupting. So get a mentor. Next thing is, I believe that there are a lot of pathways to success. And the people who succeed have a higher likelihood if they’re doing something they’re passionate about. In almost all walks of life, opportunities are created. People who are doing something they like will just pay more attention. So if you do something – this is kind of a negative for enterprise software – but if you’re doing something that matches a hobby, you’re going to have redoubled time and attention.
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Big Data Could Cripple Facebook
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 3 | 30 |
So there’s this startup called , which does big-data sentiment analysis, “pulse of the planet” stuff. I , and now they’ve got an actual product with an actual business model up and running in private beta: , “The Social Stock Trader Rankings,” which performs sentiment analysis on StockTwits data and a sampling of the Twitter firehose to determine traders’ overall bullish/bearish feeling. They also compare reality against past sentiment to score and rank traders based on their accuracy, which is more interesting. It’s a first iteration, but it looks pretty nifty, and I like the idea of a ranking system wherein unknowns can leave high-profile loudmouths in their dust by virtue of simply being right more often. Even if I feel slightly uneasy when I imagine such a system being applied to, say, tech bloggers. Actually being held for what I’ve written in the past? Doesn’t that just seem terribly And of course it’s early days yet for companies like SmogFarm/KredStreet, and sentiment analysis, and natural language processing (such as that which powered ), and -style data mining. Just imagine what they’ll be able to do in five years. And when they turn all that big-iron, big-data searchlight power on, say, Facebook timelines — what they be able to determine? A few years ago the EFF that something as simple as your browser settings make you a lot less anonymous online than you might believe. Last week a found that “human mobility traces are highly unique,” and when polling allegedly anonymous cell-phone location data, “four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.” Good software can mine a lot of meaning out of apparently sparse and empty data. So just imagine what happens when next-generation language- and image-processing software, and then the generation after that, and the generation after , is unleashed on your Facebook timeline. It seems very plausible that all those innocuous things you say, and how you say them, and the pictures you post, and the games you play, will subtly and invisibly add up to a terrifyingly accurate portrait of you, including any and/or all of the things about yourself that you never actually wanted to make public. What’s worse is that it will be ridiculously easy. Would-be employers won’t have to scroll through your Facebook timeline themselves, they’ll just need to point their profiling software in your direction and 30 seconds later read its high-confidence predictions of your work habits, neuroses, personal failures, emotional instabilities, attitude towards authorities, and sexual proclivities, all expertly extrapolated from the tapestry of subtle-to-invisible nuances accumulated from all of your photos, comments, Likes, upvotes, etc.; all individually meaningless, but collectively highly illuminating. Individual profiling is a huge business just waiting to be tapped by ethically challenged startups. (This could be mitigated somewhat if you were to keep all your activity friends-only, of course; but even then, every app or distant acquaintance you’re connected to will be able to learn more about you than you ever intended. And it’s easy to envision employers requesting that you connect to them on Facebook as part of the job-application process, and filtering out those who refuse…) I can imagine what that kind of profiling software would have said about me, early in my career: Which, er, would have been ; but obviously I didn’t want my potential employers back then to know about it. Doesn’t matter to me now, of course, now that I’ve mellowed out some and I’m pretty well-established. But when people who are still struggling discover that everything they do online says far more about themselves than they know, and will be ceaselessly stored, sifted, mined and measured…they’ll inevitably become a whole lot less forthright than they are today. Most people already know not to publicize individual things that reflect badly on them; once they realize that the of what they post can have serious repercussions, too, they’ll clam up. In the end all public online activity will essentially become an endless ongoing job interview. Doesn’t that sound great? You would think all this big-data artillery would be good news for Facebook, so that they can target their ads more effectively. But once everything you share is being watched, filtered, and graded by remorseless, relentless profiling software, you’ll inevitably begin to share far less. Sure, you can try to use pseudonyms…but screw up and they’ll be tied to your real identity forever. “ ” states that every year the amount of information shared by Internet users doubles. But KredStreet and the like are only the very beginning of what can be done with this kind of data analysis. It’s hard to imagine Zuckerberg’s Law marching on once people realize that everything they do online accumulates into data that reveals far more about them than they know, which can and will be used against them. Instead I can see Facebook slowly turning into a ghost town where everyone is always on their very best fake behavior.
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Did PayPal Just Clone Stripe’s API Documentation?
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? As we reported this morning, PayPal a number of new APIs and a brand new developer portal today. This also included the release of new REST APIs. One thing that —competitor Stripe’s REST API documentation looks remarkably similar. You can see from the screenshots that PayPal structured their documentation with the API documents on the left hand side of the page and the sample code on the right side of the page. This layout is identical to the way Stripe lays out its REST API. PayPal also has a blueprint of its logo on its developer home page, which is similar to Stripe’s blueprint on the startup’s homepage. You can see the chatter about the similarities on Twitter Even Stripe’s founder Patrick Collison Tweeting, “16 months after Stripe launches, PayPal’s response is… a clone of Stripe’s API docs.” It doesn’t appear that PayPal has copied any actual language but many that the payments giant copied Stripe’s design for their documentation. There’s no illegality in this, but it is something that is called out by the developer community when it does happen. A spokesperson for PayPal issues this statement: “Under David [Marcus’] leadership we have a renewed focus on creating simple beautiful products for all our customers – consumers, merchants and developers. The design of the developer pages matches that philosophy in making it as easy as possible for developers to get to what they need quickly. It matches what we have already done on paypal.com for consumers and our PayPal page for merchants www.paypal.com/merchants.” Stripe launched its developer-friendly online payments system that allows developers to avoid setting up merchant accounts and dealings with banks, while still ensuring transaction safety. The service has bit a hit with developers because of its simplicity. The company not only competes with PayPal, but also Braintree; and is backed by General Catalyst, Sequoia, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk. Curebits was for taking design elements and code from 37Signals last year. Zynga has sued Vostu . These are different cases, of course, but the underlying fact is that design was copied. It’s a surprising move by a company that is actually part of another public company, eBay. And it’s worth noting that the design was copied from a very buzzed about, fast growing competitor.
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Netflix Stops Issuing API Keys To New Developers, Effectively Ending Its Developer Program
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Netflix just used the quiet Friday afternoon to that it is effectively ending its public developer program. Netflix will stop issuing API keys immediately and will not accept new API affiliates. The company will no longer offer a test environment for developer and its developer portal is already set to be read-only. Netflix’s OData catalog, which was never updated in the first place, will be retired a month from now on April 8. The only good news for developers here is that applications that are currently actively calling the API will remain active, so services like , and m which all either use data from Netflix or offer integration with the service, will likely remain online for the time being. Netflix did not say for how long it plans to support its current public API. The company says these ‘changes,’ as the company calls them, “are designed to allow us to focus our API efforts on supporting the products and features used most by our members.” Its API program, Netflix argues, has “shifted over the past few years” and is now more about supporting all of the devices that are used by its 33 million members to stream shows and movies. Here is a list of all the changes the company announced today: We will no longer issue new public API developer keys. All existing keys that are actively calling the API will remain active. We will no longer accept new API affiliates. There will be no impact to existing and active affiliates. We will no longer offer test environments. The test tools have been unavailable for a while and we won’t bring them back. We will set the forums in the developer portal to read-only. We encourage developers to continue their conversations at with the tag “netflixapi”. The existing forum posts will remain on the site for now in the form of an archive. We will retire the OData catalog, effective on April 8, 2013.
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Bang With Friends Launches Site To Help You Have Sex With Strangers At SXSW
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Hooking up at SXSW was never very hard, but it just got easier. If you’re in Austin this week and looking for that special someone to have anonymous sex with, look no further: Bang With Friends has extended its hookup app to make it available for the social media experts looking for a little love after a margarita… or six. If you have never used Bang With Friends, it works like this: You go to the site, click Facebook Connect, and choose from a mosaic of friends who you’re “Down To Bang” with. And if one of your friends also clicks on you to indicate that they’re Down To Bang as well, you’re both sent an email suggesting that you just get it over with and hook up already. Well, the site has launched a new landing page at , which is aimed at hooking up attendees that might be interested in, um, banging. Unlike the original web app, BWF’s SXSW page shows you other attendees who have connected with the SXSW page, highlighting them with a special SXSW symbol. Because, you know, this is all about SEX. At SXSW. In addition to the SXSW-specific site, Bang With Friends is partnering with MakeLoveNotPorn’s Cindy Gallop, who is speaking at the event. BWF minions will be handing out limited-edition-branded condoms during her session. It’s all mainly promotional fluff for the site’s bigger mission of connecting people who’d like to have sex with one another. And on that front, it seems to be doing pretty well — already, Bang With Friends has had about 750,000 users connect to the site, submitting some 16 million “Down to Bang” clicks since the site launched. Of all those clicks, about 180,000 pairs have been successfully matched… Though there’s no word on how many of them ended up doing the deed. Bang With Friends isn’t the only app to tap into SXSW’s hookup culture to get ahead. Social network is using the event as a way to get users sharing their sexual health status. You know, as a way to ensure other people don’t get your STDs.
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Flush With $80M, Desire2Learn Buys ‘Anti-Sharepoint For Students’ Platform Wiggio, Its 2nd Acquisition In 2 Months
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
, the online learning platform based out of Waterloo, Ontario in Canada that raised $80 million in , is stepping up to the M&A plate. Today, we’ve learned, and confirmed, that the company is making its second acquisition in as many months by buying , a collaboration platform for students. The companies are not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but what we do know is that the ten-plus-year-old Canadian learning company is looking to expand its foothold in the U.S. higher-ed market. Wiggio is based in Boston, which is a key hub for the e-learning market, but not because . (Just kidding, , more than one of which is a Desire2Learn customer.) Acquiring Wiggio means that Desire2Learn doesn’t have to start from scratch in the market and allows it to open a Boston office. Accordingly, employment offers are being made to all six Wiggio employees, who (for those who accept) will remain in Beantown and help to open Desire2Learn’s new office. We’re also hearing that the company is building itself up south of Canadian border also because it is eyeing up an eventual IPO in the U.S. Exits in the ed-tech market are also significant for another reason: A ton of ed-tech startups, some with great ideas but pre- meaningful revenue, have received seed funding, but it’s been a struggle for many of them to raise Series A and B rounds — an amplification of the . In many cases, investors just aren’t that interested in putting big money in these companies right now, so in most cases the best (or only) option for them is to get acquired. A final decision has yet to be made on whether Desire2Learn will integrate Wiggio’s technology into its platform and begin offering it to schools. For those unfamiliar, , Wiggio set out to build the “anti-SharePoint,” providing schools with a social and collaboration network for groups associated with educational institutions, which can range from math clubs to sports teams and sororities. In other words, Wiggio aims to provide schools with the same kind of easy-to-use collaboration tools that services like Box, Yammer, WebEx and Basecamp offer to businesses — like the ability to hold virtual meetings through web conferencing, share calendars and files, create documents and study plans, or chat and video message fellow students about tonight’s homework assignments, for example. While plans for integrating Wiggio are still up in the air, Desire2Learn Market Development VP Jeff McDowell tells us that Wiggio’s platform will continue to operate as a stand-alone service for the foreseeable future, which means that Wiggio’s 1.1 million users and 100,000 collaboration groups won’t be forced to begin looking for a new home next week. No imminent shut down. Wiggio has raised from New Atlantic Ventures, Bob Doyle and angels. It was founded in 2008 by Dana Lampert, just after he graduated from Cornell, and influenced by all the enterprise collaboration tools he’d come acros while during a past Wall Street internship. Lampert is currently the CEO. The Wiggio deal is Desire2Learn’s second acquisition in as many months, following on the heels of its . Backed by The Gates Foundation, Degree Compass offers a predictive analytics tool, which, like Netflix’s recommendation engine for movies, helps students find classes, courses and subjects that fit their interests, skills and grade level and help them move towards their degree. The service also allows schools to get a better sense of how well their students will perform in particular subjects through its grade prediction system, which, in early testing at several pilot schools, has been able to predict whether a student will pass the class with 90 percent accuracy based on their prior performance. And not only that, but can distinguish whether or not a student will get an A, B, C, D or F grade — with 92 percent accuracy. McDowell tells us that Desire2Learn will be going to market with Degree Compass in the next month, with a version that’s very close to the one it acquired. So, whereas Degree Compass solves an immediate market need for Desire2Learn and its institutional customers and is being implemented right away, Wiggio’s technology isn’t in as high demand given the company’s current services, which makes its long-term future a little more uncertain. It is clear, however, that, since its $80 million raise in September from and , Desire2Learn has been looking to become an acquirer in EdTech, and its hiring of McDowell, who previously helped lead platform marketing and business development at fellow Waterloo resident BlackBerry, is another demonstration of that. The $80 million round, the largest to date for a Canadian tech company (and one of the largest ever made by NEA), was raised to help Desire2Learn invest in customer service and cloud infrastructure, platform development and global growth, i.e. acquisitions. Since launching in 1999, Desire2Learn has bootstrapped its way to a Learning Management System (LMS) that competes with the bigs (and incumbents) in the space like and . In fact, the company spent the first three or so years of its life mired in patent-related litigation with Blackboard. At the time, using litigation was not an unfamiliar approach for Blackboard in dealing with competitors. Although the battles dragged out for years, Desire2Learn was able to come out the other side with just enough capital and steam to begin building. Today, Desire2Learn has over 700 clients and over 8 million learners across higher education, K-12, healthcare and the corporate sector. And it has over 600 employees worldwide, which it hopes to expand to 750 by the year’s end (partly inorganically, it seems). Although the company does not disclose financial information, we’ve been hearing that its institutional contracts with its customers are translating into millions of dollars of revenue — a relatively rare thing in EdTech.
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In First 24 Hours Of 3.0 Launch, Path Made More Money Than Ever And Sent More Than 1M Messages
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
TechCrunch TV interview talked to Path founder and CEO Dave Morin today at the in Austin, Texas. You can watch that in the video embedded above, to see us discuss 3.0, whether messaging could interfere with Path’s Facebook relationship, , and more. But there were some key off-camera comments as well, in which Path founder and CEO Dave Morin told me some interesting details about how 3.0 has made a bigger impact on the company than even the team had expected. In fact, Morin said, in the first 24 hours after the 3.0 launch, Path made more money than it had in its entire lifetime as a company, total (starting with , Path has collected affiliate revenue from media sales generated in the app.) And messaging has proved extremely popular, with more than 1 million messages sent by users within the first 24 hours of 3.0’s debut. I’m told he’s now announcing those figures publicly in an ongoing following our chat. It’s good news from the social networking app, which is universally lauded as beautifully designed and thoughtful, but has been criticized for possibly not quite making a big enough dent outside of the early adopter crowd. This is an example of Path being more forthcoming with numbers that might prove those naysayers wrong — similar to how the company recently announced that its user base numbers 6 million people — and could be an indication of more confidence from the company.
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Facebook Beefs Up With Acqhire Of Storylane Because It’s Time To Fight Tumblr
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Facebook’s no blogging platform, but Tumblr is and it’s eating the social network’s young. If Facebook wants to host our digital lives, it needs richer sharing. That’s Storylane’s specialty, so of its team sounds like a smart staff-up. The startup’s Chief Executive Story Teller Jonathan Gheller and crew could convince us to share our quick memes and long opinions on Facebook. You see the kids, they love Tumblr. Internet savvy folks do, too. Customization, big images, animated GIFs, and the option to write something longer if necessary. It all makes Facebook’s status update box seem a bit confining. Timeline may your life history, but most people don’t splay their scrapbook all over their coffee table. Facebook needs a better home for people who care a little bit more about what and how they share. Wait wait wait. What about Facebook Notes? Well, when was the last time you saw someone share a note? That’s because Facebook buried them when it switched to Timeline 18 months ago and the product has been growing moldy in the dark ever since. and Gheller could bring fresh life to Facebook’s blogging intentions. in October 2012, and our own Anthony Ha’s coverage explains that Gheller wanted it to be “the home for personal thoughts and stories that go deeper than a quick Facebook or Twitter update.” It’s great place for memories, poetry, and personal manifestos. Storylane would even try to inspire you with prompts like “What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?” or “What hobbies do you enjoy the most?” You know who else started trying to creatively ( ) you to share? Facebook. “How are you feeling, Josh?”, “What did you learn today?”, “What’s your favorite Halloween memory?”. No wonder Gheller and his four employees were keen to join forces with Facebook, who’s picking up just Storylane’s talent, not its product or data. Tumblr’s success won’t be easy to create inside Facebook’s walled garden. Most Tumblr posts are public and it’s heavy on re-blogging — both which are not Facebook’s forte. It’s also about sharing to people who want to subscribe specifically to your blog or come find you, not about blasting posts to everyone you’ve ever met. Facebook and the Storylaners (terrible band name) would need to find the right distribution scheme for Facebook blog posts. If it can make it work, though, it’d add a powerful publishing style to its repertoire. And it could win back some of the youth it admits are . First thing’s first, Facebook has to start rendering animated GIFs. The Tumblr kids (and adults) can’t get enough of ’em.
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Inside Google Street View: From Larry Page’s Car To The Depths Of The Grand Canyon
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
The concept of moving throughout the world freely without actually having to “physically” travel is the Holy Grail for many. Being able to explore a physical space that is thousands of miles away without having to deal with the rigors of travel seems like something out of a science fiction novel. With Street View, Google has brought us as close as we could possibly get to teleportation – without the actual physical matter transference, of course. The project started as research at Stanford and then hopped into Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page’s car. Snapping photos of every nook and cranny of the planet so that people could travel the world from the comfort of their own homes or mobile devices is the hallmark of Google’s approach to the world around it and the evolution of technology. I spent the day with the founding members of the Street View team to learn about how it went from a gimmick in someone’s mind to a utility that we use without thinking, and in some cases, wouldn’t want to live without. Starting out as a camera strapped to Page’s car, Street View technology has been added to vans, cars, tripods, , bikes and even a snow mobile. It has become the eyes of all of Google’s vision for how we view the world after launching on May 25, 2007. While the product has had its , Google has forged ahead. Before I spoke with , engineering director, and , engineering manager, at Google Maps, I had done quite a bit of research into the history of the Google Maps product as a whole. What I didn’t know is how “pie in the sky” the concept of Street View actually was, which is an easy misconception to have once a technology has become so ubiquitous. Vincent told me a bit about the first concept of Street View, which was hatched at Google based on some experiments being done at Stanford, led by . Levoy and one of his students had come up with a way to shoot video and paste it together into one picture, and Google decided to invest a little money into more experiments to see if it was feasible to take photos of every street in San Francisco. By parsing out this video frame by frame, it could make a really “long” image, or a facade of an entire street. It was distorted, of course, but this was the building block that Google needed to prove its Street View theory. On these long, wiggly, very early street-wide images, Vincent said, “That was interesting to us.” Pretty to the point, and that was the moment that Street View was born. After this testing, Larry Page strapped a camera onto his car and snapped shots throughout San Francisco. These images, along with some very basic cross-street data, would be patched together into something that wasn’t quite useful, but was even more “interesting,” as Vincent put it. From Page’s car, the very early Street View team, which was comprised of a few random Googlers using their 20 percent time, threw some cameras into a van with a GPS and some lasers. The lasers were to grab data so that the team could know what the distance was between the camera and the facades of the buildings. That spacial recognition is what helps Google patch all of its images together and give it that 3D feel. The camera took a lot of pictures, the devices, hooked up to a raid of computers in the back of the van, and then this very unique dataset that is what makes Street View Street View, was amassed. It wasn’t pretty, though, as Vincent said: It was a Frankenstein-looking car, but it let us capture enough data in the Bay Area. We had a van that we borrowed from the security team. It would go into the city, do some driving, and things would stop working and the computer gave us errors. Working on a project at Google with your 20 percent time is only part of the battle. Getting other people to join your team and getting it approved is a whole separate hurdle. Vincent told me that once they collected all of this data, people started piecing it together, and the demos made sense. In Q3 of 2005, Vincent and his team gave a tech talk at Google, one that takes place every Friday, and was able to get more 20 percenters to join the team, including a key engineering VP. In October of 2005, Street View was approved and had the go-ahead to expand. There was no turning back. The world would be mapped out pixel by pixel by a bunch of moonshot thinkers who were trying to figure out how many devices they could bolt onto a car without it failing every five miles. While Street View was still under the radar at this point, Vincent could start hiring people – Filip being the first. The fact that these two are still working on the product today is a testament to how far it’s come and how much is still left to do. In early 2006, there were seven Googlers working on Street View full time, with the goal of making it a “real product.” Vincent had this to say on the transition: There were a few things at that time that we were really interested in. Perspective panoramas were cool but really hard to make. We only had one UI/UX guy to figure out how to integrate it into maps, but there was no compelling way to show it, because there was no “Google Maps” when we started. Yes, all of the infrastructure that you see today in the Google Maps product didn’t even exist at that time, so the Street View team at Google had even passed Google’s current plans and trajectory. Vincent shared: What we did was built a new platform. We wanted to build something reliable and scalable and put it in a car. Something with high-speed cameras to take pictures, so we had 8 SLRs in a rosette configuration to take images all around the vehicle. Our thought at this time was “it was going to have to be expensive to be comprehensive.” This “rosette design,” which originally consisted of five lenses and one main fisheye called the L2, has become the core to every Street View vehicle. Once this approach to photography and information-gathering was set in stone, Google knew that this would work. Google Street View, and everything Google does pretty much, is all about the data it collects. In many ways, Google is extremely obsessed about collecting all types of data. This approach has ruffled the feathers of those who feel like their privacy is being invaded, but the company takes the approach of “collect as much as you can, make sense of it later, display it in a way that helps people.” Take that approach, then rinse and repeat. Street View collects quite a bit of data. Vincent’s team had to figure out a way to scale these original vans to grab as much of it as possible so that they wouldn’t have to drive the same routes more than once. The team threw lasers onto the vans – four on each side – to get distance information, more GPS, collected wind velocity and everything in between. He said that the approach was simple: “Collect as much data as possible and figure it out.” How was this going to work outside of San Francisco, though? There is now Street View data from more than 3,000 cities and 47 countries all over the world, so there was a lot of work ahead before this project ever saw the light of day. Vincent said: We had a rack of four or five machines in the back of the vehicles, but something was always breaking. We built three or four of these, and took images mostly in California. The cars were always failing, so we couldn’t scale this. Five million unique miles driven later, the failures are now few and far between. All of this sounds fantastic – collecting data and photos just by driving around a city – but to make it actually useful, the team had to come up with a way to visualize it and tweak it from a user-experience perspective. Ones and zeros make uber-math geeks happy, but there’s no way that our parents could ever make sense of any of that. To fully experience Google Maps and Street View, the design had to be nearly perfect, as if you just stepped into a foreign city for the first time and had your head on a swivel. To do this, the Street View team built itself an internal tool to churn through all of the geographical information: they smacked layers of photos on top of it, used all of the spacial details picked up by the lasers bouncing off of buildings and landmarks, and then determined whether it was actually usable. With quite a bit of work, it finally was: This data was collected by drivers who would fill up hard drives and ship them back to Google. The drivers wouldn’t send them in until they had five disks completely full. The disks would get shipped to a data center, the information uploaded and then everything would get fed into its core database and go through a few processing steps. One of those processing steps was the blurring of people’s faces and license plates. These are seemingly obvious privacy issues that nobody thought of before this product existed, so Google had to invent the technology to do it systematically. Additionally, there are 15 images taken for each finished shot and angle that you see on Street View today, and Google’s software takes all of these images and mashes them together, adjusts the exposure for sun, shadows, color differences and brightness. That’s the processing that goes into making “perfect” panoramic images. All the while, Google is detecting and extracting information from objects like street signs to feed back into the main Google Maps product. That’s quite a load. As each of the cameras on top of the vehicle would snap pictures, the location information could be associated with it, along with that spacial information from the layers, thus allowing the Street View team to stitch together all of the angles necessary to create this beautiful panoramic imagery. A photo from the front, sides, behind and then eventually from the fisheye looking upwards at buildings would turn into the 3D views that we enjoy today: One cool thing that I learned was that since the cameras looking in front of and behind the vehicle were partially obstructed, Google invented a technology to smooth those images out using shots from other angles, and that’s why the 3D images seem as if a photo-taking vehicle never existed: Google Street View launched officially in 2007 and was only available for San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver. The cameras at that time were 5 megapixels, which is barely what we have on our phones today. Now they’re 75 megapixels; try to wrap your brain around that one. It was an immediate success, even though the Street View team, and Google, didn’t know how well it would be received. Of course, Google was ready to burn a few machines to the ground by serving up this imagery, and Vincent recalled what that day felt like: We saw traffic go through the roof and about as high as we could serve, well we hit that limit immediately. What’s great about being at Google is you get to observe traffic and interest. The launch showed the interest, and a bunch of websites started popping up and sites popped up showing funny images captured by us. Those funny, and sometimes disturbing, images have since caused a stir, with Google . The original vans weren’t scalable, so fitting this technology, which now consists of “ladybug” cameras with those same 8 lenses and a fisheye, had to be put into cars that could be driven everywhere in the world. You’ve probably even seen one by now. “It took some time to get there,” Vincent says of Street View, as all of its contraptions have gone through multiple iterations, leading up to Google eventually building its own cameras and custom rigs. Once the core technology was solid, Street View was being asked for in smaller cities and towns in other countries, so the team scaled down the rigs to fit onto other vehicles like bikes. The Street View Trike can maneuver its way in and out of alleyways, around big landmarks and down streets that aren’t wide enough for a car or van. Then, a member of the team decided that he wanted to do the Street View treatment on the mountains during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Why not, right? The Street View technology was then adapted to be driven around by a snow mobile. It was too cold out for the camera, so Vincent said that the engineer had to take off his jacket to keep it warm. As more data was collected and more imagery was displayed online, the ideas came faster and faster. Why would you stop with outside imagery? Why not get panoramic imagery indoors, especially in famous museums? The Street View Trolley was born. On indoor Street View, Vincent said: We made a new mini computer and shrunk everything and put it onto a pushcart to go into large indoor spaces. A tripod would be too time consuming. The challenge is that there is no GPS indoors, so we worked on complex algorithms that extracts locations of the Trolley without GPS, with lasers and positional data. This Trolley has now helped launched 50 museums. You’re starting to get the picture. If it doesn’t exist, that doesn’t stop forward-thinking Googlers. Once something works just a little bit and it seems cool and useful for consumers, the money and resources are allocated and things are built on the fly by any means necessary. The current Street View cameras currently consist of 15 cameras (no more fisheye needed), because Vincent felt like Street View wasn’t getting photos. Google continues to push the limits of quality and accuracy, which is one of the reasons why . You see, Google has been doing all of this since 2005. Not only that, it has been doing it at a huge scale since 2007. All of those lessons learned, all of that data and all of those man-hours mean that Google not only had a head-start, but also a perennial edge moving forward. Basically, catch them if you can. At the end of my day with the Street View crew, I asked Vincent why he started all of this. His answer, straight-faced, serious and yet wide-eyed and empathetic…”We wanted to connect people.” Yes, a lot of Google’s technology runs in the background of our desktops and phones without any of us knowing how it works. That’s the magic, though; you don’t really want to know how the sausage is made; you just want to know that it tastes really good. When something tastes good, you’ll come back and eat more and even tell your friends about it. Vincent likes that Google products are taken for granted, because it allows them to innovate more – and faster. There are a lot of things that Street View can accomplish in the future. With its Trekker backpack, wooded areas can be charted out to , as well as allow you to without ever actually getting on a plane or bus. Even though the early days of Street View weren’t pretty, be it the devices that were cobbled together or the artifact-full images that were posted, people got the concept, embraced the concept and asked for more. As long as Google keeps trekking along to gather as much data as it can and figure out how to display it later, we’ll continuously be introduced to more products that just work. While you might not be able to physically teleport just yet, your mind can wander wherever you like, making the world feel like a smaller place. That connects us to people in a way that no other technology has ever accomplished. The best part about all of Street View’s historical body of work is that a lot of these approaches have been open-sourced, as if to say “come and get us.” Can you catch up to Google? When it comes to Maps, you better have a pretty sophisticated and fast vehicle, because they’re literally everywhere; just look for the iconic camera. Also, when you use your smartphone to scope out an area of interest, remember everything that went into displaying that smooth imagery so quickly. Who knows, you might be able to participate in the project one day. With Google Glass, you be able to take shots of the world around you and have them included in Street View imagery. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? About as crazy as strapping a digital camera onto a founder’s car.
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Market Research Provider AYTM Rolls Out Its Biggest Update Yet With Bigger Panels, Video Questionnaires & More
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
, a market research firm which got its start in the demo pit at TechCrunch50 (in the pre-Disrupt days), is rolling out its biggest update ever to its service. According to CEO Lev Mazin, the company has made several improvements across all fronts, which include an expanded consumer reach, the addition of market research experts available, better pricing, a redesigned website, and more. The last time (as it’s known for short) provided details to its audience reach, the company was saying that . Today, the company reaches 20 million users – a metric it grew by expanding its own proprietary panels, but also through closing less than a half-dozen strategic partnerships with panel providers through API integrations. Due to NDA agreements, however, Mazin can’t provide those names. He explains, though, that this increased reach is important because the larger AYTM grows, the more use cases it can offer to potential customers. They can now drill down further into customer demographics in order to carve up more precise segments of a user population – for example, not just smartphone owners, but Android owners who are male, who are in a specific age range, and who are also gamers. The company has also now brought in its own market research experts to aid those who either don’t know how to or don’t have time to use the service’s . Instead, starting at $995 and up, AYTM offers with a seven-day turnaround time. Mazin says that 80 percent of its research assistance is handled by its own in-house staff, while another 20 percent is outsourced to external experts, given the subject of the customer’s questionnaire. Depending on how AYTM’s customer base adopts this feature, he says the firm can quickly scale up either side of the expertise offered – internal or external – as the case may be. There are a handful of other features that have been introduced as well with this new release, including support for video questionnaires and video responses, which is a fairly unique way to add a little jazz to what might otherwise be sometimes boring data presentations. The company also adjusted pricing – before you could only get three completed questions per questionnaire for 95 cents each; now you can get 10. And you don’t have to blow through those asking the demographic info (gender, age, etc.) – you also get up to 10 of those on top of the actual questions you want to ask. Delivery times are also now no longer estimated, but guaranteed, and can be viewed in advance . To date, AYTM has worked with thousands of companies and has run 150 million questions through its service. The 15-person company hit profitability last year, Mazin adds. All the new features and services are live now on the redesigned version of the .
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Intel Capital President: Disrupt Alum Expect Labs “Fits In Nicely” With Voice Plans For Ultrabook
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Intel Capital, the venture arm of Intel, boasts over 120 portfolio companies to have listed publicly on the NASDAQ alone. In celebration of that, President Arvind Sodhani rang yesterday’s closing bell, and we caught up with him to chat about the future of the Ultrabook platform, wearable computing, and advancements in voice and gesture technology. Intel Capital has actually in two of our most recent Disrupt alumni, Ark and , which focuses on predictive voice transcription to help you out as a digital assistant while you’re on the phone. Sodhani hinted quite strongly that Expect Labs could potentially be the company to bring voice support to the Ultrabook platform, . “Our platforms, ultrabooks, tablets and laptops, will have a digital personal assistant on them in the next several years,” said Sodhani. “They’ll anticipate what you want to do next, what you need, and they’ll be context-aware.” “Expect Labs fits into that very nicely,” said Sodhani. He also mentioned that Intel is looking at other companies for both speech and gesture recognition, but Expect Labs is clearly in the running. Along with the rapid expansion of the cloud, Sodhani believes that 2012’s onslaught of voice-powered technology will only continue to grow alongside gesture-recognition technology. As will wearables. Though Intel Capital hasn’t yet invested in wearable computing hardware, Sodhani admits that they’re certainly open to it should the right opportunity arise.
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Google Research Releases Wikilinks Corpus With 40M Mentions And 3M Entities
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Google Research just its , a massive new data set for developers and researchers that could make it easier to add smart disambiguation and cross-referencing to their applications. The data could, for example, make it easier to find out if two web sites are talking about the same person or concept, Google says. In total, the corpus features 40 million disambiguated mentions found within 10 million web pages. This, Google notes, makes it “over 100 times bigger than the next largest corpus,” which features fewer than 100,000 mentions. For Google, of course, disambiguation is something that is a core feature of the Knowledge Graph project, which allows you to tell Google whether you are looking for links related to the planet, car or chemical element when you search for ‘ ,’ for example. It takes a large corpus like this one and the ability to understand what each web page is really about to make this happen. To construct this data set, Google looked at links to Wikipedia pages “where the anchor text of the link closely matches the title of the target Wikipedia page.” There is a high probability that this anchor text is a mention of the corresponding entity that’s the focus of the entity that’s discussed in the Wikipedia entry. The 10 million annotated web pages, sadly, aren’t part of the corpus because of copyright issues, but the features all the necessary tools to create this data from scratch. The UMass team also published a paper that explains the process that was used to create this data set in more detail ( ). Last year, Google released a similar data set when it a database with over 7.5 million concepts and 175 million unique text strings, which is similar to what Google itself uses to suggest targeted keywords for advertisers. That set, too, was built by looking at Wikipedia articles to identify concepts and the anchor links that other websites used to link to them.
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MakerBot Announces Its First Easy-To-Use Desktop 3D Scanner, The Digitizer
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Bre Pettis, founder of 3D-printer manufacturer MakerBot, announced their first desktop 3D scanner, the Digitizer, at a SXSWi keynote today. Pettis was coy about availability or final design but instead was focused on making a splash at the event. “We’re excited to put ourselves out there with the announcement. I have a tradition of announcing things at SXSW. I don’t think there are many actual physical products announced at SXSW, so it’s special,” he said. Officially called the MakerBot Digitizer Desktop 3D Scanner, the device will work in concert with the MakerBot printer to complete the constellation of services MakerBot offers. For example, you will be able to scan an object and print it immediately on a MakerBot printer. According to today’s release, the design shown at SXSW is a prototype and there is no launch date slated although Pettis said it would be available “this Fall.” Pettis, for one, is excited. “It’s a natural progression for us to create a product that makes 3D printing even easier. With the MakerBot Digitizer, now everyone will be able to scan a physical item, digitize it, and print it in 3D – with little or no design experience.” “It’s going to be another pathway for people to make 3D models,” he said. UPDATE – I’ll be posting live photos from the event. The scanner uses two lasers to map small, breadbox-sized objects and a webcam to create a digital model of any object.
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Facebook Adds More Verbs To Open Graph Actions, You Can Now ‘Do’ More Stuff Through Partner Apps
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Facebook announced a number of , joining the “watch video” and other existing ones available to developers. These include actions in the Fitness, Books and Movies & TV categories that help users better express their interaction with media and their world. Of course, they also help developers mining the Open Graph for data get a more accurate picture of user intent and habits. The new common actions include “run, walk and bike” for the fitness category, “read, rate, quote, and want to read” for books, and “rate, plus want to watch” for movies and TV. In the fitness category, the new actions help differentiate between specific types of actions for lifestyle apps. Facebook uses Nike to demonstrate the “run” action in, well, action, showing a user’s distance traveled, as well as time of run and NikeFuel accumulated in a sample Facebook post. Users familiar with Path’s Nike+ integration may find this type of post familiar. As for the new common actions for books, movies and TV, they help identify not only what a user has actively been consuming, but also what they intend to buy, and to what degree they enjoyed something with a quantifiable score. The value of gathering intent data, as well as qualitative information on exactly what kind of media people like for marketers and others who use Open Graph information to customize their consumer interaction should be apparent. It’s also a play for higher engagement, as Facebook outlines in its blog post: For example, the new fitness stories dynamically update when someone finishes their workout, and early data shows that average likes per story have increased by more than 2x. As we move more apps to use a common set of actions, we’ll be able to further optimize the performance of these stories and the user experience. Previously, developers could’ve created these actions on their own via Facebook’s Custom Actions tool, but now they’re normalized and offered up to all developers on Facebook’s platform, which makes the information gathered via them more generally useful. Facebook announced that a number of top-tier brands are already employing the new common actions, including Jawbone UP, Runkeeper, Endomondo, Kobo, GoodReads, Rotten Tomatoes and Hulu, and also let developers know that it will be forcing a transition from similar custom actions to the new common versions by July 10, 2013. For end users, the surface effect of this change might not be instantly apparent, but it will definitely have an impact for Facebook’s developer and advertiser partners.
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Last Call For The Disrupt NY Extra Early Bird Discount
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
Procrastination is a hell of a drug. Don’t let it ruin your life. And, for the purpose of this post, don’t let procrastination cost you money. Today, Friday, March 8th, is the last day for the . Today is the last day that you can score tickets at a hefty discount. Today! With the extra early bird discount, the tickets are $1,795, which nets buyers an all-inclusive general admission conference pass. That pass gets you into all three days of the conference and each night’s after party. The price jumps to $1,999 tomorrow and $2,999 on April 11th. Of course you could score the same ticket for free. If you’re the adventurous type, participate in the Disrupt NY 24 hour Hackathon (shown below). Not only are you competing for some serious cash prizes, but all participants earn a ticket to Disrupt. Plus, you get to present your creation on the Disrupt stage in front of a panel of judges. It for GroupMe. With a brand new venue and the largest number of Disrupt Battlefield applications of any Disrupt, this year’s New York City show is shaping up nicely. Save some money and get tickets early.
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Dynamic Signal Launches VoiceStorm To Manage Employees’ Social Media Promotion Efforts
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
, the social marketing company led by Adify co-founder Russ Fradin, is launching a new product today called , which encourages, manages and measures employees’ efforts to promote a company on social networks. Fradin told me that VoiceStorm is functionally similar to Dynamic Signal’s existing platform, which helps companies run word-of-mouth marketing campaigns — it’s just built for employees rather than customers or fans. Basically, Fradin aims to replace all those team emails and in-person encounters where someone is nudging everyone else into tweeting something, posting it on Facebook, and so on. “One of our first clients said to us, ‘Hey, can we get our employees to join this community as well?'” Fradin said. “Our employees are really our best advocates. We want to be able to send content to them and make it super easy for them to be able to get that content.” VoiceStorm can automatically pull content from a company’s RSS feeds, and users can also upload content that they find elsewhere for approval. So when an employee logs into their dashboard, they might see the latest job listings, or a press release about a big product launch, or a TechCrunch article about their latest venture funding. Then they can select the content that seems worth sharing, write their own message, and push it to all of their connected social accounts. Management, meanwhile, can see who’s doing the most sharing and getting the most clicks. The site even includes a leaderboard of the most successful employee advocates. Fradin argued that this allows companies to quantify the value of that promotion, and to reward employees accordingly. For example, if someone’s sharing eventually leads to the hiring of an important team member, that could save the company tens of thousands of dollars in recruiting fees. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3LowoaDonk] There are other companies, , trying to help employees promote the company on social media. Fradin said that with VoiceStorm, the key ingredient is mobile messaging. Managers can not only add content to the system, but they can also send it as a push notification to specific groups within the company. So if TechCrunch had a big scoop that we wanted to promote immediately, VoiceStorm could actually send alerts asking all the writers to tweet it right away. On the flip side, if employees just want to visit the VoiceStorm site once a day, they can also queue up a number of social media updates, then the service will automatically space them out so that they don’t all post at once. Fradin said there’s not much technical intelligence in the scheduling. It’s less about optimizing the timing and more about making it convenient for the employee. Oh, and it isn’t just for employees. You can invite other company supporters, as well — for startups, that would probably include their investors and advisors. VoiceStorm is free for up to 40 users, with final pricing to be announced later.
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VMware CMO Rick Jackson On His Way Out, Transitioned To SVP Role
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
More changing of the guard among the leadership ranks at . CMO Rick Jackson is on his way out of the enterprise software company. He’s stepping down as CMO moving into SVP role, although he’ll remain CMO until a replacement is found. According to an internal note provided to TechCrunch, “Rick Jackson will be transitioning to a new role as SVP of Global Enablement. Rick remains CMO until a replacement is hired and transition completed.” We’d been hearing other details this week that we weren’t able to confirm, although this latest development shows that they were not entirely off the mark, either. Jackson had told some staff earlier in the week that he would be leaving his role because the new CEO — to replace Paul Maritz — wanted his CMO to be “10 feet down the hall”. Jackson recently moved from the Bay Area — VMware is headquartered in Palo Alto — to Austin, Texas. These two aren’t the only c-level executives to leave VMware. The virtualization giant also lost its CTO in January 2013. Further back, in April 2012, VMware’s . Jackson, who has been in IT for 25 years, has been with VMware since 2009 and has also had roles at BEA Systems and Borland Software. We’ve reached out to the company and will update this post with more details as we learn them. Photo:
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Facebook Barely Poked Snapchat, Active Usage Data Shows
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
After initially missing the boat on mobile-photo sharing and then having to turn around and plunk down nearly $1 billion for Instagram, Facebook wasn’t going to let a hot app (and potential existential threat) emerge too quickly again. Although Facebook is more than 1 billion users strong, the company still has a paranoia and mortal fear that the next social network could emerge out of a distant dorm room. With promising engagement and growth metrics, Snapchat had quietly piqued some interest about a year ago before entering a hyper-growth phase with about 5 billion photos sent in a year plus $13.5 million in funding led by Benchmark Capital. By late last year, Snapchat compared to 300 million photos posted on Facebook per day. Facebook responded much faster this time with an app called Poke, . It had extras like the ability to send simple text messages, in addition to video and photos. It also allowed group conversations. But for many reasons, a Facebook clone does not a startup-killer make. Data on the active usage for both apps showed that in market share from December to January after Facebook Poke’s launch. It then leveled off into February, while Facebook Poke down to less than 0.25 percent among iPhone users in the U.S. A has a panel of a few million users that it samples active usage data for apps from. Because the company’s products track data compression, they can actually see the “market share” of different apps — or what percentage of iPhone owners in the U.S. used them in the last month. So as you can see below, their data suggests that 12 percent of U.S. iPhone users opened up Snapchat in February. Facebook has a mixed track record of competing against what it considers emerging threats. It has had successes like Messenger, which the company launched after buying Beluga. But on the other hand, it bought Instagram after it looked like a was going to come out too late in the market to be competitive. It after about two years after exploring the super-competitive group-buying space, and Foursquare didn’t decline after Facebook launched its own “check-in” product. After very tentative way back in 2008, Facebook started aggressively pushing pages, fans, followers and more public status updates. All of these products — Quora, Instagram, Groupon, Foursquare, Twitter — are still very much alive as their own brands because they accumulated strong enough network effects and their own very specific behaviors. Although Facebook has the clout, trying to compete as a Swiss army knife against a much more precise array of tools doesn’t always work out. So as Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel said earlier,
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Hacker Steals $12,000 Worth Of Bitcoins In Brazen DNS-Based Attack
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 |
A brokerage, was hit by hackers who used a bit of social engineering to take control of the company’s DNS servers and ultimately funnel out $12,000 worth of Bitcoins. Hackers first took over the Bitinstant’s DNS domains and then the company’s email servers. They used these to log into another Bitcoin exchange, VirWox, and pull out $12,480 worth of Bitcoin out of a Bitinstant account. The company , noting that no “personal or transactional information has been leaked.” The unique nature of the hack and the number of blinds used to hide the attacker’s identity was fairly clever but Bitinstant notes that the exploit was focused mostly on faking passwords and a failure to use multi-factor authentication. As Bitcoin use grows online, it will only be a matter of time before we add a few more zeros to that $12,000 sum.
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With 200K Stories Shared, Storylane Launches An iPhone Reading App
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
Last year, launched than what you’d find on other social media properties. And thanks to , you can now browse those stories when you’re on the go. The concept behind Storylane is pretty straightforward — founder Jonathan Gheller wants it to be the home for personal thoughts and stories that go deeper than a quick Facebook or Twitter update. The site prompts users to answer questions like “What have you learned from your failed relationships?” and “What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?” You can follow individual users to see their stories, and there are also pages to browse trending content across the whole site and within individual topics. You can’t post full comments, but you can hit buttons to say that you liked a story, or that it inspired you, and so on. The Storylane Reader iPhone app is a more stripped-down version of the experience, offering a stack of content for you to browse, so you can enjoy a story or two while you’re waiting for the bus or whatever. The experience is supposed to be personalized based not just on the people you follow but also the feedback that you’ve given. When I open the app I see a pretty broad (and not obviously personalized) range of content, with titles like “You must fall in love three times” and “Surprises, I love Surprises!” but then I haven’t been a very active Storylane user. (Sorry, I guess I like my social media glib and shallow.) It’s also a good-looking app — I think I prefer the iPhone design to Storylane’s look on the web. If you’re posting stories, you can also get notified about feedback. However, you can’t post stories directly from your phone — which I suppose makes sense, given the company’s emphasis on thoughtfulness. In addition to launching the iPhone app ( ), founder Jonathan Gheller announced that users have now shared 200,000 stories on Storylane.
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Successful Woman Gets Attacked For Standing Out Too Much, Again
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
There’s no aphorism that describes successful women more than “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Yet, thankfully we keep doing. As we are women who’ve worked under plenty of women, and are now on , we’ve reaped the benefits of this “doing” firsthand. It was a lot harder to be in the workforce 30, 20 or even 10 years ago — sheerly as a numbers game. As women in our early 30s, we’re just beginning the adventure of being successful females with families, and we appreciate that there are more of us around these days. But to us the discussion around this is still somewhat stilted, as there is a generation gap still not accounted in the narrative. We’re not the first women to find something very wrong with of Facebook COO ’s book “Lean In” and her efforts to help empower professional women. Sandberg postulates that many women tend to not “lean in” to their careers. Instead of leaning back, she encourages women to remain focused on their professional work and not to neglect that work in favor of responsibilities with family and home. Because she herself is in a very privileged position, it’s easy for critics to with her approach, as they feel like a woman who can easily afford two nannies, a cook, a driver and more doesn’t represent the norm. This despite the cultural idea that . Yes, Sandberg has luxuries that many of us don’t have — but she didn’t achieve those things without sacrifice, diligence and work. Instead of basking in the fruits of her labors, she’s taking her platform and success and attempting to make younger women’s professional lives better by sharing lessons she has learned. Sandberg and other tall poppies like Marissa Mayer entered the workforce when there were very few women in leadership positions — especially in heavily male-dominated fields like technology. This led to those women being seen as exceptions to the proper order. Exceptional women became tokens, as if there were only room for one in a power position, one per company, one per board. The backlash that’s happening to Sandberg and so on) is what happens when one of us stands out, perhaps because women have . But back in the day the fight was over men or other scarce resources, not the corner office. This competitive tendency might explain why we ourselves have found it extremely difficult to find older female mentors. There have been few women in our professional lives who wanted to invest in our careers. They were too busy tearing us down or scared that we would somehow rise above them to take the time. But doesn’t have to be the case. Women leaders : There’s now room at the table for more than one of us. It’s not a zero-sum game. Right now Sheryl Sandberg is an outlier. But, as communication head Ashley Mayer , we need more outliers like this, especially if we want professional success to be a given for our daughters. These are the women we want to be. These are the women who defy convention to try to improve the lives of women in future generations. These are the role models we see, who prove there’s space for many of us at the top. It’s problematic when the criticism of these outliers comes from people we suspect are subjectively defensive of their own positions instead of objectively judging the ideas on their own merits. Instead of applauding efforts to change the culture, they nitpick them, find flaws that don’t even exist and literally . “There’s an uncomfortable truth in what Sandberg’s saying, and a lot of the blowback is because of our collective squirminess with the subject,” Reuters’ Megan McCarthy wrote. “So, critics focus on the things they can grasp, like her privilege, and then make the argument about that.” “But her privilege is beside the point, ” she emphasized, “The idea that women can be seen as individuals in our professional careers is audacious and bold. There’s power in the thought that we can shape our situations around our expectations instead of always searching for a spot where we fit in. Audacious, bold, and powerful ideas aren’t usually well received.” For this to be a non-issue for our daughters, we have to avoid the of feminism, “If I sell out all the other women, then I get away with it, and I get the “reward” of being accepted.” We need to realize that we can mentor others, men and women, and that their success won’t take away from ours. In fact, it may increase it. As for gaining power in your own job, your career, it’s sort of like the “put on your own oxygen mask before you try to help others breathe” instruction on airplanes, our editorial director and Fara Warner noted. “Respect yourself, respect your work and act like an adult. Lean in all you want but lean in the way you want the world to see you…not what you think the world wants to see.” For women of all generations, and the men who love and work with us, our best weapon is the awareness of repeating these destructive patterns — and honestly analyzing and counter-programming this behavior when it happens. Otherwise we’ll backslide. Lean in to this — because it’s
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Ahead Of SXSW, Ride-Sharing Startup SideCar Prepares For Fight With Austin Authorities
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
By all accounts, next week’s SXSW Interactive conference should be huge for ride-sharing startup . The company will be partnering with a number of the biggest names in tech to provide free rides to and from parties being thrown during the event as a way to introduce the service to people who don’t live in San Francisco or have never tried out ride sharing. But recent actions by authorities in Austin could put a damper on the company’s coming out party. SideCar is hoping to take advantage of the huge number of tech-savvy people descending on Austin next week as a way to educate people from around the country on the advantages of ride sharing. To do so, it’ll have a local community of drivers providing rides around town from 8:00 am to 3:00 am. As part of the festivities from March 8 through March 17, SideCar will be giving free rides to and from some of the biggest parties during SXSW. That includes events from Twilio, Tumblr, Twitter, Livefyre, Mass Relevance, LinkedIn, The Raptor House, Text100, ShareThis, The Villa Austin, Tropo, Echo, The Backplane, Spotify, and Slacker Radio. (Yes, it’s quite a list.) In addition to the parties, SideCar will be granting VIP access to some attendees during SXSW, giving them the ability to set their location as a free hotspot for three hours at a time. Those VIPs will be able to use the service to get free rides for themselves and anyone else going to or coming from “Spotlight” locations they’ve chosen. Those users will only be able to set one spotlight at a time, but anyone traveling to or from those destinations won’t have to pay to do so. For anyone who’s ever tried to get around Austin during SXSW, the addition of a new fleet of SideCar drivers, in addition to the city’s licensed taxis, should be a welcome change. Due to the number of people who are in town over the course of the conference, taxis are generally in short supply. But not everyone is excited about having a bunch of unlicensed drivers handing out rides around town. Earlier this week, SideCar from the city. And on Thursday, the Austin City Council voted to enable its police officers to who are found to be giving out rides for pay in violation of City Code 13-2-3 — i.e. the rule around operating licensed taxi services. That, of course, could put a damper on SideCar’s plans, as it relies on unlicensed drivers to make the service work. Then again, Austin’s reaction to SideCar’s ambitious SXSW promo probably should have been expected. After all, the company entered the Austin market in part through its . And HeyRide was no stranger to controversy in the city — it too had a by Austin authorities after it opened up for business last year. Austin isn’t the first place where SideCar has faced scrutiny from local regulators or authorities. It got hit with a cease-and-desist order for operating in its home market of San Francisco last August, and later received a fine for violating the California Public Utility Commission’s charter party regulations. And on Monday, as part of a sting operation. Despite the threat against its drivers, SideCar CEO Sunil Paul said the company won’t be altering plans for its big SXSW marketing push. It’s already discussed possible police action with drivers it has signed up in Austin, and has promised to support them by paying any fines incurred during the conference and providing legal help if necessary. “We talked to our community of drivers there, and they are excited,” he said. “They are confident that what they are doing is right and they are excited to help support this rollout during South By Southwest.” At the same time, SideCar is attempting to skirt around taxi regulations by paying its SXSW drivers as “brand ambassadors,” rather than compensating them based on the usual distance or time travelled while driving passengers around Austin. Since they’re being paid flat rates rather than per-ride, Paul doesn’t believe that those drivers should be in violation of the local taxi ordinance. Even so, he blamed Austin’s recent moves on pressure from the existing taxi lobby in the city. “The complaints are coming from people with business models that they’re trying to protect,” Paul told me. But, he said, “the role of government is not to protect these business models.” With all that in mind, a lot rides on next week’s SXSW promotion, as SideCar hopes to introduce its service to a whole new group of passengers from around the country. In addition to San Francisco and Austin, SideCar is in the midst of aggressive expansion to a number of new markets, including Seattle, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, and Washington, D.C. For riders in a number of those markets, SXSW might be their first experience with a SideCar, and the company is hoping that experience is a good one.
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Yahoo Does Some Spring Cleaning: Shuts Down Avatars, App Search, Sports IQ, Clues, Updates API And Its BlackBerry App
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
Yahoo, which is now officially a , just a Google-like spring cleaning campaign. Just like Larry Page shutting down a number of under-performing Google properties when he took over from Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s new CEO Marissa Mayer is also in the process of shutting down a number of smaller Yahoo properties. According to today’s announcement, Yahoo will shut down its , , , and its Message Boards website on April 1st. In addition, it’s ending support for the on April 16th. While it is shutting down the Message Boards website, individual message boards on sites like Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Fantasy Sports will remain active. BlackBerry users will be able to continue to use the app, but it won’t be made available for download after April 1st. If you have no idea what all of these products are, you are probably not alone. , for example, as the name implies, allowed you to build you own avatar and then export it to Facebook and Twitter. This is Yahoo’s second round of closures, following the demise of a number of Yahoo Messenger features . Yahoo Clues, which never made it out of beta, let you analyze search trends and features riveting content like a that told you who today’s most popular celebrities are. Virtually all of the other products Yahoo is shutting down were similarly underused, so chances are there won’t be a major outcry over today’s closures. As Yahoo EVP of Platforms Jay Rossiter notes in the announcement, the company is making these changes ” in an effort to sharpen our focus. By continuing to home in on our core products and experiences, we’ll be able to make our existing products the very best they can be.” Here is Yahoo’s full list of products that will get the ax next month:
Effective April 1, 2013, we will no longer support Yahoo! Avatars across our properties. If you like your existing avatar and want to keep it, please go to the , pick a picture size and format, and click the appropriate download button. Similarly, if you want to edit your avatar, you can download the image and then use a photo editing service of your preference. If you want to continue using your avatar with our products, go to and upload the avatar you downloaded. For more details, please click . Additionally effective April 1, we will no longer support the Avatars YQL table.
Effective April 1, 2013, the Yahoo! app for BlackBerry will no longer be available for download. For those of you who have already downloaded the app, you can continue to use it but it will no longer be actively supported.
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! Clues (beta) will shut down.
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! App Search will shut down.
Effective April 1, 2013, Yahoo! Sports IQ will shut down. Your final lifetime Sports IQ score and rank will be automatically transferred to and preserved within your Yahoo! Fantasy Profile.
Effective April 1, 2013, the Yahoo! Message Boards website will shut down. Our message boards on individual properties (like Yahoo! Finance and ) will remain active. We also encourage you to ask and answer questions on , and discuss issues in the comments section on
As of April 16, 2013, we will no longer support the Yahoo! Updates API.
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Google Explains How Search Works, Complete With Live Spam Slideshow
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
Google today updated its , its homepage for all things search, with a handful of educational and interactive features that explain in layman’s terms . Did you know the web had over 30 trillion pages, by the way? Or that Google supports over 100 billion searches every month? Or that Google’s index is over 100 million gigabytes? If you find factoids like that interesting, you’ll probably enjoying a scroll through the , which also contains a few clickable links to charts and graphs showing things like the rise of spam, and milestones in Google’s spam-fighting techniques, among other things. The update is something of a follow-up to last year’s detailed look into how Gmail works called . For the most part, it’s really high-level stuff here, designed to make the details of technology approachable and understandable to a more mainstream audience looking to gain a better understanding of what happens after they type into the search box. The new sections of the site include not only the graphical explanation of Google Search’s inner workings, but also details about Google’s major algorithms and features, a list of Google policies, plus a 43-page document that explains how Google evaluates its results. (OK, that part might be a little more in-depth, I’ll admit.) But the best part? . Here, you can see screenshots of spam Google has removed from its search results only minutes ago. Dozens upon dozens of them, in fact. It’s almost like getting a real-time view into Google itself, which is actually pretty fascinating. Now if only we could see what people were googling for in real-time, we would really….wait… Nah, that might be terrifying.
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The Mophie Juice Pack Air For iPhone 5 Drops iTunes Syncing, But Still Saves You When You Need More Power
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
Mophie caused a bit of a double-take by introducing not one but two rechargeable external battery cases for the iPhone 5 within a few days of each other. The offers a sleeker body, but the , announced later, offers more stamina. I’ve been testing the latter for nearly a week now, and it lives up to Mophie’s good reputation, with a single trade-off that may or may not influence your buying decision. The Juice Pack Air for iPhone 5 will look and feel familiar to owners of previous Mophie Juice Packs. It has a rubberized texture that makes the matte back extra grippy, a smooth black plastic band extending around the entire sides of the device, and a button on the back that lights up indicators showing how much battery is remaining. Some of the elements have shifted to make up for the new iPhone’s design: the battery indicator and activation switch are on the back, not the bottom, and the micro USB port is on the bottom surface where the Lightning port would be on an iPhone 5 without a case. [gallery ids="768936,768937,768938,768939,768940,768941"] One of the few unfortunate changes caused by the iPhone 5’s redesign is the shift of the headphone port to the bottom, which is where the business end is on Mophie’s battery pack cases. That means that on this Juice Pack Air, there’s around a half-inch hole any headphones have to go through to get to the iPhone’s 3.5mm stereo port. Mophie includes an extension cable to make sure your headphones will work no matter their design, but it’s an extra bit to keep track of and potentially lose, and that’s never good. Overall, the Juice Pack Air feels like a quality accessory, however, and all the pass-through switches and buttons work well. There’s even mesh on the front-facing speaker ports, which do enhance sound to my ear, and an appropriately wide opening on the back to accommodate the camera lens and flash without impeding mobile photography. The Juice Pack Air claims to be able to provide around 8 more hours of 3G talk time and Internet use, 8 more hours of LTE browsing, 10 hours of Wi-Fi web, and up to 40 more hours of audio playback or 10 more hours of video. Mophie says that’s up to 100 percent the normal battery life of your iPhone 5. I happened to be able to test charging a dead iPhone 5 from a drained state with a fully-charged Juice Pack Air, however, and it only got the iPhone up to around 80 percent charge. Your mileage may vary, however, and 80 percent from a cold, dead battery that has lain empty for a while is still pretty impressive, and in everyday use I found it was as close to doubling my iPhone 5’s life as made no difference. The Juice Pack Air gets warm while charging, but that’s nothing new and I mention it more to make new users aware than to cite it as an issue. New users should also note that the Air features pass-through charging via the supplied micro USB cable: You can plug it in overnight and the iPhone inside will charge first, with the case getting its fill afterwards. One thing missing in this version is pass-through syncing, however. That could be a problem for some, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve done a wired sync of an iOS device, so it doesn’t bother me. The Juice Pack Air is a solid performer, which isn’t surprising, given its pedigree. It has the same general downsides as its predecessor (mostly that it adds bulk to the iPhone), and loses a few tricks. But most won’t miss the lack of pass-through syncing now that iPhones are much more autonomous devices than they were in the past. And the Air for iPhone 5 is slightly thinner than the version for iPhone 4/4S. If you need the extra power that a battery case provides, the Juice Pack Air remains the case to beat.
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Backed By Reed Hastings & More, Gobstopper Launches Its E-Reading Platform For Schools To Help Rethink Humanities Education
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
As the founder of two public charter prep schools, an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at NewSchools Ventures and a former English teacher, Jason Singer is familiar with the starring role that technology is increasingly playing in the classroom. However, while the push to improve STEM education is alive and well, there’s a tendency to forget about the other side. When it comes to basic reading and writing skills, American high school and college students aren’t exactly making the grade. A , for example, showed that only “one quarter of eighth and 12th graders are proficient in writing,” while (in a separate study) that SAT reading and writing scores plummeted to record lows in the U.S. last year. That’s why Singer has teamed up with Mauricio Alvarez — the former co-founder and CTO of — and is today launching , an e-reading platform designed to help English teachers reinvent the way that they teach texts and assess reading comprehension. Singer tells us that part of the reason for the disappointing performance of students on standardized reading and writing tests lies in assessment. It is still extremely difficult for teachers to assess students’ level of understanding and engagement when they’re involved in reading assignments, because, unlike Math, students can’t show their work and teachers can’t be there to force them to do their homework. Sure, they can force them to write an essay on each chapter of an assigned book, but , English teachers already spend an inordinate amount of time reading and grading papers. Teachers spend hours providing personalized feedback on papers, correcting grammar and so on, but students just flip to the end of the paper to see what grade they received. Over-focusing on testing, rote language learning and instruction via red ink to teach students better reading, writing and grammar doesn’t help students learn and teachers teach, in spite of how much schools rely on this process. So, with Gobstopper, Singer and Alvarez Gobstopper, have developed an online tool for teachers that aims to re-think reading assignments by creating an e-reading platform that allows teachers to insert the questions and quizzes they would normally put in worksheets directly into the text of the assigned reading material itself — online. Gobstopper enables teachers to attach a quiz to the end of a chapter, insert instructional or expositive video to explain trick concepts (within the text), while automatically grading students’ performance on these online assessments. The idea is to create a scenario in which educators no longer have to rely on a paper-based model; in other words, no more having to photocopy, assign, collect and manually grade worksheets — a time-sink for teachers, especially as it provides a minimum level of insight into whether or not students are understanding key concepts. To get Gobstopper off the ground, the co-founders have raised $425K in convertible debt from NewSchools Venture Fund, Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings and EdMentor’s Ron Beller and Jennifer Moses, among others. With this capital in tow, Gobstopper has been able to build its beta product (which officially launches today), organized pilots in six (non-Kipp) schools and a Common Core-aligned high school ELA curriculum, both of which will go live this fall. Teachers today are fundamentally over-worked and underpaid — while the future of education remains unclear — that much, at least, is certain. They have to order books, do inventories, manage distribution, deal with loss and damage of reading materials, create, photocopy and distribute worksheets, create and grade quizzes, differentiate and personalize learning for students within a wide range of learning paths (and abilities) without much real data on students’ individual mastery, among others. Gobstopper aims to help simplify teachers’ lives by providing them with a browser- and cloud-based e-reading platform that lets teachers layer texts with questions, quizzes and rich media, while attempting to close the feedback loop by driving daily instruction with meaningful data, differentiate learning for students and motivate and reward student mastery. It does this by allowing teachers to teach free public domain texts (for free), receive immediate feedback on right and wrong answers through its analytics dashboard and allow students to access teacher explanations from the text and earn motivational badges for demonstrating mastery (a la Khan Academy). The work students complete on the platform works on any device (thanks to the cloud) and is automatically submitted to teachers for easy storage, reference and grading. The best part, Singer explains, is that (at launch) users will be able to choose public domain books and create their own curriculet layer around those texts for titles that include Huck Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, The Prince, The Raven, Walden and more. This means that, once students have signed up and teachers have assigned due dates to homework assignments, then those assignments automatically appear on a student’s dashboard and each morning teachers are two clicks away from viewing Common Core data they can use to support students’ learning process and drive instruction. Teachers can use one of Gobstopper’s curriculets as a foundation, modifying it as they see fit, or make their own, he says. At launch, the platform will be free to use, but the founder says that, as the startup moves forward, it will look to potentially create an enterprise-grade, premium product for schools and districts for a fee. And perhaps offer a white-label-style tool for publishers to integrate into their texts, but that remains to be seen. For more on Gobstopper,
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Judge Cuts $450M From Apple’s $1B Damages Decision Against Samsung, Orders Second Trial
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
Apple’s landmark has been partially vacated by presiding judge Lucy Koh, . The judge has orders just north of $450 million be struck from the $1 billion total, an amount which relates to 14 Samsung products involved in the case, pending a new trial to determine appropriate damages for those specific devices. Koh said that a new trial has to be held to determine damages on those products, which include the AT&T Galaxy SII, the Galaxy Tab, Nexus 4G and others, based on the fact that the court isn’t able to make adjustments to the amounts owing based on infringement by those products for legal reasons. In the second trial, which will be decided by an entirely new jury, Apple could wind up being awarded more or less in damages based on their evaluation of the per-product cost of infringement for that group of Android smartphones and tablets. Apple is still entitled to an award of $598,908,892 from the part of the damages decision that Koh has determined should stand, though FOSS Patents suggests that no actual money will change hands until the result of this new, second trial is decided. Apple will also be able to exercise its option to pursue additional damages based on post-judgement royalties, and pre-judgement interest, pending the new jury’s decision.
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TechCrunch Giveaway: Nest And Free Ticket To Disrupt NY #TCDisrupt
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Elin Blesener
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
TechCrunch is right around the corner! We have already announced many influential speakers, including Kevin Systrom of Instagram, Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway of SV Angel, Kevin Ryan of Gilt Groupe and will be announcing many more soon. You can view the whole list of speakers and special guests we have announced so far . Disrupt NY is going to be an amazing show. We are giving away one free ticket to the show that will get you into the full three days of the conference, plus all of the after parties where you can dance and drink the night away with us. We also are going to give away a Nest learning thermostat. is better than your regular thermostat because it can actually learn your daily schedule, and program itself to change heating and cooling patterns accordingly. It knows when you’re away and when you’re at home, and using it can lower your home’s energy bill by around 20 percent. You can also connect to the Nest remotely via the Nest Mobile app for Android and iPhone and change the temperature even if you’re on a business trip on the other side of the world. This second-generation version is compatible with a lot more home heating and cooling systems, too, and smaller than the first-gen device. Want a shot at winning both? All you have to do is follow the steps below. 1) 2) – Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag)
– Or leave us a comment below telling us what your favorite thing is about New York City The giveaway starts now and ends next Friday at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner next Friday. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note the ticket is for one person only and does not include airfare or hotel.
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Google Muscles Further Into Paid Discovery Of Apps With New Focus On Click-To-Download Mobile Ads
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
The app stores are overrun, and there’s little way to get noticed until you break into the charts. So Google just announced it’s making it easier to buy an AdWords unit called mobile ads that lead directly to iTunes and Google Play. With a similar design to Facebook’s app ads, Google is reaching out its hand for a cut of the paid discovery market emerging as every company in the world goes mobile. How are the big ad platforms going to stay afloat as users shift from the full-sized web to the small screen? Less room to show ads and reluctance to tap in payment information to make purchases mean traditional advertising models fail on mobile. But there’s one type of conversion that’s much easier on the go and that advertisers are willing to pay for: app installs. As most smartphone users already have their credit card information stored with Apple or Google, ads that instantly open their app stores can quickly show a return on investment. Either people buy a paid app with a simple touch and perhaps an entry of their password, seamlessly make in-app physical or digital purchases later, or view more ads in the app that pay out to the developer. Advertisers love obvious ROI, and that’s what they get from paid app discovery. To chase this market, in October, and they’ve been a hit. of the top 100 grossing iOS apps were using them by January, and the ads have been shown to have low costs and , at least on the social network. So it makes perfect sense for Google to have its own version. It launched a few years ago but is getting highlighted now alongside an easier buying interface for developers. Update: Google has had app install ads for a few years, it’s the buying interface and focus that’s news. Google’s Click-To-Download AdWords ads can be placed on mobile sites, and they kick users directly to their device’s app store when tapped. The installs they drive can give apps the boost they need to show up in lists like Top 10, New and Noteworthy, or What’s Hot where they can rise above the sea of crappy apps and start racking up organic downloads. Users who have the app already can have clicks open them to specific Page thanks the app ad instead of conjuring the app store. Businesses are spending money to build apps, and earning money once they’re used, so if it takes paying Google or Facebook to get them installed, well then “shut up and take my money.”
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Yahoo Is Now Officially Calling Itself A ‘Technology Company’, Ditching The ‘Digital Media’ Tagline
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
today issued its to the Securities And Exchange Commission. These kinds of forms have a lot of that is reused again and again — often, companies just change the relevant revenue numbers and leave everything else the same for years (come to think of it, isn’t that the former Yahoo CEO made for the ?) But with this latest 10-K, its first with , Yahoo switched up its language in an interesting way. Yahoo is now labeling itself first and foremost as a “global technology company,” in the place where it used to call itself a “digital media company.” Here is the first sentence of today’s 10-K (bold type added by TechCrunch for emphasis): “Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (‘Yahoo!,’ the ‘Company,’ ‘we,’ or ‘us’), is focused on making the world’s daily habits inspiring and entertaining.” And here is the first sentence of the 10-K Yahoo filed last year and the two years prior, respectively (again, bold type added for emphasis): “Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (‘Yahoo!,’ the ‘Company,’ ‘we,’ or ‘us’), is a premier .” “Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (‘Yahoo!,’ the ‘Company,’ ‘we,’ or ‘us’), is a premier that delivers personalized digital content and experiences, across devices and around the globe, to vast audiences.” “Yahoo! Inc., together with its consolidated subsidiaries (‘Yahoo!,’ the ‘Company,’ ‘we,’ or ‘us’), attracts hundreds of millions of users every month through its innovative technology and engaging content and services, making it one of the most trafficked Internet destinations and a .” It seems that Mayer, a engineer by training, is working to put an end to that long-running debate as to whether Yahoo is primarily a — no more quibbling, technology is the top priority. Like other corporate moves since Mayer has taken over as Yahoo’s CEO, it’s a small change, but it’s a symbolic and important one.
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Shasta Ventures Doubles Down On Enterprise Software Experience With New Hires
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
is doubling down on enterprise software experience with the additions of Zenprise CEO Jayaram Bhat as an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) and Issac Roth as Venture Advisor at the early-stage venture firm. As the company tells us, this is a move to grow Shasta’s enterprise software, cloud and SaaS practice. New EIR Jayaram Bhat hails from enterprise mobile security company Zenprise, where he was CEO. Zenprise was acquired by Citrix. Prior to Zenprise, Bhat was a corporate consultant and was Vice President of Marketing at Mercury Interactive Corporation. He was also a member of the board of Electric Cloud and Tealeaf, which was acquired by IBM in 2012. Roth, who was formerly at open source enterprise giant Red Hat, is joining Shasta as a venture advisor. At Red Hat, he helped create OpenShift, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service. OpenShift was based on Makara, a Shasta-backed company which Roth co-founded (and ). Roth was also instrumental in Red Hat’s investments in Appcelerator and 10gen. Prior to founding Makara, he spent five years at Wily Technology and CA Technologies. Shasta already has an impressive portfolio of enterprise investments, including Anaplan, Apptio, Crittercism, Lithium, Typesafe, Zenprise and Zuora, but as managing director Jason Pressman explains, Roth and Bhat’s expertise only adds value to the firm’s practice. He adds that he expects both individuals to either start or join an enterprise startup that Shasta will back. We’re seeing more VC firms staff up with enterprise expertise as investor sentiment on the space. General Catalyst just brought , and we’re likely to see more of these hires in the industry.
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Germany Passes New Internet Copyright Law After Watering It Down To Spare Google From Having To Pay
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
The German Bundestag passed an addendum to the country’s copyright laws , the so-called “Leistungsschutzrecht,” that allows publishers to charge aggregators and search engines for the content they index and re-publish on their sites and in their apps. An would have meant that Google, Google News and other aggregators and search engines would have had to pay, even if they just displayed “single words or very small text excerpts” from copyrighted text. Before passing the law, however, the Bundestag watered it down considerably and now allows for the use of snippets. Sadly, though, as today, it’s unclear how the law actually defines the word “snippet”; the current assumption is that everything up to about 160 characters would still be okay. A number of German publishers lobbied their government to push the stronger version of the law, but the government decided to at least make the law compatible with the way Google currently indexes and displays snippets. Thanks to this, Google will likely not have to pay for uses of text up to about 160 characters. Startups and aggregators like Flipboard and others will likely have to reconsider how they use texts in Germany or start paying a license fee (content older than one year is excluded from the law). A Google spokesperson told that the company thinks the new law is “neither necessary nor useful” and that it will only “hurt German Internet users and the country’s economy.” The organization of German publishers, of course, is rather about the new law (though given that they do seem to be a bit behind the times, they would have probably preferred linking to their texts to be made illegal) and argues that it provides publishers with a framework for licensing their content to aggregators. While the German newspaper industry is still in relatively good shape compared to the U.S., most of the publishers also know that the age of the printed paper can’t last. Just like most of their counterparts in the rest of the world, though, they struggle with finding new ways to monetize their online content. While they had originally hoped that Google could subsidize their operations through licensing fees for a while, chances are they will now have to sue aggregators and startups instead. There is a very small chance that the Bundesrat (the upper house of the German Parliament) could still kill the bill. Most pundits, however, currently think that this is very unlikely.
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Mg Siegler
| 2,013 | 3 | 8 | null |
Defense Distributed Prints An AR-15 Receiver That Has Fired More Than 600 Rounds
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tAW72Y_XPF4] , a group run primarily by gunsmith Cody Wilson, has released a video of an AR-15 with a 3D-printed lower receiver firing off over 600 rounds, a unique feat in the realm of 3D-printed parts. The part, , worked nearly perfectly while firing 600 rounds and, as Wilson notes, “the test ended when we ran out of ammunition, but this lower could easily withstand 1,000 rounds.” The AR-15 is a modular firearm and Wilson and others are attempting to modify – and eventually replicate – using 3D printers. Gunsmiths have been building gun parts for decades and so this is definitely nothing new. However, with the ubiquity of 3D printing and the ease with which manufacturers can design and share models, the process of 3D printing a gun is ramping up quite quickly. This right now from , an “island of misfit objects” where gunsmiths are sharing their designs. Ars Technica : He added, “The message is in what we’re doing—the message is: download this gun.” Is this a 3D-printed gun? No. Does it point to a future where you will no longer require a $500,000 military-spec milling machine to build a real gun? Yes, and this is definitely the beginning of a very interesting period in firearms history.
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Study: High-Skilled Immigrants Are Neither Better Nor Brighter Than U.S. Workers
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
While America’s political and business elite to ease high-skilled immigration laws, a new study argues that foreign workers aren’t necessarily better or brighter. “The immigrant workers, especially those who first came to the United States as foreign students, are in general of no higher talent than the Americans, as measured by salary, patent filings, dissertation awards, and quality of academic program,” University Of California-Davis professor, Norman Matloff. While technology leaders, such as Bill Gates, often complain that they must bait the best foreign workers with luxurious salaries, Matloff that data doesn’t back this up. To illustrate just how little big tech companies actually value foreign workers, he presents a graph of the share of percentage of foreign workers that make substantially more than their native colleagues. At Google, for instance, only 12% of foreign workers are making 1.45 times the average worker in their field. Matloff, a noted critic of high-skilled H1-B visa reform, finds that because there is no statistical difference in economic output between foreign and native workers, the idea of a shortage of high-skilled workers is a myth. “One of the industry’s most effective public relations tacks has been to claim that too few Americans major in STEM fields in college,” he argues. Instead, foreign immigrants have saturated the market, pushing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students onto other career paths. Quoting a study by a team of Berkeley economists, “…high-tech engineers and managers have experienced lower wage growth than their counterparts nationally. …Why hasn’t the growth of high-tech wages kept up?… .” Posh Wall Street jobs for American STEM students are fueling the so-called “diversion” of STEM students away from technology careers. Between 2003 and 2006, the share of MIT grads going into financial services nearly doubled, from 13% to 25%. “If you’re a high math student in America, from a purely economic point of view, it’s crazy to go into STEM,” said Georgetown University researcher Anthony Carnevale. As a result of the overwhelming influx, Matloff argues that foreign immigrants became a kind of “indentured servant,” forced to work for lower pay and less legal protections (a concern also by industry unions). Matloff’s study is sure to take a lot of heat, especially because he doesn’t take into account foreign entrepreneurs, who a huge chunk of influential technology corporation, from Google to AT&T. Matloff writes that he didn’t factor in the impact of entrepreneurs, because “the value of each of these indicators in assessing innovation is problematic. The difficulty with focusing on entrepreneurship is that one doesn’t know what kind of business is involved.” Perhaps the take-away point is that the United States, at the very least, needs a “startup visa,” which allows hungry, innovative foreigners to , without a sponsoring business. Senator Jerry Moran ( : A) recently introduced legislation to make this a reality, the Startup Act 3.0. Either way, Matloff’s study is sure to spark a furious debate, as immigration reform continues to be top-of-mind for the US Congress.
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Ustream Cuts Workforce By 6 Percent, Hires Two VPs From Ooyala As It Focuses On Pro Sales
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
Live video service just announced “a small restructuring” of the workforce that will result in cutting approximately 6 percent of the current team. The company said the restructuring, along with the hiring of two new vice presidents, is an attempt to focus on sales of its Pro Broadcasting products and to move toward profitability. A company spokesperson told me that after today, Ustream will have a global headcount of 191 across its San Francisco, Los Angeles, Budapest, Korea, and Japan offices. They also said that despite the cuts, the company is still growing, with more than 15 employees already hired this year and more than 25 open positions (16 of which are in sales). Ustream says that it’s increasingly becoming a SaaS business, namely one that makes money by selling software (as opposed to ads). It also says that the Pro product line has grown 150 percent year-over-year, and was recently used to live stream the Sony PlayStation 4 launch, which 1 million people watched concurrently. To move further in that direction, Ustream is also announcing that it has hired two executives from enterprise video service Ooyala — , previously Ooyala’s director of sales, is now vice president of subscription sales at Ustream, and , formerly director of solutions marketing, is now vice president of product marketing. (Both are apparently new positions.) In the press release announcing the changes, CEO Brad Hunstable says that Ustream is now working with 15 million live broadcasters who reach 80 million monthly viewers: “We expect to grow our Saas Pro Broadcaster business even faster this year as we add sales capacity and customer success resources to help monetize our huge base of freemium broadcasters.”
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HitBliss, The Pandora Of Ads, Will Pay You To Watch Commercials
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
We’ve been bombarded by advertisers for so long it’s rare we even remember this, but advertising is still valuable. , a new service launching into beta, is looking to put the control back in the hands of consumers, opting in to the notion that content sellers and advertisers shouldn’t even be in communication. “After all, the only thing that advertisers and content creators have in common is the consumer,” said founder Sharon Peyer. The HitBliss platform is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have the HitBliss Store, which is just like any other content platform wherein customers can rent a movie for $3.99 and download a TV show for $2.99. There are absolutely zero ads on the Store. On the other side of the business lies HitBliss Earn, lovingly nicknamed the “Pandora of ads”, which is where things get much more interesting. HitBliss Earn is an opt-in only platform that lets consumers create an advertising profile. This profile gives information like gender, name, and location — all the good stuff advertisers use to target you — but it goes much further than that. The HitBliss Earn app actually scours the user’s internet history to deliver advertisements the same way Google delivers ads based on search terms. This way advertisers know they’re reaching the right demographic, but all on the user’s terms. See, HitBliss Earn actually lets advertisers pay users directly for their attention, and users can then earn real credit that can be used in the HitBliss Earn store. HitBliss Earn starts by lining up a queue of advertisements, with the most targeted first. That first ad has a greater earn potential, and that value goes down the less these ads are targeted toward you. I know your first thought — what’s to stop you from pulling out your smartphone during the ads or switching to another application? Well, HitBliss. The service works a bit like online traffic school or Aol’s Standards of Business Conduct training, in that you’re given a short window of time to respond to prompts asking if you’re paying attention. If you turn down the volume, mute, or switch the window to another application, the ad will stop and you’ll be reminded that you can only get paid for the ad if you actually watch it. If an ad isn’t relevant to you, you can tell HitBliss that you don’t want to see this particular ad again, or that you don’t want this particular brand to be able to reach you again. That valuable information then ends up directly in the hands of the advertiser, who can use it to determine why their ad isn’t landing with their targeted audience. The more you use HitBliss Earn, the more “trust points” you gain, meaning you’re interrupted less frequently during ads to check if you’re paying attention. During beta, HitBliss isn’t taking any commission off of the Earn platform. In other words, all the money advertisers pay to put their ads on the platform ends up directly back in the hands of consumers watching the ads. That money can then be spent on the HitBliss Store, where HitBliss is taking a cut of the transaction. Eventually, when the platform goes public and scales, HitBliss will start charging advertisers to be on such a valuable, disruptive platform. For now, however, it’s all about letting consumers adjust to the idea that they’re in charge of the ads they see. HitBliss already has an impressive roster of advertisers and content providers, including Aflac, Dr. Pepper, and Liberty Mutual on the advertising side, and Warner Brothers, Paramount, Starz, and NBC Universal on the content side, to name just a few. The truth is, we don’t hate ads. We’re just trained to believe that we do because advertisers have abused us for years. Yet, without ads, we wouldn’t know about when our favorite products go on sale or hear about what’s new from this or that company. But when you’re watching a well-built ad, or seeing something informative, you remember how much value ads actually have. HitBliss is simply stepping in to jog your memory.
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YouTube Lays Easter Egg In Tribute To Harlem Shake Meme
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
In one of Google’s funnier Easter Eggs, users have a fun surprise awaiting them on YouTube. Conducting a YouTube search for “do the Harlem shake” initiates a UI-style Harlem Shake on the world’s biggest video sharing platform. The dance starts with the YouTube logo doing the classic back-and-forth seen in the beginning of most Harlem Shake videos (more often than not, by a solo dancer wearing a yellow hat or helmet). Once the beat drops, the entire page (thumbnails, descriptions, related videos, etc.) begin to “do the Harlem Shake,” or at the very least, the meme’s version of the Harlem Shake. February, along with being Black History Month and hosting Valentine’s Day, was also the month of the Harlem Shake. The meme originated early this month, and was replicated by major organizations like and the U.S. Military. Oh, and . There’s scientific evidence behind the popularity of the meme (you can . Sigh. If you want to see YouTube’s version of the meme, just . I know, we’d never post another Harlem Shake video again, but considering this seems to be incredibly similar to that led to that promise, we thought we’d let you guys in on the fun too. Google has been playing . However, this Harlem Shake tribute is just about as perfect as it can get. After all, YouTube is the birthplace and home of the Harlem Shake meme.
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Pitching App Ideas? AppGyver Delivers Mobile App Prototypes In Minutes, No Technical Know-How Needed
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 |
Although there are a ton of DIY app builders out there, the majority of them are either designed for those with a little bit of coding know-how, or involve drag-and-drop components that are used to create a basic app or mobile website. A new startup called AppGyver (rhymes with !) is different. It’s a mobile app , not an app builder, and it’s aimed at those who need to rapidly iterate on designs during the app-development process. AppGyver was started a couple of years ago by entrepreneurs (CEO) and co-founder , but it didn’t go into private beta testing until just this December. Instead, it was being used more as an internal tool for their previous business, which involved building mobile applications for clients. “To pitch our ideas to brands, it would always take time for us and our designers to put together some things so that people on the other side could understand what we were trying to pitch,” explains Lehtimaki. “We felt that there was a need for something that demonstrates the actual feeling of what using the app will be like,” he says. To some extent, AppGyver will compete with those other DIY app builders, as well as with other prototyping services like , but Lehtimaki notes that AppGyver is meant to be easier and quicker to use. “It’s more for designers and product managers – those kinds of people,” he explains. “If you have your existing wireframes, mockups, or your Photoshop files, you can use AppGyver to immediately turn it into an interactive prototype. It literally takes minutes,” he tells me. The tool also allows for access to hardware-accelerated animations provided by the platform, as well as native navigation UI, which is another advantage over some competitors’ products. During the eight-week private beta period, AppGyver had around 2,000 testers on its platform, including large and small agencies, as well as several startups. “Startups love it, because they iterate so fast,” Lehtimaki says. “They want to meet with investors and the media, and demonstrate what they’ve come up with.” Around 5 percent of the early testers have now converted to paid users, he adds, although the product still has a free version available. starts at $9 per month in premium tiers, or for $39 per month, there are additional options, like being able to chain actions or download projects as .zip files. Based in San Francisco, and now a team of seven, AppGyver has around $600,000 in funding from private angel investors, friends, family and founder money. The company is currently raising a seed round, as it has plans to grow the company beyond just app prototyping. “Prototyping is the first phase of the app development process – there are many other stages after that,” explains Lehtimaki. “Our vision is that we will provide tools for the whole lifecycle of app development.” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX7N9zYmQvc?feature=player_detailpage]
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The ‘Bay Lights’ Creator Leo Villareal On Where Tech Meets Art [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
It’s clearly a work of art first and foremost, but there is a lot of technology at play here too. The 25,000 LED lights that are attached to the 1.8 mile western span of the Bay Bridge are all individually programmed with software algorithms that create a generative sequence making it so that the patterns never occur twice. The hardware aspect is also a technological feat, with the lights being held up by custom-designed clips and engineered to withstand harsh weather conditions for months on end. And the project, which is all privately funded, has attracted the attention and support of a number of San Francisco Bay Area tech industry power hitters including Yahoo CEO , SV Angel founder and longtime investor , Y Combinator partner and former Googler , Zynga CEO , WordPress founder , and others. So TechCrunch TV swung by the press event preceding the official lighting ceremony to hear more about the project. It was a bit of a press scrum, but we elbowed our way in and were permitted to introduce ourselves and ask two questions of The Bay Lights’ artist . He himself has a background in both art and technology — his formal education is in sculpture and interactive communications, but he has also spent time working in the software world at Paul Allen’s Interval Research in Palo Alto during the 1990s. In the video embedded above, you can see the scene at the presser and hear Villareal talk briefly about the intersection of technology and art and the tech challenges of installing The Bay Lights. I also liked a bit of what he said off camera during the press conference, when someone asked him what they should be “looking for” in the work and what his vision was. It seemed to really highlight the underlying connection between science and artistic beauty. He said: “I’m interested in rules, and underlying structures. I have worked with software, and had amazing formative experiences [in the industry]… What people will be seeing are abstract sequences which are inspired by kinetic activity around the bridge. They’re very open-ended, and highly subjective.” It really is a beautiful sight. It will be interesting to see if the Bay Bridge soon becomes as much of an inspiration to Silicon Valley and San Francisco’s visionaries as its traditionally more beautiful neighbor, . Here is the livestream of The Bay Lights, which will be switched on every evening from dusk until 2:00am PT.
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Trulia Launches Trulia Suggests, A Recommendation Engine For Real Estate
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
, the popular real estate search engine, just launched the beta of Trulia Suggests, a personalized real estate recommendation engine. The typical search experience on virtually every online real estate site involves telling the service how much you want to pay, how many bedrooms and bathrooms you need and what locations you are interested in. That works, but you often end up looking at many homes that clearly don’t match what you’re looking for. Trulia’s service, on the other hand, learns from your behavior on the site and then shows you houses that it believes will match your interests. For now, Trulia Suggests will only be available on the web, but the company plans to roll it out to its mobile apps in the future. As Trulia’s VP of product Lee Clancy told me earlier today, he believes that adding this recommendation service will have a “transformational effect on the company.” While it won’t replace the usual search experience, he thinks this feature could become a part of the company’s other tools, including its rental business. “Personalization is not just a feature but a new product direction,” Clancy said. Here is how it works: users seed the proprietary recommendation algorithm with a few ‘likes,’ in order to start creating their personalized profile (users can now also likes every posting on the service as well). Trulia will ask new users to sign up for the service after this in order to track their behavior on the site. After reviewing a few more homes, the service will start showing a selection of houses that should match your interests under the Trulia Suggests tab. You can, of course, also ‘hide’ homes you don’t like in order to tell the algorithm when a place doesn’t match your preferences. For now, Clancy told me, this feature only hides homes in Trulia Suggests, but they will still appear in your regular search results. Once Suggests comes out of beta, hiding a house will also remove it from your search results. The algorithm looks at the kind of houses you like, hide and look at on the site and automatically tunes its recommendations in real time according to your preferences, including how much you seem to be willing to pay for a house, location and other details. A feature like this, Clancy argued, is especially important in today’s real estate market. With only a few houses available for sale and high demand from buyers, Trulia Suggests allows the company “to expose consumers to properties they might not have otherwise looked at.”
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Facebook Is Looking For Office Space In Cambridge, Close To Its Harvard Roots
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
According to a , Facebook appears to be looking for office space in Cambridge, Massachusetts — home to Harvard and the dorm room where Mark Zuckerberg started the social network. It would be an appropriate place for Facebook to set up a space to attract talent, as well as revel in some nostalgia. Sources have told the publication that the company would like to find a 7,000-ish square foot space in Kendall Square that would house a newly hired set of software engineers. Once again, there are few better spots to attract talent than nearby Harvard. Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters is already right by computer scientist factory Stanford. Facebook already has a few employees in Boston’s Financial District, but this would signal a more permanent home. The area that Facebook is poking around in is also inhabited by Google, Microsoft and Nokia offices. The report also calls out Newmark Knight Frank as the real estate brokerage of choice for Facebook, and the search is focused on Cambridge Center and One Kendall Square. We all know that Facebook “infamously” made the move out to the West Coast to live the startup dream, leaving Harvard behind. It would be quite the homecoming for Zuck and company. The company’s campus is currently in the old Sun Microsystems haunt in Menlo Park, California with global locations in Ireland and Hyderabad. We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment, and will update our story if we hear back.
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The Truth About Google Glass
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8UjcqCx1Bvg#!] There’s very little to be said about this viral video except that it’s a cute rendition of what will happen for maybe the first two weeks after is launched. In fact, I suspect it will almost be impossible to get away with this stuff once Glass hits its tipping point as potential dates will be wary of your motives when you blurt out “Google Jennifer Swanson” before sipping your latte. Imagine this dystopian future: You enter a bar on a date, spend a little time in awkward conversation, and then, bored, both of you end up staring at the readouts near your corneas, oblivious to each other. The birth-rate will fall. There will be anti-Glassites who snatch these things from people’s faces and there will be Glass-free zones where orgiastic explorations of the human animal will take place with reckless abandon for you will finally be free. Free! Men and women will be reduced to zombies, wandering aimlessly as texts scroll past their eyes like flies on a dead cow’s face. Slowly, surely, our major cities will descend into lethargy and a group of Luddites will arise to fill the vacuum. The Glassites will be pacified by porn piped right into their heads while the rest of the world – the dreamers, the drinkers, and the astigmatics – will take the reins. One day a nuclear dirty bomb, built using instructions found on the Internet by a Glassite who was vaguely upset with his score in Angry Birds Glass, will destroy most of the Northeast, and Glassites will descend into rabid madness as the media hubs of the world grind to a halt. With no more Reddit or BuzzFeed, Glassites will wake up from their slumbers, their atrophied bodies limp as old spinach. But by that time it will be too late. The anti-Glassites will rule the world, their Amish-like refusal to take up technology their only protection against the tyranny of Mother Google. They will rebuild civilization in their own image, which means there will be a lot of board games and barbecues. Or maybe Glass will end up like the Segway – kind of cool, but vaguely useless. Who knows? What am I? A mind reader?
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Urban Storage Startup Boxbee Wins Best New Startup Prize At Launch, Zillabyte Takes Enterprise With Its ‘Pandora For Leads’
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
, a startup that’s looking to make urban storage (not of the digital variety) less of a pain in the ass, just won the best new startup award at in San Francisco. The winner was chosen by a jury from the 50-plus startups that demonstrated on-stage at Launch over the past three days. The conference included a bevy of categories, 12 awards in total, including “1.0,” for startups launching for the first time (that’s the category that Boxbee won), and “2.0,” for startups that were launching a major new product. The San Francisco-based Boxbee took home the best overall new startup award this year based on its plans to breathe new life into the messy offline world of urban storage. Simply put, the service aims to simplify the storage process so that users can just box up what they want to store and let it take care of the rest. For those who are moving, traveling, or are just looking for extra space at home, the startup’s “secure storage hive” allows you to order boxes, which it claims it can deliver to your doorstep within the hour. Once you’ve packed your boxes, Boxbee helps you to schedule a pickup, taking the lifting, truck-packing and transporting out of your hands. On top of that, the startup claims to go the extra mile to adapt the whole storage process to its busy customers, by allowing you to schedule pickups and returns on the Web or via its mobile app and promises to complete pickup and returns in less than two hours. Well, two hours for “carloads” and next-day pickup and delivery for storage that requires a cargo van or truck. The service then stores your possessions until you need them again, and provides complementary services to sweeten the deal, allowing you to ship your boxes elsewhere from its app or web dashboard or have them donated. To streamline the process of pickup and returns and offer more flexibility, Boxbee’s dashboard keeps an inventory of images for the contents of each box in your account, including tagged descriptions, which allow you to choose the particular box you need without requiring someone to open it and rifle through its contents. It will then return the box to you in two hours. Meanwhile, a Y Combinator-backed startup called won the “Best Enterprise 2.0” award. We actually , when it was trying to help businesses analyze big data. Since then, the company has shifted focus, and at Launch it announced a new product that it described as “Pandora for leads.” In other words, similar to the way that Pandora can recommend music based on you preferences and listening habits, Zillabyte claims that it can look at a company’s existing customer base and recommend sales leads who are similar. The company says that an early customer has already seen conversion rates improve 35 percent. took home the “Best Consumer 2.0” award for its online multiplayer tournament platform, which enables companies or groups to host scalable, cross-platform tournaments in which players can compete in the same field of play across multiple devices. Founded in January 2012 by former Netsys exec and professional poker player Phil Gordon, and based in Seattle, the startup has raised around $3.4 million in venture funding from Founders Fund and angels. Jawfish aims to take the hassle and complexities of hosting realtime tournaments out of your hands, handling messaging, servers, brackets and so on, so that you can focus on other things, including world domination. Boxbee, Zillabyte, and Jawfish comprised the big three winners from Launch’s 12 total categories, which will see a total of $2 million in funding distributed between them. In the funding department, Yammer founder David Sacks also announced today that he’ll be investing $50,000 each in the five best companies (as chosen by conference organizer Jason Calacanis), and assuming that they’re still interested in funding, we can probably assume Boxbee, Jawfish and Zillabyte will be in that group. By the way, the peer-to-peer storage company, , also took the stage today to update the audience on its progress. Co-founder Clint Gordon-Carroll acknowledged that it’s been taking longer than expected to bring a product to market (“hardware is hard”), but he said the company currently plans to start shipping in May. The more you know. You can find video of .
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EQuala Launches On iOS And Android To Bring More Context And Control To Social Music Discovery
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
Over the last decade, the rise of mobile technology and the maturation of the Web as distribution and consumption channels has had a devastating effect on the music industry, among others. Yet, on the bright side, more recently these technologies have produced a litany of new ways to discover great music, empowering both fans and musicians in the process. While it seems that each day brings a new music app or product — a net positive for music fans — there’s also a lot of noise. Many of these apps and music services are exploring the social side of music discovery, allowing users to find, download and listen to their friends’ favorite music fare. , for example, which introduced millions of Facebook users to the experience of viewing their friend’s listening activity (and sharing their own) in realtime. While music discovery via your friends and social graph has a lot of appeal conceptually, initially, it just added to the noise problem rather than channeling it. Social music experiences were exciting more as a novelty, seeming to provide more value as a feature or a layer, than as the core around which a successful music service could be built. Luckily, wants change that by giving users more control over the social music discovery experience — and the noise. ListnPlay’s free Android and iOS app looks to go that extra distance toward creating a social radio station on the Web that you’ll actually want to use by giving users with their own social “equalizer,” and allowing them to create (and more importantly) curate and customize their social music streams. Launching today in the U.S. with over 23 million tunes in its catalog (and growing), EQuala allows music fans wants to help evolve the Facebook-integrated music experience, letting users create personalized streams from songs their friends are listening to and from those with similar music tastes. After logging in through Facebook, EQuala developers comprehensive taste profiles based on the music you’ve listened to (and shared) through third-party services like Spotify, YouTube and Songza, among others. To decide whether or not your friends’ playlist is worthy of your standards, users can click on any friend in their search results to see what they’ve been listening to on these services and populate their social radio stream accordingly, listening to and sharing these friend-approved songs as they go. While the experience itself is different from other familiar services, that’s still fairly standard to the social music discovery experience. The real key (and its ace in the hole) is what EQuala does after that. Using its “Friends EQualizer,” users can then customize and control their music stream, managing whose music plays more frequently, for example. The app allows you to see each selected friend on a sliding scale (or equalizer), adjusting those controls based on how much influence you want a particular friend to have in your stream. Once customized, users can then click play to enjoy or at any time, delete friends from the list if and when they decide to go through a Creed phase. The app also enables users to communicate with one another through “love,” “shout,” and “re-shout” buttons, which send push notifications to alert you via your phone and allow you to quickly share tracks on social media. Not unlike Pandora (and Echo Nest), EQuala’s tech gives each users his or her own “Music DNA,” which is essentially a breakdown of the genres and types of music you listen to the most — along with data integrated from your “shouts” and “loves,” etc. The more you listen, EQuala personalizes your music DNA and is able to more accurately match users with those in their network who share similar tastes. The app also shows a percentage match between one user and another to give users a sense of the degree of similarity. The other selling point is that EQuala allows you to consume your friends’ music selections even if they’re not using the platform. As long as music is being shared (through Facebook), EQuala will let you tailor your social radio stream. Based on early testing, EQuala stands up pretty well, giving much more social context to your daily music consumption. It also does a pretty good job of removing friction that stands in the way of getting music playing instantly, offers a sizable catalog at launch (which is impressive in and of itself) and by allowing you to add, delete and curate your friend-informed playlist and adjust influence, wins some value points. If you’re open to the idea of social music discovery but haven’t found the right experience yet, EQuala may be what you’re looking for, giving you control over your social stream and finally putting the power to curate and customize social back into your hands. For more, here and on .
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Korean Startup Accelerator SparkLabs Hosts Its First Demo Day, Adds Tom Peters To Advisory Board
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
Korean startup accelerator hosted its first Demo Day in Seoul today with five of the six companies in the inagural class it back in November (one company, online gaming studio , is developing a game that is currently in stealth mode, so it did not present today). SparkLabs also announced that it will expand into healthcare with its second round of startups, in addition to its ongoing focus on the online gaming, mobile, e-commerce and digital media sectors. “We were originally planning to expand into healthcare next year, but the inquiries have been overwhelming from entrepreneurs in the healthcare and biotech sectors in Korea to help their companies go global. SparkLabs is excited to open our program up and accept two to four healthcare-related startups when applications open up on March 29th,” said SparkLabs co-founder Jimmy Kim in a statement. In other news, Tom Peters, the author of “In Search of Excellence,” has joined SparkLabs’ honorary board of advisors, which already includes Mark Cuban, Vint Cerf, Arizona State University president Michael Crow, and ex-Microsoft CTO/current Talko CEO Ray Ozzie. Here’s a glance at the five companies that presented:
ABLAR is spinning out FiveRocks, an advertising marketplace for mobile game developers. Their FiveRocks Market launched today to provide a new advertising marketplace for mobile game developers in Korea and North America. Market offers opportunities for game developers to use ad inventory in a variety of deal structures. For example, game developers are able to form a credit union of ad inventory for CPI/CPC or to borrow ad inventory in advance and pay back with inventory or cash (loan). These ad products are designed for small and medium sized game developers to lessen their marketing burden.
NFLabs launched Peloton Personal Edition, which allows individuals, such as data scientists, to utilize their big data platform for testing and analysis. This version includes Peloton’s lightning-fast ad-hoc query engine and dynamic graphical generator. It will allow users to add user-defined functions, as well as custom-built business logic, and this will be used on top of existing Hadoop deployments. NFLabs also launched a limited beta release of their Enterprise Edition, which is an end-to-end platform for managing, processing and analyzing large-scale data sets. This is available for one month of free usage without commitment.
WePlanet launched a new personal smart journal called STEP. STEP is a mobile service that is focused on tracking life activities through an intuitive icon-based platform and provides aggregated information through infographics. STEP helps users capture snapshots of their lives in a timely and meaningful manner with just a few icon clicks then easily aggregates and analyzes their activities.
Memebox launched their single-touch subscription for mobile. Through a short SMS, Memebox users can click and instantly log into their Memebox account. They can easily complete a purchase through their mobile device with a single click on an item. This is the first of many mobile features and apps that Memebox is launching in 2013.
KnowRe is an educational technology company that develops an adaptive learning solution focused on providing a personalized learning experience for each student. KnowRe presented their recently launched beta for students and teachers with an initial focus on math skllls.
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Rethinking Video Journalism, NowThisNews Blitzkriegs SXSW With Coverage And A 6-Second Pitch Competition
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
The TV news soundbite is about to get a lot shorter. , a New York-based startup that’s looking to reinvent video journalism for the Facebook and smartphone era, on its mobile app plus a six-second startup pitch competition using Twitter’s Vine. While we haven’t really covered the company before, . They’ve assembled a veteran team of journalists who have held senior positions at ABC News, CNN, Washington Post and The Huffington Post with $6.5 million in funding from investors including Lerer Ventures. The startup’s basic premise is this: because smartphones and tablets are eating into the time people otherwise spend watching TV, the old cable and evening news formats just don’t work. On top of that, news spreads in a different way — through social networks like Facebook and on Twitter. Clips have to be short (as in less than three minutes) and super-catchy so they grow virally. Here’s an example that’s about the history of the SXSW conference itself.
With a little more than 20 editorial employees, NowThisNews is pumping out 18 to 25 videos a day on everything from U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to the death of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to a Cribs-like video on what it’s like to live on the International Space Station.
The iPhone and iPad apps have been out for about five months, but the company isn’t sharing stats on the number of users they have or the number of viewers they have per day yet, said social editor Drake Martinet. The company’s reliant on more than the app for viewership though. “I would say there are three big buckets for us,” Martinet said. “There are obviously the app users. Beyond that, there’s referrals from outside sites and then replays on social channels like Facebook.” The teams that make these NowThisNews clips are lean. At SXSW, they’re putting two small production teams on the ground with two dedicated VJs. The goal is to help establish more of a tech audience beyond coverage of politics and entertainment. That ties into NowThisNews’s goal of reaching the 18-34 demographic that is tuning out of traditional broadcast or cable news coverage. “SXSW gives us the opportunity to showcase our incredibly agile teams that can make beautiful videos on the fly and publish that content out to mobile devices,” said , who came to NowThisNews from The Washington Post. They’re launching a six-second startup pitch contest using Vine and and covering the Startup Bus competition that hatches new product concepts on a roadtrip to Austin ahead of the festival.
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RelayRides Founder Shelby Clark Steps Down From Day-To-Day Role, Will Remain On The Board
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
founder and chief community officer Shelby Clark announced today that he is leaving his day-to-day role with the company, but will remain on its board of directors. The move comes as RelayRides has added and promoted a bunch of executives with more operational experience, and as Clark is looking to get back into founder mode and start something new. Clark started RelayRides four years ago in Boston as a way to make more efficient use of cars that spent most of their time parked and dormant. By creating a marketplace for people to rent their vehicles — kind of an Airbnb for car rentals — RelayRides was able to provide car owners with added income while also providing those without cars cheaper rentals. Not long after, the company moved west to San Francisco, and RelayRides got funded. But as it looked to expand, the need for some execs with key operational experience became clear. In 2011, around the time of its big Series A raise, the company as its CEO. Prior to that, Haddad had served as SVP of product at eBay, among other roles, after his startup iBazar was acquired by the company. Clark told me the combination of Haddad’s “founding experience, CEO experience, and operations experience” was key to that decision. Since then, RelayRides has continued to add and promote executives into operational roles. Recently, it brought on former Babycenter.com CMO Scott Kinzie as its VP of marketing, and former America Online, Nokia, and Formspring exec Tom Wang as its VP of product. It also promoted VP of business development Alex Benn to the new COO role. Clark’s departure also comes as the company has been busy expanding nationally, in part through a . Clark said he was happy to see RelayRides in a strong growth phase with a strong management team, but… “I’m a founder, I like building things and solving problems,” he told me. “I’m inspired to start something new, and branch out on a new adventure.” CEO Andre Hadded issued the following statement on Clark’s departure: “After more than four years pioneering peer-to-peer car sharing and building RelayRides into the leading peer-to-peer car sharing company, Shelby Clark has decided to step away from his day-to-day role at RelayRides. As an entrepreneur, Shelby’s passions are with starting businesses. We wish him the best in his next endeavor and are happy that he will continue to provide his insight and passion as a member of our board and an advisor to the company. Moving forward, I am confident we have the best possible team in place to fulfill Shelby’s vision to revolutionize personal mobility–including our recent additions of our VP of marketing, Scott Kinzie, and our VP of product, Tom Wang.”
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Now 18M Users Strong, Edmodo Makes Its First Acquisition In Root-1 To Become The App Market For Education
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
After spending years working as technicians at public schools, Jeff O’Hara and Nicolas Borg launched in 2008 to address what they had come to see as a huge gap in the teacher-student relationship: The need for a better, safer way for teachers to connect and communicate with their students. However, with the launch of its APIs early last year to allow developers to build apps on top of its platform, what began as a social networking tool — a sort of Facebook or Yammer for education — has more recently evolved into a marketplace for education apps. Since then, Edmodo’s platform for third-party developers has grown to support more than 400 apps, tripling the growth of what is already one of the largest user bases in education, which today stands at over 18 million registered users. In an effort to help it further expand its growing app platform, Edmodo announced this week that it has made its first acquisition, scooping up Palo Alto-based educational app maker, for an undisclosed sum. While both companies declined to share terms of the acqui-hire, Edmodo COO Crystal Hutter said that Root-1’s entire team will join Edmodo, with co-founders Manish Kothari and Ketan Kothari to help lead platform strategy and growth, while early Google employee, Vibhu Mittal, will lead R&D and co-founder Adam Stepinski will assume a “key role” within Edmodo’s engineering team. With the acquisition, Edmodo not only adds more technical talent to its staff of 70, but will now be able to leverage Root-1’s roster of five educational apps, including its OpenMinds platform, which allows teachers and students to turn learning content into apps. The startup developed OpenMinds to allow educators and educational developers to quickly convert their worksheets and projects, repurposing them into quizzes, flashcards, puzzles and games for mobile devices and the Web. Essentially, this allows technical teams to more easily access to content uploaded from third-parties so that they can devote more attention to design and infrastructure. On the teacher side, the critical value-add is that OpenMinds gives educators the ability to curate apps and educational content for the classroom and really to get more involved in how digital learning experiences are created and presented to students. As the EdTech space matures and tools more accessible and portable, Edmodo wants its platform to become part of the underlying fabric of digital education space. To do this, the startup aims to make itself an irreplaceable utility by becoming the marketplace and central distribution channel for classroom learning tools and content. Marketplaces like TeachersPayTeachers where they can share and purchase lesson plans and other educational content. Of course, it also helps that TpT is helping teachers to make a pretty penny. The web has begun to provide teachers and students with an increasing variety of distribution and sharing channels for educational content, and, going forward, whoever positions themselves at the center of this exchange will find themselves in a powerful position. In this new digital educational marketplace, teachers will also be looking for better ways to channel the noise into signal and will need a way to tap into curated discovery and search for learning tools. this search and curation engine at some point, and is looking to build better distribution, social discovery and payment solutions for education, along with giving students the ability to curate educational apps into custom learning profiles and playlists. While there are plenty of companies that harbor similar aspirations, and 18 million registered users, no one can really hold a candle to Edmodo at this point, which has become one of the largest members of the new generation of EdTech startups. Admittedly, Edmodo’s monetization strategies are still largely incipient, but as the platform now offers hundreds of both free and paid apps (taking a percentage of the revenue from paid apps), that will begin to change. And with a network that’s 18 million-strong, Edmodo isn’t exactly in a hurry. For more on the acquisition, .
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What’s All The Fuss About? Up Close With The Dish Hopper With Slingbox, The Device That Caused CNET To Implode
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
About a month ago, if you’ll remember, the very fabric of the Internet journalism game was rent asunder when , refused to let it write about the Dish Hopper with Slingbox, a DVR with a system to view your shows remotely built in. More important, however, is the Hopper’s ability to “hop” past commercials in prime-time TV a few days after the show aired, allowing you to, say, blow past the commercials in Modern Family while managing a two-handed bong. It is, as they say, indistinguishable from magic. I had a bit of time with the Hopper and I’m pleased to report that it is, in fact, one of the best DVRs you can get and arguably the best television provider DVRs I’ve used, barring my experience with TiVo-enabled devices. Here’s my take. The Hopper is focused around the DVR and Guide menus. The interface is fast and processing time when you select a movie to record or prepare a scheduled recording time is snappy – even faster than the original Hopper. The unit has Wi-Fi built in as well as a 1.3GHz processor, which makes network features like the Blockbuster and on-demand video apps much faster. The device also has a 2 terabyte hard drive, apparently the largest in the pay-TV industry, and thanks to Primetime Anytime, Dish’s prime-time recording service, you can easily grab all prime time content and still have plenty of room for movies and recorded TV. Playback is equally smooth and, in urban Brooklyn, Dish has only “gone down” once during a brief period during Hurricane Sandy. What’s really interesting, however, is the Dish Anywhere feature. This allows you to view your content on almost any device, including Android and iOS. You can prepare content for mobile when you select it for recording. This is a 1-to-1 process (an hour of video takes an hour to process) but you can then transfer that video over to your device using an iPad-only app called Hopper Transfers. This allows for offline viewing. In short, then, all of these features turn the traditional Dish DVR into a more computer/mobile centered device. Without saying much of anything out loud, CBS’s reaction to this product speaks volumes. For example, if you were a fan of Game Of Thrones and wanted to watch it on the go, you could easily use this to watch recorded episodes in your hotel room or offline on the plane. While this is nothing new – Slingbox users and pirates have been doing this for years – in the sclerotic pay-TV industry this is akin to witchcraft. Was this device worth all the fuss and attention thrown at it? Sure. It disrupts the broadcast model considerably by essentially picking out all the good stuff on major primetime networks and serving it up to viewers on a silver platter. CBS is worried that people who watch CBS will use the Hopper’s commercial hopping feature to blow past ads for McDonald’s and Ford (they definitely will) yet they don’t realize that this process, thanks to the DVR, is already out of their hands. If Dish’s commercial skipping didn’t exist, I’d just blow past the commercials anyway. There’s literally no way for them to stop it. The best feature of this DVR isn’t the clock speed or huge hard drive. It’s that the clock speed is being used to power a very powerful web-based interface with the user. While the Hopper’s guide looks primitive in the browser, it is immensely useful. Playback is rock solid on a good network connection and the ability to use Primetime Anywhere to catch up on shows you may have missed while traveling is amazing. In short, this thing did deserve best of CES and CBS was stupid to try to hush up CNET. They may not like the product, but it’s about to eat their lunch and it’s better to get behind the marauding technology than be bowled over in front of it. The current generation of TV watchers understands devices like Slingbox implicitly and appreciates commercial-skipping. While the networks can’t be faulted for hoping that a few people will accidentally not skip through a peanut butter commercial, the possibility of that happening is slim to none. They can keep people from skipping commercials by producing content that is so compelling that you have to watch it “live.” That’s the bottom line.
To attack this box for doing what humans do naturally is silly at best and destructive at worst. In the end, all the legal futzing in the world won’t change the fact that the way we use our televisions has changed drastically.
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To Earn Trust, Facebook Could Declare News Feed Changes Like Google PageRank
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
Too much bad press and too many confused users. That’s what Facebook got from silently tinkering with the news feed. BiltonGate was the last straw. Signs now point to Facebook starting to notify the public of news feed algorithm changes the way Google does for PageRank. Combined with education, Facebook could use transparency to try to convince people it tweaks the feed to help users, not sell more ads. Facebook walks a tightrope. It has to balance the interests of marketers, content creators, app developers, its bottom line, and most of all, the user experience. Over time, its power, ubiquity, wealth and privacy issues have led people to jump to the worst conclusion at the first sight of change — that Facebook just wants to gobble up more private data and make more money. That’s only half true. It definitely wants more data and money, but Facebook is a fundamentally mission-driven company. After reporting on Facebook for three years, interviewing dozens of employees, and knowing some from the San Francisco scene, I am heartily convinced it actually wants to make the world more open and connected. Doing that means gobbling up private data and making money. The data goes to personalizing the service, and the money goes to hiring people to build it. But the real kicker is that the only way it can accomplish its mission and make a fortune is to generally prioritize the user experience. If it allows advertisers and viral app developers to overpower Facebook, a few years from now there won’t be a user base to advertise or sell apps to. So , it’s typically to the benefit of the end user. The problem is it often comes at the expense of Page admins and professional content creators like The New York Times’ Nick Bilton. Facebook alters its algorithm to show people news feed stories they’re more likely to Like, which can mean fewer stories from journalists and business pages searching for eyeballs. Facebook’s done a poor job of communicating why it makes these changes, and it makes them silently. Both lead people to assume greed is responsible. Facebook had a huge issue with this over the summer. It started more intensely penalizing Pages for being marked as spam, and generally reduced the reach of Pages whose posts didn’t get many Likes per fan. Around the same time it introduced Promoted Posts, which let Pages pay to reach more people. People immediately accused Facebook of extorting Pages by reducing their reach unless they buy these Promoted Post ads. One by Dangerous Minds (illustration to the right) got 162,000 Likes by calling Facebook “the biggest bait’n’switch in history.” In reality, Facebook was going to beat back spammy Pages anyway, and the Promoted Posts feature is actually just an easier way to buy Sponsored Stories, which Facebook has had for a long time. Even if the algorithm change and ads were related, it’s not to Facebook’s benefit to make the feed worse on purpose. Otherwise people will read it less and, boom, any profits from Promoted Posts are offset by less usage. The issue reared its head again last weekend when suggesting Facebook was showing his posts to fewer of his Twitter-style Facebook Subscribe followers than a year ago because it was showing more ads. some public publishers are getting less engagement now, but claimed this was anecdotal, that users didn’t want to see Bilton’s posts, and that most public figures were getting more views now. But in the end Facebook , and, shall we say, unbecoming of one of the world’s most powerful companies. If Facebook had been more proactive about communicating its fight against spam fighting and the changes to public-post reach, it wouldn’t have gotten itself into these messes. I sense Facebook has now realized this, and suspect it will soon begin announcing at least when it makes major news feed algorithm changes. As I’ve written about terms of service changes, “you always fear what you don’t understand” so Facebook’s goal will be to increase understanding. It’s worked for Google. Every few months it publishes a post like “ : 65 changes for August and September,” outlining dozens of specific changes to PageRank so webmasters know to expect their Google search rank and traffic to fluctuate. For example, the one change is listed in August was “nearby. [project ‘User Context’] We improved the precision and coverage of our system to help you find more relevant local web results. Now we’re better able to identify web results that are local to the user, and rank them appropriately.” This lets non-local site admins know their traffic may drop because Google is giving users a better experience by directing them to relevant local results. Facebook makes minor tweaks constantly, and big changes to the feed occasionally, like the one it’s making tomorrow announcing new content-specific news feeds. It could go with a live-updated list with more in-depth posts about the big changes. Alternatively, it could release scheduled dumps of changes like Google does, but also call out the major modifications. It would need to combine this with general education about why it makes the changes in the first place. Ideally, the tone would be something like Tron’s “I fight for the user!” but that doesn’t frame marketers, publishers, and developers as self-serving spammers. Dissuading conspiracy theorists will be no easy task for Facebook. Many just inherently think corporations are evil. A transparency push will only succeed if Facebook can convey that for it to win, for businesses to win, its top priority is making itself a place where people love spending time.
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David Sacks Says He Has No Plans To Leave Microsoft, Endorses Marissa Mayer’s Work-From-Home Ban
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
founder David Sacks just left the stage at the conference in San Francisco, where he talked about his future at Microsoft and also weighed in on some hot tech topics, including . As someone with a startup background (he was chief operating officer at PayPal, founded Geni.com, and is an active angel investor), you might expect that Sacks’ time at Yammer, now that it has been acquired by Microsoft, to be limited. Or maybe, as on-stage interviewer Jason Calacanis suggested, Microsoft is hoping Sacks can help turn the company around and is grooming him for a bigger executive role. Sacks basically denied both suggestions — he said that he’s still “really happy doing what I’m doing” (running Yammer within Microsoft) and that he’s “looking forward to doing that for a while.” As for whether he’s the next Steve Ballmer (in a good way), he said, “There’s a lot of people who have much more important jobs than I do at Microsoft.” Changing topics, you might expect Sacks to be against Yahoo’s new anti-work-from-home policy, since Yammer can help geographically distributed teams work together. However, Sacks said Yahoo’s move seems like “an easy decision” — management looked at the data and saw that people working from home weren’t logging in, so they couldn’t tell what those employees were doing. “What is everyone complaining about?” Sacks asked. Calacanis also asked about last year, where he said, “I think silicon valley as we know it may be coming to an end.” Sacks said today that what he had in mind was the fact that the big tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — now have “so much surface area to their products that it’s easier for them than ever before to feature-ize you.” That doesn’t mean you can’t compete at all, he added. First of all, taking lessons from Yammer’s history, Sacks said that you want to start with an idea that’s not on a big company’s “near-term product roadmap,” because “when you first launch, your product is easy to copy.” For example, when in 2009, a team of fewer than 15 people had been working on it for about nine months: “If a big company had moved quickly enough, they could have crushed us.” But that didn’t happen. Then, after you launch and get a sense that you’re on to something, you want to deepen the product and add features as quickly as possible, so that copying you becomes much tougher. For example, Sacks argued that by the time Salesforce.com was advertising its own business social network Chatter on the Super Bowl several years later, the company was trying to compete with “Yammer 2008,” not what Yammer had become. Sacks said that another opportunity for startups is Marc Andreessen’s idea that “software is eating the world.” In other words, even though big companies are expanding into more and more industries, there are also more areas that software startups can take on. “I don’t want to seem pessimistic,” Sacks said. “I’m very optimistic about that.” Speaking of Sacks’ role as an investor, he also announced that moving forward, he will be investing $50,000 in each of the top five startups at Launch, as chosen by Calacanis.
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I’m Glad I Was An Unpaid Blogger
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
I was an unpaid blogger and I’m proud of that. After following the recent back and forth between an and The Atlantic over the depressingly low pay of freelance writers, I thought I’d explore what it meant to me to work for, essentially, free. Corporate health insurance and a moderate savings account are new additions to my life after spending five impoverished years as an underpaid freelance blogger, sleeping on the floor of my unfurnished Southern California apartments. While many critics deride the exploitation of new writers by financially beleaguered media outlets, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to trade a living wage in exchange for exposure. Reuters financial blogger and lovable British dry-humor enthusiast Felix Salmon rekindled the ongoing debate when he tweeted about a testy exchange between a freelance writer and an Atlantic editor. [tweet https://twitter.com/felixsalmon/status/308935613837635584] “I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children,” Nate Thayer. The Atlantic’s digital tech editor, Alexis Madrigal, has written an impassioned, sympathetic, and math-y 4,000-word , concluding “the economics of our business are terrible in some ways. And like everything else, the worst of it falls on the workers, the people making the widgets, doing the journalism, making the beds.” Media Outlets didn’t always offer depressingly low rates. Prior to the Internet and Craigslist-apocalypse that of newspapers dependent on physical advertising revenue, freelance journalists could make an enviable living. Magazines and mainstream papers could offer $2/word, meaning a substantial 2,000 word feature would net +$4,000 (and often much more). With an explosion of new media competitors (like TechCrunch) and plummeting online ad revenue, each individual story made far, far less profit. Media outlets still in need of content were forced to offer low or no-pay stories in exchange for reputation-building exposure. Madrigal explains the weird odds that an expensive freelance writer could help him fill his traffic needs: “But here’s the weird thing: while the top six or seven viral hits might make up 15-20 percent of a given month’s traffic, the falloff after that is steep. And once you’re out of the top 20 or 30 stories, a really, really successful story is only driving 0.5 percent or less of a place like The Atlantic’s monthly traffic. But that’s the best-case scenario. In most cases, even great reported stories will fizzle, not spark. They will bring in 1,000 or 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 visitors. You’d need thousands of these to make a big site go.” As a result, it’s only sustainable to fund in-house writers or accept some freelancers for little-to-no money. Contrary to the opinion of some of my media colleagues, I’m thrilled there was an opportunity to be a poor freelance blogger. If it weren’t for underpaid writers, I never would have had the opportunity to be a journalist. I got started as an unpaid “expert blogger” for Fast Company’s new user-generated content program. After hustling my way into tech conferences and bagging choice interviews, Fast Company featured my posts on the front page, which gave me just enough leeway to pitch paid blogging gigs. But “paid” is a laughable exaggeration: we’re talking $50 for 8 hours of work and, often, interstate travel. I hit the jackpot when I received a whopping $500 for a front-page investigative business report that took weeks to write, on top of travel and all-day interviews. But, here’s the secret I never told editors: I would have done it for free. Putting CNN, The Atlantic, and Fast Company on my resume gave me extraordinary access to the top rungs of the business and political world. I was addicted to meeting fascinating people and writing (hopefully) compelling stories. It eventually gave me the credentials to get my first paid gig back at Fast Company. Even now that TechCrunch is a full-time-plus job, I still take time out of my scarce dating life to write. Last month, I published an op-ed for The Atlantic’s politics section supporting Congress’ move to . From the emails I’ve received in response, it’s sparked an important discussion within the political science community about the relevancy of modern-day academic research. I’m yet to get around to invoicing The Atlantic. And, let’s keep this our little secret, I probably would have for the opportunity get my thoughts in a publication I know political scientists read. (For conspiracy theorists: No, I’m not cozying up to The Atlantic. I’ve written of their stories in the past, which I’m sure doesn’t ingratiate me to their editorial staff.) Now, I wish we lived in a world where content was a profitable business. But I don’t blame editors who offer to take pieces for no money. In fact, if the media business somehow developed an ethos of refusing to take freelancer pieces because they didn’t want to appear to be exploiting writers. In that moral-high-horse world, there’s a lot of wonderful information that would never be published. I’m not sure if the career of professional freelancer will even exist in a decade. When I got started, I was a humble graduate student on the path to being a professional academic. There are a lot of great pieces written by those who never plan on being full-time writers. I think few if any writers get into this job for the money; therefore, the money shouldn’t get in the way. Because, when times are tough (and they are very tough), the most important priority is the free flow of information.
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UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann Joins Facebook’s Board, Adding Another Woman Alongside Sandberg
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
today added a new member to its board of directors, , M.D. Dr. Desmond-Hellman currently serves as the chancellor of the . Prior to at UCSF in 2009, Desmond-Hellmann served as president of product development at biotech giant , where she worked for 14 years. She completed her clinical training at UCSF and is board-certified in internal medicine and medical oncology; she holds a BS in pre-medicine and a medical degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, and a master’s in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves on the board of directors at . Desmond-Hellmann is now the second woman on Facebook’s current board, alongside Facebook’s COO . She’s also the second board member from the high realms of academia, alongside University of North Carolina president emeritus . The timing of the announcement is likely coincidental, and of course Desmond-Hellmann is not defined solely by her gender, but it’s a complementary news item on the same day that Sandberg’s non-profit ‘ ‘ organization Lean In is aimed at encouraging women to stay engaged and ambitious in their careers as they build their family lives. The remainder of Facebook’s board, in addition to Sandberg and Bowles, includes Mark Zuckerberg, Marc L. Andreessen, James W. Breyer, Donald E. Graham, Reed Hastings, and Peter A. Thiel. Here is the : Facebook announced today that Susan Desmond-Hellmann , M.D., M.P.H., chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has been elected to the company’s board of directors. “Sue has a great track record of building and managing a diverse set of organizations, so her insights will be valuable as we continue to expand into new areas,” said Mark Zuckerberg , founder and CEO of Facebook. “Her experience shaping public policy and operating public companies fits well with the rest of the board and will make us an even stronger company.” “I’ve always been drawn to organizations that do ground-breaking work,” said Desmond-Hellmann. “Facebook has an ambitious mission and long-term vision of innovation that is transforming how people connect with one another. I’m proud to be part of a company that is serving such an important purpose in the world.” As UCSF Chancellor, Desmond-Hellmann oversees all aspects of the university and medical center’s strategy and operations. She previously served as president, product development at the biotechnology pioneer, Genentech. In this role, she was responsible for Genentech’s pre-clinical and clinical development, process research and development, business development and product portfolio management. During her 14 years with the company, Desmond-Hellmann brought numerous cutting-edge cancer medicines to market to help people battle the disease. Desmond-Hellmann completed her clinical training at UCSF and is board-certified in internal medicine and medical oncology. During her training at UCSF, she spent two years as a visiting faculty member at the Uganda Cancer Institute, studying HIV/AIDS and cancer. She also holds a master’s degree in public health from the University of California, Berkeley. Desmond-Hellmann is on the board of directors for Procter & Gamble, and she also serves as a trustee for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit medical research organization. Aside from Desmond-Hellmann, Facebook’s current board members are: Mark Zuckerberg ; Marc L. Andreessen , Andreessen Horowitz; Erskine B. Bowles , president emeritus, University of North Carolina; James W. Breyer , Accel Partners; Donald E. Graham , chairman and CEO, The Washington Post Company; Reed Hastings , chairman and CEO, Netflix; Sheryl Sandberg , chief operating officer, Facebook; and Peter A. Thiel , Founders Fund.
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gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 1 | null |
Update For Twitter’s iOS, Android Apps And Mobile Site Includes Top Tweets From The Past And Better Web Browsing
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
Twitter has updated its iOS and Android apps today, as well as its mobile site, to include more interesting content to keep you tapping and exploring as you perform searches. As we noted last month, Twitter has started to . Today, that experience will become more prevalent in Twitter’s mobile experience. In addition to tweets that might have some age to it, your search results will now include topics and user suggestions based on your query. Since Twitter is a real-time service, this is no easy task. A few video services have gotten the axe, and the app now has native support for traditional Chinese language. It’s nice to see Twitter combine some sweeping discovery updates with a maintenance release in time for SXSW. It’s a small tweak, but I’m enjoying the addition of the tweet staying visible when you tap a link, providing some context as you venture off of the network. You can make it go away by tapping the web page: Here’s the list of updates for and Android: • As you search you’ll see more topic and user suggestions for your query, based on what’s happening in real time. You’ll also see these suggestions when adding a hashtag or username as you compose a new Tweet.
• Top Tweets from big moments in the past pop out when you search for a given term. For example, searching for “election” might highlight Tweets from several months ago.
• When you open a web page you can now see the related Tweet for more context. Just pull the tray icon up or down to see or hide the Tweet.
• It’s easier to see long conversations in the Tweet details view, which now shows all of the replies to any Tweet
• Pull-to-refresh in Discover shows a new, smoother animation
• Support for traditional Chinese
• Uploading videos vie Mobypicture, Vodpod and Posterous is no longer supported
• Additional bug fixes and improvements Here’s a look at what you might find when doing a search: The only old tweet I saw with the “election” search was a promoted one. Hopefully that won’t be the case for all of your searches. As the discovery experience gets better, Twitter can hopefully into clicking more links and following more people. [Photo credit: ]
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The Lumio Lamp Looks Like The Most Beautiful Book You’ve Never Read
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
Sometimes the best projects are the simplest ones. is a lamp masquerading as a beautiful hardcover book with a wooden finish. To turn the lamp on, you open it up. To turn it off, you close. It’s equal parts simplicity and ingenuity. Lumio came into being when architect and designer Max Gunawan was trying to design a modular home that could fit inside a compact car. When Max realized he didn’t have enough funds to build a working prototype, he decided to use the his built up expertise somewhere else. “When I decided to pivot and translate the concept into a folding lamp, it was a natural progression to use the form of the sketchbook as a way to package the lamp,” says Max on his Kickstarter page. “That’s how Lumio was born.” An LED powers the Lumio, which can last up to 8 hours when fully charged. The cover comes in dark walnut, warm cherry, and blonde maple options and is also embedded with magnets that allows you to easily attach the Lumio to metal surfaces. Gunawan has raised over $400,000 on his Kickstarter page, shooting well past his original $60K goal. You only have a few more days days to pledge and nab a Lumio for yourself, so if you want one I’d suggest you get going .
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Fresh Off White House Petition Success, Activists Launch Copyright Reform Campaign
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
Grassroots digital activists are looking for a new another sweet, sweet hit of political success. After lobbying the White House with 100,000 petitions to overturn a law related to cell phone carrier choice, fiery young activist Sina Khanifar is demanding broader copyright reform. And, this time, he’s bringing friends: brings together a host of influential digital activist organizations, such as consumer watchdog group, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and popular content aggregator, Reddit.com, to make aggressive changes to section 1201 of the . Originally “passed by Congress to protect music labels and the movie industry from piracy, Section 1201 is now being used to prevent Americans from making fair use of the things we buy,” writes the new grassroots hub of the movement, with tools to get friends involved and contact legislators. The DMCA has long served as an evil totem for open-information hawks, who support greater permission for tinkering and data access, at the expense of tools that could prevent piracy. Most disturbing, says the group, it oddly gives the Library of Congress authority to determine exemptions for consumer copyright issues. Recently, section 1201 of the DMCA was to ban users from “unlocking” their cell phones to switch between carriers. In the past, it’s been used to go after academic researchers, such as Princeton Computer Science Professor, Edward Felton, who cracked an audio security technology for preventing piracy. Felton, to a public challenge to explore its vulnerabilities, was threatened by industry groups to cease his presentations. The winds of change seem to be at the backs of the audition activists. Changing the DMCA means going to political war with well-funded industry groups that care more about preventing piracy than broad information-sharing. But, if the success of the White House petition is any indication, nerds have come to power in very high places, and may not be swayed by lobbyists.
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ZipDial Has Turned 400M Missed Calls Into Moneymaking Connections
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
During my trip to India, one of the most interesting companies that I met with was . In a really cool home-turned-office in Bangalore, a team of brilliant people have turned a phenomenon that is unique to the country into a booming business. That phenomenon is missed calls. While that might not sound like big business, once you realize why this is a prevalent behavior in India, it will make perfect sense. Basically, a lot of residents in the country use prepaid cellphones. Each connected call and sent text costs money; therefore the missed call was born. If you were to drop your friend off at their house and head home, you would call them and then hang up, as to signal that you’ve arrived safely. This way, nobody is charged for the call. It’s kind of like the behavior of paging someone with “911” back in the day, as if to say “call me immediately.” While the pager behavior never turned into a business, the missed-call behavior most certainly has, and ZipDial owns the space. The service that the company provides is provisioning a phone number that advertisers and companies like Disney and Gillette can plaster on billboards and newspaper ads, allowing people to call the number and disconnect without getting charged. After that, the person is sent a text message with communication about deals, coupons or any other messages that the business wants to convey. This is important because incoming text messages are free for prepaid cellphone users. The telecom companies in India love it, because it’s creating traffic that never existed before. These companies can learn more about their “followers” by sending them surveys, which we’re told that many folks participate in. In many cases, these campaigns have outperformed those taking place on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The company has just announced reaching the milestone of 400 million missed calls, and I spoke with founder and CEO to discuss how ZipDial has made waves in a market that didn’t exist before. Why missed calls? What was interesting to you that screamed opportunity? Growth in mobile adoption has been astonishing over the last five years or so, shooting up to more than 700 million users. Around the 2009-2010 time frame, there were more than 20 million new, first-time mobile users added to the network every month. That’s the population of Australia joining the network every four weeks! However, there was also a massive gap between innovations in the industry around data and smartphone apps and the actual capabilities of real users who today are still 96 percent feature phone users in India. While this will evolve as handset prices drop, and I am confident that smartphone adoption will exceed the predicted 25 percent penetration in the next three years, this still leaves an huge gap in the market between what people want and the tools they have. While only 4 percent of users have smartphones and fewer than 50 percent even know how to send text messages, 100 percent of users love dialing “missed calls.” It’s an exceptionally prevalent peer-to-peer user behavior where users dial a friend’s number and then hang up on purpose in order to signal something such as “call me back” or “I’m thinking of you” or “I’ve arrived home safely.” What have you learned about Indian culture after launching the project that surprised you? 1) Word-of-mouth is powerful, beyond what we had ever anticipated. Two examples:
a) Simply as a test we created a Cricket Scores service whereby a user could ZipDial (or dial and hang up, toll-free) to a particular number to get back an instant SMS with the latest cricket score. We did zero marketing other than me posting the ZipDial Cricket number on Facebook a couple times. Within a few months the service completely took off and there were millions of users zipdialing millions of times per day. b) Upon realizing that Cricket had gone viral, we knew we needed to capture this social graph more intelligently. We built ZipDial Friend Referrals to incorporate into our customer campaigns, and it’s been amazing how well it has worked. The user experience starts with an ad in traditional media (e.g. print, TV, point of sale), and after ZipDialing to respond, the user is prompted to refer friends to the brand. In every case, there is a viral increase in reach of between 20-75 percent in responses (and therefore effectively an increase in ROI of 20-75 percent) due to friends inviting friends to participate in the campaign. It still amazes me that even though fewer than 10 percent of our users have smartphones or access to Internet, they are able to create these viral campaigns and build a social graph. 2) Willingness to pay among low-income consumers is much stronger than others would give credit. For example, take mobile payments. For users in India earning $100-200 per month, mobile payments is not about splitting a dinner bill with friends. A lady living in a slum or village who can save a $0.50 bus ride and 4 hours between travel and waiting in line to pay an electricity bill would gladly pay at least $0.50 fee for that payment transaction, something we more-connected users in the U.S. would refuse to pay. There is vibrant consumption happening even if it is at lower-value transactions, and there is strong willingness to pay for goods and services of value. Are you profitable? If not, when? We could be profitable today, at two times our current run rate, at three times, etc. It is a question of strategy and how fast we want to grow. The last 12 months for us have been squarely focused on understanding our customer metrics like ARPU, acquisition cost, retention and customer lifetime value. On that foundation, we are turning up the dials to scale faster even if it means profitability is stretched out. Tell us about your favorite usage of the service by a client. While many customers are enjoying ZipDial for a more specific pain point like collecting customer feedback, my favorite use case is when customers embrace consumer loyalty more completely. The three customers most attuned to this use case are Gillette, Greenpeace and the Disney Channel who are all using ZipDial in the same way – ZipDial Followers to build ongoing consumer loyalty. Every touch point they have with a consumer in the “real world” carries a ZipDial number as a call to action. The engagement started by dialing the first ZipDial call to action number activates an application on the platform, and the engagement continues in a flow of activities. Users become ZipDial Followers and get updates and engagement, similar to being a Twitter or Facebook follower. For example for these customers: Gillette starts with print ads, TV ads, or placards of agents giving out sample razors in shopping centers. Users engage with activities like “hear actor Salman Khan’s special message about his new movie” or “pledge to support rededication of the Gateway of India to Indian soldiers” or calling women to ZipDial to answer surveys about whether they prefer a beard or clean-shaven face on their man. Greenpeace in their PR or carried by agents who greet citizens on the street. Users ZipDial to pledge support for the various causes they support like “stop deforestation and save tigers,” “stop toxic dumping by corporations,” or “more strict regulations for food safety in India.” Disney Channel in all of their programming, including both direct Disney engagement like “vote for your favorite Disney princess” or “spot Mickey and ZipDial as he pops up on the screen” as well as brand solutions for their advertisers like “answer a quiz competition for Horlicks.” ZipDial followers recruit their friends to engage (as mentioned above regarding friend referrals). In that way, every “real world,” traditional media not only becomes interactive and sticky, but also viral. Marketers then use ZipDial Analytics for their “real world” campaigns in the same way that they would use Google or Facebook Analytics for online performance and engagement. Here are some interesting metrics from these three customers: Gillette has more than 2.4 million ZipDial users engaged compared to 1.63 million Facebook likes. Users who respond to Gillette ads invite an average of 2.8 friends to join Gillette’s ZipDial Followers, though interestingly, users who were recruited by a friend are even more likely to invite other friends at an average rate of 3.2 friends. Greenpeace has over 1.4 million ZipDial users compared to 131,000 Facebook likes. Click-through or “dial-through” rates on updates to Greenpeace’s ZipDial Followers are extremely high at 21 percent, which is far above the typical 2-3 percent response rate they get on updates to non-followers. Greenpeace also has a very high rate of viral reach. Users who responded to Greenpeace promotions have recruited an additional 54 percent of users to follow Greenpeace. Disney, in only their first month of using ZipDial, acquired more ZipDial users than their still only 281,000 Facebook users. Within only that first month, Disney also saw a very high active rate with an average of 8.1 engagements per user. Not only do these advertisers drive more engagement, but this also directly translates to analytics on performance and ROI of their traditional media spends. ZipDial Analytics allows marketers to slice data across media channels, geography, user profiles, etc. Would missed calls ever work in the U.S.? Where else would it work? Regardless of what phone you are carrying, the simplest thing you could ever do is dial a number, especially when it takes a split second for only one ring. Therefore, when it comes to driving interaction with traditional media, zipdialing will inevitably drive more responses, even in the U.S. That said, the reason we are focused on expanding first within emerging markets is because of the huge market need. Markets like the U.S. have highly connected consumers and relatively massive amounts of data on consumer profiling and personalization. This fundamentally does not yet exist in India and emerging markets, and that is the ground the ZipDial is breaking.
——— As I traveled the country, I asked people what they thought about ZipDial and the other opportunities that India has as a market. Wagoner had some pretty good ideas on what else can be done there: India has an abundance of labor, plus high demand and high willingness to pay for education, coupled with migration that clogs the crumbling infrastructure in cities where jobs are more abundant. Given these dynamics and given the increasing connectedness of people across the country, Crowdsourcing and related business models have huge potential but will take inherently Indian forms. For example, Rural BPOs are a variation of an outsourcing or crowdsourcing model that is bound to succeed. The more jobs that can be created in further reaching areas, the more this lighten the burden on overly congested metropolitan areas. Women are also a fantastic source of high quality labor. While in lower income segments, girls are severely undereducated, the number of women graduating from college or higher education nearly equals men, including in engineering and sciences. However, the percentage of women working drops dramatically in the mid twenties after marriage and child birth. This is a ripe opportunity to enable crowdsourcing models to employ well-educated women in circumstances which suit their more traditional lifestyles. Wagoner studied emerging markets in college and took a chance by moving to India after working at eBay as a Business and Product Manager for two years. It has clearly paid off. To date, ZipDial has raised money from Times Internet and 500 Startups, but from what I’ve heard, there is more funding on the way. [Photo credit: ]
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Malaysian Investment Firm Catcha Sets Aside $150M For Asean Startups
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
Catcha Group, a Malaysia-based investment firm has announced it will invest up to $150 million in Asean-based online businesses over the next five years. The funds will come both from the top as well as through the Catcha Group’s subsidiaries. The Asean region refers to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. The company’s online assets are worth over $300 million together, according to reports. Catcha’s CEO, Patrick Grove, said the decision to carve out the funding is because the company is seeing a rise in ideas and entrepreneurs in the region, and is keen to make successful exists from these investments. One of Catcha’s crowning investments was its $300,000 investment into the portal in 2007, which today is worth $170 million. Catcha has its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and offices in Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia. Its digital and print publishing arm, , is listed on the Malaysian stock exchange’s junior board. The company’s iProperty and site are both listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. (via )
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Kids Love The Apple Store So Much They Pee On The Seats
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 |
Don’t ever sit on the black balls at the kids table in Apple retail stores, recommends supposed former employee and . It seems that as 370 million people visit an Apple Store each year, a few of the kids are leaving something behind when they go. Though we can’t verify if he really worked there, Mister_Rabbit writes: “Going through my old photos from when I worked in Apple retail years ago and came across this gem, the kid’s table piss ball. I had almost forgotten that little tidbit of knowledge I had learned from the job. Apparently when kids are really into a game they will often choose to just pee in their seat without stopping what they’re doing. The result? Squishy black ball seats. I had never really believed that kids would do this until I walked by while they were retiring one of the balls one night.” Then he offered fellow Reddit visitors this photo of one of the seat balls with the cover removed: Several other supposed Apple Store employees commented that they too refer to the seats as “pee balls.” If an adult customer was being a jerk, “Why don’t you go take a seat on one of the balls while I find you some help.” Others report that all the devices get wiped down with disinfecting wipes each night, and Apple policy is to replace the balls if kids leave them, uh, stained. Though considering how mesmerizing Apple’s products are, it might not be right to place all the blame on the children. Mister_Rabbit concludes the soiled seats are “Just one of the nasty little ‘ewwws’ lurking in arguable the coolest retail environments around.”
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Filipino Accelerator IdeaSpace Picks Country’s Top 20 Tech Startups
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
Many of the brighter ideas coming out of tech startups in the Philippines are health-related, with a heavy slant on mobile technologies. Filipino incubator, just whittled a list of 700 entries from startups down to just 20. These 20 will eventually be halved further. IdeaSpace is offering 10 slots to startups to get six months incubation support and of up to $120,000 (PHP 5 million) each, to be decided on April 5. Teams from outside the Metro Manila area will also get housing support. A look at the list of finalists reveals that healthcare is a top concern, and like many tech ideas in Asia’s emerging markets, the heavy reliance on mobile technologies is apparent. IdeaSpace would not provide more details on the startups’ models, in order to protect their intellectual property, it said. IdeaSpace was founded about a year ago, as a non-profit incubator and accelerator for Filipino startups. It has the support of large firms in the country like telcos, hospitals, F&B and infrastructure conglomerates. It has about PHP 500 million ($12 million) to run for the next five years from its members. One of its founders, , returned to the Philippines to help start IdeaSpace, after years working in technology in the Valley. Valencia has a Masters of Engineering degree from Cornell as well as an MBA from Stanford. He’s worked for Cisco Systems and Raytheon in California before returning to his home country, where he’s the head of corporate development and innovation for Smart, one of the two largest telcos in the Philippines.
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ZTE Is Betting On China’s Nascent 4G Network To Bolster Its Flagging Profitability
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
ZTE is honing in on increased investment in 4G networks by China’s major telecom operators as it struggles to catch up with domestic rival Huawei Technologies, . ZTE and Huawei are expected to compete for most 4G network contracts with China’s three major carriers (China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom) because the two telecom equipment makers . Securing contracts is especially important for ZTE because its performance has been . ZTE in January that it will post its first-ever annual loss for 2012 (its earnings release is scheduled for later this week). According to ZTE, its net loss for 2012 will be between 2.5 billion yuan and 2.9 billion yuan due to delays in network projects and a decline in handset revenue. That is the first annual loss for the company since it went public in Shenzhen in 1997. ZTE’s strategy since the mid-1990s has been to focus on aggressively expanding overseas, taking on rivals Ericsson, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia Siemens in emerging markets such as India. The company’s expansion has often shaved away at its profitability because ZTE offers prices so low competitors often give up instead of matching the bids. But Huawei still holds an advantage over ZTE because Huawei’s larger size gives it an edge when offering lower bids on contracts with carriers. Huawei, the world’s second-largest telecoms equipment maker after Ericsson, has forecast that its 2012 net earnings will rise 33 percent to 15.4 billion yuan. ZTE has said that it and make a profit in 1Q2013 by cutting costs and focusing on developed markets like the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Though China’s 4G network expansion will also be a key part of ZTE’s strategy, the company may have to wait a bit longer for to reap the rewards because TD-LTE is still waiting for approval from the Chinese government. But China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom have already been busy building out their infrastructure. Together, the three companies will spend 345 billion yuan ($56 billion USD) on expanding their 4G networks this year. China Mobile, the world’s biggest wireless network operator by subscribers, in 100 large cities by the end of this year. In February, the telecom giant on the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) to start issuing 4G licenses soon by announcing that it was preparing to launch a “trial commercial” service in Guangzhou and Shenzhen with customized Galaxy S3 smartphones from Samsung. China Mobile chairman Xi Guohua said at the Mobile World Congress last month that his company’s 4G network would cover about 500 million people in 100 cities by the end of this year, and that his company is working with ZTE and HTC in addition to Samsung to develop smartphones that can run on TD-LTE networks.
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Scenes From Penn State’s Startup Week Hackathon
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
[slideshow include=”784354,784356,784355,784352,784353,784357,784358″] For the past week or so I’ve been hanging out at Penn State University for its second annual , an educational get-together of startup founders and entrepreneurs spearheaded by Weebly CEO (and Penn State alum) David Rusenko. The idea is simple enough: to give students some crucial insight into what it means to be a startup founder, and hopefully inspire some to take a chance on an idea they believe in. Those Penn State students have been on the receiving end of startup wisdom from the likes of Weebly’s Rusenko, Reddit/Hipmunk co-founder Steve Huffman, Exec founder Justin Kan, and Scribd/Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam just to name a few, but there’s only so much fun to be had by just to tales of startup glory. That’s why , Penn State’s student-run entrepreneurship group, invited local (and not so local) nerds to cook up their own pizza-and-caffeine-fueled ventures for 24 hours on a Friday night. Now I’m a sucker for a good hackathon, so I sat down with a few of the would-be founder teams to get a feel for what they were trying to accomplish in a mere 24 hours. Of all the teams present (Innoblue’s Kathleen Warner told me this has been their biggest hackathon yet), only a few dabbled with hardware. Penn Staters Sujay Patel, Houston Hunt, Katya Greene, and Andrew Greene were among that small subset with a project they call Dashtag. Long story short: Dashtag is meant to help retailers, businesses and organizations push information to visitors’ mobile devices with NFC tags. “Let’s say you’re walking through the mall and GameStop has a tablet app demo,” the team explains during its two-minute pitch. “You tap your device to the node and the download starts.” They figure it can also be used for painless Wi-Fi network setup (say, at a coffee shop), and to authenticate Bluetooth transmissions without the need for users to fish their phones out of their pockets. Penn State juniors Jimmy Zelinskie, Dan Scanlon and Drew Oros, as well as Justin Makaila from West Chester University, stayed up all night to whip up a multi-person, Django-powered video chat web app they call Present. Video conference calls are par for the course these days, but the idea here is that users can stream from webcams or iPhones thanks to a native app. The team baked Twitter support into Present so viewers can more easily communicate with broadcasters. They’ve also managed to coax the thing into work on Roku and Google TV boxes. Here’s the kicker, though — all video streams are tagged with GPS data by default, so users will eventually be able to manipulate a map interface to view videos from certain areas. And then I came across a familiar face: David Fontenot from the University of Michigan (also known as one of the guys behind the ) is at it again with another dubious concept. I can’t really repeat the name in polite company but HackMyJ*zz wants to connect people eager to start families with famous or noteworthy sperm donors. Fontenot’s tongue was planted firmly in cheek for this one, but he maintains that this is still a market that’s worth tapping — reluctant teammates Pulak Mittal (University of Pennsylvania) and Tess Rinearson (Carnegie Mellon University) didn’t seem convinced. Good luck with that, I guess. But the most impressive thing to come out of this group was a project called Hologram, created by Zain Shah (University of Pittsburgh ’15) and Ishaan Gulrajani (MIT ’16). Simply put, Hologram creates 3D images from 2D ones by analyzing and assigning depth values to certain areas based on how the objects depicted are lit. According to Gulrajani, “areas of the photo which are dimmer without flash and brighter with flash are closer, and areas of the photo that aren’t affected by the flash are farther away. The resulting 3D image could stand a bit of polish but it works remarkably well considering the pair knocked it out in 24 hours. Judges actually had to confirm that they didn’t start working ahead of time before awarding them the grand prize: an all-expenses paid trip to San Francisco.
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Presefy Lets You Control Presentations With Your Phone, No Software Required
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
Powerpoint presentations. Not once in the history of humanity has someone said “Oh man, I LOVE giving Powerpoint presentations” non-sarcastically. Really, I looked it up. , a four-man team out of Finland, is making presenting a whole lot less painful by harnessing the power of the Interwebs to do away with some of the classic problems. As anyone who has studied in the fine art of Giving Presentations That Aren’t Horrible can tell you, the first step in giving an engaging talk is getting the hell away from your computer. You want to talk with your audience, not at your laptop. That means using a remote control. And using a remote control, of course, means stepping into a world of pain. Oh, you’re using someone else’s laptop at the last minute? Better track down some compatible USB drivers and hope that they don’t explode in your face. Oh, you forgot to swap out the batteries with fresh ones? Hope you didn’t want to go past the third slide. Presefy wants to kill off the uni-purpose remote control, instead pushing the responsibility of steering to your smartphone. But here’s the special twist: because it’s all done through the browser, no special drivers or apps are required. Oh, and another cool trick: since it’s all being pushed over the web anyway, you can have just about as many people viewing the presentation on their own laptops as you want. No more straining to see what the slide says just because the dude who made it decided to put all of his bulletpoints in 8 pt. Comic Sans. College professors can give lectures without the folks in the back needing binoculars. Presefy is currently free, though the team is working on a Pro plan with features like password-protected presentations, downloadable presentations, and the ability for viewers to go between slides without screwing with the main display. The service only plays friendly with Powerpoints and PDFs at the moment (folks on Keynote will have to export to something else), but the team says other formats are coming soon. The one catch: since this is all done through the browser, you’ll want to make sure the venue you’re presenting at has solid connectivity. In a college classroom or a meeting room at your favorite VC’s office? Sure. At a tech conference with 5,000 people all chorking up the connection? This might not the best solution.
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The Social Web Will Help Protect Us From Another Dot-Com Fizzle
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
You’ve all heard stories about the infamous dot-com bubble burst of the early aughts. It wasn’t pretty, a lot of people lost a lot of money – and their livelihoods to boot. There will always be talk of whether we are close, or ever could get close, to a again. I spent some time with an early employee of everything-you-can-think-of-on-demand- , of Graphicly, which was a poster child for early dot-com excess. The company raised $250 million before it shut its doors in 2001, since it had only become popular with college students and young professionals, they said. In 1999, its revenues were only $3.5 million, leaving the company with a net loss of $26.3 million. Ouch. This service was a lot like hot companies of today and . The difference was that Kozmo didn’t have the social Internet, mobile devices or apps to spread the word about its free delivery service. Mind you, being a free delivery service makes zero sense, so no wonder why it flamed out. Baldwin and I discussed an early commercial campaign that the company was super proud of, spending millions upon millions of dollars to produce and air. It starred an older version of the Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors. It got me to thinking, and this is exactly why Kozmo fizzled: It was a cute commercial, but since it cost so much money to hire the agency to come up with the concept, cast it and air it, it was already an incredibly wasteful idea before it was complete. However, what was Kozmo to do? There was no Facebook, no Twitter and there certainly wasn’t YouTube for something like this to go (ick) “viral.” There were no Facebook pages to like, no accounts to follow and no apps to download. Kozmo had a few choices to get its name out there to the world, and all of them were expensive. This is why so many companies crashed and burned: There were no ways to do things cheaply. Failing and going back to the drawing board was impossible. To hit yet another demographic, Kozmo paid to have a different commercial created, but this one never hit the airwaves:
Again, cute and not awful. However, both of the commercials are something that these days, passing them around to networks of millions of people thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Google searches and YouTube. I can’t imagine a company like Justin Kan’s Exec even discussing paying millions of dollars to come up with an advertising campaign for television, the idea is now prehistoric and ludicrous. But that’s all companies like Pets.com and Kozmo.com had. Their ideas weren’t awful, but their operating costs, especially when it came to distribution, were astronomical. In 2013, a company like Kozmo comes out of Y Combinator every batch and raises nothing more than a $250K seed round to see if it has what it takes to succeed. If it doesn’t, then the smallish teams usually scrap the product and build something else, using their learnings from the previous letdown. While Facebook might not have hit the sweet spot for offering advertising options to brands yet, it’s of what used to be available. More startups are being formed because there are simply fewer hurdles for distribution thanks to these social platforms. It means that there are way more companies and ideas to weed through to find the gems, but it means that no real financial or industrial damage can be done. Facebook has been around for nine years and and Apple’s App Store is almost five. These are good things that will get in the way of another crash. Fewer companies going public will help that, too. We’ll never hear about , a company that to sell fashionable clothing online or a after generating only $1 million in yearly revenues. There are just too many metrics and social signals on the web these days, in real-time, to find out if a company is successful enough to warrant funding anywhere close to what the aforementioned companies raised. Having said all of that, what if Kozmo had YouTube? That Lee Majors video would have blown up on Twitter, and who knows…maybe it wouldn’t have gone out of business. Okay, it probably still would have, because “free” anything is never a good idea when it actually costs a company something. The web has grown up around businesses, for a reason, to protect entrepreneurs from raising stupid money to do stupid things with it. We’re safe for now, but Twitter and Facebook won’t cut it for social distribution forever. That means that there is plenty of room for moonshot thinkers to come in and build a service that can get the attention of hundreds of millions of users, something different, something fresh, something that smaller companies can leverage to build up their own businesses. That ongoing distribution channel evolution is important to protecting our industry from a crash ten years from now, and that’s what excites me about technology.
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Fly Or Die: Albumatic
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
In a land where entrepreneurs are struggling desperately to integrate location into the worldwide photo-sharing phenomenon, may have swooped in just in time. Ventures like Color and others have tried and failed, and not for lack of funding, to let users enjoy location-based events by sharing photos with each other around that specific event. However, it turns out that sharing photos with strangers, whether you find yourself in the same location or not, doesn’t attract users as much as you’d think. It’s not the photo-sharing that stops people, but more the “location” bit. Even Highlight, which has nothing to do with photos per se, hasn’t taken off as expected due to the fact that location has very little to do with relevance when it comes to social. Albumatic takes a new approach, by letting users close-by join Albums and add to them, while users far away can join to watch, but not add. This gives a little more control to the user, and also allows people who aren’t right there next to you still enjoy the photo-sharing process. Albumatic is in the process of in funding, according to a recent SEC filing. All in all, it’s unclear if people really want or need a service like that, especially alongside our many media-sharing apps like Instagram, Vine, etc. However, if there is a demand for location-based photo-sharing, Albumatic seems to have it figured out. Two flies.
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What If The Google Reader Readers Just Don’t Come Back?
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
If judged by my Twitter stream last week, the shutdown of Google Reader is the in the history of news. Of course, the reality is that Google is likely for a good reason: relatively few people used it, with less using it over time. , and all that. But that doesn’t mean this move isn’t a mistake for a couple reasons. The first is that Reader’s users, while again, relatively small in number, are hugely influential in the spread of news around the web. In a sense, Reader is the flower that allows the news bees to pollinate the social web. You know all those links you click on and re-share on Twitter and Facebook? They have to first be found somewhere, by someone. And I’d guess a lot of that discovery happens by news junkies using Reader. By killing the flower, Google could also kill the bees. That would be bad for all of us, even if we no longer use Reader or have . But the second reason worries me even more because it’s more quantifiable. By killing Reader, Google is likely to harm a lot of publishers, large and small, by eliminating a larger source of traffic. On , I’ve always been surprised to see Reader constantly in the top five of traffic referrers day in and day out. If I tweet out a link or share one on Facebook, it leads to large spikes, but Reader is my rock. It’s steady traffic each and every day. When I heard about the killing of Reader, I decided to dig a bit deeper to see just how much traffic Reader is responsible for. And I did this not only for my own site, but for TechCrunch as well. The results are both fascinating and terrifying. When Reader takes its dirt nap in July, a lot of us could be really screwed in the two places it hurts the most: our egos and our pocketbooks. In the past 30 days, Google Reader has been the number four referrer of traffic to TechCrunch, behind just Google Search, Facebook, and Twitter — and it nearly beat Twitter. Google Reader accounted for a little over three percent of all visits. If you go back to include the past year, Google Reader falls to number five on the list, with Aol.com, the parent of this site, sneaking in there as well. But the percentage of total referrals jumps a bit in that span, to just over four percent. If I include a full three years worth of data, the first thing you’ll notice is that Google Reader has indeed dropped quite a bit in usage over time — at least as seen by TechCrunch. Referrals (on a monthly basis) are now about one-third of what they were at the peak of Reader referral power in August 2010. But over that entire span, Reader is the number two referrer to TechCrunch, behind just Google Search. Yes, over the past three years, Reader has driven more traffic to the site than Facebook, Twitter, or Aol. In fact, it has driven more than Twitter and Aol over that span (though, to be fair, some of Twitter’s traffic was “dark social” at points before they wrapped every link in t.co). Reader has accounted for over seven percent of all TechCrunch visits in the past three years. Looking at my own personal site, ParisLemon, the story is a little different. When my site was young and not really maintained with much frequency, Reader was routinely out of the top ten referrers. But over the past couple of years, as my site has grown, Reader has quickly risen to become a key driver of traffic — it’s now consistently in the top five. To me, this shows Reader’s importance to smaller publishers. As my site has grown, Reader has become an increasingly important way for people to read my site. And it has clearly driven a lot of that growth. That all ends this coming July. And all of that just speaks to the traffic that Reader to sites. The key element of Reader, of course, is that it allows readers to consume content without visiting a site if they choose to. To some, this has always been problematic, since those readers aren’t being served ads (unless they’re being injected into the feed, of course). To others, this was a vital distribution mechanism. For every person that got referred to a site via Reader, there were undoubtedly thousands more reading quietly on a daily basis that you would simply never see or hear from. Again, while perhaps not directly monetizable, I’d imagine those readers are important in other ways. Maybe they’re other bloggers who read everything and choose to link to your site because they read a post of yours in Reader. Or maybe they’re one of those aforementioned “bees” that read your content in Reader and chose to then put it on Twitter, or Facebook, or Reddit, or Hacker News, or all of them. I can’t help but get the feeling that the ramifications of Google killing off Reader are going to be far more wide-reaching than they may appear at first glance. Given the recently and others such as Digg promising to fill the void, maybe the direct referral traffic component is replaced. But given Reader’s importance to sites like TechCrunch, I’d say that’s a pretty big . I think it’s just as likely that a large amount of those regular visitors go away and never come back. And without links to sites being seeded via Reader, maybe non-regular visitors dip as well. All of this could seriously screw with the pageview-based advertising model of the blogosphere. What if five to ten percent of visits just vanish? What if it’s even more? I’ve personally long-since moved on from Google Reader. But its impending death still concerns me. For the same reasons that the concerns me.
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Y Combinator-Backed Prizeo Helps Celebrities Tap Their Fans For Charity Fundraising
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
is a startup aiming to channel celebrities’ social media influence into funding for charity. Co-founders Bryan Baum and Leo Seigal are familiar with the fundraising world, having co-founded a student philanthropy organization while at Oxford. (That’s also where they met their co-founder and CTO Andrej Pancik.) They say the group raised more than $1 million at its charity events, but Baum argued that ultimately, the model was “not scalable.” The fundraisers are often driven by the chance to meet or win prizes from celebrities, but “even if you’re wealthy, there’s a limit to how much money you’re going to spend,” Baum said. At the same time, there are a lot of people who might want to support these causes, but can’t afford a $1,000-per-plate fee. Seigal added there are problems from the celebrity standpoint, too, because the process is often “just transactional” — they’re asked to donate something for an auction, but they don’t really get to build a relationship with the charity or with the donors. With Prizeo, celebrities can tap their broader fanbase (not just the fabulously rich) for donations, then offer prizes for their help. The celebrity decides on the prize and also writes a personal message to fans. And as those fans donate more money, they’re eligible for different rewards, but as long as they give the minimum amount, they can compete for a grand prize, which usually involves some one-on-one time with the celebrity in question. Baum said the winner is chosen by a random number generator: “Everyone’s on the same level.” But will celebrities actually get on-board? Well, Prizeo has already attracted some big names. For example, the company launched on Friday, where the grand prize is a cooking lesson with Oliver in London, all expenses paid. Seigal said the campaign has already raised tens of thousands of dollars for the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation, and “inspired hundreds of ‘messages to Jamie’ off the back of a tweet and Facebook post.” include comedian Stephen Fry and the boyband JLS (whose grand prize was “the ultimate boyband experience” with JLS and One Direction). And while the company has been UK-centric thus far, it’s about to start a bigger marketing push in the United States. The ultimate goal is to create a destination site where a community of fans can find different celebrities and causes to support. And the team is defining celebrity pretty broadly — Seigal said they’re interested in working with “anyone who has any kind of influence in any area.” Baum added that Prizeo is also “a tech platform” with a full set of features, including a simple payment process, sharing capabilities (fans can win additional prizes for sharing the campaign with on Facebook and Twitter), and analytics. The company currently makes money by charging a 10 percent transaction fee. The team also plans to start working with different sponsors to support the campaigns. Seigal said he hopes to eventually make enough money from the sponsorship side of the business to bring down the transaction fee. Prizeo is being incubated by Y Combinator. (In fact, the team recorded a brief-but-enthusiastic video testimonial from Fry as part of its YC application.) It has also raised funding from angel investors including Edgar Bronfman Jr. (former CEO of Warner Music Group) and Ajaz Ahmed (founder and chairman of AKQA).
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AWS Reveals In Job Listing It’s Launching “A New Business,” Looks To Be Pushing Deeper Into Mobile
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
Amazon Web Services believes wholeheartedly that the cloud is the future. And not just the cloud, but the AWS public cloud. As a result, and has been making some aggressive moves to fluster the incumbents and stalwarts, like Microsoft. The strategy has been to continue offering more and more services, beating its opponents at scale, while operating on razor-thin margins. And so far it’s been working: , through its programmable architecture, volume and tiny margins, AWS has built a “$1.5 billion business.” Now, it seems that AWS is looking to apply its model to mobile to get deeper into enterprise — with the creation of what looks to be a whole new arm of its cloud division. TechCrunch today learned of a job listing that has been posted and on that, in its attempt to allure engineers, describes the position as one that will be part of a new business. it says plainly, and is looking for someone who wants to build “ The post continues: In this role, you will be responsible for creating and owning world-class production tablet and web client applications across major platforms including iOS and Android … As a member of the founding team, you will have significant influence on our overall strategy by helping define the product features, drive system architecture, and spearhead the best practices that enable a quality v1 product setting the ground work for a successful v2 and beyond. While we don’t know yet what Amazon has cooking (we’ve reached out and are awaiting their comment), we do know that they’re launching a new business that is focused on building for mobile and for those with deep experience building tablet apps. It will be a new product, something AWS hasn’t done before and the team will be small, iterating quickly in a Again, Amazon needs a way to get deeper into the enterprise market as well as offer more for developers who increasingly look to their mobile devices to manage their apps. AWS has been showing off its capabilities by adding the ability for its customers to , and it’s been dropping its prices across the board. , , you name it. Founder Krishnan Subramanian says that Amazon looks to me “making a play on the front-end and looking to build out a management service to build apps for AWS on multiple mobile platforms.” For the most part, developers access AWS through the web, Subramanian said. Third-party providers are offering mobile apps, not Amazon. This new group could be charged with building a new arsenal of mobile apps. AWS does need to make a backend play but this job posting does not reflect that. As it stands right now, Amazon doesn’t have the middleware, or cloud-based mobile SDK, which would allow mobile developers to build an app without having to worry about building their own stack. However, given how well and others (who do offer this support) are doing, Amazon will likely look to get into that space. Eventually, there’s going to be a bloodbath in this space, or a feed frenzy. Kinvey et al have already begun to feed off Oracle, IBM and the other enterprise giants, and Amazon would be remiss if it wasn’t on its gameplan. But that is not the priority with this job posting. More so it looks like a way for the company to appeal to people who use mobile devices to manage their AWS instances.
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Michael Dell May Lose Control Of PC Maker After Two Competing Buyout Bids Emerge
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
Dell’s board is looking at two surprise takeover bids from Blackstone Group and billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn, citing sources close to the discussion. A special committee is deciding whether either proposal would trump an existing . The new bids mean that Michael Dell could potentially lose control of the company he founded in 1984 and that he and Silver Lake will most likely need to to make it more attractive to Dell shareholders, some of whom have complained that its terms undervalue the PC maker. Icahn and Blackstone put in their bids on March 22, the last day of the “go-shop” period to solicit competing offers for Dell. The company could potentially announce as soon as Monday whether or not they will be interested in either of the new proposals. Icahn, who is being advised by investment bank Jefferies Group, offered $15 per share for 58 percent of Dell’s stock. Icahn plans to fund the transaction with his own funds, Dell’s cash and new debt. Blackstone, which is being advised by Morgan Stanley and partnered with Francisco Partners and Insight Venture Partners, is offering to pay more than $14.25 per share for Dell. Michael Dell and Silver Lake’s offer had been to take Dell private for $13.65 per share, with Silver Lake putting up $1.4 billion. That deal would allow Michael Dell to remain CEO of the company, and he’d also contribute his 16 percent stake in Dell’s equity to the deal along with cash from his investment firm MSD Capital. Their bid has been criticized by Dell shareholders including Southeastern Asset Management and T. Rowe Price for undervaluing the company. Earlier this month, Icahn had also demanded Dell payout $15.7 billion in special dividends, though he is no longer asking for that, according to the Reuters source. Michael Dell has said that he wants to re-engineer Dell’s strategy so its focus shifts from PCs to tablets, data-center hardware, and software for corporations. The company’s founder returned as CEO in 2007 after a three year break–he had originally resigned that position in 2004.
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Google’s Global Impact Challenge Will Award $3M To 4 UK Social Entrepreneurs, With Tim Berners-Lee And Richard Branson Among The Judges
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
, the world’s largest search engine and one of the most powerful tech companies around, is now using its muscle to search for something new: social entrepreneurs. Today, the company is announcing the , a new prize that will award £2 million ($3 million) between four non-profit startups based in the UK that are using technology for social good in areas like education, economic development, health, environment and community service. Judges for the award include Tim Berners-Lee, Richard Branson, and we the people via a public vote. If successful, the prize could serve as a template for future social enterprise competitions in other countries. “Today we’re starting the hunt in the UK, but we also know that nonprofits all over the world are using techy approaches to develop new solutions in their sector,” writes Jacquelline Fuller, director of Google Giving, in a . “Who knows, the Global Impact Challenge might head your way next.” Applications for the award open today, with the deadline April 17. A Google team will make the first cut down to 10 finalists in May, at which point the public will vote for favorites, also being given a chance to make donations directly to each shortlisted project. Then, in June, Berners-Lee, Branson, Fuller and the other judges — Jilly Forster (social campaigns PR supremo) and Matt Brittin (Google’s VP for Northern and Central Europe) — will cast their votes for three winners, with the fourth coming from the public vote. Each winner will get £500,000; each of the 10 finalists will also each be getting 10 Chromebooks — a generous contribution for a startup non-profit. “The Web’s contribution to economic progress has been much celebrated, but I believe that we are only scratching the surface of its potential to solve social and political problems,” said Berners-Lee in a statement. “On behalf of the World Wide Web Foundation, I’m delighted to join Google in this exciting and innovative initiative.” The final four winners will also receive assistance from Google to get their projects off the ground. This could run from mentoring through to technical assistance — and potentially more, since some Googlers could even get involved as part of their program, which encourages all employees to give up 20 hours of the year to volunteer projects. The Global Impact Challenge is an extension of the , $23 million award that Google gave out in December among seven non-profits using technology to solve world problems like clean water ( ) and endangered species ( ). A Google spokesperson says that the difference between that round of awards and this newest Global Impact Challenge is that the latter features a competitive element, with the prize open to any non-profit in the UK that chooses to apply. On the other hand, with the earlier grants, “there was no entry criteria, rather, [the] grants [were] awarded to exceptional orgs doing amazing things with tech.” Or, as Brittin notes in a statement: “Over the years Google has sought to support great organisations that are using innovation and technology to improve the lives of millions around the world. With this new Challenge, non-profits will have the chance to make their own pitch for why they deserve the money.” The spokesperson told TechCrunch that Google does not have any specific plans to extend the open competition model to other countries right now, “But would love to be able to roll the Challenge out if possible.” As with Microsoft’s recent contest — outcome still TBA — Google’s initiative is a nice way of leveraging some of its profile, and a sliver of its profits, for something that’s been under-represented. Yes, there have been a growing number of startups cropping up around the concept of social entrepreneurship — the socially-minded crowdfunding platform being one example — and larger organizations like the proving that non-profit does not have to equal weak. But on balance, these days, when you hear the phrase “social startup” you think more of Facebook, Twitter and social media than you do of charity and good causes. For Google, this also comes at a time when the company is being scrutinized in Europe in a less flattering light. Google has been embroiled in a three-year antitrust investigation by EU regulators over its search products, with for Google to change practices, while regulators have final decisions to August of this year. Google could be liable up to $5 billion in fines if it does not settle with regulators.
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Is There Still Hope For Google’s Disappeared Android@Home And Nexus Q?
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
, Google’s Vic Gundotra keynoted the company’s 2011 I/O developer conference, and one of the big surprises of the day was the launch of Android@Home, Google’s attempt to corner the home-automation market. At the keynote, Google also showed the first prototype of what would later become the “social streaming media player” that it gave to every I/O 2012 attendee. Fast forward to today, just a few weeks before the next I/O, and home automation is still clunky and dominated by the same players as before, with the possible exception of . Google has barely mentioned Android@Home since 2011. The Nexus Q never even made it to market after Google “postponed” it just before it was scheduled to launch. Unlike other Google products, both Android@Home and the Nexus Q currently live in no-man’s land where forgotten Google products wait before they are either resurrected or put out on the curb with the rest of its failed products at the . While most neglected Google products disappear sooner or later, though, the Nexus Q, which got mostly negative reviews, still lives on an on Google Play. The Nexus Q was Google’s first attempt at designing its own hardware, and while the Q was a great hardware product, it felt like it was intentionally held back by its software, which was extremely limited. The hardware still looks great today, so maybe it will make a return at I/O this year, but hopefully as a fully featured media player with app support that’ll let you run the majority of your Android apps on a TV. I don’t have very high hopes for this, but it’s definitely a possibility, given that its internals were essentially those of a high-end Android phone. When it “postponed” its launch and gave a free Q to everybody who pre-ordered one, Google said it did so because it wanted to make the Q – and what better time to show how much it has improved it than at I/O 2013? The Nexus Q was just one piece of Google’s larger Android@Home home-automation vision. Android@Home was supposed to revolutionize home automation and turn Android into the operating system for your home. It would let you control everything from your heating system to your washer and dryer, alarm clock, lightbulbs (Google even had a partner for this “launch”), entertainment system and every other appliance. Since I/O 2011, we haven’t heard anything about Android@Home. Google still features the on its homepage, but that’s less about @Home than about talking to gadgets like a Fitbit over Bluetooth. Last month, though, Android@Home quietly made . The 4.2.2 configuration files, it turns out, mention mesh networks and Android@Home. We’ll likely see the next version of Android at I/O in May, and given this late reappearance of Google’s home-automation framework in its operating system, I’m pretty hopeful that we’ll see it make another keynote appearance this year. If not, look for it in the next list of spring cleaning items, right next to the Nexus Q and … [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD3Q4kJhD5w?feature=player_embedded]
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Wacom Cintiq 22HD Vs. Modbook Pro: Screen Real Estate Takes On Portability For The Digital Artist
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
Tablets are everywhere these days thanks to the iPad, but they lack a certain finesse necessary for fine digital arts work. That’s where longtime players like and still excel. Recently, I’ve had both a Wacom Cintiq 22HD and a new Modbook Pro in the studio for testing, and both have proven immensely handy for digital drawing, painting and photo editing. One’s clearly a desktop affair, while the other’s much more portable, but if you’ve only got the budget for one (it’s $2,000 for the Cintiq and around $3,200 for the Modbook), which to choose? The Modbook Pro is a modified MacBook Pro, from a company that has been hacking Apple’s notebooks together with Wacom pressure sensitive screens and turning out Frankenstein Apple tablets since long before the days of the iPad. The latest Modbook Pro is based on the mid-2012 version of the non-Retina MacBook Pro, with some amazing specs to boot. Some highlights (as tested): The Modbook also retains most of the ports of the MacBook Pro, with one Ethernet, one Firewire 800, a Thunderbolt port and one USB 3.0, plus the SD and audio in/out ports. The other USB 3.0 on a standard MBP is used to power the Wacom digitizer built into the Modbook’s display, which offers 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity with the included stylus, which slides into a holster built right into the case. You also get a slot-loading Superdrive on the Modbook Pro, along with a power button and sync button, which you press to make sure the pen is properly calibrated with the display whenever you power it on. The display itself is a matte, 13.3-inch 1280 x 800 pixel LCD, which has a textured feel that resembles paper when drawing with the included stylus.
The hardware is impressive, and feels sturdy and durable. Very sturdy, in fact, which accounts for one of its biggest drawbacks: it’s very, very heavy. At 5.4 pounds, it’s almost a pound heavier than a 13-inch MBP on its own, and since it’s a tablet designed for portability you quickly notice how hefty it actually is. Despite what you may think, it manages to not get too hot when in use, which is a huge bonus for a device that you’ll want to lie flat on your lap most of the time. Weight issues aside, the Modbook Pro delivers as a drawing tablet. It feels very natural, and mimics the experience of paper well. With the caveat that you’re writing on that paper on top of a stone tablet from biblical times. But it meets the definition of portable, if only just, and gives you access to full Mac and Windows (through Boot Camp) programs, including Sketchbook Pro, Photoshop, Manga Studio and many other industry stand-bys. The problem is that you often want to use it on desks and other flat surfaces, and there’s no good way to change the angle. Another issue is the on-screen keyboard. It’s the default one built into OS X, which many may not even know exists. It’s clunky, it only works with the stylus (no touchscreen input here), and it quickly has you diving for a Bluetooth keyboard if you’re doing anything other than opening and closing a drawing program. A good thing for comfort is that you can rotate the screen from the menu bar easily for portrait use. This Wacom drawing tablet is the latest in the Cintiq line (though the ). Unlike the Modbook, it isn’t a self-contained computer and must be connected to a Mac or Windows machine to work. It does have a much larger display, however, capable of true HD 1920×1080 resolution. Here’s a bit more about this bad boy: The Cintiq 22HD has two big differences from the Modbook, but in a way, they actually act as pretty equal trade-offs. The Modbook Pro costs a lot more, but that price difference is about the same as you’d pay for a MacBook Pro on its own, which is exactly what you’ll need to already own if you want the Cintiq 22HD to actually do anything, since it needs to plug into a computer.
There’s also the portability factor: the Cintiq simply isn’t. It’s like any 20+ inch display, but slightly bigger on account of the adjustable angle stand and the built-in ExpressKey and touch strip controls. Plus it’s tethered to your computer via a DVI cable (and whatever adapter you require, perhaps to Thunderbolt or HDMI) and a USB cable that handles the pressure sensitivity duties. But, you can actually slide the Cintiq 22HD off its stand, should you want to lay it in your lap for comfort’s sake, though you’d better have a pretty wide and accommodating lap to use it this way. That said, the Cintiq 22HD is a dedicated drawing tablet and its dedication to that task shows. Despite the fact that both devices use the excellent Wacom pen tech, the 22HD has double the pressure sensitivity, so it picks up more subtle changes in pen pressure, ships with a much better and more comfortable drawing stylus, and has a better, brighter display that also hase a much better viewing angle. Like the Modbook, it supports display rotation, and on its handy swivel stand, is actually easier to manhandle when used on flat surfaces. The Cintiq is also easier to use without a keyboard, thanks to the programmable ExpressKeys. You can assign them and the touch panels to zoom, pan, scroll, undo, delete, select all, or perform virtually any function you can do with a keystroke combination. That means a lot less cause to resort to keying in commands, which ultimately saves a lot of frustration. In some ways, comparing these two devices is like comparing an iMac to a MacBook Pro; if you need portability, you’re going to go with the latter regardless of the relative virtues of either. And the Modbook Pro is an excellent choice for demanding graphics professionals who need a portable device that has none of the trade-offs in terms of performance or software compatibility of something like an iPad or Galaxy Note 10.1. But if you fall within a broader group of pros and prosumers who are looking at either the entry-level Cintiq or the Modbook as a standalone solution, I’d have to go with the Cintiq. The Modbook’s portability is actually a hindrance in terms of making it comfortable for long-term use, and the Cintiq is just a better performer with more advanced, more nuanced tech on board for digital drawing and photo manipulation. Coming from the older Cintiq 12WX, the 22HD is a massive improvement, and that’s saying a lot considering how thrilled I was with the 12WX. The Modbook Pro is a remarkable achievement and perfect for those who demand portability, but it’s much more of a niche device. The Cintiq 22HD will disappoint no one who’s in the market for this sort of thing and has the budget to buy it. The main question that remains for that group of people is whether the just-announced 13HD can suit their needs instead, and I’ll let you know the answer to that in our upcoming review.
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West Virginia Lawmaker Seeks To Ban Drivers From Wearing Head Mounted Displays Like Google Glass
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
I don’t see a problem with this. In short, a West Virginia lawmaker wants to outlaw the wearing of head-mounted displays while driving in his state. The devices would join other banned electronic communication devices like cell phones. The bill, while perhaps a bit laughable at first, is logical and smart. It makes a lot more sense than of Google Glass in dive bars. The story goes that prompted the proposed legislation. CNET’s Chris Matyszczyk to the bill’s sponsor, Gary G. Howell, a Republican in the West Virginia Legislature, who thankfully isn’t an ignorant Luddite. He’s just sensible. I actually like the idea of the product and I believe it is the future, but last legislature we worked long and hard on a no-texting-and-driving law. It is mostly the young that are the tech-savvy that try new things. They are also our most vulnerable and underskilled drivers. We heard of many crashes caused by texting and driving, most involving our youngest drivers. I see the Google Glass as an extension. Texting while driving is dangerous, and while Google Glass is, well, , it is still a distraction. Cars are already overloaded with gadgets and screens. They have their own heads-up displays, countless dials and, worse yet, slow and unresponsive infotainment systems that seemingly control more of the vehicle with each new iteration. If you’re driving, that’s what you should be doing. Facebook can wait. The would lump head-mounted displays in with cell phones and other electronic devices currently banned from using while operating a motor vehicle. The first offense would result in a fine of $100. The second, third or subsequent offenses would cost $200 or $300, respectively. Howell goes on to state that he’s not sure if the proposal will become law, although he’s sure other legislatures will file similar bills. But have no fear. Google apparently saw this coming. .
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This Is Not A Smartwatch
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
Confession: I have a few storage boxes in my loft that contain old, but barely used, gadgets. Stowed away, still in their boxes, as if waiting for the right time to be brought out like unloved Christmas decorations. Ignoring the generations of well-used feature phones also put in storage (thanks to the data locked up inside their tiny brains) many of these devices are gadgets that never lived up to their promise. Which may be why I haven’t been able to throw them out. It just seems wasteful since they never had a useful life. Among this collection there is even a smartwatch. Or rather a Bluetooth watch, to give it its correct title. The smartwatch of its day, if you will. At first glance all these boxed-up gadgets look like they’re just waiting to be plugged in to finally start paying back the debt they owe for being made in the first place. Some even look a bit glamorous, gathering an air of mystery thanks to the pelting pace of technology evolution. But pick up yesteryear’s rejects and it soon becomes clear why they’re in stasis: they weren’t good enough to be useful. This is where the mystery stops. Here’s what passed for a smartwatch in 2008 – made by the : The Sony Ericsson MBW-200 Bluetooth watch was only ever an accessory to a mobile phone – and a limited accessory at that. It’s a timely reminder of the pitfalls of building a smartwatch, as the tech industry’s heavy hitters scramble their fighter jets to scream towards the . Sure, has proved there’s a market for some kind of wrist-mounted gizmo that connects to your smartphone and extends the experience of carrying a pocket-sized computer around with you all day every day — but boy it better be worth it. The MBW-200 wasn’t even good at being a watch, let alone acting as sidekick to the mobile phone. It was top heavy and chunky, so that rather than sit pleasingly on the wrist, it felt like it wanted to swing around it like a high bar gymnast. While its tiny OLED screen, resting forlornly at the bottom of the watch face, wiped a third of the markings off the dial. Aesthetically it was unbalanced and, when not displaying anything, gave the watch a vacant appearance. An ugly and uneasy conjunction of old tech and new. (It should be noted that the MBW-200 was a range of ladies’ watches – so these devices were even smaller than other SE Bluetooth watches, leaving very little room on the dial to accommodate a screen, hence its squashed situation.) I reckon a two-inch curved screen is the largest pane that could comfortable fit on my lady-sized wrist, without pushing into bangle territory — which illustrates a key design challenge for today’s smartwatch builders: wrists not only offer very limited real estate to build on, the plots aren’t all sized the same. Ergonomically the MBW-200 was already teetering on the brink of what’s acceptable everyday wrist wear — and its circular watch face was less than one-and-a-quarter inches in diameter. Another ergonomic problem with this early attempt at a smartwatch were its (physical) buttons, five in all, lined along the two strap-less sides. Being small, stiff and awkwardly placed, they required two fingers to be engaged in a pincer squeeze when pressing each one. One to push the button, the other to create an equal and opposite push from the other side to stop the watch from being shunted down your wrist. A touchscreen watch wouldn’t necessarily need any physical buttons so shouldn’t have to contend with such anchorage issues. But wrist-mounted touchscreens face other challenges — from how to protect such a large screen from the bumps and scrapes of everyday life, to how to fit in a big enough battery to power a rich, colour touchscreen display without building a chunky, ugly mess of a watch again. Hardware aside, the absolute worst thing about the MBW-200 was its ‘smart’ functions. They just weren’t smart enough to make it worth wearing. Setting aside the hassle of having to make sure watch and phone were properly paired each time you strapped the thing on, the OLED screen was ludicrously tiny: a mere 0.7 inches x 0.15 inches. Lengthier data (such as phone numbers) had to be scrolled to view, rather than being visible all at once. Not exactly helpful if you’re trying to figure out who’s calling. Incoming text messages were announced by a vibration to get your attention, and a text message icon appeared on the screen. This was fine except the actual message itself was not displayed. The screen didn’t indicate who it was from, either — both pretty huge constraints on usefulness. The watch’s other main function was to allow you to reject or accept calls via two of its physical buttons. Rejecting a call had some value – say if you wanted to stop your phone ringing and didn’t want to go to the trouble of pulling it out of your bag/pocket to do that. But having a button to accept a call but no way to take the call without getting the phone out anyway (unless you already owned and had previously paired a Bluetooth headset with it happened to have it to hand/in your ear)? Well, that feature could actually feel pretty dumb. Will an Apple iWatch or a Samsung Galaxy watch or a Google Android watch let you talk directly into your wrist when someone calls you? And include a speaker so you have to lean in close to listen? It might have to in order to avoid being annoying, but that’s more kit to fit in and more stuff to power. Not to mention a new type of behaviour to think about: people talking into and listening to their wrists. (Albeit, that doesn’t seem so odd when you consider Google is trying to get people talking to their .) And if you can make calls on a smartphone, could it actually work as a standalone phone? Squeeze in a SIM tray, and could an actually become the fabled ? It’s a stretch but maybe a smartwatch has to be that useful to be, well, . Five years is an ice age in technology terms so some of the MBW-200’s features weren’t as dumb as they look now. This watch was made to marry a dumbphone after all. And hey, some of what Sony Ericsson was doing five years ago, Pebble is doing now – which perhaps goes to show that despite a human appetite for a wrist-mounted computer, building something that genuinely works in that coveted, curved, convenient but constrained location is a harder problem than a lot of companies realise. Because a lot of companies have tried to make a smartwatch and made cupboard trash instead. When I was given the watch, after some initial excitement at the concept of being able to screen calls and texts, the reality of its limited usefulness vs. the hassle involved with charging, pairing, wearing and actually using the dumb thing soon sunk in. And, well, to cut a long story short, this not-so-smart-watch was put back in its box for good.
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The TechCrunch ‘Lean In’ Roundtable: Full Video And Transcript
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
The idea behind this was that while there has been a lot of about the book and the being born out of it, much of it has come from established women in Sandberg’s generation and above. While that’s been valuable, we at TechCrunch wanted to find a different perspective. So we pulled together a small group of Generation Y women who are part of the Silicon Valley’s rising new guard: , 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 broke the roundtable into four segments which were posted this past week: on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday, and on Friday. Now in the video embedded above, you can watch the entire discussion in full. Below, we’ve posted a written transcript of the talk, which includes time stamps that correspond with the video. Thanks for watching, and we’re hoping this is just the beginning of this discussion here at TechCrunch. Transcript:
Leena: Hi, I am Leena Rao. Welcome to this TechCrunch TV roundtable discussion on Sheryl Sandberg's much talked about new book, "Lean In:
Women, Work and The Will to Lead." I am joined by my colleague here at TechCrunch, Colleen Taylor, as well as a number of influential women in the technology world.
I would like to introduce everyone first. Please welcome Pooja Sankar, CEO and founder of Piazza, Ashley Mayer, Senior Director of Communications at Box, Megan Quinn, partner at Kleiner Perkins, and Leah Busque, founder and CEO of TaskRabbit. Thank you all for joining us here today. Pooja: Thank you. Ashley: Thank you. Megan: Thanks for having us. Colleen: We're going to do this in several short segments, because there's a lot to pull apart in this book. But just a start, I think both Leena and I wanted to thank all of you because I think there's one thing that Sheryl says in the book. A little bit further on in the book, page 146, she says when she was thinking about making her first speech about being a female executive, she said, "Friends and colleagues both male and female warned me making this speech would harm my career by instantly typecasting me as a female COO and not a real business executive.
So it takes a lot of courage just to even speak about being a woman, period, and pointing out the fact that your gender is a minority in a lot of the upper echelons of tech and business. So thank you for coming here and being on camera and talking about the book.
The first thing that I think I just want to bring up is the controversy surrounding this book. In The New York Times, Jodi Kantor and Marine Doubt, two very influential women kind of had their daggers out in some ways for this book before it came out. I just want to start off by asking you all since you've read it now, what you think about all that buzz that had happened before the book came out.
[00:02:04] Maybe Megan you can start. Megan: Sure. To be honest, I was a little bit skeptical because I did read all of those articles in advance of the book actually coming out, and it turns out a lot of those writers had not read the book either. I have to say, upon reading the book, I found myself vigorously nodding in agreement with much of what I read and many of Sheryl's circumstances and experiences. Leena: Pooja, what did you think? Pooja: So when I pick up a book, I often look to things that I can take for my own particular case, and there were many of those. It actually validated, many points I felt very validated. So I understand that not every point can be applied or is applicable to everyone, every woman out there, and I didn't want to read it with that in mind. I often find many of the criticism is around, well, these five points aren't applicable to everyone. But I really enjoyed reading it for the points that were applicable to me. Ashley: Yeah, I have been a bit of a Sheryl Sandberg fan girl for a while, since her Barnard commencement speech. So I was a little taken aback by all of the criticism before the book was published. The best part, though, is after getting the book and reading the introduction, she pretty much addresses and predicts every counter argument that was out there. So either those people hadn't read the book, or they hadn't read it closely enough. I mean, Sheryl knew what she was getting herself into when she wrote this, and she knew that she was taking a somewhat controversial stance. I think she framed things in a way that addressed and even validated all of the criticisms against her, but then that helped clear the way for her to actually make her argument. Leah: I found that point fascinating as well, and kind of near the end she tells a story about a female officer in the service and how that female officer was sort of bracing herself to be part of this very male contingent. [00:04:02]
Actually, it was the men in her group that really embraced her, but it was the wives of those men that ended up attacking her and being a little bit harder to deal with. Sheryl's point at that time is that it's often the women that aren't supporting each other and helping to build each other up. So when I read that part of the book and I thought back to those articles, that kind of struck a chord with me as well. Leena: I wanted to just add to what you said, Ashley. I hadn't read the book, of course, when I read many of those articles, and it was clear that those people hadn't read the book because she addressed things like I know I'm lucky. I know that I am lucky to have someone who takes care of my children, and I can afford multiple people to take care of my children. I know I've been lucky in my career as well to have mentors like so and so and so and so. So I think that it was a little bit, I guess, odd to me that there was that criticism even after reading the book because she did do so many, she had qualified the book so well I felt like when reading it. Colleen: Yeah, people would talk about, well, she doesn't say any, what about poor women or women who it's not even a question whether they're going to work or not. They have to. I said that just shows you didn't get to page five where she mentions that yes, there are bigger, there are many fundamental problems that we should still be working on getting up Maslow's hierarchy. That's one thing she said, "Knowing that things could be worse should not stop us from trying to make them better."
I also want to get into a point that she talks about kind of throughout, and it seems like this underlying concept of fear and fear being something that really holds women back. I wanted to see what you guys all thought of that sort of personally. I think page 24, she says, "Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure and the Holy Trinity of ear, the fear of being a mother, wife, or daughter." [00:06:12]
That's just a huge . . . we could probably spend 45 minutes just talking about fear. But I wanted to see what kind of parts spoke to you guys when she talks about those things. Megan: What was interesting to me was her comparison between fear and also self-doubt, and she really wrapped those two up together in the same chapter and in the same thinking, which is a lot of the fear that women feel, particularly around likeability honestly, which I think women do spend more time focused on and making sure their colleagues, their family, their community at large finds them likeable, is also wrapped in the self-doubt that they have over whether or not they can perform or whether or not they are performing up to the standards that they hold themselves to. So I thought that the combination of those two things really resonated with me as someone who, yes, has worked very, very hard and believes that I've earned the roles that I have, but has always sort of doubted in my head whether or not I worked hard enough. Could I have worked harder? Could I have done better, and could I've been more likeable in the same case? So that fear I think really does translate into not just a lack of sort of self-confidence, but also this question of likeability more broadly. Colleen: Yeah, it almost sounded like she was saying there is going to be fear there, but it is not unfounded. You are totally right to have these fears, and actually if you speak up, people aren't going to like you that much, because you're . . . I don't know.
Pooja, has that been your . . . Pooja: Well, if I think about the biggest difference between the 22- year-old Pooja and now today who I am, at 22, I was afraid and I was afraid to stand up for what I believed in, to even dig deep into understanding what it was that I believed in. In fact, it was actually really reassuring to hear that she was married once at a younger age, because at 22, I had entered into a traditional arranged marriage, and I was too scared to tell my parents I didn't want to. [00:08:00]
At 26 and a half, after 3 and a half years of trying, that was a very big moment where I had to stand up to an Indian society, an Indian community and relatives and say, "This isn't going to work for me." Since then, it has been trans formative because since I longer fear what others think or believe I should be doing, but I dig deep into what I want and what I believe in. Colleen: Wow. Yeah, I think I heard that from a few other people that I talked to that they were just about that personal revelation that she had in that book, and it was such a small little thing. But you're not the only person who has kind of found a lot of strength in that. Leah: Yeah, I think the other piece that she mentions, in that same chapter, besides fear is ambition, and she makes the point that actually if you talk to a lot of millenials today that just as many women will admit that they're ambitious, and that's actually a change. It's interesting, because that part really resonated with me. I remember when I was at IBM and working with a mostly male team and being an engineer and a programmer, I was always told that I was too ambitious as if it was something that was negative, and I never understood that. I was always kind of like, "Well, isn't ambition a good thing, you know?" So I think it is sort of this next generation that's taking that ambition by the reins and saying like, "This is a good thing." So I love that portion of the chapter as well. Ashley: I also really loved the whole part about the imposter syndrome because I personally related with that quite a bit, and it's nice to know that the COO of Facebook still doubts herself. I mean, when I joined Box, we were 50 people, and I was 24 years old. So I was terrified that I couldn't do the job. But even today, I think a lot of us especially who get into careers pretty young and then maybe grow with a company, I'm always constantly thinking, "Okay, am I just here because I happen to join young enough, worked really hard?" [00:10:04]
But it's very easy to dismiss that, and there are a lot of people who are in positions that maybe are a little bit higher up than what their experience levels would be, and it was really comforting that Sheryl sort of opened up about her own self-doubt and whether she could do, whether she could take on each new challenge in her career. Megan: I think that fear is compounded in Silicon Valley and in the startup community at large, where you do see people of different ages, at different roles, and different levels than you would see in the traditional corporate society. Ashley: Well, it's funny in my case, because I went to high school with our founder. So technically, it shouldn't be that weird, but I think and maybe this is something that women do more, but there is that sort of innate doubt. She does a really good job of saying address it, acknowledge it, and then just fake it until you make it, which I love because I feel like that's kind of what I do and probably what a lot of people do. We're sort of making things up as we go along, and maybe one of the benefits to being in the startup world is that you do get to sort of challenge or even ignore sort of corporate norms. So you have a chance to make your corporate culture or your career into what you want it to be. Colleen: That's a great way to wrap up that segment. We have a lot more to talk about too. Leena: In this segment, I want to talk about a feeling that she, I think Sheryl talks about throughout the book, and it's something that she says she's felt very much, and I know it's something that I feel and maybe Pooja feels as well as a new mom is guilt, and the feeling of guilt whether that be by doing things at work or by making sacrifices at work at the expense of spending time with your partner or your family or your children. She writes that guilt management is as important as time management, and I think that's really an interesting point, because I'm sure we've all felt guilt at certain points in our careers. [00:12:01]
I'd loved to hear, I guess, what you thought about that and if you agree with her. Pooja, why don't you start? Pooja: Yeah, actually I am looking at a sentence right here in the book that really stood out for me. "There is always an opportunity cost, and I don't know any woman who feels comfortable with all her decisions." I struggle with that every day. I have an eight and a half month old son, and every day he is learning something new. I get text messages and little video clips from my mother-in-law, who lives with us, about his progress, and it's very difficult. I am in the middle of a meeting with my team members and I want to watch the video, but I can't take away from what's going on in the office. It's really difficult. Leena: You know, it's also and Pooja, you talk about it from a mother's point of view, but Sheryl also addresses the fact that we make sacrifices even in our personal lives if you're not a mom. You are going out to network. You are doing things on your own. You have to have a life outside of work, and it's not all about work, but yet we feel guilty when we do spend that time away from work and we go and enjoy a nice meal or go and hang out with our friends. I'm just wondering if anyone else feels the same way or if they had those experiences. Megan: Absolutely, and I think guilty goes both ways, right, because when you are with your family, your friends, you're having a life, there's always that nagging question of, "Oh is there more I could be doing at the office? If you are the office and you are there late, especially the in a startup culture and it becomes your life because it is your life, you start to have friends who drop off, and your family start to say you never call anymore. So the guilt actually goes both ways.
For me personally, I never been a big believer in work-life balance, the phrase, not the concept to be clear, which is because I believe that if you really enjoy your work and you work really hard, it becomes your life, and if you enjoy your family and you love your family and hopefully you do, that becomes your life. So it's more about weaving the two things together than having a clock that you clock in and out of. Especially with mobile devices, it feels like you're always on now. [00:14:03] Leena: That's right. Megan: You're always on as both friend, a sister, a parent, a partner, and you're also always on as an employee, a manager, and a boss. So I actually think it's not so much the guilt of one or the other, but sort of the "I wish I could be in many, many places at once," and in some ways we're lucky that, with phones, we can be. Leah: Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean I've definitely felt it myself. Sheryl talks about being a good daughter and a good wife and a good partner and a good mother. I remember when I was first starting TaskRabbit and transitioning out of IBM, where I had a lot of time to spend with my family. I remember my parents just coming over on the weekends, as they normally did in Boston, to come visit me, and I just did not have the capacity or just the mental stamina to do the whole family like chill out, relax, catch up thing. I was just so wrapped up in getting this startup off the ground. I just remember them leaving and just having a breakdown, like just really upset that I felt guilty about not being a good daughter and not being able to spend that time with them.
So I think the thing is you can't win, because like you said, Megan, if you're spending time with friends and family, then there's always something at work you're thinking about too. I think just realizing that and embracing it and finding the best way to weave both things together, what's right for you is going to be different at different times as well. Ashley: I think it's all about setting the boundaries with yourself. So I used to have a really hard time leaving the office until everything was done, but of course nothing was ever done. I don't think that's sustainable for multiple years. So now I forgive myself for going to dinner and spending time with friends, knowing that I'll be back online from 11:00 to 2:00 a.m. So I still have the guilt, and I can't go to sleep if I have unanswered emails, and I get a lot of emails between midnight and two. [00:16:02] Colleen: Sometimes from us. Ashley: Yeah, sometimes. But I think that Sheryl does a much better job than I personally have. She calls it taking control of the situation, and what's really admirable on her part is not only did she set certain expectations for herself, like leaving the office at 5:30, but she was bold enough to make those public however sort of embarrassing and scary that was, so that other people could feel comfortable doing the same thing. I think having control over your own schedule is sort of the best way to balance sort of the guilt, and I don't mind working crazy hours as long as I can decide when to take that time off and spend it with friends or family or whatever. Leena: I think that's a really important point that she makes throughout the book is that you in very many ways have control over this, and if you set the standard, that's not only the way that it's going to affect your life, but it's also going affect the lives of women around you and for generations to come. It's funny we have this, going to back to fear, I had this fear when I was going back to work at TechCrunch that, after having a baby, the hours that I work, there's just no way that I could do that and have a baby and be a wife and do all these things and have it all.
I remember I set down with our TechCrunch's co-editors, Eric and Alexia, and I just wrote out all these notes beforehand, and I was so like mentally prepared to say like, "I can't do this all," and for them to push back on me. But when I talked to them about it, they were completely reasonable. I think I, in my own mind, had these insecurities and I created this for myself. Not to say that every work environment is like TechCrunch's work environment, but I do think that she made the point that you have control over your own destiny, and sometimes it is about your insecurities. If you just are open with it and confront it, then sometimes things can actually change. [00:18:00] Pooja: So something she talked really inspired me today at the office. I was on a trip to New York last week and starting to feel very guilty that I wasn't spending enough time with my parents, who moved out to India for us and grandchildren, and I started to block 2 hours every morning, 7:00 to 9:00 a.m., saying, "I'm not going to actually work. I'm going to go on a walk with my dad." Today at lunchtime, I told my team. They asked what did I do over the weekend, and I said, "Well, I've been blocking my calendar now and going out for a walk with my dad every day. Sheryl inspired me to say that. Leena: And what was the reaction? I am curious. Pooja: I think it was a shock to people. They've always known me to wake up at 6:00 a.m., start working, be on email, working hard until I go to sleep. So I think people were taken aback, but I'm sure they could appreciate me talking so openly about the importance of family. Colleen: Leah also, as someone who has built a business, is there anything that you think you brought to make it easier for the people who work for you as well for that guilt? Leah: Yeah, I mean I think being open, like I'm sure your team really appreciated that story and thought about ways that they could work that into their own lives. For sure, at Task Rabbit, I've been open about my schedule. My parents now have moved out to California to be closer to my husband and I, which is fantastic. So nights and weekends, we'll do dinner with them. We'll go to up to Napa with them and do weekend trips. My team knows that, and they always ask about like, "Oh how are your parents doing? How are they linking it out here?" I think it's just important to be open and transparent to make people feel comfortable about their own work-life balances as well. Ashley: My boss has three little kids, and right now she is single parenting it. She is an amazing inspiration, because I mean no one takes calendars into consideration when they schedule a meeting. So we have a lot of 7:00 p.m. meetings, and she will say, "No, this is one of the days when I have my kids. I am leaving at five." And that's that. [00:20:02]
I remember the first couple times she did that, I was like, "Whoa, what are you doing? How can the world go on?' It turns out that actually nothing falls apart, nothing breaks, and people are maybe even more productive with their time than when they have sort of a limitless calendar. So she has been a really amazing inspiration for that.
Then I have to say having a team has actually been the best thing for me. There's someone on my team who has kids, and some days he wants to pick them up from school. I feel like I need to lead by example and sometimes having my own life so that they can feel comfortable having theirs. Hopefully, I am doing an okay job of that. But I think that Sheryl really makes people conscious of manager's responsibilities and setting that example in a way that I never heard anyone do before. Leena: I am just curious, if you did, my question is I like that she said that, that you have to sort of be in control over your schedule. But I realize the criticism is that not every boss, not every leader is going to say, "Oh yeah, it's fine," when you leave at 5:00 p.m. every day to go see your kid. I'm sure we've all been in situations where we've bosses that are like that. I'm just curious how you guys react to that and do you agree with Sheryl that you have that control? What do you do if you're not in control? Leah: I think being in the startup world helps, in my opinion, because there is a lot of flexibility and control. I do feel like the startup culture embraces that flexibility. Even when I was at IBM actually, IBM has always been rated one of the top 100 places for women to work. When I was thinking about leaving, I would be lying if I didn't say that that didn't go through my head. I mean, this is a great place for me to build a career. But I think in startups, in particular, people embrace that flexibility, and I can't imagine someone not being supportive of it in this type of community. [00:22:06] Megan: I also think it is generational. I think that our generation has expectations that we will pass on as managers, as bosses, as CEOs and founders that you don't have to be physically present in one geocode, one lat and long, to be able to be very capable and competent at your job and be able to perform your job. So I think that the conversation that I've luckily never had to have, but that I would encourage someone who was in a situation you were describing to have is: How can you make sure that you're meeting all of your obligations and responsibilities and also able to take care of life's necessities? If you can't find a position like that, if you're not fortunate enough to have a role like that, you need to think about what other options there are. Of course, this isn't applicable across the board. There are lots of people who have to punch in and punch out. So it's definitely unique to our community. Pooja: My mother-in-law is a nurse, and she's the primary caretaker of my son, actually, and she has a very strict schedule. She was the one to actually have to take three months grand maternity leave off because I was back in the office in a week, and ever since she's been back full time at Standford Hospital as a nurse, she doesn't get a lot of flexibility. So I understand that it's really difficult for people in jobs like that. I don't think she has alternatives. Leena: Well, that's a good sort of segue into our next segment, because we're going to be talking about finding the right partner and how important that is in your support network as well as mentorship. So stay tuned. Colleen: In this third segment, I want to talk about partners and mentors and the sort of human element here that Sheryl really spends a lot of time talking about in the book. She talks about how women have a bit more of a hard time maybe getting mentors, and it's not because they're not out there, but it's because they kind of ask in the wrong way. It's just a very complicated mentorship situation. [00:24:00]
I want to ask all of you, have you guys have mentors along the way? Maybe you can talk about who that is. Ashley, if you want to start. Ashley: I was going to ask Sheryl to be my mentor, but apparently that is absolutely the wrong thing to do. It's funny. I don't think I've had a mentor in the traditional sense. So I have a boss who is enormously supportive, so a mentor/manager. But then the type of mentor I've had have been more for the specific questions I've had. So sort of what Sheryl talks about, don't ask someone just straight up to be your mentor. Go to them with a specific question. When I was building my team, I asked Margaret, at Andreessen Horowitz, if she would sit down with me and sort of talk about how to structure that. She was immensely helpful. Or Jane Hynes who runs communication for Salesforce and has been there since day one. So people who I felt could help in a very sort of specific way, and I have always been blown away by how receptive people have been to doing that. Coleen: Yeah. Megan: I've always had mentors as well, though none of them have ever been women, and I don't exactly know why except that perhaps all of my bosses have been men and some of them are former bosses, or just those are the people who have been able to be most helpful and applicable to my work. But I have to say I have never say the words to somebody, "Will you be my mentor?" I don't think I could. Leah: That's very awkward. Megan: It's a very awkward phrase, and in fact, if you actually said to any of these men, Megan considers you a mentor, they wouldn't be shocked, but they might be a little bit like, "Oh, I never thought about it that way." So I'm not going to name names here, but they are people who I make a point - and I am actually someone who is religious about my calendar - of meeting with on a regular basis. One in particular from the product world, who is very senior Google, basically in many ways got me through my time at Square, leading up product there with advice and guidance, not on the specific products, not even on how to build out my team, but just on how to think about growing with the organization and growing with the product user base. [00:26:08]
That was because we put time and calendared to meet every other week, every single time, and we never failed to show. So I think it's more about finding those people who had the experiences that you want to have and then just being religious about making sure that you check in with them. Leah: Yeah, I mean I've talked a lot about mentors in my life, and they've made a big different to me and making that transition from being an engineer into an entrepreneur. One of the folks that I always mention is Scott Griffith, who is the CEO over at ZipCar. He kind of took me under his wing from the beginning and even gave me free space to work out of the ZipCar office. But I think the point that really struck me in the book was that instead of going out and looking for mentors, build relationships, ask great questions, be strategic. If you do those things, then people will want to help you, guide you, and they'll seek you out. When I look back at my relationship with Scott, it all started with a 30 minute coffee chat about how I was thinking about TaskRabbit, and it just kind of snowballed from there. I think that was a really important point. It is not like she says a mentor is going to come in and be your Prince Charming, swoop you off into the CEO sunset, and I loved that analogy. I think that is the most important thing. Megan: And I also do think that you grow out of mentors, right? You need mentors for different stages of your career and candidly your life, and so it's not necessarily a relationship that's for the long term. But it's how can you have a relationship that will help you understand and excel in the portion of your career that you are at, at that time? Pooja: So my turn to share a rather embarrassing story. I was an engineer at Facebook in 2008 and overlapped with Sheryl, and I remember she held a gender issues in the workplace session. Soon after that, I was faced with the dilemma of, "Do I stay and be an engineer at Facebook, or do I go to Stanford Business School where I got admission?" [00:28:04]
She gave me some great advice, and at the end of it, I said, "Will you be my mentor?" Colleen: You're the one? Pooja: I don't know. I think she gets many of them, but the point is I'm glad she talks about this, because since then I went to Stanford Business School. I started a company, and I got genuine, true great people who took me under their wing because I was really curious and I wanted to learn and I ask lots of question. But my background, I grew up in India in a small town where women just knew how to cook, tend to a family, and get married at the age of 16 or 18. So if this book can influence other young women, well, seek mentors by learning about others and asking great questions and genuinely be curious, maybe I could have avoided asking her, "Will you be my mentor?" Leena: I loved that chapter about mentorship, and what I loved about it is that I'm really excited for my daughter to read that, because I wish I had read something like this when I was 16 years of age and thinking through my career and thinking about mentorship, because I feel like I've made the same mistake of confining myself to the notion of how a mentor should be and then trying to pigeonhole someone into that. What I realize after reading this book is that I actually do have a lot of mentors, but just they're not in the traditional form, including my husband, for example. I find him to be a mentor to me in so many different ways, professionally, personally. So I really liked the book, and it opened my eyes and it also made me realize that this is going to make a big difference I think in other women's lives. Colleen: And this is a very young panel, and we did that on purpose. We wanted the younger generation, because we've heard a lot from the Marine Doubts of the world about what they think about this book. [00:30:00]
So we wanted to get this young group together, but I think that all of you were at these points in your careers where maybe you should be someone's mentor as well and reaching out. It's not just about someone coming up to you and asking, but going and talking to a younger male or female and seeking them out too and talking to them, even though we're all so busy I can't even imagine. Megan: It is something you have to put time aside for. I mean, what's happened, as I moved from Google to Square to venture capital at Kleiner, is different people with different interests have come out and said, "I'm really interested." I have actually received emails that were, "Will you be my mentor?" It feels like a lot of responsibility, a proposal in some sorts. You can fill an entire calendar with coffee dates. So sort of the action item I gave myself, again because I am a slave to my calendar, is okay, I am going to put aside an hour every week and I'm going to fill those up with 15 to 20 minute slots and I will meet with those people who email me out of the blue, or I will do phone calls - actually, a lot of them are phone calls, because there are a lot of folks east who want to come out to California - and have those conversations. I can't be an ongoing mentor for all of these folks, but making the time, especially since so many people made that time for me, is really important. Ashley: Yeah, and I mean given how interconnected Silicon Valley is, it's also a selfish decision, right? I mean, I love chatting with entrepreneurs who are really early and wanted to learn about PR. I'm always a little baffled when they ask me because I'm still learning how to do this, or talking at incubators. There is a whole new crop of people who may go on to do really cool things. So I like that Sheryl sort of breaks down the really rigid definition of mentorship, because by no means would I want to like an hour with one person each week. She has that funny anecdote where she thinks she is mentoring this girl, and the girl says, "Oh I wish I had a mentor." Sheryl is like, "What do you think I have been doing?" She's like, "Well, a mentor is someone who will talk with you for an hour each week." Sheryl is like, "No honey, that's a therapist." So I'm not being someone's therapist, but I do think there's a lot of reasons for spending some time and information sharing and meeting new people. [00:32:04] Leena: I thought another interesting part of the mentorship angle was sort talking about her husband and making your partner into a real partner. I am curious what you guys think about that. She said in the past the biggest business decision you will make is who your partner is, who your husband, your wife, your long-term partner will be. So I am curious what all of you think about that. Pooja: Yeah, absolutely. The reason I'm successful with Piazza and the reason I can have a baby today and also be running a company is in my case not only just my husband, but also his parents and the extended family support I get. I know, I tell myself so many days that if I had not left that first marriage, I would not be anywhere near having understood my full potential. Colleen: I thought it was that was one part of the book that I thought of all of things that are controversial, I think this is probably it. She is very straightforward in saying to the point where it's almost dating advice. She is saying you can mess around with the bad boys and go on a few dates with the sensitive but toxic artist or something, but when it comes to who you settle down with, it should be a man or a woman who is stable and invests in you and stuff like that. It was just so frank I thought that she said that. Ashley: She actually said it was the number one thing, and it is a little bit shocking because it almost sounds anti-feminist, right, that you should have to like rely on a man in order to reach your full potential. I love that whenever it's a question of going for pragmatism or saying something that's comfortable and politically correct, Sheryl picks a pragmatic argument. Leah: Yeah, I think, in my case, that really resonated with me as well because my husband has also helped come up the idea for TaskRabbit and has been involved from the very beginning. Early on, he was the one that stayed at the stable, full-time job so that I can go off and not take a salary and bootstrap a company. [00:34:05]
Years later, after we raised our A round, he came on full time, and now we work together full time at TaskRabbit. So there is no question that, in my case with Task Rabbit, having my husband Kevin be a partner, not only in the business but also in our marriage, has been a huge reason why we've been successful. Colleen: She also brings up an interesting statistic of the Fortune 500 CEOs, a very small percentage of them are women obviously. It's like 28 women who are Fortune 500 CEOs, but 26 of them are married. One's divorced, and only one has never been married, which I personally hope that's something that changes, because I'm sure we have Fortune 500 CEOs who are male, a lot of them have been divorced, a lot of them are unmarried. So that was actually, that whole section was kind of disheartening to me, because you would hope that there would be more diversity in that group. Leah: Well, I think even more controversial is the point she makes about everything will be in balance when half of those fortune 500 CEOs are women and half of the people that stay home with the kids are men. I mean that's actually really a balance, and that is like the ending point that ends the book and starts the continuing conversation. Leena: Right. Colleen: Yeah, so speaking of continuing conversation, we've got more. So please stay tuned for the next segment. Leena: In our last segment, I want to talk a little bit about what Sheryl sort of claims that we are possibly our own worst enemies. Women tend to criticize each other and hold each other back, which as she said it was very sad. It is a sad sort of state of affairs, but very much the reason she wants to create these Lean In circles. So I am curious, in all of your experiences, have you felt that? Have you felt that other women have held you back in some way? [00:36:04] Leah: I don't know about other women holding me back. What I have noticed at TaskRabbit is when I've interviewed female execs that have come on board, in my case a lot of them, all of them actually have negotiated hard for the job, which I appreciate actually. But she makes the point in the book that we don't do that enough, and we don't actually push ourselves enough to say, "You know what? I'm worth more." It's the fear of likeability. It is the fear of being too aggressive or being an antagonist.
Actually, when I was reading it, it was interesting because one of our newest executive, our COO, Stacy Brown-Philpot, who just came on board, she worked for Sheryl actually at Google. So she negotiated hard for her role at TaskRabbit, and again, I respect that. After she came on board, she said, "Prior to joining TaskRabbit, I was looking at other opportunities." The timing wasn't right for her to come on there, so she was exploring other options. She was accused of negotiating too hard somewhere else, and it was an all male exec team. She decided after that it just wasn't a great fit for her, and she moved on and thankfully, and I'm very grateful she ended up at TaskRabbit. But I thought that was just an interesting story, an interesting point and something that I see happen again and again. When women do negotiate, I celebrate that, like go for it. That's what we need more of in business. Leena: That's right. Absolutely. Megan: The one example I have, because by and large I actually haven't experienced women holding me back or even exhibited it that much. [00:37:54]
However, there was an exception, which was in my first two weeks at Google, I was barely 22 years old, and another women pulled me aside and said, "You're really abrupt on the phone. You sound very aggressive. You should really soften your tone." I was shocked because I'm the middle of five daughters. My father and mom raised us to be empowered women, and my boss at the time, who was the only woman VP at Google at the time, had never mentioned that to me. So this was someone else. So I told her. I actually went right to her, because I thought, oh two weeks on the job, I'm already getting negative feedback. She was furious, and she actually went and found that person and said, "You never talk to my employee that way again, and you never give that advice to another young woman again." That was the only example I had, and I so appreciated the senior woman coming to my defense for something that was just so ridiculous. Ashley: It's funny, because I almost have an opposite example where when I started at Box, I was pretty young. I was 24 or 25, and my boss pulled me into a room and she's like, "I'm going to say something. It might be a little hard to hear, but hopefully you can just take it as constructive feedback." She said, "Like a lot of women, you are saying smart things, but you're framing your statements as questions. You play with your hair a lot during meetings." Really embarrassing classic sort of feminine things, but I was taken aback, but I was so grateful for that. I haven't felt being held back at all by other women, but I do have this very strange like I don't understand why I am so shocked, but every time I do ask some powerful woman or someone for help or not a mentorship but a question, I'm always a little bit shocked when they say yes, like I expect women in positions of power not to be open to helping me. Given that I haven't had any of the opposite response, it's strange, but I am conditioned to think that women are competitive and probably will not be supportive. Colleen: I thought that it was an interesting point, and she probably made it earlier in the book just about how women are naturally, biologically maybe they are going to be more nurturing, or that's how women are because we have babies and we can nurse them and things like that. [00:40:07]
But that is so far back in evolutionary time that that doesn't mean we shouldn't work against that now. So even if it is, I think a lot of people would say, oh women are naturally competitive with each other because there is a short time relative to men for conception, and you need to fight for the best mate. We need to all be catty to each other or something. Even if that is the case, and they haven't proven it in either way, that's not something that we should just use as an excuse and feel like we're going to hold each other back. But I think what I've heard a lot of times is that of course women are competitive with each other. That's just naturally how they are. I think if that is nature, then it's good that Sheryl is saying we should work against it. Megan: I also think it's potentially generational. So when you had very few women in positions of power, it seemed like there was only ever going to be very few women in positions of power. So it was more women fighting for a smaller number of spots. But as we get closer and closer towards Sheryl's vision of this 50/50 split, that notion goes away, and there's more opportunity to help actually actively pull up women into higher ranks and not have to feel competitive, which in some ways is just innate human feeling whether or not you're a man or a women, because there's going to be more positions and more opportunities to share. Ashley: Yeah, and that's where the ladder versus jungle gym metaphor for careers is really interesting, because if you think of a ladder, it is obviously very linear. To move up to the next rung, you necessarily have to displace someone, right? So it's a very sort of zero sum way of thinking about careers. Whereas jungle gym, you're going all over the place. Maybe you're going into a role that never existed before or creating it. So I think it's a generational thing. It could also be a sort of a startup world thing, where nothing is zero sum here because everything is growing and evolving and changing. So it's very silly if we do have these sort of more zero sum mentalities about careers because that's absolutely not how the world works. [00:42:01] Leena: I love the ladder and jungle gym comparison, because I think that is such a good way to kind of describe what a career is and how she said she had taken different roles at different places. Some may have been interpreted as a demotion or something lower, but ended up advancing her career, and I think that's a lesson that is great for all women to kind of realize that there are all different paths to finding that professional happiness. Pooja: For me, how I would answer the question actually if I really wanted to be very honest is I'm the person who might hold myself back the most and really the guilt issue, she says, "Guilt and insecurity makes us second guess ourselves and in return resent one another." She hasn't met any woman who is comfortable with all the decisions. I'm not comfortable with all the decisions I make, and I'm constantly trying to balance so many things. If one thing I can take away from this book is be comfortable, be comfortable not feeling comfortable because I'll never feel comfortable. Leena: That's a good lead in to what I wanted to ask all of you about the book. How do you feel about it? I mean, it was a very controversial book as we mentioned earlier in our conversation. Did you enjoy reading it? Is it something that you will take away and actually learn from? Are you going to start Lean In circles anytime soon? Colleen: Right. Right, because what's important to point out is that this is part of a larger movement, LeanIn.org. Leena: That's right. Colleen: This is one component of it, and then the hope is that there is an actual going forward, Lean In circle being formed by every women out there. Leena: Right. Megan: So I appreciated the book for two reasons. One, it's an incredible almanac of stats and statistics about women in the workplace. So I think almost a third of the book is footnotes. This is an incredibly well-researched and footnoted book. So I found that interesting to have that consolidated. [00:43:55]
Then the other piece was really the distillation of a lot the things that I have thought about, that my friends have thought about, I'm the middle of five daughters, that my sisters have thought about, but broken down into really small nuggets of advice and guidance. So perhaps not every single page was revolutionary or new, but it was the distillation of something that I or someone I know has thought or felt into a way that was very, very clear and crisp. If that's useful for other women, that's wonderful. Leah: Yeah. I found the book to be really refreshing honesty. I felt like it was a different perspective than what we usually hear, but is actually a perspective that I share. A lot of people have interviewed me about, "What is it like being a female in tech? What is it like being female CEO?" She mentions actually the San Francisco magazine article that came out with my head on Mark Zuckerberg's body, which I was appalled by, by the way. So it was just nice to have a refreshing look at the issues. I, for one, am really exited about having every single person at TaskRabbit read the book, manager, individual contributor, executive, everyone. We ordered 60 books, and I think it's just great for men, for women, for everyone to read and really internalize. Ashley: We ordered it at Box as well, and I'm reading it in my book club. So I will have many future discussions on this. I did, I really liked this book. I think a lot of times, every now and then, the women in tech or women in leadership topic bubbles up, and usually it ends up being totally counter productive and nothing meaningful happens. I like that Sheryl, from the onset, said there are lots of institutional things that we need to deal with. Other people are fighting those battles. I'm going to look at what individuals can do. As an individual, I really appreciate having advice that I can directly apply. Whether or not this will become a campaign or a movement will be very interesting, because it's so nuanced. [00:46:01]
So usually if there's a big social movement or uprising, it's because there's some sort of extreme view. At the aggregate, it is extreme, right? Going to 50% Fortune 500 female CEOs would be extreme, but all of the little pieces and steps we need to take to get there are so nuanced and subtle. So it will be interesting to see where this book goes from here, but I certainly appreciate it as an individual. Pooja: Well, I felt very validated. It was really refreshing as I was going through many points and I could resonate with what she was saying. There's a young 22-year-old who just graduated from Cornell last year, and she's bright, talented, ambitious, and I'm, the same thing, encouraging her to read this book and we'll talk through it. There are other young women out there at the age of 22 who could read this book. It's like there's a lot to think about, digest, reflect on. Megan: And not just women, men. There are so many men. I'm going to give this to my entire partnership, men, women, everybody because it is actually very helpful for both genders I think. Leena: I agree. I was going to give this, I told my husband as I was reading it, like you have to read this because there's so many interesting points she makes about work-life balance and mentorship, as we were talking before, your partner being helpful, that men can definitely appreciate as well. What did you think Colleen? I'm curious. Colleen: I absolutely agree with the facts and figures, and I had the same experience. I was calling out to my husband in the other room, "Did you know that we talk to female babies more than male babies?" That was just a scientific tidbit that I didn't know. So yeah, I thought it was packed with everything, and I think the overall message to me seemed to be why it's important, because I think a lot of people would say, "Well, why is it important to have more women in leadership roles at all? What if they don't want to be? What if they want to lean out? What if they want to be moms full time?" That's fine. But I think that she made a really good argument that it would have a trickle down effect if we have more women in leadership positions, and that's the thing that I'm kind of taking away from the book. That even the way the role of women in the world, there are a lot of problems and just having more women at the Fortune 500 level, it is the top 1% problem, but there will be a trickle down effect from it. [00:48:10]
So I guess I'm starting a Lean In circle. Megan: I can't wait to see the TechCrunch TV panel of men discuss "Lean In." I will tune in to that. Leena: I also loved how honest she was, and I think that was refreshing because I think it would have been easy for her to say, "Things are great. My life is great. I'm lucky to have the life that I have." But she was very honest about how she still has battles with guilt all the time, and for a mom that battles with guilt on a minute by minute basis, being away from her child, it made me feel better. If the COO of Facebook is feeling the guilt that I am, then there's something there and something that we can do at least to change it or battle with it. I found it really refreshing how honest she was. Megan: Yeah. Colleen: And it is great to have a conversation with all of you super established women being honest as well. So hopefully more people will follow in her footsteps, and we'll have a Lean In by Leah Busque, a Lean In by Megan Quinn, a Lean In by all of you, talking just more about this in the next 10 or 15 years ahead.
It's been great. Thank you for watching this roundtable discussion of "Lean In," and hopefully this is just the beginning of a conversation about these important topics. So thanks.
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How Facebook Could Fix Its Forgettable New Features
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 |
At least Facebook didn’t break anything, but the extra feeds and search box it recently launched have yet to drastically improve my experience. The homepage redesign is pretty, but I keep forgetting the Photos and Music feeds exist since they’re buried in the sidebar. And Graph Search is great when I need it, but I rarely do. With some design tweaks, though, Facebook could unleash the potential of its hard work. When you’re talking about a service where one-seventh of the world’s population has developed deeply ingrained behaviors, not screwing up is . There are a dozen ways Facebook could have made its new features overbearing or interruptive. They’re not, or at least don’t seem like it to me. Both are rolled out to just a tiny percentage of all users, though, so if there’s panic and outrage to be had, it’s still on the horizon. Here’s what the homepage looks like if you have both of the new features. Note that even among the few people with the rollouts, there are many different design variants in testing. The feed redesign and Graph Search aren’t steroids for your social network, all juiced up and braggadocious. They’re more like a nice pair of running shoes. They’ll improve your performance, but they need breaking in and they’ll only help if you remember to wear them. But that means their true value will be overlooked by most, like a pair of sneakers left in the closet. Just some quick-fading feel-good novelty. That’s a shame for two products Facebook spent a and money developing and that could make the service much better. With any luck, Mark Zuckerberg and company will be able to strike a design balance that serves their purpose without making them imposing. already got a subtle but significant tweak last week. Rather than search prompt text floating in the blue sea of Facebook’s top navigation bar, some Graph Search users now see an anchored navy box. It’s a bit more obvious that it’s something you should actually, you know, click. Still, Graph Search’s greatest barrier to usage is unfamiliarity with pecking in semantic queries like “Cafes in San Francisco visited by friends of friends.” Facebook has tried to school us with blog posts of and automatically opening a random results page when you click the bookmark in the sidebar. To make people really grasp the potential of Graph Search and , it may need to be a bit more forceful. One way would be to pre-populate the search box with a great sample query rather than the generic “Search for people, places, and things.” A single click would show off the unique strength of its , and the prompt’s presence could spark our imaginations. Another way would be creating a graphical user interface for Graph Search — a series of check boxes you could toggle to formulate a query. It could be like Facebook’s old Advanced Search page. Select ‘Places’ then ‘Cafes’, ‘visited’ rather than ‘liked’, ‘friends of friends’, and ‘San Francisco’ rather than other popular cities or places you’ve lived. Voilà, the GUI query builder constructs “Cafes in San Francisco visited by friends of friends.” That could be much easier for some people while simultaneously teaching them how to search semantically. It could all be stowed within a Graph Search drop-down. So what about the feeds? When I talked to one of Facebook’s lead designers at a party at Facebook’s Austin office, he said the biggest question is how to remind people without cluttering the homepage or making everyone feel overwhelmed. On mobile that won’t be as much of a problem, as Facebook confirmed to me the feed selector will sit right at the top of the news feed / homepage. But right now on the web, the folded-up feed selector slapped in the sidebar is far too easy to ignore. At first it only shows one additional feed to choose until you click to slide it open. Start scrolling down the homepage and the selector minimizes to just the currently viewed feed. Despite my voracious Facebook usage and hyper-awareness of the new feeds (I know – I just won’t shut up about this social network), I’ve only opened them a handful of times. They’re not annoying me, so uh, kudos, but with the current design they might not give Facebook’s time-on-site and engagement much of a boost. I’m not going to make you cringe with my crummy mockups, but I bet Facebook could dream up an interface that gets me exploring these new content streams more often. Extra feeds could make Facebook even more informative, and Graph Search could squeeze fresh utility from its vast data set. Their back-ends are built. Now Facebook just has to fiddle with their designs until they’re firmly cemented in our cerebral cortexes. Most of us could Like a status or scroll through photos in our sleep. Let’s see if these new features can become a reflex, too. Additional reading:
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 3 | 6 | null |
August Capital’s David Hornik On How To Find ‘Smart Money’ For Your Startup [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
We had the pleasure of spending some time talking to Hornik earlier this month at the festival in Austin, Texas about what it means to find the proverbial “smart money” and how entrepreneurs can go about doing it. Watch the video embedded above to hear about that, why he disagrees with on whether , the founder personalities he finds himself gravitating towards, whether the pool of startup founders he’s seen has become more diverse in Hornik’s 13 year career as a VC, and more.
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Backed Or Whacked: Baubles For Your Bike – Part 2
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
Last week’s Backed or Whacked looked at a trio of small, easily attached bicycle accessories that could beef up your ride’s horn, assist in toting shopping bags, or add more secure footing to your pedals. This week’s column looks at some larger accoutrements that can help bicyclists with their burdens. Unfortunately, none of them could get over their fundraising hill. One day, mechanical augmentations will have the power to turn us all into bionic super beings. Until the day insurance companies deny coverage on those procedures, though, we can mod our bikes to go farther and faster. Hudson, NY’s James Brisciana had sought to put his 10 years of experience in the bicycle motorization business to produce the RoadBug, a friction-based moped conversion kit that can accommodate four-stroke engines from the likes of Huasheng and Honda. The kit was also available without the engine at just $99, a $50 discount off the proposed price. Unfortunately, the campaign ran out of gas with Brisciana attracting less than $4,500 of the $20,000 sought. It may be a coincidence that the bike cargo system dreamed up by Albuquerque-based Loko Bike Products has some verbal similarity to the Lego construction toys, but the bike add-on offers a dizzying array of expansion options nonetheless. Starting with a simple “V-rack” base unit ($99 for early adopters) that quickly attaches to and detaches from a bike, Loko is a modular, convertible, removable cargo bike rack system. The“O-mounts” on its surface can accommodate an impressive array of bags, boxes, banana seats and baby seats, electric or gas conversion options, folding 8″ or 12″ extensions called U-bars, and even ruggedized iPhone cases for capturing video of the ride. With about 15 days left in the campaign, though, only 36 backers have dipped into Loko’s tantalizing alphabet soup of V-racks, O-mounts and U-bars, and the Loko motion has stalled out at just over $4,000 – a far cry from its $75,000 goal. “Ow!” That’s the expression heard after you slap your head, forgetting to bring the clip-on bike light. Well, the eventual pain could be much worse if you decide not to turn back for it and go out less-than-gently into that good night. Reasoning that bikes, like cars, should have integrated road lighting, the duet of Nick Sweeney and James Voshell created the StemLite. The product replaces the bike part upon which the handlebar rests with one that integrates an LED light powered by three AA batteries. However, backers failed to deliver in the cold light of day, and the campaign ended with only $3,200 pledged of its $45,000 target. When you were young and free, you’d scoot around on your two-wheeler dragging nothing but the wind behind you. But then life started weighing you down, becoming a big uphill climb. What if the weight on your shoulders could be placed behind your bicycle? And what if that weight could push you along instead of drag you down? That’s the idea of Ridekick. It’s an electric bike trailer that can accommodate two small children and push you to the next destination through the unending series of errands you must run to keep the little ones healthy and engaged. The Ridekick, slated to be produced in Colorado, was to retail for $899, with a $200 discount for Indiegogo backers. However, the campaign didn’t quite go off without a hitch and ended with just $6,265 of the $165,000 sought.
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Bloomberg: ‘We’re Going To Have More Visibility And Less Privacy,’ Drones And Surveillance Coming
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
“We’re going to have more visibility and less privacy. I don’t see how you stop that,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a surprisingly candid interview about the future of the surveillance state in the Big Apple. While admitting that increased surveillance was “scary” and that governments will have to be thoughtful with their laws, he seemed to side with prioritizing radical transparency, especially through the use of automated drones, “but what’s the difference whether the drone is up in the air or on the building? I mean intellectually I have trouble making a distinction.” This puts Bloomberg with the growing number of states and congress members either enacting or proposing moratoriums on the use of drones. Indeed, he went on to imply that the fears against drones were somewhat unjustified, especially since security cameras already exist: “The argument against using automation, it’s this craziness– oh, it’s Big Brother. Get used to it. When there’s a murder, a shooting, a robbery of something the first thing the police do is go to every single building in the neighborhood and say let’s see your security camera.” The NY Daily news notes that the New York Civil Liberties union has identified roughly 2,4000 cameras already affixed on Manhattan buildings–a presence that is likely to increase if Bloomberg’s most recent interview is to be believed. Lest Bloomberg be labeled as a surveillience hawk, the interview , rather than advocacy: “Everybody wants their privacy, but I don’t know how you’re going to maintain it.” Listen to part of the interview with WOR-AM host John Gambling, below. We’ll have more analysis soon.
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(Web) Castles Made Of Sand
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
If there is one sliver lining in the Google Reader that has the blogosphere (OK fine, the blogosphere), it’s the fact that Google offers a way for Reader users to export their RSS subscriptions using its service. Actually, Google Takeout lets users of most major Google services remove their data from the Google ecosystem at any time. This is how it should be done. As I sat through the demo for yet another mobile/social/data-hungry app this week – one that probably won’t make it a year before quietly slinking off into the ether of the – it struck me how radically the web has changed the disposability of our tools; the tools that allow us to create, interact with and share our data. We’ve become a bit too naive, blind and trusting in terms of where we’ve been putting our data lately. Though for all its faults, at least Google has committed to making our RSS subscriptions and other data portable. And Twitter now allows for archive exports. But everyone else? Who knows? Our data, our data, is what all of today’s consumer-facing services are building themselves on top of. They’re our thoughts du jour, our photographs and videos, our daily habits, the places we go or plan to go, our real-world interpersonal connections, our hobbies and interests, our news-reading preferences, each step we take, each emoji-filled message we send, each game we play, our scores, our kids our pets, and so on. It’s good and fine and right that the tools we use to interact with all the above change regularly. That we’re allowed to go through phases and trends with one eye on the horizon for what’s next. For instance, maybe we won’t be into photo filters, and will rather look back at pictures from the 2010’s the way a Gen Xer looks back on stirrup pants and jelly bracelets and popped collars on jean jackets. Or how a Gen Yer looks back on overalls and Blossom hats and t-shirts, knotted to the side. , we’ll laugh at our younger selves, shaking our heads. Maybe we’ll also laugh about that phase we went through where we hung out in private hidey-holes on mobile like Path, WhatsApp, Viber, Tango and SnapChat, eschewing the drama of lives lived in public on the social backbone that is Facebook. Or maybe not. Maybe we’re too caught up in ever-changing trends to have a moment to stop and think about the digital wake we create or what responsibility it is of anyone to manage it. Maybe all we care about is the , even as servers shut down, deleting our terabytes of virtual creations. Who needs them anyway? ? I kid, I kid. But here’s the thing: It’s a that almost all apps will come to the end of their independent lives at some point, and often they will come to the end of their lives – whether through “declining usage,” , or because they failed to live up to the hype (see: 95 percent of startups), , and that hype happened to have a attached . And there are So many seed-funded. . So many platforms – web, mobile, tablet, TV, car, body… ? Users who fawned over an app’s creation, contributing their time and energy into making the “next big thing,” don’t get a portion of the final paycheck when the exit is good. And when things go badly, they sometimes don’t even get to say goodbye. The app just disappears. Should we be okay with the fact that with a thousand tiny little deaths, our data trails die, too? Because that’s what’s happening. Even Google’s Takeout solution is not perfect. We might have our subscriptions, but what of our tags, our stars, our custom RSS-based search engines that can pull up blog posts from sites that have long since disappeared from the face of the public Internet? for as much as Google cares. Startups like and others at least are playing the role of digital EMT – zapping our dying data back to life. (Pro tip: re-create your exact, case-sensitive Reader tags in Feedly’s preferences to save your Reader tag history. You’re welcome.) Similarly, recently launched as , following its Twitter acquisition. These kinds of rescue attempts are still rare, though. And for smaller services getting shut down, no one bothers. Our (web) castles are made of sand, and the tides are regular. ? [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW5zPy73gWk?feature=player_detailpage] P.S. From this point forward, and with a nod to Google for the inspiration, I will ask your startup this: Have an answer ready.
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My Phone And I Are Never Getting Out Of Bed
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
Our beds used to be finite. A limited range of activities took place there. We’d sleep, or try to, make love, eat, and maybe read a paperback. But we could only hide from the world for so long. The nagging puppet strings of our desire to learn and experience would pull taught. Eventually we had to rise. Then we found someone to cuddle with. She filled our squinting eyes with wonder. Endless possibility could suddenly curl up in the comforters with us. Our friends, in our bed. A library, in our bed. An office, even, one we could attend naked or hungover or asocial, confined in the cosy confines of where we rest our heads. The alarm clock’s red face has turned green with envy. Her function just another replaced by our new mistress. But why even set it when there’s no place left to go. If I can be anywhere and learn everything whilst luxuriating in linen, reasons to emerge get sparse. Secretly our beds always long for more of our attention. Those cold mornings when you were sure you could feel the cling of its embrace, tempting you to stay. Now they have our time, even if our affection must be shared. Meanwhile we slowly wither / legs we’d stand upon grow thinner / When does seeking turn to sloth? / As we fear to turn them off. The only thing that could convince us to escape our quilted prison? / Percentage points tick down and light goes dark within our prisms. But if our outlets are located / within reach of where we’re laying / electrons will continue filling / in the data we keep swilling / So there’s still a steady stream of infotainment overfed… My phone and I are never, ever getting out of bed.
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Gillmor Gang: It’s Alright, Bob
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — convened with Gillmor in Boston and the Gang in California. We took another cut at the Google Reader damage, with @dannysullivan hating on notifications and @scobleizer hating on Android’s notifications. Did I say I told him so? Yes I did. But the mere fact we spent so much time on the stream’s destruction of Windows and RSS proved the point all along (for me since 2009). Namely, that the new platform is the stream, and the resulting multiplexed meritocracy of the combined social and messaging networks is where the developers will go. As Dylan said, “even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” @stevegillmor, @dannysullivan, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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The Windows Store Crosses 50,000 Available Apps For Windows 8 And Windows RT
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
It’s been said that there aren’t many apps available for Windows 8. I’ve said that . But that’s not entirely true. , there are now more than 50,000 apps available for Windows 8 and Windows RT, effectively making me a liar. The site aggregates applications available to the Windows Store. If it’s available on the Windows Store, you can find it listed with pertinent details here. The site also provides basic data for application uploads. According to the site, there are now 50,304 applications available for Windows 8 but uploads have slowed since Windows 8’s November launch. In fact, until just this month, the average number of new applications hitting the Store, at least per this source, has declined each month. Ignoring the inherent differences of targeting different markets, Windows 8’s cloud application distribution service is growing much more rapidly than Apple’s counterpart. Apple’s own Mac App Store launched in 2010 and currently lists only 14,000 apps, according to AppShopper.com. Of course, since Windows 8’s store also serves tablets, it’s a little unfair to compare the two (there are 376,144 iPad apps). But even with a healthy 50K apps, as a Windows 8 user myself, I have yet to find many compelling applications. There’s Netflix, Plex, and Xbox SmartGlass — all the rest I’ve tried are pathetic ports of iOS applications. I tend to stick to traditional applications that run in Desktop. It’s clear that Microsoft has succeeded to some degree. 50,000 applications available four months after launch is impressive, but Redmond still needs to incentivize developers to produce compelling applications designed for Windows 8 first and not last.
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Steve Wozniak, Speaking To The Denver Apple Pi Club In 1984, On College Pranks, Building The Apple I & II, And The Apple Pledge Of Allegiance
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vPssItXt4R4″] “I pledge allegiance to the logo of corporate marketing in Cupertino. And to the computers for which it stands: One notion, under Jobs, indispensable, for hardware and software for all.” Steve Wozniak, to the Denver Apple Pi Computer Club in 1984. And that video above is just a funny anecdotes. TUAW reader Vince Patton pointed to 14 insightful videos he uploaded to YouTube of Steve Wozniak talking to the Denver Apple Pi Club in 1984. As TUAW notes, they’re a treasure trove of first hand accounts into the formation of Apple, the creation of the Apple I and II, and Woz’s college antics. Apparently Patton recently discovered his father’s VHS taping of Woz’s talk to Denver Apple Pi computer club at the Colorado School of Mines on October 4, 1984. He cleaned up the recording and . Two of the best are embedded here but they’re all worth watching. “The computer [the Apple II] was not being design to be a product and it was not being design to be sold, nearly as much as it was being designed to impress and do some very unusual things that had not been seen before.” Steve Wozniak Ironically, when speaking about the Apple II’s integrated hardware, Wozniak brings up a point that Apple still abides by today, “Whenever you can recognized standards that will prevail, build them in.” By doing so in the Apple II, this allowed Apple to leave slots open for future hardware, or as Woz says, “for expansion beyond what we can think of.” Looking at Apple’s past hardware, this is a notion the company still believes in. From the early iMac’s use of USB over serial to the 10-year life of the Dock Connector, Apple cautiously approaches emerging standards, but tends to invest early and sticks with standards more than most other consumer electronic companies. Apparently it has been that way from the start. “Yeah, we’d lose our money, but at least we would have a company.” said Steve Jobs according to Woz. As Wozniak states, this was reason enough to sell bare PC boards and run the possibility of losing money — just so they would be involved in a company. And so the two, along with Ron Wayne who designed the manual, began selling the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976. Woz explains there was originally three employees with him and Jobs owning 45% of the company. The remaining 10% went to Ron Wayne, who designed the Apple I manuals. He got cold feet several weeks into the venture and sold his 10% stake in Apple for $800. He received an additional $1,500 later that year in exchange for forfeiting any claims against the company. Given Apple’s current value, Wayne’s 10 percent share would have been worth more than $43 billion today. Brian Heater profiled Wayne for Engadget in 2011. . All 14 videos are on Vince Patton’s .
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The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: Smartwatches, Apple On The Defensive, And The Nook HD+
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
We’re back! After a long hiatus, we’ve started up the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast, our weekly review of everything hardware. We’ll be talking about hardware startups, flagship gadgets, and the wild and wooly worlds of Apple, Samsung, HTC, and all the rest. Featuring the TC Gadgets team, this weekly audio podcast will bring you the best we have to offer and comment on the news of the week.
We’re looking for guests! If you’d like to be featured, me a line at [email protected]. We aim to make each of these about 20 minutes long – just right for a commute – and will bring on a rotating cast of TC writers. This week we talk smartwatches, Apple on the defensive, and the release of the Nook HD+. Enjoy!
You can subscribe to the . We’ll a direct iTunes link next week.
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U.S. Senate Approves Proposed Internet Sales Tax
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
An Internet sales tax is inching its way closer to being the law of the land: The U.S. Senate supported , 75-to-24, for a law that would allow states to collect taxes from Internet retailers. If enacted as is, it would allow states to levy taxes on some online retail purchases from businesses with over $1 million in gross receipts. Internet retailers their mostly tax-free existence to a 1992 Supreme Court Case, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, which declared that companies without a “substantial nexus” in a state didn’t have to pay sales tax. “Quill became a seminal case for online retailers: It meant, in essence, that they didn’t have to pay state and local sales taxes,” writes the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein.” That’s allowed them to undercut traditional brick-and-mortar stores on price. It’s also meant that state and local governments, which rely heavily on sales taxes, have lost enormous amounts of revenue as more and more commerce has moved online.” There are some exceptions: Amazon currently charges California residents sales tax, and will soon charge residents of and , after new offices and acquisitions gave it a significant presence in those states. A score of Internet lobbies, such as Netchoice, representing Facebook, Yahoo, and (TechCrunch’s parent company) Aol, that the senate’s bill “does nothing to address what the Supreme Court says was an unreasonable burden on interstate commerce,” explains Steve Delbianco of Netchoice. An equally self-interested set of lobbies, such as the National Retail Federation, representing the big box likes of OfficeMax, Macy’s, And Saks, argue that an Internet sales tax ban gives online retailers an unfair advantage and deprives states of billions in revenue. The current law will give readers a flavor for the sausage factory that is the U.S. Congress. The tax was offered as a non-binding amendment to the Democratic budget by Senators Mike Enzi and Dick Durbin. “The strategy of the bill’s supporters is to offer this general amendment and then claim that all the senators that vote for it support the bill,” Brian Bieron, eBay’s senior director for federal government relations and global public policy, to CNET. “That is not just a stretch, it is not accurate. But the game plan is to rack up a sizable vote and then make the claim the bill itself should jump over the Finance Committee and go right to the floor.” So nothing is law yet, but it’s getting closer.
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“The Business Of Literature Is Blowing Shit Up”
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 3 | 23 |
If you love books–heck, if you even ’em–run, don’t walk, and read this by Richard Nash on their past, present and future. It’s long. Don’t be frightened. But even if the Internet has shredded your attention span, at least scroll down to its epic final paragraph. Go on. I’ll wait. It’s been a rotten decade for book publishers, newspapers, and anyone else clinging to that 15th century technology called the . Marc Andreessen has advised the mighty to “ ” and shut down their presses. His partner Ben Horowitz claimed last year that “ .” Meanwhile, , , and Barnes & Noble’s Nook has gone from to . The “Big Six” publishers , but check out : If publishers are at war with Amazon, the undisputed king of e-commerce–and they –then that remarkable trend does not bode well for them. Authors aren’t doing so well either. “ .” “ .” Nowadays, when authors dream of financial success, they dream more of Hollywood or TV adaptations than slots on the bestseller list. Movies and television have held up remarkably well under the onslaught of the Internet, thanks largely to ever-more-lucrative foreign markets, while book publishing has quietly become far more hit-and-miss than Hollywood. Last year book in E.L. James’ trilogy sold . Only one other book, Gillian Flynn’s , broke a million. Which is more than it sold in print, incidentally. For the last five years, in the face of this spreading transformation, the publishing industry has been caught in a tawdry and depressing spiral of denial and decay, constantly attempting to reject new media, new technologies, and new business models until they can fight back no more. (Disagree? Name some publisher-driven innovations.) Evan Hughes’ is the latest in a long line of eulogies. If it seems incredibly musty and tired to you, you’re not alone. I’m faintly amazed that it was published in in 2013; dates back to 2007. That’s why Nash’s essay is such a breath of revolutionary air. The publishing industry will never be the same, but why can’t it be ? Why can’t a whole new model of publishing be created, rather than this false dichotomy between “published” and “self-published”? So the king is dying; well, long live the king! The Internet opens up new ways of connecting with readers that authors have never dreamed of before… and that publishers seem to barely even consider. Take . A few months ago they put a up on their site for free. (They did ask permission, even though they didn’t need to; after the rights to the books in question had reverted from their initial publishers, I released them under a Creative Commons license.) And I’m delighted that they did. A cool million chapter-views of my back-catalog hacker thriller later, I know far more about how people read the book than I ever did before: One of the fun things about is that you can work out how many readers actually _finish_ your book. In the case of Invisible Armies, — Jon Evans (@rezendi) …about 50% bounce within the first 2 chapters, but >80% of those who stay to chapter 3 finish the book. Never had numbers before… — Jon Evans (@rezendi) …obviously, the next step is for authorial algorithms to data-mine the hell out of all this and build the perfectly addictive book. :) — Jon Evans (@rezendi) Hughes seems to be arguing that authors will choose to self-publish. Charles Stross : Yes, I do it. But it’d suck up a huge amount of time I would prefer to spend doing what I enjoy (writing) and force me to do stuff I do not enjoy (reading contracts, accounting, managing other people). The only sane way to do it would be to hire someone else to do all the boring crap on my behalf. And do you know what we call people who do that? We call them . Indeed. But wait: why do all of those people have to work under the same corporate aegis? Why can’t Stross hire a separate editor, copy editor, publisher and marketer? Why must their end-product be viewed as a thing that is complete and engraved in stone, rather than a living beast amenable to A/B testing and weeks-to-months of optimization, like a Broadway play in previews? If a book isn’t a sheaf of papers any more–and given that the bestselling e-books are now outselling the sheaves, it clearly isn’t–then what is it? I’ll take a swing at that one: a book is a story told in the size and shape that fits most deeply and tightly into the human brain. Everyone keeps waiting for Amazon Singles and short stories to take off, and waiting, and waiting. But I believe novels will remain the dominant form of written storytelling so long as our brains remain substantially unchanged. Maybe the existing system of publishers and booksellers will collapse. Maybe our collective ability to filter the good from the bad will be challenged. Maybe, as more and more books are written, and more and more made available for free, full-time authors will become an endangered species. Doesn’t really matter. Books will remain, and they’re books, because they’re that razor-barbed size and shape, they’ll remain a genuinely powerful and subversive medium. Richard Nash is right: whatever tidal wave of change comes next, whatever economic system or sociopolitical order, you can bet that books, in one form or another, will be at its disruptive heart. Booksplosion, by azrasta, on .
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 3 | 24 | null |
Facebook Brings Down The Hammer Again: Cuts Off MessageMe’s Access To Its Social Graph
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
, , is confronting Facebook’s touchiness around access to its social graph. The app’s integration with Facebook stopped functioning earlier today (see left), the result of the company’s decision to cut MessageMe off from its “Find Friends” functionality, according to sources familiar with decision. MessageMe CEO Arjun Sethi declined to comment in this story and Facebook didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The move resembles Facebook’s decision last month to shut off Voxer’s access to the graph, even though Voxer connected to Facebook for well over a year. Voxer is another communications app that supports calling and voice chat. Facebook cut the app off around the same time In that decision, Facebook cited Section 10 of its platform policy (which is the same one it’s using in MessageMe’s case): Reciprocity and Replicating core functionality: (a) Reciprocity: Facebook Platform enables developers to build personalized, social experiences via the Graph API and related APIs. If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook. (b) MessageMe apparently replicates too much of Facebook Messenger’s functionality for the company to be comfortable with it. Facebook has long been touchy about providing access to the biggest of its strategic competitors like Google and Twitter. Back in 2010, look up their Facebook friends on the service or to send Facebook updates to Twitter. In the same year, Google and Facebook to Gmail’s contact importer because the social network wouldn’t send data the other way. But it’s only in the last year that the company has really stepped up enforcement against other startups. After cutting off Voxer last month, Facebook , saying that apps needed to share content back to Facebook and couldn’t replicate too much of Facebook’s core functionality. It cited the same policy in cutting off Twitter’s Vine hours after launch and . In MessageMe’s case, asking the company to share data back is kind of silly considering that people wouldn’t want to reveal who they message with or what they privately say. But the effect might not be too bad on the company. Vine has thrived over the last two months and still holds the #1 social networking spot in the U.S. on the iOS app store. in the month after Facebook cut them off. Plus, MessageMe actually doesn’t rely on Facebook for most of its growth. It instead uses the address book, which is the same method that other big messaging apps like WhatsApp and Line have used.
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See, Uber — This Is What Happens When You Cannibalize Yourself
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
Uber drivers are pissed off. But that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise… At least not to anyone who’s been paying attention. A group of UberBLACK drivers in San Francisco this evening, protesting the company’s business practices. Among other things, the group had complaints over the lack of health insurance or stock options for drivers. And the group also was protesting lower pay and a number of partners who had been recently been fired. That last part rings true for Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who wasn’t on the ground during the protest — instead, he was having dinner in Philadelphia, a market that the company had expanded to last summer. But he said it was his understanding from people reporting to him in SF that the majority of the 20+ protestors were Uber partners who had had their accounts deactivated due to quality issues. “It’s never easy to have to deactivate a partner,” he said, but stated that it was necessary to do so when drivers received poor ratings for unsafe driving or not having knowledge of the city. Job security could be an issue at the company, as protestors cited mass layoffs that happened in February. (The company disputes this.) But the bigger issue seems to be that Uber is in the midst of a big transformation, adopting a similiar strategy to Lyft and SideCar, one that threatens to chip away at its legacy UberBLACK and UberSUV businesses. When Uber first , it was billed as everyone’s private car service. As Kalanick tells it, the company was founded mainly so that he and a couple of his buddies could ride around town like ballers with their own on-demand black car service. But they weren’t the only ones looking for a fast, reliable alternative to the woeful taxi service in San Francisco. It turns out that there were many more passengers in San Francisco who were willing to pay a premium for a car that would be comfortable, that they knew would arrive on time, and that they could hail via mobile apps, without having to speak to a dispatcher. Compared to the taxi that never came, paying a little more to hail an Uber seemed like a no-brainer. Things were good for about two years and then competition came around. Using the same basic idea as Uber — that is, using mobile apps to facilitate communication between drivers and passengers — a bunch of new services cropped up offering their own, cheaper version of on-demand transportation. But while these services promised the same reliability as Uber’s on-demand service, they came at a much lower cost, due to the fact that they used taxi drivers — or in the case of Lyft and SideCar had built a fleet out of regular drivers operating their own vehicles. Uber responded by opening its platform to drivers who might not have licenses to operate taxi or limo services. And it also . So the company’s move toward cheaper options is not a huge surprise — it first launched UBERx last fall in San Francisco, and soon thereafter announced its intent to to its legacy black car service available in all its major markets. But adopting the same strategy as Lyft and SideCar, UberBLACK partners who had benefited from its growth over the last few years are annoyed. That’s because they are seeing their share of the pie start to dwindle as the company makes way for cheaper alternatives. For its part, Uber’s recent fare reduction and its are likely necessary as it sees increased competition from much cheaper alternatives. That means driving customers to its low-cost UBERx service, even if it’s at the expense of UberBLACK and UberSUV. Kalanick acknowledged that UberBLACK wasn’t at the right price a few months ago, saying it was difficult to find the right market equilibrium. He also admitted that UberBLACK partners were likely feeling a pinch in recent months, as average fares per hour and per week were slightly down. He attributed that somewhat to seasonality in the first quarter, as things slow down after the holidays. But he said fares per hour in San Francisco were still well above any other major Uber city, at a rate of about 30 percent to 50 percent. And despite competition from other service providers, Uber continues to grow. “Growth in San Francisco this year is very close to growth we saw last year,” Kalanick told me. “We’re waiting for growth to slow down but haven’t seen it yet.” That’s good news for Uber, but not necessarily of its drivers.
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UpWest Labs’ Fourth Batch Of Israeli Startups Look To Go Big In The U.S. By Taking The B2B Approach
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
a startup accelerator with the intent to expose Silicon Valley to the next generation of hot Israeli tech companies — and vice versa. While Israel has long been a hotbed for innovation and is home to the R&D labs of many of the world’s biggest tech companies, the founders saw an opportunity to create a more fluid connection between Israeli startups and the Valley. Through its three month program, selects five to seven promising Israeli startup and brings them to Palo Alto to live together in one house — an experience fit for reality TV. Unlike other American accelerators, UpWest typically likes to keep its batches small, focusing on companies that have already built some traction in Israel but are looking for exposure to American investors and customers. UpWest’s job, Galili says, is to help facilitate that connection. That’s also part of the reason the founders decided to bring on veteran entrepreneur and investor, Liron Petrushka, adding him as a partner last year. Fast forward to today, and UpWest Labs launched its fourth cohort of startups at Demo Day in San Francisco in front of a packed house of investors, entrepreneurs and geeks. The five startups are focusing on a diverse range of markets, from mobile and cyber security to brand engagement and video technology. But there was one uniting thread, which is a change from prior UpWest batches, in that these five startups are all, to some degree, bucking the consumer bandwagon in favor of a B2B approach. UpWest is currently interviewing teams for its fifth batch, which is set to begin in April. Without further ado, here’s a look at UpWest’s latest grads: is developing next generation, advance threat protection. Using its proprietary, in-process behavioral analysis tech, the startup is trying to re-invent the way companies detect and prevent cyber attacks, malware and any other security threat — whether they be targeted, APTs or zero-day attacks. Sentinel’s software monitors company desktops, laptops and mobile devices in real time, and, having reverse engineered dozens of strands of malware, it is able to monitor and detect high-threat malware and even unknown malware. Once it detects a threat on an employee’s device (even if they’re offline), for example, it automatically deploys protective measures to every end-point in the company network. The company has also built an aggregated, crowdsourced database of various malware imprints so that it can more effectively (and quickly) recognize existing threats and help companies squash them before they cause havoc. Sentinel was founded by ex-Checkpoint security experts, with decades of experience in the software security industry between them, is now working with “top enterprise brands” and recently added the former Symantec CSO to its advisory board. Veed.me is a video creation marketplace that connects small businesses and startups with talented videographers. The startup is taking an approach to video that’s reminiscent of what oDesk or 99designs does for content producers and designers — with a spin. Veed.me has recruited over 200 videographers, allowing them to create their own pages and share their portfolios. Businesses then receive concept proposals from the platform’s video experts, ideally from those with expertise in the particular area, and choose the best fit. After the project is completed by the videographer, businesses then pay them for the services rendered, the pricing of which ranges from about $1,500 to $6,000, the founders tell us. Not quite the price of oDesk, but fair pricing as long as the product is high-quality. During its seven weeks in closed alpha, Veed.me has attracted 30 customers, including Google, Waze and Eat24. The team itself is comprised of award-winning filmmakers and engineers. Qmerce offers a dynamic, unified and customized channel for brands to drive long term user engagement and loyalty. The startup wants to build the next-generation of customer engagement, allowing brands to create custom landing pages and feeds from cross-channel sources, like their social networks and games, allowing them to watch videos and socialize with their friends at the same time. Qmerce offers an end-to-end platform, which the founders say takes less than 10 minutes to integrate and, once installed, enables brands to continuously build applications on top of the platform or choose new ones from our marketplace. The startup offers an SDK so that third-party game developers can add their games to the platform. Brands can then create Qmerce feeds around particular events, campaigns or just for general engagement, while incentivizing users to interact with their social channels or play a particular game by offering them virtual currency for doing so. Qmerce is currently working with over 40 customers, including Toys-R-Us, Crocs & Pizza Hut and has raised $600K in seed capital to date. Ondigo is an automated CRM for small businesses. As a mobile-first solution, Ondigo is targeting the 20 million, offline, not-so-technical small business owners in the U.S. by allowing them to easily communicate with their customers and conduct “micro-marketing” campaigns while on the go. Ondigo connects with users’ address books on their phone, automatically building a customer database from their ordinary day-to-day communications — whether it be texts, emails or invoices. Ondigo then adds additional context and information about contacts and customers, as it looks to integrate with Quikbooks, Rapportive and other platforms. Going forward, it allows businesses to send customers links to review them on Yelp and other platforms to keep them engaged and, eventually, Ondigo wants to allow business owners to conduct all their CRM and outreach processes in one app, from sharing files to sending texts. Since launching its closed beta three weeks ago, Ondigo has onboarded over 1,200 small businesses and was ranked “#1 New Business App” on Google Play. Qlika is a next generation marketing management platform, helping brands advertise across thousands of micro-markets. Based on Big Data analysis and smart aggregation algorithms, the platform is capable of optimizing each campaign according to the local competition and best practices of each specific micro-market. Founded by Israeli military intelligence experts, Qlika wants to be the only platform that allows brands to both manage and optimize millions of campaigns across national media channels. At launch, the startup is focused predominantly on search advertising, and works individually with its customers to implement their campaigns. But, down the road, the founders want to create an automated platform that can scale by itself — for every type of digital advertising. To date, Qlika’s partners have seen a two-to-four-fold increase in profits and between 25 and 1,000x increases in scale, measured by the amount of campaigns they can manage with their existing teams.
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Google Acquires Web Application Server Talaria To Enhance Its Cloud Platform
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
, a company that a “new, dynamic web application server with a JIT-based runtime at its heart,” just announced that it has been acquired by Google. The Talaria team will become part of the Google Cloud Platform team. For the most part, the Palo Alto-based company was flying under the radar until now. The company was co-founded by in 2011 and was apparently still in private beta when Google acquired it. A Google spokesperson just confirmed the acquisition to us: “The Talaria team has developed cutting-edge technology that helps people build and run websites more efficiently, and we think they’ll be a great addition to our Google Cloud Platforms team.” While Talaria had a grander visions for its server, it only supported PHP so far and allowed developers to run applications like WordPress and Drupal. The company claimed that its technology allowed developers to “handle more users with fewer boxes, without changing a line of code.” Talaria also claimed its ” server lets you keep your favorite high-productivity languages, but with the scalability and performance you’d expect from a compiled language.” All of this is obviously a good fit for Google’s Cloud Platform, and Talaria’s announcement notes that the team will work to “help even more developers build and run their sites better.” Here is the full announcement from Talaria: At Talaria, we set out to fix the way people build and run modern web sites and applications. Over the past two years, we’ve proven our technology by powering some of the most popular sites on the web. Now, by joining forces with Google’s Cloud Platform team, we’ll be able to help even more developers build and run their sites better. We’d like to thank those people that helped us get here. Our investors and advisors that stood behind us, both in good times and bad. Our beta customers that pushed us, kicked the tires, and warmly invited us into their organizations. And finally, our friends and family that have gotten less attention and time than they deserve while we’ve been busy. We’re excited about what we’ll deliver together with the . The Talaria Team
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Uber Drivers Gather Outside SF Office To Protest Dismissals, Payment System, Lack Of Input
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
A group of current and former black car drivers gathered outside the startup’s San Francisco headquarters to protest what they said was unfair treatment by the company. When I arrived at around 5:45pm, a group of 30 or so were chanting, “No respect, no Uber!” every time someone left the building. The person leading the chants, Rajab Alazzeh of SF Best Limo, had apparently been asked by the other drivers to serve as an unofficial spokesman, and he rattled off a number of demands. He said that Uber needs to lower the company’s payment cut from 20 percent to 10 percent, to designate a specific portion of the payment as a tip that’s paid directly to drivers, to offer health insurance (which Alazzeh said had been promised), to make the drivers into full employees with W2 paperwork, and to stop bringing on “unlicensed, illegal, unsafe operators” who don’t have TCP certificates and permits. (Note that CEO Travis Kalanick disputes a number of Allazeh’s complaints — see the update below. Also worth noting is the fact that .) One of the big grievances was the fact that drivers have been dismissed for low ratings. Alazzeh said that Uber always takes the side of the passenger in these situations, even if the passenger was drunk and the driver was sober. He added that Uber doesn’t want to make the drivers employees, yet it essentially has the power to hire and fire them. Another driver, Karim Harcha of Actor Limousine Services, complained that Uber cut all three of his cars from the service four days ago because of user ratings. In the past, I’ve heard Uber drivers grumble about the launch of the more affordable service UberX, which black car drivers said had hurt their business. I asked Alazzeh if that was also one of his grievances, and he answered, “We have no input. They call us partners, but that’s just in word.” I also asked why they decided to hold their demonstration now, and Alazzeh said it was because 500 drivers were dismissed in February. “But the treatment has been going on for more than a year,” he added. “They treat us like slaves. We helped them build this business here in San Francisco, and this is the payment they show us.” Alazzeh also said that this was a nationwide demonstration, with drivers protesting in other cities including New York and Philadelphia, but that the biggest concentration was in SF, since this was the main office. In San Francisco at least, most of the drivers had dispersed by about 6:45pm. I’ve emailed Uber to ask about Alazzeh’s statements and will update if I hear back. CEO Travis Kalanick said that the three demonstrator statements I asked about (the promise of health care, the 500 drivers dismissed, and the demonstrations in multiple cities) “are all patently false, not even close to true, literally more than an order of magnitude off on the numbers and there were no other demonstrations in any other cities.” And in , he characterized it as a demonstration mostly by drivers whose accounts had been deactivated. Uber’s San Francisco general manager Ilya Abyzov also sent me this statement: Uber is 100 percent committed to working with only the highest quality transportation providers, thousands of whom are using Uber to grow their businesses and provide quick and reliable service to San Franciscans. Drivers who don’t know the city well or who are unsafe or unprofessional ultimately receive consistently negative feedback from riders that we cannot ignore.
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Carrier App Stores Suck, So Japan’s KDDI Did Something Different And Is Pulling In $250M A Year For Apps
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 3 | 15 |
When Apple launched its app store about five years ago, . It disintermediated carriers from what would become a lucrative revenue stream, one that’s brought Apple more than $11 billion in gross revenue ( ).- In the old feature phone world, developers used to have to beg and plead with the carriers for pre-install deals on phones. But these days, they just go straight through Apple’s review process or directly into Google Play. Some carriers have tried to run app stores over the years like Verizon’s Vcast app store, . Because Google Play and the iOS app store are still the main channels for downloading apps, how do carriers cope and stay relevant? Instead of starting another old app store, . , it comes pre-installed on its Android phones. At 5 million users per month paying 399 yen ($4.20) each, that’s up to $250 million in annualized revenue to pay out to developers. It’s definitely a unique model. KDDI partners with developers to bring apps into the AU Smart Pass but they often ask for premium or special unlocked content. For example, , gives away exclusive stickers. Many of the other apps are normally paid ones. Then KDDI splits overall subscription revenues back with developers based on monthly active usage. Developers can also offer in-app purchases, but they get to keep 80 to 90 percent of revenue instead of the standard 70 percent that Google Play or Apple’s app store gives them. “We needed to invent a new model and we wanted to manage the shift from feature phones to smartphones,” said Kazuhito Shimizu, who oversees mobile business development for KDDI in the U.S. He oversees a $60 million corporate venture fund that has taken stakes in companies like New York-based taxi and transportation startup Hailo. “This is kind of like Netflix for apps,” he added, saying that consumers would get confused if there were two app stores — Google Play and a branded KDDI store — on their Android phones. The Japanese carriers like NTT Docomo, KDDI and SoftBank have been in the unique position of being able to watch and learn from how U.S. and Western carriers adapted to the shift in power toward Apple and Google’s platforms. In Japan, smartphone penetration is still lower than 50 percent. Yet, Japan has this wonderfully rich history of elaborate feature phones and gaming and app platforms that have revenue-per-user metrics that still put Western markets to shame. Still, app distribution in Japan is changing dramatically as the big mobile gaming platform companies like GREE and DeNA adapt to the rise of smartphones and as players like messaging app Line emerge as interesting, new platform players. The AU Smart Pass could be an option for larger developers that are looking to break into the market there. The pass only works in Japan and on Android phones. But KDDI is exploring how to bring it to other Asian markets. The carrier is also building out features like extra cloud storage space for photos, files and music. “It can be a first marketing channel into Japan for developers,” he said.
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