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Biz Stone’s New Startup Jelly Sounds Like A Home For Do-Gooders On The Go
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 1 |
that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone was working on a new mobile startup called “Jelly.” Today, has emerged that gives us a few more details as to what Jelly might focus on, but it’s still hazy on details. In the post, Biz Stone, who is co-founder and CEO of Jelly Industries, Inc., says it will be for “everybody,” and will be mobile focused. Yes, it doesn’t sound like much, but Stone also said that the company is named after the jellyfish, which sheds light on the type of application he might be working on: We are inspired by this particular animal because neurologically, its brain is more “we” than “me.” Also, for the past 700 million years, this decentralized structure has been wildly successful. To us, it sounds like Jellyfish might have something to do with social good, or helping others out. By calling out the “we” vs. “me” aspect, it’s clear that Stone won’t be working on another social network that lets you express yourself in 140 characters, set up a bio or otherwise peacock about how amazing you are and why you’re interesting, all over the Internet. Doing “good” is another ballgame, though. You might be a generous person trying to change the world for the better, but can you prove it? Jelly sounds to us like a way to connect you to social causes and show off your contributions. The Twitter co-founder explained that “People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.” The service will be free, but won’t be available for “a while.” Additionally, Stone says that Jelly will be taking up a good part of his time, save for some of his advisory roles at companies like Branch and Fluther. Jelly is self-funded and based in San Francisco. Much like Ev Williams’ , Stone is in no hurry to become a big company he says. There aren’t many central homes for philanthropy and volunteering on the web other than a site like Causes, which piggybacked Facebook’s success and open graph. The site never took off as a standalone service, lacking helpful discovery tools to connect you with causes that you might care about. For the most part, you donate here, sign a petition there, but there’s no scorecard. If you had a public-facing profile highlighting your positive actions, you might do more good for the world and inspire others to, as well. It’s too early to ride the speculation train on Jelly, but if Biz Stone wants to do some good in the world, it will be an interesting story to watch unfold.
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The GPS-Enabled DJI Phantom Quadcopter Makes The AR.Drone Look Like A Toy
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 1 |
Back in 2010, our own John Biggs rightly Parrot’s AR.Drone as ” the coolest thing [he had] seen in a long, long time.” Since then, Parrot has launched the and while it’s still a very cool gadget, quadcopters have come a very long way since 2010. Last month, the folks at , who mostly specialize in developing unmanned aerial systems for commercial use, sent me one of their consumer-oriented and GPS-enabled to review. Most quadcopters are aimed at hobbyists and take a good amount of assembly and at least some experience with flying remote-controlled aircraft. The Phantom, which has a list price of $849 but currently retails for , comes mostly pre-assembled and is extremely easy to fly, thanks to its built-in compass and GPS module. Thanks to having GPS built-in, the drone always knows where it is in relation to you. So depending on the mode you are flying in, every input you give will always be interpreted in relation to you and not in relation to where the front of the aircraft is (here’s a video ). The other cool thing about the GPS mode is that the drone can hover in position even if it’s windy. It’ll just auto-correct for the wind, thanks to its built-in autopilot (you probably want to turn this mode off when you are trying to take a video, however, as the constant corrections will show up in your videos). This autopilot also kicks in if the Phantom loses its connection with your remote control if it flies out of reach or your remote runs out of battery, the drone itself is very low on battery, or because you turn it off to see if the autopilot actually works. Once the failsafe mode kicks in, the drone will simply fly up to 60 feet, fly back to where it first took off and land. I actually tried this and it worked surprisingly well. The drone touched down just about 3 feet from where I launched it. When you spent $700 on the drone and another $300 or so on a GoPro 3 Silver, that’s a nice feature to have. The Phantom is a clear step up from something like the AR.Drone. Its communication distance is just under 1,000 feet and a maximum horizontal speed of about 32 feet per second and a descent speed of close to 20 feet per second. That’s fast and feels even faster if you are just learning how to fly it. These show that this isn’t just a toy but can actually be used for some aerial photography. Indeed, since the Phantom launched earlier this year, a whole ecosystem has sprung up around it that provides owners with everything from to and . A gimbal, by the way, isn’t a must, but if you want to take really stable videos without the so-called “jello” effect (here’s a example of that), both a gimbal and some well-balanced after-market rotors will surely help. Here is a video I took with the Phantom and a GoPro 3 White over the weekend: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VBOSfbhacY?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] The Phantom’s battery lasts just under 15 minutes, so you probably want to buy at least a second one, given that the package only includes a single 2,200mAh battery and a charger. If you decide to get one of these, by the way, make sure you read the instructions and before you turn it on. The Phantom may look like a toy and is easy to fly, but this is a pretty high-end piece of technology and there are a few things you need to know and do before your first flight. With the just around the corner, it’s a fair bet that DJI will announce a few new products in the coming days and we’ll make sure to keep a close eye on this company.
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Now With 3 Million New Users, Google Reader’s Heir Apparent Feedly Relaunches On iOS & Android, Reveals How It Plans To Make Money
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 1 |
, the RSS feed-reading client that is rapidly becoming following the planned Google Reader shutdown, is today launching new versions of its Feedly Mobile client for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Android phones and tablets. This update, built-in response to user feedback, is focused on improving search, productivity, discovery and sharing. But the feature, which is likely to appeal to ex-Google Reader users the most is the new “title only” mode, designed to make headline scanning more efficient. The startup says it has now seen 3 million new users sign up for its service in the wake of that it’s shuttering Google Reader on July 1, 2013. Prior to this, Feedly had grown its own user base organically to 4 million users since its founding in 2008, to give you some perspective on how rapid this growth has been. “We are thankful that so many Reader refugees have selected Feedly as their new home, and we will strive to make it the best home we can for them,” says co-founder Cyril Moutran. “Our main priorities over the next 90 days are to keep the service up, listen to new users for suggestions, and keep adding smaller features weekly.” Feedly has been moving quickly to capitalize on the attention Google’s announcement brought the company, which has benefitted Feedly in particular, where its native clients have been topping the charts. The company has also been reassuring users that not only did it expect the Google Reader shutdown, it already had a transition plan in place: all you have to do is sign up for Feedly before Reader is gone, and you’ll be set. Clearly, many people have followed that advice. But today’s changes are more about keeping those users around for the long haul. For starters, Feedly has revamped its search and discovery engines, a mostly under-the-hood improvement which improves the speed of searching, and brings over 50 million RSS feeds to the search engine’s index. A “smart topic completion” feature helps you find new feeds faster on mobile’s small-screened interface, as it means less typing is involved. Meanwhile, Feedly is now tapping into its community’s behavior to improve its search algorithms – recommending feeds based on popularity. This feature is designed to improve over time, the company says, noting that the more you use Feedly to search, categorize, follow and favorite feeds, the better the feature becomes. Another new section called “Must Reads” allows you to track your most-watched feeds without the need for special folders. This now appears in the sidebar navigation next to the “Today” and “Saved for Later” sections. Moutran clarifies that, for now, this section is meant for personal organization purposes only – it’s a way to have quick access to the feeds you “absolutely want to see all updates from,” he says. However, he adds that Feedly might use this data in the future for search engine relevance improvements, but only in aggregate; it won’t show others which posts you’ve indicated are “Must Reads,” that is. Sharing improvements have also been introduced, with support for Google+, and settings that let you pick which sharing options (including Pocket and Buffer, too) will appear as a shortcut on the main toolbar. The company says it tested the beta of this new mobile release with more than 500 users over the past 10 weeks, giving a special shout-out to Squarespace founder and CEO , who has offered his own feedback, as well. As noted above, the biggest benefit to Google Reader users, who are just looking to duplicate their same Reader experience elsewhere, is the more compact title-only view. Feedly , and this is the continuation of those efforts. Most importantly, perhaps, Feedly is finally talking publicly about its business model. And yes, it will ask some users to pay. “We’ve been asked the question of Feedly’s viability a lot recently,” Moutran says. “We have heard from a significant proportion of our users that they would be willing to pay for Feedly. They love and depend on our service, and want to make sure Feedly will be there in the future,” he tells us. “We have also heard from our power users that they would like deeper integration with other services they use and pay for, like Evernote and Dropbox. We intend to launch a premium version of Feedly this year on a subscription basis that would include new features for power users.” Moutran also notes that Feedly has been working with publishers on efforts that would allow its users to discover, purchase and access premium content, such as those behind “paywalls,” or only available on a subscription basis, for example. The updated Feedly mobile apps are appearing in their respective app stores as of 9 AM PT, or you can .
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Famo.us, The Framework For Fast And Beautiful HTML5 Apps, Will Be Free Thanks To “Huge Hardware Vendor Interest”
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 1 |
, the JavaScript framework designed for building crazy rich (yet super fast) interfaces in pure HTML5, is making two announcements out of the HTML5 Developer Conference in San Francisco this morning: the framework will be free to developers thanks to a few “huge hardware vendors” taking interest, and it’s getting a physics engine. We’ve written about , but for those who missed it: Famo.us was started in 2011 by Steve Newcomb, just three years after his language processing company was snapped up by Microsoft for $100 million and rolled into Bing. While it confused a few of the judges at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012, Famo.us went on to raise a $4 million dollar Series A just six months later. In a way over-simplified nutshell: Famo.us pulls off a to allow web developers to tap the GPU of a device (be it that of a computer, smart TV, tablet, or a phone) for calculations, no plug-in required. To the developer, that means being able to build interfaces that are simultaneously richer and faster. To the end user, that means super-snazzy user interfaces without having to install any plug-ins. Check out a demo of a Famo.us-powered UI below (or check out yourself.): [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzBC20B5dsk?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] So with a few million dollars raised, how will Famo.us start bringin’ the money in? They charge developers. For-pay frameworks aren’t unheard of, though they tend to be the exception. That’s not Famo.us’ plan, though. As of this morning, Famo.us has confirmed that their framework will be free to developers for “as many … apps as you’d like, for as many users as you’d like.” Instead, Famo.us is relying on the interest of a few huge hardware vendors who are looking to Famo.us to power their UI on future devices. They’ll build (or help build) the UIs, then charge the vendors for licensing. Additionally, Famo.us will offer optional enterprise add-ons (think analytics, or the ability to record/replay user sessions to see how they navigate your design). Exactly hardware vendors have taken an interest here is currently under strict lock and key, but we can certainly narrow it down a bit. There are only so many “huge” hardware companies with the financial swagger to make something like this worthwhile. Apple is focusing mainly on native code right now (though they’ve done more than their fair share of contributions to HTML5 by way of WebKit), so it’s presumably not them. Meanwhile, both Samsung and LG have been dumping cash into HTML5-focused operating systems (Tizen and webOS, respectively) for their upcoming hardware. Finally, Famo.us is also announcing that their framework, which has thus far been focused solely on rendering, has picked up a physics engine along the way. Steve says they set out to find a physics engine that fit three criteria: it had to be fast, it had to work on mobile, and all of the data had to render to the in a way that left it Google-friendly. When they couldn’t find one that matched all of the above, they decided to build their own. It may seem strange for a framework that’s meant primarily to be used with interfaces to offer up physics functionality — it’s not a game engine, after all — but it makes sense: when you’re working with objects being thrown around in space (be it 2D or 3D space) it’s hugely advantageous to be able to work with forces that parallel the real world, like mass, gravity, and drag. Plus, it fits hand-in-hand with the way Steve explained Famo.us to Anthony Ha : “We built a shitty game engine which is basically the best app engine ever built.” Famo.us is currently in beta sign-up mode, and Steve says they have around 27,000 developers waiting to start building. Interested developers can find the
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Flurry’s Latest Calls Phablets A Fad – Devices Don’t Show Disproportionally High Enough Usage To Justify Developer Support
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 4 | 1 |
Flurry, an app analytics firm with a presence on some now 1 billion mobile devices, to examine the increasingly fragmented selection of hardware form factors on the market today, in an effort to better understand consumer preferences. The report concludes that people most prefer and use apps on medium-sized smartphones, like those in the Samsung Galaxy line, and full-sized tablets like the iPad. “Phablets,” meanwhile, Flurry dubs a “fad,” saying that they don’t show significant, or even disproportionally significant, app usage. To reach these conclusions, Flurry’s report looked at the top 200 device models in its database, which represent over 80 percent of all usage. It then broke down the devices into the following five groups:
You can see the distribution of these devices in the chart below – e.g., 16 percent have screen sizes 3.5 inches or smaller (in diagonal length); 69 percent are 3.5 to 4.9 inches – a large group which includes the iPhone; 6 percent are small tablets like the Kindle Fire and iPad mini; 7 percent are full-sized tablets like the iPad. Meanwhile, just 2 percent of devices are “phablets.” But as you may already know, device distribution doesn’t always equate to how those platforms are actually being used by consumers. Android users, for example, despite the platform’s dominant global market share, than iOS users overall, and . So Flurry compared the device install base with the number of active users and app sessions. The conclusions support the trends we’ve been hearing about for some time. For instance, even though small-screened devices account for 16 percent of devices in the market, only 7 percent are “active devices,” once users per device are taken into account, and only represent 4 percent of overall app sessions. For tablets, however, it’s the opposite – despite their small market share (7 percent of the top 200), they represent 15 percent of active users and 13 percent of active sessions. Flurry says this is because on the small end, users are on older phones, like Blackberry models, so there are fewer active users per model. These small devices are also obviously not ideal for running and using apps. And tablets, of course, are. However, on the in-between screen sizes known as “phablets,” their install base is 2 percent, while active users and sessions is just 3 percent. “Phablets are a fad,” proclaims Flurry in its post about this finding. The OS-specific data is fairly obvious. Medium-sized phones are the dominant form factor across all operating systems except Blackberry, the report also notes. Android dominantes the “phablet” market, while iOS dominates large tablets. The only Windows Phone devices in the top 200 are medium-sized phones. What is interesting is are the app trends across form factors. “Tablets are gaming machines,” says Flurry, noting that a third of time spent gaming now takes place on larger tablets like the iPad, as well as small tablets and phablets. “And while they command consumer time spent, they represented only 15% of device models in use in February and 21% of individual connected devices. These differences are statistically significant,” . And oddly enough, despite the tablets’ larger screens, they don’t see a larger portion of time spent in the books and video categories. Flurry speculates that’s because consumers are consuming a lot of text and video on their smartphones already. The report concludes that developers concentrate their efforts on medium-sized devices and tablets, not phablets and other small-screened phones.
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CrunchWeek: Facebook Home Madness
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
It’s time for that very special time each week when a few of us writers gather around the TechCrunch TV cameras to shoot the breeze about the biggest and most interesting stories from the past seven days. , and joined me in the studio this week to talk about the social network’s huge mobile announcement from Thursday. Facebook Home replaces your standard Android’s homescreen with an immersive Facebook experience featuring full-screen photos, status updates, and notifications. Facebook also announced a special version of Home will come pre-installed on the new HTC First phone on AT&T. Home is by some accounts a from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It essentially turns and puts some of Google’s premier apps like and Gmail in the background. What’s more, some have around Facebook Home. We tackled all of these issues around Facebook Home and much more–tune in above!
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Statement From Meghan Asha
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
Following about the claims against TechCrunch founder , and our request for more information as to what exactly happened, one of the key people he is of assaulting has responded. Meghan Asha has provided us with the following statement:
As we continue to look into this matter, we appreciate any parties with more facts to come forward, on the record or if they have to.
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What Games Are: The Reviewers Are Wrong About OUYA
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Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
So let’s be upfront about a couple of things. First, I went to the OUYA party at GDC. Second, I also was invited to the pre-dinner beforehand. Third, OUYA gave me one of the machines at the party, along with a nice pair of wireless headphones and a bag. Fourth, I have subsequently set the machine up in our office at Jawfish and have been playing some games on it. Fifth, I am not, nor have ever claimed to be, any kind of professional journalist or reviewer. I’m a game designer most of the time and a blogger the rest. I mention all of the above to be open before I start to talk about a review of the OUYA which appeared on The Verge this week, and more generally about a perception issue surrounding . The Verge’s review was severe and (I felt) somewhat unfair. While I received my free OUYA gratefully and enjoyed playing with it, it does have its issues. I like the box and the UI but I’m not wild about the joypad, for example. I like some of the games, but some of them are admittedly very weak. None really stand out. Why unfair though? Well because of this: When considering a device like OUYA or GameStick, the phrase “Android console” conjures up two comparisons. On the one hand there is the temptation to look at them as Android phone-alikes and then start to wonder why they don’t have 100,000 games, or no Google Play store, or alternatively to get all huffy about how much Android is apparent (this was part of – and it’s the sort of point that only a tech journalist would ever care about). The second comparison is with consoles like Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. In this mould, OUYA and similar are underpowered and half-baked, the reviewer looks at them and asks “could you ever see Call of Duty on this?” To which, of course, the answer is no. Or at least, not for a while. So what comes across is the idea that the “Android console” is a device . But that’s largely because the tech/game-journo-land concept of what these devices are about is wrong. They’re not “Android consoles.” Android is just the free operating system that most of these newfangled cheap gaming devices are being built upon. However but that’s not necessarily meant to be taken to mean that they are part of the Android platform story. It’s just convenient. Similarly, these wee boxes are not intended to be competitors to the big consoles with all of their shiny awesomeness. They’re microconsoles. Micro-what? Well, if it helps, think of them as the of the console world. That is to say: deliberately small machines with a particular focus, a low cost and the capacity to disrupt the gaming market from below rather than above. Microconsoles are the new, weird, not exactly set-in-stone thing to happen in gaming this year. What does that new thing look like? Well for one thing, not all microconsoles are supposed to be Android devices. Microconsoles are more a product category, much as “tablet” is a product category distinct from “PC,” or “ultrabook” is trying to be from “laptop.” A bunch of microconsoles currently are using Android of course, but Valve’s Steambox won’t. If/when the Apple TV gets around to games then it clearly won’t. All could probably be considered microconsoles. For another, microconsoles are mostly aiming to be cheap – both in hardware and games – and so the expectation that they should be powerful is a stretch. Granted there is a further, very undecided, argument that gamers may ultimately consider low power to be a deal breaker, but still. A review of a netbook would never seriously rate it as 3.5/10 for not being able to run Photoshop well because the reviewer accepts the premise that the device is not meant for that sort of thing. Microconsoles should be reviewed in light of the same sort of premise. For a third, microconsoles’ target market is not necessarily supposed to be the same as that for consoles. The PlayStation and Xbox are big vertical businesses focused all around selling premium games at premium prices. In that model the machine is expensive and locked-in, the cost of developing games is high and the conversation between game and player is highly moderated for the mass market. Microconsoles are horizontal, like app platforms, designed to let developers develop and see what comes of it. For a fourth, microconsoles are , like your phone. This is a very different model to that of the Wii U or PS Vita, where the all-in big launch and support has to be ready before going to market. In those businesses the hope is to hit on the right spec and sell 40 million units before you pump out an upgrade. Whereas in businesses where an upgrade cycle is intended, the first couple of iterations of the hardware try to find market fit. Remember when the App Store launched and it was beer and fart apps galore for the first few months before developers figured out what they could do? Microconsoles are kind of in that phase right now. However the big lesson for the emerging microconsole sector is not that The Verge is wrong. The people who’ve slaved away on bringing these devices to market might well think that, and feel that the fact that the review is based on Beta hardware is unfair. Yet from the standpoint of how The Verge sees what these devices are supposed to be, the reviewers are right. The lesson is that the microconsole marketing story is not yet hitting. The sense that they are a different category of device rather than the mangling of two other categories is not getting through. The notion that they are something new is not one that many journalists have latched onto. There’s a perception gap, and it’s a problem. OUYA seems to spend a great deal of time courting a Linux-esque audience of console hackers, the sort of people for whom the idea of that plays games and can be retrofit with 3D-printed controller covers is fun. This is a great early adopter audience to talk to, but at some point it’s not enough. The message of OUYA as a little-box-that-could is perhaps lost between the tug-of-war of its Androidness or its Consoleness, and the plain-speaking message of its natural advantage (price) is not coming through. “Free games under your TV” should probably be the message, but it gets a bit garbled when you’re also talking about indieness, hackability and whatnot. However it’s been less than a year since the original Kickstarter campaign sent the OUYA into the stratosphere, so all of this is what I’d have expected in context. The fact that it has become a reality, something that many people thought would be impossible, is impressive enough (although of course this does not give it a free pass). It may be scrappy, take a little while for some issues to resolve, and it may also take a couple of iterations to get it right. But put that in context with massive launch failures like Wii U or PS Vita and it looks interesting to me. There’s still a vast opportunity to innovate in the microconsole space and define the category properly. The prospect of app-style gaming coming to a TV near you is one that has the power to completely disrupt the industry that we all think we know and replace it with something leaner. “Free games under your TV” is something we have never had before. But sure, it might take a little more time to get it right.
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The Next Don: How VCs Plan For The Future
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
We all remember the last scene in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone is depicted as the next Don, taking over the role from his father as the figurehead of the mafioso Corleone family. As a viewer, we are partly left with a sense of relief — finally, Don Corleone’s wishes for his dynasty to carry on through his son will come true, Michael Corleone has finally accepted his destiny as a mob boss, and the infamous Corleone family will live on for another generation. Horsehead-in-the-bed behavior aside, the way that VC firms groom their talent isn’t all that different from how the older Corleone groomed his sons. Here are the facts: the number of active VC firms are shrinking. There are now just over 800 active VC firms. Compare this to the 1,100 in 2002 when there was a boom of new firms rising from the ashes of the dot-com bust. There are a number of micro and macro reasons for this drop, but one of the reasons for the demise of many of these firms is poor succession management. These firms did not find, groom and promote the talent that would one day take over the firm and help it find the next Google or Facebook. And there are crop of firms, many of whom we talked to, that rose in the 70s that have been doing this for years. The ones who have maintained their leadership, investor and LP reputation, been able to raise fund after fund, and manage several locations, have been able to master how succession management is done right. As Emily Mendell, VP of communications at the National Venture Capital Association explains, succession management is one of the most important issues VC firms currently face. “The reputation of a firm is built on its partners, and a brand is built. But at some point those people leave and retire and if a firm doesn’t have the next wave of up-and-coming investors who are known to both LPs and entrepreneurs, they can have a big gap, and even have trouble raising a new fund,” she says. She explains further that there are a number of VC firms that have had trouble raising funding because there isn’t a proper succession-management plan in place. We sat down with a number of leaders at various firms who have managed to pass the baton and thrive for decades. , managing partner of well-known top-tier Silicon Valley VC firm recalls the moment when the founding partners (Dick Kramlich, Chuck Newhall and Frank Bonsal started NEA in 1978) handed him the baton in 1999, after he had been at the firm for seven years. He says that all of the founding partners were still involved in the firm, as well as active in board memberships and the overall direction of the firm. The fact that they were still actively involved in NEA at the time they passed is one of the key factors in making the succession a seamless transition, he explains. He also credits the founders’ ambitions for wanting to create a “100 year firm” from the outset. “It was not about three guys coming together for a partnership, it was about creating an institution that would last for decades,” Barris says. That way, he adds, the founders didn’t put their names on the masthead. They chose a generic name that would last and still have brand value years after they passed. Now that Barris is at the helm, he is constantly finding ways to give people leadership responsibility to help foster a younger generation of partners who will one day lead the firm. He cites talented partners like Scott Sandell who runs the technology practice at NEA, as well as David Mott, who leads health care investments. And there is Pete Sonsini who runs enterprise investments and Harry Weller, who leads the firm’s East Coast practice. “If you don’t take the approach that you are thinking of as a 100-year firm, then you are more likely to manage for short-term, which is to the detriment of the other partners at the firm,” he says. Part of fostering talent and succession management at NEA is getting face time with LPs. “With LPs, we have a 12-year partnership. If you aren’t around, who is? It matters to them,” adds Barris. “Limited partners are in it for success of partners as well as the firm, and they want to make a bet on partners who will be involved in multiple funds.” NEA has three face to face meetings with partners and the firm’s board of advisors, which is made up of larger LPs of the firm. The firm also has an annual meeting with LPs, where various partners present on their investment areas and get face time with the people who are investing in the firm. Last year, NEA raised for NEA 14, its 14th venture capital fund, and a raise that has been speculated as the biggest in VC history. “Succession management is something we’ve done well and it’s really hard,” says , a long-time partner at who helps manage the firm. “The generational transition has to be part of the culture of a venture firm,” Schlein explains. “It has to be built-in because VC firms are like a clay you are molding — the firm is in an ever-changing state.” Schlein adds that the firm’s leader John Doerr rose through the ranks as an associate, and Schlein himself joined at a mid-point in his career (he joined the firm in 1996, Doerr joined in 1980). One way that Kleiner tackles creating a deep bench of talent is to never have one partner work on one deal. Each deal that Kleiner does, has a senior partner and a younger partner. Schlein says that the firm believes the VC business is very much built around mentorship. Part of creating that bench of talent is having a diverse mix of partners. He says that the firm has brought in younger talent like . He says that prior to Quinn, it was who has now been at the firm for five years. The firm has also brought in senior people like or former “People are coming in from the side and below and that’s what makes this a great partnership,” says Schlein. But the challenge, he adds, is getting the right personalities and creating a chemistry. Schlein brings up a good point in that without younger talent, or partners who have outside operational experience, firms risk being irrelevant in the current, dynamic world of technology. , one of the leading partners of , the VC firm founded by Don Valentine back in 1972, says “succession management is a huge issue if you have the notion of building a partnership that is enduring. Some venture partnerships are in the moment partnerships, and VCs need to have that crystal clear in their mind if they want a lasting firm.” Leone, who is responsible for coordinating the daily work of Sequoia’s business, recalls that when Valentine handed the keys for Sequoia over to Michael Moritz and Leone in 1996, the founder didn’t ask Moritz and Leone to buy into the partnership. He trusted that the duo would help make sure that Sequoia would last for generations. Leone adds that Valentine is still involved in the firm and comes to partner meetings around 25 percent of the time. Similar to Barris’s views, Leone credits Valentine’s choice of a generic name for the firm, which he says takes away the pressure when the original founders are gone. The other element to doing succession management right, he explains, is to build a partnership where there is no single point of failure involved in changes. “Changes should happen in a way that nobody notices,” says Leone. When it comes to actually grooming talent, Leone says that the firm likes to nurture talent and grow them from within. Younger partners and principals are working in tight-knit teams with experienced partners mentoring, with more junior staffers working on deal flow, and then as they mature, working directly with portfolio companies. “There is no notion of my deal at the firm,” Leone says. He also cites the actual organization of Sequoia’s offices (there are no individual offices) as a way for junior partners and staff to work with senior partners. , the former COO and CFO of Amazon-acquired-Zappos, joined Sequoia in 2010, and he, along with former Googler Bryan Schreier, Aaref Hilaly and a few others, are part of the new, rising guard of VCs at the firm. Lin tells us that even as young partners, responsibility is spread quickly, with plenty of interactions with senior partners on deals. Lin adds that within the first year of Sequoia, he was interfacing with LPs. Leone says that the interaction with LPs is another way to tackle succession management. And often times, he adds, it’s the younger partners who have operational experience in newer technologies like mobile gaming, who can actually impart key knowledge on LPs and senior partners. One VC who wished to remain anonymous points to Greylock as model example for succession management. The firm infamously moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley in 2009 from Boston, with partners David Sze, Asheem Chandna, Workday founder Aneel Bhusri, James Slavet, and others helping lead the firm’s practice. The firm then added LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, former Mozilla CEO John Lilly, and enterprise guru Dev Ittycheria as partners. Now Greylock has secured its place as one of the members of the elite group of top-tier firms in Silicon Valley, just a few years after basing itself out of the area. The next guard will lead a world much different than their predecessors. The families on Sand Hill no longer only compete against each other, but against a growing crop of Angels, Micro-VC’s, and Studios. They will start new practices and hire new types of talent to stay top-of-mind in a fast-paced ecosystem where seed checks are a commodity. Michael Corleone led the family into a new set of dealings and geographies, including Vegas and Cuba. But as a viewer, you get the sense that he stuck with the values his father set. He led a transition, without abandoning the tradition. What will that look like for Sand Hill Road? Photo Credit/
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Track The Progress Of This 3D-Printed OpenRC Truggy, A Remote Control Car Enthusiast’s Dream
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
If you’re into 3D printable stuff, or into remote-control cars, then the OpenRC Project is for you. A gentleman in Sweden named is sharing his progress on a 3D-printed Truggy, as well as sharing the recipe with the that he created. A truggy is an off-road vehicle, in case you weren’t sure. The cost of 3D printers is dropping both for at-home use and enterprise, so it’s a very real possibility that consumers all over the world could soon have these devices in their living rooms. Crazier things have happened. We’ve seen 3D-printed , , and even a . If you can print out your very own customized remote-control car with one, count me in. While not all of the parts are printable, such as the wheels, for really die-hard remote control car fans, those are parts that they probably have sitting around in the garage already. Here’s a video that Norée uploaded today that shows some of the schematics behind the parts, and the actual 3D-printing process using one of those fancy : The project has come a long way in the past few months; here’s a video of an earlier model breaking down: I want one. While this isn’t the only car out there, the advantage here is that you can and join the discussion. If you’re ready to print one out, .
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Drones Will Deliver The Morning Paper In France
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 1 |
Pimply delivery boys will need to find a new way to make money in France: the province of Auvergne . The official postal service, La Poste Group, has already been beta-testing the automated delivery service with 20 hornet-looking unmanned aerial vehicles. FedEx a vocal proponent of a drone-powered delivery service, and the FAA has been steadily approving regulations to permit commercial drones by fall of 2015. If this happens, say goodbye to the harkening of spring by . At least one state, Virginia, is on the path to place a , but that doesn’t seem like it’ll derail FedEx’s plan for an army of automated delivery drones. While the morning paper is nice, I can’t wait for the taco-delivery service, Tacocopter. Even though this flavor fairy (which fooled The Colbert Report), we hope it’ll be a reality soon.
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 1 | null |
Clayton Christensen Talks Venture Capital, Crowd Funding, And How To Measure Your Life
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Derek Andersen
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYVdf5xyD8I] There are few people whose impact on entrepreneurs and business in general you hear about as frequently as Clayton Christensen. Clay’s body of work includes co-founding a publicly traded company, being a Rhodes Scholar, writing one of the most influential of our generation, and a stroke that forced him to relearn to speak, teaching thousands at the Harvard Business School, and raising five children. He has accomplished gigantic things, not to mention he stands 6 ‘8″ and today is also his birthday so please wish well. When I heard he would speak at Startup Grind 2013, excitement and then panic raced through my bald head. Luckily one of the very best in the business, of GRP Partners was gracious enough to come and represent the startup community at the interview. Mark has written of his conversation, but it seems appropriate to followup with this audience and share the entire interview from a few weeks ago. The Innovator’s Dilemma as you might know outlines how companies with historically successful products and market share will be disrupted and beaten unless they are innovative again and again. Clayton also recently co-authored which explains how like in business you need to plan in order to be successful in your personal life or you run the risk of failing your family and betraying your values. Read or watch the fascinating interview below. ———————– : Welcome to StartUp Grind! I thought we would start with the disruption of education. Because you’re a professor and I thought that would put me on more comfortable grounds. : Perfect. : We’ll come right back to venture capital, I promise. What are your feelings about education in America – the doubling over the last few years of consumer debt over education, and the fact that technology might just make what you do much more available at a lower cost for more people, which in itself matches I think your definition of disruption, and what’s going on with Udemy and Stanford and other places. I’d love to hear that. : Boy, it’s a great question. I wrote my first piece about the disruption of the Harvard Business School in 1999. Because you could see this coming. I haven’t yet done the one about the disruption of the Stanford Business School. But what’s important about today versus ten years ago is, there are certain industries in which there isn’t a technological core that allows somebody to start at the bottom and go to the top. So like, hotels don’t have a technological core. Holiday Inn comes in at the bottom of the market, but they can’t go upmarket except if they emulate the Four Seasons. So they can go up, but they have to emulate the people they’re trying to compete against. They can’t disrupt them, because there isn’t anything about their model that is extendable upmarket. In so many others, computers and steel, there’s a technological core. So, for 300 years higher education was not disruptable because there was no technological core. If San Jose State wants to become a globally known research institution, they have to emulate UC Berkeley and CalTech. They can’t disrupt them. But now online learning brings to higher education this technological core. And people who were very complacent now are in deep trouble. The fact that everybody was trying to move upmarket and make their universities better and better and better drove these prices up to where they are today. So what do you do about it? I’ll just talk about the Harvard Business School and how hard it is. Because – and this is in most industries – online learning, or the technology itself, is not intrinsically sustaining or disruptive. But how it gets deployed makes the difference. So right now, the Harvard Business School is investing millions of dollars in online learning, but it’s being developed to be used in our existing business model. We’ll sell it to other universities and we’ll sell it to other universities to use in their existing business models. But there is a different business model that is disrupting us, and that’s online learning. On-the-job education. So Intel University, GE Crotonville. This model of learning is: You come in, we’ll spend a week teaching you about strategy, and then you go off and develop the strategy. You come back for two weeks in product development, and we send you – you know. You use it and you learn it and you do it while you’re employed. It a very different business model, and that’s what’s killing us. And it’s truly what’s going to kill us. : I know you think a lot of VCs don’t read your work. I’m very public about how not only influenced the way I built my startup, but the way I think as a venture capitalist. I called it something different, because I couldn’t call it the same thing you called it: I called it Deflationary Economics. I was going to call it Suster Theory, but I didn’t think that would go down too well. I think about Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York City, and he publicly has also said that the most influential work on him was in thinking about how he invests. And I think particularly with the Internet as you get much larger markets and therefore you end up trying to sell things with lower costs, with less margin, with less specification to a much bigger industry, it lends itself very well to what you’re talking about. Thinking in terms of education, and I’m thinking Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, not even the business school but education. It strikes me that something we need to think about is if employers valued students who got lower-cost education that was taught in a different way with different sets of tools and came more job-ready because they were actually learning by doing rather than learning from “chalk-and-talk,” I wonder if we’d see that shift happening faster and it might be good for our country in terms of debt and stuff : I agree. It would be wonderful if they would do that. Because the job to be done is the employers want people who can – who have the skills to do the job. Universities don’t understand that job. The students are here to learn what we think they should know. And we invest and we subsidize their education in fields for which there are no jobs. I really do think that the more we can link the employers with the people who, online, provide the skills, it really will just cause the world to flip. The scary thing is that fifteen years from now, maybe half the universities will be in bankruptcy. Including the state schools. But in the end, I’m excited to see that happen. So pray for the Harvard Business School if you wouldn’t mind. : I think – not in a terrible way – this is actually good for society. I also wrote a post – I went to University of Chicago Business School – but I wrote a post talking about how I think for most entrepreneurs, business school doesn’t prepare them well for entrepreneurship. I think it prepares people well to go look at Bain Capital much more than being entrepreneurs. And that’s how I think universities need to adapt. You have, on your staff, also: There’s a gentleman who teaches entrepreneurship there and I’m struggling to remember his name, who does a great job at actually teaching from blogs and other things in his course. Talk about internationalization of innovation. Is this something you have a point of view on? The fact now that you’ve got China and India and, we heard earlier, Brazil and other places – and the role that education may or may not play in the U.S.’ competitive advantage. : Boy, it’s a wonderful issue. And it plays it out in scary ways. So as a general rule, when a new industry takes root, and the first products emerge in a wave, almost always the architecture of the product will be proprietary and interdependent in character. The reason why that those are most successful have proprietary architectures is the product isn’t good enough in the beginning for what people need. If you try to start out with an open architecture, the modularization of the architecture takes so many degrees of freedom from the engineers that they have to make a product that’s not as good as the best, and when the best is not good enough, you can’t win that game. That’s why we lost Palm. They went open too early. So you see RIM is the most dependent proprietary architecture and the iPhone is not as closed, but still very proprietary. And then what always happens is the product becomes more than good enough for what mainstream people need. Then coming from below, it becomes more open and modular in character. And when that happens, then the people who have the proprietary architecture are just kind of pushed to the ceiling and the volume goes to the open players. So in smartphones, the Android operating system and the consummate modularity now allows hundreds of companies in China and Vietnam to now assemble these things. So it pulls in global competitiveness that isn’t nearly as intense when proprietary architectures are the norm. Just one other thing about it: Just like I pray for Harvard Business School. I pray for Apple. They always have won with the proprietary architecture. And because of their advantage, you ask them, what’s the core of the company? They say it’s the design and the interaction with the customer. It’s right there, where they have the advantage. Manufacturing isn’t really our core competence. So you just give that to the Chinese. But then what happens to them is, as the dominant architecture becomes open and modular, the value of their proprietary design becomes commoditized itself. Because now this is just open and it may not be as good, but almost good enough. Then what happens in manufacturing is – one of my colleagues visited a plant in China where they formulate logic circuitry in an iPhone. This thing is 37 layers thick. Each layer 80 microns in diameter. Vias, the holes that go up and down, are two microns in diameter. And the precision has to be, when you’re doing a via down from the top and it’s got to go to level number 17 instead of 18, this is very precision work. And the machine that makes this costs $120 million. And it drills over two million holes per hour. This is sophistication. And there is nobody in America that could make this anymore. So what we face is commoditization of the design through modularity, and then where the money is made is in sophisticated manufacturing. And it really is quite scary. : Did you read Andy Gross’ piece where he talked about this phenomenon that, because we’re not investing now in manufacturing that the advantage is moving offshore? He talked a lot about battery design for next generation cars, and because we don’t have the manufacturing for that, we’re losing competitive advantage. : Yeah. It really is scary. And I don’t know – just like, if you’ve read my stuff, I’m ashamed I haven’t read Andy Gross’ piece. But the root cause. : You should just read my blog I summarize all this stuff for you. : The root cause is the professors at business schools. Because, for example, we teach our students that the way they measure profitability is a return on capital employed. That’s a common measure. And so if I’m going to be measured by that, this is a ratio. And sure, I could get that ratio up by developing new products that generate attractive profits to go in the numerator of that ratio. Aw, what the heck, if I just outsource everything, then I get assets off the denominator of the ratio. Either way, the ratio goes up. So because the way we teach people to measure things, it causes us to outsource that job. And there are other ways to measure – but I think the cause…we are at fault. : So I want to do something tangible that I think a lot of people in this room spend a lot of time thinking about. Over the last ten years the concept of “freemium” has taken root. And I think also my industry propagates that, which is: Don’t charge people. Get as many users as you can. It’s somewhat of a land grab and you’ll find third-party ways to monetize like advertising. Obviously there is huge disruption itself in that in terms of cost going to zero. How do you feel about that for entrepreneurs and how should they think about that? : Well, dang. As a general rule, if you have a product that doesn’t get the job done that a customer is needing to get done, then often you have to offer it for zero. Because if you ask for money for it – because if it doesn’t do the job well, they won’t pay for it. So go back in the early years of downloading music. You’ve got Kazaa and a bunch of people – it was free, right? But it was an open, modular system at the beginning, and you had to be a teenager to be able to use this stuff. Adults couldn’t. And Apple came along with a proprietary interdependent architecture. And because they were proprietary and interdependent they could take it all the way from iStore all the way through. People were so delighted to have something that did the job well that they were willing to pay! : But let’s talk about a specific example. For the most part as a VC I encourage my companies to monetize. I believe in testing markets, I believe in proving the value. I don’t say “job to be done” but I use the exact same words which is, “understand customer intent.” Understand customer behavior. Because, for me, I don’t want to see products and features. I want to understand the psychology of “why.” Because I don’t believe something fundamentally will become big if there’s not an underlying reason for them using it. But – Facebook could have made decisions to monetize early, and obviously, some people would have chosen to pay for that product, and it was a premium product – they didn’t. But by becoming huge, they open up the network effect to be able to monetize in many different ways over time. So do you accept that in some cases it may… : Yes, yes. So, if in fact it is intrinsically a modular element in the stack, then modularity drives commoditization which drives profit out. So if this is going to happen, just sy it’s going to happen and make it happen. But as a general rule, when that happens, the pieces of the stack above and below it initiate a proprietary decommoditization layer in the stack. So when it becomes free, the whole industry doesn’t go to pot, but where the money is made very often flips above and below it. And so when that happens, rather than fighting the “freeness” you say “Holy Cow. There’s something happening above and below.” When – I had a stroke and sometimes I just can’t come up with word…the guys that make the calls – phone-free – no, I’m sorry, that makes telephone calls free – Skype. I’m sorry, it just happens to me periodically. They – what used to be a very profitable stack just became truly commoditized. But you look at all of the things that work on top of Skype now. Man, they’re generating billions and billions of dollars. And that always happens. I just say this just accelerates a natural process, and when it does, look above or below, and we can invest there or be an entrepreneur there. : So let’s talk about disruption of venture capital because to be fair to you, I don’t want to avoid the topic where I get disrupted. I actually do think lots of venture capital is starting to be disrupted. I personally don’t believe it’s as radical fast as many people are predicting. But one of the ways in which people believe venture capital will be transformed, disrupted is through crowd-funding. And the belief that you can raise large pools of money in a small way to fund companies. I’ll weigh-in in a second with my views on crowd funding but I’d love to hear your views: Is that one of the ways that venture capital will be disrupted, and if not, what other ways do you think it’ll be disrupted? : Boy, it’s a great question. Let me say – I will say this after this is over – you are asking great questions. And it takes a lot more brains to ask good questions than it does to give good answers, so…there’s something about crowd-funding that doesn’t feel right to me. IF in fact the creation of new businesses were all the way to the edge of rule-space, then crowd-sourcing would work. Because people could just go down a checklist and say “this fits, this doesn’t, here’s your money.” But it’s somewhere between intuition and pattern recognition, and I just don’t – it just doesn’t feel right to me. : So the biggest problem I have with crowd-funding is it takes me back to the 1990s, when you had the – I lived in Europe for a time – when you have the emergence of AIM, the alternative market in London, you had the Nuemarkt in Germany, you had the Nouveau Marche in France, of course the NASDAQ in the U.S. And we saw tons of unsophisticated people pouring money into companies that – they didn’t understand what determines the value of business. Like my Mom calls me and says, “Honey, should I invest in Facebook?” And I’m like, “Not a chance! You don’t know the first thing about it!” Now, at least with public markets, we have regulation that forces disclosures. With the private markets, people are going to invest in things for which they don’t understand including the sophisticated structures of capital such as liquidation preferences and voting rights, and… : Yeah, I’m with you 1000%. I’ll tell you where I think there is a – I don’t want to say vulnerability, but opportunity – sorry, I might get it a bit wrong here. But my sense is, for venutre capital, historically, you might have ten good investments. Two of the ten will be really home runs. A couple more are reasonable, and five or so you don’t get penny out. There are a couple of problems with that basic model. The two that win have to be really big wins to cover what went – you know. But because you don’t know which of the ten are going to make it, every time you come up to bat you actually have to go for home runs. Doubles you can’t consciously go after doubles or singles – it’s just the nature of it. And then you’ve got – we’ve got to get liquid at some point, and I can’t see how it can have a liquidity event. It’s hard to put it in if I can’t get it out, right? So, there are just a lot of people out there. Or there are a lot of ideas out there – that are singles and doubles. It’ll become a $40 million nice profitable investment. Just not the kind of thing you could ever take public or sell to a big company. Venture capital can’t go in because it can’t get out. They’re not big enough to be one of the home runs. So there’s a new technology that’s emerged in the Boston area which must mean it must be suspect in some way that it hasn’t shown up here. But they’re calling it royalty capital. The money doesn’t come in as debt or equity, but it comes in as a license, just like you can license IT and stick that on the balance sheet. You get a license to use their capital. Then, they don’t pay a royalty on this license until there’s revenue. As soon as revenue starts, there’s a royalty rate they give off to the people that gave the license. The faster the ramp, the more the royalty comes down. The way you negotiate it at some point – when the royalty accumulated to 3x the value of the license – then we just say it’s paid in full. And you don’t have minority shareholders, you know? You pay it off with pre-tax money, rather than post-tax money. And the liquidity process is a process, not an event. So that most of the companies that get funded this way actually get some out of every investment. Even those that fail pay some of it out. And so it’s possible to invest – to invest in companies that won’t go public, and…yeah. : I don’t want to run out of time without having a chance to ask you one more important area, which is: When I was 20, the most important book for me was , Steven Kelly, because it talked about how you live your life. It talked about what you make habits, what’s important to you, how you derive happiness, how you make decisions. I have not yet read your book – how you measure your life, and I don’t know if it’s in a similar vein. But I’d love for you to give us – it’ll be the next book I read – I’d love to hear the overview of it. : We designed it in three sections. The first one is, how can I be sure that I’m going to be happy with my career and successful in my career? The second one is, how can I be sure that my family and the close relationships I have with my family and close friends are a source of joy for me throughout my life, rather than a source of heartache? The third one is, how do I be sure I stay out of jail? And this is the architecture – this reflects the architecture of the last class in my semester. And what we asked the students to do is – it’s a whole semester of studying the theories from my research. And then we ask them to put the theories on my cassette of lenses, but instead of studying a company, look in the mirror. Can these theories teach us things about these three issues? And I’m not kidding you. Holy Cow! When we look at ourselves through these lenses, it’s really very scary. So for example a shocking number of my classmates, when they graduated from the Harvard Business School, every one of them planned to have a marriage that was just filled with joy and happiness. And a shocking number of them went out and got divorced two or three times. They find themselves – their children are being raised by someone they’ve never met on the other side of the country. And their family situation is a source of real pain. Not a single one of my classmates had a strategy to go out and get divorced and be unhappy. And why that happens is the same reason, like when Cisco disrupted Lucent – there wasn’t anything in Lucent that said, “you know, we should go out and go into bankruptcy and drive the company into the ground.” But that’s actually what they did. And so the theory of disruption helps you think through the decisions you’re making in your marriage. But this is the one that really applies: Look at yourself through the lens of “jobs to be done” and ask yourself – it’s since happened to me, my whole life – married life – I tried to be a good husband. But I do for Christine what I think she needs from her husband. And if I give what I think she needs from me and she’s not appreciative, I get, “Why don’t you like what I just gave you? I know this is what you need.” You know? If instead, I try to look at it from – what are the jobs that arise in Christine’s life? For which she might hire a husband. And I’m telling you. I would never hire Clayton Christensen. But understanding the jobs that she needs to do really allows me to say, “Gosh, I guess I need to be the kind of person that she would want to have.” : So, uh, you want to be sure you don’t get fired, I guess, is the answer. But no, I’ve been writing a lot and talking about happiness and motivation and interrelationships. The most stressful period of my life was running a startup and it was very unhealthy. And I try to make sure that the people I invest in understand that they don’t actually realize how much stress they’re under and how unhappy they are, and how unhappy they make those around them. If you’re not going to deal with that while you’re going through the journey, you’re going to have some pretty unhappy years. You may know, in our industry, there’s been three suicides in the past six months. You know, they may be related to the stresses. It may just be coincidental to individual psychology and chemistry, but I think we as an industry need to be more open about talking about these issues. Again, for me, very young in my career to have someone like Stephen Covey openly talking about this, and happiness – I think’s a wonderful thing. So I look forward to reading your book. : I hope it’ll be useful.
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Run On High-Skilled Visas Maxes Out Quota In Just 5 Days
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
Americans will have to hope that a lottery can bring in more talented immigrants. After just 5 days, , two-months faster than last year. Now, eager immigrants will have to submit to a lottery for a chance to work in the U.S. High-skilled immigration reform is a top priority for the nation’s technology sector. Nearly a quarter of engineering and technology companies , and have been responsible for many of the most profitable firms, from PayPal to Google. Unfortunately, high-skilled immigration reform has been stalled in the U.S. Congress until it can pass comprehensive reform. For a more thorough run-down on the arguments on both sides, check out a between high-skilled reform expert, Vivek Wadhwa, and Congressman Gutierrez. A draft of the comprehensive immigration reform law is expected to hit Congress this month. Expect a a long, .
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It’s Not Just You, Twitter’s Latest Android Update Doesn’t Let You Access Your Profile Or DMs On The “Me” Tab
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
Twitter rolled out sweeping this week, mostly to support the , but unfortunately, those who are using the service on Android aren’t so happy. The app has always been a bit buggy on the Android platform, but the issues that are being reported are more than just a little problematic. Users have experienced not being able to open the “Me” tab which allows you to access your DMs and switch accounts, important parts of the service. I’ve experienced this bug from the second that the update was released, and I’ve heard that Twitter is working on the issue. It’s not affecting all devices, but shows it as being pretty widespread. You’re presented with a blank screen and a small spinner, with no information or message that says that the service is having any problems. At first, I thought that I just had a poor connection, but after using the app with Wi-Fi turned on, it became clear that this was a big ol’ bug: Since Twitter has been streamlining all of its apps, and site, it’s a glaring issue when one of the four tabs don’t work. [tweet https://twitter.com/Mumi79/status/320526057973374977] [tweet https://twitter.com/RaihanSays/status/320353145739939840] [tweet https://twitter.com/Shaun_Biggs/status/320523466916900864] [tweet https://twitter.com/hell_dad/status/320580948167098369] While no timeframe is being offered, and Twitter hasn’t made an official statement on the issue, it’s safe to say that the beautiful redesign that the Android app received is overshadowed by these issues. If you’re having the same issue, you might have to revert to using the of the site, as I’ve done. Or, and get to your profile that way. The nice part about Google Play is that as soon as Twitter updates the app with a new build, it will go live for everyone to grab without any submission process like Apple’s. Hurry up, Twitter, people are cheesed off about not being able to get their DMs from cute girls and stuff. [Photo credit: ]
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Gillmor Gang: Fork You
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — spent a too-quick hour on Facebook Home, Twitter’s new deep linking Cards, and the jousting over Webkit. Individually, these developments represent interesting strategy for the major notification platforms of Google, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook. But taken together, we’re seeing an important moment of truth. With Facebook pulling a “kindle” by hijacking Android’s lockscreen for its notification engine, suddenly everybody has to get in line. Apple retains its AirPlay gateway to the big screen, but it’s Facebook not Google that threatens iOS’ fit and finish. And just in time for apps, Twitter sets in motion developer innovation linking app to app and eventually the Web, Look out Cleveland, a fork is coming through. @stevegillmor, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @borthwick, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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We Want To See You At Disrupt, East Coast, And Early Bird Tickets Are Nearly Gone
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
As East Coast Editor of TechCrunch I don’t get much respect. “What’s out in New York?” they ask. “No start-ups, that’s for sure. Foursquare? Meh. It’s all bankers and boredom.” I’ll tell you what’s out in New York and along the entire East Coast: some amazing entrepreneurs with some amazing ideas. That’s why I’d like to invite you all to TechCrunch Disrupt. Whether you sign up for the , (my own private nerd hardware-based science fair that I think you’re going to love) or come to all three days of talks, panels, and coolness, we want you there. You can find out more but the gist is this: the event runs from April 29th – May 1st. We’re running a pre-event 24-hour hackathon for folks who want to get one free ticket (more tickets will be released soon) but, as it stands, you still have the opportunity to pick up an before the price goes up April 11. There are plenty of ways to get into the event and plenty of reasons to go. You will rub elbows with investors, VCs, and inventors. You’ll see some of luminaries of our industry. You’ll eat great food. You’ll get to talk start-ups in the cool capital of the world (sorry, Palo Alto). I want you there. Who knows? Maybe next Disrupt we can see you on stage. [ichc-flickr-slide width=”640″ height=”480″ username=”techcrunch” set_id=”72157631537371667″ player_r=”124984″]
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California Court Bans Checking Smartphone Maps While Driving
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
In California, drivers can for using their GPS while driving. Extending the state’s current ban on texting while driving, an appellate court in California v. Spriggs argued that the “distraction would be present whether the wireless telephone was being used as a telephone, a GPS navigator a clock or a device for sending and receiving text messages and emails.” So-called “distracted driving” laws have a mixed history of efficacy. In 2010, in the found that “Any reduction in accidents following texting bans is short-lived, however, with accidents returning to near former levels within a few months.” , however, found that such laws are “moderately successful,” but only if they are strictly enforced. , to be published in next month’s , only looked at scenarios where the blame could be squarely placed on (digitally) distracted driving: single-vehicle, single-occupancy crashes. In some states, for instance, police cannot pull a driver over for texting while driving, but only add on a citation to another violation. In states with “strong” bans, driving fatalities were reduced 8 percent. In , the judge left it open as to whether the law should also apply to checking things like email, or whether drivers could safely use a hands-free version of GPS. Either way, the National Safety Council warns, “there is no research or evidence that indicates voice-activated technologies eliminate or even reduce the distraction to the drivers’ mind.” Looks like we won’t be safe on the road until we all get robotic cars. Appropriately enough, thanks to Google’s , they’re now legal in California. [ ]
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Check In, Flame Out: How To Save Foursquare
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
This hasn’t been a great year for Foursquare. “Check-ins are no longer what they used to be,” as Ingrid Lunden last month. There seems to be a general consensus that “Foursquare keeps resembling Yelp more and more…” but that comparison , especially since there’s little doubt that Yelp has much greater public mindshare. Then former Square COO and current Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois (click through for the article’s amusing corrections, if nothing else!) prompting some from Michael Lazerow on when it’s OK for someone like Rabois to bash a founder. (My answer, for what it’s worth: whenever he freaking feels like it. He’s not the Pope. He’s not the President. He’s just a venture capitalist. If you’re worried about public criticism hurting a company, then it’s built on apparent rather than real value and it deserves all the criticism it can get.) Crowley responded, gamely: Keep hating… and while you're doing so Foursquare will keep becoming the location layer for the Internet. — Dennis Crowley (@dens) Great tone…but I don’t know about that content. So the mighty check-in was just what filters were for Instagram, a gateway drug, to soon be replaced by “the location layer for the Internet?” Uh-huh. You know what that sounds like to me, in the long run? A . Like Harry Potter’s “Marauder’s Map,” to use . This does not sound like wise strategy. To paraphrase Paul Graham’s on-stage Office Hours at the last-but-one TC Disrupt, “Competing with Google. That’s not so bad. But competing with Google at .” And, oh yes, also competing with Apple, whose maps have been since their first stumbling introduction. Meanwhile, Google casually rolls out like ski trails or underwater Street Views several times a year. Does anyone seriously think, in the long run, that Foursquare has a better chance of “becoming the location layer for the Internet” than Google and Apple, both of whom take mapping extremely seriously? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Yes, their API is . I should know: I’m at least three of those 40,000 developers. But a great API does not a successful company make, and there are plenty of competitors; Yelp, Google Places, Factual, etc, although Foursquare is admittedly the most developer-friendly. So I hate to say it, but Keith Rabois was one thousand percent correct. With their tactics struggling in the face of better-established competitors like Yelp, and their strategy apparently consisting of plotting a course between Google and Apple’s in a leaky drifting raft…what’s poor flailing Foursquare to do? Funny you should ask. I happen to have an answer. And it is this: merge with Groupon. Wait, no, hear me out. I know what you’re thinking: and/or Groupon of course just in the face of sagging, well, . But think about it. What’s one thing Groupon has that almost nobody else does? An existing relationships with an enormous number of small businesses. Frequently awfully relationships, granted, but relationships nonetheless. What’s one thing that really Foursquare? Not the “location layer,” but the check-in. What’s a business model that just might work? Have users check in with intent — “shopping for my mother” or “hungry for lunch” — and promptly get deluged by coupons from a panoply of nearby retailers, and then collect a percentage of those sales. Which is of course something Foursquare kind of tries to do already. (As of after I .) But for it to really work they need a huge critical mass of small businesses to participate. What’s one thing Groupon with its bizarre, multi-billion-dollar rise and fall? Connect to just such a critical mass. Call me crazy. Call me a fool. But I think if these two long-term losers got together, they just might turn into a winner. It’s a longshot, sure — but it doesn’t seem much longer to me than believing that either has much of a glorious future on their own.
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Filipino Social Good Startups Win At IdeaSpace Competition
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
The results are in for Filipino accelerator IdeaSpace’s startup competition, and the top ten picks have a heavy focus on social projects. A glance at the list reveals a strong emphasis on environmental and health-related projects, especially those that will likely benefit the developing nation’s poorer regions. When the , many of them were mobile-phone dependent and appeared to center around developing smartphone apps for urban cities. But it seems that many of those didn’t make the cut for the top ten. One of IdeaSpace’s co-founders, Earl Martin Valencia, said: “All winners are viable business ideas based on science and technology, not just IT. They reflect the market needs of emerging markets such as the Philippines and we believe that it’s a big market also globally.” Jojo Flores, co-founder and vice president of Silicon Valley-based incubator Plug and PlayTech Center, was present at the pitching event all day. He said he is keen to invest in some of them and take them to the global stage as well. The top ten have each won six months incubation support (such as business operations covering accounting and legal services) and funding of up to $120,000 (PHP 5 million). IdeaSpace is a non-profit and was launched a little over a year ago. It has the support of various large Filipino conglomerates, and these are expected to provide mentorship to incubated companies. Some academic partners like the Asian Institute of Management and the University of the Philippines-Open University, as well as corporates like Microsoft and Amazon, will come onboard to mentor the winners of this competition.
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Where The Free Software Movement Went Wrong (And How To Fix It)
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Klint Finley
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
The biggest change I’ve seen in the tech industry in the past decade isn’t social media, cloud computing, big data, consumerization or even mobile. It’s the mainstream acceptance of open source. Even 10 years ago open source was controversial. Back then “open vs. proprietary” arguments would still erupt at meetings and parties. Back then vendors spread FUD about open source. Today, every vendor wants to call themselves “open.” Why is that? Writer Evgeny Morozov traces it back to Tim O’Reilly and his media/conference empire in . According to Morozov, O’Reilly hijacked Richard Stallman’s free software movement and turned it into the more corporate-friendly open source movement. From there, O’Reilly would go on to redefine web freedom as freedom for companies like Google to do whatever they want online, and to redefine open government not as a movement for transparency and accountability but as the need to give free data sets to for-profit companies. The piece raises important questions about the and how it influences policy — and about the consequences of sacrificing principles in the name of pragmatism. But I think Morozov misses some crucial reasons that open source supplanted Free Software. Morozov sort of glosses over the differences between open source and Free Software. Free Software, as the saying goes, is free as in speech, not as in beer. The primary freedoms, as Morozov notes, are: “users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public.” But most open source software — as — is also free software, as . So what’s the problem? The difference between the two movements is that Free Software is a social movement, and open source is a methodology. In an essay titled “ ,” Stallman complains that the freedoms promoted by the Free Software Movement are not discussed by open-source advocates, and that because of that, the public in general remains deeply confused about what open source even means. Morozov writes that the difference between the two is that free software emphasizes users and that open source emphasizes developers. But I would submit that free software is also primarily interested in developers as well, in that the freedoms it emphasizes are ones that matter to developers, but very little to the rest of us. That’s where the movement went wrong. Sure there are a few non-developers who care about this stuff — activists and other security-conscious people have reason to want to study the software they use, or to have it reviewed by trusted networks. But try telling graphic designers that they should use GIMP instead of Photoshop because they can study the code, modify it and release their own version. Or try telling a data analyst why they should use Libre Office instead of Excel, or a musician why they should use Ardour instead of Logic. See how far you get. All this raises the question: did open source eclipse Free Software because O’Reilly is such a gifted marketer, or because people just don’t care that much about the freedoms that Stallman cares about? Is it any wonder that developers are the primary users of free software? To hear the old timers tell it, it was Apache that won the mainstream over to open source by 1) providing a really good server (that happened to be free) and 2) having a license that made it very clear that a company wouldn’t be sued for using it for commercial purposes, even if they built some custom software on top of it. Once companies and developers realized that you could use open source software to build products, the flood gates were open. The upside is that more people learned about open-source technologies and corporations paid for more open-source development. If open source hadn’t caught on, we might all be doing our blogging on proprietary content management systems coded in ColdFusion running on Windows servers and IIS. An alternate picture of O’Reilly that emerges, looking over his history, is one of a pragmatist willing to make compromises to reach his goals. You can also argue that open government would never have gotten off the ground if it weren’t for the economic argument that open data could be used by private companies to stimulate the economy — we’re still waiting to see how that works out. Getting the mainstream to accept open source meant more Free Software developers getting paychecks, as well as selling more books and conference tickets. But it meant downplaying the ideology, and accepting only the software freedoms that were imagined by developers in the early 1980s. I do prefer free as in freedom software, even though I’m not a developer, but there are a few other freedoms that matter more to me: The first of those is certainly part of the Free Software Movement, and the others are promoted today by advocates for the open web, and/or and . I’m sure there are many more freedoms I’m not thinking of, but the groundwork is there for a new Free Software Movement that’s more in line with the needs of the users in our time.
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Verizon Reportedly Preparing $100B Bid For Vodafone’s Verizon Wireless Stake
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Verizon Communications is preparing a $100 billion cash and stock bid to take full control of Verizon Wireless from Vodafone Group, . Verizon’s board is expected to discuss the potential buyout next week ahead of its annual shareholder meeting. Verizon Communications and UK-based Vodafone formed Verizon Wireless as a joint venture in 1999. Though Verizon has not yet made an official proposal to Vodafone, it has hired banking and legal advisors, according to Reuters’ sources. The company currently owns 55 percent of Verizon Wireless. Though it’s uncertain if Vodafone is interested in the deal, Verizon is prepared to take a bid public if negotiations don’t come to fruition. Reuter’s two unnamed sources state that after contemplating a buyout Verizon Wireless, its British partner, from Vodafone for the past 10 years, Verizon is now “ready to push aggressively for a deal.” Taking full ownership of Verizon Wireless would give Verizon more flexibility thanks to the wireless company’s cash flow. Verizon currently has the advantage of record low interest rates, as well the current strong performance of its shares, which have risen about 20 percent this year and are currently trading at their highest price in a decade. The company would raise about $50 billion of bank financing, and make up the other $50 billion with its own shares. Verizon spokesman Bob Varettoni declined to confirm the proposal to Reuters, but noted that Verizon had said earlier this month that it would be a willing buyer of Vodafone’s share of Verizon Wireless. If Verizon does indeed take Verizon Wireless of Vodafone’s hands, it would fit into Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao’s strategy for the company, which has been to streamline its assets after years of rapid expansion. Colao has been , which makes up 75 percent of Vodafone’s valuation. Selling its Verizon Wireless share to Verizon is just one of Colao’s options. He could also sell Vodafone in its entirety to Verizon, but that seems less likely because of Vodafone’s relatively high valuation. If Vodafone does indeed sell off its Verizon Wireless stake, it could potentially make the company an attractive acquisition for suitors like AT&T.
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Latam Local Services Marketplace Startup GetNinjas Raises $3M Series A To Get More Nimble By Getting More Developers
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 6 |
, a local services marketplace startup based in São Paulo, Brazil has closed a $3 million Series A round backed by new investor , with existing investors and also participating. The latter both invested in GetNinjas’ 2011 seed round, which raised a total of $700,000. GetNinjas’ offers an online platform for a diverse range of professionals and tradespeople — from mechanics and manicurists to nannies, illustrators and school tutors — to advertise their services, and also for consumers to find the particular professional they’re looking for. This sort of local services business necessarily tends to be a regional operation — with a plethora of startups going after similar services offerings in their own backyards, such as and in the U.S. or in Russia. The rule of thumb seems to be that if a services transaction requires a service provider to actually meet with the customer — rather than being able to deliver a digital product remotely, as is the case with most of the services offered on , for instance — then the business tends to be more geographically bounded. Language barriers, location-specific client and service provider networks and the need to understand marketplace idiosyncrasies all play a part in keeping the startup’s focus regional. GetNinjas’ focus is firmly on Latin America, says founder and CEO Eduardo L’Hotellier, competing in the Latam services marketplace with the likes of , and . Its aim is to become “ Latin American player for local services,” he says — which he argues is plenty of territory to scale local services into a very big business. “[Ecommerce/auction site] built an amazing $4 billion (market cap) company focusing in Latam; I think a services player has the same potential in the region,” he says. GetNinjas plans to use its new funding to ramp up its headcount, especially by adding more developers to work on making its platform more responsive — so that “clients and pros have a great response in great time”. It’s even looking as far afield as the U.S. to hire developer talent, says L’Hotellier, thanks to fierce competition in the local market for software smarts. “We have a lot of things planned out to smooth the user experience from both sides (for clients and pros), and having a strong engineering team is vital to get that done with the quality and timing we want. It’s also a huge challenge, as the ‘war for (developer) talent’ in Brazil is pretty hot right now, so much that we are currently interviewing people from all over the Americas for a São Paulo job,” he tells TechCrunch. “We’re working on projects and our internal processes to improve response times and rates for the business we mediate in all of Brazil’s key markets.” Other plans for the funding include “redoubling our marketing efforts, evaluating new channels to reach the broad base we need, and investing in the infrastructure and costs (telecoms, third party apps) we need to get those ideas to improve the user experience rolling”. Rather than focusing in on a particular services niche — be it health or education services — GetNinjas’ strategy is to throw the services net wide, which it hopes will help it scale up the business, fuelled by repeat business as customers can use it for multiple services needs. “That, of course, also means we have a very diverse set of challenges to overcome, but we believe the advantages more than make up for them, and we can also leverage ideas and learnings across different categories,” he says. The startup, which was founded in April 2011, is currently processing “around 30,000 service requests per month” — which are “roughly distributed throughout Brazil”. São Paulo is the single biggest location, with just under 15% of the requests, but L’Hotellier said that percentage mirrors the city’s size in Brazil. “That broad base of clients is one of the pillars of our strategy, and one we’re pretty happy with currently,” he adds. Looking ahead, L’Hotellier says the plan is to expand to other “key markets” in Latin America, as well as continuing to improve the services offering within Brazil. “There’s still a lot of work to be done before we get the ‘online local services marketplace’ to the level of sophistication and ease of use we want. And I believe that’s true not only of GetNinjas, but of all players trying their hand at this relatively new business,” he says, when asked whether it might look to launch additional products on top of the services platform. “It’s still a huge, wide open opportunity, so starting shooting at other targets right now would be a waste of energy we can put towards our number one goal – to be THE solution to find local services online in Brazil and in Latin America.”
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Baidu’s Video Site iQiyi Reportedly Buys PPStream To Intensify Rivalry With Youku Tudou
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Shanghai-based video streaming platform PPStream (link via Google Translate) been purchased by iQiyi, the online video unit of Internet search giant Baidu, for around $350 million to $400 million. A Baidu spokesman would not confirm the reports, which have been circulating in Chinese media since the end of last month, but a statement by the head of rival video platform Youku-Tudou seems to confirm that a deal has indeed been struck: “After the success and synergy created by the Youku Tudou merger, increasing consolidation was inevitable throughout the video industry. We are happy to see this purchase go forward, we expect this acquisition will further rationalize the industry and help reduce piracy in the sector,” said Youku-Tudou president Dele Liu in an email. iQiyi launched in 2010 under the auspices of Baidu and from the beginning has focused on legally distributed, professionally produced media and entertainment content, which has led to the site being referred to as “China’s Hulu” (in fact, former investor Providence Equity Partner was also an investor in Hulu until exiting from the U.S. site in October). Tudou previously offered mostly user-generated content, but after being purchased for $1 billion by Youku, the combined company has . The drive toward legal content was prompted in part by by the Chinese government. Baidu for an undisclosed amount. The timing of the deal seemed to suggest that Baidu to Youku and Tudou’s August merger. At the time, Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li said that Baidu planned to integrate iQiyi’s content into Baidu’s overall search and mobile services. “Online video is a key strategic vertical for Baidu as user numbers and time-spend continue to increase expontentially, underscoring the tremendous potential in the sector,” . Acquiring PPStream would help boost iQiyi’s market share, which lags behind Youku-Tudou, China’s biggest video site. According to , Youku-Tudou holds about 32.4 percent of China’s online video market, while its nearest competitor Sohu.com has 10.9 percent. iQiyi held just 6.7 percent of the market. The deal is also potentially a lifeline for PPStream, which has struggled to make a dent in China’s highly competitive online video industry.
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@BillClinton Officially Joins Twitter, Ditches @PrezBillyJeff
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
[tweet https://twitter.com/gov/status/327267946944688128] The 42nd President of the United States and the man with the most endearing lip bite in the world, William Jefferson Clinton, has officially jumped into the 21st century by joining Twitter. The Prez has already racked up more than 200,000 followers in roughly 30 minutes and brought his lovable charm in under 140 characters. “@StephenAtHome Just got a call from Chelsea. Ready to start Twitter lessons tonight,” he wrote to comedian Steven Colbert, who had under the name @PrezBillyJeff during an interview earlier this month (video below). [tweet https://twitter.com/billclinton/status/327265550751383552] Personally, I’m a little bummed he ditched Colbert’s moniker, as I much preferred Clinton’s first Twitter bio: “I am President William Jefferson Billy Jeff Rodham Clinton. Stephen Colbert is my BFF.” In true Clinton fashion, he’s using his newfound fame to plug the Clinton Foundation, which also switched its name (@ ) tonight. Colbert also seized the opportunity to congratulate himself: [tweet https://twitter.com/StephenAtHome/status/327270485320663040] Check out Colbert’s interview with Clinton below: [hulu id=d1wybwrvf4lfqvtepqw1hq width=512]
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Marc Andreessen Speaks At She++ Conference [Video]
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Billy Gallagher
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, spoke at the she++ conference last Saturday, discussing women in tech, his favorite new technology, and his thoughts on startup culture. The video is above and you can . You can also find and at the conference shows a key part of its recruiting strategy.
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After Launching #Music, Kevin Thau Becomes Latest Employee To Leave Twitter For Biz Stone’s Jelly
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Less than one week after Twitter Music’s launch, Kevin Thau, the man responsible for the standalone app, is leaving the company to become COO of Jelly, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s mysterious, mobile-focused startup, . Thau will be the second high profile Twitter employee to join Jelly: a couple days ago, . In addition, Twitter’s first designer Vítor Lourenço, who left the company in November, is also serving as a consultant for Jelly. Thau as its “first official business development guru,” after a stint as vice president of sales and business development at Buzzwire. Before leading Twitter Music, Thau managed the mobile engineering and design teams responsible for launching the first versions of Twitter’s mobile apps before moving on to become VP of business and corporate development. Jelly is still very much under wraps, but the startup released a few hints earlier this month. In a blog post titled “ ,” Stone said the startup will be for “everybody” and “developed first and foremost for mobile devices,” which means the addition of Thau to its roster is a logical move. TechCrunch’s Drew Olanoff and Josh Constine that the Jelly team might be developing something that will help connect people to connect to social causes and show off their contributions. We’ve emailed Twitter for comment.
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Taking A Spin With Joyride, Which Aims To Liven Up Your Commute With Its Android App
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Last month, a startup called came out of stealth mode and announced that it has . Since the company is building a platform for creating entertaining drivetime experiences, we decided that the best place to see the Joyride app in action was on the road. Co-founder and CEO Jeff Chen described Joyride as an attempt to “make drive times more fun and more interesting” — instead of just listening to the same songs on the same radio stations, you could say, “Hey, let’s play a game together.” Or, “Pull up the latest comedy clips.” Or, “Teach me a new language.” It’s an application that you’ll eventually be able to install on your smartphone, which you then connect to your car stereo and control with your voice. The first application is a trivia game, which you can see me play above. (Since we were playing with a pre-release version of the app, we decided to make the filming process go a little smoother by partially relying on the touch controls as well.) There’s a social component to the game, where you can try to do better than your friends or other players did — it’s timed so that the experience feels like you’re playing each other live, even though it’s really, in Chen’s words, “fake synchronous.” The game is fun, but Chen acknowledged that it’s not going to be how people spend all their commute time. That’s why the company hasn’t launched its product yet — it’s working on a feature that plays comedy content from around the web, and it’s looking to expand the functionality in other ways. “As you start getting two or three of these key features on that platform, it really starts getting interesting,” Chen said. Ultimately, he said he wants to turn Joyride into a “voice portal” for a variety of apps, some built by the company itself, and others by third-party developers. The aim is to launch an Android app by mid-2013, he added.
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BlackJet, The Uber Of Private Jets, Releases Its iPhone App
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Want to book a private jet but are away from your keyboard? No worries! ‘s got you covered! The startup, which hopes to make non-commercial flights more efficient and less expensive for the high-powered jet set, for instantly booking private jets. BlackJet, which was , publicly launched in February. At launch it connected five cities: San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, South Florida and Las Vegas. But it was only available on the web. Now it’s expanding the ways in which its busy, on-the-go clientele can book private jets to include its own native mobile app. The BlackJet app, which was released recently, provides an ultra-simple and fast way to buy seats on non-commercial aircraft, directly from their phones. BlackJet is also growing the roster of supported cities — and trips between them — adding Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Seattle and Washington, D.C. That means the service will soon have 10 major markets total, and is connecting a lot of the big business corridors. While users perusing the site can see the new cities already, they’re really just placeholders until markets officially launch. BlackJet’s investors include a whole lot of big-name angels and celebrities, such as founder Garrett Camp, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, First Round Capital, Shervin Pishevar, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Michael Birch, Naval Ravikant, Rick Marini, Noah Goodhart, Thomas Ryan, Josh Spear, Jay Levy, Science Inc.’s Peter Pham and Mike Jones, Dan Rosensweig, Stephen Russell, Tim Ferriss, Matt Mullenweg, Ryan Sarver, Steve Jang, Shakil Khan, and David Ulevitch, among others. Another one of those investors is CrunchFund, which was started by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.
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Facebook Stops Forcing You To Tell Friends When You Claim An Offer
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Facebook’s gotten into trouble over the years for auto-sharing e-commerce activity. Determined to avoid another Beacon fiasco or scare people away from Offers they don’t want to tell friends about, Facebook now lets you choose to privately claim an offer rather than automatically share the news to friends. Facebook tells me Offers, which let brands post coupons, is getting other new features, too. Facebook first debuted its product in late 2011 as a replacement for Check-In Deals. Originally, businesses could buy ads or publish Page posts of coupons that you could ask to be emailed. Those emails could be printed out and brought to retail stores for discounts and gifts. Eventually Facebook introduced e-commerce offers that could be redeemed online with a code. Facebook said on its Q4 2012 earnings call that 42 million users have claimed Offers and 100,000 businesses have used the product. More recently as spotted by , the social network has been testing Offers with larger photos, a “remind me” option, and the ability for businesses to send you a reminder to redeem your claimed offer. Now those features are getting an official launch, and more iOS and mobile users will start seeing coupon posts in their news feeds. Along with bigger images that should entice clicks, you will now see “Shop Now” and “Remind Me” buttons on Offers. Respectively, these direct you to a third-party website where you can redeem your Offer, or let you get a reminder Facebook notification to redeem the offer in the future. All your claimed, redeemed, and expired Offers are now recorded in your private . To make sure you don’t forget about Offers you claimed, businesses now have the option to send you a single Facebook notification linking you back to that Offer. Most importantly, though, claiming an Offer doesn’t automatically trigger a news feed story shown to friends any more. Previously as soon as you clicked to claim an Offer, your friends would know about it. Shop Now or Remind Me, you’ll have a button that lets you share the news of your claim. If you don’t opt in, friends won’t hear about it That’s useful because maybe you don’t want people to know you’re keen on some discount fast food, or that you’re finally getting around to taking that Rosetta Stone course on Spanish. While viral activity stemming from Offer-claiming is one of the free product’s big selling points to businesses, it clearly pushed users’ privacy limits just a bit too far. If Facebook wants to become a serious player in e-commerce, it has to take advantage of its word-of-mouth factory without making people fear their private shopping habits will end up embarrassing them.
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Soluto Brings Web-Based PC Management To Small Business, Ranks The Best Windows Laptops For SMBs (It’s A Mac)
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Over the last few years, Israeli IT startup has morphed from simply being PC software that helps users run diagnostics on their hard drives, to a web-based platform that aims to turn you into a one-person Help Desk. In other words, Soluto now allows anyone to offer remote tech support and run diagnostics, whether that be for your mom’s computer or dozens of customers. From the beginning, Soluto has been focused mainly on individual users, but today the startup is launching a new version of its remote PC manager that brings a handful of new features and beefed-up support to small businesses. In turn, Soluto is also releasing its first trend report, which compares and ranks the market’s best-selling laptops based on reliability and usability, giving small businesses some basic guidelines to consider when purchasing a new PC. Lately, as tablets continue to eat into worldwide PC shipments and sales, the forecast for both the PC and for Windows has been increasingly grim. last month showed that global PC shipments in Q1 were even worse than it had expected, declining by 7.7 percent. The one bright spot for PCs, however, appears to be small businesses, which are expected to buy over 150 million PCs every year until 2017, Soluto founder and CEO Tomer Dvir tells us. At the same time, 53 percent of small businesses are frustrated by their computing technology, he says. Soluto wants to be a part of the solution by helping SMBs improve their productivity, operations and the overall PC user experience. The startup’s new “Business” plan gives companies a full PC management and support service starting at $9/month, which the founder says makes it considerably more affordable than comparable services. With the launch of Soluto For Business, the company will still offer a free plan for up to three PCs (or three sessions/week), along with its Pro plan for up to 10 PCs at $9/month, Business Pro for up to 50 PCs at $60 and a Business Plus plan for enterprise users that want support for more than 50 PCs. The company’s new business product allows IT managers to collect all the PCs they monitor in one place, receive email alerts when things go haywire, along with the ability to fix problems or remotely access a PC with one click from any of their devices. In turn, the new and improved version of Soluto now includes cloud-based, offline support, allowing users to access PCs and fix problems even when the PC they’re fixing is offline, receive automatic activity reports and tap into better communication tools — all of which apply to each of Soluto’s plans. With three million downloads to date, Soluto is now analyzing 100 million data points each day, including the frequency and types of crashes, app hangs, blue screens of death, boot times and background noise. When viewed in aggregate and put in context, this data can yield some valuable insights on trends in PC performance and help inform purchasing decisions. So, today, in conjunction with its new plans and features, Soluto released its first industry report, which compares and ranks the best laptops on the market. From here on out, it plans to release new reports each month, which will be available to Business Pro customers. The report is based on a sample of 150K PCs that were analyzed over three months, including data points taken from over one million boots, 224,000 crashes, 84,000 BSoDs and so on. , Soluto says that its “big-data frustration analytics” are unique because they’re based on “long-term, ongoing analysis of a huge number of PCs” and take into account events like the ones mentioned above (i.e. crashes, etc.). In turn, it defends its findings by saying that most other “best of” PC lists are based on hands-on reviews made over the course of a few days, or benchmarking software that pushes the machine to the limits. Instead, Soluto’s report is based on real data taken from the experience of actual, live human beings “in the field” under real conditions. Price was not taken into account. Without further ado, Soluto’s report found that the most reliable and best performing Windows PC laptop is … The 13-inch MacBook Pro. Ha. Yep. MacBook Pros that run Windows in parallel to its native OS X are the most stable, albeit the most expensive. Soluto’s explanation: A main factor in this machine’s metrics is the fact that every Windows installation on it is clean. Today, with PC manufacturers loading so much crapware on new laptops, this is a bit of an unfair competition. But on the other hand, PC makers should look at this data and aspire to ship PCs that perform just as well as a cleanly installed MacBook Pro. To its credit, Soluto also lists a few of the disadvantages of running Windows on a Mac, including longer set-up and configuration time and potential driver issues. In second place, ranking as the top native PC, was the Acer Aspire E1-571. This was surprising even to Soluto’s analysts: Our data has long shown that Acer machines are very stable and well-performing, but to find the E1-571 so high on the list was surprising even for us. The reason is that Acer’s E series are considered more entry level vs other series, like the V series (which you can find in the 5th place). Dell’s XPS 13 captured third place, with Dell, Acer and Lenovo making up the rest of the rankings. You can
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Dropcam Updates iOS Apps With Location Based Control And Time Scheduling
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
is updating their iOS apps today with two new features their users have been clamoring for: location awareness and in-app time scheduling. is a high definition plug-and-play security camera that has gotten some well deserved praise for its simplistic design and easy installation. Once your Dropcam is plugged into a power source, it automatically connects to your wifi connection. You can control the video feeds through your browser or your smartphone. It’s a painless setup, and pretty neat. Dropcams can be controlled in the browser and through your smartphone app, so the updates are welcome news. With location aware toggling, Dropcam can now automatically turn itself on when you leave the house, and off when you’re back inside, by virtue of the GPS on your smartphone. Another added feature is in-app scheduling, which allows you to select which times of the week you’d like your Dropcam to be monitoring your home. For example, if you were planning on going on a week long vacation, you could program your Dropcam to be on during that time in advance. Dropcam is available at their . Their apps can be downloaded in the iOS App Store .
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After Raising $6.7M For Startups And Winning SEC Approval, AngelList Opens Up Investment Platform To More Companies
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
In December, , a service that matches early-stage startups with investors, to allow accredited investors to actually invest in startups on the platform with as little as $1,000. AngelList also partnered with to create an investment vehicle for these investments. The company is announcing that, since December, it has seen 1,100 investment commitments completely online, totaling over $6 million in funding for startups raising via AngelList. And today, AngelList is opening the platform up to all startups with top-tier investors. As we wrote last December, the investment tool lets accredited investors put as little as $1,000 each into startup companies that it’s created an investment vehicle for. Via SecondMarket, AngelList creates an LLC on the fly into which all the new investors go. That way, startups only have one entity in the cap table, which simplifies documentation and structure. The minimum for an individual’s investment is $1,000, but to create the fund, there needs to be $150,000 in investment (at the time). There are around 12,000 accredited investors on AngelList, and via the SecondMarket Partnership, startups can reach another 20,000. In its base service (not the investing side of things), AngelList is helping drive 500 to 700 introductions between startups and accredited investors per week, and is helping raise on average $10 million per month. The idea is to allow a larger number of individual investors to make small investments in interesting startups, but to do so in a way that reduces the friction of most funding rounds today. By putting this online, it increases the efficiency with which startups can get funded. And just a few weeks ago, the SEC the investment platform the greenlight under its regulations. Co-founder Naval Ravikant explains that 18 pilot companies in the program, including Transcriptic, Double Robotics and Tred, received $6.7 million in commitments from 620 investors in the past four months, with about $2 million raised per month on average. Investors included Founders Fund, 500 Startups and Marc Cuban. Because of how well this worked, Ravikant decided to open up the platform more broadly. But there are still a number of requirements that startups have to meet before using the online investment feature. First, AngelList Invest is available to any company on AngelList that has a top-tier lead investor. Using today’s data on AngelList, that includes 300 startups. Other criteria include that the startup needs to be U.S.-based, less than two years old, and have no more than one round of past funding. And the lead investor has to be putting in at least $100,000 in capital, says Ravikant. In order to create the SecondMarket fund, the minimum invested needs to be $200,000 (up from $150,000 at launch). Ravikant explains that this feature is designed to encourage more startups to raise funding from legitimate investors via AngelList. “Instead of raising offline, you could get the bulk of your capital online without hassle. And you could incorporate both small and large supporters in a round without complication,” he says. He adds that this is the most open, in terms of startup criteria, that the investing platform will get. And what AngelList is doing differs from the crowdfunding market, with the criteria for startup participation and the requirement to be an accredited investor. This is just the next phase of AngelList’s evolution into a one-stop shop for seed-stage companies and their backers. And AngelList has also morphed into a jobs and talent destination, adding 600 candidates per week, and facilitating 1,600 introductions per week (with more than 3,000 startups using AngelList to find talent). It’s clear that AngelList wants to help bring much of the transactional conversations and introductions that happen at the early stage of hiring and fundraising via word of mouth or in meetings online. The site is also a No wonder the platform is rumored to be raising a round .
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Google Tests Search Without Instant Previews, Moves Sharing Tool, Cached And Similar Pages To New Drop-Down Menu (Updated)
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Back in 2010, Google to provide users with a quick way to get a graphic preview of a webpage before you click on the actual link. Now, as first spotted by Alex Chitu from the , it looks like Google is thinking about removing this feature and replacing it with a new drop-down menu. : a Instant Preview is probably not a huge hit, given that Google wouldn’t consider removing it if it were a popular feature. It did hide a bit of useful functionality besides the previews, however. Opening these Instant Previews allowed you to also find similar pages and access the Google+ Share feature. In addition, it was also the only way to find Google’s cached version of a given page, too. All of these features are still there in this new version, but they are now accessible through a drop-down menu right next to the main link. It’s not clear if this is just a test, or if Google is indeed fully removing this feature and replacing it with the new drop-down menu. We have contacted Google about this change and will update this post once we learn more. Here is what this looks like for TechCrunch (“Similar,” for some reason, only appears for a subset of results): [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGaU7JKU7TU?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360]
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Zynga Plans To Accelerate Its Launch Cycle, Says New Games Won’t Offset Declines In Q2
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Zynga hasn’t been releasing as many new titles in recent months, but things are about to pick up again, executives said during today’s conference call discussing . In fact, they said they’re launching a big new title later today — Draw Something 2. Chief Operations Officer David Ko said that there’s been “a little bit of a pause in our title slate.” Behind the scenes, he said, the company has been reorganizing and reassessing its lineup, with a focus on four core genres (casual, casino, mid-core, and invest-and-express games), but we can “expect to see an uptick in our number of launches in the back half of the year” — though he didn’t offer a specific number. The company’s revenue declined 18 percent year-over-year and bookings were down 30 percent; its outlook for the next quarter isn’t promising, either. One of the analysts on the conference call asked whether, as Zynga navigates its transition to mobile and launches new titles, we can expect the next quarter to be the “trough,” with bookings picking up again afterwards. Chief Financial Officer Mark Vranesh responded that when it came to the second-quarter outlook, “We’re not presuming that aggregate bookings from new releases are going to offset declines from existing games. … That goes to DS2 as well.” As for whether things will pick up in the back half of the year, Vranesh said that’s what the company is hoping if its new launches go well, but he also cautioned that this year will be “bumpy.” To that point, another analyst asked what Zynga can learn from its recent launches — particularly the fact that FarmVille 2 has succeeded while other attempts to turn games into franchises has not. One of the main lessons of FarmVille 2, according to CEO Mark Pincus, is that “when we combine our best brands with our best teams and their passions we see almost magical results.” Ko added that while it’s impossible to know for certain which titles will turn into successful franchises, Zynga employees have been testing Draw Something 2 and Running With Friends internally, and they’re showing “some of the highest fun scores within the company.”
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Photo Sharing App Pictorious Adds Branded Photo Challenges And Photo Showdown
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
is a photo sharing startup that is faced with the unenviable task of crawling its way out of gigantic shadow. Today they’re releasing a bevy of updates to their iOS app, which will hopefully help it mount a better challenge against the photo sharing juggernaut. Pictorious distinguishes itself as more than just an ill-advised Instagram clone with their photo challenges feature. Users can invite their friends to photo challenges on any given topic and earn points and rewards as they upvote or downvote pictures. Today their update adds branded challenges to the mix, which can be used by companies to create photo challenges for their advertising campaigns. for the first of these branded ad campaigns, which challenges their users to build “artwork” with Popchips. Full disclosure, we received several boxes of chips from Popchips to participate in this photo challenge. You can view my own handiwork below. Another new feature is Photo Showdown, which you can use to vote between two randomly selected photos taken from a photo challenge. The more pictures you vote on, the more points you acquire. It’s addictive in a stupid way, but it really doesn’t accomplish anything. It wasn’t long before I was presented with two pictures that were both equally boring. Despite the updates, Pictorious is still a little like what Instagram would be if all of your followers were complete strangers. Pictorious desperately needs a larger user base, and in spite of their best efforts, I’m pretty sure potato chips aren’t going to help them get there. Pictorious can be downloaded from the iOS App Store .
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Google’s Got A Problem. Search Ads Aren’t Just For Search Engines Anymore
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
The juggernaut that is search advertising grew so popular and lucrative because it offered businesses the ability to reach and persuade people with true purchase intent. But now keyword targeting is available on Twitter and Facebook, which could loosen Google’s stranglehold on ads that convince us what to buy. A solid model for understanding web advertising is the purchase-intent funnel. At the wide top of the funnel is demand generation — raising awareness about a product and engendering the brand to the consumer. Demand generation is more about ad views and changing your perceptions than clicks and driving immediate action. Imagine banner ads for Coca-Cola, Facebook sidebar ads for a movie coming to theaters next month, or a Twitter Promoted Tweet about Clorox bleach. They’re designed to keep those brands stuck in your mind so you pay them later, and they’re targeted based on your demographic and interests. At the narrow bottom of the funnel is demand fulfillment — convincing someone ready to make a purchase of what specifically they should buy. These ads typically seek a click through to a purchase page or sign-up form. Imagine searching for “Buy camera” on Google and seeing sponsored results for Best Buy’s website and specific Canon camera models that you can click through to purchase. Or searching “San Francisco lawyer” and seeing ads for specific local firms you could click through to book an appointment. They’re designed to attract the final click before you purchase, but to do that they need to know you’re actually in the mood to buy something. Since they directly inspire purchases and are more easily tied to return on investment, these ads can command high prices. Until recently, Facebook and Twitter were stuck in the demand generation part of the funnel. With all their biographical and interest data, they were good for brand and institutional advertising but not at delivering dollars directly into advertisers’ hands. Google has long ruled demand fulfillment with its AdWords product that lets advertisers compete in auctions to show their ads to people who’ve searched for specific keywords that demonstrate purchase intent. But those dividing lines are rapidly blurring, and it could shift the axis of power in online advertising. Twitter and Facebook are now aggressively trying to drill down the funnel into demand fulfillment, and they have the data they need to succeed. They might not have traditional web search engine queries, but they have plenty of internal searches and a near infinite amount of chatter. Twitter last week announced the launch of keyword advertising, which lets businesses target ads to people who recently tweeted or engaged with tweets containing certain keywords. Tweet about a band and you might see ads for an upcoming concert by them. Retweet someone saying they haven’t been to the dentist in forever, and you might see ads for nearby dentists. Searching for and tweeting a word are two very different things, but Twitter keyword ads are certainly much closer to purchase intent than targeting based on who you follow. And with some savvy multi-keyword targeting, for example “[Product name]” and “want”, businesses could deduce purchase intent out of 140 characters. Facebook meanwhile currently offers “search typeahead ads”. When you search for a specific Facebook Page or app, businesses can set up ads to to show their own Pages or apps above or just below the organic results. If you’re searching for “Candy Crush Saga”, you almost surely want to play a puzzle game. Search typeahead ads for other puzzle games at the moment could be very effective. Gadgets, games, professional services and more brands can all take advantage of this signal of purchase intent. And that’s just the beginning for Facebook. Last week it revealed its feature. For now, these ads can’t be targeted by keywords, just the standard biographical targeting. But it’s very likely that keyword targeting is on the way. Along with creating big advertising opportunities for online conversion businesses, they could be with local businesses. Facebook is making a big push right now to challenge Yelp as the place you find a business’ address, open hours, photos, reviews, and recommendations. Just yesterday Facebook to highlight this info. That shift in focus means people looking for Facebook business Pages aren’t just trying to see their news feed updates. They’re trying to find out how to get there because they want their service right now — aka purchase intent. Now imagine if you query Facebook’s Nearby local business browser or Graph Search for nearby Italian restaurants. Graph Search keyword ads could let an Italian restaurant show up more prominently in results, even if Facebook’s quality and relevance algorithms didn’t peg it as the best. Then there’s . These are real-time bid, cookie-retargeted ads based on what websites you’ve visited. For example, you might see an FBX ad for a flight to Hawaii you looked at but didn’t pull the trigger on. While retargeting is in a whole different category than search keyword ads, they have the same ability to reach people who are deciding where to spend their money. And in the past, Facebook has tested sidebar you post in status updates. Facebook is trying everything it can to get to the juicy bottom of the funnel. Many businesses keep essentially separate ad budgets for search, display, and retargeting. Until recently, Twitter and Facebook were only tapping the display budgets. But now they’re smashing open the other piggy banks. Businesses aren’t likely to suddenly expand the total amount of the spend on online advertising, even as the market steadily grows. Instead they experiment a bit at first with some spend borrowed from what’s usually devoted to Google, and if the ads work, they’ll cleave that Google budget and divvy it up among the newfound channels. That is not what Google wants. Search ad money is what funds its moonshots and sustains its enormous engineering staff for free products like Chrome. Despite Google’s legacy, Twitter and Facebook have formulated advantages. Twitter’s relatively un-ad-cluttered interface keeps people’s guards down which likely contributes to the reportedly high click-through rates on its ads. And Facebook has the might of the social graph to throw in the ring. Sticking the face of a friend who Likes Canon cameras on an ad for Canon cameras shown when you search for “Cameras” or “Nikon” could persuade you to click the ad, when on Google you’d ignore it. Plus there’s Amazon. The traffic to the ecommerce leader comes with implicit purchase intent, and whose shopping history data helps it target ads on-site as well as in its . Now, Google is still the heavyweight of purchase-intent web ads. That’s not going to change overnight. But the Lilliputians have finally developed the technology to drag down the search giant’s revenues and claim some of those ad dollars for their own.
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Yahoo! Japan Injects $20M Into Softbank Capital’s Early-Stage Technology Fund ’10
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Today , the NY-based venture arm of Japan’s largest wireless provider Softbank Corp., has strengthened its ties to Japan even further, announcing that will be injecting $20 million into SoftBank’s early-stage Technology Fund ’10. The $20 million investment and partnership will help U.S. startups at any point in their development, from early-stage companies who need funding to more mature companies looking to expand into new markets. Yahoo! Japan’s investment will be an addition to the $100 million early-stage fund, which is a complement to the freshly announced PrinceVille fund. SoftBank announced the $250 million , which was aimed to help U.S. markets expand into Asia using SoftBank’s extensive (and growing) network of mentors and partners. Yahoo! Japan is the largest web portal in Japan and one of the country’s largest e-commerce platforms, and it’s interested in learning more about innovation happening in the United States, with particular focus on social. According to , Yahoo! Japan’s presence in Japan is overwhelming, especially in the quickly evolving mobile landscape. “Social networking services in Asia tend to be very home grown, but Facebook and Twitter have taken over as global social platforms,” said Medved. “Yahoo! Japan wanted to understand the U.S. market.” Alongside the new investment from Yahoo! Japan (which, remember, is a separate entity from Marissa Mayer’s ship here in the U.S.), Yahoo! Japan is sending Toshiaki Chiku, the new head of U.S. operations, over to NY where he will work directly with SoftBank Capital to oversee investments and partnership deals. According to the official press release (via Nielsen), Yahoo! Japan reaches 80 percent of Japan’s internet users through its various web portals and services. Not only will Yahoo! Japan get a clearer window into the U.S. market, but companies looking to tap into the fast-paced Asian market will have a solid Goliath-style partner in Japan to back them up. Specifically, SoftBank and Yahoo! Japan will be looking to invest in mobile, social, ecommerce, online advertising, gaming, and cloud computing spaces. Obviously, each one of these markets is chock-full of prime options, but SoftBank seems to have a mind for taking on big winners. The firm’s previous exits include , BuddyMedia’s acquisition to SalesForce.com, Huffington Post’s acquisition by Aol, and .
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Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley To Join Us At Disrupt NY
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley has had a helluva April. The company a $41 million debt round from Silver Lake Partners and Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech and Union Square Ventures, and released a revamped iOS app. Yahoo M&A has been sniffing around. In an effort to foster promising web growth, the company redesign yesterday: “Foursquare is quietly breaking through as a place for information about venues,” wrote Drew Olanoff, “its most prized asset.” The company has 33 million registered users and 50 million unique monthly visitors and now has to come up with a plan to compel them to keep coming back. Is its value as a social company or as a massive location-data-review company? And though some, like Valley angel Keith Rabois, of Foursquare’s future, existing investors have faith. “This will be a very important public company one day,” Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital. “And I am in no rush.” Perhaps this is because of the drive and passion of . His resilience in the past couple of months, let alone this year, is impressive, and we’ve made room onstage at next week for him to talk about it. Just last and this week alone could fill up a whole conference day, as Crowley himself was also , in addition to everything mentioned above . ************************** Dennis Crowley is a co-founder of . Previously, he co-founded , a network of the same nature which sold to in 2005. He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Magazine, Newsweek, , and . He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Dennis holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.
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Netflix Spends $2B Per Year On Content, Primarily On Licensing Movies And TV Shows
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Following up on their strong quarterly earnings report , Netflix has just released a big ol’ mission statement document to their investor relations site, and it’s jam packed with all sorts of great lil’ details. For example: you know how every Netflix customer’s first complaint is that there’s just not enough streaming content on the service? They know — and they’re spending $2B a year to fix it. The document is a rather painful 11 pages long, but here’s some of the more interesting stuff we’ve gleaned out of it so far: – Netflix is currently spending $350 million per year to improve their services and apps
– More notably, they’re spending $2 per year on content licensing and original shows. The “vast majority” of this spending goes to licensing movies and prior-season TV shows, with a much smaller chunk of it going to their recent original content efforts. Netflix seems to be realizing that quality is better than quantity. For all of us who’ve killed an evening digging through all of Netflix’s offerings in search of that diamond in the rough, that’s great news. As we’ve gained experience, we’ve realized that the 20th documentary about the financial crisis will mostly just take away viewing from the other 19 such docs, and instead of trying to have everything, we should strive to have the best in each category. As such, we are actively curating our service rather than carrying as many titles as we can. Netflix knows they can’t be exhaustive. They can’t offer every genre of video out there, so they’re keeping their focus on movies and tv shows. More specifically, they want long-lived TV shows — topical things like The Daily Show, reality shows, and sports are specifically mentioned as things Netflix isn’t interested in right now. “We don’t and can’t compete on breadth with Comcast, Sky, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, or Google. For us to be hugely successful we have to be a focused passion brand. Starbucks, not 7-Eleven. Southwest, not United. HBO, not Dish.” Speaking of HBO… “The network that we think likely to be our biggest long-term competitor-for-content is HBO. They recently won, for example, long-term exclusive domestic movie output deals with Universal and Fox. They bid against us on many Original projects, but are not currently a bidder against us for prior-season television from other networks” With that said, Netflix estimates that they’ll eventually be “2 to 3 times larger than current linear-HBO”, with 60-90 million subscribers (versus the roughly 30 million or so that both Netflix and HBO each have today). Beyond that, Netflix sees piracy and pay-per-view services as the only competition that can offer up exhaustive sets of content, but seemingly sees Amazon/Hulu/et al. as secondary worries for the time being. As mentioned, the new mission statement comes in at a pretty heavy 11 pages — the quotes above are just the choice bits that really stood out. You can read the if you’re so inclined.
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Amid A Challenging Mobile Transition, Zynga’s Revenues Decline 18% To $264M
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
Zynga’s revenues for the first quarter of 2013 declined 18% year-over-year to $264 million as the company is in the midst of doing a big pivot onto mobile platforms. The company swung to a profit from a year ago though, with net income of $4 million. Last year, , Zynga earned $321 million in revenue. Analysts had on average that the company would pull in $209.8 million in revenue and lose 4 cents a share. So this is an earnings beat — thanks to FarmVille 2. But shares are down 9.6 percent in after-hours trading. “2013 remains a transition year,” said CEO Mark Pincus on the earnings call. “We continue to expect non-linear, uneven results and a significant decline in second quarter bookings.” He said the company had to kill two unreleased games and that they would sunset about four others including The Ville, Empires & Allies, Zynga City on Tencent and Dream Zoo. “These were hard decisions for us, but we’re confident they were the right ones,” Pincus said on the call. The issue for Zynga is that the environment on the Facebook platform remains challenging and the company has yet to prove that it has the same historic dominance on mobile platforms. Zynga said mobile platforms represented 22 percent of bookings during the quarter, which is about the same as it was last quarter. One contributing factor is that Zynga hasn’t really launched that many titles on mobile platforms this part quarter, with the exception of “What’s The Phrase.” Draw Something 2 is about to come out for global launch and Zynga says it may see a rebound in mobile revenue in the second half of this year with a slate of new titles. The company’s daily active users fell to 52 million this past quarter, down from 65 million during the same period last year. It also saw 253 million monthly active users, down 13 percent year-over-year from 292 million users. “It’s not about keeping score of the quarter. It’s about the long game,” said Zynga chief financial office Mark Vranesh on the call. One positive thing worth pointing out: it looks like the tough cuts and studio closures of last year are largely over, and Zynga’s shares have climbed 35 percent since the beginning of the year. The company is now looking ahead to a couple potential growth areas: 1) mobile games 2) midcore games 3) third-party publishing and 4) real-money gaming. On mobile platforms, which is the huge growth area for the industry, Zynga has a couple of reliable franchises like Poker, which is currently ranked #15 on the top-grossing charts in the U.S. “We still believe Poker represents one of our best long-term opportunities,” said COO David Ko on the earnings call. It also has the “With Friends” line-up which has top-grosser Scramble With Friends and the newly-launched Running With Friends, which could be compared to Imangi’s Temple Run or Kiloo’s Subway Surfers. They’ve also pumped up the release of the Draw Something sequel too. But Zynga’s performance has paled in comparison to old rivals like the U.K.’s King or Finland’s Supercell, which is the industry’s darling of the moment. With just 100 employees, that Helsinki-based company made nearly as much as Zynga did in the same quarter with $179 million in revenue only on iOS. On the real-money gaming side, Zynga only recently made its debut after the quarter ended with the launch of two titles in the U.K. market. So we won’t see the performance of any of those titles until the next earnings announcement. The company said it expects “modest” revenue from these games this year, and doesn’t expect to see “significant” real-money gaming revenue for the full year. They do plan to launch more real-money titles on Facebook and mobile platforms by year-end. In mid-core titles, Zynga recently launched War of the Fallen, a card battling game that followed on Ayakashi: Ghost Guild. Then they’ll follow up with an action RPG title later in this quarter. Although Zynga’s historic area of strength — the Facebook platform — remained tough, it did have one bright spot. In , Pincus pointed to the company’s big FarmVille sequel, which was launched seven months ago: We are encouraged by the strong execution from our teams and the breakout hit performance of FarmVille 2, which captures the imagination of nearly 40 million players every month. 2013 will continue to be a transition year as we face the challenging environment on the web and invest in developing the leading franchises and network across web and mobile platforms and offer our 253 million monthly players a connected experience that can follow them from work to school to home and anywhere in between. Apparently, this single title is what helped the company beat earnings estimates slightly.
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Just Sing It Raises $1M For Its iPhone Karaoke App, With Users Recording 500K Songs In Two Weeks
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 |
The makers of have announced that they raised $1 million in funding. I when it launched earlier this month. At the time, CEO Alec Andronikov told me that his vision is to create a truly addictive social experience — users don’t just share karaoke performances, they actually play a game where they have to guess what the other person is singing, and they can win virtual coins that unlock additional content. Ultimately, he said he wants to use karaoke as the hook for a broader social platform. In the first two weeks since launch, Andronikov said the app was installed 80,000 times. It reached No. 1 in the App Store’s music category, and its users are pretty active, having recorded a total of 500,000 performances during that period. Oh, and . The funding came from Tribeca Venture Partners, Lerer Ventures, m8 Capital, Eniac Ventures, Dennis Phelps of Institutional Venture Partners, and Bob Geiman of Redwood Technology Ventures. Just Sing It says it will use the money for further development of the app. The parent company behind the app is officially called AnyoneGame, but it sounds like the team will be de-emphasizing that name in favor of the Just Sing It brand.
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Microsoft Inks Patent Deal With ZTE, A Week After Reaching A Similar Agreement With Foxconn
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
Microsoft has a patent deal with ZTE that covers all Android and Chrome devices manufactured by the Chinese firm. This latest agreement comes a week after Microsoft scored a major coup by striking with Taiwanese smartphone maker Hon Hai, which owns Foxconn. Microsoft did not disclose the terms of its deal with ZTE, but said that they are similar to the it made with Hon Hai. Hon Hai, which is now Microsoft’s largest patent licensee, for each Android and Chrome-based device that Foxconn manufactures–which will add up to an impressive amount, since the ODM’s Chinese factories make 40 percent of the world’s phones, including Android devices for clients like Acer and Amazon. While not as large as Foxconn, ZTE is still one of the top five manufacturers of Android smartphones in the world and in the fourth quarter of 2012 shipped 9.5 million units, . Its new deal with Microsoft gives ZTE access to Microsoft’s smartphone and tablet patents, including those for operating systems, browsing, data synchronization, and audio and video transfer. Microsoft says its deal with ZTE, which marks its first patent licensing deal with a leading Chinese company and is the latest move in its longstanding efforts to get as much licensing revenue out of smartphone manufacturers as possible, was negotiated over two years. The Redmond, Washington-based software giant has been estimated to paid by other smartphone makers than its own devices. In addition to ZTE and Foxconn, Microsoft also has similar licensing agreements with Quanta and Pegatron. “Experience has taught us that respect for intellectual property rights is a two-way street and we have always been prepared to respect the rights of others just as we seek respect for our rights,” said Microsoft general counsel Horacio Gutierrez in a statement.” Microsoft may hope that its new deals with ZTE and Foxconn will persuade other manufacturers like Huawei and, eventually, Google to step in line. Microsoft’s tactic of going after Android device manufacturers has been described as a proxy war against Google, but it’s unlikely Google will cave in: in the past it has ” a charge Microsoft .
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Nokia Puts WhatsApp Hard Key On $72 Asha 210 For Asia, Africa; Qwerty S40 Handset Gets Facebook Button In Europe, Latam
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
Nokia has announced another handset in its Series 40-based Asha portfolio of low end mobiles which compete with the budget end of Android and cheap BlackBerrys. The 2G-plus-Wi-Fi Asha 210, due to ship before the end of Q2, packs a physical Qwerty keyboard and comes painted in Nokia’s now trademark eye-popping colours (yellow, cyan, magenta), plus black and white. But the most notable addition to this BlackBerry-esque device is a hardware key on the front that short-cuts to messaging app WhatsApp — which, extending the BlackBerry comparison, is the phone’s BBM replacement. As well as the ability to fire up WhatsApp by long pressing on this dedicated key, Nokia said Asha 210 buyers will get a free subscription to the messaging service for the lifetime of the device. On the Series 40 platform, WhatsApp normally charges a $0.99 annual fee after a first year of free use. Last week the messaging service said it now has north of (this compares to ). Tapping into the hugely popular social messaging craze is clearly Nokia’s aim here. Nokia describes the Asha 210’s WhatsApp hardware key as a “world first”, although we’ve seen the mobile maker ( ) . But before you start wondering how displeased Facebook is going to be with Nokia for two-timing it with , the handset actually comes in two social messaging flavours, with a second variant having a dedicated Facebook key (shown below, on the black handset) instead of a WhatsApp button.
The two Asha 210 social flavours — which also each come in single SIM/dual SIM variants — won’t be offered together in the same market but will rather be region specific, presumably corresponding to where the respective services are most popular. Neil Broadley, marketing director for Nokia’s mobile phones division, told TechCrunch the WhatsApp device will generally target Asia-Pac and Middle East & Africa, while the Facebook flavour will mostly be heading to Europe and Latin America. He also confirmed that neither device will be sold in North American. “On a market by market basis we will have either WhatsApp or Facebook,” said Broadley. “Both of our partners are hugely successful around the world and as we go on a market by market basis, some of our market teams would like to have the WhatsApp variant, some would like to have the Facebook variant. And of course we already have the Nokia Asha 205 on a global basis with the Facebook hard key there as well.” Broadley added that Nokia is looking at the possibility of making a third variant of the Asha 210 — specifically targeting the Chinese market — with another, as yet undetermined social service loaded on the hard key (China has a variety of homegrown social services that outstrip the popularity of global offerings, such as microblogging service Sina Weibo vs Twitter). Nokia certainly has work to do to win back buyers in China. In its last week, China saw the biggest drop of any of Nokia’s regions in terms of sales by value and volume, with $334 million in sales in Greater China, down 56% on the year ago quarter. Aside from differing social shortcuts, the Asha 210 variants have identical hardware and software, with a sub-1Ghz chip; 2 megapixel rear camera plus a dedicated camera key on the front of the device (in addition to the WhatsApp/Facebook key plus standard nav/call keys); Nokia’s Slam Bluetooth-sharing data transfer tech and its hot-swap SIM system; plus a rubberised full Qwerty keyboard which recycles the pillowed keys of 2008’s . The keyboard also includes shortcut keys for turning on/off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. On the software front, the device comes with WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter preloaded; support for YouTube streaming and web apps; a ‘Games Gift’ of 15 free downloadable “premium” games & apps from the Nokia Store; plus Nokia’s neat voice-guided self-portrait feature, which gets around the lack of a front-facing lens by helping users align a self-portrait when they can’t see the screen. Nokia’s earlier Facebook-button-packing phone, the full Qwerty , was announced in November last year. At the time, the company’s decision to introduce a phone with a dedicated Fb button revived a 2011 trend which, for the majority of last year, appeared to have run its course — without, apparently, covering any of the device maker particpants (including HTC, Orange and Vodafone) in huge heaps of gold. Asked about sales of the Asha 205, Nokia said it has not broken out any numbers for the model but added that the number of Facebook activations for the device is “significantly higher” than for the average Asha family device. Whatever the sales figures, Nokia clearly believes there is more gold to be mined from low end mobiles by associating its hardware with the biggest brands of the social messaging space. The Asha 210 — along with the entire Nokia Asha range — targets developing markets and cost-conscious consumers, which explains its focus on seeking ways to reduce not just the initial outlay but also the total cost of ownership, while simultaneously amping up its core social offering by making sure it can provide access to big name apps and allow for easy social photo-sharing, as Android does. The Asha 210 will have a $72 price-tag (before taxes and subsidies). The price-tag puts it in touching distance of budget Androids and while the S40 platform is not as user friendly, flexible or as app-rich as Android, Nokia has been working to strength its competitiveness against Android’s low end with additions such as its cloud-based data-compressing , which ekes out up to three times as much data as non-compression browsers to help keep the user’s data costs down, plus offers such as ‘Games Gift’ and the free WhatsApp subscription. As with other Asha devices, the 210 also boasts a long battery life — of up to 46 days on standby, and around 12 hours talk time. Nokia noted that it is using push notification technology to reduce battery drain caused by the Asha 210 checking for WhatsApp/Facebook updates. Update checking is done by Nokia in the cloud, with any new info pushed out to the user’s phone when it arrives. Nokia and WhatsApp are about to hold an about the launch of the Asha 2010 so we’ll be checking for any interesting tidbits that come out of the discussion to add as an update below. Currently, around the world, there is still plenty of regional diversity across messaging and social services — . Many of these apps inevitably compete with and come into conflict with social networking giant Facebook, which wants to own all the world’s chatter. And with Facebook having just launched its app-sidelining , social challengers such as WhatsApp are likely to be keen to find ways to increase their own visibility on mobile. Having your brand stamped on the outside of a phone sounds like a great place to start. Broadley: “We have an ongoing relationship with WhatsApp that spans a range of Nokia Asha and other Nokia products. We are both really excited about this opportunity.” Arora & Broadley: “We are very excited to bring a dedicated WhatsApp button to Asha 210 and we will take consumer feedback for future consideration.” Broadley: “We already bundle WhatsApp with many Nokia Asha family devices and are working on extending it to as many Nokia phones as possible.” Broadley: “With the Nokia Asha 210 we’ve worked hard to give people the best of both worlds. People have access to a dedicated hardware button, preloaded social networks ready to go right out of the box, and access to the Nokia Store to download and install more.” Arora: “The launch of Asha 210 does signify WhatsApp’s availability on Dual SIM devices. We are working on extending it to other Dual SIM devices.” Arora & Broadley: “There is WhatsApp deep linking into social share gallery and there is more to come.” Broadley: “We have a really high quality Nokia 1200 mAh battery in the Nokia Asha 210. The software really helps get great battery life — for example we have something called Nokia Notifications which works in the cloud to check for your social network updates, then pushes them to the phone. This stops the individual apps having to continually check for updates — saving battery.” Broadley: “Starting with the Nokia 206 announced just before Christmas we’ve been progressively uniting the Nokia portfolio under a single, coherent design language… We have one stunning design approach across the Nokia range.” Broadley: “We don’t comment on future plans.”
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Reliance Communications Partners With Twitter To Offer Free, Unlimited Access To The Service In India
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
For those in the United States and other locations that are lucky enough to be able to purchase huge data packages for their smartphones, thinking about deciding to “tweet or not to tweet” based on the cost that it could incur is a foreign concept, pun intended. For cell customers in India, it’s a very real situation, and to bring free, unlimited access to the social network to its prepaid GSM subscribers. This is yet another example of how important Twitter has become in our daily lives and how integral the communication platform is to locations all over the world. The service will be bundled with live cricket match updates, the most popular sport in the country. A customized version of the Twitter app has been created, reminding customers that they’re getting free access thanks to Reliance Mobile. If someone taps a link to an outside site, they will be reminded that doing so might incur extra charges. Reliance is the first operator to partner with Twitter in India, and its Chief Revenue Officer of Wireless, Nilanjan Mukherjee, had this to share: We are delighted to be the first operator to partner with Twitter in India on Twitter Access and offer the first of its kind unlimited Twitter access on our superior network. Our partnership with Twitter in India further strengthens our offering on the social media platform and is in line with our continuous efforts to offer innovative products with incredible affordability for our customers. Since prepaid cell phones are prominent in countries like India, signing deals like this makes the services more attractive. Back to how important cricket is to India’s culture, though. Mukherjee feels like this announcement could cause a “significant shift” of cricket fans to move over to Reliance. That’s knowing your customers. [Photo credit: ]
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Swype Finally Rolls Out Of Beta, Hits The Google Play Store For $0.99
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
Way back in March of 2010, Swype launched a super private Beta of its then totally mind-blowing (and now often imitated) swipe-to-type Android keyboard. While they’ve since shipped it out-of-the-box on dozens of handsets, opened the Beta to pretty much anyone, and , they’ve never gotten around to ditching that Beta tag — until today. (Three years in Beta? Who do they think they are, Google? ZING.) This morning, Swype hits the Google Play store for the first time. Swype will actually launch on Google Play in two separate versions: a free trial version that’ll work for 30 days, and a 99c version that, of course, works forever. The company says they’ll roll the two builds into one eventually, but didn’t want to worry about the complexities of In-App purchase stuff in this first release. Also, don’t be surprised if that 99c price goes up after a few weeks. Though the Swype Beta program has been open to just about anyone with a passing interest , getting it onto your handset has always been a pretty convoluted process. You needed to punch in your email details (they later dropped this requirement), configure your handset to allow app downloads from third-party sources, then rig up an installer which did all the required system tweaking. It wasn’t brain surgery, but it wasn’t nearly as easy as hopping into the Play Store and tapping “Install”. Meanwhile, the competition has flooded in. While Swype ( ) focused on partnering with OEMs to get its keyboard installed on handsets at the factory, alternatives like SwiftKey, SlideIT, and ShapeWay were happy to go straight to the consumer. Hell, even Android’s own official built-in keyboard picked up a similar feature as of version 4.2. So are they hitting the Play Store too late? Perhaps — but it seems they don’t mind. “Yeah, we might be late. That’s an honest concern,” Aaron Sheedy, Nuance’s VP of Mobile Product, told me in an interview, “But the adoption of smartphones is still just , and there’s a whole generation of people just coming online. Our language coverage is such that we’ll do really well in the [international] markets; we’ve got [support for] 62 languages, plus a bunch of dialects.” And if they are too late? It doesn’t matter much. OEMs like Samsung and Nokia are still paying the company licensing fees on every Swype-enabled handset, and they see that being their primary source of revenue for quite some time. (As for when Apple is going to give in and Swype-ify the iOS keyboard: while the company says they’ve met with Apple every few months to give’m heck for the state of their keyboard, there hasn’t been any official progress on that front.) If you’ve already got Swype installed on your handset, the version hitting the Play Store today should look much like what you’ve grown accustomed to. It does pack at least three features that were previously exclusive to Beta users, however: Swype hasn’t hit the Play Store just yet, but it should be up within the next hour or so. We’ll update this post with a link as soon as it goes live. It’s live! Here’s the , and here’s
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Adobe Updates Its Social Marketing Tools To Predict The Popularity Of Your Facebook Post
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
Adobe is announcing new predictive capabilities for — capabilities that should be particularly helpful to marketers wondering why some social media posts take off while others fall flat. Bill Ingram, vice president for Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, walked me through the new features earlier today in advance of the Adobe Summit in London. Adobe is using historical data — both in aggregate and at the customer-specific level — to predict the likely engagement level and sentiment around a specific Facebook post, and it can recommend keywords, content types and timing that might lead to a better response. The predictions integrate directly into Adobe’s social publishing tools. Customers can open a widget showing the estimated range for the amount of Likes, comments, and shares a post will receive. They can also identify other metrics that matter to them, and Adobe will track and predict those as well. And before publishing, the service will notify them if there are things that could be improved — for example if it would be better to schedule a post for later, because the customer’s account posted similar content a few minutes prior. To provide these kinds of recommendations, Ingram said that Adobe is analyzing the content of the posts, for example looking at keywords and content types (i.e. images vs. video). He also said that while there are other products that provide general content suggestions for social media updates, Adobe has access to unique user data, and that the product is “tuned to get smarter as data flows into the system.” Adobe plans to release the predictive capabilities this summer and to add support for social networks beyond Facebook later this year. In addition, the company is announcing a partnership with that integrates the marketing agency’s EngagedNow product with Adobe’s Marketing Platform. And it’s releasing its latest . Most interestingly, the company says that globally, tablets are now driving more website traffic than smartphones (based on an analysis of 150 billion visits to more than 1,500 websites between January 2012 and February 2013).
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Samsung Galaxy S4 Review: The S Stands For Super, Not Simple
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
The Galaxy S4 has an easy mode, and more importantly, the Galaxy S4 an easy mode. This necessity is a double-edged sword. It means that the technology built into Samsung’s latest generation smartphone does things you’ve never seen before, and maybe couldn’t even imagine. However, really that technology isn’t as simple as you might think, and could be downright overwhelming to a novice smartphone user. This is the theme I kept running into with the GS4. If you’re technologically advanced enough to be excited for hovering gestures and optical readers and two cameras working at the same time, then yes, you should absolutely jump on the Galaxy S bandwagon. But for those of you who want a phone that works well, keeps you connected, and not much else, be forewarned that the S in Galaxy S4 certainly doesn’t stand for simple. The Galaxy line has never stood out because of design. In fact, many would argue that Samsung has been quite the copycat in the land of design, but the Galaxy S4 represents the first iteration of what appears to be true Samsung design language. It ends up being a mesh of earlier Galaxy S iterations, with a hint of the Galaxy Note and a whole lot of Galaxy S III in there. I can’t say the GS4 is revolutionary by any means. It’s thin and light, just as it should be, and looks pretty meh. It’s made almost entirely of plastic save for a polycarbonate strip that runs along the edge of the phone, and it has a finish that gives the appearance of some texture, but is actually smooth. But you have to hand it to Samsung. Somehow, the company managed to fit a bigger 5-inch display on a phone that actually got thinner and lighter from previous generations. In fact, the Galaxy S4 is almost exactly the same size as the Galaxy S III despite having a larger display. Bravo.
The buttons for lock, volume, etc are smaller and more compact than before, which Samsung claims helps with the solidity and durability of the phone’s build. They jut out a bit for you to feel your way to them in a pinch, but they have points on each end, and just don’t nice. Along the back of the phone, you’ll see the 13-megapixel camera centered on the top half of the device, in usual Samsung fashion, along with a microUSB charging port on the bottom edge of the phone. The GS4 sports the same elongated home button that we saw on the Galaxy S III, but certainly has a more boxed-out shape than the very elliptical GSIII. Ready yourself, partner, ’cause the GS4 is one helluva rodeo in the software department. To start, TouchWiz (or whatever Samsung is calling it now) has been thoroughly revamped to include a set of smart toggles in the notification center, giving the user what amounts to a cheat sheet of all the features they’d never even guess were present on their smartphone in the first place. In fact, when you first power up the device you’re given a quick tutorial of all the new things the Galaxy S4 has to offer. You’ll also notice that Samsung has done away with the black bar up top, and laid all your notification icons on top of your homescreen art, along with a redesigned Samsung Hub for content, such as movies and books. From there, things get far more complicated, and not always with good reason. Let’s start with the “Air” features, as I believe they’re likely going to be the most valuable and useful to people. Air View, which lets you hover over content to get a preview of extended information, is the latest iteration of technology originally developed for the Galaxy Note II with its S-Pen stylus. This time, however, all you need is a finger. At first mention it seems confusing or overzealous, but Air View might end up being one of the must-have features for phones moving forward. It gives you a window into more detailed information without forcing you to click in and back out again, which is particularly clutch in the case of unread email. Air Gesture, on the other hand, lets you control your phone without ever touching it. Wave to answer a call (which automatically goes to speaker), swipe to scroll up and down on a page or through a gallery of pictures, and you can even set a locked phone to recognize when you gesture toward it to pick it up. This stuff will come in handy when driving, eating, and cooking, though once you’re given the extra freedom of smartphoning with dirty hands, you find it frustrating that Air Gesture is only limited to certain apps like the photo gallery, music app, and browser. Though Samsung’s new Smart Pause and Smart Scroll features seem equally innovative, I hate to imagine a world in which we’re all too lazy to press the pause button, or scroll with our thumbs. That said, I can see how the notion of auto-pausing when you’re looking away during a video, or tilting to scroll might be enticing. But given that these new features don’t work all that seamlessly, and often cause more frustration than they do delight, I’m far less impressed with these tools. Along with building interesting technology right into the system, Samsung has also launched a handful of dedicated apps like S Health, which monitors activity levels through the phone’s slew of sensors, S Translator (complete with live voice translation in over 10 languages) and the Optical Reader, which converts analog text into digital text which can be translated or saved. Of course, the same NFC-based features are still there, giving users access to S Beam and TecTiles fun. There’s also a new feature called AllPlay which lets you play a song from multiple Galaxy S4s at the same time, to take best advantage of all the little speakers. This is one of those features that will rarely, if ever, get used, but on the off-chance that you actually want it, you’ll be grateful to have it. As mentioned before, the phone comes with an easy mode which seems aimed at older generations. It “dumbs” down the phone a bit, removing many of the more complex features and enlarging text and app icons for easier navigation. The Galaxy S4 isn’t the first phone to sport a 5-inch 1080p display, but it still feels like the very first time when I look down into its Super AMOLED wonders. You can’t really argue with a pixel density of 440ppi. Text is crisp and clear, app icons are sharp, and it’s hard to find a reason to complain. I will say that the Galaxy S4 display isn’t quite as bright as the iPhone 5, but color accuracy seems to be pretty dead on save being slightly over-saturated. It’s also fair to commend Samsung once again for fitting this gorgeous 5-inch display onto a relatively compact phone. My thumb did creep past bezel territory and onto the display a few times, resulting in some interesting typos, but I’d gladly trade making a few adjustments to the way I hold the phone given that it’s so much more aesthetically pleasing with that squared-off shape. If we’re just talking hardware, the Galaxy S4 doesn’t have a life-altering, amazing camera. There’s very little shutter lag, which is an improvement, and images do seem to be truer to reality than the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy S II before it. Still, I wouldn’t say it’s a noticeable step above the iPhone 5 camera, except for the fact that there’s no purple flaring issue to be found on the GS4. Where things really get interesting, however, is within the camera app itself. The UI has been adjusted to match that of the Galaxy Camera line, offering a carousel of easy-to-understand modes and a quick toggle for AF, ISO and white-balance settings. The camera has all kinds of fun modes like Drama Shot, which lets you grab hundreds of frames to show a photo of continuous action, like someone walking across the street or skiing down a hill, and Eraser, which lets you remove any unwanted subjects of the photo by detecting movement. You can’t go back and “erase” without having shot the picture in Eraser mode first, which means you have to be actively ready for something to go wrong. And who of us remembers to do that?
Still, things like DualCam mode (shooting with both the front-facing camera and rear camera at the same time) seem very interesting. It takes our obsession with smartphone photos to a whole new level by combining two pictures into one. I’m quite pleased that Samsung decided to add more creative and useful features to the camera instead of things like face detection and group sharing features (as the company did with the Galaxy S III) that no one will ever really use. Comparison shot between the Samsung Galaxy S4 (left) and the iPhone 5 (right): No, the Galaxy S4 U.S. variant doesn’t sport the much-rumored and long-awaited Samsung Exynos Octa-5 eight-core chip. It does, however, run on the Snapdragon 600, which is the latest generation and most powerful quad-core chip out there right now. Plus, the GS4 touts 2GB of RAM, which becomes lethal combined with the Snapdragon 600. And you can tell. The Galaxy S4 is quick like lightning, in almost all respects. We ran the GS4 through Quadrant graphics testing, in which it scored just under 12,000. This is quite impressive, considering its competition (such as the HTC Droid DNA and LG Optimus G) barely broke 7,000. However, the HTC One is the real phone to beat when considering the Galaxy S4, as it’s the only phone we’ve seen that beats out the S4. GeekBench results weren’t much different. The GS4 scored an average of 3,150 out of three tests, putting it well above the average Android phone. In fact, on GeekBench, the GS4 beat out its rival, the HTC one, which scored 2,728. Still, we can’t measure the GS4 on benchmarks alone. But in any case, I’ve found the GS4 to be snappy and responsive during general browsing, app usage and video watching.
Samsung beefed up the battery on the Galaxy S4, opting to use a 2600mAh battery. It has a removable cover, so you can choose to carry along an extra battery for days when you’ll be over connected. I found that the phone lasted with me all day, even with all these crazy software features turned on at all times, and never really failed me once. Obviously, a display like this one just begs to show you videos and games, so I did find myself draining battery more rapidly on the GS4 than I do with the iPhone, which is perhaps a testament to the adage that bigger is better. In official testing, the Galaxy S4 lasted just about seven hours during our battery test, which involves running a constant Google Image search with screen brightness at 50 percent on 3G/4G only. Comparatively, the Droid DNA hung in there for around five hours while the HTC One couldn’t break the five-hour mark. In other words, the GS4 is certainly just as power-efficient as it is powerful, along with having the added bonus of a swappable battery. Win win. So what’s the verdict? At the end of the day, it’d be foolish to think that the Galaxy S4 isn’t a top-notch phone. Where specs, performance and software innovation are concerned, the company is clearly making strides. But in playing with this phone for a while, adjusting to the new features, trying to make the most of them, and sometimes failing miserably, I keep returning to the idea of “Keep it simple, stupid.” That rule seems to have been lost on Samsung. Yes, Air View is a breakthrough, and the camera features are fun and interesting, but anything that requires an easy mode is missing something. Why are smartphones so meaningful to us? Why do we despair when they run out of battery, or paw for them at the sound of a familiar ring tone? It’s because, in a way, they’re magic. They achieve complex technological feats without appearing to break a sweat. But it’s easy to forget about that when we’re shooting a video or playing Asphalt 7, because they’re built to solve and provide for us in a way that we can understand. The Galaxy S4 features are impressive — there’s no denying it. But very few of them work perfectly enough for it to feel natural. Maybe it’s because my time with the GS4 is only beginning (I received it one week ago), but I felt like I was forcing it. As Samsung continues to push the edge of technological innovation, it needs to take a quick breather and, first, think about what truly solves problems for consumers and, second, think about how to take high-level technology and make it easy to use and understand for the user.
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Twitter Is Testing Two-Factor Authentication Internally, And It Can’t Come Soon Enough
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
In what was a , one Associated Press hack and a false tweet about the White House sent the stock market into a momentary free fall. Twitter hopes to stop intrusions like that in the future by introducing a two-factor authentication process, . When this offering will be available to users is unknown. The company has been working on this at least since , and became more apparent when it was with specific experience with login security. Why has it taken so long? That’s a question that only Twitter can answer. Google rolled out in 2011, but . Making additional authentication steps mandatory for all users is a non-starter, since any friction standing between a social service and engagement would be a nightmare. Having said that, this type of authentication is something that every verified account on Twitter should have had long ago. When Twitter verifies an account, it’s saying that it’s gone through some type of procedure to approve that the person or entity is who they say they are. Keeping that integrity safe is essential to the entire concept. In Twitter’s defense, a two-factor authentication for accounts that might be used by multiple parties in multiple locations, such as in the AP’s case, could be a hard problem to solve. In Google’s two-step process, as well as Facebook’s, you’re sent a text message with a code to enter when logging into your account from an un-authenticated device: How something like that will work for an account managed by multiple people is a head-scratcher. Until two-factor authentication rolls out, it’s smart to be vigilant when it comes to clicking on unknown links, and it’s always a good idea to change your password from time to time. Word of advice, though: Don’t make your password something like “APm@rketing.” That could get hacked at any time, no matter who you are, but especially if you’re the Associated Press. [Photo credit: ]
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HTC One Review: The Competition Is Fierce, But HTC’s New Flagship Rises To The Challenge
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
that HTC knows how to put together a nice phone. Despite the quality of its wares though, HTC spent most of 2012 releasing disappointing earnings statements and being outflanked by much larger rivals — what’s a company to do in a situation like that? The answer, according to CEO Peter Chou, was to double down on innovation and design in hopes of creating a device that would truly resonate with consumers that were already up to their necks in Android phones. That device was the HTC One. Even so, plenty of questions remain. Is it really all that it’s cracked up to be? Does the One really have a chance at changing HTC’s fortunes? To answer all of the above: yes. If you’re in a rush you can skip to my final thoughts but make no mistake: the HTC One is the sort of device that deserves to be talked about. I was smitten with the One’s design from the moment I first manhandled the thing back in February, and that feeling has never really gone away — the One is a truly stunning device both to hold and to look at. Samsung could really learn a thing or two from these guys. Before I get too effusive with my praise, let’s take a quick tour around the device itself. The One’s face is dominated by a 4.7-inch 1080p Super LCD3 display that’s flanked on all sides by a thin black bezel. Sitting directly above and below the display are the One’s unfortunately named Boomsound stereo speakers (a small notification LED will occasionally blink at from the top grille), and the 2-megapixel wide-angle front-facing camera rests on the top-right corner of the device’s visage. The One’s sides and bottom are fairly nondescript — the volume rocker, microUSB port, and SIM slot are nestled along the right, bottom, and left edges respectively, while the top edge hosts a headphone jack and a sleep/wake button that doubles as an IR blaster for controlling your television. Phew. Now that I’ve run through the laundry list, permit me to gush a bit about how the One looks. To say that the One is understated in its design would be putting it mildly; the thing is terribly handsome in a stark, minimal sort of way. It’s worth pointing out, though, that the One isn’t actually that big a step forward from some of its predecessors when it comes to physical design. If anything, it represents the refinement of a design formula that HTC has been working on for the past 9 or 10 months with devices like the Butterfly and its American cousin the Droid DNA. Familiar elements like elongated speaker grilles, textured volume rockers, gently sloping backs, and highlighted camera pods seen in those earlier devices all make appearances on the One, but HTC has clearly upped the ante in terms of quality and construction this time around.
The first thing you notice as you pick it up is how light it is — at 143 grams it’s only a hair heavier than the Droid DNA, and (thankfully) the One’s minimal heft belies just how sturdy it feels. That’s all thanks to the device’s unibody aluminum chassis, which HTC says takes somewhere around 200 minutes for a CNC machine to carve out the One’s frame from a single block of aluminum. That’s a considerable chunk of time for HTC to spend while some of its rivals spit out handsets like it’s nothing, but the end result is a device that feels as reassuring in your hand as HTC’s would-be savior should. That said, you still won’t want to toss the One around all willy-nilly. The white plastic polycarbonate that runs around the device is flanked on both sides by polished, chamfered aluminum edges that are prone to picking up scuffs and dings, though some people won’t care nearly as much about that as others. The One isn’t without its share of question marks, though. If you’ve used pretty much any popular Android device before spending some time with HTC One, then one little omission will probably stick out like a sore thumb. I’m talking of course about the lack of a third soft key — the company opted to stick solely with Back and Home keys separated by an HTC logo. If you go by the company line, the choice was made in an attempt to simplify how users interact with the One. I’d actually argue that dropping that extra button is more counterintuitive than anything else since most current Android users are likely familiar with the three-button layout, but it doesn’t take too long to readjust to the two-button lifestyle. And of course, HTC has once again seen fit to exclude a microSD card slot in its latest flagship handset. I can’t really be surprised at this point considering this is a recurring theme for HTC. And it’s not as big an issue as it was in other devices, since HTC offers 32GB and 64GB versions of the One. But I’ve often looked to expandable memory as a hallmark feature of an Android device, and I’m sad to see HTC skipping them completely on its top-tier handsets. Both versions of the One I’ve played with come loaded with Android 4.1.2, but as always, HTC has done its level best to paint over the stock UI with its custom Sense interface. The Taiwanese company has been diligently trying to trim the fat from Sense for months now with largely positive results; Sense isn’t the kludgy, overwrought beast it used to be, and Sense 5 represents HTC’s biggest leap forward to date. Put very simply, Sense 5 looks great. Stock icons and the once-bubbly default keyboard and dialer have been designed to look flatter and less skeuomorphic, and HTC has dumped its usual font in favor of Roboto Condensed, which imbues the UI with a much cleaner vibe. The app launcher has gotten quite a facelift, too — a persistent time and weather widget lives at the top of the screen, and right out of the box you’re treated with a spacious 3×4 grid of applications. Tinkerers can easily fiddle with those particulars should they prefer a more densely packed grid like I do, and you can easily switch between ordering apps by name, recency of use, or whatever other convoluted scheme you can dream up.
Of course, some changes are more drastic than others. Take BlinkFeed for instance — in one fell swoop, HTC has decided to try and reinvent the Android homescreen. The concept is simple: the way HTC looks at it, smartphones are content-consumption devices so BlinkFeed was designed to surface content based on your interests and your social connections with as few steps as possible. Getting Blinkfeed set up is painless enough — you can tailor your feed by selecting from some broad areas of interest (think gaming, music, politics, etc.), and by opting to receive content from your social networks, apps, and a handful of featured sources like ESPN, Vice, and Reuters (disclosure: some of Aol’s media properties are featured sources). From there, all of that stuff gets splayed out into a vaguely Flipboard-y grid for your immediate perusal, and all it takes to refresh your feed is a downward swipe. It all makes sense on paper, but BlinkFeed in practice leaves much to be desired. Why can’t I add my own content sources? Why can’t I just turn it off rather than manually disable each content feed and switching its default homescreen status off? The likely answer to both of these questions is a familiar one: it’s all about simplicity. BlinkFeed wasn’t necessarily designed with the power user in mind — we spoke to HTC’s Jeff Gordon just prior to the One’s launch, and he made the feature out to be a consummate time-waster, something people use when they find themselves stuck in a queue somewhere. That’s about the only time I bothered to use it to be quite honest; the rest of the time I would just fire up Flipboard or Twitter and get my content straight from the sources I wanted it from. Fortunately for me, more traditional Android homescreens are but a single swipe away, but you can only have up to four of them. The unlocked international model doesn’t have much in the way of bloatware — just a few preloaded apps like TuneIn Radio and a Kid Mode courtesy of the folks at Zoodles — but the Sprint variant doesn’t fare quite as well. Expect oodles of carrier-loaded apps that range in quality from mildly useful (Lookout Security is nice to have around) to the nearly pointless (do we really need the Sprint Music Plus store when Google Play is right there?). Most of them can be uninstalled without much trouble at all, and those that you’re stuck with (I’m looking at you, Sprint Zone) can be easily hidden thanks to the revamped app launcher. As you’d expect from a device that sports a cleverly hidden IR blaster, the One also comes pre-loaded with a remote control app developed in partnership with Peel. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no TV buff, so my experience with the remote control feature was short and sweet — the setup process was over in a matter of moments, and the One succeeded in turning my television on and changing the channel and volume a few times. After popping in my ZIP code and selecting my cable provider, the app also provided guide data for all the shows I don’t watch. While it’s unlikely to replace your actual remote, it works like a charm, and that’s frankly a lot more than I was expecting. With the One, HTC has officially bowed out of the megapixel race. It’s easy enough to write off the word “ultrapixel” as a spurious bit of marketing fluff, but the One’s camera manages to prove that pixel size really does make a difference. Photos taken with the One look phenomenal when viewed on the phone’s crisp 1080p display — they’re nicely detailed and colors were vivid (perhaps a little too much so, more on that later). Sadly, a bit of that impact is lost when you transfer them to PCs or televisions. The shift towards fewer larger pixels instead of more smaller ones sounds like a good idea, and it mostly is, but there’s a sort of fuzziness apparent in some of the One’s photos that keeps my support from being full-throated. I suspect it’s an issue that won’t matter to a majority of users — the results are definitely more than adequate for [insert social network name here], and I’ve found the shots the One takes are still more pleasing than many of its competitors. If anything videos seem to fare little better; my test clips were all crisp and bright, and to my surprise the microphones blocked out plenty of background noise. Speaking of competitors, the camera sensors in most of them struggle in low light but the One manages to dodge those issues rather nicely. It’s surprisingly good at capturing light even when it’s in short supply and manages to do so without introducing much grain into the situation. It’s worth noting that the ability for the One’s sensor to pick up as much light as it does has an impact on color reproduction. Consider the comparison shot with the iPhone 5 above — the One captures more of the scene, but some details (like the tree branches in the bottom left corner of the photo) are lost because of overexposure.
As far as the Camera app itself is concerned, it remains remarkbly clean and easy to operate. Switching between the front and rear cameras takes a single swipe, popping into Zoe mode takes a single touch, you see where I’m going. Beyond the simplistic interface though is an impressive array of settings — you can muck around with ISO, white balance, timer, scene modes, face detection, and even the review duration for recently snapped photos. Honestly, I find the idea of layering filters on top of perfectly good photos to be a little ridiculous, but the One has plenty of them for you Instagram-types to fiddle around with too. And then there are the aforementioned Zoes, those peculiar little three second video clips that HTC has started to push with the One. When I first played with the One, I was downright dismissive of the concept. I’m still not entirely sold on them, but I’ve grown just a little more appreciative of the notion. My biggest issue with them is how you’re supposed to manage the things. It’s simple enough on the One itself — the short clips are accessible from the Gallery app and you can use the HTC Share service to post them online for 180 days, but the real problem emerges when you try to pull them off the device through USB. Zoes are locally stored as very brief video snippets but as a series of stills as well, so pulling them off the One en masse feels a bit more labor-intensive than it should.
Goodness, it seems like just yesterday that finding a 1080p display on a smartphone was a rare and wondrous event. These days nearly all the major Android players have worked those sorts of high-resolution panels into their new flagship phones — just look at the Optimus G Pro, Xperia Z, or Galaxy S4 to name a few. Even with such notable rivals to consider, the One’s 4.7-inch Super LCD3 panel is perhaps the best smartphone display I’ve ever seen. Text and high-res images were remarkably crisp (not a surprise considering the display sports a pixel density of about 474 ppi), and the colors are bright and accurately reproduced. While some displays pump up color saturation to lurid levels and others exhibit a pale cast, the One strikes a thoughtful balance between those extremes. I haven’t noticed any distortion or discoloration despite seeking out some of the most awkward viewing angles — in short, the One’s display is a real pleasure to ogle. One of my biggest issues with the 5-inch 1080p panel found on the Droid DNA was that it just wasn’t all that bright compared to the competition — it was perhaps the most notable miss for an otherwise impressive display. Thankfully, HTC has addressed that issue with the One. When screen brightness is cranked all the way up on both devices, the One’s display is noticeably more luminescent than its cousin and shines on the level of devices like the Nexus 4 and the iPhone 5. It may seem like a trivial upgrade, but the weather’s getting nicer and that bump in brightness has definitely helped outdoor visibility, too. Let’s just get it out of the way now: with a Snapdragon 600 chipset and 2GB tucked away in its handsome frame, the One was able to handle every task I threw at it with aplomb. Swiping back and forth between BlinkFeed and my more traditional homescreens were utterly seamless, as was scrolling down long webpages, and crafting ornate rococo structures in Minecraft Pocket Edition. If you’re the type that prefers numbers to anecdotes, the One’s five-run Quadrant average topped out in the low to mid 12,000s, handily blowing away devices like the Nexus 4 and the Droid DNA. Running Geekbench on the thing yielded similar results: the lowest of three trials was a 2728, which puts it on top of the performance heap again… for now anyway. It won’t be long at all before other devices start to catch up in terms of pure power, but there’s little question that the One will be able to handle nearly anything you load onto it and that’s really all that matters.
All that power comes at a cost though. The One managed to stick it out for four hours and 21 minutes of our standard battery test, in which the device is made to run through an endless cycle of Google image searches over the wireless data connection with the screen lock turned off and display brightness set to 50%. Granted, less than 4.5 hours doesn’t sound all that great, but bear in mind that’s nonstop usage — in my experience, the One always managed to make it through a full work day’s worth of checking emails, firing off text messages, playing music through the Boomsound speakers, and playing the occasional game with at least a little juice left over. I won’t dwell too much on network performance for two reasons: your mileage will almost certainly vary from mine, and Sprint can be frustratingly sketchy in my particular corner of New Jersey. In case you were itching for a dose of Schadenfreude for the day, I was never able to pull speeds greater than 2 Mbps down and my upload speeds topped out at 3.5 Mbps — that’s not really the One’s fault but man, that really hurt. On the upside, call quality was just peachy on both version of the device I tested (you know, in case you actually wanted to use this thing as a phone). I need to take a minute here and touch on one of the most impressive features HTC has baked into the One, and it may not be what you expected. I’ve reviewed my fair share of phones during my tenure here at TechCrunch, and with few exceptions they’ve all mostly let me down when it came to sound reproduction and quality. The One simply doesn’t — it’s got the best speakers on any smartphone I’ve ever used. Granted, that’s not really saying much since most smartphone speakers are downright wimpy, but the One’s BoomSound speakers managed to pump out crisp, loud audio along with a surprising amount of bass too. The jaunty bassline in Paul Simon’s was bright and easily discerned, and not once during my testing did the One fall prey to the dreaded muddy audio syndrome. I can boil the preceding 3,000 or so words into a few brief sentiments for you to chew on: the HTC One is easily the best device that the company has ever crafted, and it’s perhaps the single nicest Android phone I’ve ever used. Despite some minor faults, I haven’t so much as picked up any of the other Android smartphones scattered around my office during my time with the One unless I absolutely had to. It’s really that good. And yet, after releasing a smartphone to near-universal acclaim, HTC’s future is still unclear. As Matt pointed out a little while back, building the perfect phone just isn’t enough anymore. These days it seems like technical expertise and the achievements that stem from them can often be overshadowed by lavish ad campaigns and the ability to churn out devices at a breakneck pace. That said, the mobile industry has never really been what you could consider meritocratic — the market is fast and unforgiving, and there aren’t many companies that have learned that lesson as clearly as HTC has. There’s no question that the One will be facing some very serious competition in short order, but if you’re looking to pick up a new phone in the weeks or months to come it’s definitely worth your consideration. Trust me, you’ll find plenty to like here.
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The BlackBerry Q10 Is A QWERTY Keyboard Smartphone Comeback Worth Waiting For
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
The BlackBerry Q10 is, some might say, the BlackBerry OS 10 device that the company should have led with, ahead of its . That’s because it sports a hardware QWERTY keyboard, something that has become a unique distinction among top-tier smartphones these days. BlackBerry tells me they wanted to nail the all-touch experience first, in part to prove that they could, but based on my last few days with the Q10, this is the phone that’s more deserving of the “flagship” moniker for the new BlackBerry fleet. The BlackBerry Q10 is proof that a handset can take cues from the past and still be a modern, attractive device. The PVD-coateed metal border that frames the phone won’t scratch easily, as it’s the same treatment used on high-end watches. The carbon/glass composite back is extremely light, yet flexible and strong enough to handle spills, and since it’s created using a process through which it’s cut from a giant sheet and then formed instead of injection moulded, no two backs will have exactly the same pattern. It’s lighter and smaller than the Z10, feels better in the hand and looks miles better, too.
BlackBerry hasn’t reinvented the wheel with the Q10; you might have already seen one in the wild and mistaken it for a Bold, in fact. But the small changes pay big dividends. Straightening the top row of the keyboard and dropping the trackpad and hardware buttons provided room for a display that’s 30 percent larger than any previous BlackBerry QWERTY, for example, and yet typing actually feels better because of wider keys and bigger frets between the rows. My complaints when it comes to hardware design are limited, but the back panel has a bit of play, and will shift around a bit even when it’s supposed to be firmly clicked into place. It’s a little disconcerting given the overall fit and finish, but also doesn’t reveal itself awesome enough to be anything more than a minor annoyance. The BlackBerry Q10’s display is unique among modern smartphones in that it isn’t gigantic. Quite the opposite, in fact: at 3.1-inches, it’s the smallest screen of any flagship-priced device currently available on the market. Yet it’s also 30 percent larger than any of its QWERTY BlackBerry predecessors. And it’s a SuperAMOLED display, which translates to very nice color rendering, deep blacks, and good battery conservation. Overall, the display really impresses. It displays images and video with crisp, vibrant colors, and BlackBerry has even gone out of its way to tweak some user interface and core app elements to take advantage of the excellent black rendering, which also leads to battery life savings. But the display has its own downsides, too. It isn’t quite as densely packed with pixels as some of its top-tier Android competitors, for instance, and I noticed that in certain outdoor lighting conditions, owing partly to glare and partly to a weak backlight (which doesn’t auto-adjust), it can be fairly hard to make out what’s on the screen. Side-by-side with an iPhone in bright outdoor settings, the iPhone wins easily, every time. That said, the display is usable outside, and works surprisingly well for viewing photos indoors. Text rendering isn’t quite as nice on the Q10 as on Z10, but I also didn’t notice the same problems with surface grime accumulation that affected my Z10 review unit, so there might be a better oleophobic coating on this one. The Q10 is largely the same in terms of built-in software as the Z10, so I won’t go into as much detail about every single feature of BlackBerry OS 10 (check out my ). But it is worth highlighting the changes BlackBerry has made that take advantage of the Q10’s hardware keyboard, and also the trade-offs that sometimes result from those changes. The home screen arrangement has been tweaked slightly to make room for three rows of apps, and the toolbar size has been reduced as well as labels have been removed. There are new tooltips, which is great because it provides a smoother onboarding process for BB10. Text selection is made easier through refined cursor control, making it much less frustrating than it was on the Z10. Cut, copy and paste functions have been added to the dialer screen, and you can set account-specific notifications for incoming messages as well as change vibration and volume patterns for alerts for specific contacts. Overall, BlackBerry has done a good job of taking in early user feedback and using it to actually improve BB10 in the areas where it was most lacking. The Q10 boasts BlackBerry OS 10.1, an update which will make its way to the Z10 within the coming weeks, bringing the same improvements over to that side of the fence, including the improvements above and crucial bug fixes for issues like the lack of calendar syncing for Outlook users. But the really impressive software features of the Q10 focus on the keyboard. The Q10 keyboard is always present, so it makes sense to make use of it whenever possible. BlackBerry has done this by introducing Instant Action, which allows you to start typing and then execute a variety of commands, in a variety of apps. there’s a huge list of keyboard shortcuts, but some highlights include being able to BBM contacts, Tweet, send emails and more all without opening the relevant app, from no matter where you are in the OS. It’s a remarkable time saver, and a good example of why the hardware keyboard still has something to offer in a world dominated by touchscreen displays.
In general, software is improved, but since the Q10 uses the same touch-based gesture control as the Z10, but features a smaller bezel, it can be harder to execute Peek actions, or to navigate around the OS. Some improved sensitivity on the software side here would’ve helped the Q10’s software performance. The Q10’s camera is the same as the one found in the Z10, and as expected, performs in a very similar fashion. The big addition here is on the software side, since the Q10 with BlackBerry 10.1 now offers HDR. This is a feature that most OEMs have embraced lately, and also something I never find myself using on any mobile device. I’m also not a huge fan of it when used professionally by DSLR photographers. The addition isn’t hurting anything though, and will be welcome by those that appreciate it.
Overall, the Q10’s camera is a solid performer. It won’t win any low-light awards, and that’s putting it lightly, but it can still manage to take some amazing shots, which look even more amazing with the slightly exaggerated color rendering of the OLED display. It also captures stills in 1:1 ratio by default to match the display, though you can set it to use either 16:9 or 4:3, too. Video is perfectly usable, too, and defaults to wide-screen capture. This is the one place where the Q10 doesn’t fare that much better than its counterpart the Z10. Despite the fact that BlackBerry has made a lot of noise about growing its own app marketplace to 100,000 titles, there still aren’t too many to write home about. Some big names have come on board, but crucial ones, like Netflix, Instagram and Vine, to name just a few, remain absent. The Q10’s app situation isn’t helped by the fact that it has such a unique screen size. The screen means that native BB10 apps have to be coded specifically to offer both Z10 and Q10 compatibility, which BlackBerry assures me is simple enough, but which still inevitably results in some fragmentation. Q10 users simply won’t see apps that aren’t designed for its display – unless they’re Android apps. Android ports still show up and can be downloaded and used. That’s a double-edged sword, however. I found performance to be unpredictable with Android ports; Songza, for instance, lacked its concierge feature when running on the Q10. Others had bizarre visual element distortions, and even when everything goes smoothly, it still requires scrolling through an interface designed to be viewed all at once. The Q10’s app situation is a reminder just how far BlackBerry has to go, and a signal that it will probably have a much more targeted audience than the general purpose Z10. Where the Z10 faltered with battery, the Q10 excels. BlackBerry claims that the Q10 can get up to 13.5 hours of 3G talk time, 354 hours standby time, 61 hours of audio playback or up to 9 hours of video. In testing video playback and solid browsing time, it managed to come just shy of that at around 8 hours continuous use, but the standby time is what’s really impressive. This phone sips power with the screen off when it’s in your pocket, harkening back to BlackBerrys of old. It isn’t quite as long-lived, but it’s still impressive for a modern smartphone. In actual usage, being neither extremely conservative or extremely power-hungry, the Q10 manages nearly two days of use in my testing, which is, again, very unusual for a smartphone. It boasts a larger 2100 mAh battery, compared to the Z10’s 1800 mAh unit. That means you can’t use the Z10’s external charger accessory to juice up the Q10’s battery, but BlackBerry offers the exact same device designed for the new phone’s battery, too. The BlackBerry Q10 is unique among smartphones, with its square display and hardware keyboard. And BlackBerry knows that it will appeal to a certain kind of consumer. What I found in using it, is that I actually gravitated towards tasks that were productive – zapping my inbox overload, typing up actual complete paragraphs for longer posts (I’ve never used another smartphone to do that), using the newly-ported Skype app to stay in touch with teammates. This is a business phone, and an unabashed one, and in a world where we often want our devices to do everything for us, a little focus is actually a very refreshing thing. That said, evaluate your priorities if you’re thinking about getting a Q10: the app situation is still dismal for BlackBerry 10, despite progress made since the official launch at the end of January. And the OS software itself still has some bugs, too: I experienced one black screen freeze that required a soft restart, and one issue where my cellular signal continually dropped until I turned cell traffic off and then on again. For those reasons, I still have trouble recommending it generally over the iPhone or a top-tier Android phone, if only because of the ecosystem that now surrounds those devices. But if you’re a BlackBerry lover, or if you long for the days when you could feel that keyboard under your fingers, the Q10 is very impressive device, especially from a company that more than a few people had completely counted out completely. The Q10 arrives in Canada and the U.K. first, beginning in early May (May 1st in Canada), with an expected rollout in the U.S. towards the end of May in the U.S. It’ll cost $199 on contract at Canadian carriers on a three-year agreement, and will run for $249 on a 2-year agreement in the U.S. That’s relatively steep, especially for a phone with 16GB of onboard storage, but I expect we’ll see discounts and special offers before too long, as we did with the Z10.
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Flight Deals Platform GetGoing Takes On Kayak With Souped Up Search Engine For Cheaper Flights
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
The price of airfare is an ongoing point of frustration for travelers, especially considering that it feels like airlines find every conceivable opportunity to shake you down for a few more bucks. Many startups and businesses have come and gone trying to find a way to give leisure travelers access to cheaper airfare, as airlines just keep shutting them down. The reason? Airlines make more money off business travelers, who are less flexible in their travel dates and destinations, so, while they’re open to the idea of offering discounts to the average leisure traveler, they don’t want to include both. Y Combinator alum, , launched to offer discounts to leisure travelers, in part, by giving them a fool-proof way of identifying them — and filling those unsold seats. The catch, however, is that GetGoing asks users to relinquish the choice over their final destination in return for tickets that are up to 40 percent less expensive. It’s a hard pill to swallow at first, but it’s necessary to ensure airlines that you are actually a leisure traveler. In other words, users sign in, search for routes to over 1,000 destinations in 50 countries, then pick their top two destinations, whereupon GetGoing (randomly) decides where you’re headed. If you know where you want to go, it’s probably not for you, but if you’re flexible on whether you take the family to the Bahamas or Puerto Rico, GetGoing may be up your alley. Of course, understanding the limitations of their so-called “Pick Two, Get One” platform, GetGoing is today expanding its service to offer a personalized flight search engine that aims to find better prices and cheaper alternatives. FlightFinder, as its called, allows anyone and everyone to search by location, regions or experiences (like scuba diving, safaris, etc.). The idea is to make it easier for flexible travelers to find more affordable airfare by offering variety. In other words, if one searches for Maui, FlightFinder will return the best prices for both Maui, along with cheaper routes and airfare from nearby destinations, like Honolulu and Kauai, for example. Or, if you’re not quite sure where you want to go, but know you want to go some place warm, you can search for “beaches” or “snorkeling,” and GetGoing will serve up a few affordable options. While FlightFinder still requires an element of flexibility on the traveler’s part if they’re going to find the best deal, it expands the traditionally limited scope of flight search, discovery and booking. It also adds much-needed flight search and booking functionality alongside its flight deals platform. Yes, GetGoing has an uphill battle against sites like Kayak and Hipmunk, both of which have changed the way people search for and book flights, making it more expansive, transparent and efficient. For business travelers who know where they’re headed, it’s pretty difficult to beat Kayak, especially as it expands to offer complementary services directly, like hotel and adventure booking. But the GetGoing founders think there’s still room to improve online travel booking for leisure travelers by expanding the scope of results beyond one particular location or destination. The new service adds an option for less-flexible travelers, while still unlocking discounts that Kayak might not pick up — or at least that’s the idea. While its Pick Two, Get One platform offers deals on flights to over 50 countries, FlightFinder is accessible to pretty much every flight to pretty much anywhere. However, at this point, GetGoing is only facilitating bookings for flights that originate in the U.S., but it plans to expand support to international users in the near future. For more on GetGoing, or read more .
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After Years Of Government Scrutiny Over Security Concerns, Huawei Says It’s Quitting The U.S. [UPDATE]
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
Huawei, the world’s second-largest supplier of network gear by revenue, is pulling out of the U.S. after it sales efforts have been repeatedly stymied due to concerns over national security. According to , executive vice president Eric Xu said at the company’s annual analyst summit yesterday that Huawei “is not interested in the U.S. market any more.” He added that the company has been gradually shifting its focus away from the U.S. over the last year as it seeks to expand in other global markets. Huawei’s decision to pull out of the U.S. market is not a complete surprise. Earlier this month, Bob Cai, Huawei’s vice president in charge of wireless-network marketing, , and that it’s looking toward Europe and Asia to grow its key wireless-network business. But the decision still represents a represents a major setback for Huawei, which had been trying build up its U.S. business despite repeated efforts by politicians and security officials to label the Chinese company a threat to national security interests. Huawei has revised its long-term outlook for its enterprise business and now says that its goal of generating $15 billion in revenue from the business by 2017 is “too optimistic.” That target has been shaved down to $10 billion. The unit’s chief executive William Zu still expects revenues to grow 45 percent this year, up from 25 percent growth in 2012. Xu’s vow to back away from the U.S. comes after the company suffered two major setbacks. Last October, a fingered Huawei and Chinese rival ZTE as a threat to national security, calling on U.S. government and private sector companies to avoid buying equipment from both. At the end of March, Sprint Nextel and Japanese telecom SoftBank . Despite a by Huawei, as well as an appeal by senior executive Ken Hu for the U.S. government to launch a formal investigation, which Hu said would clear his company, the U.S. congressional report hurt Huawei’s presence in the U.S. According to the Financial Times, Huawei has halted its U.S expansion, and its R&D staff has dropped from 800 to 500. The U.S. congressional report was not the first blow dealt to Huawei by the U.S. government. Back in 2008, after finding out that the deal would not gain regulatory approval from D.C. after the U.S. government intervened. The U.S. government’s suspicious attitude toward Huawei stems in part from the military background of its founder Ren Zhengfei, who served as an engineer in the People’s Liberation Army. Huawei’s detractors worry that Ren still maintains close ties with the Chinese government. Huawei has had more luck building out , where BT, Vodafone, and EE are its major customers, but its still faced a fair amount of scrutiny in Europe. Earlier this month, it was reported for undercutting domestic firms by receiving state subsidies, a charge Huawei denied. An internal EU report last year also recommended that the EU take steps to limit the growth of Chinese telecoms equipment makers, citing domestic competition as well as threats to security. UPDATE: Huawei that it does not plan to pull out of the U.S. market completely and will continue to do business there.
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Indonesian Newsstand App Scoop Closes $2.4M Series B
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
just announced that it has raised $2.42 million (S$3 million) in a Series B round of funding. The Indonesian company is registered and headquartered in Singapore, and this round of funding has come from Indonesia’s largest media group, Kompas Gramedia. The company’s main product is a digital newsstand app called . This round of funding will go towards Apps Foundry’s expansion plans to the rest of the neighboring Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, said CEO, Willson Cuaca. owns a number of different publishing platforms covering print media, radio, TV and online sites in Indonesia. To be precise, its PR states that it has 26 newspapers, 80 magazines, seven book publishers, 23 radio stations, 103 bookstores, and nine TV stations. And 50 hotels. Phew. One of its newspapers, , has one of the largest circulations in the country, and prior to this funding round, Scoop had an exclusive arrangement with the newspaper. Kompas’ digital group director, Edi Taslim, said the app was attractive to the publisher because it’s already managed to get 90 percent of the country’s magazine publishers and 50 daily papers onboard. He added that 10,000 e-books from Kompas Gramedia’s seven publishers can be found on Scoop, and that the investment in the app maker was a strategic decision for the media giant in order for it to “stay on top of current trends” while minimizing the risk of undertaking the building of a similar app itself. Newsstand apps are attractive to publishers because they allow them to get content to readers without having to strike individual content deals with device makers themselves. Last year, a France-based digital newsstand app called raised in a Series B round. The app is touted as “Spotify for magazines”, and last month the company announced a deal with Asus to have the Lekiosk preloaded on its Android gadgets. Cuaca told TechCrunch that this funding round for Apps Foundry will bring the company’s total funding to $3.4 million (S$4.3 million) since its launch in 2010. Its angel and seed round at the beginning came up to $257,939 (S$320,000), and was led by Indonesian accelerator, . Its Series A was closed in December 2011, where it attracted $810,000 (S$1 million) primarily for Scoop from Shanghai-based VC , and Japanese investment firm .
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GroupTalent Wants To Hack Tech Hiring In SF And NYC By Fighting Job Spam, Focusing On The “Try Before You Buy” Model
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
launched in December of 2011 to offer solace to the many startups struggling to find top technical talent. Some might stand opposed to this ongoing while others will call it a full-blown war. Whatever you call it, startups today are hard-pressed to lure top developers and engineers away from the mighty perks and siren calls of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. So, GroupTalent set out to simplify the job search both for engineers and developers themselves, as well as the startups hoping to attract them — whether for contracted work or full-time. To do this, the startup culled together a bullpen of (vetted) talent and designed a matching engine to automatically pair these developers with relevant projects and companies, and vice versa. Having built its recruitment network to 4,000 developers, the TechStars grad took on $1 million Version One Ventures and Menlo Ventures. With its new capital in toe, GroupTalent is now looking to focus on its key markets in order to prevent itself from biting off more than it can chew. Beginning today, rather than attempting to cater to those looking for jobs in a diversity of markets, GroupTalent is narrowing its focus to the cities where it can be more effective, and where most tech startups are already: San Francisco and New York. While the startup will continue to accept projects from anywhere in the world, it is now resolved to only place talent in San Francisco and NYC. The reason being, CEO Manuel Medina tells us, is that the company has concluded that, at the end of the day, startups are best served by local talent. By focusing on cities with greatest tensity of talent, it can build a community of contract-for-hire developers that actually live in the same city and are ready to go. While GroupTalent’s talent-matching platform has a lot of appeal in concept, there have still been some gaps in the user experience, some of which stem from the broken hiring process itself. Today, the startup is doubling down on its efforts to fix the process with the release of a series of features, like a recruiter spam filter, which aims to help reduce the noise for those on the job search. In addition, the startup is also focusing more intently on contract-to-hire opportunities by encouraging developers to engage in part-time, contract work before looking for a long-term position. While this may not seem ideal, as many would prefer the stability of a full-time position at a startup of choice, GroupTalent believes that promoting contracted positions will help spread the love among startups that have immediate needs that need addressing. With developers being encouraged to take a greater number of short-term roles, in turn, more startups are able to benefit from that increased access to top talent. In turn, Medina believes that, with developers and designers engaging in multiple contract-to-hire opportunities, both talent and the startups they work for will be able to find better matches. Rather than forcing the issue, talent can test the waters and get to know the company, its product team and engineering teams. Then, if it proves to be the right fit, then they can commit to a full-time position. GroupTalent relies on its proprietary “eHarmony-like” algorithms to identify the best matches between talent and employers, which, again, sounds great in theory, but is only truly effective with the right user experience and controls. With its new spam filter, the startup now allows developers to claim a “job inquiry inbox” and an “@grouptalent” email address in an effort to help filter out unsolicited or untargeted emails from recruiters. While Gmail and other popular email clients offer filters to help users tame the email fire hose, GroupTalent wants to apply those “commercial” spam filters to hiring; in other words, to weed out “job spam.” This enables developers to filter out emails that don’t have any details, are for a different tech stack or skillset, or are below their ideal pay scale. Essentially, this means that the platform now reviews every solicitation sent to a developers’ GroupTalent email address, comparing the opportunity to their pre-defined preferences for criteria like timing, compensation and subject matter. Those that fit the criteria are then pushed to the top, while the rest goes into the spam folder. Starting today, GroupTalent is making its email concierge service free to developers. To further incentivize would-be customers, developers and designers receive a $500 referral bonus if someone they recommend takes a job. On the flip side, Medina hopes that the email concierge won’t just benefit talent, but will provide a leg-up for startups and recruiters by ensuring that their communications reach the right people — and are actually targeted the first time. In turn, GroupTalent provides feedback for employers on why developers turn down their opportunities — the idea being to increase the value proposition on both sides. GroupTalent is also offering the first 100 TechCrunch readers interested in testing out its new service an opportunity to waive the first hire fee of $5,000 for employers who use GroupTalent to make a hire. The code is “TALENTCRUNCH” and
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Through Dirt-Cheap Genetic Testing, Counsyl Is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
Jen Baumgartel opted for in-vitro fertilization after learning from a Counsyl test that she and her husband were carriers for the severest form of Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome. For cynics who say that Silicon Valley has become too mired in photo-sharing apps and addictive games, take a 15-minute drive to South San Francisco. In a non-descript lab is a company that may be paving the way for the Valley’s next wave of disruptive startups, which marry software with data from the human genome. is doing genetic tests that look for more than 400 mutations and at least 100 genetic disorders for parents who are planning children. At $599 total, or $99 with insurance, their tests cost a fraction of standard ones, which often only look for a single condition like cystic fibrosis, and run anywhere from $100 to $500. A full panel of tests for Ashkenazi Jews, a minority , can run about $4,000 to $5,000 from companies like Quest Diagnostics. Founded six years ago, Counsyl has grown to handle carrier screening for 2.5 percent of all births in the U.S. To ramp up, Counsyl has quietly taken in roughly $65 million in funding from firms like Founders Fund, Felicis Ventures, India’s Manipal Group, Google’s senior vice president of corporate development David Drummond, WTI, Rosemont Seneca, and Google research scientist Jeff Dean. “We want to make the genome practically useful,” said CEO Ramji Srinivasan. “People don’t necessarily care about genomics. At some point, the novelty of this data will wear off. The diagnostic utility has to be extremely obvious: can it change someone’s behavior? Can it make them make a different decision?” The company is coming of age at a time when the costs of full-genome sequencing are . Full genome sequencing — not the kind of testing where you’re handling only select snippets of DNA — runs at around $8,000 now, down from $100 million in 2001. Capitalizing on this, Counsyl has products for both SNP tests and a more comprehensive sequencing test that is about $999 for 10,000 genetic mutations. It’s helped women like Jen Baumgartel, a nurse in a Nashville, Tennessee in vitro fertilization clinic, choose IVF over conceiving naturally. Through a Counsyl test, she found out both her and her husband were carriers for , which put their potential children at risk of heart problems, developmental delays and cleft palate. They had a one-in-four chance of passing the condition on, and both Baumgartel and her husband carried the genes for the severest form of the disease. “I was hoping I would get an easy pregnancy,” Baumgartel said. “You never really think about how to avoid passing something onto your child, but suddenly we had this really harsh reality that this is what we would have to do.” They ended up spending around $12,000 on in-vitro fertilization and now have a healthy nine-month-old baby girl named Kinley Jo (pictured at the top). Unlike the consumer software world where costs of starting a company have fallen precipitously over the last five to ten years, bioinformatics may only be at the beginning of seeing a similar drop. “The Counsyl team are brilliant technologists,” said David Lee of SV Angel, who is investing in the company and has deep interest in health informatics as a cancer survivor. “They understood the trend of biology and software converging earlier and deeper than anyone we had met.” While other founders tapped into the big social networking and mobile app trends of the last five years, Srinivasan instead went for higher-hanging fruit. Before the market peaked in 2007, he was working on equity research for Morgan Stanley alongside famed analyst and now Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker. Like many entrepreneurs who come to the Valley from the banking and consulting worlds, he was looking for tangible work with more meaning. From across the country, he saw how old classmates from Stanford were building companies. “These guys were changing the world and I was moving around pieces of paper,” he said. “My brother told me that the genome was the next Internet. I decided to leave my earthly belongings and go live on a futon.” Srinivasan’s , is one of the company’s other co-founders. When Counsyl was founded, he had just finished a Ph.D. at Stanford in electrical engineering and was teaching and doing research around computational biology. The pair had never worked on a company together before. “In retrospect, we timed it perfectly,” Balaji Srinivasan said. “Between us we knew all aspects of academic genomics, both computational and wetlab, so we felt confident in that regard. We didn’t know much about business — not to mention insurance, supply chain management, robotics, or regulation — when we got started. But we just figured it out.” Srinivasan said the way founders approach problems in the Valley is almost like an inverted Maslow’s pyramid. Products that are about self-expression like social networking apps get the most attention from young founders, while businesses that are about more basic needs like health or financial security are under-addressed. Founders get intimidated by the regulatory risks and by the deep subject matter knowledge that you might need to attack the health, financial or legal industries. “Bright people in Silicon Valley aren’t necessary focusing on health because the speed of iteration seems slower,” Ramji said. Yet Counsyl has managed to deal with the steeper capital costs of doing biotech startup and captured a meaningful share of the carrier screening market. While they don’t say the number of tests they do per month, they do admit that they’re handling 2.5 percent of all births in the U.S. , so one could infer that they’re doing at least 100,000 tests annually. The tests themselves are easy to administer. Couples get the testing kits from their doctors, send in either a blood or saliva sample, mail it to Counsyl’s lab and then get results back in two or three weeks. Results come in a couple color-coded pages that show a couple’s numerical risks for having children with any of more than 100 recessive genetic diseases. A refashioned car-painting robot that’s being used at Counsyl to handle trays of samples. Counsyl’s price advantages over competitors are not really about any single transformative change to genetic testing. It’s more about correcting inefficiencies at every step of the way. “He’s like the Jeff Bezos of bioinformatics,” said Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, who said the firm put its largest single check ever into the company last year. “He’s good at wringing inefficiencies out, which is very much like the Amazon model.” Counsyl built image processing software that cut down on common testing errors by a thousand-fold. They creating billing infrastructure when it was too complicated to deal with the 700 insurers that pay for Counsyl tests. They created an iPad app for doctors so it would be easier to order tests and fit Counsyl in with their daily workflow. They refashioned a robot arm that’s normally used to spray paint Toyota Prius cars to handle trays of samples without requiring human intervention. They created their own wetware and had to re-engineer some chemicals from scratch when they realized they couldn’t rely on third-party labs to handle their samples properly. “If you hold the vial at the wrong angle, it will melt the reagent,” Ramji Srinivasan said. “We got to this moment where we realized we had to do it ourselves. We attempted for years not to build a lab, but once we decided to do it, it took a few months.” They found a space, started ripping out its carpets. Srinivasan bought a Home Depot book on plumbing. It was costly and tedious, but it yielded unexpected benefits. “It turned out to be the best thing for us,” Ramji Srinivasan said. “Now we control the full stack just like Steve Jobs tried to do with Apple. He said the ideal computer starts out at the beach with the sand and ends with a running machine that you can touch. If we never had to re-engineer everything, we would have never been able to do what we’re able to do.” Once they went forward with the lab and could see a path toward scaling easily, other investors stepped in. Founders Fund, which has backed companies like Tesla, SpaceX and Facebook, came in during 2011. They are “a classic Founders Fund company,” said partner Brian Singerman. “Pragmatic, but a bit crazy — good crazy — at the same time. The team is top tier and out of the box in both science and business execution.” Now that the hardware and wetware sides of the business are more manageable, Counsyl can focus on its true opportunity: interpretation and curation of genomic data. “The interpretation is the expensive part of the problem,” Ramji Srinivasan said. “It looks like a software problem, talks like a software problem and acts like a software problem.” As the wealth of data grows, Counsyl is building a scalable and repeatable system for interpreting DNA readings. If one were to take all of the published research papers associated with all of the mutations that Counsyl tests for, it would take five work years to read them all. So Counsyl is creating rule sets for how to understand what different mutations mean. Deletions or insertions into a person’s DNA can be quite serious, but there are also minor mutations that might not affect amino acids produced from the DNA. Already, Counsyl is processing a half-a-terabyte of data per day. If the company did full genome sequencing for all the customers they currently handle, they would be doing 5 terabytes per day. (For a somewhat random apple-and-oranges comparison, for its billion users. Basically, even just a few thousand genome sequencing tests can produce a lot of data.) On the consumer-facing side of the business, Counsyl’s near-term progress will be about expanding deeply into the carrier screening market. Eventually, they want to build a mainstream brand with lots of applications. “Philosophically, we want to build a consumer brand. We want people to associate us with understanding the genome the way people think about Kleenex with tissues,” Ramji Srinivasan said. From that point of view, carrier screening is an ideal starting point. Parents are strongly motivated to do their best for their future children. Not only that, timing really matters for pregnancies and childbearing. If customers end up having a good experience with Counsyl products early on, they’ll develop a trust or affinity for the brand, which will help later down the line with future services. This is unlike other genetic testing services, which focus on predicting diseases a person can contract in old age. The issue with that market is that people have a tendency to push off or procrastinate on testing for potential bad news. “The conversation with the doctor needs to be very targeted and focused. There can’t really be a question of — are you testing me? Are you testing my prospective kids?” Ramji Srinivasan said. “We don’t want to muddy the message from the doctor. The interaction has to be simple and we want the test to be squarely about prospective children.” The other issue with testing for conditions in old age is that there is an inverse relationship between how and how these diseases are. With the most predictable genetic conditions, there might not be much that a person can do to change their fate. But conditions that are more behaviorally or lifestyle-influenced like heart disease are not all that accurately forecast by genetic tests. Counsyl also tries to be conscientious about the murky ethical issues that sometimes arise with genetic testing. There are some fascinating questions here for prospective parents. For example, would a couple make a different reproductive decision if they found out that they were carriers for a lifelong condition like cystic fibrosis versus a BRCA mutation that could lead to breast cancer in mid-life? “We’re big believers in reproductive autonomy,” Ramji Srinivasan said. “We didn’t invent the idea of carrier screening. We’re just making it cheaper to find this information out. It goes back to the question: is it better to know or withhold information?” [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/63141778 w=500&h=281] from on .
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Pathmapp Launches An A/B Testing Platform For Native iOS Apps To Let Developers Optimize, Configure In Real Time
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
A/B testing has long been a fundamental part of developing applications and products for the Web, and, with the explosion of smartphones, developers are naturally eager to use the process to test new designs and updates for mobile apps. The problem is that, traditionally, this has been tricky to manage, especially on iOS given Apple’s approval process, requiring app developers to wait weeks to push new iterations. Frustrated by the current process, decided to create a solution — one that would allow developers to test different designs and push them out in real time. last year, today, the startup is officially launching an A/B testing platform for native iOS apps that aims to enable mobile developers to optimize their apps and increase conversion without making significant changes to their workflow — or to their users’ experiences. Born of the founders’ experience building mobile app agency, , simply put, Pathmapp lets iOS developers create and deploy A/B tests in real time across their native apps without having to resubmit the changes to the App Store. Of course, while Pathmapp co-founder Adam Ceresko admits this may not sound like an earth-shakingly novel concept thanks to the fact that companies like Google and Optimizely have made A/B testing for the web available for years, he believes that no one has yet adequately addressed this problem on mobile. “As mobile developers, we saw this massive gap in the market,” says Pathmapp CTO Andrew Herman. “Similar technologies have existed on the web for years, but have been sorely lacking in the mobile space since the first iPhone debuted in 2007.” Since debuting at Disrupt last year, Pathmapp has been running an extended private beta, which came to a close in March. Today marks the beginning of the official public rollout of Pathmapp’s A/B testing platform, but Ceresko tells us that it will be a rolling release, as the startup plans to continue adding new features and tweaking based on user feedback over the next few weeks. The big-picture goal, he says, is to make Pathmapp completely “independent of the web.” At launch, Pathmapp includes a number of new features that weren’t present in the beta product that the company debuted at Disrupt, chief of which is support for live configuration. In other words, app developers can now use Pathmapp to dynamically change the designs served to users in real time. This means that developers can change the interface of their apps without running an A/B test, bringing support to those who just want to tweak their design. Pathmapp has also improved its analytics and statistics. It now offers a “confidence measurement” through which it crunches the numbers on user behavior and interaction, telling developers which design performs best among its customers. The idea is to save developers some time from getting wrapped up in data and behavior measurement, allowing them to instead focus on more critical product decisions. To that end, Pathmapp now also offers the ability to segment users. This enables developers to run a test on a particular subset of users so that they can figure out which design is most effective among a particular group before pushing the change out to one and all. Lastly, Pathmapp is officially introducing A/B/N testing so that developers can try different variations within a single test, rather than having to run hundreds of tests for each small tweak. In terms of pricing, Pathmapp offers all users a free, 15-day trial, after which Pathmapp starts at $19/month in its “Scout tier,” which is built to accomodate apps of all sizes, ranging from small to enterprise. Those who are looking for greater support and flexibility can upgrade to the startup’s “Pathfinder tier” at $79/month or “Trailblazer” at $399/month. Pathmapp is developing a fairly simple, easy-to-use solution for app developers hung up on A/B testing for iOS. All they have to do is drop Pathmapp’s SDK into their apps, and they can begin building interfaces right in Xcode, managing the whole process and doing live configurations through their web dashboard. For more, find .
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In A Win For E-Hail Services, Judge Clears The Way For Mobile Taxi Apps To Launch In NYC
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
New York City is one step closer to having regulator-approved e-hail apps, thanks to the end of litigation against the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission. That’s because a judge today dismissed a controversial lawsuit filed by the black car industry against the regulator. The lawsuit, which was designed to block the TLC from starting a trial of mobile apps that would allow users to hail a cab electronically, claimed that the pilot program would have violated several local ordinances. It also claimed that the TLC’s program would have blurred the lines between cabs, which users typically hail on the street, and for-hire vehicles, which they call ahead to schedule a ride. But the judge in the case, Justice Carol Huff, rejected those claims and dismissed the case. The ruling was a victory for the TLC and for the companies that have planned to be a part of the e-hail trial. The program was expected to launch in February, but was delayed due to the lawsuit filed by the black car lobby. Without the litigation hanging over it, the TLC is once again free to move on with the application and approval process. That said, not every e-hail app will qualify. Participants in the trial are expected to integrate with the taxi’s existing meter and payment system, and be approved by the NY TLC before they begin operating. But it’s something that e-hail companies such as Hailo, Taxi Magic and Flywheel say they are prepared to do. Hailo CEO Jay Bregman told me by phone that his company has thousands of drivers trained and ready to go, and the company is just waiting for the TLC to give it the green light to launch. But it’s not clear how long it will be before companies that have applied and had their apps approved will get the go-ahead to begin rolling out services in New York City. Another company that may participate in the trial is Uber, which previously had tried to launch an unsanctioned version of its own UberTAXI service in New York, long before the . But Uber ultimately , in part because the TLC at the time “put up obstacles and roadblocks” to its trial. For what it’s worth, a representative for Uber said the company had submitted an application and received the blueprint schematics for compliance with the TLC’s program. With the launch of New York’s e-hail trial seemingly imminent, it’s probably as good a time as any to mention that we’ll be next week at , where we’ll have representatives from the TLC, Hailo, and ride-sharing startup SideCar on a panel about urban transportation. This’ll give us one more thing to talk about. Photo Credit: via
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The BeagleBone Black Is A New Single-Board Computer That Can Brew Beer
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
While the is great for educating kids about computing, can it brew a mean beer? The can. Trevor Hubbard, an engineer at Texas Instruments, uses the new, next-gen board to control heat exchangers and monitors to handle beer temperature remotely. The board itself is quite cool. It runs a AM335x 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor with graphics accelerator and has two 46-pin headers for IO, making it ideal for monitoring and robotics. The board itself . It can run Android and Ubuntu linux and connects to the Internet via Ethernet or a USB Wi-Fi dongle. Interestingly, the entire board is open source, allowing you to download and tweak the design to suit your needs. The company was founded by and , two TI engineers. The headers allow for multiple styles of input and output including serial connectivity, timers, and digital I/O. While not as inherently simple as the Raspberry Pi, it’s still a formidable board. Hubbard, who recorded a video about his project, shows how he can control his beer temperature remotely using a BeagleBoard, the Internet, and a taste for bubbly hops. There is, I’d wager, not much more a man could ask for. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eUFf-EAVWZ4]
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Apple Q2 ’13 Intl Sales 56% Of Total Revenues; Cook Defensive On China: “Best Quarter Ever” At $8.8B
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
today posted that beat estimates at $43.6 billion in sales, which illustrates that, while the Americas — led by the U.S. — remains the company’s single biggest market, Asia, led by sales in China, continues to show the strongest growth amidst weakened demand at home and in Europe. Overall, international revenues outside of the Americas were $24.3 billion, or 56 percent of the total for the quarter. International has been and will continue to be a focus for Apple. Cook cited worldwide smartphone figures from IDC that predict shipments of 1.4 billion units annually by 2016; and tablet figures of 375 million units by the same year, according to Gartner. While the U.S. continues to be a strong market for sales today, much of the future growth in mobile devices will be happening in less mature markets outside of the U.S. On the earnings call earlier, the biggest focus for what is happening internationally was Greater China, a hotly contested market that has been largely dominated by Android device makers. In Greater China this quarter, Apple has had a mixed picture. On the one hand, its revenues of $8.2 billion, sequentially, made Greater China its biggest market in terms of growth, increasing by 20 percent, while all other regions declined in the holiday aftermath. Compared to the same quarter a year ago, however, China was less impressive. It grew by 8 percent, putting it just one percentage higher than the U.S., its slowest-growing market at 7 percent. Is Apple hitting a wall there? asked one analyst. No, answered CEO Tim Cook, “We had our best quarter ever in China.” In total, he pointed out that including retail store sales, Apple had $8.8 billion in China ($8.2 billion on the posted by Apple, which does not include retail sales). That is up 11 percent year-on-year, Cook said, “the same rate Apple is growing.” He also noted that iPad sales grew by 138 percent with new records getting set for iPhone and iPad sell-through. He also noted that while a year ago, Apple launched the iPhone 4S with two different operators, at two different periods, in the quarter, with the iPhone 5 this time around, the launch fell outside of the 12-week period covered by today’s earnings. “We still see a very significant opportunity in China,” he said, noting that there are now 11 stores open in the country with plans to double that. Although Apple still does not have a local iTunes store in the country, Cook promises that it is innovating online there and “adding different functionality.” He also dug in a little on how Apple is tackling the cheap smartphone trend in China. Although the company has long been rumored to be working on a low-cost iPhone for now the company continues to use its older models as its “low cost” devices. He noted that it is selling the iPhone 4 as its low-cost device for first-time buyers. “We are hoping that will help iPhone sales in the future.” This quarter, Apple faced a tough PR push in China over its warranty policy. The negative comments, which extended into , even prompted an apology from CEO Tim Cook on the company’s Chinese site. That did nothing to help Apple, which is already facing strong price pressure from smartphone makers building locally focused handsets on versions of Google’s Android. At the end of December, it was estimated by that Android devices were approaching two-thirds of all mobile phones (not just smartphones) sold in the country, compared to just 5 percent for Apple. In other international regions, Europe continues to be Apple’s second-largest market after the Americas at $9.8 billion in revenues (without retail calculated in). That’s growth of 11 percent over last year but down 21 percent on last quarter, giving it just a $1.6 billion lead ahead of Greater China. Meanwhile, Japan and the rest of Asia-Pacific saw the very strongest growth, but the proportion of sales in those two regions continues to be relatively small. They were up respectively at 19 percent and 26 percent over the same quarter last year, working out to around $3.1 billion in each of those markets. Adding that together with Greater China, it has yet to outweigh the combination of Europe and the Americas, but is definitely bigger than either one taken on its own.
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 24 | null |
Apple CEO Tim Cook Hypes The Fall, Downplays The Summer On New Hardware
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t generally talk too specifically about upcoming product plans, but he went out of his way to put an unusually fine point on when to expect new products than he usually does. Cook kicked off today’s Apple earnings call talking about how Apple is looking forward to exciting product news in the fall, and throughout 2014, and then reiterated the exact same thing during the Q&A period. “I don’t want to be more specific, but we’ve got some really great stuff coming in the fall and across all of 2014,” Cook said later when asked if he could expand upon his earlier statements. Clearly, he didn’t expand, but he firmly reiterated what he’d said earlier. It seemed pretty apparent that Cook intended to manage expectations relative to Apple’s product release cycle in a much more direct way than Apple has in the past. The statement on the surface seems designed to cool rumors and speculation that we’ll see a new iPhone (or perhaps multiple new models) . Reports sourced from Apple’s supply and manufacturing partners have suggested a ramp-up in preparation for a June-ish consumer release, although just this past week some analyst chatter began to suggest that the . Cook also wouldn’t go so far as to eliminate entirely the possibility that we’ll see new products before the fall, but he clearly wanted to put the spotlight on later this year and the entirety of next year in terms of product innovation. Whether that means we’ll only see modest changes before September, with big bombshells like the rumored iWatch sometime later, or whether we won’t see anything before autumn, remains to be seen. Apple almost never spills any beans about what its product plans are, so it’s worth getting excited about fall based on Tim’s willingness to talk about that specific period, as well as his mention of “new product categories.” Still, unless he’s purposefully trying to throw us off the scent, people eager for new Apple products might also want to sleep through the summer.
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TC Cribs: Inside LinkedIn, The Professional Social Network With A Surprisingly Casual HQ
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 |
It’s time for a brand spankin’ new edition of , the TechCrunch TV series where we snoop around inside the employee-only sections of the tech industry’s hottest companies. Just like Walt Whitman, the tech industry , and we try to represent it all in Cribs. That means that in addition to touring bootstrapped , we also like to go inside established tech giants — and it was pretty amazing to have the chance to take an in-depth tour of , the professional social network that’s grown from its in apartment to a staff of thousands, a user base of hundreds of millions, a hugely successful , and continued stock market . What’s even cooler was that our guide was none other than , LinkedIn’s very charismatic co-founder and current VP of product who has been with the company since day one. I think it’s fair to say that he’s the best possible person that we could have asked to give us a tour, even though it meant I had to suffer a pretty humiliating loss at expert-level along the way. Watch the video above to see what it’s like inside LinkedIn — from the in-house rock band, to the unlimited Indian food, to Allen Blue’s excellent elephant impression, and beyond.
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Details Of Immigration Bill Revealed, More High-Skilled Visas And Employer Fees
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
of the highly anticipated comprehensive immigration reform bill have leaked ahead of its introduction to Congress on Tuesday (April 16). Most of the technology industry will be pleased that it nearly doubles the number of high-skilled visas (H1-B), from the 65,000 to 110,000, with a maximum of 185,000 in the future. However, as the Washington Post reports, it will also require employers who heavily rely on H1-B visas to pay fees and higher salaries. With shortages of quality engineering talent in the United States, . This year, the 65,000 visa cap was reached in just 5 days, making the bill all the more urgent. Notably absent from the (leaked) details is a new type of visa that permits immigrants to start their own companies without an employee sponsor (the so-called “ “). The bombing of the Boston Marathon may delay debate on the bill one day. We will update readers as new information is released.
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Stanford’s NovoEd Brings Collaboration And Group Learning To MOOCs To Help Fight Attrition
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
What is it with Stanford professors and Massive Open Online Courses (a.k.a. MOOCs)? For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, two of the three most popular MOOCs — and — were both founded by Stanford professors. Then there’s Class2Go, an open-source MOOC platform created by a team of Stanford engineers and professors, which (the third member of that aforementioned MOOC trifecta) to help it create an open-source platform. But the university’s MOOC contributions don’t end there. In early 2012, Stanford professor Amin Saberi and PhD student Farnaz Ronaghi created a project called Venture Lab to offer Stanford courses for free on the Web, with its first class on technology entrepreneurship attracting 40,000 students from over 150 countries. But, rather than simply creating another MOOC platform, the startup wants to solve a big pain-point for MOOCs — to make it easier to break down those huge classes of 40,000 into smaller groups. So, Venture Lab is officially re-branding and re-launching today as to not only offer courses online for free, but to offer a MOOC platform that focuses on collaboration and project and team-based learning. Beginning next week, the startup will offer seven Stanford courses to the general public as well as 10 private courses available only to Stanford students. Going forward, NovoEd plans to partner with other universities and build out a roster of classes on a range of topics, from creativity and entrepreneurship to medicine. And that’s really the key differentiator for NovoEd. Saberi and Ronaghi founded Venture Lab to help teachers who found that current MOOC offerings didn’t cater to their style, working better for mastery-focused courses than those that are more open-ended — or focused on teaching creative disciplines. Unlike, say, Mathematics or Computer Science which may work best in the lecture format, or one in which students study and practice by themselves, the founders wanted to create a MOOC platform for courses that demand more group interaction and peer-to-peer collaboration. After signing up for NovoEd, students are assigned to groups of 10 or fewer peers, based on their location or similar interests and backgrounds. As they study, students can then rate each other, with the rankings compiled at the end of the course to form a student’s “Team Score,” which then informs student decisions when they’re later allowed to form groups on their own. The idea is to create a dynamic in which students are accountable to their peers, and feel, perhaps, a bit of social pressure to perform to keep their rankings up — ultimately creating an experience that’s more engaging. Many MOOC platforms suffer from high attrition rates, so NovoEd is hoping to solve that problem by creating a social incentive system that aims to keep students from falling through the cracks and dropping out. Not only that, but the founders say that the system is designed to help students improve their group learning skills, like virtual team management, the ability to better negotiate and understand one’s role in the team, leadership and communication. These are the kind of skills one traditionally learns in the group-based environs of offline, in-class activities but have largely been missing from MOOCs and this new form of online education at scale. To help it seek partnerships with other universities and expand its course catalog, NovoEd has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from investors like Costanoa Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kapor Capital, Learn Capital, Maveron, Ulu Ventures, as well as a handful of angel investors. For more,
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Twitter Reportedly In Talks With Viacom And NBCUniversal For Content-Sharing Deal
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Twitter is nearing an agreement with Viacom to host TV clips and sell advertising on the site, . It is also reportedly discussing a content partnership with Comcast’s NBCUniversal, and one or more of the deals could be reached by mid-May. According to sources cited in the article, the partnerships would let Twitter stream videos on its site and split the resulting ad revenue with the networks. Twitter already has agreements in place with ESPN, Weather Channel LLC, and Turner Broadcasting System. If the partnerships come to fruition, it would be the latest step in Twitter’s moves to branch out from being a microblogging platform to a multi-faceted media platform in a bid to increase user engagement and reap more advertising revenue. Engaging with television networks is a logical step for the company: a third of active Twitter users tweeted last June about something they saw on television, up from 26 percent last year, (Twitter has also partnered with Nielsen to measure how much of the chatter on the site is prompted by television programs). Other recent moves by Twitter to build tools allowing users to share content within the platform instead of relying on third-party providers include the last week after it , and the .
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Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission Investigating Samsung For Online Attacks Against HTC
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission that Samsung paid students to attack rival HTC’s smartphones online. The South Korean tech giant could potentially face a fine of up to NTD $25 million ($835,000 USD) if the charges of false advertising are upheld. Samsung’s Taiwanese agent allegedly hired students to write online articles attacking HTC and recommending Samsung handsets. In response, Samsung’s Taiwan office apologizing for “any inconvenience and confusion” and saying it “has halted all Internet marketing such as posting articles on Web sites.” This is not the first time that Samsung has been in hot water with the Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission–back in January, it for an advertisement that featured “misleading” information about the Samsung Galaxy Y Duos GT-S6012. Samsung was charged with falsely stating in online and catalog advertisements that the phone has automatic focus and flash functions, which it doesn’t. And last fall, Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology (a joint venture of the two companies) was fined, along with several other companies, for fixing the prices of optical disc drives. If the current crop of charges against Samsung are true, the tactics seem rather heavy-handed. According to IDC, Samsung currently has a 30.3 percent chunk of the global smartphone market, while HTC holds just a 4.6 percent slice. Despite rave reviews for the HTC One and the release of the HTC First Facebook Home phone, the Taiwanese company has struggled over the past year , due in large part to the delayed release of the HTC One.
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Google Releases Glass Specs: Full Day Battery Life, 5MP Camera, 720p Video, 16GB Flash Memory & Bone Conduction Transducer
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
The news about Google Glass just keeps coming today. After announcing that Glass is and releasing the , Google has now also posted the full spec sheet for the Glass hardware. There are no major surprises here, but it’s nice to finally get to see what those users who will be able to buy the Explorer editions will get for their $1,500. Glass will work with any Bluetooth-capable phone, but it looks like the only way to use GPS and SMS through Glass at this point is through the , which requires Android 4.0.3+. It’s not clear if or when Google plans to ship a companion app for other platforms. The display, which is obviously the highlight of the devices, will have a resolution that “is the equivalent of a 25 inch high-definition screen from eight feet away.” In its developer guides, Google says photos should have a 640x360px resolution, so that’s probably also the resolution of the Glass display, though Google interestingly doesn’t note this in the specs. The first version of Glass will also feature a 5 megapixel camera that can also do 720p video. Glass will come with 16GB of Flash storage of which 12GB will be usable (and synced with Google’s cloud storage service). The company says the device should have enough battery power to last a full day “of typical use,” but it also warns that features like Hangouts and video recordings are more battery intensive. The coolest feature, however, is probably the , which will transmit sound from Glass to the inner ear through the bones of the wearer’s skull. Thanks to this, users won’t have to use a regular headphone to use Glass. Here are the full specs: High resolution display is the equivalent of a 25 inch high definition screen from eight feet away. One full day of typical use. Some features, like Hangouts and video recording, are more battery intensive. While there are thousands of Micro USB chargers out there, Glass is designed and tested with the included charger in mind. Use it and preserve long and prosperous Glass use.
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Google’s Glass Companion App For Android And Web-Based Setup Wizard Are Now Live
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
After a about Google Glass today, the company has now released some of the final pieces for the Glass launch: and a web-based . The companion app, which was first spotted by , will work on Android devices that run version 4.0.3+ of the operating system, enables Glass to handle SMS messages and also provides location services for the device. While Glass will work with , these features will only be enabled through the companion app. Judging from Google’s screenshots, the app will provide access to some of the basic information about the device (including its location), as well as access to the Glassware apps that you have enabled for the device. As Google helpfully reminds Android users who are tempted to download the app, “if you don’t have Glass, then downloading this will be a waste of time.” It’s not clear if Google plans to release a similar companion app for other platforms in the future. Another new Glass feature that is now live and equally useless for those without the Glass hardware is the . The setup wizard walks users through the first steps of getting started with Glass and uses a QR code that you can scan with Glass to link the hardware with your account. The wizard also allows you to set up Glass on your local Wi-Fi network.
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Dropmysite Upgrades As It Moves Into Enterprise Market
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
has beefed up its site backup product with new features, as it pushes harder into the enterprise market. Its product now includes features like incremental backups, public key authentication and PostgreSQL database support, it said. Backups start at 10Gb for $19.99. The Singaporean company was started in September 2011. But it was a side project, that suddenly became a hit online and drew more attention over to Dropmysite. The email backup service was launched in March 2012, and promised to be an easy way to dump a backup copy of your webmail from services like Gmail and Yahoo onto its servers. Three months later, the company announced it had 650,000 new users. The feature upgrade to the parent product looks like it was a natural result of the company’s focus on enterprise deals. It’s been making deals with regional telcos and hosts in a mix of reselling and investing arrangements. This has allowed its financing to reach about $1.3 million (S$1.7 million) so far, according to Dropmysite. In January, the company signed a deal with Japanese cloud provider for the latter to both invest a “six-figure sum” in Dropmyemail and resell the service in Japan. GMO Cloud, which belongs to the has a customer base of about 130,000 businesses and 6,000 sales partners in its country. In addition to that, it has a deal with Xpress Hosting in Mexico, to resell into its Spanish-speaking user base. Xpress Hosting has about 600,000 sites on its servers. Dropmysite indicated that it is in the final stages of closing a deal with a Singapore telco, and intends to reach out to the latter’s 150,000 small and medium business customers. The deal took eight months to iron out, it said. Its next deal looks to be with a telco in India, as well. Dropmysite is also trying to expand its offices. It bought cloud drive site Orbitfiles in June last year, grabbing its user base of 235,000 primarily in the US, and opened an office in Dallas in August. Prior to the Orbitfiles acquisition, its main customer base was in Asia, especially in India and Indonesia, followed by South America, it said.
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Spotify Makes Its First Moves Into Asia Via Singapore, Hong Kong And Malaysia; Latin America Via Mexico; And Four More In Europe [Update]
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Music streaming service has finally come to Asia. Today, it that it would be launching in the cities of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Its premium service, priced at $9.99 per month in the US, will also be a little cheaper in the region, with Malaysians getting the lowest price. : after turning on Asia, Spotify posted on its that it now has also turned on services in Mexico (it’s first market in Latin America); as well as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Iceland — bringing the total number of markets to 28. In Singapore, the service is priced monthly at $7.99 (S$9.90), in Hong Kong it’s $6.18 (48 HKD) and in Malaysia it will be $4.90 (14.9 MYR). It’s practically the new of music subscribers, going by Spotify’s head of new markets in Asia-Pacific, Sriram Krishnan. He told us the prices are a “sweet spot” based on deep studies of each market. Spotify does come for free, but it premium users will be able to use its mobile apps, and get functions like offline caching, where songs are stored in devices and can be played without an Internet connection. Premium users also listen at 320 kbps, while free accounts stream at 160 kbps. In an interview, Krishnan said Spotify has 24 million “active” users (he couldn’t define what “active” means in Spotify terms), and 6 million of those are paying. In comparison, fellow US music streaming site, Pandora, said recently that it has a base of about , of which 70 million log in each month. Spotify’s arrival in Asia marks one of the first times a paid streaming service has come to the region. Others such as Netflix and Pandora are missing. Users outside of the US used to be able to access Pandora by registering with a US postal code, but the service had to comply with DMCA regulations, and finally in 2007 through IP filtering. Krishnan would not give specifics on the deals made in Asia, but said that Spotify’s size makes it more of a force to reckon with during negotiations with industry execs. “We’ve been around for five years. In the past four years, we gave back $500 million to the music industry. This year, we will give back another $500 million. Having reached this scale, we’re now taken seriously,” he said. Media providers have been nervous coming into Asia because of piracy concerns. He acknowledged that piracy continues to be an issue here, but said that a premium service’s ability to offer a more convenient way to get content without going through the hassle of BitTorrenting a file would trump piracy. Of course BitTorrent is free, and you could theoretically capture a streamed track in all its 320 kbps glory, but he said that free accounts would address that sort of behavior, and the premium accounts are there for people more serious about their music. “Now that we’re in town, people have a way to access free legal music. We’re confident that our presence will revitalize the industry,” he said. Besides piracy issues, a potential expansion to new markets with the risk that few may sign up for a subscription can be costly for middlemen services like Spotify, amid rising content prices from rights owners. In February, Pandora indicated that it paid $65.7 million for its content in the third quarter last year, and that per-track royalty rates have shot up more than 25 percent over the past three years. It also said it expects rates to increase by another 16 percent by 2015. Spotify has a Hong Kong office, where Krishnan is based, and it is currently hiring sales and consumer marketing execs in its brand new Singapore office.
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Google’s BufferBox Installs Its First U.S. Pick-Up Station At A Coffee Shop In The Heart Of San Francisco
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
At the beginning of the month, we broke the news that , was . Today, it’s clear that this wasn’t just a plan, as its co-founder proudly shared the first U.S. BufferBox location, the in San Francisco. It’s no surprise that BufferBox will be setting up these shipment lockers in places that get high traffic, as it’s a more convenient experience than going to a post office or a shipping hub. Here’s the tweet from Mike McCauley, along with the on Instagram: [tweet https://twitter.com/mmccauley/status/323601862555234304] The location, in the Mission District of San Francisco, is a place where people could potentially route their packages to, knowing that they’re going to visit for a cup of joe at some point in the day anyways. BufferBox gives you a single-use address and locker number to have your items delivered to. Since worrying about packages being left on your doorstep, or, worse, missing the package delivery altogether is a pain, picking something up from a place that you go to every day on your way to work is appealing. BufferBox has only been available in the Toronto area until now, leaving people wondering what Google would do with it once it acquired the company. Business went as usual in Canada in the past few months, and the team is clearly moving forward in California. The new San Francisco option is not available on their site, but I’ve reached out to the team to find out when it would be. Another Y Combinator company, Swapbox, in San Francisco’s Nob Hill section, with plans to move fast and furious to install more. The race is on for these two companies to spread themselves out in locations that get a lot of foot traffic. On the BufferBox site, their services are currently listed as free for a limited time. You have to imagine that places like Starbucks are ripe for BufferBox placement, as it’s somewhere that people go continually throughout the day. Additionally, Google could easily integrate its new service into BufferBox’s offerings once more locations start popping up. [Photo credit: ]
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GSF India, Which Aims To Be The “TechStars Of The Emerging World,” Partners With MIT
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
, a new accelerator with hubs across several cities in India, is adding another global partnership to its roster. The incubator, , is linking up with MIT to bring founders and mentors from Boston back to India and to send local entrepreneurs back on an exchange. India’s top technical universities have long been a source of talent for global tech companies, yet the country’s startup ecosystem is only just beginning to find broader cultural acceptance in the country. In India, it’s still more prestigious in this day and age to have a secure job at a multi-national company than it is to start a company. GSF is looking to change that. “The best talent from abroad can come to India and create a new global language here. Our doors are open to the brightest talent from the rest of the world and we’re hoping the world will open its doors to the brightest startups from India,” said Rajesh Sawhney, who founded the accelerator after serving as president of Reliance Entertainment, in a talk announcing the partnership in Boston last week. Through the partnership, GSF is hooking up with to create a cross-border startup exchange. That labs program has a special focus on entrepreneurship in emerging markets; since it was founded back in 2000, it has sent about 160 MIT students to fourteen emerging markets across Africa, Latin American and Asia. Those students work as teachers and mentors in training local undergraduates in these developing countries to start their own companies through a six to eight week incubation program. Startups that have come out of the program include Rwanda’s first mobile startup, Hehe, and iChecki, which has an app for tracking taxi cabs. In the deal, Boston-based startups from MIT’s Labs will head over the India, and get hands-on support from GSF’s mentor network and co-working or office space in one of GSF’s four accelerators around the country. The idea is that they’ll get the help they need to expand locally into India. In turn, GSF’s startups get access to the technical expertise of the MIT-based entrepreneurs and program managers when they do an exchange in Boston. MIT Ph.D. students will also get to mentor GSF startups in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai. , says he’s seen the Indian startup scene change dramatically over the last five years. “In 2008, no one was talking about startups there,” he said. “There were a lot of cultural issues with risk tolerance. But now, students at the top universities have this attitude that they can do anything. They’re being courted by the top multi-national corporations and they might see entrepreneurship as something of another challenge.”
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Google Releases Glass Mirror API Developer Guides And Details Best Practices, API Remains In Limited Preview
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Earlier today, Google that it is about to ship its first Google Glass units and just in time for them to arrive, Google has now also posted the . Access to the API itself, it’s worth noting, is still in limited preview and only developers who have access to the Glass hardware will be able to work with the API. Everybody else can also start working on apps based on the documentation but won’t be able to test them. This , which will allow developer to write what Google likes to call “Glassware,” is still relatively limited and the most advanced feature developers get access to is probably the Glass wearer’s . Because every application communicates with Glass through Google’s servers, the API provides developers with a set of RESTful services and is completely cloud-based and none of the code will actually run on Glass itself. At its core, the API allows developers to send and receive information from Glass devices. Using the API looks to be relatively straightforward, though also a bit limited. Users will subscribe to new app from the developer’s website (and Google has launched a developers can use on their sites for this, too). Google currently offers for and developers, as well as for Go, PHP, .NET, Ruby and Dart. The API will give developers the option to communicate with users through timeline cards, which can include text, rich HTML, images and video. These timeline cards are not unlike Google Now cards on Android and can be bundled into packages – and users can navigate between them – or they can come as stand-alone cards. The API also provides developers with the ability to add to their apps. These, Google says, can be system commands like “read aloud,” but developers can also write custom commands for their specific apps that users can bring up through the menu system or through voice commands. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Px5wXlsME?feature=player_embedded] As for the , Google gives developers the option to use their own custom HTML, but the Glass team also provides developers with a . As Google notes, “crafting your own template gives you the power to control how your content is rendered, but with that power comes responsibility.” Because of this, Google “strongly encourages” developers to use its own template. (H.264 and H.264 baseline) should have a 16×9 aspect ratio and should have a resolution of about 640x360px (that’s also the ). Audio can be delivered in the AAC and MP3 formats. Given that Glass is a new concept, Google also posted some for how apps should interact with Glass, though it’s not clear if the company plans to enforce any of these directly. Developers, Google says, should make sure they apps are designed with glass in mind and should always test their apps on Glass before releasing them. The glass experience should also never get in the user’s way and apps shouldn’t annoy users with frequent and loud notifications. Apps should also focus on real-time notifications and apps should react to a user’s action as soon as possible. Most importantly, given that Glass is meant to be worn all day, developers should not surprise users with “unexpected functionality.” Overall, many developers will surely feel as if Google is limiting how much they can do with Glass, but it’s worth remembering that this is only a first release and chances are that Google will make more features available to developers in the future. Here are a few of the videos Google posted today that explain some of the Mirror API’s features in more detail: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d7XxIirOtk?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJrWc8XkIQE?feature=player_embedded] [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zGayIdw77s?feature=player_embedded]
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How To Use Facebook To Check On Boston Friends Without Taxing Phone Lines
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
People around the world are hoping their friends in Boston are safe after . But calling and texting friends can clog phone lines, hindering response crews. Facebook offers an alternative. By Graph Searching or viewing the , you can pull up friends who live there, see if they’ve said they’re safe, ask if they haven’t, and pass along some love. was designed for finding people with a specific characteristic. Unfortunately, the new feature is still in the early phases of its rollout. It’s currently of English-speaking U.S. users. The inability to handle this kind of query underlines how much Facebook needed to revamp its search product. Luckily there’s a workaround for everyone else. Visiting the brings up several lists of people including a tab for “Friends Who Have Lived In Boston.” It’s not a current list, but at least it’s inclusive. All of the TechCrunch staff’s hearts go out the victims of today’s tragedy, and personally I was shocked when I first heard the news. But it was when I Graph Searched “ that the gravity of situation really struck me. I have 12 friends currently living in the city that could have been affected. Remembering all of them would have been tough but Graph Search jogged my memory and filled me in on who had recently moved there. Most had already given some sign on the social network that they were safe. I posted short notes of hope on the walls of the rest, and all have since responded that they’re fine. Anyone else who visits their walls will see those reassurances, too. That means the people most likely to know someone who was hurt, or who could volunteer to help in person might spend less of their day fielding panicked texts and calls about their own well-being. That’s important because if cell phone lines near the site of the explosions , it could be harder for response crews to get their own vital calls and texts through. So instead of racking your brain for who you know in Boston, or clogging the cellular lines, consider checking on your friends digitally. And if you want to help, the has the Safe And Well person database, plus opportunities for you to donate blood or money to help victims on this dark day.
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Netflix Moves To Samsung ARM-Based Chromebooks, Thanks To Premium Video Extensions In HTML5
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Thanks to the availability of a couple of premium video extensions that it’s been helping to develop along with other members, Netflix today is announcing support for HTML5 playback on Samsung ARM-based Chromebooks. According to an entry on the , the development of Media Source Extensions (MSE), Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), and Web Cryptography API (WebCrypto) will soon allow it to support HTML5 playback on a whole host of modern browsers without the need for a third-party browser extension. While a large number of web publishers have begun to move toward HTML5-based playback over the last few years, Netflix hasn’t been one of them. It’s required users to download the Microsoft Silverlight plugin for browser-based viewing for the last several years. But with Silverlight slowly making its way out, and technologies around HTML5 getting better, the streaming video company is beginning to test out new ways to make its movies and TV shows available without a plug-in. That’s opening the door for Netflix to embrace a more standards-based format for video playback, but it’s doing so cautiously. The reason for Netflix’s use of Silverlight in the first place is due to its need to provide DRM and ensure that its users aren’t copying its content or displaying it in places where they’re not authorized to. While HTML5 video playback has become widely adopted for user-generated content, standards around DRM have been slow to develop for HTML5 browsers. Netflix has been working to change that, and its first support of those HTML5-based video technology is finally out in the wild. MSE allows Netflix to “control how to download the audio/video content in our JavaScript code,” so that it can choose the best HTTP server for content delivery based on real-time information. Meanwhile, EME ensures the content is DRM-protected. And WebCrypto allows Netflix to “encrypt and decrypt communication between our JavaScript and the Netflix servers.” Together, they work to ensure smooth, secure playback in an HTML5 environment. That said, there’s still work to do. Netflix was able to work with Google to get its videos working on those Chromebooks, thanks to a proprietary Netflix-developed PPAPI (Pepper Plugin API) plug-in which takes the place of the WebCrypto extension. But once WebCrypto is available through the Chrome browser, Netflix should be able to extend its support of HTML5 to Windows and Mac PCs without the need for Silverlight. That’s good news, since Microsoft has announced that it will end support for Silverlight in the coming years. While Netflix and other video providers have until 2021 to move off Silverlight, the move to support HTML5 only makes sense. It’s the future, after all.
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First Google Glass Devices Are Coming Off The Production Line Now, Will Ship In Batches
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Google just notified everybody on the waiting list that it is “seeing the first few devices come off the production line right now.” Google says it wants to start shipping the devices as soon as possible and doesn’t want to wait until it has produced enough to fully satisfy demand. Because of this, Glass will ship out in batches to the 2,000 “Glass Explorers” who signed up at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco last year. As far as we can see, those users who signed up for Glass through the campaign have not received this email yet and won’t be in the first batch. Google says it will soon start notifying the first batch of users who will be eligible to purchase the Glass Explorer Edition for $1,500 by email. With the first devices ready to go, this means they could start shipping within the next few days. Earlier this month, Google already that it would start shipping Glass within the next few weeks. Google is clearly under some pressure to get Glass out to its developers before I/O 2013 kicks off on May 15th. Still, it is interesting to see that the company has decided to split the 2,000 devices up in batches. We don’t know much about how Google is building this first version of Glass, but we do know that Foxconn is The fact that it doesn’t have 2,000 devices ready to ship right away clearly points to the fact that these are still essentially public prototypes and that Google is still learning how to best produce them. You can see the full email below.
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Denver Post Highlights Social Media Coverage (And Storify) In Its Pulitzer Win
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and among the winners was for its coverage of the Aurora, Colo., shootings last summer – coverage in which Twitter and Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Storify) played a big role. At this point, it’s so obvious that it seems almost silly to note that social media plays a role in how reporters break stories. However, it also appears to be a bigger influence on the Pulitzers, specifically the breaking news category, following to emphasize the importance of real-time reporting (in other words, it’s not enough to save the news for the next day’s paper). And indeed, , The Tuscaloosa News, included screenshots of its Twitter feed in its submission, and the Pulitzer committee cited its use of “social media as well as traditional reporting.” The Post’s entry is even more extensive, highlighting 48 pages of Facebook updates and tweets from The Post account and staff from the first 24 hours of coverage. “The people who follow @denverpost and our reporters and editors knew what we knew — immediately,” The Post wrote. And the Pulitzer committee specifically cites the newspaper’s “comprehensive coverage … using journalistic tools, from Twitter and Facebook to video and written reports, both to capture a breaking story and provide context.” The social media package actually opens with a screenshot of The Post’s page, which from the paper and its staff. Storify co-founder Burt Herman told me that this is the first time his company has had a role in Pulitzer-winning coverage.
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 4 | 23 | null |
Vtok Aims To Bring Google Voice And Video Chat To iOS
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Anyone who has a Gmail or Google Apps account and a number of contacts using either service will probably be able to attest to the convenience of using the as a way to connect with friends and family. But while Android has most of the plugin’s features built-in, unfortunately there’s no good way to get the same native voice and video chat functionality on iOS devices. That’s a problem that a tiny startup called has sought to solve with an app called . The app goes beyond just enabling iOS users to send messages to their connections logged in to Gmail or Google Apps, and contains many of the features people love about the service. That means voice and video chat first and foremost, but it also includes a number of other features. The Vtok app has , but it recently launched its third version of the app, which includes a major upgrade to its user interface and support for a bunch of new features. In addition to the new UI, Vtok is adding picture messaging to the release, which is one feature Sky Mobius founder Manpreet Singh said users were asking for. Vtok also includes Google Voice integration, essentially enabling users to make and receive calls to other phone numbers directly within the app. In addition to messaging with those who have Google accounts, Vtok users will also be able to send and receive text messages through the app’s Google Voice integration. So far, the app has received about 4 million downloads since launch, which isn’t a ton of users. But the company is looking to add even more social and interactive ways to communicate with Google Apps and Gmail users.
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BitTorrent’s Surf Extension Now In Beta; Use Chrome Or Firefox Like A Desktop Client For Downloading
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
BitTorrent, the content sharing and distribution network with 170 million monthly active users and 85 petabytes of content, continues to roll out more tools for artists and consumers to turn to the service for all their music, video and needs. Today BitTorrent is turning its attention to the mechanics of downloading. It is putting its — which effectively turns the browser into a desktop client for downloading content — into beta and adding some new features, including and a new recommendation engine. BitTorrent is also taking the opportunity to tie Surf in closer with how it plans to monetize the service more in the future. Included in the recommendation engine will be the content bundles that BitTorrent creates with artists. When a user searches for and starts to download a particular piece of content, other relevant artists, who have placed their work into BitTorrent bundles, will start getting preferential position and appearing near the top of the recommended list. This is something that BitTorrent says will be a hallmark of one of their newest bundle launches, from the DJ Pretty Lights based around his set from this past weekend’s Coachella music festival. As with the book bundles featuring best-selling author Tim Ferriss, Pretty Lights is a safe-ish bet for BitTorrent to try out new things. The musician is one of the most-downloaded artists on the network, with over 5 million downloads in 2012. (By comparison, Death Grips got 34 million; Counting Crows (!) nearly 27 million and DJ Shadow 4.3 million.) BitTorrent, as it continues on the road of distributing legal content further and further from its roots and original reputation as a hotbed of illegal activity, has been putting quite a lot of effort into figuring out how best to package and deliver content bundles as the cornerstone of their business. They have offered advertisers, for example, the chance to include material of their own in the mix, in the case of a , while still keeping them free to artists to upload and free for users to download. A spokesperson for BitTorrent refers to the bundles as a “series of experiments,” with the goal being “a more sustainable distribution model for the Internet’s creators and fans.” And those experiments are set to continue. “There are a lot of possible revenue models for BitTorrent bundles, and we expect to share more on that at a later date,” the spokesperson says. The Surf plug-in, which also offers users a status window to monitor the progress of a download, first launched as a service in alpha in January, as a product out of BitTorrent Labs. As for other browsers beyond these two, “No timing announced today for the others, but we are looking at them,” said the spokesperson.
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TC Makers: A Return To The Textile Economy At Durham’s Spoonflower
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Making custom fabric has long been the domain of the big guys. Trying anything new, whether it was having a swatch of cool fabric made or printing a custom logo on some slip covers, has required minimum investments of a few thousand dollars and lots of waiting. solved that. Founded by entrepreneurs Gart Davis and Stephen Fraser, this Durham, NC company began shipping fabric out of an old sock factory in 2008. They essentially use inkjet printer technology to produce jobs as small as a $5 foot square of fabric or as big as dozens of yards. Material costs $15.75 per yard. Fraser got the idea for the company when his wife, Kim, was looking for custom curtains. Not content with run-of-the-mill choices, he realized that custom printing was possible but was prohibitively expensive. They began by buying one printer and running it in a dusty old warehouse where it clogged up and seized. They recently moved to a new space with well-ventilated print rooms and plenty of cutting space.
We spoke with Fraser about his factory where they run printers day and night to fill the hundreds of orders they get a day. They see about 30% international orders with the most orders coming from Australia. They’re also working on wallpaper, decals, and giftwrap for users. Each of the printers has its own connection to the main management system and can tell operators what jobs are printing and which machines are low on ink. The company recently installed Nexus 7 Android tablets on all of their machines as well for more detailed tracking. The company can print on multiple fabric types and certain printers work best with certain fabrics, something operators can note before they run certain jobs. Spoonflower is profitable and expanding without investment. It’s a great success story that came out of the heart of a former textile capital of the world and just goes to show you that the more things change, the more things stay the same.
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Dropbox Overhauls Chooser As Platform Adds “Tens of Thousands” Of Developers Each Week
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
, which is courting developers to make it easier for consumers to add and use files wherever they want, just overhauled its “Chooser” feature. , it was designed to make it easy for developers to build in an “attach from Dropbox feature” instead of having to create one from scratch. Adding Dropbox’s Chooser to an app involves a small JavaScript snippet and helps developers avoid an implementation of OAuth, or managing uploads and storage. With that and Dropbox’s growing reach, the company says it’s adding “tens of thousands” of developers every week and that “hundreds of thousands” of files are being shared using Chooser every week. There are “thousands” of applications in development, said Daniel Levine, who works platform at the YC-backed company. Today Dropbox is touching up Chooser by adding the ability to select multiple files at once and upload files directly from their computer through Chooser. So if you want to grab 10 photos at a time and upload them directly, this would be the way to do it. “No file in Dropbox has been created by Dropbox,” Levine said. “We want a way for users to get files everywhere they want to use them.” Files uploaded through Chooser will get automatically saved in a user’s Dropbox and will automatically be available in third-party web apps. Another small upgrade is the ability to drag-and-drop files. Dropbox’s platform efforts have resulted in a couple key partnerships. Just weeks ago, inside their Yahoo inboxes. Last fall, Facebook also said that its users would be able to using Dropbox’s cloud-based storage system.
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Google: Mobile Web Access Speeds Increased 30% Over The Last 12 Months
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 15 |
Mobile browsing got significantly faster over the last 12 months, according to , and the average page load times on mobile are now comparable to desktop page load times. On mobile, web pages now load about 30 percent faster than a year ago, but when it comes to desktops, Google only found some very minor speed-ups. That, however, is actually quite impressive, given that the size of the average web page in the last 12 months. The company argues that mobile speeds increased thanks to improved browsers, more powerful mobile devices and the fast rise of LTE/4G networks. A year ago, Google’s data still that mobile browsing was typically 1.5x slower than desktop browsing. The study found that users in Japan tend to see the fastest page load times, followed by Sweden, Poland and the United States. With regard to desktop browsing, Japan and Sweden are also in the lead, followed by Canada and the U.S.
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T-Mobile Crows About First Day iPhone 5 Sales, But The Carrier’s Future Is Still Unclear
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
T-Mobile finally began earlier today, and it seems as though all that pent-up consumer tension has resulted in some promising sales for the carrier. “Today has been gangbusters for T-Mobile,” CMO Mike Sievert noted to earlier today. Naturally, Sievert wouldn’t discuss just how many iPhones were moved during the course of the day, but he did point out that customers had lined up at “nearly all” of the carrier’s retail outlets. By now the iPhone 5 is a known quantity so most stores didn’t see the sort of crazy volume that usually goes with an iPhone going on sale — for what it’s worth, our intern Michael only noticed a handful of people waiting in line at a T-Mobile store near our office in New York’s Lower East Side — but it’s heartening to see those customers finally getting a chance to pick up an iPhone without having to switch providers. This moment has been a long time coming for T-Mobile. For months upon months the carrier bore the ignominious distinction of being the only major wireless provider in the U.S. without access to Apple’s tiny mobile juggernaut. The fact that even prepaid providers like Cricket and Virgin Mobile got to offer the iPhone ahead of T-Mobile was surely cause for some consternation, but the ability to stock iPhones and a dramatic shift in how it handles its rate plans could mean big things for T-Mobile in the months to come. At least that’s what the company is surely hoping, especially since it posted some disappointing figures in its most recent — total revenue dipped 5.2 percent year-over-year, while operating income sunk some 25 percent over the same amount of time. Those figures were just released in late February, so it’ll be a while yet before we see what sort of impact the iPhone actually has on T-Mobile’s fortunes. In the meantime, T-Mobile’s brass has no shortage of other things to concern themselves with. Take the possibility of not one, but two mergers for instance — T-Mo parent company Deutsche Telekom just recently to MetroPCS shareholders in a bid to make the notion of T-Mobile/MetroPCS tie-up more palatable, and revealed earlier today that Dish Network chairman casually brought up the idea of a with Deutsche Telekom.
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Here’s How To Get Facebook Home Running On Nearly Any Android Device
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
In case you happened to miss the furor earlier today (or yesterday, depending on your timezone), Facebook officially pushed its Facebook Home launcher for owners of a select few devices to muck around with. Early impressions seem to run the gamut, but unless you had the right hardware you were plumb out of luck if you wanted to take Home for a spin. Well, let me rephrase that: you plumb out of luck. worked up a dead-simple way to get Facebook Home up and running on just about any Android device. Long story short, he patched a version of the Home app to keep it from figuring out what device you’ve just loaded it onto and showing you the customary it’s-not-your-turn screen. All you really need to do is pop into your Android device’s settings and make sure it’s set to install applications from unknown sources (it’s in the “Security” section). From there, you just have to his patched versions of the Facebook Home app, as well as his patched Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps. Already have those latter two apps installed? You’ll have to uninstall both of them and load up O’Brien’s cooked versions in order for Home to work properly. That could pose an issue for some of the more curious among you — certain devices that have the Facebook app baked into it by the manufacturer (like the HTC One, for example) won’t play nice with this version of the Home app unless you root the device and remove the Facebook app yourself. Thankfully, rooting most popular devices is way easier than it used to be, but be sure to if you think you may take the plunge. To test out O’Brien’s handiwork, I tried installing Facebook Home on two devices that it wasn’t supposed to wind up on yet: Motorola’s Droid RAZR HD and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet. After an installation process that was completed in under two minutes for each device, Facebook Home was working mostly the way it should — it took a moment for messages to come through, but Facebook’s novel chatheads appeared on both devices, and I was easily able to see what my friends were doing on a Friday night while I stayed home to play with phones. That said, not every one of my friends’ news feed updates wound up in Home’s swipe-able stream, but that seems to be the case even if you’re running Home on supported hardware. The only major missing feature I noticed was that neither device would let me send SMS messages from the Messenger app, an omission that seemed to plague most people that tried O’Brien’s builds. Granted, that means you don’t get the Home experience, but all things considered this’ll provide you a solid peek before Facebook officially brings Home to all the other Android devices of the world. As for whether or not you’ll find it to be worth keeping — well, that’s another story altogether.
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Excerpts From Laurene Powell Jobs’ First Interview Since The Death Of Steve Jobs
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
In the first interview since her husband’s death, Laurene Powell Jobs dedicated her sizable platform to advancing immigration reform, while remaining notably tight-lipped about the private life of the late Steve Jobs. We’ve included highlights (with context) from her interview with host Brian Williams. BRIAN WILLIAMS: It’s another way of saying we’re left with a world of really cool stuff. I always wanted to know what it was like to be a Kennedy and drive to Kennedy Airport; and what it’s like to be you at a light and watch 10 people cross, and the only thing they have in common are white ear buds. What’s that like? BRIAN WILLIAMS: (LAUGHS) It’s pretty cool. I mean, that changed our world. Powell Jobs has been a vocal advocate of immigration reform, partnering with director Davis Guggenheim (Waiting For Superman, An Inconvenient Truth) on a documentary highlighting the struggles of talented, patriotic American youth who have been denied entrance into the military and college because they are undocumented immigrants. To add public pressure for Congress to pass a bill that provides a pathway to citizenship for children of immigrants who came to America illegally, the film (trailer below) is accompanied by a grassroots campaign and . [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUx62UBoOoU] BRIAN WILLIAMS: Climb into the minds of our viewers watching you guys on Friday night. So help us process this. How are we supposed to feel about their parents, who did do something bad? This is ill-gotten gains, because the first entry into this country was wrong. How are we supposed to feel about the bureaucracy we would now have to have just to hand Social Security numbers to our Marine, our civil engineer? BRIAN WILLIAMS:…what about the argument that not everyone will succeed and prosper? Some people are trying to game the system; some will be a constant draw, a drain on the American economy. This won’t be all net positive. Congress is to begin debate on a draft of comprehensive immigration reform, which will likely include provisions to allow undocumented youth a path to citizenship, around mid-April. [ ]
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Schmap Takes A Deeper Dive Into Twitter Audience Data With Demographics Pro
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
already through its product, but today it launched a new, upgraded service called — CEO Paul Hallett described the concept as “Nielsen for Twitter.” Nielsen does its own social media analysis, and it last fall, but that was focused on measuring the social media impact of TV shows. Demographics Pro is much broader than that, giving customers a detailed demographic breakdown of the people following a given account or commenting on a given hashtag. The best way to understand the data that Schmap is offering is to look at a few sample profiles. Hallett showed me the data for my own Twitter followers — apparently there are 12,032 real people following me, 62.7 percent of them are male, and their average income is $80,300 per year. They like to eat at In N Out, shop at Trader Joe’s, and are “dressed by” Nordstrom’s. The report says: Professionally, @anthonyha’s followers are employed as sales/marketing managers, senior managers, programmers, web developers and investors. The account has a particularly high concentration of entrepreneurs (within the top 10% of all Twitter accounts in this respect). This goes on for 27 pages, covering things like ethnicity, location, and interests. This is all algorithmically generated, Hallett told me, and it’s based less on what people say explicitly on Twitter (though that’s a component) and more on using “massive amounts of subtle correlations” that suggest implicit details about users’ demographics, interests and habits. For example, Hallett noted that if someone checks in frequently at Whole Foods, that tells you that they like to shop at Whole Foods, but it also suggests certain things about their income level and age — nothing definitive on its own, but something that can be combined with other indicators. You’re unlikely to be as fascinated by my Twitter following as I am, but Schmap is releasing a few profiles to the public to give people a taste of what it can do. Here’s a profile of users who . And here’s one for . You don’t have to look at profiles in isolation, either. You can build charts of comparing different groups, like those tweeting about . Apparently Schmap has been already made this data available to partners through its API. For example, it powers ‘s demographics data. It seems more intuitive build the standalone product before releasing an API, but Hallett said the team originally thought that its main business would be offering this data as a customizable, white label service via the API. Eventually he realized there might be a broader audience, and also an opportunity to deliver insight and context (such as the description I quoted above), rather than pure numbers. “What we realized was … a lot of what we see in Demographics Pro is based on not just the data but our deep understanding of what makes that data special,” he said. Hallett also emphasized that Demographics Pro doesn’t allow any direct targeting of audience groups. In other words, an advertiser couldn’t just say that they wanted to run a campaign that reached a certain age and income group. Instead, they might look at a certain topic and, based on the demographic data, decide whether they wanted to run advertisements against that topic. Customers can also combine demographic and sentiment analysis by importing their own Twitter lists (each list presumably representing a specific group from a sentiment analysis programming), Hallett said. Given its interest in audience analysis (signaled, among other things, by ), I wondered if this is something Twitter could build itself. “The short answer is, ‘Yes they could,'” Hallett said — but he added that Schmap’s technology was developed by a team of “hardcore mathematicians” for over two years. “It’s not the type of thing that they could just say, ‘We like that idea, let’s do it.'”
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Code In Twitter Music’s Placeholder Page Shows Web Interface, Track Purchasing, Charts And Service Integrations
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
Since we have nothing much to go on other than a for Twitter #music, some folks did within the on the , and certain features and integrations became apparent. We’ve reached out to Twitter to confirm what we’ve seen, and we’ll update our story once we hear back. Until then, here’s what can be taken from the styling code itself, picked up on by desginer : .iconmusic-player-source-rdio{background-position:-2801px -0px;height:19px;width:30px} .iconmusic-player-source-itunes{background-position:-2751px -0px;height:19px;width:30px} .iconmusic-player-source-soundcloud{background-position:- 2851px -0px;height:14px;width:92px} .iconmusic-player-source-vevo{background-position:-2963px -0px;height:9px;width:53px} .youtube-vid player{position:absolute;padding:10px;height:200px} While this is in no way a finalized “feature set” for the Twitter #Music app, it is more information than we had before and confirmation of what we’ve seen others testing out on Twitter, which are basically embedded music players in Twitter Cards. And of course, since this is a Twitter-owned page, so the code speaks for itself. Here’s a look at what the player will look like, again referenced in the CSS for the page: Here’s that on/off switch for playing tracks: These are some random graphical elements that point to what services will be included as well: In addition to all of this, it looks like Twitter will be bringing in bios of musicians, perhaps from their Twitter profiles. All of this integration makes complete sense and perhaps the selling of music will be controlled by the artist themselves. If you’re listening to a track that someone shared from Spotify and want to purchase it immediately, it doesn’t matter which service Twitter hooks into, there’s a good chance that you’re going to follow through with your purchase. This could mean big bucks for Twitter as it marches towards going public, perhaps as early as next year. This all gives us more of a sense of what the #Music service itself might look like, even though we have no screenshots to prove it. Much in the way that Twitter set up , Twitter is taking all of the data that it’s currently collecting and just showing it off in a different, more consumable way. If #Music becomes a full-featured service that artists can use to sell music, there’s a whole host of distribution metrics that Twitter is sitting on, which also means big bucks.
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This Week On The TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast: Facebook Phone (Again) And Bitcoin
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
This week on the we talk about the launch of Facebook Fone and my own horrible attempts at becoming a bitcoin billionaire. We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.
You can subscribe to the .
Intro Music by .
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Designer Nicholas Felton Leaves Facebook After Pioneering Timeline Overhaul
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
Nicholas Felton, who came to fame as quantified through data, is leaving Facebook almost two years after being acq-hired to work on projects like Timeline. His early work, which compiled data on things like all the songs he had listened to or everywhere he had been in a single year into a “Feltron Annual Report,” became the basis for Timeline. In a sense, all the profiles of Facebook’s roughly 1 billion users are all like living, breathing annual “Feltron” reports. On April 19, 2011 I walked into the Palo Alto Facebook office and began contributing to the timeline project. Two years, many late nights and a few launch celebrations later I will be moving on. The opportunity to help mold a service of such importance to so many people has been a high point in my professional career. I’m extremely proud of the projects I worked on, grateful to the teams that built them and confident in the products to come. Facebook and Felton and his co-founder Ryan Case moved from New York to Palo Alto. When Facebook’s , he said he was inspired by seeing Felton’s annual reports: “14 pages. One year. One book. It was hard to call it anything other than what it really was — art.” He went on, “We had one reaction: we have to try to hire this guy.” There’s no word on what Felton be working on next yet.
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Where In The World Are The 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers? Mostly In The West — But Pi Founders Want More Spread This Year
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
One to 1.2 million have shipped since the device’s launch just over a year ago but where in the world are they located? While it’s impossible to say exactly where* each Pi has ended up, the vast majority of the devices sold to-date have shipped to developed nations — including the U.S. and the U.K. But the potential of the Pi as a low cost learning-focused computing platform for developing countries remains very exciting. Last week the U.K.-based blogged about a volunteer group that had taken a suitcase-worth of Pis to a school in rural Cameroon where they are being used to . At $35 apiece, and even $25 for the Model A Pi, the Pi does a lot to break down the affordability barrier to computing — although it still requires additional peripherals (screen, keyboard, mouse) to turn it into a fully fledged computer terminal. Asked about the global sales distribution of the Pi, the Foundation provided TechCrunch with some “very rough”, internal estimates of Pi sales to developing/emerging nations — and the figures (listed below) suggest that the first million+ Pi sales have overwhelmingly been powered by wealthier nations. The most Pi-populous country on the developing/emerging nations list (India) can lay claim to roughly 0.5%-0.6% of total global Pi sales to-date, according to this data. While, collectively, these listed nations make up between only 1.4% and 1.7% of total global Pi shipments. So more than 98% of the Pi pie has been sold to the world’s wealthiest countries thus far. There are also, of course, scores of (apparently) Pi-less developing nations that do not make this list at all. One of which — the Kingdom of Bhutan — does actually have a princely one Pi sale to its name at present, according to the Foundation. “It’s a server for Khan Academy Lite in a school, whose 64GB SD card costs more than twice what the Pi cost,” the Foundation’s Liz Upton tells TechCrunch. “We’re working on getting more out there!” It’s likely that some of the Pis shipped to developed countries have found their way to less wealthy nations — via charities and other ‘suitcase schemes’ such as the Cameroon school project mentioned above which took out 30 Pis. Or via individual buyers seeking to avoid high import tariffs that can push up the price of bulk commercial imports (such as in Brazil). But even factoring in some extra spread, there’s no doubt the Pi is predominantly disrupting the living rooms and schools of the developed world. Which, it should be noted, was the — specifically they wanted to get more kids coding, following a national slump in interest in computer science education. But the Pi’s unexpected popularity has generated additional momentum for the project — and even grander geographical ambitions. “We’re weighted very strongly towards the developed world,” admits Pi founder Eben Upton, when he sends the data, but he says that this spread — or rather concentration — is something the Foundation is keen to work on. “A major challenge for us this year is to find ways of making Pi more available, and more appealing, in these [developing/emerging] markets,” he says. The Pi hardware seems to offer huge potential to the developing world — being cheaper than most mobile phones, let alone most smartphones — the as the likely first computing experience for connecting the “next billions” to the Internet. The Pi is also cheaper than another Linux-based low cost learning-focused computing project: the one laptop per child’s . And it has an advantage over general Linux PCs or Android tablets in being conceived and supported as first and foremost a learning environment, making it well-suited to push into schools. As for low cost PCs in general, the netbook category — still more expensive than Pi — is facing extinction by 2015, according to analyst IHS iSuppli, which has put out a forecast today predicting zero netbook shipments within two years, and just 3.97 million units globally this year. As the , it’s great to see the rise of a new computing device that, unlike the slick consumer tablets , is intended to encourage hacking, tinkering and learning about hardware and software, rather than passive consumption of prepackaged apps — in the . And a device which also, thanks to its tiny price-tag, has such huge disruptive potential. So here’s hoping a lot more of the next million+ Pis end up very far from home indeed. *At the time of writing, the , a to get Pi-owners to report the location of their Pi and plot the owner locations on a map, was not accessible. The map is used in the feature image at the top of this post, showing a snapshot of self-reported Pi distribution in May last year
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Dish Network Chairman Said To Be Seeking A Merger With T-Mobile USA
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
Say what you will about Dish Network, but the Colorado company’s brass has some moxie. The satellite media service provider has been trying for years now to link up with notable national wireless carrier to help operate a mobile service to sell alongside its current offerings, and according to a recent report from , Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen has approached T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom about the possibility of a Dish/T-Mobile merger. In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on Dish’s potential push into the wireless market, the saga has enough bumps and twists to rival a soap opera. This is far from the first time that representatives of the company have made these sorts of overtures towards major wireless carriers and their parent businesses. Just prior to the collapse of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger in December 2011, Dish Network CEO Joseph Clayton pointed out the possibility of striking in a bid to bolster Dish’s coffers and light up its own wireless service. “We want to use it to create a national wireless network, video, voice and data,” Clayton told at the time. “The voice part, we’ll need some help with.” In the event that the merger didn’t pan out (and we all know ), Clayton also said that Dish had considered a similar partnership with the folks at Sprint. Despite later rumors that AT&T was considering a Dish acquisition because it was just so hard up for spectrum access, Dish opted to make an unsolicited $5.15 billion offer to ailing network operator Clearwire… less than a month after Sprint announced that it would purchase the parts of Clearwire it didn’t already own for $2.2 billion. At this point the three parties are still trying to hash things out, but things don’t look too promising for Dish — Clearwire has accepted $160 million from Sprint over the last two months, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that Dish is officially out of the running. That said, Ergen doesn’t seemed gutted by the prospect of losing against Sprint for control of Clearwire. “If for some reason Clearwire is not an option for us because that’s just the way the circumstances go, then we think we have other alternatives,” he noted during Dish’s most recent earnings call. Chairman Ergen and CEO Clayton have done well to set up as many contingencies as they have these past few years, but Dish’s future in mobile is still unclear and it could be months before there’s any more progress to announce.
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Ask A VC: Javelin Venture Partners’ Noah Doyle On The Next Innovations In Mapping And More
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
In this week’s Ask A VC show, Javelin Venture Partners’ Managing Director sat down to talk with us about why he started a venture firm, where the next innovations in mapping are coming from and more. Doyle has extensive experience in the online mapping world—he directed the enterprise product line for Google’s geospatial products, including Google Earth and Google Maps. Prior to Google, Noah managed the Marketing Strategy and Corporate Development functions at Keyhole, a company that created the first Web-hosted digital earth model and was acquired by Google in 2004. Doyle explains to us that some of the new technologies he’s excited about include layering social data across maps. Check out the video above for more!
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Hey, Hardware Makers: No One In The World Wants Videos That Auto-Pause When We Look Away
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
This week, that Microsoft is purportedly working on a feature for the next Xbox that can automatically pause videos when it detects that your eyes are no longer on the screen. Just weeks ago, Samsung for the Galaxy S4. No. No, No, No, No. No one in the world wants this. Okay, fine. people want this. Advertisers are probably going nuts for it. The ability to make sure people are actually mid-show ads instead of wandering into the kitchen to heat up a Hot Pocket? That’s like, yacht money, Broseph Gordon Levitt. The day my Xbox pauses an ad because I’m not paying attention, however, is the day I shed a single tear, reminisce on all the good times shared with the ol’ Chief, then throw my Xbox in the trash. Beyond that use case, this seems like a brilliant idea by someone who has how people watch TV. Think about it. When you’re watching TV, how much TV do you actually ? There are maybe three types of video that people actively give their full focus: new episodes of TV shows they love, movies that they’ve been dying to see, and porn. The rest of the time — and that’s a huge, huge chunk of the time — video watching becomes a rather passive experience. It’s something just above background noise. It’s an episode of Arrested Development you’ve seen a dozen times. It’s something you give brief bouts of attention whenever you feel like looking up from your laptop, or your iPad. “But Greg! It’s almost certainly going to be an optional feature!” Doesn’t matter. Something being optional doesn’t make it any less stupid. A bad optional feature still clutters up the UI. A bad optional feature still takes away developer hours from things that deserve the attention. A bad optional feature still gives the user a bad experience when they forget to turn it back off and it bugs out. And you just it’s going to bug out. Look — I love, love, my Xbox. I’ve run three of them into the ground. It gets more usage than pretty much any other device in my house (save my phone.) I show off the Kinect’s crazy voodoo to just about everyone that stops by — but I’m also the first to admit that the Kinect often just does whatever the hell it wants. Once or twice a week, my Kinect mistakes something in a video’s audio as a voice command (that or I’ve got a total wanker of a ghost who occasionally whispers ‘Xbox, Stop!’ into the mic.) Once or twice a day, my Kinect thinks that I’ve waved my hands to bring up the gestural interface when I’m actually laying perfectly still. A dozen times a day, the Kinect just sits back and laughs as I actually shout voice commands at it. Hands-on demos from the launch of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 suggest that their Smart Pause feature . For something like this to even be useful, it needs to work . Zero inadvertently paused videos when you’re paying attention, and zero skipped pauses when you aren’t. That’s not likely to happen. None of this is to say that the concept of detecting focused eyes is totally useless. They could detect when I’m not looking and quietly place a marker that appears on the video’s timeline, letting me know how far I need to rewind (or giving me some sort of quick jump mechanism) . would be rad. Just don’t touch my damned pause button.
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Hackers Point Large Botnet At WordPress Sites To Steal Admin Passwords And Gain Server Access
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
If you’re running a WordPress site, now would be a good time to ensure you are using very strong passwords and to your username is not “admin.” According to reports from and , there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force that aim to find the password for the ‘admin’ account that every WordPress site sets up by default. HostGator’s analysis found that this is a well-organized and very distributed attack. The company believes that about 90,000 IP addresses are currently involved. CloudFlare, its founder and CEO Matthew Prince told me earlier today, thinks the hackers control about 100,000 bots. As for the scope of the attack, Prince says that CloudFlare saw attacks on virtually every WordPress site on its network. If somebody guesses your WordPress password, that’s obviously a big problem, but attacks like this then open up ways for the hackers to take over your server – and that’s what whoever is behind this attack is clearly after. The CloudFlare team that the attacker is currently using a network of relatively low-powered home PCs, but the aim is “to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack.” Home PCs can be the staging ground for a large denial-of-service attack, but servers have access to far more bandwidth and can hence push out far larger amounts of traffic. This currently attack is similar to an that was also aimed at WordPress sites. That attack, however, was looking for outdated versions of , a popular PHP-based image resizer that is often used as the default by many WordPress templates. Both CloudFlare and HostGator, as well as a number of other hosting providers, have taken measures to protect their customers. Besides choosing a – which is always a good idea – you can also install a of that limit the number of login attempts from the same IP address or network to put a stop to these brute-force attacks (though as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg notes in a blog post , changing your ‘admin’ username to something ab it more obscure may be your best defense given that the hackers do have 90,000 IPs at their disposal). If your site is hosted on WordPress.com, you can also turn on to add an extra layer of security.
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Y Combinator Grad ReelSurfer Gets A Makeover, Now Lets You Clip & Share Any ESPN Or New York Times Video
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
Y Combinator grad is an instant video editor, born out of its founders frustration of trying to find clips, quotes and scenes from their favorite movies on YouTube and other video sites. The process is probably familiar to you: Search for clip, don’t find it; if you do find it, it’s part of a larger clip, so you have to download, convert and clip the video yourself. So, ReelSurfer developed the tools to let you clip any video from any website and share it with your “homies” and “homedawgs” over the Facebooks, Twitters and more. Or at least that’s the eventual goal. In truth, ReelSurfer’s design has been less-than-perfect and it hasn’t really allowed you to clip video. Yes, YouTube has a lot of videos. Like a lot. But that’s not the only media player out there. Today, ReelSurfer has officially a redesigned interface, which looks a whole helluva lot better and makes it easier to navigate and makes its URL search box even more prominent — as it should be. The new interface still enables users to make video mashups or reels of multiple videos and link back to the source so that viewers can check out the full clip if they so choose. However, the new interface does allow for improved search and video discovery, so that users have a better chance to see if the clip they want to make has already been clippity-clipped by someone else. Time saving, my friends, time saving. Yet, the biggest addition would have to be that ReelSurfer the now allows users to use its to clip videos from both Brightcove and Ooyala, in addition to YouTube and Vimeo. Who cares? Well, that means you can now clip and share videos from ESPN (which uses ) and The New York Times, which uses BrightCove. [You can see the full list of supported sites/media .] Since it’s been a little while since we’ve heard anything from ReelSurfer, the startup also pulled back the curtain a little bit to give some examples of who is using its service and how. TedXTeen, PopSugar are using it to create and share viral, social media-friendly clips, along with The Counting Crows(!) and Reuters. More on the .
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Gillmor Gang Live 04.12.13 (TCTV)
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
– Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor.
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Bake Sale 2.0: PledgeCents Launches A Crowdfunding Platform To Help Underfunded Schools Raise Money
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
With the passage of the JOBS Act, the Crowdfunding Era began and since then these fund-raising platforms have been sprouting in every vertical — even education. Just two weeks ago, we , which “gives alumni a platform by which they can invest in innovative projects created by students at their alma mater.” Today, we have another entry into the education crowdfunding set — Houston-based startup, . But, rather than going after higher education, PledgeCents is launching today to help K-12, public schools raise the funding they need to survive as federal and state funding continue to dry up. To do this, the startup wants to connect investors and corporations with schools that have exhausted traditional fundraising channels and are looking for alternative ways to offset funding reductions. The idea, PledgeCents co-founder Ricky Johnson said, is to allow public schools to keep the programs, supplies and services they need to maintain educational standards for their students amidst a slow economic recovery (and the thing that no one talks about in polite company in education, the unsustainable spending). So, PledgeCents allows any K-12 school with funding needs (so, every school in America) to raise funding — for any type of project, resource or program. In canvassing schools to find out what their most pressing needs are, they naturally found that schools have a variety of micro-projects they’re interested in funding, particularly equipment, field trips, school security and supplies for science labs, art and theater. The platform enables teachers to create projects, while administrators can oversee the process to ensure the funds are used in appropriate ways, and PledgeCents even sends out bracelets that students can wear (in school colors) to help promote the campaigns among their friends. The platform will also dole out rewards to the school campaigns that raise the most funds. But, perhaps the biggest difference from other crowdfunding sites? The funds raised on the platform will be distributed to schools regardless of whether they hit their fundraising targets. In terms of differentiation from other fundraising startups out there like AlumniFunder, , or (and even or Crowdtilt) is that they tend to focus on alumni or raising funds for supplies, the co-founder says. Instead, PledgeCents wants to go broader to include supplies, teacher salaries and general education-related activities like field trips and band equipment. “School funding in Texas has taken a huge hit of late so my son’s high school is actually in the process of setting up a PledgeCents project to fund the salary of one of the marching band’s instructors,” Austin-based brand strategy consultant Dave Manzer tells us. Plus, in light of AlumniFunder and EverTrue’s focus on fundraising at colleges and universities, PledgeCents is one of a very small number of crowdfunding platforms that exclusively serves K-12 education — in a broad way. However, like many others, posting a fundraising campaign is free for schools and anyone can contribute (after signing up for an account). Users will also be able to search for campaigns by particular criteria, like school category, state, region or type of school (public/private/charter, etc.) Additionally, those who sign up for accounts will be able to select preferences and receive email alerts when projects matching their criteria are added to the site. “The slow economic recovery continues to impact school funding across the United States,” Johnson concludes, “and many educators are waking to the realization that they have to find alternative funding for at-risk programs and services.” PledgeCents gives teachers the platform to do that, because, hey, every penny counts. The one strike against PledgeCents? Selection. Only six campaigns are currently live. But, the other big check in the “plus” column is that, like , the startup is now offering tax-deductible donations, so that parents, friends (really, anyone) can donate to school projects they want to see funded. PledgeCents will collect the nonprofit tax I.D. info from public schools or 501(c)3 information from charters, and then that will be distributed to the investors in the appropriate cause. Pretty cool. For more, find
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Travis Kalanick Says ‘It Doesn’t Bother Me’ If Ridesharing Takes Customers From Uber’s Other Services
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 4 | 12 |
CEO Travis Kalanick just wrapped up a press phone call where he discussed that the company released earlier this morning. The apper stated that Uber would be rolling out ridesharing services in cities where it had received “tacit approval” in the sense that regulators didn’t crack down on other services. To kick things off, Kalanick noted that ridesharing is kind of a loose term, so he specified that he means “non-licensed drivers who are providing transportation services for compensation.” He said Uber has been staying away from that business, because of the “extreme regulatory risk”: “Believe it or not, that was at a level that we were just not comfortable with.” (The “believe or not” refers to the fact that Uber has certainly seemed willing to fight other regulatory battles.) However, in the past year Uber has gotten approval from California regulators to offer ridesharing, and Kalanick said that as Lyft and SideCar rolled out, they’ve seen what is “essentially a non-enforcement policy” in some cities. So Uber is going to follow their lead. Specifically, Kalanick said that if a ridesharing service launches somewhere and regulators don’t take action within 30 days, Uber is going to take it as a sign of approval. He argued that if regulators are going to take action, it usually happens pretty quickly, . Kalanick was also asked about what percentage ridesharing will be of Uber’s business in any given city, and whether he expects there to be “substitution” as users choose this option instead of Uber’s more expensive services. He answered that the usage will probably differ from city to city, but that “of course” there will be some substitution. People are going to look for more affordable options as they use Uber more often and as the product spreads. “It doesn’t bother me in the least,” he said. “If a customer wants a product that’s cheaper, that … they feel delivers more value per dollar, that means we just did a better job for that customer.” Earlier today, TechCrunch’s Ryan Lawler . Kalanick answered that it’s better for partners because it means consumers aren’t going elsewhere.
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