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Tapgram Aims To Make Messaging Easier For People Who Can’t Easily Communicate
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
There were plenty of promising startups showing off at Disrupt NY 2013’s Startup Alley (one of them even became as an audience choice), but none managed to yank on the ol’ heartstrings quite as much . Long story short, Tapgram is a social service that aims to dramatically simplify the process of communicating for people who have trouble doing it otherwise. Rather than force people to peck out responses, Tapgram lets them respond by tapping large, simple icons that signify moods — the yawning face means you’re feeling a bit sleepy, and and you can probably guess what the big purple frowny face signifies. Nestled below that grid of faces are four severity modifiers so you can temper or emphasize the message you’re trying to send. After all, there’s a considerable difference between feeling a little groovy and extremely groovy (and before you ask, those are indeed real options). Switching over to the location menu lets those users tap even more big bright icons to share places they’ve gone to, are thinking about going to, or want to go to. From there, those messages get pushed into a stream of activity for friends and loved ones to keep track of, and a quick change in the settings automatically pushes those messages to connected Facebook newsfeed. But why take such a simplistic approach to communication? Well, for some people, it’s much easier than the alternative. That’s the case for Tapgram creator Ruble’s mother. After having a stroke she has been has dealing with a condition called aphasia that prevents her from processing language as the rest of do, which makes more traditional modes of communication woefully complex. His name could sound familiar if you’ve been keeping tabs on thoughtful accessibility hacks — Ruble was also responsible for that used Microsoft’s gesture-tracking camera to help his mother send emails, a hack that ultimately led to Tapgram’s creation. It’s simple, sure, but Ruble says it’s been very effective not only for people dealing with aphasia. So far, the service has been available as a public beta for the past four months or so and counts people with autism and those coping with traumatic brain injuries among its hundreds of users. As you’d expect from a beta service it’s all still a little rough around the edges, but it works mostly as intended and Ruble pointed to the possibility of native apps down the road to help make the experience of communicating via Tapgram a little smoother. If nothing else, it’s already helping some people (and the folks that care about them) communicate easier, and that’s worthy of some praise in my book. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPid_cnV1DM&w=640&h=360]
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Google’s Cloud Is Eating Apple’s Lunch
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 5 | 4 |
A new front has opened in the smartphone war, and for the first time in many years, Apple is both outnumbered and outgunned. I’m not talking about the phones themselves. iOS is still better than Android, although the gap has narrowed. The next iPhone will doubtless be the best phone in the world when it’s released, as ever. It won’t be as customizable – no Swype, no Facebook Home – but those remain relatively minor inferiorities. The new battlefront is different. The new battlefront is the cloud: Google Maps vs. Apple Maps, Siri vs. Google voice search, iCloud vs. Dropbox et al, and Google Now vs…well, nothing at all, yet. This is a big deal. As we grow accustomed to an always-online world of ubiquitous computing, your phone becomes less a device in and of itself and more a gateway to its cloud services. And it’s very hard to argue that Apple is anything but the serious underdog here. You know they have a problem when even die-hard Apple supporter John Gruber is to pieces like “ ,” which is replete with quotes like “If they couldn’t get iCloud working, who can?” … “It just doesn’t work” … “Many of these issues take hours to resolve and some can permanently corrupt your account” … “A developer’s worst nightmare.” Remember when Siri was introduced, and people were pronouncing it a serious threat to Google Search itself? , . Haven’t heard that one in a while, have you? And not without reason; Siri seems to have stagnated, while over in Mountain View, Google is doing some with many-layered neural networks — and superior voice search is just one of the applications. Can Apple match that? Who knows — but it’s safe to say that this kind of thing, cutting-edge technology beyond great hardware and superb design, isn’t their core strength. It’s Google’s. As is shown by Google Now, which is inexplicably treated as nothing more than Google’s answer to Siri by hordes of writers who apparently can’t think beyond simple dichotomies. It’s much more than that; until Siri tells you what you should do , there’s really no comparison. Meanwhile, Google Now has been , continuing Google’s to dominate the iPhone app space. (They’ve been quite successful; the two iOS apps are YouTube and Google Maps.) As TC’s Semil Shah has , thanks to Apple’s iOS restrictions, no third party could build a true iOS competitor to Google Now on Android. Only Apple itself has that power. But will they succeed? And by the time they do, will Google have outstripped them again? Again, nobody has a crystal ball; but Google has a long history of building superb, scalable, reliable, (mostly) developer-friendly, and technically groundbreaking web services. Apple…does not. That said, a bet against them is by no means a guaranteed win. Consider Apple Maps, which has taken great strides since its initial stumbles. And as my friend Lunatic (no, really) pointed out while debating with me on Twitter, it’s a bit rich to call Apple overmatched while iOS’s share of the American smartphone market still seems to be increasing faster than Android’s, and At least it's actual data, rather than anecdotes. & more adept at skating to where the puck is going to be: Apple/Google? Arguable. — Lun Esex (@LunaticSX) But at the very least, on this new cloud-services battlefront, Apple is in the unfamiliar position of underachieving underdog up against the mighty Google war machine. With Google I/O and Apple WWDC both only weeks away, we can expect to find out soon whether either has a new secret weapon. Let’s hope they both do, because the great thing about this war is that when these two giants do battle, everyone else usually wins. Clouds over SoMa, by yours truly, on .
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Amazon Launches Appstore and Developer Web Site In China
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
Amazon quietly launched its in a surprise move that paves the way for the rollout of Kindle devices in that country. At the same time, Amazon also debuted its (link via Google Translate), promising that they will soon have access to customers in 200 countries. A (link via Google Translate) outlined why the Amazon Appstore might be an attractive alternative to Google Play for Chinese developers. Reasons include: easier access (Google Play isn’t widely available in China and most developers sell through third-party app stores); a more open and “friendly” environment (the article as an example of problems with Google Play’s TOS); a worldwide customer base; and an attractive revenue sharing model. China had not been included in the list of 200 countries, including Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, that it would bring the Appstore to. In addition to the Kindle reading app and e-books, messaging apps are currently available for download, as well as popular games like Angry Birds and Temple Run. Amazon says it will offer popular games and apps from Chinese developers like Tencent and Sina. The launch of the Amazon Appstore in China comes less than a month after the company . The , at the same time the Kindle iPhone and iPad apps became available to download for users in that country. There have been years of speculation that Amazon will finally release Kindle hardware in China, but the launch of its Amazon Appstore there is the most concrete step so far. Another clue is the possibility that a will begin shipping this year. The low price point would help the device compete in China, where tablets are often sold for less than $100.
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Gillmor Gang: Glass Onion
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 5 | 4 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — well, we talked Google Glass. @scobleizer has certainly made the case for the life-altering shower-taking scenarios, but what the Gang got into was what happens next. Do we wait for the actual launch early next year, or is the die already cast with this alpha rollout? One thing for sure: there’s plenty to unravel in this second Glass hour in a row. What lurks beneath the actual hardware and the choices Google has made in terms of enhanced reality – no, and an atomization of some key aspects of the phone – yes, is the stark choice the search company must make in playing open with Android. @scobleizer reports switching about 30% of his notifications and alerts from iOS to Android, understandable as the Glass interface is the first point of contact for audio chimes and call announcements but not the visual. Glass is in reality more of an audio device with some visual renderings and recorders. But will the price point Scoble suggests they need to meet — $200 — really be reachable to them unless they can get mass data to subsidize some significant portion of the hardware? More likely, they will open the hardware to iOS much like they just did with Google Now (part of the Search app) and make their stand with turn by turn against Siri. Both Google and Apple will face an increasingly sophisticated customer base that can see just how far voice and facial recognition can really go without mass data from across what used to be called the Web. In a way, Glass is Google’s response to the iPad Mini, which has rolled up an enormous part of the existing tablet market by cannibalizing its big tablet and adding a large percentage of the 7-inch minis. At several Gartner conferences this week, the number of Minis was reminiscent of what happened when the iPad first broke through on planes. In one fell swoop, Apple captured the lion’s share of the unique gestures made possible by the Mini form factor, which makes it easy to do 90% of both enterprise and social computing in conjunction with the phone. Glass does the same thing for Android, creating a pool of unique gestures that can be expanded upon with advanced services that connect Glasses together. The common wisdom is that Google doesn’t get social, but Glass is an opportunity for them to get out front with the phone, just as Apple has with the Mini. If Google doesn’t interoperate with the Mini, it will provide an opening for Apple and the nextgen iPhone. More importantly, Glass has to reach the broad market as Search, Gmail, Apps, and Maps have done to feed the data monster it sells off as realtime advertising. Apple’s common wisdom Achilles Heel, not getting the Web and massive Cloud scale, means they will continue to open their platform to Google to maintain market while exploiting their lead in media integration. They lose data they can’t yet handle, but maintain their hold on developer and media revenue and buy much needed time. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Grow First, Ads Later: Facebook’s Strategy For Desktop, Mobile, And Now Instagram
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
When you’re spreading like wildfire, why douse the flames to make a few bucks? Facebook’s willingness to wait on advertising helped its site and mobile apps grow massive, and now it’s applying the same strategy to Instagram. Wall Street is clamoring for Facebook to earn back the $700+ million it spent buying the photo app, but Mark Zuckerberg refuses to trade tomorrow’s dollars for today’s dimes. It took Facebook years to get serious about ads. That’s because it was serious about growth and the user experience from day one. Facebook’s first ads were actually called “flyers” and promoted on-campus events. They fit right in rather than detracting from the value of the social network. When Facebook started selling to more traditional advertisers, the units it offered were tiny, and relegated to the sidebar so organic content could stay front and center. Compared to the loud flash banners and pop-ups found elsewhere, Facebook seemed like a sanctuary. The strategy helped it quickly grow to hundreds of millions of users. Facebook launched its iPhone app in July 2008. For over three years, not a single ad was shown. The world was starting to go mobile, and Facebook wanted to welcome it with open arms, not greed. In 2010 and 2011, Facebook’s smartphone apps were growing at a stunning pace to become the most popular things on mobile. Clogging them with ads could have stunted growth when it had the most momentum. By the end of 2011, both Facebook for iOS and Android had , and almost twice as many monthly users. There was no guilt in telling a friend to go download the apps. They weren’t necessarily the fastest thanks to their reliance on HTML5, but they didn’t waste limited real estate on squeezing money out of advertisers. It wasn’t until early 2012 that Facebook finally announced it would start showing ads on mobile and the desktop news feed. By then an overwhelming percentage of people in the developed world were already using its site and smartphone apps. User growth in its most important markets like the US, UK, and Canada had slowed to a trickle. Growth was predominantly coming from the developing world where people use Facebook’s feature phone apps. When it finally started showing ads on the web feed, iOS, and Android, Facebook had a lot less to lose. It didn’t need its apps to be as viral and add as many users in the first-world any more. It just needed to make sure not to drive people from them. Ads started appearing, slowly at first as Facebook gauged reactions, and faster as it saw people weren’t browsing the feed significantly less because there were a few ads in the middle. Long story long, the strategy has worked. Facebook could surely have an extra billion in the bank if it monetized earlier. But it might have sacrificed millions of users and positive connotation to get that money. Still, it’s been a bit of a surprise that a year after acquiring Instagram, Facebook said on this week’s earnings call that there’s on the photo app. That’s not for lack of demand, Zuckerberg said: “Instagram, they’re really doing well and growing really quickly, and I think that that is the right focus for them. And they have this opportunity to capture and basically build off this huge community and I think that that should be 100% of the focus right now. I am really optimistic about the business opportunity there, too. You already have a lot of brand from folks who advertise with Facebook putting content into Instagram, getting huge engagement rates. So people are coming to us and asking for ways to make that even richer and it’s something that we’re thinking about. But right now, I think that – I’m just really proud of the team and excited about how quickly they’re growing. They’re growing a lot faster now and were faster to get to 100 million than Facebook even.” Perhaps when Facebook’s given Instagram enough time to grow, and it figures out how it wants to the advertising experience to work, we’ll see it monetize the acquisition. It has plenty of options for how. Instagram could show glossy photo brand ads in the feed, but might try to avoid forcing users to click out to a browser to follow the ads. That’s why I’d expect Instagram to start with ads that help businesses get more followers and keep users bouncing around the app. Businesses might pay to get the photos they post to their accounts showed to people who don’t currently follow them. A social version of these follow ads might target friends of or people who follow people who follow a brand. Yes, that’s a mouthful. Another option would be allowing brands to amplify the reach of user posts that tag them using . If I tagged Nike in a photo of my shoes, Nike might pay to show that post at the top of my friends’ feeds or show it again a week after I originally posted it in hopes of attracting more followers. Instagram could also try Suggested Accounts that ask people to follow certain brands similar to Twitter’s Promoted Accounts ad unit. which let developers pay to get their apps shown in the feed and downloaded have become Facebook’s new darling, so they could make their way to Instagram too. Facebook and Instagram can afford this growth > ads strategy because its thinking long-term. Not long-term like Google with its moonshots, but Facebook is confident they’ll be dominant in their fields for at least a few years. Their large userbases and network effects luckily afford them a bit of a moat. It’s still a gamble, though. There’s always the risk that by the time Instagram starts advertising, something new in the media capture space will be stealing the attention of its users. It’s a tightrope to walk, but one that leads to a healthy community, quality experience, and a sustainable business model.
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Everlane CEO Michael Preysman On Keeping An Edge Amidst The Copycats [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
has built a really that uses technology to provide luxury quality apparel at much lower prices than traditional high-end designer brands. But with that success has also come copycats — particularly abroad, where Everlane has not yet expanded its business (at the moment the company is operating only in the .) So when we had the chance to talk to Everlane founder and CEO backstage at this past week, we asked him how he plans to keep an edge as other companies look to find success with the same business model. Our exchange on this topic begins at 4:30 in the video embedded below this post, and Preysman has some strong opinions on the subject, saying: “The problem with copycats is that honestly, they have no soul. It sounds silly to say that, but when you don’t have soul and you don’t have a reason for why you’re doing the things you’re doing, you’re always one step behind, and you never really connect with the consumer. And one thing we talked about on the is people are looking for a connection with the brand, and they’re looking for trust. There’s a brand out there in Turkey that which is actually, I think ‘mave’ must mean ‘ever’ in Turkish, and it’s literally a complete replica of our site. I mean, the code, everything — they stripped out all the front end code. But the problem is they’re always going to be one step behind, and they don’t actually have the reason for being that we have. So, I don’t know that we worry so much about competitors. Because at the end of the day, I think our biggest competitor is ourselves.” We also talked about why Everlane is so focused on bringing transparency to the clothing production process, how stripping out the third-party retail part of the supply chain has saved the company so much money, what’s next on the horizon for Everlane, and more. Check it all out in the video embedded below.
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Chris Dixon On How Tech Can Turn NYC Into A Town That Makes, Not Takes [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
So in our chat backstage, Dixon talked a bit more about how he sees the tech industry impacting the “company town” feeling of Wall Street dominating New York — and how tech is shifting the energy of the city back from a place that takes things, to a place that makes things. We also talked about Andreessen Horowitz is investing beyond software and into the hardware space, Dixon’s very popular , and more. Check it all out in the video above.
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Saturday Night Live Takes On Google Glass
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
Aaaand the Google Glass jokes have officially gone mainstream. Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update — the bit that long ago became the best reason to tune into SNL — took on Glass last night… and, well, they kind of nailed it. Starring the legendary Fred Armisen* as “Tech Correspondent” Randall Meeks, the skit tears into Glass for just about everything you’d expect. The cold, distant stare of a distracted Glass user? Yep. The sometimes whonky voice commands? Yep. Surprise porn? Of course. Yeah, yeah — there’s an inaccuracy or two that probably has Glass devotees ’round the world spittin’ vitriol onto every forum within reach. But all in all, the writers did a pretty good job of making me laugh at myself. I’ve embedded NBC’s version of the clip below. Alas, as licensing restrictions continue to ignore how the Internet actually works, this player probably won’t work outside of the US. I’d link directly to a YouTube version, but that’d just get it taken down in a heartbeat — so for now, our international friends will have to [hulu id=pevgubwnd_vyknilk37i9g width=512] [*Fun fact: of all the currently active members of the cast, Fred Armisen is the second-longest tenured cast member. In fact, he’s second only to his co-star in this skit, Seth Meyers.]
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On Rekindling A Sense Of Mystery
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
A little disconnection goes a long way. In the tangled web of digital social networks that we weave one thing is increasingly absent: a sense of mystery. We are so wrapped up in our digital social graphs there’s rarely room for gaps. Our networks offer the promise of being entangled with ever more connections — reaching out to grasp the hands of friends’ friends (and so on to the edge of the digital universe) – reminding us how few degrees of separation there are between citizens of the wired world. Networks turn strangers into quasi-acquaintances before we’ve ever met them IRL. Based on the digital recreations our networks generate, we may decide we never need to meet such and such a person. A social snub online doesn’t have to involve any socialising at all. Add in the various knowledge graphs we constantly tap into — Internet search , networked mobile apps & services, the low and high level chatter of our connections as we track and trace their activity online – from what they watch and listen to, to who they talk to, where they go, what they see — and the sum of our networked knowledge starts to feel all seeing, all knowing. Context is being pushed at us faster than we can escape it. Ignoring the minority of intentionally gated personal data, our digital networks are ripping off the masks of the many, leaving only the Anonymous few fighting for the right to remain unknown. We triage email, triangulate individuals. Sidestepping the issue of privacy – which is a whole other (highly polarised) debate — where’s the fun in knowing everything before truly knowing anything? More importantly, what happens when we’re not engaging our creative faculties half so much because the mind isn’t being asked to fill in all those blanks? The ellipses are being overwritten. It’s no longer about making mental leaps to join dots. The challenge now is about piecing together the endless jumble of data that’s being pushed at us. Instead of dreamers, we’re policemen sifting through a bottomless box of evidence. Of course it’s churlish to complain about the interconnectedness afforded by networks and digital devices. Go back a handful of generations and the entire plot of a novel could hinge on whether someone received a paper letter slipped under a door at the right moment in time. That plot is no longer possible for those of us who have chosen to be wired in. We don’t have to wait to get news. We’re unlikely to miss a message once it’s fired at us from the myriad channels now open for communication unless we’re deliberately trying to. Our problem is filtering the signals we’re receiving. Tuning out the noise so we can hear the stuff that’s relevant, important, valuable. That’s the quotidian challenge. The philosophical and emotional challenge is that we’ve replaced life’s little mysteries with a barrage of sound and fury. That may not sound very important – and perhaps it’s not. But in my view it does leave a gap that developers could think about tapping into. What’s mystery for? It fires the imagination, as well as working our logical, critical, analytical faculties (which are still getting a good workout online). If boredom is good for creativity – and there’s been lots written on the need to give the mind downtime to come up with great ideas — it follows that mystery oils the wheels of imagination. An app I wrote about in March does just this: is an anti-social photo sharing app. You take a photo and share it to a random stranger. It doesn’t tell you who gets it. In return you get a photo back – shared by another random stranger, with nothing to tell you who sent it beyond a general location which is revealed when you tap on the photo to turn it over. There are no social networking tie-ins. You can’t post the photo straight to Facebook or Twitter. It’s deliberately disconnected. Rando offers little glimpses into other worlds. Stripped of almost all their context, they are fascinatingly rich, replete with mystery – in a way that the photos your friends post to Facebook can never be. That’s not to say those photos don’t have any value or aren’t important — they do, and they are. But they just engage a different part of our minds. In the same way that falling without distraction into a good book entices the mind’s creative faculties – really invites us to fall down our own mental rabbit hole like Alice tumbling into Wonderland — Rando’s randomness is a pocket-lighter for the imagination. I find myself continually firing it up, just to see what it sparks. And looking back through the photos I’ve received, trying to imagine a context for them, trying to figure out who sent that image, and why, and what they were trying to say. The creativity flows both ways too. Creating a photo to send in this app means gifting a small piece of your world to a stranger. And when you start to see your world through the eyes of an unknown person, you see details afresh. Find mystery in dusty, overlooked corners. Kindle things and thoughts laid dormant. A little disconnection goes a long way. Think on it. [Original Alice in Wonderland illustration by , now in the ]
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6 Experts on Speeding Up Data
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Alex Williams
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
Speed. That’s what it’s all about these days. The problem: it’s still more effective to use FedEx than trying to squeeze a data load across a network. It’s an absurd reality when it requires a plane to move data from one place to another. It’s not necessary to move terabytes of data all day, all night. Moving hard drives across the continent for a feature film is different from pulling in data to analyze and then presenting in an application. But the loads will have to get heavier with the connectivity of smartphones, the invisible geofence around your house, 3-D printers and the endless variety of data objects available to aggregate and analyze. In applications, the complexity of moving data is requiring new ways to use Flash and RAM. Hard drives are outdated, their mechanical parts not capable of keeping up with the volume and velocity of data that companies are analyzing. New databases are emerging. Startups and large companies like SAP are developing in-memory databases. NoSQL databases have become the darlings of the developer community. The need for speed in application performance and analysis has endless dimensions. , who recently joined as a managing partner, commented in an interview last week at their offices in New York that the Internet of Things (IoT) creates friction with data transfer. He cited the rise of , an IoT protocol for passing data that the says is “not really a lingua franca for machine-to-machine communication, but a messenger and carrier for data exchange.” The MQTT inventor discovered the need for the messaging protocol when he started automating his 16th century thatched roof cottage on the Isle of Wight. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9nrm8q5eGg?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] That ball the child rolls across the floor? As I discussed with Turck, It’s not a ball but a data object with its own social identity, that could someday connect to trillions of other objects. It will become an avatar, known more as data object than the the child bounces on the stoop of his family’s Brooklyn brownstone. Now think of all the data that will pass from objects such as this ball and you can sense the scope of a world of dimensions. To get some perspective, I asked some experts about the new reality of data that seems to be encompassing just about everything these days. Their views reflect less about the future than what is actually happening today. Late in April, offered general availability for its real-time anlaytics platform. The platform uses an in-memory database and a distributed infrastructure to analyze large amounts of data. The database is built for speed. Eric Frenkiel, CEO and Co-Founder of MemSQL, said in an email interview that the last decade has seen great improvements in data retention at scale. “Companies have used compressed columnar stores and Hadoop to store large volumes of data, conferring a competitive advantage against companies that don’t retain and analyze their data,” Frenkiel said. “But big data is only useful if it’s accessible, and with larger data volumes, it’s become evident that companies are struggling to process this data to keep pace with the speed of their business.” He said that ss companies become increasingly data-driven, faster databases are necessary to counteract the inertia of these large data sets. “With data retention and storage solved, the next fundamental shift is speed,” Frenkiel said. “Swapping out hard disks for flash storage has helped somewhat, but the real innovation lies in evolving the software responsible for storing and analyzing that data.” At its core, MemSQL is an aggregator that acts as the intelligence for the data analytics. Analysis is orchestrated across the nodes, which are there just to carry ou the commands of the aggregator. These nodes are “wonderfully unaware.” They are the foot soldiers, Frenkiel said. “Companies are looking at in-memory computing because it offers a transformative approach to solving big data problems,” Frenkiel said. “In-memory computing solves the velocity component, but it needs to be paired with a scale-out architecture to satisfy the volume component.” He added that in terms of adoption, companies will continue to leverage existing solutions but are augmenting their data warehouses with databases that can quickly consume and analyze data to make fast decisions. “The companies that will win are the ones that take advantage of the velocity of data to spot trends and identify anomalies as they are in the process of occurring,” Frenkiel said. “These companies still have to analyze huge data volumes, but they now have to architect for that velocity to gain real-time insights and spot competitive advantages.” won the Battlefield competition at Disrupt NY this past week. Co-Founder Hicham Oudghiri said the need for speed can be thought of also as the need for ever expanding data. But he said the problems of scale for Enigma and other like are really entirely different than what most startups are facing everyday. “Usually, when you think of scale, you think of users, millions of users, hundreds of millions of users, and they’re all more or less trying to look at the same thing (or the same “type” of thing from a schema perspective),” Oudghiri said. “So you have these people hitting your servers concurrently, and you need to think about things that are further up your lines of defenses first. You think about round-robin strategies for web servers, content delivery networks like CloudFlare and Amazon’s auto scale to match the peaks in traffic. But for data intensive apps, the problem is kind of reversed. You don’t actually need that many users to have scalability problems, because you have billions and billions of rows to inspect for any query. On top of that, often you have to bring together very disparate data schemas across datasets that are very, very, diverse in nature and content.” He said there is no magic answer to the problem. But redundancy is most important when considering how “There is no “right” model. SQL, noSQL, graph databases, etc.,” Oudghiri said. “Use them all. They all have their purpose and when used together in concert can really help you get most of the way there. Think of your database architecture as a whole less as one ideal system and more as a collection of complimentary voices that can live harmoniously together. That way you can also be flexible and tinker with different parts at a time. “Second, RAM is your friend and persistency is something you have to work for in your cluster of servers. We scale our search in RAM. It’s cheap enough to be able to do so at this point, so the real challenge is building software around maintaining persistency for things you store in RAM.” I followed up with him after hearing from others, who said the cost of RAM is an issue. “Some of our stuff is in SSD, but it’s just not fast enough for very horizontal search applications,” Oudghiri said. “Also, the degradation of the SSD drives is a little unpredictable. Though RAM is not persistent at all, at least I can count on its non-persistence. It’s really a risk/reward calculation.” The team at takes a different perspective. 10gen is the corporate sponsor for MongoDB, the NoSQL database. Jared Rosoff, Technical Director at 10gen said in an email interview that there are at least two elements to speed: application development and application performance. “There’s little argument that MongoDB speeds application development,” Rosoff said. “The flexible data model and idiomatic drivers make developers more productive and able to iterate features quickly.” Regarding application performance, MongoDB is designed to use all system memory as a cache of recently used data, allowing developers to achieve in-memory performance when your working set fits in memory.” DRAM becomes less viable as the workloads get bigger, Rosoff said. “But when tackling big-data workloads on a purely in-memory database, you’ll be forced to buy enough DRAM to fit your entire data set,” Rosoff said. “This is challenging because of the upper limit of how much RAM you can put in a single server, and the cost of the RAM itself. MongoDB can use disk and flash-based storage to handle much larger data sets on a single server. Solid State Disks (SSDs) and Flash storage devices are allowing many customers to run MongoDB at nearly in-memory performance at a fraction of the cost of purely in-memory systems.” Finally, MongoDB’s document data model ensures data locality, reducing the number of disk IO’s required for complex data models, which is critical for providing high-performance. makes APIs out of relational databases. Founder Victor Olex asked if it is the speed that people need. In his view, it is the database that has become the problem. “The speed of access to data depends not only on the distance (measured network latency) but also the amount of time it takes to retrieve data from rest (i.e. file system, database) and amount of data transformations along the way (i.e. format conversions, encoding, decoding, compression etc.),” Olex said. “Getting data from rest to fly also depends very much on the data structures implemented and how directly the data can be referenced. In context of enterprise data we have to focus on databases, which have become a bottleneck in today’s web-scale information systems. Relational databases allow for convenient declarative queries but that comes at a cost of good amount of in-memory computation and disk access to determine which records need to be sent back. Conversely, document store database generally require retrieving data by numerical keys assigned to them when they were stored or predefined indexes (lookup tables), which map search terms to those numerical keys. “Various caching technologies help with data access speed but do so at the expense of accuracy. For example a web page may be slightly out of date for the duration of cache retention setting but that may be an acceptable trade-off to save processing resources on the publisher’s database. Caching and web application layer can scale out to run simultaneously on multiple servers, allowing for parallel handling of incoming request traffic while traditional database servers though can work with multiple connections at once generally can only scale up (bigger box, more memory and processor). SlashDB was designed with web scale architecture in service of enterprise systems. It is a scalable web service, which interprets URLs into database queries and delivers response in HTTP. It can run on multiple nodes and be coupled with a typical HTTP proxy to facilitate caching of repetitive requests. “Data intensive processing has traditionally been the domain of server-side systems. With the proliferation of mobile device this changes somewhat but ultimately there is a limit at which a human person can process information, which reportedly is at 60 bits per second so one could argue that delivering anything beyond that is a waste (except we all want know about those tweets and new emails happening in the background).” “AlchemAPI is obsessed with speed,” said CEO and Founder Elliot Turner. “Our customers recognize the time value of information; therefore, we have a financial incentive to process data as quickly as possible. There is no easy fix to making data processing applications run more quickly; bottlenecks can occur within a variety of areas including the ability to store and retrieve data or analyze it. “When it comes to performing efficient analysis of data, approaches can include hardware acceleration via GPUs, distributed computing, and algorithmic innovations. AlchemyAPI leverages all of these in combination with a heavy usage of solid state technology (both RAM and SSD) to store, retrieve, and process data at high rates of speed. “With regard to solid state technologies, RAM costs are dropping steadily ( ) but are still an order of magnitude more expensive than SSDs and 100x more expensive than traditional hard drives. RAM is still somewhat cost prohibitive for truly “big data” applications that operate at the petabyte scale, therefore many vendors (including AlchemyAPI) are leveraging hybrid approaches that incorporate both RAM and SSD technology. However, we’re seeing a steady embrace of RAM for smaller deployments in the terabyte range and expect this trend to continue as prices decrease over time.” http://www.slideshare.net/alchemyapi/efficient-big-data-analysis-gluecon-2012 There is more to speeding data than using SSD, RAM or new database technology. But one thing is certain. The world is becoming a highly distributed data mesh that will require news ways to speed up data as the loads get larger and larger.
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Iterations: A Youthful Rebellion Against The Permanence Of Facebook’s Walled Garden
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
. You can follow him on Twitter at . Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected. Indeed, great things can come from this, and for many of its one billion users, Facebook isn’t just on the web — it is the web. It is where images, biographical data, and every speck of a connection to a person, place, or thing lives, both the dream of a doting family spread miles apart and a marketer close by. It is a place where generations of people now reside, hang out, fawn over public statuses and peek into the lives of others. Ironically, while Facebook’s aim is to make the world more open, they themselves are building a new web within their own closed garden, inaccessible and (mostly) unexportable to all. As the saying states, “what goes on the Internet is written in ink,” so what goes onto Facebook is etched in stone walls. Yes, much of Facebook’s traffic comes from mobile now, too. For most people who don’t care about all the latest and greatest apps, Facebook works splendidly for them, simply yet powerfully connecting them to exercise the habits they’ve picked up on the web version. Yet, at the same time, mobile platforms (phones and tablets) have presented newer and younger audiences with new graphs of people, folks whose first computing device may have been of the latest iPod touches (complete with Facetime), folks who live in other countries with exploding mobile growth adoption curves. As working professionals have come to use the Internet to help define, cement, and reinforce their perceptions of their own identities, younger generations in search of their own identity can use a battery of new services and mobile apps which containerize their activities, isolating them from the permanence of the web, a permanence embodied by the likes of Facebook and Google+. These ascendent generations may have a Facebook account for the web and to use Messenger, but they seem to be disinterested in a network where everyone hangs out, where their parents or schoolteachers may be lurking. (To be fair to Facebook, Google seems to invoke similar fears of permanence given all the apps data they have on us, combined with their integration of Google+.) The emergence of this trend isn’t an implicit criticism of Facebook, though the company sure does push its users to adopt certain behaviors — rather, this trend is merely the world evolving alongside the rapid spread of personalized computing interfaces, giving rise to services which snap, share, and explode digital pictures ( ), allow users to buy disposable phone numbers ( ), or to assume various pseudonyms and tag pictures associated with negative, potentially shameful, or embarrassing feelings to an audience who will empathize with them ( ) — and pay a monthly membership fee for the right to send private messages. (There are services which go steps further, encrypting information — such as or — allowing people to move without a trace.) What I’m writing about here is not new or original. I have read a lot about this and have simply grown fascinated by the trend itself, the trend whereby more and more people enjoy the ease and shelter provided by lightweight mobile applications, ones that seemingly never touch the web and spread like a Facebook share. For a brief selection of items I’ve read on the topic, I’d suggest: PandaWhale’s on why teens are to Tumblr over Facebook; on the “ ” of new mobile apps; Branch’s look into ; and USV’s personal about how he doesn’t want to bring video memories from another era on to YouTube. All in all, the questions this trend trigger are equally fascinating: Is this just the beginning of a big wave, or this simply a trendy byproduct of a world obsessed with social networking? If this is a trend, does it have the legs to provide the foundation for a company or set of companies to form around this organizing principle? What does this mean for the future of the Facebook newsfeed and its relevance to users? Will Facebook be reduced to a utility for public sharing backed by real identity, but miss out on all the texts, snaps, and other bits of mobile messaging exploding these days? Is this a new type of movement, or simply the ebb and flow of behavior as generations pass? And, as the trend continues, will the younger generation of users who grow up “app-first” seek to bypass the web and explicit social networks altogether, or will they join the masses as they mature? I’ve been talking about this trend with knowledgeable folks for a few months now, and everyone has a different, interesting point of view. I certainly don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but questions themselves are undeniably fascinating. It’s not even been an entire year that Facebook has been a public company, and they are on track to make lots of money (especially on mobile), but there’s no denying that despite their growing mobile metrics and revenues, mobile apps that provide all varieties of private messaging seem to challenge Facebook’s immediate relevance. As these mobile apps grow, and as Facebook approach’s it’s 10th birthday next year, the next 10 years will likely be defined by a whole new set of what is considered “social networking” — and that might already be the new reality today. What is clear, however, is that while on the web, Facebook’s walled garden enjoys a captive audience already trained to do what it wants — on mobile, that walled garden is relegated to the size of an app icon alongside a sea of competing icons with very different or non-existant “sharing models,” and if today’s currents provide any trustworthy bellwether, the next 10 years for Facebook could present quiet a thorny challenge. /
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There Is In Fact A Tech-Talent Shortage And There Always Will Be
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
For America to maintain its fragile role as the most innovative nation on earth, it must perpetually attract the world’s best and brightest. There will always be trailblazing engineers who stay in their home country, leaving the United States one notch below its potential. Yet, on the heels of comprehensive immigration reform, claiming that there is no tech talent shortage has skewed the national discussion over why we need to aggressively attract high-skilled immigrants in the first place. An Economic Policy Institute study claims that there is a surplus of American engineers, and, as a result, has garnered national headlines in , and for busting “The Myth of America’s Tech-Talent Shortage”. It has fueled protectionist critics who rail against the high-skilled visa system for a being a low-paying indentured servitude scheme to trap vulnerable foreigners into low-paying, exploitative companies. While the study highlights important misconceptions about our less-than-pretty immigration system, let’s not forget that many major tech firms, from Google to Tesla, were founded by immigrants. Yet, as more and more household-names are produced abroad, from Skype to Spotify, it’s becoming clear that America is losing its grip as the sole source of pathbreaking innovation. There will always be a shortage to the extent that America has international competition Below, I explain the Economic Policy Institute’s argument, its methodological shortcomings, and why there will always be a shortage of great workers. The Economic Policy Institute argues that two important figures prove there is no tech talent shortage: . Roughly half of STEM graduates never take a job in the field, and 52% of of those who ditch a technology career do so for reasons related to pay, promotion, and working conditions. “For STEM graduates, the supply exceeds the number hired each year by nearly two to one,” write the authors. Perhaps more importantly, since the early 2000s, wages for programmers have virtually stalled. Yet, we know when there is demand for programmers in the tech industry, wages rise. Indeed, just prior to the Internet bubble, wages sky rocketed. Moreover, in one at least career with significant excess demand, petroleum engineers, wages rose a staggering 71%. In other words, STEM careers respond normally to the laws of supply and demand; if there truly was a dearth of programmers and engineers, we’d see wages rise. University of California, Davis Professor Norman Matloff, one of the fiercest critics of the high-skilled H1-B visa program, that companies largely seek foreign workers for cheap labor. Under the current system, foreign workers need a sponsoring firm, allowing them to extort dreamy-eyed immigrants for lower salaries, who are threatened with immediate deportation if they lose their job. Almost half of the 85,000 high-skilled work visas are snatched up by shady consultant firms who are suspected of exploiting guest workers for cheap labor. Just last month, the FBI indicted a Texas IT firm, Dibon Solutions, for hoarding H1-B workers, paid only when contractors needed their service. Dibon “earned a substantial profit margin when a consultant was assigned to a project and incurred few costs when a worker was without billable work,” to a government report. For guest workers, abuse, exploitation, and uncertainty is rampant. While it is true that the high-skilled visa system is flawed and there is a surplus of engineers, other researchers have found that the market does properly value immigrants, when they’re compared to natives of similar skill, education and age. The Economic Policy Institute averages all technology wages together, yet immigrants who uproot themselves from their homeland tend to be much younger, early career engineers (and, hence, lower paid). “Age differences appear to play a role and the H1-B advantage is greater once this is adjusted for,” a study from the respected Public Policy Institute of California. When comparing foreign to natives by age, occupation, and education level, immigrants earn about 13% more than their US counterparts. Not surprisingly, many immigrants, especially from Asian nations, have terrible English skills, which leaves them ineligible for higher paying managerial roles. “If all immigrants with an engineering degree had the proficiency of English–only speakers,” Rutgers professor Jennifer Hunt, “they would have conditional wages very close to those of natives (1.9% lower)”. Before journalists reprint studies, we should be cautious of non-peer reviewed analysis from “think tanks” with an obvious agenda. In response to the types of studies that showed the relative wages of immigrants and natives, Matloff at the H1-B system for perpetuating agism in Silicon Valley. “Employers prefer to hire younger, thus cheaper, H-1Bs instead of older, thus more expensive, Americans.” In terms of patents and academic work, he found, immigrants tend to be on par with natives, busting the so-called “best and brightest” myth. In order to protect American workers, he argues, visas . While a large labor dataset of wages may show relatively equal economic value between natives and foreign, it ignores all ways in which . TechCrunch contributor Vivek Wadhwa has found that 24.3% of engineering and technology companies had at least one foreign born founder, employing 560,000 workers who contrbuted $63 billion in sales (just in 2012). How can so few foreign works make such a big impact? They’re responsible for founding a litany of household name companies, including Sun Microsystems (Vinod Khosla), Google (Sergey Brin), PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors (Elon Musk). In some ways, the immigration system is a lottery: most immigrants won’t add much more value, but every so often a genius comes along that justifies thousands of average workers. This is precisely why of a new “startup visa”, which permits immigrants to found companies without being shackled to an employee sponsor. There doesn’t appear to be limit on the number of immigrants who qualify for the startup visa, because it’s best to assume that America is always at a shortage of brilliant foreigners who could start the next Google or Paypal. But, of course, it’s not just founders; Berkeley Researcher AnnaLee Saxenian found that one of the secrets to Silicon Valley’s success was immigrant cultural , who mentor new arrivals and develop lucrative ties with their family and friends around the world. These highly skilled emigrants are now increasingly transforming the brain drain into “brain circulation” by returning home to establish business relationships or start new companies while maintaining their social and professional ties to the US,” she writes [ ]. Global benefits like these aren’t captured in wage data because workers won’t always reside in the U.S.. As a corollary, modern employers aren’t just looking for an adequate employee — they’re looking for a worker who’s at least as good, if not better, than everyone else their seeing around the world. “Jobs postings will be listed for months without finding a good candidate,” explains former Zynga software engineer and founder of Appurify, Rahul Jain, to us in an email, “we need the best of the best”. In many instances, the only qualified worker may be a friend of a friend, who has the dewy-eyed drive of an early employee who spent weekend nights dreaming up the idea of a new company with the founders. “In my case, and some of my friends, you’re really passionate, you want to work for that company,” explains H1-B worker, Myles Sutherland, of Mapping company , “I’ll take anyone from the United States or any country in the world that’s just super passionate about that job.” It’s no shock then why the high-skilled worker visa cap this year in a record 5 days. This kind of employee motivation isn’t captured in the Economic Policy Institutes wage data, because startups may not be able to pay foreign workers more; rather, they’ll just wait months to the perfect fit, if the position gets filled at all. Matloff and his fellow critics may be right that the guestworker program needs fixing. It’s exploitative and corrupt. But when the goal is to be the most innovative country on the planet, we’ll have a tech talent “shortage” until every single trailblazing founder, and their hyper-passionate friends, works in the U.S. American can never get enough brilliant innovators.
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Temptation
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Nir Eyal
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
How do products tempt us? What makes them so alluring? It is easy to assume we crave delicious food or impulsively check email because we find pleasure in the activity. But pleasure is just half the story. Temptation is more than just the promise of reward. Recent advances in neuroscience allow us to peer into the brain, providing a greater understanding of what makes us want. In 2011, Sriram Chellappan, an assistant professor of computer science at Missouri University of Science and Technology, gained unheard of access to sensitive information about the way undergraduates were using the Internet. tracked students on campus as they browsed the web. Chellappan was looking for patterns, which not only revealed what students were doing online, but provided clues about who they were. “We believe that your pattern of Internet use says something about you,” Chellappan the New York Times. “Specifically, our research suggests it can offer clues to your mental well-being.” Chellappan concluded that there was, in fact, predictive power in the data. He found students with early signs of clinical depression used the Internet differently and he could identify students most likely to face mental health issues simply by looking at how they clicked. “We identified several features of Internet usage that correlated with depression,” wrote Chellappan. “For example, participants with depressive symptoms tended to engage in very high e-mail usage.” Chellappan developed the technology in hopes of creating an early-warning system to identify struggling students. But his study raised another question, why do people with depression check email more? The answer may provide clues about why all of us use the products and services we do in our everyday lives. Psychologists believe people with depression feel negative emotions, like anxiety, more frequently than other people do. There is evidence that the depressed students in Chellappan’s study were using the Internet more because they experience negative mental states more often. To try and feel better, they turned to the web to boost their mood. Finding ways to make ourselves feel better is not something only depressives do. We all seek relief from feeling bad and the brain is primed to help us learn where we can find escape. Just as we might take a Tylenol to relieve a headache, we turn to products to relieve emotional pain. In fact, these two biological processes are so closely linked that taking a Tylenol has to ease both physical and emotional pain. The drug is effective in treating headache and heartache. Having a pain to cure is a necessary prerequisite to using products. Recent neuroscience reveals the brain even adds pain to things that were previously pleasurable to push us to get what our bodies want. When temptation is activated in the brain, it induces a biological process that not only turns on the pleasure response, but also the body’s physiological stress response. Consider a 2005 which looked at the physiological response of women exposed to images of chocolate. Researchers observed that the women experienced a subconscious reaction of alarm similar to seeing a threatening animal in the wild. The women, who had identified themselves as “chocolate cravers,” described feeling not only pleasure at the thought of consuming the chocolate, but also agitation, angst, and a feeling of a loss of control in the face of their desire. For these women’s brains, temptation was stressful. Since the 1950s, researchers have explored how the brain’s reward system compels behavior. Our understanding of the complex circuitry shows that pleasure and pain work together. Once the brain learns something good is about to happen, it induces a craving we feel as stress. The fastest relief from this discomfort is to get what we want. Companies, of course, are masters of temptation. If marketing is as, “the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers,” then implicit in this practice is accentuating the positive aspects of what being sold. This technique is used not only in hawking goods, but is also found in nature. Animals have been tricking each other by accentuating desirable traits for millennia. The process is called “super-normal stimuli” and it is a key to by creating the stress of desire. Another way products induce intense desire is through a certain kind of fear, particularly our innate need to have as much as the next person. The phenomenon is exhibited with a simple experiment conducted by Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University. In the study, de Waal rewarded two capuchin monkeys with a cucumber when they completed a simple task, in this case, handing a rock to the researcher. When both monkeys were given the same reward, they completed the task as prescribed. But when the researcher gave one monkey a grape while offering the other the standard cucumber, were very different. The stiffed monkey, who was perfectly content just seconds before with his cucumber, began shrieking, baring his teeth, thrashing in his cage, and pounding on the table to show his anger. Known in the vernacular as FOMO, or “fear of missing out”, marketers utilize this inborn trigger to incite pain akin to what the capuchin monkey felt in de Waals cage. Marketers tasked with increasing consumption of their company’s products have a difficult job; they are often charged with . To do that, they need to find the customer’s problem, their pain, in order to alleviate it. Without the biological basis spurring our desire, there would be no sales. So marketers must at least accentuate, if not induce, a level of discomfort to make us crave their wares. Like in the undergraduates in Chellappan’s study exhibiting signs of depression, we all seek to escape feeling bad. The products and services that provide immediate relief are those we come to depend upon most. Photo Credit:
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The Philosophy Of Game Development By The Numbers
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Hassan Baig
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
Mobile gaming is a huge worldwide opportunity at the moment, having clocked in at , and it is poised to grow further in the coming years. With the world’s 1 billion smartphones scheduled to almost by 2015 and games responsible for a whopping , it’s easy for anyone to do the math and see where this is going. Game development continues to have a bright future, but only for those who can develop profitable titles. Pursuing such profitability is an exact science now, with monitoring analytics and continuous A/B testing having become the staple of game development. In fact, Zynga – the gaming company to have popularized (if not introduced) the use of analytics – has as a big data company. One can imagine metrics to be ‘levers’ that a game developer can push or pull to create a desired outcome. Some levers have a generous range of motion, while others are more limited. In the end a game developer’s task is essentially to figure out the perfect combination of lever positions that will produce the best financial outcome at the least cost. Notions of creativity, novelty and fun are all confined within the prism of this analytics-centric approach: They have wiggle room as long as they improve analytics. That’s the fundamental philosophy behind modern-day game development. For those looking for a more visceral understanding of game analytics, I’ve set up a simple mathematical simulation that compares game performances across hypothetical retention and viral profiles. It’s in simple spreadsheet format and can be . I’ll quickly list out the assumptions governing this simulation, after which I’ll explain the noteworthy conclusions one can draw from the numbers. Imagine that a gaming studio has six games under its purview: Note that Game No. 1 is treated as a benchmark and the remaining games differ from it by no more than one metric. For example, Game No. 2 differs from game No. 1 in terms of average player lifetime (and is similar on all other metrics). I have used an average CPA of $1.3 throughout to calculate the games’ respective advertising spend. Lastly, in case more clarity is needed on the definitions of the terms I’ve used in the bullet points above, explanatory descriptions can be found in one of the tabs on the spreadsheet. Now on to the simulation’s broad conclusions. And since the DAU is an approximate measure of player engagement which, in turn, is directly correlated to revenue generation, average player lifetime turns out to have an obvious effect on a game’s money-making potential. In the tables of game No. 1 and game No. 2 in the tab titled “Comparative Revenue” in the spreadsheet notice how game No. 2’s higher average player lifetime gives it superior DAU and revenue numbers in comparison to game No. 1. And as explained earlier, DAU is directly correlated to revenue generation. Hence it can be surmised that d2 retention has a very obvious effect on a game’s money-making potential. It’s for this reason that most gaming companies utilize A/B testing to optimize their games’ retention rates early in the launch cycle. Also, given d2 retention usually doesn’t optimize beyond single-digit percentages, games with low retention rates are culled very quickly. Look at the comparison between games No. 1 and 3 in the spreadsheet: The latter’s higher d2 retention gives it a better DAU profile, which in turn translates to more revenue overall. That is, if a game is a poor financial performer over a certain demographic of players, buying more users for it from the same demographic will not help the bottom line. It’s the reason gaming companies optimize a game’s metrics before buying expensive eyeballs for it, and it’s also the reason certain games way before they’ve seen a full-fledged launch. Those interested can check out the illustrative comparison between game No. 1 and No. 4 in the “Comparative Revenue” tab in my spread sheet. That is, greater virality ensures more freely acquired users, hence minimizing a key cost consideration: cost per user acquisition. A somewhat similar effect can be garnered via having a captive player network which can be cross-promoted at negligible cost to another game – just that in the former case, virality causes the overall player network to itself expand as well. Overall, the ability to get free users is extremely important for any gaming company’s financial health, so it’s no wonder that Mark Pincus stressed investing and leveraging Zynga’s player network as a cornerstone of the company’s future strategy in his . As previously noted, avid number crunchers can have a quick look at the comparison between game # 1 and game # 5 in the “Comparative Revenue” tab in my spreadsheet and appreciate the marked difference between the two games’ eCPA as a result of differing K factors. This is quite a straightforward result, but its implications are far-reaching. It’s the reason gaming companies contend for long/multiple sessions and flock around the 43 year old housewife or the 28 year old male gamer, it’s the reason carrier billing is being for emerging markets , it’s why real-money online gambling is heating up and even why Candy Crush Saga went cross-platform. Analyze the comparison between game No. 1 and the relatively higher ARPDAU game No. 6. The difference in total revenue between these games illustrates my point. This concludes the results of my spreadsheet simulation. Many of these results are confessedly intuitive and though looking at my simulated numbers may give a more visceral understanding of fundamental game analytics, it’s only reinforcing what many already know. After all, it’s quite obvious that a game developer should strive for producing a title with lengthy average player lifetimes, high retention rates, great virality and high ARPDAUs. So other than confirming the obvious, t Big-name gaming companies are already following the aforementioned fundamental tenets in their production pipeline – it’s more often the smaller studios which persist with informal methodologies. That’s bad practice because instead of facilitating the smaller studios to catch up, it exacerbates the gap between the big and small fish over time. As the mobile gaming market continues to spew riches for the foreseeable future, it is imperative that modern day game developers structure their entire operations around the fundamentals of data analytics instead of trying to fit a metrics-based veneer over introverted, blind game development. Their jobs are basically to create digital entertainment products that activate the maximum possible number of highly viral users on a daily basis for the longest sessions. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Step Is A Journaling App That Helps You Make Sense Of Your Life
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
There are already plenty of journaling apps out there, but stands out as a personal data aggregator that records and helps you make sense of your life’s minutiae. As a big fan of using my iPhone to journal, I often check apps like or to see how my life has changed over the past few years and I use Facebook not just to stay in touch with people, but also to keep a log of memorable events. In the past few months, however, I’ve become increasingly disconcerted by the fact that the most comprehensive record of my personal life over the past four years exists in updates and photos scattered across social media platforms. Developed by South Korea-based , Step is a great alternative for people who share my concerns. The app is easy to use, aggregates personal data in an attractive and illuminating way–and is private. Step is currently available for , but an Android version with a customized UI is in the works. Step has two main screens: its dashboard tracks your top activities and places visited, while its journaling interface allows you to check into a place, snap photos and add activities with a tap on Step’s vast array of icons. The app’s adaptive user interface arranges icons in the order you tap them the most, making Step easier to use the more frequently you log your activities. “We are positioning Step as a lifestyle aggregator,” says developer Jay Mok. “We want to collect all this fragmented data and deliver to users one very simple tool to capture their lives. As we like to say, you can use Step to click, capture and collect your life.” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZidaPDfSk5c] Step has two target users: people with very busy schedules who want to keep a journal but don’t have the time to sit down and write down everything sentence by sentence, as well as users who are accustomed to using apps to keep track of their exercise, diet or hobbies, and now want something that will encompass all of their other activities. Users can connect Step to their Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts, but Mok says all data recorded in Step remains anonymous. “We want to find people who use social media for life logging, but don’t like the privacy issues or want the social aspect. Step can be used to capture their lives quickly, and then they can post it to Twitter or Facebook later,” says Mok. Step will constantly add new features. Eventually the dashboard will allow you to keep track of items like the average distances you have traveled in a week and specific food or drink that you consume regularly. Another planned feature will give users recommendations based on the places they check into. WePlanet also plans to partner with other apps that track things like exercise, calories or budgeting, so users can turn Step into a central access point for all their personal data. WePlanet is still working on monetization models for Step, but one possibility is making aggregated data available for business owners while preserving individual user anonymity. The development team is currently seeking seed funding from angel investors. Seed has been bootstrapped so far, with additional support from its time as a member of .
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Backed Or Whacked: Bridging Worlds Without Words
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 5 | 5 |
One of the hottest areas of tech right now is the Internet of Things, wherein everyday objects communicate with each other. As doorknobs and clothing learn to communicate, we can only hope that they will protect their language better than the humans who have seen English reduced to abbreviated gibberish in the face of texting and Twitter. If Kickstarter campaigns are any indication, though, objects have a lot to say without speaking at all. As kids age into teenagers, parents often face the dilemma of balancing supervision and independence, a fine line that their children may increasingly find themselves karmically walking as those parents age. Placing security cameras around the home of an independent elderly parent seems too intrusive while relying on an emergency alert may provide critical indications too little too late. Lively strikes a great middle ground. In the tradition of Kickstarter-funded connected sensors such as Twine and Ninja Blocks, Lively makes use of vaguely cat ear-shaped sensors that serve as proxies for the fulfillment of routines when creatively deployed. These can indicate activities, such as eating meals, taking of medications and going outside. It’s sensors for seniors. Lively isn’t just a one-way communique either. The offbeat part of the offering is a weekly printed LivelyGram that includes photos and updates from preselected loved ones. It’s somewhat like what was tried by the , but without the local hardware (well, at least bulky, ink-consuming local hardware). Like the seniors it seeks to support, Lively is independent, relying on an integrated cellular signal like the original Kindle instead of a home network connection. Lively raised less than $14,000 of its $100,000 goal, but little was ever at stake as the company had secured millions of dollars in funding prior to the Kickstarter campaign, which includes the confident phrase, “When we launch Lively…” And when they do, the basic set will go to $149 with a $20 per month fee, which includes a twice-monthly delivery of LivelyGrams. The backers of Good Night Lamp would likely argue that a house is not a home without a house that is an Internet-enabled light source. Consisting of a basic set level of a bigger and smaller lamp, the lamp lets distant friends and relatives send subtle signals to each other; up to four little lamps can be connected to a master big lamp. Turning on the big house light turns on the smaller ones. It’s a bit like having your own personal blinking red phone like the kind that connects Commissioner Gordon to Batman or Presidents Obama and Putin without the threat of the Joker or nuclear apocalypse. The Good Night Lamp had a large funding target of £360,000, of which only about £40,000 was collected, but the team refused to go gently into that good night. Publicity from the campaign led to much exposure for the team, which found an alternate route to production. Preorders at eponymous began in February for £99 and are expected to start shipping in September. Not the most directly connected of Internet objects, TeleSound sought to be a small speaker closely resembling the speaker end of a classic desk phone handset connected via Bluetooth to an iPhone. Those with the appropriate companion app would be able to send sonic emoji to remote TeleSound devices via the recipient’s smartphone, promulgating the renaissance in flatulence simulations that we all miss from the golden age of fart apps. Unlike Lively or the Good Night Lamp, the TeleSound team packed it in after reaching less than $15,000 of its $100,000 goal. Rewards for non-backers apparently included a free guilt trip as TeleSound’s sounds off, “[I]f you wanted TeleSound to happen, you should have backed the project. If enough of you and your friends did, we would have been able to make it.”
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Pentagon Clears BlackBerry, Samsung Devices For Defense Dept. Use
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
BlackBerry and Samsung devices for use on Defense Department networks. The approved devices are BlackBerry 10 smartphones, BlackBerry PlayBook tablets using the Enterprise Service 10 system and Samsung’s Android Knox. The Pentagon said earlier this week that it also expects to clear Apple devices using iOS 6 in early May. Pentagon spokesman Lt Col Damien Pickart said in a statement that “this is a significant step towards establishing a multi-vendor environment that supports a variety of state-of-the-art devices and operating systems.” He added that the approval of BlackBerry and Samsung devices does not mean product orders would be placed. Instead, it allows user groups within the Pentagon to select those devices. In February, the Pentagon to broaden its approved mobile devices so the military can access the latest communications technology and is not dependent on just one equipment vendor. The Pentagon’s initiative to diversify its roster of electronics led to that it was in process of phasing out almost all of the BlackBerries used by its employees, which . The Department of Defense’s plans do mean, however, that BlackBerry now faces much more competition for the Pentagon’s 600,000 mobile users. The department currently has 470,000 BlackBerry users. There are also 41,000 Apple users and 8,700 Android users, most of whom are currently participating in pilot or test programs.
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The Trouble With Identity’s Late Arrival On Instagram
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
BeTheDancer is Alex Greenburg’s name and handle on Instagram. He’s a good friend and a , but because Instagram doesn’t require real names, I had a lot trouble using the app’s to point him out in my photos. Right now, Instagram’s 100 million users are discovering that while pseudoanonymity can be fun, it’s not always functional. On Facebook, you’re told to use your real name, and most do. That makes it very easy to search for and friend people. Mark Zuckerberg knew the social graph depended on you being you, and saw how Myspace’s lack of made it a haven for impersonators and unaccountability. When Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger started Instagram, it wasn’t meant to be your meatspace social graph or the online copy of your personality. It was just for smartphonetography. You entered your handle and your “name”. Neither had to be your real name. Some people still use their birth name or a shortening of it as their username. I’m , for example. And many do put in their actual first and last name. But many others don’t add their real name and just go by a pseudoanonymous handle. Thanks to Facebook’s Find Friends feature it hasn’t been so hard to follow them, though. But Instagram launched , where you have to tap someone’s real name or handle into a typeahead to say they’re in an image. That gets a lot tougher if they don’t have their real name attached to their account. I didn’t think to search for Be The Dancer when I wanted to tag my buddy in a portrait I shot of him a year ago. Over the next few days, Instagram users are going to be inundated with frequent notifications that they’ve been tagged in photos. But I’d bet those who go solely by pseudonyms will get a lot less. Tacking true identity onto a two-plus year-old social network doesn’t come easy. It could even steal a bit of the carefree atmosphere that’s made Instagram such a refreshing alternative to Facebook. But one thing photo tagging will certainly do is strengthen Instagram’s social graph. After going to name a few friends in my photos, I realized I wasn’t following many of them. I opened the Facebook Find Friends feature and found hundreds of chums had joined Instagram since I last checked. I followed a ton of them, because Instagram isn’t just about photos anymore. It’s about the photographers, and the subjects who inspire them.
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Tiptop Speakers Launches On Kickstarter To Take Advantage Of Your Room’s Natural Acoustics
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Billy Gallagher
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
Look over to one of the upper corners of the room you’re in. What’s there? If you’re like me, probably nothing. Three Stanford product design majors are building a speaker to take advantage of the wasted space and natural acoustics of the corners of your room. The Tiptop speaker is a small pyramid that can stand alone or fits into a mold made for the upper corners of a room; like a Jambox, it’s wireless and Bluetooth-enabled. When mounted in a corner, the speaker takes advantage of “room gain,” using the natural acoustics of a room to make the sound richer and more appealing. “[The shape] changes how you use the product, but it also changes how the product uses the space” co-creator tells me, arguing that too many speakers are “repackaged goods” rather than actually fresh ideas. Brody, , and yesterday and so far have 154 backers and have raised almost $30,000 towards their goal, at the time of publication. They are aiming to raise $215,000 by June 1, just two weeks before the three seniors will graduate, to start producing the speakers. On Kickstarter, they’re selling Tiptops for early bird specials of $175 (first 200) and $199 (next 300), as well as the standard price of $249.
They also have philanthropic goals, pledging to give a portion of their proceeds to a Bay Area non-profit music foundation if they surpass $400,000 on Kickstarter, and lower, lighthearted goals, offering to do a push-up for every $1 donation “so we can get ourselves in Tiptop shape.” The three product design majors worked on a social media aggregation site last spring, which they quickly abandoned. “We knew we could never actually bring that to market,” Brody says. “This time around was totally different.” They were in a capstone class for the product design major, where their classmates were working on a wide range of projects—from another successfully funded project Grip Clip to recyclable backpacks to run of the mill iOS apps. Walker says they thought about the problems they and their friends had, particularly as college students and young adults living in small spaces. One night this past fall, the three were in Walker’s room discussing ideas and music. Thompson was surfing Kickstarter for inspiration, while Walker sat at his desk; Brody lay on the floor looking up at the ceiling, when using the corners of the room struck him. They held the speaker up to the corner to test the sound and loved it. “Things have kept happening like that,” Walker says. “It feels like the right use of our time because it’s almost developing itself. The idea came up very organically.” They began making prototypes in Stanford’s Product Realization Lab, changing small details like smoothing the corners of the wall mount to make up for rooms’ imperfect corners. They had friends come into a room with their eyes closed and would play songs for them with a speaker in the middle of the room and then with the speaker up in the corner. Walker says their friends thought they were playing two different speakers, and thought the “corner speaker” was much better. They ran a similar test on me and it was my “aha” moment of reporting when I knew they were on to something. The same song sounded a lot richer and fuller when it was up in the corner. Plus, with a desk and room as messy as mine, I can use all the help I can get in de-cluttering. Thompson, who is currently in New Jersey playing professional soccer for Sky Blue FC, balances training, schoolwork—she’s still an enrolled student and travels back to Palm Drive for the occasional test or meeting—and developing the product. As a result, Brody and Walker handle more of the physical iterations, while Thompson does more online work. The trio hopes to raise their lofty Kickstarter goal to pay for more prototypes before settling on a final product and shipping to Kickstarter supports and potentially new customers by the holiday season in December.
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Despite A Staff Shakeup, AOL Ventures Lives On With Co-Founder Jon Brod At The Helm
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
reported earlier today that Mike Brown Jr. and much of the team that ran AOL’s venture funding arm have formed their own VC firm — — that aims to find and fund enterprise-friendly startups. While it’s somewhat heartening to see a new firm set up shop in New York City, there’s another weighty question here that hasn’t been answered yet: now that nearly all of its staff has spun off a new venture fund, what’s going to happen to AOL Ventures? Well, long story short, it’s not going anywhere yet. I spoke to Bowery Capital founder Mike Brown today, and he confirmed that AOL Ventures’ other co-founder/partner Jon Brod would continue to run the show now that Brown is off managing a fund of his own. According to a reputable source with knowledge of the situation, AOL has no plans to give up on its early-stage investment activities, but it’s next step isn’t exactly clear. While that source said that under CEO Tim Armstrong’s leadership AOL would remain connected to the startup world, there’s no firm plan in place for how the company’s venture arm will proceed from here. Meanwhile, an AOL representative provided the following statement: “AOL Ventures, which Mike and I started in 2010, has a high performing portfolio of 27 tech start-ups and remains an important part of AOL,” said President of AOL Ventures Jon Brod, who will continue to oversee the group. “We wish Mike well in his new position and are pleased that he will continue to help manage the AOL Ventures fund.” (Disclosure: AOL acquired TechCrunch back in 2010, but you probably knew that.) While the details on AOL’s future in venture capital are still unclear, that’s definitely not the case for Brown’s Bowery Capital: it’s focused primarily on B2B startups that could strike a chord with a younger generation of CTOs and CMOs. The most prominent companies in the Bowery portfolio that fit that vision are , , , and Moat, all startups that Brown invested in as an angel. That’s not to say that relationships he and the rest of his team made with AOL Ventures’ portfolio companies have gone up in smoke — of the $33 million in capital that has been committed to Bowery, $30 million came from larger institutional investors (including AOL, as points out) with the remaining $3 million being chipped in by “90 percent” of the AOL Ventures portfolio companies Brown was involved with. And Brown is still actively helping out those AOL Venture portfolio companies — the team held a quarterly meetup for those startups’ executives at AOL’s offices in New York earlier today. Unlike the sorts of CEO get-togethers that firms like First Round Capital are known for, the one held today was meant for chief marketing and revenue officers to swap notes and take in talks conducted with leaders from Buzzfeed, Box, and Pandora to name a few.
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Evernote Partners With South Korean Messaging Giant KakaoTalk
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
is going after 90 million registered users by with the South Korean messaging giant that would bring Evernote integration to KakaoTalk’s mobile app. Despite boasting here in the United States, chances are you’ve never heard of KakaoTalk. The messaging app is mostly used by Korean Americans (such as myself), to communicate with friends and family both here and abroad. Yet back in South Korea, KakaoTalk has a dominant presence. The messaging app is installed on 95 percent of the smartphones in use and has a smaller but steadily growing user base of 15 million in Japan. Mind you, in Japan KakaoTalk is still overshadowed by Line, Interestingly enough, the partnership is the first of its kind that Evernote has inked with any messaging app, and reveals the company’s aspirations to expand its presence across the Pacific. Out of Evernote’s global 50-million-strong user base, only 15 million of those users come from the Asia-Pacific, which includes South Korea, China, Japan and Australia. Evernote is clearly hoping to leverage KakaoTalk’s ubiquity among the South Korean population to expand its user base there. KakaoTalk is also looking to expand its user base worldwide, and it’s hoping that Evernote’s popularity in the United States will put them in the limelight. Like I said before, KakaoTalk is a virtual unknown here in America if you’re not Korean, and the South Korean company would very much like to change that. It’s still unclear what form Evernote will make its presence known in KakaoTalk’s app, but it’s safe to assume that the mobile app across all three platforms (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone) will come to support the Evernote integration. KakaoTalk is a free download at the and the .
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Connected Kitchen Scale From Chef Sleeve Tracks Your Nutrition Bite-By-Bite
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
has been selling its iPad-protecting plastic sleeves since 2011 to keep kitchen gunk off the iPad you’re using while you cook. They also make a dishwasher-safe, non-porous chopping board with a built in iPad stand (below right), and a smaller stand in the same recycled paper composite finish. But Chef Sleeve’s grand plan is to create a range of connected devices for the kitchen that link up with an iPad app to let people track their nutrition in a highly granular, yet low hassle, way. To that end it’s just kicked off a , which it’s calling Smart Food Scales, that will enable people to weigh ingredients and snacks and then determine the exact amount of fat, salt, sugar, vitamins and so on in the ingredients they’re using in recipes or the snacks they’re eating at home. “This is our first smart product. We now want to activate these pieces of hardware and take the iPad even further and enhance the experience in the kitchen,” says Chef Sleeve’s Michael Tankenoff. “The Bluetooth scale will sync up with our iOS app on iPad or iPhone. Say you’re weighing strawberries. We house the USDA database of food information, so you select strawberries. Not only will it tell you the weight, but it tells you all the nutritional information. “For example, you’re preparing a salad — you put your bowl on the scale, add your lettuce, select lettuce, reset to zero, add your tomatoes, select tomatoes, reset to zero, keep going, build this recipe and when you’re done, now you know exactly the nutritional value of that salad that you have every day.” As well as the health conscious and people watching their weight, Chef Sleeve envisages the scales being useful for individuals with conditions such as diabetes to help them track their sugar intake, or people with specific nutritional deficiencies who need to make sure they’re getting enough of certain vitamins in their diet. The company is looking to raise $30,000 via its Kickstarter campaign, which runs until the end of the month. It’s showing the following prototype screenshots (below) of the planned iPad software. It also intends to open up its API at some point in the future, so that third-party developers can build apps for the smart scales — although it’s going to be careful about how it does this, as it wants to keep any other apps wholesome (scales can, after all, be used to weigh non-foodstuffs too). After the scales, Chef Sleeve says it will look to launch other connected devices that tie back in to its iOS app to keep adding to a range of smart kitchen devices. A thermometer could be next, says CEO Santiago Merea. A chopping board with an integrated scale could also be on the cards “at some point” — but he says the company is being mindful about its mainstream consumer buyer. “We need to be careful about our demographic. We’re not going to throw rockets at them,” he told TechCrunch. “We want the design to be very homey, very crafty.” If the uptake of the scales is strong, it could end up generating some fascinating data for Chef Sleeve — such as what, when and how people eat — which it said it will look to feed back into its product development. “Our pledge is going to be to not store any personal information at all — because we don’t need to but we also don’t want the risk of being hacked,” said Merea. “Food is personal… So we’re not storing any personal information but we don’t need to. With that data we can also even help our customers. It’s going to be really cool what we can do with this.” Chef Sleeve already has stores interested in carrying the smart scales, according to Merea. It’s hoping to get into speciality kitchenware stores with the smart scales, a shift of its retail strategy which, to date, has been mostly focused on selling via Amazon (and its ).
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Ironically, Smartphone Taxi Apps Blocked In NYC After Industry Groups Claim They Make It Easier To Discriminate
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
Transit trade groups pulled out the race card and managed to block smartphone taxi “e-hailing” . Associate Justice Helen E. Freedman issued an emergency injunction against smartphone taxi app companies Hailo and Uber, after hearing arguments from the several car service groups that smartphones permit drivers to discriminate against passengers based on race, name, age and location. “We’re disappointed that there is a further delay in implementing the e-hail pilot program. It’s unfortunate that taxi riders will not be able to continue to test this innovative tool for hailing taxis,” wrote Senior Counsel in NYC Law Department, Michelle Goldberg-Cahn, in a statement. On May 1st, hand waving-averse New Yorkers were supposed to be able to summon and track taxis from their mobile phones, though they weren’t allowed to pay through the application and was only available in certain parts of the city and call taxis within a certain radius of the passenger. This latest legal injunction is just the low point in a roller coaster between smartphone car service apps, who have been cleared and blocked and again, as taxi groups fight tech startups for control over the lucrative transportation industry. It is wholly ironic that taxi organizations allege that smartphone applications are a threat to equality. For years, news organizations have replicated the abject racism that occurs between people of color and drivers. “At night they will slow down to pick me up and realize that I’m a person of color then suddenly flip the switch; they’re out of service and will drive on. And I’ve seen it as far as they will go to the next block and pick someone else up within clear sight,” Briscoe Savoy, a resident of Brooklyn who participated in an ABC experiment. Indeed, one black D.C. resident defended Uber against regulators back when the state had threatened to raise prices on the smartphone black car service. “That’s why I’m dismayed by the proposed regulations that could potentially put Uber out of business,” Clinton Yates, for the “It would be a step backward for those of us who are willing to pay more money for a respectable transaction rather than take our chances on the street and be degraded in the process.” The injunction is part of an ongoing court battle. We will update readers as the story unfolds.
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Who Is Tech’s Most Inspiring New Founder? SV Angel’s Ron Conway, David Lee, And Brian Pokorny Name Names [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
What’s fantastic is that each partner had a favorite, and they all named names — so it was pretty interesting to hear. Conway pointed to Georg Petschnigg of , the startup behind hot iPad app ; Pokorny named of ; and Lee said he has been very impressed by the co-founders of , , , and . And that wasn’t all we discussed. We also talked about why the firm is optimistic that the tech industry’s brightest times are still ahead, the New York companies that SV Angel has been talking to during their current trip out east, how Conway’s increasingly active work influences his interactions on the business side, and more. Check it all out in the video embedded above.
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Songza Launches Version 3.0 With Improved Search, Quicker Navigation, And Revamped UI
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siLVq20s3DU&w=640&h=360] , the app that matches expert-created music playlists to your mood or activity, has just released a huge update to its iOS app, streamlining the experience quite a bit and cleaning up the UI to ensure that users are getting the best music to match their mood and activity in the fastest time possible. To start, you’ll notice straight off the bat that the Concierge screen has changed dramatically, with new colors in the background and the removal of the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. But it’s not just about looks. Songza’s smarter now, too. The Songza team has always prided itself on finding you an amazing playlist to match your mood and settings in just three clicks. Today, they brought that down to one long-press click on any Concierge situation (like Driving or Sweaty Dance Party) to get music playing quickly. Songza 3.0 also includes a faster way to find music for the situation you’re in, even if Concierge hasn’t predicted it for you. Simply shake the app while on the Concierge screen and you’ll be asked what you’re up to, leading you to the right playlist for the right moment. One of the biggest pain points with Songza is that it’s difficult to find the right music based on artists. Sure, you can hunt for mixes by genre, mood, activity and artists, but even then you have to sit through most of the playlist before your fave comes on. [gallery columns="4" ids="811320,811321,811322,811323,811324"] Songza 3.0 solves this problem by letting you hunt out all the playlists that include your queried artist, with the mixes that are most relevant to your preferences coming up first. And if that weren’t enough, the app automatically moves songs by your favorite artist to the top of the playlist. Last, but certainly not least, the new and improved Songza made a few tweaks to its Audio HQ feature, which was debuted in collaboration with Audyssey Laboratories back in . Record Store Clerk, a feature that tries to match you with new music based on what you already like, has been baked into the experience on the back-end, rather than remaining as a front-end feature. Clearly, things have changed a lot in the land of Songza, but the new version comes with in-app tips to help you find your way. Songza has picked up tons of traction since it launched, now boasting 4.7 million monthly active users who spend more than 65 million minutes with Songza on a daily basis. The update is available now on the .
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Garrett Camp Distills His Uber And StumbleUpon Expertise Into New Holding Company Expa
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
The is right. As Leena wrote in her , “Operators are foregoing the traditional path of joining a traditional VC to instead create a studio-like holding operation.” The latest in a series of accomplished entrepreneurs wanting to lend their expertise to a new generation of companies? Serial entrepreneur , who has set up the holding company to nurture his ideas for products. Camp tells me Expa will be very close in model to the holding companies started by entrepreneurs Max Levchin ( ), Evan Williams ( ), Michael Birch ( ) or Ron Palmeri ( ), and be more focused than organizations like or . “I’ve come up with 10 ideas over the past year that I’m interested in,” he revealed, confirming that Expa will stay small. “But realistically only three or four will really come to fruiton.” Camp became an entrepreneur in 2002 when he founded and bootstrapped discovery startup StumbleUpon, taking it all the way to a $75 million acquisition by eBay, and then a spin-out, eventually leaving the CEO role and handing over the company to . He came up with the idea for transportation app Uber in 2009 and handed that company off to its hyper-focused CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick. Nowadays, he’s spending time coaching the “Uber for private planes,” , through the growth process from his home. Derived from the words “experience apps,” Camp holds that the words “incubator” and/or “accelerator” aren’t a good fit to describe Expa, which he hopes will be primarily composed of companies that Camp himself built from scratch. “I’ve asked a lot of people what should we call it, and we don’t have an answer.” After a decade-long career, he believes he’s come up with an efficiency system to help startups reach their full potential. “Instead of doing angel investing, he says, “I’m trying to take that same amount of capital and put it into something where I can be involved in the branding and design.” “I’d really like to be involved in the early stage formation of new ideas and new products,” he says, “And use all my lessons learned in the past 10 years. Every time I make a mistake with a company, I write it out and try to figure out why it happened,” he emphasized, revealing that he also does this for things he gets right. “I’ve come up with a good set of guidelines, and if I apply these guidelines through Expa, I can hopefully end up with a couple of cool companies.” Right now Expa is self-funded, but Camp tells me that if it gets to the point where he needs to raise money for an individual company or an entire entity, then he’ll raise money. The company is currently focused on a stealth project in the realm of mobile data and analytics, though Camp says it’s too early to reveal specifics. He insists it’s not in the transportation space or “Uber for X” like Blackjet. Though he’s not going to keep milking that cow, Camp says that Uber is a great structural model for what he’d like an Expa company to be. “When I think of all the things you can do right or wrong, Uber definitely got most of them right. There’s a few that they got wrong, but none of them are fatal. And I definitely see a correlation between how many things a company gets right and how fast a company grows.” What’s the most important thing a company can get right? “Having the right amount of equity held by the right people,” Camp says. “Your goal should be fairness.”
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LinkedIn Stock Dips 10% On Slowing Growth, Even As It Beats Q1 Estimates On Sales of $324.7M; EPS $0.45
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
has just Q1 earnings of $324.7 million, up 72% year-on-year, and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.45, both soundly beating analysts’ estimates (via First Call) of $317 million and EPS of $0.31; as well as LinkedIn’s own guidance from last quarter, when it said it expected between $305 million and $310 million in revenues. Net income for Q1 was $22.6 million a big rise on the $5.0 million in earnings last year. Nevertheless, shares of the work-focused social network, however, are in after-hours trading on news that next quarter won’t be quite as rosy. First Call had estimated revenues of Q2 of $359 million, but today LinkedIn issued guidance that it expects sales of between $342 million and $347 million. That’s up between 50% and 52% on the same quarter a year ago, and is a sign of how growth is slowing. This slide from the earnings presentation says everything about the company’s revenue decline: The company says it now has 225 million users, up from 200 million last quarter. Judging by some of the product launches in the last few weeks it may have been that LinkedIn is laying the groundwork for how it will better monetize the users it has longer term as other revenue streams and customer acquisition decelerate. The new launches have included upgraded, more media-enhanced ; a to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new ; an expanded ; ; ; and a redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical. Here is how different divisions of the company have performed this past quarter: revenue was $184.3 million, up 80% over last year. Talent Solutions revenue was 57% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2013, versus 54% last year. revenue was $74.8 million, up 56% compared to the first quarter of 2012. Marketing Solutions revenue declined by 2 percentage points to make up 23% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2013. products revenue was $65.6 million, up 73% compared to the first quarter of 2012. It remained level at 20% of total revenue for Q1. The U.S. remains the biggest market for the company, with $201.4 million in revenue, 62% of the total. That’s the same proportion as the previous quarter, and has generally been declining over the last several years. International markets sales were $123.3 million. LinkedIn continues to have a heavy amount of its sales coming from its “field sales channel”: $184 million compared to $140.7 million online. Field sales, involving actual people, are more costly for LinkedIn and so the company will likely be trying to increase its online sales in quarters ahead to improve earnings as growth slows. We’re just about to listen to the call and will update with details from there.
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Heads Up! Game From Impending Shows How Branded Can Be Beautiful
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
A new game today available for iOS devices called provides an entertaining experience you could only have with a smartphone, with a simple game mechanic and a video sharing feature that means the fun can last well beyond the initial play period. The game also features a big brand tie-in, as it was made by Clear app developer Impending for Ellen DeGeneres, and featured on her show. It’s a content marketing play, but one that’s extremely well-executed and features a light touch on the branding side of things. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PO_ezpX7DwY?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] The mechanics of Heads Up! are simple, and resemble the “who am I?” style party games where players put cards with a famous person’s name on their foreheads and have others act out who they are. The words appear on virtual cards in the smartphone version, and you hold the phone screen out on your forehead, while the other player acts out whatever term or phrase is displayed. Tilting your head up activates the phone’s gyroscopic sensor, skipping to the next card, and tilting it down moves to the next one when you get a correct guess. The camera captures that on video, too, and they can then share that video directly to the Ellen DeGeneres show, where they’re uploaded to the Heads Up! Facebook fan page. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQJIWqR58Eg?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360] I spoke to Impending co-founder Phill Ryu, who explained that with this app, the pieces just came together correctly to build something that’s both a great gaming experience on its own, and a great way for the Ellen Show to associate itself with a really fun, quality game that people truly enjoy playing. After a discussion with some of the show’s producers, Impending quickly prototyped a version and then pitched that to the Ellen team, who loved the game. It made sense then for the two to bring it to the public together. Ryu says that creating brand tie-in experiences is something Impending has found it does well. “I think it’s something we are good at, in terms of expressing a brand as a mobile experience,” he said. It’s a kind of a jigsaw puzzle where they give you some pieces you need to use, and we like cutting out perfectly matching pieces to finish it up. But at the end of the day it’s not some strategy we’re pursuing either, we were just approached by cool partners with a project we found personally exciting. That’s the only pattern really in our projects, if it all lines up we tend to jump at it.” For media brands that are potentially finding they need new ways to access and engage audiences that spend more time on mobile devices and less on traditional delivery vehicles like TVs, app-based content marketing is a promising new trend. What Ryu and Impending have achieved with Heads Up! is a pretty near perfect conception of how that should work, since it puts the experience first and ties in the brand component only organically where it fits, instead of plastering it all over the place like some kind of garish overcoat. That’s why even though the app is a paid one at $0.99, it doesn’t feel like you’re buying an ad as it can with some movie and TV show tie-in games. We’ll see if this starts a trend of more brands embracing a lighter touch with more lasting potential in favor of trying settling for a quick bump in visibility from a sloppy, more obvious approach.
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“In The Studio,” Sutter Hill’s Sam Pullara Carves His Own Path From Technologist To Venture Capitalist
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Semil Shah
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
TechCrunch Those who know in the Valley know the name . Whether it was his time as a repeat entrepreneur and technical founder, or stints as an EIR at some of the Valley’s most premier venture capital firms, or his time as a lead technologist at two of the tech companies in the Valley (most recently at Twitter), Pullara has occupied nearly every seat at the table throughout his career. Now, after leaving Twitter and after years of being an angel investor, Pullara has moved himself and his blog, , over to the venture capital side as a of in Palo Alto, a firm which started back in the early 1960s and has focused on in SaaS, infrastructure, and other fundamental technologies. I invited Pullara into the Studio because he isn’t the type to seek out attention, and I let the cameras run longer to capture the full arc of his career. He has started two companies, both of which were acquired, has been an EIR and consultant with Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, was the Chief Scientist at Yahoo!, and most recently was part of a small, senior team that helped rebuild Twitter’s codebase. In this discussion, Pullara details his career moves, what he learned being a technical operator, a technical founder, and now a venture capitalist (including angel investments), with the hopes of providing an example for many engineers out there today starting out in their careers. Specifically, Pullara touches on how his technical ability gave him C-level access to company leaders to pitch solutions directly to them. On a different track, he also (honestly) explains his lessons as an angel investor and shares details into the unique capital and LP structure of Sutter Hill Ventures, where he is now investing into the next wave of technology startups.
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Lumu Is A Digital Light Meter For Photographers That Plugs Into Your iPhone & Tells You What Camera Settings To Use
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
Meet : a digital light meter for photographers that plugs into the iPhone’s headphone jack as a smaller and smarter replacement for traditional analogue light meters. It’s used in conjunction with Lumu’s app — being demoed in prototype here at hardware alley at Disrupt NY — to help photographers figure out the best camera settings for their current location. Lumu is not going to help you take better photos on your iPhone — it’s a tool for standalone cameras that have ISO, aperture and shutter speed parameters that can be manually set. The startup, which hails from Slovenia in Europe, plans to kick off a Kickstarter funding campaign in about a month. The Lumu device will cost $99. “It’s the world’s smartest light meter,” says co-founder Benjamin Polovic. “The existing light meters are large, bulky and very expensive. With Lumu, the main processing is done on the iPhone, so we use the iPhone’s power. It also doesn’t use any batteries, it’s powered from the iPhone. “You take your iPhone or your iPod and plug it in and it’s going to recognise it, and it sets all of the parameters for your unique environment. So you put in your ISO that you use in your film or your digital camera, the aperture you want to use and then it calculates the time.” The photographer then needs to manually input the suggested settings into their camera but Polovic says the group is thinking about making a Bluetooth dongle so settings can be wirelessly sent to a digital camera. “We’re excited to get some ideas from Kickstarter when the campaign launches,” he added. As well as showing the light level and exposure value for the current lighting conditions, the app lets users store pre-sets for individual geotagged locations so they can easily revisit them later. It will also include an auto mode, and a filter-style feature that will tell users how to achieve effects such as bokeh (background blur). Polovic said Lumu’s hope is to inspire more people to start digging down into their camera settings. “We love photography, we want to make it better, we want to introduce it to people who don’t necessarily know how to use cameras because they are quite complex. We want to make it simple,” he says. The startup has been developing Lumu for about four to five months, according to Polovic. Down the line, it plans to launch an SDK so developers can create other apps using the light sensor — giving the example of an app that wakes the iPhone’s owner when it starts getting light, for instance.
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Is Google Getting Serious About Gaming? Noah Falstein Hired As Chief Game Designer
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
Well, what do we have here? Somewhat under the radar, Google has hired the computer games veteran Noah Falstein to the position of Chief Game Designer. Yes, that’s right, the search giant, not normally known for its games development, appears to have a major gaming project in circulation, at least something that requires someone as experienced as Falstein at its helm. What that might be we can only speculate. A Google Glass-related augmented-reality game seems a possibility, though there could be something even more going on, given Falstein’s areas of interest. For those who aren’t familiar with his work, according to his Falstein’s been in the computer games industry since 1980, spanning companies such as LucasArts, 3DO, and Dreamworks Interactive, and is the designer behind a number of hit titles. He most recently ran his own consultancy, The Inspiracy, which offered companies help on game design, development and business, as well as being a regular on the lecture and speaking circuit. Ever influential, so perhaps not so surprising that he’s wound up at Google. On his LinkedIn , his new title is “Chief Game Designer” at Google, joining sometime in April 2013. No further details are provided. Intriguingly, however, an earlier version has the position down as “Chief Game Designer at Android Play Studio.” That, of course, points to something Android-related, even if — as one industry insider noted when I asked around — Google’s mobile OS seems to be doing just fine games-wise without the need for a dedicated Android Chief Game Designer within the company. Were Google to be working on a new game (or games) led by Falstein, it wouldn’t be an entirely new avenue. It already has the mysterious Niantic Labs, , a real-time augmented reality MMO for Android, so perhaps there’s a connection there. Or maybe a similar concept but for Google Glass. Finally, if we zoom out further and think a bit more laterally, a major interest of Falstein is the field of “Serious Games,” which he as “Using Games, Game Technology, or Game Industry Techniques for a purpose other than pure entertainment.” The list of Serious Games projects Falstein has been involved in spans anything from using game techniques to improve health and education, to financial projections. In other words, weighty stuff. Or, dare I say, very Google.
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With A Widespread Launch Looming, Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox OS Simulator 3.0
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
Mozilla was keen to talk up the 3.0 version of its Firefox OS simulator , but didn’t have much to share about when eager developers could start fiddling with it. Thankfully for HTML5 buffs, that six-week quiet period is over — the team just announced on the official that the newly updated simulator is now available to download. All of the features that appeared in are accounted for — think support for rotating displays and a mock geolocation API for testing location-aware apps — but the simulator suite has been polished a bit since we last saw it. Most of those tweaks are housekeeping changes: the size of the download has been reduced, which has led to snappier boot times, and the simulator now supports common OS shortcuts like Cmd + Q to shut down, but the simulator has also been updated to run newer versions of Firefox OS and the Gaia user interface layer. With that said, prospective Firefox OS developers will probably use one simulator feature more than any other: the ability to push work-in-progress applications to connected test devices. Mozilla and its hardware partners Huawei, LG, and ZTE (who showed off at Mobile World Congress) have been pointing to device launches in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela later this year, but the quality of the experiences found on those phones will ultimately determine whether or not Firefox OS flops. Even so, strong early sales of Firefox OS developer devices may point to a promising official launch for the first set of consumer-facing phones later this year. Just look at Spanish hardware OEM startup Geeksphone — it began selling its Keon and Peak reference devices for $119 and $194, respectively, , and the company was forced to limit the number of handsets sold that on launch day so the 20-person team could keep up with shipping. That’s a promising start especially for a company as young as Geeksphones, but there’s no question that Firefox OS is going to face some serious competition in its launch markets. Android powers a staggering number of cheap smartphones, and Nokia has refocused its efforts to build low-cost devices based both on Windows Phone and the aging Series 40 OS. Meanwhile, persistent rumors of a low-cost iPhone continue to make the rounds — Firefox OS seemed like a novel option for new and adventurous smartphone owners when I first played with it, but we’ll have to see how the rest of the industry responds.
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Dextr, An Android Email Client For You And Your Friends
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Michael Seo
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
I hate using email. I get an average of 60 to 70 emails every day, and only one percent of them are from people I actually care about. Using email today is all about sifting through the clutter. is an app that helps you accomplish that by filtering your inbox to only include emails from your friends and family. Dextr is an email client for Android that functions a lot like Priority Inbox for Gmail, only it’s a standalone app. Once you’ve downloaded the app to your phone and signed into your email account, it presents you with a list of your contacts. Here you select your closest friends, family, or associates – basically, the people you’d actually want to receive email from. Once you’ve done that, Dextr only shows you emails from this list of persons who are important to you. So while Dextr won’t (and probably shouldn’t) be replacing Gmail as your primary email client on your Android phone, having your inbox stripped down to nothing more but your own personal interactions is strangely refreshing. I abhor all the crap that ends up in my inbox, and being presented with one made up only of emails that I would actually care to read just felt nice. This is what email used to be before it became a firehose. And yet, the fact that Dextr functions less like an email client and more like a messaging app says a lot of about how we use email today. The moment I opened up Dextr, I was struck with this sudden urge to start emailing my friends and having epic threaded conversations again. That’s where Dextr succeeds, but it falls short once I realize that this is in fact, email. I rarely if ever communicate with my friends via email anymore. Messaging apps, Twitter, and Facebook have pretty much taken over that space. And although Dextr has one of the prettiest interfaces I’ve ever seen in an Android app, email at the end of the day is still email. Dextr is a little strange. It’s too bare bones just yet to function as a fully realized email client. You can’t send attachments (only view and download the ones that are sent to you), and threaded conversations are still a no-go. On the other hand, it’s a beautiful app, and perfectly performs the function of filtering your inbox down to the people you care about. For me, that feature alone is enough to keep it on my phone. At least I won’t get any crap from my friends for accidentally grouping an email they sent to me along with my spam. Dextr is a .
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In the Wake Of Funding, Skimlinks Launches New Products To Face Off Opposition
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Mike Butcher
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 |
Last month , the platform that allows publishers full control over affiliate links and content monetization, a growth financing round led by Greycroft Partners and others, while expanding into Asia. This month it has new products to roll out, launching two major initiatives. The question is, how does it stand up to the competition? The first new product is called Showcases, which is a visual alternative to the in-line-text offering its had for some time. Showcases are ad units that sit alongside content and populate automatically based on the products mentioned in an article, geo-targeted to the user. It means publishers don’t have to manually add an image to illustrate an article, . Secondly, Fashion Engine, instead of identifying products that include model numbers or brand names, finds product references that use entirely normal English words, e.g. “Kim Kardashian was seen wearing a black leather dress.” This vertical-optimized semantic engine is thus aimed at fashion publishers, such as and . Alicia Navarro, co-founder and CEO, says competitors don’t offer these kinds of products: “Both VigLink and RewardStyle don’t offer an accurate automated in-text/near-text solution geared towards fashion publishers. It is really hard to do well in non-techy verticals, and we have built the means to do it, at scale, in real-time.” They also plan to expose the API behind this new service. It sounds bold but Navarro says they want to become the “Twilio of e-commerce with our path towards open APIs for all our products.” But competitors have a few words to say about these moves. When asked, Oliver Deighton, VP of marketing of , takes slight issue with this. He says VigLink Insert has been optimized since 2012 for over a dozen categories and the VigLink catalog API already enables publishers to “create custom and highly visual shopping experiences.” Oliver Krohne, Founder & CEO of says “Alicia is right that verticals beside tech are different as you don’t have proper names like “iphone” or “galaxy tab”… However, approaching the standard ad spaces means also facing harder competition in terms of CPM rates, which you receive from all ad networks or Adsense. So it will be a challenge to exceed those.” Navarro, however, has words for these guys. “VigLink Insert was launched a while after our SkimWords product, but their solution has never been real-time… and it is a simple word match solution, rather than ours which is a trained natural language processing engine… we don’t know of a single fashion site running VigLink Insert.” “YieldKit’s comments are true, some publishers do place us in standard ad unit places, but we encourage publishers to create new real estate for Showcases alongside content, rather than placing them in peripheral ‘ad’ spots. As we evolve Showcases we will weave in behavioural optimization and even richer content so we achieve comparable earnings to traditional ‘ads.'” Whatever the case, the race is on to capture this market, and Skimlinks seems to be making most of the running right now.
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MavenSay Enjoying Sudden Popularity In Social Media-Hungry Indonesia
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
, a social recommendation app, just got a surge of unplanned downloads coming from Indonesia, and its founders are moving quickly to include Southeast Asia in its expansion plans as a result. The company’s Toronto-based co-founder, Jesse Dallal, said the two-month old app got 100,000 downloads over the past fortnight. It has a total of 130,000 downloads so far, and the sudden surge was tracked back to a power user based in Indonesia. They’re not sure which one it is, but the source of traffic points to the country, he said. The way the app works is similar to , in that users follow other users’ recommendations. These could cover places they’ve eaten or music they’re listening to, for example. For its launch, MavenSay roped in what it called “influencers”—featured brands to follow such as Momofuku and . The Indonesian user that triggered the downloads isn’t a celebrity that MavenSay had canvassed, but was clearly influential enough over his or her social network to move the downloads, said Dallal. “It’s been an unanticipated consequence of our [social] strategy,” he said, referring to the way things get viral on these recommendation platforms where people reblog items from influencers. “We’ve reached out to influencers in North America, but we’re also going to reach out to influencers in Asia now. We’re thinking of coming out there and talking to users to understand what the differences in culture and usage might be,” he said. MavenSay has seven people, including its three co-founders Dallal, Mike Wagman and Bryan Friedman. The small company can’t be expected to have concrete plans for Asia yet, but seeding interest in one of the world’s fastest-growing, mobile-hungry countries may pay off eventually. According to mobiThinking, Indonesia has mobile subscribers, although those with data connections make up just 47.6 million, or 18 percent of that. And Indonesians have been quick to embrace social networking sites, with fierce loyalties once something sticks. Aged social network Friendster started to pivot towards Asia around 2008, when it realised that of its user base was coming from the region. While it was, by that time, lagging behind Facebook globally, some markets like Indonesia stayed loyal to Friendster. MavenSay has raised funding of $890,000 so far.
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Real-Time Parking Startup ParkMe Launches An Android App
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
Real-time parking startup wants to help find you parking — in real-time. The company, which originally started out on the Web, has been making a big push behind mobile apps, which is really smart, because most times when you’re looking for parking, you’re not on a PC, but you have a smartphone nearby. There was just one problem — this app to find parking spots in real-time was , so there were a whole bunch of people who couldn’t use it. And their real-time parking finding powers were thus severely impacted. ParkMe is trying to correct that, with the release of an Android app that provides parking help to even the most helpless among those seeking to find a place to put their cars. Android users will not only be able to find the closest parking for where they are now or where they happen to be going, but they’ll also be able to find the cheapest parking. And somewhere in between, maybe even the best value — the mythical “cheapest parking which is not so far away from their destination.” The app accomplishes that by showing relevant parking rates, hours of operation, payment types, and — for those of you who want to know exactly how many free spots are available in the potential parking garage of your choice — real-time occupancy information for garages and street parking. Oh, and did I mention the Android app was designed with the new Google maps API? Yeah, that too. ParkMe CEO and co-founder Sam Friedman told me that the company wanted to make sure the experience on iOS was finished before moving on to another platform. In part, that meant getting as much real-time parking data as possible. ParkMe is available in 28,000 locations, 1,800 cities, and 32 countries around the globe. That comes after it has struck partnerships with Amco and Amano McGann, which are two of the largest parking providers around. ParkMe has raised funding from Los Angeles-based private equity firm Angeleno Group, as well as IDG Ventures and Fontinalis Partners, the investment firm co-founded by Ford Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr.
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Aiming To Dominate Mobile Ad Attribution, HasOffers Raises $9.4M Round Led By Accel
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
, a startup that helps mobile app developers see which ad efforts are actually paying off, is announcing that it has raised a $9.4 million round of funding led by . The company was founded in 2009 — the product that it initially built, and the one that’s still highlighted on , is a system that helps ad networks and agencies manage their performance-based programs. (Those agencies and ad networks include Bucksense, Tapjoy, and Sponsorpay.) However, CEO Peter Hamilton said the team realized that mobile advertisers were facing a similar problem, so called , allowing developers to see where app installs, engagement, and purchases actually come from. So as publishers run ad campaigns, they can see which social networks, publishers, and ad networks are giving them the best results, and they can adjust their efforts accordingly. Rich Wong, the Accel partner who’s joining the HasOffers board, definitely sounded more excited about the mobile side of the business when I spoke to him today. (Wong’s past investments include Google-acquired AdMob and Angry Birds-maker Rovio.) He said “some of the biggest spenders in the Accel portfolio, people who are on the cutting edge of doing customer acquisition,” such as HotelTonight, Spotify, and Trulia, were already using MobileAppTracking. (Other customers include Yahoo, Zynga, Pandora and Square.) Wong also argued that the company is part of a broader shift in mobile advertising. He said the industry’s first phase was the early “walled garden” period, followed by a second stage dominated by ad networks like AdMob, Quattro (acquired by Apple), and Millennial (now public). The third, current phase is all about the shift to programmatic buying — in Wong’s words, “the machines are taking over.” In this phase, developers are running campaigns with a wide range of different sources, so they need a better attribution system. And that system needs to be independent of any of the existing ad networks, so it can measure all sources of traffic effectively. After all, Wong said, many networks have their own attribution systems, and while they might work fine, publishers probably don’t feel entirely confident that AdMob’s can report accurately about one of its competitors, or vice versa. That point about independence came up repeatedly during our conversation, with Wong emphasizing that HasOffers is a software business, not a company that’s selling ads. “One of the reasons we’re able to do what we do with over 150 ad networks and publishers is that we’re not competitive with them,” Hamilton added. Until now, Hamilton said HasOffers has been bootstrapped and profitable, with 79 employees, so it didn’t necessarily need the money. At the same time, he said the mobile ad tracking product has really taken off: “We saw an opportunity to put our stake in the ground as the attribution analytics platform, and we didn’t want it to pass us by.” For now, that means continuing to invest heavily in the technology and product side of the business. In addition to Accel, RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Founder’s Co-op partner Chris Devore also invested. (Glaser and Devore are both based in Seattle, as is HasOffers.) Even though HasOffers is a bit older than your normal Series A company, and even though Accel has a separate fund for investing in bootstrapped, mature companies, this specific investment came from Accel’s early-stage fund: “Even though it has characteristics of a ‘growth-stage business’, we looked at it as an early-stage Series A.”
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Founders Fund Backs Its First Food Tech Startup, Hampton Creek Foods, With A $1M Investment
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
, the firm founded by Peter Thiel and other PayPal executives, that it wants to back companies with big, ambitious visions (not just dinky web startups). And that description certainly fits , a startup that wants to move the world from animal-based foods by creating alternatives that are genuinely tastier, healthier, and cheaper. Founder and CEO Josh Tetrick told me that he just closed a $1 million round from the firm. It’s Founders Fund’s first food tech investment, he said — which seems to be true, judging from the portfolio companies listed on . Hampton Creek previously raised $2 million from Khosla Ventures. The startup recently launched its first product, Beyond Eggs, a plant-based egg replacer for baked goods and other food products. I actually , where I saw the labs for testing different plant-based proteins, the kitchen where the company’s cooks stress test the products, and yes, tasted some mayonnaise and cookies created with Beyond Eggs (you can see a video of the tour below). The broader vision is to launch other plant-based alternatives. By the way, we took , including and . ( , an arm of the Thiel Foundation.)
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Google Checkout Nixed In Favor of Google Wallet
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
Google Checkout is being sunsetted as the company focuses on shaping Google Wallet into a viable PayPal rival. Google Commerce today that Google Checkouts will be retired on November 20. Google suggests that merchants who do not have their own payment processing transition to , or , which are offering discounted rates for Google Checkout users. U.S. merchants who do have their own payment processing can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy. Developers selling through Google properties will automatically transition to the Google Wallet Merchant Center in the next few weeks. News of Google Checkout’s demise comes a week after , all designed to attack PayPal’s dominance from different angles by leveraging several of Google’s properties. These include storing payment credentials in Chrome to make it easier for consumers to checkout and reduce shopping cart abandonment; making Google Wallet available in the desktop version of Gmail; the , which is designed to streamline transactions for merchants selling physical goods and services; and the for merchants offering loyalty programs.
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With Site Ai, Automated Insights Provides A Cliffs Notes Version Of Your Web Analytics
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
, a startup that translates raw data into plain English, is launching a new product that could make analytics data a lot more accessible. The new product, called , pulls data from existing systems (it started with Google Analytics and Clicky, and the company is currently taking votes on which service to integrate next), then it summarizes that data in normal sentences. For example, it can create a daily or weekly report that will tell you how current traffic compares to past patterns, what referring sites are driving the most searches, what keywords are driving the most searches, and so on. (You can see a sample report near the end of this post.) Is it really all that difficult to get that information from Google Analytics? I don’t think so, but there’s still value in going that final step and distilling the data into bullet points that everyone can understand. (At TechCrunch, for example, all the writers have access to our analytics, but we still send out a weekly email summarizing the major trends, and I had to create a similar team email when I wrote for VentureBeat.) Automated Insights founder and CEO Robbie Allen in January criticizing the dashboard-based approach to analyzing data: The problem with dashboards is that they don’t directly provide insights or deliver knowledge about the data. Even worse, most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results. Unless the user knows something about the way a visualization is constructed, (e.g., X-axis, Y-axis, units, scale, etc.), the results can be difficult to understand. For a segment of your audience (arguably a small segment), requiring this level of analysis and interpretation is probably ok. However, this also means many users will be excluded from being able to get anything meaningful from the data (I refer to this group as data novices.) Put another way: With a Site Ai summary, you shouldn’t have to do too much thinking. As the company name implies, all of the summaries are automatically generated by Automated Insights’ technology, not people. Allen told me that’s a big challenge: “Turning data into text is difficult because it requires marrying two skills that traditionally don’t play well with each other: programming and writing.” The reason Allen said he can do it is because he has a background in both technology (he worked at Cisco and has degrees from MIT in computer science), but also in writing (he’s the author of ). The company is doing something unusual with the pricing too. It’s offering free sign-up for 60 days, but after that, the price will depend on how many people sign up. If there are more than 10,000 registered users at the end of the trial period, the price will only be $4 per user. So people who like the product have more incentive to tell their friends — Allen called it “viral pricing.” Beyond its new product, Automated Insights says it will produce 300 million personalized stories in this year for customers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and the Cleveland Indians. The company, formerly known as StatSheet, has .
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BeatDeck’s Free Analytics Show Musicians Who Their Fans Are
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from , a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow’s superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup. Everyone (who isn’t a cold-hearted robot) loves music. That’s led lots of entrepreneurs to start companies aiming to help listeners discover new artists and songs. But the fact is that selling music is a tough business. Selling what music to listen on someone else’s service is even tougher. BeatDeck is different. It does nothing for the listener. Zero consumer products. Instead, it focuses solely on the music industry — the artists, the labels signing them, and the stores selling them. The first part of the equation launches today on BeatDeck.com. Artists sign up and connect their social media accounts like Soundcloud, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Last.fm. This lets them track their performance and compare it across channels, as well as see their fans’ age, gender, and location demographics. Artists also get fan influence and sentiment breakdowns thanks to reputation measurement and natural language processing. For even deeper analytics about their music, artists can share their songs to social networks through BeatDeck’s publishing system. This gives them a heatmap of which parts of their songs users are skiping to, pausing at, or rewinding to so they can listen again. Conversion metrics indicate which channels best turn listeners into fans, and where they’re getting reshared. It’s valuable data mosts indie rockers don’t have the skills or time to track by hand. It could tell them where to book their next tour date, which part of their song to pitch for commercials, and which social networks they should focus on. That’s phase one. Soon, BeatDeck will start selling enterprise licenses for its data to record labels and A&R departments (the people who decide which artists a label or management agency should sign). BeatDeck will let them monitor their artists and find new ones to catapult into fame. “We’re already in talks and worked out a couple of deals for enterprise solutions” says BeatDeck co-founder Josh Mangel. He explains that with just six big customers, which would have to include most of the big record labels, BeatDeck can be a sustainable business. “Sustainable business” isn’t what being a startup is all about, though. BeatDeck will need additional revenue streams to truly succeed. Luckily, I was able to squeeze out of Mangel that the company is working on making its data useful to online music stores. One day it could have iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon paying it to tell them whose music to recommend to you. BeatDeck could tell them that people who try to listen to screechy industrial dubstep hero , but pause 20-seconds in, should be recommended a lesser known artist like who is somewhat similar but easier to listen to. There are plenty of music stores out there that could benefit from these kind of insights. BeatDeck will be battling it out with fellow music analytics services Next Big Sound and Musicmetric. However, they charge artists to monitor their music, and most musicians can’t afford to pay. BeatDeck’s free analytics for artists could win it lots of sign-ups who will fill it with data it can sell. It’s going to be a long, hard road convincing independent musicians that they need analytics, and bundling their data into something lots of companies want to buy. In the end, the hope is that can help fledgling artists grow and get noticed by the bigwigs. Mangel concludes, “Right now the business isn’t really fair. Artists are not getting big because they’re talented, but because they’re backed by a lot of money. We want to make the music industry a meritocracy.”
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Yahoo’s Unwatchable Live Stream Proves Its Next Acquisition Should Be A Proper Video Platform
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
It’s easy to forget that Yahoo has had a long on-again-off-again love affair with online video. Remember , which kicked off the Mark Cuban Era? But you might not remember that, because other online video platforms long ago left Yahoo in the proverbial dust. Today, and Tumblr acquisition announcements, we were given a demonstration of why Yahoo has been left in the dust — and why it’s had to turn to acquisitions for help in, well, nearly every department. The event was nearly impossible to watch. Because, well, you know, Yahoo! As you’ve heard by now, Yahoo has been on an impressive buying spree over the last month — including, by the way, — snatching up a new company seemingly every week. But today, with the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, hoping to turn back the clock and gain access to Tumblr’s millions of young users. The company held a media event in New York City this afternoon to formally announce the acquisition — along with sharing the news that it will be moving into new digs in Times Square — but something was stealing the spotlight from Mayor Bloomberg and Marissa Mayer. And that would be Yahoo’s questionable video tech. Those who watched the event from home spent most of that time enjoying a hiccupy stream. Or none at all. You can see the error message above. The video-streaming technology is Yahoo’s own, running through Yahoo! Screen, first launched back in 2006, renamed Screen from Yahoo Video. With all the acquisitions Yahoo has been making of late, it makes one think that, for its next acquisition, Yahoo should go for some new video technology. Of course, after Tumblr, it may be broke. But, come on, Yahoo has somehow become the Rudy story of the tech industry. At the very least, someone should launch a Kickstarter page so that it can continue to make acquisitions.
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Yahoo Drops Flickr Pro To Compete With Facebook, Still Offers Two Paid Tiers For Ad Haters And Power Users
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
The bookend to — a major refresh of its photo sharing site Flickr — will see the company drop its Flickr Pro pricing tiers as part of a bid to compete better with Facebook/Instagram and the rest of the crowded market in the online photo space. But it is not getting rid of paid tiers altogether: it’s keeping an ad-free tier, called Ad Free, as well as a tier for power users, doublr, respectively priced at $49.99 and $499.99 for a year of use. The Ad Free service, at $49.99, will do away with the advertising the runs along the right side of the current photo feed — and if today’s discussion of what Yahoo intends to do with ads on Tumblr is any indication, ads that may be appearing soon within your photo streams. The doublr service (again with those dropped vowels… this had to have played some small role in warming the company to buying Tumblr), priced at $499.99, gives users 1 terabyte of extra space, on top of the 1 terabyte that they will already get free as part of a Yahoo account. The Pro tiers — priced at $6.95 for three months, $24.95 for 12 months and $44.95 for two years — included unlimited uploads and storage, as well as no ads, and a particularly mean-spirited allowance: those who did upload pictures could download more than just a smaller version of them. (Meaning: those who didn’t pay up wouldn’t get the full copies until they did. Their originals have always been stored by Flickr.) From what we understand from a person close to Flickr, dropping Pro isn’t going to make much difference to the company because Pro never did very well. “It has always been a relatively small percentage of the overall user base,” our contact says, adding that while now-distant past CEO Terry Semel had made a big push on premium services, after his departure (and actually during his time) there was “virtually no investment made” in trying to develop or push the Pro tier. Nevertheless, there are now currently Pro users wondering how exactly Yahoo will be them for the rest of their annual subscriptions. Yahoo that as part of the changes it will be removing “pro” badges beside people’s names and people can no longer gift pro subscriptions. Strangely, in a bit of an move, Yahoo says it will continue to offer renewable subscriptions to pro to “Recurring Pro users.” The Pro tier did have another role to play. Today, CEO Marissa Mayer recounted how the small-image download was what prompted her to rethink Flickr altogether. “When we looked across our services we asked, why are we doing that? That started a thought experiment,” she said. The decision was that Flickr no longer wanted to offer “degraded” images. “We keep your images and you have high resolution images everywhere which is a huge differentiator.” But in the age of Dropbox, BitTorrent, Mega and more, there are so many places to store pictures online today: will anyone really want to pay such a premium price for that place to be Flickr and Yahoo? In any case, as one person has , why users wouldn’t just register for two accounts rather than pay for the extra space? In the meantime, Flickr users are taking a page from the Tumblr book of user reviews, and about the changes over here.
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 2 | null |
Flickr Gets A Huge Revamp With Hi-Res Image-Filled UI, New Android App, And 1TB Of Free Storage
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
The is . Smack-dab in the middle of , Yahoo is holding a major press event here in NYC. But announcements coming out of this event aren’t related to Tumblr as much as Flickr, the photo-sharing database and social network acquired by Yahoo in March of 2005 for $35 million. Today, Flickr gets a huge revamp including a totally new look and feel, focused on three different things. First, there are no more bits of text or blue links, but rather a grid layout of huge pictures in full resolution. Second, stemming from the updated iOS app recently, which yielded 25 percent more uploads, the company is also announcing a brand new Android experience, catching the Google version of the Flickr app up to the iOS version. Finally, Flickr looks to get even “biggr.” The company is expanding storage for your photos, by quite a bit. Flickr is offering 1 terabyte of free storage for every Flickr user. Yahoo made it clear that no other Internet company in the world offers a free terabyte of storage. That’s the equivalent of 537,731 photos. In terms of the UI redesign, the new photostream has a justified format grid layout, complete with a header photo and a Timeline-style profile for users. On the top left, next to the photostream button, you can also click into Favorites and Sets. But what are photos without sharing? Users have an easy share button to send photos out on any of their favorite social networks, including Tumblr. Most importantly, Flickr has fiddled with the picture page to give a black background and a fullscreen image for every single photo page. The site has been revamped to give easy-click access to the next photo in the set or photostream, even in full-screen mode. Adam Cahan, SVP of Mobile and Emerging products at Yahoo, announced that Flickr currently has 89 million users who have shared over 8 billion photos. That’s a lot of pictures. Mayer explained that most of the changes happening at Yahoo concerns users’ daily habits, which explains why the company has put so much focus on the Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo mail, and the Yahoo weather app. In a number of ways, these products are energized and enhanced by photos. [gallery ids="820045,820035,820032,820031,820029,820028"] Yahoo’s, and particularly Marissa Mayer’s, tweaks to its overall service and the Flickr experience has helped build out both platforms, but there are still questions over Flickr’s ability to generate revenue and, perhaps more importantly, compete with photo-sharing behemoth Instagram. It’s worth noting the timing here: Yahoo just bought out one of the biggest and most popular blogging platforms around, and Flickr is a huge resource for blogs in general. But how will Yahoo integrate the two to build out use of both and make both experiences more seamless? “We have a nice set of the creator brands,” said Mayer. “Photographers and writers. With that, there is natural set of opportunities that arise between Flickr and Tumblr and we’ll deal with that as it comes.” Alongside Flickr’s product announcement news, Mayer revealed that the company would be in Times Square, in the New York Times building, which will hold all 500 employees based in NY, along with room for expansion to 200 more employees.
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Flickr Announces One Free Terabyte Of Storage Space Per User, Officially Beating Everyone
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service is now offering one full terabyte for users, enough storage space to hold whole swathes of the world’s photos. The service is offering this benefit in addition to its full resolution photo storage service. While the average user will probably not touch the outer limits of this storage space in a lifetime, this alone is probably enough to draw dedicated photographers to the service and, more important, bring lapsed users back to the Yahoo fold. This move is important. Given the odd nature of most photo sharing services, you are either limited to a few dozen gigabytes or, in the case of Instagram and other mobile services, an unstated upper limit that is not part of the marketing collateral. While I don’t doubt that Google or Facebook could make the terabyte claim in the near future, being first to market with this particular feature is an important milestone. This move is quite clearly a play by Yahoo to make its wares relevant. The long-beleaguered Flickr has at once enthralled and frustrated pro users with claims of abandonment by the web giant. As Marissa Mayer noted in her presentation, this is about “bringing lifetimes of beauty into Flickr.” It’s also about convincing casual photographers to trust Flickr as a universal shoebox for their old snaps – a lucrative and surprisingly important thing to be.
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Yahoo Sets Up Shop In Times Square For Its 500 New York Employees (But Not The Tumblr Team)
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
Today has been quite a roller coaster ride for Yahoo — the company put days of reports and rumors to rest this morning when it confirmed that it would acquire the , and now CEO Marissa Mayer has confirmed that Yahoo’s New York employees will now be moving. They’ll all soon be working right around the corner from Times Square in the same building that used to house the New York Times (229 West 43rd Street, to be more specific). The move is meant to unite the nearly 500 Yahoo employees that are currently split among three existing locations in New York City, though Mayer made it very clear that the newly acquired Tumblr team wouldn’t be folks roped into working out of the central office — David Karp and the rest of the team will continue to work out of their 10th floor office near Gramercy Park. This whole thing is reminiscent of Mayer’s edict that saw the end of remote working for long-time Yahooligans. In a memo issued by Yahoo human resources head Jackie Reses back earlier this year, it was revealed the brass though that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.” While that’s unlikely to be the case here, Mayer has shown herself to be a vocal proponent of the sort of work that can be done by bringing employees together, and it seems the Yahoo New York team is only slated to grow from there. Just before New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took the podium to deliver a few remarks, Mayer noted that the space the team will soon move into can hold an additional 200 or so people, and a post on the official (that was fast) indicated that the company wants to pump up its New York staff “by up to 60 percent.” Of course, this isn’t the only news that Mayer and company have in store for us this evening — some prominent Flickr signage means that there’s some product news in the pipeline as well. Mayer just pulled back the curtain on the , and it is .
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Inside Microsoft’s ‘Geek 2 Chic’ Fashion Show, Where Tech Types Strike A Pose For Charity [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
These models weren’t the types you’d see at fashion shows in New York or Milan: took 26 “geeks” from the local tech community and gave them full makeovers to take to the catwalk in front of a live audience. It was a fun opportunity to watch people get a little out of their element and have some fun, and of course it was all for a good cause. Check it all out in the video above.
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Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Mayfield Fund’s Navin Chaddha
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Mayfield Fund Managing Director in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or and we’ll ask them during the show. Chaddha is a serial entrepreneur turned VC, and founded vXTtreme while at Stanford, which was then acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media. At Mayfield, Chaddha focused on consumer, enterprise and energy tech investments and has helped lead the firm’s investments in Appcelerator, Bharat Matrimony (India), Brighter, CloudVelocity, Fab, Gigya, MapR Technologies, Poshmark, ShineOn (China), SwiftStack, Tejas Networks and WideOrbit. We’re interested to hear Chaddha’s view on what opportunities are available for building companies in the post-PC and post-server era. Considering his investments in both cloud and mobile startups, he’ll be able to share his perspective on which technologies will be disruptive. Please send us your or put them in the comments below!
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AngelPad-Backed DroneDeploy Wants To Help You Manage Your Legion Of Drones
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Greg Kumparak
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
The valley has a bit of a thing for drones lately — have you noticed? Airware, which builds brains for , just raised $10.7M. Longtime Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson on his DIY drone company, having raised $5 million. Even Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson what he’d do with a drone of his own. Later this week at the AngelPad demo day, another drone-centric company will make its debut: . Unlike the rest of the lot, DroneDeploy doesn’t want to drones, or even the parts that go inside. They want to make the software that companies use to their drones. Now, remember: we’re talking about drones, here, not military drones. The drones that the Valley has a budding interest in are the type that might, say, scan our gas infrastructure for leaks, deliver your lunch, or search for stranded skiers in the Alps — not the kind that shoot you from 1,000 feet above. DroneDeploy, for example, is already working with teams scanning for pirates off the coast of Sierra Leone, and delivering medical supplies in West Africa. As we’ve discussed in-depth before, . DroneDeploy is a web-based drone control and management platform. (Let that last sentence serve as a friendly reminder that we live in the friggin’ future.) Their goal is to be compatible with as many different popular drones as possible, providing their owners with things like: The way DroneDeploy sees it, there will be two big sectors in the commercial drone world: those who make the drones and those who make the software that manages said drones. By launching into beta now — about two years before the U.S. government is requiring the FAA to open up U.S. airspace to commercial drones — they’re looking to conquer that second sector right off the bat. The commercial drone market is , and that’s before it’s really even gotten started. Generally when I write about a company rolling out their beta signups, I do so with the expectation that we’ll flood their signup page with more users than they know what to do with. Given that most TechCrunch readers probably don’t have a legion of drones waiting at their behest, though, I assume that won’t be the case here. If you have a drone or 10 that need managing, however, you can sign up for ‘s beta here. [gallery ids="819962,819963,819964,819965" exclude="819959"]
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Square Cash Will Let You Send Money To Your Friends By Email
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
Square’s not just for businesses apparently, as an invite-only page for a product called “Square Cash” has popped up. Not many details are known about it, but we’ve reached out to the company for comment. A Square representative sent us the following statement on Square Cash: “We’re excited to share Square Cash with our friends. We’ll continue to invite others to try it out in the coming weeks.” shows an email to a friend with a $25 payment, with a Square email address in the CC line: There’s only the promise of email sending at this point, but you can imagine that this could become a permanent part of Square’s native apps at some point. This approach is similar to other personal payment solutions, like and PayPal. Google wants you to . Even . You can view the page right now, and that’s it. Sending money to friends is a social experience that really hasn’t been cracked yet, and it makes complete sense that a service like Square step up to take the crown. The space is officially hot again. The page promises that you can send money directly to someone’s debit card, even if they’re not signed up for Square. They’ll be given a link to attach a debit card with their first received payment, which serves as a fantastic way to onboard new Square users: The invites are being controlled by the company, not even allowing you to enter your email address. There’s also a set up for the “Cash” product already, sharing that it will cost the sender $0.50 per transaction and will be free for recipients. You’ll both get receipts for each transaction. The company says on the page: “Square Cash is the easiest way to send money to anyone, using just email and your debit card.” The company just announced a , but Square clearly wants to be in all of our pockets…and bank accounts. While it’s hard to decrypt CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets and vines, Square Cash might have been the reason for this recent little celebration: [tweet https://twitter.com/jack/status/336557531600154624] We’ll let you know when we get our invites, but it seems like those close to Square and Twitter are getting first crack: [tweet https://twitter.com/Wayne/status/336579682147373056]
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Welcome To Laptop Week
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
Laptops are the new desktops. While you can buy a solid tower PC for about $500, this price represents how little manufacturers care about the desktop world. Barring a few huge gaming rigs, laptops are where it’s at. We have been arguably remiss in avoiding formal laptop reviews and so we’re trying to remedy that with a series we’re calling Laptop Week. This week we will focus on some of the best laptops available today alongside a few gems that popped up over the past year or so. We will run the gamut from Chromebooks to Windows 8 and take a few detours on the way. You can read all of our and feel free to contact me if you’d like to see us look at anything in particular on the market or in the laptops we’re testing. Look for a few Laptop Week posts per day, starting with an amazing Ubuntu laptop that I think could easily replace a MacBook Air for those in the right frame of mind. We’ve created a quick and easy rating method for each laptop we address and take into consideration the needs of designers, entrepreneurs, and programmers. Because you mostly don’t care about speeds and feeds, these will be high-level assessments of each laptop from a practical perspective. Welcome to . We hope you enjoy your stay.
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Laptop Week Review: The Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition With Ubuntu
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John Biggs
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
Dude, you got a Linux-powered Dell! In all the years I’ve reviewed laptops I’ve never been as pleasantly surprised by an Ultrabook as I was with the Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition. This ultrathin, ultralight SSD laptop originally came in Windows flavor but, much to my surprise, I far prefer the Ubuntu edition of this device. It is solidly built, acceptably priced given the solid state drive, and surprisingly powerful. I’ve been using some form of POSIX-compliant operating system for over a decade but I must admit that I have been remiss in my Ubuntu installations. Whereas I was once a KDE kid with some Gnome leanings, my distro knowledge stopped at about Mandrake and picked up again as Ubuntu began its rise to glory. That said, I was curious to see what Linux looks like these days. In short, it looks great. The laptop itself is well-made. An aluminum top and pane of Gorilla Glass protects the 13-inch screen and it weighs a little less than 3 pounds. The entire package is self-contained, solid, and quite portable. The laptop, codenamed Sputnik, is a concerted effort by Dell to make sure everything on the device works well. It includes a number of Dell-specific packages – – but it supports most updates to the OS and attendant software and seamlessly upgraded to the latest version, 13.04, on top of the stock 12.04 Dell provides. If you haven’t used Linux on a desktop you’ll be surprised at how uneventful it is. Everything “just works,” from the camera to the disk encryption to the update downloads, and there is little of the traditional futzing around with scripts and drivers when attempting to add hardware or fix broken peripherals. As a non-power-user who once wrote a script to re-initialize my audio chip every time I woke my computer from sleep, it was a pleasure to see the XPS 13 boot up without issue and worked quite seamlessly with most devices I tried with it. Arguably, with only two USB ports (one 3.0, one 2.0) and a DisplayPort jack, you’re not going to be adding much to the mix.
The GeekBench score for this particular model hovered at around 5,500, which is solid performance. The MacBook Air, for example, gets about 6,600 on a good day and the Core i7 hits about 7,000 although it can top out at about 10,000 depending on the machine. 5,500, while not ideal, is still solid. The laptop lasted for 7 hours of standard use, about par for the course for a laptop of this size. Using the laptop was a dream. I was able to set up my environment quite quickly and seamlessly and after a few hours I quickly picked up a workflow that allowed me to write, edit photos, and post from the field. The lack of an SD card was quite disheartening, to be sure, but an external dongle helped me make short work of that issue. I used GIMP to crop and resize photos, Vim to edit my posts and writing, and connected to web-based versions of my favorite cloud services if I needed access to files or social media. The best part about the XPS 13 Developers Edition, however, is Dell’s own support offerings. It’s clear that releasing an Ubuntu into the wild without good support would be suicide for the product. To that end, the company is offering one year of “ProSupport” that includes round-the-clock North American tech support and next-day on-site servicing. While Dell Hell is still a fresh memory in my mind, at least, this offering is more in line with corporate support than end-user Windows management.
. Unless you’re a GIMP master, this probably isn’t the laptop for you. To be fair it’s surprisingly thin and light but it has no SD card slot, making it a hard sell for the designers among you. Working solely on the web? Sure, you could feasibly get away with doing a little CSS or HTML on this thing, but you’re probably better served with a laptop running more photo-editing applications. Writers will also be a little put off by the lack of native support for some of their tools. However, if you’re a markdown/plain text editor kind of person, this laptop connected with a revision control system could be a winner. It obviously depends on your workflow and, although I was able to pick it up fairly quickly, Ubuntu might not be the place to look for absolute ease-of-use. . To paraphrase Justin Timberlake, a laptop isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? An Ubuntu laptop. While you may annoy most of your co-workers with your insistence on running LibreOffice, this laptop is more than enough to run a few spreadsheets on and, in addition, build a business with. Seamless connectivity to most cloud services is a large benefit and thanks to app you can quickly and easily spin up nodes with a few keystrokes. Best of all, you’re not going to be another me-too entrepreneur with a MacBook Air and a dream (and you don’t have to use Windows 8), which is a great feeling . This is a more-than-capable programmer’s machine and all of the care Dell put into this laptop really helps it shine as a developer’s device. For example, Dell has added Profile Tool, a method for “cloning” a workspace between laptops. This allows you to manage dependencies, preferred system tools, and tool chains. An that these Profiles could become a way to “share” setups between programmers as well as a method to see how programming “superstars” have set up their machines. In short, Dell wants to make it clear that they care about developers with this device. It doesn’t get much cooler than the XPS 13 – and that’s high praise coming from an unreformed Apple addict. While I’m not sure this would become my everyday carry laptop, I could definitely see it replacing a similarly outfitted Windows machine and, if I ever felt the need to go when it comes to encryption, open software, and paranoia, this is the device I’d choose.
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Last Call For Pitch Applications To The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off. Also, Get Tickets Here!
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Jordan Crook
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 |
10 days, people! in just ten days from now, with our legendary Meetup + Pitch-off series. The magic started in New York this year, with a hugely successful pitch-off, an amazing turn-out and lots of fun memories. So we’re heading out on the open road with the event, which includes a networking meetup as well as a 60-second pitch-off competition with awesome prizes. Over the course of the year, we’ll be hitting up Boston, San Diego, and Seattle, but the first stop on our journey is in the great state of Texas. Austin, are you ready? The will be held at promptly at 6pm on May 30, and will come to a close around 10pm. Tickets include booze (21 and older please), live entertainment in the form of that 60-second pitch-off contest, and there will even be some prizes and a fireside chat with a local Austin luminary, Bijoy Goswami. Tickets to the event are selling out quickly, so if you’d like to come hang out with myself, John Biggs, Matt Burns, and your local tech community, . Speaking of time running out… Entrepreneurs, this is your last call for applications to the 60-second pitch-off. First place in the pitch-off will receive a table in Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013. Second Place will receive two tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt, and Third Place will receive one ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Companies selected to participate in the pitch-off will also meet with TC staffers for one-on-one office hours sessions to discuss the product and pitch. Up to the challenge? Our was quite the success. PaddleYou was spotted in Hardware Alley after coming in third at the Pitch-Off, while runners up and winner both made it into the Disrupt Battlefield. C’mon! How can it be a great time? We’re looking forward to seeing you there!
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David Karp’s Dilemma
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
As the Tumblr/Yahoo deal continues to be , and the world gears up for is being announced Monday morning, Tumblr founder is probably having a very interesting weekend. It’s likely, in between multiple discussions with his board members and Marissa Mayer, that he’ll take a break, like a walk or something, to gather his thoughts. On this walk (or jog or glass of wine at a bar), he will likely mull over two main outcomes. He could take Yahoo’s money, whether it be the $1.1 billion that the board is trying to approve giving him, or the more that he negotiates. Or, well, not. If he took Yahoo’s money, he would join the Billion Dollar Exit Club — you know, the ranks of Kevin Systrom, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen from YouTube, the PayPal mafia, Tony Hseih, James Clark, Marc Andreessen, etc. He would be considered “successful” by the Valley’s ridiculous standards and everyone else’s, not Zuckerberg successful, but definitely successful. Maybe he’d buy a nice house in Presidio Heights for when he has to be on the West Coast, and fill it with art and an apartment in Chelsea? [And maybe a vacation home for his family. And maybe a plane.] He’d still oversee the Tumblr product at Yahoo, at least until his lockup expired, and and maybe they wouldn’t … But the game would be over. The race would be in its cool-down period. Still, a pretty chill life overall. Especially in this economy. What would Kevin Systrom do? Sell. But with this, just like with the Instagram sale, comes a nagging, cloying afterthought: “What if Tumblr (or Instagram or _______) could have been the next Facebook?” And this nagging opportunity cost would grow even louder if Yahoo succeeded with Tumblr, finding a way to monetize its millions of eyeballs much like Google did with YouTube. “Tumblr could have been a contender.” It’s this thought that will lead to a “No” from Karp and his board if it gets nagging enough. And this thought is weighty — Zuck when he was being courted by Yahoo, and we all know how that turned out. But what happens after the “No,” the fact that Karp will be challenged to build a real business on top of Tumblr’s scale, is daunting enough to turn that “No” once again into a “Yes.” Can Tumblr turn the process of following other Tumblrs through your dashboard into a stream it can monetize with sponsored, story-style ads? Or find a way to cram ads into the notoriously independent, and risky, content? Can Karp put on the big-boy pants, hire a , and create a money-making machine? Because if he’s not sure, and he’s not ready for a long, hard, uphill fight, he should sell. Look what happened to Groupon; still trading below its $6bn offer. A billion dollars is a lot of money.
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Backed Or Whacked: Reading And Writing Through Crowdfunding
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
An ancient and once-sacred bond between author and audience, reading and writing have become but two more tasks along with a multitude of other things that we do on a host of digital devices — watcing videos, listening to music, playing games, and really anything . Still, there are some for whom the intimate act of interface between pen and paper retains more magic than all the electrons powering all the devices in the world have not been able to recreate. For them, a trio of European crowdfunding projects have trotted out a range of products to improve both endpoints of analog document creation. Arrgh! Listen up, ye scurvy dogs, as I tell ye the legend of Lazy Pete, a pirate so wrapped up in his romance novels that he didn’t see a great white shark leap from the ocean to leave him with just one hand. ‘Tis in Lazy Pete’s honor that Philip Musche surely named his one-handed book reading contraption, which essentially puts one of those book stands that keep pages open on a beefy handle. Despite showing off the reading aid in nearly enough colors to cover the Seven Seas, Musche failed to capture enough crowdfunding booty, and the campaign ended with only £533 of the desired £30,000 treasure. What the GoPro is to most digital cameras, Idae is to most pocket journals, even the durable . The waterproof, tear-resistant notebook is just the thing for when you need to make that critical addition to your grocery shopping list in the middle of your next scuba dive, and a perfect match for your . And if you needed any more proof of just how extreme it is, it has a hole for a carabiner. That said, fire will consume it along with the haiku you were inspired to write on the slopes. And if you’re not planning to keep your notes around indefinitely, the notebook can be recycled. Developed in Milan and shipped to backers last month for between $20 and $30 depending on cover color, the 32-page thought preserver cleared its $7,200 funding goal with a couple of hundred dollars to spare, but you’d expect that kind of nail-biting excitement from such a tough guy. The pencil has been thin enough to serve as a benchmark against which to compare high-tech electronics. While it’s comfortable for many, at least for short periods, it can be difficult to grasp for some. Receiving inspiration when his partner Zoë, a tattoo artist, began suffering hand pain in December 2011, Pontefract, UK-based Jai Dickerson Pierce developed the Meteor Grip. Few details are provided about what material is used to create the grip. Rather, the key to its uniqueness is being available in both right and left-handed versions. As the campaign page employs double negatives to claim, “No other manufacturer produces an ergonomic hand grip that is not ambidextrous.” That said, the campaign is not above covering a spectrum of uses, claiming that the product is useful as a novelty gift while also proclaiming that it is “changing the writing experience forever.” Not yet changed for kiddies, though, as a potential meteorite grip is for now on the drawing board. With a bit over three weeks left to go, the Meteor Grip has collected about a quarter of its humble £875 goal. Seven pounds will marry your love of astronomy with hatred of thin writing tools, and ten pounds can get one for you as well as the cramping tattoo artist in your life as soon as this month.
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Mark Suster Talks Founder CEOs, The Acqui-Hire Frenzy, And Much More [TCTV]
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
So when we heard that Suster was in San Francisco for a couple of days, we asked him to come by TechCrunch TV to talk a bit more at length about all that’s been going on. And while he warned us that he was a bit tired due to a late night visiting with industry folks here in the Bay Area the evening before we met, he was just as engaging as ever, talking about the topics mentioned above as well as the latest hot stuff coming out of the Southern California tech scene. Check it all out in the video embedded above.
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Hell No, Tumblr Users Won’t Go To Yahoo!
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Ingrid Lunden
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
We’ve all by now heard about how Yahoo is trying to get some “ ” with a supposed $1 billion purchase of hip blogging platform , but it may be a moot point if Tumblr’s users fail to stick around post-sale. and may be trying to make a move ahead of Yahoo, Tumblr may be , and (despite that) may not be afraid to play a little . But here’s something you’re not hearing much about: Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo. And they may let their fingers do the talking, and the walking. Do a search on Tumblr for “yahoo” and you get a stream of distress, interspersed with the occasional bit of helpless resignation, and some calls for activism. The voices of reluctant (usually because of the aforementioned cash situation) or anything like are few and far between. No outright enthusiasm. (Daddy!) . It’s a problem that extends to some of Tumblr’s oldest users. “If Tumblr goes to Yahoo, I will seriously consider moving my personal blog to Medium, if that’s possible,” Alexia, co-editor over here at TC, told me. She’s had a blog on Tumblr since , and, while not part of that coveted 18-24 age bracket, is a significant representative of that other cadre of important users: digital influencers. “I don’t know exactly why, but my Tumblr is a part of my identity. And for whatever reason, I don’t want to identify with Yahoo.” Some have tried to start a , with a goal of 5 million signatures, although others are about whether this will actually have any effect. User attrition is not something to be dismissed, especially when it appears to be underpinned by wider usage trends on the site. When I wrote a about what might come next for Tumblr as a business (it focused on how it could make money; not how it might need to get sold because it doesn’t), I noted that in the prior month, December 2012, it had 167 million visitors and nearly 18 billion pageviews worldwide (Quantcast figures). The trend over the last six months are down, however: in the U.S. page views are down 21% to 5.3 billion, and uniques down 5% to 76 million. the picture is better but still not growing: pageviews are down by 4%; uniques are down by 3%. Not a sinking ship, but not a zippy little speedboat, either. , indeed. Image via
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The Evolution Of Hacker News
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
The idea of a VC having its own news aggregator was a bit outlandish in 2007. But Y Combinator was in an unusual position in those days anyway. Startup incubators had been a highly visible part of the dot-com crash, and Silicon Valley was still skeptical of the concept nearly a decade later. So YC set out to be something different — a community of hackers building companies on their own terms. Hacker News was by YC co-founder Paul Graham as a demonstration of Arc, a new programming language he’d been working on. He quickly realized that it could help bring together the companies he was supporting and the rest of the folks who wanted in. With 1.6 million page views and 200,000 unique visitors on a given weekday, it’s now a key part of the venture firm’s success. But the site quickly took off, as former Redditors flocked to it to talk about tech and startups (the site was then known as Startup News). As Graham explains, as the site started seeing traction immediately, he realized this wasn’t just a way to test Arc. He wanted to make Hacker News a place to recreate the way Reddit felt in the good old days, when most of its community was made up of hackers. As Reddit drew more traffic, the hacker focus of the site evolved. The community’s user base became diluted as it grew, and Hacker News was a new home for some of the early Reddit hackers. Graham writes in February of 2007: Reddit used to have a good concentration of startup-related links, but that was because so many of Reddit’s initial users were connected in some way to Y Combinator. Now that Reddit is so much more popular, the top links tend to be images, or videos, or political news. Another goal of Hacker News, says Graham, was to be a place where founders could share ideas and communicate. In the spirit of Y Combinator’s own incubator, Hacker News was focused on being a community for entrepreneurs and founders in the tech community: a place where they could freely post and where Y Combinator could also get to know potential founders and leaders in the tech world. “From the beginning we had a real community, and some of the core group of refugees from Reddit are still prominent on Hacker News today,” Graham explains. Part of what attracted many to Hacker News was its simplicity and voting system. The product’s UI, design and color scheme have remained relatively constant over the past six years. Thomas Ptacek, one of the site’s first users, explains that he was a Slashdot user and then a Reddit user, and flocked to Hacker News (at the time Startup News) because it was more relevant to the technology and startup community. He found Hacker News to be a refreshing change from past forums where the quality of commenting was declining. Here’s how Hacker News works: Users submit links to stories, and stories are ranked according to a voting system, similar to Reddit. The difference between Hacker News and Reddit, however, is the voting system. While you can vote stories up, you cannot vote stories down (but you can flag stories). According to Graham, 100 upvotes will get a story to the top of the front page of the site. You can only downvote a comment if you have enough “karma” on the site, which is another compelling element of Hacker News. The Karma factor is determined by the number of upvotes on a user’s submission and comments minus the number of downvotes. In terms of the design, Graham says he wanted Hacker News to look like your list of processes in a terminal window. The look and feel of the site was aimed at hackers themselves who are familiar with tabular data. Graham will occasionally add new features, some of which are on the backend of the site. For example, as comments get more deeply nested and heated in terms of exchange, the reply link takes longer to appear. There is a purposeful drag implemented on this, says Graham, because deeply nested discussions are rarely interesting. Another subtle feature addition: a flame-war detector. Graham has been consistently deploying and updating proprietary software that determines whether there is a flame war, where people argue heatedly. When these flame wars take place (which Graham says can often get ugly and personal), the story in which the commenting is taking place is moved further down the page. Graham has also created sophisticated spam-detection software, which was just updated with new code six months ago. With the update, Graham says that it’s rare for spam to last on the site for more than 10 minutes. If a user does spam the site or engages in personally vicious behaviors, they run the risk of being banned. But in an interesting twist, called “hellbanning,” the user may not actually know they are banned. On the backend, Hacker News runs on one core, and Graham calls this a “remarkable feat of scaling.” In terms of human moderation, Graham himself had been spending three to four hours per day simply moderating the site. And that’s in addition to all of his duties running Y Combinator. While a number of other YC alums have moderating abilities, Graham has been the main human element of the site. “It was becoming my life,” he says. Around six months ago, Graham brought on someone else, who he chose not to name, to moderate the site. He says the individual is affiliated with Y Combinator and is a “prudent and thoughtful guy,” and has been doing a great job ever since. Hacker News has a strong affiliation with Y Combinator, as well. Graham explains that founders usually all create a Hacker News account when they apply, and that user name is the founder’s identity at Y Combinator. Hacker News also features a jobs page that shows any jobs available at Y Combinator companies. He adds that this jobs portal is very useful for Y Combinator, as the majority of the site’s audience is made up of programmers and engineers. If you are a YC founder, your username will show up in orange to other YC founders to enable these entrepreneurs to recognize and meet each other. Graham says that Hacker News gets a lot of complaints that it has a bias toward featuring stories about Y Combinator startups, but he says there is no such bias. Instead, the culture at the incubator is to use Hacker News, and with more than 1,000 YC alumni who have graduated from the incubator, many of these founders are still active on the news site and post links to their fellow founders’ launches and news. Growth has its downside. What keeps Graham up at night is worrying about the dilution of quality of the Hacker News. He explains that the site was community of insiders in the hacker world, and it has . “That is what I spend all my time thinking about,” he says. He worries that Hacker News will become what he calls “an old crumbling building.” “The community has been in a perpetual but slow decline because the site is growing,” he says. Ptacek agrees that the value of Hacker News has changed a bit. “I don’t get a community feel as much, whereas in the beginning it was a small group of people who all know each other,” he says. “It’s less likely now to see the same people from thread to thread.” One of Graham’s biggest pain points is the “schoolyard quarrels” he finds on the site on a daily basis, and wishes “users would stop misbehaving.” He cites the example of users organizing voting rings to purposefully vote up stories, which caused Graham to develop additional software to detect this. He adds that more users are trolling under newly created accounts, and are deliberately starting flame wars on the site. “I wish I could get people to stop posting comments that are stupid or mean,” he says. “It takes only one or two negative comments and a discussion turns into a flame war.” Graham adds that he gets a lot of vitriol from users personally with accusations of bias or censoring. He clarifies that he, and the other human editor, rarely take links down unless they are dupes. Even with tabloid or gossip stories that surface, Graham will not take them down. Users with high karma points tend to flag these stories, he adds, and they can then be taken down. “Hacker News makes me sad a lot,” says Graham. “I wish the community would behave the way they did when it was a little village.” Users are noticing Graham’s frustrations. Ptacek says that he observes that Graham is careful not to tell people what to say or think, but it’s clear that he wants people to treat each other better and he gets more sad over time. While Graham is open about not wanting to be the next Reddit, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Hacker News could be a business. Reddit is reportedly cash at a $400 million valuation. While Hacker News has a fraction of the traffic that Reddit does, the smaller site could actually have an impressive valuation as a business without any funding or employees. Graham himself uses the site as his primary source of news. He’s even found Y Combinator companies through Hacker News. A user in the community posted a link to Watsi, a non-profit that allows people in dire need of medical care to raise money for procedures and health care. He noticed Watsi the second time it was posted on Hacker News and thought it was an amazing idea. He cold-called the founders and convinced them to be the first ever YC-backed nonprofit. And Graham recently took a first board seat at Watsi, . But Graham is adamant that Hacker News is not a business and would not become a business. There are no ads on the site, and he has no interest in making money from ads. He admits that through the jobs page he indirectly makes money, as he is an investor in Y Combinator companies and will inevitably profit if the company’s hires help the business. Nor would he be interested in selling the site. While it’s clear that Graham has his frustrations with the community, when he talks about the site’s defining moments, he sounds like he is speaking about his own child. One of his most distinct memories about the site is the day following Steve Jobs’ death, when every story on the front page was about the Apple founder. “Users did it collectively as a tribute, and I found this a really remarkable way to show the power of a community. I thought this is really a living, breathing thing. It was like a bunch of birds flying through the sky forming themselves as an S.” “There are really good reasons to engage with Hacker News,” says Ptacek. “There is no better place to stay engaged with the hacker community…At the end of day it is a message board. Having a place where you can reach and talk to groups of people is an important concept.” As for the future of Hacker News, it’s clear that Graham is focused on maintaining quality and making sure that the community treats each other with respect and kindness. “I hope that most Hacker News readers know that I am doing this for their sake,” he says.
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What Games Are: Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Xbox?
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Tadhg Kelly
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
One of the memories that sticks with me most about the launch of the Xbox 360 was a silly analogy about inhaling. I can’t remember who said it, but the general idea was that it had a concave body to convey breathing in, perhaps a precursor to exclaiming joy. It was as daft as it sounds, but for a while there the 360 was indeed a breath of fresh air. Xbox 360 had a lot going for it, from online connectivity to a much simpler architecture that developers preferred over the PlayStation 3. In its first few years it maintained the position of being a very games-focused console. Xbox 360 was the home of indie games, for example, and digital distribution. It widely popularized the notion of achievements. But three, maybe four, years ago Microsoft started to push bigger ideas. It left a lot of the gamer-ish stuff behind and redesigned the console’s dashboard toward a media focus. Over a series of updates, Xbox slowly went Metro, became about Netflix, avatars and Kinect. Most of these innovations didn’t stick so well, and the cost they incurred was significant. Xbox 360 went from being a clear proposition to a complex and all-over-the-place machine. Many Kinects were sold, but few people actually used them for long. Many channels of TV content were brought into the fold, but finding room for them essentially killed its indie games market and lost a lot of credibility with that group. Ultimately, the successes of these divergences were generally mute. (18 billion hours of video sounds like a big deal .) This is the problem with long hardware cycles (Xbox 360 is 8 years old). Lacking annualized releases of better technology (for some reason the console industry still believes it has to carry on this way), the platform story grows old after a couple of years, leading to the urge to accessorize. Often in so doing it loses itself in the , and then needs a big reset. All of which leads up to Tuesday’s news: to unveil the next Xbox. And boy does the company need it to go well. Perception-wise, Microsoft has had a bad couple of years. Windows Phone may have won a number of plaudits for its looks, but nobody really went for it. Windows 8 sold a ton of copies, but most users sort of hate it. Surface had a glitzy launch, but people are still buying iPads. That leaves Xbox as Microsoft’s one remaining big consumer push. This one has to go right, or lots of talking heads will start to ask if there’s any market that Microsoft can get right any more. The reason the company has had a lot of these issues, I think, is that it’s bad at listening. Microsoft consistently gets lost in grand visions, visions that only it can afford to develop, and produces super-complicated propositions that nobody loves. All those years spend trying to convince the public about Windows Live services. All that time spent trying to bring us around to using Bing. All that wasted effort trying to unify user interfaces with Metro (which at its heart is just a bit broken, as has been said over and over) and who really cares? Grand visions that lose the plot are Microsoft’s forte. Yet, gaming folks are pretty excited about the next Xbox. Will it feature new horsepower? Guaranteed. Will it have Kinect baked into the box itself? Probably, but they don’t care. Will it require an Internet connection? Maybe, and they’re not sure what they think about that. Will it have lots of content partnerships? Undoubtedly. Will it copy Sony’s idea of a Share button on the joypad? Perhaps. Will there be a Halo game on it? You know it. Will it actually be anything fundamentally different, though? It doesn’t sound like it, but that may not be a bad thing. There is often an assumption in tech blog circles that the audience wants permanent revolution, but often it doesn’t. Often it just wants the thing that it knows works, and if that thing gets that job right then it’s happy. The console gaming audience generally doesn’t want consoles to do anything fundamentally different. It tends to embrace features that are additive to its core desires, like online multiplayer or achievements, but all it wants are big TV games with joypads and mad graphics. Everything else is optional. There are maybe 150 million console gamers around the world, judging by platform sales over the last few generations, and they love their expensive splashy videogames. They’ve never particularly cared for the frilly extras, like avatars, but that doesn’t stop them buying in. They like that their consoles have ESPN on them, but those are not crucial purchase decisions. They’re not convergence customers in the way that some PowerPoint deck in the depths of Redmond probably drew a few years ago to justify unified interfaces, but again they don’t mind as long as it’s not going to get in the way of playing Dishonored. For those people, the next Xbox is exciting because of the prospect of an even more-lavish Call of Duty and an even more-next-generation Skyrim. All they really want is a box that they believe can deliver that experience. The risk for Microsoft is if it screws that message up. When videogame platforms live too long, their platform holder often loses sight of its core competency. When the PlayStation 2 was over it had explored so many areas of the market that it was impossible to convey all of them in one coherent story. Sony tried, with the PlayStation 3, but the result was so confused that developers only really heard “it’s over-complicated” while consumers heard “ .” This is a business built on razors-and-blades thinking. A similar thing is happening to Nintendo with the Wii U. The Wii was a wonderfully simple device with a couple of very smart accessories (like the Wii Fit) and a raft of dumb ones. By the time the Wii U came around Nintendo seemed to have lost its sense of focus that drove Wii, instead releasing a very confusing machine. Now it’s paying the price. The biggest risk for the next Xbox is if Microsoft departs so far from its core audience that the audience feels turned off. If the company comes out only talking about transmedia, television tie-ins, movies on demand, instant messaging, Internet Explorer, phone syncing, emailing from your couch, holographic avatars, Spotify subscriptions, Twitter integration, Facebook integration and party gaming then I fear for Xbox’s survival. The gamers will ask “Yes, but, where’s the games Steve?” At its heart, the next Xbox needs to simply be about the games the games the games. Will Microsoft actually listen this time?
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CrunchWeek: Google I/O Madness And Square’s New iPad Hardware For Merchants
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
It’s that time of the week for CrunchWeek, the show where a few of us writers chat up the most interesting stories from the past seven days. , (clad in his Google Glass), and I discussed all things Google I/O, including Google+’s and the latest Google Glass apps and more. We also chatted about Square’s new hardware, Stand, which is a $299 card swiper and stand for iPad registers. Tune in above for more!
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I/Overload?
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
Did Google’s conference succeed? It launched dozens of products and services in its but did the world understand them? I saw some of the smartest journalists in technology struggling to handle the information density. But what’s the alternative? Break it up across multiple days, or even multiple conferences? Google’s breadth presents it with a challenge unique among the tech giants. Apple? Its launches center around a discrete set of devices. That’s why WWDC works. There might be one radically new product, but then just a set of iterations on what we already know. The screen is bigger, the tablet is thinner, the software gets a new sheen. And since Apple is all about hardware you need to touch to believe, it has to do it all in-person. Journalists and pundits can easily digest the news and offer their insights to the world. Facebook? It prefers the rolling thunder approach that works because it’s mostly a software company. Releasing things when they’re ready rather than waiting months for an event embodies its “move fast and break things” ideal. It reaches out to journalists almost daily about new updates. When it has something big, it throws a laser-focused, dedicated event like it did this year for content-specific news feeds, Graph Search, and Home. Even when it threw its last f8 developer conference 20 months ago, it kept it tight to just Timeline and Open Graph. The media could wrap its head around the social network’s plans. Those conferences serve their purposes because they align with the identities of producers. Some see Microsoft’s events as a fragmented mess, as they too embody their producer. Microsost has Build for Windows and developers, TechEd for enterprise, a partner conference, a management summit, and a whole event for SharePoint. By splitting them all up, it never feels like there’s one day where Microsoft rules the world. But Google has its own identity and it’s causing I/O growing pains. The conference certainly captures the spotlight. The problem is that Google’s vast ambitions have left I/O bursting at the seams. This year’s search, maps, Google+, YouTube, Google Now, Google Play, music, games, Chrome, Android, and a new phone. And that was just the consumer facing stuff! Then there were a huge set of developer announcements like a native client for C++, location APIs, game services APIs, cloud messaging for notifications, and a suite of mobile app building tools called Android Studio. Did you watch the keynote? If so, did you remember all these things? Did you have time to read insightful analysis about them? Did journalists even have the bandwidth to write intelligently about it all? It could take a while to unpack everything from I/O. I know I have at least five stories I want to write. And inevitably things will fall through the cracks as a new week will bring new news from elsewhere. And it’s only going to get more intense. Google employees I’ve talked to say Larry Page is really pushing his and speedier product cycles. They explain that Google could have saved some stuff for another conference later this year, but by then it’ll already have whole slew of new things ready to show off. Plus, developers and futurists might not be willing to come from around the world for two events a year. The single, 3+ hour keynote with no intermission did symbolized Google’s big theme of unification. Google wants to show it isn’t just a grab bag of different products. They all piggy-back on each other. Android ties mobile together. Google+ ties people together no matter what other Google products they’re using. But I/O may be too dense and rich. Like a chunk of chocolate fudge, it overwhelms the senses and leaves you struggling to chew up Google’s vision. It was so mind-boggling it put Wired’s Mat Honan into . The three days of developer sessions that followed the keynote were a success, in that they helped developers develop. But perhaps splitting the keynote into two bite-size sessions would make it all easier to swallow. One consumer keynote (Search, Maps, Google+, Hangouts, Music, phone) and one developer keynote (Android, Chrome, APIs, developer tools). They could be split across two days. Alternatively, it could be one keynote with announcements sorted into these two categories with an intermission in the middle. Either would go a long way to making I/O more comprehensible. But for now, sticking with a single, epic conference may be the best route for Google to create momentum, convey unification, bring its community together, and impress the globe. Google is determined to . The duty falls on us to keep up.
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How Hike, India’s Fast Growing Mobile Messaging App, Is Banking On SMS & Local Diversity To Beat The Big Boys
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its five million registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – , and some 600 billion in and outbound messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it’s only just over four months old. WhatsApp, of course, has been around for almost four years. Mobile messaging is hot property right now, with tech giants like and most recently bent on owning the messaging space. The reason for all this interest in cross-platform chit-chat is that mobile messaging looks poised to steal social networking’s crown jewels: aka the cool factor, and thus the user engagement (Hike incorporates social status updates and emoji-based moods into its messaging app, to hang on the social chain). But the idea that there can be one ultimate mobile messaging winner — or one player as dominant as Facebook in the full-fat social networking space — seems unlikely. And that’s what Hike is banking on to disrupt WhatsApp and keep Facebook Messenger and its ilk from crashing its just-getting-started party. There’s no doubt that local market realities intercede much more on mobile than on the traditional social networking playground of the desktop, especially in emerging markets where device, network and carrier variations influence how people communicate based on how they can afford to communicate. Those complexities provide an opportunity for local app makers to triumph over goliath outsiders if they build fixes for the local market, argues Hike. “Given how competitive this market is we do feel that in about 3 or 5 years from now you will have somewhere between three to five players globally that own parts of the messaging space in the world. You’re already seeing it right now, you have Line in Japan, you have Kakao in Korea, you have WeChat in China, you have WhatsApp in South America and Europe, you have of course Facebook message or iMessage dominating in U.S. and WhatsApp growing there too. In India of course WhatsApp is the dominant player but we’ve come on to be a very strong number two in just four months,” says Hike creator Kavin Mittal. “We can see that with communication if you solve local problems in the market there is room for a local player to win the market completely.”
Hike is one of the latest contenders to jump into the , albeit with a few neat tricks up its sleeve that it’s confident will allow it to grab significant share in its chosen markets — namely India, and other similar emerging markets in place like Indonesia, the Middle East and Africa. Some 60% of Hike’s registered users are in India, 40% globally led by the Middle East and Germany (despite its emerging markets focus, Germany was actually the first market to spike an interest in Hike — which its creator puts down to it having 128bit encryption over Wi-Fi and Germans looking for a “much more secure solution to WhatsApp”). On the neat tricks front, Hike has baked a patent-pending SMS conversion tool into its app to take advantage of fragmentation in the Indian market caused by low distribution of data-capable smartphones. So this is not just about incorporating SMS messages into a unified app — as — but about making sure a data message can still reach someone who doesn’t have data, via the SMS channel. Mittal explains that in India, even where people own smartphones they may not have data enabled, or may sporadically turn data off to save money. SMS is therefore still a key comms channel that needed to be brought into the loop. This fragmentation was the problem the app’s creators were setting out to solve with Hike. They have also done this in as low cost a way as possible by building a system that ensures it does not send cross-network SMSes (which incur a termination fee in India) but routes same network to same network. “The idea behind Hike… is it works free globally. Hike is available on iPhone, Windows, Android S40, S60, very soon BlackBerry now as well. But in case you don’t have a phone than can install Hike, or let’s say you have a phone but you don’t have data, I can still message you from Hike for free. We convert the IP message into an SMS and it’s free for me as a Hike user, to which you can reply back to – and the reply comes back straight to my inbox making messaging very seamless. So I have one app for all my friends,” Mittal tells TechCrunch. Another future trick — due to launch on June 10 — is something that will allow users who have turned off their data to still be notified that they have a message waiting for them, presumably so they know to turn data back on. “At this point in the market there’s no way to notify you when you have a message waiting on one of these applications. So we’re launching something on June 10 that’s going to solve this problem, so no matter where you are – no matter if you’re online or offline – you’ll be able to communicate via Hike with your friend all the time,” he adds. Hike is funding the conversion cost of sending the SMSes itself — in the Indian market, with a view to extending it to other emerging markets with similar dynamics — so that is one of its largest sunk costs at the moment, according to Mittal. But its monetisation strategy is based on building off that base in another way. The shift Hike’s creators are ultimately calculating on is the movement of consumer spending in its target emerging markets away from carrier ‘value add services’ — paid for infotainment SMSes and so on — to data-based content and entertainment. That’s where Hike sees its future profits, by fleshing out its messaging offering to supplement the bread and butter of social comms with “content that’s very relevant to the local market” — much as the . “India is a country of 20 countries. There’s so much diversity, cultural differences, dialects, languages that one has to cater to and given that this is a big entertainment market there is no doubt we’re going to go down the route of enriching messaging around content,” he says. “If you look at why you message it’s around a piece of content, topic, video, something new you’ve found, something funny. And India it’s much more prevalent than other markets so we’re definitely going down that route, there’s no doubt about it.” Hike is also looking to work with carriers to share some of the SMS conversion cost, with the benefit for carriers being that Hike is acting as an IP pusher, turning mobile owners into data drivers — and data is ultimately where carriers in these emerging will be making their future revenues from too. “Given the traction we’ve had in the Indian market we’ve seen a lot of interest from the operators who want to work closely with Hike and figure out how to expand and grow the traction with Hike because what we’re doing for the operators is we’re introducing a lot of people to data,” says Mittal. “What one can also do over SMS is send photos, videos and so forth, so if I’m on Hike and do SMS I can send you a picture and you get a link on SMS so you can open it on a browser, so we’re striking deals in the Indian market and the emerging markets like Middle East and Africa where the cost is not only bourn by us but by the operator too.” Hike is starting out with more resources than most startups, being created by , a 50:50 Bharti Softbank joint venture, that acts as a “quasi-strategic incubator”, as Mittal puts it. about a month ago — a measure of how much traction the app had managed to achieve in a few short months. BSB projects get their first round funded by the parent companies if they achieve enough traction. Going forward, Hike will likely look outside for funding, says Mittal — assuming it can keep on growing, and reach its goal of at least 10 million registered users (“our internal critical number”), which it views as the baseline required before starting to think seriously about monetisation. “By the end of the year we’ll be in a positon to raise money from the external market. The reason we’re doing that is the VC market in India has less of an appetite for taking massive risk. Because one of the first questions to ask is ‘hey guys why are you building another messaging app?’ And we were pretty certain that if we did what we did we’d get the traction and so far we’ve proved it,” says Mittal. “We’re in a point where we have the $7 million but we will look outside, even possibly the West Coast for funding.” Mittal won’t put a figure on Hike’s active user base but says it’s “amongst the highest we’ve seen in the industry and definitely way above 50%”. “We feel there is a room for a local player to dominate markets like India, Africa and China and so forth, and take care of the local needs, and that is something we’re working on. That’s the big philosophy we have at BSB,” he adds. India’s technology-adoption stratification poses a huge challenge when you’re trying to build an app that lets people talk to whoever they want. A challenge that, ultimately, gives the local kid a toehold over global mobile messaging players, argues Hike. “The market kind of splits India into three sort of broad demographics, the top part really mimics the U.S. population — 30, 40 million people – they’re really switched on, they know about the Internet, they have smartphones and so on and so forth; there are about 150 million people that are experimenting with the Internet, but they have a lot of churn there because the Internet is still not a utility for these guys; and then you have a billion people at the bottom of the pyramid that have no clue whatsoever the Internet even is,” says Mittal. “As you go further down in India, how do you tackle the one billion people? No one knows but we’re in India here, so we’re the guys to figure it out.”
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Speculation Of A Nexus Q Replacement Swirls After An Unannounced Google Media Streamer Hits The FCC
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Matt Burns
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
Google is prepping… . An announced Google media streamer was recently found in the FCC’s . Details are nearly nonexistent as most are held under a confidentiality agreement for the next 45 days. However, the documents released to the public call the device several times a “media player” and that it features WiFi connectivity. The H840, with a model number of H2G2-42 (a clever nod to ), could be a Nexus Q replacement. After all, does not work with the ill-fated , nor does Google have a mass-market way to get it into living rooms. Google essentially needs its own Apple TV device. Mass consumption is the only way Google Play Music All Access is going to be successful. Google needs to follow Pandora’s lead and get its service onto as many platforms and screens as possible. A native Google TV app will likely debut shortly. But Google TV is far from successful enough to do this job alone. It’s rather strange Google didn’t announce this device at I/O last week. This device will launch within the coming weeks. The FCC will release the rest of the details including the device’s user manual in 45 days, giving Google a rather small launch window. A $99-ish Roku/Apple TV clone is a no-brainer for Google. Call it a Nexus streamer. It would be a media consumption device, able to serve up Google Play and likely several staple streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu. Use an Android device for the remote. Profit.
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Gillmor Gang: Live From Betaday
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
This Gillmor Gang was recorded live at betaday, the betaworks annual gathering in New York. The Gillmor Gang included John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Davison, and Steve Gillmor. Enjoy. @stevegillmor, @Borthwick, @scobleizer, @rushkoff, @pdavison The Gillmor Gang is produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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The Time Has Come For Chrome In The Home
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not –homes. I was skeptical to begin with: , I thought, — So I devoted most of my Chromebook’s (bizarrely spacious) 320GB hard drive to an install of Ubuntu. Which I then never used even once. I suppose I would have if some kind of critical work emergency had come up: after all, I’m (mostly) a software developer by trade, and ChromeOS isn’t much of a developer platform. But that didn’t happen. Good thing, too, because Linux-on-the-desktop seems as ugly and frustrating as ever for someone, even a deeply techie someone, who just wants to get things done. ChromeOS, though, is both very pretty and almost painless. Its biggest problem is that out of the box it naively insists that you’ll be online all the time–even though it can be perfectly serviceable while disconnected. You may not have known that nowadays both GMail and (most) Google Docs can work just fine offlne. And if you didn’t, well, Google sure isn’t about to proactively tell you. You actually have to make a point of seeking out, installing, and then activating Offline Gmail and Offline Google Docs from the Chrome Web Store. Why ChromeOS doesn’t prompt you with this option as part of the onboarding process is truly beyond me. Similarly, why on Earth are “Gmail’ and “Offline Gmail” two separate apps? Google may be full of incredibly smart people, but they can also be insanely myopic when it comes to end users. Once those were up and running, though, my Chromebook was a charm to use under almost all circumstances. Offline, I could write documents, check old email, and even play a few free games from the Chrome Web Store, although most Chrome games still seem to require an initial server connection to start up. And online, of course, the world was my oyster. Did I have access to all the features of, say, Word or Excel? Hell, no. (You still can’t create a Google Docs spreadsheet when offline, either.) Was it an all-guns-blazing gaming experience? Again, no, although Chrome’s Native Client ought to keep matters improving here. What I could do, though, was email, play a few games, surf the Net, communicate (via GChat or Google Hangouts, which worked excellently), and write documents — which unless I’m much mistaken is pretty much everything that most people use their computers for at home. ChromeOS still needs better, and simpler, offline support; and I’d like to see more diversity of available hardware; but once those two things are addressed, which shouldn’t take long, I would happily recommend a Chromebook to my parents the next time they upgrade. In fact I’d happily recommend one to anyone who wants a small second laptop for travel, or who doesn’t need to do serious work on their home computer. Long ago Neal Stephenson, when to vehicles, described MacOS as a hermetically sealed day-glo VW Beetle; MS Windows as a clunky two-tone station wagon; and Linux as the product of a horde of dreadlocked hippies who spent their time building M1 battle tanks and giving them away for free. Which sounds great at first, but who actually wants to drive a tank? Well, if I may extend that a little, ChromeOS is like a sleek, shiny Airstream trailer built around that same M1 engine. There are many things it can’t do, and a bunch more at which it’s very clumsy, but within its bailiwick, casual exploring, it’s both very attractive and awfully comfortable. I don’t think Stephenson’s original analogies quite hold any more, though. Nowadays OS X is more like a Porsche…and Windows is a gas-guzzling pickup truck, or a cube van that makes disturbing noises whenever it corners. Still suitable for work, but not particularly great for either road trips or sub/urban living — and nowadays looking nervously over its metaphorical shoulder at the flotilla of drones and self-driving cars on the horizon. Dan McCullough, .
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Google Faces Another Antitrust Probe As Canadian Agency Prepares Formal Investigation
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 18 |
Google is facing another competition investigation, according to the . The has informed Mountain View of its plans to launch a formal investigation of its Canadian operations. It has not yet requested any information or documents from Google but has informed the search giant of its intention to launch a probe. The Bureau declined to comment on the scope of the investigation, noting that it is obliged by law to conduct investigations confidentially. Asked for comment on the probe, Leslie Church, Google Canada’s head of communications and public affairs, told the Post: “We will work co-operatively with the Competition Bureau to answer any questions they may have.” The Canadian Competition Bureau administers and enforces Canada’s Competition Act, among other laws. Among the types of behaviour it investigates are abuse of a dominant position involving anti-competitive practices that “substantially lessen competition in the market, or are likely to do so”. Google’s search engine is by far and away the dominant player in Canada. According to for April 2012 to 2013 Google’s share has declined over the past year but only very marginally, from more than 90% last year to just under 90% in April this year. The second largest search engine, Microsoft’s Bing, took less than 7% of the market in April 2013. Competition investigation is well-trodden ground for Google. Mountain View has been the subject of a string of investigations for a range of business practices, including a and that’s still ongoing, pushing into its third year. The FTC probe ended with Google agreeing to make some voluntary tweaks to its search and ad business and without any fine being levied. In the European antitrust case, back in April. Yesterday reported that EU antitrust regulators had extended the review period for Google’s rivals to study its proposals after were not being given as much time to formulate their responses. If Google is found to have breached EU competition rules it could face a fine of up to 10% of its global revenue.
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 20 | null |
BuzzFeed Partners With CNN And YouTube To Create Online Video Channel
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
Social news site and meme aggregator is partnering with CNN and YouTube to create a new online-video channel called “CNN BuzzFeed” that will be unveiled later today. Chief operating officer Jon Steinberg that BuzzFeed plans to invest a low “eight-digit sum” over two years in the video platform. The YouTube channel will include archival and current content designed to be shared over social media networks. Steinberg says that BuzzFeed will create around three videos a week, focusing on serious news events. The CNN partnership is the latest in a series of efforts BuzzFeed has made to become a top news source for 18-to-34 year olds, a demographic highly sought after by advertisers. The site’s business model has been a balancing act–its and pull traffic to the ad-based site, helping finance BuzzFeed’s . While BuzzFeed already , partnering with a recognized journalism brand like CNN gives the youth-oriented site credibility. In return, CNN gets access to BuzzFeed’s younger users (content from the BuzzFeed-CNN YouTube channel will also appear on ). The new channel, which will use the mashup video format BuzzFeed is known for, is being launched without the support of advertising partners, a strategy that is in line with BuzzFeed’s refusal to rely on traditional display advertising. Instead, it designed to be shared over social media. BuzzFeed’s latest round of funding was disclosed in January, when the site announced that it had led by new investor NEA with existing investors RRE, Hearst, SoftBank, and Lerer Ventures also participating, as well as new investors Michael and Kass Lazerow. CEO Jonah Peretti said in a statement the money would be used to scale up the startup into a bona fide media company: “We have the senior management, board, and investors we need to build the next great media company: socially native, tech enabled, with massive scale. We are all focused on that big goal and raised this capital to move even faster.”
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With New Study And Marketing Campaign, Microsoft Puts Renewed Emphasis On Its Social Tools For The Enterprise
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
Microsoft’s always featured a core set of social tools, but with , as well as the ongoing integration of and Skype, the folks over in Redmond are clearly ready to push social as the next major cornerstone of their enterprise offerings. Today, Microsoft is launching a to help companies understand how social can become more productive. In connection to this, the company also commissioned a new study that tried to quantify the state of social in the enterprise. This study was obviously commissioned by Microsoft, so as our own Anthony Ha , it’s probably no surprise that the result shows that “Microsoft is totally in the right business.” Still, the survey, which was conducted by , examined the responses from almost 10,000 knowledge workers in 32 countries, and its results seem pretty straightforward, even if we assume that there is a bit of bias here. Half of the employees questioned here, for example, said that social tools at work help them to increase their productivity, but there is still a considerable reluctance to adopt these tools in many companies. As Yammer’s director of enterprise strategy Brian Murray told me last week, most of this reluctance stems from IT departments that are worried about productivity loss and aren’t used to implementing technology that isn’t fully under their control. Thanks to freemium products, free trials and software that runs in the cloud, however, employees are trying new tools in small groups before the IT department even knows about them. Employees, Murray noted, have high expectations of their social tools at work. They expect the same kind of user interfaces they’ve become accustomed to from their consumer products, and they expect them to be available at their desk and on the go. Given Microsoft’s investments in this area, it’s no surprise the company believes enterprise social will be a major driver of productivity growth for many companies. “Just as email accelerated the pace of business in the ’90s, enterprise social will be the driver of greater agility and transformation in the 21st century workplace,” said Kurt DelBene, the president of Microsoft’s Office Division in a prepared statement today. “As we look ahead at how collaboration and communications continue to evolve, we believe the tools people use today — email, instant messaging, voice, videoconferencing, social — will come together and be deeply integrated into apps in ways that will speed collaboration and truly transform the way people work.” Murray also told me he believes that some of the value of these tools is pretty obvious. Employees, for example, tend to be far more engaged with their work when a company starts using social tools. A 2011 Gallup poll noted that a whopping 71 percent of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, so even a small change here could lead to large productivity gains. Social tools like Yammer, Murray also noted, make it easier to tap into a company’s experts and the expertise that’s available in a large company but often remains untapped. To emphasize this message, Microsoft is also launching , a “hub for people everywhere to discuss workplace collaboration and social tools via Twitter.” If you’re interested in the rest of the report and a full set of results from all 30 countries, you can (PDF).
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Video Discovery Service Matcha Disappears, Co-Founder Promises ‘Something Better’ In The Future
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
You might remember . The company provided a and focused on helping users find interesting movies and TV shows online based on their own preferences, as well as those of their friends on various social networks. Well, over the last few days, the website has gone dark, and those who have downloaded the mobile app report that it’s no longer working. At the Matcha.tv website, the owners have left the following notice: Service Unavailable Dear users of Matcha, we thank you for using Matcha and hope we were able to improve your TV and movie viewing experience. Unfortunately, from today going forward, this service is no longer available. All personal information collected by Matcha has been deleted. If you have any further questions about your account, please email us at: . Matcha co-founder and CEO Guy Piekarz didn’t want to comment on the service becoming unavailable, except to say that the company was not “shutting down.” Instead, the startup is apparently working on a “new direction” for its video-discovery service — a direction that was apparently causing things to break. He wrote: The hardest thing, by far, in the new direction we’re going was taking down the service, which we’ve been building for the last couple of years. We apologize for dissappointing our users and plan to provide something better in the future. Matcha.tv isn’t the first video app to disappear while its team updated the service. Last summer, video discovery startup Shelby.tv , as the startup began to rebuild its backend from the ground up. While some worried that was the end of Shelby.tv, the company soon after announced that it had and has reemerged, both with a , as well as a platform for sharing videos that is currently in beta testing. Matcha was . Its last message to Twitter followers said its next version would be “awesome” and includes “lots of enhancements.” Our next version will be awesome, we hope. Working on lots of enhancements! — Matcha (@matchaTV)
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Coinbase Leads Charge In Bitcoin’s Consumerization
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Alexia Tsotsis
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
Because why do anything other than try out hot technologies on Memorial Day, I just bought some Bitcoin. I might finally play and maybe an ear later this afternoon. I would not have bought my .1 ($13.17) in Bitcoin if it weren’t for a startup called , which is “one of the places that looked less sketchy,” according to TechCrunch editor and John Biggs. “It’s one of the ones I would tell my Mom to use,” Biggs insisted. Indeed, if your mom knows how to link a bank account to a Fidelity or Charles Schwab account and buy mutual funds, buying Bitcoin through Coinbase is a similar deal. Just input her account and routing number, verify a couple of small transactions and your mom will be one step closer to . As a Bitcoin wallet, an exchange and a merchant payment-processing system, Coinbase is one of the most, if not the most, “legit,” user-friendly Bitcoin startups out there, a position by raising $5 million from Twitter investor Fred Wilson among others — the largest investment to date in a Bitcoin startup. It took Wilson to find a Bitcoin startup that had what it took: a solid team, product and plan. And Coinbase’s founders have a pretty legit pedigree — with and having spent time at Airbnb and Goldman Sachs, respectively. In addition to investor interest, the startup is beginning to see some traction. In January, it launched its Bitcoin-to-US-dollars exchange feature, and saw $1 million converted in and out of Bitcoin. In February it saw $2.5 million, and this April the startup saw $15 million — figures inevitably increasing with the rise in the Bitcoin exchange rate. Armstrong holds that the company, which takes a 1 percent transaction fee from all conversions, is growing 15 percent week-over-week in terms of transaction volume, revenue and users signing up. “Coinbase is becoming the most trustworthy consumer brand in Bitcoin,” investor Bobby Goodlatte told me. Any abstracted currency –gold, fiat money, Klout — has value because the collective believes it has value, unlike, let’s say, food, which is a resource that actually has inherent value that you can trade currency for. Like a lot of things in life, currency is like the : As long as we all believe that a Starbucks latte is worth $3.50 it continues to be. The trick is now convincing people it is also worth 0.03 BTC. As to when that will happen, the jury’s still out. Will people lose trust in a string of random digits? Will Bitcoin ? How big a business can you build taking a 1 percent transaction fee off conversions of a currency with a $2 billion market cap? And, most importantly, when will it be easy to buy in Palo Alto? When I called Coupa today to ask, the first person I spoke to had no clue. Apparently I have to “Send Money” using Coinbase to Coupa’s wallet. Which I can’t do via the Coinbase iOS app. Max Wright, author of the , estimates that Bitcoin will go mainstream — i.e. where multiple vendors in the vast majority of niches accept Bitcoin as payment — in the next 24-36 months. Okay. “Bitcoin’s advantages over traditional banking and credit systems are undeniable. Bitcoin has zero transaction costs, which is a huge advantage over our existing credit card, pay-on-line paradigm that incurs fees of 2-5 percent on every transaction.” A16z partner and investor , who called the digital currency at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, was more circumspect as to an exact date of Bitcoin mass adoption. “These things are incredibly hard to predict. Bitcoin could flame out altogether. The key to going mainstream is for technologists and entrepreneurs to build out the infrastructure to make Bitcoin easier to use, easier to integrate, more reliable, more trustworthy, etc. This means both back-end technologies and merchant/consumer-facing services. From what I can tell, this is beginning to happen. ” As to what Armstrong, who pays his employees in Bitcoin, tells skeptics, “In our mind, it’s just low fees. If you can reduce fees it means more money in consumers’ pockets, and that means more money in small business owners’ pockets.”
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Open Source Blogging Platform WordPress Turns Ten, And Its Community Gets To Blow The Candles Out
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Drew Olanoff
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
Ten years ago today, , the open source blogging software, was born. It’s amazing to think that it’s been that long, but considering it had all of the elements that other startups and projects have tried to emulate over the past 10 years, then it makes sense. When speaking with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, you’d think that he was only a small part of the movement that attempted to empower anyone and everyone to self-publish. While that might be partially true, Mullenweg has taken all of his learnings over the years and poured them into the for-profit arm, Automattic. The project started as a form of the blogging platform b2/cafelog, and the name itself, WordPress, wasn’t even Mullenweg’s idea. It came from a friend of his. It was essential for WordPress to be open source, as Mullenweg explained to me last month: “When I first got into technology I didn’t really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software I realized how important this would be.” By allowing an infinite number of developers to collaborate on a platform, WordPress had the best chance of its peers to reach critical mass. Only developers knew what the hurdles were to setting up their own publishing platform. The competitors had their own idea of what those hurdles were, therefore putting themselves at an immediate disadvantage. It was a numbers game, community vs. corporate. WordPress has won, with more than 18 million downloads of its latest version, 3.5. The WordPress formula, when it comes to community, has been copied, but never replicated. Mullenweg told me that early meetups were the key to finding the passionate individuals that would push WordPress to where it is today: “Technology is best when it brings people together.” Most people don’t consider themselves to be writers because they simply don’t know what to say. Mullenweg felt that for people like that, giving them a platform that was easy to set up and use would allow them to spend more time on the important parts of writing. If writing is one of the hardest things to do, as Mullenweg says, then figuring out how to publish your thoughts shouldn’t be. The power of community, especially for developers, is best thought of as a group of like-minded people working towards a similar goal. The people that work on WordPress are problem solvers, they’re people who like to make things easier for themselves and for others. Those types of people are special, and WordPress was able to capture the best of the best. Some have even moved on to paying jobs at Automattic. Mullenweg tells me that one of his main early contributors, Ryan Boren, used to say: “Just code. It’s just code. Anything that we want to do is just code. There’s nothing you can imagine that can’t be done.” That type of mindset is paramount to the success of WordPress and every open source project since. Even when Mullenweg decided to turn WordPress into a business with Automattic in 2005, which has since raised $80.6 million, the community was not to be forgotten: “We figured out a business model that was complementary to the growth of the community.” By leveraging all of the hard work of thousands of contributors, Mullenweg found a way to keep giving back. By keeping WordPress open source, which was key from day one, the business side of things hasn’t alienated those who continue to work on the code that’s available to all. In fact, much of the work that’s done by the community continues to make its way into the paid WordPress.com offerings. Some of the WordPress community has found ways to create a career built off of the work that they’ve done. Whether they’re consulting, designing or implementing, the software itself has changed a lot of lives. Mullenweg tells me that while this is great, many of the open source contributors would still work on the platform even if they didn’t find a way to get paid. “They approach code like a craft, and not a job.” he says. The passion from the WordPress community has not only brought people together, but their collective work now powers 17 percent of the top 1 million websites on the web. That couldn’t have been done by Mullenweg alone, and he knows that. That’s an obvious statement now, but the key is that he’s always known that. The founder about the anniversary in a blog post today, as if the software itself was his child: You’re so beautiful… I’m continually amazed and delighted by how you’ve grown. Your awkward years are behind you. Best of all, through it all, you’ve stuck with the principles that got you started in the first place. You’re always changing but that never changes. You’re unafraid to try new things that may seem wacky or unpopular at first. He wasn’t writing to the code, he was writing to the people behind it. [Photo credits: , and ]
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Public Lab’s Crowdfunded Infragram Cameras Let People See Plants In A Different Light
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
There’s no shortage of novel Kickstarter projects that aim to change how we think about the environment, but here’s one that could literally change how we look at it. created by the civic science-minded folks at puts low-cost infrared cameras into people’s hands so they can better understand the health of the plants around them. The goal here is simple enough — by hacking these cameras to peer into the infrared (well, near-infrared) portion of the spectrum, Public Lab hopes to let users see how well plants are converting light into oxygen. The end result is a pair of images that, when processed properly, yield a single false-color image that shows off which plants (or parts of plants) are reflecting the most near-infrared light and are therefore absorbing the most red and blue light. In a bid to get as many people seeing plants in a different light as possible, the most rewarding tier will see backers at the $10 level receive a “superblue” filter that attaches onto existing digital cameras (here’s that seem to work well with the filter). A contribution of $35 nets you the most basic hardware component of the bunch — a cheap webcam that works just as well when lashed to a Raspberry Pi as it does when hooked up to your laptop. $95 nets you something really interesting: a bespoke point-and-shoot 2-megapixel camera that already has one of those “superblue” sensors nestled inside it. Once backers start snapping photos of the local greenery, they’ll be able to upload them to a work-in-progress web service to get those false color images. The team is also working on a spate of analytical tools to cull more information from those images, so the curious nature nut can gain even more insight on the flora around them. The Public Lab team is no stranger to these sorts of crowdfunded science projects — last year they successfully raised $110,000 for a homebrew spectometry kit that rather smartly relied on a shard of a DVD-R disc. This new project has only been live for five days, but a slew of enthusiastic backers has already brought the team within spitting distance of its $30,000 funding goal. With a month and a half left to go Public Labs is on track to have yet another crowdfunded scientific success on its hands — here’s hoping that some of those backers will put those Infragram camera in youngsters’ hands. After all, we could probably do with a new generation of young people that are sensitive to the plight of those poor plants.
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Ooga Labs Takes A Ground-Up Approach To Generate Growth And Network Effects For Startups
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Leena Rao
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
One of the biggest challenges many entreprenuers face is finding the right technical partner when building a company. Some startups can have a single leader, but more often than not, there is a balanced team behind every successful business. Ooga Labs founders and began their partnership when Currier moved Emode, the business he started with BranchOut founder , to San Francisco in 2000. A recent business school grad, Currier realized very quickly that he needed an engineering leader to help him grow the company. August Capital partner (then-partner had just invested in the company) set Chudnovsky, a talented engineer, and Currier up on a quasi-blind date at the Penn Dragon Cafe in Hayes Valley in 2001, and soon after Chudnovsky joined Currier and Marini on their journey to create an online testing company. More than 10 years later, Chudnovsky and Currier are still partners, but have taken a different direction. The pair run and operate , a startup studio and product-focused investment vehicle, that has backed Flickr, SecondLife, Path, Wanelo, and Lyft, among others. With the growing , it’s clear that Currier and Chudnovsky are early pioneers in this movement. Back in 2001, Currier, Marini and Chudnovsky continued to chug along despite the bubble bursting and the weak climate for startups. They tried a number of ways to reinvigorate the product, including changing Emode’s name to Tickle. Currier says that the testing application didn’t have a ton of retention and people wouldn’t stay on the site, and he quickly realized that they needed to build a system that had a network effect. So Tickle became more of a social network, pivoting slightly to a matchmaking service based on IQ and other tests. Within two years the startup became profitable and made the cover of Business 2.0 magazine. “It was during this period when we realized about the power of network effect,” says Currier. Tickle sold to Monster in 2004 for around $110 million. Currier stayed on to run the division of Monster for two years and when he departed, Chudnovsky ran the same group. Following the acquisition, Currier and Chudnovsky were starting to think about how to enter the investing world and it made sense to continue the partnership together under Ooga Labs. Both felt that their skills and value-add complemented each other. They rarely fought, and when they do they always end up arguing to the point where they forget what they were fighting about. One of the newly formed firm’s first investments was Flickr in 2004, and turned out to be immediately successful as the photo sharing site for $35 million. From the start, Currier and Chudnovsky knew they wanted to differentiate themselves as investors. First, the duo chose to focus on being product-driven advisors and investors. “I had a sense of what being a VC was like when working as an associate at Battery Ventures and I didn’t want that. But I also didn’t want to jump in with one company. We love working on product and design. That’s where Stan and I live,” explains Currier. Part of owning product as an investor also gives Currier and Chudnovsky the advantage when it comes to giving entrepreneurs value-add beyond just a check. Second, Ooga only focuses on investing in networks and marketplaces (the one exception to this rule says Currier is the technology news site started by former TechCrunch editor Sarah Lacy). Currier and Chudnovsky both decided that their expertise from creating an early social network at Tickle gave them skills and knowledge they could pass on to any startup building a network or a marketplace. And through Currier and Chudnovsky’s past experiences and bets on successful networks like Flickr, GoodReads ( ), AffinityLabs ( ), Maya’s Mom (sold to Johnson & Johnson), Ooga quietly began to build a reputation as the investor and advisor you want as a fledgling marketplace or network. As mentioned above, Ooga has gone on to fund a number of hot networks and marketplaces including BranchOut, Lyft, Path, Wanelo, Poshmark, Scripted and others. Typical investments are anywhere from $5,000 to $200,000, and all of the money is Chudnovsky and Currier’s, meaning there are no limited partners in Ooga. While Ooga serves as one of the most active advisors to a startup, the firm does not take board seats. In terms of stage, Ooga sometimes invests early, but will also put money into a company in a post A or B round (as was the case with Path and Lyft). “Entrepreneurs bring us into a startup not because they just want cash, it’s because we have a massive amount of knowledge about how successful networks and marketplaces are built,” Currier says. And this has happened through the company’s ongoing investments and creation of companies. Entrepreneurs at heart, Currier and Chudnovsky realized early on at Ooga that they also wanted to turn some of their own ideas into businesses, as well. “We felt like we had enough bandwidth that we could both build companies and advise,” he explains. “We both thought that the life between a focused operator and venture guy would be the best life.” In 2008, Ooga built a social gaming company called WonderHill, which created a hit game called Dragons of Atlantis. Currier and Chudnovsky ended up with Kabam. Another recent success came in the form of an internal web analytics and user-acquisition tool that Currier and Chudnovsky built internally which was used across the companies the duo was advising and building. Ooga realized that companies would actually pay to use this app and , called IronPearl, earlier this year. The startup provides optimization tools that will track a user through a site or app and test which combinations work best to keep them coming back after a week or a month. PayPal caught wind of IronPearl and the company in April of this year to help grow its own 100 million-plus userbase. Chudnovsky became VP of Growth at PayPal with the acquisition, and has continued in that role. Health care is another area where Currier and Chudnovsky see the potential for the network and marketplace effect. Ooga co-founded , a platform that allows consumers and health care professionals to build personalized and private communities of care around the digital health interventions and applications they prefer and can access, from wireless sensors to mobile apps to wearable devices. And of late, Ooga has expanded into events. Last week, the firm held NFX, a meeting of the minds in Palo Alto that brought together the CEOs, founders and product leaders of a number of successful marketplaces and networks. Currier tells us that it was a curated, off the record event that aimed to be an open forum to share ideas on network effects, how to produce viral user experiences, creating transactions that add value and more. The attendee list was a who’s who of the Valley, including Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, oDesk’s Gary Swart, and Meebo’s (and Googler), Seth Sternberg. Currier says the firm will hold many more of these events in the future. At the end of the day, Currier and Chudnovsky have created a new model in venture that works for them, and gives startups more value-add than just a check or a big-name in your TechCrunch post about your funding. And Ooga Labs has been able to differentiate itself in the massive sea of angel and institutional investors in the current climate. “It’s really about taking companies and ideas that don’t yet have network effects and helping change that, create growth and create retention,” says Currier. In terms of expansion, the firm plans to scale out additional investments in marketplaces. And as Chudnovsky explains, Ooga Labs has become a network-effect business, facilitating the sharing of ideas around creating growth and social marketplaces. “We simply have a different way of interacting with our companies than most investors” he says. When asked, Currier and Chudnovsky don’t really know how to phrase exactly what Ooga Labs is doing. The firm is part product and design consultancy, part investment firm, part knowledge-sharing forum, and part company builder. But who says you can’t do it all?
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Apple’s Problem Isn’t Skeuomorphism, It’s Services
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Frederic Lardinois
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
So iOS 7, , is going to do away with much of the skeuomorphic design that has crept into the operating system and its utilities. Jony Ive, rumor has it, has done away with all the textures and real-world analogs in iOS 7 and has switched to a flat design instead. Good for him, but if that’s all that is new in iOS 7, Apple has a real problem. It’s not the design of iOS, but rather the fact that its own service offerings like Siri, iCloud and iTunes aren’t all that great when compared to what its competitors in Mountain View (and may ) are working on. Phones, for all intents and purposes, are pretty much thin slabs of metal or plastic with a high-res screen on top. There are few ways a company can use design to really set itself apart. Sure, Apple still has the better build quality than most of its competitors, but that margin is getting narrower and narrower. While Apple could always claim that it had the better apps, that’s less of an argument today than it was even a year ago, given that all of the most interesting apps are now generally available for both platforms (and maybe even for Windows Phone). The area where manufacturers can distinguish themselves from their competitors is in the services they offer. Samsung has understood this and so has Google. Apple also knows that it needs killer services to keep its crown, but the ones it currently has aren’t all that great. Siri, for all its hype, still remains relatively useless. I still don’t quite understand iCloud, and developers now have better cross-platform choices than Apple’s cloud storage service (including Drive and SkyDrive from Google and Microsoft). iMessage is nice, but it’s not a killer feature and not something WhatsApp and other third-party developers haven’t already replicated and improved upon. The less said about Maps, the better. But look at what Google can offer. There is Google Now, which gives you information before you even need it. The new Google Play All Access music all-you-can-listen-to subscription service launched ahead of Apple’s iTunes/iRadio offering. Its online storage, productivity and mapping services are light years ahead of Apple’s. Now that it owns Quickoffice, Google’s productivity apps for iPad are, at least in some respects, even more capable than Apple’s mostly ignored Pages, Numbers and Keynote. And even though Google+ may not be as big a hit as Facebook, it gives Google data about its users that Apple can’t even dream of (remember ?). Google gets services – and it has the data to make them useful. It’s also slowly . Apple, so far, doesn’t. Apple may have a few data centers, but it’s still mostly a hardware manufacturer. Its problem is that its competitors can now make hardware that is at least close to what it can build, so to remain competitive, it needs these services to set itself apart from the others. iOS 7 will probably look better than iOS 6, but that’s just window dressing. Few will shed tears for Apple’s Notes app, but what Apple really needs are killer services – and so far, it doesn’t have those.
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Nextpeer, Which Has Added Multiplayer Mode To 1,000 Mobile Games, Comes to Android
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M07BmBYFw1g&w=560&h=315] , the , is . Although the platform launched about two years ago, it , growing to 1,000 live games from 100 back in January. They’ve also 10X-ed the number of monthly active users in the network, reaching 8 million from 800,000 at the beginning of the year. Those 8 million users have actually used Nextpeer’s tournaments; the actual reach of the games in the company’s network is much larger at somewhere between 20 to 30 million monthly actives, according to CEO Shai Magizmof. Nextpeer adds multiplayer mode to mobile games. When gamers launch an app, they can tap an online tournaments or multi-player button inside the game, sign in directly or through Facebook, and then join a live table. You can see an example in the video above and The idea is that multiplayer makes games much stickier and more engaging as players actually compete with each other in real-time. The platform offers both asynchronous multi-player and synchronous multi-player modes. So you can either play with people in real-time, or with different people even if they’re not playing at the same time as you. The company will also give developers the ability to customize the multi-player screen, so that it feels more native and natural to the game. Nextpeer has raised almost $2 million in funding from investors including OurCrowd and Wolfson Group, along with other private individuals.
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Minecraft Creator’s New Game ‘Scrolls’ Gets A Trailer, Arrives June 3 In Beta
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdZpx2vyCm0?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] Mojang, the creative force behind Minecraft, is releasing its next title to the public a week from today on June 3rd. The new game, called is a digital collectible card game, similar in concept to Magic: The Gathering, and therefore a very different beast from the free-form world-building and exploration sim Minecraft. Like Minecraft, it’ll allow users to access the software very early, inviting them to become a key part of the development process. But can lightning strike twice for Mojang? Minecraft is an unbridled success, by virtually every measure. At which has them find the title in the top grossing list. It’s always near the top, which is a remarkable exception for a game that offers a straightforward, one-time purchase pricing scheme; free-to-play titles rule the charts these days. The mobile version , Mojang says, and revenue is up well past $100 million at this point. Scrolls has been in development for a few years now, and after Mojang and Bethesda settled a lawsuit over the name last year, it’s now ready for a public release. It’s hard to imagine Scrolls putting up Minecraft numbers – it’s hard to imagine anything putting up Minecraft numbers – but there’s no question all eyes will be on Scrolls when it drops next week, and the trailer definitely shows something that looks like it could be very addictive fodder for gamers.
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Ticketea Raises $4 Million To Beat Ticketmaster And Eventbrite At The Spanish Box Office
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Steve O'Hear
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
Spanish startup , the leading DIY ticketing platform in Spain, has raised $4 million in a Series B round of funding. The investment is being led by newly-established Spanish VC , and will be used by the company to consolidate its position in Spain through new m-commerce products, as well as for international expansion with a specific focus on emerging markets. Latin America is name-checked, which makes sense given Ticketea’s Spanish roots. The startup raised $250,000 in seed funding in 2009, followed by a Series A round of $1.25 million at the end of 2010, which means today’s investment brings the total raised by Ticketea to $5.5 million. Meanwhile, the company says that it’s “cash-flow positive” (read: profitable), having shifted $26 million worth of tickets through its platform since launching in 2010, issuing more than 1.5 million tickets and managing over 31,000 events in over 10 Spanish speaking countries. That doesn’t sound too shabby and, accordingly, has seen the startup grow 150% in 2012, though predictably it isn’t breaking out its financials any further. What we can infer, however, is that today’s new capital is really about stepping on the gas rather than continuing to grow at its current, though respectable, pace. This will come in the form of improved event discovery and innovating around the tools it provides for event organisers. Specifically, in the pipeline are new mobile applications and sites that aim to exploit the rise in m-commerce, which the company says is seeing more than 20% of the ticketing market go mobile. Competing with market leader Ticketmaster for big events, or something like Eventbrite at the DIY ticketing Long Tail, Ticketea’s platform solves the problem of both event discovery for consumers and a way to sell tickets for event organisers. “We try to simplify the way everybody can promote, manage and sell their tickets online,” co-founder and CEO Javier Andres tells TechCrunch. “But this is not just about selling tickets, it is about bringing people together to share their passion”. Features that Andres says give Ticketea a competitive edge include support for Apple’s Passbook, deep integration with Facebook, a free access control tool for event organizers called “Ticketea checkpoint”, reserved seating functionality, including the ability for event organizers to create their own seating chart, and full localisation (language, currency and payments) for the countries it’s targeting. Ticketea operates a freemium model: It’s free to publish and promote an event, and if tickets are free, using this part of the service is also free. For events that charge for tickets, the startup takes a commission of 10% for every ticket sold (taxes and fees included). It’s not just catering for selling tickets online, either. A new POS iOS app dubbed “Box Office” lets venues sell tickets on the spot. In return they either pay a fixed fee for every ticket sold or a monthly fee depending on volume.
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The Mood Ring Gets Its Quantified-Self Update With The W/Me Wristband
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
A lot of the gadgets that help people monitor and track their physical health focus on providing feedback related to physical activity for use with tracking workout data and energy expenditure during the day. Now, a new band wants to leverage similar data sources, but with the goal of providing a more holistic picture of wellness. The W/Me wristband is based around a sensor that monitors your body’s automatic nervous system, providing feedback on body activity that you may not be at all aware of, including breathing patterns and heart rate, to let you know about automatic reactions you may be having that are detrimental to your state of health or physical wellbeing. Then, with rhythmic breathing exercises, the idea is that you’ll be able to correct these negative patterns and improve your general health and mood for the better. The W/Me project is different from most activity tracking in that it takes a very specific goal of managing breathing and describing a user’s mental state. It provides readings for agility score and ANS (autonomic nervous system) age in addition to a general description of your mental state, which provides information that tells you both how good you might be at dealing with stress, and how old your nervous system is, independent of your actual biological age. The wristband will have Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, as well as an LED readout that can provide information independent from an attached smartphone. It advertises a full week’s worth of use on a full battery charge, and also has a built-in USB connector for charging. It uses a built-in heart rate variability sensor, combined with the company’s own algorithms to arrive at its various readings, which can be displayed either on the band itself or on a companion app. Whether or not you believe in the science behind this, this is a clear growth market for quantified-self devices. There’s plenty of opportunity to explore the intersection of these devices and alternative theories of medicine and wellness, so it’ll be interesting to see if these kinds of gadgets can help bring health- and self-monitoring tech into the mainstream.
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Breaking: Company Study Shows That Company Is Totally In the Right Business
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Anthony Ha
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
I have some really big news, you guys! It turns out that if you ask people whether they want to leave their wallets at home, 83 percent of them will say yes! And sometimes, people won’t have cash with them, so they can’t make a purchase — in fact, that’s what happened to a whopping 75 percent of Canadians! What a crazy, backwards world we live in! Even more astounding: If you buy a meal for a friend, it’s possible that ! Shockingly, 54 percent of Americans say that they’ve been “stiffed” at some point in their lives! Isn’t that ? I mean, if those numbers — from — don’t totally spell “doom for the wallet,” I don’t know what does! So if you want to join me in the future, go ahead, burn your cash and use your smartphone to pay for everything! Doom for the wallet, man! What’s that, friendly merchant? I can’t use my phone to pay here? Didn’t you the survey showing that wallets are totally annoying? Sorry, I must have misheard you — no, it just a silly press release designed to drum up publicity for upcoming PayPal products and services. Are you really trying to argue with ? (Sorry to pick on you, PayPal. Clearly there’s a whole genre of annoying press releases describing studies that don’t really prove much of anything, and hey, at least it wasn’t an infographic. Still this one was a pretty perfect example of the form.) (And yes, TechCrunch both and studies likes this. But to paraphrase : That doesn’t make us hypocrites. It just means we have layers.)
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New Workout App For Pebble Shows Why Your Wrist Might Be The New Hot Spot For Mobile Devs
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
A by Toronto-based developer and entrepreneur Alex Kennberg uses the Pebble to take users through a standard 7-minute workout (made popular through media coverage at outlets including the ), and does so using only the tech on your wrist. It’s a great example of where standalone smart watch app development could take that gadget category beyond the boundaries of just being a smartphone companion. The Pebble watch app, which essentially just guides users through the 12 exercises described in the 7-minute workout, is functionally very similar, counting down the time required for each exercise and then inserting a 10-second rest between each. It uses the built-in vibration motor on the Pebble to alert you when changing from an exercise to a rest or vice versa, so that you can follow along without having to constantly look at your wrist. To install the app you simply have to update your phone to the latest version, and then navigate to a specific website to download and install the app. Once installed, however, the 7-minute workout app works completely independently of the smartphone, meaning you’ll only need the watch whenever you want to actually run the app. Kennberg’s app is remarkably simple, and yet it shows exactly what developers can do with even a lightweight SDK and a new wrist-based platform. There’s a lot of opportunity to create apps for Pebble and other smartwatches that stand on their own, and in fact this could be the difference between making similar wearable tech a lasting category, vs. just a passing fad. Google has recognized the need for a native hardware SDK for Google Glass, and there’s likewise a need for developers to step up and, with the limited capabilities available, make experiences contained by and suited to platforms like Pebble. We should see plenty more in terms of innovative software for Pebble coming based on the , but it’s nice to see what even a light touch can accomplish with devs paying attention to how this new device category might be used.
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Next On Deck For Khan Academy: Better Diagnostics And Internationalization
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Kim-Mai Cutler
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
Even though Sal Khan is now running a platform that serves 6 million students and people a month, he’s still churning out a couple videos a week. What’s been most recently on deck? World War I. To make a video, Khan says he’ll front-load several books worth of reading on everything from the Armistice Day to the sinking of the Lusitania. Then he’ll start to make videos once he feels he has a decent grasp on the subject material. “If I’m hanging out waiting for the dentist, I’ll just start reading something about World War I,” he said in a recent interview. From the original tutoring calls he’d arrange to help out relatives, to the initial YouTube channel he started, Khan Academy has grown to reach 75 million users to date, with 230 million lessons delivered and 1 billion problems answered in 30,000 classrooms throughout the world. Naturally, there’s been quite a bit of hype (with both its good and bad consequences). Khan Academy has the reach but it’s still proving out the data to show that its lessons measurably affect learning outcomes beyond the handful of pilots the non-profit has tried. “Teachers are rightfully skeptical, I think. They’re overworked. They have a million things to do,” Khan said. “It’s an incredibly tiring job and you’re throwing a new thing at them, even if they intellectually recognize the benefit of it.” Two of the top things on Khan’s priority list for the next fall are internationalization and diagnostics. The Khan Academy has pioneered ways of measuring progress, to help ensure that students don’t develop a “Swiss Cheese”-like base of knowledge with different weak areas. But he acknowledged the site isn’t as good at telling students where they should begin. What if they’re competent at certain things like logarithms but terribly behind in trigonometry? “One of the biggest complaints we get is that people don’t know where to start. By this August, we should have good diagnostics where people can figure out where they stand,” he said. He’s personally interested in Carol Dweck’s theories around fostering a growth-centered mentality in children and students. Her research is the basis for a series of media stories and discussions around how much you should praise children and . She’s found that children who internalize not innate talent, but rather diligence, tend to do better one the longer-run. He also said that the Khan Academy will be re-architecting some of the game mechanics and rewards to help with retention. While he thinks that more traditional forms of diagnostics like standardized tests aren’t all bad, they’re limited. “Standardized testing by itself isn’t a horrible thing. They’re not going to be testing every dimension though,” he said. He envisions a future where an admissions officer might not only look at grades and SAT tests, but also whether students have a record of trying over and over again even when they don’t get it right away. “If I was an admissions officer in the not too far off future, you’d look at the narrative of data: Who showed a strong degree of perseverance?” he said. He also said that it’s going to be increasingly important to have a body of creative work beyond demonstrating raw academic performance. The Academy’s platform for teaching computer science lets students create a body of programs they’ve written. (So far, students have made about 100,000 programs.) Likewise, if they were going to expand to other things like writing or music composition, they’d also encourage students to create their own portfolios. As for the growing wave of for-profit and venture-backed companies like Coursera, Khan says he’s still believes his academy should attack education problems with a non-profit-based approach. His only hesitation about going the non-profit route had to do with attracting technical talent, but the big-name hires they’ve been able to get like Google’s first employee Craig Silverstein, have tempered his original worries. “My gut tells me that education — it has to be done with the best of both worlds. When I talk to investors, I ask them, where do your kids go? How many of them are willing to send their kids to a for-profit school? It’s not that for-profit schools can’t be good and I don’t want to be self-righteous about it, but considering the sensitive stuff like the students’ data and the credentialing, my guess is that’s going to have to be in the not-for-profit realm.”
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Expect Facebook To Turbocharge ‘Notes’ Into A True Tumblr Competitor
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Josh Constine
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
Facebook used to have a blogging feature called . It still does, but it got buried by the Timeline redesign and widely forgotten. Facebook needs to overhaul Notes, and signs say a refresh may already be in the works. It could help people express themselves, make Notes a legitimate competitor to Tumblr, and soften the blow of Facebook reportedly failing to buy Yahoo’s new baby. Back in March, Facebook , a sort of blogging platform its founders described as the “the home for personal thoughts and stories that go deeper than a quick Facebook or Twitter update.” It illustrated the rift between Facebook and Tumblr. Twitter is defined by its simplicity, so we’ll leave it out of this discussion. When it comes down to it, Facebook is more limiting but consistent and easy for the masses. Tumblr gives you more freedom and control. Facebook’s brevity is sufficient for some, but others crave a more customizable presence on the web that’s separate from reports about their day-to-day life. If Facebook wants to house our whole digital lives, it may need to get serious about blogging. It’d be a big undertaking for the social network that could take a while to come to fruition. But better Notes could fill it with high-quality content, pull in ad views, and box out competitors trying to pick away at the Facebook empire. On Facebook, you write ‘status updates’ — short descriptions of your current life to keep your friends in the loop. They’re typically concocted for the news feed, rather than your Timeline, and have to adhere to Facebook’s style and format standards. They don’t have a home you’d be proud to show off. Tumblr blogs feel like you’re writing for yourself. Strange, longer-f0rm dives into niche ideas that might weird out your Facebook friends fit naturally on your own blog alongside quick hits of images and content you’ve stumbled across or created. Tumblrs reach a like-minded audience of those who seek them out, rather than being forced on your social graph. There’s an emphasis on reblogging — lending your audience to content you appreciate. On Facebook there’s not much of a re-sharing culture. You just ‘Like”, which nets creators much less added influence. When Notes launched in 2006, Facebook’s user base may not have needed it. It was around the same time the site was opening up to the public, and launching the news feed and status updates. For most of the social network’s users, short-form updates were enough. But the world has grown more tech savvy in the seven years since. People increasingly long for a place to call their own on the web. That desire, along with network effect and an improving state of mobile, led to massive, in 2010. Now the signs say it’s time for Facebook to get back in the blogging game. There’s the Storylane acqui-hire. When that went down I asked Facebook about Notes and it was atypically cagey, which made me suspect something was in the works for the feature. Then there was that Facebook was in talks with Tumblr about a potential acquisition before bought the startup. When I asked Facebook’s spokespeople flat-out whether the social network was redesigning Notes, I was met with a coy look and vague advice to watch out for something. If you remember, Facebook launched its own just weeks after announcing it would buy Instagram. It had been working on it for a while and decided to launch it anyways. Similarly, a Notes overhaul may be in store, but without a successful acquisition of Tumblr running in parallel. Facebook’s got a long way to go if it wants Notes to seriously compete with Tumblr and other populist blogging platforms. As of a few years ago I was one of the few people I knew using the feature. to host sets of links and descriptions of mixtapes I’d made or a calendar of upcoming concerts I’d compiled. Now I pretty much only see Notes used by outgoing Facebook employees leaving a long goodbye message, or Facebook divisions like of their latest coding adventures. I’m friends with a lot of power users, and if they’re not Noting, I bet the feature has quite poor traction overall. It’s not hard to see why. First, Notes is totally buried. You have to fish the bookmark out of your massive list of third-party apps. Writing a Note presents you with a sterile white canvas, with no hint of personalization. You can add basic text formatting and some markup, plus embed photos. However, you can’t add videos or animated .Gifs, Tumblr’s lifeblood. Once you publish, the Notes get published to the news feed (probably their greatest strength), but live on a boring white feed hidden within Timeline’s “More” drop-down or the optional Notes section. Compare that to Tumblr where there’s a wealth of customization options, and the ability to embed most kinds of media. Posts are distributed to a Tumblr’s followers. The Tumblr dashboard might not be as popular as the Facebook news feed, but there, posts don’t have to compete with the barrage of other content types. To make Notes competitive, Facebook would need to make the product instantly accessible from the home page. It could become a selectable feed in the , and you could opt to write them straight from the status update composer. If someone actively writes, Facebook would need to prominently display a link to their feed of Notes on their profile so friends could discover their posts beyond the feed. Notes would need to offer stylish themes, accept more media types, and preferably support drag-and-drop uploading and formatting. Figuring out privacy could be a challenge. Typically, blogs are public but Facebook is usually about sharing with friends. Defaulting to public would make Notes more sharable and help Facebook rack up ad impressions through page views, but it’d need to ensure people don’t accidentally expose themselves. Tumblr’s optional anonymity, NSFW content, and it simply not being Facebook all give it a coolness edge is some respects. As for incentivizing authors, making it quick to reshare a Note (like reblogging on Tumblr) could give people wider reach than just their friends. That could attract both average Joes who don’t have much of an audience (similar to the intention of ), as well as public figures looking for massive influence. On the business end, highly viral Notes could bring in traffic, but also box out Tumblr, which wants to monetize with sponsored posts in the dashboard that could compete with Facebook for ad dollars In the end, the goals would be to: If given a proper reintroduction, Notes might be a departure from Facebook’s highly standardized look. Keeping tighter control of how people expressed themselves made Facebook easier to use and differentiated it from the chaos of Myspace. But if done right, Notes could give people a vivid way to share and connect. It could make sure Facebook hosts not just our pasts with Timeline, or our day-to-day with news feed, but also be the manicured nest for our deepest thoughts and the content we love. Considering Facebook’s penchant for naming things what they are, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Notes eventually revived as “Facebook Blogs”. Too bad it didn’t do this a few months ago before Tumblr became such a media darling. Now whatever Facebook does in blogging may be cast as a copy in Tumblr’s shadow.
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60+ Investors Band Together To Form BitAngels, The First Multi-City Angel Network & Incubator For Bitcoin Startups
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Rip Empson
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
Nobody’s quite sure when (and if) Bitcoin will go mainstream, but plenty of investors and entrepreneurs have begun to place their bets. The snowball is off and rolling. why venture capitalists are loving this emerging market, just in the last two months, we’ve seen the Bitcoin, its own “Digital Currency Fund,” San Mateo-based accelerator to Bitcoin startups, while and Fred Wilson finally in a Bitcoin company. Today, we can check another growth milestone off the list. Entrepreneurs eyeing the Bitcoin market will be pleased to learn that is launching (what it believes to be) the first multi-city angel network and incubator created to invest exclusively in cryptocurrency startups. Fittingly, in the spirit of Bitcoin, it’s a distributed network of angels and entrepreneurs and one that was hacked together in a few days after the . Yes, Bitcoin has its own conference now. Better find a mining buddy, pronto. Led by Engine.co founder David A. Johnston, SocialRadius and Marketwire founder Michael Terpin and angel investor Sam Onat Yilmaz, BitAngels brings together a posse of angel investors who are looking to help entrepreneurs turn their Bitcoin side projects into full-time jobs. To do that, the angel network pooled together about $6.7 million in Bitcoin, which it will invest in approximately $20K chunks. BitAngels is not a formal fund, so the Bitcoins are soft-circled, not in escrow, but all 60 angels that have joined thus far (the number of angels has almost doubled in the past week) are all accredited investors with extensive experience investing and, naturally, have a lot of Bitcoin. Some mined them, I’m told, but the majority were simply fortunate to get in early when the price was low. And, for those “Bah, it’s already too late” naysayers, they’re still bullish on the market. The network is also today officially expanding to three on-site locations: Austin, San Francisco and New York, with a network of investors that includes people like Gyft CEO Vinney Lingham, Memory Dealers CEO and “Bitcoin Jesus” Roger Ver, Tradehill CEO Jered Kenna, the Winklevii, BitInstant’s Charlie Shrem and Liberty City Ventures’ Andrew Chang. But what exactly is the substance of the incubator that BitAngels plans to offer, you ask? Is it TechStars for Bitcoin, or more Founder Institute for Bitcoin? It’s not as formal as either of those, Johnston tells us, instead angels will hold office hours in each of the network’s three locations and will provide as much as support and mentoring from its angels as it can, though much of that will likely be remote. Really, more of a Founder Collective-type deal. Fleshing out the mission for Bitcoin incubator, the co-founder says that, while the network will remain far less formal than traditional accelerators, he would like to see BitAngels become a In other words, to leverage a combination of So there you have it. BitAngels isn’t quite there yet, but it’s only been nine days since it was founded, people, so give it some time. Sure, a distributed network makes it a little more difficult to organize, but Johnston says that the idea for BitAngels’ new on-site locations is to get startups around a bunch of other early-stage companies working on ideas in the same space “to leverage off of each other during the week outside of virtual classes.” Aside from the “virtual classes piece,” it’s the same idea that’s motivated Adam Draper and Boost.vc . Both entrepreneurs and investors have begun to get serious about Bitcoin, and networks like BitAngels will ideally make it a lot easier to access the capital needed to finish that BitWallet you’ve been working on — and access to an experienced group of mentors help you answer those tough questions about the design of your logo. Hey, it was only a matter of time.
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Turn The Raspberry Pi Microcomputer Into A Low-Cost Laptop With This Atrix Dock Hack
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Natasha Lomas
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 |
The / is being used by hardware hackers to power all sorts of creative projects. Including, in the above instance, a Raspberry Pi powered laptop, created by developer — principally by tying in the Motorola Atrix laptop dock. Which surely must be the coolest use of that piece of kit to date. The smartphone that the dock was intended to be hooked up to has since been discontinued but as Adafruit Industries points out in the below ‘how to’ video, the laptop dock can still be picked up via various online outlets. Its Micro USB and Micro HDMI jacks offer a neat, relatively straightforward way to turn a Pi into a laptop. Adafruit’s video shows which connectors to get and how to splice them together to plug in the Pi and get the DIY laptop working. Chou, meanwhile, has costed out his version of the Pi laptop hack — including an optional Airlink WiFi module. In total the components costs around $125, plus the cost of the Pi — making it cheaper overall than the build costs of the (the XO apparently costs around $200 to make). It’s also a lot more accessible to individuals and small groups, being as the latter machine has to be ordered by the thousand so is generally restricted to government-backed mass education projects. Go the Pi-powered DIY route and so long as you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do a little hacking, much smaller batches of low-cost laptops can be put together and put to work where they’re really needed. The Raspberry Pi’s potential as a low-cost computing platform for developing countries is pretty exciting. Pis are already being used to , thanks to a Belgian volunteer project which involved a suitcase full of the microcomputers being taken out to Africa and set up with monitors and keyboards acquired locally. It’s a great fixed-location learning solution, but couple in a bit of kit like the Atrix dock and portability could really extend the usefulness of the device. A Pi-powered laptop wouldn’t need to be tethered to a classroom location, but could be taken home by kids so they can carry on learning (the dock also contains a battery so even without any electricity at home it would offer some hours of use). The not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, which created the Pi with the hope of getting more U.K. kids learning to code, has said it is keen to look for ways to get this year, where the need for a low-cost computing solution is even greater. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZkz_a52I6s]
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Backed Or Whacked: Give PC A Chance
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Ross Rubin
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
These days, it seems that anything that whiffs of the traditional PC has all the market appeal of a month-old banana. Microsoft and its hardware cohorts are trying to fight back against the image of the staid tower and notebook with touch-enabled, all-in-one computers, clickety-covered tablets and convertible notebooks that twist like a contortionist. With no stake in Windows to protect, though, device crowdfunders have taken a different tack, pushing Android and other mobile OSes into alien configurations. While a bit of old hat for tiny game consoles from OUYA and GameStick, the game is now on for more general computing tasks. is a more established business than your typical solo entrepreneur sailing off into crowdfunding waters. But its experience with cloud services, as well as remote access lend differentiation to MiiPC, an overgrown milk pint of an Android computer that features extensive controls for the pre-tween to tween in your household and a green under-light for no good reason except it looks kind of cool. MiiPC will feature a companion app that lets ever-watchful parents and guardians control access to apps like a boss regardless of the theme-song message of Malcolm in the Middle. The MiiPC project wrapped up this week more than tripling its $50,000 goal for the mini-desktop that backers could scoop up for $99. As the device uses a similar chipset to the one in present-day Google TV boxes, the company is going to turn its interns onto it this summer to see what kind of alternative uses can be found for a small, albeit plug-tethered, Android device. . What madness is this? A mobile device with not one but two displays? The unthinkable has been thought of with Windows PCs by Toshiba and Acer and an Android device by Sony. All failed in part because the underlying operating systems are not optimized for doing things like, say, putting a keyboard or game controls on one screen with the display of an email client or game on the other. The campaign page acknowledges the issue, asking, “Need some dual screen apps?,” assuring backers that they are developing some. Sony, for its part, said it was working with third-party developers. But, again, good luck with that without Google throwing its full weight behind multi-screen devices. Backers could have nabbed the double-barrell Android tablet starting at €399, but it passed few consumers’ screenings. The project racked up little more than 1 percent of its lofty €200,000 goal. . It wasn’t quite the level of integration we see in today’s all-in-one computers like the iMac, but some of the earliest PCs had no separate tower enclosure, integrating the processor and memory into the same casing as the keyboard. Perhaps the slickest examples of these early designs were from Commodore, which used them in the rotund and popular Commodore 64 and VIC-20. Indeed, that brand and its tell-tale industrial design has been trotted out for pricey Windows-ready x86 PCs designed into cases appealing to the nostalgic. The Android-touting CoolShip, on the other hand, is not only cheap at $99, but even upgradeable so you can swap in new, more powerful processors as they become available. The flexibility should also help address another issue with computers integrated into keyboards: death by spilled beverage. CoolShip sailed by its campaign goal of $10,000, nearly doubling that amount, and is expected to start shipping to backers this month.
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Offshore 3D Printed Gun Blueprint Protector Kim Dotcom Reportedly Deleting Files [Updated]
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Gregory Ferenstein
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
3D printed guns are reportedly even too scary for the infamous free-information hacker, . After the U.S. State Department demanded that the designer of the world’s first fully printable gun , New Zealand-based Dotcom committed to keeping them safely online in his offshore legal safehaven. “I think it’s a serious threat to the security of the community. I think it’s scary that people can print 3D guns that can’t even be detected by metal detectors. This should concern everybody,” said Dotcom, according to a statement emailed to us by a spokesman. to New Zealand’s Newstalk ZB website, “The plans were available on Dotcom’s Mega website, but the New Zealand-based entrepreneur asked his staff to delete the public files. Dotcom says he thinks they are a serious threat to security of the community.” Last week, Texas law school graduate Cody Wilson made global headlines for freely distributing digital blueprints for manufacturing a lethal weapon with a 3D printer. In a mere week, Senator Chuck Schumer for immediate regulation and the blueprints themselves . Because of Dotcom’s commitment to guarding them against U.S. interference, it was questionable whether any government entity could prevent them from being distributed. Dotcom is an entrepreneur and hacker, who became famous of his Megaupload site that housed pirated entertainment content. He seemed like a natural ally in the fight for radical open information. Now that even he’s abandoned 3D weapons, perhaps there is some information that the Internet and government can collaboratively reject.
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CrunchWeek: The ‘Bang With Friends’ Buzz, Yahoo’s Acqui-hire Shopping Spree, Klout Gets Into Q&A
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Colleen Taylor
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
This week, , and I talked about the of the delightfully direct “dating” app (and its apparent privacy ), the shopping spree of (headed up by Yahoo, which snapped up ), and getting it into the Q&A space.
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 5 | 27 | null |
Clever Party Playlist App Anthm Evolves Into Jukio After Legal Woes
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Chris Velazco
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
After a legal kerfuffle with the band Rush’s management company (no, seriously), the team at saw their social playlist app get unceremoniously booted from Apple’s App Store. So what’s a down-on-their-luck team of app creators to do? Why, give the app a bunch of new features, a mild facelift, and a new name — — before pushing it into the wild again. In case you missed it back when it had a different name, Jukio is an iOS app that lets guests and partygoers choose exactly what they want to hear when the host just can’t be bothered. Setup is dead-simple — one iDevice running Jukio gets hooked up to the sound system, while guests who have the app installed can make requests from a connected streaming music service like Rdio and vote up inspired suggestions to create a party playlist. One of the neatest things about Jukio though is that you’re not limited to making suggestions at whatever shindig you’re currently attending. As always, half the fun comes from crashing other people’s remote, unprotected party rooms and cramming the playlist with inappropriate tunes. The beauty of the system is that other users can downvote other people’s choices, which unsurprisingly happened to me just about every time I suggested they listen to William Shatner’s stirring spoken word cover of . Philistines.
So what’s changed over the past year? For one, Jukio finally supports a service other than Rdio — co-founder Ben Myers told us all the way back in February 2012 that the four-person team was working to expand that list of sources, and they announced via blog post the other day that Spotify support has finally been added to the proverbial mix. Throw in the ability for Jukio to run in the background (which I’m surprised didn’t make it into the app any sooner), and access to Rdio and Spotify’s Heavy Rotation sections for easier song selection, and you’ve got yourself a pretty neat party tool. Sadly, some things haven’t changed since Anthm first hit the App Store all those months ago. The team hasn’t yet made good on their promise to bring Jukio to other platforms for instance, but that could change shortly. There’s still no word on an Android version of the app, but Myers says that a cross-platform HTML5 version is in the works, as is a “Listen With” feature that will let users listen in on Jukio parties across the globe instead of just trolling them from afar.
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Gillmor Gang: Windows Too Late
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Steve Gillmor
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — broke from the gate and never let up in a barnburner of a show about the post-Jobs era. Will Google assume the mantle of leadership from an aging Apple, or is this just an evolutionary step along the stream of innovation triggered by the iPhone/iPad? There’s plenty of data on both sides of this coin. Certainly Google Glass has triggered a lot of the same atmospherics that accompanied Apple’s storming of the Microsoft barricades. Every day we see the wreckage of the PC era float past us as our thoughts shift from Windows to Web to apps. Mobile has won the war for our hearts and minds. As Adam said to Eve: Stand back, we don’t know how big this is going to get. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
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Email, Still A Sonofabitch
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MG Siegler
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
Just about two years ago, I went off the deep end. I had come home early from an event in an effort to do something responsible: email. I was on the road and knew the situation would be dire (since I had not been checking my email all day). I was wrong. It was a . It may as well have been Inbox Trillion. There was I could get through it all with my sanity intact. So I did the only thing. . It was both an experiment and a statement. I decided that I wasn’t going to respond to email for an entire month. And while I did cheat a little (I would still check it from time-to-time in case of emergencies and to delegate some work-related items that couldn’t wait), it was without question one of the best months I’ve ever had. I was decidedly less stressed out. I found myself enjoying the internet more. I no longer dreaded opening up my laptop or looking at the push notifications on my phone. And guess what? If someone really needed to talk with me about something, they figured out a way. Funny how that works. And yet, the good times couldn’t last. The month came to a close and . While I don’t think I actually missed anything in my time away, the sheer ubiquity of the medium and the realities of life brought email back into my life full time. And I hate it more than ever. In the months and now years following the experiment, a number of people have asked for an update on my epic battle with email. The good news is that a few things have gotten much better. The bad new is that everything else has gotten much worse. After my experiment, I tried a bunch of different things to make my email situation more tenable. What I ended up coming to was a system where I would be checking email constantly throughout a day, responding to what I could quickly from my phone, archiving anything that didn’t need a response, and keeping the rest in my inbox until late at night, when the incoming volume would drop to near zero. Anything that wasn’t timely would then sit in my inbox until the weekend when the incoming volume is uniformly lower. It was a bit like letting pressure build up (quite literally, you might say) and releasing a bit of it at night so my inbox wouldn’t explode. And then releasing the rest of it every weekend. And then starting over on Monday. Every Monday. Forever. This was my life. And while it was manageable, you know what? It still sucked. Because I would find myself getting gradually more and more stressed out throughout the week as I saw my inbox grow and grow leading up to the weekend release. It made me more stressed out on Friday than on Monday. I now somewhat dreaded the weekend. Email time. Then one day a portfolio company asked to run an idea by me. That company, , was planning to take what they had learned from their to-do list app and make a new kind of email client. That, of course, became . From the moment I first heard the idea, it was a winner. It was essentially taking a lot of what I was manually doing with email and streamlining the process. And they were doing it in an extremely smart and even sort of fun way, using the native niceties of modern smartphones. Mailbox quickly became my most-used app. It still is. It basically alleviates the pressure build-up in my inbox by allowing me to release it constantly throughout a day. Brilliant. But also sort of an illusion. I’m not alleviating the pressure by responding to emails right away. Instead, I’m pushing them off to deal with at a later time. My system of responding to emails at night or on the weekend is largely the same, I simply no longer have to those emails build up until I am ready to take action. Now, don’t underestimate how wonderful such a system is. And it’s a system that will continue to improve with automations and the like now that Mailbox has the resources of . But don’t be fooled into thinking that the problems of email have been solved. The underlying issues very much remain. Mailbox simply perfected the game of that we all play. One major issue that remains with email is the notion that every message should get a response. And a big reason why I hate responding to email during the day is that too many people are too quick to respond to my reponses. For every email I send in the day, I seem to get two in return — often immediately. (As a result, this caged animal has been learning not to touch the electric fence — hence, night and weekend emailing.) And a large number of those responses are “K” or “Cool” or “Great” or “Thx” or some other banality best left unemailed. The problem with these responses, even the short ones, is that they all take time to consume. If I read them in Gmail, it takes a couple seconds to load the response. And then another couple seconds to archive it. If I read them on my phone, I have to wait a few more seconds to download the messages from the server. Not to mention the push notifications that come in alerting you to the new message, taking up yet more precious seconds. Seconds make up minutes, which make up hours, which make up days, which make up months, which make up years. One day we’ll all be laying on our death beds wishing we hadn’t wasted all that time reading a million “K” email responses in our lives. Email needs some sort of quick response or maybe even a no-response reply system. Maybe it’s read/unread states that all recipients can see. But that’s been tried before and understandably, some people don’t like others to know when they’ve read a message. So maybe it needs to be a simple checkmark, like Path recently introduced in its . Or maybe the answer is something like emoji/smilies/stickers. Believe me, I know how lame this must sound. I mean, for Chrissakes?! But ignore the immense cuteness and joy of stickers for a second and focus on what they signify: an ultra-quick way to express a reaction. This could work for email too. Neither of these things would work if they simply came in the form of yet another email response — thus, defeating the purpose. Rather, these should be in the form of some sort of quick-loading visual cue that resides *on top* of an email system. That would likely require everyone using the same email service (unless this somehow became a new standard that every email service provider adopted — not gonna happen). But perhaps a fall-back system could be put in place to deliver these quick messages in email form if the recipient isn’t using the correct email service (giving them an incentive to sign up). I guess my point is that while we’re seeing a lot of services come out with new and interesting ways to combat email overload — beyond Mailbox, see: , , , , and many others — the only way email ever truly gets “fixed” is to be completely re-imagined. It doesn’t need a paint job, it needs a demolition job. My fear is that this will never happen. We’ll keep getting better tools to handle email on various devices (on your iPhone, on your iPad, on your iWatch, on Google Glass, etc) but eventually the moles will become too quick and plentiful for any of us to whack. At that point, email will become something we only use for work while we use some other quick messaging system for everything else. This is already happening to some extent — when was the last time you sent an email for “fun”? — but the messaging world is increasingly fragmented and not universal. Earlier this week, my next step professionally. It resulted in over a hundred emails of well-wishes and congratulations. These should have left me feeling wonderful. They did not. Unfortunately, the .
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Facebook Home Is Losing Steam In The Charts…Fast
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Sarah Perez
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
, the app which CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted as the “next version of Facebook,” has not been an immediate hit. Its Google Play rankings have been dropping steadily after the launch buzz wore off, according to new data from top app store analytics firms. Despite having an active user base of over a billion on the social network itself, the company announced on Thursday that it was for its Home app. Plus, AT&T also this week on the HTC First, the first Facebook Home-powered handset, which went from $99 to just $0.99. The data shows it’s been a struggle so far, in terms of user acquisition, for Facebook Home. The lack of support for widgets, docks, and app folders seems to be the , active use, and recommendations. The application for download on April 12th on Google Play, where only a limited selection of devices were supported: the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II. A preloaded version of the app was made available via the HTC First, which officially went on sale that same day. This week, was also added. To be fair, the limited rollout is partially responsible for the app’s inability to maintain a higher ranking. On April 24th, Facebook Home reached its best position on the charts in many of the countries where it was available, but its ranks have declined in several key markets since. Its moves indicate an early rush from curious Android owners, but then a tapering off for primetime. data demonstrates this rise, then subsequent fall. Shortly after becoming publicly available, Facebook Home reached #72 overall in the U.S., on April 16th. By April 23th, it had also reached the top 100 overall in 8 countries (Norway, Singapore, Canada, Denmark, Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary, U.K.), and the top 500 in 38 countries. By the end of April, it started to drop, then ranking in the top 500 in 29 countries, and having dropped out of the top 100 worldwide altogether. It has yet to return to the top 100 in any market. analysis of the top 500 apps on Google Play, also confirms the same general trends. Towards the end of April (4/29), the firm found that Facebook Home was ranked highest in Luxembourg, where it was #83 overall, and was lowest in Portugal where it was ranked #477, but its ranking was on the decline. In the chart below, you can see Facebook Home’s top ranks as of 4/29 as well as its ranking change since just a few days prior (4/24), indicated by the small number at the top of each country’s bar. As of a few days ago (5/8), Distimo found that the picture for Facebook Home has gotten even worse. In key countries including France, Germany, Brazil, and Argentina, Facebook Home remains out of the top 500 overall apps. And the number of countries where Facebook Home is even ranked is fewer still. (Compare the number of bars in the chart below to the above). You can also see the ranking decline for the U.S., Germany and Australia, pictured below as a line graph. App Annie confirms this decline, too. As of May 10th, their data shows Facebook Home is only in the top 500 in 19 countries. And it’s not close to breaking the top 100 in any of these, with #191 being its highest ranking – and that’s in Norway. Most countries are somewhere in the 300-400 range – for example, the U.S. is #338. This is not what you would call a hit. Even Facebook itself fudged its numbers when , noting that the app was “nearing 1 million downloads.” Those are downloads, not actives. And as the above data indicates, the app is losing steam on the charts. That being said, for those who adopt Home, engagement soars. To summarize : among those who use the app, 25 percent more time spent on Facebook as a whole, with comments and likes up 25 percent, Chat usage up 7 percent, and messages sent up by 10 percent. But the goal now is to get more people to download – and then not abandon – the application. Facebook admitted that the replacing people’s custom widgets and app folders was a mistake. [Update: And as Josh Constine writes, . Some of the Facebook employees building and testing Home were regularly iPhone users, and didn’t realize how big of an issue the missing customizations were.] Facebook outlined its plans for getting Home back on track, saying it will soon offer a better onboarding experience for new users, add an icon dock (the tray of favorite apps at the bottom of your homescreen), make it easier to initiate chats with a new “Dash Bar,” and will work towards becoming more homescreen layer than replacement, so as not to disrespect the work users have done in customizing their phone. Time well tell whether or not Facebook can make these changes in time, before it loses further mindshare among early adopters who are .
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Home Console Gaming May Suffer Death By A Thousand Cuts, Rather Than A Major Revolution
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Darrell Etherington
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
The Ouya is making its way out to backers even now (though my shipping notification still hasn’t arrived. Grrr.) and judging by early impressions, it’s to take down behemoths like Sony and Microsoft. The $99, Android powered console still isn’t fully formed exactly, but it’s doubtful that between now and it’ll take on giant-killer proportions. Likewise the recently-announced , which features a subscription-based pricing model, probably won’t alone topple the giants. But combined, these and a slew of other devices including the , smart TVs from manufacturers, Steam Boxes, and even Google and Apple hardware are eating away at what was once a fairly exclusive field. It seems a lot of people are waiting for a watershed moment to signal a significant shift away from traditional console gaming to a new paradigm, but increasingly, it looks likely that what we’ll see instead is an erosion that more closely resembles glacial shift, but on a less geological time scale. There’s evidence to suggest that console gaming is already losing significant ground, like quarterly results from Nintendo that . And while Sony saw its first full-year profit in half a decade, most of the good news was on the smartphone side, and . Microsoft is still doing fairly well with the Xbox 360, but growth of key accessories like the . Slower Kinect sales are a good bellwether for the industry’s overall health, if only because it and devices like it are where console makers are turning to try to inject some fresh life into a market that had recently started to look fairly stale. To some extent, Kinect, Move and other gimmicks like the screen of the 3DS are an answer to incursions by mobile gaming and other alternatives. Just like point-and-shoot cameras needed differentiating features like long zooms to prove themselves relative to smartphone cameras, video games needed something new to reel in new buyers. The new crop of challengers to the console gaming market, including Ouya and the new BlueStacks GamePop console, risks getting discounted by critics as just another round of devices like the GP2X Wiz or the Gizmondo, which had limited appeal and then faded into the background of video games history as little more than a minor footnote. But that’s taking too short-term and dismissive a view on what’s currently happening in the video game space. It’s true that, as ardent console gamers continually remind me, there will always be a demand for that type of content. Increasingly, however, there’s a growing contingent of players that are fine saying, “if I can get it on my phone, why do I need it anywhere else?” and that’s a market that’s ripe for a living room transition like the ones being attempted by Ouya and BlueStack. It’s easy to discount these ahead of their full consumer launch, and I don’t expect them to have an immediate impact on console sales, but they are signs of a sure shift, and one that won’t go away, even if doesn’t provide the sort of bomb shock disruption that we’re so fond of identifying and championing.
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America’s Carriers Are Terrible. It’s Probably Your Fault.
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Jon Evans
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
A few days ago I landed in England and, expecting little, slipped an old UK SIM card into my phone. I’d bought it when living in London five years ago, and hadn’t used it in more than a year. But to my amazement it was still active — as was the money I’d added to its pay-as-you-go account 16 months earlier…and then I received a friendly text message informing me that my data costs were now £1 per 100MB. Another SMS popped up when I emerged from the Channel Tunnel in France a few days later, informing me it would cost me 8p to send texts and 7p per minute to receive calls. Can you imagine of that happening with an American phone company? Or Canadian? North American carriers generally expire pay-as-you-go accounts after 90 days of inactivity, and it’s at best a struggle to get them to support data at all, much less seamlessly, much much less at that price. (Which isn’t even that great, by global standards; in India two years ago I was charged $1 for a full gigabyte.) As for roaming, you’re very lucky to get American or Canadian pay-as-you-go accounts that can roam across that vast undefended border at all, and if you do, they’ll charge the proverbial arm and a leg. That same UK SIM card worked just fine in Kenya last year, and as I type this I’m about to land in Turkey, where I expect to receive another text informing me that my UK pay-as-you-go number continues to work just fine outside the EU, albeit more expensively. ( yep.) What’s wrong with this picture? Why are America and Canada so unbelievably awful? Yeah, I’m being anecdotal, but there is of to support the notion that cell service there is outlandishly expensive compared to almost all of the rest of the developed world. (And worse than a lot of the developing world, too.) Part of it is laissez-faire capitalism run amok. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a staunch defender of capitalism…that is, capitalism. Until 2008 that was a hard row to hoe among many of my friends, but that recent embarrassing spate of financial cataclysms have made it much easer. Why is my UK SIM card relatively cheap to use in France? Because EU regulators . Why are America’s carriers so parasitical, predatory, gouging and user-hostile? Because they can be, which in large part means because their regulators (including, alas, Canada’s CRTC) don’t insist on much of anything. Oh, sorry, no, my mistake. They do insist on perpetuating this state of affairs. Consider the recent breathtakingly wrong decision to make it . This was one of those classic bureaucratic catastrophes: every individual step that led to it doubtless made sense to the people involved, who were too close to their system to take a step back and notice that its actual outcome was complete insanity. If anything it should should be illegal to phones, not lock them. This is taken to new heights of madness. And yet. At the end of the day the true power lies not with the carriers, but with their customers. Alas, American and Canadian customers seem to have been hypnotized into a kind of where they just sit there and silently accept locked phones, bloated Kafkaesque pricing plans, insane roaming charges, Android phones stuffed with crapware, and two- or even three-year locked-in contracts. But they don’t have to. That’s what’s so infuriating. You too could buy an unlocked phone — an , which is a terrific phone, costs all of $299! (And I have high hopes that Google’s rumored new X Phone initiative will be even cheaper.) You too could ’s monthly pricing plan, or Straight Talk’s, instead of signing a contract. You’d more than make back the upfront costs of the unlocked phone in less than a year. And if enough people did it, the carriers would be forced to compete on quality and improve their pricing, rather than rely on their customers’ passive despair. The logical conclusion is that if your phone is locked, or if you’re on a multi-year contract, then you have no right to complain about your terrible carrier — because you’re part of the problem. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In fact, you’re ruining it for the rest of us. Thanks. But it’s not too late for redemption. Just repeat after me: “I solemnly swear that I will never buy a locked phone or sign a multi-year phone contract again.” And when your current contract expires, do just that. Maybe, just maybe, with your help, we can finally defeat these gargantuan economic tapeworms called AT&T, Verizon, Rogers and Bell — and finally catch up with the civilized world. Tapeworm, by Rhys Ormond, on .
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From The Garage To 200 Employees In 3 Years: How Nest Thermostats Were Born
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Derek Andersen
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a91yknBJxM] I remember when the press hit about Nest Labs. The guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with co-founder Matt Rogers at ‘ office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software companies. There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please watch our and think again. Matt had an early start with his first Mac product interactions at age three. When asked as a child growing up in Gainesville Florida what he wanted to be someday, Matt would respond, “I want to work at Apple.” At 16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon he agreed to basically do anything (anything being to help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand project) to get a chance to work with the robotics lab. His Junior year he applied for an intership at Apple via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got accepted. That summer he took on the worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a “one year project.” Seven days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically not sleeping.” How did it pay off? Apple awarded him a cash bonus as an intern, something VP of iPod at the time and eventual Nest co-founder said, “He had never done before.” After school he returned to Apple and spent the next few years working on the firmware for iPod nano and iPod classic. After his first weekend back at Apple, and spending Saturday and Sunday getting moved in and buying furniture, his manager approached him saying, “Where have you been?” Matt responded, “I went to buy furniture.” He replied, “You should have been here.” He responded, “Oh. I didn’t even know!” Matt said this, “Set the pace for how iPod would be for the next five years.” In December 2005, Matt and a small team started working on the first iPhone concepts in a project called “ .” At the time no one in the company knew what was going on, not even some of their own managers. They built the initial prototype in four months. It wasn’t good enough so they started again. The next version was the one Steve Jobs would on stage at MacWorld in January 2007. Four weeks previous to that, 25-members of the team went to China to assemble each of the first 200-devices to be shown at MacWorld. The team was divided into a day and night shift to hit the deadlines, working through Christmas and returning after New Year’s Day. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEmZRKKGHnQ] After shipping the iPhone, Matt led work on products like iPod nano and shuffle, parts of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. By late 2009 he had hired 40 people and managed these teams while still just in his twenties. That fall he had a two-hour lunch with Tony Fadell, his former boss at Apple who had left in 2008. Matt told Tony he wanted to start a company. “What do you want to do?” Tony replied. “I want to build a smart home company.” Tony’s response? “You’re an idiot. No one wants to buy a smart home. They’re for geeks.” But it turned out Tony was already building a smart home in Tahoe, with solar panels, geothermal heat pumps, and more. Tony honed in and focused on a single idea. “Why don’t you just build me a thermostat?” Matt replied, “Why not? We could build an iPod?” Tony responded, “We’ll do it in six months.” Tony and Matt have what appears to be the ideal co-founder relationship stemming from Matt’s early internship days at Apple. “We think very much alike, to the point where we complete each other’s sentences. I don’t know if I would be able to do it without him.” But was this the idea to risk his promising future at Apple? Matt had elevated from intern to Senior Manager in a few short years. “The more we dug, the more we realized, this is a company we must go start. We could save 10 percent of energy, solve an epic problem, no innovation (in the industry), multibillion dollar market. Why would we not do this?” Matt quit his job in spring 2010, rented a garage in Palo Alto, and started cranking in secret. Matt would visit with old colleagues and tell them, “Will you quit your job? Will you come work (for free) with us on a new project I can’t tell you about?” The first ten hires worked for free for six months before finally raising money in October 2010. They bootstrapped with money from Tony and some from Matt. “We were all working basically severn days a week, twelve hours a day, it was crazy. Not everyone was living in the office – people have families, so they’d go home for dinner and then come back. It was craziness.” Everyone worked on Thanksgiving only taking a few hours off. Matt assured me no one got divorced adding, “All the wives are happy now.” Still no one knew that Tony was even involved. “In the early days when we were fully stealth. “We had no website, no LinkedIn, we had nothing. Zero outbound communication. I wouldn’t even tell people that (Tony was involved). For all they knew, I was the only founder. To get people in the door the first time meant I did a lot of lunches, a lot of coffees to get people excited. I wouldn’t tell people on the first date – I’d show a little leg, but I wouldn’t go all the way.” Even with limited funding Nest still managing to assemble a killer engineering team in the midst of a talent war exploding all across Silicon Valley. “It was a mixture of my old team at Apple, my old professor from CMU and a few folks from Tony’s early days at General Magic twenty years earlier. One guy was a VP at Twitter, one was running Microsoft User Experience. Unlike most startup teams the average age of our team was about 40. I think I was the youngest.” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMwPg1337Zs] A year after raising Series A capital from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Lightspeed, and Shasta, they shipped their first product. This past spring Nest to have raised $80MM at an $800MM valuation and shipping 50,000 thermostats each month. This company that was in a garage in 2010 now has 200 employees, and selling its products at Lowe’s, Apple Stores, and Best Buy. About half their inventory is sold online. Like most great companies in the Valley it is not without controversy. They were recently sued for patient infringement and as one friend in the home automation industry recently told me, “Everyone is watching Nest.” They also recently acquired venture backed energy dashboard . Nest shipped its first product 18-months after their inception, with 75-employees and having spent $10MM. “That’s with a team of extremely senior guys who have all done this a dozen times before. The difference between doing it a dozen times before at Apple, Samsung or Google and doing it on your own is that there is no backup. At Apple we worked on the project for a year, got it ready and hand it over to the operations team to go scale and shoot to the moon with. We all had roles we played at previous companies and that all went out the window at Startup Land. You have an HR hat, facilities hat, and janitor hat. Doesn’t matter, you have do it.” Is it any surprise that there are so few hardware startups the Valley? Or that most entrepreneurs choose an app or a website over a hardware device? Entrepreneurship is hard enough not to have to layer in these additional complications. Matt adds, “I don’t believe I could build Nest if Tony and I didn’t have all that experience at Apple. It’s really hard to pull off fully integrated consumer electronic devices. It’s also really expensive to build a consumer electronic product. You have to build prototypes but you have to build tools. You have to get a manufacturing line set up. You have to front inventory costs. It’s crazy expensive.” When our interview finished a few weeks ago, I walked Matt out to his car. It was 9pm, and he was cheerfully headed back to work for yet another late night at Nest. After hearing about the culture and work ethic at Nest, his attitude simply reminded me of how he described working a holiday a few years previously. “That’s what it takes,” he casually said.
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Video Ad Startup TubeMogul Raises $10M For Its Asia Expansion, Opens Beijing Office
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Catherine Shu
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Video ad startup has the $10 million second tranche of its Series C funding, which it will use to expand in Asia. The funding is led by SingTel Innov8, the venture capital arm of SingTel Group. The branding-focused video marketing company is eager to tap into the Asian market, where it says video ads available for real-time buying are growing at 20.2 percent per month. Last year, TubeMogul launched a private beta in the region, running campaigns for regional and Fortune 500 brands, as well as trading desks. In addition to its funding, the company also announced today that it has opened a Beijing office, which will be headed by director of business development Sven Rossbach, who previously worked at specialized marketing services platform Cadreon. Rossbach will focus on growing TubeMogul’s Asia presence by introducing Chinese brand marketers and publishers to the programmatic buying of video ads. Other moves TubeMogul has taken to step further into Asia include and hiring former BBC.com VP Phu Troung to lead its expansion into Southeast Asia. Founded seven years ago, TubeMogul to brand advertisers and their digital ad agencies.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk Says He Got Into The Electric Car Business Because No One Else Would
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Ryan Lawler
| 2,013 | 5 | 29 |
Tesla founder Elon Musk said that he got into the electric car business after it became clear that no one else was going to build an electric car. In a keynote discussion at the D11 Conference, Musk admitted that getting into the electric car business is probably “one of the stupidest things you could do,” or it might even be crazy. “For many years, almost all people regarded it as either stupid or insane or both,” Musk said. “The reason for me to do it is not because I saw a huge market opportunity. It was clear that we were not going to see electric cars from major car manufacturers.” Musk, who is also founder of SpaceX and Solar City, said that the company was necessary because the industry would need to build a sustainable mode of transport. That said, he felt that he was mostly alone in his plans to create an electric car at scale that other people would actually want to buy. “The industry was operating under two false premises,” Musk said. “One, that you could not create a compelling electric car. And two, that no one would buy it.” Now, Tesla has electric vehicles on the road and is trying to bring the price of the cars down. He expects that in three to four years, he’ll be able to create a car that is around $30,000 to $40,000. That’ll come as a result of a reduced size, as well as optimization in the design process and reaching economies of scale. But he wants more companies to get into electric cars, and to try to make it seem like more of a mainstream item for consumers. “Now that we’ve become profitable, we expect that other manufacturers will get into the electric car market,” Musk said.
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Asian Price Comparison Site Save 22 Gets Angel Round Of “Mid Six Figures”
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Victoria Ho
| 2,013 | 5 | 11 |
Singaporean price comparison startup just got an investment of “mid six figures” in Singapore dollars, according to co-founder, . S$500,000 translates to about US$400,000, as a reference. The three-year-old startup indexes prices of goods and displays a price comparison. Its mobile app also allows you to scan a barcode of a product with your phone, and it will display a list of stores that list the same item, organized by price. Its database covers about 500,000 products, and the listings come from both retailers and mobile app users who submit product and pricing data. The company says it has staff on the ground actively indexing prices of popular goods, as well. The funding round was led by , an angel firm in Singapore. Crystal Horse also invested in Singapore-based and Hong Kong-based . Other participants in the round are from Malaysia, which operates the largest blog advertising network in Southeast Asia, and Little Lights Capital, from Indonesia. Chun Dong Chau, an investor with Crystal Horse, said the company was picked because of its engineering team. He claims that Save 22’s data engine on the backend mines data collected from retail partners’ catalogs. Compared with other price comparison websites, which just provide lead generation back to retailers, Save 22 is expected to develop an additional revenue stream from offering some data analytics back to third parties. The investor is pushing Save 22 to continue growing its database within the region, which will improve the quality of its analysis, he said. “Southeast Asia is going in terms of its GDP but also Internet and mobile penetration is growing massively. The market is quite big, and we don’t have plans to go outside yet.” The company competes with other players Asia like . The latter has a pretty similar app that also does barcode scanning, but is a younger firm, and just launched its app at the start of this year. At the start of the year, PricePinz said it had just about 4,000 products cataloged. It also said in an that its focus is restricted to electronic goods for now, but plans to expand to other verticals like groceries and apparel within the year. If it’s a scramble to catalog more data, Save 22 is the winner for now in the region, but expansion plans will potentially open it up to competition with global giants like . On the e-commerce front, Amazon’s and eBay’s are other barcode scanning apps, and have the backing of large firms with huge product databases. Save 22 was founded by Shen and , in March 2010, and has nine employees, including its two founders. It was renamed from Lobangclub (‘lobang’ translates to ‘deal’ in the Malay language) last year.
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